Orthodoxy

G >> G. K. Chesterton >> Orthodoxy


A short time ago Mrs. Besant, in an interesting essay,
announced that there was only one religion in the world, that all
faiths were only versions or perversions of it, and that she was
quite prepared to say what it was. According to Mrs. Besant this
universal Church is simply the universal self. It is the doctrine
that we are really all one person; that there are no real walls of
individuality between man and man. If I may put it so, she does not
tell us to love our neighbours; she tells us to be our neighbours.
That is Mrs. Besant's thoughtful and suggestive description of
the religion in which all men must find themselves in agreement.
And I never heard of any suggestion in my life with which I more
violently disagree. I want to love my neighbour not because he is I,
but precisely because he is not I. I want to adore the world,
not as one likes a looking-glass, because it is one's self,
but as one loves a woman, because she is entirely different.
If souls are separate love is possible. If souls are united love
is obviously impossible. A man may be said loosely to love himself,
but he can hardly fall in love with himself, or, if he does, it must
be a monotonous courtship. If the world is full of real selves,
they can be really unselfish selves. But upon Mrs. Besant's principle
the whole cosmos is only one enormously selfish person.

It is just here that Buddhism is on the side of modern pantheism
and immanence. And it is just here that Christianity is on the
side of humanity and liberty and love. Love desires personality;
therefore love desires division. It is the instinct of Christianity
to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces,
because they are living pieces. It is her instinct to say "little
children love one another" rather than to tell one large person
to love himself. This is the intellectual abyss between Buddhism
and Christianity; that for the Buddhist or Theosophist personality
is the fall of man, for the Christian it is the purpose of God,
the whole point of his cosmic idea. The world-soul of the Theosophists
asks man to love it only in order that man may throw himself into it.
But the divine centre of Christianity actually threw man out of it
in order that he might love it. The oriental deity is like a giant
who should have lost his leg or hand and be always seeking to find it;
but the Christian power is like some giant who in a strange
generosity should cut off his right hand, so that it might of its
own accord shake hands with him. We come back to the same tireless
note touching the nature of Christianity; all modern philosophies
are chains which connect and fetter; Christianity is a sword which
separates and sets free. No other philosophy makes God actually
rejoice in the separation of the universe into living souls.
But according to orthodox Christianity this separation between God
and man is sacred, because this is eternal. That a man may love God
it is necessary that there should be not only a God to be loved,
but a man to love him. All those vague theosophical minds for whom
the universe is an immense melting-pot are exactly the minds which
shrink instinctively from that earthquake saying of our Gospels,
which declare that the Son of God came not with peace but with a
sundering sword. The saying rings entirely true even considered
as what it obviously is; the statement that any man who preaches real
love is bound to beget hate. It is as true of democratic fraternity
as a divine love; sham love ends in compromise and common philosophy;
but real love has always ended in bloodshed. Yet there is another
and yet more awful truth behind the obvious meaning of this utterance
of our Lord. According to Himself the Son was a sword separating
brother and brother that they should for an aeon hate each other.
But the Father also was a sword, which in the black beginning
separated brother and brother, so that they should love each other
at last.

This is the meaning of that almost insane happiness in the
eyes of the mediaeval saint in the picture. This is the meaning
of the sealed eyes of the superb Buddhist image. The Christian
saint is happy because he has verily been cut off from the world;
he is separate from things and is staring at them in astonishment.
But why should the Buddhist saint be astonished at things?--
since there is really only one thing, and that being impersonal can
hardly be astonished at itself. There have been many pantheist poems
suggesting wonder, but no really successful ones. The pantheist
cannot wonder, for he cannot praise God or praise anything as really
distinct from himself. Our immediate business here, however, is with
the effect of this Christian admiration (which strikes outwards,
towards a deity distinct from the worshipper) upon the general
need for ethical activity and social reform. And surely its
effect is sufficiently obvious. There is no real possibility
of getting out of pantheism, any special impulse to moral action.
For pantheism implies in its nature that one thing is as good
as another; whereas action implies in its nature that one thing
is greatly preferable to another. Swinburne in the high summer
of his scepticism tried in vain to wrestle with this difficulty.
In "Songs before Sunrise," written under the inspiration of Garibaldi
and the revolt of Italy he proclaimed the newer religion and the
purer God which should wither up all the priests of the world:

"What doest thou now Looking Godward to cry I am I,
thou art thou, I am low, thou art high, I am thou that thou
seekest to find him, find thou but thyself, thou art I."

Of which the immediate and evident deduction is that tyrants
are as much the sons of God as Garibaldis; and that King Bomba
of Naples having, with the utmost success, "found himself"
is identical with the ultimate good in all things. The truth is
that the western energy that dethrones tyrants has been directly
due to the western theology that says "I am I, thou art thou."
The same spiritual separation which looked up and saw a good king in
the universe looked up and saw a bad king in Naples. The worshippers
of Bomba's god dethroned Bomba. The worshippers of Swinburne's god
have covered Asia for centuries and have never dethroned a tyrant.
The Indian saint may reasonably shut his eyes because he is
looking at that which is I and Thou and We and They and It.
It is a rational occupation: but it is not true in theory and not
true in fact that it helps the Indian to keep an eye on Lord Curzon.
That external vigilance which has always been the mark of Christianity
(the command that we should WATCH and pray) has expressed itself
both in typical western orthodoxy and in typical western politics:
but both depend on the idea of a divinity transcendent, different
from ourselves, a deity that disappears. Certainly the most sagacious
creeds may suggest that we should pursue God into deeper and deeper
rings of the labyrinth of our own ego. But only we of Christendom
have said that we should hunt God like an eagle upon the mountains:
and we have killed all monsters in the chase.

Here again, therefore, we find that in so far as we value
democracy and the self-renewing energies of the west, we are much
more likely to find them in the old theology than the new.
If we want reform, we must adhere to orthodoxy: especially in this
matter (so much disputed in the counsels of Mr. R.J.Campbell),
the matter of insisting on the immanent or the transcendent deity.
By insisting specially on the immanence of God we get introspection,
self-isolation, quietism, social indifference--Tibet. By insisting
specially on the transcendence of God we get wonder, curiosity,
moral and political adventure, righteous indignation--Christendom.
Insisting that God is inside man, man is always inside himself.
By insisting that God transcends man, man has transcended himself.

If we take any other doctrine that has been called old-fashioned
we shall find the case the same. It is the same, for instance,
in the deep matter of the Trinity. Unitarians (a sect never to be
mentioned without a special respect for their distinguished intellectual
dignity and high intellectual honour) are often reformers by the
accident that throws so many small sects into such an attitude.
But there is nothing in the least liberal or akin to reform in
the substitution of pure monotheism for the Trinity. The complex
God of the Athanasian Creed may be an enigma for the intellect;
but He is far less likely to gather the mystery and cruelty
of a Sultan than the lonely god of Omar or Mahomet. The god
who is a mere awful unity is not only a king but an Eastern king.
The HEART of humanity, especially of European humanity, is certainly
much more satisfied by the strange hints and symbols that gather
round the Trinitarian idea, the image of a council at which mercy
pleads as well as justice, the conception of a sort of liberty
and variety existing even in the inmost chamber of the world.
For Western religion has always felt keenly the idea "it is not
well for man to be alone." The social instinct asserted itself
everywhere as when the Eastern idea of hermits was practically expelled
by the Western idea of monks. So even asceticism became brotherly;
and the Trappists were sociable even when they were silent.
If this love of a living complexity be our test, it is certainly
healthier to have the Trinitarian religion than the Unitarian.
For to us Trinitarians (if I may say it with reverence)--to us God
Himself is a society. It is indeed a fathomless mystery of theology,
and even if I were theologian enough to deal with it directly, it would
not be relevant to do so here. Suffice it to say here that this triple
enigma is as comforting as wine and open as an English fireside;
that this thing that bewilders the intellect utterly quiets the heart:
but out of the desert, from the dry places and the dreadful suns,
come the cruel children of the lonely God; the real Unitarians who
with scimitar in hand have laid waste the world. For it is not well
for God to be alone.

Again, the same is true of that difficult matter of the danger
of the soul, which has unsettled so many just minds. To hope
for all souls is imperative; and it is quite tenable that their
salvation is inevitable. It is tenable, but it is not specially
favourable to activity or progress. Our fighting and creative society
ought rather to insist on the danger of everybody, on the fact
that every man is hanging by a thread or clinging to a precipice.
To say that all will be well anyhow is a comprehensible remark:
but it cannot be called the blast of a trumpet. Europe ought rather
to emphasize possible perdition; and Europe always has emphasized it.
Here its highest religion is at one with all its cheapest romances.
To the Buddhist or the eastern fatalist existence is a science
or a plan, which must end up in a certain way. But to a Christian
existence is a STORY, which may end up in any way. In a thrilling
novel (that purely Christian product) the hero is not eaten
by cannibals; but it is essential to the existence of the thrill
that he MIGHT be eaten by cannibals. The hero must (so to speak)
be an eatable hero. So Christian morals have always said to the man,
not that he would lose his soul, but that he must take care that he
didn't. In Christian morals, in short, it is wicked to call a man
"damned": but it is strictly religious and philosophic to call
him damnable.

All Christianity concentrates on the man at the cross-roads.
The vast and shallow philosophies, the huge syntheses of humbug,
all talk about ages and evolution and ultimate developments.
The true philosophy is concerned with the instant. Will a man
take this road or that?--that is the only thing to think about,
if you enjoy thinking. The aeons are easy enough to think about,
any one can think about them. The instant is really awful:
and it is because our religion has intensely felt the instant,
that it has in literature dealt much with battle and in theology
dealt much with hell. It is full of DANGER, like a boy's book:
it is at an immortal crisis. There is a great deal of real similarity
between popular fiction and the religion of the western people.
If you say that popular fiction is vulgar and tawdry, you only say
what the dreary and well-informed say also about the images in the
Catholic churches. Life (according to the faith) is very like a
serial story in a magazine: life ends with the promise (or menace)
"to be continued in our next." Also, with a noble vulgarity,
life imitates the serial and leaves off at the exciting moment.
For death is distinctly an exciting moment.

But the point is that a story is exciting because it has in it
so strong an element of will, of what theology calls free-will.
You cannot finish a sum how you like. But you can finish a story
how you like. When somebody discovered the Differential Calculus
there was only one Differential Calculus he could discover.
But when Shakespeare killed Romeo he might have married him to
Juliet's old nurse if he had felt inclined. And Christendom has
excelled in the narrative romance exactly because it has insisted
on the theological free-will. It is a large matter and too much
to one side of the road to be discussed adequately here; but this
is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating
crime as disease, about making a prison merely a hygienic environment
like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods.
The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active
choice whereas disease is not. If you say that you are going to cure
a profligate as you cure an asthmatic, my cheap and obvious answer is,
"Produce the people who want to be asthmatics as many people want
to be profligates." A man may lie still and be cured of a malady.
But he must not lie still if he wants to be cured of a sin;
on the contrary, he must get up and jump about violently.
The whole point indeed is perfectly expressed in the very word
which we use for a man in hospital; "patient" is in the passive mood;
"sinner" is in the active. If a man is to be saved from influenza,
he may be a patient. But if he is to be saved from forging,
he must be not a patient but an IMPATIENT. He must be personally
impatient with forgery. All moral reform must start in the active
not the passive will.

Here again we reach the same substantial conclusion. In so far
as we desire the definite reconstructions and the dangerous revolutions
which have distinguished European civilization, we shall not discourage
the thought of possible ruin; we shall rather encourage it.
If we want, like the Eastern saints, merely to contemplate how right
things are, of course we shall only say that they must go right.
But if we particularly want to MAKE them go right, we must insist
that they may go wrong.

Lastly, this truth is yet again true in the case of the common
modern attempts to diminish or to explain away the divinity of Christ.
The thing may be true or not; that I shall deal with before I end.
But if the divinity is true it is certainly terribly revolutionary.
That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we
knew already; but that God could have his back to the wall is a boast
for all insurgents for ever. Christianity is the only religion
on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete.
Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God,
must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds,
Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator.
For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean
that the soul passes a breaking point--and does not break.
In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it
is easy to discuss; and I apologise in advance if any of my
phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent touching a matter which the
greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach.
But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional
suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way)
went not only through agony, but through doubt. It is written,
"Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." No; but the Lord thy God may
tempt Himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane.
In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God.
He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror
of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven,
it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross:
the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let
the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all
the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable
recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god
who has himself been in revolt. Nay, (the matter grows too difficult
for human speech,) but let the atheists themselves choose a god.
They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation;
only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be
an atheist.

These can be called the essentials of the old orthodoxy,
of which the chief merit is that it is the natural fountain of
revolution and reform; and of which the chief defect is that it
is obviously only an abstract assertion. Its main advantage
is that it is the most adventurous and manly of all theologies.
Its chief disadvantage is simply that it is a theology. It can always
be urged against it that it is in its nature arbitrary and in the air.
But it is not so high in the air but that great archers spend their
whole lives in shooting arrows at it--yes, and their last arrows;
there are men who will ruin themselves and ruin their civilization
if they may ruin also this old fantastic tale. This is the last
and most astounding fact about this faith; that its enemies will
use any weapon against it, the swords that cut their own fingers,
and the firebrands that burn their own homes. Men who begin to fight
the Church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging
away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the Church.
This is no exaggeration; I could fill a book with the instances of it.
Mr. Blatchford set out, as an ordinary Bible-smasher, to prove
that Adam was guiltless of sin against God; in manoeuvring so as to
maintain this he admitted, as a mere side issue, that all the tyrants,
from Nero to King Leopold, were guiltless of any sin against humanity.
I know a man who has such a passion for proving that he will have no
personal existence after death that he falls back on the position
that he has no personal existence now. He invokes Buddhism and says
that all souls fade into each other; in order to prove that he
cannot go to heaven he proves that he cannot go to Hartlepool.
I have known people who protested against religious education with
arguments against any education, saying that the child's mind must
grow freely or that the old must not teach the young. I have known
people who showed that there could be no divine judgment by showing
that there can be no human judgment, even for practical purposes.
They burned their own corn to set fire to the church; they smashed
their own tools to smash it; any stick was good enough to beat it with,
though it were the last stick of their own dismembered furniture.
We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this
world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic
who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices
the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God.
He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert
the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne.
He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live,
for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived
at all.

And yet the thing hangs in the heavens unhurt. Its opponents
only succeed in destroying all that they themselves justly hold dear.
They do not destroy orthodoxy; they only destroy political
and common courage sense. They do not prove that Adam was not
responsible to God; how could they prove it? They only prove
(from their premises) that the Czar is not responsible to Russia.
They do not prove that Adam should not have been punished by God;
they only prove that the nearest sweater should not be punished by men.
With their oriental doubts about personality they do not make certain
that we shall have no personal life hereafter; they only make
certain that we shall not have a very jolly or complete one here.
With their paralysing hints of all conclusions coming out wrong
they do not tear the book of the Recording Angel; they only make
it a little harder to keep the books of Marshall & Snelgrove.
Not only is the faith the mother of all worldly energies, but its foes
are the fathers of all worldly confusion. The secularists have not
wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things,
if that is any comfort to them. The Titans did not scale heaven;
but they laid waste the world.



IX AUTHORITY AND THE ADVENTURER


The last chapter has been concerned with the contention that
orthodoxy is not only (as is often urged) the only safe guardian of
morality or order, but is also the only logical guardian of liberty,
innovation and advance. If we wish to pull down the prosperous
oppressor we cannot do it with the new doctrine of human perfectibility;
we can do it with the old doctrine of Original Sin. If we want
to uproot inherent cruelties or lift up lost populations we cannot
do it with the scientific theory that matter precedes mind; we can
do it with the supernatural theory that mind precedes matter.
If we wish specially to awaken people to social vigilance and
tireless pursuit of practise, we cannot help it much by insisting
on the Immanent God and the Inner Light: for these are at best
reasons for contentment; we can help it much by insisting on the
transcendent God and the flying and escaping gleam; for that means
divine discontent. If we wish particularly to assert the idea
of a generous balance against that of a dreadful autocracy we
shall instinctively be Trinitarian rather than Unitarian. If we
desire European civilization to be a raid and a rescue, we shall
insist rather that souls are in real peril than that their peril is
ultimately unreal. And if we wish to exalt the outcast and the crucified,
we shall rather wish to think that a veritable God was crucified,
rather than a mere sage or hero. Above all, if we wish to protect
the poor we shall be in favour of fixed rules and clear dogmas.
The RULES of a club are occasionally in favour of the poor member.
The drift of a club is always in favour of the rich one.

And now we come to the crucial question which truly concludes
the whole matter. A reasonable agnostic, if he has happened to agree
with me so far, may justly turn round and say, "You have found
a practical philosophy in the doctrine of the Fall; very well.
You have found a side of democracy now dangerously neglected wisely
asserted in Original Sin; all right. You have found a truth in
the doctrine of hell; I congratulate you. You are convinced that
worshippers of a personal God look outwards and are progressive;
I congratulate them. But even supposing that those doctrines
do include those truths, why cannot you take the truths and leave
the doctrines? Granted that all modern society is trusting
the rich too much because it does not allow for human weakness;
granted that orthodox ages have had a great advantage because
(believing in the Fall) they did allow for human weakness, why cannot
you simply allow for human weakness without believing in the Fall?
If you have discovered that the idea of damnation represents
a healthy idea of danger, why can you not simply take the idea
of danger and leave the idea of damnation? If you see clearly
the kernel of common-sense in the nut of Christian orthodoxy,
why cannot you simply take the kernel and leave the nut?
Why cannot you (to use that cant phrase of the newspapers which I,
as a highly scholarly agnostic, am a little ashamed of using)
why cannot you simply take what is good in Christianity, what you can
define as valuable, what you can comprehend, and leave all the rest,
all the absolute dogmas that are in their nature incomprehensible?"
This is the real question; this is the last question; and it is a
pleasure to try to answer it.

The first answer is simply to say that I am a rationalist.
I like to have some intellectual justification for my intuitions.
If I am treating man as a fallen being it is an intellectual
convenience to me to believe that he fell; and I find, for some odd
psychological reason, that I can deal better with a man's exercise
of freewill if I believe that he has got it. But I am in this matter
yet more definitely a rationalist. I do not propose to turn this
book into one of ordinary Christian apologetics; I should be glad
to meet at any other time the enemies of Christianity in that more
obvious arena. Here I am only giving an account of my own growth
in spiritual certainty. But I may pause to remark that the more I
saw of the merely abstract arguments against the Christian cosmology
the less I thought of them. I mean that having found the moral
atmosphere of the Incarnation to be common sense, I then looked
at the established intellectual arguments against the Incarnation
and found them to be common nonsense. In case the argument should
be thought to suffer from the absence of the ordinary apologetic I
will here very briefly summarise my own arguments and conclusions
on the purely objective or scientific truth of the matter.