Orthodoxy

G >> G. K. Chesterton >> Orthodoxy


If I am asked, as a purely intellectual question, why I believe
in Christianity, I can only answer, "For the same reason that an
intelligent agnostic disbelieves in Christianity." I believe in it
quite rationally upon the evidence. But the evidence in my case,
as in that of the intelligent agnostic, is not really in this or that
alleged demonstration; it is in an enormous accumulation of small
but unanimous facts. The secularist is not to be blamed because
his objections to Christianity are miscellaneous and even scrappy;
it is precisely such scrappy evidence that does convince the mind.
I mean that a man may well be less convinced of a philosophy
from four books, than from one book, one battle, one landscape,
and one old friend. The very fact that the things are of different
kinds increases the importance of the fact that they all point
to one conclusion. Now, the non-Christianity of the average
educated man to-day is almost always, to do him justice, made up
of these loose but living experiences. I can only say that my
evidences for Christianity are of the same vivid but varied kind
as his evidences against it. For when I look at these various
anti-Christian truths, I simply discover that none of them are true.
I discover that the true tide and force of all the facts flows
the other way. Let us take cases. Many a sensible modern man
must have abandoned Christianity under the pressure of three such
converging convictions as these: first, that men, with their shape,
structure, and sexuality, are, after all, very much like beasts,
a mere variety of the animal kingdom; second, that primeval religion
arose in ignorance and fear; third, that priests have blighted societies
with bitterness and gloom. Those three anti-Christian arguments
are very different; but they are all quite logical and legitimate;
and they all converge. The only objection to them (I discover)
is that they are all untrue. If you leave off looking at books
about beasts and men, if you begin to look at beasts and men then
(if you have any humour or imagination, any sense of the frantic
or the farcical) you will observe that the startling thing is not
how like man is to the brutes, but how unlike he is. It is the
monstrous scale of his divergence that requires an explanation.
That man and brute are like is, in a sense, a truism; but that being
so like they should then be so insanely unlike, that is the shock
and the enigma. That an ape has hands is far less interesting to the
philosopher than the fact that having hands he does next to nothing
with them; does not play knuckle-bones or the violin; does not carve
marble or carve mutton. People talk of barbaric architecture and
debased art. But elephants do not build colossal temples of ivory
even in a roccoco style; camels do not paint even bad pictures,
though equipped with the material of many camel's-hair brushes.
Certain modern dreamers say that ants and bees have a society superior
to ours. They have, indeed, a civilization; but that very truth
only reminds us that it is an inferior civilization. Who ever
found an ant-hill decorated with the statues of celebrated ants?
Who has seen a bee-hive carved with the images of gorgeous queens
of old? No; the chasm between man and other creatures may have
a natural explanation, but it is a chasm. We talk of wild animals;
but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out.
All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability
of the tribe or type. All other animals are domestic animals;
man alone is ever undomestic, either as a profligate or a monk.
So that this first superficial reason for materialism is, if anything,
a reason for its opposite; it is exactly where biology leaves off that
all religion begins.

It would be the same if I examined the second of the three chance
rationalist arguments; the argument that all that we call divine
began in some darkness and terror. When I did attempt to examine
the foundations of this modern idea I simply found that there
were none. Science knows nothing whatever about pre-historic man;
for the excellent reason that he is pre-historic. A few professors
choose to conjecture that such things as human sacrifice were once
innocent and general and that they gradually dwindled; but there is
no direct evidence of it, and the small amount of indirect evidence
is very much the other way. In the earliest legends we have,
such as the tales of Isaac and of Iphigenia, human sacrifice
is not introduced as something old, but rather as something new;
as a strange and frightful exception darkly demanded by the gods.
History says nothing; and legends all say that the earth was kinder
in its earliest time. There is no tradition of progress; but the whole
human race has a tradition of the Fall. Amusingly enough, indeed,
the very dissemination of this idea is used against its authenticity.
Learned men literally say that this pre-historic calamity cannot
be true because every race of mankind remembers it. I cannot keep
pace with these paradoxes.

And if we took the third chance instance, it would be the same;
the view that priests darken and embitter the world. I look at the
world and simply discover that they don't. Those countries in Europe
which are still influenced by priests, are exactly the countries
where there is still singing and dancing and coloured dresses and art
in the open-air. Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls;
but they are the walls of a playground. Christianity is the only
frame which has preserved the pleasure of Paganism. We might fancy
some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island
in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff's edge
they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the
place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down,
leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over;
but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in
terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.

Thus these three facts of experience, such facts as go to make
an agnostic, are, in this view, turned totally round. I am left saying,
"Give me an explanation, first, of the towering eccentricity of man
among the brutes; second, of the vast human tradition of some
ancient happiness; third, of the partial perpetuation of such pagan
joy in the countries of the Catholic Church." One explanation,
at any rate, covers all three: the theory that twice was the natural
order interrupted by some explosion or revelation such as people
now call "psychic." Once Heaven came upon the earth with a power
or seal called the image of God, whereby man took command of Nature;
and once again (when in empire after empire men had been found wanting)
Heaven came to save mankind in the awful shape of a man.
This would explain why the mass of men always look backwards;
and why the only corner where they in any sense look forwards is
the little continent where Christ has His Church. I know it will
be said that Japan has become progressive. But how can this be an
answer when even in saying "Japan has become progressive," we really
only mean, "Japan has become European"? But I wish here not so much
to insist on my own explanation as to insist on my original remark.
I agree with the ordinary unbelieving man in the street in being
guided by three or four odd facts all pointing to something;
only when I came to look at the facts I always found they pointed
to something else.

I have given an imaginary triad of such ordinary anti-Christian
arguments; if that be too narrow a basis I will give on the spur
of the moment another. These are the kind of thoughts which in
combination create the impression that Christianity is something weak
and diseased. First, for instance, that Jesus was a gentle creature,
sheepish and unworldly, a mere ineffectual appeal to the world; second,
that Christianity arose and flourished in the dark ages of ignorance,
and that to these the Church would drag us back; third, that the people
still strongly religious or (if you will) superstitious--such people
as the Irish--are weak, unpractical, and behind the times.
I only mention these ideas to affirm the same thing: that when I
looked into them independently I found, not that the conclusions
were unphilosophical, but simply that the facts were not facts.
Instead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament I
looked at the New Testament. There I found an account, not in the
least of a person with his hair parted in the middle or his hands
clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder
and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils,
passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a
sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who often acted like an angry god--
and always like a god. Christ had even a literary style of his own,
not to be found, I think, elsewhere; it consists of an almost furious
use of the A FORTIORI. His "how much more" is piled one upon
another like castle upon castle in the clouds. The diction used
ABOUT Christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submissive.
But the diction used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque;
it is full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurled
into the sea. Morally it is equally terrific; he called himself
a sword of slaughter, and told men to buy swords if they sold their
coats for them. That he used other even wilder words on the side
of non-resistance greatly increases the mystery; but it also,
if anything, rather increases the violence. We cannot even explain
it by calling such a being insane; for insanity is usually along one
consistent channel. The maniac is generally a monomaniac. Here we
must remember the difficult definition of Christianity already given;
Christianity is a superhuman paradox whereby two opposite passions
may blaze beside each other. The one explanation of the Gospel
language that does explain it, is that it is the survey of one
who from some supernatural height beholds some more startling synthesis.

I take in order the next instance offered: the idea that
Christianity belongs to the Dark Ages. Here I did not satisfy myself
with reading modern generalisations; I read a little history.
And in history I found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the
Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark.
It was a shining bridge connecting two shining civilizations.
If any one says that the faith arose in ignorance and savagery
the answer is simple: it didn't. It arose in the Mediterranean
civilization in the full summer of the Roman Empire. The world
was swarming with sceptics, and pantheism was as plain as the sun,
when Constantine nailed the cross to the mast. It is perfectly true
that afterwards the ship sank; but it is far more extraordinary that
the ship came up again: repainted and glittering, with the cross
still at the top. This is the amazing thing the religion did:
it turned a sunken ship into a submarine. The ark lived under the load
of waters; after being buried under the debris of dynasties and clans,
we arose and remembered Rome. If our faith had been a mere fad
of the fading empire, fad would have followed fad in the twilight,
and if the civilization ever re-emerged (and many such have
never re-emerged) it would have been under some new barbaric flag.
But the Christian Church was the last life of the old society and
was also the first life of the new. She took the people who were
forgetting how to make an arch and she taught them to invent the
Gothic arch. In a word, the most absurd thing that could be said
of the Church is the thing we have all heard said of it. How can
we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages?
The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them.

I added in this second trinity of objections an idle instance
taken from those who feel such people as the Irish to be weakened
or made stagnant by superstition. I only added it because this
is a peculiar case of a statement of fact that turns out to be
a statement of falsehood. It is constantly said of the Irish that
they are impractical. But if we refrain for a moment from looking
at what is said about them and look at what is DONE about them,
we shall see that the Irish are not only practical, but quite
painfully successful. The poverty of their country, the minority
of their members are simply the conditions under which they were asked
to work; but no other group in the British Empire has done so much
with such conditions. The Nationalists were the only minority
that ever succeeded in twisting the whole British Parliament sharply
out of its path. The Irish peasants are the only poor men in these
islands who have forced their masters to disgorge. These people,
whom we call priest-ridden, are the only Britons who will not be
squire-ridden. And when I came to look at the actual Irish character,
the case was the same. Irishmen are best at the specially
HARD professions--the trades of iron, the lawyer, and the soldier.
In all these cases, therefore, I came back to the same conclusion:
the sceptic was quite right to go by the facts, only he had not
looked at the facts. The sceptic is too credulous; he believes
in newspapers or even in encyclopedias. Again the three questions
left me with three very antagonistic questions. The average sceptic
wanted to know how I explained the namby-pamby note in the Gospel,
the connection of the creed with mediaeval darkness and the political
impracticability of the Celtic Christians. But I wanted to ask,
and to ask with an earnestness amounting to urgency, "What is this
incomparable energy which appears first in one walking the earth
like a living judgment and this energy which can die with a dying
civilization and yet force it to a resurrection from the dead;
this energy which last of all can inflame a bankrupt peasantry
with so fixed a faith in justice that they get what they ask,
while others go empty away; so that the most helpless island
of the Empire can actually help itself?"

There is an answer: it is an answer to say that the energy
is truly from outside the world; that it is psychic, or at least
one of the results of a real psychical disturbance. The highest
gratitude and respect are due to the great human civilizations such
as the old Egyptian or the existing Chinese. Nevertheless it is
no injustice for them to say that only modern Europe has exhibited
incessantly a power of self-renewal recurring often at the shortest
intervals and descending to the smallest facts of building or costume.
All other societies die finally and with dignity. We die daily.
We are always being born again with almost indecent obstetrics.
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that there is in historic
Christendom a sort of unnatural life: it could be explained as a
supernatural life. It could be explained as an awful galvanic life
working in what would have been a corpse. For our civilization OUGHT
to have died, by all parallels, by all sociological probability,
in the Ragnorak of the end of Rome. That is the weird inspiration
of our estate: you and I have no business to be here at all. We are
all REVENANTS; all living Christians are dead pagans walking about.
Just as Europe was about to be gathered in silence to Assyria
and Babylon, something entered into its body. And Europe has had
a strange life--it is not too much to say that it has had the JUMPS--
ever since.

I have dealt at length with such typical triads of doubt in order
to convey the main contention--that my own case for Christianity is
rational; but it is not simple. It is an accumulation of varied
facts, like the attitude of the ordinary agnostic. But the ordinary
agnostic has got his facts all wrong. He is a non-believer for a
multitude of reasons; but they are untrue reasons. He doubts because
the Middle Ages were barbaric, but they weren't; because Darwinism is
demonstrated, but it isn't; because miracles do not happen, but they
do; because monks were lazy, but they were very industrious; because
nuns are unhappy, but they are particularly cheerful; because
Christian art was sad and pale, but it was picked out in peculiarly
bright colours and gay with gold; because modern science is moving
away from the supernatural, but it isn't, it is moving towards the
supernatural with the rapidity of a railway train.

But among these million facts all flowing one way there is,
of course, one question sufficiently solid and separate to be
treated briefly, but by itself; I mean the objective occurrence
of the supernatural. In another chapter I have indicated the fallacy
of the ordinary supposition that the world must be impersonal because it
is orderly. A person is just as likely to desire an orderly thing
as a disorderly thing. But my own positive conviction that personal
creation is more conceivable than material fate, is, I admit,
in a sense, undiscussable. I will not call it a faith or an intuition,
for those words are mixed up with mere emotion, it is strictly
an intellectual conviction; but it is a PRIMARY intellectual
conviction like the certainty of self of the good of living.
Any one who likes, therefore, may call my belief in God merely mystical;
the phrase is not worth fighting about. But my belief that miracles
have happened in human history is not a mystical belief at all; I believe
in them upon human evidences as I do in the discovery of America.
Upon this point there is a simple logical fact that only requires
to be stated and cleared up. Somehow or other an extraordinary
idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them
coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only
in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way.
The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they
have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them
(rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them.
The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman
when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old
apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder. The plain,
popular course is to trust the peasant's word about the ghost
exactly as far as you trust the peasant's word about the landlord.
Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy
agnosticism about both. Still you could fill the British Museum with
evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favour of the ghost.
If it comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human
testimony in favour of the supernatural. If you reject it, you can
only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant's story about
the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story
is a ghost story. That is, you either deny the main principle
of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism--
the abstract impossibility of miracle. You have a perfect right
to do so; but in that case you are the dogmatist. It is we
Christians who accept all actual evidence--it is you rationalists
who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed.
But I am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and looking
impartially into certain miracles of mediaeval and modern times,
I have come to the conclusion that they occurred. All argument
against these plain facts is always argument in a circle. If I say,
"Mediaeval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest
certain battles," they answer, "But mediaevals were superstitious";
if I want to know in what they were superstitious, the only
ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles. If I say "a
peasant saw a ghost," I am told, "But peasants are so credulous."
If I ask, "Why credulous?" the only answer is--that they see ghosts.
Iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it;
and the sailors are only stupid because they say they have seen Iceland.
It is only fair to add that there is another argument that the
unbeliever may rationally use against miracles, though he himself
generally forgets to use it.

He may say that there has been in many miraculous stories
a notion of spiritual preparation and acceptance: in short,
that the miracle could only come to him who believed in it.
It may be so, and if it is so how are we to test it? If we are
inquiring whether certain results follow faith, it is useless
to repeat wearily that (if they happen) they do follow faith.
If faith is one of the conditions, those without faith have a
most healthy right to laugh. But they have no right to judge.
Being a believer may be, if you like, as bad as being drunk;
still if we were extracting psychological facts from drunkards,
it would be absurd to be always taunting them with having been drunk.
Suppose we were investigating whether angry men really saw a red
mist before their eyes. Suppose sixty excellent householders swore
that when angry they had seen this crimson cloud: surely it would
be absurd to answer "Oh, but you admit you were angry at the time."
They might reasonably rejoin (in a stentorian chorus), "How the blazes
could we discover, without being angry, whether angry people see red?"
So the saints and ascetics might rationally reply, "Suppose that the
question is whether believers can see visions--even then, if you
are interested in visions it is no point to object to believers."
You are still arguing in a circle--in that old mad circle with which this
book began.

The question of whether miracles ever occur is a question of
common sense and of ordinary historical imagination: not of any final
physical experiment. One may here surely dismiss that quite brainless
piece of pedantry which talks about the need for "scientific conditions"
in connection with alleged spiritual phenomena. If we are asking
whether a dead soul can communicate with a living it is ludicrous
to insist that it shall be under conditions in which no two living
souls in their senses would seriously communicate with each other.
The fact that ghosts prefer darkness no more disproves the existence
of ghosts than the fact that lovers prefer darkness disproves the
existence of love. If you choose to say, "I will believe that Miss
Brown called her fiance a periwinkle or, any other endearing term,
if she will repeat the word before seventeen psychologists,"
then I shall reply, "Very well, if those are your conditions,
you will never get the truth, for she certainly will not say it."
It is just as unscientific as it is unphilosophical to be surprised
that in an unsympathetic atmosphere certain extraordinary sympathies
do not arise. It is as if I said that I could not tell if there
was a fog because the air was not clear enough; or as if I insisted
on perfect sunlight in order to see a solar eclipse.

As a common-sense conclusion, such as those to which we come
about sex or about midnight (well knowing that many details must
in their own nature be concealed) I conclude that miracles do happen.
I am forced to it by a conspiracy of facts: the fact that the men who
encounter elves or angels are not the mystics and the morbid dreamers,
but fishermen, farmers, and all men at once coarse and cautious;
the fact that we all know men who testify to spiritualistic incidents
but are not spiritualists, the fact that science itself admits
such things more and more every day. Science will even admit
the Ascension if you call it Levitation, and will very likely admit
the Resurrection when it has thought of another word for it.
I suggest the Regalvanisation. But the strongest of all is
the dilemma above mentioned, that these supernatural things are
never denied except on the basis either of anti-democracy or of
materialist dogmatism--I may say materialist mysticism. The sceptic
always takes one of the two positions; either an ordinary man need
not be believed, or an extraordinary event must not be believed.
For I hope we may dismiss the argument against wonders attempted
in the mere recapitulation of frauds, of swindling mediums or
trick miracles. That is not an argument at all, good or bad.
A false ghost disproves the reality of ghosts exactly as much as
a forged banknote disproves the existence of the Bank of England--
if anything, it proves its existence.

Given this conviction that the spiritual phenomena do occur
(my evidence for which is complex but rational), we then collide
with one of the worst mental evils of the age. The greatest
disaster of the nineteenth century was this: that men began
to use the word "spiritual" as the same as the word "good."
They thought that to grow in refinement and uncorporeality was
to grow in virtue. When scientific evolution was announced,
some feared that it would encourage mere animality. It did worse:
it encouraged mere spirituality. It taught men to think that so long
as they were passing from the ape they were going to the angel.
But you can pass from the ape and go to the devil. A man of genius,
very typical of that time of bewilderment, expressed it perfectly.
Benjamin Disraeli was right when he said he was on the side of
the angels. He was indeed; he was on the side of the fallen angels.
He was not on the side of any mere appetite or animal brutality;
but he was on the side of all the imperialism of the princes
of the abyss; he was on the side of arrogance and mystery,
and contempt of all obvious good. Between this sunken pride
and the towering humilities of heaven there are, one must suppose,
spirits of shapes and sizes. Man, in encountering them,
must make much the same mistakes that he makes in encountering
any other varied types in any other distant continent. It must
be hard at first to know who is supreme and who is subordinate.
If a shade arose from the under world, and stared at Piccadilly,
that shade would not quite understand the idea of an ordinary
closed carriage. He would suppose that the coachman on the box
was a triumphant conqueror, dragging behind him a kicking and
imprisoned captive. So, if we see spiritual facts for the first time,
we may mistake who is uppermost. It is not enough to find the gods;
they are obvious; we must find God, the real chief of the gods.
We must have a long historic experience in supernatural phenomena--
in order to discover which are really natural. In this light I
find the history of Christianity, and even of its Hebrew origins,
quite practical and clear. It does not trouble me to be told
that the Hebrew god was one among many. I know he was, without any
research to tell me so. Jehovah and Baal looked equally important,
just as the sun and the moon looked the same size. It is only
slowly that we learn that the sun is immeasurably our master,
and the small moon only our satellite. Believing that there
is a world of spirits, I shall walk in it as I do in the world
of men, looking for the thing that I like and think good.
Just as I should seek in a desert for clean water, or toil at
the North Pole to make a comfortable fire, so I shall search the
land of void and vision until I find something fresh like water,
and comforting like fire; until I find some place in eternity,
where I am literally at home. And there is only one such place to
be found.