Orthodoxy

G >> G. K. Chesterton >> Orthodoxy


I have now said enough to show (to any one to whom such
an explanation is essential) that I have in the ordinary arena
of apologetics, a ground of belief. In pure records of experiment (if
these be taken democratically without contempt or favour) there is
evidence first, that miracles happen, and second that the nobler
miracles belong to our tradition. But I will not pretend that this curt
discussion is my real reason for accepting Christianity instead of taking
the moral good of Christianity as I should take it out of Confucianism.

I have another far more solid and central ground for submitting
to it as a faith, instead of merely picking up hints from it
as a scheme. And that is this: that the Christian Church in its
practical relation to my soul is a living teacher, not a dead one.
It not only certainly taught me yesterday, but will almost certainly
teach me to-morrow. Once I saw suddenly the meaning of the shape
of the cross; some day I may see suddenly the meaning of the shape
of the mitre. One fine morning I saw why windows were pointed;
some fine morning I may see why priests were shaven. Plato has
told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you
with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more.
But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living,
to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow,
or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a
single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes
to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato
and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting
to see some truth that he has never seen before. There is one
only other parallel to this position; and that is the parallel
of the life in which we all began. When your father told you,
walking about the garden, that bees stung or that roses smelt sweet,
you did not talk of taking the best out of his philosophy. When the
bees stung you, you did not call it an entertaining coincidence.
When the rose smelt sweet you did not say "My father is a rude,
barbaric symbol, enshrining (perhaps unconsciously) the deep
delicate truths that flowers smell." No: you believed your father,
because you had found him to be a living fountain of facts, a thing
that really knew more than you; a thing that would tell you truth
to-morrow, as well as to-day. And if this was true of your father,
it was even truer of your mother; at least it was true of mine,
to whom this book is dedicated. Now, when society is in a rather
futile fuss about the subjection of women, will no one say how much
every man owes to the tyranny and privilege of women, to the fact
that they alone rule education until education becomes futile:
for a boy is only sent to be taught at school when it is too late
to teach him anything. The real thing has been done already,
and thank God it is nearly always done by women. Every man
is womanised, merely by being born. They talk of the masculine woman;
but every man is a feminised man. And if ever men walk to Westminster
to protest against this female privilege, I shall not join
their procession.

For I remember with certainty this fixed psychological fact;
that the very time when I was most under a woman's authority,
I was most full of flame and adventure. Exactly because when my
mother said that ants bit they did bite, and because snow did
come in winter (as she said); therefore the whole world was to me
a fairyland of wonderful fulfilments, and it was like living in
some Hebraic age, when prophecy after prophecy came true. I went
out as a child into the garden, and it was a terrible place to me,
precisely because I had a clue to it: if I had held no clue it would
not have been terrible, but tame. A mere unmeaning wilderness is
not even impressive. But the garden of childhood was fascinating,
exactly because everything had a fixed meaning which could be found
out in its turn. Inch by inch I might discover what was the object
of the ugly shape called a rake; or form some shadowy conjecture
as to why my parents kept a cat.

So, since I have accepted Christendom as a mother and not
merely as a chance example, I have found Europe and the world
once more like the little garden where I stared at the symbolic
shapes of cat and rake; I look at everything with the old elvish
ignorance and expectancy. This or that rite or doctrine may look
as ugly and extraordinary as a rake; but I have found by experience
that such things end somehow in grass and flowers. A clergyman may
be apparently as useless as a cat, but he is also as fascinating,
for there must be some strange reason for his existence. I give
one instance out of a hundred; I have not myself any instinctive
kinship with that enthusiasm for physical virginity, which has
certainly been a note of historic Christianity. But when I look
not at myself but at the world, I perceive that this enthusiasm
is not only a note of Christianity, but a note of Paganism, a note
of high human nature in many spheres. The Greeks felt virginity
when they carved Artemis, the Romans when they robed the vestals,
the worst and wildest of the great Elizabethan playwrights clung to
the literal purity of a woman as to the central pillar of the world.
Above all, the modern world (even while mocking sexual innocence)
has flung itself into a generous idolatry of sexual innocence--
the great modern worship of children. For any man who loves children
will agree that their peculiar beauty is hurt by a hint of physical sex.
With all this human experience, allied with the Christian authority,
I simply conclude that I am wrong, and the church right; or rather
that I am defective, while the church is universal. It takes
all sorts to make a church; she does not ask me to be celibate.
But the fact that I have no appreciation of the celibates,
I accept like the fact that I have no ear for music. The best
human experience is against me, as it is on the subject of Bach.
Celibacy is one flower in my father's garden, of which I have
not been told the sweet or terrible name. But I may be told it
any day.

This, therefore, is, in conclusion, my reason for accepting
the religion and not merely the scattered and secular truths out
of the religion. I do it because the thing has not merely told this
truth or that truth, but has revealed itself as a truth-telling thing.
All other philosophies say the things that plainly seem to be true;
only this philosophy has again and again said the thing that does
not seem to be true, but is true. Alone of all creeds it is
convincing where it is not attractive; it turns out to be right,
like my father in the garden. Theosophists for instance will preach
an obviously attractive idea like re-incarnation; but if we wait
for its logical results, they are spiritual superciliousness and the
cruelty of caste. For if a man is a beggar by his own pre-natal sins,
people will tend to despise the beggar. But Christianity preaches
an obviously unattractive idea, such as original sin; but when we
wait for its results, they are pathos and brotherhood, and a thunder
of laughter and pity; for only with original sin we can at once pity
the beggar and distrust the king. Men of science offer us health,
an obvious benefit; it is only afterwards that we discover
that by health, they mean bodily slavery and spiritual tedium.
Orthodoxy makes us jump by the sudden brink of hell; it is only
afterwards that we realise that jumping was an athletic exercise
highly beneficial to our health. It is only afterwards that we
realise that this danger is the root of all drama and romance.
The strongest argument for the divine grace is simply its ungraciousness.
The unpopular parts of Christianity turn out when examined to be
the very props of the people. The outer ring of Christianity
is a rigid guard of ethical abnegations and professional priests;
but inside that inhuman guard you will find the old human life
dancing like children, and drinking wine like men; for Christianity
is the only frame for pagan freedom. But in the modern philosophy
the case is opposite; it is its outer ring that is obviously
artistic and emancipated; its despair is within.

And its despair is this, that it does not really believe
that there is any meaning in the universe; therefore it cannot
hope to find any romance; its romances will have no plots. A man
cannot expect any adventures in the land of anarchy. But a man can
expect any number of adventures if he goes travelling in the land
of authority. One can find no meanings in a jungle of scepticism;
but the man will find more and more meanings who walks through
a forest of doctrine and design. Here everything has a story tied
to its tail, like the tools or pictures in my father's house;
for it is my father's house. I end where I began--at the right end.
I have entered at last the gate of all good philosophy. I have come
into my second childhood.

But this larger and more adventurous Christian universe has
one final mark difficult to express; yet as a conclusion of the whole
matter I will attempt to express it. All the real argument about
religion turns on the question of whether a man who was born upside
down can tell when he comes right way up. The primary paradox of
Christianity is that the ordinary condition of man is not his sane
or sensible condition; that the normal itself is an abnormality.
That is the inmost philosophy of the Fall. In Sir Oliver Lodge's
interesting new Catechism, the first two questions were:
"What are you?" and "What, then, is the meaning of the Fall of Man?"
I remember amusing myself by writing my own answers to the questions;
but I soon found that they were very broken and agnostic answers.
To the question, "What are you?" I could only answer, "God knows."
And to the question, "What is meant by the Fall?" I could answer
with complete sincerity, "That whatever I am, I am not myself."
This is the prime paradox of our religion; something that we have
never in any full sense known, is not only better than ourselves,
but even more natural to us than ourselves. And there is really
no test of this except the merely experimental one with which these
pages began, the test of the padded cell and the open door. It is only
since I have known orthodoxy that I have known mental emancipation.
But, in conclusion, it has one special application to the ultimate idea
of joy.

It is said that Paganism is a religion of joy and Christianity
of sorrow; it would be just as easy to prove that Paganism is pure
sorrow and Christianity pure joy. Such conflicts mean nothing and
lead nowhere. Everything human must have in it both joy and sorrow;
the only matter of interest is the manner in which the two things
are balanced or divided. And the really interesting thing is this,
that the pagan was (in the main) happier and happier as he approached
the earth, but sadder and sadder as he approached the heavens.
The gaiety of the best Paganism, as in the playfulness of Catullus
or Theocritus, is, indeed, an eternal gaiety never to be forgotten
by a grateful humanity. But it is all a gaiety about the facts of life,
not about its origin. To the pagan the small things are as sweet
as the small brooks breaking out of the mountain; but the broad things
are as bitter as the sea. When the pagan looks at the very core of the
cosmos he is struck cold. Behind the gods, who are merely despotic,
sit the fates, who are deadly. Nay, the fates are worse than deadly;
they are dead. And when rationalists say that the ancient world
was more enlightened than the Christian, from their point of view
they are right. For when they say "enlightened" they mean darkened
with incurable despair. It is profoundly true that the ancient world
was more modern than the Christian. The common bond is in the fact
that ancients and moderns have both been miserable about existence,
about everything, while mediaevals were happy about that at least.
I freely grant that the pagans, like the moderns, were only miserable
about everything--they were quite jolly about everything else.
I concede that the Christians of the Middle Ages were only at
peace about everything--they were at war about everything else.
But if the question turn on the primary pivot of the cosmos,
then there was more cosmic contentment in the narrow and bloody
streets of Florence than in the theatre of Athens or the open garden
of Epicurus. Giotto lived in a gloomier town than Euripides,
but he lived in a gayer universe.

The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things,
but sad about the big ones. Nevertheless (I offer my last dogma
defiantly) it is not native to man to be so. Man is more himself,
man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him,
and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude,
a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent
pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday;
joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live. Yet, according to
the apparent estate of man as seen by the pagan or the agnostic,
this primary need of human nature can never be fulfilled.
Joy ought to be expansive; but for the agnostic it must be contracted,
it must cling to one corner of the world. Grief ought to be
a concentration; but for the agnostic its desolation is spread
through an unthinkable eternity. This is what I call being born
upside down. The sceptic may truly be said to be topsy-turvy;
for his feet are dancing upwards in idle ecstasies, while his brain
is in the abyss. To the modern man the heavens are actually below
the earth. The explanation is simple; he is standing on his head;
which is a very weak pedestal to stand on. But when he has found
his feet again he knows it. Christianity satisfies suddenly
and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up;
satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes
something gigantic and sadness something special and small.
The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot;
the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world.
Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like
the prompt stillness in a sick-room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy
as a sort of merciful comedy: because the frantic energy of divine
things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our
own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities
of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence,
while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.

Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic
secret of the Christian. And as I close this chaotic volume I open
again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I
am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure
which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other,
above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos
was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern,
were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears;
He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as
the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something.
Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining
their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture
down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected
to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something.
I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality
a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid
from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something
that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation.
There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when
He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was
His mirth.