Orthodoxy

G >> G. K. Chesterton >> Orthodoxy


But I really felt (the fancy may seem foolish) as if all the order
and number of things were the romantic remnant of Crusoe's ship.
That there are two sexes and one sun, was like the fact that there
were two guns and one axe. It was poignantly urgent that none should
be lost; but somehow, it was rather fun that none could be added.
The trees and the planets seemed like things saved from the wreck:
and when I saw the Matterhorn I was glad that it had not been overlooked
in the confusion. I felt economical about the stars as if they were
sapphires (they are called so in Milton's Eden): I hoarded the hills.
For the universe is a single jewel, and while it is a natural cant
to talk of a jewel as peerless and priceless, of this jewel it is
literally true. This cosmos is indeed without peer and without price:
for there cannot be another one.

Thus ends, in unavoidable inadequacy, the attempt to utter the
unutterable things. These are my ultimate attitudes towards life;
the soils for the seeds of doctrine. These in some dark way I
thought before I could write, and felt before I could think:
that we may proceed more easily afterwards, I will roughly recapitulate
them now. I felt in my bones; first, that this world does not
explain itself. It may be a miracle with a supernatural explanation;
it may be a conjuring trick, with a natural explanation.
But the explanation of the conjuring trick, if it is to satisfy me,
will have to be better than the natural explanations I have heard.
The thing is magic, true or false. Second, I came to feel as if magic
must have a meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it.
There was something personal in the world, as in a work of art;
whatever it meant it meant violently. Third, I thought this
purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects,
such as dragons. Fourth, that the proper form of thanks to it
is some form of humility and restraint: we should thank God
for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them. We owed,
also, an obedience to whatever made us. And last, and strangest,
there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some
way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some
primordial ruin. Man had saved his good as Crusoe saved his goods:
he had saved them from a wreck. All this I felt and the age gave me
no encouragement to feel it. And all this time I had not even thought
of Christian theology.



V THE FLAG OF THE WORLD


When I was a boy there were two curious men running about
who were called the optimist and the pessimist. I constantly used
the words myself, but I cheerfully confess that I never had any
very special idea of what they meant. The only thing which might
be considered evident was that they could not mean what they said;
for the ordinary verbal explanation was that the optimist thought
this world as good as it could be, while the pessimist thought
it as bad as it could be. Both these statements being obviously
raving nonsense, one had to cast about for other explanations.
An optimist could not mean a man who thought everything right and
nothing wrong. For that is meaningless; it is like calling everything
right and nothing left. Upon the whole, I came to the conclusion
that the optimist thought everything good except the pessimist,
and that the pessimist thought everything bad, except himself.
It would be unfair to omit altogether from the list the mysterious
but suggestive definition said to have been given by a little girl,
"An optimist is a man who looks after your eyes, and a pessimist
is a man who looks after your feet." I am not sure that this is not
the best definition of all. There is even a sort of allegorical truth
in it. For there might, perhaps, be a profitable distinction drawn
between that more dreary thinker who thinks merely of our contact
with the earth from moment to moment, and that happier thinker
who considers rather our primary power of vision and of choice
of road.

But this is a deep mistake in this alternative of the optimist
and the pessimist. The assumption of it is that a man criticises
this world as if he were house-hunting, as if he were being shown
over a new suite of apartments. If a man came to this world from
some other world in full possession of his powers he might discuss
whether the advantage of midsummer woods made up for the disadvantage
of mad dogs, just as a man looking for lodgings might balance
the presence of a telephone against the absence of a sea view.
But no man is in that position. A man belongs to this world before
he begins to ask if it is nice to belong to it. He has fought for
the flag, and often won heroic victories for the flag long before he
has ever enlisted. To put shortly what seems the essential matter,
he has a loyalty long before he has any admiration.

In the last chapter it has been said that the primary feeling
that this world is strange and yet attractive is best expressed
in fairy tales. The reader may, if he likes, put down the next
stage to that bellicose and even jingo literature which commonly
comes next in the history of a boy. We all owe much sound morality
to the penny dreadfuls. Whatever the reason, it seemed and still
seems to me that our attitude towards life can be better expressed
in terms of a kind of military loyalty than in terms of criticism
and approval. My acceptance of the universe is not optimism,
it is more like patriotism. It is a matter of primary loyalty.
The world is not a lodging-house at Brighton, which we are to
leave because it is miserable. It is the fortress of our family,
with the flag flying on the turret, and the more miserable it
is the less we should leave it. The point is not that this world
is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that
when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it,
and its sadness a reason for loving it more. All optimistic thoughts
about England and all pessimistic thoughts about her are alike
reasons for the English patriot. Similarly, optimism and pessimism
are alike arguments for the cosmic patriot.

Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing--say
Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find
the thread of thought leads to the throne or the mystic and the
arbitrary. It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico: in
that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor,
certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico: for then
it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of
it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico: to love it with a
transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a
man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and
golden pinnacles; Pimlico would attire herself as a woman does when
she is loved. For decoration is not given to hide horrible things:
but to decorate things already adorable. A mother does not give her
child a blue bow because he is so ugly without it. A lover does not
give a girl a necklace to hide her neck. If men loved Pimlico as
mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is THEIRS, Pimlico in a
year or two might be fairer than Florence. Some readers will say that
this is a mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of
mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Go back to
the darkest roots of civilization and you will find them knotted round
some sacred stone or encircling some sacred well. People first paid
honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love
Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

The eighteenth-century theories of the social contract have
been exposed to much clumsy criticism in our time; in so far
as they meant that there is at the back of all historic government
an idea of content and co-operation, they were demonstrably right.
But they really were wrong, in so far as they suggested that men
had ever aimed at order or ethics directly by a conscious exchange
of interests. Morality did not begin by one man saying to another,
"I will not hit you if you do not hit me"; there is no trace
of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said,
"We must not hit each other in the holy place." They gained their
morality by guarding their religion. They did not cultivate courage.
They fought for the shrine, and found they had become courageous.
They did not cultivate cleanliness. They purified themselves for
the altar, and found that they were clean. The history of the Jews
is the only early document known to most Englishmen, and the facts can
be judged sufficiently from that. The Ten Commandments which have been
found substantially common to mankind were merely military commands;
a code of regimental orders, issued to protect a certain ark across
a certain desert. Anarchy was evil because it endangered the sanctity.
And only when they made a holy day for God did they find they had made
a holiday for men.

If it be granted that this primary devotion to a place or thing
is a source of creative energy, we can pass on to a very peculiar fact.
Let us reiterate for an instant that the only right optimism is a sort
of universal patriotism. What is the matter with the pessimist?
I think it can be stated by saying that he is the cosmic anti-patriot.
And what is the matter with the anti-patriot? I think it can be stated,
without undue bitterness, by saying that he is the candid friend.
And what is the matter with the candid friend? There we strike
the rock of real life and immutable human nature.

I venture to say that what is bad in the candid friend
is simply that he is not candid. He is keeping something back--
his own gloomy pleasure in saying unpleasant things. He has
a secret desire to hurt, not merely to help. This is certainly,
I think, what makes a certain sort of anti-patriot irritating to
healthy citizens. I do not speak (of course) of the anti-patriotism
which only irritates feverish stockbrokers and gushing actresses;
that is only patriotism speaking plainly. A man who says that
no patriot should attack the Boer War until it is over is not
worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son
should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it.
But there is an anti-patriot who honestly angers honest men,
and the explanation of him is, I think, what I have suggested:
he is the uncandid candid friend; the man who says, "I am sorry
to say we are ruined," and is not sorry at all. And he may be said,
without rhetoric, to be a traitor; for he is using that ugly knowledge
which was allowed him to strengthen the army, to discourage people
from joining it. Because he is allowed to be pessimistic as a
military adviser he is being pessimistic as a recruiting sergeant.
Just in the same way the pessimist (who is the cosmic anti-patriot)
uses the freedom that life allows to her counsellors to lure away
the people from her flag. Granted that he states only facts, it is
still essential to know what are his emotions, what is his motive.
It may be that twelve hundred men in Tottenham are down with smallpox;
but we want to know whether this is stated by some great philosopher
who wants to curse the gods, or only by some common clergyman who wants
to help the men.

The evil of the pessimist is, then, not that he chastises gods
and men, but that he does not love what he chastises--he has not
this primary and supernatural loyalty to things. What is the evil
of the man commonly called an optimist? Obviously, it is felt
that the optimist, wishing to defend the honour of this world,
will defend the indefensible. He is the jingo of the universe;
he will say, "My cosmos, right or wrong." He will be less inclined
to the reform of things; more inclined to a sort of front-bench
official answer to all attacks, soothing every one with assurances.
He will not wash the world, but whitewash the world. All this
(which is true of a type of optimist) leads us to the one really
interesting point of psychology, which could not be explained
without it.

We say there must be a primal loyalty to life: the only
question is, shall it be a natural or a supernatural loyalty?
If you like to put it so, shall it be a reasonable or an
unreasonable loyalty? Now, the extraordinary thing is that the
bad optimism (the whitewashing, the weak defence of everything)
comes in with the reasonable optimism. Rational optimism leads
to stagnation: it is irrational optimism that leads to reform.
Let me explain by using once more the parallel of patriotism.
The man who is most likely to ruin the place he loves is exactly
the man who loves it with a reason. The man who will improve
the place is the man who loves it without a reason. If a man loves
some feature of Pimlico (which seems unlikely), he may find himself
defending that feature against Pimlico itself. But if he simply loves
Pimlico itself, he may lay it waste and turn it into the New Jerusalem.
I do not deny that reform may be excessive; I only say that it is the
mystic patriot who reforms. Mere jingo self-contentment is commonest
among those who have some pedantic reason for their patriotism.
The worst jingoes do not love England, but a theory of England.
If we love England for being an empire, we may overrate the success
with which we rule the Hindoos. But if we love it only for being
a nation, we can face all events: for it would be a nation even
if the Hindoos ruled us. Thus also only those will permit their
patriotism to falsify history whose patriotism depends on history.
A man who loves England for being English will not mind how she arose.
But a man who loves England for being Anglo-Saxon may go against
all facts for his fancy. He may end (like Carlyle and Freeman)
by maintaining that the Norman Conquest was a Saxon Conquest.
He may end in utter unreason--because he has a reason. A man who
loves France for being military will palliate the army of 1870.
But a man who loves France for being France will improve the army
of 1870. This is exactly what the French have done, and France is
a good instance of the working paradox. Nowhere else is patriotism
more purely abstract and arbitrary; and nowhere else is reform more
drastic and sweeping. The more transcendental is your patriotism,
the more practical are your politics.

Perhaps the most everyday instance of this point is in the case
of women; and their strange and strong loyalty. Some stupid people
started the idea that because women obviously back up their own
people through everything, therefore women are blind and do not
see anything. They can hardly have known any women. The same women
who are ready to defend their men through thick and thin are (in
their personal intercourse with the man) almost morbidly lucid
about the thinness of his excuses or the thickness of his head.
A man's friend likes him but leaves him as he is: his wife loves him
and is always trying to turn him into somebody else. Women who are
utter mystics in their creed are utter cynics in their criticism.
Thackeray expressed this well when he made Pendennis' mother,
who worshipped her son as a god, yet assume that he would go wrong
as a man. She underrated his virtue, though she overrated his value.
The devotee is entirely free to criticise; the fanatic can safely
be a sceptic. Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is.
Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.

This at least had come to be my position about all that
was called optimism, pessimism, and improvement. Before any
cosmic act of reform we must have a cosmic oath of allegiance.
A man must be interested in life, then he could be disinterested
in his views of it. "My son give me thy heart"; the heart must
be fixed on the right thing: the moment we have a fixed heart we
have a free hand. I must pause to anticipate an obvious criticism.
It will be said that a rational person accepts the world as mixed
of good and evil with a decent satisfaction and a decent endurance.
But this is exactly the attitude which I maintain to be defective.
It is, I know, very common in this age; it was perfectly put in those
quiet lines of Matthew Arnold which are more piercingly blasphemous
than the shrieks of Schopenhauer--

"Enough we live:--and if a life, With large results so little rife,
Though bearable, seem hardly worth This pomp of worlds, this pain
of birth."

I know this feeling fills our epoch, and I think it freezes
our epoch. For our Titanic purposes of faith and revolution,
what we need is not the cold acceptance of the world as a compromise,
but some way in which we can heartily hate and heartily love it.
We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a
surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent.
We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre's castle,
to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return
at evening.

No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with this world:
but we demand not strength enough to get on with it, but strength
enough to get it on. Can he hate it enough to change it,
and yet love it enough to think it worth changing? Can he look
up at its colossal good without once feeling acquiescence?
Can he look up at its colossal evil without once feeling despair?
Can he, in short, be at once not only a pessimist and an optimist,
but a fanatical pessimist and a fanatical optimist? Is he enough of a
pagan to die for the world, and enough of a Christian to die to it?
In this combination, I maintain, it is the rational optimist who fails,
the irrational optimist who succeeds. He is ready to smash the whole
universe for the sake of itself.

I put these things not in their mature logical sequence, but as
they came: and this view was cleared and sharpened by an accident
of the time. Under the lengthening shadow of Ibsen, an argument
arose whether it was not a very nice thing to murder one's self.
Grave moderns told us that we must not even say "poor fellow,"
of a man who had blown his brains out, since he was an enviable person,
and had only blown them out because of their exceptional excellence.
Mr. William Archer even suggested that in the golden age there
would be penny-in-the-slot machines, by which a man could kill
himself for a penny. In all this I found myself utterly hostile
to many who called themselves liberal and humane. Not only is
suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil,
the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take
the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man.
The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned
he wipes out the world. His act is worse (symbolically considered)
than any rape or dynamite outrage. For it destroys all buildings:
it insults all women. The thief is satisfied with diamonds;
but the suicide is not: that is his crime. He cannot be bribed,
even by the blazing stones of the Celestial City. The thief
compliments the things he steals, if not the owner of them.
But the suicide insults everything on earth by not stealing it.
He defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake.
There is not a tiny creature in the cosmos at whom his death
is not a sneer. When a man hangs himself on a tree, the leaves
might fall off in anger and the birds fly away in fury:
for each has received a personal affront. Of course there may be
pathetic emotional excuses for the act. There often are for rape,
and there almost always are for dynamite. But if it comes to clear
ideas and the intelligent meaning of things, then there is much
more rational and philosophic truth in the burial at the cross-roads
and the stake driven through the body, than in Mr. Archer's suicidal
automatic machines. There is a meaning in burying the suicide apart.
The man's crime is different from other crimes--for it makes even
crimes impossible.

About the same time I read a solemn flippancy by some free thinker:
he said that a suicide was only the same as a martyr. The open
fallacy of this helped to clear the question. Obviously a suicide
is the opposite of a martyr. A martyr is a man who cares so much
for something outside him, that he forgets his own personal life.
A suicide is a man who cares so little for anything outside him,
that he wants to see the last of everything. One wants something
to begin: the other wants everything to end. In other words,
the martyr is noble, exactly because (however he renounces the world
or execrates all humanity) he confesses this ultimate link with life;
he sets his heart outside himself: he dies that something may live.
The suicide is ignoble because he has not this link with being:
he is a mere destroyer; spiritually, he destroys the universe.
And then I remembered the stake and the cross-roads, and the queer
fact that Christianity had shown this weird harshness to the suicide.
For Christianity had shown a wild encouragement of the martyr.
Historic Christianity was accused, not entirely without reason,
of carrying martyrdom and asceticism to a point, desolate
and pessimistic. The early Christian martyrs talked of death
with a horrible happiness. They blasphemed the beautiful duties
of the body: they smelt the grave afar off like a field of flowers.
All this has seemed to many the very poetry of pessimism. Yet there
is the stake at the crossroads to show what Christianity thought of
the pessimist.

This was the first of the long train of enigmas with which
Christianity entered the discussion. And there went with it a
peculiarity of which I shall have to speak more markedly, as a note
of all Christian notions, but which distinctly began in this one.
The Christian attitude to the martyr and the suicide was not what is
so often affirmed in modern morals. It was not a matter of degree.
It was not that a line must be drawn somewhere, and that the
self-slayer in exaltation fell within the line, the self-slayer
in sadness just beyond it. The Christian feeling evidently
was not merely that the suicide was carrying martyrdom too far.
The Christian feeling was furiously for one and furiously against
the other: these two things that looked so much alike were at
opposite ends of heaven and hell. One man flung away his life;
he was so good that his dry bones could heal cities in pestilence.
Another man flung away life; he was so bad that his bones would
pollute his brethren's. I am not saying this fierceness was right;
but why was it so fierce?

Here it was that I first found that my wandering feet were
in some beaten track. Christianity had also felt this opposition
of the martyr to the suicide: had it perhaps felt it for the
same reason? Had Christianity felt what I felt, but could not
(and cannot) express--this need for a first loyalty to things,
and then for a ruinous reform of things? Then I remembered
that it was actually the charge against Christianity that it
combined these two things which I was wildly trying to combine.
Christianity was accused, at one and the same time, of being
too optimistic about the universe and of being too pessimistic
about the world. The coincidence made me suddenly stand still.

An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying
that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot
be held in another. Some dogma, we are told, was credible
in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth.
You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed
on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. You might as well
say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three,
but not suitable to half-past four. What a man can believe
depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century.
If a man believes in unalterable natural law, he cannot believe
in any miracle in any age. If a man believes in a will behind law,
he can believe in any miracle in any age. Suppose, for the sake
of argument, we are concerned with a case of thaumaturgic healing.
A materialist of the twelfth century could not believe it any more
than a materialist of the twentieth century. But a Christian
Scientist of the twentieth century can believe it as much as a
Christian of the twelfth century. It is simply a matter of a man's
theory of things. Therefore in dealing with any historical answer,
the point is not whether it was given in our time, but whether it
was given in answer to our question. And the more I thought about
when and how Christianity had come into the world, the more I felt
that it had actually come to answer this question.

It is commonly the loose and latitudinarian Christians who pay
quite indefensible compliments to Christianity. They talk as if
there had never been any piety or pity until Christianity came,
a point on which any mediaeval would have been eager to correct them.
They represent that the remarkable thing about Christianity was that it
was the first to preach simplicity or self-restraint, or inwardness
and sincerity. They will think me very narrow (whatever that means)
if I say that the remarkable thing about Christianity was that it
was the first to preach Christianity. Its peculiarity was that it
was peculiar, and simplicity and sincerity are not peculiar,
but obvious ideals for all mankind. Christianity was the answer
to a riddle, not the last truism uttered after a long talk.
Only the other day I saw in an excellent weekly paper of Puritan tone
this remark, that Christianity when stripped of its armour of dogma
(as who should speak of a man stripped of his armour of bones),
turned out to be nothing but the Quaker doctrine of the Inner Light.
Now, if I were to say that Christianity came into the world
specially to destroy the doctrine of the Inner Light, that would
be an exaggeration. But it would be very much nearer to the truth.
The last Stoics, like Marcus Aurelius, were exactly the people
who did believe in the Inner Light. Their dignity, their weariness,
their sad external care for others, their incurable internal care
for themselves, were all due to the Inner Light, and existed only
by that dismal illumination. Notice that Marcus Aurelius insists,
as such introspective moralists always do, upon small things done
or undone; it is because he has not hate or love enough to make
a moral revolution. He gets up early in the morning, just as our
own aristocrats living the Simple Life get up early in the morning;
because such altruism is much easier than stopping the games
of the amphitheatre or giving the English people back their land.
Marcus Aurelius is the most intolerable of human types. He is an
unselfish egoist. An unselfish egoist is a man who has pride without
the excuse of passion. Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment
the worst is what these people call the Inner Light. Of all horrible
religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within.
Any one who knows any body knows how it would work; any one who knows
any one from the Higher Thought Centre knows how it does work.
That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately
to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun
or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship
cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not
the god within. Christianity came into the world firstly in order
to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards,
but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm
a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being
a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light,
but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as
the moon, terrible as an army with banners.