Orthodoxy

G >> G. K. Chesterton >> Orthodoxy


All the same, it will be as well if Jones does not worship the sun
and moon. If he does, there is a tendency for him to imitate them;
to say, that because the sun burns insects alive, he may burn
insects alive. He thinks that because the sun gives people sun-stroke,
he may give his neighbour measles. He thinks that because the moon
is said to drive men mad, he may drive his wife mad. This ugly side
of mere external optimism had also shown itself in the ancient world.
About the time when the Stoic idealism had begun to show the
weaknesses of pessimism, the old nature worship of the ancients had
begun to show the enormous weaknesses of optimism. Nature worship
is natural enough while the society is young, or, in other words,
Pantheism is all right as long as it is the worship of Pan.
But Nature has another side which experience and sin are not slow
in finding out, and it is no flippancy to say of the god Pan that he
soon showed the cloven hoof. The only objection to Natural Religion
is that somehow it always becomes unnatural. A man loves Nature
in the morning for her innocence and amiability, and at nightfall,
if he is loving her still, it is for her darkness and her cruelty.
He washes at dawn in clear water as did the Wise Man of the Stoics,
yet, somehow at the dark end of the day, he is bathing in hot
bull's blood, as did Julian the Apostate. The mere pursuit of
health always leads to something unhealthy. Physical nature must
not be made the direct object of obedience; it must be enjoyed,
not worshipped. Stars and mountains must not be taken seriously.
If they are, we end where the pagan nature worship ended.
Because the earth is kind, we can imitate all her cruelties.
Because sexuality is sane, we can all go mad about sexuality.
Mere optimism had reached its insane and appropriate termination.
The theory that everything was good had become an orgy of everything
that was bad.

On the other side our idealist pessimists were represented
by the old remnant of the Stoics. Marcus Aurelius and his friends
had really given up the idea of any god in the universe and looked
only to the god within. They had no hope of any virtue in nature,
and hardly any hope of any virtue in society. They had not enough
interest in the outer world really to wreck or revolutionise it.
They did not love the city enough to set fire to it. Thus the
ancient world was exactly in our own desolate dilemma. The only
people who really enjoyed this world were busy breaking it up;
and the virtuous people did not care enough about them to knock
them down. In this dilemma (the same as ours) Christianity suddenly
stepped in and offered a singular answer, which the world eventually
accepted as THE answer. It was the answer then, and I think it is
the answer now.

This answer was like the slash of a sword; it sundered;
it did not in any sense sentimentally unite. Briefly, it divided
God from the cosmos. That transcendence and distinctness of the
deity which some Christians now want to remove from Christianity,
was really the only reason why any one wanted to be a Christian.
It was the whole point of the Christian answer to the unhappy pessimist
and the still more unhappy optimist. As I am here only concerned
with their particular problem, I shall indicate only briefly this
great metaphysical suggestion. All descriptions of the creating
or sustaining principle in things must be metaphorical, because they
must be verbal. Thus the pantheist is forced to speak of God
in all things as if he were in a box. Thus the evolutionist has,
in his very name, the idea of being unrolled like a carpet.
All terms, religious and irreligious, are open to this charge.
The only question is whether all terms are useless, or whether one can,
with such a phrase, cover a distinct IDEA about the origin of things.
I think one can, and so evidently does the evolutionist, or he would
not talk about evolution. And the root phrase for all Christian
theism was this, that God was a creator, as an artist is a creator.
A poet is so separate from his poem that he himself speaks of it
as a little thing he has "thrown off." Even in giving it forth he
has flung it away. This principle that all creation and procreation
is a breaking off is at least as consistent through the cosmos as the
evolutionary principle that all growth is a branching out. A woman
loses a child even in having a child. All creation is separation.
Birth is as solemn a parting as death.

It was the prime philosophic principle of Christianity that
this divorce in the divine act of making (such as severs the poet
from the poem or the mother from the new-born child) was the true
description of the act whereby the absolute energy made the world.
According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it.
According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free.
God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he
had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human
actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.
I will discuss the truth of this theorem later. Here I have only
to point out with what a startling smoothness it passed the dilemma
we have discussed in this chapter. In this way at least one could
be both happy and indignant without degrading one's self to be either
a pessimist or an optimist. On this system one could fight all
the forces of existence without deserting the flag of existence.
One could be at peace with the universe and yet be at war with
the world. St. George could still fight the dragon, however big
the monster bulked in the cosmos, though he were bigger than the
mighty cities or bigger than the everlasting hills. If he were as
big as the world he could yet be killed in the name of the world.
St. George had not to consider any obvious odds or proportions in
the scale of things, but only the original secret of their design.
He can shake his sword at the dragon, even if it is everything;
even if the empty heavens over his head are only the huge arch of its
open jaws.

And then followed an experience impossible to describe.
It was as if I had been blundering about since my birth with two
huge and unmanageable machines, of different shapes and without
apparent connection--the world and the Christian tradition.
I had found this hole in the world: the fact that one must
somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it;
somehow one must love the world without being worldly. I found this
projecting feature of Christian theology, like a sort of hard spike,
the dogmatic insistence that God was personal, and had made a world
separate from Himself. The spike of dogma fitted exactly into
the hole in the world--it had evidently been meant to go there--
and then the strange thing began to happen. When once these two
parts of the two machines had come together, one after another,
all the other parts fitted and fell in with an eerie exactitude.
I could hear bolt after bolt over all the machinery falling
into its place with a kind of click of relief. Having got one
part right, all the other parts were repeating that rectitude,
as clock after clock strikes noon. Instinct after instinct was
answered by doctrine after doctrine. Or, to vary the metaphor,
I was like one who had advanced into a hostile country to take
one high fortress. And when that fort had fallen the whole country
surrendered and turned solid behind me. The whole land was lit up,
as it were, back to the first fields of my childhood. All those blind
fancies of boyhood which in the fourth chapter I have tried in vain
to trace on the darkness, became suddenly transparent and sane.
I was right when I felt that roses were red by some sort of choice:
it was the divine choice. I was right when I felt that I would
almost rather say that grass was the wrong colour than say it must
by necessity have been that colour: it might verily have been
any other. My sense that happiness hung on the crazy thread of a
condition did mean something when all was said: it meant the whole
doctrine of the Fall. Even those dim and shapeless monsters of
notions which I have not been able to describe, much less defend,
stepped quietly into their places like colossal caryatides
of the creed. The fancy that the cosmos was not vast and void,
but small and cosy, had a fulfilled significance now, for anything
that is a work of art must be small in the sight of the artist;
to God the stars might be only small and dear, like diamonds.
And my haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to
be used, but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from Crusoe's ship--
even that had been the wild whisper of something originally wise, for,
according to Christianity, we were indeed the survivors of a wreck,
the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of
the world.

But the important matter was this, that it entirely reversed
the reason for optimism. And the instant the reversal was made it
felt like the abrupt ease when a bone is put back in the socket.
I had often called myself an optimist, to avoid the too evident
blasphemy of pessimism. But all the optimism of the age had been
false and disheartening for this reason, that it had always been
trying to prove that we fit in to the world. The Christian
optimism is based on the fact that we do NOT fit in to the world.
I had tried to be happy by telling myself that man is an animal,
like any other which sought its meat from God. But now I really
was happy, for I had learnt that man is a monstrosity. I had been
right in feeling all things as odd, for I myself was at once worse
and better than all things. The optimist's pleasure was prosaic,
for it dwelt on the naturalness of everything; the Christian
pleasure was poetic, for it dwelt on the unnaturalness of everything
in the light of the supernatural. The modern philosopher had told
me again and again that I was in the right place, and I had still
felt depressed even in acquiescence. But I had heard that I was in
the WRONG place, and my soul sang for joy, like a bird in spring.
The knowledge found out and illuminated forgotten chambers in the dark
house of infancy. I knew now why grass had always seemed to me
as queer as the green beard of a giant, and why I could feel homesick
at home.



VI THE PARADOXES OF CHRISTIANITY


The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an
unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest
kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite.
Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians.
It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is;
its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden;
its wildness lies in wait. I give one coarse instance of what I mean.
Suppose some mathematical creature from the moon were to reckon
up the human body; he would at once see that the essential thing
about it was that it was duplicate. A man is two men, he on the
right exactly resembling him on the left. Having noted that there
was an arm on the right and one on the left, a leg on the right
and one on the left, he might go further and still find on each side
the same number of fingers, the same number of toes, twin eyes,
twin ears, twin nostrils, and even twin lobes of the brain.
At last he would take it as a law; and then, where he found a heart
on one side, would deduce that there was another heart on the other.
And just then, where he most felt he was right, he would be wrong.

It is this silent swerving from accuracy by an inch that is
the uncanny element in everything. It seems a sort of secret
treason in the universe. An apple or an orange is round enough
to get itself called round, and yet is not round after all.
The earth itself is shaped like an orange in order to lure some
simple astronomer into calling it a globe. A blade of grass is
called after the blade of a sword, because it comes to a point;
but it doesn't. Everywhere in things there is this element of the
quiet and incalculable. It escapes the rationalists, but it never
escapes till the last moment. From the grand curve of our earth it
could easily be inferred that every inch of it was thus curved.
It would seem rational that as a man has a brain on both sides,
he should have a heart on both sides. Yet scientific men are still
organizing expeditions to find the North Pole, because they are
so fond of flat country. Scientific men are also still organizing
expeditions to find a man's heart; and when they try to find it,
they generally get on the wrong side of him.

Now, actual insight or inspiration is best tested by whether it
guesses these hidden malformations or surprises. If our mathematician
from the moon saw the two arms and the two ears, he might deduce
the two shoulder-blades and the two halves of the brain. But if he
guessed that the man's heart was in the right place, then I should
call him something more than a mathematician. Now, this is exactly
the claim which I have since come to propound for Christianity.
Not merely that it deduces logical truths, but that when it suddenly
becomes illogical, it has found, so to speak, an illogical truth.
It not only goes right about things, but it goes wrong (if one
may say so) exactly where the things go wrong. Its plan suits
the secret irregularities, and expects the unexpected. It is simple
about the simple truth; but it is stubborn about the subtle truth.
It will admit that a man has two hands, it will not admit (though all
the Modernists wail to it) the obvious deduction that he has two hearts.
It is my only purpose in this chapter to point this out; to show
that whenever we feel there is something odd in Christian theology,
we shall generally find that there is something odd in the truth.

I have alluded to an unmeaning phrase to the effect that
such and such a creed cannot be believed in our age. Of course,
anything can be believed in any age. But, oddly enough, there really
is a sense in which a creed, if it is believed at all, can be
believed more fixedly in a complex society than in a simple one.
If a man finds Christianity true in Birmingham, he has actually clearer
reasons for faith than if he had found it true in Mercia. For the more
complicated seems the coincidence, the less it can be a coincidence.
If snowflakes fell in the shape, say, of the heart of Midlothian,
it might be an accident. But if snowflakes fell in the exact shape
of the maze at Hampton Court, I think one might call it a miracle.
It is exactly as of such a miracle that I have since come to feel
of the philosophy of Christianity. The complication of our modern
world proves the truth of the creed more perfectly than any of
the plain problems of the ages of faith. It was in Notting Hill
and Battersea that I began to see that Christianity was true.
This is why the faith has that elaboration of doctrines and details
which so much distresses those who admire Christianity without
believing in it. When once one believes in a creed, one is proud
of its complexity, as scientists are proud of the complexity
of science. It shows how rich it is in discoveries. If it is right
at all, it is a compliment to say that it's elaborately right.
A stick might fit a hole or a stone a hollow by accident.
But a key and a lock are both complex. And if a key fits a lock,
you know it is the right key.

But this involved accuracy of the thing makes it very difficult
to do what I now have to do, to describe this accumulation of truth.
It is very hard for a man to defend anything of which he is
entirely convinced. It is comparatively easy when he is only
partially convinced. He is partially convinced because he has
found this or that proof of the thing, and he can expound it.
But a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he
finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he
finds that everything proves it. And the more converging reasons he
finds pointing to this conviction, the more bewildered he is if asked
suddenly to sum them up. Thus, if one asked an ordinary intelligent man,
on the spur of the moment, "Why do you prefer civilization to savagery?"
he would look wildly round at object after object, and would only be
able to answer vaguely, "Why, there is that bookcase . . . and the
coals in the coal-scuttle . . . and pianos . . . and policemen."
The whole case for civilization is that the case for it is complex.
It has done so many things. But that very multiplicity of proof
which ought to make reply overwhelming makes reply impossible.

There is, therefore, about all complete conviction a kind
of huge helplessness. The belief is so big that it takes a long
time to get it into action. And this hesitation chiefly arises,
oddly enough, from an indifference about where one should begin.
All roads lead to Rome; which is one reason why many people never
get there. In the case of this defence of the Christian conviction
I confess that I would as soon begin the argument with one thing
as another; I would begin it with a turnip or a taximeter cab.
But if I am to be at all careful about making my meaning clear,
it will, I think, be wiser to continue the current arguments
of the last chapter, which was concerned to urge the first of
these mystical coincidences, or rather ratifications. All I had
hitherto heard of Christian theology had alienated me from it.
I was a pagan at the age of twelve, and a complete agnostic by the
age of sixteen; and I cannot understand any one passing the age
of seventeen without having asked himself so simple a question.
I did, indeed, retain a cloudy reverence for a cosmic deity
and a great historical interest in the Founder of Christianity.
But I certainly regarded Him as a man; though perhaps I thought that,
even in that point, He had an advantage over some of His modern critics.
I read the scientific and sceptical literature of my time--all of it,
at least, that I could find written in English and lying about;
and I read nothing else; I mean I read nothing else on any other
note of philosophy. The penny dreadfuls which I also read
were indeed in a healthy and heroic tradition of Christianity;
but I did not know this at the time. I never read a line of
Christian apologetics. I read as little as I can of them now.
It was Huxley and Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh who brought me
back to orthodox theology. They sowed in my mind my first wild
doubts of doubt. Our grandmothers were quite right when they said
that Tom Paine and the free-thinkers unsettled the mind. They do.
They unsettled mine horribly. The rationalist made me question
whether reason was of any use whatever; and when I had finished
Herbert Spencer I had got as far as doubting (for the first time)
whether evolution had occurred at all. As I laid down the last of
Colonel Ingersoll's atheistic lectures the dreadful thought broke
across my mind, "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian." I was
in a desperate way.

This odd effect of the great agnostics in arousing doubts
deeper than their own might be illustrated in many ways.
I take only one. As I read and re-read all the non-Christian
or anti-Christian accounts of the faith, from Huxley to Bradlaugh,
a slow and awful impression grew gradually but graphically
upon my mind--the impression that Christianity must be a most
extraordinary thing. For not only (as I understood) had Christianity
the most flaming vices, but it had apparently a mystical talent
for combining vices which seemed inconsistent with each other.
It was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons.
No sooner had one rationalist demonstrated that it was too far
to the east than another demonstrated with equal clearness that it
was much too far to the west. No sooner had my indignation died
down at its angular and aggressive squareness than I was called up
again to notice and condemn its enervating and sensual roundness.
In case any reader has not come across the thing I mean, I will give
such instances as I remember at random of this self-contradiction
in the sceptical attack. I give four or five of them; there are
fifty more.

Thus, for instance, I was much moved by the eloquent attack
on Christianity as a thing of inhuman gloom; for I thought
(and still think) sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin.
Insincere pessimism is a social accomplishment, rather agreeable
than otherwise; and fortunately nearly all pessimism is insincere.
But if Christianity was, as these people said, a thing purely
pessimistic and opposed to life, then I was quite prepared to blow
up St. Paul's Cathedral. But the extraordinary thing is this.
They did prove to me in Chapter I. (to my complete satisfaction)
that Christianity was too pessimistic; and then, in Chapter II.,
they began to prove to me that it was a great deal too optimistic.
One accusation against Christianity was that it prevented men,
by morbid tears and terrors, from seeking joy and liberty in the bosom
of Nature. But another accusation was that it comforted men with a
fictitious providence, and put them in a pink-and-white nursery.
One great agnostic asked why Nature was not beautiful enough,
and why it was hard to be free. Another great agnostic objected
that Christian optimism, "the garment of make-believe woven by
pious hands," hid from us the fact that Nature was ugly, and that
it was impossible to be free. One rationalist had hardly done
calling Christianity a nightmare before another began to call it
a fool's paradise. This puzzled me; the charges seemed inconsistent.
Christianity could not at once be the black mask on a white world,
and also the white mask on a black world. The state of the Christian
could not be at once so comfortable that he was a coward to cling
to it, and so uncomfortable that he was a fool to stand it.
If it falsified human vision it must falsify it one way or another;
it could not wear both green and rose-coloured spectacles.
I rolled on my tongue with a terrible joy, as did all young men
of that time, the taunts which Swinburne hurled at the dreariness of
the creed--

"Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilaean, the world has grown
gray with Thy breath."

But when I read the same poet's accounts of paganism (as
in "Atalanta"), I gathered that the world was, if possible,
more gray before the Galilean breathed on it than afterwards.
The poet maintained, indeed, in the abstract, that life itself
was pitch dark. And yet, somehow, Christianity had darkened it.
The very man who denounced Christianity for pessimism was himself
a pessimist. I thought there must be something wrong. And it did
for one wild moment cross my mind that, perhaps, those might not be
the very best judges of the relation of religion to happiness who,
by their own account, had neither one nor the other.

It must be understood that I did not conclude hastily that the
accusations were false or the accusers fools. I simply deduced
that Christianity must be something even weirder and wickeder
than they made out. A thing might have these two opposite vices;
but it must be a rather queer thing if it did. A man might be too fat
in one place and too thin in another; but he would be an odd shape.
At this point my thoughts were only of the odd shape of the Christian
religion; I did not allege any odd shape in the rationalistic mind.

Here is another case of the same kind. I felt that a strong
case against Christianity lay in the charge that there is something
timid, monkish, and unmanly about all that is called "Christian,"
especially in its attitude towards resistance and fighting.
The great sceptics of the nineteenth century were largely virile.
Bradlaugh in an expansive way, Huxley, in a reticent way,
were decidedly men. In comparison, it did seem tenable that there
was something weak and over patient about Christian counsels.
The Gospel paradox about the other cheek, the fact that priests
never fought, a hundred things made plausible the accusation
that Christianity was an attempt to make a man too like a sheep.
I read it and believed it, and if I had read nothing different,
I should have gone on believing it. But I read something very different.
I turned the next page in my agnostic manual, and my brain turned
up-side down. Now I found that I was to hate Christianity not for
fighting too little, but for fighting too much. Christianity, it seemed,
was the mother of wars. Christianity had deluged the world with blood.
I had got thoroughly angry with the Christian, because he never
was angry. And now I was told to be angry with him because his
anger had been the most huge and horrible thing in human history;
because his anger had soaked the earth and smoked to the sun.
The very people who reproached Christianity with the meekness and
non-resistance of the monasteries were the very people who reproached
it also with the violence and valour of the Crusades. It was the
fault of poor old Christianity (somehow or other) both that Edward
the Confessor did not fight and that Richard Coeur de Leon did.
The Quakers (we were told) were the only characteristic Christians;
and yet the massacres of Cromwell and Alva were characteristic
Christian crimes. What could it all mean? What was this Christianity
which always forbade war and always produced wars? What could
be the nature of the thing which one could abuse first because it
would not fight, and second because it was always fighting?
In what world of riddles was born this monstrous murder and this
monstrous meekness? The shape of Christianity grew a queerer shape
every instant.