Orthodoxy

G >> G. K. Chesterton >> Orthodoxy


This is what I have called guessing the hidden eccentricities
of life. This is knowing that a man's heart is to the left and not
in the middle. This is knowing not only that the earth is round,
but knowing exactly where it is flat. Christian doctrine detected
the oddities of life. It not only discovered the law, but it
foresaw the exceptions. Those underrate Christianity who say that
it discovered mercy; any one might discover mercy. In fact every
one did. But to discover a plan for being merciful and also severe--
THAT was to anticipate a strange need of human nature. For no one
wants to be forgiven for a big sin as if it were a little one.
Any one might say that we should be neither quite miserable nor
quite happy. But to find out how far one MAY be quite miserable
without making it impossible to be quite happy--that was a discovery
in psychology. Any one might say, "Neither swagger nor grovel";
and it would have been a limit. But to say, "Here you can swagger
and there you can grovel"--that was an emancipation.

This was the big fact about Christian ethics; the discovery
of the new balance. Paganism had been like a pillar of marble,
upright because proportioned with symmetry. Christianity was like
a huge and ragged and romantic rock, which, though it sways on its
pedestal at a touch, yet, because its exaggerated excrescences
exactly balance each other, is enthroned there for a thousand years.
In a Gothic cathedral the columns were all different, but they were
all necessary. Every support seemed an accidental and fantastic support;
every buttress was a flying buttress. So in Christendom apparent
accidents balanced. Becket wore a hair shirt under his gold
and crimson, and there is much to be said for the combination;
for Becket got the benefit of the hair shirt while the people in
the street got the benefit of the crimson and gold. It is at least
better than the manner of the modern millionaire, who has the black
and the drab outwardly for others, and the gold next his heart.
But the balance was not always in one man's body as in Becket's;
the balance was often distributed over the whole body of Christendom.
Because a man prayed and fasted on the Northern snows, flowers could
be flung at his festival in the Southern cities; and because fanatics
drank water on the sands of Syria, men could still drink cider in the
orchards of England. This is what makes Christendom at once so much
more perplexing and so much more interesting than the Pagan empire;
just as Amiens Cathedral is not better but more interesting than
the Parthenon. If any one wants a modern proof of all this,
let him consider the curious fact that, under Christianity,
Europe (while remaining a unity) has broken up into individual nations.
Patriotism is a perfect example of this deliberate balancing
of one emphasis against another emphasis. The instinct of the
Pagan empire would have said, "You shall all be Roman citizens,
and grow alike; let the German grow less slow and reverent;
the Frenchmen less experimental and swift." But the instinct
of Christian Europe says, "Let the German remain slow and reverent,
that the Frenchman may the more safely be swift and experimental.
We will make an equipoise out of these excesses. The absurdity
called Germany shall correct the insanity called France."

Last and most important, it is exactly this which explains
what is so inexplicable to all the modern critics of the history
of Christianity. I mean the monstrous wars about small points
of theology, the earthquakes of emotion about a gesture or a word.
It was only a matter of an inch; but an inch is everything when you
are balancing. The Church could not afford to swerve a hair's breadth
on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment
of the irregular equilibrium. Once let one idea become less powerful
and some other idea would become too powerful. It was no flock of sheep
the Christian shepherd was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers,
of terrible ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong
enough to turn to a false religion and lay waste the world.
Remember that the Church went in specifically for dangerous ideas;
she was a lion tamer. The idea of birth through a Holy Spirit,
of the death of a divine being, of the forgiveness of sins,
or the fulfilment of prophecies, are ideas which, any one can see,
need but a touch to turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious.
The smallest link was let drop by the artificers of the Mediterranean,
and the lion of ancestral pessimism burst his chain in the forgotten
forests of the north. Of these theological equalisations I have
to speak afterwards. Here it is enough to notice that if some
small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made
in human happiness. A sentence phrased wrong about the nature
of symbolism would have broken all the best statues in Europe.
A slip in the definitions might stop all the dances; might wither
all the Christmas trees or break all the Easter eggs. Doctrines had
to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might
enjoy general human liberties. The Church had to be careful,
if only that the world might be careless.

This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen
into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy,
humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting
as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to
be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses,
seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude
having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic.
The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse;
yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along
one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right,
so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand
the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers
to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving
to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly.
The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted
the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. It would
have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians.
It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century,
to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be
a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let
the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own.
It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob.
To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration
which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the
historic path of Christendom--that would indeed have been simple.
It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at
which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into
any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed
have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been
one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies
thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate,
the wild truth reeling but erect.



VII THE ETERNAL REVOLUTION


The following propositions have been urged: First, that some
faith in our life is required even to improve it; second, that some
dissatisfaction with things as they are is necessary even in order
to be satisfied; third, that to have this necessary content
and necessary discontent it is not sufficient to have the obvious
equilibrium of the Stoic. For mere resignation has neither the
gigantic levity of pleasure nor the superb intolerance of pain.
There is a vital objection to the advice merely to grin and bear it.
The objection is that if you merely bear it, you do not grin.
Greek heroes do not grin: but gargoyles do--because they are Christian.
And when a Christian is pleased, he is (in the most exact sense)
frightfully pleased; his pleasure is frightful. Christ prophesied
the whole of Gothic architecture in that hour when nervous and
respectable people (such people as now object to barrel organs)
objected to the shouting of the gutter-snipes of Jerusalem.
He said, "If these were silent, the very stones would cry out."
Under the impulse of His spirit arose like a clamorous chorus the
facades of the mediaeval cathedrals, thronged with shouting faces
and open mouths. The prophecy has fulfilled itself: the very stones
cry out.

If these things be conceded, though only for argument,
we may take up where we left it the thread of the thought of the
natural man, called by the Scotch (with regrettable familiarity),
"The Old Man." We can ask the next question so obviously in front
of us. Some satisfaction is needed even to make things better.
But what do we mean by making things better? Most modern talk on
this matter is a mere argument in a circle--that circle which we
have already made the symbol of madness and of mere rationalism.
Evolution is only good if it produces good; good is only good if it
helps evolution. The elephant stands on the tortoise, and the tortoise
on the elephant.

Obviously, it will not do to take our ideal from the principle
in nature; for the simple reason that (except for some human
or divine theory), there is no principle in nature. For instance,
the cheap anti-democrat of to-day will tell you solemnly that
there is no equality in nature. He is right, but he does not see
the logical addendum. There is no equality in nature; also there
is no inequality in nature. Inequality, as much as equality,
implies a standard of value. To read aristocracy into the anarchy
of animals is just as sentimental as to read democracy into it.
Both aristocracy and democracy are human ideals: the one saying
that all men are valuable, the other that some men are more valuable.
But nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice;
nature makes no remark on the subject. She does not even say
that the cat is enviable or the mouse pitiable. We think the cat
superior because we have (or most of us have) a particular philosophy
to the effect that life is better than death. But if the mouse
were a German pessimist mouse, he might not think that the cat
had beaten him at all. He might think he had beaten the cat by
getting to the grave first. Or he might feel that he had actually
inflicted frightful punishment on the cat by keeping him alive.
Just as a microbe might feel proud of spreading a pestilence,
so the pessimistic mouse might exult to think that he was renewing
in the cat the torture of conscious existence. It all depends
on the philosophy of the mouse. You cannot even say that there
is victory or superiority in nature unless you have some doctrine
about what things are superior. You cannot even say that the cat
scores unless there is a system of scoring. You cannot even say
that the cat gets the best of it unless there is some best to
be got.

We cannot, then, get the ideal itself from nature,
and as we follow here the first and natural speculation, we will
leave out (for the present) the idea of getting it from God.
We must have our own vision. But the attempts of most moderns
to express it are highly vague.

Some fall back simply on the clock: they talk as if mere
passage through time brought some superiority; so that even a man
of the first mental calibre carelessly uses the phrase that human
morality is never up to date. How can anything be up to date?--
a date has no character. How can one say that Christmas
celebrations are not suitable to the twenty-fifth of a month?
What the writer meant, of course, was that the majority is behind
his favourite minority--or in front of it. Other vague modern
people take refuge in material metaphors; in fact, this is the chief
mark of vague modern people. Not daring to define their doctrine
of what is good, they use physical figures of speech without stint
or shame, and, what is worst of all, seem to think these cheap
analogies are exquisitely spiritual and superior to the old morality.
Thus they think it intellectual to talk about things being "high."
It is at least the reverse of intellectual; it is a mere phrase
from a steeple or a weathercock. "Tommy was a good boy" is a pure
philosophical statement, worthy of Plato or Aquinas. "Tommy lived
the higher life" is a gross metaphor from a ten-foot rule.

This, incidentally, is almost the whole weakness of Nietzsche,
whom some are representing as a bold and strong thinker.
No one will deny that he was a poetical and suggestive thinker;
but he was quite the reverse of strong. He was not at all bold.
He never put his own meaning before himself in bald abstract words:
as did Aristotle and Calvin, and even Karl Marx, the hard,
fearless men of thought. Nietzsche always escaped a question
by a physical metaphor, like a cheery minor poet. He said,
"beyond good and evil," because he had not the courage to say,
"more good than good and evil," or, "more evil than good and evil."
Had he faced his thought without metaphors, he would have seen that it
was nonsense. So, when he describes his hero, he does not dare to say,
"the purer man," or "the happier man," or "the sadder man," for all
these are ideas; and ideas are alarming. He says "the upper man,"
or "over man," a physical metaphor from acrobats or alpine climbers.
Nietzsche is truly a very timid thinker. He does not really know
in the least what sort of man he wants evolution to produce.
And if he does not know, certainly the ordinary evolutionists,
who talk about things being "higher," do not know either.

Then again, some people fall back on sheer submission
and sitting still. Nature is going to do something some day;
nobody knows what, and nobody knows when. We have no reason for acting,
and no reason for not acting. If anything happens it is right:
if anything is prevented it was wrong. Again, some people try
to anticipate nature by doing something, by doing anything.
Because we may possibly grow wings they cut off their legs.
Yet nature may be trying to make them centipedes for all they know.

Lastly, there is a fourth class of people who take whatever
it is that they happen to want, and say that that is the ultimate
aim of evolution. And these are the only sensible people.
This is the only really healthy way with the word evolution,
to work for what you want, and to call THAT evolution. The only
intelligible sense that progress or advance can have among men,
is that we have a definite vision, and that we wish to make
the whole world like that vision. If you like to put it so,
the essence of the doctrine is that what we have around us is the
mere method and preparation for something that we have to create.
This is not a world, but rather the material for a world.
God has given us not so much the colours of a picture as the colours
of a palette. But he has also given us a subject, a model,
a fixed vision. We must be clear about what we want to paint.
This adds a further principle to our previous list of principles.
We have said we must be fond of this world, even in order to change it.
We now add that we must be fond of another world (real or imaginary)
in order to have something to change it to.

We need not debate about the mere words evolution or progress:
personally I prefer to call it reform. For reform implies form.
It implies that we are trying to shape the world in a particular image;
to make it something that we see already in our minds. Evolution is
a metaphor from mere automatic unrolling. Progress is a metaphor from
merely walking along a road--very likely the wrong road. But reform
is a metaphor for reasonable and determined men: it means that we
see a certain thing out of shape and we mean to put it into shape.
And we know what shape.

Now here comes in the whole collapse and huge blunder of our age.
We have mixed up two different things, two opposite things.
Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit
the vision. Progress does mean (just now) that we are always changing
the vision. It should mean that we are slow but sure in bringing
justice and mercy among men: it does mean that we are very swift
in doubting the desirability of justice and mercy: a wild page
from any Prussian sophist makes men doubt it. Progress should mean
that we are always walking towards the New Jerusalem. It does mean
that the New Jerusalem is always walking away from us. We are not
altering the real to suit the ideal. We are altering the ideal:
it is easier.

Silly examples are always simpler; let us suppose a man wanted
a particular kind of world; say, a blue world. He would have no
cause to complain of the slightness or swiftness of his task;
he might toil for a long time at the transformation; he could
work away (in every sense) until all was blue. He could have
heroic adventures; the putting of the last touches to a blue tiger.
He could have fairy dreams; the dawn of a blue moon. But if he
worked hard, that high-minded reformer would certainly (from his own
point of view) leave the world better and bluer than he found it.
If he altered a blade of grass to his favourite colour every day,
he would get on slowly. But if he altered his favourite colour
every day, he would not get on at all. If, after reading a
fresh philosopher, he started to paint everything red or yellow,
his work would be thrown away: there would be nothing to show except
a few blue tigers walking about, specimens of his early bad manner.
This is exactly the position of the average modern thinker.
It will be said that this is avowedly a preposterous example.
But it is literally the fact of recent history. The great and grave
changes in our political civilization all belonged to the early
nineteenth century, not to the later. They belonged to the black
and white epoch when men believed fixedly in Toryism, in Protestantism,
in Calvinism, in Reform, and not unfrequently in Revolution.
And whatever each man believed in he hammered at steadily,
without scepticism: and there was a time when the Established
Church might have fallen, and the House of Lords nearly fell.
It was because Radicals were wise enough to be constant and consistent;
it was because Radicals were wise enough to be Conservative.
But in the existing atmosphere there is not enough time and tradition
in Radicalism to pull anything down. There is a great deal of truth
in Lord Hugh Cecil's suggestion (made in a fine speech) that the era
of change is over, and that ours is an era of conservation and repose.
But probably it would pain Lord Hugh Cecil if he realized (what
is certainly the case) that ours is only an age of conservation
because it is an age of complete unbelief. Let beliefs fade fast
and frequently, if you wish institutions to remain the same.
The more the life of the mind is unhinged, the more the machinery
of matter will be left to itself. The net result of all our
political suggestions, Collectivism, Tolstoyanism, Neo-Feudalism,
Communism, Anarchy, Scientific Bureaucracy--the plain fruit of all
of them is that the Monarchy and the House of Lords will remain.
The net result of all the new religions will be that the Church
of England will not (for heaven knows how long) be disestablished.
It was Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Cunninghame Grahame, Bernard Shaw
and Auberon Herbert, who between them, with bowed gigantic backs,
bore up the throne of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

We may say broadly that free thought is the best of all the
safeguards against freedom. Managed in a modern style the emancipation
of the slave's mind is the best way of preventing the emancipation
of the slave. Teach him to worry about whether he wants to be free,
and he will not free himself. Again, it may be said that this
instance is remote or extreme. But, again, it is exactly true of
the men in the streets around us. It is true that the negro slave,
being a debased barbarian, will probably have either a human affection
of loyalty, or a human affection for liberty. But the man we see
every day--the worker in Mr. Gradgrind's factory, the little clerk
in Mr. Gradgrind's office--he is too mentally worried to believe
in freedom. He is kept quiet with revolutionary literature.
He is calmed and kept in his place by a constant succession of
wild philosophies. He is a Marxian one day, a Nietzscheite the
next day, a Superman (probably) the next day; and a slave every day.
The only thing that remains after all the philosophies is the factory.
The only man who gains by all the philosophies is Gradgrind.
It would be worth his while to keep his commercial helotry supplied
with sceptical literature. And now I come to think of it, of course,
Gradgrind is famous for giving libraries. He shows his sense.
All modern books are on his side. As long as the vision of heaven
is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same.
No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized.
The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will
always change his mind.

This, therefore, is our first requirement about the ideal towards
which progress is directed; it must be fixed. Whistler used to make
many rapid studies of a sitter; it did not matter if he tore up
twenty portraits. But it would matter if he looked up twenty times,
and each time saw a new person sitting placidly for his portrait.
So it does not matter (comparatively speaking) how often humanity fails
to imitate its ideal; for then all its old failures are fruitful.
But it does frightfully matter how often humanity changes its ideal;
for then all its old failures are fruitless. The question therefore
becomes this: How can we keep the artist discontented with his pictures
while preventing him from being vitally discontented with his art?
How can we make a man always dissatisfied with his work, yet always
satisfied with working? How can we make sure that the portrait
painter will throw the portrait out of window instead of taking
the natural and more human course of throwing the sitter out
of window?

A strict rule is not only necessary for ruling; it is also necessary
for rebelling. This fixed and familiar ideal is necessary to any
sort of revolution. Man will sometimes act slowly upon new ideas;
but he will only act swiftly upon old ideas. If I am merely
to float or fade or evolve, it may be towards something anarchic;
but if I am to riot, it must be for something respectable. This is
the whole weakness of certain schools of progress and moral evolution.
They suggest that there has been a slow movement towards morality,
with an imperceptible ethical change in every year or at every instant.
There is only one great disadvantage in this theory. It talks of a slow
movement towards justice; but it does not permit a swift movement.
A man is not allowed to leap up and declare a certain state of things
to be intrinsically intolerable. To make the matter clear, it is better
to take a specific example. Certain of the idealistic vegetarians,
such as Mr. Salt, say that the time has now come for eating no meat;
by implication they assume that at one time it was right to eat meat,
and they suggest (in words that could be quoted) that some day
it may be wrong to eat milk and eggs. I do not discuss here the
question of what is justice to animals. I only say that whatever
is justice ought, under given conditions, to be prompt justice.
If an animal is wronged, we ought to be able to rush to his rescue.
But how can we rush if we are, perhaps, in advance of our time? How can
we rush to catch a train which may not arrive for a few centuries?
How can I denounce a man for skinning cats, if he is only now what I
may possibly become in drinking a glass of milk? A splendid and insane
Russian sect ran about taking all the cattle out of all the carts.
How can I pluck up courage to take the horse out of my hansom-cab,
when I do not know whether my evolutionary watch is only a little
fast or the cabman's a little slow? Suppose I say to a sweater,
"Slavery suited one stage of evolution." And suppose he answers,
"And sweating suits this stage of evolution." How can I answer if there
is no eternal test? If sweaters can be behind the current morality,
why should not philanthropists be in front of it? What on earth
is the current morality, except in its literal sense--the morality
that is always running away?

Thus we may say that a permanent ideal is as necessary to the
innovator as to the conservative; it is necessary whether we wish
the king's orders to be promptly executed or whether we only wish
the king to be promptly executed. The guillotine has many sins,
but to do it justice there is nothing evolutionary about it.
The favourite evolutionary argument finds its best answer in
the axe. The Evolutionist says, "Where do you draw the line?"
the Revolutionist answers, "I draw it HERE: exactly between your
head and body." There must at any given moment be an abstract
right and wrong if any blow is to be struck; there must be something
eternal if there is to be anything sudden. Therefore for all
intelligible human purposes, for altering things or for keeping
things as they are, for founding a system for ever, as in China,
or for altering it every month as in the early French Revolution,
it is equally necessary that the vision should be a fixed vision.
This is our first requirement.