[Extract from Chesterton's book "Orthodoxy" (1908)]
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
organising expeditions to find the North Pole, because they are so
fond of flat country. Scientific men are also still organising
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 civilisation 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 civilisation 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.
I take a third case; the strangest of all, because it
involves the one real objection to the faith. The one real
objection to the Christian religion is simply that it is one
religion. The world is a big place, full of very different kinds
of people. Christianity (it may reasonably be said) is one thing
confined to one kind of people; it began in Palestine, it has
practically stopped with Europe. I was duly impressed with this
argument in my youth, and I was much drawn towards the doctrine
often preached in Ethical Societies -- I mean the doctrine that
there is one great unconscious church of all humanity rounded on
the omnipresence of the human conscience. Creeds, it was said,
divided men; but at least morals united them. The soul might seek
the strangest and most remote lands and ages and still find
essential ethical common sense. It might find Confucius under
Eastern trees, and he would be writing "Thou shalt not steal." It
might decipher the darkest hieroglyphic on the most primeval
desert, and the meaning when deciphered would be "Little boys
should tell the truth." I believed this doctrine of the
brotherhood of all men in the possession of a moral sense, and I
believe it still -- with other things. And I was thoroughly
annoyed with Christianity for suggesting (as I supposed) that
whole ages and empires of men had utterly escaped this light of
justice and reason. But then I found an astonishing thing. I found
that the very people who said that mankind was one church from
Plato to Emerson were the very people who said that morality had
changed altogether, and that what was right in one age was wrong
in another. If I asked, say, for an altar, I was told that we
needed none, for men our brothers gave us clear oracles and one
creed in their universal customs and ideals. But if I mildly
pointed out that one of men's universal customs was to have an
altar, then my agnostic teachers turned clean round and told me
that men had always been in darkness and the superstitions of
savages. I found it was their daily taunt against Christianity
that it was the light of one people and had left all others to die
in the dark. But I also found that it was their special boast for
themselves that science and progress were the discovery of one
people, and that all other peoples had died in the dark. Their
chief insult to Christianity was actually their chief compliment
to themselves, and there seemed to be a strange unfairness about
all their relative insistence on the two things. When considering
some pagan or agnostic, we were to remember that all men had one
religion; when considering some mystic or spiritualist, we were
only to consider what absurd religions some men had. We could
trust the ethics of Epictetus, because ethics had never changed.
We must not trust the ethics of Bossuet, because ethics had
changed. They changed in two hundred years, but not in two
thousand.
This began to be alarming. It looked not so much as if
Christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if
any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with. What again
could this astonishing thing be like which people were so anxious
to contradict, that in doing so they did not mind contradicting
themselves? I saw the same thing on every side. I can give no
further space to this discussion of it in detail; but lest any one
supposes that I have unfairly selected three accidental cases I
will run briefly through a few others. Thus, certain sceptics
wrote that the great crime of Christianity had been its attack on
the family; it had dragged women to the loneliness and
contemplation of the cloister, away from their homes and their
children. But, then, other sceptics (slightly more advanced) said
that the great crime of Christianity was forcing the family and
marriage upon us; that it doomed women to the drudgery of their
homes and children, and forbade them loneliness and contemplation.
The charge was actually reversed. Or, again, certain phrases in
the Epistles or the marriage service, were said by the anti-
Christians to show contempt for woman's intellect. But I found
that the anti-Christians themselves had a contempt for woman's
intellect; for it was their great sneer at the Church on the
Continent that "only women" went to it. Or again, Christianity was
reproached with its naked and hungry habits; with its sackcloth
and dried peas. But the next minute Christianity was being
reproached with its pomp and its ritualism; its shrines of
porphyry and its robes of gold. It was abused for being too plain
and for being too coloured. Again Christianity had always been
accused of restraining sexuality too much, when Bradlaugh the
Malthusian discovered that it restrained it too little. It is
often accused in the same breath of prim respectability and of
religious extravagance. Between the covers of the same atheistic
pamphlet I have found the faith rebuked for its disunion, "One
thinks one thing, and one another," and rebuked also for its
union, "It is difference of opinion that prevents the world from
going to the dogs." In the same conversation a free-thinker, a
friend of mine, blamed Christianity for despising Jews, and then
despised it himself for being Jewish.
I wished to be quite fair then, and I wish to be quite fair
now; and I did not conclude that the attack on Christianity was
all wrong. I only concluded that if Christianity was wrong, it was
very wrong indeed. Such hostile horrors might be combined in one
thing, but that thing must be very strange and solitary. There are
men who are misers, and also spendthrifts; but they are rare.
There are men sensual and also ascetic; but they are rare. But if
this mass of mad contradictions really existed, quakerish and
bloodthirsty, too gorgeous and too thread-bare, austere, yet
pandering preposterously to the lust of the eye, the enemy of
women and their foolish refuge, a solemn pessimist and a silly
optimist, if this evil existed, then there was in this evil
something quite supreme and unique. For I found in my rationalist
teachers no explanation of such exceptional corruption.
Christianity (theoretically speaking) was in their eyes only one
of the ordinary myths and errors of mortals. THEY gave me no key
to this twisted and unnatural badness. Such a paradox of evil rose
to the stature of the supernatural. It was, indeed, almost as
supernatural as the infallibility of the Pope. An historic
institution, which never went right, is really quite as much of a
miracle as an institution that cannot go wrong. The only
explanation which immediately occurred to my mind was that
Christianity did not come from heaven, but from hell. Really, if
Jesus of Nazareth was not Christ, He must have been Antichrist.
And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a
still thunderbolt. There had suddenly come into my mind another
explanation. Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many
men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too
tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some
lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too
fair. One explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that
he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He
might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to
be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who
are growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out;
old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond
the narrow lines of elegance. Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair
like tow) called him a dark man, while negroes considered him
distinctly blonde. Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is
really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre.
Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its
critics that are mad -- in various ways. I tested this idea by
asking myself whether there was about any of the accusers anything
morbid that might explain the accusation. I was startled to find
that this key fitted a lock. For instance, it was certainly odd
that the modern world charged Christianity at once with bodily
austerity and with artistic pomp. But then it was also odd, very
odd, that the modern world itself combined extreme bodily luxury
with an extreme absence of artistic pomp. The modern man thought
Becket's robes too rich and his meals too poor. But then the
modern man was really exceptional in history; no man before ever
ate such elaborate dinners in such ugly clothes. The modern man
found the church too simple exactly where modern life is too
complex; he found the church too gorgeous exactly where modern
life is too dingy. The man who disliked the plain fasts and feasts
was mad on ENTREES. The man who disliked vestments wore a pair of
preposterous trousers. And surely if there was any insanity
involved in the matter at all it was in the trousers, not in the
simply falling robe. If there was any insanity at all, it was in
the extravagant ENTREES, not in the bread and wine.
I went over all the cases, and I found the key fitted so far.
The fact that Swinburne was irritated at the unhappiness of
Christians and yet more irritated at their happiness was easily
explained. It was no longer a complication of diseases in
Christianity, but a complication of diseases in Swinburne. The
restraints of Christians saddened him simply because he was more
hedonist than a healthy man should be. The faith of Christians
angered him because he was more pessimist than a healthy man
should be. In the same way the Malthusians by instinct attacked
Christianity; not because there is anything especially anti-
Malthusian about Christianity, but because there is something a
little anti-human about Malthusianism.
Nevertheless it could not, I felt, be quite true that
Christianity was merely sensible and stood in the middle. There
was really an element in it of emphasis and even frenzy which had
justified the secularists in their superficial criticism. It might
be wise, I began more and more to think that it was wise, but it
was not merely worldly wise; it was not merely temperate and
respectable. Its fierce crusaders and meek saints might balance
each other; still, the crusaders were very fierce and the saints
were very meek, meek beyond all decency. Now, it was just at this
point of the speculation that I remembered my thoughts about the
martyr and the suicide. In that matter there had been this
combination between two almost insane positions which yet somehow
amounted to sanity. This was just such another contradiction; and
this I had already found to be true. This was exactly one of the
paradoxes in which sceptics found the creed wrong; and in this I
had found it right. Madly as Christians might love the martyr or
hate the suicide, they never felt these passions more madly than I
had felt them long before I dreamed of Christianity. Then the most
difficult and interesting part of the mental process opened, and I
began to trace this idea darkly through all the enormous thoughts
of our theology. The idea was that which I had outlined touching
the optimist and the pessimist; that we want not an amalgam or
compromise, but both things at the top of their energy; love and
wrath both burning. Here I shall only trace it in relation to
ethics. But I need not remind the reader that the idea of this
combination is indeed central in orthodox theology. For orthodox
theology has specially insisted that Christ was not a being apart
from God and man, like an elf, nor yet a being half human and half
not, like a centaur, but both things at once and both things
thoroughly, very man and very God. Now let me trace this notion as
I found it.
All sane men can see that sanity is some kind of equilibrium;
that one may be mad and eat too much, or mad and eat too little.
Some moderns have indeed appeared with vague versions of progress
and evolution which seeks to destroy the MESON or balance of
Aristotle. They seem to suggest that we are meant to starve
progressively, or to go on eating larger and larger breakfasts
every morning for ever. But the great truism of the MESON remains
for all thinking men, and these people have not upset any balance
except their own. But granted that we have all to keep a balance,
the real interest comes in with the question of how that balance
can be kept. That was the problem which Paganism tried to solve:
that was the problem which I think Christianity solved and solved
in a very strange way.
Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Christianity
declared it was in a conflict: the collision of two passions
apparently opposite. Of course they were not really inconsistent;
but they were such that it was hard to hold simultaneously. Let us
follow for a moment the clue of the martyr and the suicide; and
take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the
brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages.
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong
desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. "He that
will lose his life, the same shall save it," is not a piece of
mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice
for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine
guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of
courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut
off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the
precipice.
He can only get away from death by continually stepping
within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to
cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with
a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to
life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must
not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will
not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious
indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink
death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this
romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not
done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits
of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the
distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who
dies for the sake of dying. And it has held up ever since above
the European lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry: the
Christian courage, which is a disdain of death; not the Chinese
courage, which is a disdain of life.
And now I began to find that this duplex passion was the
Christian key to ethics everywhere. Everywhere the creed made a
moderation out of the still crash of two impetuous emotions. Take,
for instance, the matter of modesty, of the balance between mere
pride and mere prostration. The average pagan, like the average
agnostic, would merely say that he was content with himself, but
not insolently self-satisfied, that there were many better and
many worse, that his deserts were limited, but he would see that
he got them. In short, he would walk with his head in the air; but
not necessarily with his nose in the air. This is a manly and
rational position, but it is open to the objection we noted
against the compromise between optimism and pessimism -- the
"resignation" of Matthew Arnold. Being a mixture of two things, it
is a dilution of two things; neither is present in its full
strength or contributes its full colour. This proper pride does
not lift the heart like the tongue of trumpets; you cannot go clad
in crimson and gold for this. On the other hand, this mild
rationalist modesty does not cleanse the soul with fire and make
it clear like crystal; it does not (like a strict and searching
humility) make a man as a little child, who can sit at the feet of
the grass. It does not make him look up and see marvels; for Alice
must grow small if she is to be Alice in Wonderland. Thus it loses
both the poetry of being proud and the poetry of being humble.
Christianity sought by this same strange expedient to save both of
them.
It separated the two ideas and then exaggerated them both. In
one way Man was to be haughtier than he had ever been before; in
another way he was to be humbler than he had ever been before. In
so far as I am Man I am the chief of creatures. In so far as I am
a man I am the chief of sinners. All humility that had meant
pessimism, that had meant man taking a vague or mean view of his
whole destiny -- all that was to go. We were to hear no more the
wail of Ecclesiastes that humanity had no pre-eminence over the
brute, or the awful cry of Homer that man was only the saddest of
all the beasts of the field. Man was a statue of God walking about
the garden. Man had pre-eminence over all the brutes; man was only
sad because he was not a beast, but a broken god. The Greek had
spoken of men creeping on the earth, as if clinging to it. Now Man
was to tread on the earth as if to subdue it. Christianity thus
held a thought of the dignity of man that could only be expressed
in crowns rayed like the sun and fans of peacock plumage. Yet at
the same time it could hold a thought about the abject smallness
of man that could only be expressed in fasting and fantastic
submission, in the gray ashes of St. Dominic and the white snows
of St. Bernard. When one came to think of ONE'S SELF, there was
vista and void enough for any amount of bleak abnegation and
bitter truth. There the realistic gentleman could let himself go
-- as long as he let himself go at himself. There was an open
playground for the happy pessimist. Let him say anything against
himself short of blaspheming the original aim of his being; let
him call himself a fool and even a damned fool (though that is
Calvinistic); but he must not say that fools are not worth saving.
He must not say that a man, QUA man, can be valueless. Here, again
in short, Christianity got over the difficulty of combining
furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both
furious. The Church was positive on both points. One can hardly
think too little of one's self. One can hardly think too much of
one's soul.
Take another case: the complicated question of charity, which
some highly uncharitable idealists seem to think quite easy.
Charity is a paradox, like modesty and courage. Stated baldly,
charity certainly means one of two things -- pardoning
unpardonable acts, or loving unlovable people. But if we ask
ourselves (as we did in the case of pride) what a sensible pagan
would feel about such a subject, we shall probably be beginning at
the bottom of it. A sensible pagan would say that there were some
people one could forgive, and some one couldn't: a slave who stole
wine could be laughed at; a slave who betrayed his benefactor
could be killed, and cursed even after he was killed. In so far as
the act was pardonable, the man was pardonable. That again is
rational, and even refreshing; but it is a dilution. It leaves no
place for a pure horror of injustice, such as that which is a
great beauty in the innocent. And it leaves no place for a mere
tenderness for men as men, such as is the whole fascination of the
charitable. Christianity came in here as before. It came in
startlingly with a sword, and clove one thing from another. It
divided the crime from the criminal. The criminal we must forgive
unto seventy times seven. The crime we must not forgive at all. It
was not enough that slaves who stole wine inspired partly anger
and partly kindness. We must be much more angry with theft than
before, and yet much kinder to thieves than before. There was room
for wrath and love to run wild. And the more I considered
Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a
rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for
good things to run wild.
Mental and emotional liberty are not so simple as they look.
Really they require almost as careful a balance of laws and
conditions as do social and political liberty. The ordinary
aesthetic anarchist who sets out to feel everything freely gets
knotted at last in a paradox that prevents him feeling at all. He
breaks away from home limits to follow poetry. But in ceasing to
feel home limits he has ceased to feel the "Odyssey." He is free
from national prejudices and outside patriotism. But being outside
patriotism he is outside "Henry V." Such a literary man is simply
outside all literature: he is more of a prisoner than any bigot.
For if there is a wall between you and the world, it makes little
difference whether you describe yourself as locked in or as locked
out. What we want is not the universality that is outside all
normal sentiments; we want the universality that is inside all
normal sentiments. It is all the difference between being free
from them, as a man is free from a prison, and being free of them
as a man is free of a city. I am free from Windsor Castle (that
is, I am not forcibly detained there), but I am by no means free
of that building. How can man be approximately free of fine
emotions, able to swing them in a clear space without breakage or
wrong? THIS was the achievement of this Christian paradox of the
parallel passions. Granted the primary dogma of the war between
divine and diabolic, the revolt and ruin of the world, their
optimism and pessimism, as pure poetry, could be loosened like
cataracts.
St. Francis, in praising all good, could be a more shouting
optimist than Walt Whitman. St. Jerome, in denouncing all evil,
could paint the world blacker than Schopenhauer. Both passions
were free because both were kept in their place. The optimist
could pour out all the praise he liked on the gay music of the
march, the golden trumpets, and the purple banners going into
battle. But he must not call the fight needless. The pessimist
might draw as darkly as he chose the sickening marches or the
sanguine wounds. But he must not call the fight hopeless. So it
was with all the other moral problems, with pride, with protest,
and with compassion. By defining its main doctrine, the Church not
only kept seemingly inconsistent things side by side, but, what
was more, allowed them to break out in a sort of artistic violence
otherwise possible only to anarchists. Meekness grew more dramatic
than madness. Historic Christianity rose into a high and strange
COUP DE THEATRE of morality -- things that are to virtue what the
crimes of Nero are to vice. The spirits of indignation and of
charity took terrible and attractive forms, ranging from that
monkish fierceness that scourged like a dog the first and greatest
of the Plantagenets, to the sublime pity of St. Catherine, who, in
the official shambles, kissed the bloody head of the criminal.
Poetry could be acted as well as composed. This heroic and
monumental manner in ethics has entirely vanished with
supernatural religion. They, being humble, could parade
themselves: but we are too proud to be prominent. Our ethical
teachers write reasonably for prison reform; but we are not likely
to see Mr. Cadbury, or any eminent philanthropist, go into Reading
Gaol and embrace the strangled corpse before it is cast into the
quicklime. Our ethical teachers write mildly against the power of
millionaires; but we are not likely to see Mr. Rockefeller, or any
modern tyrant, publicly whipped in Westminster Abbey.
Thus, the double charges of the secularists, though throwing
nothing but darkness and confusion on themselves, throw a real
light on the faith. It is true that the historic Church has at
once emphasised celibacy and emphasised the family; has at once
(if one may put it so) been fiercely for having children and
fiercely for not having children. It has kept them side by side
like two strong colours, red and white, like the red and white
upon the shield of St. George. It has always had a healthy hatred
of pink. It hates that combination of two colours which is the
feeble expedient of the philosophers. It hates that evolution of
black into white which is tantamount to a dirty gray. In fact, the
whole theory of the Church on virginity might be symbolized in the
statement that white is a colour: not merely the absence of a
colour. All that I am urging here can be expressed by saying that
Christianity sought in most of these cases to keep two colours
coexistent but pure. It is not a mixture like russet or purple; it
is rather like a shot silk, for a shot silk is always at right
angles, and is in the pattern of the cross.
So it is also, of course, with the contradictory charges of
the anti-Christians about submission and slaughter. It IS true
that the Church told some men to fight and others not to fight;
and it IS true that those who fought were like thunderbolts and
those who did not fight were like statues. All this simply means
that the Church preferred to use its Supermen and to use its
Tolstoyans. There must be SOME good in the life of battle, for so
many good men have enjoyed being soldiers. There must be SOME good
in the idea of non-resistance, for so many good men seem to enjoy
being Quakers. All that the Church did (so far as that goes) was
to prevent either of these good things from ousting the other.
They existed side by side. The Tolstoyans, having all the scruples
of monks, simply became monks. The Quakers became a club instead
of becoming a sect. Monks said all that Tolstoy says; they poured
out lucid lamentations about the cruelty of battles and the vanity
of revenge. But the Tolstoyans are not quite right enough to run
the whole world; and in the ages of faith they were not allowed to
run it. The world did not lose the last charge of Sir James
Douglas or the banner of Joan the Maid. And sometimes this pure
gentleness and this pure fierceness met and justified their
juncture; the paradox of all the prophets was fulfilled, and, in
the soul of St. Louis, the lion lay down with the lamb. But
remember that this text is too lightly interpreted. It is
constantly assured, especially in our Tolstoyan tendencies, that
when the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like.
But that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the
lamb. That is simply the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the
lion eating the lamb. The real problem is -- Can the lion lie down
with the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity? THAT is the
problem the Church attempted; THAT is the miracle she achieved.
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.