THEOLOGY
A distinguished military gentleman
recently wrote to the newspaper to announce that a Chinese Buddhist is shortly
to visit England, with the firm intention of finally abolishing war. He - I
mean the military gentleman - explained that Buddhism is a word that means
Enlightenment, and that only
Enlightenment can abolish War. This seems in itself a simple process of reason
and reform. But I should not be moved to criticise anything so excellent in
intention, if the writer had not dragged in the dreary old trick of comparing
the enlightened condition of Buddhists with the benighted condition of
Christians. It is true that, like most men in this modern confusion of mind, he
needlessly muddles himself by using the same word in two senses and on both
sides, and setting Christianity against itself. Buddhism is Christianity, and
Buddhism is better than Christianity, and Christianity will never be itself
until it is enlightened enough to become something different. But this mere
logomachy does not alter the essentials of the opinion, which most of us have
seen in one form or another for a great many years past. The key of the
situation is that the military critic says that "Christians have failed"
to abolish War; and that this is due to the lamentable fact that Christians are
not enlightened; or, in other words, to the curious fact that Christians are
not Buddhists.
Now, to begin with, a normal
European need hardly have any narrow contempt for Asiatics in order to feel
mildly resentful and even rebellious under this sort of thing. If the Chinese
gentleman is coming with an infallible talisman to stop all fighting in
England, might it not be suggested to him that he should stay where he is, and
stop all
fighting in China? Fighting has
never been a habit strictly confined to Christians; nor have wars been entirely
unknown outside Christendom. It may be that certain hermits or holy men, both
eastern and western, have individually abandoned war. But we are not talking
about abandoning war, but about abolishing war. In what sense have Christians
failed, in which Buddhists have not equally failed? In what respect is
Buddhism, which has looked on at all the Asiatic fighting for four thousand
years, any more successful than Christianity, that has barely looked on for two
thousand? I do not think the thing is any real discredit either to Buddhism or
Christianity, for anybody who is really "enlightened" about history
and human nature. But if we are to be told about ten times a week by every
newspaper and noisy talker that Christianity has failed to do anything because
it has failed to stop fighting, what are we to say of the chances of the
Chinese gentleman of stopping it in Europe with a new religion, when he could
not stop it in Asia with an old one? At a guess, I should say that a Christian
appeal for peace would often have been much nearer to practical politics than
the metaphysical enlightenment of the Buddhist. Without putting very much money
on the chances of either, I should say there would have been something rather
more remotely resembling a chance for a Franciscan saint influencing the policy
of Richard Coeur de Lion than of a Buddhist monk (with his mind full of
Nirvana) stopping the march of Genghis Khan. But that is a minor guess, and
does not matter. The obvious point is that, if Christianity is to be called a
failure because it has not abolished war, Buddhism can hardly be a certain and
solid guarantee that we shall abolish war. The truth is, of course, that all
such talk of abolishing this and that, among the recurrent misunderstandings
and temptations of mankind, shows an essential ignorance of the very nature of
mankind. It does not allow for the hundred inconsistencies, dilemmas, desperate
remedies, and divided allegiances of men. A man may be in every way a good man
and a true believer, and yet be in a false position. Indeed, the military
gentleman who wrote the letter about Buddhism and War need not look far for
such an example. By his own standards, he is himself inconsistent in being a
Christian soldier; and even more inconsistent since he seems to be a Buddhist
soldier.
I have taken this one text from
the daily paper before me because we all know that the religion of our fathers
is being perpetually pelted with such texts. And even apart from any loyalty to
my faith, I have enough loyalty to my fathers, and to the general record and
reputation of English and European men to feel that it is time that such taunts
should be treated as they deserve. It is no disgrace to Christianity, it is no
disgrace to any great religion, that its counsels of perfection have not made
every single person perfect. If after centuries a disparity is still found
between its ideal and its followers, it only means that the religion still
maintains the ideal, and the followers still need it. But it is not a thing at
which a philosopher in his five wits has any reason to be surprised. As a
matter of fact, it would be much more reasonable to use this taunt against the
irreligious who use it than against the religious against whom it is used. It
is the very people who use it most, the secularists and humanitarians who
really do go in for promising millenniums of peace and plenty It is the
novelists and essayists of the sceptical school who announce at intervals the
War That Will End War, or the World State that will impose universal peace.
Christianity never promised that it would impose universal peace. It had a
great deal too much respect for personal liberty. The sceptical theorist is
allowed to throw off Utopia after Utopia, and is never reproached when they are
contradicted by the facts, or contradicted by each other. The unfortunate
believer is alone always made responsible, and held to account for breaking a
promise that he never made.
Undoubtedly, this sort of sneer
would be quite as unjust to Buddhism as to Christianity. The ideal of Buddha
might still be the best for men, even if millions of men continued to prefer
what is lower than the best. As to whether the ideal of Buddha is the best for
men, that is a much larger question which cannot be at all suitably developed
here. Indeed, there is a great deal of difference of opinion about what the
ideal of Buddha really was, especially among Buddhists. That also is a taunt
vulgarly thrown against the followers of Christ, which might just as well be
thrown against the followers of Buddha. The mysterious Chinese gentleman may
impose on all the nations of the earth the same definition of peace, and still
have a more delicate task, when he has to impose on all the Theosophists the
same definition of Theosophy. But some at least of the disciples of the great
Gautama interpret his ideal, so far as I can understand them, as one of
absolute liberation from all desire or effort or anything that human beings
commonly call hope. In that sense, the philosophy would only mean the
abandonment of arms because it would mean the abandonment of almost everything.
It would not discourage war any more than it would discourage work. It would not
discourage work any more than it would discourage pleasure. It would certainly
tell the warrior that disappointment awaited him when he became the conqueror,
and that his war was not worth winning. But it would also presumably tell the
lover that his love was not worth winning; and that the rose would wither like
the laurel. It would presumably tell the poet that his poem was not worth
writing; which may (in certain cases needless to name) be indeed the case. But
it can hardly be called an inspiring philosophy for the production of good
poems any more than bad. It may be that these persons are wrong about what is
threatened by Buddhism. It may also be that the other persons are wrong about
what was promised by Christianity. But I hope we have heard the last of the
muddled discontent of worldly people, who curse the Church for not saving the
world that did not want to be saved, and are ready to call in any other theory
against it - even the wild theory by which the world would be destroyed.
FROM THE
AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
"Man is most comforted by
paradoxes"
The book of Job is among the other
Old Testament books both a philosophical riddle and a historical riddle. It is
the philosophical riddle that concerns us in such an introduction as this; so
we may dismiss first the few words of general explanation or warning which
should be said about the historical aspect. Controversy has long raged about
which parts of this epic belong to its original scheme and which are
interpolations of considerably later date. The doctors disagree, as it is the
business of doctors to do; but upon the whole the trend of investigation has
always been in the direction of maintaining that the parts interpolated, if
any, were the prose prologue and epilogue, and possibly the speech of the young
man who comes in with an apology at the end. I do not profess to be competent
to decide such questions.
But whatever decision the reader may
come to concerning them, there is a general truth to be remembered in this
connection. When you deal with any ancient artistic creation, do not suppose
that it is anything against it that it grew gradually. The book of Job may have
grown gradually just as Westminster Abbey grew gradually. But the people who
made the old folk poetry, like the people who made Westminster Abbey, did not
attach that importance to the actual date and the actual author, that
importance which is entirely the creation of the almost insane individualism of
modern times. We may put aside the case of Job, as one complicated with
religious difficulties, and take any other, say the case of the Iliad. Many
people have maintained the characteristic formula of modern skepticism, that Homer
was not written by Homer, but by another person of the same name. Just in the
same way many have maintained that Moses was not Moses but another person
called Moses. But the thing really to be remembered in the matter of the Iliad
is that if other people did interpolate the passages, the thing did not create
the same sense of shock as would be created by such proceedings in these
individualistic times. The creation of the tribal epic was to some extent
regarded as a tribal work, like the building of the tribal temple. Believe
then, if you will, that the prologue of Job and the epilogue and the speech of
Elihu are things inserted after the original work was composed. But do not
suppose that such insertions have that obvious and spurious character which would
belong to any insertions in a modern, individualistic book . . .
Without going into questions of
unity as understood by the scholars, we may say of the scholarly riddle that
the book has unity in the sense that all great traditional creations have unity;
in the sense that Canterbury Cathedral has unity. And the same is broadly true
of what I have called the philosophical riddle. There is a real sense in which
the book of Job stands apart from most of the books included in the canon of
the Old Testament. But here again those are wrong who insist on the entire
absence of unity. Those are wrong who maintain that the Old Testament is a mere
loose library; that it has no consistency or aim. Whether the result was
achieved by some supernal sprirtual truth, or by a steady national tradition,
or merely by an ingenious selection in aftertimes, the books of the Old
Testament have a quite perceptible unity. . .
The central idea of the great part
of the Old Testament may be called the idea of the loneliness of God. God is
not the only chief character of the Old Testament; God is properly the only
character in the Old Testament. Compared with His clearness of purpose, all the
other wills are heavy and automatic, like those of animals; compared with His
actuality, all the sons of flesh are shadows. Again and again the note is
struck, "With whom hath He taken counsel?" (Isa. 40:14). "I have
trodden the winepress alone, and of the peoples there was no man with me"
(Isa. 63:3). All the patriarchs and prophets are merely His tools or weapons;
for the Lord is a man of war. He uses Joshua like an axe or Moses like a
measuring rod. For Him, Samson, is only a sword and Isaiah a trumpet. The
saints of Christianity are supposed to be like God, to be, as it were, little
statuettes of Him. The Old Testament hero is no more supposed to be of the same
nature as God than a saw or a hammer is supposed to be of the same shape as the
carpenter. This is the main key and characteristic of Hebrew scriptures as a
whole. There are, indeed, in those scriptures innumerable instances of the sort
of rugged humor, keen emotion, and powerful individuality which is never
wanting in great primitive prose and poetry. Nevertheless the main
characteristic remains: the sense not merely that God is stronger than man, not
merely that God is more secret than man, but that He means more, that He knows
better what He is doing, that compared with Him we have something of the
vagueness, the unreason, and the vagrancy of the beasts that perish. "It
is He that sitteth above the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as
grasshoppers" (Isa.40:22). We might almost put it thus. The book is so
intent upon asserting the personality of God that it almost asserts the
impersonality of man. Unless this gigantic cosmic brain has conceived a thing,
that thing is insecure and void; man has not enough tenacity to ensure its
continuance. "Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that
build it. Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain"
(Ps. 127:1).
Everywhere else, then, the Old
Testament positively rejoices in the obliteration of man in comparison with the
divine purpose. The book of Job stands definitely alone because the book of Job
definitely asks, "But what is the purpose of God? Is it worth the sacrifice
even of our miserable humanity? Of course, it is easy enough to wipe out our
own paltry wills for the sake of a will that is grander and kinder. But is it
grander and kinder? Let God use His tools; let God break His tools. But what is
He doing, and what are they being broken for?" It is because of this
question that we have to attack as a philosophical riddle the riddle of the
book of Job.
The present importance of the book
of Job cannot be expressed adequately even by saying that it is the most interesting
of ancient books. We may almost say of the book of Job that it is the most
interesting of modern books. In truth, of course, neither of the two phrases
covers the matter, because fundamental human religion and fundamental human
irreligion are both at once old and new; philosophy is either eternal or it is
not philosophy. The modern habit of saying"This is my opinion, but I may
be wrong" is entirely irrational. If I say that it may be wrong, I say
that is not my opinion. The modern habit of saying "Every man has a
different philosophy; this is my philosophy and it suits me" - the habit
of saying this is mere weak-mindedness. A cosmic philosophy is not constructed
to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no
more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.
The first of the intellectual
beauties of the book of Job is that it is all concerned with this desire to
know the actuality; the desire to know what is, and not merely what seems. If
moderns were writing the book, we should probably find that Job and his
comforters got on quite well together by the simple operation of referring
their differences to what is called the temperament, saying that the comforters
were by nature "optimists" and Job by nature a "pessimist."
And they would be quite comfortable, as people can often be, for some time at
least, by agreeing to say what is obviously untrue. For if the word
"pessimist" means anything at all, then emphatically Job is not a
pessimist. His case alone is sufficient to refute the modern absurdity of
referring everything to physical temperament. Job does not in any sense look at
life in a gloomy way. If wishing to be happy and being quite ready to be happy
constitutes an optimist, Job is an optimist. He is a perplexed optimist; he is
an exasperated optimist; he is an outraged and insulted optimist. He wishes the
universe to justify itself, not because he wishes it be caught out, but because
he really wishes it be justified. He demands an explanation from God, but he
does not do it at all in the spirit in which [John] Hampden might demand an
explanation from Charles I. He does it in the spirit in which a wife might
demand an explanation from her husband whom she really respected. He
remonstrates with his Maker because he is proud of his Maker. He even speaks of
the Almighty as his enemy, but he never doubts, at the back of his mind, that
his enemy has some kind of a case which he does not understand. In a fine and
famous blasphemy he says, "Oh, that mine adversary had written a
book!" (31:35). It never really occurs to him that it could possibly be a
bad book. He is anxious to be convinced, that is, he thinks that God could
convince him. In short, we may say again that if the word optimist means anything
(which I doubt), Job is an optimist. He shakes the pillars of the world and
strikes insanely at the heavens; he lashes the stars, but it is not to silence
them; it is to make them speak.
In the same way we may speak of
the official optimists, the comforters of Job. Again, if the word pessimist
means anything (which I doubt), the comforters of Job may be called pessimists
rather than optimists. All that they really believe is not that God is good but
that God is so strong that it is much more judicious to call Him good. It would
be the exaggeration of censure to call them evolutionists; but they have
something of the vital error of the evolutionary optimist. They will keep on
saying that everything in the universe fits into everything else; as if there
were anything comforting about a number of nasty things all fitting into each
other. We shall see later how God in the great climax of the poem turns this
particular argument altogether upside down.
When, at the end of the poem, God
enters (somewhat abruptly), is struck the sudden and splendid note which makes
the thing as great as it is. All the human beings through the story, and Job
especially, have been asking questions of God. A more trivial poet would have
made God enter in some sense or other in order to answer the questions. By a
touch truly to be called inspired, when God enters, it is to ask a number of
questions on His own account. In this drama of skepticism God Himself takes up
the role of skeptic. He does what all the great voices defending religion have
always done. He does, for instance, what Socrates did. He turns rationalism
against itself. He seems to say that if it comes to asking questions, He can
ask some question which will fling down and flatten out all conceivable human
questioners. The poet by an exquisite intuition has made God ironically accept
a kind of controversial equality with His accusers. He is willing to regard it
as if it were a fair intellectual duel: "Gird up now thy loins like man;
for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me" (38:3). The everlasting
adopts an enormous and sardonic humility. He is quite willing to be prosecuted.
He only asks for the right which every prosecuted person possesses; he asks to
be allowed to cross-examine the witness for the prosecution. And He carries yet
further the corrections of the legal parallel. For the first question,
essentially speaking, which He asks of Job is the question that any criminal
accused by Job would be most entitled to ask. He asks Job who he is. And Job,
being a man of candid intellect, takes a little time to consider, and comes to
the conclusion that he does not know.
This is the first great fact to
notice about the speech of God, which is the culmination of the inquiry. It
represents all human skeptics routed by a higher skepticism. It is this method,
used sometimes by supreme and sometimes by mediocre minds, that has ever since
been the logical weapon of the true mystic. Socrates, as I have said, used it
when he showed that if you only allowed him enough sophistry he could destroy
all sophists. Jesus Christ used it when he reminded the Sadducees, who could
not imagine the nature of marriage in heaven, that if it came to that they had
not really imagined the nature of marriage at all. In the break up of Christian
theology in the eighteenth century, [Joseph] Butler used it, when he pointed
out that rationalistic arguments could be used as much against vague religions
as against doctrinal religion, as much against rationalist ethics as against
Christian ethics. It is the root and reason of the fact that men who have
religious faith have also philosophic doubt. These are the small streams of the
delta; the book of Job is the first great cataract that creates the river. In
dealing with the arrogant asserter of doubt, it is not the right method to tell
him to stop doubting. It is rather the right method to tell him to go on
doubting , to doubt a little more, to doubt every day newer and wilder things
in the universe, until at last, by some strange enlightenment, he may begin to
doubt himself.
This, I say, is the first fact
touching the speech; the fine inspiration by which God comes in at the end, not
to answer riddles, but to propound them. The other great fact which, taken
together with this one, makes the whole work religious instead of merely
philosophical is that other great surprise which makes Job suddenly satisfied
with the mere presentation of something impenetrable. Verbally speaking the
enigmas of Jehovah seem darker and more desolate than the enigmas of Job; yet Job
was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has
been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of
something which is too good to be told. The refusal of God to explain His
design is itself a burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more
satisfying than the solutions of man.
Thirdly, of course, it is one of
the splendid strokes that God rebukes alike the man who accused and the men who
defended Him; that He knocks down pessimists and optimists with the same
hammer. And it is in connection with the mechanical and supercilious comforters
of Job that there occurs the still deeper and finer inversion of which I have
spoken. The mechanical optimist endeavors to justify the universe avowedly upon
the ground that it is a rational and consecutive pattern. He points out that
the fine thing about the world is that it can all be explained. That is the one
point, if I may put it so, on which God, in return, is explicit to the point of
violence. God says, in effect, that if there is one fine thing about the world,
as far as men are concerned, it is that it cannot be explained. He insists on
the inexplicableness of everything. "Hath the rain a father?. . .Out of
whose womb came the ice?" (38:28f). He goes farther, and insists on the
positive and palpable unreason of things; "Hast thou sent the rain upon
the desert where no man is, and upon the wilderness wherein there is no
man?" (38:26). God will make man see things, if it is only against the
black background of nonentity. God will make Job see a startling universe if He
can only do it by making Job see an idiotic universe. To startle man, God
becomes for an instant a blasphemer; one might almost say that God becomes for
an instant an atheist. He unrolls before Job a long panorama of created things,
the horse, the eagle, the raven, the wild ass, the peacock, the ostrich, the
crocodile. He so describes each of them that it sounds like a monster walking
in the sun. The whole is a sort of psalm or rhapsody of the sense of wonder.
The maker of all things is astonished at the things he has Himself made.
This we may call the third point.
Job puts forward a note of interrogation; God answers with a note of
exclamation. Instead of proving to Job that it is an explicable world, He
insists that it is a much stranger world than Job ever thought it was. Lastly,
the poet has achieved in this speech, with that unconscious artistic accuracy
found in so many of the simpler epics, another and much more delicate thing.
Without once relaxing the rigid impenetrability of Jehovah in His deliberate
declaration, he has contrived to let fall here and there in the metaphors, in
the parenthetical imagery, sudden and splendid suggestions that the secret of
God is a bright and not a sad one - semi-accidental suggestions, like light
seen for an instant through the crack of a closed door.
It would be difficult to praise
too highly, in a purely poetical sense, the instinctive exactitude and ease
with which these more optimistic insinuations are let fall in other
connections, as if the Almighty Himself were scarcely aware that He was letting
them out. For instance, there is that famous passage where Jehovah, with
devastating sarcasm, asks Job where he was when the foundations of the world
were laid, and then (as if merely fixing a date) mentions the time when the
sons of God shouted for joy (38:4-7). One cannot help feeling, even upon this
meager information, that they must have had something to shout about. Or again,
when God is speaking of snow and hail in the mere catalogue of the physical
cosmos, he speaks of them as a treasury that He has laid up against the day of
battle - a hint of some huge Armageddon in which evil shall be at last
overthrown.
Nothing could be better,
artistically speaking, than this optimism breaking though agnosticism like
fiery gold round the edges of a black cloud. Those who look superficially at
the barbaric origin of the epic may think it fanciful to read so much artistic
significance into its casual similes or accidental phrases. But no one who is
well acquainted with great examples of semi-barbaric poetry, as in The Song of
Roland or the old ballads, will fall into this mistake. No one who knows what
primitive poetry is can fail to realize that while its conscious form is simple
some of its finer effects are subtle. The Iliad contrives to express the idea
that Hector and Sarpedon have a certain tone or tint of sad and chivalrous
resignation, not bitter enough to be called pessimism and not jovial enough to
be called optimism; Homer could never have said this in elaborate words. But
somehow he contrives to say it in simple words. The Song of Roland contrives to
express the idea that Christianity imposes upon its heroes a paradox; a paradox
of great humility in the matter of their sins combined with great ferocity in
the matter of their ideas. Of course The Song of Roland could not say this; but
it conveys this. In the same way, the book of Job must be credited with many
subtle effects which were in the author's soul without being, perhaps, in the
author's mind. And of these by far the most important remains to be stated.
I do not know, and I doubt whether
even scholars know, if the book of Job had a great effect or had any effect
upon the after development of Jewish thought. But if it did have any effect it
may have saved them from an enormous collapse and decay. Here in this book the
question is really asked whether God invariably punishes vice with terrestrial
punishment and rewards virtue with terrestrial prosperity. If the Jews had
answered that question wrongly they might have lost all their after influence
in human history. They might have sunk even down to the level of modern
well-educated society. For when once people have begun to believe that
prosperity is the reward of virtue, their next calamity is obvious. If
prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the
symptom of virtue. Men will leave off the heavy task of making good men
successful. He will adopt the easier task of making out successful men good.
This, which has happened throughout modern commerce and journalism, is the
ultimate Nemesis of the wicked optimism of the comforters of Job. If the Jews
could be saved from it, the book of Job saved them.
The book of Job is chiefly remarkable,
as I have insisted throughout, for the fact that it does not end in a way that
is conventionally satisfactory. Job is not told that his misfortunes were due
to his sins or a part of any plan for his improvement. But in the prologue we
see Job tormented not because he was the worst of men, but because he was the
best. It is the lesson of the whole work that man is most comforted by
paradoxes. Here is the very darkest and strangest of the paradoxes; and it is
by all human testimony the most reassuring. I need not suggest what high and
strange history awaited this paradox of the best man in the worst fortune. I
need not say that in the freest and most philosophical sense there is one Old
Testament figure who is truly a type; or say what is prefigured in the wounds
of Job.
FROM THE AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
Mr. Blatchford has summed up all
that is important in his whole position in three sentences. They are perfectly
honest and clear. Nor are they any the less honest and clear because the first
two of them are falsehoods and the third is a fallacy. He says "The
Christian denies the miracles of the Mahommedan. The Mahommedan denies the
miracles of the Christian. The Rationalist denies all miracles alike."
The historical error in the first
two remarks I will deal with shortly. I confine myself for the moment to the
courageous admission of Mr. Blatchford that the Rationalist denies all miracles
alike. He does not question them. He does not pretend to be agnostic about
them. He does not suspend his judgment until they shall be proved. He denies
them.
Faced with this astounding dogma I
asked Mr. Blatchford why he thought miracles would not occur. He replied that
the Universe was governed by laws. Obviously this answer is of no use whatever.
For we cannot call a thing impossible because the world is governed by laws,
unless we know what laws. Does Mr. Blatchford know all about all the laws in
the Universe? And if he does not know about the laws how can he possibly know
anything about the exceptions?
For, obviously, the mere fact that
a thing happens seldom, under odd circumstances and with no explanation within
our knowledge, is no proof that it is against natural law. That would apply to
the Siamese twins, or to a new comet, or to radium three years ago.
The philosophical case against
miracles is somewhat easily dealt with. There is no philosophical case against
miracles. There are such things as the laws of Nature rationally speaking. What
everybodyknows is this only. That there is repetition in nature. What everybody
knows is that pumpkins produce pumpkins. What nobody knows is why they should
not produce elephants and giraffes.
There is one philosophical
question about miracles and only one. Many able modern Rationalists cannot
apparently even get it into their heads. The poorest lad at Oxford in the
Middle Ages would have understood it. (Note. As the last sentence will seem
strange in our
"enlightened" age I may explain that under "the cruel reign of
mediaeval superstition," poor lads were educated at Oxford to a most
reckless extent. Thank God, we live in better days.)
The question of miracles is merely
this. Do you know why a pumpkin goes on being a pumpkin? If you do not, you
cannot possibly tell whether a pumpkin could turn into a coach or couldn't.
That is all.
All the other scientific
expressions you are in the habit of using at breakfast are words and winds. You
say "It is a law of nature that pumpkins should remain pumpkins."
That only means that pumpkins generally do remain pumpkins, which is obvious;
it does not say why. You say "Experience is against it." That only
means, "I have known many pumpkins intimately and none of them turned into
coaches."
There was a great Irish
Rationalist of this school (possibly related to Mr. Lecky), who when he was
told that a witness had seen him commit murder said that he could bring a
hundred witnesses who had not seen him commit it.
You say "The modern world is
against it." That means that a mob of men in London and Birmingham, and
Chicago, in a thoroughly pumpkiny state of mind, cannot work miracles by faith.
You say "Science is against
it." That means that so long as pumpkins are pumpkins their conduct is
pumpkiny, and bears no resemblance to the conduct of a coach. That is fairly
obvious.
What Christianity says is merely
this. That this repetition in Nature has its origin not in a thing resembling a
law but a thing resembling a will. Of course its phase of a Heavenly Father is
drawn from an earthly father. Quite equally Mr. Blatchford's phase of a
universal law is a metaphor from an Act of Parliament. But Christianity holds
that the world and its repetition came by will or Love as children are begotten
by a father, and therefore that other and different things might come by it.
Briefly, it believes that a God who could do anything so extraordinary as
making pumpkins go on being pumpkins,
is like the prophet, Habbakuk,
<Capable de tout>. If you do not think it extraordinary that a pumpkin is
always a pumpkin, think again. You have not yet even begun philosophy. You have
not even seen a pumpkin.
The historic case against miracles
is also rather simple. It consists of calling miracles impossible, then saying
that no one but a fool believes impossibilities: then declaring that there is
no wise evidence on behalf of the miraculous. The whole trick is done by means
of leaning alternately on the philosophical and historical objection. If we say
miracles are theoretically possible, they say, "Yes, but there is no
evidence for them." When we take all the records of the human race and
say, "Here is your evidence," they say, "But these people were
superstitious, they believed in impossible things."
The real question is whether our
little Oxford Street civilisation is certain to be right and the rest of the
world certain to be wrong. Mr. Blatchford thinks that the materialism of
nineteenth century Westerns is one of their noble discoveries. I think it is as
dull as their coats, as dirty as their streets, as ugly as their trousers, and
as stupid as their industrial system.
Mr. Blatchford himself, however, has
summed up perfectly his pathetic faith in modern civilisation. He has written a
very amusing description of how difficult it would be to persuade an English
judge in a modern law court of the truth of the Resurrection. Of course he is
quite right; it would be impossible. But it does not seem to occur to him that
we Christians may not have such an extravagant reverence for English judges as
is felt by Mr. Blatchford himself.
The experiences of the Founder of
Christianity have perhaps left us in a vague doubt of the infallibility of
courts of law. I know quite well that nothing would induce a British judge to
believe that a man had risen from the dead. But then I know quite as well that
a very little while ago nothing would have induced a British judge to believe
that a Socialist could be a good man. A judge would refuse to believe in new
spiritual wonders. But this would not be because he was a judge, but because he
was, besides being a judge, an English gentleman, a modern Rationalist, and
something of an old fool.
And Mr. Blatchford is quite wrong
in supposing that the Christian and the Moslem deny each other's miracles. No
religion that thinks itself true bothers about the miracles of another
religion. It denies the doctrines of the religion; it denies its morals; but it
never thinks it worth while to deny its signs and wonders.
And why not? Because these things
some men have always thought possible. Because any wandering gipsy may have
Psychical powers. Because the general existence of a world of spirits and of
strange mental powers is a part of the common sense of all mankind. The
Pharisees did not dispute the miracles of Christ; they said they were worked by
devilry. The Christians did not dispute the miracles of Mahomed. They said they
were worked by devilry. The Roman world did not deny the possibility that
Christ was a God. It was far too enlightened for that.
In so far as the Church did
(chiefly during the corrupt and sceptical eighteenth century) urge miracles as
a reason for belief, her fault is evident: but it is not what Mr. Blatchford
supposes. It is not that she asked men to believe anything so incredible; it is
that she asked men to be converted by anything so commonplace.
What matters about a religion is
not whether it can work marvels like any ragged Indian conjurer, but whether it
has a true philosophy of the Universe. The Romans were quite willing to admit
that Christ was a God. What they denied was the He was the God - the highest
truth of the cosmos. And this is the only point worth discussing about
Christianity.
FROM THE AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
It is only by a definite and even
deliberate narrowing of the mind that we can keep religion out of education. I
do not deny that it may in certain cases be the least of many evils; that it
may be a sort of loyalty to a political compromise; that it is certainly better
than a political injustice. But secular education is a limitation, if it be
only a self-limitation. The natural thing is to say what you think about
nature; and especially, so to speak, about the nature of nature. The first and
most obvious thing that a person is interested in is what sort of world he is
living in; and why he is living in it. If you do not know, of course, you will
not be able to say; but the mere fact of not being able to answer the question
that the other person is most likely to ask, may or may not be what some people
call education, but it is not a very brilliant exhibition of instruction. If
you have convictions upon these cosmic and fundamental things, whether negative
or positive, you are an instructor who is on one most important point refusing
to instruct. Your motive may be generous, or it may be merely timid; but
certainly it is not in itself educational.
It is sometimes said that the
devotees of a doctrinal religion, who are so often depicted as donkeys, are in
matters of this kind wearing blinkers. The word is not wisely chosen by the
critics; and in one sense is much more applicable to the critic himself. The
man who teaches authoritative answers to ultimate questions, even if he only
says that Mumbo Jumbo made the world out of a pumpkin, may be dogmatizing or
persecuting or tyrannically laying down the law about everything, but he is not
blinking anything. He is not wearing blinkers, which implies deliberately
limiting the field of his own vision. His vision may be in our view an
illusion; but if it is very vivid to him, we cannot blame him for describing
it; and anyhow he is describing the whole of it. If there is such a thing in
the world as a donkey deliberately wearing blinkers, it is the enlightened
educationist who is always making a nervous effort to keep out of his task of
imparting knowledge any reference to the things that men from the beginning of
the world have most wanted to know. Nor are those things mere hole-and-corner
objects of a special curiosity. Whether or no they can ever be known, they are
not only worth knowing, but they are the simplest and most elementary sort of
knowledge. It is a good thing that children should fully realize that there is
an objective world outside them, as solid as the lamp-post out in the street.
But even when we make the lamp-post quite objective, it is not unnatural to ask
what is its object. A naturalist, noting the common objects of the street, may
observe many facts and put them down in a note-book. A bicyclist may bump into
a lamp-post; a tramp may lean against a lamp-post; a drunkard may embrace a
lamp-post or even in a lighter moment try to climb a lamp-post. But it is not a
strange or specialist sort of knowledge to note about a lamp-post that it has a
lamp.
Now secular education really means
that everybody shall make a point of looking down at the pavement, lest by some
fatal chance somebody should look up at the lamp. The lamp of faith that did in
fact illuminate the street for the mass of mankind in most ages of history, was
not only a wandering fire seen floating in the air by visionaries; it was also
for most people the explanation of the post. If a low cloud like a London fog
must indeed cover that flame, then it is an objective fact that the object will
remain chiefly as an object to be bumped into. I am not blaming anybody who can
only manage to regard the world in that highly objective light. Even if the
lamp-post appears as a post without a lamp, and therefore a post without a
purpose, it may be possible to take different views of it. The stoic, like the
tramp, may lean on it; the optimist, like the drunkard, may embrace it; the
progressive may attempt to climb it, and so on. So it is with those who merely
bump into a headless world as into a lampless post; to whom the world is a
large objective obstacle. I only say that there is a difference, and not a
small or secondary difference, between those who know and those who do not know
what the post is for.
The deepest of all desires for
knowledge is the desire to know what the world is for and what we are for.
Those who believe they can answer that question must at least be allowed to
answer it as the first question and not as the last. A man who cannot answer it
has a right to refuse to answer it; though perhaps he is rather too prone to
comfort himself with the very dogmatic dogma that nobody else can answer it if
he can't. But no man has a right to answer it, or even to arrange for it being
answered, as if it were a sort of peculiar and pedantic additional question,
which only a peculiar and pedantic sort of pupil would be likely to ask.
Secular education is more sensible than making religion one of the extras; like
learning fret-work or Portuguese. And this principle is important in the
controversy about religious education, because it involves the whole question
which was so prominent in the controversy, the question of what is called
'atmosphere'. All that it means is, that anybody who has a right to answer this
question has a right to answer it as if it were the sort of question that it
is; a question affecting the nature of the whole world and the purpose of every
part of human life. If a man is to teach religion, it is absurd to ask him to
teach it as if it were something else, that did not apply to all the activities
of man. The expression 'a religious hour' is something very like a
contradiction in terms. And it is amusing to note that the same casual sceptic
who is always sneering at the orthodox for their forms and limitations, who is
always talking of their Sunday religion and their separation of things sacred
and profane, is generally the very man who is most ready to make fun of the
idea of a religious atmosphere in the schools. That is to say he of all people
objects most to sacred and profane things being united and to a religion that
works on week-days as well as on Sundays. The truth is that the idea of
atmosphere is simply a piece of the elementary psychology of children. In any
other matter, these people would be the first to tell us that education must
take note of all the influences forming the mind, however apparently light or
accidental. They will go wild with dismay if the child has to look at the wrong
wall-paper; they will set themselves seriously to see that he has the right
picture of the wombat; but they tell us not to trouble whether he has the right
picture of the world.
I am not implying, of course, that
there is no value in a secular social enthusiasm; or even that, in the language
that some use sincerely and even usefully, it may not deserve to be called
religion. What I doubt is whether it can in this sense deserve to be called
reason. It does not satisfy the primary intellectual hunger about the meaning
of life, that certain people may mean well, even when they doubt whether it
means anything. The truth is that there is implied in almost all idealism a
number of ideas which the idealists have seldom really followed out as ideas.
There is the notion of a choice that is mysteriously offered and followed by
equally mysterious consequences; of a mystical value attached to one part of
our nature without any authority to value it; of a sort of ultimate tryst with
nobody in particular; in short all the rich tints of a London fog surrounding a
lamp-post without a lamp. I am very far from lacking in respect for all this
groping idealism; I only say, that by its own confession, it is very incomplete
compared with that of anybody who has a complete philosophy, because he has a
creed. And I mean no offence when I say that anybody who has this sort of
education is literally a half-educated person.
But there is another aspect of the
case, which illustrates the real truth in the rather rustic Puritanism of the
people who made a fuss about Darwinism in Dayton. To some of us it seems
strange that such very antiquated Protestantism should be supposed to represent
religion. It seems stranger that such very antiquated Darwinism should be
supposed to represent science. But as a matter of fact the protest and
prosecution on that occasion did represent something. It stood for a strong
popular instinct, not without justification, that science is being made to mean
more than science ever really says. An evolutionary education is something very
different from an education about evolution. Just as a religious school openly
and avowedly gives a religious atmosphere, as a scientific class does sometimes
covertly or unconsciously give a materialistic atmosphere. A secularist teacher
has just as much difficulty as a priest would have, in not giving his own
answer to the questions that are most worth answering. He also is a little
annoyed at not being allowed to put the first things first. He tends more and
more to turn his science into a philosophy. It makes the matter too disputable
and provocative perhaps to call that philosophy materialistic. It is more polite
and equally pointed to call it monistic. But the point is that this philosophy
has in it something altogether alien, not only to all religions that refer back
to the will of God, but even to all moralities that revolve upon the will of
man. Rightly or wrongly, its image of the universe is not that of a post put up
with the design of having a lamp on it; it is rather that of a post that grew
like a tree; a lamp-post that eventually grew its own lamp. Now considering
this vision of vague growth simply as an atmosphere and an impression on the
minds of the young, (apart from its truth or falsehood) there is no doubt that
it tends so far as it goes to the notion of most things being much of a
muchness, being all equally inevitable fruits of the same tree; and certainly
not towards the idea of moral choice and conflict; of a contrast between black
and white or a battle between light and darkness.
I am not writing controversially
or trying to pin anybody with this as an individual necessity. I am writing
educationally and considering the probable psychological impression of certain
atmospheres and fine shades. I say that a great deal of evolution in education
would not make that education very insistent on the ideas of free will and
fighting morality; of dramatic choice and challenge. Why should one fruit
challenge another fruit on the same tree; or how can there be a black and white
choice between its slow gradations of green? So that even if we ignore the
primary question of religion in the sense of the purpose of creation, there is
the same sort of problem about religion even if we use it in the sense of the
purpose of doing good. If a man believes that there is between vice and virtue
a chasm like that of life and death, he will want to say so. And if other people
only say that everything is a growth of evolution, he will not admit that they
have said what he wishes to say. It is not merely a question of secular
education that seems indifferent to religion, but of scientific education that
seems rather indifferent to ethics. I am talking about educational effects, as
educationists do; and decline any sort of sentimental recrimination about the
pure and noble aims of men of science. Many who would despise anything so
classical as the teaching of rhetoric, are always ready with any amount of
rhetoric in praise of the teaching of science. I am not attacking the teaching
of science, still less the teachers of science; I am saying the teaching of
evolution, if it becomes an atmosphere, cannot be an atmosphere favourable to
moral fire or a fighting spirit. To put it shortly, the teaching of evolution
is hardly the training for revolution.
It is hardly likely to give a
special strength to the feeling that some things are intrinsically intolerable
or other things imperatively just. When a reformer can only say to a
slavedriver, "You are evolving too slow; you ought to have emerged from
the slave-state," the slave-driver has only to answer, "You are
evolving too fast; you ought to wait for the twenty-first century." Such
an argument will hardly set in a flame the fanaticism of Harper's Ferry. It
seems to me, therefore, that the poor Puritans of Tennessee are not altogether
wrong, as a matter of educational psychology, if they say that evolutionary
education, even if it is not an attack on Christian doctrine, may become an
atmosphere very alien to Christian morals; or indeed any manly and combative
sort of morals. After the doctrine that existence is a thing of design, the
next most interesting doctrine is that life is a thing of choice; and even if
men were all taught to be atheists, I doubt whether mere evolutionism would
have taught them to be really spirited and warlike atheists. And to see
atheists lose their one great virtue of ferocity would indeed be a serious loss
to religion.
FROM THE AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
The difficulty of dealing with St.
Thomas Aquinas in this brief article is the difficulty of selecting that aspect
of a many-sided mind which will best suggest its size or scale. Because of the
massive body which carried his massive brain, he was called "The Ox";
but any attempt to boil down such a brain into tabloid literature passes all
possible jokes about an ox in a teacup. He was one of the two or three giants;
one of the two or three greatest men who ever lived; and I should never be
surprised if he turned out, quite apart from sanctity, to be the greatest of
all. another way of putting the problem is to say that proportion alters
according to what other men we are at the moment classing him with or pitting
him against. We do not get the scale until we come to the few men in history
who can be his rivals.
Thus, to begin with, we may
compare him with the common life of his time; and tell the story of his
adventures among his contemporaries. In this alone he shed a light on history,
apart from the light he shed on philosophy. He was born in high station,
related to the Imperial house, the son of a great noble of Aquino, not far from
Naples, and when he expressed a wish to be a monk, it is typical of the time
that everything was made smooth for him - up to a point. A great gentleman
could be decorously admitted into the now ancient routine of the Benedictines;
like a squire's younger son becoming a parson. But the world had just been
shaken by a religious revolution, and strange feet were on all the highways.
And when young Thomas insisted on becoming a Dominican - that is a wandering
and begging friar - his brothers pursued him, kidnapped him and shut him up in
a gaol. It was as if the squire's son had become a gipsy or a Communist.
However, he managed to become a friar; and the favourite pupil of the great
Albertus Magnus at Cologne. He afterwards proceeded to Paris, and was prominent
in defending the new mendicant orders at the Sorbonne and elsewhere. From this
he passed to the great central controversy on Averroes and Aristotle; in effect
to the great reconciliation of Christian faith and Pagan philosophy. His
external life was prodigiously preoccupied with these things. He was a big,
burly, baldish man, patient and good-natured, but given to blank trances of
absence of mind. When dining with St. Louis, the French King, he fell into a
brown study and suddenly smote the table with a mighty fist, saying: "And
that will settle the Manichees!" The King, with his fine irony of
innocence, sent a secretary to take down the line of argument, lest it be
forgotten.
Then he could be compared with
other saints or theologians, as mystic rather than dogmatic. For he was, like a
sensible man, a mystic in private and a philosopher in public. He had
"religious experience" all right; but he did not, in the modern
manner, ask other people to reason from his experience. He only asked them to
reason from their own experience. His experiences included well-attested cases
of levitation in ecstasy; and the Blessed Virgin appeared to him, comforting
him with the welcome news that he would never be a Bishop. Similarly, we might
compare the Thomist scheme with others, touching on the points in which Scotus
or Bonaventura differed from it. There is no space for such distinctions here,
beyond the general one; that St. Thomas tends at least relatively to the
rational; the others to the mystic; we might almost say the romantic. In any
case, there was certainly never a greater theologian, and probably never a
greater saint. But saying that he was greater than Dominic or Francis, would
not (in the sense needed here) even hint at how great he was.
To understand his importance, we
must pit him against the two or three alternative cosmic creeds: he is the
whole Christian intellect speaking to Paganism or to Pessimism. He is arguing
across the ages with Plato or with Buddha; and he has the best of the argument.
His mind was so broad, and its balance so beautiful, that to suggest it would
be to discuss a million things. But perhaps the best simplification is this.
St. Thomas confronts other creeds of good and evil, without at all denying
evil, with a theory of two levels of good. The supernatural order is the
supreme good, as for any Eastern mystic; but the natural order is good; as
solidly good as it is for any man in the street. That is what"settles the
Manichees." Faith is higher than reason; but reason is higher than
anything else, and has supreme rights in its own domain. That is where it anticipates
and answers the anti-rational cry of Luther and the rest; as a highly Pagan
poet said to me: "The Reformation happened because people hadn't the
brains to understand Aquinas." The Church is more immortally important
than the State; but the State has its rights, for all that. This Christian
duality had always been implicit, as in Christ's distinction between God and
Caesar, or the dogmatic distinction between the natures of Christ. But St.
Thomas has the glory of having seized this double thread as the clue to a
thousand things; and thereby created the only creed in which the saints can be
sane. It presents itself chiefly, perhaps, to the modern world as the only
creed in which the poets can be sane. For there is nobody now to settle the
Manichees; and all culture is infected with a faint unclean sense that Nature
and all things behind us and below us are bad; that there is only praise to the
highbrow in the height. St. Thomas exalted God without lowering Man; he exalted
Man without lowering Nature. Therefore, he made a cosmos of common sense; terra
vientium; a land of the living. His philosophy, like his theology, is that of
common sense. He does not torture the brain with desperate attempts to explain
existence by explaining it away. The first steps of his mind are the first
steps of any honest mind; just as the first virtues of his creed could be those
of any honest peasant. For he, who combined so many things, combined also
intellectual subtlety and spiritual simplicity; and the priest who attended the
deathbed of this Titan of intellectual energy, whose brain had torn up the
roots of the world and pierced every star and split every straw in the whole
universe of thought and even of scepticism, said that in listening to the dying
man's confession, he fancied suddenly that he was listening to the first
confession of a child of five.
FROM THE AMERICAN
CHESTERTON SOCIETY
In fact, the mere abstract
rationality of this problem is very wrongly discussed. For instance, it is
always considered ludicrous and a signal for a burst of laughter if the
spiritualists say that a seance has been spoiled by the presence of a skeptic,
or that an attitude of faith is necessary to encourage the psychic
communications. But there is nothing at all unreasonable or unlikely about the
idea that doubt might discourage and faith encourage spiritual communications,
if there are any. The suggestion does not make spiritualism in abstract logic any
more improbable. All that it does make it is more difficult. There is nothing
foolish or fantastic about the supposition that a dispassionate person acts as
a deterrent to passionate truths. Only it happens to make it much harder for
any dispassionate person to find out what is true. There are a thousand
practical parallels. An impartial psychologist studying the problem of human
nature could, no doubt, learn a great deal from a man and woman making love to
each other in his presence. None the less, it is unfortunately the fact that no
man and woman would make love to each other in the presence of an impartial
psychologist. Students of physiology and surgery might learn something from a
man suddenly stabbing another man on a platform in a lecture-theater. But no
man would stab another man on a platform in a lecture-theater. A schoolmaster
would learn much if the boys would be boys in his presence; but they never are
boys in his presence. An educationalist studying infancy might make important
discoveries if he could hear the things said by a baby when absolutely alone
and at his ease with his mother. But it is quite obvious that the mere entrance
of a great ugly educationalist (they are an ugly lot) would set the child
screaming with terror.
The problem, then, of skepticism
and spiritual ecstacies is a perfectly human and intelligible problem to state,
though it may be a difficult problem to solve. It is exactly as if a man
pointed at some lady (you can choose the lady out of your own acquaintance at
your own discretion) and said with marked emphasis, "Under no circumstance
could I address a sonnet to that lady." We might reply, "Oh, yes; if
you fell in love with her you might feel inclined to do so." He would be
fully justified in replying (with tears in his eyes), "But I cannot fall
in love with her by any imaginable process." But he would not be logically
justified in replying "Oh, that is all nonsense. You want me to give up my
judgment, and become a silly partisan." The whole question under
discussion is what would happen if he did become a partisan. In the same way,
the skeptic who is expelled with bashed hat and tattered coat-tails from a
spiritualistic seance has a perfect right to say (with or without tears in his
eyes) "But why blame me for unbelief? I cannot manage to believe in such
things by any imaginable process." But he has no logical right to say that
it could not have been his skepticism that spoilt the seance, or that there was
anything at all unphilosophical in supposing that it was. An impartial person
is a good judge of many things, but not of all. He is not (for instance) a good
judge of what it feels like to be partial.
For my own part, what little I
resent in what little I have seen of spiritualism is altogether the opposite
element. I do not mind spiritualism, in so far as it is fierce and credulous.
In that it seems to me to be akin to sex, to song, to the great epics and the
great religions, to all that has made humanity heroic. I do not object to
spiritualism in so far as it is spiritualistic. I do object to it in so far as
it is scientific. Conviction and curiosity are both very good things. But they
ought to have two different houses. There have been many frantic and
blasphemous beliefs in this old barbaric earth of ours; men have served their
deities with obscene dances, with cannibalism, and the blood of infants. But no
religion was quite so blasphemous as to pretend that it was scientifically
investigating its god to see what he was made of. Bacchanals did not say,
"Let us discover whether there is a god of wine." They enjoyed wine
so much that they cried out naturally to the god of it. Christians did not say,
"A few experiments will show us whether there is a god of goodness."
They loved good so much that they knew that it was a god. Moreover, all the
great religions always loved passionately and poetically the symbols and
machinery by which they worked - the temple, the colored robes, the altar, the
symbolic flowers, or the sacrificial fire. It made these things beautiful: it
laid itself open to the charge of idolatry. And into these great ritual
religions there has descended, whatever the meaning of it, the thing of which
Sophocles spoke, "The power of the gods, which is mighty and groweth not
old." When I hear that the spiritualists have begun to carve great golden
wings upon their flying tables, I shall recognize the atmosphere of a faith.
When I hear them accused of worshipping a planchet made of ivory and sardonyx
(whatever that is) I shall know that they have become a great religion.
Meanwhile, I fear I shall remain one of those who believe in spirits much too
easily ever to become a spiritualist. Modern people think the supernatural so
improbable that they want to see it. I think it so probable that I leave it
alone. Spirits are not worth all this fuss; I know that, for I am one myself. .
.
FROM THE AMERICAN
CHESTERTON SOCIETY
The difficulty of explaining
"why I am a Catholic" is that there are ten thousand reasons all
amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true. I could fill all my space
with separate sentences each beginning with the words, "It is the only
thing that . . ." As, for instance, (1) It is the only thing that really
prevents a sin from being a secret. (2) It is the only thing in which the
superior cannot be superior; in the sense of supercilious. (3) It is the only
thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.
(4) It is the only thing that talks as if it were the truth; as if it were a
real messenger refusing to tamper with a real message. (5) It is the only type of
Christianity that really contains every type of man; even the respectable man.
(6) It is the only large attempt to change the world from the inside; working
through wills and not laws; and so on.
Or I might treat the matter
personally and describe my own conversion; but I happen to have a strong
feeling that this method makes the business look much smaller than it really
is. Numbers of much better men have been sincerely converted to much worse
religions. I would much prefer to attempt to say here of the Catholic Church
precisely the things that cannot be said even of its very respectable rivals.
In short, I would say chiefly of the Catholic Church that it is catholic. I
would rather try to suggest that it is not only larger than me, but larger than
anything in the world; that it is indeed larger than the world. But since in
this short space I can only take a section, I will consider it in its capacity
of a guardian of the truth.
The other day a well-known writer,
otherwise quite well-informed, said that the Catholic Church is always the
enemy of new ideas. It probably did not occur to him that his own remark was
not exactly in the nature of a new idea. It is one of the notions that
Catholics have to be continually refuting, because it is such a very old idea.
Indeed, those who complain that Catholicism cannot say anything new, seldom
think it necessary to say anything new about Catholicism. As a matter of fact,
a real study of history will show it to be curiously contrary to the fact. In
so far as the ideas really are ideas, and in so far as any such ideas can be
new, Catholics have continually suffered through supporting them when they were
really new; when they were much too new to find any other support. The Catholic
was not only first in the field but alone in the field; and there was as yet
nobody to understand what he had found there.
Thus, for instance, nearly two
hundred years before the Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution,
in an age devoted to the pride and praise of princes, Cardinal Bellarmine and
Suarez the Spaniard laid down lucidly the whole theory of real democracy. But
in that age of Divine Right they only produced the impression of being
sophistical and sanguinary Jesuits, creeping about with daggers to effect the
murder of kings. So, again, the Casuists of the Catholic schools said all that
can really be said for the problem plays and problem novels of our own time,
two hundred years before they were written. They said that there really are
problems of moral conduct; but they had the misfortune to say it two hundred
years too soon. In a time of tub-thumping fanaticism and free and easy
vituperation, they merely got themselves called liars and shufflers for being
psychologists before psychology was the fashion. It would be easy to give any
number of other examples down to the present day, and the case of ideas that
are still too new to be understood. There are passages in Pope Leo's
<Encyclical on Labor> [Also known as <Rerum Novarum>, released in
1891] which are only now beginning to be used as hints for social movements
much newer than socialism. And when Mr. Belloc wrote about the Servile State,
he advanced an economic theory so original that hardly anybody has yet realized
what it is. A few centuries hence, other people will probably repeat it, and
repeat it wrong. And then, if Catholics object, their protest will be easily
explained by the well-known fact that Catholics never care for new ideas.
Nevertheless, the man who made
that remark about Catholics meant something; and it is only fair to him to
understand it rather more clearly than he stated it. What he meant was that, in
the modern world, the Catholic Church is in fact the enemy of many influential
fashions; most of which still claim to be new, though many of them are beginning
to be a little stale. In other words, in so far as he meant that the Church
often attacks what the world at any given moment supports, he was perfectly
right . The Church does often set herself against the fashion of this world
that passes away; and she has experience enough to know how very rapidly it
does pass away. But to understand exactly what is involved, it is necessary to
take a rather larger view and consider the ultimate nature of the ideas in
question, to consider, so to speak, the idea of the idea.
Nine out of ten of what we call
new ideas are simply old mistakes. The Catholic Church has for one of her chief
duties that of preventing people from making those old mistakes; from making
them over and over again forever, as people always do if they are left to
themselves. The truth about the Catholic attitude towards heresy, or as some
would say, towards liberty, can best be expressed perhaps by the metaphor of a
map. The Catholic Church carries a sort of map of the mind which looks like the
map of a maze, but which is in fact a guide to the maze. It has been compiled
from knowledge which, even considered as human knowledge, is quite without any
human parallel.
There is no other case of one
continuous intelligent institution that has been thinking about thinking for
two thousand years. Its experience naturally covers nearly all experiences; and
especially nearly all errors. The result is a map in which all the blind alleys
and bad roads are clearly marked, all the ways that have been shown to be
worthless by the best of all evidence: the evidence of those who have gone down
them.
On this map of the mind the errors
are marked as exceptions. The greater part of it consists of playgrounds and
happy hunting-fields, where the mind may have as much liberty as it likes; not
to mention any number of intellectual battle-fields in which the battle is
indefinitely open and undecided. But it does definitely take the responsibility
of marking certain roads as leading nowhere or leading to destruction, to a blank
wall, or a sheer precipice. By this means, it does prevent men from wasting
their time or losing their lives upon paths that have been found futile or
disastrous again and again in the past, but which might otherwise entrap
travelers again and again in the future. The Church does make herself
responsible for warning her people against these; and upon these the real issue
of the case depends. She does dogmatically defend humanity from its worst foes,
those hoary and horrible and devouring monsters of the old mistakes. Now all
these false issues have a way of looking quite fresh, especially to a fresh
generation. Their first statement always sounds harmless and plausible. I will
give only two examples. It sounds harmless to say, as most modern people have
said: "Actions are only wrong if they are bad for society." Follow it
out, and sooner or later you will have the inhumanity of a hive or a heathen
city, establishing slavery as the cheapest and most certain means of
production, torturing the slaves for evidence because the individual is nothing
to the State, declaring that an innocent man must die for the people, as did
the murderers of Christ. Then, perhaps, you will go back to Catholic
definitions, and find that the Church, while she also says it is our duty to
work for society, says other things also which forbid individual injustice. Or
again, it sounds quite pious to say, "Our moral conflict should end with a
victory of the spiritual over the material." Follow it out, and you may
end in the madness of the Manicheans, saying that a suicide is good because it
is a sacrifice, that a sexual perversion is good because it produces no life,
that the devil made the sun and moon because they are material. Then you may
begin to guess why Catholicism insists that there are evil spirits as well as
good; and that materials also may be sacred, as in the Incarnation or the Mass,
in the sacrament of marriage or the resurrection of the body.
Now there is no other corporate
mind in the world that is thus on the watch to prevent minds from going wrong.
The policeman comes too late, when he tries to prevent men from going wrong.
The doctor comes too late, for he only comes to lock up a madman, not to advise
a sane man on how not to go mad. And all other sects and schools are inadequate
for the purpose. This is not because each of them may not contain a truth, but
precisely because each of them does contain a truth; and is content to contain
a truth. None of the others really pretends to contain the truth. None of the
others, that is, really pretends to be looking out in all directions at once.
The Church is not
merely armed against the heresies
of the past or even of the present, but equally against those of the future,
that may be the exact opposite of those of the present. Catholicism is not
ritualism; it may in the future be fighting some sort of superstitious and
idolatrous exaggeration of ritual. Catholicism is not asceticism; it has again
and again in the past repressed fanatical and cruel exaggerations of
asceticism. Catholicism is not mere mysticism; it is even now defending human
reason against the mere mysticism of the Pragmatists. Thus, when the world went
Puritan in the seventeenth century, the Church was charged with pushing charity
to the point of sophistry, with making everything easy with the laxity of the
confessional. Now that the world is not going Puritan but Pagan, it is the
Church that is everywhere protesting against a Pagan laxity in dress or
manners. It is doing what the Puritans wanted done when it is really wanted. In
all probability, all that is best in Protestantism will only survive in
Catholicism; and in that sense all Catholics will still be Puritans when all
Puritans are Pagans.
Thus, for instance, Catholicism,
in a sense little understood, stands outside a quarrel like that of Darwinism
at Dayton. It stands outside it because it stands all around it, as a house
stands all around two incongruous pieces of furniture. It is no sectarian boast
to say it is before and after and beyond all these things in all directions. It
is impartial in a fight between the Fundamentalist and the theory of the Origin
of Species, because it goes back to an origin before that Origin; because it is
more fundamental than Fundamentalism. It knows where the Bible came from. It
also knows where most of the theories of Evolution go to. It knows there were
many other Gospels besides the Four Gospels, and that the others were only
eliminated by the authority of the Catholic Church. It knows there are many
other evolutionary theories besides the Darwinian theory; and that the latter
is quite likely to be eliminated by later science. It does not, in the
conventional phrase, accept the conclusions of science, for the simple reason
that science has not concluded. To conclude is to shut up; and the man of
science is not at all likely to shut up. It does not, in the conventional
phrase, believe what the Bible says, for the simple reason that the Bible does
not say anything. You cannot put a book in the witness-box and ask it what it
really means. The Fundamentalist controversy itself destroys Fundamentalism.
The Bible by itself cannot be a basis of agreement when it is a cause of
disagreement; it cannot be the common ground of Christians when some take it
allegorically and some literally. The Catholic refers it to something that can
say something, to the living, consistent, and continuous mind of which I have
spoken; the highest mind of man guided by God.
Every moment increases for us the
moral necessity for such an immortal mind. We must have something that will
hold the four corners of the world still, while we make our social experiments
or build our Utopias. For instance, we must have a final agreement, if only on
the truism of human brotherhood, that will resist some reaction of human brutality.
Nothing is more likely just now than that the corruption of representative
government will lead to the rich breaking loose altogether, and trampling on
all the traditions of equality with mere pagan pride. We must have the truisms
everywhere recognized as true. We must prevent mere reaction and the dreary
repetition of the old mistakes. We must make the intellectual world safe for
democracy. But in the conditions of modern mental anarchy, neither that nor any
other ideal is safe. just as Protestants appealed from priests to the Bible,
and did not realize that the Bible also could be questioned, so republicans
appealed from kings to the people, and did not realize that the people also
could be defied. There is no end to the dissolution of ideas, the destruction
of all tests of truth, that has become possible since men abandoned the attempt
to keep a central and civilized Truth, to contain all truths and trace out and
refute all errors. Since then, each group has taken one truth at a time and
spent the time in turning it into a falsehood. We have had nothing but
movements; or in other words, monomanias. But the Church is not a movement but
a meeting-place; the trysting-place of all the truths in the world.
FROM THE
AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
I mean no disrespect to Mr.
Blatchford in saying that our difficulty very largely lies in the fact that he,
like masses of clever people nowadays, does not understand what theology is. To
make mistakes in a science is one thing, to mistake its nature another. And as
I read <God and My Neighbour>, the conviction gradually dawns on me that
he thinks theology is the study of whether a lot of tales about God told in the
Bible are historically demonstrable. This is as if he were trying to prove to a
man that Socialism was sound Political Economy, and began to realise half-way
through that the man thought that Political Economy meant the study of whether
politicians were economical.
It is very hard to explain briefly
the nature of a whole living study; it would be just as hard to explain
politics or ethics. For the more a thing is huge and obvious and stares one in
the face, the harder it is to define. Anybody can define conchology. Nobody can
define morals.
Nevertheless it falls to us to
make some attempt to explain this religious philosophy which was, and will be
again, the study of the highest intellects and the foundation of the strongest
nations, but which our little civilisation has for a while forgotten, just as
it has forgotten how to dance and how to dress itself decently. I will try and
- explain why I think a religious philosophy necessary and why I think
Christianity the best religious philosophy. But before I do so I want you to
bear in mind two historical facts. I do not ask you to draw my deduction from
them or any deduction from them. I ask you to remember them as mere facts
throughout the discussion.
1. Christianity arose and spread
in a very cultured and very cynical world -in a very modern world. Lucretius
was as much a materialist as Haeckel, and a much more persuasive writer. The
Roman world had read <God and My Neighbour>, and in a weary sort of way
thought it quite true. It is worth noting that religions almost always do arise
out of these sceptical civilisations. A recent book on the PreMohammedan
literature of Arabia describes a life entirely polished and luxurious. It was
so with Buddha, born in the purple of an ancient civilisation. It was so with
Puritanism in England and the Catholic Revival in France and Italy, both of
which were born out of the rationalism of the Renaissance. It is so to-day; it
is always so. Go to the two most modern and free-thinking centres, Paris and
America, and you will find them full of devils and angels, of old mysteries and
new prophets. Rationalism is fighting for its life against the young and
vigorous superstitions.
2. Christianity, which is a very
mystical religion, has nevertheless been the religion of the most practical
section of mankind. It has far more paradoxes than the Eastern philosophies,
but it also builds far better roads.
The Moslem has a pure and logical
conception of God, the one Monistic Allah. But he remains a barbarian in
Europe, and the grass will not grow where he sets his foot. The Christian has a
Triune God, "a tangled trinity," which seems a mere capricious contradiction
in terms. But in action he bestrides the earth, and even the cleverest Eastern
can only fight him by imitating him first. The East has logic and lives on
rice. Christendom has mysteries-and motor cars. Never mind, as I say, about the
inference, let us register the fact. Now with these two things in mind let me
try and explain what Christian theology is.
Complete Agnosticism is the
obvious attitude for man. We are all Agnostics until we discover that
Agnosticism will not work. Then we adopt some philosophy, Mr. Blatchford's or
mine or some others, for of course Mr. Blatchford is no more an Agnostic than I
am. The Agnostic would say that he did not know whether man was responsible for
his sins. Mr. Blatchford says that he knows that man is not.
Here we have the seed of the whole
huge tree of dogma. Why does Mr. Blatchford go beyond Agnosticism and assert
that there is certainly no free will? <Because he cannot run his scheme of
morals without asserting that there is no free will>. He wishes no man to be
blamed for sin. Therefore he has to make his disciples quite certain that God
did not make them free and therefore blamable. No wild Christian doubt must
flit through the mind of the Determinist. No demon must whisper to him in some
hour of anger that perhaps the company promoter was responsible for swindling
him into the workhouse. No sudden scepticism must suggest to him that perhaps
the schoolmaster was blamable for flogging a little boy to death. The
Determinist faith must be held firmly, or else certainly the weakness of human
nature will lead men to be angered when they are slandered and kick back when
they are kicked. In short, free will seems at first sight to belong to the
Unknowable. Yet Mr. Blatchford cannot preach what seems to him common charity
without asserting one dogma about it. And I cannot preach what seems to me
common honesty without asserting another.
Here is the failure of
Agnosticism. That our every-day view of the things we do (in the common sense)
know, actually depends upon our view of the things we do not (in the common
sense) know. It is all very well to tell a man, as the Agnostics do, to
"cultivate his garden." But suppose a man ignores everything outside
his garden, and among them ignores the sun and the rain?
This is the real fact. You cannot
live without dogmas about these things. You cannot act for twenty-four hours
without deciding either to hold people responsible or not to hold them
responsible. Theology is a product far more practical than chemistry.
Some Determinists fancy that
Christianity invented a dogma like free will for fun -a mere contradiction.
This is absurd. You have the contradiction whatever you are. Determinists tell
me, with a degree of truth, that Determinism makes no difference to daily life.
That means - that although the Determinist knows men have no free will, yet he
goes on treating them as if they had.
The difference then is very
simple. The Christian puts the contradiction into his philosophy. The
Determinist puts it into his daily habits. The Christian states as an avowed
mystery what the Determinist calls nonsense. The Determinist has the same
nonsense for breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper every day of his life.
The Christian, I repeat, puts the
mystery into his philosophy. That mystery by its darkness enlightens all
things. Once grant him that, and life is life, and bread is
bread, and cheese is cheese: he
can laugh and fight. The Determinist makes the matter of the will logical and
lucid: and in the light of that lucidity all things are darkened, words have no
meaning, actions no aim. He has made his philosophy a syllogism and himself a
gibbering lunatic.
It is not a question between
mysticism and rationality. It is a question between mysticism and madness. For
mysticism, and mysticism alone, has kept men sane from the beginning of the
world. All the straight roads of logic lead to some Bedlam, to Anarchism or to
passive obedience, to treating the universe as a clockwork of matter or else as
a delusion of mind. It is only the Mystic, the man who accepts the
contradictions, who can laugh and walk easily through the world.
Are you surprised that the same
civilisation which believed in the Trinity discovered steam?All the great
Christian doctrines are of this kind. Look at them carefully and fairly for
yourselves. I have only space for two examples. The first is the Christian idea
of God. Just as we have all been Agnostics so we have all been Pantheists. In
the godhood of youth it seems so easy to say, "Why cannot a man see God in
a bird flying and be content?" But then comes a time when we go on and
say, "If God is in the birds, let us be not only as beautiful as the
birds; let us be as cruel as the birds; let us live the mad, red life of
nature." And something that is wholesome in us resists and says, "My
friend, you are going mad."
Then comes the other side and we
say: "The birds are hateful, the flowers are shameful. I will give no
praise to so base an universe." And the wholesome thing in us says:
"My friend, you are going mad."
Then comes a fantastic thing and
says to us: "You are right to enjoy the birds, but wicked to copy them.
There is a good thing behind all these things, yet all these things are lower
than you. The Universe is right: but the World is wicked. The thing behind all
is not cruel, like a bird: but good, like a man." And the wholesome thing
in us says. "I have found the high road."
Now when Christianity came, the
ancient world had just reached this dilemma. It heard the Voice of
Nature-Worship crying, "All natural things are good. War is as healthy as
he flowers. Lust is as clean as the stars." And it heard also the cry of
the hopeless Stoics and Idealists: "The flowers are at war: the stars are
unclean: nothing but man's conscience is right and that is utterly defeated."
Both views were consistent,
philosophical and exalted: their only disadvantage was that the first leads
logically to murder and the second to suicide. After an agony of thought the
world saw the sane path between the two. It was the Christian God. He made
Nature but He was Man.
Lastly, there is a word to be said
about the Fall. It can only be a word, and it is this. Without the doctrine of
the Fall all idea of progress is unmeaning. Mr. Blatchford says that there was
not a Fall but a gradual rise. But the very word "rise" implies that
you know toward what you are rising. Unless there is a standard you cannot tell
whether you are rising or falling. But the main point is that the Fall like
every other large path of Christianity is embodied in the common language talked
on the top of an omnibus. Anybody might say, "Very few men are really
Manly." Nobody would say, "Very few whales are really whaley."
If you wanted to dissuade a man
from drinking his tenth whisky you would slap him on the back and say, "Be
a man." No one who wished to dissuade a crocodile from eating his tenth
explorer would slap it on the back and say, "Be a crocodile." For we
have no notion of a perfect crocodile; no allegory of a whale expelled from his
whaley Eden. If a whale came up to us and said: "I am a new kind of whale;
I have abandoned whalebone," we should not trouble. But if a man came up
to us (as many will soon come up to us) to say, "I am a new kind of man. I
am the super-man. I have abandoned mercy and justice"; we should answer,
"Doubtless you are new, but you are not nearer to the perfect man, for he
has been already in the mind of God. We have fallen with Adam and we shall rise
with Christ; but we would rather fall with Satan than rise with you."
FROM THE
AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Rafael Gil-Nogués
ragilno@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press
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