CHAPTER VIII

THE END OF THE WORLD

I was once sitting on a summer day in a meadow in Kent under the shadow

of a little village church, with a rather curious companion with whom I

had just been walking through the woods. He was one of a group of

eccentrics I had come across in my wanderings who had a new religion

called Higher Thought; in which I had been so far initiated as to

realise a general atmosphere of loftiness or height, and was hoping at

some later and more esoteric stage to discover the beginnings of

thought. My companion was the most amusing of them, for however he may

have stood towards thought, he was at least very much their superior in

experience, having travelled beyond the tropics while they were

meditating in the suburbs; though he had been charged with excess in

telling travellers’ tales. In spite of anything said against him, I

preferred him to his companions and willingly went with him through the

wood; where I could not but feel that his sunburnt face and fierce

tufted eyebrows and pointed beard gave him something of the look of Pan.

Then we sat down in the meadow and gazed idly at the tree-tops and the

spire of the village church; while the warm afternoon began to mellow

into early evening and the song of a speck of a bird was faint far up in

the sky and no more than a whisper of breeze soothed rather than stirred

the ancient orchards of the garden of England. Then my companion said to

me: ‘Do you know why the spire of that church goes up like that?’ I

expressed a respectable agnosticism, and he answered in an off-hand

way, ‘Oh, the same as the obelisks; the phallic worship of antiquity.’

Then I looked across at him suddenly as he lay there leering above his

goatlike beard; and for the moment I thought he was not Pan but the

Devil. No mortal words can express the immense, the insane incongruity

and unnatural perversion of thought involved in saying such a thing at

such a moment and in such a place. For one moment I was in the mood in

which men burned witches; and then a sense of absurdity equally enormous

seemed to open about me like a dawn. ‘Why, of course,’ I said after a

moment’s reflection, ‘if it hadn’t been for phallic worship, they would

have built the spire pointing downwards and standing on its own apex.’ I

could have sat in that field and laughed for an hour. My friend did not

seem offended, for indeed he was never thin-skinned about his scientific

discoveries. I had only met him by chance and I never met him again, and

I believe he is now dead; but though it has nothing to do with the

argument, it may be worth while to mention the name of this adherent of

Higher Thought and interpreter of primitive religious origins; or at any

rate the name by which he was known. It was Louis de Rougemont.

That insane image of the Kentish church standing on the point of its

spire, as in some old rustic topsy-turvy tale, always comes back into my

imagination when I hear these things said about pagan origins; and calls

to my aid the laughter of the giants. Then I feel as genially and

charitably to all other scientific investigators, higher critics, and

authorities on ancient and modern religion, as I do to poor Louis de

Rougemont. But the memory of that immense absurdity remains as a sort of

measure and check by which to keep sane, not only on the subject of

Christian churches, but also on the subject of heathen temples. Now a

great many people have talked about heathen origins as the distinguished

traveller talked about Christian origins. Indeed a great many modern

heathens have been very hard on heathenism. A great many modern

humanitarians have been very hard on the real religion of humanity. They

have represented it as being everywhere and from the first rooted only

in these repulsive arcana; and carrying the character of something

utterly shameless and anarchical. Now I do not believe this for a

moment. I should never dream of thinking about the whole worship of

Apollo what De Rougemont could think about the worship of Christ. I

would never admit that there was such an atmosphere in a Greek city as

that madman was able to smell in a Kentish village. On the contrary, it

is the whole point, even of this final chapter upon the final decay of

paganism, to insist once more that the worst sort of paganism had

already been defeated by the best sort. It was the best sort of paganism

that conquered the gold of Carthage. It was the best sort of paganism

that wore the laurels of Rome. It was the best thing the world had yet

seen, all things considered and on any large scale, that ruled from the

wall of the Grampians to the garden of the Euphrates. It was the best

that conquered; it was the best that ruled; and it was the best that

began to decay.

Unless this broad truth be grasped, the whole story is seen askew.

Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good.

Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of

joy. It is when for some reason or other the good things in a society no

longer work that the society begins to decline; when its food does not

feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless. We

might almost say that in a society without such good things we should

hardly have any test by which to register a decline; that is why some of

the static commercial oligarchies like Carthage have rather an air in

history of standing and staring like mummies, so dried up and swathed

and embalmed that no man knows when they are new or old. But Carthage

at any rate was dead, and the worst assault ever made by the demons on

mortal society had been defeated. But how much would it matter that the

worst was dead if the best was dying?

To begin with, it must be noted that the relation of Rome to Carthage

was partially repeated and extended in her relation to nations more

normal and more nearly akin to her than Carthage. I am not here

concerned to controvert the merely political view that Roman statesmen

acted unscrupulously towards Corinth or the Greek cities. But I am

concerned to contradict the notion that there was nothing but a

hypocritical excuse in the ordinary Roman dislike of Greek vices. I am

not presenting these pagans as paladins of chivalry, with a sentiment

about nationalism never known until Christian times. But I am presenting

them as men with the feelings of men; and those feelings were not a

pretence. The truth is that one of the weaknesses in nature-worship and

mere mythology had already produced a perversion among the Greeks, due

to the worst sophistry; the sophistry of simplicity. Just as they became

unnatural by worshipping nature, so they actually became unmanly by

worshipping man. If Greece led her conqueror, she might have misled her

conqueror; but these were things he did originally wish to conquer--even

in himself. It is true that in one sense there was less inhumanity even

in Sodom and Gomorrah than in Tyre and Sidon. When we consider the war

of the demons on the children, we cannot compare even Greek decadence to

Punic devil-worship. But it is not true that the sincere revulsion from

either need be merely pharisaical. It is not true to human nature or to

common sense. Let any lad who has had the luck to grow up sane and

simple in his day-dreams of love hear for the first time of the cult of

Ganymede; he will not be merely shocked but sickened. And that first

impression, as has been said here so often about first impressions, will

be right. Our cynical indifference is an illusion; it is the greatest

of all illusions: the illusion of familiarity. It is right to conceive

the more or less rustic virtues of the ruck of the original Romans as

reacting against the very rumour of it, with complete spontaneity and

sincerity. It is right to regard them as reacting, if in a lesser

degree, exactly as they did against the cruelty of Carthage. Because it

was in a less degree they did not destroy Corinth as they destroyed

Carthage. But if their attitude and action was rather destructive, in

neither case need their indignation have been mere self-righteousness

covering mere selfishness. And if anybody insists that nothing could

have operated in either case but reasons of state and commercial

conspiracies, we can only tell him that there is something which he does

not understand; something which possibly he will never understand;

something which, until he does understand, he will never understand the

Latins. That something is called democracy. He has probably heard the

word a good many times and even used it himself; but he has no notion of

what it means. All through the revolutionary history of Rome there was

an incessant drive towards democracy; the state and the statesman could

do nothing without a considerable backing of democracy; the sort of

democracy that never has anything to do with diplomacy. It is precisely

because of the presence of Roman democracy that we hear so much about

Roman oligarchy. For instance, recent historians have tried to explain

the valour and victory of Rome in terms of that detestable and detested

usury which was practised by some of the Patricians; as if Curius had

conquered the men of the Macedonian phalanx by lending them money; or

the Consul Nero had negotiated the victory of Metaurus at five per cent.

But we realise the usury of the Patricians because of the perpetual

revolt of the Plebeians. The rule of the Punic merchant princes had the

very soul of usury. But there was never a Punic mob that dared to call

them usurers.

Burdened like all mortal things with all mortal sin and weakness, the

rise of Rome had really been the rise of normal and especially of

popular things; and in nothing more than in the thoroughly normal and

profoundly popular hatred of perversion. Now among the Greeks a

perversion had become a convention. It is true that it had become so

much of a convention, especially a literary convention, that it was

sometimes conventionally copied by Roman literary men. But this is one

of those complications that always arise out of conventions. It must not

obscure our sense of the difference of tone in the two societies as a

whole. It is true that Virgil would once in a way take over a theme of

Theocritus; but nobody can get the impression that Virgil was

particularly fond of that theme. The themes of Virgil were specially and

notably the normal themes, and nowhere more than in morals; piety and

patriotism and the honour of the countryside. And we may well pause upon

the name of the poet as we pass into the autumn of antiquity: upon his

name who was in so supreme a sense the very voice of autumn, of its

maturity and its melancholy; of its fruits of fulfilment and its

prospect of decay. Nobody who reads even a few lines of Virgil can doubt

that he understood what moral sanity means to mankind. Nobody can doubt

his feelings when the demons were driven in flight before the household

gods. But there are two particular points about him and his work which

are particularly important to the main thesis here. The first is that

the whole of his great patriotic epic is in a very peculiar sense

founded upon the fall of Troy; that is, upon an avowed pride in Troy

although she had fallen. In tracing to Trojans the foundation of his

beloved race and republic, he began what may be called the great Trojan

tradition which runs through medieval and modern history. We have

already seen the first hint of it in the pathos of Homer about Hector.

But Virgil turned it not merely into a literature but into a legend. And

it was a legend of the almost divine dignity that belongs to the

defeated. This was one of the traditions that did truly prepare the

world for the coming of Christianity and especially of Christian

chivalry. This is what did help to sustain civilisation through the

incessant defeats of the Dark Ages and the barbarian wars; out of which

what we call chivalry was born. It is the moral attitude of the man with

his back to the wall; and it was the wall of Troy. All through medieval

and modern times this version of the virtues in the Homeric conflict can

be traced in a hundred ways co-operating with all that was akin to it in

Christian sentiment. Our own countrymen, and the men of other countries,

loved to claim like Virgil that their own nation was descended from the

heroic Trojans. All sorts of people thought it the most superb sort of

heraldry to claim to be descended from Hector. Nobody seems to have

wanted to be descended from Achilles. The very fact that the Trojan name

has become a Christian name, and been scattered to the last limits of

Christendom, to Ireland or the Gaelic Highlands, while the Greek name

has remained relatively rare and pedantic, is a tribute to the same

truth. Indeed it involves a curiosity of language almost in the nature

of a joke. The name has been turned into a verb; and the very phrase

about hectoring, in the sense of swaggering, suggests the myriads of

soldiers who have taken the fallen Trojan for a model. As a matter of

fact, nobody in antiquity was less given to hectoring than Hector. But

even the bully pretending to be a conqueror took his title from the

conquered. That is why the popularisation of the Trojan origin by Virgil

has a vital relation to all those elements that have made men say that

Virgil was almost a Christian. It is almost as if two great tools or

toys of the same timber, the divine and the human, had been in the

hands of Providence; and the only thing comparable to the Wooden Cross

of Calvary was the Wooden Horse of Troy. So, in some wild allegory,

pious in purpose if almost profane in form, the Holy Child might have

fought the Dragon with a wooden sword and a wooden horse.

The other element in Virgil which is essential to the argument is the

particular nature of his relation to mythology; or what may here in a

special sense be called folklore, the faiths and fancies of the

populace. Everybody knows that his poetry at its most perfect is less

concerned with the pomposity of Olympus than with the _numina_ of

natural and agricultural life. Every one knows where Virgil looked for

the causes of things. He speaks of finding them not so much in cosmic

allegories of Uranus and Chronos; but rather in Pan and the sisterhood

of the nymphs and the shaggy old man of the forest. He is perhaps most

himself in some passages of the Eclogues, in which he has perpetuated

for ever the great legend of Arcadia and the shepherds. Here again it is

easy enough to miss the point with petty criticism about all the things

that happen to separate his literary convention from ours. There is

nothing more artificial than the cry of artificiality, as directed

against the old pastoral poetry. We have entirely missed all that our

fathers meant by looking at the externals of what they wrote. People

have been so much amused with the mere fact that the china shepherdess

was made of china that they have not even asked why she was made at all.

They have been so content to consider the Merry Peasant as a figure in

an opera that they have not asked even how he came to go to the opera,

or how he strayed on to the stage.

In short, we have only to ask why there is a china shepherdess and not a

china shopkeeper. Why were not mantelpieces adorned with figures of city

merchants in elegant attitudes; of ironmasters wrought in iron, or gold

speculators in gold? Why did the opera exhibit a Merry Peasant and not a

Merry Politician? Why was there not a ballet of bankers, pirouetting

upon pointed toes? Because the ancient instinct and humour of humanity

have always told them, under whatever conventions, that the conventions

of complex cities were less really healthy and happy than the customs of

the countryside. So it is with the eternity of the Eclogues. A modern

poet did indeed write things called Fleet Street Eclogues, in which

poets took the place of the shepherds. But nobody has yet written

anything called Wall Street Eclogues, in which millionaires should take

the place of the poets. And the reason is that there is a real if only a

recurrent yearning for that sort of simplicity; and there is never that

sort of yearning for that sort of complexity. The key to the mystery of

the Merry Peasant is that the peasant often is merry. Those who do not

believe it are simply those who do not know anything about him, and

therefore do not know which are his times for merriment. Those who do

not believe in the shepherd’s feast or song are merely ignorant of the

shepherd’s calendar. The real shepherd is indeed very different from the

ideal shepherd, but that is no reason for forgetting the reality at the

root of the ideal. It needs a truth to make a tradition. It needs a

tradition to make a convention. Pastoral poetry is certainly often a

convention, especially in a social decline. It was in a social decline

that Watteau shepherds and shepherdesses lounged about the gardens of

Versailles. It was also in a social decline that shepherds and

shepherdesses continued to pipe and dance through the most faded

imitations of Virgil. But that is no reason for dismissing the dying

paganism without ever understanding its life. It is no reason for

forgetting that the very word Pagan is the same as the word Peasant. We

may say that this art is only artificiality; but it is not a love of the

artificial. On the contrary, it is in its very nature only the failure

of nature-worship, or the love of the natural.

For the shepherds were dying because their gods were dying. Paganism

lived upon poetry; that poetry already considered under the name of

mythology. But everywhere, and especially in Italy, it had been a

mythology and a poetry rooted in the countryside; and that rustic

religion had been largely responsible for the rustic happiness. Only as

the whole society grew in age and experience, there began to appear that

weakness in all mythology already noted in the chapter under that name.

This religion was not quite a religion. In other words, this religion

was not quite a reality. It was the young world’s riot with images and

ideas like a young man’s riot with wine or love-making; it was not so

much immoral as irresponsible; it had no foresight of the final test of

time. Because it was creative to any extent it was credulous to any

extent. It belonged to the artistic side of man, yet even considered

artistically it had long become overloaded and entangled. The family

trees sprung from the seed of Jupiter were a jungle rather than a

forest; the claims of the gods and demigods seemed like things to be

settled rather by a lawyer or a professional herald than by a poet. But

it is needless to say that it was not only in the artistic sense that

these things had grown more anarchic. There had appeared in more and

more flagrant fashion that flower of evil that is really implicit in the

very seed of nature-worship, however natural it may seem. I have said

that I do not believe that natural worship necessarily begins with this

particular passion; I am not of the De Rougemont school of scientific

folklore. I do not believe that mythology must begin in eroticism. But I

do believe that mythology must end in it. I am quite certain that

mythology did end in it. Moreover, not only did the poetry grow more

immoral, but the immorality grew more indefensible. Greek vices,

oriental vices, hints of the old horrors of the Semitic demons, began to

fill the fancies of decaying Rome, swarming like flies on a dung-heap.

The psychology of it is really human enough, to any one who will try

that experiment of seeing history from the inside. There comes an hour

in the afternoon when the child is tired of ‘pretending’; when he is

weary of being a robber or a Red Indian. It is then that he torments the

cat. There comes a time in the routine of an ordered civilisation when

the man is tired of playing at mythology and pretending that a tree is a

maiden or that the moon made love to a man. The effect of this staleness

is the same everywhere; it is seen in all drug-taking and dram-drinking

and every form of the tendency to increase the dose. Men seek stranger

sins or more startling obscenities as stimulants to their jaded sense.

They seek after mad oriental religions for the same reason. They try to

stab their nerves to life, if it were with the knives of the priests of

Baal. They are walking in their sleep and try to wake themselves up with

nightmares.

At that stage even of paganism therefore the peasant songs and dances

sound fainter and fainter in the forest. For one thing, the peasant

civilisation was fading, or had already faded, from the whole

countryside. The Empire at the end was organised more and more on that

servile system which generally goes with the boast of organisation;

indeed it was almost as servile as the modern schemes for the

organisation of industry. It is proverbial that what would once have

been a peasantry became a mere populace of the town dependent for bread

and circuses; which may again suggest to some a mob dependent upon doles

and cinemas. In this as in many other respects, the modern return to

heathenism has been a return not even to the heathen youth but rather to

the heathen old age. But the causes of it were spiritual in both cases;

and especially the spirit of paganism had departed with its familiar

spirits. The heart had gone out of it with its household gods, who went

along with the gods of the garden and the field and the forest. The Old

Man of the Forest was too old; he was already dying. It is said truly in

a sense that Pan died because Christ was born. It is almost as true in

another sense that men knew that Christ was born because Pan was already

dead. A void was made by the vanishing of the whole mythology of

mankind, which would have asphyxiated like a vacuum if it had not been

filled with theology. But the point for the moment is that the mythology

could not have lasted like a theology in any case. Theology is thought,

whether we agree with it or not. Mythology was never thought, and nobody

could really agree with it or disagree with it. It was a mere mood of

glamour, and when the mood went it could not be recovered. Men not only

ceased to believe in the gods, but they realised that they had never

believed in them. They had sung their praises; they had danced round

their altars. They had played the flute; they had played the fool.

So came the twilight upon Arcady, and the last notes of the pipe sound

sadly from the beechen grove. In the great Virgilian poems there is

already something of the sadness; but the loves and the household gods

linger in lovely lines like that which Mr. Belloc took for a test of

understanding; _incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem_. But with

them as with us, the human family itself began to break down under

servile organisation and the herding of the towns. The urban mob became

enlightened; that is, it lost the mental energy that could create myths.

All round the circle of the Mediterranean cities the people mourned for

the loss of gods and were consoled with gladiators. And meanwhile

something similar was happening to that intellectual aristocracy of

antiquity that had been walking about and talking at large ever since

Socrates and Pythagoras. They began to betray to the world the fact

that they were walking in a circle and saying the same thing over and

over again. Philosophy began to be a joke; it also began to be a bore.

That unnatural simplification of everything into one system or another,

which we have noted as the fault of the philosopher, revealed at once

its finality and its futility. Everything was virtue or everything was

happiness or everything was fate or everything was good or everything

was bad; anyhow, everything was everything and there was no more to be

said; so they said it. Everywhere the sages had degenerated into

sophists; that is, into hired rhetoricians or askers of riddles. It is

one of the symptoms of this that the sage begins to turn not only into a

sophist but into a magician. A touch of oriental occultism is very much

appreciated in the best houses. As the philosopher is already a society

entertainer, he may as well also be a conjurer.

Many moderns have insisted on the smallness of that Mediterranean world;

and the wider horizons that might have awaited it with the discovery of

the other continents. But this is an illusion; one of the many illusions

of materialism. The limits that paganism had reached in Europe were the

limits of human existence; at its best it had only reached the same

limits anywhere else. The Roman stoics did not need any Chinamen to

teach them stoicism. The Pythagoreans did not need any Hindus to teach

them about recurrence or the simple life or the beauty of being a

vegetarian. In so far as they could get these things from the East, they

had already got rather too much of them from the East. The Syncretists

were as convinced as Theosophists that all religions are really the

same. And how else could they have extended philosophy merely by

extending geography? It can hardly be proposed that they should learn a

purer religion from the Aztecs or sit at the feet of the Incas of Peru.

All the rest of the world was a welter of barbarism. It is essential to

recognise that the Roman Empire was recognised as the highest

achievement of the human race; and also as the broadest. A dreadful

secret seemed to be written as in obscure hieroglyphics across those

mighty works of marble and stone, those colossal amphitheatres and

aqueducts. Man could do no more.

For it was not the message blazed on the Babylonian wall, that one king

was found wanting or his one kingdom given to a stranger. It was no such

good news as the news of invasion and conquest. There was nothing left

that could conquer Rome; but there was also nothing left that could

improve it. It was the strongest thing that was growing weak. It was the

best thing that was going to the bad. It is necessary to insist again

and again that many civilisations had met in one civilisation of the

Mediterranean sea; that it was already universal with a stale and

sterile universality. The peoples had pooled their resources and still

there was not enough. The empires had gone into partnership and they

were still bankrupt. No philosopher who was really philosophical could

think anything except that, in that central sea, the wave of the world

had risen to its highest, seeming to touch the stars. But the wave was

already stooping; for it was only the wave of the world.

That mythology and that philosophy into which paganism has already been

analysed had thus both of them been drained most literally to the dregs.

If with the multiplication of magic the third department, which we have

called the demons, was even increasingly active, it was never anything

but destructive. There remains only the fourth element, or rather the

first; that which had been in a sense forgotten because it was the

first. I mean the primary and overpowering yet impalpable impression

that the universe after all has one origin and one aim; and because it

has an aim must have an author. What became of this great truth in the

background of men’s minds, at this time, it is perhaps more difficult to

determine. Some of the Stoics undoubtedly saw it more and more clearly

as the clouds of mythology cleared and thinned away; and great men among

them did much even to the last to lay the foundations of a concept of

the moral unity of the world. The Jews still held their secret certainty

of it jealously behind high fences of exclusiveness; yet it is intensely

characteristic of the society and the situation that some fashionable

figures, especially fashionable ladies, actually embraced Judaism. But

in the case of many others I fancy there entered at this point a new

negation. Atheism became really possible in that abnormal time; for

atheism is abnormality. It is not merely the denial of a dogma. It is

the reversal of a subconscious assumption in the soul; the sense that

there is a meaning and a direction in the world it sees. Lucretius, the

first evolutionist who endeavoured to substitute Evolution for God, had

already dangled before men’s eyes his dance of glittering atoms, by

which he conceived cosmos as created by chaos. But it was not his strong

poetry or his sad philosophy, as I fancy, that made it possible for men

to entertain such a vision. It was something in the sense of impotence

and despair with which men shook their fists vainly at the stars, as

they saw all the best work of humanity sinking slowly and helplessly

into a swamp. They could easily believe that even creation itself was

not a creation but a perpetual fall, when they saw that the weightiest

and worthiest of all human creations was falling by its own weight. They

could fancy that all the stars were falling stars; and that the very

pillars of their own solemn porticos were bowed under a sort of gradual

Deluge. To men in that mood there was a reason for atheism that is in

some sense reasonable. Mythology might fade and philosophy might

stiffen; but if behind these things there was a reality, surely that

reality might have sustained things as they sank. There was no God; if

there had been a God, surely this was the very moment when He would have

moved and saved the world.

The life of the great civilisation went on with dreary industry and even

with dreary festivity. It was the end of the world, and the worst of it

was that it need never end. A convenient compromise had been made

between all the multitudinous myths and religions of the Empire; that

each group should worship freely and merely give a sort of official

flourish of thanks to the tolerant Emperor, by tossing a little incense

to him under his official title of Divus. Naturally there was no

difficulty about that; or rather it was a long time before the world

realised that there ever had been even a trivial difficulty anywhere.

The members of some eastern sect or secret society or other seemed to

have made a scene somewhere; nobody could imagine why. The incident

occurred once or twice again and began to arouse irritation out of

proportion to its insignificance. It was not exactly what these

provincials said; though of course it sounded queer enough. They seemed

to be saying that God was dead and that they themselves had seen him

die. This might be one of the many manias produced by the despair of the

age; only they did not seem particularly despairing. They seem quite

unnaturally joyful about it, and gave the reason that the death of God

had allowed them to eat him and drink his blood. According to other

accounts God was not exactly dead after all; there trailed through the

bewildered imagination some sort of fantastic procession of the funeral

of God, at which the sun turned black, but which ended with the dead

omnipotence breaking out of the tomb and rising again like the sun. But

it was not the strange story to which anybody paid any particular

attention; people in that world had seen queer religions enough to fill

a madhouse. It was something in the tone of the madmen and their type

of formation. They were a scratch company of barbarians and slaves and

poor and unimportant people; but their formation was military; they

moved together and were very absolute about who and what was really a

part of their little system; and about what they said, however mildly,

there was a ring like iron. Men used to many mythologies and moralities

could make no analysis of the mystery, except the curious conjecture

that they meant what they said. All attempts to make them see reason in

the perfectly simple matter of the Emperor’s statue seemed to be spoken

to deaf men. It was as if a new meteoric metal had fallen on the earth;

it was a difference of substance to the touch. Those who touched their

foundation fancied they had struck a rock.

With a strange rapidity, like the changes of a dream, the proportions of

things seemed to change in their presence. Before most men knew what had

happened, these few men were palpably present. They were important

enough to be ignored. People became suddenly silent about them and

walked stiffly past them. We see a new scene, in which the world has

drawn its skirts away from these men and women and they stand in the

centre of a great space like lepers. The scene changes again and the

great space where they stand is overhung on every side with a cloud of

witnesses, interminable terraces full of faces looking down towards them

intently; for strange things are happening to them. New tortures have

been invented for the madmen who have brought good news. That sad and

weary society seems almost to find a new energy in establishing its

first religious persecution. Nobody yet knows very clearly why that

level world has thus lost its balance about the people in its midst; but

they stand unnaturally still while the arena and the world seem to

revolve round them. And there shone on them in that dark hour a light

that has never been darkened; a white fire clinging to that group like

an unearthly phosphorescence, blazing its track through the twilights of

history and confounding every effort to confound it with the mists of

mythology and theory; that shaft of light or lightning by which the

world itself has struck and isolated and crowned it; by which its own

enemies have made it more illustrious and its own critics have made it

more inexplicable; the halo of hatred around the Church of God.

PART II

ON THE MAN CALLED CHRIST

CHAPTER I

THE GOD IN THE CAVE

This sketch of the human story began in a cave; the cave which popular

science associates with the cave-man and in which practical discovery

has really found archaic drawings of animals. The second half of human

history, which was like a new creation of the world, also begins in a

cave. There is even a shadow of such a fancy in the fact that animals

were again present; for it was a cave used as a stable by the

mountaineers of the uplands about Bethlehem; who still drive their

cattle into such holes and caverns at night. It was here that a homeless

couple had crept underground with the cattle when the doors of the

crowded caravanserai had been shut in their faces; and it was here

beneath the very feet of the passersby, in a cellar under the very floor

of the world, that Jesus Christ was born. But in that second creation

there was indeed something symbolical in the roots of the primeval rock

or the horns of the prehistoric herd. God also was a Cave-Man, and had

also traced strange shapes of creatures, curiously coloured, upon the

wall of the world; but the pictures that he made had come to life.

A mass of legend and literature, which increases and will never end, has

repeated and rung the changes on that single paradox; that the hands

that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads

of the cattle. Upon this paradox, we might almost say upon this jest,

all the literature of our faith is founded. It is at least like a jest

in this, that it is something which the scientific critic cannot see.

He laboriously explains the difficulty which we have always defiantly

and almost derisively exaggerated; and mildly condemns as improbable

something that we have almost madly exalted as incredible; as something

that would be much too good to be true, except that it is true. When

that contrast between the cosmic creation and the little local infancy

has been repeated, reiterated, underlined, emphasised, exulted in, sung,

shouted, roared, not to say howled, in a hundred thousand hymns, carols,

rhymes, rituals, pictures, poems, and popular sermons, it may be

suggested that we hardly need a higher critic to draw our attention to

something a little odd about it; especially one of the sort that seems

to take a long time to see a joke, even his own joke. But about this

contrast and combination of ideas one thing may be said here, because it

is relevant to the whole thesis of this book. The sort of modern critic

of whom I speak is generally much impressed with the importance of

education in life and the importance of psychology in education. That

sort of man is never tired of telling us that first impressions fix

character by the law of causation; and he will become quite nervous if a

child’s visual sense is poisoned by the wrong colours on a golliwog or

his nervous system prematurely shaken by a cacophonous rattle. Yet he

will think us very narrow-minded if we say that this is exactly why

there really is a difference between being brought up as a Christian and

being brought up as a Jew or a Moslem or an atheist. The difference is

that every Catholic child has learned from pictures, and even every

Protestant child from stories, this incredible combination of contrasted

ideas as one of the very first impressions on his mind. It is not merely

a theological difference. It is a psychological difference which can

outlast any theologies. It really is, as that sort of scientist loves to

say about anything, incurable. Any agnostic or atheist whose childhood

has known a real Christmas has ever afterwards, whether he likes it or

not, an association in his mind between two ideas that most of mankind

must regard as remote from each other; the idea of a baby and the idea

of unknown strength that sustains the stars. His instincts and

imagination can still connect them, when his reason can no longer see

the need of the connection; for him there will always be some savour of

religion about the mere picture of a mother and a baby; some hint of

mercy and softening about the mere mention of the dreadful name of God.

But the two ideas are not naturally or necessarily combined. They would

not be necessarily combined for an ancient Greek or a Chinaman, even for

Aristotle or Confucius. It is no more inevitable to connect God with an

infant than to connect gravitation with a kitten. It has been created in

our minds by Christmas because we are Christians; because we are

psychological Christians even when we are not theological ones. In other

words, this combination of ideas has emphatically, in the much disputed

phrase, altered human nature. There is really a difference between the

man who knows it and the man who does not. It may not be a difference of

moral worth, for the Moslem or the Jew might be worthier according to

his lights; but it is a plain fact about the crossing of two particular

lights, the conjunction of two stars in our particular horoscope.

Omnipotence and impotence, or divinity and infancy, do definitely make a

sort of epigram which a million repetitions cannot turn into a

platitude. It is not unreasonable to call it unique. Bethlehem is

emphatically a place where extremes meet.

Here begins, it is needless to say, another mighty influence for the

humanisation of Christendom. If the world wanted what is called a

non-controversial aspect of Christianity, it would probably select

Christmas. Yet it is obviously bound up with what is supposed to be a

controversial aspect (I could never at any stage of my opinions imagine

why); the respect paid to the Blessed Virgin. When I was a boy a more

Puritan generation objected to a statue upon a parish church

representing the Virgin and Child. After much controversy, they

compromised by taking away the Child. One would think that this was even

more corrupted with Mariolatry, unless the mother was counted less

dangerous when deprived of a sort of weapon. But the practical

difficulty is also a parable. You cannot chip away the statue of a

mother from all round that of a new-born child. You cannot suspend the

new-born child in mid-air; indeed you cannot really have a statue of a

new-born child at all. Similarly, you cannot suspend the idea of a

new-born child in the void or think of him without thinking of his

mother. You cannot visit the child without visiting the mother; you

cannot in common human life approach the child except through the

mother. If we are to think of Christ in this aspect at all, the other

idea follows as it is followed in history. We must either leave Christ

out of Christmas, or Christmas out of Christ, or we must admit, if only

as we admit it in an old picture, that those holy heads are too near

together for the haloes not to mingle and cross.

It might be suggested, in a somewhat violent image, that nothing had

happened in that fold or crack in the great grey hills except that the

whole universe had been turned inside out. I mean that all the eyes of

wonder and worship which had been turned outwards to the largest thing

were now turned inward to the smallest. The very image will suggest all

that multitudinous marvel of converging eyes that makes so much of the

coloured Catholic imagery like a peacock’s tail. But it is true in a

sense that God who had been only a circumference was seen as a centre;

and a centre is infinitely small. It is true that the spiritual spiral

henceforward works inwards instead of outwards, and in that sense is

centripetal and not centrifugal. The faith becomes, in more ways than

one, a religion of little things. But its traditions in art and

literature and popular fable have quite sufficiently attested, as has

been said, this particular paradox of the divine being in the cradle.

Perhaps they have not so clearly emphasised the significance of the

divine being in the cave. Curiously enough, indeed, tradition has not

very clearly emphasised the cave. It is a familiar fact that the

Bethlehem scene has been represented in every possible setting of time

and country, of landscape and architecture; and it is a wholly happy and

admirable fact that men have conceived it as quite different according

to their different individual traditions and tastes. But while all have

realised that it was a stable, not so many have realised that it was a

cave. Some critics have even been so silly as to suppose that there was

some contradiction between the stable and the cave; in which case they

cannot know much about caves or stables in Palestine. As they see

differences that are not there, it is needless to add that they do not

see differences that are there. When a well-known critic says, for

instance, that Christ being born in a rocky cavern is like Mithras

having sprung alive out of a rock, it sounds like a parody upon

comparative religion. There is such a thing as the point of a story,

even if it is a story in the sense of a lie. And the notion of a hero

appearing, like Pallas from the brain of Zeus, mature and without a

mother, is obviously the very opposite of the idea of a god being born

like an ordinary baby and entirely dependent on a mother. Whichever

ideal we might prefer, we should surely see that they are contrary

ideals. It is as stupid to connect them because they both contain a

substance called stone as to identify the punishment of the Deluge with

the baptism in the Jordan because they both contain a substance called

water. Whether as a myth or a mystery, Christ was obviously conceived as

born in a hole in the rocks primarily because it marked the position of

one outcast and homeless. Nevertheless it is true, as I have said, that

the cave has not been so commonly or so clearly used as a symbol as the

other realities that surrounded the first Christmas.

And the reason for this also refers to the very nature of that new

world. It was in a sense the difficulty of a new dimension. Christ was

not only born on the level of the world, but even lower than the world.

The first act of the divine drama was enacted, not only on no stage set

up above the sightseer, but on a dark and curtained stage sunken out of

sight; and that is an idea very difficult to express in most modes of

artistic expression. It is the idea of simultaneous happenings on

different levels of life. Something like it might have been attempted in

the more archaic and decorative medieval art. But the more the artists

learned of realism and perspective, the less they could depict at once

the angels in the heavens and the shepherds on the hills, and the glory

in the darkness that was under the hills. Perhaps it could have been

best conveyed by the characteristic expedient of some of the medieval

guilds, when they wheeled about the streets a theatre with three stages

one above the other, with heaven above the earth and hell under the

earth. But in the riddle of Bethlehem it was heaven that was under the

earth.

There is in that alone the touch of a revolution, as of the world turned

upside down. It would be vain to attempt to say anything adequate, or

anything new, about the change which this conception of a deity born

like an outcast or even an outlaw had upon the whole conception of law

and its duties to the poor and outcast. It is profoundly true to say

that after that moment there could be no slaves. There could be and were

people bearing that legal title until the Church was strong enough to

weed them out, but there could be no more of the pagan repose in the

mere advantage to the state of keeping it a servile state. Individuals

became important, in a sense in which no instruments can be important.

A man could not be a means to an end, at any rate to any other man’s

end. All this popular and fraternal element in the story has been

rightly attached by tradition to the episode of the Shepherds; the hinds

who found themselves talking face to face with the princes of heaven.

But there is another aspect of the popular element as represented by the

shepherds which has not perhaps been so fully developed; and which is

more directly relevant here.

Men of the people, like the shepherds, men of the popular tradition, had

everywhere been the makers of the mythologies. It was they who had felt

most directly, with least check or chill from philosophy or the corrupt

cults of civilisation, the need we have already considered; the images

that were adventures of the imagination; the mythology that was a sort

of search; the tempting and tantalising hints of something half-human in

nature; the dumb significance of seasons and special places. They had

best understood that the soul of a landscape is a story and the soul of

a story is a personality. But rationalism had already begun to rot away

these really irrational though imaginative treasures of the peasant;

even as systematic slavery had eaten the peasant out of house and home.

Upon all such peasantries everywhere there was descending a dusk and

twilight of disappointment, in the hour when these few men discovered

what they sought. Everywhere else Arcadia was fading from the forest.

Pan was dead and the shepherds were scattered like sheep. And though no

man knew it, the hour was near which was to end and to fulfil all

things; and though no man heard it, there was one far-off cry in an

unknown tongue upon the heaving wilderness of the mountains. The

shepherds had found their Shepherd.

And the thing they found was of a kind with the things they sought. The

populace had been wrong in many things; but they had not been wrong in

believing that holy things could have a habitation and that divinity

need not disdain the limits of time and space. And the barbarian who

conceived the crudest fancy about the sun being stolen and hidden in a

box, or the wildest myth about the god being rescued and his enemy

deceived with a stone, was nearer to the secret of the cave and knew

more about the crisis of the world than all those in the circle of

cities round the Mediterranean who had become content with cold

abstractions or cosmopolitan generalisations; than all those who were

spinning thinner and thinner threads of thought out of the

transcendentalism of Plato or the orientalism of Pythagoras. The place

that the shepherds found was not an academy or an abstract republic; it

was not a place of myths allegorised or dissected or explained or

explained away. It was a place of dreams come true. Since that hour no

mythologies have been made in the world. Mythology is a search.

We all know that the popular presentation of this popular story, in so

many miracle plays and carols, has given to the shepherds the costume,

the language, and the landscape of the separate English and European

countrysides. We all know that one shepherd will talk in a Somerset

dialect or another talk of driving his sheep from Conway towards the

Clyde. Most of us know by this time how true is that error, how wise,

how artistic, how intensely Christian and Catholic is that anachronism.

But some who have seen it in these scenes of medieval rusticity have

perhaps not seen it in another sort of poetry, which it is sometimes the

fashion to call artificial rather than artistic. I fear that many modern

critics will see only a faded classicism in the fact that men like

Crashaw and Herrick conceived the shepherds of Bethlehem under the form

of the shepherds of Virgil. Yet they were profoundly right; and in

turning their Bethlehem play into a Latin Eclogue they took up one of

the most important links in human history. Virgil, as we have already

seen, does stand for all that saner heathenism that had overthrown the

insane heathenism of human sacrifice; but the very fact that even the

Virgilian virtues and the sane heathenism were in incurable decay is the

whole problem to which the revelation to the shepherds is the solution.

If the world had ever had the chance to grow weary of being demoniac, it

might have been healed merely by becoming sane. But if it had grown

weary even of being sane, what was to happen except what did happen? Nor

is it false to conceive the Arcadian shepherd of the Eclogues as

rejoicing in what did happen. One of the Eclogues has even been claimed

as a prophecy of what did happen. But it is quite as much in the tone

and incidental diction of the great poet that we feel the potential

sympathy with the great event; and even in their own human phrases the

voices of the Virgilian shepherds might more than once have broken upon

more than the tenderness of Italy.... _Incipe, parve puer, risu

cognoscere matrem._... They might have found in that strange place all

that was best in the last traditions of the Latins; and something better

than a wooden idol standing up for ever for the pillar of the human

family; a Household God. But they and all the other mythologists would

be justified in rejoicing that the event had fulfilled not merely the

mysticism but the materialism of mythology. Mythology had many sins; but

it had not been wrong in being as carnal as the Incarnation. With

something of the ancient voice that was supposed to have rung through

the groves, it could cry again, ‘We have seen, he hath seen us, a

visible god.’ So the ancient shepherds might have danced, and their feet

have been beautiful upon the mountains, rejoicing over the philosophers.

But the philosophers had also heard.

It is still a strange story, though an old one, how they came out of

orient lands, crowned with the majesty of kings and clothed with

something of the mystery of magicians. That truth that is tradition has

wisely remembered them almost as unknown quantities, as mysterious as

their mysterious and melodious names: Melchior, Caspar, Balthazar. But

there came with them all that world of wisdom that had watched the stars

in Chaldea and the sun in Persia; and we shall not be wrong if we see in

them the same curiosity that moves all the sages. They would stand for

the same human ideal if their names had really been Confucius or

Pythagoras or Plato. They were those who sought not tales but the truth

of things; and since their thirst for truth was itself a thirst for God,

they also have had their reward. But even in order to understand that

reward, we must understand that for philosophy as much as mythology,

that reward was the completion of the incomplete.

Such learned men would doubtless have come, as these learned men did

come, to find themselves confirmed in much that was true in their own

traditions and right in their own reasoning. Confucius would have found

a new foundation for the family in the very reversal of the Holy Family;

Buddha would have looked upon a new renunciation, of stars rather than

jewels and divinity than royalty. These learned men would still have the

right to say, or rather a new right to say, that there was truth in

their old teaching. But, after all, these learned men would have come to

learn. They would have come to complete their conceptions with something

they had not yet conceived; even to balance their imperfect universe

with something they might once have contradicted. Buddha would have come

from his impersonal paradise to worship a person. Confucius would have

come from his temples of ancestor-worship to worship a child.

We must grasp from the first this character in the new cosmos: that it

was larger than the old cosmos. In that sense Christendom is larger than

creation; as creation had been before Christ. It included things that

had not been there; it also included the things that had been there.

The point happens to be well illustrated in this example of Chinese

piety, but it would be true of other pagan virtues or pagan beliefs.

Nobody can doubt that a reasonable respect for parents is part of a

gospel in which God himself was subject in childhood to earthly parents.

But the other sense in which the parents were subject to him does

introduce an idea that is not Confucian. The infant Christ is not like

the infant Confucius; our mysticism conceives him in an immortal

infancy. I do not know what Confucius would have done with the Bambino,

had it come to life in his arms as it did in the arms of St. Francis.

But this is true in relation to all the other religions and

philosophies; it is the challenge of the Church. The Church contains

what the world does not contain. Life itself does not provide as she

does for all sides of life. That every other single system is narrow and

insufficient compared to this one; that is not a rhetorical boast; it is

a real fact and a real dilemma. Where is the Holy Child amid the Stoics

and the ancestor-worshippers? Where is Our Lady of the Moslems, a woman

made for no man and set above all angels? Where is St. Michael of the

monks of Buddha, rider and master of the trumpets, guarding for every

soldier the honour of the sword? What could St. Thomas Aquinas do with

the mythology of Brahminism, he who set forth all the science and

rationality and even rationalism of Christianity? Yet even if we compare

Aquinas with Aristotle, at the other extreme of reason, we shall find

the same sense of something added. Aquinas could understand the most

logical parts of Aristotle; it is doubtful if Aristotle could have

understood the most mystical parts of Aquinas. Even where we can hardly

call the Christian greater, we are forced to call him larger. But it is

so to whatever philosophy or heresy or modern movement we may turn. How

would Francis the Troubadour have fared among the Calvinists, or for

that matter among the Utilitarians of the Manchester School? Yet men

like Bossuet and Pascal could be as stern and logical as any Calvinist

or Utilitarian. How would St. Joan of Arc, a woman waving on men to war

with the sword, have fared among the Quakers or the Doukhabors or the

Tolstoyan sect of pacifists? Yet any number of Catholic saints have

spent their lives in preaching peace and preventing wars. It is the same

with all the modern attempts at Syncretism. They are never able to make

something larger than the Creed without leaving something out. I do not

mean leaving out something divine but something human; the flag or the

inn or the boy’s tale of battle or the hedge at the end of the field.

The Theosophists build a pantheon; but it is only a pantheon for

pantheists. They call a Parliament of Religions as a reunion of all the

peoples; but it is only a reunion of all the prigs. Yet exactly such a

pantheon had been set up two thousand years before by the shores of the

Mediterranean; and Christians were invited to set up the image of Jesus

side by side with the image of Jupiter, of Mithras, of Osiris, of Atys,

or of Ammon. It was the refusal of the Christians that was the

turning-point of history. If the Christians had accepted, they and the

whole world would have certainly, in a grotesque but exact metaphor,

gone to pot. They would all have been boiled down to one lukewarm liquid

in that great pot of cosmopolitan corruption in which all the other

myths and mysteries were already melting. It was an awful and an

appalling escape. Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the

ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not

realise that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness

and the brotherhood of all religions.

Here it is the important point that the Magi, who stand for mysticism

and philosophy, are truly conceived as seeking something new and even as

finding something unexpected. That tense sense of crisis which still

tingles in the Christmas story, and even in every Christmas celebration,

accentuates the idea of a search and a discovery. The discovery is, in

this case, truly a scientific discovery. For the other mystical figures

in the miracle play, for the angel and the mother, the shepherds and the

soldiers of Herod, there may be aspects both simpler and more

supernatural, more elemental or more emotional. But the Wise Men must be

seeking wisdom; and for them there must be a light also in the

intellect. And this is the light: that the Catholic creed is catholic

and that nothing else is catholic. The philosophy of the Church is

universal. The philosophy of the philosophers was not universal. Had

Plato and Pythagoras and Aristotle stood for an instant in the light

that came out of that little cave, they would have known that their own

light was not universal. It is far from certain, indeed, that they did

not know it already. Philosophy also, like mythology, had very much the

air of a search. It is the realisation of this truth that gives its

traditional majesty and mystery to the figures of the Three Kings; the

discovery that religion is broader than philosophy and that this is the

broadest of religions, contained within this narrow space. The Magicians

were gazing at the strange pentacle with the human triangle reversed;

and they have never come to the end of their calculations about it. For

it is the paradox of that group in the cave, that while our emotions

about it are of childish simplicity, our thoughts about it can branch

with a never-ending complexity. And we can never reach the end even of

our own ideas about the child who was a father and the mother who was a

child.

We might well be content to say that mythology had come with the

shepherds and philosophy with the philosophers; and that it only

remained for them to combine in the recognisation of religion. But there

was a third element that must not be ignored and one which that religion

for ever refuses to ignore, in any revel or reconciliation. There was

present in the primary scenes of the drama that Enemy that had rotted

the legends with lust and frozen the theories into atheism, but which

answered the direct challenge with something of that more direct method

which we have seen in the conscious cult of the demons. In the

description of that demon-worship, of the devouring detestation of

innocence shown in the works of its witchcraft and the most inhuman of

its human sacrifice, I have said less of its indirect and secret

penetration of the saner paganism; the soaking of mythological

imagination with sex; the rise of imperial pride into insanity. But both

the indirect and the direct influence make themselves felt in the drama

of Bethlehem. A ruler under the Roman suzerainty, probably equipped and

surrounded with the Roman ornament and order though himself of eastern

blood, seems in that hour to have felt stirring within him the spirit of

strange things. We all know the story of how Herod, alarmed at some

rumour of a mysterious rival, remembered the wild gesture of the

capricious despots of Asia and ordered a massacre of suspects of the new

generation of the populace. Every one knows the story; but not every one

has perhaps noted its place in the story of the strange religions of

men. Not everybody has seen the significance even of its very contrast

with the Corinthian columns and Roman pavement of that conquered and

superficially civilised world. Only, as the purpose in his dark spirit

began to show and shine in the eyes of the Idumean, a seer might perhaps

have seen something like a great grey ghost that looked over his

shoulder; have seen behind him, filling the dome of night and hovering

for the last time over history, that vast and fearful face that was

Moloch of the Carthaginians; awaiting his last tribute from a ruler of

the races of Shem. The demons also, in that first festival of Christmas,

feasted after their own fashion.

Unless we understand the presence of that Enemy, we shall not only miss

the point of Christianity, but even miss the point of Christmas.

Christmas for us in Christendom has become one thing, and in one sense

even a simple thing. But, like all the truths of that tradition, it is

in another sense a very complex thing. Its unique note is the

simultaneous striking of many notes; of humility, of gaiety, of

gratitude, of mystical fear, but also of vigilance and of drama. It is

not only an occasion for the peacemakers any more than for the

merrymakers; it is not only a Hindu peace conference any more than it is

only a Scandinavian winter feast. There is something defiant in it also;

something that makes the abrupt bells at midnight sound like the great

guns of a battle that has just been won. All this indescribable thing

that we call the Christmas atmosphere only hangs in the air as something

like a lingering fragrance or fading vapour from the exultant explosion

of that one hour in the Judean hills nearly two thousand years ago. But

the savour is still unmistakable, and it is something too subtle or too

solitary to be covered by our use of the word peace. By the very nature

of the story the rejoicings in the cavern were rejoicings in a fortress

or an outlaw’s den; properly understood it is not unduly flippant to say

they were rejoicings in a dug-out. It is not only true that such a

subterranean chamber was a hiding-place from enemies; and that the

enemies were already scouring the stony plain that lay above it like a

sky. It is not only that the very horse-hoofs of Herod might in that

sense have passed like thunder over the sunken head of Christ. It is

also that there is in that image a true idea of an outpost, of a

piercing through the rock and an entrance into an enemy territory. There

is in this buried divinity an idea of _undermining_ the world; of

shaking the towers and palaces from below; even as Herod the great king

felt that earthquake under him and swayed with his swaying palace.

That is perhaps the mightiest of the mysteries of the cave. It is

already apparent that though men are said to have looked for hell under

the earth, in this case it is rather heaven that is under the earth. And

there follows in this strange story the idea of an upheaval of heaven.

That is the paradox of the whole position; that henceforth the highest

thing can only work from below. Royalty can only return to its own by a

sort of rebellion. Indeed the Church from its beginnings, and perhaps

especially in its beginnings, was not so much a principality as a

revolution against the prince of the world. This sense that the world

had been conquered by the great usurper, and was in his possession, has

been much deplored or derided by those optimists who identify

enlightenment with ease. But it was responsible for all that thrill of

defiance and a beautiful danger that made the good news seem to be

really both good and new. It was in truth against a huge unconscious

usurpation that it raised a revolt, and originally so obscure a revolt.

Olympus still occupied the sky like a motionless cloud moulded into many

mighty forms; philosophy still sat in the high places and even on the

thrones of the kings, when Christ was born in the cave and Christianity

in the catacombs.

In both cases we may remark the same paradox of revolution; the sense of

something despised and of something feared. The cave in one aspect is

only a hole or corner into which the outcasts are swept like rubbish;

yet in the other aspect it is a hiding-place of something valuable which

the tyrants are seeking like treasure. In one sense they are there

because the innkeeper would not even remember them, and in another

because the king can never forget them. We have already noted that this

paradox appeared also in the treatment of the early Church. It was

important while it was still insignificant, and certainly while it was

still impotent. It was important solely because it was intolerable; and

in that sense it is true to say that it was intolerable because it was

intolerant. It was resented, because, in its own still and almost secret

way, it had declared war. It had risen out of the ground to wreck the

heaven and earth of heathenism. It did not try to destroy all that

creation of gold and marble; but it contemplated a world without it. It

dared to look right through it as though the gold and marble had been

glass. Those who charged the Christians with burning down Rome with

firebrands were slanderers; but they were at least far nearer to the

nature of Christianity than those among the moderns who tell us that the

Christians were a sort of ethical society, being martyred in a languid

fashion for telling men they had a duty to their neighbours, and only

mildly disliked because they were meek and mild.

Herod had his place, therefore, in the miracle play of Bethlehem because

he is the menace to the Church Militant and shows it from the first as

under persecution and fighting for its life. For those who think this a

discord, it is a discord that sounds simultaneously with the Christmas

bells. For those who think the idea of the Crusade is one that spoils

the idea of the Cross, we can only say that for them the idea of the

Cross is spoiled; the idea of the Cross is spoiled quite literally in

the Cradle. It is not here to the purpose to argue with them on the

abstract ethics of fighting; the purpose in this place is merely to sum

up the combination of ideas that make up the Christian and Catholic

idea, and to note that all of them are already crystallised in the first

Christmas story. They are three distinct and commonly contrasted things

which are nevertheless one thing; but this is the only thing which can

make them one. The first is the human instinct for a heaven that shall

be as literal and almost as local as a home. It is the idea pursued by

all poets and pagans making myths; that a particular place must be the

shrine of the god or the abode of the blest; that fairyland is a land;

or that the return of the ghost must be the resurrection of the body. I

do not here reason about the refusal of rationalism to satisfy this

need. I only say that if the rationalists refuse to satisfy it, the

pagans will not be satisfied. This is present in the story of Bethlehem

and Jerusalem as it is present in the story of Delos and Delphi; and as

it is _not_ present in the whole universe of Lucretius or the whole

universe of Herbert Spencer. The second element is a philosophy _larger_

than other philosophies; larger than that of Lucretius and infinitely

larger than that of Herbert Spencer. It looks at the world through a

hundred windows where the ancient stoic or the modern agnostic only

looks through one. It sees life with thousands of eyes belonging to

thousands of different sorts of people, where the other is only the

individual standpoint of a stoic or an agnostic. It has something for

all moods of man, it finds work for all kinds of men, it understands

secrets of psychology, it is aware of depths of evil, it is able to

distinguish between real and unreal marvels and miraculous exceptions,

it trains itself in tact about hard cases, all with a multiplicity and

subtlety and imagination about the varieties of life which is far beyond

the bald or breezy platitudes of most ancient or modern moral

philosophy. In a word, there is more in it; it finds more in existence

to think about; it gets more out of life. Masses of this material about

our many-sided life have been added since the time of St. Thomas

Aquinas. But St. Thomas Aquinas alone would have found himself limited

in the world of Confucius or of Comte. And the third point is this: that

while it is local enough for poetry and larger than any other

philosophy, it is also a challenge and a fight. While it is deliberately

broadened to embrace every aspect of truth, it is still stiffly

embattled against every mode of error. It gets every kind of man to

fight for it, it gets every kind of weapon to fight with, it widens its

knowledge of the things that are fought for and against with every art

of curiosity or sympathy; but it never forgets that it is fighting. It

proclaims peace on earth and never forgets why there was war in heaven.

This is the trinity of truths symbolised here by the three types in the

old Christmas story: the shepherds and the kings and that other king who

warred upon the children. It is simply not true to say that other

religions and philosophies are in this respect its rivals. It is not

true to say that any one of them combines these characters; it is not

true to say that any one of them pretends to combine them. Buddhism may

profess to be equally mystical; it does not even profess to be equally

military. Islam may profess to be equally military; it does not even

profess to be equally metaphysical and subtle. Confucianism may profess

to satisfy the need of the philosophers for order and reason; it does

not even profess to satisfy the need of the mystics for miracle and

sacrament and the consecration of concrete things. There are many

evidences of this presence of a spirit at once universal and unique. One

will serve here which is the symbol of the subject of this chapter; that

no other story, no pagan legend or philosophical anecdote or historical

event, does in fact affect any of us with that peculiar and even

poignant impression produced on us by the word Bethlehem. No other birth

of a god or childhood of a sage seems to us to be Christmas or anything

like Christmas. It is either too cold or too frivolous, or too formal

and classical, or too simple and savage, or too occult and complicated.

Not one of us, whatever his opinions, would ever go to such a scene with

the sense that he was going home. He might admire it because it was

poetical, or because it was philosophical, or any number of other things

in separation; but not because it was itself. The truth is that there is

a quite peculiar and individual character about the hold of this story

on human nature; it is not in its psychological substance at all like a

mere legend or the life of a great man. It does not exactly in the

ordinary sense turn our minds to greatness; to those extensions and

exaggerations of humanity which are turned into gods and heroes, even by

the healthiest sort of hero-worship. It does not exactly work outwards,

adventurously, to the wonders to be found at the ends of the earth. It

is rather something that surprises us from behind, from the hidden and

personal part of our being; like that which can sometimes take us off

our guard in the pathos of small objects or the blind pieties of the

poor. It is rather as if a man had found an inner room in the very heart

of his own house which he had never suspected; and seen a light from

within. It is as if he found something at the back of his own heart that

betrayed him into good. It is not made of what the world would call

strong materials; or rather it is made of materials whose strength is in

that winged levity with which they brush us and pass. It is all that is

in us but a brief tenderness that is there made eternal; all that means

no more than a momentary softening that is in some strange fashion

become a strengthening and a repose; it is the broken speech and the

lost word that are made positive and suspended unbroken; as the strange

kings fade into a far country and the mountains resound no more with the

feet of the shepherds; and only the night and the cavern lie in fold

upon fold over something more human than humanity.

CHAPTER II

THE RIDDLES OF THE GOSPEL

To understand the nature of this chapter, it is necessary to recur to

the nature of this book. The argument which is meant to be the backbone

of the book is of the kind called the _reductio ad absurdum_. It

suggests that the results of assuming the rationalist thesis are more

irrational than ours; but to prove it we must assume that thesis. Thus

in the first section I often treated man as merely an animal, to show

that the effect was more impossible than if he were treated as an angel.

In the sense in which it was necessary to treat man merely as an animal,

it is necessary to treat Christ merely as a man. I have to suspend my

own beliefs, which are much more positive; and assume this limitation

even in order to remove it. I must try to imagine what would happen to a

man who did really read the story of Christ as the story of a man; and

even of a man of whom he had never heard before. And I wish to point out

that a really impartial reading of that kind would lead, if not

immediately to belief, at least to a bewilderment of which there is

really no solution except in belief. In this chapter, for this reason, I

shall bring in nothing of the spirit of my own creed; I shall exclude

the very style of diction, and even of lettering, which I should think

fitting in speaking in my own person. I am speaking as an imaginary

heathen human being, honestly staring at the Gospel story for the first

time.

Now it is not at all easy to regard the New Testament as a New

Testament. It is not at all easy to realise the good news as new. Both

for good and evil familiarity fills us with assumptions and

associations; and no man of our civilisation, whatever he thinks of our

religion, can really read the thing as if he had never heard of it

before. Of course it is in any case utterly unhistorical to talk as if

the New Testament were a neatly bound book that had fallen from heaven.

It is simply the selection made by the authority of the Church from a

mass of early Christian literature. But apart from any such question,

there is a psychological difficulty in feeling the New Testament as new.

There is a psychological difficulty in seeing those well-known words

simply as they stand and without going beyond what they intrinsically

stand for. And this difficulty must indeed be very great; for the result

of it is very curious. The result of it is that most modern critics and

most current criticism, even popular criticism, makes a comment that is

the exact reverse of the truth. It is so completely the reverse of the

truth that one could almost suspect that they had never read the New

Testament at all.

We have all heard people say a hundred times over, for they seem never

to tire of saying it, that the Jesus of the New Testament is indeed a

most merciful and humane lover of humanity, but that the Church has

hidden this human character in repellent dogmas and stiffened it with

ecclesiastical terrors till it has taken on an inhuman character. This

is, I venture to repeat, very nearly the reverse of the truth. The truth

is that it is the image of Christ in the churches that is almost

entirely mild and merciful. It is the image of Christ in the Gospels

that is a good many other things as well. The figure in the Gospels does

indeed utter in words of almost heart-breaking beauty his pity for our

broken hearts. But they are very far from being the only sort of words

that he utters. Nevertheless they are almost the only kind of words that

the Church in its popular imagery ever represents him as uttering. That

popular imagery is inspired by a perfectly sound popular instinct. The

mass of the poor are broken, and the mass of the people are poor, and

for the mass of mankind the main thing is to carry the conviction of the

incredible compassion of God. But nobody with his eyes open can doubt

that it is chiefly this idea of compassion that the popular machinery of

the Church does seek to carry. The popular imagery carries a great deal

to excess the sentiment of ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.’ It is the

first thing that the outsider feels and criticises in a Pietà or a

shrine of the Sacred Heart. As I say, while the art may be insufficient,

I am not sure that the instinct is unsound. In any case there is

something appalling, something that makes the blood run cold, in the

idea of having a statue of Christ in wrath. There is something

insupportable even to the imagination in the idea of turning the corner

of a street or coming out into the spaces of a market-place to meet the

petrifying petrifaction of _that_ figure as it turned upon a generation

of vipers, or that face as it looked at the face of a hypocrite. The

Church can reasonably be justified therefore if she turns the most

merciful face or aspect towards men; but it is certainly the most

merciful aspect that she does turn. And the point is here that it is

very much more specially and exclusively merciful than any impression

that could be formed by a man merely reading the New Testament for the

first time. A man simply taking the words of the story as they stand

would form quite another impression; an impression full of mystery and

possibly of inconsistency; but certainly not merely an impression of

mildness. It would be intensely interesting; but part of the interest

would consist in its leaving a good deal to be guessed at or explained.

It is full of sudden gestures evidently significant except that we

hardly know what they signify; of enigmatic silences; of ironical

replies. The outbreaks of wrath, like storms above our atmosphere, do

not seem to break out exactly where we should expect them, but to follow

some higher weather-chart of their own. The Peter whom popular Church

teaching presents is very rightly the Peter to whom Christ said in

forgiveness, ‘Feed my lambs.’ He is not the Peter upon whom Christ

turned as if he were the devil, crying in that obscure wrath, ‘Get thee

behind me, Satan.’ Christ lamented with nothing but love and pity over

Jerusalem which was to murder him. We do not know what strange spiritual

atmosphere or spiritual insight led him to sink Bethsaida lower in the

pit than Sodom. I am putting aside for the moment all questions of

doctrinal inferences or expositions, orthodox or otherwise; I am simply

imagining the effect on a man’s mind if he did really do what these

critics are always talking about doing; if he did really read the New

Testament without reference to orthodoxy and even without reference to

doctrine. He would find a number of things which fit in far less with

the current unorthodoxy than they do with the current orthodoxy. He

would find, for instance, that if there are any descriptions that

deserved to be called realistic, they are precisely the descriptions of

the supernatural. If there is one aspect of the New Testament Jesus in

which he may be said to present himself eminently as a practical person,

it is in the aspect of an exorcist. There is nothing meek and mild,

there is nothing even in the ordinary sense mystical, about the tone of

the voice that says ‘Hold thy peace and come out of him.’ It is much

more like the tone of a very business-like lion-tamer or a strong-minded

doctor dealing with a homicidal maniac. But this is only a side issue

for the sake of illustration; I am not now raising these controversies;

but considering the case of the imaginary man from the moon to whom the

New Testament is new.

Now the first thing to note is that if we take it merely as a human

story, it is in some ways a very strange story. I do not refer here to

its tremendous and tragic culmination or to any implications involving

triumph in that tragedy. I do not refer to what is commonly called the

miraculous element; for on that point philosophies vary and modern

philosophies very decidedly waver. Indeed the educated Englishman of

to-day may be said to have passed from an old fashion, in which he would

not believe in any miracles unless they were ancient, and adopted a new

fashion in which he will not believe in any miracles unless they are

modern. He used to hold that miraculous cures stopped with the first

Christians and is now inclined to suspect that they began with the first

Christian Scientists. But I refer here rather specially to unmiraculous

and even to unnoticed and inconspicuous parts of the story. There are a

great many things about it which nobody would have invented, for they

are things that nobody has ever made any particular use of; things which

if they were remarked at all have remained rather as puzzles. For

instance, there is that long stretch of silence in the life of Christ up

to the age of thirty. It is of all silences the most immense and

imaginatively impressive. But it is not the sort of thing that anybody

is particularly likely to invent in order to prove something; and nobody

so far as I know has ever tried to prove anything in particular from it.

It is impressive, but it is only impressive as a fact; there is nothing

particularly popular or obvious about it as a fable. The ordinary trend

of hero-worship and myth-making is much more likely to say the precise

opposite. It is much more likely to say (as I believe some of the

gospels rejected by the Church do say) that Jesus displayed a divine

precocity and began his mission at a miraculously early age. And there

is indeed something strange in the thought that he who of all humanity

needed least preparation seems to have had most. Whether it was some

mode of the divine humility, or some truth of which we see the shadow

in the longer domestic tutelage of the higher creatures of the earth, I

do not propose to speculate; I mention it simply as an example of the

sort of thing that does in any case give rise to speculations, quite

apart from recognised religious speculations. Now the whole story is

full of these things. It is not by any means, as baldly presented in

print, a story that it is easy to get to the bottom of. It is anything

but what these people talk of as a simple Gospel. Relatively speaking,

it is the Gospel that has the mysticism and the Church that has the

rationalism. As I should put it, of course, it is the Gospel that is the

riddle and the Church that is the answer. But whatever be the answer,

the Gospel as it stands is almost a book of riddles.

First, a man reading the Gospel sayings would not find platitudes. If he

had read even in the most respectful spirit the majority of ancient

philosophers and of modern moralists, he would appreciate the unique

importance of saying that he did not find platitudes. It is more than

can be said even of Plato. It is much more than can be said of Epictetus

or Seneca or Marcus Aurelius or Apollonius of Tyana. And it is

immeasurably more than can be said of most of the agnostic moralists and

the preachers of the ethical societies; with their songs of service and

their religion of brotherhood. The morality of most moralists, ancient

and modern, has been one solid and polished cataract of platitudes

flowing for ever and ever. That would certainly not be the impression of

the imaginary independent outsider studying the New Testament. He would

be conscious of nothing so commonplace and in a sense of nothing so

continuous as that stream. He would find a number of strange claims that

might sound like the claim to be the brother of the sun and moon; a

number of very startling pieces of advice; a number of stunning rebukes;

a number of strangely beautiful stories. He would see some very

gigantesque figures of speech about the impossibility of threading a

needle with a camel or the possibility of throwing a mountain into the

sea. He would see a number of very daring simplifications of the

difficulties of life; like the advice to shine upon everybody

indifferently as does the sunshine or not to worry about the future any

more than the birds. He would find on the other hand some passages of

almost impenetrable darkness, so far as he is concerned, such as the

moral of the parable of the Unjust Steward. Some of these things might

strike him as fables and some as truths; but none as truisms. For

instance, he would not find the ordinary platitudes in favour of peace.

He would find several paradoxes in favour of peace. He would find

several ideals of non-resistance, which taken as they stand would be

rather too pacific for any pacifist. He would be told in one passage to

treat a robber _not_ with passive resistance, but rather with positive

and enthusiastic encouragement, if the terms be taken literally; heaping

up gifts upon the man who had stolen goods. But he would not find a word

of all that obvious rhetoric against war which has filled countless

books and odes and orations; not a word about the wickedness of war, the

wastefulness of war, the appalling scale of the slaughter in war and all

the rest of the familiar frenzy; indeed not a word about war at all.

There is nothing that throws any particular light on Christ’s attitude

towards organised warfare, except that he seems to have been rather fond

of Roman soldiers. Indeed it is another perplexity, speaking from the

same external and human standpoint, that he seems to have got on much

better with Romans than he did with Jews. But the question here is a

certain tone to be appreciated by merely reading a certain text; and we

might give any number of instances of it.

The statement that the meek shall inherit the earth is very far from

being a meek statement. I mean it is not meek in the ordinary sense of

mild and moderate and inoffensive. To justify it, it would be necessary

to go very deep into history and anticipate things undreamed of then and

by many unrealised even now; such as the way in which the mystical monks

reclaimed the lands which the practical kings had lost. If it was a

truth at all, it was because it was a prophecy. But certainly it was not

a truth in the sense of a truism. The blessing upon the meek would seem

to be a very violent statement; in the sense of doing violence to reason

and probability. And with this we come to another important stage in the

speculation. As a prophecy it really was fulfilled; but it was only

fulfilled long afterwards. The monasteries were the most practical and

prosperous estates and experiments in reconstruction after the barbaric

deluge; the meek did really inherit the earth. But nobody could have

known anything of the sort at the time--unless indeed there was one who

knew. Something of the same thing may be said about the incident of

Martha and Mary; which has been interpreted in retrospect and from the

inside by the mystics of the Christian contemplative life. But it was

not at all an obvious view of it; and most moralists, ancient and

modern, could be trusted to make a rush for the obvious. What torrents

of effortless eloquence would have flowed from them to swell any slight

superiority on the part of Martha; what splendid sermons about the Joy

of Service and the Gospel of Work and the World Left Better Than We

Found It, and generally all the ten thousand platitudes that can be

uttered in favour of taking trouble--by people who need take no trouble

to utter them. If in Mary the mystic and child of love Christ was

guarding the seed of something more subtle, who was likely to understand

it at the time? Nobody else could have seen Clare and Catherine and

Teresa shining above the little roof at Bethany. It is so in another way

with that magnificent menace about bringing into the world a sword to

sunder and divide. Nobody could have guessed then either how it could

be fulfilled or how it could be justified. Indeed some freethinkers are

still so simple as to fall into the trap and be shocked at a phrase so

deliberately defiant. They actually complain of the paradox for not

being a platitude.

But the point here is that if we _could_ read the Gospel reports as

things as new as newspaper reports, they would puzzle us and perhaps

terrify us much _more_ than the same things as developed by historical

Christianity. For instance; Christ after a clear allusion to the eunuchs

of eastern courts, said there would be eunuchs of the kingdom of heaven.

If this does not mean the voluntary enthusiasm of virginity, it could

only be made to mean something much more unnatural or uncouth. It is the

historical religion that humanises it for us by experience of

Franciscans or of Sisters of Mercy. The mere statement standing by

itself might very well suggest a rather dehumanised atmosphere; the

sinister and inhuman silence of the Asiatic harem and divan. This is but

one instance out of scores; but the moral is that the Christ of the

Gospel might actually seem more strange and terrible than the Christ of

the Church.

I am dwelling on the dark or dazzling or defiant or mysterious side of

the Gospel words, not because they had not obviously a more obvious and

popular side, but because this is the answer to a common criticism on a

vital point. The freethinker frequently says that Jesus of Nazareth was

a man of his time, even if he was in advance of his time; and that we

cannot accept his ethics as final for humanity. The freethinker then

goes on to criticise his ethics, saying plausibly enough that men cannot

turn the other cheek, or that they must take thought for the morrow, or

that the self-denial is too ascetic or the monogamy too severe. But the

Zealots and the Legionaries did not turn the other cheek any more than

we do, if so much. The Jewish traders and Roman tax-gatherers took

thought for the morrow as much as we, if not more. We cannot pretend to

be abandoning the morality of the past for one more suited to the

present. It is certainly not the morality of another age, but it might

be of another world.