The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an
unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest
kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite.
Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians.
It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is;
its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden;
its wildness lies in wait. I give one coarse instance of what I mean.
Suppose some mathematical creature from the moon were to reckon
up the human body; he would at once see that the essential thing
about it was that it was duplicate. A man is two men, he on the
right exactly resembling him on the left. Having noted that there
was an arm on the right and one on the left, a leg on the right
and one on the left, he might go further and still find on each side
the same number of fingers, the same number of toes, twin eyes,
twin ears, twin nostrils, and even twin lobes of the brain.
At last he would take it as a law; and then, where he found a heart
on one side, would deduce that there was another heart on the other.
And just then, where he most felt he was right, he would be wrong.
It is this silent swerving from accuracy by an inch that is
the uncanny element in everything. It seems a sort of secret
treason in the universe. An apple or an orange is round enough
to get itself called round, and yet is not round after all.
The earth itself is shaped like an orange in order to lure some
simple astronomer into calling it a globe. A blade of grass is
called after the blade of a sword, because it comes to a point;
but it doesn't. Everywhere in things there is this element of the
quiet and incalculable. It escapes the rationalists, but it never
escapes till the last moment. From the grand curve of our earth it
could easily be inferred that every inch of it was thus curved.
It would seem rational that as a man has a brain on both sides,
he should have a heart on both sides. Yet scientific men are still
organizing expeditions to find the North Pole, because they are
so fond of flat country. Scientific men are also still organizing
expeditions to find a man's heart; and when they try to find it,
they generally get on the wrong side of him.
Now, actual insight or inspiration is best tested by whether it
guesses these hidden malformations or surprises. If our mathematician
from the moon saw the two arms and the two ears, he might deduce
the two shoulder-blades and the two halves of the brain. But if he
guessed that the man's heart was in the right place, then I should
call him something more than a mathematician. Now, this is exactly
the claim which I have since come to propound for Christianity.
Not merely that it deduces logical truths, but that when it suddenly
becomes illogical, it has found, so to speak, an illogical truth.
It not only goes right about things, but it goes wrong (if one
may say so) exactly where the things go wrong. Its plan suits
the secret irregularities, and expects the unexpected. It is simple
about the simple truth; but it is stubborn about the subtle truth.
It will admit that a man has two hands, it will not admit (though all
the Modernists wail to it) the obvious deduction that he has two hearts.
It is my only purpose in this chapter to point this out; to show
that whenever we feel there is something odd in Christian theology,
we shall generally find that there is something odd in the truth.
I have alluded to an unmeaning phrase to the effect that
such and such a creed cannot be believed in our age. Of course,
anything can be believed in any age. But, oddly enough, there really
is a sense in which a creed, if it is believed at all, can be
believed more fixedly in a complex society than in a simple one.
If a man finds Christianity true in Birmingham, he has actually clearer
reasons for faith than if he had found it true in Mercia. For the more
complicated seems the coincidence, the less it can be a coincidence.
If snowflakes fell in the shape, say, of the heart of Midlothian,
it might be an accident. But if snowflakes fell in the exact shape
of the maze at Hampton Court, I think one might call it a miracle.
It is exactly as of such a miracle that I have since come to feel
of the philosophy of Christianity. The complication of our modern
world proves the truth of the creed more perfectly than any of
the plain problems of the ages of faith. It was in Notting Hill
and Battersea that I began to see that Christianity was true.
This is why the faith has that elaboration of doctrines and details
which so much distresses those who admire Christianity without
believing in it. When once one believes in a creed, one is proud
of its complexity, as scientists are proud of the complexity
of science. It shows how rich it is in discoveries. If it is right
at all, it is a compliment to say that it's elaborately right.
A stick might fit a hole or a stone a hollow by accident.
But a key and a lock are both complex. And if a key fits a lock,
you know it is the right key.
But this involved accuracy of the thing makes it very difficult
to do what I now have to do, to describe this accumulation of truth.
It is very hard for a man to defend anything of which he is
entirely convinced. It is comparatively easy when he is only
partially convinced. He is partially convinced because he has
found this or that proof of the thing, and he can expound it.
But a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he
finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he
finds that everything proves it. And the more converging reasons he
finds pointing to this conviction, the more bewildered he is if asked
suddenly to sum them up. Thus, if one asked an ordinary intelligent man,
on the spur of the moment, "Why do you prefer civilization to savagery?"
he would look wildly round at object after object, and would only be
able to answer vaguely, "Why, there is that bookcase . . . and the
coals in the coal-scuttle . . . and pianos . . . and policemen."
The whole case for civilization is that the case for it is complex.
It has done so many things. But that very multiplicity of proof
which ought to make reply overwhelming makes reply impossible.
There is, therefore, about all complete conviction a kind
of huge helplessness. The belief is so big that it takes a long
time to get it into action. And this hesitation chiefly arises,
oddly enough, from an indifference about where one should begin.
All roads lead to Rome; which is one reason why many people never
get there. In the case of this defence of the Christian conviction
I confess that I would as soon begin the argument with one thing
as another; I would begin it with a turnip or a taximeter cab.
But if I am to be at all careful about making my meaning clear,
it will, I think, be wiser to continue the current arguments
of the last chapter, which was concerned to urge the first of
these mystical coincidences, or rather ratifications. All I had
hitherto heard of Christian theology had alienated me from it.
I was a pagan at the age of twelve, and a complete agnostic by the
age of sixteen; and I cannot understand any one passing the age
of seventeen without having asked himself so simple a question.
I did, indeed, retain a cloudy reverence for a cosmic deity
and a great historical interest in the Founder of Christianity.
But I certainly regarded Him as a man; though perhaps I thought that,
even in that point, He had an advantage over some of His modern critics.
I read the scientific and sceptical literature of my time--all of it,
at least, that I could find written in English and lying about;
and I read nothing else; I mean I read nothing else on any other
note of philosophy. The penny dreadfuls which I also read
were indeed in a healthy and heroic tradition of Christianity;
but I did not know this at the time. I never read a line of
Christian apologetics. I read as little as I can of them now.
It was Huxley and Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh who brought me
back to orthodox theology. They sowed in my mind my first wild
doubts of doubt. Our grandmothers were quite right when they said
that Tom Paine and the free-thinkers unsettled the mind. They do.
They unsettled mine horribly. The rationalist made me question
whether reason was of any use whatever; and when I had finished
Herbert Spencer I had got as far as doubting (for the first time)
whether evolution had occurred at all. As I laid down the last of
Colonel Ingersoll's atheistic lectures the dreadful thought broke
across my mind, "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian." I was
in a desperate way.
This odd effect of the great agnostics in arousing doubts
deeper than their own might be illustrated in many ways.
I take only one. As I read and re-read all the non-Christian
or anti-Christian accounts of the faith, from Huxley to Bradlaugh,
a slow and awful impression grew gradually but graphically
upon my mind--the impression that Christianity must be a most
extraordinary thing. For not only (as I understood) had Christianity
the most flaming vices, but it had apparently a mystical talent
for combining vices which seemed inconsistent with each other.
It was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons.
No sooner had one rationalist demonstrated that it was too far
to the east than another demonstrated with equal clearness that it
was much too far to the west. No sooner had my indignation died
down at its angular and aggressive squareness than I was called up
again to notice and condemn its enervating and sensual roundness.
In case any reader has not come across the thing I mean, I will give
such instances as I remember at random of this self-contradiction
in the sceptical attack. I give four or five of them; there are
fifty more.
Thus, for instance, I was much moved by the eloquent attack
on Christianity as a thing of inhuman gloom; for I thought
(and still think) sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin.
Insincere pessimism is a social accomplishment, rather agreeable
than otherwise; and fortunately nearly all pessimism is insincere.
But if Christianity was, as these people said, a thing purely
pessimistic and opposed to life, then I was quite prepared to blow
up St. Paul's Cathedral. But the extraordinary thing is this.
They did prove to me in Chapter I. (to my complete satisfaction)
that Christianity was too pessimistic; and then, in Chapter II.,
they began to prove to me that it was a great deal too optimistic.
One accusation against Christianity was that it prevented men,
by morbid tears and terrors, from seeking joy and liberty in the bosom
of Nature. But another accusation was that it comforted men with a
fictitious providence, and put them in a pink-and-white nursery.
One great agnostic asked why Nature was not beautiful enough,
and why it was hard to be free. Another great agnostic objected
that Christian optimism, "the garment of make-believe woven by
pious hands," hid from us the fact that Nature was ugly, and that
it was impossible to be free. One rationalist had hardly done
calling Christianity a nightmare before another began to call it
a fool's paradise. This puzzled me; the charges seemed inconsistent.
Christianity could not at once be the black mask on a white world,
and also the white mask on a black world. The state of the Christian
could not be at once so comfortable that he was a coward to cling
to it, and so uncomfortable that he was a fool to stand it.
If it falsified human vision it must falsify it one way or another;
it could not wear both green and rose-coloured spectacles.
I rolled on my tongue with a terrible joy, as did all young men
of that time, the taunts which Swinburne hurled at the dreariness of
the creed--
"Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilaean, the world has grown
gray with Thy breath."
But when I read the same poet's accounts of paganism (as
in "Atalanta"), I gathered that the world was, if possible,
more gray before the Galilean breathed on it than afterwards.
The poet maintained, indeed, in the abstract, that life itself
was pitch dark. And yet, somehow, Christianity had darkened it.
The very man who denounced Christianity for pessimism was himself
a pessimist. I thought there must be something wrong. And it did
for one wild moment cross my mind that, perhaps, those might not be
the very best judges of the relation of religion to happiness who,
by their own account, had neither one nor the other.
It must be understood that I did not conclude hastily that the
accusations were false or the accusers fools. I simply deduced
that Christianity must be something even weirder and wickeder
than they made out. A thing might have these two opposite vices;
but it must be a rather queer thing if it did. A man might be too fat
in one place and too thin in another; but he would be an odd shape.
At this point my thoughts were only of the odd shape of the Christian
religion; I did not allege any odd shape in the rationalistic mind.
Here is another case of the same kind. I felt that a strong
case against Christianity lay in the charge that there is something
timid, monkish, and unmanly about all that is called "Christian,"
especially in its attitude towards resistance and fighting.
The great sceptics of the nineteenth century were largely virile.
Bradlaugh in an expansive way, Huxley, in a reticent way,
were decidedly men. In comparison, it did seem tenable that there
was something weak and over patient about Christian counsels.
The Gospel paradox about the other cheek, the fact that priests
never fought, a hundred things made plausible the accusation
that Christianity was an attempt to make a man too like a sheep.
I read it and believed it, and if I had read nothing different,
I should have gone on believing it. But I read something very different.
I turned the next page in my agnostic manual, and my brain turned
up-side down. Now I found that I was to hate Christianity not for
fighting too little, but for fighting too much. Christianity, it seemed,
was the mother of wars. Christianity had deluged the world with blood.
I had got thoroughly angry with the Christian, because he never
was angry. And now I was told to be angry with him because his
anger had been the most huge and horrible thing in human history;
because his anger had soaked the earth and smoked to the sun.
The very people who reproached Christianity with the meekness and
non-resistance of the monasteries were the very people who reproached
it also with the violence and valour of the Crusades. It was the
fault of poor old Christianity (somehow or other) both that Edward
the Confessor did not fight and that Richard Coeur de Leon did.
The Quakers (we were told) were the only characteristic Christians;
and yet the massacres of Cromwell and Alva were characteristic
Christian crimes. What could it all mean? What was this Christianity
which always forbade war and always produced wars? What could
be the nature of the thing which one could abuse first because it
would not fight, and second because it was always fighting?
In what world of riddles was born this monstrous murder and this
monstrous meekness? The shape of Christianity grew a queerer shape
every instant.
I take a third case; the strangest of all, because it involves
the one real objection to the faith. The one real objection to the
Christian religion is simply that it is one religion. The world is
a big place, full of very different kinds of people. Christianity (it
may reasonably be said) is one thing confined to one kind of people;
it began in Palestine, it has practically stopped with Europe.
I was duly impressed with this argument in my youth, and I was much
drawn towards the doctrine often preached in Ethical Societies--
I mean the doctrine that there is one great unconscious church of
all humanity founded on the omnipresence of the human conscience.
Creeds, it was said, divided men; but at least morals united them.
The soul might seek the strangest and most remote lands and ages
and still find essential ethical common sense. It might find
Confucius under Eastern trees, and he would be writing "Thou
shalt not steal." It might decipher the darkest hieroglyphic on
the most primeval desert, and the meaning when deciphered would
be "Little boys should tell the truth." I believed this doctrine
of the brotherhood of all men in the possession of a moral sense,
and I believe it still--with other things. And I was thoroughly
annoyed with Christianity for suggesting (as I supposed)
that whole ages and empires of men had utterly escaped this light
of justice and reason. But then I found an astonishing thing.
I found that the very people who said that mankind was one church
from Plato to Emerson were the very people who said that morality
had changed altogether, and that what was right in one age was wrong
in another. If I asked, say, for an altar, I was told that we
needed none, for men our brothers gave us clear oracles and one creed
in their universal customs and ideals. But if I mildly pointed
out that one of men's universal customs was to have an altar,
then my agnostic teachers turned clean round and told me that men
had always been in darkness and the superstitions of savages.
I found it was their daily taunt against Christianity that it was
the light of one people and had left all others to die in the dark.
But I also found that it was their special boast for themselves
that science and progress were the discovery of one people,
and that all other peoples had died in the dark. Their chief insult
to Christianity was actually their chief compliment to themselves,
and there seemed to be a strange unfairness about all their relative
insistence on the two things. When considering some pagan or agnostic,
we were to remember that all men had one religion; when considering
some mystic or spiritualist, we were only to consider what absurd
religions some men had. We could trust the ethics of Epictetus,
because ethics had never changed. We must not trust the ethics
of Bossuet, because ethics had changed. They changed in two
hundred years, but not in two thousand.
This began to be alarming. It looked not so much as if
Christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather
as if any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with.
What again could this astonishing thing be like which people
were so anxious to contradict, that in doing so they did not mind
contradicting themselves? I saw the same thing on every side.
I can give no further space to this discussion of it in detail;
but lest any one supposes that I have unfairly selected three
accidental cases I will run briefly through a few others.
Thus, certain sceptics wrote that the great crime of Christianity
had been its attack on the family; it had dragged women to the
loneliness and contemplation of the cloister, away from their homes
and their children. But, then, other sceptics (slightly more advanced)
said that the great crime of Christianity was forcing the family
and marriage upon us; that it doomed women to the drudgery of their
homes and children, and forbade them loneliness and contemplation.
The charge was actually reversed. Or, again, certain phrases in the
Epistles or the marriage service, were said by the anti-Christians
to show contempt for woman's intellect. But I found that the
anti-Christians themselves had a contempt for woman's intellect;
for it was their great sneer at the Church on the Continent that
"only women" went to it. Or again, Christianity was reproached
with its naked and hungry habits; with its sackcloth and dried peas.
But the next minute Christianity was being reproached with its pomp
and its ritualism; its shrines of porphyry and its robes of gold.
It was abused for being too plain and for being too coloured.
Again Christianity had always been accused of restraining sexuality
too much, when Bradlaugh the Malthusian discovered that it restrained
it too little. It is often accused in the same breath of prim
respectability and of religious extravagance. Between the covers
of the same atheistic pamphlet I have found the faith rebuked
for its disunion, "One thinks one thing, and one another,"
and rebuked also for its union, "It is difference of opinion
that prevents the world from going to the dogs." In the same
conversation a free-thinker, a friend of mine, blamed Christianity
for despising Jews, and then despised it himself for being Jewish.
I wished to be quite fair then, and I wish to be quite fair now;
and I did not conclude that the attack on Christianity was all wrong.
I only concluded that if Christianity was wrong, it was very
wrong indeed. Such hostile horrors might be combined in one thing,
but that thing must be very strange and solitary. There are men
who are misers, and also spendthrifts; but they are rare. There are
men sensual and also ascetic; but they are rare. But if this mass
of mad contradictions really existed, quakerish and bloodthirsty,
too gorgeous and too thread-bare, austere, yet pandering preposterously
to the lust of the eye, the enemy of women and their foolish refuge,
a solemn pessimist and a silly optimist, if this evil existed,
then there was in this evil something quite supreme and unique.
For I found in my rationalist teachers no explanation of such
exceptional corruption. Christianity (theoretically speaking)
was in their eyes only one of the ordinary myths and errors of mortals.
THEY gave me no key to this twisted and unnatural badness.
Such a paradox of evil rose to the stature of the supernatural.
It was, indeed, almost as supernatural as the infallibility of the Pope.
An historic institution, which never went right, is really quite
as much of a miracle as an institution that cannot go wrong.
The only explanation which immediately occurred to my mind was that
Christianity did not come from heaven, but from hell. Really, if Jesus
of Nazareth was not Christ, He must have been Antichrist.
And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still
thunderbolt. There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation.
Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we
were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some
too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness;
some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation (as
has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape.
But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape.
Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men
might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who are growing stout might
consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing
thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance.
Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like tow) called him a dark man,
while negroes considered him distinctly blonde. Perhaps (in short)
this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least
the normal thing, the centre. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity
that is sane and all its critics that are mad--in various ways.
I tested this idea by asking myself whether there was about any
of the accusers anything morbid that might explain the accusation.
I was startled to find that this key fitted a lock. For instance,
it was certainly odd that the modern world charged Christianity
at once with bodily austerity and with artistic pomp. But then
it was also odd, very odd, that the modern world itself combined
extreme bodily luxury with an extreme absence of artistic pomp.
The modern man thought Becket's robes too rich and his meals too poor.
But then the modern man was really exceptional in history; no man before
ever ate such elaborate dinners in such ugly clothes. The modern man
found the church too simple exactly where modern life is too complex;
he found the church too gorgeous exactly where modern life is too dingy.
The man who disliked the plain fasts and feasts was mad on entrees.
The man who disliked vestments wore a pair of preposterous trousers.
And surely if there was any insanity involved in the matter at all it
was in the trousers, not in the simply falling robe. If there was any
insanity at all, it was in the extravagant entrees, not in the bread
and wine.
I went over all the cases, and I found the key fitted so far.
The fact that Swinburne was irritated at the unhappiness of Christians
and yet more irritated at their happiness was easily explained.
It was no longer a complication of diseases in Christianity,
but a complication of diseases in Swinburne. The restraints
of Christians saddened him simply because he was more hedonist
than a healthy man should be. The faith of Christians angered
him because he was more pessimist than a healthy man should be.
In the same way the Malthusians by instinct attacked Christianity;
not because there is anything especially anti-Malthusian about
Christianity, but because there is something a little anti-human
about Malthusianism.
Nevertheless it could not, I felt, be quite true that Christianity
was merely sensible and stood in the middle. There was really
an element in it of emphasis and even frenzy which had justified
the secularists in their superficial criticism. It might be wise,
I began more and more to think that it was wise, but it was not
merely worldly wise; it was not merely temperate and respectable.
Its fierce crusaders and meek saints might balance each other;
still, the crusaders were very fierce and the saints were very meek,
meek beyond all decency. Now, it was just at this point of the
speculation that I remembered my thoughts about the martyr and
the suicide. In that matter there had been this combination between
two almost insane positions which yet somehow amounted to sanity.
This was just such another contradiction; and this I had already
found to be true. This was exactly one of the paradoxes in which
sceptics found the creed wrong; and in this I had found it right.
Madly as Christians might love the martyr or hate the suicide,
they never felt these passions more madly than I had felt them long
before I dreamed of Christianity. Then the most difficult and
interesting part of the mental process opened, and I began to trace
this idea darkly through all the enormous thoughts of our theology.
The idea was that which I had outlined touching the optimist and
the pessimist; that we want not an amalgam or compromise, but both
things at the top of their energy; love and wrath both burning.
Here I shall only trace it in relation to ethics. But I need not
remind the reader that the idea of this combination is indeed central
in orthodox theology. For orthodox theology has specially insisted
that Christ was not a being apart from God and man, like an elf,
nor yet a being half human and half not, like a centaur, but both
things at once and both things thoroughly, very man and very God.
Now let me trace this notion as I found it.
All sane men can see that sanity is some kind of equilibrium;
that one may be mad and eat too much, or mad and eat too little.
Some moderns have indeed appeared with vague versions of progress and
evolution which seeks to destroy the MESON or balance of Aristotle.
They seem to suggest that we are meant to starve progressively,
or to go on eating larger and larger breakfasts every morning for ever.
But the great truism of the MESON remains for all thinking men,
and these people have not upset any balance except their own.
But granted that we have all to keep a balance, the real interest
comes in with the question of how that balance can be kept.
That was the problem which Paganism tried to solve: that was
the problem which I think Christianity solved and solved in a very
strange way.
Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Christianity
declared it was in a conflict: the collision of two passions
apparently opposite. Of course they were not really inconsistent;
but they were such that it was hard to hold simultaneously.
Let us follow for a moment the clue of the martyr and the suicide;
and take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled
the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages.
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire
to live taking the form of a readiness to die. "He that will lose
his life, the same shall save it," is not a piece of mysticism
for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for
sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide
or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage;
even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by
the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice.
He can only get away from death by continually stepping within
an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut
his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a
strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life,
for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely
wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape.
He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it;
he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.
No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle
with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so.
But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it
in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance
between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the
sake of dying. And it has held up ever since above the European
lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry: the Christian courage,
which is a disdain of death; not the Chinese courage, which is a
disdain of life.
And now I began to find that this duplex passion was the Christian
key to ethics everywhere. Everywhere the creed made a moderation
out of the still crash of two impetuous emotions. Take, for instance,
the matter of modesty, of the balance between mere pride and
mere prostration. The average pagan, like the average agnostic,
would merely say that he was content with himself, but not insolently
self-satisfied, that there were many better and many worse,
that his deserts were limited, but he would see that he got them.
In short, he would walk with his head in the air; but not necessarily
with his nose in the air. This is a manly and rational position,
but it is open to the objection we noted against the compromise
between optimism and pessimism--the "resignation" of Matthew Arnold.
Being a mixture of two things, it is a dilution of two things;
neither is present in its full strength or contributes its full colour.
This proper pride does not lift the heart like the tongue of trumpets;
you cannot go clad in crimson and gold for this. On the other hand,
this mild rationalist modesty does not cleanse the soul with fire
and make it clear like crystal; it does not (like a strict and
searching humility) make a man as a little child, who can sit at
the feet of the grass. It does not make him look up and see marvels;
for Alice must grow small if she is to be Alice in Wonderland. Thus it
loses both the poetry of being proud and the poetry of being humble.
Christianity sought by this same strange expedient to save both
of them.
It separated the two ideas and then exaggerated them both.
In one way Man was to be haughtier than he had ever been before;
in another way he was to be humbler than he had ever been before.
In so far as I am Man I am the chief of creatures. In so far
as I am a man I am the chief of sinners. All humility that had
meant pessimism, that had meant man taking a vague or mean view
of his whole destiny--all that was to go. We were to hear no more
the wail of Ecclesiastes that humanity had no pre-eminence over
the brute, or the awful cry of Homer that man was only the saddest
of all the beasts of the field. Man was a statue of God walking
about the garden. Man had pre-eminence over all the brutes;
man was only sad because he was not a beast, but a broken god.
The Greek had spoken of men creeping on the earth, as if clinging
to it. Now Man was to tread on the earth as if to subdue it.
Christianity thus held a thought of the dignity of man that could only
be expressed in crowns rayed like the sun and fans of peacock plumage.
Yet at the same time it could hold a thought about the abject smallness
of man that could only be expressed in fasting and fantastic submission,
in the gray ashes of St. Dominic and the white snows of St. Bernard.
When one came to think of ONE'S SELF, there was vista and void enough
for any amount of bleak abnegation and bitter truth. There the
realistic gentleman could let himself go--as long as he let himself go
at himself. There was an open playground for the happy pessimist.
Let him say anything against himself short of blaspheming the original
aim of his being; let him call himself a fool and even a damned
fool (though that is Calvinistic); but he must not say that fools
are not worth saving. He must not say that a man, QUA man,
can be valueless. Here, again in short, Christianity got over the
difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both,
and keeping them both furious. The Church was positive on both points.
One can hardly think too little of one's self. One can hardly think
too much of one's soul.
Take another case: the complicated question of charity,
which some highly uncharitable idealists seem to think quite easy.
Charity is a paradox, like modesty and courage. Stated baldly,
charity certainly means one of two things--pardoning unpardonable acts,
or loving unlovable people. But if we ask ourselves (as we did
in the case of pride) what a sensible pagan would feel about such
a subject, we shall probably be beginning at the bottom of it.
A sensible pagan would say that there were some people one could forgive,
and some one couldn't: a slave who stole wine could be laughed at;
a slave who betrayed his benefactor could be killed, and cursed
even after he was killed. In so far as the act was pardonable,
the man was pardonable. That again is rational, and even refreshing;
but it is a dilution. It leaves no place for a pure horror of injustice,
such as that which is a great beauty in the innocent. And it leaves
no place for a mere tenderness for men as men, such as is the whole
fascination of the charitable. Christianity came in here as before.
It came in startlingly with a sword, and clove one thing from another.
It divided the crime from the criminal. The criminal we must forgive
unto seventy times seven. The crime we must not forgive at all.
It was not enough that slaves who stole wine inspired partly anger
and partly kindness. We must be much more angry with theft than before,
and yet much kinder to thieves than before. There was room for wrath
and love to run wild. And the more I considered Christianity,
the more I found that while it had established a rule and order,
the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run
wild.
Mental and emotional liberty are not so simple as they look.
Really they require almost as careful a balance of laws and conditions
as do social and political liberty. The ordinary aesthetic anarchist
who sets out to feel everything freely gets knotted at last in a
paradox that prevents him feeling at all. He breaks away from home
limits to follow poetry. But in ceasing to feel home limits he has
ceased to feel the "Odyssey." He is free from national prejudices
and outside patriotism. But being outside patriotism he is outside
"Henry V." Such a literary man is simply outside all literature:
he is more of a prisoner than any bigot. For if there is a wall
between you and the world, it makes little difference whether you
describe yourself as locked in or as locked out. What we want
is not the universality that is outside all normal sentiments;
we want the universality that is inside all normal sentiments.
It is all the difference between being free from them, as a man
is free from a prison, and being free of them as a man is free of
a city. I am free from Windsor Castle (that is, I am not forcibly
detained there), but I am by no means free of that building.
How can man be approximately free of fine emotions, able to swing
them in a clear space without breakage or wrong? THIS was the
achievement of this Christian paradox of the parallel passions.
Granted the primary dogma of the war between divine and diabolic,
the revolt and ruin of the world, their optimism and pessimism,
as pure poetry, could be loosened like cataracts.
St. Francis, in praising all good, could be a more shouting
optimist than Walt Whitman. St. Jerome, in denouncing all evil,
could paint the world blacker than Schopenhauer. Both passions
were free because both were kept in their place. The optimist could
pour out all the praise he liked on the gay music of the march,
the golden trumpets, and the purple banners going into battle.
But he must not call the fight needless. The pessimist might draw
as darkly as he chose the sickening marches or the sanguine wounds.
But he must not call the fight hopeless. So it was with all the
other moral problems, with pride, with protest, and with compassion.
By defining its main doctrine, the Church not only kept seemingly
inconsistent things side by side, but, what was more, allowed them
to break out in a sort of artistic violence otherwise possible
only to anarchists. Meekness grew more dramatic than madness.
Historic Christianity rose into a high and strange COUP DE THEATRE
of morality--things that are to virtue what the crimes of Nero are
to vice. The spirits of indignation and of charity took terrible
and attractive forms, ranging from that monkish fierceness that
scourged like a dog the first and greatest of the Plantagenets,
to the sublime pity of St. Catherine, who, in the official shambles,
kissed the bloody head of the criminal. Poetry could be acted as
well as composed. This heroic and monumental manner in ethics has
entirely vanished with supernatural religion. They, being humble,
could parade themselves: but we are too proud to be prominent.
Our ethical teachers write reasonably for prison reform; but we
are not likely to see Mr. Cadbury, or any eminent philanthropist,
go into Reading Gaol and embrace the strangled corpse before it
is cast into the quicklime. Our ethical teachers write mildly
against the power of millionaires; but we are not likely to see
Mr. Rockefeller, or any modern tyrant, publicly whipped in Westminster
Abbey.
Thus, the double charges of the secularists, though throwing
nothing but darkness and confusion on themselves, throw a real light on
the faith. It is true that the historic Church has at once emphasised
celibacy and emphasised the family; has at once (if one may put it so)
been fiercely for having children and fiercely for not having children.
It has kept them side by side like two strong colours, red and white,
like the red and white upon the shield of St. George. It has
always had a healthy hatred of pink. It hates that combination
of two colours which is the feeble expedient of the philosophers.
It hates that evolution of black into white which is tantamount to
a dirty gray. In fact, the whole theory of the Church on virginity
might be symbolized in the statement that white is a colour:
not merely the absence of a colour. All that I am urging here can
be expressed by saying that Christianity sought in most of these
cases to keep two colours coexistent but pure. It is not a mixture
like russet or purple; it is rather like a shot silk, for a shot
silk is always at right angles, and is in the pattern of the cross.
So it is also, of course, with the contradictory charges
of the anti-Christians about submission and slaughter. It IS true
that the Church told some men to fight and others not to fight;
and it IS true that those who fought were like thunderbolts
and those who did not fight were like statues. All this simply
means that the Church preferred to use its Supermen and to use
its Tolstoyans. There must be SOME good in the life of battle,
for so many good men have enjoyed being soldiers. There must be
SOME good in the idea of non-resistance, for so many good men seem
to enjoy being Quakers. All that the Church did (so far as that goes)
was to prevent either of these good things from ousting the other.
They existed side by side. The Tolstoyans, having all the scruples
of monks, simply became monks. The Quakers became a club instead
of becoming a sect. Monks said all that Tolstoy says; they poured
out lucid lamentations about the cruelty of battles and the vanity
of revenge. But the Tolstoyans are not quite right enough to run
the whole world; and in the ages of faith they were not allowed
to run it. The world did not lose the last charge of Sir James
Douglas or the banner of Joan the Maid. And sometimes this pure
gentleness and this pure fierceness met and justified their juncture;
the paradox of all the prophets was fulfilled, and, in the soul
of St. Louis, the lion lay down with the lamb. But remember that
this text is too lightly interpreted. It is constantly assured,
especially in our Tolstoyan tendencies, that when the lion lies
down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like. But that is brutal
annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb. That is simply
the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating the lamb.
The real problem is--Can the lion lie down with the lamb and still
retain his royal ferocity? THAT is the problem the Church attempted;
THAT is the miracle she achieved.
This is what I have called guessing the hidden eccentricities
of life. This is knowing that a man's heart is to the left and not
in the middle. This is knowing not only that the earth is round,
but knowing exactly where it is flat. Christian doctrine detected
the oddities of life. It not only discovered the law, but it
foresaw the exceptions. Those underrate Christianity who say that
it discovered mercy; any one might discover mercy. In fact every
one did. But to discover a plan for being merciful and also severe--
THAT was to anticipate a strange need of human nature. For no one
wants to be forgiven for a big sin as if it were a little one.
Any one might say that we should be neither quite miserable nor
quite happy. But to find out how far one MAY be quite miserable
without making it impossible to be quite happy--that was a discovery
in psychology. Any one might say, "Neither swagger nor grovel";
and it would have been a limit. But to say, "Here you can swagger
and there you can grovel"--that was an emancipation.
This was the big fact about Christian ethics; the discovery
of the new balance. Paganism had been like a pillar of marble,
upright because proportioned with symmetry. Christianity was like
a huge and ragged and romantic rock, which, though it sways on its
pedestal at a touch, yet, because its exaggerated excrescences
exactly balance each other, is enthroned there for a thousand years.
In a Gothic cathedral the columns were all different, but they were
all necessary. Every support seemed an accidental and fantastic support;
every buttress was a flying buttress. So in Christendom apparent
accidents balanced. Becket wore a hair shirt under his gold
and crimson, and there is much to be said for the combination;
for Becket got the benefit of the hair shirt while the people in
the street got the benefit of the crimson and gold. It is at least
better than the manner of the modern millionaire, who has the black
and the drab outwardly for others, and the gold next his heart.
But the balance was not always in one man's body as in Becket's;
the balance was often distributed over the whole body of Christendom.
Because a man prayed and fasted on the Northern snows, flowers could
be flung at his festival in the Southern cities; and because fanatics
drank water on the sands of Syria, men could still drink cider in the
orchards of England. This is what makes Christendom at once so much
more perplexing and so much more interesting than the Pagan empire;
just as Amiens Cathedral is not better but more interesting than
the Parthenon. If any one wants a modern proof of all this,
let him consider the curious fact that, under Christianity,
Europe (while remaining a unity) has broken up into individual nations.
Patriotism is a perfect example of this deliberate balancing
of one emphasis against another emphasis. The instinct of the
Pagan empire would have said, "You shall all be Roman citizens,
and grow alike; let the German grow less slow and reverent;
the Frenchmen less experimental and swift." But the instinct
of Christian Europe says, "Let the German remain slow and reverent,
that the Frenchman may the more safely be swift and experimental.
We will make an equipoise out of these excesses. The absurdity
called Germany shall correct the insanity called France."
Last and most important, it is exactly this which explains
what is so inexplicable to all the modern critics of the history
of Christianity. I mean the monstrous wars about small points
of theology, the earthquakes of emotion about a gesture or a word.
It was only a matter of an inch; but an inch is everything when you
are balancing. The Church could not afford to swerve a hair's breadth
on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment
of the irregular equilibrium. Once let one idea become less powerful
and some other idea would become too powerful. It was no flock of sheep
the Christian shepherd was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers,
of terrible ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong
enough to turn to a false religion and lay waste the world.
Remember that the Church went in specifically for dangerous ideas;
she was a lion tamer. The idea of birth through a Holy Spirit,
of the death of a divine being, of the forgiveness of sins,
or the fulfilment of prophecies, are ideas which, any one can see,
need but a touch to turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious.
The smallest link was let drop by the artificers of the Mediterranean,
and the lion of ancestral pessimism burst his chain in the forgotten
forests of the north. Of these theological equalisations I have
to speak afterwards. Here it is enough to notice that if some
small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made
in human happiness. A sentence phrased wrong about the nature
of symbolism would have broken all the best statues in Europe.
A slip in the definitions might stop all the dances; might wither
all the Christmas trees or break all the Easter eggs. Doctrines had
to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might
enjoy general human liberties. The Church had to be careful,
if only that the world might be careless.
This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen
into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy,
humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting
as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to
be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses,
seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude
having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic.
The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse;
yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along
one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right,
so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand
the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers
to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving
to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly.
The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted
the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. It would
have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians.
It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century,
to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be
a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let
the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own.
It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob.
To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration
which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the
historic path of Christendom--that would indeed have been simple.
It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at
which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into
any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed
have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been
one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies
thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate,
the wild truth reeling but erect.