THE WORLD INSIDE OUT
The first fallacy about the Catholic Church is the idea that it is a
church. I mean that it is a church in the sense in which the
Nonconformist newspapers talk about The Churches. I do not intend any
expression of contempt about The Churches; nor is it an expression of
contempt to say that it would be more convenient to call them the sects.
This is true in a much deeper and more sympathetic sense than may at
first appear; but to begin with, it is certainly true in a perfectly
plain and historical sense, which has nothing to do with sympathy at
all. Thus, for instance, I have much more sympathy for small
nationalities than I have for small sects. But it is simply a historical
fact that the Roman Empire was the Empire and that it was not a small
nationality. And it is simply a historical fact that the Roman Church is
the Church and is not a sect. Nor is there anything narrow or
unreasonable in saying that the Church is the Church. It may be a good
thing that the Roman Empire broke up into nations; but it certainly was
not one of the nations into which it broke up. And even a person who
thinks it fortunate that the Church broke up into sects ought to be able
to distinguish between the little things he likes and the big thing he
has broken. As a matter of fact, in the case of things so large, so
unique and so creative of the culture about them as were the Roman
Empire and the Roman Church, it is not controversial but simply correct
to confine the one word to the one example. Everybody who originally
used the word “Empire” used it of that Empire; everybody who used the
word “Ecclesia” used it of that Ecclesia. There may have been similar
things in other places, but they could not be called by the same name
for the simple reason that they were not named in the same language. We
know what we mean by a Roman Emperor; we can if we like talk of a
Chinese Emperor, just as we can if we like take a particular sort of a
Mandarin and say he is equivalent to a Marquis. But we never can be
certain that he is exactly equivalent; for the thing we are thinking
about is peculiar to our own history and in that sense stands alone. Now
in that, if in no other sense, the Catholic Church stands alone. It does
not merely belong to a class of Christian churches. It does not merely
belong to a class of human religions. Considered quite coldly and
impartially, as by a man from the moon, it is much more _sui generis_
than that. It is, if the critic chooses to think so, the ruin of an
attempt at a Universal Religion which was bound to fail. But calling the
wreckers to break up a ship does not turn the ship into one of its own
timbers; and cutting Poland up into three pieces does not make Poland
the same as Posen.
But in a much more profound and philosophical sense this notion that the
Church is one of the sects is the great fallacy of the whole affair. It
is a matter more psychological and more difficult to describe. But it is
perhaps the most sensational of the silent upheavals or reversals in the
mind that constitute the revolution called conversion. Every man
conceives himself as moving about in a cosmos of some kind; and the man
of the days of my youth walked about in a kind of vast and airy Crystal
Palace in which there were exhibits set side by side. The cosmos, being
made of glass and iron, was partly transparent and partly colourless;
anyhow, there was something negative about it; arching over all our
heads, a roof as remote as a sky, it seemed to be impartial and
impersonal. Our attention was fixed on the exhibits, which were all
carefully ticketed and arranged in rows; for it was the age of science.
Here stood all the religions in a row—the churches or sects or whatever
we called them; and towards the end of the row there was a particularly
dingy and dismal one, with a pointed roof half fallen in and pointed
windows most broken with stones by passers-by; and we were told that
this particular exhibit was the Roman Catholic Church. Some of us were
sorry for it and even fancied it had been rather badly used; most of us
regarded it as dirty and disreputable; a few of us even pointed out that
many details in the ruin were artistically beautiful or architecturally
important. But most people preferred to deal at other and more
business-like booths; at the Quaker shop of Peace and Plenty or the
Salvation Army store where the showman beats the big drum outside. Now
conversion consists very largely, on its intellectual side, in the
discovery that all that picture of equal creeds inside an indifferent
cosmos is quite false. It is not a question of comparing the merits and
defects of the Quaker meeting-house set beside the Catholic cathedral.
It is the Quaker meeting-house that is inside the Catholic cathedral; it
is the Catholic cathedral that covers everything like the vault of the
Crystal Palace; and it is when we look up at the vast distant dome
covering all the exhibits that we trace the Gothic roof and the pointed
windows. In other words, Quakerism is but a temporary form of Quietism
which has arisen technically outside the Church as the Quietism of
Fenelon appeared technically inside the Church. But both were in
themselves temporary and would have, like Fenelon, sooner or later to
return to the Church in order to live. The principle of life in all
these variations of Protestantism, in so far as it is not a principle of
death, consists of what remained in them of Catholic Christendom; and to
Catholic Christendom they have always returned to be recharged with
vitality. I know that this will sound like a statement to be challenged;
but it is true. The return of Catholic ideas to the separated parts of
Christendom was often indeed indirect. But though the influence came
through many centres, it always came from one. It came through the
Romantic Movement, a glimpse of the mere picturesqueness of mediævalism;
but it is something more than an accident that Romances, like Romance
languages, are named after Rome. Or it came through the instinctive
reaction of old-fashioned people like Johnson or Scott or Cobbett,
wishing to save old elements that had originally been Catholic against a
progress that was merely Capitalist. But it led them to denounce that
Capitalist progress and become, like Cobbett, practical foes of
Protestantism without being practising followers of Catholicism. Or it
came from the Pre-Raphaelites or the opening of continental art and
culture by Matthew Arnold and Morris and Ruskin and the rest. But
examine the actual make-up of the mind of a good Quaker or
Congregational minister at this moment, and compare it with the mind of
such a dissenter in the Little Bethel before such culture came. And you
will see how much of his health and happiness he owes to Ruskin and what
Ruskin owed to Giotto; to Morris and what Morris owed to Chaucer; to
fine scholars of his own school like Philip Wicksteed, and what they owe
to Dante and St. Thomas. Such a man will still sometimes talk of the
Middle Ages as the Dark Ages. But the Dark Ages have improved the
wallpaper on his wall and the dress on his wife and all the whole dingy
and vulgar life which he lived in the days of Stiggins and Brother
Tadger. For he also is a Christian and lives only by the life of
Christendom.
It is not easy to express this enormous inversion which I have here
tried to suggest in the image of a world turned inside out. I mean that
the thing which had been stared at as a small something swells out and
swallows everything. Christendom is in the literal sense a continent. We
come to feel that it contains everything, even the things in revolt
against itself. But it is perhaps the most towering intellectual
transformation of all and the one that it is hardest to undo even for
the sake of argument. It is almost impossible even in imagination to
reverse that reversal. Another way of putting it is to say that we have
come to regard all these historical figures as characters in Catholic
history, even if they are not Catholics. And in a certain sense, the
historical as distinct from the theological sense, they never do cease
to be Catholic. They are not people who have really created something
entirely new, until they actually pass the border of reason and create
more or less crazy nightmares. But nightmares do not last; and most of
them even now are in various stages of waking up. Protestants are
Catholics gone wrong; that is what is really meant by saying they are
Christians. Sometimes they have gone very wrong; but not often have they
gone right ahead with their own particular wrong. Thus a Calvinist is a
Catholic obsessed with the Catholic idea of the sovereignty of God. But
when he makes it mean that God wishes particular people to be damned, we
may say with all restraint that he has become a rather morbid Catholic.
In point of fact he is a diseased Catholic; and the disease left to
itself would be death or madness. But, as a matter of fact, the disease
did not last long, and is itself now practically dead. But every step he
takes back towards humanity is a step back towards Catholicism. Thus a
Quaker is a Catholic obsessed with the Catholic idea of gentle
simplicity and truth. But when he made it mean that it is a lie to say
“you” and an act of idolatry to take off your hat to a lady, it is not
too much to say that whether or not he had a hat off, he certainly had a
tile loose. But as a matter of fact he himself found it necessary to
dispense with the eccentricity (and the hat) and to leave the straight
road that would have led him to a lunatic asylum. Only every step he
takes back towards common sense is a step back towards Catholicism. In
so far as he was right he was a Catholic; and in so far as he was wrong
he has not himself been able to remain a Protestant.
To us, therefore, it is henceforth impossible to think of the Quaker as
a figure at the beginning of a new Quaker history or the Calvinist as
the founder of a new Calvinistic world. It is quite obvious to us that
they are simply characters in our own Catholic history, only characters
who caused a great deal of trouble by trying to do something that we
could do better and that they did not really do at all. Now some may
suppose that this can be maintained of the older sects like Calvinists
and Quakers, but cannot be maintained of modern movements like those of
Socialists or Spiritualists. But they will be quite wrong. The covering
or continental character of the Church applies just as much to modern
manias as to the old religious manias; it applies quite as much to
Materialists or Spiritualists as to Puritans. In all of them you find
that some Catholic dogma is, first, taken for granted; then exaggerated
into an error; and then generally reacted against and rejected as an
error, bringing the individual in question a few steps back again on the
homeward road. And this is almost always the mark of such a heretic;
that while he will wildly question any other Catholic dogma, he never
dreams of questioning his own favourite Catholic dogma and does not even
seem to know that it could be questioned. It never occurred to the
Calvinist that anybody might use his liberty to deny or limit the divine
omnipotence, or to the Quaker that anyone could question the supremacy
of simplicity. That is exactly the situation of the Socialist.
Bolshevism and every shade of any such theory of brotherhood is based
upon one unfathomably mystical Catholic dogma; the equality of men. The
Communists stake everything on the equality of man, as the Calvinists
staked everything on the omnipotence of God. They ride it to death as
the others rode their dogma to death, turning their horse into a
nightmare. But it never seems to occur to them that some people do not
believe in the Catholic dogma of the mystical equality of men. Yet there
are many, even among Christians, who are so heretical as to question it.
The Socialists get into a great tangle when they try to apply it; they
compromise with their own ideals; they modify their own doctrine; and so
find themselves, like the Quakers and the Calvinists, after all their
extreme extravagances, a day’s march nearer Rome.
In short, the story of these sects is not one of straight lines striking
outwards and onwards, though if it were they would all be striking in
different directions. It is a pattern of curves continually returning
into the continent and common life of their and our civilisation; and
the summary of that civilisation and central sanity is the philosophy of
the Catholic Church. To us, Spiritualists are men studying the existence
of spirits, in a brief and blinding oblivion of the existence of evil
spirits. They are, as it were, people just educated enough to have heard
of ghosts but not educated enough to have heard of witches. If the evil
spirits succeed in stopping their education and stunting their minds,
they may of course go on for ever repeating silly messages from Plato
and doggerel verses from Milton. But if they do go a step or two
further, instead of marking time on the borderland, their next step will
be to learn what the Church could have taught. To us, Christian
Scientists are simply people with one idea, which they have never learnt
to balance and combine with all the other ideas. That is why the wealthy
business man so often becomes a Christian Scientist. He is not used to
ideas and one idea goes to his head, like one glass of wine to a
starving man. But the Catholic Church is used to living with ideas and
walks among all those very dangerous wild beasts with the poise and the
lifted head of a lion-tamer. The Christian Scientist can go on
monotonously repeating his one idea and remain a Christian Scientist.
But if ever he really goes on to any other ideas, he will be so much the
nearer to being a Catholic.
When the convert has once seen the world like that, with one balance of
ideas and a number of other ideas that have left it and lost their
balance, he does not in fact experience any of the inconveniences that
he might reasonably have feared before that silent but stunning
revolution. He is not worried by being told that there is something in
Spiritualism or something in Christian Science. He knows there is
something in everything. But he is moved by the more impressive fact
that he finds everything in something. And he is quite sure that if
these investigators really are looking for everything, and not merely
looking for anything, they will be more and more likely to look for it
in the same place. In that sense he is far less worried about them than
he was when he thought that one or other of them might be the only
person having any sort of communication with the higher mysteries and
obviously rather capable of making a mess of it. He is no more likely to
be overawed by the fact that Mrs. Eddy achieved spiritual healing or Mr.
Home achieved bodily levitation than a fully dressed gentleman in Bond
Street would be overawed by the top-hat on the head of a naked savage. A
top-hat may be a good hat but it is a bad costume. And a magnetic trick
may be a sufficient sensation but it is a very insufficient philosophy.
He is no more envious of a Bolshevist for making a revolution than of a
beaver for making a dam; for he knows his own civilisation can make
things on a pattern not quite so simple or so monotonous. But he
believes this of his civilisation and his religion and not merely of
himself. There is nothing supercilious about his attitude; because he is
well aware that he has only scratched the surface of the spiritual
estate that is now open to him. In other words, the convert does not in
the least abandon investigation or even adventure. He does not think he
knows everything, nor has he lost curiosity about the things he does not
know. But experience has taught him that he will find nearly everything
somewhere inside that estate and that a very large number of people are
finding next to nothing outside it. For the estate is not only a formal
garden or an ordered farm; there is plenty of hunting and fishing on it,
and, as the phrase goes, very good sport.
For this is one of the very queerest of the common delusions about what
happens to the convert. In some muddled way people have confused the
natural remarks of converts, about having found moral peace, with some
idea of their having found mental rest, in the sense of mental inaction.
They might as well say that a man who has completely recovered his
health, after an attack of palsy or St. Vitus’ dance, signalises his
healthy state by sitting absolutely still like a stone. Recovering his
health means recovering his power of moving in the right way as distinct
from the wrong way; but he will probably move a great deal more than
before. To become a Catholic is not to leave off thinking, but to learn
how to think. It is so in exactly the same sense in which to recover
from palsy is not to leave off moving but to learn how to move. The
Catholic convert has for the first time a starting-point for straight
and strenuous thinking. He has for the first time a way of testing the
truth in any question that he raises. As the world goes, especially at
present, it is the other people, the heathen and the heretics, who seem
to have every virtue except the power of connected thought. There was
indeed a brief period when a small minority did some hard thinking on
the heathen or heretical side. It barely lasted from the time of
Voltaire to the time of Huxley. It has now entirely disappeared. What is
now called free thought is valued, not because it is free thought, but
because it is freedom from thought; because it is free thoughtlessness.
Nothing is more amusing to the convert, when his conversion has been
complete for some time, than to hear the speculations about when or
whether he will repent of the conversion; when he will be sick of it,
how long he will stand it, at what stage of his external exasperation he
will start up and say he can bear it no more. For all this is founded on
that optical illusion about the outside and the inside which I have
tried to sketch in this chapter. The outsiders, stand by and see, or
think they see, the convert entering with bowed head a sort of small
temple which they are convinced is fitted up inside like a prison, if
not a torture-chamber. But all they really know about it is that he has
passed through a door. They do not know that he has not gone into the
inner darkness, but out into the broad daylight. It is he who is, in the
beautiful and beatific sense of the word, an outsider. He does not want
to go into a larger room, because he does not know of any larger room to
go into. He knows of a large number of much smaller rooms, each of which
is labelled as being very large; but he is quite sure he would be
cramped in any of them. Each of them professes to be a complete cosmos
or scheme of all things; but then so does the cosmos of the Clapham Sect
or the Clapton Agapemone. Each of them is supposed to be domed with the
sky or painted inside with all the stars. But each of these cosmic
systems or machines seems to him much smaller and even much simpler than
the broad and balanced universe in which he lives. One of them is
labelled Agnostic; but he knows by experience that it has not really
even the freedom of ignorance. It is a wheel that must always go round
without a single jolt of miraculous interruption—a circle that must not
be squared by any higher mathematics of mysticism; a machine that must
be scoured as clean of all spirits as if it were the avowed machine of
materialism. In living in a world with two orders, the supernatural and
the natural, the convert feels he is living in a larger world and does
not feel any temptation to crawl back into a smaller one. One of them is
labelled Theosophical or Buddhistic; but he knows by experience that it
is only the same sort of wearisome wheel used for spiritual things
instead of material things. Living in a world where he is free to do
anything, even to go to the devil, he does not see why he should tie
himself to the wheel of a mere destiny. One of them is labelled
Humanitarian; but he knows that such humanitarians have really far less
experience of humanity. He knows that they are thinking almost entirely
of men as they are at this moment in modern cities, and have nothing
like the huge human interest of what began by being preached to
legionaries in Palestine and is still being preached to peasants in
China. So clear is this perception that I have sometimes put it to
myself, as something between a melancholy meditation and a joke. “Where
_should_ I go now, if I did leave the Catholic Church?” I certainly
would not go to any of those little social sects which only express one
idea at a time, because that idea happens to be fashionable at the
moment. The best I could hope for would be to wander away into the woods
and become, not a Pantheist (for that is also a limitation and a bore)
but rather a pagan, in the mood to cry out that some particular mountain
peak or flowering fruit tree was sacred and a thing to be worshipped.
That at least would be beginning all over again; but it would bring me
back to the same problem in the end. If it was reasonable to have a
sacred tree it was not unreasonable to have a sacred crucifix; and if
the god was to be found on one peak he may as reasonably be found under
one spire. To find a new religion is sooner or later to have found one;
and why should I have been discontented with the one I had found?
Especially, as I said in the first words of this essay, when it is the
one old religion which seems capable of remaining new.
I know very well that if I went upon that journey I should either
despair or return; and that none of the trees would ever be a substitute
for the real sacred tree. Paganism is better than pantheism, for
paganism is free to imagine divinities, while pantheism is forced to
pretend, in a priggish way, that all things are equally divine. But I
should not imagine any divinity that was sufficiently divine. I seem to
know that weary return through the woodlands; for I think in some
symbolic fashion I have walked that road before. For as I have tried to
confess here without excessive egotism, I think I am the sort of man who
came to Christ from Pan and Dionysus and not from Luther or Laud; that
the conversion I understand is that of the pagan and not the Puritan;
and upon that antique conversion is founded the whole world that we
know. It is a transformation far more vast and tremendous than anything
that has been meant for many years past, at least in England and
America, by a sectarian controversy or a doctrinal division. On the
height of that ancient empire and that international experience,
humanity had a vision. It has not had another; but only quarrels about
that one. Paganism was the largest thing in the world and Christianity
was larger; and everything else has been comparatively small.
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THE EXCEPTION PROVES THE RULE
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