|
C l a s s i c A p o l o g e t i c s
THE PARADOXES OF CHRISTIANITY
By G.K. CHESTERTON
|
This Rock
Volume 5, Number 7/8
 July/August 1994 
|
|
|
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 seek 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 opposites.
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 color. 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. 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 emphasized
celibacy and emphasized 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 colors, 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 colors 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 color: not merely the absence of
a color. All that I am urging here can be expressed by saying that
Christianity sought in most of these cases to keep two colors 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 . . . Anyone 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 fulfillment 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 equalizations 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 war-horse; 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.
This essay by G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), a convert
to Catholicism, is taken from his one of his most important books,
Orthodoxy (1908).
|
C A T H O L I C A N S W E R S :
[TOP]
