Orthodoxy

by G.K. Chesterton

It was the fault of poor old Christianity (somehow or other) both that Edward the Confessor did not fight and that Richard Coeur de Lion 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?

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.

We were to hear no more the wail of Ecclesiastes that humanity had no preeminence 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 preeminence over all the brutes; man was only sad because he was not a beast, but a broken god.

Charity is a paradox, like modesty and courage. Stated baldly, charity certainly means one of two things—pardoning unpardonable acts or loving unlovable people.

We must be much angrier with theft than before and yet much kinder to thieves than before.

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.

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.

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.

“Tommy was a good boy” is a pure philosophical statement, worthy of Plato or Aquinas. “Tommy lived the higher life” is a gross metaphor from a ten-foot rule.

Nietzsche always escaped a question by a physical metaphor, like a cheery minor poet. He said, “beyond good and evil,” because he had not the courage to say, “more good than good and evil,” or, “more evil than good and evil.” Had he faced his thought without metaphors, he would have seen that it was nonsense.

But reform is a metaphor for reasonable and determined men. It means that we see a certain thing out of shape, we mean to put it into shape, and we know what shape.

But the man we see every day—the worker in Mr. Gradgrind’s factory, the little clerk in Mr. Gradgrind’s office—he is too mentally worried to believe in freedom. He is kept quiet with revolutionary literature. He is calmed and kept in his place by a constant succession of wild philosophies. He is a Mandan one day, a Nietzscheite the next day, a Superman (probably) the next day, and a slave every day. The only thing that remains after all the philosophies is the factory.

If I am merely to float or fade or evolve, it may be toward something anarchic; but if I am to riot, it must be for something respectable. This is the whole weakness of certain schools of progress and moral evolution. They suggest that there has been a slow movement toward morality, with an imperceptible ethical change in every year or at every instant. There is only one great disadvantage in this theory. It talks of a slow movement toward justice, but it does not permit a swift movement. A man is not allowed to leap up and declare a certain state of things to be intrinsically intolerable.

The world, through mere time, might grow black like an old picture or white like an old coat, but, if it is turned into a particular piece of black and white art, then there is an artist.

On the evolutionary basis, you may be inhumane, or you may be absurdly humane, but you cannot be human. That you and a tiger are one may be a reason for being tender to a tiger. Or it may be a reason for being as cruel as the tiger. It is one way to train the tiger to imitate you; it is a shorter way to imitate the tiger. But, in neither case, does evolution tell you how to treat a tiger reasonably, that is, to admire his stripes while avoiding his claws?

The main point of Christianity was this: that nature is not our mother; nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father, but she has no authority over us. We have to admire, but not to imitate.

We have remarked that one reason offered for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow better. But the only real reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow worse.

Only the Christian church can offer any rational objection to a complete confidence in the rich. For she has maintained from the beginning that the danger was not in man’s environment, but in man.

Christianity, even when watered down, is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags.

You will hear everlastingly, in all discussions about newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party politics, this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man.

We have not got to crown the exceptional man who knows he can rule; rather, we must crown the much more exceptional man who knows he can’t.

That enigma is strictly peculiar to Christendom. There is nothing really humble about the abnegation of the Buddhist; the mild Hindu is mild, but he is not meek.

Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one’s self gravely because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch—for solemnity flows out of men naturally, but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy; it is hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.

compare the classes of Europe with the castes of India. There aristocracy is far more awful, because it is far more intellectual. It is seriously felt that the scale of classes is a scale of spiritual values; that the baker is better than the butcher in an invisible and sacred sense. But no Christianity, not even the most ignorant or perverse, ever suggested that a baronet was better than a butcher in that sacred sense.

It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness of our epoch. But in truth, the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue. And the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle. Take one quite external case: the streets are noisy with taxicabs and motorcars, but this is not due to human activity but to human repose. There would be less bustle if there were more activity, if people were simply walking about. Our world would be more silent if it were more strenuous.

If you say, “The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution toward a more humane and scientific view of punishment,” you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the grey matter inside your skull. But, if you begin, “I wish Jones to go to jail and Brown to say when Jones shall come out,” you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the hard words; it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word “damn” than in the word “degeneration.”

In actual modern Europe, a freethinker does not mean a man who thinks for himself. It means a man who, having thought for himself, has come to one particular class of conclusions—the material origin of phenomena, the impossibility of miracles, the improbability of personal immortality, and so on. And none of these ideas are particularly liberal. Nay, indeed, almost all these ideas are definitely illiberal, as it is the purpose of this chapter to show.

“The religions of the earth differ in rites and forms, but they are the same in what they teach.” It is false; it is the opposite of the fact. The religions of the earth do not greatly differ in rites and forms; they do greatly differ in what they teach. It is as if a man were to say, “Do not be misled by the fact that the Church Times and the Freethinker look utterly different, that one is painted on vellum and the other carved on marble, that one is triangular and the other hectagonal. Read them and you will see that they say the same thing.” The truth is, of course, that they are alike in everything except in the fact that they don’t say the same thing. An atheist stockbroker in Surbiton looks exactly like a Swedenborgian stockbroker in Wimbledon. You may walk round and round them and subject them to the most personal and offensive study without seeing anything Swedenborgian in the hat or anything particularly godless in the umbrella. It is exactly in their souls that they are divided. So, the truth is that the difficulty of all the creeds of the earth is not as alleged in this cheap maxim: They agree in meaning, but differ in machinery. It is exactly the opposite. They agree in machinery; almost every great religion on earth works with the same external methods—with priests, scriptures, altars, sworn brotherhoods, special feasts. They agree in the mode of teaching; what they differ about is the thing to be taught.

No two ideals could be more opposite than a Christian saint in a Gothic cathedral and a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple. The opposition exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is that the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian saint always has them very wide open.

for the Buddhist or Theosophist, personality is the fall of man; for the Christian, it is the purpose of God—the whole point of his cosmic idea.

The oriental deity is like a giant who should have lost his leg or hand and be always seeking to find it; but the Christian power is like some giant who, in a strange generosity, should cut off his right hand so that it might, of its own accord, shake hands with him.

saying of our Gospels, which declare that the Son of God came not with peace but with a sundering sword. The saying rings entirely true, even considered as what it obviously is—the statement that any man who preaches real love is bound to beget hate.

There is no real possibility of getting out of pantheism any special impulse to moral action; for pantheism implies in its nature that one thing is as good as another, whereas action implies in its nature that one thing is greatly preferable to another.

By insisting especially on the immanence of God, we get introspection, self-isolation, quietism, and social indifference: Tibet. By insisting especially on the transcendence of God, we get wonder, curiosity, moral and political adventure, and righteous indignation: Christendom.

but this is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating crime as disease, about making a prison merely a hygienic environment like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods. The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active choice, whereas disease is not. If you say that you are going to cure a profligate as you cure an asthmatic, my cheap and obvious answer is, “Produce the people who want to be asthmatics as many people want to be profligates.” A man may lie still and be cured of a malady. But he must not lie still if he wants to be cured of a sin; on the contrary, he must get up and jump about violently.

If I am asked, as a purely intellectual question, why I believe in Christianity, I can only answer, “For the same reason that an intelligent agnostic disbelieves in Christianity.” I believe in it quite rationally upon the evidence.

And in history, I found that Christianity—so far from belonging to the dark ages—was the one path across the dark ages that was not dark. It was a shining bridge connecting two shining civilizations. If anyone says that the faith arose in ignorance and savagery, the answer is simple: it didn’t. It arose in the Mediterranean civilization in the full summer of the Roman Empire. The world was swarming with skeptics, and pantheism was as plain as the sun when Constantine nailed the cross to the mast. It is perfectly true that the ship sank afterward; but it is far more extraordinary that the ship came up again, repainted and glittering, with the cross still at the top.

If I say “a peasant saw a ghost,” I am told, “But peasants are so credulous.” If I ask, “Why credulous?” the only answer is that they see ghosts.

The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare tomorrow at breakfast.

A clergyman may be apparently as useless as a cat, but he is also as fascinating, for there must be some strange reason for his existence.

Alone of all creeds it is convincing where it is not attractive; it turns out to be right, like my father in the garden.

Orthodoxy makes us jump by the sudden brink of hell; it is only afterward that we realize that jumping was an athletic exercise highly beneficial to our health.

All the real argument about religion turns on the question of whether a man who was born upside down can tell when he comes right way up. The primary paradox of Christianity is that the ordinary condition of man is not his sane or sensible condition, that the normal itself is an abnormality. That is the inmost philosophy of the fall.

Everything human must have in it both joy and sorrow; the only matter of interest is the manner in which the two things are balanced or divided. And the really interesting thing is this, that the pagan was (in the main) happier and happier as he approached the earth, but sadder and sadder as he approached the heavens.

The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things but sad about the big ones.