Chesterton, Gilbert K Orthodoxy

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become progressive. But how can this be an answer when even in saying Japan has
become progressive, we really only mean, Japan has become European ? But I wish
here not so much to insist on my own explanation as to insist on my original remark. I
agree with the ordinary unbelieving man in the street in being guided by three or four
odd facts all pointing to something; only when I came to look at the facts I always found
they pointed to something else.
I have given an imaginary triad of such ordinary anti-Christian arguments; if that
be too narrow a basis I will give on the spur of the moment another. These are the kind
of thoughts which in combination create the impression that Christianity is something
weak and diseased. First, for instance, that Jesus was a gentle creature, sheepish and
unworldly, a mere ineffectual appeal to the world; second, that Christianity arose and
flourished in the dark ages of ignorance, and that to these the Church would drag us
back; third, that the people still strongly religious or (if you will) superstitious -- such
people as the Irish -- are weak, unpractical, and behind the times. I only mention these
ideas to affirm the same thing: that when I looked into them independently I found, not
that the conclusions were unphilosophical, but simply that the facts were not facts.
Instead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament I looked at the New
Testament. There I found an account, not in the least of a person with his hair parted in
the middle or his hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of
thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with
the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a
being who often acted like an angry god -- and always like a god. Christ had even a
literary style of his own, not to be found, I think, elsewhere; it consists of an almost
furious use of the a fortiori. His how much more is piled one upon another like castle
upon castle in the clouds. The diction used about Christ has been, and perhaps wisely,
sweet and submissive. But the diction used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque; it is
full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurled into the sea. Morally it is
equally terrific; he called himself a sword of slaughter, and told men to buy swords if
they sold their coats for them. That he used other even wilder words on the side of non-
resistance greatly increases the mystery; but it also, if anything, rather increases the
violence. We cannot even explain it by calling such a being insane; for insanity is
usually along one consistent channel. The maniac is generally a monomaniac. Here we
must remember the difficult definition of Christianity already given; Christianity is a
superhuman paradox whereby two opposite passions may blaze beside each other. The
one explanation of the Gospel language that does explain it, is that it is the survey of
one who from some supernatural height beholds some more startling synthesis.
I take in order the next instance offered: the idea that Christianity belongs to the
Dark Ages. Here I did not satisfy myself with reading modern generalisations; I read a
little history. 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 any one 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 sceptics, and
pantheism was as plain as the sun, when Constantine nailed the cross to the mast. It is
perfectly true that afterwards the ship sank; but it is far more extraordinary that the ship
came up again: repainted and glittering, with the cross still at the top. This is the
amazing thing the religion did: it turned a sunken ship into a submarine. The ark lived
under the load of waters; after being buried under the debris of dynasties and clans, we
arose and remembered Rome. If our faith had been a mere fad of the fading empire, fad
would have followed fad in the twilight, and if the civilization ever re-emerged (and
many such have never re-emerged) it would have been under some new barbaric flag.
But the Christian Church was the last life of the old society and was also the first life of
the new. She took the people who were forgetting how to make an arch and she taught
them to invent the Gothic arch. In a word, the most absurd thing that could be said of
the Church is the thing we have all heard said of it. How can we say that the Church
wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever
brought us out of them.
I added in this second trinity of objections an idle instance taken from those who
feel such people as the Irish to be weakened or made stagnant by superstition. I only
added it because this is a peculiar case of a statement of fact that turns out to be a
statement of falsehood. It is constantly said of the Irish that they are impractical. But if
we refrain for a moment from looking at what is said about them and look at what is
done about them, we shall see that the Irish are not only practical, but quite painfully
successful. The poverty of their country, the minority of their members are simply the
conditions under which they were asked to work; but no other group in the British
Empire has done so much with such conditions. The Nationalists were the only
minority that ever succeeded in twisting the whole British Parliament sharply out of its
path. The Irish peasants are the only poor men in these islands who have forced their
masters to disgorge. These people, whom we call priest-ridden, are the only Britons
who will not be squire-ridden. And when I came to look at the actual Irish character, the
case was the same. Irishmen are best at the specially hard professions -- the trades of
iron, the lawyer, and the soldier. In all these cases, therefore, I came back to the same
conclusion: the sceptic was quite right to go by the facts, only he had not looked at the
facts. The sceptic is too credulous; he believes in newspapers or even in encyclopedias.
Again the three questions left me with three very antagonistic questions. The average
sceptic wanted to know how I explained the namby-pamby note in the Gospel, the
connection of the creed with mediaeval darkness and the political impracticability of the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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