Man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them.

In a recent article I remarked on a particular type of flawed thinking at leads one to conclude that atheism is superior to Christianity because it has neither split nor swayed throughout its history, while Christianity has splintered into fragments until its growth looked like a great tree. The analysis of the actual argument is back in that article, but upon some further reflection I realized that G. K. Chesterton has written some superb things about this issue in the chapter “The Paradoxes of Christianity” of his book Orthodoxy. To get a real feel for what he’s saying you really need to read the chapter (free here), and ideally the entire book. Three times.

The first part of his idea is this:

Christianity anticipated the eccentricities and paradoxes in life and accounted for them, striking a balance between what seemed to be competing ideas, not by diluting them but by allowing them to range free and rage against each other, yet in harmony.

He gives the example of the virtue of charity:

Stated baldly, charity certainly means one of two things—pardoning unpardonable acts, or loving unlovable people. [...] 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.

Do you follow his thinking? No longer is there this Aristotelian idea of virtues where the happy medium of courage is met by straddling a fence between the two extremes of cowardice and brashness. In its place was “conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite.” In the case of courage, “a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.”

The second part of the idea then follows:

This holy balance was not only contained in just virtues, or just in the one person, but ranged through Christendom, allowing groups and even nations to balance with each other.

We see this in the next quote:

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.” [em. mine]

Chesterton then moves on to the salient point for us today: the vagaries and variances in Christianity that led to its splintering into movements and groups and subgroups is not because the Church made mountains out of molehills and went to war over the most trifling of ideas, but because a mere trifle can tip the scales when you’re balancing:

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. [...] 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.

I realize that this article is basically all quotes, but hey, it’s Chesterton. There’s not much else I can really do. The closing paragraph of this chapter is too good to not include, and caps our examination nicely:

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. [em. mine]

If you’ve read this post but not the entire chapter we’ve been looking at, take comfort in knowing that you’ve actually just read a decent chunk of it, and it shouldn’t be much more work to read the rest. And then after that chapter is down, there’s only a few more (okay, nine) to read before you finish the book. If you find yourself discouraged with not being able to follow his argument, I encourage you to read this article by Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society. He same some good words for you.

More insights from The Everlasting Man:

“In Christendom hope has never been absent; rather it has been errant, extravagant, excessively fixed upon fugitive chances. Its perpetual revolution and reconstruction has at least been an evidence of people being in better spirits. Europe did very truly renew its youth like the eagles; just as the eagles of Rome rose again over the legions of Napoleon ^[1], or we have seen soaring but yesterday the silver eagle of Poland ^[2]. But in the Polish case ever revolution always went with religion. Napoleon himself sought a reconciliation with religion. Religion could never be finally separated even from the most hostile of the hopes; simply because it was the very source of the hopefulness. And the cause of this is to be found simply in the religion itself.”

Some more quick thoughts from Chesterton, this one about “The Riddle of the Nativity.” In the Everlasting Man, Chesterton devotes two chapters (The God in the Cave; The Riddle of the Gospel) to the alien (that is, otherworldly) nature of the good news.

Have you ever stopped to think about the idiosyncrasies in the nativity/incarnation story? Thought about what exactly it meant for the Most High God of Heaven to be born below the earth? That is, if the traditional view of the stable in a cave is correct? There’s something topsy-turvy in that, in the whole of the Nativity story. Chesterton says that nothing else had happened except the whole world had turned inside out. All the eyes that were faced outward at the huge expanse of the universe were now turned inward at the smallest thing, a child in a feed trough.

Such a strange story. Everything about it is backwards. The omnipotent creator was born as an impotent babe. The eternal, everlasting Alpha and Omega lay in a manger, just minutes old. The Holy One of God emptied himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and born in flesh came into a world not worthy of his pinkie toe. And not only did those toes walk the earth among us, their owner washed the toes of his disciples. Out in the open you have the angels of heaven meeting with the shepherds on the hills, but the ruler of heaven was beneath the hills.

In Hebrews it says that we have a high priest who is able to sympathize with our plight. How many are there that can sympathize with his? If anyone in the entirety of human existence ever deserved a high birth, it was he, but he was born in a dank cave. Sure, there are persons who can (unfortunately) say they were born in a back-alley, or a brothel. There are even some kings who could say they were “born low”. But there is only one King of Kings who can say as much. There is only One was can say “I, God, was born in a cave.”

Note that that cave was most likely crowded with animals, since it was during the census; not exactly the most pristine conditions for birthing a child. And while the people in the inn rolicked about, their king was sleeping under their very noses. Have you ever thought about what it would have been like to be that inn keeper? You have the ponderously pregnant Mary, and the watchful, nervous Joseph, and you turn them out into the cold. Or hot. I honestly don’t know what time of year the census was at. I think I read that it actually might have taken place over a period of a couple years. Anyways, not only could this inn-keeper not find room for a very pregnant woman and her husband, not only did he turn this young couple aside, he turned aside his messiah. Now I know that probably this inn keeper never knew exactly who he had shut the door on. News of Jesus’ heritage might not have spread out to Bethlehem before this guy was gone. But what if it had? What if this person found out that the Promised One was born out among the animals because he didn’t have room. The thought sends chills down my spine. And, of course, perhaps I’m reading too much into it. Perhaps it was convention to not elevate expectant mothers, like we do (parking spaces and all). Perhaps there literally wasn’t any room, and the inn keeper had people sleeping on every surface, stoop to cellar, and he couldn’t admit more without turning out others. I guess we’ll find out in the millennial kingdom.

I’d like to end this post with a poem by Chesterton entitled Gloria In Profundis:

There has fallen on earth for a token

A god too great for the sky.

He has burst out of all things and broken

The bounds of eternity:

Into time and the terminal land

He has strayed like a thief or a lover,

For the wine of the world brims over,

Its splendour is split on the sand.

Who is proud when the heavens are humble,

Who mounts if the mountains fall,

If the fixed stars topple and tumble

And a deluge of love drowns all-

Who rears up his head for a crown,

Who holds up his will for a warrant,

Who strives with the starry torrent,

When all that is good goes down?

For in dread of such falling and failing

The fallen angels fell

Inverted in insolence, scaling

The hanging mountain of hell:

But unmeasured of plummet and rod

Too deep for their sight to scan,

Outrushing the fall of man

Is the height of the fall of God.

Glory to God in the Lowest

The spout of the stars in spate-

Where thunderbolt thinks to be slowest

And the lightning fears to be late:

As men dive for sunken gem

Pursuing, we hunt and hound it,

The fallen star has found it

In the cavern of Bethlehem.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton never fails to amaze me. In fact, I’m really depressed that I hadn’t started reading his stuff until lately. I’m catching up now, though, so I might be able to read it all eventually. If anyone can be said to have a “rapier wit,” it is him. And the humor and beauty that comes out of his writing is hard to beat. Lately I’ve been reading The Everlasting Man and I usually don’t get through a single paragraph without hitting something enlightening, or inspiring, or heart-wrenching. I’m halfway through it now (it’s divided into two books) so I’ll probably post my thoughts on it soon.

Right now I want to explore a quote from another one of his works, Heretics, which, along with its successor, Orthodoxy, is probably a more familiar title. In this section Chesterton is examining a philosophy of the time, which I take to be some sort of prohibition sentiment, that says that one ought only drink wine for medical benefits and never to seek after pleasure in it. Chesterton responds by saying that drinking wine as medicine is the only truly dangerous and immoral way to use it. Why? Because in using it as medicine we are trying to get at something natural, something that we “ought not to be without; something that [we] may find it difficult to reconcile [ourselves] to being without.” Whereas in seeking after pleasure in drink we are seeking something unnatural and exceptional, something that unless we’re crazy we won’t chase after every hour of every day. To sum it up: “[i]t is easy to deny one’s self festivity; it is difficult to deny one’s self normality.”

Chesterton then expands on the idea of turning pleasurable drink into somber medicine. This type of seeking after a thing meant to be pleasurable because you need it is dangerous. We ought to drink because we don’t need it. That is the happiness of irrationality. To rationalize this happiness is to destroy it. Chesterton continues:

Walter Pater said that we were all under sentence of death, and the only course was to enjoy exquisite moments simply for those moments’ sake. The same lesson [of the pessimistic pleasure-seeker] was taught by the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar Wilde. It is the carpe diem religion; but the carpe diem religion is not the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people. Great joy does not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw. Great joy has in it the sense of immortality; the very splendour of youth is the sense that it has all space to stretch its legs in. In all great comic literature, in “Tristram Shandy” or “Pickwick”, there is this sense of space and incorruptibility; we feel the characters are deathless people in an endless tale.

It is true enough, of course, that a pungent happiness comes chiefly in certain passing moments; but it is not true that we should think of them as passing, or enjoy them simply “for those moments’ sake.” To do this is to rationalize the happiness, and therefore to destroy it. Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized. Suppose a man experiences a really splendid moment of pleasure. I do not mean something connected with a bit of enamel, I mean something with a violent happiness in it–an almost painful happiness. A man may have, for instance, a moment of ecstasy in first love, or a moment of victory in battle. The lover enjoys the moment, but precisely not for the moment’s sake. He enjoys it for the woman’s sake, or his own sake. The warrior enjoys the moment, but not for the sake of the moment; he enjoys it for the sake of the flag. The cause which the flag stands for may be foolish and fleeting; the love may be calf-love, and last a week. But the patriot thinks of the flag as eternal; the lover thinks of his love as something that cannot end. These moments are filled with eternity; these moments are joyful because they do not seem momentary. Once look at them as moments after Pater’s manner, and they become as cold as Pater and his style. Man cannot love mortal things. He can only love immortal things for an instant.^[1]

Such a powerful message about true happiness. Do you find yourself assenting? Anyway, I want to examine just the sentence in bold. What is Chesterton contrasting here? “Gathering rosebuds while ye may” and “the immortal rose which Dante saw”; well, what are these things? The first you probably recognize. It’s from the first stanza of a poem by Robert Herrick called “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”, and in its time was responsible, along with other of Herrick’s poems in this vein, for restoring interest in carpe diem verse; that genre which loves youth and despises old age, and extorts the young to take advantage of the time they have. Not an altogether wrong message, but wrong-headed all the same. I’ll quote the poem in full (because I can).

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying;

And this same flower that smiles to-day,

To-morrow will be dying.

The glorious Lamp of Heaven, the Sun,

The higher he’s a-getting

The sooner will his race be run,

And nearer he’s to setting.

That age is best which is the first,

When youth and blood are warmer;

But being spent, the worse, and worst

Times, still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time;

And while ye may, go marry:

For having lost but once your prime,

You may for ever tarry.

I believe Chesterton means to say that “gather ye rosebuds while ye may” is a way of saying to seek after moments of happiness as if they were the very breath of life, and thus makes a mistake in seeking after “the moment for the moment’s sake”. It is essentially just another way of saying “the moment will be gone and it you will have missed it if you don’t grasp it now.” That’s true of moments like those described, but it misses the point; and in creating the hunt for such moments, turns it into a journey filled with despair. Because how could you have great joy if you are forever seeking after that which you must necessarily lose? You will never gain every moment. And since the moments are fleeting and the trek down from their high emotion much longer than the moments themselves, you will forever be chained to such a search in futility. The further you get away from such moments the more desperately you seek them till you are an empty and useless hungry void.

So what about the second part, “the immortal rose which Dante saw”? Here Chesterton is paraphrasing a part of the Divine Comedy, specifically canto 30 (and maybe 31) of Paradise. I don’t have even a remotely good understanding of the Divine Comedy, and I haven’t yet started Paradise, but I shall venture an explanation based on what I’ve read nevertheless. In canto 30 Dante sees a vision of an endless “river of light” from which issue ‘living sparks” that sink down into the flowers along the banks, and then “plunge back into the torrent.” This vision is then expanded upon when Dante drinks from the river. He sees the whole host of the heavenly saints as an enormous, eternal, snow-white rose that expands, spreads and multiplies even beyond the size of the Sun. It appears that this vision is the result of trying to grasp the continuous flow of time to eternity in a static picture of a single moment for the purpose of intellectual as well as spiritual understanding.^[2]

So what Chesterton is saying is that great joy does not seek after temporal moments which must come and go, rather it finds in those short moments an infinity from which it draws its happiness, but then the moment is gone. “Man cannot love mortal things. He can only love immortal things for an instant” is a fantastic creed; and true, I think. We find great joy in the immortal things, or in the mortal things that we understand as immortal. If that is true then we must also find the greatest of joys in the greatest of immortal things: that which nothing greater than can be conceived: the God of Anselm, the God of Dante, and, dare I say, the God of Chesterton.

1. Chesterton. G.K. Heretics, Chapter 7.
2. http://oll.libertyfund.org/Home3/HTML.php?recordID=0045.03#nt.ci030_ln88

Today I’ve been browsing through some of G.K. Chesterton’s poems, which, like much of his writing, are fantastic. If you haven’t read The Battle of Lepanto, you must, you must, you must. The poem that I want to look at right now is titled (as is this post) To St. Michael in Time of Peace. It’s basically a one-sided conversation from the poet to Michael the Archangel, and describes various things related to him, i.e. the fight with Lucifer:

When the world cracked because of a sneer in heaven,
Leaving out for all time a scar upon the sky,
Thou didst rise up against the Horror in the highest,
Dragging down the highest that looked down on the Most High:

The part I really want to take a closer look at is this stanza on the incarnation. The wording, imagery and theological truth are profound. Here, take a read (remember: Michael is the “thou”):

When from the deeps of dying God astounded
Angels and devils who do all but die
Seeing Him fallen where thou couldst not follow,
Seeing Him mounted where thou couldst not fly,
Hand on the hilt, thou hast halted all thy legions
Waiting the Tetelestai and the acclaim,
Swords that salute Him dead and everlasting
God beyond God and greater than His Name.

OK. I recall when I was much younger I went to see a play put on at a local church. I believe it was my aunt’s church but that’s rather inconsequential. It was basically a nativity story but had a neat twist where the angels are all debating about how God is to come to Earth. Will he be a great magician? A mighty warrior? A fearless leader? A brilliant philosopher? No, he will be a babe. And of course the angels are astounded.

This stanza of Chesteron’s similarly echoes the wonder of of the inarnation. Not that He came as a little child, but that He came, and was able to come, at all. Angels and demons who are forever immortal gape with wonder at the everlastingly immortal God dying, and the whole world hushed for possibly the most beautiful word in the Greek language, or any language for that matter: tetelestai, it is finished.