by Ian Ker
he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. He has an unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage. He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot trust his own instincts. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes; he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture.
But there is one aspect of him that Chesterton characteristically emphasizes: ‘Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself.’ However, there is another thing that makes man absolutely unique among the animals—namely, that he has always felt that ‘certain forms were necessary to fence off and protect certain private things from contempt or coarse misunderstanding; and the keeping of those forms, whatever they were, made for dignity and mutual respect’. Now these forms ‘mostly refer, more or less remotely, to the relations of the sexes’, a point that ‘illustrates the two facts that must be put at the very beginning of the record of the race’. The first of these is that ‘original sin is really original’: ‘Whatever else men have believed, they have all believed that there is something the matter with mankind. This sense of sin has made it impossible to be natural and have no clothes, just as it has made it impossible to be natural and have no laws.’ But this sense of sin is above all ‘to be found in that other fact, which is the father and mother of all laws as it is itself founded on a father and a mother; the thing that is before all thrones and even all commonwealths’—the ‘form’ we call the family, round which ‘gather the sanctities that separate men from ants’.58
Chesterton dismisses the ‘fashionable’ idea that ‘a monkey evolved into a man and in the same way a barbarian evolved into a civilised man’. Far from there having been moral progress, ‘as a matter of fact some of the very highest civilisations of the world were the very places where the horns of Satan were exalted, not only to the stars but in the face of the sun’. In politics, again, a primitive society was likely to be ‘like a pure democracy’, since ‘simple agricultural communities are by far the purest democracies’. Far from there being necessarily progress, ‘democracy is a thing which is always breaking down through the complexity of civilisation’. Such is the ‘evolutionary mania’ that people have become convinced ‘that every great thing grows from a seed, or something smaller than itself. They seem to forget that every seed comes from a tree, or from something larger than itself.’ In the case of religion, it was much more likely that monotheism preceded polytheism, that ‘religion did not originally come from some detail that was forgotten, because it was too small to be traced’: ‘Much more probably it was an idea that was abandoned because it was too large to be managed. There is very good reason to suppose many people did begin with the simple but overwhelming idea of one God who governs all; and fell away into such things as demon-worship almost as a secret dissipation.’ In paganism God ‘is something assumed and forgotten and remembered by accident’. He is ‘the higher deity’ who ‘is remembered in the higher moral grades and is a sort of mystery’. What seemed clear to Chesterton was that ‘there was never any such thing as the Evolution of the Idea of God. The idea was concealed, was avoided, was almost forgotten, was even explained away; but it was never evolved.’ Polytheism itself seems often to have consisted of ‘the combination of several monotheisms’, while Confucianism seems to be ‘a rather vague theism’ in which ‘a simple truth’ seems to have ‘receded, until it was remote without ceasing to be true’. The fact that there was ‘a strange silence’ about God certainly suggested ‘the absence of God’—but not necessarily the ‘non-existence’ of God: there was ‘a void’ but not ‘a negation’. There was ‘an empty chair’ or rather ‘an empty throne’. And Chesterton invokes his favourite image of the back: ‘it was as if some immeasurable presence had turned its back on the world.’ There was ‘in a very real sense the presence of the absence of God’, which one could feel, for example, ‘in the unfathomable sadness of pagan poetry’. There was the implication that the gods of the pagans were ‘ultimately related to something else, even when that Unknown God has faded into a Fate’. For ‘what was truly divine’ seemed ‘very distant, so distant that they dismissed it more and more from their minds’. But what was quite clear was that they knew there was something wrong with the world: ‘These men were conscious of the Fall, if they were conscious of nothing else…’. Still, God ‘really’ had been ‘sacrificed to the Gods; in a very literal sense of the flippant phrase, they have been too many for him’.59
Chesterton rejects any glib notion of religious pluralism: ‘We are accustomed to see a table or catalogue of the world’s great religions in parallel columns, until we fancy they are really parallel.’ But these so-called religions—which ‘we choose to lump together’—‘do not really show any common character’. True, Islam followed Christianity and ‘was largely an imitation of Christianity. But the other eastern religions; or what we call religions, not only do not resemble the Church but do not resemble each other.’ Indeed, Confucianism was not even a religion, and could no more be compared with Christianity than ‘a theist with an English squire’. Christianity was bound up with the idea of a Church, while Confucianism and Buddhism were ‘great things’ but could not be called ‘Churches’—any more than the English and French peoples could be called ‘nomads’ although they were ‘great peoples’. The truth was that, ‘humanly speaking’, ‘the world owes God to the Jews’. And the world also owed it to the Jews that they refused ‘to follow the enlightened course of Syncretism and the pooling of all the pagan traditions’: ‘It is obvious indeed that his [God’s] followers were always sliding down this easy slope; and it required the almost demoniac energy of certain inspired demagogues, who testified to the divine unity in words that are still like winds of inspiration and ruin.’ While the rest of the world ‘melted’ into a ‘mass of confused mythology’, this God of the Jews, ‘who is called tribal and narrow, precisely because he was what is called tribal and narrow, preserved the primary religion of all mankind’. It was the Jews who had enabled the world, which ‘would have been lost’ otherwise, ‘to return to that great original simplicity of a single authority in all things’. It was to this ‘secretive and restless nomadic people’ that the world owed ‘the supreme and serene blessing of a jealous God’. An example of the secretiveness of the Jews, who ‘stood apart and kept their tradition unshaken and unshared’, was the way they had ‘kept a thing like the Book of Job out of the whole intellectual world of antiquity. It is as if the Egyptians had modestly concealed the Great Pyramid.’ And Chesterton cannot resist the ultimate paradox: ‘He [the God of the Jews] was tribal enough to be universal. He was as narrow as the universe.’60
The pagan was not an unbeliever like an atheist, but neither was he a believer like a Christian. He felt ‘the presence of powers’ about which he could only guess. His myths were never ‘a religion, in the sense that Christianity or even Islam is a religion’. Certainly, they satisfied ‘some of the needs satisfied by a religion; and notably the need for doing certain things at certain dates; the need of the twin ideas of festivity and formality’. But, although myths provided the pagan with ‘a calendar’, they did not ‘provide him with a creed’. When St Paul was in Athens, he discovered that the Greeks had ‘one altar to an unknown god. But in truth all their gods were unknown gods.’ It was only when St Paul told them who it was ‘they had ignorantly worshipped’ that ‘the real break in history’ came. Paganism, then, was ‘an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone’ and without the restraints of reason. For reason was ‘something separate from religion, even in the most rational of these civilisations’. Mythology and philosophy ran ‘parallel’ and did not ‘mingle till they met in the sea of Christendom’. But nevertheless the pagan ‘found it natural to worship; even natural to wor
ship unnatural things’. The pagan knew that when he worshipped he was ‘doing a worthy and virile thing’: he was ‘doing one of the things for which a man was made’. But the fact remained that it was an ‘imaginative experiment’ that ‘began with imagination’, and therefore there was ‘something of mockery in it, and especially in the object of it’. This mockery became ‘the almost intolerable irony of Greek tragedy’. It was not surprising that one ‘feels throughout the whole of paganism a curious double feeling of trust and distrust’. For pagan mythology was ‘a search’ that combined ‘a recurrent desire with a recurrent doubt’. And yet there remained ‘an indestructible instinct, in the poet as represented by the pagan, that he is not entirely wrong in localising his god’. It was all right to call these pagan myths ‘foreshadowings’ so long as one remembered that ‘foreshadowings are shadows’: ‘And the metaphor of a shadow happens to hit very exactly the truth that is very vital here. For a shadow is a shape; a thing which reproduces shape but not texture. These things were something like the real thing; and to say that they were like is to say that they were different.’ For polytheism was ‘never a view of the universe satisfying all sides of life; a complete and complex truth with something to say about everything. It was only a satisfaction of one side of the soul of man, even if we call it the religious side; and I think it is truer to call it the imaginative side.’ Precisely, then, because ‘mythology only satisfied one mood’, the pagan ‘turned in other moods to something totally different’. But the mythology and the philosophy never collided and ‘really destroyed the other’, nor was there ever ‘any combination in which one was really reconciled with the other. They certainly did not work together; if anything the philosopher was a rival of the priest.’61
Chesterton now begins his task of trying to make us see Christianity afresh as though for the first time, however grotesquely he has to depict it. And first of all he points out that the whole of Christianity rests on this ‘single paradox’—‘that the hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle’. Every Christmas proclaims an ‘association…between two ideas that most of mankind must regard as remote from each other; the idea of a baby and the idea of unknown strength that sustains the stars’. And ‘this combination of ideas has emphatically…altered human nature’: ‘It would be vain to attempt to say anything adequate, or anything new, about the change which this conception of a deity born like an outcast or even an outlaw had upon the whole conception of law and its duties to the poor and outcast.’ Again, Christmas, that feast so important to Chesterton, ‘is in one sense even a simple thing’, but, like all the truths of Christianity, ‘it is in another sense a very complex thing. Its unique note is the simultaneous striking of many notes; of humility, of gaiety, of gratitude, of mystical fear, but also of vigilance and drama.’ Christmas celebrates ‘the exultant explosion of that one hour in the Judean hills’, when ‘the rejoicings in the cavern were rejoicings in a fortress or an outlaw’s den; properly understood it is not unduly flippant to say they were rejoicings in a dug-out’. The ‘subterranean chamber’ where Jesus was born was literally ‘a hiding-place from enemies’, enemies who ‘were already scouring the stony plain that lay above it like a sky’:
It is not only that the very horse-hoofs of Herod might in that sense have passed like thunder over the sunken head of Christ. It is also that there is in that image a true idea of an outpost, of a piercing through the rock and an entrance into an enemy territory. There is in this buried divinity an idea of undermining the world; of shaking the towers and palaces from below…
Jesus’s followers, too, were paradoxically both ‘despised and…feared’:
Those who charged the Christians with burning down Rome with firebrands were slanderers; but they were at least far nearer to the nature of Christianity than those among the moderns who tell us that the Christians were a sort of ethical society, being martyred in a languid fashion for telling men they had a duty to their neighbours, and only mildly disliked because they were meek and mild.
What Chesterton calls ‘the combination of ideas that make up the Christian and Catholic idea’ was ‘already crystallised in the first Christmas story’. The ‘three distinct and commonly contrasted things…are nevertheless one thing; but this is the only thing which can make them one’.
The first is the human instinct for a heaven that shall be as literal and almost as local as a home. It is the idea pursued by all poets and pagans making myths; that a particular place must be the shrine of the god or the abode of the blest…The second element is a philosophy larger than that of Lucretius and infinitely larger than that of Herbert Spencer. It looks at the world through a hundred windows where the ancient stoic or the modern agnostic only looks through one.…And the third point is this; that while it is local enough for poetry and larger than any other philosophy, it is also a challenge and a fight. While it is deliberately broadened to embrace every aspect of truth, it is still stiffly embattled against every mode of error.
This ‘trinity of truths’ was ‘symbolised… by the three types in the old Christmas story; the shepherds and the kings and that other king who warred upon the children’.62
Chesterton now turns to the figure of Christ himself. And he begins by pointing out that there is the obvious difficulty that the New Testament is no longer the New Testament: ‘It is not at all easy to realise the good news as new.’ Challenging the usual stereotypes, Chesterton insists on us looking at the actual person we read about in the Gospels:
We have all heard people say a hundred times over, for they seem never to tire of saying it, that the Jesus of the New Testament is indeed a most merciful and humane lover of humanity, but that the Church has hidden this human character in repellent dogmas and stiffened it with ecclesiastical terrors till it has taken on an inhuman character.
This, Chesterton insists, ‘is … very nearly the reverse of the truth’.
The truth is that it is the image of Christ in the churches that is almost entirely mild and merciful. It is the image of Christ in the Gospels that is a good many other things as well. The figure in the Gospels does indeed utter in words of almost heart-breaking beauty his pity for our broken hearts. But they are very far from being the only sort of words that he utters. Nevertheless they are almost the only kind of words that the Church in its popular imagery ever represents him as uttering. The popular imagery is inspired by a perfectly sound popular instinct. The mass of the poor are broken, and the mass of the people are poor, and for the mass of mankind the main thing is to carry the conviction of the incredible compassion of God.…In any case there is something appalling, something that makes the blood run cold, in the idea of having a statue of Christ in wrath.
But if we turn to the Gospels themselves, what do we find? Somebody reading them for the first time, suggests Chesterton, would find that ‘part of the interest’ of the story ‘would consist in its leaving a good deal to be guessed at or explained’: ‘It is full of sudden gestures evidently significant except that we hardly know what they signify; of enigmatic silences; of ironical replies. The outbreaks of wrath, like storms above our atmosphere, do not seem to break out exactly where we should expect them, but to follow some higher weather-chart of their own.’ Nor is there anything ‘meek and mild’ about Jesus the exorcist: ‘It is much more like the tone of a very business-like lion-tamer or a strong-minded doctor dealing with a homicidal maniac.’ Indeed, the real Christ of the Gospels is ‘actually…more strange and terrible than the Christ of the Church’. Then there are the ‘puzzles’ in ‘a very strange story’, like ‘that long stretch of silence in the life of Christ up to the age of thirty. It is of all silences the most immense and imaginatively impressive’. How is it that ‘he who of all humanity needed least preparation seems to have had most’? The truth is that the Gospel story is not ‘easy to get to the bottom of’. It is anything but the ‘simple Gospel’ that people like to contrast with the Church: ‘Relatively speaking, it
is the Gospel that has the mysticism and the Church that has the rationalism. As I should put it, of course, it is the Gospel that is the riddle and the Church that is the answer. But whatever be the answer, the Gospel as it stands is almost a book of riddles.’ Instead of the platitudes one associates with moralists, a person reading the Gospels for the first time ‘would find a number of strange claims… a number of very startling pieces of advice; a number of stunning rebukes; a number of strangely beautiful stories’. Instead of platitudes, for instance, about peace, such a reader ‘would find several ideals of non-resistance, which taken as they stand would be rather too pacific for any pacifist’. But, on the other hand, our reader ‘would not find a word of all that obvious rhetoric against war which has filled countless books’: ‘There is nothing that throws any particular light on Christ’s attitude towards organised warfare, except that he seems to have been rather fond of Roman soldiers. Indeed it is another perplexity… that he seems to have got on much better with Romans than he did with Jews.’ The truth is, Chesterton concludes, the Jesus of popular conception is ‘a made-up figure, a piece of artificial selection, like the merely evolutionary man’ and impossible to reconcile with the real Jesus of the Gospels, ‘a strolling carpenter’s apprentice’ who ‘said calmly and almost carelessly, like one looking over his shoulder: “Before Abraham was, I am.”’63
Chesterton gives examples of how it is the Church that explains the riddles of the Gospel. The assertion, for instance, that the meek would inherit the earth was not at all ‘a meek statement’, but rather ‘a very violent statement; in the sense of doing violence to reason and probability’. But as a prophecy it would one day be fulfilled in monasticism: ‘The monasteries were the most practical and prosperous estates and experiments in reconstruction after the barbaric deluge; the meek did really inherit the earth.’ Again, the story of Martha and Mary found its fulfilment in ‘the mystics of the Christian contemplative life’. If the Gospels could be read as though they were ‘as new as newspaper reports, they would puzzle and perhaps terrify us as much more than the same things as developed by historical Christianity’: ‘For instance, Christ after a clear allusion to the eunuchs of the eastern courts, said there would be eunuchs of the kingdom of heaven. If this does not mean the voluntary enthusiasm of virginity, it could only be made to mean something much more unnatural or uncouth.’64