Go to Part I
I The God in the Cave
II The Riddles of the Gospel
III The Strangest Story in the World
IV The Witness of the Heretics
V The Escape from Paganism
VI The Five Deaths of the Faith
CONCLUSION: THE SUMMARY OF THIS
BOOK
Appendix I
Appendix II
I: THE GOD IN THE CAVE
1 This sketch of the human story began in a cave; the cave which
popular science associates with the cave-man and in which practical discovery has really
found archaic drawings of animals. The second half of human history, which was like a new
creation of the world, also begins in a cave. There is even a shadow of such a fancy in
the fact that animals were again present; for it was a cave used as a stable by the
mountaineers of the uplands about Bethlehem; who still drive their cattle into such holes
and caverns at night. It was here that a homeless couple had crept underground with the
cattle when the doors of the crowded caravanserai had been shut in their faces; and it was
here beneath the very feet of the passers-by, in a cellar under the very floor of the
world, that Jesus Christ was born. But in that second creation there was indeed something
symbolical in the roots of the primeval rock or the horns of the prehistoric herd. God
also was a Cave-Man, and had also traced strange shapes of creatures, curiously coloured,
upon the wall of the world; but the pictures that he made had come to life.
2 A mass of legend and literature, which increases and will never
end, has repeated and rung the changes on that single paradox; that the hands that had
made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle. Upon this
paradox, we might almost say upon this jest, all the literature of our faith is founded.
It is at least like a jest in this, that it is something which the scientific critic
cannot see. He laboriously explains the difficulty which we have always defiantly and
almost derisively exaggerated; and mildly condemns as improbable something that we have
almost madly exalted as incredible; as something that would be much too good to be true,
except that it is true. When that contrast between the cosmic creation and the little
local infancy has been repeated, reiterated, underlined, emphasised, exulted in, sung,
shouted, roared, not to say howled, in a hundred thousand hymns, carols, rhymes, rituals,
pictures, poems, and popular sermons, it may be suggested that we hardly need a higher
critic to draw our attention to something a little odd about it; especially one of the
sort that seems to take a long time to see a joke, even his own joke. But about this
contrast and combination of ideas one thing may be said here, because it is relevant to
the whole thesis of this book. The sort of modern critic of whom I speak is generally much
impressed with the importance of education in life and the importance of psychology in
education. That sort of man is never tired of telling us that first impressions fix
character by the law of causation; and he will become quite nervous if a child's visual
sense is poisoned by the wrong colours on a golliwog or his nervous system prematurely
shaken by a cacophonous rattle. Yet he will think us very narrow-minded, if we say that
this is exactly why there really is a difference between being brought up as a Christian
and being brought up as a Jew or a Moslem or an atheist. The difference is that every
Catholic child has learned from pictures, and even every Protestant child from stories,
this incredible combination of contrasted ideas as one of the very first impressions on
his mind. It is not merely a theological difference. It is a psychological difference
which can outlast any theologies. It really is, as that sort of scientist loves to say
about anything, incurable. Any agnostic or atheist whose childhood has known a real
Christmas has ever afterwards, whether he likes it or not, an association in his mind
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. His instincts and
imagination can still connect them, when his reason can no longer see the need of the
connection; for him there will always be some savour of religion about the mere picture of
a mother and a baby; some hint of mercy and softening about the mere mention of the
dreadful name of God. But the two ideas are not naturally or necessarily combined. They
would not be necessarily combined for an ancient Greek or a Chinaman, even for Aristotle
or Confucius. It is no more inevitable to connect God with an infant than to connect
gravitation with a kitten. It has been created in our minds by Christmas because we are
Christians, because we are psychological Christians even when we are not theological ones.
In other words, this combination of ideas has emphatically, in the much disputed phrase,
altered human nature. There is really a difference between the man who knows it and the
man who does not. It may not be a difference of moral worth, for the Moslem or the Jew
might be worthier according to his lights; but it is a plain fact about the crossing of
two particular lights, the conjunction of two stars in our particular horoscope.
Omnipotence and impotence, or divinity and infancy, do definitely make a sort of epigram
which a million repetitions cannot turn into a platitude. It is not unreasonable to call
it unique. Bethlehem is emphatically a place where extremes meet.
3 Here begins, it is needless to say, another mighty influence for
the humanisation of Christendom. If the world wanted what is called a non-controversial
aspect of Christianity, it would probably select Christmas. Yet it is obviously bound up
with what is supposed to be a controversial aspect (I could never at any stage of my
opinions imagine why); the respect paid to the Blessed Virgin. When I was a boy a more
Puritan generation objected to a statue upon my parish church representing the Virgin and
Child. After much controversy, they compromised by taking away the Child. One would think
that this was even more corrupted with Mariolatry, unless the mother was counted less
dangerous when deprived of a sort of weapon. But the practical difficulty is also a
parable. You cannot chip away the statue of a mother from all round that of a new-born
child. You can not suspend the new-born child in mid-air; indeed you cannot really have a
statue of a new-born child at all. Similarly, you cannot suspend the idea of a new-born
child in the void or think of him without thinking of his mother. You cannot visit the
child without visiting the mother; you cannot in common human life approach the child
except through the mother. If we are to think of Christ in this aspect at all, the other
idea follows as it is followed in history. We must either leave Christ out of Christmas,
or Christmas out of Christ, or we must admit, if only as we admit it in an old picture,
that those holy heads are too near together for the haloes not to mingle and cross.
4 It might be suggested, in a somewhat violent image, that nothing
had happened in that fold or crack in the great grey hills except that the whole universe
had been turned inside out. I mean that all the eyes of wonder and worship which had been
turned outwards to the largest thing were now turned inward to the smallest. The very
image will suggest all that multitudinous marvel of converging eyes that makes so much of
the coloured Catholic imagery like a peacock's tail. But it is true in a sense that God
who had been only a circumference was seen as a centre; and a centre is infinitely small.
It is true that the spiritual spiral henceforward works inwards instead of outwards, and
in that sense is centripetal and not centrifugal. The faith becomes, in more ways than
one, a religion of little things. But its traditions in art and literature and popular
fable have quite sufficiently attested, as has been said, this particular paradox of the
divine being in the cradle. Perhaps they have not so clearly emphasised the significance
of the divine being in the cave. Curiously enough, indeed, tradition has not very clearly
emphasised the cave. It is a familiar fact that the Bethlehem scene has been represented
in every possible setting of time and country, of landscape and architecture; and it is a
wholly happy and admirable fact that men have conceived it as quite different according to
their different individual traditions and tastes. But while all have realised that it was
a stable, not so many have realised that it was a cave. Some critics have even been so
silly as to suppose that there was some contradiction between the stable and the cave; in
which case they cannot know much about caves or stables in Palestine. As they see
differences that are not there, it is needless to add that they do not see differences
that are there. When a well-known critic says, for instance, that Christ being born in a
rocky cavern is like Mithras having sprung alive out of a rock, it sounds like a parody
upon comparative religion. There is such a thing as the point of a story, even if it is a
story in the sense of a lie. And the notion of a hero appearing, like Pallas from the
brain of Zeus, mature and without a mother, is obviously the very opposite of the idea of
a god being born like an ordinary baby and entirely dependent on a mother. Whichever ideal
we might prefer, we should surely see that they are contrary ideals. It is as stupid to
connect them because they both contain a substance called stone as to identify the
punishment of the Deluge with the baptism in the Jordan because they both contain a
substance called water. Whether as a myth or a mystery, Christ was obviously conceived as
born in a hole in the rocks primarily because it marked the position of one outcast and
homeless. Nevertheless it is true, as I have said, that the cave has not been so commonly
or so clearly used as a symbol as the other realities that surrounded the first Christmas.
5 And the reason for this also refers to the very nature of that
new world. It was in a sense the difficulty of a new dimension. Christ was not only born
on the level of the world, but even lower than the world. The first act of the divine
drama was enacted, not only on no stage set up above the sight-seer, but on a dark and
curtained stage sunken out of sight; and that is an idea very difficult to express in most
modes of artistic expression. It is the idea of simultaneous happenings on different
levels of life. Something like it might have been attempted in the more archaic and
decorative medieval art. But the more the artists learned of realism and perspective, the
less they could depict at once the angels in the heavens and the shepherds on the hills,
and the glory in the darkness that was under the hills. Perhaps it could have been best
conveyed by the characteristic expedient of some of the medieval guilds, when they wheeled
about the streets a theatre with three stages one above the other, with heaven above the
earth and hell under the earth. But in the riddle of Bethlehem it was heaven that was
under the earth.
6 There is in that alone the touch of a revolution, as of the world
turned upside down. 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. It is
profoundly true to say that after that moment there could be no slaves. There could be and
were people bearing that legal title, until the Church was strong enough to weed them out,
but there could be no more of the pagan repose in the mere advantage to the state of
keeping it a servile state. Individuals became important, in a sense in which no
instruments can be important. A man could not be a means to an end, at any rate to any
other man's end. All this popular and fraternal element in the story has been rightly
attached by tradition to the episode of the Shepherds; the hinds who found themselves
talking face to face with the princes of heaven. But there is another aspect of the
popular element as represented by the shepherds which has not perhaps been so fully
developed; and which is more directly relevant here.
7 Men of the people, like the shepherds, men of the popular
tradition, had everywhere been the makers of the mythologies. It was they who had felt
most directly, with least check or chill from philosophy or the corrupt cults of
civilisation, the need we have already considered; the images that were adventures of the
imagination; the mythology that was a sort of search; the tempting and tantalising hints
of something half-human in nature; the dumb significance of seasons and special places.
They had best understood that the soul of a landscape is a story and the soul of a story
is a personality. But rationalism had already begun to rot away these really irrational
though imaginative treasures of the peasant; even as systematic slavery had eaten the
peasant out of house and home. Upon all such peasantries everywhere there was descending a
dusk and twilight of disappointment, in the hour when these few men discovered what they
sought. Everywhere else Arcadia was fading from the forest. Pan was dead and the shepherds
were scattered like sheep. And though no man knew it, the hour was near which was to end
and to fulfil all things; and though no man heard it, there was one far-off cry in an
unknown tongue upon the heaving wilderness of the mountains. The shepherds had found their
Shepherd.
8 And the thing they found was of a kind with the things they
sought. The populace had been wrong in many things; but they had not been wrong in
believing that holy things could have a habitation and that divinity need not disdain the
limits of time and space. And the barbarian who conceived the crudest fancy about the sun
being stolen and hidden in a box, or the wildest myth about the god being rescued and his
enemy deceived with a stone, was nearer to the secret of the cave and knew more about the
crisis of the world, than all those in the circle of cities round the Mediterranean who
had become content with cold abstractions or cosmopolitan generalisations; than all those
who were spinning thinner and thinner threads of thought out of the transcendentalism of
Plato or the orientalism of Pythagoras. The place that the shepherds found was not an
academy or an abstract republic, it was not a place of myths allegorised or dissected or
explained or explained away. It was a place of dreams come true. Since that hour no
mythologies have been made in the world. Mythology is a search.
9 We all know that the popular presentation of this popular story,
in so many miracle plays and carols, has given to the shepherds the costumes, the
language, and the landscape of the separate English and European countrysides. We all know
that one shepherd will talk in a Somerset dialect or another talk of driving his sheep
from Conway towards Clyde. Most of us know by this time how true is that error, how wise,
how artistic, how intensely Christian and Catholic is that anachronism. But some who have
seen it in these scenes of medieval rusticity have perhaps not seen it in another sort of
poetry, which it is sometimes the fashion to call artificial rather than artistic. I fear
that many modern critics will see only a faded classicism in the fact that men like
Crashaw and Herrick conceived the shepherds of Bethlehem under the form of the shepherds
of Virgil. Yet they were profoundly right; and in turning their Bethlehem play into a
Latin Eclogue they took up one of the most important links in human history. Virgil, as we
have already seen, does stand for all that saner heathenism that had over-thrown the
insane heathenism of human sacrifice; but the very fact that even the Virgilian virtues
and the sane heathenism were in incurable decay is the whole problem to which the
revelation to the shepherds is the solution. If the world had ever had the chance to grow
weary of being demoniac, it might have been healed merely by becoming sane. But if it had
grown weary even of being sane, what was to happen, except what did happen? Nor is it
false to conceive the Arcadian shepherd of the Eclogues as rejoicing in what did happen.
One of the Eclogues has even been claimed as a prophecy of what did happen. But it is
quite as much in the tone and incidental diction of the great poet that we feel the
potential sympathy with the great event; and even in their own human phrases the voices of
the Virgilian shepherds might more than once have broken upon more than the tenderness of
Italy `Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem' They might have found in that strange
place all that was best in the last traditions of the Latins; and something better than a
wooden idol standing up for ever for the pillar of the human family; a household god. But
they and all the other mythologists would be justified in rejoicings that the event had
fulfilled not merely the mysticism but the materialism of mythology. Mythology had many
sins; but it had not been wrong in being as carnal as the Incarnation. But something of
the ancient voice that was supposed to have rung through the graves, it could cry again,
'We have seen, he hath seen us, a visible god.' So the ancient shepherds might have
danced, and their feet have been beautiful upon the mountains, rejoicing over the
philosophers. But the philosophers had also heard.
10 It is still a strange story, though an old one, how they came out
of orient lands, crowned with the majesty of kings and clothed with something of the
mystery of magicians. That truth that is tradition his wisely remembered them almost as
unknown quantities, as mysterious as their mysterious and melodious names; Melchior.
Caspar, Balthazar. But there came with them all that world of wisdom that had watched the
stars in Chaldea and the sun in Persia; and we shall not be wrong if we see in them the
same curiosity that moves all the sages. They would stand for the same human ideal if
their names had really been Confucius or Pythagoras or Plato. They were those who sought
not tales but the truth of things, and since their thirst for truth was itself a thirst
for God, they also have had their reward. But even in order to understand that reward, we
must understand that for philosophy as much as mythology, that reward was the completion
of the incomplete.
11 Such learned men would doubtless have come, as these learned men
did come, to find themselves confirmed in much that was true in their own traditions and
right in their own reasoning. Confucius would have found a new foundation for the family
in the very reversal of the Holy Family; Buddha would have looked upon a new renunciation,
of stars rather than jewels and divinity than royalty. These learned men would still have
the right to say, or rather a new right to say, that there was truth in their old
teaching. But after all these learned men would have come to learn. They would have come
to complete their conceptions with something they had not yet conceived; even to balance
their imperfect universe with something they might once have contradicted. Buddha would
have come from his impersonal paradise to worship a person. Confucius would have come from
his temples of ancestor-worship to worship a child.
12 We must grasp from the first this character in the new cosmos;
that it was larger than the old cosmos. In that sense Christendom is larger than creation;
as creation had been before Christ. It included things that had not been there; it also
included the things that had been there. The point happens to be well illustrated in this
example of Chinese piety, but it would be true of other pagan virtues or pagan beliefs.
Nobody can doubt that a reasonable respect for parents is part of a gospel in which God
himself was subject in childhood to earthly parents. But the other sense in which the
parents were subject to him does introduce an idea that is not Confucian. The infant
Christ is not like the infant Confucius; our mysticism conceives him in an immortal
infancy. I do not know what Confucius would have done with the Bambino had it come to life
in his arms as it did in the arms of St. Francis. But this is true in relation to all the
other religions and philosophies; it is the challenge of the Church. The Church contains
what the world does not contain. Life itself does not provide as she does for all sides of
life. That every other single system is narrow and insufficient compared to this one; that
is not a rhetorical boast; it is a real fact and a real dilemma. Where is the Holy child
amid the Stoics and the ancestor-worshippers? Where is Our Lady of the Moslems, a woman
made for no man and set above all angels? Where is St. Michael of the monks of Buddha,
rider and master of the trumpets, guarding for every soldier the honour of the sword? What
could St. Thomas Aquinas do with the mythology of Brahminism, he who set forth all the
science and rationality and even rationalism of Christianity? Yet even if we compare
Aquinas with Aristotle, at the other extreme of reason, we shall find the same sense of
something added. Aquinas could understand the most logical parts of Aristotle; it is
doubtful if Aristotle could have understood the most mystical parts of Aquinas. Even where
we can hardly call the Christian greater, we are forced to call him larger. But it is so
to whatever philosophy or heresy or modern movement we may turn. How would Francis the
Troubadour have fared among the Calvinists, or for that matter among the Utilitarians of
the Manchester School? Yet men like Bossuet and Pascal could be as stern and logical as
any Calvinist or Utilitarian. How would St. Joan of Arc, a woman waving on men to war with
the sword, have fared among the Quakers or the Doukhabors or the Tolstoyan sect of
pacifists? Yet any number of Catholic saints have spent their lives in preaching peace and
preventing wars. It is the same with all the modern attempts at Syncretism. They are never
able to make something larger than the Creed without leaving something out. I do not mean
leaving out something divine but something human; the flag or the inn or the boy's tale of
battle or the hedge at the end of the field. The Theosophists build a pantheon; but it is
only a pantheon for pantheists. They call a Parliament of Religions as a reunion of all
the peoples; but it is only a reunion of all the prigs. Yet exactly such a pantheon had
been set up two thousand years before by the shores of the Mediterranean; and Christians
were invited to set up the image of Jesus side by side with the image of Jupiter, of
Mithras, of Osiris, of Atys, or of Ammon. It was the refusal of the Christians that was
the turning-point of history. If the Christians had accepted, they and the whole world
would have certainly, in a grotesque but exact metaphor, gone to pot. They would all have
been boiled down to one lukewarm liquid in that great pot of cosmopolitan corruption in
which all the other myths and mysteries were already melting. It was an awful and an
appalling escape. Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the
creed descending from antiquity, who does not realise that the whole world once very
nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.
13 Here it is the important point that the Magi, who stand for
mysticism and philosophy, are truly conceived as seeking something new and even as finding
something unexpected. That tense sense of crisis which still tingles in the Christmas
story and even in every Christmas celebration, accentuates the idea of a search and a
discovery. The discovery is, in this case, truly a scientific discovery. For the other
mystical figures in the miracle play; for the angel and the mother, the shepherds and the
soldiers of Herod, there may be aspects both simpler and more supernatural, more elemental
or more emotional. But the wise Men must be seeking wisdom, and for them there must be a
light also in the intellect. And this is the light; that the Catholic creed is catholic
and that nothing else is catholic. The philosophy of the Church is universal. The
philosophy of the philosophers was not universal. Had Plato and Pythagoras and Aristotle
stood for an instant in the light that came out of that little cave, they would have known
that their own light was not universal. It is far from certain, indeed, that they did not
know it already. Philosophy also, like mythology, had very much the air of a search. It is
the realisation of this truth that gives its traditional majesty and mystery to the
figures of the Three Kings; the discovery that religion is broader than philosophy and
that this is the broadest of religions, contained within this narrow space. The Magicians
were gazing at the strange pentacle with the human triangle reversed; and they have never
come to the end of their calculations about it. For it is the paradox of that group in the
cave, that while our emotions about it are of childish simplicity, our thoughts about it
can branch with a never-ending complexity. And we can never reach the end even of our own
ideas about the child who was a father and the mother who was a child.
14 We might well be content to say that mythology had come with the
shepherds and philosophy with the philosophers; and that it only remained for them to
combine in the recognisation of religion. But there was a third element that must not be
ignored and one which that religion for ever refuses to ignore, in any revel or
reconciliation. There was present in the primary scenes of the drama that Enemy that had
rotted the legends with lust and frozen theories into atheism, but which answered the
direct challenge with something of that more direct method which we have seen in the
conscious cult of the demons. In the description of that demon-worship, of the devouring
detestation of innocence shown in the works of its witchcraft and the most inhuman of its
human sacrifice, I have said less of its incorrect and secret penetration of the saner
paganism; the soaking of mythological imagination with sex; the rise of imperial pride
into insanity. But both the indirect and the direct influence make themselves felt in the
drama of Bethlehem. A ruler under the Roman suzerainty, probably equipped and surrounded
with the Roman ornament and order though himself of eastern blood, seems in that hour to
have felt stirring within him the spirit of strange things. We all know the story of how
Herod, alarmed at some rumour of a mysterious rival, remembered the wild gesture of the
capricious despots of Asia and ordered a massacre of suspects of the new generation of the
populace. Everyone knows the story; but not everyone has perhaps noted its place in the
story of the strange religions of men. Not everybody has seen the significance even of its
very contrast with the Corinthian columns and Roman pavement of that conquered and
superficially civilised world. Only, as the purpose in his dark spirit began to show and
shine in the eyes of the Idumean, a seer might perhaps have seen something like a great
grey ghost that looked over his shoulder; have seen behind him filling the dome of night
and hovering for the last time over history, that vast and fearful face that was Moloch of
the Carthaginians; awaiting his last tribute from a ruler of the races of Shem. The demons
also, in that first festival of Christmas, feasted after their own fashion.
15 Unless we understand the presence of that enemy, we shall not
only miss the point of Christianity, but even miss the point of Christmas. Christmas for
us in Christendom has become one thing, and in one sense even a simple thing. But like all
the truths of that tradition, 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 of drama. It is not only an occasion for the
peacemakers any more than for the merry-makers; it is not only a Hindu peace conference
any more than it is only a Scandinavian winter feast. There is something defiant in it
also; something that makes the abrupt bells at midnight sound like the great guns of a
battle that has just been won. All this indescribable thing that we call the Christmas
atmosphere only hangs in the air as something like a lingering fragrance or fading vapour
from the exultant explosion of that one hour in the Judean hills nearly two thousand years
ago. But the savour is still unmistakable, and it is something too subtle or too solitary
to be covered by our use of the word peace. By the very nature of the story 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. It is not only true that
such a subterranean chamber was a hiding-place from enemies; and that the enemies 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;
even as Herod the great king felt that earthquake under him and swayed with his swaying
palace.
16 That is perhaps the mightiest of the mysteries of the cave It is
already apparent that though men are said to have looked for hell under the earth, in this
case it is rather heaven that is under the earth And there follows in this strange story
the idea of an upheaval of heaven. That is the paradox of the whole position; that
henceforth the highest thing can only work from below. Royalty can only return to its own
by a sort of rebellion. Indeed the Church from its beginnings, and perhaps especially in
its beginnings, was not so much a principality as a revolution against the prince of the
world. This sense that the world had been conquered by the great usurper, and was in his
possession, has been much deplored or derided by those optimists who identify
enlightenment with ease. But it was responsible for all that thrill of defiance and a
beautiful danger that made the good news seem to be really both good and new. It was in
truth against a huge unconscious usurpation that it raised a revolt, and originally so
obscure a revolt. Olympus still occupied the sky like a motionless cloud moulded into many
mighty forms; philosophy still sat in the high places and even on the thrones of the
kings, when Christ was born in the cave and Christianity in the catacombs. In both cases
we may remark the same paradox of revolution; the sense of something despised and of
something feared The cave in one aspect is only a hole or corner into which the outcasts
are swept like rubbish; yet in the other aspect it is a hiding-place of something valuable
which the tyrants are seeking like treasure. In one sense they are there because the
innkeeper would not even remember them, and in another because the king can never forget
them. We have already noted that this paradox appeared also in the treatment of the early
Church. It was important while it was still insignificant, and certainly while it was
still impotent. It was important solely because it was intolerable; and in that sense it
is true to say that it was intolerable because it was intolerant. It was resented,
because, in its own still and almost secret way, it had declared war. It had risen out of
the ground to wreck the heaven and earth of heathenism. It did not try to destroy all that
creation of gold and marble; but it contemplated a world without it. It dared to look
right through it as though the gold and marble had been glass. 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 neighbors, and only mildly disliked because they were meek
and mild.
17 Herod had his place, therefore, in the miracle play of Bethlehem
because he is the menace to the Church Militant and shows it from the first as under
persecution and fighting for its life. For those who think this a discord, it is a discord
that sounds simultaneously with the Christmas bells. For those who think the idea of the
Crusade is one that spoils the idea of the Cross, we can only say that for them the idea
of the Cross is spoiled; the idea of the cross is spoiled quite literally in the cradle.
It is not here to the purpose to argue with them on the abstract ethics of fighting; the
purpose in this place is merely to sum up the combination of ideas that make up the
Christian and Catholic idea, and to note that all of them are already crystallised in the
first Christmas story. They are three distinct and commonly contrasted things which 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; that fairyland is a land; or that the
return of the ghost must be the resurrection of the body. I do not here reason about the
refusal of rationalism to satisfy this need. I only say that if the rationalists refuse to
satisfy it, the pagans will not be satisfied. This is present in the story of Bethlehem
and Jerusalem as it is present in the story of Delos and Delphi; and as it is not present
in the whole universe of Lucretius or the whole universe of Herbert Spencer. The second
element is a philosophy larger than other philosophies; 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. It sees
life with thousands of eyes belonging to thousands of different sorts of people, where the
other is only the individual standpoint of a stoic or an agnostic. It has something for
all moods of man, it finds work for all kinds of men, it understands secrets of
psychology, it is aware of depths of evil, it is able to distinguish between ideal and
unreal marvels and miraculous exceptions, it trains itself in tact about hard cases, all
with a multiplicity and subtlety and imagination about the varieties of life which is far
beyond the bald or breezy platitudes of most ancient or modern moral philosophy. In a
word, there is more in it; it finds more in existence to think about; it gets more out of
life. Masses of this material about our many-sided life have been added since the time of
St. Thomas Aquinas. But St. Thomas Aquinas alone would have found himself limited in the
world of Confucius or of Comte. 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. It gets every kind of man to fight for it, it gets
every kind of weapon to fight with, it widens its knowledge of the things that are fought
for and against with every art of curiosity or sympathy; but it never forgets that it is
fighting. It proclaims peace on earth and never forgets why there was war in heaven.
18 This is the trinity of truths symbolised here by the three types
in the old Christmas story; the shepherds and the kings and that other king who warred
upon the children. It is simply not true to say that other religions and philosophies are
in this respect its rivals. It is not true to say that any one of them combines these
characters; it is not true to say that any one of them pretends to combine them. Buddhism
may profess to be equally mystical; it does not even profess to be equally military. Islam
may profess to be equally military; it does not even profess to be equally metaphysical
and subtle. Confucianism may profess to satisfy the need of the philosophers for order and
reason; it does not even profess to satisfy the need of the mystics for miracle and
sacrament and the consecration of concrete things. There are many evidences of this
presence of a spirit at once universal and unique. One will serve here which is the symbol
of the subject of this chapter; that no other story, no pagan legend or philosophical
anecdote or historical event, does in fact affect any of us with that peculiar and even
poignant impression produced on us by the word Bethlehem. No other birth of a god or
childhood of a sage seems to us to be Christmas or anything like Christmas. It is either
too cold or too frivolous, or too formal and classical, or too simple and savage, or too
occult and complicated. Not one of us, whatever his opinions, would ever go to such a
scene with the sense that he was going home. He might admire it because it was poetical,
or because it was philosophical, or any number of other things in separation; but not
because it was itself. The truth is that there is a quite peculiar and individual
character about the hold of this story on human nature; it is not in its psychological
substance at all like a mere legend or the life of a great man. It does not exactly in the
ordinary sense turn our minds to greatness; to those extensions and exaggerations of
humanity which are turned into gods and heroes, even by the healthiest sort of
hero-worship. It does not exactly work outwards, adventurously, to the wonders to be found
at the ends of the earth. It is rather something that surprises us from behind, from the
hidden and personal part of our being; like that which can some times take us off our
guard in the pathos of small objects or the blind pieties of the poor. It is rather as if
a man had found an inner room in the very heart of his own house, which he had never
suspected; and seen a light from within. It is as if he found something at the back of his
own heart that betrayed him into good. It is not made of what the world would call strong
materials; or rather it is made of materials whose strength is in that winged levity with
which they brush us and pass. It is all that is in us but a brief tenderness that is there
made eternal; all that means no more than a momentary softening that is in some strange
fashion become a strengthening and a repose; it is the broken speech and the lost word
that are made positive and suspended unbroken; as the strange kings fade into a far
country and the mountains resound no more with the feet of the shepherds; and only the
night and the cavern lie in fold upon fold over something more human than humanity.
II: THE RIDDLES OF THE GOSPEL
19 To understand the nature of this chapter, it is necessary to
recur to the nature of this book. The argument which is meant to be the backbone of the
book is of the kind called the reductio ad absurdum. It suggests that the results of
assuming the rationalist thesis are more irrational than ours; but to prove it we must
assume that thesis. Thus in the first section I often treated man as merely an animal, to
show that the effect was more impossible than if he were treated as an angel. In the sense
in which it was necessary to treat man merely as an animal, it is necessary to treat
Christ merely as a man. I have to suspend my own beliefs, which are much more positive;
and assume this limitation even in order to remove it. I must try to imagine what would
happen to a man who did really read the story of Christ as the story of a man; and even of
a man of whom he had never heard before. And I wish to point out that a really impartial
reading of that kind would lead, if not immediately to belief, at least to a bewilderment
of which there is really no solution except in belief. In this chapter, for this reason, I
shall bring in nothing of the spirit of my own creed; I shall exclude the very style of
diction, and even of lettering, which I should think fitting in speaking in my own person.
I am speaking as an imaginary heathen human being, honestly, staring at the Gospel story
for the first time.
20 Now it is not at all easy to regard the New Testament as a New
Testament. It is not at all easy to realise the good news as new. Both for good and evil
familiarity fills us with assumptions and associations; and no man of our civilisation,
whatever he thinks of our religion, can really read the thing as if he had never heard of
it before. Of course it is in any case utterly unhistorical to talk as if the New
Testament were a neatly bound book that had fallen from heaven. It is simply the selection
made by the authority of the Church from a mass of early Christian literature. But apart
from any such question there is a psychological difficulty in feeling the New Testament as
new. There is a psychological difficulty in seeing those well-known words simply as they
stand and without going beyond what they intrinsically stand for. And this difficulty must
indeed be very great; for the result of it is very curious. The result of it is that most
modern critics and most current criticism, even popular criticism, makes a comment that is
the exact reverse of the truth. It is so completely the reverse of the truth that one
could almost suspect that they had never read the New Testament at all.
21 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 is, I venture to repeat, 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. That 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. But nobody with his eyes open can doubt that it is
chiefly this idea of compassion that the popular machinery of the Church does seek to
carry. The popular imagery carries a great deal to excess the sentiment of 'Gentle Jesus,
meek and mild.' It is the first thing that the outsider feels and criticises in a Pieta or
a shrine of the Sacred Heart. As I say, while the art may be insufficient, I am not sure
that the instinct is unsound. 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. There is
something insupportable even to the imagination in the idea of turning the corner of a
street or coming out into the spaces of a marketplace, to meet the petrifying petrifaction
of that figure as it turned upon a generation of vipers, or that face as it looked at the
face of a hypocrite. The Church can reasonably be justified therefore if she turns the
most merciful face or aspect towards men; but it is certainly the most merciful aspect
that she does turn. And the point is here that it is very much more specially and
exclusively merciful than any impression that could be formed by a man merely reading the
New Testament for the first time. A man simply taking the words of the story as they stand
would form quite another impression; an impression full of mystery and possibly of
inconsistency; but certainly not merely an impression of mildness. It would be intensely
interesting; but part of the interest 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. The
Peter whom popular Church teaching presents is very rightly the Peter to whom Christ said
in forgiveness, 'Feed my lambs.' He is not the Peter upon whom Christ turned as if he were
the devil, crying in that obscure wrath, 'Get thee behind me, Satan.' Christ lamented with
nothing but love and pity over Jerusalem which was to murder him. We do not know what
strange spiritual atmosphere or spiritual insight led him to sink Bethsaida lower in the
pit than Sodom. I am putting aside for the moment all questions of doctrinal inferences or
expositions, orthodox or otherwise; I am simply imagining the effect on a man's mind if he
did really do what these critics are always talking about doing; if he did really read the
New Testament without reference to orthodoxy and even without reference to doctrine. He
would find a number of things which fit in far less with the current unorthodoxy than they
do with the current orthodoxy. He would find, for instance, that if there are any
descriptions that deserved to be called realistic, they are precisely the descriptions of
the supernatural. If there is one aspect of the New Testament Jesus in which he may be
said to present himself eminently as a practical person, it is in the aspect of an
exorcist. There is nothing meek and mild, there is nothing even in the ordinary sense
mystical, about the tone of the voice that says 'Hold thy peace and come out of him.' It
is much more like the tone of a very business-like lion-tamer or a strong-minded doctor
dealing with a homicidal maniac. But this is only a side issue for the sake of
illustration; I am not now raising these controversies; but considering the case of the
imaginary man from the moon to whom the New Testament is new.
22 Now the first thing to note is that if we take it merely as a
human story, it is in some ways a very strange story. I do not refer here to its
tremendous and tragic culmination or to any implications involving triumph in that
tragedy. I do not refer to what is commonly called the miraculous element; for on that
point philosophies vary and modern philosophies very decidedly waver. Indeed the educated
Englishman of to-day may be said to have passed from an old fashion, in which he would not
believe in any miracles unless they were ancient, and adopted a new fashion in which he
will not believe in any miracles unless they are modern. He used to hold that miraculous
cures stopped with the first Christians and is now inclined to suspect that they began
with the first Christian Scientists. But I refer here rather specially to unmiraculous and
even to unnoticed and inconspicuous parts of the story. There are a great many things
about it which nobody would have invented, for they are things that nobody has ever made
any particular use of; things which if they were remarked at all have remained rather as
puzzles. For instance, there is 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.
But it is not the sort of thing that anybody is particularly likely to invent in order to
prove something; and no body so far as I know has ever tried to prove anything in
particular from it. It is impressive, but it is only impressive as a fact; there is
nothing particularly popular or obvious about it as a fable. The ordinary trend of
hero-worship and myth-making is much more likely to say the precise opposite. It is much
more likely to say (as I believe some of the gospels rejected by the Church do say) that
Jesus displayed a divine precocity and began his mission at a miraculously early age. And
there is indeed something strange in the thought that he who of all humanity needed least
preparation seems to have had most. Whether it was some mode of the divine humility, or
some truth of which we see the shadow of the longer domestic tutelage of the higher
creatures of the earth. I do not propose to speculate; I mention it simply as an example
of the sort of thing that does in any case give rise to speculations, quite apart from
recognised religious speculations. Now the whole story is full of these things. It is not
by any means, as baldly presented in print, a story that it is easy to get to the bottom
of. It is anything but what these people talk of as a simple Gospel. 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.
23 First, a man reading the Gospel sayings would not find
platitudes. If he had read even in the most respectful spirit the majority of ancient
philosophers and of modern moralists, he would appreciate the unique importance of saying
that he did not find platitudes. It is more than can be said even of Plato. It is much
more than can be said of Epictetus or Seneca or Marcus Aurelius or Apollonius of Tyana.
And it is immeasurably more than can be said of most of the agnostic moralists and the
preachers of the ethical societies; with their songs of service and their religion of
brotherhood. The morality of most moralists ancient and modern, has been one solid and
polished cataract of platitudes flowing for ever and ever. That would certainly not be the
impression of the imaginary independent outsider studying the New Testament. He would be
conscious of nothing so commonplace and in a sense of nothing so continuous as that
stream. He would find a number of strange claims that might sound like the claim to be the
brother of the sun and moon; a number of very startling pieces of advice; a number of
stunning rebukes; a number of strangely beautiful stories. He would see some very
gigantesque figures of speech about the impossibility of threading a needle with a camel
or the possibility of throwing a mountain into the sea. He would see a number of very
daring simplifications of the difficulties of life; like the advice to shine upon
everybody indifferently as does the sunshine or not to worry about the future any more
than the birds. He would find on the other hand some passages of almost impenetrable
darkness, so far as he is concerned, such as the moral of the parable of the Unjust
Steward. Some of these things might strike him as fables and some as truths; but none as
truisms. For instance, he would not find the ordinary platitudes in favour of peace. He
would find several paradoxes in favour of peace. He would find several ideals of
non-resistance, which taken as they stand would be rather too pacific for any pacifist. He
would be told in one passage to treat a robber not with passive resistance, but rather
with positive and enthusiastic encouragement, if the terms be taken literally; heaping up
gifts upon the man who had stolen goods. But he would not find a word of all that obvious
rhetoric against war which has filled countless books and odes and orations; not a word
about the wickedness of war, the wastefulness of war, the appalling scale of the slaughter
in war and all the rest of the familiar frenzy; indeed not a word about war at all. 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, speaking from the same external and human stand point, that he seems
to have got on much better with Romans than he did with Jews. But the question here is a
certain tone to be appreciated by merely reading a certain text; and we might give any
number of instances of it.
24 The statement that the meek shall inherit the earth is very far
from being a meek statement. I mean it is not meek in the ordinary sense of mild and
moderate and inoffensive. To justify it, it would be necessary to go very deep into
history and anticipate things undreamed of then and by many unrealised even now; such as
the way in which the mystical monks reclaimed the lands which the practical kings had
lost. If it was a truth at all, it was because it was a prophecy. But certainly it was not
a truth in the sense of a truism. The blessing upon the meek would seem to be a very
violent statement; in the sense of doing violence to reason and probability. And with this
we come to another important stage in the speculation. As a prophecy it really was
fulfilled; but it was only fulfilled long afterwards. The monasteries were the most
practical and prosperous estates and experiments in reconstruction after the barbaric
deluge; the meek did really inherit the earth. But nobody could have known anything of the
sort at the time-- unless indeed there was one who knew. Something of the same thing may
be said about the incident of Martha and Mary; which has been interpreted in retrospect
and from the inside by the mystics of the Christian contemplative life. But it was not at
all an obvious view of it; and most moralists, ancient and modern, could be trusted to
make a rush for the obvious. What torrents of effortless eloquence would have flowed from
them to swell any slight superiority on the part of Martha; what splendid sermons about
the Joy of Service and the Gospel of Work and the World Left Better Than We Found It, and
generally all the ten thousand platitudes that can be uttered in favour of taking
trouble--by people who need take no trouble to utter them. If in Mary the mystic and child
of love Christ was guarding the seed of something more subtle, who was likely to
understand it at the time? Nobody else could have seen Clare and Catherine and Teresa
shining above the little roof at Bethany. It is so in another way with that magnificent
menace about bringing into the world a sword to sunder and divide. Nobody could have
guessed then either how it could be fulfilled or how it could be justified. Indeed some
freethinkers are still so simple as to fall into the trap and be shocked at a phrase so
deliberately defiant. They actually complain of the paradox for not being a platitude.
25 But the point here is that if we could read the Gospel reports as
things as new as newspaper reports, they would puzzle us and perhaps terrify us much more
than the same things as developed by historical Christianity. For instance, Christ after a
clear allusion to the eunuchs of 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. It is the historical
religion that humanises it for us by experience of Franciscans or of Sisters of Mercy. The
mere statement standing by itself might very well suggest a rather dehumanised atmosphere;
the sinister and inhuman silence of the Asiatic harem and divan. This is but one instance
out of scores; but the moral is that the Christ of the Gospel might actually seem more
strange and terrible than the Christ of the Church.
26 I am dwelling on the dark or dazzling or defiant or mysterious
side of the Gospel words, not because they had not obviously a more obvious and popular
side, but because this is the answer to a common criticism on a vital point. The
freethinker frequently says that Jesus of Nazareth was a man of his time, even if he was
in advance of his time; and that we cannot accept his ethics as final for humanity. The
freethinker then goes on to criticise his ethics, saying plausibly enough that men cannot
turn the other cheek, or that they must take thought for the morrow, or that the
self-denial is too ascetic or the monogamy too severe. But the Zealots and the Legionaries
did not turn the other cheek any more than we do, if so much. The Jewish traders and Roman
tax-gatherers took thought for the morrow as much as we, if not more. We cannot pretend to
be abandoning the morality of the past for one more suited to the present. It is certainly
not the morality of another age, but it might be of another world.
27 In short, we can say that these ideals are impossible in
themselves. Exactly what we cannot say is that they are impossible for us. They are rather
notably marked by a mysticism which, if it be a sort of madness, would always have struck
the same sort of people as mad. Take, for instance, the case of marriage and the relations
of the sexes. It might very well have been true that a Galilean teacher taught things
natural to a Galilean environment; but it is not. It might rationally be expected that a
man in the time of Tiberius would have advanced a view conditioned by the time of
Tiberius; but he did not. What he advanced was something quite different; something very
difficult; but something no more difficult now than it was then. When, for instance,
Mahomet made his polygamous compromise we may reasonably say that it was conditioned by a
polygamous society. When he allowed a man four wives he was really doing something suited
to the circumstances, which might have been less suited to other circumstances. Nobody
will pretend that the four wives were like the four winds, something seemingly a part of
the order of nature; nobody will say that the figure four was written for ever in stars
upon the sky But neither will anyone say that the figure four is an inconceivable ideal;
that it is beyond the power of the mind of man to count up to four; or to count the number
of his wives and see whether it amounts to four. It is a practical compromise carrying
with it the character of a particular society. If Mahomet had been born in Acton in the
nineteenth century, we may well doubt whether he would instantly have filled that suburb
with harems of four wives apiece. As he was born in Arabia in the sixth century, he did in
his conjugal arrangements suggest the conditions of Arabia in the sixth century. But
Christ in his view of marriage does not in the least suggest the conditions of Palestine
of the first century. He does not suggest anything at all, except the sacramental view of
marriage as developed long afterwards by the Catholic Church. It was quite as difficult
for people then as for people now. It was much more puzzling to people then than to people
now. Jews and Romans and Greeks did not believe, and did not even understand enough to
disbelieve, the mystical idea that the man and the woman had become one sacramental
substance. We may think it an incredible or impossible ideal; but we cannot think it any
more incredible or impossible than they would have thought it. In other words, whatever
else is true, it is not true that the controversy has been altered by time. Whatever else
is true, it is emphatically not true that the ideas of Jesus of Nazareth were suitable to
his time, but are no longer suitable to our time. Exactly how suitable they we to his time
is perhaps suggested in the end of his story.
28 The same truth might be stated in another way by saying that if
the story be regarded as merely human and historical, it is extraordinary how very little
there is in the recorded words of Christ that ties him at all to his own time. I do not
mean the details of a period, which even a man of the period knows to be passing. I mean
the fundamentals which even the wisest man often vaguely assumes to be eternal. For
instance, Aristotle was perhaps the wisest and most wide-minded man who ever lived. He
founded himself entirely upon fundamentals, which have been generally found to remain
rational and solid through all social and historical changes. Still, he lived in a world
in which it was thought as natural to have slaves as to have children. And therefore he
did permit himself a serious recognition of a difference between slaves and free men.
Christ as much as Aristotle lived in a world that took slavery for granted. He did not
particularly denounce slavery. He started a movement that could exist in a world with
slavery. But he started a movement that could exist in a world without slavery. He never
used a phrase that made his philosophy depend even upon the very existence of the social
order in which he lived. He spoke as one conscious that everything was ephemeral,
including the things that Aristotle thought eternal. By that time the Roman Empire had
come to be merely the orbis terrarum, another name for the world. But he never made his
morality dependent on the existence of the Roman Empire or even on the existence of the
world. 'Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.'
29 The truth is that when critics have spoken of the local
limitations of the Galilean, it has always been a case of the local limitations of the
critics. He did undoubtedly believe in certain things that one particular modern sect of
materialists do not believe. But they were not things particularly peculiar to his time.
It would be nearer the truth to say that the denial of them is quite peculiar to our time.
Doubtless it would be nearer still to the truth to say merely that a certain solemn social
importance, in the minority disbelieving them, is peculiar to our time. He believed, for
instance, in evil spirits or in the psychic healing of bodily ills; but not because he was
a Galilean born under Augustus. It is absurd to say that a man believed things because he
was a Galilean under Augustus when he might have believed the same things if he had been
an Egyptian under Tutenkamen or an Indian under Gengis Khan. But with this general
question of the philosophy of diabolism or of divine miracles I deal elsewhere. It is
enough to say that the materialists have to prove the impossibility of miracles against
the testimony of all mankind, not against the prejudices of provincials in North Palestine
under the first Roman Emperors. What they have to prove, for the present argument, is the
presence in the Gospels of those particular prejudices of those particular provincials.
And, humanly speaking, it is astonishing how little they can produce even to make a
beginning of proving it.
30 So it is in this case of the sacrament of marriage. We may not
believe in sacraments, as we may not believe in spirits, but it is quite clear that Christ
believed in this sacrament in his own way and not in any current or contemporary way. He
certainly did not get his argument against divorce from the Mosaic law or the Roman law or
the habits of the Palestinian people. It would appear to his critics then exactly what it
appears to his critics now; an arbitrary and transcendental dogma coming from nowhere save
in the sense that it came from him. I am not at all concerned here to defend that dogma;
the point here is that it is just as easy to defend it now as it was to defend it then. It
is an ideal altogether outside time; difficult at any period; impossible at no period. In
other words, if anyone says it is what might be expected of a man walking about in that
place at that period, we can quite fairly answer that it is much more like what might be
the mysterious utterance of a being beyond man, if he walked alive among men.
31 I maintain therefore that a man reading the New Testament frankly
and freshly would not get the impression of what is now often meant by a human Christ. The
merely human Christ is a made-up figure, a piece of artificial selection, like the merely
evolutionary man. Moreover there have been too many of these human Christs found in the
same story, just as there have been too many keys to mythology found in the same stories.
Three or four separate schools of rationalism have worked over the ground and produced
three or four equally rational explanations of his life. The first rational explanation of
his life was that he never lived. And this in turn gave an opportunity for three or four
different explanations, as that he was a sun-myth or a corn-myth, or any other kind of
myth that is also a monomania. Then the idea that he was a divine being who did not exist
gave place to the idea that he was a human being who did exist. In my youth it vas the
fashion to say that he was merely an ethical teacher in the manner of the Essenes, who had
apparently nothing very much to say that Hillel or a hundred other Jews might not have
said; as that it is a kindly thing to be kind and an assistance to purification to be
pure. Then somebody said he was a madman with a Messianic delusion. Then others said he
was indeed an original teacher because he cared about nothing but Socialism; or (as others
said) about nothing but Pacifism. Then a more grimly scientific character appeared who
said that Jesus would never have been heard of at all except for his prophecies of the end
of the world. He was important merely as a Millenarian like Dr. Cumming; and created a
provincial scare by announcing the exact date of the crack of doom. Among other variants
on the same theme was the theory that he was a spiritual healer and nothing else; a view
implied by Christian Science, which has really to expound a Christianity without the
Crucifixion in order to explain the curing of Peter's wife's mother or the daughter of a
centurion. There is another theory that concentrates entirely on the business of diabolism
and what it would call the contemporary superstition about demoniacs, as if Christ, like a
young deacon taking his first orders, had got as far as exorcism and never got any
further. Now, each of these explanations in itself seems to me singularly inadequate; but
taken together they do suggest something of the very mystery which they miss. There must
surely have been something not only mysterious but many-sided about Christ if so many
smaller Christs can be carved out of him. If the Christian Scientist is satisfied with him
as a spiritual healer and the Christian Socialist is satisfied with him as a social
reformer, so satisfied that they do not even expect him to be anything else, it looks as
if he really covered rather more ground than they could be expected to expect. And it does
seem to suggest that there might be more than they fancy in these other mysterious
attributes of casting out devils or prophesying doom.
32 Above all, would not such a new reader of the New Testament
stumble over something that would startle him much more than it startles us? I have here
more than once attempted the rather impossible task of reversing time and the historic
method; and in fancy looking forward to the facts, instead of backward through the
memories. So I have imagined the monster that man might have seemed at first to the mere
nature around him. We should have a worse shock if we really imagined the nature of Christ
named for the first time. What should we feel at the first whisper of a certain suggestion
about a certain man? Certainly it is not for us to blame anybody who should find that
first wild whisper merely impious and insane. On the contrary, stumbling on that rock of
scandal is the first step. Stark staring incredulity is a far more loyal tribute to that
truth than a modernist metaphysic that would make it out merely a matter of degree. It
were better to rend our robes with a great cry against blasphemy, like Caiaphas in the
judgement, or to lay hold of the man as a maniac possessed of devils like the kinsmen and
the crowd, rather than to stand stupidly debating fine shades of pantheism in the presence
of so catastrophic a claim. There is more of the wisdom that is one with surprise in any
simple person, full of the sensitiveness of simplicity, who should expect the grass to
wither and the birds to drop dead out of the air, when a strolling carpenter's apprentice
said calmly and almost carelessly, like one looking over his shoulder: 'Before Abraham
was, I am.'
III: THE STRANGEST STORY IN THE WORD
33 In the last chapter I have deliberately stressed what seems to be
nowadays a neglected side of the New Testament story, but nobody will suppose, I imagine,
that it is meant to obscure that side that may truly be called human. That Christ was and
is the most merciful of judges and the most sympathetic of friends is a fact of
considerably more importance in our own private lives than in anybody's historical
speculations. But the purpose of this book is to point out that something unique has been
swamped in cheap generalisations; and for that purpose it is relevant to insist that even
what was most universal was also most original. For instance, we might take a topic which
really is sympathetic to the modern mood, as the ascetic vocations recently referred to
are not. The exaltation of childhood is something which we do really understand; but it
was by no means a thing that was then in that sense understood. If we wanted an example of
the originality of the Gospels we could hardly take a stronger or more startling one.
Nearly two thousand years afterwards we happen to find ourselves in a mood that does
really feel the mystical charm of the child; we express it in romances and regrets about
childhood, in Peter Pan or The Child's Garden of verses. And we can say of the words of
Christ with so angry an anti-Christian as Swinburne:--
34 'No sign that ever was given To faithful or faithless eyes Showed
ever beyond clouds riven So clear a paradise.
35 Earth's creeds may be seventy times seven And blood have defiled
each creed But if such be the kingdom of heaven It must be heaven indeed.'
36 But that paradise was not clear until Christianity had gradually
cleared it. The pagan world, as such, would not have understood any such thing as a
serious suggestion that a child is higher or holier than a man. It would have seemed like
the suggestion that a tadpole is higher or holier than a frog. To the merely rationalistic
mind, it would sound like saying that a bud must be more beautiful than a flower or that
an unripe apple must be better than a ripe one. In other words, this modern feeling is an
entirely mystical feeling. It is quite as mystical as the cult of virginity; in fact it is
the cult of virginity. But pagan antiquity had much more idea of the holiness of the
virgin than of the holiness of the child. For various reasons we have come nowadays to
venerate children, perhaps partly because we envy children for still doing what men used
to do; such as play simple games and enjoy fairy-tales. Over and above this, however,
there is a great deal of real and subtle psychology in our appreciation of childhood; but
if we turn it into a modern discovery, we must once more admit that the historical Jesus
of Nazareth had already discovered it two thousand years too soon. There was certainly
nothing in the world around him to help him to the discovery. Here Christ was indeed
human; but more human than a human being was then likely to be. Peter Pan does not belong
to the world of Pan but the world of Peter.
37 Even in the matter of mere literary style, if we suppose
ourselves thus sufficiently detached to look at it in that light, there is a curious
quality to which no critic seems to have done justice. It had among other things a
singular air of piling tower upon tower by the use of the a fortiori; making a pagoda of
degrees like the seven heavens. I have already noted that almost inverted imaginative
vision which pictured the impossible penance of the Cities of the Plain. There is perhaps
nothing so perfect in all language or literature as the use of these three degrees in the
parable of the lilies of the field; in which he seems first to take one small flower in
his hand and note its simplicity and even its impotence; then suddenly expands it in
flamboyant colours into all the palaces and pavilions full of a great name in national
legend and national glory; and then, by yet a third overturn, shrivels into nothing once
more with a gesture as if flinging it away ``and if God so clothes the grass that today is
and tomorrow is cast into the oven-- how much more'' It is like the building of a good
Babel tower by white magic in a moment and in the movement of a hand; a tower heaved
suddenly up to heaven on the top of which can be seen afar off, higher than we had fancied
possible, the figure of man; lifted by three infinities above all other things, on a
starry ladder of light logic and swift imagination. Merely in a literary sense it would be
more of a masterpiece than most of the masterpieces in the libraries; yet it seems to have
been uttered almost at random while a man might pull a flower. But merely in a literary
sense also, this use of the comparative in several degrees has about it a quality which
seems to me to hint of much higher things than the modern suggestion of the simple
teaching of pastoral or communal ethics. There is nothing that really indicates a subtle
and in the true sense a superior mind so much as this power of comparing a lower thing
with a higher and yet that higher with a higher still; of thinking on three planes at
once. There is nothing that wants the rarest sort of wisdom so much as to see, let us say,
that the citizen is higher than the slave and yet that the soul is infinitely higher than
the citizen or the city. It is not by any means a faculty that commonly belongs to these
simplifiers of the Gospel; those who insist on what they call a simple morality and others
call a sentimental morality. It is not at all covered by those who are content to tell
everybody to remain at peace. On the contrary, there is a very striking example of it in
the apparent inconsistency between Christ's sayings about peace and about a sword. It is
precisely this power which perceives that while a good peace is better than a good war,
even a good war is better than a bad peace. These far-flung comparisons are nowhere so
common as in the Gospels; and to me they suggest something very vast. So a thing solitary
and solid, with the added dimension of depth or height, might tower over the flat
creatures living only on a plane.
38 This quality of something that can only be called subtle and
superior, something that is capable of long views and even of double meanings, is not
noted here merely as a counterblast to the commonplace exaggerations of amiability and
mild idealism. It is also to be noted in connection with the more tremendous truth touched
upon at the end of the last chapter. For this is the very last character that commonly
goes with mere megalomania; especially such steep and staggering megalomania as might be
involved in that claim. This quality that can only be called intellectual distinction is
not, of course, an evidence of divinity. But it is an evidence of a probable distaste for
vulgar and vainglorious claims to divinity. A man of that sort, if he were only a man,
would be the last man in the world to suffer from that intoxication by one notion from
nowhere in particular, which is the mark of the self-deluding sensationalist in religion.
Nor is it even avoided by denying that Christ did make this claim. Of no such man as that,
of no other prophet or philosopher of the same intellectual order, would it be even
possible to pretend that he had made it. Even if the Church had mistaken his meaning, it
would still be true that no other historical tradition except the Church had ever even
made the same mistake. Mahomedans did not misunderstand Mahomet and suppose he was Allah.
Jews did not misinterpret Moses and identify him with Jehovah. Why was this claim alone
exaggerated unless this alone was made. Even if Christianity was one vast universal
blunder, it is still a blunder as solitary as the Incarnation.
39 The purpose of these pages is to fix the falsity of certain vague
and vulgar assumptions; and we have here one of the most false. There is a sort of notion
in the air everywhere that all the religions are equal because all the religious founders
were rivals, that they are all fighting for the same starry crown. It is quite false. The
claim to that crown, or anything like that crown, is really so rare as to be unique.
Mahomet did not make it any more than Micah or Malachi. Confucius did not make it any more
that Plato or Marcus Aurelius. Buddha never said he was Bramah. Zoroaster no more claimed
to be Ormuz than to be Ahriman. The truth is that, in the common run of cases, it is just
as we should expect it to be, in common sense and certainly in Christian philosophy. It is
exactly the other way. Normally speaking, the greater a man is, the less likely he is to
make the very greatest claim. Outside the unique case we are considering, the only kind of
man who ever does make that kind of claim is a very small man; a secretive or
self-centered monomaniac. Nobody can imagine Aristotle claiming to be the father of gods
and men, come down from the sky; though we might imagine some insane Roman Emperor like
Caligula claiming it for him, or more probably for himself. Nobody can imagine Shakespeare
talking as if he were literally divine; though we might imagine some crazy American crank
finding it as a cryptogram in Shakespeare's works, or preferably in his own works. It is
possible to find here and there human beings who make this supremely superhuman claim. It
is possible to find them in lunatic asylums; in padded cells; possibly in strait
waistcoats. But what is much more important than their mere materialistic fate in our very
materialistic society, under very crude and clumsy laws about lunacy, the type we know as
tinged with this, or tending towards it, is a diseased and disproportionate type; narrow
yet swollen and morbid to monstrosity. It is by rather an unlucky metaphor that we talk of
a madman as cracked; for in a sense he is not cracked enough. He is cramped rather than
cracked; there are not enough holes in his head to ventilate it. This impossibility of
letting in daylight on a delusion does sometimes cover and conceal a delusion of divinity.
It can be found, not among prophets and sages and founders of religions, but only among a
low set of lunatics. But this is exactly where the argument becomes intensely interesting;
because the argument proves too much. For nobody supposes that Jesus of Nazareth was that
sort of person. No modern critic in his five wits thinks that the preacher of the Sermon
on the Mount was a horrible half-witted imbecile that might be scrawling stars on the
walls of a cell. No atheist or blasphemer believes that the author of the Parable of the
Prodigal Son was a monster with one mad idea like a cyclops with one eye. Upon any
possible historical criticism, he must be put higher in the scale of human beings than
that. Yet by all analogy we have really to put him there or else in the highest place of
all.
40 In, fact, those who can really take it (as I here hypothetically
take it) in a quite dry and detached spirit, have here a most curious and interesting
human problem. It is so intensely interesting, considered as a human problem, that it is
in a spirit quite disinterested, so to speak, that I wish some of them had turned that
intricate human problem into something like an intelligible human portrait. If Christ was
simply a human character, he really was a highly complex and contradictory human
character. For he combined exactly the two things that lie at the two extremes of human
variation. He was exactly what the man with a delusion never is; he was wise; he was a
good judge. What he said was always unexpected; but it was always unexpectedly magnanimous
and often unexpectedly moderate. Take a thing like the point of the parable of the tares
and the wheat. It has the quality that unites sanity and subtlety. It has not the
simplicity of a madman. It has not even the simplicity of a fanatic. It might be uttered
by a philosopher a hundred years old, at the end of a century of Utopias. Nothing could be
less like this quality of seeing beyond and all round obvious things, than the condition
of the egomaniac with the one sensitive spot on his brain. I really do not see how these
two characters could be convincingly combined, except in the astonishing way in which the
creed combines them. For until we reach the full acceptance of the fact as a fact, however
marvellous, all mere approximations to it are actually further and further away from it.
Divinity is great enough to be divine; it is great enough to call itself divine. But as
humanity grows greater, it grows less and less likely to do so. God is God, as the Moslems
say; but a great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it.
That is the paradox; everything that is merely approaching to that point is merely
receding from it. Socrates, the wisest man, knows that he knows nothing. A lunatic may
think he is omniscience, and a fool may talk as if he were omniscient. But Christ is in
another sense omniscient if he not only knows, but knows that he knows.
41 Even on the purely human and sympathetic side, therefore, the
Jesus of the New Testament seems to me to have in a great many ways the note of something
superhuman; that is of something human and more than human. But there is another quality
running through all his teachings which seems to me neglected in most modern talk about
them as teachings; and that is the persistent suggestion that he has not really come to
teach. If there is one incident in the record which affects me personally as grandly and
gloriously human, it is the incident of giving wine for the wedding-feast. That is really
human in the sense in which a whole crowd of prigs, haying the appearance of human beings,
can hardly be described as human. It rises superior to all superior persons. It is as
human as Herrick and as democratic as Dickens. But even in that story there is something
else that has that note of things not fully explained; and in a way here very relevant. I
mean the first hesitation, not on any ground touching the nature of the miracle, but on
that of the propriety of working any miracles at all, at least at that stage; 'my time is
not yet come.' What does that mean? At least it certainly meant a general plan or purpose
in the mind, with which certain things did or did not fit in. And if we leave out that
solitary strategic plan, we not only leave out the point of the story, but the story.
42 We often hear of Jesus of Nazareth as a wandering teacher, and
there is a vital truth in that view in so far as it emphasises an attitude towards luxury
and convention which most respectable people would still regard as that of a vagabond. It
is expressed in his own great saying about the holes of the foxes and the nests of the
birds, and, like many of his great sayings, it is felt as less powerful than it is,
through lack of appreciation of that great paradox by which he spoke of his own humanity
as in some way collectively and representatively human; calling himself simply the Son of
Man; that is, in effect, calling himself simply Man. It is fitting that the New Man or the
Second Adam should repeat in so ringing a voice and with so arresting a gesture the great
fact which came first in the original story, that man differs from the brutes by
everything, even by deficiency; that he is in a sense less normal and even less native; a
stranger upon the earth. It is well to speak of his wanderings in this sense and in the
sense that he shared the drifting life of the most homeless and hopeless of the poor. It
is assuredly well to remember that he would quite certainly have been moved on by the
police and almost certainly arrested by the police for having no visible means of
subsistence. For our law has in it a turn of humour or touch of fancy which Nero and Herod
never happened to think of, that of actually punishing homeless people for not sleeping at
home.
43 But in another sense the word 'wandering' as applied to his life
is a little misleading. As a matter of fact, a great many of the pagan sages and not a few
of the pagan sophists might truly be described as wandering teachers. In some of them
their rambling journeys were not altogether without a parallel in their rambling remarks.
Apollonius of Tyana, who figured in some fashionable cults as a sort of ideal philosopher,
is represented as rambling as far as the Ganges and Ethiopia, more or less talking all the
time. There was actually a school of philosophers called the Peripatetics; and most even
of the great philosophers give us a vague impression of having very little to do except to
walk and talk. The great conversations which give us our glimpses of the great minds of
Socrates or Buddha or even Confucius often seem to be parts of a never-ending picnic; and
especially, which is the important point, to have neither beginning nor end. Socrates did
indeed find the conversation interrupted by the incident of his execution. But it is the
whole point and the whole particular merit, of the position of Socrates that death was
only an interruption and an incident. We miss the real moral importance of the great
philosopher if we miss that point; that he stares at the executioner with an innocent
surprise, and almost an innocent annoyance, at finding anyone so unreasonable as to cut
short a little conversation for the elucidation of truth. He is looking for truth and not
looking for death. Death is but a stone in the road which can trip him up. His work in
life is to wander on the roads of the world and talk about truth for ever. Buddha, on the
other hand, did arrest attention by one gesture; it was the gesture of renunciation, and
therefore in a sense of denial. But by one dramatic negation he passed into a world of
negation that was not dramatic; which he would have been the first to insist was not
dramatic. Here again we miss the particular moral importance of the great mystic if we do
not see the distinction; that it was his whole point that he had done with drama, which
consists of desire and struggle and generally of defeat and disappointment. He passes into
peace and lives to instruct others how to pass into it. Henceforth his life is that of the
ideal philosopher; certainly a far more really ideal philosopher than Apollonius of Tyana;
but still a philosopher in the sense that it is not his business to do anything but rather
to explain everything; in his case, we might almost say, mildly and softly to explore
everything. For the messages are basically different. Christ said 'Seek first the kingdom,
and all these things shall be added unto you.' Buddha said 'Seek first the kingdom, and
then you will need none of these things.'
44 Now compared to these wanderers the life of Jesus went as swift
and straight as a thunderbolt. It was above all things dramatic; it did above all things
consist in doing something that had to be done. It emphatically would not have been done,
if Jesus had walked about the world for ever doing nothing except tell the truth. And even
the external movement of it must not be described as a wandering in the sense of
forgetting that it was a journey. This is where it was a fulfilment of the myths rather
than of the philosophies; it is a journey with a goal and an object, like Jason going to
find the Golden Fleece, or Hercules the golden apples of the Hesperides. The gold that he
was seeking was death. The primary thing that he was going to do was to die. He was going
to do other things equally definite and objective; we might almost say equally external
and material. But from first to last the most definite fact is that he is going to die. No
two things could possibly be more different than the death of Socrates and the death of
Christ. We are meant to feel that the death of Socrates was, from the point of view of his
friends at least, a stupid muddle and miscarriage of justice interfering with the flow of
a humane and lucid, I had almost said a light philosophy. We are meant to feel that Death
was the bride of Christ as Poverty was the bride of St. Francis. We are meant to feel that
his life was in that sense a sort of love-affair with death, a romance of the pursuit of
the ultimate sacrifice. From the moment when the star goes up like a birthday rocket to
the moment when the sun is extinguished like a funeral torch, the whole story moves on
wings with the speed and direction of a drama, ending in an act beyond words.
45 Therefore the story of Christ is the story of a journey, almost
in the manner of a military march; certainly in the manner of the quest of a hero moving
to his achievement or his doom. It is a story that begins in the paradise of Galilee, a
pastoral and peaceful land having really some hint of Eden, and gradually climbs the
rising country into the mountains that are nearer to the storm-clouds and the stars, as to
a Mountain of Purgatory. He may be met as if straying in strange places, or stopped on the
way for discussion or dispute; but his face is set towards the mountain city. That is the
meaning of that great culmination when he crested the ridge and stood at the turning of
the road and suddenly cried aloud, lamenting over Jerusalem. Some light touch of that
lament is in every patriotic poem; or if it is absent, the patriotism stinks with
vulgarity. That is the meaning the stirring and startling incident at the gates of the
Temple, when the tables were hurled like lumber down the steps, and the rich merchants
driven forth with bodily blows; the incident that must be at least as much of a puzzle to
the pacifists as any paradox about non resistence can be to any of the militarists. I have
compared the quest to the journey of Jason, but we must never forget that in a deeper
sense it is rather to be compared to the journey of Ulysses. It was not only a romance of
travel but a romance of return; and of the end of a usurpation. No healthy boy reading the
story regards the rout of the Ithacan suitors as anything but a happy ending. But there
are doubtless some who regard the rout of the Jewish merchants and money changers with
that refined repugnance which never fails to move them in the presence of violence, and
especially of violence against the well-to-do. The point, here however, is that all these
incidents have in them a character of mounting crisis. In other words. these incidents are
not incidental. When Apollonius the ideal philosopher is brought before the judgement-seat
of Domitian and vanishes by magic, the miracle is entirely incidental. It might have
occurred at any time in the wandering life of the Tyanean; indeed, I believe it is
doubtful in date as well as in substance. The ideal philosopher merely vanished, and
resumed his ideal existence somewhere else for an indefinite period. It is characteristic
of the contrast perhaps that Apollonius was supposed to have lived to an almost miraculous
old age. Jesus of Nazareth was less prudent in his miracles. When Jesus was brought before
the judgement-seat of Pontius Pilate, he did not vanish. It was the crisis and the goal;
it was the hour and the power of darkness. It was the supremely supernatural act, of all
his miraculous life, that he did not vanish.
46 Every attempt to amplify that story has diminished it. The task
has been attempted by many men of real genius and eloquence as well as by only too many
vulgar sentimentalists and self-conscious rhetoricians. The tale has been retold with
patronising pathos by elegant sceptics and with fluent enthusiasm by boisterous
best-sellers. It will not be retold here. The grinding power of the plain words of the
Gospel story is like the power of mill-stones; and those who can read them simply enough
will feel as if rocks had been rolled upon them. Criticism is only words about words; and
of what use are words about such words as these? What is the use of word-painting about
the dark garden filled suddenly with torchlight and furious faces? 'Are you come out with
swords and staves as against a robber? All day I sat in your temple teaching, and you took
me not.' Can anything be added to the massive and gathered restraint of that irony; like a
great wave lifted to the sky and refusing to fall? 'Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for
me but weep for yourselves and for your children.' As the High Priest asked what further
need he had of witnesses, we might well ask what further need we have of words. Peter in a
panic repudiated him: 'and immediately the cock crew; and Jesus looked upon Peter, and
Peter went out and wept bitterly.' Has anyone any further remarks to offer. Just before
the murder he prayed for all the murderous race of men, saying, 'They know not what they
do'; is there anything to say to that, except that we know as little what we say? Is there
any need to repeat and spin out the story of how the tragedy trailed up the Via Dolorosa
and how they threw him in haphazard with two thieves in one of the ordinary batches of
execution; and how in all that horror and howling wilderness of desertion one voice spoke
in homage, a startling voice from the very last place where it was looked for, the gibbet
of the criminal; and he said to that nameless ruffian, 'This night shalt thou be with me
in Paradise'? Is there anything to put after that but a full stop? Or is anyone prepared
to answer adequately that farewell gesture to all flesh which created for his Mother a new
Son?
47 It is more within my powers, and here more immediately to my
purpose, to point out that in that scene were symbolically gathered all the human forces
that have been vaguely sketched in this story. As kings and philosophers and the popular
element had been symbolically present at his birth, so they were more practically
concerned in his death; and with that we come face to face with the essential fact to be
realised. All the great groups that stood about the Cross represent in one way or another
the great historical truth of the time; that the world could not save itself. Man could do
no more. Rome and Jerusalem and Athens and everything else were going down like a sea
turned into a slow cataract. Externally indeed the ancient world was still at its
strongest; it is always at that moment that the inmost weakness begins. But in order to
understand that weakness we must repeat what has been said more than once; that it was not
the weakness of a thing originally weak. It was emphatically the strength of the world
that was turned to weakness and the wisdom of the world that was turned to folly.
48 In this story of Good Friday it is the best things in the world
that are at their worst. That is what really shows us the world at its worst. It was, for
instance, the priests of a true monotheism and the soldiers of an international
civilisation. Rome, the legend, founded upon fallen Troy and triumphant over fallen
Carthage, had stood for a heroism which was the nearest that any pagan ever came to
chivalry. Rome had defended the household gods and the human decencies against the ogres
of Africa and the hermaphrodite monstrosities of Greece. But in the lightning flash of
this incident, we see great Rome, the imperial republic, going downward under her
Lucretian doom. Scepticism has eaten away even the confident sanity of the conquerors of
the world. He who is enthroned to say what is justice can only ask: 'What is truth?' So in
that drama which decided the whole fate of antiquity, one of the central figures is fixed
in what seems the reverse of his true role. Rome was almost another name for
responsibility. Yet he stands for ever as a sort of rocking statue of the irresponsible.
Man could do no more. Even the practical had become the impracticable. Standing between
the pillars of his own judgement-seat, a Roman had washed his hands of the world.
49 There too were the priests of that pure and original truth that
was behind all the mythologies like the sky behind the clouds. It was the most important
truth in the world; and even that could not save the world. Perhaps there is something
overpowering in pure personal theism; like seeing the sun and moon and sky come together
to form one staring face. Perhaps the truth is too tremendous when not broken by some
intermediaries divine or human; perhaps it is merely too pure and far away. Anyhow it
could not save the world; it could not even conquer the world. There were philosophers who
held it in its highest and noblest form; but they not only could not convert the world,
but they never tried. You could no more fight the jungle of popular mythology with a
private opinion than you could clear away a forest with a pocket-knife. The Jewish priests
had guarded it jealously in the good and the bad sense. They had kept it as a gigantic
secret. As savage heroes might have kept the sun in a box, they kept the Everlasting in
the tabernacle. They were proud that they alone could look upon the blinding sun of a
single deity; and they did not know that they had themselves gone blind. Since that day
their representatives have been like blind men in broad daylight, striking to right and
left with their staffs, and cursing the darkness. But there has been that in their
monumental monotheism that it has at least remained like a monument, the last thing of its
kind, and in a sense motionless in the more restless world which it cannot satisfy. For it
is certain that for some reason it cannot satisfy. Since that day it has never been quite
enough to say that God is in his heaven and all is right with the world, since the rumour
that God had left his heavens to set it right.
50 And as it was with these powers that were good, or at least had
once been good, so it was with the element which was perhaps the best, or which Christ
himself seems certainly to have felt as the best. The poor to whom he preached the good
news, the common people who heard him gladly, the populace that had made so many popular
heroes and demigods in the old pagan world, showed also the weaknesses that were
dissolving the world. They suffered the evils often seen in the mob of the city, and
especially the mob of the capital, during the decline of a society. The same thing that
makes the rural population live on tradition makes the urban population live on rumour.
Just as its myths at the best had been irrational, so its likes and dislikes are easily
changed by baseless assertion that is arbitrary without being authoritative. Some brigand
or other was artificially turned into a picturesque and popular figure and run as a kind
of candidate against Christ. In all this we recognise the urban population that we know,
with its newspaper scares and scoops. But there was present in this ancient population an
evil more peculiar to the ancient world. We have noted it already as the neglect of the
individual, even of the individual voting the condemnation and still more of the
individual condemned. It was the soul of the hive; a heathen thing. The cry of this spirit
also was heard in that hour, 'It is well that one man die for the people.' Yet this spirit
in antiquity of devotion to the city and to the state had also been in itself and in its
time a noble spirit. It had its poets and its martyrs; men still to be honoured for ever.
It was failing through its weakness in not seeing the separate soul of a man, the shrine
of all mysticism; but it was only failing as everything else was failing. The mob went
along with the Sadducees and the Pharisees, the philosophers and the moralists. It went
along with the imperial magistrates and the sacred priests, the scribes and the soldiers,
that the one universal human spirit might suffer a universal condemnation; that there
might be one deep, unanimous chorus of approval and harmony when Man was rejected of men.
51 There were solitudes beyond where none shall follow. There were
secrets in the inmost and invisible part of that drama that have no symbol in speech; or
in any severance of a man from men. Nor is it easy for any words less stark and
single-minded than those of the naked narrative even to hint at the horror of exaltation
that lifted itself above the hill. Endless expositions have not come to the end of it, or
even to the beginning. And if there be any sound that can produce a silence, we may surely
be silent about the end and the extremity; when a cry was driven out of that darkness in
words dreadfully distinct and dreadfully unintelligible, which man shall never understand
in all the eternity they have purchased for him; and for one annihilating instant an abyss
that is not for our thoughts had opened even in the unity of the absolute; and God had
been forsaken of God.
52 They took the body down from the cross and one of the few rich
men among the first Christians obtained permission to bury it in a rock tomb in his
garden; the Romans setting a military guard lest there should be some riot and attempt to
recover the body. There was once more a natural symbolism in these natural proceedings; it
was well that the tomb should be sealed with all the secrecy of ancient eastern sepulture
and guarded by the authority of the Caesars. For in that second cavern the whole of that
great and glorious humanity which we call antiquity was gathered up and covered over; and
in that place it was buried. It was the end of a very great thing called human history;
the history that was merely human. The mythologies and the philosophies were buried there,
the gods and the heroes and the sages. In the great Roman phrase, they had lived. But as
they could only live, so they could only die; and they were dead.
53 On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the
place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realised the
new wonder; but even they hardly realised that the world had died in the night. What they
were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth;
and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the
evening but the dawn.
IV: THE WITNESS OF THE HERETICS
54 Christ founded the Church with two great figures of speech; in
the final words to the Apostles who received authority to found it. The first was the
phrase about founding it on Peter as on a rock; the second was the symbol of the keys.
About the meaning of the former there is naturally no doubt in my own case; but it does
not directly affect the argument here save in two more secondary aspects. It is yet
another example of a thing that could only fully expand and explain itself afterwards, and
even long afterwards. And it is yet another example of something the very reverse of
simple and self-evident even in the language, in so far as it described a man as a rock
when he had much more the appearance of a reed.
55 But the other image of the keys has an exactitude that has hardly
been exactly noticed. The keys have been conspicuous enough in the art and heraldry of
Christendom; but not everyone has noted the peculiar aptness of the allegory. We have now
reached the point in history where something must be said of the first appearance and
activities of the Church in the Roman Empire; and for that brief description nothing could
be more perfect than that ancient metaphor. The Early Christian was very precisely a
person carrying about a key, or what he said was a key. The whole Christian movement
consisted in claiming to possess that key. It was not merely a vague forward movement,
which might be better represented by a battering-ram. It was not something that swept
along with it similar or dissimilar things, as does a modern social movement. As we shall
see in a moment, it rather definitely refused to do so. It definitely asserted that there
was a key and that it possessed that key and that no other key was like it; in that sense
it was as narrow as you please. Only it happened to be the key that could unlock the
prison of the whole world; and let in the white daylight of liberty.
56 The creed was like a key in three respects; which can be most
conveniently summed up under this symbol. First, a key is above all things a thing with a
shape It is a thing that depends entirely upon keeping its shape. The Christian creed is
above all things the philosophy of shapes and the enemy of shapelessness. That is where it
differs from all that formless infinity, Manichean or Buddhist, which makes a sort of pool
of night in the dark heart of Asia; the ideal of uncreating all the creatures. That is
where it differs also from the analogous vagueness of mere evolutionism, the idea of
creatures constantly losing their shape. A man told that his solitary latchkey had been
melted down with a million others into a Buddhistic unity would be annoyed. But a man told
that his key was gradually growing and sprouting in his pocket, and branching into new
wards or complications, would not be more gratified.
57 Second, the shape of a key is in itself a rather fantastic shape.
A savage who did not know it was a key would have the greatest difficulty in guessing what
it could possibly be. And it is fantastic because it is in a sense arbitrary. A key is not
a matter of abstractions; in that sense a key is not a matter of argument. It either fits
the lock or it does not. It is useless for men to stand disputing over it, considered by
itself; or reconstructing it on pure principles of geometry or decorative art. It is
senseless for a man to say he would like a simple key; it would be far more sensible to do
his best with a crowbar. And thirdly, as the key is necessarily a thing with a pattern, so
this was one having in some ways a rather elaborate pattern. When people complain of the
religion being so early complicated with theology and things of the kind, they forget that
the world had not only got into a hole, but had got into a whole maze of holes and
corners. The problem itself was a complicated problem; it did not in the ordinary sense
merely involve anything so simple as sin. It was also full of secrets, of unexplored and
unfathomable fallacies, of unconscious mental diseases, of dangers in all directions. If
the faith had faced the world only with the platitudes about peace and simplicity some
moralists would confine it to, it would not have had the faintest effect on that luxurious
and labyrinthine lunatic asylum. What it did do we must now roughly describe; it is enough
to say here that there was undoubtedly much about the key that seemed complex, indeed
there was only one thing about it that was simple. It opened the door.
58 There are certain recognised and accepted statements in this
matter which may for brevity and convenience be described as lies. We have all heard
people say that Christianity arose in an age of barbarism. They might just as well say
that Christian Science arose in an age of barbarism. They may think Christianity was a
symptom of social decay, as I think Christian Science a symptom of mental decay. They may
think Christianity a superstition that ultimately destroyed a civilisation, as I think
Christian Science a superstition capable (if taken seriously) of destroying any number of
civilisations. But to say that a Christian of the fourth or fifth centuries was a
barbarian living in a barbarous time is exactly like saying that Mrs. Eddy was a Red
Indian. And if I allowed my constitutional impatience with Mrs. Eddy to impel me to call
her a Red Indian, I should incidentally be telling a lie. We may like or dislike the
imperial civilisation of Rome in the fourth century; we may like or dislike the industrial
civilisation of America in the nineteenth century; but that they both were what we
commonly mean by a civilisation no person of commonsense could deny if he wanted to. This
is a very obvious fact but it is also a very fundamental one; and we must make it the
foundation of any further description of constructive Christianity in the past. For good
or evil, it was pre-eminently the product of a civilised age, perhaps of an over-civilised
age. This is the first fact apart from all praise or blame; indeed I am so unfortunate as
not to feel that I praise a thing when I compare it to Christian Science. But it is at
least desirable to know something of the savour of a society in which we are condemning or
praising anything; and the science that connects Mrs. Eddy with tomahawks or the Mater
Dolorosa with totems may for our general convenience be eliminated. The dominant fact, not
merely about the Christian religion, but about the whole pagan civilisation, was that
which has been more than once repeated in these pages. The Mediterranean was a lake in the
real sense of a pool; in which a number of different cults or cultures were, as the phrase
goes, pooled. Those cities facing each other round the circle of the lake became more and
more one cosmopolitan culture. On its legal and military side it was the Roman Empire, but
it was very many-sided. It might be called superstitious in the sense that it contained a
great number of varied superstitions; but by no possibility can any part of it be called
barbarous.
59 In this level of cosmopolitan culture arose the Christian
religion and the Catholic Church; and everything in the story suggests that it was felt to
be something new and strange. Those who have tried to suggest that it evolved out of
something much milder or more ordinary have found that in this case their evolutionary
method is very difficult to apply. They may suggest that Essenes or Ebionites or such
things were the seed; but the seed is invisible; the tree appears very rapidly full-grown;
and the tree is something totally different. It is certainly a Christmas tree in the sense
that it keeps the kindliness and moral beauty of the story of Bethlehem; but it was as
ritualistic as the seven-branched candlestick, and the candles it carried were
considerably more than were probably permitted by the first prayer-book of Edward the
Sixth. It might well be asked, indeed, why any one accepting the Bethlehem tradition
should object to golden or gilded ornament since the Magi themselves brought gold, why he
should dislike incense in the church since incense was brought even to the stable. But
these are controversies that do not concern me here. I am concerned only with the
historical fact, more and more admitted by historians, that very early in its history this
thing became visible to the civilisation of antiquity; and that already the Church
appeared as a Church; with everything that is implied in a Church and much that is
disliked in a Church. We will discuss in a moment how far it was like other ritualistic or
magical or ascetical mysteries in its own time. It was certainly not in the least like
merely ethical and idealistic movements in our time. It had a doctrine; it had a
discipline; it had sacraments; it had degrees of initiation, it admitted people and
expelled people; it affirmed one dogma with authority and repudiated another with
anathemas. If all these things be the marks of Antichrist, the reign of Antichrist
followed very rapidly upon Christ.
60 Those who maintain that Christianity was not a Church but a moral
movement of idealists have been forced to push the period of its perversion or
disappearance further and further back. A bishop of Rome writes claiming authority in the
very lifetime of St. John the Evangelist; and it is described as the first papal
aggression. A friend of the Apostles writes of them as men he knew and says they taught
him the doctrine of the Sacrament, and Mr. Wells can only murmur that the reaction towards
barbaric blood-rites may have happened rather earlier than might be expected. The date of
the Fourth Gospel, which at one time was steadily growing later and later, is now steadily
growing earlier and earlier; until critics are staggered at the dawning and dreadful
possibility that it might be something like what it professes to be. The last limit of an
early date for the extinction of true Christianity has probably been found by the latest
German professor whose authority is invoked by Dean Inge. This learned scholar says that
Pentecost was the occasion for the first founding of an ecclesiastical, dogmatic, and
despotic Church utterly alien to the simple ideals of Jesus of Nazareth. This may be
called, in a popular as well as a learned sense, the limit. What do professors of this
kind imagine that men are made of? Suppose it were a matter of any merely human movement,
let us say that of the conscientious objectors. Some say the early Christians were
Pacifists; I do not believe it for a moment; but I am quite ready to accept the parallel
for the sake of the argument. Tolstoy or some great preacher of peace among peasants has
been shot as a mutineer for defying conscription; and a little while afterwards his few
followers meet together in an upper room in remembrance of him. They never had any reason
for coming together except that common memory; they are men of many kinds with nothing to
bind them, except that the greatest event in all their lives was this tragedy of the
teacher of universal peace. They are always repeating his words, revolving his problems,
trying to imitate his character. The Pacifists meet at their Pentecost and are possessed
of a sudden ecstasy of enthusiasm and wild rush of the whirlwind of inspiration, in the
course of which they proceed to establish universal Conscription, to increase the Navy
Estimates, to insist on everybody going about armed to the teeth and on all the frontiers
bristling with artillery; the proceedings concluded with the singing of 'Boys of the
Bulldog Breed' and 'Don't let them scrap the British Navy.' That is something like a fair
parallel to the theory of these critics; that the transition from their idea of Jesus to
their idea of Catholicism could have been made in the little upper room at Pentecost.
Surely anybody's commonsense would tell him that enthusiasts who only met through their
common enthusiasm for a leader whom they loved, would not instantly rush away to establish
everything that he hated. No, if the 'ecclesiastical and dogmatic system' is as old as
Pentecost it is as old as Christmas. If we trace it back to such very early Christians we
must trace it back to Christ.
61 We may begin then with these two negations. It is nonsense to say
that the Christian faith appeared in a simple age; in the sense of an unlettered and
gullible age. It is equally nonsense to say that the Christian faith was a simple thing;
in the sense of a vague or childish or merely instinctive thing. Perhaps the only point in
which we could possibly say that the Church fitted into the pagan world, is the fact that
they were both not only highly civilised but rather complicated. They were both
emphatically many-sided; but antiquity was then a many-sided hole, like a hexagonal hole
waiting for an equally hexagonal stopper. In that sense only the Church was many-sided
enough to fit the world. The six sides of the Mediterranean world faced each other across
the sea and waited for something that should look all ways at once. The Church had to be
both Roman and Greek and Jewish and African and Asiatic. In the very words of the Apostle
of the Gentiles, it was indeed all things to all men. Christianity then was not merely
crude and simple and was the very reverse of the growth of a barbaric time. But when we
come to the contrary charge, we come to a much more plausible charge. It is very much more
tenable that the Faith was but the final phase of the decay of civilisation, in the sense
of the excess of civilisation; that this superstition was a sign that Rome was dying, and
dying of being much too civilised. That is an argument much better worth considering; and
we will proceed to consider it.
62 At the beginning of this book I ventured on a general summary of
it, in a parallel between the rise of humanity out of nature and the rise of Christianity
out of history. I pointed out that in both cases what had gone before might imply
something coming after; but did not in the least imply what did come after. If a detached
mind had seen certain apes it might have deduced more anthropoids; it would not have
deduced man or anything within a thousand miles of what man has done. In short, it might
have seen Pithacanthropus or the Missing Link looming in the future, if possible almost as
dimly and doubtfully as we see him looming in the past. But if it foresaw him appearing it
would also foresee him disappearing, and leaving a few faint traces just as he has left a
few faint traces; if they are traces. To foresee that Missing Link would not be to foresee
Man, or anything like Man. Now this earlier explanation must be kept in mind; because it
is an exact parallel to the true view of the Church; and the suggestion of it having
evolved naturally out of the Empire in decay.
63 The truth is that in one sense a man might very well have
predicted that the imperial decadence would produce something like Christianity. That is,
something a little like and gigantically different. A man might very well have said, for
instance, 'Pleasure has been pursued so extravagantly that there will be a reaction into
pessimism. Perhaps it will take the form of asceticism; men will mutilate themselves
instead of merely hanging themselves.' Or a man might very reasonably have said, 'If we
weary of our Greek and Latin gods we shall be hankering after some eastern mystery or
other; there will be a fashion in Persians or Hindoos.' Or a man of the world might well
have been shrewd enough to say, 'Powerful people are picking up these fads; some day the
court will adopt one of them and it may become official.' Or yet another and gloomier
prophet might be pardoned for saying, 'The world is going down-hill; dark and barbarous
superstitions will return, it does not matter much which. They will all be formless and
fugitive like dreams of the night.'
64 Now it is the intense interest of the case that all these
prophecies were really fulfilled; but it was not the Church that fulfilled them. It was
the Church that escaped from them, confounded them, and rose above them in triumph. In so
far as it was probable that the mere nature of hedonism would produce a mere reaction of
asceticism it did produce a mere reaction of asceticism. It was the movement called
Manichean and the Church was its mortal enemy. In so far as it would have naturally
appeared at that point of history, it did appear; it did also disappear, which was equally
natural. The mere pessimist reaction did come with the Manichees and did go with the
Manichees But the Church did not come with them or go with them; and she had much more to
do with them going than with their coming. Or again, in so far as it was probable that
even the growth of scepticism would bring in a fashion of eastern religion, it did bring
it in; Mithras came from far beyond Palestine out of the heart of Persia, bringing strange
mysteries of the blood of bulls. Certainly there was everything to show that some such
fashion would have come in any case but certainly there is nothing in the world to show
that it would not have passed away in any case. Certainly an Oriental fad was something
eminently fitted to the fourth or fifth century; but that hardly explains it having
remained to the twentieth century, and still going strong. In short, in so far as things
of the kind might have been expected then, things like Mithraism were experienced then;
but it scarcely explains our more recent experiences. And if we were still Mithraists
merely because Mithraic head-dresses and other Persian apparatuses might be expected to be
all the rage in the days of Domitian, it would almost seem by this time that we must be a
little dowdy.
65 It is the same, as will be suggested in a moment, with the idea
of official favouritism. In so far as such favouritism shown towards a fad was something
that might have been looked for during the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, it was
something that did exist in that Empire and did decline and fall with it. It throws no
sort of light on the thing that resolutely refused to decline and fall; that grew steadily
while the other was declining and falling; and which even at this moment is going forward
with fearless energy, when an other aeon has completed its cycle and another civilisation
seems almost ready to fall or to decline.
66 Now the curious fact is this; that the very heresies which the
early Church is blamed for crushing testify to the unfairness for which she is blamed. In
so far as something deserved the blame, it was precisely the things that she is blamed for
blaming. In so far as something was merely a superstition, she herself condemned that
superstition. In so far as something was a mere reaction into barbarism, she herself
resisted it because it was a reaction into barbarism. In so far as something was a fad of
the fading empire, that died and deserved to die, it was the Church alone that killed it.
The Church is reproached for being exactly what the heresy was repressed for being The
explanations of the evolutionary historians and higher critics do really explain why
Arianism and Gnosticism and Nestorianism were born--and also why they died. They do not
explain why the Church was born or why she has refused to die. Above all, they do not
explain why she should have made war on the very evils she is supposed to share.
67 Let us take a few practical examples of the principle; the
principle that if there was anything that was really a superstition of the dying empire,
it did really die with the dying empire; and certainly was not the same as the very thing
that destroyed it. For this purpose we will take in order two or three of the most
ordinary explanations of Christian origins among the modern critics of Christianity.
Nothing is more common, for instance, than to find such a modern critic writing something
like this: 'Christianity was above all a movement of ascetics, a rush into the desert, a
refuge in the cloister, a renunciation of all life and happiness; and this was a part of a
gloomy and in human reaction against nature itself, a hatred of the body, a horror of the
material universe, a sort of universal suicide of the senses and even of the self. It came
from an eastern fanaticism like that of the fakirs and was ultimately founded on an
eastern pessimism, which seems to feel existence itself as an evil.'
68 Now the most extraordinary thing about this is that it is all
quite true; it is true in every detail except that it happens to be attributed entirely to
the wrong person. It is not true of the Church; but it is true of the heretics condemned
by the Church. It is as if one were to write a most detailed analysis of the mistakes and
misgovernment of the ministers of George the Third, merely with the small inaccuracy that
the whole story was told about George Washington; or as if somebody made a list of the
crimes of the Bolshevists with no variation except that they were all attributed to the
Czar. The early Church was indeed very ascetic in connection with a totally different
philosophy; but the philosophy of a war on life and nature as such really did exist in the
world, if the critics only knew where to look for it.
69 What really happened was this. When the Faith first emerged into
the world, the very first thing that happened to it was that it was caught in a sort of
swarm of mystical and metaphysical sects, mostly out of the East; like one lonely golden
bee caught in a swarm of wasps. To the ordinary onlooker, there did not seem to be much
difference, or anything beyond a general buzz; indeed in a sense there was not much
difference so far as stinging and being stung were concerned. The difference was that only
one golden dot in all that whirring gold-dust had the power of going forth to make hives
for all humanity; to give the world honey and wax or (as was so finely said in a context
too easily forgotten) 'the two noblest things, which are sweetness and light.' The wasps
all died that winter; and half the difficulty is that hardly anyone knows anything about
them and most people do not know that they ever existed; so that the whole story of that
first phase of our religion is lost. Or, to vary the metaphor, when this movement or some
other movement pierced the dyke between the east and west and brought more mystical ideas
into Europe, it brought with it a whole flood of other mystical ideas besides its own,
most of them ascetical and nearly all of them pessimistic. They very nearly flooded and
over-whelmed the purely Christian element. They came mostly from that region that was a
sort of dim borderland between the eastern philosophies and the eastern mythologies, and
which shared with the wilder philosophers that curious crave for making fantastic patterns
of the cosmos in the shape of maps and genealogical trees. Those that are supposed to
derive from the mysterious Manes are called Manichean; kindred cults are more generally
known as Gnostic; they are mostly of a labyrinthine complexity, but the point to insist on
is the pessimism; the fact that nearly all in one form or another regarded the creation of
the world as the work of an evil spirit. Some of them had that Asiatic atmosphere that
surrounds Buddhism; the suggestion that life is a corruption of the purity of being. Some
of them suggested a purely spiritual order which had been betrayed by the coarse and
clumsy trick of making such toys as the sun and moon and stars. Anyhow all this dark tide
out of the metaphysical sea in the midst of Asia poured through the dykes simultaneously
with the creed of Christ; but it is the whole point of the story that the two were not the
same; that they flowed like oil and water. That creed remained in the shape of a miracle;
a river still flowing through the sea. And the proof of the miracle was practical once
more; it was merely that while all that sea was salt and bitter with the savour of death,
of this one stream in the midst of it a man could drink.
70 Now that purity was preserved by dogmatic definitions and
exclusions. It could not possibly have been preserved by anything else If the Church had
not renounced the Manicheans it might have become merely Manichean. If it had not
renounced the Gnostics it might have become Gnostic. But by the very fact that it did
renounce them it proved that it was not either Gnostic or Manichean. At any rate it proved
that something was not either Gnostic or Manichean; and what could it be that condemned
them, if it was not the original good news of the runners from Bethlehem and the trumpet
of the Resurrection? The early Church was ascetic, but she proved that she was not
pessimistic, simply by condemning the pessimists. The creed declared that man was sinful,
but it did not declare that life was evil, and it proved it by damning those who did. The
condemnation of the early heretics is itself condemned as something crabbed and narrow;
but it was in truth the very proof that the Church meant to be brotherly and broad. It
proved that the primitive Catholics were specially eager to explain that they did not
think man utterly vile; that they did not think life incurably miserable; that they did
not think marriage a sin or procreation a tragedy. They were ascetic because asceticism
was the only possible purge of the sins of the world; but in the very thunder of their
anathemas they affirmed for ever that their asceticism was not to be anti-human or
anti-natural; that they did wish to purge the world and not destroy it. And nothing else
except those anathemas could possibly have made it clear, amid a confusion which still
confuses them with their mortal enemies. Nothing else but dogma could have resisted the
riot of imaginative invention with which the pessimists were waging their war against
nature; with their Aeons and their Demiurge, their strange Logos and their sinister
Sophia. If the Church had not insisted on theology, it would have melted into a mad
mythology of the mystics, yet further removed from reason or even from rationalism; and,
above all yet further removed from life and from the love of life. Remember that it would
have been an inverted mythology, one contradicting everything natural in paganism; a
mythology in which Pluto would be above Jupiter and Hades hang higher than Olympus; in
which Brahma and all that has the breath of life would be subject to Seeva, shining with
the eye of death.
71 That the early Church was itself full of an ecstatic enthusiasm
for renunciation and virginity makes this distinction much more striking and not less so.
It makes all the more important the place where the dogma drew the line. A man might crawl
about on all fours like a beast because he was an ascetic. He might stand night and day on
the top of a pillar and be adored for being an ascetic, but he could not say that the
world was a mistake or the marriage state a sin without being a heretic. What was it that
thus deliberately disengaged itself from eastern asceticism by sharp definition and fierce
refusal, if it was not something with an individuality of its own; and one that was quite
different? If the Catholics are to be confused with the Gnostics, we can only say it was
not their fault if they are. And it is rather hard that the Catholics should be blamed by
the same critics for persecuting the heretics and also for sympathising with the heresy.
72 The Church was not a Manichean movement if only because it was
not a movement at all. It was not even merely an ascetical movement, because it was not a
movement at all. It would be nearer the truth to call it the tamer of asceticism than the
mere leader or loosener of it. It was a thing having its own theory of asceticism, its own
type of asceticism, but most conspicuous at the moment as the moderator of other theories
and types. This is the only sense that can be made, for instance, of the story of St.
Augustine. As long as he was a mere man of the world, a mere man drifting with his time,
he actually was a Manichean. It really was quite modern and fashionable to be a Manichean.
But when he became a Catholic, the people he instantly turned on and rent in pieces were
the Manicheans. The Catholic way of putting it is that he left off being a pessimist to
become an ascetic. But as the pessimists interpreted asceticism, it ought to be said that
he left off being an ascetic to become a saint. The war upon life, the denial of nature,
were exactly the things he had already found in the heathen world outside the Church, and
had to renounce when he entered the Church. The very fact that St Augustine remains a
somewhat sterner or sadder figure than St. Francis or St. Teresa only accentuates the
dilemma. Face to face with the gravest or even grimmest of Catholics, we can still ask,
'Why did Catholicism make war on Manichees, if Catholicism was Manichean?'
73 Take another rationalistic explanation of the rise of
Christendom. It is common enough to find another critic saying, 'Christianity did not
really rise at all; that is, it did not merely rise from below; it was imposed from above.
It is an example of the power of the executive, especially in despotic states. The Empire
was really an Empire; that is, it was really ruled by the Emperor. One of the Emperors
happened to become a Christian. He might just as well have become a Mithraist or a Jew or
a Fire-Worshipper; it was common in the decline of the Empire for eminent and educated
people to adopt these eccentric eastern cults. But when he adopted it, it became the
official religion of the Roman Empire; and when it became the official religion of the
Roman Empire, it became as strong, as universal and as invincible as the Roman Empire. It
has only remained in the world as a relic of that Empire; or, as many have put it, it is
but the ghost of Caesar still hovering over Rome.' This also is a very ordinary line taken
in the criticism of orthodoxy, to say that it was only officialism that ever made it
orthodoxy. And here again we can call on the heretics to refute it.
74 The whole great history of the Arian heresy might have been
invented to explode this idea. It is a very interesting history often repeated in this
connection; and the upshot of it is in that in so far as there ever was a merely official
religion, it actually died because it was merely an official religion; and what destroyed
it was the real religion. Arius advanced a version of Christianity which moved, more or
less vaguely, in the direction of what we should call Unitarianism; though it was not the
same, for it gave to Christ a curious intermediary position between the divine and human.
The point is that it seemed to many more reasonable and less fanatical; and among these
were many of the educated class in a sort of reaction against the first romance of
conversion. Arians were a sort of moderates and a sort of modernists. And it was felt that
after the first squabbles this was the final form of rationalised religion into which
civilisation might well settle down. It was accepted by Divus Caesar himself and became
the official orthodoxy; the generals and military princes drawn from the new barbarian
powers of the north, full of the future, supported it strongly. But the sequel is still
more important. Exactly as a modern man might pass through Unitarianism to complete
agnosticism, so the greatest of the Arian emperors ultimately shed the last and thinnest
pretense of Christianity; he abandoned ever Arius and returned to Apollo. He was a Caesar
of the Caesars; a soldier, a scholar, a man of large ambitions and ideals; another of the
philosopher kings. It seemed to him as if at his signal the sun rose again. The oracles
began to speak like birds beginning to sing at dawn; paganism was itself again; the gods
returned. It seemed the end of that strange interlude of an alien superstition. And indeed
it was the end of it, so far as there was a mere interlude of mere superstition. It was
the end of it, in so far as it was the fad of an emperor or the fashion of a generation.
If there really was something that began with Constantine, then it ended with Julian.
75 But there was something that did not end. There had arisen in
that hour of history, defiant above the democratic tumult of the Councils of the Church,
Athanasius against the world. We may pause upon the point at issue; because it is relevant
to the whole of this religious history, and the modern world seems to miss the whole point
of it. We might put it this way. If there is one question which the enlightened and
liberal have the habit of deriding and holding up as a dreadful example of barren dogma
and senseless sectarian strife, it is this Athanasian question of the Co-Eternity of the
Divine Son. On the other hand, if there is one thing that the same liberals always offer
us as a piece of pure and simple Christianity, untroubled by doctrinal disputes, it is the
single sentence, 'God is Love.' Yet the two statements are almost identical; at least one
is very nearly nonsense without the other. The barren dogma is only the logical way of
stating the beautiful sentiment. For if there be a being without beginning, existing
before all things, was He loving when there was nothing to be loved? If through that
unthinkable eternity He is lonely, what is the meaning of saying He is love? The only
justification of such a mystery is the mystical conception that in His own nature there
was something analogous to self-expression; something of what begets and beholds what it
has begotten. Without some such idea, it is really illogical to complicate the ultimate
essence of deity with an idea like love. If the moderns really want a simple religion of
love, they must look for it in the Athanasian Creed. The truth is that the trumpet of true
Christianity, the challenge of the charities and simplicities of Bethlehem or Christmas
Day never rang out more arrestingly and unmistakably than in the defiance of Athanasius to
the cold compromise of the Arians. It was emphatically he who really was fighting for a
God of Love against a God of colourless and remote cosmic control; the God of the stoics
and the agnostics. It was emphatically he who was fighting for the Holy Child against the
grey deity of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He was fighting for that very balance of
beautiful interdependence and intimacy, in the very Trinity of the Divine Nature, that
draws our hearts to the Trinity of the Holy Family. His dogma, if the phrase be not
misunderstood, turns even God into a Holy Family.
76 That this purely Christian dogma actually for a second time
rebelled against the Empire, and actually for a second time refounded the Church in spite
of the Empire, is itself a proof that there was something positive and personal working in
the world, other than whatever official faith the Empire chose to adopt. This power
utterly destroyed the official faith that the Empire did adopt. It went on its own way as
it is going on its own way still. There are any number of other examples in which is
repeated precisely the same process we have reviewed in the case of the Manichean and the
Arian. A few centuries afterwards, for instance, the Church had to maintain the same
Trinity, which is simply the logical side of love, against another appearance of the
isolated and simplified deity in the religion of Islam. Yet there are some who cannot see
what the Crusaders were fighting for; and some even who talk as if Christianity had never
been anything but a form of what they call Hebraism coming in with the decay of Hellenism.
Those people must certainly be very much puzzled by the war between the Crescent and the
Cross. If Christianity had never been anything but a simpler morality sweeping away
polytheism, there is no reason why Christendom should not have been swept into Islam. The
truth is that Islam itself was a barbaric reaction against that very humane complexity
that is really a Christian character; that idea of balance in the deity, as of balance in
the family, that makes that creed a sort of sanity, and that sanity the soul of
civilisation. And that is why the Church is from the first a thing holding its own
position and point of view, quite apart from the accidents and anarchies of its age. That
is why it deals blows impartially right and left, at the pessimism of the Manichean or the
optimism of the Pelagian. It was not a Manichean movement because it was not a movement at
all. It was not an official fashion because it was not a fashion at all. It was something
that could coincide with movements and fashions, could control them and could survive
them.
77 So might rise from their graves the great heresiarchs to confound
their comrades of to-day. There is nothing that the critics now affirm that we cannot call
on these great witnesses to deny. The modern critic will say lightly enough that
Christianity was but a reaction into asceticism and anti-natural spirituality, a dance of
fakirs furious against life and love. But Manes the great mystic will answer them from his
secret throne and cry, 'These Christians have no right to be called spiritual; these
Christians have no title to be called ascetics, they who compromised with the curse of
life and all the filth of the family. Through them the earth is still foul with fruit and
harvest and polluted with population Theirs was no movement against nature, or my children
would have carried it to triumph; but these fools renewed the world when I would have
ended it with a gesture.' And another critic will write that the Church was but the shadow
of the Empire, the fad of a chance Emperor, and that it remains in Europe only as the
ghost of the power of Rome. And Arius the deacon will answer out of the darkness of
oblivious 'No, indeed, or the world would have followed my more reasonable religion. For
mine went down before demagogues and men defying Caesar; and around my champion was the
purple cloak and mine was the glory of the eagles. It was not for lack of these things
that I failed. And yet a third modern will maintain that the creed spread only as a sort
of panic of hell-fire; men everywhere attempting impossible things in fleeing from
incredible vengeance; a nightmare of imaginary remorse; and such an explanation will
satisfy many who see something dreadful in the doctrine of orthodoxy. And then there will
go up against it the terrible voice of Tertullian, saying, 'And why then was I cast out;
and why did soft hearts and heads decide against me when I proclaimed the perdition of all
sinners; and what was this power that thwarted me when I threatened all backsliders with
hell? For none ever went up that hard road so far as I; and mine was the Credo Quia
Impossible.' Then there is the fourth suggestion that there was something of the Semitic
secret society in the whole matter; that it was a new invasion of the nomad spirit shaking
a kindlier and more comfortable paganism, its cities and its household gods; whereby the
jealous monotheistic races could after all establish their jealous God. And Mahomet shall
answer out of the whirlwind, the red whirlwind of the desert, 'Who ever served the
jealousy of God as I did or left him more lonely in the sky? Who ever paid more honour to
Moses and Abraham or won more victories over idols and the images of paganism? And what
was this thing that thrust me back with the energy of a thing alive; whose fanaticism
could drive me from Sicily and tear up my deep roots out of the rock of Spain? What faith
was theirs who thronged in thousands of every class a country crying out that my ruin was
the will of God; and what hurled great Godfrey as from a catapult over the wall of
Jerusalem, and what brought great Sobieski like a thunderbolt to the gates of Vienna? I
think there was more than you fancy in the religion that has so matched itself with mine.'
78 Those who would suggest that the faith was a fanaticism are
doomed to an eternal perplexity. In their account it is bound to appear as fanatical for
nothing, and fanatical against everything. It is ascetical and at war with ascetics, Roman
and in revolt against Rome, monotheistic and fighting furiously against monotheism; harsh
in its condemnation of harshness; a riddle not to be explained even as unreason. And what
sort of unreason is it that seems reasonable to millions of educated Europeans through all
the revolutions of some sixteen hundred years? People are not amused with a puzzle or a
paradox or a mere muddle in the mind for all that time. I know of no explanation except
that such a thing is not unreason but reason; that if it is fanatical it is fanatical for
reason and fanatical against all the unreasonable things. That is the only explanation I
can find of a thing from the first so detached and so confident, condemning things that
looked so like itself, refusing help from powers that seemed so essential to its
existence, sharing on its human side all the passions of the age, yet always at the
supreme moment suddenly rising superior to them, never saying exactly what it was expected
to say and never needing to unsay what it had said; I can find no explanation except that,
like Pallas from the brain of Jove, it had indeed come forth out of the mind of God,
mature and mighty and armed for judgement and for war.
V: THE ESCAPE FROM PAGANISM
79 The modern missionary, with his palm-leaf hat and his umbrella,
has become rather a figure of fun. He is chaffed among men of the world for the ease with
which he can be eaten by cannibals and the narrow bigotry which makes him regard the
cannibal culture as lower than his own. Perhaps the best part of the joke is that the men
of the world do not see that the joke is against themselves. It is rather ridiculous to
ask a man just about to be boiled in a pot and eaten, at a purely religious feast, why he
does not regard all religions as equally friendly and fraternal. But there is a more
subtle criticism uttered against the more old-fashioned missionary; to the effect that he
generalises too broadly about the heathen and pays too little attention to the difference
between Mahomet and Mumbo-Jumbo. There was probably truth in this complaint, especially in
the past; but it is my main contention here that the exaggeration is all the other way at
present. It is the temptation of the professors to treat mythologies too much as
theologies; as things thoroughly thought out are seriously held. It is the temptation of
the intellectuals to take much too seriously the fine shades of various schools in the
rather irresponsible metaphysics of Asia. Above all it is their temptation to miss the
real truth implied in the idea of Aquinas contra Gentiles or Athanasius contra
mundum.
80 If the missionary says, in fact, that he is exceptional in being
a Christian, and that the rest of the races and religions can be collectively classified
as heathen, he is perfectly right. He may say it in quite the wrong spirit, in which case
he is spiritually wrong. But in the cold light of philosophy and history, he is
intellectually right. He may not be right minded, but he is right. He may not even have a
right to be right, but he is right. The outer world to which he brings his creed really is
some thing subject to certain generalisations covering all its varieties, and is not
merely a variety of similar creeds. Perhaps it is in any case too much of a temptation to
pride or hypocrisy to call it heathenry. Perhaps it could be better simply to call it
humanity. But there are certain broad characteristics of what we call humanity while it
remains in what we call heathenry. They are not necessarily bad characteristics; some of
them are worthy of the respect of Christendom; some of them have been absorbed and
transfigured in the substance of Christendom. But they existed before Christendom and they
still exist outside Christendom, as certainly as the sea existed before a boat and all
round a boat; and they have as strong and as universal and as unmistakable a savour as the
sea.
81 For instance, all real scholars who have studied the Greek and
Roman culture say one thing about it. They agree that in the ancient world religion was
one thing and philosophy quite another. there was very little effort to rationalise and at
the same time to realise a real belief in the gods. There was very little pretense of any
such real belief among the philosophers. But neither had the passion or perhaps the power
to persecute the others save in particular and peculiar cases; and neither the philosopher
in his school nor the priest in his temple seems ever to have seriously contemplated his
own concept as covering the world. A priest sacrificing to Artemis in Calydon did not seem
to think that people would some day sacrifice to her instead of to Isis beyond the sea; a
sage following the vegetarian rule of the Neo-Pythagoreans did not seem to think it would
universally prevail and exclude the methods of Epictetus or Epicurus. We may call this
liberality if we like; I am not dealing with an argument but describing an atmosphere. All
this, I say, is admitted by all scholars; but what neither the learned nor the unlearned
have fully realised, perhaps, is that this description is really an exact description of
all non-Christian civilisation today; and especially of the great civilisations of the
East. Eastern paganism really is much more all of a piece, just as ancient paganism was
much more all of a piece, than the modern critics admit. It is a many-coloured Persian
Carpet as the other was a varied and tessellated Roman pavement; but the one real crack
right across that pavement came from the earthquake of the Crucifixion.
82 The modern European seeking his religion in Asia is reading his
religion into Asia. Religion there is something different; it is both more and less. He is
like a man mapping out the sea as land; marking waves as mountains; not understanding the
nature of its peculiar permanence. It is perfectly true that Asia has its own dignity and
poetry and high civilisation. But it is not in the least true that Asia has its own
definite dominions of moral government, where all loyalty is conceived in terms of
morality; as when we say that Ireland is Catholic or that New England was Puritan. The map
is not marked out in religions, in our sense of churches. The state of mind is far more
subtle, more relative, more secretive, more varied and changing, like the colours of the
snake. The Moslem is the nearest approach to a militant Christian; and that is precisely
because he is a much nearer approach to an envoy from western civilisation. The Moslem in
the heart of Asia almost stands for the soul of Europe. And as he stands between them and
Europe in the matter of space so he stands between them and Christianity in the matter of
time. In that sense the Moslems in Asia are merely like the Nestorians in Asia. Islam,
historically speaking, is the greatest of the Eastern heresies. It owed something to the
quite isolated and unique individuality of Israel; but it owed more to Byzantium and the
theological enthusiasm of Christendom. It owed something even to the Crusades. It owed
nothing whatever to Asia. It owed nothing to the atmosphere of the ancient and traditional
world of Asia, with its immemorial etiquette and its bottomless or bewildering
philosophies. All that ancient and actual Asia felt the entrance of Islam as something
foreign and western and warlike, piercing it like a spear.
83 Even where we might trace in dotted lines the domains of Asiatic
religions, we should probably be reading into them something dogmatic and ethical
belonging to our own religion. It is as if a European ignorant of the American atmosphere
were to suppose that each 'state' was a separate sovereign state as patriotic as France or
Poland; or that when a Yankee referred fondly to his 'home town' he meant he had no other
nation, like a citizen of ancient Athens or Rome. As he would be reading a particular sort
of loyalty into America, so we are reading a particular sort of loyalty into Asia. There
are loyalties of other kinds; but not what men in the West mean by being a believer, by
trying to be a Christian, by being a good Protestant or a practising Catholic. In the
intellectual world it means something far more vague and varied by doubts and
speculations. In the moral world it means something far more loose and drifting. A
professor of Persian at one of our great universities, so passionate a partisan of the
East as practically to profess a contempt for the West, said to a friend of mine: 'You
will never understand oriental religions, because you always conceive religion as
connected with ethics. This kind has really nothing to do with ethics.' We have most of us
known some Masters of the Higher Wisdom, some Pilgrims upon the Path to Power, some
eastern esoteric saints and seers, who had really nothing to do with ethics. Something
different, something detached and irresponsible, tinges the moral atmosphere of Asia and
touches even that of Islam. It was very realistically caught in the atmosphere of Hassan;
and a very horrible atmosphere too. It is even more vivid in such glimpses as we get of
the genuine and ancient cults of Asia. Deeper than the depths of metaphysics, far down in
the abysses of mystical meditations under all that solemn universe of spiritual things, is
a secret, an intangible and a terrible levity. It does not really very much matter what
one does. Either because they do not believe in a devil, or because they do believe in a
destiny, or because experience here is everything and eternal life something totally
different, but for some reason they are totally different. I have read somewhere that
there were three great friends famous in medieval Persia for their unity of mind. One
became the responsible and respected Vizier of the Great King; the second was the poet
Omar, pessimist and epicurean, drinking wine in mockery of Mahomet; the third was the Old
Man of the Mountain who maddened his people with hashish that they might murder other
people with daggers. It does not really much matter what one does.
84 The Sultan in Hassan would have understood all those three men;
indeed he was all those three men. But this sort of universalist cannot have what we call
a character; it is what we call a chaos. He cannot choose; he cannot fight; he cannot
repent; he cannot hope. He is not in the same sense creating something; for creation means
rejection. He is not, in our religious phrase, making his soul. For our doctrine of
salvation does really mean a labour like that of a man trying to make a statue beautiful;
a victory with wings. For that there must be a final choice, for a man cannot make statues
without rejecting stone. And there really is this ultimate unmorality behind the
metaphysics of Asia. And the reason is that there has been nothing through all those
unthinkable ages to bring the human mind sharply to the point; to tell it that the time
has come to choose. The mind has lived too much in eternity. The soul has been too
immortal, in the special sense that it ignores the idea of mortal sin. It has had too much
of eternity, in the sense that it has not had enough of the hour of death and the day of
judgement. It is not crucial enough; in the literal sense that it has not had enough of
the cross. That is what we mean when we say that Asia is very old. But strictly speaking
Europe is quite as old as Asia; indeed in a sense any place is as old as any other place.
What we mean is that Europe has not merely gone on growing older. It has been born again.
85 Asia is all humanity; as it has worked out its human doom. Asia,
in its vast territory, in its varied populations, in its heights of past achievement and
its depths of dark speculation, is itself a world; and represents something of what we
mean when we speak of the world. It is a cosmos rather than a continent. It is the world
as man has made it; and contains many of the most wonderful things that man has made.
Therefore Asia stands as the one representative of paganism and the one rival to
Christendom. But everywhere else where we get glimpses of that mortal destiny, they
suggest stages in the same story. Where Asia trails away into the southern archipelagoes
of the savages, or where a darkness full of nameless shapes dwells in the heart of Africa,
or where the last survivors of lost races linger in the cold volcano of prehistoric
America, it is all the same story; sometimes perhaps later chapters of the same story. It
is men entangled in the forest of their own mythology; it is men drowned in the sea of
their own metaphysics. Polytheists have grown weary of the wildest of fictions.
Monotheists have grown weary of the most wonderful of truths. Diabolists here and there
have such a hatred of heaven and earth that they have tried to take refuge in hell. It is
the Fall of Man; and it is exactly that fall that was being felt by our own fathers at the
first moment of the Roman decline. We also were going down that side road; down that easy
slope; following the magnificent procession of the high civilisations of the world.
86 If the Church had not entered the world then, it seems probable
that Europe would be now very much what Asia is now. Something may be allowed for a real
difference of race and environment, visible in the ancient as in the modern world. But
after all we talk about the changeless East very largely because it has not suffered the
great change. Paganism in its last phase showed considerable signs of be coming equally
changeless. This would not mean that new schools or sects of philosophy would not arise;
as new schools did arise in Antiquity and do arise in Asia. It does not mean that there
would be no real mystics or visionaries; as there were mystics in Antiquity and are
mystics in Asia. It does not mean that there would be no social codes, as there were codes
in Antiquity and are codes in Asia. It does not mean that there could not be good men or
happy lives, for God has given all men a conscience and conscience can give all men a kind
of peace. But it does mean that the tone and proportion of all these things, and
especially the proportion of good and evil things, would be in the unchanged West what
they are in the changeless East. And nobody who looks at that changeless East honestly,
and with a real sympathy, can believe that there is anything there remotely resembling the
challenge and revolution of the Faith.
87 In short, if classic paganism had lingered until now, a number of
things might well have lingered with it; and they would look very like what we call the
religions of the East. There would still be Pythagoreans teaching reincarnation, as there
are still Hindus teaching reincarnation. There would still be Stoics making a religion out
of reason and virtue, as there are still Confucians making a religion out of reason and
virtue. There would still be Neo-Platonists studying transcendental truths, the meaning of
which was mysterious to other people and disputed even amongst themselves; as the
Buddhists still study a transcendentalism mysterious to others and disputed among
themselves. There would still be intelligent Apollonians apparently worshipping the
sun-god but explaining that they were worshipping the divine principle; just as there are
still intelligent Parsees apparently worshipping the sun but explaining that they are
worshipping the deity. There would still be wild Dionysians dancing on the mountain as
there are still wild Dervishes dancing in the desert. There would still be crowds of
people attending the popular feasts of the gods, in pagan Europe as in pagan Asia. There
would still be crowds of gods, local and other, for them to worship. And there would still
be a great many more people who worshipped them than people who believed in them. Finally
there would still be a very large number of people who did worship gods and did believe in
gods; and who believed in gods and worshipped gods simply because they were demons. There
would still be Levantines secretly sacrificing to Moloch as there are still Thugs secretly
sacrificing to Kalee. There would still be a great deal of magic; and a great deal of it
would be black magic. There would still be a considerable admiration of Seneca and a
considerable imitation of Nero; just as the exalted epigrams of Confucius could coexist
with the tortures of China. And over all that tangled forest of traditions growing wild or
withering would brood the broad silence of a singular and even nameless mood; but the
nearest name of it is nothing. All these things, good and bad, would have an indescribable
air of being too old to die.
88 None of these things occupying Europe in the absence of
Christendom would bear the least likeness to Christendom. Since the Pythagorean
Metempsychosis would still be there, we might call it the Pythagorean religion as we talk
about the Buddhist religion. As the noble maxims of Socrates would still be there, we
might call it the Socratic religion as we talk about the Confucian religion. As the
popular holiday was still marked by a mythological hymn to Adonis, we might call it the
religion of Adonis as we talk about the religion of Juggernaut. As literature would still
be based on the Greek mythology, we might call that mythology a religion, as we call the
Hindu mythology a religion. We might say that there were so many thousands or millions of
people belonging to that religion, in the sense of frequenting such temples or merely
living in a land full of such temples. But if we called the last tradition of Pythagoras
or the lingering legend of Adonis by the name of a religion, then we must find some other
name for the Church of Christ.
89 If anybody says that philosophic maxims presented through many
ages, or mythological temples frequented by many people, are things of the same class and
category as the Church, it is enough to answer quite simply that they are not. Nobody
thinks they are the same when he sees them in the old civilisation of Greece and Rome;
nobody would think they were the same if that civilisation had lasted two thousand years
longer and existed at the present day; nobody can in reason think they are the same in the
parallel pagan civilisation in the East, as it is at the present day. None of these
philosophies or mythologies are anything like a Church; certainly nothing like a Church
Militant. And, as I have shown elsewhere, even if this rule were not already proved, the
exception would prove the rule. The rule is that pre-Christian or pagan history does not
produce a Church Militant; and the exception, or what some would call the exception, is
that Islam is at least militant if it is not Church. And that is precisely because Islam
is the one religious rival that is not pre-Christian and therefore not in that sense
pagan. Islam was a product of Christianity; even if it was a by-product; even if it was a
bad product. It was a heresy or parody emulating and therefore imitating the Church. It is
no more surprising that Mahomedanism had something of her fighting spirit than that
Quakerism had something of her peaceful spirit. After Christianity there are any number of
such emulations or extensions. Before it there are none.
90 The Church Militant is thus unique because it is an army marching
to effect a universal deliverance. The bondage from which the world is thus to be
delivered is something that is very well symbolised by the state of Asia as by the state
of pagan Europe. I do not mean merely their moral or immoral state. The missionary, as a
matter of fact, has much more to say for himself than the enlightened imagine even when he
says that the heathen are idolatrous and immoral. A touch or two of realistic experience
about Eastern religion, even about Moslem religion, will reveal some startling
insensibilities in ethics; such as the practical indifference to the line between passion
and perversion. It is not prejudice but practical experience which says that Asia is full
of demons as well as gods. But the evil I mean is in the mind. And it is in the mind
wherever the mind has worked for a long time alone. It is what happens when all dreaming
and thinking have come to an end in an emptiness that is at once negation and necessity.
It sounds like an anarchy, but it is also a slavery. It is what has been called already
the wheel of Asia; all those recurrent arguments about cause and effect or things
beginning and ending in the mind, which make it impossible for the soul really to strike
out and go anywhere or do anything. And the point is that it is not necessarily peculiar
to Asiatics; it would have been true in the end of Europeans--if something had not
happened. If the Church Militant had not been a thing marching, all men would have been
marking time. If the Church Militant had not endured a discipline, all men would have
endured a slavery.
91 What that universal yet fighting faith brought into the world was
hope. Perhaps the one thing common to mythology and philosophy was that both were really
sad; in the sense that they had not this hope even if they had touches of faith or
charity. We may call Buddhism a faith; though to us it seems more like a doubt. We may
call the Lord of Compassion a Lord of Charity, though it seems to us a very pessimist sort
of pity. But those who insist most on the antiquity and size of such cults must agree that
in all their ages they have not covered all their areas with that sort of practical and
pugnacious hope. 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, or we have seen soaring but yesterday the silver eagle of Poland. 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. Those who quarrel about it
seldom even consider it in itself. There is neither space nor place for such a full
consideration here; but a word may be said to explain a reconciliation that always recurs
and still seems to require explanation.
92 There will be no end to the weary debates about liberalising
theology, until people face the fact that the only liberal part of it is really the
dogmatic part. If dogma is incredible, it is because it is incredibly liberal. If it is
irrational, it can only be in giving us more assurance of freedom than is justified by
reason. The obvious example is that essential form of freedom which we call free-will. It
is absurd to say that a man shows his liberality in denying his liberty. But it is tenable
that he has to affirm a transcendental doctrine in order to affirm his liberty. There is a
sense in which we might reasonably say that if man has a primary power of choice, he has
in that fact a super-natural power of creation, as if he could raise the dead or give
birth to the unbegotten. Possibly in that case a man must be a miracle; and certainly in
that case he must be a miracle in order to be a man; and most certainly in order to be a
free man. But it is absurd to forbid him to be a free man and do it in the name of a more
free religion.
93 But it is true in twenty other matters. Anybody who believes at
all in God must believe in the absolute supremacy of God. But in so far as that supremacy
does allow of any degrees that can be called liberal or illiberal, it is self-evident that
the illiberal power is the deity of the rationalists and the liberal power is the deity of
the dogmatists. Exactly in proportion as you turn monotheism into monism you turn it into
despotism. It is precisely the unknown God of the scientist, with his impenetrable purpose
and his inevitable and unalterable law, that reminds us of a Prussian autocrat making
rigid plans in a remote tent and moving mankind like machinery. It is precisely the God of
miracles and of answered prayers who reminds us of a liberal and popular prince, receiving
petitions, listening to parliaments and considering the cases of a whole people. I am not
now arguing the rationality of this conception in other respects; as a matter of fact it
is not, as some suppose, irrational; for there is nothing irrational in the wisest and
most well-informed king acting differently according to the action of those he wishes to
save. But I am here only noting the general nature of liberality, or of free or enlarged
atmosphere of action. And in this respect it is certain that the king can only be what we
call magnanimous if he is what some call capricious. It is the Catholic, who has the
feeling that his prayers do make a difference, when offered for the living and the dead,
who also has the feeling of living like a free citizen in something almost like a
constitutional commonwealth. It is the monist who lives under a single iron law who must
have the feeling of living like a slave under a sultan. Indeed I believe that the original
use of the word suffragium, which we now use in politics for a vote, was that employed in
theology about a prayer. The dead in Purgatory were said to have the suffrages of the
living. And in this sense, of a sort of right of petition to the supreme ruler, we may
truly say that the whole of the Communion of Saints, as well as the whole of the Church
Militant, is founded on universal suffrage.
94 But above all, it is true of the most tremendous issue; of that
tragedy which has created the divine comedy of our creed. Nothing short of the extreme and
strong and startling doctrine of the divinity of Christ will give that particular effect
that can truly stir the popular sense like a trumpet; the idea of the king himself serving
in the ranks like a common soldier. By making that figure merely human we make that story
much less human. We take away the point of the story which actually pierces humanity; the
point of the story which was quite literally the point of a spear. It does not especially
humanise the universe to say that good and wise men can die for their opinions; any more
than it would be any sort of uproariously popular news in an army that good soldiers may
easily get killed. It is no news that King Leonidas is dead any more than that Queen Anne
is dead; and men did not wait for Christianity to be men, in the full sense of being
heroes. But if we are describing, for the moment, the atmosphere of what is generous and
popular and even picturesque, any knowledge of human nature will tell us that no
sufferings of the sons of men, or even of the servants of God, strike the same note as the
notion of the master suffering instead of his servants. And this is given by the
theological and emphatically not by the scientific deity. No mysterious monarch, hidden in
his starry pavilion at the base of the cosmic campaign, is in the least like that
celestial chivalry of the Captain who carries his five wounds in the front of battle.
95 What the denouncer of dogma really means is not that dogma is
bad; but rather that dogma is too good to be true. That is, he means that dogma is too
liberal to be likely. Dogma gives man too much freedom when it permits him to fall. Dogma
gives even God too much freedom when it permits him to die. That is what the intelligent
sceptics ought to say; and it is not in the least my intention to deny that there is
something to be said for it. They mean that the universe is itself a universal prison;
that existence itself is a limitation and a control; and it is not for nothing that they
call causation a chain. In a word, they mean quite simply that they cannot believe these
things; not in the least that they are unworthy of belief. We say not lightly but very
literally, that the truth has made us free. They say that it makes us so free that it
cannot be the truth. To them it is like believing in fairyland to believe in such freedom
as we enjoy. It is like believing in men with wings to entertain the fancy of men with
wills. It is like accepting a fable about a squirrel in conversation with a mountain to
believe in a man who is free to ask or a God who is free to answer. This is a manly and a
rational negation for which I for one shall always show respect. But I decline to show any
respect for those who first of all clip the wings and cage the squirrel, rivet the chains
and refuse the freedom, close all the doors of the cosmic prison on us with a clang of
eternal iron, tell us that our emancipation is a dream and our dungeon a necessity; and
then calmly turn round and tell us they have a freer thought and a more liberal theology.
96 The moral of all this is an old one; that religion is revelation.
In other words it is a vision, and a vision received by faith; but it is a vision of
reality. The faith consists in a conviction of its reality. That, for example, is the
difference between a vision and a day-dream. And that is the difference between religion
and mythology. That is the difference between faith and all that fancy-work, quite human
and more or less healthy, which we considered under the head of mythology. There is
something in the reasonable use of the very word vision that implies two things about it;
first that it comes very rarely, possibly that it comes only once; and secondly that it
probably comes once and for all. A day-dream may come every day. A day-dream may be
different every day. It is something more than the difference between telling
ghost-stories and meeting a ghost.
97 But if it is not a mythology neither is it a philosophy. It is
not a philosophy because, being a vision, it is not a pattern but a picture. It is not one
of those simplifications which resolve everything into an abstract explanation; as that
everything is recurrent; or everything is relative; or everything is inevitable; or
everything is illusive. It is not a process but a story. It has proportions, of the sort
seen in a picture or a story; it has not the regular repetitions of a pattern or a
process; but it replaces them by being convincing as a picture or a story is convincing.
In other words, it is exactly, as the phrase goes, like life. For indeed it is life. An
example of what is meant here might well be found in the treatment of the problem of evil.
It is easy enough to make a plan of life of which the background is black, as the
pessimists do; and then admit a speck or two of star-dust more or less accidental, or at
least in the literal sense insignificant. And it is easy enough to make another plan on
white paper, as the Christian Scientists do, and explain or explain away somehow such dots
or smudges as may be difficult to deny. Lastly it is easiest of all perhaps, to say as the
dualists do, that life is like a chess-board in which the two are equal, and can as truly
be said to consist of white squares on a black board or of black squares on a white board.
But every man feels in his heart that none of these three paper plans is like life; that
none of these worlds is one in which he can live. Something tells him that the ultimate
idea of a world is not bad or even neutral; staring at the sky or the grass or the truths
of mathematics or even a new-laid egg, he has a vague feeling like the shadow of that
saying of the great Christian philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas, 'Every existence, as such,
is good.' On the other hand, something else tells him that it is unmanly and debased and
even diseased to minimise evil to a dot or even a blot. He realises that optimism is
morbid. It is if possible even more morbid than pessimism. These vague but healthy
feelings, if he followed them out, would result in the idea that evil is in some way an
exception but an enormous exception; and ultimately that evil is an invasion or yet more
truly a rebellion. He does not think that everything is right or that every thing is
wrong, or that everything is equally right and wrong. But he does think that right has a
right to be right and therefore a right to be there, and wrong has no right to be wrong
and therefore no right to be there. It is the prince of the world; but it is also a
usurper. So he will apprehend vaguely what the vision will give to him vividly; no less
than all that strange story of treason in heaven and the great desertion by which evil
damaged and tried to destroy a cosmos that it could not create. It is a very strange story
and its proportions and its lines and colours are as arbitrary and absolute as the
artistic composition of a picture. It is a vision which we do in fact symbolise in
pictures by titanic limbs and passionate tints of plumage; all that abysmal vision of
falling stars and the peacock panoplies of the night. But that strange story has one small
advantage over the diagrams. It is like life.
98 Another example might be found, not in the problem of evil, but
in what is called the problem of progress. One of the ablest agnostics of the age once
asked me whether I thought mankind grew better or grew worse or remained the same. He was
confident that the alternative covered all possibilities. He did not see that it only
covered patterns and not pictures; processes and not stories. I asked him whether he
thought that Mr. Smith of Golder's Green got better or worse or remained exactly the same
between the age of thirty and forty. It then seemed to dawn on him that it would rather
depend on Mr. Smith; and how he chose to go on. It had never occurred to him that it might
depend on how mankind chose to go on; and that its course was not a straight line or an
upward or downward curve, but a track like that of a man across a valley, going where he
liked and stopping where he chose, going into a church or falling down in a ditch. The
life of man is a story; an adventure story; and in our vision the same is true even of the
story of God.
99 The Catholic faith is the reconciliation because it is the
realisation both of mythology and philosophy. It is a story and in that sense one of a
hundred stories; only it is a true story. It is a philosophy and in that sense one of a
hundred philosophies; only it is a philosophy that is like life. But above all, it is a
reconciliation because it is something that can only be called the philosophy of stories.
That normal narrative instinct which produced all the fairy tales is something that is
neglected by all the philosophies--except one. The Faith is the justification of that
popular instinct; the finding of a philosophy for it or the analysis of the philosophy in
it. Exactly as a man in an adventure story has to pass various tests to save his life, so
the man in this philosophy has to pass several tests and save his soul. In both there is
an idea of free will operating under conditions of design; in other words, there is an aim
and it is the business of a man to aim at it; we therefore watch to see whether he will
hit it. Now this deep and democratic and dramatic instinct is derided and dismissed in all
the other philosophies. For all the other philosophies avowedly end where they begin; and
it is the definition of a story that it ends differently; that it begins in one place and
ends in another. From Buddha and his wheel to Akhen Aten and his disc, from Pythagoras
with his abstraction of number to Confucius with his religion of routine, there is not one
of them that does not in some way sin against the soul of a story. There is none of them
that really grasps this human notion of the tale, the test, the adventure; the ordeal of
the free man. Each of them starves the story-telling instinct, so to speak, and does
something to spoil human life considered as a romance; either by fatalism (pessimist or
optimist) and that destiny that is the death of adventure; or by indifference and that
detachment that is the death of drama; or by a fundamental scepticism that dissolves the
actors into atoms; or by a materialistic limitation blocking the vista of moral
consequences; or a mechanical recurrence making even moral tests monotonous; or a
bottomless relativity making even practical tests insecure. There is such a thing as a
human story; and there is such a thing as the divine story which is also a human story;
but there is no such thing as a Hegelian story or a Monist story or a relativist story or
a determinist story; for every story, yes, even a penny dreadful or a cheap novelette, has
something in it that belongs to our universe and not theirs. Every short story does truly
begin with creation and end with a last judgement.
100 And that is the reason why the myths and the philosophers were at
war until Christ came. That is why the Athenian democracy killed Socrates out of respect
for the gods; and why every strolling sophist gave himself the airs of a Socrates whenever
he could talk in a superior fashion of the gods; and why the heretic Pharaoh wrecked his
huge idols and temples for an abstraction and why the priests could return in triumph and
trample his dynasty under foot; and why Buddhism had to divide itself from Brahminism, and
why in every age and country outside Christendom there has been a feud for ever between
the philosopher and the priest. It is easy enough to say that the philosopher is generally
the more rational; it is easier still to forget that the priest is always the more
popular. For the priest told the people stories; and the philosopher did not understand
the philosophy of stories. It came into the world with the story of Christ.
101 And this is why it had to be a revelation or vision given from
above. Any one who will think of the theory of stories or pictures will easily see the
point. The true story of the world must be told by somebody to somebody else. By the very
nature of a story it cannot be left to occur to anybody. A story has proportions,
variations, surprises, particular dispositions, which cannot be worked out by rule in the
abstract, like a sum. We could not deduce whether or no Achilles would give back the body
of Hector from a Pythagorean theory of number or recurrence; and we could not infer for
ourselves in what way the world would get back the body of Christ, merely from being told
that all things go round and round upon the wheel of Buddha. A man might perhaps work out
a proposition of Euclid without having heard of Euclid; but he would not work out the
precise legend of Eurydice without having heard of Eurydice. At any rate he would not be
certain how the story would end and whether Orpheus was ultimately defeated. Still less
could he guess the end of our story; or the legend of our Orpheus rising, not defeated
from, the dead.
102 To sum up; the sanity of the world was restored and the soul of
man offered salvation by something which did indeed satisfy the two warring tendencies of
the past; which had never been satisfied in full and most certainly never satisfied
together. It met the mythological search for romance by being a story and the
philosophical search for truth by being a true story. That is why the ideal figure had to
be a historical character, as nobody had ever felt Adonis or Pan to be a historical
character. But that is also why the historical character had to be the ideal figure; and
even fulfil many of the functions given to these other ideal figures; why he was at once
the sacrifice and the feast, why he could be shown under the emblems of the growing vine
or the rising sun. The more deeply we think of the matter the more we shall conclude that,
if there be indeed a God, his creation could hardly have reached any other culmination
than this granting of a real romance to the world. Otherwise the two sides of the human
mind could never have touched at all; and the brain of man would have remained cloven and
double; one lobe of it dreaming impossible dreams and the other repeating invariable
calculations. The picture-makers would have remained forever painting the portrait of
nobody. The sages would have remained for ever adding up numerals that came to nothing. It
was that abyss that nothing but an incarnation could cover; a divine embodiment of our
dreams; and he stands above that chasm whose name is more than priest and older even than
Christendom; Pontifex Maximus, the mightiest maker of a bridge.
103 But even with that we return to the more specially Christian
symbol in the same tradition; the perfect pattern of the keys. This is a historical and
not a theological outline, and it is not my duty here to defend in detail that theology,
but merely to point out that it could not even be justified in design without being
justified in detail--like a key. Beyond the broad suggestion of this chapter I attempt no
apologetic about why the creed should be accepted. But in answer to the historical query
of why it was accepted and is accepted, I answer for millions of others in my reply;
because it fits the lock, because it is like life. It is one among many stories; only it
happens to be a true story. It is one among many philosophies; only it happens to be the
truth. We accept it; and the ground is solid under our feet and the road is open before
us. It does not imprison us in a dream of destiny or a consciousness of the universal
delusion. It opens to us not only incredible heavens but what seems to some an equally
incredible earth, and makes it credible. This is the sort of truth that is hard to explain
because it is a fact; but it is a fact to which we can call witnesses. We are Christians
and Catholics not because we worship a key, but because we have passed a door; and felt
the wind that is the trumpet of liberty blow over the land of the living.
VI: THE FIVE DEATHS OF THE FAITH
104 It is not the purpose of this book to trace the subsequent
history of Christianity, especially the later history of Christianity; which involves
controversies of which I hope to write more fully elsewhere. It is devoted only to the
suggestion that Christianity, appearing amid heathen humanity, had all the character of a
unique thing and even of a supernatural thing. It was not like any of the other things;
and the more we study it the less it looks like any of them. But there is a certain rather
peculiar character which marked it henceforward even down to the present moment, with a
note on which this book may well conclude.
105 I have said that Asia and the ancient world had an air of being
too old to die. Christendom has had the very opposite fate. Christendom has had a series
of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many
times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave. But the first
extraordinary fact which marks this history is this: that Europe has been turned upside
down over and over again; and that at the end of each of these revolutions the same
religion has again been found on top. The Faith is always converting the age, not as an
old religion but as a new religion. This truth is hidden from many by a convention that is
too little noticed. Curiously enough, it is a convention of the sort which those who
ignore it claim especially to detect and denounce. They are always telling us that priests
and ceremonies are not religion and that religious organisation can be a hollow sham, but
they hardly realise how true it is. It is so true that three or four times at least in the
history of Christendom the whole soul seemed to have gone out of Christianity; and almost
every man in his heart expected its end. This fact is only masked in medieval and other
times by that very official religion which such critics pride themselves on seeing
through. Christianity remained the official religion of a Renaissance prince or the
official religion of an eighteenth-century bishop, just as an ancient mythology remained
the official religion of Julius Caesar or the Arian creed long remained the official
religion of Julian the Apostate. But there was a difference between the cases of Julius
and of Julian; because the Church had begun its strange career. There was no reason why
men like Julius should not worship gods like Jupiter for ever in public and laugh at them
for ever in private. But when Julian treated Christianity as dead, he found it had come to
life again. He also found, incidentally, that there was not the faintest sign of Jupiter
ever coming to life again. This case of Julian and the episode of Arianism is but the
first of a series of examples that can only be roughly indicated here. Arianism, as has
been said, had every human appearance of being the natural way in which that particular
superstition of Constantine might be expected to peter out. All the ordinary stages had
been passed through; the creed had become a respectable thing, had become a ritual thing,
had then been modified into a rational thing; and the rationalists were ready to dissipate
the last remains of it, just as they do to-day. When Christianity rose again suddenly and
threw them, it was almost as unexpected as Christ rising from the dead. But there are many
other examples of the same thing, even about the same time. The rush of missionaries from
Ireland, For instance, has all the air of an unexpected onslaught of young men on an old
world, and even on a Church that showed signs of growing old. Some of them were martyred
on the coast of Cornwall; and the chief authority on Cornish antiquities told me that he
did not believe for a moment that they were martyred by heathens but (as he expressed it
with some humour) 'by rather slack Christians.'
106 Now if we were to dip below the surface of history, as it is not
in the scope of this argument to do, I suspect that we should find several occasions when
Christendom was thus to all appearance hollowed out from within by doubt and indifference,
so that only the old Christian shell stood as the pagan shell had stood so long. But the
difference is that in every such case, the sons were fanatical for the faith where the
fathers had been slack about it. This is obvious in the case of the transition from the
Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation. It is obvious in the case of a transition from the
eighteenth century to the many Catholic revivals of our own time. But I suspect many other
examples which would be worthy of separate studies.
107 The Faith is not a survival. It is not as if the Druids had
managed somehow to survive somewhere for two thousand years. That is what might have
happened in Asia or ancient Europe, in that indifference or tolerance in which mythologies
and philosophies could live for ever side by side. It has not survived; it has returned
again and again in this Western world of rapid change and institutions perpetually
perishing. Europe, in the tradition of Rome, was always trying revolution and
reconstruction; rebuilding a universal republic. And it always began by rejecting this old
stone and ended by making it the head of the corner; by bringing it back from the
rubbish-heap to make it the crown of the capitol. Some stones of Stonehenge are standing
and some are fallen; and as the stone falleth so shall it lie. There has not been a
Druidic renaissance every century or two, with the young Druids crowned with fresh
mistletoe, dancing in the sun on Salisbury Plain. Stonehenge has not been rebuilt in every
style of architecture from the rude round Norman to the last rococo of the Baroque. The
sacred place of the Druids is safe from the vandalism of restoration.
108 But the Church in the West was not in a world where things were
too old to die; but in one in which they were always young enough to get killed. The
consequence was that superficially and externally it often did get killed; nay, it
sometimes wore out even without getting killed. And there follows a fact I find it
somewhat difficult to describe, yet which I believe to be very real and rather important.
As a ghost is the shadow of a man, and in that sense the shadow of life, so at intervals
there passed across this endless life a sort of shadow of death. It came at the moment
when it would have perished had it been perishable. It withered away everything that was
perishable. If such animal parallels were worthy of the occasion we might say that the
snake shuddered and shed a skin and went on, or even that the cat went into convulsions as
it lost only one of its nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine lives. It is truer to say, in a more
dignified image, that a clock struck and nothing happened; or that a bell tolled for an
execution that was everlastingly postponed.
109 What was the meaning of all that dim but vast unrest of the
twelfth century; when, as it has been so finely said, Julian stirred in his sleep? Why did
there appear so strangely early, in the twilight of dawn after the Dark Ages, so deep a
scepticism as that involved in urging nominalism against realism? For realism against
nominalism was really realism against rationalism, or something more destructive than what
we call rationalism. The answer is that just as some might have thought the Church simply
a part of the Roman Empire, so others later might have thought the Church only a part of
the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages ended as the Empire had ended, and the Church should have
departed with them, if she had been also one of the shades of night. It was another of
those spectral deaths or simulations of death. I mean that if nominalism had succeeded, it
would have been as if Arianism had succeeded, it would have been the beginning of a
confession that Christianity had failed. For nominalism is a far more fundamental
scepticism than mere atheism. Such was the question that was openly asked as the Dark Ages
broadened into that daylight that we call the modern world. But what was the answer? The
answer was Aquinas in the chair of Aristotle, taking all knowledge for his province; and
tens of thousands of lads down to the lowest ranks of peasant and serf, living in rags and
on crusts about the great colleges, to listen to the scholastic philosophy.
110 What was the meaning of all that whisper of fear that ran round
the west under the shadow of Islam, and fills every old romance with incongruous images of
Saracen knights swaggering in Norway or the Hebrides? Why were men in the extreme west,
such as King John if I remember rightly, accused of being secretly Moslems, as men are
accused of being secretly atheists? Why was there that fierce alarm among some of the
authorities about the rationalistic Arab version of Aristotle? Authorities are seldom
alarmed like that except when it is too late. The answer is that hundreds of people
probably believed in their hearts that Islam would conquer Christendom; that Averroes was
more rational than Anselm; that the Saracen Culture was really, as it was superficially, a
superior culture. Here again we should probably find a whole generation, the older
generation, serve doubtful and depressed and weary. The coming of Islam would only have
been the coming of Unitarianism a thousand years before its time. To many it may have
seemed quite reasonable and quite probable and quite likely to happen. If so, they would
have been surprised at what did happen. What did happen was a roar like thunder from
thousands and thousands of young men, throwing all their youth into one exultant
counter-charge, the Crusades. It was the sons of St. Francis, the Jugglers of God,
wandering singing over all the roads of the world; it was the Gothic going up like a
flight of arrows; it was the waking of the world. In considering the war of the
Albigensians, we come to the breach in the heart of Europe and the landslide of a new
philosophy that nearly ended Christendom for ever. In that case the new philosophy was
also a very new philosophy; it was pessimism. It was none the less like modern ideas
because it was as old as Asia; most modern ideas are. It was the Gnostics returning; but
why did the Gnostics return? Because it was the end of an epoch, like the end of the
Empire; and should have been the end of the Church. It was Schopenhauer hovering over the
future; but it was also Manichaeus rising from the dead; that men might have death and
that they might have it more abundantly.
111 It is rather more obvious in the case of the Renaissance, simply
because the period is so much nearer to us and people know so much more about it. But
there is more even in that example than most people know. Apart from the particular
controversies which I wish to reserve for a separate study, the period was far more
chaotic that those controversies commonly imply. When Protestants call Latimer a martyr to
Protestantism, and Catholics reply that Campion was a martyr to Catholicism, it is often
forgotten that many who perished in such persecutions could only be described as martyrs
to atheism or anarchism or even diabolism. That world was almost as wild as our own; the
men wandering about in it included the sort of man who says there is no God, the sort of
man who says he is himself God, the sort of man who says something that nobody can make
head or tail of. If we could have the conversation of the age following the Renaissance,
we should probably be shocked by its shameless negations. The remarks attributed to
Marlowe are probably pretty typical of the talk in many intellectual taverns. The
transition from Pre-Reformation to Post-Reformation Europe was through a void of very
yawning questions; yet again in the long run the answer was the same. It was one of those
moments when, as Christ walked on the water, so was Christianity walking in the air.
112 But all these cases are remote in date and could only be proved
in detail. We can see the fact much more clearly in the case when the paganism of the
Renaissance ended Christianity and Christianity unaccountably began all over again. But we
can see it most clearly of all in the case which is close to us and full of manifest and
minute evidence; the case of the great decline of religion that began about the time of
Voltaire. For indeed it is our own case, and we ourselves have seen the decline of that
decline. The two hundred years since Voltaire do not flash past us at a glance like the
fourth and fifth centuries or the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In our own case we can
see this oft-repeated process close at hand; we know how completely a society can lose its
fundamental religion without abolishing its official religion; we know how men can all
become agnostics long before they abolish bishops. And we know that also in this last
ending, which really did look to us like the final ending, the incredible thing has
happened again; the Faith has a better following among the young men than among the old.
When Ibsen spoke of the new generation knocking at the door, he certainly never expected
that it would be the church-door.
113 At least five times, therefore, with the Arian and the
Albigensian, with the Humanist sceptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Faith has to
all appearance gone to the dogs. In each of these five cases it was the dog that died. How
complete was the collapse and how strange the reversal we can only see in detail in the
case nearest to our own time.
114 A thousand things have been said about the Oxford Movement and
the parallel French Catholic revival; but few have made us feel the simplest fact about
it; that it was a surprise. It was a puzzle as well as a surprise; because it seemed to
most people like a river turning backwards from the sea and trying to climb back into the
mountains. To have read the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is to
know that nearly everybody had come to take it for granted that religion was a thing that
would continually broaden like a river, till it reached an infinite sea. Some of them
expected it to go down in a cataract of catastrophe, most of them expected it to widen
into an estuary of equality and moderation; but all of them thought its returning on
itself a prodigy as incredible as witchcraft. In other words, most moderate people thought
that faith like freedom would be slowly broadened down, and some advanced people thought
that it would be very rapidly broadened down, not to say flattened out. All that world of
Guizot and Macaulay and the commercial and scientific liberality was perhaps more certain
than any men before or since about the direction in which the world is going. People were
so certain about the direction that they only differed about the pace. Many anticipated
with alarm, and a few with sympathy, a Jacobin revolt that should guillotine the
Archbishop of Canterbury or a Chartist riot that should hang the parsons on the lamposts.
But it seemed like a convulsion in nature that the Archbishop instead of losing his head
should be looking for his mitre; and that instead of diminishing the respect due to
parsons we should strengthen it to the respect due to priests. It revolutionised their
very vision of revolution; and turned their very topsyturveydom topsyturvey.
115 In short, the whole world being divided about whether the stream
was going slower or faster, became conscious of something vague but vast that was going
against the stream. Both in fact and figure there is something deeply disturbing about
this, and that for an essential reason. A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a
living thing can go against it. A dead dog can be lifted on the leaping water with all the
swiftness of a leaping hound; but only a live dog can swim backwards. A paper boat can
ride the rising deluge with all the airy arrogance of a fairy ship, but if the fairy ship
sails up stream it is really rowed by the fairies. And among the things that merely went
with the tide of apparent progress and enlargement there was many a demagogue or sophist
whose wild gestures were in truth as lifeless as the movement of a dead dog's limbs
wavering in the eddying water; and many a philosophy uncommonly like a paper boat, of the
sort that it is not difficult to knock into a cocked hat. But even the truly living and
even life-giving things that went with that stream did not thereby prove that they were
living or life-giving. It was this other force that was unquestionably and unaccountably
alive; the mysterious and unmeasured energy that was thrusting back the river. That was
felt to be like the movement of some great monster; and it was none the less clearly a
living monster because most people thought it a prehistoric monster. It was none the less
an unnatural, an incongruous, and to some a comic upheaval; as if the Great Sea Serpent
had suddenly risen out of the Round Pond--unless we consider the Sea Serpent as more
likely to live in the Serpentine. This flippant element in the fantasy must not be missed,
for it was one of the clearest testimonies to the unexpected nature of the reversal. That
age did really feel that a preposterous quality in prehistoric animals belonged also to
historic rituals; that mitres and tiaras were like the horns or crests of antediluvian
creatures; and that appealing to a Primitive Church was like dressing up as a Primitive
Man.
116 The world is still puzzled by that movement; but most of all
because it still moves. I have said something elsewhere of the rather random sort of
reproaches that are still directed against it and its much greater consequences; it is
enough to say here that the more such critics reproach it the less they explain it. In a
sense it is my concern here, if not to explain it, at least to suggest the direction of
the explanation; but above all, it is my concern to point out one particular thing about
it. And that is that it had all happened before; and even many times before.
117 To sum up, in so far as it is true that recent centuries have
seen an attenuation of Christian doctrine, recent centuries have only seen what the most
remote centuries have seen. And even the modern example has only ended as the medieval and
pre-medieval examples ended. It is already clear, and grows clearer every day, that it is
not going to end in the disappearance of the diminished creed; but rather in the return of
those parts of it that had really disappeared. It is going to end as the Arian compromise
ended, as the attempts at a compromise with Nominalism and even with Albigensianism ended.
But the point to seize in the modern case, as in all the other cases is that what returns
is not in that sense a simplified theology; not according to that view a purified
theology; it is simply theology. It is that enthusiasm for theological studies that marked
the most doctrinal ages; it is the divine science. An old Don with D. D. after his name
may have become the typical figure of a bore; but that was because he was himself bored
with his theology, not because he was excited about it. It was precisely because he was
admittedly more interested in the Latin of Plautus than in the Latin of Augustine, in the
Greek of Xenophon than in the Greek of Chrysostom. It was precisely because he was more
interested in a dead tradition than in a decidedly living tradition. In short, it was
precisely because he was himself a type of the time in which Christian faith was weak. It
was not because men would not hail, if they could, the wonderful and almost wild vision of
a Doctor of Divinity.
118 There are people who say they wish Christianity to remain as a
spirit. They mean, very literally, that they wish it to remain as a ghost. But it is not
going to remain as a ghost. What follows this process of apparent death is not the
lingerings of the shade; it is the resurrection of the body. These people are quite
prepared to shed pious and reverential tears over the Sepulchre of the Son of Man; what
they are not prepared for is the Son of God walking once more upon the hills of morning.
These people, and indeed most people, were indeed by this time quite accustomed to the
idea that the old Christian candle-light would fade into the light of common day. To many
of them it did quite honestly appear like that pale yellow flame of a candle when it is
left burning in daylight. It was all the more unexpected, and therefore all the more
unmistakable, that the seven branched candle-stick suddenly towered to heaven like a
miraculous tree and flamed until the sun turned pale. But other ages have seen the day
conquer the candle-light and then the candle-light conquer the day. Again and again,
before our time, men have grown content with a diluted doctrine. And again and again there
has followed on that dilution, coming as out of the darkness in a crimson cataract, the
strength of the red original wine. And we only say once more to-day as has been said many
times by our fathers: 'Long years and centuries ago own fathers or the founders of our
people drank, as they dreamed, of the blood of God. Long years and centuries have passed
since the strength of that giant vintage has been anything but a legend of the age of
giants. Centuries ago already is the dark time of the second fermentation, when the wine
of Catholicism turned into the vinegar of Calvinism. Long since that bitter drink has been
itself diluted; rinsed out and washed away by the waters of oblivion and the wave of the
world. Never did we think to taste again even that bitter tang of sincerity and the
spirit, still less the richer and the sweeter strength of the purple vineyards in our
dreams of the age of gold. Day by day and year by year we have lowered our hopes and
lessened our convictions; we have grown more and more used to seeing those vats and
vineyards overwhelmed in the water-floods and the last savour and suggestion of that
special element fading like a stain of purple upon a sea of grey. We have grown used to
dilution, to dissolution, to a watering down that went on for ever. But 'Thou hast kept
the good wine until now.'
119 This is the final fact, and it is the most extraordinary of all.
The faith has not only often died but it has often died of old age. It has not only been
often killed but it has often died a natural death; in the sense of coming to a natural
and necessary end. It is obvious that it has survived the most savage and the most
universal persecutions from the shock of the Diocletian fury to the shock of the French
Revolution. But it has a more strange and even a more weird tenacity; it has survived not
only war but peace. It has not only died often but degenerated often and decayed often; it
has survived its own weakness and even its own surrender. We need not repeat what is so
obvious about the beauty of the end of Christ in its wedding of youth and death. But this
is almost as if Christ had lived to the last possible span, had been a white-haired sage
of a hundred and died of natural decay, and then had risen again rejuvenated, with
trumpets and the rending of the sky. It was said truly enough that human Christianity in
its recurrent weakness was sometimes too much wedded to the powers of the world; but if it
was wedded it has very often been widowed. It is a strangely immortal sort of widow. An
enemy may have said at one moment that it was but an aspect of the power of the Caesars;
and it sounds as strange to-day as to call it an aspect of the Pharaohs. An enemy might
say that it was the official faith of feudalism; and it sounds as convincing now as to say
that it was bound to perish with the ancient Roman villa. All these things did indeed run
their course to its normal end; and there seemed no course for the religion but to end
with them. It ended and it began again.
120 'Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass
away.' The civilisation of antiquity was the whole world: and men no more dreamed of its
ending than of the ending of daylight. They could not imagine another order unless it were
in another world. The civilisation of the world has passed away and those words have not
passed away. In the long night of the Dark Ages feudalism was so familiar a thing that no
man could imagine himself without a lord: and religion was so woven into that network that
no man would have believed they could be torn asunder. Feudalism itself was torn to rags
and rotted away in the popular life of the true Middle Ages; and the first and freshest
power in that new freedom was the old religion. Feudalism had passed away, and the words
did not pass away. The whole medieval order, in many ways so complete and almost cosmic a
home for man, wore out gradually in its turn and here at least it was thought that the
words would die. They went forth across the radiant abyss of the Renaissance and in fifty
years were using all its light and learning for new religious foundations, new
apologetics, new saints. It was supposed to have been withered up at last in the dry light
of the Age of Reason; it was supposed to have disappeared ultimately in the earthquake of
the Age of Revolution. Science explained it away; and it was still there. History
disinterred it in the past; and it appeared suddenly in the future. To-day it stands once
more in our path; and even as we watch it, it grows.
121 If our social relations and records retain their continuity, if
men really learn to apply reason to the accumulating facts of so crushing a story, it
would seem that sooner or later even its enemies will learn from their incessant and
interminable disappointments not to look for anything so simple as its death. They may
continue to war with it, but it will be as they war with nature; as they war with the
landscape, as they war
122 with the skies. 'Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words
shall not pass away.' They will watch for it to stumble; they will watch for it to err;
they will no longer watch for it to end. Insensibly, even unconsciously, they will in
their own silent anticipations fulfil the relative terms of that astounding prophecy; they
will forget to watch for the mere extinction of what has so often been vainly
extinguished; and will learn instinctively to look first for the coming of the comet or
the freezing of the star.
CONCLUSION
THE SUMMARY OF THIS BOOK
123 I have taken the liberty once or twice of borrowing the excellent
phrase about an Outline of History; though this study of a special truth and a special
error can of course claim no sort of comparison with the rich and many-sided encyclopedia
of history. for which that name was chosen. And yet there is a certain reason in the
reference: and a sense in which the one thing touches and even cuts across the other. For
the story of the world as told by Mr. Wells could here only be criticised as an outline.
And, strangely enough, it seems to me that it is only wrong as an outline. It is admirable
as an accumulation of history; it is splendid as a store-house or treasure of history; it
is a fascinating disquisition on history; it is most attractive as an amplification of
history; but it is quite false as an outline of history. The one thing that seems to me
quite wrong about it is the outline; the sort of outline that can really be a single line,
like that which makes all the difference between a caricature of the profile of Mr.
Winston Churchill and of Sir Alfred Mond. In simple and homely language, I mean the things
that stick out; the things that make the simplicity of a silhouette. I think the
proportions are wrong; the proportions of what is certain as compared with what is
uncertain, of what played a great part as compared with what played a smaller part, of
what is ordinary and what is extraordinary, of what really lies level with an average and
what stands out as an exception.
124 I do not say it as a small criticism of a great writer, and I
have no reason to do so; for in my own much smaller task I feel I have failed in very much
the same way. I am very doubtful whether I have conveyed to the reader the main point I
meant about the proportions of history, and why I have dwelt so much more on some things
than others. I doubt whether I have clearly fulfilled the plan that I set out in the
introductory chapter; and for that reason I add these lines as a sort of summary in a
concluding chapter. I do believe that the things on which I have insisted are more
essential to an outline of history than the things which I have subordinated or dismissed.
I do not believe that the past is most truly pictured as a thing in which humanity merely
fades away into nature, or civilisation merely fades away into barbarism, or religion
fades away into mythology, or our own religion fades away into the religions of the world.
In short I do not believe that the best way to produce an outline of history is to rub out
the lines. I believe that, of the two, it would be far nearer the truth to tell the tale
very simply, like a primitive myth about a man who made the sun and stars or a god who
entered the body of a sacred monkey. I will therefore sum up all that has gone before in
what seems to me a realistic and reasonably proportioned statement; the short story of
mankind.
125 In the land lit by that neighbouring star, whose blaze is the
broad daylight, there are many and very various things motionless and moving. There moves
among them a race that is in its relation to others a race of gods. The fact is not
lessened but emphasised because it can behave like a race of demons. Its distinction is
not an individual illusion, like one bird pluming itself on its own plumes; it is a solid
and a many-sided thing. It is demonstrated in the very speculations that have led to its
being denied. That men, the gods of this lower world, are linked with it in various ways
is true; but it is another aspect of the same truth. That they grow as the grass grows and
walk as the beasts walk is a secondary necessity that sharpens the primary distinction. It
is like saying that a magician must after all have the appearance of a man; or that even
the fairies could not dance without feet. It has lately been the fashion to focus the mind
entirely on these mild and subordinate resemblances and to forget the main fact
altogether. It is customary to insist that man resembles the other creatures. Yes; and
that very resemblance he alone can see. The fish does not trace the fish-bone pattern in
the fowls of the air; or the elephant and the emu compare skeletons. Even in the sense in
which man is at one with the universe it is an utterly lonely universality. The very sense
that he is united with all things is enough to sunder him from all.
126 Looking around him by this unique light, as lonely as the literal
flame that he alone has kindled, this demigod or demon of the visible world makes that
world visible. He sees around him a world of a certain style or type. It seems to proceed
by certain rules or at least repetitions. He sees a green architecture that builds itself
without visible hands; but which builds itself into a very exact plan or pattern, like a
design already drawn in the air by an invisible finger. It is not, as is now vaguely
suggested, a vague thing. It is not a growth or a groping of blind life. Each seeks an
end; a glorious and radiant end, even for every daisy or dandelion we see in looking
across the level of a common field. In the very shape of things there is more than green
growth; there is the finality of the flower. It is a world of crowns. This impression,
whether or no it be an illusion, has so profoundly influenced this race of thinkers and
masters of the material world, that the vast majority have been moved to take a certain
view of that world. They have concluded, rightly or wrongly, that the world had a plan as
the tree seemed to have a plan; and an end and crown like the flower. But so long as the
race of thinkers was able to think, it was obvious that the admission of this idea of a
plan brought with it another thought more thrilling and even terrible. There was someone
else, some strange and unseen being, who had designed these things, if indeed they were
designed. There was a stranger who was also a friend; a mysterious benefactor who had been
before them and built up the woods and hills for their coming, and had kindled the sunrise
against their rising, as a servant kindles a fire. Now this idea of a mind that gives a
meaning to the universe has received more and more confirmation within the minds of men,
by meditations and experiences much more subtle and searching than any such argument about
the external plan of the world. But I am concerned here with keeping the story in its most
simple and even concrete terms; and it is enough to say here that most men, including the
wisest men, have come to the conclusion that the world has such a final purpose and
therefore such a first cause. But most men in some sense separated themselves from the
wisest men, when it came to the treatment of that idea. There came into existence two ways
of treating that idea, which between them made up most of the religious history of the
world. The majority, like the minority, had this strong sense of a second meaning in
things; of a strange master who knew the secret of the world. But the majority, the mob or
mass of men, naturally tended to treat it rather in the spirit of gossip. The gossip, like
all gossip, contained a great deal of truth and falsehood. The world began to tell itself
tales about the unknown being or his sons or servants or messengers. Some of the tales may
truly be called old wives' tales; as professing only to be very remote memories of the
morning of the world; myths about the baby moon or the half-baked mountains. Some of them
might more truly be called travellers' tales; as being curious but contemporary tales
brought from certain borderlands of experience; such as miraculous cures or those that
bring whispers of what has happened to the dead. Many of them are probably true tales;
enough of them are probably true to keep a person of real commonsense more or less
conscious that there really is something rather marvellous behind the cosmic curtain. But
in a sense it is only going by appearances; even if the appearances are called
apparitions. It is a matter of appearances--and disappearances. At the most these gods are
ghosts; that is, they are glimpses. For most of us they are rather gossip about glimpses.
And for the rest, the whole world is full of rumours, most of which are almost avowedly
romances. The great majority of the tales about gods and ghosts and the invisible king are
told, if not for the sake of the tale, at least for the sake of the topic. They are
evidence of the eternal interest of the theme; they are not evidence of anything else, and
they are not meant to be. They are mythology or the poetry that is not bound in books-- or
bound in any other way.
127 Meanwhile the minority, the sages or thinkers, had withdrawn
apart and had taken up an equally congenial trade. They were drawing up plans of the
world; of the world which all believed to have a plan. They were trying to set forth the
plan seriously and to scale. They were setting their minds directly to the mind that had
made the mysterious world; considering what sort of a mind it might be and what its
ultimate purpose might be. Some of them made that mind much more impersonal than mankind
has generally made it; some simplified it almost to a blank; a few, a very few, doubted it
altogether. One or two of the more morbid fancied that it might be evil and an enemy; just
one or two of the more degraded in the other class worshipped demons instead of gods. But
most of these theorists were theists: and they not only saw a moral plan in nature, but
they generally laid down a moral plan for humanity. Most of them were good men who did
good work: and they were remembered and reverenced in various ways. They were scribes; any
their scriptures became more or less holy scriptures. They were law-givers; and their
tradition became not only legal but ceremonial. We may say that they received divine
honours, in the sense in which kings and great captains in certain countries often
received divine honours. In a word, wherever the other popular spirit, the spirit of
legend and gossip could come into play, it surrounded them with the more mystical
atmosphere of the myths. Popular poetry turned the sages into saints. But that was all it
did. They remained themselves; men never really forgot that they were men, only made into
gods in the sense that they were made into heroes. Divine Plato, like Divus Ceasar, was a
title and not a dogma. In Asia, where the atmosphere was more mythological, the man was
made to look more like a myth, but he remained a man. He remained a man of a certain
social class or school of men, receiving and deserving great honour from mankind. It is
the order or school of the philosophers; the men who have set themselves seriously to
trace the order across any apparent chaos in the vision of life. Instead of living on
imaginative rumours and remote traditions and the tail-end of exceptional experiences
about the mind and meaning behind the world, they have tried in a sense to project the
primary purpose of that mind a priori. They have tried to put on paper a possible plan of
the world; almost as if the world were not yet made.
128 Right in the middle of all these things stands up an enormous
exception. It is quite unlike anything else. It is a thing final like the trump of doom,
though it is also a piece of good news; or news that seems too good to be true. It is
nothing less than the loud assertion that this mysterious maker of the world has visited
his world in person. It declares that really and even recently, or right in the middle of
historic times, there did walk into the world this original invisible being; about whom
the thinkers make theories and the mythologists hand down myths; the Man Who Made the
World. That such a higher personality exists behind all things had indeed always been
implied by all the best thinkers, as well as by all the most beautiful legends. But
nothing of this sort had ever been implied in any of them. It is simply false to say that
the other sages and heroes had claimed to be that mysterious master and maker, of whom the
world had dreamed and disputed. Not one of them had ever claimed to be anything of the
sort. Not one of their sects or schools had even claimed that they had claimed to be
anything of the sort. The most that any religious prophet had said was that he was the
true servant of such a being. The most that any visionary had ever said was that men might
catch glimpses of the glory of that spiritual being; or much more often of lesser
spiritual beings. The most that any primitive myth had even suggested was that the Creator
was present at the Creation. But that the Creator was present at scenes a little
subsequent to the supper-parties of Horace, and talked with tax-collectors and government
officials in the detailed daily life of the Roman Empire, and that this fact continued to
be firmly asserted by the whole of that great civilisation for more than a thousand
years-- that is something utterly unlike anything else in nature. It is the one great
startling statement that man has made since he spoke his first articulate word, instead of
barking like a dog. Its unique character can be used as an argument against it as well as
for it. It would be easy to concentrate on it as a case of isolated insanity; but it makes
nothing but dust and nonsense of comparative religion.
129 It came on the world with a wind and rush of running messengers
proclaiming that apocalyptic portent, and it is not unduly fanciful to say that they are
running still. What puzzles the world, and its wise philosophers and fanciful pagan poets,
about the priests and people of the Catholic Church is that they still behave as if they
were messengers. A messenger does not dream about what his message might be, or argue
about what it probably would be; he delivers it as it is. It is not a theory or a fancy
but a fact. It is not relevant to this intentionally rudimentary outline to prove in
detail that it is a fact; but merely to point out that these messengers do deal with it as
men deal with a fact. All that is condemned in Catholic tradition, authority, and
dogmatism and the refusal to retract and modify, are but the natural human attributes of a
man with a message relating to a fact. I desire to avoid in this last summary all the
controversial complexities that may once more cloud the simple lines of that strange
story; which I have already called, in words that are much too weak, the strangest story
in the world. I desire merely to mark those main lines and specially to mark where the
great line is really to be drawn. The religion of the world, in its right proportions, is
not divided into fine shades of mysticism or more or less rational forms of mythology. It
is divided by the line between the men who are bringing that message and the men who have
not yet heard it, or cannot yet believe it.
130 But when we translate the terms of that strange tale back into
the more concrete and complicated terminology of our time, we find it covered by names and
memories of which the very familiarity is a falsification. For instance, when we say that
a country contains so many Moslems, we really mean that it contains so many monotheists;
and we really mean, by that, that it contains so many men; men with the old average
assumption of men--that the invisible ruler remains invisible. They hold it along with the
customs of a certain culture and under the simpler laws of a certain law-giver; but so
they would if their law-giver were Lycurgus or Solon. They testify to something which is a
necessary and noble truth; but was never a new truth. Their creed is not a new colour; it
is the neutral and normal tint that is the background of the many-coloured life of man.
Mahomet did not, like the Magi, find a new star; he saw through his own particular window
a glimpse of the great grey field of the ancient starlight. So when we say that the
country contains so many Confucians or Buddhists, we mean it contains so many pagans whose
prophets have given them another and rather vaguer version of the invisible power; making
it not only invisible but almost impersonal. When we say that they also have temples and
idols and priests and periodical festivals, we simply mean that this sort of heathen is
enough of a human being to admit the popular element of pomp and pictures and feasts and
fairy-tales. We only mean that Pagans have more sense than Puritans. But what the gods are
supposed to be, what the priests are commissioned to say, is not a sensational secret like
what those running messengers of the Gospel had to say. Nobody else except those
messengers has any Gospel; nobody else has any good news; for the simple reason that
nobody else has any news.
131 Those runners gather impetus as they run. Ages afterwards they
still speak as if something had just happened. They have not lost the speed and momentum
of messengers; they have hardly lost, as it were, the wild eyes of witnesses. In the
Catholic Church, which is the cohort of the message, there are still those headlong acts
of holiness that speak of something rapid and recent; a self-sacrifice that startles the
world like a suicide. But it is not a suicide; it is not pessimistic; it is still as
optimistic as St. Francis of the flowers and birds. It is newer in spirit than the newest
schools of thought; and it is almost certainly on the eve of new triumphs. For these men
serve a mother who seems to grow more beautiful as new generations rise up and call her
blessed. We might sometimes fancy that the Church grows younger as the world grows old.
132 For this is the last proof of the miracle; that something so
supernatural should have become so natural. I mean that anything so unique when seen from
the outside should only seem universal when seen from the inside. I have not minimised the
scale of the miracle, as some of our wilder theologians think it wise to do. Rather have I
deliberately dwelt on that incredible interruption, as a blow that broke the very backbone
of history. I have great sympathy with the monotheists, the Moslems, or the Jews, to whom
it seems a blasphemy; a blasphemy that might shake the world. But it did not shake the
world; it steadied the world. That fact, the more we consider it, will seem more solid and
more strange. I think it a piece of plain justice to all the unbelievers to insist upon
the audacity of the act of faith that is demanded of them. I willingly and warmly agree
that it is, in itself, a suggestion at which we might expect even the brain of the
believer to reel, when he realised his own belief. But the brain of the believer does not
reel; it is the brains of the unbelievers that reel. We can see their brains reeling on
every side and into every extravagance of ethics and psychology; into pessimism and the
denial of life; into pragmatism and the denial of logic; seeking their omens in nightmares
and their canons in contradictions; shrieking for fear at the far-off sight of things
beyond good and evil, or whispering of strange stars where two and two make five.
Meanwhile this solitary thing that seems at first so outrageous in outline remains solid
and sane in substance. It remains the moderator of all these manias; rescuing reason from
the Pragmatists exactly as it rescued laughter from the Puritans. I repeat that I have
deliberately emphasised its intrinsically defiant and dogmatic character. The mystery is
how anything so startling should have remained defiant and dogmatic and yet become
perfectly normal and natural. I have admitted freely that, considering the incident in
itself, a man who says he is God may be classed with a man who says he is glass. But the
man who says he is glass is not a glazier making windows for all the world. He does not
remain for after ages as a shining and crystalline figure, in whose light everything is as
clear as crystal
133 But this madness has remained sane. The madness has remained sane
when everything else went mad. The madhouse has been a house to which, age after age, men
are continually coming back as to a home. That is the riddle that remains; that anything
so abrupt and abnormal should still be found a habitable and hospitable thing. I care not
if the sceptic says it is a tall story; I cannot see how so toppling a tower could stand
so long without foundation. Still less can I see how it could become, as it has become,
the home of man. Had it merely appeared and disappeared, it might possibly have been
remembered or explained as the last leap of the rage of illusion, the ultimate myth of the
ultimate mood, in which the mind struck the sky and broke. But the mind did not break. It
is the one mind that remains unbroken in the break-up of the world. If it were an error,
it seems as if the error could hardly have lasted a day. If it were a mere ecstasy, it
would seem that such an ecstasy could not endure for an hour. It has endured for nearly
two thousand years; and the world within it has been more lucid, more level-headed, more
reasonable in its hopes, more healthy in its instincts, more humorous and cheerful in the
face of fate and death, than all the world outside. For it was the soul of Christendom
that came forth from the incredible Christ; and the soul of it was common sense. Though we
dared not look on His face we could look on His fruits; and by His fruits we should know
Him. The fruits are solid and the fruitfulness is much more than a metaphor; and nowhere
in this sad world are boys happier in apple-trees, or men in more equal chorus singing as
they tread the vine, than under the fixed flash of this instant and intolerant
enlightenment; the lightning made eternal as the light.
APPENDIX I
ON PREHISTORIC MAN
134 On re-reading these pages I feel that I have tried in many places
and with many words, to say something that might be said in one word. In a sense this
study is meant to be superficial. That is. it is not meant as a study of the things that
need to be studied. It is rather a reminder of the things that are seen so quickly that
they are forgotten almost as quickly. Its moral, in a manner of speaking, is that first
thoughts are best; so a flash might reveal a landscape; with the Eiffel Tower or the
Matterhorn standing up in it as they would never stand up again in the light of common
day. I ended the book with an image of everlasting lightning; in a very different sense,
alas, this little flash has lasted only too long. But the method has also certain
practical disadvantages upon which I think it well to add these two notes. It may seem to
simplify too much and to ignore out of ignorance. I feel this especially in the passage
about the prehistoric pictures; which is not concerned with all that the learned may learn
from prehistoric pictures, but with the single point of what anyone could learn from there
being any prehistoric pictures at all. I am conscious that this attempt to express it in
terms of innocence may exaggerate even my own ignorance. Without any pretence of
scientific research or information, I should be sorry to have it thought that I knew no
more than what was needed, in that passage, of the states into which primitive humanity
has been divided. I am aware, of course, that the story is elaborately stratified; and
that there were many such stages before the Cro-Magnon or any peoples with whom we
associate such pictures. Indeed recent studies about the Neanderthal and other races
rather tend to repeat the moral that is here most relevant. The notion noted in these
pages of something necessarily slow or late in the development of religion, will gain
little indeed from these later revelations about the precursors of the reindeer
picture-maker. The learned appear to hold that, whether the reindeer picture could be
religious or not, the people that lived before it were religious already; burying their
dead with the significant signs of mystery and hope. This obviously brings us back to the
same argument; an argument that is not approached by any measurement of the earlier man's
skull. It is little use here to compare the head of the man with the head of the monkey,
if it certainly never came into the head of the monkey to bury another monkey with nuts in
his grave to help him towards a heavenly monkey house. Talking of skulls, I am also aware
of the story of the Cro-Magnon skull that was much larger and finer than a modern skull.
It is a very funny story; because an eminent evolutionist, awakening to a somewhat belated
caution, protested against anything being inferred from one specimen. It is the duty of a
solitary skull to prove that our fathers were our inferiors. Any solitary skull presuming
to prove that they were superior is felt to be suffering from swelled head.
APPENDIX II
ON AUTHORITY AND ACCURACY
135 In this book which is merely meant as a popular criticism of
popular fallacies, often indeed of very vulgar errors, I feel that I have sometimes given
an impression of scoffing at serious scientific work. It was however the very reverse of
my intentions. I am not arguing with the scientist who explains the elephant, but only
with the sophist who explains it away. And as a matter of fact the sophist plays to the
gallery, as he did in ancient Greece. He appeals to the ignorant, especially when he
appeals to the learned. But I never meant my own criticism to be an impertinence to the
truly learned. We all owe an infinite debt to the researches, especially the recent
researches, of single minded students in these matters; and I have only professed to pick
up things here and there from them. I have not loaded my abstract argument with quotations
and references, which only make a man look more learned than he is; but in some cases I
find that my own loose fashion of allusion is rather misleading about my own meaning. The
passage about Chaucer and the Child Martyr is badly expressed; I only mean that the
English poet probably had in mind the English saint; of whose story he gives a sort of
foreign version. In the same way two statements in the chapter on Mythology follow each
other in such a way that it may seem to be suggested that the second story about
monotheism refers to the Southern Seas. I may explain that Atahocan belongs not to
Australasian but to American savages. So in the chapter called "The Antiquity of
Civilisation," which I feel to be the most unsatisfactory, I have given my own
impression of the meaning of the development of Egyptian monarchy too much, perhaps, as if
it were identical with the facts on which it was formed as given in works like those of
Professor J. L Myres. But the confusion was not intentional; still less was there any
intention to imply, in the remainder of the chapter, that the anthropological speculations
about races are less valuable than they undoubtedly are. My criticism is strictly
relative; I may say that the pyramids are plainer than the tracks of the desert; without
denying that wiser men than I may see tracks in what is to me the trackless sand.
