 | Chesterton finally begins a shift from his observations of the world and Christianity's seeming absurdities, to Christianity’s synthesis of those observations. In chapter six, Chesterton expounds on more seeming contradictions within Christianity. How can Christianity be so fierce in one direction (e.g. damning those who commit suicide), while being so fierce in the other direction (e.g. glorifying a martyr’s embrace of death)? This chapter was extremely beneficial to me, as it not only countered many of the claims still levied against Christianity today, but also showed me why I have frequently felt so torn as a Christian – towards the hatred of sin, yet loving humanity in their fallenness because I recognized that “but by the grace of God…” |
Chesterton begins chapter six by explaining that the biggest problem with the world is that it is nearly reasonable, “but not quite.” It is reasonable up to a point, but then it changes. He gives the analogy of an alien observer of human kind. The alien sees that humanity is symmetrical. Two eyes, two nostrils, two ears, two arms, two legs, five fingers on each side, etc. But when the alien would leave what is observed to make a hypothesis of what is inside humans, were he to say that humans had two hearts – or one symmetrical heart symmetrically placed, the alien observer would be very reasonable. In fact, if the alien guessed that humans had one heart, it would be absurd given his evidence. But it is exactly at this juncture of reason and reality that the alien would go wrong, for humans only have one heart. This, Chesterton says, is exactly what we get with Christianity. We get subtle predictions that seem to go wrong, but are exactly right. For “whenever we feel there is something odd in Christian theology, we shall generally find that there is something odd in the truth.”
Ironically, it was the atheist and agnostic that lead Chesterton towards the consideration of Christianity. The more Chesterton read, the more he realized that the agnostics were painting an inconsistent picture of Christianity – or at least a very eccentric one. This piqued his interest. He says,
“This odd effect of the great agnostics in arousing doubts deeper than their own might be illustrated in many ways. I take only one. As I read and re-read all the non-Christian or anti-Christian accounts of the faith, from Huxley to Bradlaugh, a slow and awful impression grew gradually but graphically upon my mind— the impression that Christianity must be a most extraordinary thing. For not only (as I understood) had Christianity the most flaming vices, but it had apparently a mystical talent for combining vices which seemed inconsistent with each other. It was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons. No sooner had one rationalist demonstrated that it was too far to the east than another demonstrated with equal clearness that it was much too far to the west. No sooner had my indignation died down at its angular and aggressive squareness than I was called up again to notice and condemn its enervating and sensual roundness.”
To prove his point, Chesterton elaborates with a number of examples.
1. Christians push away pleasure and joy but Christians have pure joy.
“One rationalist had hardly done calling Christianity a nightmare before another began to call it a fool’s paradise. This puzzled me; the charges seemed inconsistent. Christianity could not at once be the black mask on a white world, and also the white mask on a black world. The state of the Christian could not be at once so comfortable that he was a coward to cling to it, and so uncomfortable that he was a fool to stand it.”
2. Christians are too meek, passive, and unmanly, but Christians are too warlike and violent:
“The Gospel paradox about the other cheek, the fact that priests never fought, a hundred things made plausible the accusation that Christianity was an attempt to make a man too like a sheep. I read it and believed it, and if I had read nothing different, I should have gone on believing it. But I read something very different. I turned the next page in my agnostic manual, and my brain turned up-side down. Now I found that I was to hate Christianity not for fighting too little, but for fighting too much. Christianity, it seemed, was the mother of wars. Christianity had deluged the world with blood. I had got thoroughly angry with the Christian, because he never was angry. And now I was told to be angry with him because his anger had been the most huge and horrible thing in human history; because his anger had soaked the earth and smoked to the sun. The very people who reproached Christianity with the meekness and non-resistance of the monastries were the very people who reproached it also with the violence and valour of the Crusades. It was the fault of poor old Christianity (somehow or other) both that Edward the Confessor did not fight and that Richard Coeur de Lion did. The Quakers (we were told) were the only characteristic Christians; and yet the massacres of Cromwell and Alva were characteristic Christian crimes. What could it all mean? What was this Christianity which always forbade war and always produced wars? What could be the nature of the thing which one could abuse first because it would not fight, and second because it was always fighting? In what world of riddles was born this monstrous murder and this monstrous meekness? The shape of Christianity grew a queerer shape every instant.”
3. Christianity is the same as all other religions, yet Christianity is so different from other religions:
“But then I found an astonishing thing. I found that the very people who said that mankind was one church from Plato to Emerson were the very people who said that morality had changed altogether, and that what was right in one age was wrong in another. If I asked, say, for an altar, I was told that we needed none, for men our brothers gave us clear oracles and one creed in their universal customs and ideals. But if I mildly pointed out that one of men’s universal customs was to have an altar, then my agnostic teachers turned clean round and told me that men had always been in darkness and the superstitions of savages. I found it was their daily taunt against Christianity that it was the light of one people and had left all others to die in the dark. But I also found that it was their special boast for themselves that science and progress were the discovery of one people, and that all other peoples had died in the dark. Their chief insult to Christianity was actually their chief compliment to themselves, and there seemed to be a strange unfairness about all their relative insistence on the two things. When considering some pagan or agnostic, we were to remember that all men had one religion; when considering some mystic or spiritualist, we were only to consider what absurd religions some men had. We could trust the ethics of Epictetus, because ethics had never changed. We must not trust the ethics of Bossuet, because ethics had changed. They changed in two hundred years, but not in two thousand.”
4. Christianity forces marriage and family upon women forbidding them freedom in loneliness and contemplation, yet Christianity “dragged women to the loneliness and contemplation of the cloister.”
5. Christianity is against women and their intellect, yet the modern’s sneer at the church was that “only women” attended it.
6. Christianity is too ornate and ritualistic, yet Christianity is too plain and downcast.
7. Christianity was accused of restraining sexuality, yet Malthusians recognized that it restrained it too little, for Christians had high birth rates and contributed to "overpopulation."
8. There is too much disunion in Christianity, yet Christianity is too unified.
Taking all of this evidence in, Chesterton comments,
“It must be understood that I did not conclude hastily that the accusations were false or the accusers fools. I simply deduced that Christianity must be something even weirder and wickeder than they made out. A thing might have these two opposite vices; but it must be a rather queer thing if it did. A man might be too fat in one place and too thin in another; but he would be an odd shape. At this point my thoughts were only of the odd shape of the Christian religion; I did not allege any odd shape in the rationalistic mind…[But] this began to be alarming. It looked not so much as if Christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with. What again could this astonishing thing be like which people were so anxious to contradict, that in doing so they did not mind contradicting themselves?...
I wished to be quite fair then, and I wish to be quite fair now; and I did not conclude that the attack on Christianity was all wrong. I only concluded that if Christianity was wrong, it was very wrong indeed. Such hostile horrors might be combined in one thing, but that thing must be very strange and solitary. There are men who are misers, and also spendthrifts; but they are rare. There are men sensual and also ascetic; but they are rare. But if this mass of mad contradictions really existed, quakerish and bloodthirsty, too gorgeous and too thread-bare, austere, yet pandering preposterously to the lust of the eye, the enemy of women and their foolish refuge, a solemn pessimist and a silly optimist, if this evil existed, then there was in this evil something quite supreme and unique. For I found in my rationalist teachers no explanation of such exceptional corruption. Christianity (theoretically speaking) was in their eyes only one of the ordinary myths and errors of mortals. They gave me no key to this twisted and unnatural badness. Such a paradox of evil rose to the stature of the supernatural. It was, indeed, almost as supernatural as the infallibility of the Pope. An historic institution, which never went right, is really quite as much of a miracle as an institution that cannot go wrong. The only explanation which immediately occurred to my mind was that Christianity did not come from heaven, but from hell. Really, if Jesus of Nazareth was not Christ, He must have been Antichrist.”
So Chesterton did not immediately take all of these contradicting accusations as proving Christianity. Rather, he concluded that Christianity must be some absolutely abnormal thing – to harbor such extreme ideas. But then Chesterton had a revelation. What if it was not Christianity that was oddly shaped, but everything else?
“And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still thunderbolt. There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation. Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who are growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance. Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like tow) called him a dark man, while negroes considered him distinctly blonde. Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad— in various ways. I tested this idea by asking myself whether there was about any of the accusers anything morbid that might explain the accusation. I was startled to find that this key fitted a lock…
It was no longer a complication of diseases in Christianity, but a complication of diseases in [atheists and agnostics]. The restraints of Christians saddened [them] simply because [they were] more hedonist than a healthy man should be. The faith of Christians angered [them] because [they were] more pessimist than a healthy man should be. In the same way the Malthusians by instinct attacked Christianity; not because there is anything especially anti-Malthusian about Christianity, but because there is something a little anti-human about Malthusianism.”
But Chesterton recognizes that the atheists and agnostics did not err out of pure malice. There was indeed something startlingly unique about Christianity. The crusaders were extremely fierce, and the monks extremely meek. It was at this moment that Chesterton’s earlier thought about the martyr and the suicide struck him. Christianity had resonated with this intuition within Chesterton, so perhaps Christianity had something right about these other opposing notions. In fact, Christianity’s embrace of opposites seemed to be central to its core theology.
“Madly as Christians might love the martyr or hate the suicide, they never felt these passions more madly than I had felt them long before I dreamed of Christianity… We want not an amalgam or compromise, but both things at the top of their energy; love and wrath both burning. Here I shall only trace it in relation to ethics. But I need not remind the reader that the idea of this combination is indeed central in orthodox theology. For orthodox theology has specially insisted that Christ was not a being apart from God and man, like an elf, nor yet a being half human and half not, like a centaur, but both things at once and both things thoroughly, very man and very God.”
It is here that Chesterton hits on the nerve of Christianity. This is the truth that tipped the scales in Christianity’s favor. For whereas all other religions and beliefs had held the idea that virtues were lived in balance, Christianity held that virtues were lived in extremes. For a balance is really just a weakening dilution of both virtues, whereas allowing virtues to exist in their purest form maintains their identity and power. As the alien observer who would guess that a man had one heart rather than two, this is exactly the point of irrationality that Christianity predicted correctly. To show how Christianity gets this concept right, Chesterton proceeds by using the example of courage.
Chesterton says that courage is a contradiction in terms. It means “a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.” This is “not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice.” Chesterton continues with more examples.
“A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. And it has held up ever since above the European lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry: the Christian courage, which is a disdain of death; not the Chinese courage, which is a disdain of life.”
Chesterton continues on by exploring how pride and humility are also extremes that are exaggerated within Christianity.
“And now I began to find that this duplex passion was the Christian key to ethics everywhere. Everywhere the creed made a moderation out of the still crash of two impetuous emotions. Take, for instance, the matter of modesty, of the balance between mere pride and mere prostration. The average pagan, like the average agnostic, would merely say that he was content with himself, but not insolently self-satisfied, that there were many better and many worse, that his desserts were limited, but he would see that he got them. In short, he would walk with his head in the air; but not necessarily with his nose in the air… Being a mixture of two things, it is a dilution of two things; neither is present in its full strength or contributes its full colour. This proper pride does not lift the heart like the tongue of trumpets; you cannot go clad in crimson and gold for this. On the other hand, this mild rationalist modesty does not cleanse the soul with fire and make it clear like crystal; it does not (like a strict and searching humility) make a man as a little child, who can sit at the feet of the grass. It does not make him look up and see marvels; for Alice must grow small if she is to be Alice in Wonderland. Thus it loses both the poetry of being proud and the poetry of being humble. Christianity sought by this same strange expedient to save both of them.
It separated the two ideas and then exaggerated them both. In one way Man was to be haughtier than he had ever been before; in another way he was to be humbler than he had ever been before. In so far as I am Man I am the chief of creatures. In so far as I am a man I am the chief of sinners. All humility that had meant pessimism, that had meant man taking a vague or mean view of his whole destiny— all that was to go. We were to hear no more the wail of Ecclesiastes that humanity had no pre-eminence over the brute, or the awful cry of Homer that man was only the saddest of all the beasts of the field. Man was a statue of God walking about the garden. Man had pre-eminence over all the brutes; man was only sad because he was not a beast, but a broken god. The Greek had spoken of men creeping on the earth, as if clinging to it. Now Man was to tread on the earth as if to subdue it. Christianity thus held a thought of the dignity of man that could only be expressed in crowns rayed like the sun and fans of peacock plumage. Yet at the same time it could hold a thought about the abject smallness of man that could only be expressed in fasting and fantastic submission, in the grey ashes of St. Dominic and the white snows of St. Bernard. When one came to think of one’s self, there was vista and void enough for any amount of bleak abnegation and bitter truth. There the realistic gentleman could let himself go— as long as he let himself go at himself. There was an open playground for the happy pessimist. Let him say anything against himself short of blaspheming the original aim of his being; let him call himself a fool and even a damned fool (though that is Calvinistic); but he must not say that fools are not worth saving. He must not say that a man, quâ man, can be valueless. Here again, in short, Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.
Chesterton finishes his string of examples with the virtue of charity.
“Take another case: the complicated question of charity, which some highly uncharitable idealists seem to think quite easy. Charity is a paradox, like modesty and courage. Stated baldly, charity certainly means one of two things— pardoning unpardonable acts, or loving unlovable people. But if we ask ourselves (as we did in the case of pride) what a sensible pagan would feel about such a subject, we shall probably be beginning at the bottom of it. A sensible pagan would say that there were some people one could forgive, and some one couldn’t: a slave who stole wine could be laughed at; a slave who betrayed his benefactor could be killed, and cursed even after he was killed. In so far as the act was pardonable, the man was pardonable. That again is rational, and even refreshing; but it is a dilution. It leaves no place for a pure horror of injustice, such as that which is a great beauty in the innocent. And it leaves no place for a mere tenderness for men as men, such as is the whole fascination of the charitable. Christianity came in here as before. It came in startlingly with a sword, and clove one thing from another. It divided the crime from the criminal. The criminal we must forgive unto seventy times seven. The crime we must not forgive at all. It was not enough that slaves who stole wine inspired partly anger and partly kindness. We must be much more angry with theft than before, and yet much kinder to thieves than before. There was room for wrath and love to run wild. And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.”
After all of this, Chesterton wraps up the concept with a wonderful biblical analogy. “…When the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like. But that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb. That is simply the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating the lamb. The real problem is— Can the lion lie down with the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity? That is the problem the Church attempted; that is the miracle she achieved.” How does one maintain a hatred for injustice yet compassion and mercy towards criminals? How can one uphold absolute human value yet be meek and humble? No other religion or worldview has answered these riddles the way that Christianity has. No other religion allows pride and humility or mercy and justice to be as pronounced and full as Christianity. All other religions have predicted exactly what the rational prediction is – that there must be a balance. But as Chesterton points out, this is a dilution. Christianity maintains the extremes, and it maintains them fiercely.
Chesterton finishes the chapter by giving a very brief overview of church history. He explains how the church has avoided the countless heresies and pagan pitfalls that would have made Christianity just another religion that fell along the wayside. This is what makes Christianity’s doctrine so important. Any deviance in doctrine can easily turn into great blasphemy and ruin the whole ideal, influencing greatly the happiness and carelessness of humanity. It is the church’s avoidance of the multitude of pitfalls, their protection of the core doctrine, and the embracing of the extremes that have lead Chesterton to see Christianity’s validity and uniqueness.
Chesterton has now set up chapter seven, which will delve into how the Christian ideal should guide our lives, and why this ideal surpasses any other ideal that exists.
Ironically, it was the atheist and agnostic that lead Chesterton towards the consideration of Christianity. The more Chesterton read, the more he realized that the agnostics were painting an inconsistent picture of Christianity – or at least a very eccentric one. This piqued his interest. He says,
“This odd effect of the great agnostics in arousing doubts deeper than their own might be illustrated in many ways. I take only one. As I read and re-read all the non-Christian or anti-Christian accounts of the faith, from Huxley to Bradlaugh, a slow and awful impression grew gradually but graphically upon my mind— the impression that Christianity must be a most extraordinary thing. For not only (as I understood) had Christianity the most flaming vices, but it had apparently a mystical talent for combining vices which seemed inconsistent with each other. It was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons. No sooner had one rationalist demonstrated that it was too far to the east than another demonstrated with equal clearness that it was much too far to the west. No sooner had my indignation died down at its angular and aggressive squareness than I was called up again to notice and condemn its enervating and sensual roundness.”
To prove his point, Chesterton elaborates with a number of examples.
1. Christians push away pleasure and joy but Christians have pure joy.
“One rationalist had hardly done calling Christianity a nightmare before another began to call it a fool’s paradise. This puzzled me; the charges seemed inconsistent. Christianity could not at once be the black mask on a white world, and also the white mask on a black world. The state of the Christian could not be at once so comfortable that he was a coward to cling to it, and so uncomfortable that he was a fool to stand it.”
2. Christians are too meek, passive, and unmanly, but Christians are too warlike and violent:
“The Gospel paradox about the other cheek, the fact that priests never fought, a hundred things made plausible the accusation that Christianity was an attempt to make a man too like a sheep. I read it and believed it, and if I had read nothing different, I should have gone on believing it. But I read something very different. I turned the next page in my agnostic manual, and my brain turned up-side down. Now I found that I was to hate Christianity not for fighting too little, but for fighting too much. Christianity, it seemed, was the mother of wars. Christianity had deluged the world with blood. I had got thoroughly angry with the Christian, because he never was angry. And now I was told to be angry with him because his anger had been the most huge and horrible thing in human history; because his anger had soaked the earth and smoked to the sun. The very people who reproached Christianity with the meekness and non-resistance of the monastries were the very people who reproached it also with the violence and valour of the Crusades. It was the fault of poor old Christianity (somehow or other) both that Edward the Confessor did not fight and that Richard Coeur de Lion did. The Quakers (we were told) were the only characteristic Christians; and yet the massacres of Cromwell and Alva were characteristic Christian crimes. What could it all mean? What was this Christianity which always forbade war and always produced wars? What could be the nature of the thing which one could abuse first because it would not fight, and second because it was always fighting? In what world of riddles was born this monstrous murder and this monstrous meekness? The shape of Christianity grew a queerer shape every instant.”
3. Christianity is the same as all other religions, yet Christianity is so different from other religions:
“But then I found an astonishing thing. I found that the very people who said that mankind was one church from Plato to Emerson were the very people who said that morality had changed altogether, and that what was right in one age was wrong in another. If I asked, say, for an altar, I was told that we needed none, for men our brothers gave us clear oracles and one creed in their universal customs and ideals. But if I mildly pointed out that one of men’s universal customs was to have an altar, then my agnostic teachers turned clean round and told me that men had always been in darkness and the superstitions of savages. I found it was their daily taunt against Christianity that it was the light of one people and had left all others to die in the dark. But I also found that it was their special boast for themselves that science and progress were the discovery of one people, and that all other peoples had died in the dark. Their chief insult to Christianity was actually their chief compliment to themselves, and there seemed to be a strange unfairness about all their relative insistence on the two things. When considering some pagan or agnostic, we were to remember that all men had one religion; when considering some mystic or spiritualist, we were only to consider what absurd religions some men had. We could trust the ethics of Epictetus, because ethics had never changed. We must not trust the ethics of Bossuet, because ethics had changed. They changed in two hundred years, but not in two thousand.”
4. Christianity forces marriage and family upon women forbidding them freedom in loneliness and contemplation, yet Christianity “dragged women to the loneliness and contemplation of the cloister.”
5. Christianity is against women and their intellect, yet the modern’s sneer at the church was that “only women” attended it.
6. Christianity is too ornate and ritualistic, yet Christianity is too plain and downcast.
7. Christianity was accused of restraining sexuality, yet Malthusians recognized that it restrained it too little, for Christians had high birth rates and contributed to "overpopulation."
8. There is too much disunion in Christianity, yet Christianity is too unified.
Taking all of this evidence in, Chesterton comments,
“It must be understood that I did not conclude hastily that the accusations were false or the accusers fools. I simply deduced that Christianity must be something even weirder and wickeder than they made out. A thing might have these two opposite vices; but it must be a rather queer thing if it did. A man might be too fat in one place and too thin in another; but he would be an odd shape. At this point my thoughts were only of the odd shape of the Christian religion; I did not allege any odd shape in the rationalistic mind…[But] this began to be alarming. It looked not so much as if Christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with. What again could this astonishing thing be like which people were so anxious to contradict, that in doing so they did not mind contradicting themselves?...
I wished to be quite fair then, and I wish to be quite fair now; and I did not conclude that the attack on Christianity was all wrong. I only concluded that if Christianity was wrong, it was very wrong indeed. Such hostile horrors might be combined in one thing, but that thing must be very strange and solitary. There are men who are misers, and also spendthrifts; but they are rare. There are men sensual and also ascetic; but they are rare. But if this mass of mad contradictions really existed, quakerish and bloodthirsty, too gorgeous and too thread-bare, austere, yet pandering preposterously to the lust of the eye, the enemy of women and their foolish refuge, a solemn pessimist and a silly optimist, if this evil existed, then there was in this evil something quite supreme and unique. For I found in my rationalist teachers no explanation of such exceptional corruption. Christianity (theoretically speaking) was in their eyes only one of the ordinary myths and errors of mortals. They gave me no key to this twisted and unnatural badness. Such a paradox of evil rose to the stature of the supernatural. It was, indeed, almost as supernatural as the infallibility of the Pope. An historic institution, which never went right, is really quite as much of a miracle as an institution that cannot go wrong. The only explanation which immediately occurred to my mind was that Christianity did not come from heaven, but from hell. Really, if Jesus of Nazareth was not Christ, He must have been Antichrist.”
So Chesterton did not immediately take all of these contradicting accusations as proving Christianity. Rather, he concluded that Christianity must be some absolutely abnormal thing – to harbor such extreme ideas. But then Chesterton had a revelation. What if it was not Christianity that was oddly shaped, but everything else?
“And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still thunderbolt. There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation. Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who are growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance. Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like tow) called him a dark man, while negroes considered him distinctly blonde. Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad— in various ways. I tested this idea by asking myself whether there was about any of the accusers anything morbid that might explain the accusation. I was startled to find that this key fitted a lock…
It was no longer a complication of diseases in Christianity, but a complication of diseases in [atheists and agnostics]. The restraints of Christians saddened [them] simply because [they were] more hedonist than a healthy man should be. The faith of Christians angered [them] because [they were] more pessimist than a healthy man should be. In the same way the Malthusians by instinct attacked Christianity; not because there is anything especially anti-Malthusian about Christianity, but because there is something a little anti-human about Malthusianism.”
But Chesterton recognizes that the atheists and agnostics did not err out of pure malice. There was indeed something startlingly unique about Christianity. The crusaders were extremely fierce, and the monks extremely meek. It was at this moment that Chesterton’s earlier thought about the martyr and the suicide struck him. Christianity had resonated with this intuition within Chesterton, so perhaps Christianity had something right about these other opposing notions. In fact, Christianity’s embrace of opposites seemed to be central to its core theology.
“Madly as Christians might love the martyr or hate the suicide, they never felt these passions more madly than I had felt them long before I dreamed of Christianity… We want not an amalgam or compromise, but both things at the top of their energy; love and wrath both burning. Here I shall only trace it in relation to ethics. But I need not remind the reader that the idea of this combination is indeed central in orthodox theology. For orthodox theology has specially insisted that Christ was not a being apart from God and man, like an elf, nor yet a being half human and half not, like a centaur, but both things at once and both things thoroughly, very man and very God.”
It is here that Chesterton hits on the nerve of Christianity. This is the truth that tipped the scales in Christianity’s favor. For whereas all other religions and beliefs had held the idea that virtues were lived in balance, Christianity held that virtues were lived in extremes. For a balance is really just a weakening dilution of both virtues, whereas allowing virtues to exist in their purest form maintains their identity and power. As the alien observer who would guess that a man had one heart rather than two, this is exactly the point of irrationality that Christianity predicted correctly. To show how Christianity gets this concept right, Chesterton proceeds by using the example of courage.
Chesterton says that courage is a contradiction in terms. It means “a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.” This is “not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice.” Chesterton continues with more examples.
“A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. And it has held up ever since above the European lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry: the Christian courage, which is a disdain of death; not the Chinese courage, which is a disdain of life.”
Chesterton continues on by exploring how pride and humility are also extremes that are exaggerated within Christianity.
“And now I began to find that this duplex passion was the Christian key to ethics everywhere. Everywhere the creed made a moderation out of the still crash of two impetuous emotions. Take, for instance, the matter of modesty, of the balance between mere pride and mere prostration. The average pagan, like the average agnostic, would merely say that he was content with himself, but not insolently self-satisfied, that there were many better and many worse, that his desserts were limited, but he would see that he got them. In short, he would walk with his head in the air; but not necessarily with his nose in the air… Being a mixture of two things, it is a dilution of two things; neither is present in its full strength or contributes its full colour. This proper pride does not lift the heart like the tongue of trumpets; you cannot go clad in crimson and gold for this. On the other hand, this mild rationalist modesty does not cleanse the soul with fire and make it clear like crystal; it does not (like a strict and searching humility) make a man as a little child, who can sit at the feet of the grass. It does not make him look up and see marvels; for Alice must grow small if she is to be Alice in Wonderland. Thus it loses both the poetry of being proud and the poetry of being humble. Christianity sought by this same strange expedient to save both of them.
It separated the two ideas and then exaggerated them both. In one way Man was to be haughtier than he had ever been before; in another way he was to be humbler than he had ever been before. In so far as I am Man I am the chief of creatures. In so far as I am a man I am the chief of sinners. All humility that had meant pessimism, that had meant man taking a vague or mean view of his whole destiny— all that was to go. We were to hear no more the wail of Ecclesiastes that humanity had no pre-eminence over the brute, or the awful cry of Homer that man was only the saddest of all the beasts of the field. Man was a statue of God walking about the garden. Man had pre-eminence over all the brutes; man was only sad because he was not a beast, but a broken god. The Greek had spoken of men creeping on the earth, as if clinging to it. Now Man was to tread on the earth as if to subdue it. Christianity thus held a thought of the dignity of man that could only be expressed in crowns rayed like the sun and fans of peacock plumage. Yet at the same time it could hold a thought about the abject smallness of man that could only be expressed in fasting and fantastic submission, in the grey ashes of St. Dominic and the white snows of St. Bernard. When one came to think of one’s self, there was vista and void enough for any amount of bleak abnegation and bitter truth. There the realistic gentleman could let himself go— as long as he let himself go at himself. There was an open playground for the happy pessimist. Let him say anything against himself short of blaspheming the original aim of his being; let him call himself a fool and even a damned fool (though that is Calvinistic); but he must not say that fools are not worth saving. He must not say that a man, quâ man, can be valueless. Here again, in short, Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.
Chesterton finishes his string of examples with the virtue of charity.
“Take another case: the complicated question of charity, which some highly uncharitable idealists seem to think quite easy. Charity is a paradox, like modesty and courage. Stated baldly, charity certainly means one of two things— pardoning unpardonable acts, or loving unlovable people. But if we ask ourselves (as we did in the case of pride) what a sensible pagan would feel about such a subject, we shall probably be beginning at the bottom of it. A sensible pagan would say that there were some people one could forgive, and some one couldn’t: a slave who stole wine could be laughed at; a slave who betrayed his benefactor could be killed, and cursed even after he was killed. In so far as the act was pardonable, the man was pardonable. That again is rational, and even refreshing; but it is a dilution. It leaves no place for a pure horror of injustice, such as that which is a great beauty in the innocent. And it leaves no place for a mere tenderness for men as men, such as is the whole fascination of the charitable. Christianity came in here as before. It came in startlingly with a sword, and clove one thing from another. It divided the crime from the criminal. The criminal we must forgive unto seventy times seven. The crime we must not forgive at all. It was not enough that slaves who stole wine inspired partly anger and partly kindness. We must be much more angry with theft than before, and yet much kinder to thieves than before. There was room for wrath and love to run wild. And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.”
After all of this, Chesterton wraps up the concept with a wonderful biblical analogy. “…When the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like. But that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb. That is simply the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating the lamb. The real problem is— Can the lion lie down with the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity? That is the problem the Church attempted; that is the miracle she achieved.” How does one maintain a hatred for injustice yet compassion and mercy towards criminals? How can one uphold absolute human value yet be meek and humble? No other religion or worldview has answered these riddles the way that Christianity has. No other religion allows pride and humility or mercy and justice to be as pronounced and full as Christianity. All other religions have predicted exactly what the rational prediction is – that there must be a balance. But as Chesterton points out, this is a dilution. Christianity maintains the extremes, and it maintains them fiercely.
Chesterton finishes the chapter by giving a very brief overview of church history. He explains how the church has avoided the countless heresies and pagan pitfalls that would have made Christianity just another religion that fell along the wayside. This is what makes Christianity’s doctrine so important. Any deviance in doctrine can easily turn into great blasphemy and ruin the whole ideal, influencing greatly the happiness and carelessness of humanity. It is the church’s avoidance of the multitude of pitfalls, their protection of the core doctrine, and the embracing of the extremes that have lead Chesterton to see Christianity’s validity and uniqueness.
Chesterton has now set up chapter seven, which will delve into how the Christian ideal should guide our lives, and why this ideal surpasses any other ideal that exists.
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