 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information and to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by J. A. Carter. Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton. Chapter 9. Authority and the Adventurer. PART II As a common sense conclusion, such as those to which we come about sex or about midnight, well knowing that many details must in their own nature be concealed, I conclude that miracles do happen. I am forced to it by conspiracy of facts. The fact that the men who encounter elves or angels are not the mystics and the morbid dreamers, but fishermen, farmers and all men at once coarse and cautious. The fact that we all know men who testify to spiritual incidents but are not spiritualists. The fact that science itself admits such things more and more every day. Science will even admit the ascension, if you call it levitation, and will very likely admit the resurrection when it is thought of another word for it. I suggest the regalvanization. But the strongest of all is the dilemma above mentioned, that these supernatural things are never denied except on the basis either of anti-democracy or of materialist dogmatism. I may say materialist mysticism. The skeptic always takes one of the two positions, either an ordinary man need not be believed or an extraordinary event must not be believed. For I hope we may dismiss the argument against wonders attempted in the mere recapitulation of frauds, of swindling mediums or trick miracles. That is not an argument at all, good or bad. A false ghost disproves the reality of ghosts exactly as much as a forged bank note disproves the existence of the Bank of England. If anything, it proves its existence. Given this conviction that the spiritual phenomena do occur, my evidence for which is complex but rational, we then collide with one of the worst mental evils of the age. The greatest disaster of the nineteenth century was this, that men began to use the word spiritual as the same as the word good. They thought that to grow in refinement and uncorp reality was to grow in virtue. When scientific evolution was announced some fear that it would encourage mere animality. It did worse. It encouraged mere spirituality. It taught men to think that so long as they were passing from the ape they were going to the angel. But you can pass from the ape and go to the devil. A man of genius, very typical of that time of bewilderment, expressed it perfectly. Benjamin Disraeli was right when he said he was on the side of the angels. He was indeed. He was on the side of the fallen angels. He was not on the side of any mere appetite or animal brutality, but he was on the side of all the imperialism of the princes of the abyss. He was on the side of arrogance and mystery and contempt of all obvious good. Between this sunken pride and the towering humilities of heaven there are, one must suppose, spirits of shapes and sizes. Man, in encountering them, must make much the same mistakes that he makes in encountering any other varied types in any other distant continent. It must be hard at first to know who is supreme and who is subordinate. If a shade arose from the underworld and stared at Piccadilly, that shade would not quite understand the idea of an ordinary closed carriage. He would suppose that the coachman on the box was a triumphant conqueror, dragging behind him a kicking-in in prison captive. So, if we see spiritual facts for the first time, we may mistake who is uppermost. It is not enough to find the gods. They are obvious. We must find God, the real chief of the gods. We must have a long historic experience in supernatural phenomena, in order to discover what is really natural. In this light I find the history of Christianity and even of its Hebrew origins quite practical and clear. It does not trouble me to be told that the Hebrew God was one among many. I know he was, without any research to tell me so. Jehovah and Baal looked equally important, just as the sun and the moon look the same size. It is only, slowly, that we learn that the sun is immeasurably our master and the small moon only our satellite. Believing that there is a world of spirits I shall walk in it as I do in the world of men, looking for the thing that I like and think good. Just as I should seek in a desert for clean water or a toil at the North Pole to make a comfortable fire, so I shall search the land of void and vision until I find something fresh like water and comforting like fire, until I find some place in eternity where I am literally at home. And there is only one such place to be found. I have said enough to show to any one to whom such an explanation is essential that I have in the ordinary arena of apologetics a ground of belief. In pure records of experiment, if these have been taken democratically without contempt or favor, there is evidence first that miracles happen, and second that the nobler miracles belong to our tradition. But I will not pretend that this curt discussion is my real reason for accepting Christianity instead of taking the moral good of Christianity as I should take it out of Confucianism. I have another far more solid and central ground for submitting to it as a faith, instead of merely picking up hints from it as a scheme. And that is this. That the Christian church in its practical relation to my soul is a living teacher, not a dead one. It not only certainly taught me yesterday, but will almost certainly teach me to-morrow. Once I saw suddenly the meaning of the shape of the cross. Some day I may see suddenly the meaning of the shape of the mitre. One free morning I saw why windows were pointed. Some fine morning I may see why priests were shaven. Plato has told you a truth, but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image, but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be like to live with such men still living, to know that Plato might break out in an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow, at most. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before. There is only one parallel to this position, and that is the parallel of the life in which we all began. When your father told you, walking about the garden, that bees stung, or that roses smelt sweet, you did not talk of taking the best out of his philosophy. When the bees stung you, you did not call it an entertaining coincidence. When the rose smelt sweet you did not say, my father is a rude barbaric symbol enshrining, perhaps unconsciously, the deep delicate truths that flowers smell. No, you believed your father, because you had found him to be a living fountain of facts, a thing that really knew more than you, a thing that would tell you truth to-morrow as well as to-day. And if this was true of your father, it is even truer of your mother, at least it was true of mine, to whom this book is dedicated. Now, when society is in a rather futile fuss about the subjection of women, will no one say how much every man owes to the tyranny and privilege of women, to the fact that they rule alone, education, until education becomes futile, for a boy is only sent to be taught at school when it's too late to teach him anything. The real thing has been done already, and thank God it is nearly always done by women. Every man is womanized merely by being born. They talk of the masculine woman, but every man is a feminized man, and if ever men walk to West Minister to protest against this female privilege, I shall not join their procession. For I remember with certainty this fixed psychological fact, that the very time when I was most under a woman's authority, I was most full of flame and adventure. Exactly because when my mother said that ants bit they did bite, and because snow did come in winter, as she said, therefore the whole world was to me a fairytale of wonderful fulfilments, and it was like living in some hebraic age when prophecy after prophecy became true. I went out as a child into the garden, and it was a terrible place to me, precisely because I had a clue to it. If I had held no clue it would not have been terrible but tame. A mere unmeaning wilderness is not even impressive. But the garden of childhood was fascinating, exactly because everything had a fixed meaning which could be found out in its turn. Inch by inch I might discover what was the object of the ugly shape called a rake, or form some shadowy conjecture as to why my parents kept a cat. So since I have accepted Christendom as a mother and not merely as a chance example, I have found Europe and the world once more like the little garden where I stared at the symbolic shapes of cat and rake. I look at everything with the old elvish ignorance and expectancy. This or that rite or doctrine may look ugly and extraordinary as a rake, but I have found by experience that such things in somehow in grass and flowers. A clergyman may be apparently as useless as a cat, but he is also fascinating, for there must be some strange reason for his existence. I give one instance out of a hundred. I have not myself any instinctive kinship with that enthusiasm for physical virginity, which has certainly been a note of historic Christianity. But when I look not at myself but at the world, I perceive that this enthusiasm is not only a note of Christianity, but a note of paganism, a note of high human nature and minispheres. The Greeks felt virginity when they carved Artemis, and Romans when they robed the Vestals. The worst and wildest of the great Elizabethan playwrights clung to the literal purity of a woman as to the central pillar of the world. Above all, the modern world, even while mocking sexual innocence, has flung itself into a generous idolatry of sexual innocence, the great modern worship of children. For any man who loves children will agree that their peculiar beauty is hurt by a hint of physical sex. With all this human experience allied with the Christian authority, I simply conclude that I am wrong, and the Church right, or rather than I am defective, and the Church is universal. It takes all sorts to make a Church. She does not ask me to be celibate, but the fact that I have no appreciation of the celibates, I accept like the fact that I have no ear from music. The best human experience is against me, as it is on the subject of Bach. Celibacy is one flower in my Father's garden of which I have not been told the sweet or terrible name, but I may be told it any day. This therefore is in conclusion my reason for accepting the religion and not merely the scattered and secular truths out of the religion. I do it because the thing has not merely told this truth or that truth, but has revealed itself as a truth-telling thing. All other philosophies say the things that plainly seem to be true. Only this philosophy has again and again said the thing that does not seem to be true, but is true. Alone of all creeds it is convincing where it is not attractive. It turns out to be right, like my Father in the garden. Theosophists, for instance, will preach an obviously attractive idea like reincarnation. But if we wait for its logical results, they are spiritual superciliousness and the cruelty of the case. For if a man is a beggar by his own prenatal sins, people will tend to despise the beggar. But Christianity preaches an obviously unattractive idea, such as original sin. But when we wait for its results they are pathos and brotherhood and a thunder of laughter and pity, for only with original sin can we at once pity the beggar and distrust the king. Men of science offer us health, an obvious benefit. It is only afterwards that we discover that by health they mean bodily slavery and spiritual tedium. Orthodoxy makes us jump by the sudden brink of hell. It is only afterwards that we realize that jumping was an athletic exercise highly beneficial to our health. It is only afterwards that we realize that this danger is the root of all drama and romance. The strongest argument for the divine grace is simply its ungraciousness. The unpopular parts of Christianity turn out when examined to be the very props of the people. The outer ring of Christianity is a rigid guard of ethical abnegations and professional priests. But inside that inhuman guard you will find the old human life dancing like children and drinking wine like men. For Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom. But in the modern philosophy the case is opposite. It is its outer ring that is obviously artistic and emancipated. Its despair is within. And its despair is this, that it does not really believe that there is any meaning in the universe. Therefore it cannot hope to find any romance. Its romances will have no plots. A man cannot expect any adventures in the land of anarchy. But a man can expect any number of adventures if he goes traveling in the land of authority. One can find no meanings in a jungle of skepticism. But the man will find more and more meanings who walks through a forest of doctrine and design. Here everything has a story tied to its tail, like the tools or pictures in my father's house, or it is my father's house. I end where I began, at the right end. I have entered at least the gate of all good philosophy. I have come into my second childhood. But this larger and more adventurous Christian universe has one final mark difficult to express. Yet as a conclusion to the whole matter I will attempt to express it. All the real argument about religion turns on the question of whether a man who is born upside down can tell when he comes right way up. The primary paradox of Christianity is that the ordinary condition of man is not his sane or sensible condition, that the normal itself is an abnormality. That is the inmost philosophy of the fall. In Sir Oliver Lodge's interesting new catechism the first two questions were, What are you, and what then is the meaning of the fall of man? I remember amusing myself by writing my own answers to the questions, but I soon found that they were very broken and agnostic answers. To the question, What are you, I could only answer, God knows. And to the question, What is meant by the fall, I could answer with complete sincerity that whatever I am, I am not myself. This is the prime paradox of our religion. Something that we have never in any full sense known is not only better than ourselves, but even more natural to us than ourselves. And there is really no test of this except the merely experimental one with which these pages began, the test of the padded cell and the open door. It is only since I have known orthodoxy that I have known mental emancipation. But in conclusion it has one special application to the ultimate idea of joy. It is said that paganism is a religion of joy and Christianity of sorrow. It would be just as easy to prove that paganism is pure sorrow and Christianity pure joy. Such conflicts mean nothing and lead nowhere. Everything human must have in it both joy and sorrow. The only matter of interest is in the manner in which these two things are balanced or divided. And the really interesting thing is this, that the pagan was, in the main, happier and happier as he approached the earth, but sadder and sadder as he approached the heavens. The gaiety of the best paganism, as in the playfulness of Catalyst or Theocratus, is indeed an eternal gaiety never to be forgotten by a grateful humanity. But it is all a gaiety about the facts of life, not about its origin. To the pagan the small things are as sweet as the small brooks breaking out of the mountain, but the broad things are as bitter as the sea. When the pagan looks at the very core of the cosmos he is struck cold. Behind the gods, who are merely despotic, sit the fates, who are deadly. Nay, the fates are worse than deadly. They are dead. And when rationalists say that the ancient world was more enlightened than the Christian, from their point of view they are right. But when they say enlightened, they mean darkened with incurable despair. It is profoundly true that the ancient world was more modern than the Christian. The common bond is in the fact that ancients and moderns have both been miserable about existence, about everything, while medievals were happy about that at least. I freely grant that the pagans, like the moderns, were only miserable about everything. They were quite jolly about everything else. I can see that the Christians of the modern ages were only at peace about everything. They were at war about everything else. But if the question turned on the primary pivot of the cosmos, then there was more cosmic contentment in the narrow and bloody streets of Florence than in the theater of Athens or the open garden of Epicetus. Giotto lived in a gloomier town than Euripides, but he lived in a gayer universe. The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things, but sad about the big ones. Nevertheless, I offer my last dogma defiantly, it is not native to man to be so. Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind. Praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday. Joy is the uproarious labor by which all things live. Yet according to the apparent estate of man as seen by the pagan or the agnostic, this primary need of human nature can never be fulfilled. Joy ought to be expansive, but for the agnostic it must be contracted, it must cling to one comrade of the world. Grief ought to be a concentration, but for the agnostic its desolation is spread through an unthinkable eternity. This is what I call being born upside down. The skeptic may truly be said to be topsy-turvy, for his feet are dancing upwards in idle ecstasies while his brain is in the abyss. To the modern man the heavens are actually below the earth. The explanation is simple. He is standing on his head, which is a very weak pedestal to stand on. But when he has found his feet again he knows it. Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up. Satisfies it supremely in this, that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness becomes something special and small. The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot. The silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world. Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness, like the prompt stillness in a sick room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy, because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear. Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came, and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the gospels towers in this respect, as in almost every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed his tears. He showed them plainly on his open face at any daily sight, such as the far side of his native city. Yet he concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained his anger. He flung furniture down in the front steps of the temple and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of hell. Yet he restrained something. I say it with reverence. There was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that he hid from all men when he went up a mountain to pray. There was something that he covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when he walked upon our earth. And I have sometimes fancied that it was his mirth. End of Chapter 9 Part 2 End of Orthodoxy