Orthodoxy
By: G.K.
Chesterton
Chapter 8
Review: The Romance of Orthodoxy
I.
Introduction in Defense of Everything
II.
The Maniac
III.
The Suicide of Thought
IV.
The Ethics of Elfland
V.
The Flag of the World
VI.
The Paradoxes of Christianity
VII.
The Eternal Revolution
VIII.
The
Romance of Orthodoxy
IX.
Authority and the Adventurer
The Romance of Orthodoxy
In this chapter C.'s main aim is to show that
Christian doctrines, not watered down according to liberal tastes, have social
consequences consonant with real progress and freedom from oppression, and that
the proposed liberal substitutes make for oppression and regression:
"In actual modern Europe a freethinker does
not mean a man who thinks for himself. It means a man who, having thought for
himself, has come to one particular class of conclusions, the material origin
of phenomena, the impossibility of miracles, the improbability of personal
immortality and so on. And none of these ideas are particularly liberal. Nay,
indeed almost all these ideas are definitely illiberal, as it is the purpose of
this chapter to show.
"In the few following pages I propose to
point out as rapidly as possible that on every single one of the matters most
strongly insisted upon by the liberalisers of theology their effect upon social
practice would be definitely illiberal. Almost every contemporary proposal to
bring freedom into the church is simply a proposal to bring tyranny into the
world. For freeing the church now does not even mean freeing it in all
directions. It means freeing that particular set of dogmas loosely called
scientific, dogmas of monism, of pantheism, or of Arianism, or of necessity....
There is only one thing that can never go past a certain point in its alliance
with oppression--and that is orthodoxy" (p. 330).
Chesterton deals with six doctrines:
1. ORIGINAL SIN (vs. Oligarchy): See
chapter 7.
2. MIRACLES (vs. Naturalism or Materialism)
"The only thing which is still
old-fashioned enough to reject miracles is the New Theology. But in truth this
notion that it is "free" to deny miracles has nothing to do with the
evidence for or against them. It is a lifeless verbal prejudice of which the
original life and beginning was not in the freedom of thought, but simply in
the dogma of materialism. The man of the nineteenth century did not disbelieve
in the Resurrection because his liberal Christianity allowed him to doubt it.
He disbelieved in it because his very strict materialism did not allow him to
believe it. Tennyson, a very typical nineteenth-century man, uttered one of the
instinctive truisms of his contemporaries when he said that there was faith in
their honest doubt. There was indeed. Those words have a profound and even a
horrible truth. In their doubt of miracles there was a faith in a fixed and
godless fate; a deep and sincere faith in the incurable routine of the cosmos.
The doubts of the agnostic were only the dogmas of the monist....
"A holiday, like Liberalism, only means the
liberty of man. A miracle only means the liberty of God. You may
conscientiously deny either of them, but you cannot call your denial a triumph
of the liberal idea. The Catholic Church believed that man and God both had a
sort of spiritual freedom. Calvinism took away the freedom from man, but left
it to God. Scientific materialism binds the Creator Himself; it chains up God
as the Apocalypse chained the devil. It leaves nothing free in the universe.
And those who assist this process are called the 'liberal theologians'."
(pp. 133-134).
"Reform or (in the only tolerable sense)
progress means simply the gradual control of matter by mind. A miracle simply
means the swift control of matter by mind.... If a man cannot believe in
miracles there is an end of the matter; he is not particularly liberal, but he
is perfectly honourable and logical, which are much better things. But if he
can believe in miracles, he is certainly the more liberal for doing so; because
they mean first, the freedom of the soul, and secondly, its control over the
tyranny of circumstance" (pp. 134-135).
3. DIVINE TRANSCENDENCE (vs. Pantheism and Immanentism, and especially Buddhism)
"The truth is that the difficulty of all
the creeds of the earth is not as alleged in this cheap maxim: that they agree
in meaning, but differ in machinery. It is exactly the opposite. They agree in
machinery; almost every great religion on earth works with the same external
methods, with priests, scriptures, altars, sworn brotherhoods, special feasts.
They agree in the mode of teaching; what they differ about is the thing to be
taught" (p. 136).
"All humanity does agree that we are in a
net of sin. Most of humanity agrees that there is some way out. But as to what
is the way out, I do not think that there are two institutions in the universe
which contradict each other so flatly as Buddhism and Christianity" (p.
137).
"A short time ago Mrs. Besant, in an
interesting essay, announced that there was only one religion in the world,
that all faiths were only versions or perversions of it, and that she was quite
prepared to say what it was. According to Mrs. Besant this universal Church is
simply the universal self. It is the doctrine that we are really all one
person; that there are no real walls of individuality between man and man. If I
may put it so, she does not tell us to love our neighbours; she tells us to be
our neighbours. That is Mrs. Besant's thoughtful and suggestive description of
the religion in which all men must find themselves in agreement. And I never
heard of any suggestion in my life with which I more violently disagree....
Upon Mrs. Besant's principle the whole cosmos is only one enormously selfish
person" (p. 138-139).
"We come back to the same tireless note
touching the nature of Christianity; all modern philosophies are chains which
connect and fetter; Christianity is a sword which separates and sets free. No
other philosophy makes God actually rejoice in the separation of the universe
into living souls. But according to orthodox Christianity this separation
between God and man is sacred, because this is eternal. That a man may love God
it is necessary that there should be not only a God to be loved, but a man to
love him. All those vague theosophical minds for whom the universe is an
immense melting-pot are exactly the minds which shrink instinctively from that
earthquake saying of our Gospels, which declare that the Son of God came not
with peace but with a sundering sword. The saying rings entirely true even
considered as what it obviously is; the statement that any man who preaches
real love is bound to beget hate. It is as true of democratic fraternity as of
divine love; sham love ends in compromise and common philosophy; but real love
has always ended in bloodshed" (pp. 139-140).
"That external vigilance that has always
been a mark of Christianity (the command that we should watch and pray) has
expressed itself both in typical western orthodoxy and in typical western
politics: but both depend on the idea of a divinity transcendent, different
from ourselves, a deity that disappears. Certainly the most sagacious creeds
may suggest that we should pursue God into deeper and deeper rings of the
labyrinth of our own ego. But only we of Christendom have said that we should
hunt God like an eagle upon the mountains: and we have killed all monsters in
the chase.... If we want reform, we must adhere to orthodoxy" (p. 141).
4. TRINITY (vs. Unitarianism)
"There is nothing in the least liberal or
akin to reform in the substitution of pure monotheism for the Trinity. The
complex God of the Athanansian Creed may be an enigma for t he intellect; but He
is far less likely to gather the mystery and cruelty of a Sultan than the
lonely god of Omar or Mahomet. The god who is mere awful unity is not only a
king but an Eastern king. The heart of humanity, especially of European
humanity, is certainly much more satisfied by the strange hints and symbols
that gather round the Trinitarian idea, the image of a council at which mercy
pleads as well as justice, the conception of a sort of liberty and variety
existing even in the inmost chamber of the world" (p. 142).
5. HELL (vs. Universalism)
"To hope for all souls is imperative; and
it is quite tenable that their salvation is inevitable. It is tenable, but it
is not specially favourable to activity or progress. Our fighting and creative
society ought rather to insist on the danger of everybody, on the fact that
every man is hanging by a thread or clinging to a precipice. To say that all
will be well anyhow is a comprehensible remark: but it cannot be called the
blast of a trumpet. Europe ought rather to emphasize possible perdition; and
Europe always has emphasized it. Here its highest religion is at one with all
its cheapest romances. To the Buddhist or the eastern fatalist existence is a
science or a plan, which must end up in a certain way. In a thrilling novel (that
purely Christian product) the hero is not eaten by cannibals; but it is
essential to the existence of the thrill that he might be eaten by cannibals.
The hero must (so to speak) be an eatable hero. So Christian morals have always
said to the man, not that he would lose his soul, but that he must take care
that he didn't. In Christian morals, in short, it is wicked to call a man
"damned": but it is strictly religious and philosophic to call him
damnable" (p. 143).
6. DIVINITY OF CHRIST (vs. Arianism)
"This truth is yet again true in the case
of the common modern attempts to diminish or to explain away the divinity of
Christ. The thing may be true or not; that I shall deal with before I end. But
if the divinity is true it is certainly terribly revolutionary. That a good man
may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that God
could have His back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents for ever.
Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made
God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must
have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds, Christianity has
added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For the only courage worth calling
courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point--and does
not break" (pp. 144-145).
"Let the revolutionists choose a creed from
all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all
the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find
another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult
for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find
only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which
God seemed for an instant to be an atheist" (p. 145).
Conclusion: see pp. 146-147
Chapter 8: The Romance of Orthodoxy -----“Man at the Crossroads.”
1.
What is
the main point of this chapter?
Orthodoxy is not only the only safe
guardian of morality or order, but also of liberty, innovation, and
advance. (The theme of this chapter is
stated at the beginning of the next chapter.)
2.
What are
the battlefields in this chapter?
·
Freedom vs. Rebellion
The enemies of “dogma” have their own dogmas (e.g.,
materialism). The “reformers” who set
out to liberalize theology achieve exactly the opposite in terms of social
effects. The “liberal” clergyman always
means the man who rejects miracles, never the man who is free to believe in
them.
“If we want reform, we must
adhere to orthodoxy.”
“Men who begin to fight the Church for the sake of
freedom and humanity end by flinging away freedom and humanity if only they may
fight the Church.”
“The enemies of Christianity do not
destroy Christianity; they only destroy everything else.”
3.
How does Christianity
compare with other religions?
There are those who claim that though
religions may differ in the externals, at heart they are all the same. This is simply a way of rejecting
Christianity. Chesterton points out that
most all religions are similar in regards to their externals---clergy, holy
writings, altars, sworn brotherhoods, special feasts. It is their doctrines which are dramatically
different. “They agree in the mode of
teaching; what they differ about is the thing to be taught.
·
Buddhism – insists God is inside, leaving man
inside himself. The result is isolation
and indifference. Christianity insists
that god transcends man, leaving man to transcend himself. The result is wonder, curiosity, and action.
·
Pantheism one thing is as good as another, and
so there is no impulse to moral action
·
Islam rejects the Trinity and has bred the
“cruel children of the lonely God.” (god whose integral being is not about
love)
4.
What is
paradox?
·
A “freethinker” is not really free to think for
himself; he is bound to materialism.
·
“our world would be more silent if it were more
strenuous.”
·
Sham love ends in compromise and common
philosophy; but real love has always ended in bloodshed.” “Greater love has no
man than this; that a man lay down his life for his friends.” John 15:13.
·
Christianity is the “only religion in which God
seemed for an instant to be an atheist.”
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