For the gods: We had played the flute, we had played the fool

Nearing the conclusion of his long, several chapter discussion on paganism, Chesterton writes this potent (and I think beautiful) passage on the fall of paganism in the west and the rise of Christianity:

The Old Man of the Forest was too old; he was already dying. It is said truly in a sense that Pan died because Christ was born. It is almost as true in another sense that men knew that Christ was born because Pan was already dead. A void was made by the vanishing of the whole mythology of mankind, which would have asphyxiated like a vacuum if it had not been filled with theology. But the point for the moment is that the mythology could not have lasted like a theology in any case.

Theology is thought, whether we agree with it or not. Mythology was never thought, and nobody could really agree with it or disagree with it. It was a mere mood of glamour and when the mood went it could not be recovered. Men not only ceased to believe in the gods, but they realised that they had NEVER believed in them. They had sung their praises; they had danced round their altars. They had played the flute; they had played the fool

-G.K. Chesteton, The Everlasting Man, p.182

The diagram and the drawing of theology

Speaking of the circle used by many philosophies and religions to describe existence, G.K. writes:

They have made many things out of it, and sometimes gone mad about it, especially when as in these eastern sages the circle became a wheel going round and round in their heads. But the point about them is that they all think that existence can be represented by a diagram instead of a drawing; and the rude drawings of the childish myth-makers are a sort of crude and spirited protest against that view. They cannot believe that religion is really not a pattern but a picture. Still less can they believe that it is a picture of something that really exists outside our minds. Sometimes the philosophy paints the disc all black and calls himself a pessimist; sometimes he paints it all white and calls himself an optimist; sometimes he divides it exactly into halves of black and white and calls himself a dualist, like those Persian mystics to whom I wish there were space to do justice.

None of them could understand a thing that began to draw the proportions just as if they were real proportions, disposed in the living fashion which the mathematical draughtsman would call disproportionate. Like the first artist in the cave, it revealed to incredulous eyes the suggestion of a new purpose in what looked like a wildly crooked pattern; he seemed only to be distorting his diagram, when he began for the first time in all the ages to trace the lines of a form–and of a Face.

-G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p.153

When your systematic theology always looks like a diagram and almost never a picture of a face, the face of God, the face of Jesus, you can be certain that you are missing the point.

Give the eastern snake something to bite

Eastern thought, the foundation of Buddhism, Hindu, Taoism, Confucianism, etc. is very different than the ideas we come up with in the west. Eastern principals are often illustrated by the image of a snake in a circle, devouring itself.

A good way to contrast the difference between western (largely Christian or at least post-Christian) thought and eastern thought is this:

We might say that when St. George thrust his spear into the monster’s jaws, he broke in upon the solitude of the self-devouring serpent and gave it something to bite besides its own tail.

G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p.151

Black magic is so practical

Here Chesterton makes a spot-on observation about black magic and various forms of demon worship (the darker side of paganism).

Whether it be because the Fall has really brought men nearer to less desirable neighbors in the spiritual world, or whether it is merely that the mood of men eager or greedy finds it easier to imagine evil, I believe that the black magic of witchcraft has been much more practical and much less poetical than the white magic of mythology. I fancy the garden of the witch has been kept much more carefully than the woodland of the nymph. I fancy the evil field has even been more fruitful than the good. To start with, some impulse, perhaps a sort of desperate impulse, drove men to the darker powers when dealing with practical problems. There was a sort of secret and perverse feeling that the darker powers would really do things; that they had no nonsense about them.

G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p.131

At some point, selling your soul to the devil to become a great guitar player and rock star actually makes sense, where as praying to God to give you those skills… well you know… he just doesn’t seem to work on that level.

The atheist’s magic charms

As I’ve said before, it’s very difficult to be a true and honest atheist. Most unbelievers actually hold to some form of agnosticism. And within’ that framework where God is distant, the supernatural can sometimes crop up right around the corner.

Chesterton recounts this curious story to illustrate the point:

Superstition recurs in all ages, and especially in rationalistic ages. I remember defending the religious tradition against a whole luncheon table of distinguished agnostics; and before the end of our conversation every one of them had procured from his pocket, or exhibited on his watch-chain, some charm or talisman from which he admitted that he was never separated. I was the only person present who had neglected to provide himself with a fetish.

Superstition recurs in a rationalist age because it rests on something which, if not identical with rationalism, is not unconnected with skepticism. It is at least very closely connected with agnosticism. It rests on something that is really a very human and intelligible sentiment, like the local invocations of the numen in popular paganism. But it is an agnostic sentiment, for it rests on two feelings: first that we do not really know the laws of the universe; and second that they may be very different to all we call reason. Such men realize the real truth that enormous things do often turn upon tiny things. When a whisper comes, from tradition or what not, that one particular tiny thing is the key or clue, something deep and not altogether senseless in human nature tells them that it is not unlikely.

-G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p.130

Indeed, the desire for something transcendent is hardwired within us. I suspect it takes as much effort to supress as for one not called to celibacy to supress his sexual desires. The tiny whisper, the small key, the rumour of a clue, our minds latch onto these things because we feel (and know) deep down that they just might be true.

The best poetry for the ignorant

I’ve tried hard on several occasions to like poetry. Oh, I think I’ve started several posts with that phrase in fact. Here in lies a clue though to why I continue to fail. I’m trying to be “learned” in what I’m reading. Indeed, this is a requirement for the understanding of some poetry. But perhaps the very best stuff doesn’t need any background. In fact, trying to figure out what it’s about ruins it. I should already know this from seeing what constitutes beautiful music and songwriting: an open-ended meaning. Perhaps I should go back and approach poetry while just thinking about it less.

Therefore do we all in fact feel that pagan or primitive myths are infinitely suggestive, so long as we are wise enough not to inquire what they suggest. Therefore we all feel what is meant by Prometheus stealing fire from heaven, until some prig of a pessimist or progressive person explains what it means. Therefore we all know the meaning of Jack and the Beanstalk, until we are told. In this sense it is true that it is the ignorant who accept myths, but only because it is the ignorant who appreciate poems.

-G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p.124

Beauty touches deep in the soul

I’m for copying down anything that acknowledges that beauty is not just in our heads or senses, but is a deep thing of the soul. You must to say this to honestly acknowledge the power of music, or the beauty of a woman.

There is all the difference between fancying there are fairies in the wood, which often only means fancying a certain wood as fit for fairies, and really frightening ourselves until we walk a mile rather than pass a house we have told ourselves is haunted. Behind all these things is the fact that beauty and terror are very real things and related to a real spiritual world; and to touch them at all, even in doubt or fancy, is to stir the deep things of the soul.

-G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p.120

Dreams of despair and peace

Chesterton here describes the idea that we are all just people walking around in god’s dream. Someday when he wakes up, we’ll vanish.

This idea stands out to me because I was introduced to it at such a young age. I remember watching Star Trek: The Next Generation with my parents when I was probably eight years old. There is an episode called “Ship in a Bottle” where a character in a Holodeck simulation becomes self-aware and kidnaps several of the crew. They are finally able to trick him by seemingly beaming him out of the simulation and into the “real world”. Except they only transported him to another simulation, one that looks like the ship. At the end, Picard muses that we ourselves may only be a construct of someone’s imagination, “running on someone’s desk”.

One of the few video games I remember playing hard growing up was The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, for the old Gameboy. It was a winner too. The plot line though? You have wrecked your ship on an island. It turns out the island and everyone on it are just part of the dream of the “Wind Fish”, a sort of demigod who is trapped in his sleep. After defeating all the nightmares and collecting the eight musical instruments, you wake him up at the end and everything (including Link’s new girlfriend, *sob* *sob* disappear).

I think the philosophers/theologists are right though that this really isn’t THAT much different than reality. As far as where God is in the picture, his creation of us, our utter dependence on him. You can even work passive predestination (not active) in there too. Perhaps you yourself are a character in your own dream sometimes? Big parts of it work. Still, it is a sort of despair. Like Chesterton says here, it’s remarkably closer to the Christian/Jewish idea of God than anything else paganism ever came up with.

Here and there in all that pagan crowd could be found a philosopher whose thought ran of pure theism; but he never had, or supposed that he had, the power to change the customs of the whole populace. Nor is it easy even in such philosophies to find a true definition of this deep business of the relation of polytheism and theism.

Perhaps the nearest we can come to striking the note, or giving the thing a name, is in something far away from all that civilisation and more remote from Rome than the isolation of Israel. It is in a saying I once heard from some Hindu tradition; that gods as well as men are only the dreams of Brahma; and will perish when Brahma wakes. There is indeed in such an image something of the soul of Asia which is less sane than the soul of Christendom. We should call it despair, even if they would call it peace.

This note of nihilism can be considered later in a fuller comparison between Asia and Europe. It is enough to say here that there is more of disillusion in that idea of a divine awakening than is implied for us in the passage from mythology to religion. But the symbol is very subtle and exact in one respect; that it does suggest the disproportion and even disruption between the very ideas of mythology and religion, the chasm between the two categories. It is really the collapse of comparative religion that there is no comparison between God and the gods. There is no more comparison than there is between a man and the men who walked about in his dreams.

-G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p.110

Like trying to hide the Great Pyramid

Speaking of the book of Job, G.K. discusses how remarkable it is that the religion of the Jews didn’t really mix well with anything else. (Certain branches of Kabbalah being the only thing I can think of.)

But this mighty nonotheistic poem remained unremarked by the whole world of antiquity, which was thronged with polytheistic poetry. It is a sign of the way in which the Jews stood apart and kept their tradition unshaken and unshared, that they should have kept a thing lie the Book of Job out of the whle intellectual world of antiquity. It is as if the Egyptians had modestl concealed the Great Pyramid.

-G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p.109

God comes via the Jews

While writing off “comparative religion”, Chesterton here does some remarkable comparison of religion himself:

It is regarded as a liberal and enlightened thing to say that the god of the stranger may be as good as our own; and doubtless the pagans thought themselves very liberal and enlightened when they agreed to add to the gods of the city or the hearth some wild and fantastic Dionysus coming down from the mountains or some shaggy and rustic Pan creeping out of the woods. But exactly what it lost by these larger ideas is the largest idea of all. It is the idea of the fatherhood that makes the whole world one.

And the converse is also true. Doubtless those more antiquated men of antiquity who clung to their solitary statues and their single sacred names were regarded as superstitious savages benighted and left behind. But these superstitious savages were preserving something that is much more like the cosmic power as conceived by philosophy, or even as conceived by science.

This paradox by which the rude reactionary was a sort of prophetic progressive has one consequence very much to the point. In a purely historical sense, and apart from any other controversies in the same connection, it throws a light, a single and a steady light, that shines from the beginning on a little and lonely people. In this paradox, as in some riddle of religion of which the answer was sealed up for centuries, lies the mission and the meaning of the Jews.

-G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p.104

He goes on to remind us that God (big ‘G’ here for sure) came to us through the Jews. Everything we know about him came through the Jews. In developing theologies thousands of miles and years away from that origin, it’s easy to brush over it and start with some other branch of philosophy or psychology or metaphysics, but if you want to be honest, you’ve got to start with the Israel.