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I was pleased to find Chesterton here beating the same drum as Peter Leithart in regards to the necessary public nature of Christianity. It is not a private faith that aims to only coexist with the heathen. It aims to subvert philosophy, art, economics, literature, politics, absolutely everything. Christians didn’t burn down Rome (as Nero alleged), but they were lighting fires of another sort behind every door and in every institution.

We have already noted that this paradox appeared also in the treatment of the early Church. It was important while it was still insignificant, and certainly while it was still impotent. It was important solely because it was intolerable; and in that sense it is true to say that it was intolerable because it was intolerant. It was resented, because, in its own still and almost secret way, it had declared war. It had risen out of the ground to wreck the heaven and earth of heathenism. It did not try to destroy all that creation of gold and marble; but it contemplated a world without it. It dared to look right through it as though the gold and marble had been glass.

Those who charged the Christians with burning down Rome with firebrands were slanderers; but they were at least far nearer to the nature of Christianity than those among the moderns who tell us that the Christians were a sort of ethical society, being martyred in a languid fashion for telling men they had a duty to their neighbors, and only mildly disliked because they were meek and mild.

-G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p.207

Throw Christianity in the boiling pot of goo with all other faiths. It has it’s value of course. Let it be combined with everything else of value, eh? Where have we heard this before?

The same thing was proposed to Paul on Mars Hill. And not just there and not just to him in that age.

The Theosophists build a pantheon; but it is only a pantheon for pantheists. They call a Parliament of Religions as a reunion of all the peoples; but it is only a reunion of all the prigs. Yet exactly such a pantheon had been set up two thousand years before by the shores of the Mediterranean; and Christians were invited to set up the image of Jesus side by side with the image of Jupiter, of Mithras, of Osiris, of Atys, or of Ammon.

It was the refusal of the Christians that was the turning-point of history. If the Christians had accepted, they and the whole world would have certainly, in a grotesque but exact metaphor, gone to pot. They would all have been boiled down to one lukewarm liquid in that great pot of cosmopolitan corruption in which all the other myths and mysteries were already melting. It was an awful and an appalling escape. Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.

-G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p.202

Here, we see some of the same ideas that appear in his (more interesting) work, Orthodoxy. Chesterton loves to revel in the extreme things of Christianity. How can it be against everything and for everything? It is furious in both direction. He loves this stuff and is always bringing it up.

Those who would suggest that the faith was a fanaticism are doomed to an eternal perplexity. In their account it is bound to appear as fanatical for nothing, and fanatical against everything. It is ascetical and at war with ascetics, Roman and in revolt against Rome, monotheistic and fighting furiously against monotheism; harsh in its condemnation of harshness; a riddle not to be explained even as unreason. And what sort of unreason is it that seems reasonable to millions of educated Europeans through all the revolutions of some sixteen hundred years? People are not amused with a puzzle or a paradox or a mere muddle in the mind for all that time. I know of no explanation except that such a thing is not unreason but reason; that if it is fanatical it is fanatical for reason and fanatical against all the unreasonable things.

That is the only explanation I can find of a thing from the first so detached and so confident, condemning things that looked so like itself, refusing help from powers that seemed so essential to its existence, sharing on its human side all the passions of the age, yet always at the supreme moment suddenly rising superior to them, never saying exactly what it was expected to say and never needing to unsay what it had said; I can find no explanation except that, like Pallas from the brain of Jove, it had indeed come forth out of the mind of God, mature and mighty and armed for judgement and for war.

G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p.265

He even throws out some specific examples in this case:

How would Francis the Troubadour have fared among the Calvinists, or for that matter among the Utilitarians of the Manchester School? Yet men like Bossuet and Pascal could be as stern and logical as any Calvinist or Utilitarian. How would St. Joan of Arc, a woman waving on men to war with the sword, have fared among the Quakers or the Doukhabors or the Tolstoyan sect of pacifists? Yet any number of Catholic saints have spent their lives in preaching peace and preventing wars. It is the same with all the modern attempts at Syncretism. They are never able to make something larger than the Creed without leaving something out. I do not mean leaving out something divine but something human…

-p.202

At the end he reiterates that when someone introduces a heresy, it is more likely to make God less humanlike. It doesn’t add new ideas about God, but rather it takes away the human side of Christ. It separates the divide between the image of the creator and the creator himself. Beware of making God too ethereal. He has told us again and again we are more like him than we know.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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