Carpe Cakem!

Really, it can? I’m changing my mind about this.

It is that enthusiasm for theological studies that marked the most doctrinal ages; it is the divine science. An old Don with D. D. after his name may have become the typical figure of a bore; but that was because he was himself bored with his theology, not because he was excited about it. It was precisely because he was admittedly more interested in the Latin of Plautus than in the Latin of Augustine, in the Greek of Xenophon than in the Greek of Chrysostom. It was precisely because he was more interested in a dead tradition than in a decidedly living tradition. In short, it was precisely because he was himself a type of the time in which Christian faith was weak. It was not because men would not hail, if they could, the wonderful and almost wild vision of a Doctor of Divinity.

-G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p.297

Since I’ve found church history quite a bit more interesting lately, Chesterton’s final chapter (The Five Deaths of the Faith) was one of the better ones. His observations about how Christianity seems to die every few hundred years and then blossom with fresh life is a very hopeful sentiment indeed. One can see the hand of God sustaining us, instead of we of little faith tossed on the seas of heathen sociology and politics.

The whole chapter is good, so a bit difficult to quote from.

At least five times, therefore, with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist sceptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs. In each of these five cases it was the dog that died…

Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave. But the first extraordinary fact which marks this history is this: that Europe has been turned upside down over and over again; and that at the end of each of these revolutions the same religion has again been found on top. The Faith is always converting the age, not as an old religion but as a new religion.

-G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p.288

It ends with a word of advice to critics. Oh every few years some celebrity critics crop up. Richard Dawkins. Bart Ehrman. Whoever. Some of them need to keep this in mind:

If our social relations and records retain their continuity, if men really learn to apply reason to the accumulating facts of so crushing a story, it would seem that sooner or later even its enemies will learn from their incessant and interminable disappointments not to look for anything so simple as its death. They may continue to war with it, but it will be as they war with nature; as they war with the landscape, as they war with the skies. ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.’ They will watch for it to stumble; they will watch for it to err; they will no longer watch for it to end.

Is Christianity a philosophy, full of reasoning, trying to logically answer all the big questions, with most activity centered around the literary criticism of a collection of old Hebrew and Greek writings?

Is Christianity a mystic faith, trusting in invisible, immortal things and reaching out beyond the imagination to a transcendent creator, savior, and source of life?

You know, before Christianity, these things were like oil and water. Unbelievers today are very much post-Christian in the sense that they will often combine these two things, philosophy and mysticism, and go on their merry way. But these only kissed in A.D. 33 with the resurrection of the Son of God and subsequent founding of his church.

They became orthodoxy. Like long-lost brothers, they found each other when their father reunited them as part of his redemption of mankind. When they still seem to oppose to each other today, it is like close siblings fighting over the Tonka truck in the sandbox, not as bitter enemies defending the borders of their nation.

The substance of all such paganism may be summarised thus. It is an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone; in its own field reason does not restrain it at all. It is vital to view of all history that reason is something separate from religion even in the most rational of these civilisations. It is only as an afterthought, when such cults are decadent or on the defensive, that a few Neo-Platonists or a few Brahmins are found trying to rationalise them, and even then only by trying to allegorise them.

This is to say that there was no systematic theology of Zeus. The pagans did not try to rationalize the gods. In fact, it was important not to.

But in reality the rivers of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do not mingle till they meet in the sea of Christendom. Simple secularists still talk as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and religion. The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and religion. There had never before been any such union of the priests and the philosophers.

-G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p.123

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.