Carpe Cakem!

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

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

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

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.

Chesterton, in dealing with paganism and pantheism, makes this comment in passing:

Indeed it is only too easy  to forget that there is a thrill in theism. A novel in which a number of separate characters all turned out to be the same character would certainly be a sensational novel. It is so with the idea that sun and tree and river and the disguises of one god and not of many.

-G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p.98

Wow, a sensational novel where it turns out that several characters were the same one!

The most excellent example of this ever is The Westing Game, a wonderful young adult mystery.

Sorry for the spoiler. It’s still worth the read.

They are obsessed by their evolutionary monomania that every great thing grows from a seed, or something smaller than itself. They seem to forget that every seed scomes from a tree, or from something larger than itself. Now there is very good ground for guessing that religion did not originally come from some detail that was forgotten because it was too small to be traced. Much more probably it was an idea that was abandoned because it was too large to be managed.

-G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p.96

I was thinking what I could compare this too.

How about computer technology? The seed of scratching lines on the wall of the cave evolved into the abacus, which evolved into the slide rule. From their, it gained a head and became a tube computer, then an integrated circuit calculator, then a small PC, then an advanced microprocessor and operating system, and finally it’s evolved today into cloud computing and virtualization.

The seed grew into a tree, right? Bigger ideas gradually developed? No, in fact the bigger ideas (Robots, Artificial Intelligence, near telepathic worldwide communication (cellphones and Twitter anyone?) were all there from the very beginning! Look at old science fiction written when steam engines were still running. The huge ideas have been there all along. To look at the state of computers now days and think these designs and dreams only came along recently would be to make a grave error in interpreting history. The big ideas were driving these things all along. The only difference here is that we (man) are the creators.

Perhaps the big thing (God) has been driving the state of the universe and of mankind all along as well.

Here, Chesterton nails two curious things that we do all the time. We have a grand new idea, but in our minds we legitimize it by comparing it to great things in the past. And we have grand new idea, and we imagine that the people in the past were thinking the same thing as us all along.

It is chiefly interesting as evidence that the boldest plans for the future invoke the authority of the past; and that even a revolutionary seeks to satisfy himself that he is also a reactionary. There is an amusing parallel example in the case of whatis called feminism. In spite of all the pseudoscientific gossip about marriage by capture and the cave-man beating the cave-woman with a club, it may be noted that as soon as feminism became a fashionable cry, it was insisted that human civilisation in its first stage had been a matriarchy. Apparently it was the cave-woman who carried the club. Anyhow all these ideas are little better than guesses; and they have a curious way of following the fortune of modern theories and fads.

-G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p.66

The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. He has an unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage. He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot trust his own instincts. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes; he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture. His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations. Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself. Alone among the animals he feels the need of averting his thought from the root realities of his own bodily being; of hiding them as in the presence of some higher possibility which creates the mystery of shame. Whether we praise these things as natural to man or abuse them as artificial in nature, they remain in the same sense unique.

-G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p.35

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