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Page 39
This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen
into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy,
humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting
as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to
be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses,
seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude
having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic.
The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse;
yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along
one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right,
so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand
the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers
to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving
to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly.
The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted
the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. It would
have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians.
It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century,
to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be
a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let
the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own.
It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob.
To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration
which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the
historic path of Christendom--that would indeed have been simple.
It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at
which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into
any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed
have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been
one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies
thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate,
the wild truth reeling but erect.
VII THE ETERNAL REVOLUTION
The following propositions have been urged: First, that some
faith in our life is required even to improve it; second, that some
dissatisfaction with things as they are is necessary even in order
to be satisfied; third, that to have this necessary content
and necessary discontent it is not sufficient to have the obvious
equilibrium of the Stoic. For mere resignation has neither the
gigantic levity of pleasure nor the superb intolerance of pain.
There is a vital objection to the advice merely to grin and bear it.
The objection is that if you merely bear it, you do not grin.
Greek heroes do not grin: but gargoyles do--because they are Christian.
And when a Christian is pleased, he is (in the most exact sense)
frightfully pleased; his pleasure is frightful. Christ prophesied
the whole of Gothic architecture in that hour when nervous and
respectable people (such people as now object to barrel organs)
objected to the shouting of the gutter-snipes of Jerusalem.
He said, "If these were silent, the very stones would cry out."
Under the impulse of His spirit arose like a clamorous chorus the
facades of the mediaeval cathedrals, thronged with shouting faces
and open mouths. The prophecy has fulfilled itself: the very stones
cry out.
If these things be conceded, though only for argument,
we may take up where we left it the thread of the thought of the
natural man, called by the Scotch (with regrettable familiarity),
"The Old Man." We can ask the next question so obviously in front
of us. Some satisfaction is needed even to make things better.
But what do we mean by making things better? Most modern talk on
this matter is a mere argument in a circle--that circle which we
have already made the symbol of madness and of mere rationalism.
Evolution is only good if it produces good; good is only good if it
helps evolution. The elephant stands on the tortoise, and the tortoise
on the elephant.
Obviously, it will not do to take our ideal from the principle
in nature; for the simple reason that (except for some human
or divine theory), there is no principle in nature. For instance,
the cheap anti-democrat of to-day will tell you solemnly that
there is no equality in nature. He is right, but he does not see
the logical addendum. There is no equality in nature; also there
is no inequality in nature. Inequality, as much as equality,
implies a standard of value. To read aristocracy into the anarchy
of animals is just as sentimental as to read democracy into it.
Both aristocracy and democracy are human ideals: the one saying
that all men are valuable, the other that some men are more valuable.
But nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice;
nature makes no remark on the subject. She does not even say
that the cat is enviable or the mouse pitiable. We think the cat
superior because we have (or most of us have) a particular philosophy
to the effect that life is better than death. But if the mouse
were a German pessimist mouse, he might not think that the cat
had beaten him at all. He might think he had beaten the cat by
getting to the grave first. Or he might feel that he had actually
inflicted frightful punishment on the cat by keeping him alive.
Just as a microbe might feel proud of spreading a pestilence,
so the pessimistic mouse might exult to think that he was renewing
in the cat the torture of conscious existence. It all depends
on the philosophy of the mouse. You cannot even say that there
is victory or superiority in nature unless you have some doctrine
about what things are superior. You cannot even say that the cat
scores unless there is a system of scoring. You cannot even say
that the cat gets the best of it unless there is some best to
be got.
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