For our Titanic purposes of faith and revolution, what we need is not the
cold acceptance of the world as a compromise, but some way in which we can heartily hate and heartily love it. We do not want joy and anger to
neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. We have to feel the universe at once as
an ogre’s castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return at evening. No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with
this world: but we demand not strength enough to get on with it, but strength enough to get it on. Can he hate it enough to change it, and yet
love it enough to think it worth changing? Can he look up at its colossal good without once feeling acquiescence? Can he look up at its colossal
evil without once feeling despair? Can he, in short, be at once not only a pessimist and an optimist, but a fanatical pessimist and a fanatical
optimist? Is he enough of a pagan to die for the world, and enough of a Christian to die to it? In this combination, I maintain, it is the
rational optimist who fails, the irrational optimist who succeeds. He is ready to smash the whole universe for the sake of itself.
I did not pick out this material to post because of Mother's Day.
Orthodoxy, first published in 1908, by G. K. Chesterton, is in the public domain, and available from Project Gutenberg. The previous post in this series is here.
Thanks for reading! Read Chesterton.
Musings on science, the Bible, and fantastic literature (and sometimes basketball and other stuff).
God speaks to us through the Bible and the findings of science, and we should listen to both types of revelation.
The title is from Psalm 84:11.
The Wikipedia is usually a pretty good reference. I mostly use the World English Bible (WEB), because it is public domain. I am grateful.
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The posts in this blog are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. You can copy and use this material, as long as you aren't making money from it. If you give me credit, thanks. If not, OK.
The posts in this blog are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. You can copy and use this material, as long as you aren't making money from it. If you give me credit, thanks. If not, OK.
Sunday, May 10, 2015
Excerpts from Orthodoxy, by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 22
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