It is commonly the loose and latitudinarian Christians who pay quite
indefensible compliments to Christianity. They talk as if there had never been any piety or pity until Christianity came, a point on which any
medieval would have been eager to correct them. They represent that the remarkable thing about Christianity was that it was the first to preach
simplicity or self-restraint, or inwardness and sincerity. They will think me very narrow (whatever that means) if I say that the remarkable thing
about Christianity was that it was the first to preach Christianity. Its peculiarity was that it was peculiar, and simplicity and sincerity are not
peculiar, but obvious ideals for all mankind. Christianity was the answer to a riddle, not the last truism uttered after a long talk. Only the other
day I saw in an excellent weekly paper of Puritan tone this remark, that Christianity when stripped of its armour of dogma (as who should speak of
a man stripped of his armour of bones), turned out to be nothing but the Quaker doctrine of the Inner Light. Now, if I were to say that
Christianity came into the world specially to destroy the doctrine of the Inner Light, that would be an exaggeration. But it would be very much
nearer to the truth. The last Stoics, like Marcus Aurelius, were exactly the people who did believe in the Inner Light. Their dignity, their
weariness, their sad external care for others, their in curable internal care for themselves, were all due to the Inner Light, and existed only by
that dismal illumination. Notice that Marcus Aurelius insists, as such introspective moralists always do, upon small things done or undone; it is
because he has not hate or love enough to make a moral revolution. He gets up early in the morning, just as our own aristocrats living the Simple
Life get up early in the morning; because such altruism is much easier than stopping the games of the amphitheatre or giving the English people
back their land. Marcus Aurelius is the most intolerable of human types. He is an unselfish egoist. An unselfish egoist is a man who has pride
without the excuse of passion. Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these people call the Inner Light. Of all horrible
religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within. Any one who knows any body knows how it would work; any one who knows any one from the
Higher Thought Centre knows how it does work. That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship
Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his
street, but not the god within. Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards,
but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain.
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.
License
I have written an e-book, Does the Bible Really Say That?, which is free to anyone. To download that book, in several formats, go here.
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 31, 2015
Excerpts from Orthodoxy, by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 25
Labels:
Chesterton,
G. K. Chesterton,
Orthodoxy,
religions,
self-worship,
Stoics,
worship
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment