But granted that we have all to keep a balance, the real interest comes in with the question of how that balance can be kept. That was the problem
which Paganism tried to solve: that was the problem which I think Christianity solved and solved in a very strange way. Paganism declared
that virtue was in a balance; Christianity declared it was in a conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite. Of course they were not
really inconsistent; but they were such that it was hard to hold simultaneously. Let us follow for a moment the clue of the martyr and the
suicide; and take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage
is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. “He that will lose his life, the
same shall save it,” is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be
printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man
cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of
it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about
dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a
suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like
water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly
have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the
distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. And it has held up ever since above the European lances
the banner of the mystery of chivalry: the Christian courage, which is a disdain of death; not the Chinese courage, which is a disdain of life.
It separated the two ideas and then exaggerated them both. In one way Man was to be haughtier than he had ever been before; in another way he was to
be humbler than he had ever been before. In so far as I am Man I am the chief of creatures. In so far as I am a man I am the chief of sinners. All
humility that had meant pessimism, that had meant man taking a vague or mean view of his whole destiny—all that was to go. We were to hear no more
the wail of Ecclesiastes that humanity had no preeminence over the brute, or the awful cry of Homer that man was only the saddest of all the beasts
of the field. Man was a statue of God walking about the garden. Man had preeminence over all the brutes; man was only sad because he was not a
beast, but a broken god. The Greek had spoken of men creeping on the earth, as if clinging to it. Now Man was to tread on the earth as if to
subdue it. Christianity thus held a thought of the dignity of man that could only be expressed in crowns rayed like the sun and fans of peacock
plumage. Yet at the same time it could hold a thought about the abject smallness of man that could only be expressed in fasting and fantastic
submission, in the gray ashes of St. Dominic and the white snows of St. Bernard.
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, July 12, 2015
Excerpts from Orthodoxy, by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 31
Labels:
Chesterton,
courage,
G. K. Chesterton,
Orthodoxy,
paganism,
virtue
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