All Christianity concentrates on the man at the crossroads. The vast and
shallow philosophies, the huge syntheses of humbug, all talk about ages and evolution and ultimate developments. The true philosophy is concerned
with the instant. Will a man take this road or that?—that is the only thing to think about, if you enjoy thinking. The eons are easy enough to
think about, any one can think about them. The instant is really awful: and it is because our religion has intensely felt the instant, that it has
in literature dealt much with battle and in theology dealt much with hell. It is full of danger, like a boy’s book: it is at an immortal crisis.
There is a great deal of real similarity between popular fiction and the religion of the western people. If you say that popular fiction is vulgar
and tawdry, you only say what the dreary and well-informed say also about the images in the Catholic churches. Life (according to the faith) is very
like a serial story in a magazine: life ends with the promise (or menace) “to be continued in our next.” Also, with a noble vulgarity, life imitates
the serial and leaves off at the exciting moment. For death is distinctly an exciting moment.
But the point is that a story is exciting because it has in it so strong an element of will, of what theology calls free will. You cannot finish a
sum how you like. But you can finish a story how you like. When somebody discovered the Differential Calculus there was only one Differential
Calculus he could discover. But when Shakespeare killed Romeo he might have married him to Juliet’s old nurse if he had felt inclined. And
Christendom has excelled in the narrative romance exactly because it has insisted on the
theological free will. It is a large matter and too much to one side of the road to be discussed adequately here; but this is the real objection
to that torrent of modern talk about treating crime as disease, about making a prison merely a hygienic environment like a hospital, of healing
sin by slow scientific methods. The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active choice whereas disease is not. If you say that
you are going to cure a profligate as you cure an asthmatic, my cheap and obvious answer is, “Produce the people who want to be asthmatics as many
people want to be profligates.” A man may lie still and be cured of a malady. But he must not lie still if he wants to be cured of a sin; on the
contrary, he must get up and jump about violently. The whole point indeed is perfectly expressed in the very word which we use for a man in
hospital; “patient” is in the passive mood; “sinner” is in the active. If a man is to be saved from influenza, he may be a patient. But if he is to
be saved from forging, he must be not a patient but an impatient. He must be personally impatient with forgery. All moral reform must start in the
active not the passive will.
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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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, January 31, 2016
Excerpts from Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton, 58
Labels:
Chesterton,
Choice,
free will,
G. K. Chesterton,
Orthodoxy
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