I take in order the next instance offered: the idea that Christianity
belongs to the Dark Ages. Here I did not satisfy myself with reading modern generalizations; I read a little history. And in history I found
that Christianity, so far from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark. It was a shining
bridge connecting two shining civilizations. If any one says that the faith arose in ignorance and savagery the answer is simple: it didn’t. It
arose in the Mediterranean civilization in the full summer of the Roman Empire. The world was swarming with skeptics, and pantheism was as plain
as the sun, when Constantine nailed the cross to the mast. It is perfectly true that afterwards the ship sank; but it is far more extraordinary that
the ship came up again: repainted and glittering, with the cross still at the top. This is the amazing thing the religion did: it turned a sunken
ship into a submarine. The ark lived under the load of waters; after being buried under the debris of dynasties and clans, we arose and remembered
Rome. If our faith had been a mere fad of the fading empire, fad would have followed fad in the twilight, and if the civilization ever re-emerged
(and many such have never re-emerged) it would have been under some new barbaric flag. But the Christian Church was the last life of the old
society and was also the first life of the new. She took the people who were forgetting how to make an arch and she taught them to invent the
Gothic arch. In a word, the most absurd thing that could be said of the Church is the thing we have all heard said of it. How can we say that the
Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them.
I came back to the same conclusion: the sceptic was quite right to go by the facts, only he had not looked at the facts. The sceptic is too
credulous; he believes in newspapers or even in encyclopedias. Again the three questions left me with three very antagonistic questions. The
average sceptic wanted to know how I explained the namby-pamby note in the Gospel, the connection of the creed with medieval darkness and the
political impracticability of the Celtic Christians. But I wanted to ask, and to ask with an earnestness amounting to urgency, “What is this
incomparable energy which appears first in one walking the earth like a living judgment and this energy which can die with a dying civilization
and yet force it to a resurrection from the dead; this energy which last of all can inflame a bankrupt peasantry with so fixed a
faith in justice that they get what they ask, while others go empty away; so that the most helpless island of the Empire can actually help itself?”
There is an answer: it is an answer to say that the energy is truly from outside the world; that it is psychic, or at least one of the results of a
real psychical disturbance. The highest gratitude and respect are due to the great human civilizations such as the old Egyptian or the existing
Chinese. Nevertheless it is no injustice for them to say that only modern Europe has exhibited incessantly a power of self-renewal recurring often
at the shortest intervals and descending to the smallest facts of building or costume. All other societies die finally and with dignity. We die
daily. We are always being born again with almost indecent obstetrics. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that there is in historic Christendom a
sort of unnatural life: it could be explained as a supernatural life. It could be explained as an awful galvanic life working in what would have
been a corpse. For our civilization ought to have died, by all parallels, by all sociological probability, in the Ragnorak of the end of Rome. That
is the weird inspiration of our estate: you and I have no business to be here at all. We are all revenants; all living Christians are dead pagans
walking about. Just as Europe was about to be gathered in silence to Assyria and Babylon, something entered into its body. And Europe has had a
strange life—it is not too much to say that it has had the jumps—ever since.
Orthodoxy, 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.
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Note, April 7, 2016. It has come to my attention that this post has been viewed over 800 times. I have no idea of the reason for this popularity, but am grateful for it.
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.
Sunday, March 20, 2016
Excerpts from Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton, 65
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