Before Chesterton can begin discussing the cure to modern reasoning he needs to first address why it needs curing in the first place. In this chapter he spends time laying out the case as to why our forerunners who thought in terms of fairy tales and imagination didn’t have the same problems we do, and why if we go on thinking in this “scientific” way we’ll be trapped in a self-imposed mental prison of madness forever.
Chesterton’s first point (and one that bears repeating) is that virtues uncoupled from a Christian framework go to seed and become corrupted. Our danger is not from being brought down from our vices as much as being swallowed by misplaced virtue. Pity gone to seed grows into indolence. Search for truth alone gives you cruelty. Intellectual humility run amok gets you intellectual suicide. “What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place... A man was meant to be doubtful about himself but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed… the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether… we are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe the multiplication table.” That thought forms the basis of the chapter, so I’ll say it again for effect: left to our own impulses and reasoning we take what is normally a good thing and commit intellectual suicide with it.
It was therefore to safeguard our minds that God gave us the rules of religion. He stamped His authority on the commandments and said, “By these thou shalt live,” because apart from boundaries our fallen thirst for power ruins us. We are created in the image of The Creator and so we desire to create, but because we are fallen and desire to flee from Him, our creations are designed to be safe places to flee to. Our finite reason and imagination must necessarily make a world smaller than the real one, and thus, we make jails for ourselves. Our reason first imprisons and then destroys us.
Consider the hypothesis of evolution. “Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which, if it destroys anything, destroys itself… it is an attack upon thought itself. If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism.” Evolution, the scientist says, selects traits for survivability for its creatures. But in selecting for success evolution does not select for truth, for truth is an outcome irrelevant to survival. To accept that we are the product of accidental and random events means we should never have figured out the truth of evolution to begin with. Or as Chesterton says, “You must sooner or later ask yourself the question, ‘Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape.” If we really believed in evolution, the epistemological ground would fall out from under us and we’d immediately be left with nothing to believe in. It’s the old philosophy of materialism and determinism in another package. If predetermined out of control atomic collisions make up everything—including our thoughts—then nothing matters or makes sense, not even these words. A fish doesn't know he's wet, although he's surrounded by water, the thought of 'wet' never occurs to him.
What about moral relativism, will that work? No. The instant you throw history under the bus in a progressive fit of virtue signaling you’ve given the game away. When you say those evil savages of yesteryear have nothing to teach to us today because they are evil and we are good, you fall into Nietzche’s trap. “Nietzsche started a nonsensical idea that men had once sought as good what we now call evil.” The problem? “If it were so, we could not now talk of surpassing or even falling short of them.” If the previous generation of men were afflicted with a condition that resulted in them not being able to tell the difference between good or evil, then why are we, their direct descendants, not afflicted with this same condition? If they couldn’t think straight, then how are we any different? How are we exempt from having our judgements invalidated by the same standard? If all human judgment is unreliable, then our own judgment is also unreliable. “The theory of a complete change of standards in human history does not merely deprive us of the pleasure of honoring our fathers; it deprives us of the more modern and aristocratic pleasure of despising them.” Relativism amounts to a policy of continual change, adopted merely for the sake of change, with no particular direction to change in to. It seeks that which is novel and exciting, but in end there is nothing more than monotonous, for there is nothing as monotonous as constant, unending change.
What about foregoing any rational thinking altogether and simply living for the moment? Can we just table figuring out an overarching rational principle against God and live in a pragmatic, do-what-works world of pleasure? Can't we simply close our eyes, pretend He doesn't exist, and banish the idea of God? No again. “One of those necessities is precisely a belief in objective truth. The pragmatist tells a man to think what he must think and never mind the absolute. But precisely one of the things that he must think is the absolute.” Avoiding dealing with absolute truths is self-defeating, for the only way to pull it off is to declare that there is no absolute truth, except the absolute truth that there is no absolute truth. God has so made our world that there's no escaping the need for absolute truth, for He is the Truth, and there's no universe without Him.
"Well okay," reasons fallen man, "if constructing a barricade against God using reason is no good, then what about constructing it with something else? Can we build a defense based on our wills instead? Can we use that marvelous organ that enables us to drive toward our desires?" As Chesterton says, “At the beginning of this preliminary sketch I said that our mental ruin has been wrought by wild reason… now one school of thinkers has seen this… they see that reason destroys; but will, they say, creates. The ultimate authority they say, is in the will, not in reason. The supreme point is not why a man demands a thing, but the fact that he does demand it.” But a moment’s thought shows that this won’t work either. “Pure praise of volition ends in the same break up and blank as the mere pursuit of logic. Exactly as complete free thought involves the doubting of thought itself, so the acceptation of mere willing really paralyzes the will… to admire mere choice is to refuse to choose.”
Why won’t will work as a building block? Because there’s really not much to the will in the final analysis, that’s why. Your will only helps you get what you desire—nothing more. It’s that invisible quality which says, “this, and not that.” “Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation… when you choose anything you reject everything else. …When you marry one woman you give up all the others. … If you draw a giraffe you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find you are not free to draw a giraffe… the moment you step into the world of facts you step into a world of limits… if a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end.” There is nothing in the will with which to construct with, the will only chooses from what it sees. And so by itself it does nothing to divert the universe from pressing in on us. If we turn our minds off and rely on will alone we allow God’s universe to supply us with facts, but for goodness sake, the whole point of rational insanity was to keep God’s universe out, not to let it in! If we switch to using will (which accepts God’s reality as a fundamental premise) then all we’ve done is taken a step backwards. Because if we accept God’s reality then we’ve come dangerously close to accepting the truth that our rebellion against Him merits punishment, and it’s this truth that we’re desperate to get away from and forget about to begin with.
So no matter what tool we try and use, there’s no escape of the mental prison for sinners, no evading the trap God has laid for us. All roads lead to Rome. All human philosophies set us “on the road to the emptiness of the asylum.” The second you walk away from God He takes away the light you are using to walk with. Trying to flee from Him with reason and you flee from reason. Either we must flee to God and accept His heaven or we will have hell.
Oh the depth of the riches, the wisdom of God! How true is His warning, “Do I not fill heaven and earth?” How utterly delightful His words. And this Chesterton regards as the unpleasant groundwork of his book. In the next chapter he is finally able to talk about what he wants to.
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