So it’s beyond question that our world is a fairy tale, but there’s also no denying that something is seriously wrong with it as well, because in the fairy tale the giant doesn’t eat Jack. Nature is beautiful, but she’s also red in tooth and claw, and there's a reason BBC Earth isn't showing a lion pride ripping off the flesh of the antelope. Closer to home, those honey making needle insects have a propensity to stab and swarm, and while bears may look cute and cuddly, they maul when pestered.
Some people (for lack of a better word let’s call them optimists) want to maintain a sunny outlook by pretending none of these evils exist. You see this frequently from online totalitarian apologists, but you also see it from general do-gooders who haven’t thought things through. They begin by closing their eyes to the way the universe really is, and end by fully supporting Cuban communist regimes because, "they really helped the literacy problem there." As Chesterton says, “[Defending] the honour of this world, [the optimist] will defend the indefensible… he will not wash the world, but whitewash the world.” I happen to think the impulse to close your eyes and pretend away the problem is extremely strong in our culture at the moment, and I do wish Chesterton had said more about it in this chapter. When the modernistic idea that we have unlimited and boundless control over our universe fell apart around the 1960s the post-modern idea that the only distinctions that matter are in our minds took its place. But for post-modernism to work we have to all agree that there is no such thing as evil. Thus the world is full of optimists who are lawyers for the devil. Or in Chesterton's terms they're advancing the idea that it’s better to be mentally deranged than sane. It’s the prison of reason again in a slightly brighter package.
Others look at the fallen state of things with acceptance to the point of passivity. In contrast to the optimist, the pessimist pretends he’s not a part of the show, but above it, somehow able to transcend it. He’s the candid friend who is not really candid. He takes “gloomy pleasure in saying unpleasant things. He has a secret desire to hurt, not merely to help.” The pessimist is no less trying to escape the world than the optimist, he’s just doing it in a different way, which makes him even more of a traitor. “The assumption is that a man criticizes this world as if he were house-hunting, as if he were being shown over a new suite of apartments. If a man came to this world from some other world in full possession of his powers he might discuss whether the advantage of midsummer woods made up for the disadvantage of mad dogs, just as a man looking for lodging might balance the presence of a telephone against the absence of a sea view. But no man is in that position. A man belongs to this world before he begins to ask if it is nice to belong to it… he has loyalty long before he has any admiration.”
It’s beyond question then that we need to help our world move toward the book fairy tales and away from our dark reality, but what are the changes exactly and who shall make them? The pessimist who deep down wants things to stay bad, or the optimist who doesn’t believe things are bad at all? Well… neither. The only person we should trust is the one who loves with a transcendent, holy love. Only that person is qualified to offer solutions.
And that's because only divine love transforms. I don’t mean to say something imprecise like God's love is the fuel of our universe, or the warp and woof of its weaving, but… it’s pretty much that. Without His love working through us change is flatly impossible. Take a mundane example like loving the city you live in: “Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing—say [Detroit]… it is not enough for a man to disapprove of [Detroit]: in that case he will merely cut this throat or move to [Charleston]. Nor certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of [Detroit]: for then it will remain [Detroit], which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love [Detroit]: to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved [Detroit] then [Detroit] would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles… A mother does not give her child a blue bow because he is so ugly without it. A lover does not give a girl a necklace to hide her neck.” We need to be willing to look at the world, as ugly as it can be, and love it like a woman standing by her man, because that’s how existence works. We need to love without reason if we are to see improvement in it.
‘But wait a moment,’ you say, ‘the problem with Detroit is a lack of love? Isn’t the problem that they lack a robust educational system and suffer from dwindling tax revenue base resulting in numerous disadvantaged economic zones? What does love have to do with that? Why, we could put an expert in charge of sorting this all out, follow their recommendations, and be home by lunch.’ No. That doesn't work. It's never worked. And besides, reason apart from love is the thing that builds the prisons and traps us in the first place, remember? We like the lie of the experts because it’s familiar, and because we’ve been told the lie so often it’s comforting to us, but it’s just not true. “If only we had a little bit of urban planning and a gentrification roadmap we could save Detroit” is the spirit of the age and the advice of the experts, and it’s wrong. What matters in saving Detroit is the principle that if we aim for the greater we’ll get the lesser for free, but if we aim at the lesser we’ll get neither. Ask for love and get change for free, ask for change and get stagnation. When we are committed to a higher idea than reforming (that idea being love) we will get the reforming for free. “Some readers will say that this is a mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Go back to the darkest roots of civilization and you will find them knotted round some sacred stone or encircling some sacred well. People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her… Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, ‘I will not hit you if you do not hit me”; There is no trace of such a transaction. There is a trace of both men having said, “we must not hit each other in the holy place.” They gained their morality by guarding their religion. They did not cultivate courage. They fought for the shrine and found they had become courageous. They did not cultivate cleanliness. They purified themselves for the altar, and found that they were clean… and only when they made a holy day for God did they find they had made a holiday for men.”
But there is a danger in this loving approach to fixing things too, and it’s the same danger as before. So while we need someone who loves the world to change it we also don’t want to grab the nearest hedonist and put them in charge. We need someone who loves the ideal we’re trying to achieve as well. It’s not enough to realize we are called to love first and change second, we must love God transcendently, and nothing else. To love anything else as the ideal is to love what we see of ourselves in something else, which ultimately amounts to loving ourselves. “Of all the horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within… 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… cats or crocodiles… but not the god within… All the same, it will be as well if Jones does not worship the sun and moon. If he does, there is a tendency for him to imitate them; to say, that because the sun burns insects alive, he may burn insects alive… nature worship is natural enough while the society is young, or, in other words, Pantheism is all right as long as it is the worship of Pan. But nature has another side which experience and sin are not slow in finding out, and it is no flippancy to say of the god Pan that he soon showed the cloven hoof. The only objection to Natural Religion is that somehow it always becomes unnatural. A man loves Nature in the morning for her innocence and amiability, and at nightfall, if he is loving her still, it is for her darkness and her cruelty.” It is only a love for the transcendent and Holy God that results in a transcendent love—all other objects result in the love being pulled down to Earth and becoming corrupted. Thus, we must have a God outside the system, who created the system, if we are to understand the world.
In accepting this idea Chesterton found his sanity. “I was like one who had advanced into a hostile country to take one high fortress. And when that fort had fallen the whole country surrendered and turned solid behind me… All those blind fancies of boyhood which in the fourth chapter I have tried in vain to trace on the darkness, became suddenly transparent and sane. I was right when I felt that roses were red by some sort of choice: it was the divine choice. I was right when I felt that I would almost rather say that grass was the wrong colour than say it must by necessity have been any other. My sense that happiness hung on a crazy thread of a condition did mean something when all was said: it mean the whole doctrine of the fall.” Chesterton now could make sense of it all. “The optimism of the age had been false and disheartening for this reason, that it had always been trying to prove that we fit into the world. The Christian optimism is based on the fact that we do not fit into the world… the modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the right place, and I had still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But I had heard that I was in the wrong place, and my soul sang for joy… I knew now why grass had always seemed to me as queer as the green beard of a giant, and why I could feel homesick at home.”
In fact the pagan conception of optimist collapses because any worldview working from a closed system eventually collapses. Optimist, pessimist, blend, whatever, it can’t hold together given all the pressure from the outside that God is continually shovling onto it. And while this chapter is the personal reflection of Chesterton while he was trying to figure out reality, it’s really no different than what he discussed earlier in the second and third chapters. Rationalism must always end in failure because of our inherent sinfulness.
Beyond the eternal implications of heaven or hell, this chapter has some very practical implications for everyday life. Does your marriage need improvement? You won’t get it without being all in for a sacrificial love that holds nothing back. And why not? Because unless you love transcendently you won’t commit. Do you want to see better fruit from evangelism? You need to love your friend (or neighbor) wholly first. Jesus didn’t come after men became loveable, He loved them and then by that made them loveable. Do you find yourself short with your kids and feeling guilty about it; and even though they’re your whole world you find them barely tolerable sometimes? Set your transcendent love on God. The love must be put in the right place, and you must be reminded that to love God is the first of our duties, and only after we get it right can we move onto loving our fellow man.
Read Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton here.
Next: Chapter 6 - The Paradoxes of Christianity
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