Religion
The paradox and the orthodox
Martin Sullivan
The end of last month marked the hundredth anniversary of G. K. Chesterton's birth, so a word about his religious views will rrot be out of place in this column. He moved from agnosticism through Anglo Catholicism to Roman Catholicism, a familiar enough pilgrimage accomplished by a certain type of mind. He argued his way to harbour, and when he had tied up his clumsy barque, he kept on arguing, perhaps as much to console himself as to refute others. He wrote at great speed and mined his pages with paradoxes. It was the mental satisfaction he gained in seeing the point of a contradiction and accepting it, rather than wrestling hopelessly and unhappily with it, which in the end brought him to accept the Christian faith and to uphold it. Here are one or two examples of his skill drawn from his book Orthodoxy. He opens a suggestive chapter with these words: The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and
regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait. I give one coarse instance of what I mean. Suppose some mathematical creature from the moon were to reckon up the human body; he would at once see that the essential thing about it was that it was duplicate. A man is two men, he on the right exactly resembling him on the left. Having noted that there was an arm on the right and one on the left, a leg on the right and one on the left, he might go further and still find on each side the same number of fingers, the same number of toes, twin eyes, twin ears, twin nostrils, and even twin lobes of the brain. At last he would take it as a law; and then, where he found a heart on one side, would deduce that there was another heart on the other. And just then, where he most felt he was right, he would be wrong."
He goes on to tell us that he was a pagan at the age of twelve, and a complete agnostic by the age of sixteen. He retained a cloudy reverence for a cosmic deity and a great historical interest in the Founder of Christianity. He devoured the scientific and sceptical literature of his time and found finally that his love of paradox would not enable him to digest it. Huxley, Bradlaugh, Spencer and Ingersoll converted him to Christianity. They demonstrated that Christianity was the black mask on a white world, and then in the same breath described it as the white mask on a black world. It was a nightmare and at the same time a fool's paradise. So he began to work out his own salvation. He did not jump at once on to the Christian band wagon. He walked on his own for a long time. He became convinced that the world does not explain itself, and if it is after all only the result of a conjuring trick then that sleight of hand would need to be better than the natural explanations he had rejected. He came to the conclusion that there was something personal in the world, as in a work of art, and that the proper form of thanks to it was some form of humility and restraint. "We owed also an obedience to whatever made us. And last, and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin. All this I felt and the age gave me no encouragement to feel it. -All this time I had not even thought of Christian theology."
In the end, however, he came not only to think of it, but to accept it. He always argued for it in paradoxes: "It is constantly assured," he wrote, "especially in our Tolstoyan tendencies, that, when the lion lies down with the lamb, the lion becomes lamb-like. But that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb. The real problem is — can the lion lie down with the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity? That is the problem the church attempted; that is the miracle she achieved." He would call that "guessing the hidden eccentricities of life" and knowing in advance that a man has only one heart.
Martin Sullivan is Dean of St Paul's
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