Section 68
ANOTHER AVOIDING OF HEROD'S TERRITORY
MATT. 15:29
MARK 7:31
Section 69
THE DEAF STAMMERER HEALED AND FOUR
THOUSAND FED
MATT. 15:30-39
MARK 7:32-8:9
Jon Courson helped me to see the feeding of the 4,000 in a meaningful light. All of the below is his topical study on this incident:
"The passage before us is controversial. Many scholars suggest it is nothing more than a retelling of the "feeding of the five thousand" story in Matthew 14. Why? It's the only explanation they can offer for the seeming stupidity of the disciples. You see, here in chapter 15, the disciples ask Jesus how they are to feed such a large crowd. Why would the disciples wonder how to feed four thousand if only a mere chapter earlier, they had seen Jesus feed over five thousand? "The only logical answer," conclude the scholars, "is that Mat_14:14-21 and Mat_15:32-39 are two different accounts of the same event." I, however, reject their premise for the following reasons:
• There were five thousand men in chapter 14.
• There were four thousand men in chapter 15.
• There were five loaves and two fish in chapter 14.
• There were seven loaves and a few fish in chapter 15.
• The multitude sat on the grass in chapter 14—the implication being it was springtime.
• The multitude sat on the bare ground in chapter 15—the implication being it was summertime.
• Jesus was in Bethsaida, the northern side of the Sea of Galilee, in chapter 14.
• Jesus was in Decapolis (Mark 8), on the eastern side of Galilee in chapter 15.
• After He fed the multitude in chapter 14, they wanted to make Him King.
• After He fed the multitude in chapter 15, they made no such request.
Above all, however, the reason I know these two events are separate is because Jesus Himself referred to them as such in Mat_16:9-10. If the "scholars" are right in suggesting there was only one feeding with two accounts, then Matthew wasn't listening to the Spirit as he wrote his Gospel, and Jesus was mistaken and confused about His own miracles."
I believe that's where the problem was. Here, the disciples were with Jesus in Decapolis. "Certainly Jesus won't do a miracle here," the disciples must have thought. "This is heathen territory. Most of this crowd is Gentile. The Lord isn't going to feed these people. Besides that, they've been with Him three days now. In Galilee, He fed the crowd after only one day. This is the wrong place. These are the wrong people. This is the wrong time."
The same thing happens to me and to you. The Lord blesses us. A miracle happens. Provision is made. Grace is shown. Then we get into a similar situation a month, a year, or a decade later. And we say, "Oh yeah, I know the Lord saw me through that previous difficulty. I know He provided for me graciously. But that was a different time. I was in Galilee then. I was having morning devotions. I was really close to Him. Now? I'm in the wrong place with the wrong people. This is the wrong time. Nothing is going to happen. The Lord isn't going to see me through this trouble. Not now. I'm out to lunch. I'm in Decapolis."
How easy it is to fall into the subtle trap of expecting the Lord to bless us because of our own worthiness or because we're in Galilee. "I'm praying. I'm studying. I'm close to the Lord. Of course He'll bless me!" But what we fail to factor into the equation is this very simple understanding. Jesus, we are told in verse Mat_15:32, called His disciples and said, "I have compassion on the multitude." The word translated "compassion" is actually a Greek word that describes the retching of the intestines—something which one feels very deeply. Looking out upon the hungry people of Decapolis, Jesus said, "I hurt for them. Even though no one is asking Me to provide, even though no one is believing I can provide, I want to do something for these people because I have compassion upon them." -Jon Courson
Tuesday, October 30, 2018
Saturday, October 27, 2018
Sections 66 & 67, 2nd Withdrawal, Phoenician Woman's Daughter
Sections 66 & 67
SECOND WITHDRAWAL FROM HEROD'S TERRITORY
MATT. 15:21
MARK 7:24
HEALING A PHOENICIAN WOMAN'S DAUGHTER. (Region of Tyre and Sidon)
MATT. 15:22-28
MARK 7:24-30
The Bible never fails to catch me sleeping at the wheel. Stories that I've dismissed too quickly turn around and tease me, "So you think you know me already? Well...." The last few mornings it's been the story of the Syrophoencian woman lingering in my thoughts. The journey began with The Fourfold Gospel providing broader context for this miracle.
Now the woman was a Greek, a Syrophenician by race. -Matthew 15:26
"The Macedonian conquest had diffused Greek civilization throughout western Asia till the word Greek among the Jews had become synonymous with Gentile. The term Canaanite was narrower and indicated an inhabitant of Canaan--that is, a non-Jewish inhabitant of Palestine. The term Syrophoenician was narrower still. It meant a Syrian in Phoenicia, and distinguished the Phoenicians from the other Syrians. Phoenicia was a narrow strip near the northeast corner of the Mediterranean Sea. It was some twenty-eight miles long with an average width of about one mile. Canaan means lowland; Phoenicia means palmland. The Canaanites founded Sidon (Gen. 10:19), and the Phoenicians were their descendants." Fourfold Gospel
It is important to note where Jesus seeks isolation. It is in Gentile territory and is also a potentially dangerous place for him as a Jew. 11 Tyre had a mixed population of Jews and nonJews; Mark's readers would have known these two groups to "be bitter enemies."12 This fact heightens the boundary-breaking drama that will ensue in the following passages. Not only are Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman "strangers," they belong to rival cultures/nationalities. -Christopher E. Alt
Scofield comments on the prophetic gesture inherent in Christ's response to this woman:
"For the first time the rejected Son of David ministers to a Gentile. It is a precursive fulfilment of Mat_12:18 Addressed by a Gentile as Son of David, He makes no reply, for a Gentile has no claim upon Him in that character. (See Scofield on Mat_2:2) Eph_2:12. Addressing him as "Lord," she obtained an immediate answer. Rom_10:12; Rom_10:13"
And he answered and said, unto her, Let the children first be filled: for it is not meet [suitable, becoming] to take the children's bread and to cast it to the dogs. -Matthew 15:26
"By the use of the word "first" Jesus suggested that there would come a time of mercy for the Gentiles. He uses the diminutive for the word dog, thus indicating a tame pet, and suggesting rather the dependence and subordinate position than the uncleanness of the dog. By so doing he gave the woman an argumentative handle which she was not slow to grasp." -Fourfold Gospel
"She replies by alluding to the well-known fact that dogs under the table are permitted to eat the crumbs even while the meal is in progress; intimating thereby her hope to receive and before all the needs of Israel had first been satisfied." -Fourfold
Then I dipped into an essay in Lumen et Vita, a publication from a Boston School of Theology and Ministry (Catholic and Jesuit in influence). The author, Christopher Alt, brought new dimensions to this story for me. His essay took the story and viewed it through a lens of lessons in humility and wisdom. It also taught me some sophisticated Bible study terms along the way such as chreia and pericope.
"Jesus' response" in Mk 7:27 is a chreia, "a saying that conveys an example of the wit and wisdom of a philosopher or other famous person. It was a common form in Greek rhetoric and was often used as a teaching device in rhetorical schools," --Ringe, "A Gentile Woman's Story, Revisited,"
Typically, Jesus' chreia serves as the climax of any given passage. Here, however, the woman's retort....serves as climax of passage." -Christopher E. Alt, "The Dynamic of Humility and Wisdom: The Syrophoenician Woman and Jesus in Mark 7:24-31."
Fourfold gets at the heart of her motive most precisely--what would a mother not do for her child?
"The woman's experience has been often repeated by other parents who have prayed for children which, if not demon-possessed, was certainly swayed by diabolical influences. The woman's faith is shown in many ways: 1. She persisted when he was silent. 2. She reasoned when he spoke. 3. She regarded this miracle, though a priceless gift to her, as a mere crumb from the table of his abundant powers. It is noteworthy that the two most notable for faith--this woman and the centurion--were both Gentiles." -Fourfold
Christopher Alt's essay interprets the exchange between Jesus and this woman as a mutually beneficial experience that prompted Christ to re-examine and further expand his ministry to the Gentiles in the context of his own growth. I find his argument uncomfortable because he concludes it was a "learning experience" for both of them, forcing me to think through the intermingling of being both God and man. My impulse is to immediately default to the God side, perhaps because humanity feels fragile. However, God willfully made himself a man, with fully knowledge of man's weaknesses and limits. I allow there is great mystery where God and man meet and suspect it's an unfathomable road to press further--certainly for little me and my coffee this morning. ; )
For me, the most compelling and applicable part of Alt's essay is his determination to accurately define humility in the larger context of wisdom:
"Too often, people think of humility as having a modest or low view of one's own importance. In this mindset, it is taken as the opposite of pride. It also causes most people to assume incorrectly that humility is on the completely other end of the virtue-vice spectrum; they place it on the exact opposite pole from pride. People forget that virtues do not act as polar bookends to vices. This is to say that virtues, rightly understood, go against extremes.26 They are more the books in between the bookends, the white cream between the oreo cookies. These analogies, however banal, simply mean to illustrate the space virtues occupy. Again, virtues are not extremes, but rather the median between two corresponding vices (this explains why we get it wrong more than we get it right; the virtue is always outnumbered 2:1)." -Alt
"The other–the one that is often confused with humility–is self-deprecation. Keenan describes this as an extreme that "[makes] oneself so weak as not to exercise oneself responsibly."28 Elsewhere, Keenan adds, "[w]hen we find our place between…extremes, we are humbled, for we shall stand before God. We are a people who hope and trust that we are saved– sinners, but saved." -Alt
New word: pericope--(per-rick-O-pee), noun--an extract from a text, especially a passage from the Bible.
SECOND WITHDRAWAL FROM HEROD'S TERRITORY
MATT. 15:21
MARK 7:24
HEALING A PHOENICIAN WOMAN'S DAUGHTER. (Region of Tyre and Sidon)
MATT. 15:22-28
MARK 7:24-30
The Bible never fails to catch me sleeping at the wheel. Stories that I've dismissed too quickly turn around and tease me, "So you think you know me already? Well...." The last few mornings it's been the story of the Syrophoencian woman lingering in my thoughts. The journey began with The Fourfold Gospel providing broader context for this miracle.
Now the woman was a Greek, a Syrophenician by race. -Matthew 15:26
"The Macedonian conquest had diffused Greek civilization throughout western Asia till the word Greek among the Jews had become synonymous with Gentile. The term Canaanite was narrower and indicated an inhabitant of Canaan--that is, a non-Jewish inhabitant of Palestine. The term Syrophoenician was narrower still. It meant a Syrian in Phoenicia, and distinguished the Phoenicians from the other Syrians. Phoenicia was a narrow strip near the northeast corner of the Mediterranean Sea. It was some twenty-eight miles long with an average width of about one mile. Canaan means lowland; Phoenicia means palmland. The Canaanites founded Sidon (Gen. 10:19), and the Phoenicians were their descendants." Fourfold Gospel
It is important to note where Jesus seeks isolation. It is in Gentile territory and is also a potentially dangerous place for him as a Jew. 11 Tyre had a mixed population of Jews and nonJews; Mark's readers would have known these two groups to "be bitter enemies."12 This fact heightens the boundary-breaking drama that will ensue in the following passages. Not only are Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman "strangers," they belong to rival cultures/nationalities. -Christopher E. Alt
Scofield comments on the prophetic gesture inherent in Christ's response to this woman:
"For the first time the rejected Son of David ministers to a Gentile. It is a precursive fulfilment of Mat_12:18 Addressed by a Gentile as Son of David, He makes no reply, for a Gentile has no claim upon Him in that character. (See Scofield on Mat_2:2) Eph_2:12. Addressing him as "Lord," she obtained an immediate answer. Rom_10:12; Rom_10:13"
And he answered and said, unto her, Let the children first be filled: for it is not meet [suitable, becoming] to take the children's bread and to cast it to the dogs. -Matthew 15:26
"By the use of the word "first" Jesus suggested that there would come a time of mercy for the Gentiles. He uses the diminutive for the word dog, thus indicating a tame pet, and suggesting rather the dependence and subordinate position than the uncleanness of the dog. By so doing he gave the woman an argumentative handle which she was not slow to grasp." -Fourfold Gospel
"She replies by alluding to the well-known fact that dogs under the table are permitted to eat the crumbs even while the meal is in progress; intimating thereby her hope to receive and before all the needs of Israel had first been satisfied." -Fourfold
Then I dipped into an essay in Lumen et Vita, a publication from a Boston School of Theology and Ministry (Catholic and Jesuit in influence). The author, Christopher Alt, brought new dimensions to this story for me. His essay took the story and viewed it through a lens of lessons in humility and wisdom. It also taught me some sophisticated Bible study terms along the way such as chreia and pericope.
"Jesus' response" in Mk 7:27 is a chreia, "a saying that conveys an example of the wit and wisdom of a philosopher or other famous person. It was a common form in Greek rhetoric and was often used as a teaching device in rhetorical schools," --Ringe, "A Gentile Woman's Story, Revisited,"
Typically, Jesus' chreia serves as the climax of any given passage. Here, however, the woman's retort....serves as climax of passage." -Christopher E. Alt, "The Dynamic of Humility and Wisdom: The Syrophoenician Woman and Jesus in Mark 7:24-31."
Fourfold gets at the heart of her motive most precisely--what would a mother not do for her child?
"The woman's experience has been often repeated by other parents who have prayed for children which, if not demon-possessed, was certainly swayed by diabolical influences. The woman's faith is shown in many ways: 1. She persisted when he was silent. 2. She reasoned when he spoke. 3. She regarded this miracle, though a priceless gift to her, as a mere crumb from the table of his abundant powers. It is noteworthy that the two most notable for faith--this woman and the centurion--were both Gentiles." -Fourfold
Christopher Alt's essay interprets the exchange between Jesus and this woman as a mutually beneficial experience that prompted Christ to re-examine and further expand his ministry to the Gentiles in the context of his own growth. I find his argument uncomfortable because he concludes it was a "learning experience" for both of them, forcing me to think through the intermingling of being both God and man. My impulse is to immediately default to the God side, perhaps because humanity feels fragile. However, God willfully made himself a man, with fully knowledge of man's weaknesses and limits. I allow there is great mystery where God and man meet and suspect it's an unfathomable road to press further--certainly for little me and my coffee this morning. ; )
For me, the most compelling and applicable part of Alt's essay is his determination to accurately define humility in the larger context of wisdom:
"Too often, people think of humility as having a modest or low view of one's own importance. In this mindset, it is taken as the opposite of pride. It also causes most people to assume incorrectly that humility is on the completely other end of the virtue-vice spectrum; they place it on the exact opposite pole from pride. People forget that virtues do not act as polar bookends to vices. This is to say that virtues, rightly understood, go against extremes.26 They are more the books in between the bookends, the white cream between the oreo cookies. These analogies, however banal, simply mean to illustrate the space virtues occupy. Again, virtues are not extremes, but rather the median between two corresponding vices (this explains why we get it wrong more than we get it right; the virtue is always outnumbered 2:1)." -Alt
"The other–the one that is often confused with humility–is self-deprecation. Keenan describes this as an extreme that "[makes] oneself so weak as not to exercise oneself responsibly."28 Elsewhere, Keenan adds, "[w]hen we find our place between…extremes, we are humbled, for we shall stand before God. We are a people who hope and trust that we are saved– sinners, but saved." -Alt
Alt argues that the woman knew her proper place in relationship to Christ and acted in faith accordingly. I agree with this assertion; however, I think he over-intellectualizes the underpinnings of her plea for help. As a mother, I understand that a mother would seek help for her daughter's well being. It is the type of need that would drive a woman beyond traditional boundaries as a matter of course.
Also, Alt concludes that the Syrophoenician woman has "the last word" in their dialogue about dogs.
Things that intrigue me:
Alt stresses that Mark focuses on her prostate position, but I feel the weight of her emotional cry in Matthew is equally impactful:
And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.” But he did not answer her a word.-Matthew 15:22-23
Why is Christ silent in the face of this?
"This poor Gentile mother had no claim on Jesus as the son of David-He was therefore silent. It was impossible for her to come in by the door of the covenant, but His silence led her to knock at another door, and taught her to cry, Lord, help me."-F.B. Meyer
Those who yield to God most absolutely are able to decree things! See Job_22:28; Joh_15:7.-F.B. Meyer
"If you return to the Almighty you will be built up;
if you remove injustice far from your tents,
if you lay gold in the dust, and gold of Ophir among the stones of the torrent-bed,
then the Almighty will be your gold and your precious silver.
For then you will delight yourself in the Almighty and lift up your face to God.
You will make your prayer to him, and he will hear you, and you will pay your vows.
You will decide on a matter, and it will be established for you, and light will shine on your ways.
For when they are humbled you say, ‘It is because of pride’; but he saves the lowly.
He delivers even the one who is not innocent, who will be delivered through the cleanness of your hands.” Job 22:23-30
Alt stresses that Mark focuses on her prostate position, but I feel the weight of her emotional cry in Matthew is equally impactful:
And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.” But he did not answer her a word.-Matthew 15:22-23
Why is Christ silent in the face of this?
"This poor Gentile mother had no claim on Jesus as the son of David-He was therefore silent. It was impossible for her to come in by the door of the covenant, but His silence led her to knock at another door, and taught her to cry, Lord, help me."-F.B. Meyer
Those who yield to God most absolutely are able to decree things! See Job_22:28; Joh_15:7.-F.B. Meyer
"If you return to the Almighty you will be built up;
if you remove injustice far from your tents,
if you lay gold in the dust, and gold of Ophir among the stones of the torrent-bed,
then the Almighty will be your gold and your precious silver.
For then you will delight yourself in the Almighty and lift up your face to God.
You will make your prayer to him, and he will hear you, and you will pay your vows.
You will decide on a matter, and it will be established for you, and light will shine on your ways.
For when they are humbled you say, ‘It is because of pride’; but he saves the lowly.
He delivers even the one who is not innocent, who will be delivered through the cleanness of your hands.” Job 22:23-30
Saturday, October 20, 2018
Psalm 75
"For not from the east or from the west and not from the wilderness comes lifting up,
but it is God who executes judgment, putting down one and lifting up another.
For in the hand of the LORD there is a cup with foaming wine, well mixed, and he pours out from it, and all the wicked of the earth shall drain it down to the dregs. -Psalm 75:6-8
"The contents of this cup have a different effect upon different characters. To the righteous it is a pleasant cup. Its blooming, sparkling mixture is delicious and inspiring. Not so to the wicked; what is delicious and sustaining to the good is distasteful and pernicious to the evil. Moral character changes subjectively the very nature of things."
Matthew Arnold has somewhere described God “as a stream of tendency that maketh for righteousness.” His meaning, I presume, is that the whole procedure of God in the moral world tends to put down the wrong and to raise and glorify the right. -Homilist.
I'm intrigued by this illustration and analogy---God has a mixed cup for us, some benefit from its contents, others are corrected. Behind it, there's the idea of rewards and punishments for righteousness and wickedness which makes it feel like a works-based response.
In what sense are we "rewarded" for righteous action? Although it's clear that Salvation is not a works-based thing, the Bible teaches the natural consequences of choice and character in other realms.
The LORD is good to all: and his tender mercies are over all his works. Psalm 145:9
but it is God who executes judgment, putting down one and lifting up another.
For in the hand of the LORD there is a cup with foaming wine, well mixed, and he pours out from it, and all the wicked of the earth shall drain it down to the dregs. -Psalm 75:6-8
"The contents of this cup have a different effect upon different characters. To the righteous it is a pleasant cup. Its blooming, sparkling mixture is delicious and inspiring. Not so to the wicked; what is delicious and sustaining to the good is distasteful and pernicious to the evil. Moral character changes subjectively the very nature of things."
Matthew Arnold has somewhere described God “as a stream of tendency that maketh for righteousness.” His meaning, I presume, is that the whole procedure of God in the moral world tends to put down the wrong and to raise and glorify the right. -Homilist.
I'm intrigued by this illustration and analogy---God has a mixed cup for us, some benefit from its contents, others are corrected. Behind it, there's the idea of rewards and punishments for righteousness and wickedness which makes it feel like a works-based response.
In what sense are we "rewarded" for righteous action? Although it's clear that Salvation is not a works-based thing, the Bible teaches the natural consequences of choice and character in other realms.
The LORD is good to all: and his tender mercies are over all his works. Psalm 145:9
When anarchy is abroad, and tyrants are in power, everything is unloosed, dissolution threatens all things, the solid mountains of government melt as wax; but even then the Lord upholds and sustains the right. “I bear up the pillars of it.” Hence, there is no real cause for fear. -Spurgeon
When the earth totters, and all its inhabitants, it is I who keep steady its pillars. Selah Psalm 75:3
Tuesday, October 16, 2018
Section 65, Fourfold Gospel
P A R T S I X T H
FROM THE THIRD PASSOVER UNTIL OUR LORD'S ARRIVAL AT BETHANY.
Time: One Year Less One Week
Section 65
JESUS FAILS TO ATTEND THE THIRD PASSOVER. SCRIBES REPROACH HIM FOR DISREGARDING TRADITION.
(Galilee, probably Capernaum, spring A. D. 29)
MATT. 15:1-20
MARK 7:1-23
JOHN 7:1
Here, the Pharisees and scribes attack Jesus for not washing his hands when he eats. Jesus flips the questions so that transgressing "the tradition of the elders" is juxtaposed against transgressing "the commandment of God."
Jesus observes,"This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.” Matthew 15:8-9
It is important to keep the plumb line accurate--not what we have added onto our interpretations, but God's commandments as set forth in the scriptures are enough. Christ goes on to clarify that it's not what we eat, what we put into our mouths, that defiles us, but it's what comes out of our hearts. The purity of our heart is the issue in its entirety.
"Remember that no gift to God’s service is acceptable if you neglect the claims of those who are related to you by natural ties. Morality in God’s eyes stands far above ritual." F.B. Meyers
Tradition is not good or bad in itself. It is merely what is handed on from one to another. Custom tended to make these traditions binding like law. The Talmud is a monument of their struggle with tradition. There could be no compromise on this subject and Jesus accepts the issue. He stands for real righteousness and spiritual freedom, not for bondage to mere ceremonialism and tradition. The rabbis placed tradition (the oral law) above the law of God. -BKC?
"Thus tradition undid the law. God's law leads to pure and acceptable worship, while human additions and amendments make worship vain, if not abominable. There is probably not one such addition or amendment which does not to a greater or less degree make some commandment void." -Fourfold Gospel
The tradition of the elders stated specifically that if you had something in your house which was of great value, you could say it was "corban," or "dedicated," which then made that object a gift to God. You could still keep it in your house and use it for your purposes, but it was technically dedicated to God. It was a convenient way to refuse help to people in need—even to those in your own family.
-Jon Courson
Fourfold Gospel: "It is hard for us to learn and apply the distinction between serving God as God wishes to be served, and serving him according to our own wishes and notions."
FROM THE THIRD PASSOVER UNTIL OUR LORD'S ARRIVAL AT BETHANY.
Time: One Year Less One Week
Section 65
JESUS FAILS TO ATTEND THE THIRD PASSOVER. SCRIBES REPROACH HIM FOR DISREGARDING TRADITION.
(Galilee, probably Capernaum, spring A. D. 29)
MATT. 15:1-20
MARK 7:1-23
JOHN 7:1
Here, the Pharisees and scribes attack Jesus for not washing his hands when he eats. Jesus flips the questions so that transgressing "the tradition of the elders" is juxtaposed against transgressing "the commandment of God."
Jesus observes,"This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.” Matthew 15:8-9
It is important to keep the plumb line accurate--not what we have added onto our interpretations, but God's commandments as set forth in the scriptures are enough. Christ goes on to clarify that it's not what we eat, what we put into our mouths, that defiles us, but it's what comes out of our hearts. The purity of our heart is the issue in its entirety.
"Remember that no gift to God’s service is acceptable if you neglect the claims of those who are related to you by natural ties. Morality in God’s eyes stands far above ritual." F.B. Meyers
Tradition is not good or bad in itself. It is merely what is handed on from one to another. Custom tended to make these traditions binding like law. The Talmud is a monument of their struggle with tradition. There could be no compromise on this subject and Jesus accepts the issue. He stands for real righteousness and spiritual freedom, not for bondage to mere ceremonialism and tradition. The rabbis placed tradition (the oral law) above the law of God. -BKC?
"Thus tradition undid the law. God's law leads to pure and acceptable worship, while human additions and amendments make worship vain, if not abominable. There is probably not one such addition or amendment which does not to a greater or less degree make some commandment void." -Fourfold Gospel
The tradition of the elders stated specifically that if you had something in your house which was of great value, you could say it was "corban," or "dedicated," which then made that object a gift to God. You could still keep it in your house and use it for your purposes, but it was technically dedicated to God. It was a convenient way to refuse help to people in need—even to those in your own family.
-Jon Courson
Fourfold Gospel: "It is hard for us to learn and apply the distinction between serving God as God wishes to be served, and serving him according to our own wishes and notions."
Saturday, October 13, 2018
Broad reflections of Chesterton's Everlasting Man
Chesterton's Everlasting Man is full of broad ambitious sweeps. He identifies the differences between a pagan view of our world and a Christian one. Asserting that we are often not aware of the assumptions we carry, he sifts through them and shows us that much of modern theology or philosophy is half-baked.
In a sea of ideologies, Chesterton asserts that Christianity is unique.
His observations are presented in an invitational fashion that encourages the reader to set aside their reservations and take the journey with him. He uses humor and word play in clever ways that catch you off guard. I see how C.S. Lewis could be wooed by such a mind and writer.
It lifts my heart to see the strokes of one great thinker impact another. I see the seeds of Lewis' style, approach, and thought in Chesterton. Interestingly, Chesterton's spiritual influence goes back to his wife Frances who strikes me as a gentle soul, content to allow her husband the spotlight though she had a vivid though-life of her own. This entry by Nancy Carpentier Brown on The American Chesterton Society website, offers a glimpse into the life and spirit of Frances Bogg Chesterton.
Lewis' Mere Christianity was critical in my faith journey and Chesterton to Lewis'. People are persuaded and impacted in different ways, but words--my own and those of others--have always been instrumental in my understanding and growth in all areas of life.
Spiritually, the influence of each generation upon the next is a privilege and gift. This morning I came across a glimpse of this in Psalm 71:
In a sea of ideologies, Chesterton asserts that Christianity is unique.
His observations are presented in an invitational fashion that encourages the reader to set aside their reservations and take the journey with him. He uses humor and word play in clever ways that catch you off guard. I see how C.S. Lewis could be wooed by such a mind and writer.
It lifts my heart to see the strokes of one great thinker impact another. I see the seeds of Lewis' style, approach, and thought in Chesterton. Interestingly, Chesterton's spiritual influence goes back to his wife Frances who strikes me as a gentle soul, content to allow her husband the spotlight though she had a vivid though-life of her own. This entry by Nancy Carpentier Brown on The American Chesterton Society website, offers a glimpse into the life and spirit of Frances Bogg Chesterton.
Lewis' Mere Christianity was critical in my faith journey and Chesterton to Lewis'. People are persuaded and impacted in different ways, but words--my own and those of others--have always been instrumental in my understanding and growth in all areas of life.
Spiritually, the influence of each generation upon the next is a privilege and gift. This morning I came across a glimpse of this in Psalm 71:
O God, thou hast taught me from my youth: and hitherto have I declared thy wondrous works. Now also when I am old and grayheaded, O God, forsake me not; until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation, and thy power to every one that is to come. Psalm 71-17-18
Chesterton Part II Notes
More notes and quotes to return to someday....
************************
Chesterton cleverly picks up the cave-man imagery he used in the first section of The Everlasting Man and flips it on its head by connecting it to Christ:
"God also was a Cave-Man, and had also traced strange shapes of creatures, curiously coloured, upon the wall of the world; but the pictures that he made had come to life." Chesterton p.110
Bethlehem is emphatically a place where extremes meet.112
Mythology is a search. 115
Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does 117 not realise that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religion
But it is true in a sense that God who had been only a circumference was seen as a centre; and a centre is infinitely small. It is true that the spiritual spiral henceforward works inwards instead of outwards, and in that sense is centripetal and not centrifugal. The faith becomes, in more ways than one, a religion of little things 113
The populace had been wrong in many things; but they had not been wrong in believing that holy things could have a habitation and that divinity need not disdain the limits of time and space.115
Yet even if we compare Aquinas with Aristotle, at the other extreme of reason, we shall find the same sense of something added. Aquinas could understand the most logical parts of Aristotle; it is doubtful if Aristotle could have understood the most mystical parts of Aquinas. Even where we can hardly call the Christian greater, we are forced to call him larger. p117
pentacle
. The Magicians were gazing at the strange pentacle with the human triangle reversed; and they have never come to the end of their calculations about it. For it is the paradox of that group in the cave, that while our emotions about it are of childish simplicity, our thoughts about it can branch with a never-ending complexity.And we can never reach the end even of our own ideas about the child who was a father and the mother who was a child. p. 118
. In both cases we may remark the same paradox of revolution; the sense of something despised and of something feared. The cave in one aspect is only a hole or corner into which the outcasts are swept like rubbish; yet in the other aspect it is a hiding-place of something valuable which the tyrants are seeking like treasure. In one sense they are there because the innkeeper would not even remember them, and in another because the king can never forget them. p.120
Now it is not at all easy to regard the New Testament as a New Testament. It is not at all easy to realise the good news as new. Both for good and evil familiarity fills us with assumptions and associations; and no man of our civilisation, whatever he thinks of our religion, can really read the thing as if he had never heard of it before.123
Indeed the educated Englishman of to-day may be said to have passed from an old fashion, in which he would not believe in any miracles unless they were ancient, and adopted a new fashion in which he will not believe in any miracles unless they are modern. He used to hold that miraculous cures stopped with the first Christians and is now inclined to suspect that they began with the first Christian Scientists.125
. Relatively speaking, it is the Gospel that has the mysticism and the Church that has the rationalism. As I should put it, of course, it is the Gospel that is the riddle and the Church that is the answer. But whatever be the answer, the Gospel as it stands is almost a book of riddle 125
We may think it an incredible or impossible ideal; but we cannot think it any more incredible or impossible than they would have thought it. In other words, whatever else is true, it is not true that the controversy has been altered by time.128
There must surely have been something not only mysterious but many-sided about Christ if so many smaller Christs can be carved out of him. 131
There is more of the wisdom that is one with surprise in any simple person, full of the sensitiveness of simplicity, who should expect the grass to wither and the birds to drop dead out of the air, when a strolling carpenter's apprentice said calmly and almost carelessly, like one looking over his shoulder: 'Before Abraham was, I am.' 131
Normally speaking, the greater a man is, the less likely he is to make the very greatest claim....
But as humanity grows greater, it grows less and less likely to do so. God is God, as the Moslems say; but a great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it. That is the paradox; everything that is merely approaching to that point is merely receding from it. Socrates, the wisest man, knows that he knows nothing. A lunatic may think he is omniscience, and a fool may talk as if he were omniscient. But Christ is in another sense omniscient if he not only knows, but knows that he knows. p.135
I mean the first hesitation, not on any ground touching the nature of the miracle, but on that of the propriety of working any miracles at all, at least at that stage; 'my time is not yet come.' What does that mean? At least it certainly meant a general plan or purpose in the mind, with which certain things did or did not fit in. And if we leave out that solitary strategic plan, we not only leave out the point of the story, but the story
Now compared to these wanderers the life of Jesus went as swift and straight as a thunderbolt. It was above all things dramatic; it did above all things consist in doing something that had to be done. It emphatically would not have been done, if Jesus had walked about the world for ever doing nothing except tell the truth.
Externally indeed the ancient world was still at its strongest; it is always at that moment that the inmost weakness begins. But in order to understand that weakness we must repeat what has been said more than once; that it was not the weakness of a thing originally weak. It was emphatically the strength of the world that was turned to weakness and the wisdom of the world that was turned to folly. 139
Since that day it has never been quite enough to say that God is in his heaven and all is right with the world, since the rumour that God had left his heavens to set it right.
up to 155.
************************
Chesterton cleverly picks up the cave-man imagery he used in the first section of The Everlasting Man and flips it on its head by connecting it to Christ:
"God also was a Cave-Man, and had also traced strange shapes of creatures, curiously coloured, upon the wall of the world; but the pictures that he made had come to life." Chesterton p.110
Bethlehem is emphatically a place where extremes meet.112
Mythology is a search. 115
Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does 117 not realise that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religion
But it is true in a sense that God who had been only a circumference was seen as a centre; and a centre is infinitely small. It is true that the spiritual spiral henceforward works inwards instead of outwards, and in that sense is centripetal and not centrifugal. The faith becomes, in more ways than one, a religion of little things 113
The populace had been wrong in many things; but they had not been wrong in believing that holy things could have a habitation and that divinity need not disdain the limits of time and space.115
Yet even if we compare Aquinas with Aristotle, at the other extreme of reason, we shall find the same sense of something added. Aquinas could understand the most logical parts of Aristotle; it is doubtful if Aristotle could have understood the most mystical parts of Aquinas. Even where we can hardly call the Christian greater, we are forced to call him larger. p117
pentacle
. The Magicians were gazing at the strange pentacle with the human triangle reversed; and they have never come to the end of their calculations about it. For it is the paradox of that group in the cave, that while our emotions about it are of childish simplicity, our thoughts about it can branch with a never-ending complexity.And we can never reach the end even of our own ideas about the child who was a father and the mother who was a child. p. 118
. In both cases we may remark the same paradox of revolution; the sense of something despised and of something feared. The cave in one aspect is only a hole or corner into which the outcasts are swept like rubbish; yet in the other aspect it is a hiding-place of something valuable which the tyrants are seeking like treasure. In one sense they are there because the innkeeper would not even remember them, and in another because the king can never forget them. p.120
Now it is not at all easy to regard the New Testament as a New Testament. It is not at all easy to realise the good news as new. Both for good and evil familiarity fills us with assumptions and associations; and no man of our civilisation, whatever he thinks of our religion, can really read the thing as if he had never heard of it before.123
Indeed the educated Englishman of to-day may be said to have passed from an old fashion, in which he would not believe in any miracles unless they were ancient, and adopted a new fashion in which he will not believe in any miracles unless they are modern. He used to hold that miraculous cures stopped with the first Christians and is now inclined to suspect that they began with the first Christian Scientists.125
. Relatively speaking, it is the Gospel that has the mysticism and the Church that has the rationalism. As I should put it, of course, it is the Gospel that is the riddle and the Church that is the answer. But whatever be the answer, the Gospel as it stands is almost a book of riddle 125
We may think it an incredible or impossible ideal; but we cannot think it any more incredible or impossible than they would have thought it. In other words, whatever else is true, it is not true that the controversy has been altered by time.128
There must surely have been something not only mysterious but many-sided about Christ if so many smaller Christs can be carved out of him. 131
There is more of the wisdom that is one with surprise in any simple person, full of the sensitiveness of simplicity, who should expect the grass to wither and the birds to drop dead out of the air, when a strolling carpenter's apprentice said calmly and almost carelessly, like one looking over his shoulder: 'Before Abraham was, I am.' 131
Normally speaking, the greater a man is, the less likely he is to make the very greatest claim....
But as humanity grows greater, it grows less and less likely to do so. God is God, as the Moslems say; but a great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it. That is the paradox; everything that is merely approaching to that point is merely receding from it. Socrates, the wisest man, knows that he knows nothing. A lunatic may think he is omniscience, and a fool may talk as if he were omniscient. But Christ is in another sense omniscient if he not only knows, but knows that he knows. p.135
I mean the first hesitation, not on any ground touching the nature of the miracle, but on that of the propriety of working any miracles at all, at least at that stage; 'my time is not yet come.' What does that mean? At least it certainly meant a general plan or purpose in the mind, with which certain things did or did not fit in. And if we leave out that solitary strategic plan, we not only leave out the point of the story, but the story
Now compared to these wanderers the life of Jesus went as swift and straight as a thunderbolt. It was above all things dramatic; it did above all things consist in doing something that had to be done. It emphatically would not have been done, if Jesus had walked about the world for ever doing nothing except tell the truth.
Externally indeed the ancient world was still at its strongest; it is always at that moment that the inmost weakness begins. But in order to understand that weakness we must repeat what has been said more than once; that it was not the weakness of a thing originally weak. It was emphatically the strength of the world that was turned to weakness and the wisdom of the world that was turned to folly. 139
Since that day it has never been quite enough to say that God is in his heaven and all is right with the world, since the rumour that God had left his heavens to set it right.
up to 155.
Chesterton--Part I notes, a mess
Chesterton's Everlasting Man is full of complex and well-developed argument. If I were to try and organize all of my thoughts in a logical fashion, it would require weeks of review. Right now, I'm ready to move on and get back into the gospels. Maybe at some point, I'll have a fresh wind to sort through my jumbled notes below, but for now, I'm letting them stand unsorted.
***************************************
*Chesterton asserts that men are different from animals, in kind even more than in degree.
Chapter III--The Antiquity of Civilization
pg. 30
Chesterton argues that even from the earliest beginnings of civilization, man was civilized. He points to Egypt and Babylon as evidence.
Also, barbarism and civilization have long existed side-by-side with some countries civilized and others on edge (38).
He stresses that we need to see primitive man as human--telling jokes, stories, etc. p. 40.
Page 41, he uses the term "fairy tales of science"---quite the dig. (ended with this paragraph)
There is shed over them the shadow of an exaggerated gloom, more than the normal and even healthy sadness of heathen men. It is part of the same sort of secret pessimism that loves to make primitive man a crawling creature, whose body is filth and whose soul is fear. It comes of course from the fact that men are moved most by their religion; especially when it is irreligion (39).
But one of the strange marks of the strength of Christianity is that, since it came, no pagan in our civilization has been able to be really human (41).
. It is the whole vague notion that a monkey evolved into a man and in the same way a barbarian evolved into a civilised man and therefore at every stage we have to look back to barbarism and forward to civilisation. Unfortunately this notion is in a double sense entirely in the air. It is an atmosphere in which men live rather than a thesis which they defend. Men in that mood are more easily answered by objects than by theories; and it will be well if anyone tempted to make that assumption, in some trivial turn of talk or writing, can be checked for a moment by shutting his eyes and seeing for an instant, vast and vaguely crowded, like a populous precipice, the wonder of the Babylonian wall.
But in one sense there is a significance in the old slavery. It stands for one fundamental fact about all antiquity before Christ; something to be assumed from first to last. It is the insignificance of the individual before the State. p.44
People cannot easily get rid of the mental confusion of feeling that the foundations of history must surely be secure; that the first steps must be safe; that the biggest generalisation must be obvious. But though the contradiction may seem to them a paradox, this is the very contrary of the truth. It is the large thing that is secret and invisible; it is the small thing that is evident and enormous.p.46
. But I can use my own common sense, and I sometimes fancy that theirs is a little rusty from want of use. The first act of common sense is to recognise the difference between a cloud and a mountain. And I will affirm that nobody knows any of these things, in the sense that we all know of the existence of the Pyramids of Egypt.
n. The very virtues of the Chinaman have about them something terrifying. This is the difference made by the destruction or preservation of a continuous historical inheritance; as from ancient Egypt to modern Europe. But when we ask what was that world that we inherit, and why those particular people and places seem to belong to it, we are led to the central fact of civilised history. p48
Now Chesterton is moving on to the Mediterreanean area and asserting that it was the first "melting pot" that forced cultures to interact with each other and each culture's ideas.
"It was the world of war and peace, the world of good and evil, the world of all that matters most, with all respect to the Aztecs and the Mongols of the Far East, they did not matter as the Mediterranean tradition mattered and still matters." p.49
But anyhow it is true that this, which is our first poem, might very well be our last poem too. It might well be the last word as well as the first word spoken by man about his mortal lot, as seen by merely mortal vision. If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.
But in this one great human revelation of antiquity there is another element of great historical importance; which has hardly I think been given its proper place in history. The poet has so conceived the poem that his sympathies apparently, and those of his reader certainly, are on the side of the vanquished rather than of the victor. And this is a sentiment which increases in the poetical tradition even as the poetical origin itself recedes. Achilles had some status as a sort of demigod in pagan times; but he disappears altogether in late times. But Hector grows greater as the ages pass, and it is his name that is the name of a Knight of the Round Table and his sword that legend puts into the hand of Roland, laying about him with the weapon of the defeated Hector in the last ruin and splendour of his own defeat. The name anticipates all the defeats through which our race and religion were to pass; that survival of a hundred defeats that is its triumph.
p. 52
I will maintain that most of the modern botheration comes from not realising that it is really one thing. I will advance the thesis that before all talk about comparative religion and the separate religious founders of the world, the first essential is to recognise this thing as a whole, as a thing almost native and normal to the great fellowship that we call mankind. This thing is Paganism, and I propose to show in these pages that it is the one real rival to the Church of Christ. p. 53
Putting the Church apart for the moment, I should be disposed to divide the natural religion of the mass of mankind under such headings as these: God; the Gods; the Demons; the Philosophers. p55
They are obsessed by their evolutionary monomania that every great thing grows from a seed, or something smaller than itself. They seem to forget that every seed comes from a tree, or something larger than itself. p55
'
The sun is the father and ruler of the heavens. He is the big chief. The moon is his wife and the stars are their children'; and so on through a most ingenious and complicated story, in the middle of which is a sudden parenthesis saying that the sun and moon have to do something because 'It is ordered that way by the Great Spirit Who lives above the place of all.' That is exactly the attitude of most paganism towards God. He is something assumed and forgotten and remembered by accident; a habit possibly not peculiar to pagans. p.56
The savage who thinks nothing of tossing off such a trifle as a tale of the sun and moon being the halves of a baby chopped in two, or dropping into small-talk about a colossal cosmic cow milked to make the rain, merely in order to be sociable, will then retire to secret caverns sealed against women and white men, temples of terrible initiation where to the thunder of the bull-roarer and the dripping of sacrificial blood, the priest whispers the 56 final secrets, known only to the initiate: that honesty is the best policy, that a little kindness does nobody any harm, that all men are brothers and that there is but one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible. In other words, we have here the curiosity of religious history that the savage seems to be parading all the most repulsive and impossible parts of his belief and concealing all the most sensible and creditable parts. But the explanation is that they are not in that sense parts of his belief, or at least not parts of the same sort of belief. 56-57
Alas, we also find it only too easy to take Atahocan for granted. But whether he is allowed to fade into a truism or preserved as a sensation by being preserved as a secret, it is clear that he is always either an old truism or an old tradition. There is nothing to show that he is an improved product of the mere mythology and everything to show that he preceded it
Whatever else there was, there was never as such thing as the Evolution of the Idea of God. The idea was concealed, was avoided, was almost forgotten, was even explained away; but it was never evolved.
. But I am concerned rather with an internal than an external truth; and, as I have already said, the internal truth is almost indescribable. We have to speak of something of which it is the whole point that people did not speak of it; we have not merely to translate from a strange tongue or speech, but from a strange silence. p59.
In short, there is a feeling that there is something higher than the gods; but because it is higher it is also further away
These men were conscious of the Fall if they were conscious of nothing else; and the same is true of an heathen humanity. Those who have fallen may remember the fall, even when they forget the height. Some such tantalising blank or break in memory is at the back of all pagan sentiment. There is such a thing as the momentary power to remember that we forget. And the most ignorant of humanity know by the very look of earth that they have forgotten heaven.
. This paradox by which the rude reactionary was a sort of prophetic progressive has one consequence very much to the point. In a purely historical sense, and apart from any other controversies in the same connection, it throws a light, a single and a steady light, that shines from the beginning on a little and lonely people. In this paradox, as in some riddle of religion of which the answer was sealed up for centuries, lies the mission and the meaning of the Jews. p61
Then he narrows down to the Jews role and religion:
But through all their wanderings, and especially through all their early wanderings, they did indeed carry the fate of the world in that wooden tabernacle, that held perhaps a featureless symbol and certainly an invisible god. We may say that one most essential feature was that it was featureless. Much as we may prefer that creative liberty which the Christian culture has declared and by which it has eclipsed even the arts of antiquity, we must not underrate the determining importance at the time of the Hebrew inhibition of images. It is a typical example of one of those limitations that did in fact preserve and perpetuate enlargement, like a wall built round a wide open space. The God who could not have a statue remained a spirit. p. 61
But an even stronger case can be found in the other criticism offered by the same critics. It is often said with a sneer that the God of Israel was only a God of battles, 'a mere barbaric Lord of Hosts' pitted in rivalry against other gods only as their envious foe. Well it is for the world that he was a God of Battles. Well it is for us that he was to all the rest only a rival and a foe. In the ordinary way, it would have been only too easy for them to have achieved the desolate disaster of conceiving him as a friend. It would have been only too easy for them to have seen him stretching out his hands in love and reconciliation, embracing Baal and kissing the painted face of Astarte, feasting in fellowship with the gods; the last god to sell his crown of stars for the Soma of the Indian pantheon or the nectar of Olympus or the mead of Valhalla. p. 62
As it was, while the whole world melted into this mass of confused mythology, this Deity who is called tribal and narrow, precisely because he was what is called tribal and narrow, preserved the primary religion of all mankind. He was tribal enough to be universal. He was as narrow as the universe.
They had one of the colossal cornerstones of the world: the Book of Job. It obviously stands over against the Iliad and the Greek tragedies; and even more than they it was an early meeting and parting of poetry and philosophy in the mornings of the world.
. It is a solemn and uplifting sight to see those two eternal fools, the optimist and the pessimist, destroyed in the dawn of time. And the philosophy really perfects the pagan tragic irony, precisely because it is more monotheistic and therefore more mystical. Indeed the Book of Job avowedly only answers mystery with mystery. Job is comforted with riddles; but he is comforted. Herein is indeed a type, in the sense of a prophecy, of things speaking with authority. For when he who doubts can only say 'I do not understand,' it is true that he who knows can only reply or repeat 'You do not understand.' And under that rebuke there is always a sudden hope in the heart; and the sense of something that would be worth understanding.
. There is indeed in such an image something of the soul of Asia which is less sane than the soul of Christendom. We should call it despair, even if they would call it peace. This note of nihilism can be considered later in a fuller comparison between Asia and Europe. p.64
But if anyone fancies the contrast of monotheism and polytheism is only a matter of some people having one god and others a few more, for him it will be far nearer the truth to plunge into the elephantine extravagance of Brahmin cosmology; that he may feel a shudder going through the veil of things, the many-handed creators, and the throned and haloed animals and all the network of entangled stars and rulers of the night, as the eyes of Brahma open like dawn upon the death of all.
It seems strangely forgotten nowadays that a myth is a work of imagination and therefore a work of art. It needs a poet to make it. It needs a poet to criticise it. 64
There is all the difference between fancying there are fairies in the wood, which often only means fancying a certain wood as fit for fairies, and really frightening ourselves until we walk a mile rather than pass a house we have told ourselves is haunted. Behind all these things is the fact that beauty and terror are very real things and related to a real spiritual world; and to touch them at all, even in doubt or fancy, is to stir the deep things of the soul. p. 70
Sometimes it would seem that the Greeks believed above all things in reverence, only they had nobody to revere. But the point of the puzzle is this, that all this vagueness and variation arise from the fact that the whole thing began in fancy and in dreaming; and that there are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds
. These are the myths: and he who has no sympathy with myths has no sympathy with men. But he who has most sympathy with myths will most fully realise that they are not and never were a religion, in the sense that Christianity or even Islam is a religion. They satisfy some of the needs satisfied by a religion; and notably the need for doing certain things at certain dates; the need of the twin ideas of festivity and formality. But though they provide a man with a calendar they do not provide him with a creed. p 70
It is the wise and worthy idea of not taking our advantage to the full; of putting something in the other balance to ballast our dubious pride, of paying tithes to nature for our land. This deep truth of the danger of insolence, or being too big for our boots, runs through all the great Greek tragedies and makes them great. But it runs side by side with an almost cryptic agnosticism about the real nature of the gods to be propitiated
The substance of all such paganism may be summarised thus. It is an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone; in its own field reason does not restrain it at all.
But in reality the rivers of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do not mingle till they meet in the sea of Christendom. Simple secularists still talk as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and religion. The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and religion. p.72
' Therefore do we all in fact feel that pagan or primitive myths are infinitely suggestive, so long as we are wise enough not to inquire what they suggest.
The crux and crisis is that man found it natural to worship; even natural to worship unnatural things. The posture of the idol might be stiff and strange; but the gesture of the worshipper was generous and beautiful. p. 72
So the mythological imagination moves as it were in circles, hovering either to find a place or to return to it. In a word, mythology is a search; it is something that combines a recurrent desire with a recurrent doubt, mixing a most hungry sincerity in the idea of seeking for a place with a most dark and deep and mysterious levity about all the places found. So far could the lonely imagination lead, and we must turn later to the lonely reason. Nowhere along this road did the two ever travel together.
And the metaphor of a shadow happens to hit very exactly the truth that is very vital here. For a shadow is a shape; a thing which reproduces shape but not texture. These things were something like the real thing; and to say that they were like is to say that they were different. Saying something is like a dog is another way of saying it is not a dog; and it is in this sense of identity that a myth is not a man.
Nobody really thought of Isis as a human being, nobody really thought of Demeter as a historical character, nobody thought of Adonis as the founder of a Church. There was no idea that any one of them had changed the world; but rather that their recurrent death and life bore the sad and beautiful burden of the changelessness of the world. Not one of them was a revolution, save in the sense of the revolution of the sun and moon. Their whole meaning is missed if we do not see that they mean the shadows that we are and the shadows that we pursue. p. 74
Left off on Demons and Philosophers, p. 75
e. Doubtless most popular superstition is as frivolous as any popular mythology. Men do not believe as a dogma that God would throw a thunderbolt at them for walking under a ladder; more often they amuse themselves with the not very laborious exercise of walking round it. There is no more in it than what I have already adumbrated; a sort of airy agnosticism about the possibilities of so strange a world. But there is another sort of superstition that does definitely look for results; what might be called a realistic superstition. And with that the question of whether spirits do answer or do appear becomes much more serious. As I have said, it seems to me pretty certain that they sometimes do; but about that there is a distinction that has been the beginning of much evil in the world. p. 76
This sense that the forces of evil especially threaten childhood is found again in the enormous popularity of the Child Martyr of the Middle Ages. Chaucer did but give another version of a very national English legend, when he conceived the wickedest of all possible witches as the dark alien woman watching behind her high lattice and heading, like the babble of a brook down the stony street, the singing of little St. Hugh.
l. In other words, reincarnation as such does not necessarily escape from the wheel of destiny, in some sense it is the wheel of destiny. p. 87
Perhaps a more exact statement would be that Buddha was a man who made a metaphysical discipline; which might even be called a psychological discipline. He proposed a way of escaping from all this recurrent sorrow; and that was simply by getting rid of the delusion that is called desire. It was emphatically not that we should get what we want better by restraining our impatience for part of it, or that we should get it in a better way or in a better world. It was emphatically that we should leave off wanting it. If once a man realised that there is really no reality, that everything, including his soul, is in dissolution at every instant, he would anticipate disappointment and be intangible to change, existing (in so far as he could be said to exist) in a sort of ecstasy of indifference. The Buddhists call this beatitude and we will not stop our story to argue the point; certainly to us it is indistinguishable from despair p. 88
But the point about them is that they all think that existence can be represented by a diagram instead of a drawing; and the rude drawings of the childish myth-makers are a sort of crude and spirited protest against that view. They cannot believe that religion is really not a pattern but a picture. Still less can they believe that it is a picture of something that really exists outside our minds. Sometimes the philosophy paints the disc all black and calls himself a pessimist; sometimes he paints it all white and calls himself an optimist; sometimes he divides it exactly into halves of black and white and calls himself a dualist, like those Persian mystics to whom I wish there were space to do justice. p. 90
The peculiarity of his scheme and of his country, in which it contrasts with its great pendant the system of Christendom, is that he insisted on perpetuating an external life with all its forms, that outward continuity might preserve internal peace. Anyone who knows how much habit has to do with health, of mind as well as body, will see the truth in his idea. p.84
Eastern philosophy is circular:
currence. It is no longer merely a rather topsy-turvy sort of world; it is a wheel. What has happened to all those highly intelligent and highly civilised peoples is that they have been caught up in a sort of cosmic rotation, of which the hollow hub is really nothing. In that sense the worst part of existence is that it may just as well go on like that forever. That is what we really mean when we say that Asia is old or unprogressive or looking backwards. That is why we see even her curved swords as arcs broken from that blinding wheel; why we see her serpentine ornament as returning everywhere, like a snake that is never slain. It has very little to do with the political varnish of progress; all Asiatics might have tophats on their heads but if they had this spirit still in their hearts, they would only think the hats would vanish and come round again like the planets; not that running after a hat could lead them to heaven or even to home. p. 86
Mysticism conceives something transcending experience; religion seeks glimpses of a better good or a worse evil than experience can give. Reincarnation need only extend experiences in the sense of repeating them. p.87
y. And whether it was something that Buddha founded, or something that Buddha found, or something that Buddha entirely renounced when he found, it is certainly something having the general character of that Asiatic atmosphere in which he had to play his part. And the part he played was that of an intellectual philosopher, with a particular theory about the right intellectual attitude towards it.
Perhaps a more exact statement would be that Buddha was a man who made a metaphysical discipline; which might even be called a psychological discipline. He proposed a way of escaping from all this recurrent sorrow; and that was simply by getting rid of the delusion that is called desire. It was emphatically not that we should get what we want better by restraining our impatience for part of it, or that we should get it in a better way or in a better world. It was emphatically that we should leave off wanting it. p. 88
And though the symbol is of course only a coincidence, it is a coincidence that really does coincide. The mind of Asia can really be represented by a round 0, if not in the sense of a cypher at least of a circle. The great Asiatic symbol of a serpent with its tail in its mouth is really a very perfect image of a certain idea of unity and recurrence that does indeed belong to the Eastern philosophies and religions. It really is a curve that in one sense includes everything, and in another sense comes to nothing.
Christianity does appeal to a solid truth outside itself; to something which is in that sense external as well as eternal. It does declare that things are really there; or in other words that things are really things--In this Christianity is at one with common sense; but all religious history shows that this common sense perishes except where there is Christianity to preserve it. p89
Another is that all things recur; another, which is said to be Buddhist and is certainly Oriental, is the idea that what is the matter with us is our creation, in the sense of our coloured differentiation and personality, and that nothing will be well till we are again melted into one unity. By this theory, in short, the Creation was the Fall. It is important historically because it was stored up in the dark heart of Asia and went forth at various times in various forms over the dim borders of Europe.
He talks about how the battle between Rome & Carthage was more than just about goods, it was a battle of ideals and philosophy, child sacrifice vs. cheribs.
n. If, after all these ages, we are in some sense at peace with paganism, and can think more kindly of our fathers, it is well to remember the things that were and the things that might have been. For this reason alone we can take lightly the load of antiquity and need not shudder at a nymph on a fountain or a cupid on a valentine. Laughter and sadness link us with things long past away and remembered without dishonour; and we can see not altogether without tenderness the twilight sinking around the Sabine farm and hear the household gods rejoice when Catullus comes home to Sirmio. Deleta est Carthago p.100
l. But that is no reason for dismissing the dying paganism without ever understanding its life. It is no reason for forgetting that the very word Pagan is the same as the word Peasant. We may say that this art is only artificiality; but it is not a love of the artificial. On the contrary, it is in its very nature only the failure of nature-worship, or the love of the natura p.105
c. There had appeared in more and more flagrant fashion that flower of evil that is really implicit in the very seed of nature-worship, however natural it may seem. I have said that I do not believe that natural worship necessarily begins with this particular passion; I am not of the De Rougemont school of scientific folk-lore. I do not believe that mythology must begin with eroticism. But I do believe that mythology must end in it. I am quite certain that mythology did end in it. Moreover, not only did the poetry grow more immoral, but the immorality grew more indefensible
The psychology of it is really human enough to anyone who will try that experiment of seeing history from the inside. There comes an hour in the afternoon when the child is tired of 'pretending'; when he is weary of being a robber or a Red Indian. It is then that he torments the cat. There comes a time in the routine of an ordered civilisation when the man is tired at playing at mythology and pretending that a tree is a maiden or that the moon made love to a man. The effect of this staleness is the same everywhere; it is seen in all drug-taking and dram-drinking and every form of the tendency to increase the dose. Men seek stranger sins or more startling obscenities as stimulants to their jaded sense. They seek after mad oriental religions for the same reason. They try to stab their nerves to life, if it were with the knives of the priests of Baal. They are walking in their sleep and try to wake themselves up with nightmares.
. It is proverbial that what would once have been a peasantry became a mere populace of the town dependent for bread and circuses; which may again suggest to some a mob dependent upon doles and cinemas
. And how else could they have extended philosophy merely by extending geography? It can hardly be proposed that they should learn a purer religion from the Aztecs or sit at the feet of the Incas of Peru. All the rest of the world was a welter of barbarism. It is essential to recognise that the Roman Empire was recognised as the highest achievement of the human race; and also as the broadest. A dreadful secret seemed to be written as in obscure hieroglyphics across those mighty works of marble and stone, those colossal amphitheatres and aqueducts. Man could do no more.
And there shone on them in that dark hour a light that has never been darkened; a white fire clinging to that group like an unearthly phosphorescence, blazing its track through the twilights of history and confounding every effort to confound it with the mists of mythology and theory; that shaft of light or lightning by which the world itself has struck and isolated and crowned it; by which its own enemies have made it more illustrious and its own critics have made it more inexplicable; the halo of hatred around the Church of God.p.110
***************************************
*Chesterton asserts that men are different from animals, in kind even more than in degree.
Chapter III--The Antiquity of Civilization
pg. 30
Chesterton argues that even from the earliest beginnings of civilization, man was civilized. He points to Egypt and Babylon as evidence.
Also, barbarism and civilization have long existed side-by-side with some countries civilized and others on edge (38).
He stresses that we need to see primitive man as human--telling jokes, stories, etc. p. 40.
Page 41, he uses the term "fairy tales of science"---quite the dig. (ended with this paragraph)
There is shed over them the shadow of an exaggerated gloom, more than the normal and even healthy sadness of heathen men. It is part of the same sort of secret pessimism that loves to make primitive man a crawling creature, whose body is filth and whose soul is fear. It comes of course from the fact that men are moved most by their religion; especially when it is irreligion (39).
But one of the strange marks of the strength of Christianity is that, since it came, no pagan in our civilization has been able to be really human (41).
. It is the whole vague notion that a monkey evolved into a man and in the same way a barbarian evolved into a civilised man and therefore at every stage we have to look back to barbarism and forward to civilisation. Unfortunately this notion is in a double sense entirely in the air. It is an atmosphere in which men live rather than a thesis which they defend. Men in that mood are more easily answered by objects than by theories; and it will be well if anyone tempted to make that assumption, in some trivial turn of talk or writing, can be checked for a moment by shutting his eyes and seeing for an instant, vast and vaguely crowded, like a populous precipice, the wonder of the Babylonian wall.
But in one sense there is a significance in the old slavery. It stands for one fundamental fact about all antiquity before Christ; something to be assumed from first to last. It is the insignificance of the individual before the State. p.44
People cannot easily get rid of the mental confusion of feeling that the foundations of history must surely be secure; that the first steps must be safe; that the biggest generalisation must be obvious. But though the contradiction may seem to them a paradox, this is the very contrary of the truth. It is the large thing that is secret and invisible; it is the small thing that is evident and enormous.p.46
. But I can use my own common sense, and I sometimes fancy that theirs is a little rusty from want of use. The first act of common sense is to recognise the difference between a cloud and a mountain. And I will affirm that nobody knows any of these things, in the sense that we all know of the existence of the Pyramids of Egypt.
n. The very virtues of the Chinaman have about them something terrifying. This is the difference made by the destruction or preservation of a continuous historical inheritance; as from ancient Egypt to modern Europe. But when we ask what was that world that we inherit, and why those particular people and places seem to belong to it, we are led to the central fact of civilised history. p48
Now Chesterton is moving on to the Mediterreanean area and asserting that it was the first "melting pot" that forced cultures to interact with each other and each culture's ideas.
"It was the world of war and peace, the world of good and evil, the world of all that matters most, with all respect to the Aztecs and the Mongols of the Far East, they did not matter as the Mediterranean tradition mattered and still matters." p.49
But anyhow it is true that this, which is our first poem, might very well be our last poem too. It might well be the last word as well as the first word spoken by man about his mortal lot, as seen by merely mortal vision. If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.
But in this one great human revelation of antiquity there is another element of great historical importance; which has hardly I think been given its proper place in history. The poet has so conceived the poem that his sympathies apparently, and those of his reader certainly, are on the side of the vanquished rather than of the victor. And this is a sentiment which increases in the poetical tradition even as the poetical origin itself recedes. Achilles had some status as a sort of demigod in pagan times; but he disappears altogether in late times. But Hector grows greater as the ages pass, and it is his name that is the name of a Knight of the Round Table and his sword that legend puts into the hand of Roland, laying about him with the weapon of the defeated Hector in the last ruin and splendour of his own defeat. The name anticipates all the defeats through which our race and religion were to pass; that survival of a hundred defeats that is its triumph.
p. 52
I will maintain that most of the modern botheration comes from not realising that it is really one thing. I will advance the thesis that before all talk about comparative religion and the separate religious founders of the world, the first essential is to recognise this thing as a whole, as a thing almost native and normal to the great fellowship that we call mankind. This thing is Paganism, and I propose to show in these pages that it is the one real rival to the Church of Christ. p. 53
Putting the Church apart for the moment, I should be disposed to divide the natural religion of the mass of mankind under such headings as these: God; the Gods; the Demons; the Philosophers. p55
They are obsessed by their evolutionary monomania that every great thing grows from a seed, or something smaller than itself. They seem to forget that every seed comes from a tree, or something larger than itself. p55
'
The sun is the father and ruler of the heavens. He is the big chief. The moon is his wife and the stars are their children'; and so on through a most ingenious and complicated story, in the middle of which is a sudden parenthesis saying that the sun and moon have to do something because 'It is ordered that way by the Great Spirit Who lives above the place of all.' That is exactly the attitude of most paganism towards God. He is something assumed and forgotten and remembered by accident; a habit possibly not peculiar to pagans. p.56
The savage who thinks nothing of tossing off such a trifle as a tale of the sun and moon being the halves of a baby chopped in two, or dropping into small-talk about a colossal cosmic cow milked to make the rain, merely in order to be sociable, will then retire to secret caverns sealed against women and white men, temples of terrible initiation where to the thunder of the bull-roarer and the dripping of sacrificial blood, the priest whispers the 56 final secrets, known only to the initiate: that honesty is the best policy, that a little kindness does nobody any harm, that all men are brothers and that there is but one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible. In other words, we have here the curiosity of religious history that the savage seems to be parading all the most repulsive and impossible parts of his belief and concealing all the most sensible and creditable parts. But the explanation is that they are not in that sense parts of his belief, or at least not parts of the same sort of belief. 56-57
Alas, we also find it only too easy to take Atahocan for granted. But whether he is allowed to fade into a truism or preserved as a sensation by being preserved as a secret, it is clear that he is always either an old truism or an old tradition. There is nothing to show that he is an improved product of the mere mythology and everything to show that he preceded it
Whatever else there was, there was never as such thing as the Evolution of the Idea of God. The idea was concealed, was avoided, was almost forgotten, was even explained away; but it was never evolved.
. But I am concerned rather with an internal than an external truth; and, as I have already said, the internal truth is almost indescribable. We have to speak of something of which it is the whole point that people did not speak of it; we have not merely to translate from a strange tongue or speech, but from a strange silence. p59.
In short, there is a feeling that there is something higher than the gods; but because it is higher it is also further away
These men were conscious of the Fall if they were conscious of nothing else; and the same is true of an heathen humanity. Those who have fallen may remember the fall, even when they forget the height. Some such tantalising blank or break in memory is at the back of all pagan sentiment. There is such a thing as the momentary power to remember that we forget. And the most ignorant of humanity know by the very look of earth that they have forgotten heaven.
. This paradox by which the rude reactionary was a sort of prophetic progressive has one consequence very much to the point. In a purely historical sense, and apart from any other controversies in the same connection, it throws a light, a single and a steady light, that shines from the beginning on a little and lonely people. In this paradox, as in some riddle of religion of which the answer was sealed up for centuries, lies the mission and the meaning of the Jews. p61
Then he narrows down to the Jews role and religion:
But through all their wanderings, and especially through all their early wanderings, they did indeed carry the fate of the world in that wooden tabernacle, that held perhaps a featureless symbol and certainly an invisible god. We may say that one most essential feature was that it was featureless. Much as we may prefer that creative liberty which the Christian culture has declared and by which it has eclipsed even the arts of antiquity, we must not underrate the determining importance at the time of the Hebrew inhibition of images. It is a typical example of one of those limitations that did in fact preserve and perpetuate enlargement, like a wall built round a wide open space. The God who could not have a statue remained a spirit. p. 61
But an even stronger case can be found in the other criticism offered by the same critics. It is often said with a sneer that the God of Israel was only a God of battles, 'a mere barbaric Lord of Hosts' pitted in rivalry against other gods only as their envious foe. Well it is for the world that he was a God of Battles. Well it is for us that he was to all the rest only a rival and a foe. In the ordinary way, it would have been only too easy for them to have achieved the desolate disaster of conceiving him as a friend. It would have been only too easy for them to have seen him stretching out his hands in love and reconciliation, embracing Baal and kissing the painted face of Astarte, feasting in fellowship with the gods; the last god to sell his crown of stars for the Soma of the Indian pantheon or the nectar of Olympus or the mead of Valhalla. p. 62
As it was, while the whole world melted into this mass of confused mythology, this Deity who is called tribal and narrow, precisely because he was what is called tribal and narrow, preserved the primary religion of all mankind. He was tribal enough to be universal. He was as narrow as the universe.
They had one of the colossal cornerstones of the world: the Book of Job. It obviously stands over against the Iliad and the Greek tragedies; and even more than they it was an early meeting and parting of poetry and philosophy in the mornings of the world.
. It is a solemn and uplifting sight to see those two eternal fools, the optimist and the pessimist, destroyed in the dawn of time. And the philosophy really perfects the pagan tragic irony, precisely because it is more monotheistic and therefore more mystical. Indeed the Book of Job avowedly only answers mystery with mystery. Job is comforted with riddles; but he is comforted. Herein is indeed a type, in the sense of a prophecy, of things speaking with authority. For when he who doubts can only say 'I do not understand,' it is true that he who knows can only reply or repeat 'You do not understand.' And under that rebuke there is always a sudden hope in the heart; and the sense of something that would be worth understanding.
. There is indeed in such an image something of the soul of Asia which is less sane than the soul of Christendom. We should call it despair, even if they would call it peace. This note of nihilism can be considered later in a fuller comparison between Asia and Europe. p.64
But if anyone fancies the contrast of monotheism and polytheism is only a matter of some people having one god and others a few more, for him it will be far nearer the truth to plunge into the elephantine extravagance of Brahmin cosmology; that he may feel a shudder going through the veil of things, the many-handed creators, and the throned and haloed animals and all the network of entangled stars and rulers of the night, as the eyes of Brahma open like dawn upon the death of all.
It seems strangely forgotten nowadays that a myth is a work of imagination and therefore a work of art. It needs a poet to make it. It needs a poet to criticise it. 64
There is all the difference between fancying there are fairies in the wood, which often only means fancying a certain wood as fit for fairies, and really frightening ourselves until we walk a mile rather than pass a house we have told ourselves is haunted. Behind all these things is the fact that beauty and terror are very real things and related to a real spiritual world; and to touch them at all, even in doubt or fancy, is to stir the deep things of the soul. p. 70
Sometimes it would seem that the Greeks believed above all things in reverence, only they had nobody to revere. But the point of the puzzle is this, that all this vagueness and variation arise from the fact that the whole thing began in fancy and in dreaming; and that there are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds
. These are the myths: and he who has no sympathy with myths has no sympathy with men. But he who has most sympathy with myths will most fully realise that they are not and never were a religion, in the sense that Christianity or even Islam is a religion. They satisfy some of the needs satisfied by a religion; and notably the need for doing certain things at certain dates; the need of the twin ideas of festivity and formality. But though they provide a man with a calendar they do not provide him with a creed. p 70
It is the wise and worthy idea of not taking our advantage to the full; of putting something in the other balance to ballast our dubious pride, of paying tithes to nature for our land. This deep truth of the danger of insolence, or being too big for our boots, runs through all the great Greek tragedies and makes them great. But it runs side by side with an almost cryptic agnosticism about the real nature of the gods to be propitiated
The substance of all such paganism may be summarised thus. It is an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone; in its own field reason does not restrain it at all.
But in reality the rivers of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do not mingle till they meet in the sea of Christendom. Simple secularists still talk as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and religion. The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and religion. p.72
' Therefore do we all in fact feel that pagan or primitive myths are infinitely suggestive, so long as we are wise enough not to inquire what they suggest.
The crux and crisis is that man found it natural to worship; even natural to worship unnatural things. The posture of the idol might be stiff and strange; but the gesture of the worshipper was generous and beautiful. p. 72
So the mythological imagination moves as it were in circles, hovering either to find a place or to return to it. In a word, mythology is a search; it is something that combines a recurrent desire with a recurrent doubt, mixing a most hungry sincerity in the idea of seeking for a place with a most dark and deep and mysterious levity about all the places found. So far could the lonely imagination lead, and we must turn later to the lonely reason. Nowhere along this road did the two ever travel together.
And the metaphor of a shadow happens to hit very exactly the truth that is very vital here. For a shadow is a shape; a thing which reproduces shape but not texture. These things were something like the real thing; and to say that they were like is to say that they were different. Saying something is like a dog is another way of saying it is not a dog; and it is in this sense of identity that a myth is not a man.
Nobody really thought of Isis as a human being, nobody really thought of Demeter as a historical character, nobody thought of Adonis as the founder of a Church. There was no idea that any one of them had changed the world; but rather that their recurrent death and life bore the sad and beautiful burden of the changelessness of the world. Not one of them was a revolution, save in the sense of the revolution of the sun and moon. Their whole meaning is missed if we do not see that they mean the shadows that we are and the shadows that we pursue. p. 74
Left off on Demons and Philosophers, p. 75
e. Doubtless most popular superstition is as frivolous as any popular mythology. Men do not believe as a dogma that God would throw a thunderbolt at them for walking under a ladder; more often they amuse themselves with the not very laborious exercise of walking round it. There is no more in it than what I have already adumbrated; a sort of airy agnosticism about the possibilities of so strange a world. But there is another sort of superstition that does definitely look for results; what might be called a realistic superstition. And with that the question of whether spirits do answer or do appear becomes much more serious. As I have said, it seems to me pretty certain that they sometimes do; but about that there is a distinction that has been the beginning of much evil in the world. p. 76
This sense that the forces of evil especially threaten childhood is found again in the enormous popularity of the Child Martyr of the Middle Ages. Chaucer did but give another version of a very national English legend, when he conceived the wickedest of all possible witches as the dark alien woman watching behind her high lattice and heading, like the babble of a brook down the stony street, the singing of little St. Hugh.
l. In other words, reincarnation as such does not necessarily escape from the wheel of destiny, in some sense it is the wheel of destiny. p. 87
Perhaps a more exact statement would be that Buddha was a man who made a metaphysical discipline; which might even be called a psychological discipline. He proposed a way of escaping from all this recurrent sorrow; and that was simply by getting rid of the delusion that is called desire. It was emphatically not that we should get what we want better by restraining our impatience for part of it, or that we should get it in a better way or in a better world. It was emphatically that we should leave off wanting it. If once a man realised that there is really no reality, that everything, including his soul, is in dissolution at every instant, he would anticipate disappointment and be intangible to change, existing (in so far as he could be said to exist) in a sort of ecstasy of indifference. The Buddhists call this beatitude and we will not stop our story to argue the point; certainly to us it is indistinguishable from despair p. 88
But the point about them is that they all think that existence can be represented by a diagram instead of a drawing; and the rude drawings of the childish myth-makers are a sort of crude and spirited protest against that view. They cannot believe that religion is really not a pattern but a picture. Still less can they believe that it is a picture of something that really exists outside our minds. Sometimes the philosophy paints the disc all black and calls himself a pessimist; sometimes he paints it all white and calls himself an optimist; sometimes he divides it exactly into halves of black and white and calls himself a dualist, like those Persian mystics to whom I wish there were space to do justice. p. 90
The peculiarity of his scheme and of his country, in which it contrasts with its great pendant the system of Christendom, is that he insisted on perpetuating an external life with all its forms, that outward continuity might preserve internal peace. Anyone who knows how much habit has to do with health, of mind as well as body, will see the truth in his idea. p.84
Eastern philosophy is circular:
currence. It is no longer merely a rather topsy-turvy sort of world; it is a wheel. What has happened to all those highly intelligent and highly civilised peoples is that they have been caught up in a sort of cosmic rotation, of which the hollow hub is really nothing. In that sense the worst part of existence is that it may just as well go on like that forever. That is what we really mean when we say that Asia is old or unprogressive or looking backwards. That is why we see even her curved swords as arcs broken from that blinding wheel; why we see her serpentine ornament as returning everywhere, like a snake that is never slain. It has very little to do with the political varnish of progress; all Asiatics might have tophats on their heads but if they had this spirit still in their hearts, they would only think the hats would vanish and come round again like the planets; not that running after a hat could lead them to heaven or even to home. p. 86
Mysticism conceives something transcending experience; religion seeks glimpses of a better good or a worse evil than experience can give. Reincarnation need only extend experiences in the sense of repeating them. p.87
y. And whether it was something that Buddha founded, or something that Buddha found, or something that Buddha entirely renounced when he found, it is certainly something having the general character of that Asiatic atmosphere in which he had to play his part. And the part he played was that of an intellectual philosopher, with a particular theory about the right intellectual attitude towards it.
Perhaps a more exact statement would be that Buddha was a man who made a metaphysical discipline; which might even be called a psychological discipline. He proposed a way of escaping from all this recurrent sorrow; and that was simply by getting rid of the delusion that is called desire. It was emphatically not that we should get what we want better by restraining our impatience for part of it, or that we should get it in a better way or in a better world. It was emphatically that we should leave off wanting it. p. 88
And though the symbol is of course only a coincidence, it is a coincidence that really does coincide. The mind of Asia can really be represented by a round 0, if not in the sense of a cypher at least of a circle. The great Asiatic symbol of a serpent with its tail in its mouth is really a very perfect image of a certain idea of unity and recurrence that does indeed belong to the Eastern philosophies and religions. It really is a curve that in one sense includes everything, and in another sense comes to nothing.
Christianity does appeal to a solid truth outside itself; to something which is in that sense external as well as eternal. It does declare that things are really there; or in other words that things are really things--In this Christianity is at one with common sense; but all religious history shows that this common sense perishes except where there is Christianity to preserve it. p89
Another is that all things recur; another, which is said to be Buddhist and is certainly Oriental, is the idea that what is the matter with us is our creation, in the sense of our coloured differentiation and personality, and that nothing will be well till we are again melted into one unity. By this theory, in short, the Creation was the Fall. It is important historically because it was stored up in the dark heart of Asia and went forth at various times in various forms over the dim borders of Europe.
He talks about how the battle between Rome & Carthage was more than just about goods, it was a battle of ideals and philosophy, child sacrifice vs. cheribs.
n. If, after all these ages, we are in some sense at peace with paganism, and can think more kindly of our fathers, it is well to remember the things that were and the things that might have been. For this reason alone we can take lightly the load of antiquity and need not shudder at a nymph on a fountain or a cupid on a valentine. Laughter and sadness link us with things long past away and remembered without dishonour; and we can see not altogether without tenderness the twilight sinking around the Sabine farm and hear the household gods rejoice when Catullus comes home to Sirmio. Deleta est Carthago p.100
l. But that is no reason for dismissing the dying paganism without ever understanding its life. It is no reason for forgetting that the very word Pagan is the same as the word Peasant. We may say that this art is only artificiality; but it is not a love of the artificial. On the contrary, it is in its very nature only the failure of nature-worship, or the love of the natura p.105
c. There had appeared in more and more flagrant fashion that flower of evil that is really implicit in the very seed of nature-worship, however natural it may seem. I have said that I do not believe that natural worship necessarily begins with this particular passion; I am not of the De Rougemont school of scientific folk-lore. I do not believe that mythology must begin with eroticism. But I do believe that mythology must end in it. I am quite certain that mythology did end in it. Moreover, not only did the poetry grow more immoral, but the immorality grew more indefensible
The psychology of it is really human enough to anyone who will try that experiment of seeing history from the inside. There comes an hour in the afternoon when the child is tired of 'pretending'; when he is weary of being a robber or a Red Indian. It is then that he torments the cat. There comes a time in the routine of an ordered civilisation when the man is tired at playing at mythology and pretending that a tree is a maiden or that the moon made love to a man. The effect of this staleness is the same everywhere; it is seen in all drug-taking and dram-drinking and every form of the tendency to increase the dose. Men seek stranger sins or more startling obscenities as stimulants to their jaded sense. They seek after mad oriental religions for the same reason. They try to stab their nerves to life, if it were with the knives of the priests of Baal. They are walking in their sleep and try to wake themselves up with nightmares.
. It is proverbial that what would once have been a peasantry became a mere populace of the town dependent for bread and circuses; which may again suggest to some a mob dependent upon doles and cinemas
. And how else could they have extended philosophy merely by extending geography? It can hardly be proposed that they should learn a purer religion from the Aztecs or sit at the feet of the Incas of Peru. All the rest of the world was a welter of barbarism. It is essential to recognise that the Roman Empire was recognised as the highest achievement of the human race; and also as the broadest. A dreadful secret seemed to be written as in obscure hieroglyphics across those mighty works of marble and stone, those colossal amphitheatres and aqueducts. Man could do no more.
And there shone on them in that dark hour a light that has never been darkened; a white fire clinging to that group like an unearthly phosphorescence, blazing its track through the twilights of history and confounding every effort to confound it with the mists of mythology and theory; that shaft of light or lightning by which the world itself has struck and isolated and crowned it; by which its own enemies have made it more illustrious and its own critics have made it more inexplicable; the halo of hatred around the Church of God.p.110
Thursday, October 4, 2018
Psalm 13
I'm not certain how I ended up in Psalm 13 this morning, but I did. It's short, sad, and turns on a dime. As with many of David's thoughts, it begins in despair, but turns to hope in God.
"That which the French proverb hath of sickness is true of all evils, that they come on horseback and go away on foot; we have often seen that a sudden fall, or one meal’s surfeit, has stuck by many to their graves; whereas pleasures come like oxen, slow and heavily, and go away like post horses, upon the spur. Sorrows, because they are lingering guests, I will entertain but moderately, knowing that the more they are made of the longer they will continue; and for pleasures, because they stay not, and do but call to drink at my door, I will use them as passengers with slight respect. He is his own best friend that makes the least of both of them." -Joseph Hall
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