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
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