The Dawn of Civilization

 

The dawn of history reveals a humanity already civilised. Perhaps it reveals a civilisation already old.

The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton (ebook)

Egypt and Babylon.  Chesterton offers that these are the first human societies of which we have reliable and detailed records and information.  These societies were civilized societies at the dawn of history; civilized society must have, therefore, existed before that dawn. 

They bear witness against the two common and crude descriptions of pre-historical society:

If we want to get rid of half the nonsense about nomads and cave-men and the old man of the forest, we need only look steadily at the two solid and stupendous facts called Egypt and Babylon.

When modern man thinks of primitive man, he considers what he sees as today’s [this book dates from 1925] modern savages.  But neither Egypt nor Babylon were anything like this.  Perhaps today’s modern savages are descendants from a previous, unrecorded historical civilization that saw its decline. 

What, in fact, do we know about the results of a declining civilization?

If we lost all our firearms we should make bows and arrows; but we should not necessarily resemble in every way the first men who made bows and arrows.

There is a difference between the idea of pre-historic man and decivilized man.  Chesterton notes that the Russians in retreat were so short of arms that they fought with clubs.  But some future historian would be mistaken to believe that the Russians were no different than an ancient Scythian tribe.

Further, on what basis is it believed that the earliest civilizations were despotic and tyrannical?  We certainly know in our age (as in Chesterton’s) that despotism often comes at the later stages of a declining civilization (boy, do we really know that). 

A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy.

Ten words to describe the last eighteen months.  How did he know, almost one-hundred years ago?

As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep.

He’s wrong about this.  It wasn’t while we slept; we were hypnotized, voluntarily drugged into a suggestive state, willingly sacrificing our children to the gods.  Turned into apologists and even defenders of those who tyrannize us.

But I digress…returning to the lack of evidence of despotism and tyranny in the earliest societies: we consider the strong man.  But without machine guns (to say nothing of Google), how could one strong man rise above an entire civilization.  A handful of men could overtake the strongman who was armed with little more than flint.  Sure, they might admire him.  But if his tyranny reigned over even a couple dozen people, couldn’t they have easily overthrown him?

Even more interesting: the high esteem for the Old Man.  Was the Old Man also the strong man?  How irrational is that, unless one considers that such a civilization valued things higher than having an abusive leader?

…I do know, in the human case, that if some ritual of seniority keeps savages reverencing somebody called the Old Man, then at least they have not our own servile sentimental weakness for worshipping the Strong Man.

Socialists will claim that communal property existed in the earliest civilizations; Jews are proud of their Jubilee; Teutonists will trace parliaments and juries; Celtophiles claim a more equal justice in their clan system.

In each case, there is something other than brute force, ferocity, and fear operating in these civilizations.  Far from being so very different from us, they are quite similar to us. 

The Missing Link is Missing

 

A monkey does not draw clumsily and a man cleverly; a monkey does not begin the art of representation and a man carry it to perfection. A monkey does not do it at all; he does not begin to do it at all; he does not begin to begin to do it at all. A line of some kind is crossed before the first faint line can begin.

The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton (ebook)

Chesterton’s point: shouldn’t we see, even today, some ape in some state of transition between man and ape?  Some much closer to human and some much closer to ape, a variety of states of advancement?  Not merely in physical appearance or DNA, but in mind and soul?  It is this that he will further explore in this chapter.

The modern scientist can do many things, but he cannot watch the Missing Link, he cannot run experiments on it, he cannot test it.

He cannot keep a cave-man like a cat in the back-yard and watch him to see whether he does really practise cannibalism or carry off his mate on the principles of marriage by capture.

The scientist studies based on evidence, and the evidence on much of this history of the cave man does not exist.  A fragment of a bone is clutched tightly as it is this scientist’s only tool.  But what does the fragment really tell us about the individual from which it came and, more so, about the surroundings in which he lived?

Yet, from the fragment, we get a being.  We give him a name.  We draw pictures of him, to “show that the very hairs of his head were all numbered.”  All from a thigh bone, or a fragment of a jaw bone, or a few bones from who knows how many different individuals – or creatures.

The sincerity of Darwin really admitted this; and that is how we came to use such a term as the Missing Link. But the dogmatism of Darwinians has been too strong for the agnosticism of Darwin…

What was the nature of man before he became man?  We write of prehistoric man, but as he lived in “pre-history,” what can we know – beyond a fragment of a bone?  There are traces of human lives before we find human stories; hence, we know only that man came before history – and not much else.  Chesterton will dive no further into this:

His body may have been evolved from the brutes; but we know nothing of any such transition that throws the smallest light upon his soul as it has shown itself in history.

Just because it was pre-history does not mean it was primitive.  Yet, what little we do know of the pre-history paints a picture far different than the stereotype.  We know of the art even though we don’t know of the story.

One summary of the pre-history begins: they wore no clothes.  But how does the scientist know this?  Based on what evidence?  A second claims that the cave drawings served no religious purpose – inferring that the artist or the tribe had no religion. 

I can hardly imagine a thinner thread of argument than this which reconstructs the very inmost moods of the prehistoric mind from the fact that somebody who has scrawled a few sketches on a rock, from what motive we do not know, for what purpose we do not know, acting under what customs or conventions we do not know, may possibly have found it easier to draw reindeers than to draw religion.

Maybe the reindeer was his religious symbol; maybe it was not.  Maybe he drew his religious symbol elsewhere; maybe his religion prohibited him from drawing the religious symbol (certainly an idea not limited to pre-history). 

It is commonly assumed that religion developed in a slow, evolutionary manner.  Theories abound, incorporating some combination of the fear of the tribal chief, the phenomena of dreams, and the sacrifice associated with the harvest.  But these causes are so disconnected – what could possibly connect them other than a religion, or, if you prefer, a superstition?

For the plain truth is that all this is a trick of making things seem distant and dehumanised, merely by pretending not to understand things that we do understand.

As if we are saying that pre-historic man had a strange habit of stuffing something in his mouth and chewing; or he lifted his alternating legs in rotation.  Have we not heard of eating, or walking?  We comprehend religious feelings, yet attempt to kill the idea in the pre-historic man. 

But it is likely that only a spiritual sentiment could connect such seemingly unconnected things – the tribal chief, the dream, the sacrifice.  To connect these things, it took a particular sort of mind – not the mind of a monkey, but the human mind.

The cow derives no particular feeling when hearing the skylark; live sheep don’t tie any meaning to their dead ancestors.

It is true that in the spring a young quadruped’s fancy may lightly turn to thoughts of love, but no succession of springs has ever led it to turn however lightly to thoughts of literature.

It is only in man that such experiences cross the line to art and religion.  Yes, the dog also dreams, but he has never transformed this into a religion: Cerberus is not some sort of canine trinity, worshipped by dogs. 

So, where is this Missing Link – this creature after the ape and before man had religion?  We have no evidence of him, we do not know if he even existed, we cannot deduce anything about him or how he might have (or if he might have) stumbled onto religion – assuming he did exist, which we do not know. 

Evidence on such matters begins only with the first men who were already men – they were also the first mystics:

We come back once more to the simple truth; that at some time too early for these critics to trace, a transition had occurred to which bones and stones cannot in their nature bear witness; and man became a living soul.

Conclusion

…if we chose to project the human figure forward out of an unhuman world, we could only say that one of the animals had obviously gone mad.

What else could we conclude?  Man is that much different from all the rest of creation.  There is one answer that best explains this change, this difference, this reality:

Genesis 2: 7 And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

The Unnatural Novelty

 

It is not natural to see man as a natural product. It is not common sense to call man a common object of the country or the seashore. It is not seeing straight to see him as an animal. It is not sane. It sins against the light; against that broad daylight of proportion which is the principle of all reality.

The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton (ebook)

When the man of science considers the history of man, he begins with evolution – a slow, and soothing process, reflecting gradual change.  Chesterton considers this not a practical word or a profitable idea.  Nobody can explain how nothing turned into something, or how something turned into something else.

It is really far more logical to start by saying ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth’ even if you only mean ‘In the beginning some unthinkable power began some unthinkable process.’

It is at least as rational, isn’t it?  It explains, frankly much more believably, than does the idea of “give me the big bang and I can explain the rest” (which even that they cannot do, but what of the big bang?).  The answer to this is, and will remain, a religious question.  What do scientists say?  The more we know, the more we know what we don’t know.  There isn’t progress toward an answer in that.

Neither history nor science can tell us of the origin of the universe, the origin of life, or the origin of man – the latter being a very unique form of life.  “Man is not merely an evolution but rather a revolution.”  That he has a backbone like birds or fish really tells us nothing of man – nothing meaningful, at least.

Chesterton offers as example the cave man.  Not in Plato’s cave; this one is the cave and cave man of history.  The stereotype tells us that he knocks the woman on the head before taking her to his cave.  But what evidence of such a thing do we have?  And why on earth would a woman wait to get knocked on the head?  Were cave women not interested in the benefits of a mate – food, protection, shelter?

The evidence we do have is something quite different.  It exists in the cave: there are not the skeletons of clubbed women, crushed skulls lined up in a row like bowling balls; nothing of the sort.  There is, however, art – drawings and paintings of animals, drawn in some real detail and with some real understanding.

In this and twenty other details it is clear that the artist had watched animals with a certain interest and presumably a certain pleasure.  In that sense it would seem that he was not only an artist but a naturalist; the sort of naturalist who is really natural.

To the extent there is any character at all in the evidence found regarding the cave man, it is a human character – even a humane character.  There is real evidence of such mild and innocent things; there is no evidence of the brute, clubbing women on the head.

But what is the point?  What is Chesterton driving at?  The point is found in the question: Where is the cave man of crude evolution, he asks?  The missing link, so to speak. 

Are these, perhaps, pictures on the wall of a child’s bedroom, decorated just as we do today?  That seems more likely than attributing these to a club-wielding woman-beater.  Had someone said that St. Francis of Assisi had drawn the pictures out of a love for animals, everyone would have nodded in understanding.  So, why not of the cave man?

Further: while there is to be found the picture of the reindeer drawn by the cave man, where is the picture of the cave man drawn by the reindeer?  The bird claw or the fin of a fish – where is the art from these?  Did monkeys begin to draw, with man eventually putting on the final touches? 

That is the simplest lesson to learn in the cavern of the coloured pictures; only it is too simple to be learnt. It is the simple truth that man does differ from the brutes in kind and not in degree; and the proof of it is here; that it sounds like a truism to say that the most primitive man drew a picture of a monkey, and that it sounds like a joke to say that the most intelligent monkey drew a picture of a man.

The distance between man and every other living being on earth is so extreme; would not evolution have provided beings to fill in these gaps?  Where is the proof?

Of Man and Christ

 

This book needs a preliminary note that its scope be not misunderstood. The view suggested is historical rather than theological…

The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton (ebook)

…this study is not specially concerned with the differences between a Catholic and a Protestant.

Which should work well for my purposes….

Much of it is devoted to many sorts of Pagans rather than any sort of Christians; and its thesis is that those who say that Christ stands side by side with similar myths, and his religion side by side with similar religions, are only repeating a very stale formula contradicted by a very striking fact.

Chesterton will examine two main topics: first, the creature called man; second, the man called Christ.  He will examine how, in each case, the entity being examined (man, Christ) is not merely another of a type (animal, religious figure), but something wholly different.

He suggests that the best critic of Christianity is not someone who was born into it and rejected it, or born into a culture shaped by it but personally never accepted the faith; a follower of Confucius would be a better critic, as he would be somewhat more impartial.  Instead, the now non-Christian critic of Christianity…

…will suddenly turn round and revile the Church for not having prevented the War, which they themselves did not want to prevent…

The problem of evil, often brought as a criticism of Christianity, is no less a problem outside of Christianity.  In fact, much of what we label “evil” today is only so labeled because Christianity made it so.  What was considered virtuous ethical behavior in Greece or Rome would be looked at today by all but the most vile as a hell on earth.

When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do.

This speaks to a criticism often uttered by Jordan Peterson, and I will paraphrase because I don’t want to look for anything precise: Christians don’t act as though they believe it.  To which I have thought…wait a minute.  Christians say we are fallen, and when we prove it, you say that this demonstrates that we aren’t Christian.  When one finds that the object being measured falls short, only a fool would place the fault on the yardstick.

They cannot be Christians and they cannot leave off being Anti-Christians. …They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith.

This reminds me of a statement by Tom Holland and something similar from Rene Girard: they criticize Christianity by referring to Christianity.  They have no other basis by which to criticize – certainly not in the western traditions.

The worst judge [of Christianity] of all is the man now most ready with his judgments; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard.

The modern atheists tangle with the most stereotypical and fundamentalist Christian ideas, ignoring or ignorant of the work of two-thousand years – from Ignatius of Antioch (said to be a disciple of John the Apostle) to C.S. Lewis, and hundreds of brilliant theologians and philosophers in between.

Which leads Chesterton to the point of this work:

I mean that just as the Church seems to grow more remarkable when it is fairly compared with the common religious life of mankind, so mankind itself seems to grow more remarkable when we compare it with the common life of nature.

The Christian Church is as different from other religions as man is from the rest of creation.  The critics of Christianity don’t see this because they are not detached from Christianity.  Like the iconoclast, the critic – the scientific-evolutionist or the comparative religions professor – is not impartial. 

…I should be ashamed to talk such nonsense about the Lama of Thibet as they do about the Pope of Rome, or to have as little sympathy with Julian the Apostate as they have with the Society of Jesus.

Well, many of the former critics love the current pope of Rome, so that’s something that has changed.  As to the Jesuits…those better steeped in Catholic Church history might do better than I can at explaining what has happened to the Jesuits since Chesterton wrote these words.

Why Truth Cannot Survive on a Foundation of Sand

 

Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton (ebook)

Chesterton opens the final chapter of this book with a look back at the road he has travelled thus far.  He has built his case that Christian orthodoxy (as he uses the term in the context of this work) is the only logical guardian of liberty, innovation, and advance. 

We require the doctrine of Original Sin to bring down the prosperous oppressor; this cannot be done via a belief in human perfectibility.  Mind must precede matter if we are to uproot inherent cruelties; this cannot be done if we believe matter precedes mind.  We require a Transcendent God, not merely an Immanent God; souls must be in real peril; it must be God that was crucified, not merely a sage or hero.

Assuming he has convinced at least a few sceptics of his reasoning, he is left with one final challenge: 

A reasonable agnostic, if he has happened to agree with me so far, may justly turn round and say, "You have found a practical philosophy in the doctrine of the Fall; very well. You have found a side of democracy now dangerously neglected wisely asserted in Original Sin; all right. You have found a truth in the doctrine of hell; I congratulate you. You are convinced that worshippers of a personal God look outwards and are progressive; I congratulate them. But even supposing that those doctrines do include those truths, why cannot you take the truths and leave the doctrines?

His first answer is that he is a rationalist: if he is to treat man as fallen, he must hold to a belief that he fell; if he is to understand man’s exercise of free will, it helps to believe man has free will.  Having found the moral atmosphere of the Incarnation to be common sense, he found arguments to the contrary “common nonsense.”

Many a sensible modern man must have abandoned Christianity under the pressure of three such converging convictions as these: first, that men, with their shape, structure, and sexuality, are, after all, very much like beasts, a mere variety of the animal kingdom; second, that primeval religion arose in ignorance and fear; third, that priests have blighted societies with bitterness and gloom.

The only objection Chesterton has to offer against these arguments is that they aren’t true!  Regarding the first: when considering beasts and men, the startling matter is not how alike these are, but how unlike these are: the ape has hands, yet does almost nothing with them; elephants build nothing of ivory; having an infinite supply of camel’s hair brushes, camels do not paint.  Ants have a civilization, yet not a single ant-hill has been found with pictures of famous and important historical ants.

So that this first superficial reason for materialism is, if anything, a reason for its opposite; it is exactly where biology leaves off that all religion begins.

To the second objection, Chesterton points to the conjectures offered by the moderns toward the reasons behind the rise of religion, offering that these are precisely that: conjecture.  This is because religion arose in pre-history – the time before history. 

To the third, Chesterton sees the opposite – at least where Catholic doctrine remained: singing and dancing, colorful dresses and open-air art.  Yes, Christianity has walls – it is within those walls where liberty can flourish.  He describes the walls surrounding a flat grassy field, protecting the children from falling to the cliffs below.  Could they play so freely without these walls?

I agree with the ordinary unbelieving man in the street in being guided by three or four odd facts all pointing to something; only when I came to look at the facts, I always found they pointed to something else.

Chesterton offers three additional arguments against Christianity, and finds these equally wanting: Jesus was a sheepish, gentle creature; Christianity arose in the darkest of ages; religious people are weak.

The Illiberality of Modern Ideas

 

In actual modern Europe a freethinker does not mean a man who thinks for himself. It means a man who, having thought for himself, has come to one particular class of conclusions, the material origin of phenomena, the impossibility of miracles, the improbability of personal immortality and so on. And none of these ideas are particularly liberal. Nay, indeed almost all these ideas are definitely illiberal, as it is the purpose of this chapter to show.

Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton (ebook)

Chesterton proposes that on every matter insisted upon by the modern (for his time, and more so in our time) liberals, these will result in the illiberalizing of social practice.  Keeping in mind that this book was written in 1908, when Europe was at its peak in terms of realizing classical liberal ideas, Chesterton presciently saw where this road would lead. This is noted in Jacques Barzun’s work, From Dawn to Decadence:

Two writers, Chesterton and Belloc, did express alarm at the coming of The Servile State, but they were not heeded in the tumult of violent ideas and events.

Regarding Chesterton, the evidence is to be found in many chapters of this current book – including the one I am covering in this post.  Regarding Belloc, The Servile State is a book authored by Belloc in 1912, in which he repudiates the convergence of big business with the state.  We see, all too obviously and a century too late, where this road has led.

Chesterton offers that every contemporary proposal to bring freedom to the church is simply a proposal to bring tyranny to the world.  The only solution to this problem is what Chesterton calls orthodoxy. 

I may, it is true, twist orthodoxy so as partly to justify a tyrant. But I can easily make up a German philosophy to justify him entirely.

Chesterton refers back to the previous chapter, where he demonstrated that the only logical negation of oligarchy was the idea of original sin, as all men are backsliders – an idea which has been negated by those who consider themselves to be liberal.  In this chapter he will address a few more similar ideas.

Miracles: it is believed more liberal to disbelieve in miracles than to believe in them.  But how limiting has this become.  Our disbelief in miracles has reduced our belief to the materialism that has proven that free will is an illusion.

In their doubt of miracles there was a faith in a fixed and godless fate; a deep and sincere faith in the incurable routine of the cosmos.

The liberal idea of freedom can only be realized by holding onto the idea of miracles.  If reform or progress means the gradual control of matter by mind, a miracle is simply the swift control of matter by mind. 

The similarity of all religions: we are taught that the main world religions are similar in what they teach, differing only in their rites and forms.  Chesterton offers that the opposite is true.  All main religions have similar rites and forms: priests and temples, scriptures and alters, sworn brotherhoods and special feasts.  They differ in what is to be taught.  He draws this out especially in the comparison of Christianity and Buddhism.

Chesterton separates the arguments for this belief in the similarity of the teachings of the two in two kinds: first, some resemblances are common to all humanity, so there is no reason to claim this as something special between Christianity and Buddhism; second, some resemblances are not resemblances at all. 

To the first: both Christ and Buddha were called by a divine voice from the sky – as if the divine voice might otherwise come from a coal-cellar; both had something to do with the washing of feet – as if having feet was such a differentiating feature among men; both approve of mercy and self-restraint – yet these are common features of all major religions.

To the second type, he points to the renting of the robe – to be found in both cases.  Yet the renting of the robe of the Lama is done out of respect; for Christ, it was exactly the opposite.  Both offer a way out of sin, but the way out is quite different in each.

Chesterton draws this out by looking at the difference in art:

No two ideals could be more opposite than a Christian saint in a Gothic cathedral and a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple. The opposition exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is that the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian saint always has them very wide open.

Grinning Gargoyles

Greek heroes do not grin: but gargoyles do – because they are Christian.

Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton (ebook)

Christ prophesied the whole of Gothic architecture in that hour when nervous and respectable people…objected to the shouting of the gutter-snipes of Jerusalem. He said, "If these were silent, the very stones would cry out."

The prophecy has been fulfilled as far as Chesterton is concerned, as seen in the gargoyles of the many gothic churches in Europe.

There is an appropriate end, or purpose, for a human life.  It is not random, as must be the case for the evolutionists.  It is this that Chesterton argues in this chapter.  Moderns argue that we must make things better, or good.  But when asked what this means, they talk in circles:

Evolution is only good if it produces good; good is only good if it helps evolution.

We cannot take our principles from nature – the nature we see around us – because there is no principle in nature.  We do not get equality from nature, nor do we get inequality.  Both require a standard of value, but what is the standard of value offered to us by nature?  Can nature tell us that cats are more valuable than mice (or one cat more valuable than the next)? 

Hence, evolutionists are left to identify their doctrine of good without a standard to lean on.  Nietzsche is described as offering nothing but physical metaphors.  When he said “beyond good and evil,” he avoided the need to say more clearly “more good than good and evil” or “more evil than good and evil.”  Had he done so, this idea would have been exposed as nonsense.

So, when he describes his hero, he does not dare to say, "the purer man," or "the happier man," or "the sadder man," for all these are ideas; and ideas are alarming. He says "the upper man," or "over man," a physical metaphor from acrobats or alpine climbers. Nietzsche is truly a very timid thinker. He does not really know in the least what sort of man he wants evolution to produce. And if he does not know, certainly the ordinary evolutionists, who talk about things being "higher," do not know either.

These others then come up with even sillier notions: whatever evolution brings was right, what was avoided was wrong; or whatever I want is right, and whatever I don’t want is wrong.  Reason, as Hume put it, is slave to these passions.  It is in this way that we progress – that we might be progressing down the wrong road is the question avoided.

Instead, we might consider reform.  To reform means something that was in form is now out of shape; the intention is to put it back in shape again.  Reform is the proper task for reasonable and determined men. 

And this is where the modern world has gone awry.  Progress should mean that we are changing things to suit a vision; instead, progress has now been taken to mean that the vision always changes – driven by our passions or desires.  We have freed ourselves to the extent that every day brings a new vision, a new “good,” a new end to be the pursuit of man.

As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized. The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind.

This, then, points to a requirement if one is to discuss progress: the objective must be fixed.  An artist might remain discontented with his pictures, yet not become discontented with his art.  A simple example will suffice: a man has as his objective to paint the world blue.  Every day he makes progress, painting a blade of grass, a tree, a patch of dirt.  Each one blue.  It is unlikely that he will achieve his objective in his lifetime, but that he has made progress can be easily seen and measured. 

But what if each day he decides on a new color: today, his objective is to paint the world blue, tomorrow green, the next day orange, and so on.  Can it ever be said that he is making progress?  Is his perfect world coming closer into view? 

Thus we may say that a permanent ideal is as necessary to the innovator as to the conservative; it is necessary whether we wish the king's orders to be promptly executed or whether we only wish the king to be promptly executed.

And with this, Chesterton felt a presence of something else in the discussion (keeping in mind that this entire book documents his realization that what he discovered was already in Christianity): “My ideal is at least fixed; for it was fixed before the foundations of the world.”  This fixed ideal cannot be altered; it is called Eden.  And for those orthodox who understand this of the ideal, there is always revolution:

In the upper world hell once rebelled against heaven. But in this world heaven is rebelling against hell.

This understanding offers a fixed ideal at which one can aim.  It offers a single morality.  Darwinism offers no such possibility – only offering two mad moralities, but not a single sane morality: when considering the kinship and competition that exists among and between all creatures, one can choose to be either insanely cruel or insanely sentimental:

That you and a tiger are one may be a reason for being tender to a tiger. Or it may be a reason for being as cruel as the tiger. It is one way to train the tiger to imitate you, it is a shorter way to imitate the tiger. But in neither case does evolution tell you how to treat a tiger reasonably, that is, to admire his stripes while avoiding his claws.

The Lion and the Lamb

This post is prompted by Paul VanderKlay’s short video response to the conversation between Rod Dreher and Jonathan Pageau.

-------------------------------------------------

Revelation 5: 4 And I wept much, because no man was found worthy to open and to read the book, neither to look thereon.

5 And one of the elders saith unto me, Weep not: behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the book, and to loose the seven seals thereof.

6 And I beheld, and, lo, in the midst of the throne and of the four beasts, and in the midst of the elders, stood a Lamb as it had been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God sent forth into all the earth.

We know Jesus is the slain lamb.  What of this Lion of the tribe of Judah?

Genesis 49: 8 Judah, thou art he whom thy brethren shall praise: thy hand shall be in the neck of thine enemies; thy father's children shall bow down before thee.

9 Judah is a lion's whelp: from the prey, my son, thou art gone up: he stooped down, he couched as a lion, and as an old lion; who shall rouse him up?

10 The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be.

Both Matthew and Luke trace Jesus’s genealogy through Judah.  In one being, we have both the lion and the lamb.  How can this be?  GK Chesterton describes one of the many paradoxes of Christianity in his book Orthodoxy, where Christianity is blamed both for not fighting (the lamb) and for fighting (the lion):

It was the fault of poor old Christianity (somehow or other) both that Edward the Confessor did not fight and that Richard Coeur de Leon did.

He then makes reference to the lion and the lamb:

It is constantly assured, especially in our Tolstoyan tendencies, that when the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like.

To be clear, while we commonly picture the lion and the lamb lying together, I don’t believe the Biblical sources put it exactly this way. 

Isaiah 11: 6 The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.

So, the lion and the lamb are at least in the same scene.  Continuing with Chesterton, and this image of the lion becoming lamb-like:

But that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb. That is simply the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating the lamb.

Is this the point – for the lamb to now consume the lion?  Chesterton thinks not:

The real problem is—Can the lion lie down with the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity? THAT is the problem the Church attempted; THAT is the miracle she achieved.

Jesus achieved that miracle.

We are coming to a time where Christianity is being moved to the fringe of the society.  The center is being filled by something else.  Christianity has been at the center in the West, losing ground with the Enlightenment, and finally giving way in the First World War.  It has been living on fumes since then. 

While Christianity was at the center, there was at least the objective of love, which left room at the margins.  Everything of love and respect to all in society can be found in Christianity and only in Christianity.  Sure, never perfect, never progressing fast enough, but undeniably so.

Something other than Christian love is moving to the center.  It is hate; there is no doubt about this.

I am troubled by this direction, as many are; the monologue by VanderKlay troubled me more.  For example, VanderKlay offers:

Don’t despair about being moved to the margin.  Christ didn’t belong there either, yet Christ always wins.

I know Christ always wins.  Christ knew this also.  Yet it didn’t prevent Him from despair:

The Irregular Equilibrium

Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton (ebook)

The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.

A simple example: a man is two men, with the right side a duplicate of the left.  Everything, in all appearances, confirms this as reality.  Until one gets to the heart.  Had he guessed as to the heart’s location, or that there would only be one heart, the scientist would be something more than a pure logician or mathematician.

Now, this is exactly the claim which I have since come to propound for Christianity. Not merely that it deduces logical truths, but that when it suddenly becomes illogical, it has found, so to speak, an illogical truth. It not only goes right about things, but it goes wrong (if one may say so) exactly where the things go wrong.

It is this point that Chesterton will consider: when something is found to be odd in Christian theology, it is only because something is odd in the truth.  The complications of our modern world prove this out better than any problem of faith.  Just as a scientist is proud of the complications in his science, so might one be proud of the complications of his faith.

But science can be proven, faith cannot.  What Chesterton found is that the more rational the proof, the less believable the science:

Our grandmothers were quite right when they said that Tom Paine and the free-thinkers unsettled the mind. They do. They unsettled mine horribly. The rationalist made me question whether reason was of any use whatever….

I find this in the black hole offered by the most scientific rationalist: we don’t have free will in any sense, as we are nothing more than the result of random atoms smashing together randomly.  These “rationalists” use reason to prove that there is no point in humans having reason.  All we have is an illusion of free will.  Talk about unsettling the mind – if this is where sola reason must lead, you can have it.

Chesterton would read much about Christianity – from the point of view of non-Christians and anti-Christians.  The more he read, the more he came across the extraordinary: Christianity was blamed for vices of all sorts, attacked from all sides.  And this was the issue: it was attacked from all sides – attacked for numerous contradictory reasons.

For example, Christianity is attacked for instilling morbid fear and terror that prevents men from seeking joy and liberty; as well, it is attacked for comforting men in providence.  Next, it is attacked for making men too timid, not willing to fight at all; as well, it is attacked for making men warriors.  It is attacked for claiming to be the one true religion by men who claim that mankind was “one church from Plato to Emerson.”

Chesterton was not yet moved:

…I did not conclude that the attack on Christianity was all wrong. I only concluded that if Christianity was wrong, it was very wrong indeed. …The only explanation which immediately occurred to my mind was that Christianity did not come from heaven, but from hell. Really, if Jesus of Nazareth was not Christ, He must have been Antichrist.

As we know, Chesterton’s story didn’t end there.  To his mind came another explanation.  Regarding an unknown man, some describe him as too short, others too tall.  Instead of concluding something in error about the unknown man, what if instead this discrepancy says something of those describing him?

Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad—in various ways.

Was there something morbid, not in Christianity but in the accusers, that would explain these discrepancies?  And it was by asking himself this question that Chesterton found the key to unlock the door.  The restraint of Christians saddens the hedonist; the faith of Christians angers the pessimists.

But this was still not quite enough.  There was both meekness in Christians and fierceness in the crusaders.  Christianity did not offer some mean between the two – it offered both, at the top of their game.  Christianity offered Christ – not as a centaur, but as very God and very man (and I know that the dispute on the meaning here caused perhaps the earliest rupture in the official Church).

Monstrosity as the Basis for Law

I had tried to be happy by telling myself that man is an animal, like any other which sought its meat from God. But now I really was happy, for I had learnt that man is a monstrosity.

-          Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton (ebook)

This book is turning quite Christian, as it must, I suppose, given that through it Chesterton is telling how he came to believe that which he believes.  In this telling, he includes the value and meaning of tradition; it is on this that I will focus.

Much of this is packed into one paragraph, which I will break into several more manageable parts:

The eighteenth-century theories of the social contract have been exposed to much clumsy criticism in our time; in so far as they meant that there is at the back of all historic government an idea of content and co-operation, they were demonstrably right.

This theory was born in the Enlightenment; in short form:

Social contract arguments typically posit that individuals have consented, either explicitly or tacitly, to surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority (of the ruler, or to the decision of a majority) in exchange for protection of their remaining rights or maintenance of the social order.

The starting point for most social contract theories is an examination of the human condition absent of any political order (termed the "state of nature" by Thomas Hobbes).

Returning to Chesterton,

But they really were wrong, in so far as they suggested that men had ever aimed at order or ethics directly by a conscious exchange of interests.

This is why the conversation that came to the fore by Jordan Peterson and is being held by people such as Eric and Bret Weinstein, John Vervaeke, Jonathan Pageau, Paul VanderKlay, Ben Shapiro, and the long list of celebrity atheists such as Sam Harris and others, will come to naught.  It is a conversation based on a “conscious exchange of interests,” ignoring the foundation that must underlie order.  More on this shortly.

As to the idea of a social contract, this is not how social order came to be at all:

Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, "I will not hit you if you do not hit me"; there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, "We must not hit each other in the holy place." They gained their morality by guarding their religion.

Man didn’t surrender his freedoms to a ruler in exchange for protection; he worked out his freedoms with his fellow man in the face of an authority above and outside of man’s control.

The history of the Jews is the only early document known to most Englishmen, and the facts can be judged sufficiently from that. The Ten Commandments which have been found substantially common to mankind were merely military commands; a code of regimental orders, issued to protect a certain ark across a certain desert.

But none of the commandments said “protect the ark.”  Instead, the commandments captured (I will not say “established,” as the reality of these “commands” was inherent in the natural order before they were ever carved in stone) behaviors that were necessary for a society to cultivate if it was to protect the ark.

The first table properly set man’s relationship to God – to something higher than himself.  The second table properly set man’s relationship to man – that which is equal to himself.  The commands of the second table could not survive without properly respecting the first table; the order is important.

What was the ark?  Why protect it?  Among many other things, it was that around which the Hebrew society was to be, and remain, ordered.  It was the symbol used to bring focus to this order – the orders offered via the commandments held inside.

Childlike Faith in Politics

Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old childlike faith in practical politics.

Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton (ebook)

Chesterton was told, by those older and wiser, that as he matured, he would lose his ideals and focus on the practical.  It turns out exactly the opposite occurred.  It is not his ideals that have been lost, but his faith in those who pretend to speak for those ideals:

As much as I ever did, more than I ever did, I believe in Liberalism. But there was a rosy time of innocence when I believed in Liberals.

He was raised a liberal, and has always believed in democracy – meaning “a self-governing humanity.”  This is based on two principles: first, the things in common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to each man; second, the political instinct is one of those things held in common.

This might seem slightly off, but Chesterton will explain: the political instinct is made manifest in the laws of the state.  But Chesterton does not see this as time bound; tradition plays a fundamental role:

It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record.

Tradition is nothing more than the extension of the franchise, taking into account the knowledge and wisdom of those who came before, who learned lessons in our stead and passed these lessons on to us.  Tradition refuses to submit to the oligarch of the moment:

All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.

A good man’s opinion is of value, whether he is alive today or in some time past.  And in this journey, Chesterton finds that all that he discovers has been discovered in the past – it had been discovered by Christianity.  But before coming to this, he begins with his childhood fairytales.

Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense. It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth; so for me at least it was not earth that criticised elfland, but elfland that criticised the earth.

Jack the Giant killer killed giants because they are gigantic – a mutiny against pride; the lesson of Cinderella he compares to the Magnificat; Beauty and the Beast teaches that a thing must be loved before it is lovable; Sleeping Beauty is blessed with all gifts, yet succumbs to death.  Yet it isn’t these details, but “the whole spirit of its law,” a way of looking at life, that Chesterton finds of value.

In fairyland we avoid the word "law"; but in the land of science they are singularly fond of it.

We understand why liberty is taken from the man who takes liberties, but we cannot say why an egg turns into a chicken, or a bear turns into a prince.  Which is the more strange?  After all, a bear is closer to a prince than a chicken is to an egg.  We must answer the same way that the fairy godmother answered Cinderella about how mice turned into horses:

We must answer that it is MAGIC. It is not a "law," for we do not understand its general formula. …All the terms used in the science books, "law," "necessity," "order," "tendency," and so on, are really unintellectual, because they assume an inner synthesis, which we do not possess. The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, "charm," "spell," "enchantment."

We enjoy love tales because of our instinct of sex; we enjoy astonishing tales because of our instinct of astonishment.  The youngest children don’t even need fairy tales to be astonished; mere tales will suffice:

A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door.