G. K. Chesterton

Someone once told me, or perhaps I read somewhere, that G. K. Chesterton, or it could have been C. S. Lewis, or possibly even someone else, once compared Buddhism and Christianity in the following terms: The aim of Buddhism is to bring about harmony by making everyone the same. The aim of Christianity is to bring about harmony by encouraging people to love each other for their differences.

Whether anyone actually said that, and whether you call those two positions Buddhism and Christianity or not, the conflict between those two positions is absolutely at the heart of what I do as a writer.

In the simplified forms in which they are stated above, the Christian position is far more attractive to me. However, in almost every other way, I find Buddhism more attractive than Christianity. Is that true? I'll have to think about that. In any case, it has occurred to me from time to time how strange it is that so few people seem to have thought that the absence of certain aspects of human experience in one religion and its presence in another, and the fact that all religions seem to boast such unique aspects, and such absences, means that absolutely none of them can provide the whole truth about anything. I feel that we should not be choosing between East and West, for instance, but striving to see how best they can fit together.

Recently, some intelligent commenter or other posted this passage from the works of Chesterton in the comments section of Momus's blog:

The term "pagan" is continually used in fiction and light literature as meaning a man without any religion, whereas a pagan was generally a man with about half a dozen. The pagans, according to this notion, were continually crowning themselves with flowers and dancing about in an irresponsible state, whereas, if there were two things that the best pagan civilization did honestly believe in, they were a rather too rigid dignity and a much too rigid responsibility.

Pagans are depicted as above all things inebriate and lawless, whereas they were above all things reasonable and respectable. They are praised as disobedient when they had only one great virtue– civic obedience. They are envied and admired as shamelessly happy when they had only one great sin –despair.

(…) According to him, the ideal of Paganism was not, indeed, a mere frenzy of lust and liberty and caprice, but was an ideal of full and satisfied humanity. According to him, the ideal of Christianity was the ideal of asceticism. When I say that I think this idea wholly wrong as a matter of philosophy and history, I am not talking for the moment about any ideal Christianity of my own, or even of any primitive Christianity undefiled by after events. I am not, like so many modern Christian idealists, basing my case upon certain things which Christ said. Neither am I, like so many other Christian idealists, basing my case upon certain things that Christ forgot to say. I take historic Christianity with all its sins upon its head; and I say that the meaning of its action was not to be found in asceticism. I say that its point of departure from Paganism was not asceticism. I say that its point of difference with the modern world was not asceticism. I say that St. Simeon Stylites had not his main inspiration in asceticism. I say that the main Christian impulse cannot be described as asceticism, even in the ascetics.

Let me set about making the matter clear. There is one broad fact about the relations of Christianity and Paganism which is so simple that many will smile at it, but which is so important that all moderns forget it. The primary fact about Christianity and Paganism is that one came after the other. Mr. Lowes Dickinson speaks of them as if they were parallel ideals–even speaks as if Paganism were the newer of the two, and the more fitted for a new age. He suggests that the Pagan ideal will be the ultimate good of man; but if that is so, we must at least ask with more curiosity than he allows for, why it was that man actually found his ultimate good on earth under the stars, and threw it away again. It is this extraordinary enigma to which I propose to attempt an answer.

There is only one thing in the modern world that has been face to face with Paganism; there is only one thing in the modern world which in that sense knows anything about Paganism: and that is Christianity. That fact is really the weak point in the whole of that hedonistic neo-Paganism of which I have spoken. All that genuinely remains of the ancient hymns or the ancient dances of Europe, all that has honestly come to us from the festivals of Phoebus or Pan, is to be found in the festivals of the Christian Church. If any one wants to hold the end of a chain which really goes back to the heathen mysteries, he had better take hold of a festoon of flowers at Easter or a string of sausages at Christmas.

Everything else in the modern world is of Christian origin, even everything that seems most anti-Christian. The French Revolution is of Christian origin. The newspaper is of Christian origin. The anarchists are of Christian origin. Physical science is of Christian origin. The attack on Christianity is of Christian origin. There is one thing, and one thing only, in existence at the present day which can in any sense accurately be said to be of pagan origin, and that is Christianity.

The real difference between Paganism and Christianity is perfectly summed up in the difference between the pagan, or natural, virtues, and those three virtues of Christianity which the Church of Rome calls virtues of grace. The pagan, or rational, virtues are such things as justice and temperance, and Christianity has adopted them. The three mystical virtues which Christianity has not adopted, but invented, are faith, hope, and charity. Now much easy and foolish Christian rhetoric could easily be poured out upon those three words, but I desire to confine myself to the two facts which are evident about them. The first evident fact (in marked contrast to the delusion of the dancing pagan)–the first evident fact, I say, is that the pagan virtues, such as justice and temperance, are the sad virtues, and that the mystical virtues of faith, hope, and charity are the gay and exuberant virtues. And the second evident fact, which is even more evident, is the fact that the pagan virtues are the reasonable virtues, and that the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity are in their essence as unreasonable as they can be.

As the word "unreasonable" is open to misunderstanding, the matter may be more accurately put by saying that each one of these Christian or mystical virtues involves a paradox in its own nature, and that this is not true of any of the typically pagan or rationalist virtues. Justice consists in finding out a certain thing due to a certain man and giving it to him. Temperance consists in finding out the proper limit of a particular indulgence and adhering to that. But charity means pardoning what is unpardonable, or it is no virtue at all. Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all.

It is somewhat amusing, indeed, to notice the difference between the fate of these three paradoxes in the fashion of the modern mind. Charity is a fashionable virtue in our time; it is lit up by the gigantic firelight of Dickens. Hope is a fashionable virtue to-day; our attention has been arrested for it by the sudden and silver trumpet of Stevenson. But faith is unfashionable, and it is customary on every side to cast against it the fact that it is a paradox. Everybody mockingly repeats the famous childish definition that faith is "the power of believing that which we know to be untrue." Yet it is not one atom more paradoxical than hope or charity. Charity is the power of defending that which we know to be indefensible. Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate. It is true that there is a state of hope which belongs to bright prospects and the morning; but that is not the virtue of hope. The virtue of hope exists only in earthquake and, eclipse. It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them. For practical purposes it is at the hopeless moment that we require the hopeful man, and the virtue either does not exist at all, or begins to exist at that moment. Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.

Now the old pagan world went perfectly straightforward until it discovered that going straightforward is an enormous mistake. It was nobly and beautifully reasonable, and discovered in its death-pang this lasting and valuable truth, a heritage for the ages, that reasonableness will not do. The pagan age was truly an Eden or golden age, in this essential sense, that it is not to be recovered.

And it is not to be recovered in this sense again that, while we are certainly jollier than the pagans, and much more right than the pagans, there is not one of us who can, by the utmost stretch of energy, be so sensible as the pagans.

That naked innocence of the intellect cannot be recovered by any man after Christianity; and for this excellent reason, that every man after Christianity knows it to be misleading.

Let me take an example, the first that occurs to the mind, of this impossible plainness in the pagan point of view. The greatest tribute to Christianity in the modern world is Tennyson's "Ulysses." The poet reads into the story of Ulysses the conception of an incurable desire to wander. But the real Ulysses does not desire to wander at all. He desires to get home. He displays his heroic and unconquerable qualities in resisting the misfortunes which baulk him; but that is all. There is no love of adventure for its own sake; that is a Christian product. There is no love of Penelope for her own sake; that is a Christian product. Everything in that old world would appear to have been clean and obvious. A good man was a good man; a bad man was a bad man. For this reason they had no charity; for charity is a reverent agnosticism towards the complexity of the soul. For this reason they had no such thing as the art of fiction, the novel; for the novel is a creation of the mystical idea of charity. For them a pleasant landscape was pleasant, and an unpleasant landscape unpleasant. Hence they had no idea of romance; for romance consists in thinking a thing more delightful because it is dangerous; it is a Christian idea. In a word, we cannot reconstruct or even imagine the beautiful and astonishing pagan world. It was a world in which common sense was really common.

(…) (…) My objection to Mr. Lowes Dickinson and the reassertors of the pagan ideal is, then, this. I accuse them of ignoring definite human discoveries in the moral world, discoveries as definite, though not as material, as the discovery of the circulation of the blood. We cannot go back to an ideal of reason and sanity. For mankind has discovered that reason does not lead to sanity. We cannot go back to an ideal of pride and enjoyment. For mankind has discovered that pride does not lead to enjoyment. I do not know by what extraordinary mental accident modern writers so constantly connect the idea of progress with the idea of independent thinking. Progress is obviously the antithesis of independent thinking. For under independent or individualistic thinking, every man starts at the beginning, and goes, in all probability, just as far as his father before him. But if there really be anything of the nature of progress, it must mean, above all things, the careful study and assumption of the whole of the past. I accuse Mr. Lowes Dickinson and his school of reaction in the only real sense. If he likes, let him ignore these great historic mysteries– the mystery of charity, the mystery of chivalry, the mystery of faith. If he likes, let him ignore the plough or the printing-press. But if we do revive and pursue the pagan ideal of a simple and rational self-completion we shall end–where Paganism ended. I do not mean that we shall end in destruction. I mean that we shall end in Christianity.

I have only read a little Chesterton. I read The Man Who Was Thursday and some of The Club of Queer Trades, which was given to me by Mr Wu, who rightly assumed that I would like the title. In both cases, I found that Chesterton's use of the English language was exemplary, so that it was a pleasure to read his work regardless of the content. I also remember very much enjoying the story to The Man Who Was Thursday, and thinking I discerned in it something like a mystical truth about existence. What I found strange was this: That the subtitle to that novel was A Nightmare. It seemed to me that anyone who supposed this story to be a nightmare must have been so deeply entrenched in the world of English country gardens that basically anything suggesting that England was not a beacon of sanity in the world that would shine forever would automatically become a nightmare to him. I would like to have known what he would have made of the work of, say, Thomas Ligotti.

Anyway, I was impressed by the above passage, not because I think all that is written there is the last word on the subject and beyond questioning, but because it made me see things in a different way, and reminded me, also, how seldom I find writing, or thought, that does make me see things in a different way.

That leads me to this blog post, by author Matt Cardin. It caught my attention because of my own recent blog post about the decline of literary prose style. The starting point of Matt's post was the simplification of literary prose style as pioneered by the likes of Ernest Hemingway, and the question of whether this was a good or bad thing. Whatever the ultimate good or ill of the matter might be, Matt focuses on one thing in particular that does – especially to the writer – seem rather more on the ill side of things. That is, the trend towards the simplification of prose style has actually produced, or at least may be observed to be part of, a decline in reading comprehension. I quote from Matt's entry:

It’s not necessarily dystopian through and through — I appreciate and agree with the nuance Steiner invested in the quoted passage — but it’s definitely happening. For confirmation one can just compare most of today’s mainstream, best-selling books with the popular best-sellers of an earlier era and note the differences. Dickens is of course the arch-example from 19th century England. He was wildly popular with the everyday crowd, and yet his prose is demonstrably more complex — I’m talking quantifiably, in terms of the various “reading level” measurements that teachers are used to applying to texts to find out whether they’re suitable for students of certain ages and capabilities — than the overwhelming majority of current best-selling books, both fiction and nonfiction. And what you find when you examine the matter is that this shift is bound up with the move towards a culture where text-based communication has become subsumed under the wider and ever-expanding purview of an all-pervasive mass media realm where visual images are more dominant and therefore texts are progressively changed to fit comfortably into that milieu. (Have you checked out the way even popular magazines like People have altered themselves in the past two decades to become simpler and more akin on every page to TV screens or Webpages?)

Matt then goes on to quote Christine Rosen in her essay on where this trend is leading:

… an image-based culture … is here to stay, and likely to grow more powerful as time goes on, making all of us virtual flâneurs strolling down boulevards filled with digital images and moving pictures. We will, of course, be enormously entertained by these images, and many of them will tell us stories in new and exciting ways. At the same time, however, we will have lost something profound: the ability to marshal words to describe the ambiguities of life and the sources of our ideas; the possibility of conveying to others, with the subtlety, precision, and poetry of the written word, why particular events or people affect us as they do; and the capacity, through language, to distill the deeper meaning of common experience. We will become a society of a million pictures without much memory, a society that looks forward every second to an immediate replication of what it has just done, but one that does not sustain the difficult labor of transmitting culture from one generation to the next.

I return now to the original conflict with which I headed this blog entry. In the conflict between text and image I see something like the conflict (conceptual, that is) between 'Christianity' and 'Buddhism'. Very often I have accused myself, as a writer, of egotism, simply because I am a writer. That is, in expressing myself and recording my thoughts, I am bolstering the ego, which is a hindrance to enlightenment, for in enlightenment there is no thought and no self. Reading about the decline of reading comprehension, however, I begin to wonder, again, whether Buddhism (at most only one hemisphere of the human experience) can possibly provide the whole truth. We need to go beyond old truths, maybe by synthesising them with each other – I hesitate to say by rejecting them entirely, since I think they will return to haunt us one way or another.

In an image-based society, language-based thoughts will be simpler, but they will still exist. It seems to me that, rather than freeing us – and liberation is meant to be the aim of Buddhism – such a society will bind us in tighter chains. Our thoughts will be smaller, and more the same as each other. We will not have the vocabulary to make looser and more flexible chains. One form of synthesis occurs to me as a writer, to become so proficient in the skills of thought, of language, of the self, of the ego, that the chains turn to a sort of symphony of quicksilver, and we will find, in our very chains, our freedom.

I intend to read some more of G. K. Chesterton.