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Tamela Vandonsel

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Aug 19, 2024, 8:50:51 PM8/19/24

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Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to loveit. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is thecontention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is aChristian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian.The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgments; theill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic,entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood thebeginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows notwhat, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. He does notjudge Christianity calmly as a Confucian would; he does not judge it ashe would judge Confucianism. He cannot by an effort of fancy set theCatholic6 Church thousands of miles away in strange skies of morning andjudge it as impartially as a Chinese pagoda. It is said that the greatSt. Francis Xavier, who very nearly succeeded in setting up the Churchthere as a tower overtopping all pagodas, failed partly because hisfollowers were accused by their fellow missionaries of representing theTwelve Apostles with the garb or attributes of Chinamen. But it would befar better to see them as Chinamen, and judge them fairly as Chinamen,than to see them as featureless idols merely made to be battered byiconoclasts; or rather as cockshies to be pelted by empty-headedcockneys. It would be better to see the whole thing as a remote Asiaticcult; the mitres of its bishops as the towering head-dresses ofmysterious bonzes; its pastoral staffs as the sticks twisted likeserpents carried in some Asiatic procession; to see the prayer-book asfantastic as the prayer-wheel and the Cross as crooked as the Swastika.Then at least we should not lose our temper as some of the scepticalcritics seem to lose their temper, not to mention their wits. Theiranti-clericalism has become an atmosphere, an atmosphere of negation andhostility from which they cannot escape. Compared with that, it would bebetter to see the whole thing as something belonging to anothercontinent, or to another planet. It would be more philosophical to stareindifferently at bonzes than to be perpetually and pointlessly grumblingat bishops. It would be better to walk past a church as if it were apagoda than to stand permanently in the porch, impotent either to goinside and help or to go outside and forget. For those in whom a merereaction has thus become an obsession, I do seriously recommend theimaginative effort of conceiving the Twelve Apostles as Chinamen. Inother words, I recommend these critics to try to do as much justice toChristian saints as if they were Pagan sages.7

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But with this we come to the final and vital point. I shall try to showin these pages that when we do make this imaginative effort to see thewhole thing from the outside, we find that it really looks like what istraditionally said about it inside. It is exactly when the boy gets farenough off to see the giant that he sees that he really is a giant. Itis exactly when we do at last see the Christian Church afar under thoseclear and level eastern skies that we see that it is really the Churchof Christ. To put it shortly, the moment we are really impartial aboutit we know why people are partial to it. But this second propositionrequires more serious discussion; and I shall here set myself to discussit.

I maintain that when brought out into the daylight, these two thingslook altogether strange and unique; and that it is only in the falsetwilight of an imaginary period of transition that they can be made tolook in the least like anything else. The first of these is the creaturecalled man, and the second is the man called Christ. I have thereforedivided this book into two parts: the former being a sketch of the mainadventure of the human race9 in so far as it remained heathen; and thesecond a summary of the real difference that was made by it becomingChristian. Both motives necessitate a certain method, a method which isnot very easy to manage, and perhaps even less easy to define or defend.

In order to strike, in the only sane or possible sense, the note ofimpartiality, it is necessary to touch the nerve of novelty. I mean thatin one sense we see things fairly when we see them first. That, I mayremark in passing, is why children generally have very little difficultyabout the dogmas of the Church. But the Church, being a highly practicalthing for working and fighting, is necessarily a thing for men and notmerely for children. There must be in it for working purposes a greatdeal of tradition, of familiarity, and even of routine. So long as itsfundamentals are sincerely felt, this may even be the saner condition.But when its fundamentals are doubted, as at present, we must try torecover the candour and wonder of the child; the unspoilt realism andobjectivity of innocence. Or if we cannot do that, we must try at leastto shake off the cloud of mere custom and see the thing as new, if onlyby seeing it as unnatural. Things that may well be familiar so long asfamiliarity breeds affection had much better become unfamiliar whenfamiliarity breeds contempt. For in connection with things so great asare here considered, whatever our view of them, contempt must be amistake. Indeed contempt must be an illusion. We must invoke the mostwild and soaring sort of imagination; the imagination that can see whatis there.

Out of some dark forest under some ancient dawn there must come towardsus, with lumbering yet dancing motions, one of the very queerest of theprehistoric creatures. We must see for the first time the strangelysmall head set on a neck not only longer but thicker than itself, as theface of a gargoyle is thrust out upon a gutter-spout, the onedisproportionate crest of hair running along the ridge of that heavyneck like a beard in the wrong place; the feet, each like a solid clubof horn, alone amid the feet of so many cattle; so that the true fear isto be found in showing not the cloven but the uncloven hoof. Nor is itmere verbal fancy to see him thus as a unique monster; for in a sense amonster means what is unique, and he is really unique. But the point isthat when we thus see him as the first man saw him, we begin once moreto have some imaginative sense of what it meant when the first man rodehim. In such a dream he may seem ugly, but he does12 not seemunimpressive; and certainly that two-legged dwarf who could get on topof him will not seem unimpressive. By a longer and more erratic road weshall come back to the same marvel of the man and the horse; and themarvel will be, if possible, even more marvellous. We shall have again aglimpse of St. George; the more glorious because St. George is notriding on the horse, but rather riding on the dragon.

In this example, which I have taken merely because it is an example, itwill be noted that I do not say that the nightmare seen by the first manof the forest is either more true or more wonderful than the normal mareof the stable seen by the civilised person who can appreciate what isnormal. Of the two extremes, I think on the whole that the traditionalgrasp of truth is the better. But I say that the truth is found at oneor other of these two extremes, and is lost in the intermediatecondition of mere fatigue and forgetfulness of tradition. In otherwords, I say it is better to see a horse as a monster than to see itonly as a slow substitute for a motor-car. If we have got into thatstate of mind about a horse as something stale, it is far better to befrightened of a horse because it is a good deal too fresh.

Now, as it is with the monster that is called a horse, so it is with themonster that is called a man. Of course the best condition of all, in myopinion, is always to have regarded man as he is regarded in myphilosophy. He who holds the Christian and Catholic view of human naturewill feel certain that it is a universal and therefore a sane view, andwill be satisfied. But if he has lost the sane vision, he can only getit back by something very like a mad vision; that is, by seeing man as astrange animal and realising how strange an animal he is. But just asseeing the horse as a prehistoric prodigy ultimately led back to, andnot away from, an admiration for the mastery of man, so the reallydetached consideration of the13 curious career of man will lead back to,and not away from, the ancient faith in the dark designs of God. Inother words, it is exactly when we do see how queer the quadruped isthat we praise the man who mounts him; and exactly when we do see howqueer the biped is that we praise the Providence that made him.

In short, it is the purpose of this introduction to maintain thisthesis: that it is exactly when we do regard man as an animal that weknow he is not an animal. It is precisely when we do try to picture himas a sort of horse on its hind legs that we suddenly realise that hemust be something as miraculous as the winged horse that towered up intothe clouds of heaven. All roads lead to Rome, all ways lead round againto the central and civilised philosophy, including this road throughelfland and topsyturvydom. But it may be that it is better never to haveleft the land of a reasonable tradition, where men ride lightly uponhorses and are mighty hunters before the Lord.

So also in the specially Christian case we have to react against theheavy bias of fatigue. It is almost impossible to make the facts vivid,because the facts are familiar; and for fallen men it is often true thatfamiliarity is fatigue. I am convinced that if we could tell thesupernatural story of Christ word for word as of a Chinese hero, callhim the Son of Heaven instead of the Son of God, and trace his rayednimbus in the gold thread of Chinese embroideries or the gold lacquer ofChinese pottery instead of in the gold leaf of our own old Catholicpaintings, there would be a unanimous testimony to the spiritual purityof the story. We should hear nothing then of the injustice ofsubstitution or the illogicality of atonement, of the superstitiousexaggeration of the burden of sin or the impossible insolence of aninvasion of the laws of nature. We should admire the chivalry of theChinese conception of a god who fell from the sky to fight the dragonsand save the wicked from being14 devoured by their own fault and folly.We should admire the subtlety of the Chinese view of life, whichperceives that all human imperfection is in very truth a cryingimperfection. We should admire the Chinese esoteric and superior wisdom,which said there are higher cosmic laws than the laws we know; webelieve every common Indian conjurer who chooses to come to us and talkin the same style. If Christianity were only a new oriental fashion, itwould never be reproached with being an old and oriental faith. I do notpropose in this book to follow the alleged example of St. Francis Xavierwith the opposite imaginative intention, and turn the Twelve Apostlesinto Mandarins; not so much to make them look like natives as to makethem look like foreigners. I do not propose to work what I believe wouldbe a completely successful practical joke; that of telling the wholestory of the Gospel and the whole history of the Church in a setting ofpagodas and pigtails; and noting with malignant humour how much it wasadmired as a heathen story in the very quarters where it is condemned asa Christian story. But I do propose to strike wherever possible thisnote of what is new and strange, and for that reason the style even onso serious a subject may sometimes be deliberately grotesque andfanciful. I do desire to help the reader to see Christendom from theoutside in the sense of seeing it as a whole, against the background ofother historic things; just as I desire him to see humanity as a wholeagainst the background of natural things. And I say that in both cases,when seen thus, they stand out from their background like supernaturalthings. They do not fade into the rest with the colours ofimpressionism; they stand out from the rest with the colours ofheraldry; as vivid as a red cross on a white shield or a black lion on aground of gold. So stands the Red Clay against the green field ofnature, or the White Christ against the red clay of his race.15