[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

people who really enjoyed this world were busy breaking it up; and the virtuous people
did not care enough about them to knock them down. In this dilemma (the same as
ours) Christianity suddenly stepped in and offered a singular answer, which the world
eventually accepted as the answer. It was the answer then, and I think it is the answer
now.
This answer was like the slash of a sword; it sundered; it did not in any sense
sentimentally unite. Briefly, it divided God from the cosmos. That transcendence and
distinctness of the deity which some Christians now want to remove from Christianity,
was really the only reason why any one wanted to be a Christian. It was the whole point
of the Christian answer to the unhappy pessimist and the still more unhappy optimist.
As I am here only concerned with their particular problem, I shall indicate only briefly
this great metaphysical suggestion. All descriptions of the creating or sustaining
principle in things must be metaphorical, because they must be verbal. Thus the
pantheist is forced to speak of God in all things as if he were in a box. Thus the
evolutionist has, in his very name, the idea of being unrolled like a carpet. All terms,
religious and irreligious, are open to this charge. The only question is whether all terms
are useless, or whether one can, with such a phrase, cover a distinct idea about the origin
of things. I think one can, and so evidently does the evolutionist, or he would not talk
about evolution. And the root phrase for all Christian theism was this, that God was a
creator, as an artist is a creator. A poet is so separate from his poem that he himself
speaks of it as a little thing he has  thrown off. Even in giving it forth he has flung it
away. This principle that all creation and procreation is a breaking off is at least as
consistent through the cosmos as the evolutionary principle that all growth is a
branching out. A woman loses a child even in having a child. All creation is separation.
Birth is as solemn a parting as death.
It was the prime philosophic principle of Christianity that this divorce in the
divine act of making (such as severs the poet from the poem or the mother from the
new-born child) was the true description of the act whereby the absolute energy made
the world. According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it.
According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a
poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily
been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it. I
will discuss the truth of this theorem later. Here I have only to point out with what a
startling smoothness it passed the dilemma we have discussed in this chapter. In this
way at least one could be both happy and indignant without degrading one s self to be
either a pessimist or an optimist. On this system one could fight all the forces of
existence without deserting the flag of existence. One could be at peace with the
universe and yet be at war with the world. St. George could still fight the dragon,
however big the monster bulked in the cosmos, though he were bigger than the mighty
cities or bigger than the everlasting hills. If he were as big as the world he could yet be
killed in the name of the world. St. George had not to consider any obvious odds or
proportions in the scale of things, but only the original secret of their design. He can
shake his sword at the dragon, even if it is everything; even if the empty heavens over
his head are only the huge arch of its open jaws.
And then followed an experience impossible to describe. It was as if I had been
blundering about since my birth with two huge and unmanageable machines, of
different shapes and without apparent connection -- the world and the Christian
tradition. I had found this hole in the world: the fact that one must somehow find a way
of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the word without being
worldly. I found this projecting feature of Christian theology, like a sort of hard spike,
the dogmatic insistence that God was personal, and had made a world separate from
Himself. The spike of dogma fitted exactly into the hole in the world -- it had evidently
been meant to go there -- and then the strange thing began to happen. When once these
two parts of the two machines had come together, one after another, all the other parts
fitted and fell in with an eerie exactitude. I could hear bolt after bolt over all the
machinery falling into its place with a kind of click of relief. Having got one part right,
all the other parts were repeating that rectitude, as clock after dock strikes noon. Instinct
after instinct was answered by doctrine after doctrine. Or, to vary the metaphor, I was
like one who had advanced into a hostile country to take one high fortress. And when
that fort had fallen the whole country surrendered and turned solid behind me. The
whole land was lit up, as it were, back to the first fields of my childhood. All those blind
fancies of boyhood which in the fourth chapter I have tried in vain to trace on the
darkness, became suddenly transparent and sane. I was right when I felt that roses were
red by some sort of choice: it was the divine choice. I was right when I felt that I would
almost rather say that grass was the wrong colour than say it must by necessity have
been that colour: it might verily have been any other. My sense that happiness hung on
the crazy thread of a condition did mean something when all was said: it meant the
whole doctrine of the Fall. Even those dim and shapeless monsters of notions which I
have not been able to describe, much less defend, stepped quietly into their places like
colossal caryatides of the creed. The fancy that the cosmos was not vast and void, but
small and cosy, had a fulfilled significance now, for anything that is a work of art must
be small in the sight of the artist; to God the stars might be only small and dear, like
diamonds. And my haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to be
used, but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from Crusoe s ship -- even that had been
the wild whisper of something originally wise, for, according to Christianity, we were
indeed the survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before
the beginning of the world.
But the important matter was this, that it entirely reversed the reason for [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]