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| {{title | | {{TextQuality|75%}}{{title |
| |title = The Everlasting Man | | |title = The Everlasting Man |
| |author = Gilbert Keith Chesterton | | |author = Gilbert Keith Chesterton |
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| * Prefatory Note | | * Prefatory Note |
| * [[The Everlasting Man/Introduction|Introduction: The Plan Of This Book]] | | * [[The Everlasting Man/Introduction|Introduction: The Plan Of This Book]] |
| * Part I: On the Creature Called Man | | * '''Part I: On the Creature Called Man''' |
| ** [[The Everlasting Man/Part I, 1|I. The Man in the Cave]] | | ** [[The Everlasting Man/Part I/1|I. The Man in the Cave]] |
| ** [[The Everlasting Man/Part I, 2|II. Professors and Prehistoric Men]] | | ** [[The Everlasting Man/Part I/2|II. Professors and Prehistoric Men]] |
| ** [[The Everlasting Man/Part I, 3|III. The Antiquity of Civilisation]] | | ** [[The Everlasting Man/Part I/3|III. The Antiquity of Civilisation]] |
| ** [[The Everlasting Man/Part I, 4|IV. God and Comparative Religion]] | | ** [[The Everlasting Man/Part I/4|IV. God and Comparative Religion]] |
| ** [[The Everlasting Man/Part I, 5|V. Man and Mythologies]] | | ** [[The Everlasting Man/Part I/5|V. Man and Mythologies]] |
| ** [[The Everlasting Man/Part I, 6|VI. The Demons and the Philosophers]] | | ** [[The Everlasting Man/Part I/6|VI. The Demons and the Philosophers]] |
| ** [[The Everlasting Man/Part I, 7|VII. The War of the Gods and Demons]] | | ** [[The Everlasting Man/Part I/7|VII. The War of the Gods and Demons]] |
| ** [[The Everlasting Man/Part I, 8|VIII. The End of the World]] | | ** [[The Everlasting Man/Part I/8|VIII. The End of the World]] |
| * Part II: On the Man Called Christ | | * '''Part II: On the Man Called Christ''' |
| ** [[The Everlasting Man/Part II, 1|I. The God in the Cave]] | | ** [[The Everlasting Man/Part II/1|I. The God in the Cave]] |
| ** [[The Everlasting Man/Part II, 2|II. The Riddles of the Gospel]] | | ** [[The Everlasting Man/Part II/2|II. The Riddles of the Gospel]] |
| ** [[The Everlasting Man/Part II, 3|III. The Strangest Story in the World]] | | ** [[The Everlasting Man/Part II/3|III. The Strangest Story in the World]] |
| ** [[The Everlasting Man/Part II, 4|IV. The Witness of the Heretics]] | | ** [[The Everlasting Man/Part II/4|IV. The Witness of the Heretics]] |
| ** [[The Everlasting Man/Part II, 5|V. The Escape from Paganism]] | | ** [[The Everlasting Man/Part II/5|V. The Escape from Paganism]] |
| ** [[The Everlasting Man/Part II, 6|VI. The Five Deaths of the Faith]] | | ** [[The Everlasting Man/Part II/6|VI. The Five Deaths of the Faith]] |
| * Conclusion: The Summary Of This Book | | * [[The Everlasting Man/Conclusion and Appendices|Conclusion and Appendices]] |
| * Appendix I. On Prehistoric Man | | ** Conclusion: The Summary Of This Book |
| * Appendix II. On Authority and Accuracy | | ** Appendix I. On Prehistoric Man |
| | ** Appendix II. On Authority and Accuracy |
|
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| ==Prefatory Note== | | ==Prefatory Note== |
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| can with the facts which the specialists provide. | | can with the facts which the specialists provide. |
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| ==Introduction: The Plan Of This Book==
| | [[Category:Gilbert Keith Chesterton]] |
| | | [[Category:1925]] |
| There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The
| | {{PD-old-70}} |
| other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place;
| | {{DEFAULTSORT:Everlasting Man}} |
| and I tried to trace such a journey in a story I once wrote. It is, however, a
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| relief to turn from that topic to another story that I never wrote. Like every
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| book I never wrote, it is by far the best book I have ever written. It is only too
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| probable that I shall never write it, so I will use it symbolically here; for it was
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| a symbol of the same truth. I conceived it as a romance of those vast valleys
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| with sloping sides, like those along which the ancient White Horses of Wessex
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| are scrawled along the flanks of the hills. It concerned some boy whose farm
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| or cottage stood on such a slope, and who went on his travels to find
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| something, such as the effigy and grave of some giant; and when he was far
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| enough from home he looked back and saw that his own farm and kitchengarden,
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| shining flat on the hill-side like the colours and quarterings of a shield,
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| were but parts of some such gigantic figure, on which he had always lived, but
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| which was too large and too close to be seen. That, I think, is a true picture of
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| the progress of any really independent intelligence today; and that is the point
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| of this book.
| |
| | |
| The point of this book, in other words, is that the next best thing to being
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| really inside Christendom is to be really outside it. And a particular point of it
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| is that the popular critics of Christianity are not really outside it. They are on a
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| debatable ground, in every sense of the term. They are doubtful in their very
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| doubts. Their criticism has taken on a curious tone; as of a random and
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| illiterate heckling. Thus they make current and anti-clerical cant as a sort of
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| small-talk. They will complain of parsons dressing like parsons; as if we
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| should be any more free if all the police who shadowed or collared us were
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| plain clothes detectives. Or they will complain that a sermon cannot be
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| interrupted, and call a pulpit a coward's castle; though they do not call an
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| editor's office a coward's castle. It would be unjust both to journalists and
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| priests; but it would be much truer of journalist. The clergyman appears in
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| person and could easily be kicked as he came out of church; the journalist
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| conceals even his name so that nobody can kick him. They write wild and
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| pointless articles and letters in the press about why the churches are empty,
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| without even going there to find out if they are empty, or which of them are
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| empty. Their suggestions are more vapid and vacant than the most insipid
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| curate in a three-act farce, and move us to comfort him after the manner of the
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| curate in the Bab Ballads; 'Your mind is not so blank as that of Hopley Porter.'
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| So we may truly say to the very feeblest cleric: 'Your mind is not so blank as
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| that of Indignant Layman or Plain Man or Man in the Street, or any of your
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| critics in the newspapers; for they have not the most shadowy notion of what
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| they want themselves. Let alone of what you ought to give them.' They will
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| suddenly turn round and revile the Church for not having prevented the War,
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| which they themselves did not want to prevent; and which nobody had ever
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| professed to be able to prevent, except some of that very school of progressive
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| and cosmopolitan sceptics who are the chief enemies of the Church. It was the
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| anti-clerical and agnostic world that was always prophesying the advent of
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| universal peace; it is that world that was, or should have been, abashed and
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| confounded by the advent of universal war. As for the general view that the
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| Church was discredited by the War--they might as well say that the Ark was
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| discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the
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| Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin,
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| but because they do. But that marks their mood about the whole religious
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| tradition they are in a state of reaction against it. It is well with the boy when
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| he lives on his father's land; and well with him again when he is far enough
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| from it to look back on it and see it as a whole. But these people have got into
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| an intermediate state, have fallen into an intervening valley from which they
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| can see neither the heights beyond them nor the heights behind. They cannot
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| get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians
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| and they can not leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is
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| the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live
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| in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith.
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| Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But
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| the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of
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| these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next
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| best judge would be something more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all
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| is the man now most ready with his judgements; the ill-educated Christian
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| turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud
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| of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary
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| boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has
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| never heard. He does not judge Christianity calmly as a Confucian would; he
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| does not judge it as he would judge Confucianism. He cannot by an effort of
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| fancy set the Catholic Church thousands of miles away in strange skies of
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| morning and judge it as impartially as a Chinese pagoda. It is said that the
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| great St. Francis Xavier, who very nearly succeeded in setting up the Church
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| there as a tower overtopping all pagodas, failed partly because his followers
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| were accused by their fellow missionaries of representing the Twelve Apostles
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| with the garb or attributes of Chinamen. But it would be far better to see them
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| as Chinamen, and judge them fairly as Chinamen, than to see them as
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| featureless idols merely made to be battered by iconoclasts; or rather as
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| cockshies to be pelted by empty-handed cockneys. It would be better to see the
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| whole thing as a remote Asiatic cult; the mitres of its bishops as the towering
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| head dresses of mysterious bonzes; its pastoral staffs as the sticks twisted like
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| serpents carried in some Asiatic procession; to see the prayer book as fantastic
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| as the prayer-wheel and the Cross as crooked as the Swastika. Then at least we
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| should not lose our temper as some of the sceptical critics seem to lose their
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| temper, not to mention their wits. Their anti-clericalism has become an
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| atmosphere, an atmosphere of negation and hostility from which they cannot
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| escape. Compared with that, it would be better to see the whole thing as
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| something belonging to another continent, or to another planet. It would be
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| more philosophical to stare indifferently at bonzes than to be perpetually and
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| pointlessly grumbling at bishops. It would be better to walk past a church as if
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| it were a pagoda than to stand permanently in the porch, impotent either to go
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| inside and help or to go outside and forget. For those in whom a mere reaction
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| has thus become an obsession, I do seriously recommend the imaginative
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| effort of conceiving the Twelve Apostles as Chinamen. In other words, I
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| recommend these critics to try to do as much justice to Christian saints as if
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| they were Pagan sages.
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| | |
| But with this we come to the final and vital point I shall try to show in these
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| pages that when we do make this imaginative effort to see the whole thing
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| from the outside, we find that it really looks like what is traditionally said
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| about it inside. It is exactly when the boy gets far enough off to see the giant
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| that he sees that he really is a giant. It is exactly when we do at last see the
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| Christian Church afar under those clear and level eastern skies that we see that
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| it is really the Church of Christ. To put it shortly, the moment we are really
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| impartial about it, we know why people are partial to it. But this second
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| proposition requires more serious discussion; and I shall here set myself to
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| discuss it.
| |
| | |
| As soon as I had clearly in my mind this conception of something solid in the
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| solitary and unique character of the divine story, it struck me that there was
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| exactly the same strange and yet solid character in the human story that had
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| led up to it; because that human story also had a root that was divine. I mean
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| that just as the Church seems to grow more remarkable when it is fairly
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| compared with the common religious life of mankind, so mankind itself seems
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| to grow more remarkable when we compare it with the common life of nature.
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| And I have noticed that most modern history is driven to something like
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| sophistry, first to soften the sharp transition from animals to men, and then to
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| soften the sharp transition from heathens to Christians. Now the more we
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| really read in a realistic spirit of those two transitions the sharper we shall find
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| them to be. It is because the critics are not detached that they do not see this
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| detachment; it is because they are not looking at things in a dry light that they
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| cannot see the difference between black and white. It is because they are in a
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| particular mood of reaction and revolt that they have a motive for making out
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| that all the white is dirty grey and the black not so black as it is painted. I do
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| not say there are not human excuses for their revolt; I do not say it is not in
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| some ways sympathetic; what I say is that it is not in any way scientific. An
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| iconoclast may be indignant; an iconoclast may be justly indignant; but an
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| iconoclast is not impartial. And it is stark hypocrisy to pretend that nine-tenths
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| of the higher critics and scientific evolutionists and professors of comparative
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| religion are in the least impartial. Why should they be impartial, what is being
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| impartial, when the whole world is at war about whether one thing is a
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| devouring superstition or a divine hope? I do not pretend to be impartial in the
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| sense that the final act of faith fixes a man's mind because it satisfies his mind.
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| But I do profess to be a great deal more impartial than they are; in the sense
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| that I can tell the story fairly, with some sort of imaginative justice to all sides;
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| and they cannot. I do profess to be impartial in the sense that I should be
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| ashamed to talk such nonsense about the Lama of Thibet as they do about the
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| Pope of Rome, or to have as little sympathy with Julian the Apostate as they
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| have with the Society of Jesus. They are not impartial; they never by any
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| chance hold the historical scales even; and above all they are never impartial
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| upon this point of evolution and transition. They suggest everywhere the grey
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| gradations of twilight, because they believe it is the twilight of the gods. I
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| propose to maintain that whether or no it is the twilight of gods, it is not the
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| daylight of men.
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| | |
| I maintain that when brought out into the daylight these two things look
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| altogether strange and unique; and that it is only in the false twilight of an
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| imaginary period of transition that they can be made to look in the least like
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| anything else. The first of these is the creature called man and the second is the
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| man called Christ. I have therefore divided this book into two parts: the former
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| being a sketch of the main adventure of the human race in so far as it remained
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| heathen; and the second a summary of the real difference that was made by it
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| becoming Christian. Both motives necessitate a certain method, a method
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| which is not very easy to manage, and perhaps even less easy to define or
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| defend.
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| | |
| In order to strike, in the only sane or possible sense, the note of impartiality, it
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| is necessary to touch the nerve of novelty. I mean that in one sense we see
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| things fairly when we see them first. That, I may remark in passing, is why
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| children generally have very little difficulty about the dogmas of the Church.
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| But the Church, being a highly practical thing for working and fighting, is
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| necessarily a thing for men and not merely for children. There must be in it for
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| working purposes a great deal of tradition, of familiarity, and even of routine.
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| So long as its fundamentals are sincerely felt, this may even be the saner
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| condition. But when its fundamentals are doubted, as at present, we must try to
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| recover the candour and wonder of the child; the unspoilt realism and
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| objectivity of innocence. Or if we cannot do that, we must try at least to shake
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| off the cloud of mere custom and see the thing as new, if only by seeing it as
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| unnatural. Things that may well be familiar so long as familiarity breeds
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| affection had much better become unfamiliar when familiarity breeds
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| contempt. For in connection with things so great as are here considered,
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| whatever our view of them, contempt must be a mistake. Indeed contempt
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| must be an illusion. We must invoke the most wild and soaring sort of
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| imagination; the imagination that can see what is there.
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| The only way to suggest the point is by an example of something, indeed of
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| almost anything, that has been considered beautiful or wonderful. George
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| Wyndham once told me that he had seen one of the first aeroplanes rise for the
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| first time and it was very wonderful but not so wonderful as a horse allowing a
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| man to ride on him. Somebody else has said that a fine man on a fine horse is
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| the noblest bodily object in the world. Now, so long as people feel this in the
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| right way, all is well. The first and best way of appreciating it is to come of
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| people with a tradition of treating animals properly; of men in the right
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| relation to horses. A boy who remembers his father who rode a horse, who
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| rode it well and treated it well, will know that the relation can be satisfactory
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| and will be satisfied. He will be all the more indignant at the ill-treatment of
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| horses because he knows how they ought to be treated; but he will see nothing
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| but what is normal in a man riding on a horse. He will not listen to the great
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| modern philosopher who explains to him that the horse ought to be riding on
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| the man. He will not pursue the pessimist fancy of Swift and say that men
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| must be despised as monkeys and horses worshipped as gods. And horse and
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| man together making an image that is to him human and civilised, it will be
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| easy, as it were, to lift horse and man together into something heroic or
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| symbolical; like a vision of St. George in the clouds. The fable of the winged
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| horse will not be wholly unnatural to him: and he will know why Ariosto set
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| many a Christian hero in such an airy saddle, and made him the rider of the
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| sky. For the horse has really been lifted up along with the man in the wildest
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| fashion in the very word we use when we speak 'chivalry.' The very name of
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| the horse has been given to the highest mood and moment of the man; so that
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| we might almost say that the handsomest compliment to a man is to call him a
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| horse.
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| | |
| But if a man has got into a mood in which he is not able to feel this sort of
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| wonder, then his cure must begin right at the other end. We must now suppose
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| that he has drifted into a dull mood, in which somebody sitting on a horse
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| means no more than somebody sitting on a chair. The wonder of which
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| Wyndham spoke, the beauty that made the thing seem an equestrian statue, the
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| meaning of the more chivalric horseman, may have become to him merely a
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| convention and a bore. Perhaps they have been merely a fashion; perhaps they
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| have gone out of fashion; perhaps they have been talked about too much or
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| talked about in the wrong way; perhaps it was then difficult to care for horses
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| without the horrible risk of being horsy. Anyhow, he has got into a condition
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| when he cares no more for a horse than for a towel-horse. His grandfather's
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| charge at Balaclava seems to him as dull and dusty as the album containing
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| such family portraits. Such a person has not really become enlightened about
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| the album; on the contrary, he has only become blind with the dust. But when
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| he has reached that degree of blindness, he will not be able to look at a horse
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| or a horseman at all until he has seen the whole thing as a thing entirely
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| unfamiliar and almost unearthly.
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| | |
| Out of some dark forest under some ancient dawn there must come towards us,
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| with lumbering yet dancing motions, one of the very queerest of the
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| prehistoric creatures. We must see for the first time the strangely small head
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| set on a neck not only longer but thicker than itself, as the face of a gargoyle is
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| thrust out upon a gutter-spout, the one disproportionate crest of hair running
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| along the ridge of that heavy neck like a beard in the wrong place; the feet,
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| each like a solid club of horn, alone amid the feet of so many cattle; so that the
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| true fear is to be found in showing, not the cloven, but the uncloven hoof. Nor
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| is it mere verbal fancy to see him thus as a unique monster; for in a sense a
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| monster means what is unique, and he is really unique. But the point is that
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| when we thus see him as the first man saw him, we begin once more to have
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| some imaginative sense of what it meant when the first man rode him. In such
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| a dream he may seem ugly, but he does not seem unimpressive; and certainly
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| that two-legged dwarf who could get on top of him will not seem
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| unimpressive. By a longer and more erratic road we shall come back to the
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| same marvel of the man and the horse; and the marvel will be, if possible,
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| even more marvellous. We shall have again a glimpse of St. George; the more
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| glorious because St. George is not riding on the horse, but rather riding on the
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| dragon.
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| | |
| In this example, which I have taken merely because it is an example, it will be
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| noted that I do not say that the nightmare seen by the first man of the forest is
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| either more true or more wonderful than the normal mare of the stable seen by
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| the civilised person who can appreciate what is normal. Of the two extremes, I
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| think on the whole that the traditional grasp of truth is the better. But I say that
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| the truth is found at one or other of these two extremes, and is lost in the
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| intermediate condition of mere fatigue and forgetfulness of tradition. In other
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| words, I say it is better to see a horse as a monster than to see it only as a slow
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| substitute for a motor-car. If we have got into that state of mind about a horse
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| as something stale, it is far better to be frightened of a horse because it is a
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| good deal too fresh.
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| | |
| Now, as it is with the monster that is called a horse, so it is with the monster
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| that is called a man. Of course the best condition of all, in my opinion, is
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| always to have regarded man as he is regarded in my philosophy. He who
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| holds the Christian and Catholic view of human nature will feel certain that it
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| is a universal and therefore a sane view, and will be satisfied. But if he has lost
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| the sane vision, he can only get it back by something very like a mad vision;
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| that is, by seeing man as a strange animal and realising how strange an animal
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| he is. But just as seeing the horse as a prehistoric prodigy ultimately led back
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| to, and not away from, an admiration for the mastery of man, so the really
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| detached consideration of the curious career of man will lead back to, and not
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| away from, the ancient faith in the dark designs of God. In other words, it is
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| exactly when we do see how queer the quadruped is that we praise the man
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| who mounts him; and exactly when we do see how queer the biped is that we
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| praise the Providence that made him. In short, it is the purpose of this
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| introduction to maintain this thesis: that it is exactly when we do regard man
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| as an animal that we know he is not an animal. It is precisely when we do try
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| to picture him as a sort of horse on its hind legs, that we suddenly realise that
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| he must be something as miraculous as the winged horse that towered up into
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| the clouds of heaven. All roads lead to Rome, all ways lead round again to the
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| central and civilised philosophy, including this road through elf-land and
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| topsyturvydom. But it may be that it is better never to have left the land of the
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| reasonable tradition, where men ride lightly upon horses and are mighty
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| hunters before the Lord. So also in the specially Christian case we have to
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| react against the heavy bias of fatigue. It is almost impossible to make the
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| facts vivid, because the facts are familiar; and for fallen men it is often true
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| that familiarity is fatigue. I am convinced that if we could tell the supernatural
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| story of Christ word for word as of a Chinese hero, call him the Son of Heaven
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| instead of the Son of God, and trace his rayed nimbus in the gold tread of
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| Chinese embroideries or the gold lacquer of Chinese pottery, instead of in the
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| gold leaf of our own old Catholic paintings, there would be a unanimous
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| testimony to the spiritual purity of the story. We should hear nothing then of
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| the injustice of substitution or the illogicality of atonement, of the superstitious
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| exaggeration of the burden of sin or the impossible insolence of an invasion of
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| the laws of nature. We should admire the chivalry of the Chinese conception
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| of a god who fell from the sky to fight the dragons and save the wicked from
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| being devoured by their own fault and folly. We should admire the subtlety of
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| the Chinese view of life, which perceives that all human imperfection is in
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| very truth a crying imperfection. We should admire the Chinese esoteric and
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| superior wisdom, which said there are higher cosmic laws than the laws we
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| know; we believe every common Indian conjurer who chooses to come to us
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| and talk in the same style. If Christianity were only a new oriental fashion, it
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| would never be reproached with being an old and oriental faith. I do not
| |
| propose in this book to follow the alleged example of St. Francis Xavier with
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| the opposite imaginative intention, and turn the Twelve Apostles into
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| Mandarins; not so much to make them look like natives as to make them look
| |
| like foreigners. I do not propose to work what I believe would be a completely
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| successful practical joke; that of telling the whole story of the Gospel and the
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| whole history of the church in a setting of pagodas and pigtails; and noting
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| with malignant humour how much it was admired as a heathen story, in the
| |
| very quarters where it is condemned as a Christian story. But I do propose to
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| strike wherever possible this note of what is new and strange, and for that
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| reason the style even on so serious a subject may sometimes be deliberately
| |
| grotesque and fanciful. I do desire to help the reader to see Christendom from
| |
| the outside in the sense of seeing it as a whole, against the background of other
| |
| historic things; just as I desire him to see humanity as a whole against the
| |
| background of natural things. And I say that in both cases, when seen thus,
| |
| they stand out from their background like supernatural things. They do not
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| fade into the rest with the colours of impressionism; they stand out from the
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| rest with the colours of heraldry; as vivid as a red cross on a white shield or a
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| black lion on a ground of gold. So stands the Red Clay against the green field
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| of nature, or the White Christ against the red clay of his race.
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| But in order to see them clearly we have to see them as a whole. We have to
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| see how they developed as well as how they began; for the most incredible
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| part of the story is that things which began thus should have developed thus.
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| Anyone who chooses to indulge in mere imagination can imagine that other
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| things might have happened or other entities evolved. Anyone thinking of
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| what might have happened may conceive a sort of evolutionary equality; but
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| anyone facing what did happen must face an exception and a prodigy. If there
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| was ever a moment when man was only an animal, we can if we choose make
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| a fancy picture of his career transferred to some other animal. An entertaining
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| fantasia might be made in which elephants built in elephantine architecture,
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| with towers and turrets like tusks and trunks, cities beyond the scale of any
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| colossus. A pleasant fable might be conceived in which a cow had developed a
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| costume, and put on four boots and two pairs of trousers. We could imagine a
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| Supermonkey more marvellous than any Superman, a quadrumanous creature
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| carving and painting with his hands and cooking and carpentering with his
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| feet. But if we are considering what did happen, we shall certainly decide that
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| man has distanced everything else with a distance like that of the astronomical
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| spaces and a speed like that of the still thunderbolt of the light. And in the
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| same fashion, while we can if we choose see the Church amid a mob of
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| Mithraic or Manichean superstitions squabbling and killing each other at the
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| end of the Empire, while we can if we choose imagine the Church killed in the
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| struggle and some other chance cult taking its place, we shall be the more
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| surprised (and possibly puzzled) if we meet it two thousand years afterwards
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| rushing through the ages as the winged thunderbolt of thought and everlasting
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| enthusiasm; a thing without rival or resemblance; and still as new as it is old.
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