Heretics -- Introductory Remarks on the Importance of Orthodoxy
1. Introductory Remarks on the Importance of Orthodoxy
Nothing more strangely indicates an enormous and silent evil
of modern society than the extraordinary use which is made
nowadays of the word "orthodox." In former days the heretic
was proud of not being a heretic. It was the kingdoms of
the world and the police and the judges who were heretics.
He was orthodox. He had no pride in having rebelled against them;
they had rebelled against him. The armies with their cruel security,
the kings with their cold faces, the decorous processes of State,
the reasonable processes of law--all these like sheep had gone astray.
The man was proud of being orthodox, was proud of being right.
If he stood alone in a howling wilderness he was more than a man;
he was a church. He was the centre of the universe; it was
round him that the stars swung. All the tortures torn out of
forgotten hells could not make him admit that he was heretical.
But a few modern phrases have made him boast of it. He says,
with a conscious laugh, "I suppose I am very heretical," and looks
round for applause. The word "heresy" not only means no longer
being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous.
The word "orthodoxy" not only no longer means being right;
it practically means being wrong. All this can mean one thing,
and one thing only. It means that people care less for whether
they are philosophically right. For obviously a man ought
to confess himself crazy before he confesses himself heretical.
The Bohemian, with a red tie, ought to pique himself on his orthodoxy.
The dynamiter, laying a bomb, ought to feel that, whatever else he is,
at least he is orthodox.
It is foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire
to another philosopher in Smithfield Market because they do not agree
in their theory of the universe. That was done very frequently
in the last decadence of the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether
in its object. But there is one thing that is infinitely more
absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy.
This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter,
and this is done universally in the twentieth century,
in the decadence of the great revolutionary period.
General theories are everywhere contemned; the doctrine of the Rights
of Man is dismissed with the doctrine of the Fall of Man.
Atheism itself is too theological for us to-day. Revolution itself
is too much of a system; liberty itself is too much of a restraint.
We will have no generalizations. Mr. Bernard Shaw has put the view
in a perfect epigram: "The golden rule is that there is no golden rule."
We are more and more to discuss details in art, politics, literature.
A man's opinion on tramcars matters; his opinion on Botticelli matters;
his opinion on all things does not matter. He may turn over and
explore a million objects, but he must not find that strange object,
the universe; for if he does he will have a religion, and be lost.
Everything matters--except everything.
Examples are scarcely needed of this total levity on the subject
of cosmic philosophy. Examples are scarcely needed to show that,
whatever else we think of as affecting practical affairs, we do
not think it matters whether a man is a pessimist or an optimist,
a Cartesian or a Hegelian, a materialist or a spiritualist.
Let me, however, take a random instance. At any innocent tea-table
we may easily hear a man say, "Life is not worth living."
We regard it as we regard the statement that it is a fine day;
nobody thinks that it can possibly have any serious effect on the man
or on the world. And yet if that utterance were really believed,
the world would stand on its head. Murderers would be given
medals for saving men from life; firemen would be denounced
for keeping men from death; poisons would be used as medicines;
doctors would be called in when people were well; the Royal
Humane Society would be rooted out like a horde of assassins.
Yet we never speculate as to whether the conversational pessimist
will strengthen or disorganize society; for we are convinced
that theories do not matter.
This was certainly not the idea of those who introduced our freedom.
When the old Liberals removed the gags from all the heresies, their idea
was that religious and philosophical discoveries might thus be made.
Their view was that cosmic truth was so important that every one
ought to bear independent testimony. The modern idea is that cosmic
truth is so unimportant that it cannot matter what any one says.
The former freed inquiry as men loose a noble hound; the latter frees
inquiry as men fling back into the sea a fish unfit for eating.
Never has there been so little discussion about the nature of men
as now, when, for the first time, any one can discuss it. The old
restriction meant that only the orthodox were allowed to discuss religion.
Modern liberty means that nobody is allowed to discuss it.
Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions,
has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed.
Sixty years ago it was bad taste to be an avowed atheist.
Then came the Bradlaughites, the last religious men, the last men
who cared about God; but they could not alter it. It is still bad
taste to be an avowed atheist. But their agony has achieved just this--
that now it is equally bad taste to be an avowed Christian.
Emancipation has only locked the saint in the same tower of silence
as the heresiarch. Then we talk about Lord Anglesey and the weather,
and call it the complete liberty of all the creeds.
But there are some people, nevertheless--and I am one of them--
who think that the most practical and important thing about a man
is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady
considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still
more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general
about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy's numbers,
but still more important to know the enemy's philosophy.
We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos
affects matters, but whether in the long run, anything else affects them.
In the fifteenth century men cross-examined and tormented a man
because he preached some immoral attitude; in the nineteenth century we
feted and flattered Oscar Wilde because he preached such an attitude,
and then broke his heart in penal servitude because he carried it out.
It may be a question which of the two methods was the more cruel;
there can be no kind of question which was the more ludicrous.
The age of the Inquisition has not at least the disgrace of having
produced a society which made an idol of the very same man for preaching
the very same things which it made him a convict for practising.
Now, in our time, philosophy or religion, our theory, that is,
about ultimate things, has been driven out, more or less simultaneously,
from two fields which it used to occupy. General ideals used
to dominate literature. They have been driven out by the cry
of "art for art's sake." General ideals used to dominate politics.
They have been driven out by the cry of "efficiency," which
may roughly be translated as "politics for politics' sake."
Persistently for the last twenty years the ideals of order or liberty
have dwindled in our books; the ambitions of wit and eloquence
have dwindled in our parliaments. Literature has purposely become
less political; politics have purposely become less literary.
General theories of the relation of things have thus been extruded
from both; and we are in a position to ask, "What have we gained
or lost by this extrusion? Is literature better, is politics better,
for having discarded the moralist and the philosopher?"
When everything about a people is for the time growing weak
and ineffective, it begins to talk about efficiency. So it is that when a
man's body is a wreck he begins, for the first time, to talk about health.
Vigorous organisms talk not about their processes, but about their aims.
There cannot be any better proof of the physical efficiency of a man
than that he talks cheerfully of a journey to the end of the world.
And there cannot be any better proof of the practical efficiency
of a nation than that it talks constantly of a journey to the end
of the world, a journey to the Judgment Day and the New Jerusalem.
There can be no stronger sign of a coarse material health
than the tendency to run after high and wild ideals; it is
in the first exuberance of infancy that we cry for the moon.
None of the strong men in the strong ages would have understood
what you meant by working for efficiency. Hildebrand would have said
that he was working not for efficiency, but for the Catholic Church.
Danton would have said that he was working not for efficiency,
but for liberty, equality, and fraternity. Even if the ideal
of such men were simply the ideal of kicking a man downstairs,
they thought of the end like men, not of the process like paralytics.
They did not say, "Efficiently elevating my right leg, using,
you will notice, the muscles of the thigh and calf, which are
in excellent order, I--" Their feeling was quite different.
They were so filled with the beautiful vision of the man lying
flat at the foot of the staircase that in that ecstasy the rest
followed in a flash. In practice, the habit of generalizing
and idealizing did not by any means mean worldly weakness.
The time of big theories was the time of big results. In the era of
sentiment and fine words, at the end of the eighteenth century, men were
really robust and effective. The sentimentalists conquered Napoleon.
The cynics could not catch De Wet. A hundred years ago our affairs
for good or evil were wielded triumphantly by rhetoricians.
Now our affairs are hopelessly muddled by strong, silent men.
And just as this repudiation of big words and big visions has
brought forth a race of small men in politics, so it has brought
forth a race of small men in the arts. Our modern politicians claim
the colossal license of Caesar and the Superman, claim that they are
too practical to be pure and too patriotic to be moral; but the upshot
of it all is that a mediocrity is Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Our new artistic philosophers call for the same moral license,
for a freedom to wreck heaven and earth with their energy;
but the upshot of it all is that a mediocrity is Poet Laureate.
I do not say that there are no stronger men than these; but will
any one say that there are any men stronger than those men of old
who were dominated by their philosophy and steeped in their religion?
Whether bondage be better than freedom may be discussed.
But that their bondage came to more than our freedom it will be
difficult for any one to deny.
The theory of the unmorality of art has established itself firmly
in the strictly artistic classes. They are free to produce
anything they like. They are free to write a "Paradise Lost"
in which Satan shall conquer God. They are free to write a
"Divine Comedy" in which heaven shall be under the floor of hell.
And what have they done? Have they produced in their universality
anything grander or more beautiful than the things uttered by
the fierce Ghibbeline Catholic, by the rigid Puritan schoolmaster?
We know that they have produced only a few roundels.
Milton does not merely beat them at his piety, he beats them
at their own irreverence. In all their little books of verse you
will not find a finer defiance of God than Satan's. Nor will you
find the grandeur of paganism felt as that fiery Christian felt it
who described Faranata lifting his head as in disdain of hell.
And the reason is very obvious. Blasphemy is an artistic effect,
because blasphemy depends upon a philosophical conviction.
Blasphemy depends upon belief and is fading with it.
If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think
blasphemous thoughts about Thor. I think his family will find him
at the end of the day in a state of some exhaustion.
Neither in the world of politics nor that of literature, then,
has the rejection of general theories proved a success.
It may be that there have been many moonstruck and misleading ideals
that have from time to time perplexed mankind. But assuredly
there has been no ideal in practice so moonstruck and misleading
as the ideal of practicality. Nothing has lost so many opportunities
as the opportunism of Lord Rosebery. He is, indeed, a standing
symbol of this epoch--the man who is theoretically a practical man,
and practically more unpractical than any theorist. Nothing in this
universe is so unwise as that kind of worship of worldly wisdom.
A man who is perpetually thinking of whether this race or that race
is strong, of whether this cause or that cause is promising, is the man
who will never believe in anything long enough to make it succeed.
The opportunist politician is like a man who should abandon billiards
because he was beaten at billiards, and abandon golf because he was
beaten at golf. There is nothing which is so weak for working
purposes as this enormous importance attached to immediate victory.
There is nothing that fails like success.
And having discovered that opportunism does fail, I have been induced
to look at it more largely, and in consequence to see that it must fail.
I perceive that it is far more practical to begin at the beginning
and discuss theories. I see that the men who killed each other
about the orthodoxy of the Homoousion were far more sensible
than the people who are quarrelling about the Education Act.
For the Christian dogmatists were trying to establish a reign of holiness,
and trying to get defined, first of all, what was really holy.
But our modern educationists are trying to bring about a religious
liberty without attempting to settle what is religion or what
is liberty. If the old priests forced a statement on mankind,
at least they previously took some trouble to make it lucid.
It has been left for the modern mobs of Anglicans and Nonconformists
to persecute for a doctrine without even stating it.
For these reasons, and for many more, I for one have come
to believe in going back to fundamentals. Such is the general
idea of this book. I wish to deal with my most distinguished
contemporaries, not personally or in a merely literary manner,
but in relation to the real body of doctrine which they teach.
I am not concerned with Mr. Rudyard Kipling as a vivid artist
or a vigorous personality; I am concerned with him as a Heretic--
that is to say, a man whose view of things has the hardihood
to differ from mine. I am not concerned with Mr. Bernard Shaw
as one of the most brilliant and one of the most honest men alive;
I am concerned with him as a Heretic--that is to say, a man whose
philosophy is quite solid, quite coherent, and quite wrong.
I revert to the doctrinal methods of the thirteenth century,
inspired by the general hope of getting something done.
Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something,
let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to
pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages,
is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner
of the Schoolmen, "Let us first of all consider, my brethren,
the value of Light. If Light be in itself good--" At this point
he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush
for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go
about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality.
But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people
have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light;
some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness,
because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a
lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash
municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something.
And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes.
So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day,
there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all,
and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light.
Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must
discuss in the dark.
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