Curiosity killed the Catechism

Mis-Educating our Children

2009-05-21T14:12:00.000-07:00

The trouble in too many of our modern schools is that the State, being controlled so specially by the few, allows cranks and experiments to go straight to the schoolroom when they have never passed through the Parliament, the public house, the private house, the church, or the marketplace.
Obviously it ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are put first to the baby. But in a school today the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself. The flopping infant of four actually has more experience, and has weathered the world longer than the dogma to which he is made to submit.
Many a school boasts of having the last ideas in education, when it has not even the first idea; for the first idea is that even innocence, divine as it is, may learn something from experience. But this is all due to the mere fact that we are managed by a little oligarchy; my system presupposes that men who govern themselves will govern their children.
- G K Chesterton, Whats wrong with The World

ill-Liberal Theology

2009-05-21T14:07:00.000-07:00

There will be no end to weary debates about liberalizing theology, until people face the fact that the only liberal part of it is the dogmatic part. If dogma is incredible, it is because it is incredibly liberal. If it is irrational, it can only be in giving us more assurance of freedom than is is justified by reason. The obvious example is that essential freedom which we call free will. It is absurd to say that a man shows his liberality in denying his liberty. But it is tenable that he has to affirm a transcendental doctrine in order to affirm his liberty. There is a sense in which we may reasonably say that if a man has a primary power of choice, he has in that fact a supernatural power of creation, as if he could raise the dead or give birth to the unbegotten. Possibly in that case a man must be miracle; and certainly in that case he must be a miracle in order to be a man; and most certainly in order to be free man. But it is absurd to forbid him to be free man and do it in the name of a more free religion. ... Anybody who believes in God must believe in the absolute supremacy of God. But in so far as that supremacy does allow any of any degrees that can be called liberal or illiberal, it is self evident that the illiberal power is the deity of the rationalists and the liberal power is the deity of the dogmatists. Exactly in proportion as you turn monotheism into monism you turn it into despotism. It is precisely the unknown God of the scientist, with his impenetrable purpose and unalterable law, that reminds us of a Prussian autocrat making rigid plans in a remote tent and moving mankind like machinery. It is precisely the God of miracles and of answered prayers who reminds us of a liberal and popular prince, listening to parliaments and considering the cases of the whole people... What the denouncer of dogma means is not that dogma is bad; but rather that it is too good to be true... Dogma gives man too much freedom when he falls... That is what the intelligent skeptics ought to say... We say, not lightly but very literally, that the truth has made us free. They say that it makes us so free that it cannot be the truth... I decline to show any respect for those who... rivet the chains and refuse the freedom... [who] tell us that our emancipation is a dream and our dungeon a necessity; and then calmly turn around and tell us they have a freer thought and a more liberal theology.
- G K Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

The Christian Creed

2009-04-16T11:03:00.001-07:00

The creed was like a key in three respects; which can be most conveniently summed up under this symbol. First, a key is above all things a thing with a shape. It is a thing that depends entirely upon keeping its shape. The Christian creed is above all things the philosophy of shapes and the enemy of shapelessness. That is where it differs from all that formless infinity, Manichean or Buddhist, which makes a sort of pool of night in the dark heart of Asia; the ideal of uncreating all the creatures. That is where it differs also from the analogous vagueness of mere evolutionism; the idea of creatures constantly losing their shape. A man told that his solitary latchkey had been melted down with a million others into a Buddhistic unity would be annoyed. But a man told that his key was gradually growing and sprouting in his pocket, and branching into new wards or complications, would not be more gratified.
Second, the shape of a key is in itself a rather fantastic shape. A savage who did not know it was a key would have the greatest difficulty in guessing what it could possibly be. And it is fantastic because it is in a sense arbitrary. A key is not a matter of abstractions; in that sense a key is not a matter of argument. It either fits the lock or it does not. It is useless for men to stand disputing over it, considered by itself; or reconstructing it on pure principles of geometry or decorative art. It is senseless for a man to say he would like a simpler key; it would be far more sensible to do his best with a crowbar. And thirdly, as the key is necessarily a thing with a pattern, so this was one having in some ways a rather elaborate pattern. When people complain of the religion being so early complicated with theology and things of the kind, they forget that the world had not only got into a hole, but had got into a whole maze of holes and comers. The problem itself was a complicated problem; it did not in the ordinary sense merely involve anything so simple as sin. It was also full of secrets, of unexplored and unfathomable fallacies, of unconscious mental diseases, of dangers in all directions. If the faith had faced the world only with the platitudes about peace and simplicity some moralists would confine it to, it would not have had the faintest effect on that luxurious and labyrinthine lunatic asylum. What it I did do we must now roughly describe; it is enough to say here that there was undoubtedly much about the key that seemed complex; indeed there was only one thing about it that was simple. It opened the door.
G. K. Chesterton - Orthodoxy

G K Chesterton on Feminism

2008-11-04T15:34:00.000-08:00

The basic problem of feminism is the misconception that men and women are equal. It may come as a shock to some people, but there is in fact a difference between men and women. Chesterton says, "The difference between man and woman accounts for almost everything important that has happened. We must realize that when we try to make man and woman alike." He says that of the two sexes, the woman is in the more powerful position. The woman controls the home, that fundamental unit of society. If you control the home, you control society. Chesterton says, "When I think of the power of woman, my knees knock under me." Ironically, the feminists, by giving up their power in the home, gave up all their power. When they moved into the workplace, most women certainly became like most men in that they became wage slaves, but they did not gain anything, and they certainly did not gain power. It was a distinct step downward. "What is called the economic independence of women is the same as what is called the economic wage-slavery of men."Feminists lost the privilege of raising their children to a day-care industry or a public school. Or they did something even worse: they killed their children.
- Dale Ahlquist on G K Chesterton

True Worship

2008-10-02T09:27:00.000-07:00

"Novelty, simply as such, can have only an entertainment value. And they [conservative church goers, which he believes make up the majority] don't go to be entertained. They go to use the service, or if you prefer, to enact it.
Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we receive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore. And it enables us to do these things best...when, through familiarity, we don't have to think about it. As long as you notice, and have to count, the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance. A good shoe is a shoe you don't notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling. The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God...
...A still worse thing may happen. Novelty may fix our attention not even on the service but on the celebrant. You know what I mean. Try as one may to exclude the question, 'What on earth is he up to now?' will intrude. It lays one's devotion waste. There is really some excuse for the man who said, 'I wish they'd remember that the charge to Peter was Feed my sheep; not Try experiments on my rats, or even, Teach my performing dogs new tricks."
C. S. Lewis - Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

Sin: A Sacrilege

2008-09-30T16:27:00.000-07:00

A question at once arises. Is it still God speaking when a liar or a blasphemer speaks? In one sense, almost Yes. Apart from God he could not speak at all; there are no words not derived from the Word; no acts not derived from Him who is Actus purus. And indeed the only way in which I can make real to myself what theology teaches about the heinousness of sin is to remember that every sin is the distortion of an energy breathed into us--an energy which, if not thus distorted, would have blossomed into one of those holy acts whereof "God did it" and "I did it" are both true descriptions. We poison the wine as He decants it into us; murder a melody He would play with us as the instrument. We caricature the self-portrait He would pain. Hence all sin, whatever else it is, is sacrilege.
C.S. Lewis - Letters to Malcolm:Chiefly on Prayer

Omnipotence Paradox

2008-09-30T15:36:00.000-07:00

Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say ‘God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it’, you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix them with the two other words ‘God can’. It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.
- C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

G K CHESTERTON - The Colossal Genius' Aphorisms

2008-09-11T13:51:00.000-07:00

"Everything has in fact another side to it, like the moon, the patroness of nonsense. Viewed from that other side, a bird is a blossom broken loose from its chain of stalk, a man a quadruped begging on its hind legs, a house a gigantesque hat to cover a man from the sun, a chair an apparatus of four wooden legs for a cripple with only two. This is the side of things which tends most truly to spiritual wonder."

"The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason."

"For religion all men are equal, as all pennies are equal, because the only value in any of them is that they bear the image of the king."

The Liberal

2008-09-08T23:37:00.000-07:00

The new rebel is a skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. Thus he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then he writes another book (about the sex problem) in which he insults it himself. He curses the Sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity, and then curses Mrs. Grundy because they keep it. As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. He calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble. The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes hi hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.
- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Orthodoxy

2008-08-13T15:50:00.000-07:00

...doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground...The outer ring of Christianity is a rigid guard of ethical abnegations and professional priests; but inside that inhuman guard you will find the old human life dancing like children, and drinking wine like men; for Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom. But in the modern philosophy the case is opposite; it is its outer ring that is obviously artistic and emancipated; its despair is within.
- G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

Joy

2008-08-13T13:17:00.000-07:00

Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian...The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city: Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.
- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

"Looking at" and "Looking Along"

2008-08-11T10:32:00.000-07:00

I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing inthe place. Everything else was almost pitch-black.I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.Then I moved, so that the beam fell on myeyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) nobeam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 oddmillion miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.
- C. S. Lewis, Meditation in a Toolshed

The Philosophy of Light

2008-08-07T17:06:00.000-07:00

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.
- GK Chesterton, Heretics

A Living God

2008-08-07T16:55:00.000-07:00

"It is always shocking to meet life where we thought we were alone. 'Look out!' we cry, 'it's alive'. And therefore this is the very point at which so many draw back - I would have done so myself if I could - and proceed no further with Christianity. An 'impersonal God' - well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads - better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap - best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband - that is quite another matter. There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion ('Man's search for God!') suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us?"
- C. S. Lewis, Miracles

God's Megaphone to arouse a deaf world

2008-08-07T09:32:00.000-07:00

"Your bid for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity, will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high....Nothing will shake a man--or at any rate a man like me--out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself."
- C.S.Lewis, A Grief Observed,

The Violence of Reason

2008-07-29T09:58:00.000-07:00

Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.
G. K. Chesterton - Twelve Types (1903) Charles II

Faith in the Fog

2008-07-28T14:17:00.000-07:00

“What is a lion?” asked the Witch.
“Oh hang it all!” said Scrubb. “Don’t you know? How can we describe it to her? Have you ever seen a cat?”
“Surely,” said the Queen. “I love cats.”
“Well a lion is a little bit – only a little bit, mind you – like a huge cat – with a mane. At least, it’s not like a horse’s mane, you know, it’s more like a judge’s wig. And it’s yellow. And terrifically strong.”
The Witch shook her head. “I see,” she said, “that we should do no better with your lion, as you call it, than we did with your sun. You have seen lamps, and so you imagined a bigger and better lamp and called it the sun. You’ve seen cats, and now you want a bigger and better cat, and it’s to so called a lion. Well, ‘tis a pretty make-believe though, to say a truth, it would suit you all better if you were younger. And look how you can put nothing into your make-believe without copying it from the real world, this world of mine, which is the only world. But even you children are too old for such play. As for you, my Prince, that art a man full grown, fie upon you! Are you not ashamed of such toys? Come, all of you. Put away these childish tricks. I have work for you all in the real world. There is no Narnia, no Overworld, no sky, no sun, no Aslan. And now, to bed all. And let us begin a wiser life tomorrow. But first, to bed; to sleep; deep sleep, soft pillows, sleep without foolish dreams.”
The Prince and the two children were standing with their heads hung down, their cheeks flushed, their eyes half closed; the strength all gone from them; the enchantment almost complete. But Puddleglum, desperately gathering all his strength, walked over to the fire. The he did a very brave thing...
With his bare foot he stamped on the fire, grinding a large part of it into ashes on the flat hearth. …
“One word, Ma’am,” he said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. “One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if their isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.”
(C. S. Lewis - The Silver Chair)

Perspective Makes all the Difference

2008-07-28T14:08:00.000-07:00

A sidewalk preacher giving a sermon in a downtown park. He is loudly praising God as he describes the Biblical account of Moses parting the Red Sea, leading the children of Israel through it, and finally seeing Pharaoh’s army destroyed in the deluge. The preacher is interrupted by an atheist who tells him that he’s done a lot of research and come to the conclusion that the events described must have happened at a place called the “Reed Sea,” where the water was only six inches deep and could easily have been divided by a naturally occurring steady wind.
Having stated his case, the atheist leaves for lunch satisfied that he has debunked the preacher’s ill-placed faith. But when he returns sometime later, the preacher is thanking God even more loudly than before for His miracle in saving the children of Israel. The atheist pulls him aside and says, “I thought I told you this didn’t happen at the Red Sea.” The preacher says, “Yes, I know, I’m not testifying about the miracle of parting the water anymore. I’m praising God for the fact that He managed to drown the entire army of Pharaoh in just six inches of water.”

The Paradox of Power

2008-07-17T10:21:00.000-07:00

We look back upon history, and what do we see? Empires rising and falling. Revolutions and Counterrevolutions. Wealth accumulated and wealth disbursed. Shakespeare has written of the rise and fall of great ones, that ebb and flow with the moon. I look back upon my own fellow countrymen, once upon a time dominating a quarter of the world, most of them convinced, in the words of what is still a popular song, that the God who made them mighty, shall make them mightier yet.

I've heard a crazed, cracked Austrian announce to the world the establishment of a Reich that would last a thousand years. I have seen an Italian clown say he was going to stop and restart the calendar with his own ascension to power. I've heard a murderous Georgian brigand in the Kremlin, acclaimed by the intellectual elite of the world as wiser than Solomon, more humane than Marcus Aurelius, more enlightened than Ashoka.

I have seen America, wealthier and in terms of military weaponry, more powerful than the rest of the world put together, so that had the American people so desired, they could have outdone a Caesar, or an Alexander in the range and scale of their conquests.

All in one lifetime, all in one lifetime, all gone. Gone with the wind.

England part of a tiny island off the coast of Europe, threatened with dismemberment and even bankruptcy. Hitler and Mussolini dead, remembered only in infamy. Stalin a forbidden name in the regime he helped found and dominate for some three decades. America haunted by fears of running our of those precious fluids that keeps their motorways roaring, and the smog settling, with troubled memories of a disastrous campaign in Vietnam, and the victories of the Don Quixotes of the media as they charged the windmills of Watergate.

All in one lifetime, all in one lifetime, all gone. Gone with the wind.

Behind the debris of these solemn supermen, and self-styled imperial diplomatists, there stands the gigantic figure of one, because of whom, by whom, in whom and through whom alone, mankind may still have peace: The person of Jesus Christ. I present him as the way, the truth, and the life.

The more I look at the saviors of man, the more beautiful Jesus becomes to me.

I have bent my knee to Him and I found in Him, everything.

~ Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom

All good things are definable

2008-07-15T17:04:00.000-07:00

Whenever you hear much of things being unutterable and indefinable and impalpable and unnamable and subtly indescribable, then elevate your aristocratic nose towards heaven and snuff up the smell of decay. It is perfectly true that there is something in all good things that is beyond all speech or figure of speech. But it is also true that there is in all good things a perpetual desire for expression and concrete embodiment; and though the attempt to embody it is always inadequate, the attempt is always made. If the idea does not seek to be the word, the chances are that it is an evil idea. If the word is not made flesh it is a bad word.

~ G.K. Chesterton, A Miscellany of Men

In holy things may be unholy greed

2008-07-08T16:00:00.000-07:00

Dear Mary,

A line in haste about the bits underlined in your letter (which I enclose for reference). Don't be too easily convinced that God really wants you to do all sorts of work you needn't do. Each must do his duty "in that state of life to which God has called him". Remember that a belief in the virtues of doing for doing's sake is characteristically feminine, characteristically American, and characteristically modern: so that three veils may divide you from the correct view! There can be intemperance in work just as in drink. What feels like zeal may be only fidgets or even the flattering of one's self-importance. As MacDonald says "In holy things may be unholy greed". And by doing what "one's station and its duties" does not demand, one can make oneself less fit for the duties it does demand and so commit some injustice. Just you give Mary a little chance as well as Martha!

Yours, Jack

~C.S. Lewis, Letters To An American Lady, Letter of March 19, 1956