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and does not feel any temptation to crawl back into a smaller one.
One of them is labelled Theosophical or Buddhistic; but he knows
by experience that it is only the same sort of wearisome wheel used
for spiritual things instead of material things. Living in a world
where he is free to do anything, even to go to the devil, he does
not see why he should tie himself to the wheel of a mere destiny.
One of them is labelled Humanitarian; but he knows that such
humanitarians have really far less experience of humanity.
He knows that they are thinking almost entirely of men as they are at
this moment in modern cities, and have nothing like the huge human
interest of what began by being preached to legionaries in Palestine
and is still being preached to peasants in China. So clear is this
perception that I have sometimes put it to myself, as something
between a melancholy meditation and a joke. "Where should I go now,
if I did leave the Catholic Church?" I certainly would not go to any
of those little social sects which only express one idea at a time,
because that idea happens to be fashionable at the moment.
The best I could hope for would be to wander away into the woods
and become, not a Pantheist (for that is also a limitation and a bore)
but rather a pagan, in the mood to cry out that some particular
mountain peak or flowering fruit tree was sacred and a thing
to be worshipped. That at least would be beginning all over again;
but it would bring me back to the same problem in the end.
If it was reasonable to have a sacred tree it was not unreasonable
to have a sacred crucifix; and if the god was to be found
on one peak he may as reasonably be found under one spire.
To find a new religion is sooner or later to have found one;
and why should I have been discontented with the one I had found?
Especially, as I said in the first words of this essay, when it
is the one old religion which seems capable of remaining new.
I know very well that if I went upon that journey I
should either despair or return; and that none of the trees
would ever be a substitute for the real sacred tree.
Paganism is better than pantheism, for paganism is free
to imagine divinities, while pantheism is forced to pretend,
in a priggish way, that all things are equally divine.
But I should not imagine any divinity that was sufficiently divine.
I seem to know that weary return through the woodlands; for I
think in some symbolic fashion I have walked that road before.
For as I have tried to confess here without excessive egotism,
I think I am the sort of man who came to Christ from Pan
and Dionysus and not from Luther or Laud; that the conversion I
understand is that of the pagan and not the Puritan; and upon
that antique conversion is founded the whole world that we know.
It is a transformation far more vast and tremendous
than anything that has been meant for many years past,
at least in England and America, by a sectarian controversy
or a doctrinal division. On the height of that ancient empire
and that international experience, humanity had a vision.
It has not had another; but only quarrels about that one.
Paganism was the largest thing in the world and Christianity
was larger; and everything else has been comparatively small.
CHAPTER V: THE EXCEPTION PROVES THE RULE
The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from
the degrading slavery of being a child of his age. I have compared
it with the New Religions; but this is exactly where it differs
from the New Religions. The New Religions are in many ways suited
to the new conditions; but they are only suited to the new conditions.
When those conditions shall have changed in only a century or so,
the points upon which alone they insist at present will have
become almost pointless. If the Faith has all the freshness
of a new religion, it has all the richness of an old religion;
it has especially all the reserves of an old religion.
So far as that is concerned, its antiquity is alone a great advantage,
and especially a great advantage for purposes of renovation and youth.
It is only by the analogy of animal bodies that we suppose
that old things must be stiff. It is a mere metaphor from bones
and arteries. In an intellectual sense old things are flexible.
Above all, they are various and have many alternatives to offer.
There is a sort of rotation of crops in religious history;
and old fields can lie fallow for a while and then be worked again.
But when the new religion or any such notion has sown its one crop
of wild oats, which the wind generally blows away, it is barren.
A thing as old as the Catholic Church has an accumulated armoury
and treasury to choose from; it can pick and choose among
the centuries and brings one age to the rescue of another.
It can call in the old world to redress the balance of the new.
Anyhow, the New Religions are suited to the new world;
and this is their most damning defect. Each religion is produced
by contemporary causes that can be clearly pointed out.
Socialism is a reaction against Capitalism. Spiritualism is a reaction
against Materialism; it is also in its intensified form merely
the trail of the tragedy of the Great War. But there is a somewhat
more subtle sense in which the very fitness of the new creeds makes
them unfit; their very acceptability makes them inacceptable.
Thus they all profess to be progressive because the peculiar boast
of their peculiar period was progress; they claim to be democratic
because our political system still rather pathetically claims
to be democratic. They rushed to a reconciliation with science,
which was often only a premature surrender to science.
They hastily divested themselves of anything considered
dowdy or old-fashioned in the way of vesture or symbol.
They claimed to have bright services and cheery sermons;
the churches competed with the cinemas; the churches even
became cinemas. In its more moderate form the mood was merely
one of praising natural pleasures, such as the enjoyment
of nature and even the enjoyment of human nature.
These are excellent things and this is an excellent liberty;
and yet it has its limitations.
We do not really want a religion that is right where we are right.
What we want is a religion that is right where we are wrong.
In these current fashions it is not really a question
of the religion allowing us liberty; but (at the best)
of the liberty allowing us a religion. These people merely
take the modern mood, with much in it that is amiable and much
that is anarchical and much that is merely dull and obvious,
and then require any creed to be cut down to fit that mood.
But the mood would exist even without the creed.
They say they want a religion to be social, when they would
be social without any religion. They say they want a religion
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Dobre pomysły nie mają przeszłości, mają tylko przyszłość. Robert Mallet
De minimis - o najmniejszych rzeczach.
Dobroć jest ważniejsza niż mądrość, a uznanie tej prawdy to pierwszy krok do mądrości. Theodore Isaac Rubin
Dobro to tylko to, co szlachetne, zło to tylko to, co haniebne.
Dla człowieka nie tylko świat otaczający jest zagadką; jest on nią sam dla siebie. I z obu tajemnic bardziej dręczącą wydaje się ta druga. Antoni Kępiński (1918-1972)
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