The Persecution of Religion

by G. K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News March 8, 1924

Most of us feel something rather arresting, not to say alarming, about the case of the man who was locked up in a lunatic asylum for eight years for being religious, or for taking a reasonable interest in the word "parallelogram,e and the idea of the end of the world. The persecution of science by religion is something of which we hear a good deal, and a good deal more than is historically accurate. But, in any case, it has pretty well come to an end. The persecution of religion by science has relatively, perhaps, only begun; but it is already at work, in we know not how many obscure cases of pedantry and cruelty. The mystics are very likely to be the martyrs when the psychologists become the kings. But there is involved a paradox that is still more peculiar. It is not merely that anything religious may be persecuted on the ground that it is not rational. It is also that anything irrational may be tolerated so long as it is also irreligious. It is only lunacy to assert religion; it is no longer lunacy to deny reason. If it were, all the professors of pragmatism would be locked up. The very incidents in this case afford an illustration. A man may be represented as mad and as making a mystical riddle of the word "parallelogram.e But a man is not regarded as mad because he says that parallel lines always meet. Our fathers would have called him a rank, raving madman; denying the self-evident and uttering a contradiction in terms. We only call him a mathematician of the never school of relativity or the fourth dimension. The man who said: "Two and two may make five in the fixed starse was a lunatic; and none the less a lunatic for being a literary man. I willingly admit that men of science have not a monopoly of this mental breakdown. But certainly the man who could talk as if the stars were fixed, and the numbers unfixed, was suffering from a complete mental breakdown. It is not half so crazy to expect the end of the world to come soon as to expect the Superman to come soon. Yet how many earnest evolutionists in our time have written gravely as if the Superman was to be expected next week! Things do come to an end; and a thing designed is generally reviewed by the designer when it has come to an end. A man planting a rhododendron bush sees it bloom and wither and pronounces on the experiment; and there is nothing irrational in a day of judgement, assuming a design. But there is nothing in the world to show that a rhododendron all by itself will sprout into a super-rhododendron all the colors of the rainbow, merely because that would be a superior plant. The Superman was simply and solely a phantom called out of the void by the imagination of a lunatic; a quite literal lunatic named Nietzche. Yet how vivid that utterly unreasonable vision became for many of our wavering and weak-minded generation! And the strangest thing of all is that it was some of the best brains that were thus bewitched. They also have their word "parallelogram,e like the blessed word "Mesopotamiae; but, while few soldiers want to go back to Mesopotamia, there are evidently sages who want to go back to Methuselah.

I need hardly say that I am not arguing that Mr. Bernard Shaw has a tile loose; I am only pointing out that there are far more tiles loose on the Hall of Science than on the parish church, or even the revivalist's chapel. On the contrary, it is my desire here to penetrate past the superficial oddities of Mr. Shaw's dramatic experiment, and consider whether the idea itself is in fact as sane as it is certainly serious. Mr. Shaw has suffered as a subject of criticism from two classes of critics. The first are those who say they do not know what he means, and think it necessary to infer that he means nothing. The second are those who think they do know what he means, and think it necessary to agree with it. Few people seem to see that it is quite possible to understand it pretty completely and disagree with it altogether. But, as a matter of fact, it is only by taking it seriously that anybody can disagree with to seriously. The man who says that Shaw's play is all nonsense is really lending valuable support to the man who says it is all sense. By confessing his inability to make anything of it, he is precluding himself from arguing with the man who makes everything of it. He is like a man who should defend Christianity against Renan's "Vie de Jesue by saying he thanked God he could not read the lingo. Or he is like a man who should reply to a detailed political denunciation by saying that the fellow gabbled too fast for him to follow. It would be impossible to pay a more complete tribute to the truth of a philosophy than to say that nobody understands it except the few people who have found it to be true. It would be impossible to pay Mr. Shaw a more complete compliment than to suggest that he mystifies the stupid and convinces the wise. Yet that is exactly the impression that is necessarily left by merely sneering at the eccentricity or extravagance or the extraordinary length or any other fantastic but merely external feature of the play like "Back to Methuselah.e I have, therefore, always tried to do in criticisms what Mr. Shaw himself does in prefaces, and discussed the doctrine which is the backbone of the whole business. For Mr. Bernard Shaw, of all men in the world, leaves the critics the least right to say they do not know what he means; for he elaborately explains it beforehand. Alone among the most fantastic fabulists, he not only adorns the fable with moral, but he actually puts the moral before the fable.

The preface to this particular play deals first with a more particular point; about which Mr. Shaw seems to me completely to prove his case. It is that the Darwinian version of evolution is, in the most emphatic sense of the phrase, not like life. It is impossible to believe that life has been so completely separated from will as it is implied in the notion of natural selection producing all the varieties of nature. It is far too much of a fortuitous concourse of animals like a fortuitous concourse of atoms. In that sense, every chapter of the "Origin of Speciese may be precisely described as a chapter of accidents. Natural selection is the most unnatural thing we can conceive. It is an eternal coincidence. But it is not only that the natural selection is not natural at all; it is the whole point of it that it is not selection at all. Nobody selects; and nothing cannot select. It seems to me in the largest and most luminous sense a matter of commonsense to say that, if there was not a clear design from above, then there was some sort of design from below; and it is quite possible, of course, that there was both. All this preliminary part of the preface and the argument is sound and on solid ground; because it is dealing with a definite theory and giving reasons for differing from the theory. In other words, it is trying to do in the case of Darwin what I am trying to do in the case of Shaw.

Mr. Shaw's notion is not meant to be nonsensical, but it is nonsensical; not as a term of abuse, but in the exact sense in which I have said that most sensible people would have called the modern talk about pragmatism and parallelism nonsensical. Any rational person, and especially any rational person, would have called it irrational. Any sceptic, from Lucretius or Lucian to Hume and Huxley, would have thought it far more rational to say that the world was coming to an end in a hundred years than to say that the life of a man was not coming to an end for three hundred years. The mere scale or scope of the modern prophecies would have seemed utterly unbalanced and bewildering to all the philosophies of civilized history. I think they would be right; but not merely because of anything externally extravagant about the scale or scope. What is unnatural about this philosophy is that it will not accept the only norm it can ever get; that which Aristotle called the measure of all things. A good and happy humanity is, humanly speaking, the idea by which we test political and social ideas; it is a test; it is in that sense the ideal. This futurist religion will not accept it as normal, and goes forth hunting for a new normal that it can never find. It can never find it because it can never fix it. It is obvious, of course, that a permanent ideal is absolutely necessary to anything like progress or reform. You cannot reform what is eternally formless; and you cannot march towards what is always moving about. What is the good of the progressive making certain that the children of the future shall have better boots, when the prophet is already saying that they will have no feet? It may seem a crazy comparison to say that children will have no feet. But it is not half so crazy as saying that people will have no children. And it actually is one part of this futurist scheme that the new generation will be born mature, without passing through childhood. That is an excellent working model of the whole issue. To us a world without children would not be a better world, but a very much worse world. It would not be an impossible Utopia, but simply an intolerable nightmare. And this is simply because we have kept in view, what the evolutionary lunatics have lost sight of, that there can be nothing more ideal that the ideal; and the only thing that affects humanity as an ideal at all is that which is fully human in being divine. For some of us it is fixed by a divine humanity, and even by a divine child.