G.K. Chesterton on his pre-conversion experience with Christianity: (please excuse the ellipses — Gilbert was a loquacious fellow)
“As I read and re-read all the non-Christian or anti-Christian accounts of the faith, from Huxley to Bradluagh, a slow and awful impression grew gradually but graphically upon my mind — the impression that Christianity must be a most extraordinary thing… It was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons…One accusation against Christianity was that it prevented men, by morbid tears and terrors, from seeking joy and liberty in the bosom of Nature. But another accusation was that it comforted men with a fictitious providence, and put them in a pink-and-white nursery…One rationalist had hardly done calling Christianity a nightmare before another began to call it a fool’s paradise. This puzzled me; the charges were inconsistent. Christianity could not at once be the black mask on a white world, and also the white mask on a black world…
It must be understood that I did not conclude hastily that the accusations were false or the accusers fools. I simply deduced that Christianity must be something ever weirder and wickeder than they made out. A thing might have these two opposite vices; but it must be a queer thing if it did. A man might be too fat in one place and too thin in another; but he would be an odd shape…This began to be alarming. It looked not so much as if Christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with…
I wished to be quite fair then, and I wish to be quite fair now; and I did not conclude that the attack on Christianity was all wrong. I only conluded that if Christianity was wrong, it was very wrong indeed…if this mass of mad contradictions really existed, quakerish and blooodthirsty, too gorgeous and too thread-bare, austere, yet pandering preposterously to the lust of the eye, the enemy of women and their foolish refuge, a solumn pessimist and a silly optimist, if this evil existed, then there was in this evil something quite supreme and unique…The only explanation which immediately occurred to my mind was that Christianity did not come from heaven, but from hell. Really, if Jesus of Nazareth was not the Christ, He must have been the Antichrist.
And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still thunderbolt. There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation. Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him to dark, and some too fair. One explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall…Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad — in various ways.”
(From his book, “Orthodoxy”. A favorite of mine.)
In class last night, we began arguing about whether or not we should be optimists or pessimists. Both sides felt that their perspective offered the best conditioning for the unexpectedness of life. Thinking of the above quote from Chesterton, I said I thought that perhaps as Christians we are not called to pessimists or optimists; we are called to be reality-seeking-truth-tellers. To the secular optimist, our views of human depravity and the ultimate destruction of the world as we know it will seem the most despairing pessimism. To the secular pessimist, our views of redemption, hope and joy will seem irrational optimism. Regardless, we are called to be the normal which appears extraordinary.
CSD