A Miscellany of MenChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
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A Miscellany of Men
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
English essays -- 20th century
Thus Giotto or Fra Angelico would have at once admitted theologically
that God was too good to be painted; but they would always try to paint
Him. And they felt (very rightly) that representing Him as a rather
quaint old man with a gold crown and a white beard, like a king of the
elves, was less profane than resisting the sacred impulse to express Him
in some way. That is why the Christian world is full of gaudy
pictures and twisted statues which seem, to many refined persons, more
blasphemous than the secret volumes of an atheist. The trend of good
is always towards Incarnation. But, on the other hand, those refined
thinkers who worship the Devil, whether in the swamps of Jamaica or the
salons of Paris, always insist upon the shapelessness, the wordlessness,
the unutterable character of the abomination. They call him “horror
of emptiness,” as did the black witch in Stevenson's Dynamiter; they
worship him as the unspeakable name; as the unbearable silence. They
think of him as the void in the heart of the whirlwind; the cloud on
the brain of the maniac; the toppling turrets of vertigo or the endless
corridors of nightmare. It was the Christians who gave the Devil a
grotesque and energetic outline, with sharp horns and spiked tail. It
was the saints who drew Satan as comic and even lively. The Satanists
never drew him at all.
And as it is with moral good and evil, so it is also with mental clarity
and mental confusion. There is one very valid test by which we may
separate genuine, if perverse and unbalanced, originality and revolt
from mere impudent innovation and bluff. The man who really thinks he
has an idea will always try to explain that idea. The charlatan who has
no idea will always confine himself to explaining that it is much too
subtle to be explained. The first idea may really be very outree or
specialist; it may really be very difficult to express to ordinary
people. But because the man is trying to express it, it is most probable
that there is something in it, after all. The honest man is he who is
always trying to utter the unutterable, to describe the indescribable;
but the quack lives not by plunging into mystery, but by refusing to
come out of it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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