Apologetics; Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith), 1874-1936; Christianity -- Essence, genius, nature
Mental and emotional liberty are not so simple as they look. Really they
require almost as careful a balance of laws and conditions as do social
and political liberty. The ordinary æsthetic anarchist who sets out to
feel everything freely gets knotted at last in a paradox that prevents
him feeling at all. He breaks away from home limits to follow poetry.
But in ceasing to feel home limits he has ceased to feel the "Odyssey."
He is free from national prejudices and outside patriotism. But being
outside patriotism he is outside "Henry V." Such a literary man is
simply outside all literature: he is more of a prisoner than any bigot.
For if there is a wall between you and the world, it makes little
difference whether you describe yourself as locked in or as locked out.
What we want is not the universality that is outside all normal
sentiments; we want the universality that is inside all normal
sentiments. It is all the difference between being free from them, as a
man is free from a prison, and being free of them as a man is free of a
city. I am free from Windsor Castle (that is, I am not forcibly detained
there), but I am by no means free of that building. How can man be
approximately free of fine emotions, able to swing them in a clear space
without breakage or wrong? _This_ was the achievement of this Christian
paradox of the parallel passions. Granted the primary dogma of the war
between divine and diabolic, the revolt and ruin of the world, their
optimism and pessimism, as pure poetry, could be loosened like
cataracts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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