The Everlasting ManChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
The Everlasting Man
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Catholic Church -- Apologetic works; Christianity and other religions; Religion
But this is not the point about the pictures or the particular moral
here to be drawn from them. That moral is something much larger and
simpler, so large and simple that when it is first stated it will sound
childish. And indeed it is in the highest sense childish; and that is
why I have in this apologue in some sense seen it through the eyes of a
child. It is the biggest of all the facts really facing the boy in the
cavern; and is perhaps too big to be seen. If the boy was one of the
flock of the priest, it may be presumed that he had been trained in a
certain quality of common sense; that common sense that often comes to
us in the form of tradition. In that case he would simply recognise the
primitive man’s work as the work of a man, interesting but in no way
incredible in being primitive. He would see what was there to see; and
he would not be tempted into seeing what was not there, by any
evolutionary excitement or fashionable speculation. If he had heard of
such things he would admit, of course, that the speculations might be
true and were not incompatible with the facts that were true. The artist
may have had another side to his character besides that which he has
alone left on record in his works of art. The primitive man may have
taken a pleasure in beating women as well as in drawing animals; all we
can say is that the drawings record the one but not the other. It may be
true that when the cave-man’s finished jumping on his mother, or his
wife as the case may be, he loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling,
and also to watch the deer as they come down to drink at the brook.
These things are not impossible, but they are irrelevant. The common
sense of the child could confine itself to learning from the facts what
the facts have to teach; and the pictures in the cave are very nearly
all the facts there are. So far as that evidence goes, the child would
be justified in assuming that a man had represented animals with rock
and red ochre for the same reason as he himself was in the habit of
trying to represent animals with charcoal and red chalk. The man had
drawn a stag just as the child had drawn a horse; because it was fun.
The man had drawn a stag with his head turned as the child had drawn a
pig with his eyes shut; because it was difficult. The child and the man,
being both human, would be united by the brotherhood of men; and the
brotherhood of men is even nobler when it bridges the abyss of ages than
when it bridges only the chasm of class. But anyhow he would see no
evidence of the cave-man of crude evolutionism; because there is none to
be seen. If somebody told him that the pictures had all been drawn by
St. Francis of Assisi out of pure and saintly love of animals, there
would be nothing in the cave to contradict it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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