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
To sum up, in so far as it is true that recent centuries have seen an
attenuation of Christian doctrine, recent centuries have only seen what
the most remote centuries have seen. And even the modern example has
only ended as the medieval and pre-medieval examples ended. It is
already clear, and grows clearer every day, that it is not going to end
in the disappearance of the diminished creed; but rather in the return
of those parts of it that had really disappeared. It is going to end as
the Arian compromise ended, as the attempts at a compromise with
Nominalism and even with Albigensianism ended. But the point to seize in
the modern case, as in all the other cases, is that what returns is not
in that sense a simplified theology; not according to that view a
purified theology; it is simply theology. It is that enthusiasm for
theological studies that marked the most doctrinal ages; it is the
divine science. An old Don with D.D. after his name may have become the
typical figure of a bore; but that was because he was himself bored with
his theology, not because he was excited about it. It was precisely
because he was admittedly more interested in the Latin of Plautus than
in the Latin of Augustine, in the Greek of Xenophon than in the Greek of
Chrysostom. It was precisely because he was more interested in a dead
tradition than in a decidedly living tradition. In short, it was
precisely because he was himself a type of the time in which Christian
faith was weak. It was not because men would not hail, if they could,
the wonderful and almost wild vision of a Doctor of Divinity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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