The Five Deaths of the Faith

My most infrequent book group just finished GK Chesterton's The Everlasting Man. The others had not been familiar with it, though many of you have read it.  I draw your attention to Part II Chapter VI, The Five Deaths of the Faith. 

Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a god who knew the way out of the grave.  

That would be a classic Chestertonian inversion.  We have said for centuries that because the Church remains, that Christianity has never really died. GKC looks over the landscape and says "actually, it has, many times. But it has been resurrected after each death." John 12:24 unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. (KJV) This is not something that happened once, but repeatedly, just as the physical seeds do.

The Faith is not a survival. It is not as if the Druids had managed somehow to survive somewhere for two thousand years. That is what might have happened in Asia or ancient Europe, in that indifference or tolerance in which mythologies and philosophies could live for ever side by side. It has not survived; it has returned again and again in this western world of rapid change and institutions perpetually perishing. Europe, in the tradition of Rome, was always trying revolution and reconstruction; rebuilding a universal republic. And it always began by rejecting this old stone and ended by making it the head of the corner; by bringing it back from the rubbish-heap to make it the crown of the capitol. Some stones of Stonehenge are standing and some are fallen; and as the stone falleth so shall it lie. There has not been a Druidic renaissance every{291} century or two, with the young Druids crowned with fresh mistletoe, dancing in the sun on Salisbury Plain. Stonehenge has not been rebuilt in every style of architecture from the rude round Norman to the last rococo of the Baroque. The sacred place of the Druids is safe from the vandalism of restoration.

But the Church in the West was not in a world where things were too old to die; but in one in which they were always young enough to get killed. The consequence was that superficially and externally it often did get killed; nay, it sometimes wore out even without getting killed. And there follows a fact I find it somewhat difficult to describe, yet which I believe to be very real and rather important. As a ghost is the shadow of a man, and in that sense the shadow of life, so at intervals there passed across this endless life a sort of shadow of death. It came at the moment when it would have perished had it been perishable. It withered away everything that was perishable. If such animal parallels were worthy of the occasion, we might say that the snake shuddered and shed a skin and went on, or even that the cat went into convulsions as it lost only one of its nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine lives. It is truer to say, in a more dignified image, that a clock struck and nothing happened; or that a bell tolled for an execution that was everlastingly postponed.

Yet when you read his illustrations of this, those who know history keep coming up against interpretations that aren't...quite true.  There are things that looked like possible re-interpretations a century ago, but now are partly - never fully - impossible to assert. Chesterton is still a man of his time. He gets pieces of the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation wrong. We know more plain facts about the Dark Ages now, and Gilbert's read on them is skewy. Reading through the chapter, I feel his premise being undermined at several turns, and wonder if I will have to abandon it entirely. But strangely, when I redraw the lines to map out the changes as I now think they occurred, I find the the principle has held up even as the old evidence vanishes.  The new evidence is just as good, perhaps better.  It is a re-enactment of the very theory he is advocating.

So read the chapter and be not dismayed by any spot where it looks as if it is teetering on the edge of the cliff and about to fall. A new path opens up to the side and skirts the danger.