Is anyone familiar with GK’s work? Here’s a statement of his and I think I disagree:
“Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.”
-G.K. Chesterton
I’m interpreting him to mean that Christianity has overcome contradictions by embracing them and keeping them contradictions. But perhaps I’m not reading him correctly.
Anyone?
Do you think it is similar to what Rob bell talks about when he wants to leave the tensions of the Bible in place?
I think that’s right. I’m reading Orthodoxy right now, and he expresses a similar thought.
Sonia
Dave, I didn’t read Love wins. But I sympathize with Bell. However, I think a clear distinction for me is that tensions are apparent contradictions where “furious opposites” are actual contradictions.
In my opinion GK would be wrong. I have issues with those (might even include myself) who embrace contradictions while trying to use reason in order to access the truth. If contradictions can be true, then anything can be true. IE. Sure Allah is compassionate and sure he commands me to kill the infidel, yes it’s a contradiction, but I need to just accept it.
Once Christianity simply endorses contradictions, then I think it needs to bow out of the philosophical arena. What would be better is to express why these things are “tensions” and not contradictions.
Gene
I’m a fan of Chesterton, but he does have a weakness of not always being able to distinguish between proper paradox and outright contradiction, despite showing several times that he knows the distinction. He can be very convenient about this: he affirms and promotes the distinction when he thinks it’s in his favor, but then treats contradiction as if it was as acceptable as paradox when he thinks that’s in his favor. One infallible sign of when he himself thinks he’s cheating along that line, is when he admits that doing so is unreasonable or irrational, and then tries to make that a virtue of real truth. 
In this case, although he uses language that indicates he is worried he is being only contradictory and so is compensating by trying to make contradiction seem like a virtue, I think he is actually concerned with practical paradoxes (instead of contradictions) and the right governing of extremities, not by merely suppressing them but by insisting they respect one another.
So in the immediate context of the quote, Christianity encourages us to think of mankind in glorious honor but also encourages us to remember that we ourselves are broken. The humility that had been pessimistic about humanity had to go; the humility that could be pessimistic about one’s self was encouraged to stay. “Christianity thus held a thought of the dignity of man that could only be expressed in crowns rayed like the sun and fans of peacock plummage. Yet at the same time it could hold a thought about the abject smallness of man that could only be expressed in fasting and fantastic submission. …] When one came to think of one’s self [his emphasis], there was vista and void enough for any about of bleak abnegation and bitter truth. There the realistic gentleman could let himself go–as long as he let himself go at himself. Let him say anything against himself short of blaspheming the original aim of his being; let him call himself a fool and even a damned fool (though that is Calvinistic); but he must not say that fools are not worth saving. He must not say that a man, qua man, can be valueless. …] One can hardly think too little of one’s self. One can hardly think too much of one’s soul.”
What Chesterton was looking to avoid (when considering the true philosophy) was the dilution of two things by moderation that ought to be moderated by the combination of their full and proper strengths and color. The proper pride of the rational pagan or Stoic “does not lift the heart like the tongue of trumpets; you cannot go clad in crimson and gold for this.” On the other hand, neither “does it cleanse the soul with fire and make it clear like crystal; it does not (like a strict and searching humility) make a man as a little child, who can sit at the feet of the grass.”
Again on the next page: the rational pagan would say that some things one could forgive and others one could not. As far as the act was pardonable the man was pardonable. Christianity divides the crime from the criminal and puts both forgiveness and condemnation to the extreme: the criminal we must forgive unto seventy times seven; the crime we must not forgive at all. “We must be much more angry with theft than before, and yet much kinder to thieves than before.”
I came to read Chesterton when I was becoming a universalist, and while he is certainly not a universalist a lot of what he says fits well with purgatorial universalism (although he didn’t realize it or perhaps didn’t want to admit it). “We want not an amalgam or compromise, but both things at the top of their energy: love and wrath both burning.” “The optimist could pour out all the praise he liked on the gay music of the march, the golden trumpets, and the purple banners going into battle. But he must not call the fight needless. The pessimist might draw as darkly as he chose the sickening marches or the sanguine wounds. But he must not call the fight hopeless.”
The only thing I have to complain about this, is that his vision is shortsighted: he talks as if this is the proper state of all reality, even when he acknowledges that much of this is due to sin and the need to face it. If he followed out his logic, it would lead either to a cosmological dualism where good must always have an equal and opposite evil in order to express itself most fully, or at least to Calvinistic necessity of having a non-elect to give the good, even the One Who Is Good, someone to glory over and fight against; both of which ideas Chesterton otherwise deplored and rejected. Or it must lead to the full result of the lion lying down with the lamb, where the evildoer is reformed without losing the good that the evildoer was abusing.
Chesterton knew enough to know he shouldn’t call the fight hopeless. But he couldn’t bring himself to realize the best extension of his own principle, that the fight although finally and ultimately hopeful is not thereby needless.
Incidentally, I often had Chesterton in mind when writing the character of Jian in Cry of Justice; and in the (currently unreleased) sequel I nod to a couple of things from Heretics and its sequel Orthodoxy: the humorous observation that “John Smith” is too wild and poetic a name instead of too boring and mundane a name; and the epigram “The only hope worth anything is the hope that laughs at numbers!”
(Also, don’t forget to add Orthodoxy to the current reading list, Gene and Sonia! 
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