THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND CONVERSION BY G. K. CHESTERTON, CHAPTER IV: THE WORLD INSIDE OUT

CHAPTER IV: THE WORLD INSIDE OUT

The first fallacy about the Catholic Church is the idea that it is a
church. I mean that it is a church in the sense in which the
Nonconformist newspapers talk about The Churches. I do not
intend any expression of contempt about The Churches; nor is it
an expression of contempt to say that it would be more convenient
to call them the sects. This is true in a much deeper and more
sympathetic sense than may at first appear; but to begin with, it is
certainly true in a perfectly plain and historical sense, which has
nothing to do with sympathy at all. Thus, for instance, I have much
more sympathy for small nationalities than I have for small sects.
But it is simply a historical fact that the Roman Empire was the
Empire and that it was not a small nationality. And it is simply a
historical fact that the Roman Church is the Church and is not a
sect. Nor is there anything narrow or unreasonable in saying that
the Church is the Church. It may be a good thing that the Roman
Empire broke up into nations; but it certainly was not one of the
nations into which it broke up. And even a person who thinks it
fortunate that the Church broke up into sects ought to be able to
distinguish between the little things he likes and the big thing he
has broken. As a matter of fact, in the case of things so large, so
unique and so creative of the culture about them as were the
Roman Empire and the Roman Church, it is not controversial but
simply correct to confine the one word to the one example.
Everybody who originally used the word "Empire" used it of that
Empire; everybody who used the word "Ecclesia" used it of that
Ecclesia. There may have been similar things in other places, but
they could not be called by the same name for the simple reason
that they were not named in the same language. We know what we
mean by a Roman Emperor; we can if we like talk of a Chinese
Emperor, just as we can if we like take a particular sort of a
Mandarin and say he is equivalent to a Marquis. But we never can
be certain that he is exactly equivalent; for the thing we are
thinking about is peculiar to our own history and in that sense
stands alone. Now in that, if in no other sense, the Catholic Church
stands alone. It does not merely belong to a class of Christian
churches. It does not merely belong to a class of human religions.
Considered quite coldly and impartially, as by a man from the
moon, it is much more sui generis than that. It is, if the critic
chooses to think so, the ruin of an attempt at a Universal Religion
which was bound to fail. But calling the wreckers to break up a
ship does not turn the ship into one of its own timbers; and cutting
Poland up into three pieces does not make Poland the same as
Posen.

But in a much more profound and philosophical sense this notion
that the Church is one of the sects is the great fallacy of the whole
affair. It is a matter more psychological and more difficult to
describe. But it is perhaps the most sensational of the silent
upheavals or reversals in the mind that constitute the revolution
called conversion. Every man conceives himself as moving about
in a cosmos of some kind; and the man of the days of my youth
walked about in a kind of vast and airy Crystal Palace in which
there were exhibits set side by side. The cosmos, being made of
glass and iron, was partly transparent and partly colourless;
anyhow, there was something negative about it; arching over all
our heads, a roof as remote as a sky, it seemed to be impartial and
impersonal. Our attention was fixed on the exhibits, which were all
carefully ticketed and arranged in rows; for it was the age of
science. Here stood all the religions in a row--the churches or sects
or whatever we called them; and towards the end of the row there
was a particularly dingy and dismal one, with a pointed roof half
fallen in and pointed windows most broken with stones by passers-
by; and we were told that this particular exhibit was the Roman
Catholic Church. Some of us were sorry for it and even fancied it
had been rather badly used; most of us regarded it as dirty and
disreputable; a few of us even pointed out that many details in the
ruin were artistically beautiful or architecturally important. But
most people preferred to deal at other and more business-like
booths; at the Quaker shop of Peace and Plenty or the Salvation
Army store where the showman beats the big drum outside. Now
conversion consists very largely, on its intellectual side, in the
discovery that all that picture of equal creeds inside an indifferent
cosmos is quite false. It is not a question of comparing the merits
and defects of the Quaker meeting-house set beside the Catholic
cathedral. It is the Quaker meeting-house that is inside the
Catholic cathedral; it is the Catholic cathedral that covers
everything like the vault of the Crystal Palace; and it is when we
look up at the vast distant dome covering all the exhibits that we
trace the Gothic roof and the pointed windows. In other words,
Quakerism is but a temporary form of Quietism which has arisen
technically outside the Church as the Quietism of Fenelon
appeared technically inside the Church. But both were in
themselves temporary and would have, like Fenelon, sooner or
later to return to the Church in order to live. The principle of life
in all these variations of Protestantism, in so far as it is not a
principle of death, consists of what remained in them of Catholic
Christendom; and to Catholic Christendom they have always
returned to be recharged with vitality. I know that this will sound
like a statement to be challenged; but it is true. The return of
Catholic ideas to the separated parts of Christendom was often
indeed indirect. But though the influence came through many,
centrest it always came from one. It came through the Romantic
Movement, a glimpse of the mere picturesqueness of
mediaevalism; but it is something more than an accident that
Romances, like Romance languages, are named after Rome. Or it
came through the instinctive reaction of old-fashioned people like
Johnson or Scott or Cobbett, wishing to save old elements that had
originally been Catholic against a progress that was merely
Capitalist. But it led them to denounce that Capitalist progress and
become, like Cobbett, practical foes of Protestantism without
being practising followers of Catholicism. Or it came from the Pre-
Raphaelites or the opening of continental art and culture by
Matthew Arnold and Morris and Ruskin and the rest. But examine
the actual make-up of the mind of a good Quaker or
Congregational minister at this moment, and compare it with the
mind of such a dissenter in the Little Bethel before such culture
came. And you will see how much of his health and happiness he
owes to Ruskin and what Ruskin owed to Giotto; to Morris and what
Morris owed to Chaucer; to fine scholars of his own school like
Philip Wicksteed, and what they owe to Dante and St. Thomas.
Such a man will still sometimes talk of the Middle Ages as the Dark
Ages. But the Dark Ages have improved the wallpaper on his wall
and the dress on his wife and all the whole dingy and vulgar life
which he lived in the days of Stiggins and Brother Tadger. For he
also is a Christian and lives only by the life of Christendom.

It is not easy to express this enormous inversion which I have here
tried to suggest in the image of a world turned inside out. I mean
that the thing which had been stared at as a small something
swells out and swallows everything. Christendom is in the literal
sense a continent. We come to feel that it contains everything,
even the things in revolt against itself. But it is perhaps the most
towering intellectual transformation of all and the one that it is
hardest to undo even for the sake of argument. It is almost
impossible even in imagination to reverse that reversal. Another
way of putting it is to say that we have come to regard all these
historical figures as characters in Catholic history, even if they are
not Catholics. And in a certain sense, the historical as distinct
from the theological sense, they never do cease to be Catholic.
They are not people who have really created something entirely
new, until they actually pass the border of reason and create more
or less crazy nightmares. But nightmares do not last; and most of
them even now are in various stages of waking up. Protestants are
Catholics gone wrong; that is what is really meant by saying they
are Christians. Sometimes they have gone very wrong; but not
often have they gone right ahead with their own particular wrong.
Thus a Calvinist is a Catholic obsessed with the Catholic idea of
the sovereignty of God. But when he makes it mean that God
wishes particular people to be damned, we may say with all
restraint that he has become a rather morbid Catholic. In point of
fact he is a diseased Catholic; and the disease left to itself would
be death or madness. But, as a matter of fact, the disease did not
last long, and is itself now practically dead. But every step he
takes back towards humanity is a step back towards Catholicism.
Thus a Quaker is a, Catholic obsessed with the Catholic idea of
gentle simplicity and truth. But when he made it mean that it is a
lie to say "you" and an act of idolatry to take off your hat to a lady,
it is not too much to say that whether or not he had a hat off, he
certainly had a tile loose. But as a matter of fact he himself found
it necessary to dispense with the eccentricity (and the hat) and to
leave the straight road that would have led him to a lunatic
asylum. Only every step he takes back towards common sense is a
step back towards Catholicism. In so far as he was right he was a
Catholic; and in so far as he was wrong he has not himself been
able to remain a Protestant.

To us, therefore, it is henceforth impossible to think of the Quaker
as a figure at the beginning of a new Quaker history or the
Calvinist as the founder of a new Calvinistic world. It is quite
obvious to us that they are simply characters in our own Catholic
history, only characters who caused a great deal of trouble by
trying to do something that we could do better and that they did
not really do at all. Now some may suppose that this can be
maintained of the older sects like Calvinists and Quakers, but
cannot be maintained of modern movements like those of
Socialists or Spiritualists. But they will be quite wrong. The
covering or continental character of the Church applies just as
much to modern manias as to the old religious manias; it applies
quite as much to Materialists or Spiritualists as to Puritans. In all
of them you find that some Catholic dogma is, first, taken for
granted; then exaggerated into an error; and then generally reacted
against and rejected as an error, bringing the individual in
question a few steps back again on the homeward road. And this is
almost always the mark of such a heretic; that while he will wildly
question any other Catholic dogma, he never dreams of
questioning his own favourite Catholic dogma and does not even
seem to know that it could be questioned. It never occurred to the
Calvinist that anybody might use his liberty to deny or limit the
divine omnipotence, or to the Quaker that anyone could question
the supremacy of simplicity. That is exactly the situation of the
Socialist. Bolshevism and every shade of any such theory of
brotherhood is based upon one unfathomably mystical Catholic
dogma; the equality of men. The Communists stake everything on
the equality of man as the Calvinists staked everything on the
omnipotence of God. They ride it to death as the others rode their
dogma to death, turning their horse into a nightmare. But it never
seems to occur to them that some people do not believe in the
Catholic dogma of the mystical equality of men. Yet there are
many, even among Christians, who are so heretical as to question
it. The Socialists get into a great tangle when they try to apply it;
they compromise with their own ideals; they modify their own
doctrine; and so find themselves, like the Quakers and the
Calvinists, after all their extreme extravagances, a day's march
nearer Rome.

In short, the story of these sects is not one of straight lines
striking outwards and onwards, though if it were they would all be
striking in different directions. It is a pattern of curves continually
returning into the continent and common life of their and our
civilisation; and the summary of that civilisation and central
sanity is the philosophy of the Catholic Church. To us, Spiritualists
are men studying the existence of spirits, in a brief and blinding
oblivion of the existence of evil spirits. They are, as it were, people
just educated enough to have heard of ghosts but not educated
enough to have heard of witches. If the evil spirits succeed in
stopping their education and stunting their minds, they may of
course go on for ever repeating silly messages from Plato and
doggerel verses from Milton. But if they do go a step or two
further, instead of marking time on the borderland, their next step
will be to learn what the Church could have taught. To us,
Christian Scientists are simply people with one idea, which they
have never learnt to balance and combine with all the other ideas.
That is why the wealthy business man so often becomes a
Christian Scientist. He is not used to ideas and one idea goes to his
head, like one glass of wine to a starving man. But the Catholic
Church is used to living with ideas and walks among all those very
dangerous wild beasts with the poise and the lifted head of a lion-
tamer. The Christian Scientist can go on monotonously repeating
his one idea and remain a Christian Scientist. But if ever he really
goes on to any other ideas, he will be so much the nearer to being
a Catholic.

When the convert has once seen the world like that, with one
balance of ideas and a number of other ideas that have left it and
lost their balance, he does not in fact experience any of the
inconveniences that he might reasonably have feared before that
silent but stunning revolution. He is not worried by being told that
there is something in Spiritualism or something in Christian
Science. He knows there is something in everything. But he is
moved by the more impressive fact that he finds everything in
something. And he is quite sure that if these investigators really
are looking for everything, and not merely looking for anything,
they will be more and more likely to look for it in the same place.
In that sense he is far less worried about them than he was when
he thought that one or other of them might be the only person
having any sort of communication with the higher mysteries and
obviously rather capable of making a mess of it. He is no more
likely to be overawed by the fact that Mrs. Eddy achieved spiritual
healing or Mr. Home achieved bodily levitation than a fully
dressed gentleman in Bond Street would be overawed by the top-
hat on the head of a naked savage. A top-hat may be a good hat but
it is a bad costume. And a magnetic trick may be a sufficient
sensation but it is a very insufficient philosophy. He is no more
envious of a Bolshevist for making a revolution than of a beaver
for making a dam; for he knows his own civilisation can make
things on a pattern not quite so simple or so monotonous. But he
believes this of his civilisation and his religion and not merely of
himself. There is nothing supercilious about his attitude; because
he is well aware that he has only scratched the surface of the
spiritual estate that is now open to him. In other words, the
convert does not in the least abandon investigation or even
adventure. He does not think he knows everything, nor has he lost
curiosity about the things he does not know. But experience has
taught him that he will find nearly everything somewhere inside
that estate and that a very large number of people are finding next
to nothing outside it. For the estate is not only a formal garden or
an ordered farm; there is plenty of hunting and fishing on it, and,
as the phrase goes, very good sport.

For this is one of the very queerest of the common delusions about
what happens to the convert. In some muddled way people have
confused the natural remarks of converts, about having found
moral peace, with some idea of their having found mental rest, in
the sense of mental inaction. They might as well say that a man
who has completely recovered his health, after an attack of palsy
or St. Vitus' dance, signalises his healthy state by sitting
absolutely still like a stone. Recovering his health means
recovering his power of moving in the right way as distinct from
the wrong way; but he will probably move a great deal more than
before. To become a Catholic is not to leave off thinking, but to
learn how to think. It is so in exactly the same sense in which to
recover from palsy is not to leave off moving but to learn how to
move. The Catholic convert has for the first time a starting-point
for straight and strenuous thinking. He has for the first time a way
of testing the truth in any question that he raises. As the world
goes, especially at present, it is the other people, the heathen and
the heretics, who seem to have every virtue except the power of
connected thought. There was indeed a brief period when a small
minority did some hard thinking on the heathen or heretical side.
It barely lasted from the time of Voltaire to the time of Huxley. It
has now entirely disappeared. What is now called free thought is
valued, not because it is free thought, but because it is freedom
from thought; because it is free thoughtlessness.

Nothing is more amusing to the convert, when his conversion has
been complete for some time, than to hear the speculations about
when or whether he will repent of the conversion; when he will be
sick of it, how long he will stand it, at what stage of his external
exasperation he will start up and say he can bear it no more. For all
this is founded on that optical illusion about the outside and the
inside which I have tried to sketch in this chapter. The outsiders,
stand by and see, or think they see, the convert entering with
bowed head a sort of small temple which they are convinced is
fitted up inside like a prison, if not a torture-chamber. But all they
really know about it is that he has passed through a door. They do
not know that he has not gone into the inner darkness, but out into
the broad daylight. It is he who is, in the beautiful and beatific
sense of the word, an outsider. He does not want to go into a larger
room, because he does not know of any larger room to go into. He
knows of a large number of much smaller rooms, each of which is
labelled as being very large; but he is quite sure he would be
cramped in any of them. Each of them professes to be a complete
cosmos or scheme of all things; but then so does the cosmos of the
Clapham Sect or the Clapton Agapemone. Each of them is
supposed to be domed with the sky or painted inside with all the
stars. But each of these cosmic systems or machines seems to him
much smaller and even much simpler than the broad and balanced
universe in which he lives. One of them is labelled Agnostic; but
he knows by experience that it has not really even the freedom of
ignorance. It is a wheel that must always go round without a single
jolt of miraculous interruption--a circle that must not be squared
by any higher mathematics of mysticism; a machine that must be
scoured as clean of all spirits as if it were the avowed machine of
materialism. In living in a world with two orders, the supernatural
and the natural, the convert feels he is living in a larger world and
does not feel any temptation to crawl back into a smaller one. One
of them is labelled Theosophical or Buddhistic; but he knows by
experience that it is only the same sort of wearisome wheel used
for spiritual things instead of material things. Living in a world
where he is free to do anything, even to go to the devil, he does
not see why he should tie himself to the wheel of a mere destiny.
One of them is labelled Humanitarian; but he knows that such
humanitarians have really far less experience of humanity. He
knows that they are thinking almost entirely of men as they are at
this moment in modern cities, and have nothing like the huge
human interest of what began by being preached to legionaries in
Palestine and is still being preached to peasants in China. So clear
is this perception that I have sometimes put it to myself, as
something between a melancholy meditation and a joke. "Where
should I go now, if I did leave the Catholic Church?" I certainly
would not go to any of those little social sects which only express
one idea at a time, because that idea happens to be fashionable at
the moment. The best I could hope for would be to wander away
into the woods and become, not a Pantheist (for that is also a
limitation and a bore) but rather a pagan, in the mood to cry out
that some particular mountain peak or flowering fruit tree was
sacred and a thing to be worshipped. That at least would be
beginning all over again; but it would bring me back to the same
problem in the end. If it was reasonable to have a sacred tree it
was not unreasonable to have a sacred crucifix; and if the god was
to be found on one peak he may as reasonably be found under one
spire. To find a new religion is sooner or later to have found one;
and why should I have been discontented with the one I had
found? Especially, as I said in the first words of this essay, when it
is the one old religion which seems capable of remaining new.

I know very well that if I went upon that journey I should either
despair or return; and that none of the trees would ever be a
substitute for the real sacred tree. Paganism is better than
pantheism, for paganism is free to imagine divinities, while
pantheism is forced to pretend, in a priggish way, that all things
are equally divine. But I should not imagine any divinity that was
sufficiently divine. I seem to know that weary return through the
woodlands; for I think in some symbolic fashion I have walked that
road before. For as I have tried to confess here without excessive
egotism, I think I am the sort of man who came to Christ from Pan
and Dionysus and not from Luther or Laud; that the conversion I
understand is that of the pagan and not the Puritan; and upon that
antique conversion is founded the whole world that we know. It is
a transformation far more vast and tremendous than anything that
has been meant for many years past, at least in England and
America, by a sectarian controversy or a doctrinal division. On the
height of that ancient empire and that international experience,
humanity had a vision. It has not had another; but only quarrels
about that one. Paganism was the largest thing in the world and
Christianity was larger; and everything else has been
comparatively small.

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND CONVERSION

BY G. K. CHESTERTON

Nihil Obstat: Arthur J. Scanlan, S.T.D.
Censor Librorum.

Imprimatur: Patrick Cardinal Hayes
+Archbishop, New York.

New York, September 16, 1926.

Copyright, 1926 by MacMillan Company

EDITOR'S NOTE

It is with diffidence that anyone born into the Faith can approach
the tremendous subject of Conversion. Indeed, it is easier for one
still quite unacquainted with the Faith to approach that subject
than it is for one who has had the advantage of the Faith from
childhood. There is at once a sort of impertinence in approaching
an experience other than one's own (necessarily more imperfectly
grasped), and an ignorance of the matter. Those born into the Faith
very often go through an experience of their own parallel to, and in
some way resembling, that experience whereby original strangers
to the Faith come to see it and to accept it. Those born into the
Faith often, I say, go through an experience of scepticism in youth,
as the years proceed, and it is still a common phenomenon (though
not so often to be observed as it was a lifetime ago) for men of the
Catholic culture, acquainted with the Church from childhood, to
leave it in early manhood and never to return. But it is nowadays a
still more frequent phenomenon--and it is to this that I allude--for
those to whom scepticism so strongly appealed in youth to
discover, by an experience of men and of reality in all its varied
forms, that the transcendental truths they had been taught in
childhood have the highest claims upon their matured reason.

This experience of the born Catholic may, I repeat, be called in a
certain sense a phenomenon of conversion. But it differs from
conversion properly so called, which rather signifies the gradual
discovery and acceptance of the Catholic Church by men and
women who began life with no conception of its existence: for
whom it had been during their formative years no more than a
name, perhaps despised, and certainly corresponding to no known
reality.

Such men and women converts are perhaps the chief factors in the
increasing vigor of the Catholic Church in our time. The
admiration which the born Catholic feels for their action is exactly
consonant to that which the Church in its earlier days showed to
the martyrs. For the word "martyr" means "witness." The
phenomenon of conversion apparent in every class, affecting
every type of character, is the great modern witness to the truth of
the claim of the Faith; to the fact that the Faith is reality, and that
in it alone is the repose of reality to be found.

In proportion as men know less and less of the subject, in that
proportion do they conceive that the entrants into the City of God
are of one type, and in that proportion do they attempt some
simple definition of the mind which ultimately accepts
Catholicism. They will call it a desire for security; or an attraction
of the senses such as is exercised by music or by verse. Or they
will ascribe it to that particular sort of weakness (present in many
minds) whereby they are easily dominated and changed in mood
by the action of another.

A very little experience of typical converts in our time makes
nonsense of such theories. Men and women enter by every
conceivable gate, after every, conceivable process of slow
intellectual examination, of shock, of vision, of moral trial and
even of merely intellectual process. They enter through the action
of expanded experience. Some obtain this through travel, some
through a reading of history beyond their fellows, some through
personal accidents of life. And not only are the avenues of
approach to the Faith infinite in number (though all converging; as
must be so, since truth is one and error infinitely divided), but the
individual types in whom the process of conversion may be
observed differ in every conceivable fashion. When you have
predicated of one what emotion or what reasoning process brought
him into the fold, and you attempt to apply your predicate exactly
to another, you will find a misfit. The cynic enters, and so does the
sentimentalist; and the fool enters and so does the wise man; the
perpetual questioner and doubter and the man too easily accepting
immediate authority--they each enter after his kind. You come
across an entry into the Catholic Church undoubtedly due to the
spectacle, admiration and imitation of some great character
observed. Next day you come across an entry into the Catholic
Church out of complete loneliness, and you are astonished to find
the convert still ignorant of the great mass of the Catholic effect
on character. And yet again, immediately after, you will find a
totally different third type, the man who enters not from
loneliness, nor from the effect of another mind, but who comes in
out of contempt for the insufficiency or the evil by which he has
been surrounded.

The Church is the natural home of the Human Spirit.

The truth is that if you seek for an explanation of the phenomenon
of conversion under any system which bases that phenomenon on
illusion, you arrive at no answer to your question. If you imagine
conversion to proceed from this or that or the other erroneous or
particular limited and insufficient cause, you will soon discover it
to be inexplicable.

There is only one explanation of the phenomenon--a phenomenon
always present, but particularly arresting to the educated man
outside the Catholic Church in the English-speaking countries--
there is only one explanation which will account for the
multiplicity of such entries and for the infinitely varied quality of
the minds attracted by the great change; and that explanation is
that the Catholic Church is reality. If a distant mountain may be
mistaken for a cloud by many, but is recognised for a stable part
of the world (its outline fixed and its quality permanent) by every
sort of observer, and among these especially by men famous for
their interest in the debate, for their acuteness of vision and for
their earlier doubts, the overwhelming presumption is that the
thing seen is a piece of objective reality. Fifty men on shipboard
strain their eyes for land. Five, then ten, then twenty, make the
land-fall and recognise it and establish it for their fellows. To the
remainder, who see it not or who think it a bank of fog, there is
replied the detail of the outline, the character of the points
recognised, and that by the most varied and therefore convergent
and convincing witnesses--by some who do not desire that land
should be there at all, by some who dread its approach, as well as
those who are glad to find it, by some who have long most
ridiculed the idea that it was land at all--and it is in this
convergence of witnesses that we have one out of the innumerable
proofs upon which the rational basis of our religion reposes.

--The Editor.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER:

I. INTRODUCTORY: A NEW RELIGION

II. THE OBVIOUS BLUNDERS

III. THE REAL OBSTACLES

IV. THE WORLD INSIDE OUT

V. THE EXCEPTION PROVES THE RULE

VI. A NOTE ON PRESENT PROSPECTS

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.