Whatever may be the meaning of faith, it must always mean a certainty about something we cannot prove. Thus, for instance, we believe by faith in the existence of other people.
But there is another Christian virtue, a virtue far more obviously and historically connected with Christianity, which will illustrate even better the connection between paradox and practical necessity.
This virtue cannot be questioned in its capacity as a historical symbol;certainly Mr. Lowes Dickinson will not question it.
It has been the boast of hundreds of the champions of Christianity.
It has been the taunt of hundreds of the opponents of Christianity.
It is, in essence, the basis of Mr. Lowes Dickinson's whole distinction between Christianity and Pagani**. I mean, of course, the virtue of humility. I admit, of course, most readily, that a great deal of false Eastern humility (that is, of strictly ascetic humility)mixed itself with the main stream of European Christianity.
We must not forget that when we speak of Christianity we are speaking of a whole continent for about a thousand years. But of this virtue even more than of the other three, I would maintain the general proposition adopted above. Civilization discovered Christian humility for the same urgent reason that it discovered faith and charity--that is, because Christian civilization had to discover it or die.
The great psychological discovery of Pagani**, which turned it into Christianity, can be expressed with some accuracy in one phrase.
The pagan set out, with admirable sense, to enjoy himself.
By the end of his civilization he had discovered that a man cannot enjoy himself and continue to enjoy anything else.
Mr. Lowes Dickinson has pointed out in words too excellent to need any further elucidation, the absurd shallowness of those who imagine that the pagan enjoyed himself only in a materialistic sense.
Of course, he enjoyed himself, not only intellectually even, he enjoyed himself morally, he enjoyed himself spiritually.
But it was himself that he was enjoying; on the face of it, a very natural thing to do. Now, the psychological discovery is merely this, that whereas it had been supposed that the fullest possible enjoyment is to be found by extending our ego to infinity, the truth is that the fullest possible enjoyment is to be found by reducing our ego to zero.
Humility is the thing which is for ever renewing the earth and the stars.
It is humility, and not duty, which preserves the stars from wrong, from the unpardonable wrong of casual resignation; it is through humility that the most ancient heavens for us are fresh and strong.
The curse that came before history has laid on us all a tendency to be weary of wonders. If we saw the sun for the first time it would be the most fearful and beautiful of meteors.
Now that we see it for the hundredth time we call it, in the hideous and blasphemous phrase of Wordsworth, "the light of common day."We are inclined to increase our claims. We are inclined to demand six suns, to demand a blue sun, to demand a green sun.
Humility is perpetually putting us back in the primal darkness.
There all light is lightning, startling and instantaneous.
Until we understand that original dark, in which we have neither sight nor expectation, we can give no hearty and childlike praise to the splendid sensationalism of things. The terms "pessimism" and "optimism," like most modern terms, are unmeaning.
But if they can be used in any vague sense as meaning something, we may say that in this great fact pessimism is the very basis of optimism. The man who destroys himself creates the universe.
To the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sun is really a sun;to the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sea is really a sea.
When he looks at all the faces in the street, he does not only realize that men are alive, he realizes with a dramatic pleasure that they are not dead.
I have not spoken of another aspect of the discovery of humility as a psychological necessity, because it is more commonly insisted on, and is in itself more obvious. But it is equally clear that humility is a permanent necessity as a condition of effort and self-examination.
It is one of the deadly fallacies of Jingo politics that a nation is stronger for despising other nations. As a matter of fact, the strongest nations are those, like Prussia or Japan, which began from very mean beginnings, but have not been too proud to sit at the feet of the foreigner and learn everything from him. Almost every obvious and direct victory has been the victory of the plagiarist.
This is, indeed, only a very paltry by-product of humility, but it is a product of humility, and, therefore, it is successful.
Prussia had no Christian humility in its internal arrangements;hence its internal arrangements were miserable. But it had enough Christian humility slavishly to copy France (even down to Frederick the Great's poetry), and that which it had the humility to copy it had ultimately the honour to conquer. The case of the Japanese is even more obvious; their only Christian and their only beautiful quality is that they have humbled themselves to be exalted.
