Paying Attention To The Sky

G. K. Chesterton
When Plain Folk, such as you or I,
See the Sun sinking in the sky,
We think it is the Setting Sun,
But Mr. Gilbert Chesterton
Is not so easily misled.
He calmly stands upon his head,
And upside down obtains a new
And Chestertonian point of view,
Observing thus, how from his toes
The sun creeps nearer to his nose,
He cries with wonder and delight,
“How Grand the sunrise is to-night!”
by Oliver Herford
from Confessions of a Caricaturist

“What I have now to relate really happened; yet there was no element in it of practical politics or of personal danger. It was simply a quiet conversation which I had with another man. But that quiet conversation was by far the most terrible thing that has ever happened to me in my life….

The thing befell me in the days when I was at an art school. An art school is different from almost all other schools or colleges in this respect: that, being of new and crude creation and of lax discipline, it presents a specially strong contrast between the industrious and the idle. People at an art school either do an atrocious amount of work or do no work at all. I belonged, along with other charming people, to the latter class; and this threw me often into the society of men who were very different from myself, and who were idle for reasons very different from mine. I was idle because I was very much occupied; I was engaged about that time in discovering, to my own extreme and lasting astonishment, that I was not an atheist. But there were others also at loose ends who were engaged in discovering what Carlyle called (I think with needless delicacy) the fact that ginger is hot in the mouth….

Along the front of the big building of which our school was a part ran a huge slope of stone steps, higher, I think, than those that lead up to St. Paul’s Cathedral. On a black wintry evening he and I were wandering on these cold heights, which seemed as dreary as a pyramid under the stars. The one thing visible below us in the blackness was a burning and blowing fire; for some gardener (I suppose) was burning something in the grounds, and from time to time the red sparks went whirling past us like a swarm of scarlet insects in the dark. Above us also it was gloom; but if one stared long enough at that upper darkness, one saw vertical stripes of grey in the black and then became conscious of the colossal facade of the Doric building, phantasmal, yet filling the sky, as if Heaven were still filled with the gigantic ghost of Paganism.

The man asked me abruptly why I was becoming orthodox. Until he said it, I really had not known that I was; but the moment he had said it I knew it to be literally true. And the process had been so long and full that I answered him at once out of existing stores of explanation.

“I am becoming orthodox,” I said, “because I have come, rightly or wrongly, after stretching my brain till it bursts, to the old belief that heresy is worse even than sin. An error is more menacing than a crime, for an error begets crimes. An Imperialist is worse than a pirate. For an Imperialist keeps a school for pirates; he teaches piracy disinterestedly and without an adequate salary. A Free Lover is worse than a profligate. For a profligate is serious and reckless even in his shortest love; while a Free Lover is cautious and irresponsible even in his longest devotion. I hate modern doubt because it is dangerous.”

“You mean dangerous to morality,” he said in a voice of wonderful gentleness. “I expect you are right. But why do you care about morality?”

I glanced at his face quickly. He had thrust out his neck as he had a trick of doing; and so brought his face abruptly into the light of the bonfire from below, like a face in the footlights. His long chin and high cheek-bones were lit up infernally from underneath; so that he looked like a fiend staring down into the flaming pit. I had an unmeaning sense of being tempted in a wilderness; and even as I paused a burst of red sparks broke past.

“Aren’t those sparks splendid?” I said.

“Yes,” he replied.

“That is all that I ask you to admit,” said I. “Give me those few red specks and I will deduce Christian morality. Once I thought like you, that one’s pleasure in a flying spark was a thing that could come and go with that spark. Once I thought that the delight was as free as the fire. Once I thought that red star we see was alone in space. But now I know that the red star is only on the apex of an invisible pyramid of virtues. That red fire is only the flower on a stalk of living habits, which you cannot see. Only because your mother made you say ‘Thank you’ for a bun are you now able to thank Nature or chaos for those red stars of an instant or for the white stars of all time. Only because you were humble before fireworks on the fifth of November do you now enjoy any fireworks that you chance to see. You only like them being red because you were told about the blood of the martyrs; you only like them being bright because brightness is a glory. That flame flowered out of virtues, and it will fade with virtues. Seduce a woman, and that spark will be less bright. Shed blood, and that spark will be less red. Be really bad, and they will be to you like the spots on a wall-paper.”

He had a horrible fairness of the intellect that made me despair of his soul. A common, harmless atheist would have denied that religion produced humility or humility a simple joy: but he admitted both. He only said, “But shall I not find in evil a life of its own? Granted that for every woman I ruin one of those red sparks will go out: will not the expanding pleasure of ruin …”

“Do you see that fire ?” I asked. “If we had a real fighting democracy, some one would burn you in it; like the devil-worshipper that you are.”

“Perhaps,” he said, in his tired, fair way. “Only what you call evil I call good.”

He went down the great steps alone, and I felt as if I wanted the steps swept and cleaned. I followed later, and as I went to find my hat in the low, dark passage where it hung, I suddenly heard his voice again, but the words were inaudible. I stopped, startled: then I heard the voice of one of the vilest of his associates saying, “Nobody can possibly know.” And then I heard those two or three words which I remember in every syllable and cannot forget. I heard the Diabolist say, “I tell you I have done everything else. If I do that I shan’t know the difference between right and wrong.” I rushed out without daring to pause; and as I passed the fire I did not know whether it was hell or the furious love of God.”
Reading Selection The Diabolist by G.K. Chesterton

A Commentary by Garry Wills:
“The line of argument shows what straits Chesterton was in. He had come to the shocking awareness of evil, and this had pushed his solipsism to its most terrible state. If the world was his own illusion, all evil had its source in him, along with all “reality.” That is why he identifies moral restrictions and the intellectual bounds of reality –virgins seduced and stars dissolve, The “pyramid” is really a swaying tower for him, and the slightest relaxation or “relativism” will topple it. Chesterton was creating “the star” with his arguments; the spark’s foundation is a huge pyramid of symbolism hung in empty air.

The art student shattered the entire fabric of Chesterton’s argument by admitting the indictment: he wanted to quench stars. Here was a desire not touched by the “justifying” arguments, the mutually supporting but mutually enclosed ideas of Chesterton’s discourse. It entered the scheme of things like a destructive blast from another world. “What you call evil, I call good.” The Diabolist said, inverting the entire cosmos in Chesterton’s mind. As the student went down the stairs to meet his friends, he left a stunned and defeated enemy behind him. But as Chesterton followed him down the stairs, he half heard whispered plans of some proposed innovation in evil, to which the Diabolist replied, in the words which Chesterton remembers with a compelled accuracy, “If I do that, I shan’t know the difference between right and wrong.”

I rushed out without daring to pause, and as I passed fire I didn’t know whether it was hell or the furious love of God.”

This is what happens when you enter into modern internet forums and choose to debate abortion, homosexuality (gay marriage) or atheism. You meet those who literally can’t tell the difference between right and wrong, the descendants of GKC’s diabolist. Historically their arguments were also encountered and rejected during the great nineteenth century debate over slavery in Lincoln/Douglas. Then as now the arguments are the same, rooted in a moral relativism. “I wouldn’t choose to have a (slave/abortion) but I wouldn’t want to restrict you’re right to choose.”

Recently I have been debating abortion with the usual suspects on an internet forum. After some jousting over who abortion really benefits (that it fundamentally is a sexist injustice against women and children), I followed up with a jibe against President Obama and his pro-abortion policies. “Pro-abortion” gets the juices running for it flies in the face of the greatest conceit of “pro-choice” advocates: that somehow they are advocating for some kind of freedom or expansion of a benefit. Read this rant and file under “Lies The Liberal Media Spreads: Nobody is Pro-abortion.” What leaps off the page is that the argument is advanced by Rev. Katherine Hancock Ragsdale, the Dean of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts:

And when a woman becomes pregnant within a loving, supportive, respectful relationship; has every option open to her; decides she does not wish to bear a child; and has access to a safe, affordable abortion – there is not a tragedy in sight — only blessing. The ability to enjoy God’s good gift of sexuality without compromising one’s education, life’s work, or ability to put to use God’s gifts and call is simply blessing.

These are the two things I want you, please, to remember – abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Let me hear you say it: abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Abortion is a blessing and our work is not done.

I want to thank all of you who protect this blessing – who do this work every day: the health care providers, doctors, nurses, technicians, receptionists, who put your lives on the line to care for others (you are heroes — in my eyes, you are saints); the escorts and the activists; the lobbyists and the clinic defenders; all of you. You’re engaged in holy work.

This is an argument rooted in moral relativism and that uses religiously charged terms (“holy,” “blessing,” “Saints,” “God’s gift”) in a blasphemous disregard for the religious and their beliefs. That it comes from someone who is the Dean of a Divinity School simply illustrates further the sad decline of the Episcopal Church in America. I would offer that the baiting going on in that quote is directed toward Fundamentalists but serves to insult all religious. I don’t get the point of any of it, except for its self promotion. Want a pro-choice religious speaker at your next abortion clinic promotion? Contact Reverend Kathy at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge. Specially discounted summer rates now available.

Now many if not most pro-life advocates are traditional religious believers and see the gravely unjust or immoral acts of abortion to be sins. They understand sins precisely as offenses against God. That is their reason for opposing abortion; and thus it is God’s reason in their view, the unjust taking of innocent human life, which motivates them to oppose abortion and requires that human communities protect their unborn members against it. But there is a difference between Fundamentalists who might cite scripture (“in thy mother’s womb I formed thee” Jeremiah 1:5) as their chief or even sole reason to oppose abortion, and other pro-life advocates (my hero, Robert P. George, for example). The latter are unwilling to cede the scientific or philosophical to the pseudo intellectual sophists who populate the left, and apply human intelligence to the question. 

Before we assign a value to the sanctity or value of human life, we need to understand it, they say. When does human life begin, at birth, at the fetal stage, at some “ensoulment” of the human – perhaps a certain kind of brain wave that might indicate a unique type of human intelligence? Roll those PBS science tapes, Jerome.

Robert George explains the science behind his position on abortion: “A human being is conceived when a human sperm containing twenty-three chromosomes fuses with a human egg also containing twenty-three chromosomes (albeit of a different kind) producing a a single-cell human zygote containing , in the normal case, forty-six chromosomes that are massed differently from the forty-six chromosomes as found in the mother or father. Unlike the gametes (that is, the sperm and the egg), the zygote is genetically unique and distinct from its parents. Biologically, it is a separate organism. It produces, as the gametes do not, specifically human enzymes and proteins. It possesses, as they do not, the active capacity or potency to develop itself into a human embryo, fetus, infant, child, adolescent, and adult.

Assuming that it is not conceived in vitro, the zygote is, of course, in a state of dependence on its mother. But independence should not be confused with distinctness. From the beginning, the newly conceived human being, not its mother, directs its integral organic functioning. It takes in its nourishment and converts it to energy. Given a hospitable environment, it will, as Dianne Nutwell Irving says, “develop continuously without any biological interruptions, or gaps, throughout the embryonic, fetal, neo-natal, childhood and adulthood stages – until the death of the organism…

The significance of genetic completeness for the status of newly conceived human beings is that no outside genetic material is required to enable the zygote to mature into an embryo, the embryo into a fetus, the fetus into an infant, the infant into a child, the child into an adolescent, the adolescent into an adult. What the zygote needs to function as a distinct self-integrating human organism, a human being, it already possesses.”

Some have attacked this argument as the “gradualness of gestation,” but it is not the “gradualness” but the “continuous,” that is, the continuous development of a single lasting (fully human) being…. As the human zygote matures, in utero and ex utero, it does not “become” a human being, for it is a human being already, albeit an immature human being, just as a newborn infant is an immature human being who will undergo quite dramatic growth and development over time.” If no arbitrary line separates the hues of green and red, shall we conclude that green is red? This is what the left calls for that science simply refutes by the very nature of the human being.

The sophists of the left love to divert the argument into stages of human development or personhood or to get the Fundamentalists lost in debating when “ensoulment” occurs. The bald fact of the matter is that they do not believe that all human beings are persons, or have fundamental rights. They are not scandalized by the concept of a “human non-person” and “post-personal” human beings (as well as severely retarded human beings who never were and never will be “persons,” as they are pleased to define the term) to whom the promises of basic rights and equality under the law do not apply. The same arguments were applied to blacks under slavery. Recall that it was Lincoln who cut through the moral relativism of the slave owning class to mark the high ground in the argument. Slavery was simply wrong he argued, the way that abortion is wrong today.

How strange that the man who upheld his intrinsic worth, who fought for his right to be free returns the favor by co-opting his benefactor’s Family Bible during his Presidential inauguration, turning his back on his hero and fighting for the confederacy in the abortion wars. We live in interesting times. Obama is the Anti-Lincoln.

These are the same folks who wish to establish the grim doctrine that homosexuality is simply a matter of fate, and the dehumanizing idea that one’s core identity is determined by one’s sexual desires. We are more, immeasurably more, than our sexual desires. And morally disordered desires are hardly limited to homosexuality or to sexual desires of any kind. Those who succumb to homosexual desires are, like all sinners, to be loved and assured of the transforming power of God’s forgiveness. In law and social practice, they should not be subjected to unjust discrimination, but neither should the practices that define “the gay community” be put on a social or moral par with the union of man and woman in marriage. Yet speak to these truths on an online forum and you will be castigated as “homophobic.”

Peter Kreeft writes: “Beneath a moral difference you always find some moral argument. Otherwise it’s not a moral argument. Because all argument needs a common premise. You can’t even imagine a totally new morality any more than you can imagine a totally new universe, or set of numbers or colors….Try to imagine a society where honesty and justice and courage and self-control and faith and hope and charity are evil, and lying and cheating and stealing and cowardice and betrayal and addiction and despair and hate are all good.  You just can’t do it….You can create different acceptable rules for driving and speech and clothing and eating drinking…but we are not free to make murder or rape or slavery or treason right, or charity and justice wrong. We can create different mores but not different morals….We know from experience that we’re free to choose to hate, but we’re not free to experience a moral obligation to hate, only to love.”

Affirm the Gay conceit that homosexuality defines your humanity? Condemn the queer to living a life out of congruence with his faith? Turn your back on mothers and children who need something other than the violence of an abortion? Give a war induced quadriplegic a pamphlet with a contact for the hemlock society? Those who support such aberrations begin with common logic: So we can agree that there are relative scales of value, and that the value of a life can be understood as varying based on context, and can be compared to the values of other things. The difference between someone who is “anti-life” and someone who is “anti-choice”, then, isn’t in their belief in value — it’s in the way they measure and evaluate it, and the way they adjudicate the value of a life in a given context with the value of other things…

And the answer is No. No, we can’t agree. To the young, the early dead and their survivors, the baffled, the defeated, I don’t think we can be tender enough. These are the ones the left ideologues prey upon with their glib moral relativism. Only the Church defends against them.