Latest / Catholic Church and Conversion / 002 - Introductory A New Religion

Transcript

002 - Introductory A New Religion · Catholic Church and Conversion

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Chapter one of The Catholic Church and Conversion. This is
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: a libriyvox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: For more information or to volunteer, please visit liberyvox dot org.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: Read by RICHA. The Catholic Church and Conversion by G. K. Chesterton,
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: introductory a new religion. The Catholic Faith used to be
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: called the old religion, but at the present moment it
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: has a recognized place among the new religions. This has
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: nothing to do with its truth or falsehood, but it
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: is a fact that has a great deal to do
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: with the understanding of the modern world. It will be
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: very undesirable that modern men should accept Catholicism merely as
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: a novelty. But it is a novelty. It does act
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: upon its existing environment with the peculiar force and freshness
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: of a novelty. Even those who denounce it generally denounce
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: it as a novelty, as an innovation, and not merely
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: a survival. The talk of the advanced parts in the
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: Church of England, they talk of the aggression of the
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: Church of Rome. When the talk of an extremist, they
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: are as likely to mean a ritualist as a socialist.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: Given any normal respectable Protestant family, Anglican or Puritan in
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: England or America, we shall find that Catholicism is actually,
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: for practical purposes treated as a new religion. That is
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: a revolution. It is not a survival. It is not,
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: in that sense an antiquity. It does not necessarily owe
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: anything to tradition in places a tradition can do nothing
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: for it. In places where all the tradition is against it,
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: it is intruding on its own merits, not as a
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: tradition but a truth. The father of some such Anglican
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: or American Puritan family will find very often that all
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: his children are breaking away from his own more or
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: less Christian compromise, regarded as normal in the nineteenth century,
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: and going off in various directions after various faith or
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: fashions which he would call facts. One of his sons
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: will become a socialist and hang up a portrait of Lenin.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: One of his daughters will become a spiritualist and plague
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: with the Planchett. Another daughter will go over to Christian science,
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: and it is quite likely that another son will go
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: over to Rome. The point is for the moment that
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: from the point of view of the father, and even
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: in a sense of the family. All these things act
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: after the manner of new religions, of great movements, of
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: enthusiasms that carry young people off their feet and leave
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: older people bewildered or annoyed. Catholicism, indeed, even more than
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: the others, is often spoken of as if it were
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: actually one of the wild passions of youth. Optimistic aunts
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: and uncles say that the youth will get over it,
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: as if it were a childish love affair, or that
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: unfortunate business with the barmaid. Darker and sterner aunts and uncles,
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: perhaps apps at a rather earlier period used actually to
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: talk about it as an indecent indulgence, as if its
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: literature were literally a sort of pornography. Newman remarks, quite naturally,
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: as if there were nothing odd about it. At the
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: time that an undergraduate found with an ascetic manual or
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: a book of monastic meditations was under a sort of
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: cloud or taint, as having been caught with a bad
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: book in his possession, he had been wallowing in the
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: sensual pleasures of nuns, or inflaming his lusts by contemplating
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: an incorrect number of candles. It is perhaps no longer
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: the custom to regard conversion as a form of dissipation,
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: but it is still common to regard conversion as a
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: form of revolt, and as regards the established convention of
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: much of the modern world, it is a revolt. The
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: worthy merchant of the middle class, the worthy farmer of
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: the middle West, when he sends his son to college,
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: does now feel a faint alarm lest the boy should
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: fall among thieves in the sense of communists. But he
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: has the same sort of fear lest he should fall
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: among Catholics. Now he has no fear lest he should
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: fall among Calvinists. He has no fear that his children
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: will become seventeenth century suprelapsarians, however much he may dislike
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: that doctrine. He is not even particularly troubled by the
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: possibility of their adopting the extreme Sulfidian conceptions once common
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: among some of the more extravagant Methodists. He is not
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: likely to await with terror the telegram that will inform
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: him that his son has become a fifth monarchy man,
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: any more than that he has joined the Albignesians. He
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: does not exactly lie awake at night wondering whether tom
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: at Oxford has become a Lutheran any more than a lord.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: All these religions he dimly recognizes as dead religions, or
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: at any rate as o religions, And he is only
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: frightened of new religions. He's only frightened of those fresh, provocative,
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: paradoxical new notions that fly to the young people's heads.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: But amongst these dangerous, juvenile attractions he does in practice
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: class the freshness and novelty of Rome. Now this is
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: rather odd, because Rome is not so very new among
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: these annoying new religions. One is rather an old religion.
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: But it is the only old religion that is so
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: new when it was originally and really new, No doubt,
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: a Roman father often found himself in the same position
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: as the Anglican or Puritan father. He too might find
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: all his children going strange ways and deserting the household,
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: gods and the sacred temple of the capital. He too
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: might find that one of those children had joined the
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: Christians in their ecclesia, and possibly in their catacombs. But
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: he would have found that of his other children one
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: cared for nothing but the mysteries of Orpheus. Another was
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: inclined to follow Mithras. Another was anew Bythegorian, who had
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: learned vegetarianism from the Hindoos, and so on. Though the
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: roomed father, unlike the Victorian father, might have the pleasure
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: of exercising the patria potestas and cutting off the heads
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: of all the heretics, he could not cut off the
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: stream of all the heresies. Only by this time most
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: of the streams an rather dry. It is now seldom
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: necessary for the ancient parent to warn his children against
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: the undesirable society of the bull of Mithras, or even
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: to wean him from the exclusive contemplation of Orpheus. And
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: though we have vegetarians always with us, they mostly know
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: but about true deeds than about by the goorris. When
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: that of the youthful extravagance is still useful, that other
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: new religion is once again knew, that one fleeting fashion
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: has refused to fleet, and that ancient bit of modernity
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: is still modern. It is still to the Protestant parent
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: now exactly what it was to the pagan parent. Then
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: we might say simply that it is a nuisance. But
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: anyhow it is a novelty. It is not simply what
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: the father is used to, or even what the son
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: is used to. It is coming in as something fresh
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: and disturbing, whether as it came to the Greeks, who
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: were always seeking some new thing, or as it came
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: to the shepherds, who first heard the cry upon the
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: heels of the good news that our language calls the Gospel.
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: We can explain the fact of the Greeks in the
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: time of Saint Paul regarding it as a new thing,
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: because it was a new thing. But who will explain
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: why it is still as new to do the last
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: of the converts as it was the first of the shepherds.
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: It is as if Man a hundred years old entered
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: the Olympian Games among the young Greek athletes, which would
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: surely have been the basis of a Greek legend. There
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: is something almost as legendary about the religion that is
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: two thousand years old, now appearing as a rival of
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: the new religions. That is what has to be explained
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: and cannot be explained away. Nothing can turn the legend
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: into a myth. We have seen with our own eyes
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: and heard with our own ears, this great modern quarrel
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: between young Catholics and old Protestants, And it is the
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: first step to recognize in any study of modern conversion.
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: I am not going to talk about numbers and statistics,
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: though I may say something about them later. The first
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: fact to realize is a difference of substance, which falsifies
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: all the difference of size. The great majority of Protestant
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: bodies to day, whether they are strong or weak, are
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: not strengthened in this particular fashion by the actual attraction
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: of their new followers to their old doctrines. A young
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: man will suddenly become a Catholic priest, or even a
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: Catholic monk, because he has a spontaneous and even impatient
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: personal enthusiasm for the doctrine of virginity as it appeared
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: to Saint Catharine or Saint Clair. But how many men
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: become Baptist ministers because they have a personal horror of
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: the idea of an innocent invent coming unconsciously to Christ.
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: How many honest Presbyterian ministers in Scotland really want to
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: go back to John Knox as a Catholic mystic might
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: want to go back to John of the Cross. These
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: men inherit positions which they feel they can hold with
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: reasonable consistency and general agreement, but they do inherit them.
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: For them, religion is tradition. We Catholics naturally do not
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: sneer at tradition, but we say that in this case
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: it is really tradition and nothing else. Not one man
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: in a hundred of these people would ever have joined
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: his present communion if he had been born outside it.
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: Not one man in a thousand of them would have
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: invented anything like his church formulas if they had not
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: been laid down for him. None of them has any
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: real reason for being in their own particular church, whatever
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: good reason they may still have for being outside ours.
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: In other words, the old creed of their communion has
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: ceased to function as a fresh and stimulating idea. It
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: is at best a motto or a war cry, and
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: at the worst a catchword. But it is not meeting
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: contemporary ideas. Like a contemporary idea in their time and
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: in their turn. We believe that those other contemporary ideas
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: will also prove their mortality by having also become motos
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: and catchwords and traditions a century or two. Hence, spiritualism
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: may be a tradition, and socialism may be a tradition,
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: and Christian science may be a tradition, but Catholicism will
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: not be a tradition. It will still be a nuisance
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: and a new and dangerous thing. These are the general
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: considerations which govern any personal study of conversion to the
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: Catholic Faith. The Church has defended tradition in a time
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: which stupidly denied and despised tradition. But that is simply
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: because the Church is always the one thing defending whatever
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: it is at the moment stupidly despised. It is already
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: beginning to appear as the only champion of reason in
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: the twentieth century, as it was the only champion of
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: tradition in the nineteenth. We know that the higher mathematics
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: is trying to deny that two and two make four,
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: and the higher mysticism to imagine something that is beyond
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: good and evil. Amid all these anti rational philosophies, ours
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: will remain the only rational philosophy. In the same spirit,
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: the Church did, indeed point out the value of tradition
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: to a time which treated it as quite valueless. The
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: nineteenth century neglect of tradition and mania for mere documents
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: were altogether nonsensical. They amounted to saying that men always
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: tell lies to children, but men never make mistakes in books.
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: But though our sympathies are traditional, because they are human,
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: it is not that part of the thing which ups
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: It is divine. The mark of the faith is not tradition.
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: It is conversion. It is the miracle by which men
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: find truth in spite of tradition, and often with the
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: rending of all the roots of humanity. It is with
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: the nature of this process that I propose to deal
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: and it is difficult to deal with it without introducing
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: something of a personal element. My own is only a
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: very trivial case, but naturally it is the case I
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: know best, and I shall be compelled in the pages
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: that follow to take many illustrations from it. I have
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: therefore thought it well to put first this natural note
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: on the nature of the movement in my time, to
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: show that I am well aware that it is a
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: very much larger and given a very much later movement
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: than is implied in describing my own life or generation.
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: I believe it will be more and more an issue
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: for the rising generation and for the generation after that,
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: as they discover the actual alternative in the awful actualities
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: of our time, and Catholics, when they stand up together
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: and sing Faith of our fathers, may realize, almost with amusement,
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: that they might well be singing Faith of our children.
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: And in many cases the return has been so recent
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: as almost to deserve the description of a children's crusade.
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: End of Chapter one,