"But Christianity really breaks down the middle wall of the partition. It takes a convert from central Africa and tells him to obey an enlightened universalist ethic: it takes a twentieth-century academic prig like me and tells me to go fasting to a Mystery, to drink the blood of the Lord. The savage convert has to be Clear: I have to be Thick. That is how one knows one has come to the real religion." C.S. Lewis
I have recently been reading The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton and as I went through it one of the things that caught my attention was the special care Chesterton gave to how Christianity combines mythology and philosophy, both of which had been completely separate until then except with the Jews. I do not need to discuss the flaws of the mere mythology of the pagan world (although it is important to note that it was disconnected from any kind of theology and perhaps not really believed in an intellectual sense) but it is worthwhile to consider the failings of human philosophy. Obviously there is the sense in secular philosophy of wandering through the dark, the way in which it falls into the pit of skepticism every other century, and the common accusation that philosophers confuse simple issues and turn common sense on its head (this, I think, is more often an excuse for intellectual laziness than a serious accusation) but the real trouble that Chesterton points out is something else entirely. This is that virtually all philosophies present their image of the world and of history as a pattern. Everything is evil. Everything is good. Everything is an illusion. Nothing is knowable. The claims go on and on, always trying to reduce the sum of all complexities to an ultimate simplicity. What we need is not a pattern, as Chesterton points out, but a story.
That is the difference between Christianity and nearly every worldview in competition with it. As a story it is not exceptionally complex but the mere fact that it is a story at all allows for far greater depth than any mere asceticism. At the same time, it is a story inextricably caught up in metaphysics, ethics, and the very meaning of life. At every point it resists the simplifications of worldly sages, even at times by being simpler than expected.
In Communism and Fascism the individual is swallowed up into the collective but in the Body of Christ the members are more themselves inside than outside as they each fit perfectly into the place that was prepared for them. In Hinduism and Buddhism it is a great evil to be born into the world and an even greater evil that the world should exist at all and the whole goal of these two religions is to pass into oblivion; by contrast, the Christian at once holds the world to be beautiful and wonderfully made while at the same preaching that it is fallen and will one day burn with the flames of rebirth. Whereas Postmodernists disregard any moral absolutes and Muslims preach divine law, the Christ-follower believes at once in salvation by grace and a straight and narrow path. Dualism defines good and evil as two equal and opposite forces but holy scripture treats good as the healthy, perfect original and evil as a parasite.
In studying the classic Christian writers one may also come to see the many forms of goodness. In my personal studies and speculations I have found four basic forms of goodness: wisdom, beauty, righteousness, and being. Of these I resisted a belief in both beauty and being as inherently good (indeed, I found it difficult to accept this to be true of any of them except for righteousness) but ultimately my worldly simplicity gave in. After all, who can deny the goodness of sunset or a walk through the woods? Even if there are those who are both beautiful and wicked, why should we expect the different forms to be united in a fallen world? As for being, consider the nature of things evil. Are they not less substantial than things good? Between two worlds of equal proportions of righteousness and wickedness in which one felt both with great passion and the other felt it in a diluted form, can we not say that even from a worldly perspective the world in which good and evil are really felt is the better one?
However, the really startling thing about this is not that these things are goodness but that they are all goodness. Just as all moral laws are different forms of love and all moral fortitude is courage regardless of what virtue is tested and righteousness is also both of those, so too is goodness wisdom and righteousness and being and beauty. Goodness is one thing and yet it is also these four very different things just as those four different things are each many other different things. Humility is not chastity but they are both love and to offend one is to offend all. Beauty is not righteousness but any attempt at beauty without righteousness is empty and perverse. All are one and yet all are distinct.
In this same way, the Holy Trinity is one. The Father is in the Son and the Son is in the Father but they are still distinct. They are all God but they are not all each other.
I apologize for this poorly written blog and hope that I have somehow managed through this fractured and confused peice of writing my latest revelation of God's eternal truth. The biblical worldview is a mythology, is in fact the maturation of all mythologies, but it is the mythology recorded and sung in Olympus rather than the one composed by Homer. It is a philosophy, is in fact the foundation of all rational philosophy, but it is the philosophy described by Goodness Himself and not the one made up of Plato's glimpses of Him. It is a story with all the fullness of life because it is the story of life.
