One thing I have been learning a lot about lately, thinking and reading about, really, is the utter insufficiency of reason to answer to the world. I am working on a longer article on the failure of apologetics, I have written two chapters in a surely never to be published book on the importance of emotional obedience in Paradise Lost, and as I raise my kids and see their sin and my own sins reflected back to me, I realize how little grip rationality really has on the world.
I used to hold great hope for rationality. One of my major papers in graduate school was on natural law in Milton. I hoped that if I could convince myself and my readership (which basically doesn't exist for a grad school essay; I'm not entirely convinced my professor read the whole thing) that God has so ordered this universe with evidences of himself and implanted into every human consciousness knowledge of this truth and his power then we would inevitably turn back towards Christianity.
What a freaking idiot I was. Our problem with following God is not primarily rational. We don't reason ourselves out of the faith, whatever that annoying college sophomore says to the contrary. We desire something more, choose it, and ex post facto come up with a flattering rationalistic explanation for our emotional collapse. I was talking with one of my students recently about spiritual habits. He told me that he wanted to read his Bible more. I told him, "No, you don't. If you wanted to read your Bible more you would. If you want to use your iPhone, you use it." He agreed. The problem wasn't time or energy or knowing whether or not it is a good thing as a spiritual habit to read one's Bible; the problem was that there is a universe of things he would rather do.
Anyways, back to Chesterton. I am reading Orthodoxy for maybe the third (perhaps fourth) time. In the first chapter, "The Maniac", Chesterton sets out to undermine the idea that the problems facing the world are problems of reason. He points out, with characteristic wit, that the madman is actually the most rational person you're ever likely to meet. The problem is that his rational capacities work in what Chesterton identifies as a "perfect but narrow circle." The madman's theory "explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way." So, for example, if a madman believes himself to be the subject of a massive conspiracy there is no using reason to lead him out of this wood. Everything reasonable--that cop just pulled you over for speeding, that man made a phone call after you walked past because he forgot to pick up his dry-cleaning--can be fit by the madman into the conspiracy: Of course that's what they would say. They have to have some cover.
Materialism and determinism, two popular philosophies of his day that have scarcely gone away, have the same problem for Chesterton. Similar to the case of the madman, they are marked by a "combination of an expansive and exhaustive reason with a contracted common sense." In inflating reason they deny what actually makes us human.
Chesterton's cure for these maladies is not argument, but mysticism: "Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity." The problem of the madman and the materialist and the determinist is that they try to explain too much. They engage in what we called "strong theory" in graduate school. They are not partial explanations of segments of reality; they explain everything whole hog. But this totality of explanation stultifies and denies the acceptance of paradox necessary to human living.
Chesterton writes that if a healthy man "saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them." For example, "he has always believed that there was a thing such as fate, but such a thing as free will also. . . It is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man." There are things in this life that are not explained by simple explanations. There are things in life--sometimes the best things--that make us forget that we are rational creatures at all.
Chesterton concludes the chapter in one of his more famous examples of symbolism. He writes:
"As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and health. Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal: it breaks out. For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is fixed forever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms forever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox at its centre it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travelers."
At the very heart of our faith is paradox. Contradiction. Clash. Our faith is not without reason, but is beyond and above reason at the same time. We worship a God who has revealed part of himself to us, but who would argue that we can or should or ought or maybe even ever will understand God in his utter glory and profound mystery and incandescent beauty? We all see in a mirror, dimly. Which is why the heart of Christian faith is not reason or intellect, but love, the chief emotion of paradox and mystery and glory and beauty. May it ever be.
