Religion of the Dance (of the virtues)

“MEDIEVAL morality was full of the idea that one thing must balance another, that each stood on one side or the other of something that was in the middle, and something remained in the middle. There might be any amount of movement round this central thing; perpetually altering the attitudes, but preserving the balance. The virtues were like children going round the Mulberry Bush, only the Mulberry Bush was that Burning Bush which they made symbolic of the Incarnation; that flamboyant bush in which the Virgin and Child appear in the picture, with Rene of Provénce and his beloved wife kneeling at their sides.”

~G.K. Chesterton: Geoffrey Chaucer.

The Burning Bush (detail of triptych), by Nicolas Froment. Wood, 1476;  Cathedrale Saint Sauveur, Aix-en-Provence.
 

"They do not know the present"

"THE disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living. Without some such contrast or comparison, without some such shifting of the point of view, we should see nothing whatever of our own social surroundings. We should take them for granted, as the only possible social surroundings. We should be as unconscious of them as we are, for the most part, of the hair growing on our heads or the air passing through our lungs. It is the variety of the human story that brings out sharply the last turn that the road has taken, and it is the view under the arch of the gateway which tells us that we are entering a town.

"Yet this sense of the past is curiously patchy among the most intelligent and instructed people, especially in modern England."

~G.K. Chesterton: All I Survey, XXI.

"The Church would still somehow exist in God"

MacIan burst out like a man driven back and explaining everything.

"The Church is not a thing like the Athenaeum Club," he cried. "If the Athenaeum Club lost all its members, the Athenaeum Club would dissolve and cease to exist. But when we belong to the Church we belong to something which is outside all of us; which is outside everything you talk about, outside the Cardinals and the Pope. They belong to it, but it does not belong to them. If we all fell dead suddenly, the Church would still somehow exist in God. Confound it all, don't you see that I am more sure of its existence than I am of my own existence? And yet you ask me to trust my temperament, my own temperament, which can be turned upside down by two bottles of claret or an attack of the jaundice. You ask me to trust that when it softens towards you and not to trust the thing which I believe to be outside myself and more real than the blood in my body."

~G.K. Chesterton: The Ball and the Cross.

"I prefer a more grey and gracious haze"

"THE chief gift of hot weather to me is the somewhat unpopular benefit called a conviction of sin. All the rest of the year I am untidy, lazy, awkward, and futile. But in hot weather I feel untidy, lazy, awkward, and futile. Sitting in a garden-chair in a fresh breeze under a brisk grey and silver sky, I feel a frightfully strenuous fellow: sitting on the same garden-chair in strong sunshine, it begins slowly to dawn on me that I am doing nothing. In neither case, of course, do I get out of the chair. But I resent that noontide glare of photographic detail by the ruthless light of which I can quite clearly see myself sitting in the chair. I prefer a more grey and gracious haze, something more in the Celtic-twilight style, through which I can only faintly trace my own contours, vast but vague in the dusk and distance."

G.K. Chesterton: Illustrated London News, 6/11/10.

"The Dark Ages"

"IN a word, the most absurd thing that could be said of the Church is the thing we have all heard said of it. How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them."

 ~G.K. Chesterton: Orthodoxy.

"The morning stars singing together"

"THE mystic who passes through the moment when there is nothing but God does in some sense behold the beginningless beginnings in which there was really nothing else. He not only appreciates everything but the nothing of which everything was made. In a fashion he endures and answers even the earthquake irony of the Book of Job; in some sense he is there when the foundations of the world are laid, with the morning stars singing together and the sons of God shouting for joy. That is but a distant adumbration of the reason why the Franciscan, ragged, penniless, homeless and apparently hopeless, did indeed come forth singing such songs as might come from the stars of morning; and shouting, a son of God."

~G.K. Chesterton: Saint Francis of Assisi.
 

When the Morning Stars Sang Together, by William Blake.
Pen and black ink, watercolor, over traces of graphite,
ca. 1804–7; Book of Job, no. 14.

Mary and the Convert

"Mary and the Convert is the most personal of topics, because conversion is something more personal and less corporate than communion; and involves isolated feelings as an introduction to collective feelings. But also because the cult of Mary is in a rather peculiar sense a personal cult; over and above that greater sense that must always attach to the worship of a personal God. God is God, Maker of all things visible and invisible; the Mother of God is in a rather special sense connected with things visible; since she is of this earth, and through her bodily being God was revealed to the senses. In the presence of God, we must remember what is invisible, even in the sense of what is merely intellectual; the abstractions and the absolute laws of thought; the love of truth, and the respect for right reason and honourable logic in things, which God himself has respected. For, as St. Thomas Aquinas insists, God himself does not contradict the law of contradiction.

"But Our Lady, reminding us especially of God Incarnate, does in some degree gather up and embody all those elements of the heart and the higher instincts, which are the legitimate short cuts to the love of God."

~G.K. Chesterton: The Well and the Shallows.

Song of the Angels, by William Adolphe Bouguereau; 1881.