Chesterton and the New Pagans
They have returned — the heathen described by Chesterton in "The Ballad of the White Horse."
It may not be that the great convert was indulging in true prophecy, for the vanguard of the new pagans was apparent even in his day, led by men like Shaw, H. G. Wells, and their court of Marxist and naturalistic writers. (Bertrand Russell, too callow at the time to rank as a leader, has since become grand vizier of the new pagans — not out of maturity, of course, but out of veneration for being able to attract attention by saying so little.)
But for Chesterton to describe the complete ascendancy of the heathen so well in a poem written in 1911 is rather remarkable. It took rare foresight to predict their true character, the marks by which they would be known, the cunning with which they would be able to seduce even the orthodox, and the promises they would make (and in some cases fulfill).
Suffice it to say that Chesterton saw the new heathen coming "mild as monkish clerks," pen and scroll their weapons, working materialistic wonders, breaking the sword in order to make an end of all "free knights," making man forget "his sire," and binding all men to Nothing, thus rendering them slaves without a lord. (Book VIII, stanzas 37 et seq.)
It is important to note that these aims and characteristics are completely different from those of the pagans against which King Alfred, hero of the poem, and all of Europe fought at the end of Christianity's first millennium. The danger, however, is just as great or greater for modern Christianity, and precisely because of those aims and methods. This article, therefore, in a large part, will examine the differences between the new pagans and the old.
There is a self-serving self-effacement employed by the new pagans. Chesterton elsewhere has written that only feeble spirits live in the future (George Bernard Shaw). The feeble, he explained, deal in the featureless. The old pagans' total concern with the present was in part their undoing. They destroyed, ravaged, stole, and even ruled without an eye to dynasty. Their regime was measured by the fires they lit, and when those fires burned out or were beaten out by Christian swords, the pagan rule was over. If it was not a farsighted or "humanitarian" sort of rule, it at least was an honest one. It showed all mankind what it was, to be hated or to be joined.
Free to be Slaves
The new pagans are clever enough not to offer a present regime. Their currency is promises, redeemable when the unhoping and unbelieving have inherited the earth.
This disassociation from hard reality has allowed the new pagans to survive serious setbacks. For example, the perfectibility of mankind in an eviternal universe was shaken by both world wars, catastrophes that would have brought more responsible philosophies to destruction. But the exploits of postwar science have revivified the Wellsian concept. The marvelous thing about such dogma is that it holds until disproved, and it will only be disproved when the Last Judgment comes.
As late as last June, newspaper reports hailed discovery of a new galaxy, the discoverer of which claims it may show that the universe is self-renewing and without end. This is akin to the hoping of those feeble spirits described by Chesterton. It gives the new pagans an endless period for trial and error, although in their philosophy there is no error since there is no truth.
Here is the enslavement to Nothing with a capital N. The old pagans worked a submission, but the new pagans pretend to spread liberation. When Guthrum the Dane, Alfred's enemy, triumphed in town or shire, the citizens were beholden to him by force. He did no violence to concept of loyalty, but only to its exercise.
The new pagans pretend an universal emancipation, but, since they mean a release from all loyalties, they substitute nihilistic slavery. A man loyal to nothing outside himself is a slave to self. The only place where men are completely tied to Nothing is an insane asylum. Chesterton recognized that the new pagans would attempt to turn the whole world into a Bedlam.
Acceptables vs. Morals
Let us consider the statement made by Dr. Clifford R. Adams of the department of psychology of Pennsylvania State University, writing in the May, 1960, issue of a well-known monthly magazine for women. "Moral standards are norms established by society in terms of what it considers the best interests of its members," he wrote, in discussing the desirability of premarital sex experience.
This most assuredly is good dogma in the new pagans' lexicon. The idea is to escape from moral dogmatism. But what is the actual result? Either 1) enslavement to the majority's opinion of what is in its best interests, or 2) a moral anarchy in which the weak are prey to the morally unscrupulous.
This amorality of the new pagans, therefore, wreaks havoc worse than that of the ancient marauders, for their tyranny rested on the sword and passed with the sword. The damage done by the new pagans is permanent, since it rests upon a philosophy, or, rather, the destruction of all philosophy.
How the new paganism spreads from the theories of men like Dr. Adams to the practical world may be seen in the case of Schmidt v. United States, 177 F. 2nd 450. In this case the eminent Learned Hand reversed an order denying naturalization to an alien who admitted to occasional acts of fornication. This, reasoned Judge Hand, did not show the petitioner to lack "good moral character," because society does not demand an unmarried man to live completely celibate.
Now, it is true that fornication per se may not destroy good moral character, but the decision does not rest upon society's opinion. The majority can no more make fornication proper than it could justify the rapine of Guthrum the Dane. True, the majority may make fornication acceptable, but the society then would perforce be paganized.
The ancient pagans would not have dared maintain it was right to destroy because the majority in England might have become so perverse as to enjoy the sight of burning homes and monasteries. They were sensible enough to say they destroyed because they were strong enough to destroy. Such a concept, at least, leaves intact the idea that wanton destruction is evil.
The analogy is plain. The concept of Dr. Adams and Judge Hand vitiates any idea that fornication is evil. They have out-paganized the pagan.
Nor is Lord Russell kind to truth. In one of his more recent books, Human Society in Ethics and Politics, this "monkish clerk" of the new paganism deplores "the vindictive ethic that justifies hell" and that holds "it is good that sinners should suffer."
Although we know of no ethic except possibly the Puritan one that enjoys the torment of sinners, Lord Russell's view shows how impervious are the new pagans to experience. When the superstitions of Guthrum deserted him and the ravens of his banners fell to the swordsmen of Alfred, the Dane accepted the religion of his conquerors. By the time of the great Danish King of England, Cnut, the pagans had become as good Christians as their Saxon foes.
Lord Russell's non-sense of sin (actually just plain nonsense) suffered a defeat as devastating as that of the old paganism at Edington. World War II exploded in the face of all believers in the pagan cult of liberal humanitarianism. Hitler and Stalin were adequate proof that enlightened ethics cannot exist apart from the Ten Commandments.
"Civic morality," which, incidentally, Lord Russell admits is necessary for civilization, depends upon loyalty to a fixed code of morality. You can have the grin without the cat only in fairy tales. Lord Russell, however, is naive enough to preach that you can have civic morality without a law and concomitant sanctions.
This concept works the destruction of "free knights," as Chesterton quite correctly understood. The future good society predicted by the humanitarians must be based (since it is not based on law) upon some ameliorative instinct, not upon free will. The opposite side of the image is the Existential despair of the beatniks, who are the Cassandra cult of the new paganism. In both cases mankind is sold into slavery — a slavery without a lord. The slaves of the old pagans at least retained loyalty, either to their defeated ideals or to their new masters. The new slaves are not granted the dignity of loyalty, for loyalty is anathema to the heathen of this generation.
Loyalty to What?
This is a partial explanation of the treason of the intellectuals today, particularly among certain members of the scientific fraternity. A few years ago, Einstein hastened to applaud the decision of Garry Davis to give up his American citizenship. The young "world citizen's" action can be dismissed as uninformed juvenile bravado, like that of the New York high-school lad who recently renounced an American Legion award. Einstein's, however, was undoubtedly prompted by the modern pagan's renunciation of all but a higher "loyalty" — a loyalty to "humanity," which, since humanity is a formless abstraction, devolves into loyalty to self.
When a committee, appointed at the request of Dr. Detlev W. Bronk, president of the National Academy of Science, reported that research leading to a cure for cancer "would be no less beneficial to all humanity for having been made by a Communist," it was giving approval to the idea that the high-priests of the new paganism are outside or above loyalty. It is a protective device to render them immune from the consequences of their disbelief. Like the "benefit of clergy" of older times, scientists today demand the right to be judged only by other scientists.
Dr. Bronk might have considered that it is of little benefit to cure men of cancer in order to render them healthy slaves of the new paganism. It is a strange type of beneficial science that would cure of cancer at the service of masters who kill those who believe in God or freedom of thought.
Here the new pagans far surpass the ruthlessness of the old, who did not pretend to humanitarianism at all. No Hun or Dane, stripping his enemy of sword and armor, was more cruel than the intellectuals today who strip men of their spiritual dignity and their freely given loyalty to country. When today's professors call on youths to forget their sire — i.e., their American heritage and their religious commitments — they are acting like the barbarians who despoiled palaces, libraries, and cathedrals. Thinking of agnostic professors we feel the full poignancy of Chesterton's lines:
And backward shall ye turn and gaze,
Desiring one of Alfred's days,
When pagans still were men.
Today's "monkish clerks" have taken the lead in attempting to "break the sword" of the West in its battle with the more crude manifestation of today's paganism. The efforts of men like Dr. Linus Pauling to do away with our atomic arsenal can be viewed as just that — whether they are so consciously designed or not.
"By this Sign . . ."
King Alfred and other Christian leaders more than once tried to turn back the Danes with the soft metal of gold, paid in the form of tribute. They found to their regret that the pagans were glad to take the gold, but that they respected only a cheaper metal — hardened steel. The lesson came nearly too late for Christian England. Alfred finally learned that when he was willing to fight to preserve Christianity, the tide turned against almost unbelievable odds. (Alfred at one time was reduced to a mere handful of knights against thousands of Danes!)
If there is any legitimacy in Chesterton's prophecy about the new pagans, then there is certainly danger in the pagans' attempts to have the West cast aside its weapons and deal with the Communists through bribery and retreat.
This, by the way, was the sure sign by which Chesterton said the return of the pagans would be known: "By this sign you shall know them,/The breaking of the sword . . ."
The correctness of Chesterton's analysis of the new pagans has been verified with each decade since 1911.
By details of the sinning
And denial of the sin;
By thought a crawling ruin,
By life a leaping mire
By a broken heart in the breast of the world,
And the end of the world's desire;
By God and man dishonoured,
By death and life made vain,
Know ye the old barbarian,
The barbarian come again . . .
The soothsayers of the modern heathen (psychiatrists and sociologists) and the minstrels (the novelists) are expert at the details of sinning. They purvey it as knowledge on the one hand; as entertainment on the other. But they deny the sin altogether. (I need not add I am speaking of not all psychiatrists, sociologists, and novelists.)
How unmanly is this denial of the reality of sin, compared to the ancient heathens who lusted mightily, but had room for repentance and restitution. Guthrum would have laughed loud and long had he been told by his soothsayers that he raided British towns out of a compulsion inherited from some Nordic ancestor and slew monks because of a complex stemming from the fact that his father wore brown resembling a monk's robes.
The ruins of town and villa brought down by the ancient invaders could be repaired. Not so the "crawling ruin" of thought created by modern teachers of "philosophy" in most of our universities. Here students hear that thought is some biological process (we read a Sunday supplement report attributing to dolphins an intelligence higher than man's). Introductory courses in "philosophy" are concerned with a laborious inspection of prattlings of men who jumbled ideas like jackstraws, and introductory courses in "religion" are irreverent (though churchly quiet) considerations of everything done by all manners of men and ministers in the name of religion.
"Songs of Simple Men" and "Good Laws of Ancient Kings"
Small wonder that both God, the object of true religion, and man, the object of true philosophy, are dishonored, and "death and life made vain." Logically, the perfect grade in a course in "philosophy" in most secular universities would be earned by suicide. It is interesting that the disciples of Sartre by the scores had the logic and honesty to reach that very conclusion, if we may be allowed levity about so serious a sin.
"In what wise men shall smite him?", Chesterton asks about the new barbarian. He, of course, knew the answer, but quite possibly doubted about its application. Courage in the truth is the universal bane of pagans, both new and old. This is a weapon the heathen cannot grasp or turn aside. His coming is known by "weakness winning." His going shall be known when men find once again what all men once knew — that it is better to die in hope than live in despair; better to taste once the joy of truth than live forever in the darkness of hell, which is the ultimate nihilism, the final error, and the total triumph of Nothing.
The Christian West shall have to learn the weapons to use before it can hope to turn back the new paganism. It can be taught not by science or learning, but by holy men like Alfred, who "gathered the songs of simple men" and "gat good laws of the ancient kings,/Like treasures out of the tombs . . ."
© Joseph F. Wagner, Inc.
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