~Our Lady~
NOTE FROM THE WEB MASTER: We
continue to receive anti-Marian devotion e-mail from those who are
steeped in the error of Protestantism or are ignorant in general. This
is by way of our response. Please note well that the term "Goddess" as
used in the lines of verse the author is recalling are not his, and
please do not mistake the context, for Chesterton is not calling the Mother of God a
Goddess. The author is pausing to consider what it was like from a
Protestant point of view, before he was a convert. Nor is he being
disrespectful to Our Lady when he refers to this "Thing." The Thing is
what she represents not only who she really is a vocation, that is, it was she
who called him into the Catholic Church. I wish to forestall any
unnecessary, irate e-mail.
MARY AND THE CONVERT
by G.K. Chesterton
I WAS BROUGHT UP in a
part of the Protestant world which can best be described by saying that
it referred to the Blessed Virgin as the Madonna. Sometimes it referred
to her as a Madonna; from a general memory of Italian pictures. It was
not a bigoted or uneducated world; it did not regard all Madonnas as
idols or all Italians as Dagoes. But it had selected this expression,
by the English instinct for compromise, so as to avoid both reverence
and irreverence. It was, when we came to think about it, a very curious
expression. It amounted to saying that a Protestant must not call Mary
"Our Lady," but he may call her "My Lady." This would seem, in the
abstract, to indicate an even more intimate and mystical familiarity
than the Catholic devotion. But I need not say that it was not so. It
was not untouched by that queer Victorian evasion; of translating
dangerous or improper words into foreign languages. But it was also not
untouched by a certain sincere though vague respect for the part that
Madonnas had played, in the actual cultural and artistic history of our
civilization. Certainly the ordinary reasonably reverent Englishman
would never have intended to be disrespectful to that tradition in that
aspect; even when he was much less liberal, travelled and well-read
than were my own parents. Certainly, on the other hand, he was entirely
unaware that he was saying "My Lady"; and if you had pointed out to him
that, in fact, he was generally saying "a My Lady," or "the My Lady,"
he would have agreed that it was rather odd.
I do not forget, and indeed it would be a very thankless thing in me to
forget, that I was lucky in this relative reasonableness and moderation
of my own family and friends; and that there is a whole Protestant
world that would consider such moderation a very poor-spirited sort of
Protestantism. That strange mania against Mariolatry; that mad
vigilance that watches for the first faint signs of the cult of Mary as
for the spots of a plague; that apparently presumes her to be
perpetually and secretly encroaching upon the prerogatives of Christ;
that logically infers from a mere glimpse of the blue robe the presence
of the Scarlet Woman----all that I have never felt or known or
understood, even as a child; nor did those who had the care of my
childhood. They knew nothing to speak of about the Catholic Church;
they certainly did not know that anybody connected with them was ever
likely to belong to it; but they did know that noble and beautiful
ideas had been presented to the world under the form of this sacred
figure, as under that of the Greek gods or heroes. But, while putting
aside all pretence that this Protestant atmosphere was actively an
anti-Catholic atmosphere, I may still say that my personal case was a
little curious.
I have here rashly undertaken to write on a subject at once intimate
and daring; a subject which ought indeed, by its own majesty, to make
it impossible to be egotistical; but which does also make it impossible
to be anything but personal. "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. Dealing with those personal
feelings, even in this rude and curt outline, is therefore very far
from easy. I hope I shall not be misunderstood if the example I take is
merely personal; since it is this particular part of religion that
really cannot be impersonal. It may be an accident, or a highly
unmerited favour of Heaven, but anyhow it is a fact; that I always had
a curious longing for the remains of this particular tradition, even in
a world where it was regarded as a legend. I was not only haunted by
the idea while still stuck in the ordinary stage of schoolboy
scepticism; I was affected by it before that, before I had shed the
ordinary nursery religion in which the Mother of God had no fit or
adequate place. I found not long ago, scrawled in very bad handwriting,
screeds of an exceedingly bad imitation of Swinburne, which was,
nevertheless, apparently addressed to what I should have called a
picture of the Madonna. And I can distinctly remember reciting the
lines of the "Hymn To Proserpine," out of pleasure in their roll and
resonance; but deliberately directing them away from Swinburne's
intention, and supposing them addressed to the new Christian Queen of
life, rather than to the fallen Pagan queen of death.
"But I turn to her still; having seen she shall surely abide in
the end;
Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend."
And I had obscurely, from that time
onwards, the very vague but slowly clarifying idea of defending all
that Constantine had set up, just as Swinburne's Pagan had defended all
he had thrown down.
It may still be noted that the unconverted world, Puritan or Pagan, but
perhaps especially when it is Puritan, has a very strange notion of the
collective unity of Catholic things or thoughts. Its exponents, even
when not in any rabid sense enemies, give the most curious lists of
things which they think make up the Catholic life; an odd assortment of
objects, such as candles, rosaries, incense (they are always intensely
impressed with the enormous importance and necessity of incense),
vestments, pointed windows, and then all sorts of essentials or
unessentials thrown in in any sort of order; fasts, relics, penances or
the Pope. But even in their bewilderment, they do bear witness to a
need which is not so nonsensical as their attempts to fulfill it; the
need of somehow summing up "all that sort of thing," which does really
describe Catholicism and nothing else except Catholicism. It should of
course be described from within, by the definition and development of
its theological first principles; but that is not the sort of need I am
talking about. I mean that men need an image, single, coloured and
clear in outline, an image to be called up instantly in the
imagination, when what is Catholic is to be distinguished from what
claims to be Christian or even what in one sense is Christian. Now I
can scarcely remember a time when the image of Our Lady did not stand
up in my mind quite definitely, at the mention or the thought of all
these things. I was quite distant from these things, and then doubtful
about these things; and then disputing with the world for them, and
with myself against them; for that is the condition before conversion.
But whether the figure was distant, or was dark and mysterious, or was
a scandal to my contemporaries, or was a challenge to myself----I never
doubted that this figure was the figure of the Faith; that she
embodied, as a complete human being still only human, all that this
Thing had to say to humanity. The instant I remembered the Catholic
Church, I remembered her; when I tried to forget the Catholic Church, I
tried to forget her; when I finally saw what was nobler than my fate,
the freest and the hardest of all my acts of freedom, it was in front
of a gilded and very gaudy little image of her in the port of Brindisi,
that I promised the thing that I would do, if I returned to my own
land.
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