“What use is an idol once its maker has shaped it — a cast image, a teacher of lies? For its maker trusts in what has been made, though the product is only an idol that cannot speak!”
Habakkuk 2:18 NRSV-CI
All We See is the Shadow
As we will explore further in other posts to this blog, Christ’s teachings are replete with apparent contradictions, both in relation to themselves and to other Scripture (for example, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” in Matthew 10:34 versus “All who take up the sword will perish by the sword” in Matthew 26:52).
For Chesterton, these apparent contradictions do not suggest confusion, but rather an unseen vastness of truth and clarity. To visualize this, imagine a three-dimensional object intersecting a two-dimensional plane, for example as shown in Figure 8. As the object is moved or rotated, the shape its outline makes on the plane changes, even though the object itself doesn’t change.
Figure 8: On the left is a 3D donut (toroid) intersecting a 2D plane. On the right is how the donut is perceived on the surface of the plane. As you move or rotate the donut, the part intersecting the plane changes.
We are like beings living on the surface of the plane and Christ’s teachings are like the 3-D object. From our 2-D perspective, the shapes we see represent separate teachings, and they can appear to fluctuate. What we don’t appreciate is that we are merely seeing the outline of different aspects of the same teaching.
We never really see the whole of the object towering above us and delving below, but only the thin tracing that intersects our existence–like a shadow.
Each time Christ’s teachings intersect with our plane of existence, a new shape is made, creating an opportunity for us to carve out a sort of two-dimensional facsimile. We then take these facsimiles, alone and in various combinations, and piece together images of Christ, often in a way that conforms to our own liking.
As Chesterton said, “There must surely have been something not only mysterious but many-sided about Christ if so many smaller Christs can be carved out of him.”[1]
These ‘smaller Christs,’ which each contain truth mixed with misunderstanding in some way, manifest as carved idols due to our inability, or lack of desire, to embrace the full paradox of His many sides.
Because we are unable to fully resolve the complete picture of Christ, we focus on individual aspects of His teachings, and typically ones that bring us comfort (for example, we remember all the times Jesus talked about forgiveness while forgetting all the times He talked about hell).
When we try to place those carved-out aspects back into the whole like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, they don’t quite fit. It turns out that carving idols is just as much about discarding what has been cut away as keeping what remains. When the pieces don’t fit back together, we declare the rest of the picture flawed instead of the piece we carved.
The pieces we hold seem so clearly formed that the surrounding parts look distorted and blurry in comparison. Like some optical illusion, the full picture only comes into focus by defocusing and allowing the elements to blend in a way that would not be possible (and perhaps seemingly contradictory) if we tried to resolve it element-by-element.
We will never see Christ in His complete and full glory in this world, but we should at least try to be impartial about the aspects of Him we can see. Partiality need not be nefarious to result in error, and indeed partiality often emerges from affection and familiarity. As Chesterton warned:
“Things that may well be familiar so long as familiarity breeds affection had much better become unfamiliar when familiarity breeds contempt.”
G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p. 10
The best way of seeing things impartially is to see them anew with the unbiased sense of wonder and innocence of a child. Recall the words of Jesus, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”[2]
Becoming Poor in Spirit
We must learn to love the truth more than we love our attachments to our beliefs. It is for good reason that Jesus began the Sermon on the Mount with the words, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”[3]
As Luigi Giussani explains in his book The Religious Sense, the poor are detached from possessions in such a way that they are unafraid to lose them, simply because there is nothing to lose. Thus, being poor in spirit means detachment from any sense of my own truth such that there is nothing to interfere with seeking the truth.
“The individual who is supremely poor in spirit is the one who, in the face of truth, desires truth and nothing else.”
Luigi Giussani, The Religious Sense, p. 33
Jesus is telling us to give up trying to possess truth so that we may receive His truth.
Because we cannot know God completely, we need to rely on faith and striving to know Him better as we remain humble in our limitations. In the process of gaining knowledge of God, we cannot avoid using imprecise language full of symbols and imagery, all of which reveal sacred aspects of God’s divinity even though they each individually fall short of the mark.
We must be just as ready to let go of our mental images as we were to adopt them. We must recognize that imagery is useful only to the extent it helps us build our knowledge of and relationship to God. But when those images no longer bring us closer to God, or worse yet start to become what we worship instead of God, we must discard them.
This pattern, first using symbols and images that help to demystify and understand aspects of God and then discarding them to embrace the mystery, continues in a virtuous cycle of upbuilding that ultimately leaves the paradox in place while deepening our relationship with God.
We must always remain cognizant that it is our attachment to symbols and images that turns them into idols. Nothing is an idol until we make it so.[4]
Negative Space
It is interesting to consider that this process of upbuilding through faith and striving can be reversed and yet still (paradoxically) get us closer to God–going up by going down, as it were, in strange loop fashion. The path to knowing God better includes not just finding the right symbols, but in rejecting the wrong ones.
“It could be that many people who seem to have rejected religion, who profess scepticism and unbelief, are really treading this same path without knowing it. What they are rejecting is not God, but the limited images of God which can actually, at a certain stage in life, hinder our perception of reality.”
Cyprian Smith, The Way of Paradox, p. 41
Like an artist painting a portrait, the subject is defined just as much by the foreground as the background. We can define boundaries just as well from the outside as from the inside. A sculpture can be formed equally well by adding clay or by subtracting marble.
Perhaps the prominent apologists for atheism, like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, were actually and unknowingly smashing false idols, and not God, as they attempted to chip away at the marble block of theism.
As Chesterton put it, “The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them.”[5]
Because God cannot be wrecked, the atheist apologists are simply articulating little bits of untruth to destroy them–digging up snakes just to kill them.
And in the process, eternal truth remains intact and more sharply defined.
[1] G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p. 124
[2] Matthew 18:3 NRSV-CI
[3] Matthew 5:3 NRSV-CI
[4] “The idols of the nations are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have mouths, but they do not speak; they have eyes, but they do not see; they have ears, but they do not hear, and there is no breath in their mouths. Those who make them and all who trust them shall become like them.” Psalms 135:15-18 NRSV-CI
[5] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, “The Romance of Orthodoxy”