The Everlasting Man

C.S. Lewis called The Everlasting Man, “the best popular defense of the full Christian position,” and credited it with being among the ten books that were most influential in shaping his life.

At its core, The Everlasting Man is about what it means to be human, and how Christ became a man to demonstrate and make possible human perfection.

The Everlasting Man is presented in two parts: first is a fly-over view of the history of man and the uniqueness of being human; and second is a fly-over view of how Christianity perfectly fits man’s uniqueness as exemplified in the perfect Man, Jesus Christ.

As with Chesterton’s other Christian apologetics, The Everlasting Man responds to misconceptions that Chesterton observes in the world about the nature of man and the nature of Christianity. Often, this involves alluding to world events, civilizations, and religions using broad strokes and without much explanation. As one example, a reader who does not have a solid working knowledge of Manichaeism will get bogged down.

Here is my summary of the whole argument of the book:

1. Man is not of this world.
   • The difference between man and the rest of nature is such that it seems nature is from this world and man is not.
2. The universe was designed.
   • We recognize in the universe a design, and therefore a Designer and a plan, a meaning and a first cause.
3. Man is drawn to mystery.
   • Humans are drawn to mythologies, which abounded in early history like gossip, advancing many untruths along with some truths.
4. Philosophy and religion bring structure.
   • The “thinkers” of society (those who devise their own plans) started defining this “mystery” and its purpose, giving us philosophy and religion; law and ceremony.
5. God became a man.
   • In the midst of all this, Christianity emerged with the Creator visiting the world in person and as part of history.
   • “It is nothing less than the loud assertion that this mysterious maker of the world has visited his world in person. It declares that really and even recently, or right in the middle of historic times.”
6. The nature of Christ and Christianity is unique.
   • Christianity was different from anything thought up before or since, or even implied by it.
   • “All that is condemned in Catholic tradition, authority and dogmatism, and the refusal to retract and modify, are but the natural human attributes of a man with a message relating to a fact.”
7. The Church was formed to teach Truth.
   • The Church is comprised of messengers tasked with testifying to a fact, which is a new Truth. And this new Truth and new Church survived all catastrophes, without changing the Truth.
   • “It is newer in spirit than the newest schools of thought; and it is almost certainly on the eve of new triumphs. For these men serve a mother who seems to grow more beautiful as new generations rise up and call her blessed. We might sometimes fancy that the Church grows younger as the world grows old.”
8. Christianity is the rescuer of reason.
   • It is founded in a madness that remained sane – a foundation that has stood solid while all others dissolved.
   • “But the brain of the believer does not reel; it is the brains of the unbelievers that reel. We can see their brains reeling on every side and into every extravagance of ethics and psychology; into pessimism and the denial of life; into pragmatism and the denial of logic.”
   • “If it were an error, it seems as if the error could hardly have lasted a day. If it were a mere ecstasy, it would seem that such an ecstasy could not endure for an hour. It has endured for nearly two thousand years; and the world within it has been more lucid, more level-headed, more reasonable in its hopes, more healthy in its instincts, more humorous and cheerful in the face of fate and death, than the world outside.”

For those who wish to tackle reading The Everlasting Man, I humbly offer below some of my notes to help navigate. Ultimately it is worth the effort, but one should never feel ashamed to skip sections when Chesterton is making one’s eyes glaze over, or to set it aside altogether to take up another day.

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Introduction:  The Plan of This Book

You cannot understand the full truth of something when you are too close to it. Full understanding requires a step back. However, Christianity is the same when you look at the whole thing from the outside as what it looks like from the inside. In this case, unbiased reason gives the same conclusion as informed faith.

“The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do.”

Because we sin is the whole reason for Christ to become man, suffer, die, and be resurrected so that we may be free from sin and death and perfected through him. If it were possible for us by our own power to be free of sin, we would not need the Christ that we received.

Chesterton sees the same character that is in the divine story in the human story. Our story is told best through God becoming man.

The Church as compared to other religions is like mankind as compared to other creatures. There are parallels and similarities, but one is so far beyond the other.

Much of “conventional wisdom” looks to soften the distinctions and thus ignores reality. Humans produce art and animals cannot – indeed it is unfathomable, just like God becoming man.

To see things impartially, you must see them anew and with an unbiased sense of wonder and innocence, like a child.

“Things that may well be familiar so long as familiarity breeds affection had much better become unfamiliar when familiarity breeds contempt.”

Part 1   ON THE CREATURE CALLED MAN

I:  The Man in the Cave

Quotes on evolution…

“Nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into something. Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how something could turn into something else.”

“But evolution is mistaken for explanation. It has the fatal quality of leaving on many minds the impression that they do understand it and everything else.”

Nobody denies that the following are mysteries, meaning we have no scientific explanation for them: (1) the origin of the universe from nothing, and (2) the origin of life from no life. We should be able to add to that the origin of conscious man.

The origin of conscious man is really two mysteries, one being the emergence of a new species that from its beginning had traits that would not become useful for thousands of years (thus negating evolution by natural selection), and the other being the emergence of consciousness. Is human self-awareness a trait inseparable from our ability to know and love our Creator in whose image and likeness we are made?

“Art is the signature of man.”

Art existed even in man’s prehistory. There is no reason to believe the “cavemen” were more brutish than we are, much less that we as a species have had a progressively positive evolutionary path toward more civility.

“[M]an is at once the exception to everything and the mirror and the measure of all things.”

We take our example from Christ, who is both the model for man and the exception.

“The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one.”

Compare to John 17:14, “I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.”

The similarities between man and beast only serve to accentuate the sharp differences. Yes, birds build nests, but birds do not discern the aesthetic qualities of different architectural styles.

II:  Professors and Prehistoric Men

Commenting on anthropological and evolutionary science…

“Thus while most science moves in a sort of curve, being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything.”

“[A] civilization that had religion would have a little more reason.”

III:  The Antiquity of Civilization

(no notes)

IV:  God and Comparative Religion

Most multi-deity paganism in fact has an attitude toward God as something assumed yet forgotten. There is a concept of a one, true, all-powerful God, but nobody talks about it.

V:  Man and Mythologies

“[P]rimitive myths are infinitely suggestive, so long as we are wise enough not to inquire what they suggest.”

Mythology is like humor, if you have to explain what it means, then the meaning is ruined.

“If a man cannot pray he is gagged; if he cannot kneel he is in irons.”

Man finds it natural to worship. The draw of worship is innate, as is our inclination to faith. But God needed to tell us who He is and how to worship, otherwise His nature would be left to our imagination and our error.

Analogies are always imperfect, that is there are always distinctions and differences that remain. To say that something is “like a dog” is also saying that it is not a dog.

VI:  The Demons and the Philosophers

We find in history that the worship of demons comes after the worship of deities. Men invoke demons because their perception is that demons get things done.

“For most, cannibalism is not a primitive or even a bestial habit. It is artificial and even artistic, a sort of art for art’s sake. Men do not do it because they do not thing it horrible; but, on the contrary, because they do think it horrible.”

Often, we are not tricked into doing wrong because we think it right. We do wrong knowing it’s wrong, thus appeasing our demons. And doing so requires a certain refinement in society and exercise of intelligence.

Those who seek to control seek to control what preoccupies them, and what they therefore presume preoccupies all others. As they seek control, they will use this presumption to accuse others of what they themselves are preoccupied. For example, if someone sees everything as explainable in terms of oppressor and oppressed through the lens of race, then they will interpret race and domination as being fundamental driving forces of everyone’s actions.

VII:  The War of the Gods and Demons

“The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed.”

“Men need not live for food merely because they cannot live without food.”

This sounds like a rejection of Mazlo’s hierarchy of needs (even though Mazlo didn’t come along for another 30 years).

Chesterton argues that all men think about and daydream about the “why” and “purpose” of existence. Even people who are at the bottom of the economic ladder do this. It is modern industrialism that forces the economic issues to the front. Interestingly, the people who believe Mazlo’s hierarchy and those who believe people are inherently good both see economics as the cause of sin and suffering. They are also the ones more inclined to see society and classifications of people as hierarchical and to use that to justify policies that subordinate individual freedom to some larger goal.

“[O]nly men to whom the family is sacred will ever have a standard or a status by which to criticize the state.”

This is because those to whom the family is sacred can appeal to God. This is why tyrannies always seek to tear down the family, or even try to replace it with dependence on the state.

VIII:  The End of the World

“Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy.”

Societies become weary of joy when good things no longer work, which can happen under vast prosperity when minor injustices get blown out of proportion and diminish true injustices as well as those things we used to consider good.

Part 2   ON THE MAN CALLED CHRIST

I:  The God in the Cave

No other religion or philosophy besides Christianity combines these three aspects:  (1) the mystical in a personal sense of beauty and poetry; (2) a philosophy large enough to be universal; and (3) the sense of being in a battle against evil and error.

Compare this to the ideal that all progress must be measured against, as Chesterton defines in his book Orthodoxy:  (1) the ideal must be a fixed standard, not changing with the times (universal); (2) the ideal must be artistic (beauty and poetry); and (3) vigilance is required to protect the ideal (battle).

II:  The Riddles of the Gospel

Popular opinion holds that the Church de-emphasizes the merciful, kind, and gentle qualities of Jesus.

“The truth is that it is the image of Christ in the churches that is almost entirely mild and merciful. It is the image of Christ in the Gospels that is a good many other things as well.”

There are aspects about the story of Jesus that nobody would have come up with, because they are things that nobody has ever made use of. For example, the long stretch of silence from Jesus’s life prior to age 30. This is not an element of myth-making or a hero worship fable.

The message of the Gospels is not simple. The Gospels do not contain mere platitudes.

“It is the Gospel that has the mysticism and the Church that has the rationalism.”

“The Gospel as it stands is almost a book of riddles.”

Christ’s teachings were just as jarring in His time as they are in ours, if not more so. Unlike founders of other religions, Jesus did not reflect the “morality of the time.”

“Christ in his view of marriage does not in the least suggest the conditions of Palestine of the first century. He does not suggest anything at all, except the sacramental view of marriage as developed long afterwards by the Catholic Church.”

“Whatever else is true, it is emphatically not true that the ideas of Jesus of Nazareth were suitable to his time, but are no longer suitable to our time. Exactly how suitable they were to his time is perhaps suggested in the end of his story.”

“It is extraordinary how very little there is in the recorded words of Christ that ties him at all to his own time.”

“He spoke as one conscious that everything was ephemeral, including the things Aristotle thought eternal.”

Is this what it is like to think outside of time?

“The merely human Christ is a made-up figure, a piece of artificial selection, like the merely evolutionary man.”

Erroneous explanations of Jesus’s life:

1. He never lived
2. He existed but was only human
3. He was a madman with a messianic delusion
4. He was an original teacher of socialism or pacifism
5. He was only famous for his doomsaying
6. He was a spiritual healer and nothing else
7. He was an exorcist and nothing else

“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.”

All of these misunderstandings of Christ come from the inability, or lack of will, to embrace the paradox. Because we cannot fully resolve the complete picture, we focus on one aspect and resolve that. But when we try to fit that resolved aspect back into the whole, it doesn’t quite fit, and so we discard everything except the one truth we resolved and declare the big picture flawed because our selected piece is so clear in comparison. This is how heresies come about.

Like some sort of optical illusion, the full picture can only come into focus by defocusing and allowing all the elements to blend in a way that would not be possible if we tried to resolve it element by element.

For Chesterton, the apparent contradictions in Christ’s teachings (e.g., about peace and about the sword) suggest an unseen vastness, like a three-dimensional object casting a shadow on the ground, and we can only see the shadow that suggests some things about the size and shape of the object, but does not reveal it.

III:  The Strangest Story in the World

“There is a sort of notion in the air everywhere that all the religions are equal because all the religious founders were rivals, that they are all fighting for the same starry crown. It is quite false.”

No other religion-founding prophet claimed to be God. Usually, the greater the man, the less likely he is to make the greatest claims about himself. Usually, the only man who would claim to be divine is either mad, very small and petty, or a narcissist.

“[A] great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it. That is the paradox; everything that is merely approaching to that point is merely receding from it.”

“[H]e spoke of his own humanity as in some way collectively and representatively human; calling himself simply the Son of Man…. It is fitting that the New Man or the Second Adam should repeat in so ringing a voice and with so arresting a gesture the great fact which came first in the original story, that man differs from the brutes by everything, even by deficiency; that he is in a sense less normal and even less native; a stranger upon the earth.”

Through our flaws, God is able to produce a greater good – the redemption of His salvation is greater than original justice offered to Adam and Eve.

“We are meant to feel that Death was the bride of Christ as Poverty was the bride of St. Francis. We are meant to feel that his life was in that sense a sort of love affair with death, a romance of the pursuit of the ultimate sacrifice.”

“All the great groups that stood about the Cross represented in one way or another the great historical truth of the time; that the world could not save itself.”

“It was emphatically the strength of the world that was turned to weakness and the wisdom of the world that was turned to folly.”

All the armies, riches, knowledge, power, and wisdom of the world could not accomplish what Jesus accomplished through weakness, humility, suffering, and folly.

IV:  The Witness of the Heretics

“It is nonsense to say that the Christian faith appeared in a simple age; in the sense of an unlettered and gullible age. It is equally nonsense to say that the Christian faith was a simple thing; in the sense of a vague or childish or merely instinctive thing.”

The Church was many-sided enough to fit the world – it looked all ways across the Mediterranean Sea at once. It was Roman and Greek, Jewish and Gentile, African and Asiatic.

The two statements, “God is love” and the co-divinity of the Holy Trinity, are almost identical and are each nonsensical without the other. In fact, the Trinity is the logical answer to the question of whether God is love.  If God is love, then what is the Loving and what is the Beloved? God the Father begets the Son and loves what is begotten, and the relationship emanating therefrom is the Holy Spirit.

According to Chesterton, the Crusades were largely a defense of the Holy Trinity.

“And what sort of unreason is it that seems reasonable to millions of educated Europeans through all the revolutions of some sixteen hundred years? People are not amused with a puzzle or paradox or a mere muddle in the mind for all that time.”

Those who attack Christianity are perplexed by it seeming to be holding opposing positions – being Roman and in revolt against Rome, condemning heresies that look to an outsider like itself, saying the unexpected, rising stronger out of defeat, all without needing to unsay what it has said. They see this paradox as a flaw, but they don’t appreciate that the paradox forces them to have to attack it from both sides.

V:  The Escape from Paganism

“The Church Militant is thus unique because it is an army marching to effect a universal deliverance.”

The mission of the Church Militant is to deliver the world from the slavery of an immoral state of being, and to instill hope.

“We might truly say that the whole of the Communion of Saints, as well as the whole Church Militant, is founded on universal suffrage.”

The word “suffrage” was originally used in theology about prayer.

“The dead in Purgatory were said to have the suffrages of the living. And in this sense, of a sort of right of petition to the supreme ruler.”

The god of science, the watchmaker god who winds it up and then watches it go, would not have humbled himself in sacrifice to suffer and die for his creatures. Dogma gives man freedom to fall, and even permits God to die. In contrast, the science of causation enslaves all of nature.

“[I]t is not for nothing that they call causation a chain.”

“The true story of the world must be told by somebody to somebody else.”

And the teller of the true story of the world must be outside the world.

Speaking about Christianity and the Christian story of the world…

“But in answer to the historical query of why it was accepted and is accepted, I answer for millions of others in my reply; because it fits the lock, because it is like life. It is one among many stories; only it happens to be a true story. It is one among many philosophies; only it happens to be the truth.”

This is a great answer if someone asks why you believe – “Because it’s the truth.” There really is no other reason.

All three of these traditions are present in Christianity:

• Judaism – Ethical, Logical, Legalistic
• Paganism – Poetic, Mystical
• Islamic – Militant, Obedient

VI:  The Five Deaths of the Faith

“Christianity has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”

If anything is to be resurrected, it must first die. Christianity dying and rising again many times over is like Israel, and for that matter like each one of us. We die in sin each time we turn our back to God, and yet God keeps calling us out of the tomb like Lazarus.