I’ve
never been much of a church-goer though I enjoy the rituals and the singing of
hymns (“A serious house on serious earth it is”). I understand that a church
service of any faith is not primarily an aesthetic event, which severely limits
the experience of those not among the faithful, but I’ve consistently drifted off
during the sermons, Catholic or Protestant. I can’t attest to whether most
sermons are dull, but it seems like an opportunity squandered. The priest or
minister has, in effect, a captive audience, and his subject -- God and man --
is of mortal interest to every congregant. But no cleric I’ve heard has
rivalled Father Mapple. In fact, my appreciation of homiletics is largely
literary. I love the prose of Donne and Andrewes (not to mention the King James
Bible), which makes me a dilettante when it comes to religion.
I
have found another literary exception to the sermonic rule of dullness. G.K. Chesterton
published an essay in 1928 in the London
Daily Telegraph under the title “A Sermon Against the Sin of Pride.” It was
republished posthumously in The Common
Man (Sheed and Ward, 1950) under a new and better title: “If I Had Only One Sermon to Preach.” Chesterton’s essential point is easily stated: “all evil
began with some attempt at superiority,” about which he says: “No truth is now
so unfamiliar as a truth, or so familiar as a fact.” Chesterton’s formulation
is classically Chestertonian:
“Pride
is a poison so very poisonous that it not only poisons the virtues; it even
poisons the other vices. This is what is
felt by the poor men in the public tavern, when they tolerate the tippler or
the tipster or even the thief, but feel something fiendishly wrong with the man
who bears so close a resemblance to God Almighty.”
Who
wouldn’t agree? The know-it-all, wise-guy, pundit, trivia freak, anal
retentive, op-ed writer and self-anointed bet-settler are species universally
despised. Of course, Chesterton has a sermon to preach, proposing an
alternative to indulgence in Pride, and he gets around to it near the end of
his essay (or lay sermon):
“.
. . I should begin my sermon by telling people not to enjoy themselves. I should tell them to enjoy dances and
theatres and joy-rides and champagne and oysters; to enjoy jazz and cocktails
and night-clubs if they can enjoy nothing better; to enjoy bigamy and burglary
and any crime in the calendar, in preference to this other alternative; but
never to learn to enjoy themselves.
Human beings are happy so long as they retain the receptive power and
the power of reaction in surprise and gratitude to something outside.”
In
Chesterton’s essay you’ll find common sense, love of paradox, vivid prose and a
memorable sermon: “Pride consists in a man making his personality the only
test, instead of making the truth the test.”
1 comment:
Are there not two different types of egotism though? The bad egotism is that which concentrates on the status of ourselves in comparison with others and constitutes pride in that it rejoices solely in superiority etc. The good egotism is one which I'd guess Chesterton could not have done without. That is the egotism (if you want to call it that) which looks on his own work and finds it good. It would be disingenuous to believe that such as he was unaware off his own talent and did not rejoice in a finely honed piece of prose or finely argued thesis which he had argued before he brought it to publication. Indeed this could be a definition of the critical faculty at work. One can be aware that one has talent superior to others and rejoice in it in a kind of enjoyment of the Creator's work in you without falling into the sin of pride, can one not? Or are we to believe that Nabokov, O'Connor, Johnson and Shakespeare were blithely and peculiarly unaware of the measure of their talent? Discuss in 2000 words!
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