The Fair Haven. Samuel Butler
even of those doctrines which seem to stand most widely and irreconcilably asunder.
Chapter II
But it was impossible that a mind of such activity should have gone over so much ground, and yet in the end returned to the same position as that from which it started.
So far was this from being the case that the Christianity of his maturer life would be considered dangerously heterodox by those who belong to any of the more definite or precise schools of theological thought. He was as one who has made the circuit of a mountain, and yet been ascending during the whole time of his doing so: such a person finds himself upon the same side as at first, but upon a greatly higher level. The peaks which had seemed the most important when he was in the valley were now dwarfed to their true proportions by colossal cloud-capped masses whose very existence could not have been suspected from beneath: and again, other points which had seemed among the lowest turned out to be the very highest of all—as the Finster-Aarhorn, which hides itself away in the centre of the Bernese Alps, is never seen to be the greatest till one is high and far off.
Thus he felt no sort of fear or repugnance in admitting that the New Testament writings, as we now have them, are not by any means accurate records of the events which they profess to chronicle. This, which few English Churchmen would be prepared to admit, was to him so much of an axiom that he despaired of seeing any sound theological structure raised until it was universally recognised.
And here he would probably meet with sympathy from the more advanced thinkers within the body of the Church, but so far as I know, he stood alone as recognising the wisdom of the Divine counsels in having ordained the wide and apparently irreconcilable divergencies of doctrine and character which we find assigned to Christ in the Gospels, and as finding his faith confirmed, not by the supposition that both the portraits drawn of Christ are objectively true, but that both are objectively inaccurate, and that the Almighty intended they should be inaccurate, inasmuch as the true spiritual conception in the mind of man could be indirectly more certainly engendered by a strife, a warring, a clashing, so to speak, of versions, all of them distorting slightly some one or other of the features of the original, than directly by the most absolutely correct impression which human language could convey. Even the most perfect human speech, as has been often pointed out, is a very gross and imperfect vehicle of thought. I remember once hearing him say that it was not till he was nearly thirty that he discovered “what thick and sticky fluids were air and water,” how crass and dull in comparison with other more subtle fluids; he added that speech had no less deceived him, seeming, as it did, to be such a perfect messenger of thought, and being after all nothing but a shuffler and a loiterer.
With most men the Gospels are true in spite of their discrepancies and inconsistencies; with him Christianity, as distinguished from a bare belief in the objectively historical character of each part of the Gospels, was true because of these very discrepancies; as his conceptions of the Divine manner of working became wider, the very forces which had at one time shaken his faith to its foundations established it anew upon a firmer and broader base. He was gradually led to feel that the ideal presented by the life and death of our Saviour could never have been accepted by Jews at all, if its whole purport had been made intelligible during the Redeemer’s life-time; that in order to insure its acceptance by a nucleus of followers it must have been endowed with a more local aspect than it was intended afterwards to wear; yet that, for the sake of its subsequent universal value, the destruction of that local complexion was indispensable; that the corruptions inseparable from vivâ voce communication and imperfect education were the means adopted by the Creator to blur the details of the ideal, and give it that breadth which could not be otherwise obtainable—and that thus the value of the ideal was indefinitely enhanced, and designedly enhanced, alike by the waste of time and by its incrustations; that all ideals gain by a certain amount of vagueness, which allows the beholder to fill in the details according to his own spiritual needs, and that no ideal can be truly universal and permanents unless it have an elasticity which will allow of this process in the minds of those who contemplate it; that it cannot become thus elastic unless by the loss of no inconsiderable amount of detail, and that thus the half, as Dr. Arnold used to say, “becomes greater than the whole,” the sketch more preciously suggestive than the photograph. Hence far from deploring the fragmentary, confused, and contradictory condition of the Gospel records, he saw in this condition the means whereby alone the human mind could have been enabled to conceive—not the precise nature of Christ—but the highest ideal of which each individual Christian soul was capable. As soon as he had grasped these conceptions, which will be found more fully developed in one of the later chapters of his book, the spell of unbelief was broken.
But, once broken, it was dissolved utterly and entirely; he could allow himself to contemplate fearlessly all sorts of issues from which one whose experiences had been less varied would have shrunk. He was free of the enemy’s camp, and could go hither and thither whithersoever he would. The very points which to others were insuperable difficulties were to him foundation-stones of faith. For example, to the objection that if in the present state of the records no clear conception of the nature of Christ’s life and teaching could be formed, we should be compelled to take one for our model of whom we knew little or nothing certain, I have heard him answer, “And so much the better for us all. The truth, if read by the light of man’s imperfect understanding, would have been falser to him than any falsehood. It would have been truth no longer. Better be led aright by an error which is so adjusted as to compensate for the errors in man’s powers of understanding, than be misled by a truth which can never be translated from objectivity to subjectivity. In such a case, it is the error which is the truth and the truth the error.”
Fearless himself, he could not understand the fears felt by others; and this was perhaps his greatest sympathetic weakness. He was impatient of the subterfuges with which untenable interpretations of Scripture were defended, and of the disingenuousness of certain harmonists; indeed, the mention of the word harmony was enough to kindle an outbreak of righteous anger, which would sometimes go to the utmost limit of righteousness. “Harmonies!” he would exclaim, “the sweetest harmonies are those which are most full of discords, and the discords of one generation of musicians become heavenly music in the hands of their successors. Which of the great musicians has not enriched his art not only by the discovery of new harmonies, but by proving that sounds which are actually inharmonious are nevertheless essentially and eternally delightful? What an outcry has there not always been against the ‘unwarrantable licence’ with the rules of harmony whenever a Beethoven or a Mozart has broken through any of the trammels which have been regarded as the safeguards of the art, instead of in their true light of fetters, and how gratefully have succeeding musicians acquiesced in and adopted the innovation.” Then would follow a tirade with illustration upon illustration, comparison of this passage with that, and an exhaustive demonstration that one or other, or both, could have had no sort of possible foundation in fact; he could only see that the persons from whom he differed were defending something which was untrue and which they ought to have known to be untrue, but he could not see that people ought to know many things which they do not know.
Had he himself seen all that he ought to have been able to see from his own standpoints? Can any of us do so? The force of early bias and education, the force of intellectual surroundings, the force of natural timidity, the force of dulness, were things which he could appreciate and make allowance for in any other age, and among any other people than his own; but as belonging to England and the Nineteenth Century they had no place in his theory of Nature; they were inconceivable, unnatural, unpardonable, whenever they came into contact with the subject of Christian evidences. Deplorable, indeed, they are, but this was just the sort of word to which he could not confine himself. The criticisms upon the late Dean Alford’s notes, which will be given in the sequel, display this sort of temper; they are not entirely his own, but he adopted them and endorsed them with a warmth which we cannot but feel to be unnecessary, not to say more. Yet I am free to confess that whatever editorial licence I could venture to take has been taken in the direction of lenity.
On the whole,