Testing the Truth

From introduction to the The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion by Marshall McLuhan. This is part of McLuhan's conversion story. This is written by McLuhan's son, Eric, one of the editors of the book.

At every turn, while he was investigating the background for his study of Thomas Nashe, he would encounter the Church — what Chesterton called (another book title) The Thing. It was everywhere. At one point, he later told me (and he was never very specific just when that point occurred), he decided that the thing had to be sorted out or he couldn't rest. Either it ws true, or it wasn't. Either the entire matter was true, all of it, exactly as the Church claimed, or it was the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on a gullible mankind. With that choice clearly delineated, he set out to find which was the case. What came next was not more study, but testing.

The matter had to be tested — on its own terms: that is, by prayer. He told me that the principal prayer that he used was not some long or complex formula, but simply, "Lord, please, send me a sign." He reported that, almost immediately, not one but a deluge of signs arrived. And they continued to arrive unabated for a long time. As to just what the signs consisted in and what happened next, well, some things must remain private. The reader may deduce the rest from the fact of his conversion. ...

I simply absolutely love this guy's sheer logic. Here's how it's supposed to work. So let's find out.

And, as it turned out, McLuhan was answered abundantly in the way that only God can.

Worshippers of Moloch were members of a mature and polished civilization ...

There was a tendency to call upon spirits of terror and compulsion. There is always a sort of dim idea that these darker powers will really do things, with no nonsense about it. In the interior psychology of the Punic peoples this strange sort of pessimistic practicality had grown to great proportions. In the New Town, which the Romans called Carthage, as in the parent cities of Phoenicia, the god who got things done bore the name Moloch, who was perhaps identical with the other deity whom we know as Baal, the Lord. The Romans did not at first know quite what to call him or what to make of him; they had to go back to the grossest myth of Greek or Roman origins and compare him to Saturn devouring his children. But the worshippers of Moloch were not gross or primitive. They were members of a mature and polished civilization, abounding in refinements and luxuries; they were probably far more civilized than the Romans. And Moloch was not a myth. These highly civilized people really met together to invoke the blessing of heaven on their empire by throwing hundreds of their infants into a large furnace. We can only realize the combination by imagining a number of Manchester merchants with chimney-pot hats and mutton-chop whiskers, going to church every Sunday at eleven o’clock to see a baby roasted alive.

G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

What is terrible is that today we don't have to imagine Moloch worshippers being civilized the way Chesterton did. We've got abortion clinics all over the country.

The Medium and the Message

A colleague, Joe Keogh, wrote in the Ottawa, Ontario G. K. Chesterton Newsletter of a curious exchange between my father [Marshall McLuhan] and Toronto's then Archbishop Pocock. The good Bishop, it is said, once asked that given John's famous prologue to the fourth gospel, did this not indicate that Christ Himself is the archetypal example of the medium as message? He readily assented.

Introduction to The Medium and the Light by Marshall McLuhan

Isn't that just the best? I love the way this guy (and that bishop) thought. And the McLuhan book is excellent.

We must certainly be in a novel

We must certainly be in a novel; What I like about this novelist is that he takes such trouble about his minor characters.

G.K. Chesterton

As a minor character, I like that too!

The thing that keeps life romantic and full of fiery possibilities

Life is always a novel. ... Our existence is still a story. ...

But in order that life should be a story or romance to us, it is necessary that a great part of it, at any rate, should be settled for us without our permission. If we wish life to be a system, this may be a nuisance; but if we wish it to be a drama, it is an essential.... The thing which keeps life romantic and full of fiery possibilities is the existence of these great plain limitations which force all of us to meet the things we do not like or do not expect. ... Of all these great limitations and frameworks which fashion and create the poetry and variety of life, the family is the most definite and important.

G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

Climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside.

Of course the family is a good institution because it is uncongenial. It is wholesome precisely because it contains so many divergencies and varieties. It is, as the sentimentalists say, like a little kingdom, and, like most other little kingdoms, is generally in a state of something resembling anarchy. ...

The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day he was born.

G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

We have to love our neighbor because he is there.

We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbor. ... That is why the old religions and the old scriptural language showed so sharp a wisdom when they spoke, not of one's duty towards humanity, but one's duty towards one's neighbor. The duty towards humanity may often take the form of some choice which is personal or even pleasurable. ... But we have to love our neighbor because he is there — a much more alarming reason for a much more serious operation. He is the sample of humanity which is actually given us.

G.K. Chesterton, Heretics,
On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family

I have seen the first line of quote interpreted, often by realtors, as meaning that our neighbors are a precious gift. And they are, but not in the sweetly sentimental way that the realtors put forward. We may, in fact, like our neighbors. But often our neighbors are a source of great trial. They are given to us by God in order to try us, to test us, to teach us.

What is equally sobering is we are given to them, as their neighbors, for the very same reason.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

Literature and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity. A work of art can hardly be too short, for its climax is its merit. A story can never be too long, for its concusion is merely to be deplored, like the last half-penny or the last pipelight.

G.K. Chesterton, In Defence of Penny Dreadfuls

People must have stories

But people must have conversation, they must have houses, and they must have stories. The simple need for some kind of ideal world in which fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and older than the rules of good art, and much more important.

G.K. Chesterton, In Defence of Penny Dreadfuls