Chesterton: The Nightmare Goodness of God

4--The Waning of the West and the Threat of Islam: The New Jerusalem and The Flying Inn

97 s The New Jerusalem and The Flying Inn The Waning of the West and the Threat of Islam 4 Jesus Christ . . . made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament. But Omar [in Edward FitzGerald’s rendering of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám] makes it, not a sacrament, but a medicine. He feasts because life is not joyful; he revels because he is not glad. “Drink,” he says, “for you know not whence you come nor why. Drink, for you know not when you go nor where. Drink, because the stars are cruel and the world as idle as a humming-top. Drink, because there is nothing worth trusting, nothing worth fighting for. Drink, because all things are lapsed in a base equality and an evil peace.” So he stands offering us the cup in his hand. And at the high altar of Christianity stands another figure, in whose hand also is the cup of the vine. “Drink” he says “for the whole world is as red as this wine, with the crimson of the love and wrath of God. Drink, for the trumpets are blowing for battle and this is the stirrup-cup. Drink, for this my blood of the new testament that is shed for you. Drink, for I know of whence you come and why. Drink, for I know of when you go and where.” G. K. Chesterton, Heretics (1905) In the face of late modern Islamist terrorism, it is a perilous thing to air Chesterton’s complaints against Mohammedanism, as he called it. Chesterton could easily though wrongly be enlisted as a militant in “the clash of civilizations.” Samuel Huntington famously invented this phrase to define his argument that, after the 1989 rending of the Iron 98 Chesterton: The Nightmare Goodness of God s Curtain, the essential world-dividing line has become cultural rather than political and ideological. Nor is there any longer a real breach between East and West, even between North and South. The true conflict , Huntington maintains, lies between civilizations—together with the religions, languages, histories, and mores undergirding them. The great sundering chasm, the impassable crevasse, is the one separating those cultures that embrace secularization-cum-modernization over against those that do not.1 Huntington regards the resurgence of both Islam and Christianity in the late twentieth century as largely a defensive reaction against the devastating effects of this hydra-headed beast of secular modernity—its individualism, its pluralism, its industrial capitalism, its emancipation of women, its elevation of the bureaucratic over the personal, its privatizing of religion, its democratizing of the social and political order. Christianity and Islam grew markedly, Huntington asserts, as their new adherents sought refuge in community- and tradition-dependent claims to truth—claims that modernity and secularity cannot support .2 Yet there are two essential differences, according to Huntington . Whereas Christianity is spread mainly by missionary effort, Islam grows by population no less than conversion. And with the advent of Islamist jihad, it also increases its power and presence by violence. In his book’s single most controverted passage, Huntington asserts that “[i]n the early 1990s Muslims were engaged in more intriguing violence than were non-Muslims, and two-thirds to three-quarters of intercivilizational wars were between Muslims and non-Muslims. Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards.”3 The aim of this chapter is not to deal with the rightness or wrongness of Huntington’s thesis except as it bears on Chesterton’s own treatment of Islam and Der Untergang des Abendlandes, as Oswald Spengler first named the Decline of the West in 1918 and again in 1923. We shall see that, at times, GKC joined those who have insisted that we face nothing less than a contest between “the West and the rest,”4 as Huntington put it in yet another memorable phrase. Yet we shall also discover that Chesterton pulled back from such a wedding of Western culture and Christian faith, insisting that the Church stands as both the critic and transformer of all civilizations, including the increasingly alien cultures that it once birthed in Europe and America. In his latter s The Waning of the West and the Threat of Islam 99 years, Chesterton came to see that the Church, as the very Body of Christ, shall outlast the collapse of the West just as it once survived the decline and fall of...