No More Learning

Shallow
speakers and shallow thinkers in pulpits and on platforms often talk
about the world's worship of pleasure, and whine against it. But it is
rarely in the world's history that its ideal has been one of joy and
beauty. The worship of pain has far more often dominated the world.
Mediaevalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its
wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its
whipping with rods--Mediaevalism is real Christianity, and the mediaeval
Christ is the real Christ. When the Renaissance dawned upon the world,
and brought with it the new ideals of the beauty of life and the joy of
living, men could not understand Christ. Even Art shows us that. The
painters of the Renaissance drew Christ as a little boy playing with
another boy in a palace or a garden, or lying back in his mother's arms,
smiling at her, or at a flower, or at a bright bird; or as a noble,
stately figure moving nobly through the world; or as a wonderful figure
rising in a sort of ecstasy from death to life. Even when they drew him
crucified they drew him as a beautiful God on whom evil men had
inflicted suffering. But he did not preoccupy them much. What delighted
them was to paint the men and women whom they admired, and to show the
loveliness of this lovely earth. They painted many religious
pictures--in fact, they painted far too many, and the monotony of type
and motive is wearisome, and was bad for art. It was the result of the
authority of the public in art-matters, and is to be deplored. But their
soul was not in the subject Raphael was a great artist when he painted
his portrait of the Pope. When he painted his Madonnas and infant
Christs, he is not a great artist at all. Christ had no message for the
Renaissance, which was wonderful because it brought an ideal at variance
with his, and to find the presentation of the real Christ we must go to
mediaeval art.
There he is one maimed and marred; one who is not comely
to look on, because Beauty is a joy; one who is not in fair raiment,
because that may be a joy also: he is a beggar who has a marvellous
soul; he is a leper whose soul is divine; he needs neither property nor
health; he is a God realising his perfection through pain.

The evolution of man is slow. The injustice of men is great. It was
necessary that pain should be put forward as a mode of self-realisation.
Even now, in some places in the world, the message of Christ is
necessary. No one who lived in modern Russia could possibly realise his
perfection except by pain. A few Russian artists have realised
themselves in Art; in a fiction that is mediaeval in character, hecauae
its dominant note is the realisation of men through suffering. But for
those who are not artists, and to whom there is no mode of life but the
actual life of fact, pain is the only door to perfection. A Russian who
lives happily under the present system of government in Russia must
either believe that man has no soul, or that, if he has, it is not worth
developing. A Nihilist who rejects all authority, because he knows
authority to be evil, and welcomes all pain, because through that he
realises his personality, is a real Christian. To him the Christian
ideal is a true thing.

And yet, Christ did not revolt against authority. He accepted the
imperial authority of the Roman Empire and paid tribute. He endured the
ecclesiastical authority of the Jewish Church, and would not repel its
violence by any violence of his own. He had, as I said before, no scheme
for the reconstruction of society. But the modern world has schemes.