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Mary and the Convert | G.K. Chesterton | From The Well and the Shallows
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I was brought up in
a part of the Protestant world which can best be described by saying that it
referred to the Blessed Virgin as the Madonna.
Sometimes it referred to her as
a Madonna; from a general memory of Italian pictures. It was not a bigoted or
uneducated world; it did not regard all Madonnas as idols or all Italians as
Dagoes. But it had selected this expression, by the English instinct for
compromise, so as to avoid both reverence and irreverence. It was, when we came
to think about it, a very curious expression. It amounted to saying that a
Protestant must not call Mary "Our Lady," but he may call her
"My Lady." This would seem, in the abstract, to indicate an even
more intimate and mystical familiarity than the Catholic devotion. But I need
not say that it was not so. It was not untouched by that queer Victorian
evasion; of translating dangerous or improper words into foreign languages.
But
it was also not untouched by a certain sincere though vague respect for the
part that Madonnas had played, in the actual cultural and artistic history of
our civilisation. Certainly the ordinary reasonably reverent Englishman would
never have intended to be disrespectful to that tradition in that aspect; even
when he was much less liberal, travelled and well-read than were my own
parents. Certainly, on the other hand, he was entirely unaware that he was
saying "My Lady"; and if you had pointed out to him that, in fact, he
was generally saying "a My Lady," or "the My Lady," he
would have agreed that it was rather odd.
I do not forget, and indeed it would be a very thankless thing in me to forget,
that I was lucky in this relative reasonablenesss and moderation of my own
family and friends; and that there is a whole Protestant world that would
consider such moderation a very poor-spirited sort of Protestantism. That
strange mania against Mariolatry; that mad vigilance that watches for the first
faint signs of the cult of Mary as for the spots of a plague; that apparently
presumes her to be perpetually and secretly encroaching upon the prerogatives
of Christ; that logically infers from a mere glimpse of the blue robe the
presence of the Scarlet Woman--all that I have never felt or known or
understood, even as a child; nor did those who had the care of my childhood. They
knew nothing to speak of about the Catholic Church; they certainly did not know
that anybody connected with them was ever likely to belong to it; but they did
know that noble and beautiful ideas had been presented to the world under the
form of this sacred figure, as under that of the Greek gods or heroes. But,
while putting aside all pretence that this Protestant atmosphere was actively
an anti-Catholic atmosphere, I may still say that my personal case was a little
curious.
I have here rashly undertaken to write on a subject at once intimate and
daring; a subject which ought indeed, by its own majesty, to make it impossible
to be egotistical; but which does also make it impossible to be anything but
personal.
"Mary and the Convert" is the most personal of topics,
because conversion is something more personal and less corporate than
communion; and involves isolated feelings as an introduction to collective
feelings. But also because the cult of Mary is in a rather peculiar sense a
personal cult; over and above that greater sense that must always attach to the
worship of a personal God. God is God, Maker of all things visible and
invisible; the Mother of God is in a rather special sense connected with things
visible; since she is of this earth, and through her bodily being God was revealed
to the senses. In the presence of God, we must remember what is invisible,
even in the sense of what is merely intellectual; the abstractions and the
absolute laws of thought; the love of truth, and the respect for right reason
and honourable logic in things, which God himself has respected. For, as St.
Thomas Aquinas insists, God himself does not contradict the law of
contradiction.
But Our Lady, reminding us especially of God Incarnate, does in
some degree gather up and embody all those elements of the heart and the higher
instincts, which are the legitimate short cuts to the love of God. Dealing
with those personal feelings, even in this rude and curt outline, is therefore
very far from easy. I hope I shall not be misunderstood if the example I take
is merely personal; since it is this particular part of religion that really
cannot be impersonal. It may be an accident, or a highly unmerited favour of
heaven, but anyhow it is a fact, that I always had a curious longing for the
remains of this particular tradition, even in a world where it was regarded as
a legend. I was not only haunted by the idea while still stuck in the ordinary stage
of schoolboy scepticism; I was affected by it before that, before I had shed
the ordinary nursery religion in which the Mother of God had no fit or adequate
place. I found not long ago, scrawled in very bad handwriting, screeds of an
exceedingly bad imitation of Swinburne, which was, nevertheless, apparently
addressed to what I should have called a picture of the Madonna. And I can
distinctly remember reciting the lines of the "Hymn To Proserpine,"
out of pleasure in their roll and resonance; but deliberately directing them
away from Swinburne's intention, and supposing them addressed to the new
Christian Queen of life, rather than to the fallen Pagan queen of death.
"But I turn to her still; having seen she shall surely abide in the end; Goddess
and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend."
And I had obscurely, from that time onwards, the very vague but slowly clarifying
idea of defending all that Constantine had set up, just as Swinburne's Pagan
had defended all he had thrown down.


It may still be noted that the unconverted world, Puritan or Pagan, but perhaps
especially when it is Puritan, has a very strange notion of the collective
unity of Catholic things or thoughts. Its exponents, even when not in any rabid
sense enemies, give the most curious lists of things which they think make up
the Catholic life; an odd assortment of objects, such as candles, rosaries,
incense (they are always intensely impressed with the enormous importance and
necessity of incense), vestments, pointed windows, and then all sorts of
essentials or unessentials thrown in in any sort of order; fasts, relics,
penances or the Pope.
But even in their bewilderment, they do bear witness to a
need which is not so nonsensical as their attempts to fulfill it; the need of
somehow summing up "all that sort of thing," which does really describe
Catholicism and nothing else except Catholicism. It should of course be
described from within, by the definition and development of its theological
first principles; but that is not the sort of need I am talking about. I mean
that men need an image, single, coloured and clear in outline, an image to be
called up instantly in the imagination, when what is Catholic is to be
distinguished from what claims to be Christian or even what in one sense is
Christian.
Now I can scarcely remember a time when the image of Our Lady did not stand up
in my mind quite definitely, at the mention or the thought of all these things.
I was quite distant from these things, and then doubtful about these things; and
then disputing with the world for them, and with myself against them; for that
is the condition before conversion. But whether the figure was distant, or was
dark and mysterious, or was a scandal to my contemporaries, or was a challenge to
myself--I never doubted that this figure was the figure of the Faith; that she
embodied, as a complete human being still only human, all that this Thing had
to say to humanity.
The instant I remembered the Catholic Church, I remembered
her; when I tried to forget the Catholic Church, I tried to forget her; when I
finally saw what was nobler than my fate, the freest and the hardest of all my
acts of freedom, it was in front of a gilded and very gaudy little image of her
in the port of Brindisi, that I promised the thing that I would do, if I
returned to my own land.
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