Admittedly, I’m behind in last weeks reading, but I did manage to make two passes through “The Ethics of Elfland” (this means I will post up the remainder of this post on Monday). For the longest time, since my first encounter with Orthodoxy many years back, this has been one of my all-time favorite chapters of any book I have read. I’m sure my love of it is more simplistic and shallow than others. As with swimming, if my feet can’t touch the bottom while my head is out of the water, I get uneasy quickly.
Chapter 4: The Ethics of Elfland
Let’s begin, I love the juxtaposition of fairy land against our everyday world. Fairy land seems to be an echo from earlier chapters in that it continues to reverberate reason and wonder, while the everyday world has little to do with wonder. There is reason in the necessary things of elfland and wonder in everything else. But in the everyday world, we have taken the reasonableness of the necessary things and attempted to apply them unnaturally to everything else. We have taken the one single idea and reapplied it to everything we see and know (like the madman). Elfland makes a visible distinction between the two realms and yet they co-exist harmoniously; Everyday land lauds the one to the demise of the other.
Chesterton draws a distinction between necessity and possibility and I think his distinction between the two ideas is a good one to maintain. Everyday land seeks to remove the possible so that all is necessary and determined. Elfland sees them co-existing together.
Further, Chesterton paints a wonderful image of how repetition speaks to vitality and life and contrasts this with variance and how that depicts a wearing down and dying. He reminds us of how we have grown old due to sin while the Father is younger than us. Chesterton hits on a rather paradoxical idea. Sin sets decay in motion and with it brings death. Time existed before sin, but decay was not part of time. The wearing down and wearing out does not occur for the sinless and pure – God is eternally young though God existed from eternity. We age and grow old and die. Though, being finite, we are infinitely younger than an infinite God, we are also far older than He precisely because of sin.
I would love to hear your thoughts. If you have been reading Orthodoxy – bravo! If you haven’t started, then I would encourage you to do so and join in on the conversation – it is a good one.
Previous posts from The Gospel Coalition (GC) and Mere Orthodoxy (MO) in this series:
- Orthodoxy – G.K. Chesterton – Introduction (GC)
- Orthodoxy – G.K. Chesterton – Chapter 1 (MO)
- Orthodoxy – G.K. Chesterton – Chapters 2 & 3 (GC)
- Orthodoxy – G.K. Chesterton – Chapters 4 & 5 (MO)
Previous posts from Risen Hope in this series:
- Orthodoxy – G.K. Chesterton – Part 1
- Orthodoxy – G.K. Chesterton – Part 2
- Orthodoxy – G.K. Chesterton – Part 3