This picture is one of the hundreds of pictures that can be taken in the streets of my city during The Holy Week. Personally, this is my favourite image (La Piedad by Gregorio Fernandez). I'll try to take more pictures these days because, believe me, it's worth seeing.
Anyway, I posted this, because this Sunday will be Palm Sunday and because The Holy Week is about to start. As I don't know any Chesterton's quotes on this subject, I beg you, please, to share any Chesterton's quote about The Cross or anything. I'll be most grateful. (If I have any mistake, will you tell me? Thanks ! )
3 comments:
The Everlasting Man is a great source for Lenten quotes.
Also if you look for the Thursday posts on the ACS blog (there's a link in the sidebar here) you will find a treausure trove of amazing GKC quotes like this one:
But if the divinity [of Christ] is true it is certainly terribly revolutionary. That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that God could have his back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents for ever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point - and does not break. In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss; and I apologise in advance if any of my phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent touching a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. It is written, "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." [Mt 4:7 quoting Dt. 6:16] No; but the Lord thy God may tempt Himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane. In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God. He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. [Mt 27:46 quoting Ps 22:1]
[GKC Orthodoxy CW1:343]
I should probably do a post on this soon, but I don't want to rush, your picture looks so cool there and so perfect as we approach the end of the season of lent.
Here are some quotes. (I got them from the ACS Blog):
...the life of Jesus went as swift and straight as a thunderbolt. It was above all things dramatic; it did above all things consist in doing something that had to be done. It emphatically would not have been done if Jesus had walked about the world for ever doing nothing except tell the truth. And even the external movement of it must not be described as a wandering in the sense of forgetting that it was a journey. This is where it was a fulfilment of the myths rather than of the philosophies; it is a journey with a goal and an object, like Jason going to find the Golden Fleece, or Hercules the golden apples of the Hesperides. The gold that he was seeking was death. The primary thing that he was going to do was to die. [Mt 16:21, Lk 12:49-50] He was going to do other things equally definite and objective; we might almost say equally external and material. But from first to last the most definite fact is that he is going to die.
[GKC, The Everlasting Man CW2:339]
AND
As the sunset clouds were heavy with a purple which typifies the rich tragedy of Lent, so on this evening passion seemed to weigh on him with something of the power of doom. ... as he gazed upwards for an instant, from the place where he had fallen, he saw above the black forest and against the vivid violet clouds, something strangely suitable to that tragic purple recalling the traditions of Lent. It was a great face between outstretched gigantic arms; the face upon a large wooden crucifix. The figure was carved in the round but very much in the rough, in a rude archaic style, and was probably an old outpost of Latin Christianity in that labyrinth of religious frontiers.
["The Tower of Treason" in CW14:300]
"In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God."
This was one of the objections my father had to the Passion movie.
Thanks for posting the picture and quote!! I never knew Chesterton had written anything like that; I thought it was all either fiction or apologetics of one sort or another. Mapaz, where do you live? It must be a wonderful place to be now.
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