That saintly sage G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) was a true wise man, always in quest of truth, even if often smilingly in a cap and bells. He is rightly notable for adages and epigrams, the most famous of which is surely, “The difficulty that ensues when people cease to believe in God is not that they then believe in nothing, but that they believe in anything.” Over 75 years I have found no adage truer than this one about contemporary Western persons. The main logical difficulty is that so few of them believe in any of the same things. For many of them the one constant seems to be “anything but Christianity” (let’s call it ABC), as in “I am spiritual but not religious,” but the receptacle of this exalted spirituality seems pretty much anything heterodox: yoga, polyamory, crystals, banal bromides, dietary supplements (or dietary subtractions).
Perhaps we are seeing the ultimate working out of what the great contemporary sociologist and theologian Peter L. Berger called “the heretical imperative.” Ever since Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman — and even before Nietzsche, who read Emerson — every man, or woman, seems to be his own (or her own) Messiah. Amor sui usque ad contemptum boni (love of self even unto the contempt of the good): There is nothing authoritative that is conceived to be anterior, exterior, or superior to the self.
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