The Mystagogue

Whenever you hear much of things being unutterable and indefinable and
impalpable and unnamable and subtly indescribable, then elevate your
aristocratic nose towards heaven and snuff up the smell of decay. It is
perfectly true that there is something in all good things that is beyond
all speech or figure of speech. But it is also true that there is in all
good things a perpetual desire for expression and concrete embodiment; and
though the attempt to embody it is always inadequate, the attempt is
always made. If the idea does not seek to be the word, the chances are
that it is an evil idea. If the word is not made flesh it is a bad word.

Thus Giotto or Fra Angelieo would have at once admitted theologically that
God was too good to be painted; but they would always try to paint Him.
And they felt (very rightly) that representing Him as a rather quaint old
man with a gold crown and a white beard, like a king of the elves, was
less profane than resisting the sacred impulse to express Him in some way.
That is why the Christian world is full of gaudy pictures and twisted
statues which seem, to many refined persons, more blasphemous than the
secret volumes of an atheist. The trend of good is always towards
Incarnation. But, on the other hand, those refined thinkers who worship
the Devil, whether in the swamps of Jamaica or the salons of Paris, always
insist upon the shapelessness, the wordlessness, the unutterable character
of the abomination. They call him "horror of emptiness," as did the black
witch in Stevenson's Dynamiter; they worship him as the unspeakable name;
as the unbearable silence. They think of him as the void in the heart of
the whirlwind; the cloud on the brain of the maniac; the toppling turrets
of vertigo or the endless corridors of nightmare. It was the Christians
who gave the Devil a grotesque and energetic outline, with sharp horns and
spiked tail. It was the saints who drew Satan as comic and even lively.
The Satanists never drew him at all.

And as it is with moral good and evil, so it is also with mental clarity
and mental confusion. There is one very valid test by which we may
separate genuine, if perverse and unbalanced, originality and revolt from
mere impudent innovation and bluff. The man who really thinks he has an
idea will always try to explain that idea. The charlatan who has no idea
will always confine himself to explaining that it is much too subtle to be
explained. The first idea may really be very outree or specialist; it may
really be very difficult to express to ordinary people. But because the
man is trying to express it, it is most probable that there is something
in it, after all. The honest man is he who is always trying to utter the
unutterable, to describe the