The Man in the Cave

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. GENESIS 1:27

In 1920 H. G. Wells published The Outline of History, a vast and enormously popular account of the human story from the beginning of the universe to the Great War. Its message, broadly, was that man is an animal who has gradually evolved, that religion is one of the stages through which he has passed, and that Jesus was a remarkable teacher among many. Chesterton, who liked Wells and disagreed with him about almost everything, set out to tell the same story the other way round. The result was The Everlasting Man (1925), which many readers think his greatest book. Its first part is about man; its second is about Christ.

Seeing it from outside

Chesterton began with an unusual claim. In his introduction he wrote that “the next best thing to being really inside Christendom is to be really outside it.” His complaint about the critics of Christianity was that they were neither: they were too familiar with it to see it, and too hostile to understand it. His aim, therefore, was to make the familiar strange again — to look at man, and at Christ, as though for the first time, with the eyes of someone who had never heard the story before.

The picture on the wall

He started in a cave. He imagined a priest and a boy crawling through a long tunnel in the hills and coming out, at last, in a cavern on whose walls, by lamplight, they see the paintings left there by prehistoric men: great sprawling outlines of reindeer and horses and bison, drawn with skill and life. Such caves had indeed been discovered not long before he wrote.

What does the boy learn from the paintings? Not, Chesterton said, that the men who made them were brutes. He learns the opposite: that they were men, very like ourselves, with the very human urge to make pictures. And then he notices something so simple that it is easily missed. He has found the place where a man drew a picture of a reindeer. He would have to dig a great deal deeper before he found the place where a reindeer drew a picture of a man. In the chapter called The Man in the Cave Chesterton put the conclusion in six words: “Art is the signature of man.”

I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well. PSALM 139:14

Different in kind

This is the argument of the whole first part of the book. Man is an animal, but he is not merely an animal. He is different from every other creature, not in degree but in kind. No other creature paints, or prays, or buries its dead with ceremony, or tells stories, or laughs, or asks what it is for. The more closely we look at man as an animal, Chesterton said, the stranger he appears. In the same chapter: “the more we really look at man as an animal, the less he will look like one.”

He went on, through the following chapters, to look at the earliest civilisations, the religions and mythologies of the ancient world, and the philosophies of Greece and India, and he argued that in each of them the same thing appears: a creature haunted by the sense of something beyond the world, reaching out in myth and ritual and thought towards a God he could not quite find. The myths were dreams, he said; the philosophies were guesses; and the whole of the ancient world was waiting.

That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us. ACTS 17:27

Weighing it

Chesterton’s account of the uniqueness of man is a powerful and much-needed answer to the belief that human beings are nothing but clever animals. It stands on the first chapter of Genesis: man alone is made in the image of God, and the marks of that image — creativity, reason, worship, moral sense — are everywhere visible, even in the oldest traces of human life.

Two points may be weighed. First, Chesterton was not arguing against every theory of biological development; he was arguing against the philosophy, often attached to it, which says that man is merely a product of nature with no more meaning than a beetle. He was content to leave the scientific details to the scientists, and his own views on them were not those of every evangelical reader. What he insisted on was that, however the human body came to be, the human being is something new in the world, and points beyond the world.

Second, his account of the pagan myths as dreams and guesses, reaching out towards the truth, is generous and often illuminating. But Scripture also speaks more darkly of the religions of the nations, as the worship of creatures in place of the Creator. Chesterton knew this, and he wrote of the dark side of paganism with real horror in later chapters. The reader should hold both truths: that the human heart was made for God and seeks Him, and that left to itself it turns that seeking into idolatry.

And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. ROMANS 1:23

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Think of the things that you do that no animal does: pray, create, laugh, grieve, ask questions. Thank God for His image in you.

2. Read Psalm 8 and Genesis 1:26–31 slowly, and consider what it means to be made in God’s image.

3. Consider someone you find hard to respect. Remember that they too bear God’s image.

4. Read Acts 17:22–31 and notice how Paul speaks to people who were feeling after God.

5. Read the chapter of The Everlasting Man called The Man in the Cave, in the Ochorus library.

A PRAYER

Lord God, You made man in Your own image, and You crowned him with glory and honour.

Thank You that I am not merely an animal, but a creature made to know You, to praise You and to make things for Your glory.

Forgive me for the times I have lived beneath my calling, and treated others as less than Your image-bearers.

Thank You that what the ancient world reached for in the dark, You have given in Jesus Christ. Amen.