"GKChesterton-TheSuperstitionOfDivorce" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chesterton G.K)

quite true, and that some of us may be so perverse as to think a point
in favour of the religion. But anybody who holds it at all will hold it
as a philosophy, not hung on one text but on a hundred truths.
Fraternity may be a sentimental metaphor; I may be suffering a delusion
when I hail a Montenegrin peasant as my long lost brother. As a fact, I
have my own suspicions about which of us it is that has got lost. But my
delusion is not a deduction from one text, or from twenty; it is the
expression of a relation that to me at least seems a reality. And what I
should say about the idea of a brother, I should say about the idea of a
wife.

It is supposed to be very unbusinesslike to begin at the beginning. It
is called "abstract and academic principles with which we English, etc.,
etc." It is still in some strange way considered unpractical to open up
inquiries about anything by asking what it is. I happen to have,
however, a fairly complete contempt for that sort of practicality; for I
know that it is not even practical. My ideal business man would not be
one who planked down fifty pounds and said "Here is hard cash; I am a
plain man; it is quite indifferent to me whether I am paying a debt, or
giving alms to a beggar, or buying a wild bull or a bathing machine."
Despite the infectious heartiness of his tone, I should still, in
considering the hard cash, say (like a cabman) "What's this?" I should
continue to insist, priggishly, that it was a highly practical point
what the money was; what it was supposed to stand for, to aim at or to
declare; what was the nature of the transaction; or, in short, what the
devil the man supposed he was doing. I shall therefore begin by asking,
in an equally mystical manner, what in the name of God and the angels a
man getting married supposes he is doing. I shall begin by asking what
marriage is; and the mere question will probably reveal that the act
itself, good or bad, wise or foolish, is of a certain kind; that it is
not an inquiry or an experiment or an accident; it may probably dawn on
us that it is a promise. It can be more fully defined by saying it is a
vow.

Many will immediately answer that it is a rash vow. I am content for the
moment to reply that all vows are rash vows. I am not now defending but
defining wows; I am pointing out that this is a discussion about vows;
first, of whether there ought to be vows; and second, of what vows ought
to be. Ought a man to break a promise? Ought a man to make a promise?
These are philosophic questions; but the philosophic peculiarity of
divorce and re-marriage, as compared with free love and no marriage, is
that a man breaks and makes a promise at the same moment. It is a highly
German philosophy; and recalls the way in which the enemy wishes to
celebrate his successful destruction of all treaties by signing some
more. If I were breaking a promise, I would do it without promises. But
I am very far from minimising the momentous and disputable nature of the
vow itself. I shall try to show, in a further article, that this rash
and romantic operation is the only furnace from which can come the plain
hardware of humanity, the cast-iron resistance of citizenship or the
cold steel of common sense; but I am not denying that the furnace is a