Recently, I posted some passages from the introductory section (nidāna) of the Kathāvatthu-Aṭṭhakathā. I would encourage anyone who is interested in this topic to read those passages.
They speak to how far astray things can go if wrong views are not disputed, and to how right view can persist for a very long time when they are:
Additionally, I have been reading a delightful book originally published in 1908 titled Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton. Now the book is about Christian Orthodoxy and is written by a Christian Apologist, but the section I post below is not about promoting a Christian world-view, but simply about the idea of orthodoxy and divergence from it. He also goes into some of the psychology of those who retain orthodox views, and interestingly of those who reject them. Not only is it beautifully written, but the parallels to our tradition are amazing. It is so reflective of our situation that I reflected on the Kathāvatthu-Aṭṭhakathā for a long time after reading it. I would encourage everyone to read it:
“This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly. The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. It would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians. It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom—that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.”
G. K. Chesterton. Orthodoxy, page 102
My favorite line from the above for reflection is the following:
“It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own.”
Words of wisdom.
Renaldo