Symbols alone are of even a cloudy value in speaking of this deep
matter; and another symbol from physical nature will express
sufficiently well the real place of mysticism before mankind. The one
created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of
which we look at everything—Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains
everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility—Detached
intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all
moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light,
reflected from a dead world. But the Greeks were right when they made
Apollo the god both of imagination and of sanity; for he was both the
patron of poetry and the patron of healing. Of necessary dogmas and a
special creed I shall speak later. But that transcendentalism by which
all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We
are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something
both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle
of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable,
as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly
reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them
all her name.
G.K Chesterton - Orthodoxy
From which C.S Lewis presumably drew his own and better known
extrapolation:
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only
because I see it, but because by it I see everything else
"Is Theology Poetry?" (1945)
