I found a link to your blog on my site. Very nice. I was warmed to read the brief and humble description of you and the family with whom God has blessed you. I pray that he will fulfill the desire of your heart to know him more deeply and serve him more fervently. May you and your wife grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus and do great exploits for the kingdom!

Sincerely yours,
Bob Gonzales

I noted the overall theodicy of the story and thought I perceived typical themes, implications and assumptions. Perhaps I was too ready to see them and seeing, I did not really see. But as you said, the work was “theodicy of a universal character, in which the six, or maybe seven, caricatures. . . are brought to silence and to worship before the awful hilarity of truth,” and this seems to me to have almost nothing to do with Job at all, save for their mutual place within a broad genre. That is to say, Thursday is a work that is more comfortable with the philosophy of religion than Biblical religion, and I struggled to recognize any genuine holiness about Sunday.

Maybe that was Chesterton’s point, that the “holiness” of GOD is so unlike our usual fabrications that it requires a kind of satire to sever our hearts from the idol. However, if that is the case, then his alternative isn’t instruction we can get from Scripture. We would have to obtain it, as I think Chesterton does, from the hymns of other-worldly saints. Yet I wonder whether his view is, after all, rather more the typical one really, simply disguised by the ingenuity of his paradoxical translation.

Whether the wedding feast will involve “frivolity” in the usual sense is anyone’s guess. I simply know that when Job was at a loss to fathom the purpose of his pain and its implications for his future, GOD did not float by in a balloon dropping apparently childish scribbles on bits of paper. It was a whirlwind and a profound interrogation for him which opened up a grandeur Job had never imagined and could not deny.

Perhaps Chesterton thinks that, unlike Job, modern man must be teased and provoked to the chase while being confronted with his own brand of absurdity. I’m inclined to think that, whatever our Father does, there’s a vital sense in which He never really changes and that He certainly doesn’t set His people against each other… but then, when I refer to His “people,” I mean something much narrower than Chesterton seems to intend, and when I envision their “unity,” it revolves around something I think must be quite foreign to his religious context.

My own view of Thursday, at least broadly, is that it is a book aiming at theodicy along the lines of Job; but it is theodicy of a universal character, in which the six, or maybe seven, caricatures – remember that for C, the caricature is the only real thing – are brought to silence and to worship before the awful hilarity of truth. The fullness of time is marked by a great wedding feast, and I think Chesterton does well to mix in some frivolity.

But at the same time, I really don’t think there is an unnecessary or trivial word in all the story: Chesterton has many gifts as a writer, but subtlety is not generally one of them. Look at any of his poetry – the herd of cows that gets loose in Cork county becomes a metaphor for Irish liberation, and King Alfred’s Vikings talk like 20th century skeptics.

I guess I’m somewhat puzzled that you find the work so difficult. To me it read in more or less straightforward fashion, but perhaps you simply read it deepter than I, and hence uncovered points of tension that I had glossed over.

1. I don’t know enough about Seneca to appreciate your insight on Chesterton. Nevertheless, I am rather sure Chesterton would not have liked Knox at all. The puritans, of whom Knox was a forerunner and entirely of their kind, gave Chesterton a very bad taste in his mouth. I always thought that his attitude toward them was that their whole purpose in life was to take the flavor out of everything, and Knox was one of the chief offenders of this “monstrous” breed. Of course, I may have missed Chesterton completely, but that’s what I’ve gathered from him (and from Lewis).

2. When I referred to the “stark realism” of Christ, I had meant only that it is a realism that doesn’t hold back any punches or indulge in pretense or frivolity. It is pointed, sober, breathtaking and painfully true and holy. In Christ, we confront Reality as He is.

3. When asking whether Chesterton might have done some “honor” to God, we have to consider (as best we can) what he actually meant. Examining the rest of his work and considering his religious devotion would advance this purpose greatly, so my criticism of him does take this into consideration, but it did so superficially. My remarks had much more to do with my interpretation of the story, which could have been lopsided…

4. Trying not to provide too many spoilers, I would say that Chesterton, like many brilliant men, has a tendency to stand off to one side for a moment and comment about life and human foibles as though he were not as affected by these as he knows that he is. It isn’t that he fails to appreciate his place among the rest of us. I was given the strongest impression that Chesterton throughout, so observant on the ironies of life, was really laughing at the whole human race, himself included. And yet, he doesn’t take seriously enough how this might affect his own critical observations. It’s the relative immunity which the court clown, the jester of life, always grants to himself to one degree or another.

But, more importantly, Chesterton’s apparently mystical inclusivism, his attempt to describe the sometimes whimsical or ridiculous and paradoxical nature of God and His relationship to us, his view of truth, his illustration of conversion and final salvation, his perspective on Biblical history with its prevailing types and symbols, his somewhat shallow attitude toward righteousness and contrasting sin and evil in the world, all compelled me to turn away in weak sympathy. Of course, there are places where I could feel that Chesterton had really done something justice, that he had given piquant expression to something that we only vaguely feel. And there I could praise GOD for having been kind toward a man who it seems to me abused so much that our Father had granted to him. We could, of course, append that conclusion onto virtually any person who ever lived, but here I meant to apply it more acutely.

Am I suggesting that Chesterton was not a Biblically Christian author? That is harder to tell and I haven’t given his work a lot of study. Frankly, I don’t think I should read too much into a wildly symbolic novel, but there are points of legitimate criticism that can be made, otherwise a work so indecipherable would be useless to us. I don’t think Chesterton intended to be that abstruse… but I cannot assume dogmatically that I got the point myself. Maybe I missed something vital. Perhaps while he was trying to say something profound, I too often interpreted him trivially. It could be… There must certainly be a reason so many people have found Chesterton to be a rare voice of religious sanity.

Yet, I say that as I realize that many would have said (and do say) the same of Lewis. I’m inclined more, in these cases, to be thankful to GOD, like Joseph, for leading His people into and out of Egypt, for while we so often intended it for evil, He meant it for good and for the saving of many in Israel.

I wonder what strides I might make as a human being if I regularly exercised toward others–whether of my own culture or not–the sensitivity and restraint you showed to the woman from Libya and to your other students.

How I wish that all students had such a caring teacher!

I’m anxious to read your response to Joel’s comments. I found his remarks both interesting and insightful and presume I will find yours to be as well.