Red Booth Notes: Understanding GK Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (Part 1)

The Book of Job is chiefly remarkable…for the fact that it does not end in a way that is conventionally satisfactory…It is the lesson of the whole work that man is most comforted by paradoxes…What a high and strange history awaited this paradox of the best man in the worst fortune.[1]

—from an Introduction to

The Book of Job, by G.K. Chesterton

If there is one theme or image that runs throughout The Book of Job, it is that of God as the inscrutable Almighty, the mysterium tremendum, or divine embodiment of “overwhelming mystery.” This Latin phrase figured prominently in German theologian Rudolf Otto’s book, The Idea of the Holy, first published in 1917.[2]

But ten years earlier, in 1907, Chesterton himself had spoken in very similar terms. In his now classic Introductory essay on The Book of Job, he wrote of “the special tone and intention of the Old Testament”—highlighting “its main idea, which is the idea of all men being merely the instruments of a higher power.”[3]

Chesterton also spoke of “the riddle of the book of Job”—which, though it sounds lighthearted to the modern ear, was in no way a departure from the idea of the mysterium tremendum which Otto would later describe. In his essay, Chesterton declared the riddle of The Book of Job to be a thing mighty and inscrutable, a source of seemingly unanswerable things that paradoxically bring solace to Job, and turn his captivity.

Chesterton was powerfully drawn to this Homeric tale of the Old Testament. For as a young man, his own odyssey had set him for a time within a prison of despair. But then, in ways he never forgot, his own captivity had been turned.

In his late teens, and for a period lasting approximately one year, (the summer of 1893 to the summer of 1894), Chesterton was besieged by a despondency so overwhelming that he likened it to “a blind spiritual suicide.” The catalyst had been a perfect storm of dabbling in the occult, morbid introspection, and immersion—through his classes at art school—in the pervasive cultural pessimism and decadence of the 1890s. He was overcome by a debilitating sense of loss, exile and isolation. It was an existential crisis. As he would later write, “when the evil things besieging us do appear, they do not appear outside but inside.”[4]

Chesterton’s description of how he struggled free of this oppressive despondency was couched in language from The Princess and the Goblin, the classic fantasy in which George MacDonald had written of “the thread that the fairy great-grandmother put into the hands of [the boy] Curdie to guide him out of the mazes of the goblins.”

MacDonald’s book offered a thread that guided Chesterton out of the labyrinth of his despair. When he stood in greatest need of help, he remembered his childhood reading of MacDonald’s tale. Other writers too, rallied to his aid. He described it all in the pages of his Autobiography:

I hung on to the remains of religion by one thin thread of thanks. I thanked whatever gods might be, not like Swinburne, because no life lived for ever, but because any life lived at all; not, like Henley for my unconquerable soul (for I have never been so optimistic about my own soul as all that) but for my own soul and my own body, even if they could be conquered.[5]

Chesterton coined a phrase for this new way of looking at things. He called it the “mystical minimum of gratitude.” And, in addition to MacDonald’s invaluable guidance, Chesterton felt himself assisted in part “by those few of the fashionable writers who were not pessimists; especially by Walt Whitman, [Robert] Browning and [Robert Louis] Stevenson…[as in] Browning’s ‘God must be glad one loves his world so much,’ or Stevenson’s ‘belief in the ultimate decency of things.’”

Slowly, arduously, a countervailing perspective was dawning in Chesterton’s mind—like dawn after a night of troubled dreams. When he began to grasp its implications fully, relief and joy broke over him. They never left. As he would later write:

 What I meant, whether or no I managed to say it, was this; that no man knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything.

At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he was actually alive, and be happy.[6]

At the heart of it all, as one scholar has observed, “was George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin—a fairytale about faith that made the deepest impression on [Chesterton]. This tale, in which a princess in a castle is attacked from below by goblins and uses a magic thread as her guide, made ‘all experience a fairy-tale’ and gave Chesterton a vision of things that his conversion later confirmed.”[7]

Wordsworth famously said “the child is father to the man.”[8] Sometimes as children, we learn of things that we carry with us the rest of our lives, enduring things—things that rally to our aid when so much seems uncertain. They help us find our way.

Dr. Greville MacDonald understood this in relation to his father’s timeless story. And in words that Chesterton himself might have written, the younger MacDonald observed: “In [my father’s] most imaginative stories he is constantly offering help to the divine questionings. In The Princess and the Goblin it is a little invisible clue, which when at last we have hold on it, we dare never lose again…”[9]

In 1924, Chesterton stated that George MacDonald, in his writings, had realized “the apparent paradox of a St. Francis of Aberdeen, seeing the same sort of halo round every flower and bird.”[10] This was a sentence from his Introduction to a new biography of the Scottish novelist, and it could not have been a more telling comparison. For in the development of his moral imagination, there is a direct line of connection from Chesterton’s boyhood reading of MacDonald to St. Francis, and from St. Francis to The Book of Job. To begin to understand this is to begin to understand why The Book of Job held lifelong meaning for Chesterton.

* * *

 We begin with St. Francis.

In 1923, just one year before his Introduction to the George MacDonald biography appeared, Chesterton’s book, St. Francis of Assisi, was published. In its first chapter, Chesterton stated that the figure of St. Francis “stands on a sort of bridge connecting my boyhood with my conversion to many other things; for the romance of his religion had penetrated even the rationalism of that vague Victorian time. In so far as I have had this experience, I may be able to lead others a little further along that road.”[11]

Even more intriguing is the fact that twenty years earlier, in 1903, very near the time that Chesterton was completing his manuscript for The Man Who Was Thursday, St. Francis had been the focus of an essay in Chesterton’s book Varied Types (published in England as Twelve Types). He felt an lasting gratitude that St. Francis had navigated the often troubled waters of the world while never forgetting “to take pleasure in a bird as it flashed past him, or a drop of water as it fell from his finger: he was, perhaps, the happiest of the sons of men.” This was a phrase that harkened to his future description of MacDonald as a “St Francis of Aberdeen.”

In St. Francis of Assisi, Chesterton had used the language of a “bridge” to convey how he connected MacDonald’s writings to those of St. Francis. He then moved from speaking of St. Francis to speaking The Book of Job. Once, Chesterton had nearly been lost in the darkness of a “nihilistic abyss.”[12] These three sources, in concert, had brought him out of it. In writing of St. Francis, Chesterton brought it all together. “The saint,” he said,

is like the broad daylight. Being in some mystical sense on the other side of things, he sees things go forth from the divine as children going forth from a familiar and accepted home…

So arises out of this almost nihilistic abyss the noble thing that is called Praise…When we say that a poet praises the whole creation, we commonly mean only that he praises the whole cosmos. But this sort of poet does really praise creation, in the sense of the act of creation. He praises the passage or transition from nonentity to entity; there falls here also the shadow of that archetypal image of the bridge, which has given to the priest his archaic and mysterious name [of pontiff].

The mystic who passes through the moment when there is nothing but God does in some sense behold the beginningless beginnings in which there was really nothing else. He not only appreciates everything, but the nothing of which everything was made. In a fashion he endures and answers even the earthquake irony of the Book of Job; in some sense he is there when the foundations of the world are laid, with the morning stars singing together and the sons of God shouting for joy.[13]

This is why The Book of Job was of such absorbing and continual interest to Chesterton. Lost in a labyrinth of despair, he had been led out of it by following the one thin thread spoken of in MacDonald’s tale. St. Francis led him further still. And in the close of introductory essay, Chesterton revealed where that thread eventually led him. “I need not say,” he wrote, “that in the freest and most philosophical sense there is one Old Testament figure who is truly a type; or say what is pre-figured in the wounds of Job.”[14]

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