Mercy That Wears a Mask

“Man is most comforted by paradoxes.”

Back in May, I read The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G.K. Chesterton. The entire composition is one gigantic allegory and its meaning completely eluded me during my first read through. It’s one of those books in which it is possible to understand the plot perfectly and feel entirely lost at the same time because with every line you read, you know that there’s so much more going on behind the text that you don’t fully comprehend. You feel like you’re missing out on something wonderfully profound, something brilliant. And that feeling of loss and confusion propels you do something that people who do not love reading will never understand; it makes you read it again.

So last month, that’s what I did. And the message I acquired this second time through I believe is worth sharing. So here we go! I’ll try to keep this short as possible…

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare is Chesterton’s response to the Book of Job, confronting Satan’s accusation that Job did not know suffering. Before we explore this nightmare, it is important to discuss a shorter piece Chesterton wrote on this book of the Bible, as it is essential to fully understanding his nightmare. (Note: Chesterton is about the most quotable author ever to exist, so a bulk of this is going to be quotes. He says things way better than I can anyway…)

In his essay Introduction to the Book of Job Chesterton writes of the philosophical riddle within the book, and essentially he argues that this riddle deals with humans’ response to God’s role in suffering. He writes that Job throughout the entire book is basically asking the following, “It is easy enough to wipe out our own paltry wills for the sake of a will that is grander and kinder. But is it grander and kinder? Let God use his tools; let God break His tools. But what is he doing, and what are they being broken for?” Job’s response to this question Chesterton declares is optimistic in nature while his comforters are pessimistic, a role reversal from what commonly is established. While Job even goes so far as to label the Almighty as his adversary, he never seems to doubt that his enemy has a case of which he cannot understand. He wants God to Justify Himself; this is optimistic. “He lashes the stars, but it is not to silence them; it is to make them speak.” His comforters on the other hand are pessimistic in the sense that they insist on everything fitting together in the world, leaving no room for the miraculousness of God. I believe the reason he claims this view to be pessimistic is that it is doesn’t give God the credit deserved for His creation; it’s far more complex than what it seems. “The mechanical optimist [which Chesterton views as pessimistic] endeavors to justify the universe avowedly upon the ground that it is a rational and consecutive pattern. He points out that the fine thing about the world is that it all can be explained. That is the one point, if I may put it so, on which God, in return, is explicit almost to the point of violence. He insists on the inexplicableness of everything.” This brings us to the point where God himself enters the dialogue, and we find that He has come to propound the riddle, not explain it. He answers Job’s questions with questions of his own, bigger and more perplexing. Job sees the impenetrability of God and is comforted, leading Chesterton to state, “The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.”

Alright, so keeping this in mind and coming back to The Man Who Was Thursday, here’s a brief synopsis: Gabriel Syme, a poet, is taken to a secret anarchist meeting after denouncing a fellow poet’s (Gregory) claim of being an anarchist as insincere. What Gregory doesn’t know is that Syme is an undercover police detective. Within this meeting, Syme gets himself accidentally-on-purpose elected to the office of Thursday, a position on the Supreme Anarchist Council. (All seven members are named after a day of the week.) From here, he strives to stop the council and its leader Sunday from destroying the world without breaking his oath of secrecy to Gregory, and along the way, he discovers that he is not the only detective on the council. I will leave it there, in an attempt to spoil as little of the story as possible for those of you who have not read it.

While this book is FULL of amazing ideas, there are two main ones to which I will limit myself. The first is the concept of the two sides of God: his back and his face. Chesterton argues that his back is synonymous with nature, and as discussed in The Introduction to the Book of Job, nature is inexplicable. It is impossible to understand it, and it often appears to be terrible. However, through nature, God’s creation, we are able to catch glimpses of his face, and we see that it is almost too good to even comprehend. This paradox is what comforts us. Syme makes the following remark based upon his first glimpse of Sunday, the anarchist counsel leader and symbolization of God:

“I only saw his back; and when I saw his back I knew he was the worst man in the world. His neck and shoulders were brutal, like those of some apish god. His head had a stoop that was hardly human…I had seen his back from the street, as he sat in the balcony. Then I saw his face in the sunlight. His face frightened me, but not because it was brutal, not because it was evil. On the contrary, it frightened me because it was so beautiful, because it was so good.”

This leads up to right before the climax of the book, at which point one of Syme’s comrades asks the following, “Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world.” We have only truly seen God’s back, and while we see his presence in creation, it is hard to justify the suffering and devastation that also occurs alongside the beauty. Where is God in what we have deemed to be the terrible parts of creation? We often trick ourselves into thinking that we can understand everything around us and come to a full understanding of who God really is, but we can’t. As Sunday tells Syme:

“Grub in the roots of those trees and find out the truth about them. Stare at those morning clouds. But I tell you this, that you will have found out the truth of the last tree and the topmost cloud before the truth about me. You will understand the sea, and I shall be still a riddle; you shall know what the stars are, and not know what I am.”

In other words, God will always be a riddle. All that matters is that He is good and is responsible for the orchestration of all humanity. As another character comments, “You know Nature plays tricks, but somehow that Spring day proves they are good natured tricks.”

The second idea, which Chesterton probably meant to be the main theme of his book, is the idea that our faith as Christians has been tested through suffering. In the Book of Job, Satan makes the accusation that Job only calls God good because he has never suffered. Chesterton, through this book, makes the claim that Christians do suffer for their faith on a regular basis because of the nature of life. Christianity is not an easy path. In the end of the nightmare, Gregory, who we find out is actually the Satan figure of the book as well as the true anarchist, makes the following accusation of the policemen who once made up the anarchist counsel. “You have never hated because you have never lived. Is there a free soul alive that does not long to break you, only because you have never been broken? Oh, I could forgive you everything, you that rule mankind, if I could feel for once that you had suffered for one hour a real agony such as I…” Syme, after experiencing what must have been the most trying week of his life, interrupts, basically summing up the whole of the theme:

“Why does each thing on the earth war against each other thing? Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe? For the same reason that I had to be alone in the dreadful Council of the Days. So that each thing that obeys the law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter. So that the real lie of Satan may be flung back in the face of this blasphemer, so that by tears and torture we may earn the right to say to this man, “You lie!” No agonies can be too great to buy the right to say to this accuser, ‘We have also suffered.’”

And then, he wakes up from the nightmare…

Jeff Baldwin sums this theme up well when he says, “When man faces the universe alone, it seems like night is descending, but once he understands the gospel he knows he stands at dawn, with all things made new.” That is a lesson we all can take from The Man Who Was Thursday.

Well, I really don’t feel like I did Chesterton justice at all in this summary, firstly, because it is not possible, secondly, because it would so long no one would read it, and thirdly, to go in further depth would require spoiling the story more than I already did. I commend all of you who actually read all of this…I will mail you a gold star, for real….and I hope this makes sense to someone other than myself. :P

I would encourage everyone to read this book as it is amazing and thought provoking. Chesterton is an extremely witty author as well, so it is a very enjoyable read. By reading this novel, you can explore the depths of his allegory by answering questions such as, Why is God the head of the anarchist counsel? Why are all the policemen pretending to be anarchists? Why is digestion poetical? Why is it a nightmare anyway?

Bask in the inexplicableness, and let yourself be filled with wonder; see the mercy behind the mask. That is all.