A “rhapsody of the sense of wonder”: G. K. Chesterton’s defense of mysticism in his reading of the Book of Job

ABSTRACT

Throughout many of his works G. K. Chesterton insisted that “logic is misleading” and “things are not what they seem.”¹ His critiques of the approach to life based purely on logic leads him to engage with the concept of mysticism. Scholars have long interpreted Chesterton’s attitude to this phenomenon in the context of his Christian beliefs. Quentin Lauer notes that “not only was [Chesterton] consistent in his praise of mysticism, whether the poetical mysticism of Francis of Assisi, the theological mysticism of Thomas Aquinas, or what we might call his own ‘intellectual mysticism,’ but he has commitment to Jesus Christ in faith as essentially a mystical venture,” noting that the roots of Chesterton’s vision of mysticism can be found in the context of Christian faith.² Marshall McLuhan famously calls Chesterton a “practical mystic,” alluding, at least partially, to his ability to see the mysterious and even the miraculous in the ordinary and describe the “daily miracles of sense and consciousness.”³ In his extensive study The Tumbler of God: Chesterton as a Mystic (2012), Robert Wild concludes that Chesterton’s unique vision of life is in itself a product of “mystical grace” that was given to him “for a particular mission” which, according to Wild, consists in showing people how to adopt a vision of life that allows them to see the truth about God’s created world.⁴

Though Chesterton’s understanding of mysticism is recognized as having a strong connection to his Christian faith, his praise of this phenomenon has never been considered as a part of his Christian apologetic discourse. This article argues that Chesterton’s interpretation of the Old Testament Book of Job is a defense of what he sees as a Christian mystical view of life, a vision that welcomes mystical as a form of revelation and calls for a renewed sense of wonder in the created world. The article further looks at how this vision of mysticism is expressed in Chesterton’s interpretation of the Book of Job, a story that presents perhaps one of the most puzzling of mystical experiences we find in the Bible and one to which Chesterton returned at various stages of life. Taking Chesterton’s view of mysticism as a starting point in the study of his interpretation of the Book of Job allows us to see that he defines this phenomenon in the context of his Christian faith and adopts a Christian apologetic stance in his reading of this Biblical text. Chesterton presents his concept of mysticism as an attribute of and argument for the Christian view of life.

Chesterton’s defense of mysticism figures prominently in his reading of the Book of Job in the 1907 essay of the same name that has since been reprinted as an “Introduction” to this Old Testament text.⁵In the figure of its eponymous character, the Book of Job poses a profound question about the meaning of human suffering, to which Chesterton refers as a “riddle.” An appeal to mysticism does not serve to explain Job’s “riddle”; rather Chesterton suggests one should move beyond the immediate events and context of the story, even beyond its culmination in the extraordinary mystical experience. Though God’s voice from the whirlwind at the end of the story does not answer the question about the meaning of human suffering, the question that remains unanswered, this experience is very important nonetheless. God’s monologue, Chesterton suggests, is in itself a defense of mysticism as a way of seeing and appreciating life, a “rhapsody of the sense of wonder,” the vision of the phenomenon that Chesterton advocates for in the “Introduction” as well as throughout many of his works.⁶As the ending of Chesterton’s essay reveals, his reading of the Book of Job is Christ-centric, an emphasis also made by Robert Wild. Chesterton’s interpretation of the text evokes the idea of Jobus Christi—Job’s suffering is seen as a prefiguration to the suffering of Christ—a view that alludes to some early Christian interpretations of the story.

Chesterton’s interpretation of God’s monologue suggests that the mystical can be evoked by a sense of wonder at the created world. Chesterton’s defense of mysticism constitutes an important element in his apologetic writings. Though not an apology in a traditional sense of the word, his “Introduction” to the Book of Job is apologetic in its nature. Like many of Chesterton’s other works including Orthodoxy, it provides an intellectually engaging argumentation for the necessity of recognition of the mystical in God’s created world. This article will thus start with a brief consideration of apologetics and its meaning in the twentieth century. I will also look at the phenomenon of mysticism and how it came to be understood in post-Medieval Christian culture, as well as the meaning that Chesterton allotted to the term in his works to appraise its role in his interpretation of allegedly one the most complex stories of the Old Testament. The article further considers ways in which Chesterton situates the discussion about mysticism at the center of his analysis of the story of Job. A significant part of his reflection in the “Introduction” is dedicated to the discussion of Job’s comforters and their inability to see a realistic picture of life, the fallacy that Chesterton attributes to the pessimistic vision; their attitude is opposed to that of Job. The article also looks at Chesterton’s interpretation of the voice of God as crucial for understanding the message of the text: as the voice of joy and wonder at the created world, God’s expression is a reminder of the mystical in everyday reality.

My consideration of this vision of mysticism in Chesterton’s works allows for a deeper understanding of him as a twentieth-century apologist. Peter J. Bowler defines “apologetics” as “a term traditionally used to defend Christianity against its critics” in his consideration of the twentieth-century ideological landscape in Britain.⁷ Chesterton’s reputation as a defender of Christian faith is confirmed in his writing. The early Christian thinkers who defended Christianity against heresies are a constant presence in his works, with the lives of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Francis of Assisi forming book-length studies. Chesterton undoubtedly developed an affinity with them as he felt compelled to defend his faith against what he saw as “modern heresies.” Patrick Allitt considers Chesterton’s apologetic writings to be highly influential in Britain and abroad in the book chapter entitled “The British Apologists’ Spiritual Aeneid.”⁸ Ralph C. Wood considers him as “the foremost twentieth-century literary apologist for the Christian faith,” adding literary to emphasise that Chesterton’s fiction, as well as non-fiction, serves the purpose of defending his faith.⁹ The studies by John Coates (2009) and David Pickering (2020) consider rhetorical and stylistic elements of Chesterton’s apologetic writing.¹⁰ Though much attention has been paid to Chesterton as a twentieth-century apologist, mysticism has rarely been considered as part of his strategy of defending Christian belief; it was more often mentioned as a supplementary note to his more robust claims. My discussion here offers a way to rethink his engagement with mysticism as a part of his apologetic thought.

As an object of study, mysticism is a complex phenomenon and notoriously elusive to define. Peter John Kenney sees it as a construct that reflects the evolution of modern thought with regards to religion, stating that “religion is understood primarily as a matter of personal experience, and only secondarily as a civic, social, or institutional phenomenon. And within the sphere of personal religious experience, mystical experiences are those that are seen as the most intense.”¹¹ Basing on Charles Taylor’s vision of mysticism,¹² Kenney defines this concept as “the apex of personal religious experience, in which the self experiences spiritual reality immediately. As such mysticism is understood as the culmination of true religion. It represents the apogee of the modern Western cultural trend toward the personal in religion.”¹³ Attention to mysticism, according to Kenney, stems from this fundamental shift from social and cultural aspects of religious life to religion as a deeply personal phenomenon. He sees St. Augustine’s Confessions, the book that famously offers Augustine’s personal spiritual journey, as a staple for how people perceive and talk about mystical experiences in the Western world. Chesterton similarly stresses the personal and experiential nature of the phenomena in his biography of Thomas Aquinas, where, with characteristic laconism, he states that “the Mystics can be represented as men who maintain that the final fruition or joy of the soul is rather a sensation than a thought. The motto of the Mystics has always been, ‘Taste and see.’”¹⁴ This view of Mystics with a capital “M,” which Kenney describes, reflects Chesterton’s view of Aquinas and other saint mystics he wrote about or mentioned in his works, including St. Augustine. However, in his apologetic works and essays, Chesterton often talks about the experiences of everyday mysticism, a sense of appreciation of mysteries of life that are always accessible to all people.

This vision that recognizes the mysterious in everyday reality can be found in Chesterton’s Orthodoxy (1908), one of his most important apologetic works. Here, Chesterton offers his understanding of the phenomenon as a mode of thinking and specific view of life: “But for the moment it is possible in the same solely practical manner to give a general answer touching what in actual human history keeps men sane. Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.”¹⁵ The meaning of mysticism here clearly shifts towards a more general understanding of the phenomenon; Chesterton talks about mysticism as an everyday phenomenon, a part of life, or of interpretation of reality. According to this vision, “mystery” and “mysticism” are practically parts of the same phenomenon, the mysticism of everyday reality. Chesterton’s equating of the two notions implies that the events and experiences people encounter on a daily basis can be seen as mystical; this vision calls for renewed understanding of life.

Mysticism, in this sense, is accessible to everyone. Chesterton states that “ordinary man has always been sane” primarily because of his attitude to life: accepting the unknown part of it, and refusing to be bothered by contradictions. On the other hand, “the madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory.”¹⁶ It is in allowing for mystery in one’s life that one can preserve a healthy outlook and “sane” judgment, according to Chesterton. Wild contends that Chesterton uses the word “mysticism” “to describe a necessary dimension of seeing the world” and, more specifically, “to define an attitude of mind which preserves a sense of mystery about life and does not try to reconcile or explain rationally the paradoxical nature of reality.”¹⁷ It is this sense of mysticism as an attitude and perception of reality that Chesterton becomes an advocate for in his “Introduction” to the Book of Job and other works, and it is the assertion of life as a mystery that Chesterton reads in God’s response to the question of Job.

Chesterton’s reading of the Book of Job allows him to begin his reflection on the meaning behind Job’s suffering and the larger question of theodicy it triggers—that is, why the innocent need to suffer when there is a benevolent and loving God. This question could be seen as one of the mysteries of life that need to be accepted, but in the book, Job does not accept this answer without questioning, and neither does Chesterton. Mark Knight, in his study Chesterton and Evil (2004), warns that “it would be very easy to misunderstand Chesterton’s appeal to mystery here as an attempt to avoid difficult questions concerning evil altogether.”¹⁸ Knight shows that Chesterton deeply engages with the problem of evil and theodicy both in his fiction and non-fiction works; according to his reading, Chesterton’s understanding of evil is linked with the Free Will Defense argument found in early Christian writers, which maintains that evil results from men having free will to choose it over good.¹⁹ The problem of Chesterton’s attitude to evil is also treated by Duncan Reyburn in his 2016 book Seeing Things as They Are: G. K. Chesterton and the Drama of Meaning. Reyburn presents Chesterton’s understanding of the problem of the existence of evil and suffering as a tension between “mystery and revelation,” stressing the importance of both notions for further analysis of Chesterton’s vision of the nature of evil.²⁰

Chesterton’s reading of the Book of Job, as presented in the mentioned studies, provides insight into his understanding of the existential problem of the nature of evil in the world and his response to the question of theodicy. Chesterton does not claim to have a definitive answer to these problems: in his later essays published in The Well and the Shallows (1935), he states that “the world is still asking the questions that were asked by Job.”²¹ However, his reading of the Book of Job provides many important insights into the way Chesterton envisions mystery as a part of life and mysticism as a way to see and understand the world. He situates this book among those he believes are allegories for larger reality and convey fundamental truths about life. Chesterton writes: “The ‘Iliad’ is only great because all life is a battle, the ‘Odyssey’ because all life is a journey, The Book of Job because all life is a riddle.”²² Job therefore serves as the basis of Chesterton’s interest in the mysterious nature of life. He recognizes the timeless quality of the book’s claims and their enduring relevance when he states that it is “better worth hearing than any modern philosophical conversation in the whole modern philosophical world.”²³

In the “Introduction,” Chesterton compares The Book of Job to the epic and warns against superficial reading of both:

Those who look superficially at the barbaric origin of the epic may think it fanciful to read so much artistic significance into its casual similes or accidental phrases. But no one who is well acquainted with great examples of semi-barbaric poetry, as in The Song of Roland or the old ballads, will fall into this mistake. No one who knows what primitive poetry is can fail to realize that while its conscious form is simple some of its finer effects are subtle.²⁴

Situating these reflections in his analysis of the Book of Job, Chesterton emphasises that “artistic significance” and “accidental phrases” are very important for understanding the message of this story and should be taken seriously. To pay close attention to these elements, he proceeds to read the book as one would a literary text, commenting on the way the characters come through in the Old Testament. This approach that Chesterton chooses does not point to his vision of the Book of Job as fictional. Rather, he believes that this text invites literary analysis that would help to see beyond its “simple” form. Throughout his analysis, Chesterton attempts to uncover “many subtle effects which were in the author’s soul without being, perhaps, in the author’s mind”²⁵ when the Book of Job was created.

The mentioned approach helps to explain Chesterton’s surprising reading of the character of God and Old Testament patriarchs in the “Introduction.” In his initial, quite generalizing overview of the Old Testament, the characters of God and Old Testament patriarchs are approached as those in literature, a reading practice that may seem unsettling to those who are used to religious interpretations of Biblical texts. Thus, Chesterton sees the character of God as “the only chief character of the Old Testament; God is properly the only character in the Old Testament.”²⁶ Chesterton expounds on this point by offering Biblical citations and examples and stating that “all the patriarchs and prophets are merely His tools or weapons; for the Lord is a man of war. He uses Joshua like an axe or Moses like a measuring rod. For Him, Samson is only a sword and Isaiah a trumpet.”²⁷ All the saints of the Old Testament appear to be “little statuettes” of God. Reyburn finds that in Chesterton’s reading “God is certainly still a character …, rather than being only a mystical force.”²⁸ Chesterton does offer a religious interpretation of the story towards the end, which effectively contrasts his previously used strategy of reading; however, the initial independence of religious discourse in his analysis allows for him to focus closely on the text and what it has to say.

The important interpretative point that Chesterton makes is that mystery is at the very heart of the Book of Job, and this is what lends the story its universal appeal and relevance. “The desire to know the actuality” sets the Book of Job apart from other stories of the Old Testament.²⁹ Here, one sees a human who comes into contact with divine mystery when all his wealth, his children, and servants are taken from him and he is struck by a disease while sinless. Job wants to know why he suffers terrible misfortunes while innocent and poses this question to God. Chesterton writes: “The book of Job stands definitely alone because the book of Job asks: ‘But what is the purpose of God? Is it worth the sacrifice even of our miserable humanity?’”³⁰ This desire to understand this larger purpose of God and the meaning of suffering grants Job his individual character, which stands out in the Old Testament.

In situating mystery at the center of the story, Chesterton suggests that the mistake of Job’s friends is in trying to explain everything with the help of logic, leaving no space for the mysterious. With evolution being a new and widely discussed topic at the time, Chesterton compares Job’s friends to “evolutionists,” criticizing their approach to life, according to which “everything in the universe fits into everything else; as if there were anything comforting about a number of nasty things all fitting into each other.”³¹ Job’s friends want to see a world where everything appears transparent and clear; good things happen to those who are good, and vice versa. Pavol Hrabovecky argues that Chesterton “criticised the kind of people who looked at the world only through logic and strictly limited reason. According to [Chesterton], they lived in a world of fictional abstractions and not in reality and as such, could not find the truth about life.”³² The reason why Job’s comforters could not understand the reality of things that were present before them is because they did not see that the “riddle” they encountered could not be comfortably reduced to a purely logical explanation. Chesterton refers to overreliance on logic as a “striking mistake” in Orthodoxy. He expounds on his point by stating that: “the morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid.”³³ Job’s comforters lack a perspective, a particular vision that allows space for a mystery in life and are not able to understand the complexity of life.

Chesterton’s interpretation of the images of Job and his friends is built on what Duncan Reyburn calls a “familiar Chestertonian dichotomy of optimism and pessimism.”³⁴ Here, as well as elsewhere in his works,³⁵ Chesterton stresses that these terms hardly mean anything. However, the dichotomy proves helpful to him in outlining the differences in human perceptions of reality. Chesterton states that “If moderns were writing the book, we should probably find that Job and his comforters got on quite well together by the simple operation of referring their differences to what is called the temperament, saying that the comforters were by nature ‘optimists’ and Job by nature a ‘pessimist.’”³⁶ Job would be seen as a pessimist for refusing to accept easy explanations for the mystery of suffering that the comforters offer and denying the version that suffering is the result of sin. According to Chesterton, Job’s vision of life, even among his misfortunes, remains optimistic because he believes that God has a reason for the suffering he endures, and he “is anxious to be convinced, that is, he thinks that God could convince him.”³⁷ Job’s questioning of God and his confusion are not the result of the loss of faith in God’s greater design which he sees as good or the loss of a sense that this universe is not how it should be: “He remonstrates with his Maker because he is proud of his Maker. He even speaks of the Almighty as his enemy, but he never doubts, at the back of his mind, that his enemy has some kind of a case which he does not understand.”³⁸ Job seeks the answer and is perplexed by his lack of understanding of his misfortune but trusts that God can provide an answer. Commenting on Chesterton’s interpretation of the image of Job, Reyburn writes: “This in essence is a claim that Job is on the side of hermeneutic clarity and genuine understanding even in the face of what is impossible to explain. Unlike the skeptic, who obliterates sense before evidence has been presented, he expects to find meaning when he is looking for it.”³⁹ Though Chesterton points out the fallacies inherent in both optimistic and pessimistic views, optimism does stand closer to “hermeneutic clarity” as it affirms the belief that there is meaning in the universe, and Chesterton consistently defends this stance in his writings. In his essay “The Philosophy of Gratitude,” for example, Chesterton states: “Our attitude towards existence, if we have suffered deprivation, must always be conditioned by the fact that deprivation implies that existence has given us something of immense value.”⁴⁰ Pessimists cannot adequately see the “immense value” of existence apparent even in “deprivation,” and pessimism precludes Job’s friends from adequately seeing the reality amidst Job’s misfortunes in the book.

The differences in the views of Job and his friends, which may be seen as the differences in optimistic and pessimistic perceptions of reality, outline the fundamental differences in their perception of the world. Optimism, for Chesterton, allows for preserving a belief in the goodness of God, even if it is not apparent; it is precisely the worldview that allows space for the mysterious as an attribute of the Christian faith. While Job believes in the goodness of God, “all that [Job’s comforters] really believe is not that God is good but that God is so strong that it is much more judicious to call Him good.”⁴¹ The pessimistic outlook here obscures the true picture of the world for Job’s friends, who, unlike Job, cannot hold on to their belief that the nature of God is good when confronted with a mystery. With regards to Chesterton’s interpretation of the characters of Job’s friends, Reyburn writes: “They are so pessimistic, in fact, that they cannot properly listen to their friend even while he endures unimaginable catastrophes. Pessimism is a hindrance to interpretative clarity and earnestness.”⁴² For Chesterton, however, the Book of Job defends a certain mindset that facilitates “interpretative clarity” and optimism that, in his understanding, is akin to hope. Retaining an optimistic vision for Job means remaining loyal to his beliefs about God and trusting that God is good and has a purpose, despite the mysteriousness of the purpose.

A pessimistic outlook, which blocks “interpretative clarity” and the ability to see and appreciate reality, is identified as one of the “heresies” of the modern philosophies that Chesterton consistently criticizes. Thus, the modern idea of a Superman, “a demigod of infinite mental clarity,” appears to be an optimistic one, but is, according to Chesterton, deeply troubling and pessimistic.⁴³ Chesterton sees the existing reality as a mysterious, almost sacred gift that people need to learn to appreciate; thus, imagining a creature that surpasses humans undermines this vision. In Heretics, Chesterton writes, “when we really see men as they are, we do not criticise, but worship; and very rightly.”⁴⁴ The image of Superman is pessimistic because it undermines the fundamental belief in humanity as it is. Chesterton sees Bernard Shaw’s keen interest in Nietzsche’s Superman as problematic, particularly because it erases the mysticism from the idea of humankind and obscures the fascination with it. Commenting on Chesterton’s vision of Nietzsche’s idea, Aidan Nichols notes, “through the importance it gave to eugenics, [the doctrine of the Superman] lacked charity towards existing humankind.”⁴⁵ The existence of such a vision is a flaw in modern philosophy and indicates to Chesterton that his contemporaries do not see people “as they are,” that is, worthy of fascination and awe. The Book of Job, on the other hand, gives voice to a human struck by the worst misfortunes and appears to justify the human desire to know the answers to hard questions as God responds to Job’s plight. The Book of Job offers a response to what Chesterton sees as fallacies in modern philosophy, as he stresses the relevance of it: “The present importance of the book of Job cannot be expressed adequately even by saying that it is the most interesting of ancient books. We may almost say of the book of Job that it is the most interesting of modern books.”⁴⁶ Like other Chesterton’s apologetic works, “Introduction” to the Book of Job allows Chesterton to address what he sees as problems with a modern attitude to life.

Chesterton identifies the loss of a sense of mystery as another modern fallacy.⁴⁷ Alison Milbank draws attention to the importance of “re-enchantment” for Chesterton, the restoration of a sense of the mysterious in the world.⁴⁸ Milbank importantly notes that, like Tolkien, Chesterton was well aware that “it is not enough to present their readers with the world described in tones of wonder,” instead “re-enchantment came by logic and reason: it was equally intellectual if not ‘intellectualist.’”⁴⁹ This intellectual engagement with the text is very important in Chesterton’s interpretation of the Book of Job. Reyburn refers to it as “resistance to taming the text” as, unlike Job’s comforters, Chesterton does not attempt to find an easy explanation to the mystery.⁵⁰ Instead of trying to explain the mysterious, he looks at what its presence means in the text. Chesterton find that the mystery points to God, and the story thus gains religious significance: “This, I say, is the first fact touching the speech; the fine inspiration by which God comes in at the end, not to answer riddles, but to propound them. The other great fact which, taken together with this one, makes the whole work religious instead of merely philosophical is that other great surprise which makes Job suddenly satisfied with the mere presentation of something impenetrable.”⁵¹ The encounter with mystery moves the Book of Job beyond philosophical inquiry, and Chesterton foreshadows his turn to religious interpretation towards the end of his essay.

Reyburn also addresses holistic attitude to mystery Chesterton adopts. In a chapter dedicated to the image of Job in Chesterton’s legacy, Reyburn effectively warns against associating Chesterton’s way of thinking with either the focus on “revelation and immanence” or on “mystery and wonder,” without recognizing the interconnectedness of these approaches in his works.⁵² Adopting either of the two perspectives will inevitably lead to the limitations of the possibilities of interpretation of Chesterton’s works, reducing his image to either “uncompromising ideologue” or the one “endlessly grasping for the impossible.”⁵³ According to Reyburn, these two visions are not mutually exclusive: “This mystery is not the mystery over and against revelation. It is not an equivocal posture that opposes the univocal and dialectical postures. It is the mystery found even in the midst of revelation.”⁵⁴ The event of understanding for Chesterton occurs in this tension or in what Reyburn calls a “paradoxical partnership” of mystery and revelation.

Chesterton focuses explicitly on this tension. Although Job “has been told nothing,” he is comforted as he “feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told.”⁵⁵ Job’s experience of hearing God’s voice from the whirlwind does not reveal the mysterious nature of God nor His intention in having Job go through his sufferings. Instead, Job experiences the revelation, and the voice of God in the whirlwind leaves him with the mysterious and good feeling of unspeakable “surprise.” In his autobiography, Chesterton recalls that during an experience that can be called a dark knight of the soul, he realized that “at the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder.”⁵⁶ God’s appearance in the story seems to reawaken a sense of “wonder,” a “burst of astonishment” in Job, and this is a happy revelation and happy occurrence that comforts Job. Chesterton emphasises that the mystery that God refuses to reveal is a joyful one; he brings in examples from the Biblical text to illustrate this point to the readers:

there is that famous passage where Jehovah, with devastating sarcasm, asks Job where he was when the foundations of the world were laid, and then (as if merely fixing a date) mentions the time when the sons of God shouted for joy (38:4–7). One cannot help feeling, even upon this meager information, that they must have had something to shout about.⁵⁷

Elsewhere, he also mentions that “the riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.⁵⁸ God’s appearance, as well as his refusal to address Job’s question, are still good news; Job is able to understand and feel a sense of wonder and joy, and is comforted.

Mark Knight explains that the appearance of God in the Book of Job is significant as it bears a possibility of an answer to Job’s question about the mystery of suffering: “had the Book of Job wanted to suggest that the suffering of the innocent was completely incomprehensible, it would surely have left Job’s questioning of God unanswered.”⁵⁹ This appearance does not address Job’s question, but it is a response to Job nonetheless. Chesterton maintains that “the refusal of God to explain His design is itself a burning hint of His design.”⁶⁰The existence of the tension between mystery and revelation is a part of the common-sense approach to life that Chesterton preaches, the approach that allows for mystery to be a part of life and for people to preserve sanity. Referring to Chesterton’s understanding of this tension in Orthodoxy, Hrabovecky writes that “man needs a balance between logic and mystery that transcends the world, and [Chesterton] calls this balance mysticism.”⁶¹ This helps us to conceptualise the mysteries of everyday existence as a part of a common-sense approach to life. For example, in God’s monologue in the Book of Job one can find a defense of mystery as a part of life, as well as an intent to renew the fascination with the mystery of life itself, views that Chesterton advocates. He summarizes the Old Testament lines in the following way: “[God] unrolls before Job a long panorama of created things, the horse, the eagle, the raven, the wild ass, the peacock, the ostrich, the crocodile. He so describes each of them that it sounds like a monster walking in the sun. The whole is a sort of psalm or rhapsody of the sense of wonder. The maker of all things is astonished at the things he has Himself made.”⁶²God, in Chesterton’s view, reignites Job’s fascination with ordinary, everyday life, reminding him that humans, as they are, do not have full understanding of all things that exist on the earth. However, God calls attention to the fact that even familiar things are fascinating in the way they are created, uncovering before Job a “psalm or rhapsody” of created things that reveal the harmony of existence. Chesterton notices that “when God is speaking of snow and hail in the mere catalogue of the physical cosmos, he speaks of them as a treasury that He has laid up against the day of battle—a hint of some huge Armageddon in which evil shall be at last overthrown.”⁶³ Ordinary phenomena, such as snow and hail, become the objects of fascination in God’s speech; there is also an aura of mystery surrounding them that Chesterton sees as “a hint at some huge Armageddon.” The natural world has an air of mysticism in Chesterton’s reading of God’s monologue. In the “panorama of created things,” God shows His fascination with the universe, also igniting a similar response in Job. In other words, God here gestures towards mystery by defamiliarizing known and familiar things.

In God’s monologue, Chesterton reads a call for a renewed vision of the common and expected reality; this very call sounds prominently in his own works and is particularly strong in his apologetic texts and critique of modern philosophies. “Sometimes we have to be startled into remembering the universe, in which case we are once again astonished at it,” Dale Ahlquist writes, commenting on the concept of “astonishment at the universe” found in Chesterton’s works.⁶⁴ Collin Cavendish-Jones states that a prominent message in Chesterton’s works is “being enraptured, astonished, constantly surprised and enchanted by life. Chesterton thought the modern world was sleepwalking into nihilism, and the purpose of his heaviest paradoxes is always to wake it up, to show his readers the strangeness and beauty that surround them.”⁶⁵Chesterton’s fascination with the ordinary and everyday aspects of life has a significant religious meaning as well. Wild also emphasises that Chesterton’s attitude to mysticism, as well as his emphasis on the necessity to celebrate the created world, is closely and inseparably linked to his Christian faith: “his mystical doctrine concerns seeing the world with an open eye, the eye of faith. He experienced God mostly in created reality itself.”⁶⁶ God in his monologue defends and reaffirms the value of created reality that bears witness to God as Creator. Commenting on Chesterton’s attitude to religion in Orthodoxy, Mark Knight and Emma Mason notice that “Chesterton offers a reading of Christian theology that affirms the particularity of the material world and refuses to narrow the sphere of religious concern to a discrete spiritual realm.”⁶⁷ In his reading of God’s monologue in the Book of Job, Chesterton pays close attention to God’s fascination with the material world; he consistently reaffirms this value in his own works. According to Ian Ker, Chesterton saw a “wonder at the unexpectedness of the ordinary world” as typical of the Dickensonian novel, and so is a feature that for Ker aligns Dickens with Catholicism.⁶⁸ A sense of wonder at the created world and fascination with the ordinary and the mundane is a part of an experience that reminds an individual of the Creator and elicits a sense of gratitude; it is, therefore, a part of Chesterton’s apologetic appeal.

The loss of the sense of astonishment—even with the things of man’s creation—signals for Chesterton a loss of being in touch with reality, and he warns about this tendency in society in his essay “A Mad Official” (1912). Here he associates the loss of the sense of wonder at the things created by people with their inability to think reasonably: “These are peoples that have lost the power of astonishment at their own actions. When they give birth to a fantastic fashion or a foolish law, they do not start or stare at the monster they have brought forth. They have grown used to their own unreason.”⁶⁹ For Job, the sense of astonishment at familiar things and a renewed sense of appreciation of the universe are linked to the presence of God and are part of the revelation. Commenting on the need for humans to experience such fascination with the ordinary, Chesterton writes in Orthodoxy: “Ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary.”⁷⁰

This motif is apparent in Chesterton’s lesser-known works; in his essay “A Defence of Skeletons” (1901) we find what can be called a poetic presentation of probably the most down-to-earth and mundane sound imaginable, the sound of a pig:

Has the poet, for whom Nature means only roses and lilies, ever heard a pig grunting? It is a noise that does a man good—a strong, snorting, imprisoned noise, breaking its way out of unfathomable dungeons through every possible outlet and organ. It might be the voice of the earth itself, snoring in its mighty sleep. This is the deepest, the oldest, the most wholesome and religious sense of the value of Nature—the value which comes from her immense babyishness. She is as top-heavy, as grotesque, as solemn, and as happy as a child.⁷¹

Chesterton defamiliarizes the pig’s grunting here, treating it as an irreplaceable element of our nature, representative of the “earth itself, snoring in its mighty sleep.” The “ugliness” of nature also defines it, as much as the perceived beauty does; and this sound of nature is also surrounded by a sense of mystery.

The theme of fascination with familiar reality, even though it may turn out to be dark and full of secrets, becomes prominent in Chesterton’s novel The Man Who was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908). Stephen Medcalf explains that in the 1880s and 1890s Chesterton wrote works which “All conecern reawakening humanity to the value of existence through encountering death”; the scholar appraises the influences of Robert Lewis Stevenson and Charles Dickens’s villains on the grim atmosphere in the work of this period.⁷² The mentioned novel, often considered Chesterton’s best work of fiction, presents, in Chesterton’s own words: “a nightmare of things, not as they are, but as they seemed to the young half-pessimist of the ‘90s.”⁷³In it, a central character Gabriel Syme is recruited by Scotland Yard to fight a society of anarchists. Syme finds himself on a mission in the European Anarchist Council, where the council members are identified by the days of the week, only to discover that almost all members were also undercover detectives like him enlisted for the mission by the secret police. In a complex twist of events, Gabriel Syme meets mysterious Sunday, the Council President, who, as it turns out, is also not an anarchist, but the one allegedly behind all that has happened to Syme and other detectives. Sunday, like God in the Book of Job, does not offer an answer to why all the enlisted people had to go through suffering to discover that they are all undercover detectives who share the aim to destroy the society of anarchists. However, in answer to Syme’s question regarding whether he has ever suffered, Sunday evokes a familiar Biblical text from Matthew 20:22: “Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?”⁷⁴ Interestingly, without being granted an explanation but a question in response to a question, Syme is, like Job satisfied. The endings of the novel and the Book of Job are also similar. In his analysis of the Book of Job, Chesterton notices: “When, at the end of the poem, God enters (somewhat abruptly), is struck the sudden and splendid note which makes the thing as great as it is,” and Job feels the “atmosphere” of “something which is too good to be told.”⁷⁵ At the novel’s end, Syme awakes from his dreamy state and finds himself taking a walk in the park: “He felt he was in possession of some impossible good news, which made every other thing a triviality, but an adorable triviality.”⁷⁶Job and Syme are left with the feeling of greatness and the unspeakable good news. In the Book of Job, at least in Chesterton’s interpretation of it, as well as in the novel, the main characters appear to be changed by the experiences of meeting a mysterious power that they do not fully conceive of yet recognize as good. Like Job, Syme finds some new appreciation of life as he walks in Saffron Park and observes nature: “Dawn was breaking over everything in colours at once clear and timid; as if Nature made a first attempt at yellow and a first attempt at rose. A breeze blew so clean and sweet, that one could not think that it blew from the sky; it blew rather through some hole in the sky.”⁷⁷ The influence of the Book of Job on Chesterton is very apparent in this novel. Here, we see Chesterton elaborating on the problems he sees in the story of Job. Noting the connection between the two works, Ian Boyd finds that the novel can serve as an “extended commentary” on the Book of Job; the novel offers the development of the ideas expressed in it.⁷⁸ William Oddie, like many other Chesterton scholars, sees the novel as autobiographical and argues that it represents “the escape from the nightmare of the 1890s” for Chesterton who was a student at the time, “a nightmare which in its new context in Edwardian secularist culture has come to incorporate new threats to Chesterton’s vision of sanity.”⁷⁹ The Book of Job provides a framework for the plot of the novel; and Syme comes to the realization that there is beauty and sense in life even if it may appear otherwise at times. This realization is a part of a view of life that Chesterton defends, a vision that allows for mystery in human life and the feeling of fascination with mundane things.

Along with celebrating ordinary created reality, the Book of Job also seems to recognize human potential and celebrate human strength, even in and through weakness. Coming from the position of great weakness and lack of understanding, Job raises his voice to God and is justified. Job’s “desire to know the actuality; the desire to know what is, and not merely what seems” sets him apart from other characters in the Old Testament. Job’s comforters, on the other hand, who attempt to assert their vision of God and explain Job’s situation through it, are found guilty of not speaking the truth about God. Chesterton addresses a paradoxical triumph of the weak when responding to Bernard Shaw’s advocacy of Nietzsche’s Superman whose alleged superiority lies largely in his physical strength and mental capacity. Chesterton turns to folklore literature and finds that it is “almost exclusively devoted to the unexpected victory of the weak over the strong”; he also expresses his disagreement with a “caddish doctrine” which maintains that “the strength of the strong is admirable, but not the valour of the weak.”⁸⁰ Even the tale of “Jack the Giant Killer” exposes the fallacy of warship of “natural advantages”: “If it were not a tale of effort and triumph hardly earned it would not be called ‘Jack the Giant Killer.’ If it were a tale of the victory of natural advantages it would be called ‘Giant the Jack Killer.’”⁸¹ In the Book of Job, as is the case in folk tales, moral superiority is what makes a character a hero. Chesterton’s fascination with the image of Job, once the most needy and weak of all people, may at least partially stem from the incredible symbolic potential of this character. Even in his suffering and weakness, Job projects unwavering optimism and strength of faith, which again leads to the known paradox of Christianity, maintaining that there can be strength in weakness.

As is the case in The Everlasting Man, Chesterton’s reading and interpretation of the Book of Job in the final paragraph is clearly aligned with a Christian tradition. Returning to the question of the mystery of Job’s suffering, he focuses not on what the text says, but on what it does not say and draws a parallel between the Old and New Testaments:

But in the prologue we see Job tormented not because he was the worst of men, but because he was the best. It is the lesson of the whole work that man is most comforted by paradoxes. Here is the very darkest and strangest of the paradoxes; and it is by all human testimony the most reassuring. I need not suggest what high and strange history awaited this paradox of the best man in the worst fortune. I need not say that in the freest and most philosophical sense there is one Old Testament figure who is truly a type; or say what is prefigured in the wounds of Job.⁸²

Here, somewhat unexpectedly, Chesterton deviates from the established course of the reading of the story by appealing to the religious interpretation of it. Chesterton suggests that the Book of Job has a continuation in the New Testament, and the suffering of the “best man,” Job, prefigures the suffering of sinless Christ in the New Testament. The text of the Book of Job can be read as indicating this connection, when Job asks for a “mediator” between God and man, thus pointing to the figure of Christ who is to come and be the “mediator” the Old Testament anticipates: “If only there were a mediator between us, someone who could bring us together. The mediator could make God stop beating me, and I would no longer live in terror of his punishment. Then I could speak to him without fear, but I cannot do that in my own strength.”⁸³ This interpretation of the character of Job is not new; it originated in the early medieval period and is believed to be first mentioned by Origen of Alexandria (c. 185–c. 253).⁸⁴ Other Christian authors adopted this vision, including St. Augustine of Hippo, and many later authors employed it as well. Though this interpretation does not fully resolve the question of human suffering or explain the nature of evil, it is significant for understanding Chesterton’s overall vision of the story. By appealing to the medieval idea of Jobus Christi, or Job as Christ figure, Chesterton aligns himself with a long tradition of Christian thinkers, a fact that confirms the Christian apologetic nature of the essay.

Job’s mystical encounter with God is the culmination of the story and what Kenney calls “the apex of personal religious experience.” However, analysing St. Augustine’s vision of mystical encounters, Kenney writes: “The paradox of contemplation to Augustine was that such dramatic episodes occurred only for some people and only as an initiation to the transcendent realm and to God’s presence. But they were not a necessary prerequisite for what really mattered, which was bringing the soul into a permanent association with God.”⁸⁵ According to this vision, mystical experiences should never be sought as an end goal of religious experiences, while the soul’s “personal association with God” is the true aspiration for a Christian. Likewise, Chesterton’s interest is not in the mystical experience for its own sake; instead, he asks what can be learned from the story as a whole and what is implied in it. However, the concept of mysticism becomes for Chesterton an important part of his apologetics and an argument for a Christian view of life that awakens a sense of wonder at God’s world. In God’s monologue, the Book of Job propounds a “rhapsody” or a hymn to the created world, reaffirming a sense of astonishment and wonder in life. For Chesterton, the attitude of mind that allows for recognition and appreciation of mystery in everyday existence is key for uncovering the truth about life, faith, and God, as reflected in his reading of the Book of Job as well as in other works. Another important aspect that he highlights is the paradox that Job suffers afflictions not as a punishment for being “the worst of men,” but because “he was the best.”⁸⁶ Chesterton calls it “the very darkest and strangest” but also “the most reassuring” of paradoxes, as he links the mystery of the story of Job to that of the salvation of humanity in the context of the New Testament. Chesterton offers an undoubtedly positive view of mysticism as an attitude to life; for him, mysticism revolves around the questions of faith and points to greater mysteries of God’s plans for humankind. The concept of mysticism allows Chesterton to address the problems he sees inherent in the philosophies that dominated at the time and shed light on the Christian faith as a way of life, constituting an important part of his Christian apologetic discourse.

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges the support of this work by the Fernandes Fellowship offered through the Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick. Many thanks to Professor Emma Mason, the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, for fruitful discussions and suggestions which significantly improved the manuscript.

Footnotes