![]() The men’s attempts to make sense of their cosmos, to realign the structure of their society, and to comprehend Sunday not only confuse them but also threaten to destroy them. ![]() The exception is Sunday, whom Syme recognizes without an introduction, “with an unaccountable but instantaneous certainty.” Syme can’t put his finger on it, but there is something remarkable about this man. “ had thought at first that they were all of common stature and costume,” but upon closer inspection finds “each man subtly and differently wrong.” One by one, through a dramatic and energetic course of events, the disguises fall away and the men are exposed as not being who they proposed themselves to be. Each of the elected men sees a fault in fallen creation and thinks he has the means to correct it, whether that be simplicity, cynicism, decadence, doubt, or optimism. With a “roar rose like the sea, the hands rose like a forest,” the General Counsel of the Anarchists of Europe elect Syme to the post of Thursday. Syme soon joins a band of supposed anarchists named for each day of the week. ![]() Only Syme can follow this line of reasoning, because he alone in the novel is “a humble. It is the victory of Adam.” Gregory cannot be swayed. “Chaos is dull,” Syme says, and each time a train makes its station, “man has won a battle against chaos. . . Syme, whose first name recalls God’s messenger archangel, retorts that “the rare, strange thing is to hit the mark the gross, obvious thing is to miss it.” All of creation-every carefully sculpted petal, each intricately formed molecule-points to something going right, to the Creator “hitting the mark,” to an end to chaos thanks to God’s almighty hand. Gregory’s desire is for a train to unexpectedly land at a station not on its schedule (later, his purpose is put more directly, to “abolish God”). The allusion to Lucifer in the former’s name confirms this character’s preference for chaos, for a time without God’s living word. Is it the end-or the beginning all over again? Poets Lucian Gregory and Gabriel Syme engage in the initial dialogue in a garden reminiscent of Eden, arguing the superiority of either chaos or order. Surrendering oneself to the will of God can feel like reading a detective novel. It follows that the reader enters this community on an evening “that looked like the end of the world.” Attempts at structure rest on no firm foundation, and so they fail. Though the scene is described as “pleasant,” an astute reader sees where the ironies lie. ” The inhabitants of this atmosphere do not know who they are they have lost what it is to be human they have let their own faculties of creativity decay. ![]() Its architecture is undefined, it holds vague pretenses of being an intellectual center, and one new to the scene “could only think how very oddly shaped the people must be who could fit into. Saffron Park, the neighborhood in which the novel opens, can’t decide what it is. In Chesterton’s early-twentieth-century England, “modern life” looked like creation, distorted. Chesterton extolled the genre in his essay “ A Defence of Detective Stories” as “the earliest and only form of popular literature in which is expressed some sense of the poetry of modern life.” Augustine of Hippo acknowledged a similarity in Scripture: “The new is in the old concealed the old is in the new revealed.” The mystery of creation and redemption, then, is exactly the sort of material that can be addressed in a detective story. Any detective novel worth its salt reveals its resolution from the start, albeit in a veiled manner. Relevant parallels exist between a good detective novel and Scripture. Perhaps Chesterton’s proposal is not as far-fetched as one might think. To embrace the humility of knowing we can’t know it all, to be willing to watch the story unfold before us, is what opens our hearts to the gift of faith and the movement of grace in our lives. How can a surreal romp through a London suburb, involving a poet detective and a horde of anarchists, be elevated into an instruction on what man was made for? In matters of faith, mystery itself is part of the answer. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, a detective story revealing transcendental realities-and more particularly the redemptive Christ himself-seems to hinge on a facetious proposal. Home › Articles › Finding Christ in “The Man Who Was Thursday”
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