"There is one central conception of the book of Job, which literally makes it immortal. That is the conception that the universe, if it is to be admired, is to be admired for its strangeness and not for its rationality, for its splendid unreason and not for reason. Job's friends attempt to comfort him with philosophical optimism. Job tries to comfort himself with philosophical pessimism. But God comforts Job with indecipherable mystery, and for the first time, Job is comforted. God simply refuses to answer, and somehow the question is answered. Job flings at God one riddle, God flings back at Job a hundred riddles, and Job is at peace."
He is comforted with conundrums.
"...if we are to be reconciled to this great cosmic experience it must be as something divinely strange and divinely violent, a quest, or a conspiracy, or some sacred joke."
G.K. Chesterton
"Going mad is the slowest and dullest business in the world. I have very nearly done it more than once in my boyhood, and so have nearly all my friends, born under the general doom of mortals...The doom that makes a man come almost to the end of thinking before he comes to the first chance of living."
G. K. Chesterton
Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven?
Canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?
--Job 38:33
Not by might nor by power,
but by my spirit,
sayth the LORD Almighty.
Zech 4:6
A Year with G.K. Chesterton, 365 DAYS OF WISDOM, WIT, AND WONDER.
