I am so glad that you called GKC a “Knight of Faith”. What a powerful title this is! Abraham, Mary the Mother of God, and Gilbert Keith Chesterton: each is about as different than the other as is possible. Then how did each one live that makes them all worthy of being called “Knights of Faith”? As I understand it, Kierkegaard called Mary and Abraham knights of faith because both displayed such incredible faith in such difficult circumstances, and both expected the absurd to happen. Abraham knew that God would provide a sacrifice, even as he raised the knife to slay Isaac, and Mary answered the angel by saying, “I am the Lord’s Servant”. She was to give birth to the Messiah and she accepted this freely and faithfully, having faith that she would be blessed by God.

And now we come to Chesterton, can he compare to Mary or Abraham? I say, along with RJ, that he definitely can. GKC did not live two lives, one as a journalist and one as a Catholic; his Catholic faith permeated, soaked through, and entirely transformed his writing and lecturing career. He lived during such a complex and confusing time, what with evolution, nihilism, Nietchze’s “Death of God”, WWI, Marxism, Social Darwinism, and a slew of other socio-economic transformations in the world from 1900 to his death in 1934. But Chesterton never faltered! He always expected the absurd from God; he always expected that faith in Christ would win the day, and it did. By making a leap of faith early on in his life, by devoting himself to God’s service through all of his ambitious endeavors, and by tirelessly defending the faith, we can honestly call Chesterton a “Knight of Faith”.

It is for passages like this that Chesterton’s title of “Master of Paradox” truly makes sense. What is incredible about GKC is that he always shows the greatest truth through the most confusing and paradoxical examples. For example: “Man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand.”

I think I could honestly think about this sentence for hours and still not get all of the wisdom that is in it.

When we see ourselves: conscious, feeling beings who are capable of reason, we are faced with something that is basically impossible to understand. Why do we exist? Why is there not nothingness? This universe is complex, beautiful, and orderly; then why is it this way?

These questions reveal that we do not understand everything while at the same time they show that we actually do get it. The reason we do exist is because God didn’t want nothingness, the reason that the universe exists is because God’s Word is powerful and perfect and glorious, and the reason we humans have minds and souls and hearts is so that we can love each other and love God! When we accept the fact that we know nothing, then the Creator-God makes Himself known to us. And this is a glorious paradox.