Reflections on the Book and Wounds of Job

Through the prompt kindness of a vivid-souled Catholic priest, who is also a contemplative Maronite monk in Massachusetts, I recently received an undated, eleven-page text written by G.K. Chesterton and entitled “Introduction to the Book of Job.” It was, moreover, a text that I had never before read, nor even known about. Furthermore, since this transmitted version of the undated text also had some unexplained ellipses in it, as well as an alluringly succinct Epigraph — “Man is most comforted by paradoxes” — I started to wonder about the occasion of the essay’s first appearance and thus proceeded to do a little more research, which led to some additionally illuminating discoveries.

During the deep trials of World War I, in 1916 — some two years before his own brother Cecil was to die on the battlefield of a disease contracted near the very end of the War — G.K. Chesterton wrote a nineteen-page Introduction (pp. ix-xxvii) to a much longer and illustrated text of 102 pages from the Old Testament, in an Anglican “authorized version” of that spiritually challenging book entitled: The Book of Job: With an Introduction by G.K. Chesterton & Illustrated in Colour by C. Mary Tongue.

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