Ironies of Faith: The Laughter at the Heart of Christian Literature

by Anthony Esolen

I pray that I may be touched by the Christian mysteries of incarnation and transcendence, free will and design, sin and redemption, blindness and vision, freedom and submission, and, most of all, the subtle strand that links human love to the love that moves the sun and the other stars.

Christianity is the opposite of a mystery religion: the creed is short and openly professed. Yet its simple tenets belie unfathomable depth.

it makes no sense for the skeptic to embark on a quest for knowledge, when there is no knowledge to be had.

To fail to love is to destroy oneself.

In another sense, too, Niggle used time well, according to the Second Voice. He answered many “Calls.” The Voices discuss what calls he answered and why, with the First asserting that Niggle called them “‘Interruptions,’” and the Second excusing the “‘poor little man’s’” lack of perception. What we have here, as the voices examine the chronicles of Niggle, is a time parallel to the time we perceive. In our own chronicles we mark time by great deeds, wars, and masterpieces. But in heaven’s time—in real time—who knows where the critical moments fall? C. S. Lewis makes the same point in The Great Divorce. The narrator sees a woman so grand that angels, men, and beasts follow reverently in her train. He supposes she was some queen on earth. But she was only an ordinary country woman—ordinary in the world’s terms, extraordinary in her love. So warm was her charity that she changed many of the lives that touched hers; like Monica, she was a mother to many.

His disciples, by contrast, are to practice humility: he sends them forth to rule the world by means of sacrificing themselves for it. What else should we expect from the suffering servant? And that is the starkest reversal of all: a slain Lamb rules on the throne.