![]() ![]() "Why does each thing on the earth war against each other thing? … So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist." "I see everything," Gabriel Syme shouts in the book's last chapter. This is the dark, impenetrable paradox of will and consciousness. Somehow our choices are not totally determined, yet somehow they also are not random, as if decisions were made by shaking tiny dice inside our skull. We have a knowledge of good and evil and a freedom to choose, within limits, of course, between the two. If our behavior were entirely determined by how our brain is wired by heredity and environment, then we would be mere automatons with no more genuine free will or self-awareness-two names for the same thing-than a vacuum cleaner. Man's freedom to do wicked things, as Augustine and so many other theologians of all faiths have said, is the price we pay for freedom. ![]() In Chesterton's comic fantasy, which he calls on the title page "A Nightmare," free will is symbolized by anarchism. Chesterton, revolves around two of the deepest of all theological mysteries: the freedom of the will and the existence of massive, irrational evil. T he Man Who Was Thursday, a masterpiece by G. ![]()
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