How many does it take to dance? : the mystery of the political in G. K. Chesterton

Mystery in G. K. Chesterton is a constitutive feature of human commonality. Father Brown - Chesterton's most famous character from the eponymous detective stories - asserts in the above epigraph that meaning is a mystery because it is neither a revealing nor a concealing, neither obvious nor obscure, being mediated instead through interpersonal contact. Linguistic interaction is not confined to an exchange of words, but is broadened to include all signs that enable the relation between the hidden and the revealed. The mystic, says Chesterton, sets 'a thing up in broad daylight' - in other words, mystery is linked to the making public, to the political. I will propose here the even stronger position that community and the political are possible for Chesterton because of mystery, when mystery is understood as holding in abeyance the dialectic between revelation and concealment. This notion of the mystery has been discussed in relation to theology and the detective story in Chesterton. Its political implications, however, have never been sufficiently developed.