“The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Living in Isolation from Ourselves
Stated simply, the predicament of modern humans is how to overcome the mundaneness of existence. Walker Percy, the American twentieth century novelist and devout Catholic, examined this predicament in much of his work, often weaving Kierkegaardian philosophy into his stories and characters.
One aspect of our predicament is the ever-increasing reliance on science and technology to solve our problems, to which Percy said:
“The secret is this: Science cannot utter a single word about an individual molecule, thing, or creature in so far as it is an individual but only in so far as it is like other individuals. The layman thinks that only science can utter the true word about anything, individuals included. But the layman is an individual. So science cannot say a single word to him or about him except as he resembles others. It comes to pass then that the denizen of a scientific technological society finds himself in the strangest of predicaments: he lives in a cocoon of dead silence, in which no one can speak to him nor can he reply.”
Walker Percy, “The Delta Factor”
In other words, the purview of science is limited to what is inside the universe and outside of each individual–science cannot peer into the human soul. When we place our faith and trust in science alone, we find that we have not only cut ourselves off from God, but we’ve cut ourselves off from ourselves.
In this state of isolation from God and ourselves, questions about why the universe exists and why we exist are not just unanswerable, they are unaskable. Waking up inside what Percy calls a ‘cocoon of dead silence’ can be a Kafkaesque nightmare, but only if we choose to remain trapped.
By resigning ourselves to the awareness that we don’t have all the answers–that there is truth and meaning beyond our ability to comprehend–we become liberated, just as Job was ultimately liberated.
“[W]hen the scientists, philosophers, theologians and artists have said all the profound things they are able to say, there remains something unsaid – and unsayable. There is something refreshing about this fact.”
Cyprian Smith, The Way of Paradox, pp. 30-31
Shared Yearning
Everyone daydreams about the purpose of existence. Even people who are at the bottom of the economic ladder do this. Even people who don’t have enough to eat do this. Even people who don’t have a roof to sleep under tonight do this. It is in our nature to do so.
As G.K. Chesterton deftly expressed, “Pragmatism is a matter of human needs; and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist.”[1]
The fact that we all share a yearning to understand the big ‘WHY’ means we share an inherent dignity and worth. Not comfortable with the unity that shared yearning represents, modern society seeks division, dredging power, oppression, and economic issues to the forefront, and assigning gradations of value and fault to individuals and societal systems accordingly.
As a result of this division, we lose what makes us individuals and what binds us as humans, in favor of tribal identities.
Interestingly, the people who believe Mazlow’s hierarchy (discussed here) and those who believe that people are inherently good see external factors such as economics as the primary cause of sin and suffering. That belief is used to justify public policy aimed at addressing real or perceived societal hierarchies, often by imposing ‘corrective’ hierarchies based on assigning people to classifications or groups.
An example is critical race theory, where all social interactions are interpreted as oppressive events, with race being what determines who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed. To counter such divisiveness, we should heed Chesterton’s warning:
“If we wish to pull down the prosperous oppressor we cannot do it with the new doctrine of human perfectibility; we can do it with the old doctrine of Original Sin. If we want to uproot inherent cruelties or lift up lost populations we cannot do it with the scientific theory that matter precedes mind; we can do it with the supernatural theory that mind precedes matter.”
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, “Authority and the Adventurer”
It is easy to say that two wrongs don’t make a right, but more difficult to put it into practice. The abhorrence of racism and the evils done in its name demand justice, but how often do we turn to the immediacy of divisive reaction rather than the long road of unification and healing?
The dehumanization of division has even crept into public health policy. Eradicating Down’s Syndrome may be a laudable goal, but if the solution is to end innocent life in utero, as it has become in some northern European countries, then we have unthinkably turned again to the horrors of eugenics.
“[Satan] always sends errors into the world in pairs – pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse…. He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one.”
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 186.
In its hubris, mankind thinks it possesses the deftness to use a seemingly smaller evil to eradicate a perceived bigger one. Like the would-be tyrant, we promise to relinquish our emergency powers as soon as the danger subsides. But once we get a taste for playing God, the appetite for more is never satiated.
The Power of Wonder
The madness in which the ends justify the means is the same kind of madness that insists on resolving all paradox. The ability to embrace contradiction (such as ‘e pluribus unum,’ or ‘out of many, one’) helps avoid coming to a false conclusion (such as ‘living my truth’). We must therefore be ever vigilant to avoid using paradox to create false dichotomies that sow division rather than unity.
The key to living in the visible world without being imprisoned by its alluring flattery is understanding that the invisible world is more important.
“Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.”
2 Corinthians 4:16-18 NRSV-CI
Paradox is the struggle between our physical selves and our spiritual selves, although the struggle is not directly each against the other. Instead, the struggle is with how each confronts the mystery of existence. “To say that at the heart of the world lies a mystery, is to glimpse the possibility that it may have some kind of ultimate meaning; that it may, after all, be worthwhile.”[2]
Our intellect is simultaneously drawn to and repelled by paradox: drawn first by curiosity of the absurd, then by a deep realization that something meaningful is hidden there; and repelled by our inability to resolve the illogic that makes paradox easy to dismiss as silly and unproductive wordplay.
The reward awaiting those who allow what draws us in to prevail over what repels us (in other words, those who embrace paradox) is an awareness of the limitations of the human intellect–an awareness that opens the intellect to the possibility of a higher kind of knowing.
Through humility and acceptance of the power of wonder over certainty, paradox teaches us proper spiritual posture so that our lives can be ordered accordingly.
This means diminishing ourselves so we can be exalted; losing ourselves so we can be saved; and dying to ourselves so we can truly live. You cannot find happiness by pursuing happiness in this world, but only by pursuing God as if we did not belong to this world.
“[T]he four or five things that it is most practically essential that a man should know, are all of them what people would call paradoxes. That is to say, that though we all find them in life to be mere plain truths, yet we cannot easily state them in words without being guilty of seeming verbal contradictions…. One of them, for instance, is the unimpeachable platitude that the man who finds most pleasure for himself is often the man who least hunts for it.”
G.K. Chesterton, “The Twelve Men”
Paradox constantly challenges us to transcend; it is both the reason why we pursue higher meaning and the means by which we pursue it.
Paradox helps us understand the world by providing a perspective from which to see the world from the outside–from God’s perspective–as if we ourselves were creatures of the beyond. “If we truly want to follow God, we must seek to be other-worldly.”[3]
Embrace Uncertainty to Remove Doubt
One of the greatest powers of paradox is that it counters the corrosive nature of certainty, and not by making us doubt, but by removing doubt. “And as my questions increase, so does my faith, which Scripture esteems as a higher prize than certainty.”[4]
By embracing the uncertainty, we, like Job, express a deep faith in God’s plan. By demanding certainty, we allow doubt to creep in as we wonder whether our solutions might be better than God’s. Certainty is our own; faith comes from God.
We crave the certainty of a final answer, even about things for which certainty is not possible. But we must remember that craving certainty is an earthly desire, a desire of the flesh, and not a spiritual desire.
Even when certainty is possible, it should not be what drives us. Certainty is to satisfy ourselves when we should be trying to satisfy God.
Paradox helps us practice letting go of certainty so we can begin to realize that the hidden nature of God’s plan is purposeful and necessary. “Seeing through the glass dimly is not a flaw in the system.”[5]
Perhaps we should learn to recite a slightly different version of the Serenity Prayer,[6] something like this:
God grant me the contentment to live with ambiguity, the knowledge to understand what is certain, and paradox to show me the difference.
Allowing paradox to lead us into wonder holds certainty at bay and preserves in us the meekness of wisdom.
The Prince of Paradox
Chesterton was a master at finding wonder in the wisdom of ambiguity. When confronting the ideas of those who insisted on a man-made answer (among his favorite targets, and good friends, were George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells), Chesterton loved to argue via juxtaposition.
For example, when confronting the oft-given but rarely examined advice of ‘believe in yourself,’ Chesterton noted that the place where you are most assuredly to find people who consistently believe in themselves with the strongest conviction is the lunatic asylum.
Unlike the advice typically found in self-help books, the way to achieve success is not to believe in yourself, but to believe in something outside yourself–the kind of something that engages you in adventures and enthralls you to the kind of awe and wonder that makes you forget yourself.
The beauty of paradox is that it provides its own juxtaposition, yielding ample and fertile ground for flipping the script on the conventional ‘wisdom’ of the world.
For Chesterton, paradox was not just a fun rhetorical tool for juxtaposition. He saw something powerful, meaningful, and resilient in the ability to hold on to paradox and embrace it. In particular, Chesterton believed that Christianity’s ability to maintain paradox provided convincing proof of its reliability.
Recall that Gödel’s incompleteness theorems concluded something similar: that a system without paradox would have to be either inconsistent, or consistent but so simple as to collapse into tautology.
Christianity is our best explanation of the universe and its relationship to God from the perspective of being inside the universe. If God’s creation did not contain paradoxes and unprovable truths, how could it be reliable?
Kierkegaard understood this as well, stating, “The paradox in Christian truth is invariably due to the fact that it is the truth that exists for God. The standard of measure and the end is superhuman; and there is only one relationship possible: faith.”[7]
Is it really so surprising to realize that it’s God’s world, and we’re just living in it?
Waking up the Mind
It could be said that Kierkegaard’s most intimate relationship was with paradox. He didn’t avoid it; he sought it out at every opportunity. To him, like the beloved to the lover, paradox was the thinker’s passion.
“The supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think. This passion is at bottom present in all thinking, even in the thinking of the individual, in so far as in thinking he participates in something transcending himself. But habit dulls our sensibilities, and prevents us from perceiving it.”
Philosophical Fragments, Søren Kierkegaard writing as Johannes Climacus
It is incumbent upon us to work to overcome the habits that keep us from grappling with paradox. It is our duty to accept that there are things which we cannot understand, and to forego demanding an explanation.
The point of paradox is not to resolve it, for that is beyond our capacity. The exercise is meant to elicit an understanding of our limitations and thereby open us up to the possibility of seeing a glimpse of the incomprehensible.
“This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.”
Attributed to Søren Kierkegaard
Confronting the reality that there is meaning beyond our comprehension resigns us to reliance on faith.
In this regard, the ‘unlearned’ have a leg up on the intellectual elites who have a hard time admitting to limitation. Indeed, Kierkegaard had little hope for academic types in their ability to find faith in paradox, stating acerbically, “Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.”[8]
Undaunted or unaware of Kierkegaard’s admonishment, many academic elites followed the example of Wittgenstein and Russell by altogether dismissing paradox, typically reducing it to nothing more than clever logic puzzles.
One such professor, from Harvard no less, was the heralded twentieth century philosopher and logician W.V.O. Quine. For him, the only thing that distinguished paradox from any other run-of-the-mill absurd statement was that paradox has some argument that could sustain it.
“In this [Quine’s] view, then, although paradoxes may be interesting and might lead to interesting insights, they are ultimately meant to be overcome with more refined philosophical categories — a result considered by many to be the paragon of intellectual progress. It is largely due to the prevalence of this philosophical framework that many contemporary scholars writing on paradox within the Anglophone tradition have entirely ignored Kierkegaard.”
Nowachek, “Living within the Sacred Tension” (see footnotes for full citation)
Even scholars of Kierkegaard have downplayed paradox, interpreting it as something that can be resolved through faith, and as a result (they argue) ceases to be paradox at all. Such a view would have been anathema to Kierkegaard, who maintained that faith does not resolve paradox, but rather puts the faithful in perpetual existential engagement with it.
“[F]or Kierkegaard, paradoxes fundamental to the ongoing practice of the Christian life and that demand perpetual existential engagement such as those he associates with Abraham’s faith, selfhood, the God-man, and Christian love…are neither puzzles to be solved nor nonsense to be overcome through more refined philosophical categories.”
Nowachek, “Living within the Sacred Tension”
In a certain way, paradox attacks the very foundations of academia and western thought because it challenges the assumption that human intellect and reasoning are necessary and sufficient to understand the world.
“It is precisely this sense that Kierkegaard emphasizes when he claims that paradox is that which stands in contrast to human categories or human ability and thereby functions to reveal the limitations of human reason. Put in another way, in encountering the paradox, the understanding is confronted by something that runs contrary to what it could have expected or rationally anticipated….”
Nowachek, “Living within the Sacred Tension”
This doesn’t mean that reason is rejected in favor of paradox, unlike how Quine rejected paradox as incompatible with reason. Rather, paradox shows how, where, and the extent to which reason has limitations.
Fullness of Light
The habits of conventional reason tend to dull our senses to anything contrary to normal expectation. Seeking out paradox counteracts that tendency, waking up the mind and the senses to the existence of things beyond our capacity to understand and, therefore, to the need for faith.
In this sense, paradox should not be seen only in its negative–that is as an indicator of the limitations of reason. Instead, “paradox may be understood as a positive unity of opposing existential entities whereby these entities are neither undermined nor mediated into a third synthesized entity, but rather are held together in a joint reciprocal relationship.”[9]
Paradox has the ability to hold opposing concepts together not in spite of the tension between them, but because of the relationship that the tension creates.
Just like photons are somehow a superposition of wave and particle properties that remain unresolved until we try to understand them through measurement, only by preserving ambiguity by not attempting to solve the paradox can we realize, quite literally, the fullness of light.
[1] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, “The Suicide of Thought”
[2] Cyprian Smith, The Way of Paradox, p. 31
[3] Jen Pollock Michel, Surprised by Paradox, p. 85
[4] Jen Pollock Michel, Surprised by Paradox, p. 3 (calling to mind the multiple times Jesus said, “Your faith has healed you,” to those he miraculously healed)
[5] Jen Pollack Michel, Surprised by Paradox, p. 2 (referring to 1 Corinthians 13:12)
[6] The Serenity Prayer is, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
[7] Attributed to Kierkegaard
[8] Attributed to Kierkegaard
[9] Matthew Thomas Nowachek, “Living within the Sacred Tension: Paradox and Its Significance for Christian Existence in the Thought of Søren Kierkegaard” (2016). http://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu/680