“The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.”
Luke 17:20-21
Do You See What I See?
The most reprinted newspaper editorial in history first appeared in 1897 in the New York paper The Sun as a response to an eight-year-old girl named Virginia. Her friends told her there was no Santa Claus, and she wanted to know the truth.
The answer she received in that editorial was an affirmation that reality that lies beyond what is visible. It began by saying:
“Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.”
The inability to allow oneself to revel in fairy tales because of the misconception that they are not real is a sign of an unhealthy human disposition. Believing only in what you can personally see, hear, touch, taste and smell cuts you off not only from the spiritual, but from everyone else whose world extends beyond your own.
Just because nobody sees Santa Claus is no indication that there is in fact no Santa Claus. Often what is most real are things that neither children nor adults can see.
Consider this. It’s not the act of drinking from the mythical fountain of youth that keeps a person young, but rather the belief that it will–even if only in comparison to the curmudgeon insistent upon pure rationality (which definitely accelerates the aging process).
The editorial concluded by waxing philosophically:
“[T]here is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain….”
Here lies the crux: there is something powerful about the invisible world that is accessible to all who are willing to believe the unseen. And thank God for that, because we need it to stay sane.
Forbidden Fruit
For believers in God, Truth with a capital ‘T’ is an unchanging absolute, and therefore becomes the most real thing in their lives. The danger is that this emboldens the believer into thinking she has the capacity to achieve certainty and thus makes certainty the goal.
The danger for the non-believer is that their view of reality becomes myopic, to the exclusion of anything they cannot see or explain. Their reality is confined inside a hermetically sealed box to protect it from contamination, but they are stuck inside as well, starving for oxygen.
To fully embrace reality requires belief that paradox contains truth, and acceptance that the paradox is unreconcilable. To fully embrace reality, we must accept that the invisible is more real than the visible. As C.S. Lewis said, “Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.”[1]
If, as G.K. Chesterton intimated, the lunatic is the manifestation of pure rationality left untethered, then struggling with paradox serves as a pressure-release valve, allowing sanity some room to permeate after the steam of pure logic and rationality is vented.
“Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.”
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, “The Maniac”
The great mystery is what makes life worth living, and worth living in such a way that any part of you not invested in it finds itself in a state of decay.
Adam and Eve wanted to know the answer to the riddle of good and evil, which was the promise of the forbidden fruit. Their pride made them believe they could handle seeing with God’s eyes, but instead all they saw was their own shame. Despite God’s warning, they ate the fruit, and the price was exile and death.
For those struggling to resist the temptation of pride in seeking certainty, choosing instead to leave mystery and paradox intact, God grants the ability to keep up the good fight.[2]
While paradox can seem wild and wooly, what we gain in the struggle to maintain it is our sanity, free from the prison of pure rationality.
“Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies is wait.”
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, “The Paradoxes of Christianity”
Straddling Affirmation and Denial
Working on our faith requires that we develop and hone the desires that cannot be satisfied in this world, and then resist the temptation to satisfy them with worldly things.
Once we accept that the invisible is more real than the visible, we open ourselves up to the possibility that the invisible is our true home. “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”[3]
Suddenly, our reference point shifts away from what this world says is true and valuable, seeking instead the light of God’s face. We can now see God’s law with a new perspective,[4] not as prohibitions against earthly pleasures, but rather as guardrails preventing us from plunging into the abyss while we are left free to explore.
“And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it has established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.”
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, “The Paradoxes of Christianity”
The truth cannot outside of the tension between the visible and the invisible–the tension between our physical selves and spiritual selves. Truth resides in the tug-of-war between affirmation and denial, not of God but of our earthly existence.
No one’s teachings exemplified this disposition better than the Dominican monk Eckhart von Hochheim, commonly known as Meister Eckhart. Born around 1260, Meister Eckhart espoused the view that God exists within us, and that we can form a union with His presence by turning our focus inward.
His approach resembled Eastern mysticism in its embrace of the paradoxical, very much like a Zen koan, and as a result he was accused of heresy by the Catholic Church. His status as a potential heretic was not because his teachings were in error, but because the Church considered his teachings as highly likely to lead others into error.
It seems the Church was not wrong in that view considering that to this day Meister Eckhart is not well understood and often quoted out of context. It is therefore with some trepidation that I endeavor to weave some of Meister Eckhart’s teachings into this blog.
As Kierkegaard would do centuries later, Eckhart encouraged us to live in the midst of the conflict between opposites and resist the urge to resolve them. According to Eckhart, “[The highest truth] transcends the Principle of Contradiction, and can be grasped only through paradox.”[5]
The ‘Principle of Contradiction’ is the brick wall that mathematics ran into when encountering Russell’s Paradox (see here), and is simply the notion that opposite statements cannot both be true at the same time.
Kurt Gödel overcame this principle by using it against itself. Gödel proved not that opposite statements can both be true, but that there necessarily exist true statements that cannot be proven. He thus solidified for all time the idea that even in rigorous mathematics we sometimes need to learn to live within the tension of opposites.
For Eckhart, embracing the paradox is the only way that we can even attempt to truly encounter God. “[Eckhart] sees the Reality of God as something that can be grasped only within the tension and clash of opposites.”[6]
Emulating Columbo
As Kierkegaard explained, the ability to live within the sacred tension comes by virtue of a dual transcendence akin to what Abraham endured when he was instructed by God to sacrifice Isaac. To describe this journey, Kierkegaard defined three spheres of existence, representing what he called ‘stages on life’s way.’
The first is the esthetic sphere, whose denizens are characterized by valuing immediacy, seeking pleasure, and recognizing only the material world. This is our base state as humans, literally and figuratively.
Transcending the esthetic sphere to reach the ethical requires resignation of the self and an understanding that a higher ordering to the universe exists. Residing in the ethical sphere, one values obligation, seeks duty, and recognizes the spiritual world in addition to the material world.
Most well-meaning people who want to be good and leave a positive legacy exist in the ethical sphere and will never go beyond. Transcending the ethical sphere involves living almost entirely as one belongs to a different world, with essentially no regard for the ordering of the material world. This is the religious sphere.
In the religious sphere, one is singularly focused on fulfillment of a purpose, seeking eternal joy to the point of enduring any temporal suffering, and ordering one’s thoughts and actions solely to the spiritual world.
Paradox has a role to play in both transitions, first from esthetic to ethical, and then from ethical to religious. The particular flavor of paradox found at the border between the esthetic and ethical spheres is irony.
Irony can be described as a sort of wry incongruity between the appearances of something and the actuality of the thing. For example, commenting that it’s a beautiful day when it’s raining.
Think of how the television detective, Columbo, used irony by feigning ignorance to entice others into making admissions. Thusly considered, irony becomes more of a rhetorical technique utilizing juxtaposition rather than the juxtaposition itself.
Properly employed, irony can prompt the esthete to view her situation from a different perspective, as if from a distance or from the outside looking in. Ultimately, the irony itself establishes nothing other than to point out a truth that lies beyond it.
According to Kierkegaard, the ethicist uses irony because, “he comprehends the contradiction between the mode in which he exists in his inner being and his not expressing it in his outer appearance.”[7]
In other words, the ethicist, who has begun to let go of material pleasures (what Kierkegaard would call the mundane) in an effort to transcend the material world and adhere to higher moral standard (the ethical infinite), allows the contradiction to come into existence between living in the material world and being responsible to the spiritual one.
Kierkegaard wants us to experience irony as irony and not try to understand it. We do this by embracing the paradox through faith such that the higher meaning is revealed, resulting in a new perspective from which we see the joy and humor in the irony rather than the anxiety of living with unresolved paradox.
Whereas irony is the border between the esthetic and ethical spheres, humor, specifically absurdity, is the border between the ethical and religious spheres.
To achieve the rare transcendence from ethical to religious such that your individual actions are justified by the spiritual over all universal morality, something more than the mere incongruity of irony is required.
From the point of view of the ethicist, the religious sphere is absurd and cannot be understood, because the religious sphere resides in paradox. Although we can intellectually understand the leap of faith that Abraham made across the chasm from ethical to religious when he was willing to sacrifice his son, we cannot truly understand Abraham unless we cross that chasm ourselves.
Abraham’s leap seems as impossible as reconciling an unreconcilable paradox–a paradox like God becoming a man and having a dual nature, remaining fully divine while being fully human.
Sanity of Paradox
It is fitting that irony and humor are what’s required to transcend from esthetic to ethical and from ethical to religious. Irony and humor inject levity into the weighty, worldly things we take so seriously, lifting and lightening our souls in the process of emptying ourselves.
As G.K. Chesterton noted, the heavy, serious things (the visible) fall, while light, humorous things (the invisible) float. Paradox has a way of transforming the serious and heavy into the humorous and light. And like humor, paradox only works if you don’t try to explain it.
As we turn our attention inward and examine ourselves against our responsibilities, we find ourselves living in the contradiction between finite things and the immorality of the eternal.
Training that inward attention deeper toward our relation to God, our sense of self-importance is annihilated, even while our individuality is elevated above the universal.
Irony overcomes the finite world in favor of the universal, and humor (absurdity) elevates the individual over the universal. Both irony and humor function as paradox, employing incongruity and absurd contradiction to point to a higher truth.
Kierkegaard uses the term ‘upbuilding’ to describe processes such as transcending esthetic to ethical and ethical to religious. Upbuilding begins by relating yourself to God through something beautiful (aesthetic), and therefore something subjective. As you relinquish the subjectivity of the aesthetic for objectivity in your relation to God, you leave your individuality behind.
The upbuilding process is a strange loop, where each step is built on the one before, and the first step is built on the last. As you leave your individuality behind, always believing less in yourself and more in higher truth, you let go of some of the stubborn rationality that prevents you from embracing the paradoxical.
And this is what keeps us sane.
[1] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 134
[2] “Very often what God first helps us toward is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.” C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 101
[3] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 136
[4] “Whenever we feel there is something odd in Christian theology, we shall generally find that there is something odd in the truth.” G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, “The Paradoxes of Christianity”
[5] Cyprian Smith, The Way of Paradox, p. 27
[6] Cyprian Smith, The Way of Paradox, p. 24
[7] Hong & Hong, The Essential Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 233