Paradoxes: one could spend a lifetime and beyond (assuming of course there is a beyond) attempting to resolve paradoxes and never make a single one disappear. We are plagued with discontinuities. We may come close to ridding ourselves of such paradoxes, but close is not good enough. G.K. Chesterton says in his biography of Saint Thomas Aquinas, “It is a fact that falsehood is never so false as when it is very nearly true.”[1] This may be the case with human attempts to resolve paradoxes.
Theologians and philosophers have argued over paradoxes for centuries, all the while failing to resolve them. My personal journey into accepting them began with Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Close to the beginning of his monumental work he encourages the reader to “confront the apparent contradiction head-on, to savor it, to turn it over, to take it apart, to wallow in it,” so that the reader might gain fresh insights into this strange universe.[2] Hofstadter demonstrates that paradoxes are an integral part of the cosmos: Bach capitalized on paradox in his compositions; Escher in his sketches; and Gödel in his mathematical proofs.
I believe our motivation to resolve paradoxes is rooted in distaste for tension. While some of us are seemingly equipped to deal with tension, many of us work tirelessly to make it go away. In doing so we live a contradiction. Our bodies, for instance, would drop dead without structural tension. Biological homeostasis (the antagonistic pursuit of chemical balance) is our lifeline. Within the realm of music, there would be no stringed music without tension. There would be no kettledrums in the orchestra. There would be no overhead lighting in the concert hall.
Paradoxes abound and come in many shapes and sizes. One of the greatest paradoxes comes from our understanding of light. Physicists have puzzled over the behavior and nature of light for centuries. If studied under one set of circumstances, light reveals itself as a wave of electromagnetic character. If studied under another set of circumstances it portrays itself as a particle: a photon. These two qualities of light are contradictory, yet are the source of life on this rock we call Earth.
Religious texts are notorious for such paradoxes. In one text we find that truth will be hidden from the wise and revealed to babies![3] Perhaps truth is more simple than complex. In some texts we discover that if we want to live, we must die. To be the greatest, we must become the least. To keep anything, we must give it away. To hold on in desperation is to lose what is sacred.
G.K. Chesterton raised one such paradox with respect to issues of faith and mysticism: “The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid.”[4] What do you seek? Comfort? Consolation? Escape from tension? No discontinuities? Understanding the complex? Many wise people have discovered that in order to make sense of our existence we must dive in and swim wholeheartedly in the waters of paradox. If we run from paradoxes we will most certainly end up coming round to meet up with them again and again. (Figure 1)
Figure 1. Running To & From Truth
So, whether we are running to or from paradox, we encounter truth eventually. It may, however, make the journey a bit more enjoyable if we choose to embrace paradox with courage and a resolve to understand as much as we can.
– Sam Augsburger
[1] G.K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas / St. Francis of Assisi (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2002), 85.
[2] Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 26.
[3] Luke 10:21-22.
[4] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Colorado Springs: WaterBrook Press, 2001), 32.
