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To: betty boop

Your talk about the problem with Aristotle's excluded middle reminds me of another literary term popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: paradox. I wrote my undergraduate honors dissertation on paradox in the poetry of John Donne, and my tutor put me onto Chesterton's "Orthodoxy" in connection with the project.

I still recall Chesterton's image of orthodoxy not as something staid and stable, but as a chariot wildly reeling its way down through history, spilling heretics out left and right, while the truth managed to stay on board.

Thus, for instance (to suggest a few examples on my own in Chesterton's spirit, since I don't have the book by me), Jesus is not either God or Man, but both. Innumerable heresies tried to make Him one or the other, and failed. Human beings are not just bodies or souls, but both. We are neither "the soul in the machine" nor are we compounded only of matter. Hegel was a wild man, but he was on to something with his pattern of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

Why was paradox so popular among the religious poets? Perhaps because it can shadow forth what a literal statement finds it difficult or impossible to say.

But as for Bohr and Einstein, didn't Einstein (I forget his exact words) say that he didn't think God approved of quantum mechanics?


296 posted on 11/05/2006 6:05:31 PM PST by Cicero (Marcus Tullius)
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To: Cicero; betty boop

Oh, yes, now I recall. "God doesn't play dice with the Universe."


297 posted on 11/05/2006 6:07:35 PM PST by Cicero (Marcus Tullius)
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