“Every experience is a paradox in
that it means to be absolute,
and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself
and yet never escapes itself.” ~ T. S. Eliot
and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself
and yet never escapes itself.” ~ T. S. Eliot
Over the last couple of
posts, we’ve looked at paradoxes –
statements that seem to be understandable in our representative system, but
produce confounding results. Mandelbrot’s statement that a coastline gets
longer the shorter the scale of measurement becomes is an example of a paradox of infinite recursion; Godel’s
statement that any logical system must be inconsistent or incomplete
exemplifies a paradox of
self-referentiality. I will hereby gift you another of my unsubstantiated
assertions: all paradoxes are either paradoxes
of infinite recursion, and so statements about the One-in-All; or they are
paradoxes of self-referentiality, and so statements about the All-in-One.
These concepts of One-in-All
and All-in-One, to which we briefly alluded some time ago in a discussion of
the Phoenix, are important in theology, where they provide analogies for the
Divine. Within the pentapartite model of reality outlined early in the life of
this blog, these concepts are transcendental
– they derive meaning only as relations with ideals, or metarelations.
Systems constructed by our
rational faculty cannot grasp these metarelations, because they are bound to
the objective and subjective realms. Even though I am providing you the raw
material for a scheme that describes metarelations, it necessarily falls short
of being properly descriptive – my assertion that there exists something beyond our understanding is not at all the
same thing as an assertion that this
specific entity here is understandable as being beyond our understanding
(in fact, you might be able to recognize this second construction as a
restatement of the paradox of self-referentiality). Nevertheless, an
examination of paradoxes has value – not only as an intellectual exercise, but
also as a spiritual one.
Nicolas of Cusa, known also
as Cusanus, elaborated a sophisticated philosophy around this notion of paradox
as a womb of truth in the transcendental sense. He posited a cosmology in which
God was both within and beyond the All of Creation and the Nothingness of Void;
he described God as the non aliud,
the ‘not-other,’ that is, the thing which is neither One nor the Other (this
can be seen as a challenge to the Aristotelian Law of the Excluded Middle, an
anticipation of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, or yet another restatement of
the paradox of self-referentiality). For Cusanus, God was the unimaginable
union of All and Nothing in One.
(A quick aside: note that
Cusanus here introduces a third element to our earlier picture of One-in-All
and All-in-One. In fact, we can now talk of One-in-Nothing, All-in-Nothing,
One-in-All, Nothing-in-All, and All-in-One. We could talk of Nothing-in-One, but that would actually be Two,
harking back to our earlier discussion of essential numerology. The cosmology
of One, Nothing, and All is another restatement of the Law of Fives.)
Cusanus
accepted that God was unknowable, in accordance with Church teaching (he was a
Bishop of Rome in the Catholic Church). He nevertheless felt that we could
understand something of the Divine,
seeing perhaps “as through a glass darkly” but seeing nonetheless. Cusanus
believed this could be accomplished by meditation upon the coincidentia oppositorum, the “marriage of opposites” – in the
sense that paradoxes simultaneously defy and unify the opposites of True and
False in a bivalent logic, they are ripe for Cusanian study.
