By Dr. Jonathan Wanner
“The truth shall make you odd.”—Flannery O’Connor
A paradox clears up the mud in your mind by making it dirtier, and the best paradoxes rely on an error to correct an error. G. K. Chesterton intuited this fact well, as he routinely confuses the reader only to enlighten him, teaching logical truths through the appearance of contradictory lies. Take the opening punchline of The Everlasting Man:
“There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there.”1
The reason this works is that readers have no idea what he is talking about, at least initially. Forced into a stance of humility, the first knowledge one acquires is an awareness of ignorance. Chesterton is simply addressing a common pride: Most readers don’t know what they don’t know. That is, the best readers are aware of what they do not understand; they have a reason to seek knowledge. It is the difference between ignorance and error. The ignorant reader will revise his preconceived notions of “getting home” and reread the phrase as “understanding home,” whereas the erroneous reader will accuse Chesterton of nonsense. Like the ignorant reader, we should be comfortable with the agitation of not knowing, for as much as we imagine we suffer “gaps” of ignorance, our knowledge is not simply like Swiss cheese punctured with a few holes. If we zoom out, we see our dense mass of knowledge itself floats in an immeasurable emptiness — that the empty space around the Swiss cheese surrounds and exceeds any gaps inside it.
For a Catholic, paradoxes are especially pertinent because theology is not a compromise between opposing extremes as much as it is a synthesis of truths on both ends of a spectrum: Sin is both destructive and providential; humans are both mortal and immortal-bound; and God acts with both justice and mercy. Christ, above all, is the ultimate discordia concors: In him humanity and divinity, life and death, strength and weakness harmonize in a cosmic and undivided concord. How mystically the Divine Physician receives wounds to heal wounds. Indeed, the best poems are paradoxical because Christ is a unity of seeming contradictions, and all the best paradoxes are, in some measure, a descant upon his birth and death.
Within this Christological frame, the beauty of Chesterton’s paradoxical vision is that it points to Christ’s divine humility by imitating it. Christ emptied himself of the appearance of his divinity so that we could empty ourselves of the illusion of our divinity — and find a reason to need God. In like manner, Chesterton empties himself of the appearance of truth to help us transcend the illusion of falsehood. Ultimately, we admire Chesterton’s wit best when, by it, we experience the insufficiency of human wit. As ignorance is an excuse to rely on God’s providence, we know God more fully by knowing we do not know him fully. Though the cross-eyed vision may at first blind us, we learn by that blindness to see through crucifixed eyes. Chesterton, like all the greatest poets, makes the truth sound odd so that, made familiar with falsehood, we might become as strange as we always were.
1G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (Hodder and Stoughton, 1925), 3.
