“One may not like [aristocratic]
courts (I don’t much like them myself), but at a certain stage it is only in a
court that a man may do something extravagant for its own sake, because he
wants to, because it seems to him worth doing. And it is sometimes through such
wilful, superfluous actions of individuals that men discover their powers.”
That is Lord Clark, reflecting on the relative social narrowness
of the early Italian Renaissance. The parenthesis does not appear at all in his
script. It’s very much an aside. Yet there is something here of vital
importance to understanding – well, nearly everything, perhaps even He who goes
beyond thingness.
It is that the ability to hold matters in tension, to
embrace paradoxes without abandoning claims of objective truth, is central to
being an integrated human being, to engaging with matters of truth, and to
building worthwhile civilisations.
Paradox does not mean contradiction. A paradox is a
demonstration of the limits of our understanding. To take a famous and simple
example, “This sentence is false” is a paradox – because it creates an
irresolvable conundrum. We cannot conclude the sentence is actually false, for
that would mean it were true – but if it were true, it would be false, and so
forth. Nor can we escape down the deconstructionist’s escape slide and declare
that the sentence is possible because language is meaningless – because we are
using language to understand the sentence, and to communicate to others that
language is meaningless!
Paradox demonstrates constraint. It demonstrates the
grandeur of reality – uncontainable, irreconcilable when drunk neat by mere
humans. That is at the heart of Clark’s act of honesty – that one may resent
hierarchy, but hierarchy, wealth, and even excess can all serve the human
spirit. Clark’s aside was no pretence. He was a lifelong socialist of the old
English breed, much more Morris than Mao. He was made a member of the House of
Lords – and sat with the Labour peers. His contemporary political beliefs were
egalitarian – and yet his artistic and civilisational beliefs were much more
complex. Civilisation must be disseminated – but often originates with
self-selecting elites. Social cooperation and obedience is necessary for the
development and survival of civilisation, but individual Heroes (for Clark,
this group included Bernard, Michaelangelo, Luther, Mozart, and Turner –
amongst others) defy social expectations to push the whole body onwards,
usually for a mixture of good and ill. No-one, to Clark, better represented
harmony (that most social and humane grace) than Raphael, yet this very harmony
ended up corrupting the civilisation it enriched, by its emphasis on the
perfect human figure. Luther purged Europe of suffocating stasis and consuming cant,
yet unleashed waves of sectarian violence.
Paradox is not simply a logical or mathematical category. It
is really the only way in which we can grapple with the mystery of other humans
– why does the Dark Lady smile one moment, and turn away the next? Why was Father
so heroic, generous, wise – and yet cold? It is a sign of the times that these
sound like banalities. Even the “Save The Statues” campaigns tend to defend
controversial monuments on the basis that it was a different time, and
preservation is a historical necessity – but really, what ought to be derided
is the desire to simplify to “good” or “evil” a being so numinous and
paradoxical as a human.
Orson Scott Card’s most famous character, Ender, ends up as
the “Speaker for the Dead”, who speaks honestly at a funeral, as a sort of
priest-eulogist. No false praise; no hysterical condemnation. Just an honest
seeking of the mosaic truth of the other self, transfigured now by death into
memory. This is the embrace of paradox.
Paradox is not, I repeat, a surrender of moral values. It is
not an announcement that black is white (Now, have I outed myself as a racist?
Is my statue to be toppled?). It is not a declaration that up may as well be
down. An acceptance of paradox is, in truth, an acceptance of the opposite –
that good and evil exist, and beauty and ugliness exist. What’s more, beauty
and beauty exist, in the stern eccentricity of Virginia Woolf and the forlorn
classicism of Greta Garbo (to take two examples, again, of Lord Clark’s). How
to reconcile beauty to beauty? How to reconcile Athens and Jerusalem? More than
a mere man might compass.
Yet every such pair of poles conceals some deeper synthesis,
perhaps imaginable if never, in this life, attainable. Two converging roads –
sometimes separated by waste tracts, sometimes made of quite different materials
– but converging, ever converging, on a still point in the hazy distance of
this turning world.
The great assaults on truth in our age do not come from the
paradoxically honest, but the monologically deceitful. To declare that one’s
body is not one’s truth – that one’s gender is up for construction – is not the
embrace of paradox, but its denial and atomisation. The marvellous, sobering,
heartbreaking relationships our body can have with our sense of self are
tensions – but like the tautness of refined musculature (a fitting analogy). A
form of tension here is to be preferred to slackness or ease. Embrace the body;
embrace the soul; find synthesis somewhere beyond yourself, sometime beyond
now. Do not collapse the tension.
Love all men totally, yet love your close neighbours
exceptionally, and your family exclusively. How is such a set of loves possible?
Surely it is impossible – yet every truly benevolent man or woman has
accomplished it, at least in part, in fits and starts. Somehow the most
singular, irreplicable of loves – that erotic love that transcends itself in
marriage – is a fitting partner on the village green to the love of country,
and is completed (Somehow! Beyond its own immediate essence!) by the bearing
and sharing of children, and for all its consuming fire can never destroy the
need for the comradeship of men for men or women for women. Are not, in fact,
men and women the ultimate embodied paradox? Why this difference, why this
alien flesh? And yet – and yet!
The truth waits beyond ourselves, in the wood beyond the
limit of our sight. Paradox is the path.
Someone wrote a book recently called 'paradoxology', which seeks to embrace seemingly paradoxical theological truths (like the sovereignty of God and the responsibilities of mankind) and use them to lead us to hallelujah.
ReplyDelete