“The Spectre of a Rose”

Understanding the power of medieval paradox, with help from T. S. Eliot.

“Merry” and “tragical”? “Tedious” and “brief”?
That is hot ice and wondrous strange snow!
How shall we find the concord of this discord?
—A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Last week we looked at medieval warfare through the lens of paradox, seeing war and peace as an expression of “the paradoxical mode of thought that permeated medieval culture and that found in the great questions of human life—as in human nature itself—a wholeness and harmony of opposites.” But what exactly is paradox? And why bother talking about it in the twenty-first century, when life—as we learn from the news media—is an endless succession of domestic crises, foreign threats, and looming global catastrophes?

It is worth talking about because Aristotle taught that paradoxical language is both pleasing and enlightening, and the German poet and philosopher Friedrich von Schlegel wrote that paradox is “everything simultaneously good and great,” and the literary scholar Cleanth Brooks believed that paradox was vital to poetry written by man, and the English writer Thomas De Quincey believed that paradox was vital to man’s discernment of the poetry written in the cosmos.

It is worth talking about because St. Augustine found paradox in the deep realities of the created world, whose “beauty … is formed of the eloquence of contrarities in nature,” and the ancient Greeks found it in the deep realities of all living things, and Blaise Pascal found it in the deep realities of human existence, insisting that “the true religion must necessarily … give us a reason” for the “astonishing contradictions” in our nature.

Finally, it is worth talking about because some of the boldest paradoxes in the history of human thought and literature were uttered by a Man whom countless people from all over the world revere as a divine Teacher, and the incarnation of Truth, and the voice of eternal Wisdom:

Happy are ye when men shall hate you…

Whosoever will save his life, shall lose it…

I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he die, yet shall he live.

A good definition of paradox is “that which seems impossible or contradictory yet proves, upon further reflection, to contain truth and convey meaning.” Paradox is related to various forms of expression that enrich human life with pleasure, beauty, intricacy, and sublimity. It has close kinship with

• irony, which is saying one thing while communicating another, and which expands into the Socratic tradition of knowing that one does not know;

• allegory, which derives from Greek allo- and -agoria and therefore suggests “speaking the other,” that is, sharing deeper wisdom and higher truths by telling two stories at once;

• antithesis, which is also a pairing of opposites yet accentuates contrast rather than contradiction, and which was absolutely fundamental to Shakespeare’s poetic and dramatic genius;

• and mystery, which excites the imagination through obscurity, uncertainty, and alterity, and which in Christian theology evokes religious realities that transcend human perception or understanding.

Perhaps paradox is not so much akin to these expressive techniques as within them—a mode of thought that resonates at the very heart of the poetic experience, just as Pascal found paradox at the very heart of the human experience. And as literary or cultural paradox leads us to truth by inviting us to contemplate, Pascal’s paradox was a path to discovering what it truly means to be human:

Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Humble yourself, weak reason; be silent, foolish nature; learn that man infinitely transcends man, and learn from your Master your true condition.¹

A few examples will help to give some texture and clarity to all this theory, and for that we will turn to T. S. Eliot. A devoutly Christian gentleman of vast erudition and great respect for things medieval and paradoxical, he is almost certainly the most famous English-language poet of the twentieth century. His best-known work, The Waste Land, is not his best work—that honor goes to the Four Quartets. A thematically rich series of four meditative poems, it draws expressive energy from the four elements of the material world, the mysteries of the immaterial world, and the enduring paradoxes of human life.

Below are examples of paradox that I selected from the Four Quartets; I hope you enjoy them, and try not to read them too quickly…

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.

There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing,
No end to the withering of withered flowers,
To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless.

Midwinter spring is its own season
…
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart’s heat.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

A foundational theme of the Via Mediaevalis newsletter was also a foundational paradox of medieval culture: the glorious things of the immaterial realm are attained through the ordinary things of the material realm, or as I expressed it in a previous post, the flowers of the spirit are rooted in the earth. Another foundational paradox of medieval culture, though not often understood as such, is monasticism. This will be our topic of discussion on Tuesday.

For now I’ll leave you with two other paradoxical realities that powerfully influenced life and thought in the Middle Ages, and which are also found in the rich poetic tapestry of the Four Quartets. The first, which is as essential to Christianity in general as it was to medieval civilization, is the Incarnation. There really is no surpassing a paradox of this magnitude—divinity fuses with humanity, eternity enters into time, God encloses Himself in His creation, and Life itself is made subject to death.

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled.

The second is the Virgin Mary, who was not only a tender, loving Mother but also she who will crush the head of the infernal beast—not only “beautiful as the moon” and “bright as the sun” but also “terrible as an army set in battle array.”² Eliot’s poetry sings of this same paradoxical woman by surrounding the fairest of all flowers with the primal fear that we naturally feel when beholding those who have conquered the grave:

It is not to ring the bell backward
Nor is it an incantation
To summon the spectre of a Rose.

1. See the Pensées, no. 434.

2. This highly evocative poetry, adapted from the Hebrew Bible (Song of Songs 6:10), was applied to Mary in Christian liturgical texts.