The Paradox: A Thinker’s Passion

(Moonlit Snow found here)

“One must not think slightingly of the paradoxical…for the paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity.”

~Søren Kierkegaard

“The fundamental and paradigmatic paradox in [Christian] thought is, of course, the Incarnation. In theological terms, the ‘hypostatic union.’ Jesus of Nazareth is God made man…fully divine and fully human, true God and true man. Not partly divine and partly human, like some Greek demigod. He is a divine Person who possesses both a divine and a human nature. Clearly, this is a paradox, a tension: how can one person be both things? But to receive the truth of Who and What He is, we must allow these seemingly opposed truths to tug at one another. We must allow the tension to remain.”

~Paul Scalia

“What are those sorrowful and joyful mysteries of human life, mutually contradictory yet together resultant in others that are glorious? Turn to that master passion that underlies these mysteries – the passion that is called love – and see if there be anything more inexplicable than such an explanation. What is this passion, then, that turns joy to sorrow and sorrow to joy – this motive that drives a man to lose his life that he may save it, that turns bitter to sweet and makes the cross but a light yoke after all, that causes him to find his centre outside his own circle, and to please himself best by depriving himself of pleasure? What is that power that so often fills us with delights before we have begun to labour, and rewards our labour with the darkness of dereliction?”

~Robert Hugh Benson