A Paradox

So, in my Philosophy of Religion class Friday, we were talking about the importance of philosophy, and I got started thinking about how some things can be significant and insignificant at the same time. Chesterton (in Orthodoxy) talks about Christian paradoxes, and this is similar to some things he mentions.

Some examples of the paradox: It's important to think about things in religion and have coherent systems of thought. If we're going to believe something, we need to think about it somehow so that we can keep it real on all levels (love God with our minds, as Karyn was saying). And the positions we take on intellectual issues make a difference; some fights about theory are really worth fighting. Philosophy matters. But then, what's a lifetime's abstract study of God worth in comparison with one act of sacrificial love to another done for God's sake? What does philosophy matter in comparison with practical obedience to God?

Or another one, close to home for me: What's the good of spending so much time and energy making a line of poetry work? Why agonize over whether this alliteration is too much or how to make this image consistent, when you could be doing something of more impact? Maybe five or ten people are ever going to read the poem, and maybe a couple of those will get something out of it. It's a lot of work for something insignificant. But then it is significant too. It's hard to find something more significant than communicating a complex truth beautifully with another person.

Or struggling to be better: Our practical moral victories are lame and insufficient, but we break our hearts over them anyway, and it's right that we do.

Or even ourselves: We're ridiculous little people, but we're also the brilliantly significant objects of God's love.

This last one leads to something that might help to understand the paradox: We're valueless compared to God, but we're deeply valuable in relation to God. So maybe the issue is to relate things instead of just comparing them. By comparison, any human act can be insignificant, but by relation, any human act can be significant.

But anyway, seeing the paradox of doing things that are both significant and insignificant gives an interesting (and, I think, healthy) attitude. Because of the significance of minute things, we can do what we do passionately. Because of the insignificance, we can laugh at ourselves and eschew pride. I think we can work with awareness that what we're doing can be a life-and-death matter and a joke at the same time, and quite genuinely and undilutedly each.