The Paradox Topos in Medieval and Early Modern Thought

I found a nice article that gives a brief overview of the use of paradox in a few different literary works from Medieval and Early Modern England. It’s called “The Paradox Topos”, and is written by Lisa Gorton. (Also, apparently my spellcheck doesn’t like the word ‘topos’, so as I write this post, there’s going to be lots of annoying red underlines who are trying to tell me that I’m wrong.)

The paradox that Gorton is looking at particularly is a neoplatonic one, which is founded on ideas of using spatial geometry to imagine spiritual relationships. She is examining specifically a scene in Dante’s Paradiso in which God is posited as being both the center and the perimeter as a circle. Gorton makes a number of interesting observations about this creation. One interesting thought is that rather than the image’s containing merely a philosophical proposition, it also holds emotional connotations. Thus the paradoxical argument is more complicated than merely that of communicating an idea: authors who employ this particular image are making an emotionally charged argument about the nature of God and the world.

I also found an interesting footnote in this article which discusses the fact that Medieval and Early Modern people were much more familiar with rhetorical paradoxes than we are, and as such were possibly more able to accept paradoxes without feeling that they must resolve them. This would seem to explain a lot about Donne’s use of paradoxes in his preaching. One of the things that I have wondered is if Donne would have been incomprehensible in his sermons to the less educated of his audiences. The McCullough chapter that I read mentions that, like those who wrote for the theatre, Donne had to keep in mind in writing his sermons that his audience could be very mixed. I wonder how the division of high/low in his audiences interacts with Donne’s use of paradox.

The idea of paradoxical symbolic geometry is one that is pretty apparent in much of Donne’s poetry. I am thinking particularly of his “Hymn to God, my God, in My Sickness”, in which he, contemplating a sickness which he thinks will ultimately kill him, compares himself to a map, then commenting “What shall my west hurt me? As west and east / In all flat maps (and I am one) are one, / So death doth touch the resurrection.”

I think that perhaps examining Donne’s use of paradox in the context of Early Modern attitudes towards paradox will help me to better explore what Donne is actually doing with all of his paradoxes.