The Spiral Henceforward Works Inward

I am reading Chesterton's Everlasting Man along with a discussion group and here are some quotes from The God in the Cave and a few of my comments:

"A mass of legend and literature, which increases and will never end, has repeated and rung the changes on that single paradox; that the hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle. Upon this paradox, we might almost say upon this jest, all the literature of our faith is founded. "

"It is at least like a jest in this, that it is something which the scientific critic cannot see. He laboriously explains the difficulty which we have always defiantly and almost derisively exaggerated; and mildly condemns as improbable something that we have almost madly exalted as incredible; as something that would be much too good to be true, except that it is true. "

"But it is true in a sense that God who had been only a circumference was seen as a centre; and a centre is infinitely small. It is true that the spiritual spiral henceforward works inwards instead of outwards, and in that sense is centripetal and not centrifugal"

"... the practical difficulty (of celebrating the infant Jesus without including his mother) is also a parable. You cannot chip away the statue of a mother from all round that of a new-born child. You can not suspend the new-born child in mid-air; indeed you cannot really have a statue of a new-born child at all. Similarly, you cannot suspend the idea of a new-born child in the void or think of him without thinking of his mother."

I think I could write much more on this chapter, which seems to be the "centre as well as circumference" of the book.

I notice that Chesterton seems to us two kinds of paradoxes, much as our Master did. One kind is hyperbolic -- trying to cast light on truth indirectly by means of a sparkling contradiction. Jesus said it is better to pluck out your eye than to keep it in Gehenna. In an earlier chapter, Chesterton says something about the joking and word plays of the Egyptian hieroglyphics that does not seem (to me) literally true, but it makes a point about the creativity of language in refining, as well as representing, thought processes.

The other kind of paradox seems more simply literal. "Blessed are the poor.." No one would think this is conventional wisdom, but it is simply, practically true in many ways. It is a hidden truth. Chesterton's points about the hands that had made the sun and stars being too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle, and about the modern expert casting mild doubts upon the reality of something that has been "madly exalted as incredible", seem to fit in this category.

I'll have to keep looking as we keep going through the book and seeing if these categories are helpful in looking at Chesterton's paradoxes.

Edited to Add: I went to Studeo to see what Love2LearnMom had put down for her list of thinking blogs. Through the list , I found her family's CINBlog and found this post Theology of Littleness, where Love2LearnMom had earlier pasted practically the identical quotes that I just put in this post. My duplication was inadvertent, though I suppose it's not surprising that the same sparkling contrasts jumped out at both of us. She has put some quotes of Ratzinger's alongside Chesterton's so it is interesting reading.