In an earlier post, I mentioned that Pierre Séguier owned the French collection (Paris) of the Oxford-Paris-Londres Bible. Pierre Séguier was one of a handful of individuals who ruled France in the seventeenth century. He purchased the Paris selection of the Bible moralisée. However, he also conducted the trial of Nicolas Fouquet, France’s Superintendant of Finances (1653-1661). (See RELATED ARTICLES.)
In the same post, I described our four Bibles as paradox literature. That paragraph is no longer part of my post. I may have erased it mistakenly or it may have been removed. It could wait. Paradox literature is defined as follows:
In literature, the paradox is an anomalous juxtaposition of incongruous ideas for the sake of striking exposition or unexpected insight. It functions as a method of literary composition and analysis that involves examining apparently contradictory statements and drawing conclusions either to reconcile them or to explain their presence.
(See Paradox in literature, Wikipedia) [1]
Yes, there is a paradox. God used an instrument that man would create: the compass. The artists who illuminated the Creation depicted tools that would make sense to their contemporaries, not to mention the artists themselves. In fact, these examples showed that man was creative. God Himself had to be recognizable. The four depictions of God we have seen could be understood by the humblest among us. Northrop Frye writes that:
Present things are related to past things in such a way that cognition becomes the same thing as re-cognition, awareness that a present effect is a past cause in another form.
Northrop Frye [2]
So, we have created myths, stories (mythoi) of causality.
RELATED ARTICLES
- Vaux-le Vicomte: Fouquet’s Rise and Fall (20 August 2013)
- Bibles mémorisées: 13th-century France (27 February 2021)
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[1] Rescher, Nicholas. Paradoxes:Their Roots, Range, and Resolution. Open Court: Chicago, 2001.
[2] Northrop Frye, Creation and Recreation (University of Toronto Press, 1980), p. 59.
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© Micheline Walker
1st March 2021
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