¹ See, for example, Brooks, Cleanth, “Paradox and Literature,” the first essay in his important The Well-Wrought Urn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1947)Google Scholar . For a critique of Brooks's approach as “monism” by one of his influential contemporaries see Crane, R. S., “The Critical Monism of Cleanth Brooks,” in Crane, R. S., ed., Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952) 83–107Google Scholar ; for modern reflections on the New Critical project see Hosek, Chaviva and Parker, Patricia, eds., Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985)Google Scholar . The importance of paradoxical language as a general concept in New Criticism also led to renewed attention to the use of paradox as a literary figure during the Renaissance: see Colie, Rosalie L., Paradoxia Epidemica (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966)Google Scholar.

² Eliade, Mircea, “Mephistopheles and the Androgyne, or ‘The Mystery of the Whole’,” in Mephistopheles and the Androgyne: Studies in Religious Myth and Symbol (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1958) 78–124.Google Scholar

³ See Clifford, James and Marcus, George E., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986)Google Scholar ; Marcus, George E. and Fischer, Michael M. J., Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Movement in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986)Google Scholar ; and White, Hayden, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

⁴ Mathematics, offering clear logical contradictions, probably presents the most striking illustrations. For example, the perplexing realization that infinite sets may include one another—musn't the part be smaller than the whole?–bhas led to specialized mathematical theory for infinite sets (for a fuller but still nontechnical account see Falletta, Nicholas L., The Paradoxicon [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983] 61–69)Google Scholar . Set theory itself, moreover, needed to be totally rethought in the wake of Russell's paradox: what is the status of “the set of all sets that do not contain themselves as members” (, Falletta, Paradoxicon, 16–19)?Google Scholar In philosophy of science, the dynamics through which scientific anomalies lead to new knowledge have offered some of the liveliest debates over the last decades, with Kuhn and Popper presenting contrasting positions (see Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [2d ed.; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970]Google Scholar and Popper, Karl R., Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963])Google Scholar . For a review of the debate see Lakatos, Imre and Musgrave, Alan, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ Suzuki, Ramsey, and Smart present different types of paradoxical religious language (see Suzuki, D. T., “Reason and Intuition in Buddhist Philosophy,” in Moore, Charles A., ed., Essays in East-West Philosophy: An Attempt at World Philosophical Synthesis [Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1951] 17–48Google Scholar ; Ramsey, Ian and Smart, Ninian, “Paradox in Religion,” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 33 [1959] 195–232)CrossRefGoogle Scholar . De Cusa's De Docta Ignorantia (in Dolan, John Patrick, ed., Unity and Reform: Selected Writings of Nicholas de Cusa [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1962] 55–98Google Scholar ) presents a classical discussion of religious paradox from Western tradition ; Slater, Robert Lawrence (Paradox and Nirvana: A Study of Religious Ultimates with Special Reference to Burmese Buddhism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951]Google Scholar ) discusses the roles of paradox in Theravada Buddhism. The philosophy of paradox has been expounded by Slater, Howard A. (The Pertinence of Paradox: The Dialectics of Reason-in-Existence [New York: Humanities Press, 1968])Google Scholar ; a useful over-view and bibliography has been provided by Yusa, Michiko, “Paradox and Riddles,” Encyclopedia of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1987)Google Scholar.

⁶ , Brooks, Well-Wrought Urn, 17–18Google Scholar . For paradoxes in religious language Brooks looks to the Gospels: “He who would save his life must lose it”; and “The last shall be first.”

⁷ Ibid., 11.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ O'Flaherty, Wendy Doniger, Siva: The Erotic Ascetic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981Google Scholar ; first published as Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva [London: Oxford University Press, 1973])Google Scholar.

¹⁰ O'Flaherty gives some existential dimensions to the logical and social bases of mythic contradiction stressed by Levi-Strauss (see his Structural Anthropology [New York: Basic Books, 1963])Google Scholar . Eliade's logic of natural symbols in myth is fully enunciated in his Patterns of Comparative Religion (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1958)Google Scholar.

¹¹ , JacobNeusner, Method and Meaning in Ancient Judiasm (1st series; BJS 10; Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1979) 101.Google Scholar

¹² Smith, Jonathan Z., “A Pearl of Great Price and a Cargo of Yams,” HR 16 (1976) 1–16; see esp. p. 2.Google Scholar

¹³ Smith, Jonathan Z., “Earth and Gods,” JR 49 (1969) 103–27.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Biale, David, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (2d ed.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).Google Scholar

¹⁵ Gershom Scholem, “Redemption through Sin” in idem , The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken, 1971Google Scholar ; first published in Hebrew, 1937).

¹⁶ See , Biale, Gershom Scholem, 7–8.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Scholem, Gershom, Sabbatai Zevi: The Mystical Messiah (trans. Werblowsky, R. J. Z.; Bollingen Series 93; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973) 78–86Google Scholar ; Graetz, Heinrich, The Structure of Jewish History and Other Essays (trans, and ed. Schorsch, Ismar; New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1975) 169Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Scholem, Sabbatai Zevi.

¹⁹ , Scholem, “Redemption through Sin,” 88.Google Scholar

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ Ibid., 95.

²² , Biale, Gershom Scholem, 87–88.Google Scholar

²³ Werblowsky, R. J. Zwi, Joseph Karo: Lawyer and Mystic (2d ed.; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1977Google Scholar ; first publ. at Oxford, 1962).

²⁴ Ibid., 245–46.

²⁵ Ibid., 129–30.

²⁶ Neusner, Jacob, Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) 45–166.Google Scholar

²⁷ , Neusner, Method and Meaning, 122–31.Google Scholar

²⁸ , Neusner, Judaism, 173.Google Scholar

²⁹ Ibid., 134.

³⁰ Ibid., 47.

³¹ E.g., Eliade, Mephistopheles and the Androgyne.

³² E.g., O'Flaherty, Siva.

³³ Bynum, Caroline Walker, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982).Google Scholar

³⁴ Katz, Steven T., Mysticism and Religious Traditions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).Google Scholar