by Nick Gevers
On the day the desperate abbot entered my office in need of an unassailable absurdity, it took me a while to realize that he’d slipped past Mrs. Graham and padded softly up to my desk, so intently were my thoughts fixed on that desert traveler and his equivocal death wish. Peering through my grimy basement window at the cavalcade of feet and paws marching down Bleecker Street, I decided that the guard’s dilemma owed its structure to the classic Liar Paradox, to wit, “What I am saying now is false.” I tell my students that anyone who desires a more concrete version of the Liar Paradox should take an index card and write on the front, “What’s on the other side is true,” then turn the card over and write, “What’s on the other side is false.” So venerable is this contradiction that, when Bertrand Russell devised his notorious antinomy concerning the set of all sets that are not members of themselves, he was happy to frame it as a version of the Liar Paradox—though the problem he identified is rather more profound than that.
“Dr. Kreigar, I presume?”
I rotated my beloved swivel chair. My visitor, a towering figure in a black cassock, introduced himself as Abbot Articulis, the head of “a small and dwindling monastic community that traces its origins to that magnificent heretic, Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus, also known as Tertullian.”
“How dwindling are you?”
The abbot heaved a sigh. He was a handsome man with anthracite eyes and a lantern jaw. “There are only six of us left—me, three monks, and two nuns, maintaining our Adirondack monastery with the help of a small staff.”
“If Tertullian was a heretic, why do you follow him?”
“Because we are heretics, too. So you see, our Order is free of contradiction. Well, not entirely free, for it was Tertullian himself who famously asserted, concerning the Resurrection, ‘Credo quia absurdum,’ ‘I believe because it is absurd,’ though what he actually said was, ‘Certum est, quia impossibile’—‘it is certain, because impossible. ’ Forgive me for interrupting your meditations, Dr. Kreigar. I shall state my business quickly, after which you may return to staring out the window.”
“Call me Donald.”
“Bartholomew.”
“Are you sure you came to the right university?” I asked. “Drop by Fordham, and you’ll be up to your eyebrows in fellow Catholics. Me, I’m a lapsed logical positivist who now believes in the rarefied God of Paul Tillich, which I suspect won’t do you much good.”
“For all I care, you could be a raging atheist,” Articulis said, “as long as you can supply our monastery with what it needs: a robust paradox. Having read your book—”
“Which one?” My personal favorite is The Title of This Book Contains Threee Erors, but I’m better known for Adventures in Self-Reference and A Taxonomy of Nonsense.
“Adventures in Self-Reference. It convinced me you’re the man of the hour. Five potent paradoxes are already in our possession, but unless we acquire a sixth—I know this sounds ridiculous—without the sixth, the world will be laid waste by a voracious metaphysical menace.”
“I see.” Thus far my visitor’s résumé failed to match the profile of the typical East Village lunatic, but that didn’t mean he was a harmless Hudson Valley monk. “Metaphysical menace—fascinating. If it’s a theological conundrum you seek, I’m afraid most of them aren’t particularly confounding. Can God make a stone too heavy for Him to lift? If you think about it, the Omnipotence Paradox—”
“It has an answer,” Articulis interrupted, studying the Escher print beside my bookcase, Ascending and Descending : thirteen hooded figures climbing a rectangular stairway clockwise and getting nowhere, even as another thirteen descended counterclockwise with the same result. “No, God can’t do that, and by the way it doesn’t matter, for He nevertheless remains all-powerful with respect to making and lifting stones. Specify any coherent weight—a hundred trillion tons, a thousand trillion tons—and He will easily fashion the expected object and drop-kick it across the universe. No, Donald, we are not interested in trivial riddles involving God’s presumed limitations.”
Evidently I’d misjudged the man. Articulis knew something about paradoxes, and perhaps about voracious metaphysical menaces as well. “I immediately think of Bertrand Russell’s great and bewildering insight concerning categories,” I noted. “Might that one turn the trick for you?”
“Alas, we’re already running Russell’s Antinomy at full capacity. The fact is, you won’t grasp the nature of our plight without visiting our monastery and observing the Order in person. Might you come on Sunday afternoon? You could stay for dinner, spend the night, and leave the next morning. I believe you’ll get a journal article out of it, perhaps a whole book.”
I gazed inwardly, scanning the dreary parameters of my insipid life. My four-week summer school class, Philosophy 412: Varieties of Infinity, met every afternoon at 3:00 PM, which meant I could take my sweet time returning from Rhinebeck on Monday morning. “Fine. How long is the drive?”
Articulis shrugged and pulled a slip of paper from his cassock. “By train the journey takes slightly more than an hour. I’ve presumed to write out the directions”—he set the paper on my desk, anchoring it with my pewter sculpture of Escher’s Band van Möbius—“and we’re prepared to advance you fifty dollars toward gasoline.”
I waved away his offer. “Keep your money. Academia pays better than Jesus.”
“True, Donald, though our winery does make a small profit. Château Pelagius, have you heard of it?”
I was astonished to learn that Articulis’ heretics were responsible for the best bargain red to be found in any Greenwich Village bodega. “Not only have I heard of it, I’ve got six bottles on my shelf.”
“Driving toward Rhinebeck on Route 9, you may find yourself revisiting Achilles’ fruitless attempt to outrun the tortoise—or do you agree with Charles Peirce that such paradoxes present no difficulty to a mind adequately trained in logic?”
“I’m with Aristotle. Every serious thinker should hone his intellect on Zeno’s whetstone.”
“We’ll expect you by three o’clock,” Articulis said, backing out of the room in a series of steps so short and smooth they constituted a credible demonstration of why the swift-heeled Achilles, tangled in the laws of geometry, would never win the great footrace. “Bring a thirst for merlot and an appetite for perplexity.”
Articulis’s directions were free of ambiguity, and I reached my destination with no difficulty, parking outside the main gate. Secluded in a sleepy valley, nestled beneath a thick mantle of fog, the crumbling Monastery of Tertullian seemed closer in character to a fallen citadel or a haunted castle than a spiritual retreat. The place even had a moat, a stagnant curl of mossy water enfolding the broken walls like a leprous arm. Perhaps this stinking green lagoon was once a tributary of the Hudson, but it had long since been amputated and left to fester on its own.
Crossing the bridge, I could not help imagining that, as in the Gallows Paradox, a guard would now appear and ask me to state my business. But instead I was greeted by a dour, bespectacled, clubfooted dwarf who used a croquet mallet as a cane. He introduced himself as Constantine, “major-domo of the monastery, and minor-domo as well,” then guided me through the portal into the lush and labyrinthine vineyard on which the community’s finances depended.
On all sides the trellises held great skeins of vines, each as dense and convoluted as the Gordian knot. Clusters of purple grapes peeked out from among the leaves, soaking up the sun like the naked lymph nodes of a flayed giant. Here and there a student in a Vassar, Bard, or rock band T-shirt stood poised on a stepladder, picking the harvest with an eye to meeting the fall semester’s tuition bill.
“Don’t let this go to your head, Professor, but I believe God has sent you to us,” Constantine said as we reached the center of the maze, where a wrought-iron bench stood flanked by marble angels. “A plague has come to our community, and Abbot Articulis has taken the burden entirely on himself. Now he has you to share his troubles.”
Uncertain how to respond, I made a paradoxical remark, pointing to a Vassar student and saying, “That elephant is about to charge.”
We continued our journey, always making left turns, the strategy for solving any connected maze except one designed by Escher, until at last we walked free of the vineyard. Before us stood the abbey, a dilapidated two-story affair, stricken with creepers. As Constantine sidled back into the labyrinth, Articulis emerged from the building and descended the stone steps, clutching to his chest an antique, leather-bound volume that I assumed was a Bible. We exchanged innocuous and anodyne pleasantries. His handshake was earthy and vigorous. He flashed the cover of his book—not Holy Writ after all but rather a Confessions of Tertullian—then gestured toward the adjacent chapel, its windows displaying as much empty leading as stained glass, the bell tower faced with exfoliating stucco.
“Upon your arrival, you doubtless noticed that our community occupies an island.” Taking my arm, the abbot led me across the monastery grounds and into the cool air of the chapel. “One thousand years ago, on the blackest of Black Fridays, the world suffered a momentous rupture—a crack in the Teilhardian lithosphere.”
“You don’t say.”
“In the primeval reaches of the Hudson Valley, a basin then populated largely by Algonquins and Mohawks, the divine pipework sprang a leak.”
“My goodness.”
A spiral staircase presented itself. We ventured upward through the bore of the tower, round and round the moldering bell rope, eventually disembarking into an open-air turret dominated by an enormous bronze bell laden with spiderwebs and lacking a clapper. Articulis guided me to the nearest Gothic window. Cirrus clouds hung in the sky like cuneiform characters. Below us spread the malevolent lake, coiled around the monastery like an immense anaconda.
“Left unchecked, the tarn will ooze across the entire lithosphere, menacing the biosphere with poison, pestilence, and pandemonium,” Articulis said, indicating the moat with a rigid finger. “At the moment, only a few denizens of the noosphere, my brave band of ordained monks and nuns, stand in opposition to the rift. Through their religious devotions they keep the tarn at bay.”
“That doesn’t sound very plausible,” I noted, the dust of NYU rationality still clinging to my shoes.
Articulis laughed and said, “‘Certum est, quia impossibile. ’ ” He brushed the cover of the Confessions. “No, I’m being needlessly clever. It is certain because of what I find in these pages. Tertullian not only foresaw the rift, he founded a religious community and charged it with containing the exudate when it appeared fifteen hundred years later. The man was a devotee of riddles. Indeed, it was he who gave Christianity its counterintuitive Trinity, ‘tres Personae, una Substantia.’ He believed that when the fateful year 1700 arrived, his monks and nuns were duty-bound to travel to the New World, make their way to the Adirondacks, build a monastery on the site of the fault, and begin to cultivate the Five Primal Paradoxes. If they held these contradictions in their minds night and day, decade after decade, century after century, then the leak would never grow so copious as to threaten the planet.”
I’d say one thing for the discourse available in Hudson Valley monasteries—it effortlessly eclipsed the polysyllabic chatter that occurred at NYU Philosophy Department meetings.
“Did Tertullian specify the five problems?” I asked, instantly receiving the abbot’s nod. “Let me guess. I’ll bet the Liar Paradox made the cut.”
“Not only did our founder mandate that one, he anticipated all the flourishes Bertrand Russell would add many years later. The Confessions also prescribes the Ruby Paradox, the Nonsense Paradox, the Lawyer Paradox, and the Sorites Paradox.”
“All good choices.”
“Every one is Greek in origin, a fact that gave Tertullian pause—‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ he once remarked—but for the sake of the greater good he set aside his anti-pagan prejudices. Through fifty generations, our Order has pondered these fundamental puzzles. Hour by hour, minute by minute, heartbeat by heartbeat, we have eaten the paradox, drunk the paradox, breathed it, smelled it, sweated it, voided it, dreamt it.”
“A recipe for lunacy, I’d say.”
Articulis hummed in corroboration. “No one understood better than Tertullian that this great commission would blur the distinction between a monastery and a madhouse. And yet the Order cleaved to its task, inspired by our founder’s revelation that, come the dawn of the third millennium, the fault would finally begin to heal. By the year 2015, or 2020, or perhaps 2025—Tertullian was never clear on this point—it would be as if the crack had never occurred.”
“So you’ve beaten the Devil?” I asked, gazing through the Gothic window. A flock of vultures wheeled above the tarn in apparent prelude to feasting on the corpse of the Teilhardian biosphere.
“Not quite,” Articulis said. “For it happens that in the final days of our project Lucifer has acquired an ally—five allies, actually, one for each paradox.”
“Allies?”
“They are difficult to describe, but happily I needn’t try, as the quintet is available for your inspection. With characteristic prescience, Tertullian foretold their advent. In the Confessions he called them cacodaemons.”
It occurred to me that, to enjoy a conversation of this caliber, a person would normally have to organize a seminar among the dozen most accomplished schizophrenics in the five boroughs. “Are they in fact from Hell?”
“Why would you ask such a question, Donald? You don’t even believe in Hell.”
“True—but you do.”
“Not really, no. Concerning the source of the cacos, Tertullian is most explicit. He calls them the children of Vorg—Vorg being their creator-god, an elusive deity inhabiting an inaccessible netherworld on another plane of reality. The Confessions predicted that when the five cacos spewed forth from the fault, they would arrive singing hymns to Vorg.”
I leaned through the window. A blast of hot summer air pulsed against my brow and cheeks. The tarn’s iniquity ascended to my nostrils in spiraling filaments of stench. I gagged and jerked back inside.
“A crack in the lithosphere,” I muttered. “You know, Bartholomew, I almost believe you.”
“Will you help us weld the fractured world whole?”
“What I’m about to say is true,” I told the abbot. “What I just said is false.”
As the sun began its paradoxical descent, being a stationary object that manifestly moved, Articulis took me to a classroom in the basement of the abbey. Covered head to toe in a threadbare frock, his face obscured by the cowl, a runty monk sat slumped in a maimed leather chair, gouts of cotton stuffing streaming from its wounds. His attention was locked on a wall- mounted chalkboard displaying two sentences rendered in capital letters.
LINE 1: THE SENTENCE WRITTEN ON LINE 1 IS NONSENSE.
LINE 2: THE SENTENCE WRITTEN ON LINE 1 IS NONSENSE.
Articulis tapped the monk on the shoulder. “Brother Francis, I would like you to meet a visitor, Dr. Donald Kreigar. He has come to help us seal the tarn.”
Brother Francis rose but, instead of facing me, remained fixed on Line 1 and Line 2.
“Ah, the infamous Nonsense Paradox,” I said, attempting to strike up a conversation. “In assailing the self-referentiality of Line 1, the author of Line 2 has offered a cogent and credible definition of nonsense—and yet Line 2 is the very sentence it so justly criticizes.”
Francis said nothing.
“Is he under a vow of silence?” I asked.
“A pledge of paradox,” Articulis corrected me. “Speaking would compromise his ability to nurture the contradiction.” The abbot stepped forward, interposing himself between the monk and his conundrum. “Dr. Kreigar would like to see your caco.”
Without saying a word, Francis slid back his cowl. His face, a pale, wizened, bulbous- nosed affair, seemed almost attractive compared with the slimy, legless, roach-brown vermin attached to his left temple. In shape the parasite
suggested a horseshoe crab, in size it evoked a spatula, and in spirit it echoed a cancerous tumor. My immediate impulse was to locate a pair of canvas gloves, pull the thing off the monk, and mash it beneath my shoe—but when I proposed this remedy to Articulis, he countered with Tertullian.
“The Confessions claims that a cacodaemon cannot be forcibly extracted without killing its host. We have no reason to doubt this assertion. Were Brother Francis to die, not only would the Order lose a beloved child of God, the Nonsense Paradox would lose its strongest avatar on Earth. And yet, as things stand, Francis will soon be unable to serve the lithosphere, for the caco is sapping his strength and impeding his powers of concentration.”
“If I were ever colonized by one of these fiends,” I told Articulis, “my powers of concentration would be the least of the casualties. I would also lose my ability to control my bowels, retain my breakfast, and sustain my reason.”
Among the strangest of the caco’s aspects was the noises it made, a series of staccato gasps testifying to the satisfaction it took in absorbing the Nonsense Paradox, every seventh exhalation accompanied by a sound that fell on my astonished ears as “Vorg.”
“It seems to be praising its god,” I said.
“Exactly,” Articulis said. “Vorg, Vorg, Vorg—just as Tertullian foresaw.”
“This plague must be combated,” I said.
“Combated, exactly—with all our philosophical resources. We don’t know whether the cacos are immortal, or what their weaknesses might be. We know only that they feed on paradox the way a butterfly feeds on nectar or a tick on blood. Last week I hit upon a strategy—tentative, untested, but a strategy all the same. I shall give you the details presently, but first you must witness the full scope of the infestation.”