Paradoxes of Catholicism is a Catholic studies text by Robert Hugh Benson The mysteries of the Catholic Church, a materialistic scientist once announced to an astonished world, are child's play compared with the mysteries of nature. He was completely wrong, of course, yet there was every excuse for his mistake. For, as he himself tells us in effect, he found everywhere in that created nature which he knew so well, anomaly piled on anomaly and paradox on paradox, and he knew no more of theology than its simpler and more explicit statements.

We can be certain therefore--we who understand that the mysteries of nature are, after all, within the limited circle of created life, while the mysteries of grace run up into the supreme Mystery of the eternal and uncreated Life of God--we can be certain that, if nature is mysterious and paradoxical, grace will be incalculably more mysterious. For every paradox in the world of matter, in whose environment our bodies are confined, we shall find a hundred in that atmosphere of spirit in which our spirits breathe and move--those spirits of ours which, themselves, paradoxically enough, are forced to energize under material limitations.