The Paradoxes of the Highest Science

About this book

Éliphas Lévi has a taste for ideas that seem to contradict themselves. In The Paradoxes of the Highest Science he makes the difficulty part of the lesson, asking what a reader might discover by holding opposing principles together.

The essays range through faith, magic, reason and spiritual authority. Lévi writes from within nineteenth-century occult philosophy, where provocative language was often used to unsettle inherited religious assumptions. His arguments do not resolve into a single manual of practice. Their energy comes from the repeated challenge to examine a familiar certainty until its opposite begins to seem intelligible.