Grace
I believe that it is the fate of the Occident to bring the critically rational, wanting to understand on the one hand and the mystically irrational, seeking the redeeming experience of unity on the other hand into connection with each other again and again. Both attitudes will always dwell in the soul of the human being, and the one will always already carry the other as the germ of its opposite. This creates a kind of dialectical process of which we do not know where it will lead. I believe that as Westerners we must entrust ourselves to this process and recognise the pair of opposites as complementary. By allowing the tension of opposites to exist, we must also acknowledge that in any path of knowledge or salvation, we depend on factors beyond our control, which religious language has always called grace.
Wolfgang Pauli 1954
