Principle that divine omnipotence does not extend to logical contradictions

The Principle that divine omnipotence does not extend to logical contradictions is the limiting claim in a comic theological dispute: divine power may be infinite without making contradictions possible. The argument begins amid rival positions on the reality and size of a stranger’s nose, but its central question is whether omnipotence encompasses whatever can be asserted or only what is logically possible. The controversy turns the nose into a vehicle for an abstract debate, then leaves that object behind as the disputants move on to wider questions about divine attributes.

The Dispute Over Omnipotence

The Nosarians assert that God’s power is infinite and that he can do anything. The Anti-nosarians answer with a qualification: God can do nothing that implies contradictions. Their disagreement is not simply over the scale of divine power. It concerns what “anything” can coherently mean. On the Anti-nosarians’ account, a contradiction does not become an achievable task merely because it is described as one.

The argument gives the question a deliberately plain test. The Popish doctors state that God cannot make two and two five; their opponents call that claim false. The exchange exposes the pressure point directly: one side treats the denial of such an impossibility as a necessary boundary, while the other resists restricting infinite power in that way. The principle therefore appears not as a detached maxim but as a disputed rule of reasoning, contested by speakers who disagree about whether logical impossibility limits what divine omnipotence can do.

The Nose as a Test Case

The nose controversy gives the theological dispute its extravagant example. Doctors who defend the reality of the nose maintain that infinite power extends without qualification. The Lutherans counter that it extends only to possible things. Their contrast makes the nose a test of the difference between unlimited power and the claim that even an impossibility must be possible for God.

The Popish doctors declare that God could make a nose as large as the steeple of Strasburg. The surrounding argument specifies the scale: the steeple is described as the biggest and tallest church steeple in the world, and the proposed nose is measured at 575 geometrical feet. The Anti-nosarians doubt that a nose of that length could be worn by a middle-sized man; the Popish doctors swear that it could, while the Lutherans say it could not. This is not quite the same question as whether God can make two and two five. Rather, the immense nose tests the boundary between a startling but imaginable object and an alleged impossibility, while the arithmetic example states the logical limit more starkly.

From Bodily Possibility to Theology

The dispute over whether such a nose could be worn carries the speakers beyond the body and into the scope of divine power. Its consequence is a broader controversy over the moral and natural attributes of God. The narrative makes the transition itself part of the joke: a fantastical disagreement over the proportions of a nose becomes a route into theological speculation.

That route leads the disputants to Thomas Aquinas and, through him, to the devil. By then, the stranger’s nose is no longer the issue under discussion. It has served as a “frigate” that launches the speakers into deeper waters, a concrete and absurd object providing passage to an abstract argument. The principle’s force in the episode lies both in its proposition—that contradictions do not fall within omnipotence—and in the unstable, comic way the book stages the attempt to define the limits of divine power.