ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the paradox of meaning as it is displayed in the intellectual/scientific and political values-spheres. Western meaning has a peculiar, overarching characteristic for Max Weber: economic, mundane activities, which were not a means to salvation in any other religion, were given meaning in Protestantism and became in fact the path to grace; and reason/intellectual life, which had always been one of the roads to religious meaning, became itself a path that led away from the meaning of death and life. Puritan certitude and the Dionysian intoxication are linked together in terms of the emotional state of religious meaning. If the result is an understanding of paradox as 'meaning within meaninglessness' it should be remembered that this expression and concept are not something externally imposed on the texts but are how Weber himself, quite explicitly in fact that sets up his account of the value-spheres.
