The pursuit of integrated life leads us inevitably to the existential and intellectual precipice of unknowing. The word’s troubles make it so. The precipice is the pinnacle of a temple. We imagine the temple is of God’s making, but the weight and significance of our choices makes it largely our own. The first decision that the traumas of life requires of the reflective theologian is to stand at the precipice of human making divested of dogma. This surrender to deconstruction enables us to take our place there.
Like Jesus of Nazareth, who came in the midst of his spiritual wilderness to the temple made with hands, we are tempted to fling ourselves dramatically from the pinnacle in a show of faith which will prove the greatness of our theological divestment; but there remains a specific affirmation – like Jesus, we first think angels will catch us. But also like Jesus, we must say “no” to the temptation toward public melodrama; like Jesus we must speak truth to lie. Then we may – indeed we must – step forward into “an unknown country.”
Earlier I thought that it would be an act of faith that would enable this step. But I have changed my mind. In this condition beyond doubt and without specific affirmation, we step in despair and hope from the temple of our own making. What lies before us is what St. John of the Cross called, “the cloud of unknowing,” an abyss.
This is what we theologians have in common, we stand together in the necessity of stepping forward “in fear and in trembling,” despair and hope, into unknown possibilities, each of which reflects a different posture before the deconstruction of our unknowing. It is one cloud of unknowing, but there are differences in our “postures” before the unknown.
Looking again to Kierkegaard, we see him standing with hope, that is, positive expectation, though still not knowing what or precisely whom to expect. In him there is despair unto hope. Looking now to Nietzsche, the other posture is “negative hope,” because he does not hope there is someone to catch him, but rather he hopes for meaning despite that absence. So in Nietzsche also there is despair and hope. Their responses to the despairing human existential condition are two sides of the same coin: a pregnant agnosticism. The first side is unknowing hope in a positive possibility, and the second is unknowing hope in a negative possibility. But the unknowing is the same for both: an abyss.
The abyss itself cannot be described, and this for obvious reasons. From the temple, we know, we see our control – kingdoms of this world are the powers of our own rule and making – and here again the likeness to Jesus is keen . He sees that those bastions of power are ephemeral and fleeting, illusions of an insecure self. So the abyss is not the profound emptiness of a literally unfathomable chasm, nor the profound psychological darkness of anfechtung; rather, it is the nothing that is something because someone stands before it in hope. Our first glimpse of it is by looking not to the powers of this world, but beyond them. (“The kingdom the power and the glory” look as nothing.)
Ironically looking beyond them locates the cloud within. When we ponder the immensity of the universe and then ask the questions: why “now”? and why “here”? We call infinitude into our conscious presence. It takes our breath away, this existential echo of the literally unfathomable reality of space, time and relativity. Our reflexive response is ontological shock. This is the real source of our final unknowing before the despair expressed as hopeful step forward. The abyss, then, is the nothing perceived by our anxiety itself – the anxiety of our unknowing – which becomes something when we are honest enough with ourselves to perceive it.
Alas! To take the step at all is an assertion of our self-hood, but in receptive mode, for in the step we leap into the possibility of our undoing, and the hope of our rebuilding. The abyss may be seen, therefore, not as chasm, but as the very path to the possibility for which we hope. Hope turns out, by necessity, to be greater than faith for faith’s sake. Entering with hope instead of faith releases infinite possibilities for faith itself, whereas entering with faith limits hope (indeed, it is not to enter at all). Rather, this is a return to knowing and idolatry, because it is knowing before its time. We may be tempted to say of the abyss “this is Thou,” whether we refer to the divine or the merely ultimate; but “neither is this thou.” How tragically limited is faith when we presume to know what we can only know through stepping forward with hope into unknowing. The cloud and the abyss are the one way before us. Let us enter with hope! When we do, the possibilities for faith are infinite.
"...Neither is this Thou" (- C. Williams) 