AGNOSIS: THEOLOGY IN THE VOID

Also by George Pattison

ART, MODERNITY AND FAITH

KIERKEGAARD ON ART AND COMMUNICATION (editor)

KIERKEGAARD: THE AESTHETIC AND THE RELIGIOUS

Agnosis: Theology in
the Void

George Pattison
Dean of Chapel
King's College
Cambridge
 First published in Great Britain 1996 by
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Pattison, George, 1950-
Agnosis : theology in the void / George Pattison.
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I. Nonbeing—Religious aspects—Christianity. 2. Theology,
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IAGO I am not what I am.
Shakespeare, Othello, I.I.

FOOL Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle?

LEAR Why no, boy; nothing can be made out of nothing.
Shakespeare, King Lear, 1.4.

It appeared to a man as in a dream - it was a waking dream -

that he became pregnant with Nothing like a woman with child,
and in that Nothing God was born, He was the fruit of nothing.
Meister Eckhart (tr. Walshe), Sermon Nineteen.
 Contents
Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1

1 The Augustinian Inheritance 7

2 Nothingness and the Return of Metaphysics 41

3 The Experience of the Void 81

4 Nothingness and the Place of Religious

Experience - An Asian View 108

5 Agnosis: Thinking God in the Void 138

Notes 170

Bibliography 188

Index 192
 Acknowledgements
A work such as this is the product, for good or ill, of insights and
arguments gleaned from many different sources - more, probably,
than I am myself able to recognize. I do, however, acknowledge a
particular debt to colleagues and friends who have read and com-
mented on sections of this book at various stages in its production
or discussed some of the ideas in it with me, especially Pippa Berry,
David Ford, Wolfram Kinzig, Irena Makarushka, Steve Shakespeare,
Shudo Tsukiyama and Yasugi Yamaguchi. Many of the thoughts on
Nietzsche and Kierkegaard came into focus through the Nietzsche
and Kierkegaard reading groups in which I participated between
1993 and 1995 and I would like to thank the members of those
groups. I am also particularly grateful to the Provost and Fellows of
King's College for permitting me to take a period of leave during
the early stages of work on this project. Many of the ideas pre-
sented here have been discussed over the years with my good friend
Ulrich Fentzloff and I am specifically indebted to him for introduc-
ing me to Heidegger's Beitriige zur Philosophie and for the days spent
reading in his guest room.
The challenge of Don Cupitt's work was a major motive in set-
ting to work on this project, which, though in one respect intended
as a critique of elements in his writing, is also offered as an ac-
knowledgement of his courage in expanding the boundaries of theo-
logical thinking in Britain.
My family have had to endure long hours of distractedness, as
I stared into the abyss of agnosis. Sorry - but thank you Hilary,
Charlotte, Neil and Beth.
 Introduction
In calling for a transformation of religious belief that would make
it accessible to inhabitants of the postmodern world, the English
philosopher of religion Don Cupitt, in his 1982 book The World to
Come, suggested that such a transformation would involve looking
'long enough into the Void to feel it turn our bones to water'. Cupitt
described such a willed endurance of the Void in terms that recall
the language of mysticism, stating that it requires of us an 'inner
transformation' and 'a discipline of selflessness' until the Void itself
is transformed into 'the Ineffable', arousing '(non-cognitive) wor-
ship'.1 Yet, if this seems to imply an understanding of the contem-
porary experience of the void as corresponding in some way to the
moment of purgation or to 'the dark night of the soul' that various
forms of ascetical theology have often described, Cupitt's concep-
tion of the void is distinctively modern. For, as he understands it,
the void is not simply some inner state, a subjective feeling of aban-
donment or dereliction. No: 'the Void' is a characterization of the
religious situation of our time; it is that into which all the inherited
concepts and categories, icons and images of God have collapsed.
It is the situation left by that 'death of God' proclaimed by the
madman of Nietzsche's parable, a death that not only shakes the
foundations of religious constructions of reality but also undermines
all systems of social order, ethical existence and metaphysical specu-
lation. In a world that is in this radical sense Godless no 'reality'
can be taken for granted, no all-embracing framework holds to-
gether the diverse realms of science and culture, no ultimate refer-
ent secures the ever-shifting helix of symbolic systems. The world
is only what we make it, only how we represent it, only a function
of language.
The adepts of such a Void can no longer cohabit with the reas-
suring doctrines of the theistic belief that provided mystics and
knights of faith of previous ages with a stabilizing frame of refer-
ence for their wilder ventures of godly desire. For this Void is itself
inseparable from the death of God and the end of theism. Yet,
Cupitt maintains, some form of religion is possible on the far side

1
2 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

of the Void, a form that (in his writings at least) has become known
as 'non-realism', that is, a form of belief that no longer claims the
sanction of reality for its beliefs and practices. Such belief is a self-
consciously 'merely' human invention, a way of speaking.
However, such 'Hyperborean faith' (as Cupitt called it in The
World to Come) is inseparable from the experience of the void itself.
But can that experience be turned into a secure 'result' on which a
future theology can safely build its postpostmodern structure? Won't
a truly post-realist faith find itself returning ever again to the void
that is its birth-place, whence alone it can be born and re-born,
again and again?
We have been here before. From the 'theology of the death of
God' of the 1960s, through Tillich's confrontation with the manifes-
tation of non-being in existentialist meaninglessness, through Karl
Barth's 1921 portrayal of a humanist world laid waste, through
Nietzsche himself and back, past Kierkegaard, to Hegel (at least):
the encounter with nothingness has been a recurrent motif of mod-
ern religious thought. Nor is it any wonder that many in the West
have found themselves attracted to Buddhism as a form of religion
in which that encounter appears to have been successfully internal-
ized. Indeed, Cupitt himself has referred to his own style of Chris-
tianity as 'Christian Buddhism'.
It is not only religious thought that has succumbed to the lure of
the abyss, however. Secular culture has been - and continues to be
- highly productive of verbal and visual evocations of the void.
'There's no lack of void,' as Samuel Beckett's tramp Estragon said
to his associate Vladimir. Painting, music, literature and film can all
provide examples enough. The void is not just a matter of modern
religious experience: it is integral to the modern experience as such.
Of course, there is a considerable body of opinion that maintains
that all this concern with the void is somewhat passe', being too
redolent of postwar depression and existentialist despair. Writing
in 1966 Robert Martin Adams could claim that 'Nothing is closer to
the supreme commonplace of our commonplace age than its preoc-
cupation with Nothing.'2 Today, however (or so the story goes),
we've left all that behind. Cupitt himself declares that 'the mourning
is over':3 the death of God is no longer an occasion for anxiety, grief
or despair but the beginning of a 'joyful wisdom'. Such a wisdom
indulges itself in the creation of new values and new symbols with-
out the kind of guilt or melancholy that characterized the first wave
of post-theistic thinkers such as Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard.
 Introduction 3

A truly postmodern theology will have left such modernist angst

behind.
However, although it seems to come naturally to identify talk of
nothingness or the void with the shadow-side of life (as Iris Murdoch
seems to do in her Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals4), this book is
certainly not an argument for pessimism. Neither is it simply a
return to questions that have fallen by the wayside of intellectual
progress. If the self-styled postmodern world order is no longer
angst-ridden in the manner of existentialism, questions concerning
the death of God and the end of metaphysics continue to preoccupy
many labourers in the vineyards of the humanities. The enterprise
of deconstruction, so influential in the 1980s and early 1990s, can
itself be seen as a further extension of the task of thinking through
just what those events imply. Within the narrower field of theology
and religious studies recent books as diverse as Jean-Luc Marion's
God Without Being and Thomas Altizer's The Genesis of God5 evince
a concern to think theologically in the situation of the void, even if
the approaches taken diverge considerably from that of the present
study.
The question as to what it is to think of God in the situation of
the modern/postmodern void is a question that the contemporary
religious situation presses upon us. But how can we orientate our-
selves in the face of such a question? Doesn't it immediately reduce
us to a silence as blank as a Rothko painting? What is there to say
that is not a falsification of the matter in hand? The moment we
begin to speak or to write aren't we thereby imposing an order, a
structure, a meaning on what in itself is, simply, nothing? Surely it
is still true that, as Lear said to his fool, 'Nothing can be made out
of nothing'?
And yet - as has already been indicated - the theme of nothing-
ness or of the void is not new to modern religious thought. Legiti-
mate or not, much has already been said. Moreover, because, in the
very formulation of the question, we identify ourselves as partici-
pants in that talk, one way of beginning is to see how the question
has been constituted in the many conversations in which it has
come to expression.
The enquiry therefore takes the shape of a hermeneutical opera-
tion, a venture in interpreting a sequence of texts and counter-texts,
and, thereby, also a historical investigation. But what texts? And
what is the nature of the historical sequence that comes into view
through them?
4 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

These questions suggest a number of comments that (I hope) will

explain much about what follows and that underline the modesty
of the position being advanced.
Firstly, although thought is necessarily historical, its history is
not subject to any law of necessary progress. This is worth saying,
because even though there would be few takers today for a crude
kind of Hegelianism that would see the history of ideas as an un-
broken chain of dialectically necessary stages progressing towards
a clear and determinate goal, there is a residual Hegelianism in
much humanistic thinking that shows itself in a number of ways.
One example of this is a tendency to treat certain thinkers or
movements as having definitively resolved this or that question of
philosophy in such a way that we are obligated to accept their
conclusions in formulating our own beginnings. To take a specific
instance to which considerable attention will be devoted towards
the end of this study: there are many now writing who seem to take
a particular post-structuralist understanding of the relationship
between language and reality as an incontestable datum for all
further reflection on the matter. To speak personally, however, I am
more and more persuaded that although Derrida offers valuable
lessons in slow and circumspect reading, Derrida is not a stage on
the road towards absolute knowledge such that his methods and
assumptions must be accepted without further thought or question.
The shape of any study must be shaped by the question at issue (a
comment that, of course, reflects a certain decision already taken
about the relationship between text and hors-texte), not by precon-
ceptions as to 'what the age requires'. There cannot be only one
way of exploring the key questions of religious existence. Some
may find one way useful - deconstruction perhaps - others won't.
There is no compulsion and no necessity. Alternative routes exist.
It follows from this that, although in one sense the subject itself
leads the enquiry, the textualization of the subject will be intrinsi-
cally variable and that there will be an inevitably individual ele-
ment in the choice of texts used to get at the subject, reflecting the
perspective, situation and experience of the writer. Indeed, as may
become apparent, it is perhaps true of all religious writing that the
story it tells about the history of religious ideas will be profoundly
influenced by the writer's own story. At the same time it is not
implausible that individual stories develop out of and in turn influ-
ence collective stories in important ways. Thus, the discussion in
Chapter 4 of the Kyoto school reflects my own long-term interest in
 Introduction 5

and debt to Japanese Buddhism. But this is not to say that Agnosis
is merely a heavily coded autobiography, for (to stay with this
particular instance) the world-historical encounter between Europe
and East Asia is one that has massive implications at every level for
the shape of human existence in the twenty-first century. In terms
of autobiographical influences, it may be added that the biggest
single such influence in the present work is my own repeated real-
ization of my inability to live by the faith I profess. But that too - the
record suggests - is no unique experience. On the contrary, it is one
with which all those who seek to live Christian lives and to under-
stand Christian thought must come to terms.
It is always possible, of course, that other works and other writ-
ers have important things to say on nothingness. One such is Meister
Eckhart. Such omissions must be acknowledged - but, precisely
because I am not attempting a Hegelian world-history of nothing-
ness, they do not require apology, since I am aiming neither to
produce an exhaustive survey of all relevant material nor to achieve
any kind of finality.
A separate, methodological comment may also be of some use at
this point. A number of discussions of nothingness have begun by
attempting to offer a clear definition of the concept itself. An exam-
ple of this is Paul Tillich's development of the distinction between
me on and ouk on as the distinction between a relative kind of non-
being that can come into some sort of dialectical relation to being
and an absolute kind of non-being that is sheer nothingness. How-
ever, such attempts to stabilize usage have been, at best, disap-
pointing in terms of results. The key Greek terms to einai, he ousia
and to on have between them been variously translated as being,
reality, substance, essence and existence and both the original terms
and their translations have been variously assimilated to each other
or distinguished from each other. Already in the classical world
there was, as Christopher Stead has put it in his study Divine Sub-
stance, 'extraordinary chaos and incongruity' amongst the various
senses of ousia and correlative terms.6 Nor have matters improved
since - and if that is the case with 'being' how much more are the
difficulties going to be compounded when it comes to the negative
terms! In any case, even if a single author can achieve consistency
within the covers of a single book, there is little to suggest that one
person's usage is going to command the kind of consensus that
would be a chief aim of any such exercise. A definition that cannot
take its place in the world of conventional usage is of very limited
6 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

value. More often the only result is to torture language into impos-
sible and unsustainable positions.7
Thus, although terminological exactitude is an ideal not to be
scorned and although (in another respect) there is much that is
appealing in the kind of profound reflection on 'basic words' prac-
tised by a Heidegger, I have chosen to paint with a broader brush
and to allow the sense of such terms as void, non-being and noth-
ingness to emerge from their place in the larger picture. Once again
it is a matter of enabling the question to emerge with just enough
distinctness as to point us towards an appropriate response.
 The Augustinian
Inheritance
Despite the contemporary repudiation of Augustinianism, Augus-
tine remains a defining thinker for Western Christianity and for
Western thought in many fields.1 For in Augustine we can see the
drawing together of the manifold threads of Platonizing Christian-
ity and thus an expression of what theology, when it is at its most
metaphysical, might have to say. Moreover, with regard to the very
specific area of questioning to be pursued in what follows, Augus-
tine's formulation of the issues remained determinative even for
those traditions of Christian metaphysics that looked more to Aris-
totle than to Plato.
What then is the place of nothingness in Augustine's theology
and how important is it in the overall structure of that theology?
One primary context in which nothingness is discussed is the
problem of evil, in relation to which the concept of nothingness or
non-being is used to harmonize faith in the goodness and omnipo-
tence of God with a vision of the world as fallen. This suggests that
the topic is one of vital importance to the whole structure of Augus-
tine's theology. For although the problem of reconciling belief in an
all-good and all-powerful deity with the all too apparent evidence
of evil was not unique to Christianity (and, as we shall shortly see,
Augustine was able to draw heavily on Platonic sources in his for-
mulation of and response to this problem), the Judaeo-Christian
emphasis on the sovereign and personal character of God inscribed
this problem in the very heart of the theological project.
It is by no means coincidental that this is one of the questions
where Augustine's appropriation of Platonism is most apparent
and yet, at the same time, most transformative. To anticipate: it is
precisely in his manner of appropriating the Platonic doctrine of
evil as non-being that Augustine prepares the ultimate demolition
of Platonic cosmology and the advent of an existential and radically
religious understanding of human existence - an understanding
that, in its turn, was to provide the paradoxical foundation for a
8 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

renewal of metaphysical thinking in the early modern era that, in

its turn, has provoked a still more resolute attempt by philosophers
and anti-philosophers to settle the metaphysical accounts once and
for all. Whether this has been achieved remains an open question.
The game is still in play.

PLOTINUS

We begin by briefly examining the essential features of the Platonic

position as Augustine received it. If in so doing we limit ourselves
to Plotinus, this is because it is in Plotinus that we have the most
accessible version of Platonism as Augustine knew it. Augustine's
Plato was, precisely, the Plato of Platonism (and, to a considerable
extent, Plato as he is still popularly represented). How far this co-
incides with the historical Plato himself remains disputed: indeed
philosophers are divided as to whether Plato himself was, in the
modern sense, a metaphysician at all.2
To call Plotinus a religious metaphysician, however, might seem
less controversial.3 In his Enneads the epistemological and meta-
physical questions of such dialogues as Parmenides, The Sophist and
The Republic are blended with the cosmological speculations of the
Timaeus into an overarching speculative world-view that is pre-
sented dogmatically rather than dialectically and mystically rather
than politically.
Plotinus inherits from the Pythagoreans, through Plato and Aris-
totle, a view of reality as constructed in and through the interaction
of a sequence of mutually defining polarities such as one and many,
resting and moving, male and female, light and darkness, good and
bad, limited and unlimited.4 The process of world-making is conse-
quently understood as the bringing of that which is without limit
and therefore formless and chaotic under the rule of limit, unity
and the good. Only that which is so ordered can be said truly 'to
be' and, as such (and following the Platonic equation between know-
ing and being), both knowable and essentially good. Yet the order
thus arrived at is always vulnerable to the disintegrating power of
its polar negative.
Plotinus describes this negative thus: We may, he says, try to
think of:
measurelessness as opposed to measure, of the unbounded against
the bound, the unshaped against a principle of shape, the
 The Augustinian Inheritance 9

ever-needy against the self-sufficing: think of the ever-undefined,

the never at rest, the all-accepting but never sated, utter dearth...
whatever participates in it or resembles it becomes evil, though
not of course to the point of being, as itself is, Evil-Absolute.5

Yet the status of this 'evil' is problematic, since the realm defined
by limit and measure is coterminous with the realm of being and of
goodness. What follows?

. . . Evil cannot have place among Beings or in the Beyond-Being;

these are good. There remains only, if Evil exist at all, that it be
situate in the realm of Non-being, that it be some mode, as it
were, of the Non-being [eidos ti tou me ontos], that it have its seat
in something in touch with Non-being or to a certain degree
communicate in Non-being.
(Enn. 1.8.3)

This evil 'something', which is 'a mere image as regards Abso-

lute-Being' (Enn. 1.8.3), is named as 'matter' (hule). This 'matter' is
not only the cause of evil in the universe generally, it is also the
cause of evil in the soul, for the soul too becomes evil when 'it is
touched with Unmeasure, it is shut out from the Forming-Idea that
orders and brings to measure, and this because it is merged into a
body made out of Matter' (Enn. 1.8.4).
This is not to say that the body or material life is immediately evil
in itself, for in so far as it has form it still manifests the creative
goodness; in so far as it participates in matter, however, it is evil.
If there is dualism in Plotinus' system, it is not therefore simply
between the physical and the spiritual or the visible and the invis-
ible, because these are linked in complex dialectical ways. Rather,
it is between limit and the unlimited, between what has form and
what does not, between what is knowable and what is not. In this
respect Plotinus is not prepared to say that matter is completely
unlimited, completely unformed, completely unknowable - but it
possesses only the absolute minimum of being, or, to invoke a Pla-
tonic analogy, it is situated at the lowest point on the line from
absolute being to absolute non-being. This is how Plotinus attempts
to describe the epistemological implications of this position:

What, then, is this indetermination in the Soul? Does it amount

to an utter absence of Knowledge, as if the Soul or Mind had
10 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

withdrawn? No: the indeterminate has some footing in the sphere

of affirmation. The eye is aware of darkness as a base capable of
receiving any colour not yet seen against it: so the Mind, putting
aside all attributes perceptible to sense - all that corresponds to
light - comes upon a residuum which it cannot bring under de-
termination: it is thus in the state of the eye which, when directed
towards darkness, has become in some way identical with the
object of its spurious vision.
(EMM. II.4.10)
Yet, he continues, even this is a kind of vision, albeit a vision 'of
shapelessness, of colourlessness, of the unlit, and therefore of the
sizeless' and there is a kind of experience and a kind of knowledge
associated with this vision: '.. . in knowing Matter [the Mind]
has an experience, what may be described as the impact of the
shapeless . . . ' (Enn. II.4.10). In describing this twilight zone of con-
sciousness, Plotinus reveals some of his fundamental philosophical
commitments:

. . . what [Mind] can directly apprehend it sets on one side as its

own; but the something else which Reason rejects, this, the dim,
it knows dimly, this, the dark, it knows darkly, this it knows in
a sort of non-knowing. And just as even Matter itself is not stably
shapeless but, in things, is always shaped, the Soul also is eager
to throw over it the thing-form; for the Soul recoils from the
indefinite, dreads, almost, to be outside of reality, does not en-
dure to linger about Non-Being.
(Enn. II.4.10)
But to repeat: the physical structure of the universe cannot be
unequivocally identified with either matter or the evil of non-being.
Not only is there a kind of higher matter associated with the intel-
lectual world that can in some sense be said 'to be' (Enn. H.4.5) but
the material world is itself beautiful in a way that draws us towards
the absolute beauty of the world of Ideas. Thus, in his polemic
'Against the Gnostics' and their rejection of the corporeal world,
Plotinus protests that the cosmos itself is throughout and in all its
parts subject to the will, the intellectual illumination and the provi-
dential ordering of its maker. 'And we must recognize,' he says:
that even in the world of sense and part, there are things of a
loveliness comparable to that of the Celestials - forms whose
 The Augustinian Inheritance 11

beauty must fill us with veneration for their creator and convince
us of their origin in the divine, forms which show how ineffable
is the beauty of the Supreme since they cannot hold us but we
must, though in all admiration, leave these for those. Further,
wherever there is interior beauty, we may be sure that inner and
outer correspond... if anyone tells me he has seen people
fine-looking but interiorly vile, I can only deny i t . . . the All is
beautiful...
(Enn. II.9.17)

The outer world then - the material world in the modern sense
- is in some measure participant in, related to or a reflection of the
intellectual, intelligible world, the world of Ideas, of Forms. Lying
between that which is incapable of form and manifestation on the
one hand and the Goodness that is 'beyond being' on the other, it
is, in varying degrees and combinations, a mixture of being and
non-being. In this lies its character as a world of becoming, a world
of change and chance, of instability and impermanence, a world in
which what is formed and shaped and knowable is prone to defor-
mation, to the disintegration of shape and to a falling away from
knowledge. In this respect non-being, just as much as being, can be
said to characterize everything we experience and everything which
is for us an object of consciousness apart from what is purely and
solely intellectual. The question for Plotinus is essentially the moral
or religious question: whether we allow the guiding thread of being
within a world permeated by non-being to lead us to the vision
of absolute Beauty, or whether we allow non-being, disorder, to
frustrate such contemplation and obscure its analogues within the
world of sense.

AUGUSTINE: NOTHINGNESS AND EVIL

In taking the goodness of the creator and of all his works to be

axiomatic Augustine is a good Platonist. However - and here he is
generally regarded as differing sharply from the Platonist tradition
- the creator he finds spoken of in Genesis knows no exterior limit
to or constraint on his activity. The formless matter that though
'completely without feature' was 'not complete and utter nothing-
ness'6 is itself created by Him, being comprised, according to Au-
gustine, in the biblical statement: 'In the beginning God created
12 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

heaven and earth.' God's power is sovereign and unhindered. There

is nothing therefore to prevent his works manifesting his essential
goodness in a manner fitting their status as creatures. 'For God is
existence in a supreme degree - he supremely is ... no existence is
contrary to God, that is to the supreme existence and the author of
all existence whatsoever.'7 And 'It is from the abundance of your
goodness that your creation subsists, for you do not withhold ex-
istence from good which neither benefits you nor is of your own
substance and therefore equal to you, but exists simply because it
can derive its being from y o u . . . You created, not because you had
need, but out of the abundance of your goodness.'8 And again:

The Supreme Good beyond all others is God . . . Being omnipo-

tent he is able to make out of nothing . . . good things, both great
and small, celestial and terrestrial, spiritual and corporeal
. . . therefore, all good things throughout all the ranks of being,
whether great or small, can derive their being only from God.
Every natural being, so far as it is such, is good. There can be no
being which does not derive its existence from the most high and
true God.9

Importantly, the presence of Platonic language and Platonic as-

sumptions in passages such as these reflect precisely those points
on which Platonism served Augustine as a means of liberation from
the dualism of the Manichees, the other of the main schools of
religious philosophy through which he passed on his journey to-
wards Christianity.
The Manichees offered complex cosmological mythologies as 'sci-
entific' explanations of the world, explanations that at first intrigued
and persuaded the curious mind of Augustine, but later gave him
the opportunity to display his rhetorical powers in a brilliant and
mocking demolition of Manichee teaching. According to the
Manichees hyle, matter, is in itself a principle independent of and
standing over against God - although they denied that in allowing
such a principle they were in fact speaking of two separate Gods.
Augustine, while condemning them of dualism, also argued that,
paradoxically, the sharp antithesis they drew between God and the
made world reduced God to the same level as hyle. The Manichean
conception, precisely because it made God subject to the power of
hyle, betrayed the materialism of its theology. In his own Manichean
period, as recalled in The Confessions, Augustine himself had been
 The Augustinian Inheritance 13

unable to break free from thinking of God as in some manner a

spatially extended being and in speaking of his release from such
crudities through his encounter with Platonic writings. He wrote:

. . . I asked myself 'Is truth then nothing at all, simply because it

has no extension in space, with or without limits?' And, far off,
I heard your voice saying I am the God who IS . . . I might more
easily have doubted that I was alive than that truth had being.
For we catch sight of the Truth, as he is known through his
creation.10

This discovery of the spiritual nature of divine being was simul-

taneously the key to a non-dualistic understanding of evil. Because
God is goodness and because God is the source of all being and
because there is nothing contrary to God, 'evil' cannot itself be a
substance or essence but at most a disordering or corrupting of
created goodness. Against the Manichean view that evil is a certain
kind of nature, Augustine, arguing that 'nature', 'substance', and
'essence' are three synonymous terms, states that 'evil is that which
falls away from essence and tends to non-existence'11 and that, there-
fore, evil cannot be any kind of nature. It is a no-thing. Its only
power is the power to bring about the diminution or disordering of
being within the created order, yet 'Nothing is allowed in the provi-
dence of God to go the length of non-existence.'12
Such thoughts would not, of course, have been strange to the
Platonists. Yet there is genuine innovation in Augustine's rework-
ing of Platonic themes. Whereas Plotinus regarded non-being, and
therefore evil, as somehow embedded in the very structure of the
cosmos, Augustine represents the sovereignty and freedom of the
Creator still more radically than did Plato in his comments regard-
ing the transcendence of the Good 'beyond being'. The origin of
evil cannot therefore be comprised within an account of the gener-
ality of beings. It is possible for the universe to exist without evil
and, indeed, in an eschatological perspective, this is exactly the
kind of world there will be when God is all in all, 'in the end,
without end'.13 Evil, then, is in this sense ontologically unfounded.
Its ultimate origins are to be explained only by reference to the
voluntary acts of free agents and not by reference to the ontological
structures of cosmogony. Whether in angels or in human beings,
falling away from God is a result not of nature but of the perver-
sion of nature through choice. It is a refusal to cleave to God,14 a
14 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

voluntary desertion,15 that nonetheless remains in some kind of

contact with being, no matter how vitiated.16
It is integral to the whole structure of Augustine's thought that
defection from 'Supreme Existence' occurs only in and by means of
an act of will: there is no evil 'matter' or 'nature' which, of itself, is
able to affect the course of that order of beings established by God's
creative and providential work. The ultimate causality by which
sin is to be explained is to be found exclusively in the will. In the
dialogue On Free Will, Augustine refuses to continue the search for
an ultimate cause of evil beyond the fact of will:

An evil will, therefore, is the cause of all evils... [And] what

cause of willing can there be which is prior to willing? Either it
is a will, in which case we have not got beyond the root of evil
will. Or it is not a will, and in that case there is no sin in it. Either,
then, will is itself the first cause of sin, or the first cause is with-
out sin. Now sin is rightly imputed only to that which sins, nor
is it rightly imputed unless it sins voluntarily.17

This privileging of will as the ultimate causal ground of evil goes

along with an appeal to history rather than to ontology as the final
arbiter of truth. Yet while Augustine appeals to the Bible in order
to explain the causation of evil, his account of its 'nature' remains
distinctively Platonic. Thus, in discussing the fall of the rebel angels
in the City of God, Augustine begins by stating, 'The truth is that
one should not try to find an efficient cause for a wrong choice.'
Ignoring this advice, however, he then offers what is, in effect, a
causal explanation articulated in ontological categories: 'It is not
a matter of efficiency, but of deficiency; the evil will itself is not
effective but defective. For to defect from him who is the Supreme
Existence, to something of less reality, this is to begin to have an
evil will.'18 Causality is denied only to be reinstated. The same con-
tradiction emerges when Augustine re-inscribes ontological catego-
ries within the biblical story of Adam's transgression, as when he
writes: ' . . . only a nature created out of nothing could have been
distorted by a fault. Consequently, although the will derives its
existence, as a nature, from its creation by God, its falling away
from its true being is due to its creation out of nothing.'19
The results, as well as the origins, of evil willing are likewise inter-
preted by means of ontological categories. Thus, the consequence
of evil willing, of wrong choices, is to slip down the ontological
 The Augustinian Inheritance 15

scale: 'to abandon God and to exist in oneself, that is to please

oneself, is not immediately to lose all being; but it is to come nearer
to nothingness.'20
In such ways Augustine's understanding of non-being comes
to owe as much to Platonist ontology as to Biblical sources. Although
the will must be held culpable for its abandonment of what is good,
the possibility of its doing this is grounded in the same kind of
ontological lack that characterizes all created being as such: that it
'is' 'ex nihilo', that it 'exists' by virtue of and in dependence on an
Other, from which it is derived but of which it is not a part -
indeed, in relation to which it is ontologically discontinuous. Both
the cause and the effect of evil willing are in this way 'explained'
by reference to ontological lack or diminution.

AUGUSTINE: NOTHINGNESS AND TIME

Nothingness and time are frequently juxtaposed in religious litera-

ture, for time is that which brings us to nothing, thereby exposing
us to our essential transiency in contrast to the unchangeableness of
God. Here too Augustine proved decisive for the thought of West-
ern Christendom.
The locus classicus of Augustine's discussion of time is in Book XI
of the Confessions, in which he sets out on an exegetical encounter
with Scripture, beginning with the very opening words of the Bible:
'In the beginning'. Although this might seem to mark a break with
the 'autobiographical' and introspective orientation of Books I-X,
it is important to note that the question of time is profoundly con-
nected with the prolonged and complex examination of memory
and the knowledge of God in Book X. The thematic progression
from memory to time seems entirely appropriate since, after all, our
experience of time is (as Augustine himself will argue in Book XI)
inextricable from memory.
Yet it is striking that in Book X itself the images and metaphors
that guide Augustine's exploration of memory are themselves pre-
dominantly spatial. Memory, he says, 'is like a great field or a spaci-
ous palace, a storehouse for countless images of all kinds which are
conveyed to it by the senses.'21 This spatializing tendency lies at the
bottom of some of the more puzzling shifts that take place in the
course of Augustine's discussion.
Take, for example, the following line of argument. Starting with
16 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

the clue of humanity's universal desire for a happiness (beata vita)

that is based on truth Augustine asserts that the concept of truth
itself contains an implicit understanding of God, for God is truth;
and yet, he says, since all knowledge is a kind of recollection, even
the concept of truth must at some point in time have entered the
memory:

See how I have explored the vast field of my memory in search

of you, O Lord! And I have not found you outside it. For I have
discovered nothing about you except what I have remembered
since the time when I first learned about you. Ever since then I
have not forgotten you. For I found my God, who is Truth itself,
where [!] I found truth, and ever since I learned the truth I have
not forgotten it. So, since the time when I first learned of you, you
have always been present in my memory, and it is there that I
find you whenever I am reminded of you and find delight in
you.22

At this point, then, we might expect Augustine to narrow his

investigation to the moment in time when he first learned about
truth and thus about God. Instead, he immediately reverts to a
spatial understanding of memory by asking ' . . . in which part of
my memory are you present, O Lord? What cell have you con-
structed for yourself in my memory? What sanctuary have you
built there for yourself?'23 And, finally, 'Where, then, did I find you
so that I could learn of you?',24 a question which is immediately
answered in roundly spatial terms - 'in yourself, above me'. The
question as to when Truth/God first entered the memory is left
hanging in mid-air.
The investigation of time in Book XI, however, goes some way
towards resolving this ambiguous ending. For now the human
capacity for understanding time is itself shown to be dependent
on memory. In other words, the deep, ontological structure of the
human mind is such that memory itself provides the criteria by
which we measure time and thus 'know' time - in so far as time is
knowable at all.

It is in my own mind, then, that I measure time. I must not allow

my mind to insist that time is something objective . . . I say that
I measure time in my mind. For everything that happens leaves
an impression on it, and this impression remains after the thing
 The Augustinian Inheritance 17

itself has ceased to be. It is the impression that I measure, since

it is still present, not the thing itself, which makes the impression
as it passes and then moves into the past.25

To ask, then, about the 'time' 'when' truth first entered the mind
would not, on Augustine's understanding, be properly answered
by appearing to check a mental event (the moment of learning truth)
against an external, objective 'time'; rather, the question as to the
'time' of truth is answered by referring time itself to the synthetic
function of memory. It is memory that provides the measure of
time and not vice versa.
To see the wider implications of this statement, we need to note
further aspects of the concept of time.
Augustine's initial attempt to answer the question 'What is time?'
involves an examination of the three dimensions of time - past,
present and future. The question is, however, soon brought to a
standstill by the nature of the object of enquiry, since, as we expe-
rience it, neither can time be grasped in an essential definition nor,
more profoundly, 'is' time at any point, in the sense of an enduring
presence-to-consciousness.

Of these three divisions of time, then, how can two, the past and
the future be, when the past no longer is and the future is not yet?
As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on
to become the past, it would not be time but eternity. If, there-
fore, the present is time only by reason of the fact that it moves
on to become the past, how can we say that even the present is,
when the reason why it is is that it is not to be? [... cui causa, ut
sit, ilia est, quia non erit.. . ] In other words, we cannot rightly say
that time is, except by its impending state of not being. [... non
vere dicamus tetnpus esse, nisi quia tendit non esse.]26

Time, itself, then, like evil, has no 'nature' or 'substance' and,

strictly speaking, resists definition. We only 'know' time by virtue
of the order imposed on it when, via the impressions of external
and internal events, it is given its 'place' in the memory. In this
respect, the relationship between memory and time reflects the broad
drift of Platonic thought regarding the relationship between the
measuring, limiting and ordering function of mind and the meas-
ureless, limitless, disordered chaos/non-being of that which first
'is' only by virtue of its subsumption into the realm of mind - or,
18 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

we might add, the relationship between the prime mover, itself

unmoved, and motion. Mind (or memory - Augustine regards these
as equivalent) is the rule and measure of time, that itself has neither
rule nor measure. But Augustine's discussion is, once more, not
simply Platonic. For the denial of objectivity and the radicality of
his refusal to ascribe 'being' to time means that Augustine has moved
decisively away from the Platonic principle, articulated in the
Timaeus, that time is, in some way, an image of eternity. The maker
of the universe, according to Plato, wished to make the world as
like as possible to the ideal model of an eternal living creature.

Now the nature of the Living Being was eternal, a character with
which it was impossible fully to endow a generated thing. But he
planned to make as it were a moving likeness of eternity; and, at
the same time that he set in order the Heaven, he made, of eter-
nity that abides in unity, an ever-flowing likeness moving ac-
cording to number - that to which we have given the name Time.27

The Platonic view thus implies a degree of resemblance or like-

ness between time and the eternal being. This principle is also main-
tained by Plotinus who draws the conclusion that it is therefore
possible to rise to a knowledge of the eternal by means of a consid-
eration of time itself: ' . . . admitting this relationship of Time as
image to Eternity the original, that if we chose to begin by identi-
fying Time we could thence proceed upwards by Recognition [cf.
Platonic recollection] and become aware of the Kind which it im-
ages' (Enn. III.7.1). Although Essential Existence, the One, is eternal
and so beyond time the realm of temporal things is in its very
temporal structure oriented towards eternity:

Existence for the (generated) All must similarly consist in a goal

to be attained: for this reason it keeps hastening towards its fu-
ture, dreading to rest, seeking to draw Being to itself by a per-
petual variety of production and action and by its circling in a
sort of ambition after Essential Existence. And here we have, in-
cidentally, lighted upon the cause of the Circuit of the All; it is a
movement which seeks perpetuity by way of futurity.
(Enn. 11.7 A)

Yet Augustine refuses to admit such continuity between time and

eternity. Why not? The answer is essentially quite simple: because,
 The Augustinian Inheritance 19

as he understands it, time belongs in the realm of created being and

is as such separated from the Creator by an infinite qualitative dif-
ference - for within the realm of created being it is only humankind
that is made in the image of God and thus, essentially, 'like' God.
Just as the beauty of the external world of the natural creation
cannot bring the soul to God, unless the soul turns in on itself (X.
27), so the way to God does not lie through time but through the
ordering power of the mind that gives order, coherence, continuity
and a semblance of being to time. Time is not an analogue of God,
as might be the case for a Platonist, since God is altogether before
and beyond all time. Thus, in response to those who ask what God
was doing before the creation of the world, Augustine declares
such questions to be meaningless. 'Time' only has meaning at all
within the realm of creation. Indeed, although it is possible for us
to conceive of a creature that is itself outside time, it is not possible
to apply temporal concepts to God himself:'... before all time began
you are the eternal Creator of all time, and . . . no time and no cre-
ated thing is co-eternal with you, even if any created thing is out-
side time.'28 Although the creation itself is enacted in time, in the
'seven days' and subsequently in the history of the two cities, the
City of God and the City of Man, God's decision to create the world
is itself eternal. Indeed, in the divine creative will that is the sole
source and guarantor of any kind of being whatsoever, the eternal
Sabbath in some sense already is, for if it were not it would be
subject to time.
This suggests that the concept of time is well suited to mediate
between the two senses of nothingness that we have found in
Augustine's discussion of the origin of evil: firstly, nothingness as
the nihil out of which creation, even creation in its essential good-
ness qua being, is brought into being and, secondly, nothingness as
the 'nature', consequence and fate of evil. For, on the one hand,
time is written into the very structure of the created universe that
God created 'in the beginning' and thus, like the ex nihilo character
of creatures itself, functions as a continuing vestige of the radical
contingency of the creature qua creature. Yet, on the other hand, in
a manner that is significantly more specific than the abstract state-
ment of the creaturely ex nihilo, it defines that point of difference
between creatures and God that is attributable to the fall and al-
ienation rather than to the mere ontological dependence of the crea-
ture. For in the eternal Sabbath, when we shall know as we are
known and when God will be all in all, the creature will continue
20 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

to bear the stamp of the ex nihilo (i.e. will still be a creature), but it
will no longer be 'in time'; in the pure intellectual contemplation of
God by the mind (memory) it will, as creature, be, with God, out-
side of and purged of time.
This is not to say that the concept of time can of itself explain
how creatures created ex nihilo fall away from their Creator towards
another kind of non-being, a kind that is both utter and culpable.
For the sceptic can always rephrase his question by asking why the
Creator should make a temporal creation if time by definition is
separation from God? But if time does not 'explain' the fall, it does
focus more precisely the place in or at which the non-being of the
creature qua creature (and specifically the willing creature, the hu-
man being) is exposed to the non-being of evil - its own evil and
the evil that befalls it. The non-being of time is thus a bridge be-
tween the non-being of the ex nihilo and the non-being revealed in
rebellion, fall and punishment.29

AUGUSTINE: NOTHINGNESS AND THE WILL

From his reflections on evil, time and the origin of the world,
Augustine created a composite picture in which the character of the
human subject is determined by its creation ex nihilo, its temporality
and its fall towards nothingness. If this leads to the concept of
nothingness having a central role in the ontological schematization
of existence, it also influences the psychological account of the will,
which comes to be seen as permeated by the nothingness from
which it was created and also endowed with responsibility for the
self's subsequent choice of nothingness over against being. But even
when Augustine 'explains' the malfunctioning of the will by means
of ontological categories, the will as we encounter it and as he
describes it is first and foremost revealed in the world of concrete
existence: the living, passional and volitional situation of the hu-
man subject. This existential situation is thereby constituted as a
phenomenological surface on which Augustine is able to map non-
being in narrative and psychological terms. In attempting to read
that map with Augustine, we begin to see how the existential story
of non-being-as-fallen-will-in-time is sowing the seeds of destruc-
tion of the very metaphysics to which Augustine himself appeals,
indeed these seeds are sown in the very process by which Augustine seeks
to explain that story metaphysically.
Let us then attempt a brief reconstruction of Augustine's existential
 The Augustinian Inheritance 21

phenomenology of non-being as exemplified in his polemics against

the Pelagians.
Beginning with Adam in the state of original perfection, the will
is understood as radically free and as having defected from God's
will entirely on its own responsibility - a fact which for Augustine
and for the Christian tradition generally justifies God's position
with regard to the current ill state of the world and of human
beings in particular. Yet the actual situation of human beings alive
in the world now is very different. Although Augustine's (in part)
early work On the Freedom of the Will was later to be quoted against
him by the Pelagians, who upheld the freedom of the will before
and after the fall, even here he insists that: 'When we speak of the
freedom of the will to do right, we are speaking of the freedom
wherein man was created.'30 Augustine's meaning is clearly 'we are
only speaking of the freedom wherein man was created' but not of
the will in man as we find him now.
This tension between the created ideal and the existential reality
pervades Augustine's discussion of the respective limits of freedom
and grace.
Thus, A Treatise on Grace and Free Will speaks of the need for both
free will and grace. Citing a sequence of divine commandments
from both Old and New Testaments which imply the freedom of
those addressed by them he asks: 'What is the import of the fact
that in so many passages God requests His commandments to be
kept and fulfilled, and of the way in which He makes this request,
if the will is not free?'31 Nonetheless, we cannot dispense with the
need for grace - as if a man 'when he leads a good life and per-
forms good works (or rather thinks that he leads a good life and
performs good works), [were to] dare to glory in himself, and not
in the Lord, and to put his entire hope of righteous living in himself
alone...' (APW, p. 20). Along with the exercise of choice there
must be the co-operant grace of God if there is to be any legitimate
talk of 'good works'. So, with regard to chastity (an issue of pecu-
liar importance to Augustine himself) Augustine writes:

Such precepts would not be given unless a man had a will of his
own, wherewith to obey the divine commandments; and yet it is
God's gift which is indispensable for the observance of the pre-
cepts of chastity . . . It follows, then, that the victory in which sin
is vanquished is nothing else than the gift of God, who in this
contest helps the free-will of the combatant.
(APW, pp. 22-3)
22 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

All this, however, applies only to those who are already engaged
in attempting to live the Christian life; but the foundation of that
life depends entirely on grace. For Augustine, as for many of his
later interpreters, the testimony of St Paul was decisive - and not
only the testimony of Paul the theologian but of Paul the man, the
persecutor of the Church who became the Apostle to the Gentiles.
With regard to the state of Paul prior to his conversion Augustine
remarks: 'Now there was, no doubt, a decided merit in the Apostle
Paul, but it was an evil one, while he persecuted the Church . . . and
it was while he was in possession of this evil merit that a good one
was rendered to him instead of the evil' (APW, p. 26). Nonetheless,
Augustine does not adduce Paul's miraculous conversion in order
to do away with the need for the exercise of the freedom of the will
by the believer. There is, or will be, a place for such exercise, but the
basis must be clear: 'For the accomplishment, however, of the radi-
cal change within him - his call from heaven, and his conversion by
that great and most effectual call - God's grace operated alone,
because his merits, though great, were yet evil' (ibid.). If Augustine
concedes a degree of freedom in all this, it is not so great as to
legitimate the kind of talk of human merit that he ascribes to his
opponents.
His essential purpose remains the justification of God in the face
of human complaints. As he says in responding to the Pelagian
writer Julian: 'They are not, then, free from righteousness except by
the choice of the will, but they do not become free from sin save by
the grace of the Saviour' (APW, p. 240).
Augustine returns again to Paul and, in particular, the seventh
chapter of Paul's letter to the Romans where Paul is addressing the
contradiction between the content of the Jewish Torah, which he
affirms, and its effectiveness in bringing about the fulfilment of its
own commandments. The discussion issues in a string of paradoxi-
cal assertions: 'For that which I do, I allow not: for what I would,
that do I not; but what I hate, that I do' (v. 15); ' . . . for to will is
present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not.
For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not,
that I do' (vv. 18-19) and 'For I delight in the law of God after the
inward man: but I see another law in my members, warring against
the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of
sin, which is in my members' (v. 24).
Augustine takes this to mean that the struggle between sin and
grace continued in Paul after his conversion. So, when Paul writes:
 The Augustinian Inheritance 23

'For we know that the Law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under
sin' (7.14), Augustine takes the 'I am carnal' to refer, not to Paul the
Pharisee, persecutor of the Church, but to Paul the Apostle, one
who has received the gift of faith but does not yet enjoy the fullness
of that blessedness to which he aspires. The statement is to be read,
as it appears, as a statement in the present tense and not an oblique
reference to a conquered past. Nor does Augustine - perhaps sur-
prisingly given the persistent traces of the Manichean distrust of
matter to be found even in his mature thought - soften the impact
of this reading by allowing the admission of carnality to be taken
solely as a reference to the body in which, as a mortal human being,
Paul still lives. It is of the whole of himself, of the two inseparable
elements of body and spirit, that Paul is here speaking.
The picture that emerges in Augustine's exegesis is thus a picture
of a self divided against itself. This is the situation both of the
Apostle and of all who, like him, are 'established under grace . . .
[but]... not yet established in that perfect peace in which death
shall be swallowed up in victory' (APW, p. 255). In this intermedi-
ate state, even though we have withdrawn our consent to sin, we
still lack the power to overcome it. Indeed, in a sense, conversion
intensifies the predicament of the divided self. For the turning
of the will, through grace, towards the good sharpens the conflict
between the different factors in the situation. For, though still sub-
ject to carnal lust (meaning by this an active perversion of the self
rather than the vehemence of bodily desires), the 'spiritual' self
refuses its consent to such lust; though 'free from the consent of
depraved lusts' Paul and the other Apostles 'still groaned concern-
ing the lust of the flesh, which they bridled by restraint with such
humility and piety, that they desired rather not to have it than to
overcome it' (APW, p. 256).
It is thus possible to speak of three forms of willing in Augus-
tine's view of the self. The first, or lowest, is that of the carnal self,
the will determined by selfish lust; the second is that of the believer
whose will, in the mode of free choice, is directed to the good, even
though he is incapable of bringing that good to fruition; the third
is the good will sustained and endowed with perseverance by grace
and no longer subject in any way to the power of nothingness.
If the first of these forms belongs to humanity apart from faith,
even Christians can only attain the second form in this life, poised
between the moment of conversion and the final triumph of the
City of God. Precisely because this life is a life lived in time, a life
24 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

characterized by a 'before' and an 'after', it is a life that never es-

capes the nothingness of being-in-time.
At this point, however, we can see the emergence of what many
regard as a troubling aspect of Augustine's argument: predestina-
tion. For if the final defeat of evil depends not only on the initial
activity of God in conversion but also on the continuing activity of
God in the grace of perseverance, aren't we left with predestina-
tion? Or, to put it another way: if life in time is subject to constant
volatilization, then how can God (from his eternal point of view)
not know (in what for us must be the past) what (for us) belongs
to the future? Such a doctrine is, however, theologically troubling.
Indeed Augustine himself is aware of such scandalous implications
as the damnation of unbaptized infants, the obduracy of those who,
like Pharaoh, harden their hearts against God's will, or the lack of
perseverance by some of the baptized. His only response is, ultim-
ately, that we cannot know why all this should be so. All we can do
is to marvel at God's ability to bring good out of evil.

. . . if I am asked why God should not have given them persever-

ance to whom He gave that love by which they might live as
Christians, I answer that I do not k n o w . . . So far, therefore,
as He condescends to manifest His judgement to us, let us give
thanks; but so far [as He thinks fit] to conceal them, let us not
murmur against His counsel, but believe that this also is most
wholesome for us.
(APW, p. 85)

If there is a scandal here, what is it? After all, if faith is bound to

affirm the religious priority of God, should it not accept the conse-
quences of that priority - including predestination?
Isn't the real scandal this: that, despite all disclaimers, the formu-
lation of any doctrine of predestination seems to imply a human
prejudging of the workings of God's inscrutable will? But isn't this
what theology invariably does when it tries to think the things of
faith metaphysically and thereby implies knowledge of what can-
not be known? Doesn't all ontology imply the possession of criteria
by which to decide once and for all what is really real? Even when
the results of such knowledge are not applied to individuals they
serve to generate a speculative illusion that we can see as God sees.
The real scandal of predestination, then, is not the assertion of the
 The Augustinian Inheritance 25

priority of God but the metaphysical ontology that gives theology

the power to judge reality itself.
In this sense Augustine is indeed scandalous, for although he
conceals his metaphysics by telling the story of the self as the story
of embodied intention, the story is profoundly determined by the
metaphysical logic of being and nothingness. For Augustine the self
is not simply a concrete personality seeking the things of God but
a trace of nothingness in the midst of the created plenitude of be-
ing. This is, of course, a radical transformation of Platonic anthro-
pology, yet, if the mapping of ontology on the plane of narrativity
prepares the way for the destruction of the old metaphysics, it is
also laden with possibilities of a metaphysical renewal: indeed,
precisely that metaphysical renewal that was to happen through
the dynamic idealism of Hegel, his successors and critics. Yet before
this renewal could take place, a conscious attempt was to be made
to separate the Augustinian narrative from its metaphysical impli-
cations. To see what that attempt involved, and how it also contrib-
uted - albeit paradoxically - to the advent of the new metaphysics,
we turn next to the Augustinianism of Luther, Calvin and Pascal.

LUTHER AND CALVIN

The ambiguity of the Augustinian inheritance - that the narrative

figuration of the self is the bearer of a concealed metaphysical pre-
determination - continued to characterize much medieval Christian
thought. Naturally, factors and influences other than Augustine
contributed to the shape of medieval theology and philosophy. Yet
even where the influence of Aristotle came to prevail over that of
Plato, some of the fundamental features of Augustine's theological
squaring of the philosophical circle continue in play. Thus, Aquinas
too identifies God with being in such a way that this 'being' is the
most distinctive and most appropriate name for God. Yahweh's
self-designation in Exodus 3 as 'I am who I am' and 'He who is' is
taken by Aquinas as showing that, since 'names have been devised
to signify the natures or essences of things . . . the divine being is
God's essence or nature.'32 God not merely 'is', but is the unique
being whose essence, whose very identity (i.e. his being the way he
is) is identical with his being.33 Moreover, being is further identified
with goodness, such that God is both being and goodness itself
26 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

and, therefore, the source of the being and goodness of all else that
is. As was the case for Augustine, 'no being, as being' can be evil.34
Thomas did not, of course, monopolize the discourse on nothing-
ness in the Christian Middle Ages. Important and provocative con-
tributions come also from the more radically mystical line of
medieval thinking. Some of these will be examined in another con-
text.35 Yet metaphysical ontology continued to provide a frame-
work within which the basic issues of Christian faith were thought.
The most radical challenge to such assumptions was, paradoxically,
to come from a theology that was itself strongly Augustinian -
albeit a theology that pitted the Augustine of the Pelagian conflict
against Augustine the Platonic metaphysician. This was the theo-
logy of the Protestant reformation and, above all, of Luther and
Calvin.
Few texts were more central to the theology of the Protestant
Reformation than Paul's Letter to the Romans, in particular as me-
diated by Augustine. Luther's own Lectures on Romans of 1515/16
were a pivotal moment in his discovery of 'justification by faith
alone' as a foundational principle in theology. He summarized the
teaching of the letter thus: "The chief purpose of this letter is to
break down, to pluck up, and to destroy all wisdom and righteous-
ness of the flesh . . . We must be taught a righteousness that comes
completely from outside and is foreign. And therefore our own
righteousness that is born in us must first be plucked up.'36 In this
concern for a righteousness that comes solely from God, Luther
makes explicit the transformation of the metaphysical language of
nothingness in Augustine's analysis of the divided self in order to
turn it against metaphysics. For example, with reference to Romans
3.7 Luther wrote:

What these words seek to establish and maintain is solely this,

that inwardly we become nothing, that we empty ourselves of
everything, humble ourselves . . . For all creation teaches that 'there
is no need of a physician except for those who are sick', that no
sheep is sought except the one who is lost, that no one is freed
except the captive, that no one is enriched except the pauper, that
no one is made strong except the weak, that no one is exalted
except the man who has been humbled, nothing is filled except
that which is empty, that nothing is built except that which has
been torn down. As the philosophers say: a thing is not brought
into form unless there is first a lack of form or a change of previous
 The Augustinian Inheritance 27

form; again a 'potential idea' does not receive form unless at its
inception it has been stripped of all form and is like a tabula
rasa.37

It is striking that not only does Luther describe the nothingness

of the human subject in exclusively evangelical terms but also shows
himself familiar with a set of philosophical ideas that would, if he
wanted it, offer him scope for a metaphysical explanation of the
language of self-annihilation. It is notable, however, that Luther
does not develop this philosophical illustration: indeed, the point
is that it is merely an illustration, an appeal to a set of ideas and
concepts with which he could assume his listeners to be familiar,
to highlight or underline the main point. The religious argument is
not being grounded in a metaphysics: the metaphysics is only being
used ad lib in the service of the religious argument.
In the same spirit the metaphysical aspects of non-being that
permeated Augustine's understanding of creation and the origin
and nature of evil are rejected by Luther, although, as in the Sermon
on the Magnificat, he can use the analogy of creation as a way of
characterizing the divine 'style':

Just as God in the beginning of creation made the world out of

nothing, whence He is called the Creator and the Almighty, so
His manner of working continues unchanged. Even now and to
the end of the world, all His works are such that out of that
which is nothing, worthless, despised, wretched and dead, He
makes that which is something, precious, honourable, blessed
and living .. .38

But this does not mean that the material and spiritual depend-
ence of the creature on the Creator is defined in such a way as to
inscribe 'non-being' as some kind of ontological deficiency (and
thus an abiding potentiality towards evil) in the creature. In his
Commentary on Genesis Luther specifically rejects Augustine's inter-
pretation of the primeval matter as 'almost nothing', as that which
exists only on the very lowest threshold of being, an interpretation
which, as we have seen, helped to install Platonic metaphysics with-
in the edifice of Christian theology. 'How,' Luther asks, 'can you
apply the term "mere nothing" to something that is a genuine sub-
stance of the kind Moses calls heaven and earth?'39 Interestingly, he
associates this repudiation of a Platonizing interpretation of the
28 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

creation narrative with a far-reaching rejection of the allegorical

method which had served Augustine and other Patristic figures as
a means of dovetailing their biblical and their Platonic investments.
Moses' purpose, he said, 'is to teach us, not about allegorical crea-
tures and an allegorical world but about real creatures and a visible
world approached by the senses.'40
Luther likewise rejects the Augustinian understanding of sin in
terms of privation or ontological deficiency: 'It is a nausea toward
the good, a loathing of light and wisdom, and a delight in error and
darkness, a flight from and an abomination of all good works,
a pursuit of evil.'41 Sin is not an ontological lack but a fact of the
will of the inward, subjective orientation of the self. This anti-
metaphysical thrust is further highlighted by Luther's warning
that the ground on which alone the vital issues are to be fought
out lies outside the sphere of all possible knowledge. When Paul
speaks of the love of God, Luther comments:

It is called 'God's love' because by it we love God alone, where

nothing is visible, nothing experiential, whether inwardly or out-
wardly, in which we can trust or which is to be loved or feared;
but it is carried away beyond all things into the invisible God,
who cannot be experienced, who cannot be comprehended, that
is, into the midst of the shadows, not knowing what it loves, only
knowing what it does not love; turning away from everything
which it has known and experienced, and desiring only that which
it has not yet known.42

Yet, though taken out of the realm of knowledge and transposed

into a volitional key, the language of nothingness remained a vital
resource for Luther's theology. For the inwardness of the will, of
the self-evaluation of the willing subject and that subject's own
experience of itself as 'nothing', provides a context in which such
language is unavoidable. When Luther says that 'inwardly we be-
come nothing' this is not a statement for or against a doctrine of
the self as 'substance' but is to be understood in the light of his
own definition of what he means by 'inwardly': 'I use the term
"inwardly" (intrinsice) to show how we are in ourselves, in our
own eyes, in our own estimation.. .'43 It is the subject's own self-
evaluation that is at stake, an evaluation which the God-relationship
brings into the sharpest possible focus. 'Before God' - to use a char-
acteristically Lutheran phrase - that self-evaluation itself (rather than
any ontological or essentialist definition) determines who we are.
 The Augustinian Inheritance 29

The self that understands itself to be 'nothing', however, is the self

that has abandoned the attempt to establish itself as the basis of its
own value, or, more precisely: it is that act of abandonment, an act
in which it consents to know itself only as it is in God's judgement
and God's foreknowledge - a judgement and a foreknowledge,
however, that are entirely inscrutable and that can only be believed
in by faith. If Luther makes it sound as if there is almost a causal
relationship between becoming as nothing and justification this is
because the two are for him simply different aspects of the same
event. Becoming as nothing is the 'inward', i.e. subjective, aspect or
experience of justification.

. . . God has assuredly promised his grace to the humble . . . that

is, to those who lament and despair of themselves. But no man
can be thoroughly humbled until he knows that his salvation is
utterly beyond his own powers, devices, endeavours, will, and
works, and depends entirely on the choice, will, and work of
another, namely, of God alone . . . But when a man has no doubt
that everything depends on the will of God, then he completely
despairs of himself and chooses nothing for himself, but waits for
God to work; then he has come close to grace, and can be saved.44

In this context Luther insists that the analogy to God's primordial

creation out of nothing is exact:

. . . before man is changed into a new creature of the Kingdom of

the Spirit, he does nothing and attempts nothing to prepare him-
self for this renewal and this Kingdom, and when he has been
recreated he does nothing and attempts nothing toward remain-
ing in this Kingdom, but the Spirit alone does both of these things
in us, recreating us without us and preserving us without our
help in our recreated state . . . But he does not work without us,
because it is for this very thing he has recreated and preserves us,
that he might work in us and we might cooperate with him. Thus
it is through us he preaches, shows mercy to the poor, comforts
the afflicted. But what is attributed to free choice in all this? Or
rather what is left for it but nothing? And really nothing!45

In inwardness, therefore, in the self-awarenesss and self-evalua-

tion that belongs to the life of faith, the subject knows itself, qua
will, to be as nothing. This understanding, Luther maintains, is
given that 'men may be instructed, moved, awakened, terrified .. ,'46
30 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

but it is also a source of comfort, for it means that we no longer

even attempt to rely on our own power to overcome sin (an attempt
that is always accompanied by the anxious awareness of possible
failure) but trust entirely and solely in God's grace and mercy.
Many of Luther's (and Augustine's) views on the freedom or
non-freedom of the will are taken up and further systematized
by Jean Calvin. Like them Calvin regards Adam as having been
created with sufficient freedom to have kept to God's law had he
so chosen but that, subsequent to Adam, no one, believer and un-
believer alike, has such freedom. Everything depends on God's in-
scrutable election.
In reading Calvin on this point, it is essential to bear in mind the
anti-metaphysical statements that Calvin himself constantly reiter-
ates throughout his Institutes of the Christian Religion (first edition
1536). This repudiation of metaphysics qualifies the scandal of elec-
tion in an important way by disallowing any objectifying interpre-
tation that would reduce the doctrine to a piece of cosmologi-
cal speculation (a reserve that not all subsequent Calvinists have
observed). In this connection it is important to notice how Calvin
insists on the principle of humility, appropriating a statement of
Chrysostom (with whom he is not generally in sympathy): 'The
foundation of our philosophy is humility' (Inst. I, p. 232). The reli-
gious thrust of the Institutes is to move the reader to an ever greater
humility and an ever more complete acknowledgement of his de-
pendence on God and it is this that determines the structure and
rhetorical shape of Calvin's argument. It is only secondarily what
might be called 'systematic theology' and it is certainly not a specu-
lative ontology.
It is in the light of these assumptions that Calvin's restatement
of Luther's insistence on human incapacity is to be read. Acknowl-
edging that human reason in some measure, even after the fall,
distinguishes human beings from the rest of creation and that, ac-
cordingly, we can see some measure of rationality in the human
pursuit of mechanical crafts, in the ordering of civil society and
with regard to 'things indifferent', Calvin is very clear about the
limits of reason with regard to the religious requirement of salva-
tion. Speaking of the philosophical advocates of reason he remarks;
'Their discernment was not such as to direct them to the truth, far
less to enable them to attain it, but resembled that of the bewildered
traveller, who sees the flash of lightning glance far and wide for a
moment, and then vanish into the darkness of the night, before he
can advance a single step' (Inst. I., p. 238).
 The Augustinian Inheritance 31

But even if reason were capable of knowing that in which our

highest good consisted, there would remain the problem as to
whether we are able to will that good. Here Calvin utterly rejects
the view 'that the soul has in itself a power of aspiring to good,
though a power too feeble to rise to solid affection or active endeav-
our' (Inst. I, pp. 245-6). Such a doctrine, he suggests, provides those
who maintain it with an excuse for their lack of obedience since it
is not they who commit sin, but sin itself, controlling their actions
like an alien force. Similarly he dismisses the distinction between
operating and cooperating grace, since such a distinction blurs the
force of the insight that 'nothing is left for the will to arrogate as its
own' (Inst. I, p. 262). Calvin's own conclusion could not be more
forcefully stated.

Let it stand, therefore, as an indubitable truth, which no engines

can shake, that the mind of man is so entirely alienated from the
righteousness of God that he cannot conceive, desire, or design
anything but what is wicked, distorted, foul, impure, and iniqui-
tous; that his heart is so thoroughly envenomed by sin, that it can
breathe out nothing but corruption and rottenness; that if some
men occasionally make a show of goodness, their mind is ever
interwoven with hypocrisy and deceit, their soul inwardly bound
with the fetters of wickedness.
(Inst. I, p. 291)

Calvin cites a pseudo-Augustinian simile (also used by Luther) in

which the self is compared to a horse that must be ridden either by
God or the Devil. However, Calvin does not wish this simile to be
used to exculpate human beings from their responsibility for sin.

When it is said, then, that the will of the natural man is subject
to the power of the devil, and is actuated by him, the meaning is,
not that the will, while reluctant and resisting, is forced to
submit... but that, fascinated by the imposture of Satan, it nec-
essarily leads to his guidance, and does him homage.
(Inst. I, p. 266)

(Calvin's further comments on this even suggest that there is at

least room for questioning whether 'Satan' has any objective exist-
ence outside the disorder of the human will: 'The blinding of the
wicked, and all the iniquities consequent upon it, are called the
works of Satan; works, the cause of which is not to be sought in
32 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

anything external to the will of man, in which the root of evil lies,
and in which the foundations of Satan's kingdom, in other words,
sin, is fixed' [ibid.].)
The will itself is therefore responsible for its own bondage; the
power which binds or which annihilates the will is its own power.
Yet what do 'necessity' and 'compulsion' or 'what is done voluntar-
ily' and 'what is done by free choice' mean in this context?
Calvin answers such questions by reflecting on the character of
God's goodness and the devil's badness. 'Were anyone to ask... Is
not God necessarily good, is not the devil necessarily wicked, what
answer would they give?' The answer, Calvin thinks, is obvious.
'The goodness of God is so connected with his Godhead, that it is
not more necessary to be God than to be good ...' (Inst. I, pp. 253-
4). Yet it would sound absurd to speak of God as being good be-
cause of some external compulsion. Similarly, the characteristic evil
of the devil's actions does not depend on a power outside his own
personality. The same goes for human beings: 'If the free will of
God in doing good is not impeded, because he necessarily must do
good; if the devil, who can do nothing but evil, nevertheless sins
voluntarily; can it be said that man sins less voluntarily because he
is under a necessity of sinning?' (Inst. I, p. 254). The conclusion is
that:

Man, since he was corrupted by the fall, sins not forced or un-
willing, but voluntarily, by a most forward bias of the mind; not
by violent compulsion, or external force, but by the movement of
his own passion; and yet such is the depravity of his nature, that
he cannot move and act except in the direction of evil.
(Inst. I, p. 254)

Calvin finds this conclusion not only in Augustine but also, per-
haps surprisingly, in Bernard of Clairvaux, whom he quotes to the
following effect:

Thus the soul, in some strange and evil way, is held under this
kind of voluntary, yet sadly free necessity, both bond and free;
bond in respect of necessity, free in respect of will: and what is
still more strange, and still more miserable, it is guilty because
free, and enslaved because guilty, and therefore enslaved because
free.
(Inst. I, p. 254)
 The Augustinian Inheritance 33

The importance of this understanding of the will as free and yet

unfree and in this way self-annihilating is further highlighted if
we bear in mind that the 'will' is not merely one faculty alongside
others but determines the fundamental character of the self. In rec-
ognizing the powerlessness of its will, the self recognizes its own
nullity. Thus, in becoming as nothing, in humility and submission,
the self is not merely practising a particular virtue: it is becoming
what it really is. For ' . . . we cannot be trained to the fear of God,
and learn the first principles of piety, unless we are violently smit-
ten with the sword of the Spirit and annihilated, as if God were
declaring, that to be ranked among his sons there must be a de-
struction of our ordinary nature' (Inst. I, p. 515). In the light of
Calvin's teaching on the bondage and nullity of the will, that 'de-
struction' is not a task for either physical or mental ascesis, nor a
'work' that we can bring about by the exertion of either mind or
body. It is, simply, to accept and to become what we already are.
If we recall the scholastic definition of the soul as 'an individual
substance of a rational essence' we can gauge something of the
distance in anthropological self-understanding travelled by the
Reformers from their own scholastic origins. However, it is also
important to bear in mind that not only has the understanding of
the self undergone a radical transformation in their hands but that
the very ground on which the discussion of the nature of the self is
carried on has been changed. The nature of the self is no longer to
be treated within the horizons of a metaphysically - and ontologically
- determined discourse framed by concepts and categories inher-
ited from classical philosophy but takes shape within a discourse
for which the self as will, as inward self-evaluation, has become
primary. Speculation has been displaced by the passion of the self
that, becoming conscious of its own nothingness, seeks a strictly
religious transformation and redemption.
Yet what of the world in which the drama of the self gets played
out? What of the stage on which this passion is enacted? Can that
simply be ignored: can thought really be expected so to discipline
itself as to ignore the factical context within which passional self
exists? Is, for example, the world of nature simply to be handed
over to the indifferent and quantitative procedures of science with-
out any further questioning as to what our being in the particular
kind of world we actually inhabit means for our subjective life? Is
our situatedness at a particular historical juncture merely a matter
of indifference, so that the situation of the self over against God is
34 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

conceived as somehow static and unchanging? Must nature and

history be left outside the project of our fundamental self-evalua-
tion before God? In other words: can the kind of exclusion of meta-
physics that Luther and Calvin required be carried through without
inviting a 'return of the repressed'?
Certainly, some twentieth-century reworkings of the Augustinian-
Lutheran-Calvinist tradition can be seen as manifesting just such a
return: this is, in some respects, the case with Karl Barth. I shall
return to this 'return of the repressed' in an appendix to this chap-
ter. First, however, I move to another earlier thinker in the Augus-
tinian line, Blaise Pascal, because it is in Pascal that the story of the
self that becomes as nothing before God in its culpable loss of an
original freedom is brought into connection - albeit a problematic
connection - with the picture of the world that emerged through
the scientific revolution of the early modern period.

PASCAL

The history of the Port-Royal community near Paris in the mid-

seventeenth century, where the strongly Augustinian teaching of
Jansenius was cultivated by such figures as Antoine Arnauld, the
abbe Saint-Cyran and, most famously, Pascal himself, shows that
the kind of view of human nothingness described by Luther and
Calvin was not a uniquely Protestant phenomenon.
Unlike Luther and Calvin, however, Pascal was able to relate the
Augustinian discourse on the divided self of the human subject to
the new world of the scientific revolution of which he was himself
very much a representative. Yet, although Pascal set the crisis of the
self on the stage of the cosmos made known by reason and by
science, and thus far recalls the synthesis of speculative and reli-
gious interests that took place in Platonism, this is not for the sake
of speculative ontology as such. Nonetheless (and looking towards
the project of German idealism) Pascal can be read as determining
the scope and problematic of any future ontology that would seek
to incorporate the Augustinian story of the self.
At first it might seem as if the way in which Pascal frames the
crisis of the divided self underlines even more strongly the singu-
larity of the human being's subjective experience within a universe
dominated by mathematically determinable laws of rigorous inflex-
ibility. It is also striking that, in his unfinished Pensees, Pascal achieves
 The Augustinian Inheritance 35

this by means of a few extraordinarily condensed reflections and

aphorisms.
In, for example, the reflections on 'The disproportion of man'
Pascal invites his reader to consider, first, the immensity of the cos-
mos, in which even the orbit of the sun is merely 'the tiniest point
compared to that described by the stars revolving in the firmament',
a thought, in comparison with which the individual himself 'is lost',
enclosed in a 'little dungeon'; but, then, Pascal continues, consider
'another prodigy equally astounding', namely the microscopic world,
in which no particle is so small that it cannot be further subdivided
revealing world upon world within itself.

Anyone who considers himself in this way will be terrified at

himself, seeing his mass, as given him by nature, supporting him
between these two abysses of infinity and nothingness, will trem-
ble at these marvels... For, after all, what is man in nature? A
nothing compared to the infinite, a whole compared to the noth-
ing, a middle point between all and nothing, infinitely remote
from an understanding of the extremes . . . Equally incapable of
seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in
which he is engulfed . . . We are floating in a medium of vast
extent, always drifting uncertainly, blown to and fro; whenever
we think we have a fixed point to which we can cling and make
fast, it shifts and leaves us behind; if we follow it, it eludes our
grasp, slips away and flees eternally before us. Nothing stands
still for u s . . . We burn with desire to find a firm footing, an
ultimate, lasting base on which to build a tower rising up to
infinity, but our whole foundation cracks and the earth opens up
into the depth of the abyss.47

Within this situation of contradiction, the greatest contradiction

of all is to be found in the fact that we are ourselves conscious of
it. Our capacity for thought distinguishes us from all other crea-
tures in this vast, incalculable cosmos, that macro- and micro-
cosmically transcends us so awe-inspiringly. By making us aware
of the contradiction that we are, thought raises that contradiction
to a new level. Pascal again portrays this situation with condensed
brilliance.

Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking

reed. There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to
36 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

crush him: a vapour, a drop of water is enough to kill him. But

even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler
than his slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advan-
tage the universe has over him. The universe knows none of this.
(Ibid., p. 95)

No wonder that he adds the often-quoted line: 'The eternal silence

of these infinite spaces fills me with dread' (ibid.).
Here, then, we see again the Augustinian vision of human exist-
ence as a failed project, a will that is responsible for its own failure
to be that to which it aspires, that which it knows or believes it
should be. We burn with desire, as Pascal put it, to establish our-
selves on a firm, ontologically secure base, only to find that very
base repeatedly elude us, cracking under our feet and revealing the
emptiness of all our aspirations and speculations: the emptiness,
the unfoundedness, that is, of our selves; the emptiness, the
unfoundedness, that we are.
Yet this situation is not described in the exclusively religious
language of Paul's Letter to the Romans, as a conflict between gos-
pel and law. Pascal's apologetic concern, writing for those he seeks
to draw into the community of faith rather than for those already
within it, means that he cannot rely solely on a vocabulary that is
only intelligible to the faithful. By the very nature of his project, he
must go out to meet his readers where they are. Pascal thus re-
writes the Augustinian description of the divided self on the canvas
of a world that is the world known to his contemporaries, whether
with regard to the social world of the French court (as in his com-
ments about boredom and diversion) or with regard to the new
world being opened up by science and technology.
Nor is it merely a matter of chance that he should do this. For the
century that separates Pascal from Luther and Calvin had seen, as
Pascal's own comments suggest, a shaking of the foundations. The
language of theology and of Christian doctrine is no longer unchal-
lenged as the common language of intellectual enquiry or social
construction. Pascal is not just an apologist because that happened
to be the way in which his talents directed him. Pascal was an
apologist because a purely dogmatic understanding of the human
subject, shaped out of the internal resources of the Christian com-
munity and addressed primarily to that community, was no longer
sufficient. The very style of argumentation in Luther and Calvin
 The Augustinian Inheritance 37

involved repeated appeal to scripture and to the theological tradi-

tion. Such appeal is lacking in Pascal. The vision of the human
subject as a vanishing speck, poised between the abysses of infinity
and nothingness, is not a vision that can be proved by scripture or
tradition, but is presented as a direct appeal to the subjective expe-
rience of the reader; 'Isn't this how you too experience yourself?' is
the question posed to us by each of Pascal's existential descriptions.
Yet, if Pascal does not begin with theology, neither does he re-
inscribe the religious situation within cosmology. If the new vision
of the cosmos opened up by the scientific revolution provides a
context in which to set the human drama, the point is precisely that
this context is itself wnable to explain that drama. Knowing the
universe does not mean knowing the human heart - because there
is no single point of view, no single perspective within the universe
from which human beings can grasp the whole. Every horizon is an
infinitely receding horizon. And, conversely: there is no single point
of view, no single perspective within the universe from which human
beings can themselves be observed and grasped and known, finally
and irreducibly, as objects of scientific enquiry. Although Pascal
clearly believed that Christianity was, in an objective sense, 'true',
his apologetic strategy pre-empts any attempt to return to a specu-
lative or ontological understanding of the human situation. The
truth of Christianity is no longer framed by a discourse on 'being'
and 'non-being' as metaphysically valid categories; it is instead
framed by a discourse on the needs, the miseries, the wretchedness,
the pride and the tragedy of the human subject. That discourse
cannot be validated by any general metaphysic but only by the
answering testimony of those same human needs and miseries. The
search for understanding itself can go no other way than the way
of passion and engagement, forsaking the illusion of a universalizable
'knowledge'. It is a matter of and for the heart.
But although the universe does not explain human beings, by
staging the anthropological drama in the way he does Pascal has
relocated the Augustinian volitionalist understanding of the self as
an internally contradictory, self-annihilating passion and insubstan-
tial 'nothing' onto a ground that is accessible to general human
experience. This, I suggest, signals an epochal shift in anthropologi-
cal reflection and one that was to provide a starting-point for the
new ventures of metaphysical thinking that were to come with the
advent of German idealism and its critics.
38 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

APPENDIX: THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED IN

KARL BARTH'S DOCTRINE OF 'DAS NICHTIGE'

Luther and Calvin, I have argued, sought to separate out the task
of Christian theology from the enterprise of speculative metaphys-
ics and to keep it uncontaminated by any kind of ontology. From
the standpoint of the Reformation the question about Being (and
therefore of the ontological status of descriptions of the human
subject in terms of nothingness) has no place in theology. But is it
possible to exclude this question from any important interpretation
of human existence on anything other than a provisional basis?
Indeed, even if the question as to what kind of being the human
being is is ultimately unanswerable, doesn't that final unanswer-
ability only reveal itself to those who have followed the question
through to the bitter end? To put it another way: doesn't the tactic
of simply declaring the question to be irrelevant, leave it free to
play in the margins of theology in such a way that it will continue
to interrupt the discourse of theology with a never-ending stream
of absurd, irrelevant and phantasmagoric interventions? To say, as
a grammatical remark, This question cannot be asked' doesn't help
resolve a situation where the question is being asked. Since it is
being asked there is therefore a job to be done in asking what the
question means and why, in its own terms, it must be superseded.
These interventions by a marginalized question represent, I have
suggested, something like the 'return of the repressed' in Freudian
psychology. In twentieth-century theology Karl Barth represents a
particularly interesting example of just such a return.48
As for Augustine, Luther and Calvin, so too for Barth does Paul's
Letter to the Romans represent a defining moment in theology. In
Barth's commentary on this the theme of human nothingness be-
fore God is evoked in an extraordinarily powerful sequence of words
and images. The apostle is one in whom 'a void becomes visible',
a void that reveals to us our situation as wanderers in the night,
worshippers of the No-God, subject to the 'No' of the true God and
utterly questionable in our manner of existing; God 'is He whom
we do not know', 'the hidden abyss', from whom we are separated
by 'the crevasse, the polar zone, the desert barrier' - by a distance
whose 'ultimate significance' is 'sharp, acid and disintegrating', for
God is 'Wholly Other'. So, 'if the experience of religion is more than
a void . . . it is a shameless and abortive anticipation of that which can
proceed from the unknown God alone.' Our sole reality is - death.49
 The Augustinian Inheritance 39

Barth's basic view of the human situation, shaped by the tradi-

tion of Luther and Calvin (and such other prophets of the negative
as Jeremiah, Griinewald, Pascal, Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard) would
therefore seem to rule out any way of dealing with the question of
nothingness that would bring it back under the aegis of an objecti-
fying and speculative mode of knowledge. Yet his discussion of the
question of nothingness in his later Church Dogmatics would seem
to do just that - i.e, to restore an objectifying, speculative and, ultim-
ately, ontologically determined treatment of the subject.
The question is addressed at length in Volume III/3 of the Church
Dogmatics. Here Barth is concerned to address what he regards as
claims by Heidegger and Sartre to a 'knowledge' of nothingness, a
knowledge that is based on the human capacity for self-understanding
rather than on the knowledge that comes on the basis of the divine
void.
In the course of his discussion Barth distinguishes between the
nothingness that belongs to the situation of the creature as such and
the nothingness that characterizes evil in its opposition to God, i.e.
the nothingness of the ex nihilo and the nothingness that accrues
from the fall. In pursuing this distinction, however, Barth not only
restores the primacy of speculation: he also carries speculation fur-
ther than Augustine himself ever did.
Barth's account of nothingness (Das Nichtige) is haunted by the
dilemma that it is theologically inappropriate to ascribe the origin
of such nothingness either to God (for that would make God the
origin of evil) or to the creature (for that would be to trespass on
the sole lordship of God). There is, he says, a perfectly proper form
of non-being that belongs to the creature as such. Its contingency
and finitude, its not-being-God, the negative side of creation, are all
proper aspects of creatureliness and establish the basis for the cov-
enantal relationship between creature and Creator accomplished
definitively in Jesus Christ. 'True' nothingness, however, is some-
thing else again. It has no place in creation. It is 'inimical to', 'in
opposition to' God and 'demands on our p a r t . . . a radical fear and
loathing.'50 Yet how can anything exist which is thus opposed to the
will of God who is the sole Creator and originator of all that is?
'Only God and His creature really and properly are. But nothing-
ness is neither God nor His creature' (CD III/3, p. 349). On the
other hand it is 'surely not nothing or non-existent' (ibid.). So, 'in
a third way of its own nothingness "is"' (ibid.). Having previously
acknowledged that with regard to this particular question 'the
40 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

necessary brokenness of all theological thought and utterance' are

especially manifest (CD III/3, p. 293), Barth does not now hesitate
to pile on the paradoxes: Nothingness 'exists only through God, in
the power of the divine negation and rejection, of the divine judge-
ment', it 'does not exist in itself, but only in this state of antithesis'
(CD II/3, p. 332); it is 'that from which God has separated Himself
and in face of which he asserts Himself and exerts His positive
will,' it 'has no power save that which it is allowed by God,' 'It "is"
not as God and His creation are, but only in its own improper way,
as inherent contradiction, as impossible possibility' (CD III/3, p.
351); it 'is that which God does not will' (CD III/3, p. 352).
If the primordial manifestation of this nothingness is in the chaos
of Genesis 1 (and Barth offers an extraordinary exegesis of the Spirit
that moves across the face of the abyss in Genesis 1.2 as represent-
ing this power of nothingness rather than the Spirit of God itself
(CD III/l, pp. 102ff.)), its true face is 'that which brought Jesus
Christ to the cross, and that which he defeated there' (CD III/3, p.
305).51 Yet if Barth can say, with Calvin, that the real form of this
evil nothingness is, above all, the sin of man, and if he acknowl-
edges the problematic nature of all theological language in this area,
his concern with the 'reality' of nothingness points to a virtually
Manichean hypostatization of evil-as-nothingness that Augustine
would surely have refused.
This is not merely a 'return of the repressed' but, as such, it is
also a warning that claims to dispense with the question as to the
kind of being that belongs to the human subject in its self-disclo-
sure as nothingness before God may not merely be premature but
may lead thinking into a final dishonesty, no matter how good the
intentions.
A more adequate approach to settling the metaphysical accounts
is to be found by asking more precisely as to the outcome of the
radical transformation of Augustinian thought that occurred in
German idealism and that was critically carried forward by such
figures as Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
 Nothingness and the
Return of Metaphysics
HEGEL: INTRODUCTION

In the Augustinian tradition nothingness is thought through its

refractions in a sequence of interlocking concepts: creaturely de-
pendence, fallenness, time, and the will (or self) in its existential
failure to be what it is. Nonetheless, nothingness itself is not thought
in its thematic unity. In the case of Augustine himself this is be-
cause its various manifestations are only united by virtue of the fact
that (like everything else) they are modifications of the one being
that is the prime metaphysical reality. In the case of the Augustin-
ianism of the Reformers it is because the very possibility of thinking
these fundamental religious realities is denied. Yet, by virtue of
their thoroughgoing foregrounding of the crisis of the will, the Re-
formers paradoxically prepared the way for a reinvention of meta-
physics on the basis of the self-in-search-of-itself - a reinvention
that would therefore locate nothingness at the very centre of the
metaphysical project. This turn in the history of metaphysics is above
all associated with the name of Hegel and so it is to Hegel that we
now turn.
If Hegel is paradigmatic for the characteristically modern
reinvention of metaphysical speculation on the ground of human
subjectivity we have to ask how far his claims on behalf of a meta-
physics founded on subjectivity (and, therefore, in an Augustinian
perspective, founded on the essential nothingness of the human
subject) actually reach? It is certainly the case that Hegel's develop-
ment of the dialectics of nothingness seems to involves claims of
objective and even cosmological validity; dialectical logic, he claimed,
reveals the inner life of the divine Trinity prior to the creation of the
world.1 Early critics, such as Trendelenburg (followed by Kierkegaard),
argued that Hegel's system claimed (falsely) to be able to generate
a complete representation of reality out of the resources of logic
alone and so to construct the world on an a priori basis. Others,

41
42 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

such as McTaggart, have given a more modest interpretation of

Hegel's aims and arguments, arguing that nowhere does he claim
to be able to do without the input of normal sense experience or
empirical science and that his system has primarily to do with
the necessary conditions under which we represent the world to
ourselves rather than with the way the world is in itself. That is
to say, it is essentially 'transcendental' in a sense that Kant would
have understood and approved.2
The question that is at stake here is vital to the understanding of
Hegel's account of nothingness. Put most simply, it is this: is non-
being/nothingness essentially reducible to the logical function of
negation - or does the logical function of negation itself determine
the very structure of the world? Moreover, if Hegel does indeed see
nothingness as ontologically significant, how far are both content
and concept of ontology qualified by his subjective orientation?
Indeed, to put it bluntly, if ontology is henceforth to be founded on
nothingness, can it still be ontology? Must it not pass over into a
kind of history, the renarration of what exists only as occurring in
time? Must not Hegelian reason succumb to post-Hegelian hermen-
eutics and, in the end, to deconstruction?
Two key texts will serve to focus this question: the Introduction
and first chapter of the so-called Greater Logic and the Preface to the
Phenomenology of Spirit. Bearing in mind Hegel's own strictures in
the Phenomenology on those who think that reading the aims and
results of a philosophical system can itself count as doing philo-
sophical work we shall not claim to have dealt adequately with the
issues raised by these two introductory passages. Nonetheless, the
systematic nature of Hegel's thought itself means that these texts
can take us some considerable distance towards illuminating the
decisively 'Hegelian' understanding of nothingness - and of the
implications of that understanding for both philosophy and theology.

HEGEL: LOGIC

In The Science of Logic Hegel begins with the concept of science

(wissen) itself. This concept assumes the unity of subject and object
in an act of knowing (wissen) in abstraction from any particular
content or contents. In other words, logic is not the study of what
it is to know about history or astrophysics or any particular posi-
tive science. It is the study of knowing itself, of what it is to know,
in complete abstraction from the specific content of knowing. This
 Nothingness and the Return of Metaphysics 43

is why logic must begin with what is only given in, with and under
the concept of knowing itself, and this, Hegel says, is 'Being': to
know something is, at its simplest, to be able to say 'it is'. Being is
the most immediate form of consciousness, the undifferentiated unity
of subject and object. Simple immediacy and pure Being correspond
to one another completely. Being cannot therefore be differentiated
either internally or in relation to anything else. It is pure indeter-
minacy and completely empty. If - to think what cannot be thought
- we imagine any mental act at all in this context, even the simplest
act of intuition (Anschauen), it can only be an intuition of Being by
Being itself and, as such, without content. We can think nothing in
connection with such an intuition. It is completely empty. Or (if we
read the Logic as making no pretensions beyond the analysis of the
conditions of truthful predication) to say of something 'It is' is not
yet to have said anything meaningful. In such an expression we
have said nothing at all. Either way we have no way of differentiat-
ing between Being and Nothing (Nichts).
Being and Nothing are, therefore, inseparable. They coexist in a
relationship of always already having passed over into one another.
This unity Hegel calls Becoming (Werden). Becoming, however, has
a double-structure in which Nothing relates to Being and Being to
Nothing. These two relations are defined as Emergence and Disso-
lution (Entstehen and Vergehen respectively) - and yet Hegel draws
back from claiming that with this move he has created out of purely
logical resources any obligatory relationship to an external world of
phenomenal change. For these terms, though seemingly charged
with a certain descriptive force, exist logically in a state of mutual
cancellation and reciprocal paralysis. It is only when grasped as a
whole, as a motionless unity of Being and Nothing, that Becoming
is constituted as a new immediacy, which Hegel calls Dasein.
But what is Hegel actually saying in all this?
According to Trendelenburg, he has already played a sophistical
trick in order to move from the realm of pure thought to the realm
of things, a move which, Trendelenburg argues, can only be made
with the (in this case unacknowledged) assistance of empirical ex-
perience. Trendelenburg ('a man who has preferred to be content
with Aristotle', as Kierkegaard put it3) confronts the dialectical
'movement' with the following dilemma:

Either the negation by means of which alone the progress of the

second and third moments is mediated is the purely logical ne-
gation of A/Not Not-A - but then it can neither produce anything
44 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

determinate in itself in the second moment nor yield an act of

unification in the third moment. Or it is the real contradiction -
in which case it cannot be arrived at by a [purely] logical route
and its dialectic is not a dialectic within pure thought.4

On Trendelenburg's view, as McTaggart was to put i t , ' . . . Hegel

attempted what was impossible and achieved what was useless.'5
But, McTaggart argues, Trendelenburg has misunderstood Hegel's
intentions and, indeed, Hegel's actual argument. McTaggart claims
that Hegel never intended to deny the relationship between thought
and reality, nor need pure thought in Hegel's sense be assumed to
be something existing apart from experience. 'All thought', he states,
'requires something immediate on which to act. But this need not
prevent the dialectic process from being one of pure thought.. .'6
In other words, Hegel is not denying that there is an immediate
element (i.e. a moment of experience) in knowledge; what he is
denying is that such immediacy is the sole measure of knowledge.
Knowledge, fed by experience, becomes what it is only by virtue of
a complex internal structure that cannot be reduced to experience
- and it is this complex internal structure that the Logic is setting
out to depict. Thus, when Hegel, in later sections of the Logic seems
(to Trendelenburg and to Kierkegaard) to be arguing that the (real)
worlds of nature and spirit are generated out of the structures of
pure thought, McTaggart asks us to see this, as he sees all the tran-
sitions in Hegel's system, as involving no fresh truth but merely 'a
contemplation of the same truth from a fresh point of view'.7
Yet even if this is so, this does not explain the meaning that the
possibility of such a change in its point of view is to have for the
knowing subject. In the Aesthetics, for example, Hegel argues that
even a mediocre landscape painting is more interesting than 'the
mere natural landscape' because of 'the feeling and insight' with
which it has been invested by the artist.8 This comment by no means
implies that the 'real' landscape doesn't 'exist' in the commonsense
meaning of the word. It does show, however, that the meaning that
the landscape has for us is determined primarily by the way in
which the subject represents it to itself. Whether or not the subject
can determine the being of the object, it certainly does determine the
meaning of that being, that is, what that being 'is' for us. If, at one
level, such a subjective metaphysics does not dispute the ground of
an objective metaphysics of being, its claims to provide a frame-
work of understanding are no less total. At the same time, knowledge
 Nothingness and the Return of Metaphysics 45

acquires an 'existential interest'. This has been powerfully brought

out by one of Hegel's most influential twentieth-century interpret-
ers: Alexander Kojeve.
Kojeve does not see Hegel as abandoning the legitimate horizons
of subjectivity in order to found a new objective world-order, but
nor does he see him as merely offering a redescription of the world
that simply leaves everything in its place. Kojeve has laid particu-
lar emphasis on Hegel's claim that 'the subject is substance'; that,
instead of the human subject being thought in terms of prede-
termined ontological or cosmological categories, the ontological
categories are now thought from the standpoint of human subjec-
tivity and its characteristic dynamics, pre-eminently its character as
discourse or language. Kojeve further understands this reorientation
of philosophy as involving 'the acceptance, without reservations, of
the fact of death'.9 That is to say, Hegel's philosophy is explicable
only on the premise of the knowing subject being historical, finite
and mortal. But such a subject can have no interest in trespassing
in the forbidden realms of metaphysical speculation.
It is no coincidence that the text which stands at the centre of
Kojeve's interpretation is the Phenomenology of Spirit rather than the
Logic, because it is in the Phenomenology that Hegel seeks to show
how the structure of affirmation/negation/negation of the negation
set out in the opening pages of the Logic can be correlated with the
processes that are constitutive of empirical science, human history,
culture and religion and philosophy. In the Preface to the Phenom-
enology he embarks on the task of explaining how the relationship
between being and nothingness described in the Logic is determina-
tive not merely of the form but of the actual history of human
consciousness.10

HEGEL: PHENOMENOLOGY

In the Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel defines his

own position by polemically distancing himself from Fichte and
Schelling and their principle of intellectual intuition, according to
which the T, the knowing subject, intuits itself as Being, as the
absolute ground of all other beings and objects of knowledge. Where-
as Descartes had had to infer the existence of the T from what was
for him the sole immediate datum, 'I think', these idealists believed
that the T actually intuits, rather than merely infers, its Being.
46 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

For Hegel, however, such claims amount to no more than 'a

monochromatic formalism' which does no more than 'to palm off
its Absolute as the night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are
black.'11 He is generous enough to his opponents to see that in them
philosophy seeks more than the mere accumulation of unconnected
empirical or historical facts or the random efforts of an unsystematic
rationalism.

Spirit has broken with the world it has hitherto inhabited and
imagined, and is of a mind to submerge it in the past, and in the
labour of its own transformation... But just as the first breath
drawn by a child after its long, quiet nourishment [Hegel means
its embryonic life] breaks the gradualness of merely quantitative
growth - there is a qualitative leap, and the child is born - so
likewise the Spirit in its formation matures slowly and quietly
into its new shape . . . But this new world is no more a complete
actuality than is a new-born child . . . So too, Science, the crown
of a world of Spirit, is not complete in its beginnings . . . the ini-
tial appearance of the new world is, to begin with, only the whole
veiled in its simplicity12

However, if such simplicity is allowed to count as a philosophical

virtue, then, Hegel says, we are in the realm of 'complacency' and
'rapturous haziness'.13 Compared with the earthbound condition of
what went before, it is an advance, but the fact that Spirit can be (at
least temporarily) satisfied with this 'bare feeling of the divine in
general' is simply a measure of the extent of its impoverishment. It
is like a wanderer in the desert for whom a mere mouthful of water
is sufficient to satisfy its craving.14
True science, Hegel insists, requires an articulate, differentiated,
formally structured representation.

Without such articulation, Science lacks universal intelligibility,

and gives the appearance of being the esoteric possession of a
few individuals . . . Only what is completely determined is at once
exoteric, comprehensible, and capable of being learned and ap-
propriated by all.15

'The True is the whole', he states - and the whole precisely as an

articulated system. General terms such as 'the Divine' or 'the Ab-
solute' are meaningless unless or until they are given specific content.
 Nothingness and the Return of Metaphysics 47

If the subjective idealists have been prepared to take the initial step
in understanding Substance as Subject, they have failed, as yet, to
grasp the true character of such subjectivity.

This Substance is, as Subject, pure, simple negativity, and is for this
very reason the bifurcation of the simple; it is the doubling which
sets up opposition, and then again the negation of this indifferent
diversity and of its antithesis. Only this self-restoring sameness,
or this reflection in otherness within itself - not an original or
immediate unity as such - is the True.16

The character of subjectivity as pure negation serves the require-

ment of systematic articulation precisely because the specific,
determinate negation of what is given in immediate experience is
the motor force by which objects are systematically differentiated
from one another and yet related in a genetic process of universal
metamorphosis.
If we are to justify our claim to know something as it is, we must
be committed to what Hegel calls 'the seriousness, the suffering,
the patience and the labour of the negative'.17 So, for example, the
divine Being is, as such, merely abstract: to exist concretely, for
itself as Spirit, it must journey through the world of negation and
death. The true is not merely to be established at the level of es-
sence: it must also be articulated in that which is other than essence
- in the accidental, the contingent, the finite.

The circle that remains self-enclosed and, like substance, holds its
moments together, is an immediate relationship, one therefore
which has nothing astonishing about it. But that an accident as
such, detached from what circumscribes it, what is bound and is
actual only in its context with others, should attain an existence
of its own and a separate freedom - that is the tremendous power
of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure T. Death,
if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things
the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the
greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understand-
ing for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not
the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by
devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself
in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds
itself... Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the
48 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

face and tarrying with i t . . . This power is identical with what we

earlier called the Subject, which by giving determinateness an
existence in its own element supersedes abstract immediacy.. .18

That which classical philosophy understood as responsible for

the ontological instability of the phenomenal world and for the
deficiency of our so-called 'knowledge' (better: 'belief') of that world
has been brought from the margins of philosophy to its very centre.
What was formerly conceived of as the antithesis of rational thought
is now itself thought of as that very power.
But there is more: we have already noted how, for Kojeve, Hegel's
philosophy is a philosophy (indeed, Kojeve claims, the first philo-
sophy) to completely internalize the finitude and mortality of its
subject, a philosophy by and about that unique conscious finite,
mortal existent we call the human being. But this philosophy is also,
Kojeve argues, a philosophy that incorporates the Judaeo-Christian
conception of the human subject as essentially historical. The exist-
ence of the finite and mortal human subject discloses itself -
phenomenologically - precisely as history, as temporality. History
is the process of successive determinate negations that constitutes
the whole. Time, categorized under the rubric of non-being by
Augustine, is - and precisely in this very non-being - re-evaluated
as the very motor-force and ineluctable condition of the project of
being human.
Yet if Hegel demands a reversal of Augustinian metaphysical
values with respect to time, contingency and human freedom, this
very re-evaluation is achieved by applying the equally Augustinian
account of the divided self, an account that sees the human subject
as being responsible for itself as a locus of nothingness within the
plenitude of divinely created being. It has already been noted that
Augustine's own thought is heavy with the seeds of a destruction
of metaphysics. But, whereas Augustine's starting-point is meta-
physical and speculative (in such a way that he is condemned to
think the existential dimension within the metaphysical horizon),
Hegel has made the Lutheran crisis of faith determinative for philo-
sophical thought. The self which in this way gives shape to the
philosophical project can therefore only 'know' itself under the form
of its alienation from its own true being, as subject to finitude,
contingency and as a being-towards-death.
The influence of the Christian story itself in shaping Hegel's
philosophical programme can, however, also be understood in more
general terms. The story of a subject that only attains to ultimate
 Nothingness and the Return of Metaphysics 49

fulfilment by virtue of having lost its original 'self-enclosed' state

of perfection by no means coincidentally recalls the overarching
Christian narrative of fall-and-redemption although that story is
now radically re-interpreted: the fall is, as N.P. Williams put it in
describing Hegel's position, 'in reality a successful climb'19 - or,
more precisely, as the necessary prelude to such if the labour of the
negative is carried through to its proper conclusion. As such the
'fall' in fact comes to coincide with creation itself as the process by
which we come to be what we are.
The pattern of the God who subjects himself to finitude and to
death as the condition of the restitution of truth also evokes the
Christian story of the God who becomes incarnate and dies on the
cross - and Hegel is to speak later in the Phenomenology of 'the specu-
lative Good Friday', of the death of God that marks the complete
opening up of all that is finite and subject to death as a proper,
indeed essential, dimension of truth and therefore of philosophy.
Yet Hegel is neither simply adapting philosophy to the model
of Augustinian religious anthropology, nor simply reversing the
ontological values of Platonism. In the process of mutual interpen-
etration by which these two sources come to ground the history of
his own thought, both are transformed. The concept of non-being
is not simply brought in from the margins to the centre of the
philosophical task - it is also redefined in dynamic terms by virtue
of its relation to the freedom, contingency and temporality of the
self-seeking divided self. By making the crisis of the divided self
foundational to his project and thinking it through in ontological
categories, Hegel re-invents metaphysics on a new basis. The schema
of dialectical logic is played out (or, as Hegel might have put it,
is made 'actual') in the dynamic evolution of human history in its
many-sided totality: political, scientific, artistic, religious and, not
least, philosophical.
Hegel did not, of course, think in a vacuum and if he is spoken
of here as 're-inventing metaphysics' this is not to deny that his
project constitutes a very specific solution to a specific problem in
idealistic thought in Germany after Kant. For if Kant had promoted
a view of the self as active and essentially productive of its world,
in accordance with the a priori categories that the subject itself
brings to experience, he had made it equally clear that by that very
same principle the world as it is in itself is necessarily opaque to the
knowing self. We can only know in an absolute sense what we have
ourselves constructed in accordance with the laws and forms of our
own consciousness, yet we can never know that the world itself is
50 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

actually constructed in accordance with those laws. The epistemo-

logical grandeur of Kant's philosophy is matched by its ontological
humility. Yet post-Kantian idealists - notably Fichte, Schelling and
Hegel himself - had difficulty in accepting Kant's own self-denying
strictures on the scope of knowledge. Philosophy, they felt - if it
was really going to be able to claim to give an account of knowledge
- needed to be able to secure its own principles, rather than leave
them in the obscurity of such an unknown realm of things-in-
themselves. Having assumed Kant's model of the productive self,
the desideratum of these thinkers was to give a satisfactory account
of how the productive subject of consciousness can secure its own
foundations ontologically and so to guarantee the truth of its world-
picture. In their various ways they each offer an explanation as to
how the subject can thus get behind itself and secure its own foun-
dations. For Fichte and Schelling this is primarily through an intui-
tion that is variously characterized as 'intellectual' or 'aesthetic' but
that, in either case, is endowed with a quality of incorrigibility and
immediate self-certification. For Hegel such immediate intuition is,
as we have seen, totally inadequate. Philosophy's engagement with
its unknown other must be shown to be of a more radical, far-
reaching and agonal quality, if philosophers are really going to
claim to have given sufficient grounds for believing in a world that
is entirely accessible to the reason in whose image it was created.
If, on the one hand, Hegel is therefore more 'dangerous' than his
predecessors, his belief in the achievability of his project is no less
complete.
Yet, if we are tempted to think of Hegel merely as an unfortunate
sufferer from philosophical hubris, we should pause to consider
whether (and if so how) it might be possible to think such an an-
thropology without invoking a general view of things, without pro-
jecting a universal horizon of being within which to carry such
thinking through. If we want to justify a religious conception of
human nothingness we cannot simply by-pass the question as to the
status of that conception with respect to knowledge - not, at least,
without inviting the return of the repressed.
It is in the light of this question that we now turn to Kierkegaard
and Schopenhauer, who represent two attempts to think nothing-
ness from a religious but non-metaphysical standpoint, as a form of
non-knowledge, and who thereby prepared the way for the advent
of later, non-religious forms of existentialism, such as those of
Nietzsche and Sartre.
 Nothingness and the Return of Metaphysics 51

KIERKEGAARD: INTRODUCTION

Kierkegaard's relation to Hegel has been much discussed. Was he

one of Hegelianism's most unrelenting and thorough-going critics;
or, despite all the polemics, did he remain in some sense under the
sway of the Master? How far and in what respects are Kierkegaard's
distinctive religious and philosophical positions susceptible of in-
corporation into the system?20
The topic of nothingness certainly provides us with one area in
which answers to such questions seem to be required. For, as we
shall see, Kierkegaard too makes the identification between noth-
ingness as a condition of creaturely existence and nothingness as
the distinctive root of human freedom central to his understanding
of the human situation. Similarly, the process he describes as 'becom-
ing as nothing' is closely correlated with the originary temporaliza-
tion of the self. Yet there are also far-reaching differences. Chief
among these differences, it will be argued, are the implications for
what is said about non-being with respect to knowledge.
It has become customary to preface any discussion of Kierkegaard
by defining the attitude to be taken towards to the extraordinarily
diverse and ironically mystifying character of many of his most
important works. However, the extensive problems of interpreta-
tion that these texts present cannot easily be dealt with in the present
context.21 Of the works discussed here, The Concept of Anxiety and
Philosophical Fragments are two of the most influential of his early
pseudonymous works, published under the pseudonyms of Vigilius
Haufniensis and Johannes Climacus respectively. Anxiety claims to
be a psychological study relating to a fundamental dogmatic con-
cept, namely original sin; Fragments sets itself up as an exploration
of three closely interrelated questions: 'Can a historical point of
departure be given for an eternal consciousness; how can such a
point of departure be of more than historical interest [and] can an
eternal happiness be built on historical knowledge?' As an experi-
mental testing of what Climacus takes to be the Socratic position,
it also serves Kierkegaard as a means of critiquing what he regards
as key elements in the Hegelian system. Repetition and Either-Or are
books that seem to have the form of novels in the tradition of the
Bildungsroman.22 At the same time they raise and address a range of
metaphysical, existential and religious questions and situations. Here
we shall be using them specifically to throw further light on the
issues of time and repentance. The Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses
52 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

are a collection of religious addresses published under Kierkegaard's

own name. Moreover, the relationship between each of these texts
and Kierkegaard's overall religious purpose remains problematic.
In bringing them together to illuminate the question of nothingness
I am implicitly accepting that they are part of a coherent religious
account of the human situation that can be read out of the author-
ship as a whole, although I do not claim that the presence of an over-
arching strategy running through that authorship justifies each and
every indiscriminate plundering of Kierkegaard's works, nor that
Kierkegaard himself had a clear-cut 'position' prior to the actual
production of that authorship. As he was to acknowledge in his
retrospective account of the authorship The Point of View for my
Work as an Author, he himself had to learn to become a reader of his
own works before he could discover their true meaning.23

KIERKEGAARD: THE CONCEPT OF ANXIETY24

The book of this name, which, despite the bearing of its content on
such dogmatic questions as the fall and original sin, Kierkegaard
carefully defines as 'psychological', draws heavily on the Hegelian
account of the fall as the transition from nature to Spirit or from
innocence to knowledge. It also reflects Kierkegaard's critical but
not unappreciative reading of Karl Rosenkranz's Psychologie, an
application of Hegelian principles to the field of psychology. This
reading is, for example, reflected in what is a decisive point in
Kierkegaard's text, when he defines 'the concept of anxiety' itself.
Set against an assumed background of the biblical story of creation
and fall, Kierkegaard describes the emergence of the human subject
as taking place only in and by means of the awakening of anxiety.

In innocence, man is not qualified as spirit but is psychically

qualified in immediate unity with his natural condition. The spirit
in man is dreaming... In this state there is peace and repose, but
there is simultaneously something else that is not contention and
strife, for there is indeed nothing against which to strive. What,
then, is it? Nothing. But what effect does nothing have? It begets
anxiety. This is the profound secret of innocence, that it is at the
same time anxiety. Dreamily the spirit projects its own actuality,
but this actuality is nothing, and innocence always sees this noth-
ing outside itself.25
 Nothingness and the Return of Metaphysics 53

It is notable that the key terms used or drawn on in this passage

- 'spirit', 'psyche' (or 'soul'), 'immediate unity' and 'nature' - are used
precisely in a Hegelian sense. So, we read in Rosenkranz: 'Man's
existence proceeds from nature, and in its immediate unity with
that [nature] we call the single spirit "soul" . . . As soul spirit is
dreaming...' 26 Recalling the Hegelian model of unity, broken up
by a dialectical negation that is at the same time a doubling and a
differentiation and proceeding to a fresh unity that reintegrates
the differentiated elements, we see 'nature' here as standing for
undifferentiated unity and the human subject, so long as it remains
within that natural unity, defined as soul; whereas 'spirit' repre-
sents a stage in which the subject has differentiated itself from nature
yet (for Rosenkranz at least) not repudiating its natural 'base' but
reintegrating it in an all-embracing act of self-consciousness.
Its very kinship to the Hegelian model also enables us to locate
Kierkegaard's departure from that model quite precisely. To do so
we turn back to the concept of anxiety itself and to that in which
anxiety is rooted and grounded: nothing. What is Kierkegaard
saying with this? A clear signal is given when he adds the follow-
ing definition: 'anxiety is freedom's actuality as the possibility of
possibility' (CA, p. 42). These programmatic statements offer a sum-
mary view of the yield issuing from the merging of ontological
schematization and psychological narrative. It is a view which rep-
resents the emergence of the human being as a self-conscious and
responsible subject (i.e. as spirit) occurring as the opening up within
the undifferentiated unity of nature of a dimension of possibility
which, as possibility, has (as yet) no actual existence, which, in this
sense, 'is not'. Nothing and possibility are the phenomenological
characteristics of this condition and anxiety its subjective correlate,
but, precisely as such, it is this condition itself. This condition is
therefore nothing other than the emergence of subjectivity. As
Kierkegaard says: 'That anxiety makes its appearance is the pivot
on which everything turns' (CA, p. 43).
It is argued, with reference to the Genesis narrative, that to be
anxious is not yet to be guilty, nor, indeed, does the fall follow
inevitably from the condition of anxiety. For this condition, as free-
dom, as the possibility of possibility, is completely indeterminate.
The concept of anxiety cannot be used to give a causal explanation
of the fall. As Kierkegaard repeatedly states, concepts of the fall
and of original sin are dogmatic concepts that belong strictly to
theology, to revelation; anxiety is a psychological concept that can
54 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

only serve to illuminate the condition that is the possibility of such

events. Once freedom has activated itself over against either the
divine will or natural immediacy, the stage of anxiety has already
been transcended. Similarly, psychology, understood as an objec-
tive science (albeit the science of what Hegel called 'subjective Spirit'),
cannot 'explain' the actuality of freedom, only the conditions under
which freedom occurs, anxiety itself being the main such condition.
Nonetheless, it is hard to avoid the impression that, for Kier-
kegaard, the genesis of the self by means of anxiety means that the
activation of freedom almost inevitably takes a negative form, so
that the origin of the self and its fall virtually coincide. The 'typical'
form of spirit in the world is the form of the failure to be spirit. In
another key passage Kierkegaard writes:

Anxiety may be compared with dizziness [vertigo]. He whose

eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy.
But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye
as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence
anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the
spirit wants to posit the synthesis [i.e. to assert its own existence
as the synthesis of freedom and nature] and freedom looks down
into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself.
Freedom succumbs in this dizziness. Further than this, psychol-
ogy cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything is
changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty.
Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has
explained and which no science can explain.
(CA, p. 61)

Does this mean, then, that freedom must fall and has therefore
been brought into the domain of ontology? Against this conclusion,
it should be noted that the passage quoted is taken from a section
'Subjective Anxiety' in a chapter 'Anxiety as Explaining Hereditary
Sin Progressively' in which Kierkegaard assumes Adam's fall and
seeks to develop the implications of that for the manifestations of
anxiety in subsequent individuals. In other words, the question is:
how does the manifestation of freedom as a failure to be itself in-
fluence a subsequent individual's relation to his own freedom - a
freedom to be attained, of course, precisely in and through anxiety?
The 'necessity' of the fall is not being stated as a necessary conse-
quence of anxiety per se, but anxiety is being framed - for the present
- by the history of the failure of freedom. It is also significant that,
 Nothingness and the Return of Metaphysics 55

in the final chapter, 'Anxiety as Saving Through Faith', Kierkegaard

goes on to frame anxiety quite otherwise: as a stage in the religious
development of the individual in a sense in which even Christ him-
self is said to have been anxious (CA, p. 155). Here we find, for
example: 'Whoever is educated by anxiety is educated by possibil-
ity, and only he who is educated by possibility is educated accord-
ing to his infinitude' (CA, p. 156). Anxiety can educate the individual
into faith. The vertigo of freedom can issue in a result quite other
than the fall:

In actuality, no one ever sank so deep that he could not sink

deeper. But he who sank in possibility - his eye became dizzy,
his eye became confused, so he could not grasp the measuring
stick that Tom, Dick and Harry hold out as a saving straw to one
sinking; his ear was closed so he could not hear what the market
price of men was in his own day, did not hear that he was just
as good as the majority. He sank absolutely, but then in turn he
emerged from the depth of the abyss lighter than all the trouble-
some and terrible things in life.
(CA, p. 158)

Anxiety, as the state from which freedom in a qualitative sense

'leaps' out, is itself indeterminate with regard to the 'result' of this
leap, whether it be a leap into sin or a leap into faith. On the other
hand, there is no freedom, no sin and no faith, without anxiety;
moreover, given the reciprocity of anxiety and nothingness, 'noth-
ingness' is thus inscribed as an integral moment of the human
project: not merely of the failure of that project but of that project
itself, even when seen, in faith, as triumphantly fulfilled. To see the
further implications of this we turn to the Philosophical Fragments,
where the theme of knowledge, that is, of the status of religious
concepts vis-a-vis the requirements of knowledge, is subjected to a
rigorous dialectical cross-examination.

KIERKEGAARD: REBIRTH AND REPENTANCE

In order to 'answer' the questions posed on its title page ('Can a

historical point of departure be given for an eternal consciousness;
how can such a point of departure be of more than historical inter-
est; can an eternal happiness be built on historical knowledge?')
Philosophical Fragments begins by asking the question: 'Can the truth
56 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

be learned?' Kierkegaard's pseudonym, Johannes Climacus, takes

Socrates as representing the position that it can. The Socratic model
of knowledge, as he portrays it, regards all knowledge as a species
of recollection and thus as something that is always already within
the orbit of human consciousness. As recollection truth is ultimately
a matter of self-explication or self-interpretation. There is no deci-
sive other to be known or to challenge the self's self-knowledge. All
is enclosed within a monistically conceived immanence. Within this
immanence, moreover, no particular moment is especially privi-
leged. Truth is attainable from any point within the system. If, then,
things are to be otherwise, Climacus suggests, it follows that the
moment in time must come to have decisive significance and it
follows from this that prior to learning the truth the learner must
have been in a state of ignorance so extreme that he did not even
know he was ignorant, a situation of complete untruth. Therefore,
the one who is to teach the truth must not only give the learner the
truth, but also the condition by means of which the truth is to be
recognized for what it is. This, however, turns out to be a fairly
transparent representation of the Christian story of redemption: the
learner who is in error is the sinner, the teacher who gives the
condition is the God himself as saviour, deliverer and reconciler,
the moment in which the 'learning' takes place is the fullness of
time, 'short and temporal... y e t . . . filled with the eternal'.27 The
impact of this moment in the life of the one who learns the truth
(who is saved or who becomes a believer) is, Climacus says, '. . .
a change... like the change from "not to be" to "to be". But this
transition from "not to be" to "to be" is indeed the transition of
birth. But the person who already is cannot be born, and yet he is
born. Let us call this transition rebirth . . .' (PF, p. 19).
Climacus then goes on to pose the further question: is the picture
he has experimentally put forward thinkable? And who could think
it? Surely, he says, it can only be the one who is or has been reborn.
In the moment, a person becomes aware that he was born, for his
previous state, to which he is not to appeal, was indeed one of
'not to be'. In the moment, he becomes aware of the rebirth, for his
previous state was one of 'not to be'.
(PF, p. 21)
The project, then, is thinkable, but only from the standpoint of
one who has known the moment as the decisive moment of transi-
tion from error to truth, from sin to salvation, from non-being to
 Nothingness and the Return of Metaphysics 57

being. From outside the position of faith, however, the implication

clearly is that the project cannot be thought, since the two stand-
points are divided by an 'infinite qualitative difference', as Climacus
was to put it in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Being cannot
be thought from the standpoint of non-being.
Moreover, even the sense in which the project is thinkable by one
who stands on the other side of the moment of rebirth is extremely
limited. For all Climacus is prepared to claim is that the one who
has been born can think back to the moment of birth. The moment
of birth establishes a 'new being', within which recollection is pos-
sible. One can think back to the beginning of faith from within the
life of faith. But even for faith the transition itself remains unthink-
able. Although the believer is conscious of his previous life of sin,
this present consciousness of sin is entirely other than the con-
sciousness that sin has of itself. The moment, as the exact point of
intersection of being and non-being, is at the same time the exact
point of intersection between the thinkable and the unthinkable.
But this unthinkability will therefore be ever present at the very
foundations of faith. For this foundation is nothing but the self-
activation of freedom out of the condition of nothingness/anxiety
and therefore as such groundless and beyond reason. The believing
subject can recollect his consciousness of the truth back to the
moment of rebirth but not beyond it.
This 'moment', it should be said, must not be conceived as a
static, discrete moment in time. It is not possible to locate the moment
temporally as, say, 5.30 p.m. on Tuesday 19 June. Although, for
instance, the incarnation, as a dateable historical moment, provides
Climacus with a pivotal objective correlate of the subjective mo-
ment of transition, the historical nature of this event is reduced to
the minimal report that' "We have believed that in such and such
a year the god appeared in the humble form of a servant, lived and
taught among us, and then died" '(PF, p. 104). In terms of an image
later employed by Karl Barth, the moment of incarnation relates to
history as a tangent to a circle: but that is precisely to say that it is
not in or of history.
Other works of Kierkegaard provide a variety of perspectives
that enable us to fill out our picture of what is involved in the rela-
tionship between the qualitative time of the moment and the con-
tinuity of linear time. These perspectives are those of repentance
and repetition, concepts that, in the religious writings, come to-
gether in the concept of patience.
58 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

The theme of repentance is broached by Judge William, Kier-

kegaard's fictional representative of the ethical position, whose let-
ters to the aesthete 'A' constitute the bulk of Either/Or Part II. In the
context of an exposition of the principle of self-choice as being the
foundation of the ethical life, the Judge introduces the notion of
repentance as relating the act of self-choice to temporality. One
who chooses his own self - an act which the Judge carefully distin-
guishes from the claims about self-positing in Fichtean and Roman-
tic Idealism - chooses a self that is not a metaphysical entity apart
from or outside of time. He chooses a self that is what it is solely
by virtue of the history that has brought it to its present. Salvation
for the self in whom the passion of freedom has been aroused is not
escape from the world but acceptance of the burden of its own
temporal concretion - and it is this action that the Judge defines as
'repentance': such a one, he says, 'repents himself back into himself,
back into the family, back into the race, until he finds himself in
God. Only on this condition can he choose himself, for only in this
way can he choose himself absolutely.'28 This act is also equated
with love for God: repentance is love for the self that God has
willed the self to be, it is the absolute and unqualified choice or
acceptance of itself 'from the hand of the eternal God' (EO II, p.
217). The relationship between repentance and time is further em-
phasized when the Judge contrasts the position he is describing
with that of mysticism. The mystic, in his view, chooses himself
absolutely, but does not do so with regard to his temporal life-
story. The mystic turns away from the world, rather than entering
ever more deeply into it. The experiences that the mystic seeks are
periodic and disconnected interruptions of life: '. . . there is no
development. Repetition in time is without meaning, continuity is
lacking' (EOII, p. 242). The mystic's self-choice is abstract, detached
from its concrete temporality and therefore also lacking in freedom
and ethical vigour. But this is precisely to say that it is not repentance:

The true concrete choice is the one by which I choose myself back
into the world in the very same moment I choose myself out of
the world. That is, when repenting I choose myself, I collect myself
in all my finite concretion, and when I have thus chosen myself
out of the finite in this way, I am in the most absolute continuity
with it.
(EO II, p. 249)
 Nothingness and the Return of Metaphysics 59

We shall return to the temporal aspect of repentance (see Chapter

3). Here, I seek only to emphasize how the project of thinking
through the selfhood of the self in its totality is denied on the basis
of the self's dependence on a creator whose way of being is quali-
tatively different from that of inner-worldly finitude. Ontological
discontinuity between itself and its ultimate foundation is written
in to the situation of the self, such that its existence as a self is
inseparable from its subjection to repeated and fundamental nega-
tion and the correlative unthinkability of its ground. In its indeter-
minacy and its unthinkability the self must be characterized (as it
is by Johannes Climacus) in terms of the axis being/non-being, an
axis that is in turn defined as the repeated transition that is consti-
tutive of the religious life.
Since, however, Kierkegaard also understands the religious task
as essentially equivalent to the human task, we must understand
these comments as applying not merely to a selective group of
religiously minded individuals (born again Christians, perhaps?)
but as normative for the human situation as such. The dialectic of
nothingness and freedom thus comes to define the field on which
the human drama is to be played out.
We can, in conclusion, identify three features of Kierkegaard's
position that stand in sharp contrast to anything to be found in the
Logic or the Phenomenology. Firstly, although constitutive of human
selfhood as such, the dialectic is unthinkable in the sense of non-
conceptualizable. It falls outside the scope of universal knowledge.
Even if we refine this statement to say that it hinges on what is
precisely the boundary between the thinkable and the unthinkable,
the intersection of being and nothingness, this boundary itself is
defined, in one aspect, as belonging to nothingness and so to the
unthinkable. Even if the recollective consciousness of repentance
can reach back to this boundary it can touch only one side of the
line. Secondly, and in close connection with this, the transition
concerned can only be made individually. No one else can deliver
me to myself. If the situation of anxiety - the rootedness of freedom
in non-being - is general, freedom, as the moment of becoming a
self in the true sense is inherently individual. Following on from
this, and thirdly, it is in the religious life of the individual, not in
relation to 'science', that the issue of the dialectic is decided, in the
actuality of the individual's living out the religious/human task.
Yet Kierkegaard's refusal of the 'speculative' character of Platonic,
60 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

Augustinian and Hegelian accounts of nothingness is not merely

anti-metaphysical (as was the case for Luther and Calvin). Kier-
kegaard - in this respect importantly akin to Hegel - has rather
brought about a philosophical situation in which the task of narrat-
ing the story of the divided self invites a rethinking of the funda-
mental questions of philosophy.

NOTHINGNESS AND WILL: SCHOPENHAUER

The twentieth century's experience and understanding of nihilism

is virtually inconceivable apart from the life and the writings of
Friedrich Nietzsche. Yet Nietzsche's own contribution to the revela-
tion of the void at the very heart of the modern experience is itself
inseparable from his own critical appropriation of Schopenhauer.
Indeed, to anticipate one outcome of the following discussion of
their work, it may well be that it is Schopenhauer who should in all
fairness be regarded as the real creator of the new paradigm which
Nietzsche was subsequently to exploit with such brilliance and to
so great effect. Nor, to be fair, would Nietzsche himself necessarily
have demurred from such a judgement. Despite the harshness of
many of the comments against the pessimism and decadence of
Schopenhauer's position in The Will to Power, even here it is appar-
ent that Schopenhauer is regarded as playing a pivotal role in the
understanding of modern nihilism. If Nietzsche has moved on from
the enthusiasm of Schopenhauer as Educator (an enthusiasm balanced
by a careful delineation of what he regarded as the 'dangers' at-
tendant upon the uniqueness of Schopenhauer's position in Ger-
man culture), the debt is nonetheless acknowledged.
We turn then to Schopenhauer's own writing, to one whose chef
d'ceuvre concludes: '. . . to those in whom the will has turned and
denied itself, this very real world of ours with all its suns and
galaxies, is - nothing.'29 This indicates that even though an index to
Schopenhauer's works might not offer many entries under 'noth-
ingness', the concept itself is fundamental to his thought as a whole,
and it is therefore necessary to frame his specific comments within
a larger overview.
What Schopenhauer was to Nietzsche, Kant was to Schopenhauer:
a philosophical mentor who provided a decisive stimulus to the
formation of the pupil's intellectual development, yet from whom
the pupil was to depart in certain key respects. Schopenhauer is
 Nothingness and the Return of Metaphysics 61

himself very precise both as to the greatest achievement and the

greatest failure of the sage of Konigsberg. We shall return to Kant's
greatest failure, but what of his greatest achievement? 'Kant's great-
est merit is the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing-in-itself
(WWR I, p. 417), Schopenhauer wrote in the 'Criticism of the Kantian
Philosophy' appended to The World as Will and Representation. What
did he mean?
Firstly, and fundamentally, he meant that the world as we experi-
ence it, the world as an object appearing to the perceiving human
subject, is as it is only by virtue of the a priori activity of the per-
ceiving mind. It is the structure of the perceiving mind that deter-
mines how the world is in its appearing to us. Apart from the
subject's own activity in perception there is no independent knowl-
edge regarding how things are in themselves or what they 'really'
are. In setting out his own explanation as to how the 'shaping spirit'
of the human mind actually works to form an objective world of
perception, Schopenhauer appeals to what he calls 'the fourfold
root of the principle of sufficient reason'. Indeed, in his own preface
to The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer made two
stipulations: firstly, that the reader should read the work twice over
before presuming to understand it and, secondly, that he should,
before reading it, read an earlier work On the Fourfold Root of the
Principle of Sufficient Reason. It may therefore prove useful to preface
the exposition of the doctrine of nothingness taught in Will and
Representation by a summary of the main argument of The Fourfold
Root.
Here Schopenhauer bases himself upon the premise of the inter-
dependence of subject and object, or, of the dependence of the object-
world on the representational activity of the subject. 'To be object
for the subject and to be our representation are one and the same
thing.'30
The objects of representation, Schopenhauer argues, fall into four
distinct classes, each of which comes under the jurisdiction of a
particular form of the principle of sufficient reason. These four classes
of objects are: (1) the realm of empirical representation (in which
the principle of sufficient reason takes the form of causality); (2) the
realm of abstract representation (in concepts, by means of language);
(3) the a priori intuition of space and time (the realm of geometry
and arithmetic); and (4) 'the immediate object of inner sense' (FFR,
p. 157) which Schopenhauer defines as the will.
In each of these realms of objects the principle of sufficient reason,
62 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

that 'Nothing is without a reason (Grund) why it is so' (FFR,

p. 17), takes on a particular form. If, for example, we ask the reason
for something with respect to an object in the empirical world, such
as a body in motion, we are asking for an explanation in terms of
causality: the cause is the reason or ground of the alterations we
perceive in that object. If, on the other hand, we ask the reason for
a proposition such as 'The world exists for us as will and as repre-
sentation' we are asking for an explanation at the level of concepts
and logic, for a definition of the concepts contained in the propo-
sition and for a clarification of the logical relationship between its
various terms.
The distinctions between these various fields of objects and their
respective forms of the principle of sufficient reason, together with
his insistence on the inseparability of the object-world as a whole
from the subject for whom it is an object, point Schopenhauer to
what he regards as the fundamental error in Kant's philosophy, an
error which, he believes, has repeated itself many times in the his-
tory of philosophy. Already in the ancient world the Greek philo-
sophers had confused 'the logical law concerning the ground of
knowledge with the transcendental natural law of cause and effect'
(FFR, p. 21). In Kant this same confusion appears in terms of the
logical or formal principle 'Every proposition must have a ground'
and the transcendental or material principle 'Every thing must have
a ground.' Therefore, despite Kant's recognition of the role of the
subject in shaping the actual form of perception, the distinction
between the kind of reason operative in the subjective sphere and
the kind of reason operative within the objective world has still not
been sufficiently grasped. Or, as Schopenhauer puts it in the appen-
dix to Will and Representation, '[Kant] did not properly separate
knowledge of perception from abstract knowledge . . .' (WWR I, p.
437). This leads to what Schopenhauer regards as the unfortunate
result that Kant continues to be troubled by the question regarding
an objective or real ground for the subjectively determined realm of
representation. Even though Kant denied that we could have any
theoretical knowledge regarding such a thing-in-itself, he nonethe-
less posited its hypothetical existence as a necessary condition of
the appearance of an object-world. This, however, is to seek a 'cause'
for the subject's activity in the object-world, yet causality can only
be spoken of in the context of the world of representations that
exists only by virtue of the formative action of the subject.
Contrasting his own position with that of Kant, Schopenhauer says:
 Nothingness and the Return of Metaphysics 63

Our philosophy will affirm the same immanence here as in all we

have considered hitherto. It will not, in opposition to Kant's great
teaching, attempt to use as a jumping-pole the form of the phen-
omenon . . . in order to leap over the phenomenon itself... and
to land in the boundless sphere of empty fictions.
(WWR I, pp. 252f.)

This criticism of Kant has a momentous bearing on how Schopen-

hauer wishes his own discussion of the in-itself to be understood.
This in-itself is identical with what he takes to be the fourth form
of the principle of sufficient reason, the will. The will is, at its sim-
plest, the form in which the subject knows or perceives itself. 'When
we look within, we always find ourselves willing' (FFR, p. 160). As
the subject of knowledge, we can never become an object to our-
selves, because to do so we would have to give up being subjects.
The result is that ' . . . the subject knows itself only as willing, but
not as knowing' (FFR, p. 157).
But what, then, is the relationship between the subject who wills
and the subject who knows? Are they not one and the same? They
are, indeed, says Schopenhauer, but such a statement of identity
cannot be taken as the basis for explaining the will in terms of
knowledge or, conversely, explaining knowledge in terms of will
(as occurred in Fichte and other post-Kantian idealists). The influ-
ence of the will on the world of knowledge is not causal (for cau-
sality only holds good within a particular class of representations).
Instead it arises out of the dual character of the subject itself. 'But
the identity of the subject of willing with the knowing subject by
means of which (and indeed necessarily) the word "I" comprises
and characterizes both, is the riddle of the world and thus inexpli-
cable' (FFR, p. 160). When Schopenhauer says that the world can be
understood as the objectification of the will he is not then saying
that the will 'explains' the existence of the world, merely that it is
the objective form of the will itself. But the will itself resists all
objectification, all hypostatization, and is not to be understood as
any kind of essence.
This may seem to be a very poor result for all Schopenhauer's
efforts; how convenient it would be if we could solve all the fun-
damental problems of philosophy by simply declaring them to be
'inexplicable'. Schopenhauer, however, insists that the question it-
self is incoherent. When he declares that 'Motivation [the form of
reason characteristic of willing] is causality seen from within. ..'
64 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

(FFR, p. 162) he is setting up a principle that is fundamental to the

whole further development of his thought. Subjective experience,
the life of the subject as will, is not and cannot itself be a factor in
any empirical state of affairs or in any causal chain. Willing as such,
subjectivity as such, cannot bring anything about in the world. And
yet it is, simultaneously, a fundamental and universal aspect of the
world. The world, in every respect, reveals itself in a twofold man-
ner: as representation it is entirely governed by causality, reason
and mathematical order; as will, it is entirely a matter of subjective
experience, entirely a matter of how we experience it, of (to anticipate
one of Schopenhauer's twentieth-century admirers) 'experiencing-as'.
In a further qualification of his doctrine of will Schopenhauer
also acknowledges that will, as the thing-in-itself, cannot adequately
be dealt with in terms of the principle of sufficient reason. Even
what is spoken of in The Fourfold Root as 'motivation' is already an
objectification and as such a mere shadow of the will. The will is,
strictly speaking, groundless; it exists outside the sphere of reason
in which alone 'grounds' have their proper place. The will is one,
not as an object or a concept but 'as that which lies outside time and
space, outside the principium individuationis ...' (WWR I, p. 113).
The scope of the concept of will is thus expanded virtually without
limit, since its undifferentiated unity means that it can just as well
be described as the 'within' of animal, vegetable and even inorganic
existence as of human life. To think of the empirical individual as
the true subject of volition is a perspectival illusion brought about
precisely by the adoption of the framework of the principle of suf-
ficient reason. Think of a magic lantern, Schopenhauer suggests: the
many pictures projected by the lantern are shown only by virtue of
the one single light. In the same way, there is one unchanging will
at the centre of universal change, strife and development.31
Yet these remarks concerning the universality of will make it still
more urgent to see how Schopenhauer envisages the connection
between the world as will and the world as representation. Doesn't
the statement of the identity of the subject of will and of represen-
tation beg the question? For in what way and in what respect is it
the 'same' subject? In what way and in what respects is the T that
experiences and the T that evaluates the world the same 'I'? How,
indeed, can we speak of 'identity' except in terms of the principle
of sufficient reason?
If Schopenhauer never answers such questions conclusively, he is
quite specific in identifying what must be an integral part of any
 Nothingness and the Return of Metaphysics 65

such 'answer': the body. For it is as bodies, as corporeally existing

entities that we are at one and the same time a part of the object-
world and also will. The same body is given to consciousness in
two entirely different ways: as an object among objects and as will.
The body is the primary phenomenon of the will: 'The action of the
body is nothing but the act of will objectified, i.e. translated into
perception' (FFR, p. 100). The 'inside' of the body, the will, not as
phenomenon but as thing-in-itself, is known to me better than any-
thing in the object world - although, of course, non-objectively and
certainly not as an explanatory principle. It is the most immediate
datum of consciousness.
The 'how' of the will's connection to the world of representation
is still, perhaps, puzzling. The puzzle continues throughout Schopen-
hauer's discussion of the freedom of the will with respect to the
duality of absolute will and the freedom of the liberum arbitrium, the
will operating under the conditions of the object world, as an object
among objects. What is clear is that Schopenhauer's appeal is to
what he takes to be the immediate subjective experience of bodily
existence as never occurring apart from an interpretative evaluation
of a certain kind and that this evaluation is nothing other than will
itself in its mode of experiencing-as.
This evaluation has two basic forms that Schopenhauer calls the
will-to-live and the will-to-deny-the-will-to-live. Either we experi-
ence the world as that which draws us to itself, or as that which
repels us. The manner of our experience in this sense is the criterion
of good and bad (or evil). We call 'good' whatever has a certain
'fitness or suitableness . . . to any definite effort of the will' (WWR I,
p. 360). In this sense 'goodness' is entirely relative. It is simply that
which serves the purpose of our willing, i.e. what conforms to the
affirmative form of experiencing-as.
However, it is not this affirmative form of evaluation that most
concerns Schopenhauer. For the world, he argues, is typically expe-
rienced in the mode of suffering and as pain, since 'the basis of all
willing . . . is need, lack, and hence pain...' (WWR I, p. 312). The
famous Schopenhauerian pessimism is powerfully, eloquently and
extensively illustrated in the many pages he devotes to portraying
the human situation as determined by a will that can never find
satisfaction in any of the innumerable forms by which it seeks to
represent itself to itself and which it proposes to itself as objects
of desire. If these objects do not by their resistance to the will
frustrate the fulfilment of its desire (thus causing it to suffer), then
66 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

the satisfaction of one desire quickly leads to boredom, as our cease-

less appetite (the appetite that, in a certain sense, we are) casts
around for new objects. The misery of this situation is compounded
by the illusion of separate existence, the illusion that my will is
different from your will, that our two wills are in competition with
each other, rather than (as is really the case) two manifestations
under the form of the principle of sufficient reason and of the prin-
ciple of individuation of one and the same universal will. One
passage may stand for many:

Every time a man is begotten and the clock of human life is

wound up anew, to repeat once more its same old tune that has
already been played innumerable times, movement by movement
and measure by measure, with insignificant variations, every in-
dividual, every human apparition and its course of life, is only
one more short dream of the endless spirit of nature, of the per-
sistent will-to-live, is only one more fleeting form, playfully
sketched by it on its infinite page, space and time; it is allowed
to exist for a short while that is infinitesimal compared with these,
and is then effaced, to make new room. Yet, and here is to be
found the serious side of life, each of these fleeting forms, these
empty fancies, must be paid for by the whole will-to-live in all its
intensity with many deep sorrows, and finally with a bitter death,
long feared and finally made manifest. It is for this reason that
the sight of a corpse suddenly makes us serious.
(WWR I, p. 322)

Or, as he put it elsewhere: The world itself is hell, and human

beings are in one respect the souls in torment and in another the
devils therein.'32 On several occasions Schopenhauer also quotes a
verse by Calderon that speaks of existence itself as a crime or sin.
All this, we recall, is to be understood in terms of the body's
experiencing-the-world-as 'good' or 'bad', an evaluation that is
entirely subjective and untranslatable into the categories of knowl-
edge - despite the fact that the same subject supports both worlds,
the world of will and the world of representation, and despite the
fact that we are conscious of it with an immediacy that far exceeds
anything we know by means of the principle of sufficient reason.
Yet if it is indeed true that the will-to-live, as the positive
evaluation of the world by the experiencing subject, is superficial
and inadequate in the face of the suffering inherent in the very
 Nothingness and the Return of Metaphysics 67

dynamics of will as unsatisfiable appetite and unrealizable desire,

then what can be done by the sufferer to change his situation? To
change the world - at the level of the phenomenal objectification of
reality - is not possible on the basis of willing alone. The conflict
between will and reality that is at the root of its suffering is not a
conflict within the object world, within which there is only the
'freedom' of the liberum arbitrium. It is not a conflict between one
self and another self, but a conflict between the one absolute will
and the necessity of a world of finite, limited and mutually restrict-
ing manifestations. But since the will as the in-itself cannot act on
the world causally (for causality operates only within the world of
appearance) it would appear to have no alternative but, literally, to
suffer in silence.
There is, however, one thing it can do. If it cannot change the
world, it can renounce it. It can learn the denial of the will-to-live.
In a preliminary way it can learn this denial through art, under-
stood by Schopenhauer as a kind of representation that is not de-
termined by the principle of sufficient reason. Practically it can
manifest itself as asceticism, which Schopenhauer regards as the
truly religious attitude, exemplified in Christianity no less (though
with less philosophical insight) than in Hinduism and Buddhism.
This is the sole manner in which the will can assert its freedom in
the face of the phenomenal world: ' . . . the only case where that
freedom can become immediately visible in the phenomenon is the
one where it makes an end of what appears' (WWR I, p. 402).
Here, in the turning of the will away from its own self as will-to-
live, we can locate Schopenhauer's distinctive contribution to the
history of nothingness. In the closing section of the first (and most
systematic) volume of Will and Representation, he addresses himself
to the issue of nothing, remarking that 'the concept of nothing is
entirely relative' and, he adds, 'What is universally assumed as
positive, what we call being, the negation of which is expressed by
the concept nothing in its most general significance, is exactly the
world as representation, which I have shown to be the objectivity,
the mirror, of the will' (WWR I, pp. 409-10). If we accept this view
of what counts as being and what counts as nothingness, then
the will which turns away from the world and no longer seeks to
see itself in the mirror of the world, 'is lost in nothingness'. But,
Schopenhauer suggests, this is entirely a matter of perspective. 'If
a contrary point of view were possible for us, it would cause the
signs to be changed, and would show what exists for us as nothing,
68 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

and this nothing as that which exists' (WWR I, p. 410). From such
a point of view we would, for instance, no longer speak of the
denial of the will-to-live in terms of nirvana or the annihilation of
the self, but of 'ecstasy, rapture, illumination, union with God' (ibid.).
In terms of his own system, however, Schopenhauer must deny
that we can ever 'know' such a condition, since knowledge belongs
precisely to the world conditioned by the principle of sufficient
reason, the world as representation. As long as we ourselves exist
as the will-to-live (that is to say: as long as we exist) and since like
can only be known by like, the view that 'the nothing' (jenes Nichts)
is that which actually exists, is 'real', 'can be known and expressed
by us only negatively . . . No will: no representation, no world' (WWR
I, pp. 410-11). And so:
. . . we freely acknowledge that what remains after the complete
abolition of the will is, for all who are still full of the will, assur-
edly nothing. But also conversely, to those in whom the will has
turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours with all its
suns and galaxies, is - nothing.
(WWR I, p. 412)
This is a standpoint which Schopenhauer identifies in a footnote as
that of the Pmjnaparamita Sutra.
Such denial, however, cannot be an event in the 'real' world
constructed according to the principle of sufficient reason and there-
fore has no ontological status. Yet, even if the will cannot be con-
sidered the ground of being in any causal sense, it is within the
dimension of will that it is decided what is and what is not to
count, for us, as being. Being, and ontology as the theory of being,
are thereby conceivable only within or in the light of a more pri-
mordial act of evaluation. Outside such evaluation 'being' (and, of
course, 'non-being') have no meaning for us. The dimension of will
is conceived as a non-noetic, non-ontological dimension of valua-
tion, of experiencing-as - and, precisely, yet only, as such, deter-
minative for ontology.
In this concept of evaluative experiencing-as, Schopenhauer moves
the question of nothingness beyond the kind of oppositions be-
tween faith and knowledge, between psychology and ontology or
between subjective and objective points of view that are character-
istic of the Augustinian tradition in its various forms. Evaluative
experiencing-as prescinds from the kind of truth claims that inhere
in all speculative world-picturing.
 Nothingness and the Return of Metaphysics 69

Yet Schopenhauer's standpoint is highly precarious and easily

slips into either dualism or reductionism. In their different ways,
dualism and reductionism continue the speculative project of meta-
physical ontology by another name since they seek to reintegrate the
realm of will and of value into the realm of the knowable and onto-
logically determinable.
A dualistic interpretation would understand Schopenhauer as
asserting the existence of two separate realities, such that the world
of nirvana is hypostatized as a somehow 'real' alternative to the
world of becoming, 'a separate reality'. Against this interpretation
must be set Schopenhauer's insistence on the identity of the one
subject of both willing and knowing, even if this identity is simply
asserted as a riddlesome fact. The whole system is essentially within
immanence. But, to the extent that Schopenhauer emphasizes im-
manence and defines will in terms of our self-experience as embod-
ied, he invites a reductionist reading that would understand the
will and therefore all value in merely objective and even crudely
physiological terms. For value then becomes merely a reflection of
the bodily pain and pleasure occasioned by our interaction with
other bodies in time and space.
Traces of both dualism and reductionism and therefore of the
metaphysical desire to determine the kind of being that will and
value are also haunt the writings of Schopenhauer's most signifi-
cant nineteenth-century disciple: Friedrich Nietzsche. In Nietzsche,
too, we shall encounter again the Schopenhauerian understanding
of nothingness in relation to will, value and embodiment and in
Nietzsche, too, we shall find the problematization of ontology only
ambiguously resolved.

NOTHINGNESS AND WILL: NIETZSCHE

Of few thinkers is it more true to say that partial and tendentious

quotations, torn out of context, have given rise to the most extreme
distortions and perversions of his thought than in the case of
Nietzsche. As with Kierkegaard, the very form of his work creates
a basic interpretative problem: its poetic, aphoristic, prophetic and
(sometimes) violently polemical character make it difficult to
decide how far Nietzsche intends his own writing to be simply
a stimulus to the reader's own creative thinking and how far it
'teaches' a doctrine or a programme to which the 'good' reader
70 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

must accede. This problem has immediate bearing on questions of

being and nothingness. The issue can be put in the form of a ques-
tion: does Nietzsche's contribution to such questions remain within
the non-ontological paradigm opened up by Schopenhauer - or
does he rehabilitate a speculative, ontological discourse on being
and nothingness, albeit one that is determined to take a reductionist
and anti-idealistic stance?
Perhaps such an interpretative dilemma must haunt any attempt
to create an understanding of existence that is non-ontological. For
if, as Schopenhauer argued, the confusion between real and formal
senses of the principle of sufficient reason has pervaded the history
of philosophy, is this not precisely because language itself continu-
ally seduces us into understanding all discourse as (no matter how
heavily mediated) discourse about the 'real' world 'out there'? How
can one frame a discourse that is consistently non-referential? If
Nietzsche himself appears to sink into simple materialistic reduc-
tionism ('What determines rank, sets off rank, is only quanta of
power and nothing else'33), isn't the risk of such slippage inherent
in the problematic nature of the discourse he undertakes: to speak
of that which cannot be subsumed under ontological categories
in language laden with ontological assumptions? And, of course,
this risk is bound to trouble any attempt to speak or write of
nothingness.34
Let us begin with The Will to Power where Nietzsche engages in
a vigorous polemic against Schopenhauer as the type of a certain
kind of pessimism which Nietzsche himself now seeks to supplant.
Throughout the book Nietzsche distinguishes between two funda-
mental types of pessimism or nihilism. Thus, at WP 10 he writes of
'Pessimism as strength... [and]... Pessimism as decline', or, at WP
22 of 'Nihilism as a sign of increased power of the spirit: as active
nihilism [and] Nihilism as decline and recession of the power of the
spirit: as passive nihilism' - although even the pessimism of strength
('my type of pessimism' WP, 134) and active nihilism are only a
point of departure for the revolution in humanity, the advent of the
Ubermensch that Nietzsche believes to be imminent.35
But what are pessimism and nihilism?
Nietzsche himself begins with a programmatic definition of nihil-
ism: 'What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate
themselves. The aim is lacking; "why?" finds no answer.'36
Later, Nietzsche lists three reasons that are determinative for the
advent of nihilism. The first is the recognition that 'becoming has
 Nothingness and the Return of Metaphysics 71

no goal', that 'becoming aims at nothing and achieves nothing'; the

second is the absence of any universal order of things and the third
is the rejection of metaphysical consolation, 'one grants the reality of
becoming as the only reality, forbids oneself every kind of clandes-
tine access to afterworlds and false divinities - but cannot endure this
world though one does not want to deny it.' Or, summing u p : ' . . . the
categories "aim", "unity", "being" which we used to project some
value into the world - we pull out again; so the world looks valueless'
(WP, 12).
This would seem to be the position of Schopenhauer. Yet, as
Nietzsche goes on to argue, it is a position based on a contradiction.
For the conclusion that the world is valueless and that the realm
of becoming is meaningless reflects a hangover of what Nietzsche
calls the 'categories of reason', i.e. Schopenhauer's 'sufficient rea-
son'. For the idea of 'purpose' is only valid within the limitations
and conditions of a network of causal relationships. Similarly, the
negation of purpose, 'purposelessness', only makes sense within or
in relation to such a network. Once we have discovered with
Schopenhauer that value is entirely perspectival, it is just as incon-
sistent to ascribe negative value as it is to ascribe positive value to
the world - or, indeed, any inherent value. Schopenhauer's view
that the world is hell is itself an example of such a confusion.
In discussing 'To what extent Schopenhauer's nihilism still fol-
lows from the same ideal that created Christian theism' Nietzsche
argues that 'the last metaphysicians still seek in true "reality", the
"thing-in-itself" compared to which everything else is merely ap-
parent' and that even though Schopenhauer could not accept any
positive description of the thing-in-itself (such as Kant's ideal of
intelligible freedom) he nonetheless remained committed to a ver-
sion of the 'metaphysical ground' and 'did not renounce the abso-
luteness of the ideal' (WP, 17). It is this covert metaphysical ambition
that conditions Schopenhauer's pessimism about the world.
Schopenhauer is later linked with Pascal, who in Nietzsche's eyes
is an outstanding example of Christian pessimism.
Reading Schopenhauer dualistically, Nietzsche himself becomes
reductionist in tone. Thus, he can speak of Schopenhauer's philoso-
phy as representing 'the exhaustion or the weakness of the will' (WP,
84) since, according to Nietzsche, Schopenhauer's insight into the
priority of will, of evaluation, over the object-world should lead to
a view that 'treats cravings as their master and appoints to them
their way and measure' (WP, 84). But this is not what happens!
72 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

Nonetheless the appearance of pessimism does mark a stage both

in the discovery of value as a subjective product and in the inaugu-
ration of a transvaluation of all values.
Nietzsche finds the supreme paradigm of the new world he pro-
phetically foresees in the artist. Whereas in Schopenhauer's view
art led to detachment from the will-to-live by means of the contem-
plation of Platonic Ideas, Nietzsche sees the artist, especially the
Dionysiac artist, as representing an affirmative evaluation of life,
even when the world is known to be indifferent to the artist's own
values. Art is redemption. It expresses and enhances the will to
power in the face of the absence of value in the objective world,
it 'is stronger than pessimism, "more divine" than truth' (WP, 853).
The artist provides Nietzsche with a model of how to go on ex-
isting in a world that has been emptied of value and in which the
subject has internalized the doctrine of nihilism but to such a degree
and with such an intensity that he has at last become free of the last
illusion: the illusion of nihilism itself, that the world is the negation
of all value. Art creates a world that is not true, a world in which
knowledge has nothing to contribute, a world that lies outside the
duality of being and non-being. It is the world born out of the
annihilation of being.
Yet it would be premature to identify Nietzsche's More-than-
Human-Being with the artist in the crude sense of one who paints,
acts, sings or writes. By no means all of these are artists in Nietzsche's
sense. Conversely there are, perhaps, many who have no artistic
talent in the normal sense who are nonetheless capable of living
artistically. 'The artist' is first and foremost a moral category: a
human form of valuation. This moral vision of living artistically as
a programme for human existence, when it does not sink into the
crudities of eugenics or physiological reductionism (as it certainly
risks doing at many points in The Will to Power, and not only in the
last book 'Discipline and Breeding'), is perhaps most poetically (and
therefore most appropriately) rendered in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
In taking as his eponymous hero the founder of one of the world's
great religious traditions (curiously, a tradition known precisely for
its dualistic outlook) and in casting much of the book in a style
reminiscent of ancient religious texts, Nietzsche would appear to
be setting out a 'teaching', a set of prescriptive doctrines and moral
norms. If we interpret Nietzsche in Social Darwinian terms, as pre-
paring the breeding ground for the new, stronger, more intelligent,
more wilful race of supermen who are to inherit the earth, the
'blond beasts', then this may indeed be what he is doing. However,
 Nothingness and the Return of Metaphysics 73

such a reductionist teaching is scarcely the promised overcoming of

metaphysics. Such an overcoming demands a non-noetic, non-
ontological understanding of will. Let us then see whether such a
non-reductionist reading of Zarathustra is possible. In doing so we
turn to a number of key moments in which Zarathustra illustrates
the ethics that have internalized and, in free artistic play, claim to
have transcended the nihilistic void.
Zarathustra begins with the hero's descent into the world after ten
years of mountain solitude. Yet, although there is a prophetic aura
and even an evangelistic fervour about Zarathustra at this stage,
the Prologue makes it clear that Zarathustra himself still has much
to learn. His 'doctrine' is no finished system of dogma or moral com-
mandments. If his resolve to descend again to the world of men at
the beginning of the Prologue represents one decisive conversion,
his noon-tide moment of illumination at the end of the Prologue
shows that such conversions are no once-for-all events. For the free
spirit the moment of the void and the 'turning' (to use Schopen-
hauer's expression) which it imposes upon those who experience it
is not something that can be objectified as a particular, concrete event
that could serve as the foundation for a new 'system' or 'rule of life'.
Other conversions and reconversions follow as the story contin-
ues: Zarathustra returns again to his cave, then back again to the
world of men, again to his cave and then begins a series of wander-
ings among mountains and forests; he experiences new dawns, new
awakenings, new noon-tides, new midnight hours, his 'stillest hour'.
In this cycle of changes and chances, a cycle significantly marked
by reference to the ever-recurring 'hours' of the day, Zarathustra
shows that his message is not something 'ready-made', but some-
thing to be found and lost and found again, a matter for eternal
recurrence, not secure possession.
In other respects also the Prologue prefigures the book's subse-
quent themes.
Zarathustra comes down from his mountain and enters a town,
where the people are assembled in the market-square awaiting the
arrival of a tightrope walker. Addressing the crowd, Zarathustra
sets out his doctrine of the More-than-Human-Being in a series of
startling and powerful images. First of all he appeals to the princi-
ple of evolution itself:

All creatures hitherto have created something beyond them-

selves: and do you want to be the ebb of this great tide, and
return to the animals rather than overcome man?
74 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

What is the ape to men? A laughing-stock or a painful

embarrassment...
You have made your way from worm to man, and much in
you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now man is
more of an ape than any ape.
But he who is the wisest among you, he also is only a discord
and hybrid of plant and of ghost. But do I bid you become ghosts
or plants?
Behold, I teach you the More-than-Human-Being.37

Is this to be understood in a Darwinian sense, as a demand that

his hearers accept their own relativity within the chain of evolving
material life and, in some manner not yet specified, cooperate with
the processes of evolution thus: the worm - the ape - the human
being - the More-than-Human-Being . . . and beyond . . . ? Or is it
representing the human being as a synthesis of dialectically op-
posed elements: being and non-being, being-in-itself and being-for-
itself, nature and spirit, a synthesis which is established, maintained
and consummated in and through a process of historical and psy-
chological development?38
Both these readings, however, deny significant novelty to the
phenomenon of the More-than-Human-Being. In the former, it is
simply the next stage in a causal chain that has already been set in
motion and that, perhaps, will fulfil itself with or without the con-
sent of currently existing human beings. In the second, the novum
is reduced to the synthesis of two already existing elements.
To understand the passage differently we must see how these
opening statements are qualified by what follows - both by what
Zarathustra subsequently says and by what happens in the market-
place.
At the start of his next speech Zarathustra evokes the image of
the tightrope, stretched out above the market-place.

Man is a rope, fastened between animal and More-than-

Human-Being - a rope over an abyss.
A dangerous going-across, a dangerous wayfaring, a danger-
ous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and staying-still.
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal; what
can be loved in man is that he is a going-across and a down-going.
(Z, pp. 43-4)
 Nothingness and the Return of Metaphysics 75

Can this still be read as an objectification of the subject of will-

ing? In so far as the goal of the process seems to be fixed in advance
- should we say the next stage of the evolutionary process? - this
might seem to be the case. But already this passage begins to qualify
the image of the fixed rope, the two termini of which are deter-
mined in advance, in an important way. The allusion in the first
'verse' to 'the abyss' (Abgrund), though not of itself requiring a philo-
sophical reading (it could be taken merely as referring to any deep
drop or any great depth) begins to conjure up the foundationless
quality of the venture involved in bringing about the advent of
the More-than-Human-Being, the subjectivity that lies outside all
objectification. In the second verse the image changes from that of
the rope itself to that of the tightrope walker who dares to walk it.
It is no longer the fixity of the way across, no longer the causal
chain, that is in view, but the crossing itself. The 'danger' of this
crossing is stressed four times in a short sentence. If the placing of
the rope is a given, an objective datum, the crossing of the rope
cannot be assumed in advance: it is a venture exposed to the alarm-
ingly real risk of failure. What happens is entirely within the will
of the one who ventures it. So, in verse three, the point is under-
lined. The issue is not that of the goal but of the bridge itself, the
going-across, the down-going or downfall of the subject.
This emphasis is underlined by the events that follow. The tight-
rope walker appears and begins to cross the rope over the market-
place. But when he is half-way across a wild burlesque figure springs
out and, after abusing the tightrope walker verbally, leaps over
him, causing him to lose his balance and fall at the feet of Zarathustra
himself. The townspeople scatter in all directions, but Zarathustra
remains and comforts the dying man with the assurance that death
is simple extinction, there is no after-life, no hell and consequently
nothing, in death, to fear. Zarathustra carries the body of the tight-
rope walker away, intending to give it a decent burial with his own
hands. But, after he has left the town, he falls asleep and awakens
to a new truth: that he needs living companions and not dead ones:
'The creator seeks companions, not corpses or herds or believers.
The creator seeks fellow-creators, those who inscribe new values on
new tables' (Z, p. 52).
What does this tell us of Zarathustra's project?
The tightrope walker is ambiguous. Zarathustra commends him
inasmuch as he has made his living by living dangerously. His is
a 'higher' form of existence than that of the crowd buying and
76 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

selling in the market-place. Yet he is cautious and hesitant in cross-

ing the rope and loses his footing, fatally, when he is mocked by the
clown. This latter figure seems altogether at home on the tightrope,
completely ignoring its danger, shouting and swearing and jump-
ing across the abyss without a care. The difference between these
figures thus reflects the opposition in The Will to Power between a
nihilism that is still enmeshed in the illusions of rationalism and
that consequently lives with a constant consciousness of the danger
of existence (as in Schopenhauerian pessimism) and a nihilism that
knows the world to have only those values which it itself gives it
is therefore free to live joyfully, redemptively and artistically in
relation to the world. Not that the clown is himself the More-than-
Human-Being: but he is the sign that nihilism itself, in its negative
judgement on the world, is only a transitional moment.
The story continues when Zarathustra takes upon himself the
burden of the dead man (his affiliation to Schopenhauer?), evoking
the classical image of human existence as 'an immortal soul tied to
a corpse', but then unlearns this burden. For the tightrope walker
is the one whose way across is still determined by the track of a
rope tied at both ends, a way which is not open to the new, the unex-
pected, a way which can never be a wandering. Zarathustra thus
concludes his speech to the dead man: 'I make for my goal, I go my
way; I shall leap over the hesitating and the indolent. Thus may my
going-forward be their going-down [i.e. downfall]!' (Z, p. 52).
This distinction between the 'two ways' of nihilism is fundamen-
tal to the 'plot' of Zarathustra and puts the reader on notice that
what is at stake in all that follows is no system, no finished product,
but a challenge to a going-across that is still to be defined, a launch-
ing-out over the abyss with no end in sight.
Two further passages may be called in confirmation of this read-
ing, passages that are, in themselves, striking statements of Nietz-
sche's fundamental philosophical intentions. They are the sections
'Of Self-Overcoming' and 'Of Redemption' from Book II.
'Of Self-Overcoming' sets out the doctrine of the will to power
and, more precisely, the will to power as evaluation over against
and prior to the will to truth, in other words the priority of evalu-
ation over ontology and epistemology.
In the opening verses Zarathustra declares that the will to truth
is none other than the 'will to the conceivability (Denkbarkeit) of all
being' and that, in order for the realm of beings to be thinkable,
it must first be conformed to the mind of the knowing subject -
 Nothingness and the Return of Metaphysics 77

echoes, via Schopenhauer, of Kant. But the a priori that Kant por-
trays as a timeless categorical structure Nietzsche describes as an
act of will, of subjective evaluation. Speaking to 'the wise' he says
of them that it is they themselves who, by an act of will, create the
world before which they subsequently kneel.

The ignorant, to be sure, the people - they are like a river

down which a boat swims: and in the boat, solemn and dis-
guised, sit the assessments of value.
You put your will and your values upon the river of becoming;
what the people believe to be good and evil betrays to me an
ancient will to power.
It was you, wisest men, who put such passengers in this boat
and gave them splendour and proud names - you and your ruling
will!
Now the river bears your boat along: it has to bear it. It is of
small account if the breaking wave foams and angrily opposes its
keel!
It is not the river that is your danger and the end of your good
and evil, you wisest men, it is that will itself, the will to power,
the unexhausted, procreating life-will.
(Z, pp. 136-7)

At the level of the principle of sufficient reason, bound by the

ineluctable laws of causality, the river of becoming goes as it must.
But, for the human subject, everything depends on the prior valu-
ation that is given to this process. Neither the river itself nor the
system of causality that makes its course explicable can prove or
disprove any particular evaluation. It is not, therefore, the external
world of becoming itself that threatens the 'ancient will to power'
concealed in the prevailing evaluation (that of Judaeo-Christian re-
ligiosity and such contemporary 'throw-backs' as Schopenhauer). It
is the advent of a new will, a new ordering of values. It is not the
world that overthrows values. Only within the realm of value can
value be overthrown.

And life itself told me this secret: 'Behold/ it said, 'I am that
which must overcome itself again and again.

'Whatever I create and however much I love it - soon I have

to oppose it and my love: thus my will will have it.
78 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

'And you too, enlightened man, are only a path and footstep of
my will...
. . . Unchanging good and evil does not exist! From out of them-
selves they must overcome themselves again and again.
(Z, pp. 138-9)

The complete indeterminacy of value, the complete lack of onto-

logical groundedness of will, such that neither willing nor valuing
are rooted in being, calls us to a permanent revolution or, to speak
with Nietzsche, of eternal recurrence, an eternal repetition and turn-
ing. Value is not given. It is always to be striven for and created
anew.
In 'Of Self-Overcoming' Nietzsche thus stands with Schopenhauer
regarding both the ungroundedness of will in relation to the exter-
nal world of becoming and the dependence of meaning on evalu-
ative will. In 'Of Redemption' we see him attempting to distinguish
himself from his Master and yet, once more, rehearsing the mutual
nihility of world and will. Thus he alludes to Schopenhauer: '"Ex-
cept the will at last redeem itself and willing becomes not-willing
- ": but you, my brothers, know this fable song of madness!' (Z,
p. 162). But what is Zarathustra's alternative?
He begins, surrealistically, by describing how men appeared to
him when he descended from his solitude, such as the man who
appeared to be a gigantic ear, with the rest of the man reduced to
a minuscule stalk from which dangled a soul.

Truly, my friends, I walk among men as among the fragments

and limbs of men!
The terrible thing to my eye is to find men shattered in pieces
and scattered as if over a battlefield of slaughter.
And when my eye flees from the present to the past, it always
discovers the same thing: fragments and limbs and dreadful
chances - but no men!
(Z, p. 160)

Human beings as they are encountered are essentially empty and

void. They are unfulfilled, underway to an event that has not yet
arrived. They are characterized by a deceptive nothingness for they
are not that which they lay claim to be. Indeed, they are without
any foothold in being. What, then, is the task of one who, like
Zarathustra, has gained insight into this condition and discerns
 Nothingness and the Return of Metaphysics 79

the fragmentariness, the unfinishedness, the nothingness of all that

currently passes for 'human'? What can he make of the chain of
events, the necessity, the fate that has produced such bizarre mal-
formations, such suffering modes of eternal becoming?
I walk among men as among fragments of the future: of that
future which I scan.
And it is all my art and aim, to compose into one and bring
together what is fragment and riddle and dreadful chance.
And how could I endure to be a man, if man were not also poet
and reader of riddles and redeemer of chance!
To redeem the past and to transform every 'It was' into an 'I
wanted it thus!' - that alone do I call redemption!
(Z, p. 161)
Or, as he qualifies his definition a couple of pages later:
Until the creative will says to it [to time and its 'It was']: 'But
I will it thus! Thus shall I will it.
(Z, p. 163)
The poet, reader of riddles and redeemer of time, cannot change
the past; he cannot interfere with the chain of causality that makes
the world what it is. His power is solely within the realm of value,
of experiencing-as. Zarathustra - himself but a fragment and a
riddle among fragments and riddles - does not set up the banner
of a will to power that can 'triumph' over the circumstances and
fatedness of empirical and historical circumstance. At those levels
all things must submit to whatever laws are appropriate to their
level of being. At the level of will - a level defined historically and
ontologically by Nietzsche as the level of nihilism, a level or a di-
mension that is not and cannot be brought under the aegis of being
- and at that level alone, redemption becomes possible: redemp-
tion, that is, as the self-valuation of the subject in, out of and never
apart from its full and decisive insight into the nothingness of its
own situation; a self-valuation to be renewed, a self-overcoming to
be re-enacted, repeatedly, as a 'turning' of the will and a conversion
to the self, eternally, recurrently, world without end.
Has Zarathustra/Nietzsche, then, shown us how we might exist
as dancers across the face of the abyss, wanderers in a barren wil-
derness beneath an empty sky and a horizon whose firm contours
have been erased by the event of the death of God?
80 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

But if that is indeed our situation are we not truly drifters in a

realm of endless caprice? Is there anything to say, anything to think,
when we have ventured so far out over the abyss? Isn't the upshot
(as Nietzsche at least dared to say) that 'meaning' is neither more
nor less than what the strong decide meaning shall be: sheer sub-
jectivity as will-to-power - and nothing else?
Such a conclusion throws up a curious paradox: that although
Nietzsche's critique of philosophy contains a particular warning to
those who, from Kant onwards, had explicitly sought to ground the
truth of the known world on the basis of the self-productive subject
of knowledge, his own thought seems to reinstate that subject in all
its cosmogonic rights. For now that there is no true world to which
the subject must submit and although any world that any subject
creates is going to be characterizable as provisional and transient -
a mere ripple within the infinite flux of eternal becoming - the
world and the values that the subject creates for itself (if not simply
solipsistically conceived) demand the assent of others. Yet this as-
sent is no longer demanded on the basis of the shared insights of
reason but solely on the basis of the will-to-power's determination
that 'It shall be so!' For all its distinctiveness, the Nietzschean self
seeks a redemption that Hegel would have recognized: to see itself
in the world it has created and to find an inexhaustible satisfaction
therein. In this perspective it is fully understandable how Heidegger
can regard Nietzsche - precisely as the thinker who brings to an
end the epochal history of metaphysics - as himself a metaphysical
thinker. For Nietzsche - no less than for any Platonist holding to
the principle that 'like is known only by like' - the world is re-
deemed by being made adequate to the purposes of the self and the
self in its turn is redeemed by being recognized as a master of the
universe, even if no more is claimed for that universe than that it
is an illusion produced by the will-to-power as art. If Nietzsche
overcomes in himself the kind of reductionism that would make
the self nothing but a complex of quantifiable physiological pro-
cesses, his thought nonetheless concludes with another kind of
reductionism: a will to power as ancient as metaphysical ontology
itself.
 3
The Experience of the Void
From Hegel to Nietzsche, the philosophy of modernity exploited
the Augustinian picture of the divided self as the basis for a new
metaphysics that is at one and the same time a metaphysics of sub-
jectivity and a metaphysics of nothingness. Whether that metaphys-
ics constitutes itself as the exposition of absolute knowledge (Hegel)
or as the quest of a projected unity that endlessly slips away from
completion (Nietzsche - and Sartre: 'Man is a useless passion'1),
being is conceived only as it appears in and through the horizon of
nothingness, a horizon within which the mystery of the in-itself can
make no further appearances.
One consequence of this transvaluation of philosophical values is
that there is now no room in the philosophical picture for God. For
wasn't God known in the older Christian metaphysics precisely as
'He Who Is', i.e. He who, in himself, is the pre-eminent symbol of
being's superiority over non-being? Or, to put it another way, doesn't
God-talk invariably and inevitably function as prolepsis, that is, as
an actual anticipation in thought and existence of eschatological
reality? When God comes on the scene, aren't we always already at
the end? Isn't God's word necessarily final? And aren't the pro-
cesses of subjectivity and history with all their risk, uncertainty, open-
endedness and indeterminacy thereby pre-empted and so emptied
of actual significance? In this respect, isn't the doctrine of predes-
tination, as expounded by Augustine and Calvin, implied in all
theology? Yet it is precisely the proleptic function of theological
metaphysics that the modern philosophy of subjectivity or of noth-
ingness has sought to avert, declaring that no end can be antici-
pated except that which depends on risk, chance, leap, the seizing
of time, the throw of the dice. The philosophy of subjectivity re-
quires the removal of all guarantees of a happy (or any other kind
of) ending - and who is God but the guarantor of all such guaran-
tees? In this respect, then, the atheism of Nietzsche and of Sartre is
the most consistent expression of the modern philosophy of noth-
ingness since not only do they reverse the relationship between
being and nothingness (Hegel too could be seen as doing that), they

81
82 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

also problematize the self in such a way as to make the possibility

of its completion of its own project infinitely questionable.
Isn't it therefore dangerous for religion even to play with the
kind of discourse on nothingness that we find in Hegel, Kierkegaard
and Schopenhauer, where there seems to be a residual possibility of
some kind of religious faith to be attained even in and through the
heart of the void? Aren't these thinkers, at the end of the day, half-
hearted nostalgists, dreaming of dry land in the midst of shipwreck?
Wouldn't it at least be more consistent either to go the whole way
with atheism or to reaffirm the old metaphysics of being (as did the
Neo-Thomists)?
But it is not only the possibility of God that is excluded by a rad-
ical conception of the subject as pure nothingness or of nothing-
ness as pure subjectivity. It is the possibility of essential otherness
as such. The universe inhabited by such a subject is massively one-
dimensional and articulated in a resoundingly monological voice.
Whether it is for the monologue of absolute spirit, of will-to-power
or of the existential individual, the world is constructed as a theatre
in which only one performer speaks.
This point is not immediately theological. It may, for instance, be
focused on the way in which the single dominant voice is exclu-
sively a masculine voice, that speaks only by virtue of the silence
of the female. This objection is powerfully stated against Nietzsche
by Luce Irigaray, who seeks to rescue the female voice from
its enforced silence: T want to disentangle myself from your ap-
pearances, unravel again and again the mirages conjured up by
your seductiveness, and find where I begin once more.'2 Of the
implications of Zarathustrian values for the recognition of the other,
she writes:

Nothing of the other is retained but the footstep, and the hole
that opens up beneath the feet. This is the fortune of the super-
man - those footsteps that circle endlessly round and round the
same radii of a circle and thus keep their balance even on the
dizzying edge.
All that remains of the other is a taut rope that plays with the
void by keeping it always at an even distance. There is no other
but the axle that allows an infinite series of cartwheels, a dizzy
rapture every moment that never loses its spell.

In protest at which, she adds

 The Experience of the Void 83

Between T and 'you', I want there to be once again a passage

and a sharing in life and in death. And not to stay within you.3

But it would be a mistake to read such a passage as 'merely'

speaking for the obliterated reality of women in a philosophical
situation determined by Nietzsche. Irigaray's protest is made on
behalf of an open discourse in and through which alone the authen-
tically human can come to appearance. A comparable point might
be found in Heidegger's critique of the world-view of scientific
modernism, characterized by what he calls 'the self-assurance of no
longer allowing oneself to be summoned .. .'4 Can the void, then,
become something more than mere emptiness, wherein the subject
gyrates and poses for himself alone? Can it become the space
wherein, for the first time, another voice is heard, where the subject
discovers that he is no longer sufficient unto himself, but is ad-
dressed, claimed, held responsible, opened to dialogue? If not, we
should note, then the standpoint of subjectivity has itself acquired
the character of prolepsis, since the subject predetermines whatever
is to count as 'meaning' within the realm of possible experience and
this is no less the case if (as for Nietzsche and Sartre again) there is no
final accomplishment of some supposedly absolute meaning.
Yet if such a re-evaluation of the void is to occur, if the possibility
of hearing the voice of the other is to arise from within the space
of non-being, then the subject encircled and permeated by nothing-
ness must learn to relate to that nothingness in a new way. Put
more simply, he must learn through this nothingness to relate. Let's
go further and suggest that this possibility of experiencing the void
as a place wherein the other may be heard - a possibility here
aroused by the demand of the historically silenced other, woman -
not only releases new and further possibilities for human being-in-
community, but also, as grounding the possibility of being-in-rela-
tion at all, prepares us for the relation to the personal transcendence
of the divine.
And s o . . . a question: is there nothing in nothingness but the
actus purus of subjective self-projection, the groundless positing by
the self of itself as its own foundation? What if we could speak of
an experience of nothingness such that nothingness was no longer
conceived as the simple non-existence of objective structures of
meaning and value (and therewith the delivering over of the sub-
ject to itself as the sole source of meaning and value) but instead as
an experience of the subject, as that which befalls it in its foundational
84 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

moment, as given to it - indeed, the purest of all givens, givenness

itself, experience of nothing but just experience, pure experience; in
a word: grace?5 Nothingness, then, would no longer be a cipher for
the death of God that surreptitiously advances a metaphysics of a
subjective kind, but a place of revelation - a place where truth is
revealed to the subject, not decided by it. Can we therefore rethink
the religious possibilities of a philosophy of nothingness: does such
a philosophy lead inevitably to nothingness and nothing but noth-
ingness in the sense of nihilism?
But what is meant here by 'experience'? With this question the
whole domain of the study of religious experience is thrown open,
a domain we cannot hope to explore fully here. Yet one distinction
needs to be made, namely whether in speaking of experience we
are necessarily referring to a particular experience, localizable to
a particular time and a particular place - or can the language of
experience be legitimately extended to include that which reveals
itself in and through experience while not itself being present in an
immediate or focused way?
In other words, if we are to speak of an experience of nothing-
ness, must it be something akin to the material studied by William
James in his classic study The Varieties of Religious Experience?6 Or,
perhaps, the kind of experience recorded by Aldous Huxley after
experimenting with a hallucinogenic drug (a possibility already
known to James's generation as 'the anaesthetic revelation'7), de-
scribed in The Doors of Perception:

. . . I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass

vase. The vase contained only three flowers - a full-blown Belle
of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal's base of a
hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-coloured carna-
tion; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold
heraldic blossom of an iris . . . [But] I was not now looking at an
unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen
on the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment by mo-
ment, of naked existence... I continued to look at the flowers,
and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equiva-
lent of breathing - but of a breathing without returns to a start-
ing-point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from
beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper mean-
ing. Words like Grace and Transfiguration came to my mind, and
this of course was what, among other things, they stood for ... The
 The Experience of the Void 85

Beatific vision, Sat Chit Ananda, Being-Awareness-Bliss - for the

first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate
hints or at a distance, but precisely and completely what these
prodigious syllables referred to.8

Such experiences, as those who report them generally agree, are

hard to describe, pushing beyond the boundaries of language into
the realm of that which cannot be spoken. James lists 'ineffability'
as one of the fundamental hallmarks of religious experience. The
question of language and experience will be more fully discussed in
a later chapter,9 but for the present my concern is simply to explore
how the concept of an experience of nothingness might serve to
qualify the subjective metaphysics of nothingness of Nietzsche and
Sartre. Of course, merely to claim the support of some ineffable
religious experience cannot of itself rebut Nietzschean or Sartrean
nihilism. No single experience on the plane of phenomenal experi-
ence can count for or against the kind of ontological assumptions
built into such nihilism. What is at stake is rather the framework
within which such experience is interpreted. Thorough-going nihil-
istic subjectivity will simply not allow that any particular experi-
ence has meaning apart from its appropriation by the subject - so
that the act of appropriation is effectively an act of creation. What
is required therefore is to establish the possibility of experience as
a possibility reaching into the very heart of the subject's being-as-
subject in such a way that subjectivity is no longer separable from
being determined-as-experience, or, simply, from a certain quality
of receptivity.
The case I shall argue is that it is precisely an 'experience of
nothingness' that is alone suited to ground an understanding of the
subject as, in some sense, determined-as-experience or, to speak the
language of religion, founded on grace. For as long as experience is
experience of 'something' we remain at the level of a subject-object
structure that either conceals a metaphysics or represents the work-
ings of a will-to-power. Only an experience of nothingness - or,
more precisely, only an experience of ourselves as subject to the
experience of nothingness - can break the spell of nihilism.
What is being sought, then, would seem to be akin to what
Heidegger, in his essay What is Metaphysics, speaks of as 'feeling',
'mood' or 'atyunement' - although Heidegger too takes care to sep-
arate his use of such terms from their everyday use in referring
to particular fluctuating occurrences in the emotional life of the
86 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

individual. Heidegger's interest is rather in how such occasions can

disclose 'being as a whole' and, in the specific mood that is the
main focus of the essay, anxiety, reveals 'the basic occurrence of our
Da-sein' in, through and as 'the nothing'.10
Heidegger himself is notoriously coy about his relationship to
Kierkegaard, reading Kierkegaard as offering no more than merely
phenomenal descriptions of religious experiences. However, since
at the same time he also acknowledges that Kierkegaard, in his
religious writings and in The Concept of Anxiety, is 'the man who has
gone farthest in analysing the phenomenon of anxiety'11 it may be
of some value to return to Kierkegaard with a view to finding a
religiously adequate account of such a fundamental experience - an
experience that, if 'merely' ontical or existentiell (Heidegger's terms
for what remains on the level of subject-object experience), can
become an unsurpassable resource for the subject in its existence as
subject (see also Chapter 5 below).
In doing so we recall that the Kierkegaard who said 'Subjectivity
is truth' also said, 'Subjectivity is untruth'. The discovery of its essen-
tial nothingness is not the end of the subject's religious quest: it is
merely the discovery of the possibility of that quest.

TO BECOME AS NOTHING

In the spirit of Heidegger's commendation of Kierkegaard's religi-

ous writings, we begin by focusing on two of the Eighteen Upbuilding
Discourses, 'To Need God is a Human Being's Highest Perfection' and
'One Who Prays Aright Struggles in Prayer and Is Victorious - in
That God Is Victorious'. These discourses will serve to exemplify the
figuration of nothingness as something that is experienced by the self
and experienced in a manner that reveals it to be constitutive of the
self's own existence.
Recalling that these discourses are not primarily philosophically
oriented descriptions of the religious life but are attempting to per-
suade readers to live out the values and commitments they embody,
it follows that nothingness is not being discussed here as a concept,
but as a value, a state, a condition to be grasped and lived. They are
religious writings intended to serve the exigencies of edification.
In the discourse 'To Need God' Kierkegaard depicts the situation
of the human subject aspiring to assume the responsible burden of
its own subjectivity and to that end becoming conscious of itself in
 The Experience of the Void 87

its difference from the continuity of its natural milieu. The merely
animal existence of the human being is likened to being 'an
instrument... in the service of inexplicable drives, indeed, in the
service of the world' or 'like a mirror in which... the world reflects
itself.'12 This, in the terminology of The Concept of Anxiety, is the 'psy-
chic' level of existence. To become a self, however, involves grasping
one's self precisely in respect of the difference between the human
subject and its environment. By internalizing this difference, the
self establishes itself by means of and as a process of self-transcend-
ence. Thus far, we might expect nothingness to be identified with
this capacity for transcendence over the given. That might be the
case if we were dealing with Hegel, but Kierkegaard's picture is
more ambiguous, for the Kierkegaardian self:

. . . struggles not with the world but with himself. Observe him
now; his powerful figure is held embraced by another figure, and
they hold each other so firmly interlocked and are so equally
matched in suppleness and strength that the wrestling cannot
even begin, because in that moment that other figure would over-
whelm him - bat that other figure is he himself.
(UD, pp. 308-9)

There can only be one outcome of such a completely level contest:

This is the annihilation of a person, and the annihilation is his

truth. He shall not escape this knowledge; for he is indeed his
own witness, his plaintiff, his judge . . . To comprehend this anni-
hilation is the highest thing of which a human being is capable;
to brood over this understanding, because it is a God-given good
entrusted to him as the secret of truth, is the highest and most
difficult thing of which a human being is capable . . . - yet what
am I saying - he is incapable even of this; at most he is capable
of being willing to understand that this smouldering brand only
consumes until the fire of God's love ignites the blaze in what the
smouldering brand could not consume.
(UD, p. 309)

In a sentence: 'Thus a human being is great and at his highest when

he corresponds to God by being nothing at all in himself...' (UD,
p. 311).
In Kierkegaard's retelling of the Augustinian-Lutheran 'story of
88 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

the self the striving towards an unobtainable righteousness is no

longer the situation of the Christian self alone: it is the situation of
the human self as such. It is the 'truth' of each of us - and here
Kierkegaard situates himself on the ground mapped out by Pascal
and, more immediately, by Hegel (and later to be claimed for on-
tology by Heidegger).
By way of contrast the discourse 'One Who Prays Aright' might
seem to mark a retreat into a more narrowly religious sphere (a
sphere that is merely 'ontical', in Heidegger's sense) in so far as it
restricts itself to the concept of prayer. Nonetheless, as it progresses,
this discourse serves to further underline how, for Kierkegaard, the
basic project of becoming a self, of becoming who we are, is - at
least at this point in his authorship13 - represented as interchange-
able with the task of religious existence. In other words, religion
(and religious activities) are not seen as an isolated 'department'
of life but as essentially congruous with life itself. Religion is not a
matter of certain overt forms of behaviour or the use of a certain
vocabulary or a particular set of concepts: existence is religious
simply in respect of the degree or quality of passion, seriousness or
ultimacy with which life is lived and not with regard to the ideo-
logical framework of belief-systems that may be used (after the
event) to interpret existence.
'One Who Prays Aright' describes prayer as a process of transfor-
mation. Initially it seems as if prayer is all about bringing to God's
attention the wishes and aspirations of the one who prays. Prayer
becomes a struggle, however, when the question regarding the
nature of the good which the one who prays is seeking is raised. Is
this 'good' to be determined in terms of the understanding that the
one who prays brings to his prayer, or is it to be determined in
accordance with God's idea as to what is 'good'? Such questions
become particularly sharp when the circumstances of a person's life
are at odds with what they themselves assume to be their highest
good. Leaving aside the cruder forms of prayer which seek some
specific good or some specific intervention from God and passing
through those forms in which the one who prays seeks enlighten-
ment as to what is or should be their highest good, Kierkegaard
moves on to those forms in which the one who prays asks simply
to understand the will of God in his situation. Such a one might, for
instance, ask: 'How can this loss I have had to endure, this suffering
which has befallen me, be your will, O God?' The victory of prayer
in such a situation is not that the one who prays gets his way or
 The Experience of the Void 89

gets the explanation he wants. For, Kierkegaard asks, 'is this the
explanation, that God denies him the understanding and requires
only faith and consequently wants only the understanding with
him that is in the realm of the ununderstanding?' (UD, p. 395). The
'result' of the process is thus the faith that 'with God all things are
possible', yet, since this 'result' is neither guaranteed by experience
nor by reason, its only 'evidence' is the process itself, i.e. that the
struggle continues, that the one who prays 'proves' his faith in God
by carrying on praying - even (especially) when such prayer is, in
any external sense, pointless.
Fully aware of the limitations of such similes, Kierkegaard likens
the turning point in the struggle of prayer to a child sitting down
to draw, whose fumbling efforts are corrected and transformed into
a thing of beauty by an invisible artist standing behind it. The ex-
planation that the one who prays seeks is like the child's drawing.
It is an attempt to represent God within the limitations and, ultim-
ately, in the likeness of the praying subject.

Ah, but now comes the difference, because the child has to be
helped by the addition of something, but more and more is taken
away from the struggler. The external world and every claim on
life were taken away from him; now he is struggling for an ex-
planation, but he is not even struggling his way to that. Finally
it seems to him that he is reduced to nothing at all. Whom should
the struggler desire to resemble other than God? But if he himself
is something or wants to be something, this something is suffi-
cient to hinder the resemblance. Only when he himself becomes
nothing, only then can God illuminate him so that he resembles
God. However great he is, he cannot manifest God's likeness;
God can imprint himself in him only when he himself has be-
come nothing. When the ocean is exerting all its power, that is
precisely the time when it cannot reflect the image of heaven, and
even the slightest motion blurs the image; but when it becomes
still and deep, then the image of heaven sinks into its nothing-
ness.
(UD, p. 399)

This, Kierkegaard concludes, may not give the one who prays the
explanation (forklaring) he wanted, but, what he does receive or
experience is transfiguration (forklarelse) in God. Although the God-
relationship as established in this 'moment' hinges on the sharpest
90 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

possible contrast being drawn between the divine and the human,
between the God who is everything and the one who prays who is
nothing, yet, paradoxically, it is in this very nothingness that the
one who prays is said to resemble God, to have God imprinted in
him, to be transfigured in God or to reflect the image of God.14
The teaching of the discourses, then, would seem to be in direct
continuity with the Lutheran understanding of the self existing 'as
nothing' before God and needing to be completely reorientated
under the guidance of divine grace, while simultaneously qualified
in terms of its own essential nothingness.
But as in The Concept of Anxiety, the God-relationship coincides
with the subject's discovery of its essential freedom. To have the
possibility of the God-relationship is to be free and to be free is to
be able to understand one's life in the reflection of the God-relation-
ship in which one understands oneself as a sinner, as nothing. The
'failure' of the one who prays to get the answer he wants or the ex-
planation he wants is an experienced occurrence in the life of the
believer, that discloses the self to itself in its most fundamental char-
acteristic, in what belongs to the very possibility of a human way of
existing. If this is to be spoken of as a 'merely' ontical event, it is
nonetheless an event, an experience, that must engage its subject
totally and without reserve. It is, in Tillich's phrase, a matter of
ultimate concern.
This experience of nothingness, then, is not the object of a special
kind of religious experience accessible only to a religiously-minded
cognitive minority. It is the experience, the 'owning', of that noth-
ingness that belongs to the human subject as such and, in parti-
cular, to the human subject as having the 'possibility of possibility',
the possibility of freedom; the possibility to find, to become and
to be a self, 'in spirit and in truth'. Moreover, it is not a nothing-
ness in which and as which the self produces itself: it is a nothing-
ness revealed to and experienced by the self as a disclosure of its
essential truth. In knowing itself 'as nothing' before God, the self
understands itself as being unconditionally derivative, absolutely
dependent and owing itself entirely and utterly to this Other, to
whom the disclosure of this truth is also owed. Moreover, in con-
trast to Hegel, such spirit, such truth, is 'founded' on a nothingness,
a non-being, that cannot be encompassed within any system of
knowledge; it constitutes a hinge between being and non-being that
is humanly unthinkable and that, for the one who prays, can only
be a matter for faith, an 'ununderstanding'.15
 The Experience of the Void 91

Yet the suspicion may still remain that all this talk of nothing or
nothingness conceals a prolepsis of an eschatologically predeter-
mined value and thus a hidden metaphysics. For Kierkegaard's talk
of God transfiguring the nothingness of the religious subject seems
to determine in advance what happens on the site of nothingness as
if there were an almost causal link: become as nothing and God will
(perhaps it can even be said: God must) shine through you. In this
respect, an image from Kierkegaard's early journals may be taken
as paradigmatic: 'The old Christian dogmatic terminology is like an
enchanted castle where the most beautiful princes and princesses
rest in deep sleep - it needs only to be awakened, brought to life,
in order to stand in its full glory.'16 Behind the rhetoric of nothing-
ness (and, in Kierkegaard's case, the whole complex machinery of
indirect communication), the old dogmatic answers are always
already lying in wait, as if 'nothingness' is just a filmy mist conceal-
ing the 'enchanted castle' of doctrine from the eye of the unseeing
traveller. To be sure, one must enter into that mist in order to arrive
at the castle, one must pass into the moment of obscured vision that
befalls all who enter the mist - but it is only for a moment: one re-
emerges into the brightness of a day in which everything is just as
it always was.
In seeking to penetrate further into what can be derived from
Kierkegaard's thought in this respect, it will be necessary to untan-
gle two closely interconnected issues: the first is centred on the
question of the priority of God or of the ontological other in the
religious life, the second on the question of time. That these two
questions are necessarily interconnected can be seen by reflecting
on the way in which the main point at issue here has been con-
ceived. For the identification of the metaphysical God with the
ideological function of a prolepsis of eschatological reality means
that the radicality with which the human situation vis-h-vis time is
thought will react upon the way in which the priority of God in the
religious relationship is conceived. Here I shall, firstly, address the
question as to how the experience of nothingness can be under-
stood as allowing for an assertion of the priority of God in such a
way as to slip the net of prolepsis and then, secondly, see how the
experience of nothingness is given to the subject in, with and as its
experience of temporality.
With regard to the question of time, I shall continue to focus
primarily on Kierkegaard, although it is worth repeating (as was
noted in the Introduction) that it is not the historical unfolding of
92 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

the question but the question itself that is the primary focus of this
enquiry: Kierkegaard is important only in so far as he serves to help
illuminate what is essential in the question. Firstly, however, I shall
address the question of the experience of nothingness as the expe-
rience of God as that is described and analysed by one of the found-
ers of the modern understanding of religious experience: Friedrich
Schleiermacher.

NOTHINGNESS AND THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD

Outside the narrow sphere of Christian theology, Schleiermacher is

rarely brought into discussions of the crisis in metaphysics.17 Yet
Schleiermacher not only does no less justice to the abyssal quality
with which the void reveals itself in our experience than a Kier-
kegaard or a Schopenhauer: he also shows one direction in which
it may yet be possible to reappropriate the language of Christian
theology as a resource with which to interpret that revelation and
to speak of God in such a way as not to confine divinity to a reified
metaphysics.
In his Speeches on Religion (1799) Schleiermacher appeals to reli-
gion's 'cultured despisers' on the basis of what he hopes they will
recognize as a shared ground of experience. Differentiating religion
from speculative philosophy and from Kantian moralism, Schleier-
macher offers an analysis of the contents of consciousness that, in
his view, shows that the possibility of religious experience is latent
within the general horizons of human experience. At one and the
same time, 'religious' experience is an irreducible and distinct sphere
of consciousness and yet locatable within universal consciousness.
In other words, Schleiermacher is not attempting to speak of some-
thing that he believes to be weird or random - apparitions, audi-
tions or hallucinations - but of what he believes to be given as a
possibility within any human life. To go even further: it is a possi-
bility without which life would not be completely or authentically
human. Religious experience is constitutive of the humanum as such.
Central to Schleiermacher's account are the concepts of 'intuition'
and 'feeling'. At first 'intuition' appears to be the dominant notion,
for Schleiermacher states, programmatically, that the concept 'intui-
tion of the universe' 'is the hinge of my whole speech.'18 In the light
of this we might naturally assimilate his project to that of another
early Romantic philosopher, Schelling, whose System of Transcen-
 The Experience of the Void 93

dental Idealism appeared within a year of Schleiermacher's Speeches.

Yet this comparison actually highlights what is distinctive in
Schleiermacher's thought over against his fellow romanticist. For
Schelling, taking as his starting-point the Fichtean model of the self
as dynamically self-productive, actus purus, values intuition as that
by which the self is able to reflect upon itself, to see itself, in the
immediate act of its own self-production. Intuition guarantees the
absolute self-transparency of the acting self and thereby makes
possible the construction of a system of transcendental idealism
in which, by the power of intuition, an exhaustive exposition of the
story of the self is narrated. In this intuition the self is able to see
what it is in the entirety of its history, to see itself as a whole. And
this possibility is maintained even at the price of handing over to
art the definitive moment of self-apprehension, on the grounds that
art is able to overcome the reflective 'gap' implicit in all philosophi-
cal reflection. Art gets beyond duality in a way that philosophy
cannot - and in doing so lays the foundation for a total world-view.
Famously rebuked by Hegel as offering to philosophy merely
that dark night in which all cows are black, Schelling's project was
criticized by Kierkegaard in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript,
where the pseudonym Johannes Climacus rejects the possibility of
an existential system, that is a system like Schelling's that claims
both to begin with the actuality of the existing self and also to offer
a total overview of the self in its existence. Yet that criticism is
already implied (before the publication of Schelling's System) in
Schleiermacher's Speeches, for, as he states, 'Intuition is and always
remains something individual, set apart, the immediate perception,
nothing more. To bind it and to incorporate it into a whole is once
more the business not of sense but of abstract thought' (OR, p. 105).
And, later, he adds: 'A system of intuitions? Can you imagine any-
thing stranger? Do views, and especially views of the infinite, allow
themselves to be brought into a system?' (OR, p. 106). In moving to
a standpoint from which to survey the whole as a totality we are de
facto leaving behind the standpoint of pure intuition - and that
means that we are, of course, no longer basing ourselves upon that
standpoint. This is an argument Hegel could have made - but
whereas Hegel is content to sacrifice the immediate for a view onto
the whole, Schleiermacher remains loyal to the immediate. For what
is true of intuition is also true of religion: 'It stops with the imme-
diate experiences of the existence and action of the universe, with
the individual intuitions and feelings . . . ' (OR, p. 105).
94 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

In taking his stand upon the purity of intuition in its 'independent

particularity', Schleiermacher, like Schelling, was to be rebuked by
Hegel. Hegel could only understand this pure immediacy, this inde-
pendent particularity, as no-thing, empty, vacuous, without content:
by the very dynamics of the negative dialectics by which the Hegel-
ian system is constructed, the Schleiermacherian intuition is excluded
from the system as that which is always already transcended.
Schleiermacher, while acknowledging that the emptiness of pure
intuition is unable to offer a vista on totality, does regard it as none-
theless infinite in itself - infinite, undefined, uncontained, outside
and beyond all defining and separating reflection. Yet, he admits,
even such pure intuition - despite its declared incommensurability
with any systematic project of thought - may appear inviting to
speculation. Even in the moment of intuition I may find myself
asking 'What is it that I see? What is it that appears to me in this
intuition?' - and so the purity of intuition is lost, subsumed into the
machinery of reflection, dialectics and speculation. To speak of in-
tuition at all - merely to name it - to isolate it, to 'have an intuition',
is necessarily to refract intuition through the medium of reflection
and to make it other than itself and no longer intuition. 'Not only
when we communicate an inner action of the mind, but even when
we merely turn it into material for contemplation within ourselves
and wish to raise it to lucid consciousness, this unavoidable sep-
aration inevitably occurs' (OR, p. 112).
Intuition itself, therefore, offers only a partial and inadequate
approach to that ground of consciousness that is beyond duality.
To provide a second point of reference for this purely immediate
ground, Schleiermacher therefore calls in another concept: feeling.
Only by orienting ourselves with reference to both these points can
we begin to hope to get a view on the primordial datum. 'Intuition
without feeling is nothing . . . feeling without intuition is also noth-
ing; both are therefore something only when and because they are
originally one and unseparated' (OR, p. 112). Whereas intuition
represents the universe in a particular aspect to the intuiting con-
sciousness, feeling is concerned with the 'change in your inner
consciousness' (OR, p. 109) that always accompanies such represen-
tations and that is inseparable from them in the moment of expe-
rience. As I see the picture, the flower, the sunset, the faeces, I am
in the very moment of seeing - intuiting - drawn towards the object of my
vision or else repelled by it. Experience is neither intuition in isolation
nor feeling in isolation, but both together - or, rather, that state of
 The Experience of the Void 95

consciousness that is prior to the separation of both: 'The first

mysterious moment that occurs in every sensory perception, before
intuition and feeling have separated, where sense and its objects
have, as it were, flowed into one another and become one . . . ' (OR,
p. 112).
This mysterious moment of experience - mysterious yet occur-
ring continuously as the abiding source of the stream of conscious-
ness - is not of itself 'religion'. But nor is religion to be understood
apart from it. Experience becomes religious by a certain intensifica-
tion such that in this primordial moment I am not merely experi-
encing the universe for myself, as a spectator of the world or of
consciousness, but am opened to it. In 'the higher and divine reli-
gious activity of the mind' the 'mysterious moment' is repeated -
yet still indescribably. So Schleiermacher is moved to one of the
most concentrated and poetic passages in his whole authorship as
he attempts to break through the barrier of this inexpressibility:

Would that I could and might express it, at least indicate it, with-
out having to desecrate it! It is as fleeting and transparent as the
first scent with which the dew gently caresses the waking flowers,
as modest and delicate as a maiden's kiss, as holy and fruitful as
a nuptial embrace; indeed, not like these, but it is itself all of these.
A manifestation, an event develops quickly and magically into an
image of the universe. Even as the beloved and ever-sought-for
form fashions itself, my soul flees toward it; I embrace it, not as
a shadow, but as the holy essence itself. I lie on the bosom of the
infinite world. At this moment I am its soul, for I feel all its
powers and its infinite life as my own; at this moment it is my
body, for I penetrate its muscles and its limbs as my own and its
innermost nerves move according to my sense and my presenti-
ment as my own. With the slightest trembling the holy embrace
is dispersed, and now for the first time the intuition stands before
me as a separate form; I survey it, and it mirrors itself in my open
soul like the image of the vanishing beloved in the awakened eye
of the youth; now for the first time the feeling works its way up
from inside and diffuses itself like the blush of shame and desire
on his cheek. This moment is the highest flowering of religion.
(OR, pp. 112-13)

This 'love scene', as Richard Crouter has called it, makes clear how
'intuition' is of itself a mere reflection, 'the image of the vanishing
96 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

beloved'. Even before it is articulated as language such a differen-

tiation of intuition from the immediacy of living experience consti-
tutes consciousness as the representation of what we have always
already lost and as loss of presence - and if that is the case with
regard to the simple intuition, how much more when it is a matter
of a 'system' of intuitions. Since language itself is inconceivable
unless just such a system is presupposed, it follows that any at-
tempt to think or to attempt to speak the reality of religion is to
think or to speak in the necessary absence of that which is being
spoken about. And - versus Schelling - the same strictures would
apply on any attempts to recreate or represent the mysterious
moment aesthetically. For not only language, but any system of
representation presupposes the absence of that which it represents.
Schleiermacher's poem also enables us to see how he relates the
specifically religious dimension of experience to the primordial
depths of experience in general. For it is only in terms of its inten-
sity that the rapture he evokes is distinct from the primordial unity
beyond intuition and feeling that inheres in all experience. Although
the experience is localized by reference to epiphanies of natural
beauty and erotic love (including the epiphany given in the sexual
act - 'a nuptial embrace'), these are privileged only as persuasive
examples by which to draw to the reader's attention that the very
foundation of the self is its ravishment by the 'infinite world'. The
very infinity of the world that is experienced in such moments
disempowers in advance any attempt to distinguish or to restrict
such experience to experiences of a certain kind. It is also signifi-
cant in this respect that Schleiermacher does not appeal to the tes-
timony of mystics or other knights of faith but to experiences that
are within the capacities of all human beings: nature, love and sexual
union.
Indeed, Schleiermacher's emphasis on the raptures of love and
sex adds force to the case that such experience is foundational for
the existence of the experiencing subject. Just as we can't exist
without these raptures, since it is to them that we owe our very
existence as biological beings, so also religious experience, under-
stood as the maximum point on a scale that is constituted by the
mysterious rapture inhering in all experience, establishes the meas-
ure by which everything that lies on that scale is to be graded.
However, the metaphor is misleading if 'measuring' implies restric-
tive definition, for Schleiermacher is pointing to what, in all ex-
perience, opens out onto or is pregnant with the possibility of the
 The Experience of the Void 97

non-totalizable infinite. In the religious dimension of experience

lies the possibility of all experience as such.
And here a further point must be made: that the sexual metaphor
(and more than a metaphor: ' . . . not like these, b u t . . . is itself all of
these') is eloquent of what Schleiermacher most wants to say about
the self: that it is not sufficient unto itself; that it cannot constitute
itself as the Fichtean T constituted itself; that it cannot mirror itself
in a totalizing intuition a la Schelling; that - to speak positively - it
is what it is, it is as it is, it is, simply, by virtue of its openness to
the other: the beloved who is for me the bearer of the universe.
But who is this other? Clearly not an 'other' who can be defined
or apprehended in an intuition that is adequate to its object. For the
opening-out to the other that Schleiermacher describes is one in
which self and other meet and are constituted prior to the separa-
tion of intuition and feeling. It is a unity that is no unity, for there
are no separate objects or selves to be united. It is the absolute
indifference, the moment of non-differentiation, on which self and
other meet and on which, though only in the moment of separation,
they are constituted as self-and-other. What is disclosed to me in
the passion of the erotic is more than the 'other' human individual
in their individuality and separateness. In and through that other I
am revealed to myself in a yet more fundamental aspect.
The charges of pantheism that Schleiermacher's early thought
attracted might lead us to think of the philosophy of the Speeches as
massively ontological. Yet that in which the unity is grounded is
prevented by its very character of infinite immediacy from being
constructed in terms of being. For how can we describe or define
that ground as 'being' without already subjecting it to intuition and
representation?
Schleiermacher's self cannot be understood as a self-constituting
entity: the self 'is' only by virtue of or in relation to that which it
is not. Yet this that-which-it-is-not is itself thereby participant in the
becoming of the self or in the self's infinite immediacy. Schleier-
macher's 'orthodox' opponents were indeed right to the extent that
a 'God' who can be such an other is not the 'God' of classical the-
ism, neither in terms of being a separate personality nor in terms of
being comprehensible within a coherent ontology - yet that is by no
means to concede the charge of pantheism; it is rather to point to
nothingness - non-representable, non-intuitable - as the milieu in
which, for Schleiermacher, the romance of religion is conducted.
These reflections are not weakened by Schleiermacher's later
98 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

formulation of the religious feeling as the 'feeling of absolute de-

pendence'. At one level this might seem to involve a return to meta-
physical prolepsis and a denial of the mutual determination of self
and other on the ground of nothingness, by defining the dependent
self and the one on whom it depends as statically opposed entities,
eternally separate as self and other, creature and creator. Yet, as
Schleiermacher presents it, the very identification of God as the
one on whom we absolutely depend denies to us the possibility
of developing a reificatory concept of God.19 For 'God', he says, is
simply to be understood as 'the Whence of our receptive and active
existence' and, as such, 'is not the world, in the sense of the totality
of temporal existence, and still less is it any single part of the world',
for such a restriction on the Whence would only permit 'a limited
feeling of dependence', not 'the absolute feeling'. Moreover, this
absolute feeling is not and cannot be 'conditioned by some pre-
vious knowledge of God': the only 'idea' we could have of God in
this connection would be as 'that which is co-determinant in this
feeling and to which we trace our being in such a state.'20 God, in
other words, is only to be understood out of the experience and with-
in the (infinite) horizon of that experience - and that experience
is still, indeed still more strongly, modelled in terms of the self's
existence as incapable of self-constitution.
It is not irrelevant to recall that in addition to his critique of the
absolutizing of knowledge, Schleiermacher also pioneered an alter-
native approach to humanistic study by transforming the scope of
hermeneutics, from being a mere ancillary to the study of biblical
or other ancient texts into a regulative science for all interpretative
endeavours concerned with human beings' self-representation in
language. In other words, all dogmatic, philosophical or cultural
texts were to be approached not so much as evidence for some
objective state of affairs but as the self-representation of a human
subject in whose immediacy alone the ultimate ground of all mean-
ing could reside. As a philologist in his own right, Schleiermacher
naturally took care to give due weight to the demands of philologi-
cal study, yet the methods of such study could not of themselves
finally decide on the meaning of any particular text. In order to
understand that text as a human product in the integrity of the
essential meaning vested in it by its origin in the actuality of human
life, grammatical interpretation required the supplement of psycho-
logical interpretation. This again Schleiermacher divided into two
parts which he called the comparative and the divinatory. The
 The Experience of the Void 99

comparative method assumes a structure of universal categories

and principles and seeks to locate the particular text within that
structure. (So, for example, we might say that 'Schleiermacher' is
to be understood as an example of 'Romantic philosophy'.) The
divinatory 'method', by way of contrast, requires a leap of subjec-
tive transformation: 'The divinatory is that [method] in which by,
as it were, transforming oneself into the other, one seeks to grasp
what is individual [in a text] in its immediacy.'21 This absolutely
individual characteristic in any given text is not a concept and is
not itself a representation amongst representations. It is what
Schleiermacher calls the 'style' of a text.22 In so far as the divinatory
method is integral to all interpretative endeavour, it therefore be-
comes clear that the project of interpretation can never be exhaus-
tively finalized in terms of any objective results. The divination of
style is a task that must not only be ventured by each new reader
on the basis of their own subjective interest in the given text, it
must also be repeated and its achievements re-appropriated in an
ongoing engagement with the text by each individual reader. The
reader can never reduce that which it can only divine to an object
or a result (or even 'a reading') over which it has some kind of
control. It is perhaps not insignificant - not least with regard to the
reasons for which we were unsatisfied with Nietzschean or Sartrean
nihilism - that Schleiermacher comments of the divinatory faculty
that it is 'that aspect of understanding human beings in which
women are strongest' while the objectifying and comparative method
is more typically masculine.23
If, of course, the Schleiermacherian self is understood as an im-
permeable substantive entity, then the activity of the productive
self in which the origin of each text is to be divined will be
portrayable as, in Heidegger's terms, a 'merely ontical' event, the
activity of a finite, limited 'personality' that offers itself as legiti-
mate material for objectification and thereby also knowledge. Divi-
nation then becomes no more than an alternative route to knowledge,
another way of reaching the same goal as that presupposed in the
work of intellectual reflection. If, on the other hand (and as has
been argued here), it is the case that Schleiermacher's account of
experience points to an understanding of the self as in itself
unfathomably rooted in the mysteriousness of its originary indebt-
edness to an other beyond all particular others, then the act of
divination can itself never be more than an imaginative and provi-
sional raid on the ultimately inarticulable. The labour and play of
100 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

Schleiermacherian hermeneutics is, in this understanding, a never-

ending journey across the face of the abyss, a continual appropria-
tion of meaning from the gracious fecundity of the void.
With these comments, however, we come to another aspect of
the experience of nothingness, namely its character as revealing the
utterly temporal character of human existence. The interdependence
of the questions of time and of deity has already been raised. At
this point it need only be restated that unless the attempt to think
God on the basis of the experienced nothingness of human existence
also embraces the absolutely temporal nature of human existence
(including, necessarily, human thought), we are likely to finish by
reinstating a God whose 'being' is no more than a mirror-image of
human nothingness and so a God ripe for Feuerbachian reduction!
Also, the degree to which the God-relationship is thought from
within the heart of the void will be the degree to which the divine-
human relationship is conceived as involving a genuine and
unsurpassable mutuality of freedom. But - and here lies the chal-
lenge - is it possible for theists to think God from within a situation
that is temporal through and through? To take a first step in ad-
dressing this question, we return to Kierkegaard.

NOTHINGNESS AND THE EXPERIENCE OF TIME

In the previous chapter we heard how Kierkegaard's Assessor

William critiqued a mystical attitude in which the self chooses itself
acosmically, in separation from the world. An important aspect of
this separation is precisely the mystic's failure to know what the
Assessor regards as 'a human being's eternal dignity,' namely 'that
he can gain a history' (EO II, p. 250).
Something of what this might mean has already been explored
by the Assessor in an earlier letter, in which he attempted to show
the young man to whom he is writing that marriage is just as -
even more - beautiful than a mere succession of love affairs. The
role of time is critical in this. Endurance through time and the liv-
ing out of the reality of marital love in every moment of that time
lies at the heart of marriage. For this very reason the inner history
and the true beauty of married love cannot be represented artisti-
cally, since art always culminates in the moment, in what can be
shown in the immediacy of an intuition of the here-and-now. The
beauty of married love can only be known by being lived.
 The Experience of the Void 101

Romantic love can be portrayed very well in the moment; marital

love cannot, for an ideal husband is not one who is ideal once in
his life but one who is that every day . . . Courage can be concen-
trated in the moment; patience cannot, precisely because patience
contends against time . . . Thus, when patience acquires itself in
patience, it is inner history.
(EO II, pp. 135-8)

In this exposition the Assessor complements Climacus's view of

the moment. For the Climacan 'moment' is not the kind of moment
that could be represented in the immediacy of art. Conversely, even
in repentance, as expounded by the Assessor, the self cannot con-
stitute itself but only arrives at the point of its own ontological
indeterminacy. The self of Judge William is no timeless essence, but
is what it is only in and through its free self-appropriation in time.
It is not, but is only becoming.
We may at this point draw in another pseudonym, Constantin
Constantius, to further supplement our interpretation. In Constan-
tin's eyes the chief task of human existence is to achieve 'repetition'.
What is repetition?
Constantin himself defines it by contrast to recollection:

... repetition is a crucial expression for what 'recollection' was

to the Greeks. Just as they taught that all life is a recollecting,
modern philosophy will teach that all life is a repetition . . . Rep-
etition and recollection are the same movement, except in oppo-
site directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated
forward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward.24

The drama of Repetition itself concerns a young man who is in-

capable of living in the present and who sees his life in the retro-
spective mood of a reflective poet, looking upon it as if it were an
event that had already slipped away into the past. Not surprisingly,
when he gets engaged his engagement proves unsustainable, since
he is incapable of relating to the 'reality' of his fiancee, who be-
comes merely a foil for his poetic reflections. After breaking off the
engagement, however, he is plunged into an existential confronta-
tion with the emptiness and meaninglessness of existence. 'One
sticks a finger into the ground to smell what country one is in; I
stick my finger into the world - it smells of nothing. Where am I?
What does it mean to say: the world? What is the meaning of that
102 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

word? Who tricked me into this whole thing and leaves me stand-
ing here? Who am I? How did I get into the world? Why was I not
asked about i t . . . ?' {R, p. 200 adapted).
In such a situation there can be no falling-back on some ready-
made explanation. Recollection must give way to repetition, the striv-
ing in time to attain selfhood in and by the ever-renewed/repeated
commitment to the concrete moment. But the price of repetition is
the abandonment of any fixed concept of the self. The self that
exists by repetition exists not otherwise than in the flux and void of
time.
Constantin himself is portrayed as one who knows that repetition
is the only ground of an authentic life but who, at the same time,
is unable to bring it about. He sees that the relentless forward rush
of time makes recollection unsustainable, but, for himself, he can
only experience that onrush as annihilating negativity, as a being-
towards-death:

. . . one sits calmly in one's living room; when all is vanity and
passes away, one nevertheless speeds faster than on a train, even
though sitting still... Farewell! farewell! You exuberant hope of
youth, what is your hurry? After all, what you are hunting for
does not exist, and the same goes for you yourself. Farewell, you
masculine vim and vigour! Why are you stamping the ground so
violently? What you are stepping on is an illusion!... Travel on,
you fugitive river! You are the only one who really knows what
you want, for you want only to flow and lose yourself in the sea,
which is never filled! Move on you drama of life - let no one call
it a comedy, no one a tragedy, for no one saw the end! Move on,
you drama of existence, where life is not given again any more
than money is!
(R, pp. 175-6)

Death is the only certainty.

Yet the further adventures of the young man offer an alternative
to such pessimism, an alternative which, in the closing letters of the
young man to Constantin, is depicted as attainable through the
'thunderstorm' of a religious crisis. For those who endure the anni-
hilation of a world constructed on the principle of recollection (and,
we should recall, recollection is not only - as it is for this young
man - the essence of poetry; it is also, with an eye on Climacus's
confrontation with Socrates, the principle of knowledge) and with
 The Experience of the Void 103

it the annihilation of the self that belongs to such a world, the

possibility of a breakthrough, the possibility of freedom, the possi-
bility of a new beginning, a 'repetition', beckons from beyond the
void. But such a new beginning cannot, according to Repetition, be
attained by any who refuse the annihilation of their constructed
world. The nothingness of all they had hitherto known and under-
stood and been must be faced, endured, suffered and hope placed
firmly and finally in the hands of God: for only the Other can posit
me and bring about my new beginning when I no longer exist -
and the logic, we see, is exactly that of Climacus.
The issue of the temporality of the self that has found itself in its
nothingness before God is also addressed in the Eighteen Upbuilding
Discourses. That the topic is central to the religious vision of the
discourses is indicated in a preliminary way by the fact that several
of the titles of the discourses advertise the theme of temporality -
and indicate the direction in which the concept will be developed.
Two aspects of such temporality are paramount: patience and ex-
pectation. The very first discourse is entitled 'The Expectancy of
Faith' and depicts the situation of a self adrift in a universe of
trackless relativity. How can such a self come to its self, how can it
acquire identity, purpose and coherence? The answer, Kierkegaard
suggests, is to be found in its capacity for concern for the future.
Eternity, understood as the ground of the self, the power which
posits it and which establishes a criterion by which to measure it,
is only disclosed to us in the form of the future so that our self is
not but is always the aim of our project, always still to be attained.
The theme of expectation recurs in, for example, 'Patience in Ex-
pectancy' and 'The Expectation of an Eternal Salvation', while that
of patience is to be found (in addition to in 'Patience in Expect-
ancy') in the two discourses 'To Gain One's Soul in Patience' and
'To Preserve One's Soul in Patience'. In the former of these
Kierkegaard makes it quite explicit that the category of repetition is
integral to what he means by patience. 'Patience' is not a particular
virtue of the self nor a particular emotional or temperamental at-
tribute: it is the self itself in its temporality, 'it is all a repetition'
(UD, p. 170).
The essentially temporal structure of selfhood is perhaps most
succinctly summarized, however, in the discourse 'Strengthening in
the Inner Being' in which Kierkegaard describes the awakening of
what he calls 'concern' in the self, concern that seeks an under-
standing 'about the meaning the world has for him and he for the
104 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

world, about what meaning everything within him by which he him-

self belongs to the world has for him and he therein for the world'
and that, as such, is experienced as a looking-beyond the immedi-
acy of the moment (in the sense of the spatialized 'moment' that is
the object of the aesthetic ecstasy critiqued by the Assessor): this
'beyond', however, is not a timeless world of essences but arises
out of a deeper temporalization of the self whereby the self becomes
'older than the moment' and only so grasps the eternal (LTD, p. 86).
Yet is this really a 'deeper temporalization' of the self - or is it not
an indirect way of reinstating the perennial religious contrast be-
tween a temporal world of change and chance and an eternal world
of unchanging constancy? Isn't Kierkegaard merely thinking time
for the sake of thinking eternity? Is history, being-in-time, only a
'moment' in an eternal drama?
There is one more important discussion of time in Kierkegaard's
otuvre that is relevant here, a discussion that links up again to the
question of the moment, as that appeared in the Philosophical Frag-
ments. This is the discussion of the moment as the point of union
between time and eternity in The Concept of Anxiety.
This is certainly a difficult passage and we cannot expect to achieve
more than a highly contestable reading of it.25 There are, however,
two points that might usefully be highlighted. The first has to do
with the distinction between the sense of 'the moment' as that might
be understood in the context of immediate sensuous existence (as
when we say that the sensualist lives merely in and for the mo-
ment) and the radical understanding of 'the moment' as the mo-
ment of unity between time and eternity. The second, proceeding
out of that, has to do with the way in which the self's relation to the
eternal (and so to God) might at the same time be understood as
radically temporalized in such a way that the God-relationship is
not a flight from the flux of being-in-time but a concrete way of
temporal existence.
Kierkegaard's argument involves a critique of the belief that 'the
present' can be understood as 'a moment' in time. Starting from the
customary definition of time as 'an infinite succession', he suggests
that such a definition implies the further assumption that time is
divisible into past, present and future. Such a division would, he
accepts, be admissible if - but only if - 'in the infinite succession of
time a foothold could be found, i.e. a present which was the divid-
ing point...' {CA, p. 85). This, however, is not the case, for 'every
moment, as well as the sum of the moments, is a process (a passing
 The Experience of the Void 105

by)' and therefore 'no moment is a present, and accordingly there

is in time neither present, nor past, nor future' (CA, p. 85). More-
over, the very conception of time as divisible into past, present and
future is precisely a falsification of what essentially belongs to time,
because it envisages time as 'spatialized . . . because [it] allows time
to be represented instead of being thought' (CA, p. 85). Even to
posit the present as a kind of static or fixed vantage point from
which to construct a schematization of time is, as Kierkegaard puts
it, 'incorrect'. It is to conceive of the moment as 'a discrimen', a
division of time. But 'the present... is not a concept of time, except
precisely as something infinitely contentless, which again is the
infinite vanishing' (CA, p. 86). Time is not the sort of thing that can
be divided or broken up into distinct and separable moments.
Kierkegaard therefore wants to replace a spatialized concept of
the moment with what he believes to be a more satisfactory con-
cept: the moment as the moment of unity between time and eter-
nity. Acknowledging that 'the moment' (0jeblikket, literally: the
glancing of an eye) is a 'figurative expression' and therefore 'not
easy to deal with', Kierkegaard offers as a picture of the moment an
image drawn from romantic poetry, the image of Ingeborg, a poetic
heroine, looking across the sea after Frithiof, her departing lover.
Interestingly, Kierkegaard had previously referred to this passage
in his journals, where he described it as representing the essence of
romanticism, in so far as romanticism culminates in a mood of pure
longing or presentiment (Anelse), oscillating between presence and
absence.26 Recalling Schleiermacher's conception of intuition as al-
ways 'the image of the vanishing beloved', we can glimpse how this
'picture' of the temporally-determined attitude of longing constitutes
that longing as an object of representation that is simultaneously
present-absent. Kierkegaard comments:'... a sigh, a word, etc. have
power to relieve the soul of the burdensome weight, precisely be-
cause the burden, merely by being expressed, already begins to
become something of the past' (CA, p. 87 adapted). Even the most
momentary intuition, one that seems to represent its object imme-
diately in the simplest moment of vision, is qua intuition also a rep-
etition: it reveals its object as a presence (what I here-and-now intuit)
constituted by an absence (that which is now already, for me, in the
past). Therefore the moment gives meaning to the world precisely
by revealing the human world as a being-in-time. Every moment is
always already temporalized.
That we see anything at all, that we experience anything at all,
106 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

that a world rises up all around us in which we exist as selves - all

this is possible only on the basis of the moment-qwa-repetition. This
vital principle needs to be borne in mind when Kierkegaard speaks
of the relationship between 'the moment' and 'eternity'. When he
denies that the moment is to be understood as an 'atom of time'
he is denying that it is reducible to a spatialized schema; when he
affirms that it is to be understood as an 'atom of eternity' he is not
abstracting the moment from time but emphasizing its role as con-
stitutive of the self in its striving to acquire continuity and 'become
older than the moment' (CA, p. 88). Thus understood the moment
is foundational to history and to spirit (CA, p. 89). "The moment is
that ambiguity in which time and eternity touch each other, and
with this the concept of temporality is posited, whereby time con-
stantly intersects eternity and eternity constantly pervades time'
(CA, p. 90).
A related point arises out of the role of futurity in Kierkegaard's
characterization of the intersection of time and eternity. 'This is
because the eternal first signifies the future or because the future is
the incognito in which the eternal, even though incommensurable
with time, nevertheless preserves its association with time' (CA, p.
90). As indwelling the future, the eternal thus calls into being our
way of existing as a being-in-time. Even the moment of intuition,
as the moment in which, as an 'image of the vanishing beloved', the
world comes into existence for us, is the revelation of a dynamic
self-world reciprocity that is not so much constituted on the basis of
what 'is', i.e. of a perception of a present actuality, but on the basis
of what 'will be', i.e. of an infinite flux that comes, in the human
subject, to exist for itself as an aspiration towards the possibility of
a meaning that is always to be divined and never attained and thus
is profoundly futural.
But does this answer the question as to whether Kierkegaard's
talk of 'becoming older than the moment' is a way of radicalizing
the temporality of the self or a way of escaping or taming the spiral-
ling vortex of time? Doesn't understanding existence in the light of the
eternal always in fact end up by functioning as an insurance against
the all-consuming character of time?27
Does Kierkegaard, in short, accept the measure of Holderlin's
vision in the poem 'Hyperion's Song of Fate':

Doch uns ist gegeben,

Auf keiner Statte zu ruhn,
 The Experience of the Void 107

Es schwinden, es fallen
Die leidenden Menschen
Blindlings von einer
Stunde zur andern,
Wie Wasser von Klippe
Zu Klippe geworfen,
Jahrlang ins Ungewisse hinab.

(Translation: Yet to us is not given to find any place to rest; suffer-

ing humanity evanesces and falls blindly from one hour into the
next - like water tossed from rock to rock, year after year down into
uncertainty.)
If Kierkegaard's attempts to give a theoretical form to such a
radical conception of time risk falsifying that experience itself
(and what theorizing will altogether escape this risk?), can we not,
even so, find in his words a line of vision opening onto just such
an experience of time as the continually self-annihilating milieu of
subjective existence and, as such, experienced in, with and under
the experience of nothingness in which the self realizes its incapac-
ity to be itself and, in doing so, becomes transparent to God?
If this is so, then we can begin to see how the single concept of
an experience of nothingness might provide a perspective within
which the various contexts by means of which the Augustinian
tradition had thematized nothingness can be seen in their essential
unity: the creatureliness of the human subject, its subjection to tem-
porality and its fallenness (concretized in its manner of existing as a
divided self that can never establish the ground of its own unity).
Moreover, precisely by offering such a unitary perspective, this
experience opens up the possibility of a new manner of existing in
which existence as a fallen and utterly temporal creature is no longer
judged negatively in terms of its defection from primal being, but
as the only way in which even being itself could ever come to be for us.
But do we have any fully worked examples as to what this might
mean concretely and in practice?
On the basis of popular wisdom alone, it would seem that we do:
namely in those great traditions of Asian thought in which nothing-
ness has been given the kind of foundational role in religious and
philosophical thought that being has, until recently, performed in
the West. It is therefore to such a comparative study that we now
turn.
 Nothingness and the Place
of Religious Experience -
An Asian View
The language and the symbolism of nothingness, of non-being and
of the void inevitably call to mind Asian traditions of religious
thought and experience. Indeed, any attempt by the West to go it
alone in formulating an adequate account of nothingness would
be the height of provincialism.1 On the contrary, the enterprise
of thinking through the concept of nothingness in the context of
Western thought cannot but be invigorated and strengthened by a
serious engagement with any one of a number of Eastern thinkers
and schools, Hindu, Taoist and Buddhist. If religious thought today
is duty-bound to understand its project against the background of
human globalization, this must be especially true in the case of
fundamental concepts of being and nothingness that have so widely
been taken as marking one of the most distinctive boundaries be-
tween East and West.
If Japanese Buddhism is here taken as chief partner-in-dialogue,
this is in full acknowledgement of the fact that any enquiry that laid
claim to historical and systematic completeness would need to
undertake an extensive and thorough-going examination of other
eastern traditions and sources. Among the reasons for selecting
Japanese Buddhism for dialogue are the following.
Firstly, in the encounter with the philosophically articulated form
of modern Japanese Buddhism represented by the Kyoto School,
we meet a movement within Buddhist thought that has itself en-
gaged in an extensive and intensive dialogue with Western philoso-
phy and theology and for which the modern crisis of nihilism has
played a decisive and formative role. The significance of this achieve-
ment can scarcely be overestimated: what Nishida, Nishitani, Tanabe
and others have done is to have internalized the Western crisis
of nihilism as formulated by Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and
Heidegger into the life and development of Buddhist thought. But

108
 Nothingness and the Place of Religious Experience 109

this is no simple work of Westernization. For not only are the

Western sources subjected to a distinctive critique in the process of
being appropriated, but, by a kind of philosophical chiasm, the
translation of Western philosophy into Buddhist categories also
makes Buddhism accessible to the West as a philosophical and re-
ligious resource for the living and overcoming of nihilism. Out of
this process of translation and interpretation, then, there arises a
vocabulary and a conceptual framework by means of which a mutual
evaluation and critique of Buddhist and Western traditions can be
inaugurated.
Secondly, Zen Buddhism has acquired a more or less independ-
ent life of its own in Western culture going back to and beyond
such popularizers as Alan Watts and the 'Beat Zen' of Jack Kerouac
and others.2 In this respect Zen has become an important part of
modern Western culture itself - albeit in a form that purists may
regard as illegitimate. Yet, in defence of Western Zennists, it should
be said that through D.T. Suzuki writers such as Watts were engag-
ing with an authentic and living representative of Japanese Bud-
dhism and one who was himself a close associate of the Kyoto
thinkers.

SATORI AND PURE EXPERIENCE

Where to begin? One point might be the concept of satori, defined

by Suzuki as 'another name for Enlightenment' and 'the acquiring
of a new point of view in our dealings with life and the world'.3
Since Suzuki also speaks of Enlightenment as the 'raison d'itre of
Buddhism', 'the solid basis' on which the whole edifice of Bud-
dhism is erected,4 and defines 'the essence of Zen Buddhism' pre-
cisely in terms of 'acquiring a new viewpoint of looking at life and
things generally',5 we can see at once that the nature and character
of saton/Enlightenment is an issue of vital importance. What, how-
ever, does it have to do with the Augustinian story of the divided
self crying out for a redemption that can only come through the
abyss of divine grace? And how is it to be understood in relation
to claims concerning the possibility of a non-culturally-determined
religious experience of nothingness?
A first step in answering such questions might be taken by ques-
tioning Suzuki's formulae more closely.
What, for instance, is meant by 'acquiring a new point of view in
110 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

our dealings with life' and what are the respective roles and limits
of immediate experience and of reflective understanding in this
'point of view'? More fundamentally still: is the self that acquires
such a new point of view independent of that process of acquisition
(as if, for example, it were confronted with a supermarket shelf
stocked with possible points of view from which it could freely
choose), or is the self itself inseparable from the point of view it
occupies in such a way that the view on the world that the self
acquires in satori is the self altogether and exclusively? But what if
this particular point of view is precisely no particular point of view
at all but the point of view of absolute nothingness, a view that sees
the world as total emptiness - the 'place', 'field' or 'standpoint' of
sunyata, as Nishida and Nishitani (see below) were to put it?
What, then, is the understanding of self and of self-and-world
presupposed in the religious phenomenon of satoril
Many of the accounts of how particular aspirants came to realize
their satori would seem to suggest that it is a specific and concrete
experience of a certain kind, an event in the psychological develop-
ment of the individual that has a particular time and a particular
place. A word or even a blow from the Master suddenly awakens
the seeker and opens his eyes to the truth - or perhaps it is the
seeker's own relentless quest that leads him to the decisive break-
through. If this is so then we must think of Zen and Zen experience
as of a piece with 'religious experiences' such as that of Huxley,
described in the previous chapter (Huxley, of course, explicitly links
his account to a Buddhist understanding of Enlightenment which
he defines as 'to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent
otherness'6).
But is there really any experience capable of yielding an imme-
diate and incorrigible intuition of the ultimate referent of religious
language and symbolism? And, even if there is, can we give an
account of that experience without immediately falsifying it in the
distorting mirror of language, shot through as all language inevit-
ably is with the cultural preconditioning of experience?
In the light of these comments, it is significant that Suzuki him-
self does not so much speak of 'experience' as of 'acquiring a point
of view', or, in the language of existentialist theology, an 'under
standing of existence'. But to acquire a point of view or an under-
standing of existence can be only loosely associated with the mo-
mentary and intense character of an 'experience'. As Kierkegaard
remarked with regard to the Socratic method of instruction, the
 Nothingness and the Place of Religious Experience 111

'moment' in which the truth is learned has only a passing signifi-

cance: it is merely the occasion of learning the truth, whereas what
is decisive is the content of that truth. Moreover, as will become
apparent, descriptions of experience are inevitably formulated within
the construction of experience as a subject-object relationship, while
Zen claims to overcome such a construction. But what might 'expe-
rience' mean, if not the experience of an object by a subject? If Zen,
therefore, claims somehow to have transcended the subject-object
structure, it is likely that we will have to extend our understanding
of experience not a little in order to bring it into contact with Zen
Enlightenment. Yet this is not to say that we should easily let the
concept of experience go, for without such a concept we would
seem to have no standpoint other than the uncontrollably fissile
standpoints offered to us by the shifting sands of cultural and in-
tellectual relativity.
The relationship between religious experience and Enlightenment
as understood by Zen is at the heart of the story of Hui-Neng (AD
638-713), the Sixth Patriarch of Chinese Buddhism, a story that is
crucial in the development of Zen.7 When Hui-Neng first arrived at
the Tung Ch'an monastery in the northern Chinese district of Huang
Mei, he was, according to tradition, regarded as an ignorant south-
ern barbarian and set to work chopping firewood. Sometime after
his arrival, however, the then Patriarch Hung Jen asked all the
monks in the monastery to submit a short poem summarizing their
understanding of Zen. The chief contender was a monk called Shen-
Hsiu, who submitted the following poem:

This body is the Bodhi-tree.

The mind is like a mirror bright;
Take heed to keep it always clean
And let not dust collect upon it.

In this poem Enlightenment is envisaged as acquiring a clear

and undistorted view of how things really are, a view that only dis-
cipline and practice can achieve since our conventional vision is
clouded by ignorance and misunderstanding. Once these false as-
sumptions are removed we no longer experience or think of our-
selves as separate and detached from the true nature of reality.
Hui-Neng, as a mere servant of the monastery, was not strictly
entitled to submit a poem - but did so nonetheless. It ran:
112 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

There is no Bodhi-tree,
Nor stand of mirror bright.
Since all is void,
Where can the dust alight?

In the best fairy-story style, Hui-Neng's submission was, of course,

recognized as the more insightful and, having run the gauntlet of
jealousy and persecution on the part of the other monks, he became
Hung Jen's successor. But what are the implications of his poem for
the question of religious experience?
Shen-Hsiu's poem exemplifies an understanding of religious ex-
perience that is not alien to some Western mystical traditions. All
things are essentially united in the absolute. Our separateness is a
kind of perspectival illusion. To abandon that illusion in a moment
of awakening is the 'moment' of religious experience such that
religious experience is precisely the moment in which such an
awakening occurs. It is thus in and through such religious experi-
ence that we become enlightened and, in this sense, religious expe-
rience is the goal of ascesis (Shen-Hsiu's mirror-polishing!). From
Hui-Neng's point of view, however, such ascesis is pointless and
unnecessary. The truth of identity is grasped so radically that even
the state of ignorance is encompassed by it. All that is needed is
the recognition that this is so.8 It is in this sense that Hui-Neng's
doctrine was regarded as one of 'sudden' Enlightenment - and yet
this 'sudden' Enlightenment cannot be understood as a specific ex-
perience or moment of awakening since the very foundation of its
possibility is the denial of any separate object of such experience:
there is no Bodhi-tree, all is void. There is no essential change,
psychologically or ontologically, in the passage from ignorance to
Enlightenment.
What does this mean? If Hui-Neng's teaching undermines the
possibility of religious experience, if the moment of awakening has
no singular privilege, to what is religious language and practice to
be attached? Doesn't the utter collapse of differentiation between
ignorance and Enlightenment implied in his poem wreck the whole
project of religion at its very inception and devalue any attempt to
speak truth?
An attempt to give a philosophical account of the possibility (and,
indeed, the necessity) of an awakening to reality that both does and
doesn't have the character of experience lies at the heart of Kitaro
 Nothingness and the Place of Religious Experience 113

Nishida's A Study of Good, his first major work and one of the sem-
inal texts of modern Japanese philosophy. The first section of A
Study of Good is devoted to the concept of 'pure experience'.
Against the background of his reading of such Western psycholo-
gists as Wundt and James and of his own immersion in Zen, Nishida
aims to locate Zen Enlightenment in a relation to experience that is
entirely intuitive, stripped of all subjectively-determined structur-
ing and, as such, standing in a direct relation to reality. Such 'pure
experience', Nishida says, signifies 'a condition of true experience
itself without the addition of the least thought or reflection' and
'When one directly experiences one's own state of consciousness,
there is not yet a subject or an object, and knowing and its object
are completely unified.'9
As Nishida goes on to expound this 'pure experience' it becomes
clear that such experience neither excludes nor negates the differ-
entiating activities of thought or will, but is presupposed as the
ground without which such differentiations would dissolve into
chaos. In this respect 'pure experience' is the foundation of our
knowledge of reality, of ethics and of art but finds its supreme
manifestation in religion. Although we have access to it through an
intellectual intuition, this should not be understood as a merely
passive contemplation or reflection of life. Consciousness is, for
Nishida, the primary aspect of reality and this consciousness is no
less corporeal, emotional and active than it is mental or theoretical:
the intellectual intuition is in essence the unifying activity that unites
and thus grounds the manifold of functions and manifestations of
the self. Yet even to talk of 'self is misleading, since this already
seems to presuppose the separation of self and world and the split-
ting up of the single reality into the duality of the subject-object
structure. Nishida is insistent that we should not take 'pure experi-
ence' as something that a separated individual self or consciousness
'has': 'It is not that there is experience because there is an indi-
vidual, but that there is an individual because there is experience.
The individual's experience is simply a small distinctive sphere of
limited experience within true experience.'10 Again: ' . . . we think
that... feeling and the will are purely individual. Yet it is not that
the individual possesses feeling and the will, but rather that feeling
and the will create the individual. Feeling and the will are facts of
direct experience.'11 Similarly, the unifying function of the intellec-
tual intuition is not to be understood as a subjective consciousness
imposing a unity on a manifold of experience given from without:
114 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

Our Spirit is usually considered to be the unifying function of

reality and to be a special reality vis-a-vis nature. But in actuality,
there is no unifying activity apart from that which is unified and
there is no subjective spirit apart from objective nature. To say
that we know a thing simply means that the self unites with
i t . . . If we are purely subjective we can do nothing. The will is
able to realize itself only by according with objective nature.12

Or:

Only when we thoroughly eliminate the subjective fancies of the

self and unite with a thing... can we satisfy the true demands
of the self and see the true self... At that point we can say that
things move the self or that the self moves things, that Sesshu
painted nature or that nature painted itself through Sesshu.13

The unifying activity, however, is equally not to be thought of

merely as the operation of a separate objective or material cause on
the subjective human mind and will. In the intuition of the unifying
activity that is the foundation of the self - or, better, of both self and
world - we intuit the present reality of God. There is thus a funda-
mental identity between self and God: '. . . it is a fundamental idea
of all religions that God and humans have the same nature, that in
God humans return to their origin.. .'14 Even more boldly (from
the standpoint of Western theism): '. . . God and humans have the
same foundation of spirit.. .'15
'Pure experience', then, may be defined as the life of God (a life
that Nishida further characterizes as personal and loving) mani-
fested as the unifying unity of both nature and spirit, self and world,
subject and object as present in a consciousness that is prior to (though
not outside of or necessarily excluded by) individual consciousness.
Despite the challenge that such a concept of 'pure experience'
poses to certain types of theistic thought, it would not be true to say
that the concept as such is entirely alien to the Western tradition. In
several respects Nishida is wrestling with the same problematic as,
for example, Schelling, Schleiermacher or Schopenhauer. Like them
he is trying to establish a principle of unity that is not merely ide-
alistic but that embraces and contains the manifold of concrete
experience. Further (and this is at least comparable with Schleier-
macher's Second Speech in On Religion16) this principle, although
prior to the differentiated functions of thinking and willing, is
 Nothingness and the Place of Religious Experience 115

presupposed by them and thus in some sense given in, with and
under them even in their everyday functioning as (apparently) sepa-
rate and distinct: in the spirit of Hui-Neng's poem, we do not need
to polish the mirror, we only need to see what is already there.
There is no separate or special 'religious' experience, because reli-
gious experience is the true face of all experience.
If the comparison with such forms of Western idealism holds,
however, it raises the possibility that Nishida's thought could be
brought into the orbit of a metaphysics that is, ultimately, oriented
towards being rather than (as we might have assumed from its
Buddhist provenance) nothingness. Yet for Nishida it is axiomatic
that absolute nothingness and not being is the fundamental princi-
ple of philosophy. How then does the characterization of the ultim-
ate ground as absolute nothingness qualify the description of pure
experience?
In the first instance, it involves denying the ultimacy of the dis-
criminatory function of mind. Or, to put it the other way round, the
unity of all phenomena is thought through to a point at which the
structures of differentiation between the various facets of being and
consciousness break down. Each particular function, each particu-
lar thing, is, as individual and separate, without substance, devoid
of absolute being.
Correlative to this is the assertion that the reality of religious
experience cannot be given a definitive form based on the stand-
ards of knowledge (in so far as these standards invariably assume
the reflective division of subject and object, self and world). That
which is the foundation of all knowledge and experience is so com-
pletely and equally the foundation of all, that it is not the founda-
tion of any in particular. There is no point or moment of privileged
access to it and no kind of experience or knowledge is nearer to it
than any other. It is thus equally describable as an absolute fullness
or an absolute emptiness.
The critique of knowledge implied in this position is carried fur-
ther in Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness, where Nishida
appeals to the neo-Kantian prioritizing of value over being, quoting
Heinrich Rickert: 'Meaning precedes and surpasses all existence'
and, in his own words, 'Before being there is meaning.'17
With this, however, we return to the ambiguity of Suzuki's talk
of 'acquiring a new viewpoint' on the world. For Nishida's account,
despite the emphasis on 'experience', is not, in any usual sense,
concerned with 'experience of' phenomena, since such experience is
116 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

possible only on the basis of a differentiation between subject and

object that is transcended in pure experience. The 'meaning' is not
given to the subject by the experience of the object, but the experi-
encing of the object never occurs apart from the act of evaluating
and giving meaning to the world. And yet this statement does not
have the connotations of a subjective imposition of meaning and
value on an indifferent objective reality that it would have in the
Western context. For the value we give the world is itself given in
the pure experience of the founding unification of self and world in
the life of God.
God, the unifying function, is not regarded by Nishida as the
'object' of (religious) experience, not even as situated on the objec-
tive side of experience in preference to the subjective. God, to use
the concept that would become definitive of Nishida's later thought,
is the 'place' (basho) of experience and, as such, no-thing: nothing-
ness is the 'place' whereon all that is occurs. As the universal ground
or condition it is implied in all experience but is never the object of
any experience.18
Basho is developed by Nishida in dialogue with yet also in oppo-
sition to his understanding of Aristotle's theory of knowledge. In
his view Aristotle sought to ground the reality of knowledge by
means of objective and universal judgements or else sees the sub-
ject as knowable only in terms of the universalizable and objectifiable
predicates of which it is the bearer (so, for example, 'man' is de-
fined and known as the 'animal' that is also 'rational'). Yet such a
way of knowing always and inevitably involves abstracting from
the concreteness of the particular. Even if it is conceded that, for
Aristotle at least, there can be no knowledge unless there are some
particular experiences of particular entities in the first place, such
experiences only become knowable in so far as they are mediated
through what is universal. The further we journey into the realm of
the knowable, the less we have to do with the concrete, the singu-
lar, the 'this'.19
Against such a construction of consciousness as necessarily self-
concealing, Nishida insists on the primary reality of the world as
'absolutely contradictorily self-identical'.20 As such it is not merely
the objective field on which the possibility of knowledge arises, as
if we were to understand it simply in the sense that, say, the con-
cept of 'colour' provides the field on which judgements such as
'this is red' can be made.21 In its fullest sense basho, as the field or
place (topos) of knowledge, is both grounded in and grounds the
self - where the self is construed not merely as a passive base on
 Nothingness and the Place of Religious Experience 117

which the construction of knowledge takes place, but as active in

that construction.
We have still, perhaps, not moved beyond what a Fichte or a
Schelling could have said. The close correlation between their over-
coming of Kantian agnosticism and Nishida's own project is per-
haps hinted at by Nishida when he remarks that "The world of the
thing-in-itself... is the locus, the topos of the very existence of our
self; it is the self-forming historical world, which is immediate to
our self.'22 In other words, although Nishida does not crudely claim
that we can know the transcendent ground of knowledge as some
kind of object, he does seem to allow that, as against Kant, the
thing-in-itself can in some sense be regarded as constitutive of what
we know and, although it can never become an object of knowl-
edge, it is, in pure experience, immediately given to the self. It is
important here that the self, as Nishida construes it, unlike the self
of the German idealists, is not a transcendental actus purus. For the
self - at least in Nishida's later writings - is to be understood as
much in terms of its self-contradictory character as in terms of its
synthetic function. The way to the intuition of basho is through the
self - and, indeed, through a self that is understood as ceaselessly
active - but yet precisely through the self's experience of its self-
contradiction and the consequent problematizing of existence.
Above all this means becoming aware of our own death - and
not merely in the sense that we are conscious of the mortality we
share with all living things. For it to lead to a religious awakening
and an authentic intuition of basho, the awareness of death must be
absolute and all-consuming.

To know our eternal death is the fundamental reason of our

existence. For only one who knows his own eternal death truly
knows that he is an individual. Only such a one is the true indi-
vidual, the true person. What does not die is not singular exist-
ence; what repeats itself is not an individual. Only by facing
the eternal negation, do we truly realize the singularity of our
existence.23

Only death can bring us face to face with absolute singularity,

i.e. with that which knowledge modelled on Aristotelian principles
necessarily leaves out. Nishida is not only conscious of the dimension
of contradiction and paradox in this: he regards such a dimension
as of the essence. 'In what sense is the absolute the real absolute?'
he asks:
118 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

The absolute is truly absolute in facing nothing. By facing noth-

ing it is absolute being... So long as the self is not absolutely
nothing, there remains something that stands against it and ne-
gates it; the self does not yet embrace the absolute self-negation
within itself. Therefore, that the self self-contradictorily stands
against itself means that nothing stands over against nothing.24

In this respect, then, the religious quest set in motion by the

anxious awareness of death reveals what is also the ground of all
experience and knowledge, bringing about a transformation of con-
sciousness that is for the first time (yet, in Eliot's sense, also iden-
tical with 'where we started') open to a vision of the world in its
present actuality, unclouded by imposed differentiations. Nishida
himself indicates some analogies between his own project and that
of a Western religious philosopher such as Paul Tillich, yet he is
also aware of differences.25 Whereas, for Tillich, 'the shock of non-
being' (of which the encounter with mortality can be the occasion)
plays only an instrumental role in bringing us to awareness of Being-
Itself, for Nishida, the revelation of non-being in such metaphysical
shock is unsurpassable. The non-being thus revealed is itself inte-
gral to the grounding of that place or basho on which the world of
phenomenal experience is constructed.
The concept of basho is also central to the thought of Keiji Nishitani,
who applies it to finding a way out of the nihilism of scientific
materialism and existentialist atheism. In Nishitani's hands, Bud-
dhist philosophy thus becomes therapeutic for that line of Western
thought that has succumbed to the crisis of nihilism.
Nishitani distinguishes between the nihility that both scientific
ideology and atheistic existentialism disclose (for all their apparent
opposition) and the absolute nothingness that, as 'emptiness', is, for
Buddhist thought, the place or field of unity and truth. The attitude
that is determined by nihility alone and that cannot break through
to grasp itself as located on the field of absolute nothingness is, for
Nishitani, the characteristic attitude of Western nihilism - scientific
or existentialist.26
In science, interdependent on the development of technology,
Nishitani sees the laws of nature being abstracted out of their 'natu-
ral' environment and presented and exploited in a purity that they
never have in nature itself: 'The laws of nature work directly in
machines, with an immediacy not to be found in the products of
nature.'27 In this process human beings are, on the one hand, liberated
 Nothingness and the Place of Religious Experience 119

from nature and given a degree of mastery over their environment

that is unique: 'It is a rule over nature more far-reaching than the
self-rule of nature itself.'28 On the other hand, however, this level of
technological control can only be achieved at the cost of excluding
anything that smacks of subjective value or feeling. In a situation
in which scientific criteria of truth are dominant it becomes impossi-
ble to establish or to sustain principles of truth with regard to the
subjective side of life - art, morality, religion. Consequently, human
beings are, in their subjectivity, given over to a life without truth,
without value, without meaning. This is what Nishitani means by
'nihility' - and its manifestations are multifarious (indeed, he seems
to regard Western society in its totality as living in the shadow of
such nihility): the self-confidence of the scientist, who has no inter-
est in the moral or social issues arising out of the application of his
research, the purposelessness of mass-culture29 or the resolute self-
conscious nihilism of a Sartre.30 In each case the subjectivity of the
human subject is experienced as lacking in final worth, value or
purpose. Such experience of nihility has nothing to do with the
individual's spontaneous optimism or pessimism and even less with
having a depressive attitude towards life.
Yet this experience of nihility is something else again from the
'experience' of absolute nothingness as the field on which all things
live and move and have their being. For, in each of its manifesta-
tions, it remains limited by a certain concept of the subject. Instead
of regarding nothingness as the field of subjectivity and objectivity
equally, it understands nothingness - whether with indifference,
pleasure or despair - solely within a horizon determined by a cer-
tain projection of subjective existence. It remains, in Buddhist terms,
attached to or partial to particular aspects or dimensions of the
world. It is in this spirit that Nishitani writes:

. . . Sartre's notion of Existence, according to which one must cre-

ate oneself continually in order to maintain oneself within noth-
ing, remains a standpoint of attachment to the self - indeed, the
most profound form of this attachment - and as such is caught
in the self-contradiction this implies . . . the 'nothingness' of which
he speaks remains a nothingness to which the self is attached . . . [it
is] a nothing of which there is still consciousness at the ground
of the self. No matter how 'pre-reflective' this consciousness is,
it is not the point at which the being of the self is transformed
existentially into absolute nothingness.31
120 Agnosis: Theology in the Void-

In contrast to existentialist nothingness, Nishitani appeals to the

Zen concepts of 'the Great Doubt' and 'the Great Death'.

The Great Doubt comes to light from the ground of our existence
only when we press our doubts (What am I? Why do I exist?) to
their limits as conscious acts of the doubting self. The Great Doubt
represents not only the apex of the doubting self but also the point
of its 'passing away' and ceasing to be 'self. It is like the bean
whose seed and shell break apart as it ripens: the shell is the tiny
ego, and the seed the infinity of the Great Doubt that encom-
passes the whole world. It is the moment at which self is at the
same time the nothingness of self, the moment that is the 'locus'
of nothingness where conversion beyond the Great Doubt takes
place. For the Great Doubt always emerges as the opening up of
the locus of nothingness as the field of conversion from the Great
Doubt itself.32

The difference between the discovery of nothingness at the ground

of the self in Sartrean existentialism and in the Great Doubt of Zen
is that in the former the nothingness is understood uniquely in
terms of its relation to the subjectivity of the self whereas in the
latter the subject's self-experience of nothingness, of absolute ground-
lessness, opens up a new vista on reality. The nothingness that it
discovers is not simply that which gives it its characteristic subjec-
tivity but is, as Nishitani goes on to say, 'the face of the original
self... the full realization . . . of the reality of the self and all things.'33
In other words, it is a nothingness that transcends or that relates
equally to subject and object, self and world. In the revelation of
this nothingness the subject, the self, does not discover its unique-
ness in opposition to all other beings; instead, it discovers its unity,
on the field of nothingness, with all that is.34 Nishitani's argument
here reveals another aspect of the situation that the emphasis in the
previous chapter on an experience of nothingness was intended to
bring into view. In terms of this emphasis, the experience of nihility
(in the sense of the nihilistic consciousness of nothingness) is, of
course, only improperly described as 'experience'. Indeed, nihility
is precisely that which above all excludes 'experience' as a source
of meaning and value.
Elsewhere Nishitani uses the spatial imagery of 'far' and 'near' to
tease out the difference between nihility and the experience of
absolute nothingness. Nihility opens up as a yawning abyss that
 Nothingness and the Place of Religious Experience 121

separates us from what is most familiar - persons and things, friends,

flowers, stars - showing them to us as strange, unfamiliar, uniden-
tifiable.
Even as we sit chatting with one another, the stars and planets of
the Milky Way whirl about us in the bottomless breach that sep-
arates us from one another. There is a sense in which we who sit
together in the same room stand apart from the entire universe.
One sits in front of another with body and mind manifest in
nihility such that one cannot say whence the other comes nor
whither he is going. This is the abyss of nihility.35
By way of contrast:
. . . on the field of emptiness that absolute breach points directly
to a most intimate encounter with everything that exists. Empti-
ness is the field on which an essential encounter can take place
between entities normally taken to be most distantly related, even
at enmity with each other, no less than between those that are
most closely related.36
In this sense, the field of emptiness is not constituted as a 'far
side' in relation to human experience but as an 'absolute near side'.
Customarily we think of Platonism and Christianity as world-views
involving an interpretation of human life that hinges on a 'far side',
whether that be the far side of the world of Forms or Ideas that
gives meaning and value to the world of change and chance or the
far side of the divine Being that is conceived as the 'Wholly Other'
Creator and Redeemer of creatures. Each of these stands in what
Nishitani terms a 90° relation to the human subject. The field of
absolute nothingness, however, is our absolute near side, nearer to
us than we are to ourselves - and this, he suggests, is more like a
180° relation. Absolute nothingness is not an 'Other' to the subject,
but is comprised within the standpoint of the subject.
This yields what Nishitani refers to as a 'double exposure' com-
ing out of the Great Death. He uses both the writings of the Japan-
ese haiku poet Basho and T.S. Eliot's vision of the crowds streaming
over London Bridge as a crowd of the dead in an 'Unreal City' to
explain what he calls this
. . . true vision of reality . . . In it, spirit, personality, life, and matter
all come together and lose their separateness. They appear like
the various tomographic plates of a single subject. Each plate
122 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

belongs to reality, but the basic reality is the superimposition of

all the plates into a single whole that admits to being represented
layer by layer. It is not as if only one of the representations were
true, so that all the others can be reduced to it. Reality eludes all
such attempts at reduction. In the same sense, the aspect of life
and the aspect of death are equally real, and reality is that which
appears now as life and now as death. It is both life and death,
and at the same time is neither life nor death. It is what we have
to call the non-duality of life and death.37

In this spirit Nishitani likes to deploy a sequence of paradoxical

doublings to describe this one reality: life-siue-death, being-sive-
nothingness, negation-siw-affirmation, etc.38 Absolute nothingness
is the 'place' or ground (though not in the sense of ground-and-
consequence, i.e. 'sufficient reason') on which the experience of this
reality happens. It is not the object of that experience. Yet, equally
- and perhaps for us, in the situation of nihilism, more importantly
- as absolute nothingness it is not determined by the standpoint of
subjectivity, the language or the culture of the subject. In its char-
acter as non-subjective it anticipates and negates all scepticism re-
garding the truth of our being-in-the-world.
It is vitally important, however, that this is not conceived of as an
intellectual construct (a la Hegelian dialectic) that is used after the
event to interpret or explain reality. Basho's haiku used by Nishitani
in illustrating the 'double exposure' indicates its thoroughly imme-
diate and intuitive character:

Lightning flashes -
Close by my face,
The pampas grass!

This verse, which for Japanese readers carries an allusion to the

artistic motif of a skull lying in the pampas grass and thus of the
mutual superimposition of life and death - death in the midst of
life, life in the midst of death - vividly communicates the sudden-
ness, the givenness and the absolute clarity of the vision that occurs
with the instantaneous speed of a lightning flash. In this moment of
illumination we see that we are never outside that which, as abso-
lute nothingness, is to be experienced in this doubly exposed look
of things.
At one level, however, we are still confronted by the same problem
 Nothingness and the Place of Religious Experience 123

that was left by Nishida's concept of 'pure experience' (and before

that by Hui-Neng's poem): how, if the subject is always already
identical with the object of pure experience, if the living being is
always already identical in its Great Death with absolute nothing-
ness, can we come to realize and appropriate the standpoint of the
'double exposure' in the lightning flash of intuition that discloses
the presence of the void in and to the subject(-sfue-object!)? What is
the path from the everydayness of human existence to the openness
of the Great Doubt? What is the place in our self-experience and
self-understanding where such illumination occurs? And nor should
we forget the question as to how such a path can be thought from
within the horizons of the Western-Augustinian discourse on the
divided self, the self that is not what it truly is? The rhetoric of the
Great Doubt and the Great Death seem to bespeak a very particular
kind of experience or subjective process. Yet, as we have already
seen, the logic of pure-experience-as-absolute-nothingness works
against the possibility of identifying any single 'moment' or 'aspect'
of the subject's inner-worldly life as uniquely privileged with re-
gard to the field of absolute nothingness.
In this respect Zen Buddhism as a culturally and historically
specific religious tradition is haunted by the paradox that if Zen
experience is thus all-embracing, it is hard to see how any particu-
lar method or way of Zen training can offer privileged access to
that experience.
One way forward is offered by another tradition of Japanese
Buddhism: the Pure Land School as represented in Shinran's classic
text Tannisho and as articulated philosophically in the twentieth
century by Hajime Tanabe. Here, in Tanabe's philosophy of meta-
noetics (in which the teaching of the Pure Land was a decisive influ-
ence) we see both how a way to realization of absolute nothingness
can become open to human beings struggling in the midst of their
lostness (everyday or nihilistic as the case may be) and how such a
way can be shown as opening from within the Western experience
and understanding of the divided self.

OTHER POWER AND THE GATEWAY TO NOTHINGNESS

Hajime Tanabe (1885-1962) succeeded to Nishida's professorial chair

in 1928 and, like Nishida, sought to reinterpret Japanese Buddhism
for a time of crisis by means of an intense engagement with Western
124 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

thought, above all with the great German idealists and their critics.
Also like Nishida, he gave a central role to the concept of absolute
nothingness as the foundation of both religion and philosophy. On
the other hand, inevitable differences in emphasis led to a breach
which seemed to be both personally and philosophically unresolv-
able.39 It is not to the purpose here to pursue the course of this dispute,
other than to highlight how one of Tanabe's key concepts - that
of repentance (or metanoesis: zange) - can be used to break through
the impasse generated by the subject's paradoxical standpoint
vis-h-vis its own grounding in absolute nothingness. Indeed, the
very paradoxicality of that standpoint is itself the point of break-
through, intellectually and existentially. Whether that breakthrough
is in itself to be understood as demanding a complete break with
all that Nishida had said of the pure experience of absolute noth-
ingness or whether the relationship is more akin to that of the
Hegelian Aufhebung is an issue to which we shall return later: for
the time being I comment only that Nishitani, at least, understood
himself to have learned from both teachers and to have arrived at
some kind of mutual mediation of their philosophies in his own
thought.
One further introductory remark may be in place at this point,
namely that Tanabe's exposition of the paradoxical relationship
between the human subject and its own ground in absolute noth-
ingness establishes a very real and a very concrete 'point of contact'
with the Augustinian discourse on the divided self.
Tanabe himself relates his discovery of metanoesis to a specific
time and place. Typically for his thought this time and place and the
character of the act it occasioned give the concept both a social and
a practical dimension. Metanoesis is, for Tanabe, a non-conceptual
concept; metanoetics a non-philosophical way of doing philosophy.
Nor is metanoesis a purely individual act: it is, typically, an act in
which the destiny of a community is realized (both in the sense of
'understood' and in the sense of 'made real') by the individual but,
by the individual, as the meaning of the common situation. These
comments are exemplified in Tanabe's own experience of metanoia,
which he dates to the closing months of the Second World War and
to the completely impossible situation that the national crisis of
Japan caused for one who, as a teacher of philosophy, was a servant
of the state and one, moreover, whose own philosophy had encour-
aged the view that the nation-state was to be regarded as 'the
 Nothingness and the Place of Religious Experience 125

supreme prototype of existence'.40 For, in the face of the imminent

collapse of Japan and the suffering of the Japanese people, and in
the light of his own critical view of the political ideas that had led
the nation down the erroneous path of militaristic nationalism, how
could he himself speak the truth as he saw it while remaining a
university teacher - and without causing further inner conflict and
suffering among the Japanese people?41
The political dimension of this crisis is underlined by his later
comments that his personal guilt was directly associated with hav-
ing failed to speak out against the militarists. The national crisis
was not merely the fault of those in power: it was also the fault of
each and every citizen and certainly of intellectuals in positions of
public responsibility. 'There is no excusing the standpoint of the
innocent bystander so often adopted by members of the intelligent-
sia,' he stated (PM, p. liv). In the spirit of Dostoevsky's 'Each is
responsible for all' Tanabe affirms the interrelationship between
individual metanoia and the doctrine of collective responsibility
that provided a powerful focus of postwar thought.42
Tanabe's doctrine of metanoesis is thus indissociable from its social
context, just as the contemporary religious and philosophical dis-
cussion of nihilism cannot ultimately be dissociated from the very
real and very practical issues confronting humanity in the present
age of technological, political and cultural globalization.
But how did Tanabe's sense of indecision, failure and culpability
develop into the doctrine of metanoesis? Let us return again to
Tanabe's own words:

At that moment [i.e. the moment when he realized his complete

indecision] something astonishing happened. In the midst of my
distress I let go and surrendered myself humbly to my own in-
ability. I was suddenly brought to new insight! My penitent con-
fession - metanoesis (zange) - unexpectedly threw me back on
my own interiority and away from things external. There was no
longer any question of my teaching and correcting others under
the circumstances - I who could not deliver myself to do the
correct thing. The only thing for me to do in the situation was to
resign myself honestly to my weakness, to examine my own in-
ner self with humility and to explore the depths of my powerless-
ness and lack of freedom.
(PM, p. 1)
126 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

Not only did this redirection of his intellectual focus give Tanabe
a new subject for philosophical analysis. It gave him, as he experi-
enced it, a new standpoint from which to do philosophy - albeit a
standpoint that generated a sequence of philosophical paradoxes:

. . . metanoia, or the way of zange... led to a philosophy that is not

a philosophy: philosophy seen as the self-realization of metanoetic
consciousness. It is no longer I who pursue philosophy, but rather
zange that thinks through me. In my practice of metanoesis, it is
metanoesis itself that is seeking its own realization. Such is the
nonphilosophical philosophy that is reborn out of the denial of
philosophy as I had previously understood it. I call it a philoso-
phy that is not a philosophy because, on the one hand, it has
arisen from the vestiges of a philosophy I had cast away in de-
spair, and on the other, it maintains the purpose of functioning
as a reflection on what is ultimate and as a radical self-awareness,
which are the goals proper to philosophy.
, p. 1)

Whereas Nishida's way of pure experience opened a view on

absolute nothingness as always already implicit in the action of the
self and as the always given topos or place of thinking as such,
metanoesis, as Tanabe understands it, depends on the exposure of
a radical breach between the factical or empirical life-situation of
the self and the truth to which that self is summoned. Not only is
that truth not a constitutive part of the self, it is actually unattain-
able by the existing self - and it is precisely the recognition of the
unattainability of its own truth by the self that provides the hinge
that establishes the possibility of metanoesis as a new beginning,
both existential and intellectual.
Like the place of pure experience in Nishida's thought, that which
is experienced in metanoesis is described by Tanabe as absolute
nothingness and, moreover, as an absolute nothingness that is simul-
taneously (although not immediately, but paradoxically) identical
with the realm of everyday human experience. It is an absolute that
'Since [it] is the negation and transformation - that is, conversion -
of everything relative . . . may be defined as absolute nothingness'
(PM, p. li). However, as conversion, it is not simply an object of
intuition but a redirecting of the experiencing subject back towards
its being-in-the-world in a new and transformed (converted) manner.
 Nothingness and the Place of Religious Experience 127

It is a 'resurrection', a 'regeneration to a new life' and thus 'noth-

ingness-^wfl-love', 'the confirmation of the Great Nay as the Great
Compassion' (PM, p. li) - all of which characterizations have, for
Tanabe, the connotation of active involvement with the world and
thus to be lived as 'faith-witness' (PM, p. lx). There is no moment,
however, at which the dynamic presence of absolute nothingness,
of the shipwreck of all human reason and all human hope, is not in
play. It is this continuing power of absolute nothingness that pre-
vents metanoesis from being appropriated as an object that can be
given and possessed once and for all, reified into something one
'has' or even 'is'. Unattainable, it is only to be attained by virtue of
the loss of all that we have and are.
One of the key differences between Tanabe and Nishida can be
seen in relation to the role of intuition in the subject's awareness of
absolute nothingness. For Tanabe repudiates the possibility of any
direct intuition of absolute nothingness as propounded by Nishida.
'Some may imagine a self-identical totality directly accessible to the
grasp of intellectual intuition, but the nothingness we are speaking
of here cannot be intuited at all,' he writes (PM, p. 45). The 'experi-
ence' of absolute nothingness in metanoia requires the complete
abandonment of everything that had hitherto counted as constitu-
tive of the subject's self-identity. Intuition is therefore an inappro-
priate concept since, he argues, 'The affirmation that is restored
through the mediation of this negation is in no sense a direct affir-
mation . . . It is a way of realizing a self-abandonment that can never
be intuited in terms of being' (PM, p. 48). Intuition, however, im-
plies an immediate relationship between subject and object that is
incompatible with the dynamics of metanoia, even if the imme-
diacy is that of an immediate openness to absolute nothingness:
'Not even the topos of absolute nothingness exists immediately,' he
remarks - with a clear, though unstated, reference to Nishida (PM,
p. 19). Interestingly, this critique of intuition is also related to Western
traditions of mysticism stemming from Plotinus: 'Once nothingness
is intuited as the One of Plotinus, however, it ceases to be nothing-
ness and turns into being' (PM, p. 89). This error42 feeds through
into such Christian mystics as Eckhart who work within the Plotinian
paradigm (PM, pp. 166-7 and 174). It leads to an essentially aes-
thetic and contemplative stance towards the absolute, rather than
the active engagement of the subject who undergoes the experience
of metanoia (PM, p. 89).
128 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

It is not only intuition, however, that is excluded by the experi-

ence of metanoia. Similar arguments are brought to bear against
any attempt to establish some kind of continuity between the sub-
ject's mental and intellectual life and the impact of absolute noth-
ingness. In this respect Tanabe sees himself as extending the
principles of the Kantian critique of reason. In his view, Kant stopped
short of the ultimate implications of his own procedure since he
allowed 'the reason doing the criticizing [to] stand outside of the
critique. . .' (PM, p. 38), whereas he himself seeks to show that
the critique of reason points to a more fundamental 'crisis of self-
disruption' (PM, p. 38) that reason itself cannot encompass and in
which reason is brought to destruction (PM, p. 50). Although Hegel
sought to incorporate this negative moment of the destruction of
reason - the 'speculative Good Friday' - into the methods of philo-
sophy, thereby restoring the final dominion of reason, he finally falls
'into a nondialectical, self-identical philosophy, which is simply a
return to Kantian reason and to Schelling's philosophy of identity'
(PM, p. 52; see also p. 55). Moreover, he adds, Hegel's philosophy,
because it is thus finally contemplative and rationalistic 'does
not conform to practice, [i.e. does not reflect the praxis-oriented
requirement of the situation of metanoia] and results in an imper-
sonal pantheism' (PM, p. 52).
Over against Hegel, he concludes, 'My absolute critique and
metanoetics leave me no alternative but to follow Kierkegaard' (PM,
p. 53; see also p. 28).
In one sense the critique of intuition and of reason suggests (as
it is intended to do) the complete annihilation of the humanum in
the experience of absolute nothingness. On the other hand, Tanabe
argues, it is only metanoesis that first yields to the subject its own
proper freedom. For metanoesis involves the recognition that what
might be called 'innate freedom', a freedom that is immediately
affirmed as part of the constitution of the human subject, must be
negated in order to arrive for the first time at a complete acceptance
of our total responsibility for all that we are in the trans-temporally
accumulated totality of our identity:

Human freedom in its true sense is rooted solely in the grace of

the absolute. This grace negates our being in order to convert us
to anew being by awakening in us a consciousness of the unfath-
omable depth of our sin and thereby leading us to recognize that
this innate freedom is, in reality, the very cause of our lacking
 Nothingness and the Place of Religious Experience 129

freedom in the true sense, and that only the negation of the former
assures us of the latter.
(PM, pp. 4-5)

This 'latter' freedom does not exist as an innate quality or at-

tribute of the human subject, but is grasped by the subject in the act
of repentance by which it takes responsibility for its own contin-
gency, its having existed and its continuing to exist as a sequence
of particular, finite contingent acts. Tanabe affirms Heidegger's
characterization of Da-sein as a 'thrown project': the 'thrownness'
of the subject reflects its ineluctable relatedness to chance and con-
tingency; its 'project'-character highlights the possibility, within the
situation of thrownness, to choose itself in and by its own freedom
(PM, pp. 70-1 and 77-9). As free, the subject is thus also delivered
over to its own historicity. Repentance is not a matter of restoring
an eternal present, but of breaking through the determination of the
self that has been effected by the past, by the self's 'history' in the
everyday sense, toward an indeterminate future - and it is in this
breaking through the ecstatic horizon of temporality that the self
both finds and exercises its proper freedom or, simply, itself (PM,
pp. 64-9).
This characterization of freedom is, however, altogether falsified
if freedom is thought of as something that can be attained and
possessed once and for all. Its temporality and contingency mean
that it can only be 'real' to the extent that the breakthrough is re-
peated in every movement from past to future, in every choice and
decision of the self. It is in this sense that the concept of repetition
is central to freedom. 'Zange', Tanabe writes, 'should be as infinitely
continuous as conversion and should, therefore, envelop within itself
the infinite repetition of "eternal return"'(PM, p. 6). Although
Heidegger's description of the 'thrown project' involves him in a
notion of repetition, Tanabe regards this as lacking the essential
dimension of metanoia. Heidegger, he argues, restricts himself to
a historical plane on which continuity can be achieved by virtue of
the power of 'interpretation' and 'understanding' rather than by the
repentant action of metanoia. Hermeneutical rather than metanoet-
ical, Heidegger's position reverts to that of Eckhart and Plotinian
mysticism. The phenomenology of the divided self that he seems to
offer is ultimately reincorporated within the horizons of an unbro-
ken human immediacy (PM, pp. 86-93). Authentic repetition on the
other hand means becoming open to a transcendent power that
130 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

cannot be circumscribed within the plane of a merely historical

consciousness. In this regard, Tanabe (once more) finds himself close
to Kierkegaard:

[Heidegger] correctly interprets the notion of 'repetition' as the

restoration of the past to self-consciousness by means of the de-
cision of the authentic subject - which he takes from Kierkegaard
- . . . [But] For Kierkegaard, repetition does not point to a self-
identical being but to eternity through a death-and-resurrection
in which dialectical negation must affirm being (through repeti-
tion) as mediating the manifestation of nothingness. For Heideg-
ger, repetition shows rather the tendency to become the repetition
of self-identical being. Kierkegaard clearly asserts that repetition
belongs to the category of transcendence, an assertion made pos-
sible by his standpoint of faith. But the sort of idealistic transcend-
ence that Heidegger's approach recommends cannot shake free
of the limitations of the identity of relative being, and this means
that he cannot completely overcome historicism in the sense of a
traditionalism or revivalism.
{PM, pp. 91-2)44

In all of this, Tanabe holds fast to the distinction between Self-

Power and Other-Power. That metanoia can be undergone as an
experience of transformation, of salvation, of death-and-resurrection
(and not simply as an experience of despair) is possible only on the
basis of a power that completely transcends the power of the hu-
man subject. Although this power is best described philosophically
as 'absolute nothingness', since this is the only conceptual formu-
lation that adequately preserves the 'infinite qualitative difference'
between Other-Power and Self-Power, Tanabe also speaks of it re-
ligiously in terms drawn from the Pure Land tradition of Japanese
Buddhism and above all the Pure Land teaching of Shinran (1173-
1262 CE).
Central to the doctrine of the Pure Land is the belief that Amida
(a divinized aspect of the Buddha), prior to attaining his Enlighten-
ment, made 48 vows directed toward the salvation of all living
beings. Of these, one, known as the Great or Primal Vow, asserts
that the one thing needful for salvation is to call upon the name of
Amida - ritualized in the recitation of the name, 'Namu Amida
Butsu', a practice known simply as the Nembutsu. Religiously each
and every individual is in the same position, reliant altogether and
 Nothingness and the Place of Religious Experience 131

absolutely on the salvific power of Amida's vow alone, without

human mediation.
This spiritual 'levelling' is mythologically represented in Shinran's
belief that his own age was one of decline, a period of world-his-
tory in which the spiritual capacities of people were being progres-
sively dimmed. Consequently, whereas it was possible for those
born in an earlier age to attain to Enlightenment by their own ef-
forts, he, his contemporaries and successors lack the capacity for
such spiritual heroism. In the light of this, there is a dialectical
interdependence between the ignorance, the incapacity and even
the wickedness of the human subject and the saving power of
Amida's compassion. In a certain sense it can even be said that it
is precisely the evil person who is closest to salvation through the
Vow. In words ascribed to Shinran himself:

. . . a person who relies on the good that he does through his self-
power fails to entrust himself wholeheartedly to Other Power
and therefore is not in accord with Amida's Primal Vow. But
when he abandons his attachment to self-power and entrusts
himself totally to Other Power, he will realize birth in the Pure
Land.
It is impossible for us, filled as we are with blind passions,
to free ourselves from birth-and-death through any practice
whatever... Hence the evil person who entrusts himself to Other
Power is precisely the one who possesses the true cause for birth.45

When the self realizes its complete incapacity and its need to rely
completely on the Vow of Amida, the religious situation is radically
individualized and personalized. Enlightenment is no longer 'a state'
to be attained: it is that which, under the figure of the Pure Land,
is found only in and through the love of an Other. This individu-
alization is most succinctly stated by Shinran in a remark he is
reported as having often repeated: 'When I consider deeply the
Vow of Amida, which arose from five kalpas of profound thought,
I realize that it was entirely for the sake of myself alone!'46 - a
comment that is to be understood in the light of the dialectics of
the 'thrown project', i.e. that it is only (yet precisely) in relation to
our contingency, the complete concreteness and specificity of our
existential situation, that we can realize our being as freedom.
The distinction between self-power and Other-power is devel-
oped by Tanabe as a critique of Zen, in so far as Zen represents a
132 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

religion of self-power. "The lofty words and noble deeds of the Zen
masters recorded in various accounts can fill us with admiration/
he acknowledges - but, he adds, they 'lie beyond the reach of our
own learning and practice' (PM, p. 124). He comments similarly on
Nietzsche and Heidegger. Their 'ways' may, at one level, be true -
or would be if human beings had the capacity to carry through the
projects they represent.
The distinction between self- and Other-power is, of course, also
operative in his strictures on the limitations of intuition and reason.
Indeed, it may be described as the key-thought of metanoetics.47
Where, then, does this lead our enquiry into how to contextualize
the experience of absolute nothingness in the empirical givenness
of human existence?
At first glance, it may seem to have made our problem still more
intractable, since the severity of Tanabe's disjunction between what
belongs to self-power and what belongs to Other-Power, evidenced
in his strictures on the role of intuition and of reason, would seem
to preclude any possibility of 'experience' in the normal sense at all.
Outside the world constructed noetically by the human subject there
would indeed seem to be nothing at all, nothing to experience and
nothing to know.
Yet Tanabe's philosophy of metanoetics begins precisely at the
point where this subjectively-determined world-construction breaks
down, at the point where, as Kierkegaard might have put it, sub-
jectivity is untruth. From the point of view of absolute nothingness
attained in metanoia, the requirement of self-transcendence and the
ecstatic horizon opening towards Other-power run together in such
a way that we can only speak, authentically of the presence of the
Other in the measure that we abandon all given constructions of
the self (including not only the constructions bequeathed to us by
our social and cultural heritage but also those that we are ourselves
even now (even I, as I write) are in the process of constructing).
If we say that in metanoia we experience the presence of the Other
in and as absolute nothingness, we can only do so with the proviso
that the 'we' that does the experiencing only comes into being on
the far side of metanoia. The 'we' that does the experiencing is
presented to itself as self-constituting freedom only in and by its
repentance-metanoia-zange. Here too it might be relevant to invoke
Nishida's concept of the absolute near side. For Tanabe, however,
the emphasis would not be on the lightning flash of intuition but
on the absolute near side of the self's continuing recognition and
 Nothingness and the Place of Religious Experience 133

appropriation (always under the rubric of repetition!) of its own

catastrophic failure to be that which it is. The absolute near side is
the sinfulness of the self that cannot fulfil its own project, falling
in its thrownness beyond the possibility of becoming a project for
itself. That which is to be held together in the paradox of metanoia
is not simply a string of antithetical predicates such as negation/
affirmation, death/resurrection, nothingness/'wonderful being', etc.
Such a lived (and paradoxical) dialectic does indeed belong to meta-
noia, but it does not reflect the true centre of that experience. The
surrender of self-power in favour of Other-power is an experience
of the paradox - the morally and religiously scandalous paradox -
of the unity of sin and love. This unity is signalled by Shinran's
words on the 'advantage' (in an ironic, Pauline, sense) of the 'evil
person' and on the realization that the Vow was made uniquely
and solely for him - for outside the supreme concreteness of the
individual's acceptance of his own sin, as responsible to himself for
the failure of the project that he is, terms such as sin and love have
no meaning; they mean only when they are spoken from the heart
of the one of whom Kierkegaard speaks as 'an existing individual'.
But such a one does not have the experience of metanoia as an
experience of an object yielding knowledge. Knowledge, as we have
seen, cannot penetrate the mystery of repentance nor can intuition
'see' what is going on here. We have moved from a dialectic of
knowledge to a dialectic of holiness.
Yet even though that which is given by or produced by metanoia
cannot be objectified as knowledge, as a pre-existent datum that
bestows meaning on the experience, the penitent believer will not
- cannot - say that his repentance is his own work, the result of his
self-power. It is not something that happens within the horizons of
a projection from the side of the subject alone. In the subject's ac-
tion of metanoia (and metanoia is not, of course, real unless it is the
subject's very own action) what occurs occurs as that which elicits
gratitude - occurs, that is, as grace.
At the same time, even though Tanabe's doctrine of metanoetics
demands the repudiation of his earlier emphasis on the primacy of
the nation state, it would be false to say that the apparent 'indi-
vidualism' of metanoetics - an 'individualism' that can apparently
be assimilated unproblematically to the individualism of Lutheran
models of faith - involves a repudiation of the social dimension of
the self. Tanabe insists on what he calls 'action-faith-witness' as the
necessary correlate of repentance - or, more simply, on the ineluctable
134 Agnosis: Theology in the Void-

requirement of love. As he puts it in The Demonstratio of Christianity,

isolated subjectivity exists 'only provisorily', in order through de-
spair and repentance 'to convert itself to the self-negation of love.'48
Grace calls us to realize and make concrete grace itself in a commu-
nity of love.
If we are able, in this way, to understand metanoetics as opening
a way towards speaking of absolute nothingness as that which is
not 'of ourselves' and therefore, in some sense, experienced, then we
may begin to glimpse a way through the relativity that results from
the modernist and post-modernist insistence on the complete deter-
mination of religious experience by culture and language.49 For we
may now be willing to concede that there is in truth nothing out-
side the endlessly self-constructing web of psychological, cultural
(and even biological) value - and yet it is precisely with regard to
and, as it were, by the grace and presence of this nothing that the
possibility of being ourselves is given to us. If we further insist with
Tanabe on the impossibility of establishing this experience of abso-
lute nothingness either as an object of possible knowledge or as the
founding principle of all knowledge, we concur with relativism in
what, at the intellectual level, must appear to be a radical agnosti-
cism, an a-gnosis or un-knowing - and yet we say that it is pre-
cisely such agnosticism that is integral to the project of religious
faith; moreover, this faith itself is entirely correlative with the project
of becoming who we are summoned by grace to become.
It might, however, be objected that, to the extent that we are able
to vindicate the possibility of an other-relatedness and an other-
dependence at the heart of the experience of absolute nothingness,
we once more raise the spectre of predestination associated with
Augustinianism, especially in its Calvinist form. In discussing this
concept in connection with Augustine, Luther and Calvin attention
was drawn to their reluctance to speak of predestination outside
the context of religious address and response. Here too we may say
that the doctrine of Other-power, as developed by Tanabe, is not
intended to establish a criterion of meaning or a principle of des-
tiny outside of that which comes into existence in the historicity of
the human subject.
In a valuable paper on 'The Problem of Time in Shinran', Nishitani
tackles the issue of predestination as it is raised by Pure Land teach-
ing. Nishitani repudiates the 'Once upon a time ...' way of think-
ing of Amida's Vow, as if in some mythological past Amida had
seen from afar those individuals whom his Vow would benefit and
 Nothingness and the Place of Religious Experience 135

resolved on doing his best for them. Here Shinran's insistence that
the Vow was made precisely for himself alone comes into play. For
this individualization brings into view the inseparability of the Vow
from the contingent situatedness of each human subject in relation
to which the Vow 'was' made. Nishitani suggests that in order to
adequately demythologize the Pure Land doctrine we need to con-
sider, firstly, that "The fulfilment of the Primal Vow is further back
in the past than any point in the past. The time of fulfilment is one that
is, at whatever point in time, always historically the past.'50 That is
to say, the 'pastness' (and with that the givenness) of the Vow is not
measurable on any scale of chronological, historical time. Its
'pastness' is a symbol of its transcendent quality. Secondly, and
apparently in contrast to that quality of transcendence, 'the Primal
Vow fulfilled in that time manifests itself directly to each individual
sentient being within historical time.'51 Yet, thirdly, this is not to say
that the Vow exists in an eternal present, equally near and equally
far from all points of history. It is present always (and only) 'in
conformity with the succession of before and after in time.'52 His-
torical time 'is simultaneously the time of the working of the power
of the Primal Vow, and the time of the working of that power is
simultaneously the time of its fulfilment.'53 The conjunction of 'that
time' and 'this time' in a simultaneity or contemporaneity (and
Nishitani appeals in this respect to Kierkegaard) of present lived
experience is the true moment of historicity: for it is not as if the
religious act is constrained by laws of temporal progression over
which it has no influence; it is rather that religious existence itself
is generative, through the relationship of self- and Other-power, of
time. Time is the time of relation, not that within which relation
occurs.
Shinran's teaching is in this way interpreted as indeed emphasiz-
ing the priority of Other-power, but not as a priority that can be
established or quantified in categories alien to the religious rela-
tionship itself. It is only as the practitioner of metanoia, only as one
who knows himself to be the beneficiary of the saving power of the
Vow, that I am able to affirm the transcendence or priority of Other-
power. It is a matter of confession and faith, not of knowledge. As
'experience' of absolute nothingness, it is an experience in which I
find myself as always already given to myself 'ransomed, healed,
restored, forgiven' - and yet, at the same time not other than the
self I am in my division, failure and sin. Because this is not merely
an experience of my own nothingness as a sinful human subject
136 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

over against an absolutely good and absolutely real God, but is also
an experience of 'absolute nothingness', it is not quantifiable in any
way and can never become or be made into the ground or evidence
of any particular concepts or descriptions. As against Nishida, this
is not a 'place' on which any system of knowledge can be raised.
Should Tanabe's objections to Nishida's affirmation of continuity
between the existing subject and its life-world (including its knowl-
edge of that life-world) and the ground of absolute nothingness be
upheld? Not entirely. For although Nishida does indeed speak the
language of intuition his critique of the subject-object schema an-
ticipates and undermines the attempt to understand 'pure intuition'
as a form of knowledge in any conventional sense. Nothingness is
not at all the object of such intuition. The concept of absolute noth-
ingness as the 'place' of all particular acts of consciousness involves
the withdrawal of nothingness itself from any objective or causal
relation either to the subject or to any other objects in the world.
Given with every act of consciousness, implicated in every function
of mental and moral existence, absolute nothingness can never be
separated out from such instantiations as their object, cause or even
meaning.
Nonetheless, both in terms of the rigour with which he trans-
poses the dialectic of absolute nothingness into the paradoxical
dialectic of sin and holiness and in terms of how the emphasis on
an absolute disjunction between self- and Other-power makes pos-
sible the concept of a non-culturally-determined 'experience' of
absolute nothingness that, appropriated as saving grace, is the power
of religious existence - 'a power, not ourselves, that accepts our
unrighteousness' - we conclude that Tanabe's metanoetics is likely
to prove more fruitful in breaking through the paralysis of nihilism
and, even under the twin constellations of the death of God and of
the end of metaphysics, opening a path to the rebirth of religious
experience. We may not, however, refuse to acknowledge the price
that must be paid by all who would venture that path: the aban-
donment of all pretensions to secure a basis in knowledge for reli-
gious existence or to make of religion itself a ground for other
forms of knowledge. The religious way through the void is the way
of agnosis, of unknowing, not in the sense of mystical contempla-
tion but of active repentance and metanoetic freedom.55
One further comment may be in place at this point. If, in Tanabe's
reinterpretation of Pure Land teaching we have found human exist-
ence to be characterized from the ground up by a structural grace
 Nothingness and the Place of Religious Experience 137

of redemption, this would suggest that it is more appropriate to

think the Christological story of grace within the wider human
horizon of universal grace rather than the other way round (as in
Barthian theology). We do not know of grace because of the revela-
tion of God in Christ: we recognize the revelation of God in Christ
as an event of grace because, in the self-consciousness of 'I am not
what I am', we are open to the experience of a grace that, as abso-
lute nothingness, is the 'place' in which or on which our human
drama is acted out.56
 5
Agnosis: Thinking God
in the Void
LANGUAGE AND EXPERIENCE

Arising out of the heart of everyday self-experience comes an expe-

rience in which nothingness is disclosed to us in the modes of
createdness, temporality and fallenness as the possibility of our own
possibility. Yet, because this comes to us in the form of experience, it
does not mean that such a possibility is reduced to the self-assertion
of pure subjectivity. As the place at which self-representation oc-
curs, it is also the site of an originary communication, such that we
come to ourselves, in actuality and in representation, only in and
through the grace of the other. At the same time, through the
concretization of such grace in the neighbour who requires my love,
the founding experience of nothingness releases me from the ego-
tistical abstraction and closure of being towards the possibility
of vital selfhood. Such an experience is of a kind that may well
be called 'religious', although it does not, thus far, demand the
specificity of any particular religious credo. To the extent that it is
nonetheless precisely the void of modern nihilism that has led us to
such an experience of nothingness, we are brought to the paradox
that nihilism itself, supposedly the harbinger of the end of religion,
has opened up the way to a new beginning of religion. Nor is this
new beginning that of a religion stripped down to the anthropocen-
tric specifications of Feuerbach and his twentieth-century heirs
(including his theologian heirs). It is rather the new beginning of a
religion that is shaped from the ground up as the cry for redemp-
tion, a summoning in fear and trembling and in emptiness of spirit,
of that which is not ourselves though taking form in the mutual
mediation of creaturely existence.
If this may serve as a r£sum£ of the argument of this book, many
may regard it as having been vitiated from the very start by a
fundamental methodological oversight. This concerns what many
would regard as a development in the history of philosophy no less

138
 Agnosis: Thinking God in the Void 139

significant than the 'turn to the subject' associated with early mod-
ernism, namely the 'linguistic turn' that, in a variety of ways and
in a variety of representatives, has been largely determinative for
twentieth-century philosophy and theology. These disciplines have,
it seems, less and less defined themselves as being concerned with
how the world is or how we may know the world, but with the
way in which we represent the world to ourselves, especially in
and through language. Symptomatic of this turn are philosophies
as diverse as those of Ayer, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida and
Habermas. In the wake of the redefining of the tasks of philosophy
in linguistic terms, many would regard the popular model of the
self as a subject who 'has' experiences of an object world (even
when these experiences are as uncanny as an experience of nothing-
ness) and which then translates these experiences into language as
no longer tenable. There is no subject and no object, no self and no
world to which we have privileged access: there is only represen-
tation, only language, propagating and disseminating itself across
the face of the world. Indeed 'the world' is nothing more nor less
than the sum of linguistic self-production.
'Humanity' is therefore no longer conceived in terms of some
supra-historical or supra-cultural essence as was the humanity of
traditional humanism, idealistic or materialistic. Humanity is hu-
man in and as that which has broken through the silence of the
animal realm.1 Once this breakthrough is effected, 'the whole land-
scape [that was once beheld silently] is overrun with words as with
an invasion, it is henceforth but a variant of speech before our
eyes.. .'2 Merely to speak is to locate ourselves within a never-
ending verbal chain that, as Derrida has forcefully represented it,
has the fundamental characteristics of writing: the immediacy of
presence is always already deferred by the 'spaced' differentiation
of articulated discourse, rendering impossible the kind of subject-
object embrace that is determinative for all concepts of 'experience'.
But it is not even necessary for the argument to be taken into the
more controversial regions of post-structuralist theory in order to
query the kind of statements regarding experience that I have been
making. Some of the key issues are well-focused by George Lindbeck,
a self-styled 'post-liberal' theologian, who has categorized theories
of religion and doctrine into three main groupings. The first is shaped
by an understanding of doctrines as cognitively or informationally
meaningful. The second is the approach he calls the 'experiential-
expressive' that 'interprets doctrines as noninformative and
140 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

nondiscursive symbols of inner feelings, attitudes or existential

orientations.'3 The third (his own) is the 'cultural-linguistic' approach,
according to which doctrines neither signify objectively existing
entities in the world nor express the inner states of the believer's
self-consciousness, but serve to 'regulate' the textually defined life
of religious communities. On this view, the debate as to what doc-
trine ought to say cannot be decided by an appeal to facts or experi-
ences but only, on the basis of 'inter-textuality', by the interrogation
by the community of its own textual resources leading to extrapo-
lations from and reapplications of those resources. This principle of
inter-textuality leads to the view that 'Adherents of different reli-
gions do not diversely thematize the same experience; rather they
have different experiences.'4 It is the extensive compendium of a
community's textuality that determines what can or cannot count as
experience for those who inhabit this textual universe, not vice versa.
A similar case has been argued with regard to mystical experi-
ence by Steven T. Katz. Katz has no difficulty in pointing out the
absurdities of the view, popular among theorists of religious experi-
ence in the first half of the twentieth century, that there is a single
core experience underlying the diversity of religions. Against such
a view, Katz maintains that 'as a result of his process of intellectual
acculturation in its broadest sense, the mystic brings to his experi-
ence a world of concepts, images, symbols, and values which shape
as well as colour the experience he eventually and actually has.'5
To make claims regarding a foundational 'experience of nothing-
ness', then, and to 'read' such an experience out of texts as diverse
as those of Zen and Pure Land Buddhism, or Schleiermacher's and
Kierkegaard's romantic and existential variations upon a pietistic
theme, might seem to conflate too many and too diverse language-
games to hold out any chance of illuminatingly reflecting the con-
temporary religious situation. Is it really going to be possible to
trace a path through the global web of language toward that which
is outside or beyond language, which language intends but at which
it can never arrive? After all, even the attempt to find such a path
must itself be constructed in language and as language, as a se-
quence of words on paper having only such power of conviction as
language bestows upon itself in its self-ravelling-unravelling play.
A book cannot, qua book, call a halt to this play by some sudden
extra-linguistic gesture, like that of a Zen master who beats his
pupil across the shoulders with a stick or yells out some inarticulate
and meaningless cry.
 Agnosis: Thinking God in the Void 141

Yet is this to render completely inadmissible any attempt to deal,

in language, with an experience that, though testified in language,
claims to be rooted in a pre- or extra-linguistic realm? Having cited
Merleau-Ponty with regard to the invasion by language of the pre-
linguistic landscape, we should also learn from his sense for the com-
plexity of the interrelationship between language and its world that
is energetically if enigmatically testified in the closing pages of The
Visible and the Invisible where he explores this interrelationship under
the figure of the chiasm. To be sure, 'after' the advent of language
there can be no naive return to a non-verbalized world, yet there is
what Merleau-Ponty calls a profound 'reversibility' between silent
vision and speech. Although speech overruns the landscape of
silent vision, the mute world, it is also the case that 'if we were to
make completely explicit the architectonics of the human body, its
ontological framework, and how it sees itself and hears itself, we
would see that the structure of its mute world is such that all the
possibilities of language are already given in it.'6
Indeed, if we accept the basic hypothesis of evolution, then it
becomes clear that language as such is a late arrival on the scene of
communicative processes. Language arises only in a context of bio-
logical and social communication that is already highly developed
in itself. Indeed, recent studies in ethology seem to reinforce the
view that there is a continuum between animal communication and
human language. And who, after all, has not had the experience of
recognizing that a person's body language or voice patterns are
at odds with what they are consciously articulating in language?
Colour, shape, form, movement are all powerful means of commu-
nication in themselves and often, in truth, more powerful than the
messages intended by the spoken word. Sculptors, painters and
dancers, theatre and film directors engage our attention precisely
by means of their proficiency in such unspoken dimensions of com-
munication. Nor should we regard these dimensions as 'merely
private'. On the contrary, they are very often only too public. Not
only artists but the news media have been very adept at capturing
images of human pity and fear in such a way as to set the para-
meters for public debate.7
Another aspect of the question regarding the limits of language
might be brought into view by asking whether it might not be pos-
sible for language to incorporate into itself a critique of language so
as to achieve transparency with regard to its own limitations vis-h-
vis experience? Such a project has engaged many philosophers as
142 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

well as poets and creative writers. It is also relevant to religious

writers who seek to communicate a type of experience that they
frankly admit is 'beyond words'.8
There are, however, further problems for an enquiry of the kind
being attempted here. For it is not as if the appeal being made on
behalf of experience is being lodged in the immediacy of descrip-
tive sentences in the present tense that could purport to picture
transparently or to point directly to the experience concerned. Such
'first-hand' accounts might be assumed to represent the best way of
getting at experience through language. The 'evidence' examined in
this enquiry has been of a largely 'second-hand' nature, reflections
on the concept of nothingness rather than first-hand reports of the
experience of nothingness. We have in this way allowed the com-
plexities of culture, history and philosophy to cast their shadow
over the innocence of direct speech, instead of remaining close to
the primary interface between language and experience. The con-
cept of an experience of nothingness has been arrived at as the
answer to a theoretical question, rather than the experience itself
being isolated and secured as a datum for subsequent theoretical
reflection.
The 'cultural-linguistic' method must therefore be acknowledged
in this respect at least: that religious questions are never asked (nor
answered) in a cultural or linguistic vacuum. The question cannot
be whether some ideal language in some timeless circumstances
might provide an immediate and truthful representation of exper-
ience.9 The question can only be whether the concrete accumulation
of texts to which contemporary thinking is heir is an appropriate or
adequate resource through which to gain access to the space of
experience. Here the saying applies that 'Life is lived forwards, but
understood backwards', in the sense that it is precisely by journey-
ing backwards down the path of reflection that we in fact arrive at
what is most original and yet which still awaits being thought.
However, it should also be added that the experience spoken of
here, though foundational and thus implicit in all self-experience
(in such a way that it is more familiar to us than we are to our-
selves) poses unique difficulties. For it is not an experience of this
or that. The problem is not merely the problem as to how a particular
configuration of articulated words, such as 'This is a yellow table',
can represent the object itself, 'a yellow table'. For the experience of
nothingness is the experience of that which is not nor never can
become an object, a represented thing - and yet I have claimed that
 Agnosis: Thinking God in the Void 143

this non-experiencable nothingness comes to us precisely as experi-

ence. Yet, as experience, it must be experience of the ineffable, the
unsayable, the incommunicable, a sign of contradiction.10
Such difficulties are readily comparable to many familiar prob-
lems arising for all religious language. Indeed, even before the lin-
guistic turn, religious writers of the past rarely assumed that 'God'
was accessible to them in the way that objects in the world were
accessible. They did not need modern discussions of religious lan-
guage to understand that 'God' required a unique logic and that
reports of experiences, such as mystical experiences, that claimed
to represent unmediated experiences of God posed singular prob-
lems for language. This double problematizing of language and
experience with regard to God culminates in the twin questions of
negative theology and mysticism, both of which are, interestingly,
often recognized as singularly relevant to the contemporary crisis of
representation - so much so that it may well be said that if negative
theology and mysticism did not exist, it would be necessary to
invent them. Of course, it cannot be assumed that they somehow
'contain' a ready-made answer to our contemporary crisis. In con-
tinuity with the whole hermeneutical endeavour of this book, such
insights as may be looked for cannot be found outside of the
transformative processes of interpretation itself, processes that nec-
essarily involve the contemporary situation as contributing to any
understanding of mysticism and negative theology we may arrive
at.

MYSTICISM AND NEGATIVE THEOLOGY

Allusion has already been made to the complex ways in which

the vocabulary of nothingness and non-being circulated between
metaphysical and voluntaristic schemata during the medieval and
early modern periods. At that point, however, no consideration was
given to the further possibility that some at least of the texts that
employ this vocabulary might be read neither as applying precon-
ceived metaphysical concepts nor as representing acts of subjective
self-evaluation but as reporting (or attempting to report) actual
experiences.
Yet experiences of God - whether focused on some concrete
manifestation or mediation of the divine or as in some deeply
mysterious sense immediately present in and to the very self of the
144 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

subject having the experience - haunted the margins of medieval

philosophy. Even if the mainstream of ecclesiastical theology in-
sisted on deferring the fullness of the beatific vision to the end of
time, there are hints at the possibility of attaining some momentary
anticipation of that vision now, in the midst of this transitory life.
Both in Augustine and in Aquinas, following Augustine, it was
conceded that a vision of God, like unto that enjoyed by the saints
in heaven, could in principle be granted to inhabitants of the sub-
lunary world.11 Yet there was also- a full recognition of the prob-
lems surrounding any attempt to translate such an experience into
the concepts and categories of human understanding.
Pseudo-Dionysius, constantly quoted throughout the medieval
period, invoked Moses as an example to believers that they should
'look for a sight of the mysterious things.' At the same time he
warned them that in doing so they will need to venture Ijeyond all
being and knowledge'.12 'Here, being neither oneself nor someone
else, one is supremely united by a completely unknowing inactivity
of all knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing noth-
ing.'13 Only in such an act might we presume to know one of whom,
in a short summa of Dionysian theology, it must be said that:

It is not soul or mind, nor does it possess imagination, conviction,

speech, or understanding. Nor is it speech per se, understanding
per se. It cannot be spoken of and it cannot be grasped by under-
standing. It is not number or order, greatness or smallness, equal-
ity or inequality, similarity or dissimilarity. It is not immovable,
moving, or at rest. It has no power, it is not power, nor is it light.
It does not live nor is it life. It is not a substance, nor is it eternity
or time. It cannot be grasped by the understanding since it is
neither knowledge nor truth... It falls neither within the predi-
cate of nonbeing nor of being. Existing beings do not know it as
it actually is and it does not know them as they are. There is no
speaking of it, nor name nor knowledge of i t . . . it is both beyond
every assertion... it is also beyond every denial.14

Nonetheless, and despite this description of the ultimate object

of mystical vision by means of an accumulation of paradoxes and
contradictions, it is perhaps the supreme paradox of Dionysius'
thought that human beings are called to make the ascent to mystical
knowledge, 'to strive upward as much as you can toward union
with him who is beyond all being and knowledge.'15
 Agnosis: Thinking God in the Void 145

In the hands of the author of the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing,

for one, these theological teachings could be grasped as an aid to
practical religion.16 Having counselled his readers to seek God and,
warning them that their initial steps will plunge them into the
darkness of a cloud of unknowing, the author is blunt in respond-
ing to the obvious question as to what we are seeking when we
seek this hidden God.

But now you will ask me, 'How am I to think of God himself, and
what is he?' and I cannot answer you except to say 'I do not
know!' For with this question you have brought me into the same
darkness, the same cloud of unknowing where I want you to be!
For though we through the grace of God can know fully about all
other matters, and think about them - yes, even the very works
of God himself - yet of God himself can no man think.17

To 'know' God would demand a reorientation of all our powers

of knowing so complete that both subject and object would have to
be recast in negative terms: the 'place' where such contemplation
occurs is, strictly, 'nowhere', since it is neither 'outside or above,
behind or beside' the knower.18

And, though your natural mind can now find 'nothing' to feed
on, for it thinks you are doing no thing, go on doing this no
thing, and do it for the love of God. Therefore, do not give up but
work vigorously on that nothing, with vigilant longing and will
to have God, whom no man can know. For I tell you truly that
I would much rather be nowhere physically, wrestling with that
obscure nothing, than I would be some great potentate who
whenever I wanted could be anywhere I liked, and enjoy every-
thing as if it were my own.19

But then, as if to disable in advance the possibility that this 'no-

where' and 'nothing' might themselves be falsely objectified, the
author acknowledges the perspectivism of all valuations, in a man-
ner that strikingly anticipates Schopenhauer, by adding that it is
only the 'outer self that calls them 'nowhere' and 'nothing', whereas
'Our inner self calls it "All" .. .'20 The point, therefore, is not to hypo-
thesize a nothingness that could be reified into the 'object' of an
experience but to underscore the irreducible distinctiveness of this
way of experiencing and of what is experienced in it.
146 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

The rhetoric of The Cloud is striking, yet in one respect at least it

is in agreement with the broad stream of medieval theology: that
God, even when intuited mystically and even when, in that intui-
tion, seen as in some sense identical with the soul itself, remains
inconceivable. In 'knowing' God mystically, we 'know' that which
cannot be constrained by the limits of our understanding or thought
within any preconceived essence; we 'know' what is truly 'noth-
ing', beyond each and every 'thing'. Didn't Aquinas himself say of
God that 'in this life we do not know him as he is in himself and
can't the doctrine of analogy itself be understood as an attempt to
incorporate the negative implications of Dionysian theology into
theological discourse itself while giving permission for the theo-
logical language game to go on being played?21 If the doctrine of
analogy is generally read solely as a vindication of God-talk (not
least by its critics), can't it just as well be read as a sustained medi-
tation on the limitations inherent in all such talk?
But doesn't admitting the fundamental inconceivability of God
undermine everything that theology tries to do? In conceding that
'in this life we cannot know God as he is in himself, doesn't the
doctrine of analogy effectively deconstruct itself and take with it
the whole edifice of theology? Doesn't it disseminate equivocation
throughout the whole theological system? Conversely, doesn't
Aquinas' robust determination to carry on theologizing convict him
of inconsistency in the face of this his own most challenging insight?
To explore the implications of negative theology for language
concerning God we turn to two recent studies, by Michael Sells and
Kevin Hart.
Michael Sells addresses the possibility of incorporating negative
theology into theological discourse in terms of what he calls the
'performative intensity' with which the negative principle is en-
acted within theological writing. Sells defines this performative
intensity as 'a function of the frequency and seriousness with which
the language turns back upon its own propositions.'22 This criterion
can then be used to generate a scale at the lower end of which, as
Sells puts it, there 'would be an assertion of ineffability, followed
by a full chapter or treatise that freely employs names and
predications of the transcendent, and then at the end reminds the
reader that the transcendent is beyond all names and predications.'
It would be towards this lower end of the scale that we might
expect - in a very rough and ready way, of course - to find Aquinas
and much of the broad stream of ecclesiastical theology. The tran-
scendent unknowability of God is acknowledged, but only weakly
 Agnosis: Thinking God in the Void 147

performed. At the other end of the scale are writings, almost cer-
tainly including the works of Pseudo-Dionysius, The Cloud of Un-
knowing and Meister Eckhart, 'in which the mystical discourse turns
back relentlessly upon its own propositions and generates distinc-
tive paradoxes that include within themselves a large number of
radical transformations, particularly in the area of temporal and
spatial relationships.'23 What such performative intensity achieves,
according to Sells, is a kind of self-deconstruction that, while not
abandoning the burden of reference (i.e. while maintaining the in-
tentionality of theological discourse towards the reality of God),
guards 'referential openness' and refuses the temptation 'to fill in
the open referent'.24 Instead of offering a mystical ontology, such
high performance writings explore a disontology, described by Sells
as 'the ongoing attempt to gain a momentary liberation from the
delimitation of predication and reference as represented by thus
and not thus.'25 Such disontology does not aspire to treat its subject
as an element, not even as the primary element, in any causal or
explanatory chain, but, by the use of 'split, fused and shifting ref-
erence' it seeks to establish 'a moment of receptivity free from the
security of referential delimitation.'26 It is prepared to acknowledge
that 'the smallest semantic unit is not the sentence or proposition,'
as is assumed both by the metaphysics of being and by positivist
assaults on such metaphysics, 'but the double sentence or dual
proposition' - that is, a sentence or proposition that retains its
propositional character and yet cannot be determined with respect
to any one single meaning.27
Sells' study is largely devoted to readings in those writers whom
he regards as exemplary practitioners of performative intensity -
Plotinus, John the Scot Eriugena, Ibn 'Arabi, Marguerite Porete and
Meister Eckhart. For, in practice, it is only by dint of interpretative
work that it can be demonstrated that the acceptance of such non-
monological logic does not lead to incoherence but, on the contrary,
enlivens and enriches the language of theology. Indeed, Sells' study
is devoted to showing that such language is, in the full sense of the
word, the realization of theological discourse, the only way in which
it can do justice to the character of religious experience and exist-
ence as essentially qualified by love.28
Not the least significant of Sells' contributions to understanding
the knot of issues with which we are currently concerned is the
warning that negative theology should not be treated as if it repre-
sented a consistent and uniform theological position. A weak ac-
knowledgement of divine unknowability functions quite otherwise
148 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

than a strong or intensely performing internalization of the nega-

tive principle.
This distinction between kinds of negative theology is important
also in the context of Kevin Hart's attempt to narrow the gap be-
tween negative theology and deconstruction. For Derrida's deter-
mination to refuse the blandishments of negative theology will mean
something quite different according to whether his conception
of negative theology itself is shaped by a strong or a weak form. It
would, for example, be very plausible to see deconstruction as oppo-
sing a weakly performing negative theology precisely because of
an (unacknowledged) kinship with a strongly performing version
of it. Hart himself refers to the distinction made by John Jones
between 'negative theology [that] functions within official theology
or, more specifically, metaphysics to express the pre-eminence of
the divine cause' and a 'negative (mystical) theology [that] denies
all that is and all reference to beings and . . . ultimately denies all
official theology and, hence, metaphysics.'29
Hart uses the first of these forms of negative theology to illustrate
how such theology can be understood as a 'restricted economy' in
Bataille's sense, functioning to support or to sustain in equilibrium
a system whose ultimate orientation is towards the knowledge of
being as such. Qualifying the second of Jones's options, Hart sug-
gests that a radical understanding of negative theology should not
be taken as simply 'denying' metaphysics. Such a denial, he argues,
could only be made in the light of some supposedly superior knowl-
edge, thereby merely introducing a new level of metaphysical dis-
course. Thorough-going negative theology - negative theology that
denies non-being as vigorously as it denies being - is not the denial
of metaphysics in any merely adversarial sense.

The relation between the two negative theologies is one of supple-

mentarity... So for Pseudo-Dionysius, negative theology is both
within metaphysics as a restricted economy, and outside it as a
general economy. That is, negative theology plays a role within
the phenomenon of positive theology but it also shows that posi-
tive theology is situated with regard to a radical negative theol-
ogy which precedes it. In short, negative theology performs the
deconstruction of positive theology.30

This analysis enables Hart - despite Derrida's own disclaimers -

to dovetail the projects of negative theology and of deconstruction.
For, he claims, his argument 'demystifies certain descriptions of
 Agnosis: Thinking God in the Void 149

deconstruction as an atheological discourse: on the contrary, in some

contexts it is the theological discourse par excellence.'31 An important
aspect of Hart's argument (and one that relates directly to the present
discussion) is his distinction between a mystical theology that seeks
to validate itself by appeals to experience and a negative theology
that is primarily concerned with 'a certain attitude towards dis-
course on God'.32 Essentially he is not interested in opening a dis-
cussion in which 'experience' could count for or against a given
theological or philosophical position. Instead he wishes to pursue a
meta-reflection on theological language that eschews the recourse
to an originating experience that, he claims, just can't be got at.
'Although what we may take to be a presence may institute a text
it cannot function as the origin of the text's significations/ he states.
Nor, he adds, 'can it be recovered by a reading of the text, since we
cannot even talk of a presence in a text, only of a trace of a trace.'33
The rapprochement between deconstruction and negative theology,
then, would appear to mark the end of the line for any theory (such
as that being advanced in these pages) in which experience oper-
ates as a key player.
Hart's case involves exploiting a system of ascending critiques, in
which Bataille's critique of Hegel is subject to an analogous critique
by Derrida, before that in turn is similarly critiqued by Hart him-
self. Thus, with regard to Hegel, 'Bataille recognises that the unlim-
ited loss which characterises radical negativity does serve a need; in
providing an outlet for excess energy it paradoxically helps to pre-
serve norms.'34 But then Bataille too ultimately 'allows his critique
to be gathered back into the dialectic,'35 for his symbols of tran-
scendence - 'chance, eroticism, laughter, sacrifice and play' - are
operative 'only as a phenomenal supplement, as a social particu-
lar'.37 In other words, they remain quantifiable, objectifiable and
susceptible to being interpreted as no more than a moment within
a defined totality. But is this correct?
Derrida's criticism of Bataille is not in fact a criticism 'without
reserve'.37 Bataille, as Derrida interprets him, does - at least in cer-
tain aspects of his work - understand that the world of ecstasy
cannot be 'another world' that demands 'another language' and
that would, therefore, re-establish the ancient dualism of metaphys-
ics. Let us quote from Derrida's essay, where he restates what he
believes Bataille to have understood.

. . . sovereign speech is not another discourse, another chain un-

wound alongside significative discourse. There is only one discourse,
150 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

it is significative, and here one cannot get around Hegel. The

poetic or the ecstatic is that in every discourse which can open
itself up to the absolute loss of its sense, to the (non-)base of the
sacred, of nonmeaning, of un-knowledge or of play, to the swoon
from which it is reawakened by the throw of the dice.38

In order fully to grasp the point at issue in the triangle Hart-

Derrida-Bataille it may prove worthwhile to consider aspects of
Bataille's work that relate to the present discussion.

EXCURSUS: BATAILLE AND 'INNER EXPERIENCE'

Bataille's dadaistic rhetoric seems to lead away from the question

of religious experience, narrowly conceived: but this is precisely be-
cause of Bataille's suspicion that the 'religious' understanding of mystical
experience tends inevitably to anticipate in advance the 'meaning' of such
experience and thereby to subordinate it to the requirements of interested
calculation. In privileging such instances of pure experience as laugh-
ter and the erotic, Bataille is attempting to outmanoeuvre the
proleptic marches of consciousness that reduce pure experience to
that-which-has-already-been-conceived, i.e. the knowable as the
product of will-to-power. 'No doubt preoccupation with the future
can be consistent with the freedom of the present moment/ he writes,
'but with temptation the contradiction is flagrant. Eroticism may
certainly stray into some overwhelmingly depressing modes, but
on the other hand the calculations of a tempted religious must be
stressed, for they confer a miserliness, a poverty, a dismal disci-
pline on the ascetic life of no matter what religion or sect.'39
This is the complaint Bataille brings to bear on all 'theological'
conceptions of experience: that the space of such experience is al-
ways circumscribed in advance by the miserly and dismal calcula-
tions of religious self-interest. What, then, is Bataille's alternative?
In claiming the subject of 'inner experience' for the first part of
his Somme Atheologique, Bataille defines it as:

not being able to have principles either in dogma . . . or in

science... or in a search for enriching states . . . it cannot have
any other concern nor other goal than itself. Opening myself to
inner experience, I have placed in it all value and all authority.
Henceforth I can have no other value, no other authority . . . I call
experience a voyage to the end of the possible of man.25
 Agnosis: Thinking God in the Void 151

However, this 'voyage to the end of the possible' is not under-

taken in order to find out what lies within the limits of human
possibility: it is rather to explore those limits as they are thrown
into relief by the breakdown of possibility. What happens there is
the overthrow of all attempts to incorporate the absolute into the
domain of knowledge. 'Experience attains in the end the fusion of
object and subject, being as subject non-knowledge, as object the
unknown' (IE, p. 9).
Bataille's account of inner experience is permeated by Kier-
kegaardian terms and concepts. Just as the self of Kierkegaard's
Upbuilding Discourses was brought to an impasse by its inner self-
contradiction, so Bataille's self reaches the exhaustion of its possi-
bilities in a dead end, and in that very exhaustion, he says, 'when
nothing is possible any longer is in my eyes to have an experience
of the divine; it is analogous to a torment' (IE, p. 33). From Kier-
kegaard too comes the vocabulary of anguish, trembling, possibility
and impossibility and leap used by Bataille in order to communi-
cate inner experience.
Let us begin with anguish: anguish can take a merely superficial
form that squanders the opportunity of being brought to the point
of torment. 'Instead of going to the depths of his anguish, the anx-
ious one pratters, degrades himself and flees. Anguish, however,
was his chance: he was chosen in accordance with his forebodings'
(IE, p. 35). Like Kierkegaard, Bataille summons Job: 'Trembling...
like Job... knowing that all is lost' (ibid.); and, powerfully, the
crucifixion, as the moment when God Himself became 'the Impos-
sible', the incomprehensible despair of self-sacrifice. 'We back away
from "possible" to "possible", in us everything begins again and is
never risked, but in God: in this "leap" of being which He is, in his
"once and for all"?' (ibid.)
The event of the cross - as that which is declared by Christianity
to be the saving event, the pivot on which the whole history of God
turns and by which the true character of God is revealed - is thus
the event that saves and reveals but only by establishing salvation and
revelation on a ground that is unintelligible to reason and impassable for
the moral self-consciousness. Its very character as victory - as salva-
tion and revelation - is falsified in the very instant when it is inter-
preted (as, of course, it is repeatedly interpreted in official theology)
as an accomplished event, a 'once for all' that is no longer qualified
by the 'risk', the indeterminacy of the 'leap'. To experience this
event as the event of God we must, Bataille asserts, leave 'God'
behind: 'The word God, to have used it in order to reach the depth
152 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

of solitude, but to no longer know, hear his voice. To know nothing

of him. God [sic] final word meaning that all words will fail further
on ...' (IE, p. 36).
Bataille's anguished meditation on the cross cannot therefore
culminate in a gesture or a word of conventional piety, not even the
piety of a 'dark night of the soul'. He is not a 'good apostle' who
has 'an answer for everything' (IE, p. 37). The darkest moment at
the foot of the cross is no more darkness, no more despair than it
is laughter. In an anecdotal illustration, Bataille recalls his umbrella
collapsing over his head and eliciting a laughter such as he had
never laughed in which 'the extreme depth of each thing' was dis-
closed to him.41 Yet, conversely, even as laughter it is also 'dizzi-
ness, vertigo, nausea, loss of self to the point of death' (IE, p. 37).
If the collapse of his umbrella made him laugh, Bataille also re-
marks that in its collapsed state it covered him like a black shroud
evoking prospects of mortality. For to exist at the extreme limit is
to give oneself totally to the moment in which we break free from
the compartmentalization of laughter versus sobbing and of seri-
ousness versus ecstasy that is constitutive for everyday conscious-
ness as well as for the 'ratio' of rational consciousness.
The resistance of such inner experience to knowledge is also in-
dicated by yet another Kierkegaardian term: 'I can only, I suppose,
reach the extreme limit in repetition [emphasis GP], for this reason,
that I am never sure of having attained it, that I will never be sure'
(IE, pp. 42-3). With this concept, therefore, Bataille disarms in ad-
vance the certitude of conversion or of mystical experiences (as
those are normally understood). I can neither be sure of having nor
of having-had an experience of the extreme limit: I can claim it only
as I come to it in repetition, living the leap in the openness of risk
- yet even this must not be construed as an action on the part of the
subject who is journeying to the extreme limit, for 'inner experience
is the opposite of action. Nothing more. "Action" is utterly depend-
ent upon project... [and project].. .is the putting off of existence to
a later point' (IE, p. 46). Although the extreme limit may be ap-
proached via project, the moment of arrival is precisely the moment
when the whole structure of project is overthrown. Existence bursts
in as repetition, and the 'fulfilling' of the project (the finding of a
self or the securing of knowledge) is deferred to another time. Inner
experience, understood as such an irruption of existence, is a way
of 'non-knowledge' that is itself the communication of ecstasy and
that 'is ANGUISH before all else' (IE, p. 52).
 Agnosis: Thinking God in the Void 153

Yet also laughter:

Each isolated existence emerges from itself... in a sort of easy

flash; it opens itself at the same time to the contagion of a wave
which rebounds, for those who laugh, together become like the
waves of the sea - there no longer exists between them any par-
tition as long as the laughter lasts; they are no more separate than
are two waves, but their unity is as undefined, as precarious as
that of the agitation of the waters.
(IE, pp. 95-6)

And, again: 'Shared laughter assumes the absence of a true an-

guish, and yet it has no other source than anguish.'
If the inner death and non-knowledge of anguish bespeak the
hidden depths of interiority, laughter breaks down the walls of
separateness and displays the non-knowledge of the extreme limit
as communication. Non-knowledge is not just an inner mental event
that the individual has with himself and for himself: it is a cosmic
event, an event of global and universal import. The laughter is not
just the laughter of a solitary individual wrapped in the black shroud
of his umbrella shrieking at his own absurdity: it is a calling-into-
question of a whole edifice of structured social relationships. The
wave ripples back and forth, up and down, traversing every step of
the social hierarchy and - precisely in the face of this laughter - the
'highest values', the supposed 'summit' that holds together the whole
interconnected edifice of thought and of social order, is stripped
bare, denuded of its pretence to have dispelled insufficiency. The
summit erupts in laughter. This is the sole transfiguration of the noth-
ingness to which the anguished consciousness of the extreme limit leads.
'Man is no longer . . . the plaything of Nothingness, but Nothing-
ness is itself his plaything - he ruins himself in it, but illuminates
its darkness with his laughter, which he reaches only when intoxi-
cated with the very void which kills him' (IE, p. 92).
Yet if laughter illuminates and communicates Nothingness, it does
not objectify Nothingness but communicates it in a manner that
evades the rationality of discourse or of project. It is a communica-
tion that is effected in silence, for all 'profound communication
demands silence' (IE, p. 92).
In case this should be seen as a retreat into what Kierkegaard
might have called 'hidden inwardness', Bataille goes on in his Somme
AtMologique to endow such returns to the 'primal continuity linking
154 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

us with everything that is'42 with a significance that is nothing short

of global.
To understand this point we need to grasp the distinction Bataille
makes between 'general' and 'restricted' economies. Integral to his
analysis is, as he puts it, the 'basic fact' that:

The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of

energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more en-
ergy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy
(wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g. an organ-
ism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be
completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost
without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or
catastrophically.43

In other words: I can expend the superabundant resources on luxury,

display or enjoyment - or (in the most extreme form) waste them in
war.
Within the domain marked out by this principle of general
economy, however, human societies develop by a series of inter-
locking restricted economies: energy is channelled to particular
projects, particular goals, the achievement of which become in turn
stepping stones to the attaining of yet other projects, yet other goals.
Liberal and Marxist economics alike assume that such channelling
of energy can be carried on indefinitely and that if anything goes
wrong with the system it is only because the flow of energy has not
been properly adjusted. Against such views Bataille insists that there
will and must be a periodic excess of energy over immediate use-
fulness. Indeed, the more intense the channelling of energy, the
more restricted the economy, the more rapid the build-up of such
excess is likely to be and the more explosive its final release.
The principle is exemplified in the 'potlatch' customs of certain
societies, in which an exchange of gifts is carried out that leads -
from a strictly utilitarian viewpoint - to the squandering of re-
sources on the part of the respective 'givers'. Such gestures of con-
spicuous - even self-immolatory - consumption may seem useless,
but for Bataille they demonstrate the nature of general economy.
The same motif is found in the element of sacrifice that is central to
all historical religion: sacrifice liberates a world that is in the proc-
ess of being reduced to the restricted economy of a world of things
to a 'sacred' world, in which 'the weight introduced ... by the avarice
and cold calculation of the real order' (AC I, p. 61) is removed.
 Agnosis: Thinking God in the Void 155

This highlights a further ambiguity of human societies. On the

one hand we establish ourselves as human, as differentiated from
the animal world, by a series of taboos and laws that involve us in
putting away or concealing those bodily functions that most be-
speak our animal origins - reproduction, digestive processes and
death. In this way the sacred world is separated out from the pro-
fane world that is the world of the everyday, the world of work. Yet
just as the animal world had previously functioned as a given from
which human beings needed to distinguish themselves in an act of
self-asserting projection, so now the profane world is constituted as
a given in which my specifically human freedom is unable to prove
itself to itself. The existence of taboo therefore invites the transgres-
sion of taboo. In the history of religions, Bataille sees this exempli-
fied in the phenomena associated with religious festivals, when, for
a period of time, normal prohibitions are suspended and 'all is
permitted', even, in some cases, unbridled sexual licence and mur-
der. But this is not, as Bataille puts it, the dog returning to its vomit
- a mere reversion to the non-differentiation of the animal state. It
is rather a distinctively human response to a distinctively human
problem - not least because the whole meaning of the festival can
be summarized in the phenomenon of laughter and 'there is noth-
ing more contrary to animality than laughter' (AC II, p. 90). The
logic is essentially simple:

. . . relative to profane life this sacred animality has the same mean-
ing that the negation of nature (hence profane life) has relative to
pure animality. What is denied in profane life (through prohibi-
tions and through work) is a dependent state of the animal, sub-
ject to death and to utterly blind needs. What is denied by means
of divine life is still dependence, but this time it is the profane
world whose lucid and voluntary servility is contested.
(AC II, pp. 92-3)

The festival is also essentially communicative: communicating

the ecstatic anguish of excess energy, energy that has no use, no
function - although it is a function of energy in which we are -
impossibly - most ourselves.
In the festival we experience what Bataille calls 'sovereignty' in
the sense that 'we may call sovereign the enjoyment of possibilities
that utility doesn't justify . . . Life beyond utility is the domain of
sovereignty' (AC II, p. 198). Even the industrial worker whose life
is entirely dominated by utility can know moments of sovereignty.
156 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

He treats himself to a drink. Not because he needs it, nor because

that is what he always does at such and such a time of day, but just
because he feels like it. The drinking itself may be merely a me-
chanical operation, the imbibing of a certain quantum of alcohol,
and yet in the drinking the miracle occurs:

. . . the glass of wine gives him, for a brief moment, the miraculous
sensation of having the world at his disposal... Beyond need,
the object of desire is, humanly, the miracle; it is sovereign life,
beyond the necessary that suffering defines. This miraculous ele-
ment which delights us may be simply the brilliance of the sun,
which on a spring morning transfigures a desolate street... It
may be w i n e . . . the form of beauty, of wealth - in the form,
moreover, of violence, of funereal and sacred sadness; in the form
of glory. What is the meaning of art, architecture, music, painting
or poetry if not the anticipation of a suspended, wonder-struck
moment, a miraculous moment?
(AC II, pp. 199-200)

Sovereign moments may thus break out in the midst of the every-
day - a glass of wine, a ray of sunlight. They may also be experi-
enced through art. Literature, for instance, 'continues the game of
religion, of which it is the principal heir.' It does this in so far as it
plays the game of looking death in the face, offering a vicarious
enactment of the individual's exposure to death and his attainment
of sovereignty in such exposure - effectively the function of sacri-
ficial ritual itself.
But do such periodic releases of excess energy - whether in col-
lective orgies of carnivalistic licence or in the discreet pleasures of
literature - really liberate us from bondage to laws of servility and
utility? On the contrary, don't such releases function, as Marcuse
put it, as a repressive tolerance, securing the homeostatic stability
of the profane world and thereby functionally determined with
regard to that world? Isn't the whole thing a feint? Hasn't prolepsis
always already triumphed in advance?
And, in any case, what would it mean to conceive of the sover-
eign subject or the sovereign moment? Aren't we back with the old
problem: that the moment we think it, it is no longer what we need
it to be? Derrida comments that Bataille must, consistently, 'mark
the point of no return of destruction, the instance of an expenditure
without reserve which no longer leaves us the resources with which
 Agnosis: Thinking God in the Void 157

to think of this expenditure as negativity. For negativity is a re-

source.'^ Otherwise the sovereign moment, the ecstasy of non-knowl-
edge, has merely become a negative moment: a rhythm in the
movement of universal history, an Aufhebung that only suspends
the elements of consciousness in the pre-determined cause of a
'higher' integration of those elements. Such Aufhebung, as Derrida
puts it, 'remains within restricted economy.'45
This, of course, is precisely what would happen if it were possi-
ble to objectify inner experience by regarding it as a distinctive
domain of experience (like the experience of colour or the experi-
ence of pain): something that was commensurate with a specific
technical vocabulary or a distinctive set of philosophical concepts
or even a 'grammar' in Wittgenstein's sense. But here we may re-
peat a previous quotation from Derrida's essay:

There is only one discourse, it is significative, and here one can-

not get around Hegel. The poetic or ecstatic is that in every dis-
course which can open itself up to the absolute loss of its sense,
to the (non-)base of the sacred, of unmeaning, of un-knowledge
or of play, to the swoon from which it is reawakened by a throw
of the dice.46

There is no specific theme, no discursively defined meaning that

can be isolated as that of the sovereign moment. The language of
sovereignty - i.e. the language of 'inner experience' - is 'Not a
reserve or a withdrawal, not the infinite murmur of a blank speech
erasing the traces of classical discourse, but a kind of potlatch of
signs that burns, consumes, and wastes words in the gay affirma-
tion of death: a sacrifice and a challenge.'47
According to Derrida, then, Bataille neither claims the privileged
standpoint of a negative theology, nor retreats into mysticism.48
Instead he subverts the logic of both mysticism and negative theolo-
gy from within their own structures.
In Derrida's view the character of these structures is supremely
summed up in the Hegelian concept of Aufhebung. The world con-
structed through Aufhebung is precisely a world in which every
negation generates a corresponding affirmation. It is a world con-
structed as a rationally linked totality in which the question 'What
for?' can always be answered - and it is therefore a world con-
structed according to the principle of restricted economy.
Bataille, however, points out (or this at least is how Derrida
158 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

understands him) that such a world also invites the reversal of its
own values, its own construction. The aim that, by means of the
Aufhebung, humanity might establish and represent to itself its suc-
cessful transcendence over the mere givenness of the natural order
can equally well be achieved by the festal reversal of everything
established by means of the Aufhebung, for by this reversal it brings
itself back into the presence of death, of unmeaning and of primal
continuity, in relation to which alone the revelation of the mira-
culous, the poetic and the divine can be ecstatically communicated.
What the Hegelian system represents as completed and secured
through determinate historical moments must be enacted ever again
under the sign of repetition - and always as if from the very begin-
ning. Without the organizing teleology of the system, however, the
system can henceforth be read in any direction: backwards or for-
wards. Laughter and anguish alike ripple up and down and across
all the surfaces of our hierarchical constructions of experience.

But how does this excursus help our understanding of the inter-
relationship between language, experience and negative theology?
If Hart is correct, then Bataille's privileging of inner experience-
sovereignty-general economy is itself always open to deconstruc-
tion, always itself lapsing into restricted economy - and doing so
precisely because it lays claim to a particular kind of uniquely
privileged zone of experience from which to interpret the totality of
phenomena. Experience cannot deliver us from the self-deconstructing
processes of language - while language, in turn, means that we can
never lose ourselves in experience in the way that Bataille seems to
think we can.
Yet Derrida's reading of Bataille makes things somewhat more
complicated, because Derrida acknowledges that Bataille's sover-
eignty is not a particular experience demanding a particular lan-
guage. 'Sovereign speech is not another discourse.' But this also
means (though Derrida doesn't say so) that inner experience is not
a certain kind of experience. It is not the experience of something
(that would be objectifiable and susceptible to the machinery of
Aufhebung). It is the experience of nothingness. But that experience
itself, qua experience, frustrates any attempt to construct a uniquely
privileged language or a uniquely privileged interpretative stand-
point. Bataille - and this is a possibility left open precisely by
Derrida's (though not by Hart's) reading of Bataille - gives voice to
 Agnosis: Thinking God in the Void 159

a dimension of experience that makes fundamental demands on

language rather than (as is claimed in the postmodern consensus)
language being determinative for what can or can't count as experi-
ence for us.
But what is the cost to be paid for such a possibility?
Isn't it the cost of reason itself, the loss of any principle or any
purpose that might give cohesion to experience or knowledge?
Bataille doesn't just deconstruct, he seems to have destroyed any-
thing that could lay claim to be called a self or a world. Isn't this
moral and epistemological anarchy?
These objections may be put another way: if the religious project,
as that was classically conceived, involved the human subject in an
act of upward self-transcendence, such that the subject was brought
into and defined in relation to that which finally transcends it in
terms of ontological status (God), doesn't Bataille simply reverse
the direction of transcendence in such a way that all we are left
with is a downward transcendence, a falling-away of the subject
from its defining trajectory into what must end as an inchoate and
dissolute unravelling of the self? And with the unravelling of the
self the chain of language is also undone. Isn't the rejection of both
negative theology and even mysticism a sign that the very last vestige
of an attempt to bring experience into a coherent whole has been
abandoned? Whatever Bataille says, isn't it a case of the dog return-
ing to its vomit? And, as Bataille himself concedes ('without re-
serve', it seems), all we can say is: nothing; silence. And doesn't
that consequence itself follow necessarily if experience is taken as
a starting-point in such a way as to exclude the pre-structuring of
experience by reason? Isn't it the most elementary lesson of critical
philosophy that experience always already relies on the shaping
spirit of the self in such a way that, far from the self being derivable
from experience, experience itself exists only as constituted by the
epistemological, linguistic and cultural action of the 'experiencing'
subject? If we really have to choose between Bataillean anarchy and
Hegelian prolepsis, mustn't we always opt for Hegel if we are to
make any sense of experience at all - including religious sense?
How can such an issue be decided?
Poised between reason and experience we choose to go one way
or the other according as to whether we are more swayed b y . . .
reason or experience! Are we convinced by the warning offered
on behalf of reason that self and world must ultimately be think-
able within a perspective that is, in principle at least, totalizable
160 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

(or else anarchy)? Or does our experience reveal to us an abyss

within every thought we think, an abyss so deep that no thought
can measure it? Perhaps it is not possible to do any more than
describe and re-describe the alternatives posed by this moment of
decision. Yet if that is so, then we are being no less rational in
resolving to take a stand on experience rather than on pure reason
or pure language.
In arguing that the expulsion of experience from textuality has
not been as final as deconstructionists have assumed, I return, then,
to the kind of view put forward by Sells: that negative theology,
radically conceived as strongly performative, contains a commit-
ment to reference, although it is one in which the referent itself
remains open and undefined, even in the act of being referred to.
The experience that is the experience of nothingness is not 'an'
experience, like an intuition of a figure in a landscape or a sensation
of sudden warmth. There is no 'ground of meaning' assumed in
negative theology and, thus far, an affinity with deconstruction may
be conceded.
Yet in this correlation between a strongly performing negative
theology and the experience of nothingness, we seem to have re-
turned from the metaphysical heights invoked by talk of mystical
ascents down into the midst of the most mundane reality. Such a
descent might well appear doubly problematic. For, on the one
hand, it seems rhetorically incongruous to deploy a language that
is as problematic as the language of nothingness in order to end
up with the world familiar to everyday common sense. Is it really
necessary to take such extreme measures merely to save the ap-
pearances? On the other hand - and this is more troubling - we
would seem to be bereft of any criteria by which to establish the
special quality either of the experience of nothingness itself or of
the linguistic or other communicative means we have at our dis-
posal by which to articulate that experience. When the heights crash
down into the depths in this way, all differences are dissolved into
ultimate indifference.
Bataille himself might be taken as providing a warning example.
For his identification of sovereignty and inner experience with the
transgression of that network of restrictions and taboos that society
makes into our 'second nature' would seem to lead only too di-
rectly to the kind of contemporary moral nihilism according to which
all things are permitted so long as they do not conform to the laws
and orderings of society? But if all is permitted, how can we vali-
date our own evaluations?
 Agnosis: Thinking God in the Void 161

Here too, however, we may distinguish between what originates

on the ground of self-assertion alone and what is given to us as
experience. To indulge the will to transgression in the cause of
maintaining the self-consciousness of the self as differentiated from
the givenness of its environment (whether that is its natural envir-
onment, its place of work or the wider social order) is one thing: the
manifestation of the miraculous in the midst of the everyday, given
and experienced as grace, is something else.
To find and to speak truthfully of what belongs to such grace
can, of course, be no science, nor even an art for which, over a
period of time and with practice, we might develop a certain apti-
tude. Such speech must stand under the sign of the same grace as
the experience it seeks to retell.

FROM EXPERIENCE TO KNOWLEDGE?

Where does this leave the question of questions, the question con-
cerning knowledge of God?
There is, after all, a faculty within the academy that has such
knowledge as its special province. If it can no longer claim to be
queen of all sciences, its representatives are still jealous of its title
to 'theology' and are reluctant to concede the entirety of their en-
deavour to the less ambitious concept of 'religious studies', i.e. the
study of religion as no more than one aspect among others of hu-
man social, psychological or cultural reality.
Nor can it be denied that the present work is, in a quite definite
sense, theological. Its starting-point was the contemporary crisis of
belief in God and the exigency arising out of this crisis that we seek
a way of thinking God within the void of modern and postmodern
nihilism.
Yet no one would regard the kind of experience that has been
adumbrated in the course of this enquiry and the kind of under-
standing of religious language that has been explored in the last
few pages as 'scientific' in any hard sense. Even in comparison with
other subjects from within the spectrum of the humanities, the kind
of experience and the kind of language that have been our concern
here, cannot claim the coherence that is a sine qua non of any aca-
demic discipline - a remark that is no less true if it is extended to
areas of interdisciplinary study which are also required to justify
themselves in terms of a rigorous and distinctive specification of
subject-matter and methodology. In any case, even apart from the
162 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

motive of academic self-respect, the global shrinkage of funding for

more arcane subject areas makes the question of definition yet more
compelling.
In the face of such demands, however, we can only confess that
the experience of nothingness and the kind of language that might
preserve the traces of such an experience occupy no special place
within any conceivable system of knowledge and have no clear and
distinct boundaries that might serve to define them vis-a-vis other
experiences and other languages. If then, as some have claimed,
theology is today the interdisciplinary discipline par excellence, isn't
a 'theological' enquiry such as this a prime example of (in a quite
definite sense) undisciplined writing?
Certainly it is the case that so-called theological texts do not pro-
vide the only texts in which we can read of the experience of noth-
ingness. Not only the works of poets and artists or the data of
psychoanalysis, but events and situations in social and personal life
also offer representations of such experience. Indeed, the totality of
cultural history is a potential resource for a hermeneutics of noth-
ingness. Perhaps the fact that the present study has worked from a
'theologically' weighted selection of texts merely reflects the intel-
lectual itinerary of the author and the specific cultural milieu within
which he writes.
There are two points here. The first concerns the ability of what
is currently known as theology to contribute to the creative inter-
pretation of contemporary nihilism and the second with the impli-
cations of the kind of approach exemplified in this book for theology.
With regard to the value of theology (taking this in the sense of
what, de facto, is done by that name in university departments or
comparable institutions - or even by the occasional private thinker)
for the debate about nihilism, we may reflect, firstly, on the central-
ity of writers such as those studied here for the advent of modern
nihilism: writers who have fundamentally contributed to the shap-
ing of modernity and postmodernity and who nonetheless belong
in some way to theology.
More fundamentally, however, it is not implausible - although it
cannot be decided outside the venture of interpretation itself - to
claim that theology, when not diverted into narrowly ecclesiastical
or confessional disputes, may offer singular resources for learning
to think and to speak, once more, of unsurpassable value 'in the
void'. This is not said in the spirit of special pleading, as if theology
had copyright on humanity's ultimate concerns. Theology today
 Agnosis: Thinking God in the Void 163

cannot for one moment stand apart from the ongoing engagement
with contiguous disciplines in relation to which it must convinc-
ingly demonstrate the force of its insights in practice. The point is
rather that theology, if it is prepared to accept the implications of
such diverse theological critiques of metaphysical knowledge as
those associated with Luther and Kierkegaard on the one hand and
with mysticism and negative theology on the other, has consider-
able and indeed unique resources to bear on the question of how
thinking remains possible 'after' metaphysics. For this question is
not new to theology. It has accompanied theologians from biblical
times onwards.
For theology, no less than philosophy, is concerned with ques-
tions concerning the limits of possible knowledge, but, to a much
greater extent than philosophy, it can accommodate itself to the
thought that reason and the world of facts certified by reason are
not final. 'Let religion begin where it will, it must begin with that
which is above reason,' as Dean Mansel put it.49 One way in which
theology has acknowledged this is by a willingness to admit an
element of mystery into the structuring of human experience and
reflection.
Mansel himself, John Henry Newman, Rudolf Otto, Gabriel
Marcel, Karl Rahner and, more recently, Gordon Kaufman and D.Z.
Phillips are just some who have made a place for mystery at the
very heart of theological endeavour.50 Inevitably the way in which
they have done so bears the stamp of their various distinct ap-
proaches to theology - and yet they provide a convergent testi-
mony regarding (a) the importance of mystery; (b) that, in Marcel's
phrase, 'The recognition of mystery... is an essentially positive act
of the mind ...'; (c) that mystery has to do with what is most fun-
damental to our self-identity; and that (d) mystery can never be
translated without remainder into knowledge.
The question of mystery shows one way in which theology has
been able to find its most interesting questions precisely at those
points where the limits of reason or of human knowledge come into
view. Moreover, if it is true that it is in the interests of critical
thinking in general to distinguish between what does and what
does not require rational justification - if, as Kierkegaard put it,
thought is always governed by its own paradoxical will 'to discover
something that thought itself cannot think' (PF, p. 37) - then to raid
the inarticulable world of religious experience will not be without
value for those who also value reason as a guide to life's perplexities.
164 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

Such raids help us, as perhaps nothing else can, to reflect on what
can and what cannot be thought, what can and what cannot be
known - even if, in the nature of the subject itself, the best they can
yield is a body of case-law that requires continuing interpretation
rather than any final or definitive 'answer'.
In this respect, then, we may say that theology, precisely by vir-
tue of its willingness to place its own status as 'science', as an
'academic discipline', at risk, may nonetheless also serve the wider
community of thought.
But how far can talk of an experience of nothingness or a theol-
ogy that owes its specific shape to such an experience really ad-
dress that wider community?
David Tracy has forcefully argued the case for recognizing and
maintaining the character of theology as public discourse. Taking
note of the three public realms for which the contemporary Euro-
pean or North American theologian writes (the realms of church,
academy and what he calls 'the wider society'), he states that 'the
drive to genuine publicness... is incumbent upon every theolo-
gian .. .'51 Although the extent to which any one particular public
is held in the foreground of the theologian's view will vary, thus
affecting the specific colouring of the resultant theology, public it
will and must be. Not only must it relate to the continuing life of
the church community, it must also meet 'the highest standards of
the contemporary academy and engage with matters of weight and
concern to the complex life of society as a whole.'52
The argument presented here could be read as failing to meet this
challenge. The concern with some kind of (apparently) inarticulable,
mysterious experience and the prominence given to such theologi-
cal arcana as negative theology, mysticism and nothingness could
be seen as a surrendering of the requirement to engage with broad
issues of vital contemporary concern on the ground established by
agreed criteria of truth.
That is a judgement I would reject. On the contrary, the challenge
to think God in the void of contemporary nihilism belongs very
much to the public realm of our time, engaging the attention of aca-
demy, church and wider society alike. Moreover, the methodological
commitment to dialogue across religious boundaries consciously re-
flects the global event of the encounter of world religions that is of
momentous significance for the future of the religious conscious-
ness - despite the current ascendancy of various forms of funda-
mentalism and communalism. Moreover, although it has not been
 Agnosis: Thinking God in the Void 165

possible to circumscribe a distinctive domain that the experience of

nothingness might occupy as sole tenant, that experience has been
approached, for the most part, through writings and writers that
have good claims to classic status in the worlds of philosophy and
theology. The evidential base constituted by these texts is not in
any sense esoteric, despite the fact that the meaning we have sought
(and believe to have found) in them is not in every case obvious nor
established beyond the possibility of further contestation. That,
however, must be the condition of any hermeneutical endeavour.
Finally, it should be noted in defence of the public nature of this
enquiry that the question of God, as that has been addressed here,
is a matter of cultural concern far beyond the boundaries of any
particular grouping of faith communities. A theology that is to be
authentically public cannot afford to defer this question of ques-
tions. It is indeed a necessary preliminary to any purely confes-
sional theology. It is one of the great tragedies of twentieth-century
theology that in an age when public reflection on the fundamental
possibility of religious faith has been needed as rarely before, Chris-
tian theology has allowed itself to be diverted into the doubtless
important but ultimately secondary field of Christology. The re-
solve to think the fundamental questions of theology from a stand-
point determined by the agenda of Christology (framed on the one
side by questions of New Testament interpretation and on the other
by the rediscovery of Trinitarian doctrine) has trapped theology in
a discourse that certainly seems intended to reach the particular
public of the church, yet, while tolerated by the public of the acad-
emy, has cut theology off from the religious questions of the wider
society. The intellectual musculature of Barthian theology cannot
conceal the fact that the path along which it has led theological
endeavour has culminated in a dead end.53 The myth of its continu-
ing viability can only be sustained in the restricted economy of
seminary education or in the singular social configuration of theol-
ogy to be found in the Germanic and North European countries.54
There have always, of course, been those who resisted such siren
voices, from Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard through to those con-
cerned by contemporary issues of gender, social liberation and plan-
etary sustainability, who have sought to do theology in such a way
as to make clear its lines of communication to the non-theological
world. By internalizing the doubts, the experiences, the works and
aspirations of humanity into their theologizing they have provided
a perennial source for the authentic renewal of theology. But what
166 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

is crucial in all this is not whether the particular theology con-

cerned is natural or supernatural, rational or revealed, but rather
the relative priority given to Christology or to fundamental theo-
logy. It has been a basic assumption of this enquiry that the
Christological question only begins to make sense when we are first
able to find a way of speaking together about God and about hu-
manity's perennial longing for redemption that does not presup-
pose 'the Christian answer'.
Yet, finally, no matter how 'public' the intention and orientation
of this work (and irrespective of the effectiveness with which it
has carried out its task) it cannot (and would not want to) claim to
have gone as far as to establish theology on the secure ground of
public knowledge. Indeed, that claim is regarded here as essentially
unrealizable. If there is to be a theology for our time, it probably
cannot claim to be more than an agnosis, a theology of unknowing.
If that seems a meagre result, it is worth recalling that gnosticism
was among the first movements to be rejected by the church as
heretical. Without wishing to endorse the manner of ecclesiastical
proceedings against such heresies, it is reasonable to reflect that it
may be as unwise today as it was in the second century CE to claim
a knowledge one cannot make good before the world.

A 'SECOND BEGINNING' FOR THEOLOGY?

The shape and outcome of this enquiry has been largely deter-
mined by the choice of works discussed. These have, intentionally,
been of a decisively religious orientation, even when their religious
concern has issued in radical revisions or even the repudiation of
prevailing models of religious existence and thought.
Even if the tactic of focusing on religious texts in this way should
be unexceptionable within the restricted economy of a theological
enquiry, however, it may seem arrogant - particularly in the light
of the closing remarks of the previous section - to have passed by
a thinker who has done so much to determine not only the under-
standing of nothingness in the twentieth century but also the
problematics of ontology in a post-metaphysical situation. I mean,
of course, Martin Heidegger.
Allusion has been made to Heidegger's own categorization of
Kierkegaard's thought as 'merely ontical' in contrast to his own
concern for fundamental ontology and surely this distinction itself
 Agnosis: Thinking God in the Void 167

speaks in favour of a deeper engagement with Heidegger. Who

would wish to rest content with the 'merely ontical' when the pros-
pect of a more 'fundamental' venture of thought beckons - especially
when, as in Heidegger's own later work, fundamental ontology itself
becomes 'merely' the preliminary to a still more primordial thinking
of being (or 'beyng'/Sej/n or being 'under erasure'/$efii)?
Nonetheless, the insistence required by my argument on the in-
eluctability of the experience of nothingness makes it necessary to
stay with what may - in a more purely philosophical perspective
(understanding philosophy here in Heidegger's sense as primarily
concerned with the question of being) - appear 'merely ontical'. For
the thinking of the experience cannot be dissociated from the living
of the experience itself - not, at least, if it is to have any religious
value.
Yet it would seem to be an over-simplification to cast Heidegger
in the role of a philosopher whose exclusive concern is with think-
ing, rather than the understanding of existence itself. Heidegger
himself acknowledged that in certain respects ontology cannot be
separated from what is made manifest in the realm of ontical exist-
ence. It is only for beings who exist ontically that the question of
being can possibly arise. Indeed, the very proximity of the ontical
and ontological dimensions in Heidegger's thought contributed to
the (mis)reading of Being and Time that earned Heidegger the repu-
tation of being himself an advocate of nihilism. This (mis)reading is
certainly plausible. Take, for example, the way in which the ever-
present threat of death, as constitutive of its potential for authentic
existence, leads to Da-sein55 anxiously 'find[ing] itself face to face
with the "nothing" of the possible possibility of its existence.'56
'Primordial and authentic coming towards oneself, as 'the meaning
of existing in one's ownmost nullity'57 can arise only on the basis of
our being ' "thrown into death".'58 Even more significantly, the
very methodology that enabled Heidegger to interpret the every-
day inauthentic existence of Da-sein ontologically would seem to
depend on allowing the experience of the world at the ontical level
to determine the course of philosophical reflection.
Yet Heidegger was to take issue with the nihilistic reading of
Being and Time. In the most thorough-going and unitary exposition
of the themes of his later philosophy, Contributions to Philosophy (Of
the Event [Ereignis]),59 Heidegger rejected the charge that Being
and Time represented either a philosophy or a Weltanschauung of
death60 and dissociated it from existentialism (Existenz-philosophie).61
168 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

Repudiating both Nietzschean and Sartrean models of nothingness-

(jMfl-subjectivity,62 he distances himself from the exploration of fun-
damental ontological categories (including nothingness) in a manner
that remains on what he regards as the merely phenomenal plane.
Thus, he is at pains to separate the existential sense of anxiety from
experiences of anxiety in any psychological sense.63 Talk of experi-
ence always belongs on the surface of phenomenality - a judge-
ment that would certainly extend to the experience of nothingness
with which we have been concerned here. It is in this sense that
Heidegger's own interest is in thought, not experience. Being and
Time is therefore misread, he claims, when it is read as a phenom-
enal or anthropological description of the alienated condition of
modernity. Where it really belongs is as an exercise in 'fundamental
ontology'.
Nothingness, in Heidegger's sense, is not to be thought of in
terms of its being an experience that could prove religiously valu-
able for the existing individual but rather as an aspect of being
itself. Neither an end in itself, nor (unlike Hegelian negation) me-
chanically facilitating the transition from relative to absolute being,
nor yet mere vacuity (das Nichtige), nothingness is said to inhere in
or belong to being,64 when that is understood in its truth, a truth
that nothingness reveals as abyssal in its very basis.65 Nothingness is
not therefore a step on the way to knowledge of being: it is a sign
that the way to being, a way required by the exigency of the Seins-
verlassenheit, the abandonment by being that Heidegger regards
as characteristic of modernity, is beyond all calculation. As such it
may be spoken of as a leap and it is by such a leap that we are to
bring about the transition from 'the end of the first beginning' to
the 'second beginning' of thought66 and to arrive at the place where
we may attend to the peace in which the last God will pass our
way.67 Yet we must not think of this transition as a historical event
in any usual sense.68 There can be no question of the ending or the
beginning of objective periods or epochs of history, since the his-
tory concerned is that of being - and thus at the level of fundamen-
tal ontology - not of beings in their phenomenality.69 The leap is not
therefore the instantaneous act of a single moment in time, but
the keeping open of a place within which to understand the self-
differentiation of being, a place where we may wait upon being as
its watchers and guardians. Still, what being is to be for us cannot
be decided this side of the leap in which we authentically raise the
question of being and of the truth of being, the truth of what it is
 Agnosis: Thinking God in the Void 169

to be. It is towards that question that Heidegger's later philosophy

(some would say ever more mystically) progresses.
Even so, because Heidegger's own statement regarding what is
involved in the second beginning of philosophy requires the pos-
tulating of a moment beyond all prevailing paradigms of know-
ledge (shaped as these are by the metaphysical presuppositions of
philosophy's first beginning), the very distinction that Heidegger
himself makes between the ontical and the ontological is rendered
questionable - if, that is, the 'merely ontical' is no longer evaluated
according to criteria derived from metaphysics. In other words,
isn't the division between the merely ontical and fundamental on-
tology itself all too redolent of such metaphysical dualities as the
essential and the existential or the necessary and the contingent? If
this question is taken seriously, as I suggest it should be, then the
'turning' towards the second beginning of philosophy that Heidegger
so eloquently invokes will itself demand an occurrence in the realm
of the ontical or of experience before it can become an event in
thought.
Heidegger is generally clear that, despite his copious use of theo-
logical imagery, he is not doing Christian theology. My remarks
here suggest that he must be taken at his word and that it is a
dubious procedure for theologians to be over-eager to assimilate
Heideggerian being to the Christian God. Nonetheless, the analogy
between his quest for a 'second beginning' of thought 'beyond'
nihilism, and the quest undertaken in this book is not accidental.
This analogy should not, however, be taken as implying any expec-
tation regarding the imminent convergence of philosophy and the-
ology and the creation of some new epochal synthesis. Whether
Heidegger's thinking towards being might provide a context in
which to articulate the 'truth' of an experience of nothingness, or
whether such an experience is condemned to remain merely phe-
nomenal and philosophically fruitless are questions that cannot be
decided in advance of the struggle of thinking itself. Even if such
a struggle cannot promise philosophers and theologians the assur-
ance of an agreed outcome - perhaps, indeed, only the probability
of 'similitudo in dissimilitudine' - the task of thinking God in the
void and under the sign of agnosis provides philosophers and theo-
logians alike with an occasion to ask again what counts as truth in
thinking and speaking of God, a question that is, of course, neither
new nor strange to either philosophy or theology.
 Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. Don Cupitt, The World to Come (London: SCM, 1982) p. 66.
2. Robert Martin Adams, Nil. Episodes in the literary conquest of void during
the nineteenth century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966) p. 3.
3. Cupitt, The Long-Legged Fly (London: SCM, 1977) pp. 150ff.
4. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (Harmondsworth: Pen-
guin, 1992) pp. 498ff (Chapter 18: "The Void').
5. J.-L. Marion, God Without Being (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1991) and Thomas J.J. Altizer, The Genesis of God (Louisville: Westmin-
ster/John Knox Press, 1993). This is not to mention the ongoing enter-
prise of deconstructive a-theologies such as those of Cupitt himself or
Mark C. Taylor.
6. C. Stead, Divine Substance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977) p. 125.
7. See the discussion of Karl Barth's concept of 'Das Nichtige' in Chapter
1 below for an example of this.

CHAPTER 1 THE AUGUSTINIAN INHERITANCE

1. See, for example, A. Kroker and D. Cook, The Postmodern Scene (Lon-
don: Macmillan, 1988).
2. Among those who attempt to separate Plato from Platonism have
been F.M. Cornford, Plato and Parmenides (London and New York,
1939) - see, for example, his comments on Wahl, Speiser and Palt on
p. 13; Gilbert Ryle, 'Plato's Parmenides' in R.E. Allen (ed.), Studies in
Plato's Metaphysics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963):'... the
Parmenides is a discussion of a problem in logic' (p. 135). The distinc-
tion is nicely put by G.E.L. Owen: 'Platonists who doubt that they
are spectators of Being must settle for the knowledge that they are
investigators of the verb "to b e " ' (G.E.L. Owen, 'Plato on Not-Being'
in G. Vlastos (ed.), Plato: A Collection of Critical Essays I: Metaphysics
and Epistemology (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1971) p. 223). More
recently Stanley Rosen has sought to sever the link between Plato
and metaphysics in the context of a critique of Heidegger's reading
of Platonism. Thus, Rosen states: '. . . the most evident implication
of the Platonic dialogues as fictional dramas or poems is that there
is no science of being qua being and certainly none of Being or the
whole' (S. Rosen, The Question of Being (Newhaven: Yale University
Press, 1993) p. 29).
3. Though see, for example, the anti-metaphysical reading of Plotinus
given by Leon Chestov in his essay 'Words That Are Swallowed Up;
Plotinus's Ecstasies' in L. Chestov, In Job's Balances (London: J.M.

170
 Notes 171

Dent, 1932) pp. 327-67. Chestov, like Berdyaev, sees 'being' as a

temptation for theology, rather than as a virtue. Whereas Chestov
regards Plotinus' concern for what is beyond being as laudable, Gilson
sees in it a sign of the fundamentally anti-Christian bias of Platonism:
' . . . wherever true and genuine Platonism shall prevail, ousia will not
come first, but only second, in the universal order. In other words,
the great chain of being as a whole hangs upon a cause which itself
completely transcends i t . . . This is the authentic doctrine of Plotinus,
and it is the very reverse of a Christian metaphysic of being' (in
E. Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of
Mediaeval Studies, 1952) p. 24).
4. See Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.5 (various translations).
5. Plotinus (tr. McKenna), Enneads (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991)
p. 58. Further references are given in the text as Enn., followed by the
conventional divisions of Plorinus's text (here 1.8.3).
6. Augustine, Confessions XII.3 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961) p. 282.
7. Augustine, The City of God (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972) p. 473.
8. Confessions XIII.2, 4, pp. 311, 313.
9. From The Nature of the Good in Augustine, Earlier Writings (London:
SCM (The Library of Christian Classics, Vol. VI), 1950) p. 326.
10. Confessions VII.10, p. 147. This, as Emilie Zum Brunn comments, is
one of over fifty passages in which Augustine explicitly appeals to
Exodus 3.14 in order to underwrite his ontological principles. See
her essay "The Augustinian Exegesis of "Ego sum qui sum" and the
"Metaphysics of Exodus" ' in E. Zum Brunn, St. Augustine: Being and
Nothingness (New York: Paragon House, 1986) Appendix.
11. Augustine (ed. Schaff), The Writings Against the Manicheans and Against
the Donatists (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans (reprint of Library
of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers 1887 edition)) p. 70.
12. Ibid., p. 72
13. City of God, p. 1091.
14. City of God, pp. 471-3.
15. Ibid., pp. 571-4.
16. Zum Brunn, op. cit., pp. 20-2 and elsewhere. As Zum Brunn puts it,
'Nothing goes back to nothingness, not even the slightest particle of
corporeal being' (p. 22).
17. Earlier Writings, p. 200.
18. City of God, pp. 479-80.
19. Ibid., p. 572.
20. Ibid., p. 574. See Zum Brunn, esp. Chapter 3, 'The Fall Towards
Impossible Nothingness'.
21. Confessions X.8, p. 214.
22. Confessions X.24, p. 230.
23. Confessions X.25, p. 230.
24. Confessions X.26, p. 231.
25. Confessions XI.27, p. 276.
26. Confessions XI.14, p. 264.
27. Plato, Timxus (London and New York: Dent (Everyman), 1965)
pp. 30-1.
172 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

28. Confessions XI.30, p. 279. As an example of such a 'creature', Augus-

tine cites 'created wisdom, that intellectual nature which is light
because it contemplates the Light... the rational, intellectual mind
of God's pure city, our mother, the heavenly Jerusalem, a city
of freedom, which lasts eternally in heaven... the Heaven of Heav-
ens which belongs to the Lord . . . fitted to behold your face continu-
ally a n d . . . never turned away from it...' Confessions XII.15, pp.
291-2.
29. For the existential implications of Augustine's concept of time, see
M. Heidegger, The Concept of Time (dual language edition, Oxford:
Blackwell, 1992) pp. 3-6. It is significant that it is precisely Augus-
tine who gives Heidegger the cue to asserting that "The question of
what time is has pointed our inquiry in the direction of Dasein...
[meaning] the entity that we each ourselves a r e . . . ' (p. 6). Another
significant contemporary discussion of Augustine's concept of time
is that of Paul Ricoeur. See Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, Vol. 1, 1984), especially Chapter 1. As
Ricoeur reads Augustine, eternity does not merely function as a lim-
iting concept that 'strikes time with nothingness' but serves to ex-
tract 'from the very experience of time the resources of an internal
hierarchization, one whose advantage lies not in abolishing time but
in deepening it' (p. 30). This hierarchization then functions as a model
for an interpretation of narrative that can deepen the experience of
temporality rather than reducing it to a logic or some other non-
temporal schema. I shall in a later chapter raise the question of an
experience of nothingness that is in its very heart an experience of
ourselves as utterly temporal. Yet whether any theology, even a
hermeneutical theology, can ever provide an adequate model for
thinking that experience is, in a sense, precisely the question at issue
- and one that I regard as insoluble in an important sense. Even
though I endorse the hermeneutical move, as far as it goes, I remain
suspicious of any hermeneutics that claims (or that appears to claim)
to be able to legitimate its own methodology or to secure its own
foundations. Another way of marking this difference is to note that,
for Ricoeur, the deeper probing of time leads away from distention
(the passive aspect of the experience of temporality, as Ricoeur de-
scribes it) in favour of intention (the active positing of time as a
function of mind). The model of experience to be put forward, be-
low, however, finds its point of reference in what Ricoeur, speaking
of Augustine's distentio, calls the 'slippage' or 'discordance' in the
subject's active imagining of time. The difference to which I am draw-
ing attention could be described as merely a difference in emphasis
- yet sometimes it only requires a fractional difference to bring about
a move from one category to another. I shall try to put it like this: my
understanding is more that we find our core self-evaluation in the
suffering of time than in the wresting of a hierarchizable meaning
from it: yet I also concede that our very suffering of time itself sum-
mons us to the ever-to-be-repeated task of finding and communicat-
ing a meaning, even in the midst of time's nihilatory ebb and flow.
 Notes 173

In another respect, however, my attempt to link the nothingness of

time to the nothingness of creation, fall and self-as-will does parallel
Ricoeur's move from the experienced nothingness of time to the
construction of meaning as a narrated story of the self.
30. Earlier Writings, p. 202. It should be noted, however, that this quota-
tion is taken from Book II of On the Freedom of the Will, written
considerably later in Augustine's career.
31. Augustine (eds Holmes and Wallis), The Anti-Pelagian Writings,
Vol. II (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1876) p. 16. Further references
are given in the text as APW.
32. Thomas Aquinas, On the Truth of the Catholic Faith (Summa Contra
Gentiles) Book One: God (Garden City: Image, 1955) p. 121 (Ch. 22.10).
Also, Summa Theologix, la. 13, 11., where it is asserted that ' "He
Who Is" is the most appropriate name for God.' This definition con-
tinues to be characteristic of Thomism in various forms, e.g. the Neo-
Thomism of Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson and, more recently,
the Transcendental Thomism of Karl Rahner and others. (See, for
example, J. Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge (London: Geoffrey Bles,
1937) especially pp. 278-84; E. Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers
(Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1952); Johannes
Lotz, 'Being' in Karl Rahner (ed.), Encyclopedia of Theology (London:
Burns & Oates, 1975).
33. For a critical view of Aquinas' concept of being see Anthony Kenny,
Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980) especially Chapter 2.
34. Aquinas (1955), Book Three, Part 1, p. 49 (7.5).
35. See Chapter 6 below.
36. Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans in Luther's Works, Vol. 25 (St Louis:
Concordia, 1972) pp. 135-6.
37. Ibid., p. 204.
38. Luther, Bondage of the Will in Luther's Works: The Career of the Reformer
111, Vol. 25 (Philadelphia: Fortress) p. 299.
39. Luther, Lectures on Genesis in Luther's Works, Vol. I (St Louis:
Concordia, 1958) p. 7.
40. Ibid., p. 5.
41. Lectures on Romans, p. 299.
42. Ibid., p. 294.
43. Ibid., p. 222.
44. Bondage of the Will, pp. 61-2.
45. Ibid., p. 242.
46. Ibid., p. 154.
47. Pascal, Pensies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966) pp. 90-2.
48. But by no means unique. In quite different ways Jean-Luc Marion
and Thomas Altizer also bring about such a return. Marion's post-
ontological theology ends with a restitution of transubstantiation and
Altizer, who once upon a time proclaimed the theology of the death
of God, has recently claimed virtually theogonic powers for his specu-
lations on nothingness (see Introduction, note 5).
49. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1968) pp. 33, 42-4, 45, 46, 49, 50 and 54.
174 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

50. K. Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark) p. 305.

Further references are to CD in the text.
51. This Christocentric focus is pursued further by E. Jungel in his God
as the Mystery of the World. For example: "The proclamation of the
resurrection of Jesus reveals the sense in which God involves Him-
self in nothingness' (Jungel, God as the Mystery of the World (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983) pp. 218-19). See Chapter 5 for a further
discussion of the limits of a specifically Christological approach to
the question of nothingness.

CHAPTER 2 NOTHINGNESS
AND THE RETURN OF METAPHYSICS
1. G.W.F. Hegel (ed. Lasson), Wissenschaft der Logik I (Samtliche Werke
Bd. Ill) (Leipzig: Felix Meiner) p. 31.
2. J.M.E. McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1896) p. 49.
3. S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1992) p. 110.
4. A. Trendelenburg, Logische Untersuchungen I (Berlin, 1840) p. 44.
5. McTaggart, p. 32.
6. McTaggart, p. 34.
7. McTaggart, p. 91. In the context of his discussion of Kant's critique
of the ontological argument, Hegel himself draws a sharp distinction
between Sein and Da-sein that depends precisely on Da-Sein's func-
tioning as a predication of actual existence. See Logik, p. 73.
8. Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1975) p. 29.
9. A. Kojeve, Introduction a la Lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947)
p. 540.
10. It is, of course, no coincidence that Kojeve's reading is focused pre-
cisely on the Phenomenology.
11. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977) p. 9.
12. Ibid., pp. 6-7.
13. Ibid., p. 6.
14. Ibid., p. 5.
15. Ibid., p. 7.
16. Ibid., p. 10.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., pp. 18-19.
19. N.P. Williams, The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin (London:
Longmans, Green and Co., 1927) p. 505. For precedents to such a
position in the Christian tradition, see John Hick's account of what
he calls the 'felix culpa' theme in Christian theology, alluding to a
medieval verse which read 'O happy fault, which secured such and
so great a redemption.' In John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (Lon-
don: Fontana, 1968) pp. 103-4 and 323f.
20. See, for example, the debate between Thulstrup and Taylor. N.
 Notes 175

Thul-strup, Kierkegaard's Relation to Hegel (Princeton: Princeton Uni-

versity Press, 1980); Mark C. Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and
Kierkegaard (Berkeley and London: University of California Press,
1980).
21. Roger Poole in Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication (London and
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993) insists on 'keeping
the pseudonyms apart.' A more widely held view is that of Sylvia
Walsh, who writes, 'the enterprise of trying to distinguish between
the pseudonyms is not nearly so important as discerning the move-
ments of thought within the authorship.' In S. Walsh, Living Poeti-
cally. Kierkegaard's Existential Aesthetics (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1994) p. 15. My own Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic
and the Religious tries to explore the issue of indirect communication
by another route that is more concerned with the literary form of the
various writings rather than their being ascribed to particular pseu-
donymous authors.
22. See George Pattison, Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991) pp. 140-3.
23. S. Kierkegaard, The Point of View (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1939), pp. 73-4.
24. It is important to recognize that 'angst', 'anxiety' and 'dread' all
translate the same Danish word used by Kierkegaard - 'angest' -
and it is tempting simply to use 'angst', since this has now become
a familiar term among English speakers. Unfortunately, it has come
to have even stronger connotations of subjective moodiness and
despair than 'anxiety' itself. Although Kierkegaard's use of the term
will be compared to that of Heidegger later (see below) we may sim-
ply say here that the very strong refusal of any particular ontic state
that characterizes Heidegger's discussion is less marked in Kierkegaard.
Indeed, I suggest that it is very important for Kierkegaard to use the
term to bridge both recognizable states of everyday conscious life
and the more profound states that reveal the subject's ontological
place vis-d-vis nothingness.
25. S. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1980) p. 41. Further references are given as CA in the text.
26. C. Rosenkranz, Psychologie (1843) p. 5.
27. S. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1985) p. 18. Further references are given as PF in the text.
28. S. Kierkegaard, Either/Or II (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1987) p. 216. Further references are given as EO II in the text.
29. A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I (New
York: Dover, 1966) p. 412. Further references are given in the text as
WWR I or II.
30. A. Schopenhauer, Ueber die Vierfacher Wurzel des Satzes vom zurei-
chenden Grunde. Werke in zehn Banden Bd. V (Zurich: Diogenes, 1977)
p. 41. Further references are given in the text as FFR.
31. Although this analogy itself seems to imply that the will is in some
sense external to that which is illuminated by it, in a manner that
Schopenhauer probably would not have wished to imply.
176 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

32. A. Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena II./l Werke Bd. IX, p. 326.
33. F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Vintage, 1968) 855 (refer-
ences will be given according to entry rather than to page number;
further references will be given as WP in the text). In a similar vein
are such remarks as the following: "The spread of Buddhism (not its
origin) is thus to a considerable extent dependent on the excessive
and almost exclusive rice-fare of the Indians, and on the universal
enervation that results therefrom.' F. Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom
(London: Foulis, 1910), p. 173 (Book III.134). Noting the reservation
regarding the 'origin' of Buddhism, the thrust of the passage is in a
strongly reductionist direction. On a grander scale is the whole of
Book Four of The Will to Power. 'Discipline and Breeding'.
34. For a further discussion of issues of language, see Chapter 5 below.
35. Rather than speak of the 'Superman' or 'Overman' of previous trans-
lations, I shall use the expression 'the More-than-Human-Being'
which, to my mind, better captures the continuities and discontinuities
between the Ubermensch and contemporary humanity, while leav-
ing ambiguous what Nietzsche leaves ambiguous. It is also valuable
in this case to do as much as possible to undermine the view that
we already know - for good or ill - what Nietzsche means by this
concept.
36. We may note that in The Fourfold Root Schopenhauer had signalled
the field of volition precisely by reference to the question 'why' as
opposed to the 'how' of causal explanation (p. 161).
37. F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1961,
1969) pp. 41-2. Further references are given as Z in the text. I have
occasionally adapted Hollingdale's translation.
38. Nietzsche's sarcastic allusion to plant and ghost suggests that de-
spite the claims of the idealists this synthesis has still not been ad-
equately worked out. The More-than-Human-Being will therefore be
the one who achieves what idealism promised but failed to deliver.

CHAPTER 3 THE EXPERIENCE OF THE VOID

1. J.-P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness (London: Methuen, 1958) p. 617.
2. Luce Irigaray, The Marine hover of Friedrich Nietzsche (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1991) p. 31. For further approaches to a
feminist appropriation of the language and imagery of nothingness
see, e.g. Rosi Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1991) especially Chapter One 'Images of the Void'; also, Philippa
Berry, 'Sky-dancing at the boundaries of contemporary Western
thought: feminist theory and the limits of deconstruction' in David
Long (ed.), Healing Deconstruction: Postmodern Thought in Buddhism
and Christianity (Atlanta: AAR Press, 1996). That Nietzsche himself is
not unaware of the problematic status of a totally free, totally active
self might be inferred from such passages as 'The Night Song' in Part
Two of Zarathustra.
3. Ibid., pp. 17-18.
 Notes 177

4. M. Heidegger, Beitrage zur Philosophic (Frankfurt am Main: Kloster-

mann, 1989) p. 117.
5. It may seem rash to embark upon a discussion of experience without
a preliminary investigation of the problematics of language and ex-
perience. Such investigations have, of course, been at the centre of
much twentieth-century philosophy, psychology and linguistics.
Moreover, many would regard such divergent streams of modern
thought as Wittgensteinian language philosophy and Derridean post-
structuralism as agreeing in this: that we can no longer naively
assume that language simply mirrors experiences in words. Instead,
experience is always already mediated through language. 'Experi-
ence' has in this way become a region of transcendence as mysteri-
ous and as impassable as the region of divinity itself. Discussion of
these questions is, however, being deferred until later (see Chapter
5 below), where they will be contextualized in an overall assessment
of the status in respect of knowledge of the view of nothingness that
will then have been arrived at.
For the present, I note parenthetically that there is a significant
congruence between the argument I am presenting here regarding
experience and the interrelationship between experience and tran-
scendence as that was explored by Gabriel Marcel in, e.g. The Mys-
tery of Being. It is incidentally striking that the first example to which
Marcel resorts in order to illustrate the possibility of a transcendence
within experience concerns a husband who learns to stop treating his
wife merely as an object and to recognize in her a subject in her own
right whose claims on him are as legitimate as his claims on her! See,
The Mystery of Being (London: Harvill, 1950) pp. 39-56.
6. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (London: Collins/
Fontana, 1960). James's lectures give many examples of religious
experiences of various kinds - and, of course, there are many works
of literature as well as of religious biography that would yield fur-
ther descriptions.
7. Ibid., pp. 374ff.
8. Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (St Albans:
Granada, 1977) pp. 15-16.
9. See Chapter 5 'Language and Experience' below. For a critical view
of the Jamesian understanding of experience see Nicholas Lash, Easter
in Ordinary (London: SCM, 1988).
10. See M. Heidegger, What is Metaphysics? in M. Heidegger (tr. and ed.
Krell), Basic Writings (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978) espe-
cially pp. 98-104 ("The Elaboration of the Question').
11. M. Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962) p. 492 (n. iv
to Division One, Chapter Six).
12. S. Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1990) p. 308. Further references are given as UD in
the text.
13. He is at pains himself to differentiate the kind of religiousness rep-
resented in the discourses from what he elsewhere calls 'paradoxical
religiousness' or 'religiousness B'.
178 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

14. See also the discourse 'How Glorious it is to be Human' in Upbuilding

Discourses in Various Spirits.
15. In offering this analysis of Kierkegaard's view of the experience
of nothingness I acknowledge that it places Kierkegaard closer to
Heidegger's project of offering a fundamental ontological analysis
than Heidegger himself seems to have allowed, while also claiming
for it a religious significance that Heidegger would not have claimed
for his own work. The proximity between Kierkegaard and Heidegger
for which I am arguing could also be explored with regard to
Heidegger's own repudiation of Sartrean existentialism in the 1946-
7 Letter on Humanism and his critique of Nietzsche from the 1930s
onwards. However, there does remain the difference that whereas
Heidegger seems primarily oriented towards the question as to how
what is here being called the 'experience of nothingness' can be
thought, Kierkegaard's thrust is to assist his readers in making that
experience actual in their own existence. More simply, Heidegger
remains a philosopher, Kierkegaard a religious apologist. For a fur-
ther exploration of this tension see Michael Weston, Kierkegaard and
Modern Continental Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1994) especially
Chapters 2 and 4.
16. S. Kierkegaard (eds Hong and Hong), Journals and Papers Vol. 4
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975) p. 461. Danish edition
number II A 110.
17. A striking discussion of Schleiermacher's relevance to the issues raised
by post-structuralism can be found in Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and
Subjectivity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990) Chapter
6.
18. Friedrich Schleiermacher (tr. Crouter), On Religion: Speeches to Its
Cultured Despisers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)
p. 104. Schleiermacher's Speeches went through many revisions and
Crouter's translation is of the first, and most 'Romantic', edition.
Further references are to his translation, given in the text as OR.
19. For a discussion of the problem of reification in theology see Gordon
D. Kaufman, In Face of Mystery. A Constructive Theology (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993) pp. 330-1.
20. F. Schleiermacher (tr. Mackintosh and Stewart), The Christian Faith
(Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark) pp. 16-17.
21. F.D.E. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik und Kritik (Frankfurt am Main:
1977) p. 169.
22. Ibid., p. 168.
23. Ibid., p. 169.
24. S. Kierkegaard, Repetition in Fear and Trembling and Repetition (Prin-
ceton: Princeton University Press, 1983) p. 131. Further references are
to R in the text.
25. For further comment - in the context of a thorough-going study of
the implications of Kierkegaard's view of time for understanding the
self - see Mark C. Taylor, Kierkegaard's Pseudonymous Authorship. A
Study of Time and the Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975)
especially pp. 81-6 and pp. 122-6.
 Notes 179

26. See my discussion in G. Pattison, Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the

Religious (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 49-53.
27. If, at this point, some might argue that it is Nietzsche who gives a
more authentically temporal view of the self, it is worth pondering
Shestov's comment that 'the important thing in "eternal recurrence"
is not the word being defined, but the word doing the defining, i.e.
not recurrence, but eternity.' In L. Shestov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and
Nietzsche (Ohio University Press, 1966) p. 292. However, it is not my
intention in saying this to enter into an argument as to whether it is
Kierkegaard or Nietzsche who has most honestly confronted the
voracity of the temporal flux, since neither of them can evade the
ambiguity of all attempts to represent that flux. What both do achieve
is precisely to bring that ambiguity into the sharpest possible focus.

CHAPTER 4 NOTHINGNESS AND THE PLACE OF

RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE - AN ASIAN VIEW
1. In this respect I differ toto caelo from the line taken by Jungel, who
does not allow such dialogue any fundamental role in formulating
a Christian understanding of nothingness, dismissing out of hand
what he disparagingly refers to as 'more or less pitiful borrowings
from oriental wisdom.' (Jungel, God of the Mystery of the World (Grand
Rapids, Eerdmans, 1983) p. ix.)
2. See, for example, Kerouac's novels The Dhartna Bums (New York:
Viking Press, 1958) and Satori in Paris (London: Deutsch, 1967).
3. D.T. Suzuki, Studies in Zen Buddhism: First Series (London: Rider,
1949) p. 229.
4. Ibid., p. 60.
5. Ibid.
6. Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (St Albans: Gra-
nada, 1977) p. 63.
7. This account is taken from D.T. Suzuki, The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind
(London: Rider, 1958).
8. Although the legend of Hui-Neng emphasizes his poverty and lack
of learning his position at this point carries forward a line of Budd-
hist thinking that goes back to the Indian Buddhist philosopher
Nagarjuna, for whom the distinction between the worlds of nirvana
and samsara (i.e. the worlds of absolute reality and of becoming re-
spectively) is merely perspectival. 'Enlightenment' is not gained by
leaving the world of becoming behind and entering into a different
kind of being: in a very real (the reallest!) sense, the world of becom-
ing is the world of nirvana.
9. K. Nishida, An Inquiry Into the Good (Newhaven and London: Yale
University Press, 1987,1992) pp. 3-4. See also Nishitani Keiji, Nishida
Kitaro (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991)
especially Chapters 6, 7 and 8 which summarize Nishida's argument
in An Enquiry Into the Good. See also Robert E. Carter, The Nothingness
180 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

Beyond God: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nishida Kitaro (New

York: Paragon House, 1989).
10. Nishida, An Inquiry, op. cit., p. 19.
11. Ibid., p. 50.
12. Ibid., p. 77.
13. Ibid., pp. 134-5.
14. Ibid., pp. 154-5.
15. Ibid., p. 156.
16. See, for example, the passages beginning 'I entreat you to become
familiar with this concept: intuition of the universe' and 'But before
I lead you into the particulars of these intuitions and feelings...'
in Schleiermacher's On Religion. Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) pp. 104-6 and 111-14. Of
course, Schleiermacher is wanting to seek out and to stress the dis-
tinctiveness of the religious function, whereas Nishida is wanting to
show its foundational character for all forms of consciousness. Yet
the whole thrust of Schleiermacher's argument is that without the
distinctive dimension of religious experience all other separate forms
of consciousness (such as knowledge or morality) lose the essential
connection with the cosmic whole within which alone they have
their true validity. It is noteworthy that both Schleiermacher and
Nishida make favourable reference to Spinoza.
17. K. Nishida, Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness (New York:
SUNY, 1987) p. 5, p. 164.
18. See Masao Abe, 'Nishida's Philosophy of "Place"' in International
Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 4 (Winter 1988) pp. 355-71.
19. For a discussion of the relationship between Aristotle and Nishida
see Carter (1989), op. cit., especially Chapter 2 "The Logic of Basho',
pp. 16-57; see also Abe, 'Nishida's Philosophy of "Place" ', op. cit.
20. See, for example, Nishida, 'The Logic of Topos and the Religious
Worldview' in The Eastern Buddhist (Part I in) vol. XIX, no. 2 (1986)
pp. 1-29 and (Part II in) vol. XX, no. 1, pp. 81-119. For a discussion
of the term 'absolutely self-contradictorily identical', see Carter (1989),
op. cit., p. 61.
21. See Carter (1989), op. cit., pp. 28ff.
22. Nishida, "The Logic of Topos' Part I, op. cit., pp. 12-13.
23. Ibid., p. 18.
24. Ibid., p. 19.
25. See, e.g. "The Logic of Topos' Part II, op. cit., p. 118.
26. For a critical view of Nishitani's conflation of science and existential-
ism see M. Abe, 'What is Religion?' in The Eastern Buddhist, New
Series, vol. XXV, no. 1 (Spring 1992) especially pp. 66-9.
27. Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1982) p. 83.
28. Ibid., p. 84.
29. Ibid., p. 86.
30. Ibid., pp. 30-5. See also K. Nishitani, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism
(Albany: SUNY, 1990) pp. 185-8.
31. The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, op. cit., p. 187.
 Notes 181

32. Religion and Nothingness, op. cit., p. 21.

33. Ibid., pp. 21-2.
34. On Nishitani's development of the concept of the Great Doubt see
also Hans Waldenfels, Absolute Nothingness: Foundations for a Buddhist-
Christian Dialogue (New York: Paulist Press, 1980) pp. 65-6.
35. Religion and Nothingness, op. cit., pp. 101-2.
36. Ibid., p. 102.
37. Ibid., p. 52.
38. We might refer in this context to Masao Abe's elucidation of the
difference between Eastern and Western understandings of the rela-
tionship between being and non-being in his essay 'Non-Being and
Mu - the Metaphysical Nature of Negativity in the East and the
West' in M. Abe, Zen and Western Thought (Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press, 1985) pp. 121-51. See also Waldenfels, op. cit., pp. 70-
4. The essential difference is that whereas the West thinks being in
opposition to non-being and even in the radical existentialist ontol-
ogy of, for example, Paul Tillich, can only conceive of the duality of
being and non-being as resolvable by the power of Being-Itself, a
power outside of or external to that duality of being and non-being,
Zen thinks the duality of being (u) and non-being (mu) as occurring
within the field of absolute non-being (Mu, Sanskrit: sunyata). But the
priority of sunyata is of a quite distinctive kind from the priority of
Being-Itself in Tillich's ontology: '. . . u and mu . . . mutually affirm
and deny one another. In other words, mu is never a mere privation
of M, but is inseparably bound up and co-ordinated with it' (Wald-
enfels, op. cit., p. 72). In this respect it is also worth noting how
Nishitani uses the copula '-sive-' in such phrases as 'negation-siue-
affirmation' and 'death-siwe-life'.
39. On the differences between Nishida's and Tanabe's philosophies see
Keiji Nishitani, Nishida Kitaro (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1991) especially Chapter 9 "The Philosophies of
Nishida and Tanabe'; see also James W. Heisig, 'Foreword' to Hajime
Tanabe, Philosophy as Metanoetics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1986).
40. Makoto Ozaki, Introduction to the Philosophy of Tanabe: According to the
English Translation of the Seventh Chapter of 'The demonstratio of Chris-
tianity' (Amsterdam: Rodopi BV, 1990) p. 94.
41. Tanabe, Philosophy as Metanoetics, op. cit., pp. xlix-1. Further refer-
ences are given as PM in the text.
42. Tanabe's position here may be interestingly contrasted with that of
Heidegger, who played a formative role in Tanabe's own develop-
ment (Tanabe had already written on Heidegger in 1924, prior to the
publication of Being and Time). Whereas Heidegger seems never to
have decisively repudiated his association with the Nazi Party, most
notoriously witnessed by his Rectoral Address in the University of
Freiburg in 1933, Tanabe clearly accepted his share of responsibility
for policies that he acknowledged to have been utterly mistaken.
Tanabe himself commented critically on newspaper reports of
Heidegger's Rectoral Address, drawing attention to the absence of
182 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

authentic political engagement in the position Heidegger was ad-

vancing. H. Tanabe, 'Philosophie der Krise oder Krise der Philosophie?
- Zu Heideggers Rektoratsrede (1933)' in H. Buchner (ed.), Heidegger
in Japan: Gedenkschrift der Stadt Meflkirch zum hundersten Geburtstag
Martin Heideggers (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke, 1989).
43. As Tanabe sees it: against the view that Plotinus establishes a
metaphysics of being see Chapter 1, n. 2.
44. Although this is not decisive for the philosophical issue, we can see
in this critique of Heidegger a reflection of the different stances taken
by the two men toward the fates of their respective countries in the
1930s and 1940s. See n. 42 above.
45. D. Hirota (tr.), Tannisho: A Primer (Kyoto: Ryukoku University Press,
1982) pp. 23-4.
46. Ibid., p. 43.
47. For a critical view of Tanabe's appropriation of Shin teaching see the
essays by Hase Shoto, Taitetsu Unno, Ueda Yoshifumi and Jean
Higgins in Taitetsu Unno and James W. Heisig (eds), The Religious
Philosophy of Tanabe Hajime (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1990).
One criticism is that, as the title of Jean Higgins' essay puts it, metanoia
for Tanabe is still something 'undertaken' rather than 'undergone'.
In terms of Christian theology that is to say it is a matter of works
- rather than of faith - righteousness, or, more philosophically, of
action rather than of experience.
48. From the translation of the Seventh Chapter of the Demonstratio in
Ozaki, op. cit., p. 131.
49. For a fuller discussion of the issue of language see Chapter 5, below.
50. K. Nishitani, The Problem of Time in Shinran' in The Eastern Budd-
hist New Series, vol. XI, no. 1 (May 1978) p. 16.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid., p. 17.
53. Ibid., pp. 18-19.
54. Although Tanabe himself equates Zen with the way of self-power,
this is open to question. Suzuki, for instance, argues that Zen En-
lightenment cannot be separated from a process of transmission that
is ultimately rooted in the experience of the Buddha himself: '. . .
what constituted the life and spirit of Buddhism is nothing else than
the inner life and spirit of the Buddha himself; Buddhism is the
structure erected around the inmost consciousness of its founder
. . . The claim of Zen followers that they are transmitting the essence
of Buddhism is based on their belief that Zen takes hold of the en-
livening spirit of the Buddha, stripped of all its historical and doc-
trinal garments' (Suzuki, Studies in Zen Buddhism: First Series, op. cit.,
pp. 53-4).
55. This is not to deny that at the individual level the discovery of mystical
spiritualities of unknowing may serve as a symbolic expression for
the venturing of such a way. It is simply to repeat that, as was
argued in the previous chapter, such spiritualities are, typically, caught
up at the intellectual level with metaphysical and ontological
 Notes 183
assumptions that inhibit the dynamics of freedom that can be seen at
work in, for example, Kierkegaard or Tanabe.
56. This not only involves taking a critical position over against the kind
of Barthian approach that would deny to dialogue between religious
traditions any fundamental role in Christology, it also implies that
Christology is not the primary field in which such dialogue is to be
set in motion. Christology is only a mediated theme in religious
dialogue and must defer to the more fundamental question of God.
This means that the argument developed here is conceived quite
otherwise than the dialogue reflected in, e.g. J.B. Cobb and C. Ives
(eds), The Emptying God. A Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation (New
York: Orbis, 1990) and John P. Keenan, The Meaning of Christ. A
Mahayana Theology (New York: Orbis, 1989). It is on the other hand
closer to the more specifically f/ieological Buddhist-Christian dia-
logue set up by Raimundo Pannikar in his The Silence of God: The
Answer of the Buddha (New York: Orbis, 1989).

CHAPTER 5 AGNOSIS: THINKING GOD IN THE VOID

1. Cf. Heidegger's critique of Rilke in M. Heidegger, Parmenides Winter
Seminar 1942-3. Gesamtausgabe Bd. 54 (Frankfurt am Main: Kloster-
mann, 1982) pp. 227ff.
2. M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwest
University Press, 1968) p. 155.
3. G. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine (London: SPCK, 1984) p. 16.
4. Ibid., p. 40.
5. S.T. Katz, 'Language, Epistemology and Mysticism' in idem (ed.),
Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (London: Sheldon Press, 1978)
p. 46.
6. Merleau-Ponty, op. cit, p. 155. D.W. Harding, writing about litera-
ture from a psychological perspective put it well when he said that
'creative writers . . . [reveal]... traces of a richer matrix, perhaps more
confused, perhaps more complex, from which their words and images
have emerged' (in Experience into Words. Essays on Poetry (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1963) p. 197).
7. For a discussion of the limits of language and vision see my Art,
Modernity and Faith (London: Macmillan, 1991) especially Chapter 8,
'Restoring the Image'.
8. See below, especially the discussion in the next section of negative
theology and mysticism.
9. Theology and religious studies are not themselves equipped to ask
the question in such terms. For even in its most empirically oriented
representatives, the philosophy of religion has simply not developed
rigorous methodologies appropriate to such an enquiry. The only
area which might prove fruitful with regard to such a task is that of
cognitive studies, where the rigour of scientific testing is being brought
to bear on questions of culture, language and experience. For a
184 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

cross-section of work relevant to religion in this area see Pascal Boyer

(ed.)/ Cognitive Aspects of Religious Symbolism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992).
10. It might well seem on the contrary that 'the void' or 'nothingness'
are pre-eminently terms for which no possible experiential correlate
can be given and, indeed, that they may be taken as proof of the
power of linguistic construction in the shaping of consciousness. Don
Cupitt, for instance, although (confusingly?) aware of the complex
interface between verbal and non-verbal communication, insists that
it is the structure of the field of signs that generates and legitimates
talk of 'the void': He writes, "The Void is opened by the insubstan-
tiality, the relativity, the transience and the lack of any hard centre
in the sign itself (see The Time Being (London: SCM, 1992) p. 60.). Yet
if communication is, as Cupitt here and elsewhere describes it, truly
a universal cosmic phenomenon, then it seems most peculiar to sin-
gle out human language as somehow determinative for the nature of
all communicative processes. Indeed, the vision of 'reality' as noth-
ing but a temporally determined and evolving network of commu-
nications undermines the whole distinction between realism and
non-realism on which much of Cupitt's influence in contemporary
religion depends. A somewhat different attempt - from a Witt-
gensteinian direction - to give an account of 'nothing-talk' as a prod-
uct of the linguistic determination of religion is that of Gareth Moore,
Believing in God (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1988).
11. For a vigorous statement of this position see Dom Cuthbert Butler,
Western Mysticism (London: Arrow, 1960, pp. 116-23)
12. Pseudo-Dionysius (tr. Luibheid), The Mystical Theology in The Com-
plete Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1987) p. 135.
13. Ibid., p. 137.
14. Ibid., p. 141.
15. Ibid., p. 135.
16. In saying this I do not intend to broach the complex question as to
whether the author was himself 'a mystic' who wrote from first-
hand experience. My point, more modestly, is that whatever his own
experience he specifically used Dionysian logic in the service of the
religious life.
17. Anon. (tr. Wolters), The Cloud of Unknowing (Harmondsworth: Pen-
guin, 1961) p. 59.
18. Ibid., p. 134.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., p. 135.
21. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Question 13 of the divine
names (or: theological language).
22. Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1994), p. 3.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., p. 16.
25. Ibid., p. 20.
26. Ibid., p. 32. Sells' use of 'receptivity' here is significant with regard
 Notes 185

to the project of this enquiry as offering a critique of Nietzschean

subjectivity.
27. Ibid., p. 32.
28. Sells certainly doesn't develop the point himself, but there would
seem to be an inviting point of contact between his argument and the
dialogical conception of language associated with Bakhtin. Bakhtin,
of course, is not overtly concerned with anything that could be de-
scribed as 'mystical' knowledge or experience, yet his exposition of
the double-voiced character of liberative discourse provides both an
important analogy to and a significant widening of the principle that
Sells seeks to establish.
29. Quoted in Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1989) p. 200.
30. Ibid., pp. 201-2.
31. Ibid., p. 202.
32. Ibid., p. 182.
33. Ibid., p. 181. If one regards deconstruction as having in some way
'scientifically' established a certain view of the relationship between
language and experience, then such assumptions would have to be
allowed. But while it may bring that relationship repeatedly into
question, why must we concede a principle that can itself only be
formulated in metaphorical and imprecise language?
34. Ibid., p. 196.
35. Ibid., p. 197.
36. Ibid., p. 196.
37. See Chapter 4, above.
38. J. Derrida, Writing and Difference (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1978) p. 261.
39. Georges Bataille, Eroticism (London: Marion Boyars, 1987) p. 251.
40. Georges Bataille, Inner Experience (New York: State University of New
York Press, 1988) p. 7. Further references are given as IE in the text.
41. It is striking that in a section so full of allusions to Kierkegaard
Bataille introduces an anecdote relating to his umbrella - a motif also
used in self-mockery by Kierkegaard.
42. Bataille, Eroticism, op. cit, p. 15.
43. Bataille, The Accursed Share, Vol. I (New York: Zone, 1991) p. 21.
Further references are to AC (Vols I or II) in the text.
44. Writing and Difference, op. cit., p. 259.
45. Ibid., p. 275.
46. Ibid., p. 261.
47. Ibid., p. 274.
48. Ibid., pp. 271-2. Needless to say, Derrida would seem to be identi-
fying negative theology here with what I have, with Sells, described
as 'weakly performing' negative theology.
49. H.L. Mansel, The Limits of Religious Thought (Boston: Gould & Lin-
coln, 1859) p. 169.
50. See, for example, J.H. Newman, 'The Christian Mysteries' in Paro-
chial and Plain Sermons, Vol. I (London: Rivington, 1840) - also other
sermons in these series; Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy
186 Agnosis: Theology in the Void

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959); G. Marcel, The Mystery of Being,

Vols I and II (London: Harvill, 1950 and 1951) - see also the cel-
ebrated distinction between mystery and problem in Being and Hav-
ing (London: Collins Fontana, 1965), p. 127; Karl Rahner, Foundations
of Christian Faith (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1978) espe-
cially Chapter 2 'Man in the Presence of Absolute Mystery'; Gordon
Kaufman, In Face of Mystery. A Constructive Theology (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); D.Z. Phillips, Faith After
Foundationalism (London: Routledge, 1988) especially Chapter 20 'A
Place for Mystery'.
51. David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination. Christian Theology and the
Culture of Pluralism (London: SCM, 1981) p. 29.
52. Ibid., p. 21.
53. These remarks do not, however, apply to the Karl Barth of the
Romerbrief, one of the great existentialist texts of the twentieth century.
54. I would wish to register a comparable disagreement with
the prioritizing of the Christological question in such Buddhist-
Christian dialogical studies as those of Masao Abe (see John Cobb
and C. Ives (eds), The Emptying God (New York: Orbis, 1990)) and
John Keenan (see his The Meaning of Christ: A Mahayana Theology
(New York: Orbis, 1989)). See also Chapter 4, note 56.
55. Heidegger's characteristic term for the existing human subject through
whom being is revealed.
56. M. Heidegger (tr. Macquarrie), Being and Time (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1962) p. 310.
57. Ibid., p. 379.
58. Ibid., p. 378.
59. M. Heidegger, Beitriige zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) Gesamtausgabe
Bd. 65 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1989). Not available in
English at the time of writing.
60. Ibid., p. 285.
61. Ibid., p. 234.
62. See, for example, M. Heidegger, "The Word of Nietzsche: "God is
Dead"' in The Question Concerning Technology and other Essays (New
York: Harper & Row, 1977) and 'Letter on Humanism' in Basic Writ-
ings (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977).
63. See 'What is Metaphysics?' in Basic Writings, especially pp. 102-3. It
is indeed his unease concerning the possible conflation of phenom-
enal (or existentiell) description with ontological (or existential) analy-
sis that provides the key to his attitude to Kierkegaard, whom he
regards as a 'penetrating' student of the human situation, but who
does not think that situation existentially, i.e. ontologically. (See Be-
ing and Time, p. 494 and p. 497 - significantly, both comments are
made in footnotes.) This judgement is repeated in Beitrage zur
Philosophie, where, despite referring to Kierkegaard alongside
Holderlin and Nietzsche as one of the three nineteenth-century think-
ers who most profoundly experienced the rootlessness of the mod-
ern era (p. 204), he still remarks that, between Hegel and Nietzsche
 Notes 187

'nothing original' happened in metaphysics 'not even with Kier-

kegaard' (p. 233).
64. Beitrdge, op. cit., p. 264.
65. Ibid., p. 245. Heidegger is playing on the words Abgriindigkeit and
Grund.
66. Ibid., pp. 228-9.
67. Ibid., pp. 16-7.
68. Ibid., p. 20.
69. Ibid., pp. 227. Heidegger is making a similar point in his response to
Ernst Junger's image of nihilism approaching a meridian line beyond
which humanity may begin to look towards its overcoming. See
M. Heidegger, The Question of Being (London: Vision, 1959) pp. 83ff.
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Heidegger, M., What is Metaphysics? in Heidegger (tr. and ed. Krell), Basic
Writings (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).
Irigaray, L., The Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche (New York: Columbia
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1960).
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tions of Language, vol. 2 (1966).
Katz, S.T., 'Language, Epistemology and Mysticism', in Lindbeck, G. (ed.),
Mysticism and Philsophical Analysis (London: Sheldon Press, 1978).
Kaufman, G.D., In Face of Mystery. A Constructive Theology (Cambridge,
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Keenan, J.D., The Meaning of Christ. A Mahayana Theology (New York: Orbis,
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Kierkegaard, S., Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Princeton: Princeton
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Kierkegaard, S., Repetition, in Fear and Trembling and Repetition (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1983).
Kojeve, A., Introduction a la Lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947).
Levin, D.M., The Opening of Vision. Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988).
Lindbeck, G., The Nature of Doctrine (London: SPCK, 1984).
Luther, M., Bondage of the Will, in Luther's Works: The Career of the Reformer
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McTaggart, J.E.M., Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1896).
Marcel, G., The Mystery of Being (London: Harvill, 1950).
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Maritain,}., The Degrees of Knowledge (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1937).
Merleau-Ponty, M., The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwest Uni-
versity Press, 1968).
Moore, G., Believing in God (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1988).
Nishida, K., An Inquiry Into the Good (Newhaven and London: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1987, 1992).
Nishida, K., Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness (New York: State
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Buddhist (Part I in) vol. XIX, no. 2 (1986) pp. 1-29 and (Part II in) vol. XX,
no. 1, 1987, pp. 81-119.
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Suzuki, D.T., The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind (London: Rider, 1958).
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Tillich, P., Systematic Theology (Welwyn: Nisbet, 1968).
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 Index
Abe, M. 181n, 185n Creation, doctrine of 11-12, 13,
Adams, R.M. 2 19-20, 27-8, 29, 39-40, 52-5
Agnosis 134, 136, 166, 169 Cupitt, D. 1-2, 184n
Altizer, T.J.J. 3, 173n, 175n
Anxiety 52-5, 86, 117, 151-3, Death 45, 47, 48, 75, 102, 117-18,
155, 158, 168 120, 121-3, 156, 167
Aquinas, St Thomas 25,144, 146, Death of God, the 1-3, 49, 79,
173n 136
Arnauld, A. 34 Dependence 41, 98
Aristotle 7, 8, 25, 43, 116 Derrida, J. 4, 139, 148-50, 156-9,
Art, artist 44, 72, 93, 96, 100-1, 177n
113,156 Descartes, R. 45
Augustine, St 7-40, 41, 48, 134, Divided Self, the 22-3, 26, 33,
144, 172-3nn 34-7, 48, 49, 81, 87-8, 123, 133,
Ayer, A.J. 139 135
Dostoevsky, F.M. 39, 125
Bakhtin, M. 185n Dionysius the Areopagite see
Barth, K. 2, 34, 38-40, 57, 165-6, Pseudo-Dionysius
186n
Basho (Japanese poet) 121, 122 Eliot, T.S. 118, 121
Basho, concept of, see Place, Enlightenment (in Buddhism) see
concept of Satori, concept of
Bataille, G. 148-59, 160, 185n Eschatology 13, 19-20, 91
Beckett, S. 2 Eckhart, Meister 5, 127, 129, 147
Being 5, 43, 166-7, 181n Eternal, the, see Eternity
Bernard of Clairvaux 32 Eternity 18, 56, 103-6
Body, embodiment 9, 23, 65, 69 Ethics, the ethical 58, 100-1,113
Buddhism 2, 4-5, 67, 108-37 Evaluation 28-9, 65, 66, 68, 71,
72, 76, 77
Calderon de la Barca, P. 66 Evil (and nothingness) 7, 8-15,
Calvin, J. 30-4, 36-7, 38, 39, 40, 39-40
60, 134 Evil Will 22-3,31-2
Causality 61-2, 67, 76 Existentialism 118, 167, 178n
Chestov, L. 170-ln, 179n Experience 45, 64-6, 81-107,
Choice (sec also Will, willing) 109-23,126, 134, 135-7,138-61,
13-14, 58 168
Christ see Jesus Christ Experiencing-as 65, 68, 79
Christology 137, 165-6, 174n,
183n, 185n Fall, the 14, 19-20, 30, 32, 41,
Chrysostom, John 30 48-9, 52-5
Cloud of Unknowing, The 145, Feeling 92, 94, 113
147 Feuerbach, L. 138
Consciousness 113-17 Fichte, J.G. 45, 50, 63, 93, 97, 117

192
 Index 193
Freedom (see also Will, willing) Kant, I. 42, 49-50, 60-1, 71, 76,
21-5, 30, 48, 51, 52-5, 58-60, 65, 80, 117, 128
90, 103, 128-9 Katz, S.T. 140
Kaufman, G. 163
Gilson, E. 171n Kerouac, J. 109
God 144-6, 151-2, 161-6 Kierkegaard, S. 2, 39, 41, 42, 43,
God (and Being) 12, 13, 25-6, 81, 50, 51-60, 69, 82, 86-92, 93,
169 100-7, 108, 110-11, 128, 132,
Grace 21-5, 29, 30, 31, 84, 85, 151, 152, 153, 162, 163, 165, 166,
128, 134,136-7, 138, 161 175n, 177n, 178n, 179n, 185n,
Griinewald, M. 39 186-7n; pseudonymity in 51-2,
69
Habermas, J. 139 Knowledge 9-10, 28, 30-1, 37,
Harding, D.W. 183n 42-4, 46-7, 48, 55-7, 59-60, 62,
Hart, K. 146, 148-50, 158-9 68, 76, 80, 93-6, 113, 115-17,
Hegel, G.W.F., Hegelianism 4, 126, 128, 130, 133, 135-6, 140,
41-50, 51, 60, 80, 81, 82, 87, 88, 144-9, 151-2, 157, 161-6
90, 93, 108, 128, 149, 157-8, Kojeve, A. 45
174n, 186n Kyoto School 4-5, 108-9
Heidegger, M. 6, 39, 80, 83, 85-6,
88, 99, 108, 129, 132, 139, 166-9, Language 85, 96, 98-9, 134,
170n, 173n, 175n, 178n, 181-2n, 138-43, 146-50, 157, 177n
186-7n Laughter 153, 155, 158
Hermeneutics 3, 98-9, 143, 165 Lindbeck, G. 139-40
Hick, J. 174n Logic 41-5
Hinduism 67 Love 87, 96, 100-1, 134, 138, 147
Historicity of thought 4,14,168-9 Luther, M. 25-30, 36-7, 38, 39,
Holderlin, F. 106-7, 186n 60, 134, 162
Hui-Neng 111-12, 115, 123, 179n
Humility 30, 33 McTaggart, J.E.M. 42, 44, 174n
Hung Jen 111 Manicheanism 12-13
Huxley, A. 84-5, 110 Mansel, H.L. 163
Marcel, G. 163, 177n
Ibn 'Arabi 147 Marcuse, H. 156
In-itself, the 61, 63, 64, 71, 117 Marion, J.-L. 3, 173n
Incarnation, the 57 Matter 9-11, 12, 14
Intuition 43, 45, 50, 92-7, 105, Memory 15-18
113, 114, 117, 126, 127, 132, 136, Merleau-Ponty, M. 139, 141,
160 183n
Irigaray, L. 82-3 Metanoia, metanoetics see
Repentance
James, W. 84-5, 113, 177n Metaphysics 7-8, 20, 26-7, 30,
Jansenius 34 33-4, 38-40, 41-50, 59-60, 71,
Jeremiah 39 80, 81, 91, 92, 98, 136, 148-50,
Jesus Christ 55 168-9, 186-7n
John the Scot Eriugena 147 Moment, the 56, 57, 101, 104-6,
Jones, J. 148 110-11
Jungel, E. 174n, 179n Murdoch, I. 3
Jiinger, E. 187n Mystery 95, 163-4
194 Index

Mysticism 26, 58, 112, 140, Principle of Sufficient Reason

143-50, 152, 157, 160 61-4, 71, 76
Prolepsis 81, 91, 98, 150, 156, 159
Nature 33, 35-6, 37, 52-3, 87, Pseudo-Dionysius 144, 147, 148
114, 118-19, 155, 158 Pure Land Teaching 130-7, 140
Negative Theology 143-61 Pythagoreanism 8
Newman, J.H. 163
Nietzsche, F. 1, 2, 40, 50, 60, Rahner, K. 163
69-80, 81, 82-3, 85, 99, 108, 132, Rebirth 55-7
176n, 178n, 186-7n Redemption 56, 72, 78-80,
Nihilism 70-3, 76, 79, 85, 99, 135-6
108-9, 118-19, 136, 162 Recollection 56, 57, 59, 101-2
Nirvana 68 Repentance 51, 55, 57-60,
Nishida, K. 108, 110, 112-18,123, 124-37
124, 126, 127, 136, 180n Repetition 57, 78, 101-3, 106,
Nishitani, K. 108, 110, 118-23, 129-30, 133, 152
134-5 Representation 61-5
Non-realism 1-2 Rickert, H. 115
Ricceur, P. 172-3n
Ontical, the 86, 88, 90, 99, 166-7, Rosen, S. 170n
175n Rosenkranz, K. 52-3
Ontology 14-15, 19, 20, 24-5, 26, Rothko, M. 3
28, 30, 33, 34, 37, 54, 68, 70, 80, Ryle, G. 170n
147, 166-9, 186-7n
Other, otherness 82-3, 90, 97, Sacrifice 154
103, 121, 130-7 Saint-Cyran, the Abbe 34
Otto, R. 163 Sartre, J.-P. 39, 50, 81, 83, 85, 99,
Owen, G.E.L. 170n 119-20
Satan 31-2
Pascal, B. 34-7, 39, 71, 88 Satori, concept of 109-23
Patience 57, 101, 103 Shakespeare, W. 3
Paul, St 22-3, 26, 36, 38-9 Schelling, F.J.W. 45, 50, 92-3, 96,
Pelagian Controversy, the 21-4 97, 114, 117, 128
Pessimism 65-6, 70, 102 Schleiermacher, F.D.E. 92-100,
Phillips, D.Z. 163 105, 114, 140, 165, 180n
Place, concept of 110, 116-18, Schopenhauer, A. 2, 40, 50, 60-9,
122, 136 70, 76, 78, 82, 114, 145
Plato, Platonism 7, 8-11, 18, Self (as Substance) 28, 33, 45, 47
170n Sells, M.J. 146-8, 160, 185n
Plotinus 8-11, 13, 18, 127, 129, Shen-Hsiu 111-12
147, 170-ln Shestov, L. see Chestov, L.
Poole, R. 175n Shinran 123, 130-1, 133, 134-5
Porete, M. 147 Sin (see also Fall) 28, 30, 53-5,
Possibility 53, 54, 90, 138, 150-1 133, 135-6
Postmodernism 1-3 Socrates, the Socratic 51, 56, 102,
Potlatch 154, 157 110-11
Prayer 88-90 Sovereignty 155-8, 160
Predestination 24, 29, 30, 81, Spirit 46, 47, 52-3, 90, 114
134-5 Stead, C. 5
 Index 195

Subjectivity 37, 41, 45, 47, 48, 53, Trendelenburg, A. 41, 43-4
75, 77, 81-2, 85, 86-7, 93, 119, Truth 16, 46-7, 56, 86, 90,
133-4, 138, 168 110-11
Sunyata 110, 120-2, 181n
Suzuki, D.T. 109-13, 115 Values 72, 76-8
System, the 41, 51, 56, 158
Walsh, S. 175n
Tanabe, H. 108, 123-7, 181-2n Watts, A. 109
Taylor, Mark C. 174-5n, 178n Will, willing 14, 20-5, 28-9,
Theology 38, 161-9 31-3, 36, 41, 63-9, 72, 73, 75-80,
Thulsturp, N. 174-5n 113, 114
Tillich, P. 2, 5, 90, 181n Williams, N.P. 49
Time 15-20, 23-4, 41, 48, 51, Wittgenstein, L. 139, 157, 177n
56-60, 91, 101-7, 129-30, 134-5, Wundt, W. 113
179n
Topos, concept of, see Place, Zange see Repentance
concept of Zen 109-23, 131-2, 140, 182n
Tracy, D. 164 Zum Brunn, E. 171n