The obscurity confronting us in God is owing to the fact that He is far too luminous for the feeble sight of our intellect, which is unable to endure His infinite splendor.
…
From this it follows that what is obscure and incomprehensible for us in God transcends what is clearly seen. Here, in fact, the darkness is light-transcending. What the mystics call the great darkness is the Deity, the intimate life of God, the “light inaccessible” mentioned by St. Paul (I Tim. 6: 6).We now understand what St. Teresa means when she says: “The more obscure the mysteries of God, the greater is my devotion to them.” She indeed realized that this obscurity is not that of absurdity or incoherence, but the obscurity of a light that is too intense for our feeble vision.
In this divine light and shade, then, the shadows transcend the light. Faith tells us that this impenetrable obscurity is the sovereign good in its more intimate characteristics, so that it is to this absolutely eminent Goodness, though still a mystery incomprehensible to the intellect, that our charity cleaves; the food of love in this life is mystery, which it adores. Here on earth love is superior to the intellect.
(Garrigou-Lagrange, Providence).
Lars von Trier’s 2018 The House That Jack Built holds a profound metaphysical observation lodged in the very core of its narrative. The main character is an embodiment of the Faustian spirit, a psychopathic engineer epitomizing modern industrial civilization in his obsessive striving to build the perfect house, the complete, divine artifice – finally best approximated by a pile of frozen corpses.
Somewhere in the middle of the film, the protagonist reflects on his topsy-turvy artistic search for the ever more profound perversion of created being, and remarks how he as a child observed that the photographic negative offers us a way to approach “the real inner demonic quality of the light. The dark light.”
This remark, on the surface quite disturbing, unexpectedly brought into my view the received scholastic principle that evil is only privation. The limitation of that which is good.
But this actually distinguishes it from the notion of absolute nothingness, this mystery of utter emptiness. For evil is really the limitation of actualized being, the perversion or crookedness of that which already is, and specifically resides in how it fails to connect with the true and ultimate Good.
“And Jesus said unto him, ‘Why callest thou Me good? There is none good but One, that is, God.’”
(Mk. 10:18).
In other words, the ex nihilo out of which Creation was brought was not some primordial ocean of absolute evil. It was something else entirely.
Recall the Devil. According to many theologians, he was among the greatest of all angels, if not the preeminent. He bears the name of light-bringer, also attributed to “the aurora” and “the light of the morning”. Brightness as perfect as any mere creature can possess. And yet the ultimate personification of evil itself.
Trier’s film ends by focusing this sublime reflection on a negative image of a representation of the blazing abyss of the deepest hell. Its shining glow transposed into the most stygian blackness.
Contingent being in its fallen state, bright and glorious as it may be in our eyes, is always incomplete – and the perversion of the most perfect creature, merely conditional as it is, is the very apotheosis of evil.
But in these observations lies a most curious insight.
This is all evil is. This is everything it could ever be. Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed.
In a previous meditation around this topic, I concluded that absolute nothingness indirectly permits being, and thus transcendence, through its inevitable (per impossibile) negation of even logic – but I failed to realize that absolute nothingness actually is transcendence.
In other words, I failed to really see that the unlimited and unbounded omniabsence actually is one and the same as the dark and impenetrable Cloud of Unknowing.
The Lord is king, let earth rejoice,
let all the coastlands be glad.
Cloud and darkness are his raiment;
his throne, justice and right.
(Ps. 96).
Dress being down like this by negation, step by step, until negation itself is unveiled and denuded, and you’ll find transcendence hiding beneath it all. Clothed in darkness.
Transcendence at the root of the root, at the infinite depths beneath both being and negation.
For, paradoxical as it may sound, any truly “negative” nothingness, any truly desolate and final hellscape, must actually be limited in its negations. It must stipulate being in the sense of some contingent barrier that forever and ever imprisons or extinguishes life and becoming.
It must be privation.
But push it just a little bit further, and you’ll find yourself stepping right outside into the daylight of transcendence.
Now absolute nothingness, the nothingness that dissolves substance-thinking, must not be clung to as nothingness. It must not be taken as a kind of substance, or even as the nihilum of a kind of “minus substance.” The important thing is the de-substantializing dynamic of nothingness, the nothingness of nothingness. Put in philosophical terms, it refers to the negation of negation, which entails a pure movement in two directions at the same time: (1) the negation of negation in the sense of a further denial of negation that does not come back around to affirmation but opens up into an endlessly open nothingness; and (2) the negation of negation in the sense of a return to affirmation without any trace of mediation. Absolute nothingness, which first of all functions as radical negation, is maintained as this dynamic coincidence of infinite negation and straightforward affirmation. In this coincidence, and because of it, a fundamental transformation and a complete return—a sort of “death and resurrection”—are achieved in ex-sistence.
(Ueda Shizuteru, “’Nothingness’ in Meister Eckhart and Zen Buddhism”).
Ex nihilo. Creation from nothingness. This doesn’t mean that God created the world out of evil in an endless sea of self-subsisting horror as I’ve unconsciously tended to think. “Nihilo” doesn’t refer to a cold, bleak emptiness circumscribed by an iron logic of negation that throughout eternity and beyond prohibits love and being from blossoming once more.
No. This is the infinite field of possibilities that denies all the conditional limitations of mere beings.
There is no individual thing, no compulsion, outward nor inward, no law. It is the germinal nothing, in which the whole universe is involved or foreshadowed. As such, it is absolutely undefined and unlimited possibility—boundless possibility. There is no compulsion and no law. It is boundless freedom.
(Charles Peirce, The Essential Peirce, Volume 2).
However, what the Christian says in faith, and through reason, in a certain opposition to the Buddhist or others who also affirm a “positive” or fruitful notion of nothingness, is that this transcendence isn’t exhausted by emptiness. That it’s rather the case that this absolute otherness is really one and the same as the unapproachable light of divinity, the utter fullness of an existence beyond being that really and fully contains and infinitely transcends the contingent goods of created existence.
Here, in some strange and terrible sense, lies something of the mystery of the Crown of Thorns. Christ, the Lord of the universe, as non-king accepting the anti-regalia of a bitter fucking joke, yet transforming them into the undisputable symbols of a victory infinitely beyond our very notions of meaning itself.
He was still speaking when suddenly a bright cloud covered them with shadow, and from the cloud there came a voice which said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; he enjoys my favour. Listen to him.’ When they heard this the disciples fell on their faces, overcome with fear. But Jesus came up and touched them. ‘Stand up,’ he said ‘do not be afraid.’ And when they raised their eyes they saw no one but only Jesus.
(Mt. 17).
Christian theology has it both ways. It affirms transcendence as, in a sense, the absolute emptiness and negation of contingent being, yet at the same time proclaims that the infinite darkness of God’s absolute otherness is somehow mysteriously manifest, somehow fully present in and through the humble apparition of a foggy October morning. In the smile of a weakling child.
In the frailty of the fading life of the very least of creatures, struggling in the face of final extinguishment.
The key to this conclusion lies in the fact that the only stable and permanent negation possible is contingent. Evil must be privation.
For when negation is pushed to its limits and beyond, we instead approach being beyond being. A transcendence beyond existence absolutely other than contingent being is indeed the same thing as the negation of the negation:
“… the negation of negation in the sense of a further denial of negation that does not come back around to affirmation but opens up into an endlessly open nothingness; and the negation of negation in the sense of a return to affirmation without any trace of mediation. Absolute nothingness, which first of all functions as radical negation, is maintained as this dynamic coincidence of infinite negation and straightforward affirmation …”
(Shizuteru, ibid.)
In other words, the ultimate negation of negation inherent to absolute and final nothingness actually implies the move into transcendence, into the absolutely other which stands in opposition to both negation as well as to contingent being.
This mean that something which we with trembling and trepidation can approach as “positive transcendence” inevitably is inherent in the absolute negation. The negative meaning of nothingness can never be the final word, because evil necessarily is privation and absolute, hard limits.
The nothingness of stagnation, the nothingness of a cosmic prison, namely presupposes the limitations of being, a corrupt and thwarted one, yet being nonetheless.
And if being is given, in whatever manner or form, then along comes the whole edifice of logic, metaphysics and positive theology.
And if being is pushed aside through and beyond the ultimate negation of negation, transcendence supervenes, world without end. We then step back into the daylight beyond and within. The beating heart of everything.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.(Jn. 1).
But what’s the most astonishing fact about Christianity, its single most surprising and existentially riveting feature, is that God Himself went on this path before us. That God Himself went through this utter humiliation and descent into non-being in His redemptive death and passion.
That God, in the fully divine and fully human person of Christ, actually, truly and completely died in every sense of the word.
That He emptied Himself in a literal affirmation of the Nietzschean adage to provide salvation for all of creation, the kenosis of God which somehow becomes one with the frailty and weakness of contingent and sinful being – something which finally also turns secularization itself on its head:
In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss; and I apologize in advance if any of my phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent touching a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in the terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. It is written, "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." No; but the Lord thy God may tempt Himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane. In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God. He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt.
Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.
(Chesterton, Orthodoxy).
+++ +++ +++
i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
(E. E. Cummings)
August 2023, on the feasts of the Transfiguration & St. Cajetan