Why do we no longer grieve the loss of God?
Anselm and Hegel vs. Apophatic Hardness of Heart
Hegel, looking around him at his early nineteenth-century contemporaries, gave voice to a bitter complaint:
It is no longer a grief to our age that it knows nothing of God; rather it counts as the highest insight that this cognition is not even possible… What the Christian religion … proclaims as the supreme, the absolute commandment, ‘Ye shall know God,’ is now accounted mere folly.1
This verdict has not aged a day: Hegel could be speaking of contemporary apophatic thinkers like Stephen Mulhall, Denys Turner, or Jean-Luc Marion, who revel in God’s unknowability (an unknowability in no way attenuated, they insist, but rather heightened by revelation).
We are always and everywhere, they tell us, in danger of turning God into an object; the insight that God cannot be conceptualized counts for them, no less than for Jacobi or Schleiermacher, as the pinnacle of theology.
He could equally be speaking here about nearly every student in our undergraduate classrooms, who if they “know” anything about religion, know an unreflected fideism: that religion is not and cannot be a matter of knowledge. The religious are as happy, if not happier, than the irreligious to celebrate the fact that God cannot be known—for they see the absence of knowledge as faith’s condition, the source of its merit, and thus its badge of honor.
But Hegel reminds us that this was not always the case.
There was a time when all [science] was a science of God… There was a time when [one] cared, was driven indeed, to know God, to fathom his nature—a time when spirit had no peace, and could find none, except in this pursuit, when it felt itself unhappy that it could not satisfy this need, and held all other cognitive interests to be of lesser import.2
This “time” extends to nearly the entirety of human religious history, but, in Hegel’s mind at least, might well refer to the medieval period above all others.
For as Hegel wrote elsewhere of Anselm (and the medieval world with him):
[Anselm] makes a noteworthy remark, which contains his whole philosophy… ‘It appears to me great negligence if we are firm in the faith, and do not seek also to comprehend what we believe.’ Now this is declared to be arrogance; immediate knowledge, faith, is held to be higher than knowledge. But Anselm and the scholastics maintained the opposite view.3
Anselm, Hegel suggests, was unsatisfied with incomprehension of the divine. He felt infinite grief the at the loss of God. This grief became the engine of his thinking, and did not allow him to rest in the ignorance of merely believing. He took seriously the commandment to know God.
Many of us may be hesitant here to take Hegel at his word, about Anselm and the medieval world he represents. Did he (and they) really wish to know God? Did he (and they) really feel the grief of which Hegel speaks, a grief so alien to ourselves?
We might have various reasons for suspicion.
Perhaps we have had drilled into us a Thomistic distinction (hardened in modernity) between what reason can know—that God is, his existence—and what must be received through a faith which is defined by the absence of clear vision—what God is, his nature or essence, including the mystery of the Trinity. (I’m assuming here that “we” have bought, additionally, the propaganda that Aquinas is representative of the medieval world rather than, on many questions of fundamental theology, an outlier).
Again, the medieval world may be mediated to us through modern readings of the mystics which revel, in post-Kantian apologetic fashion, in God’s sheer mysteriousness.
Or we may buy that bedtime story, often told to frighten young theologians, of the ravening maw of the monstrous Hegel, whose shadow rises higher until he has consumed all history and turned it into himself.
So let us not take Hegel’s word for it—we shall let Anselm speak for himself, and for the medieval world, or that part of it shaped by the genre of the spiritual itinerary. Did men once grieve the loss of God? Did they once consider the knowledge of God the “one thing necessary,” the command of the Christian religion?
The Tears of the Proslogion
We need look no further than chapter 1 of Anselm’s great work the Proslogion.
Anselm bids us to “‘enter into the chamber’ of your mind, shut out everything but God… and seek him ‘behind closed doors’ (Matthew 6:6).” In this seclusion, which vividly recalls the beginning of Augustine’s Confessions, the search becomes a problem to itself: “where shall I seek you, since you are absent?” God becomes an “unapproachable light” which he seeks nevertheless to approach.
Anselm experiences this divine absence as unbearable, and it defines his identity as a “distant exile… ‘banished far from your face’ (Psalm 51:11).” For “I have never seen you… still I do not know you.” But such knowledge, such vision, is the very purpose of the human. “How wretched human beings are! They have lost the very thing for which they were created.”
The images pile onto one another: we have exchanged the “bread of angels” for the “bread of sorrows.” We are racked with hunger, empty-handed beggars, blind and shut out from the light, fallen from a height and buried deep underground.
Anselm’s grief at this loss of God is expressed in “sighs”; he says that “[I] cry out as my heart weeps.”
The axis of this drama is the Trinitarian image of memory, knowledge, and will, the little Trinity through which humans were intended to know the big Trinity. But this image has been “eroded” and “clouded” by sin, so that “it cannot do what it was created to do”: “to remember you, think of you, and love you.”
Anselm does not desire to “scale your heights,” for he knows that is too much for his understanding. But he does “long to understand your truth in some way.” He believes “in order to understand.”
And in the very next chapter (ch. 2) he embarks on the famous so-called “ontological proof.”
The tears which flow from Anselm will emerge again, as the proof seems to collapse midway through the book.
As he sought to reconcile God’s seemingly contradictory attributes, the divinity who was initially defined as “something than which nothing greater can be thought” morphs into “something greater than can be thought” (ch. 15). The God who seemed to be contained in every thought, even that of the atheist who denies him, now seems to escape thought altogether.
His encounter with a light which is “too dazzling” (ch. 16) recalls the Neoplatonic ascent of Confessions 7, where Augustine knew the Goal but not the Way. A collapse of mediation threatens the stability of knowledge.
At this apophatic juncture in the argument, Anselm’s epekeina4 in which God recedes “beyond” being and knowledge, grief reemerges and motivates a renewal of the search.
“Still, O Lord, you are hidden from my soul… and so it still lives in darkness and misery.” “Once again, '‘behold, confusion!’ (Jeremiah 14:19) Behold, once again mourning and sorrow stand in the way of one seeking joy and happiness.” “Let my soul gather its strength, and let it once more strive with all its understanding to reach you, O Lord.” (ch. 17-18)
In this second sailing, Anselm finds a solution to this crisis of God’s inaccessibility: “all things exist in you” (ch. 19).
The entire journey, including the rupture between our little Trinity, deformed by sin, and the big Trinity, is contained within God, whose eternity “contains even the very ages of time” in their division from himself (ch. 21).
Anselm has been in God from the beginning: “the complete, one, total, and unique good” (ch. 22).
He was not in exile, on the outside trying to get in, but has been within all along; or rather, his exile is a moment in God’s procession and return to himself, whose consummation is paradise.
There, what is already true in part will be wholly so: “they will love God and themselves and one another through God, and God will love himself and them through himself” (ch. 25). Our remembering, knowing, and loving will be proven to be what they are: God’s Trinitarian self-othering.
God will forever transcend even the restored human image of the Trinity, to be sure, but not in such a way as to leave it on the outside. God, as Augustine discovered through John’s Gospel (but not libri Platonici) is not only the Goal but the Way.
Thus, in discovering our Trinities (from least to most eschatologically adequate) to be included in God’s perfect self-othering, Anselm has secured a standpoint from which one can say both that we will know God at journey’s end and that we participate in this knowledge even now in the illimitable horizon of our thought (discovered in the so-called ontological argument).
Therefore the grief of God’s loss can be assuaged, for “I have found a joy that is full and more than full",” a joy that reflects the inversion of perspective that transpires when we discover our in-Godding:
“The whole of that joy will therefore not enter into those who rejoice; instead those who rejoice will enter wholly into that joy” (ch. 26).
We will not capture God in a concept, but will find ourselves to be contained in the Concept’s unfolding.
“They will be called, and will truly be, ‘sons of God; (Matthew 5:9) and ‘gods’ (Psalm 82:6, John 10:34).” (ch. 25)
The Collapse of the Medieval Spiritual Itinerary: Modern Apophaticism
To be sure, not every medieval spiritual itinerary displays as clearly as Anselm’s the grief at God’s loss and the imperative that God be known. Some of them end in more dramatic expressions of unknowing (although as we have seen, these need not necessarily be read as simple “cognitive failure” but rather an inversion of perspective regarding the subject who is doing the knowing; “I shall know even as I am known”).
But all medieval spiritual itineraries have this in common: they are itineraries, which is to say they imagine that there is somewhere to go. We have not already arrived; if we had we would never set out.
There are reversals, setbacks, and transformations of what it means to know. There may even be moments of profound unknowing, like Anselm’s crisis of God as the beyond.
Indeed, he more radically apophatic itineraries, may from our modern vantage point, be in danger in the end of losing the Way in the Goal, or kicking the ladder away at the end. They may not be able to account for having set out, for the steps which mediate the immediacy of the final apophatic standpoint. But set out they nonetheless did.
For the engine, the motivation, of even the more apophatic medieval journeys remains the grief of which Hegel speaks: a dissatisfaction with one’s initial standpoint and a cognitive thirst for a more adequate God-relation. This grief, and the journey it inaugurates, may sometimes be presupposed rather than adequately grounded in the One itself; here lies the superiority of Augustine/Anselm (which comes from thinking the logic of the Trinity).
But what never takes place (until perhaps the late work of Nicholas of Cusa5) is what is characteristic of modern apophaticism: the suppression of grief over God’s loss and the presence of the Goal only in and as its initial absence, circumventing the journey so that one need never set out.
Having been defined by his unknowability, and all cognitive access forbidden not merely provisionally but finally,
Rather than an arduous journey of many steps (which many involve a dialectical inversion of perspective at the end), one starts with the inversion, telescoping the itinerary and cutting out all mediating steps.
Modern apophaticism is the collapse of the medieval spiritual itinerary:
God is Wholly Other, but by this very token he is the Non-Other.
God is Absent, but his absence is the index of his mysterious Presence.
One can achieve in a simple koan what in the medieval world took a whole masterwork, or an entire lifetime.
There is no time to grieve, for to lose God is—immediately—to find him. When God slips from our grasp, indeed in this very slipping away, we have the highest insight that God is Not An Object. This is, we are told, an insight so insuperable that neither revelation nor the eschaton change our cognitive situation for the better.
We have found what we are looking for before ever having to leave country, kindred, and our father’s house.
One might protest that modern apophaticism is nothing but profound awareness of grief of God’s loss. Is not this awareness what it cultivates and celebrates? Is it not in its entirety a testament to grief?
But here we have mistaken despair for grief, and are blind to the dialectic by which despair becomes complacency.
One can no longer grieve what is not possible; if God is defined by unknowability, it makes no sense to weep over not knowing him.
Indeed, quite quickly one’s cognitive despair becomes the complacency of one who possesses the Goal immediately and at every moment.
Thus if any process can survive this telescoping of steps, this collapse into immediacy, it is one characteristic of modernity: therapy.
We must suppress our grief and extinguish all cognitive striving in divinis, for such striving is based on a failure to understand the “grammar of God-talk.” All that is need, we are told, is a basic grasp of God’s “non-contrastive transcendence.”
But such cognitive therapy is not an itinerary, or at least not a Christian one. It does not reflect an incarnational or Trinitarian standpoint. It does not go through—like the God-man—the infinite grief of Spirit at Golgotha; it does not retain the Way in the Goal. It does not discover the God who sets out for and arrives at himself.
May we weep these tears in order to come into the triune Joy which, in its perfect self-division, accomplishes our inclusion.
LPR vol I, p.87. In the critical philosophy of Kant, God had become merely a moral presupposition of practical thinking; to speculative thought he was an inaccessible in-itself. With a way to the divine through reason seemingly barred forever, religion’s self-styled defenders, like Schleiermacher, placed all their chips on feeling, specifically the feeling of absolute dependence.
Ibid.
LHP.
See Andrew Griffin, “The Inclusive Epekeina of Anselm’s Proslogion,” Dionysius 38.
See Andrew Griffin, “Nicholas of Cusa’s Neoplatonism Pivoting to Modernity,” unpublished.
As someone who doesn’t have training in medieval theology and who I guess found my way into apophaticism by quarreling with Hegel I appreciated this. I do sincerely hope that my apophaticism isn’t the goal but is the way, as you say.