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Book series: Philosophy, n. 25
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For the will desires not to be dark,
and this very desire
causes the darkness.
– Jacob Boehme
 INTRODUCTION

The essays in this volume explore, in one way or another, the darkness of
the will. The first treats of will in the mode of spontaneity, clarifying the
will’s causal darkness, the unknowability of its whence and whither. The
second treats of will in the mode of impotentiality, finding there the paradox
of a negatively mystical power: the ability to do what one cannot by not
doing it. The third treats of will in the mode of sorrow, affirming the will’s
negativity as a superessential force, one that exceeds the bounds of being.
The fourth treats of will in the mode of matter, exposing the cosmic
blackness of its tears. The fifth treats of will in the mode of vision, seeing
life as a ladder that ascends itself by means of the ruptures of becoming.
The sixth treats of will in the mode of eros, explicating the prismatic
contradiction between love and lust. The seventh treats of will in the mode
of sacrifice, listening for the freedom that is found through the
transgression of oneself.
These intersecting lines of thought are animated by a simple and perennial
unifying idea: that the truth of the will is found in its mysterious power to
suspend itself, to say no to its own yes. Like a sun that reveals the ground of
its light by retracting its rays, showing that it need not shine, only the will
that knows how to negate itself is free. “For only that which is without
principle properly lives, since anything having the principle of its operation
from something else, insofar as it is other, does not itself live.”1 As the
will’s darkness is caused by its very desire not to be dark, so the way of its
illumination or self-disclosure moves in the direction of not wanting its own
desire, of affirming and entering the darkness of its own light, the
invisibility of the fire within its flame. Thus Bonaventure completes his
Itinerarium mentis in Deum with a summoning of our will across the
threshold of wanting, a calling forth of the heart to desire beyond desire’s
own summit:
Now if you ask how all these things are to come about, ask grace, not doctrine; desire, not
intellect […] darkness, not clarity; not light, but the fire that inflames totally and carries one into
God through spiritual fervor and with the most burning affections […] Only that person who says:
My soul chooses hanging, and my bones death can truly embrace this fire. Only one who loves this
 death can see God, for it is absolutely true that no one can see me and live. Let us die, then, and
enter into this darkness. Let us silence all our cares, desires, and imaginings.2

How to clarify the obscurity of this deep inner vision that somehow
perceives and seizes the sheer necessity of turning against itself? And how
to understand what becomes of the one who does so, unless it is oneself?
For Schopenhauer, the will’s self-negation, like a secret voiding or
swallowing of the impenetrable starlit darkness perpetually gazing back at
every entity in this universe, proves nothing less than the inexistence of
matter: “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.”3 For Teresa of
Avila, the will’s self-negation proves the permanence of real freedom and
fresh joy:
I remember […] that when I left my father’s house I felt such dreadful distress that the pain of
death itself cannot be worse. Every bone in my body seemed to be wrenched asunder. […] the
whole action did me such violence that, if the Lord had not helped me, my resolution would not
have been enough to push me forward. […] No one saw what I endured, or thought that I acted out
of anything but pure desire. At the moment of my entrance into this new state I felt a joy so great
that it has never failed me even to this day. […] When I remember this freedom, there is no task,
however hard, that I would hesitate to undertake were it put before me.4

Either way, experience realizes the ineradicable immanence or radical

availability of a pure despite assuring one of an absolute security. Either
way the will paradoxically finds itself advancing ever further via surrender
into the paradisical fact that there is nothing the matter. Either way the
lesson is one: there never was, is, nor will ever be any power in reality’s
vast expanse with the power to make one unhappy. In the end, not even
oneself...
Seeing that the following essays, written between philosophy and
mysticism, accordingly wander and linger within the threshold landscapes
joining/separating hopeless pessimism and foolhardy fidelity, I trust that
they will lead the reader nowhere else.

1 Meister Eckhart, The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, trans. Edmund
Colledge (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), p. 128, translation modified.
2 Bonaventure, Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, trans. Zachary Hayes (Saint Bonaventure, NY:
Franciscan Institute, 2002), p. 139.
3 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols. (New
York: Dover, 1969), I, 412.
4 Teresa of Avila, The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself, trans. J. M. Cohen (New York:
Penguin, 1957), p.33.
 I.
THE WHIM OF REALITY:
ON THE QUESTION OF WILL

The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence
it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one, who is born of the Spirit.
– John 3. 7–8
Here my high imagining failed of power; but already my desire and will [il mio disio e ‘l
velle] were turned, like a wheel being moved evenly, by the Love that moves the sun and
the other stars.
– Dante, Paradiso, XXXIII.142–5
My mother groan’d! my father wept. / Into the dangerous world I leapt.
– William Blake, ‘Infant Sorrow’
It seeks to know itself. It is of no use to ask why... The plain truth about this initial urge to
know itself is best called a whim (Lahar) The initial whim is completely independent of
reason, intellect or imagination, all of which are by-products of this whim. Reason, intellect
and imagination depend upon the initial whim and not vice versa.
– Meher Baba, Beams

Seeing that: 1) existence is whyless, purposeless, without whence or

whither; 2) there is little or no worth in wanting a will that is anything less
than reality’s own whim; and 3) will can only be grasped in a movement
that is of will itself, in the motion of its question – this essay takes aim at
will in the mode of spontaneity, that is, in terms of that which enacts or
spends itself freely, of its own accord (sua sponte). Refusing the reduction
of the spontaneous to causal illusion, senseless caprice, or simply a
placeholder for the unthinkable, I consider the will as the reverberation of
reality’s unaccountable and infinitely restless urge to know itself – thus, in a
form capable of crossing the apparently impassible distance between
individual and universal wills, between what one wants/chooses and all the
forces bringing everything into being. This principle will be traced through
four constellations of spontaneity, each with a different attendant spirit:
question (Augustine), earthquake (Dante), love (Meher Baba), birth
(Meister Eckhart). By drawing nectar from an array of broadly mystical
medieval and modern sources, I hope to distill not only a taste of the will’s
power, but something of its imperishable sweetness.
If there is a question of will – of that which moves thought, feeling, action
– it is because will itself has the nature of a question. Will: the reverberating
whim of Reality... Who would prefer to show up here – to itself, to life, to
this text – wanting anything less?5

Punctus Interrogativus
The medieval predecessor of the modern question mark indicates the
rising intonation of a question in a form resembling a flash of lighting or
swerving line suspended above a point.6 In Paradiso, Dante passes beyond
the human (trasumanar) in the midst of unknowing like inverse lightning:
‘You are making yourself swell [grosso] with false imaginings’, explains
Beatrice faster than he can pose the question, ‘You are not on earth as you
believe, but lighting, fleeing its proper place, never sped so fast as you,
going back to yours […] It would be a marvel in you if […] you had
remained below’.7 Rogare, to ask, derives from *rog-, to stretch out the
hand (cf. reach), a variant of the root *reg- ‘move in a straight line’.
Augustine, reaching through his inability to grasp himself, to wield wholly
his own will, asks,
Why this monstrousness [monstrum]? And what is the root of it? […] The mind commands the
hand to move and there is such readiness that you can hardly distinguish the command from the
execution. Yet the mind is mind, whereas the hand is body. The mind commands the mind to will,
the mind is itself, but it does not do it.8

Thomas Metzinger speaks of falling in love as a lightning strike uniting

and dissolving two phenomenal selves – ‘a little bit like dying, and also
[…] like going insane’.9 Nietzsche, bridging no-one-being and the
Bhagavad Gita, confirms the illusion of agency, that ‘“the doer” is invented
as an afterthought, – the doing is everything,’ by comparing it to the
common misperception which ‘separates lightning from its flash and takes
the latter to be a deed, something performed by a subject, which is called
lightning’.10 One might go on and on. And still the bolt, as if instantly
freezing the infinite, is no less something that STOPS, comes to a point.
This forking fire moving in a line, this swerving ray flying faster than flight
– how else to seize it except by being seized, to touch it without being
struck?
What is will – it asks – if not a flashing of this darkness to itself, auto-
eclipse of the who who asks the question? As Augustine says, ‘Tu […] in
cuius oculis mihi quaestio factus sum’ [You in whose eyes I am
made/become a question to myself]’.11 One never wonders, authentically or
self-doingly (auto-entes), without being that wonder. So Nietzsche, the
Augustine of our age, says of wisdom’s lover:
this is a person who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes, and dreams
extraordinary things; who is struck by his own thoughts as if from outside, from above and below
[…] who is perhaps a storm himself, pregnant with new lightning; a fatal person in whose vicinity
things are always rumbling, growling, gaping, and acting in uncanny ways.12

Whose eyes are these, in which I am made or become a question to

myself? Or, whose question is this, by which eyes peer into my own
darkness? ‘The eye with which I see God’, says Meister Eckhart, ‘is the
same eye with which God sees me: my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one
seeing, one knowing and one love’.13 Thus I want to say that will is cyclops,
folded through itself as a self-doubling mirror, its darkness to itself a piece
with its power – the whole black gravity of a pure-nothing pupil through
which everything including itself is seen, as reflected by Pseudo-Dionysius
on the erotic double ecstasy of divine creation:
And, in truth, it must be said that the very cause of the universe […] is also carried outside of
himself […] He is […] enticed away […] and comes to abide within all things […] by virtue of his
[…] capacity to remain, nevertheless, within himself.14

That which moves all things operates as through a mirror, in presence of

absence and absence of presence. So do the souls of the blessed in Dante’s
Paradiso, in tune with the divine will, ‘gaze into the Mirror in which,
before you think, you reveal your thought’.15
What vision or theory of will is possible without blinding fidelity to this
blindness? A blindness like that of the radical husband – a medieval figure
for the Incarnation – who puts out one of his eyes to assure his one-eyed
wife of his love.16 It is as if to seize the will one must remove an eye, stick
one’s vision with the will’s own blindness. But which one? ‘This power of
sight’, as Hadewych explains,
 has two eyes, love and reason. Reason cannot see God except in what he is not; love rests not
except in what he is. Reason has its secure paths, by which it proceeds. Love experiences failure,
but failure advances it more than reason […] When reason abandons itself to love’s wish, and love
consents to be forced and held within the bounds of reason, they can accomplish a very great work.
This no one can learn except by experience.17

If we pluck one, we lose the will’s force. If the other, we lose what sees it.
How to blind one and preserve both? How to blind both and preserve one?
Such is the work of experience, of the flashing life that sees there is no real
knowledge without entering the living darkness of the knower, no real will
without becoming the willed. Anyone can simply think and feel and go
through the motions. Nothing is easier, lazier, than merely having a wish! If
only... But to swim through one’s pupils, to walk in the dark to the point of
forgetting oneself and forgiving everything! ‘Whether men soar to outer
space or dive to the bottom of the deepest ocean’, says Meher Baba, ‘they
will find themselves as they are, unchanged, because they will not have
forgotten themselves nor remembered to exercise the charity of
forgiveness’.18 One must become the question one is, be the question that
creates you, fall into the blind spot of one’s essential image. This is
illuminated by Eriugena:
the Divine likeness in the human mind is most clearly discerned when it is only known that it is,
and not known what it is […] what it is is denied in it [negatur in ea quid esse], and only that it is
is affirmed. Nor is this unreasonable. For if it were known to be something, then at once it would
be limited by some definition, and thereby would cease to be a complete expression of the image
of its Creator, Who is absolutely unlimited and contained within no definition.19

Or Meillassoux: ‘we must project unreason into things themselves, and

discover in our grasp of facticity the veritable intellectual intuition of the
absolute’.20 The darkness whereby one does not know is the very image of
truth.
Did you create yourself or not? Unforgiveable! Here the will stands up and
takes a bow, to itself. Once the applause dies down, it begins to gesture – a
spontaneous sign language created, preserved, and destroyed in each
movement. A few words of acknowledgement no doubt, I couldn’t have
done it without... you? We understand nothing. Luckily M.E. is on hand to
translate the gist:
In my birth all things were born, and I was the cause of myself and all things: and if I had so
willed it, I would not have been, and all things would not have been. If I were not, God would not
 be either. I am the cause of God’s being God: if I were not, then God would not be God. But you
do not need to know this.21

Either way – and both are true: there is no way you either did or did not
create yourself – one’s life rises like the sun through a self-splitting horizon,
just as our problems of will are properly dilemmas of self-division, of being
stuck by, as opposed to ascending by means of, the primordial fissure of
nature, the fault which is the ground of habit or ethics, the internal fracture
that makes each agent its own patient and each patient its own agent. ‘I do
not understand my own actions’, says St. Paul, ‘For I do not do the good I
want, but the evil I do not want is what I do’ (Romans 7. 15–9). But the
contradiction – and it would not be a contradiction if will were not one – is
also power and the way of freedom:
Life itself wants to build itself into the heights with pillars and steps; it wants to gaze into vast
distances [...] therefore it needs height! And because it needs height, it needs steps and
contradictions between steps and climbers! Life wants to climb and to overcome itself by
climbing.22

The agent/patient dilemma variously faced in the activation of will –

wanting to do without being the one who does, wanting to be one who does
without having to do – is, as the sting of Epictetus’s teaching proves, also
the term of its own overcoming, namely, the power of flight, to freely do as
one wills without the burden of being the doer. Whence Félix Ravaisson:
‘The law of habit can only be explained through the development of a
Spontaneity that is at once active and passive’.23 Willing climbs through
doing into being, grappling with the facture of itself in a movement that
overcomes it by facing oneself head on. Therefore, a word of warning to
whoever may hope to wield, without being swallowed by, the question (of
will). Twisting our eyes through the blackness of its peephole, Augustine
confesses,
But You […] turned me back towards myself, taking me from behind my own back, where I had
put myself all the time that I preferred not to see myself. And You set me there before my own face
that I might see how vile I was […] I saw myself and was horrified.24

Seismos
In Junji Ito’s manga The Enigma of Amigara Fault, an earthquake opens
up a mountain to reveal a rift full of individualized human forms (Figure 1).
Amigara means ‘empty shell,’ and to the person whose body uniquely fits
this shadow-space, their own abyss-negative, the hole seems irresistible,
drawing one towards it with an entombing gravity only you can fathom, not
unlike that now tying each of us to these corpses.

Figure 1: Junji Ito, The Enigma of Amigara Fault.25

As with much horror fiction, the fable inverts a pre-modern motif, echoing
backwardsly the reunion of soul and body at the end of time when history
gives up its dead and there is ‘a great earthquake such as had never been
since men were on the earth’ (Revelation 16. 18).26 The secret subgenre at
work here – a current on par with the hyper-covert style of one’s own event
– might be christened seismic individuation terror, a form crossing themes
of cataclysm and ontological self-binding. What is this continuity between
what Levinas terms ‘that most radical and unalterably binding of chains, the
fact that the I [moi] is oneself [soi-même]’27 and the cosmic forces whose
surges shake mountains, if not reality itself?
For Nietzsche, it is the inhuman self-beholding of his own destiny in Ecce
Homo: ‘I am not a human being. I am dynamite’.28 For Lispector, it is the
breath of her own free words, ‘so that it shivers and shakes and my
earthquake opens frightening fissures in this free language – but I captive
and in the process of not being I become aware and it goes on without
me’.29 For Cioran, it is the detonation of life and death: ‘I feel I must burst
because of all that life offers me and because of the prospect of death […] I
feel my life cracking within me from too much intensity, too much
disequilibrium. It is like an explosion which cannot be contained, which
throws you up in the air along with everything else’.30 For Augustine, in the
trauma of conversion, when the whole world seems to turn with one’s
turning, it is the resurrection from the tomb of habit that constitutes the
cataclysm, a resurrection from being bound to one’s own dead self which he
compares to the raising of Lazarus (John 11. 1–44),31 just as his own
experience of self-facing mirrors the terms of the Etruscan pirates’ torture
(philosophically twisted by Reza Negarestani)32 in which a living and a
dead body ‘are bound as closely as possible, part fitted to part’ and left to
decompose together.33 As Augustine considered this necrotic togetherness
an apt image of the ‘heavy yoke upon the children of Adam,’34 so does he
ask near the beginning of the Confessions, ‘What have I to say […] save
that I know not where I came from, when I came into this life-in-death – or
should I call it death-in-life? I do not know’.35 And for Dante, who
conceives the form most poetically, it is the terrifying tremor of Earth’s
highest peak and bridge to Paradise – ‘I felt the mountain shake like a
falling thing, and a chill seized me such as takes him who goes to death’.36
This happens when the soul, finally overcoming the volitional fracture of
the Fall, feels the primal surprise of its own will, as the poet Statius
explains:
‘the mountain trembles when some soul fees itself cleansed, so that it rises up or starts to climb
[…] We know that we are cleansed when the will itself surprises the soul with the freedom to
change convents, and the soul rejoices to will it […] And I, who have lain in this sorrow five
hundred years and more, only now felt the free will of a better threshold: therefore you felt the
earthquake’.37

Confirming the question as seismos of reality, the wayfarer upon feeling

this says, ‘No ignorance ever assailed me with so much desire to know’.38
The form in question reflects the infinity of individuation’s depth charge, a
force hidden within the absolutely asymmetrical crack connecting oneself to
everything.39 Is one or is one not intrinsically one with Reality? Is one’s will
other than that which is creating, preserving, and destroying the universe –
yes or no? What fact can the fact that one is oneself – summit of
impossibility! – not make to tremble? As Meher Baba explains, the cause of
this whole multifarious cosmic mess without and within oneself – not the
universe or a universe but this one – is the unaccountable whim of the
eternal or divine Reality to know itself, which operates as the universal
dialectic from ‘Who am I?’ to ‘I am God’, generating en route, in the spiral
of evolution and involution, all temporary beings as provisional answers: ‘I
am stone’, ‘I am plant’, ‘I am human’, and so forth.40 ‘The infinite question
is infinite unconsciousness; the infinite answer is infinite consciousness’.41
Now what impresses me here is that this question, which governs all
experience and is itself the impression of first experience, has the nature of
a spontaneous primal shock:
[The] first experience of the infinite Soul was that it (the Soul) experienced a contrariety in its
identity with its infinite, impressionless, unconscious state. This experience of contrariety effected
changeableness in the eternal, indivisible stability of the infinite Soul, and spontaneously there
occurred a sort of eruption, disrupting the indivisible poise and the unconscious tranquility of the
infinite Soul with a recoil or tremendous shock which impregnated the unconsciousness of the
unconscious Soul with first consciousness of its apparent separateness.42

– A shock that, due to the infinite disparity of its terms, seems to go on

forever: ‘The process takes an infinitely long time and eternity gets
seemingly broken into the unending past, the transient present and the
uncertain future’.43 In other words, the vector of being known as will is the
reverberating dilation of the original word – shout or sigh, take your pick –
the inexplicable erotic-surge of Reality to realize itself by impossibly
splitting itself from itself, ‘causing’ in the process the gross, subtle, and
mental worlds, or in Meillassoux’s parlance the surchaotic ‘ruptures of
becoming: matter, life, and thought […] [each of which] appears as a
Universe that cannot be qualitatively reduced to anything that preceded it’.44
This general idea is beautifully confirmed in Dante’s poetic cosmology,
whose tripartite order is bound together, like the comedic empyrean
conspiracy of its author’s journey, by the route of love, a word deriving
from rumpere, to break. In the Commedia, the passage to paradise,
descending through hell and ascending through purgatory, is literally that, a
rupture. As Virgil explains to the pilgrim, after climbing down-up through
the center of the cosmos upon Satan’s body, the inversely formed abyss and
peak were generated by Lucifer’s fall when the earth ‘left this empty space
[lasciò qui loco vòto] in order to escape from him, and fled upward’
(Inferno, XXXIV. 125–6).45 The void-space of hell then becomes passable,
crucially, by means of a series of ruins (ruine), ‘alpine [alpestro]’ (Inferno,
XII. 2) landslides of ‘ancient rock’ [vecchia roccia]’ (Inferno XII. 44)
which occur at the time of the Crucifixion darkness when, as Virgil explains
in the seventh circle of Inferno, ‘this deep, foul valley trembled so that I
thought the universe must be feeling love’ (Inferno, XII. 40–2). Suffering
the contradiction of their desire, the lustful souls of hell feel bound to stop
before this ruin, damning there the force of the divine love whereby they, in
refusing to be ruined by it, are damned: ‘When they come before the
landslide, there the shrieks, the wailing, the lamenting, there they curse
God’s power’ (Inferno, V. 34–6).
It is one thing to assert, as a famous physicist does, that ‘Spontaneous
creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the
universe exists, why we exist’.46 It is another to know and feel in one’s
bones that this is not only true, but the mere shell or amigara of a truth
more torturous still, one that, in order to remain you, one never stops
denying. Who are these people who people hell, entombing themselves in
Earth, but they who forever people themselves, refusing fatally to affirm,
except in the inevitability of their denial, the universe-quake of the hyper-
intimate, self-shattering will? Who is capable of negating, in the last
instance, the question of the question, to insist all the way down on oneself
as a universally separate entity? At least Satan has the guts to rebel against
God, the courage to suffer the eternally just consequences of his own
complicity. What makes me shudder – were there something to fear – is the
prospect of revolution without conversion, progress at the hands of persons
who prefer themselves all the way down, who elect their identity with
reality in the least original way. Such are the very hell of hell, the negligent
or non-choosing (from nec-legere, to not choose), the nauseatingly
lukewarm, ‘neither cold nor hot’ (Revelation 3. 15), who are spat out at the
end of time. Paradoxically, it is these who are making all the noise, the
merely material beings who ‘were never alive’ (Inferno, III. 64).
‘Master, what is so grievous that it makes them lament so loudly?’ He replied, ‘I will tell you
briefly. They have no hope of death, and their blind life is so base that they are envious of every
other fate […] let us not speak of them, but look and pass on’ (Inferno, III. 43–51).
 Such is the wretched racket of this world of worry, clamoring constantly
for what it claims to want but fails to will, finding fault at a feast where one
chooses to chew wood. But don’t worry, as everyone knows, hell is good
news: ‘Abandon every hope, you who enter’ (Inferno, III. 9). For,
The condition of the world, the strife and uncertainty that is everywhere, the general
dissatisfaction with and rebellion against any and every situation shows that the ideal of material
perfection is an empty dream and proves the existence of an eternal Reality beyond materiality.47

And so, before the cosmic mountain of matter and its noise, all the
frustrated murmuring and fuss ever to be made thereon, let us set the much
louder silence of an earthquake, one that takes place – but where? – when
will willfully abandons itself, surprising whosever it is, as for the first time.

Pondus Meum
It is always a question of will precisely because there is no having
something without becoming it, no becoming it without being it, no being it
without the delight of it. Therefore it is always a matter of love, of one’s
essential gravity, of the curvature of will: ‘My love is my weight; by it I am
borne, wheresoever I am borne [Pondus meum, amor meus; eo feror,
quocumque feror]’.48 As love is transport, carrying one away who knows
where, so is it detachment, leaving what cannot be taken, all the possessions
which will not survive the journey. Consider how the prospect of realizing
the loveable – truth, goodness, beauty – per force demands a passage from
being its putative possessor to being wholly possessed by it, to becoming it,
in other words, being flown along the flight-path of union whose fulfillment
is proven by its very joy. Thus Agamben: ‘The problem of knowledge is a
problem of possession, and every problem of possession is a problem of
enjoyment’.49 And Eckhart: ‘The just man serves neither God nor creatures,
for he is free, and the closer he is to justice, the closer he is to freedom, and
the more he is freedom itself’.50 And Porete: ‘And she is inebriated not only
from what she has drunk, but very intoxicated and more than intoxicated
from what she never drinks nor will ever drink’.51 Spontaneous joy, the
smiling ‘flash of the soul’s delight’,52 is the mark of hitting the mark, the
sign-in-the-event that proves even the most invisible vision. As Dante
writes near the end of the Commedia, ‘The universal form of this knot, I
believe I saw, because I feel my joy expand as I say this’ (Paradiso,
XXXIII. 91–3). Likewise the absence of this flash is testimony of fraud. ‘Be
not sad like the hypocrites’ (Matthew 6. 16). Do you want knowledge, or do
you want to be the knower? Do you want justice, or do you want to be the
judge? Do you want the wine of bliss, or do you want to be the drinker?
How beautiful the face that does not refract this dilemma, which is clear of
the dark interference of some leaden desire, hiding under gold paint, the
counter-will of wanting to be the one who wills – even to the point of killing
will itself. Ask someone whether he wants to be or to appear good? You
know what he will answer: that he wants to be good – because he wants to
appear so.
The irresistible power of love is precisely that of a higher order gravity,
the grave levitation of a heaviest yet scalar and vertiginous lift that elevates
and quickens life through-against its own weight, just as one ascends in
climbing via a tensional state of pulling and pushing. Similarly, St. Teresa
experiences levitation simultaneously as an aerial force carrying her away –
‘you see and feel this cloud, or this powerful eagle rising and bearing you
up’ – and, in her resistance to this rapture, as an earthy creature raising her
from below: ‘it has been like fighting a great giant […] a great force, for
which I can find no comparison, was lifting me up from beneath my feet’.53
And it is the spontaneity of the resurrective power of love – a seizure of the
will’s wholeness and specular revelation of the one in the many – that
demonstrates and manifests will as never one’s own:
it comes as a quick and violent shock […] We have to go willingly wherever we are carried, for
in fact, we are being born off whether we like it or not […] We are not the masters; whether we
like it or not, we see that there is One mightier than we.54

This willy-nilly dimension of love is why the affirmationism of most love-

talk fails to move, because it lacks the essential negativity of spontaneous
nature, the whenceless and whitherless swerve of whim that, less than
affirming an object or value, negates the opposition between affirmation
and denial and thus says yes to something ‘beyond affirmation and denial’
precisely without having to say so.55 Whim is the sacred threshold between
love and will, the apophatic sentry guarding the all-coercive power of what
can never be coerced. Meher Baba writes,
If there is to be a resurrection of humanity, the heart of man will have to be unlocked so that a
new love is born into it […] Love cannot be born of mere determination; through the exercise of
 will one can at best be dutiful. Through struggle and effort, one may succeed in assuring that one’s
external action is in conformity with one’s concept of what is right; but such action is spiritually
barren because it lacks the inward beauty of spontaneous love. Love has to spring spontaneously
from within; it is in no way amenable to any form of inner or outer force. Love and coercion can
never go together, but while love cannot be forced upon anyone, it can be awakened through love
itself. Love is essentially self-communicative; those who do not have it catch it from those who
have it. Those who receive love from others cannot be its recipients without giving a response
which, in itself, is the nature of love. True love is unconquerable and irresistible.56

The practical and theoretical implications of the spontaneous and self-

communicative nature of love for the question of will are profound.
Simultaneously, love’s theory and practice are free from systematization
since, blowing where it will, love is never subject to volitional
determination, whether affective or intellective. No turn of will, no desire or
decision, grasps love, which enjoys the sovereign status of the generator or
primum mobile of the will’s motion and thus no less the freedom of
indifference towards it. Whence:
1) The ethical non-proscriptiveness of the Nietzschean amor fati: ‘Let looking away be my only
negation!’57
2) The economical humility of the Bataillean depense: ‘Woe to those who […] insist on
regulating the movement that exceeds them with the narrow mind of the mechanic who changes a
tire’.58
3) The sorrowlessness of divine compassion, as explained by Aquinas: ‘a person is said to be
merciful (misericors), as being, so to speak, sorrowful at heart (miserum cor); being affected with
sorrow at the misery of another as though it were his own […] To sorrow, therefore, over the
misery of others belongs not to God; but it does most properly belong to Him to dispel that
misery’.59
Love is the Argument (from PIE root *arg- ‘to shine’), the true gold that,
outshining all other arguments, cannot be proven or denied, bought or sold,
by any silver. Its lesson is not a question of doctrine, but of waking up from
oneself, of coming to life, as per the Universal Message: ‘I have come not
to teach but to awaken. Understand therefore that I lay down no precepts
[…] You have not to renounce anything but your own self. It is as simple as
that, though found to be almost impossible’.60
Almost. Therefore, rather than speak to the question of will in the sense of
how – and how frequently deceptive and self-deluding is the will of the
person asking ‘how’! – I will just say a few words about this almost as the
space for the ‘cultivation of will’ in the civic terms proposed by Boris
Ondreička.61 Specifically, because mind touches truth only by stripping
away its falsehoods, and because in social matters this means above all
seeing through one’s personal falseness, I will speak to the issue of spiritual
barrenness, the lack of ‘the inward beauty of spontaneous love’ as the desert
ground where, precisely in the space of the manifest impossibility of the
task, will may be seeded into love’s garden. Since love is not amenable to
inner or outer force, the image of planting in desolate ground is a properly
hopeless figure for this order of cultivation which, because it clearly will
not work, just might work in the right way, that is, spontaneously.
Now the two great signs of spiritual barrenness especially evident in our
culture are worry and lust, that is, anxious concern about past or future and
appetitive craving for fleshy excitements. The first is typified by capitalism,
the pursuit of happiness through profitable business (from OE bisig,
‘anxious, worried’):
There are very few things in the mind which eat up as much energy as worry […] Worry is the
product of feverish imagination working under the stimulus of desires. It is a living through of
sufferings which are mostly our own creation.62

The second is typified by consumerism, the pursuit of happiness through

deceptive delights of distraction, possession, and ingestion (delight, from
de-lacere, ‘to lure away’):
A man likes curry because it tickles his palate. There are no higher considerations, so it is a form
of lust […] Lust of every type is an entanglement with gross forms, independent of the spirit
behind them. It is an expression of mere attachment to the objects of sense.63

As worry is the lowest form of imagination and thinking, so lust is the

lowest form of love. Where we see the former culturally elevated to the
point of identification with intellectual virtue, we see the latter culturally
elevated to the point of identification with affective virtue. Where the
former circulates under the masks of responsibility, concern, and care, the
latter circulates under the masks of fun, glamour, and affection. Moreover,
worry and lust rather obviously circumambulate the perimeter of the
seeming impossibility of renouncing one’s ‘own self,’ namely, the
identitarian so-and-so that one possesses. When you hear that you must
renounce nothing but yourself, immediately their voices are heard,
possessing one’s own: ‘If I give up myself, who will I be? Don’t me wrong,
I like the idea of not having to renounce anything else, but if I am no longer
me, how will I enjoy it all?’
It seems universally true that in order for something to take place, space
must be present for it. Natura abhorret vacuum. Even God, the ultimate
objectless object of love who gets in no one’s way, must, according to the
Christian principle of kenosis (withdrawal) and the Jewish idea of tzimtzum
(contraction), open a void in himself to create. Accordingly, in place of
whatever wants to pimp worry and lust as modes of love, let us put forward
the empty space of an inviolable NO that remains incomprehensible to
those claims, namely: 1) vis-à-vis worry, a surer conscience that is
interested without concern, a care that does not care; and 2) vis-à-vis lust, a
surer pleasure that is neither excited nor cold, a delight neither repressed
nor indulged. Together, this two-eyed NO may be conceived as the internal
looking away of vision, in the midst of all seeing, into the singularity of will
that cannot not continue gazing: ‘In that Light one becomes such that it is
impossible ever to consent to turn away from it toward any other sight,
because goodness, the object of the will, is all gathered there’ (Paradiso,
XXXIII. 100–4). By contrast, worry and lust are both perpetuated via
promiscuity, the panoply of cross-eyed mixings wherethrough one fails to
mind one’s own business or distinguish the difference between, in
Epictetus’s terms, what is up to us and what is not: ‘The things that are up
to us are by nature free, unhindered, and unimpeded; the things that are not
up to us are weak, enslaved, hindered, not our own’.64 Thus, to keep the
space between the two clear, is at once a form of cleanliness, of keeping
order, and a manner of not confusing what is possible and what is not, of
opening up more and more the negative space of the almost wherein self-
renunciation is not impossible. So in the iconography of temperance, the
inspirational flow of internal tears between the powers of the soul waters
without watering a spontaneously flowering rose (Figure 2).65
 Figure 2: Oswald Wirth, Le Tarot, “Tempérance.”66
A simple word for the desert space where the seed of will, exactly in the
absence of a place to root itself, might sprout into love is chastity (from PIE
root *kes- ‘to cut’ and cognate with Latin cassus ‘empty, void’). Chastity is
not love, but the faithful guard against its palpable absence, a space
impervious to spiritual barrenness holding open through enclosure the fact
that the desert of the world is not not a garden. As such, chastity is a sine
qua non of civic environment.67 It is not the key that will unlock the heart,
but a heart-lock to keep out keys that are not love’s. As chaste eyes mirror a
chaste heart, so chastity manifests in the form of a positively negative
looking, the clean gaze of a conscious no one, in the sense of a soul that
refuses either to identify or be identified with the gross, subtle, or mental
body, which it is not:
As Soul, it does nothing, it merely IS. When the mind is added on to the soul, it appears to think.
When the subtle body is added onto the soul with the mind, it appears to desire. When the gross
body is added onto all these, the soul appears to be engaged in actions. The belief that the soul is
doing anything is a false belief.68

The gaze reflecting this IS, as Agamben indicates in The Coming

Community, is not not love: ‘Seeing something simply in its being thus –
irreparable, but not for that reason necessary; thus, but not for that reason
contingent – is love’.69 Correlatively, evil is visible as the blind, soulless
identification of a being with its attributes, ‘the reduction of the taking-
place of things to a fact like others’.70 If chastity looks undesirable to you,
that is good news, a sign of its harmless, self-sufficient truth. Worry and lust
are shallow, dissatisfying forms of satisfaction, so their rejection necessarily
cannot feed the habitual impulse and stubborn demand for satisfaction.
Ultimately, the rejection of worry and lust, thanks to the impossibility of
definitive success in either area, is constituted by the radical negativity of
happiness, the pure despite of its inherent independence from all objects of
desire. But don’t believe me. Listen to the encouraging words of
Hadewych: ‘What satisfies Love best of all is that we be wholly destitute of
all repose, whether in aliens, or in friends, or even in Love herself […] And
that life is miserable beyond all that the human heart can bear’.71 And
Eckhart:
cast out all grief so that perpetual joy reigns in your heart. Thus the child is born. And then, if the
child is born in me, the sight of my father and all my friends slain before my eyes would leave my
 heart untouched. For if my heart were moved thereby, the child would not have been born in me,
though its birth might be near.72

Somewhere in the silence between the despair of self-denial and the joy of
self-detachment, faster than it can be seen by itself, the will flies free.

Abandon
The resurrection of humanity according to the whim of Reality means the
end of its death. It makes sense, then, to try to remember now what this
death will have been after it is over, which is something already forgotten,
namely, birth. So, while birth cannot be remembered, one may still
surrender the memory of it, and in this manner veer into its immemorial
nature, which is itself continuous with surrender. Thus for Cioran – as least
until he grew ‘bored with slandering the universe’73 – to wrestle with the
trouble of birth is a matter of ridding oneself of the traces and resonance of
its ‘scandal’. ‘‘Ever since I was born’ – that since has a resonance so
dreadful to my ears it becomes unendurable’. 74 ‘Detachment then should
apply itself to getting rid of the traces of this scandal, the most serious and|
intolerable of all’.75 After all, what is this obstinacy that insists on having
been born? What perverse form of life willfully takes possession of itself in
this way, saying, ever since I was born? Says the Schopenhauerian sage
Vernon Howard, ‘A body came into the world, but it wasn’t you’.76
Surrender marks the intersection of love, birth, and spontaneity. To
surrender is at once to give up and to give over, to renounce and provide. As
such surrender cannot be calculating, because it gives up on, or abandons
hope in, what it gives, and thus becomes capable of receiving it for the first
time. True surrender is spontaneous and found at the summit of love, past
lust and longing, when one surrenders oneself to the beloved or ‘a man
lay[s] down his life for his friends’ (John 15. 13), as well as in true
knowledge, when the identity of being the truth’s knower is renounced
before the truth itself. The verbal root of spontaneity, PIE *spend- (to make
an offering, perform a rite, to engage oneself by a ritual act), contains this
sense of sacrifice and self-offering, just as we speak of the spontaneous as
something ‘surrendered to’, as to a whim. The spontaneity of authentic
transformation is also thus a species of death, of surrendering to the
expiration of what is untenable, even if holding on to it would rob one of
nothing other than the chance to surrender, as when leaping into the sea. In
such situations we say that there is nothing to lose and everything to gain.
And that is the secret of even the most seemingly impossible surrender,
which by the truth of spontaneity is preserved from being a loss and gains
the giver otherwise unreceivable gifts – heads of the heads which are
severed. As Rumi writes, ‘I lowered my neck and said, “Cut off the head of
a prostrator with Dhu ‘l-Faqār.” | The more he struck with the sword, the
more my head grew, till heads a myriad sprouted from my neck’.77 Spiritual
tradition thus intuits that whatever one authentically surrenders is always
returned in some unforeseeable new present, as if never lost. Only a death
can give you birth. And if you surrender all, who and what is there to lose,
to not possess? Meister Eckhart says,
if a man has gone out of himself in this way, he will truly be given back to himself again […] and
all things, just as he abandoned them in multiplicity, will be entirely returned to him in simplicity,
for he finds himself and all things in the present ‘now’ of unity.78

Surrender is backed up by the infinite beyond of its own whim.

What does it mean, then, to surrender birth? It means a paradox: that birth
is surrendered by surrendering to birth. That is, since one never avoids birth
as such, birth is given up by giving in to birth in a way that abandons being
born, that surrenders all that is born about one’s being. And that is no
different from how – if one remembers – one is born, in a kind of leap-fall
that gives up on by giving in to itself, and vice-versa. One is born by
surrendering to birth, and one surrenders to birth, not by wanting it, but by
surrendering birth, by giving it up. In other words, nothing is born without
renouncing birth. Birth takes place in spontaneous surrender of birth.
Everyone is born by not wanting to be. Upside down. The latent does not
properly arrive but as it were falls into presence out of its already being
here. So Gebser states that ‘far- and deep-reaching mutations […] are latent
in origin, they are always back-leaps […] into the already (ever-)present
future’.79 Birth’s scandal (from PIE *skand- ‘to leap, climb’) is only a step.80
To where? According to Scotus, haecceity or thisness is the very summit of
actuality, its ultimate principle, as Gilson explains, ‘this “hecceity” is in
itself indifferent to both existence and non-existence. It is, in created being,
the ultimate determination and actuality which perfects its entity’.81 Far
from being a contingent adjunct of human existence, individuation is its
divine raison d’etre: ‘And in those beings which are the highest and most
important, it is the individual that is primarily intended by God.’82 Species
are a means of making individuals and individuals the way to produce
whoever you are. As Meher Baba makes explicit, individuality is not lost
when the drop realizes it is ocean – that is the whole point: ‘When the soul
comes out of the ego-shell and enters into the infinite life of God, its limited
individuality is replaced by unlimited individuality. The soul knows that it is
God-conscious and thus preserves its individuality’.83
The incalculable genius of individuation is that of a finitude more infinite
than infinity. So the concept of genius itself, originally the god who
becomes each man’s guardian at the moment of birth, addresses the divine
whimsy of individuation. As Agamben observes, in words that may as well
be spoken of birth itself,
One must consent to Genius and abandon oneself to him; one must grant him everything he asks
for, for his exigencies are our exigencies, his happiness our happiness. Even if his – our! –
requirements seem unreasonable and capricious, it is best to accept them without argument.84

In sum, surrendering birth drives one only further into the impossible core
of birth’s will as the immediate actuality of the evil genius of the universe,
which is nothing other than the spontaneous decay of the superessential
Reality into individualized consciousness of itself. Everything hinges on
this whim: ‘Whatever be the type of gross form and whatever be the shape
of the form, the soul spontaneously associates itself with that form, figure
and shape, and experiences that it is itself that form, figure and shape’.85
Only spontaneity makes sense of the intuitive dialectic and leapless leap of
birth, by which one is willed in the perfect slippage of this self-answering
question: Why am I me? – I am not. Only surrender will satisfy the terrible
desire which birth’s abyss generates. That which is dying for you to open,
yet is willing to wait forever, if only for the simple reason that, as Eckhart
says, ‘the opening and the entering are a single act’.86 So I will end, willing
the end of my will, with Desnos: ‘Ever since birth, we have been seeking
one night to walk together side by side, even if only for a moment in time.
Our age is infinity’.87

5 Cf. Nietzsche on the will of the question of will: ‘That a theory is refutable is, frankly, not the least
of its charms: this is precisely how it attracts the more refined intellects. The theory of ‘free will’,
which has been refuted a hundred times, appears to owe its endurance to this charm alone –:
 somebody will always come along and feel strong enough to refute it’ (Friedrich Nietzsche,
Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Judith Norman [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], p.
18).
6 See M. B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
7 Dante, Paradiso, trans. Robert M. Durling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), I. 91–140.
8 Augustine, Confessions, trans. F. J. Sheed, 2nd edition (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), VIII. 9. Will is
not grasped, but touched in the negativity of unknowing. Cf. ‘Philosophers tend to talk about the
will as if it were the most familiar thing in the world. In fact, Schopenhauer would have us believe
that the will is the only thing that is really familiar, familiar through and through, familiar without
pluses or minuses. But I have always thought that, here too, Schopenhauer was only doing what
philosophers always tend to do: adopting and exaggerating a popular prejudice. Willing strikes me
as, above all, something complicated, something unified only in a word – and this single word
contains the popular prejudice that has overruled whatever minimal precautions philosophers
might take. So let us be more cautious, for once – let us be “unphilosophical”. Let us say: in every
act of willing there is, to begin with, a plurality of feelings, namely: the feeling of the state away
from which, the feeling of the state towards which, and the feeling of this “away from” and
“towards” themselves’ (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 18).
9 ‘[T]he spark of sympathy shooting back and forth between two conscious human beings may be
experienced as an instantaneous spark. It may be transparently represented as one single event,
taking place in one single moment, but bridging the gulf between two individuals.
Phenomenologically, lightning strikes and mutually unites two phenomenal selves – this is the
“affective dissolution of the self” […] Because it involves loss of control over and transient
dissolution of the emotional self-model, the experience of catching each other in the act of falling
in love is a little bit like dying, and also a little bit like going insane’ (Thomas Metzinger, Being
No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity [Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2003], p. 603).
10 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), p. 26.
11 Augustine, Confessions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), X. 33.
12 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 174.
13 Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works, trans. and ed. Maurice O’C. Walshe (New York:
Herder & Herder, 2009), p. 298.
14 Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist, 1987), p. 82.
15 Dante, Paradiso, XV. 62–3.
16 ‘The greatest good God ever did for man was that he became man himself. Here I shall tell you a
story that is relevant to this. There was once a rich man and a rich lady. The lady had an accident
and lost one eye, at which she grieved exceedingly. Then the lord came to her and said, “Wife,
why are you so distressed?” You should not be so distressed at losing your eye”. She said, “Sir, I
do not mourn because I have lost my eye, I mourn for fear you might love me the less”. Then he
said, “Lady, I love you”. Not long afterward he put out one of his own eyes, and going to his wife,
he said, “Lady, so you may know I love you I have made myself like you: now I too have only
one eye”. This is like man, who could scarcely believe that God loved him so much, until God put
out one of His own eyes and assumed human nature’ (Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, pp.
279–80).
17 Hadewijch, The Complete Works, trans. Mother Columba Hart (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), p.
86.
18 Meher Baba, The Everything and the Nothing (Beacon Hill, Australia: Meher House Publications,
1963), p. 69.
19 John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon (De Divisione Naturae), ed. I. P. Sheldon-Williams and
Édouard A. Jeauneau, trans. John. J. O’Meara, 4 vols. (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced
Studies, 1999–2009), IV, 73.
20 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray
Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), p. 82.
21 Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, p. 424.
22 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), p. 78.
23 Félix Ravaisson, Of Habit, trans. Clare Carlisle and Mark Sinclair (New York: Continuum, 2008),
p. 55.
24 Augustine, Confessions, VIII.7.
25 The story is printed in Junji Ito, Gyo, Volume 2 (San Francisco: Viz Media, 2004), pp. 173–204
26 Biblical quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the
Apocrypha (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
27 Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003),
p. 55.
28 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Gods, and Other Writings, trans.
Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 143–4.
29 Clarice Lispector, Breath of Life, trans. Johnny Lorenz (New York: New Directions, 2012), p. 81.
30 E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992), p. 8.
31 See Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Come Cosa Che Cada: Habit and Cataclysm, or, Exploding Plasticity’,
in French Theory Today: An Introduction to Possible Futures, ed. Alexander R. Galloway (New
York: TPSNY, 2011).
32 Reza Negarestani, ‘The Corpse Bride: Thinking with Nigredo’, Collapse IV: Concept Horror
(2008), p. 160.
33 ‘Ex quibus humanae – inquit – vitae erroribus et aerumnis fit, ut interdum veteres illi, sive vates,
sive in sacris initiisque tradendis divinae mentis interpretes, qui nos ob aliqua scelera suscepta in
vita superiore, poenarum luendarum causa natos esse dixerunt, aliquid vidisse videantur:
verumque sit illud quod est apud Aristotelem, simili nos affectos esse supplicio, atque eos qui
quondam, cum in praedonum Etruscorum manus incidissent, crudelitate excogitata necabantur,
quorum corpora viva cum mortuis, adversa adversis accommodata, quam aptissime
colligabantur; sic nostros animos cum corporibus copulatos, ut vivos cum mortuis esse
coniunctos [Cicero, Hortensius]. Nonne qui ista senserunt, multo quam tu melius grave iugum
super filios Adam et Dei potentiam iustitiamque viderunt, etiamsi gratiam, quae per Mediatorem
liberandis hominibus concessa est, non viderunt?’ (Augustine, Contra Julianum, IV. 15 <
http://www.augustinus.it/latino/contro_giuliano/index2.htm>).
34 Ibid.
35 Augustine, Confessions, VI. 7.
36 ‘[I]o senti’, come cosa che cada, | tremar lo monte, onde mi prese un gelo | qual prender suol colui
ch’a morte vada’ (Purgatorio, XX. 127–9).
37 ‘Tremaci quando alcuna anima monda / sentesi, sì che surga o che si mova | per salir sù […] De la
mondizia sol voler fa prova, | che, tutto libero a mutar convento, | l’alma sorprende, e di voler le
giova. | […] E io, che son giaciuto a questa doglia | cinquecent’ anni e più, pur mo seniti | libera
volontà di miglior soglia: | però sentisti il tremoto’ (Purgatorio, XXI. 58–70).
38 Dante, Purgatorio, XX. 145–6.
39 See Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Absolute Secrecy: On the Infinity of Individuation’, in Speculation,
Heresy, and Gnosis in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion: The Enigmatic Absolute, eds.
 Joshua Ramey and Matthew Harr Farris (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), pp. 269–79.
40 ‘The original first word, through the original whim of God, created out of the latent Nothing the
latent original first impression of “Who am I?” and this original first impression procreated the
latent Nothingness as the original Creation. In turn, the procreation of the Nothingness procreates
the impressions which continue to preserve the Nothingness consistently as the original Creation,
until eventually this Nothingness is destroyed by opposite impressions through the processes of
reincarnation and involution of consciousness, and the final answer of “I am God” is obtained to
the first word “Who am I?”’ (Meher Baba, God Speaks: The Theme of Creation and Its Purpose,
2nd ed. [New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1973], p. 109).
41 Meher Baba, ‘The Whim from Beyond’, Beams on the Spiritual Panorama (San Francisco:
Sufism Reoriented, 1958), p. 9.
42 Meher Baba, God Speaks, p. 173, original emphasis.
43 Meher Baba, Beams, p. 10.
44 As quoted in Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2011), p. 187. Cf. ‘Incognitum Hactenus – not known yet or
nameless and without origin until now […] In Incognitum Hactenus, you never know the pattern
of emergence. Anything can happen for some weird reason; yet also, without any reason, nothing
at all can happen’ (Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials
[Melbourne: re.press, 2008], p. 49).
45 Dante Alighieri, Inferno, ed. and trans. Robert Durling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
46 Stephen Hawking, The Grand Design (New York: Bantam, 2010), p. 180.
47 Meher Baba, Everything and the Nothing, p. 55.
48 Augustine, Confessions, XIII. 9.
49 Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. xvii.
50 Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, p. 130.
51 Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls, trans. Ellen L. Babinsky (New York: Paulist,
1993), p. 105.
52 ‘E che è ridere se non una corruscazione de la dilettazione de l’anima, cioè uno lume apparente di
fuori secondo sta dentro?’ (Dante, Convivio, III. 8. 11, <
https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/library/convivio-italian/>).
53 Saint Teresa of Avila, The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila, trans. J. M. Cohen (New York: Penguin,
1957), pp. 136–7.
54 Saint Teresa of Avila, Life, pp. 136–8.
55 ‘Now we should not conclude that the negations are simply the opposites of the affirmations, but
rather that the cause of all is considerably prior to this, beyond privations, beyond every denial,
beyond every assertion’ (Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, p. 136).
56 Meher Baba, Discourses, 6th ed., 3 vols (San Francisco: Sufism Reoriented, 1973), I, 24.
57 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of
Songs, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), p. 157.
58 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, 2 vols., trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1991), I,
26.
59 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, Pt. 1, Q. 21, Art.4, <
http://dhspriory.org/thomas/summa/FP/FP021.html>. Cf. ‘Tristitia […] et dolor ex ipsa sui ratione
in Deo esse non possunt’ (Summa contra Gentiles, I.89,
<http://dhspriory.org/thomas/ContraGentiles.htm>) [sorrow and pain by their very nature cannot
be in God].
60 C. B. Purdom, The God-Man (Crescent Beach, SC: Sheriar Press, 1964), pp. 343–4.
61 ‘Can we cultivate a will? Can we cultivate a will of civic environment? QUESTION OF WILL
wants to search for productive ontologies before the world degenerates to an urgency of
reparatory oncologies’ (Boris Ondreička, http://questionofwill.com/en/about/).
62 Meher Baba, Discourses, III, 121.
63 Meher Baba, Discourses, III, 176.
64 Epictetus, The Handbook (The Encheiridion), trans. Nicholas White (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983),
p. 11.
65 See Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Hermeticism, trans. Robert Powell
(New York: Penguin, 1985), pp. 388–92, and Julius Evola, Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The
Metaphysics of Sex (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1983), p. 218.
66 Public domain image, source: < https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:14_-
_La_Temperance.jpg>
67 Cf. ‘Although communism was a conglomeration of a few correct ideas and many wrong ones, its
reasonable part – the understanding that shared life interests of the highest order can only be
realized within a horizon of universal co-operative asceticisms – will have to assert itself anew
sooner or later. It presses for a macrostructure of global immunizations: co-immunism.
Civilization is one such structure. Its monastic rules must be drawn up now or never; they will
encode the forms of anthropotechnics that befit existence in the context of all contexts. Wanting to
live by them would mean making a decision: to take on the good habits of shared survival in daily
exercises’ (Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics, trans. Wieland
Hoban [Cambridge: Polity, 2013], pp. 451–2).
68 Meher Baba, Discourses, III, 146. Cf. ‘As far as the superstitions of the logicians are concerned: I
will not stop emphasizing a tiny little fact that these superstitious men are loath to admit: that a
thought comes when “it” wants, and not when “I” want. It is, therefore, a falsification of the facts
to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “think”’ (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and
Evil, p. 17).
69 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 105.
70 Ibid., p. 14.
71 Hadewijch, The Complete Works, trans. Mother Columba Hart (New York: Paulist, 1980), p. 75.
72 Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, p. 75.
73 Liiceanu Gabriel and Ilieşiu Sorin, Apocalipsa dupa Cioran (1995).
74 E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Seaver, 1976), p.
3.
75 Ibid., p. 19.
76 Vernon Howard, Your Power of Natural Knowing (New Life Foundation, 1995), p. 164.
77 Mystical Poems of Rūmī, trans. A. J. Arberry, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1968), I, 117. Dhu ‘l-Faqār is ‘Alī’s sword. On beheading as symbol of self-annihilation and
mystical union, see Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Non potest hoc corpus decollari: Beheading and the
Impossible’, in Heads Will Roll: Decapitation in Medieval Literature and Culture, eds. Larissa
Tracy and Jeff Massey (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2012), pp. 15–36.
78 Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, p. 271.
79 Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, trans. Noel Barstad with Algis Mickunas (Athens, OH:
Ohio University Press, 1985), p. 530.
80 Cf. ‘If one can allow one’s mind to dwell on a bold hypothesis – which could also be an act of
faith in a higher sense – once the idea of Geworfenheit [thrownness] is rejected, once it is
conceived that living here and now in this world has a sense, because it is always the effect of a
 choice and a will, one might even believe that one’s own realization of the possibilities I have
indicated – far more concealed and less imaginable in other situations that might be more
desirable from the merely human point of view, from the point of view of the “person” – is the
ultimate rationale and significance of a choice made by a “being” that wanted to measure itself
against a difficult challenge: that of living in a world contrary to that consistent with nature, that
is, contrary to the world of Tradition’ (Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger, trans. Joscelyn Godwin and
Constance Fontana [Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2003], p. 227).
81 Etienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (New York: Random House,
1955), p. 766–7n68.
82 John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio II, d.3, n.251, quoted in John Duns Scotus, Early Oxford Lecture on
Individuation, trans. Allan B. Wolter (St. Bonaventure, New York: Franciscan Institute, 2005), p.
xxi.
83 Meher Baba, Discourses, II, 74.
84 Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone, 2007), p. 10.
85 Meher Baba, God Speaks, p. 5. Cf. ‘In the same sense the masters write that in the very instant the
material substance of the child is ready in the mother’s womb, God at once pours into the body its
living spirit which is the soul, the body’s form. It is one instant, the being ready and the pouring
in. When nature reaches her highest point, God gives grace: the very instant the spirit is ready,
God enters without hesitation or delay. In the Book of Secrets it says that our Lord declared to
mankind, “I stand at the door knocking and waiting; whoever lets me in, with him I will sup”
(Revelation 3. 20)’ (Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, p. 58). So for Plotinus, body is the
spontaneous instrument of soul: ‘In the absence of body, soul could not have gone forth, since
there is no other place to which its nature would allow it to descend. Since go forth it must, it will
generate a place for itself; at once body, also, exists’ (Plotinus, Enneads, IV. 3. 9,
http://classics.mit.edu/Plotinus/enneads.4.fourth.html).
86 Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, p. 58.
87 Robert Desnos, Mourning for Mourning (London: Atlas Press, 1992), p. 50.
 II.
OF A LEADEN HUE:
CHAUCERIAN NON-MYSTICISM

Figure 3: 16th-century portrait of Geoffrey Chaucer.88

For not what thou arte, ne what thou hast ben, beholdeth God with his merciful ighe,
bot that that thou woldest be.
– Cloud of Unknowing
I’ll have every appearance of a failure, and only I will know if that was the failure I
needed.
– Clarice Lispector
The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.
– Meister Eckhart

This essay, through an examination of Chaucer’s poetry, takes up the

question of what it means not to be a mystic. Drawing from a variety of
medieval and non-medieval sources, the argument falls into seven parts. In
the first, I examine Geffrey’s withholding of his name in the House of Fame
in light of the principles of individuation and impotentiality. In the second, I
show how Chaucer’s figuration of poetic creativity is connected to
apophasis, self-forgetfulness, and decreation. In the third, I argue that
Chaucerian non-mysticism it itself mystical in the sense of being a
passively active suspension of mysticism, a mysticism of impotentiality. In
the fourth, I explicate the connection between mysticism and impotentiality
in the context of medieval concepts of mystical sorrow. In the fifth, I
demonstrate significant intersections between the poet’s self-portrayal and
affects of mystical contemplation, with comparison to the Black Knight in
the Book of the Duchess. In the sixth, I show how the essential form of
Chaucer’s poetry intersects with the divine image. In the seventh, I suggest
that the Canon’s Yeoman figures most clearly the dark relation between
Chaucer’s poetry and the labor of mystical becoming.

Who Am I?
Caught up to the third book of the House of Fame, whether ‘in body or in
gost’ (981) no one knows, Chaucer’s visionary alter ego Geffrey gives the
following answer when asked by someone standing behind him, ‘Friend,
what is thy name? | Artow come hider to han fame?’ (1871–2).89
‘Nay, for sothe, frend,’ quod y;
‘I cam noght hyder, graunt mercy,
For no such cause, by my hed!
Sufficeth me, as I were ded,
That no wight have my name in honde.
I wot myself best how y stonde;
For what I drye, or what I thynke,
I wil myselven al hyt drynke,
Certeyn, for the more part,
As fer forth as I kan myn art’.
(House of Fame, 1873–82)
Amidst the clamor of critical love for what Chaucer famously says here
about himself as poet, what he does not say, and how he does not say it, has
passed relatively unseen. Refusing without refusing to name himself,
Geoffrey answers only the second of the stranger’s questions, denying the
first by means of a shrewd implication, namely, I do not answer your
question because it is enough for me that no one knows my name. And a
strange kind of negatively maximal sufficiency this is, an enough which,
defined upon the threshold between life and death, preserves itself at once
against the living death of being famous and the deathly life of immortal
fame itself.90 What is thus at stake in the form of the dreaming poet’s reply
is not only anonymity but anonymity’s authenticity or self-doing
(autoentes). More than just going without a name, true anonymity involves
the activity of preserving both anonymity and namedness against the
dominion of nomination, namely, the maintenance of a namelessness that
does not become another name and a namedness that does not lose the
anonymous. To maintain anonymity, to keep one’s namelessness in hand,
means both keeping one’s name out of the hands of others and grasping
one’s own namelessness. The power of the poet’s strong preference ‘That
no wight have my name in honde’ is inseparable from its application to
himself, from keeping his name in the hands of a no one, someone who is
not a creature or living being. This requires escaping the reverse affirmation
of I will not tell you who I am, a trap of a piece with the belief ‘that the will
has power over potentiality […] [which] is the perpetual illusion of
morality’.91 This itself – the principle of individuation or abyss of identity –
means both not answering and not not answering the question of one’s
name. The mode of Geffrey’s reply to the stranger’s question is that of a
naysaying that also refuses to say no by means of simply and actually doing
it, the act of a namelessness that, being free from answering the question of
itself, freely answers anyway, however it pleases. Like Bartleby the
Scrivener’s ‘I prefer not to’, which ‘opens a zone of indistinction between
yes and no […] between the potential to be (or do) and the potential not to
be (or do)’,92 Geffrey the Maker identifies himself according to a
nomenclative impotentiality, the ability of one who has a name to not have
one, to suspend one’s own name and stand apart from its call.
Chaucer’s self-centric drama of poetic anonymity participates in the more
broadly medieval ‘ethics of anonymous subjectivity’ according to which, as
Gregory B. Stone says, ‘The anonymity of the writer was the default mode,
the proper state of affairs; the appearance of an author’s name was reckoned
a defect’.93 Considering Dante’s third-person reference to himself in the De
Vulgari Eloquentia, Stone observes that
here we observe an ‘I’ reluctant to disclose its identity, an ‘I’ that will not name itself or will only
ever name itself as ‘I’. The subject in question willingly says ‘I am I’ but resists saying ‘I am X’.94

Recall that the question of self-indication similarly haunts the Christian

paradigm of mystical experience, St. Paul’s rapture to the third heaven,
which as reprised by Chaucer is spoken precisely between these
alternatives: ‘I know a man […]’ (II Corinthians 12. 2). Augustine’s
comment on this line, that ‘no one wonders whether he wrote this about
himself’ [de seipso haec eum scripsisse nemo ambigit],95 only indicates that
there is indeed a no one or not-man (ne + homo) who does wonder, just as
there is someone who understands time without the question of it: ‘What
therefore is time? If no one [nemo] asks me, I know; if I want to explain it
to someone questioning me, I do not know’.96 The certainty of knowledge is
paradoxically grasped through the presence of oneself as no one and/or no
one as oneself, in the psychosomatic impossibility of its own place: ‘Y wot
wel y am here, | But wher in body or in gost | I not, ywys’ (House of Fame,
980–2). Likewise, Geoffrey’s answer requires the presence of a stranger, a
question posed by nobody who is nearly oneself, as dramatized in his
ambivalent verbal appearance behind the dreamer, who in turn seems to
turn before hearing him, upon the blowing of Fame’s black trumpet:
With that gan about wende,
For oon that stood ryght at my bak,
Me thoughte, goodly to me spak,
And seyde […]
(House of Fame, 1868–71)
As the event of mystical vision makes it impossible either to speak or not
to speak of it as happening to me, the poetic event at once voids and fills, no
less than the abyss of one’s own birth, the I of its maker:
For never sith that I was born,
Ne no man elles me beforn,
Mette, I trowe stedfastly,
So wonderful a drem as I.
(House of Fame, 60–2).
For I, the dreamer, is the dream of dreams.
The place of this anonymity is not an abstraction but the poetic actuality of
a text by whose making an author’s being becomes beyond itself. Like the
three-faced fallen angel whose eternally-weeping body is the deepest
turning point of Dante’s descending ascent (Inferno, XXXIV. 85–93), the
self-otherness of textual authority is the dark trinity of verse itself as a
triune procession among three no-ones: 1) the inspired individual who
cannot claim identity with the origin of their art, 2) the unnamable divine
Author of all things, and 3) the anonymity of the work itself – its form and
matter. Thus Stone writes,
According to the text itself, the text is anonymous. What was the motivation for this reluctance to
name oneself as author? To be sure, it was in part a conventional rhetorical device, a demonstration
of one’s humility. More, it was grounded in the medieval writer’s sense that the originator or the
proprietor of the truth of the text is […] Another.97

Poetry’s immanent turning among these dark poles, the innominate

obscurity of its creative process, finds expression in the movement of
tetragrammatonic tautology whereby Dante answers the question of his
authorial identity in Purgatorio:
E io a lui: ‘I’ mi son un che, quando
Amor mi spira, noto, e a quell modo
ch’e’ ditta dentro vo significando’
(XXIV. 52–4)
[And I to him: ‘I in myself am one who, when Love breathes within me, take note, and to that
measure which he dictates within, I go signifying.]
The poet’s answer, being what it says and doing what it is, synthesizes the
movement of authorial self-naming and the process of signification itself: I
am one who goes signifying, I am I … The answer discloses the aporetic
magic of creative action as a mimesis of nothing, the copying of an image
whose existence or being there to copy is produced in the copying. As
Dante states in the De Monarchia, ‘in all action what is principally intended
by the agent […] is the disclosure or manifestation of his own image.
Whence it happens that every agent […] takes delight’.98 And in the
Convivio: ‘chi pinge figura, | se non può esser lei, non la può pore’ [he who
depicts a form, if he cannot become this form, cannot portray it].99 Thus
poetic action, the act of the true poet or creator, one who makes it new,
requires a leap of being beyond the given, a movement resulting in a word
that is never the same, in something more real for never having been, in
someone in touch with the superessential.
That Dante’s authorial self-portrait mimics the name of the Ineffable
exposes the properly mystical ground of poetry, specifically, the domain of
individuation whose hiddenness – the darkness of who itself – locates one
in divine freedom, in God’s own being above God. This freedom is the very
humanity of the divine, the inversive truth of creation whereby God’s
descent into man is actually divinity’s ascent above itself. Such is the truth
expressed in the essential namelessness of the mystical subject, called by
Pseudo-Dionysius as the state of ‘being neither oneself nor someone
else’,100 wherein the coincidence of man and God is realized. ‘There was a
man. That man had no name, for that man is God’.101 It is also found in the
idea that individuality is the highest product of creation, the work of its
production or summit of its poetry: ‘in those beings which are the highest
and most important, it is the individual that is primarily intended by
God’.102 You do not happen to be a human – the human happens in order to
be you. The placelessness or absolute foreignness of identity, the fact that
‘the essence of my self arises from this – that nothing will be able to replace
it’,103 is the continuity between human and divine creativity, just as it is the
defining or topological bounding of identity that forms, as diagnosed by
Laruelle under the name of philosophy, ‘this organon, this a priori form
which, giving us the World, forecloses the mystical experience which
intrinsically constitutes humans’.104 This continuity, the ‘ergonomic’ utopia
of poetry, is located in the paradox of individuation as simultaneously
wholly outside and wholly inside the order of making, its being an
unmakeable thing at once made and not made by making itself. Thus for
Scotus, haecceitas or thisness is ‘a positive and simply incommunicable
entity […] neither the matter nor the form, nor a composite of them, but the
mode or end term of them all, which completes and fulfills them, and is
their ultimate reality’.105 The actuality of the individual is something other
than either creature or creator, yet inseparable from both of them, being
‘rather quid concreatum, concreated with the creation of a created thing’.106
One’s specific existence, your own actuality, is neither a being nor nothing.
It is a creation of the uncreated – in both senses. The generic impossibility
of identity, the absurdity that one is so-and-so, is in reality an inexplicable
unity of specificity and the power to not be at all. On the one hand, this
unity appears as sheer absolute fact:
That I am a man is something other men share with me; that I see and hear and eat and drink, that
is the same as with cattle; but that I am, that belongs to no man but myself, not to a man, not to an
angel, not even to God except insofar as I am one with Him. It is one purity and one unity.107

On the other hand, this unity appears as the infinitely radical spontaneity
of self-generating being:
For in that essence of God in which God is above being and distinction, there I was myself and
knew myself so as to make this man. Therefore I am my own cause according to my essence,
which is eternal, and not according to my becoming, which is temporal. […] If I were not, God
would not be either. I am the cause of God’s being God: if I were not, then God would not be God.
But you do not need to know this.108

If the worldly or natural self feels itself to be someone because it simply

happens to be, the divine or supernatural self feels that it happens to be
because it is simply no one. For the former, becoming generates being – a
temporary, already-dead being that lacks itself, that will not be. For the
latter, being – an eternal, unborn being that, without need to, will be –
generates becoming. And it is this distinction which is enacted in the
countermovements of providing and withholding the name, in verbally
producing one’s being versus withholding one’s being from the sphere of
the word.

Ex Nihil-Know
The primary implication of the mystical view of selfhood upon the issue
of poetic identity – a view haunted by its own divine purposelessness and
being beyond the order of knowledge – is that the poet is authentically
someone who becomes himself by passing through the twin abyss of
individual birth and cosmic creation, the anonymous passageway of one’s
own being. As Agamben states,
According to the mystics, the obscure matter that creation presupposes is nothing other than
divine potentiality. The act of creation is God’s descent into an abyss that is simply his own
potentiality and impotentiality, his capacity to and capacity not to […] Only when we succeed in
sinking into this Tartarus and experiencing our own impotentiality do we become capable of
creating, truly becoming poets.109

The divinely obscure link between individuation and self-creation or

autopoiesis, the dark this that ‘you do not need to know’, is the ground of
the poet’s placing of his name on a need-to-know basis, that is, maintaining
both inner and outer silence with regard to the question who am I? – a
silence that no less demands to be spoken via answering-without-answering
the question. The mystical work of poetry, the production of its production,
is the paradoxically creative unmaking of its maker. This is the work of
decreation, or undoing of the createdness of being, which restores man to
divinity and to the work of the human itself. As it says in The Cloud of
Unknowing, ‘this […] work of the soule that most plesith God,’ through
which one forgets
all the creatures that ever God maad and the werkes of hem […] this is the werk […] in the
whiche man schuld have contynowed yif he never had synned, and to the whiche worching man
was maad, and alle thing for man, to help him and forther him therto, and by the whiche a man
schal be reparailed agein.110

The perfection of creation is found through its own forgetting, just as

creative activity itself occurs through the spontaneity of positive
forgetfulness, which no less operates through the freedom of refusal. As
Meher Baba explains,
positive forgetfulness is one in which the mind remains aware of external stimuli, but refuses to
react to them […] One who is not equipped with this positive forgetfulness becomes a barometer
of his surroundings […] [and] is perpetually at war with himself […] In the exercise of this
positive forgetfulness, not only is non-reaction to adverse circumstances essential, but also non-
reaction to favourable and pleasurable circumstances […] In such moments of true forgetfulness
there is a mental detachment from all material surroundings in which the poet allows his
imagination to soar. An artist, when he gives form to an ideal in which he completely forgets
himself and irrelevant surroundings, creates a masterpiece.111

In these terms, Geffrey’s no-less no to the question of his name defines the
non-difference between the ground of his art and his indifference to both
good and bad fame. The refusal of fame affirms not only self-possession but
self-forgetfulness, the state out of which the poet-dreamer is producing the
whole dream he is experiencing in in the first place. Or as Jordan Kirk
observes, commenting on the dreamer’s sleepiness, ‘Chaucer imagines a
state of dumbness from out of which utterance would have, somehow, to
emerge’.112 Just as Chaucer dreams himself into a special incognito voyager
through his own poetic vision, the mysticism of poetry itself, its hidden
work, is on the order of a secret mission – a secrecy on par with one’s birth
– to discover the identity of salvation and there being no one to save.
Clarice Lispector calls this process deheroization:
The gradual deheroization of oneself is the true labor one works at beneath the apparent labor,
life is a secret mission. So secret is the true life that not even to me, who am dying of it, can the
password be entrusted […] And the secret is such that, only if the mission manages to be
accomplished shall I, in a flash, perceive that I was born in charge of it […] Until it is finally
revealed to me that the life in me does not bear a name. And I too have no name, and that is my
name. And because I depersonalize myself to the point of not having a name, I reply whenever
someone says: I. Deheroization is the great failure of a life.113

Here we find the mystical relation between greatness and failure,114 the
intersection of Hell and poetic vision, which for Dante holds the salvific
logic of his work:
Tanto giù cadde che tutti argomenti
a la salute sua eran già corti,
fuor che mostrarli le perdute genti.
(Purgatorio, XXX. 136–8)
[He fell so low that all means for his salvation had already fallen short, except to show him the
lost people].
Proportionally, the sense of Chaucer’s self-portraying answer will not stay
within the bounds of humility or self-reliance as expressed in his putative
death-bed poem Truth: ‘Flee fro the prees and dwelle with sothfastnesse’
(1). As Geffrey takes a subtler middle path between fleeing and joining the
crowd, so his answer, a stridently quiet trumpeting of the truth of quietude,
is tonally adapted to the difficulty of speaking over the voices of others
without being overheard. Where a simple ‘no’ would have sufficed,
Chaucer-Geffrey performs an answer translatable into an obscurely
ambivalent array of statements: 1) no one needs to know my name because
I know who I am; 2) everyone needs to know that I do not know who I am;
3) no one needs to know my name because I do not know who I am; 4)
everyone needs to know that I know who I am. Fame must be bounded with
silence and self-knowledge with unknowing. For like Dante, who goes
signifying ‘a quell modo | ch’e’ ditta dentro,’ in the measure that it is
spoken within, Chaucer handles himself in a form of apophatic proportion
to poetry, ‘As fer forth as I kan myn art’. The poet knows himself insofar as
he knows, is capable of, poetry – the identity of his art and the art that
makes him in the first place. Via poetry, I am myself, as far as I know. In
preferring to move within the autonomy of an anonymous interiority,
Chaucer like Dante chooses the heart over head as the locus of identity, that
more open sphere of memorial and imaginative existence defined by
Augustine as ‘ubi ego sum quicumque sum’ [where I am whoever (or
whatever) I am].115

Not Not Mysticism

Now the question to pursue is, in what sense is Chaucer’s poetry mystical?
Virtually no one thinks of Chaucer as a mystic, starting with the scholars
who haven taken the mystical potential of his work most seriously.116 Of
Chaucer’s non-mysticism, his inversion of the ‘third heaven’ of ecstatic
vision into the hologrammatic earthly contingency of the House of Fame is
exemplary. Far from being ‘caught up to paradise’ and hearing ‘things that
cannot be told, which man may not utter’ (II Corinthians 12. 4), Geffrey
hears ‘a great noyse withalle’ (2141) and sees only likenesses of ‘the same
wight | Which that the word in erthe spak, | Be hyt clothed red or blak’
(1076–8) – a joke on the colors of medieval book bindings which
underscores the idea that this is not a vision but a dream made out of texts.
Even at its most otherworldy, Geffrey’s experience does not pass beyond
the threshold of the book, writings as good as the stars themselves, and
easier on the eyes.117 And where there is a secret in Chaucer, it is not the
unutterable secret of those who love to say ‘Secretum meum mihi, secretum
meum mihi’ (Isaiah 24. 16),118 but a secret generated by its mere
withholding:
That shal not now be told for me –
For hit no need is, redely;
Folk kan synge hit bet than I;
For al mot out, other late or rathe.
(House of Fame, 2136–40)
Here Chaucer’s comically mystical secret is simply something you do not
need to hear, but might hear eventually, never knowing whether it was what
the poet heard.
But what does it mean to not be a mystic? Is it a matter of being other than
mystical, or being without mysticism, or being incapable of being a mystic?
Or is the substance of Chaucer’s non-mysticism something deeper and more
obscure, a real suspension or eclipse of the mystical itself? That this poet
concerns himself with inverting or profaning the experience of mystical
vision, an operation that cannot not produce a punctum of identity with the
profaned, is at minimum proof that his non-mysticism is not a matter of
indifference. Furthermore, that Chaucer’s work is tied to the alter-egoic
exercise of impotentiality and unknowing – ‘I not, ywys, but God, thou
wost’ (House of Fame, 982) – suggests that his non-mysticism is indeed a
substantial, if dark, i.e. mystical or hidden, matter.
To start, the mystical possibilities of the scene of non-self-naming
addressed above are not insignificant. The stranger standing right behind
Geffrey, posing the unanswerable question of himself, is too much (and not
enough) like the God who converts Augustine:
But You, Lord […] turned me back toward myself, taking me from behind my own back, where I
had put myself all the time that I preferred not to see myself. And you set me there, before my own
face.119

The implicit cephalophory of Geffrey’s answer – ‘by my hed! […] as I

were ded […] my name in honde’ – is too much (and not enough) like the
martyrdom of St. Denis the Areopagite, the inexistent author of the
Christian apophatic tradition: ‘Tunc erigens se sancti viri corpus exanime,
apprehendit propriis manibus sanctum caput abscissum’ [Raising itself, the
lifeless body of the holy man then grasped with his own hands the sacred
severed head].120 And the final appearing non-appearance of an unknown
‘man of great auctoritee’ (2158) is too much (and not enough) like a
theophany. As the text is about to dream itself awake, a crowd of names and
concepts presses, ‘And everych said, “What thing is that?” | And somme
sayde, “I not never what”’ (2147–8), recalling an instruction from The
Cloud of Unknowing:
Do that in thee is to lat as thou wist not that thei prees so fast apon thee, bitwix thee and thi God.
And fonde to loke as it were over theire schuldres, seching another thing; the whiche thing is God,
enclosid in a cloude of unknowyng. And yif thou do thus, I trowe that withinne schort tyme thou
schalt be esid of thi travayle.121

Does not this present absence of the mystical element confirm Chaucer’s
love of the unknowable, his understanding that the incomprehensibility of
the incomprehensible is not reason to disregard but the precise grounds of
searching for it, that seeking and finding endlessly converge? ‘That is
indeed how incomprehensible things have to be searched for, lest you
should think that you have found nothing when you have found out how
incomprehensible the thing you are searching for is’.122 Is not the poet’s
adventure in failed mysticism of a piece, impotentially, with the miraculous
failure of mystical finding? As Eriugena says:
since that which human nature seeks and toward which it tends, whether it moves in the right or
the wrong direction, is infinite and not to be comprehended by any creature, it necessarily follows
that its quest is unending and that therefore it moves forever. And yet although its search is
unending, by some miraculous means it finds what it is seeking for: and again it does not find it,
for it cannot be found.123

Is there not a yes to these questions hiding in the substantial darkness and
obscure negativity of Chaucer’s relation – at once failure and refusal – to
the mystical? I prefer to think so, at minimum for the poetry of it, out of
love of finding what seeing Chaucer’s secret mysticism produces.
Chaucer’s mystical non-mysticism is rooted, I will maintain, in the
operation of impotentiality within his works. More specifically, the mystical
sense of his poetry is to be found most clearly in its figuration of
intellectual, affective, and corporeal forms of darkness (ignorance, sorrow,
and blackness) and their relation to themes of poetic labor. Through these
forms, Chaucer figures the creative unground or abyss of his poetry in a
dark manner that is properly mystical. Chaucerian non-mysticism signals in
a special way what it means to be, in an intensive sense, not not a mystic,
and more generally, what it means to live freely and creatively from the
radical immanence of a negativity that is unbound by opposition to
affirmation. In analogy with the head-bearing Pseudo-Dionysian individual
who is ‘uplifted to the ray of the divine shadow’ and united to the Truth
‘beyond every denial [and] beyond every assertion’, who finds God via the
indifference of individuality itself or ‘being neither oneself nor someone
else’,124 Chaucer is neither a mystic nor not a mystic – both an indifferent
mystic and a different non-mystic. Chaucer’s poetry leads – and leadens –
one to the place or state where precisely not being a mystic partakes of the
superessential, that Reality for which even what is not, the inexistent itself,
is full of love. So writes Dionysius in The Divine Names: ‘one might even
say that nonbeing itself longs for the Good which is above being. Repelling
being, it struggles to find rest in the Good which transcends all being, in the
sense of a denial of all things’.125 As nonbeing or nothing is here envisioned
as loving by means of its very incapacity to do so, non-mysticism via
Chaucer is on the order of a negative love that realizes what it is incapable
of by not doing it.

Tearless Tears
To prepare for seeing the poet’s darkness in these terms, let us recall that
such an inverted impotentiality – the powerless power of mysticism itself –
is present in the characteristically medieval contemplative labor of mystical
sorrow, particularly in the monastic experience-practice of penthos
(mourning, compunction), a purifying feeling-knowing which finds true joy
in the perfection of grief. In The Ladder of Divine Ascent, John Climacus
defines penthos in terms of a continuous disposition of self-inversion:
We have not been called here to a wedding feast. No indeed. He who has called us has
summoned us to mourn for ourselves. Blind tears are suitable only to irrational beings […] Tears
are actually the product of thought, and the father of thought is a rational mind. […] Wear
something to encourage you in your mourning. Those who lament the dead wear black. And if you
find yourself unable to mourn, then lament that very fact. […] The man wearing blessed, God-
given mourning like a wedding garment gets to know the spiritual laughter of the soul.126

Serving as a kind of asymptotic entryway into the supreme passionless

sorrow of divine being, penthos – imperatively – is itself an inverted
impotential, something that one should never not do, even when one cannot:
When we die, we will not be criticized for having failed to work miracles. We will not be
accused of having failed to be theologians or contemplatives. But we will certainly have some
explanation to offer to God for not having mourned unceasingly.127

This mystical mourning, occupying the power of a negative virtuality, is

strangely at home within the inability to mourn and is thus a living index of
the realm of divine actuality, where what does not happen is eternally more
real than what does.128 Like the charity of the left hand’s blindness to the
right hand’s works (Matthew 6. 3), penthos is paradoxically preserved and
perfected in the dark light of unawareness to itself:
I have seen mourning in some; in others I have watched mourning for the inability to mourn, for
though they have it they act as if they did not, and through such splendid ignorance they remain
inviolate. Regarding such, it was said: ‘The Lord makes wise the blind’ (Psalms 145. 8).129

Similarly, in The Cloud of Unknowing, perfect sorrow – the summit of

contemplation wherethrough the abyss between oneself and God is finally
crossed – is defined in factical continuity with the bare knowing and feeling
of one’s own being, such that the definition itself bleeds into experience of
what it defines:
Alle men han mater of sorow, bot most specyaly he felith mater of sorow that wote and felith that
he is. Alle other sorowes ben unto this in comparison bot as it were gamen to ernest. For he may
make sorow ernestly that wote and felith not onli what he is, bot that he is. And whoso felid never
this sorow, he may make sorow, for whi he felid yit never parfite sorow.130

So, where a gloomy face is a sign of hypocrisy – ‘Be not sad like the
hypocrites’ (Matthew 6. 16) – penthos, in the form of non-manifest
mourning for not mourning, fulfills the paradox of a true hypocrisy whose
authenticity resides in the silent-even-to-itself apotentiality of a secretly
active mournful not-mourning, a sorrow that mysteriously persists without
its own potential.
Where potentiality is the power to do something, and impotentiality is the
power to positively not do something, like the active silence of someone
who can but wills not to speak, apotentiality here means more than a lack of
power but a power as it were more powerful in its lack, a third form of
potentiality altogether: the power to do something at once without the
power to do it and without the doing of it, without act. If doing what one
properly cannot, what is impossible, connotes a miracle, this positively
inactive apotentiality is a species of negative miraculousness, the mystery of
doing what you cannot by not doing it.131 Where freedom or the ability to do
as one wills is ‘to be found in the abyss of potentiality’ and ‘is […] to be
capable of one’s own impotentiality’,132 mystical sorrow points to a freedom
beyond freedom, a freedom free of its own free will, a freedom free of itself
that is freedom: ‘The just man serves neither God nor creatures, for he is
free, and the closer he is to justice, the closer he is to freedom, and the more
he is freedom itself’.133 This is the realm of a will so unitary that its
impotentiality paradoxically extends into negation of its own divine ground:
Such a man is so one-willed with God that he wills all that God wills and in the way God wills it.
[…] In this way, one wills to do without God for God’s sake, to be sundered from God for God’s
sake.134

Such freedom is the characteristic condition of the astonished souls who,

as Porete says, ‘do not know how to consider themselves good or evil’ and
are pregnant with ‘the true seed of divine Love, which makes the Soul
completely surprised without being aware of it’135 – they who are
intoxicated without drinking: ‘And she is inebriated not only from what she
has drunk, but very intoxicated and more than intoxicated from what she
never drinks nor will ever drink’.136
In sum, non-mysticism and mystical sorrow coincide in the secrecy of
mysticism itself, in the space of non-difference between its summit and
failure, where the real mystic is one who succeeds at failing to be a mystic.
And this is close to where Agamben’s reflections on potentiality ultimately
lead, to where ‘the creature is finally at home, saved in being
irredeemable’.137 Or as Mechthild of Magdeburg exclaims, ‘Ah, blessed
Estrangement from God, how bound I am to you in love!’138 And yet, what
diligence is needed to never become incapable of distinguishing, in the
omnipresence of their meeting, between the comfort of this home and the
ecstasy of this exile, between the ‘noble castle’ (Inferno, IV. 106) of Limbo,
dwelling place of so many wonderful poets and philosophers, and the
immeasurable enclosure of the true Paradise, ‘garden | of the eternal
gardener’ (Paradiso, XXVI. 64–5). As we turn now to look more closely
through the chamber of Chaucer’s eyes, beware lest we forget this
difference.
 As It Were a Mazed Thing
Chaucer portrays himself in the House of Fame as a dazed being, an entity
astonished to the point of mute, sleepy, amazement. The atmosphere of
epistemological stupor which fills the dreaming poet’s vision extends from
the stars he would rather not look upon – because books on the matter
provide sufficient experience of a light that would destroy his sight (1011–
17) – to the texts before which his vision diurnally dims:
In stede of reste and newe thynges
Thou goost hom to thy hous anoon,
And, also domb as any stoon,
Thou sittest at another book
Tyl fully daswed ys thy look;
And lyvest thus as an heremyte,
Although thyn abstynence ys lyte.
(House of Fame, 654–8)
The eagle who, bearing Geffrey aloft, here portrays the poet is himself his
dream of the eagle which Dante’s sleeping pilgrim-self dreams while being
carried in the flesh to the gates of Purgatory by St. Lucy (Purgatorio, IX.
13–63), the saint whose plucked-out and miraculously restored eyes
embody the intimacy between blindness and illumination. That the eagle
speaks these lines in mid-flight to his likewise stupefied cargo – ‘For so
astonyed and asweved | Was every vertu in my heved, […] | That al my
felynge gan to dede’ (549–52) – both underscores the creative intersection
between the poet’s waking-reading and sleeping-dreaming states and
exacerbates the skeptical comic sense that this dream is not true spiritual
vision but the speech of someone talking alone in their sleep – words
spoken and heard by no one, the prolix babbling of the runaway animal of
imagination itself. And yet, in the ecstasy of the eagle’s gaze, the form of
Geffrey’s vision per se is seen, dramatizing how the poetic-dream doubles
as an avenue of self-awareness, the intensification of vision to include the
being of vision itself, i.e. not only what, but that and how one is seeing.
And by making the reader see him see himself in the likeness of a hermit,
Chaucer both casts his person into the poem as the shadow of a
contemplative and calls into question the reader’s own self-awareness, the
lucidity of our look.
Are we to see this poet, then, as only a contemplator of shadows, a seer
without real illumination? Or does the very darkness of Chaucer’s vision,
the intensive ignorance of his dreaming, convey a kind of secret
knowledge? The answer will depend, of course, on whether and how and
how far one desires to see what there is to see in this darkness, which first
means, within oneself, seeing that darkness, like the uchromic color black,
is precisely what can never be located ‘out there’. But however gravely or
lightly we choose to take Chaucer’s poetry as a form of contemplative
mysticism – and I think one must do both at once – the fact remains that his
verse works mystically, that there is an element of unmasterable hiddenness
at work in his work, a labor of darkness. Is Chaucer showing us the identity
– as per the word-play in the last line of the poem’s invocation, ‘What that I
mette or I abreyd’ (110) – of waking and dreaming? And/or the imaginal
essence of creation, the inseparability of the seeing of making and the
making of seeing? – ‘And God saw […]’. (Genesis 1. 4). One can neither
say nor not say. But the poet is illuminated by his own darkness, clarified in
a vision of the unseeability of things.
Here we must conceive of how Chaucer’s poetry operates, not like the
non-mystical mysticism or mysticism-without-God of modernity (a
religiously pseudo-religious mysticism in the absence of divinity’s reality),
but as a mystical non-mysticism, in the sense of a dark presencing of hidden
reality without recourse to special individual spiritual relation with the
Deity, a mystified and mystifying mysticism – neither for nor against
religion – of the simple divinity of reality itself. Here I see the secret
mission of Chaucer’s poetic vision as no less profound, no less universal,
than Dante’s – minus the empyrean conspiracy of individualized
experience. With Dante’s verse, significance unfolds via divine authorial
providence, as hermeneutically too good to be true, so that one typically
senses with the meaning that the poet was always there before you.
Chaucer’s word, by contrast, is full of turns opening into dubious, hard-to-
recognize alleyways one never quite knows whether anyone has walked.
Alchemically, Chaucer’s poetry is not gold but lead, a potential of truth
‘Lurkynge in hernes and in lanes blynde’ (Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, 658). It
does not tell or show you how to accomplish the transformation, much less
speculatively navigate the seas beyond Dante’s mystical neologism,
trasumanar (to pass beyond the human). But it quietly does perhaps the
most spiritually crucial thing over and over, which is to lead newly back to
the place where one must actually labor or ‘with fear and trembling work
out your salvation’ (Philippians 2. 12). The directive force of Chaucer’s
(non)mysticism, not unlike the voice of The Cloud of Unknowing, is
something which precisely points recursively to one’s essential lostness, to
our inexplicable heaviness to ourselves, to the fundamental bewilderment of
human being: ‘Look up now, weike wreche, and see what thou arte.’139
Chaucer’s itinerarium mentis or ascensus cordis – the way he takes and
the way he shows – is a flightless and lightless spiritual path, like the
obscure dream of someone who sleepwalks through the whole divine
comedy of this so-called world. And this of course is perfectly mystical,
given that that is how the soul most securely travels, by the light its own
night. As John of the Cross, commenting on his verse, ‘In darkness and
secure’ [A oscuras y segura], explains,
In this night the soul subtly escapes from its enemies, who were always opposed to its departure.
[…] it departs by a very secret ladder of which no one in the house knows. […] the darkness […]
relates to the sensory, interior, and the spiritual appetites and faculties, because this night darkens
their natural light so that through the purgation of this light they may be illumined supernaturally.
It puts the sensory and spiritual appetites to sleep, deadens them, and deprives them of the ability
to find pleasure in anything. […] And over all this hangs a dense and burdensome cloud that
afflicts the soul and keeps it withdrawn from God. As a result the soul asserts that in darkness it
walks securely.140

As sleepwalking itself constitutes an uncanny exercise of potentiality –

doing what you can by not doing it and thus doing what you as such cannot
– the mystical working of Chaucer’s non-mysticism may be understood as a
mode of spiritual somnambulism, a walking through the darkness of being
that holds open its hidden reality by remaining closed to it. Compare the
opening of the Book of the Duchess, in which the poet is deadened by a
sleeplessness indistinguishable from the indifference of thought itself:
I have so many an ydel thought
Purely for defaute of sleep
That, by my trouthe, I take no kep
Of nothing, how yt cometh or goth,
Ne me nys nothyng leef nor looth.
Al is ylyche good to me –
Joye or sorowe, wherso hyt be –
For I have felynge in nothing,
But as yt were a mased thyng,
Always in poynt to falle a-doun;
For sorwful ymagynacioun
Ys always hooly in my mynde.
(Book of the Duchess, 4–15)
 Here the poet embodies, not the pain of spiritual longing, but a ( )hole
sorrow in which joy and sorrow are alike good, as if perpetually falling
towards the in-difference of their factical ground: ‘The root of all pure joy
and sadness is that the world is as it is’.141 This radical yet numb sorrow,
seen in the black indistinction between the night of the world and the
darkness of the will to itself, is like the shadow of ecstasy as defined by
Bataille: ‘The object of ecstasy is the absence of an outside answer. The
inexplicable presence of man is the answer the will gives itself, suspended
in the void of unknowable night’.142 Where in ecstasy one stands outside
oneself, wakefully asleep to one’s identity, in the shadow ecstasy of this
sleepless sorrow we see the self precisely unable to step out of itself, bound
to the gravity and presence of its own inexplicably still-living being. In
these terms, the poet’s maddening, melancholic insomnia offers itself as a
negative analogy of mystical ecstasy, that which, as the Cloud-author
affirms, ‘revith fro a man alle wetyng and felyng of his beyng’.143 As the
self-sorrowing mystical subject of Cloud ‘goth ni wood for sorrow’,144 so
does Chaucer’s unsleeping voice walk hauntingly on the verge of the other
sense of hooly: ‘This sorow, yif it be trewly conseyvid, is ful of holy desire;
and elles might never man in this liif abide it ne bere it’.145 That Chaucer is
indeed conceiving of his sorrow in such para-mystical terms is confirmed in
the figure of the Black Knight, the personification of non-survivable
sorrow:
Hit was gret wonder that Nature
Myght suffer any creature
To have such sorwe and be not ded.
(Book of the Duchess, 467–9).
As the embodied pupil of the dreamer’s own ‘sorwful ymagynacioun’ (14)
– ‘For y am sorwe, and sorwe ys y’ (597) – the weeping Black Knight
blindly reflects both the mystical ‘gift’ or ‘grace’ of tears (donum
lacrimarum, gratia lacrimarum) and the Crucifixion darkness, the universal
‘eclipse’ whereby, as Julian of Norwich relates, St. Denis was converted
and the ‘planettes and the elementes,’ ‘the firmamente and erth, failed for
sorow’:146
For nothyng I leve hyt noght,
But lyve and deye ryght in this thoght;
For there nys planete in firmament,
Ne in ayr ne in erthe noon element,
That they ne yive me a yifte echone
 Of wepynge whan I am allone.
(Book of the Duchess, 691–6)
Reprising Virgil’s ‘lacrimae rerum’,147 whose visual context (the mural of
the Trojan War in the temple at Carthage) is behind the windows in the
dreamer’s room where ‘hooly al the story of Troye | Was in the glasynge
ywroght’ (Book of the Duchess, 326–7), we may term this solitary cosmic
sorrow the gift of the tears of things, a dark painting or glassing of the
windows of the soul with everything’s unbearable gift.
Similarly, Chaucer’s own otherworldly bodily appearance in the
Canterbury Tales – ‘“What man artow?’ quod he; | […] evere upon the
ground I se thee stare […] | He semeth elvyssh by his contenaunce’
(Prologue to Sir Thopas, 695–13) – suggests, like a dark secret too open to
see, a too-deep-for-words stupefaction before the ground or radically
unknowable fact of reality, a reality that, insofar as our being is
commensurate with it, is itself stupefied, suspended in the question of itself
(see Figure 3). Reflecting this authorial self-portrait, at the inconclusive end
of the House of Fame we find the inarguable appearance, the pure authority
of a human no one – the impersonal human individual – as the unknowable
itself:
Atte laste y saugh a man,
Whiche that y nat ne kan;
But he semed for to be
A man of gret auctorite....
(House of Fame, 2155–8)
In other words, Chaucer unveils authority, perforce coinciding with his
own, to be the unknowable itself as what bears the highest authority over
us, that that which I do not know nor can. That this crucial line has been
commonly emended to ‘Which that y nevene nat ne kan,’ which ruins the
echo of Geffrey’s earlier paraphrase of Paul – ‘I not, ywys, but God, thou
wost’ (982) – and problematically restricts the problem of the status of
appearance to a question of nameability precisely where the poem is
stepping beyond the name, is itself a marker of this essential nebulousness
of being, the omnipresent depth of the unknowable that is too immediate,
too clear and present, in a sense too lordly or dangerous (fr. dominus), to
see.148 As if the editorial desire for a name would erase the unnameability of
authority itself...
Where Dante’s paradisical vision climaxes with seeing the insoluble
species of man in the light of God – ‘dentro da sé […] mi parve pinta de la
nostra effige’ (Paradiso, XXXIII. 131) [within itself it seemed depicted
with our image] – Chaucer’s verse circles upon the very threshold of
unknowability and humanity, the divine appearance of the nameless human
image itself, whose power is inseparable from one’s not seeing it. Again
there are significant possible echoes of The Cloud of Unknowing, between
the crowd’s treading ‘fast on others heles’ (2153) and stamping ‘as men
doon aftir eles’ (2153–4) and the ‘travaile […] [of] tredyng doun of the
mynde of alle the creatures that ever God maad’,149 as well as between the
phrasing of the emended line, ‘nat ne kan,’ and the description, in the same
passage in the Cloud, of the divine secret (privité) ‘the whiche man may
not, ne kan not, speke’ and which the anonymous author dares ‘not take
apon me to speke with my blabryng fleschely tonge’.150 As this ultimate
image is – with radical implicity – the last image the poet dreams before
waking, the visibly invisible line or limen between Geffrey and Chaucer, so
is it formally equivalent with the first image of all vision, the seeing before
seeing or species of vision itself through which anything is seen, the non-
imaginal image which simply is, as expounded by Bonaventure, pure divine
being (purissimum esse):
How remarkable, then, is the blindness of the intellect which does not take note of that which it
sees first, and without which it can know nothing. But just as the eye, when it is concerned with the
variety of colors, does not see the light through which it sees other things […] so the eye of our
mind, intent as it is on particular and universal beings, pays no attention to that being which is
beyond every genus even though it is that which first comes to the mind, and it is through this that
all other things are known. […] Accustomed as it is to the darkness of things and to the phantasms
of sensible objects, when the mind looks upon the light of the highest being, it seems to see
nothing. And it does not understand that this darkness itself is the highest illumination of our
mind.151

It is perfect, then, that Chaucer opens the third book of the House of Fame
by recapitulating the opening lines of Paradiso, in which Dante invokes
divine power to manifest poetically ‘l’ombra del beato regno | segnata nel
mio capo’ (I.23–4) [the shadow or image of the blessed realm imprinted in
my head] – an image Dante clearly wants us to grasp simultaneously as
both the individualized visionary seed of his ‘poema sacro’ (Paradiso,
XXV. 1) and the universal divine image in which humanity is made, one’s
seeing of which is to be in Paradise. For in doing so, Chaucer elides or
secrets the designation of this shadow as such, asking for help ‘to shewe
now | That in myn hed ymarked ys’ (1101–2), only to explain what he
means with a bathetic gloss: ‘Loo, that is for to menen this, | The Hous of
Fame for to descryve’ (1104–5). It is thus as if Chaucer, suspending any
name for what is in his head, wants to dilate the space between the literal
and mystical or anagogical senses almost irreparably, to a point where the
reader must either lose both or identify them completely or somehow do
both at once. In other words: the divine image is so dark that it is not even
an image and/or it is so clear that it is whatever is in your head.

So Heavy a Burden of Himself

Chaucer’s poetic form, in silent parallel to the mystically sorrowful
contemplative who, bound within the negative gravity of his own that,
‘berith so hevy a birthen of himself,’152 is that of an apophatic body
consciously walking the line between waking and sleep, the living shade of
an anonymity who knows best how it stands by virtue of an intrinsic and
ineradicable astonishment, the non-suspendable experience of being
amazed before the labyrinthine bewilderment, the deathily alive ‘Domus
Dedaly’ (1920) of its own being. Just as Geffrey’s visionary flight is
initiated by the terror of facing the apparent nothingness or emptiness which
is the place of all images – ‘no maner creature | That ys yformed be Nature |
Ne sawgh I’ (489–91) – so does Chaucer’s poetry arise like a reflection of
the self-constitutive obscurity of the poet himself, as a diplopic or two-in-
one-and-one-in-two projection of his own divine image through the object
of vision. Here it is the very suspension of poetry’s vatic power, the
inscrutability of its origin – ‘hyt is warned to darkly – | But why the cause
is, noght wot I’ (51–2) – that best accords with divinity, as per Eriugena’s
explication of the imago Dei:
the Divine likeness in the human mind is most clearly discerned when it is only known that it is,
and not known what it is […] what it is is denied in in it [negatur in ea quid esse], and only that it
is is affirmed. Nor is this unreasonable. For if it were known to be something, then at once it would
be limited by some definition, and thereby would cease to be a complete expression of the image
of its Creator, Who is absolutely unlimited and contained within no definition, because He is
infinite, superessential beyond all that may be said or comprehended.153

On this model, one may take seriously, without reducing to equation, the
resemblance between Chaucer’s self-portrayal and affects of mystical
contemplation. The dimness of the poet’s reading eyes recalls the look of
deep, self-erasing sorrow: ‘My eye has grown dim from grief, and all my
members are like a shadow’ (Job 17. 7).154 The wakeful sleepiness of the
poet-dreamer recalls the apophatic excessus mentis or passing of the mind
beyond itself:
If a person were really asleep for a hundred years, he would not know any creature and he would
not know of time or images. [Only if you so sleep,] then can you hear what God is bringing about
in you. This is why the soul says in the Book of Love: ‘I sleep and my heart is awake’ (Song of
Songs 5. 2).155

The indifference of the dreamer to the experience of his dream recalls at

once the nepsis or sober vigilance and apatheia or equanimity of the
hesychasts: ‘The proof of apatheia is had when the spirit begins to see its
own light, when it remains in a state of tranquility in the presence of the
images it has during sleep and when it maintains its calm as it beholds the
affairs of life’.156 And Chaucer’s characteristic habit of marking of the
bounds of speech – ‘I can say yow namoore’ (Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, 651)
– which both perpetuates and remedies the problem of the verbal increase
of word over thing diagnosed in the House of Fame,157 recalls the definitive
expression of ancient skepticism, ou mallon, ‘no more’. As Pyrrho is
reported by Eusebius to have maintained,
things are equally indifferent and unstable and indeterminate; for this reason, neither our
sensations nor our opinions tell the truth or lie. For this reason, then, we should not trust them, but
should be without opinions and without inclinations and without wavering, saying about each
single thing that it no more is than is not or both is and is not or neither is nor is not.158

‘What sholde I moore unto this tale sayn?’ (Nun’s Priest’s Tale, 3046).
Pace Delany’s identification of Chaucer’s skeptical fideism,159 the
Chaucerian namoore, befitting the trothplight of truth and falsehood in the
House of Fame – ‘I shal never fro the go, | But be thyn owne sworen
brother!’ (2100–1) – is more proper to what we might call skeptical
mysticism, in the sense of a skepticism experienced, not with a view toward
the essential irrationality or absurdity of faith in God, but with a view
toward the revealed darkness of God, a non-dogmatic spiritual faith or
practical belief in the experience of things as the palpable evident
hiddenness of divine reality. Skeptical mysticism names the mystical
element of non-mysticism, the dubious scoping of the world as a vision of
God in the mode of eclipse, a divine revelation via the miraculous absence
of the divine. As Agamben says, ‘what is properly divine is that the world
does not reveal God’160 – a statement that only makes sense if understood as
positively participating in own intensive negation, namely: what is properly
divine is that the world does not not reveal God. And this is no less the
horror which Chaucer’s gaze reflects, the darkness of life’s light, its divinity
(from the IE root dyeu, ‘to gleam, to shine’, also the root of words for ‘sky’
and ‘day’): ‘I have gret wonder, be this light, | How that I lyve, for day ne
nyght | I may nat slepe wel nygh noght’ (Book of the Duchess, 1–35). As
Lispector says,
The horror is that we know that we see God in life itself. […] And if I postpone the face of
reality until after my death – it’s out of guile, because I prefer to be dead when it is time to see Him
and that way I think I shall not really see Him, just as I only have the courage to really dream when
I sleep.161

Such is the horror felt in Geffrey’s un-Chaucerian cri de cœur: ‘“O Crist,”
thoughte I, “that art in blysse, | Fro fantome and illusion | Me save!”’
(House of Fame, 492–4). Chaucer’s poetry follows the liminal, properly
imaginal line of seeing the inseparability of truth and falsehood as the very
truth of the world before which the said, in order to be true to the event of
saying, must always also be unsaid. And this is precisely the discursive
method of mysticism as dwelling with the unsayable or living in the plight,
the entangling risk, of unknowable yet realizable Truth. The Cloud-author
writes,
For I telle thee trewly that I had lever be so nowhere bodely, wrastlyng with that blynde nought,
than to be so grete a lorde that I might when I wolde be everywhere bodely, merily pleiing with al
this ought as a lorde with his owne.162

Taking his own path between these two options, between the ‘nowhere’ of
the contemplative which is really everywhere and the everywhere of the
worldly person which is really nowhere, the poet walks somewhere in a
special form of verbal unknowing that at once erases and preserves his
name, moving inside an anti-correlational correlation between self and
world that defines without delimiting his place.
Chaucer’s autonomous burdensomeness to himself, the paradoxical
freedom of his own weight which Geffrey feels in the non-difference
between the eagle’s claws and his own feet, in the space between ‘Thou art
noyous for to carye!’ (House of Fame, 574) and ‘I wot myself best how y
stonde’ (House of Fame, 1878), is the freedom of poetry as the exercise of
the impotentiality of silence, the operation of the power to not not speak
before the unnamable reality of things. In this, poetry occupies an
antinomian relation to logos, standing above but not contrary to the law of
the word, which it superlatively fulfills by not having to follow. Whence the
mysticism of poetic truth, its strangely participatory standing apart from
both fiction and non-fiction, fable and science, in parallel to mysticism’s
independent, unbound complicity with religion. But where in the word, or
in the world, dare one make the cut between poetry and mysticism? How to
separate poetry’s secret from the mystical which is, as defined in Robert
Grosseteste commentary on Dionysius, ‘the most secret and the most
hidden speaking and talking with God’ [secretissima et occultissima cum
Deo locutio et sermocinatio] and ‘everything more spiritual that is signified
by the less spiritual or the non-spiritual’ [omne spiritalius per minus
spiritale vel per rem non spiritalem significatum]?163 For both, truth is
beyond correlation, above but not contrary to the logos of tradition, as
Pseudo-Dionysius affirms:
I am in agreement with the scripture writers. But the real truth […] is in fact far beyond us. That
is why their preference is for the way up through negations, since this stands the soul outside
everything which is correlative with its own finite nature.164

Likewise, the poetic word represents a positive negativity of language, a

logos that stands things outside of their own finitude. This essential insight
into the mystical nature of language – an insight grounded in the negativity
of the this itself, in the monstrosity of the index – pervades the aesthetics of
medieval culture. As David Williams explains in Deformed Discourse:
[The theory] that God transcends human knowledge utterly and can be known by what He is not,
eventually becomes a generalized medieval habit of thought that conceives of the human intellect
as remaking in its own image […] all the objects of knowledge its seeks to understand. The
corrective to this process of ‘misrepresenting’ the intelligible was borrowed from the originally
theological method of Pseudo-Dionysius and involved the progressive negation of logical
affirmations about the world and the real. In the aesthetic production of the Middle Ages, a
favoured way of achieving this negation was to deform the representation of the thing described in
such a way as to call into question the adequacy of the intellectual concept of the thing in relation
to its ontological reality.165

The mystical weight of Chaucer’s apophatic body is that of a graven

image, a deformed copy of his nameless self, whose material presence
works to ground the truth of his word, that is, to negate simultaneously both
the difference and the identity between all that poetry sees and ‘That in myn
hed ymarked ys’ (House of Fame, 1103). And unless there is reason to
speak of a spiritless word or to believe in a faith that does not go beyond the
throat, we must also see that the mysticism of this corpus, far from being
anything irrational, may rather be something too common-sensely
medieval, something composed of a substance too real for us to see, that is,
too dark for the putative we who live with a deadly conviction in our senses
and yet trust to the authority of a form of science that ‘has in origins in a
unprecedented mistrust of experience as it was traditionally understood’ –
the we in which ‘no one now seems to wield sufficient authority to
guarantee the truth of an experience’ and for whom ‘all authority is founded
on what cannot be experienced’.166

It Dulleth Me to Rhyme
Of all of Chaucer’s creations which may be said to embody the principle
of poetic creativity, it is the Canon’s Yeoman who most clearly figures the
mystical dimension of the poetic act, he whose tale – at once labor and
science – transforms him from lead into gold:
Evere whan that I speke of his falshede,
For shame of hym my chekes wexen rede.
Algates they bigynnen for to glowe,
For reednesse have I noon, right wel I knowe,
In my visage; for fumes diverse
Of metals, whiche ye han herd me reherce,
Consumed and wasted han my reednesse.
(Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, 1094–1100)
In dramatizing this transformation, which appears both to happen and to
not, Chaucer plays simultaneously with the possible impossibility of the
work of alchemy and the work of mysticism (purgation, illumination,
union) whose enduring image in the Western tradition is that of iron which
becomes fire without being capable of becoming it. As Richard of St. Victor
says,
What is the Holy Spirit if not a divine fire? After all, every love is a fire, but a spiritual fire. That
which material fire does with iron, this fire […] does with a sordid, icy, and hard heart. In fact, as
soon as this fire enters, the human soul gradually puts away every darkness, every coolness, every
 hardness, and it becomes similar in every way to him by whom it is inflamed. By the effect of the
flame of divine fire, [the human soul] burns up everything, blazes and is melted in God’s love.167

Correlatively, the Yeoman understands himself as undergoing a poetic

process that strangely not only transforms him without transformation –
‘For reednesse have I noon’ – but actually worsens his ‘leden hewe’ (728):
‘Of his falsnesse it dulleth me to ryme’ (1092); ‘It dulleth me whan that I of
hym speke’ (1172); ‘It weerieth me to telle of his falsnesse’ (1304). The
Yeoman’s glowing thus stands in parallel contrast to the image of spiritual
transformation in the Second Nun’s Tale, which is produced as Tiburce
experiences the fragrance of the crowns brought from paradise by an angel
for Cecilia and Valerian: ‘The savor myghte in me no depper go. | The
sweete smel that in myn herte I fynde | Hath chaunged me al in another
kynde’ (250–2). Compared to this blissful infusion, the Yeoman seems
bound within the labor of the negative, trapped in the sculptural void left by
his clearing away or aphairesis of alchemy’s falsehoods. And yet this very
non-recognition of the substantiality of transformation, his disowning of his
own becoming-gold, is also a form of blindness that suggests the dawning
of a higher order of beauty. As Pseudo-Dionysius writes in the Mystical
Theology,
If only we lacked sight and knowledge so as to see, so as to know, unseeing and unknowing, that
which lies beyond all vision and knowledge […] We would be like sculptors who set out to carve a
statue. They remove every obstacle to the pure view of the hidden image, and simply by this act of
clearing aside (aphairesis) they show up the beauty which is hidden.168

Is not the Yeoman more beautiful in not knowing his beauty, in resembling
more closely the darkness of the divine image itself?
While to an orthodox religious view the difference between the Yeoman’s
and Tiburce’s transformations would seem to point up the distance between
true conversion effected through the Holy Spirit and the self-alienating
fraudulent spirituality of alchemical science, it remains true that the
Yeoman’s alteration, which is ultimately his transformation into himself via
the horizon of becoming a ‘trewe man’ (Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, 1481), is
more closely analogous to the mystery of divine union. For the real
‘miracle’ of this union is that the individual soul is not obliterated, that the
creature, the iron, does not entirely pass away into the fire of the Creator,
but remains itself eternally. As Eriugena explains, describing the process of
theosis: ‘Iron, or any other metal, when melted in the fire, is seen to be
converted into fire, so that it appears to be pure fire; and yet the substance
of the metal is preserved’ [salva metalli substantia permanente].169 In other
words, God-realization or divine union is the formal reverse of Eucharistic
transubstantiation, the inverse of the Incarnation or God’s ‘becoming’ Man.
In the former, the real miracle, the miracle of the miracle, is how all of the
accidents of the bread, as per Aquinas, ‘in hoc sacramento manent sine
subiecto’ [remain in this sacrament without a subject],170 that is, how
breadiness is untouched by the transformation of bread into God’s body. It
is not God who has to be produced or brought from anywhere. Rather the
substance of the bread needs to get out of its own way. But in the latter, in
Man’s ‘becoming’ God, in being transformed like the famous martyr Al-
Hallaj into the subject of ‘I am I,’171 or – if that is too heretical, as it must be
for you – in being saved, the real miracle is the mysterious remaining of the
creature in the superessential subject of God, the non-vanishing of the
individual I, all of whose attributes are now wholly divine or fire-like. And
it is precisely this saving of the iron in the fire, as Eriugena’s words suggest,
the eternal survival of the black metal or dark material of creation in the all-
consuming hyper-being of the Creator, which holds the meaning of
salvation. Salvation is not the saving of the individual from destruction, but
the saving of the individual from the event of salvation itself, the
incomprehensible preservation of oneself in the midst of being the kind of
human, the proper no one, who sees God and lives (Exodus 33. 20).
Similarly, in al-Sadiq’s commentary on Moses’s experience of God on Mt.
Sinai, the human enjoys the status of an inexplicable phantom equivalent to
the place of language:
[I]t is not proper for anyone but God to speak of himself by using these words inni ana, ‘I am I’.
I was seized by a stupor (dahsh), and annihilation (fana’) took place. I said then: ‘You!’ […] He
replied to me: ‘None but I can bear My speech, none can give me a reply; I am He who speaks and
He who is spoken to, and you are a phantom (shabah) between the two, in which speech (khitab)
takes place’.172

After all, it is not Paradise if you – that complex of answers other than
silence to the question Who am I? – are in it, just as the root of Hell, the
source of its hyper-privative power, is simply your ability to remain, to not
not be, you forever. In these terms, the Yeoman’s glowing, of him but not
properly his, suggests the appearance of a halo, identified by Agamben as
the ‘the becoming singular of that which is perfect […] [the] gift [of] a
supplemental possibility […] the beatitude […] of a potentiality that comes
only after the act, of matter that does not remain beneath the form’.173
That Chaucer’s recovering alchemist accordingly figures poetry as the real
alchemy or philosopher’s stone, the mystical potentiality whereby one
accomplishes what one cannot by not doing it (i.e. by being a poet!),
becomes clear in the concluding gesture of his tale in which the truth of
alchemy is saved in the midst of its failure, on the grounds of its own
impossibility. In tune with the scene of Geffrey’s non-self-naming in the
House of Fame, the Yeoman paraphrases Plato’s answer, in an alchemical
treatise by Senior Zadith (Ibn Umayl), to the question, ‘Telle me the name
of the privee stoon’ (1452):
‘Nay, nay,’ quod Plato, ‘certein, that I nyl.
The philosophres sworn were everychoon
That they sholden discovere it unto noon,
Ne in no book it write in no manere.
For unto Crist it is so lief and deere
That he wol nat that it discovered bee,
But where it liketh to his deitee
Men for t’enspire, and eek for to deffende
Whom that hym liketh; lo, this is the ende’.
(Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, 1463–71)
Like the iron in the fire or the stone which Chaucer’s sitting before a book
is as dumb as, the substance of alchemical truth occupies the very line of
human and divine knowledge, one’s experience of which holds the essence
of experience, that passage or coming-out-of-going-through (ex-per-ientia)
which is the form of death.174 The dark secret of alchemy – impossible yet
attainable, unattainable yet possible – is like an endlessly terminal or
horizonal projection of the divine image, the dark space of creation in
which God makes the human and the human – if only it would prefer not to
prefer itself – produces God. In affirming the refusal to name this secret
precisely without denying what the secret names, the Yeoman at once exits
the desert of imaginary knowledge and enters the paradise of the simple
sanity of his own silent being. For here lies the real and creative accord of
man and God, within the intimacy of their indistinct power to say no, a no
no different from – as identical as one’s own identity – the ability to do as
one truly wills. As the Yeoman’s halo appears via his retrospective tale,
after his experimental experience of alchemy, so does Chaucer’s mysticism
glow through-after the event of his poetry – a potentiality that comes only
after the act, the glory of the poet’s nay and namoore. The obscurity of this
glow is the darkness of real mysticism, the mysticism of the intensive
infinity of reality itself, by whose grace one may truly do (and not do) as
one pleases. ‘Ask, and it will be given you; seek and you will find’
(Matthew 8:7) – the first, blindly overlooked meaning of which is: do not
seek seeking. Likewise, the Yeoman’s common-sense realism, which names
things according to the tautology of their proper being – ‘What, devel of
helle, should it elles be? | Shaving of silver silver is, pardee!’ (1237–9) – is
expressive, not of a reductive materialism, but of the hyper-literalism of a
reality which is anagogic by nature, that is, pulled upward, and this way and
that, by its own unfathomable intention. As Pseudo-Dionysius, in words
that may as well be spoken of poetry, says:
We grab hold of it with one hand and then another, and we seem to be pulling it down toward us.
Actually it is already there on the heights and down below and instead of pulling it to us we are
being lifted upward.175

Or as Robert Myles states near the end of Chaucerian Realism:

Through his poetry, Chaucer causes his readers, to distinguish between the object which
language intends and how that object is intended, and forces us to adopt what is called today the
reflective phenomenological attitude. […] Chaucer’s works show us how, through intentional acts,
we all intend ourselves, direct ourselves, create what we become. We ourselves are responsible for
whatever we create, including, most importantly, our own particular being.176

Chaucer is a mystic because he saw the truth, the dark indeterminacy, of

the divine human image. And because he saw it, as he preferred to see it, he
will never be a mystic. ‘[I]t is so lief and deere’ (Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale,
1467). That is, God is in love with His image in the mirror – in love with
not knowing that the image is His, with never imagining what He loves to
be an image, with seeing how immeasurably the image indeed loves Him.177
And I am nat wont in no mirour to prie...

88 Public domain image, source: < https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_Chaucer_-

_Portrait_and_Life_of_Chaucer_(16th_C),_f.1_-_BL_Add_MS_5141.jpg>.
89 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
90 As Piero Boitani observes, ‘The world of Chaucer’s fame is suspended between life and death. On
a personal level […] the protagonist is aware of the very close relationship between fame and
death. […] the journey to Fame shows itself to be a voyage toward anonymity’ (Chaucer and the
Imaginary World of Fame [Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 1984], pp. 170–1).
91 Giorgio Agamben, ‘Bartleby, or On Contingency’, in Potentialities: Collected Essays in
Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 254.
92 Giorgio Agamben, ‘Bartleby’, p. 255.
93 Gregory B. Stone, ‘The Nameless Wild One: The Ethics of Anonymous Subjectivity – Medieval
and Modern’, Common Knowledge 12 (2006), p. 221.
94 Stone, ‘Nameless Wild One’, p. 221.
95 Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram, XII. 1. 2, <http://www.augustinus.it/>.
96 ‘Quid est ergo tempus? Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio’
(Augustine, Confessions, XI. 14. 17, <http://www.augustinus.it/>).
97 Stone, ‘Nameless Wild One’, p. 222.
98 ‘Nam in omni actione principaliter intenditur ab agente, sive necessitate nature sive volontarie
agat, propriam similitudinem explicare. Unde fit quod omne agens, in quantum huiusmodi,
delectatur; quia, cum omne quod est appetat suum esse, ac in agendo agentis esse quodammodo
amplietur, sequitur de necessitate delectatio, quia delectatio rei desiderate semper annexa est’
(Dante Alighieri, De monarchia, ed. Pier Giorgio Ricci [Verona: Mondadori, 1965], I. 13. 2–3).
99 Dante, The Convivio, trans. Richard Lansing (New York: Garland, 1990),
<http://digitaldante.columbia.edu/library/dantes-works/the-convivio/>.
100 Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, p. 137.
101 Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, p. 192.
102 John Duns Scotus, Early Oxford Lecture on Individuation, p. xxi. Cf. ‘When the soul comes out
of the ego-shell and enters into the infinite life of God, its limited individuality is replaced by
unlimited individuality. The soul knows that it is God-conscious and thus preserves its
individuality. The important point is that individuality is not entirely extinguished, but it is
retained in the spiritualised form’ (Meher Baba, Discourses, II, 74).
103 George Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press, 1988), p. 69. The passage continues, ‘the feeling of my fundamental
improbability situates me in the world where I remain as though foreign to it, absolutely foreign’.
104 François Laruelle, Dictionary of Non-Philosophy, trans. Taylor Adkins (n.p., 2009), p. 53.
105 Mauricio Beuchot, ‘Chrysostom Javellus and Francis Sylvester Ferrara’, in Individuation in
Scholasticism: the Later Middle Ages and the Counter-Reformation (1150–1650), ed. Jorge J. E.
Gracia (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 465.
106 Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. 103–4.
107 Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, p. 131.
108 Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, p. 424
109 Agamben, ‘Bartleby, or On Contingency’, p. 253.
110 Cloud of Unknowing, edited Patrick J. Gallacher (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1997), pp.
30–2.
111 Meher Baba, God Speaks, pp. 213–4, my emphasis.
112 Jordan Kirk, ‘Theories of the Nonsense Word in Medieval England’ (doctoral thesis, Princeton
University, 2013), p. 173.
113 Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H., trans. Idra Novey (New York: New
Directions, 2012), p. 185.
114 Cf. ‘If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness’ (II Corinthians 11. 30).
115 Augustine, Confessions, X. 3. 4, <http://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/conf>.
116 ‘I claim neither that Chaucer was himself a mystic nor that his work has any specific mystical or
theological meaning of an allegorical nature, only that Chaucer knew of this type of writing and
shared some attitudes with the devotional and mystical authors’ (Robert Boenig, Chaucer and the
 Mystics: The Canterbury Tales and the Genre of Devotional Prose [Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell
University Press, 1995], p. 10). ‘Though Chaucer is not a mystic, his works reveal an underlying
structure paralleling the mystical progress towards ecstasy and higher knowledge. Far from
aiming to demonstrate that Chaucer was a mystic, the analysis enables the underlying narrative
structure to emerge that […] impacted on Chaucer’s work’ (Gerardina Antelmi, ‘Chaucer’s
Modes of Dreaming: Definitions, Sources, and Meaning’ [doctoral thesis, Cardiff University,
2011], p. xvi). ‘Although Chaucer was not a mystic, he deploys imageries and knowledge that
pertain to mystical discourse’ (ibid., p. 144). ‘So it is that mysticism underlies the thought of most
of our great poets, of nearly all our greatest poets, if we except Chaucer, Dryden, Pope, and
Byron’ (Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Mysticism in English Literature [Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1913], p. 13).
117 ‘I leve as wel, so God me spede, | Hem that write of this matere, | As though I knew her places
here; And eke they shynen here so bryghte | Hyt shulde shenden al my syghte | To loke on hem’
(House of Fame, 1012–4).
118 This is favorite expression of St. Francis and the Christian mystical tradition at large. Cf. ‘Et
unaquaeque invenit secretum sibi cum sponso, et dicit: Non omnibus uno in loco frui datur grata
et secreta sponsi praesentia’ (Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, 23.9,
Library of Latin Texts – Series A, <http://www.brepolis.net>) [And each enters with the
bridegroom into a secret place for herself, and says, my secret is for me, my secret is for me. The
dear and secret presence of the bridegroom is not given for all to enjoy in one place].
119 Augustine, Confessions, VIII. 7. 6.
120 Odone, De sanctis martyribus Luciano episcopo, Maximiano presbytero, Iuliano diacono, 5.21,
Acta Sanctorum Database (ProQuest).
121 Cloud of Unknowing, p. 60. Linda Tarte Holley has identified this as a ‘striking parallel image’
in Reason and Imagination in Chaucer, the Perle-poet, and the Cloud-author: Seeing from the
Center (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 55.
122 Augustine, The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, 1991), p. 396,
translation modified.
123 Eriugena, Periphyseon, PL 122:919, translation cited from Bernard McGinn, The Growth of
Mysticism: Gregory the Great through the 12th Century (New York: Crossroad, 1994), p. 118. Cf.
‘Seek his face always, [Psalms 104. 4], let not the finding of the beloved put an end to the love-
inspired search; but as love grows, so let the search for the one already found become more
intense’ (Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, trans. Maria Boulding, 6 vols. [Hyde Park, NY:
New City Press, 2003], VI, 186). Cf. ‘Let us therefore so look as men who are going to find, and
so find as men who are going to go on looking’ (Trinity, p. 271).
124 Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, pp. 136–7.
125 Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, p. 73.
126 John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell (New
York: Paulist Press, 1982), pp. 140–1. See John Chryssavgis, ‘“Joyful Sorrow”: The Double Gift
of Tears’, chapter 5 of John Climacus: From the Egyptian Desert to the Sinaite Mountain
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004) and Hannah Hunt, Joy-Bearing Grief: Tears of Contrition in the
Writings of the Early Syrian and Byzantine Fathers (Leiden: Brill, 2004). Hunt’s definition of
penthos nicely articulates both its distinction from ordinary sorrow over something and the sense
of its being a refined repentance which affectively touches the divine mystery, a powerfully
liminal summit of sorrow in which the operations of nature and grace palpably touch: ‘a heartfelt
sorrow, expressed by actual tears, or a desire to weep, which is generated by and expressive of the
mystery of divine participation. Such grief is never despair, self-pity, or mourning for human
losses. It thus occupies a unique position in the crux between body and soul. It is the purified
 passion experienced by the penitent who, through the pricking of conscience, accepts his or her
need to repent, in order to be restored to God […] Penthos is a process, not a static condition. It is
the remorse of the sinner as much as the charism of the perfected spiritual athlete’ (3).
127 Climacus, Ladder, p. 145.
128 Cf. ‘In the eternity of existence there is no time. There is no past and no future, only the
everlasting present. Therefore, in eternity nothing has ever happened and nothing will ever
happen. Everything is happening in the unending NOW, if there is anything happening at all;
because all that has apparently happened, all that is apparently happening and all that will ever
apparently happen in the illusory cosmic universe is all that which God has already dreamt the
moment His own original infinite whim surged as ‘WHO AM I?’ So, really speaking, nothing has
happened and nothing will ever happen’ (Meher Baba, God Speaks, p. 97).
129 John Climacus, Ladder of Divine Ascent, p. 141. Proportionally, the Cloud identifies the work of
contemplation with the very will for it, a will that is itself dark: ‘The abilnes to this werk is
onyd to the selve werk, withoutyn departyng; so that whoso felith this werk is abil therto, and
elles none; insomochel, that withoutyn this werk a soule is as it were deed, and can not coveite it
ne desire it. For as moche as thou wylnest it and desirest it, so mochel hast thou of it, and no more
ne no lesse; and yit is it no wil, ne no desyre, bot a thing thou wost never what, that sterith thee to
wilne and desire thou wost never what’ (Cloud of Unknowing, p. 63). I thank Jordan Kirk for
showing me this correspondence.
130 Cloud of Unknowing, p. 71.
131 As Climacus’s account of penthos shows, the not-doing by which what cannot be done is done is
contained within the negative space of an other-doing which points back to it: ‘Wear something to
encourage you in mourning. Those who lament the dead wear black. And if you find yourself
unable to mourn, then lament the very fact’ (Ladder of Divine Ascent, p. 138).
132 Giorgio Agamben, ‘On Potentiality’, in Potentialities, pp. 182–3.
133 Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, p. 130.
134 Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, p. 531.
135 Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls, trans. Ellen L. Babinsky (New York: Paulist,
1993), pp. 87, 101.
136 Ibid., p. 105.
137 Agamben, ‘Bartleby’, p. 271.
138 Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans. Frank Tobin (New York:
Paulist Press, 1998), p. 156.
139 Cloud of Unknowing, p. 29.
140 John of the Cross, Collected Works, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington,
DC: ICS Publications, 1991), p. 430.
141 Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 90.
142 George Bataille, The Bataille Reader, ed. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell,
1997), p. 45.
143 Cloud of Unknowing, p. 71.
144 Cloud of Unknowing, p. 71.
145 Ibid.
146 Julian of Norwich, The Writings of Julian of Norwich, eds. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline
Jenkins (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), pp. 185–7. On the gift
of tears, see Holy Tears: Weeping in the Religious Imagination, eds. Kimberly Kristine Patton and
John Stratton Hawley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
147 Virgil, Aeneid, I. 462, <http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/vergil/aen1.shtml>.
148 The emendation is made on metrical grounds, but as Thomas A. Bredehoft notes, adding an e to
‘Whiche’ suffices (The Visible Text: Textual Production and Reproduction from Beowulf to Maus
[Oxford: Oxford Textual Perspectives, 2014], p. 93n59), which is how Bodleian Library MS
Farifax 16 reads, ‘Whiche that y nat ne kan’, as per Furnivall’s transcription in A One-Text Print
of Chaucer’s Minor Poems: Being the Best Text of Each Poem (London: Chaucer Society, 1871),
p. 240. Following the sense of the manuscripts, Heath provides ‘Which that I ne wot, ne kan’
(Works of Chaucer [London: Macmillan, 1913], p. 584).
149 Cloud of Unknowing, p. 57.
150 Ibid.
151 Bonaventure, Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, p. 115.
152 The Cloud of Unknowing, p. 72.
153 Eriugena, Periphyseon, IV, 73. Thomas A. Carlson explicates Eriugena’s understanding of
the imago Dei in relation to the theophanic principle that the ‘created world […] is the vision of
God – in both senses of the word’ (The Indiscrete Image: Infinitude and Creation of the
Human [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008], p. 94).
154 On this motif, see Eugenie Brinkema, ‘Visible Darkness: Optics According to Augustine’, in The
Forms of Affects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), pp. 54–6.
155 Meister Eckhart, Teacher and Preacher, trans. Bernard McGinn (New York: Paulist, 1986), p.
293.
156 Evagrius Ponticus, quoted in The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, ed. Bernard McGinn
(New York: Random House, 2006), p. 57.
157 ‘Wente every tydyng fro mouth to mouth, | And that encresing ever moo […] | Than ever hit
was’ (House of Fame, 2076-83).
158 Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica, XIV.18, quoted in Richard Bett, Pyrrho, His Antecedents, and
His Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 16. Cf. ‘The object of propositions is the
co-temporal world of appearances; God and the Good from which proceeds the equitable order of
human life exist in eternity, beyond the reach of immanent propositions. The enigmatic force that
let Pyrrho appear as a saintly, semidivine figure to his contemporaries was the silence of the
mystic’ (Eric Voegelin, ‘On the Types and Character of Skepticism’, in Collected Works, Volume
3 [Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2000], p. 426).
159 Sheila Delany, Chaucer’s House of Fame: The Poetics of Skeptical Fideism (Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 1994).
160 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 90.
161 Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H., p. 154.
162 The Cloud of Unknowing, p. 94.
163 Mystical Theology: The Glosses by Thomas Gallus and the Commentary of Robert Grosseteste
on De Mystica Theologia, ed. and trans. James McEvoy (Paris: Peeters, 2003), p. 67.
164 Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, p. 130.
165 David Williams, Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Medieval Thought and
Literature (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), p. 5.
166 Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron
(London: Verso, 1993), pp. 19, 16.
167 Richard of St. Victor, On the Trinity, trans. Ruben Angelici (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2011), p.
220.
168 Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, p. 138.
169 Eriugena, Periphyseon (The Division of Nature), trans. I. P. Sheldon-Williams and J. J. O’Meara
(Montreal/Paris: Bellarmin, 1987), p. 545.
170 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Opera Omnia, ed. Roberto Busa (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt:
Frommann-Holzboog, 1980), III. 77. 1.
171 See Carl Ernst, Words of Ecstasy in Sufism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985),
p. 45.
172 Quoted in Carl W. Ernst, Words of Ecstasy in Sufism (Albany, NY: State University of New York,
1985), p. 10.
173 Agamben, Coming Community, pp. 54–5.
174 ‘Traditional experience […] remains faithful to this separation of experience and science, human
knowledge and divine knowledge. It is in fact the experience of the boundary between these two
spheres. This boundary is death’ (Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History, p. 21.)
175 Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, p. 68.
176 Robert Myles, Chaucerian Realism (Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 1995), p. 135.
177 ‘God is Love. And Love must love. And to love there must be a Beloved. But since God is
Existence infinite and eternal there is no one for Him to love but Himself. And in order to love
Himself He must imagine himself as the Beloved whom He as the Lover imagines He loves’
(Meher Baba, Everything and the Nothing, p. 9).
 III.
SORROW OF BEING: IN CALIGNEM

He who increases knowledge, increases sorrow.

– Ecclesiastes 1. 18

This essay proposes a non-systematic, syncretic, and speculative ontology

of sorrow in the mystical tradition, one that understands the reality of
sorrow in relation to the universal and beyond the humoral confines of the
human. Radicalizing Heidegger’s insight that ‘the being of Da-sein is care
[Sorge, sorrow],’ I will affirm that sorrow belongs to the fact of being itself,
as well as to the obscurer region of nonbeing.178 Prior to and beyond the
parameters of mundane emotion, sorrow exists in the universal form of the
negative identity of thought and being, in the pure negativity through which
thought and being are the same – a conception that necessarily requires
conceiving thought as openly as possible, at the merest and the maximal
levels of nature. Sorrow, far from being limited to the evolutionary
environment of our terrestrial sphere, is more properly understood as a
weird kind of cosmic substance composed of all being’s refusal of itself, the
intrinsic negation of its own event. Grasping sorrow in these terms does not
render actual, particular sorrow irrelevant or merely ontologically
atmospheric, but rather redeems sorrow’s palpable darkness from both the
hallucinogenic obscurity of affordable, instrumentalized problematicity
(sorrow as problem to be fixed or solved in the self-interest of making
everything OK) and base ‘Manichean’ materiality (sorrow as merely an evil
psychical ingredient in things).179 In this theory, sorrow is projectively
restored to reality as not only a reflective index, but a perfectible operation
of the universal, a way forward into new reality.
The sorrow of being, in the mystical mode of a most radical sorrow that
one is, is not simply an affective byproduct of knowledge, but the very
means of intensifying knowledge of the real, of actually realizing its truth.
Mystical sorrow fulfills the obverse of the above epigraph from
Ecclesiastes: he who does not increase sorrow, does not increase
knowledge. Touching at once the wondrous general fact of being (Why
something instead of nothing?) and the horror of individuation (Why am I
me?), the sorrow of being follows the dark and inversely paradisical path
along the twisted root that grounds all entities to the beyond. Sorrow reveals
the ‘twist’ of the root as the total cosmic complication of the individual
entity: its ultimate confounding of distinctions as to what is inside/outside,
self/world, singular/all. In the context of the speculative realist will to
escape the correlation of self and world, the sorrow of being is not simply a
passion, but the digestible substance of facticity, the unavoidable portal
through which the philosopher must pass.180 More than a feeling, it is the
live form of the refusal of the principle of reason whereby the absolute is
alone thinkable.181 Or, in the words of Bonaventure, this sorrow is the
gemitus cordis [groaning of the heart] that is the essential double of the
fulgor speculationis [brilliance of speculation] whereby mind is desirously
led beyond itself.182
The sorrow of being is definable at the intersection of three concepts:
1) Augustine’s definition of sorrow as counter-volition: ‘when we dissent from what happened
against our will, such will is sorrow’.183
2) Pseudo-Dionysius’s apophatic formulation of ontic negation as excess or excellence: ‘In it [the
Good] is nonbeing really an excess of being […] And one might even say that nonbeing itself
longs for the Good which is above being. Repelling being, it struggles to find rest in the Good
which transcends all being, in the sense of a denial of all things’.184
3) The definition of perfect sorrow in The Cloud of Unknowing: ‘All men have grounds for
sorrow [mater of sorow], but most specially he feels grounds for sorrow who knows and feels that
he is. In comparison to this sorrow, all other kinds of sorrow are like play. For he can truly and
really sorrow who knows and feels not only what he is, but that he is. And whoever has not felt
this sorrow, he may make sorrow, because he has never yet felt perfect sorrow’.185
The broader implications of these concepts are as follows.
First, Augustine’s volitional definition furnishes the idea of sorrow as a
pure event of negative will. While the definition would seem to identify
sorrow as the experience of contradiction between events and a pre-existing
or at minimum latent will, it also suggests the reverse formulation, namely,
sorrow as the event of will itself via negation. This in turn suggests the need
to think not-willing as a primary form of willing.186 Here not-willing is
perforce still unseverable from the idea of the good (will is definitionally
for the good), but the actuality of the will is suspended and the given
existence of the good is unnecessary. Rather than a ground of willing,
sorrow only requires an obscure minimum of not-willing, a minimum that is
thinkable differentially and in coordination with degrees of being. The
minimal universal form of the sorrow of being required for absolutizing
Augustine’s definition is thus definable as an infinitesimal not-willing that
the merest event of being contradicts. If we allow, taking a cue from
premodern concepts of creaturelines, that all things in some capacity find
themselves,187 that being does not occur without event to itself, such that
every ‘there’ is also in reality a ‘here’, then the sorrow of being is simply
the primordial negative will internal to the event of being, or, the not-
willing that its event per se ontically demands and entails. Such an idea of
the sorrow of being, as an endless echoing of the absolute event of negative
will, can be correlated both to object oriented philosophy’s capaciously
essentialist principle of withdrawal, where withdrawal now achieves the
register of every entity’s unfathomable refusal of the fact of its own
being,188 and to the hyper-chaotic principle of absolute contingency, where
contingency now means the entity’s radical suspension, or always-dangling-
over, its ownmost inevitable impossibility.189 Furthermore, the principle of
an absolute event of negative will finds confirmation in negative theories of
becoming and freedom (becoming as refusal of being, freedom as
impotentiality or ability not to be) and is cosmically narratable as a form of
dark panentheism, the process theology of universe as the Real’s self-
refusal, a divine will to be otherwise that produces being as the Infinite’s
self-realizing negation.190 At this level of conception, the absoluteness of the
event of negative will, like Schelling’s eternal No, signals at once the
endless ruthlessness of its perpetuation or echoing in all existence and the
hyper-spontaneity of its origin in eternity – the idea that not-willing is an
originary whim from beyond determining the nature of the cosmos as an
illusion that sustains Reality.191
Second, Dionysius’s understanding of ontic negation as excess furnishes
the link between the sorrow of being and the mystical idea of reality as
infinitely, endlessly intensive, as hiding within itself more and more reality.
From this perspective, being is not itself real, but is the strange thing whose
reality lies in its being the deep mask of the real, a thing within which there
is always greater reality. Accordingly, the sorrow of being, rather than being
restricted to the order of a response to being, or a feeling about it, is the
negative essence of be-ing itself as the very restlessness of the real, being’s
need ‘to find rest in the Good which transcends all being’. The sorrow of
being is being in its ineradicable identity with reality’s endless will or desire
for itself, its refusal of all else. Existentially, an entity really is the question
of itself. All things actually are what Augustine says he became: ‘a great
enigma to myself’ [ipse mihi magna quaestio]’.192 Being’s sorrow is
sorrow-being in the sense of an essential self-shadow that is definable via
Eriugena’s understanding of the divine image in terms of an eclipse of what
by that:
the Divine likeness in the human mind is most clearly discerned when it is only known that it is,
and not known what it is […] what it is is denied in in it [negatur in ea quid esse], and only that it
is is affirmed.193

Here the intimate link between sorrow and mystical unknowing becomes
clear. The darkening of knowledge in relation to an absolute
incomprehensible fact, a total what-less that, is co-substantial with the
groundless or acontextual refusal of the very fact of being. The negative
intensification of facticity which constitutes mystical sorrow is internal to
the darkening of knowledge that increases knowledge.194 In these terms,
essential sorrow is revealed to be not only an expression of ‘impossible’
mystic desire, the ‘excessive’ will for the impossible and final unitive
knowing of absolute reality, but more properly the necessary term of
knowledge as realization or intensive development of the real, the negative
ground of being’s being able to epistemically ‘go’ anywhere, to process or
elaborate the real whether it will or no.
The sorrow of being is the unavoidable downward passage, like Dante’s
path through hell, through which knowledge becomes, the way it actually
comes to life. Just as dialectical understanding requires not simply the
posing of questions but their experience, an actual feeling of the negativity
of the question, so is essential sorrow necessary for real knowledge, that is,
knowledge that touches the known via realization in specific experience.195
In other words, the sorrow of being is more than mystical affect precisely in
its intersection with the identity of knowledge and realization that is
essential to mystical experience/discourse, mysticism’s being defined not by
thinking, but by contemplation as that which ‘has what meditation seeks’
(Hugh of St. Victor).196 Essential sorrow is the open ground of
contemplation, the epistemological portal through which thought enters the
known. This is confirmed in the way mystical discourse characteristically
holds knowledge within the domain of fundamental sorrow, not merely to
chasten but to perfect it, at once to free knowledge from the mirage of
world-mastery and to keep knowledge radically open to its own intensive
reality. ‘Let us die, then, and enter into this darkness,’ writes Bonaventure,
‘let us silence all our cares, desires, and imaginings’.197 Mystical sorrow is a
negative insistence on unitive knowledge, the dark drive not to illuminate
but to actually find the identity of knower and known, to exit the domain of
identification with appearance and become the body of truth. It pertains
fundamentally to the impulse for epistemological self-purgation, the will to
eliminate the roots of falsehood from one’s own being, to practice
understanding as ascesis and self-negation. Mystical sorrow fuels the
burning condition of heart that at once fuses all knowledge to the principle
of scientia, to truth as necessarily immanent to its understanding, and
ceaselessly insists, in the face of the cosmic or divine limitlessness, on the
profound necessity of a knowledge beyond knowledge, the unclosable
finality of a science beyond being. The sorrow of being accordingly holds a
special relevance to crises of scientistic limits, the terror of impassible
epistemological vistas. Before them it negatively asserts another way out,
the viability of a direct pathless path to limitless reality. Correlatively, the
sorrow of being, as ineradicable pan-dilemma, speaks no less significantly
to the universal value of general, diurnal discontent, reclaiming it as a
negative index of an immanent beyond. It belongs at once to otherworldly
‘spiritual’ intention and to this-worldly worry, profoundly flattening both
within one universal emergency of being. In short, the reality of sorrow is
nothing other than being’s own logic, creatively cancelling in one
movement all deferrals of transcendence, what Nietzsche criticizes as
‘bury[ing] one’s head in the sand of heavenly things,’ and every dream of
materialism in desperate favor of the infinite real.198 Its telos is thus neither
achievement nor comfortable consolation, but the intensive infinitization of
arriving search, as if to find that reality itself is totally mystical.199
Third, the Cloud of Unknowing’s factical definition of perfect sorrow
furnishes a principle of revolution against creationism, not only in the
familiar religious sense, but as the more general and insidious orientation
towards thinking of oneself, along with everything else, as somehow an
effect or product of a broader expansive universe, a grand ‘out there’ whose
reality is prior to and fundamentally independent of one’s own. This belief
in and attitude towards the world as an autonomous reality which is and
must be whether one is or not, as it were, is inseparable from the general
concept of subject as an individuated entity that is subject of world and its
own event within it. Belief in ‘the world’ is a correlate of the fraud of
givenness. The subject on this view is something produced or created by
and within the universe in an uncanny event of oneself that is generically
identified with birth: ‘To be born is both to be born of the world and to be
born into the world’.200 Blind acceptance of this uncanniness – whether
narrated as chance, celebrated as natalism, or elided within a discursive we
– founds the false autonomy of narrow selfhoods, the minimal lives of
beings for whom living is constituted by consuming or possessing by
dispending the ‘gift’ of being. As E. M. Cioran indicates, it is the fastening
of individual being to birth that grounds its limitation:
If attachment is an evil, we must look for its cause in the scandal of birth, for to be born is to be
attached. Detachment then should apply itself to getting rid of the traces of this scandal, the most
serious and intolerable of all.201

The unavoidable error of attachment, which every attempt to ‘be someone’

confesses and whose impulse infects the very idea of death, is that there is
someone here in need of having a life in the first place, a for-whom-by-
whom of being that diurnally assumes the excruciating task of continually
interrupting the superessential or divine whylessless of reality. The sorrow
of being, experienced and realized as ineradicable fact, operates as the
ruthless grace of the real which eradicates and exhausts the essential lie of
this indigence, venting the voidal substance of identity and opening the
unground into which not only moral but metaphysical responsibility leaps.
The subject superiorly receptive to the call of this perfect sorrow is
precisely the one who freely lets itself as subject be thrown into its depths,
exercising and exorcising itself in a liberatory act of spontaneous apophatic
adventure – a paradisical leap beautifully imagined by Don Quixote in
defense of poetic truth:
[C]an there be any greater delight than to see […] here and now before us a vast lake of bubbling
pitch, and swimming about in it vast numbers of serpents, snakes, and lizards and many other
kinds of fierce and fearsome animals, while from the lake comes a plaintive voice [una voz
tristísima]: ‘You, O Knight, whosoever you may be, beholding this dread lake: if you wish to attain
the good hidden beneath these black waters, you must show the resolve of your dauntless breast
and cast yourself into the midst of the dark, burning liquid [negro y encendido licor], else you will
not be worthy to see the mighty marvels contained in the seven castles of the seven fairies that lie
beneath its murky surface’? And what of our delight when the knight, almost before the fearful
 voice [la voz temerosa] has ceased, without giving his situation a second thought, without stopping
to consider the peril to which he is exposing himself, or even shedding the burden of his armour,
commends himself to God and to his lady and hurls himself into the boiling lake and, all of a
sudden when he least knows where he is bound, finds himself amidst flowery meadows, far finer
than the Elysian fields themselves?202

Throwing himself into the black liquid in immediate continuity with the
sorrowful voice that evokes his very indeterminacy (‘whosoever you may
be’), the knight embodies the meta-personal and hyper-desirous subject who
obliterates or short-circuits melancholia by escaping through the very
identity that melancholia is for. Similarly, to burrow thought into the event
of oneself and push philosophically through it requires intensifying beyond
its own internal self-constituting limit the kind of cosmic dependency which
holds identity ‘on the shore’ and which is currently the familiar staple of
scientistic wonder: we are star dust. As the Cloud of Unknowing’s flirtation
with refusal of the ‘gift of being’ exemplifies, overcoming this subject-
creationism is an essential task of medieval mysticism, from Pseudo-
Dionysius’s description of becoming ‘neither oneself nor someone else’ to
Meister Eckhart’s identification of the human essence as primordially above
God:
To preserve a place is to preserve distinction. Therefore I pray God to make me free of God, for
my essential being is above God, taking God as the origin of creatures. For in that essence of God
in which God is above being and distinction, there I was myself and knew myself so as to make
this man. Therefore I am my own cause according to my essence, which is eternal, and not
according to my becoming, which is temporal.203

Rather than viewing this imperative only existentially as one of the

passions of facticity, let us accept it as direct evidence that, as the American
sage Vernon Howard expresses it, ‘A body came into the world, but it
wasn’t you’.204 In sum, one’s fundamental need for escape, the hopeless and
helpless desire ‘to get out of oneself, that is, to break that most radical and
unalterably binding of chains, the fact that the I [moi] is oneself [soi-
même]’,205 is not some outrageous psychological drama but a true index that
one is indeed not oneself, something more and other than one’s proper
being, a someone more real than anything else who is discoverable all of a
sudden when one least knows where one is bound.
In conclusion, such mystically essential sorrow – a sorrow concerning
precisely the hiddenness of one’s being such – is conceivable as the dark
identity of thought/feeling and being, a negative equation spanning the
ontological divide between what is and what is seemingly only about what
is. Discursively, such negative equation calls for forms of statement whose
logic is both untenable and necessary, impossible and inevitable: being is
sorrow, matter is tears. This is a mode of assertive or cataphatic apophasis
that, rather than speaking away from language, stays within the negative
curvature of a space opened by twisting language against itself. In these
terms, negative equation proceeds as an intimate, confluent counterpoint to
mystical discourse itself.206 Where traditional mystical discourse orbits
around the singular unspeakable identity of the individual and God, the
logical process of negative equation discloses similarly remote planets of
truth in more local or immediate regions of being. The negative equation
offers a kind of untenable yet indispensable axiom whose meaning lies less
in coherent statement but in its speaking according to a radically immanent
yet inherently hidden or foreclosed truth. The intellectual procedure of
negative equation is thus also comparable to François Laruelle’s non-
philosophical concept of ‘mystic-fiction’ as a coming discourse which
abandons the occult status of the mystical secret in favor of its immanence
as secret:
La pratique future renonce à prétendre penser l’Un par l’Un, ou avec l’Un, et pense le rapport au
mystico-philosophique selon l’Un, elle expose le Secret qui fait les Humains par axioms et
theorems […] Il n’y a plus de secret ou de mystere ‘caché’ telle une boîte noire au cœur de l’Un ou
de Dieu, en réalité au cœur du Logos. Mais un secret qui reste tel qu’un secret que ne transforme
pas sa révélation ‘formelle’ puisqu’il est déjà révélé. Un révélé-sans-révélation, un secret (de) l’Un
déjà donné pour le Monde, secret de l’humilité que sa communication n’entame pas.207
[The future praxis renounces pretending to think the One by the One, or with the One, and thinks
the mystico-philosophical relation according to the One; it exposes the Secret that makes Humans
through axioms and theorems […] No more is there a secret or a mystery ‘hidden’ like a black box
at the heart of the One or of God, actually at the heart of the Logos, but a secret that remains like a
secret which does not alter its ‘formal’ revelation because it is already revealed: a revealed-
without-revelation, a secret (of) the One already given by the World, a secret of humility that its
communication does not cut into.]
In place of an account or explanation of the Secret, the logic of negative
equation offers a photographic revelation of its identity, an irrevocable
giving of its immanence.208 As a form of mystico-philosophical theorem, the
negative equation sees with the sorrow of being, pro-viding it in an
accordant form that fulfills the simultaneous double sense of the exposure
here defined by Laruelle, namely: 1) exposure by means of axioms and
theorems of the Secret which makes humans; and 2) exposure of the Secret
which makes humans by means of axioms and theorems. It is precisely this
doubleness of exposure which is evident in the Cloud’s definition of perfect
sorrow as a definition one is to sorrow over: ‘And whoever has not felt this
sorrow, he should sorrow, because he has never yet felt perfect sorrow’. To
understand the sorrow of being requires participation in this procedure of
giving mystical truth, a giving which erases givenness and sets thought in
an immanent posture of non-difference vis-à-vis ontologically disparate
terms, in this case, feeling perfect sorrow and sorrowing that one does not
feel it. In other words, negative equation operates in participation with the
mystical text’s characteristic refusal of the epistemic normativity of
philosophical discourse, the textuo-intellectual charade of sufficiency which
is thought’s evil, its instantiation of ‘the reduction of the taking-place of
things to a fact like others, the forgetting of the transcendence inherent in
the very taking-place of things’.209 Like Meillassoux’s demand that we
‘project unreason into things themselves,’210 negative equation represents a
(counter)intuitive speculative move that evades the correlational structure
of philosophical reasoning, the philosopher’s decisional staying within the
dialectical circle of having and answering questions about the world. The
intellectual leap of negative equation is a form of definition that escapes
definition’s hermeneutic utilitarianism, its being for the sake of discourse.
Overstepping the pursuit of questions concerning the relation between
seemingly irreconcilable categories (e.g. individual and universal, thought
and being), it asserts the independent profound reality lurking within the
question’s essential negativity. In sum, negative equation anchors definition
to the openness of its own ground: ‘We define only out of despair. We must
have a formula, we must even have many, if only to give justification to the
mind and façade to the void’.211
Contrary to the intellectualist investment in philosophic reason as an
already-established and sufficient mirror of reality, the sorrow of being calls
one to open another path – a path of greatest resistance – in which
intellectual truth lies is disclosing, in the form of the radical negativity of
that, the real impossibility or actual abyss of the identity of thought and
being. This identity, marked by the evental intersection between the thought
of being and the being of thought, is an essential negativity that constitutes
an absolute internal limit to all speculative solutions of the correlation, all
theoretic unbinding of the subject-object knot. Epistemic reason, that which
‘needs to know,’ would demand that we decide the question and choose an
answer as to how the autonomous real is thinkable, how human discourse
enters ‘the great outdoors, the eternal in-itself, whose being is indifferent to
whether or not it is thought’.212 To labor under this requirement is the way
of modern science, which ‘has its origins in an unprecedented mistrust of
experience as it was traditionally understood’.213 To ignore this requirement
is the way of criticism, a situational discourse and mode of knowledge
‘which neither represents nor knows, but knows the representation’.214 To
neither ignore nor accept it is the way of mystical contemplation, the
science of experience which both knows and represents by unknowing the
representation.

178 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1996), p. 262.
179 My dialectical opening of the sorrow of being finds thus support in Reza Negarestani’s critique
of affordance, the illusory and restricted from of openness, and hopes, through this special form of
the ‘folly of the impossible’, to extend its work of unbinding: ‘only by rigorously embracing this
folly can we develop a genuine non-restricted dialectical synthesis with the universal absolute and
unbind a world whose frontiers are driven by the will of the open and whose depths are absolutely
free’ (Reza Negarestani, ‘Globe of Revolution. An Afterthought on Geophilosophical Realism’,
Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture 17 [2011], p. 33).
180 ‘We now know the location of this narrow passage through which thought is able to exit from
itself – it is through facticity, and through facticity alone, that we are able to make our way
towards the absolute’ (Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 63).
181 ‘The absolute is thinkable only by a refusal of the principle of reason. […] speculation,
understood as thought about the absolute, is possible only by not being metaphysical’ (Quentin
Meillassoux, ‘The Immanence of the World Beyond’, in The Grandeur of Reason: Religion,
Tradition, and Universalism, eds. Conor Cunningham and Peter Candler [London: SCM Press,
2010], p. 444). Accordingly, the principle of the sorrow of being demands understanding
thought’s not being metaphysical in a literal sense. The sorrow of being is the real negative form
whereby thought is not metaphysical. Real refusal of the principle of sufficient reason is other
than the thought of it.
182 ‘No one is disposed in any way to the divine contemplations which lead to ecstasies [excessus]
of the mind without being, like Daniel, a person of desires [vir desideriorum]. But desires are
inflamed in us in a double way, namely, through the cry of prayer which makes us roar with
groaning of the heart, and through the brilliance of contemplations, by which the mind turns itself
most directly and intensely to the rays of light’ (Bonaventure, Itinerarium, p.39).
183 ‘[C]um […] dissentimus ab eo quod nolentibus accidit, talis voluntas tristitia est’ (Augustine, De
civitate Dei, ed. Bernard Dombart and Alphonse Kalb, 5th ed. [Stuttgart: Teubner, 1981], XIV. 6).
184 Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, p. 73.
185 ‘Alle men han mater of sorow, bot most specyaly he felith mater of sorow that wote and felith
that he is. Alle other sorowes ben unto this in comparison bot as it were gamen to ernest. For he
may make sorow ernestly that wote and felith not onli what he is, bot that he is. And whoso felid
 never this sorow, he may make sorow, for whi he felid yit never parfite sorow’ (Cloud of
Unknowing, p. 71). All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.
186 By ‘not-willing’ I thus do not mean the negation of willing affiliated with passivity. Nor do I
mean non-willing, in the sense of an erasure or transcendence of will through intensive negation
of will itself in the manner of Gelassenheit. By ‘not-willing’ I mean willing that is negative per
se, in the sense of a pure no, a refusal that is in ‘excess’ of the possibility of refusal.
187 As upheld in the context of theophanic panpsychism. ‘The whole world is intelligent, living, and
speaking […] They stop with what the eyesight gives to them, while we consider the situation
differently […] the mystery of life fills the entire world’ (Ibn al ‘Arabi, The Meccan Revelations,
Volume 1, trans. William C. Chittick and James W. Morris [New York: Pir Press, 2005], p. 36). As
Chittick explains, the Arabic word for being (wujûd) also signifies ‘finding’ and carries the
existential sense of being-for-itself: ‘The implication is that what exists finds itself, i.e. is aware
and conscious of itself by the very fact of existence’ (239n20). On Ibn Arabi’s concept of wujûd,
see William C. Chittick, The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-’Arabi’s Cosmology
(Albany, NY: SUNY, 1998), pp. 3–15. For the Sufi existentialist tradition, the identity between
being and finding is grounded in the idea of God as absolute simple real existence, the ultimate
Reality which is its own existence (divine Being as the only thing the really finds itself), and in
the factical principle of Being’s essential individuation: ‘The universality of Being […] is
distinguished from the universality of a genus in that it is a ‘particularized’ universality [kullī bil-
takhassus] […] the nature of Being is such that by its very character it is particularized in the
individual, and hence it cannot conceptually be known’ (Alparslan Açikgenç, Being and Existence
in Sadra and Heidegger [Kuala Lumpur, ISTAC, 1993], 58–59). Here we have the intimate
counterpoint to the Heideggerian insistence that ‘Being is not a being’, namely, a recognition, via
the mystery of individuation, that Being precisely is a being in a sense that fulfills rather than
obliterates the distinction between Being and beings: ‘The schools of Ibn ‘Arabī and Mullā Sadrā
make a distinction between Being (wujūd), which is solely applicable to God, and existence
(mawjūd), which applies to all that there is insofar as they are theophanies of divine names and
acts. God is existent (mawjūd) insofar as he is disclosed to us, but Being insofar as he is unknown
and unseen (ghayb). There is unity of Being but existence is not a singular reality. It is our self-
conceptualization as existing entities that assists us in recognizing divine existence, since our
awareness of our selves is the basis for the central cosmological proof of God’ (Sajjad H. Rizvi,
‘Mysticism and Philosophy: Ibn ‘Arabī and Mullā Sadrā’, in Cambridge Companion to Arabic
Philosophy, eds. Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005], pp. 235–6). The sorrow of being is precisely the essential negativity of such probative,
reality-intensifying self-conceptualization – the horror of individuation as lived theological
imperative. It is thus the inside-out form of the more ethically-celebrated ‘impossible’ recognition
of the other (whether human, nonhuman, or inhuman) via the identity of life and thought: ‘Every
life is some form of thought […] while men may recognize grades in life they reject grades in
thought; to them there are thoughts (full and perfect) and anything else is no thought. This is
simply because they do not seek to establish what Life is […] Contemplation (theoria) and its
object constitute a living thing, a Life, two inextricably one’ (Plotinus, The Enneads, trans.
Stephen MacKenna [Burdett, NY: 1992], III. 8. 8).
188 Graham Harman uses the example of fire burning cotton to illustrate ontological withdrawal, a
generalized form of Heideggerian concealment: ‘The rich reality of cotton-being is never drained
dry by the fire, any more than by human theories of cotton or human practical use of it. There is a
certain unreachable autonomy and dignity in the things’ (‘Asymmetrical Causation’, Parallax 16
[2010], p. 100).
189 Quentin Meillassoux rationalizes the necessity of absolute contingency through the principle of
non-contradiction: ‘It is necessary that this be this and not that, or anything else whatsoever,
precisely in order to ensure that this can become that or anything else whatsoever. Accordingly, it
becomes apparent that the ontological meaning of the principle of non-contradiction, far from
designating any sort of fixed essence, is that of the necessity of contingency, or in other words, of
the omnipotence of chaos’ (After Finitude, p. 71).
190 Such a will is understood nihilistically, through a kind of theoretical collapse of the Good beyond
being (epekeina tes ousias) into the death of God, in Philip Mainländer’s Die Philosophie der
Erlösung (1894), according to which the universe is a pre-cosmic suicide, the process of a divine
Will-to-die. Thomas Ligotti explains: ‘existence was a horror to God […] This being so, His only
means to get free of Himself was by a divine form of suicide […] In Mainländer’s philosophy,
“God knew that he could change from a state of super-reality into non-being only through the
development of a real world of multiformity”. Employing this strategy, He excluded Himself from
being. “God is dead”, wrote Mainländer, “and His death was the life of the world”. […] the Will-
to-live that Schopenhauer argued activates the world to its torment was revised by his disciple
Mainländer not only as evidence of a tortured life within living beings, but also as a cover for a
clandestine will in all things to burn themselves out as hastily as possible in the fires of becoming’
(The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror [New York: Hippocampus
Press, 2010], pp. 35–6).
191 ‘The unitarian Beyond is an indivisible and indescribable infinity. It seeks to know itself. It is of
no use to ask why it does so’ (Meher Baba, ‘The Whim from the Beyond’, Beams, p. 8). Meher
Baba’s explication of the original Whim is comparable to the ‘incessant primordial deed’ which
for Schelling prosecutes universal and individual being: ‘God is only negating force with respect
to Being in order to make a ground for Itself as eternal Love. But this negating force does not
know itself, and hence, also does not know its own relationship. It does not know the freedom of
the decision, by virtue of which it alone is what is active. It had to be so. So that there would be a
true beginning, this higher life had to sink back into unconsciousness of itself. There is a law in
humanity: there is an incessant primordial deed that precedes each and every single action and
through which one is actually Oneself. Yet this primordial deed sinks down into unfathomable
depths with respect to the consciousness that elevates itself above it. Thereby, this primordial deed
becomes a beginning that can never be sublimated, a root of reality that cannot be reached
through anything. In the same way, in the decision, that primordial deed of divine life also
eradicates consciousness of itself, so that what was posited as ground in divine life can only be
disclosed again in the succession through a higher revelation. Only in this way is there a true
beginning, a beginning that never ceases to be a beginning’ (Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling,
The Ages of the World, trans. Jason M. Wirth [Albany, NY: State University of New York Press,
2000], p. 85). As Alina Feld explains, it is this divine self-negation that grounds the sorrow of
entities: ‘At all its levels of manifestation and in all its hypostases, this self-negation is perceived
as divine pathos. This, Schelling believes, explains the ground of melancholy in all creation’
(Melancholy and the Otherness of God [Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011], p. 115).
192 Augustine, Confessions, IV. 4.
193 John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon, IV, 73. Thomas A. Carlson explicates Eriugena’s
understanding of the imago Dei in relation to the theophanic principle that the ‘created world […]
is the vision of God – in both senses of the word’ (The Indiscrete Image, p. 94). My identification
of the imago Dei and the sorrow of being in the form an eclipse of what by that fulfills this
relation in terms of intensive negation in the Dionysian sense, that is, negation not as the opposite
of affirmation, but as that which produces or brings into presence what is beyond affirmation and
denial. The created world is a vision of God in the mode of eclipse, a divine revelation via the
 miraculous absence of the divine. As Agamben says, ‘what is properly divine is that the world
does not reveal God’ (The Coming Community, p. 90) – a statement that only makes sense if
understood as positively participating in own intensive negation, namely: ‘what is properly divine
is that the world does not not reveal God’. Similarly, in identifying the sorrow of being with being
itself (e.g. being as the negativity of the question of being), I am pushing the threshold of negation
into the substantial, into where an excessively grammatical and literal understanding of
Eriugena’s negatur in ea quid esse makes perfect sense: one is that in which what one is is
negated, or stronger, one is the negation of what one is. The manner in which the negativity of the
imago Dei as a factical eclipse of essence, or brilliant darkness of that, provides the essential
space of relation to the divine, precisely by marking out a place of superessential intimacy, is
beautifully expressed by Mechthild of Magdeburg: ‘Ah, blessed Estrangement from God, how
bound I am to you in love!’ (Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans.
Frank Tobin [New York: Paulist Press, 1998], p. 156).
194 As Thomas Gallus explains in commentary upon Dionysius’s Mystical Theology: ‘The divine
light is the clarity of divine knowledge. The divine night is the incomprehensibility of that
knowledge […] The incomprehensibility itself is found through the fading of the lights, that
means going beyond the senses and the mental powers. Having got that far, knowledge itself is
darkened since it is increases beyond itself’ (Exposicio Vercellensis, chapter 1, in Mystical
Theology: The Glosses by Thomas Gallus and the Commentary of Robert Grosseteste on De
Mystica Theologica, ed. and trans. James McEvoy [Paris: Peeters, 2003], p. 17). The sorrow of
being is accordingly to be conceived as a sense beyond sense and power beyond power through
which an apparently impossible circumspection about being is discerned as dynamically
fundamental to it.
195 The fundamental connection between experience and the negativity of questioning or unknowing
is clarified by Hans-Georg Gadamer: ‘the openness essential to experience is precisely the
openness of being either this or that. It has the structure of a question. And just as the dialectical
negativity of experience culminates in the idea of being perfectly experienced – i.e., being aware
of our finitude and limitedness – so also the logical form of the question and the negativity that is
part of it culminate in a radical negativity: the knowledge of not knowing’ (Truth and Method,
trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd ed. [New York: Continuum, 1994], p. 362).
196 ‘Meditatio est assidua et sagax retractatio cogitationis, aliquid, vel involutum explicare nitens,
vel scrutans penetrare occultum. Contemplatio est perspicax, et liber animi contuitus in res
perspiciendas usquequaque diffusus. Inter meditationem et contemplationem hoc interesse
videtur. Quod meditatio semper est de rebus ab intelligentia nostra occultis. Contemplatio vero de
rebus, vel secundum suam naturam, vel secundum capacitatem nostram manifestis; et quod
meditatio semper circa unum aliquid rimandum occupatur; contemplatio ad multa, vel etiam ad
universa comprehendenda diffunditur. Meditatio itaque est quaedam vis mentis curiosa; et sagax
nitens obscura investigare et perplexa evolvere. Contemplatio est vivacitas illa intelligentiae, quae
cuncta in palam habens, manifesta visione comprehendit. Et ita quodammodo id quod meditatio
quaerit, contemplatio possidet’ (Hugh of St. Victor, In Salomonis Ecclesiasten Homiliae XIX, PL
175:116–7). ‘Meditation is the concentrated and judicious reconsideration of thought, that tries to
unravel something complicated or scrutinizes something obscure to get at the truth of it.
Contemplation is the piercing and spontaneous intuition of the soul, which embraces every aspect
of the objects of understanding. Between mediation and contemplation there appears to be this
difference: meditation always has to do with things that are obscure to our intelligence, whereas
contemplation is concerned with things that are clear, either of their nature or in relation to our
intellectual capacity. Again, while meditation is always exercised in the investigation of one
matter, contemplation embraces the complete understanding of many, or even of everything.
 Meditation is, then, a certain inquisitive power of the soul, that shrewdly tries to find out things
that are obscure and to disentangle those that are involved. Contemplation is the alertness of the
understanding which, finding everything plain, grasps it clearly with entire comprehension. Thus
in some ways contemplation possesses that for which meditation seeks’ (Hugh of St. Victor,
Selected Spiritual Writings, ed. and trans. Aelred Squire [New York: Harper & Row, 1962], pp.
183–4). It is significant with regard to sorrow that Hugh develops this understanding in
commentary upon Ecclesiastes, specifically, the opening line: ‘vanity of vanities, and all is vanity’
(Ecclesiastes 1. 1). The clarity of contemplation is formally identical to the realization of vanity or
emptiness, which is the very beginning of, or transition into, contemplation, as Hugh succinctly
explains elsewhere: ‘Through contemplation we go out in four ways. The first way is when we
consider what everything created is in itself [quid sit ex se], and find that all things are vanity
because, just as each creature comes into being out of nothing, so too its daily changes show that
of itself it also tends to nothing’ (De arca Noe morali PL 175: 637, Selected Spiritual Writings, p.
77). The contemplative emptying of the what of things may be considered as the mirror image or
real projection of the human divine image, as defined via Eriugena. It is a fundamental translation
between non-knowledge and the nothingness of things which constitutes the essence of human
work as vanity of vanities, that is, the productive disclosure or intensification of vanity: ‘the work
of man is rightly called not only vanity, but vanity of vanity’ (De arca Noe morali PL 176:645;
Select Spiritual Writings, p. 90). Here the relation between human work, the work of
contemplation, and the work of the human itself comes into view. Contemplation is defined by a
paradoxically expansive and pan-illuminative restoration of problematicity from being something
‘out there’ to be figured out and remedied by mental and material labor, to a purely or perfectly
problematic something ‘in here’, something within and beyond the very nature of the subject as a
created thing, a work that does not know what it is. Contemplation thus actualizes the literal
topological sense of sorrow, as represented in another line from Ecclesiastes, ‘Cor sapientiam ubi
tristia est’ (7. 5) [the heart of the wise is where sorrow is].
197 Bonaventure, Itinerarium, p. 139.
198 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 21.
199 ‘[S]ince that which human nature seeks and toward which it tends, whether it moves in the right
or the wrong direction, is infinite and not to be comprehended by any creature, it necessarily
follows that its quest is unending and that therefore it moves forever. And yet although its search
is unending, by some miraculous means it finds what it is seeking for: and again it does not find
it, for it cannot be found’ (Eriugena, Periphyseon, PL 122:919, translation cited from Bernard
McGinn, The Growth of Mysticism: Gregory the Great through the 12th Century [New York:
Crossroad, 1994], p. 118). Cf. ‘Seek his face always [Psalm 104.4], let not the finding of the
beloved put an end to the love-inspired search; but as love grows, so let the search for the one
already found become more intense’ (Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, VI, 186).
200 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge,
1962), p. 527.
201 Cioran, Trouble with Being Born, p. 19.
202 Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote, trans. John Rutherford (New York: Penguin,
2000), p. 456.
203 Meister Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, p. 424.
204 Vernon Howard, Your Power of Natural Knowing (New Life Foundation, 1995), p. 164.
205 Levinas, On Escape, p. 55.
206 This intuitive hermeneutic strategy of negative equation is similar to that of ‘apophatic analogy’
as articulated by Thomas A. Carlson in relation to an indiscrete relation between Heideggerian
being-toward-death and Dionysian being-toward-God: ‘I find myself prohibited, by the very terms
 of the analogy, not only from identifying those terms but also from distinguishing them – for the
terms themselves cannot be given determinate, identifiable content; indeed lacking the
determinacy or identity of any ‘what’, the terms indicate that which would remain, in and of itself,
unknown and unknowable’ (Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God [Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1999], p. 17). Ultimately, this indiscrete relation exceeds restriction to the
theological and thanatological and opens to the ‘nonexperience at the center of experience’ (p.
262). As such, the apophatic analogy offers a method of resourcing the mystical tradition beyond
its putative restriction to religious experience and restoring the understanding of mystical truth to
‘ordinary’ experience, where it necessarily is all along: ‘There is nothing irrational in true
mysticism when it is, as it should be, a vision of Reality. It is a form of perception which is
absolutely unclouded, and so practical that it can be lived every moment of life and expressed in
everyday duties. Its connection with experience is so deep that, in one sense, it is the final
understanding of all experience’ (Meher Baba, Discourses, I, 7). In keeping with Carlson’s
privileging of the relation between givenness and impossibility, we may say that negative
equation also offers a way of ‘giving’ experience to itself via the ‘impossibility’ of its inherent
non-identity.
207 François Laruelle, Mystique non-philosophique à l’usage des contemporains (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 2007), p. 61.
208 The perceptual essence of science as immanent knowing has been theorized by Laruelle through
the concepts of photographic-stance and vision-force: ‘To the transcendent paradigm of
philosophy which remains within onto-photo-logical-Difference, we oppose the stance of the most
naïve and most intrinsically realist knowledge, a stance that appears to us essential – more so than
calculation and measurement – to the definition of the essence of science’ (The Concept of Non-
Photography, trans. Robin Mackay [Falmouth, UK; New York: Urbanomic/Sequence, 2011], pp.
9–10). The connection between science and mysticism in these terms, as contiguous perceptions
of an inherently divine reality, may be found in Charles Sanders Peirce’s understanding of the
scienticity of experience: ‘By experience must be understood the entire mental product […]
Where would such an idea, say as that of God, come from, if not from direct experience? […] as
to God, open your eyes – and your heart, which is also a perceptive organ – and you see him. But
you may ask, Don’t you admit there are any delusions? Yes: I may think a thing is black, and on
close examination it may turn out to be bottle-green. But I cannot think a thing is black if there is
no such thing to be seen as black […] It is the nominalists alone, who indulge in such skepticism,
which the scientific method condemns’ (Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler
[New York: Dover, 1955], pp. 377–8).
209 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 14.
210 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 82.
211 E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Arcade, 1975), p.
48.
212 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 63.
213 Agamben, Infancy and History, p. 19.
214 Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas, p. xvii.
 IV.
THE TEARS OF MATTER:
ON THE CRUCIFIXION DARKNESS

Sunt lacrimae rerum

– Virgil
All men have matter of sorrow; but most specially he feels matter of sorrow that knows
and feels that he is.
– The Cloud of Unknowing
Matter is the will itself.
– Arthur Schopenhauer

“The contours of cosmic pessimism,” writes Eugene Thacker, “are a

drastic scaling-up or scaling-down of the human point of view […]
shadowed by an impasse, a primordial insignificance, the impossibility of
ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought.”215 By
intellectually elevating the worst to universal magnitudes, cosmic
pessimism forces the question of the relation between what ultimately is
and how one feels about things. More specifically, it necessarily entertains –
with utmost due skepticism – the problem of whether human sorrow, our
volitional and affective sense for what is wrong, has any universal validity
at all.
This essay finds in cosmic pessimism the conceptual starting point for a
mystical reinterpretation of the most radical representation of cosmic
sorrow in the Christian tradition: the crucifixion darkness. As an ultimate
figural conjunction of the pessimal and the optimal, this event provides the
grounds for a paradisical inversion of pessimism around the axis of sorrow.
Far from being an impasse, pessimism’s constitutive shadow is now seen to
be an index of sorrow’s meta-subjective universality and thus the best
means of overcoming sorrow itself.

The Bitter Taste of Thought – How distant I am from everything

Cosmic pessimism inhabits an essential paradox. On the one hand, it
asserts that the ultimate truth of things, insofar as any such truth exists, lies
within a profoundly negative factuality: meaninglessness, suffering,
nothingness, contingency, and so on. On the other hand, it necessarily
denies, under penalty of not being properly cosmic, any ultimate
significance to this truth, consigning the knowing of it to the abyss of an
unmasterable exteriority. The cosmic pessimist is a peculiar kind of musical
puppet whose ultimately meaningless movement hauntingly sounds the
strings of a universal, foreclosed real. His thought hovers, like a lost
astronaut, inside a non-locatable intersection between absolute and
absolutely hopeless knowledge, passively exploring the subessential space
of a kind of ontologically collapsed apophatic mysticism. Where mystical
contemplation, as defined by Pseudo-Dionysius, ‘knows beyond [super] the
mind by knowing nothing,’216 cosmic pessimism reversely knows nothing
by not knowing beyond the mind in an intensive sense, by exacerbating the
conditions of knowledge vis-à-vis its beyond. It understands the
nothingness of things through a properly improper form of thinking, a
paradoxically intellectual pushing of thought outside of itself from within
the parameters of rational reflection and self-immanence. This is
exemplified in the philosophical posture of Schopenhauer who, ‘content to
comprehend the true nature of the world according to its inner connexion
with itself,’217 discloses from there at once the universality of will and the
nothingness of the material cosmos – a truth paradoxically fulfilled and
realized in the will’s negation: ‘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’.218 Crucially, the nothingness to which cosmic pessimism restores
the world, as distinguished from the nothingness of base nihilism, is neither
subjective nor objective. Rather it is the nothingness of world itself, a
nothingness illuminated by the desire – a longing endured in pessimism’s
negative fidelity to the good – for thought’s liberation from relation to the
world, from having to be about it. ‘In other, happier times,’ imagines
Cioran, ‘the mind could unreason freely, as if it belonged to no age […]
engulfed in a moment of the world which it identified with the world itself.
Without concern for the relativity of the work, the mind dedicated itself to
that work entirely’.219
The affective dimension of cosmic pessimism is correlatively inversed vis-
à-vis apophatic mysticism. In keeping with the Augustinian prioritization of
faith over reason recorded in Anselm’s maxim, credo ut intelligam,
apophatic mysticism insists on the priority of feeling over understanding, in
the sense of the real movement of will necessary for directing the intellect
beyond itself into divine reality. Mystical apophasis is not only unknowing
but the active and restless affective drive beyond knowing, which is the
ground of unknowing itself. As Pseudo-Dionysius advises in the opening of
the Mystical Theology, ‘with your understanding laid aside […] strive
upward [ἀνατάθητι, consurge] as much as you can toward union with him
who is beyond all being and knowledge’.220 The affective difficulty of this
upward striving is expressed in the qualification that it be enacted with ‘a
mightly struggle’ [forti contritione, συντόνῳ διατριβῇ], an expression
whose terms – a possible source for the Cloud’s definition of perfect sorrow
– evoke the idea of consuming auto-frictional pain, a grinding and rubbing
of the self against itself in struggle towards what is beyond it.221 In the more
explicitly affective Dionysian tradition, such striving is understood more
expansively in terms of love (amor, dilectio, affectio).222 Hugh of Balma
writes,
the Psalmist says, Taste and see. ‘Taste’ refers to the affectus of love; ‘See’ refers to the
intellect’s cogitation and mediation. Therefore one ought first to surge up in the movement of love
before intellectually pondering […] For this is the general rule in mystical theology: one ought to
have practice before theory, that is, one ought to be well practiced in the heart before one has
knowledge of the things said about it.223

The cosmic pessimist experiences an opposite but similar mystically

analogical reversal of the Aristotelian hierarchy of sense, one that echoes
and reinvents the negative side of apophatic striving.224 This is evidenced,
for example, by the will’s blindness for Schopenhauer, Cioran’s bitterness,
and the trope of touching the mirror in Lovecraft’s The Outisder.225 It is a
reversal wherein feeling, rather than forming the advancing horizon of
thought, is torturously bound to its interior: ‘my tears have always turned
into thoughts. And my thoughts are as bitter as tears’.226 The affect of
cosmic pessimism as collapsed apophatic mysticism is a bitterness internal
to the negativity of intellection, a hypersubjective touch and taste of thought
as it hits up against what it cannot contact. The structure of this feeling is
beautifully synthesized in Cioran’s hopelessly apophatic essay, ‘I Do Not
Know’:
I do not know what is right and what is wrong […] There are no valid criteria and no consistent
principles in the world […] To tell the truth, I couldn’t care less about the relativity of knowledge,
 simply because the world does not deserve to be known. At times I feel as if I had total knowledge,
exhausting the content of this world; at other times the world around me does not make any sense.
Everything then has a bitter taste, there is in me a devilish, monstrous bitterness that renders even
death insipid. I realize now for the first time how hard it is to define this bitterness. It may be that
I’m wasting my time trying to establish a theoretical basis for it when in fact it originates in a
pretheoretical zone […] I could be called anything because I stand to lose nothing. I’ve lost
everything! Flowers are blooming and birds are singing all around me! How distant I am from
everything!227

This indefinable, suspiciously pretheoretical bitterness is a palpable

negativity cosubstantial with the impossibility of relation between thought
and being, a subject-exploding affective zone of objective indistinction
between the feeling of negativity, whatever emotional form it may take
(sorrow, fear, despair, etc.), and the negativity of feeling itself as the true
and intimate opposite of rational knowledge: ‘The concept denoted by the
word feeling has only a negative content, namely that something present in
consciousness is not a concept, not abstract knowledge of reason’.228 Where
mysticism represents an intensification of the spiritual, a positive
intensification that discloses the superior reality and identity of the spiritual
via its signification by something sub/non-spiritual,229 cosmic pessimism
represents a reverse intensification of the intellectual. Namely, cosmic
pessimism is a negative intensification that discloses the inferior reality and
non-identity of the intellectual (and thus its ecstatic failure vis-à-vis reality)
via its signification by something extra/non-intellectual, via a feeling that
forces consciousness outside of thought by means of contradiction with the
inexplicable affective materiality of intellection, the ‘impossible’ feeling of
thought itself. The cosmic pessimist thinks beyond/against thought by
intensifying thought’s affect as its substance, by turning up the volume on
the negativity of intellection to a level of indistinction with the idea. It is in
such terms that Thacker explicates cosmic pessimism as an art of flailing, a
sorrow-filled intensification of human perspective, so that ‘all that remains
of pessimism is the desiderata of affects – agonistic, impassive, defiant,
reclusive, filled with sorrow and flailing at that architectonic chess match
called philosophy, a flailing that pessimism tries to raise to the level of an
art form’.230 The incommensurability of thought and being, the impossibility
of their proper relation, is the sorrow-filled space of cosmic pessimism. It is
the domain where the philosopher, no longer a philosopher, falls and flies
like Satan ‘flutt’ring his pennons vain,’ crossing Chaos – if at all – ‘by ill
chance’ (Paradise Lost, II. 933–5).231
Yet what if one recognizes this space of irreparable distance, the hopeless
abyss between oneself and the greater universe, as itself a cosmic substance
and the very medium wherein thought touches the real? What if the no
man’s land delimiting knowledge, which the human seems at best to fill
only virtually with his own negativity, is actually sorrow itself as a
universal aspect of existence? Such recognition is perforce the unutterable,
semi-conscious ‘hope’ of cosmic pessimism, not a hope for anything, nor a
hope of any value, but a hope in the immanent truth of its own situation. ‘I
turned away from philosophy,’ writes Cioran, ‘when it became impossible
to discover in Kant any human weakness, any authentic accent of
melancholy [tristesse]’.232 The reality of sorrow is the substantial hook on
which the inverted optimism of the anti-philosopher hangs, the actuality of
his truth. The supremely positive philosophical discovery of cosmic
pessimism is its disclosure of a sorrow one can no longer call one’s own, a
sorrow at once neither about a given object (sadness) nor about oneself
(melancholy), a negative feeling whose paradoxical authenticity (from auto-
entes) resides in one’s not being the agent of it.
From this perspective, the truth of cosmic pessimism lies not in doctrine
but in the conscious disowning of the comprehensiveness of knowledge in
the name of an ineradicable gap between science and its event, between
knowing and the capacity to know. Cosmic pessimism per force fails itself
wherever it becomes prescriptive (e.g. anti-natalism) – as if the worstness of
the cosmos could ever be delimited by its contents, as if anything in
particular could ever make one happy, or unhappy for that matter! Cosmic
pessimism is not properly an –ism, but an act of showing, outside the
parameters of formal proof, the non-philosophizability of the universe. It is
a demonstration of the fact that the human, by virtue of its own event, is
consitutively incapable of intellectually navigating the negativity binding
thought and being, of definitively illuminating the darkness of one’s relation
to the real. Modulating between the impersonal obscurity of the cosmos and
the all-too-personal impossibility of individuated existence, the
dispersonally passionate voice of the cosmic pessimist gives objective and
generalized expression to the affective un-ground of modern philosophy.
This is a voice that inversely expands the virtual, skeptical blackening of
knowledge wherein the cogito is discovered – Descartes’s pretense ‘that all
the things that had ever entered my mind were no more true than the
illusions of my dreams’233 – into the very blackness of the universe, the
neither-subjective-nor-objective fact of its uchromic expanse. Such
inversion is perfectly traced in the opening and seemingly incidental ‘I
think’ of Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all
its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it
was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have
hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up
such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad
from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.234

This familiar impasse, the destining of human consciousness to either

ignorance or madness, is a fundamental projection of the constitutive
paradox of cosmic pessimism. The way beyond it, a way off the ‘island’,
consists in understanding the felt impasse itself – the epistemic sorrow of
the cosmic pessimist – as a true perception of things, as a feature of the
universe as such.

Things Cannot Be Better – Either the world is now at an end, or...

To see the universal materiality of sorrow, to understand it as an extra-
human and general condition of things, constitutes a speculative solution of
cosmic pessimism’s constitutive paradox and a creative resolution of its
self-preserving predicament. Just as the interruption of the ‘see-sawing
between metaphysics and fideism’ requires for Meillassoux that we
‘transform our perspective on unreason, […] project unreason into things
themselves, and discover in our grasp of facticity the veritable intellectual
intuition of the absolute,’235 so the materialization of the unreason of
sorrow, its liberation from the logics of reaction and melancholic self-
reference, is a portal opening the other side of the ultimacy of the worst, the
place where the cosmically pessimal is not only actually but optimally true.
To properly think through cosmic pessimism, as opposed to dwelling in it,
will require a new concept and experience of hopelessness, a truer
hopelessness that is at once more hopeless, because it is more real, and less
hopeless, because it is less concerned with human identity. Such a
hopelessness is unveiled when we peer through the precise blindspot or
auto-eclipse of cosmic pessimism, its attachment to the total futility of its
drama, famously professed by Lovecraft as ‘the fundamental premise that
common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or
significance in the vast cosmos-at-large’.236 On the other side of this
arbitrary collective limit lurks the more terrifying prospect that one’s
(human) emotion does indeed have validity and significance in the cosmos-
at-large, that it holds truths which infinitely exceed you, that subjective
identity which, contrary to its most precious and self-defining pretenses, is
already wholly lost to the universe. This is the greater horror still that
cosmic horror perforce precludes and flirts with in the form of madness,
namely, the fact that one’s pathetically finite human being is so abyssically
in universe that neither is there anywhere to hide nor any reason to, because
the life on whose behalf one trembles was itself never one’s own. Here we
touch upon the higher form of cosmic horror, a horror-without-us that may
be understood as the post-subjective affect proper to a ‘non-euclidean’ and
anagogic cosmic pessimism, in the sense of that which inverts the axiom of
its irrelevance and thus discloses the universal curvature of its own affect.
Like the contemplative who finds himself raised up by what he seeks or the
divinely bewildered who finds his own being inseparable from the
multiplicative movement of the One,237 this cosmic pessimist plunges into a
new order of the pessimal, one that is far worse than whatever is worst for
him, a more perfect worst that could not be better.
In light of Lovecraft’s ‘fundamental premise,’ the universal reality of
sorrow offers itself as a live medium for leaping through and resolving the
apparently exclusive options of madness or neo-medieval retreat.
Dialectially, it is a portal out of which spring the chaiastic twins of a new
revelation of darkness and new ground for the ‘medievalization’ of science.
Where the former signals a reappreciation of the intellectual unmasterability
of the universe, a sobering coming-into-view of the cosmos as an
unscalable mountain or unfathomable abyss, the latter signals a reinvention
of the cosmocentric subject, a life-expanding emerging of universe as
invisibly or mysteriously within. The work of this sorrow is to pierce the
bubble of subjectivity and expose consciousness to complicity with the
spheres. The trajectory of finding sorrow’s extra-subjectivity is one of
fundamental topological reorientation, a somersaulting inversion of identity
whereby the self reverses itself vis-à-vis the world and is no longer the
auto-hallucinatory interior of being. The promise of real sorrow thus
accords with contemporary elucidations of the present age of human history
as one in which traditional mystical truth is rediscovered in profoundly
exteriorized forms, where the inward, putatively subjective sublimity of
premodern contemplation is eventially relocated to the ‘inhuman’ outside.238
Peter Sloterdijk, for example, reading Heidegger in intimate contrast to
John of Damascus, concludes his bubbleology with the claim that Dasein’s
conundrum to itself ‘calls […] us to become involved with the
monstrousness of the external’.239 And Eugene Thacker, reflecting on
philosophy as horror, feels the present future of mysticism to be
fundamentally ‘climatological’, to be about ‘that which in shadows
withdraws from any possible experience, and yet makes its presence felt,
through the periodic upheavals of weather, land, and matter’.240 Given the
symmetry between these current visions of cosmic affect and the archaic
figuration of extreme sorrow both as tempest and as body capable of
swallowing one whole,241 there is visible here, like the outline of an image
in restoration, the old intuition that the self-inverting way to freedom, as in
Dante’s exit from Hell, per force passes via the form of a weeping
monstrous body.
The way into such a mystically transformed perspective on sorrow, one
that finds at once sorrow’s dark materiality and its meta-pessimisitic
optimality, is shadowed forth in the spectacle of the crucifixion darkness,
wherein cosmic sorrow marks the coincidence of the best – ‘“Truly I say to
you, today you will be with me in Paradise”. It was now about the sixth
hour, and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour, while
the sun’s light failed’ (Luke 23. 43–4) – and the worst: ‘Now from the sixth
hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. And about the
ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eli, Eli la’ma sabach-tha’ni?” that
is, “My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?”’ (Matthew 27. 45–46).
Filling this three-hour interim, the darkness, like a universal veil over the
very heart of the divine passion, occurs in the position of a mysterious non-
mediating medium between the truths of these antipodal statements. As
Coelius Sedulius would write in his elaborative versification of the Gospels,
‘there were mystic secrets | In that space of time’.242 The visible darkness of
the crucifixion event, via the paradox of a negative light, hiddenly gives
witness to a zone of occult identity between the immanent summit of
perfection and the kenotic abyss of God’s self-dereliction. While the
Synoptic Gospels do not explicitly connect the darkness (skotos) with
sorrow, the link is implicit through the general association of darkness with
grief and death, and more specifically, in light of ‘the outer darkness […]
[where] men will weep and gnash their teeth’ (Matthew 25. 30). On the
basis of this connection, the crucifixion darkness appears as the durational
moment when the cosmos becomes wholly exterior, a universal outside.
During this excruciating phase, the world itself assumes the dimensions of a
real spectacle or material revelation whose sense is both gnostic and
apocalyptic, a self-showing of the cosmos in its inevitable ending and
extreme distance from the divine Light.243 Yet, by virtue of this very
exteriorization, the universe is now simultaneously revealed as the
profoundest interiority, a domain where nothing is without inherent and
immediate contact with the ineffable source of everything. Like the purest
form of luminous trembling or flash, an infinitesimal yet thoroughly
extended light showing nothing else than that there is something one does
not see, the crucifixion darkness exposes the cosmos to be a meta-
topological coincidence of the pessimal and the optimal, a strange place
where the only way to discern with certainty where you are is to see that
you are hopelessly lost.
Medieval interpretation of the crucifixion as an event of universal sorrow
magnifies the interior and affective aspect of this darkness. As Julian of
Norwich explains, commenting on her vision of Christ’s passion, the
darkening of the world is a sorrowful failing or collapse of created nature
that testifies to its essential link with divinity:
Here I saw a gret oning [oneness] betwene Crist and us, to my understonding. For when he was
in paine, we ware in paine, and all creatures that God hath made to oure servys, the firmamente
and erth, failed for sorow in their kind [nature] in the time of Cristes dying. For it longeth kindly
[naturally] to ther properte [order] to know him for ther lorde, in whom all ther vertuse [powers]
stondeth. And when he failed, then behoved nedes [it was necessary] to them for kindnes [because
of their nature] to faile with him, in as moch as they might, for sorow of his paines.
And thus tho [those] that were his frendes suffered paine for love, and generally alle: that is to
sey, they that knew him not sufferde for failinge of all manner comfort, save the mighty prive
keeping [powerful secret sustaining] of God. I mene of two maner people that knew him not, as it
may be understond by two persons. That one was Pilate, that other person was Saint Dionisy of
France, which was that time a paynim. For whan he saw wonders and merveyles, sorowse and
dredes, that befelle in that time, he saide: ‘Either the worlde is now at an ende, or elles he that is
 maker of kindes [nature] suffereth’. Wherfore he did write on an awter: ‘This is an awter to the
unknowen God’.
God of his goodnes, that maketh planettes and the elementes to worke in ther kinde to the blessed
man and to the cursede, in that time it was withdraw fro both. Wherfor it was that they that knew
him not were in sorow that time. Thus was oure lord Jhesu noughted for us, and we stonde alle in
this maner noughted with him, and shalle do tille that we come to his blisse. 244
The passage beautifully synthesizes the constellation of ideas that were
exegetically attached to the crucifixion darkness in Julian’s time: 1) that the
darkness is a kind of material sorrow, a substantial affective participation in
divine suffering; 2) that the darkness occurs by means of a supernatural
withdrawal of natural powers, in concert with God’s kenosis or self-
emptying; and 3) that witnessing the darkness, as figured in the person of
Dionysius, is an index of apophatic mystical vision, the revelation of the
divine via unknowing. In keeping with the mystical intimacy of separation
from the Omnipresent – ‘O blissful Estrangement from God, how bound I
am to you in love!’245 – these principles in concert communicate the
immanence of a positively negative affective pole of experience that
marvelously converts privation to surplus and dereliction to home. How
does sorrow, as the very substance of this darkness, overcome the
opposition between the pessimal and the optimal? How does sorrow’s
uncanny materiality or weird whatness touch the superlative thatness of
divinity?

What’s the Matter? – All creation groaned

Identification of the crucifixion darkness with sorrow, which dates to at
least the early 3rd century, continues preceding antique and Jewish tropes,
namely, the personification of the darkening or eclipsed sun as evil/tragic
omen and the figuration of the ‘Day of the Lord’ in Amos 8. 9–10 and
Jeremiah 11. 28.246 Chief among the prodigies appearing around the
assassination of Julius Caesar in Virgil’s Georgics is the sun who ‘felt for
[miseratus] Rome that time that Caesar fell | and veiled [texit] his gleaming
head in gloom | so dark the infidels began to fear that night would last for
ever’ (I. 467–8).247 Ovid continues the conceit and accentuates the sense of
a fearful spectacle of mourning: ‘solis […] tristis imago | lurida sollicitis
praebebat lumina terris’ [the sorrowful image of the sun shone with lurid
light upon the troubled earth].248 The motif compares to the legend of
Romulus’s apotheosis during an eclipse, which was also inseparable from
the question of its own truth.249 For Augustine, the Roman legend, in
connection to its aspect of sorrow, provided figurative precedent and pretext
for apologetic affirmation of the supernatural darkness of the crucifixion:
Then, there was an eclipse of the sun, which the simple-minded populace, not knowing that it
was explainable by the sun’s regular course, attributed to the power of Romulus. If the eclipse was
taken as the sun in mourning [luctus], it would have been more natural for them to believe that
Romulus had been murdered, and that, by the failing [aversione] of the sun’s light, the crime was
revealed. That phenomenon did in truth occur [revera factum est] when our Lord was crucified by
the cruelty and impiety of the Jews. That this latter darkening [obscurationem] of the sun was not
caused by the normal course of the heavenly bodies is sufficiently proved by the fact that it
occurred at the time of the Jewish Pasch.250

The affiliation of darkness and sorrow here serves as the implicit term
whereby the crucifixion darkness signifies the eclipse of pagan ignorance
by the supernatural light of Christian truth. Although Augustine does not
literally identify the crucifixion darkness with solar sorrow, their significant
association intimates how sorrow comes to be seen, not only as an
important figural and/or aesthetic attribute of the crucifixion event, but as
the actuality of its cosmicity and thus also a logically necessary principle
for the darkness’s simultaneous displacement of and differentiation from the
antique exemplar, which is now reduced to naturalistic explanation.251 In
these terms, late antique interpretation of the crucifixion darkness
transmutes the pathetic fallacy of solar sorrow into cosmo-theological fact.
Ephrem the Syrian, for instance, elegantly connects the event of universal
com-passion, the sun’s visionary self-darkening, and the principle of
sorrowful withdrawal: ‘Created beings suffered with [him] in his suffering.
The sun hid its face so as not to see him when he was crucified. It retracted
its light back into itself so as to die with him’.252
The literal and material affirmation of cosmic sorrow at the crucifixion
conforms with its spiritual truth via continuity with the general coincidence
of repetition and compassion that marks the Christian path: ‘If any man
would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow
me’ (Matthew 16. 24). Giving witness to the divine Passion demands the
possibility of a mourning beyond mourning, a sorrow that is com-passion in
the fullest participatory sense, one that is never simply a feeling-sorry-for
and is always in touch with the universality of the cross whose shadow was
seen ‘super universam terram’ (Matthew 27. 45). The given reality of this
felt contact is the ground of one’s own cross, the foundation of an affective
spiritual authenticity that passes beyond relation into the passion of the
God-Man. Furthermore, the crucifixion darkness, as absolutely common
sorrow, shows forth in negative form not only the eternal creative
universality of the Christ – ‘all things were created through him and for
him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together’ (Colossians
1. 17) – but the temporal process of that creativity: ‘We know that the
whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now’ (Romans 8.
23).253 More specifically, the actuality of the sun’s sorrow, at once a real
impossibility and a live allegory of the universally suffering Sol Iustitiae,
both marks it as a singular hyper-portent, a sign above and beyond all
similar signs, and indicates the absolute singular immanence of what it
signifies: ‘For there is is one God, and there is one mediator between God
and men’ (I Timothy 2. 5). As God’s suffering shows to man the way to
‘deny himself,’ the way itself is inescapably followed in the dark spectacle
of the whole cosmos which already has.
The element of sorrow, perceived directly only in the crucifixion
darkness’s commentarial nimbus, is thus a kind of essential supplement
which simultaneously protects the event against reduction to portent or
wonder and preserves the intrinsic, divine openness of its significance. In
order to be saved from the metaphoricity of its legendary precedent and
participate formally in its own truth, the crucifixion darkness must in a real
yet strangely unspecifable way be sorrow. Sorrow is the darkness of the
universal darkness, amidst its not being named as sorrow. Here we must
posit, as a poetic inevitability of the tradition, that the non-reference to
sorrow in the Gospel accounts is intrinsic and even intentional, both a
rhetorical and apologetic necessity with respect to the narrative task of
repeating without repetition the ancient motifs of cosmically portentious
death (i.e. not making Jesus’s death sound like Julius Caesar’s) and a
representational necessity with respect to capturing and rendering the
darkness palpable, in the form of its own inscrutability or mystery. The
representational point or punctum of the crucifixion darkness, at once lost
on and proven by the ink expended in explanation of it, is that it is dark,
that to witness or affirm it is to be in the selfsame darkness, to sense the
failing of one’s own thought and feeling before it, and more intensively, to
see the non-difference between that felt failing and the profoundly ongoing
event of created being. Crucially, this affective paradox of the crucifixion
darkness is cosmically scaled and thus expressible in the generalized form
of a negatively hyper-literal anagogic sense: the present absence of sorrow
in the originary representation of the cosmic darkness event is the
universality of sorrow itself.
Seen in these intensive terms, the crucifixion darkness bleeds into a
universal auto-affective domain that is invisible, seemingly impossible, and
properly free from the operation of efficient causes. Via this radically
immanent hidden space, this visible temporal world is shown to be the
shadow of that invisible eternal one. This happens, precisely by an opening
of the palpable negativity wherein they touch, as described in Leo the
Great’s sermon on the Passion:
It has been shown that Jesus, when lifted up, did draw all to himself, not only by suffering in our
substance, but even by a disturbance [commotione] of the whole world. While the Creator was
hanging on the gallows, all creation [universa creatura] groaned [congemuit], and all the elements
at the same time felt the nails of the cross. Nothing was free from that punishment [supplicio]. By
this he drew both earth and heaven into communion with himself, by this he broke the rocks,
opened the tombs, unlocked hell, and hid the sun’s rays with the horror of thick darkness. The
world owed this witness to its own Creator, so that in the fall of its Maker all things should want to
come to an end.254

Here the world is drawn into communion with God by means of a

universal passivity that, while moving in different verbal forms (breaking,
opening, unlocking, hiding), is yet one common feeling, a com-motion and
co-mourning in a real affective sense. All at once the whole world is
brought low, humiliated in a pain (supplicio) that, by virtue of being
suffered by the world’s infinitely intimate Other, at once touches it beyond
its capacity to feel and negatively fulfills its ownmost and elementally
inconceivable volitional essence. Cut to the quick, the cosmos darkly bleeds
a divinely occult will, demonstrating in a kind of blind yet self-opening
seizure that everything indeed wants to be, firstly, because it does not.
The crucifixion darkness is not only a revelation of the incredible fact of
the incarnate God – ‘Truly this was the Son of God’ (Matthew 27. 54) – but
a revelation of the mystery of matter itself, a shadowing forth of its hidden,
willfull depths. The material lesson of this darkness is thus antipodal to
contemporary theoretical discourse about ‘melancholy objects’, which
seems inherently bound to both evoke and dismiss the idea of sorrowing
matter, as exemplified in the opening caveat of Peter Schwenger’s The
Tears of Things:
The title of this book appropriates Virgil’s phrase and applies it in a way that will doubtless seem
very strange to the classical grammarian; its evocative power, however, has been impossible to
resist. From the boad range of probable meanings for rerum […] I have narrowed the word to its
most concrete meaning, that of material objects. Not that I am asserting that such objects shed tears
– for themselves, or for us – or that they feel the kind of emotion that would produce tears, or any
kind of emotion. Nevertheless, there is a melancholy associated with physical objects […] it is
generated by the act of perception, perception of the object by the subject. This perception, always
falling short of full possession, gives rise to a melancholy that is felt by the subject and is
ultimately for the subject. It is we who are to be lamented, and not the objects that evoke this
emotion in us without feeling it themselves.255

Over and against such self-referentially human melancholy, a sorrow for

and by us, stands the darker sorrow of things whose feeling deeply escapes,
precedes, and exceeds my own.256 Inverting Schwenger’s terms, the sorrow
within the crucifixion darkness is a sorrow found, not through the act of
perceiving an object, but in the passion of not-seeing. It is a melancholy not
generated via relation, but paradoxically revealed without exposure in the
ground of its own latency, re-veiled in the painful flash of feeling that
glimpses it and at once knows – somewhere within the mute feeling of
feeling itself – that it cannot. The sorrow (of) the crucifixion darkness, a
sorrow whose genitivity is per force elided, is a dark sorrow, sorrow that is
dark to itself, as if it were a sorrow that only sorrow itself feels. Such deep
real sorrow is not properly understood as expressed or even signified by the
crucifixion darkness. It is rather, with pre-relational celerity, something that
is actually photographed by the darkness-event, illuminated in the
seemingly impossible light wherethrough it takes a picture of everything.
Thus, instead of thinking of the dark sorrow revealed in the crucifixion as
something matter either feels or does not feel, one must think it on the level
of a sorrow that matter obscurely is, of a dark matter that is sorrow. The
universal darkness of the crucifixion is not an image of all matter being
made to weep, as if for three miraculous hours around the Christian pole of
history the world were temporarily a panpsychist one. Nor is it the base
opposite of that, a merely material spectacle poetically marking the crux of
the cosmic theo-drama, the truth of which is ultimately allegorical or
otherwise than the darkness event itself. For it is equally true that the
crucifixion darkness is a true image of all matter being made to weep. The
darkness is an image of something harder to envision than either. It is the
image of a cosmos that does not not cry, of tears that are materially at the
heart of its being made. In sum, the universe itself – an entity that most
certainly includes your being in it, and vice-versa – is the true melancholy
object, the dark realm of a literally authentic melancholy, that is, sorrow
humorially proper to black earth. This black earth is not only the dust
wherein life clings to itself, but what Eriugena calls ‘that invisibile mystical
earth and dark intelligible abyss’ [ipsaque tenebrosa abyssus intellectualis],
namely, the domain of the primordial causes of all visible things, which is
‘perceived by no intellect except that which formed it in the beginning’.257
From this perspective – a cosmic view of this itself – the darkness
sorrowfully surrounding the Creator’s death is invisibly identical with the
gaze that brings the universe into being.258
This primordial passivity into which the crucifixion darkness opens is
visible in the impersonal affects found both within and on the surface of its
representations. Clarifying this demands that we consider, as if under the
very starlight of the anti-diurnal cosmic darkness, the non-difference
between surface or secondary aspects of the representation and the actual
reality of a sorrow that is too vast and deep ever to be considered as only
one’s own. Again, still, we are here in the domain of a hyper-literal
anagogy, of a truth that presents itself too immediately, too terribly in
advance of my capacity to recognize or acknowledge anything as true. So,
paralleling the unrecognized appearance of God in the world – ‘He was in
the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him
not’ (John 1. 10) – the crucifixion darkness bears the overall paradoxical
sense of an unmistakable yet unrecognized event, of a radically novel and
indeed obvious happening that yet happens without being known. Like an
inverted analog of the as not of messianic time, what Agamben calls ‘the
simultaneous aboltion and realization of the as if’ according to which old
identities remain only in a new space of auto-eclipse or non-coincidence
with themselves,259 the visibility of the darkness hides in its being visibly
unseen, hardly noticed, as if the world were darkened not by darkness, but
by darkness’s hidden invisibility.260 The cosmos is manifestly, literally
darkened, and yet the event, in its happening, happens as if it does not, via
an actuality that appears to erase itself by means of its own manifestness.
This aspect is communicated not only in the general feeling of historical
doubt that haunts the whole tradition, with its continual demand for extra-
Biblical and non-Christian confirmation, but in the interpretive narration of
the darkness as simultaneously an independent cosmic event and the
mirroring sign of perversely exceptional human blindness to it, so that the
spectacle of all creation sorrowing also only testifies to the fact that, on the
island of human identity, it strangely does not. Where the eyeless elemental
world, like an affective avant-garde, immediately feels and/or sorrows for
the divine passion, the human world, in the inertia of its own inner
darkness, remains unmoved. As interpreted by Melito of Sardis, among the
earliest commentators to link the crucifixion darkness with sorrow, the
withdrawal of light from the exposed body of the God-Man is a veiling of
human vision from what everything except it sees, a blinding manifestation
of its own blindness:
The master is obscured by his body exposed, and is not held worthy of a veil to shield him from
view. For this reason the great lights turned away, and the day was turned to darkness; to hide the
one denuded on the tree, obscuring not the body of the Lord but human eyes. For when the people
did not tremble, the earth shook. When the people did not fear, the heavens were afraid. When the
people did not rend their garments, the angel rent his own. When the people did not lament, the
Lord thundered from heaven, and the most high gave voice.261

The crucifixion darkness thus takes on the dimension of an impersonal

affect that is neither subjective nor objective and both, a substantial
common something the seeing of which coincides with not seeing it, so that
darkness, beyond being the object of sightless subjective vision – seeing
that one does not see – phenomenally inverts into a kind of visionless
objective seeing, the palpable presence of the invisible seeing wherein the
visionless visible (matter) perceives the manifest Invisible (God). The unity
of this double-sided darkness, binding together the mass blind ignorance of
humans who ‘know not what they do’ (Luke 23. 34) and the universal
visibility of what is happening among the non-human, is sorrow in the real
sense of a negative identity of thought and being, specifically, a doubly
inversive darkness containing in once circle thinking’s incapacity to see
what really is and the incapacity of what cannot think to not see it. The
ambivalence of this darkness is captured in a comment by Ephrem the
Syrian:
 Because the mind of those who crucified him was darkened, and they did not perceive what kind
of Sun was nailed on the cross, the sun which illuminates the eyes became darkened. When their
eyes had been darkened, their mind became a little enlightened, Woe, woe to us, this was the Son of
God! Do you not see that, as long as the darkness was intensified about corporeal eyes, the
darkness of intimate thoughts was not removed. This was because darkness belongs naturally to
the darkened.262

Here we find clearly expressed the weird privative doubleness of the

crucifixion darkness as sorrow, its being equally a sorrow in that it is not
felt, a sorrow negatively in turn for itself. The cosmic sorrow communicated
in the withdrawal of light from the world intersects with the withdrawal of
sorrow from those who witness it, a withdrawal that is itself an object of
sorrow. The universal sorrow of the crucifixion thus appears in the mode of
an inverted, extra-human sublimity. Where the sublime definitionally
concerns the human subject’s experience of the limits and impossibility of
experience when encountering objects of external nature, this cosmic
sorrow concerns a movement of that nature as liminal subject around the
negation of God’s seemingly impossible humanity, an experiential
movement of the cosmos itself out and through (ex-per-ience) the limits of
the human. The divine self-dereliction accomplished in the death of the
God-Man whose soul ‘is very sorrowful, even to death’ (Mark 14. 34) thus
exposes the even more unbelievable profane self-dereliction of the human,
the empty abandonment of itself to itself wherethrough people, despite the
sorrowfulness of life, somehow remain stupidly unmoved by the plenitude
of the universe passing through their very being.

Going Through Withdrawal – What it is is negated in it

The dark matter of sorrow everywhere surrounding the crucifixion, in the
willful secrecy of matter’s being otherwise than matter, is like a perfect
inverse projection of the Neoplatonic and mystical principle that the
‘created world […] is the vision of God – in both senses of the word’,263 a
reflective shadowing of the hidden fact that everything is optimally
enclosed by and ordered towards the loving, omnipresent, and
uncircumscribable gaze of the Infinite. There is every reason, therefore, to
identify the crucifixion darkness with the divine image, the hyper-
generative analogy in which the human, out of nothing, comes to be as the
special creature capable of seeing and becoming beyond being. As
explicated by Eriugena, the divine image is constituted by ontological auto-
eclipse, the brilliant obscurity of being to itself, its self-visible occlusion of
essence: ‘the Divine likeness in the human mind is most clearly discerned
when it is only known that it is, and not known what it is […] what it is is
denied in in it [negatur in ea quid esse], and only that it is is affirmed’.264
And this essential incomprehensibility is likewise seen in all creatures – ‘no
substance or essence of any creature, whether visible or invisible, can be
comprehended by the intellect or by reason as to what it is’265 – so that the
divine image is, as if indistinguishably, at once something properly within
the human specifically and the general visibility of the image to the human
within all things, a living visibility or image-being that the human, in the
immanent space of its own being to itself, actually is. Fulfilling the ontic
role of an entity paradisically placed in the midst of a divinely improper
world – ‘what is properly divine is that the world does not reveal God’266 –
the human is the unaccountable visibility of the divine darkness, the
obscure comprehensibility of the Incomprehensible and discernible
indiscretion according to which the world’s non-revelation of God is not
simple privation but a strange plenitude that does not not reveal God.
Such an apophatic and positively negative concept of the divine image is
visible in the negative epistemic aspects of the crucifixion darkness: the
spiritual blindness of ‘they [who] know not what they do’ (Luke 23. 34), the
radical question of divine abandonment marking the darkness’s end
(Matthew 27. 46), and the fearful supernatural mystery of the visible
darkness itself: ‘and they were filled with awe [ἐφοβήθησαν]’ (Matthew 27.
54). Along the universal continuum connecting the hidden superessential
deity to the inscrutable essences of visible nature, these dark rays of the
divine image, emanations of the whatless and whyless That, intersect
formally with the exegetical clarification of the darkness as sorrow,
withdrawal, and mystical vision – intersections which themselves show the
connection between unknowing and understanding, between obscurity and
the light of commentary. That the exegetical elaboration of the crucifixion
darkness moves in this three-fold direction is itself an instance of the divine
image, a movement wherein the commenting mind sees the divine
cosmicity of its own essential obscurity reflected in the crucifixion
darkness, for that is exactly what the divine image is: a sorrow (or negative
feeling of the fact of being, the negativity of being’s being a fact), a
withdrawal (of the substance or what of being vis-à-vis its supervenient
facticity), and a mystical vision (in the sense of a blind seeing of a hidden
something that one cannot properly see). Here we see a new literal sense of
the Cloud’s definition of perfect sorrow, whose specialness – ‘Alle men han
mater of sorow, bot most specyaly he felith mater of sorow that wote and
felith that he is’ – is special not only in the sense of intensity or
particularity, but in the more substantial sense of being constituted by image
or appearance (species). Accordingly, to follow or trace these intersections
between what commentary sees in the crucifixion darkness (sorrow,
withdrawal, mystical vision) and the negative epistemic elements inherent
to its event (spiritual blindness, the question of divine dereliction,
supernatural mystery), as we will now see, is precisely to touch upon the
identity of feeling perfect sorrow and seeing the image of matter. In other
words, the interpretation of the understanding of the crucifixion darkness
will show, through the negativity of interpretation’s own will, that sorrow is
the species of matter, that materiality itself is the ‘tears of things’.
First, the identification of the darkness with mystical vision corresponds
with its sublime, awful spectacle – a connection embodied in the figure of
Dionysius as its neither-present-nor-absent observer and orginary authority
on mystical apophasis or ‘know[ing] beyond the mind by knowing
nothing’.267 Within the indiscrete eye of this ideal witness – an indiscretion
only intensified in the subsequent revelation of the pseudonymous author’s
negative self-authentication by means of the darkness event itself, its
serving as an essential term for his not-having-been-where-he-was and
having-been-where-was-not in the contemplative interest of becoming
‘neither oneself nor someone else’268 – the miraculousness of the ‘ineffable
and divine miracle of the solar eclipse [divino atque ineffabili miraculo
solaris eclipseos]’ lies not only in its scientific inexplicability but in its
mysterious point of indistinguishability from ‘the ray of the divine
shadow’.269 In other words, Dionysius’s witnessing of the darkness
communicates the otherwise invisibility of all things ‘if that ineffable ray
[radios ille ineffabilis] were not diffused into all, in order that all might
subsist and be made one in it and be joined to their beginning,’270 and thus
also speaks to the common sense of the mystical as not supernatural
experience but the secret ground of experience itself. What gives access to
this ground, what ‘explains’ the poetic transposability of cosmic eclipse and
mystical vision within the Dionysian figure is, precisely, the element of a
primordial affective negativity, specifically, the continuity of sorrow and
apophasis as twin, affective and intellective reflections of the vexed and
indiscernible identity of thought and being. Rendering this explicit,
Dionysius, as presented in Lucas Fernández’s Auto de Pasión (1514), a
work written during the period of controversy over the humanist
deconstruction of Dionysius’s authority, will introduce himself in words
that effectively voice and personify the patristic exegesis of the darkness as
compassionate elemental sorrow: ‘I am Dionysius of Athens | and, when
Astronomy failed me [faltarme], | I was able to feel the pain, | overflowing
with sorrow [fatigas], | that this God had suffered’.271 In this moment it is as
if Dionysius, exactly when the integrity of his work was in turn failing and
being eclipsed by new science, is at last freed into the divine indeterminacy
of identity and suddenly able to properly name himself in a mystical way
via an exegetical fictive excess that couldn’t be more true, to say what he
really is by speaking himself simply as an obscure body, a dark matter that
feels beyond itself and painfully knows what it properly cannot. As the
Dionysian corpus is being philologically reduced to historical materiality, a
base on which rests the severed identity of their author, the figure of
Dionysius is sublimated into the sorrowful mystery of matter itself, into an
obscure something whose life is perfectly founded on feeling what ‘it’
already has and never will. Displaying all the more authentically the
creative destruction of identity his work demands, Dionysius is now
unveiled to be the very opposite of a fraud. Hagiographically fused with St.
Denis, the saintly cephalophore, holding his own severed head upon a
corpus of texts only no one could have written, embodies the intersection of
faith and self-defiance: ‘He is truly faithful who neither believes in himself
nor hopes in himself, but, like the Prophet, becomes to himself “as a broken
vessel”’.272 Such mystical self-defiance is not properly a victory over
matter, but the utmost fulfillment of matter’s very darkness as the real
analogy of the intellect’s darkness to itself:
You cannot do better than to place yourself in darkness and unknowing. ‘Oh sir, must everything
go then? Is there no turning back?’ No indeed […] there is no turning back, but only a pressing
forward, so as to attain and achieve this possibility [perfection]. It never rests until it is filled with
all being. Just as matter never rests till it is filled with every possible form, so too intellect never
rests till it is filled to capacity.273
 Second, identification of the crucifixion darkness with sorrow corresponds
with the spiritual blindness of the crucifiers, a blindness which is at once
specific to the event (not knowing that one is killing the God-Man, denying
human divinity) and generic to humanity (simply not knowing what one is
doing, willfully being ignorant). The simultaneity of the specific and
general senses of this blindness make it a figure for the negative spirituality
of human stupidity, the substantial coincidence of spiritual sleep and
materialism, as suggested in Cyril of Alexandria’s commentary on the
darkness,
and this was a plain sign unto the Jews, that the minds of those who crucified Him were wrapped
in spiritual darkness, for ‘blindness in part hath happened unto Israel’. [Romans 11. 25] And David
in his love unto God even curses them, saying, ‘Let their eyes be darkened, that they may not see’.
[Psalms 69. 23, Romans 11. 10] Yea! creation itself bewailed its Lord: for the sun was darkened,
and the rocks were rent, and the very temple assumed the garb of mourners.274

Cyril is here reprising Paul’s discussion of spiritual blindness in Romans

11, which also looks back to Isaiah 29, in which the unintelligibility of
spiritual insensiblity is significantly figured in terms of the absence of
material cause: ‘Stupefy yourselves and be in a stupor, blind yourselves and
be blind! | Be drunk, but not with wine; stagger, but not with strong drink! |
For the Lord has poured out upon you a spirit of deep sleep, and has closed
your eyes’ (Isaiah 29. 9–10, cf. Romans 11. 8). Accordingly, the
sorrowfulness of the crucifixion darkness as a visibile manifestation and
general projection of mass human blindness consists precisely in its
immaterial materiality, which is the form of both spiritual blindness itself
and its being an object of sorrow. Generic spiritual blindness, particularly in
the sense of the especially religious condition of ‘people [who] draw near
with their their mouth and honor me [God] with their lips, while their hearts
are far from me’ (Isaiah 29. 13), is properly represented, correctively, by the
general sensible privation of the sensible because such privation expresses
at once the painful material unintelligibility of spiritual blindness – a
blindness so inexplicable that it seems negatively miraculous and effected
by a divine cause (‘For the Lord has poured out...’) – and the paradoxical
materiality of its inherent senselessness, the fact that spiritual blindness, far
from being simply a blindness to the spiritual, is as much a failure to truly
or authentically see the material, as shown in Campbell’s classic critique of
the non-materialist nature of consumerist materialism and in Augustine’s
confessional investigation into the phantasmatic and collective charater of
sin: ‘I would not have committed that theft alone: my pleasure in it was not
what [quod] I stole but that [quia] I stole: yet I would not have enjoyed
doing it, I would not have done it, alone’.275 So the spectacle of cosmic
sorrow, in which the entire material universe darkly mourns and refuses the
event of ignorant human action, is the very image of spiritual stupidity as
the inane and banally self-centered whatless and whyless that whereby our
reality is diurnally mystified. The crucifixion darkness as sorrow is an
impossible seeing and being moved which reflects, through perfect
inversion, the inexplicable unmoving sleepy blindness of the ordinary
matter-bound human who, as Bonaventure says with respect to the sensible
plenitude of the world, deserves that that whole world revolt against him:
any person who is not illumined by such great splendors in created things is blind. Anyone who
not awakened by such great outcries is deaf. Anyone who is not led from such effects to give praise
to God is mute. Anyone who does not turn to the First Principle as a result of such signs is a fool.
Therefore open your eyes, alert your spiritual ears, unlock your lips, and apply your heart so that in
all creation you may see, hear, praise, love and adore, magnify and honor your God lest the entire
world rise up against you.276

At the same time, the spiritual lesson of the sorrowful darkness is, by
inescapable internal necessity, as much a lesson against spiritual blindness
as a lesson for the pure, loving seeing of its fact: ‘Father, forgive them’
(Luke 23. 34). This seeing is love, not in the sense of sympathy or some
kind of irrational affective attachment, but in the sense of the self-less,
direct perceiving of the simple fact of the matter, a factical through-seeing
which is nothing but love itself: ‘Seeing something simply in its being-thus
– irreparable, but not for that reason necessary; thus, but not for that reason
contingent – is love’.277 The binding spiritual lesson of the darkness is that
one is not to sorrow over the spiritual blindness of which it is the image, as
doing so – a phantasmatic materialization and reduction of the cosmic
darkness into an object of sorrow – is only another not-knowing-what-one-
is-doing no different from the spiritual darkness which one is refusing. Like
the Cloud’s definition of perfect sorrow as nothing other than the most
simple knowing and feeling of being itself, the crucifixion darkness thus
demands experience of an obscurely self-liberating and seemingly
impossible sorrow that is and is not one’s own, a sorrow of those ‘who
weep as not weeping [qui flent, tanquam non flentes]’ (I Corinthians 7. 30).
That there is matter or grounds for sorrow cannot be denied. That one ought
ever sorrow is absolutely deniable. Such is the theoretically darker and
more frightening practical lesson – a truth interminably lost on the religious
or venerative misperception of the event as sacrificially accomplishing my
salvation – of the crucifixion. As Eckhart observes:
Christ says, ‘Whoever would follow me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow
me’. That is, cast out all grief so that joy reigns in your heart. Thus the child is born. And then, if
the child is born in me, the sight of my father and all my friends slain before my eyes would leave
my heart untouched.278

The question of the cross, of actually inhabiting the cosmic darkness

surrounding it, is the question of sorrowing without sorrow, of refusing evil
without refusing its fact, of withdrawing from blindness without entering
into the worse delusions of worry.279 This means, in short, becoming
familiar with the twin shadowiness or shared negative nexus of sorrow and
matter, of making friends with the objectlessness of sorrow, with there
being nothing the matter, nothing other than sorrow’s own species, the
actual apparency or face of something to sorrow over. As per Plotinus’s
understaning of the correlative non-being of matter and evil, according to
which matter ‘is only evil when looked at in itself and seen to be that final
term of the scale of Being which is totally impotent,’280 sorrow is a
negatively willful gaze into the mirror of matter, a gaze which composes
materiality around the inversive curvature and perverse apparency of its
own coming-to-be, the primordial evil of individuated being whose being,
joined to the cosmos by separation, is indistinguishable from sorrow itself:
‘the being of Da-sein is care [Sorge]’.281 But this matter, the neither-
transcendent-nor-immanent materiality of the impossibile and inevitable
fact that one is, is another order of matter, a stranger matter that, unlike the
incorporeal and unreal materiality of the sensible, does not have ‘no reality’
and is not ‘not capable of being affected’.282 Neither the mirror nor the one
gazing into it, this matter, the hidden matter of matter, which sorrows and
suffers the evil of itself, which faces everything in the image of its own
blindness, is, to maieutically force the figure where it cannot yet must go,
tears. There is sorrow in you because ‘you’ are sorrow. Such is the
superlative good news – a truth bigger than the fact of God and precisely
one that you cannot accept – which the crucifixion darkness, if one shows
the courage to see it in its simple identity with the actual silent expanse of
cosmic darkness surrounding us all, instructs you in, pointing the way back
beyond the suffering of law and before the trauma of beginning.283 In these
terms, the crucifixion darkness, as the projection of the generic spiritual
blindness in which people live, re-presents, or rather cinematically exposes
in the too-real spectacle of a representation that sees, the ordinary cosmos
as a universal vale/veil of mourning: ‘I clothe the heavens with blackness’
(Isaiah 50. 3). Pressing itself upon and inwardly imposing itself within the
dark blankness of the human gaze, the crucifixion darkness forces the fact
that this black universe, inseparable from the obscurity of your being in it,
is at once the place and hiding of the place where the false lights of the
world must and most paradisically fail:
The condition of the world, the strife and uncertainty that is everywhere, the general
dissatisfaction with and rebellion against any and every situation shows that the ideal of material
perfection is an empty dream and proves the existence of an eternal Reality beyond materiality.284

To the one who grasps oneself in the world but not of it, who sees that
one’s own appearing is the only sorrow ever known,285 sorrow itself is
neither a fact of life nor a response to it, but the abiding sign and constant
knowledge that everything is openly enclosed or unboundedly walled, para-
dised, within the world beyond. The inseparability of sorrow and matter is
the perfectly superficial surface of the durable fleshlessness of the world,
the hyper-solid deathlessness of what, never born, dies to it, no problem.286
Third, identification of the crucifixion darkness with withdrawal
corresponds to the radical question of divine dereliction that marks the
darkness’s ending: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’
(Matthew 27. 46) Hanging in a kind of infinite suspension between the
withdrawal of God and the withdrawal of matter, between the divine
darkness of mystical vision and the essential darkness of everything the eye
lights upon, this question voices a universal affective abyss and eternally
ancient negative will whose emergence as voice spontaneously shatters all
darkness in the endless light of its own inexplicable origin. Before all
hermeneutic rendering and probing of the meaning the question, over and
against every answering and explanation of its why, there stands the
absolutely free and independent truth of the question’s own actuality, a pure
actuality silencing all questions about it. Whatever the theological truth of
the abandonment signified, in the intensive reality of the question – a reality
more real than the real it questions – there is no abandonment whatsoever.
Such is the significance of the question as the end of the cosmic darkness,
that the question’s emergence marks its perfective conclusion, at once
completing it and destroying it in the paradox of finality captured in John’s
version of Jesus’s last words: ‘It is finished [τετέλεσται]’ (John 28. 30). The
darkness is total – now there is no more darkness. On the one hand, this
radical question, the question of divine dereliction, is an absolute darkness,
a negative indication of an eternal negativity. The given ground of the
question is something that could not be darker, a loss of Everything that
swallows all lights, all the more so if any are left after the loss. On the other
hand, the question’s negative indication of its ground, the infinitely ordinary
yet equally miraculous capacity of the question not only to indicate this
eternal negativity, but, in the non-difference of its own substantial
negativity, to speak it, is a superessential positivity, an affirmation beyond
affirmation and denial. The actuality of the radical question of divine
dereliction, what makes it radical in the first place, lies in its fulfillment of
the superessentiality of negation, as seen the apophatic principle that ‘the
negations are not simply the opposites of the affirmations’.287 The abyssic
depth of this question goes far beyond the transcendent mystery of its
unanswerability, the insolubility of its being the opposite of a hidden
answer, for that mystery is both affirmed and denied in the immanence of
the question, in the still greater mystery of the question’s real remaining, a
remaining that ‘answers’ the question precisely by not answering, by
remaining silent. The question silently answers itself, not propositionally,
but in its own being. In being voiced, the question resurrectively survives
itself so to speak, dispelling the darkness of its substance or what with the
brilliantly dark light of its own fact or that.288 The perfect absence of an
‘answer’ – the presence of silence – in the actuality of the question is the
best of all possible answers.289 In these terms, it is imperative to take
seriously and matter-of-factly exactly what seems most impossible
regarding the optimal and pessimal statements defining the beginning and
ending of the cosmic darkness, namely, that the today of paradise and the
why? of divine abandonment are the same, the very place of being with
God. Similarly, to extend the auto-destructive darkness of the question to
the surrounding senses of the crucifixion darkness elaborated above, the
universality of the darkness is the identity of the withdrawal of matter and
the withdrawal of the divine, a unitary coincidence of the essential
whatlessness of everything before the superessentiality of its that. The
radical question of divine abandonment is, literally and figuratively, the
cosmically silent sorrowful voice of matter itself, a saying of absolute
abandonment showing the impossibility of its being so.
What saves this reading of the crucifixion darkness from being only an
intellectually gratifying speculative conceptualization of mystical Christian
truth is the reality of sorrow itself, a reality that is the very condition of
truth, as per the obverse of Ecclesiastes 1:18 (‘He who increases
knowledge, increases sorrow’): he who does not increase sorrow, does not
increase knowledge. For it is only in sorrow that the coincidentia
oppositorum of the crucifixion becomes more than a mystical conceit, only
in the actuality of tears that the cosmic darkness around it is more than an
interesting image. Like the nigredo of the alchemists, the darkness of
sorrow is the creatively self-destroying term that opens the corporeal to the
substantial nothingness of matter and the infinity of its immanent beyond.
So at the level of mind, ‘it is only in the starlight of sorrow that we become
conscious of other worlds’.290 As the crucifixion darkness is seen externally
as a medium of stupefying, supernatural transition – ‘An awful darkness,
which was entirely supernaturally and terrible! Here a new world was
begun’291 – so sorrow itself, internally, is a kind of supernatural or magical
problem, a problem whose problematicity, if actually understood, abolishes
all problems and inverts today into paradise: ‘Understanding our sorrow is
pure magic. When sorrow is truly understood it ceases to be sorrow’.292
According to the Cloud of Unknowing, the ground of such magical
contemplative mutation of the pessimal into the optimal is the brute
inescapable fact that being simply is a sorrow to itself, a sorrow
cosubstantial with its own unearthly material: ‘but most specially he feels
matter of sorrow that knows and feels that he is’.293 Ultimately, the only
thing the matter with anything is the mere/pure fact of one’s being, apart
from anything about one’s being. The matter of sorrow is a literally
essential negativity moving between being and the experience (knowing
and feeling) of being. Paradoxically, this supreme and originary sorrow is
both disclosed and overcome only by assuming and entering it. As the
Cloud-author explains in another text, this is the truly speculative work and
real crucifixion, your own:
For all the sorrow that exists, apart from that, is nothing in comparison [not a poynte to that]. It is
then that you are yourself a cross to yourself. This is the authentic exercise [trewe worching] and
way to the Lord […] Many men identify themselves with their activity, but there is a distinction; I
myself that do is one thing, my deeds that are done are another. It is the same with God; he is one
thing in himself, his works are another. I would rather weep till my heart should break because I
lack this feeling of God and of the painful heaviness of the self, and thus inflame by desire to have
and to long for that feeling of God, rather than enjoy all the well-devised imaginative and
speculative meditations that men can tell of or find written in books, no matter how holy or
worthwhile they appear to the subtle regard [ighe] of your speculative mind.294

Entering and assuming the sorrow that is oneself means making it actual
and new, realizing it the paradoxical moment of self-erasing labor. This
working is neither an activity nor an inactivity, but something outside and
between doing and being whereby being overcomes itself – becomes
beyond being – by means of a contrition of being, a woeful crushing and
crucifixion of itself under its own weight, within a gravity of sorrow that
spontaneously converts into the freest flight. Where ‘melancholy is the
unconscious music of the soul’,295 a movement of being that stays within the
circuit of the self-world correlation, mystical sorrow is the soul’s conscious
music, a movement of being that escapes being’s correlativeness by
crucifying it to itself, by ceasing to call oneself with the names of doing and
desisting to flee the torture chamber of one’s own existence. Being the
actual com-motion of a sorrowful universal passivity, the crucifixion
darkness is the real manifest image of this music. Mystical sorrow, letting
oneself be swallowed by this cosmic darkness, is not really your feeling of
this dark universal music. The music is the hidden, sorrowful sound of the
universe feeling you.296

215 Eugene Thacker, ‘Cosmic Pessimism’, Continent 2 (2012), p. 68.

216 Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, p. 137.
217 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, II, 640.
218 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, I, 412.
219 E. M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist, trans. Ronald Howard (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998), p. 46.
220 Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, p. 135.
221 Mystical Theology: The Glosses by Thomas Gallus and the Commentary of Robert Grosseteste
on De Mystica Theologica, ed. and trans. James McEvoy (Paris: Peeters, 2003), p.21, citing the
 version of John Sarrazen; Greek cited from Dionysius Areopagita, Opera, ed. G. Heil and A. M.
Ritter (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1991).
222 See Boyd Taylor Coolman, ‘The Medieval Affective Dionysian Tradition’, Modern Theology 24
(2008): 615–32. So Thomas Gallus glosses ‘consurge’ as ‘consurge per principalem affeccionem’
[rise by means of the principle affection] and ‘forti contritione’ as ‘forti mentis conamine’,
moving the concept away from affective negativity towards the principle of intellectual love
(Mystical Theology, ed. McEvoy, I.2).
223 Hugh of Balma, Carthusian Spirituality: The Writings of Hugh of Balma and Guigo de Ponte,
trans. Dennis D. Martin (New York: Paulist Press, 1997), p. 71.
224 On the mystical inversion of the epistemological ordering of the senses, see Susan Ashbrook
Harvey, Scenting Savlation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2006) and Rachel Fulton, ‘“Taste and see that the Lord is sweet”
(Psalms 33. 9): The Flavor of God in the Monastic West’, Journal of Religion 86 (2006), pp. 169–
202.
225 As Schopenhauer observes, touch and smell are the ‘senses […] most closely related to the will,
and hence are always the most ignoble, and have been called by Kant the subjective senses’
(World as Will and Representation, I. p. 200). On bitterness, see E. M. Cioran, Syllogismes de
l’amertume (Paris: Gallimard, 1956). ‘I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this
century and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my
fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a
cold and unyielding surface of polished glass’ (H. P. Lovecraft, The Fiction, Complete and
Unabridged [New York: Barnes & Noble, 2008], p. 169). Donald R. Burleson comments: ‘The
whole experience of Lovecraft’s fiction is the experience of the Outsider, wandering though
textual mazes of shockingly revelatory mirrors, reaching out with hopeful hands and touching, in
various ways, the fateful glass’ (Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe [Lexington, KY: University
Press of Kentucky, 1990], p. 158).
226 Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, p. 34.
227 Ibid, p. 49.
228 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, II, 51.
229 As Robert Grosseteste observes, ‘“mystical” is used for everything more spiritual that is
signified by the less spiritual, or by a reality that is not spiritual; and a mystery is everything
which refers to something of a more spiritual nature’ (Mystical Theology, ed. McEvoy, p. 667).
230 Eugene Thacker, ‘Cosmic Pessimism’, p. 68.
231 John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merrit Y. Hughes (New York: Macmillan,
1957), my italics.
232 Cioran, Short History of Decay, p. 47.
233 René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald A.
Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), p. 18.
234 H. P. Lovecraft, ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, in The Whisperer in Darkness (Ware, UK: Wordsworth
Editions, 2007), p. 34.
235 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 82.
236 Letter to Fransworth Wright, July 5, 1927, cited from H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of
Madness, introduction by China Miéville (New York: Modern Library, 2005), p. xii.
237 ‘We grab hold of it with one hand and then another, and we seem to be pulling it down toward
us. Actually it is already there on the heights and down below and instead of pulling it to us we
are being lifted upward to that brilliance above’ (Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, p. 68).
‘[G]uidance means being guided to bewilderment [hayra], that he might know the whole affair is
perplexity, which means perturbation and flux, and flux is life’ (Ibn Arabi, Bezels of Wisdom
 [Fusus al-Hikam], trans. R.W.J. Austin [New York: Paulist Press, 1980], p. 254). Andrey Smirnov
explains the relation between bewilderment and movement, which is also present in the English
etymology, thus: ‘The hā’ir “perplexed” human being finds himself in constant movement. He
cannot gain a foothold at any point, he is not established anywhere. This is why Ibn ‘Arabī says
that he is “perplexed in the multiplication of the One”: this “multiplication” is not just
epistemological, it is ontological as well, and the perplexed human being is moving in the
whirlpool of life and cosmic Order and at the same time realises that he is at that movement’
(‘Sufi Hayra and Islamic Art: Contemplating Ornament through Fusus al-Hikam’, paper presented
at Sufism, Gnosis, Art: The Thought of Ibn Arabi and Shah Nimatullah [Seville, 22–23 November
2004]).
238 On modernity’s experiential deobjectivization of mystical hermeneutics and restriction of
mysticism to the ‘aesthetic or subjective’, see Niklaus Largier, ‘Mysticism, Modernity, and the
Invention of Aesthetic Experience’, Representations 105 (2009), pp. 37–60.
239 Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres I, trans. Wieland Hoban (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011), p.
629.
240 Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2011), p. 158.
241 ‘When my most searching scrutiny had drawn up all my vileness [miseriam] from the secret
depths of my soul and heaped it in my heart’s sigh, a mighty storm arose in me, bringing a mighty
rain of tears’ (Augustine, Confessions, VIII.12). ‘[Y]ou should rather turn to forgive and comfort
him, or he may be overwhelmed [absorbeatur, katapothē] by excessive sorrow’ (II Corinthians 2.
7).
242 Coelius Sedulius, Carmen Paschale, trans. Patrick McBrine (unpublished), V. 241–2.
243 On these and related senses of darkness (skotos) in the New Testament, see Theological
Dictionary of the New Testament, eds. Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, trans. Geoffrey W.
Bromley, 10 vols. (Stuttgart: Verlag, 1971), X. 438–41.
244 Julian of Norwich, A Revelation of Love, ch.18, lines 11–30, in The Writings of Julian of
Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, eds. Nicholas Watson
and Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), pp.
185–7.
245 Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans. Frank Tobin (New York:
Paulist Press, 1998), p. 156.
246 On the exegetical history and early contexts, see Rufino Maria Grández, ‘Las tinieblas en la
muerte de Jesús: Historia de la exegesis de Lc 23,44–45a (Mt 27,45; Mc 15,33)’, Estudios
Biblicos 47 (1989), pp. 177–224; Dale C. Allison Jr., Studies in Matthew: Interpretation Past and
Present (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2005), pp. 79–105, esp. 98–100; and Larry J. Kreitzer, Gospel
Images in Fiction and Film: On Reversing the Hermeutic Flow (London: Sheffield Academic
Press, 2002), pp. 105–21.
247 Virgil, Georgics, trans. Peter Fallon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
248 Ovid, Metamorphoses, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), XV. 785–6.
249 ‘The multitude […] believing this and rejoicing in it, went away to worship him with good hopes
of his favour; but there were some, it is said, who tested the matter in a bitter and hostile spirit,
and confounded the patricians with the accusation of imposing a silly tale upon the people, and of
being themselves the murderers of the king’ (Plutarch, The Parllel Lives, trans. Bernadotte Perrin
[Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923], Life of Romulus, ch. 27).
250 Augustine, City of God, trans. Gerald G. Walsh and Grace Monahan (New York: Fathers of the
Church, 1952), III. 15. The positive prefigurative function of the antique motif is shown in
reference to Virgil by Orosius, Augustine’s student: ‘On the same day at the sixth hour, the sun’s
light was completely effaced, a hellish darkness suddenly fell over the earth, and, as the saying
 goes, impious mortals fear’d eternal night [Georgics I. 468]’ (Paulus Orosius, Seven Books of
History Against the Pagans, trans. A. T. Fear [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010], VII.
4. 14).
251 Augustine goes on to cite favorably Cicero’s sensible interpretation of the legend: ‘For even
though, during the darkness of that eclipse, Nature carried Romulus away to man’s inevitable end,
yet the story is that it was his merit that caused his translation to heaven […] his great
achievements led to the belief that, when he disappeared during a sudden darkening of the sun, he
had been added to the number of the gods; indeed such an opinion could never have gotten abroad
about any human being save a man pre-eminently renowned for virtue’ (Republic, trans. Clinton
Walker Keyes [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966], I. 16).
252 Saint Ephrem’s Commentary on Tatian’s Diatessaron: An English Translation of Chester Beatty
Syriac MS 709, trans. Carmel McCarthy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 319.
Similarly, Jerome’s interpretation of the darkness as caused by the sun’s withdrawal of its light –
‘It seems to me that the clearest light of the world, that is, the ‘greater luminary’, withdrew her
rays [retraxisse radios suos] either in order to avoid seeing the Lord hanging there, or to prevent
impious blasphemers from enjoying her light’ (Saint Jerome, Commentary on Matthew, trans.
Thomas P. Scheck [Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008], p. 319) –
explicitly preserves the supernaturality of the darkness against those critics of the Gospels, e.g.
Porphyry and Celsus, who ‘suspect that Christ’s disciples, through ignorance, have interpreted an
eclipse of the sun in connection the Lord’s resurrection’ (Jerome, Commentary on Matthew, p.
318.). Jerome’s comment was accordingly incorporated into the Glossa Ordinaria on Luke 22. 44
– ‘Sol retraxit radios ne aut pendentem videret Dominum, aut ne impii blasphemantes sua luce
fruerentur’ (PL 114:548) – as that is only account to signify the darkness in terms of eclipse: ‘the
sun’s light failed [ἐκλιπόντος, obscuratus]’ (Luke 23. 45). Apologetically, explanation by
withdrawal is, like the darkness itself, something ‘to prevent impious blasphemers from enjoying
her light’.
253 The link between the Creator’s suffering and the suffering of creation itself is explicit in a
Byzantine vespers hymn for Good Friday: ‘All creation was transformed with fear, when it beheld
you hanging on the cross, O Christ. The sun was darkened and the foundations of the earth
trembled. All creation suffered with the One who created all things’ (as cited in Richard
Viladesau, The Beauty of the Cross: The Passion of Christ in Theology and the Arts – from the
Catacombs to the Eve of the Renaissance [New York: Oxford University Press, 2006], p. 34).
Exposing the unity of Christ and Creator, the darkness expresses the ‘central doctrine […] [of] the
“descent” (avataraṇa) of a Soter whose eternal birth was “before Abraham” and “through whom
all things were made”’ (Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, ‘One and Only Transmigrant’, in
Coomaraswamy 2: Selected Papers, Metaphysics, ed. Roger Lipsey [Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1977], p. 84). In these terms, the darkness of the crucifixion is a point at which
the Christian understanding of the universality of the Incarnation bears comparison to the non-
anthropocentric idea of the Avatar as universal manifestation: ‘It is very difficult to grasp the
entire meaning of the word “Avatar”. For mankind it is easy and simple to declare that the Avatar
is God and that it means that God becomes man. But this is not all that the word “Avatar” means
or conveys. It would be more appropriate to say that the Avatar is God and that God becomes man
for all mankind and simultaneously God also becomes a sparrow for all sparrows in Creation, an
ant for all ants in Creation, a pig for all pigs in creation, a particle of dust for all dusts in Creation,
a particle of air for all airs in Creation, etc., for each and everything that is in Creation […] this
Divinity pervades the Illusion in effect and presents Itself in innumerable varieties of forms –
gross, subtle and mental […] God mingles with mankind as man, and with the world of ants as an
ant, etc. But the man of the world cannot perceive this and hence simply says that God has
 become man and remains satisfied with this understanding in his own world of mankind’ (Meher
Baba, God Speaks, pp. 268–9). From this perspective, the crucifixion darkness acquires the
paradoxical sense of a specifically human blindness, a kind of blackening of the universe which
objectifies ordinary man’s inability to perceive the non-totality of the human world.
254 Pope Leo I, Sermons, trans. Jane Patricia Freeland and Agnes Josephine Conway (Washington:
Catholic University of America Press, 1996), sermon 57, Latin supplied from PL 54:330.
255 Peter Schwenger, The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2006), p. 2.
256 Recent steps in this direction include Timothy Morton’s object-oriented melancholy –
‘Melancholy is an object-like presence that our psyche finds hard to digest. It is literally the
footprint of another entity of whatever kind whose proximity was experienced as a trauma […]
Melancholy by definition implies coexistence […] Existence is coexistence and coexistence is
melancholy. And melancholy just is the persistence of a rift between essence and appearance’
(Timothy Morton, ‘Melancholy Objects’, audio lecture,
http://archive.org/details/MelancholyObjects) – and Drew Daniel’s concept of melancholy
assemblage: ‘Treating melancholy as an assemblage rather than a type of substance or a type of
subject breaks its conceptual unity into an extended, provisional, and modular set of relations
between and across material elements’ (Drew Daniel, The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and
Epistemology in the English Renaissance [New York: Fordham University Press, 2013], p. 12).
257 Eriugena, Periphyseon, II. 551.
258 The correlative sense of the crucifixion as profane contrapasso of divine creation is expressed by
Melito of Sardis: ‘He who hung the earth is hanging. He who fixed the heavens in place has been
fixed in place. He who laid the foundations of the universe has been laid on a tree. The master has
been profaned. God has been murdered’ (Melito of Sardis, On Pascha, trans. Alistair Stewart-
Sykes [Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001], p. 64).
259 See Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Lettter to the Romans,
trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 24.
260 As illumination conceals the visible in its own clarity, darkness conceals the invisible in its own
obscurity.
261 Melito of Sardis, On Pascha, p. 64.
262 Saint Ephrem’s Commentary on Tatian’s Diatessaron, p. 308.
263 Thomas A. Carlson, The Indiscrete Image, p. 94.
264 John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon, IV. 73.
265 Ibid., I. 39.
266 Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 90. The principle is proportional to Pico della
Mirandola’s idea of the human as the extra, supplemental ‘someone’ who perfects divine creation
in contemplating it: ‘But when the work was finished, the Craftsman still longed that there were
someone [aliquem] to ponder the meaning of so great a work, to love its beauty, and to wonder at
its vastness’ (Oration on the Dignity of Man, III. 12,
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/pico/text/bori/frame.html).
267 Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, p. 137. The general association between mystical vision and
witnessing the crucifixion darkness is evident in the biographical matter of Dionyius. Eriugena, in
the prologue to his translation of the Dionysian corpus, portrays Dionysius as an intellectual
luminary effectively converted by the eclipse which eclipses his own reason: ‘Dionysius the
Areopagite and brilliant sage | adorned Athens with his stellar light. | He was shaken [commotus]
forthwith by the moon’s drawing near the sun | at the time when our Lord was fastened to the
cross. | Overcome [stupefactus] by the frightful eclipse he was soon converted’ (Carmina, ed.
Michael W. Herren [Dublin: School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies,
 1993], p. 11). In Hilduin’s Passio Sanctissimi Dionysii, Dionysius describes the darkness as a
signifying and speaking divine light: ‘haec nox, quam nostris oculis novam descendisse miramur,
totius mundi veram lucem adventuram signavit, atque Deum humano generi effulsurum, serena
dignatione dictavit’ (PL 106:27B) [This night, whose new descending we marvel upon with our
eyes, has signified the true light to come into the whole world, and has spoken with bright dignity
that God will shine forth upon the human race].
268 Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, p. 137. See Charles M. Stang, Apophasis and Pseudonymity
in Dionysius the Areopagite: ‘No Longer I’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
269 Eriugena, Versio operum Sancti Dionysii Aeropagitae, PL 122:1032, and Pseudo-Dionysius,
Complete Works, p. 135, respectively.
270 Paul Rorem, Eriugena’s Commentary on the Dionysian Celestial Hierarchy (Toronto: Pontifical
Institute of Medieval Studies, 2005), p. 189; Latin supplied from PL 122:135.
271 Lucas Fernández, Auto de la Passión, ed. María Josefa Canellada (Madrid: Castalia, 1976), 214,
cited from Luis M. Girón-Negrón, ‘Dionysian Thought in Sixteenth-Century Spanish Mystical
Theology’, Modern Theology 24 (2008), p. 693. The Cloud-author, in reference to Dionysius,
similarly defines knowledge of God as failure of knowledge in God: ‘For have a man never so
moche goostly understondyng in knowyng of alle maad goostly thinges, yit may he never bi the
werk of his understondyng com to the knowyng of an unmaad goostly thing, the whiche is nought
bot God. Bot by the failyng it may; for whi that thing that it failith in is nothyng elles bot only
God’ (Cloud of Unknowing, p. 96).
272 Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Nativity (Chulmleigh, Devon: Augustine Pub. Co., 1985),
p. 107.
273 Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, p. 57.
274 Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary Upon the Gospel of Luke, trans. R. Payne Smith, 2 vols.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1859), II, 722.
275 Augustine, Confessions, II. 17. ‘[T]he spirit of modern consumerism is anything but
materialistic. The idea that contemporary consumers have an insatiable desire to acquire objects
represents a serious misunderstanding of the mechanism which impels people to want goods.
Their basic motivation is the desire to experience in reality the pleasurable dramas which they
have already enjoyed in imagination’ (Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of
Modern Consumerism [Oxford: Blackwell, 1987], p. 90).
276 Bonaventure, Itinerarium, p. 61.
277 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 105. On the need to develop infinite forbearance,
the capacity to ‘accept the world as it is’ in the midst of acutely suffering ‘the gulf between that
which is and that which might have been if only the world’, see Meher Baba, Discourses, II, 119–
21.
278 Meister Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, p. 75.
279 ‘Worry is the product of feverish imagination working under the stimulus of desires’ (Meher
Baba, Discourses, II, 121). Cf. ‘If you are awake you cannot be worried, if you are worried you
cannot be awake’ (Vernon Howard, ‘Don’t Answer the World’, Titled Talks: Volume One, audio
recording).
280 John M. Rist, ‘Plotinus on Matter and Evil’, Phronesis 6 (1961), p. 162, italics mine.
281 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 262. Cf. ‘Plotinian sensible matter just is the principium
individuationis, which serves as the horizon for becoming by spatiotemporally individuating
Forms as sensible objects. The principium individuationis imposes a veil of obscurity on noetic
activity […] [and] causes an ontological illusion whereby the sensible world and the real are
conflated […] The principium individuationis […] is hence to be indentified as primary evil, or
 evil itself’ (John A. Pourtless, ‘Toward a Plotinian Solution to the Problem of Evil’, Aporia 18
[2008], p. 13–4}.
282 Plotinus, Enneads, III. 6. 7.
283 ‘‘There is a God’; but this cannot make me blessed, for with this I acknowledge myself as a
creature. But in my breaking-through, where I stand free of my own will, of God’s will, of all His
works, and of God himself, then I am above all creatures and am neither God nor creature, but I
am that which I was and shall remain for evermore’ (Meister Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works,
p. 424). ‘That faint light in each of us which dates back to before our birth, to before all births, is
what must be projected if we want to rejoin that remote glory from which we shall never know
why we are separated’ (Cioran, Trouble with Being Born, p. 157). ‘Beginning and end and all the
paraphernalia of things and becomings that go along with them are what constitute opposites to
God […] Law binds equally all, except those who become free […] But all experience is in
“nothing”. There is no suffering. When I say this, you grouse. Since you do not know the law of
nothingness, you think there is nothing like justice. When one escapes “law”, and merges in God
who is beyond law, he becomes God’ (Meher Baba, God to Man and Man to God, ed. C. B.
Purdom [London: Victor Gollancz, 1955], pp. 267–8).
284 Meher Baba, The Everything and the Nothing (Beacon Hill, Australia: Meher House
Publications, 1963), p. 55.
285 ‘Everything is wonderfully clear if we admit that birth is a disastrous or at least an inopportune
event; but if we think otherwise, we must resign ourselves to the unintelligible, or else cheat like
everyone else’ (Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born, p. 98).
286 ‘Thus it is Christ’s sweeping assertion about himself that must be considered with regard to man
and his true essence: “They are not of the world any more than I am” (John 17. 14). Just like
Christ, as a man I am not of the world in the radical phenomenological sense that the appearing
out of which my phenomenological flesh is made, and which constitutes my true essence, is not
the appearing of the world. This is not due to the effect of some supposed credo, philosophical or
theological; it is rather because the world has no flesh, because in the ‘outside-itself’ of the world
no flesh and no living are possible – they cannot take shape anywhere other than in Life’s pathētik
and a-cosmic embrace’ (Michel Henry, I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity,
trans. Susan Emanuel [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003], p. 101).
287 Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, p. 135..
288 Cf. ‘THE OBJECT OF ECSTASY IS THE ABSENCE OF AN OUTSIDE ANSWER. THE
INEXPLICABLE PRESENCE OF MAN IS THE ANSWER THE WILL GIVES ITSELF,
SUSPENDED IN THE VOID OF UNKNOWABLE NIGHT’ (George Bataille, The Bataille
Reader, ed. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson [Oxford: Blackwell, 1997], p. 45).
289 Reaching beyond the question as action, silence is here to be thought as what is transacted in the
unanswered question: ‘Things that are Real are given and received in Silence’ (Meher Baba,
quoted in Lord Meher, p. 1654, <http://www.lordmeher.org>). ‘Silence is nothing merely
negative; it is not the mere absence of speech. It is a positive, a complete world in itself. Silence
has greatness simply because it is. It is, and that is its greatness, its pure existence’ (Max Picard,
The World of Silence, trans. Stanley Godman [Chicago: Regner, 1952], p. 1). Any answer
breaking this silence – ‘Because...’ – would be at once no answer at all and the worst of all
possible answers.
290 Ricard Le Gallienne, The Romance of Zion Chapel (New York: John Lane, 1898), p. 238.
291 Martin Luther, Explanatory Notes on the Gospels, trans. P. Anstadt (York, PA: P. Anstadt &
Sons, 1899), p. 154.
292 Vernon Howard, The Power of Your Supermind (Pine, AZ: New Life Foundation, 1967), 124. Cf.
‘Feel sorry for yourself rightly by feeling sorry that you have a self’ (Vernon Howard, A Treasury
 of Trueness [Pine, AZ: New Life Foundation, 1995], no. 689).
293 Cloud of Unknowing, p. 71.
294 The Pursuit of Wisdom and Other Works by the Author of the Cloud of Unknowing, trans. and ed.
James Walsh (New York: Paulist Press, 1988), p. 237. Middle English supplied from English
Mystics of the Middle Ages, ed. Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
p. 95.
295 E. M. Cioran, Tears and Saints, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1996), p. 104.
296 ‘Music’ is used here, not metaphorically, but as a categorical term for the willful, being-in-
motion of being, its being always something beyond and in excess of being, an excess necessarily
understood in the negative, as shown by the nature of indication – ‘the significance of the This is,
in reality, a Not-this that it contains; that is, an essential negativity’ (Giorgio Agamben, Language
and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. Karen E. Pinkhaus and Michael Hardt [Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1991], p. 14) – and realized in self-denial: ‘Being is dying by
loving’ (Meher Baba, Discourses, I, 29).
 V.
BECAUSE IT’S NOT THERE:
A VISION OF CLIMBING AND LIFE

Figure 4: Meher Baba, chart from Beams on the Spiritual Panorama.

Imagine a great shining chain hanging downward from the heights of heaven to the
world below. We grab hold of it with one hand and then another, and we seem to be
pulling it down toward us. Actually it is already there on the heights and down below and
instead of pulling it to us we are being lifted upward to that brilliance above, to the
dazzling light of those beams.
– Pseudo-Dionysius
The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.
– Meister Eckhart
The horror is that we know that we see God in life itself.
– Clarice Lispector

This essay explores the interface of climbing and life through the three-
fold theory of vision developed by St. Augustine in commentary on St. Paul
rapture to the ‘third heaven’ (II Corinthians 12. 2). As Augustine’s theory
concerns at once the structure of ordinary perception and the scale of
ecstatic experience, I investigate the mystical analogy between climbing
and life in terms of the problematic of vision as a primary expression of
life’s will to ascend. Like Paul’s rapture, which takes place in the
topological aporia of a radical unknowing – ‘Whether it was in the body or
out of the body I do not know’ (II Corinthians 12. 2) – the experience of
inner and outer elevation found in climbing is one that fundamentally alters
the sense and meaning of environment, curving perception around the void.
Over and against the nostalgic affirmation of natural place found in both
humanist and anti-humanist environmental thought, the visionary
experience of climbing, ascending the very scale of seeing, exposes the too-
actual impossibility of life’s location, its being somewhere that is both
space and place, and neither. At the crux of climbing as a way of seeing and
seeing as a way of climbing is glimpsed the unitary utopia of life, its divine
height and depth, at once local and universal, somewhere and nowhere.
Climbing touches the ungraspable location of vision. The seam between life
and climbing is the invisible way of seeing – a line descending and
ascending an absent reality, something that is not there. Where modern
alpinism and environmentalism are both characteristically married to the
human-dwarfing presence of nature as an essentially external fact, life’s
imperative to climb urges the inevitable and ancient counter-intuition, that
the universe is within oneself. The magnetic there-ness of the mountain
which per Mallory’s famous answer, ‘Because it’s there,’ inspires one to
climb is suspended by a fact more wondrous still, that it is not.
The life of climbing is the climbing of life. Let us see what this means by
looking at vision, by posing the mutual question of life and climbing as a
matter of seeing. Where does life take place? Before itself, to the one who
sees it. Where is that? There, where it is, in its own being, wherever
anything is, somewhere in the heart. As Augustine says, ‘cor meum, ubi ego
sum quicumque sum’ [my heart, where I am whoever I am].297 For who will
dare to draw a line between life and being, to say that is but only this lives?
Climbing concerns in a special way the openness of this line. As golden-age
alpinist Leslie Stephen put it, ‘Where does Mont Blanc end, and where do I
begin? That is the question which no metaphysician has hitherto succeeded
in answering’.298 At least this is how I am seeing it: that life, soul, is the
inescapable taking place of being to itself, the miracle of its own visibility,
the unbounded whole of one’s seeing-being-seen in the first place, at once
middle and all. But to see things so – via the principle that whatever exists
finds itself simply by virtue of its own existence – demands seeing beyond
our eyes. As Ibn Arabi says,
The whole world is intelligent, living, and speaking […] But the People of Reflection say, ‘This
is an inanimate object (jamâd); it has not intelligence’. They stop with what their eyesight gives to
them, while we consider the situation differently […] the mystery of life fills the entire world.299

And this is precisely how life sees, by seeing differently, beyond the seen,
raising and rising itself upon the shining chain of vision, climbing through
the contradiction of its own sight. As Nietzsche says,
 Life itself wants to build itself into the heights with pillars and steps; it wants to gaze into vast
distances and out upon halcyon beauties – therefore it needs height! And because it needs height, it
needs steps and contradictions between steps and climbers! Life wants to climb and to overcome
itself by climbing.300

Likewise, to see climbing, to envision what it is and touch its life, requires
holding on to it, in all the endless moves of opposition and identity between
seer and seen, as a form of vision. To start, this means feeling the gravity of
climbing as a wrestling with the blind grip of matter, a struggle with the
body as mirror or angel of vision. So Thoreau, reflecting upon climbing
Mount Katahdin, says,
I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me […]
Talk of mysteries! […] The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact!
Who are we? where are we?301

To climb is to touch and fail to grasp – like missing a hold that proves the
route goes – the location of vision, a place which, as far as I can see, is
nowhere. Such is the living idea (from idein, ‘to see’) that this vision of
climbing will attempt.
The supra-alpine ‘altitudes of human contemplation’ which Petrarch
remembers with each descending step that he is forgetting to climb in the
Ascent of Mount Ventoux... René Daumal’s non-Euclidean Mount Analogue,
accessible but unsummitable, the visible door of the invisible... George
Mallory’s missing camera, lost somewhere on Mount Everest – that the
modern destiny of climbing is entangled with premodern forms of visionary
desire is obvious.302 I hope not to explain one with the other, much less
confuse them – maybe just a little, as all vision is, between its eyes,
somewhat crossed – but point the gaze toward a higher bewilderment, one
that, before the totally awesome fact that there is climbing, unknows all the
more what it is that climbing really climbs. What matters above all, given
that life is already tumbled into the grip of climbing’s all-too-human fact, is
less to critically and theoretically sort climbing out than face its life as the
crux of itself – a term whose originally spiritual and hermeneutic meaning
are worth bearing in mind. By poetically mirroring climbing through a
mystical prism, one may perhaps glimpse something of the new that ever
remains, in the words of Meher Baba, ‘to be climbed with the eye of
consciousness now fully open’ (see Figure 4).303
 Figure 5: Gustave Doré, Illustration of Inferno 5.304
The word ‘route’ derives from rumpere, to break. In the Divine Comedy,
the passage to paradise, descending through hell and ascending through
purgatory, is literally that, a rupture. As Virgil explains to the pilgrim, after
climbing down-up through the center of the cosmos upon Satan’s body, the
inversely formed abyss and peak were generated by Lucifer’s fall when the
earth ‘left this empty space [lasciò qui loco vòto] in order to escape from
him, and fled upward’ (Inferno, XXXIV. 125–6). The void-space of hell
then becomes passable, crucially, by means of a series of ruins (ruine),
‘alpine [alpestro]’ (Inferno, XII. 2) landslides of ‘ancient rock [vecchia
roccia]’ (Inferno, XII. 44) which occur at the time of the Crucifixion
darkness when, as Virgil explains in the seventh circle of Inferno, ‘this
deep, foul valley trembled so that I thought the universe must be feeling
love’ (Inferno, XII. 40–2). Accordingly, this rupture is the site of despair for
the souls damned for lust (see Figure 5): ‘When they come before the
landslide, there the shrieks the wailing, the lamenting; there they curse
God’s power’ (Inferno, V. 34–6)
Now consider this – the connection between rupture and the vertical path
of visionary adventure – as an allegory for the vital interface between
climbing and vision. As climbing holds are paradigmatically comprised
(literally, in the motional moment of prizing them) of fractures, fissures,
and similar features in an otherwise blank face, so vision ascends itself by
means of essential breaks, enraptured interruptions which are synthesized
into the whole loopy movement of living awareness in a world where, as
Merleau-Ponty says, ‘Inside and outside are inseparable. The world is
wholly inside and I am wholly outside myself’.305 Similarly, demonstrating
the ecstatic continuity between seeing and grasping (see Figure 6), the
space where one already is where one is going and there is always
dissolving into here, Heidegger describes the reach of human spatiality as
one of de-severance: ‘“De-severing” amounts to making the farness vanish
– that is, making the remoteness of something disappear, bringing it
close’.306

Figure 6: Philippe de Champaigne, Saint Augustine (detail).307

The vital link between climbing and vision is seen clearly in Augustine’s
influential theory of vision. Commenting on St. Paul’s rapture to the ‘third
heaven’ (II Corinthians 12. 2), Augustine shows how sight shines through
the simultaneity of three already-scaled steps of intensifying presence and
proximity: the corporeal, the spiritual (or imaginal), and the intellectual. He
illustrates this order of experience with the perfectly literal example of
reading the second half of the double law of charity, as if broken off from
the ‘great and first commandment’ (Matthew 22. 38), namely, to love God
‘with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind’
(Matthew 22. 37):
When you read, You shall love your neighbor as yourself, three kinds of vision take place: one
with the eyes, when you see the actual letters; another with the human spirit, by which you think of
your neighbor even though he is not there; a third with the attention of the mind, by which you
understand and look at love itself.308

The way in which each level both coincides and breaks with the others
becomes clearer if we consider their topological aspects. Corporeally, one
senses an object, that is, something that seeing does not see through, a thing
which is indubitably there. Spiritually, one senses an image, that is, a
transparent medium perceivable between and across objects, a thing that is
both here and there. Intellectually, one senses an idea, that is, an immediate
truth or principle, a form that is simply here, or as Augustine spells it out,
one of the ‘things which do not have any images that are like them without
actually being what they are’.309

Figure 7: Giovanni Bellini, The Ecstasy of St. Francis.310

Far from separating ultimate seeing – the vision of God – from ordinary
seeing, Augustine shows how mystical vision of the divine reality is
continuous with a general phenomenology of experience and perception, as
captured in Bellini’s Ecstasy of St. Francis (Figure 7), wherein the saint’s
being inside and outside the world are aesthetically coincident. Or as
Francesco Tomatis says of the experience of mountain ascent, ‘The return to
the world is one with the flight from it, in alpinism as in mysticism’.311 To
accentuate the connection between visionary ascent and climbing, we may
overhear in Paul’s words the breathless expression of one who has just sent
a difficult route, in this case, on-sighting Paradise,312 a term whose Sanskrit
analogue, paradesha, means ‘height’ or ‘high land’:313 I don’t know how I
did it, but I know that I did, ‘whether in the body or out of the body I do not
know’ (II Corinthians 12. 2). Rather than being something impossible, the
inexpressible elevation of such spontaneous rapture is simply the actual
summit of vision’s natural elevation, through which all seeing climbs.
Likewise, according to Bonaventure, the ‘most pure being [purissimum
esse]’ of God is the first image of all intellectual vision, the presence which
the mind, in its blind habituation ‘to the darkness of things and to the
phantasms of sensible objects,’ willfully disregards, ‘not tak[ing] note of
that which it sees first, and without which it can know nothing’.314 In light
of the traditional figure of vision as ‘a ladder [klimax, scala] on which there
is a perpetual going up and down’,315 this blindness is inversely equivalent
to not seeing the ladder, the hierarchical scale of things, by failing to
recognize, through the principle of reflection or specular awareness, that the
first step is a step, that it is not all there is but more truly a mirror and
memory of other steps before and beyond it, a scale one necessarily
descends in order to be here, in this actual living form, in the first place.
Seen differently, the deep solidity of the sensible, the inevitable scandal of
matter (from PIE *skand- ‘to leap, climb’), is a sign that it is to be
ascended, or as Bonaventure invites us to do in the Itinerarium, stepped
upon as through a mirror: ‘let us place the first step of our ascent at the
bottom [in imo], putting the whole world of sense-objects before us as a
mirror through which we may pass to God, the highest creative Artist’.316

Figure 8: Nicolas Dipre, Jacob’s Ladder.317

Significantly, in the account of Jacob’s dream, the ladder also bears a
conspicuously liminal relation to stone (see Figure 8), fulfilling its status as
‘l’oree du songe’ [the shore of dreaming], in Caillois’s beautiful
formulation.318 ‘Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his
head and lay down in that place to sleep […] So Jacob rose early in the
morning, and he took the stone which he had put under his head and set it
up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it’ (Genesis 28. 11–8). Forming
the sacred threshold of his dream of the ‘angels of God […] ascending and
descending’ a ladder ‘set up on the earth’ (Genesis 28. 12), Jacob’s stone,
the initiatory step of sleeping and waking life, shows forth the material
ground of vision’s elevation, indexing the hyper-solidity of the
superessential, a reality who dreams in minerals. The pillow’s becoming
pillar symbolically intimates the inversive or paradoxical ascent of
individualized consciousness via descent into unconsciousness, the soul’s
climb into truth via illusion, or paradise through hell, whose last step
mirrors the first. As Meher Baba explains,
The process of perception runs parallel to the process of creation, and the reversing of the
process of perception without obliterating consciousness amounts to realising the nothingness of
 the universe as a separate entity. The Self sees first through the mind, then through the subtle eye
and lastly through the physical eye; and it is vaster than all that it can perceive. The big ocean and
the vast spaces of the sky are tiny as compared with the Self. In fact, all that the Self can perceive
is finite, but the Self itself is infinite. When the Self retains full consciousness and yet sees nothing,
it has crossed the universe of its own creation and has taken the first step to know itself as
everything.319

‘And Saul arose from the ground; and when his eyes were opened, he saw
nothing’ (Acts 9. 8). Correlatively, stone typifies the first of the three
worlds or kingdoms (mineral, vegetable, animal) out of which life is made
and through which love flows in degrees turning it back towards its own
superessential reality via the chain of being. As Vossler says, summarizing
the medieval view, ‘The stone that falls to earth obeys the amor naturalis;
the beast that seeks its food or continuance of its species, the amor
sensitivus; man who uplifts himself to God, the amor rationalis’.320 Or
Augustine: ‘Pondus meum amor meus; eo feror, quocumque feror’ [My
love is my weight. By it am I borne wherever I am borne].321
Yet as experience per force proves, this continuous and ultimate flow of
life, the visionary climb and gravitational flight of the cosmic storm that has
us all in its fatal grip, takes place only through great impasse, by means of
the ruptures, aporias, and ruins of love that lead onward through despair,
over and against the non-options of madness and self-destruction. So the
climber, countering the force of gravity only by means of it, must evade and
pass through the alter-gravity of love’s opposite, fear,322 above all the
temptation to freak out and/or fall to death. Such is ‘the moment of divine
desperateness, when everything seems to give way, [and] man decides to
take any risk to ascertain what of significance to his life lies behind the
veil’.323 As love is the highest law, the law beyond law binding all laws, so
does it correspond, within the ontological chain of vision’s descent-ascent,
not only to the force of synthesis that binds the chain together, but to the
separations and breaks through which one link in the order holds to the
next, the ruptures whose too-actual inexistence, like the rungs of dreams,
hold the truth and sense of the chain in the first place. The fact that it goes,
that reality is real and its shining chain of vision – or as Kierkegaard calls it,
this ‘bridge of sighs’ we all must walk324 – unbreakably holds from here to
eternity, is realized through one’s being broken upon it, via visionary
ruptures in one’s corporeal, spiritual, and intellectual being, among the most
painful of which, as climbers know, is the experience of being cut off from
the ability to climb. But as Heidegger says, ‘severing also is still a joining
and a relating’.325 Climbing is the climbing of climbing, a moving seizure of
its own weight and upstreaming of the first fall, the originary irruption of
time or ‘number of motion in respect of “before” and “after”’,326 that
somehow still never stops streaming out of eternity through the spheres. As
Sanford Kwinter observes, capturing also the cinematic and extra-cameral
perspective of climbing’s visionary body,
for it is not enough to prevail over gravity but rather be able to make it stream continuously
through one, and especially to be able to generalize this knowledge to every part of the body
without allowing it to regroup at any time […] as a spatialized figure in the head. Thus the body
too must be broken apart into a veritable multiplicity of quasi-autonomous flows […] the climber’s
task is less to ‘master’ in the macho, form-imposing sense than […] to engage the universe’s wild
and free unfolding through the morphogenetic capacities of the singularity.327

Furthermore – and here the link to the question of life, and life as the
spontaneous question or individuating whim of itself, comes more closely
into view – the three-fold order of vision corresponds directly to the three
surchaotic leaps of cosmic evolution, as described by Quentin Meillassoux
in The Divine Inexistence:
Such cases of advent […] can be divided into three orders that mark the essential ruptures of
becoming: matter, life, and thought. Each of these three appears as a Universe that cannot be
qualitatively reduced to anything that preceded it.328

Yet, if one finds oneself adhering to the intuition that climbing and life are
more intimately and universally related, so that such advents are
intelligible, not only as unaccountable irruptions but as veritable moves
upon the vertiginous and invisible axis of the eternal, then the vista
becomes ever less concerning and ever more interesting. Now one climbs
through vision and enters a universe where being is not only something
witnessed by precarious epiphenomenal eyes but is seeing itself, ad
infinitum. Here the ‘created world,’ as Thomas A. Carlson (who also
happens to be a rock climber) affirms in The Indiscrete Image, ‘is the vision
of God – in both senses of the word’.329 From this perspective, according to
which ‘the gross, subtle and mental spheres’ are not discrete domains, but
‘interpenetrating globes’,330 the perilous and singular evolution of vision,
everywhere climbing over itself, is revealed as the endless and unfinishable
expression of the fundamental unity of reality. As de Chardin writes,
 One could say that the whole of life lies in seeing […] To be more is to be more united […] But
unity grows […] only if it is supported by an increase of consciousness, of vision […] To try to see
more and to see better is not, therefore, just a fantasy, curiosity, or a luxury. See or perish. This is
the situation imposed on every element of the universe by the mysterious gift of existence.331

But what, someone asks, am I to do with this vision? Wrong question. Or

rather, the question of vision at the heart or interface of climbing and life is
to be answered tautologously, in a manner befitting the inherent
purposelessness or whylessness of this ‘mysterious gift’. ‘Purposelessness
is of Reality,’ says Meher Baba, ‘to have a purpose is to be lost in falseness
[…] The Goal of Life in Creation is to arrive at purposelessness, which is
the state of Reality’.332 Similiarly, Tomatis emphasizes the essentially
renunciatory movement of mountain climbing: ‘True alpinism is empty-
handed’.333 Climbing is the way of seeing – physically, imaginatively,
intellectually – the living truth of this purposelessness, namely, that as
Meister Eckhart says, ‘Only that which is without a principle properly lives
[Hoc enim proprie vivit quod est sine principio]’.334 ‘At these peaks,’ writes
Evola, ‘just as heat transforms into light, life becomes free of itself’.335 As
the mountain, as object of ascent, recedes from view in the process of
summiting it, so the truth of Mallory’s famous answer to the why of
climbing, ‘Because it’s there,’ lies in the seeing the fact that it is not. Such
is the groundless ground of the one who lives, as Eckhart says, ‘without
Why’.336
Were Augustine as passionate a reader of climbing problems as he was of
Scripture, he might have said that when you read X (the crux), three kind of
vision take place: one with eyes, when you see the actual holds; another
with the spirit, by which you imagine the movement or pattern of energy
you will perform; a third with the mind, by which you see the ascent itself,
beyond the means of realizing it. Seeing that these three levels of vision are
at work in all activity and experience, this correspondence per se is neither
here nor there. What more matters more deeply is the element of climbing
that is discoverable within the process of vision, specifically, how the
operations of seeing work gravitationally through-against the negativity and
therelessness met with between and at each of its levels, namely, that of 1)
seeing, in bodies, what seeing cannot penetrate, which reflects an essential
blindness of vision, the inability to see what one is looking at; 2) seeing, in
images, what is not actually there, which reflects an indiscernible
subjectivity, the projective force of vision that only sees things by looking
into itself; and 3) seeing, in objects of intellect, what is here without really
seeing anything at all, which reflects an essential senselessness, the
darkness of the mind to itself. This darkness, as Eriugena explains, is the
pure, invisible, yet no less factical mark of divinity: ‘the Divine likeness in
the human mind is most clearly discerned when it is only known that it is,
and not known what it is […] what it is is denied in in it, and only that it is
is affirmed’.337 Climbing and seeing coincide in the dark heart of vision, its
reach out of nowhere through the placeless place of its taking place before
itself.

Figure 9: Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.338

Because it is not there. In other words, it seems that vision only ever
occurs via a series of cryptic or hyper-intelligent moves between the breaks
within its own continuity. This is why, in the vertiginous intensities of
experience, one often appears quite clearly to see and feel and think almost
headlessly, as if witnessing the action from some proximate yet non-present
place. Likewise, Tomatis finds that the liminal ‘experience of void’
provided in climbing and which constitutes the proper ‘mysticism of the
mountain’ is one that ‘reopens our eyes to the simple depth of true
dimensions […] [and] purifies us of the dreams of reason and its
consequent nightmares’.339 In other words, climbing reveals to vision the
suprarational vertiginousness of its own structure, the dimension wherein
vision climbs upon and through something or someone that is present
without presence. The paradoxical place of such an empty presence is like
the somewhere (or someone) embodied in the gaze of Caspar David
Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Figure 9), an awareness
hovering as if apart from and nearer to the human than himself, close by a
passing figure who stands in the air of intellect, above the mists of spirit,
upon the rock of matter, taking in the selfsame view. Here I envision
Augustine quoting and confessing himself in the margins, near the edges of
the painting you are not seeing, ‘look upon me and see me […] in whose
eyes I am become a question to myself’.340
Who will turn to face this inevitable gaze, the impossible look of life
itself? Who will meet the gaze of that which is ‘taking me away from
behind by back where I had put myself when I was preferring not to see
myself’?341 Who may endure to the summit this pure will of vision, the
living abyss of oneself that looks out at the world for no reason at all? ‘The
unitarian Beyond is an indivisible and indescribable infinity. It seeks to
know itself. It is of no use to ask why’.342 Nothing to be done, there is
nothing else to do. As Meher Baba says, paralleling the popular imperative
to climb now, ‘Spiritual progress is like climbing through hills, dales,
thorny woods and along dangerous precipices to attain the mountain top.
On this path there can be no halting or return. Everyone must get to the top
[…] All hesitation, sidetracking or resting in halfway houses, or arguing
about the best route, only postpones the day of final fulfillment’.343
I’m off.

297 Augustine, Confessions, X. 3.

298 Leslie Stephen, The Playground of Europe, (London: Longman, 1894), pp. 260–262.
299 Ibn Arabi, The Meccan Revelations, I, 36.
300 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 78.
301 Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1892), p. 71.
302 See Francesco Petrarca, Prose, ed. G. Martellotti (Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1955), p. 842; René
Daumal, Mount Analogue: A Tale of Non-Euclidian and Symbolically Authentic Mountaineering
Adventures, trans. Kathleen Ferrick Rosenblatt (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2004), p. 51;
Jochen Hemmelb and Eric Simonson, Detectives on Everest: The 2001 Mallory & Irvine Research
Expedition (Seattle: Mountaineers Books, 2002), p. 18.
303 Meher Baba, Beams on the Spiritual Panorama (San Francisco: Sufism Reoriented, 1958), p. 80.
304 Public domain image, source: <
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gustave_Dor%C3%A9_-_Dante_Alighieri_-_Inferno_-
_Plate_14_(Canto_V_-_The_hurricane_of_souls).jpg>.
305 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York:
Routledge, 2002), p. 474.
306 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 139.
307 Public domain image, source: <
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Champaigne,_Philippe_de_-_Saint_Augustin_-_1645-
1650.jpg>.
308 Augustine, On Genesis, trans. Matthew O’ Connell (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2002), p.
470.
309 Ibid.
310 Public domain image, source: <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Giovanni_Bellini_-
_Saint_Francis_in_the_Desert_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg>.
311 Francesco Tomatis, Filosofia della montagna (Milan: Bompiani, 2008), p. 49, my translation.
312 In climbing parlance, to ‘on-sight’ a climb means to succeed at the ascent without any prior
knowledge.
313 Julius Evola, Meditations on the Peaks, trans. Guido Stucco (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions,
1998), p. 113.
314 Bonaventure, Itinerarium, p. 115.
315 A. K. Coomaraswamy, “The Inverted Tree,” in Traditional Art and Symbolism, ed. Roger Lipsey
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 390.
316 Bonaventure, Itinerarium, 53.
317 Public domain image, source: <
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nicolas_Dipre._Le_songe_de_Jacob._c.1500_Avignon,
_Petit_Palais..jpg>
318 Roger Caillois, The Writing of Stones, trans. Barbara Bray (Charlottesville: University Press
Virginia, 1985), p. 8
319 Meher Baba, Discourses, II, 98.
320 Kurt Vossler, Medieval Culture: An Introduction to Dante and His Times, Volume 1, trans.
William Lawton (New York: Frederick Unger, 1958), p. 302.
321 Augustine, Confessions, XIII. 9.
322 ‘There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear’ (1 John 4. 18).
323 Meher Baba, Discourses, II, 14–5
324 Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: Part I, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 471.
325 “[A]uch das Trennen ist noch ein Verbinden und Beziehen” (Martin Heidegger, “Logik:
Heraklits Lehre vom Logos,” in Heraklit, ‘Gesamtausgabe,’ Bd. 55 [Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio
Klostermann, 1970], p. 337).
326 Aristotle, The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941),
Physics IV. 11.
327 Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture
(Cambridge. MA: MIT, 2002), pp. 29–30.
328 Quentin Meillassoux, quoted in Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the
Making (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), p. 187.
329 Carlson, The Indiscrete Image, p. 94.
330 Meher Baba, Beams, p. 11.
331 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Human Phenomenon, trans. Sarah Appleton-Weber (Brighton:
Sussex Academic Press, 2003), p. 3.
332 Meher Baba, The Everything and the Nothing, p. 62.
333 ‘Il vero alpinismo è a mani vuote’ (Tomatis, Filosofia della montagna, p. 44).
334 Quoted in Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994), p. 286.
335 Evola, Meditations on the Peaks, p. 5.
336 ‘If a man asked life for a thousand years, “Why do you live?” if it could answer it would only
say, “I live because I live”. That is because life lives from its own ground, and gushes forth from
its own. Therefore it lives without Why, because it lives for itself. And so, if you were to ask a
 genuine man who acted from his own ground, “Why do you act?” if he were to answer properly
he would simply say, “I act because I act”’ (Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, p. 100).
337 Eriugena, Periphyseon, IV, 73.
338 Public domain image, source:
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caspar_David_Friedrich_-
_Wanderer_above_the_sea_of_fog.jpg>
339 Tomatis, Filosofia della montagna, p. 45, 47.
340 ‘[R]espice et vide […] me, in cuius oculis mihi quaestio factus sum’ (Augustine, Confessions, X.
33).
341 Augustine, Confessions, VIII. 7.
342 Meher Baba, Beams, p. 8.
343 Meher Baba, Listen, Humanity, ed. D. E. Stevens (New York: Harper Colophon, 1967), p. 186.
 VI.
THE INVERTED RAINBOW:
ON THE COLOR OF LOVE

Figure 10: Vienna Genesis, rainbow covenant.344

The mystery of the universe is hierarchic in structure. There are graded orders, one
supervening upon the other.
– Meher Baba, ‘Supervening Orders in the Spiritual Panorama’, Beams
When one is meant for spiritual advancement, one has either love or lust to the extreme.
This lust must be converted into love.
– Meher Baba, The Perfect Master
Being is dying by loving.
– Meher Baba, Discourses
I am man and woman and child. I am sexless […] Have no fear.
– Meher Baba, to Norina Matchabelli

As Meher Baba explains, the impressions which form the ground of all
thought, feeling, and action345 are of seven colors in correspondence with
the colors of the rainbow:
All thoughts, words and acts cause sanskaras or impressions on one’s mind.
Sanskaras are of seven different colors, the same as those of a rainbow.
Ordinary good thoughts cause impressions of a light blue color.
When such thoughts are put into actions, either in words or deeds, the impressions generally
caused are of a deep blue color.
Anger and wicked deeds like murder cause sanskaras of red color. Red sanskaras are the worst,
and they are difficult to be wiped out.
Intense spiritual longing gives rise to sanskaras of the green color. Just as red sanskaras are the
worst, so the green ones are the best.346
The spiritual significance of the rainbow is thus essentially hierarchical. It
concerns the inherent ordering of gross, subtle, and mental forms of being,
along with their relative values, along a vertical scale of degrees from best
to worst, highest to lowest. Hierarchical degree is the principle according to
which the one Reality is expressed in the domain of duality. It is the step or
unit of discrimination whereby the realm of opposites serves as the
playground for the soul to ascend to the divinely individualized all-sided
spiritual perfection that is beyond opposition and intellectual
comprehension.347
The hierarchical spectrum of impressions is what makes some kinds of
thoughts, feelings, and actions bad, that is, harmful rather than helpful to
the life of the unrealized soul. What makes lust, greed, and anger – ‘the
chief forms in which the frustrated ego finds expression’348 – lower than
purity, generosity, and kindness, respectively, is that the impressions of the
former are more binding to consciousness than the latter. Accordingly, the
essential problem with sexual promiscuity is not that it is immoral, but that
it unnecessarily burdens the mental bodies of its agents349 with an exchange
of the most limiting and spiritually or psychically harmful kind of
impressions:
There are seven kinds and colors of sanskaras. Red is the worst and the deepest; it is the most
lasting impression and takes the longest to be wiped out. These red sanskaras are caused by the sex
act, hence they are a great check on the progress and advancement. The sex act is considered a
grave sin on the Path and prohibited to spiritual aspirants.
Thoughts [of sexual desire] may come, and even a rush of impulses, but one should not commit
any action with another person. Even self-pollution [masturbation] is better, though it is bad in a
physical way.
Sexual intercourse has the worst consequences. It attracts to oneself the worst sanskaras of ages
past of one’s partner; hence it is most difficult to wipe out. It incurs incredible damage to one’s
spiritual progress.350
By contrast, the sanskaric nature of sex in marriage is qualitatively and
quantitatively lighter.351 The depth vs. lightness of impressional coloring
corresponds to the heaviness vs. lightness of feeling that governs the
distinction between lust and love, minimum and maximum:
Love is also different from lust. In lust there is reliance upon the object of sense and consequent
spiritual subordination of the soul to it, but love puts the soul into direct and co-ordinate relation
with the reality which is behind the form. Therefore lust is experienced as being heavy and love is
experienced as being light. In lust there is a narrowing down of life and in love there is
an expansion in being. To have loved one soul is like adding its life to your own. Your life is, as it
were, multiplied and you virtually live in two centres. If you love the whole world you vicariously
live in the whole world, but in lust there is an ebbing down of life and a general sense of hopeless
dependence upon a form which is regarded as another. Thus, in lust there is the accentuation of
separateness and suffering, but in love there is the feeling of unity and joy. Lust is dissipation, love
 is recreation. Lust is a craving of the senses, love is the expression of the spirit.
Lust seeks fulfillment but love experiences fulfillment. In lust there is excitement, but in love there
is tranquility.352

The experiential import of the chromatic nature of impressions is clarified

by recognizing that the deepening of impressions correlates directly with
the superficialization of experience and the lightening of impressions
correlates directly with the deepening of experience. Thus,
If the mind tries to understand sex through increasing the scope of sex, there is no end to the
delusions to which it is a prey, for there is no end to the enlarging of its scope. In promiscuity the
suggestions of lust are necessarily the first to present themselves to the mind, and the individual
is doomed to react to people within the limitation of this initial perversion and thus close the door
to deeper experiences.353

Promiscuity is in these terms paradigmatic of the more general scopic

delusion governing self-hypnotized consciousness,354 its futile propensity to
paradoxically seek satisfaction of and refuge from self-imprisoning desires
through indiscriminate multiplication and mixing (pro-miscere) of their
objects. Like a prisoner attempting to escape his situation by looking out the
window and assembling in his vision more and more objects that only
accentuate the fact of his imprisonment, promiscuity is the path of staying
on the surface as if doing so would somehow add up to a depth:
Truth cannot be grasped by skipping over the surface of life and multiplying superficial contacts.
It requires the preparedness of mind which can centre its capacities upon selected experiences and
free itself from its limiting features. This process of discrimination between the higher and the
lower, and the transcendence of the lower in favour of the higher, is made possible through whole-
hearted concentration and a real and earnest interest in life. Such whole-hearted concentration and
real interest is necessarily precluded when the mind becomes a slave to the habit of running at a
tangent and wandering between many possible objects of similar experience.355

With respect to the hierarchical spectrum of impressions, promiscuity

represents a doomed drive to overcome the multi-colored stains of the
mental body by means of an intensive disordering and indistinction that
only render the colors more impenetrable and less lucid, quantitatively more
thick and qualitatively more flat. Proceeding perforce through the refusal to
distinguish the higher from the lower, if not willfully mix them up,
promiscuity is the frustrated process of obfuscating the spiritual goal, which
is to arrive at the precise balancing of good and bad, higher and lower,
which alone liberates the mind from the limitation of coloring all
together.356 Meher Baba’s spiritual work and teachings on the problem of
sex emphasized the perils of promiscuity and excessive lust. In 1937, in
Cannes, he spoke of ‘the work I wish to do for the world involving the
minimizing of lust, especially of homosexuals, which is now prevalent to an
alarming extent all over the world,’ clarifying later that that this work
concerned ‘the youth of the future’.357 The nexus of lust and promiscuity358
is evident more generally in terms of the ordering of satisfaction.359 The
promiscuous tendency of lust is on the level of desire for satisfaction, which
seeks to consume rather than give to its object, and thus must move like a
glutton between several different similar dishes or ‘many possible objects of
similar experience’:
In real love there is no desire for satisfaction – only for satisfying! Nowadays, even lust is taken
for love. The subtle difference is missed. There is a very subtle difference between love and lust,
but it is quite clear. They are two different things. You love rice and curry; this is lust. You love a
cigar; lust again. You love curry and eat it, but do not give anything by the act. You finish the
beloved!360

The ingestion model of promiscuous lust is also fulfilled in the nature of

backbiting, a worst form of speech-lust that accrues the deepest kind of
impressions:
If anyone speaks about another’s shortcomings behind his back, even though what he says may
be true, it is slander. What effect do the sanskaras of backbiting produce? Suppose Mr. A says to
Mr. B: ‘Mr. C has not come; he is a bad man’. Mr. C is not present. Mr. A has told this directly to
Mr. B. Consequently, there is an exchange of sanskaras in an indirect way between Mr. A and Mr.
C, and in a direct way between Mr. A and Mr. B. Thus, the sanskaras of slandering are of two types
– direct and indirect. Thereby, the most minute sanskaras are created and for millions of births it is
difficult to be freed from them. Sanskaras are of seven colors. Sanskaras of lust and anger have
different colors, and the sanskaras created by backbiting are still deeper. We do not know them as
such, but they are some of the worst type and nearly impossible to eradicate. Viruses are very
subtle germs and invisible, but they are the most troublesome. Similarly, the sanskaras of calumny
and defamation are most wicked and troublesome.361

The sanskaric toxicity of backbiting is the basis for its traditional

designation as eating the (dead) flesh of one’s brother.362
Right understanding of the rainbow, then, is that which grasps the priority
of its vertical, hierarchical sense over its horizontal structure, just as one
does not raise a flag to fly in the wind without first fixing its pole. The
rainbow properly represents the panoply of forms only because it is first an
order of degrees. It expresses the unitive diversity of the many only because
it is first a manifestation of the one that stands beyond all. In other words,
the rainbow is formally defined by a balancing of the one and the many
without parity, a harmony that neither reduces the one to the many nor
equalizes the elements of the many, which are only united in common
derivation from the one and ranked difference from each other. Such proper
balancing of the vertical and horizontal aspects of the rainbow was in fact
dramatized in the semi-collective design process of Meher Baba’s flag in
1924:
It had been proposed that a flag be flown near the Jhopdi and a debate ensued about it. The
Hindus said the color of the flag should be red, but Ramjoo objected, saying that red reflected only
Vedant, and that green was better. Then the Hindus took objection, arguing that green was typically
a Mohammedan color. The Parsis and Iranis disapproved of both colors, and to bring about accord,
Baba proposed, ‘The flag should be of seven colors’. Dina prepared a flag accordingly and, after it
was sewn, it was hoisted near the Master’s Jhopdi on the evening of 23 April 1924.
As the flag stirred, Baba remarked, ‘Do you know why I suggested a seven-colored flag? The
seven colors represent the seven planes of consciousness’.
Baba had specified the positioning of two colors: ‘Red should be at the bottom of the flag and
sky blue at the top. Arrangement of the other five colors is your decision’.
He later added: ‘Besides representing the seven planes of consciousness, these colors also
represent sanskaras. The colors in the flag signify man’s rise from the grossest of impressions of
lust and anger – symbolized by red – to the culmination in the highest state of spirituality and
oneness with God – symbolized by sky blue’.363
Solving the contention around different religious identities without
reducing itself to the purpose of solving them, the choice of the rainbow is
suggested by Baba for higher and deeper reasons which yet give free play to
the drama of individual human choice. In this way, the process of designing
the flag spontaneously reflected the nature of the rainbow itself as firstly a
vertical and secondly a horizontal form. Likewise, the decision process
performs the reordering of different religious paths around a unitive
spiritual truth that stands beyond religion itself. The significance of the flag
remains independent of the context of its production, indifferent to all
dramas of symbolic identification. The flag does not name or represent the
identity of whoever flies it, much less the values of a party, but stands as a
direct reflection of the spiritual ladder that one is – willy-nilly – on. It is not
a flag of, but a flag for the one who sees it.
In accord with the independent status of Meher Baba’s flag – or better, the
flag that Meher Baba and his followers made – among the first things one
will notice is its vertical difference (with the exception of the Italian PACE
[peace] flag) from both the natural rainbow and its common use in other
flags and elsewhere. Compared to the common rainbow, this flag is upside
down, with the consequence, clearly intended by the choice of ‘sky blue’
for the top color, that the highest part of the flag chromatically bleeds into
the sky itself in harmony with the upward gaze of the viewer, a gaze that as
such figurally participates in the principle of spiritual ascent represented by
the flag. The design also evokes the circumzenithal arc or ‘smile in the sky’
whose colors are purer than those of those of the rainbow.364 The more
popular kind of rainbow flag does the opposite, keeping red at the top of the
order, or in the case of the original design of the LGBT/Gay Pride flag,
even adding an eighth color (hot pink) in the head position to signify
sexuality.
That Meher Baba’s flag is properly understood as a righting of the
rainbow via inversion is supported by his general view on the common
spiritual darkness of the human mind365 and his promise to turn the world
upside down: ‘with the breaking of my silence will come the manifestation
of my internal work which will turn the world upside down’.366 ‘A time will
come when I will have to turn the world upside down’ (cf. Figure 10).367
The spiritually inverted rainbow addresses itself precisely to the human soul
who, having fully developed his consciousness via the kingdoms of cosmic
evolution, now finds himself, in an excessively human or non-natural
world,368 ironically inverted vis-à-vis the spiritual planes through which he
must ascend via involution:
Having achieved full consciousness as man, he has already arrived at his destination, for he now
possesses the capacity to become fully conscious of his Soul. Still he is unable to realize this divine
destiny because his consciousness remains completely focused in his inverted, limited, finite self –
the Mind – which, ironically has been the means of achieving consciousness.369

Furthermore, the inverted rainbow of spiritual reality, the chromatic image

of the hierarchical order of the human spirit, embodies a universal, vertical,
and ideal alternative to other symbolic uses of the rainbow in the modern
world. More specifically, the spiritually righted rainbow stands in contrast
to the inordinate exaltation of sexual experience and identity in modern
culture.
Here the position of lust in the spectrum of impressions becomes crucial,
as it constitutes both a foundation and the lowest degree of the vertical
order, in keeping with the fact of sexual pleasure as the highest sign of the
inherent emptiness of worldly pleasure:
 Sexual intercourse is the highest type of sensual pleasure in the world. But how long does it last?
Only a few minutes.
If this, the highest of all worldly pleasures, is compared with the real happiness of eternal divine
bliss, it is a mere shadow of a drop from the infinite ocean of eternal bliss. When once realised, this
bliss is felt and enjoyed every second forever.
From this comparison you can imagine the hollowness of the world and its pleasures.370
Symbolically, lust is the hinge upon which the rainbow is rightly inverted,
just as lust is at once the force behind the creation of the universe and the
foremost obstacle on the spiritual path:
Lust means a craze. Some have the lust for power, some lust of the senses, etc.
The whole creation came out of lust. The first whim was lustful. God had intercourse with
himself through the Om point, and the creation was the result of this act.371
In the spiritual path, lust is the greatest obstacle.372
As the ‘hinge’ obstacle, lust is also the tensional line that persists until the
end and bisects all other barriers on the path.373 Lust is thus crucial in the
sense of a ladder to push against, a providential enemy and scalar force one
must heroically fight in order to realize its own utility and good:
Lust is not bad. Because of this lust, you have been born as human beings. It is due to this very
lust that you will turn from men into God. But even if lust is there in you, don’t put it into action.
From the spiritual point of view, lust is the worst possible weakness. The real hero is he who
successfully fights it.
... The fact is, you should have this lust, but you should do your utmost not to fall prey to it. You
should put up a fierce fight, and though defeated a thousand times, you should again be ready to
continue to fight the lust.
Were I to wish it, I could destroy the lust in you in no time. But what would be the use of
destroying it? Inevitably I will destroy it. In the meantime, continue on with the battle inside
yourselves. This is the law. It is necessary. Then joy will come in defeating lust.
Without a struggle, there is no pleasure in fighting. The real pleasure lies in success after so
many defeats. Wars won without obstacles, without sacrifices and untiring effort afford no
pleasure. This should be a life and death fight. Lust is there to be fought. It is a lifelong struggle. It
will be a conflict in you till the end of your days. It should be there to fight you, and you should
always be alert and ready for battle, to kill....
Foremost you should try to get rid of lust, as all other vices are on account of it. For instance, if a
parrot’s throat is cut, it dies. But if its wings are clipped, it does not die; after some time the
feathers of the wings grow back. Lust can be compared to the parrot’s head. Therefore when lust is
still present and we conquer other evils, such as anger, the evils again revive – everything rises out
of the head. But if lust is killed once and for all, every other evil is also destroyed. You have to cut
off its head.
Yet in truth, lust is necessary for evolution. It starts developing in the vegetable forms. With the
increase in lust, there is advancement in evolution, since lust means energy. And with the increase
in energy, consciousness expands.
But these are points on this path which you will never understand. There are thousands of points
thinner than hair. Remember, it is no easy thing to eradicate sanskaras gathered during birth after
birth, and lust is the hardest of all sanskaras. But be heroes and fight lust; you will defeat it. The
 real pleasure is to fight it and not succumb to it. Knowing this, I let it remain, but I will destroy it
in you when the right time comes. Until then, go on fighting, and never give up.374
The necessity of fighting lust as an originary force is predicated upon its
being the lowest form of love, the minimum whose inherent limitation
negatively but indirectly affirms with the utmost persistence the maximum
of its own higher reality:
Lust is the most limited form of love functioning under the thraldom of ignorance. The
unambiguous stamp of insufficiency which lust invariably bears is in itself a sign that it is an
incomplete and inadequate expression of something deeper, which is vast and unlimited. Through
the manifold and unending sufferings which are attendant upon undiluted lust, and the continued
experiences of frustration which it brings, the spirit is ceaselessly registering its unyielding protest
against the utter superficiality of a life of unqualified lust. In this manner the irrepressible voice of
the infinity of God’s love indirectly asserts the imperative claims of its unexpressed but unimpaired
reality.375

The rainbow of impressions thus also corresponds to the different forms of

love – lust, longing, resignation – which predominate in the gross, subtle,
and mental spheres, respectively, as intimated by the impressional
greenness of spiritual longing (see above), which like spring is the principle
of upward and self-renewing turning from lower to higher forms of love.
The inverted rainbow is the chromatic scale of love which maps the journey
of the soul as a ‘thrilling divine romance’.376
Fittingly, green was the favorite color of Baba’s closest female disciple,
Mehera Irani.377 And Mehera’s favorite color for Meher Baba was pink or
rose, the non-spectral color that one perceives ‘between’ the high and low
ends of the spectrum and the alterative of green (white light minus green
equals pink).378 If black is the color of the absence of light (the color of
vision itself), rose is the color of the presence of light without color. Meher
Baba called Mehera his ‘Radha’, spoke of her many times as ‘the purest
soul in the universe,’ and said, ‘She is my very breath without which I
cannot live’.379
From this elevated perspective, to restrict the sense of pink to the lowest
expressions of love makes even less sense than calling black white.
O friend, I am dying! Surely I die.
The anguish of being kept apart
From Krishna is more than I can bear.
Alas! to whom then shall I leave
My priceless Treasure? When I am dead,
I beg you, do not burn my body;
Do not cast it into the river.
 See that it is not given to the flames;
Do not cast it into the water.
In this body I played with Krishna.
Bind my lifeless form, I beg you,
To the black tamala’s branches;
Tie it to the tamala tree.
Touching tamala it touches black.
Krishna is black, and black is tamala;
Black is the colour that I love.
From earliest childhood I have loved it.
To the black Krishna my body belongs;
Let it not lie apart from black!380

344 Public domain image, source: <https://digitalcommons.acu.edu/ferguson_photos/2305/>.

345 ‘From the psychogenetic point of view, human actions are based upon the operation of the
impressions stored in the mind through previous experience. Every thought, emotion and act is
grounded in groups of impressions which, when considered objectively, are seen to be
modifications of the mind-stuff of man. These impressions are deposits of previous experience
and become the most important factors in determining the course of present and future
experience. The mind is constantly creating and gathering such impressions in the course of its
experience. When occupied with the physical objects of this world such as the body, nature and
other things, the mind is, so to say, externalised, and creates gross impressions. When it is busy
with its own subjective mental processes (which are the expressions of already existing
sanskaras), it creates subtle and mental impressions. The question whether sanskaras come first
or experience comes first is like the question whether the hen or the egg comes first. Both are
conditions of each other and develop side by side. The problem of understanding the significance
of human experience, therefore, turns round the problem of understanding the formation and
function of sanskaras’ (Meher Baba, Discourses, I, 54–5).
346 Meher Message, 2:7 (July 1930), p.8.
347 ‘In order to have a comprehensive idea of what is implied in perfection, it is necessary to classify
it into two categories. There is spiritual perfection, which consists in the inner realisation of a
transcendent state of consciousness beyond duality. There is also perfection as expressed and
seen in the domain of duality. All related existence which is a part of the manifold world of
manifestation admits of degrees; and when we are concerned with perfection as seen in this
manifested world, we find that, like other things subject to duality, it also admits of degrees. Bad
and good, weakness and strength, vice and virtue are all opposites within duality. In fact, all these
aspects are expressions of the one Reality in different degrees. Thus, evil is not utterly evil but
goodness in its lowest degree; weakness is not mere incapacity but strength in its lowest degree;
and vice is not pure vice but virtue at its lowest. In other words, evil is the minimum of good;
weakness is the minimum of strength; and vice is the minimum of virtue. All the aspects of
duality have a minimum and a maximum and all intervening degrees; perfection is no exception
to this […] When perfection is concerned with duality it consists in the excellence of some
attribute or capacity. In this context perfection in one respect does not necessarily include
perfection in other respects […] The different types of excellence which are characteristic of
duality are all within the scope of the intellect, for such excellence can be easily envisaged by the
extension (in imagination) of something good which is found in the limited experience of
everyday life. The perfection which belongs to the spiritually realized souls is not in the domain
 of duality, and as such is entirely beyond the scope of the intellect. It has no parallel in the domain
of duality […] All sorts of excellence are latent in spiritual perfection. Krishna was spiritually
perfect. He was also perfect in everything. If he had wanted to he could have shown himself as a
perfect drunkard, a perfect sinner, a perfect rogue or a perfect murderer, but that would have
shocked the world. Though possessed of perfection in every respect, it was not necessary for him
to exhibit it in fulfilling his mission. The spiritually perfect souls can exhibit supreme excellence
in any mode of life which they may be required to adopt for the spiritual upliftment of other souls,
but they do not do so merely to show themselves as perfect in that respect. Excellence of
capacities is used by them only when there is a spiritual need for it, not merely to satisfy the
curiosity of others. When they use such excellence of capacity they do so with utter detachment
[…] If you try to grasp the nature of perfection by means of a set standard (implying an opposite),
you are bound to limit it and thus fail to understand its real significance. Perfection includes the
opposites and transcends them, therefore the perfect man is not bound by any rule or limited ideal.
He is beyond good and bad, but his law for those who are good gives good reward, and for those
who are bad it responds in their own coin. Krishna proved to Arjuna, who was his devotee, that
his apparent bringing about of the physical and mental annihilation of the vicious Kauravas was
for their spiritual salvation. Perfection might manifest itself through killing or saving according to
the spiritual demands of the situation. The heart of the Perfect One is at once soft like butter and
hard like steel’ (Meher Baba, Discourses I, 115–9).
348 Meher Baba, Discourses, I, 27.
349 As Meher Baba once explained, the mental body has the form of a chromatic circle of seven
colors: ‘If you see Chanji with your gross eyes, you see his figure – no circle, no colors
surrounding him. But if you concentrate and can see him through your subtle eyes, you can see
his astral form without color or mark – a faint form, a bit blue or grayish. If, however, you have
developed mental consciousness and see him through your mental eye, you see him in the form of
a circle with seven colors – all blended together in one. This can only be seen by a Master. Colors
are due to sanskaras created by imagination. Why seven colors? When the first clash between
Energy and the Heavens [or Space; Pran and Akash] took place, it created a spark, a circle which
had seven colors. All such sparks have seven colors. None knows that even before the electron,
there is one form in the beginning. But what name to give it! The clash of Energy and the
Heavens created this first form’ (Lord Meher, p. 1731).
350 Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, pp. 1889–90.
351 ‘The aspirant must choose one of the two courses which are open to him. He must take to the life
of celibacy or to the married life, and he must avoid at all costs a cheap compromise between the
two. Promiscuity in sex gratification is bound to land the aspirant in a most pitiful and dangerous
chaos of ungovernable lust. As such diffused and undirected lust veils the higher values, it
perpetuates entanglement and creates in the spiritual path insuperable difficulties to the internal
and spontaneous renunciation of craving. Sex in marriage is entirely different from sex outside
marriage. In marriage the sanskaras of lust are much lighter and are capable of being removed
more easily. When sex-companionship is accompanied by a sense of responsibility, love and
spiritual idealism, conditions for the sublimation of sex are much more favourable than when it is
cheap and promiscuous’ (Meher Baba, Discourses, I, 146).
352 Meher Baba, Discourses, I, 159–60.
353 Meher Baba, Discourses, I, 146–7.
354 ‘The boundary in which consciousness can move is prescribed by the sanskaras, and the
functioning of consciousness is also determined by the desires. As desires aim at self-satisfaction,
the whole consciousness becomes self-centred and individualised. The individualisation of
consciousness may in a sense be said to be the effect of the vortex of desires. The soul gets
 enmeshed in the desires and cannot step out of the circumscribed individuality constituted by
these desires. It imagines these barriers and becomes self-hypnotised’ (Meher Baba, Discourses, I,
36).
355 Meher Baba, Discourses, I, 147.
356 ‘When there is exact balancing and overlapping of good and bad sanskaras, they both disappear,
with the result that what remains is a clean slate of mind on which nothing is written, and which
therefore reflects the Truth as it is without perversion. Nothing is ever written on the soul. The
sanskaras are deposited on the mind and not on the soul. The soul always remains untarnished,
but it is only when the mind is a clean mirror that it can reflect the Truth’ (Meher Baba,
Discourses, I, 99). ‘Good actions bind a man with a golden chain, and bad actions with an iron-
spiked one. But the chain is there in either case, and the man is never set free. Yoga and other
practices are good and merit an aspirant a good life in the next birth, but a man is never free from
bondage or given mukti as a result of them. Therefore, to achieve emancipation, one must be
without virtues or sins – without any kind of sanskaras. One’s slate should be quite clean without
credit or debit in one’s account’ (Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, p. 333). Cf. ‘It is all a
question of the mind. Bondage and liberation are of the mind alone. The mind will take the
colour you dye it with. It is like white clothes just returned from the laundry. If you dip them in
red dye, they will be red. If you dip them in blue or green, they will be blue or green’ (Gospel of
Sri Ramakrishna, chapter 5, <http://www.belurmath.org/>).
357 ‘One day in Cannes, Baba disclosed, “For my work I need a healthy, handsome, intelligent and
innocent boy. These qualities are essential for the work I wish to do for the world involving the
minimizing of lust, especially of homosexuals, which is now prevalent to an alarming extent all
over the world. If the boy is not innocent, he would at once misunderstand my intention, which
would hinder instead of help my work”. On another occasion, when Kitty questioned Baba about
his work with the boys, he remarked, “I am working with the youth of the future”’ (Lord Meher,
pp. 1863–4). It should be noted here for the unfamiliar reader that Meher Baba never condemned
homosexuality and that homosexuals were among his closest followers. The true self is sexless
and the spiritual problem is not sexual orientation but lust. Speaking in 1952 of the youth of
America, a nation he singled out as ‘destined to lead the world spiritually’, Baba said, ‘be sure
these very youths who now know not of God, but know only to eat, drink, be merry and do lustful
actions, will soon get the shock of their lives and know that only loving God is real life!’ (Lord
Meher, p. 3082). Cf. ‘I like the Americans best, and the Italians for their good hearts; but I don’t
like the way the Arabs behave – they are the worst, full of lust!’ (Meher Baba, quoted in Lord
Meher, p. 1511).
358 ‘If one is lustful, he has a tendency to fasten his lust upon several persons of the opposite sex’
(Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, p. 2275).
359 ‘I will tell you something about lust and love. It has such a feeble link of demarcation that lust
can be thought of as love, and love as lust; and yet, love takes you to God, and lust binds you in
illusion. The sign of love is one: love never asks for anything. The lover gives all to the Beloved.
Lust wants everything. Remember that one who wants nothing is never disappointed. He who
wants nothing has everything’ (Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, p. 3627). ‘Lust wants
possessions. Love gives possessions’ (Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, p. 1895).
360 Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, p. 1779.
361 Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, p. 4667.
362 ‘Saint John Chrysostom paints an eloquent picture of the evils of backbiting. “What is the use of
sparing birds and fishes if we eat our own brothers?” he says. Indeed, the backbiter rips his
brother’s flesh with his teeth and tears his neighbor’s body to shreds. That is what Saint Paul
wants to frighten us from when he says, “If you bite and devour one another, take heed or you will
 be consumed by one another” (Galatians 5. 15) […] Saint Gregory declares, “There is no doubt
that those who indulge in backbiting others, feed on their flesh” (Saint Gregory, Moral, Book 14,
Chapter 14). Making himself equal to God, the backbiter pretends to examine hearts and discern
the most secret things in man, even his intentions. He would wrest God’s sword from His hand if
he could. The backbiter is so fond of human flesh he often spares not even his own relatives’
(Father Belet, ‘Sins of the Tongue: The Backbiting Tongue’,
<http://www.catholicapologetics.info/morality/general/btongue.htm>). ‘O you who have believed,
avoid much [negative] assumption. Indeed, some assumption is sin. And do not spy or backbite
each other. Would one of you like to eat the flesh of his brother when dead? You would detest it.
And fear Allah; indeed, Allah is Accepting of repentance and Merciful’ (Koran, 49. 12). ‘Jesus
and his disciples went past a dead dog. The disciples said, “It stinks repulsively”. But Jesus said,
“Its teeth are so white”. In this way, He taught them never to say anything bad about anyone’
(Hilyatu’l-awliya, II, 283, quoted in Ishak Ersen, Jesus Christ in the Traditions of Islam, <
http://www.light-of-life.com/eng/sources/s4395et1.htm>). Feeding on what it spits out, backbiting
is psychic consumption of another’s rotten body.
363 Lord Meher, p. 504.
364 <http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumzenithal_arc>.
365 ‘The mind of the worldly minded is darkened by a thick layer of accumulated sanskaras which
must be considerably weakened for the aspirant even to enter the Path […] What is
conventionally recognised need not always be spiritually sound. On the contrary, many
conventions express and embody illusory values since they have come into existence as a result of
the working of average minds which are spiritually ignorant. Illusory values are mostly
conventional because they grow into that matrix of mentality which is most common’ (Meher
Baba, Discourses, III, 113).
366 Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, p. 723.
367 Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, p. 800.
368 ‘The sanskaras are of two types – natural and non-natural – according to the manner in which
they come into existence. The sanskaras which the soul gathers during the period of
organic evolution are natural sanskaras. These sanskaras come into existence as the soul
successively takes up and abandons the various sub-human forms, thus gradually passing from the
apparently inanimate state of the stone or metal to the human state, where there is full
development of consciousness. All the sanskaras which cluster round the soul before it attains the
human form are the product of natural evolution and are referred to as natural sanskaras. They
should be carefully distinguished from the sanskaras cultivated by the soul after the attainment of
the human form. The sanskaras which get attached to the soul during the human stage are
cultivated under the moral freedom of consciousness with its accompanying responsibility of
choice between good and bad, virtue and vice. They are referred to as non-natural sanskaras.
Though these post-human sanskaras are directly dependent upon the natural sanskaras, they are
created under fundamentally different conditions of life, and are, in their origin, comparatively
more recent than the natural sanskaras. This difference in length of the formative periods and in
the conditions of formation is responsible for the difference in the degree of firmness of
attachment of the natural and non-natural sanskaras to the soul. The non-natural sanskaras are not
as difficult to eradicate as the natural sanskaras which have an ancient heritage and are therefore
more firmly rooted’ (Meher Baba, Discourses, I, 55–6).
369 Meher Baba, Everything and the Nothing, p. 46, my emphasis.
370 Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, p. 352.
371 Meher Baba, Awakener 22:1 (1960), p. 40.
372 Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, p. 1095.
373 ‘The game atya-patya is played in a large rectangular field with many parallel horizontal lines
and one bisecting vertical line. Once, when the game was being vigorously played, Baba stopped
play and called the men under the shade of a nearby tree where he explained its spiritual meaning:
“The horizontal lines are the barriers representing pride, anger, greed, jealousy, hatred, envy and
egoism, which the traveler on the spiritual path has to overcome before attaining the spiritual goal
of God-realization. The bisecting line represents lust which persists to the end, even long after the
other undesirable qualities have been subdued and overcome. Once the goal is attained, these very
faults are elevated to the level of divine attributes, and nothing but good accrues to others when
they are expressed. Those on the Path can and do help others, yet only up to the point or level
where they themselves are. But those who have realized the ultimate state of God and reached the
goal of Self-Realization can help others stranded at any stage of the inner journey”’ (Lord Meher,
p. 275).
374 Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, pp. 1099–1101.
375 Meher Baba, Discourses, III, 177.
376 ‘Even in the lowest lustful life of the gross sphere, God is experiencing Himself as a lover, but it
is a state of a lover who is completely ignorant about the true nature of himself or the beloved. It
is a state of a lover who is inexorably separated from the beloved by an opaque curtain of un-
understood duality. It is nevertheless the beginning of a long process by which the lover breaks
through the enveloping curtain of ignorance and comes into his own Truth as unbounded and
unhampered Love. But in order to get initiated into infinite love, the lover has to go through two
other stages which are characteristic of the subtle and mental spheres.
The lover in the subtle sphere is not free from lust, but the lust which he experiences is not undiluted
as in the gross sphere. The intensity of lust in the subtle sphere is about half that in the gross
sphere. Besides, there is no gross expression of lust as in the gross sphere. The lover in the gross
sphere is inextricably entangled with the gross objects; hence his lust finds gross expression. But
the lover in the subtle sphere has gotten free from attachment to gross objects; hence in his case
lust remains unexpressed in the gross form. His lust has subtle expressions, but it cannot have
gross expression. Besides, since about half of the original lust of the gross sphere gets sublimated
in the subtle sphere, the lover in the subtle sphere experiences love not as undiluted lust, but in a
higher form as longing to be united with the Beloved.
Thus in the gross sphere love expresses itself as lust, and in the subtle sphere it expresses itself
as longing. Lust is a craving for sensations and as such is completely selfish in motive. It has utter
disregard for the well-being of the beloved. In longing there is less of selfishness, and though it
continues to be possessive in a way, the beloved is recognised as having worth and importance in
his own right. Longing is a less limited form of love than lust. In longing the curtain of duality has
become more transparent and less obstructive, since the lover now consciously seeks to overcome
duality between the lover and the Beloved by securing the presence of the Beloved. In lust the
emphasis is solely on the limited self and the beloved is completely subsidiary to the gross needs
of the self. In longing the emphasis is equally distributed on the self and on the beloved, and the
lover realises that he exists for the beloved just in the same way as the beloved exists for him.
The lover in the mental sphere has an even higher and freer expression of love. In his case, though
lust has not completely disappeared, it is mostly sublimated. Only about one-fourth of the original
lust of the gross sphere remains, but it remains in a latent form without any expression. In the
mental sphere, lust does not have even subtle expression. The lover of the mental sphere is
detached from subtle objects, and he is free from possessive longing for the beloved which is
characteristic of the lover in the subtle sphere.
In the mental sphere love expresses itself as complete resignation to the will of the beloved. All
selfish desire, including longing for the presence of the beloved, has disappeared. Now the
 emphasis is solely on the worth and will of the beloved. Selfishness is utterly wiped out and there
is a far more abundant release of love in its pure form. However, even in the mental sphere love
has not become infinite, since there is still present the thin curtain of duality which separates the
lover from the beloved. Love is no longer in the clutches of selfishness, but it is still short of
being infinite because it is experienced through the medium of the finite mind, just as in the lower
spheres it is experienced through the medium of the lower bodies.
Love becomes consciously infinite in being as well as in expression, when the individual mind is
transcended. Such love is rightly called divine, because it is characteristic of the God-state in
which all duality is finally overcome. In divine love, lust has completely disappeared. It does not
exist even in latent form. Divine love is unlimited in essence and expression, because it is
experienced by the soul through the soul itself. In the gross, subtle and mental spheres the lover is
conscious of being separated from the beloved, but when all these spheres are transcended, the
lover is conscious of his unity with the Beloved. The lover loses himself in the being of the
Beloved and knows that he is one with the Beloved. Divine love is entirely free from the thraldom
of desires or limiting self. In this state of infinity the lover has no being apart from the Beloved.
He is the Beloved Himself.
We thus have God as infinite love, first limiting Himself in the forms of creation, and then recovering
His infinity through the different stages of creation. All the stages of God’s experience of being a
finite lover ultimately culminate in His experiencing Himself as the sole Beloved. The sojourn of
the soul is a thrilling divine romance in which the lover, who in the beginning is conscious of
nothing but emptiness, frustration, superficiality and the gnawing chains of bondage, gradually
attains an increasingly fuller and freer expression of love, and ultimately disappears and merges
in the divine Beloved to realise the unity of the Lover and the Beloved in the supreme and eternal
fact of God as Infinite Love’ (Meher Baba, Discourses, III, pp. 177–80).
377 See
<https://image.jimcdn.com/app/cms/image/transf/none/path/se80bcf7e1bbfb507/image/i601758fd
b3dfa504/version/1279084917/image.jpg>.
378 ‘There is No Pink Light’, <http://youtu.be/S9dqJRyk0YM>.
379 ‘Mehera’s love for me is 100 percent pure. It is not like others who love Baba. All these years
she has been with me, and has been as pure as anything. She has no lustful thoughts or desires –
not even for her “Krishna” [Baba]. Nothing at all. Her sole purpose in life is to love me’ (Meher
Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, p. 5312). See David Fenster, Mehera-Meher: A Divine Romance, 3
vols. (2003).
380 Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, chapter 23, <
http://www.ramakrishnavivekananda.info/gospel/volume_1/23_festival_at_surendras.htm>
 VII.
INNER LIFE | INNER DEATH:
ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE SACRED

Figure 11: Orazio Riminaldi, Martyrdom of St. Cecilia.381

The ears of mortals are filled with this sound, but they are unable to hear it.
– Macrobius

The idea of the sacred, rooted in the concept of what is set apart for or
marked by the divine, is necessarily a matter of the intersection between
presence and absence, revelation and concealment, the visible and the
invisible. ‘It is impossible for the divine ray to illumine us unless it is
enshrouded by a variety of sacred veils’.382 So the theory of the sacred is
traditionally concerned with the order of liminal objects (aura, relic, vestige,
shadow, image, etc.), forms that translate between presence and absence,
forming their threshold, just as ‘every threshold is sacred’.383 We speak of
‘traces of the sacred’ because the sacred appears universally and
fundamentally as trace, that is, as the absent presence and present absence
of another reality in the midst of this one – ‘a presence that is no longer
distinct in any way from an absence’.384 The sacred is the sign under which
all things are never only themselves but also signs, inscriptions of
something vastly beyond and within them: ‘all creatures in this world of
sensible realities […] are shadows, echoes, and pictures of that first […]
and most perfect Principle’.385
Here the real mystery of the sacred, the mystery of its mystery, comes into
view: not simply that the divine or eternal truth manifests itself, but that its
reality becomes apparent without destroying or displacing the actuality
which veils it, without consuming its otherwise profane covering. ‘It is
impossible to overemphasize the paradox represented by every hierophany
[…] By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it
continues to remain itself’ – like iron in the fire.386 The truth of the sacred is
not the eternal per se, but the ultimate paradox of its sojourn in time and
space: ‘In order to arrive at that […] which is most spiritual and eternal, and
above us, it is necessary that we move through the vestiges which are
bodily and temporal and outside us’.387 In this sense, the sacred belongs less
to the infinite than to the finite, to the hierarchy of mortal beings who
somehow manage, as if from some infinitely secret reserve of inner
strength, to vibrate with the tremendous power and music of the deathless.
The paradox of the sacred is the very divinity of the world: ‘The world –
insofar as it is absolutely, irreparably profane – is God’.388 It is the
omnipresent threshold of above and below, the zone both of heavenly or
transcendent revelation and the unearthing of knowledge too immanent or
immediate to admit, to begin with, ‘The horror […] that we know that we
see God in life itself.389
The trace embodies the paradox of the sacred, its liminal intimacy with the
profane, in the sense of being something left behind – a footprint, a sandal,
a corpse. A trace is decidedly not the being of which it is the trace, and yet
one cannot erase the presence of the thing in it. The logic of the trace
explains the mutual potentiality of the sacred and the profane. As trace, an
object is potentially worthy of being thrown away or used. As trace, an
object is potentially worthy of being preserved or set apart from use.
Contradictions of the cadaver. We do not cry over the loss of our shit, our
former precious food. ‘Then why on earth should we shed tears and weep
and wail when the body, which is merely food for the soul, is cast off at
death?’390 Thus the capital error to avoid vis-à-vis the sacred is to forget or
deny what Bataille defines as its ‘subjective identity’ with the excremental:
The notion of the (heterogeneous) foreign body permits one to note the elementary subjective
identity between types of excrement […] and everything that can be seen as sacred, divine, or
 marvelous: a half-decomposed cadaver fleeing through the night [errant la nuit] in a luminous
shroud can be seen as characteristic of this unity.391

The danger of ignoring the sacred/profane threshold, the line of the trace
which both separates and joins them, is beautifully illustrated in an
anecdote from 1929 about a disciple who refused to wear Meher Baba’s
sandals:
‘Master, I could never wear your holy sandals.’ Thereupon, Baba bitterly remarked to the others
present, ‘How unlucky Vishnu is! When I give him my sandals to wear, he just touches his
forehead to them and puts them back. This type of worship and reverence pains me. It is not
worship; it is punishment. By disobeying me, Vishnu does not worship me he punishes me. And
the sad part is that he thinks he is revering me. Not to keep my word and to worship one’s own
sentiments is sheer disobedience. Vishnu does not revere me. He reveres his own emotions, and to
him, they are apparently superior to my orders. Such things deeply pain me.’ Disturbed, Chhagan
asked, ‘Are we not to consider your sandals as sacred?’ ‘Every belonging of mine is sacred’,
replied Baba, ‘and to have a feeling of reverence for them is good. But they are not more important
that I am […]’ Baba’s mood changed and he then asked those present, ‘Have you ever examined
what I defecate?’ Some replied, ‘Yes’, and some said, ‘No’. But none could give a description
which satisfied Baba. So he himself explained: ‘You have no idea what my feces contain. In the
beginning of creation, I defecated, and all the suns, moons, stars and universes came out. They are
all my excrement! But just imagine! When this dirty thing is so beautiful, how can you ever
imagine my real splendor? You will lose your senses if you ever see even a glimpse of it’.392

Refusing to wear the Master’s sandals is tantamount to losing the truth of

the sacred as trace and veil of itself, as something whose sacredness cannot
be severed or set apart from its fitness to be sacrificed for its own essence.
Not wanting to step upon the holy, to place it between one’s feet and the
earth, one loses its meaning as threshold of the divine, its being another veil
or step in the ladder of vestiges leading beyond oneself. The order of the
sacred, of the divine infinity of the trace, commands one simultaneously to
disregard the world as waste and revere it as holy. As ‘a sacrifice is the
visible sacrament or sacred sign of an invisible sacrifice’,393 so the
expanding wasteful expenditure of the visible universe is but the trace of a
Reality we fail to glimpse. Failure to touch and hold open this threshold
produces two opposite and intersecting artificial worlds: 1) a world where
the sacred is everything and thus nothing is sacred (all things prone to being
exploited, violated, destroyed); and 2) a world where the sacred is nothing
and thus everything is sacred (all things prone to being overvalued,
protected, preserved). Lost to both is the supreme naturalness and
spontaneity of life, what John of Ruusbroec calls the ‘outflowing generous
commonness of the divine nature’.394
In order to abandon both of these spheres, ambivalently religious and
secular, let us trace the sacred less in terms of what happens than in terms of
what does not, less as an event to be sought than something more exciting
and overwhelming than any occurrence: the direct, trembling evidence of
that infinite existence and eternal present in which nothing has ever
happened and nothing ever will – where all is happening NOW. In the midst
of life’s non-stop plenitude of sense and sensation, the sacred summons our
aptitude for the fundamentally unknown yet deeply felt, at least by ‘the
selected few, who scattered amongst the crowd, silently and
unostentatiously surrender their all’.395 Guided by Orazio Riminaldi’s
painting of the martyrdom of St. Cecilia (Figure 11), the patron of music, I
will listen for the sacred as the unheard filling our ears, taking up along the
way the crucial question of what it calls one to sacrifice.

With Empty Hands | Praying for Nothing

‘Whoever seeks or aims at something is seeking and aiming at nothing,
and he who prays for something will get nothing’.396 To approach the
sacred, not to mention presume to speak about it, demands at the beginning
a voiding of desire, an emptying of expectation.397 ‘Anything you look
forward to will destroy you, as it already has’.398 Not to worry, desire will
not abandon us, but it must be detached from predetermination, unleashed
from the person or identity pretending to be its master, freed from being
your pet. ‘Love is its own excuse for being. It is complete in itself and does
not need to be supplemented by anything […] Love is no love if it is based
upon any expectation’.399 Now the cord is free to tie our hands, the powers
that would presume to reach for and hold the sacred as its possessor or
producer.
This binding signifies, not the closure of will, but its being held open to its
own infinity, its abandonment to its own beyond. So Bataille frames his
essay “The Sacred” around the quest-less ‘quest’ of modernity’s restless
spirit and the inescapable imperative that this spirit, in order to grasp the
sacred as the grail-less ‘“grail” without which […] human existence cannot
be justified, simply recognize, since it sought and seeks without respite, that
it never sought, and does not seek, to reach less far’.400 This renunciation at
the outset is co-substantial with the refusal to settle, to accept substitutes,
and more specifically for Bataille, it is the artist’s refusal ‘to surrender
“what possesses him” to the standards of salesmen, to which art has
conformed’.401 To grasp the vanity of results, of dreams of success, of a
sacred which will be ours, is to discern the immanence of a world beyond
this one within our very agitation or desire for something else.
The condition of the world, the strife and uncertainty that is everywhere, the general
dissatisfaction with and rebellion against any and every situation shows that the ideal of material
perfection is an empty dream and proves the existence of an eternal Reality beyond materiality.402

Whether this Reality is properly named God or not is absolutely irrelevant

– to the will that sacrifices itself to itself, that touches in emptiness its own
infinity. The sacred is no one’s project.
The realm of morality is the realm of project. The opposite of project is sacrifice. A rite is the
divining of a hidden necessity (remaining forever obscure). And whereas, in project, the result
alone counts, in sacrifice, it is in the act itself that value is concentrated. Nothing in sacrifice is put
off until later – it has the power to contest everything at the instant that it takes place, to summon
everything, to render everything present.403

If the sacred may be the object of search, it is search of a mystical order,

of a findless finding:
since that which human nature seeks and toward which it tends, whether it moves in the right or
the wrong direction, is infinite and not to be comprehended by any creature, it necessarily follows
that its quest is unending and that therefore it moves forever. And yet although its search is
unending, by some miraculous means it finds what it is seeking for: and again it does not find it,
for it cannot be found.404

Of infinite search: ‘Seek his face always, let not the finding of the beloved
put an end to the love-inspired search; but as love grows, so let the search
for the one already found become more intense’.405
The necessity of sacrifice lies in the fact that the hidden depth of your will
– which your desires simply do not want you to know – is so much vaster
than you:
In my birth all things were born, and I was the cause of myself and all things: and if I had so
willed it, I would not have been, and all things would not have been. If I were not, God would not
be either. I am the cause of God’s being God: if I were not, then God would not be God. But you
do not need to know this.406
 So the first rule of drawing near the sacred – ‘the manifestation of
something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our
world’407 – is deregulation of what would manage it. Therefore, on the one
hand, a warning: ‘Woe to those who, to the very end, insist on regulating
the movement that exceeds them with the narrow mind of the mechanic
who changes a tire’.408 And on the other, a promise: ‘It is a certain and
necessary truth that he who resigns his will wholly to God will catch God
and bind God, so that God can do nothing but what that man wills’.409 The
saint’s tied hands hold God on a leash.
Not the cessation of prayer, then (as if that were possible for a living,
breathing being), but the surrender of letting prayer be bound to the purity
of itself – a prayer (for nothing) spontaneously capable of receiving
everything. ‘I may give you more, much more, than you expect – or maybe
nothing, and that nothing may prove to be everything’.410 Seeing that the
sacred is nothing if not the manifestation of transmundane reality, the first
obstacle in the search for it is the expectant sense of the sacred as an object
of search. The unveiling of the divinely Real, of sovereignly indifferent
Truth, takes place only from the perspective of what is blind to it, of the
vision that is always failing to see it.
You have only to remove the umbrella and the Sun is there for you to see. It does not have to be
brought there from anywhere. But such a tiny and trivial thing as an umbrella can deprive you of
the sight of such a stupendous fact as the Sun.411

So in the theory of the Eucharistic sacrament, it is not a matter of the

production of God (who is everywhere and in everything) out of the bread
and wine, but the emptying of their substance so that the fact of God
appears through their accidents which like sacred veils remain without a
subject (manent sine subiecto), freely floating in an atmosphere-less
atmosphere, a supreme threshold neither of this world nor of any another –
like the virginity of Mary’s pregnant womb, impossibly empty and full of
the human divine.412 Void most fertile, pure secret possession, a priceless
prize of hands holding zero, not even themselves: ‘Here I divulge to you a
point worth noting: | Hidden in your penniless hands is Treasure untold’.413
So also in the theory of contemplation – a word that itself refers to
establishing a space for divination – it is always a matter of removal or
apheresis to disclose what is already there:
 If only we lacked sight and knowledge so as to see, so as to know, unseeing and unknowing, that
which lies beyond all vision and knowledge […] We would be like sculptors who set out to carve a
statue. They remove every obstacle to the pure view of the hidden image, and simply by this act of
clearing aside [aphaeresis] they show up the beauty which is hidden.414

A body on the threshold of everything, carved out of nothing...

The spectacle of the sacred takes place in the paradox of what appears in
the absence of spectacle, in the pure spectacle of the actual appearance of
no-thing. Thus all anticipation of the sacred must wait or abide in the
negation of anticipation, in the eradication of the sense of insufficiency that
the human is forever projecting onto the world – as if Reality were not
always already infinitely more than enough!
‘When life seems to be idle or empty it is not due to any curtailment of the infinity of the Truth,
but it is due to one’s own lack of capacity to enter into its full possession. Just as it is not right to
pile up all spiritual importance for some anticipated future, it is equally not right to arrogate it
exclusively to things that create ado’.415

Witnessing the sacred is a work of the instant, of the present before it

passes like the grail before Perceval, who fails to realize its significance by
deferring it, by saving for later the truth that saves, precisely by remaining
its spectator.416
We are the ones who cannot stand this always present light, and so we promise it for later, just in
order not to feel it today, right this very minute […] And if I postpone the face of reality – it is out
of guile, because I prefer to be dead when it is time to see Him and that way I think I shall not
really see Him.417

As martyr means ‘witness’, seeing the sacred means death of the spectator,
the end of the spectatorship that is already dead to the face in front of its
eyes.
How remarkable […] is the blindness of the intellect which does not take note of that which it
sees first, and without which it can know nothing […] When the mind looks upon the light of the
highest being, it seems to see nothing. And it does not understand that this darkness itself is the
highest illumination of our mind.418

Let us hear, then, precisely where we cannot see. ‘Now the men who went
in company with him, stood amazed, hearing indeed a voice, but seeing no
man. And Saul arose from the ground; and when his eyes were opened, he
saw nothing’ (Acts 9. 7–8). Let me hold with empty hands the music that
fills the emptiness of this non-seeing: ‘The image […] was “divine” […] I
embraced this vast emptiness and its sound’.419
 The Sacred Gate | Gate of the Sacred
The sonic dimensionality of the threshold of the sacred is beautifully
represented by the gate of Purgatory in Dante’s Commedia:
Then he pushed open the door of the blessed gate [porta sacrata], saying: “Enter; but I warn you
that whoever looks back must return outside.”
And when the pins turned in the hinges of that sacred place [regge sacra], pins made of strong,
resonant metal,
Tarpeia did not roar so nor seem so harsh [acra] when the good Metellus was taken from it, so
that later it was left lean.
I turned [rivolsi] attentive to the first thunderclap [tuono], and I seemed to hear voices, singing
“Te Deum laudamus,” blended [mista] with the sweet sound.
The image rendered in what I heard was exactly what one perceives when there is singing with
an organ
so that now one understands the words, now not [or sì or no].
When we were within the threshold of the gate, in disuse because of human souls’ evil love,
which makes the twisted way seem straight,
I heard it being closed again, resounding, and if I had turned back my eyes to it, what would have
been a worthy excuse for the fault?420
Rising from the southern pole and guarding Paradise at its summit, the
antipodal peak of Purgatory spans the space between earth and heaven, this
world and its beyond. As the portal to and through this sacred mountain, the
gate holds and keeps Purgatory’s essence as a zone of vertical movement
and transformation, from below to above. Its sacred threshold is
paradigmatic of Purgatory as the universal threshold or Barzakh through
which the soul ascends to divinity.421 In the ontological scheme of Dante’s
vision, founded on Augustine’s model of vision’s three orders (corporeal,
imaginal, and intellectual), Purgatory corresponds to the imaginal or subtle
world, that which forms the ever-present line between the material and the
immaterial and whose nature is marked by dialetheia, being always at once
true and false, there and not there.
Imagination is neither existent nor non-existent, neither known, nor unknown, neither negated
nor affirmed. For example, a person perceives his form in a mirror. He knows for certain that he
has perceived his form in one respect and he knows for certain that he has not perceived his form
in another respect […] He cannot deny that he has seen his form, and he knows that his form is not
in the mirror, nor is it between himself and the mirror […] Hence he is neither a truth-teller or a
liar in his words, ‘I saw my form, I did not see my form’.422

This mirror-nature of the world, wherethrough every image is undecidably

simultaneously received and projected, is precisely what makes it a ladder
of spiritual ascent: ‘let us place the first step of our ascent at the bottom,
putting the whole world of sense-objects before us as a mirror through
which we may pass to God, the highest creative Artist’.423
In foregrounding the sonic dimension of the dialetheic or yes-no nature of
the purgatorial image, the wayfarer’s passage through this stepped portal
upholds the ancient and medieval idea of music as the principle of cosmic
order according to which the soul may return to life eternal: ‘Gifted men,
imitating this harmony on stringed instruments and in singing, have gained
for themselves a return to this region, as have those who have devoted their
exceptional abilities to a search for divine truth’.424 Indeed the whole
mountain is musical in the sense of being the place of an upward movement
whose essence is to become more and more pleasurable. ‘Music […] is the
science of moving well, in such a way that the movement is desired for
itself, and for this reason charms through itself alone’.425 As Virgil explains,
echoing the Aristotelian theory of ethos,
‘This mountain is such that it is always more difficult at the bottom, at the beginning; and the
further up one goes, the less it gives pain. Thus, when it shall seem so easy to you that going up
will be like floating downstream in a boat, then you will be at the end of this path’.426

So the rule of crossing this threshold, that one must pass with a whole will
and not look back, exemplifies the transitional link or articulating joint of
difficulty and ease in musical ascent – not looking back being both a trial,
the temptation Orpheus and Lot’s wife fail to overcome, and a direct
emergence into the unidirectional flow that will arrive at the summit. As
music moves by desiring the movement of itself, one passes the gate of
Purgatory by not wanting anything more than to pass through, by turning,
converting in tune with the time of its hinges. ‘Follow me. And he said:
Lord, suffer me first to go and to bury my father. And Jesus said to him: Let
the dead bury their dead’ (Luke 9. 59–60). Or as Meher Baba said at the
start of the New Life, ‘I am going to see who is out to die for no reason by
going with me’.427 Music to whose ears? ‘Only music provides definite
answers’,428 because the essence of music is death:
Music has an intimate relation to death. Existing in time, music gives testimony to the
melancholy brevity of existence; music is in fact this ephemeral, transient quality of everything
that exists […] At the same time, we also know that music never ceases, even when the music’s
over.429

Like music death is not the end of life – if it is then there is no death – but
the never-ending cessation of merely living, the crossing of the ever-present
threshold between whatever passing state one likes to call life and life itself.
This is the actual death, the one happening constantly whether you want it
or not, that we dream is not happening by wanting it not to, i.e. by wanting.
If you dive deep in the realm of thoughts and think seriously for just a few minutes, you will
realise the emptiness of desires. Think of what you have enjoyed all these years and what you have
suffered. All that you have enjoyed through life is today nil. All that you have suffered through life
is also nothing in the present. All was illusory.430

The ears of mortals are filled with this sound...

Here is what it takes to hear the sound filling my dying ears, the music
sometimes called silence.
I am not to be attained by those who, loving me, stand reverently by in rapt admiration. I am not
for those who ridicule me and point at me with contempt. To have a crowd of tens of millions
flocking around me is not what I am for. I am for the selected few, who scattered amongst the
crowd, silently and unostentatiously surrender their all – body, mind and possessions – to me. I am
still more for those who, after surrendering their all, never give another thought to their surrender.
They are all mine who are prepared to renounce even the very thought of their renunciation and
who, keeping constant vigil in the midst of intense activity, await their turn to lay down their lives
for the cause of Truth at a glance or sign from me.431

Notice immediately the secret fundamental link between the sacred and
signification, between the thing that ‘becomes something else, yet it
continues to remain itself’ and the ‘thing which, over and above the
impression it makes on the senses, causes something else to come into the
mind as a consequence of itself’.432
As per Bataille’s theory of sacrifice, passing the sacred threshold is thus a
spiritual work of the instant, the moment wherein the silent sign of Truth is
given and received. The step through the portal belongs to the integral act
of will which simultaneously advances decisively forward and rests within
the pleasure of its own movement, keeping inside itself the silence of its
high purpose, dying to itself each moment to live anew. ‘The crucial instant
is that of death, yet as soon as the action begins, everything is challenged,
everything is present’.433 The passage between time and eternity moves into
awareness of their mysterious unity in the flowing present, the pure point of
forever’s circle: ‘this whole time, which to us seems so long while it is
rolling along, is really a moment [punctum]. Whatever has an end is not
long’.434 In this sense, it is the present (proverbially precious) moment itself
that is par excellence the threshold of the sacred, that now – this now –
which is experienced only with a mind no longer consumed by spectating
itself, refusing to be absorbed by listening to its own noise, but dwelling
more and more in ‘the present which is ever beautiful and stretches away
beyond the limits of the past and the future’435 – or sì or no.
Only through a clear and tranquil mind is the true nature of spiritual infinity grasped as
something which is not yet to be, but which already has been, is and ever will be an eternal self-
fulfillment. When every moment is rich with eternal significance there is neither the lingering
clinging to the dead past, nor a longing expectation for the future, but an integral living in the
eternal Now.436

Inner silence, the only real sanity, alone permits the continuous sacrificial
passage from death to life which forms the living present. ‘The
Pythagoreans and the wise men among the Egyptians, forbade speaking
while passing through doors or gates; for then they venerated in silence that
God who is the principle of wholes (and, therefore, of all things)’.437 And as
Dante’s lines perfectly show, it is exactly this silence that allows one in a
measure to look back without doing so, to hear the sound of what is closing
behind you without losing the opening of what is ahead, the real future:
‘Today you will be with me in Paradise’ (Luke 23. 43).
The sacrificial nature of Dante’s resounding regge sacra is more deeply
encoded in the reference to the Tarpeian Rock, a cliff next to the Temple of
Saturn (housing the ancient Roman treasury) from which homini sacri,
banned and legally murderable ‘accursed men’ and other criminals were
cast to their death – ‘a fate met by a long historical catalogue of tyrants,
false witnesses, treacherous allies, men guilty of incest, magicians, and
slaves who had betrayed their masters’.438 The shame and stigma of such
death is seen in the Life of Aesop, where the wise slave turns the tables on
the men of Delphi with a final fable of a daughter raped by her father: ‘The
daughter said to him: “You are doing forbidden and ugly things. I had rather
suffer this crime and evil from a hundred others than from you alone”’.439
So Aesop would prefer far worse suffering than to this death at the hands of
the mob. ‘But, unwilling to hear anything, the men of Delphi had him
thrown over a steep cliff’.440 Symbolically, such executions e saxo [from the
rock] played upon the sense of casting down the criminal – rejecting,
destroying, and eliminating him like waste from the community, as per the
meaning of the abject, thrown away from. And so the inexplicably easy
escape by Jesus of this fate at Nazareth figures the radical, divine freedom
of the one who has already ‘emptied himself’ (Philippians 2. 7): ‘And they
rose up and put him out of the city, and led him to the brow of the hill on
which their city was built, that they might throw him down headlong. But
passing through the midst of them he went away’ (Luke 4. 29–30). The
sacred man walks through the world like a sound. ‘The wind blows where it
will, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes or
where it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit’ (John 3. 8).
In Dante’s text, the proportionate resonance of the sacred with the accursed
is also mirrored in the rhyme between sacra and acra, between the blessed
and the bitter, and the mysterious way that the thunderous noise of the
turning hinges itself turns to sweet music as the pilgrim-poet turns himself
(rivolsi) to hear it.
The structure of the moment of passing through thus suggests a complex
and crucial double analogy: 1) that in order to cross the sacred threshold,
one must be cast and cast oneself down like an accursed man, dying to
oneself without hope of return as if tossed from a cliff – indeed the poet
says, ‘I threw myself [mi gittai]’ at the ‘holy feet’ of the angel guarding the
gate;441 and 2) that in order to hear the music of the divine one must not turn
away from but rather towards its seeming opposite, the harshness which is
the sign of its opening or manifestation. Synthesizing the two, we may say
that spiritual ascent has the nature of a fall, a dislocation of the self from
itself, a fundamental loss of position that crucially provides it the freedom
to turn freely beyond itself – like a bird pushed from the nest to fly. The
painful harshness of the portal’s opening, the descent of self-sacrifice
through the narrow gate (Matthew 7. 13), thus itself turns, within the
experience of the one who follows and endures it, who does not turn away,
into the music of moving above, the self-sufficient pleasure of gaining
higher ground. The impossibility of properly locating the music of the
sacred portal (mi parea | udire), at once inside and outside the one crossing
it, fulfills the mysterious relation between the sacred and the profane. The
thunder of the gateway is literally pro-fane, outside and before the temple.
And yet to the one who passes through, this terrible tone (tuono) is itself the
sweet sound (dolce suono) of the highest love, now understood – now
surpassing understanding. The threshold of the sacred, in this sense, is not
sacred. What is sacred is the sacrificial passage across its profanity, the
death of being cast down like trash from its summit, the treasure of being
stolen from the temple below as living plunder. Only thus does the figural
link between Caesar’s despoiling of the treasury and Christ’s harrowing of
hell makes sense, namely, from the perspective of the supernal
transgressiveness and violence of the divine, its violation of our sense of the
good, our virtue – as marked by the musical word-play between the strong
and resonant metallo (metal) of the portal which like the ‘good | Metellus’
resists but cannot not give way under threat of death by the superior power.
‘But what the mind does not believe, the heart does. And in the end the
intellect does, too; what else is left for it to do?’442
Such are the murderous ways of the Masters, love of whom is self-
annihilation – as if anyone would want it otherwise!
Our ways are quite opposite to the ways of the world. We outwardly harass those who love us,
and we do nothing to those who despise us. We nourish our enemies and kill our friends!
Muhammad was one of us and his teeth were broken by stones. Look at what happened to Jesus –
he was crucified. We crush the eyeballs of our lovers underneath our heels and ignore our foes. We
mercilessly tyrannize our lovers and even murder them. But no one has the right or the daring to
ask us why we do it.443

Such is the transcendent criminality of the divine, with which there is no

union without embracing a terrifying and seemingly senseless death.
And this is a frightening life Love wants, that we must do without the satisfaction of Love in
order to satisfy Love. They who are thus drawn and accepted by Love, and fettered by her, are the
most indebted to Love, and consequently they must continually stand subject to the great power of
her strong nature, to content her. And that life is miserable beyond all that the human heart can
bear.444

Only the will stands in the way of its own truth.

That this interpretation is in tune with Dante’s vision of the sacred is
confirmed later in the poem in the scene of one soul’s resurrection from its
purgatorial state, that of Statius. Whenever this happens, the whole
mountain shakes in spontaneous expression of the individual’s will
becoming whole and thus ready to advance to Paradise – a threshold
moment that completes and perfects the act of its crossing into Purgatory.445
Statius’s salvation, it turns out (according to Dante’s daring fiction),
sacrally hinged upon his spiritually truthful but critically erroneous
misinterpretation of a line in Virgil’s Aeneid:
 ‘And had it not been that I straightened out my desires, when I understood the place [là dove]
where you cry out [tu chiame], almost angry at human nature: “Why do you, O holy [sacra]
hunger for gold, not govern the appetite of mortals?” I would be turning about, feeling the grim
jousts [i.e. in Hell].’446

Since Statius was prodigal, greedy for spending rather than saving, he –
providentially – read this passage as condemning his own vice and not
according to its clear contextual meaning: ‘O cursed hunger for gold’ [auri
sacra fames]. Reading himself in place of the text, Statius perfectly fulfills
the sacred threshold of the sign by trespassing it, following the gesture of
divine truth across its profane threshold, falling for a meaning far more
immediate and personal – and thus truly universal – than its general moral
truth. ‘The deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal,
because through them one reaches the original source of life’.447 Seeing
what is there, reading the text of things, is not sufficient. One is called to
listen for the sign that turns the seen into sound, the music of a present
voice (‘there where you cry out’) pointing the way – like the sing-song tolle
lege, tolle lege Augustine hears in the garden448 – to the sacrifice one must
make, to the place from which one needs to be thrown. So the poet, as if
tossed from the rock to whose resounding he compares the opening of the
way to the paradise-topped peak, says of the earthquake, the sign of the
soul’s eternal birth: ‘I felt the mountain shake like a falling thing, and a chill
seized me such as takes him who goes to death.’449

A Crown | Eyes Cannot See

‘The headsman struck her three times in the neck but could not her head
off; and because the decree forbade striking a fourth blow, he left her
bleeding and half dead. She lived for three days’.450 St. Cecilia’s dilated
martyrdom suggests a hidden relation between decapitation (as perennial
symbol of mystical union) and music.451 On the surface, the saint’s vita
presents no clear connection between the two themes and Riminaldi’s
placement of musical objects on the ground towards which Cecilia gazes is
an iconographical device. It functions primarily to identify the saint as
Cecilia, and less obviously, to situate the protracted moment of her death in
the midst of the universal spectrum of music, earthly and divine, temporal
and eternal. In light of the traditional idea of the body as instrument of the
soul, and more specifically the Platonic analogy of soul to body as harmony
to lyre,452 the presence of the silent instrument suggests the saint’s
marvelous death as swansong, as the manifestation of the spiritual music of
her life becoming more intense on the threshold of its eternity: ‘when these
birds feel that the time has come for them to die, they sing more loudly and
sweetly than they have sung in all their lives before, for joy that they are
going away into the presence of the god whose servants they are’.453 Yet a
different order of swansong, one inverted toward the prolongation of this
life, a staving off and turning away from death’s threshold rather than
hastening towards it, and thus paradoxically a turning of life into that very
threshold, the life-in-death and death-in-life of being left half dead.
Whereas beheading ideally represents, as Foucault says, the ‘zero degree of
torture,’454 the act of killing refined to an almost perfect gesture of death as
separation of soul and body, the passion of Cecilia’s being neither beheaded
nor not beheaded dilates this zero into a seemingly unendurable duration:
‘seminecem eam cruentus carnifex dereliquit’ [the bloody butcher left her
half-dead].455 The lovely irony of this cruelty is that it is ultimately Cecilia’s
towards herself, the answer to her prayer for a delay of three days during
which she might continue to do her spiritual work. The inept headsman, a
man who both cannot and can only make meat (carni-fex) of the virgin, thus
figures the impotence of earthly powers in the face of the divine, and
ultimately, the unbeheadability of the soul united to God in love. As
Augustine says, ‘We are limbs of that head. This body cannot be
decapitated’.456 So, spiritually, decapitation signifies the mystical, sacrificial
death of the self to itself whereby God is realized or divine union attained,
as seen in the figure of the cephalophore, the corporeal emblem, in
Dionysius’s words, of ‘being neither oneself nor someone else’.457 Letting
fall one’s head signals the highest degree of divine love described by
Bernard of Clairvaux,458 the sacred abjection of becoming, in the words of
the Psalmist, a broken instrument or vessel [vas perditum]:
I am the scorn of all my adversaries, a horror to my neighbors, an object of dread to my
acquaintances; those who see me in the street flee from me. I have passed out of mind like one who
is dead; I have become like a broken vessel. (Psalms 31. 11-2)

A three-day-long musical composition for an instrument indistinguishable

from its breaking. Can we hear its strains, its tone?
 Cecilia’s unique twist on this paradigm – a twist that holds the secret of
her song – has to do with how her death moves in a direction opposite the
Orphic model of musical self-dissolution:
Orpheus’ limbs lay scattered, strewn about; but in your flow, you, Hebrus, gathered in his head
and lyre; and (look! a thing of wonder) once your stream had caught and carried them, the lyre
began to sound some mournful notes; the lifeless tongue, too, murmured mournfully; and the
response that echoed from the shores was mournful, too.459

Where the dismembered Orpheus dissolves into the neither-subjective-nor-

objective flow of nature, Cecilia remains in her wounded virgin body,
refusing to pass away. And this too is music, a continuation of her original
manner of song, on the day of her wedding to Valerian: ‘While the musical
instruments sounded, she sang in her heart to the Lord alone, saying: “Let
my heart and my body be undefiled, O Lord, that I may not be
confounded”’.460
The dimensionality of this music – internal but not not external, about its
own business yet not alone, not of this world and in it – holds the key to the
structure of her martyrdom as a figure of the sonic threshold of the sacred.
For the direction of her passion is to live above this insane world precisely
by not abandoning it, facing (as in Riminaldi’s painting) not the heaven
from which the angel descends to receive her soul, but the earth, as if
refusing, sacrificing for as long as possible her own sanctity in the midst of
doing all that will ensure it. As she tells Pope Urban after her execution: ‘I
asked for a delay of three days so that I might commend all of us to your
beatitude and have you consecrate my house as a church.’461 The doubleness
of the threshold of the sacred, its being the zone not only of another world’s
manifestation in this one but this world’s manifestation in that one, is here
revealed vis-à-vis the intensely interested this-worldliness of the
otherworldy – an order of interest that concern or care about the world
cannot grasp.
He trues the standard of human values by interpreting them in terms of divinely human life. He is
interested in everything but not concerned about anything. The slightest mishap may command his
sympathy; the greatest tragedy will not upset him.462

Too interested to be concerned, too compassionate to feel sorry. What

interests the saint above all is her work, a work which, as per her epithetic
comparison to a ‘busy bee’ [apis argumentosa],463 is simultaneously labor,
song, flight, and vision, as Dante shows us in Paradiso:
the holy army was shown to me […] like a swarm of bees […] which flying sees and sings the
glory of him who enamors it […] enflower[ing] themselves at one moment and in the next
return[ing] where their labor ensavours itself.464

Chaste and fruitful, collective but not promiscuous, amorous yet sexless,
laboring and contemplative – such are the paradoxical qualities that have
made the bee a sacred creature par excellence, a living trace and
manifestation of the pure activity of the divine in a fallen world. ‘The origin
of bees is from Paradise, and an account of the sin of man they came hence,
and God conferred his blessing upon them’.465 They are synthesizers of the
omnipresent, sonic followers of the pervasive sacred sign: ‘Following such
signs and traits, some have said that bees enjoy a share of the divine mind
and drink pure aether; for God moves through all things – lands and the
sea’s expanse and deepest heaven’.466 In Cecilia’s vita, this holy apian
activity, in keeping with the sense of argumentosa (rich in proof, making
clear, evident, fr. arg- to shine) is constantly about disclosing to others what
she alone sees, spiritual and material: 1) the angel who will murder her
husband if he touches her with lust: ‘I have a lover, an angel of God, who
watches over my body with exceeding zeal;’ 2) the crowns of rose and lily
whose scent converts her brother-in-law: ‘We have crowns that your eyes
cannot see. They bloom with florid color and snowy whiteness;’ 3) the idols
her torturers command her to sacrifice to: ‘What you call gods are nothing
but lumps of stone […] Put your hand out and touch them, and you will
know with your fingers what you can’t see with your eyes!’467 The patron
saint of music is not a musician but a musical being buzzing between the
visible and the invisible, the perishable and the imperishable, distilling
sweetness across their threshold.
To penetrate into the essence of all being and significance and to release the fragrance of that
inner attainment for the guidance and benefit of others, by expressing, in the world of forms, truth,
love, purity and beauty – this is the sole game which has intrinsic and absolute worth. All other
happenings, incidents and attainments in themselves can have no lasting importance.468

Too busy to be beheaded and too busy not to be, Cecilia is a neither
cephalic nor acephalic drone of the divine – a heart lost in heavenly love, a
face seeking always the sweetness hidden everywhere in this blooming and
rotting earth.

Figure 12: Stefano Maderno, Saint Cecilia.469

In the marble sculpture of the saint by Stefano Maderno (Figure 12), made
according to the appearance of her corpse in 1599, at the opening of her
tomb, Cecilia appears as alive as ever, dripping from her wound, humming
with death, dwelling wherever she is, because it is everywhere.470 So yes:
‘the human being arrives at the threshold: there he must throw himself
headlong [vivant] into that which has no foundation and has no head’.471
And no: for there is no one to throw, and nowhere to be thrown.
... a half-decomposed cadaver fleeing through the night in a luminous
shroud...

381 Public domain image, source:

<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:O_Riminaldi_Martirio_de_Santa_Cecilia_1630_P_Pit
ti.jpg>
382 “[I]mpossibile est nobis aliter lucere divinum radium, nisi varietate sacrorum velaminum
circumvelatum” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I. 1. 9,
http://dhspriory.org/thomas/summa/FP/FP001.html), citing Pseudo-Dionysius.
383 Porphyry, quoted in Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1997), p. 293.
384 Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 5.
385 Bonaventure, Itinerarium, p. 77.
386 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, p. 12.
387 Bonaventure, Itinerarium, p. 47.
388 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 89.
389 Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H., p. 154.
390 Meher Baba, Tiffin Lectures, As Given in 1926–27 (Myrtle Beach: Sheriar Foundation, 2017), p.
272.
391 Georges Bataille, “The Use Value of D.A.F. De Sade,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings
1927–39, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 94.
392 Lord Meher, pp. 1027–8.
393 Augustine, City of God, X. 5.
394 Ruusbroec, Spiritual Espousals, quoted in A Companion to John of Ruusbroec, eds. John
Arblaster and Rob Faesen (Leiden: Brill, 2014), p. 145.
395 Meher Baba, quoted in C. B. Purdom, The God-Man, p. 212.
396 Meister Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, p. 350.
397 Cf. “[Bataille’s] work is marked by an ever-reformulated interest: an interest in the place where
mysticism and philosophy reach their limits and face one another with empty hands. Bataille calls
this place, this outer limit, the ‘sacred,’ and sometimes the ‘holy’: it is a place such that when we
are there, we are nowhere” (Laurens ten Kate, “The Gift of Loss,” in The Flight of the Gods:
Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology, eds. Ilse Nina Bulhof, Laurens ten Kate (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2000], p. 250).
398 Vernon Howard, audio recording.
399 Meher Baba, Discourses, II, 92.
400 Georges Bataille, “The Sacred,” in Visions of Excess, pp. 242–5.
401 Ibid., p. 245.
402 Meher Baba, The Everything and the Nothing, p. 55.
403 Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, pp. 136–7
404 Eriugena, Periphyseon, PL 122:919, translation cited from Bernard McGinn, The Growth of
Mysticism: Gregory the Great through the 12th Century (New York: Crossroad, 1994), p. 118.
405 Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms, VI, 186.
406 Meister Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, p. 424.
407 Mircea Eliade, Sacred and Profane, p. 11.
408 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, trans. Robert Hurley, 2 vols. (Brooklyn, NY: Zone, 1991),
I, 26
409 Meister Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, p. 92.
410 Meher Baba, quoted in C.B. Purdom, The God-Man, p. 296.
411 Meher Baba, Life at Its Best (San Francisco: Sufism Reoriented, 1957), p. 28.
412 ‘The species of the bread and wine, which are perceived by our senses to remain in this
sacrament after consecration, are not subjected in the substance of the bread and wine, for that
does not remain, as stated above [Question 75, Article 2]; nor in the substantial form, for that does
not remain, and if it did remain, “it could not be a subject”, as Boethius declares [De Trin. I].
Furthermore it is manifest that these accidents are not subjected in the substance of Christ’s body
and blood, because the substance of the human body cannot in any way be affected by such
accidents; nor is it possible for Christ’s glorious and impassible body to be altered so as to receive
these qualities. Now there are some who say that they are in the surrounding atmosphere as in a
subject. But even this cannot be: in the first place, because atmosphere is not susceptive of such
accidents. Secondly, because these accidents are not where the atmosphere is, nay more, the
atmosphere is displaced by the motion of these species. Thirdly, because accidents do not pass
from subject to subject, so that the same identical accident which was first in one subject be
afterwards in another; because an accident is individuated by the subject; hence it cannot come to
pass for an accident remaining identically the same to be at one time in one subject, and at another
time in another. Fourthly, since the atmosphere is not deprived of its own accidents, it would have
at the one time its own accidents and others foreign to it. Nor can it be maintained that this is done
miraculously in virtue of the consecration, because the words of consecration do not signify this,
and they effect only what they signify. Therefore it follows that the accidents continue in this
sacrament without a subject. This can be done by Divine power: for since an effect depends more
upon the first cause than on the second, God Who is the first cause both of substance and
accident, can by His unlimited power preserve an accident in existence when the substance is
withdrawn whereby it was preserved in existence as by its proper cause, just as without natural
causes He can produce other effects of natural causes, even as He formed a human body in the
Virgin’s womb, “without the seed of man” [Hymn for Christmas, First Vespers]” (Thomas
Aquinas, Summa Theologica, III. 7. 1).
413 “Song of the New Life,” in Purdom, The God-Man, p. 179.
414 Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, p. 138.
415 Meher Baba, Discourses, I, 167.
416 “But he kept more silent then he should have, because with each course that was served he saw
the grail pass by completely uncovered before him […] So the question was put off, and he set his
mind to drinking and eating” (Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances, trans. William W. Kibler
[New York: Penguin, 1991], p. 421).
417 Lispector, Passion, pp. 153–4.
418 Bonaventure, Itinerarium, p. 115.
419 Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 127.
420 Dante, Purgatorio, IX. 130–X. 6.
421 See William C. Chittick, The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-’Arabi’s Cosmology
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998,), pp. 332–9.
422 William C. Chittick, Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), p. 118
423 Bonaventure, Itinerarium, p. 53.
424 Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. William Harris Stahl (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1952), p. 74.
425 Augustine, On Music, trans. Robert Catesby Taliaferro (Washington, DC: Catholic University of
America Press, 1947), I. 2.
426 Dante, Purgatorio, IV. 88–94.
427 Purdom, The God-Man, p. 169.
428 E. M. Cioran, Tears and Saints, p. 80.
429 Eugene Thacker, ‘Day of Wrath’, Glossator 6 (2012), p. 89.
430 Meher Baba, Discourses, I. 28–9.
431 Meher Baba, quoted in Purdom, God-Man, pp. 212–3.
432 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr. (New York: Macmillan, 1958), II.
1.
433 Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 137.
434 “[H]oc totum quod nobis diu videtur quamdiu volvitur saeculum, intellegas punctum esse. Non
est diu quod habet extremum” (Augustine, Ennarationes in Psalmos, XXX. 2. 8,
<http://www.augustinus.it/latino/esposizioni_salmi/index2.htm>).
435 Meher Baba, The Everything and the Nothing, p. 41.
436 Meher Baba, Discourses, I, 167.
437 Porphyry, On the Cave of the Nymphs in the Thirteenth Book of the Odyssey, trans. Thomas
Taylor (London: Watkins, 1917), pp. 41–2.
438 Mark Bradley, “Crime and Punishment on the Capitoline Hill,” in Rome, Pollution and Property
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 108.
439 John E. Keller, Aesop’s Fables: With a Life of Aesop (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
1993), p. 51.
440 Ibid.
441 Purgatorio, IX. 109.
442 Ladislav Klima, Glorious Nemesis, trans. Marek Tomin (Prague: Twisted Spoon Press, 2011), p.
64.
443 Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, p. 699.
444 Hadewich, Complete Works, p. 75.
445 See Dante, Purgatorio, XXI. 58–63.
446 Dante, Purgatorio, XXII. 37–42.
447 E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, p. 4.
448 See Augustine, Confessions, VIII.
449 Dante, Purgatorio, XX. 127–9.
450 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, II, 323.
451 See also Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Half Dead: Parsing Cecilia’, in Dark Chaucer (New York:
punctum, 2012) and ‘Non potest hoc corpus decollari: Beheading and the Impossible’, in Heads
Will Roll: Decapitation in Medieval Literature and Culture, eds. Larissa Tracy and Jeff Massey
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2012).
452 See Francesco Polosi, Plato on Music, Soul, and Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010).
453 Plato, Phaedo, 85a, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington
Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 67.
454 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Vintage, 1995), p. 33.
455 Giacomo Laderchi, S. Caeciliae Virg[inis] et Mart[yris] Acta... (Rome, 1723), p. 38.
456 Augustine, Ennarationes in Psalmos, LXXXVIII. 5.
457 Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, p. 137.
458 Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God, chapter 10,
<https://www.ccel.org/ccel/bernard/loving_god.xii.html>
459 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Harcourt, 1993), p. 361
460 Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, II, 318.
461 Ibid., 323.
462 Meher Baba, Discourses, III, 15.
463 Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, II, 319.
464 Dante, Paradiso, XXX. 4–9.
465 Dull Gwent Code, quoted in Hilda M. Ransome, The Sacred Bee in Ancient Times and Folklore
(New York: Dover, 1937), p. 196.
466 “His quidam signis atque haec exempla secuti | esse apibus partem divinae mentis et haustus /
aetherios dixere; deum namque ire per omnes / terrasque tractusque maris caelumque profundum”
(Virgil, Georgics, IV. 219–22, <http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/vergil/geo4.shtml>).
467 Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, II, 319–23.
468 Meher Baba, Discourses, II, 110.
469 Image source:
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Santa_Cecilia_in_Trastevere_September_2015-
5a.jpg>.
470 Art opening of her tomb | All abuzz with death | Dropping honey from the womb | Kissed by the
first breath.
471 Georges Bataille, “The Obelisk,” in Visions of Excess, p. 222.