Fragmentary Thoughts on Grace and Necessity (2)

 When one is borne to one’s extremity, when all illusions are dissipated, when the support with which one concentrates the force he sustains collapses, one is compelled, within the condition of suffering, to draw nearer to a question:

Is there a source of this entire edifice of necessity? If necessity has no source, that means absurdity; if it has a source, then transcendent will is implied. At the outermost edge, one has to interrogate the Invisible. “Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand.”[Job 1:12] Man and God cannot be coequal. When one cries out, “Why have You forsaken me?” he is in truth questioning the relation between him and god. Job, after all his calamities, did not relinquish his faith — yet this persistence was founded upon the presumption that “He must have His reasons,” that is, upon the judgment “He is good.” It must be noted, however, that Job doubted. Man and God cannot be juxtaposed; to thrust the finite into direct contiguity with the Infinite results only in the finite being torn apart. This act of transgression unveils no truth; it merely inaugurates a downward degeneration into ever lower level of illusion. Whenever man seeks to accomplish, through imagination alone, that which should be undertaken by other faculties, he not only sabotages his original aim but annihilates it altogether. Every intrusion of imagination into a domain where another power ought to reign constitutes a betrayal. Imagination, whenever it fabricates within the realm of reality, generates nothing but mirages. This pure transcendence — He — cannot be comprehended, cannot be described, His name is unknowable, unutterable. How, then, is He to be approached? Through prayer. “Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer thee? I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.”[Job 40:4] How are we to interpret Job’s doubt? As the posture of one under force. Yet, what Job truly sought to ask was: If God were an evil God, then what can he do? Gnosticism (γνωστικός) posited the Démiurge as an evil god — a lesser, foolish, and selfish being. Yet Gnosticism did not truly confront the question: it invented a “non-being God”, which is utterly ineffable, utterly aloof from the physical world— it is a silent abyss rather than an answer to everything. It is merely another illusion, substituting one illusion for another. The question “What if God is evil?” begins from man — and therefore is a transgression. In speaking of “my relation with Him,” man does not even truly know what he says. In order to take an example that is clearer, saying that a line has a discrete length and at the same time contains an infinite number of points implies a contradiction. The Greeks sought to resolve it by hypothesizing that lines are composed of finitely many points, they didn’t think what they were saying, because one can’t think it “I would need God to seize me forcibly, for if death in this instant tore away the veil of flesh and placed me right before God, I would flee.” “In the Jewish tradition, the name ‘YHWH’ (יְהֹוָה) — the Tetragrammaton — is unpronounceable. One must substitute Adonai (אֲדֹנָי) — ‘the Lord’.” The relation between man and the transcendent (divinity/the unknowable) cannot be a relation of equals. Thus, any assertion of “I comprehend” or “I define” is, in essence, illusion. The only real thing is the posture of enduring force — as real as Job’s doubt. The transmission of this posture cannot rely on assertion: reality cannot be transmitted through illusion. The only possibility lies in retaining an intentionality precisely where communication fails. The ineffable extremity manifests itself in the visible gesture. Apophatique. The finite cannot express the transcendent. All attempts are doomed to failure; but their traces, their imprint of hopeless action, reveal the possibility of tending-toward. Unless one consents to pay the full price, the end cannot be attained. Even the smallest concession renders it void. Reality admits no subtraction. We should adopt the manière de esoteric prayer. Frequent cases (to be enumerated, and classified) in which by asserting a truth on a certain plane you destroy it. As soon as you have announced it (or announced it on a certain plane) it is no longer true. It is only true behind (above) the contrary assertion. It can therefore only be perceived by minds capable of grasping simultaneously several superimposed rows of ideas. It is incommunicable in the sense that language is one-dimensional or at the most two-dimensional (two-dimensional if it is written, but the page forms a limit). Such is the raison d'être of esotericism. Eurydice. Truths which are seen to be false as soon as you examine them. ——“ne flectat retro sua lumina, donec Avernas / exierit valles; aut inrita dona futura.” (Met. X, 50–51) ——iamque iterum moriens non est de coniuge quicquam questa suo supremumque ‘vale,’ quod iam vix auribus ille acciperet, dixit revolutaque rursus eodem est. （Met. X, 60–62） Eurydice(you’re not permitted to look back.) I don’t know whether you have stared away in class/when working/while chatting, and I don’t know whether you wear glasses…but if you experience them both, you may notice the reflection on the inner side of your lens: a reflection of the world behind you. Blurrily, instant-imaging. You gaze forward, intent on some certain object, but suddenly, at the edge of your perception, a twisted fragment of the rear world appears — inverted, blurred, almost hallucinatory — and with a slight alteration of hue, it vanishes. Those which are blurry, spontaneous — are they more real? Eurydice dwells within this reflected image. At the instant Orpheus turned his gaze, the image disappeared — and with it, she was drawn back into the darkness. Even the best singer Orpheus no longer had his chance. This reflection was not the axis of vision, not the focus of consciousness, but it appeared — superimposed upon what you intended to see. Yet if you try to focus upon it, to grasp it, it dissolves. It lies precisely where attention cannot remain much: the periphery of vision, where light enters at a particular angle. Eurydice — the beloved borne by Orpheus — at that moment, was she real? Might she not have been more real than the Eurydice who had not yet died? Is this structure — let us call it the Eurydice structure — suggesting that the interior, blurred, instantaneous image may possess a greater reality? “Unmanufactured,” “uncontrollable,” “blurry yet self-revealing” — as for men, these properties seem to signify greater reality. But this does not confer superiority; it simply marks our incapacity to seize, to question, to demand it：It neither submits to will, nor accepts contemplating, nor tolerates naming. It is closer to illusion than to any tangible object. It is not an object. It merely manifests as if it were an object. It denies and transforms the act of voir. It cannot be termed “anti-seeing”; it exists dependent upon the inverse of the medium — surfacing upon the medium itself. To confirm the real is to diminish the real. This non-object protests against the ordinary structure of the real. The pro forma structures of reality collapse here. From the ruins rises a sense of mystery, an imitation of the sacred — the very heart of esoteric rites. The form of the esoteric rite: To refrain from filling the void with imagination; to desist from speaking the void; to speak only the describable, to the utmost. Gesture transmits itself through its delicacy, its interweaving, its blurred form — and poetic language, is its natural analogue. Poetic language, bearing its destiny of failure, invokes indirectly, leaving only traces. It does not name a concept, but in its inevitable failure, in its meandering (since poetic material already consists of compounded images), in its blurriness, through a ritualistic structure of repetition, it mimics the structure of the posture under force or juxtaposes it against its contrary — causing it to surface. Presence, vibration, and openness — these three traits complete the imprint. We have not yet known “it”; poetic language awakens our attention to it while simultaneously veiling it. To describe the reflected image is merely to create a sliding sensation of perception. Using a form of structure, before the contents fully form, to momentarily summon and retract the evocative posture — thus transmitting a fragile, evanescent shard. Ποικιλόθρον’ ἀθάνατ’‘Aφρόδιτα, παῖ Δίος δολόπλοκε, λίσσομαί σε, μὴ μ’ ἄσαισι μηδ’ ὀνίαισι δάμνα, πότνια, θῦμον. Ποικιλόθρον᾽ Ἀθανάτ᾽ Ἀφρόδιτα “ On the throne of many hues, Immortal Aphrodite, child of Zeus, weaving wiles: I beg you, do not break my spirit, O Queen, with pain or sorrow” [Ode to Aphrodite, Sappho, Fragment 1，translated by Diane J. Rayor and André Lardinois] Ode to Aphrodite— according to Simone Weil — exemplifies perfect poetry: Language, here, exists to sustain — to sustain the space of meaning under the weight of suffering and force. This sustaining is not for the sake of expressing emotion, but to avert collapse. The posture of poetic language: Its semantics coil upon themselves, pointing inward, achieving the maximum congealment— coagulated from the structure of sustaining the force — seeking the narrowest outward signifying bandwidth. “It cannot be directly seen; it emerges at the rupture of the structure of contemplation.” Repetition - disturbance - fracture - return. To repeatedly behold this developing image — might one not glimpse its structure? Paul Valéry: “Philosophy is poetry.” When philosophy recognizes its incapacity to verify ultimate truth, it transforms into an art of spirit creation — into poetry. This transmutation is itself a deeper acknowledgement of limits: That truth, in its transcendence, cannot be verified; man can only respond to chaos through forms — aesthetic responses to the abyss. Philosophy thus becomes more like art —The struggling and shaping of spirit along the brink of the abyss. The structure, the posture of enduring, thus transmits itself outward.