Darkness Be My God

On being a "pure theist" — and some commentary on Kojève's "Atheism"

“Nada, nada, nada, nada — y en el Monte, nada.” A drawing based on St. John of the Cross’s sketch of Mount Carmel

In a previous post, I shared a long excerpt from Kojève’s book, Atheism. Today I share some of my own thoughts on that excerpt, relating to the affinity that Kojève himself observes between atheism and '“pure theism.” I want to begin with the notion of fear. What Kojève describes in this paragraph seems to be the very fear which, on the account he gives throughout much of his writings, the idea of God is meant to assuage:

I am not in terror (or less) if I am with my dog, if I encountered a cow, if I am at home, etc. I do not fear all that is close, related to me in some way or another. But it is easy to see that everything in the world is more or less close to me; I am not in terror when I see stones, fields, clouds, and the like—in a word, I am not in terror during the day. The plenitude of the qualified content of the world is not strange to me and I do not fear it; I am in terror when there is none of this content; I am afraid at night when the world threatens to dissolve in the gloom of nonbeing and when it seems at times that it (especially where I do not even see that I see nothing, do not see the gloom which is nonetheless something or other--behind my back) loses the last bit of commonality with me—its somethingness.

The invention of a “God” in certain “fetishistic” forms of theism, which certainly includes certain varieties of Christianity, may well be interpreted as an attempt to evade this feeling of terror that arises when one confronts… nothingness. This confrontation takes place, above all, in the encounter with death. Absent belief in a God, death is the threshold behind which lies absolute unfamiliarity, wherein I and the world no longer share in common our somethingness. But whereas, in the above text, darkness threatens me with the dissolution of the world into the gloom of nonbeing, death threatens me with my own dissolution. Either way, by death I am threatened with the loss the last bit of commonality between myself and the world—my somethingness. The belief in God, and more specifically the afterlife, is contrived to evade this fear, giving us something to hope for instead of face the inevitable gloom. Theism of this sort is nothing more than a cop out of facing our fears.

Kojève does recognize, to his credit, that certain forms of theism are more careful to avoid this pitfall, though he ultimately seems to think they do not succeed. Nonetheless, his discussion of the likenesses between “unqualified theism” and atheism itself is revealing, and it is in just this point of comparison that I think it is worth pushing. Kojève goes on:

What follows from all that has been said regarding our problem of atheism and theism? We saw that the world is not frightening to us, not strange, and this is above all because we are in an interaction with it. On the other hand, we saw that God is outside the world in the sense that he is and is given in a completely other way than the human being and the world. Now, we can say that if the world is close to us, then God is strange to us, that if it is not frightening for us in the world then it is terrible to be in front of him, and that between me and him there is none of that interaction that there is between me and the world. But there can already be no interaction if God acts on me and I will be unable to act on him. In this way, the theist will be the one to whom is given such a terrible, strange something that finds itself outside the sphere of her influence, while the atheist is the one for whom there is no such thing.

Notice here how the “gloom of non-being” from the previous quotation resembles the God of this second paragraph: between myself and God there is no interaction, no commonality. A theism that believes in such a God is exempt, or comes close to being exempt, from the critique that Kojève often levels against theism elsewhere. For the God of such a theism is precisely a fearful God, fearful in just the way that nothingness is fearful to the slave in the Master-Slave dialectic.

To state it all-too-briefly, the slave is he who first fears death, and only succeeds in becoming human to the degree that he conquers this fear, learning to accept death as absolute. The slave is first enslaved, not by the master, but by his own terror of nothingness. He becomes free only on condition that he can transcend this terror. The freest man is one who no longer fears death. He accepts it, perhaps even desires it.

God is, for the theist, what nothingness or non-being is for the slave. Kojève recognizes that, for the theist, God is something terrible—fear is at the root of religion in its purest manifestation. Indeed, for all sorts of theisms, including those more pagan, fear of the gods has much to do with how humans revere and worship them. The gods are feared because, in some way, they are outside the sphere of human influence. Kojève notes insightfully that, depending on how this sphere of human influence is defined, the gods themselves will be differently identified—resulting in the various “fetishistic” theisms, such as paganism, etc., leading to the most extreme variety of theism which denies even that God can be known: “In this way, we obtain various forms of theism, beginning with "fetishism" and ending with the pure theism that especially emphasizes the absence of the most general form of interaction (which it grasps as such in distinction from fetishism) denying the knowability of God.” It is highly significant that, in the parenthetical, Kojève distinguishes this last form of theism from fetishism. This is a “pure” or “unqualified” theism, for whom there is nothing in the world that is outside man’s influence—and yet God is outside this influence, and is therefore totally unfamiliar and unknowable. The pagan gods at least looked something like men. But the God of pure and unqualified theism has nothing in common with men. Kojève comes close to admitting that this God is practically equivalent to “the gloom of nonbeing” when he goes on to observe this parallelism:

The atheist does not always deny the qualified something that the given form of theism considers God (for example, she does not deny the moon) but only the strangeness of this something. But the pure theist has the same point of view as well: her world coincides with the world of the atheist. The difference is only that, for her, outside of this world there is something strange and not yielding to her influence, while for the atheist there is nothing.

The “pure” theist and the atheist inhabit the same world: a world in which there is nothing absolutely strange, nor anything outside man’s sphere of influence. (As a side note, this theism and this atheism thus share a certain “promethean” quality with respect to the world.) Where they differ, says Kojève, is in whether they believe there is anything “outside” this world. The atheist denies that there is anything outside the world—there is nothing. The theist claims that there is something outside the world—but it is absolutely unknowable. It might as well be nothing.

For the pure theist, the “fear of the dark” which Kojève mentioned earlier is actually the fear of God—not the fear of just any god, who may only ever be “relatively” outside the sphere of my influence, but the fear of a God who is absolutely outside the sphere of my influence, and thus absolutely unknowable. Into this God all things disappear, as if going back into the gloom of non-existence. The classical theological pattern of exitus-reditus holds in relation to nihil as much as it does to God: ex nihilo they proceed and ad nihilum they return. (“Remember, O Man, that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.”) This is the missing dimension of that Christianity which Kojève spends so much time elsewhere criticizing: for the pure theist, transcendence and resurrection—the movement into the “afterlife”—look as much like a return to the uncreated, pre-created source, to the nihilum before all things existed, as a return to God. It is the same thing. This is why God is fearful: he might as well be nothing.

And this is also why, as Kojève himself goes on to acknowledge, the mystics have so often referred to God—disconcertingly and paradoxically—as “nothing”:

For the pure theist, God is only something, but this something is an "other" something, not something of the "human being in the world." But if it is "other" only because it is not something of the "human being in the world," and if all totality of qualified content is contained in the "human being in the world,” this “something” (subjectively, at least) threatens to turn into nothing. Cognitively, something deprived of all attributes, positive as well as negative, does not distinguish itself in any way from nothing; only in relation to nothing is one unable neither to affirm nor to deny attributes because nothing is and cannot be substance, the subject of affirmation or denial. True, there may be other forms (that are not cognitive, like love, for example) of the givenness of the divine something, but if extreme theism denies every interaction of the human being and God, the Divine something will be nothing for her. And it is in fact so that several mystics call God "nothing." Is this atheism? Let it be so—it does not disturb us that the atheist [is] undoubtedly a homo religiosus. But it does disturb us that between theism and atheism there is nothing like a sharp border, that theism continually passes from "fetishism" to atheism. We are also disturbed that mystics, such as [Meister] Eckhart and [John Scotus] Eriugena, i.e., undoubtedly Christians, called God “nothing;” and we would not be willing to consider them atheists. In general, atheism and theism are too different, have always been perceived as opposed, and the continuous transition from one to the other seems impossible.

Kojève’s puzzlement is as profound and revealing as it is amusing. If the logic of “pure theism” is followed to its conclusion, as it has been above all by the mystics such as Meister Eckhart and John Scotus Eriugena (to name only a couple), the distinction between theism and atheism seems to diminish to an absurd point. Surely, theism and atheism have always been opposed! How can they now be so alike?

The mystics are those who, like Kojève’s liberated slaves who have become sages, have overcome their own fear. In some respect and to some degree, they have transcended their own fear of the dark, not by explaining it away or even by escaping from it, but by dwelling in the dark and learning to love it. They have undergone what John of the Cross called the dark night of the soul, and they have learned to abide in that dark night. They have accepted that God is darkness; and that to dwell in God is to dwell in a sort of death, to let themselves and their whole world fade into that darkness, and they have learned to “love this death” (to quote another mystic, St. Bonaventure). For these souls, God is not reducible to the assurance that life continues after death, and thus a handy tool for evading their fears. The mystics are those who have learned that the return to God is an even more profound disappearance into darkness than death itself—something more fearful and terrible—and they have conquered this fear.

Kojève’s earlier assertion—that the only difference between the pure theist and the atheist is that, for the former God is something (i.e. he exists), whereas for the latter God is nothing (i.e. he does not exist)—is on shaky ground in the face of the mystics. Kojève himself recognizes this, and spends much of this particular text grappling with the diminishing difference between atheism and theism. Leaving aside the remainder of that treatise for the time being (I hope to return to it in future installments—this is an ongoing exploration), I think it is very worth drawing attention to what I think Kojève has come very close to discovering:

The truest and purest theism is one that transcends the very disjunction of “theism vs. atheism,” i.e. a theism that transcends the very question of whether God “exists or doesn’t exist.” Kojève may think, ultimately, that such a theism is nothing but an absurdity and a contradiction. The mystics, such as Meister Eckhart, did not reject it on this account. On the contrary, they leaned into this sense of contradictoriness and embraced the God of the dark night because of it. They could be satisfied with nothing less than a God who is the absolute coincidence of all opposites—including the most fundamental of all opposites: something and nothing, being and non-being, existence and non-existence. The negation of all negations.