Apophatic Bard

Abstract

Apophatic Bard Peter Heinegg My Bright Abyss Meditation of a Modern Believer. By Christian Wiman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013, 182 pp. $13 (paper) John Bunyan himself couldn't have invented a better name for the author of these often tormented, always probing, unsparing, restless reflections: he's a true Christian Why‐man. Wiman was born in 1966 in a “tiny, dying town in far West Texas.” Raised a Baptist, at age twelve he was “visited” by some sort of overwhelming spiritual presence that left him “weeping and shaking and curled up tight in the church basement.” Whatever it was, the experience faded, and he became an atheist in college (Washington and Lee University). He has taught literature, written six books (both prose and verse), and edited Poetry magazine. At 37 he married, at 39 he developed a rare form of cancer, and at some point after that he found himself making his way back to faith, with the help of a kindly, wise United Church of Christ minister he calls Matt. Wiman can be irritatingly vague about his personal life (of course, this is a collection of pensées, not a memoir); but he leaves no doubt about the agony he's been through. “I have had bones die and bowels fail; joints lock in my face and arms and legs, so that I could not eat, could not walk. I have filled my body with mingled mouse and human antibodies, cutting‐edge small molecules, old‐school chemotherapies eating into me like animate acids.” It's the perfect setting for a Christian Job, and Wiman seizes the opportunity. His unimaginable pain “seemed to incinerate all my thoughts of God” and leave him sitting alone in the ashes. Well, it did and it didn't. It plunged him into a decade‐long wrestling match with God that may well continue for the rest of his life, even though he has apparently won a reprieve from the cancer, thanks to a bone‐marrow transplant. The reader can only rejoice in Wiman's hard‐fought medical victory. But who is this God, exactly? And what is a “bright abyss/, into which all my longing will not go”? The via negativa has a certain sexiness about it. Compared with the blandly confident affirmations of dogmatic theology, it sounds far more humble and honest, perhaps even the only kind of belief a skeptical age could ever accept. No cheap grace here! Faith doesn't ease Wiman's anxieties. It's tenuous, pre‐carious, unsure. It provides no “clean, intellectual coherence, no abstract ultimate meaning.” He finds much of Christianity “uselessly absurd.” He will go so far as to say that “every man creates the God creating him.” Uh‐oh. It's not clear where this leaves us. The purpose of all thinking about God, Wiman boldly declares, is to make God's silences “clearer and starker,” to render the “divine unmeaning” (the aspects of the divine that can't be grasped in human terms) “more irreducible and more terrible.” That's a striking formula; but Wiman must be aware that only a tiny minority of believers could be comfortable with it. Surely he knows that their religious life compares with his somewhat as day‐hikes in the Rockies do with climbing K‐2 (not that he ever comes close to anything like boasting). Given the fearsome crags and thin air of this fideistic territory, it should come as no surprise that Wiman claims “art is … often better at theology than theology is.” So he fills his rambling notebook with lines from Emily Dickinson, Patrick Kavanagh, Rilke, Hopkins, Osip Mandelstam, D.H. Lawrence, Yeats, George Herbert, Seamus Heaney, Richard Wilbur, Ted Hughes, Wordsworth, Browning, and sometimes Wiman himself, rather than Aquinas, say, or Barth, though he does quote Augustine and Bonhoeffer. It's hard to guess how (and if) all these acute insights add up to any coherent vision, except perhaps to what he calls the experience of “saving otherness,” which might be equated to “our individual subjectivity being lost and rediscovered within the reality of God.” Without God all experience is ultimately a dead end, although Wilman doesn't want to...