The bean plants in the garden are dead, dead, dead—killed by a frost I should have seen coming. This is This Republic of Letters, ready to replant until spring will stick. ❧

St. Teresa of Ávila.

One more quotation from James K.A. Smith's Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark:

In contrast, the mystics describe an experience of unknowing that rocks the very foundations of confidence in knowledge. What follows is a humility that St. John of the Cross describes as a “humiliation.” St. Teresa describes it as an experience of “annihilation.” In describing “the Prayer of Union,” [St. Teresa of Ávila] cautions: “Don’t think that this union is some kind of dreamy state.” It is, rather, an experience of utter vexation. It is a kind of death. “Even if she is able to love, she does not understand in the midst of her loving how or what it is she loves. She doesn’t know what she wants. She has died completely to this world so that she can fully live in God. This is a delicious death.” ❧

"Hudson River Scene" by John Frederick Kensett, here.

Speaking of theology and James K.A. Smith's book, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark, he writes:

To think with a philosopher like Hegal is, in a sense, to wade into a luminous dark. I see the difficulty of his philosophy now as the fruit of someone wrestling with complexity that eludes analysis. I love it even more for its inscrutability, in that sense.

I'm reminded of the Richard Rorty, who writes in Philosophy as Poetry:

Hegel, Heidegger, and their admirers hope to change not only your intuitions but your sense of who you are, and your notion of what it is most important to think about. To use Emerson's language, they are trying to draw a larger circle—trying to lure their readers out into as yet uncharted spaces. … If you stop at each sentence and pause to ask yourself whether it has been backed up with a sound argument, you will never finish their books. To get through their books, you must temporarily suspend disbelief, get into the swing of the story that is being told, pick up the jargon as you go along, and then decide, after having given the entire book the most sympathetic reading you can, whether to move out into uncharted space.

I think Smith—or at least the mystics he writes about—would push us beyond uncharted space, into the thing that isn't even space, something beyond knowing. But Smith also discusses those a-rational logics that Rorty is pointing at here—the kind that live, un-ruled, in our experiences rather than our intellects. ❧