On Fragments and Certainty

This review essay explores the central thesis of Thomas Pfau's Incomprehensible Certainty. It explores, specifically, the basic distinction between picture and image that shapes the book as a fundamental apparatus.1 But I am in tension with that distinction. Non est falsum et verum in rebus sed in mente.2 I do not know that Pfau disagrees with me, strictly speaking. But it is also the case that he desires for images a sort of substance that allows them independence, a sort of ontic solidity in themselves that establishes their prominence.3 Or at least, images are—as long as image and not mere appearance—the gateway to ontic solidity. Pfau argues for “a Neoplatonist and Christian conception of the image as the medium granting us access to noncontingent (or ‘pre-predicative’) meaning.”4 But I am in tension with this claim, too. I take metaphysics to be, for the most part, the science of contingence. So I am at once fascinated by and uncertain about this need for noncontingence, which Pfau often elides into metaphysics itself, into being and its science.5 Below I wrestle with my fascination and uncertainty, performing what is, I hope, a tribute to the long hours and the careful art that fill the book. I converse with two poets (Rainer Maria Rilke and Sappho) and with Hans Urs von Balthasar in order to discover the sorrows and the dreams that line the pages of Incomprehensible Certainty, and in order to discover what might be illuminating in my—as they will turn out, ultimately Balthasarian—lines of difference from Pfau. As I read Incomprehensible Certainty, my question became: what is Incomprehensible Certainty trying to secure in its monumental effort? What must, at all costs, survive? The answer is image. Of course, but why? Why this metaphysics—what is it protecting? Let me try to answer this question. In a lot of ways, Incomprehensible Certainty tells a very sad story about Western thought. That story is a story of loss—loss of the real. It is the story of Rilke's resignation. And there is something lonely and infinitely mournful in Pfau's question that closes his long meditation on Rilke's “Rose Window”: “Can the epiphanic still carry meaning in an era dominated by naturalistic epistemologies and strictly immanent forms of explanation and cognition?”6 Or, near the beginning of the book, “Ours is a world of visibility without phenomenality, of pictures and all manner of visual simulacra disseminated with unprecedented efficiency and without physical or mental effort on countless digital platforms [...] and colonizing every facet of life.”7 Incomprehensible Certainty’s aspect of mourning is its sharpest and most consistent feature, a dagger fragment under its ribs. It is a sorrow everywhere, and always a sorrow for the real, which makes it so wide as sorrow that it can be difficult to pin down. In this, Incomprehensible Certainty bears out its grief in an agōn of sorts, a contest, one held against “reduction.” The opposite of reduction is sight: “as we shall find time and again, the true aim of iconic seeing is to guide its beholder toward heightened self-recognition, which begins with a humbling reminder concerning the utter fragility and vulnerability of the good and the true in us.”8 Pfau envisions a universe that we can trust. This trust is so fundamental for Pfau that, in the same span of pages, he denies that Holbein's Dead Christ could ever rob a person of faith.9 We see in this remarkable claim a trust that is not betrayed. A universe that brings us out of ourselves and into a goodness so good that it would be agony to lose. Which is the book's agony, almost. Or something like it. I think Rainer Maria Rilke has a way of getting under the skin of this trust in his Sonnets to Orpheus.10 There, he poeticizes the deliberate collapse of kinds of becoming into one another. In the Sonnets, Rilke surrenders himself radically to what Pfau calls “the self-immolation of visual and proprietary experience.”11 It is the song of a perpetual temporary. But this “perpetual temporary” is Rilke's resource for articulating form. Be forward in all farewells as if backward too, like the winter just now expiring. Then, under the chill of every winter, one would be the endlessly cool, a rise of wintering itself, a heart overcome and overall. ... Be—and simultaneously be being at its term, be an unending ground, shiver in place a parting, so then you might burden time its only filling.12 The Sonnets are a gesture, and their contiguating meaning is gesture itself. This meaning effects a kind of inversion that challenges a (Western) reader's accustomed capacities for sensate assembly, which are still very much impacted by Hellenistic and Medieval emphases on eyes and images. That is part of the thrill of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus: their effervescent, disorienting flow of decisive but unfamiliar material convocations. It is as if Rilke switches around the wiring of being conscious body. As Pfau explains, for this effect Rilke has to retreat to or create a Weltinnenraum, a worldinnerspace, “a domain logically anterior to all discrete perception, identification, and representation.”13 It is haunting. It is gorgeous. It is a claim about what it is to is. It is a claim that Incomprehensible Certainty is very worried about. I am worried over it, too, in my way. This claim has consequences, less on the remarkable poetry and its arresting sensuality, and more on what is implied to be possible to being, to beings. Those claims, too, are meaningful.14 But this meaning is complicated, or arrives in a complicated way. I do not know that metaphysics—a claim about what existence is—stands or falls or dies, ever. As science: sure, sciences can die. But a science is not being, or claims about being. Bernard Lonergan says that, for a human being to ask a question at all requires, already, a notion of being, of a to-be-known; this to-be-known is, itself, a notion of being.15 I think Rilke demonstrates this with canny visceralness. And he demonstrates that art is expressive enough to express distinctive stances toward what-is. But I think that these two demonstrations matter in different ways.16 My sense of Balthasar is that he is more worried about the question “which metaphysics?” than he is the question of metaphysics at all. And this “which metaphysics?” matters very much because it has the power to rob conscious beings of various options for their concrete becoming in the world—in Blondelian terms, it can assist in robbing human beings of their destiny.17 (It is not itself the robber or the robbery.) In this sense, Balthasar is worried about the reduction of the real, much like Incomprehensible Certainty is, but I think he is worried about a different reduction. It has less to do with image and more to do with our apprehension of intelligibility in act. What Blondel calls “the seriousness of life” imposes itself on us, but we must ask after it or it is lost; we are, we act, and we are able to amputate our being in its action by refusing its question to us.18 That question is the question of God. For Blondel, the reduction at hand is not so much a constraint of “vision,” but a failure to follow the human élan to its end; the reduction is of human action and its meaningfulness, and its radical need for what outstrips its own power. Balthasar appropriates Blondel's concern. In his preparatory remarks in Glory of the Lord vol. 7 (Metaphysics In the Modern Age), Balthasar discusses how the modern, Western world cannot unsee the affirmation of human freedom that developed under Christianity's influence. But, unmoored from the glory of God, who anchors the world and human freedom, modern human beings face “decision” and “yawning abyss” simultaneously.19 It is not that there is nothing, but that the something of the world becomes “indigestible.”20 Absent the radical disproportion that funds all that is proportionate, human meaning faces its perplexing lack of certainty, which Balthasar takes to be very real. But this excision of being is also a failure to face up to created being's genuine responsibility for itself.21 And Balthasar's point here is underlined by his rejection of Neo-Platonic metaphysics as ultimately unhelpful for expressing Christian truth, a position most decisively expressed in “The Fathers, the Scholastics, and Ourselves.” In that essay, he insists that Plotinian participation-essence loses a sense of the created world as not-God.22 For Balthasar, a “true” vision of the world requires both the absolute and the not-absolute—the contingent—together. By way of transition, I will say that Rilke testifies to something strange but also burdensome with the silent object-deaths of the women (the girls, Mädchen) who populate his Sonnets. Never do Daphne or Eurydice get to articulate, with their mouths, the violence—the male violence—that catalyzes their transfigurations (into a laurel tree, into the dead).23 It is a curious silence, a troubling silence. I think this silence is an image of exactly the human violence that Balthasar is most anxious about. The problem has less to do with metaphysics as such and more to do with what our excisions of reality excuse in us. “For the late Rilke,” explains Pfau, “the consummation of the real thus demands an act of ‘resignation’ (Verzichten), the suspension of all desire for making, depicting, representing, or otherwise taking possession of the real.”24 Not all renunciations, including those renunciations of Rilke's, are good. I am intrigued by those renunciations that Incomprehensible Certainty allows: a book that by its very title desires surety of some kind, even if the incomprehensible kind. And I am intrigued by those renunciations it does not allow. “A fork in the road has been reached,” says Pfau, with grim certainty, “once visualization and the images to which it gives rise are no longer being credited with transcendental, symbolic significance.”25 With the death of Goethe's dream, there rises a shadow in the West. That shadow is the empirical universe: “the natural sciences begin to exfoliate into various empirical disciplines and subfields.” Pfau detects here, like many others—and I do not say they are wrong—a shift in the Western notion of what counts as real, as existence. George Eliot appears at this point in Incomprehensible Certainty as a rather surprising (though welcome) lonely light in a disintegrating artistic universe. Incomprehensible Certainty, as a whole, does not like method. It detests the domineering, grasping rise of the scientific method.26 By contrast, the book's own method is inductive.27 So Pfau's complaint is toward a cruelly reductionistic modern naturalism, clinging to “a cogito scrupulously detached from appearances and intent on mastering them by means of some universal method, even as doing so may come at the price of ever-increasing levels of conceptual abstraction and a consequent loss of intuitive kinship with the so-called world of experience.”28 On some level, our world's methodical commitments, for a book like Incomprehensible Certainty, cost us our human experience. The intuited image, meanwhile, defends our experience. But in the argument of the book, the reality of the intuited image (nearly?) vanishes, or threatens to. For Incomprehensible Certainty, therefore, our loss is absolute. It is the loss of ourselves and of God. Everything. Which is, I must confess, a severe burden to place on image. Balthasar finds image meaningful, too, I think, but in a distinct way that relieves some of the pinpoint pressure on true iconic seeing and its failure, which is so all-and-everything in Incomprehensible Certainty. As a first step, Balthasar calls being “expressive.” This is a positive quality; it is the vulnerable self-offering of a being to other beings (which Balthasar depicts, speaking of Rilke, even of trees).29 For Balthasar at least, created being has to deal with its positive measure. That is its central freedom and burden. Understanding this responsibility requires understanding how Balthasar is not concerned for image as such. Much as in Herrlichkeit, where form (Gestalt) is not ultimately grasped by eyes that see (see the form), nor by any sense at all, but rather form is grasped by the whole assembly of the human being's spiritual faculties in acts of apprehension and judgment (language Balthasar uses in Theo-Logic I), so, in a similar way, image is not form either.30 Given Balthasar's use of faculty psychology, image is particular and peculiar in meaning. The issue is two-fold: (1) image is already a shift away from material perception itself, like with eyes, for it names the in the the are still not the act of affirmation or That is Or, in the it is the seeing of form. And I follow these for Balthasar, being is not is, is being's is always only ever of not because but because it is and not not because are not being, but because they are not being's measure. Or, in Balthasar's images “as are not and in that sense do not existence. only to the because conscious being has to sense perception into and existence with an This Balthasar the being of and the being of he explores various of or are and so there is a positive a of being by It is a of being being and the is the act of is being in its being. is being in the of its being. And Balthasar does as an apprehension that is, and that is This is the meaning of material therefore, including the of being's this which it is I to be Balthasar's vision of the the and the to a of being. So if Balthasar image at all, it is by is being's answer is a notion of being that image of less than substance (though not less than to for to a need that in its very is an image of being's which is a of order to and to the of being, you need a kind of a to what is other than and to the wide world that Incomprehensible Certainty in itself a it is not the of image in order to it again, as in it is the of the modern of modern of the of human into So the of the book is a of sorts, the of human the power of image. It is also an act of an of that would that most of all that would our of which is in image. I that and because I think they a real of in the long I could also use the and that the more The book is a for the and it is about the loss of that Incomprehensible Certainty, I of And not not because of Pfau's Western and of I if this book. What we of is of that to a whole that they are, of for a of from other images poetry like from And they images to a a a of and an agony not even enough to an it is not possible to out the of without We must the part the us And the us in and us at measure. for at this from I ... I to light ... face The fragment is more from very much of the same that an effort of one to another. The in the to more taking the to be it, a face that once the A It would be in Thomas it is always for And that if us with its only a for us to says the with an at because they are but also because they are of the of the [...] poetry can because it and becomes a whole, on the by who are by the in The and of I think, one of the central of Incomprehensible Certainty, which is the of image in a world of mere Pfau in his is on the image as a a of that by its very the and of its And I ask with does In every sense, with can we without this of and of an form and its says to us, with not is for against the of and even in the face of the in the of desire as for to in a of which would be I to point out that desire something of its of its I to ask about this it image that Or is it the are Much of the has to for us. of the of poetry I Pfau's claim that acts of the of an image so a distinctive I am because what I in my are to me to the distinction between perception and by being both and a metaphysics of image or even just these images of into which so our I ask with a what is I can which no longer as whole are these as it images And we must answer such a question because the do I would like to two that of the other in desire does more than from Rilke to Balthasar's of It which under a the form of in this of the form of its which is By its this requires the of the reader's affirmation for it to be as and as as this is already in some or a In every has to both and with a for a different the in the desire of of or Balthasar “a being is both to itself and to the calls this which is to something other than the of own for Balthasar, an for being a with a being and in being a that is with a of to to be by In other requires more and freedom, not In a similar way, poetry is the of an that is For Balthasar, the affirmation of being the affirmation of the of being. This affirmation can only take the of But of being, by its with its of the other that it is must the of its own its as an It not be a will to if it The appears under exactly this aspect of being, as a to being's Balthasar in the first the of the now us is any of that is not that is not the as by the in an of this in its act of affirmation an act of It it but it also also over what it is not in the as nor in the as but in the as it the then even to a sense of that is, an intelligibility that can be is so to desire and to the and because we are so We do not a image. We do not to do more than on than be itself a than be We can image to be its own as and this is possible so long as we trust our own our its to take to and to and in a sense to come to the shapes of in Balthasar's terms, is how we come to know the real. This is what reality is at all. is, as Lonergan the My point is is not a And Balthasar is radical in this is no aspect of that in he the whole in in the sense that it is in need of a of the Or, if we turn to his conception of human being in its being, as in A “The of which can of himself not only his it it. he may this into there will always be a that has to be because the is in the very of the I am Incomprehensible Certainty to image so that, against its own of it cannot the that images are In Balthasar's vision of the all of being a and a being that are being and and that is This on the one that all truth, in its as itself to the absolute that On the it means that that is not is It in order to It is a And it will die. So if is to human beings the that they for but cannot to be, then it will be the the the does not a or a to says Balthasar, uses in all his and fragility and as the in which he the world of Incomprehensible Certainty It a of reality I Incomprehensible Certainty is also a book that It I think, more dreams than I able to read in its many It is a book, that is very anxious for the of It is anxious that this take a particular the of image the of human I with Pfau on this in that I are to his they might with Incomprehensible Certainty in its pages of remarkable and with a of I I it some I am more than I can to be how much I how much I It to me that I am more with this aspect of than Incomprehensible Certainty I is with I that our here is a cannot is can we not they are and to We also will die. We will be, an but but not absolute My tension with Pfau, out is something like the tension of and also something like the tension of I do not know that image I do It is not that we do not it is the of that being in its being. We are We for God. And is not a But I do not know that we must be more than these that we are in order to be in order to be by in order to be by God. says Balthasar, existence is this and of to the the the

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