Holy Unknowing
“Nothing poisons truth so quickly as an assurance that one has found it.” —Christian Wiman, poet and former editor of Poetry
“I pray God to rid me of God.”
When “God” is enlisted for exclusion, domination, and self-interest, one gladly thinks of Meister Eckhart’s famous prayer. Christian Wiman is right: “The minute you begin to speak with certitude about God, God is gone.” Nothing makes truth sound false faster than excessive enthusiasm. We inhabit a reality far greater than our certainties.
Wiman adds, “There are times when silence is not only the highest, but the only possible piety.”
Silence, not withdrawal. The world keeps reporting corruption, evil, and treason at the highest levels of power. Another day? Didn’t we just have one?
Here is the surprise: after fighting cancer for twenty years, Wiman still wakes with wonder. The darkness of death casts a strange light, more brilliant as it nears. A celebrated poet and essayist, called “the most important Christian writer in America” by The Dish and “the best devotional poet writing in English” by Poetry, he has lived close to death through chemotherapy, a bone marrow transplant, and experimental drugs that have kept him alive month after month.
A beloved professor of religion and literature at Yale Divinity School, Wiman is challenged and energized by his students. He also finds joy watching his twin daughters grow into teenagers who ask, “Why are you a poet? I mean, why?”
In his latest book, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, Wiman shows how joy and awe can break into anguish. Against modern despair, he offers not reassurance but wonder. Any serious response to crisis begins in restored consciousness: before action can be effective, it must remain human. Love, beauty, and the sheer fact of being alive keep the flame from going out.
What we pay attention to expands. It can grow so large we seem to live entirely inside it. Once an idea takes hold of the mind, it governs how we feel and act. We are not our thoughts, but they shape our world. They can become a spiritual force that replaces mystery with mastery.
Creeds begin not with “I know” but with “I believe.” The life of faith is larger than its formulas. Experience exceeds explanation. Awe comes before assent. In suffering, belief does not end the struggle; it sends us deeper into it. It can clarify, but it can also narrow. It can steady the mind but also harden it. Before belief, beyond custom or inheritance, reverence points the way. Reverence is certainty after confession.
We set limits where grace does not. Reverence answers no questions and dispels no darkness. It sharpens attention and keeps us from mistaking our limits for God’s. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” —John 1:5
Wiman’s insistence on awe returns me to Caracas, where wonder arrived before I had a name for it. I loved the night skies there, in a city held in a valley of the Andes. I was in third grade, newly arrived from Detroit, where smoke and flame rose from the Chrysler factory down the street. I had not known the silent expanse above.
Caracas gave me stars. With my father’s help, I made a “telescope” from soup cans taped together, with 100-watt lightbulbs strapped on. I thought the best way to see in the dark was to shine a lot of light. It revealed nothing. No matter. I was proud of it. How it worked was beside the point.
The mountains captivated me, too. As we grew older, my friends and I cut a trail beyond the foothills and named it after our last initials. Since two of them began with A, mine with G, and another with Lo, the name became “Double-Angelo.” We carried lunches, full canteens, and, like proper explorers, a compass, though the only choices were up or down.
The mystery of the skies came to earth in mist, wet rock, undergrowth, and the gnarled roots of ancient el niño trees (Gyranthera caribensis). Their branches shelter mosses, lichens, ferns, and orchids. Or so I later learned. Thoreau would not have been impressed: “Your greatest success will be simply to perceive that such things are, and you will have no communication to make to the Royal Society.”
I saw more when I knew less. Things rang true before making sense. The spiritual was not elsewhere. It was there before I knew what to call it. There is a way of beholding nature that is itself a form of prayer.
The ecologist Arne Naess writes, “The smaller we feel compared to the mountain, the nearer we come to participating in its greatness. I do not know why this is so.”
The inverse is true, too. At the smallest imaginable scales, scientists have long suspected that another layer of physical reality may underlie quantum theory, perhaps one that even reverses cause and effect. An austere physicalism that reduces spirituality to matter still cannot eliminate mystery. It settles for “extraordinary.”
The trouble comes when the effort to name and know an experience replaces the experience itself.
Faith begins in reverence. If we are lucky, it ends in tears of joy.
Notes and reading
Memento mori—“Remember that you must die.” Rooted in Roman Stoic practice, the phrase names the discipline of keeping death before us so that desire, belief, and love come into clearer view.
Christian Wiman—My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer; Survival Is a Style: Poems; and Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair. Before teaching at Yale, Wiman edited Poetry, one of the world’s leading literary journals. Rowan Williams writes that Wiman “interrogates pain, joy and God with a rare depth of honesty” and draws on “literary, mystical, scientific” companions.
Meister Eckhart—“. . . rid me of God,” from Sermon 52, on “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Eckhart is not rejecting God but asking to be freed from the “God” we possess, weaponize, or reduce to our own image. Holy unknowing, not holy certainty.
Henry David Thoreau—Journal, October 4, 1859; see also “Uncommon Learning,” Thoreau Society, 1999.
Diane Ackerman—“. . . beholding nature,” The Moon by Whale Light and Other Adventures Among Bats, Penguins, Crocodilians and Whales (1992). Ackerman is an American poet, essayist, and naturalist, author of A Natural History of the Senses, an exploration of sensory perception.
Arne Naess—Always the Mountains, David Rothenberg (2007), 14. Naess coined the term “deep ecology” while advancing a biocentric worldview. Rothenberg is a philosopher, musician, and writer.
“At the smallest imaginable scales”—See Karmela Padavic-Callaghan, “A step beyond the quantum realm,” New Scientist, May 2–8, 2026; and “The essence of reality,” in the same issue. The first considers whether a deeper layer of physical reality underlies quantum theory; the second asks whether reality can be reduced to physics or whether conscious experience resists such reduction.
Romaric Jannel— “Against Certitude: On language, science, and the discipline of not knowing” (Medium, April 26, 2026). Jannel is a French scholar of Japanese and comparative philosophy, with a special interest in the encounter between Buddhist and Western thought. He also writes for a broader audience on his Substack, Philosophy and Beyond.
Thank you for introducing me to Christian Wyman. I just ordered Zero to the Bone, and I look forward to reading it. Your story about the homemade telescope with the hundred-watt lightbulbs reminds me of the Peanuts strip in which a few of the children are staring reflectively at the stars. Linus decides to move forward a few feet. When asked, he explains that he wanted a closer view. Here is Peter on the Mount of Transfiguration asking Jesus if he can build tabernacles for him, Moses, and Elijah. Our responses to wonder follow their own logic. I commend your father for going along with yours.