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Knowledge is a Repeating Question
On ‘the grammar of ana’: Advancement and restoration
Asking Ourselves Again What We Believe
“There is nothing nostalgic at work here. We are,” Richard Kearney says in Anatheism, “to borrow from Kierkegaard, not concerned with a ‘recollection’ backward but with a ‘repetition’ forward.”
For him, believing (or not believing) in God “is a choice made over and over, never once and for all.” It is a “bracing oscillation between doubt and faith, withdrawal and consent.” Because we are disoriented, we might be able to reorient ourselves. (He hopes that we do; he doesn’t want to be left with a religion that is merely cultural or aesthetic and has no God in it.) But he says we can’t reorient without first disorienting. We can’t have new thoughts and renewed commitment without first suspending judgment and opening the mind. We need that “aperture,” that entryway.
Faith, or the lack thereof, is a cycle. It reminds Kearney of
“the ancient patristic figure of circumcession (perichoresis) where different persons move endlessly around an empty center (chora), always deferring one to the other, the familiar to the foreign, the resident to the alien. Without the gap in the middle there could be no leap, no love, no faith.”
Existence “speaks according to the grammar of ana” (a prefix meaning to advance or restore), which he understands as “retrieving what was lost as found in a new way,” in words like “après coup” (deferred action), “analogy” (comparison), “anagogy” (mystical interpretation), “ananmnesis” (reminiscence), and “anakephaleosis” (recapitulation, as in a completion and a restart). “Anatheism does not,” Kearney assures us, “propose a new God, a new belief, a new religion. It simply invites us to see what has always been there a second time around — ana.”
Returning to Something Familiar
To know something, we have to grasp it but also let it go so that we can grasp it again and, in the act of grasping, remind ourselves that we know it. That also lets us adjust our knowledge to ways in which we may have changed or the object of our knowledge may have changed. Iain McGilchrist wrote in The Master and His Emissary:
