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.”
