Literary Cryptotheologies of Modernity, or the Primacy of the World

This essay is an extended analysis of two aphorisms: Angelus Silesius’ sacred epigram on “the rose without why” and Paul Celan’s sentence on the hidden god of the poem. While there seems to be no direct connection between them, I nonetheless interpret them as belonging to – or even stronger, creating – the same paradigm of a typically modern religiosity which I call here a literary cryptotheology: a peculiar religion of deus absconditus who conceals himself and retreats in the background in order to let the world and the creation come stronger to the fore. Thus, if the “mystical rose” is to reach its full glory and achieve an autotelic existence causa sui or “without why,” which so far had only been God’s attribute, God the Creator must become a “hidden God,” i.e. conceal his blinding splendour. By playing on the Lurianic motif of tsimtsum, “God’s withdrawal,” and its avatars in the modern thought from Hegel to Derrida, I wish to outline a peculiar “religion of the World” – neither simply secular, nor traditionally theological – which I see as the unique modern contribution to the evolution of religious faith. In modernity, faith does not disappear: it only changes its object.

 

This essay is an extended analysis of two aphorisms: Angelus Silesius’ sacred epigram on “the rose without why” and Paul Celan’s sentence on the hidden god of the poem. While there seems to be no direct connection between them, I nonetheless interpret them as belonging to – or even stronger, creating – the same paradigm of a typically modern religiosity which I call here a literary cryptotheology: a peculiar religion of deus absconditus who conceals himself and retreats in the background in order to let the world and the creation come stronger to the fore. Thus, if the “mystical rose” is to reach its full glory and achieve an autotelic existence causa sui or “without why,” which so far had only been God’s attribute, God the Creator must become a “hidden God,” i.e. conceal his blinding splendour. By playing on the Lurianic motif of tsimtsum, “God’s withdrawal,” and its avatars in the modern thought from Hegel to Derrida, I wish to outline a peculiar “religion of the World” – neither simply secular, nor traditionally theological – which I see as the unique modern contribution to the evolution of religious faith. In modernity, faith does not disappear: it only changes its object.