How To Be An Agnostic
of religious traditions, as the repositories of much that is great in
human art and thought, but they will not be living traditions for
them, but rather points of departure towards an atheistic future.
Hence Clough’s poem can end in prayer, if of a purged
sort. What it emphasises is that the via negativa is an ongoing
process. The poem begins with an invocation of God – ‘O Thou’.
The prayer at the end requires a return to the beginning; in
calling out again to that now dimmer ‘shrine’, the poet repeats
the process of unknowing. This is not because the agnostic is
condemned to some pitiful attempt to call out to a deity who
is really not there. Rather, the prayer for divine guidance and
discernment requires it. Like repeatedly reading a wonderful
novel, or hearing great music time and time again, each repeti-
tion changes and deepens one’s relationship with the process of
negation. This is, in Eckhart’s phrase, a sinking ‘down eternally
from nothingness to nothingness’.
How may one try to think about this, for clearly it is a process
ultimately as indescribable as the non-image of God it seeks?
Well, there is a parallel in the process of Socratic philosophy.
Socrates’ insight was that wisdom is found in a knowledge of
ignorance. Such wisdom is not arrived at simply by admitting
that one is ignorant; that is not enough. One must explore the
nature of one’s ignorance as deeply as possible. Like mystical
prayer, it is to this extent a process of unknowing, of letting go.
This is why Socrates did not stand in the agora simply preach-
ing a message of condemnation to his fellow Athenians for their
unacknowledged ignorance, but he engaged them, to discover
more about what they thought they knew. In this way he nur-
tured a way of life that came to be called philosophy. Similarly,
mysticism is not simply an assertion that, whatever else the
divine might be, divinity is unknown. Rather, it has as its goal
an ever more profound appreciation of this truth. The cycle of
invocation, negation, invocation, negation, that Clough’s poem
sets up is, therefore, the fundamental pattern of the mystical life.
Replace ‘invocation’ with ‘assertion’, and one has the pattern of
the Socratic life too – assertion, negation, assertion, negation.