The online version of this interview was edited to reflect recent changes at Image, where James K.A. Smith was formerly editor. If you’d like to read this conversation in print, please buy a subscription in our store.

When considering the themes of mystery and faith (and art), we pretty quickly thought of James K.A. Smith, the former editor of the long-standing literary journal Image, whose mission is to explore the intersection of all of these themes. In one of his editorials, titled “The Gift of Not Knowing,” Smith reflects on the artistic power of metaphor: “Sometimes metaphors make familiarity possible … But sometimes what we need are metaphors that make the familiar strange — metaphors that remind us of the depth of the mystery that is God and grace.” He supplies a beautiful quote by the Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain: “Mystery is not the implacable adversary of understanding. [It] is a fullness of being with which the intellect enters into a vital union and into which it plunges without exhausting it.” This is the footpath we trod in the following Q&A, tracing an expansive definition of mystery, one that feels awestruck and optimistic.

A professor of philosophy at Calvin University, Smith is that rare scholar whose work has also found wide public appeal. He is the author of books like On the Road with Saint Augustine (2019) and You Are What You Love (2016), which aim to bridge the gap between the academy and the Church, and to educate lay readers on the history of the Christian faith and radical orthodoxy. Most recently, his book How to Inhabit Time (2022) invites readers into a greater awareness of the Church’s past and future, and to see how such “temporal awareness” might influence the present. Smith writes with the authority of a scholar and the intimacy of a friend, with faithfulness and curiosity, conviction and openness — a happy balance we think you’ll appreciate here.

MB: Do you find the mystery of God — God’s elusiveness — frustrating? If so, how do you manage that?

Smith: Maybe there’s a difference between God’s hiddenness and the mystery of God — two different ways of being elusive. Is God hiding? Withdrawn? Distant? We all know this experience; the psalms are full of such frustrating moments where God is elusive in the sense of being absent, silent, aloof. That kind of elusiveness is unsettling, though not uncommon. I learn to live with this by listening to saints who testify that every pilgrimage, at some point, passes through arid deserts. I try not to get anxious about it. Most importantly, I try not to draw any conclusions about God in such seasons.

But when I think of the mystery of God, then we’re talking about a mode of God’s being elusive that is a comfort, in a strange way, because it’s a reminder of God’s otherness and transcendence. There’s a sermon where Augustine is trying to explain the Trinity to his congregation, and they must have been furrowing their brows because he pauses and says something like, “Do you not understand? Of course not! If you could understand, we wouldn’t be talking about God!” And then he takes them further and further into the strange mystery of God as an infinite room to explore. In that sense, I experience God’s elusive mystery as a kind of cosmic sea in which I can float. I’m in touch with something I can’t control. Indeed, I’m suspended in this sea. I think that’s part of what’s comforting: There’s a wonderful paradox in which I sense God’s otherness, but without experiencing it at a distance. This is a mystery in which I live and move and have my being — in which I dwell. And somehow this ineffable, uncontrollable Mystery communicates: “You are loved.” I’d swap knowing and understanding for loving and being loved any day.

MB: One of the great mysteries of the human experience is our inability to ever be satisfied or content, no matter our circumstances. We are restless creatures, perhaps now more than ever. In your book On the Road with Saint Augustine, you wrote about our “road-hunger,” our mistaken notion that “the road is life.” How do you see that restlessness at play in your own life, and how do you work to counteract it?

Smith: As I try to explore in the book, I think there are different ways of being restless. There is a kind of existential, cosmic restlessness that stems from not knowing who we are or what we’re made for or where we’re headed — a restlessness that stems from lacking a sense of identity and wholeness. This is the kind of restlessness we experience as angst and that we try to satisfy with sorry substitutes for God, or that we try to numb ourselves from experiencing by self-medicating in all the ways available to us in modernity. For Augustine, that is a restlessness we can be liberated from.

That liberation, however, is not the same as the ultimate rest — peace — that we long for. As long as we are praying “thy kingdom come,” we are restless, in a sense, because we are imbued with eschatological longing. To sing Maranatha! — Come, Lord! — is a kind of sanctified restlessness. So, too, when we pray, “How long, O Lord?” Continuing to endure and witness injustice should make us restless. Sometimes I think Christianity in the US could use a little more eschatological restlessness. We’re a little too comfortable with the here and now.

But then what I appreciate about Augustine is how he recognizes that even the redeemed still struggle with a kind of restlessness and ambition that is somewhere between these two. It’s kind of maddening to me how much this is still true in my fifties — how much I’m still amped up by a sense of vocational unsettledness, for example; or how much I still struggle with contentment; how much I think it will be the next book that will finally be the book I’ve been trying to write my whole life. Maybe this is just the messiness of ambition in this vale of tears. Augustine is not a perfectionist: he doesn’t think we ever escape this. We might learn ways to quiet the angst and hunger, but what we always have available to us is confession. Telling God the truth about our own restlessness is its own liberation since we always know God’s reply: te absolvo.

MB: In your own spiritual journey, have you approached faith in the gospel more as a mystery to be unraveled and understood or a mystery to be embraced?

Smith: Thirty years ago, I saw mystery as a country to be vanquished. Today, I see mystery as a place in which to dwell.

If I wanted someone to blame for my early animosity to mystery, there are probably two culprits: fundamentalism and philosophy. I came to the Christian faith, from an unchurched background, by way of a fundamentalism that, now looking back, I see primarily as a religious form of mastery and control — not only of people, but of God. Of course, this community was confident in their knowledge of God because they believed they alone accepted the authority of the Scriptures. But that’s precisely where I now see such a sad irony: how strange to be proud of receiving a revelation, and how sad to reduce the Bible to a storehouse of facts to be mastered and, ultimately, wielded. How small the God contained therein. We sometimes think of fundamentalism as a radical devotion to God, but in most cases — and certainly in my experience — the sociology is very different: Fundamentalism is a means of trying to control the world by having (a certain) God on your side. If you’re after control, you need a God who is predictable, not mysterious. I cringe at the confident zealot I was as a young man. I wonder how much fear was behind all that.

All of this could have been amplified by an occupational hazard when I began to pursue philosophy as a vocation and career. Suffice it to say that there are some dominant strains in contemporary philosophy, particularly in its Anglo-American forms, that approach any mystery as a puzzle to be solved. Any “cloud of unknowing,” so to speak, is a fog to be dispersed. When this gets wedded to Christian faith, what you get is “apologetics.” To paraphrase Blaise Pascal, the god of the apologists shares little in common with the feisty, fiery mystery of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The god of the apologists is usually a puzzle piece in an explanation, invoked to demonstrate that “we” are right. I sometimes worry that, for my younger self, philosophy was fundamentalism by other means.

But it was also philosophy that pointed a way out and led me back to mystery as something to be embraced. I think my experience with Pentecostalism a little later in my faith journey is what opened me up to this.

MB: Can you tell us a bit about your experience with Pentecostalism and how that affected you?

Smith: The short version of the story is that, well, as an itinerant preacher who was studying philosophy (I was in my early 20s), I got myself kicked out of that fundamentalist community. There’s a lot of heartbreak and hurt in that episode I’m skipping over, but what’s important for us here is that, despite almost everything I would have expected, our family landed in a Pentecostal church that welcomed us with open arms. It was a time of very significant healing (I recount a little of this in my book, Thinking in Tongues). Pentecostal prayer and worship was an invitation to experience the grandeur and mystery of God, not as something to be vanquished and controlled, but rather as something to rest in. Here was a spirituality in which “knowledge” (narrowly understood) was not the first or fundamental goal; rather, the indwelling and filling of the Spirit was like learning to breathe again, inhaling the infinite love of God. It was about experiencing the abundance and excess of God’s grace and mercy in a way that overflowed our capacity to understand. I think it’s not insignificant that, at this time, in the mid-90s, there was a charismatic revival happening in which people experienced being overwhelmed by God’s care in the form of an uncontrollable laughter. It wasn’t about knowledge or insight or doctrinal correctness or even a pious moralism. Instead, it was an experience of encounter with a God who transcended our categories without being aloof or distant but rather warm and intimate.

Perhaps it’s not an accident that around this same time, my philosophical leanings shifted, too. I was reading Thomas Aquinas in a serious way, and I remember a little book by the French Thomist Étienne Gilson called Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages. That was where I first encountered a distinction between “negative” mystery — a puzzle to be solved — and “positive” mystery — a depth to swim in, never touching bottom.

Then I started to focus on contemporary “continental” (French and German) philosophy, including the likes of Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jean-Luc Marion. But my first foray into this field was through the work of an American philosopher named John D. Caputo. (In fact, I would go on to do my PhD under his supervision.) It is intriguing to me that one of his earlier books I read was The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought in which he draws on parallels between Heidegger’s phenomenology and the German mystic Meister Eckhart. I say “intriguing” because, of late, I’ve been spending a lot of time re-reading Eckhart and it feels like coming home. The real breakthrough book for me that shaped me more than I probably realize was Caputo’s Radical Hermeneutics. The last chapter of that book — I smile to look at it again now — is titled, “Openness to the Mystery.” I want to spend the rest of my life leaning into that openness.

MB: What does that look like for you in practice?

Smith: I guess I’d highlight a few threads of how this shapes my life. First, I think liturgical traditions, even if they seem highly scripted, actually create more room to dwell in the mystery of God. Liturgy is like learning the scales you need to know to play jazz: They are means to cultivating openness. It shouldn’t surprise us that mystics in the Christian tradition are usually embedded in monastic communities that pray the Divine Office. I also think the repetition of a liturgical spirituality — including the liturgical calendar — is predicated on the sense that we can spend eternity encountering and re-encountering the wonders of God and still find new facets of grace and love.

Second, I guess I keep trying to apprentice my spiritual expectations to spiritual masters. So I find myself always reading and re-reading Brother Lawrence, Thomas Merton, St. John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, Henri Nouwen, all of whom help me feel a little less alone when I experience God’s hiddenness and when I am trying to dwell in God’s mystery.

Finally, I would say that art plays a significant role in trying to live a life that makes room for mystery. More specifically, I think contemporary art — whether visual art or conceptual art, poetry or experimental fiction — is an invitation to experience a kind of “difficult beauty” that upends and unsettles me in all the best ways. Aquinas used to describe philosophy as a “preamble to faith,” and in the same way I think of contemporary art as a preamble to mystery. The discipline of attention, the demand for openness, the experience of not understanding but dwelling with — it seems to me that these facets of contemporary art are spiritual disciplines. And so, for me, a life lived “mysteriously” is a life lived aesthetically because contemporary art is its own mystic crucible of un-knowing.

MB: Toni Morrison once wrote: “If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.” How do you experience “mystery and magic” in your writing process?

Smith: That’s such a wonderful line from Morrison. I think I know what she means. The absolutely best day of writing is the day you sit down with a plan, and at the end of the day, you’ve filled three pages with words that you never could have guessed would arrive. I think that only happens if your writing practice is undergirded by a posture of, well, “entrustment.” I wish I had a better word for it. I think part of the mystery of writing is letting yourself step into a space where, as an author, you’re not in control of everything in advance. Of course you come with intention, and you might even have an outline, but at some point you have to push out from shore and give yourself over to a flow where your imagination can get out ahead of the executive control of your intellect. I don’t want to get Freudian about this, but I think this is what I mean by entrusting yourself to your subconscious — to all the ways you’ve invested in shaping your imagination. I once heard the writer Garth Greenwell say that style is a life condensed to a voice. So I think you have to trust that your imagination can draw on the well you’ve been filling before you sat down to write. That’s when writing is its own experience of glossolalia, a gift.

MB: You served as editor of the literary magazine Image, whose tagline is “Art, Faith, Mystery.” Why is “mystery” included there?

Smith: It’s a good question. The tagline precedes my tenure as editor in chief, so I’m guessing a little bit. But I can say that was a big part of what attracted me to the role with Image. I think the language of “mystery” is meant to signal both enchantment and capaciousness when it comes to matters of faith and the divine, which seems resonant with how you’d expect the arts to take us into spiritual places and questions. I also think the language of “mystery” is a point of contact between the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and insofar as Image aspires to be a home for literature and art informed by, and grappling with, these traditions, mystery is a signal that we’re not interested in policing the divine. I think it’s what also makes Image hospitable to those writers and poets and artists who don’t identify as people of faith but whose curiosity and imagination keep bumping up against questions of ultimacy — “spiritual” questions in the most generous sense of the word.

I hope that’s what has suffused the ethos of Image—not just openness to divine mystery but also the kind of “horizontal” mystery of other people. We talk about this in terms of “incarnational humanism.” One of Image’s fundamental values is what we call “incarnational humanism”; and, interestingly, the non-profit that was incorporated to sustain Image over thirty years ago was called “The Center for Religious Humanism.” I am more and more convinced that this is one of the key contributions for art and literature informed by faith today: to bear witness to the irreducible complexity and profundity — the mystery — of other human beings who are always more than the label we give them, always overflow our perceptions and stereotypes, always elude our “takes” and categorization. This was a theme I first learned from the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas who explored how “the face” of the Other was an icon of infinity.

MB: You seem to be someone who casts his net very wide in the search for beauty and inspiration — whether in art, movies, music, literature, philosophy. Where do you see what C.S. Lewis called “patches of Godlight” these days? What are you drawing inspiration from lately?

Smith: Gosh, this changes from week to week! I guess what doesn’t change is my rather promiscuous hunger to encounter new things in the arts. I respect those people who, like, re-read Austen or Dostoyevsky every year, but I feel like there is so much that is fascinating and beautiful in the world, and still being made, that I want to gobble up as much as I can. (In more introspective moments, I wonder if this is a reflection of my working-class upbringing, where I grew up in a house without books and zero interest in culture and the arts, so now, like some clichéd social climber, I’m trying to make up for lost time. I hope it’s not only that.)

But some recent enthusiasms for me: I was recently able to visit the incredible Gego retrospective at the Guggenheim and I am absolutely entranced by her fabrications and feel like I’m going to spend the next few years trying to live inside the space of her sculpture. She makes emptiness meaningful in ways that feel mystical. We also recently enjoyed the Broadway revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, starring Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan. First produced in 1964, the play feels so incredibly timely today, raising fundamental questions about how we live together as a society and what to do with our moral outrage. There’s a kind of Albert Camus energy about it I just loved. I’m looking for an excuse to write about it. I also recently read Jay Hopler’s final poetry collection, Still Life, which broke my heart in the best possible way.

It’s funny: Part of me is very cynical and skeptical; but in these areas of my life, I’m an inveterate enthusiast.

COMMENTS

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One response to “Notes From the Cosmic Sea”

1. David M Albertin says:

   02/22/2024 at 1:13 pm

   Kudos–for helping to wrestle with my restlessness. David Albertin

   Reply