Paradisical Pessimism: On the Crucifixion Darkness and the Cosmic Materiality of Sorrow

Sunt lacrimae rerum

—Virgil, Aeneid 1.462

All men have matter of sorrow; but most specially he feels matter of sorrow that knows and feels that he is.

—The Cloud of Unknowing

“The contours of cosmic pessimism,” writes Eugene Thacker, “are a drastic scaling-up or scaling-down of the human point of view . . . shadowed by an impasse, a primordial insignificance, the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought.”¹ By intellectually elevating the worst to universal magnitudes, cosmic pessimism forces the question of the relation between what ultimately is and how one feels about things. More specifically, it necessarily entertains—with utmost due skepticism—the problem of whether human sorrow, our volitional and affective sensor for what is wrong, has any universal validity.

This essay finds in cosmic pessimism the conceptual starting point for a mystical reinterpretation of the most radical representation of cosmic sorrow in the Christian tradition: the crucifixion darkness. As an ultimate figural conjunction of the pessimal and the optimal, this event provides the grounds for a paradisical inversion of pessimism around the axis of sorrow. Far from being an impasse, pessimism’s constitutive shadow is now seen to be an index of sorrow’s meta-subjective universality and thus the best means of overcoming sorrow itself.

The Bitter Taste of Thought—“How Distant I Am from Everything”

Cosmic pessimism inhabits an essential paradox. On the one hand, it asserts that the ultimate truth of things, insofar as any such truth exists, lies within a profoundly negative factuality: meaninglessness, suffering, nothingness, contingency, and so on. On the other hand, it necessarily denies, under penalty of not being properly cosmic, any ultimate significance to this truth, consigning the knowing of it to the abyss of an unmasterable exteriority. The cosmic pessimist’s thought hovers, like a lost astronaut, inside a non-locatable intersection between absolute and absolutely hopeless knowledge, passively exploring the subessential space of a kind of ontologically collapsed apophatic, or negative, mysticism. Whereas mystical contemplation, according to the sixth-century theologian Pseudo-Dionysius, “knows beyond [super] the mind by knowing nothing,”² cosmic pessimism reversely knows nothing by not knowing beyond the mind. It understands the nothingness of things through a properly improper form of thinking, a paradoxically intellectual pushing of thought outside of itself from within the parameters of rational reflection and self-immanence. This is exemplified in the philosophical posture of Schopenhauer, who, “content to comprehend the true nature of the world according to its inner connexion with itself,”³ discloses at once the universality of will and the nothingness of the material cosmos—a truth paradoxically fulfilled and realized in the will’s negation: “to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours with all its suns and galaxies is—nothing” (ww, 1:412). Crucially, the nothingness to which cosmic pessimism restores the world, as distinguished from the nothingness of base nihilism, is neither subjective nor objective. Rather, it is the nothingness of world itself, a nothingness illuminated by the desire—one endured in pessimism’s negative fidelity to the good—for thought’s liberation from relation to the world, from having to be about it.

The affective dimension of cosmic pessimism is correlatively inversed vis-à-vis apophatic mysticism. In keeping with the Augustinian prioritization of faith over reason, which is recorded in Anselm’s maxim, credo ut intelligam, apophatic mysticism insists on the priority of feeling over understanding, that is, feeling in the sense of the real movement of will necessary for directing the intellect beyond itself and into divine reality. Mystical apophasis is not only unknowing but also the active and restless affective drive beyond knowing, which is the ground of unknowing itself. The affective difficulty of this Pseudo-Dionysian encouragement to “strive upward” by laying understanding aside is expressed in the qualification that it be enacted with “a mightly struggle” (forti contritione, συντόνῳ διατριβῇ), an expression that evokes the idea of consuming auto-frictional pain, a grinding and rubbing of the self against itself in a struggle toward...