Much pleasure and enlightenment can be had from desultory reading. I mean the sort when you don’t read a particular book from cover to cover, but just pick up first this one, then that, reading a little here and a little there. The different passages that catch your attention often fit surprisingly well together, like the bits and scraps that go to make up a collage.

It is something I like to do after I’ve finished a book for review and don’t feel like reading anything else just yet. The other day, for instance, having finished Robert Harris’s excellent Conspirata, I picked up two very different books to page through idly: José Ortega y Gasset’s Man and Crisis and J.-K. Huysmans’s En Route.

The chapter I happened upon in the first is titled “In Transition from Christianity to Rationalism,” and I was immediately taken by the opening sentence: “We do not know what is happening to us, and that is precisely the thing that is happening to us — the fact of not knowing what is happening to us.” I proceeded to skim the chapter, but nothing in it excited me as much as that opening gambit, which I like because it encapsulates my instinctive understanding of being — specifically, its fundamental uncertainty and absence of necessity.

Leibniz said that the most basic philosophical question is “Why is there something and not nothing?” Well, the fact is, there needn’t be anything. Lev Shestov, who suggested — in Athens and Jerusalem, I think — that God could be defined as “infinite caprice,” framed his entire philosophy in opposition to the despair born of necessity.

Determinism, I suppose, is the philosophy of necessity par excellence. Julian Barnes, in Nothing To Be Frightened Of, summarizes it in distinctly personal terms: “[F]ar from having a whip to crack, I am the very tip of the whip itself, and what is cracking me is a long and inevitable plait of genetic material which cannot be shrugged or fought off.”

I seem to be constitutionally incapable of subscribing to determinism. A determined determinist would, I guess, ascribe that to the chain of causation whose end-point I happen to be. But then I could write off his opinion as the result of the same in his case.

I have to say that I can never quite believe that any determinist lives his life as one. I am sure they feel that they think their thoughts and not that they merely have thoughts.

For me, the mystery and uncertainty born of the feeling that being is not necessary is the ground of my faith. And this brings me to the other book I was browsing through the other day. J.-K. Huysmans is probably best known for his novel À rebours, which was the model for the yellow-backed French novel that so influenced Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray. The novel I picked up, En Route, is the second in a series featuring his alter ego Durtal. The first, La Bas, recounted his hero’s (and Huysmans’s own) involvement with Satanism. The series as a whole is the story of Durtal-Huysmans’s journey of faith. (Huysmans’s said once that “the Devil, by his hooked claw, drew me to God.”)

I had started reading En Route a while back, but had got distracted by other business and never finished it. I expect to finish it over the weekend. In the passage that leaped out at me the other day, Durtal is pondering the nature of God:

… we do not know Him — we are ignorant of him. He is, and, in fact, He can only be, immanent, permanent, and inaccessible. He is we know not what, and at most we know what He is not. … He is above and forever incomprehensible.

This notion of the divine nicely mirrors the sense of uncertainty I have living in this unnecessary world. Of course, to call the world unnecessary is at least to suggest that it is gratuitous. I would say it is precisely that. And why not? The word gratuitous shares an etymology with another word: grace.

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Frank Wilson

Frank Wilson was the book editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer until his retirement in 2008. He blogs at Books, Inq.

Latest posts by Frank Wilson (Posts)

• An illusion of precision - September 9, 2015
• Watching the passing scene - October 28, 2013
• To see like a child - June 26, 2013
• Riffing and digressions - January 21, 2013
• Life is a parenthesis between one darkness and another - September 13, 2012

Tags: religion & philosophy, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson // 1 Comment »