This rich and thought-provoking study of William Desmond’s aesthetics provides an accessible introduction to Desmond’s philosophy. I found Knepper’s presentation of Desmond’s thought to be exceptionally lucid, avoiding excessive jargon without losing the richness and texture of Desmond’s thought and language—and, more importantly, without failing to be itself a thoroughly philosophical work (rather than merely a book about philosophy). Knepper also helpfully draws out many of Desmond’s unnamed or rarely named conversation partners and intellectual influences. By contextualizing Desmond in this way, Knepper both situates Desmond’s thought in what Knepper calls a “philosophical countercurrent that has steadily persisted throughout the past century,” and accentuates Desmond’s singular voice in this “countercurrent” in philosophy that is “moved more by astonished wonder than by skeptical doubt” (7). Above all, Wonder Strikes struck me as a thoughtful and engaged expression of gratitude and admiration for Desmond the philosopher and for the gift of his thought to the philosophical community, and it has deepened my own appreciation for Desmond’s work.

Moving from these summary observations and into the text itself, I’d like to explore in particular the four key themes Knepper identifies in Desmond’s philosophy: receptivity, abundance, affirmation, and wonder. By approaching Desmond’s philosophy through these four key themes, Knepper shows both how Desmond understands the nature of philosophical thought to be a practice of mindfulness of being, and the way in which this understanding of philosophy informs Desmond’s approach to the relationship between philosophy, art, and religion.

1. Receptivity

Receptivity (or porosity, a favorite Desmondian term): we are never simple, autonomous, atomic selves—no being is such. Knepper points first to our embodied receptivity, offering the simple experience of breathing for our philosophical reflection, and recalling Desmond’s observation that there is no dualistic “inside” or “outside” to the body. “Our very body is a between,” Knepper writes. “We live out an ongoing exchange,” receiving our environment into our own bodies, and giving to our environment from our own bodies (14). Moving more interiorly, Knepper notes the way in which music enters us not just through the openness of our bodies, but also into our more inward porosity: the notes of familiar melody stir us to search for the name of a song in our memory, or cause us to recall another memory, perhaps quite without our explicit consent. “We are receptive in our intimate depths,” Knepper writes, “we are porous in our memories, thoughts, and desires as well as our sense organs” (14). An understanding of this constitutive receptivity is central for understanding Desmond’s philosophical practice: understanding ourselves as essentially porous fundamentally changes our approach to thought. If we exist always in this state of interchange, deeply entrenched already within the happening of being, then philosophical thought cannot—and perhaps ought not—simply strive to go beyond, but must enact a cultivated mindfulness in the midst of being. Philosophy, then, may be a mode of intermediation in the between, a form of communicating with and responding to being.

Knepper also helpfully points to the ethical charge related to our porosity, reminding us of Desmond’s metaphor of “clogged porosity” (and noting the potential limits of this metaphor). We are continually tempted to and often trapped in self-enclosure: our porosity is “clogged,” and we lose, to some extent, our capacity to attend to reality as it shows itself and as it is, preferring our own interpretations and delusions to reality, or preferring the surety of our conatus essendi over against the more primal—and less controllable—passio essendi. Desmond, like Iris Murdoch, sees the overcoming of this tendency toward self-enclosure and the rehabilitation of our more fundamental receptivity as central to the moral life. In conversation with Ryan Duns’s work on Desmond’s philosophy as a spiritual practice, Knepper incorporates into this discussion of our constitutive receptivity and clogged porosity Desmond’s ideas of “agapeic mind” and “posthumous mind” as spiritual exercises, ways of training oneself in attentive receptivity and vigilance. By way of explanation, he offers not only description but also images from literature, first Desmond’s own examples from the life of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and from the story of the prodigal son, and then his own reflection on posthumous mind exemplified in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.

2. Abundance

Abundance: “Desmond is a philosopher of abundance, of ‘overdetermined’ excess, of the ‘too-muchness’ of being” (23). Knepper draws out the many ways in which Desmond understands the “abundance” of being: the multiplicity of beings, the inexhaustibility even of the singular, finite being, the overdetermined nature of our own self-transcending and desire, the multifaceted modes of intermediation between beings.

In his discussion of this key theme of abundance, Knepper also notes an important criticism that has been made against Desmond’s thought, namely, that Desmond’s continued referencing of “the other” or “otherness” can or does easily tend toward abstraction of the other, rather than attention to “the rich singularity of things” (30).1 This critique, however—as Knepper tells us—does not seem to pass unnoticed by Desmond. Desmond’s frequent recurrence to poetic description within his philosophical works helps us to return to the concrete, singular other. Knepper’s observation here sheds light on this key feature of Desmond’s philosophical writings. Desmond is not merely an academic philosopher or writing about philosophy. His work intends not to draw us away from the happening of being and into the purely noetic realm of thought and system, but to help us return to being with a renewed attention and deepened mindfulness. Desmond’s recurrence to poetic language is thus not simply a stylistic feature of his work, but also carries philosophical import.

3. Affirmation

Affirmation: Affirmation in Desmond’s thought is, Knepper tells us, the other side of our porosity. As constitutively porous beings, we receive from the outside, but we also live by a desire that moves from inside to outside. Following Plato, Desmond sees this constitutive desire as double: desire is not merely lack, but a mingling of lack and plenty, penia and poros. Because of this doubleness, eros carries an “agapeic potential” (33). Indeed, for Desmond, “agape is the highest possibility of eros,” and it does not “simply leave eros behind” (33). If it is the case that eros is motivated most fundamentally by an over-fullness and by the need not to consume but to affirm the goodness of the other, then true eros always contains within it the seed of agapeic love, a love that affirms the goodness of the other as other and even goes so far as to offer oneself in sacrificial service for the other. Knepper shows here how Desmond incorporates both Platonic insights and biblical wisdom in his relating of eros and agape. The full flowering of erotic desire into agapeic service is, for Desmond, already present in the Platonic tradition, even if not named as such, as it is in the Christian tradition. God’s affirmation of the goodness of creation in the Judeo-Christian creation narrative is at the same time an “agapeic release” of that creation to be for itself (34). In other words, God’s affirmation of the goodness of His creation is not sterile. It is an efficacious blessing, a freeing of creation to be not for God’s satisfaction but for its own good. Here Desmond shows a deep kinship with Josef Pieper, who connects this affirming love with the act of creation itself (Faith, Hope, Love 169–72). God truly endows his creation with its own goodness, with its own being, and he releases this creation to be for itself in his affirmation.

Knepper also brings into this discussion the nature of self-affirmation, addressing the possibility that “Desmond’s emphasis on agape may seem naive about self-interest,” given Desmond’s praise of agape for its self-forgetfulness and its disinterested affirmation of the other (34). This possibility in Desmond’s thought, it seems, would reveal a certain rupture or discontinuity between eros and agape. Knepper recalls Desmond’s own words: “True enough: even ‘It is good’ we human beings utter seems to be entangled in some open or secret ‘It is good for me, for us'” (34). However, self-affirmation is never merely self-affirmation, if Desmond is right that we are fundamentally porous beings. Self-affirmation is always, at bottom, an affirmation of being itself. I experience the gift of being most intimately in my own being; thus, it seems, the most radical affirmation of being I can make is my own self-affirmation, and this self-affirmation is, at its root, an affirmation of the goodness of being as such. In this way, my “self” affirmation of my own being is most true when it is also open to the possibility of the good of other-being and of being in community.

In this discussion of affirmation, I would have been interested to see some treatment of what Desmond calls Nietzsche’s “counterfeit amen.” Knepper does make reference to Nietzsche’s suspicion of alleged disinterested affirmation of the other. But it seems to me that there is more at stake when we move beyond Nietzsche’s well-trod account of ressentiment. I have in mind questions like the following: Does the sacred yes-saying of Zarathustra’s child amount to Desmond’s understanding of affirmation, and is it the same as Desmond’s relation between self-affirmation and the affirmation of the goodness of given being? What might differentiate Desmond and Nietzsche on this score? Does the responsibility of gratitude lessen, or even negate, the gift of “being for itself” that God bestows in his creation? In what way is gratitude tied to affirmation?

4. Wonder

Wonder: “William Desmond’s philosophy begins in wonder. It wonders at the aesthetic richness of the world, at our own mysterious depths, at the strangeness of there being anything at all” (1). Desmond considers a particular form of wonder to be most primordial: astonished wonder, “astonishment at the too-muchness of being” (35). Wonder is, as Socrates tells Theaetetus, the pathos of the philosopher (Theaetetus 155D). Wonder is something that happens to me, something that strikes me from beyond my anticipation. Moreover, this being struck by wonder is possible only because I am constitutively open to wonder.

The primal experience of astonished wonder opens to two related but derivative forms of wonder: perplexity and curiosity. Unlike wonder as such, which “entails an implicit, spontaneous affirmation” and thus is “agapeic” and “gives rise to gratitude and reverence,” perplexity “rattles and disturbs,” arousing in me a desire to “search for solid ground, for a secure grip on things” (36). Perplexity then narrows into curiosity, as it becomes interested in finding solutions to increasingly determinate, specific problems. Knepper helpfully summarizes: “Astonishment discloses being as richly over determinate. Perplexity discloses it as ambiguously indeterminate. Curiosity, on the other hand, is concerned with determinate knowledge, with how things work, with identifying and solving problems” (40).

What distinguishes Desmond’s philosophy is his insistence on the priority of astonished wonder over these two other modes of wonder throughout the adventure of philosophical thinking. Philosophy begins in wonder, yes, but it also ends in wonder and is companioned throughout by renewed wonder (xi). A philosophical practice that is not companioned by wonder is subject to a kind of tyrannical perplexity or curiosity that approaches the overdetermination or “too muchness” of being with fear and a desire to control.

Another feature of Desmond’s thought that Knepper points out is Desmond’s sense that wonder strikes first not in a moment of contemplating the existence of things generally, but in astonishment at the particular. It is the astonished wonder at the singular that first awakens our astonishment at the being there of anything at all. The experience of astonished wonder at the singular is also not a moving away from the singular even as it moves “beyond” the singular and to the transcendent: “To experience the transcendent via this beautiful painting or song is hardly to stop attending to it. To be struck by the strangeness of this child existing is hardly to brush the child aside” (109).

This centrality of wonder and openness to the plenitude of being also keeps Desmond’s philosophy open to its “significant others” or “companioning” approaches to being: art and religion. The prevalence of wonder is a reminder that being is always too much for thought, and that it is precisely this too muchness to which thought must be faithful. Philosophical thought will, as Desmond says, inevitably fail:

To be absolutely true to the plenitude of this happening is all but impossible for us, and indeed failure of some sort is inevitable. But this impossible truthfulness is asked of us, even if inevitable failure brings us back to the truth of our finitude. This failure may itself be a success of sorts, in renewing metaphysical astonishment before the enigma of being that was, and is, and always will be too much for us, in excess of our groping efforts.2

Paradoxically, it is in the failure of thought to capture being that thought is perhaps most true to being, but only when it confesses its own inadequacy before the plenitude of being. This self-recognition enables philosophy to accept art and religion as companions, rather than ways of mindfulness that are to be, in the end, overcome by philosophy (à la Hegel).

In Desmond’s philosophy, it seems to be precisely a sense of wonder that keeps philosophy itself open to the divine. Knepper claims (and I concur), “If one were to approach Desmond’s thought through a single poem, Hopkins’s ‘God’s Grandeur’ would be a fitting choice” (113). We see in this poem, as in Desmond’s thought, an attentiveness to the way in which man can both commodify nature and alienate himself from it. More importantly, though, we see in both a deeply sacramental vision of nature. The beauty and excess of nature is “hyperbolic”—it “throws us toward the creator but also returns us to the creation with a heightened awareness and a vocation of care” (114). This unmistakably Catholic vision of creation as sacrament undergirds Desmond’s entire philosophy.

As a student of Desmond’s and a great admirer of his thought, I am deeply grateful to Knepper for his work in Wonder Strikes, both for the way in which this book provides a much needed introduction to Desmond’s philosophy and for the way in which it has renewed my own appreciation for Desmond’s thought.

This was a case of metaphysics, at least as difficult for Joe to deal with as for me.
—Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, vol. 1, chapter 91

After his first day at Miss Haversham’s dreadful house, Pip returns home, disturbed, to the blacksmith’s forge where he lives with his abusive sister and her meek husband, Joe Gargery. At this pivotal plot moment in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Pip recalls the traumatic singularity of this day that “made great changes in me,” the first link in a “long chain” that would bind his life.2 His childlike astonishment at the world has been warped by an old woman’s perverse desire to see a child at play and the young Estella’s proud cruelty toward his “common” habits. Frightened by these happenings, Pip lies about them to his sister, regaling long tales of a lavish game with swords, flags, and dogs. When Joe Gargery hears these stories, his “helpless amazement” prompts Pip to honesty:

“You remember all that about Miss Havisham’s?”

“Remember?” said Joe. “I believe you! Wonderful!”

“It’s a terrible thing, Joe; it ain’t true.”

“What are you telling of, Pip?” cried Joe, falling back in the greatest amazement. “You don’t mean to say it’s—”3

What follows is Joe’s gentle effort to counsel Pip, although this requires them both to recountenance all the day’s wonder, astonishment, and perplexity. Joe vanquishes his credulity by stepping into the breach between muddled fictions and hard truths, between Pip’s desperation and his own love for Pip. He mediates in this “case of metaphysics” by playing the companioning role of philosopher, confessor, and father, reassuring Pip that he sees him as wonderfully “oncommon.” If Pip is at all common, the way toward “oncommon” living will be something like what William Desmond would term the passio essendi (patience of being), as it has been for any “unpromoted Prince”: “‘Ah!’ added Joe. With a shake of the head that was full of meaning, ‘and begun at A too, and worked his way to Z.'”4 Joe’s expressions of unlearned wisdom are comic, as he then concedes that he has never made it to the end of the alphabet.5 Yet his words are an important corrective to the Bildungsroman‘s tragic momentum and the deforming of Pip’s conatus essendi (his endeavor to be)—the dangerous “distension” of his great expectations (Knepper 18, 22). Skilled in striking the anvil, Dickens’s Joe is distinctively open to wonder’s strikes. He is vulnerable to its counterfeits, too, but he has a generosity of spirit—an agapeic mind (19)—that accompanies Pip to the novel’s final pages. “‘Ah!’ added Joe.”

I am inspired to begin my reflections on Steven F. Knepper’s Wonder Strikes: Approaching Aesthetics and Literature with William Desmond with Dickens because Dickens furnishes the last of Knepper’s many compelling demonstrations of the metaxological approach to literature for which he advocates. My thoughts on Jim Gargery glean from how Knepper sets Desmond’s philosophy to work in his interpretation of Ebenezer Scrooge’s transformation in A Christmas Carol from quintessential miser into a man who “laughs a redemptive laugh that affirms the goodness of being” (198). Dickens has not been a postmodern favorite, as Desmond notes in his foreword to Wonder Strikes. This has been at the expense, not just of his fiction’s good cheer, but also his “lucid vision of our dark condition”—and what lies between (xiv–xv). Knepper’s application of Desmond’s thought to writers from Dickens to Toni Morrison, Herman Melville, and so many more, foregrounds all the in-betweenness of the modern novel, which has made its historic conquest of our imaginations in metaxological terrain: between intimate first-person expression and remote third-person observation; between the comic and the tragic; between the low and the high; between imitation and creation, between the common and the uncommon.

Wonder Strikes is written as a warm invitation to do as its subtitle proposes—to approach aesthetics and literature (poetry and fiction) in the company of William Desmond. Knepper models the kind of “companioning” at the philosophical heart of Desmond’s project (xi, passim). The book’s first part is a welcome entry point to Desmond’s aesthetic theory, equipped with crisp definitions of his writing’s essential lexis. In chapter 1, Knepper discusses Desmond’s “aesthetics of happening,” detailing how receptivity and porosity, abundance, affirmation, and different modes of wonder are constitutive of our encounters with the “too-muchness” of the world in which art plays its intermediating part, together with religion and philosophy (13).

Knepper generously explains how Desmond’s philosophy is porous to his own poetic gift, just as his poems are to his philosophy. In chapter 2’s account of “the call of beauty,” he quotes an especially poetic passage from Desmond’s interpretation of J. M. W. Turner’s The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons. Turner, according to Desmond, “‘is catching the conflagration as it flamed and his painting hand catches fire'” (56). This phrasing inevitably recalls the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins—the kingfishers catching fire and dragonflies drawing flame that denote the “singular particularity” of all things, doing the same thing that all creatures do as they “selve” that which they are (113).6 Knepper’s gift is to catch densely poetic, intertextual passages like this one and show how Desmond lets art, philosophy, and religion draw flame from one another. In this context, Knepper proposes a metaxological account of the posture and practice of literary creativity. Here is a vision of the writer as mediator, moving blithely between “external and internal otherness,” between “imitation and creation,” between this world and otherworlds, between poetry and prayer, between apophasis and cataphasis. No wonder Knepper is confident in arguing that many of Desmond’s philosophical concepts offer “affordances for literary criticism” (135).

This confidence leads to Knepper’s attractive proposal for how we can read within and between the many intellectual legacies that we inherit. If we have been raised on a hermeneutic of suspicion—a way of thinking assigned to rather than chosen by now many generations of young scholars—can we still aspire to a hermeneutic of affirmation that does not abandon all our acquired critical acumen (160–62)? Knepper thinks this possible. In the book’s second part, “Reading in the Between,” he considers governing critical theories with the mind of a thinker convinced of the goodness of being and what Desmond terms its “overdeterminacy” (1). The way of reading Knepper is grounding will be “marked by patient openness and a certain critical humility” (139). This disposition presumes that interpreting a text cannot exhaust it, unlike the shrinkage to which we subject texts whenever we consent to the hermeneutic limits set by a particular theory or ideology.

A metaxological approach to reading does not necessarily supplant other approaches but rather leaves them what Hopkins calls “root-room”—room to grow if they have life.7 Such reading will move judiciously between discourses, not blindly affirming errors but compassionately affirming honest disclosures. It offers what Knepper terms “affordances that are to be found in a generous study of earlier thinkers.” These can free our literary readings from the intellectual “‘straightjacket'” into which so many scholars have squeezed their thinking in an academy that long ago stepped out “‘beyond metaphysics'” (194). When wonder strikes, metaphysics resonates anew, not overwhelming but enlivening our encounters with literary art.8

Knepper’s hope for what he calls “criticism in the metaxu“—”balancing critique with affirmation”—has much in common with the post-critical turn in literary theory (7, 132). In an important chapter on “Epiphanic Encounters,” he compares Desmond’s understanding of reading as intermediation with Rita Felski’s concept of “co-making” (133–34).9 He applauds the commonsense return to character for which Felski, Amanda Anderson, and Toril Moi have recently argued. New historicism’s preference for discontinuities over continuities and the reductionism of psychoanalytic approaches are noted as examples of methodologies that have been inevitably formulaic, like “a cookie cutter that carves the same shape into every text” (135). Knepper’s alternative is not one more literary theory to rival the others but rather an extension of Desmond’s metaxology toward an understanding of literary texts as epiphanic encounters and epiphanic encounters as constitutive of literary texts from Genesis to Joyce.

This restoration to literature of its epiphanic potential is an inviting proposal for formal scholarship and also for teaching in the college classroom. What are we up to when we invite students into the literary worlds we assign to them? What if the study of literature were to become, before all else, an exercise in agapeic attention, not uncritical in its affirmations, but always entailing “an attentive openness and patience prior to such critique” (139). This is a kindred approach to what Michael Tomko, following Samuel Taylor Coleridge and J. R. R. Tolkien, has called the “poetic faith” we need in our literary explorations.10 A metaxological approach to literature is an invitation for students and professors alike to wonder together at the goodness of being and to countenance their own capacity to be radically transformed by encounters with beauty, with art, with one another, not to mention the “‘companioning’ power of the divine” (161).

As in any good classroom, laughter occupies a culminating place in this metaxological vision of literary art. Knepper explains how this focus on the comic is not at the expense of the tragic but rather emerges from Desmond’s recalibration of the Aristotelian privilege given to the noble and the tragic with respect to the low and the comic. These arguments about “redemptive laughter” are particularly well suited to analysis of the novel, which has always teetered uncomfortably between genres, “between tragic lack and comic excess” (175). I am drawn once again to Dickens’s Great Expectations and to the fraught relationship between Joe Gargery and Pip. When little Pip learns to read and write, his entry into literacy brings with it a realization of Joe’s illiteracy. He scrawls a note on his charcoal slate, promising to teach Joe to read just as Joe will teach him to be a blacksmith: “JO WOT LARX.”11 He is imagining a purposeful, playful life of comic companioning—and reading. But the happenings at Miss Haversham’s will introduce a desperate impatience into Pip’s sense of who he is and should become. This new imbalance between passio and conatus has a tragic tilt, which Joe perceives when he visits Pip in London after an anonymous benefactor has sent him forth to pursue his indeterminate “great expectations.” Joe has a note written to announce his visit in which “He wishes [the scribe] most particular to write what larks.” The now foppish Pip receives this message “with considerable disturbance, some mortification, and a keen sense of incongruity” (199). Joe is, indeed, comically incongruous in his city garb when he arrives at Pip’s lavishly furnished quarters, his eyes “rolling round and round the room, and round and round the flowered pattern of my dressing-gown.”12 The scene is painfully epiphanic for Pip, in the moment and in the retelling. His tragic course has a Faustian feel, all the more eerie because any diabolical deal was made in childhood. As he beholds Joe beholding him, however, Pip sees himself anew—adorned, foolish, and callous. Joe may be comically beside himself in his perplexity at Pip, but his generously agapeic mind registers the wonder of Pip’s being even as he refuses to affirm him in that dressing gown. Narrator Pip is, of course, recounting all this with the clarity of what Desmond terms “posthumous mind”—a mind newly awakened and attentive to all that was nearly lost (20). This hard-won perspective on his forestalled tragic course is drenched with tears. But it is also resonant with the kind of affirming laughter that, as Knepper writes, “offers another way of undoing the hardened conatus and returning to the passio” (175).

Pip’s tears get turned to laughter—licensing all the comic episodes scattered throughout his narrative—thanks to Joe’s patient agapeic gaze that lets the novel finally tilt from tragic collapse toward comic affirmation. Pip falls ill after his great expectations are confounded. Febrile, he hallucinates that he is a brick in a wall or a steel beam in an engine. It is as if he can only imagine himself, dehumanized, as a cog in the machine of history. Like Jacob and the angel, he wrestles with fantastical people he thinks are trying to murder him—only to discover “that they meant to do me good” and that “all these people sooner or later . . . settle down into the likeness of Joe.” Pip has been misreading the world as a place of mere acquisition and ambition (or, as Knepper might flag it, “serviceable disposability”), learning to suspect and fear it (4). When he recovers, however, he discovers that Joe is indeed at his bedside, gazing with a “face that looked so hopefully and tenderly upon me.”13 Joe has been reading the world better all along. Present to Pip on the threshold of his derangement, Joe knows how to companion his anguished descent toward tragic failure and his restoration to wonder. Just as Scrooge finally “laughs a redemptive laugh that affirms the goodness of being”—transforming himself and his story—Joe Gargery offers a winning emblem of what it is like to be disposed to wonder’s strikes.

As Knepper notes in his discussion of Desmond’s concept of idiot wisdom, a disposition like Joe’s “recognizes the worth of the singular in a way that will seem excessive, even foolish to ‘universal’ reason” (70). Is it absurd to choose Joe as exemplary of how to read fiction and, more boldly, how to read one another and the world? When I read about Joe, I find him wonderful. He is, of course, too good to be true, certainly more like a holy fool than a sophisticated scholar. Yet the logic of Wonder Strikes, culminating in “redemptive laughter,” prompted me to pick Joe, disposed as he is to larks and wonders, as the right companion for the task of reviewing this wonderful book. Knepper has movingly brought into focus all the ameliorative hope in Desmond’s philosophy and shown how it offers a glimpse of restoration and remedy for what ails our thinking and our teaching whenever “they are not sourced in astonished wonder” (95).

What I most appreciate about Steven E. Knepper’s thoughtful and expansive monograph Wonder Strikes is, at face value, obvious: I love its engaging presentation of the work of William Desmond. As Desmond was, until recently, mostly unknown to me, Knepper’s book has helped open a new world of interpretive possibility. But what most intrigues me about Knepper’s book is something a little different, and the clue here is found in a section of the book that feels more familiar, situating Desmond’s novelty in context. This is where Knepper discusses the work of Rita Felski, whose arguments for postcritique have marked an important moment of reckoning for literary studies. Knepper doesn’t seem consumed by postcritique per se: his brief appeal to Felski is, if anything, more taken with the uses of literature (the title of Felski’s precursor to The Limits of Critique), though postcritique hovers in the background.1 Reading, Knepper elaborates through Felski, is an “imaginative supplement” we bring to a text, “a process of ‘co-making'” that arises from, as Desmond would call it, a text’s overdeterminacy, its openness to multiple aspects of potential significance. “Because [Desmond’s] metaxological approach recognizes the work as overdetermined, it affirms the possible insights of any number of critical approaches and their attendant concepts—biographical, formalist, feminist, historical, and so forth.” In this respect, Desmond’s concepts of perpetual betweenness (“metaxology”) and porosity are, like Felski’s model of postcritique, “less an approach than a framework,” a way of opening ourselves to ways texts may move us and act on us.2

Brief though it is, this section of Wonder Strikes helps explain what I find especially provocative about Knepper’s book. Let me provide some context. Over the past decade, especially, several scholars I admire, particularly scholars of religious faith, have expressed their hunger for a vision like Felski’s—and, in Knepper’s treatment, Desmond’s—in literary studies. That vision, as they see it, is more overdetermined than ideological, more evocative than suspicious: in the common currency, it’s a vision they deem postcritical, and some of these friends have sought to adopt Felski’s vision for postsecular criticism. Lori Branch, for example, wonders whether, through postcritique,

we might begin to glimpse a scholarly culture in which spiritual, religious experiences of hope, belief, love, and longing weren’t routinely dismissed or secularized; whether the reparative types of reading Felski approves might recognize their kin in the poetry of praise or the prose of repentance; . . . [and] whether we can acknowledge the ways that religious sensibilities have much to tell us about how to approach a text “as a phenomenon to be engaged” rather than merely an “inert object to be scrutinized.”3

Branch is a master of the stirring manifesto. But Felski’s reply to this line of inquiry, while appreciative, is also, tellingly, squeamish. It accedes a formal similarity to the “religious sensibilities” Branch invokes (“both [postcritique and postsecularity] include encounters with the numinous, the transfigurative, the inexplicable”) while keeping the two approaches at arm’s length (“My emphasis, as [Branch] points out, is squarely on aesthetic, rather than religious, enchantment”).4 Felski perceives the potential for meaningful dialogue between postcritique and postsecularity; she even spent a day as an invited guest at the 2019 NEH seminar on postsecularity that Branch organized with Mark Knight (the editor of Literature and Theology, an excellent venue for literature and religion). But ultimately, if openness-qua-expressions-of-faith are what Branch has in mind, however overdetermined—however truly open—such expressions may be, Felski isn’t going there.

And neither, in a way, does Knepper. And that is what I find so provocative about Wonder Strikes. Because affectively, his book seems to share more with Branch than with Felski, more with those who are open to religion than with those for whom religion triggers an allergic, familiarly suspicious, reaction. But unlike Branch and some of her contemporaries, Knepper expresses little if any inclination to reveal how iconic thinkers and schools of thought (e.g., Derrida, whom Branch evokes, or Lyotard, as I have5) are “always already” postsecular. Indeed, Knepper seems largely unconcerned about making a space for religious thinking among the normative, secular registers of modern thought. I do not believe this is because Knepper is unsympathetic to thinking that takes religious faith seriously. He simply proceeds as though such thinking, as one expression of porosity, already finds its own norms and oracles, with Desmond being his pertinent case in point. For this reason, there is little that strikes me as “post-iche” (postsecular, postcritical, postmodern . . .) about Wonder Strikes, little that betrays a self-conscious sense of belatedness in a crowded, distracted, and potentially indifferent marketplace of ideas. Instead, and reflecting the openness it describes, Wonder Strikes is expository rather than polemical. What, it asks, is this wonderfully overdetermined object, this philosophy of Desmond’s? What might it bring to literary studies? And how does it expound on work by thinkers of a similar cast of mind—people like Byung-Chul Han, Richard Kearney, Catherine Pickstock, Gabriel Marcel, Jacques Maritain, Jean-Louis Chrétien, and others?

To this extent, Wonder Strikes seems to belong more to a decades-long theological turn—more to a world whose cultural imaginary proceeds from such origins as Jewish philosophical ethics and Vatican II, and that thus moves easily across literary criticism and systematic theology—than to a more recent, and understandably defensive, postsecular turn whose laureate is Charles Taylor. A Secular Age, though a remarkably influential achievement, concedes a point in its very title: we live in a secular world, yes . . . but that secularity is not what you think it is! By contrast, Desmond’s world, and by extension Knepper’s, has fewer preliminary obstacles. It is strikingly, gloriously overdetermined, and so the best we can do is open ourselves to it in wonder and then find ways to respond.

Knepper enacts such a response by unfolding four tenets central to Desmond’s philosophy. First, he discusses Desmond’s aesthetic of wonder, a sensual and thus embodied excess that “pour[s] over and through us. At times, it breaks through our numbness, striking us.”6 Desmond’s concept bears similarities to others that draw from a tradition of theological aesthetics, from Hans Urs von Balthasar’s extensive meditations on transcendence to Richard Kearney’s “carnal hermeneutics.”7 As Knepper shows, and this is his second point, Desmond’s “incarnate” aesthetics impel us to reconsider beauty as a vehicle of wonder, as what “testifies to forms that are not closed but open. [Beauty] testifies to open wholes that communicate beyond themselves.”8 Third, for Desmond, art that produces and provokes us to reflect on beauty thus becomes a means of instruction; it situates us in a lush “between” (in Knepper’s treatment, between imitation and craft, inspiration and skill, and traditions and individual talents) that frames experience. Art, drawing on both (and situating itself between) religion and philosophy, becomes a privileged medium for incarnating the differential aspects of wonder as astonishment and/or as perplexity. Fourth, these features of experience—wonder, openness, and beauty—place us evocatively in the realm of the sacred, which impresses on us “the excess and mystery of being.”9 Knepper takes special care to contrast these sacred facets of our existence with the “serviceable disposability”—the reductive, impoverishing instrumentality—that characterizes so much of modern life. And once he lays these foundations of Desmond’s thought, he proceeds in the second half of his book to present a series of illustrative encounters with works of literature: ancient, Biblical, and Melvillean epics; James Joyce’s experiments with narrative; Shakespearean tragedy; and Dickensian flights of festivity and memory.

Throughout, Knepper’s book indirectly reveals the deep secularity of so much postsecular discourse. It is not that postsecular discourse is irreligious (as the religion/irreligion binary is one most postsecular criticism deconstructs) but rather that it is deeply bound up in its own time and circumstances. Hence, it wasn’t 9/11 alone to which postsecular critics began responding but also the critical injunction to “Always historicize!”10 In the form of new historicism, this axiom demanded that critics negotiate the mechanics of poststructuralism within a “cultural poetics” that accounted for a text’s material (including its historical) conditions of possibility. Here, postsecular criticism found itself on two sides of a line. On one side, it contested the dialectical-material bases of the historicist turn by insisting on religious and spiritual facets of our natures that are irreducible to crude materialism.11 But on the other, it made this case by adopting historicist premises, namely that history (e.g., 9/11) revealed that the secularization thesis was fundamentally unsound.12 In effect, then, postsecular criticism emerged in the early 2000s as an autodeconstructive enterprise—it argued compellingly against the historicist logic of its own articulation. Whatever the structural weakness of this approach, it was also a source of strength inasmuch as postsecular critics could present otherwise unfamiliar thinking in a familiar form: why religion matters now.13 (“Always sacralize”?)

In Knepper’s treatment, Desmond’s thought seemingly involves little of this drama. It is far more evocative than dogmatic, too taken with overdetermination, perhaps, to insist that one particular aspect of its philosophical approach “matters now!” But this prompts, for me, several questions around a critical intervention like Knepper’s—questions with which I will conclude:

Why Desmond now? And is “Why Desmond now?” even a proper way to approach his work? If not, what suggests that this work can draw and maintain attention?

Would Knepper consider himself a postsecular critic? If so, where does he situate his work relative to the critical mass of postsecular thought? And if not, does he hew instead to the earlier theological turn? In short, does Knepper see his work in terms of recent critical history?

What is the relationship between the “incarnate aesthetics” Knepper expounds in Wonder Strikes and the historical-materialist aesthetic that provided the grist for cultural studies?

Lastly, Wonder Strikes is, perhaps, the best exhibit of why scholars interested in literature and religion—scholars given to a postsecular bent of mind—might find real value in Desmond’s work. And ultimately, it is the integrity of our critical engagements of Desmond that will determine the latter’s viability for literary studies. So how do we describe the meaning of this engagement? In the spirit of Desmond’s work, is it possible to find ourselves “metaxologically” between the residual historicism of present-day postsecularity and a postsecularity that operates on entirely different grounds? Might any of these questions prompt, in the spirit of Knepper’s book, wonder (whether astonishment or perplexity) at the state of our current critical climate? Is there anything sacred about our era of “crisis”?

Catharsis is purgation—unclogging the porosity. There is a horror in this unclogging, for we have covered our more intimate souls with carapaces of powerful protection, and these carapaces are now being pierced and dissolved. This is like a death bringing us to nothing; but there is a stream of compassion in the purged porosity; the purge allows the fluency of life’s energy of affirmation to flow again.1

In daily life, we use the word “tragedy” for a myriad of experiences as if no definition is necessary. This is telling. The tragic is such a permeating expression that it lives as the coverall to the absolute, the descriptive correlate for the incommunicable grief, for the denuding of our many visages, and for the appearance of that face in each of us which no mirror can reflect. Why is it that the term “tragedy” becomes the common designation for the unexpressed but surely felt language of chance, probabilities, possibilities, ifs and what ifs that populate every recollection when the bottom falls out?

Tragedy is the pervasive label for bad timing, inopportune timing, terrible, terrifying lamentable timing. If only a day later, a minute earlier and second later, then our loved one is not wrapped up in the fatalism of chance. In the everyday, the term is both flexible as to cover a penumbra of situations and yet demands the precision of a specifically designated experience. Tragedy is the template for “the howl” and its power to march back in time and alter memories; how the howl has a way of inhabiting and upending past happiness. This word is the frontispiece for the aching chasm of the unfinished, unresolved, and unsaid. “Tragedy” is the universal story of the human condition yet intimate and unrepeatable. “It is tragic” is the repeated expression by strangers united in sorrow, and yet each is separated by a gulf of difference. The word “tragedy” stands present and cloaked for us, we need what it offers and yet are exiled by what it gives, and in the very moment it is uttered.2 Tragedy is the allotted expression for our inability to escape evil; there are no utopias to be made. When they are attempted, it results in the devastation of faith and transcendence. Tragedy is most acutely the placeholder expression for the unserviceability to manage or “fix” death. What is at the surface is pulling us into deeper waters, and up may be down. Our only anchor is this phenomenal placing, this declaration: the tragic. With Nietzsche:

A man who has thus, so to speak, put his ear to the heart-chamber of the cosmic will, who feels the furious desire for existence issuing therefrom as a thundering stream or most gently dispersed brook, into all the veins of the world, would he not collapse all at once? Could he endure, in the wretched fragile tenement of the human individual, to hear the re-echo of countless cries of joy and sorrow from the “vast void of cosmic night,” without flying irresistibly toward his primitive home at the sound of this pastoral dance-song of metaphysics? But if, nevertheless, such a work can be heard as a whole, without a renunciation of individual existence, if such a creation could be created without demolishing its creator—where are we to get the solution of this contradiction?3

“Tragedy” describes deaths, diseases, losses, dramatic downward changes in fortune. But our historical, philosophical, theological, literary, cultural, and aesthetic preoccupation with the experience raises it above a vague and broadly construed affectivity nor does it allow itself to be over-determined or pinned down. “There is something of the sacred in this excess, of the ultimate, and like all such experiences it is at the limit of language.” The tragic oscillates in the metaxu, as Knepper’s writing ventures “in the middle space between the poetic and systematic.”4 When we do use the term in a more defined way, it falls into the well-known exegetical structure of Aristotle’s Poetics with hamartia, anagnorisis, peripeteia, and the overlooked catharsis. While useful, Steven Knepper, anchored deftly in Desmond, and acknowledging Steiner and Eagleton, unsheathes another way to approach tragic being. Knepper’s approach more chiefly responds to the person as absolute singular who resides within the tidal amplification and recession of Being (to “being at a loss”) and thus more fully realizes catharsis.

Wonder Strikes is a magnificent achievement because it excels in excavating, and without an opprobrious systematization, the chiaroscuro of meaning which orients the grandeur and the terror of real wonder which is both rupture and rapture. What it means to encounter the Beautiful is no decorative accoutrement. What happens to the human person when immersed in rebirth and conversion cannot be conditioned into overdetermination nor left fallow in hazier emotion. The work gives us the tools to approach catharsis and to have a profound understanding of tragic meaning. Chapter 6 “Tragic Howls and Being at a Loss,” calls to mind our originary ordering in wonder and to question what is the true essence of the tragic as tragic? We wonder and plumb our mysterious deep. What is the difference between an evil action as compared to a tragic one? How is guilt involved? Does, for example, Macbeth’s freedom as guilt render him unable to be a tragic figure even if what he produces are the circumstance for tragic experience and tragic figures? The malevolent villain plays a part in the rise of a tragic figure, but how can his actions be tragic if within his control and motivated by their own deplorable moral code? These calibrations are subtle and must avoid overdetermination and lack of illumination. With Knepper:

This is an explicit theme of Macbeth where foul becomes fair. The Weird Sisters perhaps represent not only temptation, but also the depths within us from which temptation emerges. Because humans are open wholes, that place is equivocal and mysterious. It is inside us but also open to influence. If the Weird Sisters are intimate with Macbeth’s psyche, it would be too simple to reduce them to it. Desmond claims, “Macbeth toys with an act. But he is also being toyed with.”5

The tragic involves a collision of the fates, freedoms, the guilty and the guiltless. Something appears to be tragic when there is a collision between two realms. The majestic and vast potentialities of human life are cut back by an opposing order, a relentless cosmology, an ontological fatalism which overrides these potentialities which, as great potentialities, still seek to persist and fulfill themselves even as they are being cut down. Tragedy occurs in the miscalibration of the conatus and passio, where eros emerges as a self-enclosed anti-cathartic echo chamber, a violence of ego for Macbeth or willful blindness for Lear. The possibility of catharsis occurs only when all ends are weighted within a singular figure whose actions somehow contain the all, and yet this all is unable to be endured. What then must happen, what choices are to be made?

The tragic figure as absolute singular is entirely free and wholly fated, an uncalculated mystery and an inevitable consequence of a series of choices. Our preoccupation with the tragic is that it strips open, and into revelation, one human life in its own elegiac sovereignty. Each human being is the end of meaning, not as stopgap but as elongated finality, a metaxic porosity. Tragedy is distinct from sickness unto death, even from the evil that is within and without. It is not an affectivity or a mood but an interior knowing that simultaneously violates knowledge. The tragic essence punctures every cell of reality, and because of this it cannot be contained. Its essence is to become the person, to reveal one’s absolute singular just as parasitical parasomnia becomes Macbeth who refuses its corrective cathartic nourishment. His porosity is calcified as sponge ossified without water and tide:

Methought I heard a voice cry, “Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep”—the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.6

In King Lear, Lear’s madness becomes his higher redemptive sanity. In the tragic, Lear is unable to maintain the consistent hardness of self-deception. He can no longer continue the extension and mirroring of his horizontal egoistic sanity. This metaxic porosity breaks through the cracks:

And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world,
Crack nature’s molds, all germens spill at once
That make ingrateful man!7

Lear’s allegiance to his own deception prevents porosity and hardens him into a visage of disingenuous sanity. He “thinks he is a generous and magnanimous King, but there is a cataract over his porosity that only allows distortions to make their way through.”8 When tragedy becomes him, he becomes mad and only through that sacred madness—the very expression of his absolute singularity—is His receptivity recovered, and with it the possibility of catharsis:

Since I was man,
Such sheets of fire, such bursts of horrid thunder,
Such groans of roaring wind and rain I never
Remember to have heard.
Man’s nature cannot carry
Th’ affliction nor the fear.9

Tragedy fills us with truth as it impoverishes thought structures. It dissolves all “carapaces.” It makes the human being porous. The tragic figure cannot speak he is the speaking, his action is the utterance, he becomes his own absolute singular for all to see. The particular as the universal. In tragedy, the whole of existence is experienced in one all event, as if universal time is caught up in one particular event, the tragedy itself. Yet because we are particular beings, each having to experience life in his or her own absolute singular, tragedy frees us into that knowledge of the All and then appears to trap us in its fate. We have experienced the All but cannot act in it. And this “cannot-act” is the acting, is the metaxological abidance, the stretched finality. Tragedy liberates and traps the experiencer in its fate/unfathomability—this sheer and violent union of freedom and fate, knowledge and ignorance, contingency and inevitability becomes the essence of the tragic! The contradiction itself reveals the essence of the tragic, what should not go together is precisely what goes together.10

Tragedy can leave the philosopher at a loss in two ways—before the annihilating “never” and the wondrous “once.” No system can make either fully determinate. A true confrontation with them will always leave the philosopher at a loss for words, or at least the right words.11

The tragic enters the region of the absolute singular. It exists in the boundaries where freedom and fate, contingency and inevitability, knowledge and ignorance, innocence and guilt co-exist in one person. They are contradictory for the systematic philosopher, yet their combination is what constitutes the elusive essence of the tragic, and the expressed vision of each human person. This is perhaps why in the everyday the term “tragedy” is such a permeating and almost omnipresent label. Desmond in Wonder Strikes acknowledges this and more: “Such perplexity is as ancient as it is modern, as medieval as it is postmodern. We are not newcomers in wrestling with the chiaroscuro of the finite between.”12 For Desmond, tragedy’s confounding union of poles, this “being at a loss” is akin to a “near-death experience.” It is the type of Platonic dying where the way down is truly the way up, where what was once waking life is but a dissevering somnambulance. We see this most clearly in the figure of Lear and his catharsis through receptivity to otherness. In unlearning his flattened serviceable sanity—one that revolves around flattery—he learns the holy madness of truth and porosity, and sees, for the first time, his real communion with other absolute singulars such as Poor Tom (Edgar). “Edgar, himself has been returned to harrowing vulnerability—framed by his brother, sentenced to death by his father—but instead of fleeing he patiently waits in disguise for opportunities to serve.”13 When Lear is filled with empathy encountering Poor Tom shivering in his nudity, with nothing but a blanket, he envisions his own absolute singular: “Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings! Come. Unbutton here.”14 Lear learns through suffering and shakes off his spiritual sleepwalking:

Come, let’s away to prison.
We two will sing like birds i’ the cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing,
I’ll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness.15

Lear wakes to the numinous beauty of Cordelia’s love and through the other, is refreshed in light, knowing himself. His discovery of his own absolute singular is an overflow that is not self-affirming, as he has always been, but “other-affirming:”16 This is what the chiaroscuro of the finite between provides, this “other-affirming” is catharsis and what Nietzsche fails to achieve in all his will to power.17 Knepper shows us a way to understand tragedy as the percussive sound wave when the bell has been struck reaching into silence, communicating the unsaid without compelling it to speak ideationally. It is my view that Steve Knepper, in his fidelity to Desmond’s work on porosity, has found a startling avenue to approach tragic meaning, and to give fertile foundation for the neglected dimensions of catharsis. Catharsis is more than purgation, more than a cleaning of emotions, and it is not additive, as if transcendence is a leaving behind, a simple rising above. It is the unclothed, the foot that cannot feel the grass is finally unshod.18 It is the return to the inner Spring deep into the earth, to the inscape. Catharsis recovers the instress inside mystery, where Being keeps knowing and knowing forms an inlet enclosed in Being. Through our metaxic porosity, wonder strikes! We reach “the dearest freshness deep down things” and kiss the “dappled-with-damson west” and understand:

I kiss my hand

To the stars, lovely-asunder
Starlight, wafting him out of it; and
Glow, glory in thunder;
Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west:
Since, tho’ he is under the world’s splendour and wonder,
His mystery must be instressed, stressed;
For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand.19

I was not far into Wonder Strikes when I exhaled a bittersweet sigh. “Thank goodness,” I exclaimed inwardly, “that I published my book before he did. Otherwise, I’d have had to rethink everything I wanted to write about Desmond!” If William Desmond is the Master of metaxology—Desmond’s neologism—then I think it fair to call Steven Knepper the Maestro who deftly coaxes and weaves together the voices that resound in the metaxu, the “between.” Knepper’s book is a model of clarity, fidelity, and creativity. Clarity: the writing is crisp and reflects the work of an accomplished teacher. Fidelity: the text represents Desmond fairly and, at times critically, and Knepper refrains from ventriloquizing through the text to say what he believes Desmond ought to have said. For those familiar with Desmond’s oeuvre, there are no counterfeit Desmonds here! Creativity: fidelity to Desmond’s thought allows Knepper to put Desmond into conversation with a variety of interlocutors. Although Wonder Strikes is certainly a scholarly work on and about Desmond’s metaphysics, it is also an exercise in metaxology. True to Desmond’s own practice of philosophy, Knepper invites readers to be companions on a pilgrimage into the heart of the metaxu.

I want to center my comments on Knepper’s description of epiphanic encounters. An epiphany, he writes, unfolds in four movements:

1. There is a positive or determinate disclosure of the other.
2. There is at the same time an awakened sense of the other’s overdetermined mystery.
3. There is a resultant self-transformation.
4. There is an extension of wonder at the other to wonder at more broadly.1

As a theologian, I welcome what I recognize as Knepper’s sacramental attunement. An epiphany or sacrament is not something to be wrested violently from the other—human or divine—but must be welcomed or, in Desmond’s language, undergone (passio). Epiphanic encounters are at once informative and transformative: awakening to the overdeterminate mystery of the other initiates a transformative process within the beholder.

Of course, there are betrayals of epiphany. Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry” recounts such treason. Instead of welcoming a poem’s disclosure on its terms, students of poetry seek to extract its meaning through force, through an exertion of the conatus essendi. Rather than patiently undergoing the poem, the reader attempts to work it over:

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

In a similar manner, Christian sacraments are likewise misinterpreted. Not infrequently do I hear the Eucharist caricatured as the event where the priest calls Jesus down from heaven and forces him into the bread and wine placed on the altar. Whether glimpsed in the impatient conatus of the impatient student or in the misinterpreted sacerdotal conatus, the epiphanic event or sacramental disclosure is ignored. The too-muchness of the poem’s meaning, the too-muchness of the divine presence, can be so all-encompassing as to become invisible.

While writing this response the song “Revelator Eyes” by the Paper Kites played on Spotify. How fitting that while writing about epiphanies one receives an epiphany out of the blue! The song, as I hear it, is about an epiphanic encounter that both threatens and promises to transform the person who is falling in love. Indeed, the epiphany catalyzed by being beheld by another’s “revelator eyes” de-centers and re-centers the singer:

Give me little reason to refuse my center
Shifting in with feelings of a sweet surrender
I can feel it I can feel it alone
And I know why I can see it show
In your revelator eyes
In your revelator eyes

The (potential) beloved’s “revelator eyes” are portals that are disclosive and invitatory. They disclose an offer of relationship and invite the addressee to the “sweet surrender” of communion. This “surrender,” however, is no conquest of the conatus. On the contrary, this transformational surrender is the consequence of having undergone the suasive passio initiated by the beloved and received as a gift, a grace.

Knepper appreciates and frames epiphanies as events both eccentric and ecstatic. Epiphanic encounters are initiated from an Other beyond or outside of the self. The ecstatic response to this address is not a haphazard “outer reaching” but is, instead, a directed “Other reaching” that woos one deeper into the mystery of the One who calls. As Knepper illustrates, we can discern these epiphanic addresses in poetry, in art, and literature. We can return again and again to the same work and find ourselves wonder struck at new insights, at new and transformative experiences as the text’s secret depths are made manifest. The epiphany of the poem, painting, or text touches and affects the interpreter in new and unexpected ways.

Knepper and I share an interest in the work of contemporary sociologist Hartmut Rosa. In The Uncontrollability of the World Rosa diagnoses the malaise of the modern era as its “having lost its ability to be called, to be reached.”2 The language Desmond and Knepper used to describe this state is that of being “clogged.” What fascinates me, though, is the way Knepper’s fourfold movement of epiphany maps onto the four characteristics of Rosa’s sense of relating to the world in a resonant way. A resonant relationship, he writes, entails (1) that one be affected by the other, (2) that this affective encounter elicit an emotional response that moves (emovere = to move out) the affected agent outward, (3) that this bilateral encounter result in a transformation in the affected agent, and (4) an understanding that this process cannot be controlled or manipulated. The world as other to the self remains fundamentally uncontrollable.3 A life-giving and life-affirming resonant relationship with the world must be allowed to emerge on its terms; there exists no step-by-step plan to establishing a resonant relationship. A resonant relationship with the world must be received, welcomed, and lived into. For the theologically attuned, Rosa guides readers to a threshold where sociology and mysticism touch: “Resonance requires giving up control over both what we encounter and the process of encountering it, and at the same time being able—and trusting in our ability—to reach out to this other side and establish contact with it.”4 God, the Divine Mystery, can be mediated through the finite but can neither be contained nor constrained by it.

In my imagination, I see Knepper and Rosa in a karaoke bar. They select a song by The Paper Kites but surreptitiously swap a single word to make the song reflect their shared insight into the world: Resonator Eyes. Out in the audience, Desmond raises a pint. He, too, makes a substitution. In place of his native Slainte he opts for a Greek expression germane to the song: Agape!

I recently read Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. If Haidt’s thesis about the “Great Rewiring” of the brain holds true, if the cellphone that was intended to be an instrument has become the environment for many, then one is left to wonder whether and how this generation will recognize and respond to epiphanies. My invitation/challenge to Knepper is to reflect on the status of the epiphany in our age. Can there be real epiphanies in virtual space? Can a sojourner in the digital desert encounter the Burning Bush and be called? Can the call to prophesy arise amidst megapixels? At its root, my question is that of a fellow teacher and companion in the metaxu who looks to a learned peer for counsel: Does the reconfigured ethos of cyberspace offer affordances that may lead to epiphanic encounters and resonant relationships? Does a digitally reconfigured ethos thwart such encounters and relationships? Might a (re)newed lectio divina attune us to the infinite depths of the world around us?

I submit this question, as much philosophical as pastoral, to my friend and companion in the metaxu!