Emily Dickinson and the Unknown God

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And Dickinson, the focus of this chapter, is revealed by her approximately 1,800 poems and poetic fragments to be, despite her unquestionable experiences of joy, loving identifiation with natural creatures, and illuminative transcendence, more typically and generally a poet of doubt, loneliness, longing, inward struggle, fury, alienation, dread, and depression—a master, as Harold Bloom puts it, “of every negative affect.”1 Also, contrary to her popular image, she is among the most cognitively demanding poets America has produced. And finally, she is a brilliant poetic explicator of what it means to live in the anxious openness of the “tension” of the metaxy—that is, in the unrestful, inescapable, and irresolvable tension of existence in-between world and transcendence, time and eternity, ignorance and knowledge, despair and faith, hope and fulfillment.2

Poet of the In-Between

As a prelude to exploring the way Dickinson’s artistic corpus constitutes an unusually faithful, extended testimony to the in-between, or metaxic, condition of human existence, we might briefly consider why a more accurate understanding of the character of Dickinson’s poetry and outlook, and, more important, an appreciation of her greatness as a poet, are not more common.

First, there was the long delay in the initial coming to light of her achievement, due to her life of intense privacy, to the withholding of her poems (no more than ten of which were published during her lifetime)3 and to their first being published—beginning in 1890, four years after her death—in small or incomplete editions, with the poems edited, punctuationally modified, and even linguistically altered, to suit conventional tastes. It was not until the 1950s and 1960s that the full scope of her accomplishment and her original versions became well known and that she entered the mainstream teaching canon and anthologies. And only the last few decades have shown a careful critical devotion to repairing the changes inflicted by her early editors, to the compiling of folio and variora editions, and to making publicly available her work as she wrote and preserved it.

Second, there is her poetic originality. Although her forms and meters are often familiar or even commonplace—especially the hymnal stanza form that she employs so frequently in her work—her poetic voice is utterly unique, and, once encountered, is instantly recognizable in its peculiarities of diction, concision, and metaphoric invention. Harold Bloom, however prone to hyperbole, does not overstate in remarking that “[l]iterary originality achieves scandalous dimensions in Dickinson. . . .”4

Third, Dickinson’s literary originality, however impressive, is in service of an even greater gift: what Bloom calls her “cognitive originality.” “Cognitive originality” is the capacity for, and the realized expression of, thinking that breaks new ground. It is the discovery or invention of previously unthought interpretations and meanings, the forging of new imaginative and ideational connections. Of Dickinson’s cognitive originality, it is nearly impossible to gain the measure. Again to quote the enthusiastic Bloom, with whom in this matter I once more agree:

Except for Shakespeare, Dickinson manifests more cognitive originality than any other Western poet since Dante. . . . Dickinson rethought everything for herself. . . . No commonplace survives her appropriation. . . . [Further, she] can think more lucidly and feel more fully than any of her readers, and she is very aware of her superiority. . . . [Indeed, we] confront, at the height of her powers, the best mind to appear among Western poets in nearly four centuries.5

Bloom is not alone in this assessment. Dickinson’s most admired biographer, Richard B. Sewall, also asserted that her creative use of the English language matched that of Shakespeare, and he compared the exuberantly “reckless” invention of her writing with that of the author of the Book of Job.6 Why, one might ask, is this extraordinary appraisal not more widely known?

One answer is that few people read beyond the anthologized poems, and those who make the attempt often find it difficult to keep up with Dickinson’s flashes of insight and audacities of expression. She is a poet, as Robert Weisbuch writes, “who will not stop thinking” and who in fact frequently thinks harder and more deeply than we wish her to. Thus it is that, as Clark Griffith writes, in the popularizing anthologies Dickinson’s worst poetry is often “confounded with her best,” her work persistently being misappreciated and “misread for the simple reason that her intelligence is slighted.”7 

And fourth, we must take into account that Dickinson was a woman. Most citizens in the republic of letters have simply not been prepared to accept that it is a woman who, at the height of her powers, confronts us with “the best mind . . . among Western poets” since Shakespeare.

Now, let us point out right away that neither literary power nor intellectual brilliance are invariably employed in serving an accurate explication of the truths of existence. Both literary and cognitive originality may, alas, provide us only with stunningly detailed accounts of “second realities,” to use the term for ideological fantasies that Voegelin borrows from the Austrian novelists Robert Musil and Heimito von Doderer.8 But in Emily Dickinson’s case, intellectual, emotional, and imaginative power is indeed matched by a severe honesty and perspicacious openness to reality. Her poems consistently explore and articulate genuine truths about the human situation in the cosmos; about the intricacies of consciousness and the ongoing constitution of “self”; about the facts, surprises, and mysteries of the natural world; about the central importance and yet ultimate impotence of language; and about our human relationship to the mystery of divine transcendence. Thus, it is not surprising to find in Dickinson’s work a recurrent emphasis on the fact that human beings are, first and last, passionate questioners and unsatisfiable yearners for a certainty and fulfillment that remain unavailable to us in this lifetime. In this regard, her poetry repeatedly echoes Voegelin’s analyses of consciousness and existence. For Dickinson, as for Voegelin, to be human is to be “the Question”— the questioning tension toward that divine ground of reality that is the origin, deepest identity, and ultimate concern of each of us—in the enacting of which, as long as we live, “there is no answer,” finally, “other than the [comprehending] Mystery as it becomes luminous in the acts of questioning.”9 We might say that for both writers existence is essentially a desire, a longing—and Dickinson could well be described as “the poet of longing” par excellence. One critic has indeed described her complete oeuvre as “a dramatization of a philosophy of desire.”10 Taking Dickinson’s desire, then, as normative desire, faithful to the truths of existence, let us examine, now, some of the evidence for Dickinson being a preeminent witness to the metaxic, or “in-between,” structure of existence, using Voegelin’s philosophy as our analytic touchstone.

The essential experience of human existence, writes Voegelin, is that of the “in-between,” the metaxy of Plato, which is neither time nor eternity. . . .

[And] let us recall [that in the human] experience of the tensions between the poles of time and eternity, neither does eternal being become an object in time, nor is temporal being transposed into eternity. We remain in the “in-between,” in a temporal flow of experience in which eternity is nevertheless present.11

[Human existence is thus] a disturbing movement in the In-Between of igno-rance and knowledge, of time and timelessness, of imperfection and perfection, of hope and fulf i llment, and ultimately of life and death.12

To reveal the parallel between this description and Dickinson’s poetic vision of existence, let us begin with some verses that indicate her affirmation that eternal reality is no “object in time”—is no external “place” or “thing”— but rather a reality revealed through the experience of divine presence in consciousness, which illuminates the “temporal flow of experience” as the in-between of time and timelessness. She writes:

The Blunder is in estimate
Eternity is there
We say as of a Station
Meanwhile he is so near
He joins me in my Ramble
Divides abode with me
No Friend have I that so persists
As this Eternity  (1690)13

This image of Eternity “dividing his abode” with Dickinson—being present, that is, as the divine partner who dwells with, and indeed co-constitutes, her self—is not an isolated trope in her work. Her sense of the intimate ontological interpenetration of her finite human longing and the divine presence who both establishes and draws forth that longing is concisely conveyed in the following short poem, which in its second stanza suggests how any intellectual analysis of this paradoxical intersection of time and timelessness must, for someone attentive to her lived experience of existence in the metaxy, appear no more than an artificial linguistic container:

He was my host – he was my guest,
I never to this day
If I invited him could tell,
Or he invited me.
So infinite our intercourse
So intimate, indeed,
Analysis as capsule seemed
To keeper of the seed. (1754)

More penetratingly still, from a poem in which the word awe in the first line denotes Jehovah, and in which the word residence in the third line refers both to the divine Beyond and to the human soul:

No man saw awe, nor to his house
Admitted he a man
Though by his awful residence
Has human nature been. 
[…]  (1342)

Thus we know of eternal being, of “Paradise,” only because divine presence condescends to “bisect” our worldly consciousness, inducing our longing for the divine mystery:

Of Paradise’ existence
All we know
Is the uncertain certainty –
But it’s vicinity, infer,
By it’s
Bisecting Messenger – (1421)

Paradise, Eternity, Immortality, Heaven, and God are all terms that serve Dickinson as references to what Voegelin calls the “pole of timelessness” experienced in the in-between of conscious existence. Both writers make clear that although we may identify and name this timeless reality, we never experience it as a “separate” being apart from “the temporal flow of experience” that is consciousness—and to uncritically imagine it after the manner of a spatiotemporal object (that is, as a “place,” or a “thing”) is to delusionally misconstrue it. We know of “eternal being,” of transcendence, as the ground of existence and of nature only by virtue of the fact that human consciousness is experienced and understood as being co-constituted by temporal and eternal reality, as being an ontological “in-between” where time and timelessness interpenetrate in an experiential unity. If logic rebels against this notion of time and eternity intersecting in consciousness as “paradoxical,” still it is confirmed as a fact through proper attention to, and close consideration of the meaning of, the “tension” of conscious existence.

Again and again in Dickinson’s poetry, we encounter her evocations of precisely this experience of consciousness as a worldly “locale” where eternal being both is immediately present (and so promises “immortality”) and where it announces its utter and radical transcendence. So, on the one hand, she avers:

The only news I know
Is Bulletins all Day
From Immortality.
[…]    (820) And:

The Infinite a sudden
Guest Has been assumed to be –
But how can that stupendous come
Which never went away?  (1344)

Thus the immediacy of divine presence. On the other hand, as “Immortality” and “The Infinite” are symbols for a divine beyond—a dimension of timeless meaning transcending anything we can experience or know in consciousness— she makes clear in many poems that we can never truly claim to possess or know it from within our situation in the “in-between”:

[…] Immortality contented
Were Anomaly –  (984)

And:

[…] If end I gained
It ends beyond Indefinite disclosed – […]    (484)14 

With the paradox of metaxic consciousness—the ontological simultaneity of the immediacy of divine presence in consciousness together with its nonpossessable, unknowable, radically transcendent character—being constant in Dickinson’s awareness, it is not surprising that longing suffused with doubt is ever-present in her poetry. A glance at her biography shows that the seeds of this outlook were sown early. The time of her youth in Massachusetts was the time of the Second Great Awakening, and the Congregationalist community within which she received her religious formation, with its Calvinist theology, was swept by a series of revivals during the first twenty years of her life. But Dickinson soon responded with skepticism and aversion. When pressed, at age seventeen, she refused to become a professing Christian. She dismissed the doctrines of original sin, hell and damnation, and election. She became the only adult member of her family who remained aloof from church membership and never took communion.15 Her poetry often reveals a smiling contempt for those who presume assurance of salvation and election, who embrace the mysteries of Christian faith as settled facts, and who take God as definitely revealed in Scripture and doctrine. Nevertheless, and crucially, hers was from early years and throughout her life a profoundly religious temperament. Her sensitivity toward, and openness to, the mystery of divine presence dominated her life and work. She could not ignore her experienced participation in transcendence and recognized the longing for deeper and ultimate communion with the divine ground of being as the central human orientation. Thus in her poetry we find her constantly relying, to express her religious insights and intimations, on the language of the only religious tradition she knew—the language of covenant, heaven, immortality, paradise, seal, promise, ordinance, Jesus, Gethsemane, Eden, crucifixion, spirit, grace, and God—but with a difference. She uses them to explore and explain her own clear-eyed quest of what it means to live in the in-between of the tension toward the divine mystery, with all of its doubts, unanswerable questions, strug-gles for faith, and dark nights of the soul.

Richard Wilbur puts the matter of Dickinson’s use of traditional Christian language elegantly:

At some point Emily Dickinson sent her whole Calvinist vocabulary into exile, telling it not to come back until it would subserve her own sense of things. . . . [I]n her poems those great words are not merely being themselves; they have been adopted, for expressive purposes; they have been taken personally, and therefore redefined.16

In other words, Dickinson found in her own consciousness those experiences, insights, and passions for which the great religious language could be used as evocative symbols, and then, in using them as she did in her poems, she personalized and revitalized them, making them transparent for her own spiritual experiences, at whatever cost of destabilizing their commonplace usages within what was to her an unconvincing religious institutional context.

As to that institutional context: we hear Dickinson’s clear rejection of the so-called Christianity of her religious community in a number of poems. In one, it is scorned as childishly naïve:

I’m ceded – I’ve stopped being Their’s –
The name They dropped opon my face
With water, in the country church
Is finished using, now,
And They can put it with my Dolls,
My childhood, and the string of spools,
I’ve finished threading – too – […]    (353) 

Another seems to link her own skepticism to a broader decline of genuine Christian faith, in a tone reminiscent of Matthew Arnold, or even Nietzsche:

Those – dying then,
Knew where they went –
They went to God’s Right Hand –
That Hand is amputated now
And God cannot be found – […]    (1581)  

A few poems on this subject are more expansive, rehearsing Dickinson’s young efforts to believe, her subsequent feeling of betrayal, and her anger in the wake of her intellectual and emotional dismissal of the platitudinous God of comfortable assurances, the revealed God deemed so readily available to congregants at prayer.17 In “I meant to have but modest needs,” the full drama of betrayal unfolds:

I meant to have but modest needs –
Such as Content – and Heaven –
Within my income – these could lie
And Life and I – keep even –

But since the last – included both –
It would suffice my Prayer
But just for one – to stipulate –
And Grace would grant the Pair –

And so – opon this wise –
I prayed – Great Spirit –
Give to me A Heaven not so large as Your’s,
But large enough – for me –

A Smile suffused Jehovah’s face –
The Cherubim – withdrew –
Grave Saints stole out to look at me –
And showed their dimples – too –

I left the Place – with all my might –
I threw my Prayer away –
The Quiet Ages picked it up –
And Judgment – twinkled – too –

That one so honest – be extant –
To take the Tale for true –
That “Whatsoever Ye shall ask –
Itself be given You” –

But I, grown shrewder – scan the Skies
With a suspicious Air –
As Children – swindled for the first –
All Swindlers – be – infer –  (711)

Noteworthy here are the facts that a human “Life” does require, in its longing, a “Heaven” for its proper counterbalance, to “keep even”; that nothing of the sort is assured, no matter how intense and sincere the longing; that the smiles, dimples, and twinkling of, respectively, God, the saints, and a semianthropmorphized Judgment Day, are not emblems of tender affection but condecending amusement at the petitioner’s naïvete; and that the final emphasis is on a general suspicion of all religious presumption.

Again, however, this suspicion is not a denial of the divine mystery. It is the acknowledgment that the human condition, first and last, is that of being a questioner—a questioner who, as Voegelin puts it, would “deform his humanity” through uncritically accepting answers and “refusing to [continually] ask the questions” concerning fulfillment of our yearnings for communion with the divine mystery that, if we are existentially honest, we cannot ignore, however difficult it may be to hold onto religious faith regarding our ultimate relationship to it.18 Thus Dickinson repeatedly, in her work, begins by affirming the reality of the transcendent pole of the metaxy but then proceeds to explore the actual human relationship to it, which is that of, in her own words, “uncertain certainty” (1421).19 We find a concise example of this trajectory in “I know that He exists”:

I know that He exists.
Somewhere – in silence –
He has hid his rare life
From our gross eyes.

’Tis an instant’s play –
’Tis a fond Ambush –
Just to make Bliss
Earn her own surprise!

But – should the play
Prove piercing earnest –
Should the glee – glaze –
In Death’s – stiff – stare –

Would not the fun
Look too expensive!
Would not the jest –
Have crawled too far!  (365)

In this poem of encompassing spiritual possibilities, we traverse the entire human pathway that runs between St. Thomas Aquinas’s assertion that it is in the natural capacity of human reason to know that God is real to Macbeth’s horrifying vision of life as a cruel and pointless joke.20 But, of course, the latter possibility is posed in the subjunctive. The final word, for Dickinson, is always recognition of the unknowable—of the basic mystery of human-divine relations, a mystery whose denial would, in Voegelin’s words, conceptually “destroy the In-Between structure of man’s humanity.”21

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The Unknown God

Returning a last time to our question, then—just who or what is Emily Dickinson’s “God”?—let us assay an answer, however incomplete it must be.

Dickinson often had experiences of epiphany, or “theophany,” in which the immediacy of divine presence was as certain to her as the fact of her own being. And because she remained honest to herself, and spiritually discerning, about those experiences, she did not deceive herself about how fleeting the moments of “visitation” were or how desolate she felt when they had passed. In addition, she underwent experiences of dread, alienating depression, and fear for her sanity that she can only have interpreted as being allowed, if not ordained, by the divine author of her existence. And which-ever type of experience she wrote about, one fact is consistently brought to the fore: the ultimate divine source of the experience is magisterially “beyond,” majestically incomprehensible. Never does Dickinson eclipse from her awareness the absolutely transcendent mysteriousness of “God” and the pattern of his intentions for her mind. Dickinson’s God is unrevealed: hidden, silent, unpredictable, and thus, above all things—despite his “visitations”—unknown. 

And here again, as with her evocations of human existence as life in the in-between of world and transcendence, ignorance and knowledge, despair and faith, we find Dickinson attuned to a key element in Voegelin’s philosophy. For in a number of works, Voegelin takes pains to explain how the divine ground of being—which in ancient cultures was experienced and symbolized as a plurality of intracosmic gods—gradually came to be recognized in its transcendent “oneness” through a differentiating process (discussed in chapter one) that produced symbolisms first of henotheism, then monotheism, and finally an explicit mysticism. We encounter such mysticism already in Plato’s notion of divine ultimacy as a “being beyond being” in Republic Book VI (508–9), but in a much more explicit and detailed manner in Jewish and Christian mystical traditions (and in those of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism). The historical differentiating process shows that, in the end, an explicit conceptual apprehension of divine radical transcendence forces upon its discoverers a consciousness of the profound unknowability of the divine essence. Thus Voegelin describes the “millennial Movement” of human-divine encounter as issuing, during the first millennium b.c.e., into an explicit appreciation that, ultimately, the divine ground is an “Unknown God”—an undisclosable primal Mystery known to be such. The “God” who emerges from Dickinson’s poems, it seems to me, conforms precisely to this “Unknown God” identified in Voegelin’s account of the historical process of mystical differentiation—that is, the one ineffable divine reality “behind” all intracosmic, mythic, and “revealed” gods of human history.34 

A more precise parallel can be made, and it is one that speaks directly to Dickinson’s success in recovering difficult truths about life in the metaxy in a cultural and theological atmosphere dominated by the “revealed” God of doctrinal Christianity.

In his account of the Christian epiphany and the Gospel movement, Voegelin argues that the “extraordinary divine irruption in the existence of Jesus,” as recorded in the New Testament, was nothing less than the coming to full clarity of the fact that Yahweh, God, the Creator, is indeed the agnostos theos, the “hidden divinity” or “Unknown God,” of an absolutely radical transcendence. The utter “beyondness” of ultimate divine reality, Voegelin argues, was at first glimpsed and then increasingly recognized in the theophanic experiences of earlier traditions—both Hebrew/Judaic and other—but climactically revealed as such by Christ. What Jesus’ teachings and actions impressed upon those who responded to “the whole fullness of divine reality [theotes]” in him (Col. 2:9), was the radical mysteriousness, and absolute incommensurability with the created world and all finite comprehension, of “the Father” to whom he bore witness. Voegelin concludes: “The revelation of the Unknown God through Christ, in conscious continuity with the millennial process of revelation . . . is so much the center of the gospel movement that it may be called the gospel itself.”35 

However, he continues, the drama of the gospel as the climactic revelation of the Unknown God, who has been the divine partner in metaxic encounter for all peoples of all times, although “alive in the consciousness of the New Testament writers,” has largely been lost to the modern churches. This Voegelin attributes to the process of “doctrinalization,” of formulating in propositions the experienced truths of the Christian epiphany, so as to precisely explain, and institutionally protect, their meanings—a process that was both necessary and inevitable but heavy with unfortunate consequences. The principal problematic outcome, he explains, has been the separation of “doctrinal” or “school theology” from “mystical or experiential theology” and the institutional and pedagogical ascendance of the former to the point of the near-eclipse of the latter. The result is that “Christianity” today has become, by and large, a matter of believers being urged to embrace (without too many questions, please) sets of doctrines or propositions presented as information about God and his creations “revealed” through Scripture and church teaching. For Voegelin, who considers a life of genuine faith to be dependent on personal mystical experiences, it has been a disaster for the modern world that “[t]he Unknown God whose theotes [divine reality] was present in the existence of Jesus has been eclipsed by the revealed God of Christian doctrine,” that the ultimate unknowability of radically transcendent divinity has been largely forgotten in the mainstream Christian traditions.36 

When Emily Dickinson rejected the “revealed God” of her Congregationalist community, therefore, and bravely explored in her own consciousness— with an “inward eye,” as Barton Levi St. Armand puts it, that “remained steadfastly, obediently open”—just who or what “God” might be, and discovered that “Jehovah” was an unknowable, sometimes terrifying Mystery, a Mystery for which “Jesus” and “Gethsemane” and “Crucifixion” could be approached as symbol-windows opening onto elemental truths of consciousness, she was in her own idiosyncratic and nonscholarly way recovering the truth of the “Unknown God” and thus the essence of the Christian epiphany itself.37 From the point of view of Voegelin’s philosophy, Dickinson was in fact penetrating to the “engendering experiences” of key Christian symbols and expressing those experiences and revivifying those symbols in poems of startling lucidity and originality. For her poems repeatedly remind us that “the truth of reality has its center not in the cosmos at large, not in nature or society . . . but in the presence of the Unknown God in a [person’s] existence to his death and life,”  and that, in the wake of the differentiation of the radical transcendence of the ground of being, true testimony about the divine “can only proceed from the god who is experienced as the Unknown God in the immediate experience of the divine Beyond.”38 In this view, Dickinson suddenly looks less like the post-Christian nonbeliever portrayed by many commentators—or even like a brilliant originator of a unique religious faith, making her, like Willam Blake, a “sect of one”39—and more like a courageous, solitary recoverer of elemental truths at the core of a religious tradition whose institutional forms, as she knew them, repelled her. Though she undoubtedly rejected “Christianity,” she may have been far more Christian than she suspected.

For if Voegelin is correct, the very heart of the Christian epiphany is that human existence is life in the unresolved tension of the metaxy, with the divine source of reality understood both as immediately present in consciousness— the “site and sensorium of divine presence”—and as the divine Creator so transcendently “other” that one can only speak of “Hiddenness,” “Silence,” and “the Nameless.”40 Dickinson’s poems convey with power and precision exactly this unresolved tension, as well as this dual appreciation of 1) divine presence in the mind, and 2) the divine’s radical inaccessibility, as they again and again point to, on the one hand, “the divine reality which enters the metaxy in the [questing] movement of existence” in the human mind, and on the other, “the invisible God, experienced as real [utterly] beyond the metaxy of existence.”41 

Bearing this analysis in mind, we may consider, finally, a poem in which Dickinson encapsulates our human condition: our situation of longing, doubting, and hoping in the “in-between” of time and eternity, ignorance and knowledge, and faced with the challenge of sustaining authentic faith in light of awareness that the drama of our existence unfolds within, and in conscious relation to, an unfathomable Mystery:

This World is not conclusion.
A Species stands beyond –
Invisible, as Music –
But positive, as Sound –
It beckons, and it baffles –
Philosophy, dont know –
And through a Riddle, at the last –
Sagacity, must go –
To guess it, puzzles scholars –
To gain it, Men have borne
Contempt of Generations
And Crucifixion, shown – 
and laughs, and rallies –
Blushes, if any see –
Plucks at a twig of Evidence –
And asks a Vane, the way –
Much Gesture, from the Pulpit –
Strong Hallelujahs roll –
Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul –  (373)

Here we find the key Dickinsonian themes addressed above: clear affirmation of the reality of transcendent being; the impotencies of analytical intelligence in grasping the mystery of transcendence and the soul’s ultimate destiny; recognition that the core of human consciousness is a longing for communion with that mystery; and the difficulties of genuine faith in an Unknown God contrasted with smug religiosity, a contrast caustically conveyed by her depiction of pulpit oratory and fervid congregational hymn-singing as narcotics employed to ward off awareness of the tension of metaxic existence. The last word, aptly for Dickinson, lies with “the Tooth / That nibbles at the soul”— the spiritual tension experienced by her principally in the negative modalities of doubt, anxiety, and an alienated and solitary seeking.

from the book A more beautiful question  the spiritual in poetry and art Glenn Hughes
From chapter  Emily Dickinson and the Unknown God