In a deep and consequential epiphany, the revelation comes from nowhere. What I come to know as given, prior to the epiphany, is inconceivable and, therefore, nothing. In a moment of epiphany, a new given emerges from nothingness — ex nihilo.
I, who could not conceive and was oblivious, and that which was inconceivable and submerged in oblivion, have been conceived together.
What has changed? The beholding subject? The beheld object? Both have changed — and something more. The relationship between the subject and all possible givens changes. Reality is now revealed to the subject through a transformed objectivity.
It is now a given truth that reality is always given to every subject in the form of some particular objectivity. This is as true of a personal subject, like you or me, as it is of an academic subject. Reality is given to mathematicians in one way and to historians in another. But to the subject of epiphany, reality is given in a pluralistic objectivity: an objectivity of myriad objectivities.
But yet something more — beyond subject, object and objectivity — changes too. This beyond matters most of all: our relationship with nothingness changes.
In epiphany, all that is epiphanically given appears out of nothingness — ex nihilo.
The nothingness from which epiphanies appear does not feel like nothing.
We sometimes conceive nothingness as a kind of darkness. But darkness is something we see. The analogy falls short.
Nothingness must not be confused with sensing no thing. Nothingness is the loss of sense itself, or the absence of sensibility.
If we lose vision, we do not see blackness; instead, we experience boiling chrome of sightlessness.
If we lose a part of our body, we do not feel of numbness; we are tormented by an aching phantom limb.
If we lose our hearing, we are not submerged in silence; we experience intolerable hypersonic ringing.
If we lose our sense of smell, the world does not become odorless; it reeks of burning rubber, sulfur and brimstone.
If we lose our sense of taste, our mouths and tongue are filled with bitterness.
As it is with the senses of the body, so it is with the sensibilities of the soul.
If we lose sense of purpose, we do not become care-free; we are paralyzed by ennui.
If we lose capacity to love, we do not become detached or objective; we are depressed.
If we lack understanding, we don’t experience ignorance; we become negatively omniscient, and know that there is nothing to know.
If we lose our sense of self, we don’t become selfless; we become self-conscious nebulae of resentment.
Nothingness is dreadful.
It is from dreadful nothingness that all epiphanies emerge — ex nihilo.
Dread is the birth pangs of revelation.
If epiphany happens once, it can happen again, no matter how dreadful and impossible it seems.
It will always seem impossible. It will always be inconceivable. It will always be masked in oblivion. It will always be dreadful. We will always be certain that “this time is different; this time it is final.” But is not.
How, then, can we ever again take despair or hopelessness at face value? How could we ever be nihilists? How can we not become exnihilists?
The nothingness that engulfs and pervades our given world an inexhaustible wellspring of surprise.
This nothingness is real. It liberates us from every omniscience, and frees us for God.