Mystical Unknowing

Mystical Unknowing, as it appears in Rollins's parable-driven theological text, names a paradoxical epistemological condition in which proximity to the ground of faith does not yield greater illumination but greater opacity. Drawing on the classical mystical tradition of docta ignorantia (learned ignorance, most associated with Nicholas of Cusa), the concept holds that the more intensely the subject orients itself toward the source of its own conviction, the more that source recedes into indeterminacy. This is not mere agnosticism or intellectual humility but a structural claim: the act of "closing one's eyes" — suspending ordinary cognitive grasping — is precisely what enables a different, non-representational mode of seeing. Knowing and not-knowing are not opposed but folded together; unknowing becomes the very medium of a deeper epistemic access.

The second theoretical move embedded in this concept ties it to the ethics of transformation: unconditional acceptance — neither demanding change from the other nor criticizing their position — is posited as the only genuine condition under which subjective transformation becomes possible. This mirrors the Lacanian clinical insight that the analyst must refuse to respond at the level of demand so that the subject's desire can emerge. Mystical Unknowing thus operates at the intersection of epistemology and ethics: the suspension of the will-to-know, like the suspension of demand, opens a space in which something genuinely new can occur in the subject.

Within its source (rollins-peter-the-orthodox-heretic-and-other-impossible-tales-paraclete-press-20), Mystical Unknowing sits at the center of Rollins's project of "pyrotheology" — a theological stance that embraces the dissolution of certainty as spiritually productive rather than threatening. The concept is not merely devotional; it makes a structural argument that resonates directly with several canonical Lacanian concepts. Most immediately, it is an elaboration on the problematic of Knowledge (savoir): where Lacan distinguishes between knowledge that knows itself and knowledge that does not know itself, Rollins's mystical unknowing names the deliberate cultivation of the second mode — a knowing that is constitutively incapable of closing itself into completeness, analogous to Lacan's insistence that "in the unconscious there is a corpus of knowledge which must in no way be conceived as knowledge to be completed, to be closed." Mystical Unknowing is thus a spiritual specification of structural incompleteness.

The concept also resonates with Lack and Desire. The closer the subject approaches the "source" of faith, the more it encounters not plenitude but a void — a structural manque-à-être (want-to-be) that cannot be filled by any particular object of knowledge. This is precisely how Lacanian desire operates: it circles around das Ding without arriving, sustained by the impossibility of closure. Furthermore, the ethical dimension of the concept — unconditional acceptance as the condition of transformation — maps onto the Lacanian distinction between Demand and desire: criticism and demand close down the space of the other's subjectivity, while withdrawal of demand (the analyst's abstention, or here the mystic's non-coercive acceptance) allows genuine subjective movement. The big Other, Jouissance, Repetition, and Subject are implicitly at stake too: the subject that surrenders the demand to know fully is also surrendering a fantasmatic jouissance of mastery, breaking a repetitive circuit, and opening itself to the contingency of the Other's irreducibility.

The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible TalesPeter Rollins · 2009 (p.129)

a word that casts up the idea of closing one's eyes so as to be able to see... the more we attend to the source of our faith the more we realize how little we know.

The phrase "closing one's eyes so as to be able to see" is theoretically loaded because it encodes the paradox of docta ignorantia in a single chiasmic gesture: vision (epistemic access) is conditioned on blindness (the suspension of ordinary cognition), directly inverting the Enlightenment model in which more looking yields more knowing. The second clause — "the more we attend to the source of our faith the more we realize how little we know" — formalizes this as a structural law: proximity to the source is inversely proportional to representational clarity, making unknowing not an accident but the constitutive form of this mode of epistemic relation.