Teologia "Braku" : o jednym wierszu Emily Dickinson

Abstract

Dickinson’s text, from which we depart in this essay was written around 1865, centers on the notion of „Missing” distinguishing between its two varieties. One of them, missing minor Things, seems to be constituted not by itself but in reference to a much larger and dramatic kind which Dickinson calls Missing All. As we try to demonstrate, Missing All names the experience of God as an uninterrupted oscillation of forms never allowed to coagulate and freeze in a solid identity. God appears to be the power which destabilizes things, names, and meanings, in brief: God is an inner anxiety pulsating within being. The thesis of God’s destabilizing power allows one to approach religious experience in a form which shows limitations of accepted rituals of religious practices. This strange non(presence) of God who chooses to withdraw from man’s world, to „miss” from it, liberates Him from the confines of the usually dychotomic human categories such as presence/absence or activity/passivity and also allows for the projection of God’s message upon the stage of social processes. God as Missing All defends a human individual without however endorsing the ordering of the world established by the collective social and ideological operations.