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Emotions can involve various levels of thought about the objects that attract them. They also involve (at least a disposition to) aroused feeling—affective response to perceived affective qualities. This registers in the fullest immediate way the value found in an emotion’s object. Indeed, certain values cannot be understood or acknowledged by creatures who lack the appropriate affective capacities. Because of the worth that emotions variously find and give, there are sorts of worth they themselves come to be given. This can rebound on emotional responses themselves, giving them or denying them, now at a third level, distinctive kinds of worth.

In this chapter, Jeannot interrogates Berrigan on his theory and practice of civil disobedience. Using Rawls’s theory of civil disobedience in a Theory of Justice as a foil, Jeannot argues that Berrigan underground, fleeing the authorities after the trial of the Catnonsville Nine, cannot be accommodated to the American narrative after the fashion of Thoreau in Walden Pond. We must understand Berrigan along the path of a via negativa as defying the best American traditions of civil disobedience and their philosophical justifications. He must disturb us in the way that he disturbed a sober and thoughtful Robert Coles. Hazy evocations of Thoreau, or Gandhi, or King will not suffice. What is required indeed, if we are to take his great refusal seriously, is a clear grasp of the liberal doctrine he negated, of which the best contemporary version is Rawls.

Christian groups in America, committed to the cultivation of a feeling of emptiness and a theological program of self-denial, have defined themselves through a process of via negativa in which they attempt to establish collective identities and a rationale for belonging by detailing what they are not. Disestablishment has abetted that process by creating the conditions for the proliferation of religious groups who serve as foils. Viewing the history of Christianity in America as the promotion of the feeling of emptiness turns our attention from historical narratives that recount the progressive enlargement, refinement, alteration, erasure, and reinvention of a certain core set of principles and beliefs thought to comprise the essence of Christianity. It alternatively evokes fluidity, indefiniteness, contradictoriness, paradox, the anxious construction of appearances, the unreliability of language, and preoccupations with failure and loss.

This chapter provides a deconstructionist interpretation of The Sickness unto Death. It begins by tracing Western culture's penchant for moralizing sin, arguing that Kierkegaard's text resists such moralizations. It then analyzes a closely related group of texts, those of the Romantics, with their celebration of human trespass, attending especially to Lord Byron's play Cain. Anti-Climacus (Kierkegaard's pseudonym) plays with the idea that humans might dispose themselves to sin in the effort to win self-security—just as the Romantic poets see creative growth in suffering and transgression. The chapter, however, argues that Kierkegaard actually deconstructs such Romantic leanings in the effort to depict the virtue of faith negatively through the possibility of human failure.

American Christians fear words. Beginning with Puritan colonists, Americans have been deeply concerned about being deceived by empty words and empty doctrines, and consequently by having their dearest ideas exposed as empty belief. American Christians have formed religious communities by decrying the beliefs of their competitors as empty words and presenting their own beliefs as true, although suspicion of the reliability of the words of one’s own group has been common as well. The construction of group identity in an American setting characterized by competition arising from disestablishment has been challenging for most Christian groups. Groups have utilized a method of building and maintaining identity by characterizing the words of their opponents as deceptions and in general relying upon definition via negativa to establish and police group boundaries.

Although against Giles of Rome Scotus holds that existence is not necessarily the cause or ground of thisness, he maintains that thisness may entail existence. When this entailment is associated with the propositions that the existence of a thing is a good for that thing and therefore to one’s own at least prima facie obligation not to be indifferent to its survival and wellbeing. But this argument for what we have named blank ecology glides from metaphysics to theology when Scotus maintains that the cause or ground of the thisness of finite worldly things is ultimately the will of the Creator. That is, the only undogmatic mode of facing this claim is to engage with the arguments of the theologians, even if our arguments amount to an adoption of the via negativa. Following that route is tantamount to following what in this chapter is referred to as the method of learned ignorance, docta ignorantia (Nicholas of Cusa). A method is a means that is voluntarily applied, like Descartes’ typically Western Enlightenment method of doubt. A way is usually more passively pursued, as in Oriental religious practices. Via admits either interpretation, ideally a combination of both, right-brained ratiocination and left-brained waiting attentiveness, without which there is no love—and therefore no God, if, as we are told by theologians and poets like Hopkins’ favourite George Herbert in the poem by him that Hopkins liked most, God is verily Love.

Most theories of sacrifice regard the practice as contributing in some way to social formation. This chapter examines examples of functional theories offered by Durkheim, Mauss, Robertson Smith, Girard, Jay. Unlike most reviews of theory, this one devotes considerable space to the view of Bataille that sacrifice seeks to restore individuals to a “lost intimacy” with the sacred realm of immanence by releasing both what is offered and the one making the offering from economies of exchange in which their value is determined by productivity. The offering is the “accursed share” of excess goods that must be abandoned (but not necessarily destroyed) in a gesture of liberation from humanly constructed systems of meaning, whether social, political, or religious. For Bataille, sacrifice enacts the mystical “way of negation” (via negativa) taken to the extreme of denying the enduring reality of either God or the self as defined by conventional theology or ethics.

One ancient reaction to the difficulties of identifying and describing God is to say that we cannot know what God is, we can only say what he is not. But does that leave any room at all for belief in God? One classic response is to say that we can apply terms to God only in some analogical sense.