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A review by brice_mo
Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair by Christian Wiman
4.0
Christian Wiman’s Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despairis a worthwhile and overwhelming follow-up to the themes of My Bright Abyss and He Held Radical Light.
The book’s title begs to be misread—I anticipated these pieces forming a dam-like barrier “against despair,” but it’s more accurate to say that they are bumping “against” it the way one bumps against a person in a crowd. They are about learning how to make room and take room in equal measure, offering complication where readers may crave simplicity.
Simplicity is not Christian Wiman’s style.
His understanding of faith is not so much the affirmation of God as it is the acceptance of loss. It is unconcerned with belief because, if there is a God, their self-belief is presumably sufficient for everyone. As such, Wiman’s flavor of Christianity is disinterested in avoiding or explaining the human condition; instead, it is eternally preoccupied with becoming unconditionally human. This is an apophatic, companionable nihilism without the corresponding cynicism one might expect. This is Nietzsche and Weil walking hand-in-hand. It’s quite a cathartic read, particularly in a religious climate that seems interested in the world only insomuch as it can procure sociopolitical power. If Wiman’s Christianity had its way, there would be no Christendom—this is religion whose primary goal is to be free of religion.
I love Wiman’s work, but I can’t deny that it’s occasionally exhausting. Readers will be swept away in some of these sentences as they spiral beyond meaning and into feeling. It’s to be expected, as the author’s theology is profoundly bored by “meaning” in a traditional sense, but it can still read as self-indulgent. His editorial strengths are in synthesizing ideas from different authors and artists but not necessarily in economy of language. Likewise, as much as I admire Wiman as an essayist, his poetry always strikes me as needlessly esoteric, and the poetic entries in this book feel disruptive. They feel like an attempt to escape what the rest of the book endeavors to explore.
Even so, I think Zero at the Bone has something to offer for all readers, regardless of religious background. Christian Wiman invites us to parse out whether contentment in our beliefs is merely veneered complacency, but he is just as skeptical of those who console themselves with devout skepticism (@me). Readers looking for some sort of oasis in their existential wasteland will not find it here, but they may be better prepared to inhabit the desert a while longer.
The book’s title begs to be misread—I anticipated these pieces forming a dam-like barrier “against despair,” but it’s more accurate to say that they are bumping “against” it the way one bumps against a person in a crowd. They are about learning how to make room and take room in equal measure, offering complication where readers may crave simplicity.
Simplicity is not Christian Wiman’s style.
His understanding of faith is not so much the affirmation of God as it is the acceptance of loss. It is unconcerned with belief because, if there is a God, their self-belief is presumably sufficient for everyone. As such, Wiman’s flavor of Christianity is disinterested in avoiding or explaining the human condition; instead, it is eternally preoccupied with becoming unconditionally human. This is an apophatic, companionable nihilism without the corresponding cynicism one might expect. This is Nietzsche and Weil walking hand-in-hand. It’s quite a cathartic read, particularly in a religious climate that seems interested in the world only insomuch as it can procure sociopolitical power. If Wiman’s Christianity had its way, there would be no Christendom—this is religion whose primary goal is to be free of religion.
I love Wiman’s work, but I can’t deny that it’s occasionally exhausting. Readers will be swept away in some of these sentences as they spiral beyond meaning and into feeling. It’s to be expected, as the author’s theology is profoundly bored by “meaning” in a traditional sense, but it can still read as self-indulgent. His editorial strengths are in synthesizing ideas from different authors and artists but not necessarily in economy of language. Likewise, as much as I admire Wiman as an essayist, his poetry always strikes me as needlessly esoteric, and the poetic entries in this book feel disruptive. They feel like an attempt to escape what the rest of the book endeavors to explore.
Even so, I think Zero at the Bone has something to offer for all readers, regardless of religious background. Christian Wiman invites us to parse out whether contentment in our beliefs is merely veneered complacency, but he is just as skeptical of those who console themselves with devout skepticism (@me). Readers looking for some sort of oasis in their existential wasteland will not find it here, but they may be better prepared to inhabit the desert a while longer.