Well, this was unexpected.

James K. A. Smith is known for his rigorous work on the confluence of philosophy and Christianity. He’s made a career out of knowing. Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark is an ode to unknowing. I’ll let Smith explain:

I have sat in the impenetrable dark, vexed, desperate, and despairing. I have wandered lonely into the cloud of unknowing and given up hope. Despite all of my well-honed powers of rationality, I couldn’t think my way out of the dark. Despite my professional expertise in conceptual mastery, I couldn’t find a way out the cloud. . . . You could probably say I gave up. Maybe the gentle mystics say I let go. What I didn’t realize is that I was learning something—docta ignorantia. (156)

Smith suggests four phases to this journey into the unknowing: solitude, silence, darkness and wonder. As we walk this path we come face to face with the insufficiency of language to limn experience. “Such experiences are … more real than our capacity to describe them” (169). The attempt to get beyond language to the originary wonder of things is rooted in phenomenology, although Smith presents it in such a clear way that no prior philosophical training is needed to follow his line of thought.

If you’ve read Smith before, you won’t be surprised to find each phase richly enhanced by discussions about art, film, and poetry. Engagement with art is a way to break out of normal life and Smith’s descriptions of his experience with art make you want to watch the film or view the canvas for yourself. Of course, your experience would be different—such is the nature of art.

The crackling prose and confessional tone of Make Your Home keep the reader engaged, but repetition of the main ideas become bit wearisome. If you’re hitting an existential crisis or just love the work of Smith, this book is well worth the read. If you’ve already wrestled with human contingency and uncertainty, this book will serve as the testimony of a fellow pilgrim.

Smith, James K.A. Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing. Yale UP, 2026.