Demolition and Depravation as a Doorway
A Feature Review of
Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing
James K.A. Smith
Yale UP, 2026
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Reviewed by Emily Cash
James K.A. Smith’s newest book, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing, will feel at once familiar and strange to readers who know his work. There are few thinkers who can parse an idea with Smith’s sophistication and clarity, and this book is no exception. However, even as Smith brings his philosophical mind to bear on the inner workings of contemplative spirituality, he does so by confessing its limitations.
He opens by describing how he had previously practiced and pursued knowledge: in a hyper-rational binary mode, with a commitment to certainty, to “getting it right.” But he eventually came to understand that this way of thinking (and, therefore, of relating to ideas and others) is not only ill-equipped to solve the cultural ills of our time but was also powerless in the face of his own experience of depression. The book is a testimony to how his anxiety-fueled desire to know gave way to a more fundamental desire to be known, which involved his contemplative embrace of unknowing.
He structures the book around four interrelated practices/postures that comprise the “mystical path:” solitude (anachoresis), silence (hesychia), darkness/unknowing (docta ignorantia), and wonder (mysterion). He commends contemporary art as a companion for learning to befriend mystery, since it demands a contemplative posture that can help reform and heal our perception.
The four chapters devoted to this path are dense and demanding but rich with insight. The first two chapters, on solitude and silence, are devoted to reinvigorating those otherwise static terms with mystical meaning. Smith carefully distinguishes genuine solitude from its counterfeits – the pseudo-solitude of our devices chief among them – describing it primarily as a function of releasing the need for distraction and affirmation. Solitude thus defined is not escapism but actually a practice in availability and integrated attention. Smith likewise fills the idea of “silence” with new content: he describes an expectant internal quiet that requires the relinquishment of one’s impulse to master what might arrive. He distinguishes this contemplative silence from the silence of apophatic theology, which he brilliantly argues can be at once “a refusal and a hedge” rather than a robust openness.
The chapter entitled “Dwelling in Darkness” is the beating heart of the book, for it is in this darkness that Smith’s own profound experience becomes the most immediate to the reader. He explores unknowing (learned ignorance) as an experience of epistemic undoing that is not merely the absence of answers but, borrowing from Derrida, a knowing held perpetually “under erasure.” To dwell in this darkness is to make friends with failure, to wait without expecting resolution, and to undergo a humiliation of intellectual striving. But demolition and deprivation are not total, because the loss of control is also a doorway into an experience of givenness. Or, as Smith memorably words it, “the need for comprehension gives way to a surprising hunger for communion.”
The last major chapter, “Welcoming Wonder,” traces the transformation that follows. The despair of not-knowing becomes, surprisingly, elation — “the mind thought itself shipwrecked, only to learn that it is buoyed in a sea of love.” This empowers a primal trust, which Smith sees as the wellspring of a fearless, non-possessive love of neighbor. Wonder, it turns out, is not merely a private mystical achievement but an opening outward; epiphany is not a function of novelty but of restored perception that empowers communion.
Threaded throughout the book are extended ekphrastic reflections, where Smith beautifully describes the way that particular artworks (paintings, poems, novels, songs, etc.) have facilitated his mystical experiences, inviting the reader to share in his confrontation of epistemic limitation for the sake of a deeper knowing. These reflections contribute to the larger confessional quality of the book, which is its greatest strength; Smith’s willingness to disclose his limitations, his failures, his dependence, and his unassailable belovedness was truly a wonder to behold.
However, if you are looking for a gentle, approachable introduction to the mystics or contemplative spirituality, this is probably not the book for you. Make Your Home is a maelstrom of quotes, allusions, and references, drawing extensively on mystics, monastics, philosophers, and artists. The range and depth of Smith’s engagement is impressive, and it makes the endnotes a treasure-trove that alone is worth the price of the book. But it does give the book a disorienting pace and intensity that may be at cross-purposes with its content — unless the reader approaches it more as an emphatic invitation to mysticism than a patient companion for the path it describes.
In that sense, I do not represent the intended audience of the book, and that shaped my experience of reading it. Smith seems to address readers who are not only unfamiliar with mysticism but who share Smith’s previous philosophical impulses for discursive, binary thinking and conceptual mastery. As much as I love to understand, there is a canvas on the wall of my office with Debbie Millman’s handwritten words, “this, just this, I am comfortable not knowing” (from her book Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design). In other words, I am walking my own mystical path with my own particular mystical and artistic companions, and so I didn’t need Smith’s book the way someone else might.
And, from my vantage point, there are ways that the book still traffics in binary thinking. For example, Smith demonizes distraction (drawing on imagery from Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle), but then describes being “arrested” by the surprise of a particular piece of music, seemingly unaware that epiphany is often the byproduct of holy distraction. Or he draws a distinction between knowledge and love, as though love doesn’t always involve a measure of (always partial) knowing. And, perhaps most interestingly, he asserts that contemporary art — “experimental, nonrepresentational, abstract and conceptual, art we so often think of as ‘secular’”— is best suited for forcing or fostering contemplative attention. But to discount other eras or genres of art denies the inherent subjectivity of a productively disruptive aesthetic encounter.
Nonetheless, Make Your Home in this Luminous Dark is an important book precisely because of its own unashamed subjectivity: a thinker like Smith cannot be easily dismissed, and so his experience of and commitment to wonder are a prophetic invitation to those who cannot yet tolerate mystery, paradox, or unknowing. We would all do well to join Smith in his embrace of an openhanded, dynamic, prayerful knowledge, for it is the kind of knowing that flows from and feeds love.
Emily Cash
Emily Cash serves as a pastor at Valley Springs Fellowship in Warsaw, Indiana. She cohosts the podcast Holy Writ, a conversation at the intersection of literature and scripture, and authors the Substack newsletter: Driftwood Prayers. Her scholarly work and ministry explore how biblical interpretation, spiritual formation, and practices of dialogical connection converge in the life of the church.
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