It’s “news from nowhere,” wrote nineteenth century artist and anarchist William Morris, a new age that has come.  So his patterns and sketches state.  But unless we seek the well at the world’s end or, if we are so inclined, follow Charles Williams, he an Inking of Oxford fame, in his descent into hell, we look for this age in vain.  Like kainos, like chadash:  it comes out of nowhere.

     As it should.

     Yet this still leaves a problem.  From where did this new age come?  We treasure the thought of it, we love the sound of it.  And we know that we do.  But other than defining its importance by our subjective response to it, we struggle to see why it’s here.  Why it captures us as it does.

     Why it makes us believe in it.

     Many a theologian, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jew, and more, has of course told us that, well, it is God from which everything comes.  From this God, this hidden and omnipotent presence embedded in the circles of the universe, this immaterial yet material somethingness that somehow pervades all of reality, seen and unseen, they argue—in a variety of ways—comes all that is to be, as well as all that is to come.  What will one day be.  Even nowhere.  Once where, now nowhere, nowhere is where in disguise, a doppelgänger, a phantom, a voiceless voice of another world.

A world waiting to be known.

Besides, where did God come from?

This we will never know.  Nor do we really need to.  Besides, if we really knew where God, however we choose to define him, came from, what would we be?  We would know too much to be where, yet too little to be nowhere.

And that’s the point.  If, as the curious and inquisitive medieval thinker Hermes Trismegistus once contended, “God is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere,” then even if we know where “God” is, we really don’t.  Or as the Italian and, allegedly, pantheist Giordano Bruno noted, building on Trismegistus’s words, “We can [only] state with certainty that the universe is all center, or that the center of the universe is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.”

We are helpless to really be ourselves.