Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing

by James K.A. Smith

A philosopher journeys back to the mystics to learn how to live with uncertainty in the twenty-first centuryHow do we live when we don’t know what to believe, or who to believe, or how we could even know? In this deeply felt book, philosopher James K. A. Smith explores how radical uncertainty can be liberating, opening us to another way of being. The pain of his own profound uncertainty led Smith to a surprising source for modern the mystical experiences of St. Teresa of Ávila, St. John of the Cross, and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing. These mystics testify to a deeper truth beneath distraction, anxiety, and love.Drawing on ancient traditions of contemplation as well as on contemporary novels, poetry, film, and paintings, Smith speaks to the fundamental yearnings that persist in late modernity, including the philosophical quest for knowledge and certainty. He shows us how the gifts of the Christian contemplative tradition and the riches of creative works embody a liberating spirituality that recovers the fullness of being human.In bringing a philosopher’s questions to the mystics, Smith brings a mystical heart back to philosophy.

Genres: Philosophy, Theology, Religion, Nonfiction, Spirituality, Art, Christian

256 pages, Hardcover

Published March 24, 2026

Reviews

[Lukas Merrell]

James K.A. Smith is one of those authors that I will always read. Mainly because he is such a gifted author and thinker, but also because he always stretches me. This book is no exception. My mode of thinking was deeply challenged throughout this work. As a philosopher myself, I completely understand having to come to terms with the amount of uncertainty in the world. As I’ve gotten older, I have become more and more at peace with ubiquitous mystery. Smith’s book helped me think more deeply about that reality and how to apply more of the mystic tradition to my life. I especially loved the chapters on silence and solitude.

While it was helpful overall, there was a concerning line of reasoning in this work that I ended up disagreeing with. He rightly talks about how the type of mystery that takes us to the very edge of our knowledge can then move us beyond knowledge into love, contemplation, or just Being itself. My worry is knowing when and where we are supposed to draw the mystery line. Surely it can’t be that we need to abandon reason at the first glimpse of mystery, and I don’t necessarily think Smith is arguing for that claim. However, some of his illustrations are confusing.

He uses examples like contemporary art to demonstrate how looking at a confusing artwork helps move us to uncertainty and mystery. He says abstract art produces in us an uncomfortable feeling because we lack the knowledge to apply to it. The experience he is describing is certainly true, but I can’t help but ask the question, what if it is because the art is irrational in itself and completely detached from reality? Human beings have the ability to create irrational things and produce falsehoods. An encounter with such absurdities does not mean we have been graced with an experience of transcendence, it could just be wrong and we should apply reason to parse through it.

My worry with Smith’s thought process here is that it can lead to confusion about a number of situations that should be clear. Especially in the realm of morality (which he unfortunately confirmed my suspicion as this is teased at the end of chapter 4). An overemphasis on uncertainty can make something that should be very clear become blurred.

Of course, someone could respond to my push back here and claim that I am exactly the type of person he is speaking to—one who tries to reason their way through all of life’s messiness. And maybe they are right. Perhaps I will look back on this book (and review) years down the road and realize I was on a path towards something greater. For now, I am striving to balance reasonable convictions with epistemic humility in uncertainty, but I think Smith is tipping the scales slightly too far towards uncertainty.

[Simon Wiebe]

Die Hauptdarsteller der Moderne wie René Descartes kämpften mit Zweifeln, während sie sich nach einem Zustand sehnten, in dem jeglicher Zweifel aus der Welt geschaffen wird. Descartes Experiment, die unbestreitbare Wahrheit zu entdecken und den Ängsten vor Unsicherheit und Dunkelheit zu entkommen, hat die westliche Vorstellungskraft seit Jahrhunderten vorangelebt. Während die meisten Menschen im Westen Descartes noch nie gelesen haben, leben sie instinktiv nach seiner epistemischen Regel: Unsicherheit macht uns unruhig, während sich Sicherheit wünschenswert anfühlt.

James K.A. Smith bietet eine andere Erzählung an, nämlich die, dass man sich im Dunklen zuhause fühlen sollte. Dafür bringt er Mystikerinnen und Mystiker ins Gespräch mit Kunstausstellungen, Filmen und seiner eigenen Biografie. Das Buch hat folglich einen persönlichen Ton, weshalb ich von einer Sterne Bewertung absehe. Im Buch geht es um Stille, Dunkelheit, Gottesbegegnung und eine „mystische Epistemologie“

[Jenn Malzone]

I’m so lucky I found this book

[Garrett Mikulka]

A rather harsh review not because I necessarily disagree with what is said in this book (although there is one great exception to that) but because I don’t really know who this is for beyond Smith himself.

I’ll start with my one big disagreement: much of this book is built upon the ideas of St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul. A lot of the discussion around this subject is using language that is technically accurate, but Smith also spends much of the book saying that experiencing art and appreciating it is analogous, or even synonymous, with the dark night of the soul as described by St. John of the Cross. This seems to me the biggest misstep of this book because that idea is antithetical to the dark night of the soul. For St. John, the dark night is representative of the moments when meditating and contemplating, including on the aesthetic, cease to bring any joy or fulfillment or comfort. So I don’t think it’s at all fair to compare standing in awe of a painting at a museum (a great thing) to the inner and utter turmoil of feeling abandoned by God for months and potentially years on end when you live a life of contemplative prayer (also important to remember here that St. John was writing about problems encountered by life-long contemplatives, whose experiences are very different from that of a normal person in the world). In fact, as I understand St. John, the state that Smith describes—one of contemplation and enjoyment of art and life without really clear analytical boundaries—is not so much the dark night as the prerequisite for maybe one day experiencing the dark night. So while I don’t think that what Smith talks about here is in itself bad (I actually think it’s quite a good way to live), it’s a category mistake that doesn’t do service to the mystical tradition from which it draws so much. It’s possible, too, that Smith is seeing his own experience as analogous to the dark night since he once found such comfort in analytical thinking and that losing that comfort was so traumatic that it warrants comparison. If that’s the case, while I think that’s a valid and vulnerable place to be, it’s still rather tone deaf to the tradition itself.

Now on to the other stuff that just didn’t seem good enough to justify a book. A significant portion of this book is spent describing powerful scenes from movies in detail, or works of visual art, or passages from novels. It’s not particularly well done. Plus, to anyone who has spent time studying literature or film or visual art, I think the conclusions drawn are fairly obvious. Not bad or wrong, but definitely not particularly deep or worthy of a book.

Finally, I was expecting more philosophy since Smith is, in fact, a philosopher. But the book concludes with proposing dialectic as a way forward in philosophy, and to say this he points to Hegel. That’s all well and good, but Hegel isn’t exactly fresh, and plenty of thinkers have long been working in the Hegelian tradition. So who is this for?

So this book deals in three major subjects: (Christian) mysticism, literary/film/art criticism, and philosophy. As for the first, it often (though not always) misrepresents that tradition. As for the second, it is done in a mediocre fashion by a non specialist. As for the third, it simply points to a well-worn path as though this were not already a developed line of inquiry.

As a personal journey, I think the narrative described of growth and reckoning with one’s own sense of reasoning and being-in-the-world is admirable and good. I have nothing bad to say about the journey itself. From the text itself and from interviews I’ve heard, it seems like Smith is in a much better place and that this was a painful but fruitful journey towards something valuable and good. But as a book, I don’t think it speaks sufficiently or effectively to any of the disciplines with which it engages. So five stars for vibes, but two stars as a book.

[Giselle]

“Darkness” is the unknowing. The relinquishing of the desire to know. In that space of uncertainty, whether triggered by suffering or doubt, makes room for knowledge to be superseded where understanding is surrendered and instead met with radical acceptance and humility. That’s where we find God. Not in the knowing but in the “being” and the uncertainty that accompanies that. ( And by being: he means a self that is loved because it receives / because being itself is a gift. ) And that’s where we come to realise our belovedness, which then gives us our security, to go on with life, to know God and to love as an action.

I think that’s my biggest takeaway from this book - but I think James covers a lot of about Christian mysticism that could do with more explanation with how it still links to Christ.

[Bennett Rogers]

I came to this book with three assumptions: first, that Smith’s views had remained largely unchanged; second, that he was working within the Augustinian tradition; and third, that it would resemble Jason M. Baxter’s introduction to Christian mysticism. I was wrong on all three counts.

Smith describes passing through a crisis of certainty—one that sounded eerily similar to deconstruction. In response, he turns to mysticism and modern art, with its rejection of binary categories (such as true/false), as a way of becoming comfortable with unknowing and cultivating a new awareness of the divine and of love.

While I can sympathize with his doubts, I find his proposed solution theologically untenable and spiritually dangerous. For that reason, I cannot recommend this book and have given it two stars.

[Jim Schuessler]

With my engineering career as background, I related to James K. A. Smith's descriptions of his early goals of finding the "right" or best philosophical arguments to defend a thesis. As a follower of Jesus, I steeped myself in apologetics and air-tight logical reasoning to God. This book is helping me see how my "correct" doctrine may be a precarious Tower of Babel and this book, among other things, is leading to a far more secure foundation built by God first loving me, rather than me trying to work up love for God. That said, Smith's paths to the mysteries of God through contemplation of modern art and some movies is one I have a hard time relating to. I can count on one hand the times I've been in a modern art gallery, let alone appreciated any of it, so is this the only path James? Still, I really enjoyed this book as Smith opened my eyes to so much I have been and continue to be ignorant of. Seeking God in stillness has become a joy, and I look forward to each day He will have me on this earth!

[Paul Reidy]

A terrific treatise into a philosopher's move into the mystic and reconciling his role as a philosopher and a believer in God. It had prompted many notes and further reading and watching from his references throughout the book. Moving from being limited and scared of the unknown to the unknown being freeing and exhilarating.

[Dana Van Ostrand]

I'm grateful for this book. I'm reading this book at a time in my life where my life of faith has felt fragile, tumultuous, and unknowing. Smith offers wisdom; inviting me to move deeper into that unknown, where the underpinnings of love might be found. He offers musings from films, paintings, and other fine arts that tell his story of unknowing. May we be known beyond information.

[Jack Naylor]

I have a complicated relationship with James K.A. Smith. I like a lot of his insights about love, the Christian kerygma, and the "modern condition." But he's a little more Marxist and relativist (in that he thinks we can't adjudicate many debates in the typically rational way) than I would prefer. This book, however, is him at his best, and I would commend it to anyone looking for a proper embrace of mystery in the Christian life.

Guided by mystics like Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, the Cloud of Unknowing, and phenomenological considerations, he takes the reader on an exploration of the light that may be found in the dark - that is to say, the understanding that may be garnered when we divest ourselves of the need for control. One thing that really aided the delivery of this message for me was his engagement with contemporary art and film. His exploration of these pieces as a means to challenge our epistemologies and to better dwell with the world resonated strongly with me. In an age of mass production, it is difficult to allow the world to infiltrate our realities and destroy our paradigms, but it's an experience we need to seek.

Most of all, I like Smith's book because it sounds a note of conviction for me. I want to consume the world, to cut it up, and categorize it. I wish it made perfect sense in submission to my edifice of rationality. But it doesn't - and that's a good thing. I can't found an ultimate understanding of the world within myself. That can only be rooted in the knowledge of God's most original love. That is the only surety and the only thing that may convince anyone to abandon the idolatry of their own project.

[Josiah Solis]

“Such a contemplative posture and practice…will make us vulnerable to an encounter with the God who—wonder of wonders—loves us.”

[Heath]

James K. A. Smith has delivered again! The timing of this book was impeccable. As I picked it up, I was just finishing Martin Laird's Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation, which Smith draws on regularly.

This book is an intersection of my training, where philosophy, theology, and psychology meet. Smith captures the essence of the mystics, adds his own reflections on aesthetics, and directs the reader to a place beyond knowing. This book, and Laird's before it, feel like the two sides of a gate leading to the next journey on my pilgrimage. I am excited to see what I learn.

[SK]

In this book, philosopher James K.A. Smith explores the relationship between mysticism and contemporary art. If they are both experienced rightly without any preconceived notions, they each lead one down a path of "not-knowing without end—" and to an experience of "ignorance that is bottomless, inescapable, unrectifiable" (167). Why should the reader want to follow Smith into this "luminous" darkness when, at one point in the book, Smith claims that "mysticism, like philosophy in its best moments, ruins your life" (138) and that contemporary art "baffles and even repels" (36)? After reading this book, I am not sure.

I struggled to make sense of Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark, and perhaps that is the point, since Smith's argument (if he would even call it that) seems to be set against certainty, knowledge, and understanding. Instead, he is after experiences that are unsettling, decentering, and disruptive. Though Smith is a professing Christian, I was not able to find much here that is distinctively Christian. In fact, Smith "confesses" (or rather, he seems proud to announce) that Christians and religious certainty now make him "cringe." This quest toward unknowing strikes me as a response to that discomfort: "The mystics helped me imagine a future for my faith after a season of anger and embarrassment at the dogmatism of both my youth and my co-religionists" (200).

My impression is that Smith has exchanged the truths of Scripture for a vague and solipsistic faith that makes no claims and where "one's listening bends inward" (107). For him, meditation, whether focused on religious experience or art, is not centered on God and his attributes. Instead...

"The mystics helped me recognize this curiosity at my own curiosity, this fascination with my experience of befuddlement" (35).

"Stillness and silence center us in our longings and our fragility, our need and our yearning" (110).

"I start to watch myself watching the movie. I become curious about what this movie is doing to me...fascinated by my fascination" (116).

He claims that the kind of meditation he prescribes pulls us out of our self-absorption and leads us to 'love", but I am not so sure about that after reading this book. His notion of love and what it means to be beloved is very fuzzy and vague. I came away feeling like there is a performative quality to this book and that what interests Smith most is himself.

I'm giving this one two stars instead of one because Smith is a fine writer. Even when the ideas didn't make much sense, I enjoyed his writing at the sentence level. I also found some of his film analysis interesting but there was a hilarious irony to that too, because he would resist the idea that a contemporary film has a "meaning" and then he would proceed to tell us what one means.

[Misael Galdámez]

James KA Smith has been on a journey, and this book is in some senses the culmination of that journey. From what I can tell, part of this journey has been motivated by the Christian turn toward fascism and very right-wing politics and a lack of charitable love and compassion toward others (I can relate). Finding mysticism in the dark night saved his faith by his own admission, and gave him a new (Christian) way of seeing and being in the world.

Ultimately, that's what I think this book is about: a formation and way of being in the world. It's about an encounter with an Other—God, Love itself—that leads to understanding our own position in the world as beloved. It's about viewing the world as gift, something to be received, rather than something to be analyzed and taken for granted. Ironically, this sense comes to us in the darkest moments of our lives and is a knowing that is beyond knowledge. That's also part of what makes it hard to write about mysticism—it's an experience that goes beyond what words can describe and must be experienced.

I think the book itself is quite good. I enjoyed how he wove together voices from philosophy and church history to talk about mysticism. It does suffer from attempting to separate mystery, solitude, silence, and darkness, which in the mystical tradition are a cohesive whole. Smith also writes about the dark night of the soul—which is an experience of desolation—at the same time as practices that place him in a space that is able to receive the world and understand it non-analytically (e.g. art). At times, that makes it hard to see the connection between the mystics and art.

Having said that, I get what he is trying to do. He is trying to make a connection between the practices of solitude, silence, and darkness, and the experience of contemporary art that does it for him. For Benedictines, that's ora et labora. For me, it's more like pray and work (out). Working out physically places me in a space to receive the world as a gift of God, and to see others in the light of God's Otherness and Love.

The last thing, which is more a qualm with some Christian writers rather than James KA Smith specifically, but the usage of "liberation" in Christian theology tends to annoy me. Not because I disagree, but because liberation is never given its proper context. What is liberation, and more importantly, what is it for? Who is liberation for? And how has God liberated us? It ends up feeling as more of signal of one's politics and theology rather than something substantive. I don't think that's how it's meant, but it can come across that way.

All said, a good read.

[Tyler Stitt]

"Make Your Home..." could be seen as Smith both extending and reframing his previous work, particularly thinking of his Cultural Liturgies books. If, as he argues in "You Are What You Love", the ways we know cannot be reduced to mere information transfer, then here he is doubling or tripling down. We are not transformed by our knowing nearly as much as we are by our unknowing; or more precisely, by our being known.

“Our anxious need to know and to master attends us as long as we walk this valley shadowed by death; and so we must undergo, again and again, the disruption and recentering that pries our conceptual grip off false securities, that allow us to let go, opening our hands to receive gifts we could never manufacture.” (45)

Contemplation, rather than information, is at the heart of both spiritual formation and the philosophical endeavor.

As St. Teresa says in Interior Castle, “The important thing is not to think much but to love much, as so to do whatever best awakens you to love.”

For this reason, the dark night of the soul may be entered into not as tragedy but a doorway. Personal tragedy need not end in despair. “The failure of our understanding can help us. When we reach the end of what we know, that’s where we find God.” (The cloud of unknowing, 75, 156) And what's more, “Contemplation yields an awareness of our belovedness that spills over as compassion and charity. Compassion and charity are modes of being-with that pull us out of ourselves as contemplation does.” (179)

This was very good. Smith's meditations on art and its contemplative power will be especially worth coming back to.

[Max]

Leave it to JKAS to poem Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev in such a literarily-picturesque way — a reverse adaptation, if you will — as if Tarkovsky’s reputation doesn’t dance and pounce before him.

Artists, philosophers and film snobs draw nigh, I’ve discovered a fresh hive of your nectarous sustenance. Huzzah! A plentiful bounty unto charitable dissemination. What a wild ride, his words not mine (pg. 131).

Notwithstanding having moments of delight and learnedness (the irony) and fascinating recommendations, it wasn’t even orbital of my favorites of his or the genre. Next time, maybe.

[Eric]

Very interesting book. Very academic feeling, a lot of dense language throughout. I did find the key concepts meaningful, although they were so theoretical that I'm not quite sure how to actually apply them to my life. I am definitely planning on revisiting parts as I feel the concepts are so high level that it will take time for them to sink in.

Another note: I didn't realize it would be so Christian, but luckily Smith's flavor of Christian faith is very progressive, and he frequently references an "otherness" or just "the divne" rather than capital G god so it was ok in the end.

[Paula Bramante]

Elevates not knowing to a sacred practice and a gift

This book offers a beautifully interwoven contemplation of art and mystic wisdom in a voice that walks the line skillfully between academic and popular writing. Along the way, readers will find abundant references to specific visual artists, writers, and filmmakers for follow up after they finish the book. In these turbulent times, it’s good to recognize bewilderment as an invitation to discover truths we might never glimpse otherwise and to learn about artists who can help us plumb the depths of those discoveries.

[Michael Austin]

This is an excellent book. At times I was confused and didn't understand, at times it was like someone was describing my own experiences as a philosopher and person trying to follow Jesus and his Way, at times I was reassured in my own deep (and deepening) convictions about the true centrality of love. I'll be re-reading this one relatively soon. This book is a gift, and I'm grateful to Smith for writing it.

[Mary]

“The despair of not knowing becomes the elation of not knowing.” Maybe this sentence summarizes this book for me except I am not to the elation part just yet with one epilogue to go. I did despair but stuck with it, one chapter at a time, taking notes on my laptop. I liked the summary of the four points of contemplation: solitude, silence, darkness, wonder—with Latin terms. I struggled with intellectual mastery which is not the point of contemplation. I am humbled.

[Chris Wilder]

I'm a huge admirer of Smith and was excited to read this book. His writing on the mystics I found incredibly beautiful and helpful, but he lost me when he would compare it to contemporary art. I'll admit that if I was familiar with some of the art he was referencing it may have enhanced my enjoyment of those sections.

[Ken Reese]

It is difficult to put the transformative value of mystical experience into words. The Soul's dark night is a horror beyond language, but there is light in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. That light is felt most acutely when all you see is the dark, and in these moments God makes himself known. Yes.

[Tyler]

A beautiful book. I like how James integrated mysticism with philosophy and opened up the door to understand some obscure concepts without becoming too heady. It helped having a few of the other books to use as reference points and follow along with. I read this book slowly and devotionally trying to absorb as much as I could!

Highly Recommend!

[Cameron Barham]

“This book is a testament to the failure of philosophy as I knew it. The book is a testimony to the liberation of unknowing. This book reaches toward philosophy as it could be—illuminating the idea that the love of wisdom can be a path to the wisdom of love.”, p. 7-8

[Justin Lonas]

Wow, did I need this one. "Modernity taught us to crave knowledge as substitute for being embedded in communities where being known is the practical foundation for going on.... Being right is a sorry substitute for being loved."

[Josh Shelton]

Very difficult subject to evaluate. But I think he did about as well as anyone could.

I would put the end of our exploring slightly higher than this one. But all in all it was very helpful for me. 4.5 stars

[Griffin Gooch]

Excellent. Review to come on some website, at some point.

[Ryan Fendley]

One of my favorite books as of recent.

“Only when I let go

of what others say,
and listen to who

I truly am, do I make
room for the one me

You want me to be.”

[Persis]

A book worth reading slowly and pondering what it means to embrace wonder and unknowing rather than certainty.

[Danyuhl Mackuh]

probably true