Shedding Meta-Light on the Enlightenment

So, this Hamann fellow, despite all the never before seen light illuminating reality for the first time,

prophesied that the Enlightenment, theoretically unable to support itself, being based on illusions regarding its own rationality, would end in nihilism.

Which would have made him unpopular, supposing he cared about popularity: "he realized that his own writings were perhaps too difficult to be worth publishing," and "never wrote for the public anyway, except ironically, having written for individual readers who 'knew how to swim.'" 

Which of course reminds me of Dávila. For example, his first book 

remained virtually unknown because only 100 copies were printed and these were presented as gifts to his friends.... [He] made no attempts to make his writings widely known. Only by way of German (and later Italian as well as French and Polish) translation beginning in the late eighties did Dávila's ideas begin to be read among poets and philosophers.

There is still no authorized English translation of the Aphorisms. Which is fine by me. Some things are better when they're hot.

Kierkegaard was a big fan, calling Hamann "the greatest humorist in Christendom," even "the greatest humorist in the world." All others are number two, or lower.

He was a bit of a slacker and gentleman loaffeur before his time: "With an encyclopedic curiosity, which he later equated with dissipation," and "given ample time for leisure, he indulged his intellectual curiosity to the point of gluttony, virtually bankrupting himself on books." 

Until he had a dramatic conversion experience in 1758, when, while reading his Bible, he gradually then suddenly "began to perceive that God was somehow speaking to him and that the same one who authored the Bible was the author of his life." He "discovered that Scripture was 'living and active'" and "that in some strange way it was also addressed to him."

Afterwards "he could not go back to laboring for 'the god of the world,'" but "now aimed to work for God." Which made him, "in worldly terms, useless." Or even more useless than before. 

Which was okay, because he thought the Enlighteners were the ones left in the dark: "What a Nothing, what a smoke, what a pestilent Nothing are [our days] in our eyes when reason counts them!," for "All is labyrinth, all disorder, if we wish to see by ourselves." 

The German idealism of his contemporaries "precisely shut out the world, so that one no longer encounters in it anything other than reason," which "might as well 'be nothing.'" 

The joke's on them: "Christian humor is the appropriate response to the fundamentally ludicrous nature of idolatry, however refined and 'rational' its permutations might be." 

Hamann indulges in irony because in his view Christianity not only commends irony, but is essentially ironic.... the entire economy of salvation could be said to be ironic -- even humorous -- to the extent that the "gods" of the world are "outwitted."

Concur: "The Christian needs irony in order to humiliate the devil." Which is why the Babylon Bee, in its ironic humiliation of the diabolic left, is doing God's work.  

For Hamann, Socrates is the great forerunner, for "the wise know that they know nothing. Such is the irony, the divine joke, at the origin of western philosophy." 

whereas the way of rational autonomy popularized by the Enlightenment is ultimately dead and unenlightened, the way foreshadowed by Socratic ignorance and fulfilled in Christian humility is fruitful because it is alive to the illuminating presence of the Holy Spirit.  

Ironically, the cultured despisers of Christianity "are in fact the modern-day heirs of those who killed" Socrates, so ha ha.

This is as far as I've gotten in the book, so, the end for now.