Melancholy without God

"Where God once used to dwell, we now find melancholia." Gershon Scholem

This devote of mysticism understands that for someone whose life was imbued with the experience of a god permeated life, the secularized world is empty no matter how filled with mundane activities. It is ultimately joyless no matter how much he/she pursues an infinity of consumerist goals, and even political goals that might elevate her/him to a social being. The "happiness" of modernity offers no consolation whether it be in public or in private life to this former "believer". What then is missing from the mundane world touted as the be all and end of modernity, the material universe stripped of all transcendental reality. The "what cannot be seen", the "what is obviously non-temporal FACT" right there in front of our data filled eyes cannot be conceptualized by our existing categories, or grasped by a rationalist enlightenment perspective. Insofar as the secularized perceive what is beyond this egoistic and materialistic universe of being, the unseen is probably pursued negatively, like a negative theology, a self-destructive drug. This non-temporal FACT can be given no narrative though clearly it has a story in every fact. It has a history even if not physically perceived, indeed a past, and a future beyond the "seen", the experienced of today, of the NOW. It is like a lyric that wraps itself around the words one reads, the signifiers one grasps, the immediate symbolic content that is signified. Each fact leads to a beyond, a past, a future, an incomensurability. Can we possibly accept the position that it is possible to ignore this FACT, this "unreasonable" reality without destroying our very imagination, indeed the creativity of human reason?