Circling the Tower: The Eucharist and Modernity’s Crisis of Transcendence

Today we urgently need to think the faith so that we can express it in contemporary cultural settings and challenges, but also to counter the risk of cultural emptiness, which in our time is becoming increasingly invasive.

Pope Leo XIV captures with this statement a paradox that has become increasingly difficult to ignore. We live amid unprecedented cultural production, endless content, constant commentary, ceaseless noise. And yet something feels hollow. The emptiness is not the absence of things to say, but the absence of depth in saying them. Modern longing is not pure. It is confused, contradictory, often ugly in its desperation. It scrolls endlessly, buys compulsively, performs perpetually.

And yet at its best, it is also heartbreakingly beautiful, the beauty of someone still searching in the wreckage, still asking questions when all the easy answers have failed. This longing is not merely psychological. It has metaphysical weight. What we call cultural emptiness is often a symptom of a deeper problem, the loss of a credible grammar of transcendence. What follows argues that modern longing becomes spiritually sterile when it is trapped either in aesthetic distance or philosophical inevitability.

The Czech-German poet Rainer Maria Rilke represents longing at its most refined and tragic, a life oriented toward the sacred yet unable to enter it. Maurice Blondel gives philosophical clarity to what Rilke inhabits poetically, the will’s inability to close upon itself. But Blondel’s strength introduces a risk. The crack may begin to look like a bridge, as if transcendence were simply the resolution of a structural lack. Erich Przywara then provides the necessary correction, insisting that the relation between God and creature remains asymmetrical and non-reciprocal even at the height of intimacy, in Deo semper maior, “in God, ever greater.”

The Infinite Circle: Rilke and the Home of Longing

The Book of Hours (1905), written between 1899 and 1903, is Rilke’s most sustained meditation on the search for God. Structured as the prayers of a Russian monk—though a distinctly modern one—the collection presents a speaker who is intimate with God yet estranged from him: uncertain, questing, devotional without arrival. The first book, The Book of Monastic Life, opens with deceptive simplicity:

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not ever complete the last one,
but I give myself to it.[1]

The image suggests cosmic expansion; the speaker is not small. Yet the decisive line follows immediately: the last circle will never be completed. Movement without arrival becomes the poem’s true subject. The conclusion sharpens the dilemma:

I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years,
and I still do not know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

A thousand years of circling, not approaching, not entering, not even drawing closer. The tower remains unclimbed, the door unopened. This uncertainty is not treated as a problem to be solved but as a condition to be inhabited. Here lies Rilke’s signature move: longing becomes the dwelling place. Not longing as passage, but longing as home.

This is profoundly modern. We have become experts at longing, curators of our own incompleteness. Rilke does something similar, though with far greater honesty and craft. God becomes unspeakable not through overwhelming holiness, as in the apophatic tradition, but through perpetual deferral. The sacred is hidden not because it exceeds language, but because it never arrives. Consider the near-blasphemous intimacy of the following: 

What will you do, God, when I die?
I am your pitcher (when I shatter?)
I am your drink (when I go bitter?)
I am your robe and your profession: without me what reason have you?

God needs the poet. The divine depends on human perception. This is not the God of aseity, of Abraham or Augustine, but a God enclosed within human consciousness. It is beautiful, and dangerous. For if the relation is symmetrical, the infinite has already been reduced. A symmetrical infinity is no infinity at all.

This pattern repeats throughout The Book of Hours:

I find you, Lord, in all Things
and in all my fellow creatures, pulsing with your life;
as a tiny seed you sleep in what is small
and in the vast you vastly yield yourself.

The vision is panentheistic, nearly pantheistic. God suffuses all things. Yet this very immanence prevents God from appearing as Other—never breaking in, never commanding, judging, or bestowing grace. The spirituality is real, but it never risks dispossession. The monk circles the tower, but he never knocks—perhaps fearing what might answer.

And yet, there is one poem where something shifts. One moment where the circling threatens to break, where God speaks not as an object of contemplation but as a living voice. It is the poem that I would argue stands at the center of Rilke’s entire spiritual quest, the moment where his longing becomes most explicit and most vulnerable:

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Do not let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

This poem reverses almost everything else in The Book of Hours. Here God speaks first, and the soul is not seeking but sent. “Go to the limits of your longing” is not an invitation to aestheticize restlessness, but to press desire until it breaks open and reveals what it truly wants. “Embody me” turns contemplation into command: participation, not fusion. Beauty and terror are permitted, but neither is final. The bond is real enough to be lost. Then the poem turns outward: “Nearby is the country they call life.” The sacred is not buried deeper within interiority, but encountered in embodied seriousness. It ends with a request both intimate and devastating: “Give me your hand.” Rilke renders the call with precision, but his life suggests how hard it is to receive.

By the time of the Duino Elegies (1923), begun in 1912 and completed after the long silence of World War I, the earlier invitation has intensified into terror: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?” The sacred no longer appears as a hand offered, but as overwhelming intensity. “Every angel is terrifying,” not from malice, but because divine radiance exceeds what fragile human life can bear.

Rilke’s instinct is modern and honest. Transcendence cannot be domesticated without being destroyed. Yet without ascetic discipline and communal forms, nearness becomes unlivable. The cost is isolation: the sacred never decisively enters history and action, and longing collapses into aesthetic interiority rather than encounter. The tower is never climbed. The door is never opened. The hand is never taken.

The Breaking Point: Blondel’s Phenomenology of Action

Maurice Blondel (1861–1949), a French Catholic philosopher, takes modern desire with full seriousness and subjects it to analysis. Like Rilke, he begins from lived experience rather than doctrine. He takes longing seriously and refuses to reduce it to psychology or dissolve it with easy apologetics. But where Rilke stays at the threshold, Blondel asks what longing does, what its structure is, and where it points.

His answer is simple and devastating. Human willing never coincides with itself. What we desire always exceeds what we can accomplish, not as an accident of weakness or history, but as the structure of human existence itself. In L’Action (1893), Blondel begins with the most basic fact: to will anything at all is already to act. Even refusal and retreat are forms of willing. We cannot step outside volition. We are always already committed.

And here is the clue. Every finite intention, when pursued honestly to its end, reveals an openness beyond itself. Try to will only autonomy, self-sufficiency, or flourishing, and push it without self-deception. You discover that the self cannot ground itself. The circle of self-enclosed willing breaks open from within. Seek happiness in pleasure, success, knowledge, or virtue. Achieve it, and the circuit still does not close. You remain restless and incomplete.

Blondel’s method is phenomenological, but his conclusion is metaphysical. The insufficiency is not merely psychological but ontological. Immanence, pressed to its own logic, cracks open and demands transcendence, not as an external supplement but as the condition of its intelligibility. Here Blondel gives philosophical form to what Rilke intuits poetically: human life is oriented beyond itself. Longing is not merely a mood to cultivate or an aesthetic posture. It is a movement that demands interpretation.

Where Rilke circles, Blondel advances. The circle cannot hold. In this sense Blondel clarifies what it means to “go to the limits of your longing.” The limit is the point where longing, pressed far enough, breaks through its own closure and reveals itself as already open beyond itself. And crucially, Blondel claims this is not theology forcing philosophy into submission, but philosophy discovering its limits from within.

Blondel’s project is therefore pastoral as much as philosophical. He writes for the modern person who cannot simply accept tradition on authority, but who is also honest enough to admit that autonomy does not satisfy. For the one who circles the tower because entering seems impossible, Blondel offers a diagnosis: the impossibility is not in the tower, but in the illusion that circling is enough. Restlessness is not a problem to manage, but a sign to be read.

Yet Blondel reaches his own threshold. The question is whether, in proving that self-enclosed immanence is impossible, he makes transcendence feel inevitable in a way that threatens to undo transcendence.

Here he approaches what might be called an immanentist dialectic, a pattern noted by thinkers like Cyril O’Regan in post-Hegelian philosophy. Transcendence is opened only to be resolved back into immanence as its self-overcoming. God becomes the name for human striving’s final fulfillment. The sacred becomes the immanent order’s telos. Blondel explicitly rejects this. His entire project depends on the absolute gratuity of the supernatural. Grace cannot be deduced from nature, and the divine answer is not necessitated by human insufficiency. The crack in immanence does not automatically become a bridge. And yet his argument generates tension. By showing that the will’s trajectory opens beyond itself and even points toward God, he risks making that opening too smooth, too determinate, too philosophically secure.

This is clearest in Blondel’s claim that the human condition constitutes an “obligatory option” for the supernatural. We must choose. We cannot choose. Even refusal carries metaphysical weight. This is brilliant. It blocks retreat into indifference and exposes neutrality as a substantive stance. But it also risks making the supernatural look like the logical completion of a natural trajectory. Nature poses the question, grace supplies the answer. The fit becomes too perfect. God begins to look less like free gift and more like the answer to an equation the will itself has posed.

Think of it this way: when Rilke hears God say, “Give me your hand,” the call comes from outside the circle of longing. It interrupts, and it cannot be derived from longing itself, however far longing is pushed.

The God Ever Greater: Przywara’s Metaphysics of Grace

Erich Przywara (1889–1972), the Polish-German Jesuit, enters where Blondel’s diagnosis risks collapsing transcendence into completion. Writing in the interwar period, with Europe sliding into ideological frenzy, Przywara watches both secular philosophy and Christian modernism attempt to resolve the tension between transcendence and immanence. Each resolution promises liberation, and yet each risks collapse, either into a humanism that absorbs God into history, or into a piety that denies the world any theological density.

Przywara’s contribution is not to reject openness, but to refuse closure. His central instrument is the analogia entis, the analogy of being. He develops it most fully in Analogia Entis (1932), though its logic is already present throughout his earlier work. The aim is straightforward and severe: to articulate creaturely relation to God without turning God into a projection, and without turning the creature into a rival.

The structure begins with a claim that Christian theology cannot abandon. God and creature are not simply unrelated. Both “are.” The creature has being, and it has it truly. Without some genuine likeness between Creator and creature, no speech about God would be meaningful, and faith would collapse into either silence or myth. But the decisive point is how the likeness is held. God and creature do not share being in the same way. The creature has being. God is being. The creature exists by participation. God exists as source. This difference is not simply quantitative, as if God had “more” of what creatures have. It is qualitative. It marks an absolute ontological asymmetry. Przywara condenses the entire argument into the phrase in Deo semper maior, “in God, ever greater.” The closer one draws to God, the more God exceeds. Nearness does not cancel otherness. It intensifies it. The peak of intimacy does not end transcendence. It reveals transcendence more radically.

This is what protects theology from the modern dialectical temptation. In a post-Hegelian climate, difference often functions only as a stage on the way to synthesis. Contradiction generates movement, movement generates reconciliation, and reconciliation generates closure. Even a theology of longing can be seduced by this shape. The soul is restless. Immanence cracks. The opening appears. God arrives as completion. The story ends in resolution.

Przywara refuses this ending. The “gap” between Creator and creature is not a defect to be overcome. It is the very condition of creaturehood. The creature is always “between,” always receiving, always upheld, always dependent. There is no point in creaturely life at which dependence becomes equality. There is no stage at which participation becomes possession.

For Przywara, then, transcendence is not an external supplement to immanence. It is not a missing piece waiting to be fitted into the system of nature. Transcendence is the condition under which all created existence occurs. Immanence is real, but it is never self-grounding. The world is thick with reality but never sealed. The creature can act, love, build, suffer, and pray, but never become source.

This also means that the relation between God and creature is non-reciprocal. The creature depends absolutely on God. God does not depend on the creature at all. The relation is real, intimate, and participatory, but it is not symmetrical. Symmetry would imply that God and creature stand within the same horizon of being, differing only in degree. It would make God a supreme object inside the world rather than the ground of the world’s very existence. At this point Przywara helps us read Rilke and Blondel with new precision.

Rilke’s fear in the Duino Elegies is the fear of annihilation. The sacred overwhelms. The angel is terrifying. Transcendence feels like a force that consumes the self. This is not superstition. It is an accurate intuition of the instability of the modern soul before divine intensity. A humanity trained to protect itself through distance does not know how to endure nearness.

This is because the soul can embody God because embodiment is participation, not completion. The creature becomes the place where God chooses to act, but God remains the free source of this action. The shadows are created, and yet God moves within them. Grace inhabits creaturely life, but grace does not become dependent on creaturely life for its divinity.

This is the metaphysical discipline modern longing requires. Without it, longing oscillates between two equally sterile poles. Either it remains aesthetic distance, circling the tower forever, spiritual but safe. Or it seeks intensity, and collapses into terror, frenzy, or mysticism without measure. Przywara does not solve longing by abolishing it. He purifies longing by placing it within a grammar of asymmetrical nearness. The gap does not close, and precisely for that reason, nearness becomes possible.

Conclusion: The Hand Extended in History

To read Rilke alongside Blondel and Przywara is not to correct Rilke in a superior tone, but to understand him more fully, and perhaps to love him more. Rilke stands as a luminous witness to modern humanity’s spiritual sensitivity and to its wounds. He shows what happens when longing is protected but never fulfilled, when the sacred is honored but never trusted, when the threshold becomes not a passage but a dwelling place.

His tragedy is not unbelief. It is isolation. He circles the tower for a thousand years, and the circling itself becomes a kind of devotion. There is something noble in this refusal of cheap consolation. Rilke will not worship false gods. He will not pretend that art is enough. He will not lie about his incompleteness. This honesty is itself a kind of spiritual achievement. But honesty is not enough. Longing, however refined, is not fulfillment. Circling, however devotional, is not entry. And this is where Rilke’s beauty becomes tragic. He knew what was being asked. But he could not answer. Not because the hand was not offered, but because he lacked the conceptual and communal resources to understand how taking that hand could be anything other than either presumption or annihilation.

Blondel clarifies what Rilke suffers. The circle cannot hold. The self cannot close itself. Restlessness is not merely a mood of modern culture. It is the disclosure of a metaphysical condition. The modern effort to remain enclosed within immanence is not only spiritually impoverishing. It is incoherent. Yet Blondel also shows why the question of transcendence cannot be settled by philosophical inevitability. If grace becomes the completion demanded by nature’s structure, then God becomes predictable. The gift becomes an equation.

Przywara provides the correction. His in Deo semper maior safeguards the irreducible asymmetry between Creator and creature. It protects transcendence precisely in the moment of intimacy. God can be present without becoming a possession. The creature can participate without becoming equal. Still, a final question remains. Where does this become more than a concept? Where does a metaphysical grammar become livable for creatures like us, not as an argument but as communion?

It takes flesh. The Christian claim is not that God becomes less overwhelming, but that God becomes near in a form the creature can receive. Not by canceling divine otherness, but by giving divine life a human face, a human voice, and a human body. The incarnation is not an idea that completes longing. It is the interruption that judges longing and fulfills it, without dissolving it into projection.

And this is why the Church matters for modern longing. Not because the Church offers an institutional substitute for transcendence, but because the Church is where transcendence becomes encounter under the conditions of creaturely life. The sacraments are not religious ornaments for an already complete existence. They are the concrete forms in which divine nearness becomes bearable, repeatable, and communal. Modernity produces religious geniuses who lack a home. Rilke is the clearest example. The Christian tradition, at its best, does not merely admire longing. It disciplines longing. It teaches the soul how to receive rather than only how to desire. In the Eucharist, the soul does not circle the tower. It is brought inside. God does not remain a terrifying intensity that overwhelms the creature, nor a distant object of interior contemplation. God gives himself as food. This is nearness without fusion, intimacy without possession, transcendence without terror. The Eucharist insists that fulfillment is possible because a gift is possible.

To “go to the limits of your longing” is therefore not to pursue infinite interiority. It is to allow longing to become obedient, receptive, and enacted in life. It is to let longing be converted from aesthetic circling into concrete communion. “Nearby is the country they call life,” Rilke wrote. Christianity replies that life is not merely serious. It is sacramental. It is the place where the hand is offered, and where it must be taken, again and again, not in solitude, but in the Church’s serious rhythms of grace.

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