On this day last year, we launched the first issue of Macrina Magazine. I want to thank all of those who have visited our publication and attentively read its pages, whether consistently or inconsistently. I also want to thank all of those who have contributed to the magazine by submitting articles, reflections, short stories, and poetry that partakes in the spirit of our project. The editorial team is deeply grateful for the many ways in which you, as readers, have supported us.

We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground! – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §107

As the anniversary of our launch began to approach, and I started to think about how I might address it, I asked myself the question: what do readers want to hear from the editor-in-chief of a magazine? Certainly they don’t merely want to be met with empty thanksgivings and platitudes. If I am to communicate anything, surely it ought to be something which inspires faith in the reader. Not faith as such, but faith in the magazine—in our vision, in what we represent.

But what would it mean to have faith in Macrina Magazine? In ordinary speech, faith suggests a form of stability or certainty. We have faith in that which stabilizes us. Faith is that certainty which extends beyond the limits of knowledge. Faith requires a confident leap from our limitations towards refuge. We do not know where that leap will take us, but we know that what we put our faith in does. If this is what it means to have faith, I am not so sure that I have faith in Macrina. 

I don’t have that form of faith in Macrina because that would presuppose that we know where we are going, that Macrina’s vision is fixed and final, and that the project itself has a substantial stability that grounds those of us who are devoted to it. If that was the precondition of faith, I would have lost faith in Macrina a long time ago. More often than not, I share Dante’s disposition in the first tercet of The Divine Comedy: 

Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
For the straight way was lost. (Inferno, I.1-3). 

What’s the future of the magazine? Is this all worth it? Am I fit to be a leader? Do I know where I am going? Are these the questions and thoughts of someone who has faith? Maybe not. On the other hand, perhaps there is a way of speaking about faith, in its finite mode, that doesn’t presuppose firm beginnings and ends. In other words, what if the precondition of faith is aporetic—wayless and difficult? Maybe the anxieties I have about stability are precisely the precondition of this faith. In the dynamic of the three theological virtues, faith is a beginning and a foundation. Hope is a teleological virtue of the middle. And love is an end, the only of the theological virtues which persists in the eschaton. If faith is a beginning, maybe it is better conceived as a beginning analogous to Dante in the dark forest: a beginning in the middle which has recognized its loss of sight and way. 

To draw on the philosopher Gillian Rose, faith is a virtue or habit which allows one to go on, to continue, when the way is obscured. It takes the certainty from faith but not its confidence. Aporetic faith resists fixing unanxious beginnings and commits itself to continue amidst uncertainties and contradictions.¹ Faith is a possibility that allows us to continually risk ourselves, without fixed beginnings or endings. As Vincent Lloyd has put it, “to acknowledge inherent, irreparable conflict and to continue to gamble—that is faith."²  Faith is thus the foundation for continued activity, not the precondition for despair and passivity. Faith’s anxiety grows fruit; fear’s anxiety thwarts. To paraphrase the epigraph, we need friction to walk. 

This is the faith that I have in Macrina, and it is also the faith I hope you, not just as readers but as contributors, can cultivate with us. I don’t have everything figured out, we don’t have everything figured out, and you don’t have everything figured out. Take that uncertainty not as an opportunity to withdraw in the anticipation of stability, but as the precondition for risking activity—in writing, in expression!

It is my hope that you take this reflection as an invitation to join us as we fail towards form, with faith as our friction.