The via positiva & the via negativa

Jung stressed the importance of discovering and exploring our potential for spiritual alignment in order for people to mature throughout life. Of the four main mechanisms of the mind he identified - inflation, projection, suppression/repression, and integration - only one, integration, was entirely healthy, and a great aid to maturation. The two spiritual pathways of the via positiva and the via negativa are classic examples of integration, but they each carry the weight of their histories.

The western mind has been saturated with the result of the "dispute” between Parmenides of  Elea and Heraclitus of Ephesus . Both were born in the 6th century BCE, and died in the 5th century BCE, as far as we know.

Heraclitus described the world as being in constant flux: “you cannot step into the same river twice.”

Parmenides divided the world in two. The apparent world of flux behind which was a more stable world. He did so by distinguishing between substance and essence; on the surface substance seems to flow, but beneath lies a stable word of essence. 

The Greco-Roman philosophers  of classical period, especially the two giants – Plato and Aristotle – followed Parmenides in building their respective philosophies on the distinction between substance and essence.  Substance is subject to change. Essence is unchanging. Between them they established Parmenidian thought as dominant.

As the classical world declined and morphed into the age of monotheistic religions, splitting the Mediterranean world into two – North and West Christian, South and East Islamic – the substance essence distinction became embedded in their respective theologies. God being the essence. The apparent world of flux – of death and decay, of temporality and suffering –  being willed and held in place by the deity, by whatever name known. 

And so the dominant idea of something permanent behind reality remained in the western mind  - Classical, Christian, Muslim, Judaic - for the next two and a half thousand years.

Growing from an entirely different root stock, the Eastern mind dispensed with the the notion of unchanging essences, instead embracing transience as fundamental, especially in Buddhism and Taoism: we live in a world of illusion. All we can do is watch it flow and sail with its winds, or detach ourselves into equanimity, knowing the circus of illusion to be just that. Learning that to see is to see from different perspectives at the same time, none more real, or less real, than the other.

By contrast the monotheistic religions projected their God on to the shelf provided by the notion of essence; safe, secure and beyond human knowing: omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient. The puppet master behind the scenes making things happen, if, as, and when he chooses.

Nineteenth century imperialism dismissed the Eastern mind as nebulous. It had nothing to compare to the fruits of enlightenment rationalism, or of the scientific revolution. Like it or not, post Newton, we seemed to live in an entirely deterministic world, perhaps built by a divine clock maker who had set it going. A world capable in time of being entirely described and known.

Then came the twentieth century. The ultimate triumph of rationalism, of the knowability of everything, given time, effort, precision, and  ingenuity, was expected. The final working of the Newtonian universe. That was what David  Hilbert - the renowned mathematician - and the Positivists envisioned. It was the consensus amongst the educated. 

It was not to be.

The limits of the determinable had been reached. It was proving to be a subset of a wider universe in which chaos and order danced together, the one emerging from the other as stability decays into instability, and new stabilities emerge out of chaos.

Quantum uncertainty puts an end to (pre)determinism. Even a divine intelligence could not know what the outcome will be: God defeated by schrodinger’s cat in a box! 

Events now only becoming determined from the point of interaction between the known and the random, not before. Events are to be described by a probability matrix in advance, anyone of which possibles can emerge at the branching point, as the others collapse. 

Quantum theory was not the only limiting factor restricting what could be determined. It came from within mathematics itself. Godel’s incompleteness theorem marking the end of the remorseless march of rationalism in maths.

Turing‘s halting problem marking another limit to the knowable: even a perfect machine cannot predict it’s own results.

And finally the emergence of chaos theory itself, revealing a universe changing between stable and chaotic states.

It looks as if Heraclitus was right after all. 

Welcome to the world of Schrödinger’s cat and the butterfly effect. A world where the distinction between substance and essence does not exist. Where events are forged by interaction at the time, and each forms an expanding cone of possibilities of how it might develop, and decay.

The two and a  half thousand year reign of essence hidden behind substance, the safe hiding place for Gods, gone in a quantum flash.

The via positiva uses symbols, drawn from rich traditions of western religious iconography, as stepping stones to awaken a sense of the transcendent God; but his hiding place has gone! His, their, her, omnipotents, omnipresence and omniscience terminated. The god loci made possible by Parmenides and so fully developed by all three of the western monotheisms may resonate psychologically, maybe the path needed by some in order to open their spirituality, but it no longer allows for a higher power creating and manipulating behind the scenes.

The via negativa, by contrast, is more amenable to life lived in a post mechanically determined universe. It is more open to the teachings of the East. By deconstructing the symbolism of the monotheistic religions it can become a vehicle for spiritual growth and maturity, incorporating what is good from those traditions with what is discovered anew - the process of continuing revelation - making it a dynamic path not a static path. What those on the path of the via negative are likely to encounter is the immanence of the divine embedded in the hear and now, as in George Fox’s advice to “walk cheerfully over the world answering to that of God in every one.”