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.”

Do monotheists have a monopoly over religion?

I feel the Religious Society of Friends would be misrepresented if the marriage declaration was altered along the lines suggested in the Friend of 10 February in order to accommodate non-theism, unless we wish to abandon our traditional view that marriage is a ‘religious commitment’ as set out in Quaker faith & practice (1.02, 23).

The declaration not only reflects the couple’s view of marriage but also the view of the Religious Society of Friends as a corporate body.

In my opinion the way in which we define commitments such as marriage and membership reflects how we see ourselves as a faith community. If we wish to remain a religious society, why would it be right for us to define either in non-religious terms? Richard Pashley, The Friend, March 2, 2023

Equating being “non-theist” with being “non-religious” is something of an error. Many non-theist have a deeply spiritual and reverential attitudes towards life and towards relationships. That is not lessened for them by the absence of a purported intangible. 

Many modern Pagans regard the earth itself as sacred and the life springing from it as its sacred out-flowing. They reverence the natural world. The sky god, the celestial god, the abstracted omnipresent but intangible god of judgement, trapped in the texts of ancient books, is not their god. Their focus of reverence is tangible: it is the woods and trees, the rivers and streams, and the abundant fecundity of life.

The Taoist reverence the flow of energy through everything. It is not the river that is sacred, but the flowing of the river. It is not the tree that is sacred, but its growing. It is not the leaf that is sacred but the falling of the leaf. It is not the bird that is sacred, but the flying and singing of the bird. It is not the person that is sacred, but the life that flows through them. When we are in accord with the flow, when we are in harmony with it, when we bend ourselves to it, then we are in spiritual alignment. There is no god, no operator behind the scenes pulling the strings, no eternal all seeing judge, just the flow that gives and keeps on giving, without judgement.

The great Tao flows everywhere. All things are born from it, yet it doesn't create them. It pours itself into its work, yet it makes no claim. It nourishes infinite worlds, yet it does not hold on to them. Since it is merged with all things and hidden in their hearts, it can be called humble. Since all things vanish into it and it alone endures, it can be called great. It isn't aware of its greatness; thus it is truly great.  Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching: translated by Stephen Mitchell.

Are we to say that the Pagan or the Taoist are not religious because they have no god? Equally, can we say that the non-theist is not religious, because, likewise, they have no god?

Late Roman Empire Christianity – the illegitimate child of Judaism grown into maturity, conformity and authority – inherited from its parent a conception of a celestial god – ineffable, omnipotent, omnipresent, a law giving mega-god – and passed that conception on to its breakaway children, reformed Protestant and non-conformist alike. That was the dominant conception of the god of Christianity in seventeenth century England. We should not be surprised to find that conception embedded in the words of seventeenth century Quakers. 

Their radical re-centring onto unmeditated experience and away from ritual may have returned those first Quakers to what they thought was a form of primitive Christianity, more akin the lived experience of Jesus and his disciples, but it also took them away from reliance on creed or doctrine. They conceived of Jesus as standing in the presence but with the word in his heart. They too wished to stand in such a presence harkening to the word in their heart; and they found that it was in stillness and silence that the seed of that word grew and gave forth. 

But the presence of what? To say that is to leave a vacuum that linguistically begs to be filled. Does it need to be filled? That sense of wonder, awe, reverence, sacredness and transcendence is a vehicle for spirituality, but does it necessarily have to carry you to the response "god"? Is that a convenient word that serves to fill a linguistic vacuum? An obedience to the subject <–> object structure of our language? Is such a response void filling in order to be rid of cognitive and linguistic discomfort? Should we not be examining that discomfort and learning from it? To avoid doing this is, if anything, lazy. 

Our language, it seems, requires an object, but, as the theologian Paul Tillich* points out, if "god' is an object, then he is only one more thing among a universe of things, and, as he is not immediately apparent or tangible, he can cease to have importance or relevance. Rather, Tillich felt that 'god' should stand for the very ground of being itself, or, as he sometimes put it, as being itself: god as sacredness, as reverence, as wonder, as awe, as the totality of being, as our greatest concern, not as one more object among a universe of objects.

In Tibetan Buddhism sometimes pupils are advised to practice 'god' devotion. Only when they have fully realised the practice and come to be devoted to the god, experiencing them as real, does the meditation master burst the bubble so that the pupils are shocked into realising that they have created an idol that is a projection of their own yearnings. Thus deconstructed, 'god' function as a doorway into deeper realisation. This is similar to the Zen advice, that "If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him". The devotion and reverence engendered by the practice of god-worship is thus transferred to all life, to being itself. 

Are we to say that such Buddhists are not religious because they have burst the bubble of god? Equally, can we say that the non-theist is not religious, because, likewise, they have no god? Because they are not prepared to worship an idol that is a projection of their own yearnings? That is to deny them devotional and reverential agency. That is to deny them profoundly religious experiences simply because they are not prepared to focus those feelings onto the inherited god of Christianity, a culturally manufactured idol.

I have no doubt that many non-theists are deeply religious, which is exactly why they are non-theist. To worship an mind-made idol – a projection – which they know to be mind-made, would be sacrilegious, blasphemous, and a manifest gross lack of integrity.

Carl Jung in his work as an explorer of the human mind – the psyche – identified what he called the 'god-archetype. A latent cluster of feeling, images, desires, yearnings, in his patients which troubled them unless attended to. It often found form by projection, taking the shape suggested by the patient's culture and history, becoming an object of devotion, of worship, of ritual and of veneration. Alternatively they might suppress it, becoming notably iconoclastic and atheistic; or inflate their experience, becoming identified with the archetype, either embodying it or by becoming its servant. He advised that only integration would aid what he called individuation – which we might think of as maturation – conditioning the psyche (spirit) into wisdom rather than knowledge, thus letting those complex feelings find expression in ways that helped build and enrich life.