The Via Negativa v The Via Positiva: East Meets West in Spiritual Thought, Where Does Unity Fall? A Paper Presented By Deborah Hill-Davis Unity Institute Lyceum April 14, 2011 What is the relationship of matter to Spirit and Spirit to matter? This question is at the crux of the discernment of the mystics and theologians of all ages. What is it to
2 know God? The search to understand this relationship of Spirit to our human condition, to suffering, to salvation or enlightenment is at the bottom of the human desire to understand the nature of God and the nature of man and the complex interrelationship of the two natures. Do we know God through (cataphic) epistemology or (apophatic) mystical experience? Fillmore speaks repeatedly of our carnal mind, by which he most often means material or physical being. His vision of spiritualizing matter through realization of the Divine within and by way of the faculty of thought is akin to the Desert Mystics who were embracing the experience of complete Oneness with God. And the mystical understanding of the Eastern traditions seeks the Way of apophasis, of the knowing and the unknowing to reach the place of No-thing-ness, or complete Oneness with all that is or ever was. In the journey to discovery of what God is or is not, and the relationship of creator and created, what are the pitfalls? And where do the Fillmores, as Christian mystics of the modern era, land and what do they prescribe for the spiritual seeker, the Unity Truth student? Is it the Via Positiva or the Via Negativa? It is not possible in the scope of this paper to unpack and explore all there is to know about the Via Positiva and the Via Negativa for these terms simultaneously describe a spiritual practice and embrace a theological conundrum. The journey has been an ongoing aporia which is an insoluble contradiction or paradox in a text s meaning. There is no true or logical resolution of the issue of the relationship of matter to Spirit, the human divine, the finite-infinite, and the binary nature of the Spirit/Matter universe. This paper reflects the struggle of the author with the dilemma, the aporia and includes an exploration of both the cataphatic theology of the Via Positiva and the apaphatic theology of the Via Negativa and the possibilities of resolution in the theological and spiritual journey.
3 The western Christian orthodoxy has attempted to resolve this in the divine/human being of Jesus Christ. However, contemporary theologian Catherine Keller poses the problem with this divine embodiment: Divinity comes, after all, encumbered by the projection of all manner of finite images derived from our bodily life: images of a lord or a warrior, a friend or a father, a humanoid love, and minimally, an inconspicuous little personal pronoun (as in He is not a person, He is beyond gender. )...in coming to us divinity submits-quite problematically- to bodily encumbrances while nevertheless remaining irreducible to them. 1 The traditional Christian theological orthodoxy has been a cataphatic journey to define, describe and thereby limit or reify the nature of God; to define and understand our relationship to God through the nature of Jesus Christ. The Via Positiva is the way of speaking of all of the positive attributes of God so that one can merge with or become imbued with these Godlike characteristics. However, in the 2000 years of speaking God, it has been a male, heterosexual conceptualization and discourse, which has omitted a significant portion of the Christian community, or body of Christ. Is it possible for all bodies to become God like in a Christian understanding of God? A return to the mystical apophatic tradition of the first and second century Christians offers an understanding of God by unspeaking God and seeking Oneness with the God that cannot be spoken. The eastern mystical journey attempts to resolve it in dissolution of all into the Oneness without a Supreme Being or God. As the first line of the Tao Te Ching states, The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. 2 The Christian mystical tradition ultimately is an apophatic journey of unspeaking what has 1 Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller, ed., Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality, ed. Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller (New York, New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 4. 2 S. Mitchell, ed., The Tao Te Ching of Lao-Tzu, ed. S. Mitchell, July 20, 1995, http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/core9/phalsall/tests/taote-v3.html (accessed April 2, 2011).
4 been spoken of God. As the Catholic mystic, Meister Eckhart expressed so clearly, God is a Word but an unexpressed Word.... Who can speak this word? No one can except for one who is this Word. God is a Word which speaks itself 3 Fillmore s understanding of God as Principle comes down solidly with the Apophatic theology of the early Christian mystics. The Unity journey begins with the essentially mystical experience of Myrtle s healing, a spiritualizing of her body in the healing process. This is not unlike the unspeaking of God of the early Christians inasmuch as it is a spiritual experience with no articulated theology of the nature of God. Myrtle experienced God and healing, an intimate personal experience of Spirit that transformed her physical being. While Western philosophy has an unrelenting dualistic disjunction and Christianity a pervasive, and logically insurmountable theology of separation, Unity began with an experience of Spirit and Body integration. That is a radical departure from the orthodoxy! In seeking to understand what happened to his wife, Charles developed a theology unencumbered by traditional Christian orthodoxy. In centuries of evolution of Christianity, speaking intimately of God, the negative edge of cataphatic theology, according to Catherine Keller, is theolatry, whereby what is said becomes God. As Meister Eckhart, a 14 th century mystic so succinctly stated, I pray God to rid me of God. 4 Charles version was 3 Meister Eckhart, Theosophy Trust-Great Teacher Series@ Theosophy Trust, 2011, theosophytrust.org/tlodocs/articlesteach.php?d=meistereckhart.htm&p=80 (accessed April 2, 2011). 4 Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller, ed., Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality, 4.
5 to go to headquarters in meditation to experience God. In that action, he returned to the practices of the first century Christians, the Via Negativa. The early Christian Church theologians in seeking to resolve the aporia, developed the concept of theosis: the process whereby through the sacrament of Baptism, God is poured into human beings, and we do become God like, but not like the triune God and therefore not worthy of worship. This was very important to the early Christian church to not have humans become God like to the point of idolatry. As noted in an article by Ed Marks from the journal Affirmation and Critique, on the deification of man: The early church fathers used the term deification to describe the believer s participation in the divine life and nature of God but not in the Godhead. We human beings need to be deified to be made like God in life and in nature, but it is a great heresy to say that we are made like God in his Godhead, but in His life, nature, element, essence and image. 5 The episode of the Transfiguration reported in the Christian Scriptures by the writers of Mark and Matthew in which Jesus, Moses and Elijah all have a shining and noncorporeal appearance and are resplendent with light and the three disciples are allowed to witness this gives authority to the possibility of theosis, or the pouring in of God to humans. It is also through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus that our deification is possible at all. There is no other means whereby we participate in the Divine nature of God. And we will eventually participate in the resurrection experience of Jesus when we die and have a resurrected body. Until then, the orthodox Christian waits for the coming reign of God, hoping for God to draw near and make His Presence known to us through Scripture. 5 Ed Marks, "Deification by Participation in God's Divinity," Affirmation & Critique: A Journal of Christian Thought, October 2002, http://www.affcrit.com/archives/ ac 02 02/html (accessed March 31, 2011), 48.
6 However, in the cataphatic practice of contemplating all the positive attributes of God, we have the possibility of anthropomorphizing God, making God in our image and likeness according to our limited human understanding of God. Throughout the evolution of Christianity and the mystical tradition there has been this dynamic tension between the infinite and the finite, the creator and the created, the transcendent and the immanent God. This aporia, or insoluble contradiction cannot be solved in language, in either speaking all that can be said about the nature of God in the cataphatic tradition or unspeaking all in the apophatic tradition. In truth, both the cataphatic and apophatic traditions are inextricably entwined and each contributes to the depth of the other. In the essay, De docta ignorantia of Cardinal Nicolas of Cusa, a 14 th century reformer in the Catholic Church, Cusa asserts: Therefore the theology of negation is so necessary to the theology of affirmation that without it God would not be worshiped as the infinite God, but as creature; and such worship is idolatry, for it gives to an image that which belongs only to truth itself. 6 The ancients saw the gods as other and as impacting the physical world in response to the offerings and rituals, which were provided and conducted in a barter or appeasement theology. Even Jewish theology and religious practice had that understanding and practice. When Jesus came on the human scene and spoke of God within and claimed to be the son of God, the tension of the human divine relationship appeared in the human evolutionary drama in a significant way. In the resurrection of the body, Jesus presented what was understood to be his true Divine nature, in overcoming the final limitation of the human body, death. Hence the focus of Christianity became that process of theosis whereby the followers of Jesus could also attain that divine status of also overcoming death by believing in Christ. 6 Catherine Keller, "The Cloud of the Impossible: Embodiement and Apophasis," in Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation and Relationality, ed. Chris and Keller, Catherine Bosel (New York, New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 31.
7 The earliest Christians did not have an extensive cataphatic theology of God and they sought God through experience and the hesychastic or contemplative way of prayer. Hesychastic prayer is a practice of stillness, or silence to find that inner calm or place of peace that passes all understanding. It is practice of contemplative prayer, which removes all thoughts, beliefs and opens one to an experience of the Divine. It is a way of prayer and meditation that empties one of all sense of self in a therapeutic manner initially. It is sitting still in silence for hours to clear out all that is of the outer world to make way for the experience of the Presence of God. This is the experience of the Desert Fathers and Mothers of very early Christianity. The 4 th century bishop, Gregory of Nyssa (c.332-395) says that every concept formed by our understanding which attempts to attain and to hem in the divine nature serves only to make an idol of God, not to make God known. 7 Apophasis is not an intellectual process, but something lived day and night and is an experience of God, not discourse about God, not a worship of God. According to Jean-Yves Leloup in Being Still, The hesychastic tradition affirms the transcendence of God and our real sharing in the life of Christ. 8 The language of apophasis is replete with negative terms relative to God: invisible, ineffable, infinite, uncreated, inaccessible. As St. Thomas says, Concerning God, one cannot say what God is, but only what God is not. 9 God is completely Other, a different nature which is incomprehensible to us, therefore it is futile to try to comprehend God. God is more than being, beyond being itself, completely transcendent. As St. John Damascene states it: 7 Jean- Yves Leloup, Being Still: Reflections on an Ancient Mystical Tradition, ed. O.S.A. M.S. Laird, trans. O.S.A. M.S. Laird (Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 2003), 55. 8 Ibid.,56. 9 Ibid., 56.
8 Concerning God, it is impossible to say what God is in Himself; it is more precise to speak of God by negations. God is not, in fact, another thing. This is not to say that God does not exist, but that God is above all that is, beyond being itself. 10 By establishing God in this way, the Apophatic Fathers take God out of the trap of aporia and God becomes as Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme state, a pure Nothing, whereby nothingness becomes the pre-condition and origin of being. The desert mystics rightly note that to grant ontology to God is to step into the binary conundrum of orthodox Christianity. This also sounds somewhat familiar to the Buddhist Nothingness out of which All that is, is and the Oneness of the All, but without God as a precursor. As the gospel writer of John tells us in John 1:18, no one has ever seen God. And Paul, in 1 Timothy 6:16, adds that God lives in inaccessible Light whom no one has seen or can see. At this point in the evolution of Christianity there is no Christian theology, rather a theologian is one who prays. According to Leloup, The word God itself, Deus in Latin, means luminous day. It is a symbol of Light which illumines all things but remains invisible. 11 The total Transcendence of God keeps the Apophatic Fathers out of the aporia or theological paradox thus far, or does it? Another of the Apophatic Fathers, an early Christian mystic who made significant contributions to the mystical tradition was the unknown who took the name (Pseudo) Dionysius the Areopagite, the first bishop of Athens. In his Mystical Theology, IV-V, he states the following about the nature of God:.the Universal Cause, which transcends the entire universe, is neither matter.nor has a body. It has neither figure nor form not quality nor mass. It is in no particular place and cannot be grasped by the senses.we now say that this Cause has neither soul nor intelligence. One cannot grasp it intellectually. It is not knowledge, truth, kingship, wisdom, one, unity, divinity or good. It is not spirit or sonship or paternity in any way we can understand. Nor is it anything which is accessible to our knowledge or to the knowledge of any other being or to anything that pertains to being. Nor one knows it as it is.it escapes our power to reason, 10 Ibid., 57. 11 Jean- Yves Leloup, Being Still: Reflections on an Ancient Mystical Tradition, 56
9 name and know. It is neither dark not light, neither true nor false. One can affirm or deny nothing of it. When we make affirmations and denials that relate to inferior things, we affirm or deny nothing of this Cause. For every affirmation remains on this side of its transcendence, which is deprived of everything and is beyond everything. 12 Within a biblical context, the Dionysius understanding of God is like the God of the Hebrew Scriptures, a hidden God, one who refuses to reveal his name to Moses in the burning bush. Moses is directed to walk in God s Presence to understand I am, who I will be.. And Moses ascended to the mountaintop to enter the mystical darkness and let go of all he knew to belong entirely to God. Hence the apophatic way is not simply a negative theology, it is an experience of God as Nothing and Everything, as knowing and not knowing. God is the Mystery that is beyond every negation and every affirmation. As Leloup explains it: Ultimate Reality is beyond both the negation and affirmation, that is, beyond the dual operation of the mind: neither this nor that. Apophasis is the direct apprehension of the Real as it is, without the projections of the discursive mind that distort the Real. It is to see without the eyes, to comprehend without the mind. And if it is only like that knows like, it is necessary to become God in order to know God. 13 This is the apophatic experience of the Via Negativa of the Desert mystics. The experience of Moses, on the mountaintop does not lead him to Nothing, but through Nothing to Union. The goal of the Apophatic Way is ecstasy, supreme happiness, the hesychastic experience of union and the profound stillness or peace that passes all understanding. There is a paradox in negative theology, however which does not go unnoticed because there is still the presumption of what we call God as Rozenweig notes, Of God we know nothing; but this ignorance is ignorance of God. 14 While the 12 Ibid., 58. 13 Jean- Yves Leloup, Being Still: Reflections on an Ancient Mystical Tradition, 59. 14 Catherine Keller, "The Cloud of the Impossible: Embodiement and Apophasis," in Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation and Relationality, 32.
10 cataphatic theology reifies God, the apophatic or negative theology cannot escape the Presence in which it experiences Union. The aporia continues. Charles Fillmore approaches this aporia as a Divine Paradox, an assertion that may appear contradictory or opposed to common sense, but is nonetheless true. When we explore what Charles posits about God, we need to remember that he is working backward from experience to all that lies behind his experience of Spirit in the Silence and Myrtle s healing experience, which resulted from her spiritual practice of affirmative prayer. In Charles Fillmore s theology, God is Principle: God is the name we give to that unchangeable, inexorable principle at the source of all existence. 15 God is not Person, but Principle and By Principle is meant definite, exact, unchangeable. It best describes the unchangeableness that is an inherent law of Being. 16 Myrtle also speaks to this in How to Let God Help You, Though personal to each one of us, God is IT, neither male nor female, but Principle. God is not a cold, senseless principle like that of mathematics, but the Principle of life, love and intelligence. 17 This Principle that is God is what is Source for all that is and the Substance out of which all that is exists. When Fillmore speaks of God as Being he is not using at a noun that is a synonym for God. Rather it is used as Paul Hasselbeck noted, more like a verb denoting action or energy than as a static noun. This sense of action or energy is better conveyed by the word 15 Charles Fillmore, "Lessons in Truth," in Heart- Centered Metaphysics: A Deeper Look at Unity Teachings (Unity Village, MO: Unity House, 2010),94 16 Charles Fillmore, "Atom Smashing Power of the MInd," in Heart- Centered Metaphysics: A Deeper Look at Unity Teachings (Unity Village, MO: Unity House, 2010), 90. 17 Myrtle Fillmore, "How to Let God Help You," in Heart- Centered Metaphysics: A Deeper Look at Unity Teachings (Unity Village, MO: Unity House, 2010), 90.
11 Beingness 18 The Fillmores thereby escape reifying God in the cataphatic tradition for God is not to be worshiped so much as God is to be experienced. While Fillmore appears to walk the apophatic path by calling God Principle, he also steps into cataphatic theology with his assertions of God as Beingness, with his understanding of the two aspects of Being, the visible and invisible. This understanding is one of the ways Fillmore resolves the aporia, and his referent for this frequently is Jesus, who emphasized the invisible aspect of Beingness. It is also worth noting that Fillmore did not posit God, Principle as the creator of the physical universe. Rather, in Mysteries of Genesis, he states that. God is Mind, and all God s works are created in Mind as perfect Ideas. 19 Later in the same book he states, God creates through the action of God Mind and all things rest on ideas. 20 Fillmore s understanding of God as Divine Mind is neither clearly cataphatic nor apaphatic; it is unlike the God-concepts of orthodox Christianity and not in alignment with the discourse offered by Dionysius as noted earlier. There are several additional features of Charles theology that together move him to a place apart from both the unresolved dualism of orthodox Christian theology and the attempted transcendence of the Apophatic Way. These are his understanding of Consciousness which is not just intellect but a characteristic of human awareness that Fillmore defines in Revealing Word as Conscious mind-the mind that makes one know of one s mental operations and states of consciousness; that phase of mind in which one 18 Paul Hasselbeck, Heart- Centered Metaphysics: A Deeper Look at Unity Teachings (Unity Village, Missouri: Unity House, 2010), 92. 19 Charles Fillmore, "Mysteries of Genesis," in Heart- Centered Metaphysics: A Deeper Look at Unity Teachings (Unity Village, MO: Unity House, 2010), 103. 20 Charles Fillmore, "Mysteries of Genesis," in Heart- Centered Metaphysics: A Deeper Look at Unity Teachings, 103.
12 is actively aware of one s thoughts. The mind through which one establishes one s identity. 21 And he continues, Mind-the starting point of every act of thought and feeling: the common meeting ground of God and humankind 22 It is in our consciousness, our mind, that the opposites or the creator-created paradox is resolved. Consciousness is the only thing that is able to resolve the paradox of the Oneness and all of Beingness with the polarity of the planes of existence. Fillmore asserted in The Mysteries of Genesis, that: God created two universal planes of consciousness, the heavens and the earth. One is the realm of pure Ideas, the other of thought forms. God does not create the visible universe directly, as a person makes a concrete pavement, but God creates the Ideas that are used by the intelligent image and likeness to make the universe. Thus God s creations are always spiritual. Humankind s creations are both material and spiritual according to humankind s understanding. 23 However, it leaves the human open to the possibility of idolatry as a result of this paradox being resolved in the human consciousness. It could be Fillmore has not yet resolved the aporia, but in his understanding of Christ, it might be possible. In orthodox Christianity, Jesus as part of the Triune Godhead as both divine and human, offers the believer the possibility of deification through baptism. In the apophatic tradition, the same is true: the presence of Christ in the world deepens the apophatic way. That God incarnated in the person of Jesus Christ is what makes it possible for full communion between the human and divine and the incomprehensibility of this is the mystery, why God would do this is an unanswerable question, another dimension of the aporia. As Maximus the Confessor noted in Ambigua 5 21 Charles Fillmore, "Revealing Word," in Heart- Centered Metaphysics: A Deeper Look at Unity Teachings (Unity Village, MO: Unity House, 2010),9. 22 Charles Fillmore, "Revealing Word," in Heart- Centered Metaphysics: A Deeper Look at Unity Teachings, 9. 23 Charles Fillmore, "Mysteries of Genesis," in Heart- Centered Metaphysics: A Deeper Look at Unity Teachings. 8.
13 The incarnation is a mystery more inconceivable than any other. In taking on human flesh, God made Himself understood only by appearing even more incomprehensible. God remains hidden even in this self-manifestation. Even while making himself known, God remains ever unknown. 24 It is ironic to note that in-conceive-able is the descriptor used for this mystery of Divine incarnation! It is not surprising that explanation via virgin birth entered the theolatry at some point! It is because of this paradoxical union of human/divine in Jesus that humanity has any possibility for realizing the full potential for which it was created. While orthodox Christianity offers salvation through the existence, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the apophatic position is that it allows human beings the reality of the experience of God while continuing to affirm his transcendence. 25 God s immanence and transcendence is affirmed in the divine human man, Jesus Christ. The hesychastic experience offers an affirmation of divine transcendence, of God s inaccessible essence, and the nearness of God, God s immanence and presence in each of us, the divinization of humanity through the energies of the Word and Spirit. 26 This sounds remarkably like Charles Fillmore s understanding of Jesus as the Christ, the presence of God energy within each individual human being. Fillmore s foundational belief about Jesus Christ is: Jesus Christ, metaphysically, is that perfect fulfillment in humankind that is manifested as the result of the conscious union of the Christ Idea and the Jesus activity in the human consciousness. 27 Fillmore elaborates further in Keep a True Lent: In every person the Christ, or the Word of God, is infolded; it is an ideal that contains ideas. 28 In The Revealing Word, he 24 Jean- Yves Leloup, Being Still: Reflections on an Ancient Mystical Tradition, p.61 25 Ibid. p.62 26 Ibid. p.64. 27 Charles Fillmore, "Foundations of Unity, Series Two, Vol. 1," in Heart- Centered Metaphysics: A Deeper Look at Unity Teachings (Unity Village, MO: Unity House, 2010). P.145.
14 states: Jesus Christ is a union of the two, the idea and the expression, or in other words, He is the perfect human demonstrated. 29 It is Fillmore s understanding also in The Revealing Word, Christ abides in each person as potential perfection.each person has the Christ Idea within, just as Jesus had. Each person must look to the indwelling Christ in order to recognize their divine origin and birth. 30 But Fillmore offers a caution, a caveat which is an echo of the aporia, suggesting that he has not completely resolved the spirit/matter paradox. He states in Atom Smashing Power of Mind: To say that we are human as Jesus Christ was a human is not exactly true, because He had dropped that personal consciousness by which we separate ourselves from our true God self.he proved in His resurrection and ascension that He had no consciousness of separation from that of Being, therefore He really was this Being to all intents and purposes. 31 Jesus is the avatar of human, and inasmuch as we are able, we also manifest the Divine pattern that is also who we are. But Fillmore admits that in the experience of our personal consciousness, we experience our matter or non-divinity, our sense of separation, or sin. We are born whole, but unaware of our wholeness, or True divine nature. It is through the activity of the Christ and the Divine Mind of which we are emanations, that we begin to realize who we really are. The Apophatic path sees this as a pouring in of spirit or divinization. As LeLoup noted from the Apophatic Fathers, including: 28 Charles Fillmore, "Keep a True Lent," in Heart- Centered Metaphysics: A Deeper Look at Unity Teachings (Unity Village, MO: Unity House, 2010). p. 144. 29 Charles Fillmore, "Revealing Word," in Heart- Centered Metaphysics: A Deeper Look at Unity Teachings, p.112. 30 Charles Fillmore, "Revealing Word," in Heart- Centered Metaphysics: A Deeper Look at Unity Teachings, p.144. 31 Charles Fillmore, "Atom Smashing Power of the MInd," in Heart- Centered Metaphysics: A Deeper Look at Unity Teachings, p.145.
15 Gregory of Nyssa, in Homilies on the Beatitudes 6: One can truly say that the pure in heart see God, and that no one has ever seen God. Indeed, he who is invisible by nature becomes visible through his works. And Basil of Caesarea, Letter 234: We affirm that we know God in his works, but we can hardly expect to approach the divine essence itself; for God s essence remains inaccessible, whereas God s energies come to us. And from Maximus the Confessor, cited by Etyyme Zigabene, Dogmatic Panoply, 3: We can partake of God only in so far as God communicates himself to us, but of God s ineffable essence we may never partake. 32 The Apophatic Fathers conclude that we can participate in God and truly experience God, but we can never completely understand or contain all of God. We desire God, we experience God, and God fulfills this desire and forever empties it because God is forever more or greater than we are but as we move continually into this experience of God, we are continually exalted. God is the most High and remains so forever. We can experience more and more of God, but never all of God. As Gregory of Nyssa expresses it in Homilies on the Song of Songs, 8: Thus the person who rises never stops, going from one beginning to another beginning by means of beginnings which never end. 33 We can never know God completely or become completely divine as Jesus was. Does Fillmore agree? In Mysteries of Genesis, Fillmore appears to maintain some kind of separation of God and human, with Jesus providing the same possibility as the Apophatic Fathers posited. He stated: God is carrying humankind along in God Mind as an ideal quantity, the image-andlikeness human of God s creation, and God s divine plan is dependent for its success on the manifestation by humankind of this idea. The divine plan is furthered by the constant idealism that keeps humankind moving forward to higher and higher achievements. The image-and-likeness pours into humankind a perpetual stream of ideas that the individual person arranges as thoughts and forms as a substance and life. While this evolutionary process is going on there seem to 32 Jean- Yves Leloup, Being Still: Reflections on an Ancient Mystical Tradition, p.63. 33 Jean- Yves Leloup, Being Still: Reflections on an Ancient Mystical Tradition, p.64
16 be two people, one ideal and spiritual and the other intellectual and material, which are united at that consummation, the ideal human, Christ. 34 With this assertion, Fillmore again makes the point of contact between the Divine and human the idea, or mind. Human beings are not just seeking to know or experience more and more of God as the Apophatic Fathers suggested. Rather human beings receive these Divine Ideas as thoughts and then manifest them to form substance and life. The exemplar of this was Jesus, for he united the material and spiritual. However, Fillmore clearly states that there is a separation, or two people one ideal and one spiritual, and thus the aporia is not resolved, but perhaps somewhat unpacked in that man as a material being is identified as having a spiritual purpose in the evolutionary process that Fillmore references. We noted earlier that on the cataphatic path of divinization the early Christians were aware of the possibility of idolatry and avoided it via salvation through believing in the death and resurrection of Jesus. What are the possibilities of idolatry on the apophatic path and how did the early Apophatic avoid them? How is it one can know God more and more and not have that morph into some form of idolatry? Is it possible for Truth Students to stray into this idolatry when they ask another truth student, what was in your consciousness that created this? There are several possible answers from the anonymous 14 th century author of The Cloud of Unknowing, a practical guide written by a contemplative of that time to aid the seeker in the Apophatic Way. This treatise is dense with insights, guidance and understanding of what is demanded in the journey of experiencing God in the way of apophasis and many scholars have explored and elucidated its contents. The intention in the present context is to highlight the some essential ideas in order to consider what the 34 Charles Fillmore, "Mysteries of Genesis," in Heart- Centered Metaphysics: A Deeper Look at Unity Teachings, p.106.
17 idolatry pitfalls might include on the apophatic path, and how to transform them. There are four key words in this text, which offer an overall framework for understanding and they are God, sin, humility and love. The contemplative is seeking to know God through experience, not through thinking. Therefore, one must reject all thought, be it good or bad, positive or negative. Sin in this understanding is the knowing and feeling of our being 35 because there is an awareness of self that brings joy and gratitude and an awareness of self that bring suffering. The self that is separate from God is the self that suffers. This separation from God, or sinful self finds it is necessary to undergo a purification process to rid one of self-ful-ness, which ultimately is not completely possible. The steps necessary for fully experiencing the Presence of God include both the cloud of forgetting and the cloud of unknowing. The cloud of forgetting is the deepest possible letting go of self, or personality and attachments to outer concerns of any kind. It is a process of deep humility, which requires a complete giving of self to God and it is a special calling. This humility is essential to experiencing God in the Apophatic Way and it keeps us from the idolatry of believing that we are the ones doing the knowing. As it is stated in Chapter 2 of The Cloud of Unknowing: For in the beginning, it is usual to feel nothing but a kind of darkness about your mind, or as it were, a cloud of unknowing. You will seem to know nothing and to feel nothing except a naked intent toward God in the depths of your being. 36 35 William Johnston, ed., The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counseling, First Image Books, ed. William Johnston (New York, New York: Doubleday, 1973), 11. 36 William Johnston, ed., The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counseling, 48.
18 This theme of naked intent is threaded throughout this mystical guidebook. That theme continuously reminds the pilgrim that to open to the possibility of the experience of God, one has to release all self that is not of God, which is frequently a painful process. Many references are made in The Cloud of Unknowing to the story of Mary and Martha with Jesus as related by the author in the gospel of Luke in 10: 38-42 in which Martha is concerned with all things in the outer and Mary sits at the feet of Jesus to learn and love. Jesus does not rebuke Martha, but observes that Mary has chosen to give her attention and energy to her spiritual life, which can never be taken from her. This is the way of contemplation, the way of stillness, of yielding of self completely to God. The author of Luke tells us that Jesus told both women that Mary had chosen the better way, the way of stillness, love and presence. The final word of the framework that is present in this story of Mary and Martha is love, for that is the way that we can experience God. The Cloud of Unknowing states it this way: Try to understand this point. Rational creatures such as men and angels possess two principal faculties, a knowing power and a loving power. No one can fully comprehend the uncreated God with his knowledge, but each one, in a different way can grasp him fully through love. Truly this is the unending miracle of love: that one loving person, through his love can embrace God, whose being fills and transcends the entire creation. 37 It is in the stillness, with a complete surrendering of self in humility that we experience God who is unknowable and the love that is God that is the true apophasis. It is in our ability to love that we are present in God, without separation. It is God-Love that solves the aporia without idolatry in the apophatic theological tradition. 37 William Johnston, ed., The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counseling, 50.
19 The journey of the Unity Truth student is one of contemplation as well as activation for the basic Unity teaching directs the individual to take the gifts of the silence or contemplation into daily life. While the practice of the Silence and prayer are the essential components of Unity s spiritual teachings, the Truth student can be best described as a householder mystic; one who is in the world, but not of the world. Unity began as the Society of Silent Help whereby individuals gathered to sit in the Silence together. The Silence is described by May Rowland, long time director of Silent Unity in the following way, The silence is not something mysterious. It is that inner place of stillness, where you feel and know your oneness with God. 38 This is a distinct contrast to the Apophatic understanding of contemplative prayer, in that it is entrance into the mystery of oneness, and a very deep knowing or experience of this oneness. In Teach us to Pray, Charles and Cora Fillmore describe the Silence as having a purpose: The purpose of the silence is to still the activity of the individual thought so that the still small voice of God may be heard. For in the silence, Spirit speaks Truth to us and just that Truth of which we stand in need. 39 The descriptions of the silence given by the Fillmores and other Unity teachers consistently indicate that the seeker enters the Silence with an intention, not necessarily with the complete surrender of self that the Apophatic Fathers taught. However, in Myrtle Fillmore s Healing Letters, she clearly indicates that love is present in the Silence when she wrote: Be still and know that at this moment (your heart) is the altar of God, of love; for love so sure and unfailing, love so irresistible and magnetic that it draws your 38 May Rowland, "The Magic of the Word," in Heart Centered Metaphysics: A Deeper Look at Unity Teachings (Unity Village, MO: Unity House, 2010), 60. 39 Charles Fillmore and Cora Fillmore, "Teach Us to Pray," in Heart- Centered Metaphysics: A Deeper Look at Unity Teachings (Unity Village, MO: Unity House, 2010), 49.
20 supply to you from the great storehouse of the universe. Trust God, use God s wisdom, prove and express God s love. 40 Contemporary Unity theologian, Paul Hasselbeck clarifies the understanding of the early Unity thinkers when he describes the Silence as the still point or the void. Hasselbeck s understanding is more akin to the early Apophatic Fathers, and suggests the true mystical union of the human and divine, whereby the human sense of self dissolves into Oneness or God. He states, It is a state of no time, no thought, no sensation and no awareness. The Silence, then is the matrix out of which come guidance, inspiration and realization from our Higher Self. Guidance ( the Voice, ) inspiration, and realization are the effects of having been in the Silence. These experiences occur just this side of the Silence. 41 It is important to note the significant difference between what Hasselbeck states about the experience of the Silence and what the original Unity writers and thinkers stated about the Silence. Hasselbeck s description is far more akin to the empty of self, completely humbled and open to God experience of the Apophatic Fathers. Any gifts of the Silence happen after one is no longer in that place of no awareness of self, or complete yielding to Spirit. The Unity fathers and mothers, placing the divinity of Christ both within God and within the human being, enter the Silence with the intention of establishing/strengthening/realizing Truth/God and then directing or using that divine realization with a purpose of establishing harmony, prosperity or health in the outer. This leaves the Truth student to wonder, what went wrong if the intentions are not manifested, or at risk of spiritual pride if the intentions are manifested. If entered with true humility and love, then this Unity Way of Silence, in the awareness of Unity s 40 Myrtle Fillmore, "Myrtle Fillmore's Healing Letters," in Heart- Centered Metaphysics: A Deeper Look at Unity Teachings (Unity Village, MO: Unity House, 2010), 55. 41 Paul Hasselbeck, Heart- Centered Metaphysics: A Deeper Look at Unity Teachings (Unity Village, Missouri: Unity House, 2010), 61.
21 prayer, It is not I, but the Christ within, that does this work. In this awareness, Unity s theology could be a resolution of the aporia a possibility to know God in Spirit and in Love. Without humility and love, the Unity Truth student can evidence spiritual arrogance, expressing divine resignation rather than a true understanding of Divine Order and be open to accusations of idolatry in attempting to manipulate God by way of magical thinking and misapplication of Divine Ideas. In summary, we began with the aporia or insoluble contradiction of transcendence and immanence of God. We speak of God in the cataphatic tradition and unspeak of God in the apaphatic tradition. In attempting to know God, there is the epistemological knowing and the experiential knowing, each offering a possible resolution of the aporia of knowing the unknowable that is God. These spiritual paths seek to know God without falling into the idolatry of mistaking what is not God for God. The cataphatic theology places the resolution in the divine/human embodiment of Jesus Christ and speaks of the in pouring of Spirit in humans through baptism. The apaphatic theology emphasizes the transcendence of God, the unspeakableness of God and thereby attempts to escape rather than resolve the aporia. The Apophatic experience of hesychastic prayer offers the pilgrim the possibility of the experience of God through complete purification (surrender of self), yielding to God in humility and in love with no intention other than the knowing. Unity offers a path of experiencing God or spiritual Truth in The Silence with the intention of manifesting the realization of Truth in the material. It is our human/divine nature, our Christ nature that makes possible this out-picturing of our true nature. Does Fillmore truly resolve the aporia? Is Unity the Via Positiva or the Via Negativa?
22 Bibliography Boesel, Chris and Catherine Keller, Eds. Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation and Relationality. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Eckhart, Meister. Theosophy Trust-Great Teacher Series @Theosophy Trust, 2001, accessed April, 2011. http://theosophytrust.org/tlodocs/articlesteacher.php?d=meistereckhart.htm&p=8 0 Fillmore, Charles and Cora Fillmore. Teach Us to Pray. In Heart-Centered Metaphysics: A Deeper Look at Unity Teachings. Paul Hasselbeck. Unity Village:Unity House, 2010.
23 Fillmore, Charles. Foundations of Unity, Series 2 In Heart-Centered Metaphysics: A Deeper Look at Unity Teachings. Paul Hasselbeck. Unity Village: Unity House, 2010. Fillmore, Charles. Keep a True Lent. In Heart-Centered Metaphysics: A Deeper Look at Unity Teachings. Paul Hasselbeck. Unity Village: Unity House, 2010. Fillmore, Charles. Lessons in Truth. In Heart-Centered Metaphysics: A Deeper Look at Unity teachings. Paul Hasselbeck. Unity Village: Unity House, 2010. Fillmore, Charles. Mysteries of Genesis. In Heart-Centered Metaphysics: A Deeper Look at Unity teachings. Paul Hasselbeck. Unity Village: Unity House, 2010. Fillmore, Charles. Revealing Word. In Heart-Centered Metaphysics: A Deeper Look at Unity teachings. Paul Hasselbeck. Unity Village: Unity House, 2010. Fillmore, Myrtle. How to Let God Help You. In Heart-Centered Metaphysics: A Deeper Look at Unity teachings. Paul Hasselbeck. Unity Village: Unity House, 2010. Fillmore, Myrtle. Myrtle Fillmore s Healing Letters. In Heart-Centered Metaphysics: A Deeper Look at Unity teachings. Paul Hasselbeck. Unity Village: Unity House, 2010. Hasselbeck, Paul. Heart-Centered Metaphysics. Unity Village: Unity House, 2010. Johnston, William, ed. The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counseling.New York: Doubleday, First Image Books Edition, 1973. Keller, Catherine. The Cloud of the Impossible: Embodiment and Apophasis. In Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality. ed. Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller, 25-44. New York: Fordham University Press: 2010. Leloup, Jean-Yves. Being Still: Reflections on an Ancient Mystical Tradition.M.S. Laird, O.S.A., trans. Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 2003. Lao-tzu. Tao Te Ching. S. Mitchell, trans. [on-line-book] (last updates 20 July 1995, accessed April 3, 2011): available from http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/core9/phalsall/tests/taote-v.3html Marks, Ed. Deification By Participation in God s Divinity. [journal on-line] (Affirmation and Critique: A Journal of Christian Thought, Vol. VII, No.2, October, 2002, accessed April 3, 2011): available from http://www.affcrit.com/arch /ac_02_02.html Rowland, May. The Magic of the Word. In Heart-Centered Metaphysics: A Deeper Look at Unity teachings. Paul Hasselbeck. Unity Village: Unity House, 2010.
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