The Affirmative and the Negative Ways

Here's the reflection that I shared during Sacred Space at St Martin-in-the-Fields this evening:

Rowan Williams' book Silence and Honey Cakes: The Wisdom of the Desert takes its title from a story about two of the Desert Fathers: ‘… two large boats floating on the river were shown to him. In one of them sat Abba Arsenius and the Holy Spirit of God in complete silence. And in the other boat was Abba Moses, with the angels of God; they were all eating honey cakes.’

A man visits the desert fathers and experiences two approaches to spirituality. One involves abstinence, particularly from speech through silence, while the other involves an open welcome, enjoyment of company and the eating of honey cakes. The man expresses a preference for the latter, which leads another to question how such different paths to God can exist. He then receives a vision in which God accepts both.

Rowan Williams explores this story in terms of our different vocations. I would like to think about it in terms of the two different ways to God that the story juxtaposes. They are also the two different paths found in Psalm 23 – the path through green pastures and beside still waters and the path through the valley of the shadow of death.

In one we find God in the world around of us - the people, places, creatures and creations including the green pastures and still waters. In addition, we use these things as visual or lingual images which reveal aspects of God to us. This is an affirmative way based on the understanding that God's creation is good and that something of the creator can be seen in the creation. This is a way of abundance – a spread table, a full cup, goodness and mercy. It’s also the way of the Arts, where multiple images and experiences build up a composite picture of God. This is the way of Abba Moses in the boat together with honey cakes and the angels of God.

The other way is visualised by Abba Arsenius who is silent in his boat with the Holy Spirit of God. This is the way of abstinence which recognises the inadequacy of every image and word and creature and creation to show or tell us about God. God is always more than any way of describing or imaging him and, therefore, the best way to experience God as is, is to dispense with words and images altogether and go by way of silence and darkness. As a result, this way of experiencing God is known as the negative way or also, sometimes, as the dark night of the soul which can involve travelling through the valley of the shadow of death. While the way of abundance is more easily and readily reflected in the Arts, the Arts can and do engage also with the negative way, as is evidenced by the fact that the phrase ‘dark night of the soul’ derives from a poem by St John of the Cross.

Both ways lead to God, but, as they are polar opposites, they approach God by different routes and therefore we may, at times, have to choose between them and, if we were to follow either to their conclusion, we would have to make an ultimate choice, as Abba's Arsenius and Moses seem in the story to have done. However, it is possible to combine aspects of both approaches or to follow one way rather than the other at different seasons in our lives.

My thinking about these two ways to God has been informed by that of the poet, dramatist and novelist Charles Williams. His views on these two ways have been summarised as follows: ‘The Way of Affirmation consists in recognizing the immanence of God in all things, and says that appreciation of whom and what God has made may lead us to appreciation of Himself. The Way of Rejection concentrates on the transcendence of God, the recognition that God is never fully contained in His creation; it says that we must renounce all lesser images if we would apprehend His. These two Ways have been expressed by the paradox "This also is Thou; neither is this Thou," and tend generally to illustrate, respectively, Catholic or Protestant thought in their attitudes toward the use of images.

While Williams insists that a complement of both these Ways is necessary to the life of every Christian, and that none of us can walk the Kingdom's narrow road by only affirming or only rejecting ... yet he contends that Christians are usually called primarily to one Way or the other.’ 

While both these ways are ways to God, they are also ways to understanding ourselves; in itself a necessary part of our journey towards God. The greatest commandment is to love God and to love our neighbour as ourselves. Rowan Williams connects these things when he writes that the reason why ‘the desert monks and nuns valued self-awareness’ was that to ‘be a real agent for God to connect with [our] neighbour … each of us needs to know the specific truth about himself or herself.’

These two different ways to God that we have been considering provide, as you would expect, different ways in which to encounter and understand ourselves. On the Affirmative Way, the pre-eminent metaphor may be that of light. Light enables us to see all that is around us. As a result, we can then also perceive ourselves. When we look around us and see other people, creatures and objects, we can undertake an exercise in comparing and contrasting; thinking to ourselves I’m similar to this and I’m different from that. These thoughts connect with the South African word ‘Ubuntu’, which essentially means ‘I am because you are’, and the phrase ‘I-Thou’ explored by the philosopher Martin Buber, who wrote about ‘the I-Thou relationship, where our human relationships can only be truly authentic when we open ourselves fully to the other and encounter them as whole and unique persons.’ St Anthony the Great spoke about dependency being at the heart of community and our belonging to one another when he said that ‘Our life and our death is with our neighbour’ and, as a result Rowan Williams states that ‘only in the relations we have with one another can the love and mercy of God appear and become effective.'

On the Negative Way, the pre-eminent metaphor for knowing ourselves may be that of silence. In silence, we hear the working of our own minds, we hear our self-justification and unmask our need to defend our territory, establish our position, and defend our ego. As Rowan Williams states, ‘Our words help to strengthen the illusions with which we surround, protect and comfort ourselves; without silence, we shan’t get any closer to knowing who we are before God.’ Our ‘sense of the authentically human, depends and can only depend on the quality of our silence – the need to let go of words in certain ways, that willingness to occupy a space before God which is not a defended territory, defended against God or against anyone else. And because we occupy a space that isn’t a defended territory, it is space both for God and for each other. We are moving beyond our fascination, our hypnosis by the ideas of choice and individuality as conceived in the modern world, moving towards the possibility of a human life characterised by consistent instinctive responsiveness to the truth, acquiring an instinctive taste for truth. A taste for truth, that’s to say an appetite for what is real, so strong that it allows us constantly to keep ourselves in question, under scrutiny, not in an obsessional way but just going on asking, ‘Who is being served here? The ego or the truth?’

Which boat are we sitting in? In which would we wish to sit? Are our personalities fundamentally compatible with sharing silence or honey cakes? Have we found ways to combine the affirmative and the negative ways or to move between the two at different times and seasons of our lives?

While you are pondering those questions I close with two poems exploring first the Negative Way, second, the Affirmative.

are/are not

We hear you
and
do not.
We are with you
and
are not.
Through whom,
with whom
and in whom,
we are – what?

We are one
with what
we are
not.

No voice is audible,
yet we hear.
No hand touches ours,
yet we feel.
No eye has seen the glory,
yet we kneel.
What you are,
who you are
is and
is not
clear.

Knowing
and
not knowing.
In
and out
of touch.
Out of mind
yet
mindful.
Out of sight
yet
insight.

We are
in relation
to much
that is excess –
beyond
comprehension
and expectation –
being
night
and
light.

Attend, attend

Attend, attend, pay attention, contemplate.
Open eyes of faith to days, minutes,
moments of miracle and marvel; there is wildness
and wonder wherever you go, present
in moments that never repeat, running free,
never coming again. Savour, savour the present –
small things, dull moments, dry prayers –
sacraments of presence, sense of wonder,
daily divine depth in the here and now.
There’s only here, there’s only now,
these are the days, this is the fiery vision,
awe and wildness, miracle and flame. Take off
your shoes, stand in the holy fire; sacrament
of the burning, always consumed, never repeating
present moment, knowing the time is now.   

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Taize - Within Our Darkest Night.