What is Your Spiritual Path?

Ways of affirmation and negation

Image: Detail from title page of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake

One thing is necessary on any spiritual path, many traditions say. Or rather, that one thing is found in two ways which, at root, join together. The approaches are affirmation and negation - also called fullness and emptiness, praise and silence, knowledge and love, activity and contemplation.

But which way is yours?

The relationship between the two contraries, to use William Blake’s word, is expressed in a story that comes from the early Christian period.

A young brother sets out to learn from two of the great desert fathers of early Christian Egypt. He finds the first, Abba Arsenius, who sits with the young man. Together, they maintain a complete silence. The hours pass. No greeting. No blessing. No wisdom. Not a word is said.

After a while, the searching brother leaves. He seeks the other monk of renown, Abba Moses. The saint welcomes the young man warmly, sharing honey cakes. The hours pass. They laugh. They talk freely. They eat.

But the young brother is now confused. He sought direction. So which is the way to God?

That night he dreams. He sees two large boats perfectly in tandem floating down the Nile, each carrying holy figures. In one boat sits Abba Arsenius and the Spirit of God, maintaining perfect silence. In the other sits Abba Moses with the angels of God, all eating honey cakes.

The point of the story - or at least one point - is that the restrictions of silence lead to a perception of the abundance of all things, as does taking right delight in all things. So which way is your way? Most humans need both, lest we simply indulge in goodness or needlessly deny ourselves goodness without perceiving the source of goodness - which is, of course, the satisfaction sought.

In other words, silence and honey cakes don’t just complement each other, as if the advice is “don’t indulge” or “gain balance”. Rather the one reveals the significance of the other. Each way fosters an awareness of that which lies beyond one way in isolation. You might say that affirmation and negation together lead to revelation, by way of perceptual transformation. And each can be practiced.

When it comes to silence and the way of negation, I follow The Cloud of Unknowing. The author of this English mystical classic - the text is contemporary with Julian of Norwich - doesn't promise anything on the outlined path. Not peace. Not happiness. Not visions.

All that is required is consigning everything into “the cloud of forgetting” - thoughts, feelings, devotions, assumptions, "no exceptions", the author insists. Then, sit in the silence and "beat on that thick cloud of unknowing with the sharp arrow of longing and never stop loving," as Carmen Acevedo Butcher translates the Middle English.

I find the simple starkness very helpful.

This silence will be the theme of an Easter retreat at Broughton Sanctuary with which I am delighted to be participating. John Butler, followed by thousands at spiritualunfoldment, will be holding the silence - though he would immediately say, he holds nothing, and that's the point. Truly, it is wonderful to sit with him. Presence transmits. Do consider coming.

When it comes to the way of affirmation, Dante is a genius. His journey in The Divine Comedy, through the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso can be read as a path into a correct, full perception of the world around us: an affirmation. He learns to understand and love the way in which all things are images of God.

In the Inferno, he encounters individuals who are trapped in their lives because what should be images have become mirages. These souls are gripped by deformed reflections and distorted echoes, which is also to say that they grow in frustration and eventually come to hate themselves, others and the world around them. They exist, in a word, in hell.

In the Purgatorio, Dante encounters individuals who, having dropped the mirages, are learning how to see divine images well. They discover, on the way of affirmation, that who they are profoundly affects what they affirm, even what they perceive. Images speak more clearly as the souls clarify the ways in which their virtues-become-vices distort their awareness, which means that perfected vision gradually becomes possible, too.

Then, in the Paradiso, the journey into God can really begin, Dante tells us. Images now deliver the divine light unalloyed. Dante learns to resonant more fully, understand more deeply, and love more richly, until, at the culmination of the pilgrimage, in the unmediated presence of God, the way of affirmation joins the way of negation in silence: the silence that falls after the famous last line of the poem:

“As in a wheel whose motion nothing jars
By the love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

That is the translation by Dorothy L. Sayers.

Dante has so much practical wisdom and revelatory perception to impart. Drawing on my own time with The Divine Comedy, which I teach and have written about at book length, I will be leading a half day of reflection on these tremendous insights.

There’s more information about the day here, or email mail@markvernon.com.

The Divine Comedy is a text that changes lives. Do consider joining me and tasting the honey cakes. No prior knowledge of this wondrous work will be assumed, partly because returning to its insights afresh is so immensely valuable.

One thing is necessary on any spiritual path, many traditions say. Do pursue them both.