The Theology of a Negative God

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Many writers about God are storms of intellect. They write not about ideas, but about philosophers, and their ideas about ideas. So, they seem distanced from their subject by at least two steps.

They are very educated but complex thinkers. Sadly, this does not always make for good teachers. Their writing-style is often a nightmare of commas replacing periods, hypercomplex compound sentences, and sentences run together. Still, if you can get past all that mental molasses, some ideas do come through, although not with clarity.

As they themselves recognize, simplicity is a most desirable trait in an effective teacher. But it is totally lacking here. They seem, often, to be writers of the "old school," from the late nineteenth century. Then, writers wrote, not to share or to educate, but to display their personal erudition, education, acumen, or brilliance. This is the wrong reason for writing.

The result is that their writings are opaque. And when not opaque, they are fuzzy, unclear, and nebulous. The writings are confused as well as confusing.

As noted, they are not about truth, ideas, or concepts. They are about other writers and their ideas. At times, reliance is stunningly heavy on agnostic, skeptical, even cynical, philosophers. For a mystic, as for the average person, this hurts credibility. Spinoza and Nietzsche are hardly "models" of clear theological thinking.

What is needed is a "theological philosophy," or a "philosophic theology." This blending of the theological and philosophic seems the most natural in the world, and so, we can speak without concern of "theophilosophy."

The most glaring and stunning absence stands out like a black hole at the center of a galaxy! In all their talk of "God," they do not mention "Love" a single time! In an ocean and flurry of words, they have lost the simple essence of the message of Jesus and all the mystics. This is no minor deletion!

Why is the modern myth of the "death of God" so important to these writers? How much of their writing is subjective, defining and declaring their own personalities, and how much objective, a statement of consensually accepted fact? Their personal selfimages and selfesteem seem to permeate at least parts of their writing.

I certainly agree that the "deepest thinking" can be, and often is, "anti-ecclesiastical." For most of the greatest discoveries in spiritual psychology and mysticism have been made outside the formal Church.

It seems to be one of their goals to "define" God, but, again, without the concept of an agapological Reality, this is doomed to confusion. I think that they have been affected by the almost universal idea that an "external God" exists.

Mystics have, by contrast, always known that there is no God "out there." They have seen God (Love) as "in here." They worship Love. This is a perspective to which theological writers often seem quite oblivious.

They seem sometimes to have a fixation on "solitude." Is this a symmetric response to being neglected or dismissed by society, resulting in an anti-social perspective? Mystics, of course, recognize the value of healing solitude. Periodically, temporarily, it is just the medicine that the soulmind needs for integration or recovery. But only ascetics carry it to unhealthy extremes, as life-policies.

Theological writers often seem to demand, if not glorify, solitude for its own sake, rather than as the means to an end. Is this another subconscious projection of their personally preferred pattern?

The exploration of the "negative" also seems to reflect personal experience. We all have two options: We can study the positive, filling our heartminds with it, or study the negative, filling our heartminds with despair and depression. Many in philosophy chose the latter course.

Some, such as Nietzsche, were led into depression, chaos, and even apparent psychosis. In their focus on negativity, are they reflecting the events of difficult lives? Has this life caused them to feel "abandoned by God"? So, are they "striking back" at God by portraying God as the ultimate negativity of the cosmos-- a place usually reserved for the "satan"?

They speak of a "voyage into our most absolutely negative depths." This contrasts dazzlingly with the utter positivity of the "Journey to the Center of the Soul," a phrase used to describe the mystical exploration of deeper Mind. Mystics are unified in their statements that the Core or Nucleus of Mind is Light, Love, and all things delightful. They emphasize pleasure and joy, which they often call "rapture" or "ecstasy."

But without the negativity, they feel, theology would be "vacuous." Mystics too recognize the negative, brutal, ghastly, and nightmarish. They ascribe it to karma, or personal choice. But, since it is all illusion (maya), God, Who is Reality, has nothing to do with its creation. For Reality cannot exist in unreality. It is possible to have an entirely positive theology without descending into the condescending state of vacuity. Mystics have demonstrated this many times.

The mystic John wrote, "God is Light, and there is no darkness at all in Him." (1 Jn. 1:5) Between the two-- the dismal darkness of despair and the luminous life of light, I choose the latter.

The writers write like depressed persons. It would be interesting to see how they feel subjectively about their regular state of mind. One feels that they would often be subject to chronic depression, despair, and anxiety-- all of which thickly overlay their theophilosophy.

God is darkly called an "absolute abyss." If this were in reference to God's impenetrability, or God's ineffability, it would be in harmony with mysticism, as when Dionysius (c. 500) called God the "darkness." But this mystical "darkness" is the darkness of inscrutability and of incomprehensibility, not of negativity. Here, the writers are clearly referring not just to that which is above human understanding, but to that which is negative.

Of course, in the overall view, God is both opposite ends of every spectrum. But not all activities are the "active will of God." Only those that support Love are. All antiagapic activities are part of the permissive will of God. And so, in Revelation, the "dragon" is portrayed as being secretly "in the employment" of God. (See my book The Apocalypse of Love: Mystical Symbolism in Revelation.) But it is just as great an error to limit God to the purely, or absolutely, negative, as it is to see God as the exclusively human-defined "positive." But positivity, as in mysticism, heals; and negativity drains energy. Seeing God as the negative is not only depressing, leading many to despair, but unfruitful in terms of Light and Love. For why should one serve, or seek to spread, the Light-- when God is darkness?

This god is, not surprisingly, tied in with the "ultimate Angst." Knowing this god is soul-rattling, disturbing, unsettling. It leads not to peace and tranquility, as does the God of the mystic, but to nervous and untrusting tension, stress, and anxiety. This god is not healing, but literallly sickening.

No wonder they come to the conclusion that "theological thinking is ultimately pathological thinking." I agree whole-heartedly, if we begin with the premise of a totally negative god! This negative God is ultimately the result, as well as the cause, of interior pathology. It literally makes people "spiritually sick" to try to relate to a god who is pure negativity.

But Jesus had nothing good to say about darkness, in which "men hide their evil deeds."

It is an actual brokenness. This is the opposite state to that of being "healed," for "heal" shares a root with "whole," as well as "holy." To reach for holiness, the sacred, is to be whole, not broken.

Grace is God's unearned Love. We are saved from ignorance, not because we are good, but because God loves us, and wills our salvation. So, the most evil (ignorant) person in the world has an equal chance for salvation, after having dissolved karma in Love.

They apparently feel pressured to mention "joy," as it is a major theme of Christian and other mystical writers the world over. But they seem to do so reluctantly, and then, neutralize its power by writing, as one theologian does, "Absolute joy... is inseparable from absolute chaos." They seem determined to make their god a nightmare of negativity and creator of chaos. But the precision and mathematical design found throughout the cosmos, from atom to galaxy, contradicts this portrait of God as haphazard and random.

Again, they feel impelled to taint joy: Being "enslaved to darkness," they say, is the way to joy. Carried to an extreme but logical conclusion, could it not be argued that satanism is the Way to God, or psychosis the way to sanity? Again, they corrupt the purity of joy: It is always accompanied, they claim, by "absolute guilt." Mystics disagree!

Despair, they claim, is the "very signature of a genuine theology." No,it is not; it is the "signature" of their brand of very negative "theology." To celebrate God as pure, uncontaminated Light, Love, and joy has been the traditional Way of enlightenment; but they seem determined to present their god as dour and dismal delusion.

They predictably misunderstand the Asian Job, in the Bible, as successfully having questioned the goodness and rationality of God. This is the question that also captivated Carl Jung. But Job confronted Jehovah, not God. Here, they have slipped into the ubiquitous theological error of confusing Jehovah with God. Job dared to say "NO!" to Jehovah, negating him as a god of reason.

They speak of "self-negating." This has the appearance of wisdom, for it uses a similar phrase to the mystical "self-denying," "self-emptying," "self-anulling," and similar phrases. But they are talking about the negation, not of ego or small mind, but of God. For they speak of the "self-negating of ultimate Ground Itself." The mystic renounces her lower, human, animal nature so that the clear, bright nature of Love, deep within, might shine forth into the world. But by so doing, she affirms the Ground, never negating It. ("Self-emptying" is also a respectable term in mysticism.)

They speak of the "crucified God," in apparent defense of the "death of God" idea. But in mysticism, the Crucifixion was an allegory of the voluntary death of the lower nature, the ego, or humanimal aspects of mind. In mysticism, God never dies. In Jesus, God never died. It is only when the lower (human and animal) aspects of mind die that the higher Self can live. So, this interpretation of the allegorical meaning of the Crucifixion is upside-down and backwards!

The theologian is called to apath of "ultimate subversion." But true theological subversion should be creative, not destructive. Running through the temple with a sledge-hammer, destroying everything regarded as sacred, is not the task of the wise person. Just because our unenlightened society says something, does not mean that it is wrong. Liars can tell truths, and ignorant people parrot true wisdom.

These writers seem to think in categorical generalizations. If people believe that God is light, it is their duty to show that God is darkness. Their "radicalism" consists in little more than contradictions of socially approved teachings. But true wisdom must go far beyond mere contradiction of ideas because they are popular. It must have many more, and positive, layers of teachings to replace those which are illusion.

They refer to the God of Christianity as "an absolutely transcendent God," and here, they are just plain wrong. The interior God of Love was taught by gnostics who were, in the beginning, the majority of Christians. The Jewish Jehovah was absolutely transcendent, which is one reason that no one could ever relate to "him." Extrapolating this to the God of mystical Christianity just does not work, for several reasons. Instead of defining God as "an absolute nothingness consuming everything in its wake," these writers need to redefine God as Love. Does this "reduce" God? No way! For this God is all the Love in all the hearts in all the beings in all the galaxies! God is still overwhelmingly great, but God is great in positivity, not in negativity.

Their way to God might be vaguely analogous to the mystical Way, but comparisons of the two soon fal apart. For, unlike the mystical Journey inward, they say, "Our voyage begins with the sinking into the depths of chaos." The mystical Journey begins with an uplifting of the mind into Light, Love, and joy unexcelled. It is, they admit of their voyage, "pathological." The mysticalJourney is the opposite: It heals at every step.

Satan they define as "the dead body of God." This odd imagery seems designed to support the "God is dead" bias, but in mysticism, the "satan" is seen as the conceptual opposite of Love, and that is fear. (God has no real opposite, for God is Reality.)

Nihilism has traditionally been rejected by most thinking people, including mystics, as a dead-end. So, these writers seem compelled to define it as "light." But many unstable and disturbed people have followed this empty, shattering idea to its logical conclusion that nothing has any ultimate meaning. This philosophy, if it might be so respectably labelled, is as dead as the ancient gods. "Even theology must become nihilistic today," they opine. This is an attempt to empty the cosmos of God-- an opposite of mysticism. They even mistake mysticism for nihilism, its opposite. The Buddhist sunyata, "void," for example, is not an absence of everything. This is a common misunderstanding. It is instead Mind poised to spring into action, to leap into Its own dream. It is the pre-creative state of Mind. It is Mind before creation, emanation, or manifestation.

This nihilism creates "incurable wounds." True spirituality is the healing of those and similar wounds of incompleteness, separation, alienation, and brokenness.
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