TENSION of EXISTENCE an Analysis of Harry Williams

Fiona Gardner

TENSION OF EXISTENCE

An Analysis of Harry Williams’ Responses to the Movement of Divine Presence

The fact is we can love God and our neighbour only at the expense of being able to hate both of them (…) Unless we are ready to entertain this conflict between love and hatred we shall never grow in the love of God and man.1

Summary – This paper uses some of the relevant ideas of the philosopher Eric Voegelin and the analytical psychologist Carl Jung as a theoretical and critical framework to reflect on and consider the mental breakdown and psycho-spiritual experiences of the theologian Harry Williams that allowed him to move from a state of spiritual closure to one of differentiation and spiritual opening that characterizes his writings. Each interpretive approach offers differing emphases yet together provide a seamlessly compatible way of understanding Williams’ emergence into his true nature and spiritual authenticity.

Introduction

In 1976 Harry Williams’ book Tensions was published; based on retreat addresses the book explores conflictual feelings such as love and hate, depend- ence and independence, faith and doubt, knowing and not knowing. Williams’ premise, founded on his personal experiences, is that conflict is life, and holding the tension of opposing thoughts and feelings is part of an authentic spirituality. His autobiography, published some years later, is still extraordinary for the account of his mental breakdown, the demolition of his false religious persona and his struggle to understand his psyche and his true God.2 Williams

1 H.A. Williams, Tensions: Necessary Conflicts in Life and Love, Springfield, IL: Templegate, 1976, 16. 2 H.A. Williams, Some Day I’ll Find You, London: Beazley, 1982. 122 fiona gardner trained as a priest, and he worked initially in a London parish, before returning to Cambridge as Chaplain of Westcott House, and then as a Fellow and Lecturer in Theology at Trinity College. Following a mental breakdown and a fourteen year-long psychoanalysis he eventually moved in 1969 at the age of fifty to become a member of the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield – an Anglican Religious Order. His personal experiences led him to the belief that ‘everyone should try to find the real God through finding the real self’ which for him included acceptance and integration of the negative including ‘scepti- cism, anxiety, sexuality and worldliness’.3 Williams’ insights on acknowledging and holding the tension of the opposites is largely overlooked in contemporary theological discussion yet remain highly relevant in the field of spirituality, and, so, the focus of this paper is to introduce and explore these further. The critical theoretical framework used for this psycho-spiritual analysis of Williams’ breakthrough into spiritual health is constructed from two separate though inter connected disciplines. The first adapts some of the concepts on holding such tensions taken from the work of the political philosopher Eric Voegelin, and the second appropriates the thinking of the analytical psychologist Carl Jung and in particular his work on living with the opposites. Whilst Voegelin does not link his philosophy directly to psychology4 he was aware of the work of Freud and of Jung, and of Jung’s idea of bringing aspects of the unconscious in to consciousness.5 The subject of the analysis is then Williams’ self-interpretation of his developing awareness of opposing thoughts leading to spiritual authenticity, and the analytical tools used to explore this are specific and relevant theories from the writings of Voegelin and of Jung. One of the central ideas of Voegelin’s used in this paper is that of different modes of self-understanding: ‘The terms closure, breakthrough and openness are used by Voegelin to symbolize the different experiences one can have in relation to the surrounding reality of God and man, world and society’6 depending on the response to what Voegelin called ‘the movement of divine presence’.7 These terms are used as section headings in the paper to delineate the three stages of Williams’ spiritual development; in each section the relevant

3 Obituary of H.A. Williams, Church Times 02/11/2006, https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/ articles/2006/10-february/gazette/fr-harry-williams-cr 4 C.f. Robert S. Seiler, ‘A Philosopher and a Psychoanalyst: Eric Voegelin and Donald Winnicott on the In-Between of Human Life’, posted 8 May 2017 on Voegelin View, https://voegelinview.com/author/rsseilerjr/ 5 Eric Voegelin interview with Peter Cangelosi entitled ‘The Limit of Depth Psychology’, posted 1 August 2013 https://voegelinview.com/recovering-reality-pt-1 6 Meins G.S. Coetsier, Etty Hillesum and the Flow of Presence: A Voegelinian Analysis, Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2008, 132. 7 Ibid., 111. tension of existence 123 theoretical frame from Voegelin and Jung is outlined and then illustrated by Williams’ descriptions of his experiences. The phrase used in the main title of this paper: ‘the tension of existence’ reso- nates not only with the title of Williams’ book but also with both Voegelin’s and Jung’s theoretical frameworks. Voegelin, though sometimes seen as a con- servative figure, wrote in a counter cultural way about his understanding that every human being is in a paradoxical existence in terms of a reality founded in time and materiality in the world ‘yet tensionally formed by a timeless spiritual transcendent order experienced in various modes’.8 The tension involved in the very state of being alive and in our precarious situation between all sorts of opposites, including that between humanity and divinity, runs as a central theme throughout Voegelin’s work. He writes that ‘tension of existence is the human condition. There is no way of abolishing it but death’.9 Jung’s explora- tion of what it means to live with the tension of the opposites played a central role in his thought; he called this coincidentia oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites, meaning a meeting of opposing emotions or parts of the psyche. He saw that opposites are required for the definition of any entity or process and for psychic energy, and for him the pairs included the ego/persona where if the tension of living with both are out of balance there is confusion between genuine identity and social role, and also ego/shadow where a lack of integration or an inability to integrate the shadow leads to projection of the negative or an over-identification which leads to a negative inflation.10 Jung says that one only achieves a ‘presentiment of the whole’ and can only ‘achieve balance’ by nurturing one’s ‘opposite’. However, doing so is very difficult, as nurturing the opposite of one’s own thoughts, feelings and attitudes ‘is’ Jung writes, ‘hate- ful to you in your innermost core, because it is not heroic’.11 Jung takes a special interest in the Christian mystic and philosopher, Meister Eckhart who sees a coincidence of opposites between God and man, and who seeks to unite the opposites by discovering God within his own soul;12 a task which also

8 Ellis Sandoz, ‘Introduction’, in: The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. Vol. 12: Published Essays 1966-1985, ed. & introd. Ellis Sandoz, Baton Rouge/ London: Louisiana State University Press, 1990, xi-xxii, xii. 9 Eric Voegelin, ‘On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery’, in: The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. Vol. 12, 213-255: 245. 10 Andrew Samuels, Jung and the post-Jungians, London/ Boston/ Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985, 93. 11 Sanford Lewis Drob, http://theredbookofcgjung.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/coincidence-and- conflict-of-opposites.html 24 November 2009. Page references given are from C.G. Jung, The Red Book, ed. Sonu Shamdasani, New York/ London: Norton, 2009, 248, 263. 12 C.G. Jung, Psychological Types (The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Vol. 6), London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1921, par. 412, 416, 432. 124 fiona gardner occupied Jung himself. Jung acknowledged his appropriation and adaption of the work of Nicholas of Cusa on the coincidence of opposites moving Cusa’s ideas from their medieval context as a principle and method of rational theology, and emphasising instead the importance of the unconscious, the personal and the experiential.13 Both Voegelin and Jung emphasise the significance of symbols that act as a container for immediate experience where the meaning cannot be stated definitively. Voegelin wrote about how such symbols can become obscured and deformed and the need for experience to be articulated through soteriological symbols created to express the experience of being moved by a personal God who exists in the human soul.14 Jung appreciated that symbols are important as a transcendent function where the opposites are unified and transcended, as for him, the source of the symbols and hence the power of the imagination, lies outside the conscious ego. God, for Jung, is the essential unifying symbol and the collective unconscious is the source of all creativity; the soul or psychological self is transcended by the process of transformation.15 The theories of both Voegelin and Jung on living with and at times transcending the opposites can be seen to resonate in Williams’ account; his experiences endorse that we are always and inevitably involved in creative conflict and in healthy life-giving tensions, but our failure to recognise and accept these leads – as he discovered – to neurotic destructive tensions, a sort of death. He writes, [I]f we refuse to let life in by the front door by accepting and welcoming those tensions which are necessary and healthy (…) life will be against us (…) or against the perversions which masquerade as ourselves.16 In the next section such masquerading is explored further.

Closure – The Prohibition of Questions

The term narcissistic closure was used by Voegelin as a characteristic of spiritual alienation and estrangement that is a reaction against philosophical insight and a resistance to the search for truth and order. In the individual psyche this means that dogma and doctrine take precedence over immediate engendering

13 There are seventeen references to Cusa and his writings in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Cf. David Henderson, ‘The Coincidence of Opposites: C.G. Jung’s Reception of Nicholas of Cusa’, in: Studies in Spirituality 20 (2010), 101-113. 14 Michael P. Federici, Eric Voegelin, Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2002, 233. 15 Jeffrey Miller, The Transcendent Function, Albany: State University of New York, 2004, 44. 16 Williams, Tensions, 19-20. tension of existence 125 experience, and, so, there is a loss of meaning through abstraction whilst the general influence of the rational scientific approach leads to a lessening of vital- ity in metaphysical reality and a sense of the unknown God; the resulting spiritual void becomes filled by ‘the pseudo-religions of modern ideology’ and ‘a secular-imminent spirituality, a pseudo-spirituality’.17 This estrangement to transcendent reality was seen by Voegelin as an imaginative and existential closure, a spiritual dullness, leading to reified and opinionated propositions and certainty with a resulting ‘dehumanization of the person’.18 People then live with the love of self and in rejection of the good, in a state of second reality, a fictitious world considered as real but which in fact eclipses genuine reality with false perceptions of the human condition.19 The tension of existence in the state of closure means that all the tensions are within the individual psyche, but this is a psyche closed to awareness and the consciousness of the ground of being; the numinous aspect of reason is eliminated or seen as a psychological deviation of reason and the symbols linked to engendering experience are compacted and restricted instead expressing not reality but [the thinker’s] state of alienation from it.20 One of the characteristics of the state of closure is a prohibition of asking questions leading to a dimin- ished and restricted horizon. Voegelin notes that the extent of the horizon depends on the person’s willingness to be open to the full dimension of reality of his conscious existence; the responsibility is in the hands of the individual; although Jung might suggest that this choice will not always be a conscious one. The overall effect of this reductionist approach to becoming real is that the tension of existence is regarded as unimportant; instead there will be an internal tension and chaos in the psyche as one aspect is kept to the fore at the expense of its opposite. The one-sided nature of closed existence tends to mean that in Jungian terminology the ego is over identified with the persona (the side facing the world confidently, amiably and agreeably), while the shadow aspect is suppressed and repressed from conscious awareness and so finds expression in other ways. Sometimes people who are ‘apparently well-put-together people’ find themselves coming to analysis ‘just before the personality begins to blow up’21 where analysis is in part about stripping off the mask and discovering then that what seemed so real ‘in relation to the essential individuality of the person

17 Federici, Eric Voegelin, 54-57. 18 Ibid., 189. 19 C.f. Voegelin was here influenced by Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, published in 1943. 20 Eric Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, ed. Ellis Sandoz, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University, 1989, 17-18. 21 June Singer, Boundaries of the Soul, New York: Anchor Books, 1973, 218. 126 fiona gardner concerned is only a secondary reality, a product of compromise, in making which others often have a greater share (…) The persona is a semblance, a two- dimensional reality’.22 The stronger and more rigid the persona then the greater the denial of the shadow – all that we are ashamed of. As Jung understood when one attempts to live from only one side of the personality, usually the conscious adapted attitude, then the opposite side remains in the subconscious, waiting for some situation which allows it to break through. Williams’ writing about this state of mind understands that if you drive conflict underground ‘you deaden yourself, and your protest against your own deadness will manifest itself in neurosis, in one of those sterile destructive forms of tension from which we have to be healed and delivered’.23 Shame and guilt are closely intertwined, and Williams was exposed to a great deal of religious guilt as a he grew up, partly through the influence of his evangelical Christian mother, experiences reinforced in a different way at his Anglican Oxford train- ing college from which he emerged as High Church, yet, ‘still the same old apparatus for producing religious results by whipping up guilt feelings and branding people for life with neurotic compulsions, sold as the voice of God’ with various ‘taboos and a resort to moral blackmail’ about what you could or could not do.24 Williams identified too much with his persona as priest – one where ‘the mystery of grace’ was kept ‘at arm’s length’ and describes his relationship with God during this time as fundamentally a closed contract: ‘my life was based on the tacit assumption that God would scratch my back on condition that I scratched His’. This god who Williams later identified as an ‘idol’, ‘a taskmaster’ and ‘a neurotic’; a god of Williams’ projections and one who had to be kept ‘in a good mood’ by ‘jabbering at him at regular intervals’. Williams describes this as being suffocatingly tedious but worse was the sup- pression and reduction of his personality: For this God of mine forbade me to be three-quarters of what I was (…) God wanted me to be an emotional dwarf so that I might give my stunted heart wholly to him (…) and this meant that enjoying yourself too much was suspect (…) you could enjoy yourself safely as a duty, but it could be dangerous to enjoy yourself as a pleasure. There was an implicit prohibition on questioning, as the illusion was ‘that everything had a Christian answer, and that, even if I didn’t myself know what it was, I could in principle discover it’; he felt in a stranglehold with the god

22 Ibid., 210. 23 Williams, Tensions, 16. 24 Williams, Some Day I’ll Find You, this and subsequent quotes taken from 93, 129-132, 123, 143, 164-166. tension of existence 127 that ‘the priests had encouraged me to believe in (…) the puppet of the savage hypnotist (…) little more than the dupe and slave of my own guilt-feelings’. With hindsight Williams sees that, I hadn’t yet begun to find my own real self. Instead I clung to the false security of the image of myself as a ‘good Catholic’. I made an ecclesiastical stance a sub stitute for a personal identity. I thought that holiness consisted in knuckling under to my idol. Yet somewhere within me I knew darkly that I wasn’t a ‘Catholic’ at all and that the idol was the object of my hatred. Also with hindsight he recognises that ‘the true God began to reach out to me’ and Williams became less and less willing to ‘knuckle under to the idol and its demands’. However the conflict was confusing as what looked like a revolt against the idol ‘looked and felt like a revolt against the true God (…) In the end the guilt became intolerable and I broke down completely’ with the final trigger the unrequited love for a colleague, for Williams (who was homosexual at a time when this was illegal and strongly condemned by the church), the cumulative stress became intolerable. Thus it was that my deepest, most tender, and strongest feelings were felt by me to be monstrously horrible, something to be utterly condemned, as well as being, I felt, the legitimate target of ridicule (…) The cause, or causes, infinite in their complicated ramifications, spread back to the day I was born, perhaps earlier. For Williams the falling in love was what he described as ‘the first eruption of an earthquake, that I was being raised up from the unfeeling sleep of death to the severe pains and penalties, as well as the rewards, of life’.25 Here then was the breakthrough into Voegelin’s second mode of self-understanding, where Williams’ previously repressed feelings began to emerge into consciousness – but not without a struggle.

Breakthrough – Leaps in Being through Immediate Experience

A time of breakthrough may originate in a time of breakdown; a time of unrest and conscious disorientation or alienation, where the pressure has been on doing rather than being, putting forward the false self rather than living in the true self. In Voegelin’s terms the person is cut off from the immediate and real experience of transcendence or the divine and in Jung’s theory the person might be stuck in a false compliant persona but disconnected from their inner reality. The psyche seeks to heal itself by initiating a search for meaning by making

25 Ibid., 165. 128 fiona gardner

‘a leap in being’ and repetitions of leaps in being, and finding ‘a new interior direction or movement towards the ground, the divine-immortal Beyond’.26 In psychological terms the leaps of being are understood as an irruption from the unconscious of previously repressed or denied parts of the self, and to become conscious of this shadow involves ‘recognising the dark aspect of the personality as present and real’.27 This is a process of looking within, reflecting on what is found there in order to avoid being taken over by it, where such confrontation with inner conflict, disorder and narcissism results in personal transformation and an expansion into what was previously unknown. Living as one’s self rather than as another involves experiencing our own heights ‘only after being cast into our own depths’.28 Voegelin refers to an opening up to the flow of presence as an ‘exploring of the quest for reality’29 and the pressure to open to this expands during times of crisis with a longing for honesty and a search for divine regenerative order rather than disorder. Any meaning will be through direct experience in which the tension is to articulate one’s own reality and that involves the reactivation of ‘the engendering experience’ in the psyche to ‘recapture the truth of reality living in the symbols’. The truth of experiential reality has not been lost but lies dormant waiting to ‘be imaginatively aroused by a spiritually sensitive soul’.30 The search leading to revelation and the recovery of order is then a matter of spiritual awakening where things become real because they have been experienced. Voegelin appreciated that the two forces at work to shift into a consciousness of reality requires ‘the union of the divine pull and the willingness to search for it’, where, the ‘divine intellect moves the intellect of man to engage in the search for the ground’. Human beings are then in search of the divine, ‘and that search is engendered by an attraction or pulls from the divine’. There- fore any revelation is the movement of response to an ‘irruption of the divine in the psyche’ and a recapturing of experiences of transcendence and a return to the mystery.31 Williams’ breakdown initially took the form of feelings of dizziness and fear: ‘I became more and more the victim of terror’, developing increasing phobias

26 Coetsier, Etty Hillesum and the Flow of Presence, 115. 27 C.G. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (Collected Works. Vol. 9[ii]), Princeton: Princeton University Press (Bollingen Series), 1950, 8. 28 Sanford Lewis Drob, Reading the Red Book: An Interpretive Guide to C. G. Jung’s Liber Novus, Louisiana: Spring Journal, 2012, 89, 82. 29 Coetsier, Etty Hillesum and the Flow of Presence, 126. 30 Federici, Eric Voegelin, xxvii, xxxiii. 31 Coetsier, Etty Hillesum and the Flow of Presence, 180. tension of existence 129 about sitting for meals, travelling, going into a church or a shop until eventually he became unable to walk outside at all, and then lost the use of his legs. One interpretation would be that he became overwhelmed, physically paralysed by all the persecutory emotions that had remained unprocessed in his unconscious mind. Following unhelpful but well-meaning input from a priest a psychiatrist arranged for three weeks in a Nursing Home. Williams comments that healing from inside the church including confession, anointing with oil by the Bishop, and, continuous Holy Communion could not work: ‘For there was in myself too great a confusion between the true God and my persecuting idol’:32 suppressed emotions, childhood trauma and religious guilt had become patho- logical and projected onto this superegoic and punishing god. Williams recounts his rage at his suffering, [T]his paralysing terror always waiting to spring out at me at any moment; my consequent inability to concentrate on anything or enjoy anything; the inevitable isolation (…) the prayers which were answered by nothing but the cruelty of an empty echo. Eventually able to get back to teaching Williams stayed away from church saying no prayers as religion felt too tainted: I had had enough of God for the time being. It was an indescribable relief not to have this ghastly creature breathing with disapproval down my neck and to tell him instead to fuck off. It was the idol I was disposing of (…) for the true God will never fuck off. Interestingly, Williams did hold onto a Christian insight which can be seen as the emergence of holding the tension of the opposites which was that ‘the cruelly destructive and negative nature of suffering can be seen, if only in a glass very darkly, as charged with positive and creative possibilities’, where the true God, far from being a tyrant was prepared to suffer in order to create and called people, ‘to share his suffering so that in the end they too might look on what has been made and find it very good’. During the early years of his breakdown/breakthrough Williams was meeting with a psychiatrist three times a week but feeling as if there was insufficient mutual response he sought a referral for psychoanalysis, a treatment which lasted for fourteen years, initially three times a week, then twice a week and in the last year weekly. This analysis moved Williams into an openness of mind where increasingly difference and differentiation became possible with awareness and holding of the opposites.

32 Williams, Some Day I’ll Find You, this and subsequent quotes taken from 171-177. 130 fiona gardner

Openness – An Advancing Process of Differentiation, Balancing the Tension of the Opposites

From a philosophical perspective Voegelin saw open existence as a process of real consciousness, an openness to experiences as well as to keeping them in balance, and as a response to the movements of divine presence arising from the experience of what he termed the In-Between of the divine and human; here he saw the realm of the spiritual as the space between these poles of tension,33 and writes, ‘what becomes manifest is not a truth on which one can settle down forever after but the tension of light and darkness in the process of reality’.34 The breakthrough from the closed state of mind into openness is the experience of participation through contact with reality that is more than oneself yet within oneself: both transcendent and immanent – another opposite to hold in balance. The awareness that ‘there is a divine presence in the process of becoming conscious of reality, that human consciousness is guided by the divine presence within it’35 changes the person who goes through such an illu- minative and revelatory process leaving them with a different type of consciousness and understanding of true reality from people who have not had such experiences. The analytical psychologist Jung thought that the mentally ill could be seen as ‘seekers after truth’ and that ‘symptoms are always justified and serve a pur- pose’ if only to bring the person into analysis, which Jung defines early in his career as ‘an understanding and a moral support in the honest experimental attempt one calls “life”’.36 Jung would have appreciated Williams’ labelling of the ‘idol’ god and the deadness of the religion linked to it; for Jung this would be a ‘petrified symbol used stereotypically for “magical” effects’, and whilst fas- cinating it was completely the opposite of a symbol which for Jung ‘is the sensuously perceptible expression of an inner experience. A religious experience strives for expression and can be expressed only “symbolically” because it tran- scends understanding’.37

33 Claire Rawnsley, A Consideration of the Philosophical Insights of Eric Voegelin: The Life of Reason, the Equivalent Symbol of the Divine Human Encounter (PhD-dissertation, University of Queensland, 1998), https:// espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:152688/n30062667_phd_ totalthesis.pdf 34 Eric Voegelin, Order and History. Vol. 4: The Ecumenic Age, Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2000, 280. 35 Federici, Eric Voegelin, 140. 36 C.G. Jung, Letters. Vol. 1: 1906-1950, ed. Gerhard Adler & Aniela Jaffe, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973, 53, 47, 59. 37 Jung, Letters, 59. tension of existence 131

Analysis is an opportunity to recover authenticity and independence through integration of the shadow and for Williams his analysis became over time a spiritual and psychological rebirth, a ‘night sea journey’.38 He found his ana- lyst, Christopher Scott, who was not a Christian in the formal sense a ‘man of profound spiritual perception (…) He had penetrated to and was in communion with Reality’.39 As the analysis progressed Williams found himself opening to this Reality which he describes as an advancing process of differentiation through which truth is understood and articulated in a deeper, complex and more complete way: Christopher was always stressing that the self of which we are aware is only a very small fraction of our total self (…) This unknown total self included what we had been forced by adverse circumstances to repress (…) But the infinitely larger part (…) was that unknown self which is the fount of all that is good, lovely and creative in what we are and do. The unknown self in this sense corresponded largely with the Jungian Unconscious. When terror threatened it was on this unknown self that one had to rely, since it transcended the injured and shop-soiled self of which one was aware and also the region of the subconscioused where things in themselves good and natural became diseased because shut away in the dark.40 Consciously Williams was setting out to kill the god ‘who soaked you in guilt- feelings and demanded continual self-abasement’ and to find his way to the God ‘who was prepared to suffer anything in order to create His universe and give Himself to it’.41 The analysis he says was a preparation for the life of prayer and it lead him into an integrity and wholeness that he felt he had lacked before, giving him an insight into his Christianity; it was in effect a death and resurrection; a movement from closure to openness and into something universal. Williams after the analysis ended was able to write about holding the tension of opposites and about experiences of transcending dualism through glimpses of God. He understood then that if the true infinite includes the finite in its own infinity then it includes ‘all in the finite which is tormenting and hideous and death-dealing’,42 and he discovered with the holding of these contrasting opposites that there can be transformation of the shadow and dark things – both personally and collectively. Williams quotes Jakob Boehme: ‘that the dark principle in nature is as it were the fuel which eternally feeds the eternal love and joy which constitute the life of God’. Both are needed and ultimately all the contradictions, conflicts and tensions which have to be accepted and in

38 Jung, Letters, 86, fn. 2. 39 Williams, Some Day I’ll Find You, 182. 40 Ibid., 185 (italics in original). 41 Williams, Some Day I’ll Find You, 187. 42 Ibid., and subsequent quote 365. 132 fiona gardner a sense welcomed are gathered up in what Williams describes as ‘the incon- gruity between death and fullness of life’,43 in this way there is through the knowledge of depth in our lives a sense of transcendence of the opposites and an experience of union with ‘the absolute fullness of the ultimate mystery’.44 The symbolism involved in articulating such experiences arise from what Crosier calls ‘the spiritual vents that gave birth to them’45 and such symbols are articulated through Williams’ writing where we read how the tension is experienced from the temporal pole as a loving and hopeful urge towards the divine eternity, and, from the pole of eternal being is experienced as a call and irruption from the divine. For Williams the full metaphysical and religious implications of this – which he knew from first-hand experience, provided him with the ability to dismantle dogma and undo the destructive damage from his past leaving him with the basis of a creative faith by which to authentically live. At the end of his auto biography he is able to symbolise the reality of his experiences in this way: that he has become ‘a person who, because of what he has seen, feels increasingly that he is out in the cold’. For whilst he has caught glimpses of glory now and then, the tension of existence remains the most powerful symbol, and this insight is summarised as: Nothing is for nothing. You always have to pay for what you get. Without pain there can be no birth; without death no resurrection. In that necessity the ideal and the actual are reconciled and seem to belong inescapably to each other.46

Conclusion

In this paper I have used some of the relevant ideas of the philosopher Eric Voegelin and the analytical psychologist Carl Jung as a theoretical framework to reflect on and consider the psycho-spiritual experiences of the theologian Harry Williams. Each of the three views an acceptance of living with the opposites with rare glimpses of transcending these dualities as part of the tension of existence and of authentic spirituality. This multi-disciplinary approach is in itself important and a characteristic of the move from a closed state of mind and stultified religious belief to an advancing process of differentiation that charac- terises the openness needed to balance and hold an awareness of the tension involved in living and in a relationship with God. The coincidentia oppositorum

43 Williams, Tensions, 120. 44 Williams, Some Day I’ll Find You, 352. 45 Coetsier, Etty Hillesum and the Flow of Presence, 179. 46 Williams, Some Day I’ll Find You, 383. tension of existence 133 supersedes all boundaries, including opposing perspectives on such psycho- spiritual experiences, so it can be seen that each interpretive approach has offered differing emphases yet together provide a seamlessly compatible way of understanding Williams’ emergence into his true nature and spiritual authenticity.