TENSION of EXISTENCE an Analysis of Harry Williams
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Studies in Spirituality 29, 121-133. doi: 10.2143/SIS.29.0.3286941 © 2019 by Studies in Spirituality. All rights reserved. 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 hold- ing 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’ break- through 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-interpreta- tion of his developing awareness of opposing thoughts leading to spiritual authenticity, and the analytical tools used to explore this are specific and rele- vant 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://voegelin- view.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 integra- tion 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 theol- ogy, 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 psycho- logical self is transcended by the process of transformation.15 The theories of both Voegelin and Jung on living with and at times tran- scending the opposites can be seen to resonate in Williams’ account; his experi- ences 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.