Christians have a problem.1
On the one hand, the testimonies of mystics throughout history—and recent findings in psychology—strongly suggest that nondual experience is profoundly good for us. The ability to perceive ourselves, at least some of the time, as integrated parts of a universal whole (rather than as isolated, separate monads) seems to do wonders for our happiness and sense of wellbeing.
On the other hand, holding too tightly to a mainstream Christian theology can make nondual awareness hard to come by.
In many Christian theologies, longstanding ideas like the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (“creation out of nothing”) and the debatable notion that God is a distinct “person” make it conceptually impossible for a human being to realize some fundamental identity with that God. Unlike the Hindu follower of Advaita Vedanta, for instance, the mainstream Christian cannot affirm an ultimate identity between their own being and the original source of all being. After all, if God and his creation are truly two separate things, it’s hard to imagine what they might have in common.2
Under the circumstances, a Christian who hopes to cultivate nondual awareness, or make sense of their own nondual experience, is limited to a few options.
They can abandon Christianity altogether, and explore Eastern religions with less dualistic ontologies and more comprehensive sets of psychotechnologies, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism. While this is a tried and true way of promoting nondual awareness for an increasing number of Westerners, it leaves behind the beautiful, complex mythos of the Christian tradition, and removes much of the transformative power offered by the art, music, literature, and ritual of that tradition. In short, it seems a shame to let so much good material go to waste.
Another approach is to study Christian mysticism, both in its historical manifestations and in more modern presentations offered by thinkers such as Richard Rohr and Thomas Keating. Older techniques such as St. Ignatius’s imaginative prayer and newer ones like Keating’s Centering Prayer can serve as great tools for imaginal work and contemplation, respectively. But, ultimately, they remain limited by an orthodox theological framework that is allergic to too-strong expressions of unity between humans and God. (See for instance Richard Rohr’s strong insistence on referring to his ontology as panentheism, rather than pantheism. To an outsider, this might seem like hair-splitting. But the distinction is vital to Rohr, who has taken on the thankless task of trying to develop a nondual Catholicism within the bounds of existing Catholic dogma.)
Such a framework also remains stuck on theodicy, refusing to allow God any contact with or responsibility for evil in the world. This is an awkward position to hold today for the same reasons theodicy has always been awkward—a purely good God/Ground-of-Being/One doesn’t account for the world we experience, in which both good and evil arise.
There is another way. A path toward a truly nondual Christianity which makes room for darkness; which holds onto valuable Christian myths such as the Fall and the Incarnation, while still allowing atomized humans to realize an identification with a vaster, divine whole. It begins with the work of William Blake.
God Is Dead. Long Live God.
In the poetry and painting of William Blake, radical 20th-century theologian Thomas J. J. Altizer found a vision of a Christianity that could celebrate the full range of human experience and allow for human identification with the divine.
At the heart of Altizer’s theology is his particular understanding of the Incarnation, according to which every part of the Trinity—including the all-important Father, or Godhead—becomes human with the birth of Jesus Christ. This, of course, means that God in his entirety actually died at the time of the Crucifixion, and no longer exists in the way that he once did. This, according to Altizer, was the original understanding of the Incarnation, which was quickly replaced by an understanding of the Father as absolute, transcendent, and totally other.
As he puts it in The New Gospel of Christian Atheism:
“[in traditional Christology] the body of Jesus is clearly not the Godhead of Christ, for Godhead is eternal and can never suffer or die, hence the orthodox condemnation of Patripassionism [sic], which is nothing less than a condemnation of total incarnation, an incarnation in which Godhead itself becomes wholly and finally incarnate. Certainly orthodox Christology is a refusal of a total Incarnation, just as it is a refusal of the Word made ‘flesh.’” p. 46
Altizer, in other words, calls for a full embrace of what some early critics derisively called patripassianism—the belief that the Father and the Son both died on the cross. Drawing on the work of Hegel, Altizer understands this death as a dialectical development. He frames it as a form of kenosis, or absolute self-emptying, by which the universe is made anew and divinized:
“Jesus [] is the very paradigm of an absolute and an actual self-emptying, and not only the Jesus who is the sacrificial Victim, but the Jesus who actually enacted the dawning of the Kingdom of God, a dawning that both Blake and Hegel understand as the self-negation of a heavenly transcendence, one absolutely transfiguring that transcendence, so that transcendence itself is now only here and now.” p. 45
In this “death of God” theology, the divine and the mundane become merged in the death of Jesus Christ, such that every human is now divine, a god:
“Thus the Universal Humanity is One Man, whom the Christian calls Jesus the Christ […] an unveiling of an absolute redemption or an absolute apocalypse finally reconciling and uniting all opposites whatsoever, as for the first time we are given a full and total apocalyptic vision.” p. 64
This radical Christian ontology has a lot in common with the ontologies implied by the Buddhist Heart Sutra,3 which states that “Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.” Broadly speaking, both ontologies collapse the binary distinction between some ultimate reality—God in the one case, emptiness in the other—and the mundane reality we live in every day.4 Some branches of Mahayana philosophy take this idea still further, arguing that samsara (lived reality, with all its imperfections) and nirvana (enlightenment) are in fact one and the same thing.
Put in Christian terms, such an idea might be expressed as “Flesh is Spirit; Spirit is Flesh.” Or, more bracingly: “Hell is Heaven; Heaven is Hell.”
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and a Workable Christianity
Again, according to Altizer, we already have such a nondual Christian framework available to us in the work of William Blake.
Blake frequently depicts God the Father as analogous with—or even identical to—Satan, in that the Christian God is a repressive force, condemning the human body and its pleasures and negating the fullness of life by his mere transcendent existence. Accordingly, the death of this God at the Crucifixion is the redemption of humanity from a false dualism which paints the body and pleasure as evil.
Indeed, in his classic work The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake explicitly mounts an all-out assault on duality, penning lines that read as if they had been inspired by Mahayana philosophy or the wildest tantric sages:5
“Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.”
“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity. He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. The cut worm forgives the plough.”
“Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”
“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”
“For everything that lives is holy.”
Now, these are hardly orthodox Christian statements—Blake is unlikely to get the Vatican’s stamp of approval anytime soon. But they are poignant expressions of nondual thinking which make use of established Christian symbols and imagery.
In other words, per Altizer, Blake offers us a blueprint for a Christianity that could actually work for the large numbers of people who love and cherish Christian myth and ritual, but who can’t honestly bring themselves to ignore the flaws in orthodox Christian theologies, ontologies, and philosophies.
To stubbornly hold on to a Christian dualism after having had an experience of nonduality—or simply after having been convinced of the logic of nondual ontology—is to do violence to one’s reason. To pretend that the image of a transcendent Father hasn’t been used to crush human spirits is to ignore centuries of Church history. Blake’s poetry and painting offer us a way to salvage what is marvelous about Christianity, while also integrating its many horrors.
With Blake’s help, the modern Christian might be able to cobble together a version of their religion which can celebrate the body and senses, acknowledge the trauma brought on by two millennia of repression, and make room for life—a Christianity that can function in the real world.
- Actually, we have several. But this is a big one. [↩]
- Accordingly, Christian accounts of nondual experience tend to get a bit twisty when compared to writings from other traditions, as the mystics involved try to fit their experiences to orthodox theologies. See for instance The Mirror of Simple Souls, which posits the “will” as the common factor between a “naughted” person and Love, a.k.a. The Holy Spirit—carefully preserving some difference between the human soul and God. [↩]
- Though it is not quite identical to them—Altizer maintains the existence of certain absolute realities, such as the Fall, which would be hard to square with Mahayana Buddhism. For instance, according to Altizer:: “Christianity knows an absolute dichotomy or an absolute opposition that is simply impossible in Buddhism, an opposition between the depths of sin and the depths of grace, depths of grace inseparable from the depths of sin, for they are depths of grace only realizable in the depths of sin, and only an absolute opposition or an absolute dichotomy between sin and grace makes possible a uniquely Christian redemption […] Christianity is inseparable from an absolute fall, a fall wholly transforming the creation [.]” The New Gospel of Chrisian Atheism, p. 15 [↩]
- “could that Sunyata be a model or a paradigm of an absolutely transfigured Christian Godhead, a Godhead in which Being is an absolute nothingness, but an absolute nothingness that is an absolutely transfiguring nothingness? This is a Godhead already apprehended by a deeper Christian mysticism, but one never called forth in the fuller expressions of Western Christianity [.]” Altizer, The New Gospel of Christian Atheism, p. 17 [↩]
- To my knowledge, there is no evidence that Blake was actually familiar with Buddhist thinking. He seems to have arrived at similar conclusions independently. [↩]
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