The poets of via positiva

The great proclaimers of via positiva in the West include Thomas Traherne, William Blake, and Walt Whitman. We will look at older traditions that incorporate some of the via positiva outlook later on, but these poets of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries arrived at their views without supporting tradition. All three were intensely spiritual men, whose orientation was jnani by our definition here, and who were anything but renunciates. While Whitman may have found some inspiration in Blake, he had a very different spirituality, finding no interest in the occult worlds depicted in the poetry and art of Blake. Neither men were influenced by Traherne, because his work was not discovered until the 20th century. What all three have in common, and which William James could not accept, was a conviction in the essential goodness of life. 'Energy is eternal delight' says Blake, which both Traherne and Whitman would have assented to. Traherne taught the acquisition of the 'infant eye', the ability to see even a pebble as a treasure, let alone the wonders of the human body, 'the azure veins in an infant's limbs'. These lines of Whitman may represent one of the best summaries of via positiva:

I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash'd babe,
and am not contain'd between my hat and boots,
And I peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good,
The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good. (Song Of Myself, v. 7)

The usual accusation against the poets of the via positiva is that they are naïve, and Traherne's 'infant eye' could support that view at first glance. On closer inspection however we find a great maturity, an ageless wisdom, that William James was quite unaware of. Whitman tells us this:

No dainty dolce affettuoso I,
Bearded, sun-burnt, gray-neck'd, forbidding, I have arrived,
To be wrestled with as I pass for the solid prizes of the universe,
For such I afford whoever can persevere to win them. (Starting from Paumanok, v. 15)

Biographers of Whitman bear out this view of Whitman as a man, recording President Lincoln as saying just that, with that emphasis, about Whitman after seeing him pass the window of the East Room in the Whitehouse. Whitman's point in the poem is more significant, however, because he is declaring himself as spiritual teacher, a fact of Whitman's life quite lost to history (see 'selected Masters / Whitman'). Whitman, in contrast to Blake and Traherne, has had an entirely secular legacy, which raising an interesting point. Can a jnani via positiva teaching be presented in the West as a secular system of thought with no explicit reference to the spiritual?

William James's objection is valuable however, in that it shows the obstacles to accepting the via positiva as a valid spiritual path. James was a psychologist, and even taking into account the transpersonal tradition in psychology of Jung, Hillman, Wilber and Maslow, it is fair to say that the psychologists are generally interested in the pathological mind. This is no accident, nor is it confined to the profession, it is simply part of human nature. However it was not always so, as a look at more ancient spiritualities show.

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