The opposite of positive thinking

For St Paul of the Cross, authentic joy comes from experience and compassion — not internalised storytelling

Part 5 of our series with David Benjamin Blower: Notes on Poverty, Death and Nothingness, exploring the writings of St Paul of the Cross

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St Paul of the Cross is hell on all mantras of positive thinking. He is drawn like a moth toward the pain. He goes out of his way to sit before it and to contemplate it. He beholds it and listens attentively to it. He resonates with it and shares in it. He projects himself onto it in order to really feel it.

I have many questions about this morbid bent. I have stumbled across more than a few quotes that suggest he simply dislikes himself:

“We must fear that terrible beast, self-love…” 

“Remain in the truth of your own nothingness…” he says.

“He would not be God… if I—little earthworm that I am—could understand his marvels…” 

Perhaps he is a paradoxical master of positive thinking. He goes joyously toward the worn edges, as though he has found some paradise hidden in plain sight; some Narnia through the cupboard of death, poverty and nothingness. He writes like a lover, like a drunk Persian poet. 

“The greatest is he who makes himself least. He it is who will be able to gain access to the wine cellar… that hidden sanctuary where the soul can speak heart to heart with the God who loves him.”

“Would I not do better simply to be like a moth and to dart into the flames of love, to remain there in that silence known only to lovers, allowing myself to be consumed, to give my life, to lose myself…?”

Unqualified positive thinking is, of course, a political posture. Walter Brueggemann calls it “royal consciousness,” I believe. This is to inhabit a story in which anything is possible because everything is fine. There's a kind of top-down cultural gas-lighting at work in the idea that all the problems are, therefore, in one's own mind and it is there that they can be overcome.

It’s an approach to the world that keeps the individual in circular dialogue with themselves, and it correlates nicely with the atomised consumer culture of late capitalism. It's a mirage where the individual is the basic social and political unit. The Other is off to the side, and easily falls into the category of competition.

Nothing is more dull and uninteresting and lifeless to the pen of St Paul than insulated privilege and opulence. It's not worth talking about. There's no life to be found there. These things are like Plato's cave of shadows; they're a false image of the world. They're a construct plastered over what is really happening. Authentic joy comes from experience, not simulacra. He doesn't find joy in spite of suffering, but in it. For him, the social location of suffering is the only place authentic joy is possible. Com-passion is the opposite of atomisation: it re-members us to everything and everyone. This is very simply the place of truth, the place where things are really happening, the place where God is.

Undoubtedly, there is a danger of romanticisation, for the tourist at least. St Paul's daily routine of contemplating the crucifixion is not a life hack. He has been (quite fairly) accused of sentimentality, but even so, he lived what he prayed and prayed what he lived. He was driven, we might say, by a kind of joyous in-loveness. The Jesus he called his “divine spouse” identified with suffering and oppression as the common experience of a world managed by power. One could contrive a flimsy and anxious happiness to the side of that truth through positive thinking, but an experience of joy can only begin by dwelling deeply on what is really happening.

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