"The Eye of the Paradox"

[Cambo]

Foreword: This is an essay I recently wrote for my religious studies paper proposing a (kinda unorthodox) reading of the first two Chronicles of Thomas Covenant trilogies. For those who do not know via affirmativa and negativa, they are spiritual techniques for achieving union/enlightenment/god-consciousness. They are present in most major religions, but I am most familiar with the Buddhist applications. Via affirmativa generally involves single minded concentration on a positive concept or image. Via negativa involves the attempt at removing concepts and images entirely. The end goals of both are the same. Hope you enjoy.

[Cambo]

“The Eye of the Paradox:” Via Affirmativa and Via Negativa in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever and The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.

This essay proposes a reading of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever and The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen Donaldson as exploring the via affirmativa and via negativa techniques of spiritual transformation. The central characters of Thomas Covenant and Linden Avery will be shown to represent various aspects of these techniques. It will be argued that as these two characters progress through the plot of the two trilogies, the strengths and weaknesses of both via negativa and via affirmativa are explored. Each character begins their narrative in a state of spiritual pathology representative of pitfalls within each technique. So, Thomas Covenant can be seen as beginning from a position of pathological affirmativa, and Linden Avery from pathological negativa. The spiritual nature of the characters’ quest can be seen in the nature of their eventual triumph, in which each experiences a form of non-duality, which in the case of Covenant becomes a permanent state of being. The opposing nature of each character’s powers allows them to be read as a ying yang metaphor, as their victory would be incomplete without both Covenant’s wild magic and Avery’s Staff of Law. It is not suggested that Donaldson intended his fantasy saga primarily as a metaphor for eastern methods of Enlightenment.

The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever was first published in 1977, followed by The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant from 1980 to 1983. Author Stephen Donaldson lived in India from the ages of three to sixteen, where his father worked with lepers. He conceived the character of Thomas Covenant after watching his father give a speech on leprosy. While Covenant’s leprosy is undoubtedly the driving theme of the first Chronicles, Donaldson’s early exposure to Indian culture is noticeable throughout all the books, which contain several explicit references to eastern language and culture. The Ravers, for example, three evil possessing spirits, ironically take for themselves the names samadhi, moksha and turiya, Sanskrit words for one-pointed concentration, liberation, and pure consciousness. A minor character names himself dukkha, or suffering, after he is brutally tortured and maimed. Dukkha itself is ubiquitous in the Covenant saga, with various characters raped, tortured, dismembered, possessed, immersed in lava, and forced to walk on compound fractures. The extent of the lavishly described sufferings of the characters goes beyond the usual conventions of epic fantasy, and certainly reflects the Buddhist Noble Truth that Life is Suffering. This is not to suggest that the author wrote the Covenant books to intentionally reflect themes of Eastern philosophy. Indeed, Donaldson himself has stated that he writes primarily for the sake of story, rather than “themes or belief systems.”It is also important to note that the fantasy realm of the Land is not a Buddhist or Hindu world. The Land has a deistic Creator, absent from his Creation, although he appears in Covenant’s “real” world. This Creator has his opposite in the Satan figure of Lord Foul, who is very much present. The Land itself has a pantheistic life force known as Earthpower. These variations do not alter the fact that the climaxes of both trilogies contain powerful non-dualistic imagery and states. This, at least, would seem to be intentional, as when asked about the importance of contradiction in his books, Donaldson replies: “every human being is by his/her very nature a contradiction between material flesh and unquantifiable consciousness...Personally, I don’t know of any other way to process the dilemma of being a walking, talking contradiction except through storytelling. Certainly the fundamental postulate of traditional Western religions- dualism- doesn’t do it for me.” So it is unlikely to be accidental that the dilemmas of the central characters are often spiritual in nature, or that the resolutions of those dilemmas contain such a depth of unitary symbolism. For these reasons, a reading of the novels in regard to the practices of via affirmativa and via negativa would seem entirely valid.

The titular character Thomas Covenant, then, is the reader’s introduction to the dangers of via affirmativa. It is revealed that he his experience in a leper’s asylum gave him a grim determination to survive through constant vigilance of his disease through such techniques as the ritualised Visual Surveillance of Extremities, or “VSE.” Covenant constantly reminds himself of the fact of his leprosy in order to survive, meaning his life revolves around constant affirmation of both his medical condition and his will to survive it. This via affirmativa path quickly becomes pathological, however, as Covenant also continuously affirms his status as a social pariah, endlessly repeating his mantra “leper outcast unclean!” He thus comes to loathe himself as much as his disgusted fellow townspeople. This pathology is carried over with Covenant to the alternate universe of the Land. After arriving in the Land, Covenant’s leprosy is magically healed, he is welcomed as a messianic reincarnation of a mythical hero, and his white gold wedding ring is apparently a talisman of immense power. Impossibilities such as this strike at his essential identity as a leper; leprosy can never be cured, and lepers must survive according to their essential impotence. If a leper forgets their impotence, they forget to manage their disease, and die. Faced with being unable to accept his leprosy in the real world, Covenant embraces Unbelief; the affirmation that the Land is a dream, that leprosy is the only truth of his existence. This Unbelief leads Covenant to commit atrocities. His first act in the Land, driven near insanity, is to rape the innocent Lena. As the narrative progresses, Covenant makes repeated trips between worlds, spanning decades in the Land and mere weeks in his world. Throughout, he constantly affirms his identity as a leper and by logical extension his Unbelief in the Land, with disastrous, often metaphysical consequences. He cynically manipulates his own rape child Elena, playing on her delusions of grandeur, and her incestuous desire for him, in the hope she will take his place as the Land’s saviour. Elena’s reckless exertion of power breaks the Law of Death, increasing Foul’s power over the Land, and causing her death. This leads her admirer Hile Troy to brand Covenant a “moral leper,” a moniker he cannot help but accept. Yet he is not remorseless, and he is unable to stop himself falling in love with the Land and its people, and developing a desire to help them. As he predicted, he finds himself unable to cope with his leprosy in his real world. He becomes trapped between his self-preserving Unbelief and his compassion for the world he refuses to believe in. Covenant’s plight suggests a frightening potential in the via affirmativa technique: he is caught between two opposite, yet imperative, affirmations.

By the climax of the first trilogy, Covenant has become resolved to attempt to defeat the Satanic Lord Foul, driven in equal measure by remorse for his misdeeds, love for the Land, and hatred for Foul. To do this, he must first come to terms with his dilemma, and utilise via affirmativa to aid him rather than allowing it to trap him. The key to unleashing Covenant’s dormant wild magic, and defeating Foul, lies in what Covenant thinks of as the “Eye of the Paradox.” This is a state that has many parallels to non-dual consciousness, in that Covenant recognises the false distinction between affirmation of himself and affirmation of his love for the Land. “Only by affirming them both, accepting both poles of the contradiction...only by steering himself not between them but with them, could he preserve...both the Land and himself, find the place where the parallel lines of his impossible dilemma met.” The parallel lines meet in Covenant’s rage for persecuted lepers, the connection between Lord Foul’s contempt for him as a leper and for the Land. If the Land is his dream, then it is an extension of Covenant himself, and the conflict between the two becomes meaningless. Thus via affirmativa is able to become a tool for Covenant to unleash his wild magic and save the Land, no longer a paradoxical dilemma. Upon returning to his own world, Covenant finds himself able to both manage his leprosy and affirm his humanity.

The opening of The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant introduces the reader to Linden Avery, who will illustrate the pitfalls of a pathological via negativa. Avery’s existence is dominated by her past much as Covenant’s is initially dominated by leprosy. When she was young, her father slit his wrists in front of her, his last words to her being “you never loved me anyway.” Her mother blamed her for this, and psychologically bullied Linden even on her hospital deathbed. Driven to despair and manic depression, Linden murdered her and passed it off as natural causes. These experiences taught Linden a visceral abhorrence of suicide and despair, which drove her to become a doctor not to affirm life, but to deny death: “a rejection of her own mortal heritage rather than an approval of the beliefs she nominally served.” While she is just barely able to manage these pathologies in the real world, once she is transported with Covenant to the Land, they prove just as disastrous as Covenant’s Unbelief in the first trilogy. Linden’s dilemma lies not so much in an inability to believe in the Land, but in a refusal to believe in evil. This refusal soon becomes impossible, as in the Land she alone has the “health sense,” an ability to directly perceive natural good and evil once shared by everyone in the Land. Almost immediately confronted with a brutal murder, she claims that “people kill because they’re hungry. Afraid...Driven. Because someone, something, forces them. Nobody likes it.” Unwitting of her past, Covenant almost pushes her over the edge by replying, “Everybody likes it. Everybody likes power...This is no different than any other murder. It’s just more obvious.” This touches upon Linden’s own dark lust for power, the part of her that enjoyed murdering her mother, that she has repressed and denied for years. When Covenant painfully admits his rape of Lena, she protests not at the act itself, but at the admission of it, “as if an accusation of evil had been raised among them.” This pattern continues, as Linden is exposed through her health sense to Lord Foul’s visceral perversion of nature, the Sunbane, leading her denial to turn into horror and paralysis. Her dilemma is exacerbated by Covenant’s repeated assertion that Lord Foul and his works are external manifestations of the evil within ourselves, making it impossible for Linden to deny her own inner evil. In terms of via negative techniques, Linden’s negations lead to disaster because they are in place to preserve the ego, preserve her fragile sense of self worth, rather than to escape it.

Linden soon learns to envy Covenant the stubborn affirmation he learned in his first visits to the Land. Now comfortable with the paradoxes of his existence in the Land, Covenant has become “an assertion of life and commitment to the Land, a statement of himself in opposition to anything the Despiser could do.” However, Covenant’s rapidly growing power, and his egotistical determination to prove himself against Foul a second time, soon become far more dangerous than Linden’s simple paralysis. Soon after arriving in the Land, Covenant is afflicted with a unique venom by Lord Foul’s servants, which heightens the power of this wild magic, but lessens his control over it. The wild magic is the keystone of the Arch of Time that holds the world together, and Covenant holds the power to break the Arch, completely freeing Lord Foul. As Covenant is repeatedly bitten by snakes, spiders and insects, his control over the wild magic begins to slip, endangering the entire world. Covenant begins to relearn his old distrust of power, describing it to Linden as “a more complicated form of helplessness.” Despite this, Covenant has come to define himself by his white ring, and the redemption he once earned from its power. He vehemently rails against Lord Foul’s prophecy that he will deliver the ring of his own free will, but he is less able to reject the claim of the mystical Elohim that the ring is rightfully Linden’s, not his. Linden’s health sense would be able to guide the wild magic in a way that didn’t endanger the world, and in emergencies Linden proves she is able to take control of Covenant’s ring without his volition, using it to heal mortal injuries, something his numb leper’s senses are incapable of. Nevertheless, along with leprosy, the ring is one of the twin meanings Covenant has chosen for his existence, and he refuses to be parted from it. His stubborn affirmations are driven by ego preservation as much as Linden’s negation, but the power that comes with them is infinitely more dangerous.

As the characters of Linden and Covenant develop, they gradually leave behind the self destructive aspects of both via affirmativa and via negativa, and come to learn the redemptive aspects of each approach. For Linden, the answer lies in both the cathartic admission of her past crimes to Covenant, and the realisation that her health sense can be used for healing and affirmation. The catalyst for her arrives in healing the wounded from both sides of a ferocious battle. Required to immerse herself through health sense into other people’s injuries, she finds the capacity to take another’s hurt upon herself. Through this, she is able to affirm life without denying her own pain, explicitly adopting the affirmative as her mantra: “Yes. It was specific and clean: it had meaning, value: the pain of it was worth bearing. Yes. And it held her in one piece. As if for the first time: Yes.” In this way, Linden leaves behind the need for the relentless negation of her past. Covenant’s answer lies in the opposite direction; he must learn to relinquish his grip on the destructive affirmations he has allowed to define him. His first hints of how to do this come from his companion Brinn’s battle with the Guardian of the One Tree. A potent hand to hand fighter in his own right, Brinn finds himself completely outmatched by the tranquil, ancient, but relentless Guardian. He defeats the Guardian by surrendering himself, pulling them both over a cliff. Covenant, no longer able to contain the wild magic and Lord Foul’s venom, emulates this surrender, immolating himself in the enormous Banefire. Protected from death by wild magic, Covenant emerges with magic and venom fused inside of him, vowing never to exert his power again. He also possesses new insight into the nature of his conflict with Lord Foul, meaning he is finally ready to confront Foul directly. Covenant and Linden effectively swap techniques, Linden now adopting via affirmativa and Covenant via negativa. These individual resolutions lead to conflict between them, however, as Linden realises Covenant intends to surrender his ring to Lord Foul after all. Believing him to be acting out of the despairing negation that previously ruled her, she determines to follow him only so she can wrest control of the ring from him at the last minute. Covenant does nothing to dissuade her, as he is unwilling to sabotage her newly found affirmative strength. This tension between the two characters, and the spiritual paths they have chosen, is only resolved in the climax of the trilogy.

Covenant and Linden’s final confrontation with Lord Foul shows even more explicit non-dual themes than the resolution of the first Chronicles. Both Covenant and Linden are able to follow their separate paths to their logical conclusion. In Foul’s seat of power in Mount Thunder, Linden survives the ultimate personal horror of being possessed by a Raver, having pure evil violate her senses “as fundamentally as rape.” But her newfound affirmation for the Land and herself enables Linden to repel the Raver from her. She then has the opportunity to wrest the ring from Covenant before he hands it to Lord Foul. She forgoes this opportunity, electing to trust Covenant at the last. She soon finds that she has misjudged the nature of Covenant’s surrender. Mocking Foul, Covenant hints at the insights he gained in the Banefire: “You should see yourself. You’re even starting to look like me... You’re just another part of me. Just one side of what it means to be human. The poisonous side...We are one.” His taunts have the desired effect; after giving Foul the ring, he is immediately killed by his own wild magic, finally burning out the deadly venom. Covenant leaves his physical form to become pure wild magic, the conscious keystone of the Arch of Time, literally unified with the fabric of reality. “Brinn showed me the way. He beat the Guardian of the One Tree by sacrificing himself, letting himself fall...I’m the paradox. You can’t take the wild magic away from me.” Lord Foul, being a creature of pure malicious ego, fails to understand. He expends himself completely attempting to pit the useless power of wild magic against Covenant, while Covenant is strengthened by every attack. After Foul’s defeat, Linden finds her personal victory in the removal of the Sunbane. Using her health sense, Linden immerses herself into the corruption that so horrifies her. Though she goes through intense spiritual agony, she is able to alter the Sunbane to her will, acknowledging the evil outside and within herself, while affirming her mastery of it. Therefore in Linden’s and Covenant’s victories the redemptive potential of both via affirmativa and via negativa is realised.

This essay has argued for a reading of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever and The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant as exploring aspects of via negativa and via affirmativa spiritual paths. It has not been contended that such themes were the explicit intention of author Stephen Donaldson, rather that the nature of the story Donaldson wished to tell, and the author’s personal background, lend themselves well to such an interpretation. Certain linguistic and symbolic motifs in the Chronicles are derived directly from Eastern philosophy, particularly Sanskrit words such as dukkha and Samadhi. Most importantly, however, it has been shown that the spiritual dilemmas of central characters Thomas Covenant and Linden Avery have important parallels to via affirmativa and negativa. The spiritual nature of these crises is reflected in the near explicit themes of non-duality present in the character’s eventual triumph. In the first Chronicles, Covenant must learn to simultaneously affirm two paradoxical assumptions. In the Second Chronicles, he must learn to release one of those affirmations, attaining mystical victory through surrender of the ego. Linden Avery, for her part, learns to cease her futile attempts at negating her past, finding herself able to affirm life and death without despair.

[Orlion]

Now, before I read this, I need to know how to place some preconceptions. The concept of Via Positiva and Via Negativa seems to be similar how I view finding truth, namely the process by which Archimedes calculated pi. Essentially, what he did, is he drew a circle. Then, he'd encase the circle in a polygon ( a multi-sided shape, I think he ultimately used a 70+ side shape). The idea is that as a polygon gets more sides, it begins to resemble a circle more and more. As a result, the parameter of this shape becomes more like the circumference of the circle, and BAM! You can estimate pi. However, he didn't stop there. He also inscribed this polygon within the circle. This took into account that the circumference of the inside of the circle could be shorter than the circumference at the outside of the circle (theoretically, this is false, but for practical considerations this needs to be considered). As a result, he was able to get a range of values for pi, or rather, pi is a value between x and y. As the polygons got bigger, the range got smaller and the calculation was closer to the true value of pi.

That's a mouthful, but if I just want to know if your Vias are kinda the same?

[rdhopeca]

Certainly makes one wonder where he is going in the last series.

[Cambo]

Orlion: Sounds very similar to via affirmativa. To apply the example, a contemplator using via affirmativa might envision and focus on the polygon, then when he felt he was ready move on to the circle within the polygon, expand the size of the polygon until it became a circle, etc. and hopefully through these mental exercises gain some kind of mystical insight. Via negativa, however, would be more like starting with a vastlt complex system of polygons and circles, and trying to strip them away, layer by layer, until there's nothing left.

[Cambo]

And yes rd, I am very excited to see what resolutions Donaldson has in mind for the Last Chronicles. Way back when he wasn't even sure he was going to be writing them, he mentioned something about "acceptance." Considering the story's been in his head since he conceived the 2nd Chronicles, and the Last are supposedly a logical extension, that certainly set my gears whirring!

[Lord Zombiac]

Next time I read this I'll be sure not to drink so much metheglin!

[Cambo]

Ouch. Transcendental philosophy is not to be dealt with drunk. I have unfortunate experience in this.