Fear the Vacuum

Maybe it is because my partner's Consumer Reports magazine arrived today and it features an article about vacuums... or perhaps because I have been teaching about the Churrigueresque architectural style in Latin America, but this evening I am interested in the topic of... Horror vacui. 

Horror vacui is a term meaning, "horror of the vacuum"...the fear of empty space, or negative space (as my high school art teacher called it). It is relevant to thermodyamics, art and human psychology. I'd like to think about its application to religion.

As Buddhist author Geshe Namgyal Wangchen writes of emptiness,

"The fully awakened clear state of mind that realizes the truth of emptiness - the emptiness of inherent existence - is the wisdom we seek. It is called prajna in Sanskrit. When we acheive this wisdom we are able to realize emptiness from the depth of our own personal experience, beyond intellectualization."

In Buddhism, emptiness is the reality of the universe, and of ourselves. To be afraid of it would be to fear the essential reality of our existence. Becoming aware of our emptiness is necessary for seeking Enlightenment.

By contrast, the Baroque architecture of the Counter-Reformation in Europe and New Spain is notable for its energy and excessive decoration of every available space:

Dome of Capilla del Rosario, Santo Domingo Church, Puebla, Mexico

While the Catholic Church of the 16th-18th century expressed horror vacui proudly to convey its power and glory, Protestants viewed such decoration as sinful.

Theologically speaking, Christianity's 3-in-1, or Trinitarian, concept of God is more complex than that of Islam and Judaism, but seems pretty un-frilly next to the thousands upon thousands of deities in Hinduism. A dizzying array of deities and universes exists in Mahayana Buddhist cosmology -- despite the Buddhist belief in emptiness as the ultimate reality.

Elaborate complexities exist within most religious traditions, despite how simple their theologies may seem. In terms of amor vacui, or love of emptiness, however, here is my favorite example:

Rabbi Yitzhak Luria, a 16th-century Jewish mystic and Talmudic scholar from Safed, Palestine, argued that for the world to be created, God had to withdraw himself. He taught the concept of tzimtzum, or self-extraction. Basically, God had to pull His radiant fullness back, so to speak, in order to leave an empty place for the universe to exist.

As Sanford L. Drob writes of tzimtzum,

"The doctrine of Tzimtzim gives expression to a series of paradoxical ideas, amongst which is the notion that the universe as we know it is the result of a cosmic negation. The world, according to Lurianic Kabbalah, is not so much a something which has been created from nothing, but rather a genre of nothingness resulting from a contraction or concealment of the only true reality, which is God. Like a film image that has been projected on a screen, the world exists in all its details and particulars only as a result of a partial occultation of what would otherwise be a pure and homogenous light...God's contraction, concealment, and ultimate unknowability are thus the greatest blessings he could bestow on the world and mankind."

In Luria's teaching of tzimtzum, the essence of reality is Ein Sof, or God's infinite existence. God obscured that reality in order to make it possible for there to be a material universe.This is an interesting contrast with the Buddhist view of reality as emptiness.

As the Yiddish saying goes, "You can always make something out of nothing," even a nice classroom discussion.