The Two Gods: Ascending vs. Descending Theology

Wilber's View

This is Wilber's account of how Ascent and Descent — meant, in Plato and Plotinus, as a single completed movement, "transcend this world, awaken as this world" — hardened in the West into two flatly incompatible pictures of God. Once Christian doctrine locked in that full Ascent could never be consummated in this life (no liberation in this body, on this earth — the resurrection is deferred to a future event, not a present realization), the two paths lost their only point of experiential contact and split apart theologically: an ascending God, the goal of "the way up," reached by turning from all created things toward an immutable, otherworldly Perfection; and a descending God, the source of "the way down," delighting in and flowing out into the sheer diversity of the created Many. Wilber traces the ascending God's clearest Western lineage through Augustine, whom he credits with a real and influential discovery — "Western Vedanta," the argument that the interior Witness or basic Wakefulness behind all doubt cannot itself be doubted, since doubting it still presupposes an aware subject doing the doubting. That's a genuinely Vedantic insight (Wilber lines it up with Zen's "ordinary mind" and Dzogchen's rigpa), and Wilber credits it with quietly seeding the entire Western philosophical tradition's turn "within" — a line he runs all the way through Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel.

But Wilber's real target is what Augustine's discovery got locked into: because Augustine can't allow Ascent to be completed in this body, on this earth, his own otherwise-nondual insight curdles into "the schizoid God" — Lovejoy's phrase, which Wilber adopts wholesale — two Gods with no way to be reconciled, the Church officially choosing the ascending one for the next thousand years (asceticism, world-renunciation, "my Kingdom is not of this world") while the descending program went unofficially underground until the Renaissance triggered what Wilber calls "the great reversal." The strongest part of this chapter is diagnostic: it's a genuinely illuminating way to read a millennium of otherwise-puzzling Western theological argument as downstream of one specific doctrinal choice (deferred bodily resurrection) rather than as free-floating philosophical disagreement. What's more contestable is how much causal weight rests on that single doctrinal hinge — Wilber largely follows Arthur Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being here, and presents Lovejoy's history as settled fact rather than one influential interpretation among others, while adding his own further claim (that the "real" fix requires direct nondual realization, not just better doctrine) that goes beyond anything Lovejoy himself argued.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

Without direct access to the unifying and unspoken One, the two paths, Ascending and Descending, became logically incompatible and utterly irreconcilable… It produced, in fact, two utterly irreconcilable Gods.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 10, "This-Worldly, Otherworldly"

Plato's "Spectator" and Plotinus's "ever-present Wakefulness" are developed by Augustine into a full-fledged conception of the interior Witness (Augustine would say the Soul) as that which cannot, under any circumstances, be doubted… in your immediate awareness there is certainty, even if it is only a certainty that you are doubting—and you can never shake that certainty.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 10, "This-Worldly, Otherworldly"

This Western Vedanta, as I have called it, passed, in its various forms, from Augustine to Descartes, Spinoza, Berkeley, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre… Spirit, as basic Wakefulness, is not something that needs to be proven, but something that even the existence of doubt always presupposes as its own ground.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 10, "This-Worldly, Otherworldly"

The dogmatic belief in the future resurrection of the body put an effective end to that vision. The future resurrection of the body, and the radically unique… realization of the Nazarene blocks the final liberation of the soul in this body, in this life, on this earth. No longer can the Ascending and Descending Paths be held together in the immediacy of this moment.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 10, "This-Worldly, Otherworldly"

The one God was the goal of the "way up," of that ascending process by which the finite soul, turning from all created things, took its way back to the immutable Perfection in which alone it could find rest. The other God was the source and the informing energy of that descending process by which Being flows through all levels of possibility down to the very lowest.

— Lovejoy, quoted in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 10, "This-Worldly, Otherworldly"

The pessimistic Ascenders dourly pursued an otherworldly Goal they were assured of never reaching, and the optimistic Descenders giddily embraced a this-worldly creation whose Source they celebrated but never experienced.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 10, "This-Worldly, Otherworldly"

See Also

• The Ego Camp and the Eco Camp — this same Ascend/Descend split under its later, secularized modern names
• ascent-and-descent — the nondual unity of the two paths this split is a falling-away from
• Plotinus — the "One World" synthesis, still holding Ascent and Descent together, that this split follows historically
• Wilber's Non-Dual Reading of Plato — the earlier figure Wilber reads as already uniting both movements
• great-chain-of-being — the continuous Chain this theological fracture cuts across
• Baruch Spinoza — inheritor of the "Western Vedanta" line, later recast by Wilber as the philosophical exemplar of pure Descent
• Georg Hegel — another link in the Western Vedanta lineage, and (with Schelling) Wilber's candidate for finally resolving the Ego/Eco version of this split