John P.Dourley
In his late autobiography Memories, Dreams and Reflections,1 Jungdraws a
compelling picture of his early experience of institutional religion in his own life and in that of his father as nearly totally negative. From the perspective of his later years the son retrospectively indicts his minister father’s faith in the monotheistic and transcendent God of Swiss Calvinism with his father’s effective removal from life’s supporting and balancing vitalities. The consequences of such removal took the form of the lifelong frustration of his personal potential and an endemic depressive condition, a condition, suggests Jung, which may have contributed to his father’s untimely demise.2
From the recall of old age Jung contends that even as a youth he had already experienced the living reality of God in what he was later to call the collective unconscious.3 In his living commerce with the unconscious then and throughout his life he found life’s energies so much more readily and fully available in an unmediated and experiential access to their source within. Hence the religious import of his recall of his lifelong relation with his father is Jung’s contention that he found within himself the energies and life-giving experience which a functioning religion should mediate and which his father sought in vain in a monotheistic deity somehow beyond the psyche. Sadly he recalls that he could not convey such experience to his father or minister uncles, whose faith and theology had impaired or destroyed their natural religious sensibilities and so capacity for such experience.4
Nevertheless, Jung’s interest in religion continued throughout his lifetime. It did so, in large part, because he could not deny the religious content of so many of the expressions of the psyche with which he was confronted as a doctor and psychiatrist. From such unlikely origins as his experience of his father’s monotheistic faith, Jung’s own mature paradigm of the psyche came eventually to identify in the psyche as residual to it what he was to call ‘an authentic religious function’.5 Effectively this authentic religious function
was the basis of Jung’s understanding of humanity as the ‘image of God’ in so far as this function worked for the making whole or total of those lives open to its impress on their consciousness.6 Viewed from this perspective, Jung’s psychology may be understood as one in which humanity, naturally an ‘image of God’ in the wholeness its seeks, is moved by the psyche itself into ever sharper delineations of this image through greater appropriation and approximation of personal integration and universal relatedness.
In this manner Jung came to equate without residue psychological maturity and authentic religious experience. Their identity rests on the natural teleology of the psyche towards wholeness, a teleology which works to unify the many powers that constitute the individual even as it breeds in the individual an empathic identity with the totality. For Jung these qualities of life became the hall-mark of true religion and, indeed, especially of mystical experience. However, the process that led him to his own paradigm of the psyche eventually forced him to place the power that works these patterns of totality, the natural goal of psychic and religious life, within rather than beyond the psyche. The shift to this radical interiority became the ultimate counter to that transcendent monotheism that had so sapped his father’s life energies. Thus Jung, again from the perspective of age, came to look back on the meaning of his life’s work as the effort to heal the wound that monotheistic Christianity had inflicted on his father as a microcosmic instance of the wound it had inflicted on the wider Christian culture.7
Jung’s psychology has thus attracted the widespread attention of religionists because of its claim to have identified the origins of religious experience in the human psyche itself.8 This claim can be viewed as favourable to religion and to its study. For it supports the contention that human consciousness is in and of itself incorrigibly religious. Yet others have attacked Jung’s claim as undermining religion itself. This response is particularly evident with those who identify true religion with its concretion in one or other preferred revelation, taken, at least in religion’s monotheistic variant, as a definitive historical incursion by a wholly transcendent, self- sufficient and perfect God into human affairs. Such unforced forays of monotheistic deities into human history usually culminate in the formation of a privileged community, the chosen, bearing what some theologians sometimes and, from the viewpoint of their faith commitment, accurately, call ‘the final revelation’.9 The phrase itself and its associated psycho- theological dynamic bear critical scrutiny in the twentieth century, when there is historically warranted suspicion that the final revelation and the final solution may not be unrelated.
Jung’s mature psychology came to provide humanity at least potentially with one of its more effective protections against monotheistic faith. For as it moved into its later and most sophisticated formulations it progressively undermined the religious and moral credibility of monotheistic faiths by showing their presiding divinities to be creations of the psyche itself. In his
final paradigm of the psyche Jung was to conclude that the projections of the truth and power of the Self beyond the psyche created both the divinities themselves and their respective communities who worshipped in their disparate One and only Gods the truth of the Self in projections powerful enough to cluster competing communities of belief around them.
Sustained reflection on Jung’s understanding of the psychogenesis of the various One and only Gods, a contradiction in itself which would be humorous if its historical effects were not so tragic, reveals transcendental monotheisms and their accompanying faiths to be currently serious threats to human life both personal and societal. At the personal level the removal of the energies of the Self through their projection on to a divinity beyond the psyche debilitates the psyche thus victimized. For the experience of the Self in projection can be but a pallid counterfeit of the immediate experience of the energies of the Self undiluted by collective symbolism and by the sometimes lifeless ecclesial means for the distribution of the graces of the one presiding God. The foregoing is but another way of describing more psychologically the processes of belief which so victimized Jung’s father.
Yet a paradox remains in evaluating the psychological consequences of the psychogenesis of the One and only Gods. For the intensity of the experience of the divinity of the Self is both impaired by monotheistic projection even while the experience of the Self in projection can become burdensome to the individual member of a believing monotheistic community. Projected divinity can become a psychic weight on the soul of the believer for at least two compelling reasons. The moral imperative of the Self in projection creates a conscience which terrorizes the consciousness of the individual and, as Freud would argue, drives it into paroxysms of Self- or other hatred.10 Since, from Jung’s perspective, the source of this terror is the consequence of the betrayal of the inner Self, its power is easily understood but would be lessened if the believer could turn inward to the conscious service of that native divinity which cannot be indefinitely offended without the destruction of the natural image of God within the individual.
But the Self in projection is also destructive to the ‘believing’ mind, which must violate itself in offering intellectual assent to the ‘sacrosanct unintelligibility’11 of the monotheistic ‘revelations’ and their now culturally meaningless theological elaboration. This is particularly the case where the monotheisms take themselves literally and historically, as they usually do, and in so doing contribute to the loss of the symbolic and so religious sense in the individual and culture whose consciousness they inform. Religion thus becomes the self-defeating effort to read poetry as prose.
Here Jung’s questioning is more perceptive than Freud’s, it might be argued: he challenges the theologians of his day to come up with a more compelling reason for religion and its expression in and of themselves. This
question would entail facing the question of why humanity cannot seem to divest itself of the unlikely and literally meaningless kind of statements that symbolic and primordial religious discourse seem always to express. For Jung such a facing of the deeper question ‘Not why this or that God but why religion at all’ seemed unlikely to be asked by the religious or theological community. ‘Theology regards our efforts in this respect with mistrustful mein, while pointedly declining to tackle this very necessary task itself. It proclaims doctrines which nobody understands, and demands a faith which nobody can manufacture.’12
The realization that Jung’s mature psychology is corrosive of monotheistic faiths surfaces with particular clarity in two of the many dialogues Jung carried out with theologians and religious thinkers of various types. The perceptive monotheist’s well-founded fear, across denominational lines, of the full implications of the commerce between the divine and the human in Jung’s paradigm of the psyche is nowhere more evident than in his interchanges with Martin Buber, the Jewish religious thinker, and with Victor White, OP, a Dominican and Thomist, and so a representative of the then presiding Roman Catholic theological tradition. These conversations are themselves classical instances of Jung’s dialogue first with his father and then, throughout his life, with representatives of monotheistic religiosities and theologies. The conversations with Buber and White dramatically exemplify the threat Jung’s psychology represented to their transcendentalist, monotheistic and so dualistic theologies. Yet, paradoxically, a sustained examination of the reasons for the failed dialogues with Buber and White contributes to the understanding of the religious and metaphysical import of Jung’s own psychology and why it remains in the end incompatible with transcendental monotheism in any of its variants.
A sustained examination of his dialogue with Buber and White reveals that the latent foundational incompatibilities of Jung’s psychology with their monotheistic transcendentalism, supernatural dualism and sophisticated fundamentalism aborted a successful outcome of the dialogues in principle and from the outset. Yet even as the dialogues themselves served to make the foundational incompatibilities between Jung’s psychology and the unqualified monotheisms of his conversants blatantly apparent, they also helped or forced Jung towards the more radical formulations of his later major works as they touched on the relation of religion to psychology. Without the dialogues, especially with White, Jung would not so readily have come to the radical conclusions reached in his work on Job.13 In this work Jung unfolds almost poetically the vision of a divinity unable to resolve its own self-contradiction in eternity and so forced to create human consciousness as the only locus in which such contradiction could first be perceived and then, with the help of its conflicted source, resolved. This manner of imagining the divine-human relation implies a mutuality of being and real need between the divine and the human with which a truly
transcendent monotheistic faith can never be fully comfortable. Let us turn, then, to the conversations with Buber and White to give substance to what has been said.
Buber initiated the discussion with Jung without prior personal dialogue in an article entitled ‘Religion and modern thinking’ in a German journal, Merkur, in February 1952.14 In the article Buber points back to ‘a very early writing’15 in which Jung first expressed his Gnostic leanings, which, in Buber’s opinion, permeated Jung’s psychology thenceforth. In 1916 Jung had indeed written a piece of Gnostic poetry entitled Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, or Seven Sermons to the Dead.16 In his later reply to Buber, Jung was to describe
this piece of poetry as ‘a sin of my youth’.17 This was hardly a very candid or courageous statement on Jung’s part if by it he meant to imply that after his youth he moved away from a Gnostic sensitivity. To anyone who reads primary Jung, it is simply undeniable that Jung’s appreciation of Gnostic religiosity, understood as an unmediated experience of the unconscious and its religion-making powers, remained firmly in place throughout his mature writings. For Buber the unmediated intercourse between divinity and humanity foundational to Jung’s psychology was simply unacceptable and abrasive to his monotheistic mind. In his view Jung’s psychology served only to corrode modernity’s sense of the true transcendent and monotheistic God. It is not surprising, then, that in this initial article Buber linked Jung with Sartre and Heidegger as contributing to the modern Eclipse of God,18 the title of a later book of essays containing Buber’s initial attack on Jung and his reply to Jung’s reply.
Buber’s case against Jung in his opening attack thus centres on the charge that Jung’s psychology was a sophisticated form of that reductionism known as psychologism and was imbued with a profoundly Gnostic spirit which too intimately related the divine and the human. Such gnosis allegedly vested the human with an illegitimate knowledge of the religious mystery beyond the competence of the human noetic capacity. Buber’s was a well-stated variant of a charge made in more than one form against Jung’s psychology. Indeed, the charge was, on one occasion, lodged in desperation by Jung against his own psychology when he admitted his difficulties with the contemporary monotheistic mind, especially Christian. The difficulties centred around his own prolonged efforts to author an understanding of the psyche which would serve to recall the projections that create the monotheistic deities and so reroot humanity in its own psychic soil and in its native sense of divinity. Jung is obviously referring to charges such as Buber’s when he writes that anyone engaged in such a task is inevitably accused of ‘“psychologism” or suspected of morbid “mysticism”’.19
At this point it should be noted that Buber’s charges of Gnosticism and reductionism imply that Buber himself clearly knew where the legitimate boundaries of human knowledge of the divine lay and how the divine and human interrelate in their experience of each other. Indeed his description
of what divinity is and how it relates to humanity is frankly laid out in this article. Buber, in phrases reminiscent of Barth’s formulations, variously describes this divine being as ‘that absolute Other, the absolute over against me’20 and ‘One who is experienced or believed in as being absolutely over against one’.21 In his later reply to Jung’s response, Buber further describes this absolute other as a ‘super-psychic Being’22 and ‘an extrapsychical Being’.23 His central concern is to affirm that such a Being exists independently of the psyche or of what he calls ‘the human subject’.24 His fear is the classical monotheist’s fear that Jung’s psychology denies such transcendent independence of the One and only Divine Other. Buber’s obvious uneasiness with radical human subjectivity forces his conclusion, in fact a correct one if properly understood, that Jung’s psychology supports a religion ‘of pure psychic immanence’.25 In these passages Buber’s presupposition, indeed his faith, is that true monotheism and true transcendence imply a divinity which exists or can exist independently of the human psyche which such divinity creates. Jung’s suggestion that the psyche creates such divinity remained profoundly disturbing to him.
In a second distinct line of argument both in his original charge and in his rejoinder to Jung’s reply, Buber argues that Jung’s conception of the Self as made up of the unity of opposites, including good and evil, is the basis for a form of moral libertinism. To support his charge he cites Jung’s usage of Carpocrates, a Gnostic, identified as such by no less an authority than Irenaeus himself.26 Jung does indeed cite Carpocrates three times throughout his Collected Works27 to point to the necessity of the assimilation of the shadow,
the less acceptable sides of one’s humanity, in the process of individuation.28 For Jung the conscious assimilation of the shadow is hardly libertine. It is a process of psychological suffering which always entails the painful and steadfast staring at the potential for evil in one’s personal being, and, more, at the personal tendency to project such evil on to the other. Such confrontation with one’s personal evil and the tendency to flee it through identifying it with another is the first step in the transformation of shadow through its appropriation. Such appropriation can work the change of shadow from an enemy into an ally in an expanded and safer consciousness less susceptible to projecting personal or collective evil in the demonization of the other as individual or as community.
Understood within the context of Jung’s psychology, such rigorous honesty is a far cry from any moral irresponsibility. On the contrary the moral demand to confront one’s shadow grounds a harrowing, lifelong Self-examination under the scrutiny of the Self’s critique of one’s conscious position made most tellingly through the dream. Such a process demands a far more prolonged, deeper and extensive examination of conscience and an accompanying penitential sensitivity than collective religions can provide with their lists of general sins. These lists of sins do, indeed, document the truly dehumanizing, but because of their general nature fall short of identifying
the specific evil of an individual life as do dreams. Jung is explicit in his statement that such morally rigorous, often humiliating, shadow work is the work of a lifetime.29
The process is even more demanding when shadow reclamation takes the form of withdrawing a negative projection cast upon a community, especially upon a community bonded by a system of counter-beliefs presided over by a competing monotheistic God. Such collective demonization may be systemic to monotheistic consciousness, which to date has tended to relate to other and competing monotheistic communities as embodying, if not evil itself, at least an intransigent heart hardened against the preferred version of the One true God. This projection, to date apparently unavoidable in monotheistic collective consciousness, targets the competing community for conversion, genocidal extermination or, at best, a rejective tolerance in the ghetto. If the psychological dynamism operative in the discomfort with variant or contradicting forms and communities of monotheism shown by monotheistic communities to each other could be identified, such identification would contribute to the uncovering of the connection between communal monotheism and violence. Jung’s psychology casts some considerable light on the historically and so empirically evident connection between monotheistic faith and death. For Jung’s psychology strongly implies that monotheistic communities may need to project their shadow and so to demonize their variants as endemic to the process of their self-making or bonding under the One true God.