MAKING IT ROOMIER:
IVAN ILLICH AND C.G. JUNG ON THE MYSTERY OF EVIL AND THE NEXT CHRISTIANITY
“The advocates of Christianity squander their energies in the mere preservation or what has come down to them, with no thought of building on to their house and making it roomier.”
-C.G. Jung, Aion[1]
Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit – “Called and uncalled, God will be present” - inscription carved above the door of Jung’s home in Küsnacht
In the fall of 1988, in State College, Pennsylvania, at the end of a meandering interview that had proceeded on and off for two weeks, Ivan Illich astounded me with the declaration that the “institutionalization” of the Christian Gospel had produced “an evil deeper than any evil I could have known with my unaided eyes and mind.”[2] He summed up the effect of this evil in the old Latin adage corruptio optimi pessima – the corruption of the best is the worst. The unprecedented freedom that had been revealed in Jesus Christ, he said, had generated an equally unprecedented and proportionate evil, and this “profound ambiguity” was constitutive of the modern West.
Ten years later, in a second set of interviews that were published after his death as The Rivers North of the Future, Illich filled out the proposition that had so astonished me.
In these conversations, he identified what he called “the mystery of evil,” deriving the phrase from The Second Letter of Paul to the Thessalonians in the New Testament. In that letter – scholars now divide on whether it was actually written by the apostle Paul – the author advises the Thessalonians not to become “excited” or “shaken in mind” by announcements that “the day of the Lord has come.” That day, the letter goes on, will not come before “the rebellion” which will reveal “the man of sin” who “proclaim[s] himself to be God.” However, “the mystery of iniquity,” which will ultimately produce this result, is “already at work,” the letter says, even though it is currently being “restrained.” Neither “he who now restrains,” nor the mode of this restraint, is further described.[3]
In his commentary on this much-commented passage, Illich does not concern himself, as have interpreters from Tertullian to Carl Schmitt, with what or whom this restraining force (katechon) might be. What Illich emphasizes is the sentence which says that “the mystery of iniquity is already at work.” (The Greek expression which was translated in the King James Bible as “the mystery of iniquity” is musterion tēs anomias. The Vulgate, St. Jerome’s Latin translation which became authoritative for the Western Church, rendered this phrase as mysterium iniquitatis, which the King James Bible continued. The more contemporary Revised Standard Version substituted “the mystery of lawlessness,” which is more faithful to the Greek anomias, but Illich preferred the older translation.) Basing himself on this sentence, Illich goes on to suppose that the first Christian communities must have been generally aware of the mystery that Paul, or his ghost writer, announce. This mystery, says Illich, was…
…that the final evil that would bring the world to an end was already present. This evil was called Anti-Christ, and the Church was identified as the milieu in which it would nest. The Church had gone pregnant with an evil which would have found no nesting place in the Old Testament. Paul in the second chapter of his second letter to the Thessalonians calls this new reality the mystery of evil. He says that something unbelievably horrible has come into being and begun to grow with his foundation of communities around the Eastern Mediterranean, something whose full extent won’t be grasped until some future moment at which he places apocalypsis, meaning the end of time and the world.[4]
Part of Illich’s evidence that the first Christians were attuned to the ambivalent character of the Church, as both the herald of salvation and the “nesting place” of “final evil,” is the New Testament’s references to the continuing existence of the vocation of prophecy in the new Christian communities. What further need could there be for prophets, Illich asked, now that the Word of God had become present and available in the flesh? His answer was that they were retained in order to announce the mystery of evil.
I would happily be overruled by more competent authority, but I can find little textual evidence for this claim. Illich ascribes four main qualities to the mystery of evil. It was unprecedented - unknown to the Old Testament. It was endemic, and uniquely proportioned to the Church – the Church was its the proper and only “nesting place.” It was progressive – the Church had “gone pregnant” with something that could be expected to increase. And it was final – it could and would “bring the world to an end,” if not recognized and counteracted. Beyond the prediction I have quoted from Second Thessalonians, I don’t find any of these claims in the New Testament, and even in Thessalonians the “man of lawlessness” who “proclaims himself to be God” is said to “takes his seat in the temple of God” and not in the Church (ekklesia) by which the Christians replaced temple worship. The second letter of John warns of “deceivers” whom the apostle calls “anti-Christs,” but these are evidently external threats. John seems to be denouncing rival preachers who “profess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.” I get no sense from these New Testament authors that they are aware that a radically new kind of evil has entered the world with the Incarnation, and, even less, that this evil is inherent in the Incarnation and belongs to it as shadow belongs to light, or night to day. Paul warns the new Church at Corinth against those who spread “contention;” John of Patmos scolds the Ephesians for “abandon[ing] the love you had at first;” but neither speaks of the looming danger that Illich recognized retrospectively – that the Gospel corrupted will produce a new and unprecedented form of evil.[5]
Rather than the clairvoyance that Illich imputes to the Church of Paul’s time, I’m more inclined to agree with Simone Weil who felt that even “primitive Christianity” held the seed of triumphalism that flowered in the established post-Constantinian Church. This seed, according to her, consisted in allowing the Resurrection to overshadow and, in effect, denature the Crucifixion, leaving Christians in full possession of an unshadowed truth and requiring only that they devise the “system of education” that would make everyone else “fit to receive Christ’s message.”[6]
But whether or not the early Church actually had the awareness that Illich thinks it ought to have had is finally just a historical quibble. Because, according to Illich, this supposed awareness was soon lost in any case. “What is impressive about the transition from the early Church to the established Western Church,” he says, “is how thoroughly th[e] mystery [of evil] disappeared from the Church’s teaching and the concern of most of its members. It re-appeared from time to time in the prayers, writings, and sermons of mystics and reformers; but the Roman Church did not centre faith on its existence, and neither did most of the Reformed Churches.”[7]
Throughout the interviews that comprise The Rivers North of the Future, Illich insists that his remarks, even if they summarize a lifetime’s reflection, remain provisional and preliminary. He speaks, at one point, of having offered only “a little pencil sketch of where I think I have been standing”; he qualifies his whole presentation to me as nothing more than a tentatively offered “research hypothesis”; and he admits that “none” of the “research themes” which he has broached “has [yet] been developed in the direction I would like to see it flower.”[8] I do not think this was bashfulness or false modesty. Illich’s accounts can be quite sketchy, even if always evocative. About the mystery of evil, for example, little more was said than what I have quoted, until the final day of the round of interviews that comprise the first part of The Rivers North of the Future. Then Illich made the following dramatic statement:
I claim that the mysterium iniquitatis has been hatching. I know too much of Church history to say that it’s now breaking its shell, but I dare to say [my italics] that’s it now more clearly present than ever before. It is, therefore completely wrong to ascribe to me the idea that this is a post-Christian era. On the contrary, I believe this to be, paradoxically, the most obviously Christian epoch, which might be quite close to the end of the world.[9]
“Only faith,” he went on, “can fully discern the mystery of evil,” but all who have sensed some uncanny perversity in the heedless dynamism of the modern age are its witnesses. And, even if what they witness is the mystery of evil, Illich adds “this…does not make it less fit to be the entrance door into the entire mystery of the Incarnation.” This last sentence is no more than a hint, and is not developed further, but I have always read it to mean that, in our time, many will only be able to enter Christianity through its back door, so to speak, recognizing the optimum only by an awed and disconcerted recognition of the pessimum. Interpreting further, one might even suggest that the mysterium iniquitatis is, in fact, the form in which Christ’s instruction that “the gospel must…be preached to all nations” has been perversely realized.[10]
Illich’s twin claims – that the mystery of evil is “hatching” and that the “end of the world” might be near – were surprising. During most of his teaching life, he had been a resolutely non-apocalyptic thinker. In a conference he gave to a group of psychiatrists and psychologist in 1966, he expressed his conviction that “the kingdom [can be] fulfilled with utopic [i.e. utopian] completion” and can “come about without being apocalyptic.”[11] In an interview in 1992, he told me that had “always abstained from making apocalyptic statements or interpreting the apocalypse,” preferring, he said, to stay away from “that kind of fundamentalism.”[12] Even when he finally agreed to explore with me the implicitly apocalyptic idea that “our present world can finally be understood only as a perversion of the New Testament,” he still professed himself “hesitant” about the term anti-Christ.[13] It cannot have been easy for the man Erich Fromm once called a “radical humanist” to dare the “risk [of] being mistaken for a fundamentalist preacher” by deploying such a “monstrously churchy” term, let alone by recognizing the possible imminence of “the end of the world.”[14] Just how disconcerting it may have been is marked for me by the unforgettable and unsolicited outburst by which Illich punctuated the second day of our conversation. In the middle of his exposition which I have just quoted of the idea of mysterium iniquitatis, he suddenly interrupted himself and said:
What I have stammered here, talking freely and unprepared, I have avoided saying for thirty years. [my italics] Let me now try and say it in a way that others can hear it: the more you allow yourself to conceive of the evil you see as evil of a new kind, of a mysterious kind, the more intense becomes the temptation – I can’t avoid saying it, I cannot go on without saying it – of cursing God’s Incarnation.[15]
This volatile parenthesis took me quite unawares. I had not at all imagined that Illich might be facing an intense temptation to curse the Incarnation. Perhaps, since the one who suffers this temptation isn’t actually specified, he may only have been straining to imbue the mystery of evil with the greatest possible dramatic effect. But the word avoid, and the practice of this avoidance over thirty years, is impressive just the same. It’s hard not to conclude that some highly charged knowledge is breaking through a previously effective reticence, if not repression. I am myself only beginning to face the implications nearly twenty years after the words were uttered. In the short term, they presented an imponderable, and basically insoluble, editing dilemma for me as a broadcaster: to leave this statement in the programs I was preparing would risk grave misunderstanding – “I heard Ivan Illich on the radio last night, cursing the Incarnation,” I imagined some inattentive listener saying; to take it out would be to suppress a moment of truth which the author of the statement had himself characterized as “unavoidable.” (I left it in, bracketed by defensive and, I hoped, clarifying continuity.) Today what strikes me most, beyond the clear implication that the ill effects of the Incarnation are so nearly equal to the good as to provoke this temptation, is the word avoid, along with the sense – “I cannot go on without saying it” – that something has forced itself to the surface, despite resistance. Something is being confronted that is supremely hard to accept: Christianity, defined as “the attempts of the churches to institutionalize, legitimize, and manage Christian vocation,” has finally created a world in which nothing fits, nothing belongs, and nothing finds any natural scale or limit – a world which is the end of the world.
This outcome was not inevitable, in Illich’s view, but its possibility was certainly inherent in the very existence of the Church. When we were discussing how the “proportionality” of pre-modern cultures had been undermined by missionary Christianity, and I asked Illich whether he thought the Gospel could have been preached to traditional cultures without destroying their sense of proportion, he answered, simply, “Yes, but it was not the will of God,” implying, inevitably, that what had actually occurred was the will of God.[16] On another occasion, when I was visiting him in Mexico, he made this point even more explicit. He and Lee Hoinacki and I were talking one evening, and I remarked that I considered the passage in which Jesus is shown as intending to establish a church to be an “interpolation” in the Gospel. (In Matthew 16:18, Jesus says, “You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church.” This saying is the foundation of the “apostolic succession” which is thought to link today’s church with Jesus by an unbroken tradition, as well as being a pun – Peter’s name in Greek means rock.) Illich replied that he had been intensively exposed as a student to discussion of whether this passage is an interpolation. But, for him, he went on, it was part of his faith to take it as spoken. Jesus, in his divine mind, must have known all that would follow, even to us sitting around the table that night, and yet he still founded his church. This founding, with foreknowledge, of a church that would incubate the mystery of evil was part of “the darkness of God,” he said. And yet, he added, how else would we know Him if he had not founded his church on this unsteady rock? (Peter, remember, was “the man of little faith,” who failed in his attempt to walk on water, as well as Jesus’s tempter – “Get thee behind me, Satan” – and ultimately his denier – “The cock will not crow, till you have denied me three times.”[17])
Illich was brave – or perhaps foolhardy, as some of his more cautious friends thought – in reviving the figure of anti-Christ – a figure that carries, to say the least, a lot of colorful, historical baggage. [18] Protestant reformers from the time of John Wycliffe onwards explicitly identified anti-Christ with the institution of the papacy – “the devil’s vicar,” said Luther – and this has continued sporadically right down to the present. (As recently as the year 2000, the United States Congress censured a North Carolina Bible college, Bob Jones University, for persisting in this identification.[19]) In recent times, the idea of there being an anti-Christ has taken on a kitschy, B-movie air – this is the province of mock-Satanic heavy metal bands, horror movies and books with titles like How to Tell If Your Boyfriend Is the Anti-Christ. And, now there is billionaire financier Peter Thiel who is currently conducting a lecture series on anti-Christ in which he makes the anti-Christ stand for a stagnant, “peace and safety” inflected world order that wants to regulate and reign in technological and scientific progress.[20] Illich knew some of this, of course. He recognized “the risk of being mistaken for a fundamentalist preacher” that he was taking on in “applying [this] monstrously churchy term.” But he gave an interesting reason for taking this risk: “I would have preferred to simply speak about sin, but I was afraid that by using that term I would only heighten the guarantee that I would be misunderstood.”[21]
This gives us a valuable clue as to what Illich intended by speaking of anti-Christ. Illich defined the Christ-event very simply as the revelation that God is available to us in and as one another. “I no longer call you servants,” Jesus says in John’s Gospel, “because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.” God’s “business” has been opened to humanity. But, at the risk, of what Illich calls sin: that we might refuse or pervert this offer and thus create an infinitely worse situation than we were in before the offer of equality with God was extended. We are now in this situation, Illich thinks, but lack the means to speak of it because the idea of sin has grown hopelessly obscure. What blotted out the proper meaning of this idea, he says, was “the criminalization of sin” by the reformed Church of the second millennium. What had formerly been understood as a deeply personal failure to answer the call of God, and one another, was reinterpreted as the violation of a law. “Christ came to free us from the law,” Illich says, but with the transformation of the Church into a legal state, from the 11th century on, “sin be[came] a juridical category [and] Christianity allowed the legal mentality to be brought into the very heart of love.”[22]
This denaturing of sin has taken another step in our time, according to Illich, with the invention of “values” as the legal tender of the moral realm. “Good,” he says, “is absolute.” The word speaks of what is proper and fitting for a human being, or any other being, according to their nature. Values are relative and utilitarian. They replace any thought of nature by an economic calculus – a sliding scale of risks and benefits, advantages and disadvantages, likes and dislikes. But sin, by Illich’s definition, is “a personal offence of God which is intelligible only in the light of the new freedom” incarnated in the Christ. It’s not a disvalue. “And this has made it impossible,” he concludes, “to convey the idea that modern horrors can be grasped only by those who understand their sinfulness, their direct contradiction of the new freedom proposed in the Gospel.”[23]
Illich’s admission that he employed the rather florid figure of anti-Christ only because talk of sin would have been even more confusing and obscure should assure us that he means nothing mythological by this hoary term. He is not invoking the old legend of a mild and deceptive tyrant whose reign will trigger the last battle and the descent of “a new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven.”[24] The Anti-Christ for him is “the conglomerate of a series of perversions by which we try to give security, survival ability, and independence of individual persons to the new possibilities that were opened by the Gospel by institutionalizing them.”[25] But his repurposing of the term is evocative none the less, because it gestures, tentatively, at the inherent ambivalence of the Incarnation. Illich does not say explicitly that Christ and anti-Christ are, and must be, born together as two sides of the same coin, two aspects of the same reality. And yet he almost does. He says that, even though the Gospel might have been preached without destructive consequences, this was not the will of God. He states that the Church had “gone pregnant with an evil that would have found no nesting place in the Old Testament.” And he claims that this mysterious evil was fraught with such consequence that the Church ought to have “centre[d] faith on its existence,” rather than succumbing to “the brutal… earnestness” of believing that it had come into exclusive possession of an unshadowed good needing only to be imposed on the world.[26]
He argues further that this overlooked evil has now reached such an extent that “the mystery of the Incarnation” is present to most people only as its corruption, as a “a horror…that they can’t explain away.”[27] He allows that awareness of this horror can become “an entrance door into the entire mystery of the Incarnation,” but this still implies, as I noted earlier, that the Gospel has been “preached to all nations” only as its inversion. In all these assertions, Christ and anti-Christ remain thoroughly and inseparably interpenetrated.
American historian and theologian Bernard McGinn has written a history of anti-Christ from the age of the apostles to our own. [28] In his book he asserts that during the modern period the figure of anti-Christ lost its pertinence and its place in respectable discourse. “After 1660,” he writes, “the last Enemy rapidly became the hobby of cranks.” However, McGinn does acknowledge two important exceptions. The first is Vladimir Solovyev, the late nineteenth century Russian theologian, poet, and pamphleteer, whose “The Story of the Anti-Christ” was one of the few writings – and the first – that Illich ever recommended that I read. The second is psychologist C.G. Jung. These were “the last major Western thinkers,” McGinn wrote in 1994, “who were convinced that real consideration of the problem of evil necessarily involves Anti-Christ.”[29] McGinn’s judgment seems to me to have been premature, as Illich’s willingness to wade into the turbid waters of the anti-Christ legend shows. Rene Girard’s attempt to reclaim and redefine this old idea is another example. Both in my view are “major thinkers.”[30] But McGinn is certainly right about Jung, and it is Jung’s thinking that I want to explore and juxtapose to Illich’s in what follows. It will be my contention that Jung’s treatment of the theme of anti-Christ can help us to understand the implications of Illich’s “pencil sketch,” and that the two of them together can shed light on the age that is trying to be born amidst the ruins of industrialized charity and legalized love.
In the years since his death in 1961, Carl Jung’s reputation has remained restricted. His inheritors have built thriving institutions throughout the world to propagate his ideas; he has been adopted and honoured by what can be loosely called the New Age movement; but he has remained a somewhat suspect figure to the academic mainstream. Historian Richard Noll’s book The Jung Cult: The Origins of a Charismatic Movement (1994) typifies this suspicion. I thought the book scurrilous, but the American Association of Publishers gave it their Award for Best Scholarly Book in Psychology in the year of its publication. Others – even when rejecting Noll’s imputation that Jung was a self-divinizing charlatan – have been put off by Jung’s attempt to expand the boundaries of science to include religious experience, abandoned styles of thought, like alchemy, and various other phenomena, like meaningful coincidence, that are still generally judged occult within official science. I see Jung, on the contrary, as a prophetic figure and an important religious thinker who cleared a way for the new understanding of the Incarnation, and the meaning of Christianity, to which Illich also points. But because he remains such a marginal figure in the polite academy, I will briefly introduce his contributions to the study of Christianity before turning to the account of anti-Christ that makes him comparable to Illich.
Jung saw himself throughout much of his life as being in a situation that was typical of the majority of his contemporaries: “inside Christianity,” but also as decisively outside it.[31] He was inside it, and it was inside him, in the sense that he regarded his culture, his inheritance, and his own formation as deeply and ineradicably Christian. Western culture is so “saturated with Christianity,” and so “utterly moulded by it,” he repeatedly said, that all its members are necessarily Christians, whether they acknowledge it or not.[32] In The Red Book he encapsulates this situation by the aphorism, “you can certainly leave Christianity, but it does not leave you.”[33] He was outside Christianity in the sense that he saw Christianity, in his time, as caught in a fatal bind – “a universal religious nightmare,” as he once put it – clinging desperately to tradition, but unable face the Apocalypse it had itself generated.[34] As he once summed up this aspect of his religious attitude, “I must be satisfied with being a Christian who is in the same conflict Christianity is in.”[35]
Religiously, Jung saw himself as a man without faith who, in its despite, had had to rely on experience. He explained this position in a letter he wrote in 1955:
The charism of faith was denied me. I was thrown back on experience alone. Always Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus hovered before me, and I asked myself how his fate would have fallen out but for his vision. Yet this experience came upon him when he was blindly pursuing his own way. As a young man I drew the conclusion that you must fulfill your destiny in order to get to a point where a donum gratiae [a gift of grace] might happen along. But I was far from certain and always kept the possibility in mind that on this road I might end up in a black hole. I have remained true to this attitude all my life.[36]
The reference here to “experience alone,” like the related claim Jung sometimes made that he was no more than a scientist or empiricist of the soul, should not be read as naïve, reductive or scientistic. Jung knew perfectly well that there is no such thing as unrefined or unmediated experience, uncoloured by presupposition – that’s evident enough in his statement that Christianity will not leave us, even if we think that we have left it. His just-an-observer stance was sometimes defensive – not surprising given the frequent charge against him that he was promoting irrationalism – but at bottom what he was arguing was that experience is the only ground left to us when received religion and psychological experience begin to disagree. “All the things one finds in religion,” he writes, “are images of psychological realities.”[37] So long as religion is felt to correspond with experience, there is no need for a separate science of psychology to account for these realities. Religion, whether imparted as dogma or direct knowledge, gives sufficient expression to the soul, and, in that sense, is psychology. Psychology, at least as Jung practiced it, arises only when religious orientation is lost. “Among all my patients in the second half of life – that is to say, over thirty-five,” he once said, “there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.”[38] His patients, and his readers, he wrote were not “the happy possessors of faith, but…those many people for whom the light has gone out, the mystery has failed, and God is dead.”[39] For some, Jung’s attempt to deal with religion psychologically, or phenomenologically, as he sometimes said, amounted to “psychologism.”[40] But this, he thought, was a nonsensical criticism: “If in physics one seeks to explain the nature of light,” he said, “no one expects as a result that there will be no light. But in the case of psychology everybody believes that what it explains is explained away.”[41]
During the last fifteen years of his long life (1875-1961), Jung intensified what one of his successors, Murray Stein, calls his “treatment of Christianity,” or alternately his “psychotherapy of a religious tradition.”[42] What was at stake, he thought, was nothing less than the human self-image which, for Jung, is a reflex of what he called “the God-image.” Jung believed that God and humanity are inseparably coupled and endlessly define and engender one another, with God made in our image as surely as we are made in God’s. “The imago dei [the image of god],” he wrote, “pervades the whole human sphere and makes mankind its involuntary exponent.”[43] He believed further that “transformations of the God-image run parallel with changes in human consciousness,” and that “destruction of the God-image is followed by the annulment of the human personality.”[44] These two postulates made the renewal of Christianity an urgent task. The landmarks in Jung’s effort to execute this task were Aion: Researches in the Phenomenology of the Self, published in German in 1951, Answer to Job, published the following year, and the letters Jung wrote to a variety of religiously-concerned correspondents during this period.[45] I will focus here on Answer to Job, a book that has had a compelling importance for me for many years, particularly during the time that I have been pondering Illich’s unsettling assertions about anti-Christ, the mystery of evil, and the possible imminence of “the end of the world.”
Answer to Job cost Jung an immense and wrenching effort. It was a book, he said, that he “waited forty years to write” and, when the time came, he was “swept along by its arrival and unable to stop it,” as if “the spirit [had] seiz[ed him] by the scruff of the neck.”[46] Peter Kingsley reports that during the period of the book’s writing…
…Jung not only hardly slept…hardly shaved, hardly washed. People in his immediate circle were terrified of what might happen to him, as well as what he might do to them. He shut himself away for hours and worked until he was exhausted. Then he became moody and often furious, lashed out for no reason, was crude and rude.[47]
This portrait, which Kingsley has assembled from the reminiscences of family and friends, is seriously at variance with the image of the serene sage that one gets from some of Jung’s late interviews, and may be somewhat overwrought, but Jung himself testified, in a letter to his friend Erich von Neumann, that he had undergone a terrifying experience of “nakedness” in mustering “the arrogance I had to summon up in order to be able to insult God.”[48]
Jung’s insult to God is a short book – only 121 pages in its English edition – in which he reads The Book of Job as a crucial revelation of the nature of God, and as an indispensable background both to the New Testament, and to the dilemma in which Christianity finds itself today. Included in the “Wisdom Books” that come between the historical books and the books of prophecy in the Christian Bible, The Book of Job recounts a day “when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord.” (King James Version 2:1.) Amongst them is Satan – the name means accuser or adversary in Hebrew – who is evidently one of these sons. God asks Satan what he’s been up to, and Satan replies that he’s been “going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it.” God then asks whether Satan has noticed “my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and upright man, one that feareth God and escheweth evil.” Satan replies that Job’s exemplary conduct is likely the result of all the advantages God has conferred on his faithful servant. Withdraw these benefits, Satan goes on, and “he will curse thee to thy face.” God, provoked, invites Satan to try Job’s loyalty. “Behold he is in thy hand,” God tells Satan.
This sets the familiar story in motion. Satan begins tormenting Job, reducing him to misery and ruin. Various friends tell Job that he must have done something wrong, or this would not have happened. “Curse God and die,” is his wife’s famous advice. But Job refuses to curse God, and around the midpoint of the story, the book undergoes what one commentator calls “a shift in emotional tone.”[49] Job experiences “an unbidden inrush of self-certainty about the correctness of his position,” and he begins to talk back to God. Speaking in the “bitterness of [his] soul,” he determines that he “will say unto God, do not condemn me [but] show me wherefore thou contendest with me.” (10:2) Does it seem good to you, his address to God continues, “that thou shouldst oppress [and] despise the work of thine hands and shine upon the counsel of the wicked?” Insisting on his essential innocence, he asks for an explanation. He neither admits his guilt, nor renounces his faith, but instead calls God to a higher standard. In effect, he gives a better account of God, than God gives of himself. “I know that my redeemer liveth,” Job says, “and that he shall stand in the latter day upon the earth.” (19:25) This statement, which resounds so magnificently in Handel’s setting in Messiah, sums up Job’s position. He takes his stand within God and points to a redemptive possibility of which God himself seems as yet unaware.
The book then concludes with a speech in which God “answer[s] Job out of the whirlwind.” “Who is this who darkeneth counsel without knowledge,” God thunders. God then goes on, at length, to commend the grandeur and intricacy of his creation, and to ask Job, finally, who he thinks he is. Does Job think, God asks, that he can “contend with the Almighty” to “instruct” and “reprove” him. Question mark (40:2) Job responds tactfully, “Once I have spoken” but now “I will lay mine hand upon my mouth [and] proceed no further.” Mollified, God restores Job’s fortune and the story concludes
with “the latter end of Job” even more “blessed…than his beginning.” (42:12)
What is crucial in all this for Jung is that Job appears to know God better than God knows himself, and to stand for something within God to which God himself apparently lacks access. Jobs intuits the possibility of redemption – “I know that my redeemer liveth” – while God seems to have little sympathy for his creatures and remains pretty much stuck on touting his omnipotence – “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?... Canst thou send lightenings?...Doth the hawk fly by thy wisdom?” and so on. (38:4, 38:35, 39:26). God appears vain, lacking in the foreknowledge that his supposed omniscience would seem to promise, and surprisingly conscience-less in his willingness to let Job suffer in order to allay his own self-doubt. Job on the other hand is steadfast in his defence of both his own dignity and God’s. In Jung’s words, he stands “morally higher” than God.
Jung, as we have seen, speaks of a “God-image” that exists within us. This image is not “something invented,” but rather “an experience that comes upon man spontaneously.”[50] From time to time this image changes, as even the most casual reader of the Bible can attest – the Lord of Hosts whose “fierce wrath” demands that the Amalekites should be “blotted out” down to the last sheep (Deuteronomy 25:19, 1 Samuel 28:28) is not the loving Father of the New Testament. And these
“transformations of the God-image,” as I’ve already quoted, “run parallel with changes in human consciousness.”[51] What is behind this God-image – i.e. what is actually the case in metaphysical terms - is a question on which Jung presents himself as agnostic. He can speak of God expansively and lyrically, as when he concludes Answer to Job with a paean to “the One who dwells within [us], whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses [us] on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky.”[52] But he also calls himself an "Erfahrungswissenschaftler," a German word which his translators have generally rendered as empiricist. This translation, in my opinion, has created a lot of unnecessary confusion, since the English word evokes a bare-bones epistemology that has little to do with what this heir of German Romanticism meant by calling himself an “experience scientist,” the literal translation of his German word. Phenomenologist would probably have been a much better term. In any case, Jung treats God as what he calls an archetype - a mutable and possibly illimitable psychic reality that is intimately and reciprocally connected with the consciousness that confronts it. Archetypes, he says, are relatively “autonomous factors,” but so is consciousness, so it is impossible to say definitively whether changes in the God-image originate in consciousness or in the archetype. One alternative – the archetype initiates – “degrades consciousness to a mere machine,” and makes humanity a reflex of its gods. The other – consciousnesss initiates – “robs the archetype of its autonomy” and turns God into a human projection. So Jung, characteristically, affirms both terms of the contradiction. He “concede[s] to the archetype a definite measure of independence, and to consciousness a degree of creative freedom proportionate to its scope.” He views “sometimes the one and sometimes the other as the acting subject.” Accordingly, Jung can say, on the one hand, that “our image of God creates us,” and that “God is reality itself,” and on the other, with Meister Eckhart, that “by being created, the soul created God, for he did not exist until the soul was made.”[53]
It is Jung’s supposition that the God-image, in its power and effulgence, at first overwhelmed the people we meet in the first books of the Bible. Moses is permitted to see only “the back parts” of God, because, as God says, when Moses asks to see his glory, “there shall no man see me and live.”[54] This is not to say that Job is the first to question God. Abraham contests God’s plan to destroy Sodom. (Genesis 18:20-33); Moses argues several times with God, as, for example, when God threatens to “consume” the Israelites following their infidelity with the golden calf (Exodus 32:10-14) But Jung feels that a decisive turning is reached with Job’s determination to hold his ground. At the end, Job “lays his hand upon his mouth,” and meekly confesses his “vileness” (40:4), but he has, nevertheless, withstood God, as well as administering what Jung calls a “moral defeat.” Job has shown himself to be, as you might say, the better man. He has kept faith with God, even while God was whimsically and unnecessarily abusing him. This creates what Jung calls “a disturbance in the unconscious.” Something new now has to happen. On the conscious level God has restored order, reasserted his majesty, and Job has graciously submitted to being put back in his place. But, in the unconscious, where God’s defeat has registered differently, humanity has acquired a new valence, and God cannot simply go on as before. According to Jung’s physics-inflected image, in which the psyche is conceived as a system of energy flows, the disturbed unconscious has “acquire[d] a higher potential than exists in consciousness.” This potential must necessarily start “flowing towards consciousness” and showing itself “in the form of dreams, visions and revelations.”[55]
The visions begin in the Book of Ezekiel where the prophet sees “the glory of the Lord” in the likeness of “a human form” which appears in “fier[y]…splendor” above an emerald throne.[56] The book of Daniel contains a comparable vision. The prophet first sees an “Ancient of Days…his clothing…white as snow…the hair of his head like pure wool.” Then before him comes “one like the Son of Man…with the clouds of heaven” and to this radiant newcomer is given “dominion and glory and kingship.”[57] There are other visions of this Son of Man, some even in pagan sources like Virgil’s Fourth Ecologue, where the poet imagines the birth of the emperor Augustus as a divine “descent” accomplished under the sign of the Virgin – not Mary but Astraea, virgin goddess of justice.[58] What is going on, in Jung’s terms, is what he calls the constellation of an archetype – a process by which “unconscious contents which are ready to irrupt into consciousness” assemble and cohere.[59] The culmination of this process, in Christian terms, is the Incarnation – the appearance of God in human form, when “the Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us and we beheld his glory.”[60]
Jung, in Answer to Job, conceives the Incarnation in terms that are virtually opposite to the account that still resonates through Christian liturgies – of a sacrifice to atone for human disobedience and restore comity with God – of a “propitiation for our sins,” in the phrase from the Anglican service of Holy Communion that is stencilled on my memory. In Jung’s version, it’s God who is atoning, and, in effect, making it up it to Job, by assuming the human condition himself. This leads to the image of the loving Father, the God who is love, as the Gospel of John asserts, and “in [whom] there is no darkness at all.”[61] The difficulty, for Jung, is that God, in becoming “all light,” has simply displaced the elements of his character that the Book of Job had revealed. God, in Jung’s psychiatric language has gotten himself into a “fearful dissociation” and what will be bound to follow is an “enantiodromia in the grand style.”[62]
Enantiodromia is a word that Jung borrows from the early Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who uses it “to designate the play of opposites in the course of events – the view that everything turns into its opposite.” Heraclitus says: “From the living comes death and from the dead life, from the young old age and from the old youth; from waking, sleep and from sleep, waking; the stream of generation and decay never stands still.” Jung incorporated the word into his philosophy to signify “the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time.” “This characteristic phenomenon,” he explained, “practically always occurs when an extreme, one-sided tendency dominates conscious life; in time an equally powerful counterposition is built up, which first inhibits the conscious performance and subsequently breaks through the conscious control.”[63] In the case of Christianity, what Jung thought had happened was that the shadow side of God had simply disappeared: an all-good God had engendered an all-good Christ, and whatever remainder of evil there might be in the world must be assignable to God’s creatures alone. St. Basil (330-379) in one of his homilies makes this explicit, refuting Heraclitus almost word for word: “It is…impious to say that evil has its origin from God; because the contrary cannot proceed from its contrary. Life does not engender death; darkness is not the origin of light; sickness is not the maker of health…Evil is not a living animated essence; it is the condition of the soul opposed to virtue, developed in the careless on account of their falling away from good.”[64] Basil’s doctrine was further developed by Augustine and came to be known by the tag privatio boni – lack, or deprivation, of good. The essential idea was that evil has no substantial existence but is simply the absence of good, as cold is the absence of heat. It takes on the appearance of a positive, or substantial phenomenon only as an effect of its distance from the good. This doctrine has had many cogent defences throughout Christian history. In our time C.S. Lewis has argued that good can exist on its own, while evil is a “parasite” on the good and derives all its vitality from this dependent relation.[65] Jung regarded the idea that good is substantial, while evil is no more than a phantom produced by its absence or diminution, as “nonsensical.”[66] He saw good and evil as mutually informing realities, each meaningless without the other, as day would mean nothing without night. Buddhism refers to this integral and indissoluble arising-together as “codependent origination.”[67] “‘Good’ and ‘evil’ are opposite poles of a moral judgment which, as such, originates in man,” Jung writes. “A judgment can be made about a thing only if its opposite is equally real and possible.”[68] Evil and good, for Jung, are relative to one another, and, according to the principle of enantiodromia, continuous with one another. “In the last resort there is no good that cannot produce evil and no evil that cannot produce good.”[69]
It was Jung’s view that Christianity’s insistence on a God without shadow and a saviour without sin was bound, by its one-sidedness, to produce a compensation or reversal. “The coming of the Anti-Christ,” he wrote in Aion, “is not just prophetic prediction – it is an inexorable psychological law.”[70] Aion was a book that had an out-sized influence on me as a young man, giving shape and reason to my youthful intuition that the present world must stand, for good or ill, on the threshold of a new age. When I re-read the book more recently, this sentence – about the inexorability of anti-Christ – stood out and pushed me into the attempt to read Illich and Jung together that is the occasion of the present essay. According to Jung, the darkness of God, and the shadow of Christ, are missing from most of the New Testament, and therefore must inevitably at some point break through and reappear. (This is Jung’s unshakeable Heraclitean principle: “In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order, in all caprice a fixed law, for everything that works is grounded in its opposite.”[71]) This breakthrough occurs first in the Book of Revelation – the lurid, revenge fantasy that brings the cloudless world of the New Testament to such an uncanny end. Maintaining the traditional, but now mostly rejected, idea that the John who wrote Revelation was the same man who wrote the Gospel and the two epistles in that name, Jung portrays the book as the “counter-position” that has built up in the unconscious of the “love-preaching bishop.” The “apocalyptic ‘Christ,’ Jung writes, “behaves rather like a bad-tempered, power-conscious boss.”[72] First there are the admonitions to “the seven churches in Asia,” five of which get the back of the boss’s hand. Smyrna is “a synagogue of Satan”; Thyatira is rebuked for tolerating “that woman Jezebel,” a false “prophetess,” whose children the Lord will “strike dead.” Christ “hates” the Nicolaitians; he will “spew” the Laodiceans “out of his mouth” for their “lukewarm” faith, and so on.[73] Some of these vindictive figures are still recognizable, and remain in circulation in evangelical preaching and popular talk to this day.
There follows the vision of the avenging Christ on his white horse, riding out “as a conqueror bent on conquest,” (6:2) “a sharp sword [to] smite the nations” clenched in his mouth. (19:15). “The seven bowls of God’s wrath [are] poured out” (16:1), and “the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable…the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters and all liars” are cast into “the lake of fire and brimstone” (21:8). By the time this delectable destruction finally comes to an end, only 144,000 people (7:4), out of the entire human race, remain alive to inherit “the new heaven and the new earth.” (21:1)
The Book of Revelation, Jung says, is “rightly placed at the end of the New Testament” because “it reaches beyond it into a future” that Jung in his last years felt was “all too palpably close.”[74] René Girard has spoken of how absolutely strange it is that a society preoccupied by the end of the world, and all too ready to believe in its imminence, as many activists and reformers now are, would take no cognizance whatever of the precise prediction of just such a sticky end in the scriptures that have shaped that society – not just the Book of Revelation but also the “apocalyptic discourses” to be found in each of the three Synoptic Gospels.[75] Girard was, of course, an exception to his own stricture, and so was Carl Jung. Jung was thoroughly preoccupied, in the years after Hiroshima, with “the worst catastrophe of all: the final clash of opposites in an atomic war,” and vividly aware that this potential clash was the outward expression of a divided psyche.[76] He viewed his time as a culmination of the two Christian millennia in which the archetype of the Self, the archetype one-sidedly incarnated in Christ, had been fatally split. In his exposition in Aion, he draws on the symbolism of the astrological age of Pisces that was coming to end at the time Jung was writing. [77] The era of Pisces corresponded with what Illich called “the age of the Church” and was represented by the image of two fish facing in opposite directions.[78] These opposing figures, Jung says, signify the divided character of this period and the “inexorable psychological law” which dictates that the reign of the immaculate Christ must be succeeded by the predominance of anti-Christ. Anti-Christ, in Jung’s inflection of the term, does not mean anti-Christian, as it does for Nietzsche when he adopts this pose in his late, distempered polemics against his rival, Christ.[79] Nor does it mean the deceptively mild ersatz of the Christ of which Vladimir Soloviev and Illich speak.[80] Jung means the inevitable irruption and return of what he thinks is repressed and occluded in the Christian story.
Jung’s underlying assumption here is that the psyche has a “polaristic structure.” Just like “any energetic system,” he says, the psyche runs on “the tension of opposites.”[81]
This is his basic “physics” of the psyche. In the unconscious opposites exist “in undifferentiated form.” What has been called the principle, and sometimes the law, of non-contradiction, since Aristotle first formulated it, does not obtain in psyche’s unconscious domains – there A and not-A, good and evil exist together in an undivided state. But consciousness requires, and is defined by an object, some other by which it becomes aware of itself. Opposites must, therefore, be differentiated in order to enter consciousness. Once admitted, they are then usually evaluated, ranked, and segregated – sometimes so completely that the “polaristic” character of things is made to disappear altogether. Often, one member of a pair is subordinated to the other, and the lesser one made secondary and derivative, as evil is subordinated to good in the doctrine of privatio boni, or women are construed as defective men in Aristotelian philosophy. For Jung, the ability to sustain “the tension of the opposites,” and to recognize their inherent equality and mutually defining character, virtually defines the art of living, as well the flowering and authentication of individual personality that he called “individuation” and on which he thought social integrity depended. He told his friend Babara Hannah, for example, that avoidance of a catastrophic World War Three “will depend on how many people can stand the tension of the opposites in themselves.”[82] Just that.
Jung believed that the problem of the “paradoxical,” or ambivalent, character of God – the problem posed in Job and postponed in the Incarnation – had finally, by his time, produced what he called “a universal religious nightmare.” The West, and the world, he thought, had been able to overlook this shadow, so long as the “specifically Christian achievement” had been seen to outweigh it.[83] Opposing empires poised to enact Armageddon – the site of Revelation’s famous “last battle” – showed him that this shadow must now be faced, or else. Today, the nuclear stand-off that preoccupied Jung is mirrored in every department of public life in a kind of total polarization that I imagine Jung would have diagnosed in the same way he did the Cold War – as an enacting of “the psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate.”[84] Critics have often reproved Jung for this view in which quasi-timeless archetypes determine everything and more local, more temporal, and more socio-political determinants are made quite subsidiary or set aside altogether.[85] This criticism has its point, but here I want to consider what we can learn from Jung’s view of Christianity as an incomplete or unresolved story.
Christianity, according to many of its defenders, is a finished building, a comprehensive scheme of salvation requiring only that Christians stick to the plan. This conviction, as Jung suggests in the passage I placed at the head of this essay, causes them to “squander” their energies in a vain effort to preserve every brick of this perfected structure, and to deny that, for many, once-potent symbols have now grown worn, dogmatic and devitalized and lost their capacity “to evoke the original experience.”[86] Why not, Jung asks, make the house a little “roomier?” According to him, this would involve, at last, facing up to the “metaphysical dilemma” that is first broached in Job. Is God not omnipotent, as seems to be implied in the scene of Christ’s temptation when Satan, without demur from Jesus, asserts that “authority” over “all the kingdoms of the world” has been “delivered” to him?[87] Or – the other alternative – are “morally contradictory opposites…contained in the God-image,” as we see in Job and Revelation alike?”[88] This “God-image,” in Jung’s way of speaking, is indistinguishable from “the Self,” which he takes to be “the ineffable totality of man that can only be formulated symbolically.”[89] Since Christ symbolizes the Self, and since it is Jung’s axiom, shared with mystics like Eckhart and Angelus Silesius, that God and humanity are a continuum and an indissoluble couplet, it makes sense to say that the two are ultimately indistinguishable. (“Without me,” says Silesius, “God can no moment live.”[90] Hegel also states that God’s knowledge of himself is “a self-consciousness in man” and that man, equally, “knows himself in God.”[91]) What this means is that the human self-image is split, just as the God-image is split, and this is why Jung thinks it so momentous that we should face this split rather than destroy ourselves by acting it out.
The second great element of Christian renovation for Jung is the abandonment of an external saviour who acts for us, and whose saving power can be controlled and administered by an authorized clerisy. As early as The Red Book, which Jung began to compose during the First World War, he wrote: “If I am truly to understand Christ, I must realize how Christ actually lived only his own life, and imitated no one. He did not emulate any model. If I thus truly imitate Christ, I do not imitate anyone, I emulate no one, but go my own way, and I will also no longer call myself a Christian.”[92] This theme continues throughout his work. In a lecture from 1932, he asks: “Are we to understand the Imitatio Christi in the sense that we should copy his life and, as it were, ape his stigmata; or in the deeper sense that we are to live our lives as truly as he lived his in its individual uniqueness? It is no easy matter to imitate the life of Christ, but it is unspeakably harder to live one’s life as Christ lived his.”[93] In a seminar during the summer of 1939, he remarked: “The dogma claims that Christ was God who became man. In psychological terms this means that the Self approached the consciousness of man, or that human consciousness began to realize the Self, as a real human fact.”[94]
Like many, Jung was influenced by the prophecies of Joachim of Fiore (1135-2002), the medieval abbot whom historian Bernard McGinn has called “the most important apocalyptic thinker of the whole medieval period.”[95] John Dourley in his book Jung and His Mystics says that Jung “closely associate[d] his thought and even his person” with Joachim.[96] Joachim divided history into three ages, an age of the Father, corresponding with the Old Testament, an age of the Son, extending from the time of Christ’s Incarnation to Joachim’s own time, and an impending age of the Spirit in which an inward and more truly spiritual religion would prevail. Many thinkers have subsequently adopted Joachim’s tripartite, or Trinitarian, scheme, though often altering the time scale. Philosopher Friedrich Schelling, another notable influence on Jung, transposed Joachim’s diagram into the three ages of the Western Church: the Petrine period of undivided Roman Catholicism, the Pauline, or Protestant, age, and a dawning age of Johanine Christianity, in which the “mighty fortress” of the first two ages would be replaced by a new church – dispersed, decentred, spiritualized, and no longer seeking “its visibility…in…political forms,” as Illich says in one of his essays on the church of the future.[97] Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s late reflections on “religionless Christianity” and “man come of age” also belong to this lineage, as does Illich’s 1967 “call to celebration” with its invitation to “live the future.”[98]
I would place Jung in this company, of those who announce a new age of Christianity, even though he professed himself, from childhood, an “outsider” to the religion in which he was raised. He had little to say about a future church, other than to recommend that it be “roomier,” and often criticized Christianity as a “closed system” which tends to “paralyze” the very “fantasy activity” on which he thought its renovation depended.[99] Jung, by my estimate, is a prophet. I know that Illich has said that “the time of prophecy lies behind us,” and that “our only chance now lies in taking this vocation [i.e. prophecy] as that of the friend.”[100] But what else are we to call the words of those who still hear the voice of God? Jung heard that voice from a young age, as he relates in his autobiography Memories, Dreams and Reflections, and he came to know, by experience, that, unlike the abstract and textual God that was worshipped at a safe distance in his pious, Protestant milieu, this living God “could be something terrible” – something apt to confound all our fondest hopes and expectations.[101] Jung wrote, of his parson father, one of a remarkable nine ministers among Jung’s parent’s siblings, that he spoke of God in terms that were “hollow” and seemed to be only “hearsay”: “He did not know the immediate, living God who stands omnipotent and free, above his Bible and his Church, who calls upon man to partake of His freedom, and can force him to renounce his own views and convictions in order to fulfill without reserve the command of God. In his trial of human courage, God refuses to abide by traditions, no matter how sacred.”[102]
Notable in what Jung says here is his emphasis on the freedom of God. He strikes the same note in an unpublished statement unearthed by Peter Kingsley from the Jung archives, in which Jung says that he saw it as his task to help “God to be alive and free from the suffering man has put on him.” (There is an interesting echo of this statement in Illich when he says that “to speak of faith as the celebration of our seeing what is there” is “to let God be what and who God is.”[103]) Jung goes on to qualify himself as “a mystical fool” and to assert that this foolishness finally “proved to be stronger than all my science.”[104] Implied is the idea that there is still more to know of God – that God remains an active and living presence within human beings. Christians often view Christ, not just as God’s Word, but as God’s last word – the apocalyptic either/or, thrown once and for all into the human conversation. The Gospels, in this view, provide a complete and definitive revelation, and all that remains to be seen is whether people will recognize their salvation, or opt for the lake of fire instead. I simplify and caricature, of course, since all Christian recognize the continuing promptings of the Holy Spirit, the “Counselor” whom Jesus sends in his place after his ascension.[105] But, even so, there is a sense in which Christianity has regarded itself as a final disclosure, one that completes and supersedes all other accounts of human destiny. This was not Jung’s opinion, as we have already seen. Illich felt that a misapprehension of the Gospel was at the root of modernity’s self-destructive trajectory; Jung argued that the New Testament with its God in whom there is no darkness was itself a misapprehension in need of correction.
The essence of Jung’s proposal was to begin the replacement of dogmatic religion by experiential religion. He made this proposal with open eyes and realistic respect for human weakness. He respected dogma and believed it could perform effectively in the place of experience, but only so long as its symbols remained vital and persuasive. Once “metaphysical ideas become detached from the psychic contents they once reflected,” he thought, they begin to develop a life of their own. They become ideology and “tradition,” and the more “lifeless they become, the more people cling to them.” Eventually “the meaningful turns into the meaningless.” [106] The difficulty for Jung is that people need, want and will have religion. At the very beginning of his career he told Freud in a letter that, in his view, “religion can only be replaced by religion,” and he maintained this view to the end of his life, writing in The Undiscovered Self in 1957, “you can take away a man’s gods, but only to give him others in return.”[107] What this meant in practice was that the West would either renew Christianity or submit helplessly to debased religions, like the Nazi cult that had recently ruled Germany. In an essay completed just ten days before he died, he wrote: “Anthropologists have often described what happens to a primitive society when its spiritual values are exposed to the impact of modern civilization. Its people lose the meaning of their lives, their social organization disintegrates, and they themselves morally decay. We are now in the same condition. But we have never really understood what we have lost, for our spiritual leaders unfortunately were more interested in protecting their institutions than in understanding the mystery that symbols present.”[108]
For Jung, the stakes were not less than everything. As I have said, he saw his world as engulfed in a “universal religious nightmare,” made in equal parts of unconscious religion, outmoded religion, and irreligion, all equally dangerous.[109] How could the world be awakened from this nightmare? Jung’s short answer was almost always some version of what I quoted earlier: learn to bear “the tension of the opposites” which are the condition of consciousness, and the path to “individuation.” “Although we human beings have our own personal life,” he says, “we are yet in large measure the representatives, the victims and promoters, of a collective spirit whose years are counted in centuries.”[110] Individuation, as Jung used the term, described not idle, or arbitrary differentiation, but rather an exemplary individual facing up to some common predicament. In the case of religion, this meant abandoning the illusion that we could ever unharness ourselves from this “yoke,” as theologian Karl Barth calls the human propensity to make gods.[111] Homo is, above all, religiosus, and, as it said above Jung’s front door in Küsnacht, “called or not, God will be there.” The problem of religion, for Jung, cannot be abandoned or set aside; it can only be faced. More specifically, he thought that Western people needed to address the elements in our Christian, and Judaeo-Christian, inheritance that are erupting all round us as external pathologies. It was his conviction, for example, that worldly schisms are often “expressions of the unrecognized polarity of the dominant archetype” – whether these schisms divide the Church, the geopolitical realm, as in his time, or the political landscape, as in ours. In whatever case, enemies look blindly at one another and see only monstrosity and unaccountable evil.
Jung’s idea that what we overlook within us is bound to appear outside us in projected and disguised form has its limits. “Wherever you are is the center of everything,” as Northrop Frye has said, and Jung’s lifelong preoccupation with establishing the originality and universality of the psyche sometimes led him to overlook competing explanations of social and historical phenomena.[112] An example is his diagnosis of Naziism as a Wotan cult – a reawakening of the old German religions that were repressed by Christianity.[113] The idea is illuminating but needs to be supplemented by historical explanation rather than replacing historical explanation as sometimes happened with Jung. Nevertheless, I think his idea that our contemporary social and ecological chaos enacts a “religious nightmare” is fundamentally correct. His prescriptions were essentially two. First, he thought that the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit which had been the West’s “dominant archetype” was an unstable and incomplete figure. The discovery of the triune nature of God was, according to Hegel, nothing less than “the pivot on which world history turns.”[114] Hegel made this extravagant claim because of the dynamism, or principle of progress, that he perceived in the idea of God as a tripartite relationship, and that he represented in various ways in his philosophical system. Today, when progress is an out-of-control automaton and, at the same time, a discarded fiction, this dynamism appears in a different light. Jung’s answer was to supply the Trinity with its missing fourth – the element able to turn it into a balanced structure.[115] Quadernities, and balanced pairs, occur throughout Jung’s thought in keeping with his conviction that the very energy of existence arises from the “polaristic structure” of the psyche. He enumerates the “basic psychological functions,” for example, as the foursome of thinking, sensing, feeling, and intuition.[116] In the case of the Trinity, the absent fourth, depending on the context, is said to be the feminine, the devil, and matter. The general idea is to make opposition fundamental. So, he says, for instance, that matter, insofar as it represents consolidation and resistance, has often been connected to “the adversary.” “The will to be different and contrary is characteristic of the devil,” he writes, “just as disobedience was the hallmark of original sin.” But the autonomy of the individual is unthinkable without a medium. Resistance/opposition, or difference/disobedience, are the “the necessary conditions of the creation and ought, therefore, to be included in the divine plan and – ultimately – in the divine realm.”[117]
The same principle of “necessary condition” applies to evil. The evil that afflicts Job comes from God, insofar as it comes from his dark and disowned son Satan. But when God “answers” Job by assuming flesh, he does so as a being “in whom there is no darkness at all” – the loving father represented in the immaculate son. The shadow is unacknowledged and so must necessarily reappear: Christ will be dogged by anti-Christ, the light-bringer accompanied by the dark tempter. Jung believed it was time for a new chapter in this story to begin. He held that “there is no such thing as the “Good” in general, because something that is definitely good can be definitely evil in another case.” The incarnation of the good therefore depends on “those relatively few individuals capable of enough consciousness to make ethical decisions, i.e. to decide for the Good.”[118] Here he agrees with William Blake – definitely a “Jungian” avant la lettre – that “God only Acts and Is, in existing beings or men.”[119] Christ must come alive within us, and no longer be seen as the external saviour who performs a kind of metaphysical magic by placating God and making things right for us in heaven.
The Japanese poet Matsuo Basho says, “Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.”[120] This is Jung’s thought precisely. Much is said in The Red Book against “imitation” – Jung’s spirit guide Philemon says, for example, that Christ’s work “would be completed if men managed to live their own lives without imitation” – but I think it might be better to think of Jung, like Basho, counselling a form of inner, or individualized, imitation, rather than dreaming of overcoming imitation altogether. Rene Girard, in his lifelong effort to expose “the romantic lie,” held that imitation – or mimesis, as he said – is constitutive of human beings, and no pretense of self-creation can finally circumvent this ultimately social and mimetic character of our kind.[121] I don’t think the mature Jung would have disagreed with this view. Jung grew and changed throughout his life and, in his old age, wrote to a student who had reminded him of something he had said in 1910 that he found this ancient remark to be an “unfortunately unexpungable reminder of the incredible folly that filled the days of my youth.”[122] Jung was certainly a romantic, but of that chastened style that Owen Barfield called “romanticism come of age.”[123] His statement, referred to earlier, that “transformations in the God-image run parallel with changes in human consciousness” certainly suggests a process of mutual imitation – humanity changing in imitation of our idea of God, our image of God changing in accord with humanity’s degree of self-consciousness. So I think it’s better to take Jung’s injunction “to live one’s life as Christ lived his,” as a call to face one’s individual destiny with the same courage and completeness with which Christ faced his, and not as a dream of some quite impossible authenticity or originality. Jung’s strictures against imitation can then be read as a new phase of imitation, and as a call to imitate a new conception of the Christ as the way-finder and friend rather than as saviour and sacrificial substitute.
Jung addresses this issue in the concluding passage of Answer to Job, in which he calls this possibility of imitating Christ in a new way as “the Christification of many.” So far, he says, Christianity has “avoided the difficulty” that would be involved by designating Jesus as “the one and only God-man.”[124] But Christianity as a religion is failing, even if this is happening slowly, unevenly, and with important exceptions. Taking William James nice definition of religion, in one of its aspects, as a “set of procedures for working on the disposition of the deity,” we can say that, as instances of Bonhoeffer’s “man come of age,” we no longer depend on Christ to “work” on the Father on our behalf.[125] Or, in Jung’s ironic formulation in Answer to Job, we no longer need Christ to save us from God.[126] Accordingly, the full implications of Christ as a “way” can now begin to appear.[127]
Jung treats Christ, in Aion, as a symbol of the Self – a term Jung uses in a way that borders on the concept of Ātman in the philosophy of the Upanishads, where it signifies the depth at which individual and universal consciousness intersect. He defines it, first, as “the ineffable totality of man that can only be formulated symbolically,” and, second, as a “totality [that] is…indistinguishable from a God-image.”[128] Jung held, as we have seen, that there is no humanity without God, and no (knowable) God without humanity. He viewed God as a dynamic and evolving reality that is present in the psyche, but also as a reality that is so far from being “merely psychological,” that in the last sentence of Answer to Job he speaks, as I mentioned above, of “the One who dwells within [us], whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses [us] on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky.”[129] God, on Jung’s pragmatic assumption, is what we experience as God. “Man can have no idea of anything greater than Man, as a cup cannot contain more than is capaciousness,” says Blake, and Jung whole-heartedly agrees.[130] Jung had the greatest respect for dogma and doctrine insofar as they extended and routinized visionary experience, but he insisted that when doctrine falls out of tune with experience, a new experience must be sought in preference to a hopeless preservation of the doctrine. He realized that this was, in certain sense, a formula for chaos, a return of the luxuriant variety of theological opinion that marked the first Christian centuries, and that only gradually submitted to the authority of the Church Councils that were called to hammer out a consistent creed. “I grant you,” he wrote to fellow psychologist August Vetter in 1932, “that I am on the best way to delivering up the Christian concept of the spirit to the chaos of Gnosis again from which it was so carefully insulated.” But without the “charism of faith” which he felt had been denied to him and many others, he saw no alternative. If the “Christian myth [were] to become obsolete,” as it already has for so many, it would be a catastrophe “with quite unpredictable consequences.” So “the need for a more psychologically oriented interpretation that would salvage its meaning and guarantee its continuation forces itself upon us.”[131]
One the difficulties faced by Jung’s “psychologically-oriented interpretation” is that it requires us first to understand what he means by psychology. Jung’s conception of “the unconscious,” to begin with, barely corresponds with what this term is normally taken to mean in post-Freudian psychology and psychoanalysis. There, as the word unconscious itself suggests, the term tends to function as a purely negative category, referring to a bounded and corporeal place into which unacceptable images and memories have been banished. But this is the very least of what Jung means by this expression. He retained the word after his final break with Freud but continually enlarged its meaning, thereafter, sometimes taxing it beyond any easy or ready intelligibility. To make it intelligible, one needs to understand the full scope of Jung’s understanding of the term psyche with which it is more or less synonymous and co-extensive. Psyche, in the Greek from which it comes, means spirit but can also mean life, breath and soul. Jung uses the word, at different times, in several of these senses. The psyche is the medium through which all of reality is experienced, and therefore, he says, the only immediate object of experience.”[132] It is the absolute horizon of what we can know – the ur-medium through which all knowledge must pass. In another place he says that “at bottom” the psyche is simply “world.”[133] In the latter half of his career, he began to use the word psychoid to describe the region in which he supposed that the psychic and the physical interpenetrate, and he evolved concepts like synchronicity to explain apparent connections between inner and outer events that are unaccountable within the Cartesian mind/matter dichotomy that rules Galilean science. Psyche, for Jung, is infinite – it has no ascertainable boundary or containment. He says, for example, that “we cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities, [since] both are borderline concepts for transcendental contents.”[134] Or consider this passage on the role of the shadow – meaning the rejected or ignored elements of personality – in controlling access to the unconscious…
The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well…what comes after the door is, surprisingly enough, a boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no inside and no outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad…where I experience the other in myself and the other than myself experiences me.[135]
Jung, as is well known but not perhaps well understood, also hypothesizes something that he calls the collective unconscious, which is, so to speak, a crystallized residuum of the entire human experience. I referred earlier to Jung’s supposition that the madness that seized Germany in the 1930’s was a reawaking of the old religion of the Germans which had been suppressed by their forced conversion to Christianity. In his Terry lectures at Yale in 1937, he asserted that, “in the lower stories of the skyscraper of rational consciousness,” people carry with them “the whole living past.”[136] He says that all “religious statements are psychic confessions which, in the last resort, are based on unconscious, i.e. transcendental processes.”[137] All this, and more, belongs to the unconscious – das Unbewusste – so it is good to remember that this apophatic name points finally to the unknown and the unknowable. Jung frequently acknowledges this himself. As “the subject of knowledge,” he writes, “the psyche “[is] a veiled form of existence not immediately accessible to consciousness” and, therefore, “all our knowledge must be incomplete…to a degree that we cannot determine.”[138]
Jung understood the unconscious as inherently contradictory. Consciousness is marked and defined by discrimination – the unconscious by indistinction and the coherence of opposites. Unconsciousness is also fundamentally ambivalent. It wants, on the one hand, “to flow into consciousness in order to reach the light,” and, on the other, “it continually thwarts itself because it would rather remain unconscious.”[139] In Answer to Job, he shows this ambivalence at work even in the archetype of God. Job shows God the way to a greater self-awareness – a way God will ultimately take in the Incarnation. But, at the same time, God recoils from learning anything from Job’s display of moral courage, falling back on his majesty and might, as he bullies Job into submission. It is this ambivalence that is left out of the orthodox account of the Incarnation, according to Jung. God is made human, but barely human, according to the tradition that has kept him carefully hedged by the prerogatives and attributes of divinity – from his immaculate birth to his being, in the traditional formula, “perfect God and perfect Man.” It is this pure light, without darkness, that has invoked, as its inevitable compensation, the Apocalypse that now surrounds us. Jung was transfixed and preoccupied by the prospect of nuclear Armageddon, but we can now enlarge the vision of the things “so unheard of and so staggering,” that Jung contemplates at the end of Answer to Job, to include the complete usurpation of the place of God by Homo Deus, as Israeli writer Yuval Noah Harari calls the artificially intelligent and genetically sovereign humanity now expanding on the horizon. John’s apocalypse, with its haunting violence and schadenfreude, was a harbinger, Jung says, but now we have the thing in full, and in a form which Jung thought would not go away without careful attention to the “universal religious nightmare” it expressed.
Answer to Job revealed the ambivalence within God that the Christian mainstream for the most part denied. The Incarnation was effective, Jung thought, in “preserv[ing] mankind from [the] loss of communion with God” that was predicted by his “moral defeat” at the hands of Job, but only for so long.[140] So long as Christianity was culturally fruitful, he says, it made sense to “ignore the dark side of the Apocalypse” so as not to endanger “the Christian achievement.”[141] But now, he goes on, “we have experienced things [that make] the question of whether such things are in any way reconcilable with the idea of a good God…burningly topical.” What must now be recognized, therefore, is what he calls “the inner instability of God.” This instability is not just manifest in God’s doubledealings with Job. It is nothing less, according to Jung, than “the prime cause of the creation” – creation being the moment at which something wholly unconscious, or purely potential, begins it journey towards consciousness. [142] The first books of the Bible remain drenched in this encompassing and still largely unconscious power. God appears almost wholly unconscious – surprised, for example, though ostensibly omniscient, to discover that “the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”[143] The people live, overwhelmed and, for the most part, unquestioning, within God’s fearsome glory. Job marks the moment when humanity begins to assume the burden of consciousness, and the element of reciprocity in the divine-human relationship begins to manifest. Job challenges the part of God that “would rather remain unconscious” and creates the “potential,” in Jung’s word, that begins, inexorably, to flow towards the Incarnation and its revelation of God as a man, who had “come into the world…become flesh and dwelt amongst us.”[144] God’s instability, however, persists and “gentle Jesus, meek and mild,” in the familiar words of Charles Wesley’s hymn, continues to be opposed by shadowy Satans and anti-Christs, who express the unacknowledged darkness of God.
The image of the all-good God vexed by a defective humanity which can only plead for exemption from the deserved divine wrath has now reached its terminal crisis, according to Jung. The divine wrath rages all around us, apocalyptic fears are easily translated into perverse political projects, and a new “loss of communion with God” threatens. The replacement Jung proposes is Eckhart’s image of God and man as an indivisible and mutually-informing whole in which “God can no more do without us than we do without him.” In the New Testament Jesus refers to himself most frequently by the epithet Son of Man.[145] In effect, says theologian Walter Wink, he calls himself The Human Being.[146] In him the essential divinity of man, and the essential humanness of God are revealed. This is not necessarily unorthodox. The fathers of the Church say the same. “The Son of God became man so that from a man you might learn how to become a god,” Clement of Alexandria wrote in the second century.[147] “The descent of God to the human level was at the same time the ascent of man to the divine level,” Pope Leo I stated in the fifth century.[148] When William Blake says, in “There is No Natural Religion,” one of the first of his illuminated books, that “God becomes as we are, that we may become as he is,” he sums up what was pretty well the unanimous voice of the early Church.[149] The tradition that reaches from Meister Eckhart and the Rhineland mystics into German Romanticism and idealist philosophy also stresses the continuity, reciprocity and proportionality of God and humanity. Recall Hegel’s statement, quoted earlier, that God’s knowledge of himself is a “self-consciousness in man.”
Jung is certainly an inheritor and exponent of these traditions and recognized himself a such. “I am definitely inside Christianity,” he wrote in a letter in 1956, “and, as far as I am capable of judging about myself, on the direct line of historical development.”[150] But he also added to these traditions, and in a way that sometimes strained his relationships with his Christian interlocutors. Answer to Job, for example, caused a rift between Jung and the Dominican priest, Victor White, with whom Jung had, up until then, enjoyed a long conversation.[151] The sticking point was Jung’s argument that evil is not merely a privatio boni, a deprivation of good, but something substantial and real. Victor White could not accept the idea that there could be evil in God.
But Jung is not saying that God is evil. He never claimed that he understood the entirety of what or who God is. He emphasized again and again that he was taking only tentative steps along a dark and unfamiliar road. (He might, like Paul, be “taken up into the third heaven,” or he might, as he said, “fall into a black hole.”[152]) The Enlightenment, he said, had held that “metaphysical beliefs are moonshine” and that reasonable humans ought to grow up and take charge of themselves. But the truth of the matter was rather that “the rationality of reason cannot be demonstrated” and “one never possesses a metaphysical belief, but is possessed by it.” “It is,” he went on, “the relative ‘numinosity’ of a given metaphysical statement that determines the affect it evokes.”[153] Numinosity was the word that Jung’s slightly older contemporary, theologian Rudolf Otto had coined, from the Latin numen, to convey the tremendous, sometimes overwhelming impression that can be left by encounters with the divine.[154] “Numen,” said Jung, “is objectively real as a psychic phenomena,” and this gives us “an empirical basis on which to proceed.”[155]
Proceeding empirically, in this sense, what Jung was saying is, not that God is evil, but that God is unconscious, a state in which opposites remain latent, interpenetrated and undifferentiated. There is “no abstraction in the unconscious,” Jung says, which means everything is what it is and nothing more – there are trees but no forest.”[156] Differentiation and discernment are manifestations of consciousness – “opposite poles of a moral judgment which, as such, originates in man,” Jung says.[157] This is why Jung can say that Job has been “lifted up” to a knowledge of God which God himself does not yet possess, and that Jahweh has suffered a “moral defeat in his dealing with Job.” God becomes conscious in mankind, but only reluctantly, for though he has created humanity “in his own image” for this purpose, he also feels the inertia of unconsciousness – its tendency to stay as it is. Consciousness is suffering. As the ability to see and bear the oppositions within things it can be nothing else. Job’s provocation – “I know that my redeemer lives and at last he will stand upon the earth” – can lead only to the Cross.[158] The evil in God must become conscious and visible.
“The language I speak must be ambiguous,” Jung once wrote, “[it] must have two meanings in order to do justice to the dual aspect of our psychic nature.”[159] This applies to Answer to Job and helps to explain why the book was such a challenge for Christians. Jung saw God and Self as, at the same time, distinct and indistinguishable; he saw God as an empirical reality within the psyche and as “the One who encompasses us on all sides”; he called himself a sober scientist and a mystical fool. He was seeking a new language for our religious experience. God, in the language I learned, and internalized, growing up, is what philosopher Richard Kearney calls the “omni-God” – omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent – complete, perfect, unmoving and so, by definition, in need of nothing.[160] The Church fathers whom I cited earlier recognized that in Christ God had graciously extended an invitation to “become as he is.” But they emphatically did not say with Jung that God needed “to become as we are” on the heels of a moral “defeat.” God, out of his inexhaustible goodness, may have condescended to humanity in the Incarnation, but he did not have to do so in order to fulfill something lacking in his being. There could, by definition, be no such lack. Jung was offering a new image, foreshadowed in Hegel and the mystics, but made shockingly explicit in Answer to Job, where God is said to be unstable, changeable, and even evil, in the qualified sense outlined above. For Jung God and humanity are a continuum along which there must inevitably be a point at which they are indistinguishable, even as they remain distinct.
According to Jung, the challenge for contemporary persons is to make God conscious by becoming conscious ourselves. His thought was that, in the coming age, people would live as Christ, rather than imagining themselves as “the sheep of his pasture” or the beneficiaries of his saving sacrifice. Alongside the image of the threefold Trinity – quicksilver, spiritualized and unstable – Christianity already possesses the image of the fourfold Cross. The cross, Jung wrote, retains “all that that has been lost through Christ’s extreme spiritualization.”[161] Its wood grows from the ground; its crossed arms express contradiction; its quadernity expresses stability and inclusion. But the cross must once again become a living symbol – not a sign of what has been, not a sign of dominion, not a sign of something done for us, but a sign of the nature of the reality in which we seek our way. Jung called this way individuation – a term by which he hoped to convey something dramatically different than individualization. As we have seen, Jung held that human beings are “in large measure…representatives…of a collective spirit whose years are counted in centuries.” His hypothesis of a collective and transpersonal unconscious containing a common stock of images and dispositions speaks of this aspect of our being – “the whole living past,” as cited above, carried “in the lower stories of the skyscraper of rational consciousness.”[162] So, though we may live as individuals, we still live the common life of our time, and of all times, enacting the “primordial patterns” which are our inheritance and destiny.[163] Individuation is the common life expressed in a completely individual form in which it becomes peculiarly itself. Christ as both an individual man and the universal Son of Man – the Human Being – is a first instance of individuation. Hans Urs von Balthasar, adapting a phrase from Hegel, calls him the “concrete universal” – a contradiction whose opposed aspects interpenetrate and condition one another: individuality coloured by its universality; universality give meaning by its individual expression.[164] For Jung, to live as Christ lived means pursuing individuation, rather than some predetermined pattern of Christian life.
Jungian analyst Marion Woodman has written: “Living by principles is not living your own life. It is easier to try to be better than you are than to be who you are.”[165] This exactly expresses what I think Jung means in saying that it’s easier to imitate Christ, than it is to live as Christ lived. To imitate, in Jung’s sense, is to borrow or draw on his goodness and merit, and copy its pattern. To live as Christ is to discover and unfold the universal in one’s individual situation. G.K. Chesterton, in an often-quoted passage from his book Orthodoxy, claims that the problem with the modern world is not that it’s bad, but rather that it is “too good,” or, in Marion Woodman’s paradoxical phrase, “better than it is.” Christianity’s pretended goodness now haunts it. The evils that shadowed this too-goodness have come to light in tales of residential schools, Magdalene laundries, and abusive priests. The stringent and self-righteous orthodoxies of the politically correct, or, more recently, woke, parody the Christian claim to secure possession of the last word and enact what Rene Girard once called a “super-Christianity.”[166] The Church seems, in Illich’ words, a “folkloric phantom” with most of its energies still focused on preservation rather than renovation.[167] Jung’s proposal invites a new stance.
One of the difficulties this proposal faces is an either/or way of thinking about the existence of God. God, to this way of thinking, must either be a fully competent external administrator, exercising his sway throughout the universe, or he must be “purely psychological,” which in everyday speech means a figment, a fantasy, a projection without external warrant. These alternatives are products of a deeply ingrained mode of thought – one that we revert to so easily and so unthinkingly that it might well be called our default mode.[168] It strictly divides the subjective from the objective, the res cogitans, as philosopher René Descartes called the thinking stuff inside us, from the res extensa, the material stuff that makes up the world. And this leads us to think that if God cannot be found in this external realm, then God does not exist as anything more than a consoling idea. Jung starts from the assumption that God “is objectively real as a psychic phenomenon.”[169] He does not pretend to know what is ultimately the case, since he holds, with Immanuel Kant – his teacher on this point – that that “we are absolutely incapable of saying how the world is constituted in itself.” [170] This limitation, he thinks, is permanent and absolute, while we live, since we have no standpoint outside the psyche and, therefore, no knowledge that is not mediated by the very thing about which we are seeking knowledge in the first place. He recognizes and respects the fact that, for some, faith can provide “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” but such disclosures of faith can never be decisive for others who don’t share them, and, lacking this “charism” himself, as well as feeling that most of his contemporaries were in the same case, he proceeds phenomenologically, or according to the phenomena we experience.[171]
What Jung calls an empirical, or sometimes, a phenomenological posture is a form of epistemic humility. Those who lack faith or dogma as sure guides, he thought, must proceed hesitantly but at the same time boldly, since the situation we are in as a people, in effect, between religions is desperate. On the one hand, human beings cannot do without a vitalizing dialogue with God. On the other, religions tend to codify, routinize and institutionalize the experience of God and eventually grow defensive and ossified, as their formulas become outmoded and lose their pertinence. Finally, there is an “unendurable rift between our outer situation and our ideas, now become antiquated.”[172] Jung believed this to be most people’s situation during the last years of his life, and I believe it to be our situation, a fortiori, today. To take just the most obvious example: technology renders humanity more “god-like” by the day, but the God whose properties are being appropriated remains unconscious in the discourse of the techno-utopians who operate the demonic parody of Christianity in which we currently live. Jung tackles this situation head-on and insists that the only way out lies in revising the religious framework of which this self-deification is an unacknowledged expression. This is also Illich’s position, and I would now like to undertake an explicit comparison of their views. But, before I do, let me first try to sum up Jung’s main points as I understand them:
§ Religion is an inescapable human destiny. If we don’t have one, we’ll have another, and an acknowledged religion is better than an unacknowledged one.
§ God and humanity are indissoluble, interpenetrated and mutually informing. No origin or priority can be assigned. The theist view that an already perfect and self-sufficient God unaccountably decides to give himself a big headache by creating humanity, and its mirror, the atheist view that humanity creates God, are both equally mistaken. In Psychological Types, Jung approvingly quotes Eckhart: “By being created, the soul created God, for he did not exist until the soul was made.”[173]
§ God seeks consciousness in humanity – humanity seeks access to a wisdom that surpasses our mental horizon in God.
§ God is a complex of opposites – dark as much as light, evil as much as good, an indifferent power more than a benign intelligence - because in the unconscious ground in which God dwells opposites remain undifferentiated.
§ The all-good God and his all-good Son are archetypes that have been “hopelessly split into two irreconcilable halves, leading ultimately to a metaphysical dualism – the final separation of the Kingdom of Heaven from the fiery world of the damned.”[174]
So long as this split persists we will continue to encounter the alienated evil outside ourselves – as the devil, the enemy, the other.
§ The elements estranged by Christian tradition – the feminine, the material, the satanic will have to be re-integrated, and mutable, unsteady figures like the Trinity replaced by more stable fourfold images.
§ Christianity “will not leave us,” even when we think we have left it, because it saturates our language, our imagery, our habits of thoughts, and, for Jung, our unconscious memory. Nor should we try to leave it, since it has brought us part way to where we ought to be going: a fuller consciousness of what Blake calls “the human form divine.”[175] Retaining Christianity will require that it be made “roomier” and this will involve the abandonment of a certain anxiety about inherited institutional forms and practices.
I come now to the comparison of Jung’s and Illich’s positions, and to the attempt to understand both how they support each other and how they correct and supplement one another. But let me start with their differences, since these are obvious and unavoidable. Jung called himself a psychologist, while Illich often scorned psychology, saying at one point that “the mysterious historicity” of each person is closed to those who are “infected by psychology.”[176] Jung, though he found himself to be still inescapably “inside” Christianity in his later years, was a man, by his own account, without faith or church affiliation who proposed wholesale changes to Christian orthodoxy in order to bring it into conformity with “psychological necessity.” Illich was an orthodox Christian, who portrayed his theology as “radically traditional” and claimed that he appeared as an innovator within the Church only because he dared to “spell…out the social consequences” of his orthodoxy.[177] On top of that Jung has been a major source of inspiration for neo-pagan and New Age movements whose members, being “spiritual not religious,” often treat Christianity as a dogmatic relic of an earlier time.[178] Among 20th century thinkers who sought a radical reorientation of modern society and warned that without such a change humanity would be lost to itself, they would seem to occupy opposite ends of the spectrum – Illich the radically orthodox anti-modernist, Jung the spiritual adventurer trying to fish a new religion out of his own inner depths.
But appearances, and reputations, can be deceptive. In the first place, they are both apocalyptic thinkers, albeit reluctant ones – Illich insisting, until quite late in life that he had “always abstained from making apocalyptic statements or interpreting the apocalypse,” Jung portraying his quarrel with God in Answer to Job as a destiny he had been postponing for forty years.[179] By apocalyptic thinking, I mean a thinking of history on the terms proposed by Jesus when he says that “there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be…brought out into the open.”[180] According to this view, the appearance of God in the flesh poses a choice and inaugurates a period, however prolonged, of decision. Time will no longer cycle aimlessly but will acquire a direction and a tendency – towards a final revelation. People will be set free from the tight bonds of religion and the abject fear of implacable gods, but this will demand that they finally answer for their freedom – by accepting God’s Word, or by declaring an independence and self-sufficiency that will at last destroy them. Illich and Jung, however, have different versions of this apocalyptic dilemma. Illich held that the “the attempts of the churches to institutionalize, legitimize and manage Christian vocation” had finally produced an institutional architecture so comprehensive and so suffocating that humanity now stands on the brink of what he names variously as “an artificial creation,” “a total crisis,” and “a planned and engineered hell.”[181] Jung’s apprehension that “the thread by which our fate hangs is wearing thin” rested on his claim that a moribund and mistaken idea of God had produced a “metaphysical dualism” which humanity now acts out as a series of potentially catastrophic conflicts, notably the nuclear standoff that terrified the last years of his life and produced visions of a ruined world.[182] These are by no means the same idea, but they have in common the intuition that a misunderstanding and misappropriation of Christianity lies at the root of what ails our world. Both Jung and Illich say that the contemporary world can only be brought back into alignment with God and nature by a radical rethinking of its religious traditions and a critical return to their source.
Jung and Illich also have in common the idea of anti-Christ, although again in apparently different forms. Jung says anti-Christ is a “psychological necessity” arising from the one-sided claim that God, as revealed in Christ, is a being “in whom there is no darkness at all.” Illich is harder to pin down because his remarks are sketchy, and it’s not always possible to know whether he is speaking of what he thinks is the case or only of what he thinks the apostle Paul and the early Church believed. Since Illich clearly deplored the fact that the “mystery [of evil] disappeared from the Church’s teaching” once the Church became an established institution, and since he intimated that the Church ought to have “centre[d] faith on this mystery,” I’m going to assume that Illich himself accepted what Paul [or whoever it was] wrote to the Thessalonians. Illich’s view is then as follows: with the Incarnation, a “final evil” which will sooner or later bring the world to an end takes up residence in the Church, and, by implication, in those modern institutions that will later be stamped from the Church’s mold. This evil is being restrained – by what agency the author of the letter doesn’t say – but, at last, the “man of sin,” or “the man of lawlessness,” or “the son of perdition” – in short, the anti-Christ – will be revealed and then “the Lord Jesus will destroy him by the breath of his mouth.”[183] Illich further states that this moment is now upon us – “the mysterium iniquitatis,” he says, “has been hatching” and we “might [now] be quite close to the end of the world.”[184]
How different are these views? Jung asserts, axiomatically, that archetypes are inherently ambivalent, or bipolar. So long as they are unconscious, the opposites which are their energetic principle remain enfolded within them. When they emerge into consciousness, their dual character necessarily expresses itself. Should this duality be denied, and one side only emphasized, a compensation will necessarily occur. The radiant Christ will invoke a shadowy Satan; the attempt to be “better than we are” will make us worse than we are; the kingdom of Christ, Christendom, will be succeeded by a Luciferian modernity in which technology and economy are king. Illich does not think in these terms, certainly, but he does assert, in his own way, that anti-Christ is born with Christ, and he comes very close to saying that this is an inevitable and inherent part of the Incarnation. Illich presents the Gospel as uniquely liable to corruption – a corruption which will mirror point for point the thing it corrupts. The world’s “mysterious vocation to glory” will become a “demonic night”; love will acquire the force of law through the “criminalization of sin”; the visibility of the “invisible God” in Christ will license the uncontrolled flood of images in which our world is now drowning, and so on.[185] Illich does not present this as inevitable, but he does present it as pretty inexorable. He speaks of “flipping,” of “perversion,” of “noon” and “sunset” – in the case of the doctrine of contingency – of turning “inside out” and “upside down.”[186] This may not be enantiodromia, the term Jung borrows from Heraclitus to signify “the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time,” but I think it’s quite close.[187]
I have argued, at length, in my Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey that Illich’s work is pervaded, and, in a way, epitomized, by the idea of complementarity, which appears in various guises: the “multiple balances” of Tools for Conviviality, the opposing and incompatible social domains he imagines in Shadow Work when he distinguishes the “economic from [the] vernacular,” the “flipping” which the Gospel undergoes by its subjection to institutional imperatives.[188] Complementarity is a general word, and these instances are not all the same. Contradiction differs from complement; balance and inversion, nemesis and reversal are each distinct. But all reflect an underlying idea of some necessary principle of opposition within the things of world – a principle that must be honoured, if things are to stand up and hold together, and sustained, when opposites fall into conflict. And this is where I see Illich and Jung converging.
The same principle informs lllich’s thinking about Christianity. A story he told will illustrate:
When I left New York and went to Puerto Rico, I went there…as vice-rector of a Catholic university. But I knew that I couldn’t possibly engage in an educational, administrative job there without considering it primarily as a political activity. So I refused to preside over a Christian community as a priest. For my own purposes and because I liked to do it, I bought a little hut for twenty dollars in a fishing village, Playa Cortada, and I said Sunday mass for them. It was a little village of poor fishermen who earned most of their money working in a sugarcane factory for a couple of months a year. That was a good experience, but the moment I went to Puerto Rico I got out of any kind of official relationship to a bishop for whom I would work in the pastoral care of his people. I didn’t want to get mixed up in a conflict between the priestly office of making the otherworldly unity and brotherhood of the liturgy real and my personal stance as a politician. There was no danger of getting the people of Playa Cortada mixed up in my proposal to transfer university budgets back to the primary educational system.[189]
The distinction Illich draws here between politics and the church as the site of an “otherworldly unity” is made again and again in his work. It’s the distinction between the Church as She and It – between “the pearl in the net,” or “the divine bud that will flower in eternity,” and the sociological object that pursues its interest and advantage in the same blind and determined way as any other social institution.[190] It’s why Illich kept his distance from “liberation theology,” even though he convened the meetings at which it began, and why he was so harsh to the Maryknoll missionaries, Tom and Marjory Melville, when they sought refuge at CIDOC after being expelled from Guatemala for their alleged political activities there.[191] He believed that politics and the Gospel would never mix. Heaven and earth, the kingdom and the world were always carefully distinguished, so carefully that I have sometime thought that the best motto to sum up Illich’s thought would be, “Know the difference.” This is the “awareness” that is alluded to in the title of his first published collection, Celebration of Awareness – the awareness that heaven is like “the reflection of trees on water,” in Wendell Berry’s words – it can inspire us and lead us, but we cannot hold or keep it.[192] When we try, the criminalization of sin, the legalization of love, and the administration of salvation are the results.
Illich’s emphasis on humour in his stance towards both the Church and the Gospel is a further example of the spirit of contradiction in his work. Humour is generally an acknowledgement and a celebration of anomaly, reversal, irregularity, paradox or some other evidence that, as the saying goes, you can’t win. Illich writes that “what the Church contributes through evangelization is like the laughter in the joke. Two hear the same story, one gets the point.”[193] He recalled late in life that “when I had to prepare homilies, I tried to read the Sunday Gospel until, at a certain moment, I started laughing and then I said to myself: “Now I understand!”[194] He said, of Jesus, that his parable are “in the best way, joke[s]” and that his “only economics are jokes.”[195] When he presided over the Center for Intercultural Formation (CIF), training about-to-be missionaries in Cuernavaca, Mexico, he told an interviewer from a Jesuit magazine that he believed that “what the Lord came to teach us [is] how to play” and that, accordingly, the purpose of his center was to introduce these aspirants “to the ‘ludicrous’ [and] ‘playful aspects of the Gospel [and] to the fact that we don’t understand any Gospel story unless at the end of it we can smile a smile which comes up from our stomach, from the depths of our being.” [196] All these remarks refer, one way or another, to the ambiguity of truth. Illich’s claim that Jesus’ “economics are jokes,” for example, refers to Jesus’ being asked, by those seeking to “entangle him,” whether “it is lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?”[197] His answer – “Render…unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s” – is a masterpiece of witty equivocation. It’s no answer, because there is no answer: everything belongs to Caesar on the one hand, and everything to God, on the other. “Those who tell do not know, those who know do not tell,” says Lao Tzu.[198] Because the truth is always internally contradictory, it cannot be directly seized and codified but must be apprehended as a sense or a feeling, an aroma or a punch-line. The idea is everywhere in Illich from the “dysymmetric complementarity of gender” to the synthesizing “common sense” that Illich claims was “washed out” of people’s cultural repertoire by modern science.[199] Always the truth evades the simplifying gaze and appears only to “double vision.”[200]
During the years of his formal priesthood, Illich was a tireless advocate of the “new Church” that he felt must sooner or later replace the “clerical and irrelevant Church” that he was then confronting.[201] He felt that this new form could only be “trustingly search[ed] for,” not planned or imposed, but he did have a good deal to say about its character.[202] One of the features that he emphasized was that it must be utterly novel and utterly traditional at the same time – another instance of the interplay and interdependence of opposites in his thought that I’m trying demonstrate. He cherished the traditions of the Church – in one of his essays he recalls how as a young chorister he “threw ashes on his head” if he “mispronounced a word or sang a false note”[203] – but he also called for new forms of celebration. The Church, he said, had seen itself during its history in the light of many different metaphors and models – from the simple memorial meal of the first Christians, to the splendid pomp of a Byzantine court, and on to a modern service bureaucracy – and now it was time to reimagine it.[204] The Church must certainly make itself visible in some form, he argued, but it need not be in imitation “of some political or organizational structure.”[205]
Illich’s writings were occasional – tailored for a particular audience or historical moment, taken up with some particular question or circumstance. I see this as an expression of humility, though the word might mislead and is certainly not meant to evoke any lack of confidence or self-esteem. Illich resisted whatever impulse he might have had – and perhaps there was none – to create a system, a school, or even a deliberately consistent philosophy or theology. He did not “thematize” his concerns, if you’ll pardon this rather academic word. There is consequently no place in his work that he announces himself as an exponent of complementarity. Nevertheless, I think this term, if it is taken to include opposition and contradiction as well as more harmonious and synergistic forms of difference, names Illich’s characteristic idea. It is also a point of convergence with Carl Jung. Both men insist, it seems to me, on the essential ambiguity and doubleness of all worldly things, including even our apprehension of God. Both draw attention to the threatening shadows cast by monisms of all kinds – whether it be an unclouded Incarnation, an all-absorbing Christianity, or an all-seeing science. And both finally apprehend an approaching “end of the world,” should our religion not be made “roomier.”
Carl Jung has a mixed reputation, and there are elements in Jung’s writings, especially his youthful writings, that clash with contemporary sensibilities. Claims that he was an anti-Semite and quasi-Nazi have no merit in my view, but he did hold that all cohesive and long-standing peoples have their own distinct psyches, as well as sharing in the collective psyche, and this led him to write controversially, for example, about “Jewish psychology.” Likewise he argued that National Socialism was an atavistic expression of German psychology. And he did sometimes expound a kind of “biologism” in which religious ideas are accounted in the language of instinct, adaptation, evolution etc. – a language which I’m sure Illich would have found appalling, as did Martin Buber when he wrote of Jung’s “mystically deifying the instincts.”[206] Philosopher Paul Bishop, a sympathetic but judicious critic of Jung, finds his thinking to be “bedeviled” by conflicting discourses – one which sees time as oriented and apocalyptic, another which sees it as cyclical and recurrent.[207] This is astute, I think, and I would add to it that I also find that Jung sometimes muddles his “scientific” stance, in which religion is treated functionally and instrumentally, with more philosophical and theological registers. It is also the case that Jung has deep roots in Goethe and in German Romantic Naturphilosophie – a point I haven’t time to go into here, but which is undoubtedly another important strand in his thought.[208] All these considerations bear on the various inherited and adapted languages Jung deploys, and, as with all of us, which sometimes deploy him. Add to that a life of constant learning; a sincere, though sometimes also strategic, attempt to gain a hearing and a respectable perch by casting himself as a “scientist;” and the genuine novelty of what he was attempting – a non-reductive, philosophically-oriented psychology that could rescue and renovate tradition without betraying it. All these require that Jung be read as a pilgrim soul, as a thinker in process, and as a writer trying to forge a language as ambiguous as his subject, not as an oracle. “Thank God I am Jung, and not a Jungian,” his associate Barbara Hannah once heard him remark.[209]
I believe that Jung and Illich both belong to a group of clairvoyant thinkers who lived, taught and wrote in the 20th century. To their names I would add, among others, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s, and Owen Barfield’s. This list reflects my experience and inspiration, I know; other might construct quite a different constellation. None of the thinkers I have mentioned knew one another, but I believe they were all in some way prophets. Since I have already defied Illich’s proscription on contemporary talk of prophecy, I will continue to use the word, as he himself formerly did. In a passage in which he commends George Orwell as a prophet, Illich defines this vocation as the ability to “see clearly into the present.”[210] It’s a good definition, I think, because it directs attention to the way in which the thinkers I’m talking about experienced their own time – as a time of ending. Rosenstock-Huessy at the catastrophic Battle of Verdun in the First World War realized that his “whole world, organized in church, state, universities, the ‘Western World’ that is, [had] collapsed.”[211] Young Ivan Illich felt the death of old Europe in his bones, when Hitler’s armies invaded Austria in 1938, and he realized he would never again have a home but only a “tent.”[212] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in Tegel prison in Berlin before his execution in 1945, began to wonder whether the “Western,” and “religious” form of Christianity might be at its end and about to be succeed by some still unknown “religionless” version.[213] Barfield experienced modernity’s meaningless in the form of a deep depression until poetry taught him that humanity’s unconscious “original participation” in Nature could revive from its modern detour through “single vision” by a conscious reawakening to the power of language.[214] Jung felt the terror of nuclear war – he told Marie Louise von Franz just before he died of a vision in which “enormous stretches of the earth [were] devastated” – and felt that catastrophe could be avoided only if “the schism in the human heart” were healed.”[215] In all these cases the exhaustion of modernity was vividly experienced, and a new age prophesied, not as a prediction or plan, but as a necessity rooted, as Illich says, in a vision of the present. Jung, faithless but acutely aware that the only replacement for religion is another religion, and that “the destruction of the God-image is followed by the annulment of the human personality,” realized that humanity must regain its soul or lose its way entirely.[216] He presented himself quite explicitly as physician to a wounded world and a conflicted religion.[217]
Illich was more circumspect, and only in the last period of his life did he begin to speak openly about his view of the modern West as a perverted Christianity. During the period in which he promoted “institutional revolution,” and advanced the ideas for which he is still best known, he hoped that humanity would find a new “ethical foundation,” as he puts it in Limits to Medicine, the final version of Medical Nemesis. He epitomized this new ethics in the maxim: “Act so that the effect of your action is compatible with the permanence of genuine human life.” But he then asked himself a momentous question: “Is it possible, without restoring the category of the sacred, to attain the ethics that alone would enable mankind to accept the rigorous discipline of this new imperative?” His answer, tentatively, was yes. “Faith,” he said, “cannot be the foundation for an ethical imperative because faith is either there or not there” – that is to say: it’s in God’s gift, not ours – and therefore only a “rational agreement” will serve. He recognized that, up to the present, “only the awe of the sacred” had been able to limit human ambition, but now, he said, industrial society had eroded taboo and supplied such novel forms of “miracle and wonder” that the “religious” solution was no longer available. Nor, he continued, was it desirable, since the likely result would be an ersatz “ecological religion.” Consequently, only a political “agreement about basic values and…procedural rules” would avail.[218]
Illich never, to my knowledge, revisited this argument – except, in a general way, when he said that his arguments in the 1970’s about politically-determined limits to tools had been based on assumptions about the nature of tools and the nature of society that no longer obtained after the 1980’s.[219] But, neither did he retract the prediction that, if politically-determined limits to tools were not instituted, the result would be “a gruesome apocalypse,” complete imprisonment in technology, a world in which all bridges to the past have been broken etc.[220] So, did Illich perhaps hope that his analysis of modernity as corrupted Christianity opened a door to a new reception of the Gospel and a recovery of what we have lost or betrayed? He never said so explicitly, but that is certainly my hope. “Faith in the incarnate word sacrificed on the cross is not a religion,” Illich once said, and “cannot be analyzed within the concepts of religious science.”[221] One can add, I think, though the point is more associated with René Girard than Illich, that Christianity also de-mystifies the sacred, so a renewed openness to the actual import of the Incarnation would not necessarily be the revival of “the awe of the sacred” in the form of “a new ecological religion” about which Illich felt such misgivings. If Illich is right, the Gospel has already been “preached to all nations,” and largely accepted by them, in the upside-down form of industrial and post-industrial modernity. Revision of this perverse Gospel now seems the only possibility.
