AMB_eBook_v2.2 - Bill Renwick
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Exploring Consciousness
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William W. R
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Elton A. Hall
N O E T I C P R E S S
AWAKENING TO THE
MYSTERY OF BEING
EXPLORING CONSCIOUSNESS AT THE NEXUS OF
PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, AND PSYCHOLOGY
AWAKENING TO THE
MYSTERY OF BEING
EXPLORING CONSCIOUSNESS AT THE NEXUS OF
PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, AND PSYCHOLOGY
WILLIAM WALTER RENWICK
ELTON ARTHUR HALL
NOETIC PRESS
NORFOLK, VA
Awakening to the Mystery of Being
Exploring Consciousness at the Nexus of
Philosophy, Religion, and Psychology
by William Walter Renwick
and
Elton Arthur Hall
Copyright © 2025 by Noetic Press, an imprint of
Theosophy Trust Books
Library of Congress Control Number: 2025900386
ISBN-13: 978-1-955958-07-3
Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data
(Prepared by Cassidy Cataloguing Services, Inc.)
Names: Renwick, William Walter, author. | Hall, Elton A, author.
Title: Awakening to the mystery of being : exploring consciousness at the nexus of philosophy, religion, and psychology / William Walter Renwick, Elton Arthur Hall.
Description: Norfolk, VA : Noetic Press, an imprint of Theosophy Trust Books, [2025] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN: 978-1-955958-07-3 | LCCN: 2025900386
Subjects: LCSH: Consciousness--Religious aspects--Christianity. |
Presence of God. | Ontology. | Meaning (Philosophy)--Religious aspects--Christianity. | Theology. | Christian life.
formation. | LCGFT: Essays.
Classification: LCC: BS645 .R46 2025 | DD`C: 248--dc23
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means - graphic, electronic, or mechanical - including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Noetic Press is an imprint of Theosophy Trust Books. Noetic Press books may be ordered through Amazon.com and other retail outlets, or by visiting: https://theosophytrust.org/Noetic_Press.htm
Published and printed in the United States of America.
Cover design: Kirk Gradin; photo: Messier 81, Spitzer Space Telescope; NASA/JPL-CalTech.
Dedications
For Kathy
Astrum vitae meae, sine qua non
For Mary
Friend and sweetheart, gone too soon.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................. 1
PROLOGUE .............................................................................................................................. 3
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS ............................................................................................... 6
THE EXISTENTIAL CRISIS OF OUR AGE ........................................................................ 22
THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND PRIMORDIAL WISDOM ............................................. 39
PART I: GREEK PHILOSOPHY AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT .................................. 43
EARLY GREEK AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING ............................. 45
THE PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHERS ...................................................................... 58
PLATO, HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHY, AND THE NEOPLATONISTS ............... 78
PHILOSOPHY OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT ............................................................ 94
PART II: CHRISTIANITY, IDEALISM, AND ROMANTICISM ................................... 109
EARLY CHRISTIANITY’S ENCOUNTER WITH PAGAN PHILOSOPHY ........ 111
PHILOSOPHY OF IDEALISM .................................................................................... 124
PHILOSOPHY OF ROMANTICISM .......................................................................... 141
PART III: THE MODERN WORLD IN TRANSITION ................................................... 155
THE COMING TRANSFORMATION OF WESTERN CULTURE ........................ 157
THE RISE AND FALL OF CIVILIZATIONS ............................................................ 168
PART IV: CONSCIOUSNESS AND TRANSCENDENCE ............................................. 171
PROTOMENTAL FOUNDATION OF THE COSMOS ........................................... 173
THE QUANTUM UNIVERSE ..................................................................................... 193
BEING AND THE NUMINOUS ................................................................................. 202
PART V: PAUL TILLICH AND CARL JUNG ................................................................. 223
INTRODUCTION TO PAUL TILLICH AND CARL JUNG ................................... 225
PAUL TILLICH’S CONFLICTED LIFE ..................................................................... 235
PAUL TILLICH AND THE GROUND OF BEING .................................................. 253
C. G. JUNG’S PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION .......................................................... 272
DARKNESS, LIGHT, AND SOUL .............................................................................. 288
INSTINCTS, ARCHETYPES, AND THE SELF ......................................................... 303
JUNG’S PSYCHOLOGY IN DIALOGUE WITH THE EAST .................................. 318
THE RED BOOK: UNION OF SPIRIT AND MATTER ........................................... 325
PART VI: STORMY TRANSITION TO A NEW AGE .................................................... 345
THE FOURTH METAMORPHOSIS OF THE GODS ............................................... 347
DARK HERALD OF THE FOURTH METAMORPHOSIS ..................................... 352
JUNG AND THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL ..................................... 359
JUNG’S INSIGHTFUL ANSWER TO JOB................................................................. 372
JOHN’S VISIONARY BOOK OF REVELATION ..................................................... 383
DAWN OF A NEW AGE ............................................................................................. 394
EPILOGUE ............................................................................................................................ 408
BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................................. 409
ONLINE SOURCES ............................................................................................................. 426
INDEX ................................................................................................................................... 429
About the Authors ............................................................................................................... 443
Acknowledgements
Although neither author is a dyed-in-the-wool adherent of either Jung’s psychology or Tillich’s theology, both find in their writings vital insights into the present religious and cultural malaise and the human condition. Well over a decade ago, presentations and discussions conducted at meetings of the Idaho Friends of Jung in Boise sparked our interest in exploring Jung’s religious thinking. Richard Tarnas, whose widely acclaimed The Passion of the Western Mind has been used in universities across the country, later published Cosmos and Psyche, a Jungian inspired consideration of the relation between the universe and human affairs. On three occasions, Tarnas took time from his busy lecture schedule and set aside his normal fees to visit this small but enthusiastic group. His presentations were received with great appreciation, and the authors are grateful for his willingness to share his profound insights with a lay audience. One author—Bill Renwick—wrote a dissertation under Tarnas’ direction on numinosity and the role of the opposites in Jung’s psychology. The other author—
Elton Hall—produced an honors thesis on Paul Tillich. Both works inspired them to broaden their thoughts on institutional religion, especially Christianity, and the impact Jung has had on religion.
Many people indirectly contributed to this book. Rev. Elizabeth Greene, for a quarter of a century the minister at the Boise Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, was especially helpful by reviewing early drafts of various chapters, always demanding clarity in our thinking. She spent some months meeting with the authors on a regular basis to study Jung’s Red Book. Cheryl Haas, our editor, immensely improved the book’s language and organization. George Patterson read an early draft and lent his support to our efforts. John Powers, editor of Theosophy Trust, richly deserves our special thanks for his efforts to see the book through to print, a complex process. Kirk Gradin brought his design skills to creating the cover.
The opinions expressed in this work are those of the authors alone, as are any errors that might be found in it.
This book is dedicated to the memory of Mary Austin Crofts who was a close friend and sweetheart of Bill. She died of a heart attack and stroke on March 15, 2023. She had been stricken ill three weeks earlier with covid. Mary was a beautiful, talented woman and a highly respected community leader and passionate environmentalist who was responsible for preserving and enhancing the city of Sun Valley, Idaho and its wild surroundings.
2 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
Before Bill met Mary, she was married to a man named Kim, who she always described as the love of her life. She had always wanted to live in a tropical environment, close to the ocean, so in 2004 they set off together to build a new home in Panama. There they found a magnificent but remote piece of property upon which they built a beautiful home overlooking the Pacific. The third story of their new home reached high into the forest canopy, from where they could watch parrots, cockatoos, and other exotic birds fly about in the treetops.
But their adventure in paradise was violently and brutally ended when Kim was murdered by drug dealers who entered their house in the middle of the night.
Apparently, they had mistaken their house for another one on the other side of the island. He died in her arms before help arrived.
Bill met Mary several years after Kim had died. She never forgot Kim, however. She loved him dearly up to the moment she died.
After the stoke she survived for several days in the hospital. Bill visited her every day and though she was unconscious the last days of her life, he talked to her while stroking her hair. On the last day, he told her it was time for her to spread her wings and ascend into the arms of Kim who was waiting for her. Once again, he told her that he loved her, squeezed her hand one last time and left. On the way home he got a call saying that she died shortly after he had left the hospital. Apparently, she heard him say it was time.
The book is also dedicated to Katherine May (Lennard) Hall, Elton’s wife for more than sixty years. A brilliant student of history, she has never wavered from supporting her husband throughout his career, including sacrificing a scholarship to a major university to follow him in his studies. Though legally blind from birth, she taught in an elementary school, engaged in public speaking, worked in a bakery, and was sought out in various retail stores for her fashion sense. She is an avid reader whose thinking is invariably worth paying attention to. Without her warmth, support, and challenging insights, Elton’s contribution to this volume would have been impossible.
Prologue
Existence, the preposterous miracle of existence! To whom has the world of opening day never come as an unbelievable sight? And to whom have the stars overhead and the hand and voice nearby never appeared as unutterably wonderful, totally beyond understanding? I know no great thinker of any land or era who does not regard existence as the mystery of all mysteries.
John Archibald Wheeler1
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, Santayana declared, and the metaphor is apt. The mind that seeks the deepest intellectual fulfillment does not give itself up to every passing idea. Yet what is sometimes forgotten is the larger purpose of such a virtue. For in the end, chastity is something one preserves not for its own sake, which would be barren, but rather so that one may be fully ready for the moment of surrender to the beloved, the suitor whose aim is true.
Richard Tarnas 2
Paul Tillich, a preeminent twentieth century theologian, was invited to visit and lecture at Occidental College in 1963 on his way to take up his University Professorship at the University of California, Santa Barbara.3 Although his lectures, delivered in a heavily German-accented English, were difficult to follow, his message was greatly appreciated. Throughout his visit, he stressed the need to liberate Christian thought from fundamentalism and literalism, using rigorous reasoning and emphasizing the importance of transcendent experience in religious life.
After his lectures, Tillich was driven from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara by Franklyn D. Josselyn (1914-2010), then the chaplain of the college. The route through the San Fernando Valley drops into the Oxnard plain and closely follows the ocean from Ventura to Santa Barbara. This was the old Highway 101, later replaced by the freeway a few yards away. The old four-lane road is so close to the shoreline in places that one can step out of a car, scramble across a few rocks, and come to stand silently on the narrow beach where the waves can be sometimes gentle, sometimes quite violent.
1 John Archibald Wheeler, At Home in the Universe, 184.
2 Tarnas, Richard. Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, xiii.
3 The University Professorship was given to well-known scholars by the University, a short-term appointment that allowed students and faculty interaction with prominent thinkers of the day.
4 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
As Josselyn and Tillich were driving along this stretch of road with its magnificent vista of the Pacific, the sun was setting, and the sky had turned those autumnal colors that sunsets offer to the sea. Suddenly, Tillich demanded that the car stop on the spot.
He got out, crossed the road, clambered down to the beach, and walked out into the waves until the water was rising and falling between his knees and his hips. His face was alight with joy. It was a sacred moment. He raised his arms in reverence and watched the sun set in all its magnificence. As twilight descended, he stepped lightly across the darkening sands, his suit dripping with saltwater, and climbed back into the car.
Josselyn told this story to Elton Hall, one of the authors of this book, a few days after it happened. The story left a deep impression on Elton, then a college student majoring in philosophy. He immediately realized that here was a man worthy of great respect, a renown Protestant theologian and rigorous thinker who clearly cherished reason and rational discourse, standing in the cold waters of the ocean overwhelmed by the beauty that he beheld. His Systematic Theology had been mostly completed, and, as his public lectures showed, Tillich had not stopped thinking and rethinking his views on Christianity and, increasingly, on the religious traditions of the world. Yet here he had stood in the lapping waves of the Pacific, entranced by the water and the setting sun.
It was almost as if he were an ancient Egyptian priest watching Atum set in the western sky to begin his night journey to battle the chaotic forces of darkness in anticipation of his victorious rise in the east the next morning.4
Tillich had argued for many years that experiences of the Holy are essential for the growth and transformation of the individual. But critical reasoning was equally important to him for successfully integrating these shattering epiphanies into one’s life.
And here, in this brief time between Ventura and Santa Barbara, he illustrated his deepest convictions in his own response to the scene. Josselyn reported that when he got back into the car, neither said anything of the event, proceeding in silence for the remainder of the trip.
In a nutshell, this story summarizes the overarching theme of this book, which, like Tillich, attempts to hold the tension between the experience of the sacred and the necessary rational thinking required to make real use of it in one’s life and in relation to the world. In our current age, liberal ideals appeal to the rational mind while 4 The Egyptians believed that Atum, the sun disc, and its god, Ra, sank in the west to undergo a night journey “under” the earth in a solar bark and fought the dark forces of chaos in order to maintain the order of the universe. Each dawn Atum’s rising proved the success of the nocturnal struggle—for another day.
conservative values affirm community traditions.5 The tension between these opposite positions has stretched society to the breaking point today. As a result, we are now experiencing an existential crisis that is due, in part, to the loss of religious values that have for centuries inspired the pursuit of wisdom. Unfortunately, in the hyper-rational world of today, these spiritual values have lost their power to nourish the weary soul.
But as Christians, Buddhists, and many others have long taught, it is by opening to the Divine center within, and the struggle to understand and integrate it into life, that leads to wholeness and a loving, compassionate relation to the world and every person in it.
5 Conservative politics today, unfortunately, have drifted far from their traditional goal of supporting community values.
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
It is patent that the condition into which we have now come is not simply an accident, a run of bad luck which a little forethought here, a little cleverness there, might have avoided. Our problem is that we are caught up in a civilization having immense drive but no direction, marvellous [sic.] capacity to get there but no idea where it is going.
P.W. Martin6
Imagine experiencing Earth’s beauty for the first time—its birds, fish, mountains, and waterfalls. Imagine, too, the vastness of Earth’s home, the universe, with its numerous galaxies, stars, and planets. Surrounded by such magnificence, we can ask ourselves a simple question: Can we find a way to sink deeply into these immensities? And if we can, will this enable humans to participate in the flourishing of life?
Brian Thomas Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker7
This book undertakes an ontological exploration of Being as it relates to Paul Tillich’s theology and Carl Jung’s psychology of religion. Ontology is that branch of metaphysics that concerns itself with the nature of Being, the fundamental ground of existence. In addition to examining this inscrutable mystery, the book also examines religion—especially Christianity, though not exclusively—from a perspective of religious naturalism and the evolution of the human spirit. Such a perspective not only looks to the natural world for inspiration and meaning but also searches within for spiritual depth and guidance, much like Buddhism does. 8 As we are just now discovering, the inner world is considerably more expansive than we, in the West, have typically perceived it to be. The contemporary religious studies scholar Jeffrey J. Kripal concurs with this assessment, enlarging the definition of both nature and the inner world to include a whole range of extraordinary experiences—psychic, transcendent, numinous—and, by inference, Being, the ultimate ground of all possible human 6 P.W. Martin, Experiment in Depth: A Study of the Work of Jung, Eliot and Toynbee, 14.
7 Swimme, Brian Thomas and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe, 1. Brian Swimme received his Ph.D. from the Department of Mathematics at the University of Oregon in 1978 for work in gravitational dynamics. He is currently teaching at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Mary Evelyn Tucker is senior lecturer and research scholar at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and the Yale Divinity School.
8 Buddhism does not accept the idea that there is a creator god, though it accepts that there are “gods” in nature, but they are part of the evolving cosmos.
experience.9 The numinous, as we are using the term throughout the book, refers to those profound spiritual experiences, like deeply felt love and the mystical, that transcend our everyday lives.10
While ontology is concerned with the conceptual analysis of Being, the experiential process by which individuals awaken to the mysterious depth of Being within themselves, is uniquely individual and transformative. Developing effective ways to invoke this eternal source of spiritual depth through which lives are forever changed, has preoccupied philosophers and spiritually devout people in every culture throughout every age. Today the importance of these visionary encounters has been greatly magnified because it is only through the transforming depth of the human soul that we can hope to resolve the political tensions that threaten the future of humankind. The following ten points briefly summarize how the book approaches the nature and source of these life-changing experiences:
1. There exists a sacred dimension to existence, referred to throughout the book as the numinous, which is accessible to everyone.
2. The source from which numinous experience arises is Being itself.
3. Like Being, the existence of consciousness is a great mystery that has so far eluded explanation. It is the proverbial crack through which the numinous light of the soul gains a rightful place alongside the current scientific view of reality.
4. A central calling of all religions is to consciously awaken to the sacred mystery from which numinous experiences arise. The Greeks, for example, whom we study in the first part of the book, awakened to it through a process Plato and the Neoplatonists called noesis.
5. Paul Tillich conceived Christ to be a symbol for this profound and mysterious power, which he felt transforms and enlivens the soul through prayer, meditation, and worship.
6. Carl Jung argued that sacred experiences arise from the archetypal foundation of the psyche and that they play an important role in healing broken lives.
7. Jung also believed we are approaching a critical time in the evolution of human life when we can no longer be solely guided by unconscious instincts, as we have done so often in the past, for they are not only responsible for oppression 9 Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities, makes the case for exploring unusual human experiences such as psychic and seemingly transcendent phenomena, a position consistent with his earlier works.
10 Refer to the chapter “Being and the Numinous” for a full explanation of the term.
8 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
and war but have sown misery into the lives of individuals since the beginning of civilization.
8. Instead, humankind must awaken to the promptings of the Self—the numinous and organizing core of the individual psyche—by which Jung hoped humanity would eventually be transformed through a process he termed individuation. In the later stages of this transformational process, the individual is spiritually guided along the path toward wholeness by the numinous urgings of the soul. We discuss this in greater depth in the chapters on Jung.
9. In addition, Jung envisioned that the world is moving toward a propitious moment when humanity must advance beyond its tribal past and awaken to a higher level of consciousness if we are to avoid disaster. We examine his thoughts on this in our discussion of Jung’s Answer to Job.
10. If we fail in this important endeavor, we may not survive. Nuclear weapons and global warming alone may bring about the extinction of the human species unless consciousness is lifted to a higher level commensurate with the ethical and spiritual teachings of Christ and other founders of great religious traditions.
Today, because of the vast expansion of knowledge during the modern era, psychologists, philosophers, and theologians are just beginning to fully grasp, in radically new ways, the role and purpose that transformative experiences have in not only healing psychological wounds but also enriching and empowering the soul. Fully actualizing this potential, however, is a lifelong process. But with persistent effort, individuals can uncover and nurture the seed of divine wisdom hidden deep within them. But, nonetheless, they often need to overcome many obstacles until this long-hidden kernel of wisdom resplendently unfolds, bursting forth like a spiritual flower that radiates throughout their lives. This is consistent with many of the ideas we entertain throughout the book, including our survey of Greek philosophy, our analysis of Tillich’s theology, and our rigorous examination of Jung’s religious psychology.
Plato and the Neoplatonists sought this hidden Truth by practicing a spiritual discipline that raised their consciousness to a higher, almost mystical state, called noesis. For Tillich, it was attained through the ethical teachings of Christ and the celebration of the Holy, while for Jung, it was accomplished by attaining a conscious and intimate relationship with the Self, the organizing principle at the center of the psyche. All these inner-directed disciplines are aimed at spiritual fulfillment. While there are many examples of prominent philosophers and scientists that we could have used to explore the mystery of Being, Tillich and Jung are the two best suited for the
purposes of this book. Tillich is important because his whole theology is based on the nature of Being. Jung complements Tillich’s work by psychologically investigating the objective psyche, the only way that Being can be empirically understood. Note that throughout this book, we use “objective psyche” and “collective unconscious”
interchangeably, as Jung did, to refer to the portion of the unconscious that is universally held by everyone.
The book is divided into six parts. The first two examine the rise of enlightened reason within the West, starting with Greek philosophy. As important as the Greek renaissance was for the advancement of humankind, its rational philosophy also sowed the seeds for the religious and existential crisis that today has resulted in a pervasive sense that life has no meaning. The third and fourth parts explore the nature of humanity’s present position and what is necessary to understand and move beyond it. The fifth and sixth parts discuss Paul Tillich’s theology and Carl Jung’s psychology, and apply both to religion and the future of human flourishing. These renowned scholars recognized the importance of drawing upon the numinous resources with individuals for rekindling a sense of purpose in life by unifying enlightened reason with the primordial wisdom of the soul—the sacred treasure that lies hidden at the core of the psyche. The great expanse of Western history that we cover in the book has been unfolding from the time Greek philosophy first emerged out of its mythical past to the present time of scientific advances. But the story is hardly finished. In the aftermath of World War II, Jung came to believe the present age is now at a propitious moment when the opposites of good and evil are arising from the unconscious and challenging the world to rise above its darkened past and fully embrace its spiritual heritage.
The story we tell asserts that the existing world we know through our senses is but a reflection of a higher order, which endows existence with beauty, purpose, and meaning. Similar stories have been told in every culture throughout the world since the beginning of humanity’s existence. The one exception to the universal belief in a transcendent order of some kind is the story told by many scientists today who view reality through the lens of materialism. In this reductionist story, there is no ultimate meaning or purpose to life, only an endless succession of events, each one determined by preceding factors going back to initial conditions existing at the moment when our universe first burst into existence.11
11 Physicists and cosmologists aver that the Big Bang is the best theory for the evidence we have, but the theory remains open to refinement, development or even replacement as science advances its understanding of the universe.
10 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
Not all cosmologists and physicists are comfortable with such a spiritually barren account, which is based solely on materialistic determinism. Brian Swimme, a professor of cosmology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, is as much a poet of the universe as he is a mathematician and physicist. He tells the story of the cosmos from a perspective of wonder and imagination. He often challenges his students with questions such as: how is it possible that a world filled with giraffes and elephants and Beethoven could possibly have emerged from the rapidly expanding and incredibly hot plasma that first burst forth at the beginning of time? Most scientists, though, are comfortable working within the constraints of materialism. But even then, some find it necessary to touch on philosophy when pondering the many puzzling aspects of quantum physics and Einstein’s theory of relativity, since any interpretation of either one requires moving beyond the limits of experimental results. Though philosophy does not provide objective certainty like science does, it often awakens the heart to the mystery and majesty of Creation.
When the origin of the universe is pondered long and deeply, a sense of its eternal mystery can sometimes break through the barrier of our hurried existence, filling the soul with a sense of wonder. Find a place far from the invasive light of urban centers and look up into the night sky. It is hard not to be struck with the awesome display of stars, each one a distant sun or galaxy. The night sky has always sparked the imagination of people searching for purpose and meaning in life. Freeman Dyson, whom Swimme and Tucker quote, is a theoretical and mathematical physicist known for his works in quantum field theory and astrophysics. “The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture,” Dyson says, “the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming.”12 He clearly suspects that life and consciousness are somehow hardwired into the universe waiting for the right conditions to actualize them. Swimme and Tucker, as they tell the story of the universe, assert the existence of a hidden intelligence guiding the unfolding of the Cosmos from the moment of its birth 13.8 billion years ago to the flourishing of life that we know today. They argue that even the formation of galaxies seems to have been destined from the beginning. In current cosmology, the universe initially was filled with a vast cloud of particles. Left to itself, they explain, the universe would have never birthed the millions of galaxies that now support planets like our earth. But scientists have recently discovered that a series of vibratory waves, which began oscillating outward at the beginning of the universe, broke through this dense cloud of particles causing it to fragment into the clumps of matter from which the galaxies 12 Swimme and Tucker, Journey of the Universe, 11-12, Here Swimme and Tucker are quoting Freeman J. Dyson, Disturbing the Universe, 250.
were forged. Swimme and Tucker liken these creative vibrations to the “music of the spheres,” so revered by Pythagoras and his followers.
Pythagoras, who laid the foundation for mathematical science twenty-six centuries ago, would certainly be delighted, for his intellectual heirs have discovered that the billions of galaxies were formed by a cosmic music that moved the universe into the next phase of its journey.13
We begin our exploration into the mystery of Being with the early Greek philosophers who were likely filled with wonder, much as we are, when gazing upon the heavens. They relied on Babylonian astrologers to explain the regular workings and marvels of the night sky, but all the Presocratic philosophers we study in this book relied on reason to explain the world in which they lived. Because heavenly bodies—
sun, moon, planets, and stars—move in regular patterns, the heavens were thought to reveal a world of perfection not easily realized on earth. Nonetheless, most of them considered the eternal nature of Being to be even higher, standing above everything else, including the heavens.
In this book, Being is conceived as the creative foundation and eternal blueprint from which the universe first came into existence. It is thus the root and primordial source of all existence, including its basic physical attributes—spacetime, matter, and energy.
As the ground of nature, Being is pure potential, embodying the underlying foundation from which this vast universe was formed. Defined as such, Being does not exist in time and space. It is nothing—or “no-thing.” Rather, it is the pure potential from which the universe was, as it were, willed into existence,14 including the laws of physics and the initial conditions that existed at the birth of the universe.
In today’s science, however, everything is reduced to energy, spacetime, and matter, in which case Being would be conceived as nothing more than the singularity that first gave birth to the stars and governs evolution and the flourishing of life. What, if anything, proceeded the “Big Bang” remains unexplained. Physicists have offered some rather radical ideas that profoundly challenge our imagination, speculating, for instance, that our universe was created through a collision of two pre-existing membranes (often called ‘branes’), hypothetical objects of any number of dimensions.
13 Ibid., 19.
14 We do not have a word to describe the hidden agency that created the universe. So, as a substitute, we use the word ‘will’ here, to capture its essence. Whatever its true nature, this mysterious, creative force cannot be described in ordinary language, just as God’s Word in Genesis cannot be taken literally.
12 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
Others argue that there are infinite universes, and we happen to occupy one that has exactly the right conditions for life. What characterizes all such explanations is the desire to explain everything deterministically, a view that grew out of the Enlightenment beginning with Francis Bacon and René Descartes. Christianity disputed these enlightened thinkers, insisting that God was the source of the universe and all that exists within it. In today’s world, however, we can no longer rely on the Christian God for an explanation of reality. While science has done an amazingly good job exploring the intricacies of the physical world, what cannot be explained scientifically is the nature of Being. For this we need to go back to the early Greek philosophers to begin finding alternate and suitable ways of conceiving it. Many of the early Greek philosophers, including Plato, understood the world of our senses to be an imperfect reflection of a transcendent reality. Even though we cannot simply appropriate ancient science and philosophy, we can learn much from the efforts of these thinkers.
The study of Being, ontology, has a long philosophic history dating from the time of the early Greek philosophers up to the present. Even today, in this age of science, philosophic questions concerning the ultimate nature of existence are still relevant.
Martin Heidegger, for instance, a German existentialist philosopher, wrote Being and Time in the middle of the twentieth century. It is a seminal work that has influenced humanistic disciplines including theology and psychology. While Heidegger presents a rigorous analysis of Being—the source of existence—we take an intuitive approach to exploring it. Paul Tillich, a Protestant theologian and philosopher, whose ideas we examine closely in the fifth part of this book, also addresses the ultimate nature of existence by defining God as the ground of Being or Being itself. By doing so, he is capturing the spirit of Greek philosophy by equating Being with God. Along with Tillich’s theology, we examine Carl Jung’s psychology which has important parallels to Tillich’s work. Jung, though enamored by ancient Greek culture, refrained from metaphysical speculation. Nonetheless, his empirical investigation of the objective psyche—the collective unconscious—may be as close as science can get to understanding the foundational structure of existence. While collaborating with his friend Wolfgang Pauli, an early contributor to quantum physics, Jung expanded his understanding of the objective psyche by postulating that it may partially exist
“beyond” the deterministic world of time and space. Jung considered this radical step consistent with the empirical evidence. His far-reaching research into the nature of psyche, we believe, thus goes well beyond the limits of a materialistic science, indirectly shedding light on the nature of Being by delving deeply into the unconscious.
When exploring the nature of Being, however, there is no way to ignore the entire spectrum of Greek philosophy, including its later developments in Roman times when Hellenism and Neoplatonism flourished. Even with the advance of science today, there is not much more that can be said about Being than was known at the time of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Plato taught that the material world is an imperfect reflection of a transcendent order consisting of archetypes or Forms. Because these transcendental objects are beyond the world of the senses, he thought they could only be known through deep reflection. Jung’s theory of archetypes is often compared to Plato’s Forms, but there are important differences. Primarily, while Plato’s archetypes are metaphysical entities that mediate between the world of senses and a higher reality, Jung’s archetypes are purely psychological in nature.
By the time of David Hume and Immanuel Kant, however, the idea that the world is based on a higher reality had receded, making room for the thoroughly materialistic philosophy of our time. In reaction, some romantic poets and philosophers continued to envision a higher order, but the First World War vanquished such aspirations.
Though logically compelling, the impoverished materialism of science has greatly contributed to the pervasive crisis of meaning that characterizes so much of the modern world. Understanding consciousness as grounded in Being might thus turn out to be just the antidote that we need to address this crisis. By shedding light on its mysterious nature, our current age might then become cognizant of a richer reality in which love, beauty, and spiritual depth are seen as fundamental to nature rather than considered as mere feelings generated by the brain.
At the beginning of the book, we examine the existential crisis that now pervades modern culture and is indirectly threatening the very survival of the human family.
While affecting every aspect of modern life, this crisis is the result of many things including war, racism, economic deprivation, and the gradual decline of religion.
Freud argued that religion was akin to a collective neurosis that humanity needed to outgrow. We take the opposite position, recognizing that religious experience has always been fundamental to humanity’s understanding of itself and the Cosmos and remains crucially important today. But religions’ foundational stories, based on the supernatural, must be reinterpreted in a way consistent with the modern understanding of the Cosmos. We cannot definitively answer questions like “Is there a God?” or “Is there life after death?”—questions that each individual must answer for herself or himself. But a spiritual vision of reality, reasonably consistent with science, can be profoundly inspiring, opening one’s heart to the mystery of Being and even providing a basis for imagining a postmortem survival of the soul. In a letter to Esther Harding written in 1951, for instance, Jung said: “I’m inclined to believe that something of the human soul remains after death, since already in this conscious life we have
14 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
evidence that the psyche exists in a relative space and in a relative time, that is, in a relatively non-extended and eternal state.”15
Unfortunately, the religious stories that have been told for ages seem unable to speak meaningfully to many people today. This is especially true in Europe where the churches are largely empty.16 We do not feel that religion will die out like many secular-minded people expect; rather, we believe the old religious stories will eventually be replaced or reinterpreted symbolically, as Jung did, to accommodate our modern understanding of the Cosmos. It is likely that the inscrutable mystery of Being will also become an essential part of this new story as people search for purpose and meaning in their lives.
In the future, if Christianity is to survive, it must fashion a new story, possibly envisioning God much like Tillich did, as the ground of Being or Being itself. What is true for Christianity also pertains to all the major religious traditions—Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Every religious tradition must adapt to this rapidly changing world by aligning its spiritual traditions with the modern concept of reality, just as they originally fashioned their most sacred beliefs from the organic cultures in which their religions first arose. As a psychologist, Carl Jung provides one way of accomplishing this. His psychology, which in many ways complements Tillich’s theology, shows how religion largely derives from the archetypal structures of the psyche, which, we argue, are themselves embedded in the ground of Being. The work of both scholars thus represents not only contemporary perspectives on the nature of Being but also anticipate future trends in religion. While doubtless not the last word, they point the way forward.
Symbols emerge over generations and serve as a conduit for accessing the sacred, which is often hidden by the demands of everyday life. Once discarded, however, they cannot be easily replaced. It is impossible to predict the future, but humanity can only prosper when people live close to the sacred center of their own being. The modern world has lost awareness of this truth. It must be regained, whether through Christianity, another religious tradition like Buddhism, or something entirely new.
Regardless of the religion or the lack of it, two principles remain true. The first affirms the importance of symbols for accessing the sacred, the basis for individual 15 Jung, “Letter to Esther Harding,” Dec 5, 1951, Jung, Letters, 2, 29.
16 The shrinking of church involvement does not signify the shrinking of religious sensibility. It does show the failure of religious institutions to meet contemporary spiritual and psychological needs. One might think of the growing number of people who identify themselves as “spiritual, but not religious” in this regard.
transformation. Beyond the symbol, the second principle affirms that the ultimate source of sacred experience is the ground of Being however it is conceived. Even if all religious truths but these two principles are lost, life’s meaning still will be restored regardless of what happens in the coming years.
But even as religious faith withers in our glaringly sophisticated world, much wisdom needed for healing the multiple crises occurring throughout the world can still be found in the works of the ancient Greek philosophers such as Socrates and Plato. It is comforting, maybe even critical, that we return to the basic philosophical insights at the core of our Western tradition. It is there that a new or rejuvenated story may emerge that can rekindle a sense of wonder and appreciation for the mystery of Being.
Although Greek philosophy is widely appreciated for its rational and scientific sensibility, the underlying motivation for people like Parmenides and Plato was often spiritual. A striking example is Plato’s intuitive discipline— noesis—which opens the heart and mind to the inner secrets of reality. The Neoplatonists extended this idea further, developing a spiritual practice called theurgy that combined the discipline of philosophy with a contemplative lifestyle lived in accordance with the highest ethical standards.
We endorse the position Anthony Kronman—Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School—takes in Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan.17 Here he argues that Western culture is emerging from fifteen hundred years of Christian theology and needs to recover the spirit of our Greco-Roman inheritance. The Homeric Gods had pretty much lost their hold on the imagination by the time of Socrates and Plato. From then on, many educated Greeks and the Romans drew their spiritual inspiration from the natural order, much as we must do now if we are to preserve the essence of the spiritual traditions bequeathed to us.
The gradual drift from Christian theology began with the Renaissance and continues to this day. To better understand this transition that culminated in modern philosophy, we first turn to René Descartes, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. We then examine Idealism by reviewing the philosophies of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Baruch de Spinoza, Friedrich Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Arthur Schopenhauer. Lastly, we trace the development of the romantic poets and philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While the Enlightenment perfected reason, the romantic philosophers provided a bridge between the overly intellectual spirit of the Enlightenment and the spiritual longings of the soul. Here we summarize the writings of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph 17 Kronman, Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan.
16 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Although Nietzsche declared that God is dead, he rejected the nihilism that was beginning to paralyze the European spirit. Instead, he favored the Dionysian state of intoxication which he considered superior to the insipid rationalism of the educated class, which he accurately determined had lost it power to excite the soul.
During the Greek classical period, philosophy as practiced by Plato and the Neoplatonists served to enlighten the soul. Like these Greek philosophers, the Romantic philosophers that we study were also inspired by a rational form of spiritual inquiry that lifted their vision upward to gaze upon a higher spiritual reality, free of human greed and cruelty. Ralph Waldo Emerson was especially gifted with a higher vision. When discussing Emerson’s philosophy of Being, Richard Geldard writes: “In terms of the philosophy of being, the question of where we find ourselves is a real one.
Arising from it are answers to what the cosmos is, what forces brought it into existence, and what individually, happens to be our purpose of life living.”18 Both Tillich and Jung would likely find their respective philosophies consistent with Emerson’s philosophy, at least on this crucial point. So, although our discussion of the mystery of Being covers a wide range of perspectives from the early Greeks to the current age, all these diverse philosophical and psychological endeavors shared a belief that humanity is destined to attain a higher level of consciousness.
In the fourth part of the book—"Consciousness and Transcendence”—we examine consciousness and its transcendent states. We devote considerable time to exploring the origin of consciousness because its existence suggests that the universe is filled with purpose and meaning. Though biology has succeeded in characterizing life and cellular activity as a natural outcome of evolution, the so-called survival of the fittest, it has nothing to say about the origin of consciousness, except to resort to evolutionary biology, which is only able to address the evolution of the brain. Consciousness itself remains stubbornly outside scientific scrutiny but, nonetheless, there is clearly something about nature that makes it possible for consciousness to exist in an otherwise material universe.
Until now, this unavoidable conclusion has largely escaped the notice of scientists.
We name this fundamental property of reality “Mind” for lack of a better name. Mind in conjunction with Being is not only an integral part of reality but may be what Swimme and Tucker call the hidden intelligence of the universe responsible for establishing its initial conditions and guiding the formation of the galaxies. We argue that it is also the potential from which the psyche and consciousness derive. Psyche is 18 Geldard, The Esoteric Emerson: The Spiritual Teaching of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 9.
best understood as a field, largely unconscious, that surrounds and interpenetrates all forms of life, including microorganisms and plants. As an unconscious factor, psyche may also guide the course of history, our individual destinies, and the evolution of life itself.
Following this line of thought, it is reasonable to suggest that our experience of transcendence is also grounded in the foundational structure of reality. Rudolf Otto coined the term ‘numinous’ in 1917 to provide a psychological basis for examining sacred experience objectively, independent of religious traditions. But even if the numinous has no specific religious content, he felt such experience provides the individual a glimpse into Divine nature. Both Tillich and Jung found the concept useful. Tillich used it interchangeably with the Christian sense of the Holy, while Jung broadened the concept to refer to all transcendent experiences arising from the archetypal depth of the psyche. It is through such enlightening experiences that we can awaken to the mystery of Being.
The numinous clearly had a profound effect on Jung’s thinking, as indicated in a letter he wrote to P. W. Martin in 1945:
You are quite right, the main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology.19
We do not recommend any specific technique or approach for consistently inviting the numinous into our lives, for there are many pathways to follow, depending on individual dispositions, circumstances, and beliefs. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam recommend prayer. Buddhism and most Eastern traditions emphasize the value of meditation. Hinduism, in addition to meditation, also recognizes the paths of knowledge, action and devotion. Socrates, Plato, and Thomas Aquinas followed the path of intellect that often leads to gnosis or spiritual knowledge. Artists and musicians often invoke the numinous through their chosen discipline, while numerous authors prescribe living in the “now.” Many books have been written on every one of these methods. We believe that each person, if they chose to, will find the pathway most suited for their unique life situation through reflection and thoughtful experimentation.
19 Jung, C. G. Jung Letters, 1: 1906-1950, 377.
18 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
After examining consciousness and the numinous, we turn to the theology of Paul Tillich (1886-1965) and the psychology of Carl Jung (1875–1961) to discuss their contributions to religion and the resolution of tension between enlightenment values and the primordial wisdom that has forever existed within the human psyche. We feel that Tillich’s theology is ideally suited for the coming age. Instead of belief based on supernatural explanations, his theology begins by defining God as the ground of Being.
After that, he builds his theology upon religious symbols that richly embody and strengthen the experience of the sacred.
Tillich, considered one of the foremost Protestant theologians of the twentieth century, was very much concerned with the dilemma Christianity faces in the modern era. Fully aware that its central mythos of redemption through Jesus’ sacrifice had been seriously undermined, he attempted a creative response to the existential crisis of our time. In developing his ideas, Tillich relied heavily on many of the ancient Greek philosophic perspectives we examine throughout the first part of this book. Besides his indebtedness to ancient Greece, he was also captivated by many modern writers, especially the works of Schelling, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel.
His Systematic Theology is as much as anything a defense of Christianity in the face of two unavoidable problems. First, he was well aware, as many religious scholars are, that modern research has failed to discover much about the historical Jesus. Second, the idea of God as a supreme being who created the universe and is personally involved in the life of every person is increasingly difficult to square with reality as we know it. Tillich addresses the first issue by basing his Christology on the psychological premise that Christ—verses Jesus—is a symbol through which the Holy or the sacred depth within each person is made manifest. He addresses the second by defining God as the ground of Being, not a being as such. Further, he considered that the divine ground is not only the foundation of reality but is a creative force in the evolution of life and the source of the Holy for which Christ is a symbol. Tillich’s theology is especially useful for our purposes because he develops an ontological20 position that supports the religious significance of Jung’s psychology.
Jung is considered, along with Sigmund Freud, to be one of the founders of modern psychology. His psychology, while generally empirically based, also has much spiritual insight to offer. Although modern psychology and psychiatry have moved far beyond his therapeutic techniques, we believe his analysis of Christianity provides significant support for Tillich’s philosophical inquiry into the depth of Being because 20 As indicated earlier, ontology is the branch of metaphysics that concerns itself with the nature of Being, the ground of existence.
of his uncanny insight into the unconscious. But unlike Tillich, Jung avoids the tangle of metaphysical issues surrounding many of his own positions, even though concepts like archetypes, the collective unconscious, and synchronicity are often thought to be metaphysical in nature. While not addressing the metaphysical nature of Being directly, his profound insight into the objective psyche, the foundation of all subjective experience, reveals much about the ultimate nature of reality.21 His depth psychology also addresses the felt need that many have today for a sacred vision consistent with science. As modern society turns away from the dogmatic claims of tradition, Jung’s religious insights grow in significance. Importantly, he recognized that the central organizing principle of the psyche, which he termed the archetype of the Self, is indistinguishable from the image of God ( Imago Dei).22 Its sacred, numinous quality, more than anything else, aligns his psychology with Tillich’s theology and helps substantiate it. The Self is not to be confused with the personal ego, however. As the center of the psyche, it encompasses both the conscious ego and the unconscious. By drawing close to it, Jung believed, the meaning and purpose of one’s life is revealed.
Jung’s prescription for healing humanity’s deep divisions is radical because it calls on us to rise above our instinctual nature by effecting a union of spirit with the unconscious ground of our individual being. Usually, such change occurs gradually, but as was the case of St. Paul on the road to Damascus, a powerful numinous experience can trigger a radical transformation. Christianity facilitates spiritual and psychological growth by relying on the prophetic tradition for its fundamental beliefs and using various forms of worship to create a healing crucible in which the sacred, numinous energies of the psyche cleanse the soul. But as people abandon religion, its healing power, already buried in fossilized dogma, is forfeited. A central argument of this book is that old religious doctrines and symbols should not be abandoned, but instead, be infused with a new vision in order that they can continue serving as a bulwark against the rising tide of tribalism that threatens civilization today. Jung thought many of our current problems are due to people not having a symbolic life that involves them in the divine drama of existence.
Only the symbolic life can express the need of the soul…. And because people have no such thing, they can never step out of this 21 Jung calls the collective unconscious the objective psyche because it exists outside the individual and personal psyche, being common to all humanity. In this sense, it is an object, like a table or tree, independent of an individual’s existence.
22 Within Western religions, especially Christianity, the image of God is often thought of as representative of God as a divine being, but it need not be so. Indeed, even Christian theologians like Tillich deny that God is a being.
20 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
mill—this awful, grinding, banal life … everything is “nothing but”; and that is why people are neurotic. They are simply sick of the whole thing, sick of that banal life, and therefore they want sensation. They even want war … when there is a war; they say, “Thank heaven, now something is going to happen—something bigger than ourselves!”23
Although we provide an objective assessment of Jung’s psychology for the most part throughout the book, we also expand on it, adding our own interpretation to his pioneering work. In doing so, we look at individuation from the perspective of history, beginning with Greek philosophy. Individuation, thus conceived, is a gradual historical movement leading from the controlling dominance of our lower nature to a higher, more spiritual level of consciousness. Evolution, however, has fitted us with a nature best suited for survival. But humans are also endowed with the capacity to rise above the instinctual flight or fight tendencies that have darkened our past. This is evidenced by our capacity to look at reality objectively—the forerunner of philosophy, religion, and science. Most importantly, humans are capable of spiritual discernment.
Spiritual discernment is derived from our innate capacity for numinous experience, which momentarily lifts us to transcendent heights far beyond our normal egocentric selves. It is only from this perspective that we can glimpse the higher level for which humanity is destined. Jung used dream work and active imagination to awaken the individual to this higher reality. But any discipline is effective if and only if it awakens the heart to its true spiritual inheritance.
Jung’s controversial book Answer to Job, which we examine last in our discussion of Jung, envisions that we are living through a transformative moment in the history of the world during which he hoped humanity would be redeemed by a marriage of the masculine spirit of Heaven with the feminine spirit of the earth. Jung said that the book reflects a personal myth of his that he had nurtured for years. A spiritual renewal consistent with the scope of his imaginative tale, however, cannot be achieved by returning to the old forms of religion that have grown stale but will only be realized when a new mythos appears ready to nourish our too-often-forgotten spiritual longings.
In parallel with our analysis of Being, we weave a story about “Eternal Wisdom,”
which, like Swimme’s and Tucker’s hidden intelligence, is an inherent part of the universe guiding its unfoldment. As used here, it is also an intrinsic feature of Mind, the source of consciousness. Much like Plato’s Logos, “Eternal Wisdom” permeates the world and enlivens all religious traditions with a sense of Divine Truth. Scripture, for 23 Jung, “The Symbolic Life,” CW 18, para. 627.
example, is often venerated because it serves, over time, to awaken the soul to this otherwise inaccessible form of wisdom. Tillich, in his Systematic Theology, differentiates between the Kerygma, which embodies the ineffable Wisdom that spiritual seekers have pursued throughout the ages, and apologetic theology, which expresses this eternal Truth in the language and symbols familiar to each culture. Though not planned, we may have inadvertently written a Christian apologetic for those who are still attracted to Christian symbolism and the social gospel but not the miraculous stories and deific status attributed to Jesus. It is the symbolism and high ethical standard, after all, that awakens the heart to the highest truths of religion. What we say about Christianity applies equally well to the rich symbolism and practices of other faiths. As we said earlier, Plato sought to awaken to this enlightened state through a deep meditative process, which the Greeks called noesis. It is also the innermost Truth of poets and artists as well as the more esoteric knowledge to which philosophers once aspired. Like mysticism, such revelations cannot be clearly expressed verbally. The modern world, however, has lost its connection to the ineffable Wisdom, which has inspired humanity’s highest attainments. This loss, we feel, greatly contributes to the existential crisis of our time. For humans to flourish, each person must look deep within to become whole. This labor of love cannot be avoided; the price of avoidance for the individual is failure to find meaning and purpose in life and the danger for humanity is the real possibility of annihilation.
Although the reader will find quotations from many scholars in diverse fields, this book is not a scholarly treatise. It contains neither surveys of literatures in these fields nor analyses of various positions in terms of what opponents believe. Rather, we borrow insights and perspectives from various fields including psychology, philosophy, theology, and science that help deepen our appreciation for religion and the mystery of Being. Where possible, the books referenced are readily more understandable than detailed scholarly works concerning the same subjects, except for Jung’s collected works, The Red Book, and Tillich’s three-volume Systematic Theology.
THE EXISTENTIAL CRISIS OF OUR AGE
Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God?
Frederich Nietzsche24
Indeed, along with the fires of the Holocaust, the blinding flash of the atomic bomb marked the twilight of modernism, especially of its confidence in human progress through the unhindered march of science and technology.
Timothy K. Beal25
In 2022, a documentary titled The Changing of the Gods appeared on television and cable. Its nine episodes explored the state of humanity today and what might happen in the future. Each week dealt with a different topic, amongst which were presentations on astrology, Native American practices, African prophecy, and Western analyses of our condition and future possibilities. Interestingly, historian Frank E. Manuel published a book with the same title in 1983. It consisted of several essays on the effect the Enlightenment has had on Western thought, and more recently our global understanding of the place the human species has in the world. Though these two explorations are quite different in presentation and content, they are united by one basic idea: there are times in history when the given foundations of the world and civilization shift fundamentally from what had recently been considered obvious.
The Homeric Greek view of the world with its mythical gods interacting with men and women gave way to early science: the search for the basic nature of things, culminating in a Platonic view of existence. That understanding in turn was replaced by the rise of Christianity and its belief in one God, separate from, but nonetheless concerned with the world He created. The Enlightenment replaced faith and otherworldly concerns with reason and empirical science: each of these resulted in a
“metamorphosis of the gods,” that is, a change in what is commonly felt as essential for finding meaning in life. But the past always casts shadows far into the future. The Greek gods, for instance, did not disappear with the emergence of Greek philosophy and science, but they were marginalized and reduced to little more than forces in Nature. Christianity replaced the Homeric gods with a single deity but incorporated 24 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 181.
25 Beal, Religion and its Monsters, 160-161.
THE EXISTENTIAL CRISIS OF OUR AGE 23
much Greek philosophy into its theology. The Enlightenment elevated reason above even God, but Christian faith, though weakened, did not disappear. The point of the TV episodes discussed above is straightforward: we are passing through another transition as fundamental as these earlier ones, and we are doing so on a global scale, though perhaps most immediately felt throughout the West. These four metamorphoses of the Gods are summarized below:
• The first Metamorphosis corresponds to the transition of the ancient Greek culture from a heroic religious mythos based on the veneration of the Homeric gods to a reason-based philosophy, whose philosophical innovations deeply influenced Christian theology and the Enlightenment.
• The second metamorphosis occurred with the rise of Christianity, whose values were fundamental to both the Idealists and the Romantic philosophers.
• The third metamorphosis, which was inaugurated by the Renaissance, gave birth to the age of enlightenment by combining reason with empirical investigation. Not only was its rigorous logic essential for the rise of science in the West but its stress on reason also set an important standard for Paul Tillich’s theology and framed Carl Jung’s psychology.
• The last part of our book, entitled “Stormy Transition to a New Age,” predicts the coming of a fourth metamorphosis of the gods during which time enlightened reason will be united with the sacred depth of the soul, as depicted in Jung’s Answer to Job.
There is no doubt that the world is suffering through a major crisis, partially due to a loss of meaning, individually and collectively.26 But as the old myths and symbols die, it is also apparent that secularism alone cannot restore meaning because it lacks the symbolic depth that once was found in and supported by religions. Meaning, of course, can be found in various ways, including careers, service, and loving relationships. Yet humans also need a spiritual foundation by which to live life fully.
The rapid secularization of society since the beginning of the twentieth century has, unfortunately, stripped away the spiritual beliefs many relied on in the past, resulting in an existential crisis that writers such as Sartre and Camus have dramatized. This loss cannot be restored by simply returning to the religious traditions of the past. It is truly 26 Religion, until relatively recently, has served to unify cultures and provide a sense of meaning to life, but now it is suffering a crisis due, in part, to the rapidly changing world in which we live. The so-called culture wars in the United States and emerging identity politics around the world are obvious examples of how this loss of meaning is threatening world peace.
24 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
a “New Age” and something new is being born, whose birth pangs herald a renewed vision of reality.
Over the next century, world culture is likely to go through a major transition that could, without exaggeration, be called apocalyptic. The driving forces for this transition include global warming, overpopulation, species extinction, the global economy, technological innovation, nuclear proliferation, and the breakdown of religious traditions.27 Science and technology have had an especially dramatic effect on the environment as well as the way we understand ourselves and think about reality. The old Gods are fading, but a new story is gradually coming into existence that affirms the sacredness of the natural order. We do not think that traditional religions will soon vanish or be replaced by some emerging universal faith. Rather, we see the myths and stories that have inspired people throughout the ages slowly changing as they evolve into a new mythos, consistent with a modern view of reality.
Though the disheartening chaos of our times, with its violence, sectarianism, and loss of meaning, looks to some like an endless downward spiral into spiritual decadence, it can also be seen as the alchemical turbulence out of which something rejuvenating and beautiful can emerge. The old must die for the new to be born—a veritable metamorphosis of the gods.
Today, we are facing a Copernican-like revolution that is certain to dramatically change the world. Copernicus’ revolutionary discovery was radical,28 not only because it displaced the earth as the center of the universe, but more importantly, because it upset the Ptolemaic, earth-centered, astronomical model of the heavens upon which much Christian dogma had been built. The reverberations from his discovery sent shock waves throughout Christianity. The Church was further traumatized by Martin Luther when he rebuked the prevailing scholastic philosophy of his day, turning instead to a faith based on Biblical scripture as he understood it. But now that modern science has expanded our vision far beyond Luther’s narrower world, there seems to be little room for scripture or traditional religious belief. Faith is under attack and is not likely to survive the world of tomorrow without deeply engaging the scientific and social consensus now dominant throughout most of the world.
27 Today, there are many articles warning of the economic danger that lower birth rates pose for economically advanced nations. But overpopulation is by far the greater problem now facing less developed nations. If not brought under control, mass starvation, brought on by overpopulation and global warming, will likely trigger a level of destruction that will consume the world in unending conflict.
28 Copernicus rejected the traditional view that the earth is the center of the universe by placing the sun there and holding that the earth revolves around it.
THE EXISTENTIAL CRISIS OF OUR AGE 25
To traditional Christians, this looks like a concession to secularism, but we see it as an opportunity for spiritual renewal. That renewal begins—in fact, has already begun—with individuals looking into the depths of their own natures. The spiritual embers found there will undoubtedly inspire and forge the next spiritual transition.
But now, in the current maelstrom of political madness, many people find themselves on the margins of institutional religion. Though science and technology have transformed the world, and mostly for the better, a “brave new world” in which reason and science alone provide for the spiritual and emotional needs of its citizens has been shown not only to be inadequate but sometimes downright disastrous (as Soviet communism and the social disintegration of various indigenous societies have shown).
Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning,29 survived the Nazi death camps because he found personal meaning in helping relieve the suffering of his fellow prisoners. After the war, he wrote about his experiences, emphasizing the critical importance of carefully attending to the spiritual resources within oneself from which meaning ultimately derives. Without a spiritual grounding, the worst aspects of human nature are too often released upon the world. Jung was acutely aware of this problem, especially regarding the rise of Fascism in Germany. “The more Christianity lost its authority,” he wrote when looking back at the first decades of the twentieth century, “the more likely it was that the ‘blonde beast’ would break the bounds of its underground prison and breach the surface.”30 Jung believed that Nietzsche had
“heard the first rustlings of the savage god in the primeval forests of the unconscious,”31 but the warlike nature of this fierce beast was not fully felt until the 1930s when Hitler rose to power. Today, as religion is increasingly abandoned, particularly in the West, the dark forces lying dormant within the collective unconscious again gather strength, waiting to be released upon the world. Religious experience strengthens the center by giving depth and meaning to the individual. But when the center collapses, social discord follows. William Butler Yeats (1865 -1939), whose prophetic poem “The Second Coming,” written shortly after World War I, describes the dilemma that led to the terrifying destruction that engulfed the world 29 Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning.
30 McLynn, Carl Gustav Jung, 355. McLynn cites Jung, CW 10, page 13, but what Jung actually writes on page 13 is: “As the Christian view of the world loses its authority, the more menacingly will the ‘blond beast’ be heard prowling about in its underground prison, ready at any moment to burst out with devastating consequences.”
31 Ibid., 355.
26 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
during the first part of the twentieth century. The forces unleashed then have hardly been tamed. As Yeats wrote:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?32
Yeats, as his poem dramatically shows, clearly understood the danger of losing the spiritual center around which life flourishes. Likewise, Jung understood the Self, the image of God, to be the center from which meaning is ultimately derived. We can never know God, Jung asserted, except through the Self, the organizing principle of the psyche, just as we can never know the world except through the senses. As such, the Self is indistinguishable from God. And, as both Yeats and Jung so clearly saw, the loss of a meaningful connection to life leaves individuals fragmented and depressingly uncertain of their identities, resulting in a pervasive sense of inauthenticity and meaninglessness. Modern life only reinforces a sense of dislocation, especially for those who, for one reason or another, feel powerless. What Yeats recognized at the end of World War I is even more true today. It is frighteningly possible that the dark beast is 32 William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming,” The New Oxford Book of English Verse, 820.
This poem is often anthologized and is online.
THE EXISTENTIAL CRISIS OF OUR AGE 27
again arising, energized by our most primitive instinctual natures. One could say that Yeats anticipated the Nordic God Wotan that was revered by Fascists.33
The collective confusion and ambiguity of the First World War, seemingly begun almost by accident and nurtured by myriad narrow agendas, had already partially fulfilled the dark side of the collective unconscious. Then, in the years preceding the Second World War, the German people were perhaps more susceptible and vulnerable than other nations to the dark possession of the Wotan archetype. They were, after all, humiliated by defeat and the egregious conditions of the Versailles Treaty, while also being weakened by the chaos of the Weimar years, and increasingly desperate in an unsympathetic world. Current events show how much we are also susceptible and vulnerable.
The “rough beast” has not been killed or even banished but has become a global phenomenon, possessing those whose centers no longer hold. Unfortunately, a worldly vision cut off from the nourishing energies of the deep psyche ultimately leads to social collapse. Dogmatic religion, however, is not and never was the answer.
Fundamentalists of all faiths, despite claims to the opposite, nurture the violence of the modern world in religious and secular guises, threatening an even greater level of destruction than that experienced in the last century. Liberal religious institutions have abandoned outworn dogmas and instead struggle for social justice. Their effort to mitigate poverty and relieve misery is commendable, but that alone does not satisfy the need for meaning that religions have traditionally provided, for only when life is suffused with the sacred, does it flourish.
A radical new approach to religion is called for at this time if we are to avoid disasters far greater than those visited upon the world during the twentieth century.
By grounding religion on the mysterious and transcendent nature of reality, we offer one avenue for spiritual awakening in the coming years. This approach begins by recognizing that consciousness and our capacity for love are an integral part of the great mystery of Being that awaits further exploration. As P.W. Martin wrote, when summing up his discussion of Jung’s path to wholeness: “Consciousness plays its part in the forming and firming of the whole spirit not by abdicating but by using its faculties to the full.” He further notes that “without love the Self cannot hold together.
Why this should be, or even what exactly we mean by love even, are questions to which 33 Wotan is one of the principal Gods of Norse mythology, which Jung employs to emphasize the crude and demonic nature of the psyche. Wotan also inspired the Fascists who were looking to mythology to support their claim of the superiority of the German race.
28 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
we have no satisfactory answer. But empirically, that is how it is. There can be knowledge, intellect, genius even: but without love there is no integration.”34 This is why Jung emphasized the need for sacralizing the feminine side of nature, for she is the ruler of the heart.
Many of those reflecting on the contemporary milieu, seeking to avoid desperate emptiness or blind retreat into literalist dogmas, have offered solutions to our existential crisis. They range from returning to some idealized past time to proposing radically new ways to organize society. While such views and analyses are interesting, most are at best aspirational, given the contingencies of history. To successfully advance religion today any approach taken must be inclusive, incorporating the wisdom and spiritual teachings from around the world while remaining open to a new understanding of reality consonant with science and modernity. Being in tune with science does not mean bowing down to every new theory whenever one pops up. It does demand, however, that we remain open to scientific breakthroughs and the broadly scientific view of the world.35
Even scientists have difficulty defining the meaning of their own work (and some have entirely rejected the urge to interpret it). It is therefore hardly surprising that those for whom religion is an integral part of life find themselves confused and even alienated from the modern world. Confusion and alienation, however, are not perspectives or commitments: they are the lack of both. We cannot understand ourselves as separate from the world we participate in and observe. Unfortunately, alienation may be more insidious then usually thought, frequently leading to further problems, as for example, in the case of people suffering from depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. We are in the universe and are an inseverable part of it, not 34 P. W. Martin, Experiment in Depth, 244.
35 “Some of the most important science-generated beliefs that pervade our world and make up what is thought to be ‘common sense’ are outdated and mistaken ideas that arose in science during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. One such antiquated belief, which is practically a superstition, is the unquestioned assumption of an external, independent, objective universe with concurrent shallow, limited, and impoverished conception of how humankind—seen as a material object—fits into such an apparently objective world….Ironically, for the scientific point of view, it is irrational and against the very spirit of science to cling to such a false and obsolete idea of the world we live in….Relating to an afterimage as if it still exists, many physicists are doing quantum physics—and successfully solving their equations—and yet deep in their unconscious are still subtly entranced in a classical mindset that sees the world as independently existing.” Paul Levy, The Quantum Revelation: A Radical Synthesis of Science and Spirituality, 17-18.
THE EXISTENTIAL CRISIS OF OUR AGE 29
outside dispassionately looking in. There is ample room for religion to have a say, but it cannot ignore or deny our contemporary understanding of reality. Religions that continue clinging to the past will inevitably be replaced with those with a more expanded view of reality. Religion will, nonetheless, remain indispensable for finding meaning in life.
Early in this century, Jonathan Sheehan noted that
Prophets of modernity count the hours until religion’s death. They should not hold their breath. Modern society will never lack for religion, not because humans are essentially superstitious or because in their frailty, they crave supernatural comfort, but because the process of religion’s disappearance is itself integral to the self-definition of modernity. For modern society, secularization always is and always must be incomplete…. Religion is always receding and returning and its repeated tidal flow is essential to the self-image of modernity, which can no more dispense with religion than embrace it.36
Whether viewed positively or negatively, humanity cannot do without religion in the broad sense of the term. The increasing role of religion in the politics of the United States should not be surprising, even if its negative impact is regrettable.
In simpler times, an individual typically lived a lifetime within an area of a few dozen square miles, and so knew little of other cultures, values, and religions beyond the anecdotes supplied by traveling merchants and pilgrims. Today, each culture rubs up against widely varying traditions, and few can claim that only their religious beliefs and ways of life make sense. Some philosophers trace the general existential malaise and ennui in which we are living to the Industrial Revolution which turned workers into commodities. Others find its roots in the rise of empirical science in the seventeenth century. Yet others blame the Enlightenment with its insistence on reason and reductionism in science. And one can look for its roots as far back as the radical materialism of Lucretius and his predecessor Democritus in ancient Greece.
Anthropologists note that earlier societies (sometimes still called “primitive”) were relatively small clusters of human beings, tribes, or interrelated family groups, which developed their own customs, rituals, and ways of speaking of themselves and the world. One’s identity was closely tied to the tribe, which is why the threat of ostracism was such an effective means of holding the tribe together. At this level of existence, 36 Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture, ix. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
30 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
where one’s identity is inseparable from the tribe, instincts are both sovereign and essential. In ancient times, city-states and small tribal units had what might be referred to as organic cultures that developed over long periods of time and in which the inherited instinctual structures of the psyche were interwoven with the customs of the people. Although customs may have varied widely from one community to the next, they all shared a common instinctual foundation.
As small tribal societies grew and were incorporated into larger groups such as city-states, individuals were increasingly thrown onto their own resources, often with disastrous results. With the emergence of kingdoms and empires, this process accelerated, culminating today in the celebration of individual autonomy as the basis of the new global order. It is little wonder that a powerful and angry resistance has arisen to globalization. People are understandably fighting to recover their sense of identity.37 The ancient stories that had served humanity so well in the past must now be re-envisioned or replaced in the hope of recovering the sense of meaning so necessary for life to prosper.
While conservativism tries to preserve traditional values that have evolved over many centuries, liberalism often goes against the grain of human nature by promoting universal ideals based on principles arrived at through reason. Unfortunately, the instinctual nature of humanity is often in conflict with our highest values. Jesus is expressing such a value in his parable of the Good Samaritan, in which the principle of compassion overrides tribal identity.38 The same can be said regarding the tension surrounding the civil rights movement and support for gays, lesbians, and transgender people. When liberal principles gain ascendency, conservative and reactionary forces arise in defense of tradition. Tribal instincts can be pushed down and excluded from consciousness only so long before they return with a disruptive force. As culture becomes increasingly more secular, the crisis of meaning is likely to intensify, further disrupting social cohesion across the globe.
The existential crisis that grips much of the world today is not new or unique to our period of history. What is unique is that it is increasingly global, destabilizing peoples throughout the world. In the past, it occurred in specific cultures and civilizations at different times. Now, all are involved simultaneously. A similar crisis enveloped the 37 Often this resistance shows up in efforts to return to a past of smaller units, as in separatist movements for various regions or nationalist movements aimed at withdrawing from more global arrangements. Catalonian and Basque separatism and Great Britain’s Brexit movement come to mind, among many others.
38 The Jerusalem Bible: Luke 10: 25–37.
THE EXISTENTIAL CRISIS OF OUR AGE 31
ancient world during the Roman era, beginning with the “Hellenistic” age and continuing up to the time that Constantine declared Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.39 David Ulansey argues that the vast conquests of Alexander the Great in the late fourth century BCE40 transformed the ancient world by replacing
“previously separate and autonomous political and cultural entities—city-states, nations, tribes—in a single new imperial system.”41 It introduced new ideas and cosmopolitan features to a vast diversity of ethnic cultures. Though assimilation of the Greco-Roman culture expanded trade and advanced the welfare of many communities, the imperial system invariably caused the disruption of their way of life and undermined their sacred traditions.
Both Greek and Roman cultures were historically rooted in clan mentality, and the influence of Greek culture upon Rome did not change this. Rome itself, as it expanded beyond its original borders, found it was unable to sustain its own cultural integrity and succumbed to the same crisis that it had inflicted on others. Ulansey argues that this condition, driven in part by the social disruptions resulting from Alexander’s victories, prepared the way for the rise of Christianity. Prior to the Hellenistic period, he says, most people closely identified with the society into which they were born. In a sense, they had no personal identity outside the group. The fear of death was thus lessened because the individual unconsciously identified with the ongoing survival of their community. But as local traditions began to break down throughout the ancient world, due to the eventual assimilation of tribal customs into the greater world order of Hellenism, individual mortality became an existential issue.42 At the same time, local gods were abandoned, leaving people adrift without a sense of meaning, a situation not that different from the existential crisis infecting our age. Meaning is ultimately derived from archetypal symbols that serve as a conduit for the healing energies of the psyche. A feeling of alienation results when venerated symbols, passed on from one 39 The Hellenistic age covers a time period beginning with the conquests of Alexander the Great and continuing up to the time of Constantine’s declaration of Christianity as the official religion of Rome. His successors then made it the exclusive religion of the Empire.
40 Scholars tend to use the terms CE and BCE for Common Era and Before the Common Era. These replace the traditional AD and BC for Anno Domini and Before Christ, both of which refer to one religion. The newer terms keep all dates the same while dropping any specific reference to Christ.
41 Ulansey, “Cultural Transitions and Spiritual Transformation: From Alexander the Great to Cyberspace,” http://www.mysterium.com/cultural.html, 1: Accessed 04/30/2019.
42 Ibid., 8.
32 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
generation to the next, begin to lose their power, as they did during the Hellenistic period, and again in our own time. During the Hellenistic period, new religions began to appear as people sought a meaningful way to relate to this new development. The Greek mystery religions, the Jewish apocalyptic tradition, and the Essenes were all part of a cultural metamorphosis that spread throughout the Roman Empire. “Indeed,” as Ulansey explains, “it is no exaggeration to say that the many-faceted socio-cosmic metamorphosis of the Hellenistic age constitutes one of the great revolutions in the history of human culture.… In the end, the most successful product of this revolution, of course, was the religion of Christianity …”43 Without a doubt, the success of Christianity has imbued the Western world with a sense of meaning that has nurtured an unprecedented flowering of creativity.
The success of Christianity was largely due to the foundations laid by St. Paul. If it were not for his mission to the Jewish diaspora and to non-Jews, Christianity may never have taken root amidst competing mystery cults that had similar aims, including personal salvation and immortality. Though they did not share the apocalyptic stance of early Christianity, these mystery cults advanced social order in a world filled with violence and moral decay. After the Romans destroyed the Jewish temple in 70 CE, the only major surviving Christian communities were the ones Paul had established in Greek-speaking cities, such as Antioch and Corinth. As it developed over the first few centuries, Christianity borrowed much from the mythologies of Egypt and the Greco-Roman world, where the notion of virgin births was widely accepted. As for claims to Jesus’s Divine origin, it must be remembered that Julius Caesar and many of the succeeding Roman emperors were also deified as “Sons of God.” By the time Constantine summoned bishops to Nicaea in 325 CE. to forge a common creed that he hoped would unify the Roman world, Jesus had been transformed from a Jewish Messiah into a cosmic figure who spoke to people’s spiritual longings throughout the Roman imperium. The emergence of Christianity provided a vision that was compatible with the deep psychological yearnings of the time. As Rome disintegrated, the vision that constituted the Church survived, in part, because St. Augustine taught that Christians were not just citizens of some earthly realm but were more significantly citizens of Civitas Dei, the City of God, which was not of this world at all. History may not repeat itself, but it is clear the world is now going through a transformational period not unlike the closing years of the Hellenistic age. The old religious structures are withering and, as we said earlier, something new is being born.
43 Ibid., 8.
THE EXISTENTIAL CRISIS OF OUR AGE 33
The idea for this chapter on the existential crisis of our age was inspired, in part, by the book All Things Shining,44 written by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly. In this delightful book, they examine the problem of nihilism now plaguing our age. As the subtitle of their book, Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age suggests, they explore how cultures have approached the question of meaning at different times throughout the history of the West. Homer’s polytheism and Dante’s Divine Comedy are especially relevant to their argument. In Homer’s world, excellence in life was synonymous with being in attunement with the Gods (the archetypes). In the Medieval world in which Dante lived, God was the center around which everything revolved. In both worlds, meaning was replete.
Dreyfus and Kelly begin their analysis by examining how the ancient Greeks related to their pantheon of gods. They conclude that the Homeric gods gave meaning to life to the extent that individuals invited the gods to fully possess them. To illustrate their point, they describe an incident from Homer’s story of events after the Trojan War in which Helen, while attending a lavish dinner party with her husband Menelaus present, tells a sensational story of her abduction by Paris: It is not a story of heroism. Rather, the most beautiful woman in the world describes how, long ago, she left Menelaus and their young child to run off with an irresistible houseguest named Paris. Yes, that Paris.
The one whose dalliance with Helen began the Trojan War.45
Instead of rebuking her, Menelaus congratulates her saying, “An excellent tale, my dear, and most becoming.”46 Surprisingly, she is held in honor because she surrendered herself completely to Aphrodite. The story of Helen and Paris shocks our moral sensibilities, but if Dreyfus and Kelly are correct, it may accurately describe how the ancient Greeks related meaningfully to the Homeric gods by fully surrendering to the powerful strivings of these deities. The contrast to our age could not be more striking. Our culture has partially thrown off many worn-out traditions that no longer invigorate life, but as a result, it is now adrift without direction. Instead of reinvigorating life as hoped, this condition leaves us vulnerable to unconscious forces that now threaten to rob us of dignity and reduce us to a state of savagery.
Nietzsche presciently foretold the death of God in our time, but he knew that we would pay a great price for God’s demise. Christianity, we contend, though seriously 44 Dreyfus and Kelly, All Things Shining: Reading the Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age.
45 Ibid., 58.
46 Ibid., 59.
34 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
flawed, has lifted our culture to its current heights. Without it, we are in danger of surrendering our individuality to the same archetypal forces that the ancient Greeks revered. Jung would agree, warning us that such a temptation, while understandable, would amount to a retreat into the womb of the Great Mother, that is, a return to an unconscious state. Dreyfus and Kelly suggest that luring the Homeric gods back might save us from the meaninglessness of life that has settled over modern culture, but in doing so, Jung would have likely cautioned that our individuality would be surrendered. Individuation is a movement in the opposite direction. In contrast to surrendering to gods lying in wait deep within the unconscious, the goal of individuation, as Jung conceived it, is the establishment of a mature relationship with the Self as the unconscious center of one’s being. Orienting life around this life-enhancing center liberates the individual from the control of unconscious affect, that is, from both instincts and archetypes.47
Helen was clearly possessed by the archetypal energies shaping her destiny. What better description of inflation can one find? Alienation, in contrast, is experienced as a sense of meaninglessness or despair when the nurturing energies of the deep psyche dry up. Both states indicate that the ego has not achieved an independent and mature relationship with the Self. Surrendering to a modern version of the Homeric gods would set the stage, not for wholeness and meaning, but for a cycle of inflation and alienation that would ultimately intensify the sense of meaninglessness that permeates our culture today. What is needed, instead, is closer to Jung’s process of individuation, which aims to free the individual from either extreme.
Socrates represents a historical shift in the culture of Greece. Athens, at the time of Socrates, was still enveloped in the mythical lore of Homer, its moral creed molded by centuries of living close to the instinctual/archetypal core of the psyche. Socrates, through the dialectical process of inquiry, challenged his students to examine their lives, thereby liberating them from conventional patterns of thought alien to their soul.
Though he helped many of his fellow Athenians break free from the all-enveloping power of the psyche, he was subsequently tried and found guilty of corrupting the youth.
47 In The Wooden Horse: The Liberation of the Western Mind from Odysseus to Socrates, Keld Zeruneith offers a nuanced view. For him, the Iliad represents the situation described by Dreyfus and Kelly, with Helen and Achilles being the representations of possession by instincts. In the Odyssey, Odysseus represents the emergence of self-control through thoughtful strategic reflection, a gradual emergence of self-awareness and subjective understanding that culminates in Socrates.
THE EXISTENTIAL CRISIS OF OUR AGE 35
Edward Edinger, a prominent Jungian scholar, tells us that when “the collective psyche is in a stable state the vast majority of individuals share a common living myth or deity.”48 Socrates threatened that stable state and was ultimately condemned to die for attempting to liberate people from the possessive power of their failing myths.
Neither individuals nor societies can easily tolerate the sense of alienation that results when people are torn from the roots that nourish their illusions. Today we honor Socrates because he initiated a collective process of individuation, not only for ancient Greece, but for Western society as it developed throughout the coming centuries. The flowering of classical Greek culture that followed Socrates still inspires us today. But progress is never linear. From high levels of accomplishment, cultures often regress to a less developed state, only to regain momentum during periods of renewal. Recall Ulansey’s view that Alexander the Great disrupted the myths that nourished the populations he conquered. The resulting alienation, in turn, prepared the soil for the emergence of Christianity, the primary source of meaning for the West during the next two millennia.
The heart of the existential crisis that enveloped the ancient world is captured in the opening lines of Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel The Last Temptation of Christ. He gives expression to the despairing sentiment that affected not only the Israelites, but all the conquered lands that Alexander’s victories bequeathed to the Roman Empire. In the opening pages, Kazantzakis evokes their despair by depicting an Israeli village enveloped by the sights and sounds of night.
Heaven and earth were peaceful and sweet, filled with the deep silence of ageless night-voices, more silent than silence itself … Human hearts sighed. Despairing, obstinate cries from hundreds of mouths fought in this mute God-trodden chaos to unite, toiled to find expression for what they longed to say. But they could not, and the cries scattered and were lost in disjointed ravings.
Suddenly there was a shrill, heart-rending scream from the highest roof top, in the center of the village. A human breast was tearing itself in two:
“God of Israel, Adonai, how long?”49
The whole world longed for a savior to free them from the alienation that permeated the Roman Empire. Unable to give voice to their longing, they waited in mute silence for something, they knew not what. St. Paul brought to the ancient world a message 48 Edinger, Ego and Archetype, 65.
49 Kazantzakis. The Last Temptation of Christ, 6.
36 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
that answered their longing, and so a new age was born in which the Christ-image guided the Western world to its current height. But now, just as it seems that victory has been achieved, a sense of nihilism has crept into our collective awareness. It is now our turn to wait expectantly for redemption from the sense of meaninglessness that pervades the world.
We believe a new mythos is struggling to be born in our time but has yet to become a reality. The Romantic philosophers were the first to attempt to give it form but were beaten back by the events of the twentieth century. Tillich and Jung also attempted to articulate a new vision but were ultimately unsuccessful. The vision will arrive on its own schedule and when it does it will seem like a new creation when compared to the troubled time we are now living through. Exploring the efforts of Tillich and Jung, however, may help us discern the lineaments of this vision.
To illustrate the nihilistic atmosphere that stifles meaning today, Dreyfus and Kelly chose Herman Melville’s classic nineteenth century novel Moby Dick. At the beginning of their discussion, they point out the interesting fact that after writing the book, Melville confided to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne that he had “written a wicked book,”50 presumably because it reveals, in a highly symbolic form, the problem of nihilism in our age. In this literary classic, Captain Ahab, who in some ways represents the intellectual tradition of Kant and the Age of Enlightenment, is driven to confront his enemy, Moby Dick, the great white whale that bit off his leg in an earlier encounter.
The face of Moby Dick, like the face of God, is inscrutable. Ahab’s “monomaniacal purpose,” according to Dreyfus and Kelly, “is to force a confrontation—face to face—
with that ‘inscrutable thing,’ to delve beneath its inscrutability...” Accordingly, Ahab is animated to lay out a metaphysical picture of the universe that reveals a world that
“has a deep truth standing behind its surface affairs, and that man’s purpose is to uncover these final, eternal truths.”51 What Ahab hates most thoroughly, “is the idea that the universe might be inscrutable to the last; that ultimately there might be ‘naught beyond.’”52 The dawning awareness that Captain Ahab fears, also fuels the existential crisis of our age.
Melville’s work might rightly be considered wicked for its dark revelation, but all is not lost. Though we may never peer into God’s inscrutable mystery, life can still be filled with beauty and meaning. Yeats, in a letter written shortly before his death,
“rejects all aspiration to abstract knowledge of the deepest truths,” but he affirms an 50 Dreyfus, Kelly, All Things Shining, 143.
51 Ibid., 158.
52 Ibid., 161.
THE EXISTENTIAL CRISIS OF OUR AGE 37
important truth that compensates for our limited capacity. Even though we cannot plumb the ultimate nature of reality, he recognized that truth can be embodied.53 Such embodied truths awaken feelings of love and beauty, the fruits of centered wholeness.
For Yeats, poetry was his path to wholeness. Contemplating the ultimate nature of Being, even though it is as inscrutable as Ahab’s whale, also awakens the soul to these transcendent truths. Intuitive reason, as presented throughout this book, serves as a doorway into the soul whose mysteries, although never fully grasped, elevates the mind to a higher, sometimes transcendent, state of existence.
This brief story of the crises in meaning, which has recurred periodically throughout Western history, shows us that what we have been increasingly experiencing since the late nineteenth century is not wholly new. Though the crisis may be developing much more quickly than analogous ones in the past, what is truly new is its pervasive global effect. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam may be in the forefront of this crisis, but Buddhists in Tibet and south Asia, Hindus in India, Africans of varying traditional faiths, and the peoples of China and Japan are all being forced to confront the same existential issues in their own ways. All too often, in a mistaken attempt to preserve the past, people resort to violence, which, no matter how disruptive, will utterly fail to save traditional ways of life. Nor can a purely secular response, though excellent at stripping away failed views, create a way of life rich in value and meaning. The apocalyptic nature of this massive global transition demands something much more fundamental. Instead of clinging to dogmatic formulations, religions must now search for inspiration from within while embracing ideas consistent with the highest attainments of our culture, including both the arts and science. They must also cease defining themselves against other spiritual traditions and begin adapting their most sacred music, ceremonies, and symbols to a new vision commensurate with the coming age.54
In the coming years, we believe the focus of religion will move from the supernatural to the natural. But in doing so, the understanding of the natural world will be enriched and imbued with a sense of majesty, because people will discover that in nature there is more beauty and spiritual depth than ever imagined. The miracle of life and consciousness will also remain a mystery worthy of wonder and reverence. As supernatural beliefs such as the Virgin Birth begin to die out, religion, if it is to survive 53 Ibid., 186.
54 Anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists have long known that it is easier to define oneself and one’s community or nation negatively (“We are not like them,” “I am not like that,” etc.). It is often more difficult to provide a positive description of oneself or group.
38 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
in our secular age, must draw inspiration from the sacred depth of the human psyche, which, we argue, is grounded in the fundamental nature of Being. Experience of the sacred, like that of love, is an empirical truth not subject to philosophical skepticism.
But the metaphysical argument that such experiences are grounded in the fundamental nature of reality must be defended in light of scientific advances, a defense we take up later starting with our exploration of consciousness.
Before we turn to ancient Greece to undertake an exploration of their understanding of Being, we need to first examine more closely the contrast between enlightened reason and the primordial wisdom of past ages, which we briefly mentioned earlier.
THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND
PRIMORDIAL WISDOM
In retrospect it is evident that the fundamental and intellectual turning point of Western Civilization was the Copernican revolution understood in its largest sense. Nothing so effectively bestowed confidence in the supreme power of human reason. Nothing so emphatically and confidently affirmed the Western mind over all others …
Richard Tarnas55
It is not an exaggeration to say that today man experiences his present situation in terms of disruption, conflict, self-destruction, meaninglessness, and despair in all realms of life.
Paul Tillich56
The Enlightenment that transformed the modern western world also weakened the cultural and religious traditions upon which people had relied on for countless generations. The contrast between enlightened reason and tradition exemplifies what Jung means by the “opposites,” which, for him, always involve a tension between consciousness thoughts and unconscious drives. The Enlightenment, by grounding religion and society on the ideal of objective reason, sought to free humanity from superstitious beliefs by stressing rational reflection and analysis, while tradition, supported by powerful instinctual and archetypal symbols, is driven to a significant degree by unconscious factors. Richard Tarnas, in his book Cosmos and Psyche says the first paradigm—enlightened reason—“describes human history and the evolution of human consciousness as an epic of human progress, a long heroic journey from a primitive world of dark ignorance, suffering, and limitation to a brighter modern world of ever-increasing knowledge, freedom, and well-being … It is a vision that emerged fully in the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though its roots are as old as Western civilization itself.”57
But he argues there is another paradigm of equal importance that tells a very different story. In this understanding of our primordial past, human history and the evolution of human consciousness are seen as predominantly problematic. It is a story 55 Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche, 27.
56 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology I, 9.
57 Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche, 12.
40 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
of “humanity’s gradual but radical fall and separation from the original state of oneness with nature.” As the world descends into ever greater stress, it seems that our current “existential crisis” is reminiscent of the “Fall” in the Book of Genesis when
“humankind had possessed an intrinsic knowledge of the profound sacred unity and interconnectedness of the world.” The modern world, however, has strayed far from this idyllic state. Today, the deepening rift between modernity and tradition, which seems increasingly to be engulfing the world, is rapidly moving toward a crisis whose nadir “is the present time of planetary turmoil, ecological crisis, and spiritual distress.”58
Unfortunately, the current struggle between religion and enlightened reason—an unnecessary opposition if there ever was one—also threatens the world with nuclear devastation. We should take this warning of an approaching apocalypse seriously since the reactionary politics of radical right-wing parties are increasingly undermining democracy all over the world. Their reactionary values have nothing in common with the imagined beauty of our primordial past. Instead, the disillusioned ideas that empower such reactionary and populist politics gather strength from the same barbaric traits that empowered Fascism. The Enlightenment that arose in reaction to Europe’s Thirty-Years’ War (1618-1648) between Protestants and Catholics was an attempt to conquer this darker aspect of our nature through reason. Today, however, in reaction to enlightened reason, the irrational and demonic fringe of our society has slowly regained power until it now appears to largely dominate conservative politics.
This fierce reaction to liberal policies, which are closely aligned with Enlightenment values, is now wildly out of control and rapidly descending into savagery. Only the holy, numinous flame of the sacred can extinguish the flames of hatred and restore human instincts to their original primordial condition.
Tarnas notes that the unfolding of our collective destiny bears a striking resemblance to Joseph Campbell’s archetypal journey of the Hero. Today, Tarnas says, “the world is undergoing a great danger, an encroaching shadow, a fall into ruin; and a radical shift of emphasis from external realties to the internal realm, moving ‘from the world scene of secondary effects to those causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside.’”59 Although challenged by many problems, including the rise in global temperatures, racial tensions, and poverty, our society’s most pressing issues could be successfully managed if we were to tackle them objectively, but nothing can now get 58 Ibid., 13.
59 Ibid. , 43. The Hero’s archetypal journey is set out in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND PRIMORDIAL WISDOM 41
done today because dark psychic forces, which are opposed to our highest conscious ideals, are now running rampant throughout our country and the world. As psychological wounds inflicted upon society by the dark side of our instinctual nature increase in intensity, Tarnas explains there will follow “a dark night of the soul, an interior descent, bringing a crisis of meaning, a transformative encounter with human suffering and mortality, and a disorienting dissolution of the self’s basic structures of identity and being. Only through such a descent does the hero penetrate to a source of greater knowledge and power opened by a direct experience of the archetypal dimension of life.” He follows this insight by saying, “We see such a pattern in late antiquity, against the backdrop of classical civilization’s ruinous decline, as the ancient cosmological vision eventually reached an opaque boundary within the overarching fixed structure of the geocentric Ptolemaic-Aristotelean universe.”60
We believe Jung had something in mind resembling Campbell’s Hero’s Journey when writing Answer to Job. Some regard Jung as a mystic, especially since he often had visions that foretold future events. He also admitted that, unlike most people, he had always lived close to the unconscious stream that guided his life. Though for many, he said, there remains an opaque wall separating consciousness from the unconscious, he frankly acknowledged that he always found the dividing wall to be relatively transparent.61 The psyche thus became his constant companion, eventually teaching him how the future would unfold.
Drawing on his inner wisdom, Jung predicted that the opposites, which are now rising to consciousness, will eventually bring about an increase in consciousness, but only after a descent into the darkest regions of the human psyche. We think this perilous journey can be best interpreted as a confrontation between humanity’s primordial state of oneness and our modern view, which is primarily based on reason and enlightenment values. As we witness the world descend into warring factions, we can no longer avoid the pervasive evidence that seems to affirm Jung’s prediction.
Global warming will soon upset the world order and with Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran aligning against the West, a nuclear war is no longer out of the question. We would be wise to anticipate, as Jung did, that a powerful and devastating religious and political storm may soon sweep away everything in preparation for a new world to be born. We can only hope that with the birth of this new world, the primordial ground of humanity will arise alongside the triumphant vision of the Enlightenment and the two will finally be brought together as one in a sacred marriage.
60 Ibid., 43-44.
61 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 355, 356.
42 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
With this thought in mind, we now turn to the ancient Greeks to better understand the birth of Western culture. Since the ancients were far more adept at going deep within themselves to discover the secrets of the soul than we are today, we continue our analysis of enlightened reason by turning to their startling perspectives on the nature of Being. We find their intuitive insights, which they backed up by reason, are just as important, or more so, than current views based on scholarly research and science.
Part I
Greek Philosophy and
The Enlightenment
EARLY GREEK AWAKENING
TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
In short, the “sacred” is an element in the structure of consciousness and not a stage in the history of consciousness.
Mircea Eliade62
… if all is One, how came there to be Two and then a universe? In one sense, the question seems unimportant in that its answer needn’t give us pause in our daily rounds, but the question does ask about the nature of reality. Is there Being at the still point of the turning world? What is its nature? Do we receive our consciousness from Being or the evolution of the universe? Is consciousness primary or epiphenomenon?
Richard G Geldard63
Western culture is indebted to the ancient Greeks for many distinctive qualities of modern life, including our scientific and democratic traditions, both of which grew out of the fertile philosophic soil that they carefully tended. In the modern era, this rich soil again bore fruit with the rise of the Enlightenment and its love of individual freedom. The Greek rational analysis of nature, more than anything else, came to define the Western world as distinct from other ancient civilizations that were then competing for dominance. Especially important for Western philosophy was the Greek concept of Being, which was based on the inscrutable mysteries of the natural world. This metaphysical insight was later enshrined within both Islam and Christianity and inspired early Christian theologians like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. In our time, it also inspired Paul Tillich’s formulation of God as the ground of Being. Because of the dramatic advances made by these ancient Greek philosophers, we consider their contribution critical for the later blossoming of our civilization with its democratic institutions.
In this and the following two chapters, we do not attempt a comprehensive history of Greek philosophy; rather, we hope to rekindle an appreciation of the great mystery that inspired individual contributors of ancient Greek wisdom to envision the world of the senses as being fashioned upon a higher reality. To emphasize this point, we have implicitly organized our discussion of Greek philosophy around seven 62 Mercia Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, I, xiii.
63 Richard G. Geldard, Parmenides and the Way of Truth, 17.
46 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
metaphysical postulates or concepts that we feel capture the essence of a higher reality.
While some of the postulates reflect ideas that were held by the ancient Greek philosophers, others are more relevant to our current view of reality. We also contend that the postulates describe several basic ways that Being manifests as natural phenomena within the world. While Being itself is beyond description, the phenomena that arise out of it are subject to analysis. The postulates are thus deeply relevant for conceiving a natural religion that recognizes and celebrates the spiritual depth existing within reality. Such a religion is rooted in human experience, especially those experiences commonly called “transcendent.”
Being, as these postulates suggest, is eternal, consisting of nothing, that is, “no thing.” It is pure potential, an eternal blueprint, from which the phenomenal foundation of the universe came into existence, including the laws of physics, the miracle of life, and consciousness. But in addition to the blueprint, there must also have been a creative intelligence within Being itself responsible for initiating the birth of the universe. Whether there is a higher intelligence responsible for designing the universal blueprint or whether the blueprint is itself an intelligent God are amongst the many important questions that will likely continue to elude all attempts to answer rationally.
Below, we have listed the seven postulates. There are likely other characteristics of Being that we have missed, some of which necessarily remain mysterious and unknown because they have not yet manifested within the unfolding universe. It must be remembered, however, that even though these postulates may help shed light on its elusive nature, Being itself will always remain beyond classification and understanding.
1. The first postulate affirms that Being is ultimately One, not a plurality, and through some creative process which may or may not be comprehensible by human beings, becomes the Many, the diverse world of phenomena. One must keep in mind though, that this and the other ones are postulates, not facts.64
64 All lines of reasoning must have a starting point, and these are postulates. As starting points, they are not proven; they allow reasoning to proceed and to take account of known facts and may imply facts to be discovered by observation and experimentation.
Such activity, if successful, lends credence—not proof—to the postulate or postulates asserted. The remainder of this volume argues for the credibility of all these postulates.
EARLY GREEK AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING 47
2. The second postulate recognizes that existence is based on foundational principles or natural laws derived from Being. This position was embraced by most of the philosophers of ancient Greece that we discuss.
3. The third postulate states that these transcendent principles, along with much of the creative potential inherent in Being, was materially realized—
spacetime, energy, and matter—when the universe burst into existence from what physicists call a singularity.65
4. The fourth postulate formulates the existence of an intelligent, though not necessarily conscious process66 inherent in nature that not only guides the evolution of the universe but is also the hidden teleological factor in history and the unfoldment of the individual. Both Tillich and Jung embraced this idea in their respective disciplines. For Tillich, it is synonymous with God’s creativity; for Jung, it is the goal-oriented nature of the objective psyche.
5. The fifth postulate posits that life, consciousness, and human values like love, compassion, and justice, ultimately derive from Being itself. This important metaphysical postulate is more fully developed later in the chapter entitled
“Protomental Foundation of the Cosmos.”
6. The sixth postulate recognizes that everything in the universe—the material world, life, and consciousness—came into existence by differentiating from the ground of existence. It is through differentiation that opposites like positive and negative charges come into existence. The principle of differentiation is attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, whom Jung often referred to when discussing the inevitable tension of opposites that exists between consciousness and the unconscious.
7. The seventh postulate declares that there exists within Being an “Eternal Truth,” which has inspired spiritual seekers down through the ages. While no philosophy or religion can express it objectively in concrete terms, its mysterious and ineffable promptings have inspired all who open themselves to it through prayer, meditation, or the deep intuitive insights like those that 65 The Big Bang is a singularity, in that there is nothing in the universe to compare it to. It is unique in that it is the infinite potential that over time manifests everything that has ever existed or will exist in the future, at least in this universe.
66 Consciousness is so little understood that it would be ridiculous to claim that this primordial consciousness is anything like human consciousness or consciousness we find in the world’s fauna and flora.
48 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
Plato attributed to Logos. Hence, this postulate suggests that there are ways of knowing outside scientific reasoning, observation, and experimentation.
In summary, while the laws of physics govern the material cosmos, Being is the innermost essence of the universe governing not only the creation of life and the birth of consciousness but is also guiding the whole of Creation toward a mysterious destiny beyond our limited imagination. While remaining roughly consistent with our summary of Being, each of the philosophers we examine throughout the book, had their own concept of it. For Plato, Being is the reality underlying the changing world of becoming while for Aristotle it is the ultimate One from which the Many derive, and for Spinoza, it is the fundamental substance of reality. But perhaps there is a reality beyond the universe which transcends all categories, including the fundamental categories of “is” and “is not” (some Hindu views). Whether Being is the ultimate reality from which everything comes, including life and consciousness, or is thought to be a creator God, both philosophy and religion have wrestled with its nature throughout their histories.
Appreciating the philosophic perspective of the early Greek philosophers has become increasingly important today if we are to successfully confront the existential crisis that pervades modern life. In a letter to Eric Neuman, Jung seems to have agreed that even psychology owes a dept to these ancient Greeks. “Analytical psychology,”
he said, “has its roots deep in Europe, in the Christian Middle Ages, and ultimately in Greek Philosophy.”67 Though Christianity inherited the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition, the desire of the ancient Greek philosophers to discover the fundamental foundation of reality, the hallmark of classical Greek culture, was overlaid by Christian faith. This new faith gave people a feeling of certainty that God, as revealed through the teachings of Jesus Christ, was the foundation and creator of the world. Many of the fundamental questions that so fascinated the Greeks were therefore no longer considered relevant. But today, as religious faith is slowly eroded by advances in science, we find ourselves returning to the very issues with which the Pre-Socratics, Plato, and the Neoplatonists struggled. For that reason alone, it is worth reviewing their ideas before attempting our own answer to some of the same questions that so engaged the Greeks and lie at the heart of Tillich’s theology and Jung’s psychology.
Jung viewed the Greek renaissance, starting in the fifth century before Christ, as a resurgence of archetypal ideas that parallel conditions today. “These archetypal images,” Jung said,
67 Jung, Letters, I, 206.
EARLY GREEK AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING 49
belong to humanity at large and can crop up autochthonously in anybody’s head at any time and place, only needing favourable [ sic]
circumstances for their reappearance. The suitable moment for this is always when a particular view of the world is collapsing, sweeping away all the formulas that purported to offer final answers to the great problems of life. It is a matter of fact, quite in accord with psychological law that, when all the uprooted gods come home to roost in man …
and … when a religion glorifying the spirit disappears, there should rise up in its stead a primordial image of creative matter.68
Today, as people begin to turn away from traditional religion and search for alternatives to satisfy their spiritual longings, these same primordial images are once again arising, drawing people toward a spirituality consistent with Nature and the Greek concept of Being.
Although contemplation of the mystery of Creation is at the heart of religion, however it is practiced, the first, primitive, foundational question of philosophy is the relation of the Many—the cosmos and everything in it—to the One. Even if it is hard to imagine that everything we experience ultimately came from a unitary source, cosmologists now tell us the universe came into existence from a singularity—a single point with no spatial boundaries. Though the mystery of creation is beyond the grasp of reason, simple contemplation of it can still be a source of awe. Carlo Rovelli, a materialist physicist, cannot help but muse:
The world is more extraordinary and profound than any of the fables told by our forefathers. I want to go and see it. To accept uncertainty doesn’t detract from our sense of mystery. On the contrary: we are immersed in the mystery and the beauty of the world.69
People living in the West have been nourished by Christianity for close to two thousand years. But the Christ story or mythos is no longer taken seriously by a large segment of society. If we are to immerse ourselves in the mystery and beauty to which Rovelli and Christians aspire, a modern interpretation of this ancient biblical story must be envisioned. For that, Paul Tillich’s theology seems ideally suited. Because of its intellectual honesty and rigor, his theology has the necessary depth and breadth to resuscitate a moribund Christianity in this age of religious skepticism.
68 Jung, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, CW 15: para. 11..
69 Carlo Rovelli, Reality is not what it Seems, 263.
50 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
Although any new story that satisfies the hunger of the soul will evolve from many sources throughout the world, the philosophical principles that contributed to the flourishing of Greek philosophy will continue to be as important in the future as they are today. Most importantly, the Greek belief that empirical or physical reality reflects a higher order eternally existing as pure potential, must now be embraced again if we are to address our existential crisis. It is from this transcendent level, we believe, that love, the experience of the sacred (the numinous), and our highest ethical ideals derive.
When fully embraced, this truth stimulates the imagination, awakening the mind to the profound mystery of existence. This is not just an intellectual problem to puzzle over, but rather, an existential issue of great importance. By pulling back the veils that shrouds this great mystery, we can hope the modern world will eventually gain enough wisdom to avert further aggravation of the existential and spiritual crisis that threatens to hasten the ecological degradation of the planet, or worse, a nuclear war.70
The Greek “miracle” that gave birth to Western civilization and ennobled life by envisioning it founded on higher principles has, unfortunately, lost force in our secular age. We must now reignite the spirit of their quest if we are to awaken again to the great mystery that inspired the flowering of their culture, for reason alone is inadequate to the task of penetrating the divine mystery at the heart of the universe.
Only symbolic truth revealed through intuition or deep meditative states and tested through reason will suffice. Classical Greek culture not only inspired Romans and Muslims but also influenced Christian philosophers like St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Its influence endured throughout the Christian West and Islam for countless generations until the modern era dealt it a death blow. The loss of this magnificent vision resulted in a crisis of belief, a tragedy that ultimately led Nietzsche to proclaim the death of God.
We often credit ancient Greek philosophy with the beginning of science and philosophy, both of which have benefitted us immensely. During this same creative time of ferment, the Indian Subcontinent showed more of an early interest in consciousness and the empirical means for exploring it—something neglected to a great degree in the West until the modern period.71 Ancient China, meanwhile, focused 70 As will become apparent later on, the authors believe that meaning and value can be traced to the very origin of the universe and everything in it: they are part of the inherent structure of existence. While traditional Christianity rooted meaning in God’s commandments, this rather anthropomorphic view is no longer acceptable to many people, including many modern Christians.
71 The Neoplatonists and various medieval mystics independently developed philosophies that broadly reflect the essence of Eastern Wisdom.
EARLY GREEK AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING 51
on tao—the creative and sustaining root of Nature—as well as human relationships and what constitutes civilization (Confucianism). All of these traditions enliven and help renew our appreciation for the mystery of creation. Classicist and art historian Thomas McEvilley’s monumental The Shape of Ancient Thought provides a persuasive and engaging analysis of parallel developments and cultural exchanges across the ancient world, extending from ancient Greece to India via the Middle East.72 He attempts to show the extent that various philosophical problems and proposed solutions arose synchronically throughout the region, reinforcing the recent recognition among historians that contacts between East and West were significantly more frequent and substantial than once thought.
While the East has used meditation to quiet the mind as preparation for spiritual insight, the West has more often resorted to philosophy and deep reasoning, often accompanied by prayer, to open the heart and soul for reception of divine truth. Divine truth does not arrive in the form of carefully reasoned arguments, but as inspiration, a surge of feeling that kindles a passion within the soul, uniting truth with a vison of beauty.
Paul Levy in The Quantum Revelation quotes physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) regarding the relationship between beauty and truth. Heisenberg writes, “The apprehension of Ideas by the human mind is more an artistic intuiting, a half-conscious intimation,” at the sight of which the “Beautiful and the Good” becomes visible and
“the wings of the soul begin to grow.”73 Levy follows this a few pages later with a quote from physicist Max Planck (1858-1947): “New ideas are not generated by deduction, but by an artistically creative imagination.”74 Such ideas have invariably inspired belief that there is more to existence than dead matter, that there is an ultimate ground of existence, and that consciousness is not a mere accidental byproduct of organic organization but is rooted in the very nature of the universe.
The East has much to contribute to our understanding of reality, but rather than unfurl the entire banner of philosophy East and West, we will focus on our Greek heritage, touching on a few persisting philosophical themes and ideas relevant to the 72 Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies. He argues in the Forward that a colonial mentality underpinned the now discredited view that there was nothing of philosophical interest in ancient Indian thinking.
73 Levy, The Quantum Revelation: A radical Synthesis of Science and Spirituality, 40.
74 Ibid., 45.
52 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
study of Being and consciousness. We begin our discussion with the Pre-Socratics75
since they were the first in the West to ask questions in a rational manner regarding the fundamental nature of reality. Their use of reason, however, should be understood in the spirit of a contemplative discipline, in which truth is the fruit of both rational rigor and spiritual insight. Though generally materialist in their concerns, logos76 in various guises was acknowledged as an ordering or governing principle, and psyche or soul was seen as a fundamental part of existence. Because of the general Greek view that “like knows like,” nature or reality was thought to be intelligent (though not necessarily conscious).
These early beginnings, which are discussed in the following chapters, first led to the philosophy of Parmenides, who argued for a transcendental One. For this strict monist, the diversity of existence (the Many) has only a relative status compared to the reality of the One, which alone can be said to exist. Later, Plato envisioned a transcendent order, essences, or Forms, upon which all that exists depends. The contemplation of the Forms, we note, especially their highest expression—Beauty, Goodness, and Truth—produce an experience that is anything but ordinary, having a numinous or mystical quality to it. Aristotle, in turn, grounded these Forms in matter itself, though he preserved the sense of the sacred, in part, by tracing all causation back to a Prime Mover, an uncaused cause. The implications of Plato’s thinking were then taken up by Plotinus and other Neoplatonists, as well as in Hermetic works. They expanded on Plato’s philosophy by elevating the numinous sense of reality to the rare possibility of a vision of the One, the source of all that is.
The rise of Christianity is often taken as sidelining such speculations, but the then-new religion borrowed much from Plato and Aristotle even as it recast their pagan ideas in new molds. The older traditions thus continued, sometimes underground and sometimes repressed, into modern times.77 Both Jung and Tillich drew upon these 75 The term Presocratics refers to philosophers who wrote and taught before Socrates and Plato, and though some were contemporaries of both, they still used styles and methods of the older Presocratics.
76 Logos is an ancient Greek concept that can mean word, account, reason, and, with early Greek philosophers, a divine creative principle. It is the Greek term for ‘Word’ at the beginning of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word….” ( The Jerusalem Bible, John 1:1.)
77 For a rich survey of these semi-secret traditions in the history of Christianity down to the esoteric movements of today, see Antoine Faivre’s “Ancient and Medieval Sources of Modern Esoteric Movements” in Antoine Faivre and Jacob Needleman, eds., Modern Esoteric Spirituality, Chapter One.
EARLY GREEK AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING 53
strands in their understanding of the numinous, which lifts our vision upward to gaze upon the Divine while drawing its creative power from the abysmal depths—the archetypal foundation of the psyche. The mystic poet, W.B. Yeats, though apparently not familiar with Jung’s work, also drew upon these same threads.
James Olney wrote a beautiful book entitled The Rhizome and the Flower: The Perennial Philosophy—Yeats and Jung. 78 In it, he affirmed Yeats’ and Jung’s view that the nature of Being is like the rhizome of a plant, always regenerating new life from a common stratum that goes back before the dawn of history.
There is no lateral or temporal line that connects Yeats with Jung, but there are parallel lines which one could demonstrate and retrace, stretching back from both so far into the past of human history that as they reach the limits of our vision and our historical perspective they cease to be parallel and come together on the horizon of human thought in such figures as Plato first, and then, beyond Plato (in the order in which we meet them as we trace our lines back into the past), Empedocles, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Pythagoras. Seen in this light, the works of Yeats and Jung are present moments of a long past, a creative surfacing in geographically discrete places of a continuous and unbroken, though sometimes chthonic and subterranean, body of slowly developed and developing human thought and performance.79
Olney was likely drawing on Jung’s reflections on the Rhizome in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections:
Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome.
It’s true self is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that lives above the rhizome last only a single summer. Then it withers away, an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the central flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.80
78 Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower: The Perennial Philosophy—Yeats and Jung.
79 Ibid., 9.
80 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 4.
54 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
Yeats called this chthonic and subterranean undercurrent a “fibrous darkness” from which “everything has come.”81 Olney followed up by, saying,
…its flowers are of a day, blossoming and fading in a man’s lifetime, but the rhizome itself is as ancient as thought, as deep as psyche, whose limits, as Heraclitus says, ‘you would not find even by traveling along every path: so deep a logos does it have’… From deep, deep down, where it is untouched by the frosts of time, merely strengthened by increase of age, the perennial rhizome still, even in our day, nourishes its bright, beautiful, brief flowers.82
In the study of Greek philosophy, it is commonly assumed that its greatest contribution is science and logic. What Olney make clear is that far more is involved in that both cultures—modern as well as ancient—represent a flowering of the rhizome that exists at the center of our individual as well as our collective being.
Much of Jung’s psychology is based on similar insights. “Our psyche,” Jung said in his autobiography, “is set up in accord with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most subjective reaches of the psyche.”83 We know the material universe through science and the power of reason. But we can only know the nature of the psyche through myth. It has its own language, and wisdom demands mastery of both logos and mythos, for to leave either one out is to have a one-sided view of reality. In a letter to J. Allen Gilbert, Jung admitted that he does not have “the faintest idea what ‘psyche’ is in itself…”84 We can only know the psyche through the mental images that are produced by it, images that fill our lives with color and meaning. Science and logos provide measurable results that grant a certain degree of control over the world we live in, but science by itself, according to Jung, only produces “veils and curtains concealing the abysmal darkness of the Unknowable.”85 While not being able to penetrate to the core of reality, a mythos,
which is based on numinously charged symbols, and informed by logos, partially 81 Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower, 12.
82 Ibid., 53.
83 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 335.
84 Jung, Letters, I, 57. As an empiricist, Jung can go no farther than describing phenomena arising from the psyche. As the ancient Greek philosophers knew, going farther requires some metaphysical understanding.
85 Ibid. 57.
EARLY GREEK AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING 55
draws back the shroud that obscures our understanding of Being and the deep structures of the psyche that give rise to civilization.
A concept like “Being” can have different meanings in different systems, and often one philosophical or religious language does not have a concept found in another.
Scholars struggle to translate unfamiliar texts in ways that are both faithful to the original and intelligible to the reader.86 We will not attempt a detailed discussion of these comparative systems. It will serve our purposes to note similarities and broadly consonant ways that philosophy has approached Being, reality, and the numinous. Our concern is less with metaphysical systems than with understanding the source of numinous experience as fundamental to the nature of Being. The old Buddhist adage that teaching is like a finger pointing to the moon is relevant here. We should not confuse the finger (the system) with what it is pointing to.
Philosophy tends to be fine grained, exploring in detail some point of view or claim.
Yet stepping back to gain a panoramic view of ancient philosophy reveals an important pattern in human thinking that seeks unity in nature. Whether these philosophers relied primarily on careful observation of nature or favored abstract reasoning over the empirical, their efforts, as we said earlier, reflect a deep need to find some single underlying substance or principle, an all-encompassing One, from which the many diverse aspects of existence derive. Some ancient Greek thinkers turned to nature to find the one primal substance which gave rise to the world. Others looked to some organizing principle on which the world was modeled, like numbers or geometrical forms, or in the case of Plato, transcendental archetypes. The ancient Chinese, as indicated earlier, held that all is the result of the movement of the tao ( dao), which is the Way but also the ultimate reality, binding even the gods. The ancient Hindus looked to the panoply of gods,87 themselves ultimately transient, and held that beyond 86 One may look at some of the dozens of translations of the Taoist Tao te ching ( Dao de jing) and see just how different even the first section is translated to appreciate how difficult moving the content of a language (here ancient Chinese) into another language (in this case, modern English) can be. The philosophical commitments of the translator will affect the translation, but even without them, translation is immensely difficult. Good translators are heroes of thought.
87 The gods— devas—were not thought of in the way that the Christian or Muslim deity is conceived—eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, utterly consistent, etc. The gods themselves, like the Greek gods, came into being, and at the end of a great period, will dissolve back into the Source of all again. Ancient Judaism (or Hebrew religion) is not mentioned here because the god of the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament) does not characterize Yahweh in absolutist terms. From the book of Isaiah onward, Jews came
56 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
them was a Source that is the sine qua non of all existence. All of these views are consistent with our contention that Mind, as an aspect of Being, is fundamental to the unfolding of the Universe. It is interesting to note that Descartes went against this general trend, arguing that instead of one, there are two fundamental principles or substances: mind and matter (though even here God is behind both). Although his dualism was influential well into the twentieth century, today philosophy and science tend toward a monistic view in which the universe is seen as a unified whole.
Western philosophy began in “Greater Greece,” which includes the Greek mainland and the islands and colonies dispersed throughout Sicily, southern Italy, north Africa, and Anatolia. The early Presocratic philosophers were influenced by poets such as Homer and Hesiod even as they resisted their mythic accounts of the gods, while turning to Sumerian-Akkadian-Babylonian astronomers and sages for understanding the cycles of the heavens. The Homeric poets viewed the Divine and the human as part of a single reality in which humans could, at times, ascend to the heavens. The gods, though remote and unconcerned with the fate of people’s lives, would also occasionally interfere in human affairs, usually to serve their own purposes.
As noted earlier, Homer’s account of Helen reciting her passionate affair with Paris at her husband’s (Menelaus’) banquet—to the approval of all—dramatically shows how, for them, the relationship of humans to the gods included something akin to occasional possession by the gods—not for human, but for divine purposes. In this regard, Dreyfus and Kelly note:
The goddess to whom Helen was most attuned was Aphrodite; she illuminates a situation’s erotic possibilities and draws one to bring these out at their best. Achilles, by contrast, is sensitive to Ares’
mood—an aggressive mood in which opportunities to shine as a ferocious warrior become the most important aspects of the situation at hand. Other gods call forth other attunements. The best kind of life in Homer’s world is to be in sync with the gods.88
Individuals were seen as porous to various deities, rather like when individuals in later centuries thought of themselves as living under the influence of various signs of the zodiac—and today, according to Jung, are influenced by archetypes. More importantly, personal fulfillment and meaning for the ancient Greeks that Homer to understand deity in ways Christians and Muslims do. This more absolutist view was the starting point for both Christianity and Islam.
88 Dreyfus and Kelly, All Things Shining, 60.
EARLY GREEK AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING 57
wrote about, depended on submitting to the god most suited to an individual’s personality. By being possessed by that god, one’s greatest good was realized.
As philosophy emerged from this mythic background, the gods lost their importance and the relation to deity underwent profound changes. While retaining a spiritual and contemplative quality, the search for an underlying source of everything, whether material or divine, became the overriding concern for the Presocratic philosophers.
This was in line with sophisticated urban growth in cities like Athens, where obsessive
“attunement” to the gods too readily upset necessary civic order. Their philosophy is known to us mostly through quotations from later authors who quoted and paraphrased them. Though their overall thinking is difficult to determine solely from the fragments of their writings that survive, certain conclusions can be drawn. For these early philosophers, for instance, the one substance or principle, from which the multiplicity of everything within the world of appearances derives, was often called logos and sometimes soul. Unlike the Presocratic philosophers, the thinking of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle was well preserved in writing. Beginning with them, the focus shifted. Instead of searching exclusively for a universal, material substrate, Plato’s theory of Forms also imbued philosophy with an abiding concern for moral values, good government, and living the good life.
Looking back on the “Greek miracle,” it can be seen that three streams of philosophical thought arose in Greece that have been intertwined throughout Western history. Two came from the periphery of the ancient Greek world, and one was rooted in Athens. In Anatolia, the earliest philosophers, beginning with Thales, looked for a substrate (substance or first principle) that underlay and differentiated into the world as we know it. In the Italian peninsula, Pythagoras and his followers saw mathematics and number as being at the core of nature.89 And in Athens, Socrates and Plato looked at human nature and the ethical values that were a fundamental part of its constitution.
All three approaches interacted, of course, but there were clear differences in their intent. We will now examine all of them in greater depth in the next two chapters.
89 Pythagoras was born in Anatolia and migrated to Italy as an adult. It was there that his teachings gained fame.
THE PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHERS
The Pythagorean discovery that there was a relationship between musical intervals and numerical ratios led to the belief that the study of mathematics was the key to the understanding of the structure and order of the universe…
However, it was not until two millennia later that Galileo and his successors showed the sense in which it is true that the book of the universe is written in numbers.
Anthony Kenny90
Heraclitus identifies souls with fire, moisture therefore signifies death, since it extinguished the fire.. Yet—and this is altogether characteristic of one sort of Heraclitean paradox—the fiery soul is born out of its watery opposite, and in the end it returns to that opposite...
James Olney91
James Olney points out that Jung’s whole life and his entire work were dedicated to
“the great drama, both individual and universal, of the unconscious becoming conscious. That drama played itself out phylogenetically in ancient Greece, to be repeated ontogenetically in the autobiography and Collected Poems of Yeats and in the autobiography and Collected Works of Jung.”92 Although the Greek philosophers had no knowledge of the unconscious, their logical analyses of Being awakened them to the deeper level of reality that Jung would later associate with the archetypal foundation of consciousness. Many of the Presocratic philosophers discovered this hidden resource by envisioning that material existence was founded on a higher reality. Parmenides called this higher order the “One” of which nothing further can be known except that it is. For him, the One was eternal and had no relation to the sensuous world of time in which we live. Unlike Parmenides, however, most of the other Greek philosophers tried to derive the existing world from pure being. This line of reasoning was later refined by Plato and the Neoplatonists. Though their works drew inspiration from the Presocratic philosophers, Plato and the Neoplatonists were far more successful in melding eternity with time.
The Presocratic philosophers we primarily focus on in this chapter are Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Empedocles. Olney said: “… everything we call ‘Platonic’
90 Anthony Kenny, Ancient Philosophy, 9.
91 Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower, 101.
92 Ibid. , 289.
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can be deduced, and was by Plato deduced, from the archetypal doctrines associated with these semilegendary figures.”93 Their ideas are largely supportive of our seven metaphysical postulates as they relate to Being, each in his own way touching on themes important to this book. Taken together, we find in their philosophies an evolving concept of deity, the marginalization of the traditional gods, the centrality of logos (reason, speech, word) in the organization of the world, and a focus on the mind’s influence on nature. By contemplating nature, they explored the limits of reason and recognized the inexpressible mystery of Being, while insisting that the full development of reason is a precondition for any access to reality beyond the world of the senses, which also includes the natural human capacity for spiritual attunement.
The power of this perspective was much later reflected in the Enlightenment and its elevation of reason as the principle means for exploring reality. But unlike the Enlightenment, these ancient thinkers practiced what we might consider a natural religion, which brought together a rational exploration of nature with an equally fervent desire to awaken to the spiritual depth of reality. Today, some form of natural religion like theirs is becoming critically important for confronting the existential crisis of our age.
During the turbulent time in which they lived, philosophy was being irrevocably separated from the Homeric tradition, which had previously nurtured the souls of most Greek citizens. These early philosophers sought to find a suitable substitute for their ancient mythological inheritance by critically examining the natural world. They found that when combined with a spiritual discipline—for instance, Plato’s noesis—
nature embodied all the spiritual resources that they needed. The break from tradition that ensued brought about the first metamorphosis of the gods.94 The metamorphosis was not consciously willed but spontaneously arose from the unconscious underbelly of Greek culture in reaction to the loss of the secure rootedness that the Homeric tradition had previously provided. What we will find is that the next two metamorphoses—the rise of Christianity and the Enlightenment—were also spontaneous reactions driven by dynamic forces that lie deep within the collective unconscious. In each case, the entire civilization was lifted to a higher level of consciousness. The fourth metamorphosis, which is just beginning, will hopefully 93 Ibid. , 24.
94 As indicated in the introduction, The first Metamorphosis corresponds to the transition of the ancient Greek culture from a heroic religious mythos based on the veneration of the Homeric gods to a reason-based philosophy, whose philosophical innovations deeply influenced Christian theology and the Enlightenment.
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elevate us to an even higher plane of existence in which, as Jung predicted, the unruly nature of the unconscious will finally be tamed.95
The four Presocratic philosophers we are discussing in this chapter developed the fundamental elements, the roots, or the rhizomata of what some call the Philosophia Perennis, that organic body of thought which never really had any discernable beginning. In the Western world, Plato was the first to give a full and distinctive articulation to it.96
Olney points out that strict historical accuracy is not essential for interpreting Parmenides, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Empedocles, because the story that developed around them is an eternal story that emerges within every culture.97 The same can be said for Christianity. Today, many question the historical truth of the Christ mythos but the story that celebrates Christ’s life and death, nonetheless, is born out of the same rhizomata that inspired ancient Greek philosophy. As such, the story is eternally true.
Plato argued that there are two modes or realms of existence—one of being, the other of becoming—or in the philosophy of Paul Tillich, the ground of Being and the existent world. Olney argues that these two modes, though they are “distinct from one another, and even, at times, in opposition … are not absolutely and irrevocably sundered or unrelated.” From this he reasoned that the human soul is immortal and by nature divine because “the vital and ordering principle in human beings is identical with the vital and ordering principle in the universe…”98 Olney also points out that Yeats renewed this Platonic vision in poetry and Jung in psychology. It seems, he said, that all their different philosophic perspectives were carefully tended and guided "by a will or an intention beyond the consciousness of any one of them alone, including Plato.
Such is the teleology of Platonism.”99
We begin a more detailed analysis of these philosophers with Parmenides (born c.
515 BCE), who wrote an epic poem consisting of two parts: The Way of Truth, and The 95 The second and third metamorphosis represent, respectively, the rise of Christianity and the Enlightenment, while the fourth metamorphosis of the gods represents a future time when enlightened reason will be united with the sacred depth of the soul . We believe, in fact, that there is ample evidence that this metamorphosis has already begun.
96 Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower, 24-25.
97 Ibid., 26-27.
98 Ibid., 30.
99 Ibid., 31.
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Way of Seeming. The Way of Truth discusses “what is,” which he called the One, the fundamental ground of existence. All that can be said about it, he argued, is that it is uncreated and eternal. The Way of Seeming is richer in detail because it examines the phenomenal world of everyday existence in which everything born dies. In contrast to the One, he thought the sensory world, which casts a seductive spell over life, is illusory in that it is separate from pure Being.100 Although Parmenides considered the phenomenal world illusory and therefore of little concern, he also found it impossible to say much about the uncreated and eternal “One,” other than that “it is”— èsti. When discussing the nature of Being today, we cannot say anything definite about this mystery either, except that it is both eternal and the foundation of the world as we know it.
Of course, Parmenides could claim we experience change, including things coming into and passing out of existence, but our experiences do not reflect ultimate reality.
Thus, time is unreal and only gives the illusion of change.101 His pupil Zeno produced famous paradoxes that claimed to show that change could not occur. For example, assume a hare can run ten times as fast as a tortoise. Set the hare one hundred yards behind the tortoise and send them both down a track at the same time. By the time the hare reaches the starting point of the tortoise, the tortoise will have moved ahead ten yards. By the time the hare reaches that point, the tortoise will have moved ahead one yard. And when the hare traverses that yard, the tortoise will have gone a further 1/10
of a yard. No matter how long the race lasts, the hare will get ever closer but never catch the tortoise. Hence motion in time is unreal, whatever experience seems to tell us.
Much of what we know of Parmenides comes from Plato’s dialogues. Although Plato’s account of him is fictional, scholars have throughout history taken the view that the ideas put in the mouth of the fictional Parmenides are close to those of the historical 100 Whether, as we explained above, Parmenides thought that the moving, changing world was unreal or just of secondary or relative reality is a matter of debate.
101 Some contemporary physicists have the view that the whole universe exists timelessly, and that time is unreal. This view is sometimes called the block universe, in which the equations of relativity theory can do away with time. In the block universe, time is the way we experience a sequence of segments of this whole. Physicist Lee Smolin, however, argues that time is real in Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe and that space is unreal, but this is a minority view. Immanuel Kant held that both space and time depend on the way consciousness organizes experience and that we cannot say they are “out there” in the world. Thus, for Kant, we can never know things in themselves.
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Parmenides. Numerous (often fragmentary) written accounts as well as archaeology in southern Italy suggest that Parmenides was influenced by Pythagoras and was, like him, considered a healer and visionary. Archaeologists working in Velia (Elea) have found remains of a statue of Parmenides that also affirm his status as healer, prophet, and lawgiver. Here “prophet” means one who sees through appearances and can tell what is true or not, not one who predicts the far future. These discoveries throw a different light on Parmenides’ famous poem, The Way of Truth.102 In the opening lines, he is taken up into a celestial realm, and upon arriving at the portal of Day and Night, is greeted by a goddess (most likely Persephone). The poem may well be an elliptical account of his actual experience, descending into the underworld, learning about reality, and returning. As an initiate, he would be in the line of Pythagoras and the Orphics where such experiences can be expressed only symbolically and through allusions. Whether or not the poem alludes to an actual experience, Peter Kingsley argues that Parmenides not only explored the uttermost limits of rationality but also delved into what lay beyond for one who is prepared.103 Such experience occurs in the Imaginal Realm with which Jung was familiar. However we understand Parmenides’
views, he seems to have believed it possible to intuitively plumb the depth of Being through spiritual disciplines once a purified mind has been attained.
The goal of many spiritual disciplines is to clear the mind so that the experience of oneness can be realized. Such an experience might very well have led Parmenides to proclaim the existence of the One. Such mystical proclamations are necessarily expressed in mythical language because they derive from the fundamental, archetypal structure of the psyche, which links back to the primal source from which religion has evolved.
In A Vision, W. B. Yeats expressed ideas like Parmenides’ concept of the One, based on clairvoyant promptings from his wife Georgiana Hyde-Lees. Four days after his marriage to her on October 20th, 1917, she began to receive messages from what they both came to refer to as their “instructors.” At first the messages were transmitted through automatic writing, but later they were transmitted verbally by Georgiana while asleep.104 Although Yeats depended on his wife’s visions, he was at the same time madly in love with another woman, Maud Gonne, even though she never 102 For a full account of Parmenides as healer and prophet, see Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom, which contains extensive references.
103 Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom, pp. 61 ff. In fact, the whole book deals with this point.
104 Yeats, A Vision, 8-17.
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returned his love. Nonetheless, both women had a profound effect on his poetry. Olney contended that “Yeats’s descriptions of Maud Gonne’s personality and her effect on his consciousness sound like nothing so much as … Jung’s description of the anima,”
which Olney compared to a “clinical analysis of Yeats’s unhappy, confused, and half-mad relationship with Maud Gonne.”105
Georgiana’s communications became the foundation for Yeats’ A Vision where Yeats discussed what he described as the Parmenidean Sphere. He envisioned the Sphere, as Olney depicted it, as an image “representing that which can be symbolized but cannot be known.” It was therefore important for Yeats “to establish that symbolism does not function within this world but between this world and another one that enjoys an entirely different mode of being.” Yeats was also concerned, according to Olney, that if there is no such world “then this present world is the whole of reality and is nothing but spume, frothy and vain, signifying nothing.”106 The symbol, which is the only bridge connecting the two worlds, is, accordingly, as essential for poetry as it is for philosophy and, we might add, Jung’s psychology. The symbol, as Jung well knew, makes it possible to speak about that which would otherwise be hidden from consciousness. Without it, Olney claimed, perception of reality is distorted, for “an extreme monistic denial of the present world would render the symbolic process impossible, but an extreme pluralistic denial of the One Being would render it nugatory [of no value or importance].”107 For it is the relationship between the One and the Many that enlivens human experience.
The uroboros is an ancient symbol depicted as a snake coiled in a circle, biting its own tail. Jung often came across such symbolism in alchemical texts, possibly referring to Parmenides and the One Being that proceeds from itself and leads back to itself.
Other symbols with a similar meaning are a point, a circle, and the sphere, all of which, for Jung, signify wholeness. “In ecclesiastical as in alchemical literature,” he said, “the saying is often quoted: ‘God is an infinite circle (or sphere) whose centre { sic.] is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.’”108 Olney added a bit of poetic flourish to Parmenides’ One Being, describing it as a still center from which the “Heraclitean stream issues from a Parmenidean needle’s eye and, like a waterfall, it connects Below and Above, this world and that one, it returns us to our source, and it symbolizes that 105 Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower, 310-311.
106 Ibid., 140.
107 Ibid., 140.
108 Ibid., 142. The same concept is found in the Hindu Upanishads.
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which we can neither know nor say.”109 Jung had a similar view of the Pleroma. “In the Pleroma,” he said, “Above and Below lie together in a strange way and produce nothing; but when disturbed … a waterfall arises between Above and Below, a dynamic something that,” for the individual, “overpowers him, shapes him, as though he had opened a sluice that pours a mighty stream over him and sweeps him away.…”110 Or in Yeats’ words:
All the stream that’s roaring by
Came out of a needle’s eye;
Things unborn, things that are gone,
From needle’s eye still goad it on.111
Unlike Parmenides, Anaxagoras (born c. 510 BCE), attempted to close the gap between the One and the Many (the world) through his concept of a universal mind.
In formulating the nature of mind or nous, he combined Heraclitus’ logos, the power that directs or steers all things, with Heraclitus’ ceaseless interplay of opposites and Parmenides’ One—all of which are discussed later in this chapter. When mind is conceived this way, it bridges the divide between the One and the Many by providing both order and value to the cosmos. Today, in the early years of the twenty-first century, we are still engaged in questions not that different from the concerns of any of the Presocratic philosophers we discuss.
Pythagoras (born about 570 BCE) addressed the mystery of mind by claiming that the ratios between numbers pointed to an intelligent order. Some of the other Presocratics agreed with him that mind is a fundamental and guiding principle of the world, but none of them directly confronted issues concerning the origin of consciousness. While our exclusive Western focus on the material world today has also blinded us to questions concerning the ultimate origin of consciousness, such questions were of utmost concern to the yogis and philosophers of the East. Indian thinkers took an early interest in the source of perception and thought, and its relation to the world.
However, there were popular movements within Greek culture, closely tied to Pythagoras, that paralleled much Indian thinking. While Greek philosophy sought answers to the material world, the Greek mystery schools, which sprang up alongside 109 Ibid., 149.
110 Jung, Letters, 1, 6: Olney referenced this passage on page 148 of The Rhizome and the Flower.
111 Yeats, “A Needle’s Eye,” available at verse.press; Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower, 149.
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philosophy, were mystically inclined. Orphism is a good example,112 though their interest was not so much in describing and explaining consciousness as it was in transforming it. The mystery of Being was thus pursued in two directions, one by Greek philosophy searching for the primordial substance of phenomenal world and the other by the mystery schools searching for the root and transformation of consciousness. The fused Orphic-Pythagorean tradition affected much subsequent Greek philosophical thinking, either by assimilation or reaction. The monistic tendencies of both approaches meant that mind and matter would eventually be considered interrelated and mutually dependent but not until the Renaissance when there was a rapid expansion of knowledge in the West.
The philosophical and religious ideas that pass under the name Orphism are largely a mystery. Orphism is so tied to Pythagoreanism that scholars cannot agree on which elements in Orphic and Pythagorean thought belong to which tradition. What is clear is that Pythagoras founded a community that followed a particular way of life which included ascetic practices, from vegetarianism to style of dress. Yet devotees were also involved in politics and social action. But overall, their most important goal was the transformation of consciousness.
The idea that the soul113 was somehow “trapped” in a body that obscured its real nature seems rooted in both Orphism and Pythagoreanism. Consequently, the soul had to be purified to recover its true nature. Some forms of practice akin to meditation seem to have been involved. Right up through the Hellenistic Age and the early centuries of the Christian era, philosophy was seen as a way of life, not just a method of thinking about things. Christianity, which borrowed much from Greek philosophy, continued this practice, but over time Christian theology—in contrast to its spiritual traditions—
became overly intellectual, especially within scholastic philosophy. Although the earliest surviving Greek philosophies outside the mystery schools seem to have been primarily concerned with the natural world, the mind still assumed a degree of importance for them as demonstrated by Heraclitus’ fire114 and, especially, 112 Orphism offered initiates purification of the soul from which they would be freed from evil and released from the cycle of reincarnation. The name is ascribed to the mythical poet Orpheus who descended to the underworld and returned. Both Orphism and Pythagoreanism accepted reincarnation, as does most traditional Indian philosophy, though exactly what reincarnates varies with the tradition.
113 Ancient Greek philosophers did not clearly distinguish between soul and mind, and conscious activity such as willing and reasoning were understood to be elements of the soul/mind.
114 Heraclitus’ conceived fire as Logos or flux, the ultimate substrate of the world.
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Anaxagoras’ Universal Mind, both of which are discussed shortly. But only with the arrival of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle did it assume a central role.
Pythagoras’ (and his followers’) exploration of the mathematical dimensions of the world led to his discovering and noting the ratios involved in the musical scale. His experiments with vibrating strings inspired, in part, his development of the Pythagorean Theorem, which states that the squares of the sides of a right triangle are equal to the square of the hypotenuse.115 He was convinced that numbers were real in a fundamental sense.116 Hence, if nature is patterned after mathematics and geometry, it follows that the world can be known through them.117
Numbers were for Pythagoras like seeds that give birth to the sensuous world in which we live. Viewed in this organic way, the ground of Being can be conceived as pregnant with potential waiting for the right environmental conditions for the seeds to burst forth when given sufficient nourishment. Pythagoras’ numbers can also be compared to formal structures, or forms, which are analogous to engineering blueprints that provide the necessary specification for manufacturing products. But in this example, the products are the objects of the world. Pythagoras’ concept of reality118
persisted into the early days of modern science as attested to by a statement attributed to Galileo: “Mathematics,” he is reported to have said, “is the language in which God has written the universe.”119 While people today would never conceive of numbers 115 Most scholars firmly agree that the “theorem” was known to the Babylonians, though how Pythagoras got it from them is not clear. Pythagoras was born in Samos, an island off the coast of Anatolia and at some time moved to southern Italy (Croton) where he established his school.
116 Pythagoras taught that when fashioning the world, the gods used numbers and geometric forms starting with the number 1, a geometric point, and by extension created lines using 2 points, plane triangles using 3 points, and solids (tetrahedrons) using 4
points.
117 This rudimentary view finds its distant echo in the “point” of the Big Bang and the geometrical nature of Einstein’s relativity theory as well as the structure of space in loop quantum gravity theory.
118 Readers with an acquaintance with Indian philosophy will recognize that various Hindu views reflect the idea that there is a fundamental structure behind and transcending the ever-changing phenomenal world accessed by the senses. One might also think of the dynamic principles of Taoism in Chinese philosophy. The idea that reality transcends empirical observation is a universal theme throughout the history of human thought, as it is in contemporary science.
119 Although this phrase is often attributed to Galileo, it is not in his published writings.
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and geometry in quite the way Pythagoras did, we often assume that the mathematical laws of physics are in some way fundamental to the underlying structure of the universe rather than existing solely as abstract ideas in our minds. Olney agrees with many historians of philosophy when he says that “Numbers were for Pythagoras divine, with all the mystery and perfection of the divine about them.”120
While Pythagoras thought the ratios between whole numbers pattern reality, Plato viewed such patterns as Ideals or archetypes (Forms) existing beyond the physical world and Aristotle, as noted earlier, considered these archetypal patterns embedded in nature. Jung drew inspiration from the Pythagoreans to advance the idea that numbers are probably the most primitive element of order in the human mind. The physicist Wolfgang Pauli had a similar interest in numbers, and he and Jung worked together exploring the fundamental role of certain numbers in structuring not only the mind but also the universe: for instance, pi and Planck’s constant.121 This strand of thought continues to remain fundamental to science, where the most arcane theories, such as those in quantum theory, are expressed mathematically, and where expressions in words or pictures are considered wholly inadequate and deeply misleading.122
Jung was especially inspired by the number four, the numeric equivalence of the tetractys, which is a mystical symbol attributed to Pythagoras. It is a triangle composed of ten dots arranged in four rows (the bottom row having four dots, the top row, the apex, having just one). The tetractys was considered by Jung to be the basis of the ancient prophesy of Maria: “One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the One as the fourth.”123 In this case, as Jung observed, the first three represent the three-dimensional world and the fourth is the psychic ground, from which consciousness emerges. It was from number that Pythagoras came to perceive a 120 Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower, 33.
121 See Arthur I. Miller, Deciphering the Cosmic Number: The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung.
122 Like Plato’s Forms, mathematical laws may be inherent to the mental structures of reality, and therefore intuitively accessible to mathematicians.
123 Jung, CW 9 ii, para. 237: Reference by James Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower, 69. Maria was an alchemist who lived somewhere between the first and third centuries CE, invented various glass retorts and distilleries, wrote recipes for various alchemical processes, including making copper look like gold (though never claiming to transmute any substance into gold), and warning of various chemical toxicities, such as that of mercury. Her works do not survive, and much myth and legend has arisen around her, but the view that she was the mother of chemistry has merit.
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universal order (“kosmos”) that governed all that existed. By simply referring to this order, Olney concluded that “Heraclitus, Empedocles, Plato, or any other thinker implies that he subscribes to the Pythagorean vision of a dominant principle of form and order that everywhere sets the pattern for all affairs human, natural, and divine.”124 Indeed, Yeats went so far as to attribute beauty to number and although he recognized that there were no mathematical figures in heaven, he felt “the point where the divine touches the human is in numbers…”125
Pythagoras’ insight into the fundamental role of number leads into modern issues regarding symmetry, a factor relevant to quantum physics. Geometrical symmetry is easy to grasp. A square may be rotated 90° without exhibiting any perceptible change.
A rectangle, if rotated 180° will do the same. A circle can be rotated any number of degrees without visible change. Mathematical symmetry as applied to quantum physics is much more complex, but it involves manipulating equations without changing their solutions. Without an understanding of the equations themselves, one can still appreciate the idea of symmetry conveyed by them. Symmetry, for example, shows that energy, however manipulated or transformed, is always conserved.
Today, the idea of symmetry also has important implications for how particles of matter are understood. Werner Heisenberg said, “Perhaps there was no such thing as an indivisible particle. Perhaps matter could be divided ever further, until finally it was no longer a real division of a particle but a change of energy into matter, and parts were no longer smaller than the whole from which they had been separated. But what was there in the beginning? A physical law, mathematics, symmetry? In the beginning,” he concluded, “was symmetry!”126 Pythagoras’ ideas seem almost indisputable given the fundamental importance of mathematics in contemporary physics. Only through numbers, he reasoned, can one grasp the fundamental nature of reality.
Like Socrates, Pythagoras apparently never wrote anything down, but his disciples indicate that he did not separate abstract speculation from moral and religious activity when founding a community of shared practices. After his death, his disciples tended to divide into those who abandoned his deep philosophical concerns but followed his way of life (including diet and religious rituals), and those who continued his abstract and mathematical thought. The former seems to have held that city states should be 124 Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower, 71.
125 Ibid., 67.
126 Quoted by Olney, ibid. 205-206, from Heisenberg’s Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations, 209-210.
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governed by “better” people, perhaps a kind of moral aristocracy. The latter held that true knowledge was found in determining the number (mathematical formula) for each thing, going beyond appearances into the real structure of nature. Only such mathematical understanding, they felt, constituted real knowledge of nature.127
Pythagoreans also held that the human soul reincarnates through many lives, a view that influenced Plato.
We next take up the philosophy of Heraclitus (c. 535-475 BCE), who is mostly remembered for his discussion of opposites, an idea consistent with our sixth metaphysical postulate. It states that everything in the universe—the material world, life, and consciousness—came into existence through the process of differentiation. For him, only with separation and differentiation can the Pythagorean numeric seeds come to fruition. Differentiation was therefore the defining factor in the creation of the world with its myriad types of physical forms and species. Even our modern concept of the atom relies on the tension exiting between negatively charged electrons and positively charged protons. Jung also referred to Heraclitus’ idea of opposites when explaining how conscious content is created by differentiating itself from its unconscious opposite.
Heraclitus lived in Anatolia and though influenced by other philosophers, was an independent thinker. His work consists of gnomic statements, almost of an oracular nature. It appears that his gnomic-oracular reflections were designed to challenge thinkers into puzzling out their meanings, thereby gaining insight for themselves.128
Only fragments of his work survive as quotations and paraphrases in later works.
What we know today about Heraclitus comes from ancient thinkers who had access to his more complete work. From them we learn that he considered fire the ultimate substrate of existence, most likely because, in his view, flux or change was the basic nature of the cosmos.129 Fire represents flux because it devours the very material from 127 Though lacking the sophistication of contemporary mathematics, there is a similarity here with modern physical science which expresses its understanding mathematically.
For example, mathematical necessities predicted the existence of subatomic particles which were only subsequently discovered by experimentation.
128 Though facile comparisons can easily mislead, there is something of a Zen quality to Heraclitus’ statements. While they are hardly Zen koans, they seem designed to challenge conventional thought at every point, requiring reflection to begin to grasp their meanings.
129 Daniel W. Graham reviews the various views taken of what Heraclitus meant and points to the persistence of the river because of the flux of ever-new waters, for if that were not
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which it arises. Famous for allegedly saying that one cannot step into the same river twice (because the waters are flowing constantly), he seems to have noted that even things that apparently persist are in flux. Everything consists of opposites (life-death, hot-cold, love-hate, transient-eternal) though one dominates at one time, the other at another. Change is therefore fundamental to existence, and there is a unity to opposites which makes this possible.130
Heraclitus is also reported saying, “Thunderbolt steers all things.” The thunderbolt, a manifestation of fire, is the weapon and scepter of Zeus, who was, besides king of the Olympian gods, the sky god and storm god.131 For Heraclitus, the thunderbolt, which is likely a metaphor for logos or even a kind of intelligence, drives the opposites into their alternating dominance and perhaps unifies them as well. Olney observed that
“Logos for Heraclitus is a fact and a force of nature, it is the universal and endless principle directing the process of nature and as such it is the virtual equivalent of a god—in fact, the chief of the gods…”132
Heraclitus had an aristocratic contempt for ordinary people, who he derisively called the hoi polloi. His cryptic fragments would hardly be remembered except that they resonate deeply with indisputable truths that forever arise afresh from the eternal ground of existence, the rhizome that serves both as the cradle of civilization and the seat of individual consciousness. Both Yeats and Jung drew inspiration from him. For Heraclitus, as well as for Jung, the creative energy that sustains existence derives from the perpetual flux of opposites. Olney contended that throughout his poetry, Yeats repeatedly used one of Heraclitus’ fragments: “Immortal mortals, mortal immortals, living the others’ death, and dying the others’ life.” This aphorism, and variations on it, are found throughout all of Yeats’ work. Olney observed that “No other thought and the case, the river would be a lake or dry stream bed. Graham, Daniel W.,
"Heraclitus," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Graham says that Heraclitus is the first (of which we have a record) to use the world kosmos to signify the world (we would say universe). Heraclitus sees the universe as an ordered world, whose order depends on the play of opposites through constant change.
130 Jung viewed the uroboros (the serpent in a circle swallowing its tail) as a symbol representing the unity of opposites. Wholeness is achieved to the extent that this unity is consciously realized. Only then are the healing and nurturing energies of the unconscious made fully available to consciousness.
131 Zeus, sometimes called Zeus Pater (Father Zeus) is related to the Vedic sky god Dyaus Pitar (Father Dyaus) and the Roman Jupiter.
132 Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower, 130.
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no other image seized on Yeats’s imagination or teased and fascinated his mind so much as this one.”133 In line with Heraclitus’ opposites, Olney said:
… war and strife are the natural and necessary state of things, and from their operation comes the tension, the energy from pole to pole, that maintains all existence and is the sine qu a non of life itself; behind the perpetual processes of nature and in the very chaos of their becoming, there is an invariable law or formula or balanced measure that is the virtually divine Logos; and this Logos that burns throughout nature burns also through the life of every man—it is his individuality, his daimon, the formula of his psyche.134
Jung credited Heraclitus with the principle of enantiodromia, in which the opposites are fated to reverse their positions whenever one side reaches its utmost extreme.135
Even the highest good, Jung said, can be turned against itself when the unconscious defiantly undermines the striving of the ego.
For it should not be forgotten that, in the same measure as the conscious attitude may pride itself on a certain godlikeness by reason of its lofty and absolute standpoint, an unconscious attitude develops with a godlikeness oriented downwards to an archaic god whose nature is sensual and brutal. The enantiodromia of Heraclitus ensures that the time will come when the deus absconditus shall rise to the surface and press the God of our ideals to the wall.136
Jung had a vision in 1913, just prior to World War I, that confirmed for him that such a time had come. Although he did not understand it when it occurred, the vision foretold the bloodbath that was soon to sweep across all of Europe.137 The war was a stark reminder that enlightened reason was fragile. The brutal dark power, the deus 133 Ibid. , 90 .
134 Ibid., 94.
135 Enantiodromia can be favorably compared with the yin-yang concept of Taoism. In much ancient thought, a world of ceaseless change means that when something is as much of whatever it can be, it must begin to retreat into its opposite. For example, when something is as hot as it can possibly get, it must start to cool. While Jung credits Heraclitus with this principle, Olney reminds us that the term enantiodromia does not appear anywhere in Heraclitus’ surviving fragments (Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower, 90).
136 Jung, Psychological Types, CW 6, para. 150.
137 Jung, The Red Book, 231.
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absconditus, revealed not only the coming carnage of World War I but may have anticipated the subsequent rise of fascism in the 1930’s, World War II, and even the turmoil occurring throughout Europe and the United States today—a fit warning that is too often ignored when addressing the political upheavals of our age.
Jung understood that the unconscious is a “raging torrent that flows for all eternity in the darkness of the psyche…”138 Heraclitus would undoubtedly have approved of Jung’s description of it, for he understood the powerful paradoxes and contradictions within human nature. Fire, for Heraclitus, is the masculine principle of order, while the sea is the feminine principle that gives birth to new life. The sea is also the final resting place for those whose lives have completed their life cycle, for water extinguishes fire. When reflecting on common traits found in both Heraclitus’ fiery logos and Plato’s Timaeus, Olney said:
The fiery logos descends to airy images reflected in a watery stream that is the movement of earthly matter. The order of descent is precisely the same as the arrangement of the elements in Plato’s Timaeus (55d-56a) from the most mobile to the most immobile, and it corresponds to the degrees of reality and knowledge in the Republic—from the sun of pure being, to the mathematical images of aither, to images reflected in water (flickering, reflected images on the cave wall), to the earth which is virtually inanimate and unreal.139
While Heraclitus clearly thought that most human beings were ignorant because they did not pay attention to nature and moved through it as if asleep, he clearly affirmed that insight was possible by paying careful attention to experience and observation. Insight alone, however, does not lead to full understanding without Logos.
Logos, in the sense of “reason,” also needs to be brought to experience and observation, for without it, understanding—much less wisdom—is impossible. Given the ceaseless change in everything, including the human being’s body and mind, wisdom is even harder to come by, yet wisdom, in contrast to mere insight and understanding, is also possible. Heraclitus’ wisdom was intuitive, a product of long contemplation. Not until Plato though would his insights be harnessed to the rigor of a philosophical system.
But the unconscious source of Heraclitus’ wisdom, the eternal rhizome, is still operative today in the poems of Yeats, the psychology of Jung, and the works of many romantic philosophers. Even Hegel claimed: “There is no proposition of Heraclitus 138 Jung, CW 14, Mysterium Coniunctionis, para 125: Olney, page 97.
139 Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower, 99. The reflected images on the cave wall refers to a passage in The Red Book that we discuss later.
THE PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHERS 73
which I have not adopted in my Logic.”140 Heraclitus is reported to have withdrawn from social contacts in his later life, behaving in ways reminiscent of ancient Indian ascetics or “forest dwellers.”
Empedocles (c. 492-432 BCE) is the last Presocratic philosopher we discuss before taking up Plato in the next chapter. Unique in the history of ancient Greek philosophy, he is credited with being the first to propound four roots (later called elements) of existence: the familiar earth, air, fire, and water. These four foundational roots of realty—the rhizomata or radices as the alchemists described them — were envisioned to have first emerged from a Sphere, representing, for him, the original state of Being prior to the creation of the world. Empedocles conceived these four elements to be the building blocks of reality, an idea that would soon be widely accepted throughout the ancient world and inform the work of Plato and Aristotle.141 This ancient understanding has long since been replaced by our more sophisticated understanding of the physical world. However, one thing that most attracted Jung to Empedocles was the parallel he found between these four elements, which are basic to the Greek understanding of nature—psychic as well as physical—and his concept of the quaternity, which Jung heralded as the supreme symbol for wholeness.142 “These radices,” Jung said, correspond “to the Empedoclean rhizomata, and in them they [the alchemists] saw the constituents of the most significant and central symbol of alchemy, the lapis philosophorum, which represents the goal of the individuation process.”143 The lapis philosophorum—the stone of the philosophers—was not so much representative of the four roots themselves as it was Empedocles’ Sphere from which the four roots derived. As we said earlier, Jung understood the number three to psychologically represent the three-dimensional world of consciousness while the number four represents the unconscious, or in the language of metaphysics, the ground of Being.
Accordingly, wholeness, the goal of Jung’s psychology, results from the union of the three-dimensional world into which we are born with the unconscious ground of our existence: a condition not unlike Empedocles’ Sphere.
Even though Jung wanted to be viewed as an empirical scientist, his investigation into the mysteries of psyche were often based on ancient wisdom, including the work 140 Ibid., 123: Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, I, 279.
141 It is not clear whether these four elements were considered the material elements of everyday experience or something like the noumena of material elements.
142 Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower, 163-164.
143 Jung, Alchemical Studies, CW 13, para. 242; Olney, 164.
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of medieval alchemists. And as Olney observes, Jung was strongly drawn to the tension of love and strife that Empedocles celebrates:
The psyche, that great subject and object of Jung’s science and of everything he wrote, is itself precisely an Empedoclean system, binary and quaternal, self-balanced and self-regulating (when healthy), striving ever to restore itself to the condition of the monadic Sphere, which is its essence… Most of the poetry of Empedocles that chances to remain casts his system in cosmological terms, but it can all be transposed—and was transposed by the alchemists and by Jung—to the compressed scale of the individual psyche.144
When Love prevails, Empedocles taught there is total cosmic unity—a Sphere—in which all things are blended into one. As Strife intervenes, the elements become separated, and this allows for a cosmos with differentiation and life in it. Justice, for him, is the balance between these two opposite forces, and that is true both cosmically and in human interactions. Empedocles also taught that the world as we know it owes its existence to the tension between Love and Strife, which prevents the elements from either congealing into one undifferentiated whole or flying apart. And in human affairs, war is as natural as love, since these two forces contend at every level of existence. Once Strife fully prevails, all things become separated and unrelated. When this happens, Love again intervenes and draws things back together. One cannot help but compare the dynamic tension between Love and Strife to the (now challenged) theory that the universe, expanding from the Big Bang, will eventually collapse again upon itself. For Empedocles, the conflict between Love and Strife (clearly metaphorical terms for him) is ongoing, producing world after world.
Empedocles also had interesting insights regarding reincarnation. It is not his belief in reincarnation that is fascinating and unusual, because the fragments of earlier thinkers, especially Pythagoras, point to a similar belief, but rather because Empedocles spells it out in some detail. He taught that many daimones or spirits were exiled from divine perfection because of some unspecified sin.145 They must wander 144 Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower, 163. The entelechy of the Sphere refers to the realization of its potential.
145 Christian theology has sometimes characterized sin as alienation from God (often through violating His laws). Buddhists say that our condition of suffering is alienation
THE PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHERS 75
through every form of life—plant, animal, and human—until purified.146 Through the course of many lives, an individual could gain the knowledge necessary to understand the nature of things and to master them, thus becoming a god. Empedocles claimed to be such a spirit, essentially a god, and like Parmenides, he was a healer of renown.
Legend has it that after achieving divine status, Empedocles leapt into the volcano Etna after dining with friends. However, Anthony Gottlieb claims that he “died while exiled to Sicily for political reasons, probably in the Peloponnese.”147 The legendary story of his death may have been started by one of his disciples professing to have discovered one of his bronze sandals near the top of the volcano, leaving a tell-tale sign that he had committed suicide. Kingsley argues that his shamanic side required the deliberate leaving of the sandal as proof that he had passed into the divine realm, which only a god can do.148 Many writers have noted the shamanic character of these accounts. However we view his story, it is clear that, in leaving his sandal, he was asserting his transcendental awareness and knowledge.
Although these ancient philosophers and proto-scientists knew of one another’s writings and teachings, and borrowed ideas from predecessors and reacted to them, what marks this period in ancient Greek philosophy most is their individuality: each presented his cosmic and human philosophy as uniquely his own. The genius of these ancient Greek thinkers is reflected down to the present in their attempts to reduce the world to simple substances and processes, while raising fundamental questions about from our real being through ignorance, a condition with no beginning, though it can have an end (Enlightenment).
146 The fragments leave it unclear whether each human being is such a daimon or whether some spirits end up in human form. Centuries later, some Gnostics taught that each human being was (or contained) a spark of the Divine which could through striving become reunited with Deity or the divine Pleroma, while others taught that only some humans possessed this spark. Even later in Christian history, the doctrine of predestination, championed by Calvin, took the view that humans were predestined to heaven or hell. Christian Universalists, however, argued that all eventually are received in heaven.
147 Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason, 77. The Peloponnese is southern Greece, not Sicily. Some writers place his exile there.
148 Kingsley, Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic, 238-239.
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thought and human experience. Two thousand years later, the Enlightenment would again take up these issues, though entirely within the limits of reason.
Whether cast in terms of Universal Mind, reason, or guiding intelligence (not necessarily conscious), all Presocratics saw some kind of intelligent force operating on primal substance to produce the diverse world in which we live. Again, the world is intelligible because it is in some sense intelligent. Only Democritus and Leucippus (fifth century BCE) seem to have been materialist atheists, though all rejected traditional views of God and the gods. Empedocles affirmed the Divine and sought to become one with it, and Parmenides claimed knowledge from a divine source. The common thread linking all the thinkers we have discussed so far is their use of reason along with intuition when contemplating the mystery of Being. Then, just as now, rational analysis alone was inadequate to the task of penetrating the divine mystery at the heart of the universe. Even though they expressed their thoughts rationally, it is more likely that they sought insight in symbolic form, the only language available for such purposes. This is especially true of the four Presocratic philosophers we discussed—Parmenides, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Empedocles. Although seemingly rudimentary, the intuitive insights of these early philosophers have a certain appeal today as we speculate on the origin of the universe. It is unlikely that the universe burst forth from absolutely nothing. Something, possibly timeless and unchanging, must have been the source of all that followed from the initial moment of creation.149
Not until Plato was the eternal clearly understood in relationship with the existing world. In the Timaeus, Plato described how the eternal forms, the archetypes, served as a creative pattern for the formation of the cosmos, an image of the unchanging One.
This, of course, is the opposite of what Parmenides argued since, for him, nothing can be rationally known of the One except that it is eternal and without change. The archetypal pattern for the extant world, as Plato conceived it, is the ground from which the world of multiplicity and Heraclitus’ opposites derive. The ground can also be 149 Most present accounts of the Big Bang consider it to be the beginning of both space and time; hence the difficulty of speaking of what was “before” the Big Bang. Some physicists, however, believe that we can explore, at least philosophically, what went before. Such explorations are controversial.
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thought to include Pythagoras’ concept of number in the sense that the laws of physics that structure our world are based on mathematics.
The seven metaphysical postulates discussed at the beginning of the last chapter affirm that the creative nature of the Cosmos is continually evolving out of pure potential, the eternal ground of existence. The Absolute, like the One, is outside of time and therefore eternal. It is unchanging because only through time can anything change.
But when the universe burst into existence, time and space emerged together as twin partners in the creative evolution of the Cosmos. Being, as such, cannot be known directly. It can only be indirectly inferred from what has already been actualized.
Unlike the granulated universe that is suggested by modern physics, pure Being, as the primal foundation of reality, must be understood as a whole, existing without division.150 Likewise, the Universal Mind as an integral part of the unitive whole is pure potential until consciously realized. The conflict of opposites, first envisioned by Heraclitus, is thus necessary for the development of sentient life forms, which only emerge into the light of day as consciousness differentiates itself from its unconscious foundation. Without differentiation, even the first rudimentary organisms could not emerge from the primordial waters, or the universe come into existence. Such a view of Being is supportive of Tillich’s theology and Jung’s psychology, both of whom we discuss in greater detail in the fifth and sixth parts of the book.
We develop our philosophy further in the next chapter as we examine Plato, Hellenistic thought, and the Neoplatonists. Though reason itself can never reveal Being’s true essence, a pure form of intuition, much like what Plato seems to have practiced, can help penetrate its secrets. But the more advanced forms of spiritual insight can only be unveiled through experiences of the transcendent. This understanding of philosophy was always part of the Indian yoga tradition of jñāna (knowledge). Only in the modern West has philosophy become a purely rational affair.151
150 Spinoza is discussed in detail in our chapter “Philosophy of Idealism.”
151 Indian philosophy recognizes three fundamental yogas as paths to the highest possible states of consciousness: jñāna (knowledge), karma (action), and bhakti (devotion), and all three imply one another. Without knowledge, one cannot act with reverence and commitment; without action, knowledge and devotion are empty; and without devotion or reverence, knowledge is sterile.
PLATO, HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHY,
AND THE NEOPLATONISTS
There's no question, then, of developing new mythologies, as if a mythology were a kind of fancy dress that made life more exciting. The very idea that mythology is something one invents suggests an unpardonable arrogance, as if myth were at our beck and call. Rather, it is we, the will of each and every one of us, that are at the beck and call of myth.
Roberto Calasso152
In effect, they [Neoplatonists] absorbed, appropriated, and creatively harmonized almost the entire Hellenic tradition of philosophy, religion, and even literature—with the exceptions of Epicureanism, which they roundly rejected, and the thoroughgoing corporealism of the Stoics. The result of this effort was a grandiose and powerfully persuasive system of thought that reflected upon a millennium of intellectual culture and brought the scientific and moral theories of Plato, Aristotle, and the ethics of the Stoics into fruitful dialogue with literature, myth, and religious practice. In virtue of their inherent respect for the writings of many of their predecessors, the Neoplatonists together offered a kind of meta-discourse and reflection on the sum-total of ideas produced over centuries of sustained inquiry into the human condition.
Christian Wildberg153
The term “Being” as Tillich used it, is equivalent to his definition of God as the ground of all reality, a unified whole from which everything in the universe ultimately owes its existence. Such sentiments are consistent with the views held by Plato and the Neoplatonists. God as the ground of reality is substantively different from the granular nature of the objective world which is made up of a multiplicity of things. In the language of Greek philosophy, God is One in contrast to the Many. Plato, more than any other Greek philosopher except Socrates, understood that value, too, was an 152 Roberto Calasso, Literature and the Gods, 46.
153 Christian Wildberg, "Neoplatonism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed 05/17/2017.
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essential feature of the world, especially that of Truth, Beauty, and the Good.154 Value is reflected not only in the desirability of something but also in making things, thoughts and actions meaningful to human consciousness. This Platonic form of reasoning, supportive of Christianity’s concern with ethics, naturally leads to Tillich’s affirmation that God is not only the source of mind and consciousness, but the foundational source for the numinous and sacred, an experience of grace lifting the heart beyond the struggle of daily life.155 In taking this stand, Tillich is affirming an ancient truth that was of special importance to Plato and the Neoplatonists. For them, philosophy was not merely a discursive, metaphysical exercise, but a way of life. As such, it was as much a religion as a philosophy.156 These ancient traditions, which emphasized purification of the embodied soul, are representative of all seven of our metaphysical postulates described earlier.
The insights of these ancient philosophers are still important now as we strive to develop a natural religion capable of enlightening both the mind and soul, since they struggled with issues just as relevant to us today as they were for them. We can thus learn much from their insights, especially Plato’s concept of the forms and his practice of noesis, in which one glimpses the ultimate nature of reality. Also important is the Neoplatonic view of theurgy—discussed below—in which the practice of living, thinking, and contemplation awakens one to the spiritual profundity of existence.
We first turn to Socrates (c. 470-399 BCE) and Plato (429-347 BCE), both of whom are among the most important of the Greek philosophers. Keep in mind that Socrates never wrote anything down, and what we know of him comes largely from Plato.
Socrates, as depicted by Plato, was mostly concerned with human nature and values, especially as found in human virtues such as wisdom, courage, fairness (justice), the sacred (piety), and a sense of balance in action (temperance, moderation). Plato, while sharing Socrates’ ethical sentiments, was also concerned with the nature of reality.
Much of his writing on metaphysics occurred during the middle period of his life when 154 For Plato, these three are not wholly distinguishable values, being so intertwined as to be ultimately one, what Rebecca Newberger Goldstein calls “the sublime braid.” Plato at the Googleplex, 50.
155 Instead of claiming that merely the act of accepting Jesus Christ leads to salvation, he argues that salvation is achieved by opening the heart and mind to the transformative depths of human consciousness, a position that he shares with Carl Jung. Christ, for both of them, is a symbol for the sacred depth that exists within every individual.
156 In his Systematic Theology, Tillich differentiates between philosophy and theology. He considered the goal philosophy to analyze reality, which was then to be used by theology to heal and transform life. The same may be said of most Asian philosophies.
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he produced The Republic and Timaeus. In these works, he seems to have been more influenced by Pythagorean ideas than by the materialists, though he also set out ideas concerning the creation of the world, and he clearly knows of the doctrines of Parmenides. Using the Socratic process of dialogue to ferret out the truth, Plato recognized that we never see a perfect circle, yet we entertain one in the mind. He thought that this fact showed that there are perfect, eternal Forms (also called Ideas) separate from their empirical approximations that can be accessed through a higher form of reason he called noesis. Further, these Forms are the patterns upon which physical reality depends. Although Plato’s Forms and Jung’s archetypes are not the same, the reflective processes used to arrive at their respective theories are similar.
Even Aristotle’s material adaptation of Plato’s Forms, while relying on formal reasoning and systematic observation, have a Platonic formality about them, exemplifying the rigorous logic used in modern science today.
In the Timaeus, Plato drew on Parmenides when he set out the myth of creation.
According to Plato, the Demiurge who created the world from chaos was “determined to make a moving likeness of eternity, and so, as he set the heavens in order, he created of the eternity that abides in unity an everlasting likeness [ eikon] moving according to number, and this likeness is what we call time.”157 Olney attributes this passage, which he feels certain that both Yeats and Jung were familiar with, to “the essential rationale of the symbolic mode in Western tradition.”158 But this is only true when the symbol conveys a sense of the sacred, for it is through the numinous quality of symbols that the phenomenal world of time is joined to eternity. Both Tillich and Jung realized that the symbol is the bridge by which we transcend mundane existence and through it, glimpse eternity. But “It is necessary, all the same,” Olney said, “that the One Being remain the One Being, else a symbol will be no more than a natural fact and an archetype nothing but a psychological fact.”159
Plato was an aristocratic Athenian and student of Socrates. Upon Socrates’
execution, Plato left Athens, perhaps fearing for his safety, and is said to have traveled to various places including Egypt. He returned to Athens after about five years and founded the “Academy” for philosophical thinking as a way of life. The Academy survived until closed by the Christian emperor Justinian in 527 CE. Plato twice traveled to Sicily, first to teach philosophy to Dionysius I, tyrant of Syracuse, and later to Dionysius II, his son, but neither venture was successful.
157 Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower, 137: Timaeus 37d.
158 Ibid., 137.
159 Ibid. 138.
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According to his Second and Seventh Letters—the latter once thought apocryphal but more recently held as authentic—Plato said that he never wrote down his true philosophy, believing that serious discussion among seekers of truth was the only certain road to its realization. Another reason for not writing down his innermost convictions may have been because they were derived through a deep meditative process ( noesis), which, like mysticism, cannot be clearly expressed verbally. His written philosophy, nonetheless, is consistent with our fifth metaphysical postulate, which posits that life, consciousness, and value ultimately derive from Being itself.
These recorded dialogues have influenced almost all philosophers: pagan, Christian, and, more recently, secular philosophers, because the fundamental questions he explored remain open and vital today.
What we have, if we believe Plato’s letters, is a public philosophy and a private one.
This distinction was recognized in ancient times, and various thinkers offered tentative accounts of what his private philosophy might be. For most of history, however, philosophers have dealt with Plato’s philosophy as overtly presented in his written work. Yet for over a century, now, the issue has been debated, with some arguing for a hidden Plato and others restricting themselves to his public writings. Very recently, the case for a private, indeed, esoteric Plato, has been made by Laurence Lampert, author of How Philosophy Became Socratic and How Socrates Became Socrates.160 His careful investigation suggests that Socrates, after undergoing a special training, began teaching philosophy on two levels: one level for the insightful philosopher who had advanced beyond belief in the Homeric gods, and another for the Sophists who were then teaching those who could pay to learn how to influence and persuade people in the public arena. Because of his general distrust of their motives, Socrates rightly feared that they might use this teaching for personal gain by distorting his teaching with lies or even resorting to violence to achieve their aims. He was especially concerned that the diminishment of the Homeric gods would be unsettling to the people of Athens 160 Traditionally, scholars have attempted to determine the order in which the dialogues were written, dividing them into early, middle, and late dialogues, based on their content. Lampert has set this traditional ordering aside and instead uses hints from Plato’s dialogues to discern their order. Today, as he admits, some of Plato’s clues doubtless elude us, for we do not know what the original readers knew about individuals and events which would otherwise provide a chronological reading order.
But, nonetheless , he skillfully uses available clues to detect who is present, where the dialogue is placed, and when it occurred. Using this method, he ferrets out the order in which the dialogues should be read.
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unless the traditional gods were replaced by a new teaching that the populace found meaningful.
Socrates, who is seen as the thinker par excellence, recognized that the general population could not bear the ultimate truth, which he found to be eros, the single creative origin of everything, cosmic and human, which creates everything without regard to what humans consider good, indifferent, or evil. Socrates’ notion of eros can be better discerned from what Jeffery Kripal, in his book The Superhumanities, has to say. Here he describes eros as “a spiritual form of sexual desire that is no longer attached to a sexual object or person.” In other words, eros, “is no simple biological process or natural force,”161 but instead, “constitutes and drives the great circular emanation” that flows from the transcendent Godhead—or the One—into the world and back again. From this, we might also speculate that eros is the creative force that first ignited the primordial fire ball that became our universe.
By teaching that eros was the root of reality, Socrates subtly disparaged the Homeric Gods, which most people still relied on for finding personal meaning in life. Without a satisfying substitute for them, he was concerned that civilization was in danger of lapsing into chaos and crude barbarism. This is the situation that we find ourselves in today during a time when Christianity is losing its influence and nothing else has come along to meet the spiritual needs of the general population. Until we successfully transition to a new spiritual vision that satisfies the mind as well as the heart and soul, we, too, are facing chaos and barbarism. A community needs a mythos—a symbolic story that is uplifting and soulful.
Since what we know of Socrates comes from Plato, we can assume that Plato held the same view of eros. Also, because his dialogues always kept the more esoteric truths hidden, his public account of them, including that of eros, can be best compared to a well-fitted garment that reveals the outline of the body but keeps its naked form veiled.
But he also dared to share the ultimate truth with some Sophists after warning them to be circumspect in what they teach for the sake of the community, since it is not ready for the reception of these esoteric truths.
Plato’s theory of Forms or Ideas, which he treated as real, eternal, and the matrices of material objects and the virtues is well-known. While he was clearly attracted to the concept of eternal Forms, for they combine the changelessness of Parmenides with the ceaseless change in the material world, he seemed never to have been satisfied with his own discussions of them, partially because he felt they fell short of the ultimate 161 Kripal, The Superhumanities, 144.
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Truth.162 In order to avoid offering an unsatisfying rational discourse to disguise these esoteric truths, he resorted to stories that only hint at their existence. The most famous is the analogy of the cave in which prisoners are chained in such a way that they can only see shadows cast on the wall by a fire blazing behind moving figures. The shadows represent the perceptions of ordinary people living without an understanding or experience of the higher reality represented by the Forms. The prisoners thus become expert in identifying the shadows cast on the wall and in predicting their movements, but they mistakenly take the shadows as reality. If one such prisoner were released from his chains and turned around, he would be temporarily blinded by the fire casting the shadows, but he eventually would come to see that the real cause of the shadows—previously taken by him as reality itself—is the fire and the moving figures. If forced to stumble painfully out of the cave, he would see in the blinding light of the sun, the trees, mountains, and features of the outside world. Over time he would adjust his vision to glimpse the sun itself and know that it was the source of all, even the fire in the cave. But if he returned to the cave to tell his still-bound fellow prisoners, they would mock him as mad, since he could no longer discern the dim shadows well, having seen the sun, and he would find it virtually impossible to explain the outer world in the language of shadows.163
Elsewhere, Plato distinguished mere opinion from three levels of knowledge: mathematical knowledge, knowledge concerning the eternal order, and pure intuition ( noesis). In the cave allegory, the shadows represent mere opinion, while mathematical reasoning is equated with the first level of knowledge. Eternal truths, which are equated with the second level of knowledge, are represented by features of the outside world, and the radiant sun, the third level of knowledge, is associated with the source of pure intuition through which “Eternal Truth” is glimpsed.
162 Cf. especially the Parmenides, in which the mature Parmenides savages the young Socrates’ various explanations of the Forms. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein compellingly argues that Plato almost never settled on a philosophical view, believing that dialectical exchange between thinkers would get to the truth better than any single line of reasoning could. Nonetheless, he pursued the idea of eternal archetypes throughout his career. See Goldstein’s Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away. Lampert sees the Parmenides as the heart of Socrates’ training.
163 One finds here similarities with the idea of the bodhisattva path in Mahayana Buddhism, as well as Hindu and Buddhist views of the difficulties of explaining transcendent experience and reality in the conventional language of daily life. See, for example, Jonardon Ganeri, The Concealed Art of the Soul: Theories of Self and Practices of Truth in Indian Ethics and Epistemology, especially Part I.
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Philosophers have struggled to understand Plato’s view that knowing is being, that to know something is to be something. It seems that Plato is here thinking of pure intuition ( noesis), in which one apprehends reality without the intervention of ordinary experience (shadows) or reasoning ( e.g., as in mathematical truths). Such direct insight is transformative. In the cave analogy, glimpsing the sun symbolizes noesis, a numinous revelation. A deep experience like this is transformative in that nothing given by ordinary experience, observation, and inference is ever the same again, including one’s awareness and conception of oneself. When transported beyond the world of the senses by this type of insight, which far transcends those hunches we sometimes call intuition, consciousness and Being are one. To know in this sense is “to be,” for knowledge here is not knowledge of objects but knowledge of the source of existence, Being itself. In this transcendent state subject and object, as well as mind and matter, are one and cannot be put into the language of the shadows in the cave or even in the abstract language of the Forms, which themselves elude description. One is reminded that Jung, probably for the same reason, refrained from providing an exact definition for ineffable concepts like psyche, the archetypes, wholeness, and the Self.
Another important contribution of Plato is his teaching regarding anamnesis or recollection. He illustrated it in the Meno by having Socrates help a slave boy solve a geometrical problem—doubling the square—by means of asking questions that led the boy to the right answer through recollection.164 Socrates claimed that the boy could not have done this with his lack of education, if he had not somehow known the answer in advance. Socrates concluded that (1) the boy did not know the answer in the beginning, and (2) he was not taught the answer, so (3) he must have recollected it from his soul.
Elsewhere, Plato developed this concept further, concluding that everything we can know is already in the soul, lost to ordinary consciousness during birth and the early years of embodied life, but can be recollected with proper effort. These recollections are of universal truths and have nothing to do with factual information and personal memories. Each soul has exactly the same store of knowledge to be recollected. Plato did not have the concept of a hologram, in which all information is stored in each point 164 The problem is to double the size of a square, using only a straight edge (ruler). The boy begins by doubling the sides of the initial square, which produces a square four times as large. Then he tries lengthening the sides by ½ their original length, but Socrates shows that this, too, is too much. Finally, by producing three additional squares, each equal to the original square which can be done by doubling the sides of the original square, and then drawing a diagonal in each square so that they form a new square inside the four, the resulting interior square is twice the size of the original. (The diagonal cuts the original square in half, and the four halves produced in the four squares constitute a square twice the size of the original: 4 x ½ = 2.)
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of the hologram and when light is shined through half or a quarter or even less of the original hologram, it produces the whole image. But his theory of recollection is something like it in that each soul (like a point) contains the whole, which is identical in all souls.165 This is also like Jung’s idea that the objective psyche contains eternal truths that occasionally burst forth in dream and vision. Such views show why Plato said that knowing is being, for if one “recollects” what the soul knows, it transforms how one thinks of oneself and how one acts in the world.
Unlike the Presocratics, each of whom presented his own unique system of thought, Plato thought that public discussion (at least among those prepared for it, such as those admitted to his Academy) leads to truth in a way individual thinking can never do.
Genuine dialogue celebrates the understanding of all involved by identifying and challenging individuals’ preconceptions and biased proclivities. In this way, he brings individual insight and experience into the critical and rational discourse necessary to discern reality. This type of rational inquiry is seen in the example of doubling the square, where Socrates’ questioning is crucial to the boy’s discovery. Truth is a collective endeavor, but one must be prepared with rational tools—reasoning—to get at it, and others must join in to prevent building sandcastles on the seashore of thought.166 This work, however, involves more than rational analysis alone: it is a kind of purification, including withdrawal from the senses and turning within to gaze upon the mystery of Being itself.
Plato notes several times in his dialogues that Socrates had an “inner voice” that would occasionally entrance him for long periods, during which he became unaware of the external world. This voice did not tell Socrates what to do but warned him if he was about to err in some serious way. Though Socrates does not say more, this inner 165 The hologram concept is important in some forms of quantum science, including cosmology based on some versions of string theory. Jude Currivan’s book Cosmic Hologram: In-formation at the Center of Creation reviews the science involved in linking information and the hologram model at the cosmic and human scales. She argues that doing so brings in consciousness as well, thus pointing to a truly unified theory of existence. As small pieces of the hologram are used, the picture becomes less distinct though still fully present. One might think of Plato’s view that dialogue between people tends to get a clearer picture of the truth than individuals on their own are likely to discern, a view similar to Currivan’s. Thinking together is like deploying a larger piece of the hologram.
166 Collective discussion has this bright side but also its shadow—the institutionalization of assumptions that then resist any form of self-critical questioning, as all religions (and much else, including science) only too often show. Hence the need for proper preparation to engage in dialogue.
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voice likely influenced his philosophy and the whole of his life. Socrates’ communion with his daimon167 may well have been spontaneous, almost as if possessed, but Plato suggested a more systematic approach, especially in the Phaedo, Phaedrus, and Timaeus, that looks like a kind of meditation. He seemed to hold that rational thought can grasp the nature of the Forms, but only through deep contemplation can they be fully realized. This is especially true for the ultimate Form: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful. It transcends the other forms and is therefore commensurate with ultimate knowledge. Even beyond this highest Form, however, such meditation can lead to a glimpse of the creative force ( eros) behind everything. We believe such experiences are indistinguishable from all other forms of spiritual epiphanies whether likened to the soaring heights of love, the numinous, or mystical rapture.
Clearly, Plato’s concept of reasoning and rational thought is not comparable to discursive reasoning. Instead, his penetrating insights are derived from recollection, which, as we said, is a kind of direct perception of the most abstract and universal ideas and their reflected likeness in the world. If successfully realized, one is never the same again, and one feels a need to communicate these insights to others, though that cannot be done in ordinary discourse. His way of life in the Academy therefore aimed to purify the soul so that each person could achieve such knowledge, which ultimately is direct experience of Being veiled as Truth, Beauty and the Good. Without moral purification and its attendant altruistic social commitment, attempts to transcend the obscurations of earthly concerns would only lead to selfish attempts to dominate and control others. This all too human tendency forced Plato to resort to the use of esoteric language to hide the ultimate Truth from the general population. His method of purification drew upon the Orphic-Pythagorean tradition, Empedocles, and other Presocratics whose fragments also suggest some kind of purification to grasp reality.
By the time of the Neoplatonists, this transforming effort was called theurgy.
Though his discussions of transcendence are sometimes mythic and sometimes indirect, Plato laid the foundation for later Neoplatonic views of theurgy, in which the practice of living, thinking, and contemplating were used together to raise the soul and consciousness to the level of the Forms and beyond. Modern scholars once ignored this aspect of Plato’s thought because they saw it leading to a degenerate form of 167 Ancient Greeks thought that each person has an inner spirit— daimon in Greek, much like the Roman genius. Today, it is considered more like the muse of poets. For the ancients, however, the daimon was a semi-independent being wedded to the individual in life, while Jung conceived the daimon as a function of the psyche that he often called Soul. The early Christian idea of each individual having a guardian angel likely comes from this ancient belief.
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philosophy in the later Neoplatonic works. Yet more contemporary thinkers have come to see theurgy as a fundamental practice and that its transformative power does not militate against reason. Rather, the dialectical process of reasoning prepares the mind for theurgic activity. Treating theurgy as primarily ritual action is misleading. It is more like a structured practice, which leads to a state of transcendence, giving deep meaning to Plato’s dictum that knowing is being.168
Aristotle (384-322 BCE) was a student in Plato’s Academy for well over a decade, but when he was not chosen as Plato’s successor, he became tutor and philosophical companion of Alexander the Great, eventually establishing his own school—the Lyceum—in Athens. He rejected much of Plato’s philosophical approach, turning instead to empirical observation; nevertheless, Platonic thought suffuses his work.
Rather than placing the forms in some eternal realm, however, Aristotle placed them in the empirical world itself. Like his teacher, he was deeply interested in mathematics, but, unlike Plato, he was also interested in nature and biology.169 He is also credited with developing a formalization of syllogistic logic, which later led to the modern development of symbolic logic, first by Leibniz, then at the beginning of the twentieth century, by Wittgenstein and Whitehead, among others. Importantly, these contributions led to the development of the modern computer. As can be seen, Aristotle’s philosophy had a profound and lasting effect on subsequent thinking in many fields, but we will refer to him only occasionally, because much of his empirical and scientific contribution to our age is not germane to our aims and views.
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle represent the culmination of Greek philosophical culture. They not only laid a foundation for science but envisioned the world as a reflection of a higher reality. Though modified somewhat by the vastly expanded view of reality we have today, Plato’s philosophy, along with many modern writers, especially Schelling, inspired Tillich’s formulation of God as the ground of Being.
168 Some aspects of Jung’s work with patients, especially dream work, looks rather like a modern version of some forms of theurgy. Think of ailing individuals sleeping in the ancient temples of Asclepius in hopes of a dream that offered a cure. For a rich contemporary account of the theurgic aspects of Plato and Neoplatonism, see Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus. As noted before, Anthony Kronman argues that we must look back to the ancient Greeks to rekindle the spirit of modern humanity, not to simply return to their ideas and practices but to assimilate the spirit in which they sought truth, since they have much to teach us.
169 This difference between theoretical understanding of the universe (Plato) and empirical exploration of nature (Aristotle) remains today, though now as then, the two approaches are deeply interconnected.
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While Plato’s Forms share much with Parmenides’ pure Being in that they are eternal and exist without change, he was not willing to deny the phenomenal world as Parmenides did. Instead, what Plato argued in his Timaeus, Olney explained, “is that this changing cosmos is a likeness of an unchanging one, and that becoming is a likeness, an icon, an image, of Being.”170
The evolution of the physical universe follows the deterministic mathematical laws upon which the formation of stars and atoms depend.171 Though not sufficient for explaining the rise of consciousness, they define the full range of possibilities for the birth and evolution of the physical Cosmos. Assuming that Universal Mind is intertwined with spacetime, matter, and energy, it is possible that the mathematical forms and the laws of physics that govern the universe are also inherent in the structure of it, much like Plato’s Forms. If so, even the laws of physics may reflect eternity. In this regard, the mathematician Roger Penrose was a true Platonist. In The Emperor’s New Mind he says, “The mental images that each [mathematician] has… is directly in contact with the same eternally existing Platonic world!” Or as the logician Kurt Gödel put it, “We do have something like a perception” of mathematical objects, “despite their remoteness from sense experience.”172
Modern writers and philosophers who are captured by the spell of Plato as well as other Greek philosophers often find themselves wrestling with similar issues, especially with the One and the Many, and their relationship with each other. Olney, for example, reminds us that Jung’s pleroma, a term which he borrowed from the Gnostics, is like Parmenides’ One, for it too is “’endless, eternal, and entire,’ that it is
‘nowhere divided,’ and that it is ‘everywhere whole and continuous....’”173 Because Parmenides separated the way of truth from his account of the world in The Way of Seeming, he asserted that all actualizations of the One—the Many—are at best relatively real, rather like Plato’s imperfect instantiations of the Forms.
Plato also held a view of reincarnation, which comes from the Pythagoreans while giving subtle meaning to the ideas of Empedocles. Modern commentators have sometimes ignored Plato’s hints that the reincarnating soul strives to return to its true home among the gods through moral and mental purification, and contemplation of 170 Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower, 136.
171 Causal determinism breaks down at the quantum level, a feature of quantum theory that deeply disturbed Einstein.
172 Holt, Why Does the World Exist? , 172-174.
173 Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower, 131.
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the Forms. But such ideas have always arisen spontaneously in religious traditions throughout the world, only being sidelined in the West by the rise of Christianity.174
We next take a brief look at Stoicism and Epicureanism. These schools of philosophy were developed during the period called Hellenism (roughly 323-32 BCE), which covered the years between Alexander the Great and Greece’s annexation by the growing Roman Empire. Both traditions, which developed aspects of all that went before, illustrate the tension between materialism and the view that there is a transcendent reality. Though both the Stoics and Epicureans were materialists, the Stoics conceived the world having a higher spiritual reality consisting of finer matter.
The Epicureans were, instead, more exclusively focused on living the “good life.”
Living well was not hedonistic, however, but involved moderation in all things and on occasion, even included transcendent experience. In contrast to both of their philosophies, Neoplatonism, which we examine later, upheld Plato’s idea of a higher reality by maintaining that the phenomenal world is but a reflection of higher forms.
The division between materialism and Plato’s Idealism persists to the present day.
Stoicism is most popularly known from its imperial Roman advocates, especially Seneca (4 BCE-65 CE) and the emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 CE), both of whom emphasized Stoic ethical views as embodied in a way of life. The Stoic master is a sage who has conquered emotional impulses and feelings, thereby existing above the everyday affairs of the world even while deeply involved in them. Unaffected by success or failure, the sage who has achieved such mastery knows that virtue is the true happiness.
In Paul Tillich’s well-loved book, The Courage to Be, he discussed the Stoics’
understanding of Logos: “Reason in the Stoic sense,” he said, “is not the power of
‘reasoning,’ i.e., of arguing on the basis of experience and with the tools of ordinary or mathematical logic. Reason for the Stoics is the Logos, the meaningful structure of reality as a whole and of the human mind in particular. ‘If there is,’ said Seneca, ‘no other attribute which belongs to man as man except reason, then reason will be his one good, worth all the rest put together’”175
Like Stoicism, Epicureanism is most generally known from its later Roman form as found in the work of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things. Epicureanism, even in ancient times, was often misunderstood as mere indulgent pleasure-seeking but, like Stoicism, was a path to spiritual enlightenment. Epicurus (341-270 BCE) adopted, with some 174 Some early Christian theologians, such as Origen (c. 185-c. 253 CE), entertained the idea of reincarnation, only to be considered heretical later by the Church.
175 Tillich, The Courage to Be, 12-13.
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modifications, the atomism of the Presocratic philosophers Democritus and Leucippus.
Like them, he rejected any kind of immortality and had no fear of death, since no punishment or other state of experience is possible after death. The good life consists of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, but only those pleasures that enhance life should be sought after. He observed that much that we find pleasurable invariably leads to pain. Such traitorous pleasures should be avoided just as pain should be avoided. In search of living the good life, therefore, various general guidelines become obvious: avoid politics as far as possible, be wary of sex and marriage, cultivate friendship but do not indulge it, ignore the gods who are not concerned with us, and work to overcome irrational fears (such as fear of death). Rather than seeking pleasure to fulfill desires, achieving a state of well-being is the goal of life. As with the Stoics, there are no Platonic Forms or universals of any kind in Epicurean philosophy. Here the soul is simply material; it is the seat of mental functions and will dissolve at death.
Even though Stoics and Epicureans were materialists, neither tradition would have recognized the materialism of our day. Generally speaking, while Stoics admitted a corporeal God composed of a finer form of matter than ordinarily experienced, acting teleologically to direct the unfoldment of the world, Epicureans saw only atoms, void, and an occasional chance swerve.176 Unlike materialists today, both readily discerned ethical principles inherent to reality that aimed at nurturing human wholeness. While the Epicureans followed these principles, they turned inward, asserting pleasure as the highest human good while rigorously dissecting pleasures and discarding those that lead to pain. Their acceptable pleasures suggest a life of circumspect withdrawal and care of oneself, not unlike advice found in various religious traditions. In contrast to them, the Stoics believed in the value of community and engagement in the world, yet this was modulated by a strict detachment from conditions outside one’s control. This, too, is a theme found in many religious traditions. Although we hold that their views of nature are inadequate, their conceptions of life and living are suffused with moral and social awareness, obvious requirements for anyone seeking wholeness.177
During the Hellenistic period, Greek and Roman society did not become secular in any modern sense. The oracle at Delphi was still esteemed throughout the Hellenistic period, and the Eleusinian Mysteries flourished and continued to do so for centuries.
In addition to the philosophical strands originally developed in ancient Greece and 176 Epicureans acknowledged the existence of gods, but they, too, are only combinations of atoms and thus neither eternal nor relevant to human beings.
177 Were the Stoics and Epicureans to replace their concept of finer matter with our concept of Mind, their philosophy would be highly relevant for today’s world.
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imported to Rome, a deeply religious and personal strand of philosophy was present during the Hellenistic period, harkening back as far Empedocles while developing in new, and often eclectic, ways. Empedocles not only taught philosophy and practiced medicine, but also exhibited a form of spirituality that scholars today associate with archaic shamanism.178 Parmenides may have done the same. These Hellenistic strands were reflected in the Stoic and Epicurean emphasis on how one might live one’s life in fulfilling ways. Though their focus was on the good life, transcendence was also an important part of their philosophies. Both were spiritually nurtured by centering their philosophy on individual existence. Except for their views on matter, their philosophy is still as relevant to us today as that of Plato and the Neoplatonists.
We now turn to the Neoplatonists, whose philosophy arose after the Romans absorbed the Greek world. Within the Roman world, Neoplatonism developed alongside and competed with the philosophies of Stoics and Epicureans. In contrast to them, Neoplatonists held a view more aligned with Plato. Though modern science has advanced far beyond the Greek and Roman understanding of the world, the intuitive insight that the Neoplatonists had into the nature of Being is still relevant for the future of religion. Though Neoplatonism is growing in importance today, with its inspired spiritual devotion and enlightened reason, it was all but forgotten after the time of St.
Augustine (354-430 CE), not to be seriously considered again until the Renaissance, and then set aside again in the Enlightenment and during the rise of modern science.
The Neoplatonists believed that ethical behavior and metaphysical thought were inseparably connected, arriving at this understanding through deep intuition and mystical experience. The greatest Neoplatonist was Plotinus (204-270 CE), who taught in Rome in the third century. His philosophic view upheld Plato’s ideas of archetypal Forms while aligning them more directly with Parmenides’ One. For him, the One, the Source of all, does not create. Rather, it overflows from its plenitude, resulting in the radiation of the Intellect—what we might call universal or cosmic Mind—and that in turn overflows, emanating soul, of which we are a part. Nature is the final result of this overflowing process. If the One were actively creative, it would imply that God is an agent and therefore a being, but to overflow is simply a natural consequence of God’s nature not requiring any act of will—a position we feel is consistent with Tillich’s definition of God as the ground of Being.
Plotinus taught that the world as we know it through our senses is an imperfect and deceptive reflection of the One. But everyone is also imbued with intellect, which is our connection with the Divine. Intellect faces inward toward the One while also 178 Peter Kingsley, Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic, especially chapter 15, 217-232.
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looking out onto Nature. Since we possess a portion of universal Intellect, the potential exists for knowing something of the One through which the nature of Being is partially reveled. In turning toward the One, souls take on transcendent qualities that belong to Intellect and even, for a moment, may glimpse divine perfection. These higher visions are only temporary, however, because we are trapped in the material world of diversity. Simply stated, we have within us the capacity to open ourselves to Divine Wisdom but are also entranced by the immediate pleasures of the mundane world.
In defining existence in terms of the One, which gives rise to the Intellect and in turn gives rise to the soul, Plotinus was not thinking of an evolutionary process in time.
Rather, he is delineating the formal structure of reality which exists outside of time and change and includes the One as well as its overflowing emanations, which encompass Intellect, the universal Soul, and Nature. Plotinus’ concept of Nature thus includes not only the phenomenal world we observe but also its formal structure. The human soul, by being an integral part of this eternal organization, is free to either devolve toward the diversity of nature or move toward the unity of Being. Though the soul normally experiences itself moving forward in time, it can also recognize its unmoving eternal character through contemplation, thereby participating in Intellect which is ever
“facing” inward toward the One and outward toward Nature.
By living a life that was good in the ways Plato taught and withdrawing into deep meditation, the Neoplatonists held that a person can behold the One. But because we are all part of ever-changing Nature, the vision of the One is not sustainable in time.
Even though transitory, Neoplatonists believed that beholding it, even for a short time, has a transformative effect on mundane existence. Porphyry, Plotinus’ disciple, reports that Plotinus beheld the One on four occasions in his life. In a sense, Plotinus is the perfect example of the blurring of philosophy and religion. He is clearly a philosopher in the Parmenidean-Platonic mold, but his experiential view of transcendent reality looks more like what falls under the rubric of “religion.”179 Even if we cannot agree 179 It is tempting to say that religion is rooted in theology, which is like philosophy in its methods of reasoning and explanation but differs in that it begins with a range of uncriticizable concepts and propositions—e.g. original sin, the resurrection, the incarnation—whereas philosophy begins with no assumptions. But this approach is not sound because (1) not all religious traditions place emphasis on theology, focusing rather on practices, and (2) philosophy cannot begin from literally nothing but has initial concepts and dedicated methods. Aristotle famously said that first premises have come from somewhere; not everything can be logically derived. And (3) religious thinkers and theologians not only dispute the meanings of a tradition’s concepts and propositions but also challenge their truths. Evidence of this is the range of Christian sects in existence today.
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with Plotinus’ metaphysics, we appreciate his understanding of the eternal nature of the soul.
Stepping back for a panoramic view of these thinkers, we find a line from Parmenides through Plato to Plotinus. Parmenides conceived an eternal unity, which he called the One. All else he considered unreal when compared to it. Put simply, diversity and separateness (the Many), are ultimately illusory. Plato mediated between the One and the Many with his Forms (or Ideas), the reflections or instantiations of which constitute the world of ordinary experience. The Forms have a hierarchical structure, in that the highest Form is the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, a unity that governs everything else. But even beyond this highest Form there exists Parmenides’
One, which Plato said, can only be conceived logically, but never known directly.
Plotinus, in contrast to Plato, believed it was possible to experience the One, but, for him, it is not the same as Being, but rather a presentment of it, the closest we can come to knowing Being itself. This makes sense if we think of Being as pure potential, in which case symbols alone cannot fully penetrate its true nature but can, nonetheless, point to it. Only that which exists within space and time can be fully understood or directly experienced. Being’s hidden mystery is therefore impenetrable, whether we call it God, the One, or Plato’s highest Form—the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.180
However Greek philosophy is viewed, it has had a lasting impact on Western culture including its influence on Islam and Christianity. To better appreciate its value, we next discuss the philosophy of the Enlightenment, which grew out of the rational insights of these early Greek philosophers.
180 The frequent distinction between reason (rationality) and transcendent experience (mysticism or irrationality) is not useful in cases like these. Plato and Plotinus, like Tibetan Buddhists today, insist upon developing a sophisticated understanding of reason and analysis but hold that deeper levels of reality cannot be reached by them.
Only training and experience can do that, and the results cannot be expressed in discursive language but only in symbols and analogies.
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Our own ways, of course, seem to us—but not to others—natural, inevitable, and beyond question. At the pinnacle of our culture is our science.
Its nature and content, when we think about it at all, presumably are dictated by an underlying factual universe increasingly discoverable by experiment and observation. In such a universe an account of our cosmology—our understanding of the organization and evolution of the universe—would consist of a descriptive theory based on little more than a straightforward list of observational evidence.
Norriss S. Hetherington181
By the Renaissance, the Ptolemaic strategy had produced, in Copernicus’s words, a “monster”––an inelegant and overburdened conception which, despite all the complicated ad hoc corrective devices, still failed to account for or predict observed planetary positions with reliable accuracy.
Richard Tarnas182
During the medieval period, both philosophy and theology were dominated by monks and churchmen who wrote and taught in monastic communities and universities founded by religious orders. Suffice it to say that their concerns were more with the immortal soul than with the mind and the nature of consciousness. With the recovery of Plato’s writings and the texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus (both of which described the struggle of the human soul for liberation from the earthly bonds of ignorance and its concomitant pain),183 the Renaissance saw a restoration of the idea of individual freedom. Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486) has God telling man that he may make of himself an angel or a beast, underscoring his fundamental freedom and the importance of mental reflection and discriminating judgment.184 According to his Oration, the body has its strong tendencies, but the mind 181 Hetherington, Norriss S., Cosmology: Historical, Literary, Philosophical, Religious, and Scientific Perspective, 3.
182 Tarnas, Passion of the Western Mind, 248.
183 We will discuss Hermes Trismegistus in more detail in the next chapter.
184 This understanding also connects the human being firmly to both heaven and earth, a view that would have been heartily endorsed by Iamblichus. In the Oration, Pico imagines God speaking to Adam, explaining that everything in nature has its fixed place, except for man. The human being is given angelic and animal natures, so that through human choice, one may rise up toward the angels or descend into bestiality.
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will decide the individual’s fate. Within half a century of Pico’s manifesto, the Reformation, along with the rise of science, fragmented Western Christianity, undermining established beliefs and practices. This culminated in the Enlightenment, where reason was installed metaphorically as a goddess. Though the Reformation did not intend to diminish the sacred (but rather to redeem it from institutional malpractices and wrong beliefs), it unintentionally did so by insisting that each human being should rely on his or her own free understanding of the Bible to know divine truth. Unfortunately, this often resulted in a literal interpretation of scripture, which became increasingly at odds with advances being made in science. Over time, the reductionist strategy of science drove a wedge between the worldly and divine realms, and its methodology simply ignored the latter. With the rise of biblical analysis and criticism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the symbolic coherence of Christianity faltered and began to fade. Everything from the discovery of the “New World” to the denial of biblical inerrancy and the materialism of science seemed to deny the sacred entirely, a tendency only reinforced by the senseless horrors of two World Wars in the twentieth century.
Writing in The Lost Art of Scripture, Karen Armstrong examines how, until recently, the various scriptures of the world’s religions were used to help people transcend their ordinary lives and connect to the Divine. “In many ways,” she says, “we seem to be losing the art of scripture in the modern world. Instead of reading it to achieve transformation, we use it to confirm our own views.… Too many believers, and non-believers alike now read these sacred texts in a doggedly literal manner that is quite different from the more inventive and mystical approach of premodern spirituality…
.Our logic-driven mentality also makes it difficult for people to think in terms of conventional mythos and this makes scripture highly problematic.”185
Homer’s epic dramas of the Iliad and the Odyssey served the function of scripture for the ancient Greeks. But as we have seen, philosophy began to successfully compete with these adventurous tales as a source of community cohesion and meaning. Greek philosophy, in contrast, was a rational endeavor that combined imagination with reason, laying an enduring foundation for Western culture—a source of wisdom that blossomed again centuries later during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. But philosophy today is suffering a fate similar to that of scripture in that it has lost its ability to stir the spiritual imagination. Science has now taken over the role of discovering the ultimate nature of reality, leaving only a few uninspiring tasks for philosophers to argue over. Even existentialism has been downgraded into a vapid 185 Armstrong, The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts, 451.
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postmodernism in which everything is culturally relative, and spirituality and meaning are almost nonexistent. Romanticism was a reactionary movement during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries meant to restore a place for vision and love, but, as we said before, it died at the beginning of the twentieth century, a victim of World War I. Only by awakening to the spiritual wisdom at the core of our being can rational discourse be rescued from the rarefied atmosphere of the intellect. Philosophy cries out to be founded again on imagination aided by reason as first conceived by Greek philosophers when they pondered the wonders of creation.
In the West, Aristotle, often called merely “The Philosopher” because everyone knew who that was, dominated the philosophical understanding of the world for centuries after his work was recovered from Arabic sources during what has been called the Renaissance of the twelfth century. Although primarily concerned with the natural world, Aristotle’s philosophy, inspired in part by Plato, still spoke to European intellectuals such as Thomas Aquinas who was the first to fully incorporate Aristotle into Christianity. At the beginning of the modern era, however, Greek philosophy, which envisioned psyche or soul as transcendent to the material world, began to crumble. What we now consider modern philosophy represents a steady march toward a triumph of reason in which both scripture and the imaginative philosophy of the ancients were abandoned. Instead, a soulless materialism now dominates both science and philosophy. Only recently has this begun to change.
The revolutionary movement that led to the Enlightenment began with the Italian Renaissance during the 14th century. This rebirth of classical learning has been rightly hailed as a significant victory over the ignorance that characterized medieval life. Its eventual spread throughout the West, however, led to the dominance of science and reason over the spiritual longings of the heart during the Enlightenment, thus challenging the spiritual inheritance of Christianity. As the Enlightenment strengthened its hold on the educated classes, consciousness was increasingly dissociated from the sacred depths that are necessary to sustain life’s enduring values.
J. Scott Turner,186 author of Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has failed to Explain It, criticizes our decent into soullessness by examining the current state of Darwinism and modern evolutionary theory. He proposes a new form of vitalism to rescue biology from its current identification with 186 J. Scott Turner (1951- ) is an American physiologist who has contributed to the theory of collective intelligence through his fieldwork on a South African species of termite, suggesting the architectural complexity and sophistication of their mounds is an instance of his theory of the extended organism or superorganism. His theory has been favorably reviewed by a number of journals including American Scientist.
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a reductive view existing within the life sciences, which was pretty much decided by the 1940s. At stake then, he laments, “was nothing less than the soul of biology: whether we would study life as a unique phenomenon to be understood by its own rules, or whether we would flatten life under the rules that govern the rest of the material universe.”187
Traditional accounts of the history of modern philosophy, that is, philosophy from Descartes on, have furthered the flattening of life so that it can be allegedly understood using the same deterministic rules by which we understand matter. But life and consciousness seem to defy this ordering of reality, demanding different rules by which to understand their ultimate mystery. The Enlightenment, as important as it was for science and the great advances that have been made in our own time, also led to a loss of meaning in the modern world. To reclaim what has been lost, we must recognize that mind and consciousness cannot be reduced to the current laws of physics, and instead, hold a special place in the understanding of life.
After Aristotle’s writings were recovered, the Greek view of physical reality was largely embraced by most European philosophers until challenged by advances in science at the beginning of the modern era. This ancient view presumes that there is something outside of observable nature upon which the physical world is patterned, whether thought of as God, Plato’s Ideals, or the fundamental nature of Being. In contrast, philosophy today is based, for the most part, on a deterministic view of nature. It is widely assumed in university departments, even within some religious circles, that everything can be explained, including consciousness, by relying solely on deterministic laws—cause and effect—starting from the initial conditions established at the moment of the “Big Bang.” If God has a role to play in the creation of the universe, it involves little more than his involvement in establishing initial conditions and the laws of physics. After that, everything else is determined.
The Enlightenment, which arose in Western Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was revolutionary. Often called the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment was based on ideas of individual liberty and religious tolerance, which were from the beginning opposed by the Church whose fixed dogmas were considered eternal. Starting in the mid-18th century, Paris became the center for enlightened reason where philosophic and scientific theories began to challenge traditional doctrines and dogmas. Voltaire and Rousseau, for instance, argued for a society based upon reason modeled on classical Greek philosophy. Instead of basing faith on dogmatic certainty, they argued for a new civil order based on natural law and 187 Turner, Purpose and Desire, 128.
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advanced a science based on experiments and observation. Amongst the many political ideas that prevailed during this period were those of the political philosopher Montesquieu, who insisted that there be a separation of powers in government, an idea that successfully made its way into the American constitution.188
Science during the Enlightenment was dominated by scientific societies and academies, which had, by then, largely replaced universities as centers of scientific research and development, becoming the backbone for the maturation of the scientific profession. The members of this new profession defended their position as the creators of scientific knowledge, while relegating universities to the transmission of knowledge.
Most of these scientific societies were eventually granted permission to oversee their own publications, control the election of new members, and tend to the administration of the society. As a result, increasingly literate populations began to express their ideas in poetry and literature. Amongst these luminaries, David Hume (1711-1776) and other Scottish Enlightenment thinkers developed a philosophy that strove to understand human nature and the role the mind had in determining culture. In 1776, Adam Smith (1723-1790) published The Wealth of Nations, which is often considered the first work on modern economics. It was well received and had an immediate impact on British economic policy and even today influences economic theory and politics.189
The Enlightenment has long been seen as the foundation of modern Western political and intellectual culture. Its emphasis on individual freedom gave birth to America and other liberal democracies with many of the major political and intellectual figures behind the American Revolution associating themselves closely with it.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), for instance, visited Europe repeatedly and contributed actively to the scientific and political debates on the Continent while bringing the newest ideas back to Philadelphia. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) also followed European ideas closely and incorporated some of the ideals of the Enlightenment into the Declaration of Independence, which declares “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Later, James Madison (1751-1836) incorporated these ideals into the U.S.
Constitution during its framing in 1787. The Enlightenment was clearly an influence in the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution a few years later in 1789.
Thomas Jefferson was a leading voice in both wars of liberation, which together 188https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment#:~:text=The%20Age%20of%20Enli ghtenment%20or,with%20global%20influences%20and%20effects.
189 Ibid.
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represented a paradigm shift from the law of feudalism—known as the divine right of Kings—to the idea that government should be founded on the consent of the governed.
In similar fashion, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), an ardent defender of liberty, proposed that the French Revolution was the inevitable result of a radical opposition to the repressive power of monarchy.190
John Locke (1632-1704), one of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers, based his philosophy of government in social contract theory, which claimed the government’s authority lies in the consent of the people. English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) popularized this idea in his work Leviathan in 1651. Hobbes also developed many of the ideas that became fundamental for the establishment of constitutional government. Among his ideas were the inalienable rights of the individual, the natural equality of all people, the distinction between civil society and the state, the view that all legitimate political power must be based on the consent of the people, and a liberal interpretation of law that guaranteed that people were free to do whatever the law does not explicitly forbid.191
Like Hobbes, Locke believed that humans are rational and that all men are born equal with the natural right of life, liberty, and property. This became the cornerstone of the preamble of the American constitution which begins: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States….” Both Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s (1712-1778) and John Locke’s social contract theories rest on the presupposition of natural rights, which exist independently from feudal law, custom, or the Church.192
The Enlightenment’s response to the preceding century of religious conflict in Europe, especially the Thirty Years War, was a decisive factor in the development of its philosophy and theology. Theologians of the Enlightenment wanted to reform their faith by establishing it on non-confrontational roots, thereby limiting the capacity for religious controversy to spill over into politics and warfare while still maintaining a true faith in God. Locke expanded on this idea by abandoning the corpus of theological commentary in favor of a careful examination of the Word of God. After examining it more closely, however, he determined that the essence of Christianity was solely a belief in Christ and recommended avoiding more detailed debate. Thomas Jefferson 190 Ibid.
191 Ibid.
192 Ibid.
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went further and dropped any passages dealing with miracles, visitations of angels, and the resurrection of Jesus and instead focused on the practical moral code found in the New Testament. Most of the Enlightenment philosophers likewise stressed that life could be more just and fulfilling by simply awakening to one’s own intellectual powers. These grand ideas were predicated on revolutionary concepts developed by philosophers that wrote several years before the American revolution.
René Descartes (1596-1650), for instance, is important because his philosophy initiated the tradition of rational inquiry that provided a philosophical foundation for the Enlightenment and modern science. During the era that Descartes lived, worries had arisen that the material world might overwhelm and absorb the soul. His dualism, which is generally rejected today, was therefore an early attempt to separate what could be analyzed by science (material substances) and what was the province of theology (the soul). Considered the first of the Rationalists in modern philosophy, Descartes, both a scientist and philosopher, sought to ease concerns over religion by separating the realms of science from philosophical theology, holding that each had its place and could not infringe on the other. He postulated that the human being (and all existence) consisted of two utterly separate parts, res extensa and res cogitans, understood as extended stuff (matter) and thinking stuff (soul or spirit).193 While he thought these two never touch one another in nature, he observed that they were somehow connected within the human mind. To explain this, he speculated that the two are somehow linked together through the pineal gland, which is located in the only part of the brain that is not duplicated in its two hemispheres. This view, which aimed to preserve the thinking soul from the infringement of material science, was later rejected by the Church because Descartes’ dualism implied a tacit agreement that science was independent of Church authority. If it accepted Descartes position, which was reasonable enough in itself, they would have had to agree not to intrude upon science concerning such issues as to whether earth is the center of the universe and whether the universe was created in six days a few thousand years ago.194
193 It is hard for people living today to understand that a significant part of reality exists outside spacetime parameters, because we are so used to thinking in materialist terms.
But Descartes and Spinoza, along with other philosophers, considered the nonextended universe not only real but of critical importance for understanding reality—Jung also described the pleroma as nonextended.
194 Early Church Fathers were willing to interpret at least some scripture allegorically, but from the time of St. Augustine, literalism increasingly defined theology. This trend toward literalism accelerated with the Reformation and counter-Reformation, finding
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Though Descartes is greatly criticized today for his dualistic view regarding soul and body, John Cottingham in his book In Search of Soul195 argues that much can still be gained by reading Descartes’ works closely. He claims Descartes understood, as we do today, that psychological functions like memory and sense perception, as well as instinctual reactions like fear and hunger, can be explained as bodily functions. What cannot be explained physically, he further explains, is the human capacity for reason.
Descartes felt that the rational function was far too complex to explain mechanically.
Only the existence of a rational soul could explain such mental attributes as creativity, free will, and intelligence. Of course, today computers and artificial intelligence can mechanically perform complex rational processes and even simulate free will. What cannot be artificially generated is consciousness. We feel that much of Descartes argument is still relevant if in place of the rational soul we substitute the capacity for consciousness.
In various forms, Cartesian duality has been argued for and against down to the present day. Descartes’ pineal “solution” for resolving the dilemma that so exercised philosophers regarding how two completely different types of substance—mind and matter—communicate with each other was generally rejected. Yet, many of them still believed the soul makes the body move, just as the condition of the body affects the thinking and feeling parts of the soul. And, of course, for these early modernists, the nature of the soul is closely tied to God, which Descartes affirmed and argued for, because the meaning of life and existence was from ancient times rooted in the nature of the soul and its relationship to the Divine. What has changed today is what is meant by soul and the nature of the Divine. In Jung’s psychology the concept of the soul has been appropriated by the psyche, and in Tillich’s theology, God is the ground of being, the source of the Holy from which life’s meaning is derived.
Although the Church fought against relinquishing its authority over the material world, Descartes’ dualism appealed to those searching for an effective means for preserving sacred traditions in an age when emerging empirical and theoretical science threatened to undermine the sanctity of the soul. Others found solace in their Christian understanding of Aristotle’s science, which preserved the sense of the sacred by drawing God close enough to the world that His eternal intelligibility could be made actual through the human intellect. But for many, this was going too far. Even Aquinas’
more conservative integration of Aristotle into Christian theology provoked strong its home in present-day fundamentalist churches, many of which subscribe to a literalistic understanding of scripture. Karen Armstrong addresses this issue historically in The Lost Art of Scripture.
195 Cottingham In Search of the Soul, 49-69.
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resistance because it threatened to bring God so close to the world that His eternal majesty was threatened.
In many ways the modern world is nearer to the spirit of ancient Greece than to the medieval Church, as Kronman shows in his Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan.196 After Augustine, the Christian world turned decisively away from its pagan roots. Today, however, Aristotle’s understanding of God, derived from reason and not revelation, has a strong appeal. Even Jung’s concept of the imago Dei, the Self, as indistinguishable from God is consistent with the God of Aristotle, at least in one important way: Jung’s psyche and Aristotle’s intellect have access to the Divine as they each defined it. For Aristotle, the mind partakes of the ultimate nature of reality. For Jung, the Divine is equivalent to the Self, the organizing principle of the psyche.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) sought an end to unfounded speculation by differentiating between the phenomenal, which is subject to careful analysis, and the noumenal, which is beyond rational consideration because it cannot be studied empirically. He laid out his theory of knowledge in his Critique of Pure Reason. Kant, who is still highly respected, was not denying the older and more traditional view that physical realty is patterned on something of a higher nature but only making an epistemological statement about what can be known with certainty. But many of his followers confused epistemology with ontology and claimed that only the observable is real. The exception to this trend were the Romantic poets and philosophers who were intuitively drawn to the ancient view that nature is based on something of supreme value. Awakening to the mystery of Being, the position we take, requires a similar reorientation.
Kant said that he was awakened from his “dogmatic slumber” by Hume’s empirical skepticism, who had argued that everything we think comes through the senses, banishing any role for the soul in human awareness and knowledge. Whenever we create an image in the mind, we are only piecing together bits and pieces of previous sensory experience and concepts derived from it.197 Hume also questioned the nature of causation. For him, our concept of causation as a necessary connection between two things or events is without foundation. We only see patterns that repeat, and we never 196 Kronman, Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan, 173.
197 There might be one exception. Hume said that we cannot imagine a color we have not seen. If one produced a series of hues of, say, blue, omitting one step in the series, someone looking at the series might be able to imagine the missing hue. But this is not a whole new color, nor is it, Hume might say, anything more than a simple extrapolation, still completely dependent on (previous) sense experience.
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see the alleged necessary connection between the elements in such a repeating pattern.
Both self and causation may exist independently of our perception, but we cannot know this.198 Hume’s insights launched Kant on a journey of discovery. Although Kant wrote on many philosophical topics, all with immense depth and care, we develop only one of his conclusions, which was directly related to Aristotle.
Aristotle had developed a list of categories through which the world is understood.
While there is debate over exactly what Aristotle ultimately had in mind, it seems that his categories applied to the world and to our relationship (through perception) with the world. The category of substance, of which there are various kinds, covers things while the category of quality involves both things and our perception of them. The redness of an apple and the hardness of a tabletop are examples of qualities because they involve our perceptions as well as what they are in themselves. Redness is a response of the human eye reacting to light reflected off the apple and hardness of the table is a perception of nerves in the hand. Discussion and application of such categories occupied philosophy throughout much of its history. Descartes, we recall, postulated two substances, material substance and thinking substance; Spinoza, whom we examine in the chapter on Idealism, had only one—God or Nature. Kant greatly expanded this discussion when he first encountered Hume. For Kant, the categories of understanding are the inherent ways we perceive and think about the world, which is consistent with Aristotle. But he went much further by realizing that we have no way of knowing whether we have any relation to things-in-themselves.199
Kant asked, as Hume did, what empirical evidence we have that our perceptions of the external world are of reality. Since we cannot stand outside our own perceptual capacities, we cannot know if we perceive reality or only some veiled or even misleading version of it. John Locke (1632-1704), who shunned metaphysics purporting to describe reality by restricting himself to ideas and their relations to one another, had earlier made a distinction between primary and secondary qualities, those 198 Though Hume deeply influenced Immanuel Kant, he was better known throughout in his lifetime for his six-volume history of England which was a best seller for decades.
Considered an atheist, Hume was never granted a significant university chair, though he served as secretary to several noble and well-known political figures and engaged in diplomacy for the government.
199 Kant delineated twelve categories under four general types: quantity, quality, relation and modality (that is, possibility, existence and necessity).
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that are independent of human interaction, like extension,200 and those that depend on human perception, like color.201 Kant, in contrast, denies the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, making our perception of both things and qualities subject to the way we experience the world. He went even further by noting that we cannot, in any way, examine objects outside of our experience of space and time. The most we can say is that space and time are “modes of apperception,” or exclusive ways in which we experience the world and its objects. Put simply, this means that we cannot know things-in-themselves independent of the way we perceive them. What they might ultimately be remains a mystery. Jung was impressed by this aspect of Kant’s philosophy and partially adopted it as his own, arguing that we can know nothing outside the psyche. Like Hume, Kant thought that there was a world independent of consciousness, but we cannot know what it is. So ultimate questions, such as whether there is a God, can be argued for and against but cannot be settled through such reasoning. Yet he held that there is a “practical reason” that allows us to negotiate life with fulfillment and satisfaction. Practical reasoning, as he conceived it, thus allows us to believe not only that there is a God, but many other truths important for living a decent life.202 Such conclusions are not knowledge, but rather what today we might call “working hypotheses.” Such hypotheses, when they touch us deeply, form the core of our personal mythos from which we derive life’s meaning.203
200 Philosophers use the term “extension” to refer to an object having spatial coordinates.
Thoughts, in contrast, do not have extension but are, nonetheless, real.
201 Galileo first made this distinction, allowing him to separate what science can quantify through measurement and qualities which it cannot.
202 In his Critique of Practical Reason, he sets out his practical philosophy that addresses ideas important for living a good life such as belief in the existence of God.
203 Kant also insisted on human freedom and autonomy. For him, any infringement of that freedom—be it divine governance or some metaphysical determinism—undermines the moral nature of human action. Being free, we have no moral commands given to us, though mutual consent recognizes some actions as good and others as bad. The only way an autonomous being can make a moral decision is in terms of itself. Kant’s
“categorical imperative” attempts to provide a universal basis for making moral decisions by saying that an action is moral if the actor is willing to make the principle or law under which the action occurs universal, that is, applicable to all including the actor himself or herself. So, for example, if killing another human being who has offended one is judged to be morally permissible, then acting on that principle would be moral only if one were willing to be the subject of such killing if another were offended. We are not so willing, and therefore the action of killing another cannot be
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As might be expected, philosophical arguments over Kant’s epistemological conclusion, with its radical distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal, endured through the subsequent history of philosophy. If Kant is right, then knowledge like that of space and time depends on the structure of the human mind independent of perception, a view that empiricists strongly resist. Interestingly, science has successfully sidestepped this issue with the increasing use of scientific models, a technique that has proved crucial for quantum mechanics. Thus, by declaring that quantum theory is just a model, not reality itself, physicists have been able to make enormously successful predictions. When Niels Bohr (1885-1962) made his famous declaration that “There is no quantum world,” he was not saying that quantum theory is false. Rather he was pointing to the fact that quantum theory just provides a model of reality that allows for such accurate predictions. Though invariably born out in experiments, the model may not actually describe the reality it models. Albert Einstein (1879-1955) wanted science to describe reality itself; Niels Bohr was content with modeling it and avoiding the ontological question.
After the famous Solvay conference in 1927, where Einstein and Bohr jousted over their different views, Bohr’s position became orthodoxy and Einstein’s was relegated to the margins. Like the proverbial pendulum, there has been a shift in the last decades back to Einstein’s stance among a growing number of physicists. For example, theoretical physicist Heinrich Päs (born 1971) currently argues that if quantum physics is to be understood as describing what exists, as Einstein wanted to do, it necessarily leads to positing a fundamental One that is not only the source of our diverse universe and consciousness but consistent with the intuitive theories of Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Plato.204 Many physicists, while rejecting Einstein’s position, nevertheless speak as though they are describing reality, not just providing a prediction-making mechanism for experiments. We recall that Kant maintained that we can never know things-in-themselves but only the phenomena that arise from them.
Though Kant did not entirely avoid the ontological question, he would have sided with moral. What Kant’s categorical imperative does is eliminate the ontological basis for moral decisions. Religion is no longer the arbitrator of ethics. All actions are permissible as long as one is willing to accept the consequence of such actions when applied to oneself. Kant struggled with problems in this formulation, and sometimes stated it as treating others as ends and never as means. Mind, that is, thinking, is the basis of morality.
204 Heinrich Päs, The One: How an Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics. Päs refers to and quotes a range of other physicists and cosmologists in support of his views.
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the physicist Niels Bohr to the extent that he thought that reality independent of perception is unknowable.
Reflecting on what philosophers have long held, Amanda Gefter (1980- ), writing for the online Quanta Magazine, says: “we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality.” 205 At the typical human level, it seems that each individual sees (hears, touches, smells, tastes) things “out there,” and that is the way they are. Most people recognize that color exists because light waves reflected off objects interact with the eye, neural system, and brain. Something analogous happens with the other senses. But we seldom question the existence of the objects themselves as Kant’s philosophy would have us do.
Quantum physics, however, does question the existence of things in themselves. It teaches that particles constituting physical stuff have no independent, objective existence until they are observed either directly or through instruments of measurement. Gefter puts it bluntly: “There are no public objects sitting out there in some preexisting space.”206 But, admitting this much does not allow us to conclude that there is nothing at all out there; rather, our knowledge of it may be quite limited, and the senses may not be the best entrance into the reality behind sense experience.
Hence, the importance of the full range of human experience, including transcendent experiences, which deepen our insight into an inner reality beyond sensory input.
What came to be known as German Idealism arose in response to Kant, the first philosopher to declare himself an Idealist. The thinkers generally placed under this rubric had divergent views, but all attempted to “complete” Kant’s metaphysics—or to overcome it. They especially criticized Kant’s sharp separation of the phenomenal and noumenal realms. To them, it seemed that the Cartesian mental-physical dualism was being let in surreptitiously through this radical distinction since perceiving is based on a physiological function, which Descartes applied to extended matter, and the analysis of reality itself is a mental act, which he reserved for matters of the soul.
Kant’s distinction between phenomenal and noumenal, regardless of its distractors, is useful for science because of its need for empirical verification. But in doing so, intuition and feeling were largely ignored along with questions concerning the 205 Amanda Gefter, “The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality,” Quanta Magazine, www.quantamagazine.org. Accessed September 1, 2017.
206 Ibid.
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ultimate nature of Being. But regardless of how Being is described, it will always remain an inscrutable mystery.
One Hindu invocation, using the Sun as a symbol of the highest spiritual reality, calls on the Sun to withhold its rays so that we might see its true form. All we see is the light that manifests from the surface of the Sun, not the dynamics that give rise to that light, much less the causes of those dynamics. This solar analogy intimates but can neither describe nor explain the mystery of Being.207 What little that can said about Being will be explored later in the fourth part of the book, along with the argument that the potential for consciousness, which we call Mind for lack of a better term, is fundamental to the nature of reality.
207 There is an analogy here with mathematics. Mathematicians over millennia have developed mathematical systems, including geometry, algebra, calculus, and a host of more recondite systems that begin with some axioms or postulates that are taken as given and cannot be proved within the system. In the nineteenth century, Euclid’s geometry was challenged by rejecting one or more of his geometrical postulates. These non-Euclidean geometries have proven to be quite useful in contemporary cosmology and physics. Euclid’s effort is part of what mathematicians call the foundations of mathematics. The first problem mathematicians confront when building such an abstract foundation is how to get from 0 to 1. The problem is not solved by addition, because starting from 0, we do not yet have a number to add to it. Once we derive the number 1, we can get to the number 2 by addition if we can prove the soundness or necessity of addition. This mathematical conundrum may serve as an analogy to the philosophical and theological mystery of the ground of Being and Being Itself. The famous computer hardware and software designer Donald E. Knuth shows one mathematical system, using set theory, to get from 0 to 1 and so on in his “novelette”
Surreal Numbers. This system, of course, requires some postulates to get started, as any mathematical system does. A deeply religious person, Knuth knows that theology must do the same.
Part II
Christianity,
Idealism, and Romanticism
EARLY CHRISTIANITY’S ENCOUNTER
WITH PAGAN PHILOSOPHY
The very thing which is now called the Christian religion was with the ancients, and it was with the human race from its beginning to the time when Christ appeared in the flesh: from when on the true religion, which already existed, began to be called the Christian.
St. Augustine of Hippo208
Thinking, in the first centuries of our era, was more the concern of the Gnostics than of the Church, for which reason the great Gnostics, such as Basilides and Valentinus, seem almost like Christian theologians with a bent for philosophy.
Carl Jung209
We have included our discussion of Christianity together with Idealism and Romanticism since all three represent an early attempt to embrace the sacred while remaining true to the rigorous demands of the Enlightenment. Together they initiated a long process that we feel will eventually lead to the unification of enlightened reason with the primordial wisdom of the soul. Although Christianity has all too often veered into superstition, its leading theologians today have countered these unfounded beliefs by stressing the need to balance faith with reason.
Although Christianity is usually thought to have arisen exclusively from the Hebrew tradition, this chapter describes how Greek philosophy also had an important role in its rise. Anthony T. Kronman, in his book Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan, which we discussed earlier, presents an extensive critique of Western thinking, especially the long development of philosophy as influenced by Christian theology. But he feels that this philosophical trend, largely formulated within the Christian West, has run its course and that pre-Christian pagan thinking has become increasingly relevant to the modern world.210 In describing his position, he says the “God it describes and defends is not the familiar one of Abraham but what I call the ‘God of sufficient reason’—the 208 St. Augustine, Retractationes, I.1.2.3, quoted in Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed, 49.
209 Jung, “Transformation Symbolism in the Mass,” CW 11, para 422.
210 Anthony T. Kronman, Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan, passim.
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timeless intelligibility of the world as a whole … reality as such….”211 Kronman’s God of sufficient reason is of Pagan origin, especially that of Aristotle. Kronman knows that the modern world cannot simplistically return to some Platonic or Presocratic past. But he asserts that the use of experience drawn from nature, including experiences of transcendence and the sacred, along with reason, brings us to a richer and more meaningful understanding of the universe and our place in it. The pagan worldview, we believe, when enhanced in the light of present knowledge, is thus better suited to our lives than mere faith, including various forms of Christian faith.
As Rome absorbed ancient Greek culture into its growing empire, diverse religious traditions moved into Rome and across the empire. Mother goddesses were especially attractive, including Isis from Egypt and Cybele from the Near East. Recent scholarship suggests that ancient Egyptian practices, often thought of in terms of hierophantic ritual, included disciplines designed to elevate consciousness into the numinous realm of the gods.212 Various scholars have also drawn parallels between the Christian story as it emerged and the mysteries of Isis and Osiris. Much of early Christian thinking, after all, arose in Alexandria, Egypt where these mysteries were enacted.213 And some of the older Greek deities, such as Pan, exerted powers that we would today tend to think of in terms of the unconscious.
The advent of Christianity, however, marked the decline of Greco/Roman veneration of nature and its devotion to the nature god Pan. Pan was affiliated with mountain wilds, groves, and wooded glens as well as being associated with sex and fertility, an acknowledgement that Christians could not abide. During the reign of Tiberius (14–37
CE) it is said that the news of Pan’s death came to a sailor on his way to Italy. A divine voice hailed him across the salt water: “Thamus, are you there? When you reach Palodes take care to proclaim that the great god Pan is dead.”214 Olney speaks of the death of Pan as a premonition of a dying world. With Pan’s death, the ancient world began to recede, making room for the rise of Christianity. Olney contends that Pan’s place in the heart of the people was undermined by abstract reasoning “so pure that it 211 Ibid.,15.
212 See Algis Uždavinys, Philosophy and Theurgy in Late Antiquity, passim.
213 Richard A. Gabriel has gathered together and summarized much of this scholarship in Jesus the Egyptian.
214 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_(god): Accessed July 24, 2019. Pan was a nature spirit who might help the lost wanderer or rape him or her, reminiscent of nature as both benign and harsh. A detailed study of Pan is Philippe Borgeaud’s The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece.
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bore no smudge of the senses, a thought so absolute and all-encompassing that it was completely empty.”215 The same emptiness has been spreading throughout our culture for quite some time. As Kronman observed, we must now return to nature to recover our relationship to the Divine.
For many philosophers, especially those labeled Neoplatonists, deep spiritual experience was thought to be crucial to understanding the world and for living a good life. Plotinus, whom, as we saw, admitted that he had several times achieved union with the ultimate source of existence, was a philosophical thinker of the first order who, like Plato, declined to describe his innermost experiences. Proclus (412-485 CE), whose Neoplatonic writings are a challenge to understand even today, was a late successor to the position Plato held as head of the Academy. Despite hostility from then Christian Athens, his philosophy represents the culmination of Neoplatonic thought, which later influenced Christian Platonic thinking in the Middle Ages. Earlier, Philo of Alexandria (25 BCE-50 CE), though a Jew, had also contributed to Christianity by melding his understanding of Platonic thought with his loyalty to the Hebrew Bible, arguing that both traditions were deeply spiritual and compatible. We need to keep in mind that contemporary ideas of religion, what it is and how it works, were not the ideas current throughout the ancient world. Religion then included a range of social and community practices that bound people together, and though rich in myths, did not depend on specified creeds or doctrines.
The rise of Christianity is often cast in the form of a triumphant narrative. Yet seldom do events, as they are being lived, play out in tight, linear narrative terms. The Christian narrative is a story, and it is not the whole story of the life and times in which it arose. Many conflicting stories were told as the movement surrounding the crucified Jesus began to coalesce around certain ideas, such as Jesus as the Christ, the resurrection, and his dying for humanity’s sins. Various groups, often called Gnostics despite their great diversity, had views on all these subjects that varied from one another and from what became orthodoxy. Some thought that Mary Magdalene was the greatest and most knowledgeable disciple of Jesus. Others held that Jesus was merely a human vehicle of the cosmic Christ, who left him at the crucifixion, thus requiring no resurrection. Paul, who did not seem all that interested in the person Jesus, taught a doctrine of faith in the transcendent Christ as the sole means of salvation. Many Gnostics, active in the early centuries of the Christian era, held that knowledge gained through intuition— gnōsis—is the means through which salvation comes. They considered such knowledge to be deeply spiritual, having little to do with 215 Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower, 126.
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ordinarily knowing.216 Others did not focus so much on salvation as they did on escape from a world created by an anti-god who out of maliciousness or ignorance imprisoned the immortal spark of spirit in physical bodies and earthly delusion.
Although Plato had distinguished parts of the soul—appetitive, spirited, and reasoning/logical—little effort had been made to clearly distinguish between soul and spirit until certain Gnostics separated soul from spirit by proposing that the soul becomes immortal by aligning itself with unchanging spirit or perished by merging with the perishable body. Their understanding gave substance to humanity’s longing for meaning in the world by providing a moral dimension to the soul, just as Plato did centuries earlier. Even this distinction became obscured with the suppression of Gnosticism until the beginning of the modern era when philosophy again picked up the discussion.
The fact is that a great struggle ensued regarding just who and what Jesus was—
Divine or human—and why Jesus lived and died. That this struggle is preserved for us in theologies of various kinds should not blind us to recognizing that these ideas arose out of spiritual yearnings and experience. Christianity did not emerge from a barren landscape ready to nourish the spiritually hungry. The Greek mystery religions, along with others like the Mithraic mysteries, and various forms of syncretism, were on offer, and all had followers. Christianity thus had competition for the spiritual lives of individuals, not least from the Neoplatonists. Its ultimate success was the result of many complex factors, including Emperor Constantine’s edict issued in 325 CE making Christianity the state-supported religion of the Roman Empire.217
Paul, who brought the “good news” (gospel) to the Graeco-Roman world beyond Jerusalem and Palestine, became a follower of Christ because of a transforming experience to which he alludes in his letters but never fully describes.218 On the road 216 Such spiritual knowledge was often identified as gnōsis, distinct from episteme, which was considered knowledge in a more ordinary discursive sense. Gnōsis is cognate with the Sanskrit jñᾱna which can mean wisdom as well as knowledge, depending on the author using the term. Gnōsis, jñāna, and knowledge are all cognate (from the same Indo-European language root).
217 There are numerous histories of Christianity which tell the story well, including Robin Lane Fox’s Christians and Pagans. James J. O’Donnell tells the story from a pagan point of view in Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity.
218 The book Acts of the Apostles, chapter 9, does give a brief description of Paul’s conversion experience, being blinded by a light (unseen by anyone else) and the voice of Jesus (heard by those present), along with instructions of what Paul is to do. Acts follows on
EARLY CHRISTIANITY’S ENCOUNTER WITH PAGAN PHILOSOPHY 115
to Damascus to challenge early disciples of Jesus living there—who they were is unknown—he was struck with a vision and the voice of Jesus as Christ. Paul was transformed on the spot, soon becoming a missionary for his vision. His letters, which constitute a significant portion of the canonical New Testament, spell out his views.219
The core of his message is that faith in Christ is salvific; here faith is not mere belief but is the giving of oneself wholly over to the Christ. Faith is thus conceived as a life transformed by the experience of the sacred. Such faith is meant to transform a person into a new being, free of the sin of the collective and individual past. This transformation prepares one for the imminent return of Christ220 to set the world aright and for the heaven that awaits the saved after death. It is only later that the church developed increasingly authoritarian structures that culminated in the Nicene Creed.
Paul, in contrast to Church orthodoxy, was less interested in theology and the person Jesus than he was the vision of Christ as a cosmic presence.221
Once Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, a unified understanding of just what Christians should believe became important for the unity of the Empire itself. So orthodox interpretations were codified, and great efforts were the Gospel of Luke, which deals with the life and activities of Jesus, while Acts recounts the divine charge to the apostles, and the missionary activities of Peter and Paul. They are presented as working together, though the authentic letters of Paul suggest otherwise. It seems that the author is attempting to produce a smooth narrative of early Christianity but is in no way a witness to anything he writes about. Irenaeus, born a century after the crucifixion of Jesus, is the first to attribute Luke and Acts to Luke, a companion of Paul in some of his missionary work. Scholars agree that this Luke is not the author of the books attributed to him, and the real author is unknown. The account of Paul’s experience as found in Acts may report stories that circulated after Paul’s death, but they cannot be traced to anything Paul himself wrote.
219 Scholars agree that some of the letters attributed to Paul were written later, in part because they concern church ecclesiastical structure, something Paul would know nothing about. An overwhelming number of scholars agree that Paul wrote Romans, First Thessalonians, First and Second Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians and Philemon.
Colossians and Second Thessalonians are disputed, while most agree that First and Second Timothy, Titus and Ephesians are not by Paul.
220 Note that for some theologians and Christians Christ’s return does not necessarily mean that Jesus will descend from Heaven but that the spirit of Christ will become universally incarnate.
221 Since Albert Schweitzer’s famous The Quest for the Historical Jesus, many scholars have seen both Jesus and Paul as apocalyptic figures in that they believed the second coming would be very soon. An important stimulus to theological development in Christianity was caused by the “delay” of this apocalypse.
116 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
made to extinguish heretical thought that departed from the official view. A shift emphasizing correct doctrine over individual experience was already underway in pre-Christian traditions even before the time of Jesus, preparing the way for the rise of orthodoxy a few centuries after him. Many diverse views that existed prior to this time were therefore lost through neglect and suppression. Consequently, our understanding of the diversity in Mediterranean and Near Eastern spirituality was sparse and spotty until the discovery of Gnostic writings in Egypt in 1945. Their recovery shed much new light on the times—though our knowledge is still very partial. What survives from this dynamic era provides insight into interpretations of other people’s experience, but first-hand accounts remain elusive.
There is one spiritual strand, however, that was preserved from this ancient tradition and revived during the Renaissance. It so captured the imagination of Europeans that it remained important to them up through the end of the seventeenth century. A mysterious figure known as Hermes Trismegistus—Thrice Greatest Hermes—
purportedly wrote many treatises on religion and spiritual practice, including two that respectively came to be called the Corpus Hermeticum and the Smagdarine or Emerald Tablet—works to which Jung often referred. These two are the best-known survivors of this tradition. They claimed to be the revelations of a magician-seer-prophet from the time of Moses, or perhaps even earlier. Both center on theurgic practices designed to empty the mind of its mundane distraction and elevate it to the pure realm of Being.
Some early Christians found these writings to be complementary to the emerging New Testament, though others opposed them as heretical and false.
During this time, Constantinople was being steadily weakened in the face of pressure from the tribes that had already demolished the Western Roman Empire.
While being attacked from the west by these barbarous tribes, Constantinople was also threatened from the south and east by Islamic expansion. In response, Renaissance Italian princes, notably Cosimo di’ Medici, sought to rescue ancient texts preserved there but lost to the West. Thus, Plato’s works were recovered from the shrinking Eastern Roman Empire, along with the Hermetic writings. Both had an enormous influence on the thought of Renaissance Europe. The Smagdarine (Emerald) Tablet found favor in northern Europe, where the ancient tradition of alchemy flourished until the seventeenth century. The Corpus Hermeticum inspired religious thinkers and philosophers in southern Europe, including at least one pope. These texts, both metaphysical and prophetic in tone, blended religious beliefs, astrological considerations, and meditational practices into one stream, urging followers to transcend the chains of earth and mortality.
EARLY CHRISTIANITY’S ENCOUNTER WITH PAGAN PHILOSOPHY 117
Hermes was an especially important figure during the Renaissance. He taught that when divinity beheld its image in the chaos of the world, it descended into the lives of human beings as sparks of the Divine. Those sparks, however, were burdened with the negative qualities of the planets in descent, resulting in the present fallen state of humanity. But through knowledge and spiritual practice, one could first behold the divine reality and then ascend though these planetary spheres (at least in consciousness), gaining their positive qualities while shedding the negative ones. This process involved numinous experience and profound insights derived from the imaginal realm, so that the ascent could occur in consciousness, in life, and in fact, after death. So strong was this tradition that early Church Fathers felt the need to either accommodate or attack it.
The non-alchemical Hermetic works222 set out its cosmology and anthropology in some detail. They also contain instructions for training the mind to look within and above for understanding, and some passages suggest specific rituals and meditation techniques for raising consciousness. Although meditation is often thought of as
“eastern,” belonging to India and especially to Buddhists, there was Hermetic meditation, and all the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—had developed traditions of meditation, both in forms of prayer and in more mystical, even ecstatic, practices.223 Such meditative and contemplative traditions, however, have been less pervasive in the Western world than in much of the East, discouraged, in 222 The non-alchemical Hermetic works are mostly gathered together in what has come to be known as the Corpus Hermeticum, a collection of 15 or 16 books ( libelli), depending on the translator. There are numerous translations in English. One important Hermetic fragment of this type was found among the Gnostic papyri in Egypt in 1945, and sometimes these texts are called the Nag Hammadi Library, after the area in which they were found. This Hermetic fragment is the “Discourse on the Eighth and the Ninth.”
Among the alchemical works attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, the most famous and puzzling is the Smagdarine Tablet (the Emerald Tablet), also available in numerous translations. For a review of the scholarship on, and a fine account of the meditation practices of, the Corpus Hermeticum, see Gary Lachman, The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus: From ancient Egypt to the Modern World.
223 Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Professor of History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents at the University of Amsterdam, has shown beyond doubt that Hermetic wisdom centered on techniques for transcending ordinary consciousness and liberating the soul from its mundane prison. He compares these works with the writings of Iambllichus and demonstrates their similarities. His brilliant and insightful Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination: Altered States of Knowledge in Late Antiquity is a masterful study of Hermetic works, including excellent translations of relevant texts. Deeply scholarly, this book is not for the casual reader.
118 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
part, because Church officials worried that individual experience might undermine sanctioned theological doctrines and authority of the priesthood.
One highly regarded Christian philosopher of late antiquity whose ideas were shaped by the Greco-Roman classical tradition was Saint Augustine of Hippo (345-430
CE).224 His mother Monica, who was a devout Catholic, often prayed for her son who had shown little interest in her faith when young. Instead, during the early years of his education, he seemed more influenced by Latin authors, poets, and philosophers, none of whom supported his mother’s religious convictions. Then, nine years before converting to Christianity, he became devoted to a strain of Persian Manichaeism that was highly regarded in the city of Hippo and throughout North Africa. It is quite possible that Manichaeism influenced his ideas on good and evil, the idea of hell, and his hostility to the flesh and sexual activity. It was only after he first encountered the Bible and other Christian writers that he began to appreciate his mother’s religion.
Reflecting on his road to Christianity, he wrote in his Confessions: I still thought that it is not we who sin but some other nature that sins within us. It flattered my pride to think that I incurred no guilt and, when I did wrong, not to confess it . . I preferred to excuse myself and blame this unknown thing which was in me but was not part of me. The truth, of course, was that it was all my own self, and my own impiety had divided me against myself. My sin was all the more incurable because I did not think myself a sinner.225
The turning point came when Bishop Ambrose (339–397 CE), taught him the allegorical method of scriptural exegesis and introduced him to a form of Neoplatonism that was compatible with Christianity. He discovered it to be philosophically informed and, to his sophisticated mind, intellectually more satisfactory than Manichaeism, from which he had already begun to distance himself.226
One of the intriguing stories often told about his conversion, which occurred in the late summer of 386 CE, recounts that he was sitting in a garden in Milan when he heard a child singing: “Take it and read it; take it and read it.” He immediately responded by picking up Paul’s letter to the Romans, and intuitively turned to chapter 13, versus 13-224 Tornau, Christian, "Saint Augustine", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https:// plato.stanford.edu
/archives/sum2020/ entries/ augustine/>. Last accessed, January 28, 2024.
225 Augustine, Confessions, Book V, Section 10.
226 Tornau, "Saint Augustine.”
EARLY CHRISTIANITY’S ENCOUNTER WITH PAGAN PHILOSOPHY 119
14: “Let us live decently as people do in the daytime: no drunken orgies, no promiscuity or licentiousness and no wrangling and jealously. Let your armor be the Lord Jesus Christ; forget about satisfying your bodies with all their cravings.”227 St.
Paul’s letter likely spoke persuasively to his young mind that had suffered much guilt from his excessive sexual passion. In Confessions he prays: “Lord, give me chastity and continence, but not yet!”228 His heart-felt prayer undoubtedly reflects the inner conflict of everyone who has high moral standards yet is repeatedly overcome by their own desires. During this struggle, he also wrote: “I was bound down by this disease of the flesh. Its deadly pleasures were a chain that I dragged along with me, yet I was afraid to be freed from it.”229
Soon after his conversion, Augustine was drawn to the Christian doctrine of Creatio ex nihilo.230 This seemingly miraculous form of creation out of nothing is essentially equivalent to our claim that the universe came into existence through a creative upwelling from within the ground of Being. Before that, there was nothing but pure potential. If, however, the personal God of the Christians is the creator of everything that exists within the universe, then he is also, unfortunately, the creator of evil, including the passions of the flesh.231 Augustine addressed this problem by declaring that God, because he created us in his image, gave us freewill. As such, if we abuse his gracious and bounteous gift by choosing to act in ways that are despicable to God, then we must take responsibility for our choices. Jung addressed this same problem by claiming that both good and evil exist within our collective psyche and only by becoming whole can we free ourselves from possessive entanglements with the unconscious and begin acting in accordance with our inherent freewill. Of course, Jung refused to discuss metaphysical problems and restricted himself to questions involving the inner world that lies below our conscious awareness. We take a similar position by attributing evil to humanity’s instinctual natures, which evolved in accordance with natural evolution, including the survival of the fittest. We avoid Augustine’s issue by presuming that the ground of Being is neither good nor evil but just “is,” as the Presocratic philosopher Parmenides declared.
227 The Jerusalem Bible, Romans 13: 13-14.
228 Augustine, Confessions, 191.
229 Augustine, Confessions: https://www.ctsbooks.org/st-augustines-battle-with-chastity/.
230 Creatio ex nihilo was likely adopted by Christians in reaction to certain Gnostics who claimed the earth was created by an evil demiurge.
231 Theodicy is the concept under which this issue is discussed.
120 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
The most lasting philosophical impact on Augustine’s theology was Neoplatonism, which concerned the Platonic idea of a rational soul. This became a cornerstone of his theology along with many other ideas he took from both Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy. A few of the striking similarities, which we adapted from a list in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,232 include:
• The transcendence and immateriality of God.
• The superiority of the unchangeable over the changeable.
• The ontological hierarchy of God, soul, and body.
• The incorporeality and immortality of the soul.
• The existence of intelligible (Platonic) Forms existing within the mind of God, which model objects in the sensual world.
• The idea that we can only find God by turning inwards.
• The startling realization that the soul’s love of God is a quasi-erotic desire for true beauty.233
• And finally, the notion of evil as privatio boni, the absence of good . 234
This last position always rankled Jung because he was convinced that both good and evil must be considered together, insisting “that it would be extremely illogical to assume that one can state a quality without its opposite.”235
Another important Christian theologian, who was inspired by the tradition of Greek philosophy was Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 CE), who integrated Aristotle into his Summa Theologica. Viewed as a late medieval scholastic philosopher, his thought can be traced back to Aristotle, Augustine, and the early Church. The weight he gives to Aristotle especially attests to the great importance he gave to ancient philosophy for furthering our understanding of Christian theology.236 Richard Tarnas says: 232 Tornau, Christian, "Saint Augustine,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on line.
233 Recall that eros and the erotic are linked to sexuality only at the most material, bodily level, while the transcendent creative principle operates at every level of existence.
234 Ibid. We have reorganized and slightly modified this list.
235 Jung, CW 18, para. 1592.
236 Pasnau, Robert, "Thomas Aquinas", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2023
Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL =
<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ win2023/entries/aquinas/>.
EARLY CHRISTIANITY’S ENCOUNTER WITH PAGAN PHILOSOPHY 121
Influenced by Aristotle’s teleological concept of nature’s relationship to the highest Form and the Neoplatonic understanding of the all-pervasive One, Aquinas declared a new basis for the dignity and potential of man: Within human nature, as divinely posited, lay the potential for actively communicating with the infinite ground of man’s being, God, who was the source of all development toward perfection in nature.237
To communicate with the infinite ground, however, one must awaken to the sacred depth at the core of our own individual being. Only then, can we freely choose to awaken to our full human potential. “Indeed,” Tarnas declares, “only if man were genuinely free could he be capable of freely loving God, of freely realizing his exalted spiritual destiny.”238
Aquinas relied on Aristotle for affirming the dignity and value of the physical order that God created. In defense of Greek philosophy, he often quoted the passage in St.
Paul’s letter to the Romans that stated: “the invisible things of God are clearly seen…
by the things that are made [visible].”239 For only through the created order can we infer the existence of Plato’s eternal Forms. The beauty of nature, for instance, often awakens us to the spiritual potential that otherwise lies hidden within our innermost being. Aquinas believed that the human intellect by itself was incapable of perceiving Plato’s Forms. This is why God had to be incarnated in human form so that his divine nature could be made visible. For both Aristotle and Aquinas, Tarnas says, “form was an active principle—not just a structure but a dynamism toward realization; and the entire creation was dynamically moved by the highest Form, God.”240 Tarnas concludes:
As Aristotle had said, the soul was in a sense all things, because it had been created in such a way as to have the whole order of the universe inscribed within it. But the highest condition of this knowledge Aquinas recognized as the vision of God—not so much the state of philosophic contemplation recognized by Aristotle as the final 237 Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, 181.
238 Ibid., 181.
239 Ibid., 182: Romans 1:20.
240 Ibid., 183.
122 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
end of man, but rather the supreme beatific vision of Christian mysticism.”241
Aquinas, by synthesizing Plato’s Forms with Aristotelean philosophy was able to forge a spiritual vision that seems to us compatible with both Tillich’s theology and Jung’s archetypal psychology. But unfortunately, the Protestant reformation and the Catholic counterreformation brought this sweeping scholastic vision to a close.
As Christianity was emerging from its Palestinian birthplace and spreading across the Mediterranean world, Greek and Roman authors, notably Stoics, were moving toward a cosmic conception of God, foreshadowed in Plato’s works and in Aristotle’s unmoved mover or First Cause. Their conception went far beyond the gods of the myths, already sidelined by Plato and Aristotle, including allegories of pre-Christian times. Even though Christians drew upon such philosophical thinking, they actively suppressed so-called pagan thought and institutions.242 The classical learning thus lost to emerging Christendom was preserved and enriched by Muslim thinkers who translated many works into Arabic and Persian. Eventually, these would be returned to the West, providing a basis for the awakening of the twelfth century. With the slow retreat of Muslim conquerors in the Iberian Peninsula, these works again passed into the Christian world, along with manuscripts from Constantinople, which, at that time, was undergoing a slow death as a Christian city. The tension between Aristotelian-colored and Platonic-tinctured ideas within Christianity vivified late Medieval and Renaissance Europe. And the Reformation blew the Western Church apart with the appearance and sometimes reappearance of theological and philosophical views that challenged Church authority. Despite the Inquisition and political efforts to stop the diversification of Christian religious sensibilities, the spread of so-called heretical beliefs and practices, loosely identified as Christian, persists into the present.243
The Roman Church that arose in Western Europe sought to suppress not only non-orthodox doctrines and beliefs but all forms of theurgy, including personal experiences 241 Ibid., 187-188.
242 For a lively account of just how violent this suppression was, see Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. She does not attack Christianity as a religion but sets out the widespread destruction undertaken by extremists of various kinds. Religious extremism is not the exclusive property of any faith.
243 Miguel Conner, in Voices of Gnosticism, interviews scholars of the history of Christianity, a number of whom attest to the presence of and interest in these “heretical” beliefs today.
EARLY CHRISTIANITY’S ENCOUNTER WITH PAGAN PHILOSOPHY 123
of transcendence, except as found in the mass. That, of course, was only partially successful, and various figures, often called mystics, appeared within its ranks. One can readily think of Dionysius the Areopagite (5th-6th century),244 St. John of the Cross (1542-1591), the Beguines (13th century), and in a more philosophical vein, Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) and Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1328), among many others. The Protestant revolution, initiated by Martin Luther (1483-1546), rejected many elements of the Roman church, including the efficacy of the sacraments and the mystery of the mass, eventually throwing the numinous baby out with the dogmatic bath water.
Increasingly, correct belief rather than participation in a mystery, became the road to salvation. Yet Protestantism, too, gave rise to mystics, perhaps the most famous of which is Jacob Boehme (1575-1624).245
The Protestant revolution created a growing schism between Catholics and Protestants, which increasingly divided Christianity into hostile camps, eventually leading to the Thirty Years’ War that is said to have resulted in the death of a third of the European population. In the aftermath of so much bloodshed, the Enlightenment, which we looked at in the last chapter, was instituted by many of the leading scholars of the time who hoped to end such religious and partisan conflict by replacing blind faith with enlightened reason and legislating the separation of state and church.
Readers may note that, apart from referring to Augustine and Aquinas in our discussion of Christianity, the vast theological and philosophical thought of the Middle Ages has been ignored, partially because of its reliance on an all-knowing God who created the world and everything in it. Medieval thought has its own fascinating history to tell, but the intricacies of medieval philosophy and theology fall outside our concern.
244 Dionysius is often called pseudo-Dionysius because he (or she) wrote several centuries after the Dionysius that is the purported author. Scholars dispute whether this Dionysius was a Christian, assimilating Neoplatonic ideas into Christian theology or a pagan attempting to save such ideas by giving them Christian clothing.
245 Anne Fremantle, best known for her Ancilla to the Presocratic Philosophers, edited The Protestant Mystics which, broadly construing the concept of “mystic,” considers over 50
examples from Luther himself to Walt Whitman and beyond.
PHILOSOPHY OF IDEALISM
For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
William Wordsworth246
… scientism is an objectivism which purports to be mathematical and exclusive. Because of this, it behaves as if the human subject did not exist, or as if this subject were not the subtle mirror indispensable for the phenomenal appearance of the world. It is deliberately ignored that the subject is the guarantor of the logical continuity of the world and, in its intellectual essence, the witness of all objective reality… Is the nature of our mind merely a little foam on the waves of the cosmic ocean, or is there to be found deep within it a timeless witness of reality?
Titus Burckhardt247
Idealism is a philosophy that seeks to affirm the fundamental role that mind or consciousness has in the formation and structure of the universe. It stands in contrast to materialism, which reduces consciousness, and by inference spiritual values, to a mere derivative of material processes. As long as Christianity commanded universal allegiance within the West, there was no need to defend the primacy of mind over 246 William Wordsworth, Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798. This poem has been often anthologized and is also online.
247 Titus Burckhardt, Mirror of the Intellect: Essays on Traditional Science and Sacred Art, 22, 31.
matter. Few questioned that God was the source of both. But the Renaissance and Enlightenment, in challenging traditional religious authority, created a need for a rational defense of spiritual truths consistent with a more liberal interpretation of religion. Amongst the Idealists discussed below, none of them resorted to mechanistic or traditional religious explanations for explaining the mystery of life. Instead, most imagined the world governed, at least in part, by higher principles that imbued life with meaning.
The question of consciousness was, of course, a central concern to all Idealists, but their overly intellectual analysis of it was stifling, thereby contributing to the loss of meaning that we suffer from today. Romanticism, which is closely tied to Idealism, was an attempt to breathe new life into philosophy, but because so many people had lost their religious faith and sense of innocence due to the immense suffering witnessed throughout the world during the twentieth century, materialism and existentialism came to dominate the concerns of philosophy in our time.
Both Idealism and Romanticism were a natural outgrowth of these sentiments.
Seeking to capture their inspirational appeal, Marilyn Nagy said: The inmost longings of the human person, now as in every age, are to be able to believe that the course of life is toward a good end, that one’s life is developing toward its ultimate potential and fulfillment, that love is finally to be gained, and justice achieved, if not in this life then surely in some kind of continuation of existence beyond the barrier of death. To believe in these dictates of the soul rather than in the physical evidence of the perceivable world has been the purport of every metaphysical idealist since Plato.248
If consciousness is conceived as an epiphenomenal byproduct of material processes, as many today believe, including a majority of scientists, then life can have no purpose other than satisfying our material needs, striving for happiness, and, for the morally sensitive, helping relieve suffering. These are worthwhile goals but there is a longing within humanity for something more, a sense of meaning in line with the enduring inspiration that Nagy attributes to idealists in every age.
Richard Rohr (1943- ), in discussing the Franciscan philosopher and theologian John Duns Scotus (1266–1308), says, “God’s ‘first idea’ and priority was to make the Godself both visible and shareable. The word used in the Bible for this idea was Logos, which was taken from Greek philosophy, and which I would translate as the ‘Blueprint’ for reality. The whole of creation— not just Jesus—is the partner in the divine dance…. All 248 Nagy, Philosophical Issues in the Psychology of C. G. Jung, 30-31.
126 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
created beings must, in some way, carry the divine DNA of their Creator.” Such a view, he says, “is the key to mental and spiritual health, as well as to a kind of basic contentment and happiness.”249
Nagy’s and Rohr’s inspirational and beautiful thoughts summarize the recurring themes of Idealism and Romanticism found throughout this book, but before expanding on this theme in the following chapters, we must first review important contributions made by several philosophers classified as Idealists who were most prominent during the scientific revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
These philosophers laid the intellectual foundation for considering mind an important part of nature. Although they have lost favor in our high-tech world, it is important to know where we have been before attempting to articulate a modern view of Idealism consistent with Nagy’s summary of it and Rohr’s inspirational “Blueprint.” Also, since many of the philosophers discussed in this chapter greatly influenced Paul Tillich throughout his career, it is useful to review their ideas before we tackle Tillich’s theology. We start with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716).
Leibniz might best be classified as an ontological Idealist because of his concept of monads, which he set out in his famous Monadology published in 1714. Leibniz was alarmed by the secular drift of philosophy in his day as exemplified by Spinoza’s so-called atheism, and he devoted considerable effort to develop a view of God that was philosophically acceptable. In doing this, he needed to elevate the status of humanity.
In the entire universe, he said, “there is nothing more real or more permanent or more worthy of love than the individual human soul. We belong to the innermost reality of things. The human being is the new God…. Each of us is ‘a small divinity and eminently a universe: God in ectype, and the universe in prototype.’”250
While Baruch Spinoza, whom we examine later, viewed the mind as a mere abstraction derived from his concept of a universal substance, Leibniz affirmed that it belongs to “another world that is prior to and constitutes the material world; that this more real reality consists of indestructible, self-identical unities….” 251 He named these entities ‘monads’ after the Greek word for unity. Leibniz’s monads are simple, whole and indivisible, sentient entities. Living organisms are thus understood as aggregates of independent monads governed by a ruling monad that assures coherent 249 Richard Rohr’s online Daily Meditation for May 20, 2020. Accessed May 21, 2020. He is a Franciscan friar.
250 Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic, 241. Leibniz is here using the term “ectype” to mean the eternal source of our perceived reality.
251 Ibid., 242.
functioning. In this case, governing does not necessarily imply a conscious will. It can just as well be an intelligent organizing principle acting much like software does in today’s computers. Leibniz attributed the functioning of both plants and bodily organs to this organizing principle. His radical position clearly goes against the mechanistic theory that dominates science today, which relies solely on cause and effect to explain the world. It is more in line with Greek philosophy, which viewed our physical world as a reflection of a higher order of reality.
Isaac Newton and Leibniz invented calculus at the same time, independently of each other.252 But while Newton explained the movement of the moon and planets in mechanistic terms, Leibniz used spiritually endowed substances or monads to explain the orderly governing of the heavens. More importantly, monads, for him, represented the underlying principle of life itself. The unity of these spiritually endowed substances is loosely compatible with our claim, developed more fully later, that the psyche and consciousness derive from a unified whole. Psyche, as the foundational basis of consciousness, is thus seen as a continuous field that infuses all living organisms with a creative, ordering life force.
Consistent with his view of monads, Leibniz rejected Descartes’ dualism, and any attempt to explain perception and consciousness mechanically. When arguing against materialism, he imagined what a thinking machine might look like, one large enough that we could enter into it like we would a windmill:
… the visitor of the machine, upon entering it, would observe nothing but the properties of the parts, and the relations they bear to one another. But no explanation of perception, or consciousness, can possibly be deduced from this conglomerate. No matter how complex the inner workings of this machine, nothing about them reveals that what is being observed are the inner workings of a conscious being.
Hence, materialism must be false, for there is no possible way that the purely mechanical principles of materialism can account for the phenomena of consciousness.253
252 Today, we often attribute the invention of calculus to Newton, but it is worth remembering that we use a notation closer to Leibniz’s, not Newton’s calculus. There was considerable conflict between them as to who had invented calculus first and who had plagiarized it. Most modern scholars consider it a virtual tie.
253 Brandon C., "Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/
spr2020/entries/leibniz/>., Accessed March 6, 2019. Leibniz anticipates similar
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Leibniz argued, instead, that consciousness is due to monads, which, as indicated above, have a coherent inner structure that not only makes them indivisible but also ensouled, sentient beings. He believed a myriad of these monads govern various bodily functions, though they are not necessarily conscious in any sense we might recognize. This view sharply contrasts with Democritus’ theory of discrete atoms, which were being widely discussed at the time Leibniz was writing. Accordingly, Leibniz’s monads form a true unity that, at the human level, corresponds to our sense of individual existence and self-awareness. And within the individual human being, they operate freely under the guidance of the self-conscious monad, which today we would refer to as the ego. While all monads form a unity, he argued that an aggregate of matter, like the material in rocks, can never be unified in this way because matter is divisible. Leibniz even went so far as to claim that because it is divisible, matter has no actual or fundamental reality in itself. He was not denying the perceived existence of matter, but instead, claimed matter is derived from monads that are more fundamental than matter itself. From this he concluded that the material world, of which clumps of matter are just a part, is subordinate to an almost infinite number of monads. Since each monad reflects the entire universe, monads are thus God’s infinite number of perspectives on everything in the universe, meaning that God, in having all these different perspectives, created the world with its limitless diversity.254 Leibniz arrived at his theory of monads when examining the complex nature of the human mind, which suggests a unity of being, rather than a granular understanding of reality. From the time of Descartes, philosophers and scientists have been wrestling with this issue.
More recently, David Chalmers, a philosopher who has devoted most of his life to the study of consciousness, published a paper in which he asks: “how do the experiences of fundamental physical entities such as quarks and photons combine to yield the familiar sort of human conscious experience that we know and love?” 255 Chalmers arguments made today by those who claim that exploration of the brain’s structure and organization does not explain consciousness.
254 Berkeley based his idealistic theory on the idea that reality can be reduced to perception alone. Leibniz, in contrast, recognized the physical reality of the universe, separate from perception. When he says that all monads are perceived by God, he means that God is their creator.
255 Chalmers, “The Combination Problem for Panpsychism,”
http://consc.net/papers/combina-tion.pdf. Accessed 11/11/2019: This article examines the combination problem originally posed by Descartes. Chalmers’ detailed discussion includes the question of how microexperiences come together to form a unified consciousness and how simple qualities and structural properties of quarks and gluons combine to produce the much more complex and rich experiences that we have.
notes that this issue was also discussed by William James (1842-1910) in Principles of Psychology (1895). As long as we presume the universe consists of discrete entities separate from each other, the problem that Leibniz first wrestled with remains formidable.
Like so many others, Leibniz rejected Descartes’ dualism because it cannot explain the causal relationship between mind and matter.256 How does mental stuff connect with and influence physical stuff, and vice versa? If the two are utterly distinct, then how are they brought together in the human being (and in other species) since they share no fundamental properties? While many people had the same concern, Leibniz’s solution avoids Descartes’ dualism since all monads within the organism are of the same substance. At the same time, perhaps in deference to Descartes’ belief that extension is solely a property of matter and not a feature of mental substance, Leibniz denied spatial extension to monads.257 Without spatial extension, monads would be invisible just as the soul is thought invisible by many theologians who deny it extension.
In short, Leibniz stands in a special position with respect to the history of views concerning thought and its relationship to matter. He rejects the materialist position that thought and consciousness can be captured by purely mechanical principles. But he also rejects the dualist position that the universe must therefore be bifurcated into two different kinds of substance, thinking substance, and material substance. Rather, it is his view that the world consists solely of one type of substance, though there are infinitely many substances of that type. These substances are partless, unextended entities, some of which are endowed with thought and consciousness, and others of which form the phenomenality of the corporeal world. The sum of these views secures Leibniz a distinctive position in the history of the philosophy of mind.258
256 Contemporary thinkers who reject the views that mind has an independent existence from matter or that matter is a product of mind (e.g., Berkeley’s esse est percipi) also reject Descartes’ unsatisfying dualism.
257 The idea that entities exist without extension is problematic for us today because we understand the world exclusively in terms of space and time. But there may well be a reality outside of space and time that has no extension.
258 Kulstad, Mark and Carlin, Laurence, "Leibniz's Philosophy of Mind," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
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Leibniz is placed with the rationalists (as were Descartes and Spinoza) but our interest in him is more centered on his idealist stance and his understanding of consciousness. This perspective is in line with many of the Idealists that we review in this chapter starting with the seventeenth century philosopher Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677) who thought consciousness depends on a unified indivisible substance that pervades the entire universe.
Matthew Stewart in The Courtier and the Heretic 259 portrays Spinoza as a gifted thinker who was surprisingly modern in his understanding of God. For him, God is not a supreme being who rules over the world and judges humanity. Rather, God is the essential substance of reality from which all things have their being. Spinoza considered this universal substance primary since it cannot be “reduced to the attribute of some other substance.” According to him, all attributes of reality that we observe, like mind and matter, belong to it. Thus, “God alone is substance, or a being subsisting through itself….”260 He indifferently called this substance God or Nature, since for him the two are the same.261 This view in which God and Nature are indistinguishably and absolutely one, makes God immanent and Nature transcendent. In our opinion, this formulation of Being is far more complete than Leibniz’s monads, which are seldom seriously considered in philosophy today.
Spinoza was driven to view God in a way surprisingly close to Tillich’s by rejecting the authority of priest, rabbi, and scripture, relying solely on reason to guide his understanding. Although he rejected the traditional view of God as a supreme being, Spinoza was not an atheist in the tradition of someone like Richard Dawkins, who argues that the mind is just an epiphenomenon of material processes. Calling it an epiphenomenon does more to sidestep the issue than it does to grapple with the mysterious nature of consciousness,262 a mystery which has vexed philosophers from
<https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/win2020/entries/leibniz-mind/>. Accessed 1/5/2021.
259 Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World.
260 Ibid., 159.
261 The search in physics for a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) or theory of everything seems to eliminate God, yet it too aspires to a fundamentally monistic view of all existence.
262 Emergence, the appearance of new properties and laws of organization arising from complex properties, cannot be predicted from those properties. For example, the appearance of life from inert chemicals is a case of emergence. Yet we do not dismiss living things as “epiphenomena” because they emerge from complex material
the time of ancient Greece to the present. Spinoza, like Descartes, understood that both mind and matter are fundamental characteristics of reality. But unlike Descartes, he considered both to derive from his concept of a universal substance.
As already noted, for philosophy to avoid the pitfalls of Descartes’ two distinct substances, it must resolve the apparent difference between mind and matter without denying their common origin. Spinoza accomplished this, as already indicated, by arguing that even though appearing radically different, mind and matter partake of the same fundamental substance to which everything in the universe owes its existence, the apparent difference being a consequence of perception. As we observe things outside ourselves, he claimed, they appear to have material attributes occupying space, or as Descartes described it, they have extension while thoughts do not. What this means is that without extension they do not exist in the spacetime dimension as matter does, but only in the mind. Spinoza resolved this issue by making both thought and extension attributes of his singular substance. Spinoza held that humans partake of these two attributes of God/Nature, but God’s attributes are infinite and, except for these two, beyond human experience and comprehension. Spinoza’s realization that mind and body derive from something more basic than either one of them is still valid today, assuming that all of reality can be reduced to something fundamental, like Being, from which, we argue, the physical universe first came into existence.263
Reframing Spinoza’s argument slightly, we say that Mind is a fundamental property of the universe, distinct from matter, energy, and spacetime as we perceive them, but at the most fundamental level of reality, this apparent difference is resolved. Another way of saying it is that spacetime, matter, energy, and Mind are all fundamental attributes of the unitive whole we call Being, the ground of all existence.264 Indeed, this is a central thesis of this book. Whether Mind is part of the physical universe or transcendent to it, we argue that it is the ground of individual consciousness. In either case, Mind, like thoughts, would have no spacetime extension, and it thereby remains invisible. The same can be said regarding the theoretic existence of Being itself. Note interactions. Currently, science is wrestling with how to understand emergent processes, given its (increasingly disputed) commitment to a view that only matter is real. Emergence, as a concept in science, remains vague without the precision demanded by quantum physics.
263 God’s infinite attributes are called infinite modes by Spinoza. Their instantiation as objects are finite modes. Just what Spinoza meant by these terms is debated.
264 Though Spinoza held that God or Nature has infinite attributes, we find no indubitable basis on which to be comfortable with that view, so we restrict ourselves to Mind, matter, energy and spacetime, the four we know. There may, of course, be many more.
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that “Mind” as used here is capitalized to differentiate its use as the universal source of consciousness from its normal subjective meaning.
Spinoza rejected the Christian belief in the immortality of the individual soul, because, as he reasoned, if mind and matter are fundamentally the same, then the soul cannot survive the death of the body. Nonetheless, the purpose of philosophy, for him, was to achieve, as Steward describes it, a “kind of blessedness or salvation.”265 What type of blessedness or salvation could Spinoza expect to gain from a philosophy that seems to deny the immortality of the soul? Stewart answers this question saying, “Like Socrates, Spinoza avers that blessedness comes only from a certain kind of knowledge—
specifically, the ‘knowledge of the union that the mind has with the whole of Nature.’”266 The same can be said of Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophy.
Spinoza was excommunicated by his synagogue when he first began to express his views openly. Without his inner sense of blessedness, it is doubtful whether Spinoza would have taken such a radical step.267 But early in his life, Stewart explains, he
“resolved at last to find out whether there was anything which would be the true good, which would affect the mind singularly, to the exclusion of all else: whether there was something which, once found and acquired, would give me continuous, supreme, and everlasting happiness.”268 For Spinoza, love of God or Nature is a result of living a life in pursuit of wisdom, a life of contemplation, not that distinct from traditional, contemplative practices; except the pursuit, as Spinoza practiced it, was the intellectual love of God ( amor intellectualis dei). It is through this type of love, he believed, that blessedness and salvation are attained.269 Spinoza made clear that the intellectual contemplation of God is not to be confused with the ordinary type of thinking used to analyze experience and solve problems. It is, instead, a higher form of thought, which 265 Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic, 57.
266 Ibid., 57. One might think here of the Hindu view that the individual personality is not immortal but that the spirit that gives one life and is the source of one’s real nature is immortal. It is ultimately one with the spirit of all existence. This is found in the famous formula “Atman is Brahman,” that is, what is real in oneself is identical with what is real in the universe. Compared to this, all else is illusion, transient and not immortal.
267 Spinoza’s equivalence of God and Nature, along with his rejection of immortality and much else was more than his synagogue could accept. It declared him an atheist and excommunicated him.
268 Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic, 55: Stewart is here quoting from Spinoza’s The Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, which he thinks was written a year or two after Spinoza’s excommunication.
269 Ibid., 177.
Spinoza called “intellect,” that makes possible the love of God. The intellect, in contrast to ordinary thinking, is the eternal part of the mind by “which we grasp the eternal truth of philosophy.” It is a form of immortality that results from the “union of mind with ideas that are themselves timeless.”270
Spinoza’s description of intellect is reminiscent of Plato’s ideal Forms, Jung’s archetypes, and the experience of numinosity. Plato’s allegory of the cave portrays Truth as the radiant light of the sun in contrast to the shadowy world to which humanity has become accustomed. Plato distinguished reasoning, which is discursive and leads to knowledge, from noesis, a kind of intuition (but hardly mere hunches) leading to direct apprehension of universal truths. Similarly, Thomas Aquinas argued that “there is a region where human beings have access to the infinite, not in the prideful sense of claiming the divine prerogatives, but in the humble sense of feeling the unbounded yearnings for love and truth.”271
Although Spinoza lived before Kant, his “one substance” may have partially overcome Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena because the material world and consciousness derive from the same source, which can only be known through “intellect.” Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) also attempted to overcome this limitation, imposed by Kant, arguing that consciousness is not grounded in something more fundamental ( numina) but stands on its own. As a result, there is no distinction between what can be known about reality and what ultimately exists because consciousness is the beginning of all existence, including the material world. It might be difficult to plumb the depths of consciousness to derive ultimate reality, he admitted, but there is no theoretical limitation, like Kant’s, to prevent gaining such knowledge. Fichte therefore believed Kant’s theoretical distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal is untenable. This is an unprovable claim, but as Aristotle noted over two millennia ago, all lines of logic and reasoning must ultimately begin with some claim, itself unjustified by logic and reasoning, though one may give support for making it.272 We would add that instead of consciousness, Mind is a better fit for Fichte’s philosophy. After all, unlike consciousness, Mind, at least in the way we define it, has existed as part of the unified ground of reality since the beginning of the universe. If the above arguments hold true, it seems that both Spinoza’s “intellect” and 270 Ibid., 177. Unlike Spinoza’s instantiated mind and matter, Leibniz’s monads are immortal.
271 Johnson, Body, Spirit and Democracy, 63.
272 Recall that all mathematical systems begin with some axioms or postulates which, however obvious they seem to be, are not proven in their systems.
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the ultimate nature of consciousness as Fichte described it, must provide a priori insight into reality, much like Kant’s claim that space and time depend on the structure of the human mind.
We now turn to Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854), who was held in high esteem by Paul Tillich. Tillich was so enthralled with Schelling that he wrote two dissertations on him. The first dissertation was for the degree of Licentiate of Theology (1909), which qualified him to teach theology at the university level.273 The other was for a doctorate in philosophy (1910). Ronald Stone in Politics and Faith: Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich at Union Seminary in New York wrote that Schelling was the most important thinker for Tillich, though he was also influenced by Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. Tillich considered himself both an existentialist and an essentialist, both views deriving, in part, from Schelling. Schelling’s essentialism was attractive to Tillich because it appeals to the higher aspirations of humanity while existentialism, especially as it was articulated by writers like Sartre and Camus, “announced the revolt of the modern human against the illusions of idealism and the self-satisfied view of human nature expressed in the complacency known before World War I by the middle class.”274 For Tillich, this revolt was also reflected in the works of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Tillich’s Systematic Theology thus embraces both existentialist and essentialist positions.
Stone lists a number of Tillich’s positions that can be attributed to Schelling, amongst which are: 1) the finite reflects and embraces the infinite; 2) the depths of society and humanity reach into the demonic as well as the Divine; 3) theology depends on philosophy; 4) the unconscious must be considered a factor in both; and lastly, 5) existentialism and essentialism need each other.275 Schelling was impressed with Fichte’s view that consciousness is not dependent on anything more basic than itself.
But in addition, he argued, as Jung did, that reality consisted of a unity of opposites in which the structure of Nature and the structure of individual minds are the same.
Further, he held that tracing both mind and matter to their roots showed that they must be one, though exactly how this tracing is to be done is not clear. Individual consciousness arises from what Schelling described as an eternal act of cognition, which does not require a being to sustain it. Being eternal means that it has no beginning and so no creator or sustainer. It always just is. Schelling’s eternal act of cognition is similar to the idea of an eternal mind operating throughout reality. As to 273 Wilhelm and Marion Pauck, Paul Tillich: His Life and Thought, 34-35.
274 Ronald H. Stone, Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich at Union Seminary in New York, 15-16.
275 Ibid., 16-17.
how to categorize Schelling’s philosophy, he personally considered it idealistic and monistic.276
As we can see, Idealism arose primarily in Germany. Most of these Idealists believed that mind is an ordering principle in Nature. They also thought that physical reality as perceived by the senses is an illusion. Recall the original 1999 film The Matrix, in which Morpheus helps Neo discover that the world in which he lives is absolutely nothing like reality. Without going so far as to claim that our experience is nothing more than virtual reality, Idealism does hold that our world is not what it seems to be, and that Mind is more fundamental than what is discoverable through empirical observation which always depends on the senses.
In Germany, the high point of Idealism is associated with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), who, along with Fichte and Schelling, rejected the dichotomy between what we can know and what is, which led him to also reject Kant’s things-in-themselves.277 Nor could he accept any type of reductionism that attempted to reduce the mental to the physical (as found in the views of many 20th twentieth century neuroscientists), nor the distinction between what is in the mind and what is in the world outside the mind (Locke). For Hegel, as with Fichte and Schelling, the distinction between thinking and being is a fundamental error, along with any distinction between mind and what is not mind. What is real, Hegel claimed, are concepts which are something like seeds that contain the promise of a mature plant. Everything in nature is a realized concept, just as a mature plant is a realized seed. And all concepts are instantiations of an ultimate Concept that seeks to realize itself through all its manifestations.
Jung was highly critical of nineteenth century philosophers, especially of Hegel, for attempting to understand the nature of God in exclusively rational terms and considered Hegel’s writing arrogant and laborious.278 But there are some interesting similarities between them. In his book Individuation and the Absolute,279 Sean Kelly 276 Schelling’s views changed over time and are nuanced. Much fascinating detail is left out of this very general account.
277 Kant’s “things-in-themselves” were not necessarily material but it is impossible to say anything else about them either.
278 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 79.
279 Kelly, Individuation and the Absolute: Hegel, Jung, and the Path Toward Wholeness. This is a different Sean Kelly than the one that coauthored the book All Things Shining with Hubert Dreyfus, which we discussed earlier. He is a professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies.
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introduces the term “complex holism,” to provide a common framework for mediating between these two great minds. In Hegel’s Science of Logic, Kelly says, the Absolute is conceived as pure potential, while the Concept is the cognitive form or dialectical process through which the Absolute, as pure potential, becomes manifest within nature, the individual, and society. “The Logic itself,” he explains, “consists in a movement of dialectically related categories, arranged in order of conceptual complexity and concreteness. These categories are meant to describe the entire range of cognitive experience; and more than this, they are also to be understood as the very categories of being.”280 Applying the concept to Jung’s psychology, the term “complex holism” describes the dialectical relationship between opposites within the psyche, such as the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious, the individual ego and the Self, and between spirit and instinct. What Jung and Hegel have in common is an understanding that there is a progressive movement, based on a dialectical tension of opposites, which is directed toward either the manifestation of universal self-awareness in the case of Hegel or wholeness in the case of Jung.
Jung understood that “Archetypes and instincts are the most polar opposites imaginable, as can easily be seen when one compares a man who is ruled by his instinctual drives with a man who is seized by the spirit.”281 The numinous nature of the archetype has a transcendental quality, suggesting a higher state of being to which all religions aspire while instincts are more like compulsions.282 Late in his career, Jung began to consider archetypes transcendent entities, manifest in the brain but also existing beyond time and space, rather like Plato’s Forms. In the language of Hegel’s Logic, it is the dialectal tension between our natural state and the transcendent state that leads to transformation. In Answer to Job, Jung envisions that these diametrically opposed aspects of human nature will, sometime in the future, be brought together in a sacred marriage, the hieros gamos, resulting in a world-wide transformation of consciousness.
As noted earlier, Hegel’s radical departure from previous thinking283 is rooted in his fundamental conviction that thinking and matter are ontologically one. In his view, 280 Ibid., 16: Hegel, Science of Logic, Werke 5 and 6, 253.
281 Jung, “On the Nature of the Psyche,” CW 8: 406.
282 It was more often during his early years that Jung conflated the physical structure of instincts with that of archetypes. Later in his career, he considered archetypes and the collective unconscious as part of a transcendent reality.
283 One can reasonably argue that Hegel’s “radical departure” nonetheless owes much to what had gone before in the German Idealists already briefly discussed.
objects are not independent of thoughts and thoughts are not independent of objects.
The two emerge out of pure potential as a unity, so Hegel spoke of thought-things or thing-thoughts, thus emphasizing their single nature. Jung had similar notions regarding the existence of a single source for archetypes, which he conceived as having a transcendental background, which he called the unus mundus. This “transcendental psychophysical background.” he says, “corresponds to a ‘potential world,’ in so far as all those conditions which determine the form of empirical phenomena are inherent in it [the potential world].”284 We feel Jung’s position regarding a single source is much like Hegel’s theory of the Absolute, which also corresponds nicely with our definition of Being, the potential from which the universe had its beginning. Being, as we have described it throughout the book, is another name for God. It is the God of the philosophers, both ancient and modern. In contrast, the God of Abraham is a personified Being with attributes much like humans; after all, He created us in His image. Our description of Being is more like Hegel’s Absolute in that it is pure potential, the source of the Cosmos we inhabit. As such, it is, as Parmenides maintained, eternal, unknowable, and unchanging, thus it can only be inferred from what has been actualized. Our analysis of Being is also consistent with Jung’s brief forays into metaphysics. “The common background of microphysics and depth-psychology,” Jung said, “is as much physical as psychic and therefore neither, but rather a third thing, a neutral nature which can at most be grasped in hints since in essence it is transcendental.”285 While the physical world is at least partially deterministic, the synchronistic nature of the archetype exerts an indirect influence on it, which we feel acts much like Hegel’s structured potential.
In summarizing the contributions of Shelling, Fichte, and Hegel, Richard Tarnas, in his book Passion of the Western Mind, says that their ideas, an outgrowth of the Romantic Movement, “suggested that the cognitive categories of the human mind were in some sense the ontological categories of the universe—i.e., that human knowledge did not point to a divine reality but was itself that reality—and on that basis constructed a metaphysical system with a universal Mind revealing itself through man.”286
Such a view is reflected in the very title of Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea.287 Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was an atheist and saw the driving force in 284 Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14: para. 769. The phrase in brackets is ours.
285 Ibid., para. 768.
286 Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that have Shaped our World View, 351.
287 Also, and perhaps better, translated as The World as Will and Representation.
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existence as blind will, pervasive in nature and in the human being. He rejected Kant’s distinction between perceptions and things-in-themselves, arguing that there is nothing outside the teleological drive of will and its representations in consciousness.
Further, because our sensations give us the impression of an external world, we fail to see that all there is besides “will” are the ideas or representations that our senses compel in us.288 As an ontological idealist, he argued, like Kant did, that our sense of space and time, and our recognition of causality are all structured by consciousness.289
Although he arrived at his thinking early in his career, he found various ideas in Asian philosophy such as the Upanishads quite compatible and supportive of his views.
Modern scholars find this connection problematic because they think that he distorted Asian concepts.
Jeffrey Kripal argues, however, that Schopenhauer, through a mystical experience, intuitively grasped the fundamental split between Being and the ordinary world in which we perceive ourselves living.
Drawing deeply on the earlier work of Immanuel Kant and his insistence that space, time, and causality are functions of human knowing and are not features of reality itself, Schopenhauer could write: ‘There are two essential, necessary and inseparable halves to the world as representation…. The first is the object, whose form is space and time, and thus multiplicity. The other half, however, is the subject, which does not lie in ether [either] space or time because it is present complete and undivided in each representing being.’ 290
The epistemological split that Kripal refers to above, constitutes, for him, the most basic meaning of what he describes as the “Human as Two.” We interpret this to mean that each person is embedded in the ground of Being, and as such is split between the world of the senses and the numinous and eternal ground from which the world came into existence.
If Kripal’s assessment is right, Schopenhauer and mystics like him may have been granted insight into the eternal ground from which their visionary experiences arise.
288 It is tempting to think that Schopenhauer has replaced Berkeley’s God with his abstract will, the ultimate source of everything in the world.
289 Schopenhauer thought that he had solved Hume’s problems with causality by locating it in the functioning of the mind.
290 Kripal, The Superhumanities, 120. Kripal’s quote taken from Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, vol 1, 26.
Though mystics from all religious traditions report having achieved oneness with God, they nonetheless retain enough conscious awareness to catch a glimpse of the creative center from which the universe came into existence. If they truly became one with God, it would seem, at least to us, that their consciousness would be completely extinguished because there would be nothing personal left by which to experience anything. In Jung’s psychology this center is the Self, existing as a unitive totality at the core of every individual’s life. Thus, according to him, the goal is not to remain lost in mystical reverie, but to return from this mystical voyage with an expanded sense of consciousness and a renewed and more spiritual perspective on life.
Jung, who was favorably inclined toward Schopenhauer’s philosophy, may have also liked him because he found Schopenhauer’s ideas compatible with his own discovery of synchronicity and the teleological principle governing not only the process of individuation but also the course of history. Joseph Campbell provides a basis for this assessment when commenting on Schopenhauer’s essay “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual.” Campbell said:
… when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you.
And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else.291
What we have been calling Mind is very much present in German Idealism, though its role varies with each philosophy. Kant’s epistemology, which separates what can be known (phenomenon) from what cannot be known (the noumenon or thing-in-itself) is still widely accepted in philosophy and throughout scientific circles today, while Hegel, along with most of the other idealists have been largely banished to the 291 Campbell, The Power of Myth, 229.
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philosophical wilderness. We feel, however, that aspects of their philosophy must be resuscitated if we are to ever begin grappling with the mysterious nature of Being. This is especially true of Hegel’s idea that thought and being can no longer be separated in any way, since minds are as much instantiations of the Absolute as material objects are.
As we will see in the next chapter, Idealism suffused Romantic sensibilities, even though Romantic philosophers were not as interested in metaphysics as the Idealists were.
PHILOSOPHY OF ROMANTICISM
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
William Wordsworth292
Good-bye my Fancy!
Farewell dear Mate, dear love!
I’m going away, I know not where,
Or to what fortune, or whether I may ever see you again, So Good-bye my Fancy.
Walt Whitman293
The English Romantics who mostly expressed their ideas in literature, art, and poetry were not satisfied with any of the Idealists just discussed. They held that while the idealist philosopher’s focus was on mental phenomena, their rationalistic approach to the world, including aesthetic and political concerns, utterly failed to account for the affective nature of human beings. Without considering emotions and deep feelings, and by ignoring imagination and intuition, they felt we are left with a soulless philosophy that does not offer an adequate account of human existence and its rich and diverse experience. The effort to be utterly and narrowly rational also seems to leave little room for wonder and any sense of the sacred. Although Idealism supports our concept of Being, we have more in common with the Romantics. But nonetheless, we feel that mystery will always surround and obscure our best attempts at understanding the ultimate nature of reality.
292 William Wordsworth, Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, available at poets.org.
293 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass.
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Though they quarreled with it, the Romantic Movement remained closely associated with Idealism.294 Both considered mind or consciousness fundamental to reality, claiming that what we can know of reality is determined by the nature or structure of the human mind. This is certainly true of Josiah Royce (1855-1916), Francis Herbert Bradley (1846-1924), and John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart (1866-1925), all of whom emphasized the importance of feeling when teaching Idealism in America and Great Britain from the second half of the nineteenth century into the first decades of the twentieth.295
Royce, an American, argued that the Absolute is both a being and the ground of all existence, which contains the whole past, sustains the present, and anticipates the future. Since each self is a fragment of it, he believed the Absolute can thus be known to some degree. We note, however, as Parmenides wisely observed, little can be known about Being except that it is. When considering the Absolute as the ultimate source of consciousness as well as our individual existence and the source from which love flows, we encounter a mystery which inspires personal devotion quite beyond rational dispute.
Bradley and McTaggart were influential throughout England before the outbreak of World War I. Bradley attempted to bring the whole of mind—thought, feeling, and volition—into his “spiritual” concept of reality, holding that there is an unchanging Absolute, though not a being like Royce conceived it. We might liken Bradley’s Absolute to our concept of Being and Parmenides’ One, eternal and unchanging, existing without contradiction. Since Bradley envisioned the evolving universe to be reflective of the Absolute, it logically follows that the world is fundamentally spiritual, not material and that existence is endowed with the potential for love and beauty.
There has been a recent resurgence of interest in McTaggart because he, like Bradley, rejected the materialism (or, better, physicalism) of the sciences and instead thought reality is spiritual, constituted of individual selves connected by the relation of love.
294 An excellent longer account of Idealism can be found in Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann, "Idealism," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition).
Accessed 08/10/2018.
295 Bradley clearly distinguished between ontological and epistemological idealism (what is and what we can know). Ontological idealism necessarily implies epistemological idealism, but epistemological realism does not necessarily imply ontological realism, for what we can know does not entail any restrictions on what is. Bradley hesitates on just which kind of idealist he is, but McTaggart declares himself to be an ontological idealist.
Rather curiously, he also thought of himself as an empirical realist, in a sense denying the implication that ontology determines epistemology.
He also believed that all souls are eternal, though not created by some God or superior being. Like Hegel, he thought that there is an absolute idea which underpins reality, and which can be known only through a priori thought. He casts this thinking in terms of the unreality of time (disharmony or contradiction occurs only in time), a view much maligned at the time he was writing yet found today in some quantum theories.296
Philosophers had long recognized that there is something behind conscious awareness, which led to positing the existence of the subconscious by Freud. His major contribution was therefore not the discovery of the subconscious, which had already been posited by others, but the recognition that much of what we do and think is strongly influenced by its hidden layers. Jung preferred using the more neutral term
“unconscious,” to which he gave a broader and more spiritual meaning that was closer to the Romantic Movement.
Although Romantic thinkers and artists felt that they were accessing something transcendent or deeply authentic, they did not have psychological concepts like those of Freud and Jung to explain their insights.297 Instead, they were guided by an amorphous upsurge of feeling and thought that greatly influenced poetry, literature, and art from the latter half of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century.
Although the Romantic Movement was most pronounced in letters and the arts, it also influenced philosophy and science regarding the nature of the mind. Its emphasis on feeling and the imagination arose in reaction to the excesses of the Enlightenment with its focus on rational, discursive thinking and the emerging industrialization that threatened to turn human beings into cogs in an impersonal machine, best exemplified by the mechanistic assembly line. One might think of Charlie Chaplin in the film Modern Times in this regard. But the horrendous Great War shattered such philosophical and religious views. The war was so disastrous that many people lost their ability to cope in postwar life. The very idea that meaning and purpose existed behind such devastation seemed preposterous.
296 This is the block universe mentioned before, in which the whole of existence, that is, the universe, exists as a timeless block, and time is our psychological experience of passing through it, each moment being a “slice” of the block, rather like a slice of a loaf of bread.
Time is thus an illusion of experience, not part of the universe itself. McTaggart’s view that disharmony occurs only in time is not part of the block universe theory, of course.
297 Coleridge, especially, was interested in the burgeoning science of his day and wrote insightful philosophical essays.
144 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
The earliest of the Romantics was the unique visionary William Blake (1757-1827).
He knew the English translation of Plato’s dialogues by his contemporary, Thomas Taylor, who turned to the old Greek gods in Neoplatonic form. Blake’s own visionary experience revealed to him an invisible world behind the world accessible to the senses, and though he saw himself as a Christian, he did not think that institutional Christianity was necessary for having a deep sense of the sacred. Though perhaps best known for his The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which brings together the opposites that concerned Jung, he clearly experienced what Rudolf Otto was later to call the mysterium tremendum et fascinans as shown in his Illustrations of the Book of Job and clearly expressed in his poetry.298 Such deeply felt experience of the numinous contrasts starkly with the rational approach of German idealism. Although Blake has been called the father of English Romanticism, the Romantics kept almost as much distance from him as they did from the German Idealists.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850), who we look at next, had a great reverence for nature, believing that it embodied a divine spirit through which the highest level of moral perfection can be attained, and the secrets of life revealed. His nature-based philosophy, which resembles a poetic version of mystical pantheism, can be clearly discerned in much of his poetry. Throughout his captivating verse Wordsworth elegantly describes how he sees, hears, and feels the natural surroundings through which he had often wandered as a youth while meditating on the natural beauty that spread out before him wherever he looked. During these youthful meanderings in the English countryside, he seems to have been intimately in touch with the living psychic foundation of life, just as were many contemporary psychics and writers like Emerson and Thoreau. And like Paul Tillich, Wordsworth was deeply attracted to the rhythms of the sea.
Wordsworth’s mystical philosophy also assured him that even though we are all mortal and cannot escape death, all living things are eternally part of nature, and after a living organism disappears into the vastness of eternity, there is rebirth and the continuation of life in new forms. Recall Olney’s concept of the rhizome, which forever births new life. We feel that Wordsworth’s view of the living world can also be loosely compared to the psyche, which we imagine to be much like a vibrant membrane that surrounds all living organisms, subtly guiding their actions. .
298 In engraving number eleven, the text is from Job 7:14: “With Dreams upon my bed thou scarest and affrightest me with Visions.” The authors thank Leo Zonneveld for an email letter drawing attention to Blake and especially this engraving, which, Zonneveld points out, is precisely in the middle of the illustrations.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), the most philosophical of the prominent British Romantics, held that intuition and imagination were alone sufficient to penetrate, at least to a degree, the mystery of existence. He was one of the key figures in the Romantic Movement and made significant contributions to both literature and philosophical thought. Coleridge's philosophy is characterized by a combination of Idealism, laced with religious and metaphysical concepts, and a passionate desire to explore the nature of the human mind. Much of his poetry and philosophy was based on the power of imagination and the creative spirit, which he believed could connect individuals with higher truths that reveal the inner nature of reality.
For Coleridge, as for many of his romantic contemporaries, the scientific claim that matter was sufficient to explain consciousness was unacceptable. He thereby argued for a transcendent source for it. Only by addressing the true source of consciousness did he feel that we could claim a true science of nature.299 According to Richard Tarnas, the romantic spirit of writers like Coleridge, was “fueled by a newly intense sense of self-awareness and a focus on the complex nature of the human self … unconstrained by the limits of the scientific perspective.” Further, he says: To explore the mysteries of interiority, of moods and motives, love and desire, fear and angst, inner conflicts and contradictions, memories and dreams, to experience extreme and incommunicable states of consciousness, to be inwardly grasped in epiphanic ecstasy, to plumb the depths of the human soul, to bring the unconscious into consciousness, to know the infinite—such were the imperatives of Romantic introspection.300
Like all who are inspired by the Romantic spirit, Coleridge’s philosophy emphasized the unity and harmony within both nature and human society. He believed that all elements of the natural world were interconnected and interdependent, and he saw this interconnectedness as reflective of a divine order. He also held that individuals should strive for moral and social harmony, emphasizing the significance of cooperation and community.
Unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge followed the latest scientific theories and developments in academic journals, which he used to show how moral and natural philosophy might be reconciled. Beyond these theoretical considerations, Coleridge found in Christianity a language through which the principle of self-consciousness was 299 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleridge%27s_theory_of_life. Originally taken from Barfield, What Coleridge Thought, 24.
300 Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, 368.
146 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
perfectly expressed. His thoughts on aesthetics and the imagination, moral and natural philosophy, faith and reason, and the importance of the “will” for attaining true knowledge continue to influence literary and philosophical discussions to this day.
Coleridge’s sensibility affected many American thinkers, especially Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), who developed the concept of the Over-Soul, a kind of universal mind that is reflected in varying degrees in human beings. He was influenced by some Eastern ideas such as found in the Bhagavad Gita, informed by German “higher criticism” of the Bible, inspired by William Wordworth’s closeness to nature, and by Coleridge’s belief that a kind of life-force permeated all nature including the mind.
Emerson fashioned an intuitive idealism that avoided German philosophical wrangling and the occasionally superficial sensibilities of the Romantics.
Emerson found within himself a vision of self and the world that contained universal laws or principles that could be expressed in many ways, but which were accessible only through self-discipline and a form of deep reflection he called Reason. This Reason is not the discursive reasoning found in logic and German Idealism, for it transcends intellectual rigor, being more like Plato’s noesis and Spinoza’s intellectual love of God , an intuitive grasp of ultimate reality. Emerson was quite aware of Plato’s concept of the Forms, and he, like Plato, saw the Good as the ruling principle suffusing all that exists. And like the Neo-Platonists, he acknowledged that noetic awareness requires discipline to develop.
Throughout his life, Emerson eschewed systematic philosophical structures because they excluded the higher, more spiritual truth revealed through intuition. Knowledge derived from intellect alone, he felt, too easily becomes dogma, utterly missing the inner promptings of what he freely called the individual soul: those often all too brief visions of the deeper reality of things. Instead, these intuitive revelations should be considered symbolic in that they present themselves to the individual in ways the individual with his or her social, cultural, and intellectual understanding could apprehend. Emerson found the essay form the best way of stirring the imagination, thus avoiding the need for a rigorous, overarching system. His reflective mode of expression did have a certain rigor, though, in that it focused on how and for what purpose we live. Emerson is well known for an essay he wrote in 1841 entitled “Self-Reliance.” In the essay, he emphasized reliance on one’s innermost awareness, and the self-discipline necessary to discard distracting pressures of convention and trivial thoughts and instead, be open to inner promptings.
Emerson’s emphasis on the individual is not some crude individualism that seeks to disengage from and ignore others. Rather, he sought to strip away the “habitual conditions, vices, and temptations” that seem to link humans together but in fact builds
walls between them. Instead, he found the unity he desired in the concept of the Over-Soul, where individuals are intimately connected through the awareness of the heart and not just the mind. Perspectives will vary with everyone, but the transcendent unity of the Over-Soul, he believed, is found in the mutual interdependence of every aspect of the cosmos from social arrangements to environment and climate. He understood that the structure of German idealist philosophy, which sought to set out the rigid architecture of reality fails to account for the kaleidoscopic human condition and the wisdom of the heart. Hence Emerson’s essays explore the diverse geography of the human condition without attempting to formulate a single system of thought. The universal laws of Being, he believed, are necessarily the same for all, but how they appear to the inner Reason will vary with the person. Richard Geldard beautifully summed up these universal laws and the wisdom of Emerson’s philosophy when he wrote:
. . . Emerson undertook this high calling of visitation to the prisons of the mind and heart in which we ever find ourselves. He saw human beings confined through error, laziness, fear, poor instruction, blind obedience, to all sorts of habitual conditions, vices, and temptations. At the same time, we long for freedom, looking out from the darkness to glimmers of daylight where the sky and green hills promise freedom.301
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was an American philosopher and poet whose major work, Walden, conceives philosophy as a way of life, exemplified by the two years he lived a relatively spartan life on Walden Pond. Although Thoreau is often considered a transcendentalist, his philosophy differs radically from that of Emerson.
While Emerson believed in an Over-Soul, which imparts meaning to life, Thoreau would argue that the beauty and the spiritual significance of nature is by itself sufficient, though we must pause long enough from the harried bustle of life to take notice and appreciate it. There is no need, he argued, to postulate a higher order of existence. “When we perceive sights, sounds, and textures, we are not standing as disembodied consciousness apart from a world of inanimate mechanisms; rather, we are sentient beings immersed in the sensory world….”302 He discovered that life’s richest moments naturally emerge from the splendor of nature whenever we cease imposing our own values upon it.
301 Geldard, The Esoteric Emerson, 26.
302 Furtak, Rick Anthony, "Henry David Thoreau", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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Instead, we must wait quietly for nature to reveal its inner beauty to us. “One of the things we then discover is that we are involved in a pluralistic universe, containing many different points of view other than our own.”303 Even those aspects of nature that we might consider harmful, he believed, have their own intrinsic worth. Nature is all we need to realize that each human being is endowed with a spark of divinity, just as every seed is. The ripening of a seed is analogous to the development of human potential. By following the genius of our own nature, Thoreau claimed “we align ourselves with the sacred power that is embodied in nature,”304 which he considered to be a godlike force.
Thoreau’s philosophy is difficult to classify because he is more of a naturalist than a philosopher. “There are reasons,” however, for considering him “as both a naturalist and a romantic, although these categories are perhaps too broad to be very helpful. His conception of nature is informed by a syncretic appropriation of Greek, Asian, and other sources, and the result is an eclectic vision that is uniquely his own.”305 Though it is difficult to classify him, he has inspired many with his own conception of nature.
His nature philosophy is especially appreciated today. In the accelerating madness of this world, many feel Thoreau’s message promises the restoration of value through nature, which is desperately needed to heal the existential crisis of our time.
Though Thoreau believed there is no need to conceive a higher order of reality, we note that value can only be imposed on reality by a conscious observer, which brings us back to a metaphysics that can explain the existence of consciousness. So, even though nature can be appreciated for its intrinsic value, many people, like Emerson, find they prefer envisioning it as an embodiment of a higher order. Each leaf or flower then becomes a window through which the deepest secrets of life are revealed.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is often associated with the Romantic movement because of his disdain for the capitalist division of labor and its consequences for bourgeois culture and morals. In 1811, however, he is reported to have had a radical life-changing mystical experience in the Swiss town of Sils Maria. This experience undoubtedly gave his writing a romantic quality. As described by Jeffrey Kripal, the task he set for himself afterwards was “not to work in words and relative truth and moral claims that could easily be deconstructed or historized away … but to know the outside of all these historical, linguistic, and cognitive filters as it really is, directly and definitely.” Kripal found in the writings of Nietzsche a “rigorous philosophical vision 303 Ibid.
304 Ibid.
305 Ibid.
. . . that was in turn founded on an actual direct encounter with the real, including the actual structure of space and time.”306
In contrast with the optimism of Thoreau, Nietzsche anticipated a time of conflict in the future, when western civilization’s way of ordering of life would be seriously challenged. He declared that although “Apollo represents harmony, progress, logical clarity, and the principle of individuation,” Dionysus will rise in rebellion to the unsustainable order of bourgeois society, bringing “disorder, intoxication, emotion, ecstasy,” and with these heightened emotions the dissolution of individuality.
Dionysus’ wildness, because of its ecstatic nature, drives followers into an intoxicated sense of unity, the opposite of the individuation principle of reason represented by Apollo. Nietzsche thought a man in this ecstatic state falsely imagines himself powerful, a reflection of perfection. And with this aggrandized state comes a deceptive “experience of fullness and plenitude….” He arrived at these ideas from his analysis of Classical Greek culture, whose poets and dramatists celebrated the contrast between the “world of mind and order on one side, and passion and chaos on the other.”307 Nietzsche believed the Apollonian mental state was founded on the illusion of progress, an idea that he found stifling and unsupportable, and instead favored the Dionysian state of intoxication. Jung, however, would have considered such excesses evidence of neurosis. In this heightened state, he worried that the instincts would be unfortunately unleashed, and social boundaries dissolved. When we look at the world today, Nietzsche’s draconian insight into the future seems frighteningly accurate.
Nietzsche understood that in Greek tragedy, the tragedian often presents the tragic hero driven by life’s contradictory forces—Apollonian order and Dionysian frenzy—
in which the main protagonist struggles to rescue himself from his unjust and chaotic fate. In vain, he attempts to regain order in his life, but in the end, fate overpowers him, robbing him of the power to decide and thus he fails to take the necessary action to save himself. Shakespeare’s Hamlet can similarly be portrayed as an “intellectual who cannot make up his mind,” the antithesis of a man of action. He invariably falls under fate’s curse for though he glimpses the supernatural reality of his situation, which was revealed to him by a Ghost, he vacillates because he believes that no action of his has the power to change his fate.308 As evidenced by today’s political division, we also 306 Kripal, The Superhumanities, 86-87. Kripal holds the Rayzor Chair of Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University.
307 Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche.
308 Ibid.
150 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
seem unable to take the necessary action to guard against the dangers that are increasingly threatening our democracy.
Nietzsche considered the Greek tragedians Aeschylus and Sophocles to be the true representatives of tragedy, both of whom portrayed life as an endless struggle, which invariably leads to decline, deterioration, downfall, and finally to death. Nietzsche objected to the intrusion of ethical concerns into tragedy because he thought their infusion destroys the fragile and eternal balance between Dionysian frenzy and Apollonian reason. He thus criticized Plato for celebrating the Apollonian path because he held him ultimately responsible for the adoration of reason that, he felt, has debilitated western culture at the expense of the artistic impulse found in the Apollonian and Dionysian dichotomy. Nietzsche argued that without this tension, civilization “lacks the form and structure to make a coherent piece of art” and without the creative play of opposites it lacks the necessary vitality and passion to rise to the highest ideals to which art aspires. “Only the fertile interplay of these two forces” can foster the artistic passion found in the best of Greek tragedy.309 Jung would have likely agreed with Nietzsche on this issue because he understood that without the energy produced by the tension of opposites, little of value can be accomplished.
The Nazis used Nietzsche’s philosophy to support their cause by extolling his belief that Liberal bourgeois existence is decadent. “God is dead, he declared, and mankind must invent itself in a new image of greatness.”310 Unfortunately, the Nazis skillfully appropriated his declaration by arguing that the only way forward to a new human future was to create a master race modelled on Nietzsche’s Übermensch, “a superman, a heroic figure who through great struggle would transcend the banalities of everyday experience.”311 Nietzsche, though, would likely have been repulsed by the way his idea was distorted by the Nazis.
Writing about nihilism in Also Sprach Zarathustra, Laurence Lampert addresses Nietzsche’s concern by saying:
Zarathustra presents the Übermensch as the creator of new values, and he appears as a solution to the problem of the death of God and nihilism. The Übermensch does not follow the morality of common people since that favours mediocrity but rises above the notion of good 309 Ibid. Some scholars would dispute this characterization of Plato’s views. Plato recognized the power of art to affect human sensibilities and so should be treated with great care. Art is not free of presuppositions, whether Apollonian or Dionysiac.
310 Ibid.
311 Max Whyte, https://www.wilsonquarterly.com/quarterly/_/nietzsche-and-the-nazis.
and evil and herd mentality. In this way Zarathustra proclaims that the only goal of worth is the journey towards the state of the Übermensch.
Nietzsche wanted a kind of spiritual evolution of self-awareness and the overcoming of traditional views on morality and justice that he felt stem from the superstitious beliefs that are still deeply rooted within the Christian religion.312
Kripal explains that he did not read Nietzsche’s grandiose claims “as a sign of impending madness” but instead saw them “as perfectly accurate descriptions of a much greater form of consciousness that was bursting through the writer’s deteriorating body and brain.”313 Though his rantings often sounded like madness, Kripal thought Nietzsche knew “what the singular goal or ultimate meaning of humanity really was, or could be, if we but chose to will it.”314
Walter Kaufmann, known mainly for his excellent critique of Existentialism, suggests that Nietzsche’s statement "God is dead,” might reflect a more subtle understanding of divinity. Scientific developments and the increasing secularization of Europe had effectively destroyed belief in the Abrahamic God who had served as the basis for meaning and value in the West for more than a thousand years.” So even though the death of God may have represented a subtle spiritual advance for a few, traditional Christian theology had ceased to inspire the typical European. In its absence, Kaufmann says, the “belief that nothing has any inherent importance, and that life lacks any worthwhile purpose” became widely accepted throughout Europe even though it resulted in a state of nihilistic despair for many. For this reason, Nietzsche seems to have wished to hasten and deepen the feeling of despair that was threatening the stability of Europe “only so that he could also hasten its ultimate departure.”315
We argue that nihilism can only be overcome when enlightened reason, which is based on objective reason, is supplemented by the primordial wisdom of earlier times.
While the Enlightenment has been essential for the advancement of science, it has rendered religion irrelevant, a superstition from the past that many now feel can be discarded. Jung understood that only by drawing on the deep resources of the unconscious—in other words, primordial wisdom—can Western civilization be made 312 Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche.
313 Kripal, The Superhumanities, 93.
314 Ibid., 85.
315 Ibid.
152 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
whole again. Until then, our culture will remain fragmented. This condition has led to a level of political disintegration that poses a very real threat to our continued survival.
As Nietzsche dramatically articulated, we may be unable to embrace the god of Christianity, but science alone is equally unable to satisfy our universal hunger for depth and meaning in life. For that, we believe that the modern world must consciously embrace the numinous and primordial powers that lay hidden deep within the unconscious.
Tarnas points out that Nietzsche rebelled against the established norms of society throughout his life as he searched for a truth that he could live by. For this truth, Nietzsche says:
I have left the house of scholars and slammed the door behind me.
Too long did my soul sit hungry at their table; I have not been schooled, as they have, to crack knowledge as one cracks nuts. I love freedom and the air over fresh soil; I would sleep on ox-skins rather than on their dignities and respectabilities. I am too hot and scorched by my own thought: it is often about to take my breath away. Then I have to get into the open air and away from all the dusty rooms.316
Even as the positivist approach was sweeping late nineteenth century philosophy in Europe, both Hegelian idealism and American pragmatism flourished in the United States, where societies were established across America for discussion of both.
Pragmatism is associated with a variety of American philosophers holding different perspectives on a range of topics including John Dewey’s interest in education and William James’ investigation of religious experience. Instead of getting lost in trying to formulate rigorous logical pictures of the world, the pragmatists emphasized the practical value of their respective philosophies. James put it simply: a statement’s “cash value” is its truth, that is, the difference it makes or the actions that follow from it constitutes its truth.317 For James this did not mean “anything goes” or “believe whatever you want,” but rather expressed the necessity to tie what we claim to know to how we live. As both a philosopher and psychologist, his pragmatism compelled him to take subjective experience as an area for empirical study. We will encounter James again in our examination of numinous experience.
As one can see from this survey, the Idealist and Romantic traditions kept alive the idea that mind is fundamental to existence. In addition to their belief in the substantive 316 Quoted in Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche, 339.
317 James used this expression in “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth,” anthologized in Robert B. Talisse and Scott F. Aikin, The Pragmatism Reader.
nature of mind, the Romantic movement distinguished itself from Idealism by its reliance on intuition and feeling. Both envisioned a world filled with purpose and meaning, but unfortunately, some Idealists, such as Hegel, were far too intellectual to address feeling. The Romantic philosophers and poets, like Emerson and Coleridge, corrected this oversight by placing feeling above rational discourse. Such soulful concerns are by nature speculative, not in the sense of unfounded guessing but in the sense of thinking critically beyond phenomena.318 Though these philosophers have been pretty much forgotten in the scientifically sophisticated world of the twenty-first century, their ideas are important to consider as we try to reimagine a world in which the sacred is not only important but is consistent with scientific knowledge and our highest sense of truth. Though lacking the intellectual rigor of Idealism, Romantic sensibility continues to live on in in the arts today in a less philosophical way. Idealism, though it did not totally disappear, was largely set aside by mainstream philosophy in the twentieth century. What has endured is the belief that history has a progressive, unfolding pattern, which was championed by many Idealist and Romanic philosophers, especially Hegel. And even today, this idea remains strongly defended in a variety of ways, despite its occasional setbacks.
Idealism and Romantic sensibilities seem, to us, to have anticipated the coming of a new age when enlightened reason will ultimately be unified with primordial wisdom, the unconscious foundation that gave rise to past civilizations. We discuss this cultural transformation in the last four parts of the book: 1) The Modern World in Transition, 2) Consciousness and Transcendence, 3) Paul Tillich and Carl Jung, and 4) Stormy Transition to a New Age.
318 “Speculation” and “speculative” are used pejoratively today, but we use these words to distinguish thought that goes beyond phenomena and therefore science. In this sense, the assumptions behind many theories can be called speculation. One might think of Plato’s noesis leading to gnosis.
Part III
The Modern World in Transition
THE COMING TRANSFORMATION
OF WESTERN CULTURE
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of Mankind is Man,
Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,
He hangs between….
Alexander Pope319
To put it bluntly, the claim that there’s nothing but physical reality is either false or empty. If ‘physical reality’ means reality as physics describes it, then the assertion that only physical phenomena exist is false. Why? Because physical science—including biology and computational neuroscience—
doesn’t include an account of consciousness….On the other hand, if ‘physical reality’ means reality according to some future and complete physics, then the claim that there is nothing else but physical reality is empty, because we have no idea what such a future physics will look like, especially in relation to consciousness.
Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson320
This chapter marks a transition between the philosophic history of Idealism and Romanticism and the next part of the book that builds on these traditions to further embrace the primordial wisdom of past ages without sacrificing the hard-earned truths of science. Though religion has largely been abandoned today by secular-minded people, we think it can be saved by reframing it in accordance with the spiritual aspirations of romantic idealists in every age, especially when supplemented by the work of scholars like Paul Tillich and Carl Jung. All such approaches to Truth are dedicated to the pursuit of what Spinoza calls “the eternal truth,” arrived at through the “intellect,” the eternal part of the mind. These scholars understood that there is a 319 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle II (1733). Many anthologies contain this poem, and it can be found online.
320 Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson, “The Blind Spot,” Aeon online newsletter, aeon.co/essays, accessed 1/11/2019. Frank, Gleiser and Thompson are an astrophysicist, theoretical physicist and philosopher, respectively.
158 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
depth to human experience that evokes a sense of the transcendent and gives meaning to life independent of religious belief. They thus labored to bring the numinous and transcendent into daily life so that, as Joseph Campbell said, everyone could “actually feel the rapture of being alive.”321 While Spinoza and Tillich sought this depth through philosophy, Jung realized it through psychology, all arriving at similar insights from different perspectives.
At the beginning of the modern age, Spinoza seems to have had an intuitive grasp of what was to unfold over the coming centuries, as borne out today. Liberal religion in the twenty-first century now realizes, as Spinoza did long ago, that it can no longer have faith in a transcendent being whose attributes are asserted dogmatically. A modern religion must be content with finding salvation by cultivation of the depth that lies hidden at the core of every individual. Buddhists have long understood this.
Gautama Buddha avoided metaphysical speculation, teaching his followers to clear the mind through meditation, thereby allowing the eternal to manifest within them.322
Compassion and love arise when the mind is thus quieted.323 Likewise, while pursuing eternal truth, Spinoza discovered that there exists a higher level of reason that is comparable to the intellectual love of God from which blessedness and salvation are attained.
Perhaps it is not surprising that early, empirically inclined philosophers were also physicians, since those who work with the complexities of the body could easily wonder what role the soul had in its condition and activities. George Makari, in his book Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind,324 explores the encroachment of science, especially medicine, on the soul. These practitioners relegated certain functions traditionally assigned to the soul to the body with emphasis on the brain. But many people passionately resisted the materialistic approach of these physicians.
321 Campbell, The Power of Myth, 3.
322 Such clearing of the mind is no simple matter, of course. Much Buddhist philosophy and psychology deal with understanding what is to be cleared and how to go about doing it.
323 According to the Pali texts (generally taken to be the earliest Buddhist scriptures), the Buddha would tell one person that of course there is a self and another that there is no self. He was adjusting his remarks to the needs of his listeners. In this example, the first hearer was a nihilist, the second had a materialist view of self.
324 See George Makari, Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind for a deep and insightful discussion of the history of philosophy up to the beginning of the 20th century in light of the struggle to understand and preserve the soul from an increasingly reductionist materialist science.
THE COMING TRANSFORMATION OF WESTERN CULTURE 159
According to Makari, the only philosopher as hated as Spinoza was Thomas Hobbes, whose metaphysics, psychology, and political philosophy was thoroughly materialist.
Not since the atomism of Democritus had such a bold view been advanced. Most philosophical thinkers were still Christians in some form, both Catholic (e.g., Descartes) and Protestant (e.g., Kant), though often unappreciated by their co-religionists. While philosophy could not simply ignore people like Spinoza and Hobbes, its empiricist branch tended to hold on to both God and the soul in more traditional ways, at least for a while.
Largely forgotten, save for historians of philosophy, Paul Joseph Barthez (1734-1806), physician, mathematician, and master of several languages, was immensely popular in his day. He declared that he had discovered a vital principle in all life that distinguished living things from “dead” matter. Barthez, in Makari’s words, thought a
“single, global sensitivity … worked on the animal economy the same way that gravity worked on matter.”325 For Barthez, this mysterious feature of life was unknown, but it is what brings matter to life, implying that the physical world and moral value were unified just as matter was interwoven with consciousness. He did not take a position on whether this vital principle is a distinct non-material substance or whether it is a previously unidentified characteristic of matter itself.
The vital principle, Barthez explained, was “like an x in an algebraic equation; while its true identity remained mysterious, its presence was required for the equation to make sense. It did not matter if one called it a Vital Principle, the Soul, Nature, or something else… These were just words that marked the missing ingredient, the one that unified atoms with a conscious mind and made the bodily machine into a human being.”326 Barthez broadly anticipated the position we are taking regarding Mind. We are not quite sure what to call it, but there is something about nature that makes it possible for consciousness to exist. We choose to call it Mind, even though the term is somewhat misleading because there is not an English term that adequately describes this principle of nature. Like Barthez, we cannot determine where this principle of nature resides, except to say that it belongs alongside matter, energy, and spacetime, all of which are properties of reality acting together through the process of evolution to actualize consciousness. Most importantly, the existence of consciousness strongly suggests that reality is endowed with a deeper level of meaning that cannot be derived from a theory based exclusively on materialism.
325 Makari, Soul Machine, 264.
326 Ibid., 264.
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While our perspective on consciousness is embedded in twenty-first century knowledge and theory, this idea is hardly new. The ancient Greek idea of logos was sometimes seen as a kind of mind or intelligent guiding principle. Early scientific thinkers of our era still held onto a diminished idea of soul and saw the human mind as a distinct agent in the world. As science gradually banished God and soul from the universe, however, consciousness was reduced to little more than an epiphenomenal correlate of matter. The ancient idea that some transcendent and architectonic ordering principle lay behind the empirical world had long before been transferred to God in Christian theology, and so disappeared entirely as an attribute of Nature during the Enlightenment.
Kant’s analysis of human perception and the limit he placed on knowledge drains any ontological plenitude that might have remained after Locke and subsequent thinkers had made the human mind a material thing. He thereby anticipated the eventual reductionist equation that views subjectivity as mere brain activity. The ancient view that philosophical depth and insight are a necessary preparation for having numinous experiences and deep intuitive insights faded in the modern era as reason increasingly denied the value of such experience. And the expanding autonomy of the individual in recent times seems to reject the equally ancient idea of collective reasoning—like that which Plato practiced—as a means for discerning truth. Of course, reasoning together is part of modern scientific theorizing and experimentation, but it utterly avoids anything that might be considered spiritual or transcendent. Collective reasoning, as Plato practiced it, lifted the mind of the entire group to a higher level from which Truth could be discerned. Separating the numinous from the soul or anything knowable or understandable, and treating it on the same psychological level as other feelings, discredits the experience of transcendence just as material science disenchants the physical world. Today, the beliefs and gods of ancient cultures—
including the Christian belief in God and the soul—are all being squeezed out of the contemporary universe.
Despite the soullessness of modern science, most of the views found in history remain in one form or another, and the use of analogies and metaphors to grasp the world has not gone away. Starting in the seventeenth century, the cosmos was seen as a clock set running by Deity and left alone, though perhaps divinely adjusted on occasion. It has also been seen as an organism—whether conscious or not—as a machine with motors, and more recently as a computer or as information. Each analogy has eventually been discarded because empirical experience and discovery rendered it
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inadequate.327 The idea that the universe functions like a computer suggests that the most sophisticated part of the universe—the human brain—must also be like a computer: both process information. So ongoing attempts to map the brain in fine detail (a daunting task) seek to see how its “program” works. Somehow this is supposed to show that the mind and consciousness are equivalent to brain functions, and there is nothing more to it. Fine mapping reveals how parts of the brain function, but that does not itself show or explain consciousness—which, after all, is necessarily involved in the mapping.328 David Chalmers calls the mapping the “easy problem” of consciousness and explaining its source the “hard problem.”329
While some philosophers and physicists believe that science will ultimately find a way beyond the epistemological limitation of quantum physics, the Kantian view that we cannot know things-in-themselves persists.330 The contemporary French physicist Bernard d’Espagnat (1921-2015), versed in both quantum physics and contemporary philosophy, holds that the unfailing consistency of quantum experiments shows that there is something that requires such order behind what we observe. Yet all we have is empirical experience, so for us reality is empirical reality, and the reality behind our experience remains unknown. He suggests that there may be extra-scientific ways of 327 The analogy of the universe with information may be more resilient because
“information” is being redefined. Such redefinition has a long history in science.
“Gravity” once meant a certain seriousness in demeanor (we still say someone has gravitas), and “force” was associated with pushing and military deployment. While these meanings remain, such terms have specific technical meanings in science, though the terms were borrowed from ordinary speech. The same seems to be happening with
“information.” The computer analogy is also undergoing changes in part because of the introduction of self-learning into their operations. A clear and brief summary of the problems self-learning computers give to artificial intelligence research can be found in Jason Tanz, “The End of Coding,” Wired, vol 24, no. 6 (June 2016), 76-79.
328 Colin McGinn has written on the issue of mind/brain equivalency from the conviction that mind and brain are one material thing. But he argues that we do not have the sensory capacity to observe the equivalence. His views are entertainingly expressed in The Mysterious Flame.
329 David Chalmers pioneered the view that mapping the mind is the “easy problem,” while the “hard problem” is the nature of consciousness. See his The Conscious Mind. Our book is concerned with the hard problem.
330 Recall the second head quotation to this chapter.
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knowing what is behind empirical experience, perhaps meditation for example, but he does not speculate on what they might be.331
A contemporary network of physicists, biologists, medical researchers, and philosophers are exploring quantum activity as related to consciousness as well as how consciousness affects biology, medicine, and even its implications for cosmology.
Though many report experiments undertaken to expand our understanding of the mind and consciousness, complex issues distinguishing between reflection, intuition, and discursive reasoning are not often discussed. This work is diverse in experiments and points of view, but there is some recognition of the fundamental role mind has on both the physical universe and life. The conviction is not new, even among contemporary scientists and philosophers. From explorations of the effect of mind on matter to non-theological forms of intelligence in the organization of the universe, or even to the possibility of a life force existing throughout nature (shadows of Barthez), mind continues to be considered, by many, a crucial factor. The reductive materialism of much science today thus no longer remains unchallenged.332
Henri Bergson (1859-1941) proffered the idea of a teleological force in Nature in his attempt to unify the one with the many. He called this the homogeneity-heterogeneity issue. To explain evolution, he postulated the now famous concept of élan vital (vital impulse) which pervades Nature and compels evolution. But the differentiation of life forms due to the influence of the élan vital also led to a division between instinct and intellect within humans. Intellect alone cannot get back to the vital impulse at the root of all evolution and so cannot encompass ultimate knowledge. For that, intuition is required. Only through intuition, Bergson thought, can the gap between diversity and homogeneity—the many and the one—be bridged; only then can we truly know life as it actually is. Though quite different from Barthez’s ‘x’, Bergson’s élan vital is a modern attempt to understand the guiding force within existence that we associate with Mind.
Now largely rejected, we will nevertheless see the idea of some vital force reenter biology in more recent years.
As a perhaps unintended consequence of positivist and materialist trends in the early twentieth century, a deep undercurrent of skepticism erupted in what has come 331 Bernard d’Espignat, Physics and Philosophy.
332 Among numerous books and articles by scientists on such subjects, one might recall The Spiritual Brain by neurobiologist Mario Beauregard, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena by researcher and statistician Dean Radin, and The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness by Tibetologist and Sanksritist B. Alan Wallace.
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to be called postmodernism, relativism, or constructionism, depending on the field in which the concept is used. Throughout the latter half of the century and into the present, a battle has raged between more traditional philosophy and the new skepticism.333 Ironically, rejection of Hegel virtually ended grand idealistic systems of metaphysics, making way for the later development of postmodernism. Of course, various forms of idealism persisted into the early twentieth century, but the reaction to Hegel’s vast metaphysics helped clear the way for the anti-idealist, reductionist, and materialist philosophies that undergird most contemporary science.
Hegel’s overarching view that the Absolute reveals itself progressively through history as a way of increasingly knowing itself, was too much for many subsequent thinkers. As we saw earlier, Arthur Schopenhauer, in response to Hegel, published The World as Will and Representation, arguing that a metaphysical “will” drove existence through ideas alone, thus eliminating all references of a divine source such as God or Hegel’s Absolute. Instead, he declared competitive greed the dynamic force of existence—what today we would call survival of the fittest. Friedrich Nietzsche took, by then the obvious next step, in declaring that God is dead.
Since at least the time of John Locke and Isaac Newton, philosophers have argued that our perceptions of the world are not simply the world itself but rather the interaction between the world and our sense mechanisms. However, by the beginning of the twentieth century metaphysical thought, that is, the search for the foundations of reality, was in great disarray. In its place, the door was opened wide to a rapidly growing experimental and theoretical science where discoveries had already been astounding and would become even more so throughout the century. One need only think of quantum mechanics, the discovery of myriad galaxies beyond the Milky Way, the theory of evolution, the discernment of climate change, progress in medical science, and the emergence of the conflicted disciplines within the various psychologies to realize just how widely that door had been swung open. From the latter part of the nineteenth century through the work of the Vienna Circle,334 certain materialist assumptions ruled science. Amongst these assumptions was the radical claim that all that exists, all that can be experienced—including the experiencer—is comprised of 333 A good survey of the “war” between tradition and postmodernism with critiques of both is Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human.
334 The Vienna Circle flourished in the first quarter of the 20th century, especially between the two World Wars, and is best known for its conception of empiricism as anti-metaphysical and for attempting to establish clear logical principles of verification as well as doubting the meaning of statements of value as being anything more than expressions of emotions and personal preferences.
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material that can ultimately be reduced to the chemical elements and their sub-atomic components (e.g., quarks and photons). Though Newton was quite religious, believing in spiritual entities (he wrote more in commenting on the Bible than he wrote on physics), his science was completely material and mathematical. His rigorous method, by melding together theory, mathematics, and experiment, has enabled science to transform the world in which we live by ignoring higher states of consciousness.
Strangely, however, physics, the most mathematically based of all the sciences, has had to resort to philosophy and metaphysics when explaining the strange behavior of subatomic particles.
The attempt to define just what science is and what distinguishes it from non-science and unscientific thought has been a persistent irritant in the sciences. Karl Popper (1902-1994) asserted the famous falsifiability principle: a statement (theory, hypothesis) is scientific only if we can say what would falsify it, especially what would experimentally do so. Hence, the old statement “All swans are white” was falsified when the Australian black swan was discovered by Europeans in the eighteenth century. If one cannot say what would falsify a view, that view is non-scientific (and so irrational). Astrology, for instance, cannot be falsified because its predictions are too general. If the results seem to be false, the prediction can always be explained away by other astrological considerations. Because of its many variables (planetary alignments and positions, etc.), a failed prediction can be excused or amended to explain why it failed. As even Popper came to realize, it looks as if the complexity of current science raises a similar problem. If observation does not agree with a theory, the theory can always be “adjusted.” Thus, as the twentieth century wore on, the falsifiability principle became less useful.
Part of the problem is mathematics itself. Fundamental for Newton, essential for quantum physics, but some physicists nevertheless avoid complex mathematics in favor of raw experiments. Overreliance on mathematics has been questioned because all mathematical systems are based on axioms, that is, on underlying principles that are themselves unproven. Albert Einstein, who was quite good at math, contrary to popular myth, had to learn new math to develop his special and general theories of relativity. Eventually, physicists (and more recently biologists and other scientists) have had to turn to arcane mathematics to develop theories to explain phenomena and anticipate new discoveries. Such innovations have had spectacular results, including for instance, the prediction of the existence of black holes before there was any (indirect) observational evidence of them, and the prediction of various anti-particles which have since been experimentally confirmed. But it has raised a serious problem: mathematics pushes physics in directions that cannot be experimentally confirmed or challenged. The best known of these is string theory, which postulates that underlying
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all existence are infinitesimal vibrating strings, the frequency of which determines the nature of sub-atomic particles and hence the universe. Even more surprising is the attempt to explain observed phenomena by holding that the universe “splits” into two universes with each observation, so that all outcomes are realized—but not in the same universe. One result is the movement of science, particularly physics, away from the view that science must be confirmed through experiment. For those who think about such matters, this has produced a vigorous and ongoing debate between proponents of experimental necessity and those who say science should step beyond that limitation.
As already suggested, one reason Popper’s falsifiability principle has diminished importance in science is that the charge it brought against astrology holds true for science. Again, physics has led the way, simply because of the wide-spread conviction that biology reduces to chemistry and chemistry reduces to physics. Numerous philosophers of science and scientists themselves have realized that theories, including those which can be subject to experimentation, can be tweaked if the results seem negative. Modern theories are so complex, invariably being based on both mathematical and physical assumptions, that when experimental results are negative, one can still maintain the theory by trying to change various parameters, including one or more of its basic assumptions. This, of course, was the critique of astrology in the first place; now science has to face it.
Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century and into the present, two general schools of thought have been in conflict. One, based on traditional philosophy, seeks to establish truth on sound principles. The other school, sometimes called “postmodern” or “constructivist” or “relativist” argues that truth must be contextualized, that is, relative to the context in which it is examined. Put in extreme form, it means anything goes. But this radical stance is not a real position taken by thoughtful relativists. By placing truth in context, it is possible to judge some views as more sound or truer than others. Like virtually all philosophies, such post-modern relativism has antecedents, beginning with the Skeptics of fourth century BCE Greece.
Today, postmodernists favor the more nuanced view that all knowledge is subject to question and that one must often suspend judgment. They admit there is indeed truth, but only in the context from which it arises. Hence there can be social truth, religious truth, scientific truth, but there is no ultimate truth, and no academic domain, such as physics, sociology, anthropology, politics, or philosophy can claim predominance in truth beyond its own domain. Ultimately, this causes a huge crack in our societal foundation if we cannot agree on certain underlying truths. Pragmatic philosophers like William James anticipated such a position in his claim that truth was
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the “cash value” of a claim, that is, did it work in the world (including the world of oneself). It is possible, of course, to hold that there is ultimate truth, though it cannot be realized through ordinary, rational thinking.
Clearly, traditional metaphysicists, who claim there are ultimate truths, might be horrified by such a view. But even Aristotle, we recall, who first attempted to systematize logic, held that first principles must come from somewhere. This means that in going to the foundations of any view, one comes to some statements, axioms, or claims that are taken as true without proof. Sometimes this foundation, whether an axiom or an observation, is taken as just a “brute fact” of which nothing more can be said. “Questions,” Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) said, “must come to a stop somewhere,” an echo of Aristotle’s position on first principles. Medieval Christian theologians, though sometimes offering alleged proofs of the existence of God, which were always disputed by other theologians, made God the brute fact about which nothing could unconditionally be said. The challenge is deciding when to stop the questions: too soon and one misses the truth; too late, one is fantasizing, that is, inventing answers that have no rational or experiential foundation.
The post-modern relativist position (of which there are many versions) is deeply unsatisfying in a world where people seek truth as the basis for meaning in life and understanding of the world. For each side—the foundationalists and the relativists; tradition and modernity—the other side is considered somewhat irrational, either irrational regarding claims of ultimate truth or irrational in the denial of such truth.
How to put into words what is beyond words has always been the concern of mystics but now philosophy and science also must wrestle with it. Though we recognize that our lives are enriched beyond measure when we awaken to the hidden wisdom of the soul, we are just as aware that we can only express these spiritual epiphanies in poetic and symbolic language.
Jung held that numinous, transcendent, and consciousness-expanding experiences are only symbolically expressible. To treat them as revelations from God tempts one to proclaim oneself to be the holder of absolute Truth. Instead, to avoid the danger of ego-inflation, one must treat revelatory material as only pertaining to oneself. It can then provide critical insights for healing and psychological development. In doing so, one moves from relative truth to relative truth, each leading toward ever more universal truths that are reflected in one’s situation in the world.
There can be no reconciliation between traditional philosophers and post-modern relativists without recognition of the possibility of achieving higher states of consciousness that transcend truths of a lower order. And without recognition of the symbolic nature of transcendent experiences, subject to deeply reasoned consideration,
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we will be misled by them. We must be content with knowing that whatever ultimate truths we may discern, we cannot express them fully to others. Hence, dogmatism of any kind is, at best, futile and at worst, wildly misleading. Just as theoretical physics requires tremendous effort to understand, transcendent Truths take similar effort to grasp. Meaning has to be earned, as Jung painfully knew from his own experience.
The preceding section of the book showed how the Enlightenment grew out of a long and fruitful period of history that began with the Greeks. Their innovative insights, based on reason, helped differentiate early Western values from those of many other cultures which were still largely organized around tribal identity and tradition. The East also developed highly advanced philosophical and religious traditions, but unlike the Greeks, they used reason to explore the inner world that opened upon higher states of consciousness. Though Christianity nurtured many mystics, theologians like St.
Thomas Aquinas gave Aristotle a central place in his theology, preferring to base his ideas on reason.
Even though modern culture is graced with material abundance, a growing sense of meaninglessness has settled over much of the West as people drift away from Christianity. Nietzsche’s distress over the decadent drift of our advanced modern society thus seems to have been prescient when he declared the death of God. His claim certainly rings true for the current age. But we believe a new age is about to be born in which the wisdom of the soul will once again be cherished. As the next chapters of the book will show, there is ample reason for embracing this belief.
THE RISE AND FALL OF CIVILIZATIONS
As poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller wrote, “Truth dwells in the deeps”…. Theologically speaking, it’s not that the gods have fallen silent; rather, we have become unable to see or hear them.
Paul Levy335
In my view, there is little reason for conflict between most religions and science. Many religions accept—and even celebrate—science as a way to knowledge about the natural world. Beyond that, there is mystery enough in the existence and meaning of the world….
Lee Smolin336
Imagine, for the moment, that the deep archetypal energies that influence and often transform entire cultures are like ocean swells and that you are on a surfboard waiting for that perfect wave upon which to test your strength and skill. There are several other surfers near, who, like you, are patiently waiting for the next “big one.” After waiting for what feels like an eternity it arrives, a monstrous wave towering high over you.
Excitement and fear course through you as you prepare to be lifted and propelled on its crest. The other surfers are buoyed by the same rush of adrenalin and excitement.
Like surfers, we are not alone when riding the deep energies that rise from a hidden resource within the psyche, each wave uniquely shaping not only the life of the individual but entire cultures. Psychologically, archetypal energies, like ocean waves, crest and subside throughout time. We are all swimmers bobbing about in a vast expanse that we are seldom aware of, a transcendent reality that is much like the immeasurable depths of the ocean which are hidden from us by unfathomable darkness.
But whenever major historical events intrude, disrupting their flow, the archetypal underpinnings that have historically sustained civilizations begin to shift. At the end of the Roman Republic, for instance, its cultural foundations began to collapse due to corruption within and pressure from barbaric tribes that threatened Rome’s stability.
These destabilizing forces thus hastened the decline of the later Roman Empire’s power as Christianity rose to fill the vacuum. With this dramatic change, a new tapestry of 335 Levy, The Quantum Revelation, 253.
336 Lee Smolin, Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum, xxiv.
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archetypes began to constellate within western culture that, over the centuries, helped shape the modern world.
One summer while visiting Las Vegas, one of the authors of this book (Renwick) caught a glimmering sense of the dramatic forces responsible for the rise and fall of civilizations while he was eating lunch at Caesar’s Palace. Outside the temperature was approaching 115 degrees, but inside it was cool and refreshing. Those who have visited Caesar’s Palace will remember how realistic the artificial sky seems. Throughout the Palace, the sky casts an evening light whose deepening blue hue is adorned with crimson clouds announcing the coming night. His table faced a fountain around which several life-like statues of Roman deities stood. Included were replicas of Venus—the goddess of love, desire, and victory—Minerva—the goddess of wisdom, justice, and law—and Apollo—the God of reason, sunlight, and truth. Savoring his chicken marsala and a glass of burgundy wine, the author had what he called a soulful experience. Such experiences are like gifts from heaven, lifting the individuals into the transcendent realm where they are granted a moment to bathe in the light of wisdom.
While suspended in this realm, this writer suddenly became aware of how important the Roman gods were for guiding this ancient civilization to its highest achievement.
But soon after peaking, he also understood that this powerful swell of archetypal energies had abandoned the Romans as it began to sink back into the unconscious. In its absence, the darkness that always and everywhere lingers in the secretive corners of life, began to erode the greatness of Rome, eventually leading to a dark age. In that insightful moment, it suddenly dawned on him that the same psychological disintegration that led to the fall of Rome is now happening to America and Europe.
We take the position throughout the remainder of the book that 1) the collective psyche is coextensive with all life; 2) it envelops the entire globe; 3) it guides individuals toward wholeness; and 4) it influences major inflection points in history.337
Jung realized that the powerful archetypal and cultural transformations that brought Christianity to its height of power and glory began to fade at the beginning of the Renaissance. Today we are at a low point in this 2,000-year cycle as we patiently wait to be lifted out of the doldrums in which our culture finds itself. Since so many are unable to find a purpose for living in this dystopian age—despite its scientific wonders—it is essential for all of us to understand that the existential crisis of our time is reminiscent of the years preceding the fall of Rome when corruption and scandal 337 Richard Tarnas takes the position that these archetypal influences are closely related to the movement of the outer planets. He defends this thesis in his book Cosmos and Psyche.
The idea that a collective psyche envelops the world is reminiscent of Teilhard Chardin’s concept of the noosphere, which he argues for in his book Phenomenon of Man.
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tore at foundations of that great civilization. Christianity brought a new vision into the world soon after the fall of Rome, which inspired the rise of our current cultural greatness. But the spiritual foundation that supported its rise has now ebbed away.
Presciently, both Tillich and Jung believed a new vision is coming into the world that will significantly shape the coming centuries. We must expectantly wait, however, as a surfer must, for the coming of the next “big wave” to fill our troubled hearts with a renewed sense of meaning as we are lifted high and hurled forward.
Although our age has mastered much about the physical world in which we live, the psyche remains a mystery that few have ventured to explore. We believe, however, that it is the next great frontier waiting to be investigated. Importantly, when conceived as a fundamental attribute of reality, exploring the origins and unfathomable depth of the psyche—and by inference consciousness—can be seen as the first step toward unifying enlightened reason with primordial wisdom, the central topic of the second half of the book. We begin exploring the basis for their eventual unification in the next chapter with an analysis of the protomental foundation of the cosmos, which we argue is not only the basis of consciousness but is coextensive with all life.
Part IV
Consciousness and Transcendence
PROTOMENTAL FOUNDATION
OF THE COSMOS
Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end when philosophical thought has done its best, the wonder remains.
Alfred North Whitehead338
… we all—scientists as well as mystics—know only representations of reality, not reality itself. We deal with the world as it appears to us, not as it intrinsically is, so some of our interpretations may be more accurate than others. This somewhat disturbing news means that the “objective truths” on which we rely are inherently illusive….We are surrounded by a reality that transcends—or “goes beyond”—our conceptual grasp.
Karen Armstrong 339
As Alfred North Whitehead conveyed in the above quote, philosophy, at its best, is inspired by wonder. This is certainly true of past ages, though it was especially important for Classical Greek and Hellenistic philosophers, whose ontology, the study of Being, was of central concern to them. Today, philosophy is criticized for being overly intellectual and not sufficiently relevant to everyday concerns. However, one specialty in which it has been able to make an important contribution is the field of consciousness studies. Possibly the reason science has avoided this topic until recently is that it touches upon the sacred, raising questions regarding the ultimate nature of reality and whether purpose is interwoven into the fabric of the universe. If pushed far enough, such inquiries leave a strong impression that we truly live in a miraculous world in which analogies alone must suffice for explanation. In previous chapters, we saw that various analogies have been used to picture the universe, but each one in turn has been discarded as inadequate. But even analogies may have to be set aside when we contemplate the mystery of Being. As Parmenides realized long ago, all that can be said about “it,” is that “it is.” When all thoughts cease, we can only gaze upon the miracle that is our universe, in wonder.
The story we have been telling throughout the book devotes considerable time to exploring consciousness because its existence suggests that the universe is filled with 338 Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 168. That philosophy begins in wonder was said by Socrates in Plato’s Theatetus and Aristotle makes a similar point in his Metaphysics.
339 Karen Armstrong, The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts, 4.
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purpose and meaning. This is the premise upon which our critique of materialism depends. Based on it, we contend that materialism alone cannot explain consciousness.
Instead, we hold that the rich variety of experience that humans have could only exist if the potential for realizing consciousness had been an inherent feature of the universe from the moment of the Big Bang. Why consciousness exists is a profound mystery that cannot be grasped by a science based solely on the principle of cause and effect. But when the potential for it is conceived as a fundamental attribute of reality, it can be seen as an essential part of the protomental foundation of the Cosmos.340
Some would argue that the transcendent level of consciousness that mystics claim to have achieved is eternal and has always pervaded the whole universe. Presumably, according to this theory, as organisms evolved, only a filtered subset of the full panorama of universal consciousness could be processed by the nervous system of each particular species. In the case of humans, however, there seems to be no theoretical limit. Mystics, for instance, often claim to have become one with God.
Whether consciousness is presumed to have only existed as potential at the birth of the universe, as we claim, or has eternally existed in the mind of God, the vast panorama of consciousness available to every species expanded slowly over eons as neurological structures evolved from rudimentary strands that guide the simplest organisms to the vastly more complex forms of consciousness found in humans.
Importantly, at least for our purposes, the existence of consciousness within an otherwise material world awakens us to the mysterious regions of the psyche from which love, depth, and beauty emerge into the daylight world of form. Admittedly, enlightened reason has been sufficient for laying bare the inscrutable mysteries of the physical world, but now we must go further and penetrate, and most of all appreciate, the hidden truths that lift the soul beyond the humdrum world of modern existence.
In the future, we expect that scientific ventures into this unknown reality will amount to a giant step forward for humankind, comparable to that magic moment when Copernicus placed the sun at the center of the solar system or Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the moon. Only then can the rational and scientific victories of our age be brought into union with the wisdom of the soul.
340 Protomental, as we are using the term, refers to underlying properties of reality responsible for consciousness.
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We recognize, however, the uncontested fact that up to the point when life began, everything, at least at the macrolevel,341 can be explained scientifically using the laws of cause and effect, including the birth of stars and the expansion of the universe.342
But with the birth of consciousness, a new order of creativity was introduced into the universe. As marvelous as this seems, many researchers and philosophers in the discipline of consciousness studies leave little room for wonder because they explain consciousness as an epiphenomenon arising from material processes alone.343 We claim that this epiphenomenal explanation is not complete in itself; it describes nothing more than the material arrangement of neurons and synapses—and possibly computer circuits. In short, there is nothing left to explain, according to these scholars, once the functioning of the physical foundation for consciousness is understood.
However, there are indications that this dubious view is changing. In a discussion with David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, who has long held a materialist position on consciousness, is reported to have told Chalmers that “… there didn’t have to be a hard boundary between third-person explanations and first-person experience—between, as it were, the description of the sugar molecule and the taste of sweetness. Why couldn’t one see oneself as taking two different stances toward a single phenomenon?
It was possible,” he said, “to be neutral about the metaphysical status of the data. From the outside, it looks like neurons; from the inside, it feels like consciousness. Problem 341 Quantum physicists debate the concept of determinate cause at the quantum level. Are quantum actions, only statistically predictable, truly random or actually causal at a complex level we cannot discern? At the macrolevel, the level of ordinary human observation and experience, this issue does not arise. Yet the fact that something quite different may be acting at the microlevel of quantum theory raises philosophical questions as well as issues in physics.
342 The difficulty in giving an adequate account of the concept of “cause” has led many scientists to use the term only loosely, preferring to avoid the concept altogether in their precise descriptions of theories, experiments, and observations. They prefer to speak of conditions in which phenomena occur. Hume’s view was that causality itself is never observed. He pointed out that what we actually observe is just one thing or event following another regularly and, we posit causality on that basis.
343 A contemporary proponent of this view is Patricia Churchland. See, for example, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality (Princeton University Press, 2011), as well as the exchange with Colin McGinn in the New York Review of Books (Colin McGinn, “Storm over the Brain,” April 24, 2014; Churchland’s reply with McGinn’s response, June 19, 2014).
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solved.”344 So even Dennett is willing to admit that there is a subjective side to matter.
In fact, this claim, which is consistent with epiphenomenalism, is central to his philosophy, which argues against assigning consciousness to some immaterial substance or entity. The problem with his otherwise reasonable position is that he doesn’t address how the sugar molecule came to have a subjective quality. Unlike Dennett, we contend that the source of subjectivity is Being itself.
So again, we can ask: “What then is Being?” and “Why is Mind involved?” Looking at the various themes that have recurred in the history of philosophy, it appears that there are some general conclusions we can now draw. Note that these conclusions are based on the assumption that only the potential for consciousness existed before sentient beings came into existence.
• Being is eternal, continuous, and unchanging, consisting of nothing, that is
“no thing.” It is pure potential, roughly analogous to an eternal blueprint, from which the universe came into existence.345
• In addition, Being is not only the innermost reality of physical existence but also the creative agency responsible for igniting the cosmic fireball that birthed our universe.
• Being, as the innermost reality of the universe, is also the ground of all that exists, whatever “exists” might mean—material, spiritual or something inconceivable.
• As such, Being provides the “blueprint” for the governing rules that determine how the physical universe functions. Physics strives to represent these rules quantitatively.
344 Rothman, Joshua. 2017. “Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul: A philosopher’s lifelong quest to understand the making of the mind,” The New Yorker, March 27, 2017. Jonardon Ganeri, a philosopher conversant in both Western and Eastern philosophy, has argued for looking at various philosophies as stances rather than systems. Hence Dennett’s use of the word “stance” is suggestive. Ganeri holds that a pluralism of stances adds to our knowledge while insisting on one stance (his example is scientism) to the exclusion of all others diminishes it. See “Epistemic Pluralism: From Systems to Stances,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 2019, 1-21.
345 Although we define Being as pure potential, the concept is only intended to refer to primary attributes of reality, like the laws of physics and the propensity for the eventual emergence of life and consciousness. It does not apply to the potential for the creation of something like a Ferrari sports car, which, although true, would be a trivial extension of the principle.
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• As the source or origin of the universe, Being transcends time and space.
• According to Paul Tillich, Being also has a significant role in the life of an individual.
• Being as pure potential is the ultimate source of value. Value as the term is used throughout the book refers to what Plato describes as the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. As such, it also includes other qualities like love, compassion, and justice, all of which lift the mind to a higher state consciousness.
• Mind, as one of the attributes of Being, is not itself conscious, but simply the latent potential within nature from which consciousness arises when conditions are right for it.
• But for Mind to appear as consciousness, it must first be differentiated from Being—its eternal source—as Heraclitus saw in his discussion of the contending opposites.
• Furthermore, Mind plays a fundamental role in the evolution of the universe, not just as the basis of conscious experience and the course of history, but in affecting existence, even creating it in some ways.
• There is a powerful tendency to find unity in existence—a single material principle (e.g., Thales’ water, or Anaximander’s chaos), a spiritual essence governing the universe, or an abstract principle (Pythagoras’ number or today’s mathematics). So, from the ancient philosophers to modern science’s search for the Grand Unified Theory (or the Theory of Everything,) or even the singularity known as the Big Bang, there appears to be a fundamental unity within the world that is derived directly from Being.346
• Thus, Being is ultimately One, not a plurality, and through some process which may or may not be comprehensible by human beings, it becomes the Many, the diverse world.
346 We take no position on the truth of the currently fashionable Big Bang theory. A growing minority of physicists and astronomers are doubtful, believing that some alternative, perhaps a Big Bounce, is required by recent experimental data, especially regarding the Cosmic Background Radiation. See, for example, Anna Ij as, Paul J. Steinhardt and Abraham Loeb, “Pop Goes the Universe,” Scientific American, vol. 316, no.2 (February 2017), pp. 32-39.
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As discussed earlier, the line between philosophy and religion (or at least theology) has always been blurred, just as the line between philosophy and science became permeable during the last century. This recent overlap, reminiscent of the Classical Greek thinkers, is best seen in the way that scientists, typically physicists, freely write, often knowledgeably and eloquently, about philosophy. If one thinks of science as determining how things work and interact, philosophy seeks to determine why they do what they do as well as explore issues beyond scientific verification. For example, why are the laws of physics what they are? Scientists find it hard not to ask such questions without entering the philosophical realm. As philosophers shied away from metaphysics under the influence of logical positivism, linguistic analysis, and materialism in the twentieth century, scientists, led by physicists such as Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, and Pauli, have interpreted their findings metaphysically, though sometimes loathe to admit it. This is especially true regarding consciousness.
Metaphysical interpretations of consciousness presume that there is something about reality that accounts for it. It is cumbersome to discuss what this is, however, because in our scientific age with its technical vocabulary, we do not have a word for it, and concepts like Barthez’s “x” are not really helpful without further explaining how it can account for consciousness. We have been calling this missing factor “Mind,”
which we postulate derives from Being itself. Mind in this sense is not itself conscious in any way we typically experience it. Rather, it is a foundational component of consciousness in the same way that quarks and photons are foundational components of our physical world, which only emerge as mater and energy on the macroscale of reality in which we exist.347 Likewise, Mind only emerges as psyche and consciousness within higher organisms that have evolved sufficiently complex neurological networks capable of sentience.
Although we will discuss Carl Jung’s understanding of the psyche in more detail later, we might note here that his concept of it extends beyond the individual brain, suggesting to us that consciousness arises from a field surrounding and penetrating the brain, rather than solely from a network of neurons. Underlying this understanding of the psyche, we maintain, is the assumption that the psychic field responsible for consciousness is a physical manifestation of Mind and therefore is itself continuous—
347 Physicists often call the human scale of observation the macroscale because it is huge compared to the atomic and subatomic world. But then there is the scale of the universe as a whole. Perhaps we should think of the human scale as the mesoscale, between the microscale of physics and the macroscale of the universe as a whole. Ancient thinkers of both East and West sometimes saw the human being as occupying a spiritual place between heaven and earth.
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versus a steam comprised of discrete photons or particles that are separate from each other. Recall that the combination problem as set out by Chalmers is the problem of
“building” a cohesive consciousness from separated particles with mental properties.
According to him, each particle in isolation is too microscopic to support the full range of consciousness that exists at many levels of life. But if the psyche is thought to be a field, then the elements of the brain do not have to combine the individual mental properties of each particle to somehow create consciousness. Rather, brain activity from the firing of neurons allows a continuous psychic field to manifest as consciousness, complete with all its thoughts, feelings, images, and attitudes.
Furthermore, this model of consciousness portrays the psyche as a physical actualization of Mind ready to respond to neural activity. The process can be thought roughly analogous to a TV monitor that generates an image from a pattern of electrical stimulation picked out by the settings on the set. But consciousness, unlike the TV, has feedback properties which makes the interaction of Mind and brain work in both directions—from field to brain and brain to field. This analogy goes only so far, however. In fact, the image on the screen is a field comprised of points of light that are only integrated into a whole by the human mind.
Depth perception is another example in which we are dependent on the brain to form an accurate picture of the world. Psychologists have long known that the image on the retina is so distorted that the brain must make a “best guess” to create a facsimile of the world we see. This fact could also be used to partially address Chalmers’
question regarding how individual quarks and photons could combine to produce the type of consciousness with which we are familiar. There are two parts to this question.
The first asks how small, separated bits of matter could create the experiential sense that consciousness is uniform and continuous. This can be explained in the same way that depth perception is explained. The harder problem is to explain how elementary particles can produce the rich diversity of consciousness that humans have. As we said before, atoms, sub-atomic particles, and individual neurons, when physically separated from each other, are just too microscopic to be a source of consciousness with all its rich diversity, including love, the five senses, and intelligence. For this, Mind, when conceived as a continuous substrate of reality, could easily enfold within itself the potential for all these attributes and much more, just like Spinoza’s universal substance does.
Science writer Ed Yong has reported on many experiments in perception, especially among species as diverse as dolphins, insects, bats, snakes, and moles. In addition to senses that humans share with them—sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing, and inner senses such as heat and pain—he also examines senses found in other species that are different than ours, such as echolocation, electrolocation, and magnetoreception. For
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example, bats emit sounds beyond our hearing, dogs smell within a range and subtlety that far outstrips ours, many fish and insects respond to electric fields of which we are unaware, and birds see colors we cannot. What he shows is that many species, besides having several senses we do not have, can see and hear in ranges beyond our capacities. He raises (but does not attempt to answer) many questions about perception, but he mostly ignores metaphysical implications. What he makes clear, however, is that perception alone does not give us the whole real world but only that which is useful for our lives. Imagine, say, hearing or seeing radio waves and the horrible confusion that would cause as dozens of broadcasts permeate the urban air around us. Fortunately, our senses evolved to support human needs leaving us unhindered by some of the more seemingly bizarre capabilities that other species have.348
Thomas Nagel, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Law at New York University, argues that a plausible science of consciousness must expand our understanding of the basic nature of reality in such a way that it becomes apparent that both mental and physical properties of reality are necessary to explain consciousness. In Mind and Cosmos,349 he takes on the metaphysical questions left aside by Yong by exploring ways that evolutionary theory may have to change to accommodate consciousness. Much of what he covers expands on what we have already discussed.
He begins by arguing that “a physical evolutionary history would have to show why it was likely that organisms of the kind that have consciousness would arise.”350 The best candidate would be a theory shown to be inseparable from the generally accepted theory of evolution based on natural selection. To be comprehensive, such a theory would recognize how the latent potential for consciousness advances evolution. This would require abandoning the “standard assumption that evolution is driven by exclusively physical causes….,” and this, Nagel admits, “leaves us with a mystery of the most basic kind about the natural order…”351
According to him a postmaterialist theory of evolution could address the mystery of consciousness, either reductively or as an emergent process. A reductive theory presumes the building blocks of organic structures have protomental properties. An 348 Ed Yong explores animal perception in his very readable An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us.
349 Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.
350 Ibid., 60.
351 Ibid., 53.
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emergent theory, in contrast, would not attempt to explain consciousness from the bottom up like a reductive theory would. Rather, it would presume that consciousness emerges spontaneously along with its own laws and properties within a physical system like the brain, when physical conditions are suitable. In addition, we hold that emergence cannot be thought of as a spontaneous creation from nothing but must rely on an underlying structure of reality, like Mind, for it to manifest. Without such an underpinning, emergence has been called magical thinking, as we will see later.
Nagel considers the reductive account a better approach because it “accounts for the relation between mind and brain in terms of something more basic about the natural order.”352 Such a comprehensive theory is favored, he says, “by the belief that the propensity for the development of organisms with a subjective point of view must have been there from the beginning, just as the propensity for the formation of atoms, molecules, galaxies, and organic compounds must have been there from the beginning.”353 In other words, the potential for consciousness, like the potential for all subjective qualities, such as love and beauty, must have been present from the moment of the Big Bang. A scientist like Dennett might object, claiming nothing more needs to be explained. For him, the inner subjective quality of matter is just a fact of nature.
Maybe that is true for a science based solely on materialism, but if so, science must revise its definition of matter to include consciousness.
But philosophy and metaphysics, in contrast to science, must begin by realizing that the potential for consciousness is imbedded in the primordial structure of the cosmos, which suggests that the universe is far more purposeful than previously assumed.
Though no one knows why the universe is the way it is, some religions posit the existence of a creator to explain the nature of reality while others, like Buddhism, hold that spiritual agency is involved even in the absence of a creator god. But science must be content with accepting the universe as it is. So, if the potential for consciousness is a fundamental characteristic of reality, then science must also explain how subjective experience is actualized within the brain and account for its teleological (goal-oriented) nature. Here, teleology is understood as a goal-oriented principle, like the potential for consciousness, which has been built into the nature of things, present from the beginning of the cosmos. Even the human capacity for the highest of spiritual attainments must be seen as a potential existing from the beginning of time. In this 352 Ibid., 56. This is not the reduction of one thing to another, like reducing mind to matter, but the reduction of both things, like mind and matter, to something more fundamental.
Spinoza did just this in his philosophy. We will see that this more nuanced idea of reduction is important to Thomas Nagel.
353 Ibid., 61.
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view, teleology is accepted only in a “passive” sense, because no agency plans, intends, or wills the emergence of consciousness.
Arguing reductively, it follows that consciousness, as we ordinarily experience it, depends on the brain. Given that this is true, it is reasonable to assume that the most fundamental organic structures within the brain, which themselves are composed of molecules, have mental properties that account for consciousness when subjected to the right conditions. Following the reductive argument down to the most basic level, it would also seem reasonable to assert that atoms have mental properties.
This position, called neutral monism, is not as strange as it first appears. In philosophy, neutral monism expresses the view that mental and physical descriptions can refer to the same elements depending on the context.354 Atoms, in line with this principle, can therefore be described both ways. Saying that atoms have mental properties is not to claim that they have consciousness in any sense we would recognize. Instead, the potential for consciousness pervades all of reality, so the basic building blocks of nature have both physical and mental qualities that only emerge as consciousness when conditions are right. This argument is much like Dennett’s position regarding the sugar molecule, except that we are here presuming that the mental properties derive from Being itself. Throughout the rest of the book, we continue to argue that particles and the whole of physical reality derive from this same latent potential. But one might reasonably ask why Being should be considered the original source of consciousness. Could it not derive from something even more basic or be conceived as eternally flowing from God? In defense, we recall Aristotle, who asserted that all philosophical arguments must be based on certain fundamental assumptions that are beyond further rational analysis.
Nagel summarizes this position by saying: “Everything, living or not, is constituted from elements having a nature that is both physical and nonphysical—that is, capable of combining into mental wholes. So, this reductive account can also be described as a form of panpsychism: all elements of the physical world are also mental.”355 Often 354 Stubenberg, Leopold and Donovan Wishon, "Neutral Monism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL =
<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2023/entries/neutral-monism/>. Accessed 10/21/2016. Wolfgang Pauli called these elements the “third thing” between the psychic and the physical. Neutral monism is also consistent with Daniel Dennett’s position described earlier.
355 Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, 57. Francisco Patrisi (1529-1597), a Platonist in an Aristotelian environment, seems to have first used the concept panpsychism, though as we have
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panpsychism is associated with the belief that consciousness is universal, that even rocks are conscious. Such a position is hard to defend. Having mental properties, however, is not the same as being conscious. It simply refers to the fact that all things, including atoms and sub-atomic particles, have mental properties, which can contribute to the rise of consciousness when combined into mental wholes.
While maintaining the conceptual difference between Mind as a fundamental property of reality and consciousness itself, the challenge is to determine under what conditions consciousness arises. Two questions, Nagel says, must be answered to explain subjective experience reductively. First, if every particle is both physical and mental, how do the individual particles combine to form an integrated mental whole—
Chalmers’ combination problem. Second, how does consciousness emerge from the mental whole once formed? We have already noted that an isolated particle is too elementary to explain the whole range of consciousness that has so far evolved unless it is an integral part of a unified field from which the full range of consciousness derives.
Even if one can develop an imaginative solution to these questions, it is not clear that it can lead to a testable theory given the state of present-day science. “The protopsychic properties of all matter, on such a view” Nagel says, “are postulated solely because they are needed to explain the appearance of consciousness at high levels of organic complexity. Apart from that nothing is known about them: they are completely indescribable and have no predictable local effects, in contrast to the physical properties of electrons and protons, which allow them to be detected individually.”356
Of course, as we note, there has been no scientific effort to discover such fundamental mental properties, and the current assumptions and methods of physics prevent efforts at such a discovery.357 It took almost three centuries of scientific endeavor to move from Newton’s concept of the atom—little indivisible balls not much different from seen the general idea has been around in some version since the time of Thales. Patrisi argued that mathematics preceded empirical science, a view that influenced Galileo.
Patrisi also held that space is geometrical, a position that was ignored until taken up in contemporary physics.
356 Ibid., 61, 62.
357 Contemporary physics is accustomed to dealing with untestable items that seem necessary to explain what is known and can be tested. For example, no currently conceivable tests exist for strings or multiple hidden dimensions in string theory, or for loop quantum gravity or for multiple (even infinite) universes, etc. It is not surprising that without any effort in this direction possible mental properties of matter have not been discovered.
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those hypothesized by Democritus in ancient Greece—to the discovery of subatomic particles. In a similar timespan, dedicated effort might reveal much about the mental dimension of nature. Nevertheless, if the potential for consciousness is ultimately an attribute of Being and Being is the innermost reality of every particle, then, by default, every particle would have the protopsychic properties necessary to produce consciousness at a sufficiently complex level. But at this time, Nagel’s remark on protopsychic properties is quite accurate.
We do not pretend to have definitive answers to these questions. What is strikingly apparent to us is that there is something about nature that makes it possible for consciousness to exist, and whatever that is, it cannot be reduced to the laws of physics as currently understood.358
An example of an emergent theory—in contrast to a reductive theory—that explains consciousness without modifying our understanding of the microphysical basis of reality is based on complexity. In one form of this theory, consciousness is said to arise from neurological activity when a certain level of informational complexity involving highly differentiated states is achieved. Kristof Koch explored this argument in the July 2009 issue of Scientific American.359 Nagel views such emergent/materialist explanations as little more than a sophisticated appeal to magic. The disadvantage of such a theory, he says, is the “brute fact of emergence, not explainable in terms of anything more basic, and therefore essentially mysterious.”360 It can be shown that there is a correlation between highly differentiated levels of complexity and consciousness, but such a theory fails to explain how consciousness arises under these conditions. Consciousness, thus explained, is little more than an epiphenomenon, a byproduct that arises from but does not causally influence any material process.
358 Physicist and astronomer David Darling proposes a serious modification of our understanding of reality. In Equations of Eternity: Speculations on Consciousness, Meaning and the Mathematical Rules that Orchestrate the Cosmos, he argues that our brains’
processing of external stimuli (converting photons of various wavelengths into color, for example) is more than just our experience of some external reality. We participate in creating that reality and have always done so. This participation affects reality and the entire universe. Part of his speculative argument is based upon the fact that at the quantum level, particles exist only as wave functions until measured (that is, observed) at which point they “collapse” into particles. Thus, the observer affects reality.
359 Kristof Koch, ” A ‘Complex’ Theory of Consciousness,”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/ article/a-theory-of-consciousness/ Accessed 10/10/2016.
360 Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, 60, 61.
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We believe a more productive way of thinking about emergence is to accept that the potential for consciousness is inherent in nature and emerges or actualizes when highly differentiated states of information exist. This principle, which holds for both the reductive and emergent explanation of consciousness, avoids magical thinking.
Complexity then serves as the necessary condition for manifesting a latent potential within nature. This view is partly reductive in that consciousness is explained by something more basic about the natural order. But it is emergent in that consciousness is not viewed as an aggregate of individual parts or brain cells with mental properties.
Rather, it is understood to naturally arise from a psychic field when physical brain activity reaches a certain level of complexity.361
Jim Holt in Why Does the World Exist? provides one idea for how this might come about based on Roger Penrose’s book, Shadows of the Mind. According to him, Penrose hypothesizes that “electrical activities of our brain cells, usually thought to be the cause of our mental life, are mere ‘shadows’ cast by deeper quantum processes going on in the brain, which are the true springs of consciousness.”362 In this case, the emergence of a conscious field is due to a quantum effect not reducible to parts of a whole. While this avoids having to explain how elementary particles with mental features combine to create conscious wholes, the concept remains purely speculative.363 Since Penrose set out this view, scientists have largely scoffed at it. Recently, however, researchers have begun developing experiments aimed to reveal quantum effects in the brain, so the case in not closed.364
Galen Strawson, a philosopher long fascinated by consciousness, agrees that emergence as a scientific concept is sufficiently vague as to constitute magical thinking.
He prefers the term “physical” to “material” because matter has been so dematerialized in quantum theory. He declares himself a physicalist through and through, but his physicalism includes consciousness and therefore affirms some 361 This manifestation is distinct from most concepts of emergence.
362 Holt, Why Does the World Exist? , 175. Sir Roger Penrose (born August 8, 1931) is an English mathematical physicist, philosopher of science and Nobel Laureate in Physics.
He has written several works on the connection between fundamental physics and consciousness and in Shadows of the Mind and The Emperor’s New Mind he argues that known laws of physics are inadequate to explain the phenomenon of consciousness.
363 See “A Quantum of Consciousness,” New Scientist, April 23, 2022, 8.
364 George Musser reports on current efforts to discover quantum effects in the brain, believing that Penrose’s original ideas have been misunderstood and are now being taken seriously. “A Quantum Mind,” New Scientist, January 20-26, 2024, 32-25.
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mental underpinning to all existence. Thus, physicalism entails panpsychism, the theory that the potential for consciousness is universal.365
For our purposes, it does not really matter whether a purely reductive or modified emergent argument based on reductive properties is used to explain consciousness.
What is important to understand is the inescapable fact that the potential for consciousness is fundamental. A physically reductive explanation, in which dead matter without mental properties somehow becomes conscious, is not viable nor is an emergent/materialist explanation that depends on magic.366 Instead, a theory of consciousness must begin with the realization that not only the potential for consciousness has existed from the beginning of the universe but also many important aspects of consciousness are in some way derived from this initial condition. By looking at transcendent experience this way, every Holy or numinous experience becomes an instance in which one has been granted an opening to the depth and mystery of Being, a source of wonder that has deep theological and philosophical implications.
It is also quite possible that free will is inherent to the nature of reality. Although physical reality appears determined at the macrolevel, conscious organisms exhibit varying degrees of freedom. The action of simple organisms, like worms, seem largely determined, but more evolved animals, such as dogs, monkeys, porpoises, and humans, exhibit varying degrees of freedom. Free will has been a contested concept hard to reconcile with a deterministic universe. But it is equally hard to convince people that their decisions are determined and not a product of their own free will.
Admittedly, many decisions are so closely intertwined with instincts that they are virtually automatic. When subjects have been asked to make decisions involving hand and eye movement, studies have shown that signals from the brain have already fired before the subject makes a conscious decision. The conclusion drawn from these studies is that the act of making a choice is illusory; the action to be taken has already been determined by the time the individual is conscious of it. The argument does not 365 Galen Strawson, Real Materialism and Other Essays, especially Ch. 2, “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism.” Strawson rejects emergence as “magical thinking” because he holds that the emergence of consciousness from materiality is not at all analogous to water emerging from hydrogen and oxygen molecules. In the latter case, once water is present, one can see how non-liquid molecules can arrange themselves in ways that produce the property of liquidity, but there is nothing in consciousness that corresponds to any complex arrangement of matter, unless some mental property or properties can be attributed to that matter.
366 This is the pejorative sense of “magic,” of course.
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carry over, however, when the decision process is of a higher order. For example, it would seem ridiculous to argue that decisions of the Supreme Court were predetermined. Simply declaring that they are predetermined through the accumulation of a vast number of autonomic actions is pure speculation for which there is no evidence. Doing so would be another case of magical thinking or blind faith.
Eddy Nahmias, professor of philosophy and neuroscience at Georgia State University, flatly denies that free will is an illusion. He says: First of all, [the existing evidence] does not show that a decision has been made before people are aware of having made it. It simply finds discernible patterns of neural activity that precede decisions. If we assume that conscious decisions have neural correlates, then we should expect to find early signs of those correlates “ramping up” to the moment of consciousness. It would be miraculous if the brain did nothing at all until the moment when people became aware of a decision to move.367
He notes that we have learned how to take simple and repetitive tasks and remove them from consciousness—such as hitting the ball in tennis, typing, driving a car—and if we did not do so we would be “bumbling fools,” thinking about which way to turn the wheel, which letter on the keyboard to hit next, etc. Yet we remain aware of what we are doing, so that we can correct mistakes. Conscious attention, such as that required for a Supreme Court decision, “is relatively slow and effortful. We must use it wisely.”368
It appears, at least at the macro level, that the behavior of matter in interaction with energy is deterministic. It is only with the appearance of conscious life forms that free will comes into play. If the physical universe is driven by deterministic forces, then free will, which depends on consciousness, can only be derived from Mind, the protoconscious ground of reality. It is not something that can be interjected into a deterministic universe at some time after the Big Bang.369
367 Eddy Nahmias, “Is Neuroscience the Death of Free Will?,” The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments, 334.
368 Ibid., 334. The Supreme Court example is ours.
369 Free will has never meant unconstrained choice. All choices are constrained by the conditions in which they are made. If there were absolutely no constraints, there would be only chaos and randomness, in which case free choice would be impossible.
Constraints limit choices, sometimes extremely, but free will is never wholly absent, a point argued at length by Existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre.
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As with free will, it can be argued that the capacity for sight is fundamental. The eye, retina, and nerve fibers leading to the optical center of the brain are all physical, but the act of seeing is a subjective property of consciousness. And like consciousness, the experience of seeing cannot be reduced to the laws of physics as currently understood.
Evolutionary biology adequately explains how the primitive eye first developed, starting with photoreceptor proteins that sense light. Once this capacity emerged, it enhanced the survival chance of organisms that had this sensitivity. But without the subjective experience of light, which participates in its own unfoldment, it is unlikely that the eye would have evolved much further. It is the expanded, subjective awareness of the environment, after all, that has survival value. Over the course of evolution, every species developed a type of eye suitable for it. Some even suggest that bats, using echolocation, may “see” the world through their keen sense of hearing. However sight manifests, seeing involves consciousness.
Intelligence, like sight and free will, we claim, is also a property of Mind, waiting from the beginning of time to be actualized. The degree and type of intelligence that an organism exhibits clearly depends on neurological structures, but intelligence is more than the result of computer-like circuits in the brain. Just as the evolution of the eye has optimized a certain spectrum of potential for seeing for each type of organism, the evolution of the brain has actualized the potential for the type of intelligence suitable for each species. In general, it can be said that mutations that actualize latent potential for mental functioning enhance chances for survival. Mutations that do not advance survival fade out. It is quite possible that there is a whole spectrum of potentialities that have never been realized on Earth. If we were to visit a distant planet with advanced life forms, we might be surprised by the variety of mental features that are unlike anything found here.
If functions like free will, sight, and intelligence are fundamental properties of reality, it can be said they act teleologically because the potential for their eventual emergence is hardwired into reality. The concept of teleology is a fraught one. The ancient Greek thinkers accepted one or another version of teleology, perhaps most famously with Aristotle’s final cause, the teleological element in his analysis of causation. For him, the oak tree is the final cause of the acorn—it is what an acorn strives to be, and not a pine or maple. As philosophy and science strove to provide rational explanations of the cosmos without invoking the intentions of the gods (or God), teleology increasingly became a contentious issue. If the cosmos has a purpose—
if it is going somewhere predetermined or somehow willed—then it is difficult to explain its purposeful nature without invoking some deific presence in the process. For the most part, science rejects teleological explanations, preferring instead to formulate regular laws and make predictions that can be confirmed or disconfirmed experimentally. Historically, it was important for science to rule out anything that
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looked like intention in the cosmos, anything that might suggest divine plans, divine will, or divine purpose.370
Prior to Darwin’s Origin of Species, the idea of evolution was entertained by various thinkers but difficult to accept, because it easily suggested intentional development of species, culminating (at least on earth) in the human being. When Darwin hit upon the concept of natural selection through random mutations supporting the survival of the species,371 it appeared that the incipient teleology problem in evolution had been solved, replaced by a blind evolutionary mechanism. Yet in recent times, evolutionary biologists have found it difficult to keep teleology entirely out of the picture, and even quantum theorists must face the issue. Biological evolution, now known as Neo-Darwinism, has yet to explain many features of consciousness in purely survival terms, and in physics the observer (who is ultimately a conscious observer, even if instruments record the data) cannot be removed from the quantum picture. Even though hard to explain, consciousness—or Mind—has a directive influence on experimental results. Just as subatomic particles combine to form matter as humans experience it, so Mind combines with matter in a way that allows consciousness to appear. Both require complex combinations under natural laws to set the conditions for their emergence. It is not quite clear at what point teleological factors begin to influence evolution, but by the time consciousness emerges, goal-oriented behavior is apparent.
A lion seeking prey may be driven by hunger but there is always an element of choice involved. Teleological factors most obviously come into play with higher levels of consciousness, but, as Jung demonstrated, they also need to be taken into account when attempting to understand the unconscious psyche, which only becomes conscious when sufficiently energized. The entire psyche—both conscious and unconscious portions—acts purposively even though the mysterious workings of the 370 That Newton saw God and theology in his work is widely known. But it is equally true that God or divine will played a role in science from the time of Francis Bacon forward.
Science historian John Headley Brooke shows in detail how science and religion, philosophy and theology interacted in many ways in the development of science. See his Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives for a detailed account of these interactions, in which science often supported religious views and religious thinkers supported science.
371 Darwin did not originally use the term “survival of the fittest” and did not much like it.
The term was coined by Herbert Spencer, whose philosophical views came to be known as Social Darwinism, a view that Darwin was not entirely happy with.
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unconscious are difficult to discern.372 Most importantly, Jung demonstrates that history itself is shaped by the teleological structures of the collective psyche.
Although psyche is usually used as a psychological term, Jung admitted that he had no idea what psyche is. Defining it as inseparable from life, perhaps its most fundamental characteristic, is useful because it provides a basis for the emergence of consciousness. While Jung thought the objective psyche acts with purpose, though not always consciously, its affect extends far beyond the neurological structures of the brain.373 We also think the objective psyche is interweaved with and thereby influences other life forms. Defining psyche as a basic component of all biological life also helps explain the many studies that indicate plants respond to stimuli from humans and other living organisms in their environment.374 It is also more useful than Barthes’s “X”
or Bergeson’s vitalism ( élan vital) because it comports with Jung’s objective psyche. So, if psyche is not only a defining characteristic of life, but acts purposely, we conjecture that there is some level of intention, though largely hidden, guiding the entire life process.
Not only is intentionality necessary for the survival of organisms but, Nagel claims, the structure of reality giving rise to consciousness is also inseparable from it. Positing an underlying intentionality, existing from the birth of the universe, is also necessary to explain perception, belief, desire and, finally, reason. “The generation of the entire mental structure,” Nagel further argues, “would have to be explained by basic principles, if it is recognized as part of the natural order.”375 This view fits nicely into our position that contends that all qualities of consciousness, like freewill, sight, and intelligence are due to the actualization of latent potential that has existed from the moment the universe exploded into existence.
Nagel uses the term “natural teleology” when referring “to the fact that human consciousness is not merely passive but is permeated, both in action and in cognition, with intentionality, the capacity of the mind to represent the world and its own aims.”
Natural teleology thus implies:
372 Jung found dreams to be revelatory in regard to the purposive activities of the unconscious, though being symbolic, they require rational analysis and often contain multiple meanings.
374 Zoë Schlanger provides an excellent review of many biology experiments that indicate such responses and interactions in The Light Eaters.
375 Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, 68.
PROTOMENTAL FOUNDATION OF THE COSMOS 191
…the universe is rationally governed in more than one way—not only through the universal quantitative laws of physics that underlie efficient causation but also through principles which imply that things happen because they are on a path that leads toward certain outcomes—notably, the existence of living, and ultimately of conscious, organisms.376
One might wonder if these teleological principles are equivalent to the quantitative laws of nature, which are expressed mathematically. Perhaps they can be seen as complementary in that when viewed psychologically they are intelligent principles; when viewed in terms of physics, they are the mathematical laws we recognize.
Nagel is uncomfortable with any teleological explanations that suggest divine intervention in evolution. He has been persuaded, however, that the idea of natural, teleological laws operating in the universe is coherent. Such a theory, he insists, “will hold that in addition to the laws governing the behavior of the elements in every circumstance, there are also principles of self-organization or of the development of complexity over time that are not explained by those elemental laws.”377 But if evolution is not purely random but has a broad or general direction, we are convinced that some type of inherent value must also be imbedded in the very structure of reality, which has ultimately drawn creation towards the development of life and consciousness.
Although Nagel avoids any reference to a divine source to explain the teleological laws and inherent value operating in the universe, it is hard to imagine how value exists without conscious intent. Or even more puzzling, as many philosophers and scientists have wondered: Why is there something rather than nothing? We are pushed to the limits of our imagination, just as Parmenides and many of the early Greeks were, when confronting the ultimate mystery of the universe. Unlike Nagel, we do not completely deny the possibility of some type of divine authorship, but if there is, it is inherently part of the mystery of Being.
People today are comfortable imagining the universe having come into existence with an explosive power that over time produced an unimaginable number of stars and galaxies. What is even more amazing is that time and space allegedly came into existence from nothing. Before the Big Bang there was no spacetime into which the universe could expand. This incredible story of creation, science tells us, is ruled 376 Ibid., 67.
377 Ibid., 59.
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entirely by the deterministic laws of physics.378 But then, after several billion years, the miracle of life arose on the planet Earth, soon followed by the appearance of consciousness. When contemplating this modern story of the universe with all its grandeur and mystery, one cannot help but feel a sense of wonder.
In the next chapter, “The Quantum Universe,” we further explore how philosophy is increasingly shedding light on the secrets of the universe, which has recently been postulated to exist as an integrated whole in which every part is mysteriously connected.
378 Physicist Lee Smolin, in The Life of the Cosmos, argues that the idea of fixed eternal laws of nature is no longer a useful assumption. He holds that we should think of the whole universe as evolving and this evolution includes the laws of nature and subatomic particles.
THE QUANTUM UNIVERSE
Great philosophical riddles lie at the core of present-day physics and most people, by now, are aware of their existence even if but a few have a precise idea of their nature.
Bernard d’Espagnat379
Yet, standing there, under the stars, I still felt that feeling that many humans have shared: that I was somehow one with the vastness beyond myself.
Is there a more daring, courageous, and flat-out overwhelming thought than to conceptualize “the whole material world,” everything from “celestial bodies” to “life upon the earth” and from the “nebula stars to the mosses on the granite rocks, “ as the great German naturalist and discoverer Alexander von Humboldt portrayed the universe, as “One”?
Heinrich Päs 380
In our view, Mind, as an underlying feature of all existence, is inseparably intertwined with the working of the entire Cosmos, existing in intimate relationship with matter, energy, spacetime. Each could then be conceived as having a unique set of properties that clearly distinguishes it from the others. Matter is that property that has mass; energy is that property that enables work to be done; spacetime provides a dimensional framework (space and time) for all extended entities, including the brain; and Mind is that property of the spectrum that under the right conditions is capable of becoming conscious.381 By defining Mind as a property of the universe, we avoid thinking of it as some mysterious substance or ghostly entity lurking behind matter.382
The question left unanswered is whether Mind, as pure potential, should be considered an inseparable part of Being itself or an attribute of Being on the same level 379 Bernard d’Espagnat, On Physics and Philosophy, 1.
380 Heinrich Päs, The One: How an Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics, 3.
381 Examples of source material used: On Physics and Philosophy by Bernard d’Espagnat, Philosophy of Physics by Tim Maudin, Mind and Cosmos by Thomas Nagel, Nature Loves to Hide by Shimon Malin, and Why does the World Exist? by Jim Holt. See bibliography for full information.
382 In his book Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence, James Bridle avoids the term ‘mind’ and uses the concept of intelligence in ways quite similar to our use of ‘mind.’ He shows the interdependencies and interconnections throughout nature, including human beings and even machines, as manifestation of intelligence at many scales, thereby making intelligence fundamental to reality.
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as matter, energy, and spacetime. While the laws of physics represent the potential from which the physical universe came into existence, Mind, as stated earlier, represents the potential from which consciousness evolved. Both are pure potential until realized within space and time. There is an unavoidable ambiguity here that we do not attempt to resolve. Mind seems to straddle the divide between its function as an attribute of Being, existing only as pure potential, and as a property of the physical universe interwoven in some explicable way with matter, energy, and spacetime.383 Of these three, spacetime is the best candidate because it is the only one thought to be continuous, thus having characteristics much like Spinoza’s universal substance.
Contemporary physics, however, has also raised questions regarding the fundamental nature of space. Some physicists think that space itself is quantized, a kind of quantum foam. If the fabric of space is thus broken into discrete units, as this theory suggests, then even space cannot be considered continuous. If matter, energy, and spacetime are all considered noncontinuous, then Mind and the rich diversity of consciousness can only be understood if nature functions like a hologram, in which the fragmented parts reflect the whole. Such a model of reality presumes the existence of a continuous background behind the reflected images much like the relationship existing between David Bohm’s (1917-1992) implicate and explicate order. Assuming Being is the innermost background of the universe, it therefore follows that it acts in the same way that Bohm’s implicate order does.
Put simply, Bohm held that there is an implicate order that underlies particles, fields, and even consciousness as experienced by individuals. This underlying order, according to him, is holographic in the sense that every point reflects the whole. The explicate order, which is empirically observable is said to unfold from the implicate order, so every aspect of the observable universe reflects the enfolded cosmos. Bohm’s theory was developed to explain the bizarre behavior of subatomic particles. Though challenged by many scientists, his view is consistent with contemporary physics. The implicate order in Bohm’s theory could just as well be conceived as a manifestation of Being itself which we assume is eternal, continuous, and unchanging.
Spinoza’s idea that each particle is nothing more than an instantiation of the universal substance goes far to resolve both Chalmer’s combination problem and the impossibility of reducing the richness of consciousness to infinitesimally small units.
383 In the spirit of a Judaic midrash or commentary on the Torah, we might say that when God said “Let there be light,” Mind was involved in the very act of creation, that is, present from the beginning, however that origin is understood. In the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament), this presence with God from the beginning is called Wisdom ( Proverbs, chapter 8); there is no wisdom without Mind.
But Spinoza’s universal substance is inconsistent with today’s understanding of the world. Bohm’s holographic model, which is mathematically consistent with modern physics, seems a better fit for envisioning reality as a unified whole. This view, we hold, also includes higher states of consciousness like love and spiritual experience, or even mystical states that inhabit a region of the mind which Henry Corbin (1903-1978)384 called the Imaginal Realm.
The medieval and Renaissance alchemists may not have been so wrong in thinking of the universe as a symbol or vast tapestry of symbols giving rise to the world. From their perspective the hidden nature of reality might be best understood as consisting of symbols that point to something more basic, which is not discernible to the intellect.
Symbols, unlike the intellect, open the heart to a whole spectrum of feelings. Leaving symbols, and by inference love and sacred experience, out of Being, is a fundamental misconception that distorts our understanding of the structure of reality. In their absence, one is left with only a material existence devoid of value, thereby denying what many thoughtful people from cultures around the world have recognized. As many older traditions taught, opening our hearts to the transcendent is the highest achievement of culture. The sacred, so fundamental to human life in the past, must now be reclaimed for living full, meaningful lives.385
In the following discussion, whenever we reference Spinoza’s universal substance it therefore should be understood roughly equivalent to Bohm’s holographic model. This revised view of Spinoza’s philosophy can then be recast in terms consistent with modern physics, which in many ways, supports his revolutionary understanding of the universe. Before Einstein, space and time were treated separately, but because his General Theory of Relativity revealed their interdependence, they are now treated together as a four-dimensional matrix (spacetime), at least on the cosmic scale. Gravity, which Newton only reluctantly considered a force acting over distance, was redefined by Einstein as a curvature in space, which shapes the trajectory of a moving body in a 384 Henry Corbin was a professor at the Sorbonne and the University of Tehran, known for his work on what has been called Islamic mysticism. He invented the term “imaginal”
to characterize visionary experiences that he believed were real, though not empirical in any ordinary way.
385 The statistically minded thinker knows that when all history and all present humanity are taken into account, the materialist position is the outlier, not the norm, in human thought.
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way that is almost indistinguishable from Newton’s invisible force.386 The curvature is produced by the presence of a material mass and is proportional to it. From this formulation it becomes clear that matter and the four-dimensional matrix of spacetime are closely interrelated even though we perceive matter, space, and time as distinct properties of reality. Matter and energy are also interchangeable as shown by Einstein’s famous formula E = mc² (Energy = mass times the velocity of light squared).
The interrelationship between these fundamental structures of reality—spacetime, mass, and energy—suggests, as Spinoza argued, that all of them are instantiations of a universal substance.387 We hold that Mind is just as fundamental, and just as intimately involved in matter, energy, and spacetime as the latter three are with one another. We experience all of them as separate, but at the deepest level they are unified.
Anthony Kronman insists that the only metaphysical system consistent with Einstein’s general theory of relativity is Spinoza’s doctrine of modes. He writes: In the general theory, gravity becomes the shape of a region of space… On this view, it is no longer correct to say that objects are in space. They are the space they occupy, or more exactly, modifications of it. But if an object is just the bending of space in a region, the metaphysical distinction between objects and space, which Newton takes for granted, is no longer sustainable … and it is precisely here that Spinoza’s physics, with its eccentric view of bodies as modes of substance, begins to look more attractive.388
Kronman’s view of Spinoza’s universal substance would also be applicable to Bohm’s theory of the implicate order.
Quantum entanglement is another phenomenon that defies our normal way of understanding the nature of particles existing within an extended space. Entanglement links two particles such that when one particle is measured, the state of the second particle is immediately known. For example, if one of the entangled particles has a 386 Newton was not happy thinking of gravity as action at a distance, but his view of space as something like graph paper on which objects are located did not allow for an alternative. He might have been delighted by Einstein’s view of space.
387 Although Spinoza used the term “substance” we favor Kronman’s idea of fields or the abstract concept of a unified whole in which matter, energy, and spacetime are all attributes. We prefer this more abstract terminology to Spinoza’s idea of a unified substance, which sounds too much like an invisible ether-like material that pervades the universe.
388 Kronman, Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan, 640-641.
clockwise spin, the spin of the other particle, when measured on the same axis, will be found to be counterclockwise. If the spin of one of the particles is reversed, the spin of its partner will reverse also. The reversal occurs instantaneously regardless of the distance by which the particles are separated, what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” Each particle “knows” immediately that the spin of the other particle has been reversed even though there is no means for such information to be communicated between them.389 In the Newtonian world where particles are separated by space, there is no possibility for this phenomenon to occur, because, as Einstein showed, nothing—
including information—can travel faster than the speed of light. But in Spinoza’s world there is only one substance, so everything is intimately and instantaneously connected.
It is as if the entire universe is entangled, a view currently entertained by some cosmologists.
Quantum physics, Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and quantum entanglement seem to suggest that the universe is best understood as a whole, in which matter, energy, and space-time are not viewed as separate substances but rather interdependent properties of the whole universe. Spinoza thus seems to have been prescient in his conception of material objects as instances of modes within this totality.
We are not suggesting that Spinoza’s metaphysics is a perfect fit for modern physics, though it is suggestive, but that his vision is compatible with conceiving reality as a continuous whole, with spacetime, matter, energy, and Mind being interdependent properties of it.390
We have engaged in this somewhat complex and very abbreviated discourse on physics with a specific goal in mind, that is, to view reality as an interconnected and 389 Bub, Jeffrey, "Quantum Entanglement and Information", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL =
<https:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/
sum2023/entries/qt-entangle/>.Accessed 11/10/2019.
390 For some decades, physics have sought a theory of everything, in which the four fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces) are traced back to unity, a view redolent of monism. Gravity has presented a difficult problem for this effort, that is, combining relativity theory with quantum theory has proven elusive. We are adding Mind into this mix, and we doubt a theory of everything (physicists’ Grand Unified Theory or GUT) is possible without Mind and without philosophy.
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continuous whole.391 To fully appreciate how Mind can be conceived as fundamental to reality, it is important to distance ourselves from the classical view of matter in which empty space separates objects. In such a universe every particle exists in isolation except through the exchange of energy, whether in the form of inertia, electromagnetic radiation, or gravity. Consciousness is similarly reduced to electro-chemical interactions between molecular structures in the brain unless one resorts to God for an explanation. A molecule, as we have repeatedly said, is simply too elementary to be a source for consciousness, so where does it come from? The best answer to this question is to think of the molecule, along with everything else in the universe, as related through entanglement in which each particle would inherit properties of the whole. This is the approach Heinrich Päs, a German theoretical physicist whom we mentioned earlier, takes regarding quantum mechanics. In this theory, every particle is considered an instantiation of Being or Parmenides’ One. This is also true for black holes and virtual universes.
According to a contemporary view in physics, which is currently beyond any experimental or observational confirmation, whenever a choice is made, all the possible options are realized simultaneously because the universe splits into other universes that actualize each option. Multiple universes are implied in the mathematics of relativity theory, which is based on experimental evidence showing that conscious choice affects physical outcomes, at least at the quantum level. These proposed universes cannot communicate with one another and so cannot themselves be observed. Perhaps this endless “splitting” really means that the potential options remain as potentials, much like an echo, outside spacetime, with only one being actualized in spacetime. If so, the universe in which we live is the only actualized one.392
391 A clear account of Einstein’s and Bohr’s differing views of reality and their failed attempts to resolve them is found in Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality. Bohr held that science could not give a description of reality but only of predictable measurements, while Einstein argued that science is—or should be—descriptive of reality. With the general acceptance of the Copenhagen interpretation, Einstein seemed to have lost the debate, though more recent developments suggest that his view is again gaining strength.
392 Debate continues amongst physicists regarding the predictions of mathematics. Since some such predictions have led to the discovery of what was mathematically predicted, many scientists believe that every mathematical implication must be actualized in the universe or multiple universes. Other scientists hold that a mathematical prediction does not guarantee any such actual existence, and that only experiments constitute evidence of existence.
Instead of blindly accepting the seemingly bizarre possibility of infinite universes, Päs searched for a more general explanation that is experimentally verifiable. He first examined the counterintuitive nature of entanglement, in which experiments demonstrate the interdependence of entangled particles regardless of the distance separating them. From these findings he next theorized that this seemingly impossible fact of nature is ultimately resolved by considering entanglement an integral part of a unified universe in which everything is connected through the Einstein-Rosen bridge, a term popularly referred to as a wormhole.
This is also true of black holes, which likewise appear to be entangled. This is the position that the theoretical physicists Maldacena and Susskind take.393 They argue that the theory of entangled particles, connected by wormholes, is the basis for not only unifying Einstein’s general theory of relativity with quantum physics, but also for addressing quantum gravity.394 By connecting diverse aspects of the universe with wormholes, they were thus able to unify all three: Einstein’s general relativity theory, quantum physics, and quantum gravity. Drawing on Maldacena’s and Susskind’s radical thesis, Päs writes:
… the wormhole “is a manifestation of entanglement,” meaning that black holes connected by worm holes are entangled, and entangled black holes are connected by worm holes. They [Maldacena and Susskind] “go even further and claim that even for an entangled pair of particles, in a quantum theory of gravity there must be a Planckian bridge between them, albeit a very quantum-mechanical bridge which probably cannot be described by classical geometry.”395
In summary, any entangled quantum system whether considered to consist of widely separated pairs of particles or multiple universes, can be understood as fundamentally connected by wormholes. Such interconnection implies a profound unity to all existence, whether within our actualized universe or across multiple universes—if, in fact, they exist. From this perspective Päs believes all reality can be best understood as being derived from a universal One, as Parmenides and Plato claimed nearly two and half thousand years earlier. This insight has also been upheld by all mystics throughout the ages. Päs concludes by saying: 393 Päs, The One, 238.
394 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ER_%3D_EPR
395 Päs, The One, 239.
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The main message of this book is that monism is—indeed—fruitful for science: monism follows straightforwardly from quantum mechanics taken seriously; it provides a philosophical framework for most recent work in quantum gravity and a new perspective needed to approach the fundamental problems in particle physics and cosmology. As I hope I have succeeded in pointing out, there exists solid evidence that monism is a least a promising hypothesis. 396
Quantum physics has not only shown that monism can be imagined but is likely true, especially now that classical physics has been found to be inadequate for understanding the world around us. In its place, a monistic view of the universe, much like Päs describes, is gaining acceptance. This perspective is roughly consistent with Bohm’s holographic universe and Spinoza’s concept of a universal substance.
If the concept of monism is to bring the world closer together, it must be paired with the feeling of sacredness—numinosity—or it will be just another concept that goes against our spiritual longings. This is why Paul Tillich’s definition of God as the ground of Being, which is comparable to the One of theoretical physics, is highly relevant to the overall purpose of our book. Päs considers it high time to claim, “the One” back for science, so, as the German Philosopher Friedrich Schelling wrote, we can “lend wings to physics once again.”397
Higher states of consciousness seem to anticipate future directions in the evolution of humanity. For example, spiritual disciplines designed to awaken hidden potential for revelatory epiphanies, though having no obvious direct survival value, are found throughout the world in every culture. The underlying motivation driving individuals to seek these higher states appears to be teleological in nature, since it is clear that humans seek more than mere survival and reproductive success.
The last chapters of our book explore Paul Tillich’s theology and Carl Jung’s psychology of religion, both of whom rely on the revelatory power of numinous experience to provide a means for satisfying the fundamental human need for higher states of consciousness. Every numinous experience, after all, opens upon levels of reality quite different from those that could otherwise be imagined. But before examining their respective philosophies, we first examine the nature of numinous experience more closely.
396 Ibid., 239.
397 Ibid., 290.
Nonetheless, no matter how imaginative or creative our conception of reality is, humanity will never fully resolve the mystery that surrounds creation. There is the old story of the dance of the seven veils. As the dancer removes a veil, there are veils behind, and as she continues to remove them in anticipation of her showing everything, she subtly sees to it that that there is always another veil to remove. She heightens anticipation but never actually reveals herself. Being is something like that, obscured by its attributes. As the Neoplatonists said of the gods, Being reveals and hides herself simultaneously, encouraging us to penetrate her mystery. But we can never fully understand her most intimate truths. Or in hindsight, as Einstein eloquently expressed:
To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself to us as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—
this knowledge, this feeling is at the centre of all true religiousness.398
398 Albert Einstein, “Strange is Our Situation Here on Earth,” quoted by Armstrong, 64, from Jaroslav Pelikan, ed., The World Treasury of Modern Religious Thought, 225.
BEING AND THE NUMINOUS
From above it is not bright;
From below it is not dark;
An unbroken thread beyond description.
It returns to nothingness.
The form of the formless,
The image of the imageless,
It is called indefinable and beyond imagination.
Tao te ching399
Man does not dwell in pure immediacy; he lives in a world of symbolic forms. Transcendence can appear on the human plane only through these forms; it cannot appear directly because it transcends by definition the plane’s spatio-temporal categories.
Huston Smith400
In the last two chapters we emphasized that all aspects of consciousness, like free will and the capacity for sight, have evolved from the same hidden potential that first gave rise to the universe. It thus follows that the potential for numinous, transcendent experience is also an inherent feature of reality. This line of reasoning challenges the materialistic orientation of our modern culture, which reduces love, beauty, and the spiritual realm to “nothing but” bio-chemical reactions in the brain. Instead, we believe transcendent experiences open the heart to the deep mystery of Being. It is also quite possible that this latent potential within the universe has been guiding us towards a future in which Christ’s message of love will be fully realized. This message is not exclusive to Christianity, of course, but is found in many religious traditions.
Romantic writers and poets such as Lord Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and their predecessor William Blake had long recognized that there is something behind conscious awareness, typically referred to as soul or spirit that oftentimes lifts the individual beyond the normal affairs of life. Aspiring to achieve this higher state, 399 Tao Te Ching, verse 14, trans. Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English. Jonathan Star’s Tao te ching: The Definitive Edition contains a different translation along with a verbatim translation that gives the range of meanings for each character in the text. Tao (dao) in Chinese philosophy is closest to our concept of Being.
400 Smith, “Introduction to the Revised Edition,” in Fithjof Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, xxv.
along with an emphasis on feeling, brings a closeness to visible and invisible nature, as Emerson so clearly expressed in his writings. By developing this innate capacity within themselves, the romantic writers sought to find meaning in life and the universe, and shunned mere information for its own sake. Although not closely aligned with traditional religion, their poetry and other writings were suffused with a visionary or transcendent quality. Such higher states of consciousness, they believed, reveal truths and spiritual insights not accessible to reason alone—a perspective recurring in the Western tradition from the ancient Greek thinkers down to the present.
Greatly influenced by the Romantic vision, the work of Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) reflects the transition going on within European culture at the beginning of the twentieth century. Religious scholarship owes much to his insights and his concept of the numinous, even though there has been vigorous debate concerning the exact nature of a numinous experience. Jung often used the term when describing powerful experiences, like “big dreams,” that arise from the archetypal depth of the psyche, while Tillich used the term interchangeably with the religious experience of the Holy.
Our use of the term “numinous” is close in spirit to the Romantic Movement’s pursuit of the transcendent. As such, not all numinous experience need be considered dramatic. They can, instead, be very subtle, but in every instance, consciousness is lifted to a higher level than typical of everyday life. We have broadened the term to apply to experiences with which we are all familiar, like love and beauty, as well as to the more dramatic ones, like the mystical.401 Any experience can be of a numinous nature if it has a transcendent quality. Otto’s concept of the numinous is less inclusive in that he was more interested in the nonrational and primitive nature of these dramatic epiphanies. But it is important to appreciate his understanding of the numinous before discussing, in the fifth and sixth parts of the book, how Paul Tillich and Carl Jung adapted his ideas to their own work.
In his book, The Idea of the Holy (German edition, 1917; English edition, 1923), Otto coined the term “numinous” to refer to that “deeply felt religious experience that is the innermost core of all religions.”402 Even though most religious scholars now recognize that such experiences can only be conveyed through symbols, Otto considered symbols somewhat removed from the primal nature of what he was trying to articulate. To give expression to this core experience, Otto found that modern language contains nothing 401 A number of thinkers have noted that when we think of numinous experience as being of something outside ourselves, we tend to speak in terms of “higher” and “lower,” but when we think of such experience as revelatory of something within, we speak of
“inner” and “deeper.” These terms, of course, are metaphorical.
402 Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 5–7.
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that fully captures the meaning he had in mind. He was thus forced by the limitations of language to invent the word “numinous” from the Latin numen. Numen is a Latin term for “a spiritual force or influence often identified with a natural object, phenomenon, or locality.”403 Because of its primal nature, the numinous can only be appreciated by those who have encountered it at some time in their lives. He therefore cautioned the reader who cannot recall a “deeply-felt religious experience” that they will likely not understand what he was attempting to convey.404
Otto wrote in the early twentieth century when European culture was undergoing an immense transition from a world situated in the Christian tradition to a secular culture that made space for great religious diversity, including the rise of ethical and spiritually sensitive forms of atheism as adequate alternatives to traditional faiths.
Greatly influenced by the Romantic vision of the liberal Protestant mind, he firmly believed in the evolutionary advance of culture and religion, while still respecting so-called primitive religion. But his highest devotion remained with Christianity. Along with many other scholars, including Paul Tillich, he affirmed that Christianity was the present culmination of religious sensibility.405 The intellectual and cultural climate in which Otto worked also inspired the modernist works of novelists including James Joyce, Marcel Proust, D.H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, and Thomas Mann, and, likewise, the composers Béla Bartók, and Arnold Schoenberg, and psychologist Sigmund Freud. This was a time of ferment when writers eagerly explored the nonrational and symbolic foundation of the psyche. This was also a period that had a powerful influence on Jung.406
Though appreciative of the Romantic vision, Otto’s concept of the numinous is far more primordial than the inspiring poetry of someone like Coleridge. The numinous, Otto said, cannot be defined using language, because it is sui generis, meaning it is a term which is irreducible and therefore cannot be defined by another concept. As such, the numinous “can only be evoked, awakened in the mind; as everything that comes
‘of the spirit’ must be awakened.”407 He attempted to evoke this sense of the 403 Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary.
404 Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 8. He actually says that they should read no further!
405 As noted in a previous chapter, Tillich’s views were undergoing a transformation late in life, in which he recognized the value and validity of non-Christian religious traditions.
His heart, however, remained wholly embedded in Christianity.
406 Sonu Shamdasani provides a detailed consideration of the books that Jung read, assimilated and reacted to in the course of his life in C.G. Jung: A Biography in Books 407 Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 7.
nonrational through analogies such as his term “creature-feeling,” which describes the feeling of someone overwhelmed by a revelation of divine power presenting itself as
“wholly other,” thus imbuing the individual with a sense of personal finitude and cosmic insignificance. Otto described its overwhelming effect on the individual as that of “a creature, submerged and overwhelmed by its own nothingness in contrast to that which is supreme above all creatures.”408 Such cosmic insignificance does not translate into a loss of vitality, however. In fact, as personal significance is diminished, a sense of wonder and awe replaces everyday concerns and a new sense of freedom is discovered.
The word “holy,” Otto explained, originally conveyed the same sense of uncanniness that he attempted to capture in the word “numinous:” a living force, an inexpressible nonrational power, experienced in relationship to the immediate sense of the Divine. Over time this experience was rationalized, filled in with “ethical meaning,” or what Otto called “the ‘schematization,’ of what was a unique original feeling-response, which can, in itself, be ethically neutral and claim consideration in its own right.”409 As the word “holy” became rationalized, the mysterious and often frightening quality of its original meaning was slowly tamed and aligned with the moral aspirations of Christianity. Otto was thus able to draw a sharp contrast between the original meaning of the word “holy” and its modern usage, which has come to suggest spiritual perfection and moral goodness.410
Otto further emphasized its primitive nature by equating numinous experience with the Latin phrase mysterium tremendum et fascinans, which is comprised of two distinct elements, tremendum and fascinans. The mysterium tremendum, an experience of awe best described as daemonic dread, is a chilling presence, often so overwhelming “that it seems to penetrate to the very marrow, making the man’s hair bristle and his limbs quake.”411 It has it’s “crude, barbaric” side but “it may be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious.”412 For this, Otto used the Latin term “fascinans,”
meaning fascination. Although the numinous can fill the heart with dread, he realized it has an equally potent charm that can captivate an individual with a “strange ravishment, rising often enough to the pitch of dizzy intoxication; it is the Dionysiac-408 Ibid., 10.
409 Ibid., 6.
410 Tillich’s theology is redolent with this earlier sense of the Holy.
411 Otto, The Idea of the Holy., 17.
412 Ibid., 12, 13.
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element in the numen.”413 Because of its Dionysian quality, the numinous is both terrifying and fascinating.
Stephen Beasley-Murray, in his book Towards a Metaphysics of the Sacred, treats the mysterium tremendum et fascinans as a coincidence of opposites, the fascinans being “the converse and contrasting side of the feeling of the tremendum.”414 From the Jungian perspective, the tremendum can be compared to the fear of annihilation sometimes felt by the ego when confronted by the overpowering numinosity of the Self, the organizing center of total psyche, including both its conscious and unconscious aspects. In extreme cases, the Self can manifest as an evil presence filling the individual with a sense of daemonic dread. Its assimilation into consciousness, however, lessens the feeling of dread by transforming the original sense of uncanniness or awe into something that is more expressible in rational form. Fascinans, on the other hand, is the healing energy of the deep psyche that conveys a sense of transcendence. Within Christianity, the two— tremendum and fascinans—evolved into the divine opposites of good and evil, which Jung conceived as an inseparable part of the God-image that dwells within each of us. We will explore his understanding of good and evil in greater detail throughout our discussion of Jung.
In her book Rudolf Otto and the Concept of Holiness, Melissa Raphael argues that to capture the full essence of what Otto means by the term “numinous,” his whole Christian/Lutheran background must be taken into consideration along with the whole of German theology.415 Paul Tillich owed his theology to this same tradition. For him, numinous or holy experience is equivalent to an ecstatic encounter with the essential ground of Being. Nature accounts for all ordinary experiences, but Tillich realized that every ecstatic encounter transcends our natural state. Thus, the “holy” is a bearer of unconditioned meaning that stands over and against the secular. In this encounter, Tillich added, “there is a feeling of ecstatic, mysterious fear,”416 which can be brought about through many facets of reality. But whatever the situation is that causes the transcendent feeling to arise in the first place, it only serves as a symbol for something that transcends the existential condition by pointing beyond itself to its true source, which he considered the foundation of one’s ultimate concern. Since it is “infinitely removed,” Tillich, in agreement with Otto, claimed this mysterious feeling is of 413 Ibid., 31.
414 Beasley-Murray, Towards a Metaphysics of the Sacred, 7.
415 Raphael, Rudolf Otto and the Concept of Holiness, 28.
416 Tillich, Systematic Theology, I, 66.
something “entirely other.”417 Both recognized that conceptual reason can never fully grasp the nature of the Holy. But while Tillich felt its mysterious quality could be approached through symbols, Otto maintained that its primal nature remains elusive, beyond even symbolic expression.
Otto, speaking as a Christian theologian and philosopher, had faith that “the numinous is no mere projection, but an objective datum of experience belonging to a
‘wholly other’ metaphysical reality whose presence can alone give rise to a numinous state of mind.”418 While everyday concerns are grounded in the natural world, the numinous partakes of divine essence and cannot, according to Otto, be reduced to or inferred from natural causes.419 Otto drew heavily on Immanuel Kant and Jacob Fries in defense of his position regarding the ontological status of the holy.420 According to Kant, rational ideas, such as wisdom, goodness, and truth, cannot be derived from sense-experience alone. Such ideas are a synthesis of “pure reason” and empirical knowledge. This assertion follows directly from the opening words to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason:
That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. For how is it possible that the faculty of cognition should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means of objects which affect our sense? But though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience.421
Otto thought that Kant’s defense of “pure reason” accounts for the rational component of the “holy,” but to understand its nonrational origin one must look deeper by going beyond Kant’s “pure reason” to a level of the psyche which is the source of mysticism, “the bottom or ‘ground of the soul’ ( Seelengrund).”422 For this, Otto turned to Jacob Friedrich Fries (1773 -1843) whom he had written about earlier in a book entitled The Philosophy of Religion based on Kant and Fries (1909). In this work Otto 417 Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 14. One thinks of the repeated injunction in the Hebrew Bible to “fear God,” and the claim in the Muslim Qur’an that God is as close as one’s jugular vein.
418 Ibid., 62.
419 Ibid., 10.
420 Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 112 - 116.
421 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 1. This, of course, counters the views of the Empiricists, discussed in chapter 4.
422 Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 112.
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had already laid the groundwork for his later analysis of Kant. In The Idea of the Holy he expanded on his original work by including the intuitive power of inner perception along with Kant’s a priori categories to account for the human capacity to perceive metaphysical truth. Otto felt that Fries’ philosophy, by extending Kant’s critique of
“pure reason,” to include the nonrational, validates first-hand religious experience, thereby demonstrating that numinous experience, by itself, is sufficient for deriving knowledge of God. Such experiences, Otto said, point:
… to a hidden substantive source, from which the religious ideas and feelings are formed, which lies in the mind independently of sense-experience; a ‘pure reason’ in the profoundest sense, which because of the ‘surpassingness’ of its content, must be distinguished from both the pure theoretical and the pure practical reason of Kant as something yet higher or deeper than they.423
By employing the philosophical insights of Jakob Fries, Otto was able to show that there is something about religion that cannot be investigated by normal empirical methods or rational analysis—whether philosophical, psychological, sociological, or anthropological—unless reason is supplemented by insights arrived at through inner perception of the sacred. Otto calls this type of contemplation divination, a faculty through which ultimate truth can be grasped.424 He affirmed that insight into ultimate truth, thus arrived at, “has nothing whatever to do with natural law.”425 That is to say, it cannot be derived from natural causes, nor is it concerned with belief, but only with transcendent experience. For it is one thing, Otto said, to believe in a reality beyond the senses but quite another to have an overpowering experience of the Holy, which confirms its numinous nature as an objective reality. We recall that Plato’s noesis is also an experience of transcendent reality, not just a belief in it. Likewise, we define the human soul as the source of these transcendent epiphanies. As such, the soul transcends the neurological structures of the psyche, existing instead as a direct manifestation of Being itself.
Divination is concretized by “schematization,” which, as mentioned earlier, elevates the vagueness of numinous feeling to a higher state of consciousness, providing an a priori structure by which the original experience can be integrated more fully into life.
Otto claimed that it is the task of theology to further religion in this way, for only when 423 Ibid., 113, 114.
424 Ibid., 144. Otto’s concept of “divination” expands its ordinary usage.
425 Ibid., 145.
revelation is embodied and integrated into a cultural, and given a conceptual, context can the numinous be understood. Schematization represents a movement toward consciousness, much like Jung’s process of individuation. The “curtain of mystery,”
Otto maintained, surrounding the Divine can never be drawn back completely but with “greater inward reflection and contemplation, the feelings become more objectively evaluated and more accurately penetrated by the appropriate pure a priori ideas of reason, morality, and the sublime.”426
The scholarly response to Otto’s work varied enormously. Otto’s interest in primitive religions and his translation of Hindu devotional texts set him outside the more conservative scholarship being conducted in German universities in which the Gospel was still considered the basis for theological work. Otto considered the Christian God to be a rational concept while “the divine in-itself is a fearfully nonrational numen.”427 This fact, he thought, is attested to by the primitive images that strike the modern consciousness as repellent. Yet, because of their numinosity, these fearful images arise from “genuine feelings of authentic religious awe.”428 Advances made in science and rational theology can therefore never serve as a substitute for religious experience itself. In this, Otto reflects the Romantic movement’s emphasis on experience and concern about the spiritless nature of “dead” science. The Idea of the Holy is, as Melissa Raphael explains, “an unequivocal expression of Romantic hostility towards modernity’s accelerating industrialization and its corrosion of religious values.”429
Many theologians were disturbed by Otto’s work, largely because numinous experience becomes what Mircea Eliade calls a hierophany, “indispensable for religion but without theological particularity.”430 The theologian Karl Barth, while appreciating the transcendental otherness of the numinous, insisted on the uniqueness of the Gospel. He worried that Otto’s broad approach to religion led to a lack of faith, while Otto thought the numinous prepared the ground for knowledge of God as revealed in the Bible.431 Otto’s concern was not only that science and secularism were eroding faith throughout the educated classes of Europe, but that a rationalized faith loses its vitality 426 Ibid., 14.
427 Raphael, Rudolf Otto and the Concept of Holiness, 12.
428 Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 62.
429 Raphael, Rudolf Otto and the Concept of Holiness, 2
430 Ibid., 12.
431 Ibid., 11.
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and ability to reduce “the darkness and confusion of life as lived.”432 Only by restoring the numinous and nonrational elements to religion, he felt, can life be breathed back into religious traditions. We agree, especially when the rational is so narrowly defined that intellectual arguments obscure or totally deny the mysterious nature of reality.
Though subject to numerous criticisms, there have been many who applauded Otto’s work, among them Gerardus Van der Leeuw, Mircea Eliade, Huston Smith, and Wilfred Cantwell Smith433 They all acknowledged that the numinous provides a common basis for understanding disparate religious views and different religions while not denying the uniqueness of each. It is the numinous experience itself, Otto maintained, and not scriptural accounts of Christ’s Incarnation or other revelations that reveals “the essence of what it is to be a human created in the image of God.” Such understanding, he reasoned, though limited by logical restraints, is possible because
“the soul represents a form of ontological continuity with divinity.”434
As we will see later, Jung was greatly indebted to Otto’s philosophy and his concept of the numinous, which helped him grasp the meaning of the Judeo-Christian tradition in relation to the unconscious and its numinous symbolic appearances in consciousness. His psychological approach was not bound by theology, so he was free to expand his characterization of the numinous beyond Otto’s definition while retaining much of the core of Otto’s work.
Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) appreciated Otto’s understanding of the relationship between the numinous and the metaphysical and the important role that symbols have in mediating between the sacred and profane world. Chair of the History of Religions department at the University of Chicago from 1958 until his death in 1986, he considered Otto’s insight to be comparable in scope and importance to “Bergson’s élan vital, Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, Levy-Bruhl’s investigations of what he called the prelogical, mystical mentality … as well as the artistic revolutions of Dadaism and surrealism.”435 While serving as chair of the department, he worked closely with Paul Tillich who taught at the University from 1962 until his death in 1965.
Both appreciated the importance of depth psychology for lifting the living symbol from the darkness into which it had been cast, giving it new meaning. Eliade used the term
“metapsychoanalysis” to describe such an endeavor, which he hoped would elucidate 432 Otto, Naturalism and Religion, pp. 5 – 7, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31794/31794-0.txt. Accessed 10/10/2016.Wi
433 Ibid., 16.
434 Ibid., 17.
435 Eliade, The Quest, 46.
the “theoretical content of the symbols and archetypes, giving transparency and coherence to what is allusive, cryptic or fragmentary”. 436
To think within the category of the holy or sacredness was, for Eliade, inescapably and essentially, metaphysical. Beasley-Murray agrees with him on this, claiming the holy by its nature draws the individual into questions regarding the nature of Being, the essence of existence, and the source of life’s ultimate meaning and purpose. He was also cognizant that a good metaphysical system must achieve a perspective from which dualistic polarities, opposites, contradictions, and paradox are embraced in a greater unity. Otto’s concept of the numinous, which by its very nature resolves such contradictions, thus qualifies as a starting point for envisioning a single reality that unites the whole of existence.437
Eliade understood, as did Jung and Tillich, that abstract thought fails to capture the nature of the holy without the use of symbols. In Images and Symbols, Eliade confirmed Jung’s discovery that archaic symbolism spontaneously arises within consciousness
“irrespective of race and historical surrounding.” 438 One might thus say, along with Eliade, that symbols ennoble the profane by suffusing and illuminating that which transcends understanding.439 When illuminated, the heart opens upon an existential truth that would otherwise be obscured by the contradictory nature of reality, often symbolized as a coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites). Attempts have been made by philosophers and metaphysicians to intellectually break through the
“veils” that obscure the mysterious reality underlying the coincidentia oppositorum, but, as Eliade realized, only symbols come close to succeeding. In a broad sense, as Jung observed, all psychic energy is a form of libido, numinosity representing its highest octaves. Highly charged symbols thus act to transform instinctual energy into what are often considered transcendent levels of experience, like beauty, love, and religious rapture.
The multivalent nature of the symbol, according to Eliade, serves to connect different levels of consciousness, each conveying a distinct meaning. Likewise, Jung felt symbols can act like a ladder, which, by ascending, leads towards absolute reality and a sense 436 Eliade, Images and Symbols, 35.
437 Beasley-Murray, Towards a Metaphysics of the Sacred, 93.
438 Eliade, Images and Symbols, 34, 35.
439 This view, of course, would be familiar to Neoplatonists and Renaissance philosophers such as Marsilio Ficino as well as numerous Medieval religious thinkers, though they all would give it an ontological meaning as well as psychological one. Jung attempted to stay within the compass of psychology.
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of the eternal.440 Unfortunately, science today plumbs the depths of nature exclusively to expose its material substrate, thereby robbing it of any sense of mystery or sacredness. But when nature’s wonder and mystery are perceived through imagination, its sacred dimension is discovered once again. Every aspect of nature, Eliade said, opens onto the mysterious miracle of life revealing “to man the nature of an absolute existence, beyond time, invulnerable to becoming.”441 Only by recovering this sense of the sacred can meaning be rediscovered today. It is here that depth psychology has much to offer.
Archaic societies needed access to sacred space, Eliade explained, to lift their vision above the oppressive monotony of daily life. For them, it was the only space that was ultimately real. All that surrounded it was considered a formless chaos oriented around a sacred center, the axis mundi, through which the tribal shaman communicated with divine reality.442 For this purpose, sacred shrines, sacred poles, and other symbols representing the axis mundi were erected. For, as Eliade contended: This is easily understandable, since every human being tends, even unconsciously, towards the Centre, and towards his own centre, where he can find integral reality—sacredness. This desire, so deeply rooted in man, to find himself at the very heart of the real—at the Centre of the World, the place of communication with Heaven—explains the ubiquitous use of “Centres of the World.”443
Yeats in his poem “The Second Coming”444 and Jung, in almost everything he said, would have agreed with Eliade on this point. In analytical psychology, the center is, of course, the Self, which is the organizing principle of the total psyche, indistinguishable from the image of God. Often, Jung said, images of the Self are “offered by the unconscious, which, independently of the conscious mind, rise up from the depths of 440 Ibid., 51
441 Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: Studies in Religious Symbolism, 156.
442 Ibid., 20.
443 Eliade, Images and Symbols, 54. One might recall the maypoles created by elementary school children of a couple of generations ago. The interweaving of streamers by circling students can be seen as representing the order brought by the pole (the center connecting the real with the mundane world). Recall Yeats’ poem in chapter 1, where
“the center does not hold.”
444 Quoted in its entirety in chapter 1, “Introductory Remarks.”
our psychic nature”.445 Being open to their healing power compensates for the pervasive feelings of alienation characteristic in this age of scientific skepticism when the reigning philosophy of materialism has so fully triumphed over religious and metaphysical truth. Metaphysics at one time provided a conceptual structure for imagining a center around which the soul could nourish itself. As we have seen, unfortunately, sacred space has been pushed to the periphery, and consequently, modernity has been plunged into an existential crisis. But Eliade realized that for those who, like Jung, still have religious sentiment, “the cosmos is a divine creation…
impregnated with sacredness”.446 Beyond the superficial and empirical understanding of reality that people often have today, there exists within each human soul an opening through which to experience the true depth of existence, which “simultaneously reveals the modalities of being and of sacrality”.447
To regain a sense of the sacred, Jung invited the disillusioned to search within where they are likely to discover that they are not empty vessels, but indeed, are impregnated with sacredness. At the center of the psyche, a holy flame (the Self) waits to free the burdened soul from the stifling narrowness of a profane worldview, which too often leaves individuals feeling disoriented and alone because there is no meaningful center around which they can orient their lives.
Mysticism, according to Otto, is a direct experience of the numinous during which the personal-self merges with a transcendent reality “at once absolutely supreme in power” and “wholly non-rational.”448 The mystical and numinous are united by a common ground but the key factor that differentiates the supernatural nature of the mystical state from other numinous experiences is the temporary loss of personal identity that mystics report. Otto therefore considered numinous states of consciousness to be of a higher order than mystical states because the personal is retained.449 He criticized mysticism for lacking the mediating factor of reason when 445 Jung, “Answer to Job,” CW 11, para. 757.
446 Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 116. There is a great difference between treating religious feelings, perceptions and sensibilities as adjuncts to daily life and experiencing them as pervading all aspects of one’s existence. Eliade is thinking of the latter situation.
447 Ibid., 117.
448 Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 22. Otto takes an ontological view which includes the psychological.
449 Some Eastern philosophies would dispute this distinction, such as Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism, understanding mystical states to be more profound than other numinous
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encountering the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. For without it, a numinous experience is more a state of possession than a conscious expression of the holy—a view, Jung would have readily endorsed.
Whether mystical or not, Jung would likely argue that any numinous experience can rob a person of their individuality by inflating the ego. “The essential thing,” he said,
“is to differentiate oneself from these unconscious contents by personifying them, and at the same time to bring them into relationship with consciousness. That is the technique for stripping them of their power.”450 Personifying numinous affect transforms what would otherwise be a vague feeling into a conscious thought, much like Otto’s schematization does. The mystical experience may transcend personal identity, but the more important question is whether it has a lasting effect on the overall psychological wellness of the individual. The act of personifying such an experience, Jung maintained, helps bring it down to earth where it can enrich the individual’s life. After all, the goal of individuation is to develop a sense of one’s unique identity unencumbered by unconscious affect. When one has developed a strong ego, numinous experience enriches the soul, nourishing the sacred depths, which in turn, purifies the mind. But it can also lead to fanaticism when the ego is weak and defenseless against the immense power of the unconscious. Freeing oneself from its possessive power is therefore a necessary step along the way to becoming a worthy receptacle for divine wisdom, the eternal Truth that has enlivened all religious traditions throughout history.
William James’ description of the mystical in his The Varieties of Religious Experience 451
includes examples from various religious traditions including the Sufi scholar and mystic Al-Ghazzali and Christian mystics like Saint Teresa and Saint Ignatius. At the end of his study of mysticism, James evaluated whether the mystic can make an authoritative claim for a reality beyond that which is revealed by the senses. He concluded that mysticism is as much a “direct perception of fact for those who have them as any sensations ever were for us.”452 But even though the individual having the experience has a sense of certainty, the mystical state is authoritative only for the individual who has the experience while remaining inconclusive for the outside observer. Their authority, James points out, is inconclusive because there is no states. Mystics report, after such transcendental experiences, that their ordinary selves are now transformed.
450 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 187.
451 James, The Varieties of Religious Experience.
452 Ibid. 423, 424.
unanimity regarding the nature of truth revealed. Each of the great religious traditions—Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism—are based on mystical insight, but each bear witness to a different truth.453 Obviously, mysticism does not reveal a universal truth that all can agree upon, but it does point to a psychological truth by which Otto defended his concept of the numinous.
Most of the criticism leveled at Otto follows from his attempt to use Kant’s categories of reason, supplemented by the philosophy of Jakob Fries, to argue that the numinous experience is an experience of God. James understood the fallacy of drawing such conclusions from experience alone. As James puts it: “I believe, in fact, that the logical reason of man operates in this field of divinity exactly as it has always operated in love, or in patriotism, or in politics, or in any other of the wider affairs of life, in which our passions or our mystical intuitions fix our beliefs beforehand.”454 Although a numinous experience does not reveal an objective truth, it can inspire people to continue seeking after the hidden depth within themselves.
One of the great problems in investigating mysticism is that accounts of mystical experiences cannot be readily duplicated. To gain greater insight, religious scholars typically compare and contrast the wide variety of mystical experiences found in the literature of religions throughout the world. But now psychedelic research has made possible the duplication and careful analysis of experiential states which share features of mystical states as reported by visionaries. Not only does this research seem to shed light on the nature of mystical experiences but also touches upon the mystery of Being.
Because of its importance, we briefly discuss the work of two prominent researchers: Stanislav Grof, author of LSD Psychotherapy and William Richards, a clinical psychologist at John Hopkins and author of Sacred Knowledge.
Stanislav Grof (1931- ) started his research on LSD and other psychoactive ingredients in 1954. At this time, he was working at the Psychiatric Research Center in Prague, capital of the Czech Republic. Later he moved to the United States where he continued his research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center and subsequently taught at the California Institute of Integral Studies. While in Prague, he directed psychiatric researchers, and then, after moving to the United States, led clinical LSD
psychotherapy research teams in Maryland. The years of research and repeated 453 Hick, in An Interpretation of Religion, argues throughout that there is no unanimity because each numinous experience is symbolically conditioned by the experiencer’s culture and is therefore a symbolic aspect or manifestation of ultimate reality. The Real (his term for the ultimate) may manifest as persona or abstraction, depending upon the whole nature of the experiencer.
454 James, 436.
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observations from thousands of therapeutic sessions helped Grof develop a precise map of the unconscious mind. “Whether the experiences produced by LSD are genuine mystical revelations or just very convincing simulations thereof,” Grof says, “they are certainly phenomena of great interest for theologians, ministers, and students of religion.”
Within a few hours, individuals gain profound insights into the nature of religion, and in many instances their purely theoretical understanding and formal belief is vitalized by a deep personal experience of the transcendental realms. This opportunity can be particularly important for those ministers who profess a religion, but at the same time harbor serious doubts about the truth and relevance of what they preach…. For them, the spiritual experiences they had in their LSD sessions were important evidence that spirituality is a genuine and deeply relevant force in human life. This realization liberated them from the conflict they had had about their profession, and from the burden of hypocrisy.455
It should be noted that these LSD sessions were closely supervised to ensure, as far as possible, that participants had something approaching a mystical experience. Street use of LSD, however, varies greatly in its effect because it lacks controls.
William Richards (1940- ), having formal training in theology and comparative religion, began his rigorous experimental work with psychoactive substances in the early sixties. While a graduate student of theology and psychiatry at the University of Göttingen in Germany in 1963, he agreed to be a volunteer in a research project designed to study the effects of psilocybin, the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms. The hope at that time was that such research would advance our understanding of psychotic states. He describes his experience as follows: Soon, I felt immersed in incredibly detailed imagery best described as Islamic architecture and Arabic script, about which I knew nothing.
Then (forgive the poetic license), I seemed to fully become the multidimensional patterns or to lose my usual identity within them as the eternal brilliance of mystical consciousness manifested itself.
Suddenly this consciousness was experienced as outside of time, a pinnacle from which history could be viewed. My awareness was flooded with love, beauty, and peace beyond anything I ever had known or wildly imagined to be possible.456
455 Grof, Stanislav, LSD Psychotherapy, 270-271.
456 Richards, Sacred Knowledge: Pyschedelics and Religious Experiences, xix.
While contemplating this experience a few days later, he imagined it was much like what Paul Tillich meant when defining God as the ground of being, a profoundly intense reality underlying the “entire phenomenal world….”457
In many of the sessions conducted at John Hopkins, psilocybin was used to induce a mystical experience. There are several substances that have similar effects, including the active ingredient in the Peyote cactus, DMT, the active ingredient in ayahuasca, and d-lysergic acid diethylamide or LSD. The term “entheogen” coined in 1979 by Carl Ruck, a professor at Boston University, is used by Richards to refer to all such psychedelic substances. The term means “generating God within.”
Many participants in these sessions experienced being grounded in or enveloped by a numinous presence beyond ordinary reality. Some used terms like Eternity or Infinity to describe it. Regardless of their religious orientation, these people reported having a unitive experience similar to what many mystics have written about when describing God. One of the most meaningful aspects of Richard’s career was administering entheogens to terminal cancer patients. When mystical experiences are induced for these patients, Richards reports, they almost always report a loss of fear of death and are often able to live out their lives more fully. We include here a portion of a report from his book, given by a thirty-one-year-old cancer patient suffering from advanced Stage IV lymphoma:
I first went to a place that seemed to completely lack the qualities of this world as we know it. I seemed to transcend time and space and I lost complete identification with the “real” world. The experience seemed to me to be as if I was going from this world back to another world before this life had occurred…. When I was there everything seemed to make sense…. It was a very beautiful world, one in which love was very much a part…. The basic theme that I perceived…was that life continues to go on and we are basically some form of essence from a Supreme Being and we are part of that Supreme Being…. I don’t have the fear of death that I once had…. I have found that everyday living seems to be much more enjoyable….458
Although patients may lose their fear of death, they are not necessarily convinced of personal immortality, that is, the survival of the ego. “Rather, they tend to report a conviction that Eternity, or Infinity, a state of consciousness outside of time, is so unquestionably real to them that it does not matter one way or another whether the 457 Ibid., xx.
458 Ibid., 48.
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everyday personality survives when the body stops functioning and decomposes.”459
In this, they are in agreement with Buddhist philosophy. Mario Beauregard documents similar experiences and resulting attitudes in his study of near-death experiences (NDEs) and neurophysiological studies of Carmelite nuns. Neither, of course, involved entheogens.460
When one has a numinous experience, whether mystical in nature or not, there is a sense of deep interconnectedness uniting the individual with all of reality. In this regard Richards discusses Plato, the Neoplatonic theory of Plotinus, the image of the Hindu god Kali, and the “bejeweled web or net of Indra, the Vedic Lord of Heaven, in which we all participate.”461 In this mythic metaphor, Indra’s net, like that of ancient fishermen, has a jeweled bead at each crossing of the vertical and horizontal lines, so that any force on any bead affects the whole net. This image suggests both the unity of existence and the influence of each upon all.
In ordinary usage, references to love and beauty may refer to a wide range of feelings, but when magnified by the numinous they take on a transcendent quality: love being the experience of the numinous in relationship to others and beauty being the experience of the numinous in relation to aesthetics. In both cases, the experience transcends the mundane conditions of life. Although mystical experiences can radically transform the lives of individuals, most people will not experience such exalted states. Yet often numinous experience is subtle. A walk in the woods, and suddenly consciousness expands, and we are lifted to a transcendent state for just a few moments. It is this type of numinous experience that we feel has the greatest spiritual value for most people. While we sometimes have ecstatic experiences that are truly profound, the soul is more generally nurtured by the subtle openings to the transcendent that surrounds us every day. This is the spirit of the Romantic Age to which Ralph Waldo Emerson was an important contributor.
Emerson, whom we discussed earlier, most valued the “’holy and mysterious recesses of life,’ at the depth of which lay the foundations of culture and the limits of human consciousness.” 462 He believed the source of this foundation is hidden in prehistory, and only later found its way into the sacred texts of all the major religions.
459 Ibid., 48.
460 Beauregard, The Spiritual Brain, especially chapters 6 and 9.
461 Richards, Sacred Knowledge 49.
462 Geldard, The Esoteric Emerson: The Spiritual Teaching of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 2.
Emerson incorporates Buddhist and Hindu texts, as well as the wisdom of Greek culture, especially the Neoplatonists, into his vision of the world.463 But for him, ancient wisdom was but a springboard for his personal gnosis which was based on an intuitive knowing that welled up within him. This is best conceived as a divine presence that cannot be taught or described using ordinary language, nor can the knowledge gained be passed on to others “except by a re-creation in the moment of the experience of knowing.”464 He realized that he could do little more than convey the experience in ways that would inspire others to follow their own paths to the ancient wisdom that has nurtured the highest accomplishments of civilization. Emerson’s gnosis shares many characteristics with Otto’s description of the numinous. Unable to describe the experience directly, he resorts to poetic expression: Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.465
Emerson’s metaphor of becoming a transparent eyeball is reminiscent of mystical reports found throughout the world of individuals and saints ascending into a transcendent state from where they can see the unity of everything. Such experience is universal. Plotinus calls it an Intellectual Principle leading us to those higher laws which shine through a momentarily transparent universe. Reminiscing on such universal experiences, Plotinus said:
So we are left wondering whence it came, from within or without; and when it has gone, we say, “It was here. Yet no; it was beyond!” But we ought not to question whence; there is no whence, no coming or going in place; now it is seen and now not seen. We must not run after it, but fit ourselves for the vision and then wait tranquilly for its appearance, as the eye waits for the rising of the sun, which in its own time appears above the horizon—out of the ocean, as the poets say—
and gives itself to our sight.466
463 Ibid., 14-15.
464 Ibid., 64.
465 Ibid., 70.
466 Ibid., 74.
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Emerson’s Idealism was based on a love of wisdom, which was for him—as it was for Plato and Plotinus—a way of removing the clouds of illusion and seeing through to the deepest truths. The best and happiest moments of his life may well have been those “delicious awakenings” through which he was able to perceive a “world substantially more ‘real’ than what the senses perceive.”467
While Emerson discovered wisdom through nature and his pursuit of philosophy, there are many paths leading to the same end. A brief glance at various religious and philosophical traditions shows that throughout history there has recurred the idea that the human mind is somehow two-fold, consisting of a higher and a lower dimension.
The latter is the discursive, calculating mind that negotiates the world of daily life with its challenges and obligations. The higher touches upon the more universal (and hence abstract) underlying nature of the world. We have seen that Plato makes such a distinction in his levels of awareness, relegating opinion to the lower and universal principles to the higher, and then pointing even beyond that to intuition or universal perception ( noesis). Plotinus, in his discussion of the Intellect, does something quite similar. Both Hindu and Buddhist religious philosophies present views of mind and consciousness too subtle to go into here, though we note that all of them include programs and techniques for rising to higher states of consciousness and bringing those states into daily awareness. Perhaps the distinction was most sharply drawn by the Theosophist H.P. Blavatsky (1831-1891), who in her many writings used the terms
“lower Manas” (mind), “higher Manas” and “Buddhi” to distinguish discursive thinking from the apperception of universal principles. The intrusion of higher into lower consciousness may be seen in many ways, such as, an experience of the numinous, as a mystical event, or a revelation from a divine source. Though views and expositions vary widely, the sense that consciousness exists on many levels is virtually universal in the cultures of the world. All hold that the higher levels draw closer to Being, though Being itself remains unknowable except symbolically.
Both Paul Tillich and Carl Jung also imagined a future time when the dark forces of evil will eventually be conquered, ushering in a new eon when the highest potential within humanity will be realized. Tillich couched this hope within Christian message of love. Jung based such hopes on his research into the psyche and his concept of wholeness, the goal of his individuation process. Wholeness, fully realized, represented for Jung a life free of self-destructive entanglements with the unconscious, one that is lived deeply with a sense of joy and spontaneity.
467 Ibid., 78, 79.
They were both fully aware of the existential crisis that now threatens humanity.
They also understood, as we do, the importance of recapturing a sense of the sacred through which meaning can once again be found in this technological age of hyper-individualism. With this in mind, we now turn to them to provide a unified view of reality, combining the inner world of subjective experience with the objective world of nature. While Tillich understood God as the creative source of life, it was Jung who, we feel, gave substance to these ideas, drawing heavily on the creative nature of the objective psyche.
Part V
Paul Tillich and Carl Jung
INTRODUCTION TO PAUL TILLICH
AND CARL JUNG
By far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.
William James468
According to the teachings which shaped me, a pluralistic community, in which many stories coexist, was something to be tolerated either as an unavoidable evil or as a step along the way to the utopian moment when the world will embrace one viewpoint.
Don Hanlon Johnson469
In the first part of the book, we examined the nature of Being and the rise of enlightened reason, beginning with the Greeks, who used reason to explore nature.
Their emphasis on the power of reason came to define the uniqueness of Western culture throughout the next 2,500 years. But today, we are beginning to understand, like Otto did, that more is needed than an intellectual understanding of human nature to realize its full potential. At a time when Christianity is in decline, a new understanding of religion appears the only suitable antidote for our excessive reliance on reason to awaken to the beauty and meaningfulness of life in today’s world. For this, we have chosen Paul Tillich’s theology and Carl Jung’s religious psychology.
Since the time of the Renaissance, the conflict between religion and science has worn on, sometimes raging, and less often just smoldering, until many engaged Christians as well as scientists were simply worn out by the seemingly endless skirmishes.
Nothing, it seems, had been resolved. While it is relatively easy to identify the details of the battles fought between these two magisteria470 or universes of truth, it is 468 Quoted in Sheilla Jones, The Quantum Ten: A Story of Passion, Tragedy, Ambition and Science, 221.
469 Johnson, Body, Spirit and Democracy, 2.
470 Magisterium refers to a legitimate domain of authority. Evolutionary biologist and paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould argued that science and religion were distinct magisteria and were not at war since one dealt with empirical facts and theories and the other with value and meaning. He acknowledged that they bumped up against one another and both had to be careful not to encroach on the other’s territory. He was
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immensely difficult to resolve them individually or collectively. The Big Bang theory, string theory, and many other ideas in science contain an element of faith, just as religion does. If the assumptions are in error, what is observed is distorted. As Einstein said, the answers one gets depends on the questions one asks.
An underlying assumption of materialism is that every living species owes its existence to natural selection driven by deterministic forces—though we may not know at present what all those forces are. Although supportive of evolutionary theory, we have taken a different position, claiming that reality is ultimately derived, not from material causes alone, but also from the nature of Being. Instead of reducing our most cherished feelings—love and beauty, for instance, as well as transcendent experience—
to the level of cellular activity, these higher spiritual feelings are seen as inherent qualities existing as pure potential from the very beginning of the universe. Imagining the ground of reality in this way is consistent with Paul Tillich’s definition of God as the ground of Being. Admittedly, a secular approach to living a meaningful life may suffice for some, but many people today need a spiritual foundation, like Tillich’s, to give their life a sense of purpose and meaning.
The existentialist Albert Camus (1913-1960) witnessed people dying because they had lost a sense of meaning for their life. From this he concluded that “the question of life’s meaning is the most urgent question of all.”471 Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was also well aware of how important a sense of meaning is to life. At the age 50 he awakened, he said, to find “the ground on which I stood was crumbling, that there was nothing for me to stand on, that what I had been living for was nothing, that I had no reason for living….”472 C. G. Jung wrote: “Absence of meaning in life plays a crucial role in the etiology of neurosis. A neurosis must be understood, ultimately, as a suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning….”473
Religion has always served to convey a deep sense of personal meaning, but as traditional religious institutions have weakened, many in the West are turning to Eastern religion or seeking inspiration from the New Age movement. We applaud these approaches to the question of meaning, but we feel, as Jung did, that many people challenged on this view by both scientists and theologians. Neuroscience, quantum physics, psychology and mystic experiences all push the boundaries he sought to establish. His brief essay on the topic, “Nonoverlapping Magisteria” can be found at www.stephenjaygould.prg/library’gould_noma. Accessed 4/9/2017.
471 Camus, cited in Irvin Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy, 420.
472 Tolstoy, cited in Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy, 420.
473 Jung, cited in Jaffe, Myth of Meaning, 130.
INTRODUCTION TO PAUL TILLICH AND CARL JUNG 227
living in the West today, who feel their lives lack meaning, would profit by drawing inspiration from the fountain of wisdom that originally inspired Western culture.
Nonetheless, even with such a grounding, a radical reexamination of cherished beliefs may still be demanded of the individual. We are at a turning point in our culture, and the outworn formulas used in the past may no longer satisfy the soul. A new vision is required but it cannot be built without establishing it on a solid philosophical foundation based on historical precedence. We therefore believe a future religion grounded on Tillich’s theology, supplemented by Jung’s psychology, and inspired by the Sermon on the Mount could enrich Christianity at this time when its traditional beliefs are being seriously questioned.
We began our inquiry into the nature of Being by first examining Greek philosophy to establish a basis for conceiving life in a way that more fully satisfies the longing of modern people for purpose and meaning. Our discussion of modern philosophy—the Enlightenment, Idealism, and Romanticism—and the chapters on consciousness and the numinous, built on that foundation. Now it is time to explore new ways to reconceive religion as a vital source of life’s purpose and meaning in this turbulent age of spiritual crisis and skepticism. We feel that Tillich’s theology and Jung’s psychology are especially helpful for those who are still seeking spiritual nurturance but have abandoned formal religion altogether.
Tillich’s theology grew out of his theoretical understanding of Being. But because we cannot see beyond the outer reaches of the psyche, something comparable to Jung’s analysis may be all that can be empirically verified about its nature. Either way, Being is depicted in the following chapters as a creative potential, ever existing as a blueprint and force within the world, working ceaselessly toward an enlightened future. Tillich frames this expectation within the framework of Christianity while Jung conceives it psychologically, a teleological pattern governing the unfolding course of history.
Nonetheless, both scholars sought satisfactory answers for the religious crisis that is increasingly disrupting the lives of people around the world. As such, their respective works shine an important light on the future of religion. 474
As remarked earlier, Tillich’s definition of God as the ground of Being captures three essential ideas concerning God that are important for the future of religion. The first is the idea that God is not a Divine Being but Being itself, and therefore the ground of individual existence. Eastern traditions have no problem thinking of God as a symbol for the transcendent ground of reality, but Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have 474 Jung seems not to have known anything about Tillich, while Tillich was well aware of Jung.
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typically conceived God as an omnipotent being whose love is at the heart of their religions. As comforting as this idea is, it is increasingly at odds with science and the modern mind. Tillich’s second essential idea for the future of religion is that God, as the ground of Being, is the source of the Holy or numinous. The numinous, however conceived, inspires reverence and worship, awakening the mind and heart to the transcendent. Without it, religion is too often reduced to a list of dogmatic assertions derived from ancient scripture and traditional rituals that over time lose their power to inspire devotion. While the Holy inspires reverence for the sacredness of reality, it does not provide a meaningful role for God to play in human affairs.
Tillich’s third essential idea regarding God addresses the creative role God has in human affairs. Tillich’s definition of God is often criticized as being little more than a form of pantheism, but by equating God with Being itself, he envisions God as far more than a cosmic background for the evolution of the universe. Tillich’s God is also active in the teleological sense, not only in guiding the evolution of life but by influencing both the course of history and individual salvation. While the laws of physics are deterministic,475 God’s creativity draws all of nature, especially humans, toward higher states of existence. Jung attributes a similar level of creativity to the objective psyche but studiously avoids making grand metaphysical claims. Religion, on the other hand, needs a metaphysical foundation for people to feel that their life is grounded in something greater than themselves. Paul Tillich’s theology does this by affirming the metaphysical and creative foundation of the individual psyche, thereby imbuing individual existence with meaning and purpose.
Instead of understanding the core myths of a particular religion literally, religious scholars and depth psychologists, including Tillich and Jung, are increasingly interpreting religious doctrine symbolically.476 A modern religion striving to be consistent with scholarly pursuit may choose to transcend mythopoeic language altogether, as Unitarian Universalists sometimes do, but whatever form it takes, we argue that a feeling of transcendence (the numinous), accompanied by compassion and personal integrity, are fundamental and must be embraced along with a metaphysics 475 Determinism as found in classical physics seems not to apply at the quantum level and so has been a topic of much discussion and debate in quantum physics over the last century. One might think of the Hindu primordial manifestation of the ground of Being as Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, where Brahma creates, Vishnu sustains, and Shiva transforms or destroys and regenerates, while holding that all three are at root one.
476 In The Lost Art of Scripture Karen Armstrong shows that exclusively literal readings of scripture in many traditions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, is a relative recent phenomenon.
INTRODUCTION TO PAUL TILLICH AND CARL JUNG 229
that is in dialogue with contemporary science. The theological core of a modern religion must be understood to derive from the nature of reality itself if its beliefs and practices are to have a redemptive role in society today. Redemption is understood here in the context of wholeness, its personal as well as collective meaning; thus, the concept is not attached to a particular theological position but applies to all religious traditions and spiritual quests.
C. G. Jung’s psychology complements Tillich’s theology by examining, in depth, the archetypal basis of consciousness. For Jung, these foundational structures are, after all, the source of numinous experience from which meaning is ultimately derived. We are less interested in Jung’s therapeutic innovations than with his religious insights, which are based on cultivating a rich and meaningful relationship with the Self, the hidden organizational principle of the psyche. When Jung is understood this way, his work, like Tillich’s, is clearly supportive of religious naturalism. He also recognized there exists an innate need within humanity for expanding the narrow confines in which individual lives are played out. This desire for deliverance from the brokenness and narrowness of our lives is universally recognized in all religions. Religion, thus interpreted, is a spiritual process leading toward wholeness. Tillich hoped such a spiritual undertaking would ultimately transform human culture in the future. For Jung, every encounter of the Self, is a unitive and meaningful experience from which wisdom and love flow naturally.
Religious symbols speak to the heart, while creeds and dogmas speak only to the mind. But it is also true that many ideas act as symbols in themselves. Transformative symbols, whether understood as visionary ideas or images, cannot be created; they have a spontaneous life of their own. When consciously embodied, they expand our capacity for living a full and meaningful life. A great gulf has opened, however, between the modern, scientific understanding of reality and religious tradition. But symbols, because of their numinous quality, still connect the individual to “the infinite, to the ultimate, to God.”477 Tillich holds that such experiences constitute Holy and ecstatic encounters with the ground of Being while Jung attributes numinous experience to the psychic energy of the archetype. Regardless of how such experiences are conceived, they are essential for overcoming the existential alienation of our time.
By speaking to the heart, religious symbols act as a bridge between consciousness and the unconscious, or as Wallace B. Clift puts it in Jung and Christianity: “Symbols (when they are still symbols and have not become signs) possess a numinous quality, as they ‘participate’ in that which is unknowable directly. To be symbolic, a word or 477 Clift, Jung and Christianity: The Challenge of Reconciliation, 43.
230 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
image must imply something more than its obvious and immediate meaning. It has an unconscious aspect of which one is never fully aware.”478 The crucifix, for instance, only becomes a viable symbol when it invokes a spiritual feeling; otherwise, it is no more than a sign representing Christianity. Most importantly, the cross functions as a symbol when it opens our heart to the mysterious relationship between suffering and transcendence.
“The decisive question for everyone,” Jung said, “is whether they feel that they are…
related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of life…. In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted.”479 The essential that Jung refers to here is the transcendent depth of the unconscious, which can never be understood but can be related to through symbols or imaginatively rich ideas. Tillich, in contrast, posited the essential as a metaphysical structure that underlies both the experience of the Holy and the natural world.
The Christ story that so captured the imagination of early converts to Christianity is considered by many scholars to be a creative product of the early church, existing independently of historical truth.480 Both Tillich and Jung recognized that Christ, in contrast to the person Jesus, is a symbol for the sacred and creative ground of our individual existence. Tillich saw this exemplified in the life of Jesus, whom he considered representative of an idealized state of existence. He thus hoped the heightened spiritual and ethical teachings of Jesus, as presented in the Gospel, would be universally realized at some point in the future when love and the transcendent are more fully embodied throughout the world. For Jung, however, Jesus was of little concern except to note that for some unexplained reason the Christ archetype constellated around him sometime after his crucifixion. Jung’s aspiration for humanity is far more modest than Tillich’s, but he did foresee a time in the not-too-distant future when the opposites will rise to consciousness precipitating a crisis that leads to a significant advance in consciousness throughout world culture.
478 Ibid, 51.
479 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 325.
480 Bible Scholar Bart D. Ehrman’s recent book, Jesus Before the Gospels explores the role of individual and collective memory in the emergence of stories about Jesus in the decades before the gospels and extra-canonical writings appeared. While he wrestles with fallible memory, he is not in this volume directly concerned with the symbolic meaning of the Christ stories. Clearly the two (memory passed from person to person and through generations and the emergence of the powerful Christ symbol) are connected.
INTRODUCTION TO PAUL TILLICH AND CARL JUNG 231
Jung wrote about his hope for the future in Answer to Job, which we discuss in some detail later. This intriguing book traces the evolution of consciousness from the biblical time of Job up to the present. Although he wrote this visionary epic long before the current breakdown of our political system, we feel his analysis is important for our time because it sheds light on the explosive tension arising between progressive social movements and conservatism. Jung’s story, though psychologically based, envisions a future time when human consciousness is substantively transformed. His psychological prognosis is reminiscent of the Christian hope that Christ will return at the end of the age.481 Of course, the transformation Jung foresaw may take centuries to realize. By then a new religion might have arisen or Christianity may be so radically reformed as to make it virtually unrecognizable to present practitioners. After all, neither the Christian communities that St. Paul formed nor the Jerusalem community surrounding the apostle James would barely recognize present Christian beliefs and practices. If religion is to prosper in the future, we believe it will have to be primarily based on numinously rich symbols and ethical concerns rather than revelations from a personal God.
Understanding Christianity symbolically instead of literally does not lessen its beauty and importance, as many seem to fear, for it is through symbols that the sacred manifests within individuals and religions. More importantly, a symbol embodies the ineffable, or as James Olney said, “for such truths, as these, not the language of logic but only the language of myth will suffice.”482 Myth, understood this way, expresses a truth often hidden from the rigorous logic of science and philosophy. Only through myth, poetry, art, religious ritual, and symbolically rich psychologies, such as Jung’s, can the ineffable be given voice. It is only fitting then that Jung is paired with Tillich, because together the rigorous logic of Tillich is enriched by Jung’s forays into the unconscious, the primal source of all mythologies. Although Tillich did not attempt to integrate Jung’s views into his theological framework, he was appreciative of Jung’s work. He reportedly remarked in one of his last seminars at the University of Chicago that “if he had enough time left, he would like to move in a ‘Jungian’ direction.’”483 We feel this is sufficient reason to present them together in the following chapters.
481 Today some scholars have come to realize that biblical writers were not predicting the end of the world but the end of the age of Pisces. At the time Christianity began, the Roman world was awash in astrological ideas. It is from ideas like this that the Christian expectation of Christ’s return was fashioned.
482 Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower, 48.
483 Clift, Jung and Christianity, 136.
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Numinous experience, because it transcends everyday functioning, provides an elevated perspective from which to take a moral stand in line with Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Such instances brighten the dark fabric of existence, challenging the individual to align with the light. Without compassion, religion becomes merely a self-centered pursuit of salvation, but if the challenge inherent in the social gospel is taken to heart, consciousness and ethical sensibility are expanded, which in turn, greatly enriches our individual experience of life. Individuation is a process of discernment, of separating the darkness from the light. God declares in Isaiah 45:7: “I form the light, and create the darkness; I make peace, and create evil; I the Lord do all these things.”484
It is through the gift of grace, aided by human reason, that humanity is enabled to discern the difference. Without having the expanded perspective that the numinous provides, ethical decisions are usually based on rational argument and tradition, which alone are insufficient to meet the demands of our current age.
Emile Durkheim defines religion as “a system of beliefs and practices relative to the sacred that unite those who adhere to them in a moral community.”485 Bimal Krishna Matilal took a different approach. Upon assuming the prestigious Spalding Chair of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford University in 1977, he offered in his inaugural lecture a general characterization of all major religions rather than a strict definition.486
He identified five broad features of religion that we paraphrase below:
• The belief that an unexamined life is not worth living.
• Some control of instincts, he felt, is necessary for civilization, as are certain positive feelings, such as compassion, both of which are essential for freedom, personal salvation, nirvāna, or whatever else is considered the highest goal of a religion.
• The world we perceive with our senses cannot be all that there is and cannot be the summation of human existence.
• Hence, being religious involves humility regarding its highest teachings.
• Finally, people can experience life more deeply by becoming more ethically sensitive.
484 Isaiah is concerned that some in his time were beginning to attribute evil to something besides Yahweh, as Christianity did with Satan. For him God is one and alone. For Jung, both good and evil are found in the psyche, and he argued vigorously with Father Victor White over this issue.
485 Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 1.
486 Bimal Krishna Matilal, The Logical Illumination of Indian Mysticism, 31.
INTRODUCTION TO PAUL TILLICH AND CARL JUNG 233
This broad characterization of the commonality amongst religions seems true, but it is rather anemic, not offering much more than secular philosophies do.487 While mostly agreeing with these points, we need to also emphasize that the idea of transcendence and the experience of the numinous are crucial to any characterization of religion. They are, after all, fundamental to what we identify as religion.
We suggest that Durkheim’s definition can therefore be expanded to better serve the purposes of our book. Accordingly, religion can be defined as: A system of beliefs and practices relative to the unitive experience of the sacred (the numinous) that when repeatedly experienced over time and under the right conditions heals the broken spirit and expands our capacity for compassionate action. Such beliefs and practices unite those who adhere to them in a moral community that extends beyond the believers.
Religion reduced to outworn creeds is a defensive religion that alienates those with different beliefs from the loving community of all people. The globalization of humanity has rendered such religion ultimately useless at a time, unfortunately, when we must come together in a spiritual and psychological union to save the planet.
The German philosopher Karl Jaspers identified the period between 800 and200 BCE
as the Axial Age, a pivotal period for spiritual advancement that was responsible for the formation of the major religious traditions in existence today. Because the immediacy of the Divine could not be fully captured in language, however, their revelatory experience was eventually eclipsed by statements of faith and belief, much like some primordial tree caught and preserved in mud, having its organic nature slowly replaced by hard minerals until it is petrified—a thing of beauty but not the organic original.
Concerned by the spiritual decay at the heart of western culture, Karen Armstrong cautions that modernity has strayed from the core ethical values and attitudes developed long before our technological age. “An increasing number of people find traditional religious doctrines and practices irrelevant and incredible, and turn to art, music, literature, dance, sport, or drugs to give them the transcendent experience that humans seem to require.”488 But as people turn away from tradition amid social 487 There are likely religious sects that reject one or another of these general features, but it is such rejection that dooms them to remain splinter religions unable to generate widespread adherence.
488 Armstrong. The Great Transformation: The Beginning of our Religious Traditions, xi.
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upheaval, it is quite possible that we are at another pivotal point for the future of religion comparable to the Axial Age. Often, in the course of history, the old must perish for the new to be born. As Jesus is reported to have said, new wine is not poured into old wineskins. The transition will likely happen gradually over the coming centuries, but we feel that Tillich and Jung are representative of the coming age in which religion will celebrate science while also cultivating a deep relationship with the sacred, the eternal source of love.
PAUL TILLICH’S CONFLICTED LIFE
Nothing finite can cross the frontier from finitude to infinity. But something else is possible: The Eternal can, from its side, cross over the boarder to the finite. It would not be the Eternal if the finite were its limit.
Paul Tillich489
Man’s ULTIMATE CONCERN must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.
Paul Tillich490
A different portrait of Paul Tillich is drawn in this chapter than one would likely derive from only reading his abstract philosophy. In contrast to his dispassionate analysis of Christian theology, Tillich’s life was filled with theological tensions and stormy emotions, especially during the First World War. Honoring both his capacity for profound thinking and his deep engagement with the realities of a chaotic world, he refused to surrender to either. Rather, he upheld the abstract as a way of grasping and understanding the concrete, insisting throughout his life that both metaphysical thinking and self-aware involvement in the world were essential to being human. We discern this tension and balance not only in his life, but also find it reflected in his analysis of history where he said, “Once history is understood as a struggle between the powers of creation and those primitive powers destroying or at least attacking the forms of creation, the duty of everyone to resist the demonic is seen as a religious one.”491
Material in this chapter largely relies on a biography of Paul Tillich written by Wilhelm (1901-1981) and Marion (1928- ) Pauck. It was based on documents they found in the Harvard and Gottingen archives, as well as extensive interviews with his friends, colleagues, members of his family, and many conversations with Tillich himself. During their conversations with him, Tillich spoke candidly about his family, friends, and career. In 1963, the Paucks also interviewed many of Tillich’s old friends and colleagues throughout Europe on a tour they took of France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and England. Interviews were also conducted with collogues at 489 Church, F. Forrester 1987. The Essential Tillich: An Anthology of the Writings of Paul Tillich, 249.
490 Ibid., 41.
491 Stone, Ronald H. 2012. Politics and Faith: Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich at Union Seminary in New York, 29.
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Columbia University, Harvard, Yale, Union Theological Seminary, and Stanford. In their introduction to his biography, the Paucks confirmed that “Although profound affection for Tillich was apparent at almost every turn, the interviews were often sober and critical in content and tone.”492
Tillich was born on August 20, 1886, in the small village of Starzeddel in the Province of Brandenburg, which was then part of Germany. He describes the village as having a medieval character with a wall surrounding it.493 His family’s talented German ancestry could be traced back as far as the thirteenth century. Many of these distinguished forebears were monks, ministers, musicians, and prosperous manufacturers. Tillich’s father, Johannes, was the first Lutheran pastor in the family.
He was a dignified man who exuded an air of authority, though when alone, he tended to be melancholy and meditative. He loved and played music, wrote poetry, and enjoyed intellectual debates. The Paucks observed that as a parent of Prussian descent, he often seemed to his children stricter than, in fact, he was. Amongst Johannes’ many interests, philosophy was foremost, especially the tension between Greek and Christian thought, a passion that was soon taken up by his son. While respecting and even fearing him at times, Paul deeply loved his father. The Paucks note that they often sailed together on a nearby lake. These were special times for Paul, and it instilled in him a life-long and intimate connection with open water, especially the ocean.494
Tillich’s mother, Mathilde Durselen, was imbued with a more liberal nature than his father’s, apparently derived from a Bohemian background. Though liberal, she had a sad disposition. She died early at the age of 43 from cancer. Tillich once said: “My whole life was embedded in her. I couldn’t imagine any other women.” Shortly before her death, he said to her, “I would like to marry you.”495 Although brought up in a traditional Lutheran atmosphere, he was drawn from an early age toward liberal philosophy and theology, partially inspired by his mother’s love. Paul also had a close relationship with both his grandparents who provided him an emotional connection to the nineteenth century as far back as Goethe and Napoleon.496
His sister Johanna, born in 1888, also had a great influence on him. The Paucks said they shared a deep, almost mystical relationship. She was an unusually beautiful girl 492 Pauck and Pauck, Paul Tillich: His Life and Thought, v-viii.
493 Church, The Essential Tillich, 251.
494 Pauck and Pauck, Paul Tillich: His Life and Thought, 3-6. See our Prologue.
495 Ibid, 5.
496 Ibid, 5.
PAUL TILLICH’S CONFLICTED LIFE 237
and like her brother, she also had philosophical inclinations. Because they shared so much together, the two of them became “one heart and mind.” Paul’s youngest sister Elizabeth was born in 1893. He taught her many things, including how to play chess, and she remained Paul’s adoring younger sister throughout her life.497
Paul was a bright student who excelled during his final years of gymnasium, which was then roughly comparable to an academically advanced American high school.
While there, he acquired three books that influenced him greatly: Schwegler’s History of Philosophy, Fichte’s Theory of Science, and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. From reading these books over and over again, he developed his early views on realism, freedom, and determinism.498 He began his theological study at the University of Berlin in 1904.
While there he stumbled on the Collected Works of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling in a bookstore. Tillich was so enthralled with Schelling that he later wrote two dissertations on him—one for his doctorate in philosophy and one for the degree of Licentiate of Theology. Like Schelling, his romantic sensibilities were interwoven with beautiful landscapes, clouds, the smell of flowers, and the silence of the woods. Sailing with his father had also imbued in him a love of the sea, which represented for him,
“the finite bordering on the infinite.”499 His fascination with Schelling, the Paucks said,
“lasted well beyond the original encounter and the dissertation; it determined his entire philosophical point of view.”500
After completing all preparatory requirements for the ministry and writing the two dissertations, he was ordained August 18, 1912.501 By the time of his ordination, he was well versed in German Idealism, which was then dominated by Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—all of whom we briefly reviewed earlier. But he had one more academic hurdle to pass to be fully qualified to lecture at the university level: a qualifying thesis, which he worked on part time over the next two years, written on the role of the supernatural in German theology during the Enlightenment.502
Tillich’s life prior to the Great War was idyllic and, aside from his academic training, was not that different from many young middle-class Germans who reached adulthood immediately before the beginning of World War I. The conservative culture 497 Ibid., 6, 7.
498 Ibid., 15.
499 Ibid., 17-18.
500 Ibid., 16.
501 Ibid., 34-35.
502 Ibid., 37.
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was bathed in the romance of earlier times, especially the nineteenth century when German universities became renowned. In the early years of the twentieth century, German Idealism, especially the romantic poetry of Goethe, was still highly respected.
At the beginning of the First World War, Germany had been unified from a scattering of little German-speaking states for less than two generations. The path to unification had been difficult, a dream from the early 1800’s but only realized in 1871.
But once a full nation, patriotism and racial pride were harnessed by insightful leaders to make Germany an economic and technological force in the world. Otto von Bismarck, chancellor of Germany who served as trusted adviser to Kaiser Wilhelm I, threaded the new nation through the political and social tensions of nineteenth century Europe, avoiding war with Russia in the east and France in the west, allowing the country to consolidate and grow.
But this hard-earned stability was threatened when young Wilhelm II ascended the throne. England, France, and other colonial powers had already subjugated Africa and much of the world, and Wilhelm, with his erratic ambition for empire, wanted a German piece of the colonial pie. Bismarck was concerned, however, that Wilhelm’s desire to reach beyond Europe would overextend Germany. Instead, he felt Germany needed to prove its viability and strength within its own borders, and worried that something idiotic would occur in the always turbulent Balkans and trigger European war.
This is the world into which Tillich was born and educated. His innocence, however, was soon to be sacrificed when Germany entered World War I, but not before he fell in love with Grethi Wever. She was small with dark hair and had a striking resemblance to his sister Johanna whom he adored. They met by chance when he was sailing on a lake where she had a rowboat. She had a very independent personality and Tillich was warned that their personalities were incompatible. Grethi’s father, in fact, is reported to have said: “The most extreme opposites have once again been mutually attracted to one another and will lead, we hope, to a happy marriage.”503
They married in September 1914, just after the beginning of World War I. On October 1, Tillich volunteered for service in the German army.504
Along with many other young Germans, Tillich was a proud Prussian eager to fight for his country, but he quickly became disillusioned. While serving as a chaplain for the Seventh Reserve Division on the Western Front, he frequently held services under fire and comforted men while lying with them in the muddy trenches. In December, 503 Ibid., 39.
504 Ibid., 38-39.
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during the first year of conflict, he was awarded the Iron Cross. Like most others, he expected a quick victory. Although his friends were mostly drawn from academic and university associations before the War, he found that he enjoyed the camaraderie he had with soldiers from all walks of life. As his horizons widened, a profound change in his philosophic outlook emerged, ultimately leading to an embrace of religious socialism, a position he remained committed to throughout the remainder of his life.
He later admitted that by the end of four years of war, he had become “a wild man.”505
Though boredom and even depression were features of Tillich’s early service, all that changed in October 1915 with his regiment’s entry into real battle. For the next six months, life was hell. The rains had turned fields into muddy swamps and rats swarmed the trenches. At the end of the month, his regiment joined an attack during which countless men were killed. The Paucks observed, “He no longer thought of his own death; he was already in death; gripped by its force. He did not know that this was only the beginning of suffering, of inconceivable human misery.”506 Fortunately, after so much dying, the beginning months of 1916 were relatively quiet. During this time, he had an opportunity to think about all the desolation that war had brought.
Having taken the rigid hierarchical order of German society for granted before the War, he now empathized with the common lot of humanity and became acutely aware of how the landed aristocracy, the army, and the church lorded power over the people.
This short reprieve from the war came to an end when the Seventh Division was ordered to Verdun as part of the German plan to use this garrison town to break through to Paris. But the French and Allied forces foiled their plans. The failure to take Paris had a far-reaching impact on the German offensive, leading to a stalemate where thousands of men died in the trenches. The battle of Verdun, the Paucks said, could only be compared to the horrors during the siege of Stalingrad in World War II.
“Hundreds of thousands of men on both sides were killed and nearly a whole generation wasted.”507
Tillich was psychologically and emotionally exhausted by the brutality he witnessed. He later wrote that he took consolation in St. Paul’s words in Romans 8:38-39: “For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
505 Ibid., 41.
506 Ibid., 46.
507 Ibid., 49.
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These words greatly comforted him in the face of “exploding shells, of weeping at open graves, of the sighs of the sick, of the moaning of the dying.”508
Toward the end of June, his Regiment was removed from battle, which allowed him time to deliver a trial lecture at the University of Halle, after which he was appointed Privatdozent of theology there. When he returned, his regiment was transferred to northern France where he participated in the final engagements of the war and the German defeat at Champagne. In some ways, Tillich never fully recovered from the intense suffering he witnessed during the war. He wrote to his family, “We are experiencing the most terrible catastrophes, the end of the world order… it is coming to an end, and this end is accompanied by deepest pain.”509 His suffering eventually led to a personal Kairos— a moment of renewal—in which he felt something new had finally broken into his life after the horrendous experiences of the War.
Tillich had grown up firmly believing in the God of the Bible, but after witnessing the atrocities committed in the name of that God by both sides in the war, his faith was shattered. While in France he began reading Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra where he found affirmation for his existence without all the trappings of traditional religion.
It temporarily lifted him to a state of exultation in the midst of war, enabling him to embrace, for a moment, the passions of life once again. In describing the emotional impact Nietzsche had on Tillich then, the Paucks said: “He became wildly addicted to life’s vivid joys…, and like any other soldier confessed his desire to suck the last sweetness out of existence.”510
The year 1917 is remembered by Germans as the “turnip winter.” People were starving and the only food that existed in any abundance was turnips. America entered the war the following April, and from that point on, German’s defeat was all but certain. By the time of the armistice on November 11, more than eight and half million were dead, 21 million injured, and eight million taken prisoner. 511
Upon returning home, Tillich and many of his fellow soldiers were confronted by civil war on the streets of Berlin, spurred on by inflation. The collapse of the social order, he soon realized, was the inevitable consequence of the war and the breakdown of capitalism. During this time, the initial elation he felt after reading Nietzsche ebbed away and he became despondent and depressed. But eventually, after much soul 508 Ibid., 49.
509 Ibid., 51.
510 Ibid., 52.
511 Ibid., 54-55.
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searching, his depression lifted, and he began to conceive of ways to help rebuild Western civilization.512 Tillich remained in Berlin for the next six years throughout which time the streets were filled with beggars, cripples, drug dealers, and prostitutes.
As time wore on, a palatable sense of fear took hold of the city and grew to hysteric proportions. Yet Berlin slowly recovered, and it eventually became the center of the most vibrant and liberal culture in Europe, drawing a variety of creative people, including Kandinsky, Klee, Brecht, and Rilke. This renaissance of German culture was characterized by experimentation in art, literature, and music. Tillich soon adopted the bohemian, unconventional spirit of the time, with its revolutionary new ideas including Freud’s psychoanalysis, Cézanne’s Expressionistic Impressionism, and Marx’s socialism. Much of their radical thinking, which was in vogue at that time, later became material for his Christian apologetic theology.513
Even though he believed in the sacredness of marriage when he wed Grethi, he often fantasized having other intimate relationships and sometimes did. Grethi was highly unconventional herself and scoffed at the idea of monogamy; she even ridiculed him for wanting to be faithful to her. During the war she had an affair with Tillich’s good friend, Richard Wegener, which must have upset him terribly, though it also freed him from his marriage vows—they officially divorced in 1921. Grethi bore two sons from the affair, one of whom died. Richard never married her, but she came into a small sum of money through the sale of her father’s land. With this improvement in her financial situation, she raised the surviving child alone, never remarrying. Despite all this, Tillich continued to love his dear friend Wegener.514
Tillich’s sister Johanna, whom he had great affection for, died in childbirth on January 5, 1920, after which he became very depressed. His other sister Elizabeth, deeply concerned about his despondent state of mind, urged him to attend a Mardi Gras ball where he encountered Hannah Werner, a handsome young woman with
“magnificent large eyes and a deep melodious voice.” When the costume party was over, he invited her to his apartment. “Resisting at first,” as the Paucks describe it, “she yielded to his wish, and in the months that followed there developed between them a tempestuous romance” filled with “anguish, passion, and contradiction.” But even though their relationship was often roiled by the stormiest passions, Tillich forever regarded her “as the supreme love of his life”515 Unfortunately, Hannah was engaged 512 Ibid., 55-56.
513 Ibid., 59.
514 Ibid., 80, 81.
515 Ibid., 85.
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to another man, whom she married on July 13, 1920. She continued to correspond with Tillich, however, and eventually left her marriage to be with him. They were married on March 22, 1924.
From its beginning, the marriage had many heartaches and difficulties. He was attracted to her “unconventional ways, her disdain of the bourgeois, perhaps most of all by her almost boundless and unpredictable wildness.” Her intuitive grasp of ideas also nicely complemented his rational way of thinking. But there was a fatal flaw. He wanted to be “free to relate to the infinite possibilities of life that provide vital fulfillment,”516 including other romantic relationships. Hannah, nonetheless, remained with him throughout all the strain and hardship of the marriage. But there were many angry fights and passionate reunions. Finally, exhausted by the many angry upheavals, she turned inward to find solace in yoga, friendships, and painting. As they aged and “as his dependence on her grew, and her compassion for him deepened, there was often mirrored in their deeply-lined faces a new and tender understanding.”517
The stresses of their relationship, including both passionate and mystical elements, along with an acute awareness of his own weaknesses, may very well have helped him become the insightful and inspired theologian who was able to reach out and touch so many people. He understood the terrible contradictions of life. At the age of 60, in one of his best sermons, he spoke of the deep human need for acceptance.
Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we feel we have violated another life, a life which we have loved, or from which we were estranged. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us…. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice is saying “You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know…. Simply accept that you are accepted.518
Shortly after Tillich and Hannah were married, he was called to Philip’s University of Marburg to replace the ailing Rudolf Otto, whom, as you will recall, coined the term
“numinous.” They soon became good friends and often walked through the nearby 516 Ibid., 87.
517 Ibid., 89.
518 Ibid., 93.
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hills and woods together, discussing problems of Christianity and Asiatic religions.519
Most importantly, they delved deeply into the relationship existing between the demonic and the ecstatic. Hannah was often involved in these discussions, which was rewarding for all of them. While at Marburg, he also became familiar with Heidegger’s Being and Time which strongly influenced the development of his own ontology.520
His stay at Philip’s University turned out to be relatively short, however. Richard Kroner, a member of the faculty at the Institute of Technology in Dresden was very impressed with Tillich and so he helped arrange a full professorship of religious studies for him at the Dresden institute. A promotion to full professorship was enticing, so Tillich quickly accepted. Later, after the two of them had developed a closer relationship, Kroner was very surprised when Tillich confided in him, confessing that he was a great sinner. When Kroner asked why, Tillich replied, “Because I love women, drinking, and dancing.”521 Though Kroner highly respected him, he did not consider Tillich a true Christian because he was overly influenced by Hegel and Schelling. It also disturbed him that Tillich wrote so eloquently on the demonic as “a power in personal and social life that is creative and destructive at the same time,” prompting Kroner to jokingly call him a “demonic saint and saintly demon.“522
The Dresden institute failed to get the full accreditation that he had expected when accepting the position, so when he received an offer to teach at the University of Frankfurt in 1929, Tillich took advantage of the opportunity. It was a progressive university: “Its tone and program were in fact so liberal that by the 1930’s it was known, especially in fascist circles, as the ‘red university.’”523 Amongst other topics relevant to his systematic theology, Tillich gave lectures on Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Locke, and Aquinas. Because he felt free to express himself openly in the progressive, liberal atmosphere in which he taught, his classes were very popular. Although the tolerant climate at the university suited his personality well, its academic freedom was threatened when the Nazis came to power in 1933.524
519 In addition to his famous Idea of the Holy, Otto delivered lectures in 1924 at Oberlin College in Ohio on Meister Eckhart and Shankaracharya, later incorporated into his Mysticism East and West: A Comparative Analysis of the Nature of Mysticism.
520 Pauck and Pauck, Paul Tillich: His Life and Thought, 97, 98.
521 Ibid. 104.
522 Ibid., 107-108.
523 Ibid., 110.
524 Ibid., 113-117.
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But even a year before that, in July of 1932, Nazi storm troopers and some radical students who were followers of Hitler, beat up left-wing and Jewish students at the University. Tillich responded by making a speech defending freedom of thought and action and demanded that the Nazi students be expelled. This did not deter the Nazis, however, and their radical ideology soon destroyed the free atmosphere that had once prevailed at the University. Even as far back as 1920, former German officers, soldiers, and many other people were disillusioned and angry by the rapidly deteriorating conditions that existed after the War. Because of their disillusionment, they would soon rally to Adolf Hitler’s banner. From its very beginning, the Nazi party was based on racist nationalism, the working class, and a nostalgic, romantic vision of traditional Germanic culture.525 Their value system was not significantly different from that which prevails today in parts of the radical right in America. Tillich tried to ignore the signs of danger, but he eventually authored the book, The Socialist Decision, in which he wrote: “Should political romanticism and warlike nationalism become victorious, the self-destruction of European peoples is assured.”526 On February 27, 1933, the notorious Reichstag fire gave Hitler a pretense for blaming it on socialists and communists and for raising the specter of a Bolshevik revolution, thus providing him enough popular support to assume dictatorial powers on March 21, 1933.527
Even before the apocalyptic end of the Weimar republic, Max Horkheimer528 had urged Tillich to escape Germany, fearing his life was in danger because of his political associations and the book he had written condemning the Nazi scourge. The Frankfurter Zeitung had published two articles condemning the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, contending it was a hotbed of radical socialism that taught a degenerate form of “cultural bolshevism.” In the articles, Tillich, though not associated with that university, was specifically referred to as the “embodiment of the enemy.”
On April 1, 1933, Nazi storm troopers again occupied the University campus arresting Marxists and Jewish faculty and left-leaning students, thus cleansing the university of all “Bolshevik” influences. In May, Tillich witnessed the Nazi book burning spectacle in which his book was one of thousands burned.529
525 Ibid., 123.
526 Ibid., 126.
527 Ibid., 128.
528 Max Horkheimer was a German philosopher and sociologist who was famous for addressing militarism, economic disruption, environmental crisis, and the poverty of mass culture.
529 Pauck and Pauck, Paul Tillich: His Life and Thought, 129-132.
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Unknown to Tillich, Columbia University was reviewing a list of German intellectuals that were thought to be in danger. Tillich’s name was on the list. Henry Sloane Coffin, president of Union Theological Seminary, was present at the meeting and volunteered to provide a post for Tillich for one year. The Union faculty also met and agreed to pay five percent of their own salary toward Tillich’s stipend. Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), who was to become a close associate and friend of Tillich’s, cabled him with the offer. Tillich loved Germany and the decision was not easy for him. At the time, he considered America somewhat provincial, but Hannah desperately wanted to leave Germany, so he finally accepted the offer.530
He was invited to join the Columbia University Philosophy club not long after arriving in New York. In its early years, club members included such dignitaries as Josiah Royce, William James, John Dewey, and Bertrand Russell. The club’s members were eager to have him share his ideas with them, even though, at first, they were somewhat baffled by his thoughts on religion and culture, especially those concerning German Romantic philosophy and Kant’s theory of knowledge. In time, however, they found him fascinating.531
J. H. Oldham532 invited Tillich to join the preparatory commission for the upcoming Oxford Ecumenical Council. Its work was to be done in London and Geneva, which gave Tillich his first opportunity to return to Europe since coming to America.
Throughout the spring and summer months of 1936, while he was there, he visited many of his old friends, who were now scattered throughout Europe after having escaped Germany. At that time, Hitler had just invaded and reclaimed the Rhineland from France. At the conference, Tillich gave a lecture to British churchmen on how mass disintegration and meaninglessness led to National Socialism. Later, while in London, he discussed the formation of a religious association or league to help preserve what churches had failed to do because they had become petrified institutions. He hoped such an organization could inject into Protestantism a vital spirit of social justice. Afterwards, he traveled to Paris and discussed his idea with Kurt Riezler (1882-1955) who had a similar idea for a religious association based on ancient Greek culture. Olga Froebe-Kapteyn (1881-162), founder of the Eranos conference which Jung often attended, invited Tillich to come to Ascona, Switzerland and give a lecture at the next Eranos meeting, though she was concerned that his views might 530 Ibid., 133-135.
531 Ibid., 184-189.
532 J.H. Oldham (1874-1969) was a Scottish missionary who became a pioneer in the emerging ecumenical movement.
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disturb some of those in attendance. Tillich came away with the notion that the Eranos group embodied something like a Jungian non-political mysticism.533
The deteriorating conditions in Germany and memories of World War I had a significant impact on Tillich’s outlook, though much of its psychological effect remained unacknowledged by him for some time. While in Ascona, however, he had a cathartic experience. On the morning of his fiftieth birthday, his dear friend Hermann Schafft (1883-1959) organized a small band to play under his window. They played an old Lutheran song in praise of the “golden sun.” It reminded him that at the same time and hour on his 30th birthday, the regimental band had played for him on the western battlefront. Hearing the beautiful music, he broke down crying. It was as though a floodgate had opened and all the memories he had repressed came flooding over him.
“Nine days later in Geneva, Tillich telephoned his father, and in a profoundly affectionate moment the two exchanged moving farewells. It was their last conversation.”534
The convening of the Oxford Ecumenical Conference in 1937 provided Tillich with his last opportunity to return to Europe before the outbreak of war. Within its final report, he persuaded the commission to include his own controversial position, which claimed that it was entirely possible that God was “speaking more clearly through men concerned for social justice who were enemies of the church than through those who spoke in the name of the churches but exerted no social responsibility.”535 Late that summer he joined Hannah near Mount Blanc in the Italian and French Alps. The international situation had deteriorated further by then, and Tillich was more certain than ever that war would break out soon. His fear was further heightened by the utter feeling of uncertainty and meaningless that pervaded Europe. They left Europe shortly afterwards and were not to return for 11 years.
The Paucks report that in the summer of 1938, “signs and portents announced the coming catastrophe. Northern lights appeared in the late summer sky; their like had not been seen, some recalled, since 1866 when Austria was conquered by Prussia.
Carrion birds flew around the city of Vienna, and the weather was most unusual.”536
Jung would have been appreciative of such reports because he believed nature was attuned to the movements of the collective psyche. In the autumn of 1938, Mussolini 533 Pauck and Pauck, Paul Tillich: His Life and Thought, 190-192. There is, of course, truth in Tillich’s observation.
534 Ibid., 193.
535 Ibid., 194.
536 Ibid., 196-197.
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signed the infamous Munich pact with France and Great Britain, which led to Germany’s annexation of Czechoslovakia. November 9, 1938 is remembered as Kristallnacht when several synagogues in Germany were burned down and Jews began, if possible, to flee the country. On September 1, 1939, Hitler marched into Poland, thus igniting World War II.
Tillich became a citizen of the United States on March 4, 1940, and soon after, was promoted to the rank of full professor at the Union Theological Seminary. That June, Yale bestowed on him an honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity. Tillich now understood his forced emigration to America to be providential after witnessing the events leading to World War II. He still loved Germany and hoped for a future time of renewal—a Kairos—after Hitler’s defeat. Throughout the war he secretly worked for Voice of America delivering 109 talks to the German people. He relied on the Unitarian Universalist theologian James Luther Adams (1901-1994) for much of his information on American democracy.537 In 1943, Tillich and Hanna visited and fell in love with East Hampton, New York. Financial help from friends enabled them to buy a rundown house on the beach, which Hanna slowly remodeled. Tillich imagined it an ideal place for retirement, and most of his Systematic Theology was written there. Only in this secluded retreat could Tillich find time from his busy schedule to focus on his writing.
While there, he worked in the morning and met friends in the afternoon, often while walking on the beach.538
When Tillich finally returned to Germany after the war, he discovered just how much the country and its people had suffered during the conflict. He saw sad, sick, hungry faces everywhere he looked, and he was especially disturbed by the “ruins, the empty streets … the ill-clad people constantly on the move in search of things...”539
Many were blind or crippled and he noticed many of the women were shabbily dressed and their hands were rough and swollen. What struck him almost immediately was that, whereas in France there had been many men, particularly of middle age, In Germany there were very few.540
In Marburg, Tillich was having lunch with an old friend when a women came up to the table whom he did not recognize at first. Then it hit him. She was his sister Elizabeth. Elizabeth and her husband were still alive, and their daughter Heide 537 Ibid., 197-200.
538 Ibid., 207.
539 Ibid., 212.
540 Ibid., 209-213.
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escaped death because a German officer escorted her safely across the Elbe River when fleeing Russia. The officer told her that he was helping her because he loved and respected her uncle Paul Tillich.541 While in Berlin, Tillich lectured to a large audience which included many of his old friends. During the following days he met with his friends separately. Even his former wife, Grethi, came to visit him. She was very thin and had aged considerably, but he still found her lovely.542
Tillich came to realize that after the War, the world was still divided and, even worse, threatened by nuclear devastation. His hope for a new era of international cooperation was no longer possible. But to his satisfaction, America had now become receptive to his ideas. To a friend in Germany he wrote, “Harvest time is here; indeed, I am now gathering in my harvest.”543 This burst of acceptance led to several publications in the following years. The first of these was The Protestant Era, a compilation of several essays arranged around what he called the Protestant principle.
In these essays, Tillich argued that industrial technology had resulted in wide-spread dehumanization, resulting in ruthless competition, fear, despair, and meaninglessness.
The only solution for humanity, he felt, was a new spiritual reformation. “Such a reformation,” he said, “might sweep the Protestant churches out of existence, but the prophetic and critical power of the Protestant principle, itself everlasting, would remain…”544 The Protestant principle, affirms faith in terms of the Unconditional. As such, it points beyond the finite toward the infinite, inexhaustible, and unapproachable state of being.
Tillich’s faith was not bounded by Christian dogmatic assertions, and in their place, he found Existentialism more honest and relevant than what the churches had to offer.
After witnessing so much destruction, he also understood how urgent the need was for Christians to confront the prevalence of anxiety that had taken hold of people throughout Europe and America. This concern was immortalized for him in Auden’s long poem entitled “Age of Anxiety.” Tillich often referred to this poem when discussing the problems of the modern age.545 Tillich’s solution for the anxiety that pervaded so much of modern society was formulated in his book, The Courage to Be, published in 1950.
541 Ibid., 208.
542 Ibid., 215.
543 Ibid., 219.
544 Ibid.,220.
545 Ibid., 224.
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Tillich’s Systematic Theology took shape over 50 years. It was his driving passion. At one time, he left the manuscript in a compartment of a train he was riding. After working on the manuscript for many years, the real possibility of losing it left him inconsolable until it was retrieved. The first sign of heart illness intensified his effort to complete the work that had begun so many years before. The Systematic Theology was neither a Summa Theologica in the style of Thomas Aquinas nor a Church Dogmatics in the style of Karl Barth. It was more in the systematic form that began with Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), who developed the modern Protestant system of theology in the nineteenth century. Tillich’s method of correlation was fully developed in this work . It correlated the eternal truth—the object of Kerygmatic theology—which he thought Christianity pointed toward, and the need to reinterpret it for each generation—the role of apologetic theology. He realized that theology must move back and forth between these two poles, but he often leaned more toward apologetic theology because of his concern for the existential crisis now facing contemporary Western societies.546
Although he was preoccupied by his Systematic Theology throughout his life, he only began writing the final outline of it in the form of a set of propositions after World War II. From this outline, his comprehensive, three-volume Systematics finally emerged. It was the culmination of his life’s work and was largely written while sitting in his lush garden at East Hampton. Volume I was published in 1951. In honor of its publishing, there was a great celebration in the theological world. Niebuhr described it as “a great voyage of discovery into a rich and deep, an inclusive and yet elaborated vision and understanding of human life in the presence of the mystery of God.”547 Although he complemented Tillich on this important work, he and others found the work too difficult, too abstract, and too ontological. T. S. Eliot, however, read the book twice and thanked Tillich for writing it because he was “so impressed by its fertilizing effect on his mind.”548 He said that his New England Unitarian background had not prepared him for such a work.
546 Ibid., 234-235. Apologetics, according to Tillich, attempt to justify theological claims by expressing divine Truth in the language of the culture in which it occurs. Kerygma, instead, refers to the idea that there exists an eternal truth that transcends our ability to give expression to it. In traditional Christian theology, however, the Kerygma sometimes simply means a teaching in accordance with the Gospel.
547 Ibid., 237.
548 Ibid., 237.
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The year 1953 marked the twentieth anniversary of Tillich’s arrival in America. He was thankful for the influential role that had been granted him at the Union Theological Seminary, though he recognized that he was growing old and no longer had the energy to carry on his duties. But the idea of retirement was extremely distasteful to him. As he agonized over retirement, Harvard extended an offer to him that provided him a solution.549 At Harvard he would be free to teach as much or as little as he wanted. Each year the contract would be renewed depending on his health.
Mandatory retirement would be at the age of 75. For Tillich, the offer was a lifeline and so he and Hannah moved to Cambridge, excited by the new opportunity. He found his new life there fulfilling until he suffered two serious illnesses in his last year at Harvard. The illnesses weakened him both physically and mentally, and overnight he aged considerably.
Volume II of Tillich’s Systematic Theology was completed in 1957 after he had moved to Harvard. This work was largely drawn from the talks he gave on Christology in his Gifford lectures at the University of Aberdeen during the years 1953 and 1954.550 In response to this work, Reinhold Niebuhr questioned Tillich’s Christology calling him
“the ‘Origen of our period’ because he sought to relate the gospel message to the disciplines of culture by means of ontological concepts.”551
After his retirement from Harvard, Tillich was presented with an opportunity to serve as the first Nuveen professor of Theology at the University of Chicago. To forestall retirement, he again readily accepted the offer. For the next two years, he looked the part of “’the distinguished theologian in residence.’ A white haired, leonine elderly gentleman, increasingly thin and slow in movement.”552 He and Hannah were housed in a large Windermere Hotel apartment with a view, and he was provided with a spacious office and full-time secretary. His duties were light. He taught one course in each of the fall and spring quarters. It is here that he had an opportunity to teach a 549 Ibid., 247. He produced parallel translations of Biblical texts and was highly respected and also opposed during his lifetime.
550 Since the first lecture in 1888, Gifford Lecturers have been recognized for inviting preeminent thinkers in their respective fields. William James was one of those invited to participate. The Varieties of Religious Experience was the result of his Gifford lectures.
551 Pauck and Pauck, Paul Tillich: His Life and Thought, 243. Origen (about 184-253 CE) was trained in classical philosophy. He held that scripture had to be understood on several levels—literal, metaphoric, and symbolical—and entertained ideas such as reincarnation that led to his excommunication for heresy centuries after his death.
552 Ibid., 272.
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class with Mircea Eliade on the history of religions, a collaboration that deeply influenced his late thinking. During each of the winter quarters of 1963 and 1964, he conducted a seminar at the University of California at Santa Barbara.553
In 1963, during his first year at Chicago, volume 3 of his Systematic Theology was published. He said, with some regret: “But finally, in view of my age, further delay was not permissible, in spite of the fact that one never feels enough work has been done on a book…”554 Some found it the finest expression of Tillich’s thinking, but others were disappointed, feeling it fell below their high expectations. Tillich’s own reaction to the third volume was mixed at best. He admitted that now he had to “accept his finitude and with it incompleteness of the completed.”555 His reaction seems to express a feeling of resignation and relief rather than achievement after realizing that he had almost failed to complete it.
As Tillich aged, he continued to be critical of traditional Church institutions and dogmatic assertions that he felt had drifted far from the true spirit and ethical concerns of Christianity. To speak to the modern, increasingly secular world, he stressed the importance of the arts for awakening a dimension of reality that otherwise remains hidden to rational inquiry. He realized science, philosophy, and moral action are not sufficient by themselves. They must be supplemented with aesthetic experience by which the sacred depth within us and the world becomes reality. Only in this way, he felt, can Christianity be redeemed.556
During 1964, Tillich was plagued by another bout of serious illnesses—lung infections, severe bronchitis, and the despairing signs of heart failure. On October 12, 1965, inspired by his work with Eliade, Tillich delivered his last public lecture entitled
“The Significance of the History of Religions for the Systematic Theologian.” His careful lecture notes laid out a plan for a new systematic theology that would affirm the legitimacy of all religious traditions, in that revelatory experiences are universal, though limited by the finite human situation. In his lecture notes he included the secular within his broad approach to theology, stating: “The sacred does not lie beside the secular, but it is its depths. The sacred is the creative ground and at the same time a critical judgment of the secular.”557
553 Ibid., 272-273. See Prologue for his experience while there.
554 Tillich, Systematic Theology, III, v.
555 Ibid., v.
556 Pauck and Pauck, Paul Tillich: His Life and Thought, 280.
557 Tillich, “Significance of the History of Religions,” 82.
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After the talk he went to a reception and soon after arriving, went into the kitchen and reminisced about his mother and childhood, saying he felt most at home in the kitchen. As he talked, he sipped Scotch whiskey and only later joined the others. At three or four the next morning he had a severe heart attack and was rushed to the hospital in critical condition. On October 22, 1965, ten days later, he died.
In his final moments, he confronted death with the same courage, he once so eloquently expressed when comforting others:
Our anxiety puts frightening masks over all men and things. If we strip them of these masks, their own countenance appears and the fear they produce disappears. This is true even of death. Since every day a little of our life is taken from us—since we are dying every day—the final hour when we cease to exist does not itself bring death: it merely completes the death process. The horrors associated with it are a matter of the imagination. They vanish when the mask is taken from the image of death.558
The Paucks’ concluding remarks on Tillich’s life are filled with tenderness. They confided that Tillich had a premonition that he would die on the very day he did and asked Hannah not to leave him during their last day together. “Today,” Tillich said,
“is dying day.” Hannah brought him the Greek New Testament and his German Bible, his most precious possession. In his weakened condition, he touched them lovingly.
“He asked and received from her forgiveness for his transgressions. They recited together a little German poem they used to say together on their walks around their East Hampton garden, and the knowledge that he would never do so again made him weep.” That evening he expressed a desire to walk a little. “The nurse helped him sit up, he dangled his legs over the bed, then laid down and quietly died.”559
558 Pauck and Pauck, Paul Tillich: His Life and Thought, 283. Taken from Tillich’s Courage to Be, 13,14.
559 Ibid. , 283.
PAUL TILLICH AND THE GROUND OF BEING
God does not exist. He is being-itself beyond essence and existence.
Therefore, to argue that God exists is to deny him.
Paul Tillich560
Ultimate concern is the abstract translation of the great commandment:
“The Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind, and with all your strength.”
Paul Tillich561
Paul Tillich’s life was as much shaped by his openness to the Holy as to his liberal instincts and high regard for critical thought. By combining critical reflection with his love for the sacred, we feel he furthered the coming unification of Enlightened reason with primordial wisdom. He was, after all, one of the great intellectuals of the twentieth century, dedicating his life to rejuvenating Christianity in the face of an increasingly secular world. Although his ideas are expressed in the abstract language of philosophy, his faith was grounded in the numinous experience of the Holy.
Accordingly, his life had a mystical element. This was attested to earlier in our prologue, which tells the story of Tillich being so deeply and spiritually moved by the beauty of the Pacific Ocean that he waded into the pounding surf with his suit on just as the sun set over the water.562
Tillich understood that simple faith in Jesus as portrayed in the gospels was no longer viable. Nonetheless, he had a deep commitment to Christianity. How was he to resolve this seeming discrepancy at the center of his life? His solution was not that different from that of Carl Jung. Like Jung, he realized that religious symbols are at the 560 Tillich, Systematic Theology, I, 205.
561 Ibid., I,11: Revised Standard Version, Mark 12:29.
562 See our prologue for a more complete discussion of Tillich’s mystical rapture when visiting University of California, Santa Barbara. Wilhelm and Marion Pauck also remind us of Tillich’s love of the ocean in their biography. At a ceremony honoring him, Wilhelm “reminisced of the time when he had driven Tillich to Maine to prove to him that there were forests in America: he himself had paced the beach restlessly wanting to move on while Tillich sat on a rock staring at the ocean in meditation.” See Pauck and Pauck, Paul Tillich, 278-279.
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heart of any religion, for it is through symbols that the transcendent is experienced.
Weaving his systematic theology from the same cloth that inspired ancient Greek philosophy, Tillich defined God as the ground of Being or Being itself, which he defended philosophically. Beyond that, Christ became a numinous symbol for the depth of Being upon which his theology is based.
When Tillich defines God as the ground of Being or Being itself, he does not explain the difference, but we suspect that it depends on how Being is understood. If Being is equated with the fundamental nature of the physical universe, including the foundational structures of spacetime, matter, and energy, then God is the ground of Being. If Being is understood as the potential from which the physical universe burst forth, then God is Being itself. The distinction is subtle and difficult to formulate because God, understood either way, is beyond categories and definitions, though analogies may be suggestive, reminding us of Meister Eckhart’s Godhead behind God and Tillich’s God above God.
We argue that since the dawn of civilization, humanity has been slowly evolving toward a new creation in which the sacred and numinous depth of life—for which Christ is a symbol but not the exclusive one—is destined to become the guiding light for all spiritual and religious practices of the future.563 This great drama, which so intrigued both Tillich and Jung, has been advancing world cultures throughout history, driven by the underlying unconscious factors that have teleologically led humanity to the critical junction in the evolution of culture that we face today.
By the time Tillich had completed his theological studies, he understood the faith of his youth could no longer be sustained in the rarified air of scholarly pursuits. But during this period of questioning, Christ remained a potent symbol for him, representing the sacred depth at the core of every individual. Such symbols are not arbitrary. Symbols, according to both Tillich and Jung, participate in the reality which is symbolized; otherwise, they are mere signs.564 This means the symbol is not just understood abstractly but touches the heart in a powerful way that accords with the images and ideas conveyed by the symbol. Tillich came to appreciate other religious traditions, but because he was a devoted Christian, the Christ symbol remained for him the most effective way to convey the depth of being to which his work so elegantly 563 A deep study of various religions, including Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, reveal symbols that can serve the same function. Each is expressed in terms suitable to the language and culture in which they are embedded, but they all draw individuals toward the Divine.
564 Tillich, Systematic Theology, I, 9.
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gave expression. The historical Jesus, however, had receded from his view, largely because the actual life of Jesus remained shrouded in mystery for him as it did for much of the scholarly world. Later, after World War II, as he struggled to make sense of an increasingly secular world in which the Holocaust and Hiroshima were constant reminders of the very present reality of evil, the numinous or transcendent dimension of the human psyche continued to be the one truth that was beyond doubt for him.
Tillich acknowledged that the Christ myth, based on the life of Jesus as remembered by his followers, was no longer sustainable in a modern world where science held sway. He understood, however, that the Spiritual Presence, another name he used for the transcendent dimension of individual existence, could still be embraced because it is infused with the experience of the Holy. This became, for him, the bedrock for the unfolding of his systematic theology, which promises a time when love and beauty will conquer the dark forces of war and evil. The Spiritual Presence thereby fulfills, symbolically, the eschatological expectation of Christ’s return in the coming age.565
Tillich did not envision Christ returning in person, but that the fullness of love, symbolized by Christ, would become universally realized in the future.
Mircea Eliade describes Tillich as one who “followed the works of Rudolf Otto, C.
G. Jung, and Arnold Toynbee with great interest; and he wrote about religious symbolism repeatedly and with a unique acumen.”566 Although classified as an existentialist philosopher/theologian, Tillich was never satisfied with this characterization. He considered himself half existentialist, half essentialist. It was the dynamic interweaving of these two that gave his theology its distinctive quality. His existential side acknowledged the fundamental importance of experiencing the beauty and sacredness of life as well as the depths of human sorrow without regard to any specific metaphysical doctrine. His essentialist side, however, held that there exists a metaphysical structure underlying both the experience of the transcendent (numinous or Holy) as well as the whole of the natural world. His work is often criticized by conservatives for being too closely aligned with secular humanism and not sufficiently based on biblical revelation. It is true that little within his systematic theology directly references the Bible, but his emphasis on the experience of the transcendent provides 565 As late as 1963, Tillich wrestled with sustaining the relevance of Christianity, and especially the Christ symbol, for the highly secularized modern world. See Tillich, The Irrelevance and Relevance of the Christian Message.
566 Eliade, “Paul Tillich and the History of Religions,” 31.
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a spiritual depth to his work that has universal appeal, an essential characteristic, we maintain, for any future religion to thrive.567
Tillich’s theology, which in many ways is an outgrowth of Rudolf Otto’s work, parallels Jung’s exploration into the spiritual and religious foundation of the psyche.
Although he did not attempt to integrate Jung’s thinking directly into his theological framework, Tillich was appreciative of Jung’s psychological perspective on Christianity. In a talk he gave on the occasion of Jung’s death, he affirmed that Jung’s understanding of the archetypal ground of the psyche compares favorably with his own “conception of the Logos as the ground of ‘the essences of all things’”568
While at the University of Chicago, Tillich taught a seminar with Mircea Eliade on the history of religion, which broadened his understanding and appreciation for religious expression throughout the world. Eliade recognized that Tillich, in his later years, had broadened his outlook considerably and so he now felt a new systematic theology was needed:
… a theology taking into consideration not only the existential crisis and the religious vacuum of contemporary Western societies, but also the religious traditions of Asia and the primitive world, together with their recent crises and traumatic transformations.569
Though the Christian community was always a source of inspiration for him, as Tillich grew older, he became increasingly aware that other traditions, especially Buddhism, nurtured the same fundamental truth that he served. Buddhist enlightenment, for instance, is another way to symbolize the realization of the New Being, which for Tillich is represented by the life of Jesus. This expansive state, he believed, was destined for all of humanity.
Through his in-depth exploration of philosophy, Tillich came to understand that
“God does not exist.” Instead, “He is being itself beyond essence and existence,”570
567 Tillich tended to assume that readers would be familiar with the Bible, especially the New Testament, an assumption that we cannot make in the 21st century. In an informal survey of a class of 36 students in Western Religions at Moorpark College in the late 1990’s, one of us (Hall) found that only one claimed to have read the whole Bible, five the New Testament, and a few more parts of the latter—this in a class of which 34
claimed to be Christian.
568 As quoted in Eliade, “Paul Tillich and the History of Religions,” 2.
569 Ibid., 31.
570 Tillich, Systematic Theology, I, 205.
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which, we assert, is reminiscent of Hinduism’s parabrahma, that which is beyond all categories, including existence and nonexistence.571 Nonexistence would presumably be a state of pure potential without form. Interestingly, according to Karen Armstrong, the philosophers Avicenna, Maimonides, Denys and Thomas Aquinas had also insisted that God was not a being.572 Tillich expanded on traditional definitions of
“being” to include not only God as the ground of existence but “the whole of human reality, the structure, the meaning, and the aim of existence.”573 God defined as such is more than the underlying structure of all that exists, including individual existence, but is also the source of one’s ultimate concern: the basis of meaning and purpose in life.
Finding an adequate definition of God that inspires reverence, while being credible, is a challenge that, increasingly, Christianity will have to face in the years to come.
Christians typically consider God a divine being who not only created the universe but loves everyone deeply. This, in fact, is a central claim of their faith. They feel that Tillich, by defining God as the ground of Being, betrays this fundamental truth.
Nonetheless, his theology grants God a majestic role in the creation of the world, as well as being the ground of individual existence. God thereby becomes the source from which ethics and values are derived and the means by which the limited ego-self is transcended. Tillich’s definition also accords with Christ’s saving grace, ultimately experienced as “the mystical element of the divine presence.”574 He conceived the divine presence as the radiant center that resplendently shines at the core of every life, acting not only as the source of the most rapturous flights of spirit, but also the wellspring for love and beauty. Jung would probably have been favorably inclined toward this conception of God, reworking, and enriching Tillich’s concept to align it more fully with his theory of individuation. Also, because of his hesitancy to make metaphysical claims, Jung would likely have substituted the Self, the center and organizing principle of the total psyche, in place of God. After all, he considered the Self indistinguishable from the image of God.
571 Placing parabrahma beyond all discursive categories does not mean that it is nothing.
Rather it is nothing that can be conceived or experienced by finite human consciousness.
Not even Brahma of the Rig Veda can grasp it.
572 Armstrong, The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts, 346. Denys is Dionysius the Areopagite.
573 Tillich, Systematic Theology, I, 14.
574 Tillich, Systematic Theology, I, 233-234.
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Tillich thought that envisioning God as the source and creative ground of life also argues for God’s originating and sustaining creativity. Originating creativity refers to the fundamental nature and structure of reality that is the basis for all that exists, including the laws of physics as well as the generative powers of the universe responsible for life and consciousness. Nature, when understood this way, is a system of discoverable laws, like Einstein’s general theory of relativity, sufficient in themselves and inherent in nature from the moment the universe came into existence.575 Sustaining creativity, in contrast, is active in everything that exists, especially in the life of every individual. It is what makes God a living and majestic God. As such, God is equivalent to the same underlying wisdom of the universe that Jung discovered when exploring the hidden majesty and darkness of the unconscious.
When we experience God’s majesty in this way, we are truly on holy ground.
Though Tillich had no problem with the theory of evolution as far as it goes, he felt a more complete explanation must account for the teleological and creative aspects of life that escape the notice of many scientists today.576 To correct for this oversight, he used his concepts of originating and sustaining creativity to suggest that evolution has theological relevance. What he most wanted to convey is that God is not only worthy of reverence but is active throughout history and in the life of every individual. Divine agency could also play a creative role in other ways not yet understood. In Jung’s psychology, the objective psyche is the creative factor in the life of the individual, acting in a many ways like Tillich’s sustaining creativity.
God, as Tillich conceived Him, is beyond our ordinary and finite capacity for knowing since He is the ground of reality. While everything finite is conditioned and bound by space and time; God, as the ground of reality, is not. Rather, He is their source, hence, infinite. The term “infinite,” when used in this way, is a symbolic descriptor, not meant to be taken literally, at least not in the formal or mathematical sense. When using the term “infinite” in describing God, it denotes the impossibility of thinking of God in terms of finite objects. God is the essence of realty but not identical with anything observable. “If we say that God is the infinite, or the unconditional, or Being-itself,” Tillich said, “we speak rationally and ecstatically at the same time. These terms precisely designate the boundary line at which both the symbolic and the non-symbolic coincide.”577 It must be remembered, however, that symbolic descriptions for grasping the inner truths of the Spirit are but a richly painted 575 Ibid., 262.
576 We discussed teleology in the second part of this book.
577 Tillich, Systematic Theology, II, 10.
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cloth covering Being itself. Given the different types of numinous encounters that individuals experience, this veil—furnished by the psyche—undoubtedly exists at many levels, especially for a particularly sensitive individual like Jung.
Unlike secular humanists and naturalists, Tillich thought of Otto’s concept of the numinous in the same way that William James understood transcendent experiences.
Like James, he realized that such experiences are conceptually, culturally, and socially conditioned, subject only to symbolic interpretation. In the first volume of his Systematic Theology, he uses the numinous and the Holy interchangeably: , When Otto calls the experience of the holy “numinous,” he interprets the holy as the presence of the divine. When he points to the mysterious character of holiness, he indicates that the holy transcends the subject-object structure of reality. When he describes the mystery of the holy as tremendum and fascinosum, he expresses the experience of “the ultimate” in the double sense of that which is the abyss and that which is the ground of man’s being.578
Otto claimed that every numinous experience participates, in some mysterious way, in divine reality. Tillich’s definition of God as the ground of Being thus provides a framework for appreciating Otto’s claim. Tillich reminds us though, that the experience of the Holy includes both Otto’s tremendum and his fascinosum—
destructiveness and creativity—for it produces ashes as well as “divine fire.”579 This is consistent with the way that Jung thought about the numinous. He understood from his own experiences that it can be dark and shattering as well as beautiful and illuminating.580
Through conceiving the Holy in relationship to the ultimate ground of Being, Tillich deepens the abstract categories of his thought by opening his theology to mystical interpretation. Recall William Richards’ characterization of Tillich’s definition of Being, which he arrived at while participating in a research project to study psilocybin.
When contemplating its effect a few days later, he imagined the experience was much like what Tillich meant when defining God as the ground of Being, “a profoundly intense reality underlying the ‘entire phenomenal world…’”581 Although Otto was 578 Tillich, Systematic Theology, I, 215-216.
579 Ibid., 224.
580 In this context, one might think of Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction and new creation .
581 Richards, William, Sacred Knowledge, xx. We quoted Richards earlier in our chapter
“Being and the Numinous.”
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concerned that the intrinsic value of the individual is lost during mystical experience, Tillich thought of it as a form of self-transcendence, which occurs during ecstatic moments when finite human consciousness is deepened through an act of grace. In moments like these, the isolated ego transcends itself only to return transformed.
Hence, Tillich was able to give a rational expression to the ecstatic encounter with the Holy in a way that allowed the individual to merge with the transcendent while remaining grounded in ordinary reality. Although Tillich appreciated the importance of mystical experience, he was more concerned with the existential need for individual enlightenment. Likewise, Jung was not only less concerned about mystical experience but also cautioned against the possessive and seductive power of all types of transcendent experience. Instead, he affirmed the value of establishing a mature relationship with the Self—the numinous center of the psyche—which is itself a form of self-transcendence. The dynamic interplay of consciousness with it, however, always begins, as Jung explained, with a defeat for the ego. Only later, after the initial relationship with the Self is well established, is the integrity of the ego restored.582
Tillich was oftentimes revolutionary in his interpretation of Christianity. In the last volume of his Systematic Theology, published in 1963 shortly before his death in 1965, he speculated on the possibility of expanding Trinitarian symbolism to include the feminine principle, which would thereby transform the Holy Trinity into a Quaternary.
This radical change was motivated by the ambivalent feelings that he had surrounding the perceived difference between God the Father and the ground of Being, which, for him, had a more maternal quality, since he conceived it being consistent with “the origin and ultimate source of the renewal of human consciousness.”583
As Tillich conceived it, the maternal depth is a “creative nothingness” beyond all differentiation, much like our concept of Being. Its maternal symbolism was appealing to him because, as he said, “it points to the mother-quality of giving birth.”584
Protestant “moralistic personalism,” he thought, needs such symbolism to counter the masculine quality that characterizes Protestantism today. The feminine spirit, it should be mentioned, has long existed within the Judeo-Christian tradition. One only has to recall the importance of Sophia, the divine Spirit “brooding over the chaos,”585 and 582 Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, para. 778. This restoration is actually the emergence of the ego in a spiritually enhanced form.
583 As quoted in Dourley, Recovery of Religion, 76. In the book of Ecclesiastes, the feminine spirit is present with God at the creation of the world.
584 Tillich, Systematic Theology, III, 293-294 .
585 Ibid., 294.
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more significantly, her centrality throughout the Middle Ages as the Virgin Mary, a position she still holds within Catholicism today. Though Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are hard to explain, they can at least be appreciated as masculine symbols arising from the essential feminine and maternal ground upon which life is based. But masculine symbolism does not give adequate importance to the depth of feeling inherent in feminine nature. Tillich thus applauded the prevailing tendency of Roman Catholics to elevate the Holy Virgin to a status equal to Christ. He enlarges on this second point, saying:
For the devotional life of most Roman Catholics, she has by far surpassed the Holy Spirit and in modern Catholicism all three personae of the Trinity. If the doctrine which has already been discussed among Catholics that she is to be considered as co-savior with the Christ, should become dogma, the Virgin would become a matter of ultimate concern and, consequently, a persona within the divine life.586
Because Tillich’s speculation regarding the feminine occurred late in his career, it seems quite possible that his view regarding the Roman Catholic doctrine was influenced by Jung, especially since he wrote knowingly of Jung’s psychology when speaking at a memorial commemorating Jung’s life. By endorsing the Catholic veneration of Mary, Tillich drew close to Jung’s concept of the quaternity. Yet a major difference remains in that Jung, unlike Tillich, incorporated evil and matter alongside the feminine when formulating the fourth principle of the quaternity.587 In doing so, Jung recognized the need to sanctify the totality of creation.
Tillich defined the essential, including the maternal, as the structural underlay of the natural world, which, like Jung’s archetypes, also structures the psyche. It is important not to confuse the essential with God as the ground of Being. The essential derives from the ground but is not identical to it. Instead, it is finite. Though existing within the restrains of spacetime, as all finite things are, it still participates in everything that exists, including the full range of human emotions. The ground of Being, in contrast, is infinite, existing outside of nature, beyond time and space. Everyday experience, however, often falls short of the potential for depth inherent in the essential. But even when hidden, Tillich claimed that it is still “alive in existential consciousness imbuing 586 Ibid., 292.
587 Jung, “Answer to Job,” 355-470.
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it with a profound sense of removal from and drive back to its essential or divine origin.”588
Accordingly, “existence is the expression of essence and not the fall away from it.”589
Through God’s progressive incarnation over the course of history, Tillich claimed that humanity moves toward fulfillment as God becomes an actualized reality. Likewise, one of Jung’s fundamental positions is that God depends on humanity, for it is only through the individual that His fullness is realized. Of course, Jung is referring here to the God-image and not to the heavenly God revered by the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Both Tillich and Jung, however, understood that God, whether understood metaphysically or psychologically, is a symbol for a reality beyond human conception.
Speaking as a theologian, Tillich believed the essential derives from the ultimate ground of Being while Jung remained committed to an epistemology in which the psyche defines the limits of human knowledge. But like many Christian theologians before them, they both understood the goal of history in terms of God’s incarnation, however conceived. Thus, history when looked at from these different perspectives, is destined to unite the disparate parts of creation (Tillich) or the psyche (Jung) with the totality of Being.
The Holy, Tillich claimed, is present whenever the essential ground breaks through into conscious awareness. He was acutely aware though, as many existential writers are, that many people living today feel like they are strangers in the world, not really belonging to society or the natural world. But when the Holy breaks through, those who often feel estranged from life find, in fact, that they are “the door to the deeper levels of reality.”590 This deeper level, the essential, Tillich believed, is the only viable solution for feelings of estrangement. When the essential breaks into consciousness, one experiences a homecoming that conveys insight into the underlying reality of existence, the source of noesis or direct intuitive apprehension that is at the heart of Plato’s philosophy. This connection with one’s deeper being also bonds the individual to others, and indeed the whole of existence, but on a new plane of awareness.
Tillich’s understanding of the essential and the existential is close to Aristotle’s conception. Existence, according to Aristotle, is actual, and the essential is the potential that provides the actual with the power of being. Tillich, in agreeing with Aristotle, 588 As quoted in Dourley, Recovery of Religion, 25.
589 Tillich, Systematic Theology, II, 24.
590 Tillich, Systematic Theology, I, 62.
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made clear that “the power of the essential behind and within the existential”591 is not causal, but instead, directive in the teleological sense. Accordingly, it indirectly influences the evolution of life, the ultimate goal of history, and the unfoldment of individual lives. The essential, conditioned by the contingencies of life, acts, as Jung would say, as a spiritus rector drawing the individual toward fulfillment. Our current existential crisis is due, Tillich thought, to our estrangement from God’s essential nature. His goal, therefore, was to map out the means by which the estrangement can be overcome.592
In Paul Tillich, Carl Jung and the Recovery of Religion John Dourley, a Jungian analyst and Catholic priest, made a scholarly comparison between Tillich's theology and Jung’s psychology. Awareness of the essential, according to him, precedes philosophy and is “laden with a primordial religiosity.”593 Without the numinous experience that so often accompanies the sacramental encounter with divine essence, he claimed that religion would never have survived beyond its primitive beginnings. It is the relationship to the numinous quality inherent in the divine essence that draws the individual soul to seek ever greater fulfillment through it. Summarizing Tillich’s position on the essential, Dourley said:
At the level of self-conscious existence, then, humanity’s participation in the essential is the basis of humanity’s universal and native awareness of its natural continuity with divinity and the underlying divinity of nature. This awareness carries with it the acute sense of humanity’s separation from the essential as the basis of its drive to recover it.594
By adamantly claiming that the dynamic interplay between the essential and existential is necessary, Tillich avoided the sense of meaninglessness and despair that is so often characteristic of existentialism.595 While many existentialists, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, rejected or ignored the ontological ground of the 591 Tillich, Systematic Theology, III, 164.
592 Renwick, Numinosity and Resolution of Opposites in Jung’s Psychology, (doctoral dissertation, California Institute of Integral Studies, 2013), 55,56.
593 Dourley, Recovery of Religion, 28.
594 Ibid., 29; Tillich, 1951, 61, 62.
595 Ibid., 28, 29.
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essential altogether,596 Tillich viewed both the essential and existential as inseparable ontological categories. To exist without the healing power of the essential is therefore to suffer estrangement from the divine ground of one’s own being. Dourley claimed: In fact, the distortion of the essential in existence becomes, for Tillich, the basis of various forms of human suffering which provoke the quest for an alleviation only the manifestation of the essential can provide.597
History understood this way thus promises “the fullness of historical time, the Kairoi that give to history its meaning and rewards its innate religious quest.” 598
Tillich compared the union of the existential with the essential to a portrait that reveals the whole personality, highlighting all the suffering and joy experienced throughout life. A well-done portrait, therefore, does not just capture the moment, but penetrates to the essence of the individual, condensing in an image what the individual has become on the basis of his or her existential circumstances and the unconscious resources that are an indispensable part of the person’s life.599
Presocratic philosophers such as Pythagoras, Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides understood that the world of the senses was not ultimately real. “But only in Plato,” Tillich maintained, “does the contrast between the existential and the essential being become an ontological and ethical problem.”600 For Plato, Tillich reminded us, ultimate reality is only “present in the realm of eternal ideas, i.e., in essences. To approximate essential being, man must rise above existence. He must return to the essential realm from which he fell into existence.”601 According to Plato, 596 The main feature of Sartre’s ontology, for instance, is based solely on our radical freedom to make choices while Camus ignored metaphysics altogether, arguing that life has no meaning.
597 Dourley, Recovery of Religion., 26.
598 Ibid., 46: Jung uses the term “Kairos” (plural, “kairoi” ) in The Undiscovered Self where he says, “We are living in what the Greeks called the Kairos - the right moment - for a
‘metamorphosis of the gods,’…This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of the momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science:” CW 10, para 585.
599 Tillich, Systematic Theology, III, 413.
600 Tillich, Systematic Theology, II, 22. Empedocles may have foreseen this problem as well.
601 Ibid., 22.
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this is done through remembrance. He held that each soul has a memory of the essential realm from which existence derives. Further, transcendent states of consciousness, aided by reason, helps recall aspects of these memories by allowing us a glimpse into the essential nature of the forms. But only through what Plato called noesis—a direct intuitive grasp of Truth— is the essential fully apprehended.602 Though it is only through such contemplation that we rise above the finite world to momentarily grasp the supreme meaning of existence, Tillich insisted that such mystical revelations must be brought back to earth where they can serve to enlighten mundane existence. He could thus appreciate, amongst many other things, Aristotle’s effort to ground Plato’s ideals within the world.
Aristotle’s Forms, as Tillich explained, also exist within the eternal order as potentialities waiting to be actualized through rational contemplation. It is through contemplation, Anthony Kronman argues, that the philosopher realizes within his own mind the potential existing within the eternal order. Contemplative thought for Aristotle, he insisted, is more than a process of formulating ideas. “It is the eternal order itself, at its most real.” By engaging in contemplation, Kronman says, the philosopher’s mind becomes “the eternal intelligibility of the world made actual by being understood. And to that extent, he partakes directly of immortality in a way no other human activity allows.”603
Tillich differentiates between the eternal message, the subject of Kerygmatic theology, and apologetic theology, which must interpret the eternal truth within the historical and social context of the culture. As important as it is to interpret religion in the language of a culture, Tillich insists apologetic theology must always be on guard against losing sight of the Kerygma, the eternal truth. If it does, Tillich said, it becomes a victim of secularism. He used what he called the “method of correlation” to give voice to both the existential questions posed by the difficulties of life and the healing answers that arrive through revelatory insights. As such, the method of correlation also gives expression to the existential or historical situation to which apologetic theology must be responsive as well as the essential truth of the Kerygma. “It correlates questions and answers, situation and message, human existence and divine manifestation.”604 The Kerygma must be responsive to both the personal 602 Recall that for Plato these memories are not personal but exist in all human beings equally.
603 Kronman, Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan, 173.
604 Tillich, Systematic Theology, I, 8.
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understanding of reality, with its various trials and sorrows, and the ultimate of which every numinous experience grants a glimpse.
Today, many religious scholars now affirm that the eternal truth is universal, and each religion gives symbolic expression to the same transcendent depth that Christianity does. What most mattered to Tillich is that each person’s ultimate concern affirms the eternal truth, which is also the ground of individual existence. An ultimate concern, Tillich maintained, must address the purpose and meaning of life. It is the abstract translation of the great commandment: “The Lord, our God, is the one Lord, and you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.”605 He recognized that theology, so defined, is often “rooted in a ‘mystical a priori,’ an awareness of something that transcends the cleavage between subject and object.”606 Living a life devoted to Christ is for many Christians their innermost desire, an ultimate concern comparable to the great commandment
Although there are many secular concerns that occupy us throughout life, Tillich considered them subordinate to the ultimate aim of life. He is quick to point out, however, that nothing is essentially and inescapably secular. For only when confronted with sorrow and the contingencies of life can the sacred awaken the soul to its true purpose. It cannot be artificially constructed by the intellect but must be drawn forth from the depths of the soul, often through religious rituals such as the Eucharist.
Without its life enhancing power, life becomes stale. Even God can be a preliminary concern, and at the same time everything has the potential of being Holy, depending on how we experience it. What has primacy may be the love of nature or a passion for artistic expression, but if rooted in the depth of Being, it stands outside and above many of the secular concerns that compete for our loyalty. Tillich maintained that only God, as the ground of Being, constitutes the source of our true being whose nature is immune to being disrupted by time and space. Finite existence, however, is conditional. He thought two criteria must be kept in mind when formulating theological issues. The first defines the nature of our ultimate concern; the second addresses the existential condition of our existence as it relates to the ultimate aim and purpose of life. The tension between these two characterizes much of Tillich’s 605 The Jerusalem Bible, Mark 12:29.
606 Tillich, Systematic Theology, I, 9.
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philosophy, which he hoped would also become the defining criteria for Christian theology in the modern world.607
Jung and Tillich would have both agreed that there exists a form of truth, revelatory in nature, which is only accessible from the depth of the soul or psyche. It reveals itself through symbols that embody the mystery of Being in language that the soul alone fully understands. Objective reason, in contrast, can only go so far toward such understanding; beyond that, it must defer to the revelatory power of myth and symbols. Accordingly, Tillich held that the revelatory experience of the Holy is present whenever the divine ground makes its presence felt. Whenever it breaks into our lives, the individual awakens to a spectrum of experience entirely distinct from the ordinary experience of daily life. At the farthest end of the spectrum is the mystical.
For some, especially after the World Wars, the desire for greater honesty seemed to reveal life and history as an endless struggle, filled with anxiety and lacking purpose and meaning. Any lingering hope for finding meaning was considered delusional.
While Tillich understood and appreciated the existential dilemma of the modern world, he rejected the nihilistic tendency of many existentialists by affirming an attitude of courage in the face of doubt and adversity. The phrase “courage to be,”
which is central to Tillich’s theology, derives from the existential dilemma of modern culture, so vividly described by writers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and Samuel Beckett. After Nietzsche declared God dead and after two world wars that left Europe a massive ruin, many despaired of ever finding meaning in life. The existential question that hung in the air was: How does one find meaning in life when there is no divinely ordered meaning to existence? Tillich, however, conceived existentialism more broadly than many of the secular and humanist existentialists of the twentieth century did. Its value, for him, was religious, derived from accurately analyzing the human condition and showing what it means to exist in a world impregnated with the Spirit of God. Even answers coming from writers like Marx, Sartre, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Jaspers, he insisted, derive from hidden religious sources: “…matters of ultimate concern or faith, although garbed in a secular gown.”608
Tillich felt that even in the face of all the uncertainties of life, one can still find the courage to live by affirming one’s participation in the essential ground of individual 607 These two criteria reflect Tillich’s insistence that both the essential and the existential have to be wedded in religion and in the life of the individual.
608 Tillich, Systematic Theology, II, 26. In this regard, we recall the quotation from Jonathan Sheehan that we reference in the chapter “Existential Crisis of our Age.”
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existence. The courage to be, Tillich proclaimed, can be reduced to a simple affirmation:
“...the courageous Yes to one’s own true being.”609 Faith based on such courage constitutes a basis for overcoming temporal negativity.610 He acknowledged that the traditional idea of God was no longer viable, but faith based on the experience of the Holy was still possible when people are fully open to the depth of Being within themselves. Even the question of death can be more honestly faced by affirming our participation in the transcendent. “Faith is not an opinion but a state. It is the state,”
Tillich declared, “of being grasped by the power of being which transcends everything that is and in which everything that is participates. He who is grasped by this power is able to affirm himself because he knows that he is affirmed by the power of being-itself.”611
One is reminded, once again, of Viktor Frankl (1905-1997), the founder of logotherapy and most widely known for Man’s Search for Meaning.612 A Nazi death camp survivor, he ardently believed the search for meaning in life is the human being’s deepest drive. So long as that search continues, even during immense suffering, a person can live and even flourish. Frankl found the “courage to be” by helping his fellow sufferers. Undoubtedly, his courage was sustained by the depth he discovered within himself. Although Frankl did not believe that meaning will be the same for all who find it in themselves and in life, the fundamental drive for meaning is the essential condition for living well. As previously noted, Jung often remarked that neurosis is due to a loss of meaning. For Tillich, the “courage to be” did not depend on a belief in God, as such, but was strengthened and sustained by having a relationship to the ground of one’s own being. Jung had a similar outlook. When asked during a BBC
interview whether he believed in God, he said, “I don’t believe, I know.”613 Jung was 609 Tillich, The Courage to Be, 14.
610 Tillich, Systematic Theology, I, 276.
611 Tillich, The Courage to Be, 173.
612 Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning. There are many editions of this book, beginning with the 1959 edition.
613Jung,
https://lambfollower.wordpress.com/2011/11/05/carl-jung-i-don%E2%80%99t-need-to-believe-i-know/, In a BBC interview, “Face to Face with Carl Jung,” Jung said:
“The word “belief” is a difficult thing for me. I don’t believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it – I don’t need to believe it.” And when he was asked does he believe in God, he answered: “Now? Difficult to answer… I know. I don’t need to believe, I know.” Accessed 5/17/2017.
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not claiming knowledge of a divine being, but instead, was claiming that by cultivating his relationship to the unconscious, he had been granted insight into the depth of human existence. Like the Gnostics before him, Jung had gained a sense of certain knowledge concerning that which is Holy.
The goal of spiritual development, Tillich thought, is not to transcend the ordinary world but to be fully present to the concreteness of life in a loving and compassionate way.614 The truest expression of courage comes from a life of commitment to one’s own spiritual depth. “The divine,” Tillich said, “is creative, actualizing itself in inexhaustible abundance,”615 but it can only become real by manifesting in history and the concrete existence of transitory, time-bound beings.616 Jung would have been in complete agreement with Tillich on this by adding that we manifest divinity by expanding consciousness.
When understood as a symbol for the sacred foundation of individual existence, Christ was, for Tillich, the answer to the existential crisis that has arisen due to pervasive secularism. Although existentialism along with depth psychology has done much to provide an accurate analysis of existence, Tillich believed that only a theology based on the depth of Being can provide answers to the questions such analysis raises.
This is especially true when considering the biblical imagery of humanity’s fall from grace as told in the story of Adam and Eve. Tillich considered the Genesis story of the Fall to accurately represent the transition from essential to existential being, a mythological state that speaks to a time before humanity gained the freedom to decide its fate.
Accordingly, the story of the Fall must be viewed as a mythological tale for a universal human condition, of which Plato was also intensely aware. He said the soul follows the god most like its own nature, but the chariot or vehicle it guides is pulled by the horses of reason and passion. The typical soul loses control of this chariot and then plunges into this world of reflected images, left with the food of illusion rather than reality. It must return to reality through efforts of purification and control, so that the chariot ascends and does not merely race around up and down, acting erratically.
Various myths of the Fall can be found in many traditions, pointing to the alienation of the soul from God or reality and plunging back into the illusion of this world as 614 Tillich, Systematic Theology, I, 226.
615 Ibid., 252.
616 Ibid., 218.
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compared with what the soul once knew and with what it is. The story of the Fall reminds us that existence is separated from our essential nature to which we long to return. While our essential nature points toward God, our instinctual nature points downward to our primitive past.
In the book of Genesis, God placed “Cherubim and the flame of a flashing sword”617
before the Tree of Life to prevent anyone from returning to the garden. Tillich contends that if they had returned, they would have forfeited their freedom. To exist outside the divine life, Tillich thought, was to stand in actualized freedom, in an existence which is no longer united with essence. Mythically speaking, Adam and Eve, while living in the Garden, were one with God’s essence. Only then is there sufficient separation from the essential ground for a relationship with God to exist.618 Destiny cast them forth from the Garden to begin the long journey toward individual fulfillment.619
Our full potential for freedom, however, requires a new relationship be established in which the individual is rooted in the “creative ground of the divine life” while living outside the spell of the Garden. To return and live under its spell is regressive, for only through freedom can a meaningful relationship with the Divine be established.620 This is very close to how Jung envisioned the relationship one should have with the Self.
Overcoming the seductive influence of the unconscious, according to him, is the first step on the road to wholeness. Only then can freedom be actualized through a meaningful relationship with the Self, the creative ground of our own being. One cannot help but wonder if Tillich’s interest in Jung’s work influenced him when writing about the relationship that he felt must be established between the divine Ground and individual freedom.
In the aftermath of World War II, Tillich predicted the coming of a new Aeon, as was foretold in the Book of Revelation, when the New Being will appear but with the increase of power of the Kingdom of God, the demonic realm would also become stronger and more destructive.621 Because he was writing shortly after the bombing of Hiroshima, he feared that the increased destructive power of nuclear weapons, especially in the 617 The Jerusalem Bible, Genesis: 3:24.
618 Modern therapy recognizes that two people in love must have sufficient separation from each other to avoid codependency.
619 Tillich, Systematic Theology, I, 255.
620 Ibid., 256.
621 Ibid., 162-164.
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hands of tyrants, might even lead to the cataclysmic collapse of civilization. Jung, likewise, feared that a time would come when the clash of opposites would lead to a disastrous conflict not unlike the biblical apocalypse.
With their warnings in mind, how should we conceive of God today? Although the world is in turmoil, Tillich affirmed that God is “eternally creative, that through himself he creates the world and through the world himself.”622 There is thus a creative element in nature, according to both Tillich and Jung, that is operative in the life of every individual and the course of history. God’s creativity is only made known, however, through human consciousness. It seems our purpose is to awaken to the divine mystery that has silently operated in nature since the beginning of the universe.
Instead of viewing God as a transcendent being to be worshiped, God is becoming a fact of nature subject to investigation. Some might rightly fear that in doing so, God’s magnificence will be lessened, but in turn, nature will be adorned with Divine majesty.
In the final chapters of this book, we examine Jung’s psychology as it relates to the mystery of Being. Although Jung was a psychologist and not interested in pursuing metaphysical questions, his empirical investigation of the objective psyche indirectly sheds much light on the fundamental nature of existence, especially regarding the creative, teleological role that the psyche has in advancing the evolution of consciousness. Like Tillich, he employed enlightened reason to probe the innermost truths of life hidden deep within the psyche, the eternal source of primordial wisdom.
622 Ibid., 147.
C. G. JUNG’S PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION
In the beginning was the Word.
The Word was with God
And the Word was God.
He was with God in the beginning.
Through him all things came to be,
Not one thing had its being but through him.
All that came to be had life in him
And that life was the light of men,
A light that shines in the dark,
A light that darkness could not overpower.
The Jerusalem Bible 623
Both [Tillich and Jung] call for a rediscovery of the nature of religion itself, as the precondition for the revitalization of any particular religion….This in fact would mean the recognition of the individual soul and the psyche as the place of access to the divine, and the source from which man’s symbols and their attendant numinosity arise.
John Dourley624
This chapter presents a biographical sketch of Carl Jung along with some initial thoughts on his psychology. Though Paul Tillich’s theology further develops our inquiry into the nature of Being, the reader might reasonably ask: What is it about Carl Jung’s psychology that likewise advances our understanding of the foundational structures of reality? First, Jung’s psychology complements Tillich’s scholarly analysis by empirically examining the deep structures of the psyche from which religious sentiment arises. We feel this may be a better way of investigating the nature of Being than relying solely on rational analysis. As Jung points out, the psyche is all we have.
Beyond it, nothing can be known. Second, while Tillich affirms the creative nature of God as the ground of Being, Jung provides empirical evidence for the teleological drive found throughout nature. This strongly suggests that there is a higher purpose influencing the evolution of life and the universe. Third, by following Jung’s own visionary experiences we acquire a new understanding of the many dramatic visions found throughout all religious traditions. These transcendent experiences, according 623 The Jerusalem Bible, The Gospel According to John 1:1-5.
624 John P. Dourley, C. G. Jung and Paul Tillich: The Psyche as Sacrament, 23-24.
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to Jung, are not revelations from a personal God but instead, derive from the archetypal foundation of consciousness. Fourth and last, Jung’s psychology is based on the healing tension existing between the dark, unruly contents of the unconscious and the light aspects of spirit. This parallels Heraclitus’ understanding of the opposites through which everything in the universe—the material world, life, and consciousness—came into existence. When examined together, these four features of Jung’s psychology provide a roadmap for individuals to draw closer to the numinous ground of their individual existence, thereby restoring religion to its rightful place at the center of life. And it is here, at the center, that we gain a better insight into the mystery of Being through which the enlightened reason of our age can deepen our relationship to the primordial wisdom of ages past.
From its beginnings, Christianity envisioned a final triumph of love over the violence that characterizes so much of life. Jung had similar hopes for humanity, envisioning that the darkness that dwells within each of us would eventually be redeemed. This is the therapeutic goal of his individuation process, which aims to liberate individual consciousness from its destructive entanglements with the unconscious. Only then can we act freely in accordance with our true self and thus gradually awaken to the spiritual potential that lies at the center of the individual psyche. Jung called this center the archetype of the Self. It represents psychic totality including both its unconscious and conscious aspects and functions as the organizing principle of our lives. Partly because of its creative nature and numinous quality, he considered the Self indistinguishable from the symbol of Christ or the image of God.
This realization, perhaps more than anything else, aligns Jung’s psychology with the rich symbolism of Christianity. If Christianity is to endure throughout the tumult of the coming years, it is because the symbolism of the Church touches upon the felt sacredness within the heart of each Christian. In a like manner, Jung’s whole psychology was directed toward awakening individuals to the sacredness at the center of the individual—the Self. Often, as people align more fully with it, they discover that this spiritual center, once hidden, is a guiding spirit. Through its actions, higher levels of reality open to them, much like the transcendent insights revealed through Plato’s noesis. This was the long-sought goal of both Idealists and Romantics.
Marilyn Nagy’s succinct description of Idealist and Romantic philosophers—
referenced earlier—clearly demonstrates their aspiration for awakening to a higher reality:
The inmost longings of the human person, now as in every age, are to be able to believe that the course of life is toward a good end, that one’s life is developing toward its ultimate potential and fulfillment,
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that love is finally to be gained, and justice achieved, if not in this life then surely in some kind of continuation of existence beyond the barrier of death. To believe in these dictates of the soul rather than in the physical evidence of the perceivable world has been the purport of every metaphysical idealist since Plato.625
Jung knew that it is not easy to realize such high aspirations. Humans have evolved over countless eons during which the evolutionary struggle for survival fitted humanity to live in tribal communities. But in the span of six thousand years, we have overpopulated the planet and developed technologies that threaten our continued existence. Our instinctual nature is obviously inadequate for the world we created and in which we find ourselves. Although we now live in a global community far removed from our tribal past, we still respond instinctually to many of the vast problems facing humanity today. This has been strikingly apparent during the first quarter of the twenty-first century.
The United States, for instance, was founded on liberal ideals that were fashioned to protect individual liberty.626 Before then, most nations followed the law of the “jungle”
as Robert Kagan writes in his recently published book The Jungle Grows Back.627
According to him, history is again reverting to barbarism as it increasingly rejects the liberal order established throughout the Western world in the last century. Many of America’s founders were fervent believers in liberal democracy, at least for white male landowners, while also fearing individual frailty. Samuel Adams said, “Ambitions and lust for power…are predominant passions in the breasts of most men.” Patrick Henry admitted to feelings of dread when he witnessed the “depravity of human nature.”628
Without the guardrails of democracy in place, we fear, as Kagan does, that everything will return to the oppressive conditions that have existed throughout history. Much is at stake, but a better understanding of the process by which the instinctual ground of humanity sabotages our higher ideals will help people guard against the disruptive changes happening to our way of life today. It is hard to imagine a change large enough to resolve the struggle between the frailties of human nature and the enlightened 625 Nagy, Philosophical Issues in the Psychology of C. G. Jung, 30-31. We used this same quote at the beginning of our chapter “Idealism and Romanticism.”
626 There were, of course, compromises, such as the toleration of slavery, that have haunted the nation since its founding with consequences it still faces today.
627 Robert Kagan, The Jungle Grows Back: America and our Imperiled World.
628 David Brooks, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/17/opinion/liberalism-democracy-russia-ukraine.html. Accessed 3/18/2022.
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values that inspired our country’s founders. But we believe, along with Jung, that the world is moving toward a higher state of existence that will ultimately transform human consciousness.
The inherent conflict that exists between the idea of a God conceived as loving and the wide-spread reality of suffering and evil has confounded great thinkers ever since the world transitioned from hunter-gatherer tribes to the earliest civilizations. Homer’s legendary tales illustrate this tension. Thomas Cahill weaves an insightful tale of the Iliad and Odyssey in his book Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter. The ancient Greeks, according to him, were intimately familiar with suffering and evil, and during Homer’s time they conceived the universe “ruled by passions human and divine.” Violence for them seemed inevitable: “… a law established for all time among all men.…”629 While apparently true of Homeric times, several centuries later, Plato would celebrate the “good” and the “beautiful.” Later still, Christianity would proclaim the birth of a savior who was destined to redeem the world, saving it from the inevitability of evil. Amidst the brutality of today—and after two world wars—
many contemporary scholars might be inclined to admit that while religion inspires hope, the ancient Greeks were the true realists. While Jung understood the danger that evil presents to the modern world, he held out hope that the spiritual potential of the psyche would ultimately triumph.
Jung’s life was very mystical, bordering at times on the psychotic. Nonetheless, he always remained grounded in reality. From an early age, he was granted unusual insight into the mysterious working of the unconscious which, when combined with his intellect and dedication to science, yielded a unique perspective on the nature of Being. The eighteen volumes of his collected works are very scholarly, but in addition to these prodigious writings, we have also chosen to present some of his revelatory insights and startling visions recorded in The Red Book and his autobiography—
Memories, Dreams, Reflections. It is these, we feel, that are of greatest interest to people who are looking for a vision of life that imbues their own struggles with purpose and meaning. Such vivid images also grant us a glimpse into the inner structures of existence that give rise to consciousness.
Jung was born in Kesswil, in the Swiss canton of Thurgau, on 26 July 1875 as the second and first surviving son of Paul Achilles Jung (1842–1896) and Emilie Preiswerk (1848–1923). Their first child, born in 1873, was a boy named Paul who survived only a few days. His sister Trudi (Johanna Gertrud) was born when Jung was nine years 629 Thomas Cahill, Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter, 65. We discussed possession by the gods earlier in relation to Helen and Achilles.
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old. He describes her as delicate, having a rather sickly nature. Jung’s father, Paul, was a rural pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church. Preaching was a family tradition: on his mother’s side there were six parsons and on his father’s side two. Although his father, when a student, seemed destined for a promising career, he never progressed beyond the status of an impoverished rural pastor. It seemed to Jung that his father had lost his faith and with it his will to live. Jung recounts his disappointment over his father’s inability to explain the Trinity during confirmation lessons. “I was seized with the most vehement pity for my father. All at once I understood the tragedy of his profession and his life…. I now found myself cut off from the Church and from my father’s and everybody else’s faith.”630
The Jungian analyst Murray Stein,631 as well as others, have theorized that Jung’s intense interest in religion stems from his father’s failure to find personal meaning in the religious life. If so, he may have been trying to find answers to questions that his father could not answer. In his autobiography, Jung admits that he felt fated to complete the unfinished work of his ancestors:
I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished.632
Though his father had dedicated his life to the teachings of Christ, Jung’s own religious convictions were derived from his own visionary experiences, forged out of his own depth. Although familiar with Eastern religion, he felt that the West needed to nurture its own unique spiritual treasure by rediscovering its source, as he did, deep within the human soul. The spiritual treasure he discovered there was not only filled 630 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 55, 56.
631 Murray Stein is a Jungian analyst that we refer to frequently regarding Jung’s concern with Christianity.
632 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 233. The idea that things incomplete or undone pass through the generations can be found in ancient Greek myths and the biblical view that the “sins” of the fathers are passed to the sons. In mundane terms, this is the recognition that actions have consequences beyond the actor and his or her times.
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with beauty; it also confronted him with the problem of evil, which seemed to him to be part of the very structure of reality.
His focus on religion in his later years can also be attributed to his close relationship with the unconscious. At the end of Memories, Dreams, Reflections Jung reflects on the unconscious stream that he had always been able to perceive. Though for many, he understood, there remains an opaque wall that separates the conscious and unconscious world, Jung frankly acknowledged that he always found the dividing wall to be relatively transparent. He said:
That is my peculiarity. Others find these walls so opaque that they see nothing behind them and therefore think nothing is there. To some extent I perceive the processes going on in the background, and that gives me an inner certainty. People who see nothing have no certainty…. Knowledge of processes in the background early shaped my relationship to the world.633
Awareness of this stream of psychic images, however, made him feel alone, for others were not able to follow his gaze.
When he was twelve, Jung had a dramatic experience that left a lasting impression on him. Coming out of school, he went to the cathedral square. It was a beautiful day and the roof of the cathedral sparkled in the sunlight. He was overwhelmed by the sight, thinking the “world is beautiful and the church is beautiful, and God made all this and sits above it far away in the blue sky on a golden throne….” But before he had even finished with this thought, he felt something dark and terrible arising in his mind that frightened him. Instinctively, he knew he could not allow it into consciousness.
For two days he desperately fought against being overcome by it. On the third night, he surrendered.
I gathered all my courage, as though I were about to leap forthwith into hell-fire, and let the thought come. I saw before me the cathedral, the blue sky. God sits on His golden throne, high above the world—
and from under the throne an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral asunder.634
From then on, Jung was convinced that the existence of God was not a concept to be discussed but a living experience that, at times, could be terrifying. He knew he had 633 Ibid., 355, 356.
634 Ibid., 39.
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not invented the image of God destroying the cathedral, it was forced on him.635 ”I had experienced a dark and terrible secret. It overshadowed my whole life, and I became deeply pensive.” But by surrendering to this monstrous thought, what had appeared terrifying transformed into grace. He experienced “an enormous, an indescribable relief. Instead of the expected damnation, grace had come upon me, and with it an unutterable bliss such as I had never known…. It was as though I had experienced an illumination. A great many things I had not previously understood became clear to me. That was what my father had not understood. I thought; he had failed to experience the will of God... And that was why he had never experienced the miracle of grace which heals all and makes all comprehensible.”636
As a child, Jung was very solitary and he found great peace in nature, especially while sitting on a special stone near his home. Thirty years later, he returned to this very stone. “It illuminated in a flash of lightning,” he recalled, “the quality of eternity in my childhood.”637 From an early age, he understood that he had two personalities.
One, which he called his No. 1 personality, “was the son of my parents, who went to school and was less intelligent, attentive, hard-working, decent, and clean than many other boys…” His No. 2 personality occupied another realm that, he said, was “like a temple in which anyone who entered was transformed and suddenly overpowered by a vision of the whole cosmos, so that he [his #2 personality] could only marvel and admire, forgetful of himself. Here lived the ‘Other,’ who knew God as a hidden, personal, and at the same time suprapersonal secret. Here nothing separated man from God; indeed, it was as though the human mind looked down upon Creation simultaneously with God.”638
Jung’s mother was the youngest child of a distinguished Basel churchman and academic, Samuel Preiswerk, whom, it was said, taught himself Hebrew because he believed it was spoken in heaven.639 Jung seems to have inherited his two personalities from her. She was overweight and unattractive, according to Jung, but had an uncanny psychic ability which would manifest at various times when he most needed her support. During these times she seemed to exhibit great wisdom, “and what she said 635 Ibid., 62.
636 Ibid., 40.
637 Ibid., 21-22.
638 Ibid., 44-45.
639 Lachman, Jung the Mystic, 19.
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on those occasions was so true and to the point that I trembled before it.”640 He relates that when he was quite young “All sorts of things were happening at night, things incomprehensible and alarming. My parents were sleeping apart. I slept in my father’s room. From the door to mother’s room came frightening influences. At night Mother was strange and mysterious. One night I saw coming from her door a faintly luminous, indefinite figure whose head detached itself from the neck and floated along in front of it, in the air, like a little moon.”641
Admitting that he had some of his mother’s gift as a seer, Jung recounted an incident at a dinner party during which he innocently and unknowingly told the life story of a man he had only met that night. “We were having an animated conversation about criminal psychology. In order to answer a particular question of his, I made up a story to illustrate it, embellishing it with all sorts of details…. To my amazement and horror it turned out that I had told the story of the man opposite me, exactly and in all its details…. In the course of my life, it has often happened to me that I suddenly knew something which I really could not know at all. The knowledge came to me as though it were my own idea”.642 His empathic nature was likely a great asset to him when working with clients. As a therapist, he did not adhere to any theoretical or formal methodologies but rather relied on his intuition, which seems to have worked well for him. In fact, Jungian analysis as we know it today was not his invention. He once said in exasperation, “Thank God, I’m Jung, and not a Jungian.”643
As he began to look through his father’s library for books on religion, Jung hoped to find answers to his unrelenting questions, especially concerning the existence of suffering and evil in the world. He was disappointed by his father’s rather modest library which did not address issues he agonized over. About this time, his mother, speaking from her No. 2 personality, suggested he read Goethe’s Faust. The library contained a handsome edition of Goethe’s works and he immediately turned to Faust.
“It poured into my soul like a miraculous balm. ‘Here at last,’ I thought, ‘is someone who takes the devil seriously and even concludes a blood pact with him—with the adversary who has the power to frustrate God’s plan to make a perfect world.” Here at last, he realized, he “had found confirmation that there were or had been people who saw evil and its universal power, and—more important—the mysterious role it 640 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 52.
641 Ibid., 18.
642 Ibid., 50-51.
643 Hannah, Barbara, Jung: His Life and Work, 78.
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played in delivering man from darkness and suffering.”644 From then on, Jung never doubted the duality of light and darkness that defined God; they were facts not to be questioned. As Jung matured, however, he lost faith in the existence of God as a transcendent being, transferring the insights he gained from personal experience to the psyche.
Jung’s attraction to Faust was undoubtedly reinforced by a rumor that Jung’s grandfather was an illegitimate child of Goethe. There was some substance to the rumor because Sophie Ziegler, the wife of Jung’s great-grandfather, was active in the Mannheim theatre. She was a friend to many writers and may very well have been close to Goethe. “Goethe’s secret,” Jung believed, “was that he was in the grip of that process of archetypal transformation which has gone on through the centuries. He
[Goethe] regarded his Faust as an opus magnum or divinum. He called it his ‘main business,’ and his whole life was enacted within the framework of this drama. Thus, what was alive and active within him was a living substance, a suprapersonal process, the great dream of the mundus archetypus (archetypal world).” Jung admitted that, like Goethe, he was “haunted by the same dream, and from my eleventh year I have been launched upon a single enterprise which is my ‘main business.’ My life has been permeated and held together by one idea and one goal: namely, to penetrate into the secret of the personality.”645 Goethe clearly inspired Jung’s belief that there is a long historical development of the unconscious, and that he, like Goethe and everyone else, is part of the great unfolding that has been going on since the dawn of creation. “Faust stuck a chord in me,” Jung confessed, “and pierced me through in a way that I could not but regard as personal. Most of all, it awakened in me the problem of opposites, of good and evil, of mind and matter, of light and darkness.” Jung thereby recognized that Mephistopheles was indeed Faust’s sinister shadow, “who in spite of his negating disposition represents the true spirit of life as against the arid scholar who hovers on the brink of suicide.”646
Life was not always easy for Jung and only after many years of personal struggle, did he arrive at his mature understanding of the psyche. All through his life he had a close relationship with the unconscious, but as he grew into a young man and began to seriously consider a career, he left behind the expansive depth within himself that he associated with the wisdom of the ages (his No. 2 personality). Science appealed to him, especially biology, but it lacked the meaning and beauty of the humanities. And 644 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 60.
645 Ibid., 206.
646 Ibid., 235.
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besides, at that time it was difficult to make a living as a scientist.647 Finally, he chose a career in medicine and in preparing for the state examination, he read Krafft-Ebing’s book on psychiatry. He did not expect to find much of interest there because psychiatry was generally held in contempt. But as he began his study, he quickly realized that psychiatry dealt with diseases of the personality. “My excitement was intense, for it had become clear to me, in a flash of illumination, that for me the only possible goal was psychiatry. Here alone the two currents of my interest could flow together… Here was the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts…”648
Jung initially contacted Freud in 1906 while he was working at the prestigious Burghölzli Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. His purpose for writing was to discuss his research regarding the word-association test which provided empirical validation for Freud’s investigations into the subconscious. It was this work which first gave Jung scientific recognition. At the beginning of their relationship, there was a feeling of mutual admiration. Jung credited Freud with taking neurotic patients seriously and for demonstrating not only the presence of an unconscious psyche but the hold it has on life. Freud prized his association with Jung because he wanted the scientific respectability of the Burghölzli. Up to this time Freud’s reputation did not extend much beyond the Vienna Jewish community and he hoped Jung would provide a bridge to the Gentiles.
Freud’s insistence on the primacy of sexuality as the basis of neurosis was one of the major issues that led to the severance of their relationship in 1913. “I can still recall vividly how Freud said to me, ‘My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most essential thing of all. You see, we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark….’ In some astonishment I asked him, ‘A bulwark—against what?’ To which he replied, ‘Against the black tide of mud’—and here he hesitated for a moment, then added—‘of occultism.’”649 Parapsychology and Jung’s interest in spiritual matters was clearly a divisive issue in their relationship. Eventually, however, Freud became interested in parapsychology, but when Jung visited him in 1909, he treated the whole subject as nonsense, which irritated Jung. While Freud was going on about the dangers of the occult, Jung felt a burning sensation in his stomach.
It was as if my diaphragm were made of iron and were becoming red-hot—a glowing vault. And at that moment there was such a loud report in the bookcase, which stood right next to us, that we both 647 Ibid., 72.
648 Ibid., 108-109.
649 Ibid., 150.
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started up in alarm, fearing the thing was going to topple over on us. I said to Freud: “There, that is an example of a so-called catalytic exteriorization phenomenon.”
“Oh come,” he exclaimed. “That is sheer bosh.”
“It is not,” I replied. “You are mistaken, Herr Professor. And to prove my point I now predict that in a moment there will be another such loud report!” Sure enough, no sooner had I said the words than the same detonation went off in the bookcase.650
The issues of sexuality and parapsychology continued to serve as an irritant in their relationship until their fruitful partnership finally ended in 1913. After his estrangement from Freud, Jung went through an extended crisis during which time he turned inward to explore the content of the unconscious more fully. In the early days, when working as a psychiatrist at the Burghölzli Psychiatric Hospital, Jung encountered the dark side of the psyche almost daily. But it was not until he journeyed into the depths of his own psyche that he became fully aware of the importance of integrating the extreme opposites of good and evil into consciousness. His inward journey, as recorded The Red Book, preoccupied him until 1928. Afterwards, the direction of his interest gradually shifted toward alchemy and religious symbolism.
Religious and specifically Christian symbolism was clearly of great interest to Jung throughout his career. His life-long fascination with religion is further explored in Murray Stein’s book Jung’s Treatment of Christianity. 651 Here he examines Jung’s underlying motive for attempting to reformulate much of Christian doctrine, especially during the last twenty years of his life. Although his psychology of religion, according to Stein, appears to be addressing theological and metaphysical issues, Jung consistently maintained that he was an empiricist:
Although I have often been called a philosopher, I am an empiricist and adhere as such to the phenomenological standpoint. I trust that it does not conflict with the principles of scientific empiricism . .
.Inasmuch as religion has a very important psychological aspect, I deal with it from a purely empirical point of view, that is, I restrict myself 650 Ibid., 155.
651 Stein , Jung’s Treatment of Christianity: The Psychotherapy of a Religious Tradition.
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to the observation of phenomena and I eschew any metaphysical or philosophical considerations.652
Despite his claim of being narrowly focused on the psyche, Stein concludes that Jung, in his later years, was attempting to heal Christianity. But before defending his own conclusion, Stein examines four other approaches: there is “Jung the empirical scientist; then Jung the hermeneutical revitalist of Christianity; third, Jung the doctor of souls; and, finally, Jung the post-Christian modern man.”653
Because Stein felt that these interpretations are insufficient to account for the depth and richness of Jung’s psychological interpretation of Christianity, he offers another explanation more aligned with Jung’s understanding of the unconscious. He argues that because Jung recognized that Christianity was ailing, he was primarily motivated by a desire to mend the brokenness of the Christian religion as it then existed in the modern world. Unlike other explanations, this entailed a complete reworking of traditional theology.654 Because Jung grew up in a religious family, and since his father was a minister in the Swiss Reformed Church, he was very aware of Christianity’s failings—especially after witnessing how disillusioned and depressed his father had become, largely because his faith had failed him. He thus came to realize that healing Christianity would involve a radical transformation encompassing all aspects of Christian theology that he found inadequate.655 This entailed, as Stein observed:
… a future form of Christian doctrine that would substantially alter it in its most basic assumptions about the nature of God and man, and in many letters and in some published writings he pressed for deep-going changes in the way Christianity relates to evil, to nature, to the feminine, and to science. These were not the casual comments of a 652 Jung, “Psychology and Religion,” CW 11, para. 2. We will see that this assertion is not quite accurate, especially regarding some of Jung’s theories, such as synchronicity.
653 Stein, Jung’s Treatment of Christianity, 4.
654 Of course, Tillich has been criticized on exactly the same grounds—that he radically reworked Christian theology.
655 Jung was of course not the first to hope to heal Christianity. Philosophically, one easily thinks of Descartes; theologically, Meister Eckhart comes to mind. The efforts of both were rejected by the Church. Descartes felt the need to leave France for Holland, and Eckhart was charged with heresy by the Inquisition, though his death forestalled conviction and punishment.
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disinterested person. They were expressions of a deeply felt inner necessity to help Christianity change.656
Jung recognized that the rituals and images at the heart of Christianity no longer spoke to the sophisticated European of his day. According to Stein, Jung was concerned that under these conditions “Christianity would soon become extinct as a living religious tradition unless a radical transformation occurred that would lead to a new stage of its existence.”657 The lifeless images of Christianity, he felt, had to be resuscitated by a new interpretation of religion, capable of drawing forth the life-giving energies of the unconscious. Jung thus attempted to enrich Christianity’s most sacred images by addressing the psychological reality that lay behind them. If we fail to complete Jung’s herculean task, Stein feared, the dark side of the unconscious will be strengthened in this time of rapid change and turmoil. “Even worse, should the dark side of God incarnate itself in modern man, as Jung predicted it would, and find itself unmet by the full strength of a Christian (or Christian-like) spiritual standpoint, the annihilation of the race would be not only thinkable, it would be probable.”658
Stein thought Jung took decidedly controversial positions regarding Christianity because he became convinced the survival of humanity was at stake. By uncovering the inherent structures of the psyche that forever fascinate and inspire reverence, Jung hoped to resuscitate this dying religion. In pursuing this endeavor, Stein believed Jung was guided in these writings by an unseen hand, a largely unconscious spiritus rector. This guidance . . . was supplied by his strong urge to heal Christianity, which led him unerringly to the very heart of the tradition’s ailments and demanded that he offer it his psychotherapeutic help.659
We take a position sympathetic with Stein’s view in the following chapters.
Regardless of his reasons, the whole thrust of Jung’s mature thinking, following the years he worked with Freud, was of a religious nature. Even as a university student he struggled against the materialism prevalent throughout Europe in the late nineteenth century. In 1898, during an impassioned speech to fellow students, he “defended philosophy and the values of the mind against materialism,” saying at one point, “we must ‘reject the secularization of human interests. .[and] shift our concern from the 656 Stein, Jung’s Treatment of Christianity, 2.
657 Ibid., 179.
658 Ibid., 180.
659 Ibid., 17.
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material to the transcendental world…’”660 However, his passion waned as he entered medical school. After graduation, when working at the Burghölzli Institute helping psychotic patients, he gained scientific credibility as well as becoming thoroughly familiar with the latest psychiatric research. By the time he began collaborating with Freud, it seems he had turned against the spiritual values of his youth and embraced the materialism that characterizes psychoanalysis. Freud strove to build his psychology on a solid scientific foundation, and for a while Jung was content to go along.
But it seems that Jung never fully accepted Freud’s theory. Jung particularly criticized Freud’s concept of libido and instead, generalized the term to represent undifferentiated psychic energy in its myriad forms, not just sexuality. Freud was hurt by Jung’s challenge and by the end of 1913 their friendship was over. “In retrospect,”
Nagy said, “it seems clear that Jung had never in fact used Freud’s reductive technique, but was looking from the beginning toward what might be the creative potential of the personality as a whole. His diagnosis was concerned less with adaptation [to present circumstances] than with future goals.”661 Ultimately, his orientation to the future led Jung to the theory of individuation, which is based on the realization of one’s true nature, “mysteriously present from the very beginning as a potential embodied in the self.”662 One might recall here James Hillman’s book The Soul’s Code in which he compared this mysterious presence within the individual soul to an acorn, guiding each person toward her or his individual calling in life. Hillman believed this teleological principle, though often hidden, is uniquely present at birth and is therefore the mark of one’s true individuality.
James Heisig, a Catholic philosopher teaching at Nanzan Institute for Religious Culture, Nagoya, Japan, offers a critical analysis of Jung’s psychology of religion in his book Imago Dei. Although critical of Jung in some respects, Heisig recognizes that
“Jung’s writings bear the stamp of strange and powerful genius . . .”663 He argues that up to 1911 Jung conformed to the accepted genre for scientific psychology, but starting with Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido,664 Jung began to use a style of writing much 660 Nagy, Philosophical Issues in the Psychology of C. G. Jung. 209, 210: Nagy is here quoting from The Zofingia Lectures, para 168.
661 Ibid., 211. Words in brackets have been added for clarity.
662 Ibid., 209.
663 Heisig, James W., Imago Dei: A Study of C. G. Jung’s Psychology of Religion, 12.
664 As noted earlier, the first English title was Psychology of the Unconscious (1917). Years later, it was rewritten under the title Symbols of Transformation, Volume 5 of the Collected Works.
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more compatible with his own temperament. Heisig feels that in this work the breadth and depth of Jung’s intellect is revealed. He describes Jung as a person with a brilliant imagination, who “submitted himself to the relentless demands of intellectual discipline. It was this, more than anything else, that accounted for the blossoming of his genius and his wide-reaching appeal.” Heisig notes that within two years of beginning a serious study of mythology, “Jung came to wield the material boldly with the apparent finesse of an accomplished classicist.”665 Jung has been criticized for venturing into areas of scholarship for which he does not have sufficient expertise, but Heisig defends Jung, saying:
Such intellectual adventures were the very stuff of his method: making use of insight wherever it was to be found, freely trespassing academic domains with a higher purpose in mind. In fact, they were an integral part of the superstructure upon which he erected his psychological theory.666
The part of this superstructure that we choose to focus on is the material that relates most directly to the nature of Being, especially its teleological and revelatory aspects.
Revelatory stories are found throughout the sacred scriptures of all the great world religions. Ezekiel’s wheel within a wheel, Daniel’s vision of the Son of Man appearing in the heavens, Muhammad’s revelation, the Book of Revelation, the angel Moroni appearing to Joseph Smith, and the Course in Miracles are all examples. For Jung, visions like Ezekiel’s in the Hebrew bible were an affirmation of a living mystery at the foundational core of our individual being. All these revelatory experiences are impressive and contain wisdom, but each is culturally conditioned and thereby fails to impart an eternal truth in a form that is universally accepted. Jung, understanding these limitations, interpreted visions and revelations—including his own—
psychologically, as a product of the objective psyche.
As discussed earlier, we consider the objective psyche, as we do consciousness, to be an actualization of latent potential inherent to reality. As such, psyche is a feature of all living organisms. Even though simple organisms are not conscious, their psyches share many essential properties, ultimately derived from Being, that gives rise to consciousness in more evolved life forms. By analyzing the unconscious, as Jung did, a window into the fundamental nature of Being is opened, revealing a mystery pregnant with meaning. This is why so many seekers are attracted to Jung’s revelatory 665 Heisig, Imago Dei, 104-105.
666 Ibid., 105. The same criticism and defense might be made of the authors of the present volume.
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insights. They are not looking merely for useful psychological insights but are desperately searching for the hidden meaning of life. Jung, as he repeatedly asserted, restricted his investigation into what could be empirically verified. But because he had an uncanny insight into the nature of the psyche, his empiricism revealed far more about reality than his critics realize. By following his gaze as he plumbed the deeper layers of his own psyche, we gain an expanded insight into the mystery of Being. The visionary landscape he discovered from repeated journeys into the farthest reaches of the unconscious is stunning. As this landscape comes into the light of day, we discover that life is infused with purpose and meaning.
DARKNESS, LIGHT, AND SOUL
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.
C. G. Jung667
[According to Emerson,] soul is an immense power of light, that animates the faculties and organs of human beings and which is master—one who owns and directs—of both intellect and will.
Richard Geldard668
C. G. Jung’s whole life was dedicated to unraveling the hidden secrets of the psyche.
Nonetheless, much will always exist beyond the farthest reach of the human intellect.
This ontological limit on knowledge intrudes into all attempts to understand the ultimate nature of the world in which we live. But by relying on his intellect and intuition, Jung was not only able to greatly expand our knowledge of the unconscious but also to strengthen our appreciation for the traditional source of sacred wisdom—
the numinosum. Though he did not address the philosophical question of Being directly, the reclusive nature of Being becomes more accessible in light of his investigations.
Although Jung claimed to be an empiricist making no metaphysical assertions, many—including the present authors—would disagree with him on this point. So much of what he writes is not only spiritually insightful but borders on the visionary and mystical, quite beyond the boundaries of empirical investigation. Thus, we think his insights have profound metaphysical implications. Nonetheless, he rightly insisted that these uncanny visions be interpreted from a psychological perspective and refused to consider them as visitations from God, angels, or demonic spirits.669 On this last point we agree. Importantly, he also recognized that powerful numinous experiences—both dark and enlightening—can have a therapeutic effect, often releasing a person from the curse of pathology. While Paul Tillich gladly embraced the metaphysical, especially when defining God as the ground of Being, Jung retained his empirical stance, claiming that the God-image represents nothing outside the totality of psychic existence, the only lens available by which to peer into the depths of reality.
667 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 326.
668 Geldard, The Esoteric Emerson, 36.
669 See, for example, Gary Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung’s Life and Teachings.
Hence, Jung, at least in his own eyes, remained to the end an empiricist reporting only what he found through psychological investigation, based on the careful observation of phenomena.
In an essay delivered to a religious conference at Yale University in 1937, Jung provides his definition of religion:
Religion, as the Latin word denotes, is a careful and scrupulous observation of what Rudolf Otto aptly termed the numinosum, that is, a dynamic agency or effect not caused by an arbitrary act of will. On the contrary, it seizes and controls the human subject, who is always rather its victim than its creator. The numinosum—whatever its cause may be—is an experience of the subject independent of his will.670
Jung often relied on dreams and active imagination to reveal the underlying conflict existing between consciousness and the disturbing effects of the unconscious. The first dream Jung remembers, which he had between the ages of three and four, had a profound impact on him. He said the dream “was to preoccupy me all my life.” In the dream, Jung was in a meadow when he discovered a dark, rectangular hole that had a stone stairway leading downward. At the bottom was a round arch, closed off by a green curtain. With great curiosity he pushed the curtain aside to find a rectangular chamber, about thirty feet long.
The ceiling was arched and of hewn stone. The floor was laid with flagstones, and in the center a red carpet ran from the entrance to a low platform. On this platform stood a wonderfully rich golden throne… It was a magnificent throne, a real king’s throne in a fairy tale. Something was standing on it which I thought at first was a tree trunk twelve to fifteen feet high and about one and a half to two feet thick. It was a huge thing, reaching almost to the ceiling. But it was of curious composition: it was made of skin and naked flesh, and on top there was something like a rounded head with no face and no hair. On the very top of the head was a single eye, gazing motionlessly upward.671
Jung only later realized that the object in the dream was a phallus, and not until much later, that it was a ritual phallus. It seems that at the beginning of his life he had 670 Jung, “Psychology and Religion,” CW 11, para. 6.
671 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 12. The stone in Jung’s dream reminds one of the philosopher’s stone in alchemy, which was reputed to be capable of turning base metals into gold. It is also interesting that the eye is looking up, as though it too is looking for redemption. Later in life, Jung was to discover that rectangles, squares, and circles, just like the hole in the ground, represent wholeness.
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this extraordinary initiatory dream introducing him to the chthonic realm of the psyche, which throughout his life, he strove to unite with the spiritual.
Barbara Hannah, a close friend of Jung’s, tells us:
Toward the end of his life, Jung realized that this dream was initiating him into the secret of the earth. It foretold a kind of burial in the earth, in the realm of darkness, where he had to pass many years in order that the greatest possible amount of light should be brought into the darkness.672
Jung’s ritualistic phallus also represents Eros and creativity but more importantly, the dark and disturbing side of nature, a part of our instinctual heritage that remains in the unconscious where it can cause great harm to oneself and others by exerting power over the conscious mind, especially when highly energized. The goal of Jungian analysis is to bring awareness to this hidden content so that it can be integrated into consciousness. If successful, the integration process helps the individual normalize the oftentimes disturbing or threatening material that has been repressed, thus lessening its control over consciousness.
Jung realized early in his career that our highest aspirations can quickly be undermined by the unconscious. This was certainly true for St. Paul who lamented:
“The fact is, I know of nothing good living in me—that is, in my unspiritual self—for though the will to do what is good is in me, the performance is not, with the result that instead of doing the good things I want to do I carry out the sinful things I do not want.
When I act against my will, then, it is not my true self doing it, but sin which lives in me.”673 Jung would likely have identified the unconscious as the source of the suffering that burdened St. Paul, advising him that in order to live fully in accord with Christ, he must first resolve the agonizing tension that existed between his conscious desire to be loving and the darker instinctual demands of his unconscious. Finding a therapeutic solution for the dilemma that so bedeviled St. Paul—the psychological union of our darker instinctual nature with our spiritual longings—is one of the most important contributions Jung made to religious traditions, both East and West.
Many of life’s problems are due to hidden psychological complexes, buried within the personal unconscious, that reflect how the individual has adapted to life’s contingencies. Unfortunately, people often remain entangled in painful remnants from their past, unable to escape. Jung believed, however, that we can differentiate ourselves 672 Hannah, Barbara, Jung, His life and work, 24.
673 The Jerusalem Bible: Romans, 7: 18-20.
from these debilitating memories by first acknowledging the fact that they have a rightful place within us. Through acceptance, our true individuality begins to emerge.
But to truly become an individual, one must also rise above the seductive power of our instinctual nature.674 This inheritance from the past, sometimes referred to as the Great Mother, must be outgrown to become whole, just like we must outgrow our real mothers to become fully functioning adults. Becoming a distinct individual is a lifelong process that never ends. At birth, we come into the world perfectly aligned with our instinctual nature. Individuation, as Jung conceived it, involves a significant break from this idyllic state, but real progress toward becoming a unique individual can only be made after the personal unconscious is attended to. Only then, after a long struggle, can we become whole and realize our full potential while remaining true to our highest ethical ideals. Jung would likely have agreed with Martin Luther King when he said,
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it ultimately bends toward justice.”675
But now that the supernatural has receded from so many lives, we must turn inward to resuscitate the religious symbols upon which Martin Luther King’s vision is based.
This inward journey must also be accompanied by a new vision of reality that is worthy of devotion. Although philosophy can discuss the nature of Being with penetrating insight, it may require something like Jung’s empirical investigation into the psychic structures of reality to open the heart to the wonder and the mystery of Creation while living in this age of skepticism. Though both Tillich and Jung envisioned a brighter future—represented by the “New Being” in Tillich’s theology and the “Mystical Marriage of Heaven and Hell” in Jung’s psychology—they both recognized that the dark side of human nature continues to threaten world peace, as it has throughout history.
It is not surprising that the concept of opposites pervades philosophical and religious thought. If there is a single, unified source of everything, its manifestation in 674 Jung defined the collective unconscious as that part of the psyche common to all people.
To explain synchronicity, he realized the psyche also participates in a region, much like our concept of Being does, existing beyond the time-space constraints of ordinary experience.
675 This famous remark has a history. First used, though less eloquently put, by Transcendentalist, abolitionist, and Unitarian minister Theodore Parker (1810-1860), it was published in his Ten Sermons of Religion in 1853. It has since occurred in various writings by different authors. Parker said it more than once: “We cannot understand the moral Universe. The arc is a long one, and our eyes reach but a little way; we cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; but we can divine it by conscience, and we surely know that it bends toward justice.”
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the existing order, ruled by time and space, requires differentiation of the opposites, otherwise, nothing would stand out. Even the word “exist” implies as much as it comes from the Latin ex + stare, “to stand out from,” implying a foreground and a background.
It is likely that Heraclitus, to whom Jung often referred, had something similar in mind when he declared that an ordered world depends on the play of opposites. In Chinese thought, the Tao manifests as yin and yang, ceaselessly displacing and transforming each other. Throughout history, some idea of the play of opposites—or their polarity—
undergirds the understanding of the universe.676 An almost unlimited number of things can be oppositionally paired, but opposites have psychological meaning only when one position is consciously held while its opposite value is repressed where it remains hidden in the unconscious ever ready to disrupt or sabotage our best intentions.
In 1781, Johann Wolfgang van Goethe (1749-1832), poet, scientist, dramatist and more, wrote to the theologian Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801), agreeing with him that humanity takes part in both “God and Satan, Heaven and Earth, all in one, for what else are these concepts but concepts which [the] human has of his own nature.”
And sometime later in another letter, Goethe wrote: “there is an unending purification going on in me, and yet I confess gladly that God and Satan, Heaven and Hell, which you so well define are one in me.”677 The Hermetic axiom, “As above, so below” takes on fresh meaning in this context, which suggests that good and evil are as much a part of each human being as they are of the celestial order.678
676 As Empedocles’ use of the concepts of love and strife suggests, neither Anaximenes’
rarefaction and condensation nor the Taoist yang and yin should be understood too literally, since they refer to processes invisible to ordinary perception, giving rise to and permeating the cosmos. Recall that Thales had no trouble declaring that the prime substance is water and yet that all things are full of gods, perhaps dynamic intelligent though not necessarily conscious forces.
677 Both passages are quoted in Paul S. MacDonald, Nature Loves to Hide: An Alternative History of Philosophy, 261. His alternative history treats aspects of well-known philosophers and others not usually considered philosophers in terms of their too often ignored ideas, frequently concerning mind and soul. His interest is in what typical philosophy courses ignore, even suppress.
678 This axiom has often been understood to mean that the Microcosm reflects the Macrocosm—the human being reflects the universe. Hence a proper understanding of the human being, physical and spiritual, reveals the nature of the universe, physical and spiritual.
Bringing cosmic opposites down into the human psyche, as Goethe did, foreshadows Jung’s recognition that the Divine opposites that reside in the celestial order are also within us. For Jung, the psyche, as the totality of consciousness and the unconscious content, contains both light and darkness, good and evil, archetypes and instincts. And as Goethe suggests in his confession of “unending purification,” the opposites cannot be reconciled without awareness and acknowledgement of them.
Hence, Jung’s concern that the Christ of theology, purged of all darkness, leaves the individual vulnerable to the subtle influences of a malevolent Satan. Until Christ and Satan are brought together in human consciousness, the one remains but an ideal and the other a pathological force. The healing of psychological wounds, like those that disturbed Goethe, requires that the competing opposites be held in conscious tension, refusing to suppress either of them or to rationalize either one away. Only then can the healing power of the psyche act to create a unifying image of reconciliation. Jung used the term “transcendent function” for this somewhat miraculous and spontaneous healing process. He writes:
From the activity of the unconscious there now emerges a new content, constellated by thesis and antithesis in equal measure and standing in a compensatory … relation to both. It thus forms the middle ground on which the opposites can be united.679
Just as St. Paul struggled with the opposites within himself, the whole world today is engulfed in a similar battle that threatens to destroy civilization. One of the most critical factors leading to our political strife is the tendency of globalization to undermine the type of close-knit communities in which people thrive. Many manufacturing jobs, which have traditionally provided entry into the middle class have been lost. People have been uprooted and they are afraid of falling farther behind and unable to provide for their families. Even if they are still hanging on, there is an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. The resulting anger, fear, and despair is understandable, but nonetheless, extreme reactions undermine the ideals and principles of democracy upon which our nation was founded. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation represents a high mark in the evolution of consciousness, but humanity’s instinctual nature is blind to high-sounding principles. Instead, it longs for the loving support and structure of community. On a collective scale, we are suspended, like Goethe and St. Paul were, between Heaven and Hell. Similar forces, awakened in Germany after World War I, led to what Jung described as a collective psychosis. It was a momentous and disastrous time, and more than anything else, compelled Jung 679 Jung, Psychological Types, CW 6, para. 825.
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to write Answer to Job, which indirectly addresses fascist Germany’s descent into savagery.680
Both Freud and Jung developed techniques for revealing hidden and disruptive material in the unconscious. They found that once it is made conscious, psychological suffering is often alleviated. What is hidden can do more than just create psychological distress, however; it can manifest as evil. Jung lived through two world wars and witnessed many atrocities. He was acutely aware of evil and especially concerned about the danger that nuclear weapons posed for the future of humanity. In a 1959 BBC
interview he said: “The world hangs by a thin thread, and that thread is the psyche.”681
In the news today, there are reports of terrorism and violence from all over the world.
There is, without question, much that is commendable in human nature, such as our capacity for nurture and compassion, but there is a dark side, too, which all too often defeats our best intentions. While evil is a reality that humanity has wrestled with since the beginning of civilization, religious traditions have always argued that we are not the sum total of our instinctual natures, that there is a higher order that can deliver us from suffering and evil.
In the Meno, Plato had Socrates wrestle with the question of whether there is such a thing as virtue or truth, finally arriving at a solution by splitting mind, the source of virtue, from the body, a schism that has characterized so much of Western philosophy and religion. Jung’s concept of instincts and archetypes might appear to support this dualistic position by assigning behavioral characteristics to instincts while envisioning archetypes—the creative imaginal ground of consciousness—as the source of higher functioning. But for him, the two, instincts and archetypes, are part of a whole.
Throughout his life, Jung also understood, like Goethe did, that to be healed, the chthonic depths of the psyche, first revealed to him at a very young age in his phallic dream, had to be reconciled with the spiritual heights that also pervaded his life.
Jung was acutely aware that to journey down into the depth of the psyche, one must be prepared for an encounter with evil. But as Marilyn Nagy said in her book Philosophical Issues in the Psychology of C. G. Jung: “If Jung saw deeply into human 680 Martha Nussbaum has recently written an important book analyzing the current crisis in our nation. To delve into this topic further see Martha C. Nussbaum, The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at our Political Crisis.
681 Jung, “Jung on Film,” Public Media Video: 1990 Segaller Films, C. G. Jung interviewed by Dr. Richard I. Evans; online video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=ppFlVouq-Mc. Accessed 6/30/2020.
darkness, he also posited a transcendent directive center of the psyche in the self.”682
The Self,683 as Jung conceived it, embodies the totality of the psyche, both the darkness of human nature and the transcendent qualities to which religion aspires. Evil only has power while it is hidden within the unconscious where it projects its dark imagery upon the world. Once brought into conscious alignment with the light, the projection collapses, freeing the individual from its dominating power.684
Too often religious leaders attempt to align themselves with the sacred without addressing their own woundedness. History has shown, however, that religion readily falls victim to evil when exclusively promoting righteousness. Admitting that there is a dark side hidden deep within us is difficult. But even though challenging, it must be experienced as a living part of our own being.685 This is an extremely daunting task that feels like a defeat. It is easy enough to abstractly recognize unsavory parts of our personality but to truly experience them brings upon us a day of reckoning. This is what repentance is all about. Repentance is a turning point in our pathway back to God.686
We have taken a position slightly different from Jung’s understanding of evil, which, for him, is an eternal part of God existing in polar opposition to the good. Instead, we assert that evil is the result of evolutionary forces that have been necessary for human survival. As such, evil is deeply ingrained in our instinctual nature, though not in Being itself. But because these dark forces are present within every individual, we are now faced with the divine task of uniting our spiritual aspirations with the evil forces that 682 Nagy, Philosophical Issues in the Psychology of C. G. Jung, 46.
683 Nagy did not capitalize “self” nor did Jung. Others do capitalize it to emphasize that the Self is the center of the psyche as a whole and is not just a synonym for the personal ego.
This is the standard we have chosen to use.
684 One might compare this view with that of Buddhism which holds that evil is the result of ignorance, though Jung and Buddhism use quite different language and analyses to express the point.
685 This is why Jung insisted that evil is real, rejecting the traditional idea of evil as absence of good. Though Buddhists see the world of our perceptions as illusion, including our sense of self, they recognize that the unenlightened person experiences both as real, including evil. Hence, the path to enlightenment is an arduous one requiring that the initiate face the darkness of this illusion.
686 And this makes sense of the doctrine of original sin, not because of Adam’s disobedience but because of the unconscious dimension of the psyche—hence Augustine was right, not because he thought Adam’s sin passed through the male sperm, but because the unconscious is part of our DNA, which is passed through sperm and egg.
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threaten all of us at the end of the Age. While Jung spoke of the dark side of God, he was not referring to a transcendent being, but only the dark side of human nature, in which case our position is not that different from his. Lionel Corbett, author of the Religious Function of the Psyche, proposes that the psychological complex is the avenue through which the darkness manifests.687 He says, “Our ‘demonic’ complexes are formed around negatively toned, archetypal components of the Self which have not been humanized or integrated but still press for incarnation.”688 The parts of the Self that are organized around the core of the complex are like “strands of the divine within the psyche.”689 Hence, as Jung said, “God becomes a fearful task for man, who must now find ways and means to unite the divine opposites in himself....If God incarnates in the empirical man, man is confronted with the divine problem.”690
The religious function of the psyche is made apparent through suffering, which, according to Corbett, “indicates our unique relationship to the divine, and the divine’s unique incarnational pathway within us.”691 As the divine strands surrounding the complex are made conscious, the numinous energy at the core of the complex enables healing. What was negative and destructive is thus transformed gradually by the beauty also contained within the God image as it slowly becomes a living reality for the individual.692
As noted before, every great work of art validates this insight. No one would be captivated, for instance, by a play or novel that portrayed nothing but beautiful sentiments. Only when toil and suffering is redeemed by love or some other moral quality of spiritual depth, is the work of art worthy of acclaim. The Greek tragedy, as discussed earlier, succeeded because, as Armstrong puts it, “Above all, tragedy put suffering on stage. It did not allow the audience to forget that life was dukkha, painful, unsatisfactory and awry.” But because it was on stage, the fifth-century Greek tragedians could transform suffering by “placing a tortured individual in front of the polis, analyzing that person’s pain, and helping the audience to empathize with him 687 A complex consists of a constellation of closely entangled instinctual and archetypal forces that, when highly energized, can cause serious psychological difficulties.
688 Corbett, Religious Function of the Psyche, 197.
689 Ibid., 201.
690 Jung, “Jung and Religious Belief,” CW 18, para. 1661.
691 Corbett, Religious Function of the Psyche, 202. Corbett is here referring to psychological suffering and not to the type of unavoidable suffering that disease and war cause.
692 Ibid., 202. Recall that Athena’s actions in the Oresteia change relations between humans and within each person as well as the relations between the gods and human beings.
or her…”693 Empathy awakens the individual to the depth of existence in the face of suffering and tragedy. At that poignant moment, light and darkness are brought together, and healing begins.
Taking remedial action to relieve suffering is ineffective unless the psychological wounds of life are held close to the heart where the healing powers of the psyche can bring about a redemptive shift in consciousness. This means we must acknowledge and accept the unpleasant and hurtful feelings we have without denying them. Jung used the Latin term coniunctio to describe the alchemical process by which the resolution of opposites is achieved. It is here, in the crucible of the heart where, as Jung describes it, the alchemist symbolically separated deep-seated conflicts from the prima materia before reuniting them by heating them in their alchemical retort.
Psychologically, the retort’s alchemical fire through which healing is accomplished is the numinous energy of the archetypes. It is a holy fire that brings healing to the afflicted. Reliance on this mysterious and holy power differentiates Jungian analysis from all other psychologically based therapies. It is also an important reason that Jung’s work has profound religious significance.
Jung uses the term “soul” to refer to the animating power of the psyche. Unlike the Christian soul, Jung’s concept has no ontological implications, but instead, is based on embodied feelings and passions arising from the archetypal foundation of the psyche.
A spiritual experience, in contrast to a soulful one, has a disembodied quality, freeing the individual, at least for a moment, from the entanglements of life. The Greek concept of agape is an example of this form of spiritual love in which it is feely given without expectation or qualification. During such moments, because the power of the ego is relinquished, individual problems become less onerous, allowing for expanded insight into oneself. A degree of wisdom can often be discerned during such elevated states.
While a spiritual experience feels somewhat disembodied, soulfulness is fully engaged with the body. Kimberly Leeman694 is a psychotherapist who practices what might be called “heart therapy.” The heart, she says, is metaphorically the organ of feeling. Feelings can range from sadness to joy, but those feelings that are soulful—in contrast to ordinary feelings—have a quality of transcendence while simultaneously stirring the passions. Leeman uses the term “embodied transcendence” when describing such soulful experiences. By being embodied, a soulful response to life can be loving as well as passionate and possessive, stirring up heartache as well as desire.
693 Armstrong, The Great Transformation, 227.
694 Kimberly A. Leeman, Psychotherapist. We thank her for her insightful contribution to our discussion of soul and spirit.
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Falling in love is the prime example of soulfulness, combining the erotic with the highest attainments of spirit. Sometimes people suffer from too much soul because transcendent feelings can overpower a fragile psyche.
Another way of thinking of soul is provided by John Cottingham, a philosopher to whom we referred earlier when discussing Descartes. Though his discussion of soul does not explicitly differentiate between soul and spirit, as we do, he asserts that soulful feelings are of a transcendent nature, though not necessarily disconnected from the contingencies of life. It is their entanglement with the passions of life, we contend, that embodies them. Such experiences, he says, “are no longer just a ‘feeling,’ a
‘psychological episode,’ or an ‘emotional experience’ (though it is all of these things), but something that has the power to lift us above the world of ordinary mundane existence, something of transcendent importance that seems to make us fully alive to who we are and to the reality we inhabit.”695 Such ecstatic feelings produce a “longing for ‘ontological rootedness,’ for that which will ground and validate our existence, and give us a sense of being at home in the world, instead of alienated from it and alone.”696
We suspect that Jung had something close to this in mind when discussing wholeness, the end goal of the individuation process. Cottingham’s meditation on soul reminds him of a passage in Wordsworth’s poem Tintern Abbey: the heavy and weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened—that serene and blessed mood
In which the affections lead us on,
Until…made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.697
In describing the difference between spirit and soul, James Hillman quotes at length from a letter that Peter Goullart698 received from the fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet: 695 Cottingham, In Search of Soul, 20.
696 Ibid, 9.
697 Woodsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” lines 40-49. Available online.
698 Peter Goullart (1901–1978) was born into a well-educated Russian family and spent his youth in Moscow and Paris. He was interested in the Orient from an early age and after the Bolshevik revolution fled to China, eventually settling in Shanghai in 1924. There he perfected his Chinese and worked as an agent for Western tourists and businesspeople, whom he often accompanied on their trips throughout East and South-East Asia.
The relation of height to spirituality is not merely metaphorical. It is physical reality. The most spiritual people on this planet live in the highest places. So do the most spiritual flowers…. I call the high and light aspects of my being spirit and the dark and heavy aspect soul.
Soul is at home in the deep, shaded valleys. Heavy torpid flowers saturated with black grow there. The rivers flow like warm syrup. They empty into huge oceans of soul.
Spirit is a land of high, white peaks and glittering jewel-like lakes and flowers. Life is sparse and sounds travel great distances.
There is soul music, soul food, soul dancing, and soul love…
When the soul triumphed, the herdsmen came to the lamaseries, for soul is communal and loves humming in unison. But the creative soul craves spirit. Out of the jungles of the lamasery, the most beautiful monks one day bid farewell to their comrades and go to make their solitary journey toward the peaks, there to mate with the cosmos…
No spirit broods over lofty desolation, for desolation is of the depths, as is brooding. At these heights, spirit leaves soul far behind…
People need to climb the mountain not simply because it is there but because the soulful divinity needs to be mated with the spirit…699
Often, Jung equates soul with the anima, which represents the unconscious feminine in men. Its opposite partner, the animus, represents the unconscious masculine in women. The process of falling in love, which involves many unconscious factors, is above all a projection of these animating powers. In this instance the face of the lover reflects the deepest aspect of our self as mediated through the transcendent depth of our own being. Together, the anima and animus form what is called a syzygy, a pair of opposites. Murray Stein, whom we discussed earlier, suggests in his book Jung’s Map of the Soul700 that it may be better to disregard the gender identity of the anima and animus and view them together as abstract structures within the unconscious that are first encountered when journeying into the realm of the archetypes. They are, so to speak, the gate keepers and guides into the deeper levels of the unconscious. Acting together, they represent what might be referred to as soul. Consistent with this During these extended adventures he had the opportunity to explore the remote mountainous areas of Western China.
699 Hillman, Blue Fire, 115, 116.
700 Stein, Jung’s Map of the Soul, 151-159.
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characterization, soul can be conceived as a guiding power that can be related to as a living being. Because of its primitive foundation, however, soul can be difficult and moody at times, but it can also be a radiant beauty that both transcends and encompasses the ego when in partnership with the Self. In the later stages of individuation, the soul thus serves to expand consciousness by providing a pathway through which the affective and numinous energies of the Self find their way into consciousness.
Though the concept of soul has traditionally had profound religious meaning, Jung tried to stay focused on its psychological connotations. Nonetheless, we support the belief that the soul transcends our material existence in some inexplicable way, especially when mated with Spirit. For instance, the soul might be imagined to be an integral part of the “psychoid” region of the archetype. As Jung defined it, this aspect of the archetype transcends the neurophysiological base of the psyche and is apparently coextensive with the deep structures of reality. It is also this transcendent aspect of reality gives birth to creativity and the highest aspirations of humanity. Soul, conceived this way, frees it from the constraints of analytical psychology and allows it to ascend beyond its earthly limitations in support of humanity’s deepest religious longings and the intuitive revelations of artists and poets. As such, it takes on many, if not all, the qualities Jung reserved for the Self. Thus, we have chosen to use soul—
especially when mated with Spirit—interchangeably with the Self. To clarify the difference, we will use the term “Self” when examining analytical psychology and use
“soul” when discussing religion.
Most importantly, the religious and metaphysical aspect of soul derives its essence from the rich archetypal medium through which God’s Divine majesty has always been conveyed. In fact, every religious tradition has its own symbol—or symbols—for describing this same heartfelt presence within the soul, which draws spiritual seekers everywhere into fellowship with the sacred, regardless of their faith. As such, the soul enlivens life with a spiritual depth that “surpasses understanding.”
Likewise, a culture can be imagined as an ancient tree whose canopy of leaves is a mosaic of symbols that draw nourishment from the tree’s tangled roots, which extend far down into the moist, archetypal soil that has sustained the culture’s expansive growth over the course of many centuries. Importantly, a classical education brings these rich symbols to life, so that those who thirst for the waters upon which this beautiful tree depends can be saved from the numbness of a life lived only for material gain. Instead, by drinking deeply from this archetypal well they find their lives overflowing with a depth of meaning. This is why we strongly support the liberal arts and humanities programs that are now being taught at universities. These programs
are essential to our society because they conserve the symbolic inheritance that has been carefully preserved down through the generations in literature, history, the arts, music, and philosophy, which in turn nourishes the soul. David Brooks, a New York Times columnist, wrote:
Experiences with great artworks deepen us in ways that are hard to describe. To have visited Chartres Cathedral or finished “The Brothers Karamazov” is not about acquiring new facts but to feel somehow elevated, enlarged, altered. In Rainer Maria Rilke’s novel “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” the protagonist notices that as he ages, he’s able to perceive life on a deeper level: “I am learning to see.
I don’t know why it is, but everything penetrates more deeply into me and does not stop at the place where until now it always used to finish.”701
But today, the cultural inheritance of the West is going through a transformative period in which its religious, social, and cultural foundations are being shaken.
Because the transition may take several centuries, we may have to endure an extended period of chaos during which many cherished values are discarded long before new ones have taken root. As our culture slowly adapts to this change, however, we believe the religious symbols that have nourished past generations will gradually be reinterpreted or replaced by new ones, which will spontaneously arise from the unconscious. Over time, this transformation will replace the traditional Christ mythos, based on the divinity of Jesus, with a new vision that celebrates the sacred potential that lies within everyone.702 Along with scholars like Teilhard de Chardin and the nineteenth century philosopher Samuel Alexander, Philip Goff offers hope, suggesting that the natural tendency of the universe is to move toward higher states of being.703
In turn, we suggest that the soul, which is hidden deep within the innermost depths of everyone, reflects the sacred potential for which humanity is destined. By drawing close to it and establishing an ongoing relationship to its inner truth, life is given new wings by which to fly upward toward heaven.
701 Brooks, David, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/25/opinion/art-culture-politics.html.
Last accessed on 1/26/2024.
702 One might see this shift even in St. Paul, who wrote about the “Christ in me,” though he seems to have thought that this condition resulted from inviting the external Christ into one’s life. We are speaking of the sacred potential that is already in oneself.
703 Philip Goff, Why?: The Purpose of the Universe.
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This poetic metaphor comes close to capturing the final goal and purpose of Jung’s individuation process. Of course, Jung used the term “Self” in place of soul when describing an individual’s personal journey to wholeness. But though the early stages of the individuation process are mainly therapeutic, he affirmed that its more advanced stages are transformative. At the farthest reach of this generative process, the individual becomes so closely related to the Self that the sacred and life-sustaining waters at the core of the psyche flow uninterrupted into the individual’s life. While bathed in its sacred beauty, the individual finally comes to the startingly realization that the Self (or in our case the soul) is the final goal of life.
In his book, The Principle of Individuation, Stein describes individuation as an innate tendency within humanity by which individuals can incarnate fully. This can only happen, however, when all aspects of the psyche, including both its dark and light aspects, are integrated through the unitive and spiritual action of the Self. As the soul is progressively integrated with consciousness, its radiant light begins to shine into our lives undistorted by unconscious affect, which would otherwise hide its sublime beauty. This difficult but ongoing process of redemption is likely what Jung was thinking about, when, in Answer to Job, he predicted the coming marriage of the lamb—
a masculine symbol for the animus—with his bride Jerusalem—a feminine symbol for the anima. If the heavenly nuptials occur on a global scale, it will truly initiate a revolutionary advance in consciousness consistent with Jung’s prediction. Soul will then be enabled to soar upward to mate with the Spirit as the Dalai Lama so elegantly expressed in his letter to Peter Goulart. Together, soul and Spirit will create out of the psyche’s disparate parts a higher unity that renews a sense of beauty and reverence for everyone.
In summary, soul is not only the transcendent aspect of “heart” but also the spiritual and affective dimension of the Self. Although this understanding of soul, as it relates to individuation, is more implied than clearly stated in Jung’s work, we consider it the most important metaphysical truth for our troubled age, at least for the rejuvenation of a religious sensibility that celebrates the immense beauty and spiritual depth of the Cosmos.
INSTINCTS, ARCHETYPES, AND THE SELF
Rather than give free rein to the instincts, what the individual must do is to follow the lead of the compensatory images of the unconscious, and utilizing the light of consciousness, actively bring about a conscious synthesis of instinct and spirit….
Robert Aziz 704
He who dwells in all beings, yet is apart from all beings, whom no beings know, whose body is all beings, who controls all beings from within, he is your Self, the inner controller, the immortal….
C. G. Jung705
The transcendent and healing power of the Self (or the soul), which we discussed in the last chapter, is largely due to the numinous nature of the archetypes. So, in this chapter we delve more deeply into them. We also examine the psychoid nature of archetypes, which Jung believed transcends the world of space and time along with its correlate, the unus mundus.706 Archetypes, like instincts, are an inherent part of the unconscious, differing from instincts in that they have a creative and imaginative nature. Although Jung considered archetypes universal, being the same for everyone, archetypal symbols, like the Cross, are specific to a given culture. Such symbols arise spontaneously from the unconscious and are never created by the intellect. But different symbols from around the world often refer to the same neurological and instinctual features of the psyche. Jung’s empirical work—in contrast to his theoretical musings—mostly involved classifying such symbols, much like a naturalist classifies plants. In doing so, he was cataloging natural features of the unconscious mind. Many archetypes, however, remain dormant until constellated or activated within the life of an individual. Only then do they have personal meaning; before that, they are considered purely formal.
Constellated archetypes, individually attuned to the needs of society, also take part in its collective mythos, which has typically evolved over countless generations. The Christ Myth is a good example. Every Christian, in some way, participates in the collective story of Christ while developing a personal myth more closely aligned with 704 Robert Aziz, C.G. Jung’s Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity, 55.
705 C.G. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 223; based on Radhakrishnan, The Principal Upanishads, 228.
706 Ibid. para. 780.
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his or her own psyche. If not disciplined by reasoned reflection, however, the personal mythos can deviate widely from reality. An important role of the Church has traditionally been to nurture and refine the collective mythos so that it reflects the common wisdom of the culture. But today, with the breakdown of religious traditions throughout the world, this task is entirely left to the individual, a situation not unlike the cultural and social crises that led up to the birth of Christ during the Roman era.707
Jung defined the Self as the center of the psyche including both the transcendent quality of the archetypes and the chthonic realm whose dark power stands in direct opposition to spirit. He considered this dual aspect of the Self indistinguishable from the image of God ( Imago Dei). Through the long struggle to unite the highest aspiration of spirit with the forces of darkness, God becomes not only a living and redemptive power in the life of the individual but often a burdensome thorn in our side. Or as Jung said, “In this way alone can the imago Dei realize itself in him, and God become man.”708 Deliverance, however, demands that the individual accept the burden of individuation, which at times can be severe.709
On his last CD, You Want It Dark er, Leonard Cohen laments that when he rejected the devil, he lost his angel as well.710 He understood, just as Jung did, that the darkness and the light are strangely interdependent. The union of the Divine with the dark and painful parts of our life, however, cannot be achieved without suffering. This is why the Cross stirs such feelings of adoration for many who suffer. It assures them that their suffering is not in vain, that redemption follows, just as it did for Christ. We cannot be redeemed by ascending to transcendent spiritual heights alone. Only by surrendering our will to a higher power within us—the guiding influence of the Self—can the darkness be brought into the crucible of consciousness where a union with spirit can be made manifest. As Jung wrote:
707 Philip Jenkins, in Crucible of Faith: The Ancient Revolution that Made Our Modern Religious World, gives a lively account of the so-called intertestamental period, over two centuries from the last writings of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and the Christian New Testament, a time of enormous social, religious, cultural, and economic turmoil in Palestine and the eastern Mediterranean.
708 Jung, “Answer to Job,” CW 11: para. 659. We will discuss this in detail in the last two chapters on Jung.
709 Christians sometimes refer to this condition as “spiritual warfare.”
710 Leonard Cohen, You Want It Darker, “On the Level.” This was his last album, released shortly before he died.
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Yet it cannot be denied that the great symbol of the Christian faith, the Cross, upon which hangs the suffering figure of the Redeemer, has been emphatically held up before the eyes of Christians for nearly two thousand years. This picture is completed by the two thieves, one of whom goes down to hell, the other into paradise. One could hardly imagine a better representation of the oppositeness of the central Christian symbol. Why this inevitable product of Christian psychology should signify redemption is difficult to see, except that the conscious recognition of the opposites, painful though it may be at the moment, does bring with it a definite feeling of deliverance.711
One of the authors of this book (Renwick) was visiting Grace Cathedral in San Francisco when he had a powerful spiritual experience that helped him gain a greater appreciation for the significance the Cross had for Jung.
As I knelt before a wooden crucifix tucked away in one of the corners of this great cathedral, images of creation arose in my mind. Candles flickered close by and stone columns rose around me moving upward against gravity to mingle with blue light descending through stained glass windows. The crucifix gained power as I gazed at it, becoming for me, a quaternary symbol representing the forces of creation. I imagined the vertical arm of the cross extending upward into the realm of spirit and downward into the shadowy depth of the unconscious.
The horizontal arm seemed to extend outward into the world representing ego consciousness. The soul, I envisioned, was pinned to the center, serving as an axis from where the forces of light and darkness flowed outward into life.
The objective psyche in which the personal unconscious is imbedded, remains now and forever a mystery beyond comprehension, possibly spanning the expanse of the universe and plunging backward in time to its beginning. What we know of it lies at the twilight borders where we can peer into the shadowy world of the psyche using the leverage of dreams and altered states of consciousness. But those of us who have lived most of our lives in its upper stories, where the light of day streams uninterrupted, must rely on the observations of others, like Jung, who have plunged deep into the depths of the psyche and brought back stories of wonder and terrifying adventure.712
711 Jung, “Answer to Job,” CW 11: para. 659.
712 Jung’s Red Book is replete with images of adventure in the realms of light and darkness.
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Jung asserted that “living matter has a psychic aspect, and the psyche a physical aspect.”713 He did not stop there but went on to argue that if living matter has a psychic component, it is reasonable to assume that it must also “extend beyond the sphere of biochemical processes to matter in general.” In that case, he said, “all reality would be grounded on a yet unknown substrate possessing material and at the same time psychic qualities. In view of the trend of modern theoretical physics, this assumption should…afford us an opportunity to construct a new world model closer to the idea of the unus mundus. ” The Latin term unus mundus means one world, which for Jung encompasses all reality—Mind, psyche, and consciousness as well as matter, energy, and spacetime. Our concept of Being comes close to his concept of the unus mundus, which he describes as the “the unitary world, towards which the psychologist and the atomic physicist are converging along separate paths, producing independently of one another certain analogous auxiliary concepts.”714 Further, he hypothesized that the archetype, though having a neurological basis, cannot be psychologically explained in its entirety without reference to the unus mundus.
While agreeing with Jung’s hypothesis, we also believe that the unus mundus is ultimately derived from Being. We further argue that the individual psyche manifests as a field generated by electrical activity in the brain. Its exact configuration, therefore, depends on the arrangement and intensity of neural firings. Conceptualizing psyche as a field thus helps explain how consciousness seems to arise from a bundle of discrete neurons. 715 In simple organisms without a brain, there may also be a psychic field generated at the cellular level that envelops the organism and influences its behavior in ways yet to be determined.
The psychic field is not to be confused with the electromagnetic field used by cognitive scientists to measure brain activity. Although speculative, we suspect that the psychic energy that creates and supports consciousness is a distinct form of energy.
And just as electromagnetic energy can be transformed into momentum, we hypothesize that the brain acts as a transformer to convert electromagnetic energy to psychic energy. It is the psychic energy that produces mental activity, not the electromagnetic energy that cognitive science measures when mapping the brain. The brain also functions to transform psychic energy back into electromagnetic energy in 713 Jung, CW 10, “Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth,” para. 780.
714 Jung, CW 10, “A Psychological View of Conscience,” para. 852.
715 David Bohm’s holographic theory provides an example of how discrete parts of reality (explicate order) can be related to the whole (implicate order).
INSTINCTS, ARCHETYPES, AND THE SELF 307
order to engage the body. Psychic energy, like dark energy,716 has never been empirically verified, but if it ever were, it would go far in resolving many issues surrounding consciousness, including the central question that haunted Descartes and his followers: How do two completely different substances—soul and matter—
interact? Many cognitive scientists solve this problem by arguing that consciousness is simply an epiphenomenon of brain activity with no substantive role to play in the decision-making process. In that case, freewill is an illusion. Freewill regains its rightful stature by conceiving electromagnetic energy and psychic energy as two distinct forms of energy. The decision to move one’s arm, for instance, is a psychic act.
The act is then put into motion by converting the psychic energy released by the decision into electromagnetic energy. In this way psychic and electro-magnetic energy perform an ongoing dance always keeping perfectly attuned to each other. The means by which neurons perform the transformation of energy from one state to the other is likely a very simple process that evolved naturally with life itself.717
According to Jung, religious symbols like the Christ image arise spontaneously from the archetypal foundation of the psyche. Unfortunately, religion too often relies solely on metaphysical concepts to explain the efficacy of their spiritual disciplines. But from a Jungian point of view, the transformative power of religion is due to transcendent symbols, which are infused with numinous light. Only from this sublime source do transformative spiritual and mystical experiences arise. While intense numinous experiences are profound, Jung was fully aware that such experiences were of lasting value only to the extent that they aid transformation through the expansion of consciousness. As every mystic knows, the goal is not to remain forever lost in mystical 716 Dark energy, like dark matter, remains a mystery. It has been hypothesized as a force that counters gravity. The universe is held to be expanding from an initial “Big Bang,”
and, if so, that expansion should be slowing and should even begin to reverse course, resulting in a “Big Collapse” under the force of gravity. Yet the universe is not slowing its expansion rate; that rate seems to be increasing. Dark energy is thought to be a force that counteracts gravity and is causing the currently observed expansion of the universe. In this view, when the universe was smaller, gravity prevailed over dark energy, but as it expanded, gravity grew ever weaker with distance and the expanding power of dark energy became dominant, thus explaining the accelerating expansion astronomers observe today.
717 If this suggestion turns out to be erroneous, the relations of Mind and matter discussed here are not thereby imperiled but require another explanation.
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reverie but to return to the world renewed.718 Although much progress can be made while working solely with the personal unconscious, further advances depend on consciousness (the ego) becoming progressively aligned with the deep structures of the collective unconscious. As this relationship is deepened, the capacity for beauty, love, and joy is enhanced and colors become brighter, laughter more natural, and joy more spontaneous.
Harold Coward uses the symbol of the cross to show how symbols draw forth the deep wisdom inherent to the psyche. For Christians, he says, the cross may not resonate deeply at first, but over time, as one contemplates its meaning, the cross image gradually acquires more significance and is carried, by the process of intuition, deeply into the psyche until the level of the collective unconscious is reached. The God archetype, which has all the while been struggling upward to reveal itself, resonates sympathetically with the cross image and its Christian content of the crucified Christ.719
According to Coward, every authentic encounter with a living symbol brings forth an experience of depth and meaning. It could thus be argued that the process leading to wholeness consists largely of a sustained meditation on symbols. Over time, as powerful symbols, like the cross, come to embrace the numinous content of the unconscious more fully, “there occurs what Jung describes as a shift in the center of gravity within the psyche from the ego to the self. This is the mystical moment of illumination when the ego becomes aware of the larger and deeper collective dimension of consciousness and reality.”720 Or in Jung’s words: But if the unconscious can be recognized as a co-determining factor along with consciousness, and if we can live in such a way that consciousness and unconscious demands are taken into account as far as possible, then the centre of gravity of the total personality shifts its position. It is then no longer in the ego, which is merely the centre of 718 A clear example of this return is found in Mahayana Buddhism, where the ideal of the bodhisattva, one who knows himself and lives for others, is raised above that of the arhat, one who seeks personal enlightenment exclusively.
719 Coward, Jung and Eastern Thought, 131. The god archetype is what Jung called the Imago Dei.
720 Ibid., 132.
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consciousness, but in the hypothetical point between conscious and unconscious. This new centre might be called the self.721
Together, the archetypes and instincts form an organic whole in which archetypal images reflect instinctual behavior. All human experience, however, participates in both realms in differing degrees. At the lowest level, instinctual responses occur automatically, often without conscious awareness. Jung describes instincts as
“impersonal, universally distributed, hereditary factors of a dynamic or motivating character,”722 which, he said, often fail to reach consciousness. Regarding their relationship to archetypes he said, they
are not vague and indefinite by nature, but are specifically formed motive forces which, long before there is any consciousness, and in spite of any degree of consciousness later on, pursue their inherent goals. Consequently, they form very close analogies to the archetypes, so close, in fact, that there is good reason for supposing that the archetypes are the unconscious images of the instincts themselves, in other words, that they are patterns of instinctual behavior.723
When examining these patterns, Jung said, we quickly recognize the nature and role of instincts, but if we open ourselves to the imaginal realm through persistence and the careful examination of dreams along with the practice of active imagination, we reach a “layer where man is no longer a distinct individual, but where his mind widens out and merges into the mind of mankind—not the conscious mind but the unconscious mind of mankind, where we are all the same.”724 Jung referred to this foundational layer of the psyche as the Great Mother into which we are all born. In contrast, individuation is a process of becoming a distinct individual free of covert control by shadowy elements of the unconscious.
Jung seems to have given individuation a more spiritual interpretation later in his life when delving more deeply into the symbolism of Christianity. As indicated earlier, he admits in a letter to P. W. Martin, written in 1945, that the main interest of his work involves the numinous and only through such experiences can one escape the terrible 721 Jung, “Commentary on the ‘Secret of the Golden Flower’,” CW 13 , para. 67. Cited in Philosophical Issues in the Psychology of C. G. Jung, Marilyn Nagy, pp. 216-217.’
722 Jung, “The Concept of the Collective Unconscious,” CW 9i, para. 91.
723 Ibid., para. 91.
724 Jung, Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice, 46: Cited in Coward, Jung and Eastern Thought, 39-40.
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grip of pathology.725 In discussing the soul in the last chapter, we elevated it to a position roughly equivalent to Jung’s concept of the Self. As such, we said the soul is intimately related to the sacred depth of existence, its essence derived from the rich archetypal medium through which God’s Divine majesty is conveyed. This makes sense if, as Tillich defined Him, God is considered the ground of existence, and thus the essence and source of the soul. Individuation, as conventionally understood, is focused on healing the brokenness of the psyche. But during the more advanced stages of the individuation process, we suggest that it takes on a spiritual tone more in line with Jung’s letter to P. W. Martin; in which case the goal is to draw ever closer to the Self from which the highest spiritual truths can be discerned. We discuss some of Jung’s metaphysical notions concerning the Self in the next chapter: “Jung’s Psychology in Dialog with the East.”
Following Jung’s lead, we do not attempt to define instincts and archetypes neurologically but rather provide them a functional characterization, placing both on a continuum with those actions and traits that are more behavioral belonging to the instincts and those responsible for symbolic thinking and imagination belonging to archetypes. The one exception to this rule is their psychoid nature, which we discuss shortly. A functional interpretation is also consistent with Stein’s stated position in his book Map of the Soul regarding how Jung understood them.
In that book, he says, mind and body are so interrelated that they are nearly inseparable. If this is ignored, the discussion of archetypal images easily slips into an overly spiritualized and groundless psychology. To discuss the archetype from a psychological standpoint rather than from a philosophical or metaphysical one, one must ground it in life as lived in the human body, where it also becomes intertwined with personal history and psychological development. The theory of archetypes is what makes Jung’s map of the soul Platonic, but the difference between Jung and Plato is that Jung studied the Ideas as psychological factors and not as eternal forms or abstractions.726
Although there is no clear neural distinction between instincts and archetypes, the term “archetype” is usually employed when Jungians discuss such topics as myth and fairy tales. Because archetypal images usually have a numinous quality about them, artistic and religious expression are also considered archetypal as are powerful 725 Jung , C. G. Jung Letters, I : 1906-1950, 377.
726 Stein , Jung’s Map of the Soul, 86.
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dreams, especially those containing universal symbols like the mandala.727 In general, any profound and uplifting experience, whether of beauty, or a feeling of love, is thought to be archetypal. In regard to religious symbols, Jung said, “They do not come from the head at all, but from some other place, perhaps the heart: certainly from a deep psychic level very little resembling consciousness, which is always only the top layer. That is why religious symbols have a distinctly ‘revelatory’ character; they are usually spontaneous products of unconscious psychic activity.”728 Religious and mythical symbols draw much of their content from the local culture, but because the basic structure of the psyche is the same for everyone, the archetypal images produced have the same meaning once the cultural overlay has been factored out. For Jung, this common heritage of archetypal images is the distinguishing feature of the collective unconscious from which mythology draws its power. Archetypes also have a formal function in that they give form and meaning to personal experience while transcending the mundane details and cultural context in which the experience may be situated.
Because of the numinous nature of archetypal images, they often have a divine quality. In the Greek pantheon, for instance, Ares was considered the god of war, Aphrodite was the goddess of romance and erotic passion, Hephaestus was the god that nurtured artistic and technical creations, and Athena inspired cultural achievements. For the Greeks, these gods represented divine attributes that were acted out in the lives of people, sometimes with disastrous results.729 The Greeks were fully aware that the gods had great power over the individual’s destiny. During battle, Ares empowered the warrior, granting him superhuman courage. Aphrodite, as discussed earlier, drove Helen of Troy into the arms of Paris. For her, living an authentic life meant surrender to the higher calling of Aphrodite, which demanded that she allow herself to be caught up in the divine passion suffusing her.730 Ares, Aphrodite, Hephaestus, and Athena represent broad, psychological traits that empower life with an energy that is expansive and life enhancing. As archetypal images they intensify the effect of the imaginal realm where symbols mediate between the archetypes and consciousness. In contrast, our instinctual inheritance, which shapes and determines 727 In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 334-335, Jung defines a mandala as
“ an archetypal image whose occurrence is attested throughout the ages. It signifies the wholeness of the Self. This circular image represents the wholeness of the psychic ground or, to put it in mythic terms, the divinity incarnate in man.”
728 Jung, “The Soul and Death” in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, CW 8, para. 805.
729 Disastrous happenings, often attributed to the Gods, became the basis for Greek tragedy.
730 Armstrong, The Great Transformation, 106-113.
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much of life, is inherently conservative, a part of our tribal past operating in the background. As such, it strengthens and enforces cultural traditions. Archetypes, instead, have a far more visionary role, awakening the mind to new possibilities.
Jung had a fascination with astrology and often considered a client’s astrological chart, along with a host of other things, when delving into the deepest recesses of a person’s psyche. Western astrology, as we know it today, can be traced back to ancient Babylon. Throughout its long history, astrologers have been keen observers of the mind as well as the heavens. Over the centuries, astrology has accordingly served as a marvelously insightful guide to human nature. Richard Tarnas, a cultural historian and author of Cosmos and Psyche, has defined archetypes in relationship to the planets, especially the outer ones: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. In the first part of his book, he attempts a metaphysical explanation of astrology based on Jung’s concept of synchronicity. He then examines the archetypes represented by the outer planets, attempting to determine if there is a significant relationship between their cyclical patterns and historical trends. His analysis demonstrates that a high correlation does indeed exist between the movement of the planets and the course of history. According to Tarnas, Jupiter astrologically represents the principle of optimism and expansiveness, endowing a person with a sense of joyfulness and a liberal spirit. Saturn represents the conservative principle operating within the constraints of tradition and authority. Uranus represents the principle of freedom, rebellion, and liberation, responsible for sudden insight and revelation. Neptune represents the principle of spirituality and transcendence. A person embodying this archetype is drawn to the symbolic and imaginative dimensions of life, at times being granted mystical vision. Pluto represents the principle of elemental power, depth, and intensity responsible for many mythic tales of descent and transformation, death, and rebirth. It is also associated with the impulsive nature of the unconscious. Each of these outer planets have both light and dark aspects.731
Jung’s penetrating insight into the deep structures of the psyche, Tarnas says, demonstrates how many different ways the same archetype can be characterized.
Because of their mercurial quality, they defy clear definition, often appearing in different forms. He quotes from Jung to show how difficult it is to provide a constant and uniform definition of the archetypes:
The ground principles, the archai, of the unconscious are indescribable because of their wealth of reference, although in themselves recognizable. The discriminating intellect naturally keeps 731 Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche, 90-100.
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on trying to establish their singleness of meaning and thus misses the essential point; for what we can above all establish as the one thing consistent with their nature is their manifold meaning, their almost limitless wealth of reference, which makes any unilateral formulation impossible.732
Jung never compiled a complete list of archetypes he considered essential to the working of the human psyche, largely because the list would have been limitless.
Archetypes he frequently discussed were the anima, the animus, the trickster, the wise old man and wise old woman, the hero, the shadow, the child, the mother, and the maiden. The most all-encompassing archetype is the Self, a representation of the psyche as a totality, including all other archetypes. We often imagine archetypes existing beyond the physical world, but as they relate to normal psychological functioning, it is more accurate to think of them as symbolic and abstract reflections of physiological activity. But there are many transpersonal aspects of the psyche, like synchronicities, that are best explained metaphysically. Jung attributed such phenomena to the psychoid nature of the archetype, which mediates between the physical realm, in which the psyche is normally situated, and a level of reality where matter and psyche merge—possibly a realm reflecting Being itself.
Of all of Jung’s concepts that enrich our concept of Being, the psychoid nature of the archetype is one of the most important. Jung used the term “psychoid” to describe those mysterious properties of archetypes that clearly transcend the neurophysiological base of the psyche and are apparently coextensive with the deep structures of reality. He found the term useful for explaining the many synchronistic dreams that he often encountered that predicted future events. Though sometimes disturbing, they convinced him that the psyche extends beyond the brain. A synchronicity, as Jung defined it, is a meaningful psychic occurrence, such as a dream, that is a causally connected (i.e., without material causal relationship) with something that occurs in the dreamer’s waking life.733 Because these uncanny events cannot be 732 Ibid., 87.
733 An example of a synchronicity event, as discussed earlier, is the so-called catalytic exteriorization phenomenon that Jung experienced when discussing occultism with Freud. As he reported it, there was a loud cracking sound coming from Freud’s bookcase at the same time that his diaphragm felt as though it were made of iron and becoming red-hot. This synchronistic phenomenon occurred twice in a row, clearly demonstrating the relationship between a subjective experience and an outer event.
Although this was a highly dramatic experience for both Freud and Jung, most
314 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
reduced to deterministic causes, he considered it “beyond all doubt, that empirical reality has a transcendental background” which, he said, is as much physical as psychic and therefore neither, but a third thing, a neutral nature which can at most be grasped in hints since in essence it is transcendental.734
In his earlier writings, Jung considered archetypes as inherited neurological structures common to all humanity. Later, to account for synchronistic phenomenon, he was forced to postulate that they must also be coextensive with all existence. This realization was nurtured through a long friendship with the theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958) who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1945 for formulating the exclusion principle.735 While investigating synchronicity in collaboration with Pauli, Jung expanded his understanding of the objective psyche to include the larger framework of physics and theorized that the archetype extends beyond the deterministic world of time and space. The alchemists called this transcendent reality the “unus mundus, ” one world. Robert Aziz, Clinical Member of the Ontario Society of Psychotherapists, further adds:
The unus mundus, Jung explains, “is founded on the assumption that the multiplicity of the empirical world rests on an underlying unity, and that not two or more fundamentally different worlds exist side by side…. Rather, everything divided and different belongs to one and the same world.” For Jung the unus mundus is not, to be sure, a mere metaphor; it is a very real world which subsumes the world of our everyday experience. For Jung the unus mundus is specifically the world of the psychoid archetype—the unitary world whose tangible presence is the synchronistic patterning of events in nature.736
synchronistic events occur in dreams that anticipate something really happening in the future.
734 Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, para. 768.
735 In 1924 Wolfgang Pauli proposed that sub-atomic particles have spin. He followed this the next year with the exclusion principle, which states that two or more identical particles cannot simultaneously occupy the same quantum state within a quantum system. For example, two electrons in the same atomic orbit cannot have all four quantum numbers identical. At least one of the numbers must be different between the two electrons. This principle determines the atomic architecture of electron shells.
736 Robert Aziz, C. G. Jung’s Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity, 133.
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This theoretical formulation of the unus mundus is the closest that Jung ever ventured toward expounding a metaphysical theory. His attempt to meld psyche and physis into a unified whole was summarized by Charles Card as follows: 1) The realms of mind and matter— psyche and physis—are complementary aspects of the same transcendental reality. 2) Archetypes pattern all processes, whether mental or physical. 3) In the realm of the psyche, archetypes pattern images and ideas; in the realm of physis, they pattern matter and energy. 4) When operating in both realms, archetypes produce synchronistic phenomena.737
Jung’s use of the term “psychoid” was derived from the work of Hans Driesh (1867-1941) and Eugen Bleuler (1857-1939), who used the term to refer to those biological functions that support consciousness but are not capable of becoming conscious themselves.738 These functions, as they understood them, extend down into the biological strata below unconscious content, which are, at least theoretically, capable of becoming conscious.739 In this context, the term “psychoid” has no metaphysical implications, but as Jung struggled with the notion of synchronicity, he had to admit that more than biology was needed to explain such phenomena. “I am only too conscious,” he said, “that synchronicity is a highly abstract and ‘irrepresentable’
quantity. It ascribes to the moving body a certain psychoid property which, like space, time, and causality, forms a criterion of its behavior. We must completely give up the idea of the psyche’s [sic.] being somehow connected with the brain….”740 Although Jung consistently affirmed the inseparable relationship existing between the psyche and the brain throughout most of his work, here he clearly made the claim that the psyche extends beyond the biological constraints of time, space, and causality. Stein suggests that Driesch and Bleuler’s definition of the psychoid region, which extends 737 This summary was derived from Charles R. Card, "The Archetypal View of C.G. Jung and Wolfgang Pauli," Psychological Perspectives (#24, Spring-Summer 1991), 29. One can see here that Jung’s later thinking could not keep psychology from venturing into metaphysics. Many would see the same “problem” in quantum physics. As an example, Niels Bohr’s principle of complementarity holds that neither the model of light as a wave or the model of light as particles can in themselves fully describe the phenomenon of light. Only taken together, though they seem like opposites (waves are not particles), can a full understanding of light be attained. Card seems to suggest that the same kind of complementarity holds for archetypes, being both mental (subjective) and physical (objective). Hence their psychoid nature.
738 Jung, “On the Nature of the Psyche,” CW 10, para. 368.
739 Ibid., para. 382.
740 Jung, “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle,” CW 8, para. 947.
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down into the biological region below consciousness, be considered on a continuum with the transcendent.741 Not only does Jung’s theory of this mysterious region of nature help explain synchronistic dreams but also elucidates the teleological and creative role the psyche has in transcendent, mystical experiences that extend far beyond the individual. The archetype, when understood this way, is like an individual organism in the ocean that is structurally coherent and contained within itself but is open to the vastness of the sea.742 As Rudolf Otto always maintained, the numinous, while being a psychological phenomenon, ultimately points beyond the psyche to connect with the Divine, an idea not only supported by the psychoid nature of the archetype but also greatly enhances the religious significance of Jung’s work.
Corbett explains why Jung expended so much time and energy examining religion, pointing out that
Jung’s theory of the healing power of the numinosum is actually a religious theory, and those of us who adhere to it, rather than practicing psychotherapy in a purely secular manner, are returning the care of the psyche to the province of spiritual practice, as was the case in antiquity.743
The archetype of the Self, Corbett says, is not only the source of numinous/religious experience but also serves as the fundamental organizing principle of the psyche, existing beyond the empirical personality.744 As a composite of all archetypes, it serves as a spiritus rector subtly drawing the individual toward wholeness, acting much like the guiding hand of God. Corbett’s psychological approach to religious experience, free of dogmatic assertions, facilitates spiritual and psychological growth, especially for those who are isolated from the wisdom of tradition by an increasingly secularized world. In fact, he says, any method that invokes the numinous “provides that quality 741 Stein, Jung’s Map of the Soul, 95.
742 For “orthodox” science, there is nothing beyond time, space, and causality, so this idea must be addressed as a metaphysical conjecture.
743 Corbett , Religious Function of the Psyche, 13. Just as Jung’s psychology bleeds into religion, it also bleeds into metaphysics as we have seen. While Jung often uses the term
“numinous” throughout the Collected Works as an adjective to describe the emotional quality of a dream or archetypal image, he uses the term “numinosum” as a noun referring both to the experience itself and to the overpowering energy of archetypes.
744 Ibid.,15.
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of experience which is synonymous with what has always been considered the religious domain.”745
Further, Corbett contends that “any conceptual distinction between God and the psyche’s expression of the divine is purely theoretical and of little practical significance.”746 Perhaps the distinction is only “theoretical,” but it is important for religion that our highest spiritual and moral aspirations are, in some sense, believed to be fundamental to the nature of reality. This is an important reason to examine Jung’s psychology from the perspective of Tillich’s theology and his concept of Being.
Jung’s expanded view of the archetype not only accounts for synchronistic phenomenon but also connects humanity to the ineffable nature of Wisdom, which is expressed in various ways throughout all the world’s religions. It is only in the last few centuries that this connection has been diminished as we strive to build a secular society free of contamination from the divisive religious doctrines that have brought so much suffering into the world. But unfortunately, life loses its meaning when cut off from the sacred dimension of reality. Much of the existential crisis of our age is due to this loss. There is no magic cure for what ails us because, for many, the old doctrines can no longer quench the thirst the soul has for renewal. We can only go forward, hoping to find new ways to satisfy the spiritual longings that we have ignored or denied for too long. Tillich’s theology and Jung’s psychology provide a partial solution, but both recognized that something entirely new is coming into the world.
Whatever that is, it will spontaneously arise fully formed from the archetypal foundation of the psyche. Jung realized, however, that we must go through a period of increasing conflict before humanity can birth a new mythos. Just like a human birth, the new vision will be preceded by labor pains.
745 Ibid., 9.
746 Ibid., 2.
JUNG’S PSYCHOLOGY IN DIALOGUE
WITH THE EAST
Jesus said, “Recognize what is before your face and what is hidden to you will become disclosed unto you. For there is nothing obscure that will not become shown forth.”
The Gospel According to Thomas747
That which is the finest essence—this whole world has that as its soul. That is Reality. That is Ātman. That art thou (tat tvam asi).
Chandogya Upanishad748
Corbett makes explicit what Jung often conveys more indirectly through his seminal writing. He likens Jung’s concept of the Self to the “Vedantic notion of the Atman, an element of the divine within the individual which is identical with the universal absolute consciousness of Brahman.”749 While both dual and nondual interpretations abound regarding the Hindu concept of the atman, Corbett observes that “Jungian depth psychologists have largely been dualistic in this regard, presumably reflecting the unconscious bias of their Judeo-Christian heritage.”750
Although Jung was very reluctant to suggest any metaphysical explanation, he saw similarities between the Hindu concept of atman and the Self. Buddhism, however, seems to fly in the face of Jungian thought regarding the Self. Some Buddhist schools hold that there is no individual self. For them, the self is an illusion that brings on the dissatisfactions and suffering of samsara, the endless cycle of existence. In likening Enlightenment and nirvana to the blowing out of a candle flame, Buddhism was often charged with a philosophy of nihilism or non-existence. A number of late nineteenth century Western scholars of Buddhism took exactly this view, but Buddhists have always vigorously rejected this misconception.
So, what are we to make of this no-self? Buddhists believe the ego and the world it knows is one grand illusion when contrasted to the reality of nirvana. This position is consistent with the anatta (no-self) doctrine of early Buddhism, which is said to be held 747 Bentley Layton, “The Gospel According to Thomas,” logion 5, The Gnostic Scriptures, 381.
748 Robert Ernest Hume, “Chandogya Upanishad,” 6.9.4, The Thirteen Principle Upanishads, 2nd edition.
749 Ibid., 41.
750 Ibid., 42.
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by every Buddhist school, but some Mahayana Sanskrit texts use the Hindu term atman in a reconfigured Buddhist sense. But the ego is seen by all of them as the illusionary instrument of an equally illusionary individual existence, part of the aggregate that makes up the sense of a person. It has no permanence or essence of any kind but is a series of states of consciousness that people delusively consider a coherent thread.751
But as Jung insisted, without a center there can be no consciousness of any type. To know the reality of nirvana implies some form of centered, organizing principle around which this enlightened state is realized.752 This position also seems to support some Buddhist theories of reincarnation, in which only the spiritual core of individual reality survives, while the spatiotemporal aspects of it do not. But this fragment around which enlightenment depends, must also have some relation to the individual, otherwise, reincarnation becomes a meaningless concept.
The Buddhist concept of enlightenment is based on mystical experiences typically achieved through rigorous meditation practices. They have found that such illuminated experiences reveal the absence of anything personal. Christian and Islamic mystics interpret enlightened states of consciousness differently. For them, mystical experiences affirm God’s love. Kant, having argued that only phenomenal experience can be rationally claimed as true, would have likely criticized both metaphysical interpretations because each is culturally dependent and thus cannot be logically defended.
But putting aside Kant’s epistemology, we still might ask: what then, is enlightenment if there is no individual self? Whatever we call it, it is ineffable. Hindus thought enlightenment awakened the individual to the reality of the atman. Early 751 Attempts to realize ultimate reality requires intense and focused effort. Preparations may include various complex methods of meditation, visualization, and transcendent states of visualizations, but they must also inspire living a compassionate and ethical life.
752 Not all scholars hold that early Buddhism thought the anatta was a rejection of any self at all. Some think that the Buddha, steadfastly avoiding metaphysical statements of ultimate reality, remained silent about the atman. Rather, the empirical self, the self of which we are conscious, was declared illusory. In this regard, see the scholar of Pali, Sanskrit and Tibetan texts Kamaleswar Bhattacharya. In The Atman-Brahman in Ancient Buddhism, he argues throughout a deep analysis of early Buddhist scriptures, that Buddha never denied the Hindu Upanishadic atman. The Buddha’s refusal to speak about it was because anything said would be misunderstood by those who had not achieved a sufficient depth of realization. The language of relativity—comparison and contrast—implicit in all discursive thinking, is inherently incapable of describing the Absolute.
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Buddhism, which developed as a reaction to the Hindu view that we each somehow have an individual atman—a self—replaced it with the idea that enlightenment was a spontaneous realization that ultimate reality is emptiness.753 We might interpret the Buddhist concept of no-self or “emptiness” as equivalent to Being, which is beyond the restraints of empirical reality including individuality. While a mystical experience of Being might reveal its emptiness, the Self, as Jung conceived it, would continue to exist within empirical reality.
In his essay “Good and Evil in Analytical Psychology,” Jung explicitly notes the similarity between his concept of Self and the Hindu atman, the Divine, or Absolute Spirit, which he said, breathes through every individual: Not through me alone, but through all; for it is not only the individual Atman but Atman-Purusha, the universal Atman, the pneuma, who breathes through all. We use the word “self” for this, contrasting it with the little ego. From what I have said it will be clear that this self is not just a rather more conscious or intensified ego, as the words “self-conscious,” “self-satisfied,” etc. might lead one to suppose. What is meant by the self is not only in me but in all beings, like the Atman, like Tao. It is psychic totality.754
After making this dramatic comparison of Self with the Hindu concept of the atman, Jung emphasizes that the Self, as an image of God, should never be interpreted as a transcendent Being, “… though it may perhaps be a vessel for divine grace.” The blessing of grace, whatever its ultimate source, is a gift of transcendence.
“Consciousness,” Jung said, “experiences this supra ordinate totality as something numinous, as a tremendum or fascinosum.”755
The Self, which Jung said, “is the smallest of the small, easily overlooked and pushed aside,”756 is the hidden still center, serving as the organizing principle of the psyche.
Likewise, in some Hindu philosophy, atman is called “anu,” the atom. Hindu scholars and mystics therefore considered it the “smallest of the small.” Brought to 753 The Hindu atman, Buddhists felt, diminished compassion in relation to others as well as misconstruing the ultimate nature of reality. In contrast to the exclusivist Hindu interpretation that disturbed Buddhists , Advaita Vedanta, on the other hand, taught that atman is brahman, reality itself. It is not mine or yours yet is the center and totality of our reality.
754 Jung, “Good and Evil in Analytical Psychology,” in CW 10, para. 873.
755 Ibid., para. 874. Jung has Rudolf Otto’s concept of God in mind here.
756 Jung, Aion, CW 9ii, para. 257.
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consciousness through traditions like the purusha/atman teaching in the East or the mystical revelations of Meister Eckhart in the West, Jung thought it served as the guiding spirit or spiritus rector of both cultures. “The world-embracing spirit of Meister Eckhart,” he said, “knew without discursive knowledge the primordial mystical experience of India as well as of the Gnostics and was itself the finest flower on the tree of the ‘Free Spirit’ that flourished at the beginning of the eleventh century.“ All spiritual traditions thus attest to the radiant power of this inner truth. “The God-image,” accordingly, “is not something invented; it is an experience that comes upon man spontaneously….”757
For Jung, Stein says, the God-image or Self “is transcendent, which means it is not defined or contained within the psychic realm but rather lies beyond it and, in an important sense, defines it. “When the ego is well connected to the self,” he says, “a person stands in relationship with a transcendent center and is precisely not narcissistically invested in nearsighted goals and short terms gains. In such persons, there is an ego-free quality as though they were consulting a deeper and wider reality rather than merely the practical, rational, and personal considerations typical of ego consciousness.”758
The Self or atman, Jung insisted, “is actually the secret spiritus rector of our fate.”759
Through the process of individuation the individual begins to consciously work in unison with this hidden organizing principle guiding the gradual unfolding of an individual’s destiny. By paying close attention to the promptings of the Self, Jung believed the meaning and purpose of one’s life is revealed. But the relationship between consciousness and the Self is dynamic. Not only is consciousness transformed through its relationship with the Self, but the image of the Self, as manifested within the individual, is also changed, which in turn alters the foundational structure of consciousness.760
Jung understood that mystical experiences derive from the Self, the mysterious orchestrator of the individuation process. As such, mysticism is an experience of an
“unseen reality, a spiritual presence, a numen, or an absolute that is transcendent…”761
Jung’s understanding of mysticism, however, should not be confused with the goal of 757 Ibid., paras. 302, 303. Eckhart spoke of the Godhead above God, the latter being our experience of the former which forever remains unknowable.
758 Stein, Jung’s Map of the Soul, 152.
759 Ibid., para. 257.
760 Presumably, the universal Self, which is equivalent with the atman, would not change.
761 Stein, Jung’s Map of the Soul, 127.
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individuation. While the ego is temporarily transcended during mystical rapture, wholeness, the goal of individuation, is gradually achieved as ego consciousness becomes more fully aligned with both the Self and the deep, archetypal structures of the psyche, which in turn, Jung said, serve to enhance psychological well-being and wholeness.
This is in exact agreement with the empirical findings of psychology, that there is an ever-present archetype of wholeness which may easily disappear from the purview of consciousness or may never be perceived at all until a consciousness illuminated by conversion recognizes it…. As a result of the “anamnesis” the original state of oneness with the God-image is restored.762
This “ever-present archetype of wholeness” is a fundamental or universal tendency within the psyche, common to all people though often hidden.
Karen Armstrong reports that Chinese philosophy, sometimes referred to as the Great Knowledge, recognized the conflicting nature of reality. When the philosopher Zhuangzi and his followers meditated on this truth, they “began to see that all apparent contradictions formed a mysterious, numinous unity. This coincident oppositorum [resolution of opposites] brought them to the hub of the wheel, the axis of the Way…”763 Jung’s understanding of the opposites began as an attempt to reconcile and heal the suffering that he and his patients experienced. But he later came to realize, in a way consistent with Chinese philosophy, that the coincident oppositorum was not only necessary for the healing of psychological wounds, but in fact also led to the numinous center of individual existence, a psychological reality that he only later referred to as the Self. Such a transformation, of course, lies far beyond what we typically call psychology.
Although Jung was interested in Eastern thought at various times throughout his life, his mature work is clearly oriented toward the West. Stein attributes this to the Grail dream that he had while traveling in India in 1938.764 According to Jung, the dream had the effect of drawing him away from the exotic images of India and 762 Jung, Aion, CW 9ii, para. 73. Anamnesis is Plato’s term for the recollection that he held was the realization of knowledge forgotten in embodiment in the world. The slave boy’s discovery of the solution to the problem of doubling the square, discussed in chapter 2
is an example of anamnesis, which greatly deepens thought and transforms perception.
763 Armstrong, The Great Transformation, 298-299.
764 Stein, Jung’ s Treatment of Christianity, 102.
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refocusing his attention on the Occidental, which, for him, was best represented by the quest for the Holy Grail and the alchemist’s search for the philosopher’s stone.765
Afterwards, Jung’s life gradually shifted toward Christianity. Stein speculates that for Jung, “the experience of the self—that most impersonal of all the archetypes—had a highly dramatic quality. It came out of his inner struggles and turmoil and capped a period in his life that often had him wondering if he was losing his way in a psychic wilderness.”766 Likewise, mystics often speak of what John of the Cross termed “the dark night of the soul,” the confused darkness before the dawning of the numinous light of the Divine.
In the last chapter of his book, The Religious Dimension of the Psyche, Corbett speculates on the future of analytical psychology: “The practice of depth psychology with a religious sensibility,” he argues, “belongs within the contemplative tradition, because it represents an active attempt to experience and understand the ways of the divine as they operate within the human psyche.”767 Through the process of rigorously attending to the numinosum, Corbett says, an individual becomes engaged in either “a form of prayer, or a path to enlightenment, or both.”768 A prolonged discipline that brings the individual into contact with the numinosum on a regular basis thus transforms ordinary depth psychology into a form of religious worship that he calls contemplative psychology. People suffering from serious emotional pain, however, will always need traditional therapy.
If analytical psychology becomes part of the contemplative tradition, as Corbett’s speculates, then the metaphysical implications of Jung’s psychology may also assume greater importance. For example, Jung’s unus mundus with its tendency to pattern matter and energy in the realm of physis lends further credence to the idea that there is a creative and teleological ordering of reality. For Jung, this teleological principle was not only a theoretical position to argue for but also a compelling truth by which he lived his life.
The Red Book attests to the importance of this unitary principle, which was for him a visionary work that he devoted himself to from 1913 to 1928. Though he shared 765 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 282. As already discussed, his wish to heal Christianity was an important element in his renewed focus on the West.
766 Stein, Jung’s Map of the Soul, 153.
767 Corbett, The Religious Function of the Psyche, 220.
768 Ibid., 221.
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portions of it with intimate friends over time, it was not meant for publication. For most of us, the unconscious remains a shadowy world, but for Jung it was a vital and vivid part of his being. Now that The Red Book has been published (2009) we are able to gain insight into the sometimes-bizarre imagery that was for him an initiatory journey. More than anything else, it affirmed, for him, that the unconscious is far more than a storehouse for forgotten or repressed memories. Instead, he came to realize it was a living agent, participating fully in the life of every individual, though often hidden from conscious awareness.
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I worked on this book for 16 years…I always knew that these experiences contained something precious, and therefore I knew of nothing better than to write them down in a “precious,” that is to say, costly book and to paint the images that emerged through reliving it all—as well as I could. I knew how frightfully inadequate this undertaking was, but despite much work and many distractions I remained true to it.
C. G. Jung769
The overall theme of the book [ The Red Book or Liber Novus ] is how Jung regains his soul and overcomes the contemporary malaise of spiritual alienation. This is ultimately achieved through enabling the rebirth of a new image of God in his soul and developing a new worldview in the form of a psychological and theological cosmology…. Liber Novus itself can be understood on the one hand as depicting Jung’s individuation process and on the other hand as his elaboration of this concept as a general psychological schema.
Sonu Shamdasani770
The year 1913 marks a radical turn in Jung’s life. In 1912, a year before this, he published Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido,771 a work, as discussed earlier, that clearly challenged Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and ultimately destroyed their friendship. Jung reacted, in part, to the loss of this important relationship by turning inward to explore the unconscious. It was there that he discovered an innate tendency within the objective psyche that, once awakened, drove him toward a reconciliation between the darkness that he discovered within himself and his equally strong desire to be loving. Throughout history there has been a longing for a reconciliation of these 769 Jung, “Epilogue” from The Red Book, 360. Though The Red Book was completed in 1928, Jung wrote this epilogue in 1959.
770 Sonu Shamdasani, “Introduction” to The Red Book, 207. The Red Book with Shamdasani’s introduction was published in 2009.
771 As noted earlier, the first English title of Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido was Psychology of the Unconscious (1917). Years later, it was rewritten under the title Symbols of Transformation, Volume 5 of the Collected Works.
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opposites, often expressed in myth. Such stories look forward to a “golden age” when love will triumph over evil. This idea is so pervasive that it can be considered a primordial image or archetype—an archetype of the “golden age.” In Christianity this image accords with Christ’s return when he will bring a reign of peace during which time swords will be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks.772 This same image seems to have taken hold of Jung when exploring his own unconscious and then again later when writing Answer to Job.
From a young age, Jung was always conflicted about religion, never finding satisfactory answers to his questions. He found God a force to be reckoned with, sometimes terrifying but also a source of unutterable bliss. Although he never attended church after leaving home, he continued to seek answers to his questions about God that were formed early in his life. The God he thought he left behind, nonetheless, remained a force even though he now understood the majesty of God in terms of the psyche. Through an arduous descent into his own unconscious, Jung discovered that there was another center of consciousness within him, a living being distinct from his ego, which he called his soul. Later, he described this living entity as the Self or God-image ( imago Dei), providing a psychological affirmation for much that Christianity teaches. He held that this image is all we can affirm because God Himself is beyond knowing.773 Jung refused to speculate further. For him, the psychological image was sufficient since it retained all the terror and grace that tradition has bestowed on God, both the good and the evil. The Red Book or Liber Novus (New Book), edited by Sonu Shamdasani and published in 2009, is Jung’s record of his experiences during his descent into the unconscious. Both this work and Answer to Job portray the objective psyche—and hence, as we argue, the nature of Being—acting much like the Holy Spirit, in that it draws the individual and society toward ever higher states of consciousness.
Throughout his life Jung had many remarkable spiritual experiences that not only inspired his imagination but attested to the mysterious workings of the psyche. One could properly ask, however, whether Jung’s visionary experiences are any more verifiable than those reported by psychics and other paranormal practitioners. We feel that all these reports point toward an aspect of reality that needs to be better understood if we are ever to awaken to the mysterious nature of Being. Rational analysis can only frame the questions to ask. Only by going deep within oneself is it 772 Jerusalem Bible, Isaiah 2:4.
773 The God-image, residing in the psyche, is a psychological reality. Whether there is a God transcending the psyche as an ontological or trans-ontological reality is an open question. Jung’s God is not the God of philosophy or theology in that for Jung God is a psychological image—the imago Dei.
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possible to fathom what lies at the core of existence. Plato was certainly aware that reason alone was inadequate if not complemented by the type of deep experience that some ancients called gnosis. Even though Tillich’s systematic theology is based on a rigorous analysis of Being, he too recognized that opening our lives to the numinous—
the Holy Spirit—is the only way to discern the true nature of reality. To avoid getting lost in fantasy, however, Tillich, along with all the great philosophers of antiquity, understood that such experience must be balanced by rigorous reason. They knew that numinous experience is not a problem, but interpreting it,—that is, understanding it—
is.
When writing The Red Book, a clearly visionary work, Jung attributed his fantasy experiences to the psyche, certainly not to any transcendent being or messenger from God. If he had made such claims, critics would be justified in suspecting that he had suffered a psychotic break. The numinous quality of both the experiences he wrote about and the beautiful images he depicted in paintings is a striking feature of this insightful work.774 Another is Jung’s intense experience of good and evil that confirmed for him the existence of polar opposites existing within the objective psyche.
Jung used the term “objective psyche” interchangeably with the collective unconscious to describe the vast region of the psyche that extends beyond the personal unconscious.
During his inward journey, he came to realize that although the psyche is vast and mysterious, it contains a wisdom that transcends human intellect. He surrendered to its wisdom and was guided to a new understanding of life. In his autobiography, he acknowledged that the wisdom he discovered then, by following the “initial fantasies and dreams that began in 1912,” became the foundation for all that followed.775 Even though Jung cast the profound discoveries he made in the vivid imagery of fantasy, we feel his spell-binding narrative not only illuminates the inner dynamics of the objective psyche but, as we indicated above, reveals much about the foundational structure of reality—the ground of Being.
In December 1913, Jung began a series of experiments designed to explore his relationship to the unconscious during which time he carefully recorded his experiences. Because of his natural artistic ability, he often accompanied his descriptions with paintings that added depth and richness to the written material. The text was in German and Latin and rendered in a way that imitates medieval 774 Since the term “numinous” was not coined by Rudolf Otto until 1917, The Red Book, written before this time, does not use the term even though the images depicted and experiences described are of a distinctly and highly numinous quality.
775 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 192.
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calligraphy. Often Jung felt confused and uncertain about the work he was doing, but in 1916 he had an extraordinary experience, which encouraged him to continue pursuing his inner work. It began with a powerful fantasy of his anima fleeing into the unconscious.776 Explaining further Jung said:
the unconscious corresponds to the mythic land of the dead, the land of the ancestors. If, therefore one has a fantasy of the soul vanishing, this means that it has withdrawn into the unconscious or into the land of the dead. There it produces a mysterious animation and gives visible form to the ancestral traces, the collective contents. Like a medium, it gives the dead a chance to manifest themselves.777
If, as Jung indicated above, there are ancestral traits buried within it, the psyche clearly extends beyond the neurological structures of the brain, an important insight which was confirmed by what came next. Shortly after having this fantasy, Jung’s household became haunted. The climax of the experience inspired Jung to write Seven Sermons to the Dead (Septem Sermones ad Mortuos) ,778 which he asked to be excluded from the Collected Works, though he readily admitted that it deeply influenced his later work. Only after he died in 1961 was it published. As to the haunting, Jung writes in his autobiography that he felt the presence of ghostly entities throughout the house.
During this time, his nine-year-old son was disturbed by anxiety dreams, his eldest daughter saw a white figure passing through her room, and another daughter had her blanket snatched away from her two times during the night. 779
776 As indicated before, Jung describe the animus as the unconscious masculine side of a woman, and the anima as the unconscious feminine side of a man. Jung often refer to the anima as his soul because of her animating power. In Latin, animus often means mind, and anima soul; both come from a root meaning breath or to blow.
777 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 191. Those interested in Greek mythology may recall Odysseus’ descent into the underworld where he pours blood of a sacrificed goat into a trench and allows only the dead seer Teiresias to drink, thus empowering the prophet to tell Odysseus something of what is to come. The blood gives Teiresias life enough to speak. We might see this as the “dead” unconscious entering the living consciousness.
778 Stephen A. Hoeller, The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead. Jung gave close friends and associates copies of these sermons, but they were never intended for publication. Hoeller was one of the fortunate people who obtained a copy. From this he produced his own English translation. The sermons were also included in the German publication of Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
779 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 190.
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Jung understood from the haunting that something was being demanded of him, but since he did not know how to respond, the haunting intensified. Late in the afternoon “the front doorbell began ringing frantically.”780 Everyone in the household looked to see who was there, but no one was in sight. Jung was close enough to the door to see the doorbell move by itself. It felt, he said, as though the house was
“crammed full of spirits.”
They were packed deep right up to the door, and the air was so thick it was scarcely possible to breathe…. Then they cried out in chorus,
“We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought.”781
The failure to find what the spirits were seeking in Jerusalem is an allusion to the incompleteness of Christianity.
Immediately, Jung sat down and began writing whatever came into his mind, allowing his unconscious “free rein.” As soon as he began writing, the spirits departed from the house but continued communicating to him through his unconscious.
Although he was unwilling to risk publication, he later had to admit that what came to be called Seven Sermons to the Dead was a prelude to his understanding of what he needed to communicate about the unconscious as part of his own individuation process.782
If we are to believe what Jung is reporting here, it would indicate that the psyche can influence events in the physical world—for instance, his reports of ghostly spirits ringing the doorbell and snatching his daughter’s blanket away. Later in his life Jung would have likely attributed this phenomenon to the psychoid nature of the archetype, which he came to think has a transcendental background existing beyond time and space, much like our concept of Being. From there, he said, the archetype can influence both psyche and matter. As discussed earlier, Jung used this idea to explain the meaningful, acausal783 nature of synchronicity and precognitive dreams. This idea can also shed light on UFO phenomenon. Some researchers who recognize the acausal relationship between psyche and the material world feel that UFO sightings and abductions are most likely psychic events, but on occasion, they cross over into the 780 Ibid., 190.
781 Ibid., 190-191.
782 Ibid., 191-192.
783 Jung uses the term ‘acausal’ to mean without material causal relationship.
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physical realm.784 UFO sightings thus offer a tantalizing hint of what might unfold in the coming years concerning the mysterious and directive nature of the psyche. In his essay “On the Nature of the Psyche” Jung writes concerning synchronistic events: And so it is with the hand that guides the crayon or brush, the foot that executes the dance-step…: a dark impulse is the ultimate arbiter of the pattern, an unconscious a priori precipitates itself into plastic form, and one has no inkling that another person’s consciousness is being guided by these same principles at the very point where one feels utterly exposed to the boundless subjective vagaries of chance. Over the whole procedure there seems to reign a foreknowledge not only of the pattern but of its meaning. Image and meaning are identical; and as the first takes shape, so the later becomes clearer.785
The pattern that guides us throughout life, Jung said, portrays its own meaning symbolically as it flows forth from the Anima Mundi, the unconscious foundation of all living life forms. Thus, “Instinct takes specific form, even in man. That form is the archetype, so named because unconscious thought expresses itself mythologically.”786
Reason and reflection, though, must often be brought to bear on this symbolic portrayal to make sense of it.
Seven Sermons to the Dead was written three years after Jung started working on The Red Book, the primary focus of his inner life from 1913 to 1918. Although this was the most intense period of activity, he continued working on The Red Book up to 1928, after which his attention shifted to alchemy. The imaginative journey that Jung embarked upon during these early years, as he described it, provided “the prima materia for a lifetime’s work...”787
The years, of which I have spoken to you, when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, 784 See Whitley Strieber and Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained, especially Chapter 5, “A Context in the Sky.”
785 Jung, “On the Nature of the Psyche,” CW 8, Par 402.
786 Jung, Letters, I, 525-526.
787 Jung, The Red Book,199.
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the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then.788
The remainder of Jung’s life was largely devoted to finding empirical evidence to validate his experiences during this time and to draw meaning from them.
The first chapter of The Red Book is entitled “The Way of What Is to Come.” In these opening remarks, Jung clarified the difference between the “spirit of this time,” which desires to hear of “use and value,” and the “spirit of the depths,” which, in service to the soul had opened his heart to “the simplest of things” and the mysteries of life. It thereby strengthened his suspicion that the very rational ideals that had served him so well during the first part of his career had failed him. In deference to his soul’s promptings, he came to the realization that his ambition had little in common with his soul’s desire for meaning. Now at midlife, he felt a need to abandon the scientific principles that shaped his medical career and to devote his full attention to the timeless depths of his soul.789
Shamdasani explains in his introduction to Liber Novus ( The Red Book) that the “spirit of the times” corresponds to Jung’s No. 1 personality as described in his autobiography, and the “spirit of the depths” corresponds to his No. 2 personality.790
As discussed earlier, Jung experienced his No. 1 personality as cramped and restricted but described his No. 2 personality as having an eternal quality that transcended his own personal life. The “spirit of the depths,” Jung tells us, made him recognize the value of relating to his soul as a living being. At this time—the beginning of his inward journey—he was still laboring under the “spirit of the times” and had turned his soul into an object of scientific study. But later, when driven by the “spirit of the depths,”
Jung was forced to acknowledge that there was another presence within himself—his soul—that both transcended and encompassed his ego.
Jung made the decision to commit his life to the “spirit of the depths” shortly after ending his relationship with Freud and relinquishing his position as lecturer at the university (ETH, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zurich) where he had taught for eight years. He said that his journey into the unconscious made it nearly impossible to focus his energies on scientific matters.791 When he made this commitment, Jung was at the height of his career. It was not an easy decision to abandon everything that he 788 Ibid., vii.
789 Ibid., 229.
790 Jung, The Red Book, 208.
791 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 193.
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had worked for and devote himself to visionary pursuits, which at times seemed to verge on madness. To reassure himself, he asked for a visible sign that the “spirit of the depths” was not illusory. He wanted to know that the spirit that moved him was also “ruler of the depths of world affairs.”
It happened in October of the year 1913 as I was leaving alone for a journey, that during the day I was suddenly overcome in broad daylight by a vision: I saw a terrible flood that covered all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. It reached from England up to Russia, and from the coast of the North Sea right up to the Alps. I saw yellow waves, swimming rubble, and the death of countless thousands.792
Jung said that the vision lasted for two hours. Two weeks later the vision returned, this time more violent than before. An inner voice told him: “look at it, it is completely real, and it will come to pass.”793
Again, in the summer of 1914, just before the outbreak of war, he had three dreams of a similar nature to the visions. In the first two, Jung was in a foreign country.
Suddenly, in summer, a terrible cold descended from space and every living thing was frozen. In the third dream, he was again in England and needed to return home in a hurry. In these later dreams, it was not until he arrived home that he encountered the terrible cold that descended from space. Unlike the first two, the last vision ended on a note of hope. Jung said that in this dream:
There stood a leaf-bearing but fruitless tree, whose leaves had turned into sweet grapes full of healing juice through the working of the frost.
I picked some grapes and gave them to a great waiting throng.794
He was approaching forty at this time and felt that he had achieved everything he had striven for in life. In other words, the ambition of his No.1 personality had been satisfied. Now, as he moved into the second half of life, his No. 2 personality, moved by “the spirit of the depths,” was reasserting itself.
Jung’s account could be interpreted as a typical, though in his case, spectacular midlife crisis, but the comprehensive depth of his images captured in art and language throughout The Red Book suggests that something far more profound was occurring.
792 Jung, The Red Book, 231.
793 Ibid., 231.
794 Ibid., 231. This resembles the passage in the Book of Revelatio, 22: 1-2—where leaves are distributed as a cure for pagans.
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As the title “The Way of What Is to Come” suggests, Jung was, at the time, experiencing how the collective psyche is destined to unfold in the future. He came to realize that life must be first lived fully in the “spirit of the times” before one is ready for a journey into the depths. The “spirit of the times” is sensible in that it seeks to order reality. It is the guiding spirit of consciousness. The unconscious, however, seemed to Jung a jumble of irrational images that at first appear as nonsense. The “spirit of the depths,”
he said, seeks to meld together sense and nonsense in service to what he called
“supreme meaning.”795 The spirit revealed to him that a new vision of God was coming into the world, not God himself but rather a numinous image of “force and magnificence,” the essence of “supreme meaning.” It will, Jung predicted, arise spontaneously from the unconscious, a perfectly formed image that is neither a product of reason nor of nonsense but satisfies both.796 Throughout the rest of the book, we further develop Jung’s fervent hope that the modern world, with all its conflicts, is now being prepared for a new religious vision, which he believed will convey an essence of “supreme meaning,” the long-awaited answer to the existential crisis in which we are all mired.
Many of Jung’s central concepts were first formed during the years he labored on The Red Book (1913-1928), including his controversial claim that the Christian god-image was itself in need of redemption. This realization was further strengthened by an imaginal relationship he had with a feminine figure (Salome), who represented his anima. Even more dramatically, he was later led into the darker regions of his psyche, including an agonizing descent into hell. These powerful experiences convinced him that the instinctual, chthonic parts of the psyche exist alongside, but in tension with, the spiritual qualities traditionally attributed to the God-image.
Jung’s descent into the dark imagery that characterized so much of his journey into the netherworld must certainly have felt like a leap into the unknown. This was a very intense period during which Jung not only sank into the depths of Hell but was also lifted to great heights from which he could glimpse the radiant beauty of the soul.
Without enduring his ordeal through to its end, it is unlikely that Jung would have had such a deep influence on future developments of religion and culture, especially in our time. It took great courage for him to go forward into a realm of experience that closely resembled psychosis. Without being supported by an inner knowing from which he 795 Ibid., 229-230. Melding the jumble of irrational images with supreme meaning reminds us of the surrealistic art of someone like Dali.
796 Ibid., 231. The marriage of sense with nonsense is much like Jung’s transcendent function.
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gained strength, he might well have abandoned his attempt to investigate further.
Although he felt the full effect of what Rudolph Otto termed the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, 797 he was still able to endure the divine drama into which he was thrust, even when confronted with the most frightening images.
Jung perfected his technique of active imagination when exploring the depths of his soul during this time. The life-like and visionary images that arose in his mind, however, were not the vague phantoms that most of us are acquainted with when using our imagination. The images and visions he encountered were of utmost intensity. It was for this reason he rightly feared a psychotic break. But the difference between the exotic images that Jung had during these sessions and the frightening and uncontrollable images that possess psychotics is seen by the fact that he always remained in firm control. After each session, he returned to his normal life.
Although his visions seem highly unusual, even bizarre, such images have been reported by shamans and mystics throughout history. Indian yogis, for instance, discipline their bodies and minds to open themselves to these same transcendent depths. Their goal, however, is to move beyond this realm of seductive images, so they can realize ever higher states of consciousness. In contrast, Jung was a psychologist seeking only to better understand his own unconscious, especially the role opposites played in the drama of his life. His discoveries were far more modest than the unitive experiences of mystics, but still revealing. He surmised from his journey into the underworld, that we are now at a critical juncture in world affairs when humanity is being forced, by circumstances, to become more aware of the dynamic forces operating in the unconscious.
Though frightened by their intensity, the visions taught Jung, amongst other things, the importance of uniting spirit with the chthonic powers of the unconscious. In one of the visionary experiences that he wrote about, he was forced to participate in the sacrificial murder of a young girl. Jung associated the vivid imagery of this sacrifice with the possessive nature of a psychological complex that robs consciousness of life-affirming energy. Although he admitted that the thought of a sacrificial murder is shocking, Jung reminded the reader that the Eucharist is based on drinking the blood and eating the flesh of Christ. He did not spare the reader from the grisly details of the vision. In summary, Jung encountered “the body of a small girl—covered with terrible 797 Recall that Otto held that the numinous experience of the Divine manifests as both awesome and terrible yet also deeply attractive.
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wounds—smeared with blood.”798 A veiled woman, calmly standing next to the girl, tells Jung to remove her liver, cut off a piece, and eat it.
Jung’s description of the sacrificial meal is gruesome:
I kneel down on the stone, cut off a piece of the liver and put it in my mouth. My gorge rises—tears burst from my eyes—cold sweat covers my brow—a dull sweet taste of blood—I swallow with desperate efforts—it is impossible—once again and once again—I almost faint—
it is done. The horror has been accomplished.799
After Jung had choked down the piece of the girl’s liver the mysterious woman removed her veil and asked, “Do you recognize me?” Jung answered, “How strangely familiar you are! Who are you?” She answered, “I am your soul.”800
With the sudden recognition of the woman as a symbol of his soul, Jung came to appreciate that the sacrifice, which could only be achieved through the assistance of evil, had been accomplished and the “primordial powers” had now become available to serve the regeneration of his soul:
… through the sacrificial murder, I redeemed the primordial powers and added them to my soul. Since they became part of a living pattern, they are no longer dormant, but awake and active and irradiate my soul with their divine working.801
The vision, gruesome as it was, contributed substantially to his theory of individuation and the persistent effect of the opposites on our overall sense of wellbeing. For it is only by bringing the darkness into harmony with the light of consciousness that we can become whole.
Since the time of the ancient Greeks, the liver has been considered, by many, the seat of life and the soul as well as the source of one’s passions and emotions. In a footnote to the passage describing Jung’s vision of a sacrificial murder, Shamdasani references Jung’s Liverpool dream, which Jung recounts in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. 802 Here, Liverpool is clearly a symbol for the liver. Jung had this dream in 1927 long after having the gruesome vison of eating the girl’s liver. In this dream, Jung is in Liverpool, 798 Jung, The Red Book, 290.
799 Ibid., 290.
800 Ibid., 290.
801 Ibid., 291.
802 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 198, 199.
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England, and everything around him is “obscured by rain, fog, smoke, and dimly lit darkness.” In the center of the city was an island located in the middle of a pool. The little island, he said:
blazed with sunlight. On it stood a single tree, a magnolia, in a shower of reddish blossoms. It was as though the tree stood in the sunlight and was at the same time the source of light.803
The island in the dream provided Jung a “vision of unearthly beauty,” clearly portraying the center of the psyche as distinctly different from the ego. The island, ablaze with sunlight, conveyed a numinous quality that Jung perceived radiating from the Self.804 The dream provided him with a sense of finality, for he now realized with certainty that the center, represented by the island, was the ultimate goal of the individuation process. Beyond this, he realized, there is nothing more to achieve.805
Both the sacrificial vision and the Liverpool dream concerned the liver as the “the seat of life,”806 but while the earlier vision described the terrible sacrifice that must be endured for the soul’s salvation, the dream gave testimony to the end goal, the soul’s awakening.
As his soul awakened, it placed new demands on Jung that can only be described as irrational and even insane, having a force equal to “the radiance of the sun.”807 This radiant force, which is latent in everyone but seldom accessed, drives relentlessly toward completeness once activated. His soul warned him that she will become
… remorseless as the God himself, since the life of the divine child, which you have eaten, will feel like glowing coals in you. It will burn inside you like a terrible, inextinguishable fire. But despite all torment, you cannot let it be…. You feel that the fire of the sun has erupted in you. Something has been added to you, a holy affliction.808
803 Ibid., 198
804 Note that by the time of the Liverpool dream, Jung had begun using the term Self in place of soul.
805 Ibid., 198, 199. The tree is virtually a universal symbol. Recall the Ashvatta tree in the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, Yggdrasil, the world-tree in Norse mythology, the tree of life in Genesis, and the Cabbalistic sephirothal tree of lights in mystical Judaism.
806 Jung, The Red Book, 290, n147.
807 Ibid., 291.
808 Ibid., 291. The “life of the divine child” refers back to the sacrificial meal that Jung is forced to eat.
THE RED BOOK: UNION OF SPIRIT AND MATTER 337
So began the long sojourn, which Jung would later describe as the process of individuation. Once ignited, there is no escape. “The fire burns right through you. That which guides, forces you onto the way.”809 But something more than reason and willpower will be demanded of all those who are called on to navigate the chaotic nature of the underworld. Only reliance on the guiding influence of one’s soul suffices.810
Throughout The Red Book, Jung used the symbols of the white bird and serpent to represent the tension existing between spirit and the chthonic realm. Love is a product of their union. He sometimes used the term “spirit” to simply refer to the mind, but more often equated it with a quality of feeling that elevates the mind to a higher state.
The elevated state of the white bird has a numinous quality, but because it soars to celestial heights beyond the earth, it removes itself from the warmth of human embrace. Likewise, as long as the erotic nature of the serpent is coiled deep within the unconscious, it manifests as sexuality and desire; the full extent of human love can only be fully realized when the instinctual qualities of the serpent and the celestial qualities of the bird are unified.
Philemon, an imaginal figure in Seven Sermons to the Dead, who served as a guide for Jung during the ghostly hauntings of his house, spoke specifically about the relationship between the serpent and the white bird. He cautioned Jung that the serpent seeks the company of those who are spellbound by the earth. This happens when earthborn instincts are unconsciously acted out. Without understanding their irrational nature, which too often leads to destructive behavior, the individual remains under the spell of the unconscious. The spell is only broken by bringing the seductive forces that lie below the level of awareness to consciousness. Only then, can freedom be wrested from the enchanting power of the unconscious.
The white bird, by itself, is likewise powerless to affect change until the elevated feelings associated with spirit are brought down to earth. Only then can the white bird be united with the serpent. Here is a foreshadowing of the alchemical coniunctio, the mediation of opposites, that figures so prominently in Jung’s later work. Jung’s insistence on uniting the instinctual with the spiritual sets him at odds with those 809 Ibid., 291.
810 Note, that while working on The Red Book, Jung used the term “soul” in place of the Self.
It was only later in 1927 when he had the Liverpool dream that he came to realize that
“the self is the principle and archetype of orientation and meaning.” By the time he had completed his collaboration with Richard Wilhelm on The Secret of the Golden Flower, he had fully adopted the term “Self.” From then on, he used it exclusively to represent the reclusive spirit that covertly guides individuals on their long sojourn of self-discovery.
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aspects of Christian doctrine that only seek a union with the highest realms of spirit.
But as Jung often reminded his readers, a union between the dark instinctual powers of the psyche and the light of the soul is implied by the cross, the central symbol of the Incarnation, in which God becomes man.811
Jung considered the Trinity, comprised of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, to be incomplete because it lacks the earthy qualities that are the foundation of human existence. With the advent of Christianity, he argued, the God-image was cleansed of all impurities. The chaste life of the Christian mystic and the desert ascetic, like that of the white bird, sought sublime heights from which to experience divine love.812 But even though the god-image was purified, humanity was still burdened with all that is not found worthy of God. To compensate, all that was dark and evil was foisted upon the devil.
Jung considered it of utmost importance to restore these rejected elements to consciousness so that they can be sanctified through love, which he associated with the feminine capacity for relationship. Without love the dark instinctual forces lying at the base of the psyche exert a disturbing influence on consciousness. But by uniting instinct with spirit, the mischievous powers of the serpent are placed in service of consciousness. Jung rejected any intellectual joining of the spiritual and instinctual that amounted to no more than a mere linkage or lamination of the two. In the process of individuation, the two are brought together in a way that transforms both; hence, the need for an alchemical union of opposites.
The vivid imagery experienced during his journey into the depths of his own soul served as an initiation for Jung, guiding him into the mysterious relationship between Eros and Logos. Many years later when writing his book Aion, Jung said that he used the terms Eros and Logos loosely as “conceptual aids” to better describe the anima and animus: “The animus corresponds to the paternal Logos just as the anima corresponds to the maternal Eros.” As with the term “numinous,” he did not want to give these
“intuitive concepts too specific a definition.” While Jung had earlier associated Eros with the chthonic nature of sexuality, here it refers to the feeling function and the capacity for nurturing relationships. Conversely, Logos refers to the quality associated with rational discrimination and cognition. Jung found that in men, “Eros, the function 811 One might reflect on Tillich’s New Being in relation to Jung’s concept of wholeness.
812 See Jung’s description of the ascetic and desert mystic in the section titled “The Anchorite” on pages 267-270 in The Red Book.
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of relationship, is usually less developed than Logos. In women, on the other hand, Eros is an expression of their true nature.”813
We saw something of the tension existing between the passions of Eros and the rational forces of Logos, beginning with ancient Greek philosophy, continuing up through the rise of Christianity, and now forging a substantive part of Jung’s psychology. It would be a mistake, however, according to the early Greeks, to reduce Eros to passion and Logos to propositional logic. In addition to these important psychological functions, they also considered them fundamental attributes of reality.
Not only was Eros, for them, the creative drive within humans but also the force that brings disparate things together throughout the universe. Logos, on the other hand, was thought to be the rational, discriminating power of creation that scrutinizes and separates what Eros strives to unite. If there were no Eros/Logos polarity, Empedocles thought, there would be no cosmos nor anything that has arisen within it. Rather, there would only be Anaximander’s apeiron or Hesiod’s Chaos—an undifferentiated soup.
Logos, as Heraclitus asserted, acts to diversify, and guide all existence; Eros, as Empedocles said, brings things together and harmonizes them. If Logos acted alone, these Greek philosophers believed the cosmos would fall into myriad separate pieces with no relationships between them; if Eros alone existed, everything would meld together in an incoherent lump. Hence, they insisted that the proper balance between them is essential to both the proper functioning of the world and, as Jung insisted, the psychological well-being of persons. Today, science has codified these ancient principles as universal laws acting throughout the universe while philosophy and psychology understand them as instinctual patterns that govern human behavior.
Throughout Liber Novus the figure of Salome is a symbol representing Jung’s anima.
As such, she is a transformational figure for him. Her father Elijah, who is for him a messenger of wisdom, is introduced with his daughter in these opening words: On the night when I considered the essence of the God, I became aware of an image: I lay in a dark depth. An old man stood before me.
He looked like one of the old prophets. A black serpent lay at his feet.
Some distance away I saw a house with columns. A beautiful maiden steps out of the door. She walks uncertainly and I see that she is blind.814
813 Jung, Aion, para. 29.
814 Jung, The Red Book, 245.
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Elijah escorted Jung into his house which stood at the foot of a rock wall. The house was filled with darkness, but high walls glittered above them, and in the background, there was a bright stone that shone with the color of water. Jung gazed at the stone and an image of Eve and the serpent appeared, followed by Odysseus on his voyage.
Suddenly a door opened revealing a garden bathed in sunshine.
Once inside the house, Elijah introduced himself and his daughter Salome. Surprised upon hearing the name of Elijah’s daughter, Jung asked if she is the bloodthirsty woman who had John the Baptist beheaded. Elijah confirmed that she was indeed the one, but Jung found this almost impossible to grasp. He exclaimed: “You, Elijah, who are a prophet, the mouth of God, and she, a bloodthirsty horror. You are the symbol of the most extreme contradiction?” Elijah responded: “It is no miracle, it was so from the beginning. My wisdom and my daughter are one.”815
This very important statement defines the paradoxical relationship that exists between wisdom and the animating, though sometimes dark power of the unconscious. Therefore, before Elijah’s wisdom could be fully realized, Salome, who is part of Jung’s nonconscious, must be redeemed. She was, after all, blind and lacks vision, being little more than the embodiment of pleasure within his libido. Though her seductive imagery had a romantic quality, Jung was rendered incapable of truly experiencing the fullness of her love while she remained nothing more than an unconscious figure within his own psyche. Likewise, the black serpent that accompanied her represented, for him, the instinctual foundation of life, and Elijah represented spirituality and the heavenly Logos. Without the serpent’s cooperation and Elijah’s assistance, nothing of value would have been accomplished. But through their helpful influence, Salome became a conscious and vital part of Jung’s life.
One must keep in mind that these figures—Elijah, Salome, and the black snake—
were part of Jung’s unconscious and Salome’s redemption was necessary for Jung’s own development. Although Elijah represents wisdom, he is an Old Testament prophet, so his wisdom was part of Jung’s childhood understanding of Christianity, an ancient tradition that is reflected in the collective psyche but may be less relevant to our time. Hence, as Jung progressed along the path of individuation, the role of Elijah as spiritual guide needed to be replaced by the magician Philemon, whom, as we saw, made an appearance in Seven Sermons to the Dead.
Soon after Elijah introduced his daughter Salome to Jung, the sunlit garden gave way to a sultry moonlit night as wild music of a tambourine was heard in the 815 Ibid., 246.
THE RED BOOK: UNION OF SPIRIT AND MATTER 341
background. The “bloody-staring head of the holy one”816 suddenly appeared on the bright stone that shimmered before him, seizing him with fear. Jung then realized that he did not love Salome but feared her. At that moment, the spirit of the depths spoke to him: “Therein you acknowledge her divine power.”817 Although Salome has divine attributes, she is a “bloodthirsty horror” when imprisoned in the unconscious. Jung cautioned all who journey into the underworld that they must “embrace the worthless and the worthy with the same love.”818 The dark and light elements in the unconscious are intermingled, each having its rightful place. But to untangle and restore the dark powers to their appropriate place within the God-image, more than respect is demanded; an element of love must also be incorporated. Without its healing presence, the highest inspirations of spirit remain forever separated from the dark chthonic powers of the unconscious.
Jung likened the deep interior to a volcano that “pushes out the fiery-molten mass of the unformed and the undifferentiated.”
Thus my interior gives birth to the children of chaos, of the primordial mother. He who enters the crater also becomes chaotic matter, the children of chaos, the powers of darkness, the ruling and the seducing, the compelling and the alluring, the divine and the devilish.819
Jung’s imaginative, poetic approach to the unconscious captures the numinous depth of feeling necessary for journeying far into the deep interior of the psyche. Only by entering, and thereby dissolving into the chaos of the unconscious, Jung said, can one be born anew. The radiant force (the numinous) of the psyche is then activated in service of love and wholeness. It was thus fitting that Jung was next forced to imaginatively endure a symbolic crucifixion to redeem his own anima, symbolized by Salome. Because the images were so vivid and real for him—much like an emotionally intense dream—Jung seems to have suffered considerably throughout it.
Jung described his crucifixion ordeal as comparable to the “mystery of the coniunctio, in that the extreme opposites unite” and “night is wedded to day.”820 At the beginning of this initiatory experience, he was brought before a crystal in which mysterious 816 John the Baptist.
817 Jung, The Red Book, 246.
818 Ibid., 246.
819 Ibid., 247.
820 Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, para. 200.
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depths and visions could be perceived. A wreath of fire shone around the stone and the divine child appeared holding a white serpent in his right hand and the black serpent in his left. At this point, Jung was confronted with an image of the crucified Christ, and as he watched Christ suffer on the cross, he himself became Christ.
I see the cross and Christ on it in his last hour and torment—at the foot of the cross the black serpent coils itself—it has [now] wound itself around my feet—I am held fast and spread my arms wide. Salome draws near. The serpent has wound itself around my whole body, and my countenance is that of a lion.821
Jung’s lionlike countenance combined with the black serpent coiling about him suggests the lion-headed god of Mithraism.822 As he hung suspended on the cross the serpent crushed Jung in its coils until blood streamed forth from his body. Salome then bent down and wrapped her hair around his feet and after a long while she cried out,
“I see light.”823 Her proclamation announced that Jung’s anima was now ready to be made fully conscious through the union of Logos and Eros. Even though Salome’s innermost nature is love, her true beauty would have continued to be hidden from Jung until he consciously endured the tension of opposites symbolized by the crucifixion. Only then, could Salome’s sight be restored and her capacity for love awakened.824 The suffering he endured during the crucifixion was much like a waking 821 Jung, The Red Book, 252:
822 The imagery used on the cover of the paperback version of Jung’s book Aion and as the frontispiece of the hardback edition is the lion-headed god of Mithraism, a god favored by Roman soldiers and often in competition with Christianity. Aion, although associated with Mithraism, also appears in later Greek, Roman and Gnostic religions, where he was associated with endless time and sometimes encircled by the zodiac.
Distinct from linear time (Chronos, often associated with Kronos, Saturn), Aion represented eternity as endless time, and thus was associated with the afterlife. Some Gnostics considered Aion as the first emanation of the One and sometimes conceived as a male-female pair. It was also associated with nous, mind, which reaches beyond time.
823 Jung, The Red Book, 252.
824 This is an example of Jung’s transcendent function by which opposites, like darkness and light, good and evil, are mysteriously united and transformed when held in tension without attempting to rationalize their joining. This healing function within the psyche cannot be explained in rational terms. One might compare this to Diotima’s discourse to Socrates on Love in Plato’s Symposium, but taken in conjunction with the Allegory of the Cave, discussed previously. Plato’s view is put in philosophical terms, while Jung’s is wholly psychological.
THE RED BOOK: UNION OF SPIRIT AND MATTER 343
nightmare. Because of its power, it apparently left a lasting impression on him, for in his later works, Jung often used Christ’s crucifixion to symbolize the agonizing tension of opposites.
Once Salome’s eyes were opened, the serpent fell to the ground. Released from the serpent’s coils, Jung knelt at the feet of the prophet Elijah, whose eyes shone like a flame. Elijah said, “Your work is fulfilled here. Other things will come. Seek untiringly, and above all write exactly what you see.”825 It seems that Elijah was here instructing Jung concerning his life’s purpose, that is, to carefully observe the workings of the unconscious and communicate his discovery to the world. At the end of his ordeal, Jung affirmed the power of the great mystery that he had just witnessed: I know that this is the way. I saw the death of Christ and I saw his lament; I felt the agony of his dying, of the great dying. I saw a new God, a child, who subdued daimons in his hand. The God holds the separate principles in his power, he unites them. The God develops through the union of the principles in me. He is their union.826
By enduring this seemingly miraculous alchemical and psychological coniunctio, Jung’s anima evolved from simply being a blind instinctual force representing pleasure into a divine being worthy of love. It is worth noting here that Jung believed many of the alchemists had similar powers of visualization, which they invoked when investigating the prima materia. It was their imagination that gave form to the symbols and ideas that resonated so deeply with Jung’s own discoveries.
Though the serpent is not naturally helpful, it intuitively understood the transformative role it must play in the resolution of opposites, so it crept close to Jung and wound itself around his legs and body. It then told Jung that a meal is being prepared, a Last Supper that is intended for the unification of humanity. Jung was both intrigued and horrified by the idea that we are “to be both guest and dish at this meal.”
He thus declared:
The opposites embrace each other, see eye to eye, and intermingle.
They recognize their oneness in agonizing pleasure. My heart is filled with wild battle. The waves of dark and bright rivers rush together, one crashing over the other.827
825 Jung, The Red Book, 252.
826 Ibid., 254.
827 Ibid., 317.
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The unbearable tension produced by their embrace produced a euphoric feeling best described as the “ultimate and highest possibility of feeling,”828 a fit description of Otto’s mysterium tremendum et fascinans. Near the end of Liber Novus, this same spirit is emanating from a star, the goal of all one’s endeavors:
This star is the God and the goal of man.
This is his own guiding God
in him man goes to his rest.
Toward him goes the long journey of the soul after death.
In him everything that man withdraws from the greater world shines resplendently.
To this one God man shall pray.
Prayer increases the light of the star.
It throws a bridge across death,
it prepares life for the smaller world and assuages the hopeless desires of the greater.
When the great world turns cold, the star shines.
Nothing stands between man and his God, so long as man can turn away his eyes from the flaming spectacle of Abraxas.829
828 Ibid., 318.
829 Jung, The Red Book, 354: Abraxas, a figure drawn from Gnostic texts, residing at the foundation of psychic life, represents the summation of creative powers, both light and dark, good and evil, that constitute the instinctual foundation of human consciousness.
He holds the fiery sword by which entanglements are severed and opposites united.
Beyond Abraxas is the true God.
Part VI
Stormy Transition to a New Age
THE FOURTH METAMORPHOSIS
OF THE GODS
Recently there have been emerging from the deconstructive flux of the postmodern mind the tentative outlines of a new understanding of reality, one very different from the conventional modern view.
Richard Tarnas830
Since the archetype is not just an inactive form, but a real force charged with a specific energy… it is not the personal human being who is making the statement, but the archetype speaking through him.
Carl Jung831
We are living through a time of upheaval when traditional religion is becoming irrelevant in the lives of many thoughtful people. As this erosion of spiritual values becomes more widespread, we anticipate that a fourth metamorphosis of the gods will spontaneously arise from the unconscious as it propels humanity toward the unification of enlightened reason with the primordial wisdom of the soul. Recall that the first metamorphosis occurred when the Homeric gods were replaced by the Presocratic who were the first to rationally examine nature. The second occurred with the rise of Christianity, and the third metamorphosis arose with the Enlightenment and its reliance on science for determining Truth. Over time, as reason became the new God, the thoroughly secular spirit of our age began to undermine traditional values, a pervasive condition that, we envision, will eventually drive the world toward a new age of enlightened spirituality.
As the old gods are abandoned today—both the traditional Christian God and the
“god” of reason—people are searching for a new source of meaning in an otherwise materialistic society that has no intrinsic spiritual value. Eventually, new “gods” will appear to satisfy the yearning hearts of those who have been alienated from the overly rational inheritance of their own culture, but in the meantime, the pervasive malaise of our time continues to undermine social and political cohesion. We feel this is one of the underlying psychological causes of the political chaos that is now sweeping across the world. Although often hidden, it produces an obsessive and irrational response that can be truly dangerous. As we argued earlier, a similar sense of meaninglessness 830 Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche, 26.
831 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 352.
348 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
contributed to the fall of Rome as well as the rise of Fascism in the past century. Now America, Europe, and much of the world is suffering from the same affliction.
The “eternal wisdom” around which all the religions have been molded is as true today as at any time. What is changing are the stories ( mythoi) that sprang up within each culture to give expression to the sacred. For instance, what we have been calling soul functions in a way consistent with the Christian concept of Divine grace. This spontaneous gift from God kindles the spirit of love within the heart. As such, faith can be defined as a state of living in the radiant light of numinous images that spontaneously arise from the unconscious. The coming metamorphosis of the gods can thus be seen as representing a new and more insightful way of relating to faith and the eternal truths that have inspired religious devotion down through the ages.
Unfortunately, the ongoing transition to a new mythos is fraught with conflict and despair. Many of the brightest and most keenly aware individuals have just walked away from religion altogether, which further aggravates the existential crisis of our age. The roots of this transition can be traced back to the Renaissance, but the tempo of change has now reached a crescendo with defenders of tradition often aligned with right-wing forces and liberals increasingly taking a stand in support of an ethical vision more in line with a secular rendition of Christ’s social gospel.
We think Jung’s psychology, when combined with Tillich’s theology, provides a compelling way for transitioning to a new religious mythos that satisfies both the need for intellectual rigor and the longing of the soul. In support of this endeavor, we have taken the liberty to broaden Jung’s theory of individuation to include any method that opens the heart to the numinously rich foundation of human life. This ancient source of value, after all, has always served to lift the gaze of those who are downtrodden and suffering from the sordid conditions that so often surrounded them. But as Christianity progressively loses relevance throughout the West, all of us must find our own way for establishing a conscious relationship with our own soul, the eternal source of wisdom hidden deep within the psyche that silently guides each one of us toward our individual destiny.
As an example, several years ago one of the book’s authors (Renwick) was diagnosed with gall bladder cancer. After the gall bladder was successfully removed, he was scheduled for a second operation to remove all the lymph nodes that had surrounded the gall bladder as well as portions of the liver. The second operation, because of complications, was much more serious than the first. After the operation, he spent 10
days in the hospital recovering. In the middle of the night, he would be awakened by what he later came to call his soul. For an hour or two he would be surrounded by a
THE FOURTH METAMORPHOSIS OF THE GODS 349
feeling of peace that assured him that all would be well, that he was safe, and there was nothing to worry about.
Since then, his soul occasionally still visits him at night. During these visits, she (his unconscious) expresses herself to him in dream images, giving him personal advice as well as lecturing him on what needs to be included in this book. Of course, she does not speak in words, but instead, conveys her message in symbols, much like those that enrich a numinous dream. Eventually it occurred to him that this is what Jung had in mind when speaking about the need for establishing a relationship with one’s inner guide or spiritus rector. Although there are many ways that this can be done, Jung often recommended active imagination and dreamwork. The critical factor, we believe, that distinguishes the soul’s promptings from other forms of imagination is the presence of numinous images that permeate and surround the individual with a sacred light. It is worth noting that at the end of the last chapter Jung poetically described the soul as the hidden goal of all endeavors, guiding all toward their destiny at the end of life’s journey.832
In Answer to Job Jung predicts that the world is poised on the brink of an epochal moment in our history that will hasten a veritable marriage of the highest spiritual attainments of the soul with the dark, unconscious forces that have brought so much suffering into the world throughout history. But before this can happen, Jung thought that the infernal depths of the human psyche, which have brought so much distress into the world, must first be brought into the light of consciousness. Only then, after a time of trial, can the transcendent light of the soul minister to the ancient wounds of the heart and inaugurate a new age of brotherly love in which our psychological foibles and transgressions are consumed by the holy flame that burns eternally at the center of everyone’s life—the Self.
Tillich understood God to have a creative influence on the evolution of the universe as well as each individual life. Accordingly, the interwoven patterns that first emerged from the ground of Being at the dawn of creation might therefore be thought to have shaped the evolution of the natural world and the course of history. Although Jung considered himself an empiricist, his psychology is richly interwoven with metaphysical insights that intimate the existence of an eternal truth lying behind the empirical reality to which science pays homage. His theory of synchronicity also suggests that the material universe is interwoven with purpose and value and is teleologically oriented toward higher states of consciousness. Though many things that 832 Jung, The Red Book, 254. Jung’s poetic verse can also be found at the end of the last chapter.
350 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
happen to us may seem to be happenstance, when examined closely, some are found to be purposeful, as though we were being watched over and protected by a loving God.
We recently interviewed a woman who told us about a rather dramatic dream she had the night before the two planes flew into the World Trade Center. In the dream she was with a man she knew well when suddenly the scene changed, and she found herself overlooking a harbor. At that very moment there was a terrific explosion and papers were flying all about the room and a few pieces drifted out through the shattered window toward the harbor. Next to her friend was another man in a wheelchair. They were calm and seemed to have accepted their fate. When she turned on the TV the next morning, she immediately realized that her dream was not an ordinary dream, but instead, it accurately portrayed the tragedy that unfurled while she slept. As she watched events unfold over the following days, there was one story that especially caught her attention. It was about a man who refused to abandon his friend, who was confined to a wheelchair. When the building collapsed, they both perished. In real life, her friend was safe, but the dream used his image to dramatize the terror of people trapped in the burning building.
How could a dream reflect real-world, future events? At the beginning of the last chapter, we discussed how Jung had asked for a visible sign that the “spirit of the depths” was not illusory and in fact it was the “ruler of the depths of world affairs.”
As quoted earlier, he said:
It happened in October of the year 1913 as I was leaving alone for a journey, that during the day I was suddenly overcome in broad daylight by a vision: I saw a terrible flood that covered all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. It reached from England up to Russia, and from the coast of the North Sea right up to the Alps. I saw yellow waves, swimming rubble, and the death of countless thousands.833
The vision, which lasted for two hours, clearly anticipated World War I.834
Throughout his life he examined many accounts of paranormal phenomenon, much like the one he had at the beginning of his journey into the depth of his own psyche. It is likely that such experiences also shaped his understanding of John’s apocalyptic vision in the Book of Revelation. Jung believed the terrifying vision that John reported, accurately reflects how the psyche will influence major world events in the future.
833 Jung, The Red Book, 231.
834 Ibid., 231.
THE FOURTH METAMORPHOSIS OF THE GODS 351
Though John’s prediction cannot be taken literally, we agree with Jung that it heralds a time of great distress at the end of the current age. The Enlightenment, though mostly ennobling life with its rational insights, also precipitated an existential crisis that is threatening the whole world today. Although science and reason ushered in an age of unparalleled prosperity, the Enlightenment offers no solution for the existential despair that results when people are torn from the healing energies of the deep psyche from which beauty and love arise. We thus hope the coming age will set the world aright by restoring balance between the rational values of the Enlightenment and the primordial foundation of the psyche from which the wisdom we desperately need can be found.
Before we arrive on the shore of this new age, however, the darkness that has haunted humanity from the beginning of civilization must be drawn forth from the unconscious and held in tension with our most noble ideals. The ancient struggle between these antagonistic deities—the forces of evil and the God of light—is unavoidable. Though there will undoubtedly be much suffering during this time of confrontation, Jung believed we are living through a dramatic moment in history, a propitious moment, when the internecine battles that are increasingly ravishing the earth will lead to a worldwide transformation that, we argue, will hasten another metamorphosis of the Gods in our time, the proverbial time when the lion will lie down with the lamb.835
835 As noted before, we can think of this disturbing and promising metamorphosis as the fourth in Western history. The first was the metamorphosis from the ancient Greek gods to philosophy and protoscience; the second would be the transformation which was the rise of Christianity and its one God; and the third was the Enlightenment, banishing religion and transcendence for pure rationality. Each metamorphosis borrowed from the previous period, and the one we are experiencing—the fourth—will do the same.
DARK HERALD OF THE
FOURTH METAMORPHOSIS
We are living in what the Greeks called … the right moment for the
“metamorphosis of the gods,” of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science.
Carl Jung.836
And here was the final and most drastic secularizing effect of the Reformation. For with the revolt of Luther, Christianity’s medieval matrix split into two, then into many, then seemingly commenced destroying itself as the new divisions battled each other throughout Europe with unbridled fury.
Richard Tarnas.837
This chapter describes how the current political strife with all its dystopian tendencies anticipates the fourth metamorphosis of the gods. This eventual outcome is being furthered now at the beginning of the twenty-first century by the increasingly fast-paced world we live in today, a time when everyone is being swept up in the turbulence and destruction arising from deep-seated conflicts fought between warring factions. It seems as though each person is being reduced to little more than a bit player in a vast psychological drama being played out on the world stage. Jung used the term
“collective psychosis” to describe this same psychological and political phenomenon that earlier arose in Nazi Germany. He argued that before such irrational disputes can be resolved, the underlying psychological complexes and unconscious drives that are sowing discord and hatred must be brought out into the open where they can be resolved.838 Only then can the depth and beauty that belongs to our highest nature be given its rightful place alongside the many competing demands that govern the affairs of the world.
836 Jung, CW 11, Answer to Job, para 567.
837 Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, 247.
838 The various psychological complexes that now seem to have possessed large segments of our society often result in bizarre and irrational behavior, which explain much about the chaotic nature of our current condition.
DARK HERALD OF THE FOURTH METAMORPHOSIS 353
Nonetheless, as Jung watched world events throughout the first half of the twentieth century, he was appropriately alarmed by the evil that he had witnessed. Today, it is abundantly clear that the dark side of humanity is again gaining strength as it did in Germany during the leadup to World War II. There is now a real danger that the anger and despair that has, for some time, been festering underneath the surface of modern life is beginning to break out into the open as it sows hatred and destruction throughout the world. Left unattended, it will not only destroy freedom and democracy but could lead to a nuclear apocalypse.
After witnessing the Jewish Holocaust, Jung was very cognizant of the dangers posed to humanity when the dark side of the unconscious drowns out reason. Jung witnessed the rise of fascism in Germany from his home in Switzerland, where he came to more fully understand that the breakdown of German society was pathological, an eruption of unconscious forces that defied reason and eventually led to the most horrifying cruelty. Reason was powerless before the onslaught of hatred toward Jews, homosexuals, liberals, socialists, and gypsies—a nationalist disease that quickly spread throughout the Axis powers. Similar conditions are beginning to confront us today, both in the United States and throughout Europe. Political commentators have proposed many seemingly reasonable explanations for the rise of the extremist right, but they fail to account for the irrational nature of the largely unconscious forces that are eroding democracy and civil discourse. Unfortunately, as people begin to seek a new way to kindle the spiritual fires that have grown dormant in today’s secular age, their efforts have been met by a fierce resistance reminiscent of the political turmoil that caused unimaginable hardship and destruction in the first half of the twentieth century.839
Jung’s hope for a more enlightened age was based on his many years of intensive research into the psyche, which began when he went deep into his own unconscious.
As our chapter on The Red Book shows, his agonizing descent into the mysterious depths of his own psyche introduced him to Salome’s role as a representative of Eros, whose support he found critically important for furthering his own development. But more importantly, he was introduced to the terrible tension existing between our highest values and the darkness that dwells within each of us. Left unchecked, we fear this inner conflict may soon lead to a global war. We might also imagine that he could still remember how he felt when the serpent coiled about him and whispered that 839 Amongst the irrational reactions found throughout America are the QAnon lies and conspiracy theories, the willingness of many conservatives to vote against their best interests, and the degrading example of many fervent Christians who speak of love but seem filled with hatred and racism.
354 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
humanity was being prepared for a Last Supper intended for the unification of all the nations of the earth. Jung understood that much was to be demanded before the deep political divisions, which have led to so much suffering, are healed. But he also saw the first signs of humanity’s eventual unification in the Book of Revelation.
Psychologically, this frightening story portrays the dark and raw feelings hidden deep within the unconscious, which, the Bible proclaims, will be healed and sanctified at the of end of time when Christ comes with his avenging angels to defeat Satan.
We seem to have arrived at the culmination of a long historical development that first began three thousand years ago during the spiritual and intellectual renaissance that transformed Greek culture. Throughout this extended historical transition, tribal instincts guided and preserved traditional values. But it may now be time for humanity to cast off its tribal skin and ascend like a translucent butterfly toward its higher destiny. In the first centuries of our current Aeon, Christianity gave voice to this goal with its vision of universal love but not until today has humanity reached a critical inflection point which necessitates change—either we destroy ourselves or grow beyond the rancor of our age by more fully realizing Christ’s teachings within our individual lives.840 It is during times like these that the objective psyche is forced to evolve to its next higher level. We believe such an advance is programmed into the very structure of existence—the ground of Being. The only limiting factor is our inability to look within to confront the disturbing images found there. For only by holding these frightening specters in anguished tension with the healing images of our higher self can the ancient battle between the shadowy darkness of the unconscious and the alluring images of the soul lead humanity to a triumphant victory over the ravages of war.
But first, there must be a marriage of Logos whose unquenchable drive seeks the highest level of clarity with Eros, who is symbolized by Sophia. Unlike Logos’
commendable lucidity, which represents the highest aspiration of enlightened reason, Sophia derives her beauty and deep ethical sensibility from the archetypal depths of the psyche.841 Unfortunately, the widening gap between them remains today a fevered wound that must be healed before peace can reign throughout the world. Only with their marriage will it be possible for future generations to bring enlightened reason into a wholesome relationship with the primordial wisdom of the soul.
840 We recognize the spirit of Christ’s teachings in many religious traditions.
841 Philosophers once categorized all considerations of value within the field of axiology, which includes both aesthetics and ethics.
DARK HERALD OF THE FOURTH METAMORPHOSIS 355
What we discovered in writing our book is that the ultimate mystery of the psyche lies beyond understanding. The laws of physics alone can never explain such wonders as love and beauty. Though the modern world has birthed an age of scientific wonders, most people know little about the psyche. In fact, it has been reduced to nothing more than an epiphenomenon of material processes. In contrast, we suspect the psyche is a fundamental property of all living organisms, maybe life’s defining characteristic. The psyche is clearly the basis of consciousness but beyond that, not much more is known about it except from insights of those, like Jung, who have journeyed far into its mysterious depths.
The transcendent reality in which the psyche is embedded is much like a vast ocean that contains many puzzling mysteries. Consciousness, in contrast, is but a thin, delicate membrane floating on top of it. Powerful forces arising from the depths of this vast expanse can act like shifting tectonic plates, occasionally causing great distress within the uppermost layer where light is delicately balanced with the darkness that lies below. Today, we are being threatened by powerful tremors in this life-sustaining balance as ancient traditions are challenged by the encroachment of modern life. At its best, modern life champions reason and the principles of justice and equality. At its worst, it alienates individuals from each other and degrades traditional values, resulting in a pervasive sense of meaninglessness.
Although the high ideals of liberals promote justice, their dream of equality is increasingly out of sync with our instinctual nature. It is not the imbalance itself that is the problem, but rather, as in Greek mythology, when Pandora’s box was opened, misery and sorrow followed. But in our case, the damage will be of apocalyptic proportions throughout the world as the distance between the clashing opposites that divide us reach their uttermost extreme. We may now have to suffer the imminent and bitter fate that awaits us, including the real possibility of losing our democracy and the subsequent collapse of Western culture. Jung feared that the strange, apocalyptic vision of John of Patmos, as recorded in the Book of Revelation, may have been the first portent of what was to unfold from the collective psyche at the end of the age of Pisces.
Jung based his thoughts concerning the Book of Revelation on his belief that the collective unconscious is teleologically structured and is relentlessly pushing humanity to awaken to a higher level of consciousness. We catch a hint of its overall direction whenever it erupts in visions like the one that filled John of Patmos with a specter of unimaginable horrors. Though the social gospel of Jesus is a high mark in the evolution of the human spirit, the dark side of human nature has not been conquered and still spreads hatred and racial prejudice throughout the nations of the earth. Unless humanity can confront its demons and evolve to a higher level of
356 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
consciousness, it is increasingly likely that we will soon suffer an apocalyptic disaster as right-wing forces and racial prejudice continue to rise with vengeance throughout western democracies.
When we examine politics today, it is hard to find a rational argument for the radical position that far right parties throughout the world have taken, for their extreme stance is more tribal than it is conservative. The only explanation that makes sense is a psychological one.842 While conservatism has traditionally defended Democracy and its most cherished traditions, the right wing seems to be largely based on the “flight or fight” instincts that once served to unite and preserve small tribal communities.
Thomas Edsall, in his June 12, 2024 column in the New York Times, quotes from John Ganz, a political analyst and the author of the new book When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists and How America Cracked up in Early 1990s. In his book Ganz writes: Trump ‘speaks to the longing to a return to something earlier, ‘the original closeness of blood,’ something more organic than society: the gang, the mob, la famiglia—to Gemeinschaft.843
Political observers rightly attempt to explain the rise of extreme right-wing rhetoric to a growing sense of despair as people, especially those in rural and conservative communities, are economically left behind.844 David Brooks, a columnist at the New York Times, suggested that Liberals have become part of the problem because they are associated in the minds of these people with an elite class.845 Many other political commentors feel the most dangerous factor threatening Democracy today is the radical right wing’s instinctual drive to preserve white supremacy. Thomas Edsall, in his January 26, 2024 column in the New York Times, wrote:
… political scientists at the University of Virginia and the University of Michigan, wrote that “Overall, our results show that American parties are increasingly seen as distinct racial and ethnic camps rather than 842 As an example, the irrational religious fervor driving the overturning of Roe vs. Wade (a constitutional right for 50 years) is based on wide-spread, neurotic fears that Christianity is under attack by left-wing zealots.
843 Edsall, https//www.nytimes.com/2024/06/12/opinion/trump-biden-democrats-strategy.html. Last accessed 6/13/2024.
844 Paul Krugman makes an excellent argument for this phenomenon in a New Your Times article, February 27, 2024. See https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/26/opinion/white-rural-voters.html.
845 Brooks, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/02/opinion/trump-meritocracy-educated.html. Last accessed 9/1/2023.
DARK HERALD OF THE FOURTH METAMORPHOSIS 357
institutions for delivering unique policy bundles, and this has major implications for understanding current political processes in the United States.” 846
But even more important is the prevalence of radical demagoguery on television and social media outlets that amplify the anger and fear of people. After all, whenever people feel disrespected or are frightened by an overwhelming sense of despair and hopelessness, they are more likely to react irrationally to whatever affront or danger that is being spread throughout the media “echo chamber” by political agitators. In the same article Edsall quotes from an email sent by Douglass Massey, a sociologist at Princeton:
Trumpism is a cult grounded in fictions that are amplified by his supporters’ selective consumption of content on the internet and the broadcast media, which is then intensified by social media.847
Ever since the rise of the Tea Party in the early twenty-first century, policy analysts have been struggling to explain extremism in America and Europe, which seems increasingly based on irrational prejudices and fears spread by right-wing agitators.
Behind all the political disruption, however, we find a class of wealthy entrepreneurs that is well-educated and determined to undo Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and the social policies that later flowed from it. To further this objective, they helped found the Enterprise Institute and campaigned hard to radicalize the Supreme Court.
In doing so, they seem determined to turn the country back to the more ruthless, laissez faire capitalism of the early twentieth century. The reasoning behind their policies is simple enough. When interpretations of the constitution are based on “Originalism,”
the “law of the land” naturally bends toward the interests of the “moneyed” class.848
Although we agree with, and even admire, much of Brook’s and Edsall’s analysis, we also think the irrational forces that are driving the current political turmoil derive much of their strength from the deepening conflict between the dark, visceral side of human nature and the liberal desire for equality and social justice. For that reason, we 846 Edsall, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/24/opinion/trump-republican-nomination-coalition. html. Last accessed 1/26/2024.
847 Ibid.
848 We are writing this book just prior to the American 2024 Presidential Election and it seems from this vantage point that Donald Trump is ideally suited to further the goals of the “moneyed class,” because of his unique ability to stir the dark forces of the right into a frenzy. And like the industrialists who thought they could control Hitler, they trust Trump’s antics can be turned towards their ends.
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have chosen to anchor our analysis on the more primitive, unconscious basis for the right-wing drift of our society. The raw passions that are now devouring civilization seem to be pathological—a vast, cultural-wide mental breakdown caused by the increasing discord existing between enlightened reason and tradition. Of course, there are many factors that have gone into the political polarization that is now threatening our democracy, but we are keeping our analysis narrowly focused on humanity’s instinctual nature, which, unfortunately, has many fierce and barbaric traits. Because so much of Jung’s psychology is based on the struggle between opposites of this nature, it is only fitting that we turn to him to further understand the dark passions that are arising during our time. Nonetheless, our discussion in the next chapter is largely based on our own political analysis, which we feel is consistent with Jung’s more scholarly work.
JUNG AND THE MARRIAGE
OF HEAVEN AND HELL
Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
:
:
: : :
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
William Blake849
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell raises a number of problems which circumambulate a central theme. Every phenomenon consciously experienced by man is accompanied by its polar opposite in the unconscious, and the psychological state of a man is determined by the kind of relationship which he is able to maintain between these opposites.
June Singer850
Although Jung interpreted the Book of Revelation as foretelling the marriage of heaven—which he considered masculine—with earth—its feminine counterpart—he could just as well have interpreted it in the light of William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Although William Blake died 50 years before Jung was born, it is striking how much their mutual understanding of the opposites was compatible. Jung’s Answer to Job (1952)851 and Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93) convey the same mystical vision . Like Jung, Blake (1757–1827) experienced the dark side of God and recognized the importance of reconciling the spiritual heights with the consuming flames of Hell.
They both also had visionary experiences. When quite young, Blake had his first vision of angels: “Sauntering along on Peckham Rye, the boy looked up and saw a tree filled with angels, their bright translucent wings bespangling every branch like stars.”
Again, when still a young boy, he had another vision of a splendid city, “in which the houses were of gold, the pavement of silver, the gates ornamented with precious 849 William Blake, “The Tyger,” found in many anthologies and collections and at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43687/the-tyger. Accessed 7/4/2019.
850 June Singer, Blake, Jung, and the Collective Unconscious, 11.
851 Jung, “Answer to Job, ” CW 11.
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stones.”852 This vision, similar to the one John of Patmos had of the New Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation, remained with him throughout his life and when he was old, he again recounted it in his book Jerusalem. Jung’s Answer to Job ends with the same mystical marriage of heaven and hell, the hieros gamos, which unites the lamb with his bride, the New Jerusalem.
Blake and Jung were both greatly influenced by Jacob Boehme (1575 -1642), who was afflicted by a vision of God’s dark side early in life. Boehme is said to have had numerous mystical experiences during his youth. Then, in the year 1600, he had an especially powerful one that transformed his life. Striking like a blinding light, it took him years to articulate his vision clearly. He believed that this vision revealed the spiritual structure of the world, as well as the dual nature of God. He was greatly disturbed when he realized that God and nature are one and that all that exists comes from God, including evil. These warring opposites, he discovered after much soul searching, must find resolution within human consciousness, for the “wrath” of God is the fierce power of creation which must be endured, even though it causes great pain and anguish, for it gives birth to light.853 Boehme’s “fierce power of creation” speaks to the existential crisis of our age, which is foremost a spiritual and religious crisis.
Jung was fully aware of the suffering Boehme endured to tell his story. Likewise, he was driven to tell his own story in Answer to Job. It is a fascinating narrative that tells how the psyche, over the course of centuries, is preparing humanity for a transformative moment in the years to come.
The world today is no worse, and maybe even a bit better, than at many other times in history, but the stakes are higher. Although hopeful that humanity would eventually achieve a higher state of consciousness, Jung was deeply concerned that the warring opposites responsible for so much suffering throughout the world portend an ever-increasing level of political unrest. Today, in addition to the many issues that disturbed Jung, climate change is also accelerating the forces of ruination. Unable to escape the destruction caused by flooding, combined with the increasingly suffocating heat, and the record-breaking drought, we fear that these alone will likely drive people mad, seriously disrupting society everywhere. Intractable conflicts, like the ones undermining democracy and foiling efforts to address climate change, must find resolution within human consciousness, much as William Blake and Jacob Boehme 852 Singer, Blake, Jung, and the Collective Unconscious, 15, 16.
853 Jung, “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,” CW 9i, paras. 12-20: In this essay, Jung uses the shattering experience of Jacob Boehme to describe the visionary nature of archetypes.
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envisioned. Only when brought into the crucible of life with all its challenges and emotional upheavals can these deep-seated conflicts be healed. Such a union has spiritual, mental, emotional, and moral implications, as does Jung’s psychology and a variety of other transpersonal therapies that tap into our spiritual longings.
Unfortunately, the old religious stories that have nurtured people down through the ages are no longer able to stimulate the imagination and fill the heart with wonder.
Just as the Christ story constellated around the person Jesus, Jung believed a new revelation will spontaneously spring forth sometime in the future when the world is embroiled in what may appear at the time as an irreconcilable struggle. Only then, Jung thought, can the confrontation generate enough energy to create “a living, third thing—not a logical stillbirth in accordance with the principle tertium non datur [law of excluded middle]854 but a movement out of the suspension between opposites, a living birth that leads to a new level of being, a new situation.”855 Just as personal failure often forces the individual to carefully examine his or her life, we hope the destructive forces that threaten another major war today constitute a necessary precursor to universal peace. But that can only happen if, as Jung predicted, there is a fundamental transformation of conscious throughout the world.
In alchemy, Hermes-Mercurius is imagined to be a mediator or bridge between humanity and the Divine—the principle of individuation itself. His abode is in the heart where the Divine and base human instincts meet.856 It is here, in the heart center, that the transcendent function857 can act as a healing agent producing an image of reconciliation uniting competing opposites—light and darkness, love and bitterness, feminine and masculine. Individuation, as it applies to our current political situation, would therefore require that we first become aware of the unconscious motives that 854 In logic, the law of excluded middle states that for every proposition, either this proposition or its negation is true. It is one of the so-called three laws of thought, along with the law of noncontradiction, and the law of identity.
855 Jung, “The Transcendent Function,” CW 8, para. 189.
856 Jung, “The Spirit of Mercurius,” CW 13, Inscription on p. 192. This reference is inspired by a paper written by David M. Odorisio, a doctoral candidate in the East-West Psychology department at the California Institute of Integral Studies. The title of the article is “The Alchemical Heart: A Jungian Approach to the Heart Center in the Upanishads and in Eastern Christian Prayer.” Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 33(1), 27-38.
857 As explained earlier, the transcendent function unifies opposites by spontaneously producing a higher image or level of consciousness that satisfies both sides. This higher state permanently replaces the old way of perceiving life.
362 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
are fanning the flames of hatred. If not attended to soon, these hidden drives may ignite a firestorm capable of devouring the very foundations of our democracy. But awareness alone is not sufficient. To mediate between these conflicting values, the heart must be infused with the spirit of love. Only its holy flame can extinguish the flames of hatred.
Jung’s analysis of the biblical Book of Job not only delved into the deeper instinctual conflicts that have distressed humanity throughout the course of history, but more importantly, gave voice to the troubling issues that contributed to the rise of German Fascism. The fierce political struggle between liberal ideals that inspired the Germans after World War I and the dark forces that later overcame the Weimar Republic are disturbingly reminiscent of the forces which we must contend with today. To avoid a similar fate, traditional values like freedom and justice, must be reinforced, for without them, there are no guardrails.
Although it is essential that the primordial wisdom of the soul be restored to its rightful place alongside enlightenment values, our instinctual inheritance has too often betrayed us. Instead of guiding us through life, tribalism seems to be intensifying today’s seemingly intractable problems.858 For example:
• Tribal life is not by nature democratic. It is true that a community of elders often decide issues concerning when to hunt or whether to defend their territory against the intrusion of others, but tribal traditions were held sacrosanct and little leeway was allowed. Looking back through history, authoritarian structures are the rule. Athens is considered the first city state to adopt democratic institutions, but it was restricted to male citizens and did not last long. Democracy in Rome faded with the rise of its empire. Today, American democracy is also being threatened by the dark forces lying deep within our collective psyche.
• The longing for freedom is essentially the longing to escape from the coercive control of an overly dominating group or society in which one lives. For example, the Enlightenment was largely driven by the desire to free the individual from the power of the Church and the inherited aristocracy. Human nature, in contrast, evolved for living within tribal groups and it was only during the Enlightenment that freedom came to be considered important. But even now, the ancient tribal patterns that tend to dominate the individual must be guarded against if freedom is to be preserved.
858 Anthropologists hypothesize what the nature of tribal life has been in the long past by extrapolating from those pockets of tribal life that continue today. The evidence for ancient tribal life is archaeological and paleontological and, of course, indirect.
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• While tribal communities are nurturing to those belonging to the tribe, these loving qualities are not always extended to members of other tribes. We often see this today when highly conservative people are kind to neighbors, while being racist toward those of other nationalities and ethnic backgrounds. Christ, however, taught us to love everyone, even our enemies.
• While Christ is celebrated as a messenger of peace, the unfortunate fact is that humanity seems, by nature, to be violent and aggressive, even within groups that call themselves Christian. The Thirty Years’ War859 and the Inquisition are prime examples.
• The power drive, which operates from the underside of consciousness, is relentless once awakened. This inherent tendency accounts for many of the atrocities committed throughout history. But Christ taught: “Happy the gentle: they shall have the earth for their heritage.”860
• Patriotism can be a noble undertaking, but the dark side of it too often enforces a warlike stance against all outsiders. In addition to actual warfare, this destructive pattern of behavior is frequently directed toward immigrants, foreign nationalities, people of other races, transgender individuals, and those who, like orthodox Jews and drag queens, are easy targets because they look or act differently.
• Racism is deeply imbedded in human nature. Considerable effort must therefore be made to overcome this tendency. It is this issue, more than any other, that is polarizing our country today.
• Class is another category that separates people. Liberals strive to help the impoverished and marginalized but doing so goes against much of human nature. This is one of several issues that makes Jesus’ social message so radical.
• Religions, throughout history, have assumed responsibility for preserving the sacred stories and beliefs that are so important for enhancing a sense of dignity and belonging within close-knit communities. They also enforce sexual mores and social customs, which, because they are deeply engrained within the human psyche, are important for social stability. This accounts for the backlash we are still experiencing from the loosening of sexual and social restraints during the “sexual revolution” of the 1960’s.
859 The Thirty-Years’ War was a vicious struggle between European Protestants and Catholics that lasted from 1618 to 1648. An estimated 4.5 to 8 million soldiers and civilians died as a result of fierce battles, famine, and disease.
860 The Jerusalem Bible: Matthew, 5:4.
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• Although there appears to occasionally have been matriarchal societies, most were patriarchal. Thus, as with sexual mores, the otherwise morally justified fight for sexual equality goes against human instincts.
• In the current political climate, conservative legislatures have assumed the role of strongly enforcing America’s traditional values. This authoritarian stance has unfortunately been the norm for societies since Homo Sapiens first appeared on earth. Liberals, on the other hand, want everyone to be free to choose their own lifestyle. The fierce conflict between authoritarianism and freedom, which increasingly threatens the continuation of our democracy, goes to the very heart of the controversies we examine in this chapter.
• In general, every culture strives for inner coherence by resisting change.
The tension between the spiritual ideals of Christianity and our instinctual nature might best be interpreted in relationship to Jesus’ enigmatic statement in Matthew where he said: “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth: it is not peace I have come to bring, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.” 861 Jesus was striving for a more equitable society, which too often generates conflict.
The Declaration of Independence proclaims: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
This founding declaration of American democracy is a very high ideal, like Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation discussed earlier. By reason, it extends dignity and equality to all people regardless of gender, sexual orientation, race, or ancestral origin.
Our instinctual nature, however, is indifferent or even hostile to such principles.
Conservative as well as liberal positions are largely based on reasoned principles, such as those expressed in our country’s founding documents. But too often, high-principled arguments are used for less than noble purposes. For example, many wealthy people and conservative institutions often exploit traditional values for purely political and economic advantage. They cynically defend their positions against liberal high-mindedness by invoking an important founding principle of conservatism, first articulated by Edmund Burke: change should happen organically in tune with human nature—bottom-up change—and not be imposed from the top by government. This fundamental principle of conservatism was argued for by Burke several years before the French revolution, which enthroned reason as a goddess. Burke thought the interlocking complexities of human society—both internally within society and 861 The Jerusalem Bible: Mathew, 10: 34-36. [Italics are the authors’.]
JUNG AND THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL 365
between cultures—made rational attempts to transform them almost impossible.
Further, he argued that a society’s customs and traditions were a source of great wisdom that should be safeguarded and used prudently to influence gradual change.
He worried that attempts to effect rapid change solely based on intellect was likely to have destructive results, especially if the accumulated wisdom and moral sentiments of tradition were not taken into consideration.
Conservativism has a long and distinguished history based on individual integrity and the belief that the welfare of society is enhanced when government has limited power over the lives of people. But the less noble side of this tradition also empowers society’s darker side. It is this aspect of today’s conservative movement that we find most troubling, especially as it steadily gains influence in far-right parties throughout America and Europe.862 Understandably, people who feel downtrodden instinctually react angrily to the economic realities that have left them feeling disempowered.
Demagogues have stirred these feelings to a level of high intensity, and it is hard to imagine what might happen next. Since this situation is analogous to the social conditions that brought Hitler to power, we must now take dramatic action to stave off disaster.
Jung recognized that nothing is foreordained. When writing Answer to Job, he looked back at the destruction that had recently ravaged the world after World War II. He realized that during the Nazi reign the dark side of human nature had escaped from its restraints, causing unimaginable suffering throughout the world. He used the term
“collective psychosis” to explain the irrational and violent upheaval that had taken hold of the German people before and during the war. This term refers to a pervasive, psychological condition that arises throughout a culture when the dark side of the unconscious takes control of a large segment of the population. He feared that a time would come when once again our darker natures would threaten the world. A disaster of apocalyptic proportions, he felt, was now a distinct possibility. He arrived at this grim conclusion after witnessing the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It now appears that something like a collective psychosis is taking hold in America, as well as threatening other democracies. A divisive schism of this proportion will be certain to lead to a truly dangerous situation in which reason becomes useless as dark powers well up from the unconscious and overwhelm all rational considerations. Today, instead of a rational political discussion aimed at finding the best way forward for our 862 This topic far exceeds the scope of this book. We only touch upon it here to differentiate the dangers posed by right-wing movements from that of traditional conservativism. It is the extreme polarization of modern society that is most relevant to the issues addressed in Answer to Job.
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country, the heated rhetoric that is now dominating the political process is more like an out-of-control, world-wide conflagration.
Reasonable people in Germany during the lead up to World War II, including Paul Tillich and other fellow scholars, tried to persuade their countrymen by appealing to their higher values, but utterly failed. Only military defeat cooled the dark passions that are reported to have violently killed at least 80 million people. Today, reason again seems unable to deliver us from the perils of madness. Once it takes hold, it is like a wildfire destroying everything in its path. Something greater than intellect must intervene on our behalf. Under these conditions it is useless to try convincing people that democracy and freedom are at stake while they are still inflamed by dark passions arising from the unconscious. Only when disaster strikes will they likely be jolted from their dark fixations as the Germans were after World War II.
Fascism is just one instance of a collective psychosis. It may manifest in widely different ways, but all have dystopian features. It is increasingly clear that now is the time when we must begin working together to address the multiple crises facing the global social order. But there is, unfortunately, an increasing feeling of hopelessness throughout society as our country is thrown into disarray by bitter partisan conflict.
Jung wrote Answer to Job, in large part, to address the type of terrifying conditions we face today, especially the real possibility of a complete breakdown of civilization.
The Belgian clinical psychologist and practicing psychotherapist Mattias Desmet has recently written on the psychological conditions that lead to totalitarianism. He argues:
“Totalitarianism … has its roots in the insidious psychological process of mass formation... including a profound intolerance of dissident voices, and pronounced susceptibility to pseudo-scientific indoctrination and propaganda...Mass formation is, in essence, a kind of group hypnosis that destroys individuals’ ethical self-awareness and robs them of their ability to think critically. This process is insidious in nature; populations fall prey to it unsuspectingly.863
Desmet’s analysis of totalitarianism is strikingly close to Jung’s understanding of a collective psychosis. During mass movements of this kind, individuals drift into moral chaos and are subsequently swept up in the dark passions that have been let loose upon society, as happened in Nazi Germany and appears to be happening again in the twenty-first century. Even before the war, Jung promoted individuation as a means to help guard against the dark passion of mass movements of this kind, which closely 863 Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, 2.
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resemble cults. The goal of individuation, after all, is to become a unique individual capable of making decisions for oneself free of insidious social pressure.
The term enantiodromia, which Jung adopted from Heraclitus, seems especially relevant to the crisis that humanity faces today. It refers, as described earlier, to the psychological phenomena in which polar opposites are fated to reverse their positions whenever one pole reaches its utmost extreme position. This happened repeatedly during the last century. As we have seen, Germany in the early years of the twentieth century was dominated by a highly conservative and hierarchical order. But after suffering defeat in World War I, followed by runaway inflation and the Depression, a new and more liberal order arose from the ashes. Berlin became the most tolerant and vibrant city in Europe, culturally enriched by bohemian artists and writers. This, in turn, empowered the rise of German Fascism with its radical reversal of liberal values.
Its appeal was based on racist nationalism, the working class, and a nostalgic, romantic vision of the past. This pattern of reversals was repeated in the 1960’s with the battle for civil rights, protests against the Vietnam war, and the music and lifestyle of the
“hippie” counterculture. Today, there is another reversal coming into focus with the rise of the radical right and its muscular fascination with violence. In each of these cases, the reversal is driven by the tension existing between the primordial foundation of human nature and ideals based on reason—one side dominating for a while before being upended by the other. While this tension is most easily recognized as occurring between the political right and left, it appears within each individual as well. As Jung warned us regarding the archaic powers that threaten us today: “The enantiodromia of Heraclitus ensures that the time will come when this deus absconditus shall rise to the surface and press the God of our ideals to the wall.”864 That time, we fear, is now.
Given the dangers we face today, one might question why Jung felt that the story of Job is relevant to our current dilemma. This ancient biblical story, of course, is clothed in the language of myth, and for that reason, has psychological value. But it must also be kept in mind that the West was nurtured on Biblical stories, as was Jung. It was therefore natural for him to use the story’s symbolism to examine the destructive forces that were unleashed during World War II and now threaten us today. If we are to resolve these deep conflicts, Jung felt we must first recognize the darkness within ourselves, as the biblical Job did during his confrontation with an irrational God. For 864 Jung, Psychological Types, CW 6, para. 150.
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two thousand years we have worshipped Christ, the image of perfection, but our age must now face, as Job did long ago, Christ’s adversary, the dark side of God. This is not the angry Deity so often encountered in Christianity, but the primordial darkness that dwells within each of us. We have not chosen our fate, but rather, as Jung observed, the creative drive of the objective psyche—and by inference the ground of Being—has been teleologically oriented toward healing the rift that is now tearing away the foundations of our Democracy and civilization itself. This drive is the dynamic heart behind what we are calling the fourth metamorphosis of the gods.
The struggle between the opposite extremes within our culture has deep cultural and psychological roots. The dark side of human nature has been at war with our highest spiritual aspirations since before the time of Job. It is divine destiny, Jung thought, that our current Age is called upon to witness the partial fulfillment of this divine drama in the coming years. Christianity has long understood that we are not slaves to our instinctual inheritance, that through Christ the world can be redeemed.
All other major religions have similar dreams of spiritual renewal. Likewise, our country was founded on enlightened principles, but conflicted human nature has constantly undermined them. Only when the trauma caused by the endless war between our darker nature and our higher selves is brought into the illuminating light of our own soul will we begin to heal ourselves. Time is short, we must act now.
Jung maintained that the belief that Jesus alone will redeem humanity is unrealistic, for relying exclusively on his love results in a denial of the dark forces that lay in wait to sabotage our highest aspirations. We may now have to put our trust, as Jung did, in the healing power of the psyche to guide us to a new age, free of the intense acrimony that now hovers close to our hearts and disturbs our sleep with visions of an apocalypse. Remember that Judas was cast in the same role as the radical right ring is now cast. He was a trickster figure that helped inaugurate the rise of Christianity at the beginning of the last era. Hopefully, since so many people and politicians embody the same dark and traitorous instincts that led Judas to betray Jesus, they may likewise help inaugurate a new age during which the redeeming vision of Christ is finally fulfilled.
When, as an old man, Jung looked back at his first dream of the phallus in the underground temple, which was for him an initiation into the chthonic realm of the psyche, he asked:
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What kind of superior intelligence was at work…. Who spoke to me then? Who talked of problems far beyond my knowledge? Who brought the Above and Below together and laid the foundation that was to fill the second half of my life with the stormiest passion? Who but that alien guest who came both from above and from below?865
This “alien guest” from his childhood matured into an image of God, assuming a central position in his thinking. In The Red Book, the God-image is just beginning to take form in the image of a distant and solitary star, but by the time he wrote Answer to Job it was fully developed.
Answer to Job, which was published in 1952, was in many ways the most comprehensive contribution Jung made to religious studies. In writing this controversial book, Jung said he felt compelled to express himself more clearly regarding the “religious problems of modern man.” He was concerned that such a work would very likely be taken in the wrong way, but finally, he said, “I could not help being gripped by the problem in all its urgency and difficulty, and I found myself compelled to give an answer.”866 Although Jung’s “answer” is psychological, it contains radical implications for theology and philosophy.
As Murray Stein describes it, Jung was “in the grip of a largely unconscious creative spirit and unaware of the overall pattern his work would take.”867 In his heightened state when writing Answer to Job, the issue of opposites, represented by Christ and Satan became for him ever more urgent. Christ is the image of supreme goodness, though, as Marie Louise von Franz explains, “man—his likeness—is both good and evil, thus the ‘Christian God-image’ cannot become incarnate in empirical man without contradictions.”868 In C. G. Jung, His Myth in our Time, she writes: Jung wrestled with this problem all his life and expressed his struggle dramatically in Answer to Job. In his old age he once remarked that now that he knew more he would like to rewrite all of his books except Answer to Job, but he would leave that one just as it stands.869
865 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 14, 15.
866 Ibid., 216-217.
867 Stein, Jung’s Treatment of Christianity, 17.
868 von Franz, His Myth in Our Time, 161.
869 Ibid., 161. Recall that Tillich late in life would have liked to rewrite his Systematic Theology.
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In a letter dated August 30, 1951, to a Dr. H., Jung describes how revelation is an experience of being gripped by an archetype.
In consequence of the predominance of the archetype the personality that is “gripped” is in direct contact with the mundus archetypus, and his life or biography is only a brief episode in the eternal course of things or in the eternal revolution of “divine” images. That which is eternally present appears in the temporal order as a succession.870
Every civilization is likewise but an instance of the underlying “mundus archetypus,”
which forever intrudes into the history of the world. One can liken its effect to the flow of magma under the surface of the earth. Though its movement is slow, its effect on the contours of the earth is profound. Likewise, an analogous process accounts for the rise and fall of civilizations and the religious institutions upon which they were built.
For example, scholars have lately begun exploring the specifically Egyptian contributions to Christianity. Their investigations have recently focused on the Alexandrine sanctuary of Isis and Osiris, a sacred relic of the Egyptian mythos of which early Christian thinkers were quite familiar. They found that the timeless myths of death and resurrection, initiation, purification, and invitation into the realm of Deity found in the Isis-Osiris temples reappeared in new clothing in early Christianity.871
What this demonstrates is that fundamental archetypes may change their phenomenal appearance, but they remain essentially the same throughout time; this is their eternal aspect.
Throughout Answer to Job, Jung uses visionary material from the Bible to demonstrate how the objective psyche has evolved. He thus put the cultural and religious history of the West on the couch, so to speak. By analyzing Biblical material like he would a patient’s dream, he showed how the objective psyche has been preparing humanity for a triumphal union of good and evil, symbolized in the Book of Revelation as the marriage of the Lamb (Christ) with the New Jerusalem. Collectively, 870 Jung, C. G. Jung Letters, II , 22: In footnote 9 Jung says, “The archetypal, potential world as underlying pattern of the actual world. In the psychological sense, the collective unconscious.” Cf. Mysterium, CW 14, para. 761. The reader may recall that Plato held that time is the moving image of eternity.
871 Tjeu van der Berk gathers scholarly research together in his Ancient Egypt: Cradle of Early Christianity and provides a comprehensive understanding of the relation between early Christian thinkers and the Egyptian religion. The so-called Black Madonnas found in the Mediterranean and southern France have for some time been recognized as basalt images of Isis and the child Horus.
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this drama began long before Job, and today continues to be played out on the world stage.
We now turn to this controversial book to discuss the long historical development of Christian symbolism as Jung envisioned it. But we save his analysis of the Book of Revelation for the subsequent chapter—"John’s Visionary Book of Revelation”—which culminates in the marriage of Christ with his bride, the New Jerusalem.
JUNG’S INSIGHTFUL ANSWER TO JOB
There was once a man in the land of Uz called Job: a sound and honest man who feared God and shunned evil. Seven sons and three daughters were born to him. And he owned seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen and five hundred she-donkeys, and many servants besides.
The Book of Job 872
One day the Sons of God came to attend on Yahweh, and among them was Satan. So Yahweh said to Satan, “Where have you been?” “Round the earth,”
he answered, “roaming about.” So Yahweh asked him, “Did you notice my servant Job? There is no one like him on earth: a sound and honest man who fears God and shuns evil.” “Yes,” Satan said, “but Job is not God-fearing for nothing, is he? … But stretch out your hand and lay a finger on his possessions: I warrant you, he will curse you to your face.”
The Book of Job 873
In this and the next chapter we review parts of Jung’s Answer to Job. Throughout his book, Jung portrays the unconscious as having a teleological influence on the course of history, ultimately moving toward a healing reconciliation between the highest reaches of spirit and the dark side of human nature, possibly occurring in our time.
Though people often think of the unconscious in personal and therapeutic terms, Jung, especially later in his life, had a dramatically expanded view of its nature. In many ways, it became for him a substitute for God, possessing all the terror and beauty that had been attributed to Him throughout history, especially as pictured in Answer to Job. Steven Farah proposes, instead, that after the atrocities of World War II, Jung was more likely expressing his own repressed anger towards God in Answer to Job.
Interpreted this way, the book, according to Farah, can be best understood as an outpouring of Jung’s own suffering soul as if he himself were wrestling with God, just as Jacob did when wrestling with the angel.874
James Heisig, whom we discussed earlier, notes that an unusual psychological process was at work in the creation of Answer to Job, evidenced by the intensity by 872 The Jerusalem Bible: The Book of Job, 1: 1-3.
873 Ibid., 1: 6-12.
874 Steven Farah, https://appliedjung.com/answer-to-job/.
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which Jung threw himself into writing it. In turn, R. F. C. Hull describes this intense process as follows:
You should see the manuscript of Antwort auf Hiob [ Answer to Job]; the thing poured out of him, the writing contains hardly any corrections and the printed text is almost identical. Pages of foolscap were obviously written in a torrential rush, and, most amazing of all, this book . . .was released under the pressure of illness and written in about ten days, when he had a high fever.875
This inspired work appears to have come from a deep reservoir within Jung’s soul, which is also the source of mystical experience and many of the inner truths that pervade all religions. Revelatory insights such as these, because they come from the healing depths of the psyche, rightly comfort the weary and provide hope in catastrophic times. Answer to Job should therefore be read as a mythical tale that reveals an eternal truth in symbolic form. But one of Jung’s predictions made while suffering a fever, is already happening: his prophetic warning that a time will come when the opposites will shake the foundations of the world. Given the state of current world affairs, his troubling prediction turned out to be not only realistic, but uncannily accurate.
Jung interprets the story of Job as he would a fairy tale or dream where the action and characters reveal hidden aspects of the psyche. In this psychological interpretation, God represents the totality of inner opposites within the psyche, and as such exerts great power over life while remaining largely unconscious. Satan, as a part of this totality, represents the chthonic, instinctual ground. Job represents consciousness, caught, like we all are, in the dynamic struggle between these great subterranean powers and our highest values. Before his encounter with the dark side of God, as the story is told by Jung, Job may have expected Yahweh to be a benevolent ruler and just judge. “But, to his horror, he has discovered that Yahweh is not human but, in certain respects, less than human,”876 lacking awareness of His own existence. He therefore can only experience existence through his relation to human consciousness. Although Jung maintains that archetypes may possess a rudimentary consciousness of sorts, it is a form of consciousness that lacks self-reflection.877 Self-reflection is the crowning glory 875 Heisig, Imago Dei, 181, Heisig quotes Hull here .
876 Ibid., para. 599.
877 The rudimentary form of consciousness that Jung speaks of here may be part of all life forms as we have argued in “Concluding Remarks on the Nature of Being.” Also, it may explain the appearance of angels in the life of saints and ordinary people.
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of the human ego. If God were truly conscious and acted as we might expect a human to act, he would act morally. But he is too unconscious to be moral, which is why “the Creator needs conscious man.”878 We find this to be true of many myths and fables in which divine figures convey a numinous/mystical aura while acting in ways we find morally reprehensible. Victory depends on the protagonist of the story gaining insight or a secret knowledge that frees her or him from harm, or in some cases, from a spell that has darkened the land.
Job, as a representative figure for the Jewish nation, bears the burden and disgrace of an oppressed people. Humbled before God’s awesome power, as we all are whenever the holiness of God breaks into our life, Job bows down and begins to pray:
“I know that you are all-powerful:
What you conceive, you can perform.
I retract all I have said,
And in dust and ashes I repent.” 879
While most of Jung’s writing concerns individual development, Answer to Job addresses the evolution of the Western psyche. Jung viewed the Babylonian captivity of the Jewish nation as a significant collective event in the history of the West, ultimately leading to the birth of Christianity. Occurring in three waves from 597 to 581 BCE, the defeat of Israel began when Nebuchadnezzar II attacked Judah to punish Josiah’s son Jehoiakim for allying with Egypt.880 Before this time, Yahweh was a tribal deity not that much different from the Gods and Goddesses honored by other tribes.
But after their defeat at the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, an internal rethinking began in which the people gained a new insight into the nature of God. After much suffering and anguish, some came to realize that God was a divine mystery beyond good and evil, as evidenced by the seemingly unjust punishment they received from Him. This rethinking, a result of the Israelites’ collective suffering, parallels the consoling message, often made by major religions during times of crisis, which affirms that individual growth and insight most often come from dissatisfaction and suffering rather than from comfort and contentment.
Judah was a small nation surrounded by powerful forces, and it was just a matter of time before it was conquered. But in addition to the historical forces that shaped Jewish history, Jung realized that the Jewish nation was also subject to the creative, though 878 Heisig, Imago Dei, para. 575.
879 The Jerusalem Bible: Job: 42:1, 6.
880 The Jerusalem Bible, 2 Kings 24:1.
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subtle, intrigues of the psyche.881 Psychologically, the Babylonian episode takes on universal meaning. The incarnation of God, Jung thought, is an ongoing event that has been happening since the beginning of time: it is the sole reason for creation. “It was only quite late,” however, as he explains, “that we realized (or rather, are beginning to realize) that God is Reality itself and therefore—last but not least—man. This realization is a millennial process.”882 It is natural to act in accordance with our instinctual nature, but the story of civilization tells how humanity has gradually gained a level of self-awareness in which our individuality can now triumph over unconscious drives. “The longing for light,” Jung said, “is the longing for consciousness.”883 He considered this longing the central motif of Christianity, a process initiated by Job’s confrontation with the irrational nature of God.
Because Job stood firm and did not yield to Yahweh’s tyrannical behavior, Jung concluded that Job’s action forced the primordial image of God, which he equated with the Self, to undergo a transformation. One is reminded of Athena at the end of the Oresteia884 negotiating a change in the laws governing human behavior in exchange for a change in the behavior of the gods, beginning with the transformation of the Furies into the beneficial Eumenides. Jung thought Job’s behavior likewise forced God to remember Sophia, whose appearance
in the heavenly regions points to a coming act of creation . . .. Her coexistence with Yahweh signifies the perpetual hieros gamos from which worlds are begotten and born. A momentous change is imminent: God desires to regenerate himself in the mystery of the heavenly nuptials—as the chief gods of Egypt had done from time immemorial—and to become man.885
881 There is some ambiguity due to the psychoid nature of the archetype, as to whether Jung thought that the psyche could modify physical reality. We take, what seems the more neutral position, that the psyche exploits opportunities for expanded consciousness when they arise through natural processes and human choice.
882 Jung, “Answer to Job,” CW 11, para. 631.
883 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 269.
884 The Oresteia trilogy of Greek tragedies was written by Aeschylus in the 5th century BC.
They dramatize the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra, the murder of Clytemnestra by her son Orestes, the trial of Orestes for matricide, the ending of the curse on the House of Atreus, and the pacification of the Furies.
885 Jung, “Answer to Job,” CW 11, para. 624.
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Jung assumed that the heavenly drama involving the archetypal intrigues of God, Sophia, and Satan is acted out in an eternal realm entirely outside of time and space, unfolding without human awareness.
Thus Mary, the virgin, is chosen as the pure vessel for the coming birth of God. Her independence of the male is emphasized by her virginity as the sine qua non of the process. She is a “daughter of God”
. . .distinguished at the outset by the privilege of an immaculate conception and is thus free from the taint of original sin. It is therefore evident that she belongs to the state before the Fall. This posits a new beginning … she not only bears the image of God in undiminished purity, but, as the bride of God, is also the incarnation of her prototype, namely Sophia.886
Jung strays into metaphysical speculation here, as he often does, by claiming: “All the world is God’s, and God is in all the world from the very beginning.”887 In fact, he even went so far as to equate God with the pleromatic foundation of reality, which contains all possibilities.888 In The Red Book Jung describes the pleroma, by saying: Nothingness is the same as the fullness. In infinity full is as good as empty. Nothingness is empty and full. You might just as well say anything else about nothingness, for instance, that it is white, or black, or that it does not exist, or that it exists. That which is endless and eternal has no qualities, since it has all qualities…. In the Pleroma there is nothing and everything.889
Jung thus recognized that psychologically only the God-image can be spoken of, and nothing can be said about God as the transcendent Being that Christians worship.
Instead, both the God-image and our understanding of the inscrutable nature of Being should be understood as symbolic reflections arising from the psyche. By gradually 886 Ibid., para. 625. Absent male participation in the Immaculate Conception, the carrier of original sin (for Augustine, sperm) is not transmitted to Jesus.
887 Ibid., para. 631.
888 This type of pantheism is quite similar to Spinoza’s, in which God as the one Substance is imminent and everywhere but is also transcendent and beyond comprehension.
889 Jung, The Red Book, 346-347. The well-known Buddhist text, The Heart Sutra (Sanskrit Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya), states that “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form,” much like Jung’s insight.
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opening ourselves to this universal mystery, we begin to discern ever deeper levels of Truth, both individually and collectively.
Slowly, Jung explains, a new vision of God began to take root within the Jewish nation. The emotional intensity of their situation, represented by Job’s confrontation with God, set in motion the later prophetic visions of Ezekiel, Daniel, and Enoch, which together foretold the coming of Christ. Paradoxically, if it were not for Satan’s wager with God, the need for Yahweh’s incarnation as Christ would not have arisen. In scheming to bring about Job’s downfall, Satan was thus cast in the role of the Trickster.
Instead of being a source of unmitigated evil, it turned out that he was “indispensable for the unfolding and completion of the divine drama.”890 In the same way, the dark side of human nature functions as a Trickster figure in that it forces us to bring the hidden darkness within ourselves to consciousness so healing can begin.
Just as Jung assumed that the heavenly drama was acted out in eternity prior to the birth of Christ, it also seems to have set the stage for the intense political turmoil into which the world is descending today. In fact, the roots of today’s spiritual crisis were already present in Christ’s social gospel, whose teachings were radical. In Matthew Jesus says: “You have learnt how it was said: Eye for eye and tooth for tooth. But I say this to you: offer the wicked man no resistance. On the contrary, if anyone hits you on the right cheek, offer him the other as well; if a man takes you to law and would have your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. And if anyone orders you to go one mile, go two miles with him.”891 Our natural response is to react angrily to all affronts to our dignity, but Christ counsels us to rise above our ingrained nature. Faith demands a radical transformation, but few answer the call, for Christ has set a very high standard indeed.
No one can be fully seized by this truth all of the time. Some of us have trouble any of the time. But this is the calling of faith. It is not a form of nostalgia. It is essentially disruptive; an eternal revolution in human affairs….892
Church dogma is often criticized because it is not rational or does not accurately reflect reality. The idea that a monotheistic God literally manifests as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit seems ludicrous to the scientifically oriented individual. But Jung defends 890 Jung, “Answer to Job,” CW 11, para. 639.
891 The Jerusalem Bible: Matthew 5:38-41.
892 Michael Gerson, Washington Post.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/evangelicals-are-having-their-own-metoo-moment/2018/05/07/e97be51e-5219-11e8-a551-
5b648abe29ef_story.html?tid=ss_mail&utm_term=.c65cecdb72ff. Accessed 04/27/2020.
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dogma for its symbolic importance. To appreciate Church dogma, Jung maintained, it is important to remember that a “delusional idea is real, even though its content is, factually considered, nonsense. Psychology’s concern is with psychic phenomena and with nothing else.”893 Jung understood dogma as faithfully representing how archetypal structures have been constellated over the centuries through a “millennial process of symbol-formation which presses towards consciousness, beginning in the darkness of prehistory with primordial or archetypal images, and gradually developing and differentiating these images into conscious creations.”894 In almost all cases, dogma gains acceptance because it captures the imagination of people living under the spell of an archetype, which is so captivating that it overpowers any rational explanation.
Thus the statement that dogmas are inspired by the Holy Spirit indicates that they are not the product of conscious cogitation and speculation but are motivated from sources outside consciousness and possibly even outside man. Statements of this kind are the rule in archetypal experiences and are constantly associated with the sensed presence of a numen.895
Christ promised to send the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, to guide and counsel those left behind when he ascended into heaven. Psychologically, the Paraclete is the invisible power behind the individuation process who abides with those who actively participate in their own conscious development. But Jung warns: self-realization—to put it in religious or metaphysical terms—amounts to God’s incarnation . . .. And because individuation is an heroic and often tragic task, the most difficult of all, it involves suffering, a passion of the ego.896
God, according to Jung, is not an independent being with his own thoughts and ideas but, instead, mirrors human consciousness. Thus, the task of humanity today is 893 Jung, “Psychological Approach to the to the Dogma of Trinity,” CW 11, para. 222.
894 Jung, “Foreword to Werblowsksy’s ‘ Lucifer and Prometheus,’” CW 11, para. 469. Here
‘psychic’ refers to the psyche as a whole, not only to what is now often called paranormal phenomena (telepathy, clairvoyance, etc.), though it includes them.
895 Jung, “A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity,” CW 11, para. 222.
896 Ibid., para. 232. One might think of some Hindu religious philosophies here, in which the individual who achieves self-realization becomes a jivanmukta, a liberated soul, identical with God though remaining in human form.
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to become fully conscious of the opposites of good and evil so that God is also made consciousness of them. That is the service that we are called to do. Only then, will the unconscious—via the transcendent function—serve to resolve the enmity between the opposites and bring them together in unity. For this reason, we must suffer the passion of the tragic hero. The dramatic and terrible forces that are tearing at the fabric of our society will not let us escape our destiny. Jung uses Christ’s crucifixion to symbolize the agony of someone caught, like we all are, in the struggle of opposites that threaten to overwhelm us. It is only through such suffering that God becomes incarnate in the life of the individual. As quoted earlier:
… the great symbol of the Christian faith, the Cross, upon which hangs the suffering figure of the Redeemer, has been emphatically held up before the eyes of Christians for nearly two thousand years. This picture is completed by the two thieves, one of whom goes down to hell, the other into paradise. One could hardly imagine a better representation of the “oppositeness” of the central Christian symbol.897
Jung further explains that the stories and myths surrounding Jesus portray him as a divine as well as human figure. He therefore must suffer “a divine as well as a human fate.”898 The divine side of Christ is vouchsafed by the fact that he was conceived through the Holy Spirit. The human side of Christ is characterized by his suffering.
Though Christ is portrayed throughout the New Testament as a person who never questions God’s unfailing support, Jung points out the one glaring exception: “the despairing cry from the Cross: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’” Jung considers this the climactic moment in the life of Christ. For, Here his human nature attains divinity; at that moment God experiences what it means to be a mortal man and drinks to the dregs what he made his faithful servant Job suffer. Here is given the answer to Job, and, clearly, this supreme moment is as divine as it is human, as
“eschatological” as it is “psychological.” And at this moment, too, where one can feel the human being so absolutely, the divine myth is present in full force. And both mean one and the same thing.899
Christ’s crucifixion is becoming ever more relevant for our times. The climactic moment of Jesus’ life and crucifixion demands that the celestial heights that many have 897 Jung, “Answer to Job,” CW 11, para. 659.
898 Ibid., para. 645.
899 Ibid., para. 647.
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longed for must now be brought into balance with the dark and contradictory nature of reality and the frailty of life. We are destined, like Christ was, to drink to the dregs the bitter fate that befell Job. This is the task Jung presented to our age.900 As foretold by Jung, the madness into which the world seems to be descending quite rapidly is evidence that our anguished, yet potentially redeeming, destiny may soon be fulfilled.
God as the ground of Being has moved relentlessly throughout history and is placing even greater demands on us now. The eschatological and psychological fate of humankind, revealed through myth, is the interpenetration of the human by the Divine. Job’s story is our story. Today, the world is gripped by chaotic forces arising from the tension between spiritual ideals that affirm the dignity of all people and the darker elements of our tribal nature that threaten our freedom. Just as it was in the time of Christ, we are living through a transformative period when the divine myth is present in its full force. It is through stories, like that of Job and the life of Christ, that we gain insight into the deep mystery of existence and see how humanity is fated to suffer the same terrifying tension between darkness and light that Jesus did. Jung asks:
“What is the use of a religion without a mythos, since religion means, if anything, precisely that function which links us back to the eternal myth?”901 By linking back to it we awaken to the spiritual dimension of reality, but that alone will not suffice according to Jung. We must also bring the eternal into alignment with our human nature.
The life of Christ is just what it had to be if it is the life of a god and a man at the same time. It is a symbolum, a bringing together of heterogeneous natures, rather as if Job and Yahweh were combined in a single personality. Yahweh’s intention to become man, which resulted from his collision with Job, is fulfilled in Christ’s life and suffering.902
Christ’s suffering makes apparent the human condition that we face today. Jung admits that it is hard to understand why the symbol of the cross should signify 900 Those familiar with the Jewish Kabbalah will think of the idea of tikkun, restoration, in this regard. Here the idea is that the creative energies of the cosmos were disrupted in their descent into more material regions of existence, and humanity must participate in their restoration to wholeness and balance.
901 Ibid., para. 647. The eternal myth is never given as such; it is always clothed in some mythos, like the Christ mythos, arising within a cultural context.
902 Ibid., para. 648. Recall in this regard Jung’s visionary experience of being crucified, the result of which Salome, fallen at his feet, cries out, “I can see!”
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redemption, “except that the conscious recognition of the opposites, painful though it may be at the moment, does bring with it a definite feeling of deliverance.”903 For, as Jung insists:
Only through the most extreme and most menacing conflict does the Christian experience deliverance into divinity, always provided that he does not break, but accepts the burden of being marked out by God. In this way alone can the imago Dei realize itself in him and God become man.904
The problem of suffering and its mysterious relationship to salvation has vexed all who desire an underlying purpose to existence. Why would God demand suffering as a precondition to salvation? Jung’s answer is insightful. He understood that the process of individuation involves a personal reckoning with painful aspects of our lives.
Without such experience, one cannot fully embrace unconscious content pressing upward toward the light of consciousness. We can gain insight into our dark side through analysis but that alone does not lead to transformation. For healing to occur, we must experience in life that which must be integrated into consciousness, a process that involves a painful reckoning with our true selves. For that reason alone, the symbol of the cross still remains a comfort to many who feel burdened by life, because suffering, consciously embraced, is an essential condition for spiritual awakening.905
This is, to use Blake’s expression, the marriage of heaven and hell.906
John of Patmos’ mad and confused imagery led Jung to speculate on the nature and meaning of the Book of Revelation, which we turn to next. He thought that John’s vision should be interpreted metamorphically as a waking dream, and like all transformative dreams, it incorporates personal as well as collective material. Though the Book of Revelation depicts God as a vengeful Deity, John’s apocalyptic revelation also points to a future time—possibly during our age—when humanity will finally be redeemed. But 903 Ibid., para. 659.
904 Ibid., para. 659. Job did not break under his divinely sent burden, a premonition of the symbolism of the cross.
905 The first of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism is recognition that the world consists of duhkha, suffering. Acknowledgement of this fact is the beginning of the path to Enlightenment, full realization and freedom.
906 As the Christian tradition developed, the myth arose that during the three days in the tomb, Christ descended into hell to rescue souls there, symbolically showing the union of the spiritual and chthonic dimensions of human nature, thus transforming the spiritual (heaven) as well as the dark depths (hell) of life.
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the work of redemption is an exceedingly long generational process that Jung believed started as far back as the story of Job.
JOHN’S VISIONARY BOOK OF REVELATION
Then the angels showed me the river of life, rising from the throne of God and of the Lamb and flowing crystal-clear down the middle of the city street.
On either side of the river were the trees of life, which bear twelve crops of fruit in a year, one in each month, and the leaves of which are the cure for the pagans.
The Jerusalem Bible 907
I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. Happy are those who will have washed their robes clean, so that they will have the right to feed on the tree of life….
The Jerusalem Bible 908
The Book of Revelation has a beautiful and hopeful ending, but much of it consists of little more than a vengeful expression of John’s hatred of the Romans. But, nonetheless, Elaine Pagels also sees a message of hope running throughout it.
Because John offers his Revelation in the language of dreams and nightmares, language that is “multivalent,” countless people for thousands of years have been able to see their own conflicts, fears, and hopes reflected in his prophecies. And because he speaks from his convictions about divine justice, many readers have found reassurance in his conviction that there is meaning in history—even when he does not say exactly what that meaning is—and that there is hope.909
John’s fantastic and highly symbolic imagery is much like one occasionally encounters in powerful dreams. As such, Jung considered its violent and revengeful images a window into the state of the collective psyche as constellated within the Jewish diaspora some 40 years after the Romans destroyed the temple in 70 CE. He takes the position that much of the material that John borrows from scripture was unconsciously incorporated into his vision just as material from one’s own life is integrated into one’s dreams. John may have modified some of the original vision to 907 The Jerusalem Bible: The Book of Revelation, 22: 1-2. It is worth noting that the leaves which are the cure for pagans is similar to Jung’s vision in The Red Book where he distributes the healing leaves, which had turned into sweet grapes, to a great waiting throng.
908 Ibid., 22: 12-14.
909 Pagels, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation, 34.
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satisfy his own political motives, but Jung considered much of the material a spontaneous product of the psyche.
Although Jung’s treatment of the Book of Revelation is primarily psychological, he was quite concerned that nuclear weapons threaten humanity with a modern apocalypse more terrifying than that portrayed in John’s revelation. All depends on the psyche as to whether humanity is destined for apocalyptic disaster or, if we are wise, a union of Spirit with the chthonic depths of the psyche, a “coincidence of opposites.”910 A vision like John’s, Jung understood, is predictive of future events in the same way as precognitive dreams are. He believed that the contents of such dreams are eternally present in the unconscious and only appear in dreams and visions occasionally as they circumambulate the psyche’s center. Because of their cyclical and predictive nature, Jung realized the oppressive forces that forged John’s vision are again coming into conscious focus, and he feared that the apocalyptic images that first burst forth from John’s unconscious could become a frightening reality with the vast destructive power now in our hands.911
Both Jung and Pagels assume that John had a great deal of repressed anger that merged with the visionary material from which terrifying images were forged announcing the end of time. More importantly, Jung felt John’s apocalyptic imagery should be taken as a symbolic warning for our age. After two world wars, one does not need to take the Book of Revelation literally to be impressed, even shaken, by its imagery.
Global warming, weapons of mass destruction, over-population, and the breakdown of religious tradition are certain to lead to major conflicts in the future. It is with this in mind that we find Jung’s interpretation of the Apocalypse compelling.
Today, humanity’s instinctual nature is increasingly at odds with a globalized world in which ideals like truth and social justice are too often viewed as undermining traditional values. The rise of fascism in Germany, as we discussed earlier, was partially driven by strong resistance to these same enlightened values. After the First World War, many Germans were deeply disturbed by the liberalization of German society, especially in the city of Berlin. Hitler took advantage of the unrest, rising to power by celebrating German tradition and its supposedly superior racial origin—the 910 As discussed earlier, Jung held that the “coincidence of opposites” or “union of opposites” is arrived at through the action of the transcendent function, a non-rational instinctive human faculty. Unlike Hegel, whose dialectic of opposing principles and ideas was a product of rational realization, the transcendent function occurs spontaneously when the opposites are consciously held in tension.
911 Jung also attributes the precognitive nature of some dreams to the psychoid nature of the archetype which exists outside of time.
JOHN’S VISIONARY BOOK OF REVELATION 385
Aryan Nation. Jung was certainly aware of these destructive forces when writing Answer to Job. It is quite possible that Germany’s embrace of fascism and its subsequent descent into evil was the basis for Jung’s concern for the future. Although the Book of Revelation foretells a final victory of good over evil, it also expresses the anger felt by people when their traditional values are threatened.
The Book of Revelation, Jung said, is so personal and so archetypal it seems abundantly clear that John was subjected to a numinous invasion from the unconscious. He is suddenly made aware of God’s immensity, and because of the timeless nature of the unconscious, he could see well into the Christian Aeon and beyond to a final victory at the end of time when the marriage of the lamb (Christ) and his bride (Sophia) takes place.912
The masculine nature of the lamb represented, for Jung, the desire to rationally conquer nature, while he thought the primordial wisdom of Eros, as symbolized by Sophia, draws its inspiration from the imaginative images by which the human spirit is eternally enriched. Although psychologically, both are needed to advance the process of individuation, whenever one gains too much power over the other, either the dark erotic passions of Eros or the soulless analytical machine-like qualities of Logos precipitate chaos.913
Up to now, the more extreme and destructive forces of the human psyche have been kept at bay deep within the unconscious. But as irrational extremes intensify, violence may erupt onto the world stage causing immense suffering. It is thus quite possible that the political madness that has descended into American politics—and the world as a whole—is but a sign of what is to come. Although Jung thought the coming of the Antichrist, as foretold in the Book of Revelation, is a necessary step in the redemption of humanity, it has stirred fear in people down through the ages.
John’s narrative describes a “torrent of negative feelings” arising from the Godhead that seems inexhaustible. The Son of Man appears holding a sharp sickle and, together 912 Jung, “Answer to Job,” CW 11, paras. 697-707.
913 The difference is dramatically seen in higher education where liberal arts programs are increasingly losing funding while STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) studies are gaining prestige. This reflects the one-sidedness of our culture that favors Logos over Eros. Even Christianity is dominated by Logos with its emphasis on a factual interpretation of Jesus’ life and resurrection, the hallmark of the Reformation. It is little wonder that religion is losing adherents, for its only through transcendent symbols that one can grasp, at least momentarily, the inner truth imbedded in scripture.
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with another angel, begins to harvest the earth, a harvest which Jung described as “an unparalleled blood-bath.”914 Jung thought the Son of Man reflects the Self, which indicated to him that the unconscious will fully participate in the blood bath, helping to bring to consciousness the dark fury that is latent within God. Thus, Jung warned: But did you know what evil is, and that it stands precisely right behind your virtues, that it is also your virtues themselves, as their inevitable substance? You locked Satan in the abyss for a millennium, and when the millennium had passed, you laughed at him, since he had become a children’s fairy tale. But if the dreadful great one raises his head, the world winces.915
Evil is a great daimon that seizes the individual with a passion, and as soon as this happens, virtues cross over to join with the dark forces. This happens, Jung warns, because “virtues and vices are brothers.”916 Finally, after the fury of the Apocalypse is exhausted, Satan is “thrown into the lake of fire and brimstone for ever and ever…, and the whole of the first creation disappears.”917
Afterward, the marriage of the lamb with his bride, the New Jerusalem, takes place.
Jung, as explained earlier, considered heaven a masculine symbol while earth is feminine. Therefore, Yahweh has His throne in heaven, while Wisdom (Sophia) has hers on the earth—a veritable marriage of the highest spiritual attainments with the natural world. The hieros gamos that unites Yahweh and Sophia at the end of time, thus
“points to their common nature: they are originally one, a single hermaphroditic being, an archetype of the greatest universality.”918 The Apocalypse, Jung said, “closes like the classical individuation process, with the symbol of the hieros gamos.”919 And from
“… the throne of God and the Lamb flows the river of the water of life, and beside it stands the tree of life, as a reminder of paradise and pleromatic pre-existence.”920
914 Jung, “Answer to Job,” para. 720.
915 Jung, The Red Book, 274.
916 Ibid., 274. And so as we have seen are Christ and Satan, as a traditional view maintains.
917 Jung, “Answer to Job,” para. 725.
918 Ibid., para. 727. The hermaphrodite and the hieros gamos are common symbols in alchemical texts.
919 Ibid., para. 743.
920 Ibid., para. 726.
JOHN’S VISIONARY BOOK OF REVELATION 387
The Book of Revelation is like a mythical tale that highlights the eternal clash between good and evil that has continually disrupted life throughout the course of history.
Imaginative tales of adventure like these, are told in every age, largely drawn forth from the depth of the psyche. Of course, unlike John’s apocalyptic prophesy, these imaginative stories are only considered fictional. We find the same theme repeated in movies like Star Wars. In real life, the terrifying destruction that Fascism brought upon the world is the most dramatic example, in recent times, of the blind fury that lies at the base of human consciousness. But today the world is again threatened. The terrible tension currently existing between the high ideals—both conservative and liberal—
forged by enlightened reason and the violent response arising from the primitive side of human nature threatens our very existence. Jung was not just writing a psychological exegesis on the Book of Revelation but was also deeply concerned about the political upheavals he feared would soon threaten our very survival.
Though Jung is almost unique amongst scholars for taking the Book of Revelation seriously, Answer to Job was the one work that Marie Louise von Franz claims that Jung was fully satisfied with, not wanting to change anything he had written in it.921 It was also an inspired work, according to R. F. C. Hull, written in 10 days under the pressure of illness.922 Answer to Job was published in 1952 shortly after World War II and a few years after his heart attack in 1944 when he had a near-death experience. During this extraordinary experience, mentioned earlier but worth repeating, Jung found himself viewing the world from 1000 miles above it. The vividness and eternal quality of floating high above the earth had a profound effect on him.
The earth, he reported, was bathed in blue light. From this height he could see India, the snow-covered Himalayas, and the reddish-yellow desert of Arabia. He then became aware of a dark block, like a meteorite, near him. It was a Hindu temple and inside a small antechamber sat a Hindu yogi wearing a white gown, whom, Jung felt, had been expecting his arrival. Upon drawing closer, Jung said: “I had the feeling that everything was being sloughed away; everything I aimed at or wished for or thought, the whole phantasmagoria of earthly experience, fell away or was stripped from me—
an extremely painful process. Nevertheless, something remained; it was as if I now carried along with me everything I had ever experienced or done…. There was no longer anything I wanted or desired. I existed in an objective form; I was what I had been and lived.” 923
921 von Franz, His Myth in Our Time, 161.
922 Heisig, Imago Dei, 181 .
923 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflection, 290-291.
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Before this experience, the hieros gamos was an integral part of Jung’s psychology, but in a letter to Kristine Mann in 1945, he admitted that it had become, for him, a lived reality soon after his near-death experience. Thus while he lay in bed recovering from his heart attack, a nurse brought him food and she seemed to have a blue halo about her head. At the sight of her, Jung experienced himself participating in a Jewish, Cabalistic celebration of marriage, after which came the Marriage of the Lamb being celebrated in a festive way in Jerusalem where there
were ineffable states of joy. Angels were present, and light. I myself was the “Marriage of the Lamb”…. That, too, vanished, and there came a new image, the last vision. I walked up a wide valley to the end, where a gentle chain of hills began. The valley ended in a classical amphitheater. It was magnificently situated in the green landscape.
And there, in this theater, the hierogamos was being celebrated.… All-father Zeus and Hera consummated the mystic marriage, as it is described in the Iliad.924
Jung describes his experience as being “… permeated by an incomparable, indescribable feeling of eternal bliss, such as I never could have imagined as being within reach of human experience. Death is the hardest thing from the outside and as long as we are outside of it. But once inside you taste of such completeness and peace and fulfillment that you don’t want to return.”925
In contrast to the experiential reality of the hieros gamos, the events of World War II still hung heavy on Jung’s heart when writing Answer to Job. After witnessing the devastation of two world wars, Jung clearly realized that evil threatens civilization.
Today, more than at any other time, it is of critical importance that the brokenness of the human spirit be made whole on a global scale. Jung was convinced that this enormous task has fallen to our age. He understood our moment in the history of humanity to be a Kairos,926 a propitious moment in which humanity is being called on to transition to a new level of consciousness. If we are to survive these perilous times, it is crucially important that we come to grips with the dark side of God, which is a part of our own being. While our age is no worse than any other, the stakes are far 924 Ibid., 294 .
925 Jung, Letters, I, p. 358.
926 Recall that Kairos is an ancient Greek word meaning the right, critical, or opportune moment for action. The other Greek word for time is chronos referring to chronological or sequential time.
JOHN’S VISIONARY BOOK OF REVELATION 389
greater than ever before, possibly leading to the destruction of the civilized world or even to the extinction of life.
The difference between Jung’s view of the dangers facing us today and other apocalyptic visions of the end of the world is that (1) for Jung there is no savior figure who will come to set things right by conquering evil, and (2) the battle is within us individually and collectively, which means the outcome is not predetermined. Because the stakes are so large , Jung was often overwhelmed by the daunting task that humanity now faces, the healing of the brokenness of our collective soul. Yet he also believed that humanity can rise to the occasion and, despite darkness and suffering, transition to a brighter age.
At the beginning of World War II, he confided in a letter to H. G. Baynes that the year 1940 reminded him “of the enormous earthquake in 26 B. C. that shook down the great temple of Karnak. It was the prelude to the destruction of all temples, because a new time had begun. 1940 is the year when we approach the meridian of the first star in Aquarius. It is the premonitory earthquake of the New Age.”927 Later that year he wrote to Mary Mellon928 saying, “You hardly can imagine the thickness of the black cloud suspended over Europe, and one wishes to escape from the soundless pressure of evil and dull idiocy.”929
The contrast between the eternal quality of his near-death experience and the terrors of war must have influenced Jung greatly when thinking about the visionary material recorded in the Book of Revelation. Unlike most scholarly analysis of this controversial work, Jung presumed that John had a precognitive vision that foretold how the collective unconscious would unfold over the coming age. The sacred marriage that Jung envisioned represented, for him, the final step in the individuation process for both the individual and humanity. Its ultimate goal, we claim, is reminiscent of Buddhist Enlightenment. When framed this way, Jung’s imagination soared far beyond the therapeutic goals of analysis to conceive a new mythos suited for our time 927 Jung, Letters I, 285: In a footnote to this passage Jung relates that shortly after the peace treaty had been signed in 1918, he had a visionary dream in which he “was returning to Switzerland from a trip in Germany. My body was covered with burns and my clothes were burnt full of holes; for I had seen fire falling like rain from heaven and consuming the cities of Germany.” Historians have concluded that the World War I peace treaty was much too punitive to Germany, imposing conditions that would ruin Germany for decades. Grievances over the treaty fed into Hitler’s rise.
928 Mary Mellon, wife of philanthropist Paul Mellon, was responsible for creating the Bollingen Series that gathered Jung’s writings into one collection.
929 Jung, Letters I, 297.
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when the dark side of human nature will be brought into harmony with the sacred depths of our individual being. “It is an explanatory myth,” Jung said, “which has slowly taken shape within me in the course of the decades. It is a goal I can acknowledge and esteem, and which therefore satisfies me.”930
Jung envisioned the marriage of the lamb at the end of the Book of Revelation to be representative of the final chapter in the mythical drama depicting God’s incarnation.
In this marriage:
. . . it is no longer the opposites ‘God’ and ‘man’ that are reconciled, as it was before but rather the opposites within the God-image itself. That is the meaning of divine service, of the service which man can render to God, that light may emerge from the darkness, that the Creator may become conscious of His creation, and man conscious of himself.931
Jung wisely made no predictions as to when this next chapter in the history of the world will be completed, but World War II and nuclear weapons greatly disturbed him, because he felt they may be precursors of the last days.932
In The Red Book, Jung recounts how one day his soul, in an alarmed state, spoke to him about what the future harbors. She spoke of a blazing fire that hovers in the air and “draws near—a flame—many flames—a searing miracle.”933 Jung realized that her prophesy foretold of a spiritual fire being ignited across the globe: She gazed into the distance and said:
I see the surface of the earth and smoke sweeps over it—a sea of fire rolls close in from the north, it is setting the towns and villages on fire, plunging over the mountains, breaking through the valleys, burning the forests—people are going mad....You bear the mark of the fire and men are horrified at you. They do not see the fire, they do not believe your words, but they see your mark and unknowingly suspect you to be the messenger of the burning agony. . . .
930 Ibid., 338.
931 Ibid., 338.
932 Jung may have seen this future state as the final chapter of the Creator becoming aware of the Creation and of the human being becoming conscious of himself as a whole, but we do not see any reason for thinking that there is not yet more future to unfold through ever greater consciousness, though what may lie beyond this anticipated future is perhaps inexpressible in today’s concepts.
933 Jung, The Red Book, 345.
JOHN’S VISIONARY BOOK OF REVELATION 391
I looked at the embers, I saw the blazing flames. May God save us.934
This is the time, according to his soul’s vision, that a purifying fire is coming into the world, a time when everyone must confront the opposites rising within themselves, which, as foretold in the Bible, will rend society into warring factions.
In this time of trial, humanity will have become, like a ripening fruit, ready for harvest. Is it possible that Christianity, in the coming years, will go through a change sufficiently radical to make room for a new religious vision broad enough to nourish the coming transformation that Jung envisioned? Murray Stein feels that this is unlikely. Such a change, he says, “would be more than difficult for Christianity to accommodate.” In fact, he emphatically declares, “It seems impossible.”935
Nonetheless, we feel Tillich’s theology is clearly a step forward because it is bold enough to include the feminine and the sacredness of the earth, both of which are needed to adapt to the vast changes that are likely to occur throughout the world.936
Likewise, Stein argues that a revision of religion sufficiently radical to accommodate Jung’s ideas “would honor God in nature and in body as well as in structures that point toward the Heavenly City.”937
Today, as institutional religion is increasingly diminished in importance throughout the world, we believe the existential crisis of our age, due in part to the loss of spiritual traditions, is likely to bring forth a new vision for a new age. Paul Tillich struggled to give form to this vision throughout his life but in the end, illness forced him to publish the third volume of his Systematic Theology without completing the goal he so yearned to bring to fruition. Jung too, we feel, struggled to give birth to the new mythos but fell short. Both Tillich’s New Being and Jung’s sacred marriage—the hieros gamos—seem tentative to us as though they were both unconsciously driven to serve as midwives to the creation of a new world, but like Moses, were not allowed to enter the promised land. But nonetheless, their immense and insightful contributions to the future of religion are essential building blocks for what is to come.
We believe that a new visionary mythos is struggling to be born, which may either imbue Christian symbols with new meaning or give birth to something entirely new.
Either way, it will reorient culture by awakening humanity to the mystery of Being and the primordial wisdom that gave birth to civilization. As Jung made clear, however, a 934 Ibid., 346. The last line is Jung speaking, not his soul.
935 Stein, Jung’s Treatment of Christianity, 187
936 Dourley, Recovery of Religion, 76.
937 Stein, Jung’s Treatment of Christianity, 188.
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mythos cannot be willed into existence but must spontaneously arise from the archetypal ground of the psyche.938 What comes forth has its own timing and cannot be discerned by the intellect until it becomes a living myth. Christianity constellated around the person Jesus and served to enrich and orient life throughout the West, at least up to the time of the Renaissance. But as science came to dominate Europe during the age of enlightenment, the power of the Christ mythos began to gradually fade.
Whatever the future brings, it will hopefully provide the world with a powerful vision of reality that will help guide it during the coming centuries as it confronts the immense problems of the age. As Beasley-Murray noted in Towards a Metaphysics of the Sacred, the holy by its nature draws the individual into questions regarding the nature of Being, the essence of existence, ultimate meanings, purposes, and the ground or cause of Being.939
Jung understood that a change of this magnitude will take considerable time to fully manifest. This is made clear by his interpretation of a dream that the analyst Max Zeller shared with him:
A temple of vast dimensions was in the process of being built. As far as I could see—ahead, behind, right and left—there were incredible numbers of people building on gigantic pillars. I, too, was building on a pillar. The whole building process was in its very beginnings, but the foundation was already there, the rest of the building was starting to go up, and I and many others were working on it.
Jung is reported to have responded:
that is the temple we all build on. We don’t know the people because, believe me, they build in India and China and in Russia and all over the world. That is the new religion.940
Zeller asked Jung how long he thought it would take to build this new temple. Jung told him it would take 600 years. This is the time he thought was needed to complete the transformation destined for the coming age. The challenge is greater than the 938 Recall that for Jung, a mythos is truth that cannot be fully rendered in discursive, conceptual language, for a mythos of this depth can only be grasped at many levels.
Doing so requires us to unburden ourselves from preconceptions and personal preferences, a task that can best be considered transcendental therapy.
939 Beasley-Murray, Towards a Metaphysics of the Sacred, 93.
940 Ibid, 188. Stein references a conversation with the Jungian analyst Dr. Max Zeller as reported in “The Task of the Analyst,” Psychological Perspectives, 6(1), 74–78.
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intellect can achieve by itself, however. We must have faith in the guiding spirit within us, the spiritus rector, to navigate the future. The purifying fire that draws near demands much of humankind. When Jung’s soul spoke to him of the purifying fire, she warned him saying, “My beloved . . .the breath of fire descends on you!”941 And so it is for everyone who takes up the challenge of individuation, especially now at the birth of a new age.
941 Jung, The Red Book, 345. One might remember here the mysterious saying attributed to Jesus: “I bring not peace but a sword.”
DAWN OF A NEW AGE
Apparently the chief difference between Homo Sapiens and our manifold kin is that for us nature is symbolic. Our mental picture of the world is more than a map of surroundings hanging over the head of an animal—a scent-based map in dogs, perhaps, and sound-based in bats. No doubt blue whales and Arctic foxes and birds of paradise all have their own concept of nature, their mental picture of the world and the interrelationships of its many parts, but presumably they do not invent for themselves a story about it as they journey through their days.
Michael Sims942
I think, therefore, that however particular questions connected with our individual destinies may be answered, it is only by acknowledging them as genuine questions, and living in the sphere of thought which they open up, that we become profound. But to live thus is to be religious…. It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all. By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard.
William James943
A new age is dawning upon the world, but instead of promising peace and prosperity, it is sweeping through cities and villages like a violent storm leaving wreckage in its wake. Fire storms and flooding, unleashed by climate change and inadequate human planning, are increasingly leaving the world in a weakened state, unable to recover easily from the financial and social damage sustained. As this century unfolds, the world will likely see far greater chaos than it is currently experiencing. This will test us severely. Many will despair, but we hold out hope, as Jung did, for the long-term future. Our optimism is based on the observation that great cultural shifts, though frequently accompanied by disaster, have often heralded major 942 Michael Sims, Apollo’s Fire: A Journey Through the Extraordinary Wonders of an Ordinary Day, 4.
943 James, 491-2. This edition is available in many printings, including online at Project Gutenberg Ebook (Ebook 621).
turning points in history.944 During the Middle Ages, the Black Plague ravaged Europe repeatedly but ultimately helped midwife the Enlightenment. Closer to our time, two world wars and the rise of Nazism contributed to unspeakable horrors around the globe, yet the Marshall Plan and the economic expansion that followed were unprecedented.
Today, we are witnessing blatant attempts to subvert democracy by would-be authoritarians as well as a distressing level of inequality that threatens our economic foundations. Global warming alone is already placing extreme stress on world populations and undermining the fragile environment upon which we depend. It is hard to predict with accuracy what will happen as the planet warms, but we can be certain that the world of tomorrow will be radically different from the one we live in today. We would be wise to listen carefully to the warning that Jung’s soul imparted to him when she said, “I see the surface of the earth and smoke sweeps over it—a sea of fire rolls close in from the north, it is setting the towns and villages on fire, plunging over the mountains, breaking through the valleys, burning the forests—people are going mad….”945
For almost two thousand years Christians have been able to successfully balance enlightened reason, which they inherited from Greek philosophy, with the primordial wisdom of indigenous societies. St. Augustine (354-430 CE) and St. Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274 CE) are two exemplary theologians that stand out for their ability to bring reason into alignment with the hungers of the soul. But today, we are living at the beginning of a new age when not only Christianity, but all religious traditions are losing their hold on the imagination of people.
Though the soul is closely aligned with the sacred foundation of the psyche, enlightened reason has taken its place in the lives of many people, resulting in the existential crisis that now pervades our culture. It seems that our age is therefore destined to live through a fourth metamorphosis of the Gods during which time new gods will eventually arise to replace the old gods that have lost their power to excite the soul.
We feel that Jung’s psychology not only helps people adjust to the demands of life but prepares them for the gift of spiritual enlightenment, as discussed earlier by Lionel Corbett in the last chapter of his book, The Religious Dimension of the Psyche. There he 944 Of course, in the long pre-history of the earth, climate change has also had profound effects on life, including five major extinctions. Some writers have called the current rapid loss of species, mostly due to human activities, the sixth extinction.
945 Jung, The Red Book, 346.
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says: “The practice of depth psychology with a religious sensibility, belongs within the contemplative tradition, because it represents an active attempt to experience and understand the ways of the divine as they operate within the human psyche.”946 This is consistent with the position Jung took in his letter to P.W. Martin regarding his interest in the numinous. As quoted earlier, he said:
You are quite right, the main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology.947
This position is also consistent with our earlier discussion of soul. Soul, as we defined it, is the numinous core of individual existence that draws everyone toward the spiritual center of life, much as Jung’s concept of Self does. By filling life with a sense of beauty and reverence, it becomes the poet’s muse as well as the source of true worship. When we lose our connection to this source of spiritual nourishment life becomes insipid and soon afterwards chaos follows. This message of social decay and alienation was elegantly conveyed in Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming,” which we quoted in full at the beginning of the book. Here is its concluding stanza which seems so prescient for our time:
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?948
946 Corbett, The Religious Function of the Psyche, 220.
947 Jung, Letters, I, 377. This quote was used earlier in “Introductory Remarks.”
948 William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming,” The New Oxford Book of English Verse, 820.
This poem is often anthologized and is online.
Yeats’ dystopian image that reduces the common lot of humanity to nothing more than a “lion body” with the “head of a man,” represents, we feel, the destructive powers that arise when the darker side of our instinctual nature gains ascendency as it did during the Nazi reign and again today. This malady results from a loss of soul.
T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is another poem that addresses the loss of a spiritual center. The first lines of the poem set the mood:
April is the cruellest [sic] month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.949
James Parker, when writing on Eliot’s well-known poem in The Atlantic magazine,
begins his essay by rhapsodizing on the effect April has on our spirit: April is the cruelest month because we are stuck. We’ve stopped dead and we’re going rotten. We are living in the demesne of the crippling King, the Fisher King, where everything sickens and nothing adds up, where the imagination is in shreds, where dark fantasies enthrall us, where men and women are estranged from themselves and one another, and where the cyclical itch of springtime—the spasm in the earth, the dazzling bud, even the gentle, germinal rain—only reminds how very, very far we are from being reborn.
We will not be delivered from this, or not any time soon. That’s why April is cruel. That’s why April is ironic. That’s why muddy old, spongy old April, bustling around in her hedgerows, brings us down.950
The Fisher King, who is a central figure in the Arthurian legend of The Holy Grail , again plays a central role in Eliot’s The Waste Land. Parker portrays Eliot’s Fisher King as a man who “sits and sleeps and sadly fishes while his kingdom crumbles around him.”951 The king has lost his virility because of a wound in his groin that cannot be healed until an innocent knight happens to appear in his court bearing the Holy Grail.
There have been many versions of this Arthurian legend and in most of them the grail represents Christ. But in The Waste Land Eliot leaves us hanging. He recognized, 949 T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems: 1909-1962. This poem is in many anthologies and can be found online at www.poetryfoundation.org.
950 James Parker, “The Prophesy of the Waste Land , ” The Atlantic, January & February 2023, 66.
951 Ibid, 69.
398 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
accurately, that the time has not yet come for redemption. Instead, our civilization must continue descending into ever darker regions as spiritual traditions collapse and material success and cynicism fills the vacuum left by the demise of Christianity. The Christ of tradition probably cannot be resurrected. We must go forward into the future waiting on a new mythos to arise in our midst, which will lead us home by restoring and strengthening the individual soul, which lies at the innermost center of life.
Mircea Eliade recognized, as we said earlier, that archaic societies gravitate to the center, the axis mundi, because, for them, it is a sacred space that lifts their vision above the oppressive monotony of daily life, being the only space that is ultimately real for humans. Although modern life is filled with diversions, what Eliade said about archaic societies is true for us today. It is the numinous center of our individual lives that gives meaning to existence. Without a relation to the center, we are in danger of falling into despair.
Recall Jung’s Liverpool dream of 1927, when he found himself in Liverpool and everything around him was “obscured by rain, fog, smoke, and dimly lit darkness.” In the center of the city was an island located in the middle of a pool. The little island, he said:
… blazed with sunlight. On it stood a single tree, a magnolia, in a shower of reddish blossoms. It was as though the tree stood in the sunlight and was at the same time the source of light.952
As mentioned earlier, the island in the dream provided Jung a “vision of unearthly beauty,” clearly portraying the center of the psyche as distinctly different from the ego.
The island, ablaze with sunlight, conveyed a numinous quality that Jung perceived radiating from the Self. Because this beautiful dream corresponds exactly with our definition of soul, we suggest that the island could also be considered representative of the soul—the affective component of the Self. While the Self is a psychological term, the soul is a religious concept that more adequately conveys sacredness. Soul, by its very nature, also inspires a commitment to living a life of love and service to others.
Logos is just as important to the future of religion as soul is. Only through Logos, with its discriminating power of reason, can we investigate the ultimate nature of reality, which, for Tillich is equivalent to God. Soul, like Plato’s noesis, provides tantalizing insights into the invisible foundations upon which the universe depends, but these intuitive epiphanies must be balanced with reason. The Presocratic philosophers we discussed earlier were able to balance the two and thus were able to 952 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 198.
penetrate the ultimate nature of Being with insights that astound us today. Plato, who followed them, has had a lasting impact on the history of the West because he was a master of both realms—Logos and soul. He laid the foundation for later Neoplatonic views of theurgy, in which the practice of living, thinking, and contemplating were used together to raise the soul and consciousness to the level of the Forms and beyond.
Today, we must again unite enlightened reason with the primordial wisdom of the soul if we are to advance philosophy beyond the narrow confines of science.
We have devoted considerable time to exploring consciousness because its existence suggests that the universe is filled with purpose and meaning. Consciousness could only exist if the potential for it had been an inherent feature of the universe from the moment of the Big Bang. Why it exists is a profound mystery that cannot be grasped by a science based on phenomena and materialism alone. But when conceived as a fundamental attribute of reality, consciousness can be seen, as we have said before, the proverbial crack in the otherwise materialist view of nature through which the light of the soul gains a rightful place alongside the scientific view of reality that currently rules supreme.953
Tillich, in his Systematic Theology, differentiates between the Kerygma, which embodies the ineffable Wisdom, and apologetic theology, which expresses revered truths in the language and symbols familiar to each culture. Both depend on Logos as much as soul. When properly balanced they become the innermost Truth of spiritual seekers, poets, and artists whose beautiful works inspire wisdom. Importantly, Tillich understood that Christ is a symbol for the sacred depth within every individual and that only by giving ourselves over to its inner wisdom is it possible to become fully functioning individuals capable of receiving the hidden glory of creation into our lives.
Jung’s psychological analysis is not that different from the position held by Tillich. He hoped that the transcendent nature of humanity, for which the Self is a symbol, will eventually be universally realized. We believe that only then will humanity be able to fully awaken to the mystery of Being.
The urgency of the current situation forces us to ask: Are Tillich’s and Jung’s respective positions regarding the future anything more than wishful thinking? Both Tillich’s prediction of a new age during which the New Being becomes a living reality and Jung’s vision of a veritable marriage of heaven and hell might seem too optimistic.
953 The grand views of physical and quantum cosmologists are not settled, even if they seem so at the popular level. The ultimate fate of the universe, multiverses of various kinds, the nature of dark matter, and the theory of pre-cosmic branes are only some of the views now hotly debated.
400 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
But nonetheless, both clearly believed that humanity has the inner capacity for transcending the dark divisions that now threaten world peace. Whether we can avert disaster, however, depends on many factors including the transformation of religion.
Religion touches the lives of so many people that it alone can make a huge difference.
The rigid beliefs of many current religions that too often drive people away, must now give way to a spiritual vision based on the natural world inspired by the sacred depths of the human psyche. Like Buddhists have long held, there is no transcendent, loving god watching over us. We are alone in the universe and must save ourselves by cultivating the spiritual resources that are available to everyone. Only by relying on this universal resource, the foundation of human existence, can we awaken to the potential for love and compassion that has been our birthright from the beginning, a beacon of hope in a raging storm.
We devoted a full chapter to exploring parts of Jung’s Red Book, which confirmed, for him, that the collective psyche is a profound resource upon which to explore the inner world of dreams, a source of great beauty as well as demonic intrigues. Most importantly, he came to realize that the psyche is a living organism that is continually evolving towards an enlightened future. This was the basis for his analysis of visionary material found throughout the Bible and the Book of Revelation. Just as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions provide insight into the otherwise invisible, molten depths of the earth, a vision reveals the inner workings of the psyche.
Although Christ represents the highest of ideals, his message has yet to be fully integrated into the lives of most individuals. Many sermons have been delivered extolling the virtue of love and compassion, but racism and war rage on. Regrettably, the dark, destructive instinctual actions that have caused so much misery throughout the world are too often promoted from the pulpits of various religions. But we can still hope that Jung is right and that the extreme tension of opposites that produced two world wars and threatens us today may also be a creative force, making possible a further realization of Christ’s message of love. It would be foolish, however, to subscribe to a Pollyanna optimism regarding our human situation. So, in the coming years leaders, religious as well as business and governmental, must aggressively act to avert disaster.
The frightening events of today are reminiscent of the cultural, social, and psychological disturbances that followed Alexander the Great’s conquest of the known world. Today, like then, the old Gods are dying, and new Gods are yet to rise in their place. People are searching for purpose and meaning and are not finding it in the traditional stories that have served Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the past. It is highly unlikely, however, that people will abandon religion altogether, for humans
need a spiritual grounding to flourish. The time we are living through is not that different from the first centuries after the birth of Jesus when the whole world was riven with anxiety. Out of that despair, Christianity was born. We predict something similar will be birthed from our modern crisis. Of course, it is possible Christianity will endure the coming fire storm, and in the end, be transformed. Like all the great religions, it is a storehouse of sacred symbols, sacraments, and traditions that draw us into relationship with the sacred center of our individual lives. We cannot simply invent new traditions to serve our spiritual needs. But spiritual traditions can be reinterpreted and revitalized as Tillich and Jung have done. By imbuing sacred symbols with new meaning our capacity for love and compassion will hopefully be strengthened.
John said near the end of the Book of Revelation that he saw a new heaven and new earth, for the first heaven and first earth had disappeared.954 Today, we do not have to take his dire predictions literally, or even seriously, to realize that his vision has relevance for the coming age. In the coming years, we might see a resurgence of fundamentalism as people desperately try to restore meaning to their lives, as well as a continued proliferation of “New Age” ideas that give people assurance that they are surrounded and supported by spiritual entities such as angels, devas, and elemental spirits. The future may embody a bizarre mixture of mystical beliefs, magical potions, flying saucer reports, and “old-time” religion. Into this mix, we have offered a vision of religion based on philosophical and psychological principles and a growing awareness that the universe is infused with meaning.
As we have seen, the mystery of Being has stimulated the imagination of seekers throughout the centuries. While modern science and philosophy shed new light on this intriguing mystery, critical reason alone cannot provide definitive answers. Delving into the transcendent ground of Being is ultimately a spiritual quest, for only by going deep within oneself can the heart be awakened to the inherent beauty and meaningfulness of creation. In this regard, our Western civilization owes much to the imagination of those early Greeks who dedicated their lives to uncovering the inscrutable mysteries of the universe, many of whose insights are still surprisingly relevant to our time.
By now it should be clear that we think Freud was quite wrong in his view of religion as an illusion, an individual and collective neurosis that would be overcome and eliminated as individuals and humanity matured. We believe, as Mircea Eliade did, that religion is part of the structure of consciousness and the psyche. So unlike Freud, 954 The Jerusalem Bible: The Book of Revelation, 21: 1-2.
402 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
we embrace religion in general while critically examining its specific doctrines. Such reflection does not reduce religion to a set of propositions but rather endows existence with meaning, which has implications for both thought and action. Religious traditions have always existed to assist individuals in assimilating the transcendent core of their being, thus precipitating an ongoing struggle between one’s highest ideals and our unruly instinctual natures.
For most people, secularism, especially in its most reductionist forms, fails to substitute for religion because its sole emphasis on science and good works, is unable to inspire a faith commensurate with the longing people have for a deeper spiritual connection with nature and the cosmos.955 Unfortunately, faith is often confused, as Tillich warns, “with belief in something for which there is no evidence, or in something intrinsically unbelievable, or in absurdities or nonsense.” But faith, properly understood, he said, “is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern.”956 His view of faith is close to that of St. Paul who understood faith as an act of courage in which life is lived in accordance with the spirit of Christ.957 We broaden this definition by recognizing, as Tillich did, that Christ is a symbol for the sacred depth existing within every individual. Viewed from this perspective, human consciousness is religious consciousness: the human being, in addition to being homo sapiens is also, in Eliade’s expression, homo religiosus.
Fredrich Nietzsche upset religious sentiments in nineteenth century Europe when he declared that God is dead. His concern was with the Christian concept of an omnipotent, all-loving personal God who created the universe and each living soul.
He feared that the inevitable loss of this idea would result in an unbearable disaster for humankind. “Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing?” Nietzsche wrote,
“Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we 955 Some forms of atheistic humanism, of course, merely deny some particular conception of God. Absolute denial is meant here. We also deny many conceptions of God, for example, that God is a Being rather than Being itself or the ground of Being.
956 Tillich, Systematic Theology, III, 130.
957 In St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate Karen Armstrong points out that pistis, usually translated as faith, meant for Paul something more like loyalty, suggesting adherence to the transformation experienced in Christian conversion—no longer loyalty to the Roman Imperium but loyalty to the Christ now within each individual, the saving power of God “beginning in pistis and ending in pistis” (Romans 1:17). Armstrong, St.
Paul, 101
not hear anything yet of the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God?”958
Nietzsche bore evidence to the fierce power of humanity’s instinctual nature, which later, after his death, escaped from the control of reason and helped the Nazis ascend to power in Germany. Jung, as noted earlier, wrote:
The archaic power of instinct, hitherto hidden behind the façade of civilized living, finally came to the surface in its true colours [ sic], and proved beyond question that we are “still barbarians.” For it should not be forgotten that, in the same measure as the conscious attitude may pride itself on a certain godlikeness by reason of its lofty and absolute standpoint, an unconscious attitude develops with a godlikeness oriented downwards to an archaic god whose nature is sensual and brutal. The enantiodromia of Heraclitus ensures that the time will come when this deus absconditus shall rise to the surface and press the God of our ideals to the wall.959
Nietzsche, Jung said, “tore through the veil of naïveté and in his Zarathustra conjured up from the nether region ideas that were destined to be the most vital content of the coming age.”960 John Cottingham writes, “Zarathustra prophesies that the grim time is coming when ‘the soil of our culture will be poor and exhausted so that nothing will grow.’” It is a time, he warns, when “Humanity will have ceased to reach for the transcendent.”961
Nietzsche’s prophesy is highly relevant for our age. Throughout the West, especially in Europe, Christianity has steadily lost members who find fossilized dogmas and impersonal rituals increasingly unappealing and irrelevant. In the United States, many Christians, especially evangelicals and some conservative Catholics, have, in reaction, become highly politicized and are attempting to force their doctrines on society at large. This reactionary movement, in contrast to their intention, is likely to hasten Nietzsche’s grim prediction. But the problem is not isolated to Christianity alone. Loss of meaning in the face of multiple challenges—global warning, overpopulation, globalization, nationalism, and tribalism—is now affecting all traditional religions 958 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 181.
959 Jung, Psychological Types, CW 6, para. 150.
960 Ibid., para. 151.
961 Cottingham, In Search of the Soul, 150.
404 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
including Hinduism and Buddhism, though they have both demonstrated greater flexibility, in some respects, than Christianity, Judaism, or Islam have.962
To be vital and relevant, a religion must rely on language to nurture both symbols and reflective thought, especially as they relate to the profound mystery of Being.
Language’s use of metaphors and symbols allow expression to be nuanced, rich, and profound, quite beyond merely being a vehicle for the transmission of information.
When used to facilitate imagination and intuition, it can also serve as a medium for spiritual vision, empowering people to intimate through symbols that which forever remains beyond full understanding.963 For Tillich, symbols have an ontological significance beyond definitive expression. For Jung, symbols connect us to the richness at the core of the psyche—the Self or soul—which, at heart, is our truest nature. Even though Tillich and Jung held quite different perspectives, both share the epistemological view that symbols link the Divine with the human and the ontological view that ultimate reality transcends our rational understanding. Languages, despite all attempts to make them as precise as formal logic, touch on and adumbrate our inner sense of being as though we were seeing life through a glass darkly as St. Paul taught.
Anthropologist and ethnobiologist Wade Davis captures the nature of language when he says:
A language, of course, is not merely a set of grammatical rules or a vocabulary. It is a flash of the human spirit, the vehicle by which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, and ecosystem of spiritual possibilities.964
Without a lyrical language rich with imagination and meaning, a person loses the capacity to envision a higher reality, and by default, is condemned to the strict confines of the rational mind. In contrast to reason, poetic symbols fill the heart with beauty and 962 All religious traditions have their fundamentalist and literalist adherents, of course, but Hinduism and Buddhism have been broadly open to change. Daoism (Taoism) and Confucianism, the traditional Chinese religions, are more enigmatic in that less is known of their development since the Communist Revolution. In earlier times, both demonstrated a cosmopolitan side in their responses to the appearance of Buddhism in China, where religious ideas were traded back and forth among these traditions.
963 A great problem for artificial intelligence is the subtlety of language. Nuance is difficult to reduce to a software program. Even as such programs are refined, this problem persists.
964 Wade Davis, The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World, 3.
wonder, both of which are essential for religion and depth psychology. Also, as Alfred North Whitehead understood, philosophy is at its best when inspired by wonder.
Such language touches upon the vast potential hidden within the unconscious, the springboard from which religion and myth have always arisen. This hidden springboard, Jung believed, is preparing humanity for a dramatic transformation of consciousness, now at the end of the age of Pisces. Instead of rigorously defending dogma, religions everywhere must now recognize the symbolic nature of their beliefs while relying on poetic language to enrich their highest values.965 Soulful images can even transform the old doctrine of original sin (not found in the New Testament but fully expressed by St. Augustine) into the universal recognition that alienation from one’s spiritual depths results in the suffering and despair that existential poets and novelists have so elegantly written about. It does not matter whether those spiritual depths are understood as coming from the Christian God, Jung’s God-image, Tillich’s ground of Being, atman, bodhichitta (wisdom mind), or Buddhist Enlightenment. When consciousness is cut off from the nourishing roots of the unconscious, it leaves individuals vulnerable to possession by the darker forces that are also hidden deep within them. Deliverance from these unruly passions is never bestowed from on high outside the individual but depends on a transformation from within where the true alchemical transmutation occurs. This understanding is closer to the Islamic tradition of Sufism and to the teachings of St. Paul than any later doctrine that suggests salvation comes from correct (orthodox) belief and ritual.
Historian Derek K. Wilson (1935- ) explores the intertwining of philosophy, science and theology found in the period between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). In reflecting on the various individuals that stand out in this period, he agrees with Tillich and Jung when he says: In truth, our story has no end, just as it had no beginning…. The vastness of the universe and the complexities of our own humanity alike convince us that we are both doomed and privileged to go on exploring…. But the belief in the all-sufficiency of the human intellect
… supposedly, solves more problems than it creates. That is a myth—
and a dangerous myth. If we ever stop wondering about ‘life, the 965 One can witness the calm expressions of Episcopal, Methodist, and Presbyterian forms, along with Pentecostal and black church enthusiasm, as well as more radical versions like Jehovah’s Witnesses, Latter Day Saints (Mormon), Christian Science, and other groups. Yet many of the varieties found in Africa and Latin America, often including indigenous rituals and ideas, are alien to and largely ignored by the congregations in the United States.
406 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
universe and everything’ … our spirits will implode; we shall become beings that exist merely because we exist, meaningless cyphers in a meaningless cosmos.966
We have arrived at a major inflection point in history, a time filled with challenge and opportunity for transformation when humanity, despite its incipient tribalism, is more interconnected than ever before. Perhaps the challenge, most readily symbolized by the very real threat of human-caused climate change and nuclear weapons, represents the dawn of a new age. Though we face an increasing dystopian society with its culture wars tearing our communities apart, our social fabric is more diverse and accepting today than in the past, especially within the younger generations who are more open to different races, immigrants, ideas, and to evolving values. They are also deeply concerned about making the planet habitable for future generations.
We thus seem to be living through a propitious moment, a Kairos—or fourth metamorphosis of the gods—which calls for a radical transition to a new level of consciousness in which religion and spirituality must be a significant component. As we have often noted, regardless of outworn dogmas and beliefs, religious institutions are still relevant because they preserve and celebrate the ancient symbols and sacred rites that over many centuries have helped people awaken to the transcendent core of their individual being and to fill their hearts with love and wonder.967 The teleological and creative nature of the heart’s longings thus reflects the primal forces that were first unleashed at the beginning of the universe. It is only through them, after all, that humanity can ascend to love’s wellspring by reaching upward to the transcendent height that is our birthright.
Throughout the book we have been arguing that the Self is interchangeable with our definition of soul. As such, the soul is the archetypal well from which the most noble feelings can be drawn, including compassion, love, beauty, and those wonderful moments of spiritual awakening that are often experienced as moments of grace. This 966 Derek K. Wilson, A Magical World, 289-290.
967 There are numerous books written on the future of religion from philosophical, sociological, and anthropological perspectives, and most of them have been ignored here. This is not because they have no value; indeed, they are rich in insights and possibilities. It is because history has a way of surprising us, and so we make no predictions about the form and nature of religions in the future. We do indicate what we believe is necessary for their survival, for we believe that religion has a profound role to play in the health and welfare of humanity.
eternal spring can be likened to the words Jesus spoke to the Samaritan women at the well, when he said:
Whoever drinks of this [ordinary well] water
will get thirsty again;
but anyone who drinks the water that I shall give
will never be thirsty again:
the water I give
will turn into a spring inside him, welling up to eternal life.968
We contend that Jung’s individuation process, at least in its later stages, is meant to arouse the spiritual fires of the soul, for only then can life become truly whole. Further, we argue that Tillich’s God, defined as the ground of Being, is the fountainhead from which the soul draws such inspiration. We feel these two ideas alone are sufficient to build on in the future as humanity strives to reimagine how religion can be renewed and strengthened in the coming age. Though dogmatic and authoritarian religious practices may be repugnant to many enlightened souls, a spirit of love can still be rekindled in the spiritual embers of our age by reimagining religion along the lines of Tillich’s theology and Jung’s psychology of religion.
Love can be understood in many ways, but its religious meaning is often equated with transcendent states that fill the heart with compassion. It is quite likely that this is the interpretation that St. Paul had in mind when he wrote: If I have all the eloquence of men or of angels, but speak without love, I am simply a gong booming or a cymbal clashing. If I have the gift of prophecy, understanding all the mysteries there are, and knowing everything, and I have faith in all its fullness, to move mountains, but without love, then I am nothing at all. If I give away all that I possess, piece by piece, and if I even let them take my body to burn it, but am without love, it will do me no good whatever.969
Two thousand years have passed since these words were written by St. Paul to his disciples in Corinth. Today, the future fate of the world is calling us, as it did then, to renew and strengthen our relationship to the transcendent source within each of us, the numinous depths from which love flows.
Will we answer the call?
968 The Jerusalem Bible: John,4: 13-14.
969 The Jerusalem Bible: 1 Corinthians, 13: 1-3.
EPILOGUE
All that is hidden, all that is plain, I have come to know, instructed by Wisdom who designed them all.
For within her is a spirit intelligent, holy,
unique, manifold, subtle,
active, incisive, unsullied,
lucid, invulnerable, benevolent, sharp,
irresistible, beneficent, loving to man,
steadfast, dependable, unperturbed,
almighty, all-surveying,
penetrating all intelligent, pure
and most subtle spirits;
for Wisdom is quicker to move than any motion;
she is so pure, she pervades and permeates all things.
She is a breath of the power of God,
pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty;
hence nothing impure can find its way into her.
She is reflection of the eternal light,
untarnished mirror of God’s active power,
image of his goodness.
Although alone, she can do all;
herself unchanging, she makes all thing new.
In each generation she passes into holy souls,
she makes them friends of God and prophets;
for God loves only the man who lives with Wisdom.
She is indeed more splendid than the sun,
she outshines all the constellations;
compared with light, she takes first place,
for light must yield to night,
but over Wisdom evil can never triumph.970
970 Jerusalem Bible: The Book of Wisdom, 7:21-30
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INDEX
A
Abraxas · 344
Absence of meaning in life · 226
Academy, Plato's · 80
Achil es · 34, 56, 275
active imagination · 20, 289, 309, 334, 349
Acts of the Apostles · 114
Adams, James Luther · 247
Adams, Samuel · 274
Advaita Vedanta · 213, 320
agape · 297
Ahab, Captain · 36
alchemy · 73, 116, 282, 289, 330, 361
American Revolution · 98
amor intel ectualis dei · 132
analogies and metaphors · 160
analogy of the cave · 83
anamnesis · 84, 322
anatta (no-self) doctrine · 318
Anaxagoras · 64, 66
anima · 63, 299, 302, 312, 328, 333, 338, 339, 341, 342, 343
anima and animus · 299
Anima Mundi · 330
Answer to Job · 20, 23, 41, 136, 231, 294, 302, 326, 349, 359, 360, 365, 366, 369, 370, 372, 373, 374, 385, 387, 388
Antichrist · 385
Aphrodite · 33, 56, 311
apocalypse · 40, 115, 271, 353, 368, 384
Apocalypse · 384, 386
Aquinas, St. Thomas · 17, 45, 50, 96, 101, 120, 121, 123, 133, 167, 243, 249, 257, 395
archetypal energies · 34, 168, 169
archetypal foundation · 7
archetype is not just an inactive form · 347
Archetypes · 136, 303, 311, 312, 314
archetypes may possess a rudimentary consciousness · 373
Ares · 56
Aristotle · 13, 48, 52, 57, 66, 67, 73, 78, 80, 87, 97, 101, 102, 103, 112, 120, 132, 133, 166, 167, 173, 182, 188, 262, 265
Aristotle, first premises · 92
Aristotle, The Philosopher · 96
Armstrong, Karen · 95, 101, 173, 228, 233, 257, 296, 322, 402
astrology · 22, 311
Astrology · 164
atman · 318, 319, 320, 321, 405
atman is brahman · 320
Atman is Brahman · 132
atoms have mental properties · 182
430 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
Augustine · 1, 45, 50, 102, 118, 119, 120, 123, 295, 376
Axial age · 234
Axial Age · 233
Aziz, Robert · 303, 314
B
Barthez · 159, 162
Barthez, Paul Joseph · 159
Beal, Tomothy K. · 22
Beasley-Murray, Stephen · 206, 211, 392
Being · 3, 9, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 27, 28, 37, 38, 42, 45, 46, 47, 49, 52, 53, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 73, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 84, 85, 86, 87, 91, 92, 93, 97, 102, 104, 107, 116, 119, 131, 134, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 147, 173, 176, 177, 178, 182, 184, 186, 191, 193, 194, 195, 198, 200, 201, 202, 206, 208, 211, 213, 215, 217, 219, 220, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 254, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 275, 286, 288, 291, 295, 306, 313, 316, 320, 326, 327, 329, 349, 354, 368, 377, 380, 391, 392, 398, 399, 401, 402, 404, 405, 407
Being is ultimately One · 46
Being,
as source · 7
empirically understood · 9
Being, mystery of · 16, 59, 173, 273, 287
Bergson, Henri · 162, 210
Berk, Tjeu van der · 370
Big Bang · 10, 12, 47, 66, 74, 76, 97, 174, 177, 181, 187, 191, 226, 307, 399
Blake, Wil iam · 144, 202, 359, 360, 382
Blavatsky, H.P. · 220
bodhichitta · 405
Boehme, Jacob · 123, 360
Bohm, David · 194, 195, 196, 200, 306
Bohr, Niels · 105, 106, 178, 198, 315
Book of Revelation · 270, 286, 350, 354, 355, 359, 370, 371, 382, 383, 384, 385, 387, 389, 400, 401
Bradley, Francis Herbert · 142
Brooks, David · 301, 356
Buddhi · 220
Buddhism · 6, 14, 15, 17, 83, 181, 213, 215, 254, 256, 295, 308, 318, 319, 320, 382, 403
Buddhist · 5, 37, 74, 93, 117, 158, 295, 318, 320, 400
Buddhist enlightenment · 256
Buddhist philosophy · 158, 218, 429
Buddhist scriptures · 158, 319
Burckhardt, Titus · 124
Burke, Edmund · 364
C
Cahil , Thomas · 275
Calasso, Roberto · 78
Campbel , Joseph · 40, 41, 139, 158
Camus, Albert · 23, 134, 226, 263, 267
Card, Charles · 314
Cartesian duality · 101
categorical imperative, Kant's · 104, 105
categories, Aristotle's · 103, 202
Chalmers, David · 128, 161, 175, 179, 183
Chandogya Upanishad · 318
Christ · 8, 18, 35, 36, 48, 49, 60, 79, 99, 111, 113, 114, 119, 202, 210, 230, 231, 239, 254, 255, 257, 261, 266, 269, 273, 276, 290, 293, 301, 303, 304, 307, 308, 326, 334, 342, 343, 348, 354, 361, 363, 368, 369, 370, 371, 377, 378, 379, 380, 382, 385, 392, 397, 399, 400, 402
Christ as a cosmic presence · 115
Christ, as symbol · 7
Christian God · 12, 209, 347, 405
Christian narrative is a story · 113
Christian psychology · 305
Christian symbolism · 21, 282, 371
Christian theology · 15, 23, 59, 65, 74, 101, 111, 120, 151, 160, 235, 249, 266, 283
coincidentia oppositorum · 211
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor · 16, 143, 145, 153, 202, 204
col ective psyche · 35, 119, 169, 190, 247, 333, 340, 355, 362, 383, 400
col ective psychosis · 293, 352, 365, 366
col ective unconscious · 9, 12, 19, 25, 27, 59, 136, 291, 308, 311, 327, 355, 370, 389, See also objective psyche
commonality amongst religions · 233
compassion · 30, 47, 177, 229, 232, 242, 294, 320, 400, 401, 406, 407
Concept, Hegel's · 135
Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan · 15, 102, 111
consciousness and our capacity for love · 27
consciousness is a great mystery · 7
conservatism · 5, 30, 40, 101, 209, 231, 237, 311, 312, 356, 363, 364, 365, 367, 387, 403
Copernicus · 24
Corbett, Lionel · 296, 316, 318, 323, 395
Corbett. Lionel · 296
Corbin, Henry · 195
Corpus Hermeticum · 116
Cosimo di’ Medici · 116
Cosmos and Psyche · 39, 312
Cottingham, John · 101, 298, 403
culture wars · 23, 406
Currivan, Jude · 85
D
d’Espagnat, Bernard · 193
d’Ḗspagnat, Bernard · 161
daimon · 71, 75, 86, 386
daimones · 74
Dalai Lama · 298, 302
Damascus, Paul on the road to · 115
Dante’s Divine Comedy · 33
dark night of the soul · 41, 323
Darling, David · 184
Darwinism, current state of · 96
Davis, Wade · 404
decisive question · 230
Declaration of Independence · 98
432 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
definition of the archetypes · 312
Dennett, Daniel · 175, 176, 181, 182
Depth perception · 179
Descartes, Rene · 12, 15, 56, 97, 100, 101, 103, 106, 127, 128, 130, 131, 159, 298, 307
Desmet, Mattias · 366
deus absconditus · 71, 72, 367, 403
Dionysius · 122
divine opposites · 206, 296
Divine Truth · 21
Dourley, John · 263, 264, 272
Dreyfus, Hubert · 33, 34, 36, 56
Durkheim · 233
Dyson, Freeman · 10
E
Eckhart, Meister · 123, 254, 320
Edinger, Edward · 35
Edsall, Thomas · 356
Einstein · 10, 66, 88, 105, 164, 178, 195, 196, 197, 199, 201, 226, 258
élan vital · 162
Eliade, Mircea · 45, 209, 210, 211, 212, 251, 255, 256, 398, 401, 402
Elijah · 340, 343
Eliot, T.S. · 249, 397
Emergence · 130
Emerson, Ralph Waldo · 16, 144, 146, 147, 148, 153, 203, 218, 219, 288
Empedocles · 53, 58, 60, 68, 73, 74, 75, 76, 86, 88, 91, 292, 339
empirical experience · 160, 161
enantiodromia · 71, 367, 403
Enlightenment · 9, 12, 16, 22, 23, 29, 36, 39, 40, 41, 45, 59, 60, 75, 76, 91, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 111, 123, 124, 143, 160, 167, 227, 237, 318, 347, 351, 362, 385, 389, 395, 405
Epicureanism · 78, 89
Epicureans · 89, 90, 91
Epicurus · 89
epiphenomenon · 45, 130, 175, 184, 307, 355
Eranos conference · 246
Eros · 290, 338, 342, 353, 354, 385
eternal blueprint · 11, 46, 176
Eternal Truth, exists in Being · 47
Eternal Wisdom · 21
existential crisis · 5, 9, 13, 18, 21, 23, 28, 30, 31, 33, 35, 36, 40, 48, 50, 59, 148, 169, 213, 220, 249, 256, 263, 269, 317, 333, 348, 351, 360, 391, 395
existentialism · 95, 125, 134, 263, 267, 269
F
faith in Christ is salvific · 115
falsifiability · 164, 165
Fascism · 25, 40, 348, 362, 366, 367, 387
Faust · 279, 280
feedback properties · 179
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb · 18, 133, 134, 135, 137, 237
final hour when we cease to exist · 252
First World War · 13, 27, 235, 238, 246, 384, 389
Fisher King · 397
Form, Platonic and Aristotelian · 13, 52, 57, 67, 80, 82, 84, 86, 88, 90, 91, 93, 120, 121, 133, 146, 265, 399
Frank, Adam · 22, 157
Frankl, Victor · 25, 268
Franz, Marie Louise von · 369, 387
Free wil · 186
Freud, Sigmund · 13, 19, 134, 143, 204, 210, 241, 281, 284, 294, 313, 325, 331, 401
G
Galileo · 58, 66, 104
Ganeri, Jonardon · 83, 176
Gefter, Amanda · 106
Geldard, Richard G. · 16, 45, 147, 288
General Theory of Relativity · 195
Gerson, Michael · 377
Gleiser, Marcelo · 157
Global warming · 395
gnōsis · 113
Gnostics · 75, 88, 111, 113, 114, 119, 269, 321, 342
God as supreme being · 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 22, 23, 26, 27, 32, 33, 35, 36, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 56, 63, 66, 71, 74, 78, 79, 87, 90, 91, 93, 94, 97, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104, 111, 119, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 126, 128, 130, 131, 132, 137, 138, 141, 143, 146, 150, 151, 157, 158, 159, 160, 163, 166, 167, 174, 182, 188, 194, 198, 200, 206, 208, 209, 210, 212, 215, 217, 221, 226, 227, 228, 229, 232, 240, 246, 249, 253, 254, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 266, 267, 268, 269, 271, 272, 273, 275, 277, 278, 279, 283, 284, 288, 292, 295, 296, 300, 304, 308, 310, 316, 319, 320, 321, 322, 325, 326, 327, 333, 336, 338, 339, 340, 343, 344, 348, 349, 350, 351, 359, 360, 367, 372, 373, 374, 375, 376, 377, 378, 379, 380, 381, 382, 383, 385, 386, 388, 390, 391, 398, 402, 403, 407, 408
God of Abraham · 137
God-image · 206, 262, 288, 321, 322, 326, 333, 338, 341, 369, 377, 390, 405
gods are abandoned today · 347
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang van · 236, 238, 279, 280, 292, 293, 294
Goethe’s secret · 280
Goff, Philip · 301
golden age · 326
Goldstein, Rebecca Newberger · 79, 83
Gonne, Maud · 62, 63
Good, True, Beautiful · 30, 51, 55, 79, 86, 93, 141, 146, 177, 320
Gospel According to Thomas · 318
Gospel of Luke · 115
Gottlieb, Anthony · 75
Goullart, Peter · 298
grace · 257
Grace · 242
Grof, Stanislav · 215
434 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
H
Hanegraaff, Wouter J. · 117
Hannah, Barbara · 241, 242, 243, 245, 246, 250, 252, 279, 290, 414
haunting · 328
healing power · 19, 213, 293, 303, 316, 368
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich · 15, 18, 72, 134, 135, 136, 139, 143, 153, 163, 243, 384
Heidegger, Martin · 12, 243, 267
Heisenberg, Werner · 68
Heisig, James · 285
Helen, of Troy · 33, 34, 56, 275, 311
Hel enistic age · 31, 32
Heraclitus · 47, 53, 54, 58, 60, 64, 65, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 76, 77, 177, 264, 273, 292, 339, 367, 403
Hermes Trismegistus · 94, 116
Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination · 117
Hermetic works · 52, 117
Hero, journey of · 40, 41
Hetherington, Norriss S. · 94
hieros gamos · 136, 360, 375, 386, 388, 391
higher states of consciousness · 166
Hil man, James · 285, 298
Hindu · 48, 63, 66, 83, 107, 132, 209, 218, 220, 228, 259, 318, 319, 320, 336, 379, 387
Hinduism · 14, 17, 215, 254, 257, 403
Hobbes, Thomas · 99, 159
hologram · 84, 85, 194
Holt, Jim · 185
Holy Grail · 322, 397
Holy Spirit · 261, 326, 327, 338, 378, 379
holy transcends the subject-object structure of reality · 259
Homer · 33, 34, 56, 95, 275
Homeric Gods · 15, 82
homo religiosus · 402
hope for the future · 231
Hul , R.F.C. · 373, 387, 416
Hume, David · 13, 15, 98, 102, 103, 104, 175
I
Idealism · 15, 89, 103, 106, 111, 124, 125, 126, 135, 139, 141, 142, 145, 153, 157, 219, 227, 238
Idealist · 106, 126, 152, 273
Imaginal Realm · 195
imago Dei · 102, 381
Imago Dei · 19, 285, 304, 308
Individuation · 20, 34, 232, 291, 310, 361
initiatory journey · 323
irrational · 28, 40, 90, 164, 166, 333, 336, 337, 347, 352, 353, 357, 358, 365, 367, 375, 385
Isis and Osiris · 112, 370
J
James, Wil iam · 53, 129, 152, 165, 214, 215, 225, 245, 250, 259, 394
Jefferson, Thomas · 98
Jesus, historical · 18, 255
jñᾱna · 114
Job’s story is our story · 380
Johnson, John Hanlon · 225
Josselyn, Franklyn D. · 3
Jung had a dramatic experience · 277
justice · 27, 47, 79, 125, 151, 169, 177, 245, 246, 274, 291, 355, 358, 362, 383, 384
K
Kagan, Robert · 274
Kairos · 247, 264, 388, 406
Kant, Immanuel · 13, 15, 18, 36, 61, 102, 103, 104, 105, 133, 134, 135, 137, 139, 159, 160, 207, 215, 237, 243, 245, 319
Kaufmann, Walter · 151
Kazantzakis, Nikos · 35
Kel y, Sean · 33, 34, 36, 56, 135
Kenny, Anthony · 58
Kerygma · 21, 249, 265, 399
King, Martin Luther · 291
Koch, Kristof · 184
Kripal, Jeffery · 6, 7, 82, 138, 148, 151
Kronman, Anthony · 15, 102, 111, 112, 113, 196, 265
L
Lachman, Gary · 117
Lampert, Laurence · 81, 150
lapis philosophorum · 73
legitimacy of al religious traditions · 251
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm · 15, 87, 126, 128, 129, 130
letters attributed to Paul · 115
Levy, Paul · 28, 51, 168
liberalism · 4, 30, 40, 98, 99, 125, 204, 236, 241, 243, 253, 274, 300, 312, 358, 362, 364, 385, 387
Liverpool dream · 335, 336, 337, 398
Locke, John · 99, 103, 135, 160, 163, 243
logos · 160
Logos · 21, 48, 52, 65, 70, 71, 72, 89, 125, 256, 338, 340, 342, 354, 385, 398, 399
loss of spiritual traditions · 391
love · 7, 13, 21, 27, 37, 38, 45, 47, 50, 70, 74, 86, 96, 120, 125, 126, 128, 132, 133, 141, 142, 145, 146, 152, 158, 169, 174, 177, 179, 181, 195, 202, 203, 211, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 226, 228, 229, 230, 234, 236, 237, 238, 239, 241, 243, 247, 253, 255, 257, 266, 273, 274, 292, 296, 297, 298, 299, 308, 310, 319, 326, 337, 338, 340, 341, 342, 343, 348, 349, 351, 354, 355, 361, 363, 368, 398, 400, 401, 406, 407
Love and Strife · 74
LSD · 215, 216, 217
Lucretius · 89
Luther, Martin · 24, 123, 352
436 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
M
Madison, James · 98
magisteria · 225
Makari, George · 158, 159
Man’s Search for Meaning · 25, 268
Manas · 220
mandala · 310
Manuel, Frank E. · 22
Marcus Aurelius · 89
Marriage of Heaven and Hel · 359
marriage of the lamb with his bride · 386
Martin, P.W. · 6, 17, 27, 309, 396
Martin, P.W. · 310
Mary Magdalene · 113
materialism · 9, 10, 13, 29, 89, 90, 95, 96, 124, 125, 127, 142, 159, 162, 174, 178, 181, 213, 226, 284, 399
materialistic science · 13
mathematics · 57, 58, 66, 68, 69, 77, 87, 107, 164, 177, 183, 198
Matilal, Bimal Krishna · 232
McEvil ey, Thomas · 51
McTaggart, John McTaggart Ellis · 142
Meaning is ultimately derived from archetypal symbols · 31
meditation · 7, 17, 47, 51, 65, 86, 92, 117, 158, 162, 253, 298, 308, 319
Mellon, Mary · 389
Melvil e, Herman · 36
Menelaus · 33, 56
metamorphoses of the Gods · 23
metamorphosis of the gods · 59
metaphysical postulates · 46, 59, 77, 79
metapsychoanalysis · 210
mind and body derive from something more basic · 131
Mind, for lack of a better name · 17, 21, 56, 90, 91, 105, 107, 131, 133, 135, 139, 159, 176, 177, 178, 179, 181, 183, 187, 188, 189, 193, 194, 196, 198, 306
Mirandola, Pico del a · 94
Mithraism · 342
Moby Dick · 36
monads · 126, 127, 128, 130
monism · 182, 197, 200
Montesquieu · 98
mundus archetypus · 280, 370
mysterium tremendum et fascinans · 144, 205, 206, 214, 334, 344
mystical experience · 215, 217, 218, 307, 315, 319, 321, 360
mythos · 18, 20, 23, 24, 36, 49, 54, 59, 60, 82, 95, 104, 301, 303, 317, 348, 370, 380, 389, 391, 392, 398
myths of the Fal · 269
N
Nag Hammadi Library · 117
Nagel, Thomas · 180, 182, 183, 184, 190, 191
Nagy, Marilyn · 125, 126, 273, 285, 294
Nahmias, Eddy · 187
near-death experience · 387, 388, 389
Neo-Darwinism · 189
Neoplatonists · 7, 8, 15, 16, 48, 50, 52, 58, 78, 86, 91, 92, 113, 114, 201, 211, 219
neutral monism · 182
new age · 36, 153, 167, 347, 349, 351, 368, 391, 393, 394, 395, 399, 406
New Age · 23, 24, 153, 226, 389, 401
New Being · 256, 291, 338, 399
New Jerusalem · 360, 370, 371, 386
new vision · 19, 36, 37, 170, 227, 291, 301, 317, 333, 377, 391
Newton, Isaac · 127, 163, 164, 183, 189, 196
Niebuhr, Reinhold · 134, 245, 249, 250
Nietzsche, Friedrich · 16, 22, 25, 33, 50, 134, 148, 149, 150, 152, 163, 167, 240, 267, 402, 403
nirvana · 318
No. 1 personality · 278, 331
No. 2 personality · 278, 279, 280, 331, 332
No.1 personality · 332
noesis · 79, 80
noesis, a numinous revelation · 84
Norse mythology · 27, 336
Nothingness is the same as the ful ness · 376
numinosum · 288, 289, 316, 323
numinous experience · 7, 9, 19, 20, 55, 117, 152, 186, 200, 203, 205, 208, 209, 210, 214, 215, 218, 229, 253, 259, 263, 266
numinous,
sarcred dimension as · 7
use of term · 7
O
objective psyche · 9, 12, 19, 47, 85, 190, 221, 228, 258, 271, 286, 305, 314, 325, 326, 327, 354, 368, 370
Odysseus · 328, 340
Olney, James · 53, 58, 60, 63, 67, 68, 70, 72, 73, 74, 80, 88, 112, 144, 231
One, the Source of al (Plotinus) · 91
ontology · 7, 12, 18, 102, 142, 173, 243, 264
Ontology · 6
optimism · 394
Oration on the Dignity of Man · 94
Origen of our period · 250
origin of the universe · 10
Orphism · 65
Otto, Rudolf · 17, 144, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 213, 214, 215, 219, 225, 242, 255, 256, 259, 289, 315, 334, 344
Over-Soul · 146, 147
P
Pagels, Elaine · 383, 384
Pan · 112
Pandora’s box · 355
panpsychism · 182, 186
pantheism · 144, 228, 376
Parapsychology · 281
438 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
Parker, James · 291, 397
Parmenides · 15, 52, 53, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 75, 76, 80, 82, 88, 91, 93, 105, 119, 137, 142, 173, 191, 198, 199, 264
Päs, Heinrich · 105, 193, 198, 199
Pauck, Wilhelm and Marion · 235
Paul · 23, 28, 32, 45, 49, 113, 114, 115, 118, 187, 200, 293, 427
Pauli, Wolfgang · 12, 67, 178, 314
Penrose, Roger · 88, 185
Philemon · 337, 340
Philo of Alexandria · 113
Philosophia Perennis · 60
Philosophy tends to be fine grained · 55
philosophy, a way of life · 79
pistis · 402
Plato · 7, 8, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 21, 48, 52, 53, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 66, 67, 68, 69, 72, 73, 76, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 97, 105, 113, 114, 116, 121, 125, 132, 133, 136, 144, 146, 150, 153, 160, 173, 177, 199, 208, 218, 219, 220, 262, 264, 265, 269, 273, 275, 294, 310, 327, 342, 370, 398
Plato, esoteric · 81
Plato’s Forms · 13, 67, 80, 88, 136
pleroma · 88
Pleroma · 64, 75, 376
Plotinus · 52, 91, 92, 113, 218, 219
Pope, Alexander · 157
Popper, Karl · 164
potential for consciousness · 181
pragmatism · 152
prayer · 7, 17, 47, 51, 117, 119, 323
Presocratic philosophers · 56, 57, 58, 60, 64, 76, 90, 264, 398
Presocratics · 52, 85
Pre-Socratics · 48, 52, 347
primordial wisdom · 9, 18, 38, 111, 151, 153, 157, 170, 253, 271, 273, 347, 354, 362, 385, 392, 395, 399
Proclus · 113
Protestant principle · 248
psyche and physis · 314
Psyche, as field · 17
psychedelic research · 215
psychic field · 306
psychic forces · 41
psychoid · 300, 303, 310, 313, 314, 315, 329, 375, 384
psychoid nature of the archetype · 313
psychological disintegration · 169
psychology · 279
Pythagoras · 11, 53, 57, 58, 60, 62, 64, 66, 67, 68, 74, 76, 77, 105, 177, 264
Q
qualities, primary and secondary · 45, 92, 103, 104, 181, 182, 338, 376, 385
Quantum entanglement · 196
quantum mechanics · 105, 163, 198, 200
Quantum physics · 106, 197, 200
R
Racism · 363
Rationalists · 100
reality as an interconnected and continuous whole · 198
reality of evil · 255
Red Book · 282, 323
reincarnation · 65, 74, 88, 89, 250, 319
relativism · 163, 165
religion and enlightened reason, struggle between · 40
religions, the cal ing of al · 7
Religious symbols · 229
rhizome · 53, 54, 70, 72, 144
Richards, Wil iam · 215, 216, 217, 218, 259
Rohr, Richard · 125
Romantic movement · 148
Romantic Movement · 137, 142, 143, 145, 203
romantic poets · 13, 16
Romantic vision · 203, 204
Romanticism · 96, 111, 125, 126, 144, 157, 227
Rousseau · 97
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques · 99
Rovel i, Carlo · 49
Royce, Herbert · 245
Royce, Josiah · 142
S
Salome · 340, 341, 343
Satan · 232, 292, 293, 354, 369, 372, 373, 376, 377, 386
Schel ing, Friedrich · 15, 18, 87, 134, 135, 200, 237, 243
Schel ing, Wilhelm Joseph von · 134
schematization · 205, 208, 214
Schleiermacher, Friedrich · 249
Schopenhauer, Arthur · 16, 137, 138, 163
Schweitzer, Albert · 115
Second World War · 27
Self · 8, 19, 26, 27, 34, 84, 102, 136, 139, 206, 212, 213, 229, 257, 260, 270, 273, 295, 296, 300, 302, 303, 304, 309, 310, 313, 316, 318, 320, 321, 322, 326, 336, 337, 349, 374, 375, 386, 396, 398, 399, 404, 406
Seneca · 89
Sermon on the Mount · 227, 232
Seven Sermons to the Dead · 328, 329, 337
Shamdasani · 331
Shamdasani, Sonu · 325
Sheehan< Jonathan · 29
Simply accept that you are accepted · 242
Sims, Michael · 394
Singer, June · 359
singularity · 11, 47, 49, 177
Smagdarine or Emerald Tablet · 116
Smith, Adam · 98
Smith, Huston · 202, 210
440 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
Smolin, Lee · 61, 168, 192
Socrates · 13, 15, 17, 34, 35, 52, 57, 66, 68, 78, 79, 80, 82, 85, 87, 132, 173, 294, 342
Socrates helps a slave boy solve a geometrical problem · 84
Socrates, inner voice of · 85
Son of Man · 286, 385
soul · 297, 300
soul does not speak in words · 349
Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind · 158
soulful experience · 169
Spinoza, Baruch de · 15, 48, 100, 103, 126, 130, 131, 132, 133, 146, 157, 159, 179, 181, 194, 195, 196, 197, 200, 376
spirit of the depths · 331, 332, 333, 341, 350
spirit of the times · 331, 333
Spiritual discernment · 20
spiritual, but not religious · 14
spiritus rector · 263, 284, 316, 321, 349, 393
St. Augustine · 32, 91, 100, 111, 167, 395, 405
St. Paul · 19, 32, 35, 119, 121, 231, 239, 290, 293, 301, 402, 404, 405, 407
Stein, Murray · 276, 282, 283, 284, 299, 302, 310, 315, 321, 322, 369, 391
Stewart, Matthew · 130, 132
Stoicism · 89
Stoics · 78, 89, 90, 91, 122
Stone, Ronald · 134
strangers in the world · 262
Strawson, Galen · 185
string theory · 85, 164, 183, 226
Superhumanities, The · 7, 82
Swimme, Brian Thomas · 6, 10, 11, 17, 21
symbol of the cross · 308, 381
symbolic life · 20
Symbols emerge over generations · 14
synchronicity · 19, 139, 283, 291, 312, 313, 314, 315, 329, 349
Systematic Theology · 4, 18, 21, 134, 206, 247, 249, 250, 251, 258, 259, 260, 391, 399
syzygy · 299
T
Tao · 292, 320
Tao te ching, (Dao de jing) · 55, 202
Tarnas, Richard · 3, 39, 40, 41, 94, 120, 121, 137, 145, 152, 169, 312, 347, 352
teleological and creative nature of the soul · 406
teleological principles · 191
teleology · 60, 181, 188, 189, 190
The Changing of the Gods · 22
The Courage to Be · 89, 249
The Idea of the Holy · 209
The Matrix, film · 135
The One, How an Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics · 105
The Protestant Era · 248
The Quest for the Historical Jesus · 115
The Second Coming · 25, 26, 212, 396
The Secret of the Golden Flower · 337
theurgy · 15, 79, 86, 122, 398
Thompson, Evan · 157
Thoreau, Henry David · 16, 144, 147, 148
Thrice Greatest Hermes · 116
tikkun, restoration · 380
Til ich, Paul · 3
Til ich, foundation of theology · 9
Til ich, life · 236
Til ich, Paul · 39
Til ich, Protestant theologian · 18
Timaeus · 72, 76, 80, 86, 88
Tocquevil e, Alexis de · 99
Tolstoy, Leo · 226
Totalitarianism · 366
transcendent experiences · 17, 106, 166, 202, 259, 272
transcendent function · 293, 333, 342, 361, 379, 384
transcendent order · 9, 13, 52
transformative experiences · 8
transpersonal aspects of the psyche · 313
tree as universal symbol · 19, 188, 233, 289, 300, 321, 332, 336, 359, 383, 386, 398
tremendum et fascinosum · 259
Trinity, the · 260, 276, 338
true realists · 275
Tucker, Mary Evelyn · 6
Turner, J. Scott · 96
U
Übermensch · 150
UFO phenomenon · 329
Ulansey · 31, 35
Unitarian Universalists · 228
unity · 40, 55, 70, 74, 80, 92, 93, 115, 126, 127, 128, 134, 137, 145, 147, 149, 177, 197, 199, 211, 218, 219, 302, 314, 322, 379
universal belief · 9
universal Mind · 137
Universal Mind · 66, 76, 77, 88, 413
universal mystery · 377
universal substance · 126, 130, 131, 179, 194, 195, 196, 200
universe is infused with meaning · 401
universes of truth · 225
unus mundus · 137, 303, 306, 314, 323
uroboros · 63, 70
V
Vienna Circle · 163
Virgin Birth · 37
Virgin Mary · 261
virtues and vices are brothers · 386
vital principle · 159
vitalism · 96, 190
Voltaire · 97
442 AWAKENING TO THE MYSTERY OF BEING
W
Wheeler, John Archibald · 3
Whitehead, Alfred North · 87, 173, 404
Whitman, Walt · 141
Wildberg, Christian · 78
Wilhelm, Richard · 15, 126, 337
Wilson, Derek K. · 405
Wittgenstein, Ludwig · 87, 166
Wordsworth, Wil iam · 16, 124, 141, 144, 145, 202, 298
Y
Yahweh and Sophia · 386
Yeats, Wil iam Butler · 25, 26, 27, 36, 37, 53, 58, 60, 62, 64, 68, 70, 72, 80, 212, 396
yoga · 77, 242
Yong, Ed · 179, 180
Z
Zarathustra · 150, 240, 403
Zeller, Max · 392
Zeno · 61
Zeruneith, Keld · 34
Zeus · 70, 388
Zhuangzi · 322
About the Authors
William Walter Renwick. Bill grew up in Montana and entered the Air Force as an officer in 1968 in the middle of the Viet Nam War. While stationed in South Carolina, he recounts that on a sunny, Saturday morning, while reading Martin Buber’s I and Thou, he had a powerful numinous experience. Although he considered himself an atheist at the time, he remembers praying, “Although I know you do not exist God, I dedicate my life to you anyway.” Only much later did he come to realize that what he had dedicated himself to, was the sacredness of that moment. Looking back over his life, he now realizes that he has, in a strange, disconnected way, kept that vow.
After leaving the Air Force, Bill earned a Computer Science degree and had a career in the computer field. When he was hired by Hewlett Packard in 2003, they gave him an office in San Francisco, so he could work for them and go back to school to get a PhD in philosophy where he wrote a dissertation titled
“Numinosity and the Resolution of Opposites in Jung’s Psychology.”
Bill was married in 1976 and has two sons, David and Peter. The marriage did not last but he still loves his former wife, Gabrielle.
Elton Arthur Hall. Elton, born in California, moved around (Texas, Wyoming, Colorado, Oregon) as a child, but spent most of his youth in California. His early literalist Christianity was dissolved by his encounter with science and the theology of Paul Tillich. Graduating from Occidental College with a degree in philosophy, he did his graduate work at the University of California, Santa Barbara, also in philosophy. Over the next three decades, he taught philosophy and religious studies at Moorhead State University (Minnesota), California State University, Fresno, Oxnard College, and Moorpark College. Over the years he offered lifelong learning classes in Santa Barbara, Camarillo, and at the Osher Institute at Boise State University in Idaho.
He has been influenced by Hindu philosophy, Buddhist philosophy and psychology, Paul Tillich’s many writings, the mystical philosophy of Muhyiddin ibn al-‘Arabi (1165-1240), and the Theosophical writings of H.P. Blavatsky.
Reviewing his life from the present, he feels that some invisible hand has guided him in those moments when decisions affected the future course of his existence.
Elton married Katherine Lennard in 1961 and they recently celebrated their 63rd anniversary. They have two daughters and three grandchildren.
Document Outline
- Online Sources
- About the Authors