Attempts
The unconscious is a reservoir of the experiences of terrestrial life. It, in a sense, remembers everything from the dawn of life to the present. In it resonates all that was and, as the power of life, all that wants to be. It is a formidable force. As a type of living archive it has a structure, or more accurately, a format for communicating itself forward. Its forms for forward movement are akin to those Kantian a priori forms the rational mind has to move itself forward into the world: the notions of time, space, substantiality, relation, etc. that organize the field of sensations in order to make them workable bits of information creating a navigable world. The “forms” the unconscious applies are symbols. The prime symbols of our existence are the arche-types. The unconscious constantly reaches out to the conscious mind to direct it toward pragmatic positivity and integrity of self and world. When its the attempts are ignored or frustrated, it counteracts. It forces forward frustrations that command attention be paid it. It wants to challenge into growth, but it also seeks balance.[i]
The voice of the unconscious is heard not merely in the dreams that come by night, but in those that come by day—the tales, narratives, and myths, the music, ritualized moves and dance, the wealth of artistic expressions that speak to us, to life, about the forces of life more profound than the ordinary, deeper in meaning than the everyday. There are also the forces we stand in and under—the emotions, fascinations, wonders, terrors—that flood across the internal life with a seeming life of their own, a life that appears to be not always reasonable or just, but always potently “other” and “above.” The prime symbol of this superior station that thrusts forth life is the arche-type of the divine centre and boundary, more succinctly, God. It is not God in-se, simply the source of our sense of a primal power. How we relate to that image, how we interact with that image is, not unexpectedly, of primal importance in the development of life, individual, social, terrestrial. This primal power-image is in its primitive apprehension amoral. Morality is an object of the human realm, of, as it were, post-paradisiac man. Thus the tales of gods have always had them acting in ways that confound the human want to divide things into good and evil, right and wrong. We read the God of the Hebrews is a “righteous God.” That is, he is–from the divine perspective–in an appropriate relationship to the situation. That is something other than the human notion of a scale in balance. The divinely appropriate may be something other than a balance. It may be a purposeful and growth-pragmatic counter-balance. The righteousness of the divine is a fearsome thing precisely because it is before, above, and beyond the human moral demands of an equitable state. The righteousness of God is the prerogative of his eternality, his being beyond the confines of the historical which he guides forward.
Jung, who proposed this God-image, this prime-power image, at the core of the psyche, disclaimed any drifting into the metaphysical. His concern was the God-image held within the psyche, not any reality that may or may not reside beyond it. He was an avowed phenomenologist, not a metaphysician. He examined the data of the psyche’s experience, nothing more. When he analyzed sacred writings he was engaged in neither exegesis nor theological speculation. His sole concern was to detect attempts by the psyche to express the inherent truth of man in the religious texts. Nevertheless, we can see in his idea of a psychically experiential God-image something of that which Christian theologians have named grace or a divine indwelling. Jung’s psychological investigations cannot be ignored in any theology that abides an unfolding revelation of God or of man’s understanding of the God whose creative print is said by virtue of either creation or grace to reside within. Theology, as a human endeavour, needs always to pencil in a sharper line here and there concerning its central interest: the church’s traditional conception of God if God is truly believed to be the prime mover of salvation history, of human history in its graced, its Spirit driven, thrust toward integrity. That being said, theology must never cease to acknowledge the non-conceptuality of God, the mysterium of God, the symbol-nature of our knowing of God.
That symbol nature needs to be acknowledged because a symbol is open to a panoply of meaning. It is a nucleus of energy without content except for meaning-fulness. That meaningfulness is given expression in being assimilated into conscious life, in being contextualized. In theological terms: the abiogenic and un-exhaustible Father becomes self-conscious through the Son whose mission is to be incarnate as conscious man. In this sense, in man God finds his self-consciousness.[ii] The symbol-nature of God for us is manifest in the unfolding understanding of God. The God-image humanity beholds and bows before has evolved with the capacities of the human psyche, with the deepening, the expanding of consciousness. That unfolding revelation has taken us from primitive animism wherein every force of nature is impregnated with the tincture, the numinosity of the divine and sacred, to the sanctity of the mother Earth who feeds and nourishes, to polytheism wherein holy mother Earth becomes one player in a cosmos of land and sea potentates under the brilliance of the singular heaven with its divine and paternal Sun, to a tribal monotheism, the triumph of one man’s god above the many, and lastly a universal monotheism. We have moved from gods to a supreme God, from gods who can die and rise again to a God who becomes man and so dies in his mortal nature and rises into his divine. God, says scripture, ever goes before us. Thus, no static conceptualization or ritualization of God can suffice as long as God references a dynamic above and beyond us. Christianity itself proclaims we can know God only spiritually, only in the Spirit in the Christ as his image. Image means imagination is at play. We can not conceptualize God. We cannot concretely know God. We can simply and only spiritually—psychically—experience God. Theology is the soul-science about the images of God one ought to hold to in order to healthily progress in life. In this theology reveals itself not a metaphysics about God, not a speculation about the nature of God in se, but a directory for the basic iconic dispositions proper for spiritual exercise and development. Realistically, theology can attempt no more. Avowedly Jung attempted no more. We have a God-image. The object of concern is how that image is conveyed, portrayed, carried-forward.
The ambivalence of God in sacred scripture
In the scriptures God is at times demandingly just, at others graciously merciful. He softens the hearts of some, and hardens those of others. There is the fearsomely incomprehensible God reflected in his two iconic agents, his “sons”: the ascended son, the Christ who brings grace and salvation, and the fallen “son,” Satan who brings temptation and damnation. While justice and mercy sit well with traditional theology, sit well with a parental God who needs to discipline as well as support, and while Hebrew scripture does present Satan among the “sons” of God who speaks before the court of God as the prosecutorial voice against man, and while in that same scriptural heritage divine wrath and whim can and do flare out in ways beyond our sense of what is reasonable, and while he who came to redeem all of creation will sit in a final cosmic judgment to separate the good children from the evil, the spiritual notion of a two-sided God, a two-faced God, a God of the two-edged sword seems not to sit that comfortably within the Christian claim that God is love hell-bent to bring all creation to perfection in his eternal embrace. Or does it?
Let us not look to the meta-physical notion of God, but to the God-image within. If this grace, and theologically that is what it needs be called, is there to propel us forward, it needs to counter those moves we by negligence, weakness, or deliberate and willful act make contrary to its creative pulse. There is in every life movements of life that feed the ego with self-importance, with self pre-tense, which allow it to ignore the propensity to hide the panoply of secret shames, failures, faults, anxieties and fears. That moment of focus away from the whole of self stirs into play a power to frustrate that hiding from reality in order to correct it. That is precisely what is being played out in the narrative of the Fall. Man hides in his shame, and God, who is his psychic centre and boundary, allows the hiding to morph into that from which man cannot hide—pain and suffering and longing—in order to awaken man, to sensitize man, to the world his hiding from reality and truth creates, and so to bluntly discipline man to look back, to turn back, to see the boundary of Paradise where the unity of life is ever bounded by illumination and sacrifice, by “flaming sword.” When man deludes himself that he can posses this divine within rather than be possessed by it, reality fragments, and so we read the tale of Babel. When man ignores the divine within and runs amok in his own pleasures, the real world is washed away, and so we read of the Flood. When man ignores the shadow within, steps over it, and identifies the ego with the God-image, then we look out our windows and see the world of war, and anger, and mayhem, the world of the Beast, and so we read Revelation. What, however, of the man who confronts his shadow and then looks to the God within?
Temptations
Jesus went to John the Baptist and submitted to a baptism of repentance. He than experienced the Spirit of God descend upon him as light and the gentleness of a dove. A divine voice proclaimed him the son in whom it has its pleasure. But this is not an exaltation. It is a prelude. This revelatory Spirit of the divine, this sacred energy, has its own more profound baptism in mind. It plunges Jesus into the desert, into an alone place. We read this is a prolonged retreat. The “forty days” is Hebrew code for a great amount of time, a time of endurance. As if this protracted retreat into the emptiness at the heart of us each were not trial enough, God sends that “other son,” that one that falls from the heavens like lightening, that one that is all flash.[iii] He plays his role as with Job. Here he offers comfort, prestige, power. He tests Jesus’s sense of self. If you are the son of God, satisfy your hunger; turn these stones to bread. Jesus ignores the invitation and counters that one lives by the word of God. Jesus passes over physical satisfaction and responds according to the Spirit’s needs for life. Satan tempts again. He takes Jesus to the pinnacle of the Temple, the very house of God, and tells him to prove the Spirit—toss yourself down and God will send his angels to save you. Jesus does not argue. He dismisses Satan—do not tempt God, one cannot tell God what he can or cannot do. Satan raises the stakes. More than satisfaction, more than prestige, he offers the world, he offers power. Look at the world, it is yours to command if you obey me. Jesus does not argue with him. He does not reason with him. He quotes the sacred texts—worship the Lord thy God, him alone shall you serve. One does not reason with the shadow within, and Satan, the “other son” is Jesus’s shadow. Jesus faces his shadow, his hidden temptation to step over the Spirit and robe himself in satisfaction, prestige, power. The shadow therein met and overcome, Jesus can face the core of himself, look upon the God-image within, identify with it and so become its incarnation in his life. As in Job, Satan’s silencing is indicative of a spiritual shift taking place. A new understanding of the divine is being born. As Jesus sees Satan “falling from the heavens,” a new vision of God comes into focus. In Jesus’s confrontation with his shadow the God of law and justice gives way to a deeper, a richer, a “higher” understanding of God. God becomes the father, and his gifts are healing, forgiveness, love. These thence become the markers of Jesus’s life and preaching. The God encountered past the shadow of man, creates a new man, “the new Adam.” Thus Jesus, having sacrificed the dark side, becomes the light of the world. It is but the first sacrifice he will make in the journey of becoming the “first born from among the dead.”
That is the theology of the “temptations.” The morality of it is this: When a man does not confront the shadow within, the hidden, primitive, naked, almost animal want for satisfaction, he walks past it and looks directly at the core of his psyche, the God-image of undifferentiated power, and he blindly identifies it with his ego. Therein he projects his shadow out on to others and manifests in his life the only side of the God-image one so psychically un-in-formed can incarnate: the dark side of God, the “primitive” and unconscious God of wrath, the amoral God of raw power. When a people forget or ignore the great symbols that transmit to the conscious mind the God-image at the core of us, such befalls them. When they forget God, falsify the image of God within, discount it for whatever reason, there is dissimulated the call to look upon the shadow, address it, confront it, integrate its power into consciousness that it not have the power to stand a centre to fascinate and entice, that it not become a blinding storm spinning out a merely material world wherein the truth of world is a matter of “my” immediate pragmatics. When God within is ignored, examination of soul, confession, repentance, and humility are not to be expected. Without them prayer becomes ego fantasizing, and shinning virtue is lost in the darkness of the anxieties and anger the ignored shadow casts. Religion, that connecting bond to the roots of us, withers. Without our roots we float untethered caught up by the whiff of whatsoever passes as “a reason”–no matter how unreasoned it may be. In this we are plagued by the insanities we unleash upon one another as throngs of egos play at being the omniscient God almighty. It is not a modern problem. The psalmist knew what happens when man turns from God, and so warns: “Content is the man who puts his faith in God, and not in them who are proud and full of lies.” (Psalm 40:5).
Jesus does not cease to be an individual with a history and mind of his own, with a sense of self. His history, mind, and self sensitivity are unchained from the sundry things within which we humans each and all either ignore or bury. He is liberated to be transparent, transparent before the God-within. “To see me is to see the Father.” So powerful is his lens into the creative grace within him that his disciples can recognize God in him, and so concretize a community of believers with a power that begins to transform the world into one of universal equality and care, a world where opposites, where “Gentile and Jew, slave and free, male and female,” no longer define, and where the world itself has a hope of liberation from the self-divinized egos of them that refuse to look upon the shadow within and so darken the world about them in its unacknowledged gloom.
Temptation does not cease to exist. Whensoever God speaks, Satan is there equivocating: Did God really say…? Satan may be fallen from heaven, but he remains a “son” of God, an enduring power roaming the world. Jesus may have confronted and cast off his shadow, but Satan still abides because, while his wings may have been clipped, he is for man, for post-paradisiac man, an essential experience.[iv] Jesus meets him again as the crowds shout “Hosanna.” They have been roused to a religious fervour. They want to make him their king. Jesus moves away from the crowds and goes into hiding. Satan again takes him to a pinnacle. This time, not of the temple, but of power. He stands before Pilate, and again he is tempted to call to his aid legions of angels. Satan, a psychosomatic power, can scourge both mind and body. Thus, Jesus, the son of God, has no longer the strength to carry his own unique cross. Another must come to his assistance as is so often the case with mere mortals. Before the cross Satan fills the mouths of the bystanders. They cry out: save yourself if you really are who you claim to be. On that cross, as the light of life dims, Jesus feels the emptiness, the void, which is the prime matter of every creature. There he knows not the distance of God, but the abandonment by God. He is left to his self. And so he bows his head to death and releases the last vestiges of his self—his spirit. Nothing is left of the man who made himself a transparency before God. Has Satan finally won? Has he exhausted Jesus? Where is that Spirit that descended upon him in Jordan’s water? Darkness covers the land; the curtain of the temple is torn asunder. Has God lost? Has God been defied, defiled, defeated? Only in death can Jesus enter into Satan’s realm. Descended into the darkness of death the incarnation into mortality is complete. “It is consummated.” Only from hell, from the bottomless pit of death, from the nothingness that becomes of us, can he by God be risen up into God-himself. It is here that Jesus becomes fully the God-man.
For man the battle with the shadow is never ended, merely paused, abrupted. Man never wins. That is reserved to God alone. Man would not be man, nor would God be God were it otherwise. The psychology of it is thus: the God-image as the core of psychic life is as eternal as is life, and man is of himself mortal. Theology would say more. The Spirit of God may be tempered in time, but it cannot be by time confined. Only God’s Spirit can shatter the darkness of hell, quench its fires, and break open its gates. Theology would venture further still. Aquinas marks the Spirit is always the same yet unique in every soul it inhabits. He writes: As God he is Holy, yet he is neither the Father, nor the Son, and so has no proper name but that of the soul he possess (Summa Theologica 1: xxxvi, art.1). Thus does he pray in us when the heart falters and words fail. He is the bond within the triune life of God in se, the bond between God and man in Christ, the power of the continuing incarnation of God that makes a man into a “son” of God. Does then this singular Spirit who possesses a soul, in its being Holy, hold within it the wholeness of its worldly ventures? Does it re-member into eternity the life it has possessed? Such questions are where the heart speaks in the symbols of faith and hope. That which resides behind Seraphim wings is ever beyond the mind and its words of reason.[v]
The mystery of life and its need of ritual
Whensoever man looks anywhere within or without to find God he cannot go beyond the event horizon of creation. He cannot transit beyond that moment of first light, be it that epic Fiat lux, the first light of physical creation, or the first and equally terrifying light of our psychic creation, the dawn of consciousness with its drive to differentiate and therein its ability to discriminate. Beyond those twinned lights of physics and psyche there is nothing in this world man can know. There is for-us no-thing to see, to ap-prehend, to com-prehend, to under-stand. But faith says there is something more. There is that dawning moment of faith itself, the “resurrection moment” when one is confronted with the something that takes hold, which beholds, that God is ever one step ahead of us, one momentum before us. “He is risen and goes before you.” He is there but in the twinkling of an eye. “Do not grasp at me.” No man can grasp because Spirit is not possessed, it possesses. It is not known, it knows. Thus it is said God dwells in light inaccessible (1Timothy 6). God is the light forever shielded by the choir of the Seraphim, by beings aflame with its heat and screaming out to all the cosmos: “HOLY,” beings mad in their melting, beings pulsing in the pain of the sacred: “HOLY,” beings undying in their everlasting dying and in charity proclaiming to all the dire warning: “HOLY.” Here no creature can live for to-be is to-be with-out God. God can come to man and inflame his soul, irradiate his being, but man cannot come to God. There is no heroic ladder of ascent to God. Man can merely, simply, humbly, bow before and attend to God, pay attention to God, reflect upon God, accept God, celebrate the God he can never in truth apprehend, comprehend, understand–the “wise and only true God.” In this man rises to the Seraph voice and makes his obeisance and adoration. It is not a task. It is a grace given, a grace resident, a grace to be embraced. It is the fragment of God, the image of God, with which we wee creatures are gifted. It is an act of life, of love. It humbles. It exalts. It is wonderous and it is to be feared, for love, like life, can wound us as well as heal us. Thus have we before us the cross whereon love both kills and brings new life. It is a profound-most image that demands we kneel before it, humble ourselves before it, confess before it both our sin and our trust. To falsify the need to approach it in reserved and ritualized time and space, in a most sacred time and space, cheapens its power. The ritualization of the cross and the holy communion and the sacred community it creates cannot be trivialized in anything that saps of the ordinary and everyday.[vi] It is the mystery of faith that must be met where faith demands we stand—bowed, wondering, dumb-founded as once we all were when we stood in Eve and Adam that fearful first conscious moment of sin, except that now we in Christ stand also in everlasting grace and gratitude.
“Let in the light: all sin expose to Christ, whose life no darkness knows. Before his cross for guidance kneel, his light will judge, and judging heal.”[vii]
[i] The attempts of the unconscious are not always successful. Some go on as if in a fog in which they are lost and by which they are narcotized. Reality for them subsides and fantasies are substantialized. Which is why God, in his wisdom, in-vented everything from shamans to psychiatrists to each in their own way minister therapy to the soul and invoke the Spirit of strength and healing.
[ii] The Godhead becomes conscious through man. The mission, the sacred function, of the Son, of the Logos is to enter creation and become conscious man. In and through this incarnating Logos God is self-conscious. It is the incarnation of God that creates the dia-Logos that enlivens and vitalizes the consciousness of both God and man, humanizing God and divinizing man. Otherwise put, the unconscious divine image within dialogues with man’s consciousness toward evolving and enriching both.
[iii] Satan has several names in scripture. The oldest seems to be Satan which means prosecutor or accuser, and Satan is depicted as having his part in the heavenly court. The legal overtone reads into the old English name of the Devil [the slanderer] and says something about both the early mediaeval and the English estimation of man. Lucifer is literally the Light-bearer. Beelzebub is the lowly Lord of the flies.
Unlike God whose light is shielded in the ring of Seraphim, Lucifer may bear his light, but he cannot contain it. In his hands it is always distorted and out of control—not unlike a flash of lightening. Thus God sets his light, his fire, into a pit–hell. As all know, even there it is not fully held in check. There is reason our Mediterranean ancestors identified hell with the sub-volcanic world. They were well aware how the fire and light of the volcano bubbled into, hissed and crept through the solidity, the substantiality, the “integrity” of this world. It did so precisely as the psychic smoke, hiss, and molten fire of the dark forces within broke into the integrity of soul. Both disruptions, each in their own way, were well known to be fascinating, seductive, mesmerizing, enticingly dangerous, potentially destructive. As the volcanic was a threat to the integrity of the world, the seductive subterranean shadow was a threat to the integrity of man himself. Both could cause a man to burn, to become stuck, to be suffocated, to be overcome by the noxious. Here we find the psyche manifesting itself in a mythic parallel. But the shadow side of man can not only burn, not only seduce with a false flame, it can freeze. Dante elegantly rehearses how the incessant beating of Satan’s wings creates at the heart of hell an ice storm. The heart of Satan’s power produces not light but the dark and ice-cold heart. That parallel belongs, however, to another tradition.
The last scriptural name of Satan is Beelzebub. It is a parody on the names of divine beings worshipped in the ancient Middle East. It is not a flattering epithet. The lord of the flies is lord over the rotting and those troublesome creatures that feed upon it, propagate within it. Here Satan is revealed for his soul. His lordship concerns not man’s mortality, but man’s morality, man’s spiritual frailty, frangibility, corruptibility, man’s susceptibility to the seduction and destruction of his vital-most, his connaturally social evocation into integrity of self and world. Satan is in every way the contrary of Christ who is vitality-infusing, the iconic archetype of the higher God-image, the differentiated God.
[iv] To this end we are given the Spirit of God to reconcile that painful opposition between good and evil. Here is given the power to confront the shadow, and so transform conflict and its ensuing temptations into a higher vision of God, a vision that rises above wrath, judgment, and law, and knows the freedom of creative self-giving. The Spirit has the power to resolve the conflict, but it cannot remove the suffering of love’s sacrificial offering of self. Even in heaven hearts remain broken and pierced. If God is love, Jung (among others) noted, and if, as claims scripture, the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord, then it is wise to fear love. Love is a fearsome thing, and needs be entered with reverence and awe. If one think it not so, one is being deluded by fleeting fascination, cozened by visions of a sugar-coated romance.
[v] Reason has a role to play in life, but it cannot ignore humanity’s irrational powers. Reason of itself would not advance without imagination, inspiration, hunches, gut-reactions, blind trust, hope, the creation of analogies, and the applications of “it is as if.” It is the illogical variation, the step beyond deterministic cause and effect, the questioning of a seemingly mathematical precision that open the space for reason to see more broadly, deeply, truly. The history of science stands the proof of this. There needs to be kept a balance between the rational and irrational forces; and there needs to be kept some friction between them. Energy does not come from status quo, and vitality does not come from ignoring our biramous nature.
[vi] There are three tell-tale signs of ritual disorientation and decay. First, during the sacred liturgy the cross or crucifix that once stood centered on or above the holy table has in many places disappeared. It has been replaced by the processional cross which is set to the side of the sanctuary. One cannot more bluntly say the cross has been side-lined. The central focus is now the minister, and as he or she is a fellow human we are inclined by standing face to face to be seduced into a “conversation” state of mind. Second, by the displacement of the prime symbol of our sin and salvation, the confession of sin has become watered down. In many places it is no more than a few sentences interspersed with sung “Kyries.” The sense of our shared and personal fallibility and fault is diluted to virtual non-consequence if not non-existence—after all we are all happily saved. Third, no one knows what to do with hands. Once we were taught to hold hands palm to palm and finger-tip to finger-tip over the pectoral bone, the “heart bone” in the centre of the chest. It is a sign of obeisance and adoration. Now arms dangle at the sides or hands are clenched and rested on the belly. Such are not “prayer positions.” But why ought there to be prayer positions when we are but talking to one another? Here is reflected the casual attitude that has seized upon the celebration of the mystery that is our faith, washing away any sense of “form,” of the formality the stand before God deserves, indeed, commands. We may vest in fine robes, swing incense, ring bells, listen to great anthems, and even “get-into” a rousing hymn, but if the absolute gravity of what we are doing is absent, so is the psychic core. A sense of absolute gravity must be created. There must be a real and ritualized confrontation of the shadow. There must be an earth-pausing bowing before that which is rightly named the Almighty. Moses was told “Take off your shoes” because he stood before no ordinary event, no world-event. Neither do we whensoever we gather before God. The mid-twentieth century liturgical concoctions that have morphed into the “casual church” and “church-lite” are grave sins of omission, and it is time for everyone to begin recognizing this and rectifying it. At stake here is our psychic life, our spiritual life, and all that hangs upon it.
[vii] John Raphael Peacey: Awake, Awake, Fling off the Night.