There seem to be several misconceptions concerning my recent reflections on God, psyche, soul, and spirit. I believe that Jungian depth psychology with its notions of a creative thrust (the God-image), and an integrational formulary (the Christ-archetype) provides the modern world with a new way of seeing that which the doctrines teach, and creeds proclaim. It is because we are so constructed psychologically that we are able religiously to so express our “heart’s desire.” Theologically, our psychological construct reflects the founding grace. The God-image is not God; it indicates the God who is above every soul and psyche. The God-image and the Christ-archetype are not per se a grace within; they point towards something more profound, the founding grace, the grace of creation, the free Grace that wills not simply a creation but an incarnation into that creation as its perfection. Psyche, soul and spirit are not synonymous; they indicate layers within the mystery that is life, depths within the mystery of our being. Like the God-image and the Christ-archetype, they are conceptual anatomizations of something which is organically a whole. Those dissected bits provide platforms from which to discuss certain aspects of the singular mystery that is life.
Furthermore if modern research into biology, physics, and psychology has taught us anything it is the expanse and the depth of the layers that constitute reality, the seemingly infinite regress of the world that recedes into not merely the mysterious, but the wonderous. If a man who believes in God sees in that wonder the Wonder-full One that speaks only of the aesthetics of his faith spread out over the face of creation. It may well bolster his faith. He may “see it” planted in reality, but it proves only that he has faith, not the object of that faith, which object for the believer, it must be noted, is the Sub-ject at the root of his own subject-ion. His faith propels the doctrines and rituals which function as pro-jections on which he can come to some working and constructive relationship with both the Subject and his own subjection to that Subject. That Subject, of course, is that which ultimately defines all, the “all” which is eschatologically the “all in all,” the font-head of wholeness and meaningfulness, thus of Logos (word) and Spirit (will).
When I recite the creed I do so without dissimulation. I confess I do not comprehend the meaningfulness of that which I recite. Yet I am moved from within, I am persuaded from within, that here is something, that encoded as it is, speaks to me of the meaning-fullness of life. Were I to comprehend it, it would be neither an act of faith nor a mystery. I confess the creed as an act of faith, a faith in the mystery that enfolds me, leads me, con-forms me to itself. Like the offering up of bread and wine become for-us the divine gift of the body and blood of Jesus the Christ crucified, risen, ascended, the recitation of the creed is an act wherein ego stops, reason stops, reasons stop. One simply rests in humbled trust. That rest is not a respite from life, but a moment that allows the struggles of ego and reason to be paused. They are paused to allow life itself to buoy us. In itself it is an at-one-ment, a simple being-present, a peace. It is, therefore, of note that the recitation of the creed is followed by the greeting of peace, and that the end of the action of communion is followed by the blessing of the peace which surpasses all understanding. The setting aside of ego and the everyday rational concerns of the world in order to rest in the mystery of faith is the ritual rehearsal for that final resting in peace, that final resting in peace in Christ “hidden in God” which is the ultimate prayer of life. How does the soul learn to surrender into the eternal rest without a ritual exercise? How does one learn to rest in peace eternal unless one first has come to taste of that peace in ritual surrender?
Many years ago I went on a first date. It was serendipitous. For once in my life I was not obtuse about such things and recognized someone was flirting with me. I thought here is someone pleasing to the eye, seemingly pleasant, and as importantly seemingly sane, so why not. We arranged to have a drink together. As the drink was ending my mind was pacing as to how I could politely put an end to this venture. Then came the question: “Do you want to get something to eat?” Ah! Food—the way to a man’s heart. [There decidedly is a reason so many rituals designed to open the heart involve food.] We went for dinner, and whilst we were eating the conversation turned to art. Then came: “I live nearby. Would you like to see some of my drawings?” I was intrigued. Was there praxis to go with theory? I was delighted that there was. The work was minimalist but moving. We talked more. Then came another question: “May I read you something I wrote?” I said “Yes,” and my life was forever changed. As the words fell there occurred within me that subliminal, almost tangible burst of light that seizes consciousness, that moment too effetely named insight. I saw into a soul. I saw its humanity, its fragility, and its absolute goodness and beauty, and as the words were still falling I said: “I love you.” There was a sustained look of dismay, but I was not asked to leave. Perhaps I was judged sincere if socially inept. But I stood by my words. I did not know where my confession would take me, but I was doubtful of a second date. Surprisingly, there was. That was decades past, and in the intervening years we have grown together into a comfortable pair. With that has come understanding. We know the whys and wherefores of each other. The comprehension of each other will never be complete, for we are each ultimately a mystery—even to ourselves. Nevertheless, our trust in each other, our love for one another, is coloured with an understanding of each other.
I have above used several terms indicative of knowledge: insight, understanding, comprehension. They are not synonymous, and the nuances that separate them are important to note. Knowledge itself is a somewhat generic term. Its basis, however, is firmly in sense experience. It is an organization of data received from “out there.” Insight needs first to be distinguished from intuition. Intuition is an internal sensing of something. It is almost visceral, a “gut feeling,” a hunch. It infiltrates consciousness. It creates a pathway that influences the flow of thought. Intuition is primitive. It activates, or is active by, the primitive parts of the brain. Insight, on the other hand, reference the higher functions of the mind. It is consciousness exploding onto a higher gradient. It is not just a type of inner “sight.” It is a light turned on, an illumination, a revelation, a dis-covering, a “surprise,” a seizure of awareness. Comprehension is knowledge, sometimes augmented by intuition or insight, which is enriched. We speak of a comprehensive knowledge, knowledge that “grasps,” that prehends, the object known in a fuller way. It is knowledge, “a seeing into” that is rounded out, encircling the object, and being able to at once hold it, to view it, from sundry angles. Understanding points to something relational in knowing. It carries a sense of a conscious relatedness between the knower and the known. We speak of understanding an issue when it is in some degree brought into the sphere of one’s own being. Thus, among persons we speak of mutual understanding, of communication becoming community.
Regarding understanding and its relational nuances there is another, albeit less common, way of looking at the term. It is to stand-under. Here there is a sense of one thing over and above another, of prioritization, of order, of humility. I am well aware humility has in this age of self-promotion and self-aggrandizement taken on a less than glowing reputation. Humility is, however, even from its etymological roots, a “bring down to earth,” a being realistic about oneself, about one’s place in the scheme of things. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite[i] imagined the heavenly court as a progression of nine angelic choirs. The second highest choir, the Cherubim, are said to hold up the throne of God. They stand under it. Figuratively it is neither their role nor their destiny to encompass God, to “comprehend” God, to “surround” God in the knowing of him. That is the role and destiny of the highest choir, the Seraphim, who are eternally bursting into roaring flame as they surround the sacred throne and so prevent its unfiltered light from incinerating creation.[ii] The sole purpose and role of the Cherubim is simply to stand under God, and that is their “glory,” their full substantiality.
This brings me to talk about my dog. He was a gentle creature. He was still a puppy when I inherited him from my mother-in-law. I did not look forward to having him, but it was my duty to look after him. Any sense of an obligation swiftly dissipated before the pleasure of his company. Yes, once again I was in love. He would sit at my side, follow me about, leap onto my lap, guard me when I napped, bring me the ball when he wanted to play, nudge me and go to the cupboard when he wanted a treat. I, of course, was not unknown to pick him up and set him on my lap, or bring him the ball when I wanted to play. We took walks together. We chased each other about in the garden. We both looked forward to a ride in the car. I relished his being-there, his presence, his being a part of my life. I could, in part, “understand” him, but in what manner could he know me, understand me? How does a member of a species lower down on the evolutionary scale know, “see into,” a member of a species higher up on that scale? Biologically he stood-under me. I was perhaps in some degree predictable, but how was I known? How could I be known when even among my own species so many, including some near and dear for decades, still are mystified by me?
How then can I, mere mortal, understand, know, or comprehend the God who is above all beings, beyond all beings? What more can I do than sit by his side, rest in his presence, rejoice in his being there, and being there for me, with me? The very inner-most workings of my psyche address me with the absoluteness of his presence, of the presence of a power working in me that is not “me” and yet wills to make me all that I am given to be. Where else, therefore, is there for me to go? Admittedly, I can ignore this pulse that speaks to me through my psyche. I can deny the absoluteness and the eternality of its depth. Many do. I confess I am from experience familiar with the discontent and ennui that exemplify that denial. The distractions are legion. They all are wanderings in the fog. They all at heart are tedious work for they are escapes from that which psychologically is the inescapable: the internal most call, the eternal Voice, the founding act latent in potential: the “Be thou whole!”
There is a sense in which we know ourselves to be a whole, a continuity. This self-knowing is not an insight into self. It lacks the sudden and revelatory force of consciousness characteristic of insight. Rather, it abides at the base of consciousness. It is usually termed apperception. But this apperception of a continuity of experience, of being, does not recede back into infinity. Apperception is also a primitive awareness of our finitude. It speaks both of our “being thrown into existence,” of our having a staring point not of our own making, and it speaks of our being mortal, of our being “destined for death.” We may consider ourselves mere threads in the weft and warp of fate, or we may consider ourselves sent out on a journey of discovery in hope. We are free to believe, to trust in, either postulate. The experiences of life tend to steer that freedom in one direction or another. Nevertheless, we all have faith in something. Life is based on trusting in this or that, and that is spoken of in theology as natural faith. Theology, however, speaks also of a gratuity of faith that is on a higher gradient, a “supernatural faith.” This faith allows man to embrace a broader, richer vision of his finitude. It allows man to understand his nature as tethered to a power greater than his self and his history, a power he internally “senses”[iii] behind, above, and beyond the finitude that seemingly binds him. It orients him toward that power. In this it places his life, his role, his destiny under that power we by custom name God. Such faith allows the will, the free will, to rise above “being thrown into the world” and being “destined for death,” and imagine something more, imagine a wholeness to life, a “holiness” to the life lived not bounded in birth and death, but in sheer creativity, in Creativity Itself. If the imprint of that all-proceeding creativity were not resident in every soul, in every psyche, no “revelation” of it in any religion would take hold within. That is the grace of creation. We are oriented from before the world was founded to not be confounded by the finitude of the world because, finite though we be, infinity itself stands at our beginning and our end. That is the direction in which scripture orients us when it is said: “Let us make man in our own image.” Man is more than dust. Man is more than alone—in his past, in his present, in his future. Man is “us” and man is bounded by the eternal even if any concept of “how that can be” escapes the grasp of the finite mind.
There is a sense in which we who believe may say God becomes man in order to understand man. Without entering into debate about how God knows all—in the sweep of a singular timeless vision of the temporal, or in the potentiality of every created act—indulge this picturing of God and man. To truly understand man God needs to stand under man. He needs to feel the weight of man. That weight is not the “glory” of man, but the brokenness of man, the slumped body of man dying on the cross of his self-imposed alienation and disorientation. The mission of the divine Logos is a sub-mission to human nature with all its frailties of body and soul, its mortality both physical and spiritual. Only in such under-taking does God feel the full impact of man’s brokenness, his sin, his incessant entropic pulse to turn to self-interest over and above the interest of others and this world. Only by standing under man can God hold him up, lift him up, support his broken psyche and soul, his internal division and divisiveness. In respect of man’s freedom, only in man can God heal man, or as scripture says it, “save” man. God not only stands with man, by man, for man, he stands under him. He allows man that which man attempted in Paradise: to place himself above God. God submits to man, and in that lays himself out as the groundwork for transforming man into that which God had from the first intended of man—that he be the Image of God himself: “Let us make man in our own image!” This is precisely that which the first disciples encountered in Jesus—the image of the divine, the holy, made tangible and real, made flesh and blood, poured out, given, broken for no other reason than “for us and for our salvation.”
Jesus is the exemplar of the resting in the presence of God. His life is remarkable because he did naturally that which Adam, and we “in Adam,” would not do. He stood where man is made to stand: under God. Only there could he feel the weight—the glory, the full substantiality—of God which is none other than the emptiness of God in his endless and inexhaustible giving of himself into creation. In God’s free giving of himself Jesus knows him as Love, and in that as parent, as Father. Because he rests in God, in the creative emptiness of God, he himself becomes an emptiness to God, a man purely trusting in God, and therein filled with God. In all this he is something more than, as depth psychology would say, possessed by an archetype. In his humility, in his life and in his death he becomes known as the true and living Image of the “Father” of us all.[iv] The memory of that life and death, that humbling even to the sacrifice of self is the church. It is the living resonance of it, the Eucharistic community where a man comes to sit with God, to submit to God, to rest in the presence of God that there resting he may learn the rest that is everlasting, that he may come to be infolded into that peace which surpasses all under-standing. A man comes to the church not to know doctrines, but to learn his peace is in standing where man was created to stand: under God, the Lord and Master of us all. It is a simplicity of obedience (worship) and love (adoration).
“O Master, let me walk with thee…Teach me the wayward feet to stay, and guide them in the homeward way…Teach me thy patience; still with thee in closer, dearer company…in hope that sends a shinning ray far down the future’s broadening way, in peace that only thou canst give, with thee, O Master, let me live.”[v]
[i] Regarding the heavenly choirs, Cf: Spirituality, Part 5, paragraphs 1-6, and endnote iv, archived under May 2017.
[ii] In the picturing of God it is said no creature may look upon God and live. However, when God creates man he breathes his own breath into man and so begins a process of immunizing him. That process continues with God taking on human nature and is sustained in the Eucharist wherein man receives into his body the body and blood of God in Christ.
[iii] In the history of philosophy it has proven difficult to find a term for this sense of dependence upon something beyond our finitude. Terms such as affinity and feeling have met with critics. I would attempt to describe it as a reservoir of receptivity founded in the very potentiality of existence.
[iv] It is necessary to add here a cautionary note on Christology. First, I have purposely said the disciples recognize Jesus as the living Image rather than to be the living Image. I fear that using any form of “to be” here is to invite a problem. “Being” is the central term in philosophy, and it was to philosophy, particularly Greek philosophy, that the early fathers and theologians turned when they attempted to set the limits on how we ought to discuss God, and Jesus, and their relationship. That philosophical usage was not something in the minds of them that wrote the sacred texts. One cannot conflate the Hebrew mind of the first century with the mind of the Greek philosophers several centuries prior without inviting confusion. That was in part the difficulty that took the better part of five centuries of argumentation to adjudicate. Second, while we may postulate that a man can be possessed by an archetype, that may in some sense be taken as presupposing that first there is a man to be so possessed. In such a stance it is as if we are saying there is a man who becomes overwhelmed, overshadowed, by an internal power, and so becomes known to his companions as a God. That may well be the case as to how the human psyche works. However, in the creed we do not confess a man becomes God, but that God becomes man. Psychology can no more describe that than can physics or philosophy. That is precisely why, like Peter in the Transfiguration moment atop Tabor, we are dumb-founded, and with Peter we say “let us put up tents” or in our case tenants of faith and doctrine. That is why we must be in our hearts and in our minds silent before the mystery, and allow it to overshadow us, enfold us, speak to us, and in its own way transform us.
I make these caveats because we have for centuries been fed the explanations of faith in terms of philosophical systems that do not always hold sway in the modern world. When new formats of elucidation, such as the ruminations of depth psychology, are turned to waves can appear in the waters. It might seem to some that one is teetering on the edge of Adoptionism wherein Jesus is at some point, such as his baptism or his resurrection, adopted by God as his son. That was the case with the ancient kings. Upon being anointed the king was hailed the “son of God,” adopted by God as a re-present-ation of God himself. Second, it may seem to some that Jesus is being subordinated to God, as in Arianism. Third, it may seem to some that in speaking of God’s incarnation as eternally willed one is ever so gently slipping into Supralapsarianism or some form of predestination other than the Christ from eternity being the Predestined One to be the perfector and the perfection of creation.
The decrees of the early councils tried to set a narrow, safe and salutary path between hills of sand that too easily could slide into those unhealthy visions called heresies. We need always to keep that in mind. While we need to respect the accomplishments of the past, we need to also keep an open and respectful mind toward the potentials within the investigations of the present. With that said, we must be cautious lest faith descend to rationalizations. Rituals in their simplicity of act, and hymns in the poetics of their words can say more to the heart and soul than doctrines and creeds. The latter may be necessary to set boundaries, but affairs of the soul are not well subject to the rational refinements that set the patterns and parameters of theology and Christian philosophy. Rarely if ever does love express itself in a weighty tome.
[v] Washington Gladden: “Walking with God.” Published in Sunday Afternoon magazine in 1879, this poem was later adapted as the hymn “O Master, let me walk with thee.”