Protasis
The first words of the Magnificat reveal Mary’s moment of illumination. They depict that startlingly calm event within which nature knows Fiat lux is always the Lux mundi. Here we have the awareness that Creativity[i] is of itself incarnating, that “Let there be light” enwombs the “Light of the world.” In the physics of this world, directly or derivatively, all light comes from the sun. In terms of the science of the soul, be it directly or derivatively, all light within man comes from the supernal Logos, the divine Word who eternally speaks the cosmic reality. Soul in its depths knows this. Reason can classify things for its pragmatic purposes. It is, however, from the depths of soul that come those scintillations of humanity that give meaning to life itself, that evolve the brute into individuality, personhood, wisdom. Soul knows its moment of “magnification” is the hour of its core come to light. Here self-awareness and world-awareness awaken, embrace, and wisdom is made incarnate.
The divine Word is from creation’s dawn within creation. When, in the fulness of its time, it is illuminated, dis-covered, and accepted as the very positivity of life, it is incarnated, made real, animate, animating. Mary’s moment of illumination is accepted, and becomes, thus, reality. The Johannine text sets that truth not upon the lips of Mary, yet tells us much the same. It proceeds thus. He, the creative word and wisdom that was always the light of the world, came into the world, but the world recognized him not. It knew him not because it had become leaden, and left the soul and its light to be taken as literal items. The world made of soul a thing idealized by reason, a conceptualization. It made of it an idol, not of stone or metal, but of ideas, of ideals, of The Law. The world saw not the depth reality of the symbolic of life. It could not look up from the depths of self and see the sacred Spirit hovering, and so was removed from the stage of Creativity’s dawn. It could not hear Fiat lux. It could not know within the depths of its being the Lux mundi. The world had become like unto that which it worshipped. It “had eyes but saw not, ears but heard not.” Yet, as long as there is world, the grace of the world’s light does not fail, cannot fail. Here the Johannine text begins the journey of revealing the world’s light, the progress wherein it supplants Law and reveals Love.[ii]
The matter of matter
In an age wherein many still take the soul as a literal substance, a refined type of matter, an excited and rarified epiphenomenon of the material body, let us consider materiality. Most will take material and immaterial as classifications or notions that neatly divide reality according to some basic schema. Our considerations might be better served were we to follow the creed and to speak of the seen and the unseen. How does one see a material body? Sight is an accumulation and coordination of a number of sensations upon ocular nerve endings. Sensations are not seen. In the case of sight, neither are they consciously felt. To see is the effect of something unseen—impressions. They that think modern bio-physics has brought us to this humbling point need remember the empiricists, most notably Hume, brought us there first.[iii] The “material” world is a construct of unseeable sensations. Can we trust that that which we claim “is” is that which we see and feel, or is it merely a reflection of how we see and feel? Secondly, may we say one has a body, a soul, a psyche, or is one a body, a soul, a psyche? Do not those terms each designate something fundamental about how one is? One is not simply skin and thoughts, sins and issues. Such are characteristics of the temporality of how one is, perspectives from which one may consider one’s life. They are not definitions, merely passing aspects of how. Is materiality wholly material? Is the material world constructed wholly out of unseen items, or is it only partially so? Does materiality, like the atoms it is said to consist of, have holes in it? Is space a material or simply a relationship one to another ultimately of stars, planets, electrons, quarks? In this world of unseen spaces and sensations is it absurd to take seriously the other unseen about us—that which we call soul, psyche, spirit? Are they not, like body, but aspects, windows, into the how of “I am”? In this world of not what but how, how applicable are our concepts about what fundamentally is?
Admittedly, one can well challenge the above considerations. The realist contend mind is part of the world and, therefore, whatsoever is constructed out of sensation can be relied upon to be a reasonable facsimile of world. The rationalists hope the seen and unseen are by some benign force coordinated. The empiricists are fundamentally skeptical, some of the world out there, some of the world inside the mind. They all are fond of finding flaw in the arguments of their opponents. Philosophy departments would be employing no one if there were no possible deficiencies to find in the ruminations of others. Among the religiously resolute, how many would be inclined to establish new denominations were they able get past the lacunae lurking in the theologies of others? We might all be the better if we let not the holes in ideas defy us and instead, like diamonds, learn to build lattices to celebrate the holes among us. Wisdom sees the world as wonderful because it allows spaces for wonder to fill.
Exegesis: all words have a history
Does the Magnificat mean something different by soul (in Greek and Latin respectively: psyche, anima) and spirit (pneuma, spiritus)? Possibly. The symbol words for life have had a varied history, but some degree of consistency might be gleanable.[iv] In the classical Latin writers spiritus usually references the life principle, the life force, the dynamic of life. It carries a sense of mind, intelligence, consciousness. In the early fathers of the church it is often used to denote the scriptural idea of life-breath [the Hebrew ruah, the Greek pneuma] which is taken by them as distinct from soul. The classical Latin animus and anima are a bit more concrete. Animus is usually used to express life as human. Anima is usually used to reference life in nature. However, in the fathers anima is often used to designate the human soul. We might summarily take all this and conclude that soul is customarily used as a referent of life, particularly individual life. Spirit is usually taken as the dynamic of life, and more specifically in the Christian context as the soul at-one and in action with the eternal creative.
Psyche has a more dramatic history. In the ancient myths Psyche, indicative of human life or soul, is the spouse of Eros (desirous love). Through adventures and misadventures Eros and Psyche are separated, and Psyche comes into the service of Eros’ mother, Aphrodite (goddess of love, but also pleasure, procreation, and beauty). The power of human life (psyche) is always in some relationship to desire or love. The desirous power of Eros and Aphrodite’s divinely free commixture of love and pleasure make for both positive and negative directionality. Eros’ arrows can inflict either love or hate, passion for or against. Psyche is therein seen the evolved and evolving manifest of soul always beset by the vicissitudes of history and human passions. Psyche is a power to invest in or to retreat from self, other, reality. Eros and Psyche are alar beings. Eros is a winged child, and Psyche a butterfly.[v] They appear most alive when they fly, flutter. There is always a sense of transience or movement about them. The myths, however, elevate that transience regarding Psyche. She begins life a mortal but after being reunited with Eros is granted immortality—the final desire.
Respecting the symbol as symbol
Theology functions as a type of foundational soul-science. In its authenticity theology knows that its work is only nominally about God, that its practicality resides in enabling man to encounter with reverence, devotion and awe the creative presence, the eternal presence, the divine presence revealed within. Theology’s concern is the soul illuminated and revealed to itself in and by the divine. Its task is to assist man in coming to know self in the light of the eternal. The revelation of the divine has meaning, has its true Word, only when it brings man to fulness (satiation, salvation, wholeness, holiness). Only in coming to know the freedom of creativity resident at the core of man, can man move toward the fulness of self and cosmos, function as agent of the creative singularity, put on the Christ-image, and co-redeem the world from the folly of ego-man. Only thus does man sanctify the world, make it, from a stance of reverence for reality, the realm of peace and equitable order, of prudent harmony, of justice met with mercy, of love in its practicality, its temporality, its authentic worldliness.
The very profundity and depth of man can only be spoken of in symbols. Freud, Jung, and their disciples keep returning to the ancient myths and sacred narratives because they constitute a vocabulary of the symbols of soul. Talk of soul, grace, illumination, God, and love is bound to symbol expression because these items reference the forces out of which the concrete is realized, actualized. Under the cover of icon they make present the powers of life. No one can touch or see grace, God, soul, or love. They are experiential and knowable only by and in their effects. We may say: “love is as love does” because no one can touch or see love-in-itself.[vi] Theological arguments of analogy are by definition “without-logic.” They are a language about seeing through surface to the dynamic.
The symbol defies having a surface, a concrete definition. But the symbol has a type of directionality–although “direction” in the realm beyond the rational concepts and constructs of time-space is itself metaphoric. The symbol can orient one in a certain direction, toward a depth of self and world-awareness. Because of the enormity of its power the symbol must be approached with respect. It needs to be encountered in reflection, in self-transparency, in submission of the “seen” present of self to the unseen creative power which resides the innermost activating, personalizing, realizing force wherein the symbol draws its life. In theological terms that force may read as grace, the divine indwelling, or God himself as creator and providential preserver. To be encountered in authenticity the symbol needs to be drawn away from the diurnal. One needs to pause and allow the symbol to be presented as symbol that one may begin to behold the sacral power behind the veil of the icon. The symbol must be named a symbol that it be not profaned and taken as literal. Psychic power is activated and released to the consciousness level, realized, when the adytum of the icon is opened and the symbol is assimilated, embraced as symbol. Only thus, as Augustine noted, can one “affect good,” act “out of grace,” be authentically creative, not simply dutiful but caring, not bound by moral laws, but open to beatitude.[vii] Most Christian theologians have followed Augustine.[viii] They hold illumination is never without an illuminator. Does it matter that some name that actor the Jungian Self evoking from the depths of the unconscious while others reference it the Divine One speaking out of the depths of soul or through the minister of the divine service plying open the symbol in sacred time-space? Does it matter that theology speaks of God and grace where modern psychology speaks of Self and psychic power when Christianity insists God is revealed only in and through his work and his incarnation? Modern psychology may have its own language, but may not two tongues speak the same truth in differing words?
In the work of decoding the symbolic, of breaking it open that it may more deeply envelop and be entered into, we need remember that each one carries acquired proclivities and prejudices. Christians have visions of Jesus. Buddhists see Buddha. Those trained by Jesuits envision spirituality according to Ignatius’ rules. Analysands of Freudians see themselves in terms of the Oedipus/Electra complex. Those under Jungian direction face ego and archetypes. But the meaningfulness to be attended is always beyond the layers of the symbol, be it the Christ as the way to the new heaven and earth, the Buddha as the beacon of selflessness, Oedipus as the portal to right order, or the Archetype as nucleus of integrity. The symbol intends the return to the Socratic dictum: behold thyself in clarity and honesty. One must know the present as the temporal and tempered cumulation of one’s journey complete with its flaws and failures, its infinite reserve of powers, its potentials and possibilities, its dynamic. There may well be existential horror in flaws and failures. Such need to be accepted for that which they are, powered against for their ill effects, turned from, and converted by the equally real and present potentials and dynamic revealed in soul. The theological brocard stands incontestable: no sin, no failure, no flaw is unforgivable or unredeemable except that which will not be acknowledged, embraced, and sacrificed (made an offering toward wholeness). In the spirit of gospel: there is no healing of that sin which is “against the Spirit,” that ever forward moving and creating dynamic of the “new” reality seeking its satiation.
There needs to be a balance in all this. The negative aspects of self cannot stand out of the context of the whole of self, outside the powers of self, outside the graced aspects of self. Egoism cannot be known without first knowing man’s inherent sociality. The Christ does not die for sin without knowing the Fatherhood of the Holy, the love-generating nature of God, of reality. Indeed, it is in recognizing the blessings and benefits of life and for them being grateful that one grasps the possibilities within life, comes to know oneself as loved, and therefore empowered spiritually, psychologically.
Soul is life itself. According to Christian doctrine it is given us by grace of God. According to modern existentialist thought it is understood as something given by chance, or something into which we are “thrown.” In both visions there is a sensitivity for an intentionality that seeks to make us, make the cosmos. Soul is not psyche, and it is not not psyche. Akin to the relationship between the eternal Father and the Son in traditional Christian thought, the first is the font-head, and other the “logos,” the form, the formative, the creative in-act by which alone the font-head can be glimpsed, and become known as “revealed.”
The above is about nuance, but nuance is an essential element of the symbolic and archetypal. When reason tries to dissect the iconic, it is lost in a maze of mirrors because symbol is numinous, qualitative. Symbol is spirit-filling. It empowers. It transfers energy. It is inspirational. Reason is practical. It builds the machines and mechanisms (the ideas and concepts) that allow us to maneuver reality. The two systems need each other, but the modus operandi of one is not applicable to the other. While reason cannot explain the symbolic without eviscerating it, it has no place to go without the symbol’s grand visions, inspiration, and the power (the trust) that it can in the light of them really go places. Inspiration left alone without a thought in one’s head is just a surrender to the reptilian base of our brain, a flittering light that distorts direction and so leads to places of fantasy, to distrust, fear, superstitions, and ultimately to their self-cloaking devices of moral superiority and self-righteousness. Thus have we the iconic contrasts: He who dwells in pure light, the Christ who is the divine light of the world for the world, and Lucifer who bears the light in its fall—shattered, derivative, deceptive.
Breaking open the religious symbol is the work of mystagogy. It presumes the symbol is already known, at least literally, and that it holds within something deeper than “a” meaning. The depth of symbol is why it reveals itself within symbol-action, within ritual. Ritual and symbol constitute an intertwining dance. They create a matrix out of which can emerge reflection. Therefrom come the realistic notions of duty, truth, logic, such that reality can be encountered not simply in its actuality but its possibilities wherein duty is made free to become virtue, truth to become openness, and logic to transcend to creativity. When one confronts symbolic talk of God and the inner powers of man one must, therefore, shun the impulse to understand literally. One must submit spiritually. The early fathers of the church spoke thus of the “deeper meaning” of scripture. This unfortunately left open a channel for the gnosticism that flourished in their world to enter and distort spirituality into a perniciousness that mistook “the flesh” and “the world” in scripture, not as terms to mark out “ego-centricity” and the “anti-social world” it creates, but as literally the body and nature itself. God’s handiwork became evil to the point some claimed it was created by a lesser god or an evil being, or ruled over by the lord of hell himself. Why then God so loved the world was not asked, and the suffering and death of the Christ became the example of the suffering one must embrace to escape this hell of an earth mistakenly and sinfully called reality.
Epexegesis: an exercise in semantics to elucidate the inner workings of life
Adding the above understandings of soul, spirit and psyche to the considerations of modern psychology we may proceed to richer depths. Soul may be understood as that which is prior to psyche—logically–as a rational means to define one aspect of an item against another. Consider the symbol of the creative font of souls. In the beginning the Spirit of God (God in his loving [self-giving] creative pulse) hovers over the void, the “chaos,” the undifferentiated, the without-order. God’s creative Word, the Logos, the divine Idea-in-action, speaks and affects order. The divine speech is more than mere utterance. It is action. It is efficacious. It accomplishes that which it intends. The first word, “Let there be light,” creates the illumination of the undifferentiated. Modern psychology might speak of it as the existence of the unconscious becoming revealed. Psyche, soul’s worldly manifest, begins the trek to consciousness of world, nature, self. In the sacred narrative of the origins of the species, man begins by encountering nature. He proceeds to discover his aloneness. His finding of self in the other is joyous but brief. Eve and Adam together, and it can only be together, discover the will to power and its polarities. Power is always power-for or power-over. Power with knowledge, with reason, can divide the world into good and evil, pleasure and pain, mine and yours. It is superficial. It is doomed. It is power applied pro and con. It lacks the creative wisdom iconized as the tree of eternal life. It wants for the sapience to give of self for other, to be a power-for, to be creative, to be life-giving. The sacred narrative of creation ends, thus, in the “fall of man.” We have a tale of self-consciousness emerging into infantile narcissism and being challenged by flame and sword, by nature and order, to find wisdom, to admit to and to arise to the truth of human nature, the definitive sociality of man. There is set before man the challenge to work toward openness and humbleness of character, the potentialities of reality within its actuality, its present. Such exploratory and experimental openness must ever allow for the deficiencies within self and others. Because man’s reach for the tree of life, the tree that allows for the giving of self to another, is frustrated by his bondage to ego-identity, Genesis tells of the enmity between self and the other. Ego-driven man must learn to understand and appreciate time, history, evolution, and so also sin, suffering, evil—the deformities, the purulent and perturbate capacities both moral and physical that ever demand payment in pain and suffering, in a passion and crucifixion, and which ever allow beyond them a transcendence, an exaltation, a resurrection of life into the “new.” Man must suffer his history and the historical imperfection of reality for the progression of all toward an ultimate perfection (salvation). In this soul and psyche need to operate as one (as graced, as the divine freedom and creativity acting as at-one with man). Man needs to act with soul, to act rationally, but more so man needs to act spiritually, with spirit.
Psyche may be understood as the world-encountering manifest of soul. It is individual yet communal. Its roots reach back through the species and beyond it through the evolution of life. It bears the history of the aeons. Every soul, every psyche, carries the imprint of the whole of the past within.[ix] Thus, the fathers could speak of every soul carrying forward in time a history generating flaw. We have our DNA, we evolve our DNA, because psyche and soul itself carry forward every moment from creation’s first “Let there be” toward the glimpsed last “Let it be,” the last “Amen.” Yet, it is only in being present, in being attentively here and now to world and self that one can be capable of the Christian vocation and assume the role of the Christ to become a co-redeemer of creation. It is only in coming to know the historic flaw within soul and its ego thrust that one can surrender history–and within that oneself–to the depths of creativity resident within.
Jung parses the psyche. Within it he finds a number of subpersonalities: persona, shadow, the archetype of soul (the animus/anima), the archetype of spirit, and at the core, the Self as the vocation to unification, to the integrity of being-in-the-world.[x] Psyche may then be more deeply understood as containing the heart of the pulse forward, the realm of the archetype of the Self, of the Christ, of the kingdom of God. It is collective. It calls not merely to individuation but to socialization, to community, to the vicarious self-giving for the well-being of all. Thus have we the symbol of the death of God-in-Christ. It arises to expose the social and cosmic nature of man as man-in-the-world. It is not the offering of things, of the “blood of bulls and goats,” but of ego identity that Self (wisdom) might take its proper seat as the centre of a man. Iconographically it is the divine One moving forward through grace and time to become the centre of all, the “all in all,” to the end that the beneficence of omniscient consciousness fill the cosmos. It is by such dynamic that the death of the divine Logos becomes the “once and for all time” sacrifice.
The notions of soul, psyche, spirit are not easily untwined because they function as one. Indeed, when they fail to do so we speak of soullessness, gracelessness, ennui, in-sapience. We may understand soul as the headwater (the creative thrust in its abiogenic self). Psyche is soul in its worldly manifest, its creative action ever capable of being creatively present, and therefore of pre-senting “good news” and the commands to “remember” and to “save”—both history and soul. Jung evolves the understating of its power in his idea of Self. The archetype of self tells of its core power—wisdom. It is the pulse of wisdom commanding its incarnation into its rightful place as the centre of person. In its sociality it is the Christ archetype. It operates as the in-spirited elan, the spirit-filled life, the graced nature and the graciousness of the creative moving toward individuation and personhood. It is the life impulse manifest in Nature as psyche, encountered within man on the deepest level as Self which is understood as the Spirit-manifesting, as the being at-one with creativity itself. This interrelatedness among soul, psyche and spirit may be considered as mirrored in the vision of the Trinity in which the Godhead generates its perfect self-image (the Son). In their perfect and mutual understanding they are locked in an eternal ecstatic love (the Spirit). Likewise, soul manifests itself in psyche, and in the knowing of each other they come to operate as one bonded in a singular dynamic. Their mutual understanding breathes out wisdom, love, vitality, spirit. They can operate as one because they are at-one in spirit. As the fathers of the early church claimed there is but one Spirit, they speak of all good action, all integral activity in man as coming from that same Spirit operating by its gracious presence in man, with man. John’s gospel rehearses this in the priestly prayer: “Thou art in me, and I in Thee…I in them, and they in me that they may be one, even as we are one.” The Christ knows therein not only his Self, but his soul, and that soul becomes Spirit when it embraces the unity of being. As says Paul: “We being many are members of one Body, and everyone members one of the other.” That interrelatedness exists by virtue of the one Spirit, the creative bond of love.
Excursus: Spirit, soul and psyche share a singular dynamic that makes them a totality, a whole. Therefore, when the Christ says: “Into Thy hands I commend my spirit,” he empties his body, his life, and makes them an empty vessel for God, for pure creativity. Only when one is empty (as the confession is meant to sacramentally and symbolically realize) can one take the bread and drink the wine. Christ’s bread and cup therein become symbols of emptiness. The church thus invokes over them the Spirit of God to make them a new reality (the coordinates of the new world order). The communicants enter into communion with both the emptiness of the Christ and the confessed emptiness of self that the Spirit of God be free to do as it will. In the eternal plan, the incarnation of Spirit is perfect. Every incarnation suffers, however, the time and place of its world, yet of the same Spirit moves that world closer to God and the eternal plan. There is a supreme optimism in every communion. It is an optimism that ought to be, in real time and space, transformative. Thus, Cranmer’s prayer book most presciently places after the ritual act of communion a song of “Glory be to God in the highest.”
From the pre-Christian perspective we may note that the ancients philosophers spoke of soul as the descent of God into creation, as the invigorating divine spark whose mission is to expand consciousness within the realm of that which is not God, that is, the material world, that man might find con-science (integrated knowledge) and so turn to make the journey back unto God. This is metaphor. It is both spirituality, psychology, soul-study, and the rational ambivalences of high and low, good and evil, flesh and spirit, pleasure and pain. It is about the moral (the social, the in-the-world) orientation of a creature who in the practicality of reason is not without the instinctiveness of psyche to be in touch with the need to be re-sponsible to the thrust of creativity, a thrust which is not individual, not even simply social, but cosmic.
A divertimento on morals
The world falters as each barters to avoid evil and ill, and to secure his or her own pleasure and good, and as sundry types of tribes and factions, and the nation-states do the same. The species stands on the tip of terrestrial life’s creative thrust. That makes it not superior to all else in this cosmos. It makes it responsible for all else. In Christian morality that is symbolized in Creativity’s present (the Christ) who offers the totality of self for the ultimate well-being (sanctification) of all, for the renewal of the cosmos thrown out of order and balance by “man’s sin,” man’s focus on “me” and “my” immediate good, pleasure, profit, gratification, satiation.
For such reason, the Christian is called to the consciousness of the pain and anguish of all this world in its every part. The Christian must feel its woes, its dis-eases of body and of soul, its wounds inflicted upon each and all from sins past and present, from sins of commission and of omission, its delusions of power clinging to parties, factions, corporations, nations, its too real neuroses and psychoses, its in-sanities of body, mind and soul. That archetypal sacrifice of self is an act of trust in self, in the divine-sparked depths of self, that the outcome of self-sacrifice carries life forward “for all,” renews all life creatively. World efficacious action flows, can only flow, from the consciousness of the world’s present. Thus, in the symbol of the death of the Christ cosmic redemption flows from the consciousness of the world’s sin.[xi] That same consciousness that knows sin, in acknowledging sin, becomes liberated to embrace the cosmos renewed in that very consciousness. Paul thus says: “That he descended onto the lower parts is the same that he ascended up above all heavens that he might fill all things.” This does not mean the Christian is absorbed in pain, anguish, or austerities. Again, let it be well noted that such cannot be held within the heart without there being there also room for joy in and gratitude for the riches and blessings of this life. Balance, symphonic resonance, marks the wise soul.
They that have ventured notions concerning the why of this world have often spoken in terms of a sacrifice, a death, a self-giving, a breaking-open for selfless reason, a creative love. There is to all such talk a sense of the orgasmic. Whether that sensitivity be explicit or not, it is there in the tales of Atum, Osiris, Prajapati, Dionysius, the Christ. This giving is cyclical, a progress from unity to differentiation to re-unity on a transcendent level. It is the whole unfolding and propelling a “new” whole-making. It is, in theological terms, the Holy in its temporality and eternality, its materiality and its spirituality, its seen and unseen. This is replicate in every individual soul and psyche—the unity of life bursts out into the differentiations of world experience (incarnation) which plants (from the tree of the cross) the world with potential (grace) for the examination of self, the revelation of self, and stirs (imparts Spirit) to find again the unity of self and soul in the other, and therein love. Reality is therein known not merely as biologic or material. Those aspects but mirror something deeper, more fundamental.
That reality is expressed, therefore, in myth and symbol, not in concepts or logic. That realm of symbols and myth can only be en-acted in ritual action. Indeed, it is anciently within the unspoken rituals that myths and sacred narratives arise. The rational mind cannot enwrap the symbolic, and so it falls to actions poetic, emotive, romantic, religious to express it within their codes, their metaphors, their sacred tales spoken in the soaring of heart, the pulsing of blood. Such is always touching upon the intimate and orgasmic because it is the giving of self over to the depths of beauty, goodness, and truth, to the depth from which such notions take flight, the fundament of creativity and creation. It is ultimately the icon of the Eternal knowing itself in its Other—in the world-generating Logos–and bringing forth Love.
It is not the death of Osiris, the Christ, or the other icons of the creative that is “extraordinary.” It is that which those deaths open out into life that is “significant” (symbol-making). In this distracted world again it must be underscored that the symbol denotes reality in its depths, its essence, in manner more true than can be mustered by material description or logical concepts. Symbol’s depth is “redemptive.” It “buys back” life from the ephemeral world. It captures the truth of reality from the banality of the everyday. It allows the “return to Paradise,” to the origin, to the unity and harmony of the origin, to life itself and within that consciousness itself. It allows, not a turn into the depths, but a movement of the depths into the present, of the unconscious into the conscious, and thus reveals the true society of man and nature. Man never “ascends” to God. The movement is always from the eternal depths to the present, from God to man. The Christ may ascend to God only when by loss of self he becomes universally at-one with God. The ascension of the Christ is the first light of man in transformation—by grace, by being at-one with God. As a revelation this is a latency. It needs to be activated. Its incarnation always wants for man to say: “Let it be according to Thy word.” The Spirit hovers over chaos until intention is made action, until is spoken: “Amen.” Thus theology says the sufficiency of grace is revealed in action. There is no encountering of heaven that does not evoke from man the consecration of the created, that does not summon to the wholeness of all God’s work, to holiness. Were this not true, Paul would be simply a man who fell of his horse in a thunderstorm. There is always, admittedly, the option of moral freedom to ignore reality, and since Eve and her Adam humanity has had to deal with that potential of neurotic derailment. The death of Judas is marked because it shows forth the ultimate plight of ego’s liberty—to be not. He has given all power to ego. He hears no voice within the depths calling him out of the present. He has no hope. He has no faith in forgiveness, and thus he has no way of giving himself a forward. He has no future. He is as fallible as Peter, but unlike Peter who can weep, his power to wash away his ego’s folly is lost to the suicidal power of melancholy.
Turning here to modern psychology we may glimpse the enmity between the pure creative and ego, between God and man. It can be argued that the anger and wrath of God symbolize that which Freud discerned: the super-ego’s power is evolved from the id. Super-ego has a hyper-morality, but also an amorality; it can be overbearing and cruel. It wants to be tamed and redeemed. It mirrors the evolution of the notion of God in human consciousness wherein God moves from the tribal and wrathful to the self-giving, self-offering God of universal love. In the sacred narrative of the demanded sacrifice of Isaac, in the consultation of Ezekiel by the elders of Israel, in all of Job, and countless other biblical tales we encounter that which may be understood, not so much as a challenge to fidelity, as a God challenging man to divert his wrath, to limit his power, to enter into not mere entreaty but dia-Logos. Logos becomes man to the end that man may converse with God, that they may convert one another, change one another. In Jesus we encounter the subliminal vocation to understand, limit, and transform the order preserving power of the divine creative. Ego-identity challenges the wrath of the super-ego’s id heritage (the letter of The Law morality) to the end that a transformation is allowed, that ego may have the power to step aside, and Self to become satiated, and to transcend to the centre of the individual, therein transforming one from individual to true man-in-the-world. Thus, in the death of Jesus-Christ God is transformed from wrath to love, from Law to Spirit, from the crucified descended to hell to the Risen One.
Excursus: It seems any attempt to capture Jesus in painting, sculpture, and especially film is doomed to be something lacking in wholeness. He is either resigned, tortured, transcending, banal, or saccharine. It is an issue to be found in the notions entertained by many ancient heresies, most notably Docetism, Apollinarianism, Nestorianism. The difficulty is for the most part omitted in scripture which proclaims him the Christ without being overly concerned to venture into his humanity, his passions, his history. Anything touching upon his psyche is said simply in support of his mission and his dedication to it. The four canonical evangelists have very differing presentations of Jesus because they have four differing audiences and four differing theological perspectives. His history and personality are not their primary concern, it is that which he does.[xii] He offers the totality of his self to his mission. He is a transparency, iconically the perfect transparency, before God. He is the empty vessel ever awaiting to be filled with the vision and will of his Father, to be filled with the Spirit of his Father. It is interesting that many mediaeval paintings of the Trinity have the Father and Jesus looking very much alike, usually, but not always, the one the older version of the other. “He is the image of the Father.” He cannot be “pictured” because, as St. Paul notes, he has become the living spirt that gives life to the new world in its redemptive evolution. It is thus that the most appropriate symbolic presentation of Jesus is the bread and the cup and their sharing. The action of communion makes him–as the Christ–real.
This emptiness of the Christ can be set within a psychological context. It is, let it be cautioned, no more than an examination of the construct of the icon of Jesus as the Christ. Taking superego as law and the command to submit, and the id as the will to power and the world chaos it creates, the surrender of the ego that stands between them allows the psyche’s magnetic poles of superego and id to collapse into each other, thereby creating a void wherein a new creation can occur. That new creation is the emergence of the Self as the seat of wisdom which rises above good and evil, law and freedom, and which is in itself creativity incarnate. This movement is symbolized in the divinization of Jesus, the confirmation of his Christhood, his becoming for-us Lord. It is the prime action of the new world order wherein the meaningfulness of life is dis-covered, revealed. It is not a world of law but love, of the freedom, not of the ego, but of togetherness for the “inheritance is the cosmos.” Law provides the security that ego craves. Love has no security, only freedom, freedom to give of itself as is creatively proper to its moment. It is propitious.
It is here well to remember that neither Jesus nor the evangelists were Greek philosophers. When Jesus says to his apostles “This is my Body” he is not making a statement about the Aristotelian metaphysical notions of substances and accidents. At that Passover supper Jesus is creating a ritual—a sacrament. “Do this in memory of me” he says. Remember your teacher, your friend. Emulate me. “As I have for you done, so do you for others.” Or, as Paul has it–robe yourself in the identity of the Christ. One ritually ingests the body and blood (the history and the life of the Christ) in token of one’s commitment to continue to do his work, to carry forward the legacy laid, and the heritage given.
Because the divine word is indicative not simply of intention, but is in itself efficacious, the church in its sacred rituals proclaims that when the divine agent (the Christ) says over the bread and the wine “This is my body [my present] …my blood [my life]” they become such—sacramentally. They are present as sacrament, as grace, as power capable of affecting reality. The divine presence is never for-itself. It is always for something—for creation, for salvation, for us. It is pure vitality intent to vitalize. One may gaze upon the bread and the cup, but if that gaze does not move one to be creatively present to the world, to renew the world in the God-presence, then it is a folly. It reduces God to an idol. “Real presence” is a theological misnomer. It is realizing presence, or it is a vacuity.
The language of religion cannot be confused with the language of metaphysics. A similarity of words is not a similarity of meaning. When the early fathers of the church added the ideas of Plato and Plotinus to scripture, when centuries later Aquinas added those of Aristotle, they were trying to elucidate the sacred imagery to a certain audience and era. Their work cannot be taken as having uncovered the mystery of life. We forget “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again” is the mystery of faith, a mythic encapsulation of an accepted trust in the workings of the world, the workings of creativity. When in this essay are applied the terms and ideas of modern psychology there is an alignment with the spirit of those in the past who sought to make relevant to their times and places the sacred narratives of the faith. Talk of ego and superego in Jesus is merely an attempt at a modern illustration, not an axiomatic statement of uncontestable validity. It intends simply to point to co-ordinates within the story-lines of scripture and modern psychology. It will undoubtedly be irrelevant in another age except as an aspect of the history of religious dialogue.
Christianity is transmitted in sacred narrative, myth, symbol, and as such points toward meaningfulness, toward layers and layers of meaning. It is not about literal truths, factoids of history. It is about salvation history. It is about Truth-in-itself—ever revealing, encompassing, vitalizing. It is Spirit put into words that Word be turned into spirit. It is about resurrection life, about real-making presence for the world. It asks of man to allow the Spirit to overshadow to the end that the divine be made manifest, worldly, concrete.
A war upon the soul
The end of the mediaeval era was the end of a unified vision of soul that had endured more than a millennium. The Renaissance was a rebirth of the ideas of the ancients. Every birth brings forth a platform for new experience, for experimentation. The churches of the West were locked into arguments about moral freedom, sin, and grace. They saw no need to revisit the arguments about soul. Soul was accepted de facto. Philosophy, critical of the literalism the late mediaeval scholars had placed upon items intangible and ripe with the pulse of experiment went on a quest to locate the intangible soul. The rationalists could find no satisfactory answer beyond that it was not body, not material. The empiricists dismissed it as a “ghost,” a fathom, a fantasy, an imagined fuel for a mechanical world that had no need of it, a superstitious remnant of a primitive and intellectually inferior past. With that, that which centuries had defined as “fallen man,” ego-driven man, eventually becomes hailed as the “natural man,” the true man. Civilized man, noble man, the Greek notion of the good-and-beauteous man, the Roman ideal of the magnanimous man were seen to be degraded versions of the human, the “compromised” man. Man under any type of “social contract” was the inhibited man. The brute will to power that is the essence of man had been bound and enslaved by a Christianity which cowed to an effete bourgeois morality. In Nietzsche and his existentialist disciples this idea comes to full flower. Nietzsche proclaims the ultimate power curtailing man is dead. The Superman—the man who escapes the kryptonite of the Christian inspired morality of the masses—is the zenith of human nature, the ideal man and the new divine. That states Nietzsche’s position without the nuance it deserves, but it is exactly such version that stirs within a civilization in decline. The atheist existentialists feast on its pessimism, and thus Sartre, Camus, Kafka et al. are not joyous reading. More dangerously, Nazism swallows it whole.
While the Nazis embraced the idea of a superman, a herrenvolk, and the pure will to power, they did not see that that “will” was about the power of “Me,” an isolated individual, an isolated “volk” enslaving all others. The Nazis hated the Communists precisely because communism knew Nazism created a new ruling class, a new race of over-lords bound by their definition of self to subjugate all others. The Nazis allowed themselves to live the shadow, the unawareness of the anti-social element, the self-destructive element. Will to power without being internally tempered, without prudence and justice is not strength, merely brute force trampling anything that stands in its way—including facts. Facts are the enemy. Propaganda becomes truth, becomes science, becomes religion. Nietzsche was prophetic of what was to come, what was fomenting. At the end of the nineteenth century Europe was overly ripe with optimism and gilding, but the convulsive revolutions that kept sweeping across the nations spoke of something more heinous at the heart awaiting revelation–a rot at the root of a dying civilization. The fin de siècle harboured a vile contagion. There was a fascination with pessimism, vague glances toward a mysticism without religion, melancholy. Seething within this was a creeping, escapist eroticism bedizened with the allure of the femme fatale and the vampiric. Seduction and death were heavily in the air. Thus when Freud detected a pulse within the psyche toward the ultimate, he apprehended it in the negative, as a death-wish. He knew the neurotic tended to be entrapped in a vicious cycle of self-debilitating, self-destructive notions, and that such is indeed a death by a thousand wounds, although they be identical. That pulse toward the ultimate is, however, capable of less pessimistic understanding. It can also be seen as a healthful wish for completeness, wholeness, rest, heaven, nirvana, beatitude, bliss, freedom. Are such items a wish for termination or for transcendence? Termination is brutish, a biology raised to a psychology. Transcendence speaks of vitality, of psychology raised to spirituality. It is never merely a matter of “what is” but how that “what” is evaluated, appreciated. How one judges an item is creative of its power.
It is of interest that the lives of Hegel and Nietzsche overlap briefly. The first still carries the optimism of the romantic age. The other is the child of industrialization and capitalism’s ascent. Capitalism and industrialization deeply wounded the world psyche. Many embraced their turpitudinous individualism and battened themselves upon the anile masses. The masses, defrauded by their rapaciousness, depauperated, and shrived of the authentic propulsion toward individuality, lost psychic power and became insnared in either infatuation or ennui. Thus read we not only Marx and Engels, but Hardy, Elliot, Dickens. In some times and places churches did try to revive the spirit, but their efforts were often derailed by the saccharine or left to descend into the pedantic and pedestrian. Two world wars scorched away the little that was left to the Christian ideals of faith and hope. The church’s ritual became to many rote, habit, spiritless, a socially sanctioned superficial sociality. Ritual shrived of spirituality is a surd. A dead man on a cross without a spirit to surrender is merely a criminal executed. He is not a saviour. Only a ritual that rehearses and implants in the hearts and minds of its participants the offering of spirit, the “into Thy hands,” transforms execution into ritual action, into symbol bridging bread and wine shared with presence and life given. Only therein stirs the psychic powers toward community, the communion of spirits bought back from their soullessness, from the scattered light of Lucifer’s bearing, the dispersed light of mass anonymity and isolating individuality. Only the coming together in this their holy communion is the light in focus, is the self and the world revealed in their truth, is the goal seen, and the meaningfulness beyond it beheld.
Ritual that does not affect the death of the everyday ego with its rationalizations and self-justifications, which does not release life into something more authentic and profound is merely a performance that abdicates the potentials of spirituality, the revelation of spiritual truth and ultimate vitality. Word and act not broken open, not crucified and pierced, is without spirit. On that fateful day, on that reverenced hill, three men died. Only one elevated his death beyond fate and so rose above it. At the fated moment of life’s final encounter he offered up his own spirit to creativity itself, and so in-Spirited a world, and redeemed a world in that sacred spiration.
The Christ offers up the “will-to-power.” He did so in the desert before the feigned benefactions of Satan. He did so once and for all time at the end of his time. In that death, in the authentic rehearsal of that death, in the acceptance of that death, the definitive nature of guilt dies—for all. Guilt and resentment flow, in Nietzsche’s analysis, from the inhibited, the repressed, will-to-power. That may say more about the psyche of Nietzsche than about the nature of psyche, more about the manner in which he resolved his encounter with a primal authority—be that the father, society with its expectations and rules, or God. One might venture to say they that must repress the notion of a God have not come to terms with, not simply the symbolic nature of religious language, but with authority. They too often cry about freedom, but are locked into a pessimism about self, human nature, society. They see the individual deformed by opposition, tension, anxiety, guilt. The world is godless and there is no space for dialogue or redemption. All such is symptomatic of a world that has lost hope, a world suffering the moral schizophrenia that emerged out of the sins, the pride, the unbridled grasps for power, the satanic mills that churn out a capitalism addicted to its delusions of self-grandeur and self-righteousness. All such is guilt ignored and thus guilt empowered. It is the shadow that hangs over the world.
In Freud there is a pessimism about psyche. It may flow from the concentration of his efforts with neurotic patients. It may flow also from the spirit of the age into which he was immersed. He lived the fall of empires, the ravages of the two great wars. Thus he is so wont to speak of the basic attitudes as attack and defence, of a death-wish, of a primary masochism within the psyche. Certainly, in this day wherein we see the Earth revolting against the sadomasochism of man, pessimism may seem adequate, realistic. There is in reading Freud, however, something reminiscent of Luther. Luther emerged out of a world of neurotic superstitions, both Christian and more primitive.[xiii] He needed to confront the oppressive parent-figure, the institutional church, to free himself and his ultimate Self, the Christ-figure. But Luther’s reform of the heart and mind of Christendom could not be a solitary voice, a solitary vision. We, as a species, evolved to operate best with binocular vision, with two functional eyes, with a visual dialogue that can lead to synthesis, even if in the evolution of thought that synthesis needs be measured in centuries. Loyola supplies the second-eye, the counter-reformative vision. He plays sometimes the Jungian, sometime the Adlerian. (Think of the theory of organ deficiency in a man who from war suffered two damaged legs.) We can read within his directions for meditation the ideas clinicalized in Janet, Freud, Jung: free-association, condensation, displacement, amplification, the methodology of building psychic power, eliminating those things that work to exhaust it and terminating them, the need for a guide to offer reassurance, to act as a sounding board, and to elucidate issues when necessary, not simply before the conscious mind (the conscience), but also the unconscious mind with its dreams, its meditational images and feelings, for to counsel in prayer is to deal with the archetypal, the ego, the subpersonalities that orbit it like satellites, and those occasional and minacious meteors that races across the psychic void.
As with Luther’s efforts, Christ needs be freed, not of the institution of church, but of the church’s symbol blindness, its cultic recalcitrance to preaching the truth of the Spirit of the gospel. We need a new Luther to fracture the impasse in institution, to stir the disinterested, inattentive and sagacious-less masses, to inspire the incogitant ministers of word and sacrament.[xiv] And to that effort we need a Loyola to ever correct the inevitable enthusiasms that are wont to derail and deform, calcify, and become unrealistic assessments demanding conformity. We need both a new centrifugal and a new centripetal force to stir, to shake, to awake the psyche of the species, to proclaim “He is not here” and “you shall see Him” unless you wait and focus, unless you make that retreat from the “flesh”, the fantasy-world of egocentricity, and discover the spirit, the soul, the power that turns (converts) the paltering world of “me” and “mine” to the truth of the world, the world which is “ours” as both boon and burden. This is Luke’s theology of waiting and prayer, waiting for the Spirit, acting in the Spirit for the benefit of all.
The neurotic, Jung tells us, is one suffering sick social relationships. Our world is become neurotic—living out of false evaluations of reality, false adequations of reality. There is a momentum to retreat from reality. It is defrauding and fracturing of our very sociality. Our humanity’s symbols, Eve and Adam, prefigure it. They want not reality. They want not Paradise. They want it all. They want to be gods. They want to pick and manipulate without concern for order and propriety, and they end manipulating one another, paining one another until they beget a world of mayhem and murder of ever-widening and seemingly unstoppable momentum. Man descends from naming the animals to maiming them. The mother of life births the murderous and envious. It is not a tale of “once upon a time.” It is our now, our ever real, ever torturous reality. Luther knew that. Whatsoever atop it we put is but veneer. Today we speak of globalism as it slips away to the forces of countless little tribes each babbling on about “me”—my distress, my needs, my hurt, my pain, my rights, my, my, my. Few see how desperately we know not the true nature of man, the sociality of man, and the history of this world, how unthinkingly we commit ourselves and all our resources to neurotically over and over repeating in alternate forms the same errors, the same follies, the same insanities, and all for the sake of me, me, me—be that me the one, the tribe, the nation, the corporation, the bottom-line profitability, the comfort and security that define “ME”—that god-complex, that object-libido investment in ego that caused Paradise to turn to dust and delusion. Man in himself, man shunning his truth, his global sociality, will ever be man discontent, man enisled, man without love, man without self-worth, man trying to define himself in acquisition, man dead to reality and defying any voice that dares cry “Arise” and be true—to yourself, to this world. Modern man does not want a resurrection because he does not want to carry a cross. He wants not a tomb from which he might arise, but a womb wherein he can ever be the centre of life and being—secure, isolated, fed, nurtured, unchallenged by the vicissitudes and trials of life in the world. Such is not bliss. It is not heaven. It is not even a haven. It is hell—something sub-terranean, darkled, solitary, un-born, still-born.
An avenue toward reproachment
Even as we stand within this hell of our own making the issue is to not abandon hope, but to find forgiveness, to leap over and past it all, to start realizing who and where we are, who and where we in truth have the potentials to be. The issue is to stop substantializing the infantile and fantastical embellishment of ego. We need face the depth reality of self, and this world. Religions once summoned man to that. They all seem to have failed. They have failed because the great icons of truth, the symbols of transformative power are no longer plied as psychic instruments into meaningfulness but as idols, concrete and dead “realities” that lead to no truth, no reality. Dogmatism killed God. Good intentioned inattention to the very profundity of God killed God. Man killed God. In this godless world, morals and laws need not apply. There is no need to rehearse “There is no health in us, but that Thou O Lord, have mercy upon us…Spare, Thou those, O God, who confess their faults” because we can lie about the state of our health and there is no One to challenge. In a godless world, we need not be reminded “All have sinned” when we can simply blame someone else or the circumstances. “Pride goeth before the fall” and we are falling because we cannot forgive, cannot make the leap-forward past the knots and entanglements our deformed sociality, our anti-sociality, our anti-world-carelessness, have created. Is Freud correct? Are we in a neurotic loop we know not how to break? Would that there be a ritual that could administer its healing myth and open us to the new, to a new earth and heaven, to a new empowering vision of our shared life. Would that “justice and peace shall kiss” and “the mountains leap like lambs.” Would that we could dis-cover with the joy of man’s desiring and put away the trinkets of our unordered, obstructive craving. Would that we all with Mary could allow the profundity of creativity come into the world.
On the grand scale there are questions that need be considered. Can the age of nation-states be sustained? Can Earth endure the petty posturings of corporate and national self-interest? Can anyone seriously propose the antagonisms for world hegemony will usher in a new Pax Romana? How long will we try Earth’s patience? Earth is the matric, the mother, out of which we are formed. It is not object for our use. It is not subject to our whims. Our relationship with Earth is one for which we are responsible. Yet we proceed pumped full of ego, falsified notions of domination, and crassly tread without care, respect, or honour. It that we hasten the day when the might of Earth’s preeminent sovereignty will crash down upon us. All Eve and Adam needed to do to save Paradise was to say: “We were wrong; we are sorry” and allow forgiveness and creativity the stage. Instead they clung to ego, to denial, to shame, to blame. Like them rather than say “All have sinned,” we pass the blame forward. Blame is not forgiveness. It does not move anyone forward. Only forgiving gives a way forward. All must be willing to make the leap forward because we all together have made the world as it is. We as individuals and as nations need say “Your sin is forgiven you” for as it is in earth so shall it be in heaven. As we make here and now so too do we empower and release creativity itself. We cannot ignore justice, but justice comes with repentance, and repentance flows from the freedom and light given in forgiveness.
How does a soul magnify the Lord? Only by allowing the divine creativity at the root of life the space to be magnificent, magnanimous. Like Mary we need to allow life to magnify Creativity, to find joy in being at-one with Creativity. Such according to Proverbs is the song of Wisdom which dwelt from the beginning with God. It is the song of the crucified Christ. It is the song that allows him to surrender the last vestiges of ego identity, to make the ultimate sacrifice, the “Into Thy hands.” In this he has his truth, his soul, his other, his Father. The cry of abandonment that begins Psalm 22 thus can soar to its summit: “Magnify the Lord all ye descendants of Jacob!” In that Psalm past the dark night of aloneness, past the trials and travail of life, he comes to know the joy of service to Creativity’s end. In this he becomes the first-born into a new world order. In this he becomes fully the Christ, the vicarious man, the light of life, the salvation of the world. Here, not in misused ritual, concretized symbol, and endless asceticism, is founded the imitation of the Christ to which all are called. This is the gospel truth every great ritual in the authenticity of activation needs reveal, needs inspire. In this broken world let us re-member our truth: there is but one Spirit, and we are members one of another, one Body.
Reflections on a concretized symbol: the iconic nature of Mary made into a metaphysics
The connatural usage of symbol language in theology does not mean it is immune from deviation. Theology is, patently, quite apt to venture into taking its symbols as concrete items that can have the rules of logic applied to them. One may consider the biblical symbol of virginal conception.[xv] As symbol it has nothing to do with banishing the normal manner of biologic conception. No human appears without the meeting of ovum and sperm. Jesus would not have been “born man” were this not the case. Virginal conception as symbol indicates the God-presence, the Christ, the agency of the divine power in time-space, proceeds purely from outside the powers and processes of the everyday world, its concerns and expectations because creativity is always something abiogenic which pours itself out, pours itself into. More directly put, the Christ, the true self of man, wisdom, is begotten by God, generated by pure creativity. Jesus is born of Mary. He is the Christ as the revelation of wisdom-in-the-world proceeding from the tree of life.
Plato came near this insight regarding the abiogenic nature of the creative logos, but made the realm of the Ideal reality itself. By this he discounted this world without allowing creative power to the Ideal. The Forms or eternal Ideas of his theory could not therefore actuate the world, and an agent of actualization, a Demiurge, was necessitated. The Forms could but be norms for the agent. Christian thought corrects the Platonic shortcoming. In its vision creativity both inspires and affects. The Logos is not an idea; it is idea-in-action, in actualization. In this sense, the incarnation of God into the world is essential to the nature of God.
Christian theology fell early under the spell of the gnostic ideas flourishing at the time of its birth. These ideas devalued the material world as something evil to be avoided, denounced or escaped. Coupled with the tendency to discard the symbolic nature of theological talk in general and Hebraic religious vision in particular, this led to taking the sacred symbol of virginal conception and making it into a concrete historical fact. Once so situated, logic could be applied, and the virginal state could be extended both into the past and future. Mary was no longer a symbol of obedience and faith, the counter-Eve, but a human nature coopted for divine use. She was “consecrated,” set aside for God alone, and could in no wise be other. Thus, her life from its very conception must, by definition, be without blemish: she is “conceived without the stain of original sin.” She is the Immaculate Conception. In like manner, this concept of impeccability is driven into the future. Mary is “ever-virgin.” No human can touch the woman God has chosen as his own instrument. The future, being open-ended, allows also for Mary, the consecrated vessel, upon the end of her worldly existence to be rescued from any form of worldly corruption. She is assumed into heaven—body and soul.
Some have argued that here we have the emergence of a new symbol—the feminine divine, the feminizing of the divine patriarchy of Father and Son. Anyone who has visited the Vatican and passed through the Sala del Immacolata cannot fail to note the central painting. The divine Father-Son-Spirit form not a straight line or a triangle as is customary in art. Mary sits not in an honoured place to the right of her son. Mary stands between Father and Son as the Spirit floats above her. It is the divinization of Mary. The triangle of tri-unity is replaced by a square—a quaternity. As Jung considered a quaternity a symbol of wholeness, this elevation of Mary was for him of great importance. It heralded the emergence of a new symbol for modern man. Some may argue that Mary is merely in these doctrines and depictions made no more than the icon of faith, which is biblical. But the notions of perpetual virginity, conception without stain of original sin, and celestial embodiment are, despite any logic, contrary to the entire biblical notion of what constitutes Christhood. Christ is the agent of God in the world, the actualizing power of the divine creative in-Spiration. It is in scriptures foreshadowed by the kings and priests, chosen, anointed, and adopted by God to act “in the name of God.” They are God’s plenipotentiary viceroys. In scripture this role is given its fulness in Jesus who initiates the new reality of world wherein all are called to assume the work of being in time-space the agents of the divine creative, and its providential and redemptive nature. All are called to embrace Christhood—Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female. Christhood has no sexual distinction. A male may have by historical condition initiated it, and may stand the nucleus about which forms the Body of Christ, but that Body is composed of both males and females. There is no need to feminize the divine. The divine—as ever it was—is asexual. Better put, the divine is above sexual identity because it is the abiogenic and pure-creative. The symbol words of Father and Son are patriarchal icons. Parent and Child have often been used to update those names, but Lover and Beloved might better serve, allowing then the Trinity to be envisioned as Lover and Beloved bonded in Love.
One might opine the dogmatic pronouncements of the Roman church regarding the immaculate conception of Mary (1854) and the assumption (1950) are aposematic of the movement toward the emancipation of women. They are not. In that same Vatican room dedicated to the immaculate one, there is a painting of a woman holding the cross in one hand and the eucharistic cup and bread in the other. If it is Mary, she certainly did hold within her body he who would become remembered and symbolized by those items. However, her apotheosis into the divine decorporealizes her and removes her from all other women. As a result it de-humanizes her. She is the goddess to whom one might pray. Women—at least those within the Roman church–cannot follow her. They cannot become the priests who hold within their consecrated hands the consecrated bread and cup. They can never be the priests because the icon of the feminine has been removed from them and made an unworldly perfection. Mary here is not an ideal of fidelity, an icon of faith, but a real woman, mother, wife become an unreality, and, therefore, something spiritually and psychologically dangerous, pace Jung. The symbol misappropriated by concretization and logic does not mutate into a new symbol. It merely becomes something inappropriate and unnecessary. Confessedly, there is the possibility that the woman with cross and cup is not Mary but a depiction of Ecclesia (holy Mother Church personified). This negates nothing of the above critique. The feminine is still disembodied, removed from reality. Ecclesia thus pictured is merely the daughter of Mary, for as the second Vatican Council decided Mary is “the Mother of the Church.”
Mary without sin and Jesus without sin become a celestial couple akin to Isis and Osiris. It is a confusing relationship where the aspects of paternity, maternity, and marriage are tossed into the air. Mary is the “spouse of the Holy Spirit.” She is the “Mother of the Church” which is in turn “the Bride of Christ.” She is her own mother-in-law. And she is, for all this motherhood, sexless, as is her son. She is, nevertheless, the new mother-goddess. Unlike her numerous predecessors in Greece and Rome she must have their varied and sundry aspects rolled into one—at least as many as the new gnostic inspired morality will allow. Celibates and virgins may find in her the anchoring icon and consolation. All may call upon her as mother. They that mourn may find in her one-time sorrows comfort and strength. But her humanity is excavated in her divinity. In the human-most moments of sensual delight how does one look to her? Because she has no sensuality she is the object of sentimentality. Her joys are all celestial. Her sorrows are wiped away. Her humanity is spent to the point that she could not, like every other mortal, waste away in death. Does the world need a goddess? Is it appropriate to sacrifice a woman to create a goddess? Is Earth, once also hailed both sacred and mother, obscured and neglected in the shadow of Mary’s apotheosis?
Regarding the title of Spouse of the Holy Spirit it needs be noted this is not a doctrinally enforced designation. It comes from piety, largely clerical piety. Nevertheless, it is a title celebrated in more than one Roman church of my acquaintance. It could well be used to bring into question the legitimacy of Jesus’ Davidic heritage, for according to Matthew the royal line runs through Joseph.[xvi] It also highlights a deficient notion of conception wherein the womb is no more than a ground for the planting of the seed, providing nothing more than shelter for it. Without both sperm and ovum how is Jesus “fully-human” as doctrine states? Where is the chromosomal mix? Did the Spirit miraculously implant Joseph’s seed into Mary? We are here not far from the fantastical notion that Jesus’ birth was such as to leave Mary virginally intact. He was at one moment within the womb, and the next miraculously outside of it without disruption to the virginal state.
The title of Mother of God [both in its Latin form of Dei Genetrix and the Greek Theotokos (God-bearer)] here bears consideration. It is its own offence, its own distortion of the symbolic, but the symbol here concerns the Christ. It takes the divine title bestowed upon Jesus as the Christ out of the context of Hebraic religious vision and symbol wherein God is always One, the Lord and father of the chosen Israel and its messiah, concretizes it into Greek metaphysics wherein intimacy with the heart and mind of God become Being-God rather than being the true and living image of God, applies to this an eldritch logic completely foreign to Jesus, the apostles, and the evangelists, and then brazenly continues on to apply it to Mary.[xvii] If anyone wills to think that here be simply Mary as icon of the soul co-operating with God, read the arguments surrounding the Nestorian controversy. In terms of spirituality, the good soul is good in that it gives birth to the presence of the divine in acting as the divine re-presentative to its time and place, in incarnating the divine, revealing the creative power in the world for the world. Mary as mother of God is a mistranslation of symbol into an impossible metaphysics. The church and it theologians need to focus on the meaning of Christhood, respect the Hebraic heritage resident within its symbols, abandon fantasies and philosophical contortions, and cease confusing a disoriented affection with spirituality.
The sum of the issue may be put as follows. There is a unity with God in conjoining the will with the will of Creativity. That moral union of wills cannot be translated into a unity of substance, essence, or being. Being at-one with the heart and mind is not the same as being one in essence, substance, or being. If, however, for whatsoever reason that philosophical leap is made it must be respected as a symbolic leap, as an understanding of being not as in-itself, but as an as-if statement, as an analogical (a “with-out logic”) statement. To receive the icon that stands before the inconceivable source of creativity without that caveat causes theology to slip ever so swiftly into idolatry, and on a pragmatic level renders the proclamation of faith into the incomprehensible and irrelevant.
The bewildering thinking in the above critiqued positions leads us to consider the doctrinal proposition of communicatio idiomatum, the idea that whatsoever could be said of Jesus could be said of him both as God and as man. The “coincidence of natures” is itself a symbol denoting the intimacy between the eternal Lord and his re-presentative in time, his Christ, the Lord-for-us. It cannot be distorted into a metaphysics about the nature of God or the nature of Jesus, nor can it be doubly distorted in stretching it and applying it to Mary. It cannot be rendered a logic that makes the mother of Jesus into the mother of God and all the titles and honours that follow from this mistranslation of a moral coincidence into a coincidence of substance. When symbol is taken as something concrete, it is to such folly that one is led. The Roman church will defend all this with its own commixture of logic and symbol. Some might opine it does so because in so many cases in the clerical mind mother cannot be denied, neglected, or offended because the clerical self-identity is grounded in the mother, or because there exists an infantile bond with the mother figure that stands in stark contrast to the bond with the Father so characteristic of Jesus’ preaching. This does not mean that no good can come from such distorted ground, but it does mean there is a flaw in the vision of psyche inclining to disoriented and deformed vision, and therein action. Wheat can grow among rocks and thistles—the infinite capacities of creativity within, of grace—can never be discounted. But, it needs ever be asked what damage and delay does this distortion of vision do to the nourishment of the world, to the good health of the world? And it is the good health, the salvation, of the world with which we are concerned. The individual soul matters only within the context of all, for while a man may want to save himself, God wills to save all.
Unlike the ancients in the West we tend to relegate God and the holy to the head. We make holiness about ideas, ideals. We have not the flair for connecting the sensual and the sacred, the sexual and the sacred. The primary creation of the rites of matrimony is the duty to propagate humanity, not an environ of human enriching touch and bond. Perhaps this accentuation is at the root of the modern world’s callousness toward the sacramental nature of marriage. It is seen to be an ersatz creature, one devoid of the joy of sex, the thrill of the sensual, the reality of human touch and its spiritual, its psychological potentialities. Indeed, religion seems to outlaw the sensual and sexual, hide them from the holy, and so allows them to become de-spirited, things merely secular, profane, profanities. Christianity has lost its way concerning sex and senses, and the de-sexualization of the “ever virgin” and her son are at the root of the issue. The vitalities of our humanness are about a great deal more than dogmatic logic and religious sentimentality.
The doctrines of perpetual virginity, immaculate conception and assumption into heaven reveal not a truth about humanity but a lie about Mary. They exhibit a patriarchal blindness that elevates one woman to divine honours that all others may be looked upon as lesser. These doctrines are, at best, a patriarchal compensation for a patriarchal prejudice, a grudge against women. Indeed, if one decides to attenuate the symbol into a logic, if a woman enwombed the Christ, it is women who ought, by nature and extension, be the priests. Then, like unto Joseph, men ought to be relegated to assisting them—at charitable best. I mean in here no disrespect for Mary. I honour the woman whose fidelity to her God and to her life gave us culturally and spiritually the most precious of gifts. Thus it is I object to her being made into something, not so much celestial, as unnatural, unreal, and unrealizable.
Excursus: Let it be patent—most Christians—in particular, those of the fundamentalist churches—are prejudiced in the reading and understanding of the scriptures. They forget the writers of scripture were Jews, or in a few cases Gentiles who had attached themselves to Judaism. However, the understanding of God, the Christ, and their relationship was interpreted and transmitted to the world in the ideas and terms of the Greek philosophers. The argumentations of the early fathers and those of the councils held at Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon are set chiefly in the philosophical terms of the world’s dominant culture—the Greek. It is not the culture that produced the scriptures they attempt to explain. Greek thought, and by inheritance Western thought, is mathematical, linear. Hebrew thought is geometric, trigonometric. It is multidimensional, full of tangents, angels in counter relationships. It is not the neat and tidy Greek 2+2=4. It is poetic, impressionistic, reflective as opposed to intellectual in the sense of rational. It seeks to capture a spirit rather than produce a crystalline concept. Hence, the philosophical concepts used to define God, the Christ, and their interrelationship create something not there in the Hebrew mind. Yet, it is through those doctrinal statements and explanations that we have all received scripture. We, to be authentic to scripture, need to return to the mind-set of the Hebrew writers. This is an issue of culture speaking to culture.
It is a socio-political issue we face in my country. A sizable portion of the citizens here think with Western minds, Greek-inspired thought processes, while it would seem the autochthonous population of this land thinks in a manner more akin to our Semitic ancestors in faith. This befuddles attempts at communication. It is about more than nuance, words or word order. It is about the entire matrix of thinking. It is about the cultural, the mythopoetic contextualization of thinking that gives rise to the very under-standing of things and actions. Communication is not impossible, but each culture must keep in mind that the internal workings of the mind of the other are moving within differing modes, and that there is thus the need to be open to constantly translating not just words but the internal dynamic behind those words which give them differing shades, contours, weights of understanding. Furthermore, it must be acknowledged that every culture, every sub-culture, carries within itself a level of xenophobia. This is not so much fear as a distrust of and a distain for the different, the foreign. A culture maintains its viability in the ability to adapt to the new, but that does not negate its inherent sense of self-preservation, of conservatism. When two cultures try to communicate there is the need to authentically suspend the culturally inbreed distaste for “otherness,” and to translate not simply the words, but the mind-sets, the internal processes, the spirit of the people. Communication must focus on its core thrust—to create a coming together, a union. In terms of knowing scripture we need to be openly of Semitic, not Greek, spirit.
The notion of Mary as mother of God has a caromed effect. Because she is the font of the Font, she becomes the very Seat of Wisdom, the Co-redeemer, and Co-mediator. Inarguably, every Christian in carrying forward the work of Christhood is such, but, as noted above, Mary holds those positions, not in a moral way, but in a metaphysical way. The essence of the situation is then that God-made-manifest-in-Christ is no longer immediate to the soul. Mary mediates between the soul and the Christ to the end that the Christ is no longer the medium of the divine immediacy to the soul. While art contains myriad examples of this, perhaps the best is to be found in the national shrine to Mary in Washington, D.C. There, atop the baldachin over the high altar stands a statue of Mary while behind her on the apse wall is a mosaic of the Christ. It is a depiction of the Roman idea of “through Mary to Jesus.” The practical result is a church, not of Christ, but of Mary. She, not her son, is the channel that transmits access to the divine. By this the Christ, the medium of divine immediacy and approachability, becomes that which traditionally would be considered the incomprehensible and inapproachable Majesty of the Godhead. The entire notion of the Trinity in the work of salvation is thrown out of alignment, and the orchestration of both soundly biblical theology and spirituality is made an incongruity.
It seems acceptable to many that Mary enjoy priority among the saints of God. As so frequently given in mediaeval art, she, along with John the Baptist, forms the bridge between the old and new dispensations. However, how Mary enjoys this pre-eminence matters. Can belonging to a people or a time give one status within the new world order wherein the issue of importance is that which one does, not that to which one belongs—be it a chosen race or the launching of a new era? That which one must do is the will of the God. It is thus that Mary enjoys her primal status—she is the first to say yes to God-as-Love in his coming to man in his history. Here Mary is in authenticity the saint and the icon of faith and fidelity. However, it needs ever be cautioned that this position cannot go unbridled. That which of faith matters is the fruit it bears, that which is brought into the world to make present to the world the Creative One to the end that the world become creative and one.
[i] Creativity is used herein to designate God and God acting within man (grace). We tend to freeze the image of God into the all-perfect being, the being in whom all possibilities are self-actualized and eternally the same, the being who is forever an unchanging and unchangeable perfection. We may depict this Being within a burst of light, a glow of radiation, but it is the Eternal One in that photonic excitement on which we concentrate while the truth of the vision is in the light, the energy, the eternal and undepletable energy. God, the eternally presenting, requires for a descriptor, not a noun, but a verbid, and one better than “Being.” We await its revelation.
[ii] Cf: on John, Reflections on a vision, February 2016.
[iii] Cf: Occidental Ideas, Part 16: Empiricism, May 2014.
[iv] The theoretical divisions of life into soul, psyche, and spirit in Greco-Roman thought is to a degree replicated in the Egyptian ideas of ka, ba, ahk, and the Hindu ideas of atman, ahamkara, citta. While the Egyptians deciphered several other aspects to soul these seem akin to subpersonalities or are requisite for bringing soul into the afterlife.
[v] Eros and Psyche are not the only mythic creatures to have wings. Wings denote mobility, swiftness, and thus the several divine messengers are winged (Mercury, Hermes, Nike, the angels). In Christian iconography the most notable messenger is the divine Spirit itself, the Holy Spirit. This persona of the divine is usually depicted as a dove. It is the act of communication between the divine font and its self-actualizing in the logos. It is always the conjunctive bond. It is the soaring bond of love that is the core unity of the Sacred One. It is always dynamic as it is the very dynamic of the Godhead personified. It is always forward moving, be that into creation, forgiveness, or the ultimate future of a new heaven and earth. It is thus the Spirit of the incarnation and the naming of the “Beloved.”
[vi] Love-in-itself does not exist. Love-in-itself is an abstraction. It exists only as a power-for. Love substantializes and appears in its object, the other, and so is sub-ject reaching out to create other as sub-ject. It is the creative bond between subjects making them subjects.
[vii] Cf.: Psychotherapeutic Drama, January 2021.
[viii] Augustine and the theologians of Platonic inclination hold the soul (and psyche) utterly disoriented in the Paradisiac fall to man’s egocentric drive. Soul needs a divine re-charging (grace) to operate correctly, and thus produce good, morally worthy, thoughts and actions. Aquinas and those of the Aristotelean disposition have not so negative a vision of man. The imprint of the divine creativity remains. Man may have “fallen” but grace is ever there to supply. God does not abandon man; it is man who turns from God, who lies to God, and therefore, to himself. Like a temple that stands in ruins man can in the depths of self still and ever feel the once holiness of his being, turn within, and in that derelict inner sanctum hover over the embers of a once sacred flame, wonder, and cry: “Have mercy.” The core power of man ceases never wanting to be alive, to be satiated, authentic. All are constantly called by the very grace we tend to forget: creation.
[ix] Cf.: The Question of Immortality, subsection: The why of our asking, July 2020.
[x] It is of interest that Jung makes animus/anima archetypes of soul. In this there is implied a sexuality inherent within psyche. This is not overt sexuality or gender, but a more fundamental sensuality that embeds within itself both the powers and the delicacies within life, knows their thrill, and instinctively appreciates their vast, varied, and variable potentials, and therein their inherent sociality, the need of other.
[xi] While salvation is said to flow, sin is static. It is the ego-centric status quo beyond which one cannot move. Sin is death because the static has no future. It is a death wish that haunts conscience, debilitates the growth of consciousness, and spews anxiety and guilt. Its resolution is forgiveness, a leap forward past the impasse of status quo, past the static state. Forgiveness creates repentance, creates the conversion of soul’s direction. They that demand repentance must proceed being forgiven know not scripture. They remember not that scripture tells us that “while we still were in sin” God sent his Christ. Does not Jesus first say: “Your sin is forgiven” and only secondly: “Sin no more”? When all have sinned, why are we so intent that others pay-up before we dispense mercy? The Christ died nailed to a cross that wrath and The Law might die. How few prefer that cross to the wrath and The Law still.
[xii] In John’s gospel the doing and the being of Jesus are definitively commixed. His acting as at-one with God is his being one with God. He is something more than the true image of the Father. He is Lord-for-us because he is the Lord. John’s gospel is, however, not a text on metaphysics. It is a text on spirituality. Its truths are said in symbols (both Hebraic and Essene) because no metaphysics can encapsulate the depths of soul and the unity of souls in Spirit which it addresses.
[xiii] Cf.: Spirituality, Part 6, subsection: Luther’s vision, January 2018.
[xiv] While this essay was being written, I was sent a link to a video. It is of a Roman priest officiating at a wedding. In the course of the sacred liturgy he performs Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” The appropriateness of the lyrics aside, in sacred space and time this man dons the hubris to give an entertainment for his own acclamation. Facinorous impiety! For such sacrilege at the very altar of God he ought to be deprived of licence to function as cleric. Charged with the care of souls, entrusted to administer the sacred most rites of the faith he has decided to celebrate his own ego. This is not pastoral action. It is crass self-promotion. Where is this man’s bishop with letter of censure in hand? Need we wonder why God and his church are neglected when clerics are all about themselves, and tolerated to be all about themselves? Do schools of theology no longer teach respect for the sacred begins in bowing down before the sacred and not abusing it as a platform for self-aggrandizement?
[xv] Cf: on the Virginity of Mary, December 2015.
[xvi] The rabbinical Matthew seeks to reinforce for his Jewish converts the Davidic heritage of Jesus from Abraham forward. His genealogy is constructed in such fashion to give a final number-symbol of fourteen, the number value of the name David in Hebrew. It is something that would not be lost to his congregants. Luke carries forward the work of Paul to preach to the Gentiles. His stress to his congregants is the openness of this “new vision,” this gospel, to all. Thus, his genealogy begins and ends with one dubbed “the son of God,” Adam at one end, Jesus at the other. As the “new” Adam, Jesus calls all humankind to be enfolded into the family of the chosen of God. The specificity of the “chosen” status of the Jews is omitted as it was but a preparatory stage for the embrace of all initiated by Jesus.
[xvii] Cf: Spirituality, Part 4: Aspects of our genetic code: Jesus, Paul, John, March 2017.