Bravo!! An assessment echoed exactly by a great Jungian, Ann Belford Ulanov in Wisdom of the Psyche:
“Jung fell for the Devil's trick, I think, and missed the sophisticated psychological description that privato boni gives us of evil's reality.... What Jung was after, I believe, is the psychological and religious truth that we must admit to ourselves, just how strong evil is. It is not something we can get around or ignore. What he missed, I believe, is the greater theological truth - that good is stronger than evil and of a different order of being.
My understanding of Jung is that did not know where to put the bad. He could not get a net over it. But he could not and did not deny or repress it. He struggled with it. His personal life and his life with women show this struggle and even the nastiness that inheres in it.... Jung's solution to his problem, masquerading as Job's worked.... This attitude of Jung's holds some of the appeal that the Zoroastrian religion holds: we can line up on the same side with God, or Ahuramazda, and fight fort the good against the forces of darkness. For Jung, the saving good was consciousness. God needs our consciousness. For myself, I think that is simply where Jung projected his particular struggle and particular God-image onto God.”
"The creation from our perspective in time — though not God’s in eternity — is unfinished, incomplete, still emerging from “chaos,” “on the way.” The Christian mystery, as Paul already indicates, is that God in Christ has begun the process of its (and our) transfiguration."
Wonderfully insightful. The whole post is, don't get me wrong. But the above quote really shone through for me.
Very helpful. Thank you. I have one question. Is it fair, I wonder, to say here that it was Jung's misreading when it was really the Lutheran church's misunderstanding?: "Instead, he is fixated on a myth of his own devising, demonstrably far less sophisticated in nature, paradoxically biblicist in a derivatively Protestant way, culled from his misreading of a few scriptural texts, for reasons related to his personal and family psychology."
Shouldn't we rather blame/credit the Lutheran church? Jung might have reasonably thought his father's church's interpretation was definitive given his own context. I don't mean to be contrarian or contentious I agree with the whole assessment here. But it is a question I often ask myself broadly, to what extent should the church take responsibility for its failure to witness well, and to what extent should we blame its critics when their (mis)understandings are conditioned by the church's own? How much can we blame Jung for thinking like a protestant?
Thanks, Aaron. No, I don't blame Jung for thinking like a Protestant, although (given how extensively read he was) one might have expected more breadth of insight and something more than a paradoxical adherence to "sola scriptura." And I don't hesitate to blame Lutheranism. Without blaming Lutherans themselves, I do regard that church's magisterial theology as gravely distorted. Jung's own obvious distortions are an inversion of the most salient confessional claims of classical Protestant (as an expression of some of the presuppositions in Western) Christian thought.
As an aside, how much did Luther's problems with his own father create in him the anxieties that underlay his theological obsessions?
Nov 2, 2023·edited Nov 2, 2023Liked by Addison Hodges Hart
This generally strikes at one of the main reasons why I left Western Christianity—it is, in most churches, infused with a sort of (literally) hellish neuroticism.
But maybe I'm just smarting a bit right now; I attended a particularly Baroque (and thus particularly annoying) Mass last night with a friend for All Saints, which has left a bad taste in my mouth.
This is suspiciously timely. I happened across the Essentia channel and Bernardo K mentioned Answers in Job as a must read book. I deeply respect Bernardo's work on analytical idealism, so this intrigued me.
Thanks for saving me the time on reading it. Your post was very helpful. Your insights into how we should read scripture and understand God is always fresh and welcome; so please keep discussing it.
It remains the one book I have ever read by Jung, and it thoroughly irritated me. With the above personal background, that’s lessened, but it’s not something awe-inspiring, that’s for sure.
Thank you, Addison, for another excellent analysis and evaluation. That was very helpful. It’s been a long time since I’ve read Answer to Job, and your take on it really helped to unpack all the reasons why my soul revolted against it. Jung had to have known that anyone who felt a calling toward a more normative Christian tradition could never abide a God who is unconscious and evil. For him to say it was his most important work was a tendentious decision that feels like a line drawn in the sand against Christianity. That is sad, because there is so much about his ideas that are so useful for transformation and deeply fascinating. I think he chose a sharp gnostic break against it along the lines of Marcionism, ignoring and curbing much of Christian tradition (like you say) - for the personal reasons of his father’s struggle, etc. but also Jung may have felt the religion wasn’t going to last in its current configuration or may evolve into something more depth psychological, and also the fact that it seemed helpless and ineffectual to stop the evil unleashed during the two world wars in Christian Europe.
I agree. I think those were also motives for his writing the book. Jung had foreseen where Germany was headed decades before the war, too, and was appalled by the fact that it seemed inevitable, almost fate or destiny. For him, because he understood God as a subjective shared reality in the world and our consciousness, the coming barbarity couldn't be explained as anything less than God's doing. Christianity, of course, knows better than to confuse human consciousness and behavior with God's action or intent. Evil exists because human beings are part of a creation that is still incomplete. We experience its change and progress as slow and temporal. God is eternal and perceives it as accomplished (the Sabbath of the seventh day, if you will). But we are in time and this process of emergence from nothingness and chaos means that that entanglement with disorder, which we experience as evil, will have an end. The goal is the perfect union of God and creation -- "all in all."
I’m a little more familiar with the other authors, but I thought I’d ask you, Addison, if there were some titles you might recommend from A.M. Allchin and John Macquarrie?
With Macquarrie, certainly his "Principles of Christian Theology." Allchin wrote on a wide-ranging number of theological and spiritual topics. "The World is a Wedding," "The Dynamic of Tradition," and "Participation in God" are good for starters.
Nov 7, 2023·edited Nov 7, 2023Liked by Addison Hodges Hart
Joseph Campbell was of great interest to me early on around 11,12,13 getting into Mythology as a field of academic study in addition to having alway enjoyed the folklore and liturature of myth and story telling espically the overlaps with still existing religious traditions.. Basically I just like Star Wars. This inevitable lead to Jung. Him, Campbell, Terrence McKenna and Alan Watts(and Jordan Peterson to a extent) a few years back in the YouTube algorithm the mindless gods of feed. were pushed often as sort of good gateway drugs into spirituality. Watts most of all just for the quality of his voice. I had found Jung's ideas interesting. I empathized espically with the claim of knowing the divine. As well as the ideas of self knowing were appealing to say the least to a 14 year old. I did have my disagreements then and probably do even more so now. But I've always appreciated the idea of a collective unconscious. I never finished answer to job I didnt finish alot of books at that time and sometimes still keep up that bad habit. I was more intrested in his essays and letters as well as the collection of the red book as it had a sort of messy prohetic shamanic quality to it as Jung claims. He had a heart attack at 55 iirc where he said he floated above and saw the whole earth. Also His letter to the pope about the assumption of mary being psychological complement was curious. He had written on the idea of a Quadterinity being the final form of a trinity because pyramids rest on bases of squares which I found kinda funny. Bulgakov latter on answered thoses questions far more interestingly to me anyway. Alot of the more modern writers seem ignorant of what absence of evil means truly and they have a kind of push since Hegel and a bit in some hindus and even daoists I see at times of Divine Drama and deterministic to the point that death and even evil should be accepted to be divine. I read of Thomas J. J. Altizer, the theologian of death and then he died a week later in a woefully macabre irony. I think ideas of the no thingness of god or the eternal resurrection are much more suited to these claims. It's understandable to try and remake theodicy especially given how most are bad that often goes for many theological claims in general but its difficult given the question is unsome sense ultimately unanswerable shankra even says its due to ignorance itself or in christian terms the fall obscures. Jung once spoke of how his grandfathers one scientific and one religious influenced him early on as well as his mothers sever mental issues and hospitalization effecting him deeply . I suppose it all does come back to childhood. Viewing this work as a personal myth apart of his own individuation and images, as well as being a hidden protagonist n the projection of his father. Is much more suited to what the likely conscious of unconscious motivations are indeed. Like an artists sketching out personal symbols for later drafts. I haven't read much of Kastrup but I did see a interview with him I found intresting. I'll have to check him out and finish answering job. Poets and writers always love using that unique book. Aqunis interestingly held it to be historical iirc for seam reason. Anyway I digress from my rambles many thanks and much love as always to you and your thoughts.
Very interesting piece. I don't know much of Jung or this book, but I am awed at the staggering complexity and nobility of his aim, whether it failed or not. Do you suppose it is distorted tradition/culture that makes necessary individuation, that is, is God making a good of disintegration, or is individuation the original aim? This is probably too broad a question. Lastly, the work of art at the end of the post is arresting. Where is that from?
I'm unsure as to how to answer your question. Basically, "individuation" is just a term for something that has been understood in all the healthy spiritual traditions: that we have to become conscious of those unconscious aspects of ourselves that cause, influence, or distort our thoughts, words, and deeds, so that we are "watchful" over them. When Paul talks about the spiritual fruit of "self-control," he's in effect referring to the fruit of individuation.
I read the Fathers carefully and meditatively. There are many texts with which one might begin, depending on what you're looking for. St. Vladimir's Seminary Press has a series of excellent patristic texts in paperback. You might check their website. The desert fathers can be found in various translations. If you want a reader of selections to ruminate on, I can recommend Olivier Clement's "The Roots of Christian Mysticism." Gregory of Nyssa's "The Life of Moses" is a good beginning text. I could recommend dozens, but I think those are a few good starters.
Bravo!! An assessment echoed exactly by a great Jungian, Ann Belford Ulanov in Wisdom of the Psyche:
“Jung fell for the Devil's trick, I think, and missed the sophisticated psychological description that privato boni gives us of evil's reality.... What Jung was after, I believe, is the psychological and religious truth that we must admit to ourselves, just how strong evil is. It is not something we can get around or ignore. What he missed, I believe, is the greater theological truth - that good is stronger than evil and of a different order of being.
My understanding of Jung is that did not know where to put the bad. He could not get a net over it. But he could not and did not deny or repress it. He struggled with it. His personal life and his life with women show this struggle and even the nastiness that inheres in it.... Jung's solution to his problem, masquerading as Job's worked.... This attitude of Jung's holds some of the appeal that the Zoroastrian religion holds: we can line up on the same side with God, or Ahuramazda, and fight fort the good against the forces of darkness. For Jung, the saving good was consciousness. God needs our consciousness. For myself, I think that is simply where Jung projected his particular struggle and particular God-image onto God.”
That's an incisive assessment. I hadn't seen it before. Thanks.
I tried to gather similar assessments a while back https://www.millinerd.com/2020/11/twelve-rules-for-understanding-jungians.html If you had written this earlier I could have saved a lot of time!! 😂
This is really good.
"The creation from our perspective in time — though not God’s in eternity — is unfinished, incomplete, still emerging from “chaos,” “on the way.” The Christian mystery, as Paul already indicates, is that God in Christ has begun the process of its (and our) transfiguration."
Wonderfully insightful. The whole post is, don't get me wrong. But the above quote really shone through for me.
Very helpful. Thank you. I have one question. Is it fair, I wonder, to say here that it was Jung's misreading when it was really the Lutheran church's misunderstanding?: "Instead, he is fixated on a myth of his own devising, demonstrably far less sophisticated in nature, paradoxically biblicist in a derivatively Protestant way, culled from his misreading of a few scriptural texts, for reasons related to his personal and family psychology."
Shouldn't we rather blame/credit the Lutheran church? Jung might have reasonably thought his father's church's interpretation was definitive given his own context. I don't mean to be contrarian or contentious I agree with the whole assessment here. But it is a question I often ask myself broadly, to what extent should the church take responsibility for its failure to witness well, and to what extent should we blame its critics when their (mis)understandings are conditioned by the church's own? How much can we blame Jung for thinking like a protestant?
Thanks, Aaron. No, I don't blame Jung for thinking like a Protestant, although (given how extensively read he was) one might have expected more breadth of insight and something more than a paradoxical adherence to "sola scriptura." And I don't hesitate to blame Lutheranism. Without blaming Lutherans themselves, I do regard that church's magisterial theology as gravely distorted. Jung's own obvious distortions are an inversion of the most salient confessional claims of classical Protestant (as an expression of some of the presuppositions in Western) Christian thought.
As an aside, how much did Luther's problems with his own father create in him the anxieties that underlay his theological obsessions?
This generally strikes at one of the main reasons why I left Western Christianity—it is, in most churches, infused with a sort of (literally) hellish neuroticism.
But maybe I'm just smarting a bit right now; I attended a particularly Baroque (and thus particularly annoying) Mass last night with a friend for All Saints, which has left a bad taste in my mouth.
This is suspiciously timely. I happened across the Essentia channel and Bernardo K mentioned Answers in Job as a must read book. I deeply respect Bernardo's work on analytical idealism, so this intrigued me.
Thanks for saving me the time on reading it. Your post was very helpful. Your insights into how we should read scripture and understand God is always fresh and welcome; so please keep discussing it.
Thanks!
It remains the one book I have ever read by Jung, and it thoroughly irritated me. With the above personal background, that’s lessened, but it’s not something awe-inspiring, that’s for sure.
Spot on, thank you.
It’s hard to say which is the more nugatory contribution to religious scholarship -- this or Moses and Monotheism. Not that it’s a competition!
Thank you, Addison, for another excellent analysis and evaluation. That was very helpful. It’s been a long time since I’ve read Answer to Job, and your take on it really helped to unpack all the reasons why my soul revolted against it. Jung had to have known that anyone who felt a calling toward a more normative Christian tradition could never abide a God who is unconscious and evil. For him to say it was his most important work was a tendentious decision that feels like a line drawn in the sand against Christianity. That is sad, because there is so much about his ideas that are so useful for transformation and deeply fascinating. I think he chose a sharp gnostic break against it along the lines of Marcionism, ignoring and curbing much of Christian tradition (like you say) - for the personal reasons of his father’s struggle, etc. but also Jung may have felt the religion wasn’t going to last in its current configuration or may evolve into something more depth psychological, and also the fact that it seemed helpless and ineffectual to stop the evil unleashed during the two world wars in Christian Europe.
I agree. I think those were also motives for his writing the book. Jung had foreseen where Germany was headed decades before the war, too, and was appalled by the fact that it seemed inevitable, almost fate or destiny. For him, because he understood God as a subjective shared reality in the world and our consciousness, the coming barbarity couldn't be explained as anything less than God's doing. Christianity, of course, knows better than to confuse human consciousness and behavior with God's action or intent. Evil exists because human beings are part of a creation that is still incomplete. We experience its change and progress as slow and temporal. God is eternal and perceives it as accomplished (the Sabbath of the seventh day, if you will). But we are in time and this process of emergence from nothingness and chaos means that that entanglement with disorder, which we experience as evil, will have an end. The goal is the perfect union of God and creation -- "all in all."
I’m a little more familiar with the other authors, but I thought I’d ask you, Addison, if there were some titles you might recommend from A.M. Allchin and John Macquarrie?
Thank you.
With Macquarrie, certainly his "Principles of Christian Theology." Allchin wrote on a wide-ranging number of theological and spiritual topics. "The World is a Wedding," "The Dynamic of Tradition," and "Participation in God" are good for starters.
Joseph Campbell was of great interest to me early on around 11,12,13 getting into Mythology as a field of academic study in addition to having alway enjoyed the folklore and liturature of myth and story telling espically the overlaps with still existing religious traditions.. Basically I just like Star Wars. This inevitable lead to Jung. Him, Campbell, Terrence McKenna and Alan Watts(and Jordan Peterson to a extent) a few years back in the YouTube algorithm the mindless gods of feed. were pushed often as sort of good gateway drugs into spirituality. Watts most of all just for the quality of his voice. I had found Jung's ideas interesting. I empathized espically with the claim of knowing the divine. As well as the ideas of self knowing were appealing to say the least to a 14 year old. I did have my disagreements then and probably do even more so now. But I've always appreciated the idea of a collective unconscious. I never finished answer to job I didnt finish alot of books at that time and sometimes still keep up that bad habit. I was more intrested in his essays and letters as well as the collection of the red book as it had a sort of messy prohetic shamanic quality to it as Jung claims. He had a heart attack at 55 iirc where he said he floated above and saw the whole earth. Also His letter to the pope about the assumption of mary being psychological complement was curious. He had written on the idea of a Quadterinity being the final form of a trinity because pyramids rest on bases of squares which I found kinda funny. Bulgakov latter on answered thoses questions far more interestingly to me anyway. Alot of the more modern writers seem ignorant of what absence of evil means truly and they have a kind of push since Hegel and a bit in some hindus and even daoists I see at times of Divine Drama and deterministic to the point that death and even evil should be accepted to be divine. I read of Thomas J. J. Altizer, the theologian of death and then he died a week later in a woefully macabre irony. I think ideas of the no thingness of god or the eternal resurrection are much more suited to these claims. It's understandable to try and remake theodicy especially given how most are bad that often goes for many theological claims in general but its difficult given the question is unsome sense ultimately unanswerable shankra even says its due to ignorance itself or in christian terms the fall obscures. Jung once spoke of how his grandfathers one scientific and one religious influenced him early on as well as his mothers sever mental issues and hospitalization effecting him deeply . I suppose it all does come back to childhood. Viewing this work as a personal myth apart of his own individuation and images, as well as being a hidden protagonist n the projection of his father. Is much more suited to what the likely conscious of unconscious motivations are indeed. Like an artists sketching out personal symbols for later drafts. I haven't read much of Kastrup but I did see a interview with him I found intresting. I'll have to check him out and finish answering job. Poets and writers always love using that unique book. Aqunis interestingly held it to be historical iirc for seam reason. Anyway I digress from my rambles many thanks and much love as always to you and your thoughts.
Very interesting piece. I don't know much of Jung or this book, but I am awed at the staggering complexity and nobility of his aim, whether it failed or not. Do you suppose it is distorted tradition/culture that makes necessary individuation, that is, is God making a good of disintegration, or is individuation the original aim? This is probably too broad a question. Lastly, the work of art at the end of the post is arresting. Where is that from?
I'm unsure as to how to answer your question. Basically, "individuation" is just a term for something that has been understood in all the healthy spiritual traditions: that we have to become conscious of those unconscious aspects of ourselves that cause, influence, or distort our thoughts, words, and deeds, so that we are "watchful" over them. When Paul talks about the spiritual fruit of "self-control," he's in effect referring to the fruit of individuation.
The art comes from Jung's "Red Book."
Thank you for the reply. The question was hurried and unclear.
Not a problem.
I read the Fathers carefully and meditatively. There are many texts with which one might begin, depending on what you're looking for. St. Vladimir's Seminary Press has a series of excellent patristic texts in paperback. You might check their website. The desert fathers can be found in various translations. If you want a reader of selections to ruminate on, I can recommend Olivier Clement's "The Roots of Christian Mysticism." Gregory of Nyssa's "The Life of Moses" is a good beginning text. I could recommend dozens, but I think those are a few good starters.