I was recently ranting to Sealchan about Jung's book,
Aion (perhaps my least favorite of Jung's later works).
Last night I couldn't sleep (coughing non-stop due to a cold), so I dragged myself downstairs at 3 AM and started paging through
Aion again in the hope of pinpointing some of the statements Jung made that rubbed me the wrong way.
I had remembered (sort of incorrectly) that Jung, after announcing the inadequacy of the
privatio boni (no evil, only the privation of good) of Church dogma, went on to accept it as "metaphysically true" (or psychologically true) as a symbolic characteristic of the Christ-as-Self Image. My quick scan last night seemed to prove my memory flawed (not an uncommon occurrence).
The actual passage I was remembering is quite a bit more vague. It reads (emphases mine):
From the scientific point of view the privatio boni . . . is founded on a petitio principii, where what invariably comes out at the end is what you put in at the beginning. Arguments of this kind have no power of conviction. But the fact that such arguments are not only used but are undoubtedly believed is something that cannot be disposed of so easily. It proves there is a tendency, existing right from the start, to give priority to "good," and to do so with all the means in our power, whether suitable or unsuitable. So if Christian metaphysics clings to the privatio boni, it is giving expression to the tendency always to increase the good and diminish the bad. The privatio boni may therefore be a metaphysical truth. I presume no judgment on this matter. [p.54]
A few pages later, Jung elaborates:
I have gone into the doctrine of the privatio boni at such length because it is in a sense responsible for a too optimistic conception of the evil of human nature and for a too pessimistic view of the human soul. To offset this, early Christianity, with unerring logic, balanced Christ against an Antichrist. . . . Only with Christ did a devil enter the world as the real counterpart of God . . . .
But there is still another reason why I must lay such critical stress on the privatio boni. As early as Basil we meet with the tendency to attribute evil to the disposition [...] of the soul, and at the same time to give it a "non-existent" character. . . . Psychological causation is something so elusive and seemingly unreal that everything reduced to it inevitably takes on the character of futility or of a purely accidental mistake and is thereby minimized to the utmost. It is an open question how much of our modern undervaluation of the psyche stems from this prejudice. This prejudice is all the more serious in that it causes the psyche to be suspected of being the birthplace of all evil. . . . If this paramount power of evil is imputed to the soul, the result can only be a negative inflation -i.e., a daemonic claim to power on the part of the unconscious which makes it all the more formidable. This unavoidable consequence is anticipated in the figure of the Antichrist and is reflected in the course of contemporary events, whose nature is in accord with the Christian aeon of the Fishes, now running to its end. [p.61-62]
Here, Jung begins his segue into an astrological analysis of the "Christian aeon of the Fishes".
Now, in the passages quoted above, I find the analysis of the Christian approach to evil and the psyche astute. To capsulize it: The Christian mindset devalues and then represses evil
and the environment where evil is recognized, the psyche. Jung's comment that this act actually leads to "negative inflation" is also insightful, in my opinion.
But this leads us into a incredibly important issue . . . namely, can this fundamentally Christian psychological act be addressed adequately with purely Christian means? If not, then the Christian mindset must be considered psychologically pathological . . . or perhaps "neurotic". But, in worst case scenarios, a moral failing such as the inability to recognize and value evil is a far graver illness than neurosis. It could become a condition of psychopathic proportions. One need only peruse the history of the Church from Constantine throughout the dark ages (and arguably, beyond) to observe innumerable episodes of such psychopathic behavior.
An appropriate answer to that might be, "Yes, but the Christians who perpetrated those inhuman acts were 'only a few bad apples' who didn't act in accord with 'true Christian virtue.'" Yet, a closer examination of the acts and the perpetrators reveals (I believe) an unacceptable level of tolerance (and at times even encouragement) from Christian dogmas and even from scripture. That is, Christian dogma offers the "disease", but does not offer the cure.
Which is really just a much more "belligerent", "feeling-toned", and straight-forward way of saying what Jung himself said in
Aion. But Jung does not (certainly not to my personal contentment) treat this "problem of Christianity" as a moral issue to be reckoned with through psychological analysis. Instead, he detours off into astrology, and then into Gnosticism and alchemy. In a scholarly examination of the Self symbols in these archaic and extinct fields, Jung finds and acknowledges a more functional Self symbol, one that is whole and not dualistic, split, or dissociated.
But, as interesting and erudite as Jung's examinations of these arcana might be, he does not effectively couple them to the issues of practical history that most distinctly demarcate their relationship to Christianity. That is, Gnosticism and alchemy were deemed heretical by the Church and the proponents of these ideologies were persecuted, destroyed, or bullied into exile or hiding. The Church was responsible for destroying as many Gnostic and pagan intellectual and religious texts as it could get its hands on . . . and all of this was part of the "Christian aeon of the Fishes" . . . and not the latter part that Jung ascribes to the Antichrist (which he seems to associate with Enlightenment rationalism).
And this is my gripe with
Aion. Jung doesn't embrace the
privatio boni directly. Directly, he comes out guns ablaze for the "psychology['s] insist[ence] on the reality of evil" (p.53). But he makes a vast psychological and moral blunder when he tries to divide Christianity into a temporal era of the Christ and complimentary era of the Antichrist. This effectively exiles the Christian shadow (Antichrist) from the birth of Christianity up until (at least) the Renaissance. Are we to take from Jung's speculative analysis of dogma, theology, and astrology that there was no Christian evil until the era of the Antichrist? Is the historical movement of Christianity really best described as a "degeneration" form an initially pure state of existence?
Also implicit in Jung's argument is the idea that the Enlightenment rationalism that Jung sees as the onset of the Antichrist's era, is oppositional to what is often called "Christian morality". But although the Enlightenment and its rationalism and science were distinctly oppositional to the Church as an institution of power, they were also responsible for introducing what we might call "humanistic morality". For example, the idea of individual human rights and freedoms, the notion of equality in the valuation of human individuals.
It would be more accurate to say that the "Antichrist's era" introduced a cure for the disease of the "Christian (im)morality" of the dark ages (in which Christianity was decidedly a "kill or convert" colonialist practice). And with this introduction of "corrective" humanistic ethos, the mythos of Christianity was also undermined. It is this wound to the Christian mythos that Jung associates with the Antichrist and the opposition to Christian thinking.
Which leads us to question how we define Christianity. Is it, is it's value as . . . an ethos or a mythos? If (as the logical answer should be) we say "both", then the Jungian notion of Christian vs. Antichristian eras and ideologies loses its meaning. We cannot, with Jung, decry Enlightenment rationalism as the destroyer of Christianity as a whole. Enlightenment rationalism marked, in effect, an increase in the consciousness of the psychopathic abuse of power by the Church. Enlightenment rationalism raised the Christian shadow . . . and it was the illumination of the (always present) Christian shadow that fractured the Christian mythos. Consciousness was the culprit,
not rationalism, per se. And consciousness is what Jung, in general, was advocating.
I fear that, as intuitive and brilliant as Jung may have been, his thinking breaks down along the border between consciousness and mythos. His treatment of Christianity is ultimately more theological than it is psychological (or scientific, as he frequently claims in the pages of
Aion). That is, he diagnoses, but then does not
treat Christianity (with his analytical psychology). He does not try to reconcile the dissociated Opposites of the Christian mindset . . . and in this inaction Jung takes a scholarly, detached (i.e., "thinking-type") approach to the "material" of Christian and quasi-Christian belief and history, instead of a humanistic one (which might here correlate with the feeling and sensation functions).
On the immediate level, this is no surprise, since Jung could probably have been characterized as an Intuitive-Thinking type. But the reader of
Aion is still left to evaluate Jung's arguments, potentially,
with the assets of feeling and sensation. Jung himself broaches the territory of morality when he begins his analysis of Christianity with the
privatio boni and the problem of evil. He claims that evil must imperatively be acknowledged as real by the scientific psychologist . . . and then he goes on to discuss the surrounding Christian mythos without an adequate sense that evil
is real.
That is, the acknowledgment that evil is real necessitates a moral position on that evil, necessitates a reaction to the problem of evil. To merely say that evil is real and then to go about ignoring the implications of real evil in the subject being discussed is tantamount to stripping evil of its reality. In this manner, Jung is in contradiction with himself throughout a good part of the writing of
Aion.
The acceptance of the realness of good and evil is demonstrated in how we react to them. Psychologizing them into the oblivion of abstract concepts is a rejection of their realness. I'm not sure we can have it both ways. The moral assessment of a subject necessitates a moral treatment of that subject.
Jung's reply to the dissociative dogma of the privatio boni is the Gnostic/alchemical notion of the Self/God Image as whole, containing both light and dark, but Christianity defined itself oppositionally to Gnosticism on this issue. So it is perhaps more accurate to say that the Christian God image and the Gnostic God image are (in this historical and theological paradigm) representative of the two Opposites . . . the Opposites which together compose the whole Self. Historically-speaking, these portrayals of the Opposites coexisted even in the earliest manifestations of Christianity. What we see in the unfolding of the "Christian era" is one of these Opposites overpowering and subduing the other.
But I don't think these Opposites are best characterized by monikers like "Christian" and "Antichristian". That is a specific language, a language that, in this case, narrows the actual value of these Opposites to the brink of meaninglessness. Instead, a broader perspective on these Opposites would seem to demonstrate that they are actually closer to "moral unconsciousness" and "moral consciousness". In the perspective of Christian dogma, the devaluation of evil can be achieved without the devaluation of good. But in Jung's perspective (and here I agree with him) good and evil cannot truly be split this way. To throw one away is to throw both away. So when we diminish evil to the point of non-existence, we are effectively diminishing morality itself . . . which is the ability to consciously differentiate between good and evil.
From this perspective, the Christian era would be an era or moral unconsciousness or amorality, because the Christian individual has relinquished the consciousness to define and differentiate good and evil. And, as stated above, the official acts in the name of the Church (especially in the dark ages) clearly demonstrate this amorality. The battle of the early Church with Gnosticism was a battle to repress the Christian shadow. In winning this battle, the Church effectively empowered the Christian shadow (i.e., the Antichrist) unconsciously . . . granting it impunity to act on every immoral, unconscious desire. This (arguably) led not only to the murder of millions of innocent people, but to an ideologically-driven destruction of pagan culture (which was notably more rationalistic, scientific, and technologically advanced than the Christian culture that replaced it). Christianization also effectively dismantled the middle class, which was the economic strength behind the Roman Empire in the pre-Christian era, leading to radically increased disparity between the (often priestly) nobility and a subjugated peasant class.
What was under attack here at the dawn of the dark ages was not "evil", but consciousness (and by implication, the value of the individual) itself. If anything is "the devil's work", it is this. That is, the first Christian era, although it saw the empowerment and globalization of Christianity as a religion, is a better candidate for the era of the Antichrist than the following age of Enlightenment rationalism. That was no golden age for Christianity.
Alternatively, we would have to consider the Antichrist to be the harbinger of true Christian morality . . . the "more genuine" emanation of the Christ. The book of Revelations could be scene as a horror-fantasy of this emanation with the number of "true Christians" reduced to a minuscule proportion, the "Christ-as-we-know-him" (as the Church) ultimately vanquished by the Christ as grotesque force of the unconscious.
In any event,
Aion never becomes a book about the Christian shadow . . . and even steers so far away from the Christian shadow as to read, in a roundabout way, as a pro-Christian text. A work of Christian theology. Jung's advocacy of the Gnostic/alchemical "whole" Self is less significant a statement than the unwritten statement that the Christian shadow (not the rationalistic, scientific shadow, but the
Christian shadow that was with the religion from the get go) can continue to be ignored . . . not only by theologians, but also by psychologists (who should be diametrically opposed to such a repression).
To which one might reply, "But
Aion isn't intended to be a book about the Christian shadow; it's supposed to be a book about the Self archetype in the Christian era." Maybe. But one thing
Aion is clearly meant to be is a book about the
psychology of Self archetype in the Christian era . . . the
psychology of the Christian Self. It therefore has the obligation to look at this Christian Self from the whole psyche's perspective, not the perspective of a particular religious ideology. And the psychic perspective includes the moral perspective. Psychology is not theology or philosophy. It is, by its nature, practical in the sense that it seeks to center its arguments in the observation of "things-as-they-are". It is beholden to seeking the "truth" (ideally). It is not meant to "explain away" inconsistencies and conundrums with linguistic manipulations. It is the servant of
data, of that which
is . . . not of theory or ideology. It's theories must bend to the data, to the real . . . unlike philosophy, which has no obligation to the real.
In this circumstance, the reality of the Christian psyche displays a distinct moral unconsciousness that has had a recognizable (and profound) effect on material reality and history (to the extent that it has been licensed by political empowerment). If Christianity was a patient it would not be enough to tell him that his moral attitude necessitated the coming of an oppositional moral attitude. The analyst would be obligated to help him see that his moral attitude has already had numerous, real effects . . . and then to devise a way to become conscious of/accept responsibility for these unconscious actions, the eventual goal being the attainment of moral consciousness and "right action".
If we imagine that a psychopathic patient can be cured, then the analyst is obligated to assist in the cure. Refusal of such a duty is itself irresponsible and immoral.
-Matt