The holiday-season tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut must give any scribe pause. Especially someone writing a blog-diary called "Jesus Thoughts." I began this thread around Halloween, going into the Advent season leading up to Christmas. Now the news is filled with the funerals of little children, and with journalists floating Job's old question, what kind of God permits such evil, such grief?
As it happens, I've started reading another book by Carl Jung, called Aion. I have very mixed feelings about Jung, as noted before - my final personal judgement is still out. He begins this book by arguing that psychology can offer a path by which modern humanity can comprehend certain realities symbolized in traditional Christian faith and ritual - eucharist, heavenly beings, redemption, etc. - which in the course of 20 centuries, he says, have lost their meaning for everyday modern life; we no longer understand them, they do not touch us or help us. Jung is writing around the time of WW 2, when it seemed that all vestiges of "Christian Europe" had been scattered, reversed - and modernity exhibited a truly "anti-christian" spirit (epitomized by totalitarian fanaticism and global violence).
Jung sometimes seems more of a pagan or Gnostic than Christian, but maybe his heart was in the right place. In any case he posits a kind of Gnostic dualism of good and evil at the roots of reality, in which the spirit and doctrine of Christ would inevitably be confronted by its deflected, repressed opposite - absolute evil, the anti-Christ. He sees this as working out historically in the culture of the West. Fundamentally he understands this as a problem of the human psyche : how to acknowledge and integrate the shadow, the dark side, of human nature, into a more complete psychic and ontological wholeness (Jung's "Self")?
I think the fundamental problem I have with all of this is that, in the process of exploring the dark side of the human psyche, Jung reifies spiritual reality within his own architecture of fixed categories (animus, anima, shadow, self, quaternion, mandala, etc.) - resulting in a kind of timeless psychic domain which seems to bear more resemblance to Greek mythology or to alchemy than to the (perhaps more simple) truth of the Gospels.
I'm not ready to deny that there is a dimension of psychological truth in Jung's doctrine. His idea that a basic quaternion - a 4-sided, cruciform geometry, which resolves the 3-sided Trinity by way of a 4th point (the personal, the individual, the singular, the excess, the shadow) - appeals to me, to a certain degree.
But I want something more. I want a wholeness which is not simply a metaphysical or psychological construct "beyond good and evil." I want a wholeness rooted in the fusion of divine and human consciousness : the fusion represented by the formula Jesus, Son of God.
It seems Jung's mistake might be that, in the labor of constructing his intellectual edifice, he loses sight of the primary reality : a divine and benevolent Mind-Person - a Creator-Spirit - from which we have come, and in whom we dwell (as "images" of same). This primary reality is personal and relational : the geometry of such inter-personal affinity, sympathy, and fusion is the very ground of our existence.
One is called into a personal relation with the conscious Source of all goodness - and draws life and truth from this deepening bond. This is the communal "Body of Christ" we share.
So to return to where we began today : how can religion, Christianity, personal "spirituality" respond to, give an answer for, the enormity of evil which just happened in Connecticut? Jung tries to re-interpret religious symbols from 2000 years ago in order to re-imagine their relevance. But after immersing myself in John Meier's reconstruction of the historical Jesus, A Marginal Jew (see previous posts), I want to try to imagine the reverse : not "how do we interpret Jesus for today?", but rather : "how would Jesus respond to the Newtown tragedy?"
Obviously, neither I nor anyone else can "imagine" accurately, in its fulness and variety, how Jesus might respond. But I will hazard an imperfect hypothesis.
For Jesus, the "kingdom of God" is a living, embodied, communal reality, which the coming of the Messiah has actually brought to earth, brought to historical actuality. This, I take it, is one of the meanings of his mysterious Gospel saying : "the Law and the prophets were until John; and from the days of John until now, the kingdom of God has suffered violence, and violent men plunder it." In other words, with the coming of the Son of Man, the eschatological age - the end-time - has irrevocably appeared on earth. The kingdom of God is at hand, is "in your midst." And precisely because the kingdom is no longer merely a hope of the future, but is here - is now embodied in Jesus and the people of God - it suffers violence : violent men attack it by force. The struggle for the redemption of the world is now fully engaged : Jesus has come.
What was the witness to Israel of both John the Baptist and Jesus? : that divine Judgement is at hand. Jesus only differed from John in the unaccountable lovingkindness he offered - the healing ministry, the casting out of illness and evil - as signs of the presence of God's reign.
How would Jesus respond to the horrors and sadness of the massacre of innocents? he would say come closer : come into the reign of God, into the rule of God's love. Save yourself from the old human habits which open the door to evils such as this.
I think Jesus would look at the town of Newtown as a kind of Everytown, USA. What happened in Newtown could have happened anywhere in the United States. There is no special sinfulness to the place where this occurred : yet this violence might be a sign of spiritual sickness which the whole nation (the whole world) - and every person - needs to address.
What are the dimensions of this spiritual illness? First, an attachment to the self and its pleasures - say, for example, guns, shooting, the collection of weapons of mass killing. But these are not the only superficial, materialistic and selfish pleasures which corrupt the soul : they are only perhaps the most obviously dangerous (or seem to be, after this tragedy). John the Baptist and Jesus both consistently preached the necessity for repentance and spiritual change - for turning toward a new communal life in God - if one hopes to see and experience the reign of God's benevolence.
A second dimension is related to the first : in our attachment to our selfish pleasures, our personal self-pleasing, we neglect those deeper values of charity, love and understanding, generosity, and justice - which are at the very root of both Judaism and Christianity. What does Jesus call the Great, the central Commandment? "Love God with all your heart; and love your neighbor as yourself." Judaism (along with many other ancient faiths) emphasizes the great duty to welcome the stranger in our midst : to help the poor, to heal the afflicted.
And who is the stranger in our midst today? There are many : but certainly one of those strangers was Adam Lanza. The troubled, the afflicted, the mentally-ill young person. The loner, the outcast, the self-outcast : like that sufferer in the Gospel, possessed by a demon, who kept hitting himself with stones. Where were the helpers, the interveners, the welcomers for Adam Lanza - when he needed help? Why was he living in solitude, at age 20, with his mother - and going to the rifle range? Obviously it's too early for me to speculate on these matters : but the outlines of this situation are clear not only in the Newtown event but in other such recent tragedies all around the country. And woe be to us, if we convert this moral crisis into some kind of mere surveillance or punitive control of the afflicted in our midst. This would be merely the next anti-Christian, anti-Judaic step. No : we must find ways to love the stranger, and heal the afflicted, and draw the loner into the circle of hope and joy.
We are all selfish; we have all gone astray.... like the wicked of the Old Testament, we are captured in the nets of our own wicked imaginations. As Jesus said, when someone addressed him as "good rabbi" : One is good, the Father only. (This statement, by the way, is a very concise rebuttal of some of Jung's speculations about the "blind idealism" of Christianity). We need to turn in charity - me, you, every one of us - to those in need, and cease treating life as a free ride for our own complacent hobbies and pastimes.
I think these are some of the things which Jesus might have said about the Newtown tragedy. But he (along with Martin Luther King) would have summarized by proclaiming, again : the reign of a loving God is here. God is my father and mother, and yours, too. All things are possible through faith in God's love. God is the creative Spirit who has brought all this about - to redeem the world. Come into the living body of faith, into the community of the kingdom - and together we shall overcome.
Showing posts with label Jung. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jung. Show all posts
12.05.2012
Jesus Thoughts (25) : thumbprints in sync
We continue to go traipsing along through the unknown remote Henry-field of scrubland interconnections, finding obscure Serengeti serendipities (in sync?) and conceptual rhymes, running into things seemingly by chance (or is it a narrow circle of H-recessive obsessions?). Yesterday I chewed the cud (in Jesus Thoughts #24) about the metaphysical frame-up of History, the intervention of Yahweh into the stream of Earth-time... as an impression of the Creator's inimitable thumbprint upon Nature (Stephen Dedalus's "signatures of things").
& last night I was re-reading Charles Stein's book about Charles Olson & Carl Jung, Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum - which digs deep into Olson's own radical sense of individuation & quidditas ("that which exists through itself is what is called Meaning" & all that). Olson wanted to shake up what he saw as the false consciousness of abstract "Greek" rationalism with a very earth-bound, local, particular kind of mysticism (he wouldn't call it "mysticism") - the Oneness of the "field" of all phenomena reflected in the integrity of the grounded, physical, real things we encounter....
Others (including Stein) have interpreted Olson much more scrupulously than I can here ... & there's much in Olson that gives me pause... yet I was struck reading this last night how closely - in some ways, not in others - Olson's values seem to rhyme with the program of the Russian Acmeists. Gumilev's notion of "chasteness" as a literary value - which he defined as a basic & spiritual respect for the particular dignity of all things as they are - & that such actual things provide the substance, the matter, the themes of Acmeist poetry (as against "Symbolist" otherworldliness).
Of course the Acmeists were also tremendously different from Olson : they had not that radical streak of American Emersonian (Poundian, Wm Carlos Williamsian) do-it-yourselfism - their sense of the spiritual integrity of things is perhaps closer to Joyce's neo-medieval Aquinas-quidditas; they were rooted in Russian Orthodox Christianity, with its contemplative emphasis on the whole as divine Creation... Yet this mystical aspect of Olson - late scribblings about everything having meaning-in-itself because All stems from the Black Chrysanthemum (his "Black Gold Flower" mandala-figure) - is not so different from Dante's final vision of the mystical Rose, the triple wheel of the Trinity... This ancient notion can give one sparks of glee, if you ponder it : that the One is reflected in the "oneness" - the beautiful distinction, the nonpareil wonderful whatness, the splendid unimaginable unique & hilarious actuality of all separate unique things... (in fact it's possible to see an analogy here with the spectacular 4th-of-July dazzle of metamorphosis, Transfiguration - eternal life)... Note this relevant, definitive passage from Mandelstam's essay "Morning of Acmeism", which Christian Wiman chose as the epigraph to his new collection of Mandelstam translations, Stolen Air : "To exist is the artist's greatest pride. He desires no paradise other than being."
Everything is paratactical in Olson, as in Pound - the poet is a bower-bird, joining things by affinity, contiguity, proximity, rather than logic... Speaking of which brings me to the other book I was reading last night - Sacred Fortress, by Otto v. Simson. About the Byzantine mosaics and architecture of Ravenna, which Dante saw. Simson explores the political-historical background to the art of these churches - and also their religious meaning. We can't grasp the artistry of the mosaics without understanding how they were united with, and illustrated, the rites of baptism and Eucharist, the sacramental processions, which happened below them, under the gaze of the icons. Simson goes very deeply into the meanings and messages which both the rites and the icons conveyed. He describes, better than anyone I've ever read, how the communicants, by participating in these sacraments (baptism, eucharist), enter into a symbiosis, first of all, with Christ in his self-sacrifice and martyrdom - in his dying - and at the same time, with Christ in his resurrection : his transfiguration into a heavenly dimension (early rites of baptism involved clothing the baptized in white robes : a representation of this dying-into-new-life most clearly imaged in the Book of Revelation - and in the mosaics of St. Apollinare Nuovo, in Ravenna).
Proximity, contiguity, affinity.... I had just been writing earlier in the day (in the Jesus Talks #23 post) about the divine play of gender roles... and the hieros gamos dimensions of the rites of the church, their sensitivity to a feminine psyche - only to find Simson characterizing the mosaics of the "virgin martyrs" in St. Apollinare, bringing their jewelled crowns of martyrdom to offer to the Bridegroom, in the very same terms I had been using (hieros gamos, etc.). So I felt a slight twinge of synchronicity there....
But I'm really rambling today. The deeper affinity or proximity I want to relate here is this clustering together of Jung's individuation, Olson's "things in themselves", the Acmeist devotion to the "chaste" dignity of things, Joyce's epiphanies... and what I was calling, in JT #24, the thumbprint of the Creator as witnessed by his righteous prophets (John the Baptist...). I'm finding these things all assembling in some kind of creative sandbox playpen...
(thinking of Olson's notes about the "Black Stone" - the "diamond" - the "Black Gold Flower" of his Maximus-vision.... & its echoes or rhymes in my poem Lanthanum - "Blackstone" leading to "St. Maximus the Confessor" by way of the octahedral, baptismal diamond of Black Elk's native American sign (pointing to the six directions)....
Affinities, proximities.... the church as tomb and marriage bed.... Olson & Mandelstam, hard-cut diamond figures, thumb-prints, opposing themselves to the drift of the times...
This coming weekend Sarah & I will be driving down to Princeton NJ, to visit Princeton cemetery, where Sarah's parents are buried. They just finished the memorial stone for both of them (her mother Pat passed away last year in November). They are buried just a few feet from the grave of Kurt Gödel, the great mathematician. Olson, maybe, would have appreciated Gödel, whose "incompleteness theorem" proved that some things in mathematics cannot ever be proved (rationally). I'm not a mathematician, but maybe Gödel in this way made an arc of closure back to the ancient Greeks, who were troubled by the "irrationality" of the diagonal to the square. There is a Jungian aspect of this uncertainty, this mystery, at the core of human reason....
So we'll be visiting a grave, and graves, there, in Princeton, at the dying of the year. I'll be thinking about them... & I'll be thinking about Simson's eloquent evocation of the mystery of death & martyrdom & glory articulated in the early church.... & I'll be thinking about the Princeton Univ. library, nearby - where they house the archive of the papers of Osip Mandelstam....
& last night I was re-reading Charles Stein's book about Charles Olson & Carl Jung, Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum - which digs deep into Olson's own radical sense of individuation & quidditas ("that which exists through itself is what is called Meaning" & all that). Olson wanted to shake up what he saw as the false consciousness of abstract "Greek" rationalism with a very earth-bound, local, particular kind of mysticism (he wouldn't call it "mysticism") - the Oneness of the "field" of all phenomena reflected in the integrity of the grounded, physical, real things we encounter....
Others (including Stein) have interpreted Olson much more scrupulously than I can here ... & there's much in Olson that gives me pause... yet I was struck reading this last night how closely - in some ways, not in others - Olson's values seem to rhyme with the program of the Russian Acmeists. Gumilev's notion of "chasteness" as a literary value - which he defined as a basic & spiritual respect for the particular dignity of all things as they are - & that such actual things provide the substance, the matter, the themes of Acmeist poetry (as against "Symbolist" otherworldliness).
Of course the Acmeists were also tremendously different from Olson : they had not that radical streak of American Emersonian (Poundian, Wm Carlos Williamsian) do-it-yourselfism - their sense of the spiritual integrity of things is perhaps closer to Joyce's neo-medieval Aquinas-quidditas; they were rooted in Russian Orthodox Christianity, with its contemplative emphasis on the whole as divine Creation... Yet this mystical aspect of Olson - late scribblings about everything having meaning-in-itself because All stems from the Black Chrysanthemum (his "Black Gold Flower" mandala-figure) - is not so different from Dante's final vision of the mystical Rose, the triple wheel of the Trinity... This ancient notion can give one sparks of glee, if you ponder it : that the One is reflected in the "oneness" - the beautiful distinction, the nonpareil wonderful whatness, the splendid unimaginable unique & hilarious actuality of all separate unique things... (in fact it's possible to see an analogy here with the spectacular 4th-of-July dazzle of metamorphosis, Transfiguration - eternal life)... Note this relevant, definitive passage from Mandelstam's essay "Morning of Acmeism", which Christian Wiman chose as the epigraph to his new collection of Mandelstam translations, Stolen Air : "To exist is the artist's greatest pride. He desires no paradise other than being."
Everything is paratactical in Olson, as in Pound - the poet is a bower-bird, joining things by affinity, contiguity, proximity, rather than logic... Speaking of which brings me to the other book I was reading last night - Sacred Fortress, by Otto v. Simson. About the Byzantine mosaics and architecture of Ravenna, which Dante saw. Simson explores the political-historical background to the art of these churches - and also their religious meaning. We can't grasp the artistry of the mosaics without understanding how they were united with, and illustrated, the rites of baptism and Eucharist, the sacramental processions, which happened below them, under the gaze of the icons. Simson goes very deeply into the meanings and messages which both the rites and the icons conveyed. He describes, better than anyone I've ever read, how the communicants, by participating in these sacraments (baptism, eucharist), enter into a symbiosis, first of all, with Christ in his self-sacrifice and martyrdom - in his dying - and at the same time, with Christ in his resurrection : his transfiguration into a heavenly dimension (early rites of baptism involved clothing the baptized in white robes : a representation of this dying-into-new-life most clearly imaged in the Book of Revelation - and in the mosaics of St. Apollinare Nuovo, in Ravenna).
Proximity, contiguity, affinity.... I had just been writing earlier in the day (in the Jesus Talks #23 post) about the divine play of gender roles... and the hieros gamos dimensions of the rites of the church, their sensitivity to a feminine psyche - only to find Simson characterizing the mosaics of the "virgin martyrs" in St. Apollinare, bringing their jewelled crowns of martyrdom to offer to the Bridegroom, in the very same terms I had been using (hieros gamos, etc.). So I felt a slight twinge of synchronicity there....
But I'm really rambling today. The deeper affinity or proximity I want to relate here is this clustering together of Jung's individuation, Olson's "things in themselves", the Acmeist devotion to the "chaste" dignity of things, Joyce's epiphanies... and what I was calling, in JT #24, the thumbprint of the Creator as witnessed by his righteous prophets (John the Baptist...). I'm finding these things all assembling in some kind of creative sandbox playpen...
(thinking of Olson's notes about the "Black Stone" - the "diamond" - the "Black Gold Flower" of his Maximus-vision.... & its echoes or rhymes in my poem Lanthanum - "Blackstone" leading to "St. Maximus the Confessor" by way of the octahedral, baptismal diamond of Black Elk's native American sign (pointing to the six directions)....
Affinities, proximities.... the church as tomb and marriage bed.... Olson & Mandelstam, hard-cut diamond figures, thumb-prints, opposing themselves to the drift of the times...
This coming weekend Sarah & I will be driving down to Princeton NJ, to visit Princeton cemetery, where Sarah's parents are buried. They just finished the memorial stone for both of them (her mother Pat passed away last year in November). They are buried just a few feet from the grave of Kurt Gödel, the great mathematician. Olson, maybe, would have appreciated Gödel, whose "incompleteness theorem" proved that some things in mathematics cannot ever be proved (rationally). I'm not a mathematician, but maybe Gödel in this way made an arc of closure back to the ancient Greeks, who were troubled by the "irrationality" of the diagonal to the square. There is a Jungian aspect of this uncertainty, this mystery, at the core of human reason....
So we'll be visiting a grave, and graves, there, in Princeton, at the dying of the year. I'll be thinking about them... & I'll be thinking about Simson's eloquent evocation of the mystery of death & martyrdom & glory articulated in the early church.... & I'll be thinking about the Princeton Univ. library, nearby - where they house the archive of the papers of Osip Mandelstam....
11.12.2012
Jesus Thoughts (13) : Psychic Sidestep
Being what they call a glutton for books, a non-stop reader, & working in a big library, & always following vague hunches & intuitions in my hunt for material, which is all caught up with what I'm trying to do in poetry, which is an obsessive pursuit in tandem with the reading.... well, it leads me into obscure corners.
"Synchronicity" : the term from Jungian psychology for the uncanny conjunction of seemingly chance events in the outside world, with one's own thoughts, or the inner world of the psyche. I'd been thinking about this lately since I was working on a book review of Christian Wiman's volume of Mandelstam translations (Stolen Air) - why? Because the review work brought back memories of my own first encounters with Mandelstam's poetry, back in the 1970s... which led me to reflect on the psychic crisis I went through in college, & the literary-synchronic strangenesses which happened to me - the happenings - in those days.
& perhaps I also began to triangulate recently on these issues due to some other recent researches, into the cathedral of St. Apollinare in Clase, and its connection with imagery in Dante's Paradiso (see Jeffrey Schnapp's book, Transfiguration of history... on that). A pun is a sort of miniature synchronism (of senses in sound)... & it got me thinking about one of my favorite poets from the old days (my old days, early 70s), Guillaume Apollinaire (though come to think of it that's not really a pun : who knows, Apollinaire may have originally been named after the saint). Soon enough I was immersing myself in a flurry of old French poets, as if part of me was sinking back into a 2nd literary childhood...
What does all this have to do with Jesus, you ask? Well, I was going to say that this general trend of my book-devouring led me to a very interesting & curious little-known (eccentric?) interdisciplinary book by Marie-Louise von Franz, a student & disciple of Carl Jung : Number and Time. This is an extremely erudite & wide-ranging meld of physics, mathematics and Jungian psychology, which examines this phenomenon of synchronicity, and proposes a sort of cosmic order rooted in basic numbers (1, 2, 3, 4...) which embody forces shaping both the mind and the physical universe - Franz's unum mundus (world-unity). It's rooted in Jung's metaphysical psychology, which posits a cosmic Self uniting all opposing forces in nature, mandala-like. An awesome and mysterious (strictly beyond conscious awareness) Mind or conjunction of opposites (subsuming good & evil).
I've always had mixed feelings about Jung. On the one hand, he seems remarkably perceptive about the artistic personality, and many of the things I went through in late adolescence seem amenable to a "Jungian" interpretation (those uncanny experiences in the midst of a crisis). On the other hand, he strikes me perhaps as a kind of Gnostic : as a "scientist" of the mind, he pursues explanations of things down dark corridors of mind & personality - explanations which reach toward the mystical & the cosmic. Yet I wonder if his theory of the cosmic Self might be a sort of spiritual over-reach of some kind. It's so close to the religious vision - the sense of a metaphysical dimension transcending & ordering the physical - a dimension which is also personal in some mysterious fashion; yet in trying to present a theory of Totality rooted in a Self which combines good & evil, it seems like he may also be reaching beyond Christianity.
There is much of warning in the Gospels about the awesome threat of God the Father's eternal judgement. "If your hand causeth offense, it is better to cut it off than to lose your whole soul to hell" (rough paraphrase from memory). Or : "Do not fear those who can destroy the body; fear Him who can destroy the soul in eternal fire!" (another rough paraphrase). A Jungian might see these warnings as evidence of a parallel notion of the frightening aspect of the ultimate Self. But what Jungianism might be missing is the time dimension of salvation history. The work of the Christian Trinity is manifest in time as a procession of saving acts. We have to grasp that this invitation to salvation and renewal is addressed directly to us, now, spoken by God-become-Man : the context of understanding (the insight of the Holy Ghost) is everything in these realms. We have to move beyond theory & intellectual speculation to action, to personal commitment, body & soul.
Jung, it seems, was fascinated by the mathematical structure of the psyche : the basic orientation by four (in the human body, in mandalas, in maps, etc. etc.). Marie-L. von Franz explores these concepts in great depth. Jung saw an oscillation (in the psyche, in reality) - a flickering - between three-four... I find these concepts very fascinating too, esp. in relation to making poetry. If we think of the Trinity - the Son & the Father, leading to the "procession" (the manifestation) of their witness & "advocate", the Holy Spirit (the very spirit of God in the body of the Church) - perhaps the matrix of that body - be it the Virgin Mary, the center of the earth, the center of the church, the center of our own individual soul - could be thought of as the "fourth". I think Jung might assent to this (though I'm by no means an expert, or even very familiar with his complex work). Where I hesitate to "follow" Jung is that sometimes in reading him I sense a curious kind of gnostic pedantry at work : the "explanation" of mysteries takes the place of a more active, direct commitment to the historical, actual embodiment of faith.
I'm probably not being fair to Jung. After all, Jesus himself says "God is Spirit and truth : & those who worship him do so in spirit and truth" - and there's something heroic about his liminal truth-search into the dark underside of the human mind. Often enough he prefaces his writings with a disclaimer : they are psychology, not theology. Maybe it's my own problem : a personal hesitancy to grapple with some of my own "unconsciousness".
I have to say I'm deep into Number and Time, though. Franz's discussion of the numerical dimensions of Chinese thought - the mandalas of number from the I Ching etc. - is very absorbing. Having just finished a very very long poem designed ornately around a symbolic number (the atomic number of Lanthanum, #57) - I feel an affinity here...
p.s. (a few hrs later.) I'd like to summarize with a little more precision what appeals to me in M-L von Franz's Jungian approach, and what gives me pause on the other hand. One of the main themes of Number and Time is the view of number as a mediator or mid-point between the psychic and the physical; Franz examines ancient Chinese modes of divination as representing an approach to reality which is irreducibly personal. The aim of divination is to examine the "field" of phenomena (by numbering) at a certain moment in time, in order to understand its meaning for the person for whom the die are cast. The play of chance allows for the decree of fate. Franz explores how this attitude is not that different from certain streams in 20th-cent. physics; time & space and physical phenomena are inseparable from the position of the observer (I'm drastically simplifying Franz's thesis here). She concludes (in a Jungian mode) that the ultimate meaning of phenomena involves the person, the self - perhaps in a dramatic analogy to the cosmological or collective Self at the creative source of all phenomena. These are "fields" which cannot be objectified or depersonalized. This I can agree with, I think : & it rhymes with my sense of the epistemology of Michael Polanyi (in Personal Knowledge and other writings).
What I am less taken with, in the Jungian approach, is the idea of a collective unconscious, structured by fixed "archetypes" shared by all human beings, and unified by an unknowable Self (in the unconscious) with which the ego seeks to be (re)integrated. There may indeed be certain "constellations" of mythological projections, representing durable aspects of human nature & personality : I'm just not sure I would grant them autonomy within an unconscious "structure". To do so seems to lead in the direction of what I was trying to describe above as Jung's turn to abstraction or gnostic "knowledge" in the description of ultimate Reality. Again, this is probably being unfair to Jung, a many-sided, subtle thinker if there ever was one. Yet for me the ultimate Reality does not "reside" in the unconscious, or in any identifiable metaphysical "place" or intellectual formulation. The ultimate Reality is not an objectively describable "Self" (no matter how awesome or obscure) : it is a relation between persons and Persons, not fixed by anything other than agape, caritas, love.
Again, to repeat : I'm not representing either Franz or Jung very thoroughly or accurately here. I'm just responding to them, informally, provisionally (this is a conversation, not a paper).
"Synchronicity" : the term from Jungian psychology for the uncanny conjunction of seemingly chance events in the outside world, with one's own thoughts, or the inner world of the psyche. I'd been thinking about this lately since I was working on a book review of Christian Wiman's volume of Mandelstam translations (Stolen Air) - why? Because the review work brought back memories of my own first encounters with Mandelstam's poetry, back in the 1970s... which led me to reflect on the psychic crisis I went through in college, & the literary-synchronic strangenesses which happened to me - the happenings - in those days.
& perhaps I also began to triangulate recently on these issues due to some other recent researches, into the cathedral of St. Apollinare in Clase, and its connection with imagery in Dante's Paradiso (see Jeffrey Schnapp's book, Transfiguration of history... on that). A pun is a sort of miniature synchronism (of senses in sound)... & it got me thinking about one of my favorite poets from the old days (my old days, early 70s), Guillaume Apollinaire (though come to think of it that's not really a pun : who knows, Apollinaire may have originally been named after the saint). Soon enough I was immersing myself in a flurry of old French poets, as if part of me was sinking back into a 2nd literary childhood...
What does all this have to do with Jesus, you ask? Well, I was going to say that this general trend of my book-devouring led me to a very interesting & curious little-known (eccentric?) interdisciplinary book by Marie-Louise von Franz, a student & disciple of Carl Jung : Number and Time. This is an extremely erudite & wide-ranging meld of physics, mathematics and Jungian psychology, which examines this phenomenon of synchronicity, and proposes a sort of cosmic order rooted in basic numbers (1, 2, 3, 4...) which embody forces shaping both the mind and the physical universe - Franz's unum mundus (world-unity). It's rooted in Jung's metaphysical psychology, which posits a cosmic Self uniting all opposing forces in nature, mandala-like. An awesome and mysterious (strictly beyond conscious awareness) Mind or conjunction of opposites (subsuming good & evil).
I've always had mixed feelings about Jung. On the one hand, he seems remarkably perceptive about the artistic personality, and many of the things I went through in late adolescence seem amenable to a "Jungian" interpretation (those uncanny experiences in the midst of a crisis). On the other hand, he strikes me perhaps as a kind of Gnostic : as a "scientist" of the mind, he pursues explanations of things down dark corridors of mind & personality - explanations which reach toward the mystical & the cosmic. Yet I wonder if his theory of the cosmic Self might be a sort of spiritual over-reach of some kind. It's so close to the religious vision - the sense of a metaphysical dimension transcending & ordering the physical - a dimension which is also personal in some mysterious fashion; yet in trying to present a theory of Totality rooted in a Self which combines good & evil, it seems like he may also be reaching beyond Christianity.
There is much of warning in the Gospels about the awesome threat of God the Father's eternal judgement. "If your hand causeth offense, it is better to cut it off than to lose your whole soul to hell" (rough paraphrase from memory). Or : "Do not fear those who can destroy the body; fear Him who can destroy the soul in eternal fire!" (another rough paraphrase). A Jungian might see these warnings as evidence of a parallel notion of the frightening aspect of the ultimate Self. But what Jungianism might be missing is the time dimension of salvation history. The work of the Christian Trinity is manifest in time as a procession of saving acts. We have to grasp that this invitation to salvation and renewal is addressed directly to us, now, spoken by God-become-Man : the context of understanding (the insight of the Holy Ghost) is everything in these realms. We have to move beyond theory & intellectual speculation to action, to personal commitment, body & soul.
Jung, it seems, was fascinated by the mathematical structure of the psyche : the basic orientation by four (in the human body, in mandalas, in maps, etc. etc.). Marie-L. von Franz explores these concepts in great depth. Jung saw an oscillation (in the psyche, in reality) - a flickering - between three-four... I find these concepts very fascinating too, esp. in relation to making poetry. If we think of the Trinity - the Son & the Father, leading to the "procession" (the manifestation) of their witness & "advocate", the Holy Spirit (the very spirit of God in the body of the Church) - perhaps the matrix of that body - be it the Virgin Mary, the center of the earth, the center of the church, the center of our own individual soul - could be thought of as the "fourth". I think Jung might assent to this (though I'm by no means an expert, or even very familiar with his complex work). Where I hesitate to "follow" Jung is that sometimes in reading him I sense a curious kind of gnostic pedantry at work : the "explanation" of mysteries takes the place of a more active, direct commitment to the historical, actual embodiment of faith.
I'm probably not being fair to Jung. After all, Jesus himself says "God is Spirit and truth : & those who worship him do so in spirit and truth" - and there's something heroic about his liminal truth-search into the dark underside of the human mind. Often enough he prefaces his writings with a disclaimer : they are psychology, not theology. Maybe it's my own problem : a personal hesitancy to grapple with some of my own "unconsciousness".
I have to say I'm deep into Number and Time, though. Franz's discussion of the numerical dimensions of Chinese thought - the mandalas of number from the I Ching etc. - is very absorbing. Having just finished a very very long poem designed ornately around a symbolic number (the atomic number of Lanthanum, #57) - I feel an affinity here...
p.s. (a few hrs later.) I'd like to summarize with a little more precision what appeals to me in M-L von Franz's Jungian approach, and what gives me pause on the other hand. One of the main themes of Number and Time is the view of number as a mediator or mid-point between the psychic and the physical; Franz examines ancient Chinese modes of divination as representing an approach to reality which is irreducibly personal. The aim of divination is to examine the "field" of phenomena (by numbering) at a certain moment in time, in order to understand its meaning for the person for whom the die are cast. The play of chance allows for the decree of fate. Franz explores how this attitude is not that different from certain streams in 20th-cent. physics; time & space and physical phenomena are inseparable from the position of the observer (I'm drastically simplifying Franz's thesis here). She concludes (in a Jungian mode) that the ultimate meaning of phenomena involves the person, the self - perhaps in a dramatic analogy to the cosmological or collective Self at the creative source of all phenomena. These are "fields" which cannot be objectified or depersonalized. This I can agree with, I think : & it rhymes with my sense of the epistemology of Michael Polanyi (in Personal Knowledge and other writings).
What I am less taken with, in the Jungian approach, is the idea of a collective unconscious, structured by fixed "archetypes" shared by all human beings, and unified by an unknowable Self (in the unconscious) with which the ego seeks to be (re)integrated. There may indeed be certain "constellations" of mythological projections, representing durable aspects of human nature & personality : I'm just not sure I would grant them autonomy within an unconscious "structure". To do so seems to lead in the direction of what I was trying to describe above as Jung's turn to abstraction or gnostic "knowledge" in the description of ultimate Reality. Again, this is probably being unfair to Jung, a many-sided, subtle thinker if there ever was one. Yet for me the ultimate Reality does not "reside" in the unconscious, or in any identifiable metaphysical "place" or intellectual formulation. The ultimate Reality is not an objectively describable "Self" (no matter how awesome or obscure) : it is a relation between persons and Persons, not fixed by anything other than agape, caritas, love.
Again, to repeat : I'm not representing either Franz or Jung very thoroughly or accurately here. I'm just responding to them, informally, provisionally (this is a conversation, not a paper).
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