Jung’s Role in My Downfall: Confessions of a Secular Religionist
This is a written form of a talk given to the Canberra Jung Society in March 2008 in Canberra.
I think of myself as a secular religionist. By this I mean simply that I feel at home in our secular society; in fact I value it, while at the same time I see religion as a central and inescapable aspect of the human condition that needs to be understood from this secular standpoint, not in a reductionistic sense but in a wholistic sense. This way of understanding secularity and religion is quite different from the typical understanding that religion is somehow implacably opposed to secularity, and vice versa. Secularity supposedly openly embraces and rejoices in deliverance from religious authority as it pins its hopes and beliefs in things like science and philosophy to determine the nature and truth of reality. Can the place of religion be grasped from such a viewpoint? I think it can. Hence I am a secular religionist.
It was Jung who first started me on this slippery slope that has led to this strange place where, in some sense, I believe all things and nothing, belong to all groups and none, and feel my greatest sense of identity in simply being a human being on a little planet in a vast universe; or is it a multiverse?
I did not begin to read Jung until I went to study at Birmingham University in the late seventies, having not long completed a degree in divinity. I was freshly ordained and wanting very much to make my mark in the organized and established church. I was taken under wing by a man named Michael Wilson who ran the Diploma in Pastoral Studies program, and immediately, without even trying, he began to widen my horizons and invite me to look at things from new and less than orthodox perspectives. He in effect gave me the sense that our secular society was not all bad, and that an active faith in Christ was not incompatible with it. I felt I had met a truly religious man in the very best and everyday sense of the word.
He started me reading books on ethology, the study of animal behaviour; from there I went to various writers on evolution, Gregory Bateson, and Freud and parts of our philosophical tradition; and of course Jung. It was as if a light had been turned on within. I came to the conviction that if Christ were to be relevant to our secular age, how we thought about him and what had happened to him had to be framed within an evolutionary world view and not the Great Chain of Being that had stood in the background of both the ancient and medieval worlds. Whereas in such worlds Christ’s divinity had not been in question, his full humanity had been, and now the situation was reversed. A secular society can accept that he was a fellow human being, but put question marks against his supposed divinity, whatever that might mean, or dismiss it all together.
I went in quest of a suitable epistemology to think about God and Christ, an epistemology that could hold and be convincing in a world view that fully embraced evolution and was no longer prepared to accept propositions about the nature of reality on the authority of a pope or church. I believed I had found it in the evolutionary epistemology of ‘hypothetical realism’ proposed by Donald T. Campbell and others, and strongly advocated by the ethologist Konrad Lorenz. The organs that enable our capacities to perceive and conceive of reality are as real as the evolved world that forms them and that enable us to perceive this world; and vice versa.
As Goethe perceived, the eye is an image of the sun and of the physical properties of light, which are present irrespective of whether the eye is there to see the light or not. Likewise the behaviour of men and animals, in so far as it is adapted to their environment, is an image of that environment. (Lorenz 1977, p.6)
But our capacity to know the world around us was only a measure of that part of reality we needed to ‘rub up against’ in life’s struggle to survive. As Lorenz put it,
What we experience is indeed a real image of reality – albeit an extremely simple one, only just sufficing for our own practical purposes; we have developed ‘organs’ only for those aspects of reality of which, in the interest of survival, it was imperative for our species to take account, so that selection pressure produced this particular cognitive apparatus… For we must assume that reality also has many other aspects which are not vital for us, barbaric seal hunters that we are, to know, and for which we have no ‘organ’, because we have not been compelled in the course of our evolution to develop means of adapting to them. We cannot hear what is transmitted on wavelengths inaccessible to our receiving apparatus, nor can we know how many wavelengths there are. (Lorenz 1977, p.7)
We had evolved as a mirror of that part of reality with which we had to directly deal, and our evolved structure, both inner and outer, our bodies and our souls as it were, is a direct mirror reflection of the forces that have formed us.
Jung quickly came centre stage in this. In a little book by Hall and Nordby, A Primer of Jungian Psychology, I read the following.
The mind, through its physical counterpart, the brain, had inherited characteristics that determine the ways in which a person will react to life’s experiences and even determine what type of experiences he will have. The mind of man is prefigured by evolution. Thus the individual is linked with his past, not only with the past of his infancy but more importantly with the past of the species and before that with the long stretch of organic evolution. This placing of the psyche within the evolutionary process was Jung’s preeminent achievement. (Hall and Nordby 1973, p.39, my emphasis)
Our soul or inner life and its structure is as complex as our outer life or body, with the origins of both in the inorganic world of matter. Both our bodies and our souls tell the story of the evolution of life. I was stunned. Then to clinch the deal, I read in Jung himself, from The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious,
The deeper ‘Layers’ of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness. ‘Lower down’, that is to say as they approach the autonomous functional systems, they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body’s materiality, ie. in chemical substances. The body’s carbon is simply carbon. Hence ‘at bottom’ the psyche is simply ‘world’. (Jung 1977, p.420)
At bottom our soul was both nothing and everything; a seemingly bottomless pit upon which had been built an inner structure complex enough to carry human consciousness.
The final break into my own freedom to think my own thoughts came again under inspiration from Jung in the closing words of Frieda Fordham in her book An Introduction to Jung’s Psychology.
He died in 1961 at the age of eighty-five having created not only a psychology but also his own version of the Christian myth. (Fordham 1982, p.145)
His own version of the Christian myth! I felt liberated to think my own thoughts. I went back to some of my own spiritual experiences with this new insight.
For instance, in my mid twenties I had the experience one day of feeling increasingly oppressed and uneasy within myself. I couldn’t rest and began to pace the floor. The feelings grew stronger until I found myself cowering in the corner of the room. I was quite desperate and thought I was going mad. Then my mind’s eye seemed to be looking down into a great well that got deeper and deeper, like a bottomless pit. I shrieked in terror. I felt I was looking into hell. Then a voice in my mind said, ‘My son not only looked into this but went into it’. The terrible oppressive anxiety began to lift after that and I was able to rest.
It was as if I now had a way of interpreting that experience, apart from a psychiatric one. I was looking into the bottomless pit that is the basis of my own soul, the place where my own inner psychic life runs out into ‘carbon’, into nothingness. I could think of hell now as a living potential inside us all, part of our inner structure as it were. I didn’t know why such an experience had happened to me but it was definitely associated in some way with God. My interest in God had been awakened some years earlier, but up until that point I could not personally see how Christ fitted in.
Now I could. From the earliest days of the movement Christ began, it was believed that in his death he descended into hell. Could it be, I thought, that Christ in his death became increasingly conscious of the structure of his own inner world, formed by the mystery of evolution, right down to the very bottom where psyche runs out into carbon and nothingness, a great descent into our evolutionary origins as direct personal experience. This would mean directly encountering all the archetypes we all share and having to contain them as they entered consciousness. Jung warned of the danger of direct connection with an archetype, that the force of it could swamp the ego and carry you off. I had had some minor experience of that very thing in my own life. Now it was all happening to Christ on the Cross, and not just one archetype but the full structure of his psyche down into nothingness itself.
The question then became how could such a thing happen, crucifixion or not. The answer I came up with was the Spirit. It was under the influence of the Spirit progressively activating Christ’s psyche that lifted it’s personal structure into his consciousness. Those of you who have had definite spiritual experiences, even something as simple as speaking in tongues, will know that after such an experience our whole being can feel ‘filled up’ and highly alive and stimulated. Our own ego can be deeply challenged under such inflationary pressures; our thoughts and feelings seem to have a life of their own and threaten to go out of control. Imagine this process magnified many, many times. I think of it as an ultimate recapitulation of the human psyche, so wonderfully created in the evolutionary process, an ultimate spiritualization of matter.
It was then also a descent of the Spirit. This is an opposite view of the significance of Christ’s death in the scheme of things to someone like Calvin. For him Christ’s death is a complete isolation from God. God in effect turns his back on his son, and pours out his wrath. In my account God in the Spirit fully identifies with us and takes up into himself the whole structure of human nature as it were. Christ’s descent into the nothingness is experienced by him as hell, but in fact it is at the same time his ascent into the absolute knowledge of all that we are as evolved creatures. This was simply not possible without the Spirit. His resurrection is then the recapitulation of this back into a structured consciousness that is now absolute. The Cross is an ultimate withdrawal, and the Resurrection an ultimate return from withdrawal. Withdrawal and return is something we all experience in different ways everyday of our lives.
The absolute nature of Christ’s experience, that on the Cross he gained absolute knowledge, namely the direct experience of everything that had gone into the formation of our inner structure as human beings, led me of course to the philosopher Hegel and his understanding of absolute knowledge as expounded in his Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel, like Jung, also understood his work as a reframing of the grand structure of Christian thought. The eternal Word unfolded itself into Creation under the power of the Spirit, and the Spirit then recapitulated this process into human consciousness to the point of absolute knowledge. Hegel saw this moment of absoluteness as his own philosophy, expounded as it was in his extremely difficult to read writings, rather than an absolute existential moment in the life of an individual like Christ. However there is a passage right at the end of the Phenomenology that is fascinating and is for me pregnant with the possibility that Hegel’s own thought had not resolved fully. In other words the moment of absoluteness was possibly something other than his own philosophy.
The goal, Absolute Knowing, or Spirit that knows itself as Spirit, has for its path the recollection of the Spirits as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the organization of their realm. Their preservation, regarded from the side of their free existence appearing in the form of contingency, is History; but regarded from the side of their [philosophically] comprehended organization, it is the Science of Knowing in the sphere of appearance: the two together, comprehended History, form alike the inwardizing and the Calvary of absolute Spirit, the actuality, truth, and certainty of his throne, without which he would be lifeless and alone. Only from the chalice of this realm of spirits foams forth for Him his own infinitude. (Hegel 1977, p.493)
For some years I tried to build a case for connecting Hegel’s insight with my understanding of Christ’s death. In the end I approached the Self intellectually in quite a different manner, but this possible connection stills remains alive within me.
My point in this paper though is that I now had a very different understanding of the significance of Christ’s death from the traditionally received one, although there may in the end be important connections. Christ’s death in my view is the recapitulation of the Spirit in its movement into the evolved created order, back into consciousness, but this time human consciousness, namely Christ’s consciousness. Much, much more can be said about all this, but my point here is that I now lived in a conception of Christ that not only incorporated an evolved world but needed it. His ascent to the divine was at the same time his descent into the depths of human nature and ultimately no being at all, rather nothingness or hell.
My greatest challenge in propounding this understanding further is in using the idea of Spirit. To the spiritually minded, and I would include Jungians of course, Spirit is a valid idea and concept. But it is an apprehension of reality from the first or second person perspective, and this is where Jung was so helpful. He gave full credence to such concepts, and wished to argue that they have a validity as significant as any third person perspective or objective concept. But in much of our secular world the objective or third person perspective prevails as the only valid way to apprehend the world, and the only true basis for science. The whole of our subjective and intersubjective experience then gets reduced to matter from which all numinosity and autonomy has been excluded. Spirit is essentially autonomous, and we apprehend it subjectively and usually personally. We can objectively observe the changes it can bring in someone, like we see the wind in the trees. But we cannot objectively sense either wind or spirit apart from its effects. Evolutionary theory in the hands of such impersonal materialists becomes a bland neo-Darwinianism that claims to explain everything by natural selection and great aeons of time. Jung would turn in his grave at the likes of a Richard Dawkins. I believe one of the greatest intellectual challenges of our age is to rescue evolutionary ideas from the neo-Darwinists, and to see evolution as an idea that describes a process rather than explain it. Such a challenge follows on from the equally important intellectual challenge of insisting that science as it is now culturally accepted has boundaries and should not exceed those boundaries; and its apprehension of truth, as important and valid as it may be, is only one of three ways of apprehending reality, and truth as such applies as much to the subjective view of the artist as it does to the intersubjective personal actions of people in community. Truth is not only correspondence; it is also coherence and self-transcendence through empathy. The denial of this leads to a secularism, which is a form of faith, of commitment to ideas emotionally; Dawkins is a man of faith in this regard. True secularity knows itself, and hence honours the whole of human experience.
Which brings me back to where we began. My life is centred in Christ as I understand him to be. He is not a church Christ. He is a free person committed to love and intersubjective truth. He needs no structure around him apart from ordinary everyday life. In that sense he is fully individuated, and walks easily in secular society in so far as it seeks truth and justice. He hates hypocrisy and he gives away his power easily. He is deeply connected personally with all the systems and forces that have formed him and us in our evolution. He carries no identity but that of human. He has yielded totally to the Spirit and in so doing knows directly and personally every aspect of his own unconscious, personal and collective. He has experienced our depths to the carbon and the nothingness that our inner world is built upon. His knowledge of reality in that sense is absolute and it is real and direct personal experience contained within him. As Hegel said, it is comprehended history of nature and humanity as formed in the archetypes and other structures of our souls, forming alike the inwardizing and Calvary of absolute Spirit. This is not religious truth in the popular conception of religion as beliefs about supposed objective realities that can be neither verified or falsified. But it is spiritual and religious belief that is based in interpersonal realities that we affirm if we wish in our own experience. We each know something about the unconscious becoming conscious; we each know something of the experience of self transcendence; we each can conceive of wholeness and the plenitude of Self. The Christ I relate to has had this experience to the point of absoluteness.
But I am a fallen soul. What church would allow me to share these ideas within its walls, an understanding I hold as a secular person. I have no flag to fly or banner to unfurl but to honour my own experience of the relationships that have formed me. I don’t need any of you to agree with my thoughts. I hold them alone. But they hold me deeply in a Christ whose own journey included the recapitulation of the Spirit as manifested in the whole of nature and history, something that implicates the whole of humanity. He experienced the whole of the Jungian unconscious as it were down to carbon and nothingness and his knowledge of nature and history is now absolute. And I hold this picture from within a sense of identity with secular culture. So you see Jung has played a very big role in my downfall.
The clash of religions has always been about the clash of ideas, with all the vulnerability of human nature behind it. Secularity holds out the promise that such ideas can be put to scrutiny and called to justify themselves; it is the arch enemy of those who cling to unreflected religious ideas as the only way to see life. It is the process whereby the wheat is sifted from the chaff. On the other hand secular culture needs to remain in touch and true to the whole of the human experience, and this is its Achilles heel. Hubris is never far away in secular culture and should be watched closely and carefully. Personal and interpersonal experiences and the ideas that arise from them are as valid and important as objective scientific observation and analysis, and lost indeed is the culture that forgets this. Perhaps this is the real challenge we face, ensuring that our culture does not come to completely deny spirit, the well spring of autonomous life and creativity that refuses to be hobbled under supposed laws of nature. Such a denial would be a hubris that could see our end.
This is a written form of a talk given to the Canberra Jung Society in March 2008 in Canberra.
I think of myself as a secular religionist. By this I mean simply that I feel at home in our secular society; in fact I value it, while at the same time I see religion as a central and inescapable aspect of the human condition that needs to be understood from this secular standpoint, not in a reductionistic sense but in a wholistic sense. This way of understanding secularity and religion is quite different from the typical understanding that religion is somehow implacably opposed to secularity, and vice versa. Secularity supposedly openly embraces and rejoices in deliverance from religious authority as it pins its hopes and beliefs in things like science and philosophy to determine the nature and truth of reality. Can the place of religion be grasped from such a viewpoint? I think it can. Hence I am a secular religionist.
It was Jung who first started me on this slippery slope that has led to this strange place where, in some sense, I believe all things and nothing, belong to all groups and none, and feel my greatest sense of identity in simply being a human being on a little planet in a vast universe; or is it a multiverse?
I did not begin to read Jung until I went to study at Birmingham University in the late seventies, having not long completed a degree in divinity. I was freshly ordained and wanting very much to make my mark in the organized and established church. I was taken under wing by a man named Michael Wilson who ran the Diploma in Pastoral Studies program, and immediately, without even trying, he began to widen my horizons and invite me to look at things from new and less than orthodox perspectives. He in effect gave me the sense that our secular society was not all bad, and that an active faith in Christ was not incompatible with it. I felt I had met a truly religious man in the very best and everyday sense of the word.
He started me reading books on ethology, the study of animal behaviour; from there I went to various writers on evolution, Gregory Bateson, and Freud and parts of our philosophical tradition; and of course Jung. It was as if a light had been turned on within. I came to the conviction that if Christ were to be relevant to our secular age, how we thought about him and what had happened to him had to be framed within an evolutionary world view and not the Great Chain of Being that had stood in the background of both the ancient and medieval worlds. Whereas in such worlds Christ’s divinity had not been in question, his full humanity had been, and now the situation was reversed. A secular society can accept that he was a fellow human being, but put question marks against his supposed divinity, whatever that might mean, or dismiss it all together.
I went in quest of a suitable epistemology to think about God and Christ, an epistemology that could hold and be convincing in a world view that fully embraced evolution and was no longer prepared to accept propositions about the nature of reality on the authority of a pope or church. I believed I had found it in the evolutionary epistemology of ‘hypothetical realism’ proposed by Donald T. Campbell and others, and strongly advocated by the ethologist Konrad Lorenz. The organs that enable our capacities to perceive and conceive of reality are as real as the evolved world that forms them and that enable us to perceive this world; and vice versa.
As Goethe perceived, the eye is an image of the sun and of the physical properties of light, which are present irrespective of whether the eye is there to see the light or not. Likewise the behaviour of men and animals, in so far as it is adapted to their environment, is an image of that environment. (Lorenz 1977, p.6)
But our capacity to know the world around us was only a measure of that part of reality we needed to ‘rub up against’ in life’s struggle to survive. As Lorenz put it,
What we experience is indeed a real image of reality – albeit an extremely simple one, only just sufficing for our own practical purposes; we have developed ‘organs’ only for those aspects of reality of which, in the interest of survival, it was imperative for our species to take account, so that selection pressure produced this particular cognitive apparatus… For we must assume that reality also has many other aspects which are not vital for us, barbaric seal hunters that we are, to know, and for which we have no ‘organ’, because we have not been compelled in the course of our evolution to develop means of adapting to them. We cannot hear what is transmitted on wavelengths inaccessible to our receiving apparatus, nor can we know how many wavelengths there are. (Lorenz 1977, p.7)
We had evolved as a mirror of that part of reality with which we had to directly deal, and our evolved structure, both inner and outer, our bodies and our souls as it were, is a direct mirror reflection of the forces that have formed us.
Jung quickly came centre stage in this. In a little book by Hall and Nordby, A Primer of Jungian Psychology, I read the following.
The mind, through its physical counterpart, the brain, had inherited characteristics that determine the ways in which a person will react to life’s experiences and even determine what type of experiences he will have. The mind of man is prefigured by evolution. Thus the individual is linked with his past, not only with the past of his infancy but more importantly with the past of the species and before that with the long stretch of organic evolution. This placing of the psyche within the evolutionary process was Jung’s preeminent achievement. (Hall and Nordby 1973, p.39, my emphasis)
Our soul or inner life and its structure is as complex as our outer life or body, with the origins of both in the inorganic world of matter. Both our bodies and our souls tell the story of the evolution of life. I was stunned. Then to clinch the deal, I read in Jung himself, from The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious,
The deeper ‘Layers’ of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness. ‘Lower down’, that is to say as they approach the autonomous functional systems, they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body’s materiality, ie. in chemical substances. The body’s carbon is simply carbon. Hence ‘at bottom’ the psyche is simply ‘world’. (Jung 1977, p.420)
At bottom our soul was both nothing and everything; a seemingly bottomless pit upon which had been built an inner structure complex enough to carry human consciousness.
The final break into my own freedom to think my own thoughts came again under inspiration from Jung in the closing words of Frieda Fordham in her book An Introduction to Jung’s Psychology.
He died in 1961 at the age of eighty-five having created not only a psychology but also his own version of the Christian myth. (Fordham 1982, p.145)
His own version of the Christian myth! I felt liberated to think my own thoughts. I went back to some of my own spiritual experiences with this new insight.
For instance, in my mid twenties I had the experience one day of feeling increasingly oppressed and uneasy within myself. I couldn’t rest and began to pace the floor. The feelings grew stronger until I found myself cowering in the corner of the room. I was quite desperate and thought I was going mad. Then my mind’s eye seemed to be looking down into a great well that got deeper and deeper, like a bottomless pit. I shrieked in terror. I felt I was looking into hell. Then a voice in my mind said, ‘My son not only looked into this but went into it’. The terrible oppressive anxiety began to lift after that and I was able to rest.
It was as if I now had a way of interpreting that experience, apart from a psychiatric one. I was looking into the bottomless pit that is the basis of my own soul, the place where my own inner psychic life runs out into ‘carbon’, into nothingness. I could think of hell now as a living potential inside us all, part of our inner structure as it were. I didn’t know why such an experience had happened to me but it was definitely associated in some way with God. My interest in God had been awakened some years earlier, but up until that point I could not personally see how Christ fitted in.
Now I could. From the earliest days of the movement Christ began, it was believed that in his death he descended into hell. Could it be, I thought, that Christ in his death became increasingly conscious of the structure of his own inner world, formed by the mystery of evolution, right down to the very bottom where psyche runs out into carbon and nothingness, a great descent into our evolutionary origins as direct personal experience. This would mean directly encountering all the archetypes we all share and having to contain them as they entered consciousness. Jung warned of the danger of direct connection with an archetype, that the force of it could swamp the ego and carry you off. I had had some minor experience of that very thing in my own life. Now it was all happening to Christ on the Cross, and not just one archetype but the full structure of his psyche down into nothingness itself.
The question then became how could such a thing happen, crucifixion or not. The answer I came up with was the Spirit. It was under the influence of the Spirit progressively activating Christ’s psyche that lifted it’s personal structure into his consciousness. Those of you who have had definite spiritual experiences, even something as simple as speaking in tongues, will know that after such an experience our whole being can feel ‘filled up’ and highly alive and stimulated. Our own ego can be deeply challenged under such inflationary pressures; our thoughts and feelings seem to have a life of their own and threaten to go out of control. Imagine this process magnified many, many times. I think of it as an ultimate recapitulation of the human psyche, so wonderfully created in the evolutionary process, an ultimate spiritualization of matter.
It was then also a descent of the Spirit. This is an opposite view of the significance of Christ’s death in the scheme of things to someone like Calvin. For him Christ’s death is a complete isolation from God. God in effect turns his back on his son, and pours out his wrath. In my account God in the Spirit fully identifies with us and takes up into himself the whole structure of human nature as it were. Christ’s descent into the nothingness is experienced by him as hell, but in fact it is at the same time his ascent into the absolute knowledge of all that we are as evolved creatures. This was simply not possible without the Spirit. His resurrection is then the recapitulation of this back into a structured consciousness that is now absolute. The Cross is an ultimate withdrawal, and the Resurrection an ultimate return from withdrawal. Withdrawal and return is something we all experience in different ways everyday of our lives.
The absolute nature of Christ’s experience, that on the Cross he gained absolute knowledge, namely the direct experience of everything that had gone into the formation of our inner structure as human beings, led me of course to the philosopher Hegel and his understanding of absolute knowledge as expounded in his Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel, like Jung, also understood his work as a reframing of the grand structure of Christian thought. The eternal Word unfolded itself into Creation under the power of the Spirit, and the Spirit then recapitulated this process into human consciousness to the point of absolute knowledge. Hegel saw this moment of absoluteness as his own philosophy, expounded as it was in his extremely difficult to read writings, rather than an absolute existential moment in the life of an individual like Christ. However there is a passage right at the end of the Phenomenology that is fascinating and is for me pregnant with the possibility that Hegel’s own thought had not resolved fully. In other words the moment of absoluteness was possibly something other than his own philosophy.
The goal, Absolute Knowing, or Spirit that knows itself as Spirit, has for its path the recollection of the Spirits as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the organization of their realm. Their preservation, regarded from the side of their free existence appearing in the form of contingency, is History; but regarded from the side of their [philosophically] comprehended organization, it is the Science of Knowing in the sphere of appearance: the two together, comprehended History, form alike the inwardizing and the Calvary of absolute Spirit, the actuality, truth, and certainty of his throne, without which he would be lifeless and alone. Only from the chalice of this realm of spirits foams forth for Him his own infinitude. (Hegel 1977, p.493)
For some years I tried to build a case for connecting Hegel’s insight with my understanding of Christ’s death. In the end I approached the Self intellectually in quite a different manner, but this possible connection stills remains alive within me.
My point in this paper though is that I now had a very different understanding of the significance of Christ’s death from the traditionally received one, although there may in the end be important connections. Christ’s death in my view is the recapitulation of the Spirit in its movement into the evolved created order, back into consciousness, but this time human consciousness, namely Christ’s consciousness. Much, much more can be said about all this, but my point here is that I now lived in a conception of Christ that not only incorporated an evolved world but needed it. His ascent to the divine was at the same time his descent into the depths of human nature and ultimately no being at all, rather nothingness or hell.
My greatest challenge in propounding this understanding further is in using the idea of Spirit. To the spiritually minded, and I would include Jungians of course, Spirit is a valid idea and concept. But it is an apprehension of reality from the first or second person perspective, and this is where Jung was so helpful. He gave full credence to such concepts, and wished to argue that they have a validity as significant as any third person perspective or objective concept. But in much of our secular world the objective or third person perspective prevails as the only valid way to apprehend the world, and the only true basis for science. The whole of our subjective and intersubjective experience then gets reduced to matter from which all numinosity and autonomy has been excluded. Spirit is essentially autonomous, and we apprehend it subjectively and usually personally. We can objectively observe the changes it can bring in someone, like we see the wind in the trees. But we cannot objectively sense either wind or spirit apart from its effects. Evolutionary theory in the hands of such impersonal materialists becomes a bland neo-Darwinianism that claims to explain everything by natural selection and great aeons of time. Jung would turn in his grave at the likes of a Richard Dawkins. I believe one of the greatest intellectual challenges of our age is to rescue evolutionary ideas from the neo-Darwinists, and to see evolution as an idea that describes a process rather than explain it. Such a challenge follows on from the equally important intellectual challenge of insisting that science as it is now culturally accepted has boundaries and should not exceed those boundaries; and its apprehension of truth, as important and valid as it may be, is only one of three ways of apprehending reality, and truth as such applies as much to the subjective view of the artist as it does to the intersubjective personal actions of people in community. Truth is not only correspondence; it is also coherence and self-transcendence through empathy. The denial of this leads to a secularism, which is a form of faith, of commitment to ideas emotionally; Dawkins is a man of faith in this regard. True secularity knows itself, and hence honours the whole of human experience.
Which brings me back to where we began. My life is centred in Christ as I understand him to be. He is not a church Christ. He is a free person committed to love and intersubjective truth. He needs no structure around him apart from ordinary everyday life. In that sense he is fully individuated, and walks easily in secular society in so far as it seeks truth and justice. He hates hypocrisy and he gives away his power easily. He is deeply connected personally with all the systems and forces that have formed him and us in our evolution. He carries no identity but that of human. He has yielded totally to the Spirit and in so doing knows directly and personally every aspect of his own unconscious, personal and collective. He has experienced our depths to the carbon and the nothingness that our inner world is built upon. His knowledge of reality in that sense is absolute and it is real and direct personal experience contained within him. As Hegel said, it is comprehended history of nature and humanity as formed in the archetypes and other structures of our souls, forming alike the inwardizing and Calvary of absolute Spirit. This is not religious truth in the popular conception of religion as beliefs about supposed objective realities that can be neither verified or falsified. But it is spiritual and religious belief that is based in interpersonal realities that we affirm if we wish in our own experience. We each know something about the unconscious becoming conscious; we each know something of the experience of self transcendence; we each can conceive of wholeness and the plenitude of Self. The Christ I relate to has had this experience to the point of absoluteness.
But I am a fallen soul. What church would allow me to share these ideas within its walls, an understanding I hold as a secular person. I have no flag to fly or banner to unfurl but to honour my own experience of the relationships that have formed me. I don’t need any of you to agree with my thoughts. I hold them alone. But they hold me deeply in a Christ whose own journey included the recapitulation of the Spirit as manifested in the whole of nature and history, something that implicates the whole of humanity. He experienced the whole of the Jungian unconscious as it were down to carbon and nothingness and his knowledge of nature and history is now absolute. And I hold this picture from within a sense of identity with secular culture. So you see Jung has played a very big role in my downfall.
The clash of religions has always been about the clash of ideas, with all the vulnerability of human nature behind it. Secularity holds out the promise that such ideas can be put to scrutiny and called to justify themselves; it is the arch enemy of those who cling to unreflected religious ideas as the only way to see life. It is the process whereby the wheat is sifted from the chaff. On the other hand secular culture needs to remain in touch and true to the whole of the human experience, and this is its Achilles heel. Hubris is never far away in secular culture and should be watched closely and carefully. Personal and interpersonal experiences and the ideas that arise from them are as valid and important as objective scientific observation and analysis, and lost indeed is the culture that forgets this. Perhaps this is the real challenge we face, ensuring that our culture does not come to completely deny spirit, the well spring of autonomous life and creativity that refuses to be hobbled under supposed laws of nature. Such a denial would be a hubris that could see our end.