Talk Six: The Triumph of the Spirit
We come now to the last talk in this series. In Talk Two, following an Introduction, I advocated for myself that in thinking about God and Christ I fully accept the modern cosmology of the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, and the evolution of Life on Planet Earth beginning around 4 billion years ago. And instead of trying to establish doctrine and dogma in talking about this, I rather adopt the flexible methodology of Theodrama. And in thinking about the evolution of Life within this Theodrama, I give equal weight to the evolution of our psychic structures as to our bodies, our minds as to our brains.
In Talk Three I admitted that in doing this it was very important to place the scriptures of my own tradition of Christianity into this Theodrama in a way that was honouring of the Bible but which looked at it historically and archeologically. In other words, while at times I may simply read the Bible devotionally without any questions, my study of it would as much as possible be through the eyes of its authors and the context in which they wrote. In this I largely accepted the scholarship of R.E.Friedman. The Bible is a story within the Story, a theodrama from another time within the Theodrama in our Time, with immediate and vital links between the two.
In Talk Four, I suggested the long orphanage of the Holy Spirit in relation to the Father and the Son in the history of the Church be brought to an end, and we truly accept, with all its challenges, that we live in the Age of the Spirit. What happens to our thinking if we give priority to the Spirit of God in our modern Theodrama and see it as the Spirit’s story? As the Spirit was there in the Big Bang and the act of Creation, so the Spirit has been there throughout all the evolutionary processes, and throughout human history. In scope we are approaching a vision as big as Hegel’s vision of the Spirit, but with the climax and resolution, as we shall see, in the Spirit’s action in Christ rather than the thought of Hegel.
In Talk Five, after listening to part of a video by Jordan Peterson, I suggested that the modern psychological idea of facing the abyss is connected to the universal mythological theme of katabasis or the descent to the
underworld. Christ’s death was so interpreted as a descent, possibly even by Jesus himself, and eventually became fixed in the Church’s mind as a descent into Hell. But this has been a victorious and glorious descent in the mind of the Church that freed the saints in Hades and broke the gates of Hell, to be questioned only at the Reformation by one Reformer who could no longer believe that the underworld existed, and another, namely John Calvin, that Christ’s descent into Hell occurred on the cross and was a punishment for humankind’s sin. And the person to the Catholic Church into dilemma about this was Balthasar, influenced as he had been by Barth. The implication of this, for both Calvin and Balthasar, is that the descent was anything but victorious and glorious, only to be overcome by the resurrection, which was. I left you with a statement at the end from theologian Matthew Emerson: The question throughout the history of doctrine has been what exactly Christ accomplished in his descent.
In other words it is still an open question. As is the atonement generally.
Although I have selected a book to focus this talk, as I have done before, the words that I most want to head this talk are from St Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians.
The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. (1Corinthians 2:10b NIV)
I have always loved this passage, but for me now it is central to my understanding of what Christ accomplished in his descent.
Our last book is Jon Mills’ Underworlds: Philosophies of the unconscious from psychoanalysis to metaphysics. This follows on from an earlier work The Unconscious Abyss: Hegel’s Anticipation of Psychoanalysis. As mentioned in the
introductory talk Mills has re-grounded the idea of the unconscious back into the western philosophical tradition in a new way, at a time when materialist science and the technology that is flowing from it seem to be taking over entirely. I think Mill is onto something extremely important.
In my last talk I mentioned that at least one Reformer, Martin Bucer, denied Christ’s descensus because he could no longer accept the idea of a netherworld to descend into. Justin Bass, a modern day Protestant theologian, sees this as a pre-Bultmannian de-mythologization, one that has receives full support from materialistic science. The descent to an underworld for many now in our culture is sheer nonsense. But what was at stake in this de- mythologization was enormous, nothing less than the shaking of the foundations. Get rid of the nether or underworld world and you have undermined the world of everyday life as we had received it from the ancient world. Mills put it this way:
The hidden abyss of the underworld is tantamount to a collective unconsciousness, whether this be a world soul (anima mundi) or the archaic deposit of human experience organized on primordial levels of internalized representations (représentations collectives), desire and conflict as cultural identifications that fuel the mythos of collective peoples. (Mills 2014: 7).
What was unconsciously real as myth had to re-assert its reality more consciously to survive as the modern world dawned. And it did. Philosophy came to rescue and then psychoanalysis.
The Reformation period saw the beginning of a new philosophical tradition beginning with Descartes. Human thought at the beginning of the modern period discovered the idea of consciousness in thinking about the self, a major development on the received tradition dominated by Plato and Aristotle. The English word ‘consciousness’ was first used in 1632. The adjective ‘unconscious’ appeared first in 1712. Writes Jon Mills,
Although all human experience is ultimately mediated by mind, in antiquity they did not have a concept for the unconscious. This was represented by myth, allegory, ritual, religion and anthropomorphic cosmogony, what was deemed to belong to a netherworld that was believed to lie beneath the
material world of telluric appearances. Mills, Jon. Underworlds (p. 2).
Because the notion of consciousness is a modern (not an ancient) concept, early cultures did not have a word for the ‘unconscious’ in the way it is commonly used today; there-fore, the nature of the soul was not examined in this light. But the unconscious depths of the soul were not entirely neglected, as many pre-Socratic philosophers attempted to delineate. Mills, Jon. Underworlds: (p. 8).
In fact, both Plato and Aristotle of course reflected at great length on the human soul and the human condition, and in this the idea of an unknown world having influence on a known world is fully implied.
Plato not only anticipates the Freudian unconscious, he also stipulates how desire can override reason and a sense of shame belonging to our ethical compass. It is here that we may see how Plato was the first psyche-analyst when he articulates the intimate relationship between desire, reason and morality, how the soul possesses a natural constitution that is instinctually driven, develops habits in relating to others and the environment, and that our true characters awaken during sleep when the soul is at rest, whether this be the ‘rational, gentle and dominate part’ (9:571c) or disquieted passion, unruliness, and anger (9:572). Mills, Jon. Underworlds: (p. 9).
Mills makes a similar reflection on Aristotle with the major addition that for Aristotle the soul is bound to the body but not reducible to matter. He is possibly the first Monist. The Mind/Body issue has been around for a long time.
But once the idea of consciousness had emerged, followed by the adjective ‘unconscious’ that eventually became a noun, the nature of reflection on the mind and soul took on a new objectivity that gave us Leibnitz, Kant, and the German idealists, and, especially for Mills, Hegel. The underworld had been reborn but now as the basis and foundation of the human psyche. Our consciousness and our capacity to feel and think and be aware of ourselves was all built over an inner psychic structure, which for all intents and purposes can be thought of as at bottom an abyss, an underworld but now in the individual’s own soul or being. And from Hegel, we had von Hartmann,
and then Freud, and Jung, and Adler, and Fairbairn, and Kohut and Stolorow, and so on. For Mills this new conception of the human soul coming fully to light for the first time however was in the ideas of Hegel, building on Kant.
As an arch-rationalist, Hegel provides one of the first attempts in the history of Western metaphysics to show how unconscious psychic forces precede reason, and how the abyss is an indispensable aspect of his entire philosophy. Mills, Jon. Underworlds: (p. 18).
The abyss had returned, no longer ‘out there’ but ‘in here’.
Now there is a much easier way to begin to see this amazing transition from an external, supposedly objective under or netherworld, that undergirded traditional society and culture, re-emerging for modern consciousness into the nature and structure of the human psyche. Remember that Hegel wrote well before Darwin persuaded us that biologically we were all evolved from the primordial first living cells. Once we really accept biological evolution, and it certainly does not have to be the Neo-Darwinian version of Richard Dawkins, we are bound I believe to accept also that our psychic structures, the basis of our capacity to be conscious and self- conscious, must necessarily also be deemed to have evolved. Remember we are not talking brain, although brain is all part of it, we are talking psyche, soul, mind and spirit. We are talking with the concepts of our subjectivity.
Freud was not the first to see the soul as an evolved structure. It was Jung. According to Hall and Nordby.
The placing of the psyche within the evolutionary process was Jung’s preeminent achievement. (Hall and Nordby :.39)
The psyche goes back to the first inner registering of life, possibly back to LUCA. Jung saw this.
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 extinguised 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 1979:420)
My consciousness is like an eye that penetrates to the most distant spaces, yet it is the psychic non-ego that fills them with non-spatial images. And these images are not pale shadows, but tremendously powerful psychic factors.... Besides this picture I would like to place the spectacle of the starry heavens at night, for the only equivalent of the universe within is the universe without; and just as I reach this world through the medium of the body, so I reach that world through the medium of the psyche. (Jung 1979:418)
In the broadest terms, for example, psyche in the universe possibly started as vague inner awareness, then stronger awareness, then objective awareness, then feeling, then soul, then complex feeling, then perception, then thought, then conscious thought, then mind, then self-conscious thought, then intentionality, then spirit; inner structure building upon itself, evolving with the evolution of the material body. And at the centre of this vast reservoir of collective images formed over billions of years, is Nothing - Carbon, the abyss, not dissimilar to David Christian’s clayton’s ‘God’ I mentioned in the second talk: a sort of nothingness full of potential.
What if we think of this as the hell Christ descended into, the abyss that was in his soul and is also in ours. When we say he descended we mean that he, in his consciousness, descended into his unconscious to as many levels as possible. Or alternatively, amounting to the same thing, his unconscious was brought progressively to consciousness, as he died.
But why would this be necessary, and how could it happen?
We are so used, particular in Protestantism to think of Christ’s death as punishment for our sins. What happens though if we think of it from the point of view of the Spirit. Here again Hegel is so helpful. For Hegel, nature and history are about the unfolding of Spirit, the implicate into the explicate, to be re-capitulated and come back to itself eventually into human consciousness. In terms of human consciousness, the omega point in the
process he called absolute Spirit and knowledge, where subject and object are One. In Christ’s death the psychic history of the race became conscious, and the energy to do this was and is the Spirit. He has a remarkable passage with which he ends the Phenomenology of Spirit that points to the Spirit coming to itself in Christ’s death in Absolute Knowing.
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 1977:493)
So in this understanding, as I interpret it, Christ’s descent into the abyss is a recapitulation into his consciousness of all that has gone before in the psychical history of the race, to the first structures of the psyche, and the Nothingness of the abyss. And the energy and power required to do this, to take Christ down, or to bring his psyche up into consciousness, is the power of the Holy Spirit searching the depths of both God and human being.
For Hegel, the abyss is the ultimate ground from which consciousness emerges, and is pure determinate negation which is present throughout the development of spirit. By virtue of its unconscious ontology, the realm of the abyss is a central principle in the phenomenology of spirit. (Mills 2014: 26).
Christ’s death, his descent into the abyss, and his resurrection is the great triumph of the Spirit of God. The whole of the story of life is recapitulated into Christ’s consciousness and the Spirit of God is now the Spirit of Christ, as St Paul says. The human race and all life has been completely spiritualised in Christ. Christ is truly the Man who is God. The new Creation is born.
This is my answer to Emerson’s question: this is what Christ accomplished
in his death, descent and resurrection.
So much more to say of course. This is only the bare bones. Much remains for me to be working on in preparation for my book No Ordinary Death: Re- Thinking Christ for the Twenty First Century, non less than showing the depth of Hegel’s thought about the Spirit and how the foundations for this in his thought came from Luther. Jon Mills shows that Hegel’s dialectic can be used to further Freud’s psychoanalysis in understanding the movement of spirit in consciousness. The challenge for me is to show how the Spirit engages with our spirits and anyone touched by and open to the Spirit of God
There is no time at this point to look in any detail into the implications of this understanding of Christ’s death, descent and resurrection for the life of the Church. But I want to raise a few points that could have implications for us.
1. This view of the death and resurrection of Christ is certainly about Christ but also fundamentally about what happened to his spirit through the Presence of the Holy Spirit within him. It is about recapitulating the story of life into the consciousness of Christ, and taking humanity into the eternal and spiritual dimension of the new creation. So it is not primarily about sin at all. The God behind this is entirely positive and loving and to be celebrated as such. Embracing or resisting the Spirit does however remain central, and there’s the rub.
2. I think it means also re-thinking building Christian community around Christ the crucified and resurrected man, not God the Son the second person of the Holy Trinity. This is of course highly controversial if not contentious. The sense of authority we need is the authority of the Spirit not the authority of the ecclesiastical structure. A whole new way of thinking and acting has to come out of this.
3. Coupled with this is the taking of the Holy Spirit seriously and being renewed in prayer and conviction. The Spirit is not an optional add on to ecclesiastical religion. He is front and centre in thought and practice. He is God to be experienced and followed in real and intentional ways.
4. How we use the Bible, how we introduce it and teach it. This is a wide open field. Bible ignorance, even in the church, is flourishing, along with an extraordinary lack of a sense of history.
5. Learning to communicate about soul and spirit and the unconscious, which includes overcoming the fear of these things that seems to grip many church people. Defining these terms clearly in our scientific culture is no longer difficult. But it does require moving on from the sort of sense certainty that materialism encourages and which we have increasingly assumed in the Church.
But this whole Theodrama is not only about the Church. It is about the whole of humanity. That is the point of this whole apologetic. And it is not about religion, as such; it is primarily about spirituality. In the end it is about our freedom as self determining human beings moving rapidly into a world increasingly controlled by other human beings through artificial intelligence and technology. If we who would follow Christ as someone central to the whole race, we have to be able to witness to this conviction in a much more convincing and all embracing way than that the Bible is the Word of God, or Christ died for us to keep us from a wrathful God. For me, his death has the most profound meaning as a triumph of the Spirit in nature and history, nothing can lie outside it, and we need the witness of this same Spirit in our lives now as never before.
Last Saturday the ABC published an article of a very large grant of money to study further the starry heavens.
The universe has a dark secret and an Australian astrophysicist is at the vanguard of a worldwide effort to try and unravel it. Professor Tamara Davis of the University of Queensland has just been given five years and a multi- million-dollar Laureate Fellowship from the federal government to explore the dark side of the universe. To help her she has an international coterie of the some of the smartest minds on planet earth and two phenomenally powered cameras on huge telescopes. The secret hiding from us in plain sight
is called dark energy, a mysterious anti-gravitational force that is pushing the universe to expand at an accelerated rate. It's the abyss between the stars — making up 70 per cent of everything. Combined with dark matter, which in contrast pulls things towards it, they make up 95 per cent of everything. Understanding dark energy may be the key to figuring out the most vexing issue in physics, the problem Albert Einstein spent the last 50 years of his life trying to solve; the fact that two fundamental theories don't make sense together. If that makes your head hurt a bit, don't worry. Professor Davis is good at explaining ridiculously complex concepts to people with non- astrophysicist-sized brains.
There is abyss everywhere it seems. Would not it be great if such funding was make available for exploring the dark side of the soul as well. Although Jung ended up with a system many think is complete, it is quite clear from some of his last writings that he believed he had only started exploring the unconscious and the ways it becomes conscious. And it seems clear also, that both he and Freud had little knowledge of the foundational work that had been laid by Hegel.
We come now to the last talk in this series. In Talk Two, following an Introduction, I advocated for myself that in thinking about God and Christ I fully accept the modern cosmology of the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, and the evolution of Life on Planet Earth beginning around 4 billion years ago. And instead of trying to establish doctrine and dogma in talking about this, I rather adopt the flexible methodology of Theodrama. And in thinking about the evolution of Life within this Theodrama, I give equal weight to the evolution of our psychic structures as to our bodies, our minds as to our brains.
In Talk Three I admitted that in doing this it was very important to place the scriptures of my own tradition of Christianity into this Theodrama in a way that was honouring of the Bible but which looked at it historically and archeologically. In other words, while at times I may simply read the Bible devotionally without any questions, my study of it would as much as possible be through the eyes of its authors and the context in which they wrote. In this I largely accepted the scholarship of R.E.Friedman. The Bible is a story within the Story, a theodrama from another time within the Theodrama in our Time, with immediate and vital links between the two.
In Talk Four, I suggested the long orphanage of the Holy Spirit in relation to the Father and the Son in the history of the Church be brought to an end, and we truly accept, with all its challenges, that we live in the Age of the Spirit. What happens to our thinking if we give priority to the Spirit of God in our modern Theodrama and see it as the Spirit’s story? As the Spirit was there in the Big Bang and the act of Creation, so the Spirit has been there throughout all the evolutionary processes, and throughout human history. In scope we are approaching a vision as big as Hegel’s vision of the Spirit, but with the climax and resolution, as we shall see, in the Spirit’s action in Christ rather than the thought of Hegel.
In Talk Five, after listening to part of a video by Jordan Peterson, I suggested that the modern psychological idea of facing the abyss is connected to the universal mythological theme of katabasis or the descent to the
underworld. Christ’s death was so interpreted as a descent, possibly even by Jesus himself, and eventually became fixed in the Church’s mind as a descent into Hell. But this has been a victorious and glorious descent in the mind of the Church that freed the saints in Hades and broke the gates of Hell, to be questioned only at the Reformation by one Reformer who could no longer believe that the underworld existed, and another, namely John Calvin, that Christ’s descent into Hell occurred on the cross and was a punishment for humankind’s sin. And the person to the Catholic Church into dilemma about this was Balthasar, influenced as he had been by Barth. The implication of this, for both Calvin and Balthasar, is that the descent was anything but victorious and glorious, only to be overcome by the resurrection, which was. I left you with a statement at the end from theologian Matthew Emerson: The question throughout the history of doctrine has been what exactly Christ accomplished in his descent.
In other words it is still an open question. As is the atonement generally.
Although I have selected a book to focus this talk, as I have done before, the words that I most want to head this talk are from St Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians.
The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. (1Corinthians 2:10b NIV)
I have always loved this passage, but for me now it is central to my understanding of what Christ accomplished in his descent.
Our last book is Jon Mills’ Underworlds: Philosophies of the unconscious from psychoanalysis to metaphysics. This follows on from an earlier work The Unconscious Abyss: Hegel’s Anticipation of Psychoanalysis. As mentioned in the
introductory talk Mills has re-grounded the idea of the unconscious back into the western philosophical tradition in a new way, at a time when materialist science and the technology that is flowing from it seem to be taking over entirely. I think Mill is onto something extremely important.
In my last talk I mentioned that at least one Reformer, Martin Bucer, denied Christ’s descensus because he could no longer accept the idea of a netherworld to descend into. Justin Bass, a modern day Protestant theologian, sees this as a pre-Bultmannian de-mythologization, one that has receives full support from materialistic science. The descent to an underworld for many now in our culture is sheer nonsense. But what was at stake in this de- mythologization was enormous, nothing less than the shaking of the foundations. Get rid of the nether or underworld world and you have undermined the world of everyday life as we had received it from the ancient world. Mills put it this way:
The hidden abyss of the underworld is tantamount to a collective unconsciousness, whether this be a world soul (anima mundi) or the archaic deposit of human experience organized on primordial levels of internalized representations (représentations collectives), desire and conflict as cultural identifications that fuel the mythos of collective peoples. (Mills 2014: 7).
What was unconsciously real as myth had to re-assert its reality more consciously to survive as the modern world dawned. And it did. Philosophy came to rescue and then psychoanalysis.
The Reformation period saw the beginning of a new philosophical tradition beginning with Descartes. Human thought at the beginning of the modern period discovered the idea of consciousness in thinking about the self, a major development on the received tradition dominated by Plato and Aristotle. The English word ‘consciousness’ was first used in 1632. The adjective ‘unconscious’ appeared first in 1712. Writes Jon Mills,
Although all human experience is ultimately mediated by mind, in antiquity they did not have a concept for the unconscious. This was represented by myth, allegory, ritual, religion and anthropomorphic cosmogony, what was deemed to belong to a netherworld that was believed to lie beneath the
material world of telluric appearances. Mills, Jon. Underworlds (p. 2).
Because the notion of consciousness is a modern (not an ancient) concept, early cultures did not have a word for the ‘unconscious’ in the way it is commonly used today; there-fore, the nature of the soul was not examined in this light. But the unconscious depths of the soul were not entirely neglected, as many pre-Socratic philosophers attempted to delineate. Mills, Jon. Underworlds: (p. 8).
In fact, both Plato and Aristotle of course reflected at great length on the human soul and the human condition, and in this the idea of an unknown world having influence on a known world is fully implied.
Plato not only anticipates the Freudian unconscious, he also stipulates how desire can override reason and a sense of shame belonging to our ethical compass. It is here that we may see how Plato was the first psyche-analyst when he articulates the intimate relationship between desire, reason and morality, how the soul possesses a natural constitution that is instinctually driven, develops habits in relating to others and the environment, and that our true characters awaken during sleep when the soul is at rest, whether this be the ‘rational, gentle and dominate part’ (9:571c) or disquieted passion, unruliness, and anger (9:572). Mills, Jon. Underworlds: (p. 9).
Mills makes a similar reflection on Aristotle with the major addition that for Aristotle the soul is bound to the body but not reducible to matter. He is possibly the first Monist. The Mind/Body issue has been around for a long time.
But once the idea of consciousness had emerged, followed by the adjective ‘unconscious’ that eventually became a noun, the nature of reflection on the mind and soul took on a new objectivity that gave us Leibnitz, Kant, and the German idealists, and, especially for Mills, Hegel. The underworld had been reborn but now as the basis and foundation of the human psyche. Our consciousness and our capacity to feel and think and be aware of ourselves was all built over an inner psychic structure, which for all intents and purposes can be thought of as at bottom an abyss, an underworld but now in the individual’s own soul or being. And from Hegel, we had von Hartmann,
and then Freud, and Jung, and Adler, and Fairbairn, and Kohut and Stolorow, and so on. For Mills this new conception of the human soul coming fully to light for the first time however was in the ideas of Hegel, building on Kant.
As an arch-rationalist, Hegel provides one of the first attempts in the history of Western metaphysics to show how unconscious psychic forces precede reason, and how the abyss is an indispensable aspect of his entire philosophy. Mills, Jon. Underworlds: (p. 18).
The abyss had returned, no longer ‘out there’ but ‘in here’.
Now there is a much easier way to begin to see this amazing transition from an external, supposedly objective under or netherworld, that undergirded traditional society and culture, re-emerging for modern consciousness into the nature and structure of the human psyche. Remember that Hegel wrote well before Darwin persuaded us that biologically we were all evolved from the primordial first living cells. Once we really accept biological evolution, and it certainly does not have to be the Neo-Darwinian version of Richard Dawkins, we are bound I believe to accept also that our psychic structures, the basis of our capacity to be conscious and self- conscious, must necessarily also be deemed to have evolved. Remember we are not talking brain, although brain is all part of it, we are talking psyche, soul, mind and spirit. We are talking with the concepts of our subjectivity.
Freud was not the first to see the soul as an evolved structure. It was Jung. According to Hall and Nordby.
The placing of the psyche within the evolutionary process was Jung’s preeminent achievement. (Hall and Nordby :.39)
The psyche goes back to the first inner registering of life, possibly back to LUCA. Jung saw this.
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 extinguised 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 1979:420)
My consciousness is like an eye that penetrates to the most distant spaces, yet it is the psychic non-ego that fills them with non-spatial images. And these images are not pale shadows, but tremendously powerful psychic factors.... Besides this picture I would like to place the spectacle of the starry heavens at night, for the only equivalent of the universe within is the universe without; and just as I reach this world through the medium of the body, so I reach that world through the medium of the psyche. (Jung 1979:418)
In the broadest terms, for example, psyche in the universe possibly started as vague inner awareness, then stronger awareness, then objective awareness, then feeling, then soul, then complex feeling, then perception, then thought, then conscious thought, then mind, then self-conscious thought, then intentionality, then spirit; inner structure building upon itself, evolving with the evolution of the material body. And at the centre of this vast reservoir of collective images formed over billions of years, is Nothing - Carbon, the abyss, not dissimilar to David Christian’s clayton’s ‘God’ I mentioned in the second talk: a sort of nothingness full of potential.
What if we think of this as the hell Christ descended into, the abyss that was in his soul and is also in ours. When we say he descended we mean that he, in his consciousness, descended into his unconscious to as many levels as possible. Or alternatively, amounting to the same thing, his unconscious was brought progressively to consciousness, as he died.
But why would this be necessary, and how could it happen?
We are so used, particular in Protestantism to think of Christ’s death as punishment for our sins. What happens though if we think of it from the point of view of the Spirit. Here again Hegel is so helpful. For Hegel, nature and history are about the unfolding of Spirit, the implicate into the explicate, to be re-capitulated and come back to itself eventually into human consciousness. In terms of human consciousness, the omega point in the
process he called absolute Spirit and knowledge, where subject and object are One. In Christ’s death the psychic history of the race became conscious, and the energy to do this was and is the Spirit. He has a remarkable passage with which he ends the Phenomenology of Spirit that points to the Spirit coming to itself in Christ’s death in Absolute Knowing.
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 1977:493)
So in this understanding, as I interpret it, Christ’s descent into the abyss is a recapitulation into his consciousness of all that has gone before in the psychical history of the race, to the first structures of the psyche, and the Nothingness of the abyss. And the energy and power required to do this, to take Christ down, or to bring his psyche up into consciousness, is the power of the Holy Spirit searching the depths of both God and human being.
For Hegel, the abyss is the ultimate ground from which consciousness emerges, and is pure determinate negation which is present throughout the development of spirit. By virtue of its unconscious ontology, the realm of the abyss is a central principle in the phenomenology of spirit. (Mills 2014: 26).
Christ’s death, his descent into the abyss, and his resurrection is the great triumph of the Spirit of God. The whole of the story of life is recapitulated into Christ’s consciousness and the Spirit of God is now the Spirit of Christ, as St Paul says. The human race and all life has been completely spiritualised in Christ. Christ is truly the Man who is God. The new Creation is born.
This is my answer to Emerson’s question: this is what Christ accomplished
in his death, descent and resurrection.
So much more to say of course. This is only the bare bones. Much remains for me to be working on in preparation for my book No Ordinary Death: Re- Thinking Christ for the Twenty First Century, non less than showing the depth of Hegel’s thought about the Spirit and how the foundations for this in his thought came from Luther. Jon Mills shows that Hegel’s dialectic can be used to further Freud’s psychoanalysis in understanding the movement of spirit in consciousness. The challenge for me is to show how the Spirit engages with our spirits and anyone touched by and open to the Spirit of God
There is no time at this point to look in any detail into the implications of this understanding of Christ’s death, descent and resurrection for the life of the Church. But I want to raise a few points that could have implications for us.
1. This view of the death and resurrection of Christ is certainly about Christ but also fundamentally about what happened to his spirit through the Presence of the Holy Spirit within him. It is about recapitulating the story of life into the consciousness of Christ, and taking humanity into the eternal and spiritual dimension of the new creation. So it is not primarily about sin at all. The God behind this is entirely positive and loving and to be celebrated as such. Embracing or resisting the Spirit does however remain central, and there’s the rub.
2. I think it means also re-thinking building Christian community around Christ the crucified and resurrected man, not God the Son the second person of the Holy Trinity. This is of course highly controversial if not contentious. The sense of authority we need is the authority of the Spirit not the authority of the ecclesiastical structure. A whole new way of thinking and acting has to come out of this.
3. Coupled with this is the taking of the Holy Spirit seriously and being renewed in prayer and conviction. The Spirit is not an optional add on to ecclesiastical religion. He is front and centre in thought and practice. He is God to be experienced and followed in real and intentional ways.
4. How we use the Bible, how we introduce it and teach it. This is a wide open field. Bible ignorance, even in the church, is flourishing, along with an extraordinary lack of a sense of history.
5. Learning to communicate about soul and spirit and the unconscious, which includes overcoming the fear of these things that seems to grip many church people. Defining these terms clearly in our scientific culture is no longer difficult. But it does require moving on from the sort of sense certainty that materialism encourages and which we have increasingly assumed in the Church.
But this whole Theodrama is not only about the Church. It is about the whole of humanity. That is the point of this whole apologetic. And it is not about religion, as such; it is primarily about spirituality. In the end it is about our freedom as self determining human beings moving rapidly into a world increasingly controlled by other human beings through artificial intelligence and technology. If we who would follow Christ as someone central to the whole race, we have to be able to witness to this conviction in a much more convincing and all embracing way than that the Bible is the Word of God, or Christ died for us to keep us from a wrathful God. For me, his death has the most profound meaning as a triumph of the Spirit in nature and history, nothing can lie outside it, and we need the witness of this same Spirit in our lives now as never before.
Last Saturday the ABC published an article of a very large grant of money to study further the starry heavens.
The universe has a dark secret and an Australian astrophysicist is at the vanguard of a worldwide effort to try and unravel it. Professor Tamara Davis of the University of Queensland has just been given five years and a multi- million-dollar Laureate Fellowship from the federal government to explore the dark side of the universe. To help her she has an international coterie of the some of the smartest minds on planet earth and two phenomenally powered cameras on huge telescopes. The secret hiding from us in plain sight
is called dark energy, a mysterious anti-gravitational force that is pushing the universe to expand at an accelerated rate. It's the abyss between the stars — making up 70 per cent of everything. Combined with dark matter, which in contrast pulls things towards it, they make up 95 per cent of everything. Understanding dark energy may be the key to figuring out the most vexing issue in physics, the problem Albert Einstein spent the last 50 years of his life trying to solve; the fact that two fundamental theories don't make sense together. If that makes your head hurt a bit, don't worry. Professor Davis is good at explaining ridiculously complex concepts to people with non- astrophysicist-sized brains.
There is abyss everywhere it seems. Would not it be great if such funding was make available for exploring the dark side of the soul as well. Although Jung ended up with a system many think is complete, it is quite clear from some of his last writings that he believed he had only started exploring the unconscious and the ways it becomes conscious. And it seems clear also, that both he and Freud had little knowledge of the foundational work that had been laid by Hegel.
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