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Answer to Job

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Robert Tulip

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Re: Answer to Job

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Harry Marks wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote: From our point of view as a species living on earth, the ultimate question is what we must do to survive, based on understanding of what features of reality affect us.
Well, I think the question of what makes life worthwhile is even more fundamental. But the two questions will line up remarkably well, since one cannot do species survival as a game against other human beings.
Harry, your comment seems untrue. You say what makes life worthwhile is more fundamental than what we must do to survive as a species. On the Maslow hierarchy of needs, the physiological needs of existence are more basic than the self-actualisation needs of making life worthwhile. Perhaps you could argue that without vision the people perish, so physical needs require the spiritual framework of faith, inverting Maslow's pyramid. To my mind that is a risky and unbalanced approach, since a scientific model of physics should provide the context for idealistic aspirations.
Harry Marks wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:It means a step back from the sense that our God is the ultimate creator of the universe, toward a view that our God is the aspects of the universe that are relevant to us. This helps to put care at the focus of faith.
Or we could just put the questions of care at the focus of faith. Of course that is essentially what you do when you ask for "the aspects of the universe that are relevant to us."
Jung is exploring a natural concept of God, whereby the myth of God as an intentional personal being is deconstructed to apply to an actual referent rather than an imaginary one.

The unusual thing about God is that the actual referent is the human imaginative construction of the source of cosmic order, with all the actual intelligence and consciousness projected from human ideas onto an imagined supreme being, imputing deliberate will to unconscious natural processes through the religious concepts of blessing and wrath. Such imputation has proven to be a practical way to simplify and explain more complex moral ideas, while containing risks of distortion.

A further aspect of the distinction here between the creator of the universe and the aspects of the universe that are relevant to us is the old myth from Plato of the demiurge, the subordinate divinity responsible for creating the world, which as I noted above Jung mentions in connection with Yahweh.

Demiurge has been a fraught concept, partly because “world” is a highly ambiguous concept, referring both to natural planet and to constructed culture. So critics have taken the Gnostic observation that the world is evil to refer to nature rather than culture, when it seems more coherent to say the original meaning was that prevailing culture was lost in delusion.

The old idea of God as universal creator evolved long before knowledge arose of the immense scale of the cosmos. The only cosmic scale that is relevant to human evolution is the solar system, as I discuss at some length in my recent essay on The Precessional Structure of Time. The solar system provides the orderly context for the evolution of the earth as a stable cocoon for life and the emergence of human consciousness. The effect of the galaxy and larger scales are just too remote, setting the initial conditions but having no ongoing direct influence on the evolution of life on earth.
Harry Marks wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:My starting point for faith is to say we should aim only to have faith in things that are real and true.
Dealing with world three objects, "real" and "true" are ambiguous issues.
Putting Jung’s metaphysical language in the context of Popper’s epistemology should be a helpful way to proceed in a systematic method. http://www.open-science-repository.com/ ... three.html explains that Popper's world three is objective knowledge while world two contains beliefs, feelings and motivations.

As per the earlier discussion, democracy is a subjective concept resting on values, like our ideas of reality and truth. Even though they seem to underpin scientific knowledge, reality and truth contain such ambiguity that they are not in themselves scientific or physical concepts but are metaphysical. Any meaning that we invest in universal abstract concepts like reality and truth involves unproveable assumptions that have the character of faith.
Harry Marks wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:… a big tradition in theology, the proof of the existence of God… has been badly corrupted by the church assumption that the God of the Bible is the creator of the universe.
That tradition is motivated by a corrupt question: how to manipulate people into living a caring life by threats from the other world.
The extent to which belief in the afterlife is corrupt is complex. To demand obedience under threat of hellfire or promise of heaven does present a simplistic morality.

And yet it is not simply corrupt. Weber argues in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that the deferred gratification produced by the Calvinist theories of heaven and afterlife was a decisive moral impetus to the rise of the investment culture that transformed the modern creation of wealth through thrift and education. The pious merchants of Amsterdam cared enough about the threat of hellfire to focus on living lives of strict probity, hope and austerity.

The converse of the threat of damnation is the promise of predestination. In Answer to Job, Jung says that “taken psychologically, as a means to achieving a definite effect, it can readily be understood that these allusions to predestination give one a feeling of distinction. If one knows that one has been singled out by divine choice and intention from the beginning of the world, then one feels lifted beyond the transitoriness and meaninglessness of ordinary human existence and transported to a new state of dignity and importance, like one who has a part in the divine world drama. In this way man is brought nearer to God, and this is in entire accord with the meaning of the message in the gospels.”
Last edited by Robert Tulip on Sun Jun 24, 2018 8:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Answer to Job

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Robert Tulip wrote:
Harry Marks wrote: Well, I think the question of what makes life worthwhile is even more fundamental [than "what we must do to survive"]. But the two questions will line up remarkably well, since one cannot do species survival as a game against other human beings.
Harry, your comment seems untrue. You say what makes life worthwhile is more fundamental than what we must do to survive as a species. On the Maslow hierarchy of needs, the physiological needs of existence are more basic than the self-actualisation needs of making life worthwhile.
I will try to explain. I often get the feeling this is a fundamental difference between our worldviews.

First, I note you posed the question from the point of view of the species, so I changed the question (without saying so) when I gave my response. If that has been a source of confusion, I apologize.

But here's my perspective: without a moral framework, in which something matters more than the pleasure or pain impacting my nervous system, we do not even care about our own children, much less the survival of all children. You can argue that caring for my descendants is instinctive, and that's true, but when it is part of an evaluative system the instinctive nature of the reasoning is irrelevant - it is still an answer to the question of what makes life worthwhile.

In essence I am arguing that even a person who has never given any conscious thought to what makes life worthwhile still has their system of answer to it.

There is an interesting piece in the New York Times (yes, I know, that is most of what I read) arguing that suicide rates are up in part because of a crisis of meaning:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/23/opin ... risis.html
We are losing sources that used to connect people to a sense of mattering to more than just themselves. It may be true, as Maslow observes, that you have to have basic security needs met before you will pay attention to such issues, but they can seriously affect your level of motivation and pleasure in life even if you are not paying attention to them.
Robert Tulip wrote:Perhaps you could argue that without vision the people perish, so physical needs require the spiritual framework of faith, inverting Maslow's pyramid. To my mind that is a risky and unbalanced approach, since a scientific model of physics should provide the context for idealistic aspirations.
No, I am not arguing that mattering matters more than being alive (though in some sense it does). I am arguing that issues of future survival are not the same thing as physical needs. After all, no one survives forever. And the human race will probably perish one day, perhaps as the solar system loses its light. The question of how to keep it going matters, but within the realm of all things that matter, not within the realm of things that I must have in order to be able to pay attention to my self-esteem or to pay attention to what matters in life.
Robert Tulip wrote:Jung is exploring a natural concept of God, whereby the myth of God as an intentional personal being is deconstructed to apply to an actual referent rather than an imaginary one.
If only he had been so careful about what he was exploring, and about explaining it. I think he was just making some observations that occurred to him while thinking about the pathologies in our "mass imagining" of God.
Robert Tulip wrote:The unusual thing about God is that the actual referent is the human imaginative construction of the source of cosmic order, with all the actual intelligence and consciousness projected from human ideas onto an imagined supreme being, imputing deliberate will to unconscious natural processes through the religious concepts of blessing and wrath. Such imputation has proven to be a practical way to simplify and explain more complex moral ideas, while containing risks of distortion.
It might be better to think of the human imagination starting from cataclysmic matters, whether volcanoes or hallucinations of a dead person, and gradually putting together a picture of hidden, ultra-powerful agents. However, I agree that the picture gradually became one of a creator source of cosmic order, and that this functioned largely as a projection of unconscious urges.

Risks of distortion, in such a framework, is putting it mildly.
Robert Tulip wrote:critics have taken the Gnostic observation that the world is evil to refer to nature rather than culture, when it seems more coherent to say the original meaning was that prevailing culture was lost in delusion.
I don't know the sources, including Plato, well enough to evaluate that proposition, but it seems reasonable to me that it might have been Plato's intent (or perhaps underlying thrust behind what he said).
Harry Marks wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:My starting point for faith is to say we should aim only to have faith in things that are real and true.
Dealing with world three objects, "real" and "true" are ambiguous issues.
Robert Tulip wrote:Putting Jung’s metaphysical language in the context of Popper’s epistemology should be a helpful way to proceed in a systematic method. http://www.open-science-repository.com/ ... three.html explains that Popper's world three is objective knowledge while world two contains beliefs, feelings and motivations.
Your source has misled you slightly. The definition in the source is
Open Science Repository wrote:It [World Three] is made of abstract objects, ideas, since descriptions of problems, theories and arguments are abstract ideas.
But also:
The world two is the world of subjective experiences; we can call it the world of consciousness. It also includes all other subjective experiences such as feelings, emotions, sensations, etc.
Subjective experiences are the inhabitants of the world two.
The idea is supposed to be that the things constructed by the mind are World Three, while perceptions, including feelings, are World Two. So when you stated that beliefs are in World Two, you were tracking "subjective" rather than "constructed" or "abstract".
Objective knowledge is pretty much all found in World Three, but note that mistaken objective construction, such as phlogiston or Newtonian Mechanics, are also World Three. Other things can be abstract constructions besides objective knowledge.

So my point was that having faith only in things that are real and true is misguided, because "democracy" and "the rule of law" and "the United States of America" and "the exchange rate between crowns and ducats" are of ambiguous reality and truth.

I am being a bit of a devil's advocate. As I have said before, I favor the true over the imaginary pretty much every time (contra the argument in "The Life of Pi" for example) that they come in conflict. But I do insist on healthy respect for the imaginary. It does not need to be brought into conflict with the real - only literalists do that.
Robert Tulip wrote:The extent to which belief in the afterlife is corrupt is complex. To demand obedience under threat of hellfire or promise of heaven does present a simplistic morality.

And yet it is not simply corrupt.
Without getting into Weber or other psychological analyses of the functioning of afterlife beliefs, I take the point. If one is willing to see the Last Judgment as a story we tell ourselves, somewhat like the warriors who wear the magic to protect them from bullets, then it operates on a number of levels at once and can certainly be accepted and even promoted in all innocence.

When you get to insistence on its revealed truth, you are dabbling in another kind of corruption, namely enforcing myth. Compelling belief. And when you scratch that a layer or two down, you come up with corrupt manipulation at best - sometimes it is instead a pathological sadism which is even worse. I was observing that an elaborate system, "the Church", the embodiment of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor, was constructed around exactly this effort to enforce myth and compel belief. It was self-consciously justifying its behavior on those grounds. I don't think there is any way to avoid the fundamental corruption of that enterprise.

What makes it quite scary is the systematic avoidance of recognizing that corruption.

Even at the time of Galileo the church had a sense of the importance of freedom of conscience. It was teaching, not belief, that was forbidden. Yet its justifications for such rules were completely in confusion about the difference between power and authority. The authority of the church had been so systematically compromised for the sake of its power (or the power of the throne through it) that it could not even raise the question to itself.

When Erasmus published his "Julius Exclusus" about the Pope being denied entry to Heaven, he should not have had to do it anonymously. (The parallels to our present Dear Leader are delicious, for those with that turn of mind.)
Robert Tulip wrote: The pious merchants of Amsterdam cared enough about the threat of hellfire to focus on living lives of strict probity, hope and austerity.
It's interesting to compare their behavior in the slave castles of Africa (and the ships stopping there) to this pious probity and austerity back in the home country. Predestination is a very sick system.
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Re: Answer to Job

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Harry Marks wrote:I think I am coming around to agreeing with this. I have seen, over and over in my life, practical considerations trumping idealistic ones.
Robert Tulip wrote:What are our practical and idealistic considerations regarding the apocalypse? The Biblical images of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ on the clouds of glory are certainly idealistic. And yet even this supernatural story, with the image of the division between the sheep and goats in Matthew 25, is remarkably practical in its insistence that salvation depends primarily on performance of works of care.
Umm, no, in the context of both policy and everyday practice, "practical" connotes the opposite of works of care. Extravagant works, outside of the norms of affordability, will continue to be marginalized. [Edit to add: I think I bypassed your point, which was that judgement was to be based on something tangible, with meaning not dependent on the supernatural. With that I agree, but it works at cross-purposes to the "practical vs. idealistic" tension I was focused on.]

I was quite serious in considering the apocalyptic dangers in the world today to be revolutionary with regards to the tension between idealism and the practical. The anti-education wing of the electorate considers environmental concerns to be examples of "liberal" (in the sense of "hopelessly impractical") foolhardiness. Suddenly idealistic concerns with the common good have become the truly practical option, and supposedly practical focus on staying within one's means have become the concern of the impractical posing to itself as anti-idealistic.

There is some interesting stuff going on relative to Jung's somewhat misguided analysis of the interplay between theological developments and apocalyptic mythology. Jung sees a "dissociation" (@605) of incarnated God from God's "amoral" side. (Dissociation, in depth psychology, is extremely dangerous. A person proceeding along two tracks, running on different and incompatible logics, is in very deep trouble. We saw this with Eliot Spitzer, Bill Clinton, Gary Hart and Ted Kennedy over sex. All of them were dedicated public servants, in the truest sense, but had split off their narcissistic sides as a result and were unable to make sound, rational choices about their love lives. One gets the feeling that Bernie Sanders has been following a different set of priorities from the beginning, not trying to pose as anything or win approval from gatekeepers and pundits.
A mild form of dissociation occurs with the traditional "two-faced" behavior of politicians and socialites. Romney admits to hostility against those receiving government help, and when it becomes public, this costs him the election, with a repeat four years later by Hillary Clinton and the "deplorables".)

Two questions arise from Jung's thesis. First, did apocalyptic prophecy represent a return of the dissociated amoral side? By insisting on asserting God's sovereignty and power, one might think yes. I'm not so sure. First, Jung makes much ado about an Atonement theory, requiring Jesus' death as a sacrifice, that isn't really present in the early church. There is a sense of judgment and the wrath of God in, say, Romans, but Paul's argument about the restoration created by Christ does not seem to hinge on Jesus being a necessary sacrifice (only Hebrews really states such an equation, and Hebrews is probably from the same tradition as the Revelation - the Ebionites, more or less).

John's Revelation is a reaction primarily against imperial power, specifically with regard to its lack of respect for religious truth and values. As such it does seem to be asserting God's claim to power. But I think there are better interpretations about how it is handling the tension between justice and power.

The Lamb may wield a sword of sorts, a sword of justice presumably, but the Lamb's power is fundamentally a healing and rescuing power, opposed to the scourges such as famine which reinforce imperial dominance systems. Jung seems to freely claim Anti-Christ and Satan as dark, hidden sides of God's power, and as long as he is thinking of God as "Reality", that kind of works. God "releases" war, pestilence, etc. out of wrath, reflecting the fact that there must be awesome power involved. But it doesn't use any sense of how God the character, our projection of a need for power, is doing its work of justice. Even more than the post-Exilic prophets, the Revelator seems to see wrathful events as something to be endured rather than to be learning important lessons from.

And if you buy Jung's view of Apocalypse as re-association of power lust, it saps most of the meaning from any claim that God incarnated Himself as a response to insight about the moral bankruptcy of punitive and arbitrary treatment of humans. God as Reality IS amoral: this is not just a dissociation driven by character dynamics. It doesn't work to suppose that the human aspiration for meaning in life, as found in holding God accountable, represents dissociation from God's need to be seen as powerful, within the dynamics of the (socially-defined) character. What it represents, instead, is the inadequacy of the construct. Justice enforced by divine wrath in nature is going to be unjust.

I think it simply makes more sense to see Jesus, Buddha and other mystical sages as choosing wisdom in response to the moral bankruptcy of worshipping a God who is punitive and arbitrary. The reassertion of power for meaning takes the form of Resurrection, rather than the (failed) claim of supernatural destruction of corrupt human institutions.

The second question arising is whether real Apocalyptic threats seen today (which do not take the form of prophetic imagery but of actual, observed threats) are in any sense restoring a proper respect for reality's Power on behalf of commands to take seriously the needs of others. On those grounds I think Jung does a little better. With both nuclear weapons and climate change, the threat of hanging is focusing the mind of the selfish and the power-obsessed.

But I am still skeptical because the commands to regard others were, formerly, presented in a context of finding meaning rather than mainly avoiding a retribution by Reality. You argue that the last Judgment is a sort of retribution by Reality, but there is obviously dissociation involved in thinking of the punishment entirely in another realm. Quite simply, it is only in the last century that it began to dawn on people that indulging our lust for Power could kill us all. Choosing the staging ground of wrath to be Heavenly judgment, taking parable as literal truth, was the true dissociation, in my view.
Robert Tulip wrote:This recognition of ambiguity seems to me to be entailed by the core gospel ethics that the last shall be first and the meek shall inherit the earth. These ideas involve respect for people who are broken and damaged and incoherent. At the same time, it is possible to imagine an ideal that is seen as a moral goal to work towards, without using that goal as a way to enforce absolute compliance.
Yes, in a sense very similar to the reason a Messiah must be peaceable, a person must be able to grasp the meaning of the life of the most marginal, in order to experience the meaning of their own life. As long as we think our life is meaningful only by virtue of accomplishing impressive deeds which show us to be somehow superior to others, we forfeit real meaning in favor of conditional, contingent, and therefore desperate grasping after results.

Just to point out the obvious, in such a results-contingent system of meaning we can never be as meaningful as a billionaire unless we have a billion ourselves. The narcissistic delusion is obvious if you put it in such stark terms. Show me a person who thinks a billionaire matters more than you and me, and I will show you one who is inevitably a White Supremacist on the inside, even if suppressing the knowledge.
Robert Tulip wrote:
Harry Marks wrote: I see the Jungian (and New Age) openness to weirdness "within nature" as basically a set of ways to access our relationship to our archetypal psychological structures.
Jung’s weirdest idea is probably his concept of synchronicity, which he described as an ‘acausal connecting principle’ in his essay introducing the Chinese oracle the I Ching. Rather than the weird idea of acausality, I prefer to see synchronicity as indicating the existence of natural causal energies and processes that our scientific methods have not yet been able to detect, such as the idea that all events at one time share a common quality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity
I read the wiki piece on Synchronicity, and spent several hours yesterday, while gardening, thinking about it. Here's what I concluded.
Coincidence is a way of expressing significance outside of a causal framework. It is a way that the world rhymes with itself.
Literature trades heavily in "significant" details. Things that make us want to retell a story are usually things that express understanding about the world, and therefore ways that the choices of others signify implications for our choices.

But sometimes the beauty of how something is expressed, the esthetic appeal of a story, has the same effect on us as a realistic examination of causality. Visual arts are, if you like, 90 percent beauty and 10 percent representative significance, while literature is more like 20 percent appeal and 80 percent representative significance. In poetry the proportions shift dramatically, as shown by the memorability of a good song and the mnemonic aide of a rhyme.

Modern literature is learning to use "appeal" methods to covertly smuggle in significance. This was most clearly revealed to me in an introduction to Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbervilles". The author pointed out that Hardy often uses improbably coincidences in a story. Some people just reject the improbability, but in fact he is invariably expressing some larger point. Tess, at one point estranged from Angel Clare, her genteel and educated husband, by her seducer, encounters Clare's parents at a social event. If she had appealed to them for help, they would have rescued her, but instead she turns away in shame and confusion. (This is echoed by rescued sex-slaves in Thailand who cannot go back to their families from shame, and so end up right back in a life of prostitution.) Hardy is symbolizing, in the agonizing coincidence of passing close to the parents and the parents not noticing her, the social chasm between Clare and Tess. Despite his captivation by Tess's looks, Clare cannot bridge the social distance, and Tess is afraid to appeal for the benevolent part of his higher status society to reach out and help her.

I believe synchronicity operates on our consciousness in a similar way, "contrived" not by a hidden author but by our penchant for being influenced by the striking and the bizarre. Such coincidences capture our attention like a rhyme, and so we have a tendency to assign significance to them even when there is no significance that can hold up to careful examination.

Jung, who learned a lot from patients about dreams and other ideations, links this "acausal" significance to the paranormal. And paranormal phenomena do tend to be constructed out of a perception of significance that is scientifically baseless. In societies that see ghosts, such as East Asia and, to a much smaller extent, Britain, the tendency for the mind to perceive the presence of a dead person gets interpreted as an actual phenomenon present. This is acausal significance: meaning is assigned to the experience that would not hold up to scientific examination.

In an absolutely fascinating book "When God Talks Back" Tanya Luhrmann, a highly qualified Stanford psychology prof investigated a denomination which fosters long and intense prayer as an encounter with Jesus. The members are quite explicitly told to imagine his presence, setting a place for him at their table, for example, and carrying on a (one-sided) conversation. Sometimes they hear him talk back. Based on comparison phenomena from other countries, she concludes that the person has an auditory hallucination. Such hallucinations are not actually so rare, she says, but in a situation with intense imaginative involvement, there is enough confusion between real and imagined experiences that the person fails to accurately classify the hallucination as artificial.

She cites other evidence, including her own experience, as does John Dominic Crossan, that visual hallucinations are also not uncommon and sometimes systematically misinterpreted for reasons that are heavily culturally conditioned.

In that light, Paul's declaration of the "appearances" of the risen Christ amounts to a dramatic claim of paranormal experience. Of course one possibility is that Jesus rose and has magical powers. But if you don't go with that one, what is to be made of claims of simultaneous experience of the absent Teacher after death? One way to think about it is to imagine a scenario in which disciples are discussing their group after the Savior's death and one of them whispers to another "I saw the Master yesterday after lunch." And the other, bug-eyed, says, "What! I saw him, too, at the same time!" The coincidence is too much for them to overlook, and the story gradually takes on the shape of the Master appearing to both together, as it gets retold.

With a powerful personal presence such as Jesus probably had, is it not possible that Jesus was "simultaneously" seen by even larger numbers (five? twenty? I have trouble believing it was ever more than that) but that the numbers as well as the presence together for the occasion got re-told in an exaggerated way. Starting with a rather innocuous synchronicity, the perception of significance leads to passing on a story that grows with the telling.
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Robert Tulip

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Re: Answer to Job

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Harry Marks wrote:The question of what about existence is good is a proper starting place for integrating knowledge with values.
Integration of knowledge with values is a fundamental theme connecting philosophy, politics and economics, the great modern Oxford subjects, raising the whole central social problem of how policy can be guided by evidence, how ethical goals, our theory of the good, relate to empirical theory of change.

When we claim that something is intrinsically good, such as care for others, we assert a factual status for that claim, beyond a mere statement of subjective sentiment which others could legitimately disagree on. And yet the validity of such moral statements is entirely different from the truth of scientific facts. A difference between science and moral theory is that science, in its classical empirical method, aspired to be free of all values, even though that aspiration breaks down as soon as we need to make any decisions on priorities. Empirical methods avoid speculation about what is good, preferring pursuit of just the facts. By contrast, religion and all morality insist a theory of value is central, always placing facts in the context of beliefs about what is good.

Science that claims a value-free stance tends toward political naivety, having no basis to influence action. Confusion about the fundamentally mythological nature of cultural stories about what is important promotes the cultural tendencies toward nihilism and relativism. Jung’s focus in Answer to Job is the empirical psychology of spirituality, how our beliefs about what is good and evil emerge in mythology and guide our cultural values, illustrating how knowledge of facts alone is only a part of a coherent integrated worldview.
Harry Marks wrote: But given that Jung and others, like the entire profession of anthropology, has shown that the mythological represents to us the complexity of our relationship to life, it takes a lot of faith in human reason to suppose that we can construct a great society without reference to the forces shown by mythology.
Does mythology achieve the goal of representing complexity of relationships or only aspire to it? It must be the latter when our myths rest upon unconscious confusion. For example in your recent comments on predestination, the mythology of this doctrine, rather than primarily representing the complexity of relationships, serves instead to conceal and distort true relationships under a false moral veneer.

Atheism has tried to refute mythology by faith in reason alone. The moral basis of this atheist rational worldview is the primacy of ensuring that claims are factually true. The great myth of Christianity is that all the events of the Gospels actually happened as described, justifying the miraculous supernatural cosmology of the church. This mythical thesis is the object of derisive mockery by the antithetical modern rational myth that logic and evidence are the highest values. As with any historical dialectic process of thesis and antithesis, the cultural debate produces the need for synthesis, as Jung is suggesting in Answer to Job.

Jung’s psychological synthesis of science and religion emerges in his rather startling approach to the mythology surrounding the Virgin Mary, as discussed in my next post.
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Re: Answer to Job

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Shortly before Jung wrote Answer to Job, the Roman Catholic Church promulgated a dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, the teaching that Mary went bodily to heaven when she died. Jung argues that analysis of this teaching is a helpful way to develop a psychological understanding of religion, as explored in my last comments just above.

Jung says the many criticisms of this dogma focused more on its apparent mythological nature than on what he says was “undoubtedly the most powerful motive: namely, the popular movement and the psychological need behind it... the living religious process.” Arguing that visions of Mary involve the collective unconscious at work, he says this teaching responded to “a deep longing in the masses for an intercessor and mediatrix who would at last take her place alongside the Holy Trinity and be received as the "Queen of Heaven and Bride at the heavenly court."

The emotional comfort and social ritual provided by Mariolatry in the Catholic tradition meets a popular psychological and cultural need that cannot be rebutted simply by a focus on scientific evidence. The iconic image of the Blessed Virgin Mary emerges from her great hymn recorded in the first chapter of Luke's Gospel. This text, called the Magnificat, magnifies Mary's holy status as the mother of God through her avowed humility, scattering the proud, feeding the hungry and exalting the faithful.

No mere facts can destroy the power of this image, which as Jung says, exists in the psyche rather than in evidence. His analysis of how Mary exists as an archetype in the collective unconscious emerges from the psychological need for balance. The patriarchal tradition of Father, Son and Holy Spirit has excluded the divine feminine, especially with the apparent change of gender of the Holy Spirit from female to male. Jung argues in Answer to Job that the celebration of Mary as Queen of Heaven helps to formalise a cultural recognition of feminine principles.

Jung places Mary in continuity with the Old Testament context of Sophia, the feminine divine Wisdom, who was with God before the creation. So too, Mary's sacred status reflects the ancient Egyptian theology of the need for God to become man by means of a human mother, and the prehistoric belief that the primordial divine being is both male and female. He describes the Catholic proclamation in 1950 as psychologically significant for uniting the heavenly bride, Mary, with God as the bridegroom, reflecting the divine marriage between Christ and the church as the mythological basis for the incarnation of God in Christ.

The duality of male and female is mirrored in myths about day and night, sun and moon, active and passive, order and nurture, heaven and earth, spirit and matter, light and dark. A whole series of such binary relationships provide metaphysical support in faith for this heavenly myth of divine marriage between the father and mother. None of these can be properly interpreted in simplistic terms. They are complementary rather than opposed, with each binary side also in some way present within its opposite, serving as mutually supporting tendencies rather than absolutes.

Jung argues against the old patriarchal church teaching of woman as the source of original sin. Instead, he sees the purely male concept of God as a pathology in need of correction at the archetypal level of popular myth. He says “a longing for the exaltation of the Mother of God passes through the people. This tendency, if thought to its logical conclusion, means the desire for the birth of a saviour, a peacemaker, a mediator making peace between enemies and reconciling the world.”

Crucially, Jung says “arguments based on historical criticism will never do justice to the new dogma; on the contrary, they are lamentably wide of the mark, failing to understand that God has eternally wanted to become man… [Such arguments] ignore the continued operation of the Holy Spirit… the tremendous archetypal happenings in the psyche of the individual and the masses, and the symbols which are intended to compensate the truly apocalyptic world situation today.”

The primary question for psychology in assessing such social symbols is therefore the social impact of the teachings of the Catholic Church, rather than their literal historical evidence. Jung says the Holy Ghost who works in the hidden places of the soul reveals the divine drama through the operation of this unconscious archetypal mythology. Calling such statements mythological does not in the slightest mean that psychic happenings vanish into thin air by being explained.

Sophia, or the wisdom of God, is defined by Jung as feminine nature that existed before the Creation, as described in the hymn to wisdom at Proverbs 8: “Set up from everlasting, from the beginning, before ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water. When he established the heavens, I was there, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was by him, as a master workman, and I was his delight, rejoicing always before him, rejoicing in his habitable earth.”

Jung says “the reappearance of Sophia in the heavenly regions [in the person of Mary] points to a coming act of creation. She is indeed the "master workman"; she realizes God's thoughts by clothing them in material form, which is the prerogative of all feminine beings. Her coexistence with Yahweh signifies the perpetual divine marriage from which worlds are conceived and born.”

The metaphysical duality involves the idea that “heaven is masculine, but the earth is feminine. Therefore God has his throne in heaven, while Wisdom has hers on the earth.” The great vision of hope of the union of heaven and earth appears in the story of the new Jerusalem coming down like a bridegroom.

For psychology, Jung emphasises that “God is an obvious psychic and non-physical fact, i.e., a fact that can be established psychically but not physically.” So the meaning of all this language is symbolic rather than literal, providing the basis for Jung to state that he considered the dogma of the Assumption to be “the most important religious event since the Reformation.”

He sees those who reject this focus on psychic reality as prey to “the unpsychological mind: [they ask] how can such an unfounded assertion as the bodily reception of the Virgin into heaven be put forward as worthy of belief?”

Jung’s answer to this modern rational objection combines observation of the evolution of faith with traditional views. We observe the psychic phenomenon of belief, and “it does not matter at all that a physically impossible fact is asserted, because all religious assertions are physical impossibilities… religious statements without exception have to do with the reality of the psyche and not with the reality of physics.”

The psychic reality in this case of Mary is that the "heavenly bridegroom" must now “have a bride with equal rights” or Christianity is “nothing but a man's religion which allows no metaphysical representation of woman… , anchored in the figure of a "divine" woman… The feminine, like the masculine, demands an equally personal representation.” While the ongoing sexism within religion illustrates that this ideal of gender equality has not been reached, Jung's argument is that the mythical story exalting Mary represents an unconscious motive driven by moral intuition.

Jung recognises the problem that such mythological dogmas remove Christianity further than ever from the sphere of worldly understanding. At the same time, he also cautions against casting cheap aspersions against all dogma. Instead, he calls for religious analysis to weigh the priority of efforts to come to terms with the world and its ideas against efforts to come to terms with God.

Imagining the place of Mary the Mother of God in the heavenly bridal-chamber involves what Jung calls “the great task of reinterpreting all the Christian traditions.” Truths which are anchored deep in the soul need the freedom of the spirit, which he notes has been a focus of Protestantism. Jung says “The dogma of the Assumption is a slap in the face for the historical and rationalistic view of the world, and would remain so for all time if one were to insist obstinately on the arguments of reason and history. This is a case, if ever there was one, where psychological understanding is needed, because the mythologem [basic theme] coming to light is so obvious that we must be deliberately blinding ourselves if we cannot see its symbolic nature and interpret it in symbolic terms.”

The myth of a heavenly marriage links to the psychology of individuation whereby every child becomes an adult. Jung sees this process as dependent on symbols which make the irrational union of opposites possible, produced spontaneously by the unconscious and amplified by the conscious mind to form the totality of the self, symbolised by the divine child. In a remarkable comment, Jung says this role of symbols in bringing opposites together means we cannot tell the difference between God and the unconscious as border-line concepts for transcendental contents and sources for an archetype of wholeness which manifests itself spontaneously in dreams, etc.

The dogma of the assumption of the blessed virgin Mary into heaven reflects this unconscious archetype of divine wholeness in the symbolic images we have of God as unconsciously related to our self-image, which in the human ideal approaches the messianic vision of incarnation of Jesus Christ. Jung says the religious need longs for wholeness. Our desires for integration therefore lay hold of the images of wholeness offered by the unconscious, which, independently of the conscious mind, rise up from the depths of our psychic nature.

The scientific perspective that sees dogma as meaningless because it conflicts with empirical evidence fails to engage with the psychic and social realities indicated by religion in terms of what the stories mean for us today.
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Re: Answer to Job

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Thanks for this material. Please know that I recognize to some extent you are working through the same material with the same goal of simply processing it, and I hope by my greater amount of free time I am not stepping on that. But the dialogue is so helpful to me, trying to clarify how these issues fit together, that I really can't resist responding.
Robert Tulip wrote:When we claim that something is intrinsically good, such as care for others, we assert a factual status for that claim, beyond a mere statement of subjective sentiment which others could legitimately disagree on. And yet the validity of such moral statements is entirely different from the truth of scientific facts. A difference between science and moral theory is that science, in its classical empirical method, aspired to be free of all values, even though that aspiration breaks down as soon as we need to make any decisions on priorities. Empirical methods avoid speculation about what is good, preferring pursuit of just the facts. By contrast, religion and all morality insist a theory of value is central, always placing facts in the context of beliefs about what is good.
That’s a good summary of a lot of our discussion to date. I might change “beyond a mere statement of subjective sentiment which others could legitimately disagree on,” to “beyond a mere statement of subjective sentiment which is arbitrary and lacks accountability to others.” The old quote about aesthetics, “There is no disputing taste” does not apply to ethics and morality.
Robert Tulip wrote:Confusion about the fundamentally mythological nature of cultural stories about what is important promotes the cultural tendencies toward nihilism and relativism.
I agree. I think the epistemological situation of value judgements is a very complex, fraught subject, and that the nihilistic relativism so common in our discourse is, to some extent, an understandable result of this complexity. Because our only real model of epistemology is descriptive, we have trouble processing concepts like “objectively wrong” concerning values. And to some extent we can get by without clarity, but the nihilism does insidious damage.
Robert Tulip wrote:Jung’s focus in Answer to Job is the empirical psychology of spirituality, how our beliefs about what is good and evil emerge in mythology and guide our cultural values, illustrating how knowledge of facts alone is only a part of a coherent integrated worldview.
Harry Marks wrote: But given that Jung and others, like the entire profession of anthropology, has shown that the mythological represents to us the complexity of our relationship to life, it takes a lot of faith in human reason to suppose that we can construct a great society without reference to the forces shown by mythology.
Does mythology achieve the goal of representing complexity of relationships or only aspire to it?
It aspires to it, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. You raise a good issue, but I only meant to imply that life is the subject it aspires to reflect.
Robert Tulip wrote:It must be the latter when our myths rest upon unconscious confusion. For example in your recent comments on predestination, the mythology of this doctrine, rather than primarily representing the complexity of relationships, serves instead to conceal and distort true relationships under a false moral veneer.
Yes, it is a really difficult mythology to parse. Note that I said, “represents to us the complexity of our relationship to life,” so that it is not only our relationship to other people that is in question. Our relationship to life encompasses how we regard relationships (e.g. instrumentally or spiritually) but it also requires that I sort out my own relationship to my aspirations and my ethics. What does it take, for example, to forgive myself while maintaining my integrity?

Predestination can be relatively benign spiritually. If a person takes a “we cannot know” attitude, and continually submits humbly to the hope of being in the elect, then the implied condemnation of much of humanity does not have to become a barrier between the person and the mercy of God. But it still, even at best, has God as a kind of monster, and the many invitations to repressed hostility are likely to overwhelm the capacity to deal spiritually with others. Wisdom can overcome some of the bad results of unconscious repression and fragmentation, but only up to a limit.
Robert Tulip wrote:The great myth of Christianity is that all the events of the Gospels actually happened as described, justifying the miraculous supernatural cosmology of the church. This mythical thesis is the object of derisive mockery by the antithetical modern rational myth that logic and evidence are the highest values. As with any historical dialectic process of thesis and antithesis, the cultural debate produces the need for synthesis, as Jung is suggesting in Answer to Job.
Well, really, we are talking about 2000 years separating the formation of the mythology and the rational myths of modernism. The literalist struggle to answer the important questions at that (literalist) level is hopeless, and a species of unconscious fragmentation itself. Just as doctors should learn how to communicate medical knowledge without terrifying their patients (unnecessarily, anyway), so social critics should give a lot of attention to methods of stepping out of literalism and addressing the issues raised by mythology.
Robert Tulip wrote:Jung’s psychological synthesis of science and religion emerges in his rather startling approach to the mythology surrounding the Virgin Mary.
Shortly before Jung wrote Answer to Job, the Roman Catholic Church promulgated a dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, the teaching that Mary went bodily to heaven when she died.

We Protestants have our own version, known generally as Feminist Theology. Example: Mary Daly says, “If God is male, then male is God.” Like Job, we ask the prevailing theology to give a moral account of itself, and of course it cannot. So, we conclude, God is Male and Female, Father and Mother. God’s masculinity is one of the pillars of authoritarian religion, as I intend to address over on the “Donald Trump” thread.
Robert Tulip wrote:Jung says the many criticisms of this dogma focused more on its apparent mythological nature than on what he says was “undoubtedly the most powerful motive: namely, the popular movement and the psychological need behind it... the living religious process.” Arguing that visions of Mary involve the collective unconscious at work, he says this teaching responded to “a deep longing in the masses for an intercessor and mediatrix who would at last take her place alongside the Holy Trinity and be received as the "Queen of Heaven and Bride at the heavenly court."
I am reminded of a quote from my studies of African literature. I hope I don’t get it wrong. The basic idea is that a Nigerian addresses a European and says, “You people have all that you need. What do you pray for?” On one level that is shallow theology, to be mocked. But in fact it also expresses a deep psychological function of religion: the person who prays for, e.g. a job, is forced to turn the problem over to God. Which means both that the person praying takes on an obligation to pursue it energetically, and that the person accepts that it not arrive by unethical means. It is a complex transaction, and not entirely healthy either spiritually or psychologically, but like confession the health depends partly on what alternative you compare to.

Mariolatry is pretty much all about this intercession process. Praying for relatives to get through a crisis, for family members to pull themselves together, for oneself to be able to manage a bad temper, etc. As well as for a job, a house, a favorable judgment for an accused relative, etc. Pleading for reality to be kind, gentle, and comforting. Which is not such an outrageous request, really.
Robert Tulip wrote:The emotional comfort and social ritual provided by Mariolatry in the Catholic tradition meets a popular psychological and cultural need that cannot be rebutted simply by a focus on scientific evidence. The iconic image of the Blessed Virgin Mary emerges from her great hymn recorded in the first chapter of Luke's Gospel. This text, called the Magnificat, magnifies Mary's holy status as the mother of God through her avowed humility, scattering the proud, feeding the hungry and exalting the faithful.
The Magnificat has become a central text for Progressive Christians as well as Roman Catholics. Even Evangelicals are beginning to catch on. It rather self-consciously echoes the prayer of Hannah (I Samuel 2) when she has received the blessing of Samuel and is, as she had promised, giving him to the service of God.
Stop acting so proud and haughty!
Don’t speak with such arrogance!
For the LORD is a God who knows what you have done;
he will judge your actions.
4 The bow of the mighty is now broken,
and those who stumbled are now strong.
5 Those who were well fed are now starving,
and those who were starving are now full.
The childless woman now has seven children,
and the woman with many children wastes away.
6 The LORD gives both death and life;
he brings some down to the grave[j] but raises others up.
7 The LORD makes some poor and others rich;
he brings some down and lifts others up.
8 He lifts the poor from the dust
and the needy from the garbage dump.
He sets them among princes,
placing them in seats of honor.
Luke is the Evangelist who cares for the poor. Jesus’ birth is announced to shepherds in the fields, not to wise men from the East. The Sermon on the Plain pronounces “Blessed are the poor,” not the “poor in spirit.” Luke is at pains to explain about the disciples holding all things in common in the early church (in Acts). So he has Mary, the “handmaiden of the Lord”, echo Hannah with a reversal prophecy.
Robert Tulip wrote:Jung places Mary in continuity with the Old Testament context of Sophia, the feminine divine Wisdom, who was with God before the creation. So too, Mary's sacred status reflects the ancient Egyptian theology of the need for God to become man by means of a human mother, and the prehistoric belief that the primordial divine being is both male and female. He describes the Catholic proclamation in 1950 as psychologically significant for uniting the heavenly bride, Mary, with God as the bridegroom, reflecting the divine marriage between Christ and the church as the mythological basis for the incarnation of God in Christ.
This lack of a feminine principle in Yahwism is itself partly created from the cruel patriarchy of “civilization” which had begun looking at women as a resource for men (who dominated by violence) rather than as an equal co-creator. The roots go back before empire or, probably, even before towns. Hunter-gatherer and early agricultural society seemed to have a lot of feminine symbols (fertility symbols, apparently). The Canaanites who became most of the Hebrews seem to have had fertility goddesses, but Elijah with his purism opposed these “foreign” practices.
Robert Tulip wrote:The duality of male and female is mirrored in myths about day and night, sun and moon, active and passive, order and nurture, heaven and earth, spirit and matter, light and dark. A whole series of such binary relationships provide metaphysical support in faith for this heavenly myth of divine marriage between the father and mother. None of these can be properly interpreted in simplistic terms. They are complementary rather than opposed, with each binary side also in some way present within its opposite, serving as mutually supporting tendencies rather than absolutes.
This raises the question what we mean by “mutually supporting tendencies.” Do we mean that a little multitasking keeps men from running into trees while hunting? Do we mean a woman sometimes has to be aggressive to protect her young? Or do we, I hope, mean that “masculine” traits work better when they do not try to split off their sensitive and cooperative side, and “feminine” traits work better when they do not try to split off their aggressive and focused side?

Jung is big on antinomies, and surely one of the strongest feature of antinomy is that one may come out at different “mix points” between the opposites that are in tension, but since both principles are important, the mix enriches each principle. Order and spontaneity, aggression and responsiveness, sensitivity and firmness, anger and resignation, all of these tensions and more lead us not so much to be forced to make awkward choices as to develop some wisdom about when one principle or the other better fits our character within a given situation.
Robert Tulip wrote:Jung argues against the old patriarchal church teaching of woman as the source of original sin. Instead, he sees the purely male concept of God as a pathology in need of correction at the archetypal level of popular myth. He says “a longing for the exaltation of the Mother of God passes through the people. This tendency, if thought to its logical conclusion, means the desire for the birth of a saviour, a peacemaker, a mediator making peace between enemies and reconciling the world.”
Mark has no birth narrative, and John has active differentiation by Jesus, with “what have I to do with you?” early on. Whatever the forces at work in the behavior Jung analyzes, they are not determinate controls but tendencies.
Robert Tulip wrote:Sophia, or the wisdom of God, is defined by Jung as feminine nature that existed before the Creation, as described in the hymn to wisdom at Proverbs 8: “Set up from everlasting, from the beginning, before ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water. When he established the heavens, I was there, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was by him, as a master workman, and I was his delight, rejoicing always before him, rejoicing in his habitable earth.”

Jung says “the reappearance of Sophia in the heavenly regions [in the person of Mary] points to a coming act of creation. She is indeed the "master workman"; she realizes God's thoughts by clothing them in material form, which is the prerogative of all feminine beings. Her coexistence with Yahweh signifies the perpetual divine marriage from which worlds are conceived and born.”
Yes Sophia, and Athena, are feminine, but I think Jung makes too much of this. The balance and calm persuasive appeal that are keys to why Sophia was seen as feminine are partly set up by contrast with a controlling, dominating, angry (but justly so) and ferociously military Yahweh. If the chief deity had been more about dispassionate judgments and big construction projects, as in Egypt, then wisdom might never have been seen as particularly feminine.
Robert Tulip wrote:For psychology, Jung emphasises that “God is an obvious psychic and non-physical fact, i.e., a fact that can be established psychically but not physically.” So the meaning of all this language is symbolic rather than literal, providing the basis for Jung to state that he considered the dogma of the Assumption to be “the most important religious event since the Reformation.”
But psychic facts can change. Society is undergoing the greatest change in gender roles since the agricultural revolution, it seems, and maybe bigger than that one. Much about the old symbols does not resonate any more. We run through memes like a scythe runs through grain, and nothing seems to stick and take on psychological significance. Frankly, modernity has offered nothing to even remotely compare to the old stereotyped gender roles, so we just live our modern lives in tension with those.
Robert Tulip wrote:Jung recognises the problem that such mythological dogmas remove Christianity further than ever from the sphere of worldly understanding. At the same time, he also cautions against casting cheap aspersions against all dogma. Instead, he calls for religious analysis to weigh the priority of efforts to come to terms with the world and its ideas against efforts to come to terms with God.

Imagining the place of Mary the Mother of God in the heavenly bridal-chamber involves what Jung calls “the great task of reinterpreting all the Christian traditions.” Truths which are anchored deep in the soul need the freedom of the spirit, which he notes has been a focus of Protestantism. Jung says “The dogma of the Assumption is a slap in the face for the historical and rationalistic view of the world, and would remain so for all time if one were to insist obstinately on the arguments of reason and history. This is a case, if ever there was one, where psychological understanding is needed, because the mythologem [basic theme] coming to light is so obvious that we must be deliberately blinding ourselves if we cannot see its symbolic nature and interpret it in symbolic terms.”
It is easy for such vague and untestable interpretations to miss equally obvious forces. The Catholic church has insisted on a celibate male priesthood for a very long time now. It could be that the Assumption of Mary was created entirely due to the exaggeratedly masculine power structure of the RCC, and that Protestantism did not have an equivalent need for re-balancing. Real feminist theology evolved within the Protestant framework, in which dissenting thought is not only permitted but almost automatically provided with an audience due to the importance placed on individual conscience.

Likewise most (but not all!) of the adjustments needed to accommodate doctrine to the understandings of modernity have happened within Protestantism. These were not flowery elaborations of mythological parables, but rationalist explications of the way the symbolism works. If anything they are too Apollonian, and the Dionysian reaction within the charismatic movement may be a shadow side of the same accommodation.

But either with rationalism or without it, some really good stuff is coming out of the merging of feminism with Christianity, and it is not mainly about reacting to science but rather is about reacting to injustice and domination and the abomination of those being enthroned in the faith of Jesus.
Robert Tulip wrote:In a remarkable comment, Jung says this role of symbols in bringing opposites together means we cannot tell the difference between God and the unconscious as border-line concepts for transcendental contents and sources for an archetype of wholeness which manifests itself spontaneously in dreams, etc.

The dogma of the assumption of the blessed virgin Mary into heaven reflects this unconscious archetype of divine wholeness in the symbolic images we have of God as unconsciously related to our self-image, which in the human ideal approaches the messianic vision of incarnation of Jesus Christ. Jung says the religious need longs for wholeness. Our desires for integration therefore lay hold of the images of wholeness offered by the unconscious, which, independently of the conscious mind, rise up from the depths of our psychic nature.

The scientific perspective that sees dogma as meaningless because it conflicts with empirical evidence fails to engage with the psychic and social realities indicated by religion in terms of what the stories mean for us today.
Well, it’s pretty funny that scientists like Lawrence Krauss, who dabble in bizarre notions like “multiverses”, should go after religious thinking. As if the ability to formulate a notion in terms of scientifically validated equations somehow makes it empirical.

But that’s utterly beside the point. The wholeness that we are all longing for is an integration of our values with our material constraints. We want to know that our sense of meaning is not arbitrary or misguided, and our efforts to pursue the meaningful will make sense to succeeding generations, which is the best empirical substitute we have for “the eye of eternity.”

I think we are still waiting for a language to use in communicating about these matters. Between the language of literature, in which we see “the world in a grain of sand” and the language of philosophy, with its “teleological suspension of the ethical” there is a vast territory to be explored by sojourning souls on their quest for the Peaceable Kingdom.

It is hard to tell at this point how important integration of reason with unconscious forces will prove to be. To some extent we simply need to avoid the extremes of aggression and control that create repressed unconscious needs. Liberation may be enough for the unconscious, frankly.
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Re: Answer to Job

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The Whore of Babylon. Okay, no question Jung is right that this is a primal motif, a figure in the collective unconscious. But we know a lot more now than 60 years ago about the unconscious.

Where does this reaction against pleasure come from? And why is it also a reaction against the feminine?

Patriarchy oppresses everyone. Most directly women, because it insists that women be dependent and private and submissive and a kind of "possession" of men. But men are also twisted and pressed and prodded and, most seriously, shamed to make them fit into a system. A system of what? Of power.

Masculinity is associated with the requirements that power requires of manhood. Lack of emotional reaction. Pride at taking punches. Determination. Strategic thinking. Being a warrior. Standing with your comrades.

Interestingly enough, it is not the power of any particular persons that is being protected. It is a gigantic, pervasive, irresistible myth. In Pashtun areas, the pride of the clan is at stake in the toughness of each man (and the submission of each woman) and so the senior males are likely to be the ones who order violent enforcement of the code. I saw a presentation about Boko Haram arguing that it is an extension of an established system whereby girls are enslaved to raise the children and the yams of an older man who is accumulating multiple "family farms," to show his status. But everywhere men feel this pressure and are expected to submit to its requirements.

And part of the requirements is a certain attitude toward women. Women can be used, dominated, treated kindly, indulged, compelled or seduced, but the vulnerability of treating them as equals is not acceptable.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/30/opinion/.../men-metoo-therapy-masculinity.html
((Note: I have tried various approaches, and cannot get the link to work. Most likely I am doing something wrong, but it should not be too difficult to track down.))
The enforcement, as the NY Times piece makes plain, is mainly shame. Learned patterns within families, of shaming children, serve to perpetuate this oppressive system.

Jung rightly sees the upwelling of hostility and projections of evil in the 20th Century as a part of the pattern of power reasserting itself because it has a psychic grip on the collective unconscious. Rage and scapegoating, school shootings and jihadism, are all extensions of this shame/dominance system. When it is questioned, people tend to see its grip as inevitable - one cannot resist the need to show oneself as powerful. Just as the dueling system was once seen as inevitable, we have this feeling that it must be so. Supposed gurus like Jordan Peterson make a good living out of telling people it is inevitable.

I would not want to claim I know whether the shame and hostility system is inevitably part of our genetic makeup. But we economists tend to view a lot of behavior as a result of incentives. If hostility, aggression and dominance gets you somewhere valuable in life, there will be those who go for it. So a certain amount of the 20th century slaughter might be seen as a result of opportunity presenting itself. I tend to see this as a narrative at least as plausible as some sort of reaction to goody-goody repression.

One of the arguments for socialism is that if you remove the artificial element of male competition, society will settle down and just be peaceable. I am not sure, but I am open to trying it.

Okay, so with hostility and shame system as background, where does the mythological repression of pleasure come from? One answer is (sort of) Nietzsche's: the downtrodden feel hatred for the oppressors and blame desire for all the evil. The flesh is the source of sin. If men weren't so busy trying to inflict themselves on captive women to get progeny, we wouldn't be in this fix. Augustine seems to have seen his own illicit desires somewhat along this line, and started the talk about "original sin." A fair share of the demand for monastery vocations seems to originate with this kind of reaction. The Whore of Babylon, in this version, is a sort of military consort or camp follower, enjoying the privilege of "I don't really care, do u?"

An alternate reading, however, suggested to me partly by the psychoanalysis from the Times, is that rejecting pleasure is yet another way of extinguishing feeling and thus vulnerability and shame. Suppose (and some scholars do) that the early church had a lot of slaves in it, many of whom had been sexually exploited by their masters. Both male and female slaves. Then the slaves might be living with a burden of guilt for having enjoyed some of the sex, or at least having been excited by it. (Old trope, really.) Then rejecting desire might be a direct rejection of their own humiliation - putting it out of their minds, so to speak. Lavishing praise on virgins, and hating on the Whore of Babylon, could be that simple.

An even harder question, for me, is why rejection of the feminine got mixed up with the shame and toughness crowd. On one level it is sort of obvious, that if you want to repudiate desire then you repudiate the object of desire. But femininity, in mythological terms, is not all about desirability. Jung's context is the adoration of Mary, Jesus' mother, and its parallels to the praise for virtuous Sophia (Wisdom), co-creator with God Himself. In brief, one can take an abstract rejection of desire and still affirm Motherhood and calm, balanced Wisdom.

So maybe the rejection of femininity seen by Jung has more to do with the rejection of self that occurs in a shame-based toughness system. Vulnerability, and the engagement in raising a new generation that entails such vulnerability, may simply be too much for many men to accept. And if, added to this threat, there is a reminder of inferior (slave) status and even the experience of having been exploited sexually himself, the man may see femininity as symbolic of the totality of all the things in the world he may not engage with, may not risk caring about, and may not let himself be in the same category as.

I said we know more about the unconscious than at the time of Jung. We now understand that much of the unconscious is just "the unimportant", edited out of awareness by more importance for something else. The dangerous part seems to be "the repressed" which we suppress from awareness (with neural connections whose function is to suppress from awareness) because it evokes scary connections, including having triggered past trauma (or been associated with past trauma).

Jung wants to see the collective unconscious as being loaded with "repressed aggression." And so it may be. Surely we agree that restraining aggression is part of becoming a civilized person. But maybe the repression is mainly of rage at being shamed, and not of some primordial urge that must be indulged collectively. I remember my father sternly barking, "Quit your crying or I'll give you something to cry about." It was not, shall we say, part of building a rational system of balancing my needs against those of others.

So maybe the "wrath of God" which Jung wants to see as apocalyptic and nigh unto inevitable is just a part of a sick system of childraising, necessitated by a sick social system of violence and domination seen as necessary for economic freedom.
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Re: Answer to Job

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I gave my talk at the Canberra Jung Society on Friday, using the discussion here. I also gave a sermon at my church on Sunday, on the theme Mary Mother of Jesus, drawing from Jung. Here it is.

Sermon 8 July 2018, Mary Mother of Jesus
Kippax Uniting Church
Robert Tulip
1. Mary the mother of Jesus is celebrated in Christian tradition as the blessed virgin, the immaculate example of holy purity, care and compassion. Mary’s maternal love for Jesus is venerated in traditional faith as a symbol of obedience to God and respect for women. As we listened to Rosemary read the great prayer of Mary, the Magnificat, with its echoes of the Song of Hannah giving thanks to God for the birth of Samuel, we hear Mary’s faith in God’s power and glory, her vision of how God blesses the humble and poor, her warning against pride and arrogance, and her certainty that good is stronger than evil.
2. Yet the role of Mary is ambiguous. Her central position in the Roman Catholic Church, worshipped alongside the Trinity, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, seems to recognise female spirituality and divinity. Yet this tradition has also used Mary to emphasise women’s subordination to men and the value of traditional gender roles against those who seek equality. The miraculous story of the Virgin Birth is something that people who value modern science find difficult, so the modern attitude tends to see the birth narratives in the Bible more as a myth than a historical event. The story of Mary seems quite old fashioned. It can be hard to see what she means for us today, how she relates to gender equality and the ability of women to do things that used to be only for men.
3. One of the themes I have appreciated in our Minister Karyl Davison’s preaching here at Kippax is her focus on what the Bible stories mean for us today. We can consider all of the Bible stories like parables, rich in symbol and moral vision. As Karyl has said, the meaning for us today is far more important than efforts to prove that things actually happened when we lack good evidence. In this light, the old values of motherhood and virginity celebrated by the Virgin Mary story still have a powerful meaning but are often mocked. Christians can seem counter-cultural in supporting such conservative moral themes, honouring traditional values. Yet we have all seen the many problems that arise when people lack respect for motherhood and virginity. Many young people don’t realise the relationship problems they will encounter by disregarding traditional family values, by not listening to the voices of experience. So the message of Mary, celebrating a chaste life of prayer and service, is still relevant for our world today, even though we see things differently from the systems of gender inequality of the past.
4. Today is the start of NAIDOC Week, the National Aboriginal and Islander celebration of identity and culture. This year the theme is “Because of her, we can”, recognising the role of Aboriginal women as pillars of their communities, often unsung and invisible, yet providing the care and support that is essential for their children to thrive in a world of turmoil and trauma. I often think of the story of the birth of Jesus in the light of Australia’s settlement and its impact on Aboriginal people. Jesus and Mary represent the poor and downtrodden and excluded, very similar to the experience of indigenous loss as the great empires expand their worldly power. The solidarity that Mary proclaims for the humble has a special resonance for Aboriginal people who have been humiliated and dispossessed.
5. In our hymns today we celebrate the Virgin Mary, recognising her role in the Christmas story, with the extraordinary Annunciation by the Angel Gabriel and the message that Jesus comes from the glorious kingdom of God. We will continue this theme of Mary with the hymn Tell Out My Soul, based on Mary’s Magnificat, and Behold a Rose is Growing, telling how Mary’s gentle arms enfold Jesus in the cold midnight of winter. All these beautiful comforting images speak to the moral vision of Christian faith. The icon of Mary as Queen of Heaven illustrates the imaginative visions of her glory and power. Mary wears the crown of twelve stars representing the twelve months of the year, with the healing energy from her soul streaming from her open palms, with blue sky parting the clouds as she stands upon the world and crushes the serpent under her bare feet.
6. However, as the reading we heard from the Book of Job indicates, in our fallen world a life of devotion cannot prevent the suffering that Christian faith sees as the work of Satan, the great power of evil in the world. I have been studying the book of Job in some depth, through reading a book by the famous psychologist Carl Jung, titled Answer to Job. Jung’s approach is to see the symbolic power of Christian stories as reflecting what he calls archetypes of the collective unconscious. The archetypes are moral themes with a universal resonance, messages and symbols that crystallise an eternal divine energy in a popular form. His analysis means that he reads the Bible stories in a mythological way. Mythological in this religious sense does not mean literally false, but rather that a myth is where we find meaning and purpose, a story that provides shared cultural identity and direction through deep psychological truths.
7. Today I will focus on Jung’s discussion of the Virgin Mary in Answer to Job. Jung is remarkably supportive of traditional piety with his analysis of the Virgin Mary, a belief that he sees as embodying a necessary upwelling of the unconscious feminine within a patriarchal culture. His analysis reflects the view that religious beliefs cannot be analysed or understood primarily in terms of whether the events described actually happened, but must be first seen in terms of their psychic cultural meaning.
8. Shortly before Jung wrote Answer to Job, the Roman Catholic Church promulgated a dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, the teaching that Mary went bodily to heaven when she died. This teaching received widespread public criticism, due to its apparent mythological nature, but Jung says the criticism missed what he says was “undoubtedly the most powerful motive: namely, the popular movement and the psychological need behind it... the living religious process.” Arguing that visions of Mary involve the collective unconscious at work, he says this teaching of the Assumption responded to “a deep longing in the masses for an intercessor and mediatrix who would at last take her place alongside the Holy Trinity and be received as the "Queen of Heaven and Bride at the heavenly court."
9. The emotional comfort provided by Mary meets a popular psychological and cultural need that cannot be rebutted simply by a focus on scientific evidence. The image of the blessed virgin emerges from her great hymn recorded by Luke, in which her status as the mother of God is magnified in humility, scattering the proud, feeding the hungry and exalting the faithful. No mere facts can destroy the power of this image, which as Jung says, exists in the psyche rather than in evidence. His analysis of how Mary exists as an archetype in the collective unconscious emerges from the psychological need for balance. The patriarchal tradition of seeing God as Father Son and Holy Spirit has excluded the divine feminine, especially with the apparent change of gender of the Holy Spirit in the teachings of the early church from female to male.
10. Jung suggests that the celebration of Mary as Queen of Heaven helps to formalise a recognition of feminine principles. He places Mary in the Old Testament context of Sophia, the feminine divine Wisdom, who was with God before the creation. Seeing the story of Mary as having evolved from earlier religion, he notes a similarity with ancient Egyptian mythology, with its stories of God becoming man by means of a human mother, and also with prehistoric beliefs that the primordial divine being is both male and female.
11. Sophia, or the wisdom of God, is defined by Jung as feminine nature that existed before the Creation, as described in the hymn to wisdom at Proverbs 8. Sophia tells us she is “set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water. When he established the heavens, I was there, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was by him, as a master workman, and I was his delight, rejoicing always before him, rejoicing in his habitable earth.”
12. Jung says “the reappearance of Sophia in the heavenly regions [in the person of Mary] points to a coming act of creation. She is indeed the "master workman"; she realizes God's thoughts by clothing them in material form, which is the prerogative of all feminine beings. Her coexistence with Yahweh signifies the perpetual divine marriage from which worlds are conceived and born.”
13. Jung describes the Catholic proclamation in 1950 as psychologically significant for uniting the heavenly bride, Mary, with God as the bridegroom, as the mythological basis for the incarnation of God in Christ, reflecting the marriage between Christ and the church. The story of divine marriage between the father and mother serves as an unconscious metaphysical archetype for a whole series of binary relationships that come together to form a whole. The duality of day and night, sun and moon, active and passive, order and nurture, heaven and earth, spirit and matter, light and dark have all traditionally been interpreted on a metaphysical basis. Rather than the old Christian assumption of male superiority, Jung argues in Answer to Job that these binary themes are complementary rather than opposed. Each side is also in some way present within its opposite, reflecting a mutual need to integrate in order to see the whole story.
14. Jung relates the metaphysical duality of male and female to the idea that “Heaven is masculine, but the earth is feminine. Therefore God has his throne in heaven, while Wisdom has hers on the earth.” The great vision of the union of heaven and earth appears in the story of the new Jerusalem coming down like a bridegroom. In our visions of God, we need an equal balance between the principles of order and nurture. These principles can be seen as order reflecting the eternal glory of God the Father in heaven, with nurture seen in the humble care of Mary, seeing Christ among the least of the world.
15. Jung argues against the old patriarchal church teaching of woman as the source of original sin. His analysis of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin is that the purely male concept of God embodied in the traditional teaching of the trinity was a pathology in need of correction at the archetypal level of popular myth, but such cultural change is an unconscious process that only happens very slowly as we evolve toward gender equality. Jung says “a longing for the exaltation of the Mother of God passes through the people. This tendency, if thought to its logical conclusion, means the desire for the birth of a saviour, a peacemaker, a mediator making peace between enemies and reconciling the world.”
16. Crucially, Jung says “arguments based on historical criticism will never do justice to the new dogma; on the contrary, they are lamentably wide of the mark, failing to understand that God has eternally wanted to become human. [Such arguments] ignore the continued operation of the Holy Spirit, … the tremendous archetypal happenings in the psyche of the individual and the masses, and the symbols which … compensate the truly apocalyptic world situation today.” This sense of apocalyptic danger after the turmoil of the Second World War continues today, including with the failure of the world to address the problem of global warming. The solution to such great problems has to be found in spiritual transformation, to enable a genuine public dialogue about how to step back from apocalyptic risks.
17. The primary framework for psychology in analysis of religion, including the stories around Mary, is therefore the social impact of Christian teachings, what they mean for our world today at a symbolic level, rather than their literal historical evidence. The Holy Spirit works in the hidden places of the soul, revealing the divine drama through the operation of unconscious archetypal mythology. Calling such statements mythological does not in the slightest mean that psychic happenings vanish into thin air by being explained.
18. For psychology, Jung emphasises that “God is an obvious psychic and non-physical fact, i.e., a fact that can be established psychically but not physically.” The meaning of religious language is symbolic rather than literal, providing the basis for Jung to state that he considered the dogma of the Assumption to be “the most important religious event since the Reformation.” Those who find this a stumbling block are prey to what Jung calls “the unpsychological mind.” To the question how such an assertion as the bodily reception of the Virgin into heaven can be put forward as worthy of belief, Jung’s answer combines observation of the evolution of faith with traditional views. We observe the psychic phenomenon of belief, and “it does not matter at all that a physically impossible fact is asserted, because all religious assertions are physical impossibilities… religious statements without exception have to do with the reality of the psyche and not with the reality of physics.”
19. The "heavenly bridegroom" must now “have a bride with equal rights” or Christianity is “nothing but a man's religion which allows no metaphysical representation of woman… , anchored in the figure of a "divine" woman… The feminine, like the masculine, demands an equally personal representation.”
20. Jung recognises the problem that such mythological dogmas separate Christianity from the sphere of worldly understanding. His response is to caution against casting cheap aspersions against the teachings of faith. Instead we should weigh coming to terms with the world against efforts to come to terms with God, considering teachings in terms of their impact on our values.
21. Imagining the place of Mary the Mother of God in the heavenly bridal-chamber involves what Jung calls “the great task of reinterpreting all the Christian traditions.” Truths which are anchored deep in the soul need the freedom of the spirit, which he notes has been a focus of Protestantism. Jung says “The dogma of the Assumption is a slap in the face for the historical and rationalistic view of the world, and would remain so for all time if one were to insist obstinately on the arguments of reason and history. This is a case, if ever there was one, where psychological understanding is needed, because the core theme coming to light is so obvious that we must be deliberately blinding ourselves if we cannot see its symbolic nature and interpret it in symbolic terms.”
22. The myth of a heavenly marriage links to the psychology of how each of us becomes an individual as the child grows to adulthood. Jung sees this process as dependent on symbols which make the union of opposites possible, symbolised by the divine child in the holy family.
23. The dogma of the assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven reflects this unconscious archetype of divine wholeness in the symbolic images we have of God as unconsciously related to our self-image. In the Christian ideal, this vision of wholeness appears in the messianic incarnation of Jesus Christ. Jung says we long for wholeness, and therefore lay hold of images of wholeness offered by the unconscious. Such images are independent of the conscious mind, rising up from the depths of our psychic nature. Rather than the scientific secular perspective that sees the dogma as meaningless because it lacks empirical evidence, Jung calls on us to engage with the psychic and social realities indicated by religion in terms of what the stories mean for us today. Even in the light of science, the power of religious stories should remain central to our ethical concerns, our hopes in faith and love to create a new heaven and a new earth, reconnecting our fallen world to the eternal truths of God. The story of the Virgin Mary has an enduring place in our world today.
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Harry Marks
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Re: Answer to Job

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Well done, sir!

Just to add a small comment, I ran across an interesting quote this week. A writer, Kathleen Norris, said in "Amazing Grace," that a myth is "a story that you know must be true the first time you hear it". She can be somewhat elliptical, but the poetry of that formulation is impressive.
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Robert Tulip

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Re: Answer to Job

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The Canberra Jung Society has kindly uploaded the draft essay I used for my talk on Commentary on Answer to Job, together with the podcasts, recorded on my telephone, of the talk and of the question and answer session.

The link is on the Society's home page http://www.canberrajungsociety.org.au/ with direct link here.

The diagram mentioned in the essay is at post165705.html#p165705

I will revise this rather aphoristic paper for publication in the Canberra Jung Society Journal.

This is largely drawn from my conversation here with Harry Marks, so thanks again to Harry. It provides a more summarised version of most of the comments I have made here.
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