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.