Re: Answer to Job
Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2018 6:23 am
@606
I admit to a lot of frustration with Jung puttering around in the gardens of mythology, with mandalas and whatnot. I want him to get to my questions and address my issues. So I am trying to back off and just listen to what he is saying.
The best I can do for rendering an account of his mythological analysis (God chose to become man, under the influence of wisdom, and then continues the incarnational process through the intervention of the Holy Spirit within people), is that he is simultaneously working with God as a manifestation of the human collective unconscious and with God as a fictional character in the mythology of the Jewish people.
There is of course no reason the two cannot be two aspects of the same process. But he moves between them rather too easily, tracing processes within one of these perspectives as an explanation for a claim about the other, for example.
So it gets a little frustrating when he goes into the "light" context of the Son of Man in Ezekiel and Enoch as if it represents an intrusion of wisdom and a humanization of the God of implacable reality, and a preparation in the Weltanschauung for Jesus to come on the scene, and then turns around and declares the upwelling of dark apocalyptic visions by the prophets to be a result of the repression of the dark side. If Jung is working with a single narrative thread in mind, it isn't apparent.
So I am trying to be more open to simultaneous narratives in tension. Jung wants to unpack God's requirement of sacrifice of his perfectly innocent son Jesus as the same dark side that appears in the prophetic calls for destruction (of nearly everything in sight - Judea, Samaria, Ninevah, Babylon, Edom, Aram, Egypt and lots more that don't come to mind at the moment). The vengeful, punitive side of God. But earlier he had the humanization of God as a result of the "power-structure God" reflecting that suffering by the faithful innocent cast His omnipotence in doubt, and put his justice to shame. With wisdom helping God to be more open to the implications of God's choices (i.e. of human narratives about God).
So which is it? Jesus represents God being more involved, more vulnerable, and more willing to suffer? Or Jesus is required to die because power-structure God will accept no taint of contact with sinful humans? Presumably Jung just waves his hands and says, "Both, of course! It's a paradox!" To the extent that both strands of human aspiration are involved, both judgmental insistence on punishing sin and forgiving relation to erring humanity, that's fair enough (though I wish he would come out and say as much.)
But there is an alternate reading in which Holy Spirit relational freedom bursts out of the boundaries of legalistic repression, but is eventually corralled back in by power structures (with their legalistic interpretation of Atonement). While that makes sense of the reassertion of God's dark side, it does not claim that repression was involved when wisdom and direct relational freedom escaped from the boundaries of repression.
I think fundamentally that Jung is trying to have it both ways: God's monstrous side as "Reality", bringing suffering upon the innocent, is a projection of aggression and domination; but at the same time aggression and domination within the "Reality" of the human psyche will inevitably intrude on the arrangements of wisdom. It seems to me Jung is running away from the question of whether the aggression and domination are necessarily incorporated into the worldview of a full consciousness, so that the most serious danger is repression of these inescapable urges, or whether wisdom can literally subdue aggression and domination with sufficient understanding of life.
Not that the question has to be settled in our lifetimes, of course. But I must confess that my own understanding of my faith in Jesus leans decidedly toward the second. I don't dabble in notions of Hell and eternal judgement and Jesus' death being a required sacrifice. I think such notions are swamped by the new message of forgiveness and grace and relationship that the early Christian community believed in.
Am I repressing aggression? I don't think so. Trump's election might argue that I, and the cosmopolitan liberal Christians in general, have done so. But I think it had more of error in it, misinterpreting the feelings of victimization arising among the Dittoheads and Tea Party, than of the willful blindness of dismissing them as "deplorables". But maybe you could make a strong case that our own repressed aggression came out in the moral superiority of calling bigotry and sniffing out every trace of white privilege, and perhaps that kind of divisive approach is what Jung is really getting at with his perception of a dark, punitive side of God.
After all, if you blow up the earth in a nuclear war, it doesn't really matter whether you did it in the name of some worthy goal.
I admit to a lot of frustration with Jung puttering around in the gardens of mythology, with mandalas and whatnot. I want him to get to my questions and address my issues. So I am trying to back off and just listen to what he is saying.
The best I can do for rendering an account of his mythological analysis (God chose to become man, under the influence of wisdom, and then continues the incarnational process through the intervention of the Holy Spirit within people), is that he is simultaneously working with God as a manifestation of the human collective unconscious and with God as a fictional character in the mythology of the Jewish people.
There is of course no reason the two cannot be two aspects of the same process. But he moves between them rather too easily, tracing processes within one of these perspectives as an explanation for a claim about the other, for example.
So it gets a little frustrating when he goes into the "light" context of the Son of Man in Ezekiel and Enoch as if it represents an intrusion of wisdom and a humanization of the God of implacable reality, and a preparation in the Weltanschauung for Jesus to come on the scene, and then turns around and declares the upwelling of dark apocalyptic visions by the prophets to be a result of the repression of the dark side. If Jung is working with a single narrative thread in mind, it isn't apparent.
So I am trying to be more open to simultaneous narratives in tension. Jung wants to unpack God's requirement of sacrifice of his perfectly innocent son Jesus as the same dark side that appears in the prophetic calls for destruction (of nearly everything in sight - Judea, Samaria, Ninevah, Babylon, Edom, Aram, Egypt and lots more that don't come to mind at the moment). The vengeful, punitive side of God. But earlier he had the humanization of God as a result of the "power-structure God" reflecting that suffering by the faithful innocent cast His omnipotence in doubt, and put his justice to shame. With wisdom helping God to be more open to the implications of God's choices (i.e. of human narratives about God).
So which is it? Jesus represents God being more involved, more vulnerable, and more willing to suffer? Or Jesus is required to die because power-structure God will accept no taint of contact with sinful humans? Presumably Jung just waves his hands and says, "Both, of course! It's a paradox!" To the extent that both strands of human aspiration are involved, both judgmental insistence on punishing sin and forgiving relation to erring humanity, that's fair enough (though I wish he would come out and say as much.)
But there is an alternate reading in which Holy Spirit relational freedom bursts out of the boundaries of legalistic repression, but is eventually corralled back in by power structures (with their legalistic interpretation of Atonement). While that makes sense of the reassertion of God's dark side, it does not claim that repression was involved when wisdom and direct relational freedom escaped from the boundaries of repression.
I think fundamentally that Jung is trying to have it both ways: God's monstrous side as "Reality", bringing suffering upon the innocent, is a projection of aggression and domination; but at the same time aggression and domination within the "Reality" of the human psyche will inevitably intrude on the arrangements of wisdom. It seems to me Jung is running away from the question of whether the aggression and domination are necessarily incorporated into the worldview of a full consciousness, so that the most serious danger is repression of these inescapable urges, or whether wisdom can literally subdue aggression and domination with sufficient understanding of life.
Not that the question has to be settled in our lifetimes, of course. But I must confess that my own understanding of my faith in Jesus leans decidedly toward the second. I don't dabble in notions of Hell and eternal judgement and Jesus' death being a required sacrifice. I think such notions are swamped by the new message of forgiveness and grace and relationship that the early Christian community believed in.
Am I repressing aggression? I don't think so. Trump's election might argue that I, and the cosmopolitan liberal Christians in general, have done so. But I think it had more of error in it, misinterpreting the feelings of victimization arising among the Dittoheads and Tea Party, than of the willful blindness of dismissing them as "deplorables". But maybe you could make a strong case that our own repressed aggression came out in the moral superiority of calling bigotry and sniffing out every trace of white privilege, and perhaps that kind of divisive approach is what Jung is really getting at with his perception of a dark, punitive side of God.
After all, if you blow up the earth in a nuclear war, it doesn't really matter whether you did it in the name of some worthy goal.