Over the past year (actually several), my boyfriend has been reading through my large and mostly unread collection of Carl Jung books, and I’ve heard all about Jung’s long-windedness and inability to get to his point. Finally he’s found an essay of his that he likes, and that’s Answer to Job which he just finished the other night. He’s summing it up as: “God’s light casts a shadow. God has a shadow side and it’s not integrated.”
Jung knows that Christianity is trying to show a paradox in God, and he acknowledges that their goal is to show the union of opposites. So he takes on their multiple contradictions and makes that case that the Christian god is made up, an animal, or else he has limited knowledge because God hasn’t successfully integrated his own shadow. There is no way that a rational person can listen to God describe himself as all-loving, and then read the Old Testament or even the New Testament, especially the book of Revelations where God seems to take delight in gruesome deaths and people being tortured. For example, here Jung is reading Revelations and holding the Whore of Babylon up against the light of its counterpart, the heavenly Jerusalem and wondering if John, the author, understands the contradictory nature of the god on behalf of whom is he having his apocryphal visions:
“The destruction of Babylon therefore represents not only the end of fornication, but the utter eradication of all life’s joys and pleasures, as can be seen from 18:22-23:
“The destruction of all life’s beauty and all of life’s joys, the unspeakable suffering of the whole of creation that once sprang from the hand of a lavish Creator, would be, for a feeling heart, an occasion for deepest melancholy. But John cries, ‘Rejoice over her, thou heaven, ye holy apostles and prophets, for God hath avenged you on her [Babylon],’ from which we can see how far vindictiveness and lust for destruction can go, and what the ‘thorn in the flesh’ means.”‘…and the sound of harpers and minstrels, of flute players and trumpeters, shall be heard in thee no more… and the light of a lamp shall shine in thee no more; and the voice of bridegroom and bride shall be heard in thee no more…
God is a paradox: often cruel, reactive, murderous, but being “God”, he gives off a lot of light with his professed love for his creation, and as we know with Jung, the brighter our light, the darker our shadow, and his shadow is certainly genocide in the Old Testament, but also since the Bible has been written and compiled, colonialism and genocide. Jung challenges Christians’ claim that the fulcrum of the death of Jesus can handle the weight of these wild opposites.
Jung is not going after their effort to unite opposites, in fact he he says that in general, “the real subject of Hermetic philosophy is the coniunctio oppositorum (union of opposites)”, and he is a fan of the concept. His own work in psychotherapy is about uniting the light of the ego structure with the darkness of its shadow- the unowned parts of us that we can’t integrate, or don’t want to out of derision or shame. It is our responsibility to use the clues that our unconscious leaves us like breadcrumbs to seek out what is hidden in the unconscious and wants to be integrated.
I was thinking about my “shadow” today as I was filming my first ever video on t-squares, in which I say that the t-square is made up of three or more unintegrated planets, but the apex in particular is the carrier of a big ugly projection that we don’t want to integrate because it is a bully or overlord in our lives. The archetype of the apex planet may indeed be carried by an actual real-world bully, so I’m not saying call up your abuser and be best friends with them, but I am saying to notice other ways the archetype shows up in your life- those are breadcrumbs the unconscious is leaving in its shadow, saying, “come find me.” The difficulty (and terrifying nature) of this integration to the ego structure- especially for the apex of the t-square is the subject of another blog post, but as Jung says, it is necessary to becoming psychological adults. Pay attention to conscious conflict, he says, because you might be on the threshold to its opposite:
The conscious realization of what is hidden and kept secret certainly confronts us with an insoluble conflict; at least this is how it appears to the conscious mind. But the symbols that rise up out of the unconscious in dreams show it rather as a confrontation of opposites and the images of the goal represent their successful reconciliation. Something empirically demonstrable comes to our aid from the depths of our unconscious nature. It is the task of the conscious mind to understand these hints. If this does not happen, the process of individuation will nevertheless continue. The only difference is that we become its victims and are dragged along by fate towards that inescapable goal which we might have reached walking upright if only we had taken the trouble and been patient enough to understand in time the meaning of the numina that cross our path.
Jung, Carl, Answer to Job in Psychology and Religion, 2nd ed, 1969. Pg. 460.