Jungian Wholeness, Part 3

I have been, in my Jungian Wholeness series of posts recently, exploring the thought of Carl Jung. Jung, who followed Freud in mapping the human psyche and discovered the potent patterns he dubbed archetypes in the collective unconscious, wanted to apply his insights to the Christian religion.

Specifically, he felt that the Christian emphasis on the trinitarian archetype, expressed in the Holy Trinity, needs to give way to quaternity, based on the archetype for wholeness. The God-symbol of three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, admirably led us in the direction of psychological wholeness in the past, but then got us stuck on a quest for spiritual purity instead of finishing the task of bringing the whole structure of the self out of the unconscious depths.

A quest for spiritual purity had its place, Jung said, according to Jung's Treatment of Christianity: The Psychotherapy of a Religious Tradition, Murray Stein's book on how Jung wanted to heal the Christian church. But Jung felt that modern Christianity was coming in for a crash landing due to its failure to allow for the redemption of our bodies in their gross, even sinful material reality.

So the Trinity as a God-symbol set us up for splitting our psyche into what about it could be admitted into conscious awareness and what had to be pushed into the unconscious depths to become part of the Jungian "shadow": the dark döppelganger to the persona that we gladly expose to outward and inward scrutiny. In the shadow we would keep our knowledge of our carnal, animal, lustful, aggressive characteristics, at times conveniently projecting them outward onto people we identify as being "other" than our own kind — justifying holy wars, crusades, inquisitions, witch burnings, and the like.

Meanwhile, we would pursue a vision of our own spiritual purification, blessed by God. This was a valid strategy for constructing the civilization we called Christendom, Jung said, but the Renaissance and the Enlightenment drove a wedge between the erstwhile power of the Trinity God-symbol and the way we live our lives in the modern world today.

Jung's prescription for bringing the power back to our God-symbol was to evolve it into a quaternity in which the supposedly wicked physical part of our nature could also be redeemed.


It occurs to me that the transition from Trinity to quaternity patterns with the Dark Night of the Soul spoken of by the Jesuit Thomas M. King in his book Enchantments, which I dealt with at length in my Enchantments series of posts.

King meditates on the repeated pattern in human experience in which we undergo a "Night of the Senses" that baptizes us by immersion in water, as it were. The immersion in effect kills off our naive belief that the physical world alone can save us. At that point we begin a quest for spiritual elevation and purification which involves an "enchantment" by the Word of God. We do our utmost to hark to God's Word alone and leave the claims of the physical world behind.

At some point, though, we inevitably come crashing back to earth. The enchantment turns to disenchantment. We are crushed by the weight of a "Dark Night of the Soul." God's Word has turned to ashes in our mouth.

Suddenly, then, we can receive a "Zen enlightenment," similar to the one told of by the great Trappist monk Thomas Merton. The formerly distasteful physical world takes on its own aura of sanctity. We realize we have undergone a second baptism, by fire and Spirit this time, and we enter upon a new kind of spiritual quest entirely: one that in no way tries to deny the stuff of our physical bodies with its cravings and its supposedly unholy agenda.

This new spiritual orientation that follows the second baptism by fire and Spirit would seem to correspond to the bringing of the full Jungian structure of the self up out of the unconscious shadow to the level of conscious awareness.

King shows that the Dark Night of the Soul and the second baptism by fire and Spirit are fully consistent with Jesus' teachings and with longstanding Christian practice, such as that found in the Spiritual Exercises of the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius Loyola. They are also consistent with the evolution of the philosophy of Plato, the subtexts of Cervantes' Don Quixote and the numerous Faust narratives, etc., etc., etc. We have many, many authorities that can be cited for the validity of the pattern ... and King, as I recall, does not even mention Jung.