The Dream of the Earth, Part 9

C. G. Jung
(1875 - 1961)

In previous installments in my series about Thomas Berry's book The Dream of the Earth, I've told of the late Passionist priest-monk's vision of a new kind of human progress that does not plunder the riches of nature.

The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung ("YOONG") had a like vision of progress, but for Jung the goal was not so much environmental harmony as the human person's psychological and spiritual growth. Jung put Christianity "on the psychoanalyst's couch" and investigated what ailed the religion. He hoped to cure what he called the church's "one-sidedness."

Berry, for his part, agreed that Western Christianity had deep anti-nature roots: for instance, during the Black Death in the fourteenth century, when Europe's population shrank by one third, the ensuing outburst of pious fervor emphasized a notion of redemption that left behind corrupt, untrustworthy physical nature.

Berry also noted that at the dawn of Europe's Neolithic Age some 5,000 years ago, male-led nomadic tribes — the Indo-Europeans/Aryans — conquered the settled agrarian peoples living in Europe then, who worshipped goddesses over gods. The Aryans' patriarchal, conquest-oriented worldview has, in Berry's view, come down to us today and blinded us to the legitimate claims Mother Nature makes on us, her (seeming) conquerors.

"Good" vs. "Evil"

Jung said the church was "one-sided" because it had long set up the opposition between "good" and "evil" as an absolute split which could under no circumstances be bridged. But, Jung said, much of what was deemed "evil" was actually an expression of inborn aspects of the human psyche. If men do evil, Doctor Jung's prescription was for individuals as well as society-at-large to bring our more unsavory drives out of the "shadow" of unacceptable inclinations that lurk within the unconscious psyche. In that way, the more "wicked" aspects of our nature could be balanced out by our sweeter side.

Jung's Archetypes

Our drives — all of them, bad or good — are associated with archetypes, Jung held. These archetypes are unconscious patterns or templates from which symbolic representations emerge in dreams, poetry, and religious images. For example, we Catholics see Mary, the Blessed Mother of God, as symbolic of purity and of holy acquiescence to God's will. Jung said Mary reflects our inborn archetype for motherhood, that for virginal purity, and that representing the nature of God himself. We couldn't as a community understand Mary if we didn't share archetypes in our collective unconscious that predispose us to that understanding.

But some of our inborn archetypes under certain circumstances dispose us to do what our church and our culture deem unsavory, antisocial things. These, like all archetypes, form so-called "complexes" that usually get hidden in the "shadow" that is hidden in our unconscious depths. From that hidden staging area they can "inflate" into the conscious realm and provoke truly evil behavior. This was Jung's view of how the evils associated with National Socialism in Hitler's Germany came about.

Berry and Jung: Overlapping Ideas

Thomas Berry was environmentally oriented, while C.G. Jung emphasized the human psyche, yet the thought of the two men overlapped. Murray Stein, in Jung's Treatment of Christianity: The Psychotherapy of a Religious Tradition, gives clues as to how and why.

Stein says Jung studied the writings of the earlier Western alchemists. He did so as a way of studying "Christianity's unconscious." In order to gain clues to what in the conscious teaching of the Christian church is incomplete with respect to our full set of unconscious archetypes, Jung held that "the images of alchemy reveal the [unconscious] compensatory reaction toward" —  and thereby limn what is one-sided and incomplete about — the church's "dominant attitude" (p. 144).

Jung and Alchemy

Alchemy was an ancient tradition the primary aim of which was the creation of the mythical "philosopher's stone," said to be capable of turning base metals into gold or silver and also of acting as an elixir of life that would confer youth and immortality upon its user. Alchemical attempts to create the philosopher's stone were precursors to modern experiments in chemistry.

Stein says about Jung's interest in alchemy:

Alchemy developed images, for example, that indicated [to Jung] the reaction of the unconscious, [in the guise of] the "chthonic feminine," to the historical (pre-Christian) cultural shift toward masculine domination. With the constellation of the father-son dominant first in classical [i.e., pagan Greek and Roman] and then in Christian culture, there was a simultaneous repression of the mother-daughter pattern of earlier matriarchal consciousness.

Jung held that ideas and images in the psyche tend to gather around one central idea, forming a complex. The "mother" archetype is typically the nuclear idea of a complex of notions elaborating the various facets of mother symbolism. Likewise, "father," "son," and "daughter" tend to become archetypal focal points. Complexes can have a single archetypal nucleus; otherwise, two (or more) archetypes together, such as "father/son" or "mother/daughter," can serve to tie together numerous ideas and images into one single complex pattern.

The "Chthonic Feminine"

Jung's "chthonic feminine" refers to the fact that symbolically, the fertile material we call "earth" (gardeners know what I'm talking about) is thought of as feminine. In particular, the "interior" of the soil (which is referred to as "chthonic," a word which is pronounced THON-ic but with an optional hard-K sound at the beginning, based on an etymological root from the ancient Greek) is thought of as female. Cults in ancient Greece made living sacrifices to the deities of the earth that were associated with its renewable fertility.

So Jung echoes Thomas Berry in nodding toward what Murray Stein calls "the historical (pre-Christian) cultural shift toward masculine domination." Both Jung and Berry felt that our ostensibly male God stems from such a pre-Christian cultural shift away from matricentric, mother-centered emphases.

I would add that there was a like shift in the fertile crescent, in the land where monotheism was born, but the bringers of patriarchal attitudes to that region of the Middle East were not Aryans from the north and east but Semites from the Arabian Peninsula. A common emphasis on patriarchy, though, is (so I am guessing) why the Judaic religion of the ancient Hebrews, inflected through Christianity, could be successfully transplanted to once-Aryan Europe at the outset of the Middle Ages.

The "Mother-Son" Constellation

Reading further in Stein's discussion, one finds hope that the "dominant attitude of Christian consciousness" which extols the male "father-son" image alone can indeed be bridged to the alchemists' cherished "mother-son" image. These two images, "never joined in a single myth or symbol," have been constellated dually in human culture, Stein writes. ("Constellated" means that the unconscious archetype or complex has manifested itself in a particular way in the outer world.) The "father-son" constellation appeared in official church doctrine, the "mother-son" constellation in alchemical treatises.

The second "son," the one that is part of the alchemists' "mother-son" image, has been called the filius philosophorum, "the philosophers' child." His mother is called the prima materia, the "primordial mother." In the alchemical view, this second son bestows redemption on the world as a whole, including physical matter. He is the filius macrocosmi, the "macrocosmic son." The first son, Jesus Christ, is the filius microcosmi, the son who redeems just "man the microcosm" but not the rest of the material world — just the spiritual aspect of man is saved, according to Christian belief.

In other words, the second or "lower" son completes the work of the first or "upper" son in redeeming the entire world.

The "Dual Constellation" of the First and Second Sons

This analysis by Jung is hopeful indeed. Jung's earlier analysis of Trinitarian symbology held that the symbol of the second son was originally represented as the Devil(!), i.e., Christ's archenemy, the Antichrist. Now, Stein says, we encounter two sons whose ...

... dual constellation, the one from the father's world reaching downward in the incarnation [of Jesus Christ], the other from the mother's world reaching upward in the symbolism and work of alchemy, represent an attempt to bridge the gulf [between the two sons] that had deepened during earlier millennia.

Unlike the Devil, the second son, extolled by the alchemists, "was not intransigently hostile to the upper son of God." Though "clearly the son of the rejected primordial mother ... his benign attitude toward the Christian son represents," in Jung's words ...

... a sign that the chthonic underworld, having been rejected by the spirit [as understood by Christianity] and identified with evil, has the tendency to compromise. There is no mistaking the fact that he is a concession to the spiritual and masculine principle, even though he carries in himself the weight of the earth and the whole fabulous nature of primordial animality.

A Hopeful Answer from the "Mother-World"

Jung went on to say that image of the second, or lower, son, as "an answer from the mother-world," "shows that the gulf between it and the father-world is not unbridgeable."

That's good, I think, because only if the gulf can be bridged can Berry's prophecy of an incipient "ecological age" on earth come true.