The Dream of the Earth, Part 10

What if we modern Judeo-Christians — Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, or even fallen away/atheist — have inherited a mindset that disposes us to deprecate and even to steal from Mother Nature?

And what if we don't even know that we have that mindset, because it seems so "natural" to us that we can't imagine any other? That's the situation described by the late Passionist priest-monk Thomas Berry in his landmark 1988 book The Dream of the Earth.

C. G. Jung
(1875 - 1961)

In my previous nine posts in this series about Berry's book, I've talked about Berry's ideas and introduced parallel ideas from Carl Gustav Jung (pictured at left), the psychoanalyst who in the first half of the last century developed an understanding of the human psyche which gives a deeper explanation of why our nature-deprecating mindset exists.

First of all, we need to keep in mind that modern people disagree among themselves. Some, as religious people, emphasize matters of the spirit, and that emphasis makes physical nature a "second-class citizen" of the material world, often imagined as fallen, even corrupt.

Others of us, those who are secularists, believe more in science than religion. Secularists would rather concentrate on the material world than on matters of the spirit.

Engineering the Earth?

Sadly, much secularist thought accords with a centuries-long tradition of trying to manage nature and make changes to how it functions. Berry contends trying to engineer the earth to suit our human aspirations makes ours a "wasteworld," not a "wonderworld." It doesn't work. It can't work.

On the other hand, those who are still religious in their outlook seem to have little spiritual connection to the earth. They and the secularists disagree about the existence of God, but they oddly agree quite well about not seeing nature in sacramental terms.

So why the secularist/spiritual split, anyway?

One reason for the secularist/spiritual split in the modern world, says Jung, is that the modern, Western, scientific attitude has lost its former connection to the contents of the unconscious archetypes that are shared by all humankind. For its part, Western Christianity has likewise lost its connection to the foundational archetypes.

Disconnection from Our Archetypal Roots

Any archetype — an "archetype "is a template which exists in what Jung called the "collective unconscious" and belongs accordingly to all humanity — is something we are normally unaware of. Yet archetypes govern all of the images and symbols we dream up. Jung said Christ, in particular, symbolizes the supreme archetype that he called the "Self."

The Self, Jung said, is the image of God within the soul, and its wide variety of external images include mandalas ...

... and depictions of Christ on the Cross:

The Self Archetype as a Symbol of Wholeness

The Self represents completeness or wholeness. That may sound as if it likewise ought to represent spiritual perfection, but Jung said it does so only with a crucial qualification.

If the Self archetype hidden in the depths of the unconscious shows forth as images of perfection rather than of wholeness, it must do so by first splitting in two. One of the two halves of the Self has to be "good," the other "evil." The good half is what then manifests as images or symbols of perfection.

This, in fact, is what Jung said has happened in Christian history. Right from the start, Christian belief "constellated" — activated, ushered forth from the unconscious — the good side of the Self in ways that insisted that Christ himself had no evil side, no "shadow." Christ was without sin. So, too, should we be.

Two Halves of the Self

"Splitting" created a tension between the two halves of the Self, only one of which represents the spiritual or "good" side of the human personality.

The "good" side of the Self became present to our consciousness in response to the advent of what Jung called the "Christ-symbol." The Christ-symbol is the way in which the crucified/risen/ascended Christ was viewed by his first devotees in the early church. Jung said that the Christ-symbol "constellated" for us the "good" half of our Self archetype.

The other half of the split Self is the animal or "evil" half that we each also possess, and it was pushed further into our unconscious realm by the advent of the Christ-symbol.

Owing to the Myth of the Fall — the Genesis story of how a serpent convinced Eve to eat the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden — nature came to be seen as fallen and corrupt. As human beings, our "animal nature" was seen as prey to evil. Our dark, animal side is what the repressed, "evil" half of Jung's Self archetype represents; the good, now-conscious half of the Self can be thought of as, for Christians in particular, a psychic prototype that, when constellated, manifests the all-good, all-light, all-spiritual side of our nature.

Inheriting such a view of ourselves and our world, is it any wonder that we Christians today so often deprecate and even fear Mother Nature? We religiously resist the caged-in-the-unconscious animal side of our Self because in the days 2,000 years ago when our church was established, it made fine spiritual sense so to do.