The Postsecular Sacred

Jung, Soul and Meaning in an Age of Change

David Tacey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429536465
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

In The Postsecular Sacred: Jung, Soul and Meaning in an Age of Change, David Tacey presents a unique psychological study of the postsecular, adding a Jungian perspective to a debate shaped by sociology, philosophy and religious studies. In this interdisciplinary exploration, Tacey looks at the unexpected return of the sacred in Western societies, and how the sacred is changing our understanding of humanity and culture.

Beginning with Jung's belief that the psyche has never been secular, Tacey examines the new desire for spiritual experience and presents a logic of the unconscious to explain it. Tacey argues that what has fuelled the postsecular momentum is the awareness that something is missing, and the idea that this could be buried in the unconscious is dawning on sociologists and philosophers. While the instinct to connect to something greater is returning, Tacey shows that this need not imply that we are regressing to superstitions that science has rejected. The book explores indigenous spirituality in the context of the need to reanimate the world, not by going back to the past but by being inspired by it. There are chapters on ecopsychology and quantum physics, and, using Australia as a case study, the book also examines the resistance of secular societies to becoming postsecular. Approaching postsecularism through a Jungian perspective, Tacey argues that we should understand God in a manner that accords with the time, not go back to archaic, rejected images of divinity. The sacred is returning in an age of terrorism, and this is not without significance in terms of the 'explosive' impact of spirituality in our time.

Innovative and relevant to the world we live in, this will be of great interest to academics and scholars of Jungian studies, anthropology, indigenous studies, philosophy, religious studies and sociology due to its transdisciplinary scope. It would also be a useful resource for analytical psychologists, Jungian analysts and psychotherapists.

The postsecular condition

1
The Postsecular Landscape

Creativity and instability

Ours is a time of enormous religious and spiritual upheaval; one can almost feel the continental plates moving beneath our feet. There is widespread instability and it is hard to make any definitive statement that cannot be contradicted. But what is clear throughout the chaos is the failure of the modern world to provide an adequate account of human meaning and purpose. As Jürgen Habermas put it: the secular hypothesis has failed.¹ Even the most sophisticated of French intellectuals, Julia Kristeva and Jacques Derrida, both atheists, were forced to concede that the West is caught in a profound spiritual crisis, and the meaning of our lives is no longer apparent. These philosophers somewhat reluctantly had to make room in their theories for spirit, soul and faith. Both recognised the failures of secularism to address individual and social needs.

At the height of modernity, many believed religion was coming to an end, to be replaced by science and reason. But this has not happened. Kristeva argues that we are forced to speak ‘once again’ about religion, but in a critical, recuperative way. While it is undeniable that traditional religions remain in steady decline in the West, there is a great deal of movement in the spirit. Kristeva says: ‘I see a new religious revival’, but she is not talking of religion in the narrow, institutional sense, which she claims died in France more than two centuries ago.² She says conventional religion ‘no longer speaks to us’, and yet the spirit of religion longs to be reborn. It is curious that intellectuals speak in the abstract about religion, distinguishing it from ‘religions’, while in the general community ‘religion’ remains fused with institutional religions, and ‘spirituality’ is the preferred term for what is newly rising in our civilisation. The shifting meaning of these terms is part of the instability of the present.

Like Kristeva, Luce Irigaray argues that we need to ‘think anew a religious dimension when many believe we have put an end to it’.³ She advocates a mode of being that is becoming; our lives should look toward the infinite with hope and anticipation. The human being needs to be oriented toward a divine goal, as this is what inspires us toward continual transformation. Irigaray reminds us that rethinking religion does not mean abandoning religion, but submitting it to rigorous cultural critique. Even Slavoj Žižek, a leading figure of the academic left, has announced that the present is characterised by a ‘Messianic longing for the Otherness that is forever to come’.⁴ Not many scholars in Western universities realise that our leading intellectuals are having these thoughts, thinking deeply about religion. Religion is clearly more than institutional religiosity, but a mode of being, an existential attitude to the world. It is, said Tillich, whatever directs our attention to ultimate concern. The spirit today is pushing ahead regardless of the state of institutions and should not be identified with collapsing forms. It will move through and beyond them to shape a new landscape. Although much of this activity does not always look coherent, it is not going to disappear.

What the new forms will be is difficult to say, but we do know that the sacred is returning, however amorphous it may appear at present. Ironically, science and philosophy, the key players in getting rid of the sacred in the Enlightenment, seem to be leading the charge. New physics, biology, chemistry, astronomy, mathematics and ecology are showing signs of openness to the sacred.⁵ There is a mystical sense emerging in psychoanalysis, psychology, therapy and counselling.⁶ We see an upwelling of spiritual interest in the wider community, especially in young people and popular culture.⁷

Sociologists have announced that we are living in a postsecular age,⁸ and are consulting leaders of religion about ‘what is missing’ in secular society.⁹ In a sense the ball is back in the religious court, but the religions don’t know it. What is emerging does not tally with what they understand as ‘religion’, and they are not very interested. The religions are still in defensive mode, a stance consistently adopted in the modern era. They are temperamentally inclined to view what is emerging from the secular domain as an antagonist or opponent. Their defensiveness is making them incapable of seeing what is before their eyes: a religious revival is at hand, and they could be part of it if they used their imagination and were prepared to experiment with existing forms. Not only this, but they do not understand what sociologists take for granted: religious institutions do not have a monopoly on the sacred.

Truth and change

Ever since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, poets, philosophers and thinkers have been speaking of the ‘death of God’, the decline of religion and the collapse of tradition. In 1855, Matthew Arnold wrote that he was

Wandering between two worlds, one dead,

The other powerless to be born,

With nowhere yet to rest my head.¹⁰

Such crises occur at critical times, whenever traditions stop speaking to the contemporary world. A new social consciousness arises which no longer makes sense of the old meaning system. These times generate disruption in institutions, experimentation in the arts, and anxiety in individuals and culture. But even in such times, the religions are not necessarily ‘dead’, even if they languish; they may seem to be dead because they are no longer in dialogue with society. In truth, they retreat into cocoons of their own making, in which the new forms are developed and eventually released into the world. Sometimes, however, religions are unable to make the necessary adaptations. If religious truth presents itself as fixed and absolute, unwilling to reinterpret itself for a new era, the ‘old guard’ will have their way and ensure that transformation does not occur. Although styling themselves as ‘conservatives’, they are not conserving tradition, but merely prolonging conventions. As such, they may ensure the demise of their tradition.

In order to survive, every tradition must learn to remake or give birth to itself. It was Picasso who said that tradition is having a baby, not wearing your father’s hat.¹¹ Unless creativity is allowed to overcome the forces that resist change, there can be no future for an institution. If a tradition continues to wear its old hat, this is the triumph of convention and the collapse of tradition. In this case, people reject it, look elsewhere for guidance and adopt other traditions. The capacity to give birth to emerging forms is a difficult one, and cannot be controlled by functionaries of the old guard, but only by the creative minds of the new. Inevitably, tensions emerge between the priestly class which seeks to preserve the old and prophetic thinkers who want to build a new dispensation that can satisfy the demands of a new cultural awareness. Jung put it this way: ‘Eternal truth needs a human language that alters with the spirit of the times’.¹²

Truth may be ‘eternal’ in the abstract, but as we experience it in the human sphere it must change like everything else. Religion cannot stand like a changeless beacon; it has to adapt to prevailing conditions, otherwise it is shunted aside as irrelevant. Then it appears as an obstacle to truth. Religion loses its spirit when it is rigidly codified in creeds and dogmas. The paradox of religion is that ‘All true things must change and only that which changes remains true’.¹³ The Eastern philosophical traditions seem to have grasped this early in their development, but the West continues to have difficulty understanding this paradox. It tends to believe that ‘eternal truth’ must remain the same.

The process of handling truth in times of upheaval is fraught with danger. If we invent new gods to suit our needs, conservatives claim that we are creating a designer religion that has no authority apart from our whims and fancies. The conservatives have a point, but so do the progressives; in fact both positions have to be dissolved to arrive at a solution. Before the sacred can be reconstructed, old positions have to be deconstructed. The ‘death of God’ has come and gone, and to continue with this discourse is to persist in an outdated stance. It might be some time before we can agree on a new concept of God. We must not expect that the present phase of turmoil will be over soon. Even as the new image of God is worked out, some will still be involved in tearing down the old. Our time is too late for the old God and too early for the new. Nevertheless, we have to let go and let come. The enigma of our time is captured by Samuel Beckett’s Endgame: ‘Something is taking its course’.¹⁴

Spirit as ineradicable

Modernity began as an experiment in getting rid of the sacred, and has ended with the awareness that this was a mistake. By the end of the nineteenth century, almost every enlightened thinker expected religion to disappear in the twentieth. Even in the 1970s, when I was a university student, most of my lecturers assumed that religion would become extinct. I believed this for a semester or two, but realised it was an error. The secularisation theory that universities promoted, believing that religion and spirituality would be replaced by a new society based on reason, has been rejected by sociologists. Social scientists were not reading the landscape correctly for a century. Although traditional forms were disintegrating, they were not taking into account the spiritual impulses that precede these forms. They were looking externally at our disruption, and not seeing beyond the surface to the underlying forces.

Even as old forms were disintegrating, there were signs in the arts and music that new energies were rising that would not be put back into the old structures. These energies would seek forms of their own, and it was only a matter of time before they would reach into culture and remould it to express the primordial religious urges. The difficulty was that scientists could not see into the depths, but in recent times they have become more humble before the situation in which we are embroiled. For instance, Grace Davie has said: ‘We do not live in a secular society. We live in a society in which belief is drifting away from orthodoxy to no one knows where; in which belief is floating, disconnected without an anchor’.¹⁵

No one speaks anymore about the triumph of secularism, or of how science will defeat belief. In The Myth of Disenchantment, Josephson observes that ‘today in neither Europe, nor America, nor the rest of the globe can one find the disen-chanted world anticipated by the major theorists of modernity’.¹⁶ In 1965 Harvey Cox wrote The Secular City, in which he argued that secularisation would see the end of all forms of religion, and yet three decades later he was forced to admit that ‘it is secularity, not spirituality, that may be headed for extinction’.¹⁷ From the 1960s to the 1980s, no one could conceive that a major secular thinker like Kristeva would write This Incredible Need to Believe.¹⁸ Today we are postsecular in spirit, if not in form. All the signs point to a revival ahead.

Spirituality and religion

The need to believe that there is more to reality is a primal impulse that appears to have been awoken by the starvation conditions of modernity. The sacred and the spiritual now appear as the unlived life of the West. Throughout this book I will refer to a three-fold historical process: first the West is religious, then it is not religious, then it is. The postsecular religious, however, is perhaps better known as ‘spirituality’. Spirituality has emerged as a new cultural category in its own right.¹⁹ It is much larger than religious traditions, but overlaps with them insofar as they were once the containers of spirit in our culture. Spirituality used to be an elite and rare activity fostered by those who were very religious: monastics, mystics and saint...