C. G. Jung and Hans Urs von Balthasar

God and evil - A critical comparison

Les Oglesby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136019289
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book brings together the work of Carl Gustav Jung and Hans Urs von Balthasar, two of the most creative thinkers in psychology and theology in the twentieth century, to critically compare their ideas on the perennial question of God's involvement with evil.

In later life Jung embarked on a project relating to Christianity, with psychotherapeutic and theological intentions, forming his collection of essays, Symbolik des Geistes, in which God and evil was a major theme. Balthasar gave significant attention to Jung's psychology in his own theological trilogy, but opposed the approach to God and evil that Jung presented.

In this book Les Oglesby provides a thorough examination of convergences and divergences in Jung and Balthasar's thinking, their different approaches to the origins and reality of evil, as well as their alternative theological orientations. The book culminates with a study of each man's understanding of the central event of Christianity, Christ's death on the Cross and his descent to the dead and discusses how Balthasar's 'vertical' and Jung's 'horizontal' approach to this major happening can be held together fruitfully with one another.

Illustrating how analytical psychology and Christian theology can mutually enrich one another when they are held in creative tension, this book invites reflection on the meaning of the central symbol of Christianity, and God's involvement with evil as an aid to integrated psychological living and theological maturity. It will prove fascinating for students of psychology and religion as well as for Jungian analysts and practical theologians.

Chapter 1

Introduction

This book aims to make a contribution to the dialogue between Jungian psychology and Christian theology, by means of a critical comparison, drawing on the works of C. G. Jung and Hans Urs von Balthasar, on the question of God’s involvement with evil. For both men this was a particular concern. It was a key theme of Jung’s 1948 collection of essays, Symbolik des Geistes, published as the opening phase of Jung’s project in relation to Christianity. Balthasar saw Jung as a representative of a contemporary response to this issue which was different from his own.

The first two parts of this book set the scene, constructing a framework and outlining bases for the critical comparison undertaken in the third and fourth parts. In chapter two, I give an introductory outline of each man’s life and work, of Jung’s project in relation to Christianity and of the theological project of Balthasar’s multi-volume trilogy. In chapter three, I offer a typological framework within which Balthasar can be read as a contextualizing theologian and Jung as a reinterpretive psychologist. There are bases for a critical comparison in the similarities between Jung’s map of the psyche and Balthasar’s theological anthropology and also in their divergent theological orientations (in chapter four) and different approaches to the questions of analogy and polarity (in chapter five). These divergent approaches are illustrated at the end of chapter five by using the essay in Jung’s Symbolik des Geistes collection on Satan in the Old Testament as a case study.

The critical comparison of Jung and Balthasar on the question of God’s involvement with evil begins, in chapter six, with an exploration of their views on the origin and reality of evil, highlighting the struggles each has with this issue within their own framework of ideas. Chapter seven looks at Jung’s essay on the Trinity in Symbolik des Geistes as the culmination of his psychotherapeutic and theological contribution to the Christian understanding of God’s involvement with evil. This seems to end with little possibility for creative dialogue with Balthasar. However, in chapter eight, I make use of a critical comparison of each man’s understanding of the Cross as the basis, in chapter nine, for the construction of a model for holding together in tension a ‘vertical’ with a ‘horizontal’ reflection on the question of God and evil.

In a final chapter, I summarize the outcomes of this critical comparison and make some suggestions for further studies in the dialogue between Jungian psychology and Christian theology.

Part I

Constructing a framework for
critical comparison

Chapter 2

Introducing Jung and Balthasar

To set the context for a critical comparison drawn from the works of C. G. Jung and Hans Urs von Balthasar on the question of God’s involvement in evil, I begin with a sketch of each man’s life and work. Then I outline Jung’s project in relation to Christianity and explain my focus on its first phase, his 1948 collection of essays, Symbolik des Geistes; and I give a summary of the main themes of Balthasar’s multi-volume theological trilogy, highlighting aspects particularly relevant to a dialogue with Jung and to the question of God’s involvement with evil.The chapter ends by identifying the main sources from Jung’s and Balthasar’s works on which I will draw.

Jung – a sketch of his life and work

It may at first glance seem obvious, for a sketch of Jung’s life and work, to use his own posthumously published memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.¹ However, the text is known to have been severely cut during the editing process, underplaying some of the difficulties of his life.² Further, it is avowedly no more than Jung’s recollections in late old age of the inner reality of experiences that he had had up to eight decades earlier. Jung himself was aware of the problem this posed (MDR: 10f.).

Drawing on biographies of Jung, which have been numerous in the halfcentury since his death, presents another challenge.They have ranged from the appreciative, tending towards the hagiographical, through various shades of neutrality, to the critical, tending towards thoroughgoing hostility.³ Biographies whose historiography is fully resourced will become available as the massive Jung archive is published (Shamdasani, 2005). A major challenge in writing an introductory sketch is the wealth of material and assessment from which to choose. The sketch offered here gives particular attention to Jung’s developing attitude towards religion (Main, 2006a).

Jung was born in 1875 into the relatively poor household of Paul Jung (1842–96), a pastor of the Swiss Reformed Church, and into an extended family which included several other clergy. Jung’s childhood was a troubled one. During his early years, he found his mother puzzling, being alternatively warm and loving and then mysteriously uncanny (McLynn, 1996: 9f.: cf. MDR: 65ff.). Jung’s father was an Oriental and classical scholar whose faith became desiccated in the routines of church pastoral work, a problem aggravated by the constricting assumptions of scientific materialism (ibid.: 29f.; cf. MDR: 110ff.). Jung himself found the inner world more resourcing than the outer; he was an introvert (in the terms of his own psychological typology), finding meaning in private rituals (which he would later see as having archetypal significance (ibid.: 18f.)) and in dreams and visions (some of which he continued to reflect on for decades (MDR: 21–39; cf. McLynn, 1996: 13–5; Bair, 2004: 23f.)).

There were early signs of Jung’s location within that stream of Christian tradition which gives priority to inner religious experience over institutional belief systems. He was critical of and saddened by his father’s lack of such a faith. Jung himself experienced religious education at school as ‘unspeakably dull’ and churchgoing as a matter of social convention set within a conservative parochialism (ibid.: 70ff.). He came to see this as an effect of secularized scientific materialism, against which he sought to mount a defence of religion in his student Zofingia lectures (CWA). These lectures show that, at least in outline, Jung’s scientific and metaphysical orientations were already in place before he took up his professional career and that the question of an appropriate phenomenological orientation was already exercising the young medical student. He was also at this time positively interested in the occult and in spiritual experience more generally, and saw in contemporary spiritualism evidence of the reality of these phenomena (Charet, 1993; cf. Shamdasani, 2009: 195).

Jung’s early teenage vision of a defecating God shattering Basel Cathedral was not only understood by the octogenarian Jung as an experience of the ‘immediate living God who stands, omnipotent and free above His Bible and His Church’ but it also provided him with some of his earliest reflections on God’s involvement with evil, forming ‘the dim understanding that God could be something terrible’ (MDR: 57; cf. Clark, 1998) as well as loving and gracious.

Jung attended the state authority’s Gymnasium in Basel and then the medical school at Basel University (Stevens, 1990: 6). The early years of Jung’s career were spent in psychiatric medicine, and then in psychoanalysis (Casement, 2001: 9–27). From 1901 he worked at the Burghölzli Mental Hospital in Zürich. He gained his doctorate in 1902 for a psychiatric study of occult phenomena, drawing on the work of the American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842–1910) and the French–Swiss psychiatrist Théodore Flournoy (1854– 1920). As Jung developed his approach he found a positive response in North America (Shamdasani, 1995: 126f.; cf. Shamdasani, 1998; Taylor, 1998; Taylor, 1999: 209–34). At Burghölzli Jung contributed to the advance of the emerging discipline of psychiatry: collaborating with the hospital’s director, Eugene Bleuler (1857–1939), on schizophrenia, taking forward experimental research with Wilhelm Wundt’s (1832–1920) word association test, and developing ideas about the theory of feeling-toned complexes (influenced by participation in Pierre Janet’s (1859–1947) seminars at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris). Burghölzli was noted for its humanitarian approach and Jung proved himself to be a caring and creative psychiatrist, primarily concerned to understand the origins and meaning of his patients’ symptoms (McLynn, 1996: 55–75). Before his participation in the psychoanalytical movement pioneered by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Jung had already developed his scientific method and his theory of complexes.The two men began a correspondence and then met, first in 1907, collaborating until 1913.They shared an interest in the origins of mental conditions and in psychotherapeutic methods (Shamdasani, 2009: 196).

Jung’s 1911–12 work, The Psychology of the Unconscious (CW B), is often taken as marking the break with Freud. There were a number of important divergences between them. Jung had doubts about the exclusiveness of Freud’s theory of sexuality (McGuire, 1974: 79), eventually rejecting the idea of reducing the interpretation of neurosis to a single ‘root-complex’ (Jung, 1913: 156). He reframed the psychoanalytical concept of libido to refer to the general life-energy of the psyche (Jung, 1928a: 17) rather than to sexuality. In his 1911–12 work, Jung also put forward a more positive, though psychological, understanding of religion.Where for Freud religious symbols were understood as products, infantile in origin, of repressed (sexual) libidinal wishes, for Jung religious symbols could be expressions of a healthy as well as a neurotically imbalanced functioning of (libidinal) psychic energy. They could also connect people with what was ancient in human experience (what he would later call archetypes) and thus could contribute to the achievements of human civilization (Main, 2006a: 299–301).

Although The Psychology of the Unconscious does not represent a complete parting of the ways (Stepansky, 1992: 169–99), nevertheless Jung felt that his chapter on ‘The Sacrifice’ (CWB: 369–414) foreshadowed a break with Freud, and in January 1913, with a final exchange of letters, their personal and professional collaboration came to an end (McGuire, 1974: 539, 540) .

In relation to religion, and Christianity in particular, Jung described himself, when he was a medical student, as ‘an educated layman who is earnestly struggling to understand Christ’ (CWA: 106). By 1912, as he recalled many years later, he felt himself no longer identified with the Christian world view: ‘In what myth does man live nowadays? In the Christian myth, the answer might be. “Do you live in it?” I asked myself. To be honest, the answer was no. For me, it is not what I live by’ (MDR: 195). If there is no longer in the West a collective Christian world view, Jung went on to ask himself: ‘“But then what is your myth – the myth in which you do live?” At this point the dialogue with myself became uncomfortable, and I stopped thinking. I had reached a dead end’ (ibid.).

During the years from 1913 to 1918 Jung underwent an intense period of ‘confrontation with the unconscious’ (ibid.: 194–225), a period of ‘disorientation’, and ‘constant inner pressure’ (MDR: 197). From one point of view, it can be seen as a ‘creative illness’, that is, something ‘from which a person emerges with a new vision of the world or with a new philosophy’ (Ellenberger, 1970: 210; cf. ibid.: 447, 670–3). Put more provocatively, in this period Jung was ‘mad … grandiose and deluded – but also … insightful’ (MacKenna, 2012: 478), though such ‘divine madness’ can be a form of irrationality that is inspiringly creative (MacKenna, 2013). Shamdasani argues that the Red Book ,⁴ an elaboration of primary material noted from 1913–16 in Jung’s Black Books, should be seen as fitting into a wider context of selfexperimentation and was ‘by no means a peculiar and idiosyncratic activity, nor the product of a psychosis’ (Shamdasani, 2009: 204; cf. MacKenna, 2012: 478), even though Jung felt its threat (Storr, 1996: 89).

Jung had already discerned many of the components of his psychological theory but these years represented his own experience of what would become the central contribution of analytical psychology, the process of individuation (Shamdasani, 2012a: 367; Stein, 2012: 282). The images that welled up into Jung’s consciousness were compelling, setting him a career-long task of discerning their meaning: ‘the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then’ (Shamdasani, 2012a: 366 quoting Jung and Jaffé, unpublished: 177). Jung’s Collected Works can be seen as his attempts to bring forward evidence of the generic applicability of the process he experienced, set within a theoretical map of the psyche.

The Red Book is also the product of a deeply religious encounter. During this period Jung reread Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) but, as his Red Book shows, ‘whereas Zarathustra proclaimed the death of God, Liber Novus depicts the rebirth of God in the soul’ (Shamdasani, 2009: 202). In MDR it appears that for Jung by 1912 the traditional God of Western Christianity was already dead. The Red Book, however, shows Jung, in pursuit of his ‘personal myth’, as struggling with a continuing quest of how to live as a Christian in the modern world. For though Jung’s primary material is his own inner experience and ‘the rebirth of a new God-image in his soul’ (Shamdasani, 2012a: 207), there is continuing engagement with the content of the ‘Christian myth’ as well as evidence of Jung’s own Christian theological orientation. For instance, when Jung explores the theology of the ancient Orphic mysteries through the deity Phanes, he makes linking referen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• Part I: Constructing a framework for critical comparison
• Part II: Bases for critical comparison
• Part III: God‘s involvement with evil
• Part IV: Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index