The War in its Effects upon Women by H M Swanwick, August 1916

Three themes emerged from researching Irene Pickard's archive: Quakerism, Jung and peace-work. If it was not for the peace-work the Pickards would not have been in Geneva, and the Irene may never have been exposed to Jung's ideas with such intensity, and certainly would never have met the man himself, nor, one expects, ever been in correspondence with him nor been on friendly terms with his wife, Emma Jung, herself a significant analyst. 

Emma Jung's visits to Geneva to talk to the Geneva Quakers was one of the key events deepening Irene's appreciation of Jung's psychology and its importance to her Quakerism. For Irene, it opened up the inner workings of the mind and gave life and validity to her faith. It placed it on a 'scientific' footing as an essential part of being a complete and psychologically healthy individual. Contrary to the Marxists or to the Positivists – both prevalent philosophies at the time – religion was neither the 'opium of the people' nor vacuous nonsense: it was, according to Jung, essential to the process of successful individuation (to becoming an increasingly mature and balanced individual).

However, it was not analytical psychology that had brought Irene to Geneva but peace-work. It was where the League of Nations was which put it at the heart of the efforts to build a new way of working internationally that might prevent another catastrophe like the First World War. It was why the Quakers had decided to open a centre near John Calvin's cathedral in the old town, and why they decided to appoint Bertram Pickard as its first full time secretary, with Irene as the warden of a proposed student hostel for young Quakers studying International Relations at the University – the first university courses of this kind in the world.

What made the Quakers adamant that they needed to have a voice in Geneva was their experience of the war. Many had been so much at odds with mainstream sentiment, so much in conflict with the authorities over such issues as conscription, and had reacted to the war so much at variance with the dominant patriotism – working to alleviate the suffering caused rather than compounding the suffering by participation – that they felt impelled to aid, in any way they could, steps taken to construct a permanent peace. 

Living out the Peace Testimony under the duress of a world war had not been a comfortable experience. It had tested many Friends to breaking point and had led some to abandon the Society. Helping to construct a peaceful future would need considerable investment in the opportunities for collaborative working with those outside the Society. That was the model that had allowed the Quakers to have such an impact in the abolitionist movement: it amplified their concern by finding and working with allies.

Once such ally was Helena Swanwick (1864 – 1939). She had been active in the women's suffrage movement, but resigned over the Suffragette's active support for the war effort, and particularly their decision not to take part in the Women's Peace Congress at the Hague in 1915. 

In 1916 she published her inflammatory condemnation of men, as makers of the war, for their blindness towards its effects on women, who suffered inordinately but had no voice. War was pre-eminently the doing of men. She also condemned her erstwhile companions in the British suffrage movement for their lack of compassion for the impact of war on women in the conflict zones: 

… although [British women] suffer like all the other women by the death and maiming of their men, they are curiously removed from the stunning effects of war on their own soil. Their grown men die, it is true, too young and very dear. But they do not see their babies killed by the thousands; they do not see their daughters outraged; they do not have their homesteads and fields defiled and burned and blown to atoms; they do not have to take part in those hideous retreats of women and children and sick and old, starving and dying on the cruel roads: they do not bear their babies to the sound of cannon … [The War in its Effect upon Women, August 1916]

She shared with the Quaker an understanding of war as tragedy and as a massive failure of human governance. She even suggest that women should ask themselves –

… whether men are so made that periodical wars are necessary for their bodily and spiritual health. Many people tell them so, and sometimes, in bewildered amaze at all the suffering brought about for what seem trumpery reasons, women will feel inclined to think that, after all, men fight because they like fighting; they always will like fighting; they always will do what they like. 

However, she thinks it is only a half truth, as:

… the mind of man should be equal to the task of directing and transforming this instinct (to fight) to the common good. By the prodigious development of mechanical and chemical resources, men have perhaps forged the weapons that will teach them that they must kill war. For it seems that unless man will kill war, industrial and military machinery will kill man.

Helena went on in 1919 to be a founding member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom [WILPF]. The league had grown out of Jane Addams's peace movement via the International Congress of Women. It appointed Emily Greene Balch as its first International Secretary-Treasurer, with its headquarters in Geneva.

Emily soon came into contact with the small Quaker community in Geneva, and became a member in 1921, saying: 

Religion seems to me one of the most interesting things in life, one of the most puzzling, richest and thrilling fields of human thought and speculation... religious experience and thought need also a light a day and sunshine and a companionable sharing with others of which it seems to me there is generally too little ... The Quaker worship at its best seems to me give opportunities for this sort of sharing without profanation.     [Randall, Improper Bostonian, p. 60]

Emily Greene Balch was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946 for her work with the WILPF. One of three Nobel prize winners associated between the wars with that small Quaker Meeting in Geneva.

In 1924 Helena Swanwick severed as substitute delegate to the League of Nations on behalf of Britain, and between 1928 and 1931, during the build up to the disarmament conference, as part of the Labour British Empire delegation.

During both those periods Helena would have connected with Emily Greene Balch and others on the network of peace activists in the city, including many from the Quaker Meeting. During her second spell that network was joined by Bertram and Irene Pickard. Bertram in particular played a very prominent part in the network. In 1929 he was appointed as Honorary Secretary to the newly formed Fédération Internationale des Institutions Internationales Etablies à Genèva [FIIG] an umbrella organisation bringing together all the non-governmental organisations [NGOs] in the city. He also became Chairman of the Disarmament Committee of the Christian International Organisations in Geneva. He made himself very much the hub of the peace activist network. 

There was a fascination in researches springing from Irene's archive, to see how apparently diverse people interwove their lives because of the networks they became part of. How they gravitated towards each other because of their commitment to one or other ideal. The network of committed peace activists in Geneva was no exception. 

I first came across Helena Swanwick in Katherine Storr's book Exuded from the Record: Women, Refugees and Relief 1914-15 whilst researching outwards from Irene's archive into its historical context. References in Katherine Storr's book led me to finding a copy of Helena's 1916 booklet, which I then used as an example of divergent attitudes to the war. It was only later that I discovered that she was connected to Emily Greene Balch via the WILPF, and had been involved in peace work in Geneva. Writing based on an archive is very much like fitting pieces into a jigsaw, but where so many pieces are hopelessly lost for ever, or others do not turn up until late.

Jung’s five stages of psycho-cultural development

Being an Eva Koch Scholar at Woodbrooke was an utter indulgence in being able to completely immerse oneself in a chosen subject: unlimited access to the library; supportive tutors; the other scholars to discuss ideas and relax with; Woodbrooke's wonderful gardens to wander and contemplate in; the support and friendship of the FiRs (Friends in Residence) and of the staff; being provided with three meals a day and a private en-suite room; nothing to do but study  – what could possibly be better?

In return you are encouraged to share the fruits of your researches with the wider Quaker community. My time at Woodbrooke was only part of what proved to be a six year process, that also involved using Friends House Library in London and visiting the Quaker United Nations Office in Geneva in order to see the archives of the Switzerland Yearly Meeting. The result has the working title Jung, the Quakers and Hitler, the text of which is now in the hands of a publisher. 

This blog is in part about the process of research and writing – the incidental discoveries and surprises on the way, as well as the challenges – but also about how that has affected me. It is a way of my processing and reflecting on the impact – something that is still ongoing. You cannot explore the psycho-spiritual journeys of your subjects without shadowing that yourself. 

I was already using this blog to explore my own spiritual journey before encountering Irene Pickard's archive. The avalanche of material that inundated me as a result of that encounter has carried me to many places that I would never have chosen: I had too many prejudices, too many barriers, too much spiritual hurt and antipathy. 

Alison Bush, who invited me to look at Irene's archive, introduced me to N, a friend of hers and a Jungian Psychologist, who was studying for a doctorate at the University of Essex at that time. Alison suspected I would need a Jungian mentor if I was to make sense of her mother's archive. Indeed she was right. 

It just so happened that, eighteen months later, whilst luxuriating in my time at Woodbrooke, N was one of the two tutors running a Jungian weekend course there – Dreaming Jung. I signed up. 

On the Saturday evening, the participants were let loose in the art room to prepare props for the role play that was to happen the following morning. I am a terrible participant on courses – far too undisciplined and anarchic. I inveigled N to sneak off and have a cup of coffee with me so that I could discuss with her some of the difficulties I was having understanding Jung. As it happened, one of the other Eva Koch scholars, who was a Professor of 'The Science of Religion' at a European University, was by the self service bar. The wonder of liminal spaces is that they can be the most dynamic and creative spaces of all. What transpired between the three of us was one of the most profound discussions about the nature of belief I have ever encountered. It even drew an audience of fascinated onlookers. The meat of it was N's explanation of Jung's five stages of psycho-cultural development, as she called them, if I understood her correctly.

Psycho-cultural because Jung was suggesting that they were stages both of cultural development, resulting from evolutions in the collective unconscious, and stages in individuation, in the maturation of the individual psyche. 

The stages could be seen in the history of religions and the societies that embraced them because they were manifestations of the collective unconscious which set the milieu and climate in which the individual unconscious was marinated: it was its growth media. The conscious self grew out of the individual unconscious, but also fed into it, just as the individual's words and actions fed into the collective unconscious through their impact on others. There is a dynamic and evolutionary process at play between the publicly conscious, privately conscious, individually unconscious and collectively unconscious levels. This is why Jung could talk of a mass-psychosis having overcome the German people under Hitler. Hitler was a product of that mass-psychosis, but he also fed into it, intensifying it and giving it shape, substance and direction.

At an individual level, the five stages may be witnessed as a child grows into adulthood and, if they are not blocked along the way, then matures on through life, often via a mid-life crisis, to reach a deeper and fuller realisation of the 'self' (their total being). A more benign state that is reconciled with the fact of their impending death. Too often individuals become stuck at some point on this path of individuation, or even regress, and are likely to become damaging to themselves or others: an all too common fate! Individuation can involve a great deal of hard work and struggle, often marked by crises and breakdowns. 

Later that evening, before going to bed, I made a note of what I thought the five stages were. The problem with profound conversations is that they can also be ephemeral. The following list is my late night distillation of what I understood.

Jung’s five stages of psycho-cultural development:

1. The pantheistic god: god as everything: god is the tree, etc.

2. The panoptic god: god is spirits in things: god is in the tree, but is not the tree itself.
 Nature as a lens through which to see god.
   
3. The transcendent god: god is above everything looking down and controlling: god the lawgiver, the all-seeing, etc: the god of judgement.

4. The death of god: there is no god: the bubble of the illusion is burst: an entirely secular world: a godless, god-free world. [c.f: if you meet Buddha on the road, kill him.]
 Secularism, not atheism, replaces religion. The progression is agnosticism, atheism, secularism: the complete disenchantment of life.
   
5. The projected god: god as the spiritual relationship we feel with the tree, etc: god as our participation mystique with the universe and the realisation of that mystique as a felt, experienced reality. The re-enchantment of life by discovering the outwards reaching of our inward spiritual centre (the god-archetype – the deep centre – the 'selbst').
   

In terms of European history, stages one and two correspond to the increasingly mythologised paganism of the pre-Christian period, evolving from "nature is god" to "the gods are present in nature" – genus loci – but also above nature – the Olympian gods. Stage three comes with the appropriation of the Jewish god, Yahweh, as "God the Father" of Christianity.  Stage four is a consequence of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution – the redundancy of God! – followed by the shock of the two World Wars – the intolerability of a God that would allow suffering on that scale. The extent to which the 'death of god' is spreading can be judged from the decline in participation in religion in the UK, perhaps the country that has progressed furthest in the fourth stage. Similar declines can be charted across the rest of Europe and in North America. The beginnings of the fifth stage can be observed in an increase in spiritual questing. The fourth stage creates a hunger, a longing, a need. The fifth stage sees people seeking to satisfy that need. The rise of New Age spirituality and of increasing interest in a sanitised Buddhism, indicated by the proliferation of Buddha statues in gardens or as household ornaments, or an ersatz Hinduism that focuses on Yoga and mediation set against a vague Brahman(ish) background, are indicators of the onset of the fifth stage. 

For me, I certainly suffered stage four. The proffered God of my culture was not just dead, but hammered to death with rigorous logic and spurned with revulsion: the twin shadows of the holocaust and of Hiroshima falling over the dwindling remnants of 'the god of love' revealing it to be the 'god of infinite hypocrisy'. However, there was a unacknowledged need, a discomfort, that gave rise to my attempting to deconstruct Zen just as I had deconstructed Christianity. Silly me: of course Zen was going to win – it was me that was deconstructed! That opened me to a wider questing, which came to rest where I am now: disciplined by sitting regularly in the gathered silence of a Quaker community and beginning to allow that re-enchantment, that discovery of the outwards reaching of an inward spiritual centre.

Meeting the Messiah: 4 – Where am I now?

 The foundational story of Christianity – the story of Jesus, his ministry and death, and of how he inspired his followers to take the Gospel (the 'good news') out into an ever widening world – is the central pivot on which the faith hangs. It is what differentiates it from the other Abrahamic faiths. 'God', known by one name or another – or even as the unnamable – exists in them all. Jesus exists in two of them – Christianity and Islam – but Jesus Christ, the man-god, exemplar and teacher of the 'second commandment – "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." (Mark 12.31) – only exists in Christianity. The authenticity of his story and teachings are crucial to Christianity's supposed authority and allure; but therein hangs a thousand and one questions.

Through my school years I was exposed to the Jesus story both at the daily school assembly – the required "daily act of collective worship"  – and the required lessons of 'Religious Education'; and, for those unlucky enough to be sent to a boarding school, compulsory Church attendance on Sundays plus an act of "collective worship" every evening. Enough exposure to have some familiarity with at least the outlines of the Jesus story. Exposure, which if anything acted as aversion therapy: by fourteen I was a sceptic, by sixteen an iconoclast, and by eighteen a cast iron atheist.

What I had received was, we might say, was the standard version of the Jesus story – if fact, given the established status of the Church of England, the authorised version – framed within a lapsarian theology, which I had reacted to with vehement distaste. I found so much of it repugnant: it was antithetical to life, to joy, to drinking the substance of being, to celebrating each breath. I had to agree with Nietzsche, that the paviours of Christianity were life denying "afterworldsmen". Christianity fed on guilt: it induced it, and then it fed on it. Repentance and penance and falling on the mercy of an unseen and unseeable being who judges and weighs every second of your life, who might just admit you to the golden afterworld, or condemn you to eternal, unimaginable and unspeakable suffering, and who was so insecure as to require regular and repeated doses of praise and worship (I am a jealous God Exodus 20: 2-6) were the substance of the religion – and I was having non of it. You could not have put more distance between me and Christianity if you tried. 

The numinosity of life led me via the East – Buddhism, Daoism, Zen, Dzogchen – and back again to the West, where I found myself sitting in Quaker meetings and once again encountering versions of Christianity, but transformed by the journey I had been on. My eyes did not fall on it in the same way as the young man's eyes. I felt sorry for what it has so often become, but heard once again echoes of the far off teachings of that wandering Galilean rabbi. 

Researching Irene Pickard's archive forced me to reacquaint myself with the Jesus story – to meet the messiah – to update both my understanding of the story and my relationship with it. Her archive was full of reference to modern theological thinkers, ranging from her mentor, Rendel Harris, through Carl Barth, Paul Tillich, Martin Buber, Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Thomas Merton and Don Cuppit, with whom she corresponded about his television programme Who is Jesus? (1977). One thing they all had in common: their Jesus was not the one I had been introduced to and rejected. 

Carl Gustav Jung, whose works provided the lenses for Irene to see her spiritual questing through, detected in the human psyche a nodal point – an archetype – around which all our spiritual feelings, images, and ideas clustered, which he called 'the god archetype'. He suspected that it was universal, but the form it would appear in would vary depending on the cultural material available. He also thought that it was itself evolving, finding better fits for its expression, which is why religions came and went. The evolution of Christianity out of Judaism and its supplanting Paganism throughout the Roman Empire, being an example. Its emerging form being made by the transfer of pre-existing symbols from earlier religions, such as that of the god-man who undergoes a cycle of death and rebirth. He suggested that if a better fit for the archetype came along, then Christianity itself would be replaced.

So what versions of 'Jesus'  – according to Jung, the Christian manifestation of the archetype – are on offer? They seem to range from the Jesus of the evangelicals, based on assumptions of Biblical inerrancy, and the certainty of the coming judgement, and even something strange and apparently not in the Bible called the 'rapture'; through the long established Jesus of Catholic dogma, with the elevated role of his mother to that of divine interceder; on via various demystifying versions, such as those emphasising Jesus as a Jew teaching Judaism to Jews, to the entire thing being a fabrication, a fiction, a didactic vehicle, a myth. Take your pick. 

One thing I think can be observed. At the budding point at which new religions are born, almost invariably there is a charismatic teacher who is focussed on reforming the pre-existing religion. The reforms may be accommodated by the faith absorbing the reforms, or by the formation of a new sect within the tradition – think here of the birth of the Franciscans, or the Jesuits – or by a schism developing, and a new branch of the religion being formed – think here of Martin Luther and the Reformation resulting in the formation of the Protestant Churches, or later of the splitting off of the non-conformist churches and sects – or by the formation of entirely new religions. The rejection of the reforms, and often the death of the charismatic teacher – sometimes at the hands of defenders of the original faith – leads to their followers either having to abandon the reforms, or set off on their own, as is seen with the birth of Sikhism, the Bahá'í or the Mormons. In each case at the budding point there is an inspired teacher. It is their followers who create the new faith: it was probably thus with Christianity.

What do I think? I know we have the texts containing the Jesus story – a legend if you will. I suspect that the Gospels are woven out of oral traditions about the sayings and doings of principally one, but may be more, charismatic itinerant Jewish teachers. The Gospels, thus created, seem to chart a progress of increasing deification, starting with Mark, where Jesus is infused with the wisdom of God manifest as love at the moment of his baptism, who then tried to live that out; through Matthew and Luke where, as well as his resurrection and ascension, the divine and miraculous origins of his birth are added; to John where, in highly literate and educated Greek, the story is reworked to emphasise the Passion – the god come to earth to suffer and redeem.

In Christianity I feel there are two distinct voices: that of Jesus the teacher, and that of Paul the evangelist. The one teaching a here and now immanence of the Kingdom that is open to all seekers (Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: Matthew 7:7); of inner revelation that will transform life; of a Jew teaching Jews to stand and live in the immanent presence of their Lord in the hope of the imminent coming of his kingdom as a result (right living leading to right ordering of the world through mass alignment with the right living); and the Greek speaking Paul, racked with guilt because of his persecution of followers of Jesus, who postpones the kingdom to an afterlife, as he is unfit to live in the immanence. His Greek speaking heritage making tenable the notion of Jesus as a god-man and the existence of an afterworld: both grafts onto the original Jewish stock.

The evangelist Paul was mission driven. First to defend Judaism against the Jesus sect, then to spread the teachings of that sect as far and wide as he could, regardless of the distinction between Jew and Gentile. It is interesting that he received his transmission of the teaching in Damascus from a community with at least three degrees of separation from Jesus, who were transmitting via an oral tradition, the intent of which was to proselytize not to preserve historical accuracy. It contained what inspired them, not what was testable as historic fact. They were fired up by the revelation of spiritual truth. Paul did travel back to Jerusalem but fell out big time with Jesus community there, and took his version of the teaching to the Romano-Greek world as a result. The Aramaic speaking Jesus community in Jerusalem's influence was largely destroyed along with the destruction of Jerusalem and the expulsion of the Jews, hence Paul's version came to dominate. 

For me some of the words of the legendary Jesus of the Gospels resonate deeply. Fewer of Paul's. I cannot say I ascribe to the cosmology or eschatology that, following Paul, is inbuilt into so much of Christianity. For me Jesus is one of the great wisdom teachers, one not to be ignored, but just one. His teaching of immanence corresponds well with what I have from my wanderings in the Buddhist world. His ethic of love the real heart of the diamond: om mani padme hum! (The jewel at the heart of the lotus). 

But I dare say my views are heretical and an anathema to many.  

Fountains of ideas: being an Eva Koch Scholar

David Lockyer writes about his experience of six weeks in residence as an Eva Koch Scholar at Woodbrooke

The most unexpected gift of spending six weeks, as an Eva Koch Scholar, at the Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham was the stimulation of the seemingly free-form conversations with the other Scholars. These, on occasions, ran on late into the night, sparking off ideas left and right, and sometimes drawing in anyone who happened to be nearby: guests, Friends in Residence, Woodbrooke tutors and attenders on other courses. No one was truly safe, not even the gardeners. Woodbrooke seems to be a place that creates fountains of ideas.

We three 2014 Eva Koch Scholars were each immersed in our work in the library during the day, and sometimes into the evenings. We spent hours of diligent digging through books on the open shelves, or in the stacks, chasing references through journals, old tomes, even documents or letters long hidden in the archives, and dredging and trawling to find those gems of ideas or threads to weave into the fabric of the stories being uncovered.

In my case it was the story of a Quaker couple, Bertram and Irene Pickard, who met at the college during the first world war. Traces of them were elusive. The knowledge that they had been there seemed certain, but evidence to support that belief proved very hard to find. Without the great skills of the librarian I doubt the proof would ever have been uncovered; and without my tutor’s instincts about where else to look I suspect that clear confirmation of their presence would have remained undiscovered. It is the human as well as the physical resources at Woodbrooke that are so important.

I am interested in the Pickards because of the fascinating roles they both played in establishing the Quaker presence in Geneva, which still continues today in the form of the Quaker United Nations Office, and because of their contacts with the psychologist Carl Jung and his circle, which, in Irene’s case, led to a lifelong interest in the relationship between his ideas and Quakerism. Over the years she compiled an extensive archive of materials on the subject that is now held by the library of the University of Essex. I was granted the privilege of studying that archive before it was lodged with the university, and am now engaged in writing about the Pickards, and especially about Irene and the archive.

Woodbrooke is a place not just to research but also to absorb a singularly Quaker ambiance. Friends in Residence, in particular, add something special – each in their own way, coming as they do from all over the world to spend a few days or weeks tending to the needs of the establishment. They bring much more than just practical care. The kaleidoscope of personalities presented by these ever-changing guardians of the place deepens the appreciation of just how many ways there are of being a Quaker.

What did I gain from my time as an Eva Koch Scholar? Well, a thick wad of notes to add to my already voluminous resources relating to the Pickards; clarification of some lines of research to do with their lives; the need to completely re-write at least one section of the planned book in the light of what was uncovered; a much deeper understanding of the subject; invaluable insights into the wider significance of my subjects’ endeavours; filling in gaps in the story of their lives; tracing the effects they had on the Religious Society of Friends, right up to the twenty-first century; and the knowledge that it may well be a year or two before I have finished with this process and finally have something coherent to show for my time.

Published in the Friend 9 Jul 2015

Meeting the Messiah: 3 – it's all in the mind

In researching Irene Pickard's archive, ignoring the foundational myth of Christianity was simply not an option. It was far to important to her, to the others whose papers were in her archive, to the Quaker and other circles in which she moved, and to Jung, who became her guide in trying to make sense of the phenomena.

Jung was first-most and foremost a psychologist. He was clear about the boundaries beyond which his speculations should not stray: he was an explorer of the human mind – the psyche – as informed by his clinical practice. This applied just a much to his understanding of religion, as it did to any other aspect of human life. Ultimately for Jung, psychological life is human life as lived, as experienced: all we know, we know via mental phenomena.

That is why whenever we speak of religious content we move in a world of images that point to something ineffable. We do not know how clear or unclear these images, metaphors, and concepts are in respect of their transcendental object. If, for instance, we say “God” we give an expression to an image or verbal concept which has undergone many changes in the course of time. We are, however, unable to say with any degree of certainty — unless it be by faith — whether these changes affect only the images and concepts, or the Unspeakable itself. After all we can imagine God as an eternally flowing current of vital energy that endlessly changes shape just as easily as we can imagine him as an eternally unmoved unchangeable essence. Our reason is sure of one thing: that it manipulates images and ideas which are dependent on human imagination and its temporal and local conditions, and which have therefore changed innumerable times in the course of their long history.    C G  Jung: Answer to Job (1954)

I love Jung's referring to 'God' as the 'Unspeakable' – I suspect the connotation in English is not quite the same as the original German! I think he literally meant 'cannot be spoken about'. But he is right, all we can speak about first hand is our experience. That is the psychological experience of 'God' – the 'God' we encounter, if we do. The other is the shrivelled construct of theology – a verbal shuttlecock batted between players in the game of god-talking. 

What are profound, and Jung knew this, are numinous experiences. They are capable of utterly altering life. In the theistic framework of the Western mind – being touched by God; in the framework of the Eastern mind, satori – sudden awakening, liberation;  to the post-modern mind – being awestruck, overwhelmed with wonder, dumbfounded; even in the probably fictional teachings of Don Juan as told by Carlos Castañeda – much loved in the New Age circles – it plays the fundamental role of 'stopping the world'. 

I think the rise of the New Age movement, with its syncretic appropriations – a pick and mix approach to spirituality and religion – would have fascinated Jung. It would fit with his suggestions that the age of Christianity was coming to an end, and that people would start searching for spiritual replacements. The term 'New Age' itself owes a lot to borrowings from Jung, who suggested the process in Aion (1951).

I think he would also have found the attraction of so many people to the range of many quite bizarre conspiracy theories that have arisen in recent years, as another symptom, just as he did the emerging belief which he wrote about in Flying Saucers: a Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (1958): all are examples of the yearning of the human soul for a centre, a point of gravity around which all those otherwise discomforting and confusing feelings that comprise the vitality of spirituality can circulate.

But what of the founding hero figure of Christianity – the messiah? The failed god nailed to a cross. 

A sense of wider meaning to one’s existence is what raises man beyond mere getting and spending. If he lacks this sense, he is lost and miserable. Had St. Paul been convinced that he was nothing more than a wandering tent-maker he certainly would not have been the man he was. His real and meaningful life lay in the inner certainty that he was the messenger of the Lord. One might accuse him of suffering from megalomania, but this opinion pales before the testimony of history and the judgement of subsequent generations. The myth that took possession of him made him something greater than a mere craftsman. Such myth, however, consist of symbols that have not been invented consciously. They have happened. It was not the man Jesus who created the myth of the god-man. It existed for many centuries before his birth. He himself was seized by this symbolic idea, which, as St. Mark tells us, lifted him out of the narrow life of the Nazarene carpenter.  C G Jung: Man and his Symbols (1964)

Irene had already encountered the idea from Rendel Harris – her employer and mentor – that the man Jesus became infused with God's wisdom at the time of his baptism by John. Jung takes that idea further, suggesting that pre-existing god-man symbol was projected over the man Jesus, perhaps by himself taking on that mantle, but especially by subsequent generations, starting with Paul. 

For Jung the god-man symbol had existed for a long time before Jesus, being embedded in myth and projected over different candidates: but he felt that it had stuck so strongly with Jesus because the myth had evolved with the absorption of Sophia – the wisdom of God manifest as love – making Jesus a new and transformed version of God – God 2.0, if you will – as he tried to explain in Answer to Job: 

Just as the decision to become man apparently makes use of the ancient Egyptian model, so we can expect that the process itself will follow certain prefigurations. The approach of Sophia betokens a new creation. But this time it is not the world that is to be changed; rather it is God who intends to change his own nature. Mankind is not, as before, to be destroyed, but saved. In this decision we can discern the “philanthropic” influence of Sophia: no new human beings are to be created, but only one, the God-man. For this purpose a contrary procedure must be employed. The Second Adam shall not, like the first, proceed from the hand of the Creator, but shall be born of a human woman. … C G Jung: Answer to Job (1954)

Jung goes on the explain how the myth has evolved by the absorption of the female, in the form of Mary, as an aspect of the divine, as part of the celestial. Mary's immaculate conception does not occur in anywhere in the New Testament, but was confirmed by Pope Pius IX in 1858, whose commission stated that neither scriptural proof nor ancient tradition were necessary for this. Her assumption into heaven was then confirmed by Pope Pius XII in 1950. Yet further evidence of a living and evolving myth – of myth making – at a very deep and spiritual level: the church having to concede to the popular process of progressive enthronement of the female as a fourth denizen of heaven. A process that was manifest in the increasing devotion to Mary over the proceeding millennium. The human need to have a female as an integral part of heaven being a projection of developments in the collective unconscious – evolution at work in the deep mind.

… Thus Mary, the virgin, is chosen as the pure vessel of the coming birth of God. Her independence of the male is emphasised by her virginity as the sin qua non of the process. She is a “daughter of God” who, as a later dogma will establish, is distinguished at the outset by the privilege of an immaculate conception and is thus free from the taint of original sin. It is therefore evident that she belongs to the state before the Fall. This posits a new beginning. The divine immaculateness of her status makes it clear that she not only bears the image of God in undiminished purity, but, as the bride of God, as also the incarnation of her prototype, namely Sophia. Her love of mankind, widely emphasised in the ancient writings, suggests that in this newest of creations of his Yahweh has allowed himself to be largely influenced by Sophia. For Mary, the blessed among women, is a friend and intercessor for sinners, which all men are. Like Sophia, she is a mediatrix who led the way to God and assures man of immortality. Her Assumption is therefore the prototype of man’s bodily resurrection. As the bride of God and Queen of Heaven she hold the place of the Old Testament Sophia. (ibid)

 Jung's profoundest suggestion is that myths are externalisations of the structures and processes of the deep mind. As humans have evolved, so have their myths. Their function is is to act as programming algorithms – as we might say these days – affecting the deep mind and helping the individual to adapt and mature. They model what is needed, and act out in symbolic form the maturation processes required within. They are essential ingredients of human growth and individuation (as he called the process of self-actualisation, of becoming an independent and evolving adult). They are only truly affective in so far as they are engaged with and believed.  

Any attempt to deconstruct a myth destroys its magic – our participation with its mystique – and blocks its effect. That is a cause of much of the modern malaise which he detected: our over rational brains had deconstructed the dominant myths of the West so that it can no longer play its part in maturing the soul – in the spiritual maturation of the deep mind. 

However, the deep mind still yearned for meaningful myths to attach itself to, as was evident in the passion with which people bound themselves to the myths of Nationalism or Communism; each resulting in tragic loss of life on an unprecedented scale. Incidences, in Jung's estimation, of mass psychosis: collective delusion that can powered appalling acts of cruelty, violence and destruction.  

Perhaps the only way for modern man to return to realising the efficacy of earlier myths is to suspend disbelief, and engage with their narratives, as would we would with an enthralling book or film? Such re-engagement with the myths should, according to Jung, help shape and encourage maturation at a deep level. 

However, such re-engagement will not be as before, because the myth will be seen with new eyes – eyes that have known the disenchantment. It will need to evolve by being infused with new elements if it is to re-enchant. Jung's own fascination with the Christian mystical tradition of alchemy led to his suggestion that the trinity would need to evolve into a quaternary in order to reflect more accurately the structures of the deep mind. Such an evolution would re-empower the myth's ability to invoke the processes of individuation, of maturation. 

For Jung, religions were not just alternative entertainments, distractions, competing in the attention market place. They encoded pathways of maturation in their symbols, and so were essential to human need; which is why they had evolved in the first place, and why they had been so passionately engaged with, why they have had such an central place in human societies: they encode the vitality of life's growth pathways – they orchestrate and evoke maturation. They are alchemic. 

Christianity, the cultural manifestation of the Western mind, and therefore the one that best suits the Western mind according to Jung, will continue evolving if it is not to wither away. If it does not evolve, then it will simply be replaces by some new symbolic system, just as Christianity itself replaced the Paganism of the Roman world. Its ability to answerer to the needs of  the deep mind will determine its fate. 

So how is Christianity evolving? What are its rivals that it must accommodate or be replaced by? It may be that evolving in a New Age direction, or perhaps by absorbing components from other faith tradition in a universalist direction, or by unearthing the perennial philosophy that is supposed to underlie all faiths, or by adopting a non-theistic, or possibly post theistic, guise. Or it may be retrenching into a more dogmatic, literalist fortress, answering to the needs of a diminishing but trenchant minority.

So, once more, what of the messiah? What have I understood from Jung about the god-man whose life, real or otherwise, has been so fundamental to the Western mind? If nothing else it must be to focus on the potency of the symbol of the god-man set within its cosmic drama – within its narrative – rather than any questions of its historicity. To ask such analytic questions is to step outside the myth and destroy it. There is a need to become re-enchanted.

Meeting the Messiah: 2 – Rendel Harris's christology

Rendel Harris (1852 – 1941) is largely forgotten these days. Some Quakers know of him because of the room named after him at Woodbrooke, the Quaker Study Centre, where his bust proudly surveys the room that bears his name, and because of the interpretation board on the walls in the main corridor which tells of his being its first Director of Studies. To Irene Pickard he was far more.

One of the problems in un-packaging her archive was to come to an understanding of her relationship with Dr J Rendel Harris, both at a personal level and as an influence on her spiritual and intellectual development. 

She worked as his secretary for over a twelve years, moving into his home after the death of his wife, becoming his general factotum as well as his private secretary. Even though he explicitly instructed that no biography about him should be written, she did just that in her retirement, privately publishing her Memories of J. Rendel Harris (1979).

She says of him, quoting and echoing W E Wilson's words:

The Doctor's academic many-sidedness is not half of the tale. A wonderful personality, full of humour, delighting in the society of all sorts of persons, a saint and mystic, utterly approachable. A man of immovable principles and strong prejudices. Delighting in fighting for great moral causes, yet charitable to opponents, and a personal friend of some whose principles he detested. Filled, even in old age, with the joy of living, radiating the love of Christ. To talk with him was stimulating, to enjoy his friendship was an education, to be his pupil for years was a privilege for which one can never be thankful enough.

For Irene, Rendel Harris functioned as a latter day John the Baptist, preparing the way for her immersion into Jung's vision of what the function of religion was and how it worked on the deep mind. She may not have been receptive to Jung's radical and challenging ideas without the preparation she received by being intimately exposed to Rendel Harris's thoughts and reflections on how Christianity evolved, and how its teachings might be understood – he was, according to Irene, particularly inspiring and adept at hermeneutics, the craft of understanding the relationship between a text and its reader. 

Rendel Harris also laid the foundation to her evolving understanding of Quakerism and Christianity, moving her on from her somewhat evangelical and literalist beginnings, as much by example as by any direct teaching. She was not his pupil, but, as his personal secretary she was very much looking over his shoulder and witnessing his mind at work. She would have typed up all of his later works and correspondence.

Coming to an understanding of Rendel Harris's beliefs about Christianity was very much an essential stepping stone in exploring Irene's archive. It was also a another step in my somewhat reluctant confrontation with some of the fundamentals of Christianity: the veracity of its foundational stories. Like it or not, researching materials like those in Irene's archive has consequences for one's own beliefs because it confronts your own prejudices and limitations by expanding the range and depth of information that underlie your opinions; it exposes you to different ways of thinking; it opens new vistas to the mind. You are necessarily affected by what you research.

Rendel Harris was a radical thinker for his age. As a scholar, he came to realise that Christianity had evolved, initially in a Jewish context, but with the addition of something new:

So long then, as nascent Christianity is making its way in a Jewish environment, it does so as a sect of Judaism, accepting the whole of the inspired Jewish documents, and re-interpreting them in the light of what it holds to be a larger revelation. The Origins of the Doctrine of the Trinity: Rendel Harris, 1919

He appears to have thought that it then evolved on through the convolutions of the early Church, until it reached a much more defined and stable state in the fourth and fifth centuries CE, when the creeds were created, and the early Christian texts were codified to form the New Testament, and then added to agreed versions of those Jewish books which formed the Old Testament, with, in the eyes of the Church, the teachings of the New superseding those of the Old.

He strongly suspected that the writers of the four Gospels used note books full of proof texts, traces of which survived in some of the ancient documents recently discovered in his time: his two volumes on Testimonies published in 1917 and 1920 suggested such traces. He thought that the proof texts were drawn from oral and written traditions about the life and teaching of Jesus, as well as from the Jewish scriptures. Their disappearance being much like the disappearance of an artist's cartoon or an architect's drawings when the finished work is complete.

He also accepted the scholastic arguments that Mark's Gospel was the primary Gospel, that is it was written before the others. This took him to a realisation of the importance of a discovery with which he was intimately involved – that of the Sinaitic palimpsest. The version of St Mark's Gospel in the palimpsest was both older and shorter than the canonical version, ending with the discovery of the empty tomb, and lacking the verses about the resurrection and ascension.

As a Quaker, Rendel Harris was at ease with the notion of the inward light, 'that of God in everyone' from which revelation sprang: a charismatic living presence within each and every person, if only they had the steadfast patience to wait upon it. As George Fox is reported to have said:

'The Scriptures were the prophets’ words and Christ’s and the apostles’ words, and what as they spoke they enjoyed and possessed and had it from the Lord’. And said, ‘Then what had any to do with the Scriptures, but as they came to the Spirit that gave them forth. …'   Margaret Fell, 1694

According to Fox, even Christ's words came from that inward wellspring: a radical thought that did not sit well with the orthodox belief in the Trinity, which asserted that Jesus was one with God from the beginning of time (that is identical with God). Fox's claim led to accusation that the Quakers denied the Trinity and were thus heretics, justifying much of the persecution they suffered.

Rendel Harris thought he understood what had happened. If St Mark's is the most authentic account, then the man Jesus had become infused with the wisdom of God at the moment of his baptism, which is where St Mark starts, so we should not wonder that there is no trace of Jesus after he was laid in the 'sepulchre hewn out of rock' with no resurrection and ascension, as is the case in the version of St Mark found on the palimpsest. Christ was that wisdom, accessible to all and universal, not the person Jesus. Testimony to its pre-existence and universality was to be found in other ancient wisdom writings. The emergent Christian churches of the late Roman Empire had welded it onto the man Jesus, rather than understanding its universality. The man Jesus simply exemplified its wonderful depth and brilliance more fully. He was the paradigm, the vehicle through which it was best exhibited. 

… Indeed we may say boldly, that Christianity as a dogmatic system is founded on two things: firstly, the identification of Jesus with the wisdom of God, and second, the description of Christ as identified with wisdom in terms borrowed from the Sapiential literature. The Origins of the Doctrine of the Trinity

Or, as he is reported in Irene's Memories to have said:

‘There is no suggestion nor fragment of evidence that we might, by excavating a thousand years, unearth an ecclesiastical Christ. He, at all events, is the dream and creation of a later age.’

It is interesting that Rendel Harris's Testimonies have been republished in 2011. Those works are still considered relevant to biblical studies as demonstrated by Alessandro Falcetta's paper on The Testimony Research of James Rendel Harris.

Rendel Harris's view of the Jewish nature of the first stages of the evolution of Christianity would be very much in accord with the views of such modern biblical scholars as Bart D Ehrman, Reza Aslan and Gésa Vermes, as would his view that the 'ecclesiastical Christ' being an artifice of later ages; although they have gone much further in developing both the understanding of Jesus as a Jew teaching Judaism to Jews, and of the evolution of Trinitarian Christianity.

The debates about the Sinaitic palimpsest and the problem posed for Christianity by the missing verses still continues.

Meeting the Messiah: 1

In researching Irene Pickard's archive it is inevitable that confronting the fundamental issue of the authenticity of Christianity was unavoidable. Hide as I might, investigating and challenging my own relationship to that vast two thousand year old tradition was not something I could duck out of. Inevitably, the very nature of the contents of the archive meant confronting my own understanding of what spirituality might be, what religions are, what role they have, and perhaps must have, in our lives, at a psychological level, if not also at a cultural and social level. 

I have for much of my life been a secular atheist, detached from involvement in any religious practice, believing myself immune to whatever appeal religions might have, protected by my intellectual training in the cannon of analytic philosophy. Religions were, ultimately, absurd, and their claims easily dismantled by the progressive application of ruthless logic. They had no useful part to play in life. They were at best delusions, at worst positively harmful. They were full of pre-scientific understandings of life, that necessarily melted away as the range and depth of our collective scientific understanding expanded. It was inevitable that they would be discarded into the dustbin of history, to borrow phrase much loved by Marxists. A lovely, clinically clean, brave new world was emerging due to intellectual advances, in which, no doubt, everything would be reducible in the end to a series of elegant mathematical formula or algorithms: intellectually satisfying in a mechanical sense, and sterile.

Only, that's not quite the truth about what happened to me. At about the age of thirty I collided with Zen Buddhism in the form of koans – intricate, logic destroying verbal Rubic cubes. Turn and turn them as you might, logical solutions are simply not possible. They twist the mind until eventually you are forced out of the comfort zone of your everyday frames of reference. Whoops! Bang! There goes the security of logical reduction used in defence of the frames of reference that you did not even know you had, but which had held your life in place until then. 

It was a bit like being plugged into Douglas Adam's Ultimate Perspective Vortex. You, naked and raw, are plugged in at one end and the vast complexity of the universe at the other. It is pretty clear which is going to win. Exposure to Zen induces a certain intellectual humility thereafter, and an openness to exploring what seemed intellectually off limits before. 

Having passed through the bowels of Zen, and on via Tai Chi and Qigong, where I encountered other meditative traditions, I have for the last decade been under the guidance of a Dzogchen practitioner from the Tibetan tradition: but I have also become a Quaker. I learned a little about them from my time teaching History, and I wanted to take a risk and try out going to a Meeting. What I did not expect was to fall through the silence into a place of honesty and welcome where I felt at home. It was whilst dipping my toes into the Quaker pond that I encountered Irene's archive.

As a researcher you are supposed to try to maintain some sort of objectivity in order to report on what you have found, however you are inevitably affected by exposure to your subjects' milieu of spiritual influence – you have to walk the same paths as the people you are studying – if in no more than you have to read what they read, read their comments as they digested what they were exposed to, read what they themselves wrote, and try to understand their understanding: you have to get inside their heads. It is a bit like wearing somebody-else's clothes and vicariously living aspects of their life whilst vainly trying not to be affected. You are inevitably changed by the experience.  

Historically, whether we like the fact or not, Christianity has done more to shape European culture than any other tradition, and via Europe, due to the technological and imperial explosion of the last three hundred years, the world. As a result an otherwise obscure Palestinian Jew of the first century CE has become the most influential spiritual teacher in history. Some influencer! Some obscurity! 2.382 billion followers (according to Wikipedia) beats anything on social media. It was clearly time to come to terms with the leviathan.

In the ten years since encountering Irene's archive, I have absorbed a very great deal that has deepened and widened my understanding. It has taken me places I would not have otherwise chosen to go, including having to come to some sort of terms with Christianity. Not my natural inclination. My early exposure to Christian piety had, I thought, inoculated me against having anything to do with 'faiths' – I do include them all – and led me to what I thought was a non-faith way: Buddhism. At least, that how Buddhism is often presented to the West, as being principally composed of meditative practices focussed on liberating the mind from the shackles of attachment. I now know that it is much more than that, and at bottom is just as much a faith-way.

Whatever my own views of Christianity, as a researcher I had to try to understand the Christianity of my subjects. Firstly there was Quakerism, at least that of the time of my subjects, which in itself meant delving into Quaker history. Then I had to try to understand Rendel Harris's Christianity – Irene's one time employer and mentor – and, the biggest ask of all, that of Carl Gustav Jung – the greatest intellectual influence on four of my subjects – Irene Pickard, Elined Kotschnig, P.W. and Marjory Martin – and significant in the life of the fifth, Bertram Pickard.

My subjects also met and were influenced by a number of the more prominent theologians of their time: Carl Barth, Adolf Keller, Visser 't Hooft, Paul Tillich and Martin Buber, among others. I had to develop at least a nodding acquaintance with their thoughts and even those of theological thinkers such as Kierkegaard.

It has been an interesting journey. It has made me realise that my early rejection of Christianity was based on a very simplistic understanding – but that vision is, after all, what I had been fed by the compulsory religious education and attendance as required in UK schools when I was young. I now know it to be a vastly more complex spiritual path. One that has left its footprint all over European thought, even those supposedly post-Christian traditions such as Humanism or Marxism, both hugely influenced by the Christian ethic, and in some ways being simply Christianity with God sucked out.

Ah, God – that's another problem, and one I still haven't come to terms with yet: the universe seems to get along perfectly well without. According to Jung I may be stuck at the 'death of God' stage. He may be right.