Symbols are evocative, that is the point of them. They are not passive. They are not signs. Signs simply stand for something or point at something. They are passive – extremely useful – but passive. In 2+2 the + does its job. The → points in the direction to go and is therefore helpful. The ← turns us around and sends us the other way. Logicians, mathematicians, graphic designers and sign makers, amongst others, deal in signs all day long, and make and invent new ones whenever they feel a need. Twenty-first century people live in a sign rich world, especially since the arrival in our lives of smart phones: the icon is king!
Symbols go deeper, at least in the Jungian sense. On the surface they are signs, but they have the power to evoke deeper responses. In fact, extremely deep responses. For Jung they reached beyond the surface intelligence into the deep mind, into the parts we are not distinctly conscious of: they engage us fully as human beings, passing way beyond the surface shell of intellect.
Jung's work with his patients had led him to realise that much of what drives and shapes us, much of what makes us what we are, is rooted so deeply in us that we are not fully conscious of where it comes from. It is like the wind that fills the sails that push boats along: we feel its force and are driven forward by it, sometimes to destruction on the rocks, sometimes into safe harbour; and, just like the wind, it can be variable, sometimes little more than a breeze, sometimes tearing at us with hurricane force. Think of people who have lost their temper, who are in rage, think how they are hurled along by their passion; and, just like the wind, those psychic forces can veer about, driving us first one way, then another, or even drop so that we wallow in the doldrums of listlessness: but where does the wind start? For sailors it is always from beyond the horizon: just so with the forces that drive us from within.
Symbols operate on the deep parts of the mind where those drives originate. Their meaning is not formal, not reducible, not containable within a matrix of definitions and words. They bypass the purely intellectual. That is why they are encountered over and over again in shapeshifting forms, capable of recurring in altered guises at different times and in different cultures; like a woman who may appear in different outfits each day, but still be recognisably herself.
Jung gave a name to those patterns underlying the swirling changes of outer appearance. He called them archetypes. He held that such archetypal symbols invoke deep responses because the deep mind is predisposed to respond to those patterns. The patterns of the archetypes lie in the deep mind – the unconscious as he termed it – like templates waiting to find configurations of the world that fit their form – they slide naturally over them imbuing them with an aura of meaningfulness.
Art abounds with archetypes because they speak to us. There are galleries full of Virgin and Childs, Crucifixions, Empty Tombs, Buddhas, or many-armed Hindu gods, for that matter. Venuses rise from seas and angry deities belch forth smoke from their noses. Art and religion have walked hand in hand through history. Even Islam has evolved its own highly symbolic abstract and hypnotic pattern to invoke deep responses in its holy spaces, wonderfully woven words into poetry, and created soundscapes from the muezzin's calls to prayer from high minarets, or in its devotional music and song.
For Jung, religions deal in archetypes. They operate on us symbolically. They create a cloud of symbolic meaning that wraps around us, invoking responses at the deepest level. They are the mechanisms by which latent potentials of the archetypes within us engage with our acts of living. They turn spaces from being simply spaces into sacred spaces. They turn actions from being simply actions into acts of worship, or blessing, or sanctification, or contrition, or penance, or devotion – lifting actions out of the mundane into the sacred. Consider the devotion showered on icons in Eastern Orthodox worship. Consider the parading of statues of the Virgin on Catholic feast days and the devotion shown towards them. Consider the ever present statues of Buddha in meditation halls, or the hanging of garlands around statues of Hindu gods.
Those clouds of meaning are shaped by religions into narratives about how the world is. Religious narratives deal mythologically with the world– narratives that do not deal with the mundane world as such, but with the sanctification of the world through weaving mythological meaning through it. They provide structures for making the world comprehensible, manageable, and even tractable. Importantly, they make it meaningful, emotionally, spiritually and evocatively – they speak to the vitality of being, not to the inert fact of being.
Jung regarded mythologies as symbolic encodings of the deep forces at play within the human unconscious, not as passive fantasies. They allow us to symbolically project our inward struggles as we mature through life. Engaging with them helps us to develop: they are midwives of the soul.
Unlike the narratives of fiction, or those spun in film or theatre, the adherents of religions are themselves woven into the plots. They are part of the cosmic drama. They must play their part, fulfil their role. They become part of a living myth. Living out their part imbues their lives with meaning – with mythological meaning. Jung liked quoting the Pueblo indians who felt it was their job to help the sun rise each day – that was their spiritual function – without which the world would die, because what would rise would not be the real sun, and the world would be bathed in a cruel light that made life wither instead of thriving.
Jung noted that many of his clients were floundering in a state of anomie because intellectually they had detached from the mythological meanings inherited from their culture. They had used their intellect to detach from the evocative power of those symbols, but in doing so had anaesthetised many of the archetypes within – hence their malaise.
Jung thought that two of the archetypes, the anima and animus, were not in danger of suffering this fate, because men and women would still meet, and, like it or not, overwhelming attraction would happen. The passion each feeling for the other coming from far deeper than anything intellectual – flowing from those two archetypes. That is why he thought they were entryways into discovering the hidden world of the unconscious: they would be there driving emotions and experiences, one way or another, for almost everyone, in their dreams and fantasies, if not project out into the world over whoever sparked their sexual interest.
However, what he termed the God-archetype, the Self, or deep-centre – that archetype which turns the world sacred and special, and which pours meaning over the 'believer' like a libation – that archetype was all too often anaesthetised by modernity. The title of his first book on the subject, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, arose from his observations of the floundering of so many of his clients who has lost contact with their deep centre, with the God-archetype, with, as Quakers would put it, that of God within.
He suggested that the mythology of Christianity no longer acted symbolically on the deep minds of many European people, which is why he suspected that we were coming to the end of the Christian Era in the West. Its mythology and symbols no longer spoke to people's condition; but this did not mean that people could dispense with a religious framework in which to live. Far from it. The archetype would lurk inside, waiting to be invoked, to be triggered, that sense of need, insatiable and prowling like a hungry wolf, disturbing dreams, disturbing behaviour, expressing itself destructively. That was modern man's search for a soul, as in the title. The zeal of the iconoclastic atheist often being testimony to such pathology, along with a restless experimentation with exotic religions – a searching for a cure – on the part of others.
Sometimes, he noted, substitute mythologies were found – those of nationalism, communism, or fascism – without their adherents realising that those too were just as mythological as any traditional religion. They served much the same function of imbuing with meaning and justifying, or even compelling action. They invoked the God-archetype, they engaged with the deep-centre of a person's being; and, as he had seen all to clearly, they laid waste to the world in consequence. Two World Wars made it only too clear that they brought the dark side of the human potential to the fore.
Jung said that the greatest danger mankind faced was from within; all too apparent in the age of assured mutual annihilation threatened by the nuclear standoff of the Cold War, as it had been in the devastating World Wars. He suggested that by recognising the importance of integrating the God-archetype into our lives such fate could be avoided. That integration should balance the constructive with the destructive, recognising the dark-side of human potentials by symbolically canalising them and directing their energies into more creative expressions than war, human sacrifice or other bloodshed. Likewise he felt that the feminine should be given equal rein with the masculine at the symbolic level. He sensed that the human psyche was seeking a more evolved and balanced expression which would be embedded in whatever mythology came to replace the existing forms of Christianity for Western Man.
Christianity might evolve by transformation of what was there into new forms – a process of continued revelation – such as the Quakers' tradition suggests – an openness to accepting new ways and interpretations; but equally, Christianity might simply be replaced, just as it had itself replaced Paganism in the Roman Empire, or as Islam had replaced its predecessors. The attraction to Buddhism or modern Paganism on the part of many people in the West would seem to support Jung's contention: the archetype will attach itself to whatever symbols invoke the deepest response. That is the nature of spiritual conversion. It may come in a blinding flash – as with St Paul on the Road to Damascus, or it may come by slow degrees of opening to new 'truth', but in either case, the conversion is very real: the old symbols become void and the new become charged because they better fit the archetypes.
For many Quakers influenced by Jung's thinking the perpetual vexed question of the divinity of Christ appeared to have a solution. Jesus of Nazareth, the Jesus of the Testaments, was a symbol capable of invoking a response from the deep archetype nearest the centre of their being for some people. The fact of the life and teaching of Jesus were fairly simple, even if the process of sifting and retelling had turned the man into a legendary figure. The projection of the archetype over the legendary figure deified him, and that was then encapsulated in the man-god figure encountered in the Gospels, especially in John. That evangelical narrative of the Saviour spoke deeply to some. For those the image woven in the narrative would trigger that strong response and would lodge in their hearts. This was Christ as powerful symbol, the key that unlocked their soul, but not for all.
For others the divinity lay not in the person but in the message. The message was the symbol that triggered a response. That was the key that unlocked the soul. It was the key to the 'Kingdom of Heaven' on earth as a way of living. It was a kingdom not of the hereafter but of the here and now; not of a paradise, but of a work in progress, built step by step, life by life. It was a living realisation of the word.
Quakers have always been ambivalent about the divinity of Jesus, and about the trinitarian vision of the God-head. Their accusers have placed them, along with the Unitarians, as being in denial of the essential mystery – the core mythology of Christianity – the belief in the dual nature of the central person of the drama, Jesus of Nazareth, as both fully human, and, at the same time, being the fully divine incarnation of the Christ.
There has been an uneasy tension in Quakerism ever since its inception due to that ambivalence. This ambivalence arises because belief is not the core of Quakerism, but the practice of silent waiting is; that state of communion that bypasses belief, focusing on experience instead: in George Fox's words – Then what had any to do with the Scriptures, but as they came to the Spirit that gave them forth. You will say, Christ saith this, and the apostles say this; but what canst thou say? Art thou a child of Light and hast walked in the Light, and what thou speakest is it inwardly from God?
That tension in Quakerism, has been sometimes fruitful, but has sometimes produced rifts, especially in North America: a tension between the more evangelical, who take the fact of Jesus as Christ – as God incarnate – as their cornerstone, who engage with the biblical narrative as truth, including the certainty of an afterlife in which they will be judged; and those who view Jesus as a teacher and guide, as the one who opens the door to the divine, as a model and instructor, who provides the code for living rightfully – those who take the teachings as a guide to constructing the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, with their sense of the divine message written in each heart as lodestone.
George Keith (1638 – 1716), who worked and travelled with both George Fox and William Penn for many years, was aware of that tension, and of the ambivalence over the 'tenets' of the faith. He eventually left the Quakers because he had come to see them as being Deists, not Christians, who were certain of their sense of “that of God-within” and of the Kingdom of Heaven they were to build in the here and now, but indifferent to the message of salvation in the death, resurrection and ascension of the transfigured being of Jesus of Nazareth revealed as the Christ.
Jung's work on the inner mechanisms of spirituality, central to which was his postulation of the archetype at the deep centre of being – the Selbst (Self) – helped make sense of the ways in which people responded to the symbols and mythology of Christianity or other religions. It accounted for the evocative nature of such symbols and mythologies, and also for how alienation from them can occur. It also provided an account of how religions evolve and mutate, or wither and die, depending on how well they engage the inner complexes – how satisfying they are to the inner psychological needs of people. Essentially, he saw religions as external mythological projections of the sufferings of the soul, but as also containing mechanisms for the relief of that suffering by aiding lifelong maturation.
No comments:
Post a Comment