Researching and writing a book is itself a transformative process. The writer cannot help being changed, especially where the material is so much about values, attitudes and belief. Each new document examined, each new source followed up, each part of the history of the subjects that is uncovered, challenges whatever pre-existing frame of belief the writer has. The writer is confronted over and over, especially where the subjects are so heavily engaged with matters of the mind and of fundamental identity. There is a need to reassess so much because of what is being uncovered. Being unaffected by such studies would be difficult.
Irene and Bertram Pickard, Elined Kotschnig, PW & Marjory Martin were all, to borrow the title of one of Carl Jung's books, examples of Modern Man in Search of a Soul. As I encountered more and more to do with their intellectual and spiritual journey I too was taken on that journey. First through the active phase of their lives as they established who they were and what their tasks in life were. Then through the questioning and doubting phase of their lives and on to the stages of struggle, discovery, and transformation.
All five of the subjects were well educated, from comfortable backgrounds, English and had grown up during that period the French so delightfully call La Belle Époque, only to have that idyll smashed by the horrors of the First World War – both hugely formative experiences. It was almost a case of Paradise Lost revisited, with La Belle Epoque playing the part of heaven and the First World War being the Fall into Hell; thus making the post-war tasks they were engaged part of the struggle to regain the lost paradise.
La Belle Époque was full of engendered certainties about the almost heroic advances of science, Empire and reason. It was a golden age of Europe, shattered in the bloodbath of the First World war; a war fought, as far as many could see, for little rhyme or reason. It fell to the lot of all five of my subjects to be tasked with picking up the pieces of that broken world in their own ways. They all became involved with peace and reconstruction work in the aftermath and were all involved in trying to construct a more durable world order, which is why they were in Geneva – a place that was the centre of such efforts because it was where the newly formed League of Nations was.
They were also part of the tiny circle of Quakers in that city. Bertram had grown up in a well-to- do Quaker family. Irene had come into Quaker circles through her secretarial work, first as a 'temp' at Woodbrooke, the Quaker College, and then as Rendel Harris' live-in secretary – Rendel Harris was the first Director of Studies at Woodbrooke. How the others came to be Quakers is less clear, although it was normal in those times to follow in the religion of your family. Growing up Quaker still set you apart from much of the world, due to an adherence to a certain plainness and an almost universal abstinence from alcohol, and a somewhat separate framework of belief and practice which all led to making socialising with others from Quaker backgrounds simpler. Then there was the Sunday problem: what to do with a day when attending some form of religious grouping was both normal and expected? Many from Quaker backgrounds found, as they do these days, the more ritualised forms of religion challenging, and Quaker circles then, as now, were attracting those alienated from the mainstreams of Christian observance: its stripped down simplicity speaking of an honesty of belief. Being seekers after the truth rather than knowers is more natural in an age of intellectual curiosity, which the twentieth century was proving to be, and Quakers have always been seekers – its lack of creed encouraging exploration over conformity. The failure of the weltanschauung of the Belle Epoque made having an open and questioning attitude to the fundamental questions of life more intellectually honest than the comfort of conforming to the inherited patterns of belief that had been shown to be so wanting.
In many ways the philosopher who best set the tone of the age was Henri-Louis Bergson, winner of the 1927 Nobel prize for Literature “in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented.1” He was perhaps best known for his 1907 book Creative Evolution in which he stressed the inadequacy of human reason. This was something that spoke loudly to the shattering of an apparently rationally organised world in 1914 and the subsequent descent into carnage. For Bergson concepts cannot capture the world since they form only an abstract net thrown over things. Only intuition can really engage, that is visceral experience itself. Neither Rationalism, especially in its iteration as Idealism, perhaps best exemplified by Hegel and his followers, nor Empiricism, iterated as Positivism, exemplified by Auguste Comte and his heirs, adequately describe our lived experience. Both are abstractions taking us away from that experience. The empiricist ultimately resolves reality into no more than a bundle of bits, reducing it to the measurable; the rationalist keeps adding more and more properties to the substance that underlies things until it becomes infinitely saturated and is equivalent to God or the universe. Intuition alone gives you the taste of reality, for it is engagement with the whole being, not simply relating with the more superficial and supposedly rational aspect of our minds.
Relating at an embodied and deep level rather than at the level of intellectual abstraction was also the theme of another thinker of the age, the theologian Rudolf Otto, who coined the term 'numinous' in his 1917 book Das Heilige, translated as The idea of the Holy. Numinosity describes the "non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the self" as he explained:
The feeling of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship. It may pass over into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul, continuing, as it were, thrillingly vibrant and resonant, until at last it dies away and the soul resumes its “profane,” non-religious mood of everyday experience. [...] It has its crude, barbaric antecedents and early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of—whom or what? In the presence of that which is a Mystery inexpressible and above all creatures. [Rudlolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 1922]
Numinosity is the fundamental experience which is the ground state of relating religiously to the world: it is spiritual experience itself. It is overwhelming experience that transports out of the mundane and illuminates the being. It is capable of inducing transformation. It may come out of the blue, or it may be sought by conscious effort and diligent practice. It may be profound and earth shattering – the burning bush, Paul's being blinded on the road to Damascus, the Buddha's realisation of enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree – or subtle and gentle – a 'knowing beyond words' in a moment. It is intuitive – felt – rather than rational. It is knowing in the bones, in the whole being.
This relates to one of the three aspects of religion identified by Friedrich von Hügel, the mystical/experiential element of his typology which he laid out in The Mystical Element of Religion as Studied in St. Catherine of Genoa and Her Friends (1908). As a modernist he realised that the Catholic Church – and by implication all religions – could no longer sidestep the questions raised by the discoveries of science and scholarship. The other two elements, the historical/institutional and the intellectual/speculative, were, he suggested, derivatives; the mainspring, undisciplined and potentially chaotic as it was, was the mystical/experiential element.
The perception of mysticism as being at the core of spirituality was shared by Evelyn Underhill, who in her 1911 book Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness had traced the aetiology and history of mysticism. She suggested that spiritual journeys are not voluntary, but are triggered either by yearning – unmet feelings of need – or by experiences, and passed through five stages:
awakening
purgation of self
illumination
the dark night of the soul
the unitive life
Each stage being a struggle and each bringing an alteration in the way of being; but also each possessing the possibility of being stuck at that stage. She suggested that the final stage of mysticism is as a “most active doer”: doubt has finally subsided and the mystic is empowered by their achieved state of being at one.
These four thinkers seem to have been influential in informing the thinking of my subjects during the 1920s and into the 1930s. They are referred to frequently in the discussion papers left by the study group they formed. The topic they decided to study during the winter of 1933-4 was Mysticism, as Irene Pickard tells us:
A series on Mysticism, in the course of which Elined Kotschnig gave a paper on "Jung as a modern Mystic" laid hold of the group, and for three years in the 1930s some twenty people formed the most intensive and far-reaching study group I have known. At one point three car loads of Friends went to Zurich for a night to meet Dr. Carl Jung . The talk with him in his garden by the lake was a memorable occasion. We felt that Quaker experience was strengthened and enlightened by this exercise in Jungian psychology. The Martins, the Stacks, the Kotschnigs the Gerigs and others were partners in the group, also the Friises and these later made a living contribution to Quaker thought and practice. P.W. Martin's book "Experiment in Depth" published in England after the war crystallises his insights arising from this beginning.2
In 2014, because of my studies of the papers left by Irene, I was awarded an Eva Koch scholarship at Woodbrooke. During my time there I took part in a course called Dreaming Jung which gave me a handle on Jung's way of dream interpretation. One of the presenters was Nancy Krieger, a Jungian analyst, to whom Irene's daughter, Alison Bush, had previously introduced me. It was Alison who had invited me to look at her mother's papers, triggering my research.
One evening during that weekend Nancy and I slipped off into the dining room at Woodbrooke so we could talk about some of the problems I was having understanding Jung. I was truly saturated by my studies at that point, so much so that I was not really seeing the wood for the trees, as the saying goes. We were joined by Professor Zbigniew Kazmierczak, who was also a Eva Koch scholar that year. It was one of the most intense discussions about the psychological path of spiritual discovery I have ever known.
Nancy suggested that the best way to understand Jung's theories about spiritual development was to understand the transformations of the images of 'God' both historically and as stages in each individual's psychological progress. That transformation could be described thus:
The pantheistic god: god as everything: god is the tree, etc.
The panoptic god: god is spirits in things: god is in the tree, but is not the tree itself.
The transcendent god: god is above everything looking down and controlling: god the lawgiver, the all-seeing, etc: the god of judgement.
The death of god: there is no god: the bubble of the illusion is burst: an entirely secular world: a godless, god-free world.
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.
As I was to discover as I delved deeper into Jung, he felt that the numinous experiences we have emanate from the activation of what he called the God-archetype that lies deep in our minds, specifically in the unconscious . What we shape as our image of God – as unique and personal as that will be – is a projection from the archetype. It will be shaped by our experience and our culture. He says of the relationship:
The religious person enjoys a great advantage when it comes to answering the crucial question that hangs over our time like a threat: he has a clear idea of the way his subjective existence is grounded in relation to “God”. I put the word “God” in quotes in order to indicate that we are dealing with an anthropomorphic idea whose dynamism and symbolism are filtered through the medium of the unconscious psyche. Anyone who wants to can at least draw near to the source of such experiences, no matter whether he believes in God or not. … That religious experiences exist no longer needs proof. But it will always remain doubtful whether what metaphysics and theology call God and the gods is the real ground of these experiences. The question is idle, actually, and answers itself by reason of the subjectively overwhelming numinosity of the experience. Anyone who has it is seized by it and therefore is not in a position to indulge in fruitless metaphysical or epistemological speculations. Absolute certainty brings its own evidence and has no need of anthropomorphic proofs. [Carl Jung, p.64: The Undiscovered Self: Rutledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1958.]
The realisation that our spirituality is generated from within is to realise that it is a projection, and that its source within – an inward light – leads us to open to the world in a different mode of relationship. George Fox described such an experience thus;
Now I was come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God. All things were new, and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter. [Quaker Faith & Practice 26.03]
Jung was aware that he was dealing with discovery of the spiritual as experience by the Western mind, which is cultured to attach such experiences to a notion of “God”. He was also aware that the Eastern mind was less inclined to shape images that way. For instance, the experience of Kensho in Zen is a numinous experience, a lightning strike of enlightenment, but is not attributed to discovering “God”. It is, however, the trigger for cultivating the sate of Satori – of being enlightened – which is to allow that inner light to illuminate your life, much like George Fox's experience.
Jung was aware that whatever we say about “God', or gods come to that, is always said about our personal experience, as he explained in Answer to Job:
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. [Carl Jung, Answer to Job]
The word 'unspeakable' does not carry quite the same connotations in German as it does in English, it is far more literal – that which cannot be spoken about – much akin to the Judaic tradition which avoids directly naming God. It also suggests the Taoist understanding which insists that any attempt at objectifying is to miss the essence:
The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.3
The subjects of my researches underwent a spiritual journey from the shattered belief in the “God” of their childhood to a rediscovery of spirituality through acquaintance with Jung. In 1938 the Geneva Quakers held a winter season on Belief, looking honestly at what each believed. Of the eighteen participants only one had what might be termed a classical belief in an external “God”. All the others had, by one route or another, arrived at something like the last stage of belief outlined by Jung: “God” felt as relationship not as object, and for several of them manifest most clearly in the people they met as love, as life, and as an inward light. They were indeed examples of Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul.
Although I had entered the Quaker world not long before being invited to study Irene Pickard's remarkable archive – a refugee from a mix of Buddhism and Atheism – I have to confess to not having “belief”. I still don't. However, my unbelief has been transformed, coming to agree with Jung when he explained:
When people say that they believe in the existence of God, it has never impressed me in the least. Either I know a thing and then I don’t need to believe it; or I believe it because I am not sure that I know it. I am well satisfied with the fact that I know experiences which I cannot avoid calling numinous or divine.4
What you can really know is what you experience, but that experience now includes for me the richness of spiritual openness and encounter.
1Nobel citation
2Pickard, Irene: The Geneva Meeting 1920-40: mss in the private collection of Alison Bush.
3Ch.1: The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu: translated by Stephen Mitchell.
4Jung's reply to Philip's question about whether all we are limited to is knowledge of the God-archetype: p.16: Philp, H L: Jung and the Problem of Evil: Rockliff, London, 1958
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