There are four categories of repression to be seen throughout history
There are four categories of repression to be seen throughout history:
- The exclusion of Nature:
This attitude led to a neglect of nature. This is shown by the art of the period. The line of the drawings bore no resemblance to nature, neither did the Dolor used, e.g. the hair might be painted green and the trees red; or by writing town instead of drawing it. This lasted till the pre-Raphaelites.
In this came period the ideals were anti-natural. For example, saints tried to be as dirty as possible. Saints did not wash, they lived in filth and vermin which they praised as the smells of heavenly roses.
Fakir practices also occurred in Christianity. These people were psychological examples of the fact that the spirit can rule the flesh.
This state of affairs had to go on till the spirit actually became stronger than the flesh, then when it had become overdue, then it began to decay.
The overcoming of the world, of carnal wishes, as in the monasteries, was a tremendous reality in those days, it really mattered.
2. The exclusion of the animal world.
Animals were really excluded. There was no artistic appreciation of the animal till the ox and the ass came in at the margin of the picture perhaps. In the gospels there is no appreciation of the animal as a living being equivalent to the Hindu attitude.
For example, there is no cathedral where monuments of the horses who had fallen in carrying the stone were set up. In medieval times the animal was grotesque, half devil. In the very early Church there are exceptions, a sacred leopard, ass, etc. St. Francis of Assisi was an exception, but he was a heretic end only by the cleverness of the Pope was his revolution undone and he was swept into the lap of the Church.
This exclusion shows a tendency to repress the parallelism of the human and the animal. These exclusions mean that humanity becomes very isolated. When this happens you feel that you have fallen from grace, for you cannot drink from the wells of nature and then you must seek for grace elsewhere. Indeed, the Church has brought this condition of affairs about for this very purpose.
- Exclusion of the Inferior Man, the weak or incapable one in us.
The Old Adam, the inferior and inert being in us, was recognized everywhere but was burdened with curses; he almost was the inherited sin. He is destined for hell. Any form of indulgence is closely linked with the Old Adam, ego]. sexuality.
In as much as the Old Adam was repressed by the Church, sexuality was also repressed, except for the purposes of propagation.
To produce as many children as possible, to make as many souls as possible for Cod’s flock was meritorious. In South America the Church bell rang to remind the men to heed the need for propagation. It is rather sexuality as erotic expression that was repressed.
Sexuality has two faces, (a) propagation which is more carnal sexuality; (b) erotic expression.
This is little known because the Church says it is all of the devil and belongs to the inferior man.
There are political reasons why this should he. When the erotic side is allowed to a man, he can recognize his dignity. He can live satisfactorily to himself. The Church has to repress this or non feels that his life has a meaning and is important to himself, and then he will not need the Church.
- Repression of creative phantasy, end of its freedom. Creative phantasy is allowed for propagation and for church windows. But where it is free it is forbidden, that is, where it does not follow the traditional form. Wherever a man feels himself the brother of the gods, he is self-sufficient.
Then he remember° his divinity. The Church is most of all against this.
This is why Galileo was persecuted, because his invention was creative and subversive to the teachings of Aristotle. Such men were persecuted for having creative phantasy. The Church murders the germ of things, and this is the murder of God for the germs of things are divine. Thus does the Church become the devil incarnate.
But no Church has been able to kill the divine in man. So at the Renaissance the Divine freed itself from the Church and lived elsewhere, and this in spite of the saying, “Outside the Church is no salvation.”
That is eternal death. It is a terrible mutilation when man is compelled to live only by a truth two thousand years old and thereby sacrifice his actual life to a mummy.
But outside of the Church there is no impersonal formulation.
At first we enjoy our liberation from the bondage of the Church. For instance, you find it in the music of Bach or Handel, where there is the joy of the Protestant for the liberation from Papacy. But in a couple of hundred years, the joy sank out of sight and everything became like old leather, because Protestantism is only a protest, not a real life. But this joy was of the eighteenth century and we cannot go back to it, that would be regression and regression is sin.
In the apocryphal sayings of Jesus we find the followings The disciples asked: “Who will draw us up to heaven, and Jesus spake unto them The fowls in the air and the fishes in the sea and the beasts on the earth shall draw you to heaven.”
And again “Where there are two I am there, and where one is alone I am there also. Break the rock, cleave the wood, I am there.”
In the sermon on the Mount, when it is read subjectively in the Gnostic form one reads: “If thou bringest thy gift to the altar and there findest that thy brother hath aught against thee, go and be reconciled to thy brother. Thy brother is thyself, therefore be reconciled to thyself…” ~Carl Jung, ~Carl Jung, Cornwall Seminar, Pages 16-18.
