Edward F. Edinger -The Psyche in Antiquity – Introduction
Introduction
C.G. lung’s book A ion, written in 1 95 1 , laid the foundation for a new discipline which can be called archetypal psycho-history.
This method studies the movements of the collective unconscious as it becomes manifest through political and cultural history. In this present study, an attempt is made to bring the method to bear on some of the changes that occurred at the beginning of the Christian eon.
Two thousand years ago, the collective psyche underwent a profound upheaval,
one that has remarkable parallels in our own time. This earlier upheaval
amounted to the death and rebirth of the functioning God-image.
There is evidence that the same phenomenon is occurring today.
This great historical drama of early Christian times played itself out largely as a confrontation between two major protagonists, Rome and Judea.
In Rome, after decades of a demoralizing civil war that destroyed the Roman Republic, the state was restabilized temporarily as the Roman Empire, with absolutist rule by a deified emperor.
The civic virtue that had been characteristic of the Republic was increasingly replaced by motives of pure greed and power.
Authentic religious devotion and patriotic service, which had been typical in the Roman nobility of the Republic, was lost in the Empire.
The religion of the people was perverted more and more by the state to serve the personal power motives of its leaders.
Even Rome’s famous religious tolerance was a cynical power ploy, according to Gibbon’s famous remark:
The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.
It is unlikely that the common people were quite as tolerant as Gibbon says,
but for the ruling class such cynicism did prevail in regard to religion.
In addition, the morally corrosive effects of universal slavery went almost entirely unchallenged, even by the wisest men of the day. Jung says about ancient Rome:
The men of that age were ripe for identification with the word made flesh, for the founding of a community united by an idea, in the name of which they could love one another and call each other brothers . . . .
[There was] an elementary need in the great masses of humanity vegetating in spiri tual darkness.
They were evidently driven to it by the profoundest i nner necessities, for humanity does not thrive in a state of licentiousness . . . .
We can hardly realize the whirlwinds of brutality and unchained libido that roared through the streets of Imperial Rome?
Judea, on the other hand, was a tiny province in the vast Roman Empire that
had precisely what Rome lacked : a profound, authentic rel igiousness that governed
its everyday life.
This faith was rooted in an historical prophetic tradition that was enshrined in holy scripture .
Its deficiency, from the standpoint of humanity as a whole, was that it was a concrete, local and highly exclusive religion; the Jews had a relation to Yahweh that was reserved solely for them.
This gave them a spiritual autonomy that allowed them to stand up to the mighty Roman Empire in an astonishing way .
At the same time, their spiritual arrogance set them apart and generated animosity on all sides .
But the Jews were not in a state of psychic stability either, as religious tradition in Judea was also in upheaval .
On the pol itical level, this proud people was chafing under harsh Roman rule .
In addition, the priestly religion of animal sacrifice and of strict, literal adherence to Mosaic law was being questioned .
As early as Jeremiah, we hear about a so-called new covenant, different from the old, which promised that “I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts .”
In addition, a new archetypal image was erupting in the Jewish psyche .
The Yahweh God-image was that of the father, but starting a few hundred years before the new era, we find another image emerging, that of the Son, called either “Son of God” or “Son of man . ”
From the very begi nning of Jewish tradition, Yahweh had designated Israel, the collective national entity, as his son .
The new formulation was bringing forth another version of the son, a son of a different and more specific nature than the collective sonship of Israel as a whole.
Jung discusses this matter in “Answer to Job,” where he speaks of the effects of Yahweh ‘ s encounter with Job.
Because of that engagement and the consciousness of Yahweh’s nature that Job acquired, Yahweh was obliged to incarnate and to become man.
Jung demonstrates that this tendency revealed itself successively, first of all in Ezekiel , especial ly in Ezekiel ‘ s great vision, then later in the books of Daniel and of Enoch.
In all of these sources, the term “Son of man” became prominent.
Ezekiel was referred to by Yahweh as the “Son of man,” the book of Daniel refers to the “Son of man” and Enoch is specifically designated as “Son of man .”
Jung is convinced that Jesus knew the book of Enoch and that he appropriated the term “Son of man” to himself.
The image of the “Son of man” has been intensely scrutinized by religious
scholars .
Any living symbol such as this has a fascinating effect, and scholars
and commentators cluster around it like moths around a flame .
The idea of the “Son of man” can be understood at two levels.
One is the personal, reductive level, where it means nothing more than that one was born of a woman .
Obviously the context of some B iblical passages belies such a simple explanation.
At another level, “Son of man” is a messianic and eschatological term .
It refers to something that derives from the transpersonal , divine dimension.
Psychologically speaking, the fact that the terms “Son of God” and “Son of
man” are often interchangeable, especially in the Gospel accounts, is u nderstandable because individuation proceeds from two centers within the individual-both from the Self and from the ego. In this sense, the term “Son of man” is parallel to the ego as a center, and the term “Son of God” is parallel to the Self as a center of the individuating personality .
The “Son of man” figure was emerging in the Jewish psyche for two or three centuries in advance of the time of Christ
This same figure was connected as well with the terms “Messiah,” “anoi nted king” and “Christ.”
Those three words
mean exactly the same thi ng.
Christos is the Greek term for anointed . One is
anointed by “chrism” (which derives from the same root word).
Messiah also means the anointed one.
The basic idea is that the Son of man is coming as the anoi nted one, sent by God to bri ng salvation to mankind and to function as a mediator between God and humanity, which is in danger of losing its connection to the divine.
As the figure of the Messiah was elaborated in the scriptures, it took on a
double aspect.
One element was that of a suffering servant: unj ust suffering was
willingly accepted by the Messiah in order to redeem mankind from sin.
Isaiah 53 is the classic statement of that face of the Messiah.
The other aspect is as a triumphant king coming in j udgment, defeating Israel ‘ s enemies, bringing a perpetual reign of righteousness-for example the description in Psalms
The Jews expected a concrete, literal version of the second, kingly type and it is largely for that reason that they refused to accept Jesus with his humiliating execution and the apparently total failure of his life.
According to Josephus, there were four competing schools or sects among the Jews at the time of Christ.
One was the Sadducees, the temple priesthood, who represented the conservative establishment.
They were practical and did not indulge in theological fantasy or elaboration of doctrine.
Unlike the Sadducees, the Pharisees were theologians.
They were more imaginative, more thoughtful, more introverted.
They believed in resurrection and in destiny.
Neither of these groups was particularly influenced by the emerging Messiah image, as they were much too rooted in the mainstream daily functioning of the community.
The other two sects, gripped by the archetype, were the Essenes and the Zealots.
The Zealots were revolutionaries and arsonists who sought to expel Rome
from Judea by military means and who were expecting the coming of a political Messiah who would literally free them from Roman rule and reestablish the monarchy of Israel.
They were seized by the Messiah archetype in a very concrete sense.
The other group, the Essenes, was the sect referred to in the Dead
Sea Scrolls.
They had largely separated themselves from the Jerusalem priesthood and had moved to the desert where they lived a monastic life awaiting the
Messiah, in daily expectation of the end of the world.
They are a striking example of the power of the Messiah archetype.
Whatever the influence of these sects, the fact remains that the emerging archetype of the Messiah had its fullest expression and its most enduring effects in the life of Jesus Christ and in the community that crystallized around his figure after his death.
The basic ideas of the myth of the Messiah as it emerged in the centuries after Jesus’ death are as follows:
God ‘ s preexistent, only-begotten Son empties himself of his divinity and is incarnated as a man through the agency of the Holy Ghost who impregnates the Virgin M ary.
His birth in humble surroundings is accompanied by numinous events, and
he survives grave initial dangers.
When he reaches adulthood he submits to ba ptism by John the Baptist and witnesses the descent of the Holy Ghost signifying his vocation.
He survives temptation by the Devil and fulfills his ministry which proclaims a benevolent, loving God, and announces the coming of the “Kingdom of Heaven. ”
After agonizing uncertainty, he accepts his destined fate and allows himself
to be arrested, tried, flagellated, mocked and crucified .
After three days in the tomb, according to many witnesses, he is resurrected.
For forty days he walks and talks with his disciples and then ascends to heaven.
Ten days later, at Pentecost, the Holy Ghost descends, the promised Paraclete.
When we examine what records remain regarding the figure of Jesus, it
quickly becomes evident that the personal story of the individual man is so interpenetrated by the description of the archetypal role projected onto him that it is impossible to separate the historical Jesus from the mythological figure.
Jung comments on this myth in a letter to Upton Sinclair who had written a life of Jesus and had sent it to Jung for his comments. Sinclair had treated Jesus largely in his personal, human aspect. Jung responded:
If Jesus had i ndeed been nothing but a great teacher hopelessly mistaken in His messianic expectations, w e should b e a t a complete loss in understanding His historicaleffect. . . . If, on the other hand, we cannot understand by rational means what a God-Man is, then we don ‘ t know what the New Testament is all about.
But it would be just our task to understand what they meant by a “God-Man.”
You give an excellent picture of a possible religious teacher, but you give us no understanding of what the New Testament tries to tell, namely the life, fate, and effect of a God-Man [that is, of the archetype] . . . .
These are the reasons why I should propose to deal with the Christian [urphenomenon] in a somewhat different way.
I think we ought to admit that we don’ t understand the riddle o f the New Testament.
With our present means w e cannot unravel a rational story from it unless we interfere with the texts. If we take this risk we can read various stories into the texts and we can even give them a certain amount of probability:
I . Jesus is an idealistic, religious teacher of great wisdom, who knows that His teaching would make the necessary impression only if He were willing to sacrifice His life for it.
Thus He forces the issue in complete foreknowledge of the facts which He intends to happen.
- Jesus is a highly strung, forceful personality, forever at vari ance with His
surroundings, and possessed of a terri fic will to power.
Yet being of su perior intelligence, He perceives that it would not do to assert it on the worldly plane of political sedition as so many similar zealots in His days had done.
He rather prefers the role of the old prophet and reformer of His people, and He institutes a spiri tual kingdom instead of an unsuccessful political rebellion.
For this purpose He adopts not only the messianic Old Testament expectations, but also the then popular “Son of Man” figure in the Book of Enoch.
But meddling with the political whirlpool in Jerusalem, He gets Hi mself caught in its intrigues and meets a tragic end with a full recognition of His failure.
- Jesus is an incarnation of the Father-God. As a God-Man He walks the earth drawing to Himself the [chosen] of His Father, announcing the message of universal salvation and being mostly misunderstood. As the crowning of His short career, He performs the supreme sacri fice in offerin Himself up as the perfect host, and thus redeems mankind from eternal perdition.
It is evident from this passage (and also from a later letter to Sinclaid that
regarding the historical Jesus, Jung subscribes to the second description.
The third interpretation, of course, is just a picture of the archetype.
The life of Christ as it comes down to us appears to be a symbolic image of two separate, superimposed events. In one, the Son of God descends to earth to incarnate as man.
In the second, the human being engages the archetype of the God-image
and finds himself caught up in embodying it.
Speaking psychologically, in the first place the Self enters the ego and in the second place the ego becomes conscious of and related to the Self, which is precisely the event that happened in the collective psyche 2,000 years ago.
In the Jewish psyche, the Christian sect that arose around the figure of Jesus
was a heresy that was eventually extirpated.
The same cannot be said about the Greco-Roman psyche, where the consequences were immense.
It is obvious that the classical psyche, more than the Jewish one, needed what the new God-image had to offer.
The decadent classical psyche was based on the principles of pleasure
and power: matter, money, and the power of the State residing in the hands
of the deified emperors, who delegated portions of their arbitrary power to favorites.
The Christ figure generated the opposite pole in the collective psyche:
the spiritual, other-worldly dimension of existence, the dimension that was
missing in the classical soul.
As Jung puts it, “[The emergence of] Christianity itself signified the collapse and sacrifice of the cultural values of antiquity, that is, of the classical attitude.”
He elaborates this in a later work:
One of the most shining examples of the meaning of personality that hi story has preserved for us is the life of Christ.
In Christianity , which, be it mentioned in passing, was the only religion really persecuted by the Romans, there rose up a direct opponent of the Caesarean madness that afflicted not only the emperor, but every Roman as wel l . . . . The opposition showed itself wherever the worship of Caesar clashed with Christianity .
But, as we know from what the evangelists tell us about the psychic development of Christ ‘ s personality, this opposition was fought out just as decisively in the soul of its founder.
The story of the Temptation clearly reveals the nature of the psychic power with which Jesus came into coll ision; it was the power-i ntoxicated devil of the prevai ling Caesarean psychology that led him into dire temptation in the wi lderness.
This devi l was the objective psyche that held all the peoples of the Roman Empire under its sway, and that is why it promised Jesus al l the kingdoms of the earth, as if it were trying to make a Caesar of him.
Obeying the inner call of his vocation, Jesus voluntarily exposed
himself to the assaults of the imperialistic madness that filled everyone, conqueror and conquered alike.
In this way he recognized the nature of the objective psyche which had plunged the whole world into misery and had begotten a yearning for
salvation that found expression even in the pagan poets.
Far from suppressing or allowing himself to be suppressed by this psychic onslaught, he let it act on him consciously, and assimilated it.
Thus was world-conquering Caesari sm transformed i nto spiri tual kingship, and the Roman Empire into the universal kingdom of God that was not of this world.
While the whole Jewish nation was expecting an imperialistically minded and politically active hero as a Messiah, Jesus fulfilled the Messianic mission not so much for his own nation as for the whole Roman world,
and pointed out to humanity the old truth that where force rules there is no love, and where love reigns force does not count.
The religion of love was the exact psychological counterpart to the Roman devil-worship of power.
Jung takes up this same theme in another letter:
Take the classic case of the temptation of Christ, for example.
We say that the devil tempted him, but we could just as well say that an unconscious desire for power confronted him in the form of the devil .
Both sides appear here: the light side and the dark.
The devil wants to tempt Jesus to proclaim himself master of the
world. Jesus wants not to succumb to the temptation; then, thanks to the function that results from every conflict [the transcendent function] , a symbol appears: it is the idea of the Kingdom of Heaven, a spiri tual kingdom rather than a material one.
Two things are united in this symbol, the spiritual attitude of Christ and the devilish desire for power. Thus the encounter of Christ with the devil is a classic example of the tran scendent function.
Speaking to a small informal gathering i n New York City i n 1937, Jung made these candid remarks:
Jesus, you know, was a boy born of an unmarried mother. Such a boy is called illegitimate, and there is a prejudice which puts him at a great disadvantage.
He suffers from a terrible feeling of inferiority for which he is certain to have to compensate.
Hence the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, in which the kingdom was
offered to him. Here he met his worst enemy, the power devil ; but he was able to see that, and to refuse.
He said, “My kingdom is not of this world.” But “kingdom” it was, all the same.
And you remember that strange incident, the triumphal entry into Jerusalem.
The utter failure came at the Crucifixion in the tragic words, “My
God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
I f you want to understand the full tragedy of those words y o u must realize what they meant: Christ s a w that h i s whole life, devoted t o the truth according t o h i s best conviction, had been a terrible illusion.
He had li ved it to the full absolutely sincerely, he had made his honest experiment, but it was nevertheless a compensation. O
n the Cross his mission deserted him. But because he had lived so fully and devotedly he won through to the Resurrection body.
This describes the personal, human ego aspect of the image of Jesus Christ,
but the other side of the image, the transpersonal dimension, equates Christ with the supreme Deity.
He is one of the three persons of the Trinity, the divine Logos that has existed from all eternity and is co-regent with God.
It is a profoundly paradoxical symbolic image: two natures united in a single individual who is both human and divine.
Origen describes this phenomenon rather colorfully, 200 years after Christ:
But of all the marvelous and mighty acts related of Him [God], this altogether surpasses human admiration, and is beyond the power of mortal frail ness to understand or feel, how that mighty power of divine majesty, that very Word of the Father, and that very wisdom of God in which were created all things visible and invisible, can be believed to have existed within the limits of that man who appeared in Judea; nay, that the Wisdom of God can have entered the womb of a woman, and have been born an infant, and have uttered wailings like the cries of little chi ldren
! And that afterwards it should be related that He was greatly troubled i n
death, saying, a s He Hi mself declared, ” M y soul is sorrowful, even unto death ;” and that at the last He was brought to that death which i s accounted the most shameful among men, although He rose again on the third day.
Since, then, we see in Him some things so human that they appear to differ in no respect from the common frailty of mortals, and some things so divine that can appropriately belong to nothing else than to the primal and ineffable nature of Deity, the narrowness of human understanding can find no outlet; but, overcome with the amazement of a mighty admiration, knows not whither to withdraw, or what to take hold of, or whither to tum.
If it think of a God, it sees a mortal ; if it think of a man, it beholds Him returning from the grave, after overthrowing the empire of death,
laden with its spoils. And therefore the spectacle is to be contemplated with all fear and reverence, that the truth of both natures may be clearly shown to exist in one and the same Being; so that nothing unworthy or
unbecoming may be perceived in that divine and ineffable substance, nor yet those things which were done be supposed to be the illusions of imaginary appearances. T
o utter these things in human ears, and to explain them in words, far surpasses the powers either of our rank, or of our intellect and language. I think that it surpasses the power even of the holy
apostles; nay, the explanation of that mystery may perhaps be beyond the grasp of the entire creation of celestial powers.
This passage is an example of the numinosity that surrounded the paradoxical
image of Christ in the early years of our era.
Given the fact that the figure of the Messiah has various names attached to
it-Son of God, Son of man, Messiah, anointed king, Christ, suffering servant and stern judge of the Last Judgment-how is it to be understood psychologically by the modern mind?
Jung has given the definitive answer to that question, first stated in 1941 in his essay, “A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity.”
Here he says that the figure of Christ is an archetype, specifically the
archetype of the Self.
He continues: It was this archetype of the self14 in the soul of every man that responded to the Christian message, with the result that the concrete Rabbi Jesus was rapidly a ssimilated by the constellated archetype. In this way Christ realized the idea of the self.
But as one can never distinguish empirically between a symbol of the self and a God-image, the two ideas, however much we try to differentiate them, always appear blended together, so that the self appears synonymous with the inner Christ of the Johannine and Pauline writings, and Christ with God (“of one substance with the Father”)
, just as the atman appears as the individualized self and at the same time as the animating principle of the cosmos, and Tao as a condition of mind and at the same time as the correct behaviour of cosmic events. Psychologically
speaking, the domain of “gods ” begins where consciousness leaves off, for at that point man is already at the mercy of the natural order, whether he thrive or perish.
Jung goes on to say:
The goal of psychological, as of biological, development is self-realization, or individuation.
But since man knows himself only as an ego, and the self, as a totality,
is indescribable and indistinguishable from a God-image, self-realization-to put it in religious or metaphysical terms-amounts to God ‘ s incarnation.
That is already expressed in the fact that Christ is the son of God. And because individuation is an heroic and often tragic task, the most difficult of all, it involves suffering, a passion of the ego . . . . The human and the divine suffering set up a relationship of complementarity with compensating effects. [This is a complementarity between the Self and the ego. ]
Through the Christ-symbol, man can get to know the real meaning of his suffering: he is on the way towards realizing his wholeness.
As a result of the integration of conscious and unconscious, his ego enters the “divine” ealm, where it participates in “God’s suffering. ” The cause of the suffering is in both cases the same, namely “incarnation, ” which on the human level appears as “individuation. ”
The divine hero born of man is already threatened with murder;
he has nowhere to lay his head, and his death is a gruesome tragedy.
The self is no mere concept or logical postulate; it is a ps)Chic reality, only part of it conscious, while for the rest it embraces the life of the unconscious and is therefore inconceivable except in the form of symbols.
The drama of the archetypal life of Christ describes in symbolic images the events in the conscious life-as well as in the life that transcends consciousness–of a man who has been transformed by his higher destin
It is impossible to overemphasize the sign ificance of this discovery of lung’ s, a discovery that can be summed up in his one lapidary sentence: “Christ exemplifies the archetype of the self.”
Once the meaning of that sentence is truly understood, the whole conflict of our age between scientific secular humanism and traditional religion is resolved .
In one stroke, traditional Christianity has been redeemed from irrelevance to the modern mind.
The vast body of Christian dogma, disputation, commentary and heresy that has extended for twenty centuries can now be understood as the painful, tortuous workings of the collective unconscious as it strives to bri ng the divine drama of the evolving God-image into human consciousness.
What happened 2,000 years ago with the eruption of the Christ archetype into collective consciousness set off a chain of events that led to a whole new eon, the eon that is now closing.
It provoked a huge process in the collective psyche that split into two main streams. In one stream, the Chri stian church developed, and through various twists and turns and dead ends finally emerged into a single uni versal Catholic orthodoxy .
This took several centuries.
The fruit of that development was the institution of the Church that was the chrysalis of Western civilization as we know it.
The Church survived the dark ages and passed on much of the work of antiquity into the modern world. Its hallmark was a unified, universal, (that is what “catholic” means: universal ) coherent belief structure that was built into an institutional framework strong enough to withstand many
political storms through the centuries.
Fundamentally, it was a collective phenomenon, and what grew out of it was a society, a collective civilization .
The other stream was Gnosticism . In contrast to the development of the
Church, it fragmented right from the beginning into a multitude of sects and proponents. It was much more individual istic than the Church stream .
In that respect it foreshadowed the Protestant movement of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The individualism of Gnosticism fed the rich theological and cosmological
fantasies of the movement.
Of course such ideas have to stem from individuals, and once you allow individuals to engage in theological fantasies, you can forget about orthodoxy.
The Church had the good sense, in order to create a durable collective, to rigorously forbid such individual theological ideas.
In the modern world we regret that tendency on the part of the Church, but it was a necessity at the time, so that the Church would be able to perform the historical function that was in store for it.
The Gnostics had no such qualms and we see in them a flowering and a dispersal of sects which was their glory, but was also their downfall because the Gnostic groups sprang up and then withered.
They did not gather sufficient impetus to form a durable ongoing tradition, not to mention the fact that they could not stand up against the Church as it crystallized.
These two streams, the Church and the Gnostics, are represented right at the beginning of their history by two major figures, Paul of Tarsus and Simon Magus of Samaria.
The first chapters here focus on these two main figures and then on their descendants. Subsequent chapters follow the two lines that stem from
them:
in the Church lineage there are Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Tertullian
and Augustine; in the Gnostic line, Marcion, Basilides, Valentinus and Mani.
Finally, a concluding chapter summarizes how these matters have continued evolving up to the current time, and clarifies their psychological significance for us today. ~Edward F. Edinger, The Psyche in Antiquity, Page 7-17
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