Christianity, Shadow, and Jung’s Diagnosis of Modern Europe

For better or for worse, we humans are storied people. Not only are we shaped by our personal and national experiences, but we also tend to assume those experiences are universal. And so, St. Augustine struggled with reining in his libido and so developed a theology that linked the Fall to sex, Martin Luther struggled with a sense of trying to earn salvation and assumed everyone else must too, and James Cone understood Christ and the Cross through the lens of the American Black experience of prejudice and lynching. For Carl Jung, this formative struggle was in allowing his heart to have a voice in the rational world of the early twentieth century. Understanding his story can help us to understand his idea of the shadow and why it’s important for us today.

Depending on who you ask, Carl G. Jung was either a stodgy ivory-tower thinker or an esoteric, woo-woo mystic. The truth is, he was both, and his struggles at reconciling these different aspects of his personality left an indelible mark on his ideas about humanity. He noted these two sides from an early age, and he considered them to be so different and irreconcilable that he thought of them as two distinct personalities: Personality 1 was the rule-abiding, serious and studious schoolboy who took after his Calvinist minister father, and found ready adult expression in the academy and in the rigid culture of early twentieth century Europe’s educated classes. Personality 2, on the other hand, the contemplative, creative, and mystical seeker who took after his more esoteric mother, found few outlets in his adult life. That is, until it forcefully made itself known. In 1913 and early 1914, Jung experienced a series of frightening visions: a field outside his train window drenched in blood, a dream of a dead hero, and images of destruction, murder, and cruelty (The Red Book).* When war broke out in July 1914, bringing all of these visions to horrific reality, Jung took notice. As it happens, he was far from the only person to have what appeared in hindsight to be premonitions of the First World War: In 1912, Kandinksy wrote of a coming catastrophe that would strike the world, and the early 1910s saw a disturbing turn in European art, suddenly filled with images of twisted buildings and apocalyptic landscapes.

How was it, Jung wondered, that these visions had managed to override his rational persona? How had he and these other visionaries manifested such apparently predictive images at a time when no one thought a great European war was possible? And come to that, how did an increasingly politically, economically, and culturally linked Europe, awash in progressive ideas and speaking of Christian brotherhood, descend so quickly into such a violent and inhumane war? At the risk of grossly oversimplifying, it could be argued that such questions guided the rest of his career.

Jung experienced his shocking outburst of visions, dreams, and images, as a genuine manifestation of his soul, what he called “the spirit of the depths,” that he had been ignoring and suppressing in the name of reason and science. He began a journal in which he recorded dreams, visions, and all sorts of other phenomena he was now attuned to notice, and reflected on their possible layers of meaning. He wrote:

The spirit of the depths has subjugated all pride and arrogance to the power of judgment. He took away my belief in science, robbed me of the joy of explaining and ordering things, and he let devotion to the ideals of this time die out in me. … The spirit of the depths took my understanding and all my knowledge and placed them at the service of the inexplicable and the paradoxical. He robbed me of speech and writing for everything that was not in his service, namely the melting together of sense and nonsense, which produces the supreme meaning. (The Red Book 120).

He saw this as a necessary exercise which he owed to those parts of his personality that he had suppressed, which he came to call “the shadow.” Robert A. Johnson helpfully uses the analogy of the story of the Fall from Genesis 3 to explain this process of shadow development: “Somewhere early on our way, we eat one of the wonderful fruits of the tree of knowledge, things separate into good and evil, and we begin the shadow-making process; we divide our lives.” Those parts of ourselves considered to be good and beneficial to us become part of the personality we show to the world, what Jung called the persona; those parts that are experienced as being bad or shameful, are pushed into the shadow where no one can see them. These can be ‘negative’ things like hatred and violence, but are just as often ‘positive’ and useful traits that weren’t valued, such as sensitivity and empathy in boys, or intelligence or leadership in women (traditionally speaking). (Though he would correctly argue that even the ‘negative’ things have a legitimate purpose and role to play.) But Jung become convinced that anything hidden, ignored, or suppressed, would find its way to the light — was the War itself, he reasoned, not just such a manifestation of long-suppressed violence, competition, and rivalry among the European powers? (This is to say nothing about the later scourge of Fascism, which he saw as a national-level outburst of a violent, loveless shadow.) In order to keep such outbursts from being destructive, one had to go into the depths and engage with the parts of oneself silenced by one’s culture, family background, and personal experiences (see Jung The Undiscovered Self; and Bobroff).

The goal, then, in Jung’s perspective, is not perfection but wholeness, an acknowledgement of the whole person, both those aspects society considers ‘good’ and those it calls ‘bad’. As he wrote in his personal reflections, “If you go to thinking, take your heart with you. If you go to love, take your head with you. Love is empty without thinking, thinking hollow without love” (Red Book 200). While on the personal level, it may take practices such as dream work, journaling, and active imagination to address the shadow, on a societal level, this is the function of religion. Religion provides the stories around which societies build their lives and develop a shared understanding; but healthy religion also sanctions engaging the shadow, whether through initiation ceremonies, in which one set of roles (persona) is exchanged for another, symbolic rituals of transformation, or letting loose collective steam through feasts and carnivals. Jung took significant meaning from the original sense of the word ‘religion’ as ‘binding together again’; he saw it quite literally as a cultural technology designed to unite and persona and shadow on both the individual and collective levels.

But he saw Christianity — or at least the Christianity in which he had been raised — as a hindrance, far more interested in creating shadow with its perfect God, long list of ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ and demands of moral perfection, and seeing the imitation of Christ as the highest purpose in life instead of the development of the person, than in seeking to address the shadow and become friends with it:

“If the God is absolute beauty and goodness, how should he encompass the fullness of life, which is beautiful and hateful, good and evil, laughable and serious, human and inhuman? How can man live in the womb of the God if the Godhead himself attends only to one-half of him?” (Red Book 166)

It is not ethical principles, however lofty, or creeds, however orthodox, that lay the foundations for the freedom and autonomy of the individual, but simply and solely the empirical awareness, the incontrovertible experience of an intensely personal, reciprocal relationship between man and an extramundane authority which acts as a counterpoise to the ‘world’ and its ‘reason.’ (The Undiscovered Self 14)

While be understood traditional Christianity to have always been lop-sided, he believed that it at least had made room for the soul in the form of its elaborate, symbol-rich liturgies, sacraments, and mystical traditions. By eliminating such things, the Reformation had ripped Christianity’s heart out and left the official forms of Protestantism a religion entirely of the head and thereby completely unable to address that “extramundane authority,” which Jung called ‘the soul’ or ‘Self’, but which most of us call ‘God’.

How are we to react to these ideas as Christians in the world today? A lot of what Jung argues strikes me as true. As I’ve written about many times already, I see the working of the shadow everywhere in my own life and in the world around me. And I’m deeply sympathetic to the intuition that the problems of contemporary religion cannot be adequately solved by a lack of religion, but rather can only be healed by a healthy religion. And yet, I reject most of his criticisms of Christianity as facile and not reflective of the Christian tradition as a whole. I propose that, without recourse to some of Jung’s more radical proposals concerning Christianity (e.g., the supposed need for a fourth Person in the the Trinity (Quaternity?)), a healthy Christianity works in precisely the way he wanted it to, engaging with shadow and not creating it, and creating healthy communities grounded in honest understanding of self and love for one’s neighbour. But this will still require a thorough and critical reflection on our faith, traditions and practices, which is what we will undertake in the rest of this series.

* See the bibliography for the series for full information.