The Shadow of God

The first half of this series has attempted to show how traditional Christian practices have the power to act as shadow work, but also can, if we’re not careful, exacerbate the connected problems of a strong dark shadow and a bright but fragile persona. Today I’m going to turn the series to aspects of Christian teaching, and specifically today, the doctrine of God. This was something about which Jung had a lot to say, and to my mind, it’s probably the area in which is proposed solutions are the most unnecessarily wild. And it’s in his main texts on this topic where Jung really did lose many of his Christian readers.

Of the recurring refrains throughout this series so far has been, “The brighter the light, the darker the shadow.” And for Jung, nowhere is that more true than in the Christian conception of God. “The image of God,” Jung wrote in his journal, “throws a shadow that is just as great as itself” (The Red Book 120).* The Christian ideal of an all-powerful, all-holy, all-loving God who demands that we become like Him leaves no room, in Jung’s way of thinking, for the all-too-human realities of weakness, selfishness, and sin. The curious paradox of humanity is that we are simultaneously capable of incredible compassion, love, wisdom, creativity and beauty on the one hand and unimaginable selfishness, cruelty, and violence on the other. Any god worthy of our worship and emulation, according to Jung, had to reflect the wholeness of human experience:

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)

In Jung’s reading of the Christian story, there are two main movements that change and evolve God: the first is the story of Job, in which God learns that His actions have very real consequences for His creatures that He should be aware of; this ultimately leads to the second and most important movement, the Incarnation, in which humanity is brought fully into divinity and God can now understand humanity from humanity’s own perspective. But still, with Christ as a perfect and sinless figure, this does not go far enough for Jung. There are still large swaths of human experience that remain outside of God.

This connects to another idea that Jung found problematic: the idea of evil as privatio boni — not as having existence itself but as an absence of goodness and love. Again, he argued, something as fundamental to human experience as evil needed to be imagined as being real and substantive.

Similarly, Jung rejected what he saw as Christianity’s exclusion of feminine imagery from the divine. If we are male and female, and must work to unite the male and female energies within us, how can a God described almost exclusively in masculine terms be sufficient for us?

All of these criticisms hit at Jung’s essential framing of life’s big questions: not about goodness or holiness, but about wholeness. As Murray Stein put it, “For Jung the physician, the final criterion of a religious doctrine’s value is its psychological impact: The psychological wholeness of the believer is the final arbiter” (Jung’s Treatment of Christianity).

Even those who, like me, are at least sympathetic to Jung’s concerns about wholeness, his assessment of Christianity’s ideas of God (to say nothing of his proposed solutions) seems wildly off-base and overly simplistic. After all, the Scriptures do show an evolution in ideas about God: From the anthropomorphic, private God of Abraham, to the parochial and nationalist God of Elijah, to the universal and ethical God of Isaiah, who finds its fullest expression in the New Testament and the teaching of Jesus. And I would argue that this evolution in God’s people’s understanding of God growing and changing over time represents its own ‘journey to wholeness’. The God of the Prophets and of Jesus is not devoid of ‘negative’ things like anger or jealousy, but those traits are fully integrated into God’s personality, which is defined as love. God gets angry, but no longer at a perceived slight at God’s own honour, but at injustice. God is jealous when it comes to those God loves, but this jealousy is out of loving concern and a desire to protect rather than out of a sense of controlling. (It’s also in the later parts of the Old Testament, such as the Prophets and Wisdom literature, where we see the inclusion of feminine imagery for God, meaning that to some extent the tradition was self-correcting its original domination by masculine imagery and ceasing to conceive of God as male.) And this comes to its head in the Incarnation, where God brings things naturally outside of God’s experience into divinity — things like weakness, finitude, and partiality— and in which the perfect humanity that Jesus represents manifests a balance of traits stereotypically considered to be ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ — he knows who he is and is strong and courageous in the face of opposition, but is also caring and compassionate and receptive to others’ experiences. Jung is right that there is still a strong sense of perfectionism here, but I don’t see that as a problem. We may be taught to pursue perfection (‘Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect’ (Matthew 5.48)), but we’re never for a second meant to expect that we’ll get there. Just as the Jungian quest for wholeness is never-ending, so too is the Christian quest to adequately reflect God in the world. And I fail to see how either of those unreachable goals is inherently more prone to creating shadow than the other. By Jung’s own definitions, any and every idea casts a shadow. The only question is what we do with it.

We should indeed be wary of a partial God who seems to promote a one-sided humanity. And for that I’m grateful for Jung’s critiques. But I maintain our stories and myths are a lot more whole than he lets on, if we have ears to hear and eyes to see.