The Shadow and Creation

On Friday we explored Jung’s claims that the Christian conception of God are insufficient to promote wholeness — that by pushing vast swaths of experience outside the divine, it instead promotes the division of the self into shadow and persona. In that post, I maintained that there are different ways of reading the Scriptures, that show a conception of God that was changing and growing over time, and far from relegating ‘bad’ things like anger and jealousy into the shadow, this evolution in how the faithful understood God’s character demonstrates a healthy integration of such feelings with the ego and persona. It’s not the stories themselves that are problematic, but how we tell them. Jung is absolutely correct that myths have the possibility to promote the growth of shadow instead of healthily integrating it. And this is what the rest of the series will look at: The stories of our faith and how they might be used to integrate and heal the soul, or conversely divide and harm it. Today we’ll look at the creation story.

We spent a lot of time on the creation story, or rather, creation stories, this past Summer. The first story, Genesis 1.1-2.3, shows God creating the world intentionally over six days, culminating with the creation of humanity in God’s “image and likeness” on the sixth day, and God resting on the seventh. The second starts with God making a garden for his human creation to live in, then creating animals and finally dividing humanity into male and female to attempt to resolve the human’s loneliness. It ends with the story of the Fall and humanity cast out of the garden for ever. What’s interesting here is that these stories leave us with very different perspectives on God, creation, and especially humanity:

These ideas permeate through whole worldviews and ideologies. For the most part, progressive Christians tend to focus on the themes of the first story, and more conservative Christians the latter. (Interestingly, the older you go in the Christian tradition, the more balanced and integrated theology you tend to find.) Do you think of humanity as inherently good by virtue of our creation, or inherently evil by virtue of our fallenness? Is our experience of the world fundamentally to be trusted, or should we view the world with suspicion? Is God for everyone, or does God take sides, preferring your people, country, or church over others? To a great degree, your answers to these questions are going to flow from which of these creation stories you prioritize.

If we focus too heavily on the first story, we may be tempted to deny our wrongdoing and sinfulness — we may see this in some Christians’ desire to water down the traditional prayers of confession. If we focus too heavily on the second, we may be tempted to reject decency and grace, whether for ourselves or for others — we see this for example in the famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” The second story, when not balanced by the first, can also lead to a great distrust of the world itself, turning the whole world into a vast conspiracy designed to lead the faithful astray. In its most extreme forms, this can lead to attitudes like those of people who insist that fossils were placed by the devil in order deceive people into accepting evolution. But of course the Scriptures contain both stories. Each on its own is imbalanced and partial. Neither on its own is able to account for the basic paradox of human existence: that we are all capable of great beauty and great ugliness, great goodness and great evil, and that while yes we believe there is sin in the world, that sin does not undo the inherent goodness and wisdom at the root of God’s beloved creation, of which we are a big part.

That said, both stories are inherently anthropocentric, with humanity being the focus of everything. In the first story, humanity is created in the very “image and likeness” of God, to have dominion over the whole earth and its creatures. In the second, the garden is made as a home specifically for humanity, and all the animals created specifically for the benefit of humans. We need to be very careful with how we tell this part of the story — especially now when we as a species are powerful enough to destroy the world with the press of a button, and have the natural world in a strangle-hold. Again, we have a choice in how we tell and live out the story. If we understand ‘dominion’ to be unlimited power and control that’s very different from understanding it as ‘sacred responsibility to care for’.

I’d be remiss to leave a post on shadow and creation without mentioning the first creation story’s method of creation by division. As we’ve seen, for Jung, the whole reason why the shadow is formed in the first place is the tendency to divide experiences and ideas. So, this story of God creating by separating everything into categories is a big deal for Jung. Now, it has to be said that it’s not just the shadow that’s formed by division; our ego and persona are too. This means it’s necessary and not a bad thing. The shadow comes into play when we assign values to the categories. This happens tacitly in the Genesis 1 story. God separates the light from the darkness of the void and we are meant to think the light is good; God separates the waters from the land and we are meant to be excited about the land’s appearance because that’s where we live. And so on. So we could easily read God’s creation by division as a kind of division of the world into good and bad. But reading on in the Scriptures, we see places where God is described in terms of darkness (e.g., on Sinai), or water, rounding out these images for us and reminding us that we don’t need to assign value judgments to the world and its categories.

Next time, we’ll look more closely at the doctrine of the Fall.