I gave my friend Bill a copy of an interview with John Kekes, whose books on politics have given me a kind of a voice for my own conservative point of view. In it, Kekes asserts that both Christianity and the Enlightenment failed to take evil seriously.
Well, I could see his point about the Enlightenment. A lot of abstract universalizing about the human race when what they really had in mind were white European males. Too much rationality. But Christianity?
Then I realized that he was talking about Augustine, who came to the conclusion that evil could not have an independent existence of its own but was a kind of parasitic emptiness of the good. Jung also found the doctrine of privatio boni impossible to swallow; it wrecked his great friendship with Victor White.
In these days of so much liberal ascendancy, with its implicit assumption of the perfectability of man, it is almost refreshing to hear Christianity criticized for being insufficiently grim!
2 comments:
I suppose Jung found it too tempting to resist 'betraying' a cleric named "Victor White." ... Strange narcissism to interpret publishing "Answer to Job" as a personal betrayal. Perhaps Jung was not yet sure he was courageous enough to publish this daring book when he reassured White that it was not for publication, or perhaps he lied. But why in either case is it a 'betrayal'?
Christian clerics may always be tending toward a naive simplisticness on the ultimacy of good and the derivativeness of evil, both in the seculum and in God, but the Bible does not drive this mistake.
In 'Answer to Job,' Jung sounds sort of "Gnostic," and I have almost no learning in these things. Yet isn't he finally suggesting that the most simplistic mistake is "splitting" à la two Gods, one material or matter-creating and evil, and one spiritual? I feel sure in any case that "privatio boni" correctly understood is a "horrifying doctrine," which Calvin said of election too.
The detour call'd modernity wouldn't have been necessary had the Teaching Church agreed to a strong reading of Aquinas and Dante.
As for the "betrayal" or inconvenience of "Answer to Job" for Christian clerics like Victor White who would use Jung rather than Freud for pastoral counselling of troubled youngsters, perhaps the temptation to 'cynicism' rather than 'wisdom' must be resisted not vis-a-vis Jung but vis-a-vis White. (Prots always suspect RC clergy of wishing to rule by a suppression of the truth. White didn't disagree with "Answer to Job" but merely wanted it put on the Index. ... And yet, in defense of the RC clergy against Prot clergy and 'secular' idealists, they at least sometimes promote this suspicion -- though we are to suspect only Jesuits, not Franciscans.)
Should we laugh unkindly at White's unintentionally comic version of the tragic beau role he grandly takes up after the publication of Jung's book on Job? “It seems that I am destined to be a wanderer & as homeless physically as I am spiritually.” Yeah, welcome to the pleroma, pal.
And what's this about the culmination of Jungian therapy in "object unity"? Sc the duality is maintain'd between the object-viewing ego qua instructed by the pschologist interpreter, who is not involved in the object? This dualism isn't even thematic?
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