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Howl ye; for the day of the LORD is at hand: it shall come as a destruction from the Almighty, Therefore shall all hands be faint, and every man’s heart shall melt. And they shall be afraid: pangs and sorrows shall take hold of them; they shall be in pain as a woman travaileth: they shall be amazed one at another; their faces shall be as flames. Behold, the day of the LORD cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate; and he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it. For the stars of heaven and the constellations thereof shall not give their light: the sun shall be darkened in his going forth, and the moon shall not cause her light to shine. And I will punish the world for their evil, and the wicked for their iniquity; and I will cause the arrogance of the proud to cease, and will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible. I will make a man more precious than fine gold; even a man than the golden wedge of Ophir. Therefore I will shake the heavens, and the earth shall remove out of her place, in the wrath of the LORD of hosts, and in the day of his fierce anger. And it shall be as the chased roe, and as a sheep that no man taketh up: they shall every man turn to his own people, and flee every one into his own land. Every one that is found shall be thrust through; and every one that is joined unto them shall fall by the sword. Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished. Behold, I will stir up the Medes against them, which shall not regard silver; and as for gold, they shall not delight in it. Their bows also shall dash the young men to pieces; and they shall have no pity of the fruit of the womb; their eye shall not spare children. (Isaiah 13: 6–18)

When we read the Bible, we are as impressed with the dark side of God as with His light side. In Isaiah 45:7, the Lord describes himself as “One forming light and creating darkness, causing well-being and creating calamity.” In the second of the Ten Commandments, God declares himself a “jealous God” and threatens to visit “the iniquity of the fathers on the children of the third and the forth generations” of those who break His law (Exodus 20: 5). Again and again, as repetitiously as the throbbing of an intense pain, we are told that the Lord is “vengeful” and turns His “wrath” upon those who resist His will. When Moses failed to circumcise his son, God became enraged and attempted to kill him (Exodus 4: 24). When Jonah shirked the call to cry against the sins of the city of Nineveh, God had him swallowed into the belly of a whale until he was terrified into submission (Jonah 1: 17).

Even with those who had been faithful to Him, the biblical record portrays God’s behavior as sadistic. Though God characterizes his servant Job as a man who more than any other has been “blameless and upright … fearing God and turning away from evil” (Job 1: 8), He takes up Satan’s challenge: “Does Job fear God for nothing?” (Job 1: 9). In order to be sure that Job’s faithfulness is not simply fair-weather loyalty, God agrees with Satan’s proposal to test him with tribulations. A tornado is dispatched, which kills Job’s sons and daughters (Job 1: 19), and he is covered with boils and sores (Job 2: 7). Though the innocent victim of these heaven-sent afflictions, Job laments but does not cry out against his Maker (Job 16: 12–17):

I was at ease, and He broke me asunder;
He seized me by the neck and dashed me to pieces;
He set me up as His target, His archers surround me.
He slashes open my kidneys, and does not spare;
He pours out my gall on the ground.
He breaks me with breach upon breach;
He runs upon me like a warrior.
I have sewed sackcloth upon my skin,
and have laid my strength in the dust.
My face is red with weeping, and on my eyelids is deep
darkness; although there is no violence in my hands,
and my prayer is pure.

When God, in the form of a whirlwind and storm, finally speaks to the traumatized Job, He righteously declares to him that it would be ridiculous and blasphemous to question or protest his sufferings. “Where were you,” asks God, “when I laid the foundation of the earth!” (Job 38: 4). In two long speeches God reminds Job of His omnipotent power and reproaches him for having the audacity to even faintly question his treatment. He shows Job the monsters Behemoth (Job 40: 15) and Leviathan (Job 41: 1) and asks him how he could dare to question his Creator when he cannot even contend with his fellow creatures.

All this has come upon us, but we have not forgotten Thee, and we have not dealt falsely with Thy covenant, our heart has not turned back, and our steps have not deviated from Thy way, yet Thou has crushed us in a place of jackals, and covered us with the shadow of death. If we had forgotten the name of our God, or extended our hands to a strange god; … But for Thy sake we are killed all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered. Arouse Thyself, why dost Thou sleep, Lord? … Why dost Thou hide Thy face, and forget our affliction and our oppression? For our soul has sunk down into the dust; our body cleaves to the earth. Rise up, be our help, and redeem us for the sake of Thy lovingkindness.

The God of the Hebrew-Christian tradition is the single source both of affliction and lovingkindness. When the children of Israel suffer tribulation, it is because God has willed that it be so, and when they wish redemption from their sufferings, it is to that same one God they must turn. To love the Lord to His satisfaction requires that we bow down before Him in fear, for, as the Book of Job teaches, God demands our complete allegiance and is prepared to go to the most inhuman lengths to test it. Nowhere, it seems, are we more immediately in the presence of the Lord than when we are wracked with pain or covered with boils. God is both the world-destroying deluge and the rainbow which follows after it. In His wrath He destroys us, and in His mercy He spares us from His wrath. He is the author of both Good and Evil, pain and pleasure, and of life and death. He works by earthquake and volcano, whirlwind and storm, pestilence, famine and the atrocities of war. His is the name we ascribe to whatever overwhelms us (lest we be accused of having other gods before Him). His ordinances are the ordinances of trauma. His authority is the authority of trauma. All vengeance belongs to Him, and He is in all things that seem to punish, afflict, or spare us.

The religious moment, the moment of the deity, is the moment of tribulation or deliverance from tribulation. When the Hebrews invoked God, they were aware of this dread paradox and appealed to His benevolent side. In Psalm 9, we are told that “The Lord also will be a refuge for the oppressed, a refuge in times of trouble.” In Psalm 107, similarly, God is associated with the termination of affliction:

Then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and He saved them out of their distresses. He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and brake their bands in sunder. Oh that men would praise the Lord for His goodness, and for His wonderful works to the children of men! … Who so is wise, and will observe these things, even they shall understand the lovingkindness of the Lord. (13–15, 43)

When we read passages about the lovingkindness of the Lord, we get the distinct impression that the Psalmist “protesteth too loudly.” These passages, though often clearly inspired by the joy of deliverance, just as often seem to be the propitiating reaction formations of men “that hath seen affliction by the rod of His wrath” (Lamentations 3: 1). The story of Job gives especially clear witness to this tactic of the suffering creature to love into kindness the power which vanquishes it:

The Lord is my portion, saith my soul: therefore will I hope in Him. The Lord is good unto them that wait for Him, to the soul that seeketh Him. It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for salvation of the Lord … For the Lord will not cast off for ever: But though He cause grief, yet will he have compassion according to the multitude of His mercies. For He doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men. (Lamentations 3: 24–26, 31–33)

The wrath of God and the kindness of God are complexly interwoven. When we are crushed and broken by an overwhelming event, we experience firsthand what the ancient Hebrews knew as the rod of His wrath. A natural piety is called into play, a piety of terror and dread. Brought low, broken asunder, we prostrate ourselves before the stimulus that threatens to annihilate us as if before our Maker. Typically, there is a moral moment. It seems that we are being punished. But what are we being punished for? What have we done to warrant this affliction? We search ourselves for sin. If we can find ourselves guilty of some error or indiscretion, our suffering will at least make sense and we can set about making our atonement.

Often, however, we can find no sin and our affliction seems quite senseless. But here, too, we are easily given over to piety. As the pain increases so, too, does our sense of relationship to an omnipotent being. As the persistence of our suffering mocks our ability to understand it within the categories of our usual existence, our sense of relationship to a wholly other will and purpose grows. Gradually, conversion dawns. The ontology of the event that traumatizes us upstages our own ontology. In order to survive, we enter into the route of that which afflicts us and allow ourselves to be re-created by it. Submitting ourselves to its epistemology, we become the keepers of its law. “Glory, Glory, Glory, for the Lord, God, Omnipotent reigneth!” As piously as the phobic patient propitiates the eliciting stimulus of his phobia, we propitiate the overwhelming event that has transcended us, acknowledging its holiness. Only in the eye of the storm do we feel safe. Only in those ritualized observances that the faithless call our “symptoms” are we the children of God.

Whether Jesus really was the Son of God or just a man imbued by his followers with that distinction, his crucifixion at the hands of the Romans bequeathed to Western culture a wholly new concept of affliction and deity. Christ nailed to the Cross abbreviated the equation that exists between creature-suffering and the Creator-God perhaps even more succinctly than the torturous relationship between the Israelites and Yahweh in the Old Testament. Where before God had been an “anxiety object” afflicting (or delivering) man from the “outside,” in the Passion of Christ God’s spirit put on the flesh, crept under our skin and located itself inside our very sensations of suffering. God dying on the Cross, God dying for our sins, was God saving us through His suffering. The revolution of thought that constituted the revelation of the New Testament was that God in his love suffers also.

If the God of the New Testament seems more kindly and compassionate toward mankind than the God of the Old Testament, this change is proportionate with the increase of Christ’s sufferings at Golgotha – Place of a Skull. Affliction not only persists in the New Testament; it becomes the way to God. Nowhere, according to the logic of the crucifixion, are we more reconciled to the Lord than in Christ’s passion. By becoming a man and suffering a human death, God sanctified suffering and redeemed it. No longer did suffering punitively correct a discrepancy between God’s will and man’s ways, but, rather, through the agony of Christ, it accented their reconciliation. [1] As the Catholic theologian Hans Küng put it:

Nowhere did it become more clearly visible than in Jesus’ life and work, suffering and death, that this God is a God for men, a God who is wholly on our side. He is not a theocratical God, creating fear, “from above,” but a God friendly to men, suffering with men, “with us below.” It is scarcely necessary to insist that we are talking here in metaphors, symbols, analogies. But what is meant is understandable enough and it is now clearer than ever that the God manifested in Jesus is not a cruel, despotic, legal-minded God, but a God encountering man as redeeming love, identifying himself in Jesus with suffering man. [2]

For the Christian, God can be known as a comfort that abides within affliction, a comfort that does not banish our sufferings but helps them to be borne. Through the agency of the crucified Christ, suffering becomes a meeting ground between God and man. It is not just that God approaches man by identifying with his sufferings; man moves nearer to God through suffering as well. Although pain and affliction may give rise to feelings of “being forsaken by God,” from the Christian perspective it can “become the point of encounter with God,” [3] the point of our greatest intimacy with Him. As Paul wrote in his second letter to the Corinthians:

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer. And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort. (1: 3–7)

“The Christian religion,” writes Ludwig Feuerbach, “is the religion of suffering.” [4] Through Christ’s suffering and the mystical participation of our sufferings in his, profane man becomes Christian man. As Pascal said, “Suffering is the natural state of the Christian, just as health is that of the ‘natural’ man.” [5] While human suffering circumscribes the finiteness of corporeal man, Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection point the way which leads through suffering to the infinity of God. “The religious individual,” according to Kierkegaard, “lies fettered in the finite with the absolute conception of God present to him in human frailty.” [6] The smaller and more vulnerable each of us is, the greater and more transcending God seems. His strength is a function of our weakness, even as His limitlessness can be seen as a reversal of our puniness. If we would “seek first the kingdom of God (Matthew 6: 33),” as the scripture demands, we must surrender ourselves first to our sufferings which, by transfixing us upon the cross of our own finiteness, eventually convey us into the presence of the infinite God, who, as deus absconditus , is paradoxically so very present in his absence.

Theology, the logic of deity, is a logic of suffering. Above all, the story of the risen Crucified provides a model of hanging in with affliction and pain until its logos emerges. Though we may feel utterly forsaken in a Gethsemane of meaningless despair, eventually a meaning will declare itself if we stay with what is happening. The incredible popularity of the Christian faith resides in the soul’s need for examples such as the one Jesus provides. The soul that has been traumatized by events it cannot take in needs to be supplied with images that can hold the overwhelming events in a holding pattern until the imagination can respond to them. Without some kind of model of perseverance and endurance, the soul will tend to retreat from life into defensive withdrawal.

But there is a problem with the Christian model. Although the example of Christ crucified shepherds the soul through the shadowy valley of afflicting events, it does not take the soul through these events to their meanings. The Christian model of suffering belongs to the body of Christian meaning and returns all suffering to that body. Overwhelming events do not have value in themselves, only by virtue of God’s having suffered them with us and only to the extent that they lead the soul to God. One meaning covers all events. No matter what it was that had transcended us, our suffering through it in Christ bears witness only to God’s love for man as manifested by His sacrifice of His Son.

Conjuring a God that is tailor-made to meet our needs for preservation does not help the soul to come to terms with the traumatic events that threaten to annihilate it. Indeed, when the soul is saved or rescued by this helpful deity, the events it was saved from may come to be viewed as even more traumatic. Whatever we do not face but gain salvation from remains unredeemed and becomes Satanic. Evil is the excrement or waste product emitted by the salvation process itself. Ironically, the more we are saved, the more there is to be saved from.

“No one comes to the Father but by the Son” (Matthew 11: 27). This statement is more than a statement of the compassion of Christ; it is a statement of epistemology as well. No one comes to knowledge (i.e., the Father) except by suffering incomprehensible events with Christ through to the Christian truth that God is love. The circularity here is noteworthy: we start with the faith position that God manifests His love by suffering incomprehensible, overwhelming events with us and then decree that, though God is incomprehensible and overwhelming, His one great trait is the love He makes perfect with us in our suffering. But the irony remains that what we suffered on Good Friday is no clearer by Easter Monday. Indeed, the challenge of working out the unique epistemologies of what we had been suffering is then either forgotten altogether (repression) or attributed to the devil (splitting). By conveying the suffering soul to the monotheistic Father (before whom no other gods may be respected), the Christian model pre-empts the soul from suffering events through to the particular theophanies latent it them.

The tremendous image of Christ dominates our culture’s relation to pathologizing. The complexity of psychopathology with its rich variety of backgrounds has been absorbed by this one central image and been endowed with one main meaning: suffering. The passio of suffering Jesus – and it is as translation of Jesus’ passion that “suffering” first enters our language – is fused with all experiences of pathology. [9]

Christ’s model of suffering, in other words, has become the script for all suffering. Every event that is anomalous or dystonic to our ego’s point of view is a place of crucifixion – abandonment (Gethsemane), agony (the whipping, the lance, the nails), humiliation (the crown of thorns), bitterness (the sop of vinegar), forgiveness (“Forgive them Father, they know not what they do”), and triumph over mortification (resurrection). As Hillman has put it,

… Christianity has nailed suffering to resurrection – first nail: it is good for you; second nail; it is isolating and heroic, and third, it always leads to a better day, Easter. Well, it doesn’t – we all know that! Suffering has other models, too, like deepening in the sense of Saturn, like dissolving and letting go in the sense of Dionysus, like raging and fighting back; it can make for prophesy; it can make for love; or the kinds of suffering we see in the women in Greek drama. We need many models, besides the Christian one, to locate our psychological experiences. [10]

Nothing in more crucial to the soul-making process, the process of turning events into experiences, than precision with regard to the events in question. Hillman’s move of “bypass[ing] the Christian view by stepping behind it to the Greeks, to polytheism,” [11] frees psychology to experience events more in terms of their own aboriginal or archetypal backgrounds. In the world of the ancient Greeks, a person who was ill or otherwise afflicted by transcending circumstances made a pilgrimage to Delphi and asked the oracle there which gods or heroes he should sacrifice to in order to get back into harmony with existence.

Sacrificing to a god within a pantheon of other gods is very different than worshipping the so-called one true God. Where the monotheistic God is at least as immense, transcending, and unabsorbable as the event His Son has saved us from, a polytheistic god, by virtue of existing in a pantheon, is a spirit of precise dimensions. Reflecting a trauma against divine backgrounds within a polytheistic context does not preserve the sense of its infinite and overwhelming proportions; rather, it divides or differentiates this “infinity” in terms of a number of gods. Each particular deity, simply by virtue of being different from the others, helps the supplicant to particularize events while at the same time acknowledging that they transcend him. When we know to which god an event belongs, we are in a better place to individuate a relationship to it and incorporate it as an experience. But until we go to the Delphi of a perspectival epistemology, we remain in the radical monotheism of our trauma.

The God of love has not had much love for the other gods, as the battles between Christians and pagans attest. As John Milton argues in his nativity ode, when Christ was born, the oracles were stilled. No longer could Delphi give us diagnosis. No longer could we find the altars specific to our afflictions and concerns. The process of returning events to their archetypal dominants was expropriated by a single instance of it, the Christian one. Incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection and apocalypse became our model of response for all events and happenings. The statement “No one comes to the Father but by the Son,” combined with the commandment that we have no other “as if” perspectives before God, became the war cry of Christian soldiering. [12] Not only did it arm the Christian against the pagan events that threatened him with harm; it armed him for a counterattack. The Inquisition – the persecution of the heretics, the alchemists, and the gnostics: the wholesale slaughter of the imagination in the name of Christian truth – reveals the shadow side of the Christian God of love and shows us the trauma that is constellated by the blood that washes away all sin. [13]

In the Book of Revelation, the trauma of the triumphant Christ is made devastatingly clear. As a “wrathful Lamb” the Christ of the Apocalypse opens the seven seals of the “Book of Redemption,” a book containing the story of man’s fall through sin and rise through Christ (Hebrews 2: 5–9), and releases destruction upon the world in the form of war, famine, death, earthquake, solar eclipse, and the vengeance of the Christian martyrs (Revelation 6: 1–17). Though Christ may be the spirit who suffers with man and vicariously atones for man’s sins, at the end, according to Christian orthodoxy, he will also visit affliction and cruelly and despotically judge those sins.

The New Testament idea that God became incarnate in human flesh makes explicit the relationship that had always existed between what Shakespeare later referred to as “the thousand shocks which mortal flesh is heir to” and religion. Human pain had pointed to God long before Jesus suffered it. Whatever afflictions man was unable to reduce for himself became the act of a deity, the act of a god. In this way culture was engaged in a fashion helpful to the suffering individual. But when the suffering soul was unable to return its affliction to a particular deity, that affliction became the voice of the one true God.

The commandment of monotheism’s God that man have no other gods before Him (Exodus 20: 3) was the commandment of traumatic events which lay outside the capacity of mankind’s present cultural containers to relativize and absorb. When Moses came down from Mount Sinai, his face burned pink from the presence of the Lord, the first commandment he read to his people from the list of ten was a “divine” admonishment that they have no other gods before His trauma.

The triumph of monotheism over polytheism – a triumph mistakenly viewed by many writers as culturally progressive – was the triumph of overwhelming events over the imagination. When events defy the imagination’s capacity to differentiate between them, they assault the soul as a unified, monotheistic, omnipotent presence. Unable to make differences between itself and the huge jumble of events that assail it as its Other, the soul-making process becomes crippled. As Freud and Breuer put it, “… any impression which the nervous system has difficulty dealing with by means of associative thinking or by motor reaction becomes a psychical trauma.” [14]

Let us imagine that the making of the covenant with the Trauma-God at Sinai was a defensive attempt to deny the felt sense of its already, in advance of itself, having been broken. While the biblical account holds that the children of Israel broke faith with the covenant after it was given to Moses, a psychoanalytic approach to the story would read this sequence in reverse. Regarded in this way, the making and un-making of the golden calf reflects the Israelites’ failed attempt to master the events assailing them. Unable to form an imaginative relationship with those events, there remained no other recourse but to form a covenant with them. Monotheism, from this perspective, was less a triumph over polytheism than the failure of the imagination, the failure of soul-making. Man makes covenants with events in a monotheistic fashion only to the extent that they overwhelm his capacity to connect with them imaginatively – or, as Freud and Breuer said, through “associative thinking.” Just as a psychic rupture precedes the phobic patient’s compulsive propitiation of an aversive stimulus, so a breach in the psyche precedes the making of a covenant.

The notion that a covenant with God was broken by idolatrous acts of the imagination is the pious cover story of a consciousness identified with the trauma that the imagination had failed to protect it from. Indeed, it is only after our calf breaks that the omnipotent God, who accuses us of breaking our covenant with him, appears in the first place. At Sinai, the soul-making project that constituted the making of the golden calf was not enough to absorb the trauma, which the children of Israel faced. Unable to turn the events confronting them into experiences that could be reconciled with their existence, the victims blamed themselves, repented their attempts at mastery, and threw themselves upon the mercy of the events afflicting them as upon the mercy of a jealous, wrathful God.

“The great religions,” writes C. S. Lewis, “were first preached, and long practiced, in a world without chloroform.” [15] Affliction and suffering, Lewis rightly reminds us, has not been a discovery of modern science, but was ubiquitously present in the past as well, at the time when religions were being formed. Interestingly, Lewis uses this observation to suggest that pain was not the stimulus that elicited religion. “At all times,” he writes, “… the inference from the course of events in this world to the goodness and wisdom of God would have been equally preposterous and it was never made.” [16] This statement, of course, is highly dubious. Indeed, one need only skim through the Old Testament with a psychoanalytic eye to see that the wrath of God and His lovingkindness were complexly interconnected despite their ambiguity. And, yet, as if anticipating the present thesis that “God” and trauma operate in the psyche as overlapping categories, Lewis rules out from the beginning the role of the traumatic factor in the formation of religion. Seeking, perhaps, to counter the argument of some atheists that suffering is a proof of the non-existence of God (if God be defined as all-knowing, all-powerful, and benign), Lewis declares that it is only “after belief in God has been accepted [that] ‘theodicies’ explaining, or explaining away, the miseries of life, will naturally appear …” [17]

This statement, made in the early pages his book The Problem of Pain , supplies the fissure through which a deconstructive reading of his subsequent argument can be made. By ruling out the etiological significance of the phenomenon of pain in the creation of the God-concept, Lewis renders its significance stingingly present. The Trauma-God that Lewis brushes away so casually is as rudimentary to his argument – and, thus, as psychologically present within it – as the God that he goes on to affirm. Indeed, the theological slight-of-hand which Lewis employs to defer the problem of reconciling pain with a benevolent God until after we already believe in God’s benevolence can be seen as a textbook example of how defenses such as splitting, rationalization, and idealization operate in a trauma-based faith.

Before quoting some of the more flamboyant examples of this clinical, and at the same time, theological syndrome from the pages of Lewis’s theodicy of pain, we must note another of his slight-of-hand moves. In the chapter, “Human Pain,” Lewis distinguishes between two groups of pain. The pain of group A Lewis describes as “a particular kind of sensation, probably conveyed by specialised nerve fibers, and recognizable by the patient as that kind of sensation whether he dislikes it or not (e.g., the faint ache in my limbs would be recognized as an ache even if I did not object to it.)” [18] The pain of group B Lewis describes as “any experience, whether physical or mental, which the patient dislikes.” [19] Delineating the two groups of pain still more sharply, Lewis adds:

It will be noticed that all Pains in sense A become Pains in sense B if they are raised above a certain very low level of intensity, but that Pains in B sense need not be Pains in A sense. Pain in the B sense, in fact, is synonymous with “suffering,” “anguish,” “tribulation,” “adversity,” or “trouble,” and it is about it that the problem of pain arises. For the rest of this book Pain will be used in the B sense and will include all types of suffering: with the A sense we have no further concern. [20]

While Lewis’s move here seems to be aimed at more intensely focusing attention upon the kind of pain most perturbing to the reader, his theodicean strategy, conscious or unconscious, is to place suffering in the arena of the likes and dislikes of the finite, egoistic human subject so that he can later make the argument that suffering is a divine corrective of man’s merely finite and egoistic human perspective.

At first glance, even the psychoanalytically-minded reader may be seduced into accepting this punctuation of the problem. If neurosis is one-sidedness, as Jung said, [21] and if nothing is more foreign to the ego than the symptom, as Freud maintained, [22] then soul-making will require that the ego be re-made or re-imagined from the perspective of the symptoms which afflict us, as Hillman has suggested. [23] The pain of group B, which Lewis’s God permits man to suffer, could, on this account, sometimes be therapeutic for man, even as for the psychoanalyst the ego can become more at home in the psyche by having it out with symptoms.

If we examine Lewis’s argument more closely, however, we notice that the dichotomy into which he divides pain, while having a certain existential validity, is logically suspect with respect to the problem at hand. Since we are all used to ignoring the lesser aches and pains to which we are subject as a matter of course, we readily agree with Lewis to bracket from discussion those sensations of pain that have not reached an acute intensity. But precisely here is where a valence is surreptitiously shifted with respect to the larger question. The fact that we routinely pass over the minor aches and pains of our bodily life is merely an observation, not an argument. It does not entail our making philosophical divisions between types of pain, at least not on Lewis’s scale. Theodicy cannot coast upon these coattails.

And yet, in Lewis’s text it does. By dividing pain into his two types, the erstwhile apologist queers the pitch with respect to how the theological problem is put. Right off the bat, the inhuman face of pain drops out of the discussion, even while Lewis focuses our attention on “ ‘suffering,’ ‘anguish,’ ‘tribulation,’ ‘adversity,’ or ‘trouble.’ ” We do not realize, perhaps Lewis does not realize, that he has maneuvered us into viewing the pain that is of concern to human beings as if man, through the agency of his likes and dislikes, were its measure. Though “all Pains in sense A become Pains in sense B if they are raised above a certain low level of intensity,” we are advised that “with [pain in] the A sense we have no further concern.” With this move, the logical level is collapsed into the literal, form into content. The fact that we do not merely suffer from this or from that, but may be “beside ourselves” with suffering, is no longer recognized. On the contrary, crammed into man as what Lewis calls “human pain,” the pain that has produced this “beside-ourselves” state is denied its metaphysical status as man’s Other. And it is in this way that man’s ultimate Other, God, is defended in Lewis’s text from the kind of critique that the problem of pain inspires.

But pain that exceeds the “certain low level of intensity” necessary for it to become a problem to man is not necessarily bounded by man. The grimace that contorts the face of a body racked with pain attests to the fact that the pain has passed beyond the limit of the body’s capacity to measure or bear it – the likes and dislikes of the subject be damned! The cruel irony of pain, an irony Lewis neglects to square with his loving God, is that the very increase in intensity of pain that puts pain into the soul of man puts man out of his soul.

By way of contrast, let us think of Lewis’s two kinds of pain in relation to the psychoanalytic concept of narcissism. Viewed from the perspective offered by this notion, Lewis’s distinction may be read as a very weak charting of the territory Freud had in mind when he distinguished between primary and secondary narcissism – at least insofar as the pleasure principle is concerned. On this account, pains in Lewis’s A sense would correspond, however dimly, to wounds at the level of primary narcissism. Denied by our character-defenses, pain inscribed at this early, infant-level may well seem as unobjectionable as Lewis suggests, but only because the repressed does not complain of its hurts in a direct manner! As for pain in Lewis’s group B sense, this may be viewed as roughly corresponding to secondary narcissism, if only because it is louder, there being an ego present to raise objections to life’s slings and arrows. But this does not mean that we may let the one level drop away, as Lewis would have us do. Streaming back to its source in the primary narcissism of the pre-verbal, body-self, a more articulate secondary narcissism may well pick up on the pains in A sense with a more differentiated sense of their acuteness. And further to this, analysis may reveal a veritable inferno of pre-verbal traumas, where before there had only been a faint ache in the limbs that was unobjectionable to the patient. Bringing back together what Lewis had defensively split apart in the course of his argument, we may here recall Winnicott’s comment that even “the smallest skin lesion … concerns the whole personality …” [24]

We simply cannot let go the problem of pain in the group A sense as brashly as Lewis does, no matter how insignificant such aches and pains may seem. For to do so, as we have seen, undermines the metaphysical status of pain in general. Also, how the line is drawn between insignificant pain and full-blown suffering is far from clear when the unconscious is figured into the mix. In each case we must ask ourselves if this line is as clear as it appears to be or if, on the other hand, this is the point where defenses have been deployed. And then there is the issue of primary and secondary narcissism. Though there certainly are pains that are merely ego-dystonic and attributable largely to man’s narrow egoism, psychotic anxieties inscribed at the level of primary narcissism may lurk within these.

It is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the Devil. A sinner in a world ruled by God may be bad; but there is always a certain security to be derived from the fact that the world around is good – “God’s in His heaven – All’s right with the world!”; and in any case there is always the hope of redemption. In a world ruled by the Devil the individual may escape the badness of being a sinner; but he is bad because the world around him is bad. Further, he can have no sense of security and no hope of redemption. The only prospect is one of death and destruction. [25]

When our ancestors referred to pains and sorrows as God’s “vengeance” upon sin they were not necessarily attributing evil passions to God; they may have been recognizing the good element in the idea of retribution. Until the evil man finds evil unmistakably present in his existence, in the form of pain, he is enclosed in illusion. Once pain has roused him, he knows that he is in some way or other “up against” the real universe: he either rebels (with the possibility of a clearer issue and deeper repentance at some later stage) or else makes some attempt at an adjustment, which, if pursued, will lead him to religion. [26]

Despite the fact that he had earlier argued that man seeks to give an account of the connection between God and pain only after a benevolent God is already believed in, Lewis here describes a scenario where pain has been the springboard to recognition of God. In his elaboration of this point, Lewis describes this God-sent or God-permitted pain in benign terms as “God’s megaphone”:

Strategically, Lewis begins by looking at the function of pain for the bad man before he addresses the pain in the lives of those of us who do not behave in “bad” or “evil” ways. The implication so far is that God shows that He is a loving God by taking the trouble to speak through His megaphone of pain to those thick-skulled, sociopathic individuals who could hear His call in no other way. Since it is commonly believed that bad men need punishment in order to help them to become good, Lewis can most easily square pain with a loving God with reference to those cases where it is being suffered by morally reprehensible people. It is important to note here that it is as an extension of the bad man argument that Lewis, in the next paragraph, goes on to give his account of why bad things happen to good people.

If the first and lowest operation of pain shatters the illusion that all is well, the second shatters the illusion that what we have, whether good or bad in itself, is our own and enough for us. Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us. We “have all we want” is a terrible saying when “all” does not include God. We find God an interruption. As St. Augustine says somewhere “God wants to give us something, but cannot, because our hands are full – there’s nowhere for Him to put it.” Or as a friend of mine said “we regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it’s there for emergencies but he hopes he’ll never have to use it.” Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him. Yet we will not seek it in Him as long as He leaves us any other resort where it can even plausibly be looked for. While what we call “our own life” remains agreeable we will not surrender it to Him. What then can God do in our interests but make “our own life” less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness? It is just here, where God’s providence seems at first to be most cruel, that the Divine humility, the stooping down of the Highest, most deserves praise. [28]

Compared to God – who is the all-good, all-powerful, absolute truth – we, like the bad man, are all to some extent off the track. If painful events afflict us, if our worldly hopes go bankrupt or tragedy strikes one of our loved ones, God is at work, recalling us to Himself through His divine megaphone. After all, man cannot live by bread alone, and famine can be squared with the love of God by seeing it as God’s attempt to lead us to His spirit, which is our proper food. The things of the world are merely relative; God is eternal. By calling to us in our pain, God reminds us of this distinction, enabling us to surrender to the absolute. But from the psychoanalytic perspective, events from the so-called “merely relative” world that are traumatic and overwhelming cannot be relativized by the soul (which they have punctured) for they seem to the soul to be no less absolute than the so-called one true God. If it is a traumatic or painful event, which has conveyed the soul to a religious experience, how can we be sure whether that soul is surrendering to the ontological God of religion and theology or simply to a bad object, interior saboteur, or superego representation, which has been abstracted from the severity of the hurt itself?

At the end of this argument, it is interesting to note the ruse Lewis uses to repress a psychological reading of the relationship between pain and religious conversion. Rather than entertain the prospect that we defend ourselves from overwhelming events by deifying them and identifying with them (Anna Freud called this mode of defense “identification with the aggressor”), Lewis simply acts this out in a sermonizing manner:

If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is “nothing better” now to be had. The same humility is shown by all those Divine appeals to our fears which trouble high-minded readers of scripture. It is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose Him as an alternative to Hell: yet even this He accepts. [29]

shut himself up in his cell … stripped himself naked … and took his scourge with the sharp spikes, and beat himself on the body and on the arms and legs, till blood poured off him as from a man who has been cupped. One of the spikes of the scourge was bent crooked, like a hook, and whatever flesh it caught it tore off. He beat himself so hard that the scourge broke into three bits and the points flew against the wall. He stood there bleeding and gazed at himself. It was such a wretched sight that he was reminded in many ways of the appearance of the beloved Christ when he was fearfully beaten. Out of pity for himself he began to weep bitterly. And he knelt down, naked and covered in blood in the frosty air, and prayed to God to wipe out his sins from before his gentle eyes. [30]

Given the soul’s natural tendency to divinize and propitiate all hurts and pains it is unable to handle through “associative thinking or motor reaction,” we should not be surprised to find masochistic suffering playing a central role in the lives of persons who have intentionally sought encounter with God. In order to enhance their relationship to God, mystics, saints, and martyrs have long exploited the physiological relationship between suffering and spirituality by intentionally subjecting themselves to pain and affliction. Just as the divinely victimized Job shrieked out in his torments, “Even after my skin is destroyed, Yet from my flesh I shall see God (Job 19: 26),” many religious seekers have attempted to awaken the gift of mystic vision in themselves by deliberately destroying their flesh through self-mortifying acts.

The more we are hurt, the more we are beside ourselves with pain, the closer we are to ecstatic union with that overwhelming intensity of stimulus the pious have called God. While low levels of pain may make us peevish and personal, intolerable affliction destroys the self, releasing the sufferer from the finite limits personhood had imposed. As Karen Horney writes, “… all masochistic strivings are ultimately directed toward satisfaction, namely, toward the goal of oblivion, of getting rid of self with all its conflicts and all its limitations.” [31]

In the annihilation of the soul’s capacity to make experiences, the mystic “experiences” divine rapture. As the intensity of a pain grows greater and greater, it eventually surpasses the capacity of the imagination to accommodate it. [32] Consciousness shatters. Metaphors give way to symbols. Held in thrall by the flaming nerves that burn in the tortured body, the traumatized soul surrenders its imaginal freedom and prostrates itself before the fire of the body’s agony as before a vision of the Lord. What had begun simply enough as the painful sensations of self-torture becomes in an instant – precisely that instant in which the agony is intensive enough to estrange the soul from the body – the symbolism of a transcending spirituality. “I could not possibly explain it,” writes St. Theresa of Avila,

In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he pulled it out, I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God. The pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans. The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one cannot possibly wish it to cease, nor is one’s soul then content with anything but God. [33]

Although the New Testament does not specifically instruct the Christian soul to torture itself, it states quite clearly that the path of the Christian is a path that leads through suffering. “Through many tribulations,” the Apostles told new initiates, “we must enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 24: 22). “Behold,” Jesus told his followers, “I have given you authority to tread upon serpents and scorpions … nothing will hurt you” (Luke 10: 19). Paul is particularly clear on this point, “boasting” of his own afflictions (2 Corinthians 11: 23–33) as if these were the humbling prerequisites to the “visions and revelations of the Lord” he had been subject to (2 Corinthians 12: 1–10). In the same passage, Paul tells his Corinthian audience that he suffered “a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to buffet me – to keep me from exalting myself” because of “the surpassing greatness of the revelations.” Despite three appeals to God for healing, Paul writes, his malady persisted. Nevertheless, the great apostle suffered his thorn gladly for the Lord told him, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.” Writing in a similar vein, Peter, in this first epistle, suggests that our spiritualization is directly proportionate with our sufferings: “… to the degree that you share the sufferings of Christ, keep rejoicing; so that also at the revelation of His glory, you may rejoice with exultation” (1 Peter 4: 13).

Suffering, in the words of Thomas à Kempis, author of the classic text of Catholic devotional De Imitatione Christi , is the “gymnastic of eternity,” the “terrible initiative caress of God.” While mostly the soul flees pain as if it were fleeing the wrath of God, it can also deify traumatic stimulation by willingly impaling itself upon it like the saints, mystics and martyrs who run so “eagerly and merrily to the Cross.” Just as God is encountered in pestilence and death, famine and flood, earthquake and lightning flash, He is encountered as well in the sting of the scourge with which one assaults one’s own body. Through acts of masochism, the seeker of God can invoke the loving sadism of his Lord’s touch. Marx was right: religion is the opium of the people. With the same firing of nervous impulses that the flagellant brings about to invoke God, he releases the natural opiates in his afflicted body. God is the leather strap, the willow switch, the cat-o’-nine-tails, and the cane. He is the gnashing of the teeth, the raving of the nerves, and the creature’s anguished cry. No matter how we are flayed, cut, broken, or pierced – voluntarily or involuntarily – we encounter God in trauma.

In The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto speculates that the earliest names for deity were derived from the inarticulate shrieks and cries that were emitted from the larynx of early man when he shuttered in terror and amazement before overwhelmingly numinous events. Quoting from the Kena-Upanishad, Otto shows how involuntary sounds that express the numinous feelings stirring in man when he encounters overwhelming events (such as thunder and lightning) may have become associated with the Numinous itself,

When the soul tires of itself and words fail, when metaphors can no longer be found through which to individuate a relationship to transcending events, a groan may be emitted, a groan so different from the soul’s usual experience of itself that, as Paul would later say, it seems to be “not I who speak, but Him in me.” By prohibiting the invectives of the traumatized soul, the commandment not to take the name of the Lord in vain deprives it of its most natural mechanism for anxiety release. Presumably, if we could utter a shriek or a moan these could be used to differentiate overwhelming experiences at least to a minimal degree. Were the soul permitted to hear the difference between one groan and another, the differences in intensity, pitch and timbre, it could use these sounds as metaphors to particularize the events that overwhelm it. But the commandment not to cry out forbids the comparison of inarticulate sounds, preserving the awesomeness of the eliciting stimulus and traumatic response. With each cry that is held back in the throat, the event to which it was a response becomes more and more other until, like a God, it becomes wholly other. God is the deferral of cursing and swearing, the deferral of groaning, weeping, howling and shrieking, and the indefinite postponement of whimpering in the dark. He is the inarticulate made Holy, the sanctification of the literally unspeakable, a circumcised tongue.

Of course, the commandment not to take the name of the Lord in vain is also a commandment not to swear false covenants. When men made covenants or contracts with one another they solemnized them by swearing before the presence of God. “If I default on my agreement with you, may the Lord strike me dead with lightning.” Ironically, the overwhelming and unpredictable events with which early man made covenants in order to render them less traumatic and less unpredictable became the background in whose terms he attempted to render his secular affairs more benign and predictable. Agreements made with reference to the name of God were made with reference to that jumble of traumatic events before which man trembled when he uttered the inarticulate sounds from which the deity’s name was later derived. God is as severe as the events that took our speech away, replacing it with the cries and groans of a traumatized creaturehood. “If I break my agreement with you, may God subject me to the moaning and groaning of the sufferings which mankind has attempted to propitiate by splitting off and deifying.”

Words, as the saying goes, are cheap. In order to make them binding and substantive, early man linked them to the inarticulate shrieks and moans through which he submitted to the authority of overwhelming stimulation as if before a God. Even today, words may seem more credible if there is a plaintiveness in them, an inarticulate excess of emotion. And, yet, like a confession at gun-point, trauma-laden speech may give us cause for skepticism. Its sincerity may be entirely a function of its identification with the power that has transcended, hurt, startled or frightened it.

In the New Testament, Jesus, God’s suffering son, is called “the Word” and described as being linguistically pre-existent in God. “In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1: 1). Perhaps, this Christic Word which dwelt from the beginning with God and which later “became flesh” (John 1: 14) was actually the pathetic groan or inarticulate whimper of early man – not a word at all but, rather, the failure of words, an anti-word. No one comes to the father but by the shrieks and groans of His Son, the “living Word.” Christ groaning on the cross, Christ groaning with us, is Christ groaning vicariously for us.

If, as T. S. Eliot wrote, the world will end “not with a bang but a whimper,” perhaps it will be with the whimpers we have “given to the Lord.” If, today, “we are hollow men,” perhaps it is because throughout our yesterdays we have devalued ourselves through monotheism. After several millennia of our endowing overwhelming events with the incarnational vulnerability they make so unbearable in ourselves, the whimpering of our displaced humanity has probably reached the mega-tonnage sufficient to break forth with quite a bang. On the other hand, if each of us, individually, would allow ourselves to whimper – to whimper and curse, and curse and swear – perhaps we could begin to diffuse the stock-pile of insufficiently experienced events and emotions that we have given to the Lord and learned to call “God.”

“If God is small enough for me to understand Him, then He’s not big enough to be God!” says the Believer with a blink. Perhaps no popular adage could better express how the no-name God of monotheistic religion produces unconsciousness. The adage not only displays a mind-set for which the will to believe has upstaged the will to understand, it displays a predilection for believing big . “If you’re going to believe, believe BIG!,” the believer ostentatiously booms. Ironically, while monotheistic religion boasts that its God is larger than what its understanding can encompass, His size does not exceed the immensity of the credulity it demonstrates with this boasting. Perhaps large monotheistic gods are not exclusively the consequence of huge tribulations, but are the consequence of big believers as well. Indeed, what would become of the one true God, the jealous God before whom one may recognize no other categories of understanding, if He did not have big believers to sustain and promote Him?

Traumatic events are not all painful. Frequently, the imagination is fixated by events, which stop it from imagining on but do not cause pain. The birth of a child, for instance, may be as overwhelming for the new father as for the mother. The sudden appearance of the new life immediately cancels the conventions of its parents’ old life, temporarily bankrupting their previous soul-making. We should not be surprised, therefore, that new parents often admit to being afraid of their children and sometimes even suffer depression or psychosis following a birth they may have joyously anticipated. It is a tremendous responsibility to be the parent of an overwhelming event, the mother or father of God.

But even events that are neither painful nor as overwhelming as the “miracle of childbirth” can stop the imagination when they are taken to be subject to the will of a divine being whom by definition we cannot understand. If God would not be God if He were small enough for man to understand, and if God is working in mysterious ways in events that defy man’s comprehension, it would be hubris for men and women to try to bring clarity to life through the action of their own minds. The more we hold to be accounted for by an explanatory category which we do not understand, the more we fail to grapple with the inherent mystery of the events themselves. The idea that God is absolutely beyond man’s capacity to fathom dislocates the mediating function of the imagination, devaluing the metaphors and models it creates as merely the productions of a finite intelligence. But when the soul-making process is devalued, the psyche itself is at risk. The soul-destroying consequence of worshipping a God who is identical with our inability to understand Him is that we then tend to propitiate, as if they too were completely transcending, events that the soul might otherwise have been able to comprehend and absorb.

It is not only as the defensive maneuver of an exhausted imagination that the God-concept appears and produces unconsciousness. Unconsciousness is built right into the notion of an omniscient God. Inasmuch as we “explain” what we cannot understand by dropping the name of a God we hold to be at least as inexplicable, we have merely glorified darkness as mystery. The unfathomable mind of God is an anti-concept which clarifies nothing. It is not just that the less we can explain the more omniscient we believe God to be. The corollary is also true: the more omniscient God seems to be, the less we even attempt to make comprehensible for ourselves.

What happens to events when we try to come to terms with them by appealing to the God whose claim to divinity resides in his being bigger than what we can understand? More: what happens to our relationship with events we cannot yet comprehend when we attempt to comprehend them in terms of a God whose omniscience is a function of the sacrificium intellectus we make when turning to Him?

Even when we leave quite to one side references to the wrath of God and stress, as does our loud believer, that He works in mysterious ways which are ultimately loving and benign, the God-concept can have a traumatizing effect upon the psyche. Whenever the core category of our epistemology is a divine category whose ways are inscrutable and mysterious, the overwhelming quality of the events we refer to it is preserved. The less we can make sense of our world, the more omniscient God seems. The more unable we are to make a residence for ourselves in the world, the more we seem to rest in Him.

The God before whom one may have no other forms of knowing is a disturbed metaphor. While it moves in the psyche among other metaphors, it is a metaphor that denies its relativity as a metaphor. Obsessive-compulsive, monomaniacal, paranoid: the monotheistic God-image is the presiding deity over many clinical syndromes. In order to remain psychological, the psyche must not only relativize the material and social events that overwhelm it, but the ideological and religious ones as well. And, of course, first among these is the One who must always be first, the One who commands us to know Him as the one true God.

“God is a conjecture,” wrote Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “but I desire that your conjectures should not reach beyond your creative will.” [40] In Nietzsche’s view, it is as wrong-headed as it is wrong-spirited to worship a metaphysical object, an object that is beyond the scope of the culture which we as culture-makers are creating. To do so is only to worship a projected, reified, hypostatized version of the existential issues we have been unable to confront and absorb. The Creator-God which men conjecture is inversely proportionate to their creative responses to the challenges of existence. The paler a people’s response, the more bloated has become their God with projected creativity. By declaring the death of God, Nietzsche sought to release again into human hands the creativity that man had displaced into the Godhead. God, in Nietzsche’s view, did not make Adam out of clay during the second week of an original creation; rather, men fashioned God out of clay, erased their fingerprints, and then blew the graven idol into supernatural proportions by means of abnegations of the will.

But why is man so quick to hide his creative power in a metaphysical conjecture, a metaphysical conceit? Perhaps it is because necessity, the mother of invention, is not appeased by our creative efforts, but again and again snarls our path with obstacles and troubles. While civilization has solved many human problems, there are other problems which have proved insoluble. As Shelley put it, if it were not for the “clogs” of “chance, and death, and mutability,” the imagination of man “might oversoar / The loftiest star of unascended heaven, / Pinnacled dim in the intense inane.” [41] Unable to exhaust the contingencies that drive us to create with our inventions, we eventually abdicate our creative power and reside conflict-free in the state of grace that accompanies the projection of our creative power, the abnegation of our will. But residing in grace is like living on credit. Sooner or later our account comes due, and we find ourselves irredeemably overdrawn. So bankrupt have we become by the worship of our old God that we require a new God to bail us out.

Just as we conjecture a creation to end all creation, a God to end all Gods, now we require a sacrifice to end all sacrifices. We require a vicarious atonement, a new testament to balance the vicarious displacements of the old testament. Unable to create our way out or through the traumatic level of existence, we conjecture a way out beyond the reach of our creating will. When this also breaks down and the trauma (“chance, death, and mutability”) confronts us again, we try to patch up the cracks in our theological defenses by packing the trauma off on the scapegoat’s back with the notion of an only begotten Son who takes the sins and pains of the world onto his shoulders and suffers them all for us.

The intense inane, like the Lacanian Real, is as traumatically numinous as it is unmediated. Standing by the sea, the usual horizon line obliterated by fog, we experience the divine influx of what before had been “out there.” Peering into the nothingness of mist and fog, minute molecules of possible thoughts boil in the featureless presence that churns before our eyes and the silence thick about us occultly hums.

Whenever the “doors of perception” are flung open onto nothing, the numinosity of the archetypes that our absent objects would have insulated us from – had they in fact been there – knocks at the door of our creative power. Opening the door we find the stoop empty, but intensely inane. Like the sea at our ear in a seashell, decontextualized into an inane mystery, the blood of emptiness and silence is the absent God transsubstantiating Himself in our minds. Knowing no God, but yet, deeply stirred by His absence, one feels that one could create anything. With Nietzsche we ask ourselves,

Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened the earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? … Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not the empty space breathe upon us? … Does not night come on continually, darker and darker? Shall we not have to light lanterns in the morning? [43]

Shelley suggests in his poem that the traumatic contingencies of chance and death and mutability are the only checks on our otherwise omnipotent imaginations. However, the opposite is also true. It is precisely through these limits and conditions that the intense inane breaks through. Wherever there is a gap in the human sphere, a window festers open in the soul. A neurotic symptom, an absent parent, the deficiencies of a modern education – all arrow longings that would, but for our still living, uninfected parts, “oversoar the loftiest star …”

Likewise, in our times of indecision, we may find that we hover in the intense inane, reluctant to incarnate into either side of the choice conflicting us. By remaining undecided (or putting this more positively, by tolerating ambivalence), we live in a sort of subtle body, unbounded by the clogs to which decisiveness would fix us. From one point of view, we are un-born, living provisionally, in need of “grounding,” typically puer, or traumatized right out of our bodies. From another, it is as if we were in the bardo realm which in Tibetan tradition is the realm between death and rebirth. In Tibetan tradition the priest, reading from a guide book describing post-mortem states of the soul, counsels the dead on the importance of staying in the bardo as long as possible, lest one’s craving for incarnation lead one to take on an inferior form through premature rebirth. In our indecision, perhaps, we are being this same priest with respect to our culture’s dead God. Hölderlin, Heidegger, Rilke, and Jung all characterized our times as impoverished or needy. By this they meant that we live in the anxiety-ridden gap between the God that has passed away, and the God, if such He will be, who is to come. Bootstrapping these ideas and traditions together (Jung spoke of amplification), we are inspired to ask the spiritual question: what if we could ascend the loftiest star and find our standing there?

Trauma is the body of the world and the body of man. “Chance, and death, and mutability” are our existential lot. To defend himself from the ontological insecurity of his existence, man has developed schizoid defenses. To use Laing’s terminology, the self has been divided. The self splits off from the body and hovers above it – a false self. World becomes mere worldliness, and a transcendental, heavenly world is split off and affirmed:

The self, as long as it is “uncommitted to the objective element,” is free to dream and imagine anything. Without reference to the objective element it can be all things to itself – it has unconditioned freedom, power, creativity. But its freedom and its omnipotence are exercised in a vacuum and its creativity is only the capacity to produce phantoms. The inner honesty, freedom, omnipotence, and creativity, which the “inner” self cherishes as its ideals, are cancelled, therefore, by a co-existing tortured sense of self-duplicity, of the lack of any real freedom, of utter impotence and sterility. [44]

As the self grows bigger and bigger in its disembodied vacuum, as God grows bigger and bigger in His world-transcending vacuum, larger and larger traumatic experiences are required to bring the consciousness that has split off into the false-self and God back into touch with the body of the world and man. The traumatic events we deny return to us cumulatively. At the end of millennia there are indeed judgment days, days of reckoning. The bigger God becomes, the more events we channel off into the void of his righteousness, love, and grace, the more perilous becomes the human situation. And God does become bigger:

Mountains get made out of avoided molehills, and then, ironically, the molehills of a millennium of denial do sum up to mountains. In order to feel anything in our aloof vacuum, there must be huge explosions. In order to break through our catatonic withdrawal, there must be shock treatments. When man created God, he created the Auschwitz oven. The flaming fire-pot that Abraham saw in his dream of the ceremony of the covenant with Yahweh returns in the demonic guise of Hitler’s final solution. In order for us to feel anything, 6 million people had to be exterminated. The last century has enacted a Derridean deconstruction of our civilization’s logo-centric, Judeo-Christian defense, the Judeo-Christian covenant. In the text of history we can read the subtext of God, the horror of the Great Code. God is the oven. God is the atom bomb. God is a trauma.

The finger burned on the hot stove supplies the decision to avoid the repetition of a similar event in the future. “Once burned, twice shy,” goes the popular adage. The relationship that develops between the singed finger and the aversive object – in this case the kitchen stove – is based upon mis-trust. The burned finger comes to respect the hot stove, to reverence and propitiate it. The reflex withdrawing the burned finger, the finger’s pained response, is an act of piety before the glowing element, an act of prostration before the stimulus, the stove. Pentecost: recoiling from its experience of the stove-God, the finger stiffens and throbs, slayed in the spirit. Prayers are offered; devotions are observed; oven-mitts and priestly robes are worn. In the rhetoric of trust, supplications are made to the object of our mistrust: “Lord have mercy upon us.” “Forgive us our trespasses.” “Lead us not into temptation [trauma], but deliver us from evil [pain].” In order to protect ourselves from what has hurt us, we whitewash it and identify with it. Our trauma is converted into a loving father, and our mis-trust hypocritically refined into a covenantal relationship with Him. Religion originates at our fingertips.

What is pathological about incarnational thinking is that it is exaggerated in two directions at once. Both in its idealism and in its pragmatism it goes too far. The incarnational mind imagines in terms of ultimate inventions and final solutions. Its logic is a logic of God becoming man and of man becoming God. Its fascination is with a sacrifice to end all sacrifice, a “once and for all” solution. What the incarnational perspective reckons to be spirit it must render in the flesh. The proof is in the pudding. Just ask the Japanese. They have become experts on incarnation – American-pragmatist style. They study it, replicate it, and industrialize it, because they are fixated in the trauma of it. (Identification with the aggressor is the specific defense mechanism.) The Americans so loved the world and peace that they nuked the Japanese for its redemption. Truman justified the atomic bomb as the necessary violence in a war that would end all war. No more pistols and grenades. No more eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, Old Testament combat. It’s the New Testament now. Now we will call into being a new order. Now we will destroy whole cities with our Savior-bombs. After all, isn’t that the mystery: they have to lose their lives to gain them, in a higher form, redeemed?

The end of religion, theoretically, would correspond to the absorption of its traumatic contents and iconographic substitutes into man’s ongoing creative process, into soul. At the apocalyptic end of a millennium, the trauma which has been displaced into the extra-human world of spiritual conjectures erupts. We pass beyond our eschatology, beyond our conjectures, beyond the orienting structures of our fear. The world comes to an end. Usually, this ending is conceived of moralistically as a judgement day. On the one hand, a trauma-free heaven is imagined for those who have piously propitiated the trauma; on the other hand, a traumatic hell is imagined for those who have not worshipped the trauma. Clearly, this moralistic mythology of the final absorption of trauma is the expression of a consciousness still very much propitiating of trauma.

In our culture, in most cultures, women have been associated with what Jung called “earth, darkness, the abysmal side of the bodily man with his animal passions and instinctual nature and to ‘matter’ in general.” [46] While men have tended to be regarded as rational spirits, women have tended to be seen as irrational, inferior, and weak. Whether as Lilith, Eve, Pandora, Whore of Babylon, witch at the stake, hysteric in Charcot’s clinic or on Freud’s couch, woman has been imagined to be either trauma itself or particularly susceptible to it.

Like everything else that is associated with trauma, woman is split in two. Just as we conjecture about traumatic events in terms of pain and pleasure, good and bad, positive and negative, heaven and hell, we split the feminine into a virgin and a whore. Whether we look east to the Arab countries where women are covered from head to toe, or west to America where women are more scantily clad, the whore-madonna complex is everywhere present.

The conference at Badasht was similar in a sense to Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. Bahá’u’lláh’s daily abrogation of a traditional Islamic law was intended to inaugurate a new aeon, even as Christ sought to inaugurate a new aeon by giving the old Jewish laws a new twist: “You have heard that the ancients were told … But I say unto you that …” Bahá’u’lláh, doubtless, saw his law-breaking as the fulfilment of the orthodox tradition. Like Christ, he had not come “to abolish the Law or the Prophets, but to fulfil [them]” (Matthew 5: 17–18).

The key difference between the Sermon on the Mount and the Conference at Badasht was that while Christ’s revision of the law was given to prepare man for the coming of the end of the world and the Kingdom of God, Bahá’u’lláh’s law-breaking was an attempt to help man to take up residence in a world that had already ended, a kingdom that, in the revelation of the Báb (or Gate), had already come. If the situation during Christ’s time was pre-apocalyptic (as presumably it still is for the Judeo-Christian world), the situation for the followers of the Báb was apocalyptic right at the very time of the Badasht conference. Perhaps what happened next at Badasht can be accounted for in terms of the apocalyptic intensity that the conference was invested with, a traumatic intensity for which not everyone present was ready.

Consternation immediately seized the entire gathering. All stood aghast before this sudden and most unexpected apparition. To behold her face unveiled was to them inconceivable. Even to gaze at her shadow was a thing which they deemed improper, inasmuch as they regarded her as the very incarnation of Fátimih [the daughter of Muhammad], the noblest emblem of chastity in their eyes.
Quietly, silently, and with the utmost dignity, Táhirih stepped forward and, advancing towards Quddús, seated herself on his right-hand side. Her unruffled serenity sharply contrasted with the affrighted countenances of those who were gazing upon her face. Fear, anger, and bewilderment stirred the depths of their souls. That sudden revelation seemed to have stunned their faculties. Abdu’l-Kháliq-i-Isfáhani was so gravely shaken that he cut his throat with his own hands. Covered with blood and shrieking with excitement, he fled away from the face of Táhirih. A few, following his example, abandoned their companions and forsook their Faith. A number were seen standing speechless before her, confounded with wonder.
… A feeling of joy and triumph had now illumined her face. She rose from her seat and, undeterred by the tumult that she had raised in the hearts of her companions, began to address the remnant of that assembly. Without the least premeditation, and in language that bore a striking resemblance to that of the Qur’án, she delivered her appeal with matchless eloquence and profound fervour. She concluded her address with this verse of the Qur’án: “Verily, amid gardens and rivers shall the pious dwell in the seat of truth, in the presence of the potent King.” … “This day is the day of festivity and universal rejoicing,” she added, “the day on which the fetters of the past are burst asunder. Let those who have shared in this great achievement arise and embrace each other.” [48]

By the testimony of Bahá’u’lláh, that heroic youth [Quddús] … was subjected to such tortures and suffered such a death as even Jesus had not faced in the hour of His greatest agony. The absence of any restraint on the part of the government authorities, the ingenious barbarity which the torture-mongers of Bárfurúsh so ably displayed, and fierce fanaticism which glowed in the breasts of its shí‘ah inhabitants, the moral support accorded to them by the dignitaries of Church and State in the capital – above all, the acts of heroism which their victim and his companions had accomplished and which had served to heighten their exasperation, all combined to nerve the hand of the assailants and to add to the diabolical ferocity which characterized his martyrdom. [49]

Táhirih, also, was put to death for her blasphemy. Adorned in “a gown of snow-white silk,” [50] she met her executioners. Handing them a silken kerchief, the symbol of her purity since the days of her infancy, Táhirih underlined the meaning of her martyrdom. To her being strangled by this symbolic kerchief while wearing her wedding dress was her nuptial union with the new creation her actions had helped to release from the misogyny of Islam.

There is much to admire about Táhirih. In the symbolic action of her unveiling herself at Badasht, as in her martyr’s death in Tihrán, we sense that the trauma that her religious tradition had so long propitiated had at least partially been absorbed into a new form. That she was both a woman and a poet is also suggestive here. However, when “meet[ing] [the] Beloved” [51] has the form of martyrdom, as it had in her case, that meeting has been in the spirit, not in the soul. The trauma released at Badasht was absorbed into a new religion, not into the simple soul-making of men and women.

Of course, there is an immense difference in scale between a religion-making martyr like Táhirih and the simple soul-making of the modern individual. This difference, however, is just the point. In our time, the spirit’s traumatic intensity needs to be radically interiorized, reflected through our inhibitions, wrestled with as the neurosis and our neurosis at one and the same time. For meaning in the vast sense of religion requires too much blood. The world can no longer afford such devotion to its gods.

How man conceives of what might be called his metaphysical status is an immensely important problem. Jung’s contribution to its clarification was to define the individual as “an immensely weighty milligram without which God had made his world in vain.” [52] Making the same point in another way, Jung referred to psychology as “a sphere but lately visited by the numen, where the whole weight of mankind’s problems has settled.” [53] Against the macrocosmic background that martyrdom and religious terrorism provide, we may better appreciate what Jung was trying to do in making these assertions. While at first glance, these lines seem to inflate the significance of the individual and of psychotherapy, their actual intent may have been to scale back and reduce the absolute significance of the Trauma-God. Where religious man would devoutly identify with the trauma, putting the demands of its spirit before his own life, there is another task – the building of the earthly tabernacle through a devotion to the small-scale, the individual, the daily, and the unique. In a letter to a correspondent, Jung wrote:

God wants to be born in the flame of man’s consciousness, leaping ever higher. And what if this has no roots in the earth? If it is not a house of stone where the fire of God can dwell, but a wretched straw hut that flares up and vanishes? Could God then be born? One must be able to suffer God. That is the supreme task for the carrier of ideas. He must be the advocate of the earth. God will take care of Himself. [54]

The macrocosmic relationship presents a great difficulty. It shows itself symptomatically first in the form of an urge to make the microcosmic relationship objective, external, tangible. The coniunctio of the masculine and feminine halves of the self is apt to overpower the individual and force him into physical, i.e., cosmic, manifestation … [E]very archetype, before it is integrated consciously, wants to manifest itself physically, since it forces the subject into its own form. The self in its divinity (i.e., the archetype) is unconscious of itself. [55]

[The archetype] can become conscious only within our consciousness . And it can do that only if the ego stands firm. The self must become as small as, and yet smaller than, the ego although it is the ocean of divinity: “God is as small as me,” says Angelus Silesius … The hierosgamos takes place in the vessel. In principle you are not the goddess, I am not the god, otherwise man would cease to be and God would not have been born. We can only stretch out our hands to each other and know the inner man. Superhuman possibilities are not for us. [56]

Heir to the enormous BANG with which the universe began, soul made its first appearance as the gods through whom it responded to the obdurate conditions of its traumatic surround. Perhaps best described as the “within of things,” soul came into the picture by pre-emptively turning Being’s violent fullness against itself in the form of a whole plethora of images. It was these images, each at least minimally different from the outwardness of the things which they lit up from within, that bought wiggle-room, freedom, life, and will for the soul. How else but by turning the tables upon the determinate forces of the universe could the reflectedness of the psyche, the reflectedness of the soul, have brought itself forth?

… are the precipitate of the psychic functioning of the whole ancestral line; the accumulated experiences of organic life in general, a million times repeated, and condensed into types. In these … all experiences are represented which have happened on this planet since primeval times. The more frequent and the more intense they were, the more clearly focused they become in the archetype. [57]

What Jung here refers to as the “accumulated experiences of organic life …, a million times repeated,” we may take as a reference to the traumatic exigencies of nature that have repeatedly inscribed themselves as memory, remembered themselves as soul. Interestingly, this connection is etymologically given with the word “archetype” itself. As Jung has noted, taken together the Greek roots arkhē (origin, beginning) and tupos (blow or imprint) present the notion of an originating imprint, a first blow. [58] Like the gods who drew their sustenance from the killing blow of the sacrificer’s axe, archetypes also have their source in trauma. [59]

Further to these references to Jung’s work, a number of others beg to be cited here. I think, for example, of “Mind and Earth,” an essay that treats of the mind as “a system of adaptation determined by the conditions of an earthly environment. ” [60] In this essay the great psychologist looks back to “that prehistoric time when reindeer hunters fought for a bare and wretched existence against the elemental forces of wild nature.” [61] Surely this is a reference to the traumas that have been the sources of our most primordial soul-making. And, then, in the seminar on dream analysis we find the following:

… a medicine-man has to go through hellish tortures. Eskimos hang them up by their toes or immerse them in icy water till they are nearly mad. Such a series of shocks pierces holes through which the collective unconscious comes in from all sides. Now, provided a man can stand the onslaught of things coming from below, he can influence other people, he can have an almost hypnotic effect on his fellow tribesmen. [62]

It is not the world as we know it that speaks out of [archaic man’s] unconscious, but the unknown world of the psyche, of which we know that it mirrors our empirical world only in part, and that, for the other part, it moulds this empirical world in accordance with its own psychic assumptions. The archetype does not proceed from physical facts, but describes how the psyche experiences the physical fact, and in so doing the psyche often behaves so autocratically that it denies the tangible reality or makes statements that fly in the face of it. [63]

A passage from Nietzsche speaks to this. Introducing his analysis of the constitution of man’s conscience and memory, the traumatic philosopher asks, “How can one create a memory for the human animal? How can one impress something upon this partly obtuse, party flighty mind, attuned only to the passing moment, in such a way that it will stay there?” In line with our thesis concerning trauma, Nietzsche answers:

One can well believe that the answers and methods for solving this primeval problem were not precisely gentle; perhaps indeed there was nothing more fearful and uncanny in the whole prehistory of man than his mnemotechnics. “If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory” – this is a main clause of the oldest (unhappily also the most enduring) psychology on earth. One might even say that wherever on earth solemnity, seriousness, mystery, and gloomy coloring still distinguish the life of man and a people, something of the terror that formerly attended all promises, pledges, and vows on earth is still effective : the past, the longest, deepest and sternest past, breaths upon us and rises up in us whenever we become “serious.” Man could never do without blood, torture, and sacrifices when he felt the need to create a memory for himself; the most dreadful sacrifices and pledges (sacrifices of the first-born among them), the most repulsive mutilations (castration, for example), the cruellest rights of all the religious cults (and all religions are at the deepest level systems of cruelties) – all this has its origin in the instinct that realized that pain is the most powerful aid to mnemonics. [64]

Nietzsche’s mnemotechnics of religious cruelty, along with Jung’s account the soul’s having inscribed the exigencies of nature into itself in the form of archetypes, lead us now to Wolfgang Giegerich’s account of ritual slaughtering as primordial soul-making. According to Giegerich, the history of consciousness, subjectivity, inwardness, and soul is a history of killings. Turning the tables on the obdurate conditions of life, soul killed itself into existence, the form of this process being that of ritual sacrifice.

The dullness of animal existence had consisted in the fact that the reaction to whatever was encountered had to be more of less automatic (affective, instinctual), exclusively in the service of the biological purpose of securing and heightening life. Homo necans – the killing man – burst asunder this being bonded by naked biological interests through his blow with the axe or thrusting the spear. For with this tremendous deed he logically broke through life’s boundary to death, by which boundary the living organism is completely enclosed; he thus inflicted the experience of death upon himself, while still in life, and made this experience the basis of his own, no longer merely-biological life. [65]

All Gods need sacrifices. Why? Because they have their existence, their reality, only in the sacrificial blow and blood. Our idea is that God or Gods are existing entities (if we accept the notion of God at all). But in ancient times Gods were nothing else but the trembling of the soul vis-à-vis the blow with the axe, a trembling which like the vibration of a musical string fades out in time and is therefore in need of renewal … In the sacrificial blow the soul drove the God images or archetypes into itself. Each killing blow imprinted the specific archetypal image in the soul afresh. [66]

If there is a contemporary resonance to Giegerich’s account of the soul-constituting importance that ritual slaughtering had held for archaic man it is the resonance of an old habit dying hard. Though clearly killing and ritual sacrifice are no longer viable ways of soul-making in our time, they are still used by the members of dying faiths and backward nations as a means to set the soul trembling again. But power politics has long replaced religious awe, even for those nations which pretend that they have not divided Church from State. Despite their most concerted efforts, the martyr, the terrorist, and the suicide-bomber of today cannot really achieve the ends that they so deludedly seek by spilling new blood for such an old ceremony. The slaughter we watch nightly on the news is hardly awe-inspiring to anyone today. (The glee of a terrorist or of a nation manifesting its destiny is hardly awe.) Even an event as enormous as the collapse of the Twin Towers is paltry compared to media’s capacity to render it into digitalized images. Effeteness and irreality are our trauma today, and no amount of blood seems able to move us from our dullness now.

1 In John (15: 1–2, 4–6) the meaning of suffering as punitive correction persists:

I am the true vine, and My Father is the vine-dresser. Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit, He prunes it, that it may bear more fruit … Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you, unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me, and I in him, he bears much fruit; for apart from Me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch and dries up; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.

13 It may be objected at this point that God cannot be held responsible for the actions of those who act misguidedly in His name. Hillman has suggested, however, that every model structures its own uses and abuses and is thus responsible for both. It is not enough to say in hindsight that so and so was a bad Christian. God and Jesus, being the original models upon which the behavior of the “bad believer” has been patterned, must not be exonerated from criticism. For Hillman’s views about models and their shadows, see Louis Zinkin, “Is There Still a Place For the Medical Model,” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1984), 120.

32 Saint Teresa of Ávila carefully distinguished the wish-fulfilling aspect of the imagination from a true vision of God: “It happens to some people … that they become absorbed in their imagination to the extent that everything they think about seems to be clearly seen. Yet, if they were to see a real vision, they would know without any doubt whatsoever their mistake, for they themselves are composing what they see with their imagination.” True vision, Saint Teresa goes on to say, is entirely different from the wilful productions of the imagination: “In … vision … the soul is very far from thinking that anything will be seen, or having the thought even pass through its mind, suddenly the vision is represented to it all at once and stirs all the faculties and senses with a great fear and tumult so as to place them afterward in that happy peace.” (Teresa of Ávila, The Interior Castle, trans. K. Kavanaugh and O. Rodriguez [Mahwah, N. J.: Paulist Press, 1979], 158)