V

CHRIST, A SYMBOL OF THE SELF

[68]     The dechristianization of our world, the Luciferian development of science and technology, and the frightful material and moral destruction left behind by the second World War have been compared more than once with the eschatological events foretold in the New Testament. These, as we know, are concerned with the coming of the Antichrist: “This is Antichrist, who denieth the Father and the Son.”1 “Every spirit that dissolveth Jesus … is Antichrist … of whom you have heard that he cometh.”2 The Apocalypse is full of expectations of terrible things that will take place at the end of time, before the marriage of the Lamb. This shows plainly that the anima christiana has a sure knowledge not only of the existence of an adversary but also of his future usurpation of power.

[69]     Why—my reader will ask—do I discourse here upon Christ and his adversary, the Antichrist? Our discourse necessarily brings us to Christ, because he is the still living myth of our culture. He is our culture hero, who, regardless of his historical existence, embodies the myth of the divine Primordial Man, the mystic Adam. It is he who occupies the centre of the Christian mandala, who is the Lord of the Tetramorph, i.e., the four symbols of the evangelists, which are like the four columns of his throne. He is in us and we in him. His kingdom is the pearl of great price, the treasure buried in the field, the grain of mustard seed which will become a great tree, and the heavenly city.3 As Christ is in us, so also is his heavenly kingdom.4

[70]     These few, familiar references should be sufficient to make the psychological position of the Christ symbol quite clear. Christ exemplifies the archetype of the self.5 He represents a totality of a divine or heavenly kind, a glorified man, a son of God sine macula peccati, unspotted by sin. As Adam secundus he corresponds to the first Adam before the Fall, when the latter was still a pure image of God, of which Tertullian (d. 222) says: “And this therefore is to be considered as the image of God in man, that the human spirit has the same motions and senses as God has, though not in the same way as God has them.”6 Origen (185–254) is very much more explicit: The imago Dei imprinted on the soul, not on the body,7 is an image of an image, “for my soul is not directly the image of God, but is made after the likeness of the former image.”8 Christ, on the other hand, is the true image of God,9 after whose likeness our inner man is made, invisible, incorporeal, incorrupt, and immortal.10 The God-image in us reveals itself through “prudentia, iustitia, moderatio, virtus, sapientia et disciplina.”11

[71]     St. Augustine (354–430) distinguishes between the God-image which is Christ and the image which is implanted in man as a means or possibility of becoming like God.12 The God-image is not in the corporeal man, but in the anima rationalis, the possession of which distinguishes man from animals. “The God-image is within, not in the body. … Where the understanding is, where the mind is, where the power of investigating truth is, there God has his image.”13 Therefore we should remind ourselves, says Augustine, that we are fashioned after the image of God nowhere save in the understanding: “… but where man knows himself to be made after the image of God, there he knows there is something more in him than is given to the beasts.”14 From this it is clear that the God-image is, so to speak, identical with the anima rationalis. The latter is the higher spiritual man, the homo coelestis of St Paul.15 Like Adam before the Fall, Christ is an embodiment of the God-image,16 whose totality is specially emphasized by St. Augustine. “The Word,” he says, “took on complete manhood, as it were in its fulness: the soul and body of a man. And if you would have me put it more exactly—since even a beast of the field has a ‘soul’ and a body—when I say a human soul and human flesh, I mean he took upon him a complete human soul.”17

[72]     The God-image in man was not destroyed by the Fall but was only damaged and corrupted (“deformed”), and can be restored through God’s grace. The scope of the integration is suggested by the descensus ad inferos, the descent of Christ’s soul to hell, its work of redemption embracing even the dead. The psychological equivalent of this is the integration of the collective unconscious which forms an essential part of the individuation process. St. Augustine says: “Therefore our end must be our perfection, but our perfection is Christ,”18 since he is the perfect God-image. For this reason he is also called “King.” His bride (sponsa) is the human soul, which “in an inwardly hidden spiritual mystery is joined to the Word, that two may be in one flesh,” to correspond with the mystic marriage of Christ and the Church.19 Concurrently with the continuance of this hieros gamos in the dogma and rites of the Church, the symbolism developed in the course of the Middle Ages into the alchemical conjunction of opposites, or “chymical wedding,” thus giving rise on the one hand to the concept of the lapis philosophorum, signifying totality, and on the other hand to the concept of chemical combination.

[73]     The God-image in man that was damaged by the first sin can be “reformed”20 with the help of God, in accordance with Romans 12:2: “And be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is … the will of God” (RSV). The totality images which the unconscious produces in the course of an individuation process are similar “reformations” of an a priori archetype (the mandala).21 As I have already emphasized, the spontaneous symbols of the self, or of wholeness, cannot in practice be distinguished from a God-image. Despite the word (‘be transformed’) in the Greek text of the above quotation, the “renewal” (ἀνακαίνωσις, reformatio) of the mind is not meant as an actual alteration of consciousness, but rather as the restoration of an original condition, an apocatastasis. This is in exact agreement with the empirical findings of psychology, that there is an ever-present archetype of wholeness22 which may easily disappear from the purview of consciousness or may never be perceived at all until a consciousness illuminated by conversion recognizes it in the figure of Christ. As a result of this “anamnesis” the original state of oneness with the God-image is restored. It brings about an integration, a bridging of the split in the personality caused by the instincts striving apart in different and mutually contradictory directions. The only time the split does not occur is when a person is still as legitimately unconscious of his instinctual life as an animal. But it proves harmful and impossible to endure when an artificial unconsciousness—a repression—no longer reflects the life of the instincts.

[74]     There can be no doubt that the original Christian conception of the imago Dei embodied in Christ meant an all-embracing totality that even includes the animal side of man. Nevertheless the Christ-symbol lacks wholeness in the modern psychological sense, since it does not include the dark side of things but specifically excludes it in the form of a Luciferian opponent. Although the exclusion of the power of evil was something the Christian consciousness was well aware of, all it lost in effect was an insubstantial shadow, for, through the doctrine of the privatio boni first propounded by Origen, evil was characterized as a mere diminution of good and thus deprived of substance. According to the teachings of the Church, evil is simply “the accidental lack of perfection.” This assumption resulted in the proposition “omne bonum a Deo, omne malum ab homine.” Another logical consequence was the subsequent elimination of the devil in certain Protestant sects.

[75]     Thanks to the doctrine of the privatio boni, wholeness seemed guaranteed in the figure of Christ. One must, however, take evil rather more substantially when one meets it on the plane of empirical psychology. There it is simply the opposite of good. In the ancient world the Gnostics, whose arguments were very much influenced by psychic experience, tackled the problem of evil on a broader basis than the Church Fathers. For instance, one of the things they taught was that Christ “cast off his shadow from himself.”23 If we give this view the weight it deserves, we can easily recognize the cut-off counterpart in the figure of Antichrist. The Antichrist develops in legend as a perverse imitator of Christ’s life. He is a true , an imitating spirit of evil who follows in Christ’s footsteps like a shadow following the body. This complementing of the bright but one-sided figure of the Redeemer—we even find traces of it in the New Testament—must be of especial significance. And indeed, considerable attention was paid to it quite early.

[76]     If we see the traditional figure of Christ as a parallel to the psychic manifestation of the self, then the Antichrist would correspond to the shadow of the self, namely the dark half of the human totality, which ought not to be judged too optimistically. So far as we can judge from experience, light and shadow are so evenly distributed in man’s nature that his psychic totality appears, to say the least of it, in a somewhat murky light. The psychological concept of the self, in part derived from our knowledge of the whole man, but for the rest depicting itself spontaneously in the products of the unconscious as an archetypal quaternity bound together by inner antinomies, cannot omit the shadow that belongs to the light figure, for without it this figure lacks body and humanity. In the empirical self, light and shadow form a paradoxical unity. In the Christian concept, on the other hand, the archetype is hopelessly split into two irreconcilable halves, leading ultimately to a metaphysical dualism—the final separation of the kingdom of heaven from the fiery world of the damned.

[77]     For anyone who has a positive attitude towards Christianity the problem of the Antichrist is a hard nut to crack. It is nothing less than the counterstroke of the devil, provoked by God’s Incarnation; for the devil attains his true stature as the adversary of Christ, and hence of God, only after the rise of Christianity, while as late as the Book of Job he was still one of God’s sons and on familiar terms with Yahweh.24 Psychologically the case is clear, since the dogmatic figure of Christ is so sublime and spotless that everything else turns dark beside it. It is, in fact, so one-sidedly perfect that it demands a psychic complement to restore the balance. This inevitable opposition led very early to the doctrine of the two sons of God, of whom the elder was called Satanaël.25 The coming of the Antichrist is not just a prophetic prediction—it is an inexorable psychological law whose existence, though unknown to the author of the Johannine Epistles, brought him a sure knowledge of the impending enantiodromia. Consequently he wrote as if he were conscious of the inner necessity for this transformation, though we may be sure that the idea seemed to him like a divine revelation. In reality every intensified differentiation of the Christ-image brings about a corresponding accentuation of its unconscious complement, thereby increasing the tension between above and below.

[78]     In making these statements we are keeping entirely within the sphere of Christian psychology and symbolism. A factor that no one has reckoned with, however, is the fatality inherent in the Christian disposition itself, which leads inevitably to a reversal of its spirit—not through the obscure workings of chance but in accordance with psychological law. The ideal of spirituality striving for the heights was doomed to clash with the materialistic earth-bound passion to conquer matter and master the world. This change became visible at the time of the “Renaissance.” The word means “rebirth,” and it referred to the renewal of the antique spirit. We know today that this spirit was chiefly a mask; it was not the spirit of antiquity that was reborn, but the spirit of medieval Christianity that underwent strange pagan transformations, exchanging the heavenly goal for an earthly one, and the vertical of the Gothic style for a horizontal perspective (voyages of discovery, exploration of the world and of nature). The subsequent developments that led to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution have produced a worldwide situation today which can only be called “antichristian” in a sense that confirms the early Christian anticipation of the “end of time.” It is as if, with the coming of Christ, opposites that were latent till then had become manifest, or as if a pendulum had swung violently to one side and were now carrying out the complementary movement in the opposite direction. No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell. The double meaning of this movement lies in the nature of the pendulum. Christ is without spot, but right at the beginning of his career there occurs the encounter with Satan, the Adversary, who represents the counterpole of that tremendous tension in the world psyche which Christ’s advent signified. He is the “mysterium iniquitatis” that accompanies the “sol iustitiae” as inseparably as the shadow belongs to the light, in exactly the same way, so the Ebionites26 and Euchites27 thought, that one brother cleaves to the other. Both strive for a kingdom: one for the kingdom of heaven, the other for the “principatus huius mundi.” We hear of a reign of a “thousand years” and of a “coming of the Antichrist,” just as if a partition of worlds and epochs had taken place between two royal brothers. The meeting with Satan was therefore more than mere chance; it was a link in the chain.

[79]     Just as we have to remember the gods of antiquity in order to appreciate the psychological value of the anima/animus archetype, so Christ is our nearest analogy of the self and its meaning. It is naturally not a question of a collective value artificially manufactured or arbitrarily awarded, but of one that is effective and present per se, and that makes its effectiveness felt whether the subject is conscious of it or not. Yet, although the attributes of Christ (consubstantiality with the Father, coeternity, filiation, parthenogenesis, crucifixion, Lamb sacrificed between opposites, One divided into Many, etc.) undoubtedly mark him out as an embodiment of the self, looked at from the psychological angle he corresponds to only one half of the archetype. The other half appears in the Antichrist. The latter is just as much a manifestation of the self, except that he consists of its dark aspect. Both are Christian symbols, and they have the same meaning as the image of the Saviour crucified between two thieves. This great symbol tells us that the progressive development and differentiation of consciousness leads to an ever more menacing awareness of the conflict and involves nothing less than a crucifixion of the ego, its agonizing suspension between irreconcilable opposites.28 Naturally there can be no question of a total extinction of the ego, for then the focus of consciousness would be destroyed, and the result would be complete unconsciousness. The relative abolition of the ego affects only those supreme and ultimate decisions which confront us in situations where there are insoluble conflicts of duty. This means, in other words, that in such cases the ego is a suffering bystander who decides nothing but must submit to a decision and surrender unconditionally. The “genius” of man, the higher and more spacious part of him whose extent no one knows, has the final word. It is therefore well to examine carefully the psychological aspects of the individuation process in the light of Christian tradition, which can describe it for us with an exactness and impressiveness far surpassing our feeble attempts, even though the Christian image of the self—Christ—lacks the shadow that properly belongs to it.

[80]     The reason for this, as already indicated, is the doctrine of the Summum Bonum. Irenaeus says very rightly, in refuting the Gnostics, that exception must be taken to the “light of their Father,” because it “could not illuminate and fill even those things which were within it,”29 namely the shadow and the void. It seemed to him scandalous and reprehensible to suppose that within the pleroma of light there could be a “dark and formless void.” For the Christian neither God nor Christ could be a paradox; they had to have a single meaning, and this holds true to the present day. No one knew, and apparently (with a few commendable exceptions) no one knows even now, that the hybris of the speculative intellect had already emboldened the ancients to propound a philosophical definition of God that more or less obliged him to be the Summum Bonum. A Protestant theologian has even had the temerity to assert that “God can only be good.” Yahweh could certainly have taught him a thing or two in this respect, if he himself is unable to see his intellectual trespass against God’s freedom and omnipotence. This forcible usurpation of the Summum Bonum naturally has its reasons, the origins of which lie far back in the past (though I cannot enter into this here). Nevertheless, it is the effective source of the concept of the privatio boni, which nullifies the reality of evil and can be found as early as Basil the Great (330–79) and Dionysius the Areopagite (2nd half of the 4th century), and is fully developed in Augustine.

[81]     The earliest authority of all for the later axiom “Omne bonum a Deo, omne malum ab homine” is Tatian (2nd century), who says: “Nothing evil was created by God; we ourselves have produced all wickedness.”30 This view is also adopted by Theophilus of Antioch (2nd century) in his treatise Ad Autolycum.31

[82]     Basil says:

You must not look upon God as the author of the existence of evil, nor consider that evil has any subsistence in itself [ ]. For evil does not subsist as a living being does, nor can we set before our eyes any substantial essence [] thereof. For evil is the privation [] of good. … And thus evil does not inhere in its own substance [], but arises from the mutilation [πηρώμασɩν] of the soul.32 Neither is it uncreated, as the wicked say who set up evil for the equal of good … nor is it created. For if all things are of God, how can evil arise from good?33

[83]     Another passage sheds light on the logic of this statement. In the second homily of the Hexaemeron, Basil says:

It is equally impious to say that evil has its origin from God, because the contrary cannot proceed from the contrary. Life does not engender death, darkness is not the origin of light, sickness is not the maker of health. … Now if evil is neither uncreated nor created by God, whence comes its nature? That evil exists no one living in the world will deny. What shall we say, then? That evil is not a living and animated entity, but a condition [δɩἀθεσɩς] of the soul opposed to virtue, proceeding from light-minded [] persons on account of their falling away from good. … Each of us should acknowledge that he is the first author of the wickedness in him.34

[84]     The perfectly natural fact that when you say “high” you immediately postulate “low” is here twisted into a causal relationship and reduced to absurdity, since it is sufficiently obvious that darkness produces no light and light produces no darkness. The idea of good and evil, however, is the premise for any moral judgment. They are a logically equivalent pair of opposites and, as such, the sine qua non of all acts of cognition. From the empirical standpoint we cannot say more than this. And from this standpoint we would have to assert that good and evil, being coexistent halves of a moral judgment, do not derive from one another but are always there together. Evil, like good, belongs to the category of human values, and we are the authors of moral value judgments, but only to a limited degree are we authors of the facts submitted to our moral judgment. These facts are called by one person good and by another evil. Only in capital cases is there anything like a consensus generalis. If we hold with Basil that man is the author of evil, we are saying in the same breath that he is also the author of good. But man is first and foremost the author merely of judgments; in relation to the facts judged, his responsibility is not so easy to determine. In order to do this, we would have to give a clear definition of the extent of his free will. The psychiatrist knows what a desperately difficult task this is.

[85]     For these reasons the psychologist shrinks from metaphysical assertions but must criticize the admittedly human foundations of the privatio boni. When therefore Basil asserts on the one hand that evil has no substance of its own but arises from a “mutilation of the soul,” and if on the other hand he is convinced that evil really exists, then the relative reality of evil is grounded on a real “mutilation” of the soul which must have an equally real cause. If the soul was originally created good, then it has really been corrupted and by something that is real, even if this is nothing more than carelessness, indifference, and frivolity, which are the meaning of the word ῥαθʋμία. When something—I must stress this with all possible emphasis—is traced back to a psychic condition or fact, it is very definitely not reduced to nothing and thereby nullified, but is shifted on to the plane of psychic reality, which is very much easier to establish empirically than, say, the reality of the devil in dogma, who according to the authentic sources was not invented by man at all but existed long before he did. If the devil fell away from God of his own free will, this proves firstly that evil was in the world before man, and therefore that man cannot be the sole author of it, and secondly that the devil already had a “mutilated” soul for which we must hold a real cause responsible. The basic flaw in Basil’s argument is the petitio principii that lands him in insoluble contradictions: it is laid down from the start that the independent existence of evil must be denied even in face of the eternity of the devil as asserted by dogma. The historical reason for this was the threat presented by Manichaean dualism. This is especially clear in the treatise of Titus of Bostra (d. c. 370), entitled Adversus Manichaeos35 where he states in refutation of the Manichaeans that, so far as substance is concerned, there is no such thing as evil.

[86]     John Chrysostom (c. 344–407) uses, instead of στέρησɩς (privatio), the expression (deviation, or turning away, from good). He says: “Evil is nothing other than a turning away from good, and therefore evil is secondary in relation to good.”36

[87]     Dionysius the Areopagite gives a detailed explanation of evil in the fourth chapter of De divinis nominibus. Evil, he says, cannot come from good, because if it came from good it would not be evil. But since everything that exists comes from good, everything is in some way good, but “evil does not exist at all” ( ).

[88]     Evil in its nature is neither a thing nor does it bring anything forth.

Evil does not exist at all and is neither good nor productive of good [ ].

All things which are, by the very fact that they are, are good and come from good; but in so far as they are deprived of good, they are neither good nor do they exist.

That which has no existence is not altogether evil, for the absolutely non-existent will be nothing, unless it be thought of as subsisting in the good superessentially []. Good, then, as absolutely existing and as absolutely non-existing, will stand in the foremost and highest place [ ], while evil is neither in that which exists nor in that which does not exist [ , ].37

[89]     These quotations show with what emphasis the reality of evil was denied by the Church Fathers. As already mentioned, this hangs together with the Church’s attitude to Manichaean dualism, as can plainly be seen in St. Augustine. In his polemic against the Manichaeans and Marcionites he makes the following declaration:

For this reason all things are good, since some things are better than others and the goodness of the less good adds to the glory of the better. … Those things we call evil, then, are defects in good things, and quite incapable of existing in their own right outside good things. … But those very defects testify to the natural goodness of things. For what is evil by reason of a defect must obviously be good of its own nature. For a defect is something contrary to nature, something which damages the nature of a thing—and it can do so only by diminishing that thing’s goodness. Evil therefore is nothing but the privation of good. And thus it can have no existence anywhere except in some good thing. … So there can be things which are good without any evil in them, such as God himself, and the higher celestial beings; but there can be no evil things without good. For if evils cause no damage to anything, they are not evils; if they do damage something, they diminish its goodness; and if they damage it still more, it is because it still has some goodness which they diminish; and if they swallow it up altogether, nothing of its nature is left to be damaged. And so there will be no evil by which it can be damaged, since there is then no nature left whose goodness any damage can diminish.38

[90]     The Liber Sententiarum ex Augustino says (CLXXVI): “Evil is not a substance,39 for as it has not God for its author, it does not exist; and so the defect of corruption is nothing else than the desire or act of a misdirected will.”40 Augustine agrees with this when he says: “The steel is not evil; but the man who uses the steel for a criminal purpose, he is evil.”41

[91]     These quotations clearly exemplify the standpoint of Dionysius and Augustine: evil has no substance or existence in itself, since it is merely a diminution of good, which alone has substance. Evil is a vitium, a bad use of things as a result of erroneous decisions of the will (blindness due to evil desire, etc.). Thomas Aquinas, the great theoretician of the Church, says with reference to the above quotation from Dionysius:

One opposite is known through the other, as darkness is known through light. Hence also what evil is must be known from the nature of good. Now we have said above that good is everything appetible; and thus, since every nature desires its own being and its own perfection, it must necessarily be said that the being and perfection of every created thing is essentially good. Hence it cannot be that evil signifies a being, or any form or nature. Therefore it must be that by the name of evil is signified the absence of good.42

Evil is not a being, whereas good is a being.43

That every agent works for an end clearly follows from the fact that every agent tends to something definite. Now that to which an agent tends definitely must needs be befuting to that agent, since the latter would not tend to it save on account of some fittingness thereto. But that which is befitting to a thing is good for it. Therefore every agent works for a good.44

[92]     St. Thomas himself recalls the saying of Aristotle that “the thing is the whiter, the less it is mixed with black,”45 without mentioning, however, that the reverse proposition: “the thing is the blacker, the less it is mixed with white,” not only has the same validity as the first but is also its logical equivalent. He might also have mentioned that not only darkness is known through light, but that, conversely, light is known through darkness.

[93]     As only that which works is real, so, according to St. Thomas, only good is real in the sense of “existing.” His argument, however, introduces a good that is tantamount to “convenient, sufficient, appropriate, suitable.” One ought therefore to translate “omne agens agit propter bonum” as: “Every agent works for the sake of what suits it.” That’s what the devil does too, as we all know. He too has an “appetite” and strives after perfection–not in good but in evil. Even so, one could hardly conclude from this that his striving is “essentially good.”

[94]     Obviously evil can be represented as a diminution of good, but with this kind of logic one could just as well say: The temperature of the Arctic winter, which freezes our noses and ears, is relatively speaking only a little below the heat prevailing at the equator. For the Arctic temperature seldom falls much lower than 230° C. above absolute zero. All things on earth are “warm” in the sense that nowhere is absolute zero even approximately reached. Similarly, all things are more or less “good,” and just as cold is nothing but a diminution of warmth, so evil is nothing but a diminution of good. The privatio boni argument remains a euphemistic petitio principii no matter whether evil is regarded as a lesser good or as an effect of the finiteness and limitedness of created things. The false conclusion necessarily follows from the premise “Deus = Summum Bonum,” since it is unthinkable that the perfect good could ever have created evil. It merely created the good and the less good (which last is simply called “worse” by laymen).46 Just as we freeze miserably despite a temperature of 230° above absolute zero, so there are people and things that, although created by God, are good only to the minimal and bad to the maximal degree.

[95]     It is probably from this tendency to deny any reality to evil that we get the axiom “Omne bonum a Deo, omne malum ab homine.” This is a contradiction of the truth that he who created the heat is also responsible for the cold (“the goodness of the less good”). We can certainly hand it to Augustine that all natures are good, yet just not good enough to prevent their badness from being equally obvious.

*

[96]     One could hardly call the things that have happened, and still happen, in the concentration camps of the dictator states an “accidental lack of perfection”—it would sound like mockery.

[97]     Psychology does not know what good and evil are in themselves; it knows them only as judgments about relationships. “Good” is what seems suitable, acceptable, or valuable from a certain point of view; evil is its opposite. If the things we call good are “really” good, then there must be evil things that are “real” too. It is evident that psychology is concerned with a more or less subjective judgment, i.e., with a psychic antithesis that cannot be avoided in naming value relationships: “good” denotes something that is not bad, and “bad” something that is not good. There are things which from a certain point of view are extremely evil, that is to say dangerous. There are also things in human nature which are very dangerous and which therefore seem proportionately evil to anyone standing in their line of fire. It is pointless to gloss over these evil things, because that only lulls one into a sense of false security. Human nature is capable of an infinite amount of evil, and the evil deeds are as real as the good ones so far as human experience goes and so far as the psyche judges and differentiates between them. Only unconsciousness makes no difference between good and evil. Inside the psychological realm one honestly does not know which of them predominates in the world. We hope, merely, that good does—i.e., what seems suitable to us. No one could possibly say what the general good might be. No amount of insight into the relativity and fallibility of our moral judgment can deliver us from these defects, and those who deem themselves beyond good and evil are usually the worst tormentors of mankind, because they are twisted with the pain and fear of their own sickness.

[98]     Today as never before it is important that human beings should not overlook the danger of the evil lurking within them. It is unfortunately only too real, which is why psychology must insist on the reality of evil and must reject any definition that regards it as insignificant or actually non-existent. Psychology is an empirical science and deals with realities. As a psychologist, therefore, I have neither the inclination nor the competence to mix myself up with metaphysics. Only, I have to get polemical when metaphysics encroaches on experience and interprets it in a way that is not justified empirically. My criticism of the privatio boni holds only so far as psychological experience goes. From the scientific point of view the privatio boni, as must be apparent to everyone, is founded on a petitio principii, where what invariably comes out at the end is what you put in at the beginning. Arguments of this kind have no power of conviction. But the fact that such arguments are not only used but are undoubtedly believed is something that cannot be disposed of so easily. It proves that there is a tendency, existing right from the start, to give priority to “good,” and to do so with all the means in our power, whether suitable or unsuitable. So if Christian metaphysics clings to the privatio boni, it is giving expression to the tendency always to increase the good and diminish the bad. The privatio boni may therefore be a metaphysical truth. I presume to no judgment on this matter. I must only insist that in our field of experience white and black, light and dark, good and bad, are equivalent opposites which always predicate one another.

[99]     This elementary fact was correctly appreciated in the so-called Clementine Homilies,47 a collection of Gnostic-Christian writings dating from about A.D. 150. The unknown author understands good and evil as the right and left hand of God, and views the whole of creation in terms of syzygies, or pairs of opposites. In much the same way the follower of Bardesanes, Marinus, sees good as “light” and pertaining to the right hand (δεξɩóν), and evil as “dark” and pertaining to the left hand (ἀρɩστερóν).48 The left also corresponds to the feminine. Thus in Irenaeus (Adv. haer., I, 30, 3), Sophia Prounikos is called Sinistra. Clement finds this altogether compatible with the idea of God’s unity. Provided that one has an anthropomorphic God-image—and every God-image is anthropomorphic in a more or less subtle way—the logic and naturalness of Clement’s view can hardly be contested. At all events this view, which may be some two hundred years older than the quotations given above, proves that the reality of evil does not necessarily lead to Manichaean dualism and so does not endanger the unity of the God-image. As a matter of fact, it guarantees that unity on a plane beyond the crucial difference between the Yahwistic and the Christian points of view. Yahweh is notoriously unjust, and injustice is not good. The God of Christianity, on the other hand, is only good. There is no denying that Clement’s theology helps us to get over this contradiction in a way that fits the psychological facts.

[100]        It is therefore worth following up Clement’s line of thought a little more closely. “God,” he says, “appointed two kingdoms [ßασɩλείας] and two ages [], determining that the present world should be given over to evil [], because it is small and passes quickly away. But he promised to preserve the future world for good, because it is great and eternal.” Clement goes on to say that this division into two corresponds to the structure of man: the body comes from the female, who is characterized by emotionality; the spirit comes from the male, who stands for rationality. He calls body and spirit the “two triads.”49

Man is a compound of two mixtures [ɸνραμἁτων, lit. ‘pastes’], the female and the male. Wherefore also two ways have been laid before him—those of obedience and of disobedience to law; and two kingdoms have been established—the one called the kingdom of heaven, and the other the kingdom of those who are now rulers upon earth. … Of these two, the one does violence to the other. Moreover these two rulers are the swift hands of God.

That is a reference to Deuteronomy 32 : 39: “I will kill and I will make to live” (DV). He kills with the left hand and saves with the right.

These two principles have not their substance outside of God, for there is no other primal source [ἀρχὴ]. Nor have they been sent forth from God as animals, for they were of the same mind [ὁμóδoξoɩ] with him. … But from God were sent forth the four first elements—hot and cold, moist and dry. In consequence of this, he is the Father of every substance [], but not of the knowledge which arises from the mixing of the elements.50 For when these were combined from without, choice [πρoαίρεσɩς] was begotten in them as a child.51

That is to say, through the mixing of the four elements inequalities arose which caused uncertainty and so necessitated decisions or acts of choice. The four elements form the fourfold substance of the body ( ) and also of evil (). This substance was “carefully discriminated and sent forth from God, but when it was combined from without, according to the will of him who sent it forth, there arose, as a result of the combination, the preference which rejoices in evils [ ].”52

[101]        The last sentence is to be understood as follows: The fourfold substance is eternal () and God’s child. But the tendency to evil was added from outside to the mixture willed by God ( ). Thus evil is not created by God or by any one else, nor was it projected out of him, nor did it arise of itself. Peter, who is engaged in these reflections, is evidently not quite sure how the matter stands.

[102]        It seems as if, without God’s intending it (and possibly without his knowing it) the mixture of the four elements took a wrong turning, though this is rather hard to square with Clement’s idea of the opposite hands of God “doing violence to one another.” Obviously Peter, the leader of the dialogue, finds it rather difficult to attribute the cause of evil to the Creator in so many words.

[103]        The author of the Homilies espouses a Petrine Christianity distinctly “High Church” or ritualistic in flavour. This, taken together with his doctrine of the dual aspect of God, brings him into close relationship with the early Jewish-Christian Church, where, according to the testimony of Epiphanius, we find the Ebionite notion that God had two sons, an elder one, Satan, and a younger one, Christ.53 Michaias, one of the speakers in the dialogue, suggests as much when he remarks that if good and evil were begotten in the same way they must be brothers.54

[104]        In the (Jewish-Christian?) apocalypse, the “Ascension of Isaiah,” we find, in the middle section, Isaiah’s vision of the seven heavens through which he was rapt.55 First he saw Sammaël and his hosts, against whom a “great battle” was raging in the firmament. The angel then wafted him beyond this into the first heaven and led him before a throne. On the right of the throne stood angels who were more beautiful than the angels on the left. Those on the right “all sang praises with one voice,” but the ones on the left sang after them, and their singing was not like the singing of the first. In the second heaven all the angels were more beautiful than in the first heaven, and there was no difference between them, either here or in any of the higher heavens. Evidently Sammaël still has a noticeable influence on the first heaven, since the angels on the left are not so beautiful there. Also, the lower heavens are not so splendid as the upper ones, though each surpasses the other in splendour. The devil, like the Gnostic archons, dwells in the firmament, and he and his angels presumably correspond to astrological gods and influences. The gradation of splendour, going all the way up to the topmost heaven, shows that his sphere interpenetrates with the divine sphere of the Trinity, whose light in turn filters down as far as the lowest heaven. This paints a picture of complementary opposites balancing one another like right and left hands. Significantly enough, this vision, like the Clementine Homilies, belongs to the pre-Manichaean period (second century), when there was as yet no need for Christianity to fight against its Manichaean competitors. It might easily be a description of a genuine yang-yin relationship, a picture that comes closer to the actual truth than the privatio boni. Moreover, it does not damage monotheism in any way, since it unites the opposites just as yang and yin are united in Tao (which the Jesuits quite logically translated as “God”). It is as if Manichaean dualism first made the Fathers conscious of the fact that until then, without clearly realizing it, they had always believed firmly in the substantiality of evil. This sudden realization might well have led them to the dangerously anthropomorphic assumption that what man cannot unite, God cannot unite either. The early Christians, thanks to their greater unconsciousness, were able to avoid this mistake.

[105]        Perhaps we may risk the conjecture that the problem of the Yahwistic God-image, which had been constellated in men’s minds ever since the Book of Job, continued to be discussed in Gnostic circles and in syncretistic Judaism generally, all the more eagerly as the Christian answer to this question—namely the unanimous decision in favour of God’s goodness56—did not satisfy the conservative Jews. In this respect, therefore, it is significant that the doctrine of the two antithetical sons of God originated with the Jewish Christians living in Palestine. Inside Christianity itself the doctrine spread to the Bogomils and Cathars; in Judaism it influenced religious speculation and found lasting expression in the two sides of the cabalistic Tree of the Sephiroth, which were named hesed (love) and din (justice). A rabbinical scholar, Zwi Werblowsky, has been kind enough to put together for me a number of passages from Hebrew literature which have bearing on this problem.

[106]        R. Joseph taught: “What is the meaning of the verse, ‘And none of you shall go out at the door of his house until the morning?’ (Exodus 12 : 22.)57 Once permission has been granted to the destroyer, he does not distinguish between the righteous and the wicked. Indeed, he even begins with the righteous.”58 Commenting on Exodus 33 : 5 (“If for a single moment I should go up among you, I would consume you”), the midrash says: “Yahweh means he could wax wroth with you for a moment—for that is the length of his wrath, as is said in Isaiah 26 : 20, ‘Hide yourselves for a little moment until the wrath is past’—and destroy you.” Yahweh gives warning here of his unbridled irascibility. If in this moment of divine wrath a curse is uttered, it will indubitably be effective. That is why Balaam, “who knows the thoughts of the Most High,”59 when called upon by Balak to curse Israel, was so dangerous an enemy, because he knew the moment of Yahweh’s wrath.60

[107]        God’s love and mercy are named his right hand, but his justice and his administration of it are named his left hand. Thus we read in I Kings 22 : 19: “I saw the Lord sitting on his throne, and all the host of heaven standing beside him on his right hand and on his left.” The midrash comments: “Is there right and left on high? This means that the intercessors stand on the right and the accusers on the left.”61 The comment on Exodus 15 : 6 (“Thy right hand, O Lord, glorious in power, thy right hand, O Lord, shatters the enemy”) runs: “When the children of Israel perform God’s will, they make the left hand his right hand. When they do not do his will, they make even the right hand his left hand.”62 “God’s left hand dashes to pieces; his right hand is glorious to save.”63

[108]        The dangerous aspect of Yahweh’s justice comes out in the following passage: “Even so said the Holy One, blessed be He: If I create the world on the basis of mercy alone, its sins will be great; but on the basis of justice alone the world cannot exist. Hence I will create it on the basis of justice and mercy, and may it then stand!”64 The midrash on Genesis 18 : 23 (Abraham’s plea for Sodom) says (Abraham speaking): “If thou desirest the world to endure, there can be no absolute justice, while if thou desirest absolute justice, the world cannot endure. Yet thou wouldst hold the cord by both ends, desiring both the world and absolute justice. Unless thou forgoest a little, the world cannot endure.”65

[109]        Yahweh prefers the repentant sinners even to the righteous, and protects them from his justice by covering them with his hand or by hiding them under his throne.66

[110]        With reference to Habakkuk 2 : 3 (“For still the vision awaits its time. … If it seem slow, wait for it”), R. Jonathan says: “Should you say, We wait [for his coming] but He does not, it stands written (Isaiah 30 : 18), ‘Therefore will the Lord wait, that he may be gracious unto you.’ … But since we wait and he waits too. what delays his coming? Divine justice delays it.”67 It is in this sense that we have to understand the prayer of R. Jochanan: “May it be thy will, O Lord our God, to look upon our shame and behold our evil plight. Clothe thyself in thy mercies, cover thyself in thy strength, wrap thyself in thy loving-kindness, and gird thyself with thy graciousness, and may thy goodness and gentleness come before thee.”68 God is properly exhorted to remember his good qualities. There is even a tradition that God prays to himself: “May it be My will that My mercy may suppress My anger, and that My compassion may prevail over My other attributes.”69 This tradition is borne out by the following story:

R. Ishmael the son of Elisha said: I once entered the innermost sanctuary to offer incense, and there I saw Akathriel70 Jah Jahweh Zebaoth71 seated upon a high and exalted throne. He said to me, Ishmael, my son, bless me! And I answered him: May it be Thy will that Thy mercy may suppress Thy anger, and that Thy compassion may prevail over Thy other attributes, so that Thou mayest deal with Thy children according to the attribute of mercy and stop short of the limit of strict justice! And He nodded to me with His head.72

[111]        It is not difficult to see from these quotations what was the effect of Job’s contradictory God-image. It became a subject for religious speculation inside Judaism and, through the medium of the Cabala, it evidently had an influence on Jakob Böhme. In his writings we find a similar ambivalence, namely the love and the “wrath-fire” of God, in which Lucifer burns for ever.73

[112]        Since psychology is not metaphysics, no metaphysical dualism can be derived from, or imputed to, its statements concerning the equivalence of opposites.74 It knows that equivalent opposites are necessary conditions inherent in the act of cognition, and that without them no discrimination would be possible. It is not exactly probable that anything so intrinsically bound up with the act of cognition should be at the same time a property of the object. It is far easier to suppose that it is primarily our consciousness which names and evaluates the differences between things, and perhaps even creates distinctions where no differences are discernible.

[113]        I have gone into the doctrine of the privatio boni at such length because it is in a sense responsible for a too optimistic conception of the evil in human nature and for a too pessimistic view of the human soul. To offset this, early Christianity, with unerring logic, balanced Christ against an Antichrist. For how can you speak of “high” if there is no “low,” or “right” if there is no “left,” of “good” if there is no “bad,” and the one is as real as the other? Only with Christ did a devil enter the world as the real counterpart of God, and in early Jewish-Christian circles Satan, as already mentioned, was regarded as Christ’s elder brother.

[114]        But there is still another reason why I must lay such critical stress on the privatio boni. As early as Basil we meet with the tendency to attribute evil to the disposition (δɩάθεσɩς) of the soul, and at the same time to give it a “non-existent” character. Since, according to this author, evil originates in human frivolity and therefore owes its existence to mere negligence, it exists, so to speak, only as a by-product of psychological oversight, and this is such a quantité négligeable that evil vanishes altogether in smoke. Frivolity as a cause of evil is certainly a factor to be taken seriously, but it is a factor that can be got rid of by a change of attitude. We can act differently, if we want to. Psychological causation is something so elusive and seemingly unreal that everything which is reduced to it inevitably takes on the character of futility or of a purely accidental mistake and is thereby minimized to the utmost. It is an open question how much of our modern undervaluation of the psyche stems from this prejudice. This prejudice is all the more serious in that it causes the psyche to be suspected of being the birthplace of all evil. The Church Fathers can hardly have considered what a fatal power they were ascribing to the soul. One must be positively blind not to see the colossal role that evil plays in the world. Indeed, it took the intervention of God himself to deliver humanity from the curse of evil, for without his intervention man would have been lost. If this paramount power of evil is imputed to the soul, the result can only be a negative inflation—i.e., a daemonic claim to power on the part of the unconscious which makes it all the more formidable. This unavoidable consequence is anticipated in the figure of the Antichrist and is reflected in the course of contemporary events, whose nature is in accord with the Christian aeon of the Fishes, now running to its end.

[115]        In the world of Christian ideas Christ undoubtedly represents the self.75 As the apotheosis of individuality, the self has the attributes of uniqueness and of occurring once only in time. But since the psychological self is a transcendent concept, expressing the totality of conscious and unconscious contents, it can only be described in antinomial terms;76 that is, the above attributes must be supplemented by their opposites if the transcendental situation is to be characterized correctly. We can do this most simply in the form of a quaternion of opposites:

[116]        This formula expresses not only the psychological self but also the dogmatic figure of Christ. As an historical personage Christ is unitemporal and unique; as God, universal and eternal. Likewise the self: as the essence of individuality it is unitemporal and unique; as an archetypal symbol it is a God-image and therefore universal and eternal.77 Now if theology describes Christ as simply “good” and “spiritual,” something “evil” and “material”—or “chthonic”—is bound to arise on the other side, to represent the Antichrist. The resultant quaternion of opposites is united on the psychological plane by the fact that the self is not deemed exclusively “good” and “spiritual”; consequently its shadow turns out to be much less black. A further result is that the opposites of “good” and “spiritual” need no longer be separated from the whole:

[117]        This quaternio characterizes the psychological self. Being a totality, it must by definition include the light and dark aspects, in the same way that the self embraces both masculine and feminine and is therefore symbolized by the marriage quaternio.78 This last is by no means a new discovery, since according to Hippolytus it was known to the Naassenes.79 Hence individuation is a “mysterium coniunctionis,” the self being experienced as a nuptial union of opposite halves80 and depicted as a composite whole in mandalas that are drawn spontaneously by patients.

[118]        It was known, and stated, very early that the man Jesus, the son of Mary, was the principium individuationis. Thus Basilides81 is reported by Hippolytus as saying: “Now Jesus became the first sacrifice in the discrimination of the natures [ɸʋλoкρίνησɩς], and the Passion came to pass for no other reason than the discrimination of composite things. For in this manner, he says, the sonship that had been left behind in a formless state [ἀμoρɸία] … needed separating into its components [], in the same way that Jesus was separated.”82 According to the rather complicated teachings of Basilides, the “non-existent” God begot a threefold sonship (). The first “son,” whose nature was the finest and most subtle, remained up above with the Father. The second son, having a grosser (παχʋμερέστερα) nature, descended a bit lower, but received “some such wing as that with which Plato … equips the soul in his Phaedrus.”83 The third son, as his nature needed purifying (ἀπoκαθάρσɩς), fell deepest into “formlessness.” This third “sonship” is obviously the grossest and heaviest because of its impurity. In these three emanations or manifestations of the non-existent God it is not hard to see the trichotomy of spirit, soul, and body (πνενματɩкóν, Ψʋχɩкóν, σαρкɩкóν). Spirit is the finest and highest; soul, as the ligamentum spiritus et corporis, is grosser than spirit, but has “the wings of an eagle,”84 so that it may lift its heaviness up to the higher regions. Both are of a “subtle” nature and dwell, like the ether and the eagle, in or near the region of light, whereas the body, being heavy, dark, and impure, is deprived of the light but nevertheless contains the divine seed of the third sonship, though still unconscious and formless. This seed is as it were awakened by Jesus, purified and made capable of ascension (ἀναδρoμή),85 by virtue of the fact that the opposites were separated in Jesus through the Passion (i.e., through his division into four).86 Jesus is thus the prototype for the awakening of the third sonship slumbering in the darkness of humanity. He is the “spiritual inner man.”87 He is also a complete trichotomy in himself, for Jesus the son of Mary represents the incarnate man, but his immediate predecessor is the second Christ, the son of the highest archon of the hebdomad, and his first prefiguration is Christ the son of the highest archon of the ogdoad, the demiurge Yahweh.88 This trichotomy of Anthropos figures corresponds exactly to the three sonships of the non-existing God and to the division of human nature into three parts. We have therefore three trichotomies:

I	II	III
First sonship	Christ of the Ogdoad	Spirit
Second sonship	Christ of the Hebdomad	Soul
Third sonship	Jesus the Son of Mary	Body

[119]        It is in the sphere of the dark, heavy body that we must look for the ἀμoρɸία, the “formlessness” wherein the third sonship lies hidden. As suggested above, this formlessness seems to be practically the equivalent of “unconsciousness.” G. Quispel has drawn attention to the concepts of ἀγνωσία in Epiphanius89 and ἀνóητoν in Hippolytus,90 which are best translated by “unconscious.” ’Aμoρɸία, ἀγνωσία, and ἀνóητoν all refer to the initial state of things, to the potentiality of unconscious contents, aptly formulated by Basilides as (the non-existent, many-formed, and all-empowering seed of the world).91

[120]        This picture of the third sonship has certain analogies with the medieval filius philosophorum and the filius macrocosmi, who also symbolize the world-soul slumbering in matter.92 Even with Basilides the body acquires a special and unexpected significance, since in it and its materiality is lodged a third of the revealed Godhead. This means nothing less than that matter is predicated as having considerable numinosity in itself, and I see this as an anticipation of the “mystic” significance which matter subsequently assumed in alchemy and—later on—in natural science. From a psychological point of view it is particularly important that Jesus corresponds to the third sonship and is the prototype of the “awakener” because the opposites were separated in him through the Passion and so became conscious, whereas in the third sonship itself they remain unconscious so long as the latter is formless and undifferentiated. This amounts to saying that in unconscious humanity there is a latent seed that corresponds to the prototype Jesus. Just as the man Jesus became conscious only through the light that emanated from the higher Christ and separated the natures in him, so the seed in unconscious humanity is awakened by the light emanating from Jesus, and is thereby impelled to a similar discrimination of opposites. This view is entirely in accord with the psychological fact that the archetypal image of the self has been shown to occur in dreams even when no such conceptions exist in the conscious mind of the dreamer.93

*

[121]        I would not like to end this chapter without a few final remarks that are forced on me by the importance of the material we have been discussing. The standpoint of a psychology whose subject is the phenomenology of the psyche is evidently something that is not easy to grasp and is very often misunderstood. If, therefore, at the risk of repeating myself, I come back to fundamentals, I do so only in order to forestall certain wrong impressions which might be occasioned by what I have said, and to spare my reader unnecessary difficulties.

[122]        The parallel I have drawn here between Christ and the self is not to be taken as anything more than a psychological one, just as the parallel with the fish is mythological. There is no question of any intrusion into the sphere of metaphysics, i.e., of faith. The images of God and Christ which man’s religious fantasy projects cannot avoid being anthropomorphic and are admitted to be so; hence they are capable of psychological elucidation like any other symbols. Just as the ancients believed that they had said something important about Christ with their fish symbol, so it seemed to the alchemists that their parallel with the stone served to illuminate and deepen the meaning of the Christ-image. In the course of time, the fish symbolism disappeared completely, and so likewise did the lapis philosophorum. Concerning this latter symbol, however, there are plenty of statements to be found which show it in a special light—views and ideas which attach such importance to the stone that one begins to wonder whether, in the end, it was Christ who was taken as a symbol of the stone rather than the other way round. This marks a development which—with the help of certain ideas in the epistles of John and Paul—includes Christ in the realm of immediate inner experience and makes him appear as the figure of the total man. It also links up directly with the psychological evidence for the existence of an archetypal content possessing all those qualities which are characteristic of the Christ-image in its archaic and medieval forms. Modern psychology is therefore confronted with a question very like the one that faced the alchemists: Is the self a symbol of Christ, or is Christ a symbol of the self?

[123]        In the present study I have affirmed the latter alternative. I have tried to show how the traditional Christ-image concentrates upon itself the characteristics of an archetype—the archetype of the self. My aim and method do not purport to be anything more in principle than, shall we say, the efforts of an art historian to trace the various influences which have contributed towards the formation of a particular Christ-image. Thus we find the concept of the archetype in the history of art as well as in philology and textual criticism. The psychological archetype differs from its parallels in other fields only in one respect: it refers to a living and ubiquitous psychic fact, and this naturally shows the whole situation in a rather different light. One is then tempted to attach greater importance to the immediate and living presence of the archetype than to the idea of the historical Christ. As I have said, there is among certain of the alchemists, too, a tendency to give the lapis priority over Christ. Since I am far from cherishing any missionary intentions, I must expressly emphasize that I am not concerned here with confessions of faith but with proven scientific facts. If one inclines to regard the archetype of the self as the real agent and hence takes Christ as a symbol of the self, one must bear in mind that there is a considerable difference between perfection and completeness. The Christ-image is as good as perfect (at least it is meant to be so), while the archetype (so far as known) denotes completeness but is far from being perfect. It is a paradox, a statement about something indescribable and transcendental. Accordingly the realization of the self, which would logically follow from a recognition of its supremacy, leads to a fundamental conflict, to a real suspension between opposites (reminiscent of the crucified Christ hanging between two thieves), and to an approximate state of wholeness that lacks perfection. To strive after teleiosis in the sense of perfection is not only legitimate but is inborn in man as a peculiarity which provides civilization with one of its strongest roots. This striving is so powerful, even, that it can turn into a passion that draws everything into its service. Natural as it is to seek perfection in one way or another, the archetype fulfils itself in completeness, and this is a τελείωσɩς of quite another kind. Where the archetype predominates, completeness is forced upon us against all our conscious strivings, in accordance with the archaic nature of the archetype. The individual may strive after perfection (“Be you therefore perfect—τέλεɩoɩ—also your heavenly Father is perfect.”94) but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for the sake of his completeness. “I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me.”95

[124]        The Christ-image fully corresponds to this situation: Christ is the perfect man who is crucified. One could hardly think of a truer picture of the goal of ethical endeavour. At any rate the transcendental idea of the self that serves psychology as a working hypothesis can never match that image because, although it is a symbol, it lacks the character of a revelatory historical event. Like the related ideas of atman and tao in the East, the idea of the self is at least in part a product of cognition, grounded neither on faith nor on metaphysical speculation but on the experience that under certain conditions the unconscious spontaneously brings forth an archetypal symbol of wholeness. From this we must conclude that some such archetype occurs universally and is endowed with a certain numinosity. And there is in fact any amount of historical evidence as well as modern case material to prove this.96 These naive and completely uninfluenced pictorial representations of the symbol show that it is given central and supreme importance precisely because it stands for the conjunction of opposites. Naturally the conjunction can only be understood as a paradox, since a union of opposites can be thought of only as their annihilation. Paradox is a characteristic of all transcendental situations because it alone gives adequate expression to their indescribable nature.

[125]        Whenever the archetype of the self predominates, the inevitable psychological consequence is a state of conflict vividly exemplified by the Christian symbol of crucifixion—that acute state of unredeemedness which comes to an end only with the words “consummatum est.” Recognition of the archetype, therefore, does not in any way circumvent the Christian mystery; rather, it forcibly creates the psychological preconditions without which “redemption” would appear meaningless. “Redemption” does not mean that a burden is taken from one’s shoulders which one was never meant to bear. Only the “complete” person knows how unbearable man is to himself. So far as I can see, no relevant objection could be raised from the Christian point of view against anyone accepting the task of individuation imposed on us by nature, and the recognition of our wholeness or completeness, as a binding personal commitment. If he does this consciously and intentionally, he avoids all the unhappy consequences of repressed individuation. In other words, if he voluntarily takes the burden of completeness on himself, he need not find it “happening” to him against his will in a negative form. This is as much as to say that anyone who is destined to descend into a deep pit had better set about it with all the necessary precautions rather than risk falling into the hole backwards.

[126]        The irreconcilable nature of the opposites in Christian psychology is due to their moral accentuation. This accentuation seems natural to us, although, looked at historically, it is a legacy from the Old Testament with its emphasis on righteousness in the eyes of the law. Such an influence is notably lacking in the East, in the philosophical religions of India and China. Without stopping to discuss the question of whether this exacerbation of the opposites, much as it increases suffering, may not after all correspond to a higher degree of truth, I should like merely to express the hope that the present world situation may be looked upon in the light of the psychological rule alluded to above. Today humanity, as never before, is split into two apparently irreconcilable halves. The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.