Charles Victor on Religion

As an aside to a response I causally said: “Jung did not really understand the doctrine of the Trinity.” That merited the rather shocked reply: “Do you really want to say that.” After a reflective pause I said: “Yes.” The reader may, in consideration of my age, take that as sapience or senility.

Allow me to begin with a caveat. Everything we poor mortals have to say ought to be bracketed with caveats. Everything we know, as St. Paul notes, is only in part. I am aware I may be misconstruing Jung. I have read Jung’s correspondence with learned theologs who could not see Jung’s differentiation between the imago Dei and the all-transcending Holy One. They seemed to think Jung was either denying the transcendent God or equating him with the immanence of God, the evolutionary providence and grace of God within his work.

On the other hand, I feel that whensoever Jung looks toward the doctrine of the Trinity he is blindsided by a predisposition to make symbols fit into a system. He has a certain propensity to want to see things grouped as threes and fours, as triangles and squares. Three persons and the symbolic depiction of the Trinity as an equilateral triangle read to him as something lesser in power than can be represented by the number four or a square. Thus, he thinks the wedding of Mary into the Divine Trinity gives it both the balance and the power it lacks. I have addressed my objection to this in Immortality.

We humans cannot comprehend the sacred Mystery that is the triune Godhead. We can and do devise designs, concepts, images to denote it, to on one level or another of our sentient, intuitive, and sometimes intelligent structure make it tangible. For centuries, the triangular symbol has worked. Admittedly, some found it wanting, particularly in depicting the dynamic of the divine life, and thus, there came the overlay of three interlocking elongated ellipses. Still others found the symbol-design wanting in wholeness, and thus the entire devise was set within a circle.

Jung felt time and the evolution of the human spirit were pressing for something more. He regarded the triangular notion lacked the dynamic necessary to the depiction of the Godhead. He conjectured the time was upon us for the introduction of the feminine back into the notion of the Sacred. We needed to be confronted with the symbolic power of a quaternity. Perhaps he was merely more prescient than most, and understood the need for the feminine within our singular humanity to express itself. Perhaps he was too human, and caught up in his discovery of the power of alchemy’s symbolism, the geometric designs behind its chemical compounds and formularies.

I will not disagree that we need to see the femininity of the Godhead. I will not disagree that we have made God in the image of our intellect and will to the disparagement of our sentient and intuitive powers. This has been, I believe, the source of a legion of difficulties.

The failure to see the feminine within the divine may be muchly a patriarchal prejudice. The insistence of theologs to see Father and Son as proper names rather than relational indicatives bolsters this. Any being who is pure “father” or pure “son” is all about intellect and order, all about the presumedly masculine “logos [order]” without the equally presumed femininity of “eros [relativity].” But the Father who is self-generative and generates his own perfect image cannot be pure logos. Generation indicates both eros and logos. The eternal Son is spoken of as the divine Logos, as the accomplishing word. But here again, logos is not pure order and reason. It is the creative word, and creativity brims with spontaneity and relativity. We need also to consider the dynamic that arises, that is “spirated [breathed out],” between the two: the Holy Spirit. This divine personality is all about relationship, about being able to see through things and hearts, and so is wisdom, about being able to accept the core reality of things and souls, and so is love. The Spirit binds the Father and Son. It is in its joyous breath of passion that the Godhead has its eternal, spinning dance, its perichoresis. It is the Spirit who empowers the movement into creation, into incarnation. It is conceptive. But relationship, wisdom, love, conception are feminine things. The Spirit is feminine. The Spirit is the feminine face of God.

It is precisely here that Mary enters the picture. Because of her intimate connection with the Holy Spirit she is, one is tempted to say naturally, the face of the Spirit. Yet, herein resides a danger. Mary, who undoubtedly—with every Christian soul—shares co-operation with the Spirit, and in the Christhood of her divine Son, is given a singular status that no other can match. Suddenly humanity and the benefits of our singular salvation are ranked. Who can compare to Mary? She becomes the portal to heaven, the mediatrix. Thereby the mediatorship of her Son is removed from immediacy to the soul. The entire triunity of the Godhead becomes destabilised. She is due honour, but so also every soul that by the power of the Spirit says yes to God’s plan made manifest in Jesus Christ, our one mediator and advocate, our singular interface with the Eternal One before whom all saints and angels bow in prayer and adoration.

The Western mind has intellectualized God, possibly to death. We look upon our rationality as the apex of creation or the end point of evolution, and from that exalted height depict God in our image. In so doing we blithely fail to see why the prohibition against false gods leads the commandments. We claim God is all-knowing and of an all-powerful will. But is not God’s print, God’s image in all of the created order? Was it not there in the first creative command, in the pure impulse of creation to be? Is not God to be sensed in the thrust of the first particle to take form? Is not the hand of God to be discerned in the birth of the first atom? Is it not there in the churning of mountains, in the grinding weight of glaciers? Is it not there in the thirst of the first cell to replicate, in the heaving of the waves, the whirling drive of the galaxies? Is it not there in the buzzing of the bee, the prowling of the lion, the chirping of the bird? Is not God’s print to be known in the primitive, primal urge, the founding, pulsing throb to continue. This is important to note because wrapped up in all of that primal power is our intuitiveness, our palpating interconnectedness, our sentience, our sensibility, our sensuality, our sexuality. Our glorification of ourselves as intelligent and volitional beings robs God and reality of those aspects of being. Repressed or suppressed from the notion of self they manifest themselves in our bodies, our relationships, our world as all manner of ills. They cannot be denied. They will not be pushed to the side as inconveniences any more than they will be exalted to the detriment of reason and the power of will. Repressed or suppressed from our notions of the divine they manifest a God who is all about right and wrong, and with that wrath and judgement. It is a God who is all “logos,” law and order. It is a God without Spirit. Therein a feminine force needs to be found to bring feelings, mercy, tenderness, love. And thus appear Mary, her fellow saints, and the calls to the tender side of Jesus’ humanity to rectify the God-image we in the faux apotheosis of self have created.

I am aware there will be some who will object that the print of God in the created order is not the same as the imago Dei in man. Perhaps it is not. However, it is that very imprint of creativity that expresses itself in man as the image of the divine. The rational and volitional powers in man do not exist in abstraction from the temporal flow of the creative Word. There would be in man no reason and will without there first being set into creation their foundations in pure need, urge, impulse, desire, instinct. Reason and will without these aspects of our psyche and physis are nothing more than an absentmindedness at best, hubris at worst. To look upon reason and will in God without understanding these architectonic structures inherent in reason and will is deeply problematic. It expresses an inauthentic vision of the Holy. Thereby God becomes unrelatable to everything in man that touches upon the non-rational and spontaneous.

I would propose that were there the necessity to redesign a symbol of the Trinity appropriate to the age we might look to the double helix of the DNA model. In such a model Father and Son would each be a helical power whose dynamic spin is the Spirit. Note, this is not a static system. It is the living God we seek to express. If the Logos, the Son, is the perfect image of the Father, then the Father is the Prime Logos. But this generation of the Son is an eternal action. And the interaction of the two is likewise an eternal action, and the action, the breathless breathing of one into the other is their relationship, their relatedness, their Eros. That Eros does not arise out of something other than the divine, eternally pulsing energy. Thus, there is no Logos without Eros. The passion, the flame, the sheer and sheering light of God that is the Spirit is set eternally in the very who and what of the Godhead. For man, eros and logos are ideational opposites. In God they are one reality. Man wants order, desires the surety of logos, and pines for the relational power of eros. God knows them as one, as the Logos of Eros, as the Order of Love.

It is an image. It has, I believe, possibilities. And I hasten to add, there is no symbol of the Sacred One that can stand alone. I have spoken of God as a singularity, a black hole into whose unseeable mystery we by faith fall. Scripture speaks of God as hidden in impenetrable light. Those pictures seeming stand at opposite ends of a spectrum. And a spectrum is necessary. Yet, an infinitely stretched spectrum could not capture the Divine. God always transcends whatsoever we can imagine or concoct. The issue is not to comprehend God, but to allow God to be God—the impenetrable source of us, the Mystery at the root of the mystery of us. Indeed, we need to confess that we are at base as much a mystery to ourselves as to each other, such is the depth of the living imprint, imago Dei within.

Transforming the trinity in the quaternity strikes me as moving in a very unacceptable direction. Triangularity does not make for an effete symbol. Jung’s analyses of fairy tales and countless dreams attest to this. Triangles have room to move, adapt, transform, be tangential. A square or a cube is interesting, but it is closed upon itself. It can serve as a building block, but like the circle cannot move beyond itself. It is a finished system. God is never complete, never a closed system, until his creation and his incarnation into it reach the end, until the new heaven and earth are accomplished in Christ’s placing the whole of the redeemed creation into his hands.

Modern man does not require a new symbol of God. Modern man needs to come again before the Triune God, and to find there in its supernal and everlasting form the yearnful, the creative, the nurturing, the redemptive, the impassioned, the wise, the eternally entwining logos and eros that give dynamic to every soul.

More than a dozen years ago I began posting replies to inquires concerning religion. Most of those early reflections consisted of the re-editing of previous works. As time went on I realized many questions were raised because the philosophical backgrounds to the enunciations of church teachings were not understood. To ameliorate that situation I undertook a brief review of Western philosophy. The focus was upon the theories concerning how we come to formulate our knowledge of things, and how those evolving theories have created nuances in our ongoing talk of God and soul. However, as I continued to reflect upon responses to my work I realized the philosophical approach to the items of religion was not resonating in the ruminations of the general public. Most are not given to see the world as a subset of substance and accidents, matter and form. I began, therefore, to turn increasingly towards the considerations of Jung in his analysis of the psyche, the soul. Surely, everyone could introspect and realize that there is within each an animating power of conflicting forces and seemingly infinite depth, and that in so doing could come to see them as reflected in the teachings of the Christian faith. In this sense the doctrines and creeds, and indeed their enactment in ritual, are projections of the workings of psyche. They, in a sense, constitute the story of soul and how it functions.