Searching for God...#3

 Literalism begets for and begs the binary…especially in a culture dumbed down to a right or a wrong answer for each and every problem. Crises, such as 9/11, when George W. tells the world, ‘You are either for us or against us!” and the current Oval Office occupant demonizes all those who, in any major or minor degree disagree with his personal, narcissistic, and despotic need exemplify the reduction. Not only are alternative ‘thoughts,’ as opposed to and compared with ‘alternative facts,’ not permitted in a culture hygienically and militarily, obsessively and compulsively stripped of people, ideas, institutions (think both government agencies and universities, public media) that are all considered enemies, on the whim of a single tin-pot dictator, who parades as the ‘God-sent saviour’ to the American people, but this dynamic did not spring up only in the last decade.

In the third century AD, Manicheanism, founded by the prophet Mani, held as its fundamental principle that there existed an external conflict between absolute good and absolute evil.

Manicheanism was based on a supposed primeval conflict between light and darkness. It taught that the object of the practice of religion was to release the particles of light which Satan had stolen from the world of Light and imprisoned in man’s brain and that Jesus, Buddha, the Prophets and Mani had been sent to help in this task.  For the Manichean believer, the whole physical universe was mobilized to create this release. The Gnostic myth of salvation has seldom been presented on so grandiose a cosmic scale, worked out in rigorous detail; every phase of the movements of the sun, moon and stars was a stage in the deliverance of the believer’s soul and every ritual act of the individual had resonance among the heavenly bodies. (From the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, edited by F.L. Cross and E. A Livington, p.1027)

While the religion of Manicheanism was eventually driven underground by the Romans, in his youth and early adulthood, Augustine was a practicing Manichean, ‘because it taught the harsh but strangely comforting doctrine that sex was synonymous with darkness and bore the marks of the evil creator.’ (From Augnet.org,  Life of Augustine, 1031 the manichee)

From pmc.ncbi.nih.gov, written by Gregory A Petsko, May, 2008, in a piece entitled, The new Manicheans, we read:

The idea that the world can be divided into two opposing, and opposite sides is called dualism. It has perhaps its ultimate expression in a religion that thrived between the third and seventh centuries but was still practiced in the sixteenth century. It was called Manicheanism, after its prophet Mani, who was martyred in Persia around AD 277….No doubt (Augustine) would be appalled to learn that there is still a strong Manichean streak in many modern religions today, especially in their fundamentalist forms. When the religious right calls scientists agents of evil or claims that those who believe in evolution are in league with the Devil, they are adopting an essentially Manichean world view. To see things in black and white without realizing there can be shades of gray, or that everything is part of a moral dichotomy, is what philosophers call the Manichean fallacy.

When it comes to foreign policy, Western policy makers today suffer from a Manichean worldview, a caustic mindset crystallized during the decades-running Cold War with the Soviet Union.

(From the Abstract) In this…piece for the American conservative, the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy’s Research Director, September 9, 2020, Dr. Arta Moeini, argues that the persistence of the Blob- the North Atlantic foreign policy establishment-and their relentless support for primacy can be explained using a psychosociological and generational analysis. Shaped by the dualistic paradigm of the international system during the Cold War, this Baby Boomer Generation of elites suffers from a Manichean psychology and ideological fixation crystallized through decades-running US-Soviet rivalry.

Darkness and Lightness, absolute Evil and Absolute Goodness, as archetypes, continue to hold considerable influence among those pew-dwellers  who remain in Christian church pews. It is even a central tenet for some preachers of the ‘Christian’ faith. Satan and God, epitomize the two absolute poles of religion and directly confront the psychological polytheism posited by James Hillman in archetypal psychology. Monotheism, as one of those poles, the other being Satan, continues, for many, to uphold the binary, either-or perspective especially of the morality of human behaviour. From a psychological perspective that seeks to perceive ‘differently’ from the ‘soul’ Hillman urges his readers to consider a different imaginative perspective that, perhaps some god or goddess (not of Christian or another faith) buy rather from Greek mythology) may be reenacted. And with this lens, we might acquire a different and more nuanced, subtle, and perhaps even more complex exegesis of our most extreme moments. Hillman posits that the ‘soul’ looks ‘downward’ into the darkness and the pain and the trauma of our lives, while for him the ‘spirit’ looks upward into the light of promise and hope. For him, the soul seeks the space between, without turning a blind eye or deaf ear toward the darkness. As a bridge between the extremes, not only or our morality but also of our psyche’s perceptions, soul has the potential to moderate the absolutes, of both monotheism and literalism.

The absoluteness of this dichotomy of absolute good and absolute evil is troublesome for Hillman although his argument is not with religion, per se, but with the manner in which psychological pain and evil have become conflated. Fo Hillman, God is neither blind to our dark side, nor contemptuous of our actions. Indeed, his attempt to bridge psychology and religion, while subtle and nuanced, warrants much more study. Is it too presumptuous to suggest that for humans to probe the roots and influences and voices of our most extreme and challenging moments, including those aspects that can be considered to emerge from our unconscious, is to potential find, uncover, discern or even learn about a sympathetic,  congruent and perhaps even empathic relationship and connection to our search for God and the potential of our relationship to God? Transformation, at the core of the religious experience, is certainly also the core of the imaginative perspective laid onto our extreme moments. And, for Hillman, this approach is not a glib excuse to escape guilt, but rather to ameliorate whatever guilt and shame might have already become fused to those moments of trauma and darkness. His perspective is not an alternative to accountability and responsibility; rather it is a path that includes both, without piling on additional moments of trauma. Our failures, then, are not definitions of absolute evil just as our psychological ‘highs’ are not definitions of absolute goodness. And, in that light, emotions, too, given their temporality and changeability, are more likely to ‘fit’ into that lens, with less psychic and behaviour influence.

The moral implications of our actions, words and attitudes, too, have become the primary and first lens through which human behaviour is perceived, and this is especially noticeable in a culture dependent on literal, empirical, scientific apprehension of reality. Religion, over the centuries, has claimed this ‘field’ as its own, without also owning the application of this lens to its own atttitudes, beliefs and practices.

Any attempt to shift a culture’s mindset and perspective, attitudes and operating principles from first, absolutes to alternatives, and second from moral failures to psychological voices and images that, Hillman argues, can be found echoing and repeating multiple gods and goddesses from mythology, is fraught with the hurdles of the human mind’s proclivity both for instant judgements of right and wrong, and also for some deterministic path to compliance with God. The intersection of psychology and religion, or between the psyche and the spirit, is one requiring both sensitive and nuanced discernment, as well as tolerance and patience from and for any volunteer practitioners and from and for their readers. Hillman proposes that the psyche/soul dwells with those stories of down and darkness, while those of the human spirit dwell on the stories of ‘light and up’….He also differentiates between a biographic ‘case history’ and a ‘soul history’ which differs in that the latter details the emotional peaks and valleys of a human existence, while the former details the accomplishments, degrees, awards, titles and public associations. And while the Hillman dichotomy continues to echo the ‘divide’ between light and dark, he is attempting to bring a new and different lens to our misfortunes and our screw-ups. They are not, for him, first and foremost (at least psychically) a moral or ethical failure, and we can learn much about how we are ‘hardwired’ psychically, from a novel perspective. Also, Hillman contends that we have overloaded excessive responsibilities and expectations on the human ego, thereby crippling it in many instances, and flooded the diagnostic, clinical psychological assessment of too many human behaviours as diagnostically abnormal, unnecessarily and unwarrantedly. Hillman’s view is that such a template serves the professional interests of the psychological fraternity, itself deeply embedded in the literal, empirical, scientific, and consequently dismissive of the imagination which rejects both absolutes and reductionisms per se. He is attempting to ‘care for the soul’ as epitomized by the title of one of his books, The Soul’s Code.

The Christian protagonist, Paul, writing profusely in the New Testament, as he planted churches, made his own attempt to differentiate spirit and soul. From richardmiddleton.com, in  piece entitled Paul on the ‘Soul’-Not What You Might Think, October 23, 2014, we read:

Many Christians throughout history have thought that the ‘soul’ was an immaterial part of the person, and of more importance that the body. Moreover, the ‘soul’ has often been regarded as the immortal or eternal part of the person…We have come to understand that this view of the ‘soul’ ultimately goes back to Plato. In Plato’s anthropological dualism, the human person is constituted by body (partaking of mortality, change, and impermanence) and the soul, (the higher eternal part of the person; in some sense the true person). Plato understood soul (psyche) as essentially mind and regarded it as divine (he called it ‘the god within’)…..

(W)hen Paul uses ‘flesh’ in the negative sense (note that he sometimes uses it positively) he means the power of corruption in the world and in human life, and does not mean the body per se. Likewise ‘Spirit’ refers to the power of God to transform our lives, including our bodies in the resurrection. So ‘flesh’ and ‘Spirit’ are contrasted as two powers that can affect every dimension of life; they are not two realms or two parts of the human person. And they lead to two different ways of life.

Essentially, Hillman has adopted this neoplatonic view in his archetypal psychology. And while some might consider his views antagonistic to a specific faith or religion (Hillman himself was born and raised in the Jewish faith), his work seems more of a supplement, perhaps a critique, and not an attack on either specific religions or the faith experience.

Now, a question for us is whether or not our unconscious (the inner life) is in some mystical, metaphorical and psychological way related to, connected to, the divine.

To be continued……