A Jungian perspective on religious violence and personal responsibility.

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from
religious conviction."--Pascal, Pensees

The problem of religious violence is ubiquitous in human history, but attempts to explain it and perhaps thereby uncover a solution have become more urgent in recent years. Academic and popular writings that address the question abound these days, offering a variety of explanations or analyses of the relationship between religion and violence. These encompass nearly everything except the proverbial kitchen sink: scriptures (1) and dogma; "spiritual addiction" to apocalyptic visions; poverty, national humiliation, failed governance; (2) emasculation and sexual frustration; (3) equation of ultimacy with absoluteness; (4) cognitive dissonance arising when claims to absolute truth are not born out in reality; (5) the linking of religious claims with national or ethnic goals (6) and of course, the type of god one worships.

It is true that the most visible acts of religious violence in recent Western history have been perpetrated by adherents to monotheistic religions. It is tempting, therefore, to lay the blame for violence at the feet of the one God. Regina Schwartz argued in 1997 that "monotheism abhors, reviles, rejects, and ejects whatever it defines as outside its compass" and "forges identity antithetically" in such a way as to lead to violence against outsiders. (7) More recently, Rodney Stark has argued from a sociological standpoint that the monotheistic image of God is "most potent in terms of social effects" because of its inherent particularism. For Stark and others, monotheism is "the most dangerous" of images. (8) But even a cursory reading of Southeast Asia's history discloses much religious violence involving Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, none of which are monotheisms. Religious violence is a part of every form of religion: the history of Buddhism, for example, is filled with religious violence. Wars have been fought in the name of the Buddha, practitioners of other religions persecuted, Zen satori used as a tool of war. (9) In truth, Holy War seems to be an "essential element of virtually all religious systems." For believers these wars are "situational moments of divine-human cooperation," a type of sacramental action performed in accordance with transcendent goals and in the service of justice, peace, and human redemption. (10) How and why this happens must be understood.

There is some truth to be found in all of these explanations, but they do not get at the heart of the matter. Religion is an activity engaged in by human beings. Violence is a mode of human behavior sometimes but not always linked with religious goals. Religions are not actors: believers in religious ideals are. "Religion as religion cannot in and of itself be an independent source of violence." (11) And so we must look to the human in order to understand violence done in the name of the Transcendent. The nucleus of the problem lies within the human psyche, and the depth psychology of Carl Jung provides a powerful conceptual vocabulary for its disclosure. (12)

Jung's distinction between the God-image and the metaphysical God, which the human mind can never grasp, offers a way forward. For Jung, the God-image is an expression not of who/what God is, but who/what we are: religious imagery is "the phenomenology of the objective psyche." Images of the transcendent, whether mono, poly, or non-theistic are manifestations of the collective self, which is "a transpersonal center shared by a whole body of humanity." (13) We can say therefore that religious violence also is a manifestation of the collective self.

Jungian analyst Edward Edinger has shown that in order to understand Jung's claims about the god-image (and--I argue--by extension, its relation to violence in the name of the gods) it is helpful to conceptualize his thoughts in three steps. The first is to understand Jung's epistemological premises. Once these principles are understood, we can to move on to his claims about the paradoxical nature of the Western God-image. Only then are we in a position to take the final step with Jung into what we might call a "psychological ethics" which uncovers the relationship between the individual human psyche and the "continuing incarnation" or progressive transformation of the God-image in human history. (14)

Jung had deep appreciation for Kant's epistemology; it has been said of him that he was "in a psychological sense a successor to Kant." (15) For Jung, Kant established the basis for approaching the psyche scientifically in distinguishing subjective from objective, and in demonstrating how experience is shaped by subjective psychology. Jung believed that Kant's philosophy was the threshold to a new epoch in epistemology: "On that threshold minds go their separate ways: those that have understood Kant, and the others that cannot follow him." (16) In spite of repeatedly insisting that his own writings on religion were not intended as metaphysical statements, Jung has been misunderstood again and again by "the others" who could apparently follow neither Kant nor Jung in making the distinction between metaphysical and empirical language about God. (17)

In Kantian thought, knowledge comes though the synthesis of concepts and experience. Understanding is structured by means of innate categories and by the imposition of spatial and temporal form onto that which we perceive. Kant further distinguished between the way reality appears and the way it actually is. The phenomenal world is the world of appearances, the world as we experience it. Ultimate reality is the realm of the noumenal. We can never know the noumenal, but only hypothesize its existence on the basis of perception. By virtue of the a priori categories of understanding, the mind organizes reality so that knowledge is possible. Our only referent to noumenal reality is the mental construct. This means that metaphysical arguments about God go beyond the limits of human reason and necessarily lead to contradiction and false claims. It is simply impossible for the human mind to reach beyond the limits of the phenomenal world.

Individual mental experience, for Jung, occurs on three levels: the conscious, personal unconscious, and collective unconscious. Consciousness is an adaptive accomplishment, whereas the unconscious "is the source of the instinctual forces of the psyche and of the forms or categories that regulate them, namely the archetypes." (18) Archetypes are not instincts; rather they are "unconscious images of the instincts themselves" or patterns of instinctual behavior arising from the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious is the realm of supra-individual psychic activity, a repository of the universal "ancestral heritage of possibilities of representation." It contains the "whole spiritual heritage of [hu]mankind's evolution, born anew in the brain structure of every individual." Like genetically encoded potentialities, the archetypes are universal motifs or "pre-existent forms," traces of ancestral psychology that account for the common themes in humanity's dreams, myths, legends. (19) These primordial images are metaphysical entities, noumena, and so can only be experienced psychologically, never in-themselves. All of the most potent ideas, and especially religious ones, originate in the archetypes of the collective unconscious. There are numerous archetypal forms but the most important for our purposes are the God-image and the Self.

The most that can be said about God from the Jungian psychological standpoint is that "an archetypal image of the Deity" exists. (20) We must, however, remember that the god-image and statements about it are "psychic processes which are different from their transcendent object." (21) All god-images (understood here to include any referent to the transcendent, whether conceptualized anthropomorphically or not) are manifestations of cultural and evolutionary processes. A numinous image, like the God-concept, must never be equated to the "transcendental x" to which the image points, for to do so results in ego inflation. (22) The Self for Jung is not the ego, which is the center of consciousness. It is rather the "sum total of conscious and unconscious existence," or the "God within us." To assert that one knows God and that this knowledge is absolute and objective is to identify with one's subjective experience. This is a grave psychological mistake because identification of ego (subjective experience) with the archetypal Self leads to assigning universal validity to experiences that are only individually valid. (23) "If the ego is dissolved in identification with the self, it gives rise to a sort of nebulous superman with a puffed-up ego." (24) The individual who identifies with the collective psyche, particularly the Self archetype, has the experience of "universal validity--'godlikeness'--which completely ignores all differences" and leads to attempts to "force the demands of [one's] own unconscious upon others." (25) It is therefore perilous and potentially destructive.

Belief is not knowledge for Jung. Religious realities do have a transpersonal basis, arising as they do from the collective unconscious, but because they are filtered through subjective experience they can never be absolutes.

With the epistemological premises clarified we are in position to move on to Jung's God-as-paradox, or coincidence of opposites. In Jung's unflinchingly honest reading of the biblical Book of Job, explicated in his much misunderstood Answer to Job, the moral inconsistency of the Jewish and Christian God is revealed. (Here we must remember that Jung speaks of the archetypal God-image, not the metaphysical God-in-Godself.) For Jung the myth of Job tells the psychological tale of the unconscious and amoral Western god-image coming to consciousness through its encounter with the man Job. In the biblical book, God allows Satan to test Job's faith by raining down on him all sorts of financial, emotional, and physical suffering. Job's friends offer platitudes aimed at justifying God's apparent cruelty and immorality. But no matter the torment visited upon him with God's permission, Job refuses to believe either that his suffering is somehow deserved or that God does not exist. Job remains steadfast in his faith. And in the end, it is Yahweh who is changed, not Job; Job is more moral than his God. The wrath of God is poured out not on Job but on his friends who, God says, "have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has (Job 42:7 NRSV)." The friends, who offered justifications for God's immoral treatment of Job, are punished by God. Job, who remained steadfast in faith but never accepted that his suffering was just, is rewarded twice-over.

The result of this encounter between man and unconscious God-image is the humanization of the god. Something like this happens in the Buddhist mythology of enlightenment as well. In Buddhism, the Doctrine of Interdependent Origination teaches that we are caught in the wheel of Samsara (cycle of rebirth) through the interconnectedness of twelve links in the chain of dukkha (suffering or unsatisfactoriness). The most important of the links is ignorance (of the truth of anatman, no-self). Once the link of ignorance is broken through becoming conscious, or aware of the truth of no-self, it is possible to attain nibbana (Nirvana). Jung said that the "Buddha's insight and the Incarnation in Christ break the chain [of suffering] through the intervention of the enlightened human consciousness." (26) We are now ready for the final step in our movement toward understanding what Jung has to say about God, because what this all means is that "the real history of the world seems to be the progressive incarnation of the deity." (27)

We humans become participants in the Transcendent Reality, the Divine Nature; in fact, we are "indispensable for the completion of creation." (28) This means humanity must accept a new responsibility in relation to God. Through our conscious participation in the continuing incarnation of the noumenal Transcendent Reality into the phenomenal world of experience we become adults, responsible for our own existence. This responsibility entails the realization that not only do we depend upon God, but God also depends upon us. (29) In this psychological ethic, humanity must assist God by becoming conscious. In more theological language, the divine and human natures are related in one comprehensive, perichoretic process. Redemption is a dialectic process through which the God-image and humankind redeem one another. (30)

Jung said "Individuation and individual existence are indispensable for the transformation of God. Human consciousness is the only seeing eye of the Deity." (31) This is the point of Jung's Answer to Job: human beings must take responsibility for the transformation of our immoral God-images. Perhaps through acceptance of the God-image as a manifestation of our Collective Self's quest for asymptotic Divinity, we and our gods become truly moral.

Some of the many scholars who have written on the problem of religious violence offer prescriptions for a cure. These are diverse, including suggestions for the rejection of monotheism (Schwartz), the purging of sacred texts of violent passages (Trible), armed state intervention (Kimble), revision of government policy in handling terrorists(Stern), globalization of American religious pluralism (Stark), and the complete removal of religion from politics (Juergensmeyer). These prescriptions, like the explanations linked with them, do not reach the heart of the matter. The impracticality of most of them is obvious. The impossibility of the last is perhaps less obvious, especially to those shaped by Western democratic ideals.

Political ideologies aside, religion cannot be segregated from politics. For the truly religious, all of life is informed by faith. Religions are meaning-making systems and as such necessarily inform politics. As Gandhi insisted, the person who believes that religion and politics have nothing to do with one another quite clearly understands neither religion nor politics. And Jung's phenomenological analysis of religious experience supports this claim. Religion is not creed, which is what those who advocate the separation of religion from politics actually seem to mean. "Creeds are codified and dogmatized forms of original religious experience ... congealed in a rigid, often elaborate structure." (32) Religion is something else entirely. Religion is "a kind of attitude which takes careful and conscientious account of certain numinous feelings, ideas, and events" (33) that take hold of the human in such a way that we are "always rather [the numinosum's] victim than its creator." (34) And if the Self archetype is the God-within, we truly are homo religiosus; to deny this is to deny the inner reality of human existence.

The history of the United States illustrates the impossibility of segregating religion and politics. In the US, separation of church and state is a foundational political tenet. Comparatively speaking, religiously motivated violence is minimal in the country today. Diverse religious ideologies co-exist in relative peace. Rodney Stark argues that American religious civility is a product of pluralism: "The key to high levels of local religious commitment and of religious civility, is not fewer religions, but more." (35) This is true, and Jung can tell us why. America has evolved a distinctive form of civil religion in which references to God are politically acceptable and important aspects of our culture, like the Declaration of Independence and the flag, are imbued with a sacred character. Perhaps religion as practiced in America has become more civil (in the sense of being courteous toward other religions) precisely because there has evolved a common god-image or manifestation of the collective American Self that allows believers of diverse creeds to adopt a common religion, as defined in Jungian terms.

"It is one individual at a time who can transform the unconscious God-image." (36) The unconscious does not think; it merely generates images in response to the conscious situation. And so the task of the individual is to develop a wider consciousness though which we "divest the self of the false wrappings of the persona on the one hand, and of the suggestive power of primordial images [the archetypes] on the other." (37) Jung teaches us that we must acknowledge the truth that humanity is on the whole not nearly so good as we want or imagine ourselves to be. Collectivities like religious groups are accumulations of individuals, and so the problems of groups are accumulations of individual evils. Since the most powerful "psychological fact" in a system is the god, (38) the inflation that results from identification of the ego with the Self or image of God-within leads to loss of caritas, and moves the collectivity instead to lust for power. This is the source of aggression in the name of our gods, for "Where love stops, power begins, and violence, and terror." (39) Transcendental realities are not accessible to human experience, only their psychic manifestations are. Jung cautions that "psychical dangers are much more dangerous than epidemics or earthquakes." (40) We cannot know from whence the psychological images of the Transcendent derive. Honest acknowledgement of this may be the first step toward genuine religious peace. Humanity must become more moral than our gods.

Jung was deeply disturbed by the proliferation of technologies of mass destruction. He insisted that everything--meaning the survival of life on this planet--depends on us. The symbols that rise up from the unconscious are opposites; our god-images call us to be just, loving, and merciful, and they can demand of us horrendous acts of violence. We must both worship and fear our gods, for they call us to do great good and also great evil. The god "wants to become [hu]man, the uniting of [god's] antinomy must take place in [us]." Jung's words, written more than fifty years ago, speak prophetically across the decades: "The only thing that really matters now is whether [humanity] can climb up to a higher moral level, to a higher plane of consciousness, in order to be equal to the superhuman powers which the fallen angels have played into [our] hands." (41)

Notes

1. See Oliver McTernan, Violence in God's Name: Religion in an Age of Conflict (Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books, 2003); Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narrative (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984).

2. Jessica Stern, Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill (New York: Harper Collins, 2003).

3. Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000). See especially Chapter 10, "Warrior's Power" pp 187-215.

4. Lloyd Steffen, The Demonic Turn: The Power of Religion to Inspire or Restrain Violence (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2003).

5. Charles Selegut, Sacred Fury: Understanding Religious Violence (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2003).

6. T. K. Oommen, "Religion as Source of Violence: A Sociological Perspective," in Ecumenical Review vol 53 no 2 (2001): 168-179.

7. The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism, (University of Chicago Press, 1997).

8. Rodney Stark, One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). Also Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, Is Religion Killing Us? Violence in the Bible and the Quran (New York: Trinity Press International, 2003).

9. Tessa Bartholomeusz, "In Defense of Dharma: Just-War Ideology in Buddhist Sri Lanka," Journal of Buddhist Ethics. Vol 6 (1999): 1-16. Brian Victoria, Zen at War (New York: Weatherhill, 1997/1988); Trevor Lang, Buddhism, Imperialism, and War: Burma and Thailand in Modern History (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979).

10. Selengut, 19-21.

11. Oommen, 178.

12. Sociologist Rodney Stark claims that psychology is a "cul-de-sac" because violence varies cross-culturally and historically: "The causes of phenomena such as religious conflict are not to be found primarily within the human head, unless we make the patently false assumption that basic psychological processes differ greatly by time and place (115)." This statement reveals a somewhat superficial understanding of psychology, as will be demonstrated in my exploration of Jung's thought.

13. Edward F. Edinger, The New God-Image: A Study of Jung's Key Letters Concerning the Evolution of the Western God-Image. Eds. Diane D. Cordic & Charles Yates (Wilmete, IL: Chiron Publications, 1996) xxi.

14. Edinger, xxii. On Jung's "psychological ethics" see p 84ff. Jung's statements about the incarnatio continua are found in his Letters, 435-36 and in Psychological Types CW 6 par 418.

15. Ibid., 8.

16. Letters, 375. Qtd in Edinger, 8.

17. Cf. Psychology & Religion: West and East, par 2; Answer to Job pars 554-556.

18. The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche CW 8, pars 283-342.

19. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious CW 9.i, pars 87-110.

20. Psychology & Religion: The Terry Lectures (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1938/1966), 73.

21. Answer to Job par 558.

22. Ibid.

23. Letters 376. Qtd in Edinger, 10.

24. The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche CW 8, par 430.

25. "Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious" in The Portable Jung, ed. Joseph Campbell (New York: Penguin Press, 1976) 99.

26. Qtd, in Edinger, 73. Italics in the original.

27. Letters 435-6, Qtd in Edinger 89.

28. Memories, Dreams, Reflections 256

29. Letters, 316 QTD in Edinger, 87.

30. John P. Dourley, "The Religious Significance of Jung's Psychology," in The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 5 (2), 73-89.

31. C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra 336, 409. Qtd in Edinger, 75.

32. Psychology & Religion: The Terry Lectures, 6.

33. Letter to Pastor Tanner, Qtd. In Edinger, 142.

34. Psychology & Religion, 4.

35. Stark, 259.

36. Edinger, 60.

37. "Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious," 123.

38. Psychology & Religion, 93-114.

39. The Undiscovered Self, 118.

40. Psychology & Religion, 11.

41. Answer to Job, par 745-747.