INTRODUCTION: This is a very personal essay. It is risky for it can be easily misunderstood or erroneously interpreted. I would hope the reader would take this as a sincere effort to relay my belief and hope in these important matters of love coming from personal experience, especially inner experiences, and my best effort to apply intellectual capacities to them. A key matter in this essay is my belief that human life and the whole world is on a path to eventually bring into reality a 'fullness of love' . This points to a time when every human adult will become more fully conscious of how experiencing love with another person in ways that transform life to its Soul potential and the quality of potent love will be brought more fully into the world. I see our individual lives, no matter our present situation, as part of our preparations for such eventual love. Our lives are like cauldrons where 'love making' is the primary spiritual/psychological process that is occurring. So if a person is not experiencing such an outer intimate love for years , for decades or even for a life time that does not imply that one is not on the exact right track. Preparing to give and receive such love requires many experiences and a depth of inner understanding of oneself. Every relationship we have and every interaction, including those that otherwise seem painful, failures or without meaning, are important experiences of preparations to love.
So no one reading what I say here should feel their life is not just as directly moving toward such love as anyone else. In fact, no doubt in many cases one who 'seems' to have arrived at a highly developed love in their outer life may actually be far less advanced on the path to fully developed love than one who 'appears' to have no 'love forming' activity in their life at all. No one can make such judgments about others. The most important thing for any of us is to be as aware, conscious and desirous of such love for ourselves and others world-wide as we are able. These attitudes and commitments are our greatest assurance that we are for sure walking our unique paths toward the love for which we and the whole world are destined.
Answer to Job, Jung's final academic work was the most difficult for him to write. He describes his resistance to state the conclusions he had reached regarding the relationship of human and God. This is where he establishes clearly the idea that the ultimate problem in the world and the cause behind human suffering is not humans alone but also the internal moral contradiction within God itself. I've expressed his ideas in my own words in other places.(See blog post 'Cooperative Suffering Of God and Human' http://jhibbett.blogspot.com/2011/08/cooperative-suffering-of-god-and-human.html) John P. Dourley is the best author I've found for explaining these concepts. The implication is that humans with their capacity for consciousness were created not from an only loving God with no stirring needs and self interests Himself. But God experienced a necessity for human consciousness as a tool to become more fully conscious and thus a more compassionate Godself.
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| Depiction Of Creation Of Adam |
In this way it is only in human consciousness and the suffering such a process generates that the internal contradiction of God can be first apprehended, then redeemed by the human embracing its warring opposites. This means that the Trinity Godhead is not one where warring opposites and the deep pits of anger and unrelated unregulated power have come under control and in harmony with the reasoned, light and relational aspects of being . It was promoted and needed by God that this harmonizing and thus redeeming and healing of God and human be eventually accomplished in the mutual suffering of God and, at times, 'slightly more conscious' humans. Jung sees the book of Job as presenting this situation clearly where the far less powerful but more moral Job stands in the intimidating raw power of an 'out of control' non empathic narcissistic God. All that Job can do in the end of the play is 'put his hand over his mouth' when he perceives the seeming impossible demand that has come to his doorstep.... that somehow his own small ego consciousness must become the teacher and moral superior needed for this God to become conscious of its own internal contradiction.( Most scholars agree that the happy ending of Job was later added to lessen the barbs regarding God's character the original author intended.)
I'm writing this little essay thinking I may have an insight that Jung did not get to(that I am aware of) but that can be consistent with what he developed regarding the cooperative and complementary relationship between the Creator and the created, the Sacred and the Human. Jung had a dream where he and his protestant pastor father were asked to kneel before Uriah. Jung said his father without hesitation knelt till his head touched the floor. Jung knelt but stopped just a fraction of an inch before his head touched the ground.
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| Jung Stopped Short Of His Head Being On The Ground |
This implied that somehow Jung maintained his human autonomy before the religious figure, indicating that he had some question as to whether the figure deserved his complete adoration and submission. Jung found a comparison in himself kneeling before the orthodox Christian tradition, Uriah before the betraying King David, and Job before an immoral Yahweh. He saw in each case that the less powerful one had an ever so slight edge of 'moral superiority' over the one that 'should' have been , and by all tradition was, superior to the weaker. King David was even later referred to as a man 'after God's own heart.' Jung's point is it would take much courage to not 'give in' fully to such a religious spiritual power just as Job refused to confess his questions regarding Yahweh's character and justice. He saw his dad , in the dream, not even recognizing any moral problem and himself as barely keeping his personal integrity.(How I interpret Uriah below will give another reason to justify Jung's reluctance to bow down, one that he may not have been aware of.)
Uriah is portrayed in scripture story as the righteous soldier who refused the pleasures of bedding with his beautiful wife while his comrades were in harm's way, and where Uriah supposed he rightfully belonged. This was a setup by David to trap Uriah into thinking he was the father of his wife's developing illegitimate son. David knew he himself was the father. When this treachery by David did not work David sent Uriah into battle where he was sure to be killed and was. So the unlikely situation of 'superior morality' over the representation of God in King David is clearly felt. How does Uriah, even in his 'superior morality' say 'No' to the King of Israel? This also shows the total unbridled uncaring use of power of David over Uriah. This is power for power's sake. This is the 'use of power because one can', of using 'power without justice.' Such ravaging non relational power is the very problem that is at the heart of the Godhead and Job ends up squaring off with it. Like Uriah Job is pictured as carrying this load of ' moral superiority' in the presence of and in opposition to the outrageous power and unconsciousness of Yahweh( or of David in Uriah's situation.) Finally Jung felt he personally experienced this same kind of position with respect to arguably the most powerful religious system that has ever emerged in human history, Christianity. Unlike his father who was able
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| Jung And Rev. Victor White During Their Conversations On The Faith |
in 'unthinking unconscious faith' ,in Jung's view, to completely bow before the contradictions of Christian dogma, Jung was burdened with bringing essential questions to it that it could not legitimately answer. So in Answer To Job, after a life long internal wrestling with the major Christian symbols he comes forth with a view of the Godhead that appreciatively and humbly undermines, or at least reinterprets, it at its very heart.
In his appreciative undermining of substantial Christian dogma Jung appeals strongly and centrally to the symbol of the suffering and resurrecting Christ. The cross is the crux of the more 'enlightened' theology that Jung is recommending.(Jung would never admit he was practicing theology but few would now agree him.) For these images can be, instead of a one-time suffering of one god/human for the sin of all humans, a symbol of the conscious suffering of every human in the interest of furthering the healing of the incompleteness and imperfection that is contained in the Godhead. Jung insisted that it be kept in mind that this whole scenario of humans suffering willingly for/with God was at the beckoning of God who saw this as the only way out of the Sacred dilemma. And that it remains true that God also suffers cooperatively in this historical process. In other words the human and the Sacred are found to be mutually dependent and mutually needed in one another's evolutionary path to a higher consciousness, expanded empathy for all that is and a richer capacity for loving and being loved.
The additional insight that I may bring to these formulations above is the possibility that the ultimate Sacred and even the emerged Godhead as imaged in the Trinity has been pushing for something all along. There is something that humans are capable of experiencing that the Sacred is bound and determined, if not fully conscious of it Herself, for humans to discover within themselves and to experience in mortal history. Without this being discovered and it becoming a natural 'way of life' for humans, Human and Sacred are destined to the kinds of individual and community sufferings that have marked creation from its beginning. It may be that the 'weaker ones' above with their superior 'moral position', and for all the reasons they may be respected and honored, have still not yet found and experienced the thing that the ultimate God has pushed for since the beginning. So though Uriah, Job and Jung are 'right' in their smidgen of 'superior morality' they do not take the prize home from the authority they challenge. Somehow that very suspected authority, such as Yahweh over Job, or King David over Uriah, or Christianity and Uriah over Jung is rightfully insisting that something is also yet undone in the challenger. (This all demonstrates the mutuality of the growth in consciousness of any engaged powers, whether Human or Sacred. No one is perfectly and wholly right.)
What would this be that would keep God affirmed in His outrageous and unconscious power over the human who is able at times to surpass God in genuine morality? I am suggesting as I have written some years ago with respect to Uriah, there is every good reason to see that Uriah had not discovered and lived out a love for his wife of the type that humans, with what God has placed in them, are capable. The best explanation of such love that I have formulated is that it is a fully embodied love with the characteristics embedded in the Greek words Agape, Phileo and Eros. Uriah, in his great expression of 'brotherly honor' and fairness, had denigrated the meaning of love of his wife. A man who has opportunity to lie with his wife by the highest authority and does not cannot possibly value that love as an ultimate expression and gift of the Sacred in one's human life.
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| David Treacherously Offers Uriah A Night With His Wife |
A more spiritually developed Uriah would have reasoned that any time any couple fully loves the whole world is better off. He would have believed that out of his loving her he was most likely to find the answer to any problems he faced elsewhere. But instead he valued soldier comradary and so called 'honor among soldiers' above love for his woman. It can be imagined that David is justified in his treachery by making it clear that the real problem issue in Uriah's life is 'failure to significantly love', as it is in every human life and indeed even in the life of God. All parties need improvement and development in the quality of love. This is the primary dynamic of spiritual evolution in the universe. David's treachery makes clear, to those open to see it, the great 'unconscious sin' in humanity-- the failure to expect and to enter into when possible the mutual sharing and ecstasy of such love with one's beloved. (It is significant that the shadowed technical, legal and religious adultery of David and Bathsheba becomes, in the biblical narrative, a relationship eventually demonstrating a far more mature/spiritual love than either of them had experienced before. This is seen in David's unassuaged grief at the loss of the adulterous couple's love child and later the birth and rearing of the next King of Israel, Solomon. This demonstrates the consequences and complications, so common in sacred and secular story, of love and systems of conventional legality and morality.) I believe the Sacred continues to drive humans in ways beyond all expectations and predictions to discover and practice such full love, for without it God cannot be fully conscious of it either. And such an ongoing elevated consciousness of love appears to be the central purpose of creating humans from the start.
This same 'missing of the mark' of love is clearly seen in the history of Yahweh. He is represented time and again as the husband and lover of Israel. But perennially He falls into a patriarchal attitude toward his woman that is everything contrary to a balanced and mutual relationship steeped in Agape, Phileo and Eros. Over and over Yahweh refers to the 'woman, Israel,' as a whore, an adulteress and as his exclusive property.(The same value that the nation, following Yahweh's example, came to place on women and their being owned by their father or husband.) Yahweh is ragingly jealous, demanding and consistently using his unbridled power to control the relationship rather than to empower her so that mutuality is always the goal. Yes Yahweh, from his claimed moral superiority, is shown as repeatedly forgiving her for her unfaithfulness when she repents. This is the precise cycle that is seen in our culture in possessive, controlling and abusive husbands. The most exciting, and unhealthy, times for such a man in the cycle is when he experiences the return of his so called 'whoring' wife or when she forgives him (again) for his brutality.
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| Under Yahweh Adulterous Women Deserved Death |
In these stories and in Yahweh's story responsibility is never taken for the possessiveness, raging jealously, and controlling attitude and behavior that inevitably drive an honest woman away from the relationship. Israel later unfortunately took on this definition of herself and used it to interpret why God had not intervened for her. The later O.T. prophets interpret the destruction of the Temple, Jerusalem , the scattering of the people and the other sufferings of war as being 'caused by' their ' forebears being an adulterous and whoring people.' It is terribly hard and painful for the abused to own the horror of the abuser. It is much safer to blame oneself.(Reader keep in mind, my understanding is that the Yahweh image of God was that of the people at that time and place. No image of God that a human community describes can ever be a full and complete picture of the Ultimate God, the God Self that is evolving morally similarly to how humans are spiritually evolving. This development of both Sacred and Human is often in fits and starts but apparently with a final goal embedded in the ultimate Sacred and origin of all that is.)
A parallel situation to Uriah's 'moral superiority' is Job before Yahweh. Throughout the story Job is behaving 'more morally' than Yahweh and thus experiencing a very real, though terribly uncomfortable, spiritual/psychological superiority to this outrageously and undependable powerful God. But had Job yet discovered the kind of love I am referring to with his wife or any person? The text only mentions Job having one wife but it is hard to harmonize fully developed mutual love with her telling him after his trials and losses that he should, 'Curse God and die' or lose his integrity. It is probably unlikely that a man of Job's wealth in his culture would have had only one wife. Yet the author does have Job make the statement that seems to say he did not have a roving eye to 'think upon a maid.'(Job 31:1) The text does not allow us to know just how near Job had approached the kind or moral development of love that this essay seeks to describe. These problems may be a wink from the writer that neither Job or his wife had yet arrived very near the 'love' that the Sacred is determined that all humans eventually come to.
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| Had Righteous Job Arrived At Mature Love? |
So as immoral and absurd as Yahweh's overpowering of the mortal Job is, it paradoxically may push the more moral Job to discover that his morality is not complete until he would experience a much fuller love with a mortal beloved one. Were Job a polygamist, as was the custom in such cultures, I may be risking making a negative judgment on the quality of love in polygamous relationships. I must confess that I do not really know if such love can possibly be experienced for more than one person at a time. I only have my inner experience and intuition, not to mention the T.V. series about polygamous life, to make me strongly question it.
The analogies above might be carried to Jung's own time and situation. As he experienced the burden of standing appreciatively against the perceived moral giant of the West, Christian Dogma; did he also stand as a human who had yet to find the highest value of love in his intimate relationships? Of course I cannot answer that but I would think that few if any men in that time or culture had yet experienced such a love. I'm suggesting throughout this that the drive to such intimate love has been the eternal, even if not fully conscious, goal and movement of God and human from the beginning. This is the ultimate goal of human life first urged in the very heart of the ultimate God. Only in the past hundred years has such love even been a possibility as a cultural norm for Western society. For society has lived under an unrelenting patriarchy for at least 3000 years. Such a sexist underpinning of cultural norms rules out the possibility of a mutual heterosexual love between two persons except in the rarest of cases. With the consciousness raising of the woman's movement and with its necessary over reactions, it is now more possible spiritually/psychologically for there to be a growing number of couples who can experience the life-changing spiritual experience of on-going mutual monogamous Agape, phileo and Eros existing together as a more fully developed love than has been the norm of humanity to this point.
Finally, who am I in what can sound like a 'morally superior' position to say that even the heroes of our religious traditions had not yet likely experienced the kind of love that present day man and woman are capable of? (This naturally raises the question of whether Jesus of Nazareth ever experienced such love? My perspective would give every reason to trust that he either did as internal spiritual experience or in relationship to a mortal human woman. I think either would be consistent with the highest meaning of his being an incarnation of the Sacred. One documented account of a person having such an inner mystical erotic connection was Mechthild of Magdeburg. She was a 13th century Beguine church woman who describes such an encounter with the Christ figure. Such experiences undoubtedly have helped support the Catholic tradition of a nun being married to Christ.)
Like Job, Uriah and Jung; I and every person is driven by these same dynamics to question ourselves about the place and quality of love in our own personal life. Surely that question would lead to the ultimate humility which all religious strains say is an essential spiritual virtue for every human. And unquestionably, if one feels s/he has experienced such love they recognize it as a gift of Sacred grace and not of their own creation. Can any of us claim a perfection of love which alone could establish a genuine and sustained 'superior morality'?
I have spoken of this very personal area before. (Blog post 'Love's Trouble' http://jhibbett.blogspot.com/2011/08/dream-loves-troubleseptember-4.html) In the midst of my 'vision experiences' that began in mid August '85 I somehow entered into a spiritual/psychological state where I experienced internally what I trust it would exactly 'be like' to be engaged in such love with a woman over an adult lifetime. I think not only is it now 'like' I have had such an experience but that I also have some of the carry over effects of such love in my life. This is the dynamic that underlies my empathic view to both sides of all the opposites/polarities that confront human consciousness today. These polarities include the world's clashing religious/political views, good vs evil, Agape vs Eros and Sexuality vs Spirituality.
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| Jung Struggled With Christian Orthodoxy |
Jung learned much from the experiences of two historic Christian mystics- Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme. Both of them record experiences of entering into union with the Sacred from before there was any creation and before things had separated into the energizing archetypes within the Trinity Godhead. These archetypes are determined to enter and effect human consciousness. Unfortunately they are the source of the negative attitudes and behaviors of humanity as well as the positive. In these mystics' entering into this deepest level of the Sacred origins, which has most commonly been described as the The Great Mother or The Ultimate God, they came back from it with a far 'broader' and empathic perception of reality. The experience led them to a more expanded acceptance of the forces and factors that comprise all of inner and outer reality, than they would have before been capable. (My blog post 'Individuality Can Embrace The World' describes this.
http://jhibbett.blogspot.com/2011/07/individuality-can-embrace-world.html)
I can only surmise that I have been somewhat similarly affected by ' mystical-type' experiences. I come from it totally confident that the time is coming when humans can expect to have a natural, devoted and Erotic experience with a real human partner and that it will change the spiritual/psychological terrain of human/Sacred life. This will usher in a huge leap in spiritual evolution, I think just in time to save us from destroying each other or our present home, planet earth.
Another permanent effect of this internal experience of 'loving and being loved' is that I carry deeply and continually a 'missing of' the experience of that love. I yearn to return to such love, preferably in this mortal life. I'm confident that such longing and yearning is at the bottom of the most positive threads of sacred text described as the 'eternal love of God.' This yearning may be somewhat similar to what many who experience 'near death' report. I hear some of them saying that they still have an insatiable yearning for the 'promised bliss' they have tasted in the attracting light. I am seeking to describe the quality and origin of a 'yearning for mature love' that perhaps most humans have, even if only at the edges of consciousness.
