The Limits of Psychological Theology

In his book Messengers of God, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel conducts a careful reading of the Torah in order to search the mysteries of God and the human person. Jewish history unfolds in the present, Wiesel writes, and so it is that a figure like Adam remains as present to us today as ever before. There are many questions to ask of God, Creation, Adam and Eve, and the banishment from paradise, he muses. Perhaps God intended to begin His work with a question. In any case, Adam is a lonely and an appealing character whom we take to our hearts. Adam’s problems are our problems. Wiesel demonstrates in his meditation, led by his open-ended questions, an acceptance of reality as it is, with its trials and tribulations, and especially its human failings. He patiently searches for understanding with God as his partner and the Torah as his guide. Following his banishment from the Garden of Eden, Adam offers us many lessons, including the reminder that we have the power to begin again, even if we are now far from paradise. This is a profound statement from Wiesel considering his loss of family, friends, and neighbors to the Holocaust.

In his book Ego and Archetype, psychologist Edward Edinger—a disciple of the depth-psychologist Carl Jung—treats the Adam story of Genesis as a document from our unconscious in need of deciphering. In other words, the Torah is not a book to humble oneself to as one searches for meaning in the face of history’s exigencies. It is rather a cultural artifact among thousands of others that, when analyzed by the psychotherapist, can demonstrate how our psychology works, and how we can progress beyond our contemporary problems. According to Edinger, Adam was a hermaphrodite whose story was altered by the one-sided patriarchal attitude of the Hebrews, a problem Edinger intends to fix. Adam’s sin of eating the fruit, inspired by daring to be like God, robbed us of our original wholeness but helped us begin a quest for individuation, the psychotherapist theorizes. Edinger goes on to write that a gnostic sect called the Ophites worshipped the serpent who tempted Adam and Eve because the knowledge gained from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil liberated man from bondage in the garden. It is important to note that Edinger stresses that the Ophites “had essentially the same view as modern psychology.” In order to reach the tree of life, that other pillar in paradise, we must “repeatedly accept the temptation of the serpent.” We must eat our way to the tree of life, to recover our “lost wholeness.”

In Wiesel and Edinger we see two approaches to living. In Wiesel we have a man who, having endured his suffering, stands humbly before God and the cosmos, seeking to understand God and life with an open soul. Edinger, meanwhile, dismisses this humble approach, pinning the Torah down for psychoanalysis, and along the way not only dismissing the past as we know it, but raising up a gnostic idea of knowledge and power which will help us progress on our original quest to become like God, that being, to realize wholeness. Life and the human heart are rarely divided as neatly as the division that separates Wiesel from Edinger. Nevertheless, the division is there in their respective writings, which are testaments of a sort that reveal the state of their own souls.

Jordan Peterson is the newest celebrity psychologist who has been formed in large part by the work of Carl Jung. His internet lectures, debates, and books influence a wide range of people in our day. In his book Beyond Order, he rightly classifies the people of his day as “committed materialists,” but in his approach to God and spirituality, Peterson follows Jung and Edinger down a dead-end trail that does not liberate people from their materialist orientation. Instead, Peterson reinforces for people a comfortable dismissal of faith. This dismissal threatens the open soul required to properly continue a pilgrimage toward a transcendent horizon forever slipping beyond our reach.

Peterson has taken a lateral half-step away from Carl Jung, as the facile advice he offers his readers hints more toward behavioral psychology, often supported by psychological and sociological data, and the latest discoveries by neuroscientists. Contra Jung, he declares dreams to possess no mystery to unravel. Instead, he sees dreams as simply the building blocks of rational thoughts. Pro Jung, he draws attention to alchemical images and symbols like the “Dragon of Chaos” or the “Terrible Queen” to make a point about our psychology. The structure of the world, he suggests, can be found in seven characters, including partnerships like the hero-adversary and the positive and negative maternal characters.

In his public speaking and in his writing, Peterson drifts into various cultural and intellectual arenas, bringing all types of people and practices into his presentations. He sometimes expresses wonder and awe over the insights of various religious texts or intellectuals, but sometimes this awe also feels like a bit of a set-up. For example, he will praise the wonders of Dostoyevsky, but then flippantly call the Russian novelist a master sociologist and psychologist, thereby neatly sidestepping Dostoyevsky’s spiritual challenge to the modern rationalist and post-modern egoist to reflect on the human experience in a reality ringed by Spirit.

When Peterson does try to adopt the language of the Spirit, it is clear he either does not have faith in such a Spirit or does not understand its place in human life. Transcendence is a fearful reality, Peterson writes in Beyond Order, and he considers the summum bonum to be a “positive emotion” rooted in the “wise and ancient parts of us” that are concerned with our own survival. Wisdom, it seems, has been reduced to a possession in our unconscious that simply needs to be teased out. The summum bonum, according to this view, is not an evocative reality that invites us on a quest to understand and grow in wisdom, but rather a tool in our toolbox to help us physically survive. In a section titled “Christ in the Candle,” Peterson properly illustrates how in the Christian marriage rite the man and woman enter the sacrament as equal partners, both subordinated to a higher principle, bowing “to the principle of illumination.” In his section on romance, however, Peterson writes that a married couple not having sex at least twice in a given week is a setup for an extramarital affair. Peterson suggests that if a couple is not having sex, one partner in the marriage is “tyrannizing” the other. This understanding of tyranny would suggest Peterson sees the summum bonum as being found in our personal pleasures. This is problematic because Peterson cannot cure us of our materialist orientation if he has made the pleasures of the body the measuring stick and guide of our relationships.

When not contradicting himself, Peterson handles the problem of God, Spirit, and mystery in its transcendent forms with bewildering bluntness. In Beyond Order, he suggests the book of Exodus was made up in someone’s imagination, while the gospel story of Jesus offers fruitful psychological truths to consider. As with his thoughts on Dostoyevsky, anyone who follows Peterson down this path narrows the soulful horizon before them, another evocative call from the Spirit being reduced to a footnote. After all, there are all sorts of books to read that can offer fruitful meditations of a psychological type. Why bother reading the gospels if they are just one text among a million other texts that can provide fodder for our psychological belly gazing?

Religious experience, Peterson writes, can be mimicked in a neuroscientist’s lab. What does Peterson consider to be a religious experience? What about the love of wisdom and beauty, and the seeking of wisdom? Is that philosophical quest not considered a religious, or spiritual, experience? God, by Peterson’s definition, is a matter of values, highest importance, and ruling principles that had to be answered over centuries. Peterson’s use of the past tense in describing the centuries that it took to figure out God suggests that progress has liberated us from a potentially dark and unconscious figure in our psychology.

God, like ideology, is now dead, Peterson declares in Beyond Order. With God dead, Peterson continues, it is up to us to focus on smaller, simpler problems, so that we can presumably build a more just and rational society. Peterson suggests a great sin of omission is a loss of faith in ourselves, and in an attempted Midrashic moment, he interprets Matthew 27:46 as a moment where God loses faith. One question could be what God loses faith in, but Peterson’s God does not actually exist. Peterson’s God is a character in a story with useful psychological truths for us to consider, an experience of God reduced to a matter of neural phenomena that can be mimicked in a neuroscientist’s lab.

In the Jungian form that Pederson follows, God is primarily a product of our unconscious, but also a symbol that the psychotherapist can transform into an objective reality external to us when he wishes to take part in some intellectual play. So it is that Carl Jung psychoanalyzed God in his book Answer to Job. Jung begins by writing with great eloquence about transcendence and the symbols that represent spiritual experience. He calls these symbols “metaphysical objects,” and he assures the reader that he is aware of the problem of psychologizing religious experience. It would first appear that Jung understands the soulful experience of timelessness and Spirit found in divine presence, pneumatic experience as Eric Voegelin would coin the phrase. Immediately following these statements, however, Jung decides to treat sacred scripture literally, like a religious fundamentalist, the word symbol God being turned into an old man dictating earthly events from a heavenly throne. Jung then takes the old man and puts him on the therapist’s couch, treating sacred scripture as a police report. He dismisses the mystery and depth of sacred symbols, and he reduces the figure of God to that of a petulant child for us to despise, or at least to lock up in a rubber room. Along the way, Jung also ridicules the summum bonum, for terms like good and evil are no longer relevant now that depth-psychology can make conscious everything that before was unconscious. At the end of Answer to Job, having suitably destroyed God, Jung glibly suggests that God has given us atomic weapons and it is now up to men to handle things properly. Jung’s murder of God begins with a dissatisfaction and resentment for the world he is living in, writing that God and man want to escape from “blind injustice.” The murder of God is then properly prepared by rendering God, and the entirety of sacred scripture, to an unconscious, human construction that Jung can treat literally or interpretively, as it suits his needs. It is noteworthy that Jung grants himself permission to allow “emotional subjectivity” to guide his study of Job. As important as our emotions are, it is difficult to avoid psychoanalyzing Jung and his approach to the killing of God. It would appear that in allowing emotional subjectivity to enter his meditations, Jung is allowing his undifferentiated, or unconscious, shadow to guide his work in the attempted destruction of God. From an intellectual and experiential point of view, Chapter 3 of Eric Voegelin’s book Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, is an informative and enjoyable read that inspires further meditations on the subject of why and how a dissatisfied intellectual can kill God.

Jung essentially moved the mystery of existence to a realm represented by the word-symbol unconscious. Occasionally, Eric Voegelin used the term unconscious, in part because he understood that when people tried to find word symbols, stories, and images to give form to their experience of the mystery of existence, there was more than mere rationality on hand as a resource. By extension, reading somewhat between the lines in his book In Search of Order, Voegelin showed sympathy for the work of Carl Jung. This sympathy was probably rooted in the understanding that he and Jung shared a similar desire to rescue religious symbols that had suffered within dogmatic structures like Christian fundamentalism, or had been eclipsed by post-Enlightenment scientism. They also shared a hope to make people’s pneumatic experiences, or in Jung’s case, their experience of the unconscious, recognizable in a time when more and more people grew uninformed of their inner life because of their turning from religious traditions.

Eric Voegelin did not understand his use of the term unconscious to be the same as Jung’s use of the word. Jung’s use of the term was criticized by Voegelin because Jung suggested that religious symbols of the past were produced without conscious intention or awareness. Voegelin understood that in a person’s search for meaning, word symbols like God, or stories of God and the gods, were consciously understood by the ancients, including the time span of Torahic Judaism. God was a source of wonder, awe, and mystery, stirring the human soul, so the name of God and stories involving God were recorded quite intentionally. For example, the Genesis story of the beginning revealed the timeless mystery from which the present emerged. The story itself was, and is, highly evocative, thereby orienting the soul of any who meditated on its mystery with an openness to divine presence. Jung reduced the word symbol God by making it a product of the unconscious—a human construction—while Voegelin sought to expand the word to represent an eternal reality beyond human control in our search for meaning and order. The same contrast occurs when Peterson reduces the book of Exodus by blithely considering it a work of the imagination, like a good novel. Voegelin, conversely, broadened the reader’s comprehension of the text by stressing the soulfully experiential basis for this foundational and penetrating book. Once again, the depth-psychologist narrows the horizon of a person’s experience so that they can master their experience, whereas Voegelin invites an opening of the horizon. Voegelin invites a person, armed with only a vulnerable faith, to walk the uncertain line between an unstable and dissatisfying material reality, and an eternal mystery that calls us forever forward on a search to understand, an uncertain middle ground that Voegelin called the Metaxy.

Writing somewhat facetiously, yet seeking to bring some perspective to psychology, we can wonder if psychology is really a necessary discipline to concern ourselves with. If a person is virtuous and humble, or practices their faith in community, do they need psychology? In support of these wonderings, Walker Percy took the time to write, with a healthy dose of irony, “the last self-help book,” Lost in the Cosmos. The book offers insight and levity for today’s twelve step psychological guru. Voegelin meditated on Greek philosophy and the book of Exodus, and other scholars of the Voegelinian type have meditated on poets, novelists, the lives of historical figures, and even country music. The work of these scholars reveals solid people, as the health of their souls is concerned.

Time spent reading Homer, Plato, the Torah, or the works of the Christian desert hermits, is enough to understand that people have always understood human behavior. Reading Saint Paul, or the works of Shakespeare, confirms that before Freud, people had a sense of the powerful forces that rest beneath our fragile egos. Hildegard von Bingen carried out the world’s first group therapy sessions in the 12^th century. A mad woman was brought to the gates of her convent, with pleas from her family for help. Much to the horror of the other nuns, Hildegard had the mad woman brought in. She would live with the nuns, Hildegard declared. Hildegard then had the woman and other community members sit in a circle every day where they could take turns talking about things like their favorite part of autumn, or the characteristics of their favorite flower. The woman was cured of her madness in community. Hildegard had not heard of neuroscience nor of depth psychology, but she was highly sensitive to the life of the soul and the forces at play governing human behavior, forces that could at times overwhelm one’s rational mind. In my experience, if a room of ten-year-old students are asked what motivates a Grimm’s folktale character to betray their brother, or to explain why a character in a story is not happy, they invariably will provide in-depth explanations related to the virtues. These virtues, of course, are informed by the summum bonum that Jung rejects, and that Peterson reduces to a self-serving possession. We are human beings, and we understand something of ourselves and each other, just as we understand some basics of the virtuous life. The mystery of who we are lingers on the edges of our experience and our ideas. Other people, our own self, and our experiences of wonder, beauty, and hope will never be fully understood in a satisfying way.

In the end, community is important. Belonging to a community draws us out of ourselves, offers us a sense of responsibility for a larger whole, and provides us with an identity that can be hard to find on our own. Community also offers, at times quite subtly, a sense of moral order that keeps us in line when we are tempted to act selfishly. Peterson has also recognized this to some degree. With so many people in the West now living unhinged from community and even family life, it is often the psychologist who will be tasked with the work of helping those who face an ever-changing cosmos all on their own, often oblivious of their inner life. The primary role of the psychologist in seeking to help a tormented soul, and the role of all of us who are helping our neighbor, is to listen with care. One challenge for the psychologist, and for all of us, rests in the criticism of psychology offered by Michael Franz in Glenn Hughes’ edited volume of essays, The Politics of the Soul. Is the psychologist, in a moment of faith, able to keep the spiritual horizon before his patient open? Or in a desire for certainty and power, does the psychologist instead need to close a person’s soul, funneling people into the form of psychological practice they favor?

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