This segment is from the podcast conversation between Sean McGrath and myself that you find the audio version of here. If you are interested in more of McGrath’s work listen to his podcast Secular Christ.
Jakob Lusensky: In our previous conversation, you mentioned to me that you see that somehow Jung is misunderstanding evil. You also say that there’s no place for it in God. Could you maybe help us to sort of understand Jung’s view on evil and your critique on that?
Sean McGrath: So it’s not entirely true to say that there is no place for evil in God. It all depends on what you mean by God, of course, right? So there are different notions of divinity. I’m not saying there’s only one. Now I’m a Christian theologian; I speak as a Christian theologian. And my sources are, as I said, you know, people like Paul, Maximus the Confessor, Thomas Aquinas—so that I realize there are different ways of looking at these things. So, I just offer what I know, or what has been most illuminating for me on these issues.
It seems to me that if you look at the question of evil—and I really salute Jung for making it such a central question—it really is a central question. And I also salute Jung for recognizing that, psychologically speaking, it’s absolutely crucial for the analysand or the individuating soul to reckon with the reality of evil. And I think that we’ve forgotten that in so much self-help industry. I hear far too much, “It’s all good,” and not enough “This is bad. This shouldn’t be.”
Now, that said, with regard to the question of evil, you know, it is perhaps the oldest question and it is certainly the central question of Christianity. People don’t recognize that the problem of evil is not an objection to Christianity. The problem of evil is the presupposition of Christianity.
Think about the central symbol of Christianity: it is the crucified Savior. Or if you don’t want Christ as the Savior, call him the best man who ever lived: crucified and rejected by the community. What could be more evil? And this symbol is now the symbol of our salvation. So sometimes people think that, Oh, yes, because of evil, we can’t believe in Christ. I would say the opposite, actually. Only if you believe in evil can you understand the Christ—but that’s perhaps a complicated story. And I don’t really want to go into it; I wanted to say something different.
I wanted to say that, historically, coming out of the ancient world, the Western tradition, we have three models for speaking about evil. And these are not properly distinguished in Jung and they need to be.
The first is the Neoplatonic model. And this is what we—this is the tradition of evil as a privation of goodness—this was at the heart of the discussion with Victor White. And Jung doesn’t like this, for good reasons. Because to say that evil is nothing but the privation of good is to undermine its psychological reality: it’s nothing, it’s just an illusion or something like that. Now, that said, Neoplatonic Christianity, like in St. Augustine, is quite different from pagan Neoplatonism. In pagan Neoplatonism you get the thesis that Jung objects to—that evil is nothing—in Christian Neoplatonism, it’s modified. But nevertheless, there’s that problem of saying evil is just nothing, that’s Neoplatonic.
Then you have the opposite perspective in the ancient world, which is the Gnostic perspective. And this turns out to be the one that Jung ends up subscribing to, for reasons that are actually inconsistent with his own psychology. In the Gnostic model, you have good and evil as both real, but as sort of equal and opposing cosmic forces. You know, I like to think of this as the theology of George Lucas: you know, the dark side of the Force, the light side of the Force, and they’re always battling it out, they’re always duking it out. One’s always getting the upper hand only for the other one to take the upper hand, and somehow rather recognizing the two as dialectical pairs, that one will never be without the other. This is some kind of enlightenment experience and salvation. Now, the problem here, of course, is, if good and evil are equal and opposing forces, then they are really two parts of something higher which is neither good nor evil.
So, you know, the Force is really, in itself, neither good nor evil, but as these two modalities, and so the divine on this Gnostic model really has to be understood as beyond good and evil. In which case, you no longer have this real problem of evil, do you? Right, what you see in evil is really just divinity in another way, another shape and form. There’s no particular reason, I think, to object to it definitively. And I think this is the direction Jung goes with the idea of integrating evil and so on.
But there’s a third tradition, and the third tradition is the one that is most maligned, most badly represented by Jungians. And that is the monotheist tradition. And this is what Victor White was trying to argue for. And in the monotheist tradition, you don’t say evil is nothing, but neither do you say that it’s an equal and opposing force to the good. What you do is, you make a distinction between goodness as infinity, goodness as the unlimited perfection of divinity—you know, completely out of proportion to evil—and evil as created, if you like, that’s a bit difficult—but a feature of the created world or more actually a finite perversion of creation.
And according to monotheism, evil is permitted for God’s inscrutable reasons, ultimately to do with freedom. It’s permitted to infect the world for a time, but in the end, it shall be cast out. But the most important point is that there is no balance between them. You know, the John 1:15, the light shines in the darkness, the darkness does not comprehend it.
There’s no proportion between good and evil. An ant has more in common with a human being than evil has with God. So there’s no, you know, dark side of God in the sense of an evil twin to the Trinity or something. The devil is not God’s other personality or something that Christians have repressed. On the contrary, if there is such a thing as evil, which I fully believe there is, and so does Jung, then it has something to do with us and the created world.
The devil is the one person who recognizes no other outside themselves, neither God above nor another person: everybody is an object for him; using other people, but as a means to your own self-aggrandizement. Think about this as somehow taking a grotesque form in Nazi Germany, where everything becomes a means to the end of the glorification of the German state.
Jungians are not talking about integrating that, you know, they’re not talking about becoming more like an early twentieth-century Satanism, becoming more deliberately bad, wicked, selfish—they’re talking about becoming more honest about your desires, more honest about your failings, about the shadow, the inferior side of yourself, instead of projecting it onto others. That’s all excellent psychology.
But the integration of that is not an integration of good and evil in this cosmic sense. This is rather humility. And this is perfectly compatible with Christianity. This is the recognition that you’re not perfect, that you’re not God, that the things that you most hate in others are things that you have disowned in yourself.
Sean McGrath: To make it a little more simple: So what Jung has done is he’s objected to the thesis that evil is nothing, which comes out of Neoplatonic Platonism. It’s also a feature I think of some oriental systems, for example, Taoism. Jung is not on board there. There’s a psychological reality of evil. This immediately puts him on the terrain of, let’s say, monotheism, and–or Gnosticism, perhaps, and then Jung takes another step further, and he says monotheism is repressive of evil and denies the divinity of evil or something like that, the shadow side of God. And so then Jung takes a Gnostic approach, and we end up with good and evil as equal and opposing forces.
So ultimately, if Gnosticism is the theology of George Lucas, Jungianism, at its worst, is the psychology of George Lucas.
This segment is from the podcast conversation between Sean McGrath and myself that you find the audio version of here. If you are interested in more of McGrath’s work listen to his podcast Secular Christ.