The following is the presentation to the 2015 Eranos Conference in Ascona, Switzerland, by David L. Miller. The print version of this lecture is available in: Fabio Merlini and
Riccardo Bernardini, eds., Eranos Yearbook / Annale di Eranos 73: 2015-2016 — The World and its Shadow / Il mondo e la sua ombra (Einsiedeln: Daimon Verlag, 2017), pp. 320-368. It is being made available here with the knowledge and permission of the Board of the Eranos Foundation, Casa Eranos, Ascona, Switzerland, and the editor of the publisher of the Eranos Yearbooks, Daimon Verlag, Einsiedeln, Switzerland.
Evil — A Paragon of Luster
David L Miller
The literature from the Eranos Foundation announcing this Tagung raises enigmatic questions concerning the mystery of evil. The announcement notes that evil is a “tragic and unavoidable dimension of the human condition,” one that “recurs, always and everywhere” under “different guises.” Then the announcement asks: “What are the roots of evil? Does it have an independent reality on its own or, rather, is it … the unavoidable imperfection of the human condition?”[1]
Forty years have passed since I first stood at this podium, and it has been twenty-seven years since I last spoke here, but of the nine presentations I gave at Eranos from 1975 until 1988, this is surely the most difficult of the themes that I have addressed.
In the first half of my presentation today, I will petition help from three other friends of Eranos: C. G. Jung, who spoke here fourteen times between 1933 and 1951; James Hillman, who spoke here fifteen times between 1966 and 1987; and Wolfgang Giegerich, who spoke here five times between 1982 and 1988. I will attempt to trace a psychological argument about our theme that has occupied these three thinkers and therapists. In the second half of my presentation today, by drawing upon the insights of these Jungians, I will attempt to add a thought or two of my own concerning the fascination of the mystery of evil.
One may wonder why—even if limiting the psychological discussion to Jungians—I am focusing particularly on the work of Jung, Hillman and Giegerich. Surely I am not doing this only because they were Eranos presenters. Indeed there are many works by other Jungian thinkers concerning the matter of the roots of evil. For example, one thinks immediately of the book by Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig, Vom Guten des Bösen,[2] Marie-Louise von Franz’s, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales;[3] John Sanford’s, Evil: The Shadow Side of Reality;[4] Stanton Marlan’s The Black Sun,[5]and Murray Stein’s Jung on Evil.[6] And there are many more fine Jungian contributions to our theme, far too many to list. Therefore, why am I focusing, after Jung, only on Hillman and Giegerich?,
The reason has been expressed by a presentation in an altogether different context. Johnathan Z. Smith, the famous historian of religions who teaches at the University of Chicago, gave a plenary address in 1989 to the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, which is the principle world-wide professional organization of academicians in the field of religion. In the address, Smith chided his professional audience by saying that most of the presentations at the annual scholarly meeting seemed to be constituted of “show-and-tell and paraphrase.”[7] Paraphrase is of course simply repeating what someone else has said. Show-and-tell is an activity that typically takes place in elementary schools in the United States. Children in the early grades will bring in something they have to show to the class from a summer vacation and then they will tell the class about it.
Neither paraphrase nor show-and-tell advances thinking. It does not come up, for example, to the standard of Eranos about which I have recently written in an article in Spring journal,[8] and in which I spoke about the thinking at Eranos being historically at the “edge” of thought. Much of Jungian writing about evil is, I believe, a paraphrase of Jung himself or it is a sort of “show-and-tell” of individual or collective experiences that are intended to demonstrate how Jung was right in his opinions about evil. This is fine, but it does not advance thought; it does not carry on Jung’s work. On the other hand, Hillman and Giegerich have attempted, for good or ill, to think Jung’s thought further. So it is they that I petition for insights with regard to the current Eranos thematic of the nature and root of evil.
A possible sign of attempting to think a thought further is that its nature is critical. It shows itself to be against something in a way that neither paraphrase nor show-and-tell are. One might say that critical theory that is not critical is not properly theoretical at all. The Greek word from which the English term “critical” is derived (krivsi~) means “to separate,” as paths separating at a crossroad; and the Greek word from which the English term “theoretical” is derived (qeoriva) means “to view,” as in viewing a ritual or a drama.[9] Being critical is not being against an author or an idea; rather, it is taking note of where a line of thinking itself negates itself, separating itself from itself.
So in looking at what Jung, Hillman, and Giegerich are against, I will be taking note of where they see a line of thinking concerning evil self-deconstructing.[10] In order to do this, I will attempt to heed an injunction of contemporary hermeneutics that has been described as follows:
It is an insight of hermeneutics that to really understand a text or a body of thought one has to perceive it from within and on its own terms. This means one has to have penetrated to its heart or center and to have firmly positioned oneself in … (its) center (even if only ‘experimentally’ and for the duration of one’s hermeneutic endeavors) in order to interpret all the details of the doctrine in terms of this center as the heart organizing the living whole of the body of thought in question. This means that instead of looking from our own position (our own convictions, expectations, prejudices, needs) at what is visible …, we have to … give ourselves over to it…. A real understanding presupposes a kind of love, one’s abandon of one’s own subjectivity; not love as sentiment or emotion, but logical love.”[11]
I hope that in what follows I may be able to exhibit this sort of “logical love” precisely as I explore what Jung, Hillman, and Giegerich are against as they reflect on the problematic of evil. I will begin with Jung.
C. G. Jung. When Jung was eighty-four years old he spoke to a group that came from Stuttgart to Zürich to meet with him concerning the question of “good and evil.” After thanking the audience for coming to his home, he said bluntly: “People talk to me about evil … and presume that I know what it is. But I don’t.” And then he added: “When someone speaks of good or evil, it is of what he calls good or evil, or what he feels as good or evil. Then he speaks about it with great assurance, not knowing whether it really is so or whether what he calls good or evil really corresponds to the facts … so that an inner subjective picture is substituted for objectivity.”[12] I will come back in the second half of this presentation today to Jung’s implication that when dealing with the question of evil people are trading merely in words. For now, however, I want to focus on Jung saying that he cannot help with the question of the existence of evil and his implication that it might be well to beware anyone who pretends to know something about the objective reality of evil.
Jung’s claim is odd, since in the years preceding this little talk to the Stuttgart group, from the time that he was 58 years old in 1933 until he was 85 in 1960, Jung seemed himself outspokenly assured about something that he was definitely against in the discussions about evil: namely, the notion of privatio boni, evil defined as the “privation of good.” He speaks as if he indeed knew something about that which in the talk to the German group he claimed not to know anything. There are no fewer than thirty-two references to his railing against this doctrine in six different works. And this is not to mention the twenty-two diatribes against the privatio boni definition of evil in his letters written from 1945 until 1960. In one of these letters, Jung even says forthrightly that the idea of privatio boni is an issue “of greatest importance.”[13]
This stress about the idea’s importance is in a letter to Victor White, a British Dominican priest, who taught theology at Blackfriars, which is the Dominican Hall at Oxford University. Indeed, a majority of the twenty-two letters that mention privatio boni are to White. Most of them are quite long. The discussion between the two men began in a courteous and friendly manner. White had written books and articles approving of Jung’s ideas, indeed, being enthusiastic about Jungian psychology. But the tone turned precisely over the notion of evil as privatio boni. In the summer of 1952, White spent ten days with Jung at Bollingen precisely in an attempt to placate their disagreements about the notion, but to no avail. With the exception of a few long letters in November of 1953, April of 1954, and May of 1955, the two men became estranged and the conversation between them ceased. The editors of Jung’s letters say that the discussion about privatio boni “opened out a gap between the two men, a gap that both felt deeply and painfully.”[14] The relationship came to an end in May of 1955 after Jung wrote to White: “Since I am the cause of much discomfort to you, I am not sure whether you care to see me or not.”[15] White had already written to Jung: “… I do indeed feel that the discussion of the privatio boni has reached a deadlock.”[16] The notion of privatio boni was of such great importance to Jung that it ruined a personal and professional relationship!
What was Jung really against when he was against the Christian notion of privatio boni? Some may think that it had something to do with late reflections on the question of evil by an old man.[17] Others may think that it had to do with conditions in the world during and after the Second World War. But apart from subjective speculations about Jung’s personal psychology or the socio-political realities in the contemporary world, an objective question remains about what later I will call the “luster” of this issue and why Jung was so very much opposed to the “one and a half millennium”[18] long view of evil as a “privation of good.” Is it simply another instance of Jung’s war with Christianity? He had said in the Tavistock Lectures: “My problem is to wrestle with the big monster of the historical past, the great snake of the centuries, the burden of the human mind, the problem of Christianity…. Other people are not worried by such problems, they do not care about the historical burdens Christianity has heaped upon us…. It is a tremendous human problem.” And then Jung adds cryptically: “Certain people make [i.e., deal with] history and others build a little house in the suburbs.”[19] It may be that to Jung, the Christian notion of the privatio boni is a part of this burdensome snake. But it may also be that the issue is a bit more complex.
The major portion of Jung’s discussion of privatio boni occurs in Aion, volume 9ii of the Collected Works, which consists of a long monograph on the archetype of the Self. It was published initially in 1950 when Jung was 75 years old, and it was accompanied by an essay by Marie-Louise von Franz on The Passion of Perpetua. Jung’s discussion of evil as privatio boni occurs principally in an early part of his contribution to the volume, a section entitled “Christ, a Symbol of the Self.” The section begins with a litany of the evil in the world in the mid-twentieth century: “The dechristianization of our world, the Luciferian development of science and technology, and the frightful material and moral destruction left behind by the second World War ….”[20] In spite of speaking about “dechristianization,” Jung goes on in the second paragraph to announce that Christ “is the still living myth of our culture. He is our culture hero….”[21] As such, “Christ exemplifies the archetype of the self.”[22] According to Jung, the Self is constituted as a complexio oppositorum, a “complex of opposites” (ego and shadow, anima and animus, syzygy, etc.), so that in order for any figure to exemplify the Self symbolically, it must also have the structure of a complex of opposites. The christic figure satisfies this criterion since Christ is divine and human, and, even though “the Christ-symbol lacks wholeness in the modern sense,”[23] since today Christ is typically imagined to be one-sidedly perfect and pure, Jung takes pains to show that in antiquity, in the works of Augustine and others, “the original Christian conception of the imago Dei embodied in Christ, meant an all-embracing totality that even includes the animal side of man.”[24] Truly divine, but also truly human! Spirit, but also flesh! However, according to Jung, the notion of privatio boni, introduced by the Church fathers to explain evil, worked against this view of Christ as a symbol of the Self.
The problem arises when one asks about the origin of evil in creation and history. This is the problem of theodicy in the context of a monotheistic religious perspective. As the American poet Archibald MacLeish put this problem in a contemporary drama that was a modern version of the Biblical story of Job:
If God is good, He is not God;
If God is God, He is not good.[25]
That is, if God is good, then he must not be a God that is by definition omnipotent and therefore capable of preventing evil in the world; but if God is God, omnipotent and capable of preventing evil, then he must not be good, since there is evil in the world. Whence evil in a monotheistic world?
Jung thought that the Clementine Homilies represented a perspective on evil that was in accord with the imago Dei incarnated in Christ as a psychological symbol of the Self. Jung refers to the Clementine literature as “Gnostic-Christian” and dates it, in keeping with the scholarly views of Jung’s own time, to the mid-second century.[26] The text explains good and evil in terms of the right and left hand of one God, and it looks upon creation as constituted of syzygies or pairs of opposites (complexio oppositorum). Though Jung favors it, this view did not remain in theological vogue.
Perhaps—Jung thinks—in response to dualistic Manichean tendencies in the world of the early Church, the view of privatio boni replaced a Clementine view. Manicheanism presents a dualistic view of creation and of the source of creation. Mani, the Iranian prophet whose dates are now placed at 216-274 CE, seems to have been influenced in Persia by Zoroastrianism, which posits an original, eternal and uncreated dual source of the world: one side is Ahura Mazda in the form of Spenta Mainyu, “progressive mentality,” which is good, and the other side is Angra Mainyu, “destructive mentality,” which is evil.[27] These two are locked in eternal opposition. It is the “eternality” of this complex of opposition, which Manicheanism adopts, that produces an ultimate dualism. The ultimacy of the dualism compromises a monotheistic vision, and, if translated to Christian mythemes, it suggests that the opposition between Christ and the Anti-Christ (Satan or Devil) faces the charge of being vulnerable to a dualistic, rather than a monotheistic, perspective. The way around this logical difficulty was to account for evil as a privatio boni, as a “privation of good.”
The idea of the privatio boni, according to Jung, begins with the assumption that God (and the imago Dei in Christ) is a Summum Bonum, “All Good Being,” and then it follows (in the words of Tatian from the 2nd century) that omne bonum a Deo, omne malum ab homine, “everything good [comes] from God, everything evil [comes] from human beings.” As Tatian puts it in his Oratio ad Graecos: “Nothing evil was created by God; we ourselves have produced all wickedness.”[28] Evil is thus the “privation of good,” and the “good” is one in God. In his work, Aion, Jung traces this idea in the fourth century in Basil’s Hexameron and John Chrysostom’s Responsiones ad orthodoxas, , through Augustine’s Liber Sententiarum ex Augustine (late fourth century), to Dionysius Areopagite’s De divinis nominibus (in the sixth century) and Thomas Aquinas’ Summa theologica (13th century).[29] About those who expressed this perspective in Christian history, Jung says: “These all ignore the reality of evil, because they regard it as a mere privatio boni and thereby dismiss it with a euphemism.”[30]
Though the notion of privatio boni is not officially a Christian “dogma” or “doctrine,” it is considered a sententia communis, i.e., a theological “statement” (sententia) that is generally accepted (communis) as true without being named a dogma or doctrine.[31] According to Jung, the Christian idea asserts that evil is the privation of good and has no substance or reality of its own. On the other hand, Jung thought that good and evil were equally real and were polar opposites.[32] He believed that the privatio boni perspective has been responsible for a “too optimistic conception of evil” in the nature of things and a “too pessimistic view of the human soul.”[33] Evil is—as it was put in antiquity—a mh; o[n, a “non-being.[34] According to Jung, this Greek negative form means that evil has a non-existent character. It is simply the negative of good and evil therefore is viewed as having no being in itself. The perspective also attributes, according to Jung, the source of all evil to the human soul. Jung wants a view of the soul that has two sides (like the view of the Clementine Oracles).[35] He wants a more optimistic view of the Self and a more realistic view of the world.
What Jung is really against for what he thinks of as empirical psychological reasons is a one-sidedly negative view of the soul (psyche) and an unrealistic denial that evil has no autonomous and objective reality in the world, views that he attributes to anti-psychological perspectives in the Christian tradition. He is against one-sidedness.[36] For Jung, one-sided theory takes the “depth” out of “depth psychology.” Psychology is thereby reduced to conscious, rational thinking, and it becomes ego-psychology. In Jung’s view, Christianity introduced a notion concerning evil that self-deconstructs under the pressure of empirical psychology’s experience of the fundamental ambivalence of the deep self and the complex and puzzling facticity of objective evil in the world of post-World War II civilization.
James Hillman. In contradistinction to Jung’s constant attention to the mystery of evil late in his life, evil is surely not one of the principle concerns that comes immediately to mind when thinking of James Hillman’s re-visioning of Jungian psychology as “archetypal psychology.” One might imagine that this difficult topic was of no concern to Hillman. But, on closer examination, one discovers this not to have been the case. For example, when Hillman became the editor of the series called “Studies in Jungian Thought” published by Northwestern University Press beginning in 1967, the first work that he published was a book of essays entitled Evil. This work was an English translation of volume I, Das Böse, in the German series Studien aus dem C. G. Jung-Institut Zürich, and was composed of eight two-hour lectures given originally at the Jung Institute, including two presentations by training analysts Marie-Louise von Franz and Liliane Frey-Rohn. But there is more to the story of Hillman and the issue of evil than his publishing this volume.
Hillman himself made a major incursion into the depth psychological discussion of evil here at this podium in his 1974 Eranos lecture, “On the Necessity of Abnormal Psychology.”[37] His archeyptal psychological perspective in Jungian theory and practice was already known for three things: (1) a stress on the notion of “archetypal” rather than “archetypes;”[38] (2) a “nutshell” theory of psychological practice;[39] and (3) an insistence on mythic image as the principle rhetoric of depth psychological interpretation.[40]
Hillman focused on the archetypal in Jung’s psychological theory in order to save Freud and Jung’s depth psychology from regression into the personalism and behaviorism of an ego-psychology.[41] This focus on the archetypal elevated the notion of the collective nature of psychodynamics and pointed in Hillman’s later work to the psychology of anima mundi (i.e., cosmos and world).[42] The emphasis did not fall upon “archetypes.” Rather, as Hillman put it, “by ‘archetype’ I can refer only to the phenomenal archetype, that which manifests itself in images. The noumenal archetype,” he said, “cannot per se by definition be presented so that nothing whatsoever can be posited in it. In fact whatever one does say about the archetype per se is a conjecture already governed by an archetypal image. This means that the archetypal image precedes and determines the metaphysical hypothesis of a noumenal archetype. So,” Hillman concluded, “let us apply Occam’s razor to Kant’s noumenon. By stripping away this unnecessary theoretical encumbrance to Jung’s notion of archetype we restore full value to the archetypal image.”[43] Indeed, it was the notion of “value” that Hillman wanted to stress. He wrote: “ … any image can be considered archetypal. The word ‘archetypal’ rather than pointing at something … points to something, this is value.…”[44] Hillman likened his sense of the archetypal as that which has value to Alfred North Whitehead’s notion of “importance.”[45]
The clinical and hermeneutical implication of this understanding of the archetypal is to view what is of lesser value and importance in a context of greater value and importance, a process of soulful amplification rather than of psychological reduction.[46] Hillman termed this a “nutshell” theory, one nutshell inside another, and he said: “Within the [psychological or personal] affliction is a complex, within the complex an archetype, which in turn refers to a God. Afflictions point to Gods; Gods reach us through afflictions.”[47] So, personal pathologies are inside a mythic image (a God), which is inside an archetype, which is inside a complex, which our suffering is inside. Hillman learned this way of talking about therapeutic and interpretive strategy from his Eranos friend, Henry Corbin,[48] and from their shared Neo-Platonic perspective. The strategy is referred to in Plotinus and in Proclus as epistrophē.[49] These Neo-Platonist thinkers describe the movement of the soul as double: a proodos from the unity of the One, which is a descent into particularity, and a return of the soul within itself back to a higher principle (epistrophē = “bending back” or “turnabout”). This functions to locate the lesser in the greater, which, for Hillman, is to place psychopathology within the mythological order of the gods. Therefore, he will insist, along Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig, that “the primary rhetoric of archetypal psychology is myth.”[50]
Given this archetypal psychological perspective, the striking argument of Hillman’s 1974 Eranos lecture may seem not so surprising after all. It also makes plain what all this has to do with the question of evil. In his presentation, Hillman observed that the gods of ancient mythology have an evil side. They are pictured as “quarreling, cheating, sexually obsessed, revenging, vulnerable, killing, torn apart.”[51] The gods are, Hillman says, “replete with behavior that, from the secular standpoint, must be classified under criminal pathology, moral monstrosity, or personality disorders.”[52] As figurations of psychological complexes, they demonstrate what Hillman refers to as an infirmitas that is essential to the archetypal image. Unlike religions which posit a single figure as the archetype of evil (Satan, Devil), the mythologies to which Hillman points indicate a necessary evil aspect in all archetypes. Aphrodite is the goddess of sensuality and love and beauty, but she is also and at the same time jealous and wicked and mean-tempered, as we see from the tale of Eros and Psyche in Lucius’ Golden Ass.
Hillman asked his audience here forty-one years ago to “entertain the idea of the sickness in the archetype,” which is “not the same as the archetype of sickness.”[53] An archetype of sickness would approach evil and abnormality as belonging to “a single scapegoat archetype, a morbid principle like thanatos, a sickness demon, a devil or shadow who carries the evil,” while other archetypal images parade as if supremely ideal.[54] Hillman is attempting to understand evil “as an inherent component of every archetypal complexity, which has its own blind, destructive, and morbid possibility. Death,” he says, “is fundamental to each pattern of being, even if the gods do not die. They are athanatos which implies that the infirmitas they present is also eternal.”[55] The evil in the world is archetypal.[56]
Hillman reiterated this perspective in Re-Visioning Psychology,[57] in Dream and the Underworld,[58] and in the book Archetypal Psychology.[59] The view of the infirmitas of the archetypal image was not an incidental matter with Hillman.[60] But why? What was Hillman against, as Jung was against privatio boni?
It is often not difficult to see what Hillman is against. As he says in a revelatory interview: “I trust my anger. It’s my favorite demon.”[61] In the case of the psychotherapeutic and hermeneutic use of mythical imagery, so important to archetypal psychology’s perspective, Hillman’s anger was aimed at certain popular uses of mythology in psychology. He wrote in Re-Visioning Psychology: “The task of referring the soul’s syndromes to specific myths is complex and fraught with dangers…. The chief danger lies in taking myths literally even as we aim at taking syndromes mythically. For if we go about reversion [epistrophē] as a simple act of matching, setting out with the practical intellect of the therapist to equate mythemes with syndromes, we have reduced archetypes to allegories of disease; we have merely coined a new (or old) grid of classificatory terms…. So we must take care, remembering that mythical thinking is not direct, practical thinking. Mythical metaphors are not etiologies, causal explanations, or name tags.”[62] A bit later in Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman added: “The entry into myth needs an important correction. It commits the ego fallacy by taking each archetypal theme into the ego. We fall into an identity with one of the figures in the tale…. Ego [then] has become a delusional system.”[63] Hillman insisted on the infirmitas of the archetypal mythic image, on its evil aspect, in order to attempt to compensate for and work against the literalism of matching myths with psychic complexes and for a concurrent slippage of depth psychology into ego-psychology, which can happen when by noting mythic-likenesses a person comes to think that she or he knows something about what is psychically unknown and in principle unknowable (i.e., deep and unconscious).
What Hillman is against is literalism. In the Terry Lectures at Yale University in 1972 he said: “I join Owen Barfield and Norman Brown in a mafia of the metaphor to protect plain men from literalism.”[64] Then Hillman quotes Barfield and Brown. “’ … the besetting sin today is the sin of literalism.’ ‘The thing to be abolished is literalism … the worship of false images: idolatry.’”[65] Hillman had at the outset of the Terry Lectures announced that he wanted a psychological theory that would be constituted by a “poetic basis of mind.”[66] Literalism, he argued, prevents a psychologizing that is a “seeing through” behavior and fantasy. He said: “Literalism prevents mystery by narrowing the multiple ambiguity of [psychological] meanings into one definition.”[67] Whether in myth or concept, literalism inflates with a psychological fundamentalism.
Jung already had noted a similar problem. In an early essay (1916) on “The Structure of the Unconscious,” he used the word Gottähnlichkeit, “godlikeness,” to designate the assimilation of unconscious materials, as when a person identifies completely with some archetypal configuration, a collective and primordial image.[68] Gottähnlichkeit is a term that Jung acknowledges that he borrowed from Alfred Adler, and he also connects it with Goethe’s use of the same word in Faust (1.3.2050). Identification with an archetypal figuration often is experienced by a patient as a relief and a breakthrough. He or she experiences a signification that is larger than him or her. But Jung observes that it comes at a cost. The person, Jung says, is “appropriating to himself qualities and contents” that “belong either to someone else, or to everyone, or to no one.” The sense of archetypal Gottähnlichkeit causes “exaggeration, a puffed-up attitude, loss of free will, delusion.”[69] If the identification is persona-like, a social role from ego’s history, a “megalomania and simple obnoxiousness may occur.” But if the identification is collective and archetypal, “at best there will be neurosis and, at worse, psychosis.”[70] It is ironic that this can happen precisely in a “successful” analysis.
Jung therefore adjusted his language. In the early essays, use of the word Gottähnlichkeit was consistent (not only in “The Structure of the Unconscious” [1916], but also in “New Paths in Psychology” [1912]). But in later editions of the same works the term was replaced by the German word Inflation (see “On the Psychology of the Unconscious” [1917, 1918, 1926, 1936, 1943] and “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious” [1928, 1935, 1938]).[71] Perhaps Jung had come to feel that in an understanding of the psychology of “inflation” the term “godlikeness” itself can lead to inflated thinking.[72] This seems to be what Hillman was wary of and against. It would be a case of psychology being itself un-psychological: a soul (depth) psychology not being soulful. Hillman meant to be angry on behalf of soul.
Wolfgang Giegerich. The third Jungian voice and Eranos friend that I want to invoke on the issue of the roots of evil is that of Wolfgang Giegerich. Just as we have seen that Hillman responded to Jung’s reflections on the archetypal nature of evil, so Giegerich has responded both to Hillman and to Jung on the topic. Concerning Hillman’s placing of evil in the infirmitas of the archetypal image itself, Giegerich has said: “The idea [of Hillman] that pain and our real-life afflictions are an access to myth is of great importance. It removes myth from an ivory tower sphere and gives due credit to the dark aspects of psychological life. To have developed this idea is one of Hillman’s many merits in psychology.”[73] In addition to connecting with Hillman, Giegerich has also engaged the issue of privatio boni that is so crucial to Jung’s perspective concerning evil. However, he carries the thinking of both Jung and Hillman to another level and thereby moves psychological thought regarding evil.
Crucial to Giegerich’s psychological way of working is something very much like Confucius’ notion of “the rectification of names.” Confucius wrote in the Analects: “A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. …. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately.”[74] Confucius believed that disorder in the psyche and in the world could result by failing to call things by their proper names. This was a part of his concept of Li, or “propriety.”[75]
The word “psychology” is an illustration of Confucius’ point. “Psychology” has come to mean many different things, even within Jungian circles. Giegerich would like to reserve the use of the word “psychology” for discourse about the “logic” (logos) of the “soul” (psyche), just as the word itself says, and, like Hillman, Giegerich wants to insist that the logical status of soul is that it is not a thing; it is a no-thing: nothing.[76] Giegerich writes: “It [soul] is nothing—nothing other than self-manifestation.”[77] Again, he says: “The soul must not be positivized. It does not exist..”[78] That is, soul does not exist as a some-thing.
In a 1986 lecture in Jerusalem, Jacques Derrida addressed the problem of how one can speak philosophically about matters whose nature is not that of a some-thing (e. g., love, meaning, being, spirit, soul, God) without objectivizing or positivizing them. Derrida was continuing the Heideggerian query concerning whether a non-objectivizing thinking and speaking are possible.[79] The title of Derrida’s essay was “Comment ne pas parler” (“How Not to Speak”),[80] and during the course of his argument, Derrida petitioned a perspective from Meister Eckhart. Eckhart, in his 26th sermon, Quasi stella matutina, argued that “soul” is a bîwort, a “by”-word, which in Latin would be adverbum, an “adverb,”[81] i.e., a word that is put “by” another word to qualify it. On this perspective, and contrary to conventional understanding, the word “soul” is not a noun because it does not name some-thing. Rather, it qualifies, modifies, gives importance and value to every-thing, as does an adjective or adverb, like the word “red” in the poet’s line “red wheelbarrow.”[82] On this view it would be appropriate to say “soul-music” or “soul- food,” but inappropriate to say “the care of the soul,” as if there were a some-thing to take care of. It is not that meta-physical discourse should be adjectival; it is that it is always and already, and only, adjectival—even when it employs nouns. These nouns do not name physical things, even when they seem to. Nouns are supposed to refer to persons, places or things. But the meta-physical nouns are like adjectives. They refer to qualities and values.[83] So Giegerich says: “The soul, after all, does not exist.”[84] Though it is a noun, it is (in another sense) not a “noun.”
This means that, contrary to popular intuition, a psychology of soul, a “depth” psychology, is not about “a positivized human being’s feelings, ideas, afflictions, etc.”[85] If it were about such personal matters, “it would not be true psychology at all.”[86] Soul is not, according to Giegerich, “emotion, affect, feeling, drive, desire, or even image or fantasy.”[87] If it were about these things, it would be anthropology, personalistic psychology, sociology, counselling, advice, coaching, moralizing, behaviorism, i.e., it would be ego-ology and not psych-ology. It would not be taking account of what Giegerich calls “the psychological difference,” which is formally akin to what Martin Heidegger called “the ontological difference.”[88] The ontological difference in Heidegger is taking note that Being or God (divinity), which has an ontological nature, is not to be mistaken for a being or a god, which would have an ontic nature. Theologically this mistake would be idolatry. Philosophically it is a fundamental category mistake.[89] Giegerich’s warning to depth psychology is that it not mistake soul for personal humanistic matters, and he wants to reserve the term psychology for soul and its self-manifestation, even though many persons come initially into psychotherapy for personal and not for authentic psychological issues.[90] But what does this location of the domain of depth psychology in soul rather than in the person have to do with the topic of evil?
It indeed has everything to do with our topic. It enables Giegerich to take note of where Jung’s argument against the notion of evil as privatio boni and Hillman’s archetypal psychological argument against literalism both self-deconstruct by not observing radically enough “the psychological difference” between a soul-psychology and a humanistic or ego psychology.
I have already mentioned Giegerich applauding Hillman for locating evil in the infirmitas of the archetypal image itself. For Giegerich this has the desirable psychological effect of releasing archetypal material from “an ivory tower sphere and [it] gives due credit to the dark aspects of psychological life.”[91] For Hillman this works as an epistrophē, placing the vicissitudes of the human in the larger realm of the archetypal mythic image. But Giegerich notes that by not dissociating the personal from the soul realm of psychology Hillman’s strategy can have the effect of “humanizing mythology” rather than “dehumanizing psychology.”[92] If the “psychological difference” is not insisted upon, Hillman’s strategy can have exactly the opposite effect as the one intended. It produces precisely what Hillman is against: namely, literalism. It literalizes the archetypal soul material by objectivizing it in the personalistic domain. It perceives the mythological literally, and in so doing it takes the literal literally. Hillman acknowledges this possible problem when he says: “But let us not take literalism itself literally. After all, idols too are images of Gods ….”[93] But by simply saying this, one cannot always escape the idolatrous function of the form of one’s thinking and saying.[94] In the function of this form—i.e., being against the literal literally—the epistrophic intent (placing the lesser in the greater) self-deconstructs.
The matter of Jung’s arguing against the privatio boni view of evil is for Giegerich more complex than the issue with Hillman. First, Giegerich notes the crucial importance of Jung’s insistence (against the privatio boni) upon the root of evil in God for the entire perspective of a psychology of the objective psyche. “’Evil,’” Giegerich notes, “is the keystone of the whole Jungian edifice.” [95] But Giegerich argues that Jung is likely mistaken on two points: his understanding of the logical status of evil as the “privation of good” and his understanding of the use of the term non-being (Greek: mh; o[n). Jung’s interpretations lead him to the view that the ancient perspective of evil as a privatio boni produces a too optimistic view of evil in the world and a too pessimistic view of humankind. Omne bonum a Deo, omne malum ab homine. “Everything good [comes] from God; everything evil [comes] from human beings.”
According to Giegerich, there are two problems with Jung’s conclusion that the ancients did not believe in the substantial reality of evil. The first is that Jung himself has said that thinking something is evil is a subjective value judgment. I have indicated this earlier with regard to Jung’s speech to the Stuttgart group.[96] So why would Jung complain that, for example, Basil the Great would say “evil does not have a subsistence of its own?” The second problem is that Basil himself is quoted by Jung as saying “that evil exists no one living in the world will deny.”[97] This seems to affirm clearly that Basil, even while arguing for privatio boni does in no way not believe in the reality of evil. Jung, Giegerich thinks, has made a logical error. Jung interprets metaphysical (theological) statements as if they apply to the physical and empirical domain.
Giegerich additionally argues that Jung, when thinking that the ancients believed in the non-being of evil, misunderstands the Greek negative phrase mh; o[n.[98] Jung wrote: “We can no longer simply claim that it [evil] is a mh; o[n, something non-existent.”[99] Ancient Greek has two negative particles: mh; and oujk. Oujk is used with the declarative mood and mh; is used with the subjunctive and conditional moods. If one wants to say “there is not any bread,” oujk is used. If one wants to say “if I were Lord of the universe, there would not be war in the world,” mh; is used. So there is “ouk-ontic” non-being and “me-ontic” non-being. The “me-ontic” expression does not speak about a reality, but about a wish or idea or perspective. It does not refer to a thing that exists or a non-thing that does not exist. Giegerich, as well as the ancients (see reference to Basil’s Hexameron above), knows perfectly well that there are evil things in the world. Giegerich writes compellingly: “The idea that human existence was a life in the valley of tears is continually present and corroborated by the actual experience people constantly have of illnesses, numerous deaths in one’s family, wars, disease, poverty, crimes, injustice, torture …” Evil plays a “colossal role … in the world.” “Incredible atrocities have been committed and evil abounds, terrible crimes, sexual abuse and murder of small children, killing sprees, genocide, massmurder, all sorts of brutality and injustice.”[100]
But these are evils (plural) and they are evil deeds and actions (evil as an adjective). As Giegerich observes, “the reality of concrete evils in the plural is a totally different topic from the question of a possible reality of evil [singular] per se.”[101] When Jung moves from observing the evils in the world (i.e.., evil behaviors or people) to a reality of evil itself, according to Giegerich he is ontologizing or hypostatizing evil things that belong to the empirical realm of human egos and their activities. His move is logically metaphysical and not psychological.
For Giegerich, the irony of Jung’s argument against privatio boni is that this old and long-term perspective on the nature of evil represents a perspective that could greatly benefit Jung’s psychology. By favoring the imaginal world of the Clementine Oracles (God has a right and a left hand, both good and evil), Jung constructs a horizontal binarism that risks a dualistic, rather than dialectical or dynamic, analogy for the self. The perspective of privatio boni corrects this crypto-Manicheanism by reaffirming the oneness (wholeness) of God/Self and it places the relationship of the human to the divine on a vertical axis.[102]
From Giegerich’s perspective the psychological implication of the privatio boni is that evil is defined on its own terms as intrinsically evil. It is not a metaphysical hypostasis that has to be attributed to some-one (God, man, Satan, etc.). As Giegerich argues, “evil understood as a privation of good is evil because it differs from itself (we could also say ‘sins’ against itself)” rather than being evil over against something good. That is, it “differs from its own good, its own true nature, its own Being, its own determination… It is deficient or false being… A knife with a dull or broken blade is a bad knife; a man who murders is evil because he violates his own conscience, his own inner moral law…. This is a privation of the good.”[103] So, Giegerich concludes: Good and evil “have been interiorized (not into our inner, but) into themselves and thus into the objective soul…. This is what should make the privatio boni notion attractive to psychology.”[104] Now there is no binarism, dualism, oppositionalism. There is dialectic in the psyche, to be sure (back and forth of soul’s syzygies); but not contradiction or opposition (not the self over against itself).
As the poet William Blake put it:
Man was made for joy & woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Thro’ the world we safely go.
Joy & woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.[105]
In the second half of my presentation today, after the Pause, I should like to go forward from the thinking of the arguments of C. G. Jung, James Hillman and Wolfgang Giegerich, adding two further observations about our present theme, observations about the roots of evil that will be based on their reflections, but going on from their arguments into the realm of language theory and Christian mythology.
II
As I mentioned at the beginning of the first half of my presentation, the question of this Tagung announced by the Eranos Foundation asks: “What are the roots of evil?” I want now to specify and qualify this query by asking the question in a particular form: namely, I want now to ask, not what are the roots of evil, but what are the roots of the word “evil.” That is, why, when people wanted to call something evil, did they call it “evil”? Why did they use the word “evil”? What, by using this word, were they calling it? What were they calling evil when they called it “evil”?
Why am I asking this? And why do I ask it this way? One reason is that the question concerning the roots of the word evil is answerable in the physical and real world. Unlike the question, what are the roots of evil, it does not petition metaphysical or moralistic speculation. There is no real answer to the question concerning the roots of evil apart from fantasy and belief. But there is an answer to the question about the language of “evil.”
Owen Barfield, the British literary theorist and philosopher of poetics, once gave me the following advice. He said that if a student asked me a question to which I did not know the answer, I should do an etymology. I should get an answer from language. This was not merely a joking suggestion of how to defend oneself in the face of ignorance. Barfield was noted for the view that words have philological histories that carry narratives of human signification.[106] It is as if words have an “unconscious.” The meanings hiding in language disclose collective insights that have long since been lost to human consciousness. This is one reason that I shift the question of the roots of evil to the question of the roots of the word “evil,” that is, to attempt to discover what is hiding in the language of evil.
I am also prompted to the linguistic form of the question, not only by Barfield, but, as we have seen in the first hour of my presentation, by C. G. Jung, James Hillman and Wolfgang Giegerich. Jung is forthright about the importance of noting the language about evil. I have already quoted him saying to the group from Stuttgart, “When someone speaks of good or evil, it is of what he calls good or evil, … Then he speaks about it with great assurance, not knowing whether it really is so or whether what he calls good or evil really corresponds to the facts … so that an inner subjective picture is substituted for objectivity.”[107] This was not an off-hand comment for Jung. When he was an associate at the Burghölzli Clinic in Zürich in 1904, he collaborated with Franz Riklin on a word association experiment in which the two men discovered that psychological complexes that were otherwise unconscious became apparent by noting the varied speeds with which the client responded to stimulus words.[108] Language is psychologically important for insight. Jung also noted, with regard to his “aestheticizing” tendency in the Red Book, that he had not in his early years found a “right language” for the expression of depth psychological insights.[109]
James Hillman was even more emphatic about the importance of the linguistic context of psychological understanding. He used the word “rhetoric” to refer to the appropriate function of mythological discourse in archetypal perspectives.[110] In his ground-breaking Terry Lectures at Yale University in 1972, published as the book Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman talked about the “soul of words,” calling for an “angelology of words,” because, as he put it, “words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us.”[111] Hillman was playing on the Greek word from which English gets its word “angel,” angelos, which means “message bearer.” More than a decade earlier, in 1966 here at Eranos, Hillman had spent an entire presentation on “psychological language,” mining language for critical insights and mistakes in psychological understanding. This presentation became the basis for part two of Hillman’s 1972 work, The Myth of Analysis.[112]
Giegerich, too, joins Jung and Hillman in confirming the importance of psychology’s linguistic context. He writes strongly:
“If soul … is the generation and entertaining of meanings, of the words of language, of values, ideas, fantasies, laws, institutions, works of poetry, music, art, and so on, it comprises consciousness as such as well as the world as a whole. Nature, the cosmos, all things and objects, everything we see and touch, even the body are first of all psychic experiences, notions, and images and thus contents of our consciousness. As humans we live primarily in a linguistic cosmos, not in the body. We see what is and happens not directly, not as things-in-themselves, but only in terms of the words and concepts that we have of them. Everything we can possibly know and experience consists of soul stuff, [and it] has been filtered through by way of language … through language and images. We touch an oak tree and think that we touch the real thing, but what we touch is ‘oak tree,’ which is a human concept and image. We see a cow, a mountain, the moon, fog, my mother, but all these perceptions are linguistic and mental concepts.”[113]
In another essay, Giegerich refers to this perspective as “the linguistic turn.”[114] Indeed by noting the emphasis upon language in Jung, Hillman and Giegerich, I am placing them specifically in the context of what Giegerich appropriately calls “the linguistic turn” in the history of thought.
The Linguistic Turn. The phrase used by Giegerich, “the linguistic turn,” became popular as a result of Richard Rorty’s book of the same name,[115] though the phrase is likely original with the philosopher Gustav Bergman.[116] The notion is, as Giegerich has said, that language is constitutive of reality. This is a different perspective from a view of language that imagines words as labels for antecedent concepts, according to which there is something that is a tree to which the term “tree” refers. Ferdinand de Saussure is associated with this idea, as are Ludwig Wittgenstein, on the one side, and Martin Heidegger, on the other. Numerous other thinkers are also linked to this notion: Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Hayden White, to name only a few. In 1965, even before Rorty’s book, Stanley Hopper spoke here at Eranos on this perspective in his presentation “Symbolic Reality and the Poet’s task,”[117] as did I in my 1982 Eranos presentation.[118]
Crucial to this perspective is Heidegger’s view from Being and Time concerning the “as”-structure of language.[119] Stanley Hopper explains: “It is the as factor that makes up the structure of explicitness of anything that is ‘understood.’ The structure is implicit in our seeing, even when suppressed, passed over or ‘ontically unexpressed.’”[120] As the Spanish philosopher Julián Marías put it: “When we believe we walk on earth, we really walk on metaphors.”[121] Or as Gaston Bachelard wrote: “I believe that everything specifically human in man is logos. One would not be able to meditate in a zone that preceded language.”[122] And as the poet Hölderlin wrote: “Dichterisch wohnet der Mensch auf dieser Erde” (Man dwells poetically on this earth).[123]
But how does this “linguistic turn” help us with the question of evil? It encourages us to look at the word “evil” for psychological insight, for what a people may know intuitively when describing what it sees as evil with the word “evil.” Surely it is obvious that there are evil deeds, where the word “evil” functions as an adjective. (While I was in the midst of preparing this presentation in late March, a pilot intentionally flew an airplane into the side of an French alpine mountain killing all of the one hundred and fifty passengers, and, in a separate incident a couple of months later, a man walked into an African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina, and killed nine persons in cold blood.) There is no question about there being actions that may be appropriately qualified with the adjective “evil.” But when one asks what the roots of “evil” are, the term is now a noun and, according to the perspective that we have been entertaining, though nouns are supposed to name people, places or things, the abstract noun “evil” does not refer to a “thing.” It is not a label on a some-thing, but a word that names a mystery, a no-thing, a metaphor. It is the mystery of evil![124] And yet, this “evil” is not a mere name, not a mystification, but a metaphor, a word with a real knowable history.
So therefore we ask: What are the roots of the word “evil.” That is, why, when people wanted to call something evil did they call it “evil”? What, by using this word, were they calling it? What was the intuition about the nature of so-called “evil”? What is inscribed unwittingly in this word? What does the term unconsciously carry? (In this presentation—because of the limits of time and of my abilities—I will deal only with the history of the English word “evil,” though, to be sure, exploration is needed in other languages as well.)
Philologists are in agreement about the history of the English adjective, hence also the noun, “evil.” The use of the term was widespread by the fifteenth-century, though uses of it go as far back as the tenth-century. The form evel first emerged in the west midland and in Kentish dialect.[125] It comes from Middle English uvel (sometimes the “u” with an umlaut), which in turn is from Old English and Old Saxon yfel. The Old High German source of this is the word ubil and the Gothic ubils. The Proto-Indo-European background of this group of terms is upélos, which gives Proto-Germanic the root ubilaz, and is related to the Proto-Indo-European root upér, which gave Ancient Greek the word hyper.[126] The entire family of cognates carries the image of “up,” “above,” and “over” (as in the modern German über). So, the notion of evil—according to philological speculation—connotes the idea of “exceeding due measure” or “going above and beyond proper limits.”[127] One philologist has suggested an original sense of “uppity” for the word “evil.”[128]
The surprise is that when the people wanted to name evil, that is, to give it a source in language, they did not imagine that it came from deep down in the dark recesses of the abysmal nature of men and women; they rather imagined it in the heights, up and out of the boundaries of humanity. The subtitle of our Tagung, “Figures and Issues from the Abysses of the Human Condition,” is oddly valenced by this linguistic intuition: namely, the abyss is not down and in, but is rather up and out. The English word “abyss” is from the Greek which has an alpha-privative as prefix to the word for depth (bathos) and thus means “depth-less,” “without bottom,” “open all the way down” … and presumably “up,” also.
The philological history also has an implication for the metaphor “roots” in the Tagung’s question, “What are the roots of evil?” If the image in language has to do with “up,” then a particular kind of “root” or “seed” is implied. “Evil,” on this view, does not have roots like that of a botanical annual. It is more like the roots of the water lily, some ferns and forest herbs, the cloudberry and ginger, that is, it is rhizomatic. The distinction between types of roots is expressed in a song from the American musical play, The Fantasticks, which says:
Plant a radish;
Get a radish.
Never any doubt.
That’s why I love vegetables;
You know what you are about!
But with people (and with evil) it is not so clear. So the song continues:
While with children—
It’s bewilderin’
You don’t know until the seed is nearly grown
Just what you’ve sown.[129]
I am suggesting that evil is a rhizome drawn upwards to the light and the heights.
Jung’s insistence on using the word rhizome to describe the logic of the psyche is therefore relevant to the discussion of evil. He wrote that “the psychology of the unconscious has to reckon with long periods of time, for it is less concerned with the ephemeral personality than with age-old processes, compared with which the individual is no more than the passing blossom and the fruit of the rhizome underground.”[130] Here at Eranos in 1942, Jung also described the alchemical constituency of the lapis philosophorum (“philosophical stone”) as radices (“roots”) functioning like rhizomata (“rhizomes”).[131]
Apropos the Tagung’s topic of evil, it is as if evil pops up here and then there rhizomatically, like something drawing evil out of the depths into the heights, out into the open. Or as James Hillman has said: “The demonic or diabolic in itself is arbitrary, mischievous, often a matter of luck or lot. It comes and goes and seems so senseless. The more that evil is archetypal, the more we experience it as impersonal. It is incomprehensible and we do not deserve it.”[132] That is, it is not causal in a rational and linear fashion like the roots of radishes. Evil’s “roots” are rhizomatic.
If one gets “root” and “abyss” wrong, one will look for a “seed” and a “deep, dark hole” as the source of evil, and one may end up with metaphysical speculation about God or the Devil. But the logic of “evil’s” language suggests another direction. Lest the view of evil from the history of the people’s language seem surprising or counter-intuitive, it is curiously corroborated by an equally enigmatic aspect of Christian mythology, which may help to explain the surprise of evil being “up” and not “down,” not moralistic debris, but a psychological high, not from the depths, but from the light and the heights.
Christian Mythology: Lucifer. The curiosity to which I allude is that of Lucifer. If it is odd that in the history of the language evil is “up” rather than “down,” it is surely not less curious that the name of the Prince of Darkness, Lucifer, is originally a Latin word meaning the Bearer of Light. There is some reticence about this naming in the early Christian tradition, likely because the New Testament identifies Jesus as the Bearer of Light.[133] But this naming of the source of evil as Light Bearer (“Lucifer”) became popular with the people of the later Middle Ages, so that one can imagine that as a common response to the question of this Tagung—What is the source of evil?—the people would respond “Lucifer.” The popularity of Lucifer as the name for evil in this period may be due to Dante’s use of the name in Canto thirty-four of Inferno (the ninth and last circle of hell) and because of the presentations of the Lucifer figure in the texts of the Medieval Mystery Plays. For example, the York mystery play, “The Fall of the Angels,” has the following description of the figure that will in Dante be identified with Satan and Beelzebub. God is speaking to Lucifer and He says: “I have made you closest to me of all the powers; I make you master and mirror of my might; I create you beautiful in bliss, and I name you Lucifer, bearer of light.”[134] And this Angel turns out to be the source of all evil![135] How can this be?[136]
Not only is this identification of evil with light counter-intuitive, but the matter of Lucifer being at once the Evil One and the Bearer of Light seems to have been a part of a Christian mythology that is based on a mistake in language. The word “Lucifer” appears in the King James Version of the Bible in a verse in Isaiah 14.12. The text reads: “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!” Hearing this passage, one may justifiably wonder how a Latin word meaning “Bearer of Light” could appear in the Hebrew Bible before the time when there was a Roman language! The answer is not as difficult as the question may seem.
The scholars who translated the King James Bible did not use the Hebrew text as the source for the Old Testament. They used Jerome’s Latin translation of the Hebrew and Greek Bible, that is, the Vulgate, and Jerome was using the Septuagint Greek translation of the Hebrew scripture. The passage in Isaiah 14.12 in Hebrew names the figure that has “fallen from heaven” as helel ben-sha(c)har, which means “Bright Son of the Morning.” In the original context the passage is a part of a taunt that Israel will recite after the nation is restored from Babylonian captivity. This part of the taunt is aimed at the Babylonian king (perhaps Nebuchadnezzar II, but perhaps also Tiglath-Pileser, Sargon II, Sennacherib, or even a whole line of rulers). It is not a surprise that the Babylonian political figure is referred to as “Morning Star” or “Day Star” in the Septuagint, since in Apocalyptic literature fallen angels are commonly referred to as fallen stars.[137] Jerome translates helel ben-sha(c)har with the Latin word lucifer, “bearer of light,” which is also the Latin name for the planet Venus, that is, the Morning Star that appears just before sunrise. The word appears in lower-case in the Vulgate, and so is an adjective and not a proper name, and the taunt in Isaiah ends by referring to the figure as a human being and not as a god or an angel. The Revised Standard Version of the Bible translates the Hebrew as “the shining one.”
So it is a mistake to think of the figure in Isaiah 14 as a fallen angel. But Freud has taught us that one may discover psychological truth in parapraxes, in mistakes, or in what Harold Bloom has called “misprision.”[138] So now I ask: What may be the psychological truth in referring to evil as the result of light rather than darkness? I am here following the lead of Jung, who said: “The Lucifer legend is in no sense an absurd fairytale; … it is a ‘therapeutic’ myth.”[139] The Jungian analyst John Sanford puts it this way: “From the modern point of view, the legend of Lucifer may seem naïve and fanciful, but we should not overlook its wisdom.” [140]
First, we should note that just as the figure of Lucifer after the time of Jerome was amplified in Christian mythology to be equivalent to the Devil, so there is historical background behind the image of the “Light Bearer” that supports what I have called a “mistake.” Not only are there parallels in the pseudepigrapha of Second Enoch (Slavonic Enoch) to angels and fallen stars, as I have already mentioned, but the same parallel exists in the pseudepigraphal text of The Life of Adam and Eve. Also, in earlier Canaanite myth, the morning star (Roman Venus) is identified with the god Attar, who attempted to occupy the throne of Ba’al. Being unsuccessful in this rebellious attempt, Attar descended and ruled the underworld. The word in the Septuagint version of Isaiah that Jerome translates as “Lucifer” is the Greek term eosphoros, and this is a word that Plato uses in the Timaeus (38e) to refer to Eos, the Greek goddess of light, which corresponds to Aurora in Roman mythology. The planet Venus in the sky, the Morning Star, descends into oblivion with the rising of the Sun, whose light is even brighter. The associations between the Morning Star and fallen figures in antiquity are numerous.
But the narrative that compelled the mythological imagination in medieval, Christian Europe invokes Lucifer, God’s finest and most beautiful angelic creation, who opposed his will to that of his Creator and, for this rebellion, was cast out of heaven by the archangel Michael. Why did he turn against God? The motives are standard: pride (according to Origen, Chrysostrom, Jerome, Ambrose and Augustine); envy (according to Irenaeus, Tertullian, Justin Martyr and Cyprian), and lust (like the Watchers in Second Enoch who became sexually attracted to the daughters of Adam). But all of these reasons beg the question. The question remains: Why was Lucifer, the Bearer of Light, proud and envious and lustful? These seem like moralistic reasons for something whose context is mythological. Mythologically, why did the angel who is the Bearer of Light oppose the Creator?
The answer is Adam. According to late medieval legends, God created Adam and asked the angels to bow down before the greatest achievement of his creative work. But Lucifer observed that humankind was created with an original freedom, and Lucifer, having the foreknowledge of angels, knew that this would produce sin and imperfection in the divine creation. He was proud of heavenly perfection, envious of sharing that perfection with a world made imperfect by all-too-human free will, and desirous of preserving beauty for the heavenly realm only. Dante pictured Lucifer in the Inferno, not as surrounded by fire and brimstone, but as stuck upside down in frost and ice. Lucifer is imagined as frozen. From the mythographic standpoint, he is frozen in his perspective of perfectionism. God’s creation is good, so it ought to be without sin and evil. It ought to be perfect. This is Lucifer’s view. Lucifer—to use the terminology of a philologist that I cited earlier—is “uppity.” His desire for a one-sidedly perfected universe is related to and similar to the inflation of Gottähnlichkeit about which I spoke in the first hour. Like the putative “godlikeness” that Jung identified as a source of therapeutic inflation and psychological difficulties, Lucifer’s perfectionist perspective is the rhizomatic root of evil, according to the logic of this Christian mythology. But what is the psychological insight implicit in referring to evil as the result of a Luciferian perspective, a perspective that insists that, if creation is from God, there ought to be no evil in the world?
This question leads one back to Jung, Hillman and Giegerich. What may be somewhat surprising, given the differences we noted in the first hour of this presentation concerning the views of these psychologists with regard to evil, is that on the thematic revealed by the logic of the peoples’ language and by the mythology of Lucifer, there seems to be agreement. Jung is speaking about what he calls the “human stable,” when in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he reports: “I had grown up in the country, among peasants, and what I was unable to learn in the stables I found out from the Rabelaisian wit and the untrammeled fantasies of our peasant folklore. Incest and perversions were no remarkable novelties to me, and did not call for any special explanation. Along with criminality, they formed part of the black lees that spoiled the taste of life by showing me only too plainly the ugliness and meaninglessness of human existence. That cabbages thrive in dung was something I had always taken for granted.”[141] There is no perfectionist fantasy in these words. He concludes, later in the same work, “We must no longer succumb to anything at all, not even to good.”[142] As Jung puts it in an expanded version of his 1940 Eranos lecture on the Trinity: “The suffering that necessarily attaches to life cannot be evaded.”[143] The implication is that a perspective of all-light can produce psychological difficulties.
This is the view, also, of Hillman, who writes: “The Devil’s power seems to grow not in our shadow but from our light.” Psychologically, according to this statement, light, not darkness, is the root of evil. Hillman continues: “He [the Devil] gains when we lose touch with our own darkness, when we lose sight of our own destructiveness and self-deceptions. [Recall Jung’s “human stable”!] Theology says that pride leads directly to the devil; psychology can confirm this since, analytically understood, pride is a denial of the personal shadow and a blind fascination with the dazzle of one’s own light…. This is the reality of evil. Darkness is never dispersed as long as we are human and walk in the shadow of original sin and Lucifer is the original son.”[144]
Giegerich concurs and makes the matter even more psychologically radical and compelling. His perspective discloses a psychological dimension of the quest for the source of evil in the world. This quest seems to imply psychologically that there is something “wrong.” It seems to be “possessed by the grandiose demand for a perfect world and an infinite Creator whose creation ipso facto ought to be infinite and absolutely perfect.” It seems “unwilling to get over its disappointment” about “the world being essentially finite after all. The narcissistic blow that comes with this is answered by a refusal to come down to earth and to grow up… [it] results in a deep resentment, if not anger. The world’s finiteness is resentfully seen as a fault.”[145] And so we ask: Where does evil come from? Whose fault is it? We are in a psychology of shame and blame.[146]
Giegerich’s alternative is to ask us “to acknowledge our own ultimate finiteness and imperfection.” This is simply the way things are. “No, it is not our personal fault, our guilt, nor our shadow: the imperfection is simply the general objective and all-permeating character of the world and existence in the world at large.”[147]
It is well known that for Jung the psychological alternative to the notion of a perfectionist goal is the goal of wholeness, a wholeness that includes Jung’s “human stable,” Hillman’s archetypal infirmitas, and Giegerich’s “fundamental finiteness.” That is, the concept of psychological wholeness includes a recognition of the objectivity of evil. As Giegerich puts the matter: “The shadow has been recognized as the light’s, the sun’s, very own darkness. The realm of goodness has its own inherent evil.”[148]
About the differentiation of the goal of psychological wholeness from ideals of perfection, Jung said bluntly: “There is a considerable difference between perfection and completeness.”[149] “Completeness” and “wholeness” are Jung’s terms for the alchemical notion of homo totus, which can come into consciousness in a long-term psychoanalysis. Jung remarked about this process that psychological transformation is “the result of a long, technical and moral procedure” that for the patient can produce “an integration or completeness of the individual, who in this way approaches wholeness but not perfection.”[150] Again, Jung wrote: “The right way to wholeness is made up, unfortunately, of fateful detours and wrong turnings. It is a longissima via, not straight, but snakelike, a path that unites the opposites in the manner of the guiding caduceus, a path whose labyrinthine twists and turns are not lacking in terrors.”[151] And, I might add, the path is not only not lacking in terrors, but sometimes it is not lacking in evil.
Jung’s notion of wholeness carries with it a potential difficulty, because when the idea of wholeness is conceived as an ideal psychological goal to be achieved, the point about the distinction between wholeness and perfection will have already been missed. Viewing wholeness as a “goal” can make a depth psychological concept into an ego- or developmental-psychological idea.[152] Giegerich has explained the logic of this un-psychological reduction. “For we [Jungians] expect to achieve completeness through adding previously neglected functions to the number of well-developed ones or by compensating a one-sidedness through supplying the lacking side. In this manner we will get only an aggregate of functions, which in themselves are one-sided and split off, but we will never get wholeness. ‘Just as the addition of however many zeros will never make one,’[153] the addition of functions or personality aspects will never bring about oneness. Even after their combining, they will remain one-sided…. We can say that we too try to act out the idea of wholeness by projecting it onto the patient as a task to be accomplished and by understanding it on the level of behavior in terms of balancing the various functions or activities. But for Jung, wholeness is a matter of the ‘Blick fürs Ganze’ having ‘an eye for the psyche as a whole,’[154] not of becoming a psychological Jack-of-all-trades..”[155] A depth psychological perspective does not hold out wholeness as a teleological goal of therapy or analysis. Rather, a depth psychological perspective views the psyche as whole in itself. As Giegerich puts it: “Psychology must start from the ‘whole.’”[156] The wholeness is present always already.
This is, of course, very different from a shining Luciferian perspective, which wants life in the world to be far from whole; it wishes for a life that is perfectly beautiful and not ugly, light and not dark, shining and not dull, up and not down. The seductions of the Bearer of Light are the ideals and ideologies of perfection: for example, a perfect and superior Aryan race, Christian triumphalism, White supremacy, perfection in the marriage relationship, a perfect political democracy, and so on. But these sorts of perfection petition evil, as the mythology of Lucifer symbolically expresses and as history and experience attest. Lucifer makes life hell. This is because, like Lucifer, it gives to life an unrealistic refusal to acknowledge Adam, that is, it does not affirm the homo totus, the wholeness of things in the world of human finitude.
Evil: A Paragon of Lustre. Today I have been warning about the seduction of Lucifer, the Shining One, which, though it is the seduction of beauty and light, is actually psychologically a seduction of evil. I have been attempting to show that this seduction of light that is at once a seduction of evil has to do with a perfectionist ideology. It would seem that in the last forty years I have come full circle. In 1975, in my first lecture from this podium, my topic was “Images of Happy Ending.”[157] Two years later, in 1977, the topic of my second lecture at Eranos was “Imaginings No End.”[158] In both presentations I was critiquing what I called, utilizing a pun in Greek, the end (telos) of perfection (teleios).[159] My concern then was with theological and literary expressions of what Frank Kermode had called “the sense of an ending,”[160] and with what today I am referring to as a Luciferian perspective in psychology. In the earlier presentations, I called the Luciferian theme a fairy-tale perspective in religion and in literature.[161]
In the cases of religion and psychology, the seduction of perfectionism is difficult to resist. It is what the American poet Wallace Stevens called “a paragon of lustre,” which gives me the subtitle of my presentation today. In the poem, “The Woman Who Blamed Life on a Spaniard,” Stevens writes about a woman whom he calls “a paragon of lustre.”[162] Circe-like, she sings a devilishly seductive song. Here are the opening lines of the poem:
You do not understand her evil mood.
You think that like the moon she is obscured
But clears and clears until an open night
Reveals her, rounded in beneficence.
The poem suggests that we do not understand evil, and that we believe that it must be like the moon, which has a dark side, but that it will come round to be full and light. However, alas, unlike the waxing moon, a full beneficence never comes about. The poem goes on:
If she is like the moon, she never clears
But spreads an evil lustre whose increase
Is evil, crisply bright, disclosing you
Stooped in a night of vast inquietude.[163]
The seductive woman of this poem may be a “paragon of lustre,” and she may have, as the poet says, a “voice like the mother of all nightingales,” but, as the poem adds, she also has “tears” and “claws.”
The theme of this Tagung points to a similar siren-song. The question of povqen to; kakovn (“whence evil?”)[164] is a mystery that throughout history has fascinated human beings, making for what the poet calls a “vast inquietude.” The question of evil is truly a tremendum et fascinosum,[165] producing a wonderment not unlike the lunar sheen that compellingly draws lovers and poets.
Why does evil fascinate? And why does the poet refer to evil as “crisply bright” and as a “luster”? Is it like a hole in a tooth, which the tongue constantly and obsessively senses and seeks?[166] Is evil a sort of cavity, whose “root” and “abyss,” in the words of our Tagung’s subtitle, draw an eternal exploration?
The poem suggests that one might be wary of the luster that is a paragon, the imagined perfect beauty and light held out as an ideal. It might not have been noted that there is something fascinating, a fascinosum, about evil, something lustrous in evil that draws human beings, as to violent cinema and video games. It is what Wallace Stevens in another poem calls esthétique du mal,[167] the aesthetic attraction of evil, as if there were a Luciferian ironic “beauty” of evil. Indeed, there is not only something fascinating about evil, but there is also something fascinating about the question of evil that draws us over and over again, as indeed we are drawn by the topic of this Tagung. Evil is a paragon of lustre.
[1] From the Eranos website: http://www.eranosfoundation.org/bas_current_pages/current2015/EF2015Program.htm, accessed 2/17/2015.
[2] Adolf Gugenbühl-Craig, From the Wrong Side (Woodstock: Spring Publications, 1995). The title of the English translation obscures the fact that the original German title of the work reveals that it is about “the good of evil” (Zürich: Schweizer Spiegel, Edition Raben-Reihe,1992)
[3] Marie-Louis von Franz, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales (San Francisco: Shambhala, 1995).
[4] John Sanford, Evil: The Shadow Side of Reality (New York: Crossroads, 1982).
[5] Stanton Marlan, The Black Sun (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2005).
[6] Murray Stein, Jung on Evil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
[7] Johnathan Z. Smith, “Connections,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 58/1 (Spring 1990): 12; On Teaching Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 58f. Here is the whole quotation in context: “…the most important function of theory … is to force an answer to that most blunt of all questions: ‘So what?’ Too much of what we do … may be placed somewhere between show-and-tell and paraphrase. Having persuaded ourselves that, whatever else it is, religion is ultimately important (or, important because it is ultimate), we illicitly use that claim to justify anything we happen to study as being self-evidently significant. But significance is not a matter of peacock-like self-display, nor is it guaranteed by something merely being ‘there.’”
[8] David L. Miller, “On the Edge of the Round Table,” Spring 92 (2015): 153-169.
[9] Carl Kerényi, The Religion of the Greeks and Romans (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1962), pp. 151ff.
[10] I am using “deconstruction” in the sense explicated by Harold Bloom in “The Breaking of Form,” Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Seabury, 1979), pp. 1-38, especially p. 30.
[11] Wolfgang Giegerich, Soul’s Logical Life (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1998), p. 89.
[12] C. G. Jung, “Good and Evil in Analytical Psychology” (1960), in CW 10, para. 858.
[13] C. G. Jung, Letters, tr. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, vol. II, p. 52.
[14] Jung, Letters, vol. II, p. 238n1.
[15] Ibid., p. 251.
[16] Ibid., p. 555, editor’s note to letter of 12 May 1950.
[17] See the section on evil in: C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, “Late Thoughts” (New York: Vintage Books, 1965): 328-329.
[18] Wolfgang Giegerich, “The Reality of Evil,” Dreaming the Myth Onwards (Collected English Papers, vol. 6), p. 250. The first half of the present essay is merely a footnote to the exceptionally careful argument presented in Giegerich’s paper on evil to which I am most indebted.
[19] C. G. Jung, “The Tavistock Lectures” (1935), in CW 18, para. 279. See also: David L. Miller, “`Attack Upon Christendom!’ The Anti-Christianism of Depth Psychology,” Thought (Fordham University Quarterly), LXI, 240 (March 1986), 56-67; “`Attack Upon Christendom!’ The Anti-Christianism of Depth Psychology,” in: M. Stein and R.L. Moore, eds., Jung’s Challenge to Contemporary Religion (Wilmette: Chiron Publications, 1987), pp. 27-40; and, “Misprision: Pitfalls in Teaching Jung,” in: K. Bulkeley and C. Weldon , eds., Teaching Jung (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 29-50.
[20] C. G. Jung, “Aion,” in CW 9ii, para. 68.
[21] Jung, CW 9ii, para. 69.
[22] Jung, CW 9ii, para. 70.
[23] Jung, CW 9ii, para. 74.
[24] Jung, CW 9ii, para. 74.
[25] Archibald MacLeish, J. B. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), p. 14.
[26] Jung, CW 9ii, para. 99. This characterization is disputed, since the author was likely an Arian Christian, and the Homilies’ date is now thought to be as late as the fourth century. Origen (c. 360) and Eusebius (c. 325) seem to cite the Homilies. The best current estimate of dating places the text as we now have it during the reign of Constantine (died 337). The text was used as an argument against the resurgence of polytheism, mythology and theurgy. See: “Clementine Literature,” Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clementine_literature, accessed March 30, 2015.
[27] Mary Boyce, A History of Zoroastrianism (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975), pp. 192f.
[28] Cited in Jung, CW 9ii, para. 81.
[29] Jung, CW 9ii, paras. 80-115.
[30] C. G. Jung, “A Study in the Process of Individuation” (1950), in CW 9i, para. 603n152.
[31] See Jung, Letters, vol. II, p. 71n1. This is White’s professional theological judgment, and the point is, according to Jung, that if a theological idea is not officially “dogma” or Church “doctrine,” it is potentially disputable and open to debate.
[32] Jung, Letters, vol. II, p. 540n11.
[33] Jung, CW 9ii, para.113.
[34] Jung, CW 9ii, para. 88; Jung, Letters, vol. II, p.72n2 and p. 281. Jung often uses this Greek phrase when speaking of a Christian view of the “non-being of evil,” for example in the texts cited here from Dionysius the Areopagite, De divinis nominibus.
[35] For this reason Victor White accused Jung of having a Manichean, dualistic psychological perspective. See: Jung, CW 9ii, para. 112n74.
[36] For example, see: Jung, CW 18, para. 5, and the numerous references to one-sidedness as a definition of a neurotic attitude in the Index to the Jung, CW, 20, under “one-sidedness.” This is related to Jung’s antipathy for explanations that pretend that this or that, which is unknown, is “nothing but” (nichts als) one thing or another, which is known, a view for which Jung gives credit to William James (Jung, “On Psychological Understanding” [1914], in CW 3, para. 423, see also Jung, “Introduction to the Religious and Psychological Problems of Alchemy” [1944, 1952], in CW 12, para. 11n3; and, C. G. Jung, “The Aims of Psychotherapy” [1931], in CW 16, para. 98n5).
[37] James Hillman, “On the Necessity of Abnormal Psychology,” Eranos 43-1974 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977), pp. 91-136.
[38] James Hillman, “Why ‘Archetypal’ Psychology?” Spring 1970: 212-219.
[39] James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1975), p. 104.
[40] James Hillman, Archetypal Psychology (Putnam: Spring Publications, 2004), p. 31.
[41] See the sections on “personifying” and “dehumanizing” in Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, pp. 3-55, 167-229.
[42] See the section on “world” in: Thomas Moore, ed., A Blue Fire: Selected Writings by James Hillman (New York: Harper, 1989), pp. 95-191.
[43] Hillman, “On the Necessity of Abnormal Psychology,” p. 95n6.
[44] Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, p. 25.
[45] For example, see Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 237n91.
[46] Hillman’s amplification concerning the Jungian notion of “amplification” occurred in his 1976 Eranos lecture, “Egalitarian Typologies versus the Perception of the Unique” (Eranos 45-1976 [Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1970]). He said: “We amplify an image by means of myth in order not to find its archetypal meaning but in order to feed it with further images that increase its volume and depth and release its fecundity. Hermeneutic amplifications in search of meaning take us elsewhere, across cultures, looking for resemblances which neglect the specifics of the actual image. Our move, which keeps archetypal significance limited within the actually presented image, also keeps meanings always precisely embodied.”
[47] Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 104. Cf. Hillman’s 1968 Eranos lecture, “The Language of Psychology and the Speech of the Soul,” reprinted in The Myth of Analysis (New York: Harper, 1972), p. 196, where he earlier makes a similar point.
[48] Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabî, tr. R. Manheim (London: Routledge, 1970), p. 240: “In ta’wil on must carry sensible forms back to imaginative forms and then rise to still higher meanings; to proceed in the opposite direction (to carry imaginative forms to the sensible forms in which they originate) is to destroy the virtualities of the imagination.” Cf. Corbin, “Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal,” Spring 1972: 1-19.
[49] Plotinus, Enneads, tr. A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), vol. IV, pp. 410f (4.8.4 [29]); Proclus, The Elements of Theology, tr. E. R. Dodds (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1963), pp. 36f (Prop. 32).
[50] Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, p. 31. Cf. Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig, The Old Fool and the Corruption of Myth, tr. D. Wilson (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1991), p. 115: “It is my firm conviction that only mythological analytical psychology and mythological humanities have a future.”
[51] Hillman, “On the Necessity of Abnormal Psychology,” p. 94.
[52] Hillman, “On the Necessity of Abnormal Psychology,” p. 94.
[53] Hillman, “On the Necessity of Abnormal Psychology,” p. 95.
[54] Hillman, “On the Necessity of Abnormal Psychology,” p. 96.
[55] Hillman, “On the Necessity of Abnormal Psychology,” p. 96.
[56] It was not only here in 1974 that Hillman made this argument. He had already hinted at this theme in his 1968 Eranos lecture on psychological language (reprinted at Part Two of The Myth of Analysis [New York: Harper, 1972], esp. p. 196), and he continued the point strongly by reprinting his 1974 lecture six years later in a book entitled Facing the Gods (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1980), pp. 1-38.
[57] Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 104.
[58] James Hillman, Dream and the Underworld (New York: Harper, 1979), p. 128 and passim
[59] Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, p. 50.
[60] Hillman’s insistence on the “yellowing” (xanthosis or citrinitas) of the alchemical process as an important symbol of an aspect of therapy—“the fermenting corruptions plaguing therapy”—is not unlike his insistence on the infirmitas of the archetypal image. See: James Hillman, “The Yellowing of the Work,” Alchemical Psychology (Putnam: Spring Publications, 2010), pp. 204-230; and Giegerich, Soul’s Logical Life, pp. 192-197.
[61] James Hillman, Inter Views (New York: Harper, 1983), p. 147.
[62] Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 101.
[63] Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, pp. 102, 110.
[64] Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 149
[65] Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 149.
[66] Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. xi.
[67] Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 149.
[68] C. G. Jung, “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious” (1935), in CW 7, para. 224. Cf. C. G. Jung, “On the Psychology of the Unconscious” (1917), in CW 7, paras. 111, 240, 389, 454, 460, 464.
[69] A part of the problem may be due to the psychodynamic of “reversion” (epistrophē) and likening, which may involve ego identifying with something that it is not (Jung, CW 7, para. 112). On likeness, see also: Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, pp. 99, 101; and David L. Miller, Three Faces of God: Traces of the Trinity in Literature and Life (New Orleans: Spring Journal Books, 2005), chap. 2; but on the other hand, Wolfgang Giegerich, The Soul’s Logical Life, pp. 182-184.
[70] Jung, CW 7, paras. 227, 110. Cf. Jung, CW 9ii, paras. 45, 47.
[71] Most of these works now appear in Volume 7of the CW. For example see paragraph 476 (the earlier work) where the phrase reads “acceptance of godlikeness” and paragraph 260 (the later work) where the phrase reads “acceptance of inflation.”
[72] For a discussion of this issue, see: David L. Miller, “Red Riding Hood and Grandmother Rhea,” Facing the Gods (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1980), pp. 87.
[73]Giegerich, Soul’s Logical Life, p. 165. But Giegerich goes on to note that in the “actual use” of mythology by some archetypal psychologists who follow Hillman there may be an inflationary tendency in their observations of psychological Gottähnlichkeit. This would be opposed to Hillman’s own warning.
[74] James Legge, tr., Confucian Analeccts, 13.3.4-7, cited in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectification_of_names, accessed 7.8.2015.
[75] See Huston Smith, The World’s Religions (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), pp. 174f.
[76] Hillman wrote: “The primary metaphor of psychology must be soul. Psychology (logos of psyche) etymologically means: reason or speech or intelligible account of soul. It is psychology’s job to find logos for psyche, to provide soul with an adequate account of itself.” Hillman here insists also that “soul” is not a substance. (Archetypal Psychology, p. 25)
[77] Wolfgang Giegerich, What is Soul? (New Orleans: Spring Journal Books, 2012), p. 84. Cf. p. 101: “In certain Jungian quarters, the name soul is retained and maybe even profligately used, to be sure, but by means of a systematic, intentional projection, the soul dimension is reductively stuffed into ordinary persona lives of common people, whose ordinary lives are therefore sometimes said to be a reenactment of this or that myth and in this way get glorified and inflated with extraordinary meaning.”
[78] Giegerich, What is Soul? p. 22, cf. p. 41.
[79] See Stanley R. Hopper, “Introduction,” Interpretation: The Poetry of Meaning, eds. S. R. Hopper and D. L. Miller (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1967), pp. ix-xxii.
[80] Jacques Derrida, “Comment ne pas parler: Dénégations,” Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987), pp. 577-578.
[81] Meister Eckhart, tr. R. Blakney (New York: Harper and Row, 1941), pp. 222-223.
[82] William Carlos Williams, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Wheelbarrow, accessed July 13, 2015.
[83] Concerning “adjectival” consciousness, see: David L. Miller, “Gaston Bachelard and Henry Corbin: On Adjectival Consciousness,” in: Rizo-Patron, Casey, and Wirth, eds., Adventures in Phenomenology (New York: Continuum Books, 2015).
[84] Giegerich, What is Soul? p. 48, cf. p. 52: “The soul, I stressed, does not exist at all, neither literally nor imaginally. It is nothing but the product or result of a logical act of negation that opens up the space of logical negativity.” Also, see pp. 59f.
[85] On the notion of “depth,” see: Wolfgang Giegerich, “Is the Soul ‘Deep’?” in The Soul Always Thinks, Collected English Papers, Vol. IV (New Orleans: Spring Journal Books, 2010), pp. 131-164.
[86] Giegerich, Soul’s Logical Life, p. 123.
[87] Giegerich, Soul’s Logical Life, pp. 31, 49.
[88] Giegerich, Soul’s Logical Life, p. 123; Wolfgang Giegerich, “The Rescued Child,” in Soul-Violence, Collected English Papers, Vol. III (New Orleans: Spring Journal Books, 2008), p. 56n9; and Wolfgang Giegerich, “The Present as Dimension of the Soul,” in The Neurosis of Psychology, Collected English Papers, Vol. I , (New Orleans: Spring Journal Books, 2005), pp. 111, 115.
[89] See: Henry Corbin, “A Letter,” in: D. L. Miller, The New Polytheism (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1981), pp. 1-6.
[90] Giegerich refers to the work with personal problems by using the alchemical phrase opus parvum (“little work”) and to the psychological work as opus magnum (“large work”) in order to differentiate “the psychological difference.” See: Giegerich, What is Soul? p. 73; Giegerich, Soul’s Logical Life, pp. 150f; Wolfgang Giegerich, “The Opposition of ‘Individual’ and ‘Collective,” in The Flight into the Unconscious, Collected English Papers, Vol. V (New Orleans: Spring Journal Books, 2013), p. 338.
[91] Giegerich, Soul’s Logical Life, p. 165.
[92] Giegerich, Soul’s Logical Life, p. 165.
[93] James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 150. Giegerich is noticing that imaginal or archetypal psychology “sees through” the literal, but it does not see through its seeing through, thereby literalizing the non-literal. See: Soul’s Logical Life, pp. 106f.
[94] For a further explanation of the “literal” as itself a metaphor rather than as the opposite of metaphor, i.e., as a way of seeing, see: David L. Miller, “On Literalism: The Letter and the Monkey,” Spring 1984: 151-162.
[95] Wolfgang Giegerich, “Psychology as Anti-Philosophy: C. G. Jung,” Spring 77 (2007): 42.
[96] See also: Jung, CW 9ii, paras. 84, 97, 113; and Giegerich, “The Reality of Evil?” p. 243.
[97] Jung, CW 9ii, para. 83 (the quotation is from the second homily in the Hexameron).
[98] Giegerich, “The Reality of Evil?” p. 252.
[99] C. G. Jung, Über Gefühle und den Schatten (Zürich: Winterthurer Gragestunden, 1999), p.60. Cf. C. G. Jung, “Forward to White’s God and the Unconscious” (1953), in CW 11, para. 459, and see: Giegerich, ”The Reality of Evil?” p. 252.
[100] Giegerich, “The Reality of Evil?” pp. 246, 247, 276.
[101] Giegerich, “The Reality of Evil?” p. 246
[102] On the vertical as opposed to horizontal theme, see: Giegerich, “The Reality of Evil?” pp. 247, 260, 261, 266.
[103] Giegerich, “The Reality of Evil?” p. 268-269.
[104] Giegerich, “The Reality of Evil?” pp. 269-270.
[105] William Blake, Auguries of Innocence, http://www.online-literature.com/Blake/612, accessed: 4/6/2015. I am grateful to Barbara Knott for this quotation.
[106] Owen Barfield, History in English Words (Hudson: Lindisfarne Press, 1967); Poetic Diction (Wesleyan: Wesleyan University Press, 1973); Saving the Appearances (Wesleyan: Wesleyan University Press, 1988).
[107] Jung, CW 10, para. 858.
[108] See an account of this by Paul Kugler, The Alchemy of Discourse (Einsiedeln: Daimon Verlag, 2002).
[109] Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 188.
[110] Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, p. 31.
[111] Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, pp. 8-10, and compare pp. 216-217 on “the theme of language that has pursued us all along.”
[112] Hillman, Myth of Analysis, pp. 117-214
[113] Giegerich, What is Soul? pp. 74-76.
[114] Wolfgang Giegerich, “The End of Meaning and the Birth of Man,” in The Soul Always Thinks, Collected English Papers, Vol. IV, p. 218.
[115] Richard Rorty, The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967.)
[116] Richard Rorty, ”Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reification of Language,” Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
[117] Stanley R. Hopper, “Symbolic Reality and the Poet’s Task,” Eranos-Jahrbuch, 34 (1965): 167-218.
[118] David L. Miller, “From Leviathan to Lear: Shades of Play in Language and Literature,” Eranos-Jahrbuch 51 (1982): 83-84.
[119] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. J. Macquarrie (London: SCM Press, 1962), marginal notation 149-151, 154, 158-159, 223, and 359-360.
[120] Stanley R. Hopper and David L. Miller, Interpretation: The Poetry of Meaning (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), p. xvi.
[121] “Philosophic Truth and the Metaphoric System,” in ibid., p. 49.
[122] Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, tr. M. Jolas (New York: Orion Press, 1964), p. xix. Cf. Stanley R. Hopper, “Le cri de Merlin! Or Interpretation and the Metalogical,” in: The Way of Transfiguration, eds. R. Keiser and T. Stoneburner (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), pp. 200.
[123] Friederich Hölderlin, Selected Verse (Baltimore: Penguin, 1961), p. 246.
[124] Cf. Jung, Letters, vol. II, pp. 59-60: “I am quite satisfied with non-hypostasizing Good and Evil. I consider them not as substances but as a merely psychological judgment.”
[125] I am following the Oxford English Dictionary in this narrative (The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971], pp. 909-910. This version of the history is corroborated in: Eric Partridge, Origins (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1959), p. 189.
[126] Wiktionary Index: Proto-Indo-European/u, https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Index:Proto-Indo-European/u, accessed June 22, 2015.
[127] Oxford English Dictionary, p. 909.
[128] “Thesaurus,” http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/evil, accessed December 24, 2014.
[129] Tom Jones, The Fantasticks (New York: Drama Book Shop), p. 56.
[130] C. G. Jung, “The Visions of Zosimos” (1954), in CW 13, para. 120.
[131] C. G. Jung, “The Spirit Mercurius” (1943), in CW 13, para. 242. This same botanical metaphor has been adopted by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus to describe the unending characteristic of psychology and politics (Tr. B. Massumi [London: Continuum, 2004]).
[132] James Hillmn, Insearch: Psychology and Religion (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1967), p. 90.
[133] Revelation 22:16 (Greek ho aster ho lampros ho prōinos = “the bright and morning star”); cf. II Peter (Greek phōsphoros = “light bearer” or “day star.”
[134] Cited in: Jeffrey Burton Russell, Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 246.
[135] Cf. II Corinthians 11:14, where Paul is speaking about false apostles who pretend to be apostles of Christ and servants of righteousness, and he says: “It is no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.”
[136] In this presentation, I am not pretending to survey the history of the mythology of the figure of Lucifer; this has been admirably and fully done by others; rather, what I am trying to do, drawing on fine research of this mythologem, is to look at the psychology of the mythos, that is, what the Lucifer legend expresses symbolically and metaphorically concerning the logic of the psyche, especially as it relates to the question of the roots of evil. The material in this section, unless noted otherwise, is taken from the following sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucifer, accessed March 24, 2015; http://www.redicecreations.com/specialreports/2005/11nov/lucifer.html, accessed March 24, 2015; Alan W. Watts, Myth and Ritual in Christianity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968); Jeffrey Burton Russell, Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); and, John A. Sanford, Evil: The Shadow Side of Reality (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1981).
[137] For example, Revelation 12.4, and the Book of Second (Slavonic) Enoch.
[138] Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
[139] C. G. Jung, “A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity” (1942, 1948) in: CW 11, para. 291. This is an expanded version of Jung’s lecture at Eranos in 1940, “Zur Psychologie der Trinitätsidee,” Eranos 8 (1940-41). See Jung’s comments on Lucifer in the German text of the Eranos lecture on p. 61 and an allusion to the Devil as an angel that descended from heaven like lightning on p. 55.
[140] Sanford, Evil, p. 116.
[141] Jung, Memories, p. 166.
[142] Ibid., p. 329. On this same page, Jung warned: “We must beware of thinking of good and evil as absolute opposites.”
[143] Jung, CW 11, para. 291.
[144] James Hillman, Insearch (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1967), pp. 91f.
[145] Giegerich, “The Reality of Evil?” p. 283.
[146] On the obsolescence of the question “whence evil?” see: Giegerich, “The Reality of Evil?” p. 277. Cf. Wolfgang Giegerich, “Materialistic Psychology,” in Dreaming the Myth Onward,” Collected English Papers, Vol. VI (New Orleans: Spring Journal Books, 2013), p. 118n48: “Good and evil are psychologically categories of the childish mind. Good guys, bad guys, the evil empire, etc. The mature mind takes even the ‘bad guys,’ the IRA, the Hisbollah, terrorists, communists, totalitarian regimes as realities which one may at times even have to accept as partners at eye-level in open-ended negotiations. In such negotiations the issue is one of substances: what do they want and what do we want. Good and evil have become irrelevant.”
[147] Giegerich, “The Reality of Evil?” pp. 284-285, and footnote #28 (italics added). In Jungian psychological therapy shadow integration acknowledges the person has a shadow, but it does not imply that the person is identical to and identified with his or her shadow. Shadow has an archetypal nature and if a person were identified with the shadow it would amount to an inflation, as mentioned earlier with regard to Gottähnlichkeit.
[148] Wolfgang Giegerich, “First Shadow, then Anima,” in Soul-Violence, Collected English Papers, vol. III, p. 104.
[149] Jung, CW 9ii, para. 123.
[150] C. G. Jung, “Mysterium Coniunctionis,” in CW 14, para.616.
[151] Jung, CW 12, para. 6.
[152] Giegerich, “Rescued Child,” p. 73.
[153] Jung, CW 10, para. 516.
[154] Jung, CW 10, para. 370.
[155] Wolfgang Giegerich, “On the Neurosis of Psychology, in The Neurosis of Psychology, pp. 49-51
[156] Ibid., 53. Giegerich is citing Jung, CW 10, para. 354.
[157] David L. Miller, “Images of Happy Ending,” Eranos-Jahrbuch 44 (1975): 61-90.
[158] David L. Miller, “Imaginings No End,” Eranos-Jahrbuch 46 (1977): 451-500.
[159] Cf. David L. Miller, Christs: Meditations on Archetypal Images in Christian Theology (New Orleans: Spring Journal Books, 2005), pp. 23-28.
[160] Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).
[161] Cf. David L. Miller, “Fairy Tale or Myth?” Spring 1976: 157-164; “Märchen oder Mythos?” Gorgo 2 (1979): 52-60; “Myth and Folktale: Two Metamorphoses,” Mythosphere 1/1 (1998): 9-22.
[162] Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), p. 35.
[163] Stevens, Opus Posthumous, p. 34.
[164] See: Jung, CW 11, page 358. Cf. Gesammelte Werke, 11.p. 506. The Greek question—“of povqen to; kakovn (‘whence evil?’)”—is missing from the “Nachwort” to “Answer to Job” in the German works of Jung, and it is also missing from early editions of the “Prefatory Note” to “Answer to Job” in the English Collected Works. It reappears however in the eighth printing of the second edition of Volume 11of the English edition in 1989. In November of 1955, Jung wrote this short piece in English as a letter to Simon Doniger, the editor of Pastoral Psychology, who published it in the January 1956 issue (see Pastoral Psychology, vol. 6, no. 10, pp. 80-81). But Doniger omitted the Greek phrase and its English translation, perhaps inadvertently or perhaps to avoid foreign language text in his popular magazine. The original from Jung is in: Jung, Letters, II.281-282. How the phrase came to reappear in the English Collected Works in the eighth printing of the second edition of volume 11 is unknown.
[165] The phrase is used in a different way by Rudolf Otto in his 1923 book, The Idea of the Holy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958).
[166] This image is taken from a discussion of ugliness and evil by Alan Watts, in: Beyond Theology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964), p. 32: “There is a point at which certain types of ugliness become fascinating, where one feels drawn to going over them again and again, much as the tongue keeps fondling a hole in a tooth.”
[167] Wallace Stevens, “Esthétique du Mal,” Collected Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), p. 313.