Jung, the Faith, and the New World Order

I just finished rereading, after many years, Jung's important work Aion, and it set off a few reflections.

The historian Arnold Toynbee once observed that the formation of a new social-economic order gives rise to a new religious synthesis which provides the ideological grounding of that order. Now that communism is out of the way, the world is rapidly being united into a single global economic system for the first time in known history. This world-wide economy is managed by a global elite whose interests lie, not with any one country, but with the world as a whole. Though a world political order is forming, there is not, as yet, a unifying world-wide religion. But Jung can offer us a few insights.

In his view, Christ is a symbol of the self. The self in empirical psychological language is equivalent to God in religious language. The self is not the ego, but rather, the total complex of unconscious archetypes whose conscious integration brings wholeness. For wholeness to occur, good must be integrated with evil, male balanced with female, the shadow with light. The orthodox picture of Christ is incomplete as a symbol of the self, for Christ is sinless, pure goodness without the complementary evil and darkness.

The birth of Christ ushered in the Christian aeon, the age of Pisces, the Fish. This age is now ending, the age of Aquarius is about to begin. The Christian age began with an intense focus on Christ as pure goodness, but following inexorable psychological law, the pendulum has swung to the complementary extreme. Beginning at the midpoint, the eleventh century, Western civilization began to shift from spiritual to worldly, from God to nature, from the hope of heaven to world domination and the scientific conquest of matter. At the end of the Christian aeon, balancing the intense light of its beginning, the antichrist, the shadow of Christ, appeared, revealed in the horrors of imperialism, police states, and world wars.

The task of the age of Aquarius is to integrate the polarities of the past, the yin and the yang, male and the female, Christ and antichrist. This requires a comprehensive vision and Jung has one. It is an ancient vision and one that comports well with the ideological needs of the new world order. Imagine God as ineffable, transcendent, beyond description; think Plotinus, Meister Eckhart, or Purusha, the Indian concept of pure undifferentiated consciousness; consider certain fashions within the Episcopal Church, such as Jungian spirituality, Elizabeth Johnson's utterly transcendent She Who Is, or the mystical God beyond the objective Word described in Tilden Edward's Living in the Presence. This ineffable God cannot be described by any narrow set of metaphors, but all metaphors, female and male, spirit and matter, good and evil, are necessary to describe the reality that includes yet transcends them all. This religious vision unites all religions, for each of them is but one of the many manifestations of the All and Nothing, and all are roads to the same ineffable end.

This vision has possibilities. It fits well with the current pluralistic climate and transcends any narrow prejudice. It's a perfect ideology for a world government, giving every race, creed, religion, and political stripe their appropriate due, while providing a sense of unity and mutual appreciation that's good for business.

Yahweh did not have a consort. The defeat of Arius denied any sublime depth in God that transcends the Word. The advent of Jesus did not create his shadow, an elder brother named Satanael. There is no age of Aquarius, but one long wait until Christ returns. From a Jungian view, Christianity is imbalanced, incomplete, almost obsessive, and from the beginning its partisans went to their death rather than tip their hats to the genius of the empire.

Let me recommend Richard J. Barnet and John Cavanagh, Global Dreams, Imperial Corporations and the New World Order, and C. G. Jung's Aion. (Plenteous Harvest, July, 1995.)

Comments

After this essay was published, a reader happened to think I was approving of Jung's approach to reality. I am not. I do not believe it to be Christian. It is, however, exactly the sort of spiritual vision that will go well with the new world order.

I will end this brief essay with a quotation from George Lindbeck's The Nature of Doctrine. In this book he discusses a form of belief called "experiential-expressivism." This is the idea that religious language expresses religious experience. This approach usually holds that different religions are different expressions of the same transcendent reality. In other words, we are all worshipping the same God, but taking different paths to the top of the mountain. Lindbeck surmises that in a world filled with threats, the religious notion that we are all one would appear to be the perspective that best promotes religious tolerance and mutual understanding. As a result, this vision may well win out, at least in the short run. Here is Lindbeck.

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Jung, the Faith, and the New World Order

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