The Womb of God

 

The angel said to him, ‘Zechariah, do not be afraid, your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth is to bear you a son and you must name him John. He will be your joy and delight and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord; he must drink no wine, no strong drink. Even from his mother’s womb he will be filled with the Holy Spirit, and he will bring back many of the sons of Israel to the Lord their God. With the spirit and power of Elijah, he will go before him to turn the hearts of fathers towards their children and the disobedient back to the wisdom that the virtuous have, preparing for the Lord a people fit for him.’...

 When his time of service came to an end he returned home. Some time later his wife Elizabeth conceived, and for five months she kept to herself. ‘The Lord has done this for me’ she said ‘now that it has pleased him to take away the humiliation I suffered among men.’ Luke 1:5-25

Today's readings in our Christmas preparation take us to the womb of God, or as St Teresa of Avila calls it, las entrañas – the entrails or bowels, or, if you prefer, the root chakras. We are taken to the bowels or entrails of our being where God is born. Living in our modern 'world of the head' we forget our connection with the earth, the womb and the mother. Both readings chosen by the Church today (the second of which I give above) emphasise this connection with the earth, fecundity and birthing, as did Leonardo da Vinci in the 'Madonna of the Rocks' above - the Madonna is as old as the earth, she is the earth. The motto of my university, St Mary's in Twickenham, is taken from the ancient prayer to Mary as 'Star of the Sea' (Stella Maris): Monstra te esse Matrem - 'show thyself to be a mother' - which amuses generations of our rugby-playing undergraduates. But this is exactly the theme of today's readings and meditations. As Meister Eckhart says, at every moment, every hour, every minute, God is born in the womb of our being. And, as he goes on to say, 'only the virgin can give birth to Our Lord Jesus Christ' - the virgin being 'the one without pictures'. So, in these dark nights before the birth of God in the soul we reflect on our ability to be mothers of God, to allow the mysterious birth in the root of our souls that will bring salvation to the world.

I finish with Teresa's descriptions of the 'birth of God in the soul' - first as a young woman in 'The Book of LIfe' and later as an old 'crone' (her words) in 'The Interior Castle'. As both a young woman and a crone Teresa experiences the birth of God in the soul as a powerful force penetrating her to her entrails (the root chakra being of course so close to the sexual/erotic chakra - thus leading to so much silly interpretation by amateur Freudians), from this will come her joy and desire to reform the Carmelite order and 'the world in flames'. With joy let us run to meet the Christ child waiting to be born in our womb:

(From 'Teresa of Avila: Doctor of the Soul')

 

'We have returned to the ecstastic libidinal scene in Chapter 29 of The Life where Teresa encountered the cherub with the wounding spear:

 

Sometimes (when I was at this place) the Lord wanted me to see this vision: I saw an angel close to me on my left side in corporal form, something I only see occasionally. Although angels are represented to me many times I don’t see them, at least not in the sense of ‘vision’ of which I spoke at first. It pleased the Lord that I should see this vision in the following manner: he was not large but small, very beautiful, the face so enflamed that he appeared to be one of the very high angels that appear to be totally aflame (I believe they are called Cherubim although they don’t tell me their names, but I see clearly that there is a great difference between certain types of angels and others, and between these and others still, of a kind that I could not possibly explain). I saw in his hands a long golden spear (un dardo de oro largo), and at the end of the iron tip there appeared a little flame, this he seemed to put into my heart several times so that it reached my entrails (y que me llegava a las entrañas).[1] As he removed it, they seemed to be drawn with it so that I was left totally on fire with a great love of God. The pain I felt was so great that I uttered several moans, and so excessive was the sweetness (suavidad) caused by this pain that one would never want to lose it, nor would the soul be content with anything less than God. It is not a bodily pain, but spiritual, although the body has a share in it – considerably so. It is such a sweet love-exchange (un requiebro) which passes between the soul and God that I beg Him out of His goodness to give this gusto to anyone who thinks I am lying. (V: 29.13)

 

This striking and justly celebrated passage is now recalled in the Sixth Mansion:

 

          So powerful is the effect of this on the soul that it dissolves with desire      and doesn’t know what to ask for, for clearly it seems that it is with its      God. You will ask me: Well, if it knows this, what does it desire or what      pains it? What greater good does it want? I don’t know. I do know that     it seems that this pain reaches to the soul’s entrails (entrañas)[2] and           that when He who wounds it draws out the arrow, it indeed seems, in      accord with the deep love the soul feels, that God is drawing these         very entrails after Him. I was thinking now that it is as though, from this fire enkindled in the brazier that is my God, a spark (un centella)       jumped out and so touched the soul that the flaming fire was felt by it        and since it was not enough to set the soul on fire, and it is so      delightful, the soul is left with that pain; and this produced by it just      touching the soul. (M: 6.2.4)

 

When the two passages are juxtaposed like this it is possible to interpret the passage according to Teresa’s mystical theology. Bernini’s statue at Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome is, of course, a magnificent artefact of Baroque statuary, however the effect has been to take the passage from Chapter Twenty Nine of The Life entirely out of its mystical context so distorting its significance within her text. When the text is placed alongside that from the Sixth Mansion what is remarkable is the consistency of the language of the two passages written over ten years apart. The only word that does not reappear in The Castle is gustar. Following her development and clarification of the role of the gustos this is unsurprising and to be expected that it would be dropped in the later passage. The flame of the cherubim remains (so essential for the Victorine tradition, see, for example the ‘dart of flaming love’ mentioned in The Cloud of Unknowing). However Teresa introduces the all important word centella in the later passage. A clear reference to the synderesis of the medieval mystical tradition (literally; ‘the little spark’): the place, according to Gerson, Bonaventure and Hugh of Balma, where the divine touches the human in the soul. This little spark gently ‘touches’ the heart and causes the ecstasy of fire. It does not ‘penetrate’ as some translators suggest and although sexual connotations are present in the passage this sexualised interpretation cannot detract from the fact that these passages are referring to the workings of the heart rather than anything specifically sexual. The other phrase that remains constant in the two passages is las entrañas – entrails or bowels. Teresa, as always, is circumspect in her descriptions of the nature of the ‘centre of the soul’ and this is another instant where she carefully uses language to indicate a source without clearly delineating the nature of the source. A theme we shall return to in Chapter Eight below. In their balance of Dionysian unknowing with libinal energisation these passages are rightly celebrated as masterpieces of Teresa’s mystical theology.'

 Happy Advent!

 

Peter

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[1] Allison Peers uses the more provocative ‘penetrate’ here, whilst Kavanaugh uses ‘reach’.

[2] Matthew  and Allison Peers give ‘bowels’ for entrañas which seems very appropriate.

 

The Beginning of Christmas - the O Antiphons and the Genealogy of Christ

17^th December: O Wisdom! You Hold All Things Together in a Strong Yet Gentle Fashion...

 

Today the Catholic Church begins the ‘novena’ of Christmas with the great reading from the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel:

 

Matthew 1:1-17

The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

2Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers,

3and Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar, and Perez the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Ram,

4and Ram the father of Ammin'adab, and Ammin'adab the father of Nahshon, and Nahshon the father of Salmon,

5and Salmon the father of Bo'az by Rahab, and Bo'az the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse,

6and Jesse the father of David the king. And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uri'ah, 7and Solomon the father of Rehobo'am, and Rehobo'am the father of Abi'jah, and Abi'jah the father of Asa,

 8and Asa the father of Jehosh'aphat, and Jehosh'aphat the father of Joram, and Joram the father of Uzzi'ah,

9and Uzzi'ah the father of Jotham, and Jotham the father of Ahaz, and Ahaz the father of Hezeki'ah, 10and Hezeki'ah the father of Manas'seh, and Manas'seh the father of Amos, and Amos the father of Josi'ah,

11and Josi'ah the father of Jechoniah and his brothers, at the time of the deportation to Babylon. 12And after the deportation to Babylon: Jechoni'ah was the father of She-al'ti-el, and She-al'ti-el the father of Zerub'babel,

13and Zerub'babel the father of Abi'ud, and Abi'ud the father of Eli'akim, and Eli'akim the father of Azor,

14and Azor the father of Zadok, and Zadok the father of Achim, and Achim the father of Eli'ud, 15and Eli'ud the father of Elea'zar, and Elea'zar the father of Matthan, and Matthan the father of Jacob,

16and Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ.

17So all the generations from Abraham to David were fourteen generations, and from David to the deportation to Babylon fourteen generations, and from the deportation to Babylon to the Christ fourteen generations.

  

I am reminded of that old TV programme ‘Roots’, where the hero returns to his family village in Africa and gets the elders to recite the names of the ancestors – suddenly he is filled with joy as he recognises the name of his own forebear. So again, we listen to these names, some strange, many unknown, some familiar (or notorious) and we get a sense of the long lineage to which we are heirs... and what a lineage!

St Matthews lays out before us the names of our, and Christ’s,

spiritual ancestors; carefully arranged in groups of seven (the holy number):

from Abraham to the birth of King David, from David to the Babylonian exile

and from the return from Babylon to the culmination of the lineage in the birth

of Christ to Mary.

Yet, if we look at the text carefully it is a most surprising list of people.

For, as well as the great patriarchs and prophets we find some rather unusual

figures:

Tamar, whose story occurs in Genesis 38, goes to some rather

extreme lengths to conceive by Judah, including disguising herself as a

prostitute.

The Book of Joshua tells us that Rahab, the mother of Boaz, actually

was a prostitute who betrayed her own people so that the Israelites may seize

the city of Jericho.

Ruth, as described in the book named after her, is not just an outsider

– a Moabite – but also what we would call today an asylum seeker and

migrant worker – needing to pick ‘the alien corn’ in an alien land.

The fourth woman of the genealogy – Bathsheba – is so distressing to

St Matthew that he cannot even bring himself to give us her name – simply

referring to her as ‘Uriah’s wife’. Presumably because of her role in betraying

her husband and marrying another – King David.

Thus, Matthew presents us with our, and Christ’s, spiritual ancestors,

and they are a somewhat motley crew. Yes, there are great and wise saints

amongst them, but there are also thieves, vagabonds and traitors.

Our memory, both personal and spiritual, contains all this.

 

This evening is also the beginning of the ‘Great O Antiphons’ that will be sung at Evening Prayer in the Catholic tradition from now until Christmas Eve. They are sung at the moment in the prayer when the great song of Mary, the Magnificat, occurs and seems to link the mystery of the Incarnation with that of Mary as the vessel of salvation. Today’s, in Latin, reads:

O Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodiisti,

attingens a fine usque ad finem,

fortiter suaviter disponens que omnia:

veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.

 

And translates as:

 

O Wisdom, you come forth from the mouth of the Most High.

You fill the universe and hold all things together in a strong yet gentle fashion.

O come to teach us the way of truth.

 

The medieval English Carmelite, John Baconthorpe referred to Mary as the pure cloud mentioned in the Book of Kings, condensed from the saline of humanity, out of whom the refreshing waters of Christ fall and bring life to the world.

For, as we have often heard, ‘God makes straight with crooked lines’.

And in the person of Mary, the salvation of the world comes from the ‘crooked’lineage of which she is heir. Jesus, St Matthew tells us, is born from a tainted and impure line. But this fact means that God has accepted us, once and for all, in our light and darkness. After the birth of Christ there is no going back.

God has become one of us. A fact worth of special celebration today.

For when we look at the life of Mary, as in the life of Christ, we see the

holding together of these two poles of human existence: the joy and ecstasy

of Mary of the Magnificat and also the terrible suffering of Gethsemane and

the Cross traditionally represented by Our Lady of Sorrows.

 

Over the next six days we shall see in the antiphons an exposition of this theme as God is made incarnate in the mess and struggle of all our lives...

 

Happy Advent!

 

 

Peter

John of the Cross - Spiritual Rules for the Soul

Happy Fiesta of Saint John of the Cross!

Every year as the mayhem of Christmas approaches I find the quiet feast day of this gentle man a little oasis of calm and peace. To celebrate his feast day (and for Catholics it is 'Rejoicing/Gaudate Sunday' too), I share with you John's rules for the soul from my 'St John of the Cross: Outstanding Christian Thinker'. John, the eternal introvert and 'quiet man' continues his simple ministry away from the world of glamour and pride. Often people will take me aside and have a quiet word about his teaching. So, on this quiet night so near to the darkest day of the year let us remember in our prayers and thoughts those who are travelling through the dark night - whether of intellect, heart or spirit - and ask that they will soon see 'the night, more lovely than the dawn'.

Viva Juan de La Cruz!

John’s Spiritual Rules for the Soul

 

(From ‘ St John of the Cross – Outstanding Christian Thinker’, Continuum, 2010)

John adheres to three spiritual rules regarding God’s action in the soul:

 

1. God acts on the soul in an orderly fashion.

2. God acts gently on the soul.

3. God instructs us according to the state of our soul.

 

With regard to spiritual direction John is constantly advising the director to keep these three rules before their eyes at all times, knowing that God can only act and be received by someone in so far as they have the capacity to receive that action. However, throughout he continues to urge his charges to take on the steep ascent of Mount Carmel to reach the ultimate goal of nada-todo at the peak of the mountain:

 

Wipe away, O spiritual soul, the dust, hairs, and stains, and cleanse your eye; and the bright sun will illumine you, and you will see clearly. Pacify the soul, draw it out, and liberate it from the yoke and slavery of its own weak operation, which is the captivity of Egypt (amounting to not much more than gathering straws for baking bricks). And, O spiritual master, guide it to the land of promise flowing with milk and honey. Behold that for this holy liberty and idleness of the children of God, God calls the soul to the desert, where it journeys festively clothed and adorned with gold and silver jewels, since it has now left Egypt and been despoiled of its riches. (LF 3.38)

 

Thus, as always with John, we have a paradox between the shining splendid goal that is placed before us and to which we should aspire alongside the sympathetic warmth of his acceptance of our fragile nature and our incompleteness at this time before the Lord. John does not take his eye off the ultimate prizes but always tempers his message with the warmth of a seasoned pastoral counsellor.

The ultimate aim of the director, then, for John is to lead the soul to greater ‘solitude, tranquility, and freedom of spirit’ (LF 3.46). This latter quality, ‘freedom of spirit’ is very much at the heart of John’s whole theology and teaching on the life of the spirit:

 

When the soul frees itself of all things and attains to emptiness and dispossession concerning them, which is equivalent to what it can do of itself, it is impossible that God fail to do his part by communicating himself to it, at least silently and secretly. It is more impossible than it would be for the sun not to shine on clear and uncluttered ground. As the sun rises in the morning and shines on your house so that its light may enter if you open the shutters, so God, who in watching over Israel does not doze or, still less, sleep, will enter the soul that is empty, and fill it with divine goods. (LF 3.46)

 

 

 

James Hillman and 'the Curse of Christianity'

... and in the second extract, something a bit more controversial from James Hillman! You'll have to wait to see my full response to his critique...

best

Peter

 

 

Hillman and the 'Curse of Christianity'

Hillman sees himself as picking up where Jung left off. However, rather than Jung’s desire to transform Christianity, Hillman sees his aim as needing to transcend Christianity, ‘to escape the 2,000 year-old curse’. In his last dialogue with Sonu Shamdasani, he pours particular scorn on those Christianised Jungians who had hoped (like Jung we presume) to have transformed Christianity by means of analytical psychology:

Jung grasped the horror, but I don’t think the Christian followers have, and there are a hell of a lot of them. They just have the same pattern of redemption, you know, there’s light at the end of the tunnel, forever – you really are redeemed... You’re already saved. Christ has already saved you. There’s a place waiting for you in heaven. This is unacceptable to a Jewish mind. There’s too much trouble, too much horror. You can’t get away with it so easily. I’m not saying that the Christians themselves get away with it so easily, or that Jung did... I am saying that the pseudo-Christianity of Jungianism does, and that’s part of my fury. (LD:217)

He goes further in Revisioning Psychology by blaming Christianity for the ‘return of the repressed’ in all the horrors that have beset Western civilisation since the nineteenth century ‘death of God’. By creating a certain social psyche, suggests Hillman, Christianity prepared a culture within which the shadow could triumph once it faced its demise. ‘The commander’s tent flaps in the wind’ he poetically suggests, ‘while the two-horned bull Dionysus, our Devil, pagan, perverse, psychopathic, all-powerful, once he comes through the mountain wall’ (RVP:224). ‘The greatest bulwark of Northern consciousness was its now dead God who commanded battalions of light – moral philosophers, preachers, psychologists’ (RVP:224),, but now with the ‘death of God’, the ‘depths rise without our systems of protection.’ Hillman struggles again with the dilemma that faced Freud, Rank and ultimately all psychoanalysis: it is all very well to seek the return of the repressed – but once the irrational polyvalent Gods of the unconscious have arisen, what the hell do you do with them? Beginning with the repression of fin de siècle Vienna, Freud began the slow work of stripping away the layers of repression and denial beginning with the sexual. His followers, as we have seen, continued the work so that by the time Hillman wrote his work in the late 1960s and early 1970s the return of the repressed was in full swing with the sexual and social revolution of those decades. However, the removal of the ego’s ‘moral restraint’ left an inevitable void. Old man Freud recognised, as we saw in the previous chapter, the necessary role of psychology as a moral discipline. Hillman’s unanchoring of this in his polymathic ‘return to Greece’ also ushers in some very dark sides of the human psyche. I write this chapter with daily television reports of the gory battles in the Middle East –images of young men from civilised Europe holding up severed heads, engaged in mass acts of rape and torture and countless bloody atrocities suggest that Freud was right and perhaps Hillman was wrong. Perhaps the human psyche can only stand so much return of the repressed before moral repugnance kicks in. At least one hopes. In his commentary on Jung’s Red Book, Hillman at the end of his life said that the old options of Christianity were ‘worn out’. One cannot anymore ‘flee to the East’ (RVP :224) as the hippies and transcendental meditators of the 1960s had done. Rather for him the answer lies in the ‘fostering of images’, in the polymorphously perverse psyche where ‘we can place the turmoil of our fantasies within the larger depository of myths’ (RVP:225) which is for him the task of ‘recollecting the Gods in all psychological activity’ (RVP:226). Whilst remembering that this ‘return to the Gods’ is no longer a theological option:

The difference between psychology and religion boils down to the same as between psychology and science: literalism. Theology takes Gods literally and we do not... In archetypal psychology Gods are imagined... They are formulated ambiguously, as metaphors for modes of experience and as numinous borderline persons. (RVP:169)

This is his ‘initiation into the Dionysian consciousness’ (MA:274) without which ‘we have only that Dionysus that reaches us through the shadow, through Wotan and the Devil of Christianity’ twisted and perverted by ‘our misogynist and Apollonic consciousness’ (MA:274).  Psyche predates Christianity, says Hillman, so the return to the soul is a return to a source that predates Christianity: ‘the merging of psychology and religion is less the confluence of two different streams than the result of their single source – the soul’ (RVP:167). In conclusion, then, Hillman’s soul is, as we have seen, non-scientific and consequently arational living in the realm of imagination and the symbolic.

          I have tried here to give a systematic account of Hillman’s work, but he is very insistent that soul-work must, by its nature, essentially be unsystematic. I think if Hillman were ever to read this chapter on whichever astral plane he now resides, he would take a sharp intake of breath and accuse me of over-rationalisation in my approach to the psyche ( a long standing criticism!). Consequently, for him the ‘patron saint’ of soul-work is the medieval Knight Errant, who in his hermetic wanderings to and fro represents the gentle dance (Dionysius’s ‘circular movement’) which is the soul-work:

The Knight Errant follows fantasy, riding the vehicle of his emotions; he loiters and pursues the anima with his eros, regarding desire as also holy; and he listens to the deviant discourse of the imagination. (RVP:161)

For ‘The Knight Errant of psychology’ is ‘partly picaresque rogue, of the underworld, a shadow hero of unknown paternity, who sees through the hierarchies from below. He is a mediator betwixt and between, homeless, of no fixed abode. Or his home, like that of Eros, is in the realm of the daemons, of the metaxy (the middle region), in between, back and forth’ (RVP:161). Perhaps with this picture of the Knight Errant we have the final concluding picture of Hillman, the wandering, infuriating, inspiring, trangressive follower of Hermes, possibly the ultimate incarnation of the lost postmodern soul:

Because of Hermes, psychologizing is always moving between opposing views such as the Apollonic and the Dionysian attitudes, standing at either end of its spectrum, - partly Apollonic Knight, partly Dionysian Rogue, both and neither. (RVP:163)

Therefore for Hillman, psychology must always annoy all the other disciplines neither being fully Apollonian nor fully Dionysian ‘it is a counter-education, a negative learning, moving all standpoints off balance toward their borders’ (RVP:163) – it is beyond morality and immoral. We will search in vain for Freud’s moral ego in Hillman’s wandering Knight Errant Soul:

The notion of human being as centred in the moral person of free will is also a mythical fantasy, an archetypal perspective given by a single Hero or a single God; our freedom to chose, our moral cente and decisiveness, our free will... Here I am attempting to de-moralize the psyche from the moralistic fallacy which reads psychic events in terms of good and bad, right and wrong. (RVP:178)

 

Otto Rank and the Return of the Soul to Psychology

Dear All,

I am now coming to the end of the first draft of 'The Pursuit of the Soul' which I hope to have ready by Christmas. It is also a year since I started this blog, so I thank you all for taking the time to read and comment on it. I hope you enjoy these two extracts from 'Pursuit'. First from Otto Rank:

Peter

The Return of the Soul to Psychology

I have argued in this chapter that Rank’s work essentially reflects the ambiguity that lies in Freud’s writings (and indeed in ‘Freudianism’). On the one hand Freud throws open the ‘royal road to the unconscious’ with all its darkness and ambiguity. But, on the other hand, Freud, the 19^th Century ethical master, decries the control of the ‘It’ over the conscious rational ‘I’ and sees the need to continue the ‘cultural work’ of the reclamation of the Zyder Zee. As Rank put it in ‘Psychology and the Soul’:

Recognizing the unconscious, Freud acknowledged the soul; but by explaining the soul materialistically, he denied it... The soul is neither brain function, as modern neurology believes, nor sublimated biological drives, as Freud conceived it. (PS:3)

 It is on precisely this watershed between ethical confrontation and unconscious descent that Rank’s work hovers and caused him so much trouble in his lifetime. Knowing that there is a dark ‘realm’ in the unconscious is one thing, wanting to plunge into it and explore it is another.[1] If, as Rank predicted, this is a problem in early Freudianism, how much more of a problem will it become to us the sons and daughters (and grandsons and granddaughters of Freud). How far might we simply ‘blame the unconscious’ and how far must we take ethical decisions to counter the effects of the darker realms? In many respects it is the old debate between free-will and determinism given a new postmodern, 21^st Century twist.

Thus the ‘soulish’ for Rank emphasises the art of interpretation through relationship: ‘Psychology is no science in the sense of physics or biology, but a science of relationship (Beziehungswissenschaft). It is not an interpretation of facts (like physics or biology) but an interpretation of attitudes to oneself (sonder Interpretation von Einstellungen des eignen Selbst (check eignen) which in so-called objective psychology we project onto others. Psychology is self-interpretation through others, just as physics is self-interpretation through nature.’ (SP:193).

As psychology expands, suggests Rank (SP:7) so does the realm of the soulish diminish. For ‘the true object of psychology was originally something supernatural and beyond the human (Aussermenschliche): die Seele. (SP:7, my translation) and ‘the person became the object of psychological interest and investigation only when the original soul-concept faded from consciousness’. No great friend of religion, Rank concludes that ‘religion was and is as much psychology as our modern scientific psychology is, unavoidably, soul study (eine Seelenlehre).’ Thus psychology is for Rank a gradual evolution or loss of soul that was first and foremost expressed in religious terms: ‘psychology gradually evolved by denying and rejecting its first object, the soul’ (SP:8). Psychology, suggests Rank, will inevitably ignore the soul and all its ‘contradictions and irrationalities’ (PS:9) for ‘man, being a theological rather than a biological being, never lives on a purely natural plane’ (BP:196)

In summary, Rank seemed perturbed by the outlines in the mud of the unconscious left by the receding tide of religious consciousness. This is what he termed ‘the soul’/’the soulish’. Even if he had been a great advocate of religion (which he wasn’t), there seems no great desire in Rank’s writing to restore religion to its former importance in the intellectual and psychological life of his contemporaries.[2] Rather, it was as though we could follow the demands of the soul by descending further into the unconscious. Unlike Jung in the letter quoted earlier, Rank was always alert to psychology’s pretensions towards overcoming religion and realized ultimately this goal would be unachievable:

 

Psychology, which gradually displaced religious and moral ideologies, cannot fully replace them, for it is a negative, destructive ideology – an ideology of resentment in Nietzsche’s sense. (PS: 126)

 

Not surprisingly, considering what he had experienced between the psychological schools and the Nazis, Rank concluded in 1939, on the eve of World War Two, that human behaviour was essentially irrational despite all the best attempts of psychology to provide it with a rational basis (BP:11). Human nature ‘lies beyond any psychology, individual or collective’ (BP:12). Such irrationality, by definition, cannot be caught in the rational net of language thus leading Rank to return to the need for the creative artist to express that which is beyond the rational. Six months after writing this final credo in Beyond Psychology, Rank was dead:

Man is born beyond psychology and he dies beyond it but he can live beyond it only though vital experience of his own – in religious terms, through revelation, conversion or re-birth.(BP:16)

For Rank, the whole edifice of Freudian psychology was based on a flight from the ‘life-force’ as through rationalisation the Zyder Zee of the unconscious was corralled. This itself was based on interpretation, even though Freud claimed to be dealing with facts. Such a misunderstanding leads to the building up of the whole edifice of psychology which he effectively at the end characterised as the ‘flight from the soul’.[3] Thus, the ‘return of the soul’ was not just an intellectual exercise for Rank but one that lay at the necessary heart of the healing of Western culture. Freud’s real achievement for Rank was the establishment of the analytical situation itself ‘in which we can find epitomized the paradoxical workings of all the irrational forces in human nature’ (BP: 278), which, in itself, is sufficient, providing we do not get lured into the rationalised, pseudo-scientific theories that Freud projects onto his material.[4] Freud’s mistake, for Rank, was to not realise that the patient was already conscious of the material but had not chosen to verbalise it.[5] Therefore consciousness and unconsciousness are not static states of mind (with a supposed causality) but rather a function of the constantly changing and fluid dynamic psyche (‘In seelische life, there is no one stable viewpoint, as such’ WT:30). Rank’s view of analysis is one that must explore the irrational arena of the psyche without the moralising rationality of Freud’s ethical construct. This will be for Rank the therapy of the future: a ‘soulish’ therapy that will not just admit ‘our basic primitivity’ (BP:289) but allow dynamic expression of it in the practice of analysis. This dynamic balancing of the rational and irrational elements in the human psyche will be the ultimate goal of ‘soul-therapy’. Such a therapy will mean we shall ultimately be able to live in the present with all its contradictory and confusing emotional pulls:

What the individual does not know and will not know, is never the past but the present, the momentary emotional matrix which is perceived by the will as weakness and is denied accordingly...

(My therapy) allows the patient to understand himself in an immediate situation which, as I strive for it in therapeutic process, permits living and understanding to become one. As far as I know, this is the first time in the history of mankind, where we find a striving for an immediate understanding of experience, consciously, in the very act of experiencing. (WT:26/27)

With this concentration on the present, the dynamic active nature of the patient and the development of will held together in the development of creativity, we have the essence of Rank’s approach to therapy (see MP:268).

          Although non-theological in nature, Rank’s ‘return of the soul’ suggested an alternative future for nascent twentieth century psychology.

 

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[1] ‘Deep down, we don’t want to observe ourselves and increase self-knowledge. First of all, the search for self-knowledge is not an original part of our nature; second, it is painful;and finally, it doesn’t always help but often is disturbing’ (PS:5). Perhaps, as he suggests in his last work ‘Beyond Psychology’, the rational desire to control the Unconscious (to reclaim the Zyder Zee) is a ‘fear of the life-force itself’ (BP:277)

[2] ‘For the Church and liberalism are incompatible, and the Hierarchy of the Catholic Church, with the doctrine of the Infallibility of the Pope (re-stated in 1870), is more akin to the Hierarchy of Dictatorship.’ (BP:194)

[3] ‘For (Freud’s) psychology is born of the spirit of inhibited and inhibiting negation of life and as such does not lead to life’ (BP:278)

[4] And as such Rank here prefigures the work of late 20^th Century practitioners such as R.D.Laing who argued that the labelling of ‘neurotic’ or ‘psychotic’ was as much social (and perhaps arbitrary) as social norms demanded: ‘There really is no psychology of the neurotic as opposed to normal psychology, but only a psychology of difference, that is to say, the neurotic’s psychology is only pathological from the rational point of view prevalent in a given civilization’ (BP:280).

[5] ‘It is astonishing how much the patient knows and how relatively little is unconscious if one does not give this convenient excuse for refusing responsibility’ (WT:24). ‘The verbalizing itself, not the explanation or interpretation, is the specifically therapeutic agent in the sphere of consciousness’ (WT:23)

Book Review: John Philip Newell 'The Rebirthing of God: Christianity's Struggle for New Beginnings'

Book Review – Peter Tyler

 

The Rebirthing of God: Christianity’s Struggle for New Beginnings

Author: John Philip Newell

Date: 2014

Price:£16.99

Publisher: Skylight Paths Publishing

ISBN: 978-1-59473-542-4

pp 133 hbk

 

The imagery of birthing pervades John Philip Newell’s new book – not only the joy but the travails, and frankly, the messiness of it all. It is Philip Newell’s conceit that we presently lie as a church and a spiritual community in a time of birth – with all its attendant excitements, dangers and mess. This, of course, will strike a deep chord with some readers and put off others. I gave a chapter of the book to one of my classes to discuss and a lively debate ensued – not least on the striking image Newell uses at the beginning of the book from Jung’s memoirs (I won’t spoil this for you – sufficient to say it will stay in your mind for some time to come!). As always though with Newell he takes a serious topic – the crisis in contemporary Christianity – and addresses it both with seriousness and humour in a very approachable fashion. There is an awful lot of erudite research and theology behind this book but the author wears it lightly. Faced with this crisis Newell suggests we have three alternatives: the first is denial, let’s pretend nothing is happening and carry on ‘business as usual’. The second is to shore up the old foundations of ‘fortress Christianity’ against the dark forces that threaten it. The third, and the one Newell preferences, is to embrace the challenge, accept that the Holy Spirit is sweeping through dusty and moribund institutions and look forward to what he calls ‘the rebirthing’ of Christianity. In the pages that follow we have Newell’s map of discovering this rebirthing through a series of reflections on the earth, compassion, light, journey, spiritual practice, non-violence, the unconscious and love. As well as being an accomplished academic Newell is a great story-teller in the Celtic tradition (he was Warden of the Iona Community in Scotland for many years). Thus as we wander (and wonder) through the eight themes we also wander with Philip around his beloved Iona, each stage of the book reflecting for him a stage in his journey around the island itself. As with all the best Celtic spirituality, it is a narrative rooted in a specific time and place. Yet this is no parochial spirituality, through the book we journey with Philip to ‘his other home’ at the Ghost Ranch Community in New Mexico, we share his love of art and poetry, his exposition of the Gospel of John, his knowledge of the early Celtic writers such as John Scot Eriugena and throughout it all his own humour and love for his family and friends. Many of these themes have been explored in his earlier books but this one reads like a distillation of so many themes from these earlier books – a ‘summa’, if you like, of his thought. At the beginning of the book Newell states that if we begin to provide the right spiritual food in our churches, homes and parishes then many who have left the Christian family will return. From his base in family, home and the Celtic seas Philip is doing exactly that in this book – a book that provides necessary spiritual nourishment not just for Christians but for all humanity. It is I think a book that will inspire great love and freedom to those ‘in search of a way’. A message of love from Iona to the world.

 

 

 

 

 

Peter Tyler

November 2014

Book Review: Gerard W. Hughes 'Cry of Wonder: Our Own Real Identity'

Book Review – Peter Tyler

 

 

 

 

Cry of Wonder: Our Own Real Identity

Author: Gerard W. Hughes

Date: 2014

Price:£12.99

Publisher: Bloomsbury

ISBN: 978-1-4729-1040-0

pp 313  pbk

 

I was going to begin this review with the words: 'It was with great sadness that we heard earlier this month of the death of Fr Gerry W. Hughes SJ...' However, having reflected on Gerry, his life and teachings, and gone back to Cry of Wonder, published just before his death, I find myself rejoicing rather that we have had the privilege of sharing the last nine decades with such a great soul. Many will know him from his outstanding books - God of Surprises, for example, has probably done more than any other single book in the last half century to popularise the Ignatian methods in the English speaking world and will surely stay in print for many more years to come.

Much in Cry of Wonder will be familiar to Gerry’s loyal and extensive readership: accessible sections on Ignatian spirituality, a sparkling wit and at times somewhat mordant humour, and an open style. On a historical front the book traces well the transition in style of delivery of the Spiritual Exercises from preached retreat to individually guided retreat in the second half of the twentieth century. Along with such deceased luminaries as Bishop Graham Chadwick, Sr Pia Buxton IBVM and Fr Michael Ivens SJ, Gerry was one of the chief protagonists for introducing this change into the British Isles and all those who have benefitted from the Exercises over the past several decades have a lot to thank him for. What will be new to many readers will be the autobiographical content of Cry of Wonder. This largely fills the first third of the book and gives us fascinating insights into the times and influences that shaped the man but also of the Roman Catholic Church in the heady days of reform and transition in the mid-twentieth century. For those now too young to remember those times, much that happened will be explained in these pages. As well as his meditations on the Ignatian Exercises and his autobiographical sketches, the third part of the book comprises an extended discussion on Gerry’s beloved motives of Peace and Violence.  It is appropriate that Gerry should die on the feast day of two remarkable saints: St Martin de Porres of Peru and St Rupert Mayer of Bavaria. Both embodied causes close to Gerry's heart: Martin de Porres, the son of a freed slave and the illegitimate son of a Spanish nobleman, lived a life of simplicity and service that has made him a model of simple and devoted service and an ikon for all oppressed peoples. Rupert Mayer, on the other hand, another Jesuit like Gerry, saw the evils of Nazism at first hand and denounced its atrocities from his pulpit at St Michael's church in Munich. For his troubles he was sent first to Sachsenhausen concentration camp and then interned for the rest of the war. After his release at the end of the war, he died of a stroke on 1st November 1945 whilst celebrating mass at his beloved church in Munich. Gerry’s meditations and life-long conviction of the necessity of challenging government policies on war and defence seem to come from the same source as those of St Rupert Mayer (the sons of the soldier Loyola seem to understand the military mind well!) and this part of the book is a fitting testimony to all that Gerry achieved in this area – it would be good to eavesdrop on the conversations the two of them must be having now in Eternity! Gerry’s life, pursued on the margins of the Catholic Church and working with the most underprivileged people in our society, is nobly mapped in this well written book and what is most remarkable (as those of us who saw Gerry in his last few months) is that none of his early passions and insights are dimmed or weakened. ‘What, basically, do I most desire?  This is the most valuable question we can ask ourselves’, writes Gerry towards the end of this wonderful book. To anyone who has ever asked themselves this question, and would like to see how one man went about answering it, this book is addressed – which is, of course, us all. 

 

Peter Tyler

November 2014