Deciding between Jung and Christ on the problem of evil.
Films about exorcism often catch the public’s fertile imagination. The recent film The Pope’s Exorcist has, as might be expected, caught people’s attention. The Herald reviewed the film last month, but the effect it has on those who watch it may be as important as the content of the film itself.
Exorcists and confronting the power of evil are “in” at the moment. The Pope’s Exorcist was based on Fr Amorth, and his books describing his encounters with evil, and the means he used to displace, contain and overcome it, are suddenly popular again. Fr Ripperger, a cautious, canny and theologically highly competent American priest has developed what is almost a cult following on his YouTube channel.
When a film popularises evil and brings it the attention of the public, it does more than entertain. It presents people with an ever-present dilemma. Is evil a matter of entertainment and titillation in the horror genre, or does it actually exist? And if it does, in what form? And if we meet it in our personal journey, what do we do about it? One of CS Lewis’s most famous aphorisms was that the devil’s most ambitious ploy, and the form most people met him in, was the conviction that he did don’t exist at all.
For about a decade in my middle years, I gave up on the classical Christian belief in a personal devil. I had come under the influence of Karl Jung and adapted my theology and spiritual outlook accordingly.
Jung provided an all too easy way of side-stepping the problem and challenge of evil. Jung’s notion of the shadow, a kind of general unacknowledged and repressed distortion of potential goodness, was an attractive way of not dealing with the stark haunting and hunting reality of evil.
But secretly, I put a lot of energy into convincing myself that I was not stepping around the reality of the challenge of evil and constructing a more comfortable picture of the universe to do it.
In fact only a surprising and deeply shocking re-experience of the terror of the demonic jolted me out of my Jungian complacency and confronted me with the role of Our Lady and her prayers in overcoming the threat and terror of evil. As it happened, I had a friend who was a Catholic diocesan exorcist, and as I turned to him for advice, he introduced me to the rosary and the power and presence of Our Lady. And in some part it was this repudiation of Jung in favour of a more literal reading of the Gospels and the discovery of the power of Our Lady’s confrontation with the demonic that helped make me a Catholic.
It is a strange paradox of our times that the public figure who has done most to rehabilitate the possibility of faith is a Jungian psychologist, Dr Jordan Peterson.
Peterson has played an astonishing role in convincing a vast public of the power and probity of the Bible. Even, or especially, reading the text as a psychologist, he has succeeded as an evangelist when so many bishops, priests and theologians had failed. But still, he was resisting capitulating personally to Jesus. Having taught psychology at university and escaped from the clutches of Jung, I had long hoped I might find an opportunity to talk to him about the limitations of Jung as an interpreter of metaphysics.
So I was delighted when, about a year ago, I found that I had been invited to take part in a private seminar in Cambridge in which Dr Jordan Peterson (and Dr Iain McGilchrist of The Divided Brain) were the guest presenters. A small group of academics had been drawn together to test their ideas and thinking in the context of believing in God
The seminar ran its energetic and colourful course and evil was not formally on the agenda. But the hosts had put Peterson and me together at lunch and so we began a more personal conversation. As we talked over issues of belief I found myself wondering about questions of etiquette and philosophy. Did politeness require me to wait for the cheese and biscuits before bringing up the issue of theodicy and the reality of evil, or could it be done during an earlier course? One has to pick one’s moment.
When we did begin to cover the ground, sharp-witted as ever, he saw the trap at the end of the trajectory of the conversation. It seemed he wanted to postpone having to decide between Jung and Christ; and he didn’t mean just by waiting for coffee.
But you can only hold off Our Lady for so long. It turned out that the two women in his life had turned their back on Jung and embraced Jesus; his daughter through an evangelical encounter, and his wife through an encounter with the Rosary and Catholicism. I don’t think it will be long before he follows where they have led.
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