I want to write about peace, which means not only writing about its absence but about the fact that a good number of people deny that it is a possible, or even a desirable, condition of human life. That may seem puzzling given the traditional Christian grounding of our culture. Surely Christianity speaks constantly of peace, especially in the Christmas season that we are now beginning to approach. Christ is, after all, the Prince of Peace, and isn’t the Christmas message peace on earth? The first thing that happens in Milton’s great Nativity Ode is that God prepares the way for Christ’s coming by first sending down “the meek-ey’d Peace,” who “strikes a universal Peace through Sea and Land.” War ceases, and “peaceful was the night / Wherein the Prince of light/ His reign of peace upon the earth began.”
But Christianity seems to take it back again. Some people will inform you that the King James translation has it wrong: Luke 2:14 does not really say “peace, good will toward men” but rather “peace to men of good will,” the difference being a single case ending in the Greek that changes the word for “good will” from nominative to genitive. This is not mere linguistic quibbling. The reserving of God’s peace for people of good will excludes those who are not of good will—which includes quite a number, if you’ve looked around you lately. This contradicts popular tradition: Milton’s “universal Peace” that includes cessation of war is in fact the Roman Empire’s pax Romana, the peace inaugurated by the Emperor Augustus’s long reign, a merely secular peace (despite the claims of divinity by subsequent emperors). Tradition has it wrong. Moreover, even the peace of those in the reserved seating is in doubt, for Christianity contradicts itself. In Matthew 10:34, Jesus says, “I bring not peace but a sword.” Of course he does not mean a literal sword, but he does mean conflict, division within the intimate circle where we might most expect refuge and harmony: “For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household” (10:35-36). In the Trump era, we have come to know all too well what it feels like when families are divided by differences in religion and ideology, and, and the one thing we would not call that feeling is peace. The sword is spiritual: it divides the sheep from the goats.
But to become a Christian was to invite persecution by the very literal swords of the Roman authorities, to court martyrdom and contemplate being torn apart by lions. Is the promise of peace no more than the satisfaction of having chosen to belong to the in-group, of being no longer inwardly divided but confident in one’s faith? The central symbol of Christianity is not the paradisal lion lying down with the lamb but the Crucifixion. Take up your cross: that is what it means to be a Christian. I am not trying to be perverse. That is exactly what Christianity means to some people, not just in its first centuries but now. Years ago, I had as student an ardent young Christian who admitted that he aspired to martyrdom. His favorite film was Mel Gibson’s Braveheart (1995), which dramatizes the drawing and quartering of William Wallace as a traitor for rising up against Edward I. Against T.S. Eliot’s early, paralyzed characters such as Profrock and Gerontion we may set his later fascination with Christian martyrs: the historical Thomas à Beckett in Murder in the Cathedral (1935), the fictional Celia Copplestone who becomes a missionary crucified by heathens in The Cocktail Party (1949). Nor is such fascination confined to conservatives: when Milton decided to write a tragic verse drama, he chose as subject the Old Testament “martyrdom” of Samson in Samson Agonistes, towards which I am working my way in the Expanding Eyes podcast.
Jung psychologized this proclivity for being drawn and quartered. In his analytical psychology, all life consists of a Heraclitean conflict of opposites, and the belief that there is ever any peace is childish and regressive. In “Approaching the Unconscious,” his introduction to the anthology Man and His Symbols (1961), finished ten days before his death, Jung speaks, in the year before the Cuban missile crisis, of the conflict of opposites that was the Cold War, in which, ironically, both sides drew the world close to nuclear war because they were both unconsciously driven by a myth of peace. The Communist world was driven by “the time-hallowed archetypal dream of a Golden Age (or Paradise), where everything is provided in abundance for everyone, and a great, just, and wise chief rules over a human kindergarten” (73-74). However, “our own Western mythology is in the grip of the same mythology….We too believe in the welfare state, in universal peace, in the equality of man, in his eternal human rights, in justice, truth, and (do not say it too loudly) in the Kingdom of God on earth. | The sad truth is that man’s real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites—day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been, and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end. | It was precisely this conflict within man that led the early Christians to expect and hope for an early end to this world, or the Buddhists to reject all earthly desires and aspirations” (74-75). He goes on to admit that “These basic answers would be frankly suicidal” (75) if the almighty had not, as Hamlet said, fixed his “canon against self-slaughter” (1.2.135).
Late Jung is depressing reading. In another late work, the audacious Answer to Job, he says, “We rightly associate the idea of suffering with a state in which the opposites violently collide with one another, and we hesitate to describe such a painful experience as being ‘redeemed.’ Yet it cannot be denied that the great symbol of the Christian faith, the Cross, upon which hangs the suffering figure of the Redeemer, has been emphatically held up before the eyes of Christians for nearly two thousand years” (416-17). Once again he admits the obvious: “Why this inevitable product of Christian psychology should signify redemption is difficult to see,” (417), his answer being only that the redemption consists in making conscious the strife that is otherwise sunk in the unconscious.
The Book of Job is in fact a composite text. The beginning and end are a prose folktale, of a bet with the devil and a final restoration of all Job’s health, property, and his sons and daughters after he succeeded in winning the bet for God, and he lives happily ever after. In the middle of this happy-ending story has been inserted a series of poetic dialogues between Job and his friends, his wife, and finally God himself. Job insists repeatedly on his innocence of wrongdoing and refuses to stop asking why, why, why, until God himself finally shows up to silence him with a vision of sublime but inhuman cosmic power whose motives Job can never hope to comprehend, ending in a vision of Leviathan, the dragon who, as Melville’s Captain Ahab rightly surmised, symbolizes the dark mystery that determines our fate without a shred of human warmth or compassion. Jung’s vision of human life is in fact in accord with the central, poetic section of Job. The prose folktale is presumably more childish wish-fulfilment stuff.
Early Jung derived this ironic vision from the dark side of the German Romantic tradition. Goethe’s Faust, which influenced Jung more than any other text, begins with a “Prologue in Heaven” that directly parallels the Book of Job. In “Mephistopheles and the Androgyne,” Mircea Eliade notes the obvious sympathy between God and Mephistopheles in that “Prologue.” God likes Mephistopheles because Mephistopheles “stimulates human activity. For Goethe, evil, and also error, are productive….‘It is contradiction that makes us productive,’ wrote Goethe to Eckermann on March 28, 1827” (79). Mephistopheles is the principle of negation, and what he negates is life: “In place of movement and Life he tries to impose rest, immobility, death. For whatever ceases to change and transform itself decays and perishes” (79). Thus, Eliade says,
It would be easy to multiply the lines that show how, in Goethe’s view, error and evil are necessary not only for human existence but also for the Cosmos, for what Goethe called the ‘All-one.’ The sources of this metaphysic of immanence are, of course, well-known: Giordano Bruno, Jacob Boehme, Swedenborg. (80)
But Eliade goes on to trace the notion of a divinity that comprises both good and evil back to a whole series of myths and rituals that long precede such essentially modern recreations of them:
In general, one can say that all these myths, rites and beliefs have the aim of reminding men that the ultimate reality, the sacred, the divine, defy all possibilities of rational comprehension; that the Grund can only be grasped as a mystery or a paradox, that the divine conception cannot be conceived as a sum of qualities and virtues but as an absolute freedom, beyond Good and Evil… (82)
He cites Iranian Zervanism, whose good and evil deities, Ohrmazd and Ahriman, were both born of Zervan, the god of Time (83); also Vedic mythology in India, with its conflict between the gods and the demons, the Devas and the Asuras. And yet both are the sons of Prajapati, identified with the Creator Brahma (89). In Isaiah 45:7, God says, “I form the light and create darkness, I make peace and create calamity; I, the Lord, do all these things.” Isaiah’s God goes on to say, or rather to shout, “Woe unto him that striveth with his Maker! Let the potsherd strive with the potsherds of the earth. Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou?” This is the passage that Paul is nearly quoting when he both announces and defends the doctrine of predestination in Romans 8, the idea that God for no apparent reason saves or damns people by giving grace to some and withholding it from others.
Despite the fact that The Productions of Time is wholly based on a vision of creative opposites, and despite my profound influence by Jung, I am profoundly out of sympathy with such visions a God who is both good and evil, and therefore “beyond good and evil.” William Blake speaks of the marriage of heaven and hell, in his work of that title, but in fact that work is a satire. Its Angels and Devils are not good and evil—the satire comes from the fact that nervous conventional morality thinks they are. They are in fact Contraries: form and energy, reason and feeling, and the Devils are only regarded as diabolic because conventionality is afraid of energy and passion and therefore stigmatizes them. The opposites of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell are more like the Taoist yin and yang, which are also not good and evil, even if ignorance thinks they are. But true good and evil are not Contraries but what Blake called a Negation, opposites that are mutually destructive rather than synergetic. God is a coincidence of opposites in the Blakean sense of uniting true Contraries, both of which are actually good. God as a union of good and true evil is a model of psychosis, a vision of good possessed by the principle of evil.
Inundation of the psyche by evil results in either deflation or inflation. Job suffers from deflation: he is the tremulous ego bowing down before the posturing, puffed-up power principle, the God of Job, who is really what the Canadian poet E.J. Pratt, in his astonishing poem “The Truant,” calls the Great Panjandrum. The protagonist of Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker bows down in masochistic worship of a Creator who creates not just one world but entire series of universes. If on the other hand the result is inflation, what results is megalomania, in which the ego comes to think it is the Great Panjandrum, and therefore beyond good and evil. It was Nietzsche, who was never clear on this issue, who gave us the latter phrase, and his philosophy led, despite attempts to vindicate him, directly to Nazism. Today we have Trump, DiSantis, and Elon Musk—all of whom resemble the tantrum-throwing Yahweh of Jung’s Answer to Job. But Jung is quite correct about Yahweh: he is partly evil, capable of cruelty and injustice, because he is partly unconscious. It is the unconsciousness that is the evil: it is not his essential nature. What he needs to do is wake up, which, in Jung’s interpretation, he tries to do by becoming human. Evil is not necessary, let alone part of the divine nature. It is a Negation which, once cast out, is replaced by a true vision of divine Contraries, one of which may be “dark” in some sense but which is not innately evil.
Yahweh becomes human in order to wake up, but in fact humanity itself is asleep. James Joyce’s autobiographical character Stephen Dedalus calls history a nightmare from which he is trying to awaken, but Joyce has in mind Blake’s epic The Four Zoas, in which the Cosmic Man Albion falls into unconsciousness and dreams the “dream of nine nights” that is human history and the poem’s subtitle. It is precisely the role of the imagination to act as a progressively awakening force in the human psyche down through the cycles of history. It is not mere arrogance to speak of a progressive awakening of the moral sense in the course of history. It is heresy to say so in the postmodern age, which has become obsessively relativist in a backlash against the arrogance of colonialism, with its white superiority complex judging and “civilizing” the “inferior races.” But beyond a point, relativism is an evasion, and we cannot dodge the responsibility for progressively refining our moral understanding down through Western cultural history.
Dante’s hell is divided between an Upper Hell that punishes Sins of Incontinence, or lack of control, such as gluttony and lust, and a Lower Hell punishing the sins of deliberate malice. From a modern point of view, sins of incontinence are not worthy of eternal damnation, even if the guilty souls do not repent. Such sins are all forms of physical or psychological addiction, for which what is needed is not punishment but rehab, as society is struggling to get clear about drug addicts today. The Catholic doctrine of purgatory is in fact rehab built into the original either-or Christian moral scheme, and Dante is morally enlightened in allowing all of the Seven Deadly Sins to be purged on the condition of prior true repentance. Such a vision could have developed into a vision of the eventual transformation and thus salvation of all beings, even, in Origen’s opinion, the devil himself. The Universalism espoused by the fantasist George MacDonald was such a vision of universal purgatory. C. S. Lewis only refutes the vision of his literary and religious mentor MacDonald by insisting, in The Great Divorce, that God never inscrutably damns people: all could be saved, but some people are so addicted to their sin that they prefer to remain in damnation. This puts him close to Milton, but in fact also puts him at odds with more hardline predestinarians. Lewis’s analysis of evil is rather curiously compartmentalized. The kinds of sin he deals with in The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce are what Catholics call venial sin—enough to give you time in purgatory but too minor to damn you eternally. A possessive mother or wife can do great damage to the members of her family, but such evil is of a different caliber than Dante’s sins of malice.
Lewis deals with those more fully in That Hideous Strength, a much darker work that comes surprisingly near the horror tradition. One of its virtues is its vivid representation of how lesser sins can lead people into getting caught up in demonic forces. Its hapless, clueless male protagonist’s narcissistic desire to work his way into the elite faculty and administrative circles of his university leads him to become the willing puppet of some very sinister figures. There is a curious resemblance to Stephen King’s Jack Torrance in The Shining, another academic whose moral weakness leads to his possession by demonic forces. Jung and his colleague Marie Louise von Franz have both pointed out how, during World War II, some German people were led into collaboration with the Nazis via their personal shadow—desire for gain, for security, and so on. The relationship between personal and archetypal evil is thus a complex one. Peter Straub, recently deceased, probably the most illustrious horror writer after Stephen King, moved in the course of his career from supernatural to psychological horror, to studies of personalities comparable to Shakespeare’s Iago, Goneril, and Regan—people whose cold, sadistic cruelty is all the more terrifying because it cannot be ascribed to demonic possession in the supernatural sense. Such people are possessed all the same—but from the inside rather than the outside, by the collective unconscious. They resemble Adolf Eichmann as described by Hannah Arendt: people in whom something like a soul is simply missing, making them as terrifying as anything with tentacles and ichor. These are the kind of people who belong in Dante’s ninth and lowest circle.
Jung occasionally seems to doubt that human beings are capable of moral clarity. He begins an address called “Good and Evil in Analytical Psychology” by saying, “People talk to me about evil, or about good, and presume that I know what it is. But I don’t” (456). He goes on to ask, “Where do we get this belief, this apparent certainty, that we know what is good and what is bad? Only the gods know, not us. This is profoundly true in psychology” (457). As he says, “For instance, after dismissing a patient I have often wanted to kick myself because I thought I had done him an injustice. Perhaps I had been too brutal or did not tell him the right thing. Next time he comes he tells me: ‘That was a wonderful session—just what I needed to be told.’ The exact opposite can also happen: I think what an excellent session it has been, what a successful dream-interpretation—and then it turns out to be all wrong” (457). But Jung is careful to add that “In spite of all this we cannot simply abstain from judgment” (457). Later, he says, bluntly, “Nevertheless, evil remains evil. There is nothing for it but to accustom ourselves to thinking in paradoxes” (460). Eliade says something very similar about the vision of an ultimate reality beyond good and evil: “Clearly, this is only true from a transcendental and timeless viewpoint; in man's immediate experience, in his concrete, historical existence, the Devas and Asuras are opposed, and he must pursue virtue and combat evil. What is true of eternity is not necessarily true in time” (94). Jung is not espousing relativism but rather a prudent humility: “So I say at most: I hope to God I’m doing the right thing” (458). These are words of wisdom: the people who know exactly what is good and what is evil are intolerable fanatics. What is true for analysts is, I can attest, also true for teachers. All we can do is hope to God we’re doing the right thing.
At the same time, I believe there is a process working for progressive moral clarification through the cycles of history. I am not alone in this: one of the things that characterizes the current moment is the increasing awareness that attitudes, actions, and ways of speaking that were accepted as normative or at least harmless even a few decades ago now seem wrong and demeaning. Even the greatest, even the Founding Fathers, have at times been morally blind—about women and gender, about people of color, about people of lower social classes, about Native Americans, about non-Western cultures. Some of it goes too far, and I am no fan of what used to be called political correctness and is now called woke. But we are beginning to be sensitive in ways that, despite basic good-heartedness, we never were before. And we realize, uneasily, that the process is bound to continue, as we ask ourselves, to what injustices are we still blind? The moral humility Jung advocates is the only guide we have: we hope to God we are doing the right thing.
Still, genuine evil is not the bad profile of God or part of the fabric of the cosmos. It is not necessary and can be identified and cast out, and there is a creative process, the imagination working in history, that works to cast out Negations and thus liberate true Contraries, whose opposition is exhilarating rather than destructive. And the goal of that process is peace. I think we are made for peace, not for endless strife and war, literal or figurative—for peace, not in the sweet bye-and-bye but now. I distrust what seems to me much posturing tough-mindedness. It is not true that peace is a vacation in La La Land. This attitude is making us ill. The title of Tolstoy’s War and Peace implies that war and peace are the twin states of human life. But war is, or should be, a regrettable disruption or breakdown, not a season cyclically revisiting. In “A Christmas Sermon on Peace,” Martin Luther King asserts unequivocally that “the Christmas hope for peace and good will toward all men can no longer be dismissed as a kind of pious dream of some utopian. If we don’t have good will toward men in this world, we will destroy ourselves” (496). He too speaks of a possible progress in moral sensitivity, of expanding eyes that see from a wider perspective: “Now let me suggest first that if we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective” (497).
Yes, the old hippie is still hoping for a Woodstock nation, hoping to “get back to the Garden.” Yet King sees one further thing, that peace cannot just be a goal, because all merely future goals become mere donkey’s carrots: “one day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal” (498). Peace, and peace now, though also “not yet,” as Milton says in the Nativity Ode. Jung is right: there is nothing for it but to accustom ourselves to thinking in paradoxes. To find peace would be to recover paradise, not the false paradise of Calypso’s island in the Odyssey, seven years of whose vacuous harmony caused Odysseus to want to escape at all costs: “Let the trials come!” The name of Calypso’s island, Ogygia, means “hidden,” and it symbolizes a regressive return to the womb. It is Freud’s death drive, the desire of the organism to return to a state lacking in all conflict, a consummation only found in death. It is the negation of Goethe’s Mephistopheles, the will to negate life itself. But if not that, then what is it? At the end of Paradise Lost, the angel Michael tells Adam that he and Eve, though exiled in the wilderness, will carry a paradise within them “happier far” than the original Garden. Such a paradisal inward state would be the “peace of God, which passeth all understanding” (Philippians 4:7), a peace in the middle of the battlefield, still possible even as we are crucified upon the cross of the opposites. Perhaps it is what the martyrs are really seeking, the “calm of mind, all passion spent” of the final Chorus of Milton’s Samson Agonistes. “Go in peace, the Mass is ended.” “Thanks be to God.” As I have said before about other matters, and doubtless will end up saying again, I do not claim to understand what I am talking about here, but I know that it is true. That is what happens when one gets accustomed to thinking in paradoxes.
References
Eliade, Mircea. “Mephistopheles and the Androgyne or The Mystery of the Whole.” In The Two and the One. University of Chicago Press, 1962. 78-124.
Jung, C. G. Answer to Job. In Psychology and Religion: West and East. 2nd edition. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Volume 11 of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Princeton/Bollingen, 1969. 355-474.
Jung, C.G. “Approaching the Unconscious.” In Man and His Symbols. Edited by C.G. Jung. Dell/Laurel, 1968. Original copyright 1964. 1-94.
Jung, C.G. “Good and Evil in Analytical Psychology.” Translated by R.F.C. Hull. In Civilization in Transition. 2nd Edition. Volume 10 of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Princeton/Bollingen, 1970. 456-68.
King, Martin Luther. “A Christmas Sermon on Peace.” In Dreams and Inward Journeys: A Rhetoric and Reader for Writers. 8th Edition. Edited by Marjorie Ford and Jon Ford. Pearson, 2012. 4966-502.
The "meek-eyed Peace" in the Nativity Ode is Venus with her myrtle wand dividing the clouds and turtle wing. During the shortest days is the ideal opportunity with the help of Eros to wrestle us out of the fascinations thrown up by the lesser suns of fakery. A price must be paid to the prince of peace.
A very nice pre-holiday posting. You are right to emphasize the element of good will as a necessary precondition for peace. Thinking back to our teacher NF, I recall the kinds of nits he would pick. While Luke’s gospel has the general wish “on earth peace,” Matthew’s has Jesus tell his disciples to wish peace only on worthy house and then tell them, in the same talk, “Think not that I come to send peace on earth. I came not to send peace, but a sword.” NF might note that Luke writes for a Roman audience, who may still recall the Jewish wars, and places the nativity in a Roman context, “when Cyrenius was governor of Syria (i.e., after 4 CE). Meanwhile, Matthew writes for an Aramaic audience (Syriac, Milton would say), probably in Damascus, and dates the nativity to the days when Herod the Great was the client governor of Judea (i.e., before 4 BCE, though some suggest the date of 1 CE). This might come during the last Tuesday class meeting before the Christmas holidays.