Thanks to the doctrine of the privatio boni [Absence of Good], wholeness seemed guaranteed in the figure of Christ. One must, however, take evil rather more substantially when one meets it on the plane of empirical psychology. There it is simply the opposite of good. In the ancient world the Gnostics, whose arguments were very much influenced by psychic experience, tackled the problem of evil on a broader basis than the Church Fathers. For instance, one of the things they taught was that Christ cast off his shadow from himself. If we give this view the weight it deserves, we can easily recognize the cut-off counterpart in the figure of Antichrist. The Antichrist develops in legend as a perverse imitator of Christs life. He is a true imitating spirit of evil who follows in Christs footsteps like a shadow following the body. This complementing of the bright but one-sided figure of the Redeemer we even find traces of it in the New Testament must be of especial significance. And indeed, considerable attention was paid to it quite early. If we see the traditional figure of Christ as a parallel to the psychic manifestation of the self, then the Antichrist would correspond to the shadow of the self, namely the dark half of the human totality, which ought not to be judged too optimistically. So far as we can judge from experience, light and shadow are so evenly distributed in mans nature that his psychic totality appears, to say the least of it, in a somewhat murky light. The psychological concept of the self, in part derived from our knowledge of the whole man, but for the rest depicting itself spontaneously in the products of the unconscious as an archetypal quaternity bound together by inner antinomies, cannot omit the shadow that belongs to the light figure, for without it this figure lacks body and humanity. In the empirical self, light and shadow form a paradoxical unity. In the Christian concept, on the other hand, the archetype is hopelessly split into two irreconcilable halves, leading ultimately to a metaphysical dualism the final separation of the kingdom of heaven from the fiery world of the damned. For anyone who has a positive attitude towards Christianity the problem of the Antichrist is a hard nut to crack. It is nothing less than the counter stroke of the devil, provoked by Gods Incarnation; for the devil attains his true stature as the adversary of Christ, and hence of God, only after the rise of Christianity, while as late as the Book of Job he was still one of Gods sons and on familiar terms with Yahweh. Psychologically the case is clear, since the dogmatic figure of Christ is so sublime and spotless that everything else turns dark beside it. It is, in fact, so one-sidedly perfect that it demands a psychic complement to restore the balance. This inevitable opposition led very early to the doctrine of the two sons of God, of whom the elder was called Satanael. The coming of the Antichrist is not just a prophetic prediction it is an inexorable psychological law whose existence, though unknown to the author of the Johannine Epistles, brought him a sure knowledge of the impending enantiodromia. Consequently he wrote as if he were conscious of the inner necessity for this transformation, though we may be sure that the idea seemed to him like a divine revelation. In reality every intensified differentiation of the Christ-image brings about a corresponding accentuation of its unconscious complement, thereby increasing the tension between above and below. In making these statements we are keeping entirely within the sphere of Christian psychology and symbolism. A factor that no one has reckoned with, however, is the fatality inherent in the Christian disposition itself, which leads inevitably to a reversal of its spirit not through the obscure workings of chance but in accordance with psychological law. The ideal of spirituality striving for the heights was doomed to clash with the materialistic earth-bound passion to conquer matter and master the world. This change became visible at the time of the Renaissance. The word means rebirth, and it referred to the renewal of the antique spirit. We know today that this spirit was chiefly a mask; it was not the spirit of antiquity that was reborn, but the spirit of medieval Christianity that underwent strange pagan transformations, exchanging the heavenly goal for an earthly one, and the vertical of the Gothic style for a horizontal perspective (voyages of discovery, exploration of the world and of nature). The subsequent developments that led to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution have produced a world-wide situation today which can only be called anti-christian in a sense that confirms the early Christian anticipation of the end of time. It is as if, with the coming of Christ, opposites that were latent till then had become manifest, or as if a pendulum had swung violently to one side and were now carrying out the complementary movement in the opposite direction. No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell. The double meaning of this movement lies in the nature of the pendulum. Christ is without spot, but right at the beginning of his career there occurs the encounter with Satan, the Adversary, who represents the counter pole of that tremendous tension in the world psyche which Christs advent signified. He is the the mystery of iniquity that accompanies the sun of Justice as inseparably as the shadow belongs to the light, in exactly the same way, so the Ebionites and Euchites thought, that one brother cleaves to the other. Both strive for a kingdom: one for the kingdom of heaven, the other for the government of this world. We hear of a reign of a thousand years and of a corning of the Antichrist, just as if a partition of worlds and epochs had taken place between two royal brothers. The meeting with Satan was therefore more than mere chance; it was a link in the chain. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Christ: A Symbol of the Self, Paragraphs 75-78. Footnote 23: Irenaetis (Adversus haereses, II, 5, i) records the Gnostic teaching that when Christ, as the demiurgic Logos, created his mothers being, he cast her out of the Pleroma that is, he cut her off from knowledge. For creation took place outside the pleroma, in the shadow and the void. According to Valentinus (Adv.haer., I, 1 1, i), Christ did not spring from the Aeons of the pleroma, but from the mother who was outside it. She bore him, he says, not without a kind of shadow.* But he, being masculine,” cast off the shadow from himself and returned to the Pleroma, while his mother, being left behind in the shadow, and deprived of spiritual substance, there gave birth to the real Demiurge and Pantokrator of the lower world. But the shadow which lies over the world is, as we know from the Gospels, the Prince of this world, the devil. Cf. The Writings of Irenaeus, I, pp. 45! Note: Pantokrator means a title of Christ represented as the ruler of the universe, esp. in Byzantine church decoration.
Posted on: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 17:43:00 +0000
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