168 Book reviews

The darkening spirit: Jung, spirituality, religion, by David Tacey, London and New York, Routledge, 2013, 192 pp., £28.99/US$47.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0415527033

The Darkening Spirit is one panel of a diptych by David Tacey on contemporary spirituality. Where his other book, Gods and Diseases (Routledge, 2013) explores medical and clinical manifestations of repressed spirit, The Darkening Spirit is an analysis of today’s social and cultural spiritual landscape. Tacey contends that Jungian psychology, and in particular Jung’s approach to spirituality, is uniquely well placed among psychological theories to respond to the current spiritual condition. Indeed, he goes so far as to claim that ‘[t]he twenty-first century could well be Jung’s century, just as the twentieth was Freud’s’ (p. 2). In evidence of this, he indicates how many postmodern scientific disciplines such as physics, biology and ecology today radically depart from past linear and reductive perspectives, and even in Freudian psychoanalysis interest is now turning to those areas that had previously led to Jung’s ostracism from the psychoanalytic movement. Tacey’s main thesis is that ‘[t]he spirit of the holy has fallen into the unconscious, and we can no longer find this light by the official means, but only by arduous and difficult dialogue with the unconscious’ (p. 4). This thesis accounts for the book’s title, inspired by Heidegger’s observation that a darkening of the world implies a darkening of spirit. According to Tacey, the light of the spirit can now only be discovered in the dark, having become more faint and diffuse through its association with darkness. In other words, spirit has fallen into disrepute, and is repressed today, much as sexuality was the main area of repression in Freud’s Victorian times. In fact, Tacey makes the important point that spirituality has been subsumed by sex in our times, subsequently inflating sex to an unprecedented level of significance. One may recall Foucault’s discussion of the illusory claims of the ‘repressive hypothesis’, and his observation that discourse concerning sexuality actually proliferated between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries (Foucault, 1979). Today, no issue of Cosmopolitan or televised talk show would sell without some frank discussion of sexual issues. Tacey points to the cultural background of Jungian psychology in German Romanticism and philosophy: Goethe, Schiller, Schlegel, Schelling, von Hartmann, Hölderlin; and Nietzsche, who was the first to suggest that the collapse of religious mythology led to the rise of psychology and to the modern need for new containers for the sacred. This background prompted Jung’s own astute observation that the ‘discovery’ of psychology is itself the result of a spiritual need in our culture – Tacey draws heavily throughout the book on Jung’s essays ‘The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man’ (CW10),2 as well as ‘Psychotherapists or the Clergy’ (CW10). Jung, Tacey explains, argued that the image of God now wants to become darker in order to regain its power and integrity. Traditional religion, especially Western Christianity, had made the imago Dei too light, too good, static and perfect, and thus irrelevant to the nitty-gritty of human existence. In a process of self-correction, the psyche is now trying to make God more credible, in order to recover its correct orientation and balance, which can only come about when humanity is ‘connected to the creator’–therefore, Jung argues, we are living in an age of ‘metamorphosis of the gods’,akairos of changes in fundamental principles and symbols (p. 6). It is worth noting Tacey’s observation that poets, artists and prophets may be best equipped to deal with this current situation, and among psychiatrists and psychologists International Journal of Jungian Studies 169 only depth psychologists have enough understanding of the numinous not to subscribe to a narrow materialism (p. 70). In classical Jungian fashion, Tacey argues repetitiously throughout the book that a return to the outdated forms of traditional religion is now impossible. He tries to do justice to the complexity of Jung’s position on traditional religion, however, suggesting the early optimism of Jung’s advocacy of immediate and direct religious experience without the support of religious forms (dogmas, doctrines, rituals, fixed mythologies) was tempered by a later softening towards viewing religions as psychotherapeutic systems that protect the individual from inundation with the sacred. Similarly, Tacey pace Jung is critical of wholesale borrowings of spirituality from Eastern religions (p. 29), as well as the ‘figures of light’ and misappropriation of Jungian psychology to be found in much New Age spirituality, which Tacey has written about previously (Tacey, 2001). Reading between the lines of The Darkening Spirit, it is clear that Tacey embraces Jung’s spiritual project for ‘individuals, artists and philosophers to extend the Judeo- Christian story and bring it to a further level of development’ (p. 57). Far from condemning Christianity, Jung according to Tacey wanted to ‘dream the Judeo-Christian myth onward’– a position which, taken together with Jung’s theologically frustrated relationship to his father (which Tacey also discusses) and his comments about ‘mass exodus’ from the Protestant church (CW10, § 160) and about being himself on ‘the extreme left wing in the Parliament of Protestant opinion’ (CW11, § 537),3 shows just how much of a Protestant Jung still was at heart. Tacey recognizes as much when he writes that ‘Jung takes the Protestant Reformation a step forward, and he wants to take religion to a place it does not yet want to go’ (p. 63). Perhaps just as other twentieth- century discourses of liberation such as Marxism and existentialism could be viewed as heirs of what Alister McGrath (2008) has called ‘Christianity’s dangerous idea’ that individuals could interpret the Bible for themselves, Jungian psychology is also no exception. Christ, according to Tacey’s reading of Jung, ‘has not supernaturally saved the world by his sacrifice as the orthodox imagine, but he has shown us the way to achieve our own salvation. […] The Incarnation did not stop with Christ, but continues in and through us, and to understand our relation to the infinite is to realize the incarnation as an ongoing and continuing process’ (p. 69). Tacey even goes so far as to suggest that the church has made an idol of Christ, whom we need to recover as symbol – breaking out of the old Christianity in search of ‘a higher religion’ (p. 69). While Tacey’s understanding of the Jungian position is obviously the fruit of a lifetime’s consideration of these issues, especially as interpreted through James Hillman (Tacey’s mentor, to whom the book is dedicated), the weakness of the discussion Tacey offers may be in its lack of familiarity1 with the orthodox sources he pejoratively views as ‘conservative’ or ‘right-wing’. He seems to credit David Bohm and Rupert Sheldrake, for example, with discovering panentheism (p. 117), when this is the traditional Eastern Orthodox Christian perspective on the relationship between God and creation. Unlike his mentor, Tacey overidentifies with the project of depth psychology, turning it into a science of salvation practised by experts who ‘learn how to see in the dark and move in the depths’ (p. 70) – albeit a science that is a ‘temporary measure’ (p. 15) before the spirit is alchemically released from the matter in which it is currently still trapped, and religion finally moves on to the new revelation. For Tacey, this will happen culturally through the advance of postmodern science, which is making way for ‘a new spiritual experience of the world’ (p. 117). He offers a tripartite narrative of development for human consciousness, from its enchantment in animistic pantheism, to its modernist