MARK JAMES

INDIVIDUATION AND MYSTICAL UNION

Jung and Eckhart

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) regularly quoted Meister Eckhart (ca.1260-1328) approvingly in his writings on Christianity.1 Jung thought that Christianity was suffering from arrested development and saw in Eckhart an ally. For Jung Chris- tianity and Christian symbols were in danger of being eclipsed because they no longer spoke to the human condition in the twentieth century. Churches that were supposed to care for the salvation of the soul were no longer able to help the individual achieve metanoia, the rebirth of the spirit. The Christian faith had lost its ability to connect people with an experience of the inner presence of God in their lives. Christianity, he believed, proclaimed an externalised God, a God aloof from people’s experience. While this externalisation of religion united individuals into a community of believers and even empowered them to provide a valuable social service to society, it lacked the capacity to transform the person’s inner life.2 It reinforces the idea that everything originates from without the person. A new process of self-nourishment was required which feeds a person’s interior life from internal not external resources. This means that Christianity could no longer remain a creed or a dogma of beliefs to which people adhered. In Eckhart, Jung saw a man after his own heart who sought to proclaim an immanent God and move away from the conception of God as ‘wholly other’.3

This comparative study seeks to contribute towards the ongoing discussion regarding the relationship between psychology and mysticism in spirituality stud- ies by engaging Jung and Eckhart in a dialogue with each other. In exploring Jung’s theory of individuation and Eckhart’s understanding of union with God as detachment, birth of the Son in the soul and breakthrough into God’s ground,

1 See Carl G. Jung, ‘Introduction to the religious and psychological problems of alchemy’, in: Psychology and alchemy (Collected works (CW) 12; ed. H. Read et al., trans. R.F.C. Hull, Lon- don 1981, 3-37 (orig. publ. 1944). 2 Carl G. Jung, The undiscovered self (trans. R.F.C. Hull), London 1958 (orig. publ. 1957). 3 Carl C. Jung, ‘Introduction to the religious and psychological problems of alchemy’, par.11, note 6. 92 MARK JAMES it will be necessary to compare and contrast some of their themes like Self and ground, libido and desire, images of God, evil, the feminine and wholeness.

JUNG’S UNDERSTANDING OF INDIVIDUATION

The process of individuation can be characterised as a life-long process of mat- uration and growth where an individual consciously connects with the Self. For Jung, the unconscious has a personal level, which is material repressed from childhood, but also a deeper level of collective unconscious which reflects the knowledge and experience of humankind’s universal nature. The Self is the total- ity of the psyche and operates at this deeper level of the unconscious. The Self is the regulating principle of the psyche that motivates the psyche to move towards wholeness. Experience of the Self is characterised by its numi- nous quality. If an individual is committed to becoming more conscious of the content emerging from the unconscious then that person will be drawn towards greater wholeness. Thus the Self is ultimately life-giving and enables an individ- ual to discover ‘meaning and purpose in life’.4 The first half of a person’s life is given to the challenge of building and establishing their persona and thus enabling them to become competent in the world. It is through the persona that one consciously interacts within the world. The persona is vital for an individual’s healthy functioning within their social and public life. However, it is a one-dimensional personality, because there are aspects of the personality and the person which in the process of developing a persona have been suppressed or ignored at the personal level of the uncon- scious. This is termed the shadow. Each persona casts a shadow and this gives us problems as usually we are not aware of this part of ourselves and tend to see it in others and judge it in them. In the second half of life, usually after the age of 35, this personal shadow begins to assert itself. The shadow includes all those neglected, hidden or repressed dimensions of one’s personality that either one does not like, rejects or would prefer to keep hidden from the view of others. The elements of the persona and the shadow are aspects of the personal level of the unconscious for Jung.

There is also a deeper level of the unconscious and it is manifested in the contra- sexual element of the psyche. Jung gave the term anima to the feminine element in a man’s psyche and the word animus, to the masculine element in a woman’s psyche. This concept has evolved and many researchers today recognise that both men and women have anima and animus figures in their psyche. Jung believed

4 Andrew Samuels, Jung and the post-Jungians, London-New York 1985, 89. INDIVIDUATION AND MYSTICAL UNION 93 that these contra-sexual elements were gateways to deeper levels of the uncon- scious. When these elements are not conscious they can be projected onto other people just as the shadow is often projected onto some person or people we don’t like or reject. The anima or animus could be projected on to those who we fall in love with. The challenge is to recognise our projections and in work- ing with them begin to withdraw them. Through our projection experiences, through dreams and the use of active imagination we become more familiar with our inner symbols and the archetypal images behind them. They can help and direct us to realise the destiny towards which our Self seems to be guiding us. Jung distinguished the Self from the conscious self or what is sometimes called the ego. In this sense Jung uses the word Self differently from other depth psychol- ogists. He is speaking of the transcendent dimension within the human person, a centre which draws a person beyond themselves. The Self has what Murray Stein calls ‘an ego-free quality’ that is not invested in narcissistic goals and objec- tives.5 Jung chose the word Self from the Upanishads which refers to the higher personality – the Atman.

Most of Jung’s writings on the Self are scattered among his Collected Works but it is in Aion that his most focused works are to be found. Aion is the name of a god in Mithraism who rules over the astrological calendar and therefore over time. By referring to the Self by this title, Jung seems to indicate that the Self transcends time and space, factors that govern ego-consciousness.6 Gradually there is a yielding of an ego-directed lifestyle to one in which the ego supports the Self in taking a more central place in the psyche. This is a painful process in which the ego ‘dies’ to the prominent position in the psyche to a more sup- portive role, though nevertheless vital role. The ego is never made extinct by the Self but continues to play an important role in the process of individuation. It is the manager of the personality but now it no longer identifies exclusively with the persona but allows the inner symbols and images to emerge. It processes and integrates these images and symbols into conscious living and thus facilitates integration as urged by the Self.

UNION WITH GOD AS BREAKING THROUGH TO GOD’S GROUND

McGinn says that Eckhart’s mysticism can be distinguished from other mystical traditions like love mysticism (minnemystik) as mysticism of the ground or being.

5 Murray Stein, Jung’s map of the soul: An introduction, Chicago-La Salle 1998, 152. 6 Carl G. Jung, Aion: Researches into the phenomenology of the self (CW 9, pt. 2), London 1981 (orig. publ. 1951). 94 MARK JAMES

He calls the ground (grunt) Eckhart’s master or explosive metaphor. This metaphor cuts across traditional ways of mystical thought and creates a new way of talk- ing of the direct encounter with God.7 Eckhart says, ‘Here God’s ground is my ground and my ground is God’s ground’ (W13b).8 He avoids using the bridal metaphors of the Song of Songs and through his ground metaphor he institutes a new way of speaking about the union between God and the soul. According to McGinn in Middle High German the term grunt is used in four different ways. The first refers literally to the ground or earth. The second usage is for the bottom or base of an object, body or structure. The third is more abstract and is used to indicate the origin, cause, beginning, reason or proof of something. The fourth refers to what is inmost, hidden, something that is proper to a being, namely, its essence.9 Eckhart uses the term in various ways. He uses it to refer to the innermost or highest point of the soul. This is where the person is open to the presence of God within. It is also used to indicate the hidden depths of God or the mysterious- ness of God. The ground is used to refer to the fused identity between God and the human soul where they are one. The metaphor describes this ‘dynamic iden- tity […] not as a state or condition, but as the activity of grounding – the event or action of being in a fused relation’.10

Counsels on Discernment,11 Eckhart’s earliest vernacular work, which was proba- bly written for Dominican novices and students, has ten references to the ground. In the Counsels Eckhart emphasises that it is more important to be than to do. ‘If you are just then your works too are just. We ought not to think of building holiness upon action; we ought to build it upon a way of being. What matters is the ground on which the works are built’ (CD 4). The ground sounds simi- lar here to the passages in Matthew’s gospel on the true disciple is one who builds his house on rock (7:24) or is like the seed planted in fertile soil (13:8). The value of this metaphor is that it has a depth quality about it. This is not an aspect of the ground which Eckhart laboured upon. He never encourages reflection on grunt as physical ground or earth, although one feels reading Eckhart, as in the passage quoted from the Counsels above, it is assumed. For Eckhart this

7 Bernard McGinn, The mystical thought of Meister Eckhart: The man from whom God hid nothing, New York 2001, 37. 8 Quotes from Eckhart’s homilies taken from M.O’C. Walshe, Meister Eckhart: Sermons and treatises (3 vols.), Shaftesbury 1979. The number following W is the number of the sermon. 9 Bernard McGinn, The mystical thought of Meister Eckhart, 39. 10 Bernard McGinn, The mystical thought of Meister Eckhart, 48. 11 See Edmund Colledge & Bernard McGinn (Eds), Meister Eckhart: The essential sermons, commen- taries, treatises and defense, New York 1981, 247-285. In the following, the Counsels of discernment will be abbreviated to CD. INDIVIDUATION AND MYSTICAL UNION 95 ground is silent, it is without images (dark) and it is pure potentiality, receptiv- ity and passivity. Just like a seed, one is acted upon because in the ground there is nothing one does. Finley quotes Thomas Merton saying that the passivity and receptivity of the true self is like an apple ripening in the sun. There is nothing one can do but bask in the sunlight.12 This is what Eckhart also seems to say about the soul at its most noblest. This is where God acts and God gives birth to the Word. So much of the imagery that Eckhart employs, when speaking of the grunt and the union between God and the soul, is reminiscent of the earth, the soil or a womb. It is also within this ground that the ‘eternal birth of the Word in the soul’ takes place. This birth takes place in the fused identity of the ground. If one’s ground is God’s ground then it will be empty, naked and pure. Eckhart’s way has often been called the imageless way or the wayless way to God.13 His only true way is the way of renunciation, detachment, losing yourself, forgetting yourself. In the Counsels of Discernment (CD 3), Eckhart says that one must begin with yourself and forget yourself. He is not necessarily encouraging a self-reflective or introspective way to self-knowledge but rather acknowledging that wherever one discovers oneself to be acting from self-will, one needs to abandon that will for God’s will.

Eckhart advocated the path of self-forgetting or detachment from self-will. Using psychological language, O’Donovan speaks of disidentifying with the self.14 This disidentifying is a time of uncertainty and feels similar to the experience of dying. Eckhart seeks the deconstruction of the self, the ego, one’s self-will. When I have so totally freed myself, abandoned myself to God, when I am so empty, detached and naked of self-will, then God can fill me with God-will. The person who is empty of self-will, pure and naked is a virgin and a wife (W8). In this image Eckhart plays on the image of the Virgin Mary who became empty of her own will and was able to be fruitful in giving birth to God’s will and the Word in the world. The virgin is the utterly detached person, free from all images, all possessiveness and attachment. But the virgin is also a wife who is fruitful and able to give birth to the eternal Word. When our soul (our ground) is so pure, naked and bare, then God is compelled to pour Godself into us the moment when we are found ready (W4). It is then that we become fruitful and the Son is born in us. ‘All things become simply God to you, for in all things you notice only God, just as a man who stares long at the sun sees the sun in whatever he afterwards looks at’ (W4). Then my acts are God’s acts. There is an

12 James Finley, Merton’s palace of nowhere, Notre Dame (IN) 1978, 115. 13 Richard Woods, Mysticism and prophecy: The Dominican tradition, London 1998, 77-91. 14 Joan O’Donovan, ‘The way of Meister Eckhart’, in: Eckhart Review 11 (2002), 23-36, esp. 30. 96 MARK JAMES identity fusion where God’s ground and my ground become the same ground. We become one with God, there is no longer any distinction. Eckhart says that this is the ground from which the Christian needs to learn to live, to act and to know. This needs to become a well-exercised ground, a famil- iar ground, one from which the person lives and acts without a ‘why’. Thus the ground forms the basis for Eckhart’s understanding of ethics and virtuous behav- iour. If the just human being, Christ, is born in our soul then all our works and actions will be just, loving and detached.

The metaphor grunt provides a useful basis for dialogue with Jung. Are Eckhart and Jung speaking about the same reality though using different words?

JUNG’S SELF AND ECKHART’S GROUND

There are similarities in the way Eckhart and Jung speak of the Self and the ground. For Jung the unconscious is not God but it is the medium through which God speaks. The unconscious is the only accessible source of religious experience.15 According to Ulanov, Jung did not see the Self as replacing God but rather as that dimension within us that can know God.16 Jung did not believe it was possible to know the fullness of God and therefore the only access we have to God is through our God-images. For Jung when we speak of God we are speaking of God-image. He believed the Self and God-image to be identical. The Self-image is a symbol that is filtered through the unconscious psyche. It is through these pictures that we catch a glimpse of the reality of God. Jung realised that when people touch the numinous they can move beyond themselves. The Self draws a person to seek union with something ‘greater’ than oneself. There is a desire for union, for oneness, for fusion with something other than oneself. The transpersonal aspect of Jung’s psychology verges on the reli- gious. This is why Jung’s work was criticised as mysticism by other psychologists. For Jung it is the God-image in human beings, like Christ or the Buddha, that function as symbols of the transcendent self. The psyche achieves balance and order by the union of opposites. These opposites are held together and then overcome by arriving at a perspective that transcends them.17 Transcendence is the way through which the new emerges in us. Jung saw in Christ the one who reconciles the opposites between the divine and the human, the spirit and the body. Through the resurrection Christ transcends the opposites of life and death.

15 Jung, The undiscovered self, 89. 16 Ann B. Ulanov, Religion and the spiritual in Carl Jung, New York-Mahwah 1999, 75. 17 Ulanov, Religion and the spiritual in Carl Jung, 135-136. INDIVIDUATION AND MYSTICAL UNION 97

As we have already seen with Eckhart’s understanding of the union of the soul in God’s ground, there is also the awareness that there is something uncreated in the human soul (which he sometimes calls intellect or the spark of the soul)18 that enables the person to know God. Eckhart sees Jesus Christ as the meeting point between God and human beings. Christ took on human nature and this means that he has made union with God possible. The birth of the Son in the soul is one of the ways in which Eckhart expresses the mystical union of God and the person. Both Eckhart and Jung agree that integral to the human person is a facility in the psyche or in the soul that can know God. They also agree that Christ sig- nifies the transcendent in the person. However, they differ in the way they under- stand how we come to know God or the transcendent self. They also differ in their understanding of the significance of the Christ-figure. Eckhart and Jung differ in understanding how to approach and arrive at the Self or ground because of their starting points. Barnes,19 using the work of Van Kaam, tries to explain these differences in approach. He distinguishes the intro- spective approach to interiority, through rational, logical and a precise scientific observation and investigation into inner experience from what he calls the tran- scendent or contemplative approach. The contemplative approach sees life in relation to its fundamental horizon and meaning, where the person understands themselves in relation to a God of love. The self-knowledge which arises from this is not detailed and precise but rather affects the person’s conception of who they are. Doing this enables the person to see a particular issue or life event within a global context of God’s loving forgiveness. The first approach coincides clearly with Jung’s psychological methodology while the second is more characteristic of spirituality and Eckhart’s mysticism. Jung employs a scientific methodology, with its emphasis on logic and rational- ity, in his research into interiority and the observation and analysis of human experience. His introspective approach emphasises the person’s active striving to attain wholeness. Even though the self is revealed in our dreams and symbols never- theless, Jung says, the process of individuation encourages that people strive for wholeness. For Eckhart it is God’s grace that breaks into people’s lives. He believed that ‘without the grace that makes the soul like God […] it could do no saving work’.20 Ultimately it is grace which transforms but this doesn’t mean people are

18 For a complete list of terms that Eckhart uses for the uncreated element in the soul, see McGinn, The mystical thought of Meister Eckhart, 113. 19 Ronald Barnes, ‘Psychology and spirituality: Meeting at the boundaries’, in: The Way Supple- ment 69 (1990), 35-37. 20 McGinn, The mystical thought of Meister Eckhart, 129. 98 MARK JAMES just remain passive recipients of grace. We have to clear the obstacles, let go of the possessive self that prevents the Son coming to birth in us. In contrast to Eckhart, Jung sought to understand the dynamics of the Self, by looking at various human experiences of the transcendent through the study of comparative religion, alchemy, as well as esoteric and Gnostic texts. Eckhart was committed to the Christian philosophical and theological approaches to mystical union. This accounts for the differences in understanding the signifi- cance of the Christ-figure which I will investigate later in this article. Despite their differences in approach there seems to be large areas of overlap between mysticism and Jung’s process of individuation. Storr says that analyti- cal psychology is akin to the spiritual quest because the process of individuation primarily seeks to get people to devote themselves to something larger than themselves and that transcends them. This psychological approach, a secular path to salvation, is closer to a religion than a medical treatment. It arose, he argues, from Jung’s need to replace the religious faith he lost as a child.21

We have seen that both Eckhart and Jung want people to acknowledge and recog- nise the transcendent at work in their lives. Their approaches to the transcendent differ, as well as their ways of understanding and expressing the transcendent. We will now investigate these differences in approach a little further.

LIBIDO AND DETACHMENT

Some other differences between Jung and Eckhart result from their contrasting understandings of desire. Ulanov says that Jung’s understanding of libido is a theory about desire. Jung broadens Freud’s view of libido as sexual energy, making it more inclusive of all psychic energy. In contrast to Freud, Jung held that sexual motives for behaviour were gradually replaced by symbols, metaphors and analogies in the conscious and unconscious life of a person.22 ‘A symbol attracts a great deal of energy to itself and shapes the ways in which psychic energy is channelled and spent. Religions have traditionally attracted large amounts of human energy and they rely for their power almost exclusively on symbols’.23 In the individuation process, libido or our desire draws us to the symbol of the transcendent, the Self, that each person bears within them. It is the Self that we desire, it is the longing for transcendence, for transformation, for unity

21 Anthony Storr, ‘Is analytical psychology a religion? Jung’s search for a substitute for lost faith’, in: Journal of Analytical Psychology 44 (2000), 531-537, see esp. 535. 22 Ulanov, Religion and the spiritual in Carl Jung, 64. 23 Stein, Map of the soul, 81. INDIVIDUATION AND MYSTICAL UNION 99 and wholeness. The way to the Self is through the integration of the shadow, the anima/animus, and the other opposite archetypes in the psyche. The goal of the libido is essentially a positive one. It is the desire to attain a dynamic unity of the psyche through a process of integration.

Desire is at the heart of Eckhart’s path to union with God. This is the path of detachment or the surrendering of all possessiveness. For Eckhart the problem is not human desire but its possessiveness. Detachment is trying to dispossess ‘desire of its desire to possess its objects and so to destroy them’.24 So his approach is really a critique of desire. All our desires are infected by possessiveness and so all that we desire, we desire to have as a possession. We want to make it our prop- erty. Detachment restores reverence for that which we desire. A god we can possess is not God but a god of our own making and so we become its slaves. Ultimately, we desire to possess a self, an identity that I can own, that is mine. But this is for Eckhart a false self, and so when I recognise my possessive self I must abandon it. I must disidentify from this self. To be my true self I must return to the empty desert of detachment, longing for nothing. God cannot be desired in the way I desire an object. Turner points out that Eckhart also critiques the desire for experientialism or for experiences of inward consolation. Eckhart does not want people to desire ‘mystical’ experiences. This is to desire a way and to lose God. In a world where there is the tendency to equate religious experience with the extraordinary like auras, out-of-body-experiences, altered states of consciousness or other miraculous experiences, Eckhart’s teaching is rather sobering. He downplayed the importance of visions and ecstacy in the quest for union with God.25 Eckhart’s descriptions of the mystical experience of the soul approaching the abyss of emptiness are essentially conventional and lack a sense of the fantastic or emotionally ecstatic. His approach is more that of a home-coming, the recovery of a lost identity, or the achievement of memory.26 He avoids emotive language when describing this discovery of the true self, as rather a return to familiar ground. The detached person wants nothing, no experience even of God’s pres- ence in the soul, no consolation but to become a place only for God in which God could work. ‘Detachment is not so much a name for a type of experience as much as a practice for the transformation of experience’.27 Eckhart goes even further saying that to desire anything at all, even to be a ‘place’ for God to work is to fail to be the ‘nothing’ in which God alone can work.

24 Denys Turner, The darkness of God: Negativity in Christian mysticism, Cambridge 1995, 183. 25 Turner, The darkness of God, 75. 26 Turner, The darkness of God, 177. 27 Turner, The darkness of God, 179. 100 MARK JAMES

Eckhart is challenging us to stop treating God as an object among other objects, even as a supernatural or uncreated object. We should not treat God as an object of desire as if we can get something from God. He criticises those who love God as they love a cow, for its milk and cheese, for their own reward (W14b). True detachment would be accepting that like God I am nothing, a no-thing, not an object. Godhead is pure, free, imageless, the uncreated ground of unity and undifferentiation. Even to desire detachment is a sign that we don’t possess it. If one truly pos- sesses detachment then there is nothing that one desires, not even God, in the way that an attached person desires things. One desires nothing not even close- ness to God, not even to be a place where God acts. If a person is detached then their desire and God’s desire is identical. It is to live without a desire for reward or fear of damnation. It is to practice justice for justice’s sake, to love for love’s sake and desire God for God’s sake. For Eckhart this is to live without why (W11 & 12). Living a detached life is to live without seeking any reward or a desired outcome. It is to desire only God and this means accepting all the circumstances of life – its joys and sorrows, its good times and trying times with equanimity, with an inner peace. It is trusting that what is before us is an occasion to know God. ‘For God is equally in all things and all places, and is equally ready to give Himself as far as in Him lies: and he knows God rightly who knows God equally in all things’ (W69). Eckhart’s theology of detachment is a critique of ego-serving spirituality, a spirituality of ‘ways to God’, which finds a way even in detachment and so loses God. Eckhart’s way to God is a wayless way or as Turner says ‘it is the way of any way whatsoever, so long as it is submitted to the critical practice of detach- ment, the apophaticism of desire’.28 Eckhart’s approach is not a spirituality but rather a critique of spirituality. It is a corrective to all spiritualities, most especially Christian spiritualities, that caricature the transcendent.

THE ROLE OF IMAGES IN ECKHART AND JUNG

Another characteristic of the difference in approach to the Self or ground in Jung and Eckhart is their attitudes to images. Jung has a positive regard for images and symbols. Images are the psyche’s self-expression, they are the language of the psyche. These images engage us through the emotional content that they raise within us. He sees them as royal roads to the Self. Jung is conscious that even though we do have to move beyond images, nevertheless, people use images and

28 Turner, The darkness of God, 185. INDIVIDUATION AND MYSTICAL UNION 101 they have a powerful effect on our lives. He sought to highlight the power of images in our lives. Deeper than the personal shadow for Jung is the collective unconscious, namely aspects of the human personality which go beyond any specific individ- ual. They are inherent to each human being and are expressed in terms of uni- versal images or archetypal images. This is the work of integrating the unfinished business of being human. Jung is most well-known for advocating the contra- sexual dimension in the unconscious, the woman in each man and the man in each woman. These unintegrated elements are pointers to the Self and need to be accepted and their content explored in order to arrive at a balanced and inte- grated personality. Jung also identified many other deep, awe-inspiring and ‘numinous’ symbols that the Self produces to lead people to healing. These symbols and images made manifest in dreams or fantasies are indications that the Self has been activated within the person. Jung lists a number of representations of the Self. Geometrical shapes, like circles, squares, stars; numbers like four or multiples of four; dia- monds or sapphires; castles, churches and containers, wheels; human figures like kings, queens, uncles, parents, princes or princesses are possible representa- tions of the Self. There are also animals like the elephant, the horse, the bull, the bear, the fish or the snake which can represent the Self. Among African people this can be their totem animals which represent the clan. These symbols are in service of the Self. The symbol of wholeness that Jung considered exemplary was the mandala. This is a Sanskrit word meaning ‘a magical circle’. For Jung, manda- las served as images of wholeness for people moving towards the Self.29

Eckhart, however, seems to have a more ambivalent attitude towards images and symbols. On the one hand, Eckhart says, in contrast to Jung, that a detached person moves beyond images. Eckhart wants people to know God without image, to know ‘God naked in his robing room’ (W63). Jung encourages people to dia- logue and interact with the images which the unconscious throws up for them as part of the process of integrating this material. This usually is accompanied by a sense of well-being even wholeness. Eckhart’s approach, however, is more similar to Zen.30 Any image is an obstacle to the full realisation of God within.

29 Jung, Aion, 224-226. 30 See Philip Kapleau (Ed), The three pillars of Zen: Teaching, practice and enlightenment, Boston 1967, 38-41, 101-102. All experiences like extrasensory perception, ecstasy, fantasies and images from the unconscious are referred to as makyo or illusion. These experiences do not constitute enlightenment and when a meditator experiences makyo, he or she is advised to simply ignore it, to continue their sitting meditation (zazen), reminding themselves that they have to move beyond all images. 102 MARK JAMES

Eckhart is afraid that people will get an image and miss God. Eckhart, neverthe- less, acknowledges phenomena like dreams, ecstasies, visions and hallucinations but he downplays their significance for the spiritual life. He fears that people would love God for the benefits or rewards they would receive rather than loving God because they can do no other. However, the irony is that Eckhart’s theology and spiritual approach is full of imagery. Eckhart’s German sermons are full of images like the little castle, the ground, the spark in the soul, the soul as virgin wife, God naked in his robing room, loving God as you love a cow and among many others. His images are very rich and provocative. How do we make sense of this ambivalent attitude towards images? Eckhart’s use of imagery is always qualified by his radical call to detachment. He wants people to know God beyond all images in the true image of God that is the Son.31 ‘The Son is an image of God above all images, he is an image of God’s unconcealed Godhead. And from there, where the Son is an image of God, from an imprint of the Son’s image, the soul receives her image’ (W95). It is this Son who is also born in the soul when it is naked, bare and detached. Christ is the image of our likeness to God.

Unlike Eckhart, Jung did not restrict himself to the Christian tradition. He devel- oped his understanding of the Self from Gnostic and other religious sources too. This has led to accusations that Jung is really promoting Gnosticism and eso- tericism.32 His use of the Christ-figure is essentially as one symbol of transcen- dence among other symbols. Jung shows little interest in the historical aspects of the person of Christ. Eckhart hasn’t always escaped this criticism either.

EVIL IN ECKHART AND JUNG

Resulting from his approach to the Self as the integration of opposites, Jung felt that the Christian images of God lacked two important dimensions, namely evil and the feminine. Jung attempted to address some of these lacks in Christian symbolism. In Christian symbols, the Christ-figure lacks its opposite, the anti-Christ. Jung believed that for Christ to be a more complete symbol of the Self the Christ-figure

31 McGinn, The mystical thought of Meister Eckhart, 111. 32 Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age religion and Western culture: Esotericism in the mirror of secular thought, Leiden 1996, 504. Hanegraaff cautions against an uncritical use of Jung in Christian theology. He regards Jung as an esoteric thinker who uses Christian ideas and thoughts for his own purposes. INDIVIDUATION AND MYSTICAL UNION 103 needed to include not just good but also evil and the shadow.33 Jung argues against the Christian idea of evil being the lack of good or privatio boni. He felt this Christian perspective does not take the reality of evil seriously. Jung advo- cated that there is within God a shadow side. Through this he tried to explain the reality of evil and suffering in the world.

Regarding evil Eckhart has very little to say. Eckhart has a positive evaluation of creation insofar as it is a manifestation of divine goodness. Eckhart held to the Christian teaching that evil is a lack of the good that should be present. He believed that true being existed only in God as One, ‘the privation that constitutes evil is rooted in God’s decision to create anything outside of himself’.34 Thus for Eckhart the lack is inherent in all of creation because it is a falling away from true being, namely God. However, Eckhart goes further, saying: ‘In every work, even in an evil one, an evil I say both of punishment and of fault, God’s glory is revealed and shines forth and gleams in equal measure’. It is one of the statements which was quoted at his trial. McGinn interprets this as Eckhart treating evil as an illusion.35 This is precisely what Jung rallied against. He felt that Christianity highlighted the good and downplayed the power of the demonic. Perhaps Eckhart states his case too starkly but his point seems to be that God can transform evil into good.

Sanford points out that Jung’s use of terminology is imprecise and that he doesn’t adequately distinguish between the dark side and evil. Christians can accept that God has a dark side, a side which nevertheless could be leading us through darkness to wholeness, to healing, to union. It does not mean therefore that this darkness is intrinsically evil. Evil, however, seems to be that which pre- vents people from attaining wholeness, healing or union with God, or the Self for Jung. Evil and the devil, in Jungian terms, are surely those aspects of the Self which have been split off or repressed. Yet if they are integrated they no longer possess the person. Consequently, evil is not absolute but relative.36 There has been an unfortunate tendency in the Church’s history to repress its shadow side rather than to work through it. A recent case in point is the sexual abuse cases against clergy in the church. The institutional church often prefers to just hide its secrets than to deal with the problems. This is, therefore, a valid and insightful criticism of Christianity by Jung. It is a criticism that needs to be taken seriously.

33 Samuels, Jung and the post-Jungians, 98. 34 McGinn, The mystical thought of Meister Eckhart, 106. 35 McGinn, The mystical thought of Meister Eckhart, 106. 36 John A. Sanford, ‘The problem of evil in Christianity and analytical psychology’, in: R.L. Moore (Ed), Carl Jung and Christian spirituality, New York 1988, 119ff. 104 MARK JAMES

THE FEMININE IN GOD

Another aspect missing for Jung is the feminine side of God. She is absent from the Trinity. Jung acknowledged, though, that the Catholic Church attempted to address this lack with the proclamation of the dogma on the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. When we try to understand Eckhart’s use of feminine imagery of God, we need to recognise that as Hollywood points out, there are different levels of understanding Eckhart’s attitude towards gender. The first is to just look at his use of feminine imagery. At this level Eckhart repeatedly replaces misogynistic language and challenges the perspectives of his time. In his homilies he ventures even so far as to use feminine imagery for God.37 McGinn says that Eckhart was conscious that the idea of God as Father needed to be complemented with the image of God as Mother.38 Eckhart says: ‘God gives Himself in fecundity, for the noblest work of God is giving birth […] for God takes the greatest delight in giving birth’ (W71). In another sermon ascribed to Eckhart (though there is debate whether he wrote it or not), he says: ‘Where does the Father-nature have a maternal name? Where it does maternal work. Where the personal nature keeps to the unity of its nature and combines with it, there Fatherhood has a maternal name and is doing mother’s work, for it is properly a mother’s work to conceive’ (W90). However, Hollywood points out that there are two other levels of understand- ing Eckhart’s attitude towards gender. The second is to look at the lived relations between men and women at that period and the third is to recognise that there is often a conflict between the utopian or eschatological uses of feminine images and political and social action. Hollywood concludes that Eckhart’s primary use of feminine language is not primarily to change the social conditions of women in his society but rather he uses it in an eschatological sense. Although, she concedes that while Eckhart may not have intended to challenge the prevailing attitudes to gender of his time nevertheless his work has the revolutionary potential to do this. While it is true that there is little evidence of Eckhart’s political and social actions,39 nevertheless, his condemnation by Pope John XXII is an indication that Eckhart’s ideas and possibly even his actions were considered very dangerous and a threat to church and society. Studies on Eckhart’s use of the mystical insights

37 Amy Hollywood, The soul as virgin wife: Mechtild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete and Meis- ter Eckhart, Notre Dame-London 1995, 122-127. 38 McGinn, The mystical thought of Meister Eckhart, 84-85. 39 There is little evidence of his personal mystical experiences too. See the discussion about Eck- hart as mystic in Bernard McGinn, The mystical thought of Meister Eckhart, 21ff. INDIVIDUATION AND MYSTICAL UNION 105 of the Beguine women like Mechtild of Magdeburg and Marguerite Porete, indi- cate a conscious attempt to dialogue with their ideas and consider their impor- tance and compatibility with scholastic thought.40 This surely is indicative of a clear political agenda as it shows that Eckhart is not just a speculative theologian but one who also tries to give his voice and support to the new theologies emerg- ing among the women to whom he was ministering. Sells says: ‘Eckhart, as a Dominican “Meister”, was placed in a position of administrative and theological control over nuns and other women, but rather than controlling the powerful currents of late thirteenth-century women’s spirituality, he joined them’.41

Schneiders points out that Jung himself has not been free from criticism either. He has been accused of stereotyping of women by speaking positively of men who are guided by the feminine principle (anima) within them but speaking quite negatively of what he called animus-dominated women. These are women whom he considered to be overly forthright and assertive.42 Jean Bolen, a Jungian feminist psychoanalyst, uses the myths of the Greek goddesses and gods to develop and move beyond Jung’s stereotypical images of the anima or animus by showing that within both men and women there are a whole array of different inner male and female archetypal images.43

IMPORTANCE OF THE EGO

An important contribution Jung makes to Christian spirituality is to highlight the importance of the ego in the process of transformation. The process of indi- viduation is greatly assisted through reflecting on one’s dreams and engaging with the dream symbols and the other images which the unconscious throws up. Each person needs to practice active imagination, dialoguing and communicat- ing with these dream figures or images. They contain psychic content which can help the person attain wholeness. They are the psyche’s inner teachers. The psy- che seems to have an innate drive towards integration and wholeness. The task of the person’s ego for Jung is to manage and integrate the material that emerges from the unconscious in ways which don’t overwhelm the person. This means

40 See McGinn, The mystical thought of Meister Eckhart, 9-10. 41 Michael Sells, ‘The pseudo-woman and the Meister: Unsaying and essentialism’, in: B. McGinn (Ed), Meister Eckhart and the beguine mystics: Hadewijch of Brabant, Mechtild of Magdeburg and Marguerite Porete, New York 1994, 143. 42 Sandra Schneiders, ‘Feminist spirituality’, in: M. Downey (Ed), The new dictionary of Catholic spirituality, Collegeville (MN) 1993, 398-399. 43 See Jean S. Bolen, Goddesses in every woman, New York 1984, 41-45; also Gods in everyman, New York 1989, 15-16. 106 MARK JAMES that in Jungian analysis often the ego has to be strengthened first before the per- son is able to cope and deal with the inner material that emerges. This view challenges Christians who think that abandoning the self is equiv- alent to having no ego. Abandoning yourself depends on your having first acknowledged the value of yourself: ‘Claiming the ego is important. The simple truth is that we cannot go beyond it until we have first arrived there, cannot tran- scend it if we have not found it, cannot go out of it in an askesis of disidentifi- cation and oblation until we first have possessed it’.44 Failure to develop ego strength means that people overwhelmed by the inner content of the psyche could become psychotic. In Jung’s understanding, a self that overwhelms the ego can be a sign of either psychosis or mysticism. If the person’s ego is disidentified and strong enough to deal with the content of the unconscious by being more permeable and open to the Self without identifying with it and claiming the divinity of the ego, which is a sign of psychosis, then the experience is rather one of mystical union with the transcendent or the divine where the ego can ‘maintain a vital, living connection with the Self’.45 This psy- chological distinction is important for spirituality and especially of the mystical variety. Eckhart’s more radical understanding of the fusion of the soul with God could be misconstrued to mean the destruction of the ego and thus open people into psychosis rather than wholeness and union with God.

WHOLENESS AND TRANSFORMED CONSCIOUSNESS

Jung’s understanding is that the process of individuation is a dialectical one involving progress and development. One grows in wholeness throughout one’s life and there is always further growth to be achieved. One never completely becomes an integrated or individuated person in this life. This process involves the acceptance of the guidance of the Self challenging one more and more into greater consciousness during one’s life span. There is the idea of the gradual ‘refinement of consciousness towards the moment when Spirit/Geist emerges in the ground of consciousness’.46

This is one of the most fundamental differences between Jung and Eckhart. Eckhart doesn’t have a developmental understanding. Eckhart does not speak of

44 Ulanov, Religion and the spiritual in Carl Jung, 232. 45 Tomas Agosin, ‘Psychosis, dreams and mysticism in the clinical domain’, in: F.R. Halligan & J.J. Shea (Eds), The fires of desire, New York 1992, 41-65; quoted from 47. 46 John O’Donohue, ‘The absent threshold: The paradox of divine knowing in Meister Eckhart’, in: Eckhart Review 12 (2003), 21-38; quote from 31. INDIVIDUATION AND MYSTICAL UNION 107 the importance of a future-oriented growth of consciousness but rather he speaks of a radical change or, as we might say today, a paradigm shift in consciousness. Eckhart’s shift in consciousness emphasises the importance of seeing what has always been there, it is realising that union with God is a homecoming, a return to God our Origin, our ground. As O’Donohue says ‘this Origin is not lost in the primeval past but is permanently adjacent to experience’.47 God becomes a divine presence who can be met in the midst of life, who can be recognised through a transforming of one’s perception of oneself and the world. This sums up the differences in approach between Jung and Eckhart, and by implication psychology and spirituality. As O’Donovan points out, a transformed consciousness leads to a different way of relating to oneself and one’s world. Those who are detached learn ‘to see themselves as more than a problem to be solved, and to let go of an achievement energy through which they strive to make themselves whole’.48 Rather there is an acceptance of the reality of the presence of God in their lives.

Eckhart and Jung are in many ways natural dialogue partners despite their obvi- ous differences. They both saw the need for an inner and personal appropria- tion of the Christian faith as the route to a deepening of commitment rather than just the outward conformity to an exterior authority or institution. As more people become disenchanted with the authority and institutionalisation of the Christian churches it is vital that we reflect on the teachings of Eckhart and Jung. The challenge is to nourish people’s faith, desire for God and the numinous dimension in their lives in ways which speak to people’s desires that they will not be led astray by false teachers or settle for something less than knowledge of the true and life-giving God. Eckhart’s radical approach is to drop all striving and desiring. It is a surrender, an abandonment to receiving the gift of God self, in empty, patient, detached receptivity. Eckhart, through his radical critique of desire, is a reminder that an image is not God and that God’s presence is not located in the past but is con- stantly adjacent to present experience. The value of Jung’s approach is that it is a valuable way of reconciling ten- sions and oppositions within the person and it highlights more clearly the how, or is a clearer methodology of how one can become detached. Jung can helps us understand how we arrive at a detachment from images by developing a relation- ship with them, when we attempt to integrate them into our interior life and not repress them. These symbols or archetypal images possess us and we cannot be free of them without engaging with them. Jung’s approach is a valuable contribution

47 O’Donohue, ‘The absent threshold’, 31. 48 O’Donovan, ‘The way of Meister Eckhart’, 34. 108 MARK JAMES to spirituality by helping us as Christians recognise this dynamic in our inner life and it give us the tools to free us from inner conflict and turmoil. The two approaches of Eckhart and Jung can be complementary, even with their differ- ences, when they are held in creative tension. For the Christian, however, it is finally grace and not a way that works the transformation. Our task is to remove the obstacles that prevent God’s grace working in us. As Eckhart says concluding one of his sermons: Truly you are the hidden God in the ground of the soul, where God’s ground and the soul’s ground are one ground. The more one seeks you, the less one finds you. You should so seek God that you find God nowhere. If you do not seek God, then you will find God. That we may so seek God that we may eternally remain with God, and may God help us to this. Amen.49

SUMMARY

Jung believed that the Christian faith had lost its ability to bring people to experience God in their lives. In writing on Christianity, Carl Jung often quoted Meister Eckhart sympathetically. In Eckhart, Jung believed he had found an ally in bringing people to profound inner transformation. This study explores Jung’s theory of individuation and Eckhart’s understanding of union with God through detachment, birth of the Son in the soul and breakthrough into God’s ground. Both the process of individuation – as a life-long process of maturation characterised by a person’s willingness to engage with the material and images that emerge from the unconscious – and Eckhart’s path of detachment point to the transcendent within the human person. In comparing and contrasting some of their themes – like Self and ground, libido and desire, images of the transcendent, evil, the feminine and wholeness – it becomes clearer how Jung and Eckhart can assist in the dialogue between spiritual- ity and psychology. When held in creative tension, when placed in dialogue with each other, Jung and Eckhart’s approaches to the transcendent can complement each other.

Mark James is presently provincial of the Dominican Order in South Africa and completing his Masters degree in the History of Christianity at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pieter- maritzburg. Address: Aquinas Priory, PO Box 134, Mondeor, Johannesburg, 2110, South Africa. Email: [email protected]

49 Colledge & McGinn, Meister Eckhart: The essential sermons, commentaries, treatises and defense, 192.