JOURNAL OF JUNGIAN THEORY AND PRACTICE - CG Jung ...

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aspersion on the religion of Islam itself. Rather, he sensed that passion,armed with divine mission, something missing from the West for some time,was a primitive invasion of soulless Europe.That, in itself, was prescient, but when we consider that the Muslimterrorists aimed their venom at a symbol of western might, we can see thatthe power they attacked was the mercantile, rationalist, scientific, nonreligiousmyth that they despised. They do not bomb Christian churches (incontrast to synagogues) and mostly want all western materialism out of theMuslim world. Our response, however, is more complex. We embrace thevalues of the Goddess of Reason, namely democracy, tolerance, and theseparation of church and state, but underneath that more moderncommitment is the continuation of the Crusades. A western generalproclaims that his Christian god is stronger than that of the enemy and ourpresident prides himself on being a born-again Christian. In that sense, then,the old battle of Christian versus Muslim, as well as Muslim versus Jew,continues. It is true that the ancient war of the Christian against the Jew hasbeen vastly alleviated, thanks to the experience of the Holocaust, I wouldimagine, with the Catholic Church in the forefront of this reparation.Protestant churches are a bit slower in such reconciliation (e.g., Presbyteriananimosity toward Israel), but they are in no sense more hostile than the leftand right of the European rationalist intellectuals. Fewer than 10% ofEuropeans ever attend church (aside from Italy and Ireland), in contrast to40% in the United States, while over 90% of Americans profess faith inGod. We proclaim the values of the Founding Fathers, a kind of benevolentdeism, but 60 million copies of books proclaiming and describing the EndDays and Armageddon have been sold in the United States over the last tenyears. On the other hand, the hatred among Muslims toward the Jew equalsC. G. Jung’s Answer To Job: A Half Century Later Pg. 69 (Online Edition)by J. Marvin Spiegelman
that of the Nazis, with Israel becoming the contemporary focus fortraditional anti-Semitism. Judaism, meanwhile, tries to realize the ancientdream of homeland as promised by God, whether secular or religious.Are these warring strands all part of the mind of God, we might ask,following Jung? I think that we can see it this way, now. Jung also saw theinterplay of archetypal forces played out at a political level. We witness theshadow and light of each of our western religious traditions, including therational/scientific, informing the nations and regions. As Jung saw, nationsnow carry the inflation of certainty of their rightness, as the faiths alwayshave. But the clash of opposites is visibly and horribly demonstrated in thecrash into the Twin Towers and in the suicide bombers in the Middle East.Islam, never having had the Enlightenment (which brought democracy, civilrights, and individuality to the West, as well as the less attractivemercantilism and secularism), attacked the overarching, even hubristic,symbol of those towers, along with their human occupants. This can be seenas a negative coniunctio, with a possible more positive union in the future,perhaps bringing these valuable qualities to the Muslim states, as the UnitedStates proclaims it wishes to do. Perhaps Islamic passion and the capacityfor submission to the divine (which the word Islam connotes) will also affectus, particularly our rationalist hubris.The shadow side of the United States, however, including our greed,excess, aggressiveness, and righteousness, finds its foe in the Islamicshadow of violence and intolerance, as well as even more inflatedrighteousness. This battle of the opposites, each of which feels itself—asmonotheisms do—to be “the truth,” can be seen as different aspects of thedivine Oneness who has “chosen” all of them at various times. Theirincreasing interaction may indeed be due to the End Time in which the NewC. G. Jung’s Answer To Job: A Half Century Later Pg. 70 (Online Edition)by J. Marvin Spiegelman
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Page 3 and 4: excellent introduction and commenta
Page 5 and 6: dialectic in God himself (para. 587
Page 7 and 8: projects his own tendency to unfait
Page 9 and 10: attention here the familiar medieva
Page 13 and 14: the year 39 of our Common Era, unti
Page 15 and 16: female, is affirmed in an extraordi
Page 17 and 18: that her sorrow would lead him towa
Page 19 and 20: forth over the last half-century. I
Page 21 and 22: circulating upon it, and it is he w
Page 23: Consider a further aspect of the sy
Page 27 and 28: we have not destroyed each other, t
Page 29 and 30: The symbolism of the six has leapt
Page 31 and 32: larger perspective will surely take
Page 33: ________. (2002). Twentieth-century

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