This is an article by Roberts Avens, author of The New Gnosis among several other very fascinating books. Avens notes in passing that: “Gnostic knowledge is the knowledge of the soul and its aim is not to prove or to explain the soul but to transform it. Gnosis is an ancient name for depth psychology.” In this essay we get a perspective on Christian(ism) among other ideas.
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“The Burial of the Soul in
Technological Civilization”
by
Roberts Avens
The translation throughout is by the author . The citations, however, refer to the original German text,
“Das Begräbnis der Seele in die technische Zivilisation.” See Note [4]
The present article is an attempt to explore the difficult and controversial connection between Christianism and technology or technical science. Let me set the tone to what follows by referring to two American authors who have dealt with this matter. The cultural historian Lynn White Jr., having pointed to the habit of calling our time the “postChristian” age, notes that the substance of our thinking, still dominated by an implicit faith in perpetual progress, “is rooted in, and is indefensible from, JudeoChristian teleology.” In another passage which brings us even closer to the main thesis of this article, White states that “modern science is an extrapolation of natural theology and. . .modern technology is at least partly. . . an Occidental, voluntarist realization of the Christian dogma of man’s transcendence of, and rightful mastery over, nature.”(1) In view of this, I suggest, we should not hesitate to propose (and the rest of our discussion is intended to bear this out) that, in spite ot appearances, we live in an era that far from being anti-or postChristian, is eminently and uniquely Christian.
In a similar vein Theodore Roszak, the rhapsodist of counterculture, maintains that Christianism had prepared the psychic ground for the scientific revolution during the age of Galileo, Kepler and Newton. For this revolution was not so much a revolt against Christian religious psychology as a rejection of the pagan Aristotelian worldview which saw nature as alive, full of gods and demons never far below the surface of things.
It was the advent of Christianism that effected the momentous transition from myth to history. Christianism alone could claim that the Word (Logos) became flesh at one time, at one place in our human personality. Christ, unlike the mythopoeic gods of antiquity was real, because he was historical. For the first time in the course of human affairs the words “history” and “reality” became identical. It is here, says Roszak, that we must look for the origin of that “fanatically secular sensibility” which would later result in what William Blake called “the spirit of evil [read: shadow] in things heavenly”-the bomb physics, concentration camps and all th other Frankensteinian nightmares of science and technology.(2)
I shall now turn to Wolfgang Giegerich– a contemporary neo-Jungian (archetypal) psychologist who, in my view, is the first to have pursued our theme in a thoroughly compelling, radically new and pitiless manner. Giegerich speaks as a depth psychologist and psychotherapist and not as a theologian, even though this kind of psychological speech cannot be completely immune to the religious and theological aspects of the problem. It must be also stressed that he is not trying to attack or to malign technology or for that matter, Christianism. There is no guilty party in the fateful collusion of these two powers.
Christianism or the Christian truth, according to Giegerich, not only has its upper spiritual (personal belief, inner experience) characteristics, but also its own bodily reality and gravity. Hence, when he speaks of Christian truth (or of truth at all) he does not mean truth in the theological or metaphysical sense of some absolute truth, but in the psychological sense that an idea or fantasy is psychologicaly true if it is effective.
Last but not least, Christianism, for Giegerich, primarily means not the teachings of the early Church (Urgemeinde) but a Western historical force which was shaped both by the ancient Jewish inheritance and the Greek spirit. In his own words: Christianism is “a transpersonal, spiritual reality and a historical force which realized itself in the history of the Christian West”; “an independent objective reality which human beings find themselves exposed to in one way or another.”(3)
Giegerich’s essay dealing with our topic is entitled “The Burial of the Soul in Technological Civilization.” (4)` The word “burial” in this context is not equivalent to “death”; rather it conveys the idea of the “hidden,” or “depth,” and the like. In this sense the event of the Incarnation must be understood as the (hidden) truth of technology, and technology as the uncovering, fulfillment and completion of the Incarnation. Put differently, Giegerich’s aim is to show the subterranean link between apparently secular, even godless, technology and the idea of the Incarnation. On the face of it, such a project seems to contradict the commonly accepted view that modem technological civilization originated in the Age of Enlightenment when Western humanity liberated itself not only from the Christian religion but from a religious outlook tout court and founded a wholly secular, antidivine world.
The first thing to keep in mind in this context is that both moderm technology and modern science are distinctively Occidental— a circumstance which should lead us to suspect that they must be rooted in the very depths of Western psyche. Western man became addicted to technology (Verfahren) not because he was exceptionally intelligent or because only the West had created the scientific preconditions for subsequent inventions, but rather the other way around: the Westerner devoted his intelligence almost exclusively to scientific and technological progress because his consciousness was archetypally predetermined to proceed in this direction. As we know, the Chinese, besides other technical discoveries, invented gun powder earlier than the Europeans; but, whereas in China gun powder was used to shoot off fireworks for the ritual celebration of the New Year, in Europe it led to the production of cannons, bombs and finally the atomic rocket. Technical discoveries were obviously possible within the orbit of Chinese culture; yet the use of these discoveries was fundamentally different because the Chinese attitude toward being (reality) was different.
Incarnation and the World of Myth
Giegerich believes that man’s attitude toward reality finds its expression in the central tenets of religion and, inversely, these tenets condition consciousness by lending it a definite shape and direction. What fundamentally distinguishes the religion of the West from all the other “great religions” is the Incarnation—the proposition or claim that God has entered the world in the empirical (literal) figure of the man Jesus from Nazareth. Thus, says Giegerich, if the West is unique by virtue of two “happenings”— the development of a technological scientific civilization and a historically based “absolute religion” (Hegel)— it is not unreasonable to surmise that these two events may be closely connected or even identical. C.G. Jung saw the conglomerate “Christianity-technology” as our historical burden: “My problem is to wrestle with the big monster of the historical past, the great snake of the centuries. . .the historical burdens Christianity has heaped upon us.” (5) But how can Christian doctrine be a burden?
Ordinarily Christianism is seen as the saving message concerned with the inner, subjective realities of man, his individual morality (love of the neighbor, etc.). Giegerich, however, is not interested in this sort of personal religiosity. He wants to do justice to the repressed shadow of Christianity (its burden) which is at work in objective reality, in actual events (science, industry, technology). What is necessary therefore is the integration and redemption of what Jung called the Fourth – shadow, material reality ruled by the Prince of this world. (6)
Before we proceed it is necessary to make clear that Giegerich does not use the words “truth” (or the “Christian truth”) and “reality” as prefabricated metaphysical constructs or as elements of his philosophical “system.” Rather, he is only concerned with the kind of truth that, let’s say, the story of the Incarnation claims for itself, i.e., truth in the emphatic absolute way that is posited in the story. Hence “methodologically it would make no sense whatsoever to postulate as an a priori . . category of thought what is only a product of a particular event in Western mythology. . .”(7)
In mythical ritualistic cultures truth and realness belonged together: the real was also the true and the true only true to the extent that it was real. This confluence of the two has the character of phainesthai (appearance, shine). The word “phenomenon,” for Giegerich, equals the word “image.” Phenomena have no backs: they are what they mean and mean what they are. What manifests itself and impresses the soul with a numinous effect is true by virtue of its shining. To illustrate this, Giegerich refers to a conversation between Jung and a chief of the Pueblo Indians. For the chief and his people, the sun was the divine Father. Jung asked the chief whether he did not think that the sun was a ball of fire, shaped by an invisible God. In other words, Jung used the argument of Augustinus: “God is not the sun, but He who made the sun.” For the Indian this was, Jung tells us, the most awful blasphemy. He merely answered: “The sun is God. Every one can see that.” “This is the Father; there is no Father behind it.”(8)
We must now contrast in more detail mythical Gods with the Christ event. In the world of myth it is not unusual for Gods to take on human form and appear as mortals. But— and this is crucial— we can never say of a mythical God that he is the “true man” nor that he is the “true God.” The divine and human components of these Gods are never “absolutely true” or literally real. Christ, on the other hand, is neither simply a God who has assumed human appearance nor simply a man who has become equal to God nor some half divine, inbetween creature, but a true God born as the Father for eternity and a true man born of the Virgin Mary. It is extremely important for Christianism that there be a fully pure and intense recognition of Christ’s divine and human nature, and that there shall be no weakening or adjustment of this paradox whatsoever. Rather, the two opposing natures are to be together in one and the same person without conflict. They are not to be so crassly conceived that the two natures for all practical purposes fall into two separate essences which could only by chance have found themselves in one and the same person. This precarious tight rope performance, which proposes the idea of a reality in which the divine and the human are simultaneously identical and separate, is called perichoresis, the reciprocal interpenetration of divine and human nature. God and man, Logos and sarx, Word and flesh, have become irrevocably fused at onepoint-in the person of Jesus the Christ. Heaven and earth have become the same, they interpenetrate each other. The heavenly Logos is now buried in earthly flesh. Giegerich calls this event “the somatization of being”-the establishment of a new composition of being in the sense of an empirical physical reality. Incarnation furnishes the only mythical base capable of supporting our concept of facticity and a sensorily objective corporeality. Only the Christian vision makes Plato’s phrase: the body, the grave of the soul (soma sema psyches, Gorg. 493a) really true.(9)
Today for most people the first question in any talk about God has to do with his existence or non- existence. In the world of myth, however, questions of this kind simply do not arise. For example, one cannot say that Zeus existed or that he didn’t exist. One lived daily in the light of Helios, one felt its radiance in one’s body. Similarly, we do not ask: are there dogs? Is there wind? Is there life on earth? Natural phenomena have outpaced our questions about their existence long ago and our doubts have come always too late, because the answers were given by nature itself, i.e., by phenomena and their numinous shine.
Seeing God in the sun or in thunder has nothing to do with superstition or credulity; it is a kind of seeing that must be understood in the context of the mythical meaning of the word “God.” God (theos) does not signify an acting person or a supreme being; initially it was not a possible subject of a sentence but a predicate, a predicative concept. The word theos served to state something about real events, it had the meaning of “unheard of,” “extraordinary,” “wonderful.” The ancient Greeks could therefore say: “When a man helps his fellow man, that is God.” The event, the phenomenon is God. “God” signified a quality of real events themselves, their effect on man. The Gods of myth were natural, selfevident Gods so that it was impossible to believe in them or to doubt their existence.(10)
The new Christian God has ceased to be a self-evident natural God. As “pure” spirit, “pure” love, etc. he can be present only through faith and through the preaching of his word. By the same token he became a completely supernatural, transcendent, extramundane God-”the true God”, the absolute behind sensate reality. According to Giegerich all this “is not simply a gain, but also a loss. The rise to the absolute is, as an ab-solvere (a detaching), at the same time a deprivation: God suffered considerable loss in substance and is, as the infinite, only an infinitely diluted remainder of what he once was. . .”(11) It is a loss because his status as a phenomenal reality has been exchanged for the impoverished status of an assertion or dogmatic statement, etc. “God was only able to acquire his literal existence by paying the price of his substantiality, selfevidence, and worldly embodiment.” In short: “As God becomes worldless by his obtaining absoluteness, so earthly reality becomes God-less.”(12)
To compensate, so to speak, for his lack of being, God, in the Christian story, became flesh. Enfleshment, according to Giegerich, means three things. First, God’s essence ceases to be only image-like, mythical. God wants to be positively “someone,” a substantial being, a being in flesh. Second, the fact that this God (summum ens, supreme being) must become flesh, shows that from the very outset he lacks something— that he is incorporeal, insubstantial, unreal. The natural Gods never need to become flesh because they always carry their corporeality in their image-like or imaginal nature. Third, in the event of the incarnation a twofold change takes place: a change in the essence of the flesh and a simultaneous change in the essence of nature. Giegerich wants us to really listen to what is being said in the sentence “Logos becomes flesh.” The crux of the matter is not what is meant (in the sense of a “true” dogmatic statement), but what is really said, i.e., what is effective and historically real. The idea of the incarnation should not be protected from historical reality as if it were something in which an individual is free to believe or not to believe. It must be realized that this idea implies a decision about the very essence of reality, of what henceforth is to be called “real.” in the saying “the Word becomes flesh” something enormous happens—not only to the Logos which descends from heaven, but also to the flesh (the terrestrial, temporal, mortal reality assumed by the Logos). In effect, we are witnessing here an event of awesome proportions: the flesh —in its oneness with the Logos—acquires a radically different nature. The very idea of flesh, earth, reality is changed. The flesh is no longer natural, but flesh from above; indeed it is not flesh at all but, so to speak, a “logolized,” abstract flesh.
In the world of myth the natural reality was not without its own logos, but it was the natural logos, the logos of nature. Now however a reversal takes place: the logos which previously was hidden in nature has broken out of it, has become independent, absolute. God’s enfleshment, in Giegerich’s view, inaugurates an ontological revolution. Henceforth only what is logos-like will be called real. In the event of Christ a new concept of reality is sketched, a concept which later will become the justifying ground of the natural sciences. The Incarnation, seen ontologically, is the grandiose outline of the idea that nature can be replaced by a second, no longer natural nature. It is the program designed to substitute a technological world for the natural world. The theological term for this kind of corporeality is “flesh” (sarx); the contemporary philosophical designation is “positive, technological reality.”
Technology is Logos because it originates in reason; it is a product of the mind, an idea. At the same time technology is flesh, because it is corporeal reality and not simply an idea. And finally, technology is that which has “become,” because it is not something which originates out of itself (as in the case of nature) but is artificially made, the conversion of an idea into tangible reality. in fine, the flesh, after the Incarnation, has acquired a new meaning: it is “made,” technological flesh, a second nature.
We can also say that in the wake of the event of Incarnation, being (reality) is translated from the language of nature into the language of physics and technology. Occasionally we still call physics, chemistry, etc. natural sciences even though what they investigate is no longer nature (the self evident) but, on the contrary, that which is attainable by looking away from nature and using highly artificial tools, utensils and methods. The socalled natural sciences serve the Incarnation, and their ultimate goal is not to acquire knowledge, but to transfer the Logos from “above” into what was formerly the sheer radiance of the “naturally” natural, to transfer being from nature into technology.
Nature is not simply trees, mountains, animals, but a state, a condition of being. Giegerich’s word for nature in this sense is “wilderness”-the Mother Earth encompassing and bearing our existence, bringing forth and nourishing man and engulfing him again at his death. Nowadays this “virgin nature” is withdrawing into an expanded version of the zoo which we call the natural reserve, wildlife sanctuary or national park. On a deep level, this fact has little to do with the spreading of civilization and the like: i.e., what we are witnessing is not merely a quantitative change, but something much more radicala world shaking qualitative change in the relationship of nature to man and, by the same token, a fundamental transformation in the very notion of nature. Today, nature is rapidly becoming “man’s problem child” inasmuch as we are enjoined to guarantee her survival. “It is as if nature had become senile and helpless and now were utterly dependent on the care of her grownup children, or as if she were on welfare requiring our planning and support.” To Giegerich this means that an “ontological annihilation” of nature is taking place, “nature’s denaturation”, for in the very moment nature needs protection (stewardship), it is no longer nature in the true sense. The point is not that nature needs protection because we ruthlessly exploit the wilderness, but rather because the fate of nature herself is now in the hands of man.” (13)
Now, just as nature (in the ontological sense) is something more than an assemblage of natural things, so is technology not simply a set of utensils and machines, but a way in which the totality of the world, the world as world, can be. There were technological discoveries and machines in antiquity, but they were not “technological” in our sense of the word for every discovery was embedded in myth. The inventors were gods and heroes (Prometheus), the protoi heuretai. Modern technology is something qualitatively different; it is technological civilization, a totalitarian framework embracing human existence in its entirety. Our entire being and our understanding of being is technologized and oriented toward technologicality. Technology has become its own goal, the goal we are called to serve. The common view of technology as instrumental (neutral in respect to human volition) is therefore obsolete. Technology is primarily and fundamentally an ontological event destined to change the very essence and meaning of reality.
To be sure, says Giegerich, we still have ‘ our poets and painters, forests and brooks, but nature in its deepest sense (wilderness) belongs to the past. Art, like mythos, exists objectively only on the basis of nature and, inversely, nature exists only on the basis of art and mythos. In this respect the great lyric poetry of a Goethe proves nothing. Nature did not die subsequent to the death of forests. She essentially died when Plutarch’s words “the Great Pan is dead” negatively certified the decline of the nature-gods. The Incarnation positively sealed Plutarch’s words through the instauration of a new, entirely different God. The empty space, formerly occupied by genies (spirits, etc.), has been taken over by genius, the subjective, feeling “I,” the sorcerer who attempts to reanimate nature.
Nature, art, symbols today exist only in the form of subjective experiences, leisure, antiquities. A rose was a rose was a rose . . . As James Hillman has shown, the fowl and the pig are no longer animals but rather egg-producing and meat-producing machines.(14) All this however, is neither wrong and immoral nor right and good, just as rain or sunshine is neither wrong nor right. For no one in particular is responsible, there is no guilty party. It is simply the new truth of being: the flesh has become technological including the literal flesh of a pig.(15)
The Manufactured God
Earlier we alluded to the need to prove the existence of God. In Giegerich’s opinion, this effort, far from being a purely intellectual game (in contrast to piety), is itself a form of true piety. We must not think of the proofs of God as an intellectual need for certainty; on the contrary, our need for certainty should be seen as a hint that God demands a real objective existence. God did not want to remain in the “state” of Logos (pure Idea): he wanted to become flesh.
There is an elemental dynamism propelling this whole process. The need to prove the existence of God is not a human necessity at all (the Medieval monks had no doubt in this regard). Rather we are witnessing here the Christian essence of God instinctively thrusting itself into consciousness. To be sure, this is not a “natural” instinct (like, for example, sexuality); it is Logos that wants to become flesh and precisely because it is Logos it announces itself at first in the form of logical argumentation .(16)
In the common view, modernity is mainly associated with man’s liberation from Christianism. Giegerich believes the opposite is true. Modem man has renounced Christianism only to the extent that the latter is identified with a simplistic and literal approach to the Bible. If however by Christianism we understand an existential quest possessing and obsessing Western man, we must aver that in the emergence of modernity and science, Christianism has found its true essence and has come into its own.
It is customary to identify science with rationality, consciousness, and mathematical calculation. This is legitimate only from a purely formal point of view. When we observe the unprecedented dynamism and unrest accompanying scientific developments in all areas of life, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that this drive, far from being rational, is in the highest degree irrational; it is sheer instinct, possession, passion, monomania. Giegerich is not referring to the personal passion of a particular investigator, but to the passion of Western humanity. This means that science, unbeknownst to itself, is a true religion in the double sense of careful observation (relegere) and of the archetypal dominants binding (religare) our perceptions, thinking, and behavior. The scientific instinct is the same religious instinct, the same unconscious impulse that stimulated medieval Schoolmen to prove the existence of God—a God whose essence consists precisely in demanding proof because proving (as logical argumentation) itself constitutes the real and indispensable form of worship. The concerns of Scholasticism and science are the same; only the shape assumed by the latter has decisively changed. Science has not abandoned Christianism; rather it is the Christian Church that has deserted science. The Church renounced its own child, its own living and developing Christian truth and has chosen to remain pure Logos (dogma, metaphysical doctrine, faith, inner experience).
When Giegerich suggests that the basic concerns of Christianism and science are identical, he means that science no longer demands the literal-Scholastic proof of God by means of logical deduction, for this kind of literalism really misses the point. A proof that is exclusively logical remains a matter of thought and does not affect the fleshly reality. Logos remains Logos (logical). Science has understood that there is only one way of proving something. An absolute God who is no longer obvious (as in myth) can be proved only by manufacturing him. Logos becomes flesh only through fabrication just as the presentation of a house becomes true only in the process of building it.(17)The task which science and technology unconsciously try to accomplish is to build, manufacture, and simulate God in actuality (in flesh). It is a continuing process of God’s incarnation and at the same time the empirical proof of his existence by means of created physical reality (artificial technological nature).
An objection may be raised that a manufactured God, though empirically provable, cannot be a transcendent, otherworldly God, a creator; he himself would be a creature. Moreover, what would happen to a faith that believes what it sees not? Giegerich agrees that the manufactured God must remain a transcendent God. The only question is: how are we to understand words like “transcendent,” “absolute,” “otherworldly,” “invisible” (non-sensual) and “creator”? If by “transcendence” etc. we mean that God has nothing whatsoever to do with the empirical reality, then of course he would be irrelevant. Clearly a transcendent God must be also in some sense immanent.
Transcendence, according to Giegerich, should not be conceived literally and metaphysically, but as a quality within reality, as another “style” of reality. The manufactured God is an empirical absolute, an immanent transcendence, a sensibly given non-sensible. It is the technological world— artificial, unnatural — that transcends the natural world. It is the artificially made world that is progressively “absolutized,” i.e., released from nature as the self-evidently given. For example, when we learn from physics that a piece of wood, completely contrary to its natural-sensible appearance, is in fact empty space, we are indeed in the presence of the empirical non-sensuous transcendence. It can be said therefore without further ado that scientific knowledge is realized faith, faith that believes what it sees not. Natural science, empirically speaking, is pure supernaturalism.” (18)
Inflation of Things – Images
Giegerich operates with Jung’s definition of religion as symbolic life— a life in which we participate via ritual. Symbolic life is not exclusively our life, our subjectivity. For next to the subjective and the personal there is an objective – psychical “spiritual life” which claims us; it is an autonomous life which uses us (like the drama uses the actors) for its own needs and is indifferent to our interests and concerns. For example, the Pueblo Indians see themselves as the sons of the Father, the Sun whom they must assist by helping him daily to rise over the horizon and to walk across Heaven. They do not do it for themselves only: “. . .we do it for America, we do it for the whole world.”(19 )Referring to the modem world, Jung says: “There is no symbolic existence in which I am something other, in which I play a role, my role as one of the actors in divine drama.”(20)
Giegerich (respectfully) disagrees with Jung. The truth of the matter is that there is today a symbolic life in Jung’s sense. We sacrifice two thirds of our available time to symbolic life without recognizing it as such. Here are some instances.
Millions of people sit every evening for hours in front of their TV sets. They imagine they do so for pleasure but that is only a pretense hiding the objective state of affairs. The cult of TV is.not due to a natural human need; man is not naturally oriented toward entertainment. Circa 1700 there were no newspapers, no cinema and the only books to be found in the average household were the Bible, hymnal and, occasionally an Almanac. These books were read over and over again — sheer, endless monotony from our standpoint. Moreover there was no such thing as “free” time after the workday, but celebration-time (Feierabend, Holyday).
In Giegerich’s scheme of things, the provenance of TV is not human. Behind this phenomenon there is an objective necessity; television does not serve our need to be entertained— we serve television. In its objective being TV is show, show as theatrum mundi— a mixture of world records, Westerns, Oscars, quizzes, summit conferences. It is the theatre of life in its heights and depths, in its spectacularity and banality. Man, the consumer, is used so as to replace the absolute God as the indifferent spectator with a God who is carnally represented in real life. There must be TV for the divina comedia to have real existence in the flesh. That television has nothing to do with the satisfaction of personal pleasure is betrayed by the fact that it often remains on when nobody is watching. The divine show must go on.
Before we turn to other instances of symbolic life it would be helpful to observe with Giegerich that the destruction of mythical imagination has by no means eliminated the imaginal. What has happened is that the image has undergone a fundamental change in quality: it has been intensified to the point of becoming “a distillate of image.”(21) There has been an unprecedented inflation of the image; in effect we now live, says Giegerich, in an “absurdly imagistic time”: posters, magazines, prints, art books, comics, TV, advertising, printed fabrics and wallpaper.
In mythical cultures, the image always conveyed something, a numinous Other which manifested itself immediately in the image, shining forth from it. By contrast, contemporary images are absolutely indifferent to what they show. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony can be the musical background for a soup commercial, a cognac commercial or a political party. What matters is pure show. This however is not exploitation of image and it would be inappropriate for us to react with moral indignation. “We must try to appreciate. . .television [etc.] as the modern form of image worship— -as the authentic and only possible way to worship the image of the Christian God.”
God’s prohibition to make any “graven image” is only directed against natural deities, not against the pictorial representations of Jahweh himself. What is rejected is the worship of the natural inasmuch as it claims to be substantial and divine (imaginal). Concurrently, what is demanded is the cult of a God image that has left all traces of the natural behind and has no substantial content. “This,” says Giegerich, “exactly corresponds to the new nature of God who has shaken off his natural reality and purified himself into an idealized ‘unreal’ abstraction, into an image in the public relations sense of the word. The Christian God’s existence is not substantial; it lies solely in his prestige, the effect of his ‘public relations’, in his being believed by his ‘true believers’, his ‘fans’.”
The only difference between Christian and pagan worship is that the Christian God “does not have the sensual shape of natural phenomena or of a cast, painted, or carved image, but rather the abstract and absolute shape of image per se: the image of public relations. The numinosity once invested in what the image manifested now belongs to the ‘image for the sake of image.’ We need images, more and more images, no matter what of.” What matters is prestige as such, the praise of the name for the name’s sake. We can say therefore with Giegerich that “. . any activity cultivating the prestige of something (… ) is an enactment of God’s nature and as such a sacred act—the cult of worship of our God image.” (22)
Another example of symbolic life is advertising, which like television, has its predestined place in the new dispensation. Advertising replaces mythical poetry as the praise of the uncreated nature and its many Gods. It is the glorification of products, a hymn to production, i.e., a hymn to creation and the creator-God. Here Christianism ceases to be a purely subjective attitude and is transformed into an absolute existence imposing its reality upon us even against our will. “Advertising is the constant proclamation of salvation and the constant confirmation in the belief in salvation. (23)
Speaking about computers, Giegerich stresses that their meaning goes beyond facilitating work. First, computers simulate the mighty vision of the enfleshed God as the noeisis noeiseos, thought thinking itself, i.e., thought that is fully autonomous and selfsufficient. Second, computers are the realization of God as the intuitus originarius (creative intuition). Our finite thinking proceeds discursively; we can only think one thought after another whereas God’s thinking can grasp the whole at once, in one single glance. Computers simulate this procedure as well as they can under the conditions of temporality. The basic drive behind the computer industry is the vision of manufacturing God as the Omniscient, for the goal is the total storing of all information. We must note however that this is not a question about our omniscience: in point of fact, thanks to computers, we are becoming more and more nescient. Storage takes place for the sake of omniscience as such.
The transcendent, otherworldly standpoint of God acquires empirical existence also in the form of satellites and space travel. Whenever television shows us on a daily basis the satellite weather map we celebrate this transcendent standpoint.(24) The spyflights which from the heights of many miles can spot golfballs on the ground simulate the allseeing eye of God under the conditions of empirical life (cf. Psalm 139, 7). The few examples we have adduced show that technology has the task of producing God’s predicates in a literal way, physically, in actuality. The divine predicates must no longer be nomina, flatus voci but realia.
Giegerich insists that it would be misleading to look for a special God in each of these inventions. We find plurality of different Gods, divine images, only in the things of nature. Technology as a whole is directed toward the erection of one, absolute, total, allencompassing God-the God of technology. In a letter to me, Giegerich clarifies his position as follows: “The event of technology as a whole means the end of eachness, the end of cosmos and the victory of universe . . .Concrete objects, tables, cars, shoes, tin cans, plastic now have their nature in being throwaway objects, and only abstract Technology as a whole has divine value.”(24a)
To be truly a creator, to attain his full being, the God of technology must subdue everything that appears from itself, i.e., everything natural. It belongs to his very essence to conquer, extensively as well as intensively, a people, a culture, one realm of being after another, for his dynamism lies in his lack of being. only what is artificial assumes a confrontational stance in the presence of the natural, converting it into an object. The essence of a manufactured God consists in opposing and overcoming the natural. And the technological civilization is capable of overpowering the natural world because for this civilization things have become empirically evident. Every thing is a fusion of heaven and earth in one point (perichoresis). In a word, the very being of the artificial (the technological) is power and violence-violation. On another occasion, Giegerich singles out Goethe’s Faust II as an allegory of the modern man and his inhospitality toward natural images. “Faust is the depriving, robbing one. So his name (fist) is not without deeper significance. Embodying the principle of literal activism, Faust is characterized by the empty fist that needs to grab in order to be.”(25)
Giegerich rejects any attempt to explain technology as the product of human pride—that would be to ignore facts. Technology is our burden, an exacted duty whether we like it or not. It is the destiny of the West and possibly of the world as a whole, so that every kind of moralistic valuation is pointless. The true hubris seems to consist precisely in trying to interpret technology in personalistic moralistic terms, i.e., by conceiving it as human accomplishment. The merely human standpoint must be left behind if we are to understand this astonishing, monstrous, incredible phenomenon in the face of which we are becoming increasingly perplexed and helpless as it develops in its purity.
When we observe the behavior of twentieth century man we see the very opposite of hubris-an unusual modesty, discretion, humility, even shame. We no longer have kings representing our highest self. We have dispensed with servants; we identify with the needy, the oppressed. We see ourselves as needy: we like to appear sloppy and wear sneakers, blue jeans and Tshirts. We prefer to be photographed in snap shots so as to avoid posturing and ostentation. It is nearly impossible for us to “talk big” and at best we tolerate the sublime in the form of parody, satire, persiflage, irony. In all these instances Giegerich detects an unconscious defensive posture on the part of modern man and woman. We are anxious to avoid the danger of inflation because God, enfleshed in technology, is, in an uncanny way, exceedingly near and real. We must make ourselves small, appear shy in the presence of the Holy.
In reality, however, it is not human beings that are inflated but technical things. Things are becoming increasingly logos-like: they acquire ever more numerous divine attributes and autonomy. Things—the camera, car, stereo—are now the fascinosum, because they are invested with soul. For example, the senseless urge to buy and to consume, in Giegerich’s view, is nothing less than an unconscious, unacknowledged act of devotion. The same applies to the phenomenon of a society built on planned obsolescence: it is as if things wanted to be bought as a way of receiving our tribute but do not wish to be at our disposal and for our enjoyment. They become worthless, i.e., they withdraw so as to remain autonomous. A similar situation obtains in the case of sightseeing: every tourist must take a picture for the millionth time of this castle or that Greek temple. Things themselves demand reverence-a reverence which is long overdue considering the fact that we still prefer to dwell- — neuroticallyin pre-Incarnation mentality.
In all these and many other ways, spiritual life withdraws from human beings and is transferred to things. Things become dominant (prestigious) and human beings—mere servants. The place of events and decisions is surrendered to technology and the world of things acquires spontaneity, a numinous irrational power of its own. (26)
Exteriorization
In one of his letters Jung relates that during an expedition in Kenya the party took a native into the jeep who had never seen a car. After a while the native asked the diver to stop the car and stretched himself on the ground, saying that he had to wait for his soul to catch up.(27)
We confuse the situation of the native with our own. We still assume that it is we who, thanks to our rational and technological development, have surpassed the soul. Like the native, we the moderns, believe that the soul resides in what we have forsaken long ago: in nature, in the life of instinct and sexuality, in the earth, in myths and religions. The truth is that our soul has left all those things; she travels in the jeep, she sits at the steering wheel, whereas we have stepped out, and wait for the soul to catch up from behind, i.e., from everything that by now lies in the past. Actually however, we haven’t stepped out at all for it is impossible to ignore the direction of history. We have stepped out only in fantasy. In reality Giegerich says we have been driving for hundreds of years with our backs turned against the direction of locomotion. No wonder, then, that we bemoan our alienation.(28)
Nature, mythos, the ancient Gods are really dead. And, as Hölderlin knew, it is not only forbidden but also impossible to awaken the dead. We believe that we are still living on earth whereas in truth our anima circles around the earth in our satellites in cold empty space. Instead of looking up from the earth to the sky, we look at our earth from above. Giegerich does not deny that our deep sense of communion with nature and our appreciation of the cultural treasures of the past are valuable human emotions. But insofar as these feelings are nothing more than sentimental nature romanticism and nostalgia for the lost world of myth, they have the effect of a lullaby. They foster the delusion that the past harbors eternal truths, that Mother Earth is indestructible, that the old values are stable. It is clear, however, that the air and the oceans will not be cleaned up, that the destroyed rain forests will never grow again. Apart from these ontic (empirical or physical) destructions, nature has been long since destroyed in its ontological essence. Man’s attitude toward the world as a whole has radically changed because it has become possible first, to literally-physically leave the earth and second, to destroy life on earth, even the planet-earth itself.
In spite of all this we are still immersed in medieval states of mind. As we solemnly deliberate about self-actualization a truly human society (love of the neighbor), about a whole nature, etc., milliards are spent on industrialization, armaments, development of computers and space exploration. We manage to convince ourselves that people who are responsible for these excesses are the repressive holders of power, the plundering bosses of industry, the hybrid technocrats. In Giegerich’s opinion, our attitudes in this respect are completely neurotic. The right hand refuses to know what the left hand is doing. But—just as the left hand is our hand, so these people are our industry bosses and our technocrats; it is they who carry our shadow for us so that our consciousness maypretend to be immaculate. We belong to the very technocrats whom we loathe.
There is an infallible sign as to the true place of the soul: “Where your treasure is, there is your heart” (Matt. 6, 21). Where money accumulates, there is the soul. For the soul, according to the tenets of archetypal psychology, is not the private, noncommittal psyche of the individual, but the real, the collective unconscious in Jung’s sense, the contemporary world of archetypal images. We should not be misled by the apparently rational character of technology. Technology is not the opposite of instinct and unconscious psyche but another style of unconscious. It is not the case that our consciousness has become rationalistic, calculative and so on; in point of fact, it is still very much entangled in idealistic, nostalgic, sentimental attitudes. What has happened is that instinctual psychic life has changed its language and its medium from a mythical to a rationalistic style. The objective (collective) psyche today is represented by technology. Technology is our nature, our new earth, our instinct, our body, our spiritual, symbolic life.
Hillman has pointedly observed that “technology is cursed by our mechanical idea of it. It is the great repressed, the unconscious . . .”(29) Giegerich, for his part, is convinced that technology is the new place of real, factual happenings. It is here—in the world of technology—that the real wind blows, a mighty pneuma of extraordinary dynamism. Once again, therefore, recognition and apology are overdue; we must admit that technology is “our place of ’soulmaking’, our form of alchemical opus and our place of theophany.”(30)
As technology lost its connection with our consciousness and conscious development, our consciousness became alienated from technology. Scientists, condemned to the narrow confines of experimentation, have been unable to realize the true dimensions of their endeavor; they did not know that they were in effect the trustees of the Incarnation and that the administration of the Christian truth had been passed over to them together with the managers of industry and the advertising establishment.
We refuse to grant science and technology a psychological and theological reality and then—lo and behold—we are surprised that they are soulless and godless. We are doubly alienated: first, from mythos and nature because the objective psyche which formerly resided in these realms has been transferred to the technology; second, from technology as our contemporary nature and mythology because we have remained nostalgically bound to nature.(31)
In an effort to clarify what is at stake, Giegerich distinguishes between what he calls “Sunday truth” and “workday truth.” From the perspective of Sunday-truth, religion means faith in the historical Jesus as the Christ, as “my personal savior.” Here everything hinges on man as person, on his interior (inner being), on his moral sentiments, his faith. In this view, man or the idea of man becomes psychologically the highest value and provides the foundation for individualism, interiority, etc., in short, for hubris of consciousness (Jung called it “monotheism of consciousness”).
Western ways of thinking and experiencing are steeped in the precincts of Sunday-truth; we despise the workday truth which nonetheless determines the real, “the bottom line” circumstances of our existence. We allow ourselves the luxury of freedom of thought, i.e., the luxury of subjective and arbitrary Weltanschauung and religion whereas what really counts (and secretly we know it) is not our thinking (“our opinion”) but what our “real behavior thinks.” We live on two planes: we spend colossal sums of money for “culture” (theater, restorations, concerts, antiquities) without realizing that these cultural endeavors do not affect our real lives for they belong to the compartment “leisure time” which is completely divorced from the compartment “worktime” or the “real world.”
Giegerich urges us to recognize that the values of humanism, freedom, individualism (including the Jungian “individuation”), interiority, etc. are “the untruth of the West.” We are not Indians who can find truth in the Self (Atman) and for whom it is entirely legitimate to downgrade matter and material reality. What for the Indians is truth, for the West is a sojourn in the lie-neurosis. Occidental truth is the opposite of that of India: it is the Incarnation, a movement into outer reality, conceived by Giegerich as the manifestation of objective psyche. The greatness of the Occident lies in the production of ever bigger collective, objectively real, autonomous-anonymous structures: physics, technology, industry, multinational combines, consumer society, advertising, bureaucracy, statistics. For all “practical purposes” this is the direction of the Western libido and it is in this direction that we find our truth, our meaning, our anima. However, as we saw, the Westerner appears to be incapable or unwilling to choose between Sunday-truth and workday- truth. As long as this kind of paranoia persists, Christianism is bound to remain unredeemed. For only exteriorization, i.e., moving without reserve in the direction of our collective and objective reality (technology) can be the redemption and cure of the Christian res religiosa.
Incarnation is fulfilled in total exteriorization which, for Giegerich, is the crucifixion. Crucifixion is itself incarnation, complete immersion in earthly reality. God ceases to exist: “My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me.” God is now fully enfleshed and there is no escape hatch supplying the hope that his former metaphysical status may be restored. Resurrection is not the return of the old (God) but the resurrection of the crucified and Godless. In this sense resurrection, instead of making exteriorization retrograde, seals it. God is not dead, he continues to exist; it is only that in the event of his Incarnation-Crucifixion he has changed his Gestalt and his place. Once again he is as the mythical Gods used to be— a non-metaphysical innerworldly God. The only difference is that he no longer dwells in nature but in the artificial world of technological civilization (second nature). In view of this it is flagrantly unjust, notes Giegerich, to refer to our technological civilization as being secular or godless. Technology is not the seculum but, quite to the contrary, civitas dei.
Indeed one can say that Christianism has brought the fullness of grace, provided we do not understand “grace” in the banal sense of personal wellbeing (sanctification), but as the real presence of God. The things of technology are the empirical presence of the absolute God. And our age is the most Christian because it enacts the fulfillment of the Christian truth-the real enfleshment of God. Seen from the workday perspective, Occidental man has lived extremely piously; he has been faithful (to the manufactured God) almost unto death if one considers the threat of nuclear holocaust and the progressive destruction of environment. It is as if the motto of technicalization were: fiat deus, sed pereat mundus.
Giegerich speculates (to my mind somewhat wistfully) that the transition from natural Gods to the absolute God (replacement of nature by the artificial world of technology) perhaps would not have assumed such literally catastrophic proportions if the entrance of the preexisting Logos into work day servitude had been accompanied by a similar movement of the part of the human Logos—the soul, heart, consciousness. Western humanity, by fully immersing itself into the world of technology, would have faced technological reality not in a neurotic way (not as the seculum), but, like archaic humanity, would have found its own place in the very midst of this earthly reality. As a result, the crucifixion would have been followed not only by resurrection but also by a descensus ad infernos (descent into the realm of shadows) and an ascension to heaven. The new artificial “earth” which was brought by Christianism would have appeared again, suffused with imagination and transparent to heaven. Christianism and the technical world would have become psychological and thus have been recognized once again as our objective psyche (anima mundi). In a word, it would be a return of “animism”—not however in its pristine state but in the altogether new form of technological reality—as a kind of new primitivism.
In conclusion, Giegerich insists that it is not sufficient to use technology in a sparing, frugal way just as it is ineffectual to practice Christian love of the neighbor in the work place and in the neighborhood. That would be trying to dignify technology and the workday from Sunday’s perspective only. A really incarnated Logos demands real tribute: its enfleshment must be accomplished—even onto Good Friday—in us (in our consciousness) as well. This means that the Logos must take its abode beneath matter, beneath the things of technology; it must find in these things the place of its truth, its meaning, its soul, its God. The Logos must also give up the belief in the otherworldly God as well as in Christ as “my personal savior.” For only a complete burial of the soul (Logos) in technology can bring about the rehabilitation-redemption of the shadow.(33)
Notes
(1) Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis,” Science, 10 March, 1967, Vol. 115, Number 3717, pp. 1205-1206.
(2) See Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1972), pp. 454-55.
(3) Wolfgang Giegerich, “Die Rettung des Kindes oder die Entwendung der Zeit,” Gorgo 5/1981. p. 114. Author’s trans.
(4 ) Giegerich, “Das Begräbnis der Seele in die technische Zivilisation,” Eranos Jahrbuch 1983, Vol. 52, pp. 211-276.
My article is mainly a paraphrase of Giegerich’s essay and there is no attempt on my part to intersperse it with adventitious thoughts or being critical. Besides “The Burial of the Soul” Giegerich is the author of numerous lectures held at The C. G. Jung Institute in Stuttgart as well as at the Eranos Conferences, Ascona, Switzerland. Dr. Giegerich received his university training in Würzburg and Göttingen, Germany, and Berkeley, California. He was assistant professor of German literature at Rutgers University from 1969-1972. He is now editor of Gorgo, a journal which delves into the meaning of terrorism and the current ecological crisis, linking these subjects to the imagination and to the loss of soul. He has just completed a major book entitled Psychoanalysis of the Nuclear Bomb.
(5) C. G. Jung, CW 18, par. 279.
(6 ) See Jung, CW 11, par. 211; pars. 250, 251; 9i, pars. 195-97.
(7) Giegerich, “The Nuclear Bomb and the Fate of God,” Spring, 1985, p. 15.
(8) Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, rev. ed. (New York: Pantheon, 1973), p. 25 ff; cf. CW 18, par. 688.
(9) See Giegerich, “Das Begräbnis der Seele,” op. cit., pp. 22326.
(10) See Ibid., pp. 233-34.
(11) Giegerich, “The Nuclear Bomb and the Fate of God,” op. cit., pp. 89.
(12) Ibid., pp. 910. Giegerich traces this development to the story of the Golden Calf in the Old Testament. See “The Nuclear Bomb and the Fate of God,” op. cit., pp. 127.; cf. Giegerich, “Busse für Philemon: Vertiefung in das verdorbene GastSpiel der Götter” (Eranos Jahrbuch 1982, Vol. 51, pp. 189242.)
(13) See Giegerich, “Saving the Nuclear Bomb,” Facing Apocalypse, ed. by Valerie Andrews et al. (Dallas, Texas: Spring Publications, Inc., 1987), pp. 100 ff.
(14) See James Hillman, “The Animal Kingdom in the Human Dream,” Eranos Jahrbuch 1982, Vol. 50.
(15) See Giegerich, “Das Begräbnis der Seele,” op. cit., pp. 244-45. Giegerich consistently distinguishes between “ontic” and “ontological.” “Ontic” refers to existing realities, events, behaviors and in some contexts to the empirical and literal levels of meaning. “Ontological” refers to Being and to the modes of Being that particular literal entities may be in. At times he equates “ontological” with the metaphorical/archetypal and the imaginal ( in contrast to the imaginary). For example, the things of nature, even though they may be ontically very much alive, may nevertheless be said to be ontologically dead from the moment when they ceased to be the dwelling place of Gods, nymphs, daimons, and turned into objects of physics. Natural objects are ontologically dead when they no longer have a numinous shine, radiance.
(16 )See Ibid., pp. 245-47.
(17) See Ibid., pp. 249-50.
(18 ) See Ibid., pp. 15152.
(19 ) Jung, CW18, pars. 625, 629.
(20) Ibid., par. 628.
(21) Giegerich, “The Nuclear Bomb and the Fate of God,” op. cit., p. 17.
(22) Ibid., pp. 18-19.
(23 ) Ibid., p. 20.
(24) See Giegerich, “Das Begräbnis der Seele,” op. cit., pp. 255-56.
(25 ) Giegerich, “Hospitality Toward the Gods in an Ungodly Age,” Spring 1984,-. 69.
(26) See Giegerich, “Das Begribnis der Seele,” op. cit., pp. 257-60.
(27) See Jung, Briefe III, p. 376.
(28) See Giegerich, ‘Das Begräbnis der Seele,” op. cit., p. 261.
(29) Hillman, “The Imagination of the Air and the Collapse of Alchemy,” Eranos Jahrbuch 1981, Vol. 50, p. 327.
(30) See Giegerich, ‘Das Begräbnis der Seele,” op. cit., pp. 262-65.
(31) See Ibid., pp. 265-66.
(32 )See Ibid., pp. 26771. In a personal communication Giegerich points out that the “Sunday-truth” and the “workday- truth” belong to two different levels. The higher level (the workday truth) does not completely invalidate the lower level (the Sunday-truth); it only relativizes the latter. “We now live in a divided, two-layer reality; the first reality is that of personal psychology, the second that of collective or transpersonal psychology . . . .Archaic man did not have a personal psychology in the sense we do. Today it is possible for us to have two separate truths, that of our science and that of our faith or feeling. As long as we know that our faith or feeling are valid only on the level of our personal, subjective psychology, it is authentic.” (Letter Oct. 3, 1986).
(33) See Giegerich, “Das Begräbnis der Seele,” op. cit., pp. 27376.
Reprinted with permission from Sulfur: A Literary Quarterly of the Whole Art . Fall, 1987 #20 pp. 34-54
A set of thoughts from Parzifal
