A factor unknown

Laurie Andrews reflects on God and Jung

When our daughter was a little girl she asked me: ‘Daddy, is there a God?’ ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘otherwise there would be no word for it.’ But as the philosopher Cyril E M Joad used to say on the radio programme The Brains Trust, it all depends what you mean by God.

‘Jesus said: “But who do ye say that I am?” And they replied, “You are the kerygma of the ground of our being, the quintessential personification of all our conation towards the Omniscient-Omnipotent, the ontological-existentialist summation of the transcendental in our experiential cognition of the universe.” And Jesus said: “What?”’

Carl Jung

The Franciscan Richard Rohr said: ‘First there is the fire; then the words about the fire – then the arguments about the words about the fire’; theology – God talk. In his new book A Little History of Religion, Richard Holloway, the former bishop of Edinburgh, writes: ‘Gods were the common imaginings of the human race’s deep past, dreamed up by minds that gazed in wonder at the universe they found themselves in.’ I heard Jo Farrow say once that she knew someone who said: ‘Some people never change their god; very unhygienic.’ The word God appears thirty-eight times in Advices & queries, but who or what is this taken for granted God? And who decides?

In 1959, when he was eighty-four, Carl Jung was interviewed for a BBC television documentary by journalist John Freeman. After talking about Jung’s childhood faith, Freeman asked him: ‘Do you now believe in God?’ Jung paused and then replied: ‘Difficult to answer. I know. I don’t need to believe – I know.’ But what did he mean?

In a letter to the BBC magazine The Listener, following the interview, Jung, in answer to correspondents, wrote: ‘My opinion about “knowledge of God” is an unconventional way of thinking… which takes into consideration the immense darkness of the human mind… we cannot continue to think in an antique or medieval way when we enter the sphere of religious experience. I did not say: “There is a God”… I do not know a certain God (Zeus, Jahweh, Allah, the Trinitarian God, etc.) but rather: I do know I am obviously confronted with a factor unknown in itself, which I call “God”…

‘It is an apt name given to all overpowering emotions in my psychical system subduing my conscious will and usurping control over myself. This is the name by which I designate all things which… upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life… Yet I should consider it an intellectual immorality to indulge in the belief that my view of a god is the universal, metaphysical Being of the confessions (i.e. religion) or “philosophies”… Only my experience can be good or evil, but I know that the superior will is based upon a foundation which transcends human imagination.’

In other writings Jung used different analogies: for example, God as something stronger than his (ego) self, instinct or intuition, our conscience, an idea or proposition and the voice inside us; so no metaphysical Being or sky god, except in the archetypal or mythical sense.

Coming to Friends

I came to Friends in September 1984. I had rejected my teenage evangelical faith and spent twenty-five years in the purgatory of addiction, but following a crisis I was forced to become ‘as open-minded as only the dying can be’ and seek a spiritual solution to my soul sickness. I shall be forever grateful that Friends accepted me as I was. After two years as an attender, I applied for membership and was visited by two seasoned Friends. I made plain that I was now an agnostic; it was noted but did not seem to be a stumbling block.

Harvey Gillman wrote in the Friend (5 August) that when he told his visitors he was living with another man it was a ‘stop’ for one of the visitors. But Harvey added: ‘Friends have changed because human beings have witnessed to their own authenticity and have seen each other as individuals. I am not all Jews. I am not all gays. And as Friends will know, I am not all Quakers… There are many ways of being human and that diversity is what we all have in common.’

Pretended builders

In a great peroration George Fox declaimed:

All you pretended builders of people up to heaven, who deny the light, deny Christ, deny God… They build in the dark. Spiritual Egyptians, spiritual Sodomites and spiritual Babylonians, with the Jews, deny the light… And has not the old pope, Cain-like… set up as head of his city… in opposition to Christ and his church… All you who call yourselves churches – first, papists: You say you have never heard Christ’s voice. How then were you married to Christ, who have never heard his voice, and Christ your husband never spoke to you? Strange kind of marriage! Presbyterians: You say you are Christ’s wife and spouse and bride, yet you say you never heard Christ’s voice from heaven, and yet you will be married… this manifests deceit. And come independents and Baptists: You say you are Christ’s spouse and bride and wife, yet you say you never heard Christ’s voice… Can you be married to Christ without his spirit, without his light?

Hugh McGregor Ross quoted these words of Fox in his book George Fox: A Christian Mystic. Anti-Semitic, homophobic, racist and anti-ecumenical, Friend George would be disowned, or at least severely eldered, today. For, as Harvey Gillman said: ‘Friends have changed.’

A secular understanding

Fox’s inflammatory words would not appear in a modern edition of Quaker faith & practice, which is why it is important that we make generational revisions to our basic text. Daphne and Peter Copestake say we should not attempt the next revision until we ‘have been able to unite in a clear, Spirit-led understanding of what Friends are’ (5 August). But Friends are who we are right now in all our stimulating, fertile, inchoate diversity.

We need not and should not wait indefinitely to reflect our changing Society in Quaker faith & practice. In A Little History of Religion Richard Holloway said Quakers decided that if God was wrong about slavery, as recorded in the Bible, He could be wrong in other ways: ‘[Quakers] ended a childish way of reading the Bible. By asserting their conscience against it they made it possible to study it like any other book and not as an untouchable idol.’

Paul said it nearly 2,000 years ago: ‘The letter killeth but the Spirit giveth life.’ My conscience leads me to be an open-minded agnostic and more and more questing enquirers come with a secular understanding of spirituality. Their experience is to be valued because we are, as individual Friends and as a Religious Society, work in progress; we weren’t the first word and we won’t be the last.

‘Judge not, that ye be not judged’ (Matthew 7:1).

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