Appendix C
Simón Bolívar
‘Liberator’ of Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador from Spain
dominates an upscale plaza in central Cartagena
Related topics: 1. Mass psychosis; 2. Re-finding his faith
1. On the phenomenon of ‘Mass psychosis’ – continued from the Frontispiece, footnote 2[1]
(Refer back to the Frontispiece, footnote 2
for a better understanding of how the idea of 'mass psychosis'
arose in connection with our 'look at' the present literary
work, mj lorenzo's Hooked on
Cocaland, a fictional travel diary which, upon initial
reflection, might seem little related to the phenomenon of 'mass
psychosis'. )
Dr. Lorenzo tells the story that he first got the idea of the
possibility of the real scientific existence of such a thing as
‘mass psychosis’ from Carl Jung.
In his reading of, and about, the extremely wise sage,
Jung, over the early years (starting in 1961 at age 18, and when
he studied at the C. G. Jung Institute of Analytical Psychology
in Zürich in 1969), Jung’s notion of ‘psychic epidemic’
would come up here and there, sometimes in the foreground,
sometimes in the background. In
fact it came up in a big and noticeable way already on page 14
of the very first book of Jung’s writing mj lorenzo ever read,
and that was at age 18 in 1961.[2] It was a constant of
psychologist-psychoanalyst-psychiatrist-philosopher Jung’s
scientific understanding of mankind, that not only individuals
could become psychologically disturbed, but also whole groups of
people simultaneously, even whole societies, or a whole human
realm within a society, all of them at once and in the same
exact way. In his book, Psychology and Alchemy,
for example, Jung traced the history of the psychology of the
entire Western civilization's ‘modern’ Western mind, the major
significant mental leaps modern Western man had taken, starting
with the Enlightenment in the 16- and 1700s: when it rejected
all mythology, and even Christian religion and theology as
‘primitive’ and ‘illusory’, until the very worst happened:
“...The fire chilled to air, and the air became the great wind
of Zarathustra and caused an inflation of consciousness which,
it seems, can be damped down only by the most terrible
catastrophe to civilization, another deluge let loose by the
gods upon inhospitable humanity.”[3] In other words, Jung
was saying: Western civilization after the Enlightenment
suffered a mass, civilization-wide manic-like ‘disturbance’ of
the ‘psyche’, a 'psychic epidemic', or 'mass psychosis', which,
finally fanned by the grandiosity of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and other
writings (and other cold and grandiose philosophies coming from
other Western writers and thinkers, especially Freud), spawned
two horrific world wars, a Cold War with the Communist world,
and a war with global Muslim-extremist terrorism. Jung wrote these words in
his Psychology and
Alchemy during World War II, and was not aware as yet of
the last two of these four global wars, but had he been, he
would have included them as part of the ‘psychic disturbance’ he
was describing, thought the Dr., because both the Cold War and
the war with Global Islamic-Extremist Terrorism had been fed by
mass hysteria and crazy psychotic group-think on both sides of
those conflicts, ‘an inflation of consciousness’, as Jung
put it, or a ‘psychic epidemic’, as he also called it, just as
World Wars I and II each had been. And the Dr.'s own term for it
was 'mass psychosis'.
Over the Dr.’s lifetime a progression of understanding of mass psychosis can be traced as part of his mental growth, if one looks back over his life from his present age of 74 (in 2017). As mj was growing up he put it together from an early age, first of all from watching movies about World War II, but eventually from reading too, that expansionist Nazi Germany and expansionist Imperial Japan, both, were experiencing a kind of craziness that infected practically everyone in their citizenry. World War II movies were particularly good at getting across the crazy group-think and machine-think of the paranoid and grandiose propaganda-infected German populace. By the time of the publication of the present work in 2017, the Dr. considered Nazi Germany the ‘classic’ illustration of ‘mass psychosis’. (See letter h. below, 'The Germans before and during World War II'.) U. S. Americans, too, were revved up as a people during WW II, en masse, practically every citizen after the Japanese attacked undefended Pearl Harbor without ever declaring war; but throughout his life he never thought of the American anger, panic and obsession with aggression during most of WW II as anything but realistically defensive, natural, and healthy-minded, based on real, and not imagined, or trumped-up, threats. His compatriots never did either, as far as he could tell. He was still too young and undeveloped during the 50s to understand the Korean War. But with the growing anti-Vietnam-War protests in the late 60s mj lorenzo finally began to see his own U.S., itself, now, as behaving something like WWII Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, i.e., mongering war based on a ‘wrong’ or ‘misguided’ perception of ‘threats’ to its welfare around the globe.
Then suddenly his personal experience and
comprehension of the phenomenon of ‘psychic epidemic’ reached a
crisis point. During 1970-71 he suffered a near- (or some said
‘complete’) nervous-breakdown which was partly triggered by
Nixon’s invasion of
In his The Remaking young Dr. Lorenzo announced to the planet that he was in the world to ‘save the human race from destroying itself’. Since it was obvious that he was never in a position to save humanity physically from destroying itself – for who but God could do that? – his readership and supporters, and even his critics, understood from 1971 on, that he meant to ‘save’ humanity ‘spiritually’, or ‘psychologically’, or in some other non-physical way, mainly by altering their inner psychic workings. But did he consider humanity, his people, and himself, any or all, to be ‘psychotic’? In The Remaking he often described all three – humanity, his people, and himself ‒ in a way that sounded as if he thought nearly everybody was crazy; he used the term 'schizophrenic' more than once; and therefore, to his most ardent students, it was clear from the first (late 1971) that mj lorenzo, in his writing – and also in the way he lived his life – was attempting to treat the ‘psychosis’ he had seen in his own people, in humanity at large, and in himself; and by means of this treatment, to ‘save the human race from destroying itself’.
But after that year, as the years went by, the ‘ardent students’ of mj lorenzo were clearer on this than he was most of the time. He remained muddle-headed throughout much of the 70s, 80s and 90s on the subject of ‘mass psychosis’, or ‘psychic epidemic’, with only occasional glimmers of remembrance. It was a hard thing to think about, apparently: maybe it was painful to think that your own people, including your own closest relatives and friends, including maybe even yourself, might be so benighted and gullible as to become ‘psychotic en masse’, unable to resist mass social thinking fads, and weak in maintaining firm and independent mental individuality. Or maybe he was not quite convinced yet that the thing he thought of as ‘mass psychosis’ really existed. Perhaps it should be stated in this way: mass population-wide craziness could be imagined in Nazi Germany, or Stalinist Russia, but it was much harder to see it or believe it was happening, or even COULD happen, right among his own beloved – and sacred – and usually presumably sane – people and nation.
During the later years of the Vietnam war, he
felt at times, and halfway comprehended, that the war-favoring
Right, the so-called ‘hawks’, were half-deluded about the threat
which Vietnam might pose to the planet. Therefore he tended to
believe the Left when they said that the Right was acting
‘illegally and immorally’ in their attempt to stop Ho Chi Minh
from uniting North and
Then, in Exactly How Mrs. Nixon’s
Legs Saved the White House Christmas Concert, Dr. Lorenzo
explored the threat that President Nixon’s ‘ego’ represented to
the future well-being of the
The editorial staff of the present series of
studies of mj lorenzo's creative works, including his eleventh
book, Hooked on Cocaland,
have concluded, therefore, that Dr. Lorenzo for most of his
adult life was only marginally concerned with the issue of ‘mass
psychosis’. As the
totalitarian Soviet Union was falling apart in the late 80s, it
certainly looked to him for a while as if the
Finally, in the years after the Islamic
extremists’ attack on the
It was about this time, sometime between 2007
and 2012, during the early years of The Chockawhoppin Post, when the Dr. began to
mentally collect references to ‘mass psychosis’ or general
society-wide 'craziness' that popped up in books by respected
thinkers, to support his growing conviction that 'mass
psychosis' was a real phenomenon, and that it was happening all
around him. Following are some of the examples he collected.
a. The Huron of the 1600s. Dr. Lorenzo remembered that, while working on his Waring trilogy, especially Mrs. Nixon’s Legs, when he had studied Bruce Trigger’s Children of Aataentsic in order to understand half-Huron Bill Blackburn’s reaction to powerful-white-man Fred Waring, Trigger had described a two-sided tragic event that had befallen the Huron tribe and the Jesuits both, while the latter were trying to Christianize Bill’s Huron tribe during the mid-1600s.[4] After the Huron were attacked by the Iroquois and also suffered great loss of life from a Smallpox plague in the tribe, to the point that they barely had enough manpower left to function any more as a tribal society, they had experienced a spreading delusional belief that their virtual demise as a tribe was being caused by some kind of witchcraft performed by the Jesuits, by their Christian religion or God, and/or by their Christian-convert tribal members. This was a kind of ‘mass psychosis’ on a tiny tribal scale (for the Huron tribe by now was tiny), and eventually it contributed to their persecuting and killing cruelly some of the Roman Catholic Jesuit priests, and to their chasing the rest of them out of the Huron territory. Trigger, via his amazing research in Jesuit archives and elsewhere, was able to describe an astonishingly detailed course of where this delusional belief began (with one or two tribal leaders whose names were recorded in Jesuit documents), and how it spread (to many more leaders and tribal members, some even named).[5]
b. Nero’s Rome. The Huron event
reminded the Dr. that Nero too had triggered a mass psychosis
over the presence of Christians in the capital city, Rome. Roman
Emperor during the first century A.D., he had spread the rumor
that
c. Hysterical anti-Semitism
throughout European history.
The Nero episode reminded the Dr., he said, of all the
pogroms against the Jews in Europe down through the centuries,
often started when something big went wrong, like the bubonic
plague called the ‘Black Death’, or the Germans’ loss of World
War I, whenever the people didn’t know who else to blame and of
course would never blame themselves, for that would require very
hard psychological work. For
instance there was the time that the Cossacks suffered some
disaster and someone started the rumor that the Jews were to
blame, the delusion spread, and the Cossacks took up arms and
invaded an area of what is now
d.
Ever since the time of Christ himself, fanatical Christian groups have deluded themselves that Christ’s ‘return’ was imminent, any second or day. They’ve all been wrong, for two thousand whole years they have been wrong, every single little group, and every single day of every single one of those two thousand years; and there were thousands of these groups over time, despite Christ's specific instruction, on more than one occasion, not to try to guess WHEN 'the end times' and his return would occur [Acts 1:7; Matthew 24:36, 42; Luke 19:11; Luke 21:8,9]: the Jehovah’s Witnesses are a current example; and the Evangelical Christian-right today; and each current group is likely wrong too, because no one really knows what the so-called 'prophetic' parts of scripture mean, in all reality, until suddenly a prophecy appears to have been fulfilled and it becomes clear. finally. what it must, or at least might, have meant: and the Spanish in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, too, like many Christians in any century, got caught up in such delusional Christian end-time ideas on a grand national scale.
They also believed that Isabella was a version of Mary. One time she dressed up in pale blue and purposely rode a donkey to a very important royal occasion, just in order to forward such a notion. This book was captivating, it was so full to overflowing of shocking tidbits like these.
Some Spanish believed that the Jews practiced a Passover ritual during which they would sacrifice a Christian child. At times Christians in a particular village or city in Spain would become possessed by this notion with respect to the local Jewish populace, and they would spread mass psychotic panic throughout the town until action was taken against the Jews, either pogrom-like violence, or Inquisition-type violence.
"...the death toll was... so enormous, in fact,
that one president of Colombia asked the married men who
remained
‒ while still having as many children as
possible with their wife ‒
to hook up as well
with the many unattached women left over by the shortage of
men,
and replenish the lost male population in that way too."
"that, they say,
is how Sandi and Ibrahim [shown here]... ended up with 31
half-siblings"
f. The English leading up to World War II. Winston Churchill described the dangerously inappropriate pacifism of the English during the years leading up to World War II, while the Germans were building up to war- readiness on a grand scale (and the English were refusing to admit it was happening), by saying, on page 9 of his The Gathering Storm (all underlines are ours): “History will characterize all of these transactions as insane.”[8] And then he used the word ‘insane’ again on the next page, still describing the attitude of the English prime minister, political leaders and most of the English populace, just to be sure that the reader would really understand that he meant what he was saying literally, not figuratively: that the English were ‘insane’, i.e., hospitalizably psychotic as an entire people, leaders and populace alike, during these years. But on page 10 he used a different word describing the same condition of the English people: “All this is a sad story of complicated idiocy....,” as if to recommend to readers that if they were unwilling to stretch their understanding so far as to see the English populace as psychotic, Churchill might be content with their believing that the English at least were severely deprived in the I.Q. department. But since Dr. Lorenzo had read all six volumes of Churchill’s History of the Second World War, he said, and nowhere else had Churchill ever used the word ‘insane’, he suspected his original impression was correct, that Churchill really did mean that the English had lost their minds and were literally, not just poetically, ‘insane’, meaning, as Merriam-Webster's Unabridged Dictionary defined the word (underlines ours), “disordered in mind to such a degree as to be unable to function safely and competently in ordinary human relations; compare PSYCHOTIC: marked by psychosis [which is defined as]: 1: profound disorganization of mind, personality, or behavior (1) that results from an individual’s inability to tolerate the demands of his social environment whether because of the enormity of the imposed stress or because of primary inadequacy or acquired debility of his organism especially in regard to the central nervous system or because of combinations of these factors; and (2) that may be manifested by disorders of perception, thinking, or affect, symptoms of neurosis, by criminality, or by any combination of these — distinguished from neurosis; compare INSANITY; 2: extreme mental unrest of an individual or of a social group especially in regard to situational factors of grave import; <war psychosis>; <mass psychosis> — compare HYSTERIA 2; synonyms: see INSANITY.”
It was at about this point in his mental growth that the Dr. began to be able to discern among all of these mass breakouts of craziness certain even more detailed psychiatric patterns. After the allies compelled the Germans to many big concessions at the Peace talks in 1918, at the end of WW I, the German people were in a depressed state that bordered on psychosis, and developed into actual psychosis as Hitler and his evil henchmen played on German sensitivities and whipped the populace into mass hysteria and paranoid fear of the allies, the Jews, the Gypsies and homosexuals, the communists, and on and on. Then, as the Hitler years proceeded and the Germans gradually felt better and better about themselves, their depression a thing of the past, they went out of bounds in the opposite direction, developing a mass megalomania of psychotic proportions, a mass psychotic manic disorder, fostered deliberately by Hitler and his highly honed propaganda machine. In other words, Dr. Lorenzo began to notice that a ‘mass psychosis’ could have a mood component, either depressed (very down in the dumps and paranoid, group-wide) or elated (very high and grandiose, the whole group, no matter how large, even maybe an entire nation, or most of it).
g. The English before World War I. The Dr. remembered too
that he had read somewhere, or seen on TV maybe, that the
preachers and other leaders of Great Britain had whipped up war
fury among their populace prior to entering WW I, not just as a
response to the buildup of German military might, but also in a
way that fed into sword-rattling and maybe even helped to cause
the war by provoking Germany to war. The emphasis in that story
had been that preachers and other leaders ‘deliberately
infected’ the general populace with their fear and hatred of
German power. This
psychosis also seemed ‘manic’ to the Dr.
h. The Germans before and
during World War II. The best statement on Nazi
Germany and its effect on Europe and the rest of the world that
Dr. Lorenzo ever came across was that of Dietrich Schwanitz, a
German writer, historian, and history professor, in his 1999
college textbook, Bildung,
or, in Spanish, La cultura,
p. 175 (in the Spanish translation). The following is the Dr.'s
translation from Spanish: "Beneath the smoking ruins remained
approximately seventy million dead. With an imprudence truly
stupefying, the political leaders had unleashed the bounds of
war itself, and with that a delirium of self-destruction.
History had known horrifying eras, like that of the plague, or
the Thirty Years' War, but never had it produced bloodbaths on
the scale of those thirty years between 1914 and 1945 (not
counting the years of peace between the two World Wars). It
remains an enigma why it had to be as it was: was it by any
chance inevitable? In any case, one thing is certain: this
collective insanity started in Germany, which turned into an
insane asylum in which a single crazy man made off with the
power and declared war on civilization itself. Once Pandora's
box was opened, there was nothing left to do but witness the
worsening of the situation." Some of Schwantiz' words clearly
describe a mass psychosis in the usual language of psychiatry:
'delirium'; 'collective insanity'; 'self-destruction'; and
'turned into an insane asylum in which a single crazy man made
off with the power''; other expressions are more poetic and less
medical, but add to the picture of 'mass psychosis': 'seventy
million dead'; 'an imprudence truly stupefying'; 'unleashed the
bounds of war itself'; 'bloodbath'; 'declared war on
civilization itself'; Pandora's box'. It is worth noting that
'self-destruction', or self-destructiveness, is always
considered, in the field of psychotherapy, a mental disorder
grave enough to probably warrant psychiatric hospitalization.
Schwanitz is therefore saying that his people, the German
people, were hospitalizably crazy en masse from 1914 to 1945. In
fact he does say explicitly: Germany was "an insane
asylum." The problem was, there were no doctors or nurses
treating the insane. So: it was an insane asylum without any
kind of treatment or treatment personnel. It's difficult to
imagine a clearer claim of mass psychosis than the phrase, "this
collective insanity started in Germany, which turned into an
insane asylum in which a single crazy man made off with the
power and declared war on civilization itself." It's exactly the
kind of thing you would expect to happen in an insane asylum
where there was no treatment or treatment personnel. And yet,
Schwanitz was not a psychiatrist. He was a writer and historian,
and a student of comparative culture. He made it his lifelong
task to compare the English and German cultures so as to
understand why the Americans came out on top after WWII, not his
own country, Germany; and his explanation, after many years of
study, was the famous Calvinism of the English and American
peoples, and the famous Lutheranism of the Germans. Calvinism
led to the English and American constitutions and their concern
for the human rights of their citizens; while Lutheranism led to
authoritarianism, he said. All of this can be quite well
understood by a careful reading of his explicit statements and
implicit references in Bildung,
combined with a reading of his biography online. Since his
textbook was aimed initially at German university students (in
Hamburg) he often used more careful language than we have used
in our summary above, but it's all there in Bildung. For more
information on his European history textbook, Bildung, see Afterthought 6 and its
footnote 14; and also
see 'Schwanitz' in the Bibliography.
"Bigamy
would not be considered illegal, until the male population
got re-established."
little boys of Santisima Cruz' Hand of God
neighborhood
seem proof that a re-population campaign is still under way
After thinking about all of this, and even
more examples, too many to list, the Dr. felt he was in pretty
good company believing that an entire nation or a significant
part of a nation’s populace could become psychotic all at once,
by contagion as it were. The
‘contagion’ aspect was what had helped Carl Jung to call it a
‘psychic epidemic’. But
the Dr. still worried he might be abusing his title and career
of ‘Psychiatrist’ by going a little bit beyond Jung and calling
it ‘mass psychosis’; so one day he checked the DSM-IV to see if
he had any leg to stand on, as far as the Psychiatry profession
was concerned; and he was amazed to discover all of the support
he needed, even though the subject had never been taught in any
of his training programs, and had never been discussed, to his
knowledge at least, by the profession in any way, except by Carl
Jung and the Jungians. (See Bibliography
under Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Fourth Edition.)
He found that most of the instances of group craziness or ‘mass psychosis’ he had heard of, fit the DSM-IV diagnoses of ‘Delusional Disorder’ (p. 296) and ‘Shared Psychotic Disorder’ (p. 305), when the two diagnoses were combined in the same group of people. And the DSM-IV even allowed the possibility that a mental illness they named ‘Shared Psychotic Disorder’ “...can occur among a larger number of individuals...” (see pg. 305, first paragraph, under 'Diagnostic Features'). When two people were psychotic together, the disorder was called by the French term, ‘Folie à Deux’ (craziness of two), said the DSM-IV. But the American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic and Statistical Manual provided no term for when a psychosis was shared by a larger number of people, even though it granted that such was possible; so the Dr. invented the term ‘Folie en masse’, where, in French, ‘Folie’ means ‘craziness’, and ‘en masse’ means ‘in a body’ or ‘as a whole’, or, in this case, ‘as a group’.
Since, according to his observations from studying history, as above, the ‘Delusional Disorder’ could have a ‘mood component’ of up or down, i.e., manic or depressed, it appeared as if there must be three basic kinds of ‘mass psychosis’: (1) mass depressed-and-paranoid Delusional disorder; (2) mass manic-and-grandiose Delusional disorder; or (3), the two kinds could be ‘mixed’ in the same group of people.
The progression of the Dr.’s conviction that
his people were currently
possessed en masse by some kind of psychosis began during the
years of the younger Bush’s presidency, after the bombing of the
twin towers on 9/11/01. His conviction grew and grew, and was
given special impetus after investigative news reporters showed,
and the Bush administration finally admitted, that none of the
suspected international crimes of which the Bush administration
had been paranoiacally (or prevaricatingly) accusing Iraq and
its leader, Saddam Hussein, had occurred. And it was another kick in
the groin when Bush Jr., just before leaving the White House,
confessed that his disgustingly brazen invasion of
After Barack Obama was elected president in
2008, and the fear of speaking out against the CRAZY Bush
administration was therefore gone, the Dr. experienced an
explosion of de-repressed anger which he voiced in a set of
emailed newsletters he called The Chockawhoppin Post,
most sent from
Although, to the Dr.'s credit, the Merriam-Webster's Unabridged Dictionary's
definition of "amok" is "possessed with a murderous or violently
uncontrollable frenzy <an amok soldier>;" which sounds
crazy enough.
And for more on 'run amok' try Hendrickson's Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase
Origins (see Bibliography),
p. 457: "In 1516 an Englishman translated an Italian work that
said of the Javanese, 'There are some of them (under the
influence of opium) who... go out into the streets and kill as
many people as they meet... These are called Amuco'. Within a century, to run amok was common in
English for 'running viciously mad and frenzied for blood'. The
word amok comes
ultimately from the Malay amoq,
meaning attacking desperately, or murdering in a state of
frenzy, and was originally applied to an animal in a state of
rage," which sounds close enough to Bush and his administration
with respect to Iraq, we think, to consider mj lorenzo more
right than right, once again.
Dr.
Lorenzo's ('world-famous') Mexican patio garden in November
2016: nopal and pink mandevilla
2. Dr. Lorenzo’s ‘re-finding his faith’ and the ‘logical and scientific’ steps he took to get there at age 71.
Some have argued that this last-minute
addition to 'a look at mj lorenzo's eleventh book Hooked on Cocaland' has
nothing to do with that subject; but the Dr. insisted it 'has everything to do
with everything',
and he wanted it included; so we have indulged him: with
apologies to our readers. But not really. For, in the end we
realized that since Protestant Christian Fundamentalists and
Evangelicals helped elect Donald Trump president in huge numbers
(40% of the electorate, they say), maybe the following piece of
writing of the Dr.'s will help us understand those rarely
appreciated people called 'Bible Belt' 'Evangelicals' and
thereby prepare us for the next four to eight years (or more) of
U.S. and world history.
Come to think of it, another argument for including it might be
to shed some light on the otherwise unexplained frequency of
allusions and direct references to the Bible in the present
work, which far exceed in frequency and number anything seen in
previous publications at this website, i.e., in our 'look at'
Dr. Lorenzo's The Remaking,
or his Exactly How Mrs.
Nixon's Legs Saved the White House Christmas Concert, or
either of his Mexican picture stories, The Tlahualiles of Sahuayo, or A Trip with Our Lady and Lord and
The Tin Can.
Also, it lines up with our original purpose, which was to keep
the public informed of the progress of Dr. Lorenzo's thinking
regarding his own past publications, and life to date, and his
thinking in general, while we simultaneously present our own
reactions and those of his worldwide readership, positive and
negative, to him and his writing and other creative works over
the years.
Dr. Lorenzo wrote the following Chockawhoppin Post in late 2014 and early 2015
after visiting his fundamentalist Christian Uncle Eddie for four
months in the summer of 2014. He said he had intended to send it
out to friends and family, but never did. Please note that the
Dr., in inimitable mj lorenzo style, makes his ultimate
point about Science and God NOT in the main text of the
Post but in THE NEXT TO LAST FOOTNOTE
(yuk!!!), footnote number
43, which is a MUST READ FOOTNOTE therefore, and a tucked away
tidbit of the type which B. C. Duvall mentions twice in his note
from B. C. Duvall
– how to
read this kind of writing – but Sammy Martinez
insists that footnote 43 should be read only in its proper
sequence, not jumped ahead to, as a freshman student of mj
lorenzo might be tempted to do. In other words: in ‘this kind of
writing’, a reader should (or ‘must’) read all of the
footnotes too,
a fortiori, and, in the present instance, at least, in proper
sequence.
The Chockawhoppin Post – no date
never mailed out – written late
2014 and early 2015
The Way to God
The intention of Moses, in beginning
his Book with the creation of the world, is, to render God, as
it were, visible to us in his works.
John
Calvin
Commentaries on the
First Book of Moses Called 'Genesis'
from Calvin’s
preface entitled ‘Argument'
(see Bibliography
under 'Calvin')
“We see, indeed, the world with our eyes, we tread the earth with our feet,
we touch innumerable kinds of God’s works with our hands,
we inhale a sweet and pleasant fragrance from herbs and flowers,
we enjoy boundless benefits...”
John Calvin, ‘Argument’
preface to his Commentary on Genesis
(see Bibliography
under 'Calvin')
new growth since the 1984 volcanic eruption killed every living thing for miles
including this spot: Mt. St.
Helens visitor center, Washington State
A couple of weeks before leaving Uncle Eddie and his elder daughter Marilyn in Seattle on August 22, I read the last chapter of Jolande Jacobi’s anthology[10] of the writings of the 20th century’s greatest sage, Carl Jung, her chapter entitled “The Way to God,” hoping to answer my question, Why am I even the least little bit drawn back to conservative Biblical Christianity? Especially living around Uncle Eddie’s imperfect righteousness and judging condemnation of so many people and things in this world.
Partly, of course, my renewed interest in Fundamentalist Christianity must be due, at least in part, to having promised Uncle, when I called him in January ’14, and he INSISTED on putting me up at little cost for as long as I wanted, that, in exchange, I would go to church with him; I was so touched by his heartwarming invitation to stay with him, I gave away the farm, or something like that.
I felt so uprooted by the mafia wars in
I visited Uncle Eddie last when I was 12, 59
years ago, and we were great friends then, spending several fun
summer weeks together at his home in
(And: my sudden need for affordable housing
this past year was due to my having been chased out of my
dirt-cheap rental house in Mexico by an uncommonly nasty variety
of the Mexican mafia and left homeless – more on this later.)
(Plus:
I was afraid I’d barely endure church, but I found I actually liked the preacher and enjoyed the church services, even though they were a little holy-roll-y[11] and I wasn’t raised that way and have always avoided such churches like The Plague. But the rock band in this church sounded like the Grateful Dead!!! Kool!!! And I was surprised I enjoyed Eddie’s weekly Saturday-morning Greek Bible class in his living room, and even the people in it. This, mind you, (darn it!), after years of ‘sanely’ hating the very idea of church and church people.
Am I senile then? I am 71. Well... in fact there’s still a lot I can’t stand about church and church people, quite sanely, I think, Uncle Eddie’s oracular condemnations being the prime example most recently, like his constantly proclaiming everything about government to be ‘corrupt’ and ‘evil’, etc., etc., as if he were perfect and looking down on the world from above like an archangel, when, in fact, in my humble opinion, with all due respect, of course, for I do love him, he may be a tiny bit corrupted by evil himself, the way he daily judges everyone else instead of daily confessing out loud his own impurfeckshuns.
“Judge not, lest ye be judged!” I admonished one day.
“Jesus said those words to the general public,” he answered, trying to dodge the charge; for he meant that Jesus had NOT said those words to his disciples, of whom Eddie considered himself an extension. (Therefore the Bible verse did not apply to him!)
Now: hardly anyone in this world can possibly know scripture by heart, verse by verse, as well as Uncle Eddie, who has been working at it for 92 years. But I thought I might have nailed him this time.
“He did not!” I came back. “He was talking to his disciples, one of whom you are claiming to be. I read it in Luke yesterday!”[12]
“Are you meaning to say,” I confronted him another day when he condemned local government mental health facilities and refused to send a young suicidal friend of his to one of those ‘corrupt and evil’ places, “that everyone I ever worked with from 1964 until 2008, 45 years in city, county, state and federal medical and mental health facilities all over Pennsylvania and Colorado, was ‘corrupt and evil’?”[13]
Now he tried to wiggle out of his mass
condemnation of ‘all government’. (‘All government
is hostile to God,’ he said one day.) “No, just here in very liberal
But I wouldn’t buy this wiggle-waffle either, because I knew his condemnation was much broader than that; and I told him that while there might be a few insincere rip-offs in Washington State police forces, mayor’s and state house positions and etc., I knew from much experience, firsthand and practically lifelong – experience the likes of which he could never claim to possess – that most government workers were trying their hardest to help people as much as possible. And I added, since he based every least little thing in his life on Scripture, “What about the Bible verse that says, ‘Thou shalt not speak evil of the ruler of thy people’?”
“Obama duh-duh-duh duhhh,” he said, mumbling something fundamentally debasing of our nation’s current president, as also is his daily habit. He thought that by ‘ruler’ I meant the U.S. President, when Paul the Apostle (in Acts 23:5) used that verse from Exodus to apologize for speaking evil of the High Priest (head rabbi), thereby teaching us, 2000 years later, that the term ‘ruler’ in Exodus 22:28 applied then and does now to all governing powers, religious and secular both. And that’s consistent with what John Calvin said, too, about respecting government authorities, whom he referred to as 'magistrates'.[14] Not that I have never in my life criticized a U.S. President (or Calvin); far from it; but Eddie DAILY thoroughly condemns and repudiates as ‘evil and corrupt’ EVERYTHING to do with government, the courts, judges, police, police chiefs, state legislature, mayor of Seattle (a ‘homosexual’, horrors! Sodom and Gomorrah!), U.S. President, Federal Reserve, U.S. banks, insurance companies, and so on, day in and day out, wearisomely, and with a superior and righteous, venomous and cold, yet inflammatory (for me) prophetic air that disgusts me and makes me feel ashamed to be related to such a crusty old kook in any way, let alone by being a FAVORITE NEPHEW!
Though I recognize I can be a crusty old kook too (but hopefully less often). (And less self-righteously and less arrogantly.) (MAYBE.) (Rotsa ruck.)
Anyway, here’s what I have RE-learned from Jung about myself and ‘the way to God’, much of it having been ‘learned’ years ago, only to become forgotten, apparently. (I first read most of this particular Jung anthology when I was a sophomore at Wrigley College, 1961-62, age 18, and then read tons of Jung’s other writings after that, down through the years, all of which touched frequently on religion, even though Jung intended his scholarship to always fall under the rubric of, ‘the science of... the investigation of the psyche’, i.e., psyche-ology, which most of shorten to psychology.)
1. Jung’s “The Way to God,” point one: Religions.
“Religions,” Carl Jung wrote and taught on a daily basis, career-long, “are psychotherapeutic systems in the truest sense of the word, and on the grandest scale. They express the whole range of the psychic problem in mighty images; they are the avowal and recognition of the soul [psyche], and at the same time the revelation of the soul’s [psyche’s] nature.”[15]
So, I guess that means, despite all my enlightened scientific DOUBT about Fundamentalist Christianity’s claims to miraculous-ness, and its claims to being the one and only religion and theology – currently – or ever – having been set in motion and authorized by the One and Only True God, and in spite of my dislike of Fundamentalist Christian judgmental hypocrites: the church service, the Greek Bible study, and the interesting conversations with Uncle Eddie about Scripture and Christian practice, have been ‘therapeutic’ for me in some way; apparently; ACCORDING TO JUNG. (!) (Whose every word – almost – I have always revered, not because, as someone once accused, I am gullible and passive, uncreative, and un-original, and can't think for myself and need someone else to tell me how to think; but because, after much study of others’ systems, I have felt he had the best psychological system for understanding and living life, no matter what your religion or philosophy.)
Carl Jung
grew up in a family of high-level Swiss scholars of Ancient and
Biblical Greek. His father and both grandfathers were eminent clerics
and scholars in
Jung went on to say, as if referring to the Freudians, that “...only the individual consciousness that has lost its connection [its relationship] with the psychic totality remains caught in the illusion that the soul [psyche] is a small circumscribed area, a fit subject for ‘scientific’ theorizing.”[17] The biggest key word in the phrase was ‘totality’. It was a theme he harped on in almost all his writing. And by ‘psychic totality’ he meant ‘conscious AND UNCONSCIOUS’; meaning this: that live, vibrant, engaged human beings, to be healthy and balanced physically and mentally, must maintain an ongoing living relationship with everything that is involved in being human, from God to gods to devils to universes to flowers to women and men and children and animals, clowns, work, play, excrement, sex, doctors, magicians, clairvoyants, heroes, paths of enlightenment, crazy whack-brained insane people, a hundred other important things, etc., and etc.; the point here being that the ‘psychic totality’ must include all sides of life, dark and light, unconscious and conscious, meaning religion too. These days we would call this ‘holistic’ thinking, ‘holistic’ healing. To be a ‘whole’ human being, you have to know ALL of life well, in other words, and especially know yourself well, not just the Bible, or not just sex, drugs and rock and roll, or not just your seventy hour work week for Boeing, or not just your addiction to sports TV, and so on.
Another key word in that statement was ‘illusion’. It took Jung a while to put it together but he was horrified when he finally realized that the Freudians had decided to consider all religion ‘nothing but’ an ‘illusion’ or ‘delusion’, and to cross it off the list of things important enough to be employed during psychotherapy in the healing of the psyche.
And then Jung dropped the bomb that left Freud’s psychoanalytic movement in nuclear dust, or should have, if only Freud’s materialistic worldview, by the time Jung broke with him by shouting things like this, had not crept so inextricably into the zeitgeist of the day, the early 20th century: “The loss of this great relationship [between the individual and ‘the psychic totality’, which only religion can reveal] is the prime evil of neurosis.”[18]
What? Neurosis results from being cut off
from religion? Everyone in Jung’s day thought, ‘How archaic can
you get in this modern, scientific age’? Did Carl Jung never
hear of the ‘Age of Enlightenment’, or the ‘Age of Reason’?
Freud himself was embarrassed to devastation by this bomb when
Jung dropped it, for the older man had thought the younger would
some day, when Papa Freud died, assume leadership of the
biology-based Freudian analytic movement. Freud saw that Jung
was a genius and a charismatic leader of men. But no. Instead,
Jung broke away and started his own school of psychotherapy. The
schism was wider than the
I am aware that the Buddhists at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, and other 'post-modern' groups as well, have dismissed even the words ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ as outdated and bugaboo in a 'post-modern' world; but my own feeling is that those two words and the meanings they convey are not irrelevant to most normal people today, but rather, simply incompatible with certain Buddhist and some other forms of post-modern thinking.
I’m going through the chapter, “The Way to God,” page by page, studying the lines and phrases I circled and underlined recently.
Here’s one I underlined heavily: “...the statements of religion are the most improbable of all and yet they persist for thousands of years.”[20]
To which Jung adds: “Their wholly unexpected vitality proves the existence of a sufficient cause which has so far eluded scientific investigation.”[21] And, having read so much Jung in my 71 years, I wrote my own understanding of this in the margin: the “sufficient cause” I’m sure he is referring to here is the emotional need, the instinctual, or very biological need of the psyche (as Jung means the word psyche – see above) to believe that one’s life is not meaningless. Another interpretation of ‘sufficient cause’ would be to see it as meaning ‘God’ or a ‘Higher Power’. Or it could mean a physical, biological, psychological instinct, maybe one of the ‘archetypes of the collective unconscious’ which Jung elaborated on forever, such as the ‘Self’, as Jung defined that term. 'Sufficient cause' could be all three of these possibilities at once, in fact: (1) the need for meaning, (2) the need for Higher Power, and (3) the need for a meaningful relationship with 'the Self'.
Okay, we all want ‘meaning’, meaning’s nice, but how could someone ‘super-educated’ (like me), after 71 years of science, enlightenment and socially acceptable doubt, be drawn to neo-Calvinist doctrinal insanity looking for ‘meaning’? Why not puff out the chest and say, okay, it’s brutal, but after 14 billion years of the universe’s post-Big-Bang hoopla and carryings on, the relative newcomer species, Homo sapiens – who found black holes and came to feel God-like for it – are really, nevertheless, no more significant than the dog species, or cucaracha; and understand less than those critters do about everything. Let’s face it like brave men and women! And make that our meaning!
I think it’s called ‘existentialist’
thinking, isn’t it? Wasn't it Kafka, an existentialist, who said
he felt like a cucaracha, a cockroach?
Well, frankly, I’ve tried thinking like that many times, and I HATE but HATE HATE HATE living that way.
Call it weakness, fantasy-fulfillment, whatever (despite the fact that the greatest sage of the 20th century calls it necessary biological human instinct); BUT: I actually like the Biblical argument that God has created and adopted the human race as a kind of pet project, and I can join the project, or not resist its crazy pull on me. And, I like Guru Garland’s argument that the ultimate human experience is to be alive on the planet when a Perfect Master like himself is alive on the planet, to hear about him, track him down and experience a tutelary love relationship with him, kind of like you might with a poetry teacher you fell in love with – Platonically, of course, but far more powerfully, since a poetry teacher will probably not reveal to you the meaning of life, while a Perfect Master probably will.
“The very absurdity and impossibility of [religious] statements...,” says Jung, “...[are] the real ground for belief, as was formulated most brilliantly in Tertullian’s ‘prorsus credible, quia ineptum’.”[22]
What’s that????
‘That’, friend, is Latin.
‘Absurdity and impossibility’ the ground for belief??? Did Jung think we were all crazy???
Tertullian, one of the very early ‘church
fathers’, was born near where
Horrors. What have I gotten myself into?
But such statements did not worry Jung, and ever since I discovered the sage Jung when I was 18, I’ve taken his every word very seriously, as I said, because I sensed from the beginning that, while he ever remained one of the most eminent scientists of modernity, he understood some kind of thing about me that hardly anyone else in post-modern scholarly circles did; and that particular thing has been my perpetual need to feel that my life had permanent, enduring, true and even holy meaning. From the beginning I could tell he understood the psychological, emotional and intellectual ins and outs of such a need, in someone like me.
And on that path of re-discovery Jung became
a chief guide.
And anyway, though I am bright, Jung’s IQ right from the very
first page of Psychological
Reflections seemed thrice mine. And the authority with
which he wrote and spoke was mesmerizing, and impossible to
ignore.
“The audacity of Tertullian’s argument,” he wrote one year before I was born, in 1942, “is undeniable, and so is its danger, but that does not detract from its psychological truth,” his emphasis being on the word ‘psychological’. And a couple of weeks ago in Jacobi’s Jung anthology I circled the words, ‘its psychological truth’. “An improbable opinion has to submit sooner or later to correction,” Jung continued. “But the statements of religion are the most improbable of all and yet they persist for thousands of years. Their wholly unexpected vitality proves the existence of a sufficient cause which has so far eluded scientific investigation.”[24]
Amen. There’s that ‘sufficient cause’ again. I re-quoted it to remind myself that some of us have a need to believe in something more than just our own navel-contemplating, finite, and scientifically proven, material existence.
Although: the Fox series, “Cosmos,” blew me away on what seemed at the time to be pure scientific theory and no religion at all. How are we to understand that??!! The gorgeous and awesome color images of space, the brilliance and courage of so many scientists who were scoffed or burnt at the stake because a hundred years or more ahead of their time, the interconnectedness of every molecule and force in the universe, the acuteness of the narrator’s perception and his passion for science and ultimate truth, all swept me off my feet and left me feeling small and meaningless. So maybe my weird attraction to Uncle Eddie and his Christian-Fundamentalist world, and even despite his exasperating judgmental attitude (which fortunately for everyone he has never applied directly to me), has been partly a reaction to the impact of that television series about the physical origins of the universe, life and man. Rarely has TV risen to such quality in my lifetime.
It was just about the time I saw the first
episode of that High Definition ‘Cosmos’ series on my son's big
new wide-screen TV that I called Uncle Eddie from
Uncle Eddie, whose father (my mother’s
father) was a genius mechanical engineer and inventor (of the
first internal combustion fire engine in Philadelphia, for
example, says Uncle, who got it straight from his parents; and
also of the first Maytag automatic washer, a fact which none of
us knew before Eddie casually mentioned it at a band picnic
recently), the same Uncle Eddie who taught high school science all over
the western United States, continuously decries and condemns the
materialistic scientific
attitude of the modern world. I got to
“There are seven origins that evolution can’t explain!” he’d go on. “Like the origin of life!”
“Shhh, I can’t hear it,” I’d say, again and again.
I place the word ‘watch’ TV in quotes because 92-year-old Uncle is legally blind and has to sit sideways a foot from the screen and look out the sides of his eyes to see any little bit at all. Macular degeneration destroys central vision, leaving only a little peripheral vision. So he actually missed all the stunning TV screen visuals of vast sparkling outer space, the starry multi-colored Milky Way spiral, the gleaming ‘galaxy-subcluster’ to which our Milky Way galaxy belongs, and so forth, many if not all of which were actual color photographs the camera was moving through ever so slowly as if we were in a spaceship.
Maybe if Eddie had been able to see it all on TV with good eyesight, he would have been as mesmerized and awestruck as I was. Because even John Calvin argued for that visual and sensual approach to believing that God existed, in his commentary on the book of Genesis. (The capital letters below are Calvin’s, not mine:)
Since the infinite wisdom of God is
displayed in the admirable structure of heaven and earth, it
is absolutely impossible to unfold THE HISTORY OF THE CREATION
OF THE WORLD in terms equal to its dignity. For while the
measure of our capacity is too contracted to comprehend things
of such magnitude, our tongue is equally incapable of giving a
full and substantial account of them.[25]
And, after 500 years of scientific knowledge and experience post-Calvin, we have not advanced much in these two areas, our capacity either to comprehend, or to describe in words, that stupefying ‘Creation’.
Although: a camera and some computer art might have gotten us a tiny bit closer, maybe.
But on second thought, let’s read more of
what Calvin said about this, just to wake ourselves up to what a
brilliant start the
absolutely necessary reform of the Roman church was
given by this man’s wonderful mind and heart and ability to write.
After all, we are here in neo-Calvinist
As he, however, deserves praise, who,
with modesty and reverence, applies himself to the
consideration of the works of God, although he attain less
than might be wished, so, if in this kind of employment, I
endeavour to assist others according to the ability given to
me, I trust that my service will be not less approved by pious
men than accepted by God.[26]
In other words, if God can approve of his
writing, hopefully God's creatures can do as much.
He wrote this in his ‘Argument’, a kind of preface to his
commentary on Genesis (which he addressed and dedicated to the
10-year-old future King Henry IV of France, the
then-Calvinist-Protestant-Huguenot, Henry of
And now, back to his ‘looking-at-Creation’ approach to developing a belief in God:
I have chosen to premise this...
[book of commentary on Genesis], for the sake not only of
excusing myself, but of admonishing my readers, that if they
sincerely wish to profit with me in meditating on the works of
God, they must bring with them a sober, docile, mild, and
humble spirit. We see, indeed, the world with our eyes, we
tread the earth with our feet, we touch innumerable kinds of
God’s works with our hands, we inhale a sweet and pleasant
fragrance from herbs and flowers, we enjoy boundless benefits;
but in those very things of which we attain some knowledge,
there dwells such an immensity of divine power, goodness, and
wisdom, as absorbs all our senses.[27]
Isn’t that lovely prose? Each thought is precious; precise; and elegantly stated. And clear! And sensuous almost to being Dionysian! He loved the good and simple God-given things of the earth! Heaven help him and us! (‘THE theologian’, as even his Roman Catholic contemporaries called Calvin, actually enjoyed drinking red French wine every evening, something else that confounds nay-saying T-totaler Uncle, who considers wine, always and everywhere, a Temptation of the Devil Himself.)
Therefore, let men be satisfied if
they obtain only a moderate taste of them [i.e., the
‘innumerable kinds of God’s works’ that we ‘see’, ‘tread’,
‘touch’, ‘smell’, and benefit from – including wine] suited to
their capacity. And it becomes us so to press towards this
mark during our whole life, that (even in extreme old age [and
Calvin was approaching death at the moment he wrote this]) we
shall not repent of the progress we have made, if only we have
advanced ever so little in our course.[28]
Supposedly, Fundamentalist Protestant American Christianity derives mostly from strict Calvinism and Calvin, yet the Fundamentalists have lost touch with their own founder, apparently. They are all so cocky sure they know exactly how Creation was created, six days, animals now, birds later, etc. Light and dark, earth and heavens and firmament, all by some literal formula laid down by Moses in Genesis, all showing their pathetic literalness and lack of imagination. And here is the founder of their own kind of Protestantism, telling his Geneva congregation and all congregations of the future: if you think you are so smart as to really grasp and understand how the world was created by having read Genesis, forget it, Bud! It’s far beyond anything even Moses could have dreamt up in his grandest God-given visions or put into words. That’s what I hear Calvin saying.
And it’s actually one of the nicer ways to convince yourself that God exists, if you ask me.
When I attempted for the first time in my life to actually read Calvin’s Institutes (his famous thick guidebook for Christian living based on his super-intelligent, well reasoned and practical understanding of Scripture) one day (right before moving to Seattle), waiting in the car for my son to buy out the biggest comic book store in the world (in Denver) and charge it to my credit card, I was shocked that ‘The Theologian’ made no attempt to PROVE – theologically or philosophically – the existence of God, like any other self-respecting major thinker of his age would have done, but rather kayaked right around that whirlpool and started his Institutes right smack dab in the midstream of our relationship with the Creator, our ‘God’, as if it were simply assumed that such a ‘Creator’ existed and such a relationship was not only possible but already happening. As, indeed, all of this was assumed: by Calvin, when he wrote his Institutes; since he was writing to his congregation of known believers, and assumed they already believed.
It turned me off that anyone so brilliant would assume his reader, namely me, already believed in the existence of God. But now I am discovering that in his later years he did not assume such, but instead deigned to address our possible doubts about God’s existence. In this commentary on Genesis (published in French during the last year of his life) he sort of attempted to convince us that God existed by reminding us to ‘look’ at his creation and asking us to ‘meditate’ on that amazing creation and what kind of someone or something might have produced it.
You might protest that his thinking was ‘circular’ or ‘unscientific’, or ‘putting the cart before the horse’. How can we, born in an age of scientific reasoning, presume the existence of God?
But in the 1970s when I was following an Indian guru and learning his meditation, even Guru Garland used such a ‘circular’ argument when trying to transport his followers to holier and truer realms. I have it in print. And his religious background was Hinduism-derived, not Christian. All of his discourses are preserved in various forms, if anyone doubts that an Indian guru would use the same argument as John Calvin. So this trick of convincing people that God exists by drawing their attention to ‘his creation’, must have been resorted to in many cultures and civilizations down through human history.
In Jungian terms, that fact would constitute another kind of ‘proof’ that universal planet-wide human psychology, by demanding an explanation for Creation, including the existence of our own incredible selves, points to the likely existence of a Creator.
In fact, now that I remember, it is exactly how I was raised by two Fundamentalist Christians who were dyed Calvinist in the wool: I was taught to appreciate God on a daily basis, by appreciating the finer qualities of his creation. On our trips west or to Canada or Florida, or even just at home looking at an encyclopedia or cutting roses in the back yard, my mother would say to me, a little boy, “Isn’t God’s creation beautiful, Jacky? Isn’t it amazing that he made these wonderful beautiful marvelous things just for us, just because he loves us?”
And, appreciative I remain to this day. This is why I find it so upsetting to hear Christians in my own family, like Uncle, deriding gifts from God. Government health insurance, for example, he sees along with so many other things of this world as nothing but a thing ‘evil’ and ‘corrupt’ and therefore beneath a Christian’s God-given dignity to elevate by using. It’s preferable – by some weird self-destructive, or ‘ascetic’[29] (might be a better term) ‘Christian’ ‘reasoning’ – to remain without free health insurance, so that when Eddie or Marilyn DO rack up a hospital bill of $100,000 they can take their great need to the rest of the church congregation for emergency handouts and watch God work a miracle of impoverishing the entire flock because of Uncle’s stiff-necked short-sightedness in refusing to sign up for free Medicaid insurance, which was a gift from God in the first place, and one which he refused to see as such. (Flash: Medicaid is now free in many states, to those who qualify due to lack of income resource, as Eddie and Marilyn would; and yet they refuse to dirty themselves by signing up for anything so tainted, so ‘evil’ and ‘corrupt’, because produced by ‘evil and corrupt’ ‘hostile-to-God’ government.)
Why does the Law, received directly from God
by Moses on Mt. Sinai, COMMAND over and over again, "TAKE CARE
OF YOUR WIDOWS AND ORPHANS!"???
Excuse the tirade.
Anyway, so now, 500 years after Calvin, we are discovering that,
when THE theologian did get down to the nitty gritty of
interpreting Genesis and presenting his reactions to his
congregation in Geneva (for such was the origin of most of his
‘Commentaries’ on scripture – they were presented live to
serious educated students of scripture in mid-sixteenth century
Geneva, right in or next to St. Peter’s church, as serialized
expositions, sermons or classes, in the earliest days of the
Roman church ‘Reform’ movement, known since as ‘The
Reformation’), John Calvin actually deigned to deal with our
possible doubts about the existence of such a phenomenal
phenomenon as a Creator-God, as if we were human and fallible
(and a little lost) after all, and might have harbored some
doubts. And to convince us, he used the mind-bogglingly
stupendous ‘Creation’ as depicted by ‘Cosmos’, and all of the
rest of God’s gifts to us, his creatures.
That approach has worked on me, most of my life, maybe because my mother got me started off on that foot.
But as for Eddie, even though my mother was
his big sister (12 years older) and he too has always loved her
very much, and even though she always pampered and educated him
with her big-sis love, there may be no hope that he’ll ever see
Creation as shown in the beautiful ‘Cosmos’ programs as possibly
‘proving’, or helping to prove, God’s existence.
He rejects it in its entirety because it doesn't come right out
and say that the Universe was created by God in six days six
thousand years ago.
Having been able to see with perfect eyesight
probably would not have increased Uncle Eddie’s awe or wonder
because the whole series of the ‘Cosmos’ programs sounded to him
as if based on the materialistic (i.e., God-less) assumptions of
modern science: such as the one that the human species, Homo
sapiens, far from being created miraculously in one day, as
Moses put it in Genesis, had evolved through
apes from single cell bacteria or some such thing, over millions
or billions of years; and on the
assumption that the whole stretch of ‘creation’ from the Big
Bang to now was almost fourteen
billion years total; whereas Eddie clings literally to
those constraining words of the first few verses of Genesis that
‘the evening and the morning were the first day’, and that all
of the creating of
creation from ‘the heavens and the earth’ to the fishies
of the wine-dark sea took place in SIX, you heard me, SIX short
days of a seven-day week; apparently so that God, who everyone
agrees was omnipotent by definition, meaning TIRELESSLY,
UNCEASINGLY AND INDEFATIGABLY ALL-POWERFUL, could nevertheless
‘REST’ because worn out, presumably, from such a massive ass
job, and worship (himself?) on the seventh and holy extra REST
day of the week!!@X!XX%$*###! Or at least pause to absorb
properly everybody else's worshipping of him. Or her.
!!!$%&*###()+!
Then Marilyn (Eddie’s right-hand help since
her birth, practically, because her mother died) and Marie Noel,
a French madamoiselle in the Greek Bible class, were kind enough
to invite me on a day trip to Mt. St. Helens (which suffered
volcanic eruption on May 18, 1980), mainly to visit the
‘Creation Museum’, created by Creationists, where the presenters
argued, using photos of the volcanic eruption, that the
cataclysm of the eruption left in just a few hours yards-thick layers of
sediment the likes of which scientists have been claiming for
two centuries would have taken millions or billions of
years to be laid down by protracted geologic forces;
and argued many other such contemporary-science-bashing
positions including one against global warming (‘a conspiracy of
anti-Bible scientists whose brains and souls have been
successfully conquered and dominated by the Devil’). In other
words, if a VOLCANO could produce in one day yards-deep layers
of earth that LOOKED millions of years in the making, SO COULD
GOD! AND IF YOU DOUBTED IT, YOU WERE A DEVIL'S ADVOCATE.
“...if they sincerely wish to profit with me in meditating on the works of God,
they must bring with them a sober, docile, mild, and humble spirit.”
John Calvin, preface to Commentary on Genesis
Mt. St. Helens was a fairly symmetrical volcanic cone shape,
before a 1984
volcanic eruption blew out this whole side of the top of the
cone
I thought about trying to convince my uncle that he should just poetically – or figuratively – stretch the figurative meaning of the words in Genesis, ‘the evening and the morning were the first day’, into two billion years or thereabouts, until I remembered he would have nothing of it. He is an angrily and adamantly convinced believer in creation in six 24-hour days, no more no less, and also in the Victorian, Northern Irish, Anglican Bishop Ushher’s chronology which condensed all universal history after those six days of creation into six thousand, you heard it, 6000 short years total, lice, mice, Neanderthals, early and late Stone Age man, BIG BANG and all, right up to today. And if I tried to convince him not to be so darn literal, it would only add weight to Uncle’s suspicion that I was of the Devil. (Which was not a good idea when the rent he charged was so low, and he treated me so kindly and generously and made me feel like one of the family.)
(And now that the ‘evil and corrupt’ Roman Catholic Pope Francis himself has endorsed the evolutionary view of ‘creation’, as of October 2014, I would be seen in worse company yet.)
Not one iota of Hebrew or Greek Scripture may be 'altered', is Uncle Eddie’s position.
Although he has been quite wily in translating and interpreting Scripture in his own brilliant way, to see Jesus as simply the Messiah, as promised, and not as part of a ‘triune’ Trinitarian God, an idea which most Christians for 1700 years have considered heretical:
“When?” he asks, “did Jesus ever call himself ‘God’ in the Gospels? Nowhere. Never. On the contrary, he always referred to God as ‘my Father’; and he explained that he only said what ‘my Father’ told him to say.” To this point that Jesus was not God, but rather the Messiah, he can quote Joseph Ratzinger himself (who wrote on the point long before he became the recently-resigned Pope Benedict) and can cite dozens of Bible verses by heart, Old Testament and New, all with a 92-year-old brain, complete with chapter and verse and a clean comprehension of what he considers erroneous translations and evil and corrupt chicanery regarding translations down through the ages, all of which, despite blindness, he has stored in a memory vault against the day when someone would ask him who Jesus really was. “So let us never admire the less than completely Christianized poly-theistic pagans of the early church who wanted God to be three gods in one,” says Eddie, “accustomed as they were to multiple deities, being as they were ‘poly-theistic pagans’ (and thus ‘corrupt’ and ‘evil’).”[30]
That’s WHY – he says – misguided doctrinaires of the early church, during the first few centuries after Christ, forced the doctrine of the ‘Trinity’ onto Scripture by a method and with a result which he calls “Twisture, not Scripture:” BECAUSE: they were ‘corrupt and evil’ ‘pagan’ ‘polytheists’.
He is winsome in his own outrageous way.
But the lesson I get from it all is this: if you want to believe in the existence of God, but find it difficult because of modern science, don’t just listen to Fundamentalist Christians. Also read Calvin’s introduction to his Commentary on Genesis, or watch ‘Cosmos’; or look at a picture of your granddaughter.
Blimey!!!
the
Dr.’s granddaughter Denver Zoo
June 2016
2. Jung’s “The Way to God,” point 2: Neo-Calvinism.
And then come the paragraphs in the Jung anthology which support my famous, or should I say infamous and annoying (to some), argument of the last few years in all or most of my books,[31] Mexican picture stories,[32] and past Chockawhoppin Post articles, my persistent haranguing (you might call it) insistence that the worldview of the USA always has been and still remains ‘essentially Calvinist-Christian or ever-so-slightly modified Calvinist-Christian’ and that they who fail to recognize this simple fact of history are doomed to commit grave errors of judgment in their lifetime.
“A collective attitude is equivalent to a religion,” said C. G. Jung. “We entirely forget that the religion of the last two thousand years is a psychological attitude, a definite form and manner of adaptation to the world without and within, that lays down a definite cultural pattern and creates an atmosphere which remains wholly uninfluenced by any intellectual denials.”[33] By ‘intellectual denials’ he means our attempts to convince ourselves that we have become so enlightened by science and ‘Reason’ that we no longer endorse and are no longer affected by any of the ‘articles of faith’ our Christian or Jewish ancestors honored: “...our age is afflicted with a blindness that has no parallel. We think we have only to declare an accepted article of faith incorrect and invalid, and we shall be psychologically [emphasis on ‘psychologically’] rid of all the traditional effects of Christianity or Judaism.”[34]
I think I ran into this phenomenon at least once in my life.
When we attempted to re-publish my book, The Remaking,[35]
in 'look-at' format, as a hand-holdable book, through a New York
City literary agent in 2006-8, we came away with the impression
that we had broken a sacred rule of the New York high arts
crowd, namely, never to write about religion as if it were
actually an important subject worthy of consideration by any of
the New York fine arts crowd, not even if you were writing very
serious literature. Such was taboo because socially and
artistically gauche, and this was what Jung was referring to,
the modern and post-modern attitude that we are now
‘enlightened’ by scientific and rational knowledge, and no
longer need the religions which gave birth to our civilization,
our way of life and worldview, or any discussion of those
religions, pro or con. When in fact, au contraire, mon frere, the real
error, as Jung put it, was to think that we would be happier
without any such religions than with them.[36]
Jung saw this as a kind of mass, population-wide, psychic
suicide, or, as in one of his quotes above, the ‘worst part’ of
MOST ‘cases of neurosis’, i.e., messed up minds and hearts and
lives.
In other words, and in short: to deny or forget that the U.S.
American worldview is still essentially
Calvinist-Protestant Christian, as it has been since day one, is
dangerous to the survival and health of the entire American
people and the things they believe in.
Does that sound grave
enough??!!
I was going to go through the whole chapter of Jacobi’s Jung anthology on the subject of “The Way to God,” but now I’ve used up twelve Microsoft Word pages on just the first few paragraphs, and this issue of The Chockawhoppin Post is already whopper-sized and chock fool I mean full.
There remain many more things I have ‘re-learned’ from reading again the chapter (after 53 years) – or have re-remembered – about my idiotic attraction to conservative Fundamentalist, Biblical Christianity; but the main thing is that I am an idiot.
But then: this was exactly what Uncle Eddie had been teaching in his Saturday morning Greek Bible class. In fact, sometimes I thought he was aiming his subject matter at me in particular, it all fit my situation so neatly.
The first or second week I was in
Paul, a Jew himself, Yeshiva-educated in
It is written [Isaiah 29:14]:
I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
And the prudence of the prudent will I reject.
For consider, what have the philosopher, the writer and the critic of this world to show for all their wisdom? Has not God made the wisdom of this world look foolish? For it was after the world in its wisdom had failed to know God, that he in his wisdom chose to save all who would believe by the “simple-mindedness” of the gospel message. For the Jews ask for miraculous proofs and the Greeks an intellectual panacea, but all we preach is Christ [meaning 'Messiah'] crucified – a stumbling-block to the Jews and sheer nonsense to the gentiles, but for those who are called, whether Jews or Greeks, Christ [Messiah] the power of God and wisdom of God. And this is really only natural, for God’s “foolishness” is wiser than men, and his “weakness” is stronger than men.
I Corinthians 1:19-25
(J. B. Phillips’ translation from the Greek)
But this just sounds like Jung again, who admitted (in some of the quotes above) that ‘preaching Christ crucified’ and all other religious hocus-pocus struck the modern mind as “foolishness.” And foolish is how I feel, especially after everything I said about poor Uncle. And yet...
So...... that’s how things were going
recently in
But then my daughter and I began talking
about sharing an apartment in
But what was I going to do without Uncle Eddie’s massive house-filling resource library; his Josephus; or his Ricker Berry Interlinear Greek-English New Testament (which translates Greek to English, word for word on the page, right between the lines of the original Greek Scripture); or his 1800-page, six-inch thick mega-tome, the 1897 Liddell and Scott Greek-English Lexicon, which is THE ultimate Greek-English dictionary in the world because it translates in fine print every possible meaning of every ancient Greek word, adding lengthy examples of its use within actual Greek phrases and sentences, starting with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (chapter and verse), and going through every century of that particular word’s changes in Greek usage and writing, all the way through scores and scores of Greek writers, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, etc., etc., all the way down to New Testament times, even to the four Gospels, Luke’s Acts, Paul’s epistles, and Philo of Alexandria and Josephus (Jewish contemporaries of Jesus), to Plutarch and Galen and even later (early centuries AD), spelling out examples of their using the word in sentences and phrases by the dozen in every epoch of ancient Greek history; and what would I do without Eddie’s Calvin’s Commentaries on Genesis, or his John Calvin on God and Political Duty, or Calvinist William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, or the Foundation for American Christian Education’s great big red hardback two-volume The Christian History of the Constitution of the United States of America, etc., etc., all of which were either expensive or hard to find, especially the incredible Greek lexicon, and all of which I was studying during my four months in Seattle in order to understand my beloved Uncle Eddie’s conservative Fundamentalist Protestant Christian worldview, the weltanschauung within which I was raised consciously, and the one within which most Americans have been raised un-consciously, even if Catholic, Jew or Muslim. What was I going to do?
I had
decided I needed a breather from Fundamentalist naysaying and
had packed my car, all the while bemoaning aloud the loss of
all of these resource books and Uncle Eddie’s whole
house-filling library. Whereupon blind Eddie asked Marilyn to
lead him to the basement and – between his memory and her
eyesight – they found me a deluxe extra copy of Ricker Berry
and a ‘Vine’s’
reference text on Greek and Hebrew word usage I’d never seen
in his house before, the 750-page Vine’s Complete
Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words.
There were hundreds of books in his library, maybe thousands,
since I never got to explore the basement. Even the day I
arrived in late April, in order to find room on the property
for me, they were about to throw out (or take to the used book
store) a whole box of books which included J. Gresham Machen’s
What is Faith (!)
and a handbook summarizing, one by one, the best-known 20th
century Neo-Orthodox theologians (two books which I
immediately claimed), just because they suddenly felt they had
no room for them and me both.
“Would
you like the Greek Lexicon?” he asked me, back in the living
room now.
“Oh no!” I protested, and I meant it sincerely. “Your Greek students would be upset with both of us if you gave that away. You need that here for your own research. I thought you might have an extra Ricker Berry,” I said. (Because he had at least six or eight copies of Josephus, for example; he was a used-book-store fanatic; every Sunday after church we had to stop at the Religion section of Second Hand Books at the South Center Mall, partly to have extra resource texts around, to hand out to his various young protégés when they came by once a year or so, having developed to a new stage in their understanding, where a new book might benefit them.) “But I wasn’t dreaming for a second of your giving away that incredible Greek Lexicon.”
But blind and knowing his living room as he did, after 40 years in it, he shuffled straight to the shelf and pulled it out. “I have enough other lexicons, I’m giving it to you,” he said, all 1800 pages of one of the most stupendiferous books ever produced by the bumbling human spirit, the amalgamation and culmination of generation after generation of famously expert 17th, 18th and 19th-century European scholars (German, French and English) of the ancient Greek tongue, all of it mixed in with his out loud apologies for not being a more fun hangout pal and for badgering me too much with his theological positions, pressure which had come from his wish, he explained, after wasting most of his life and finally putting it all back together, to educate me, whom he loved, he said, as completely as possible before he (or I) kicked the bucket. I was wiping my eyes as he opened the ten-pound lexicon and pulled out pieces of whole 8½X11 paper typewritten pages he’d stuck here and there over many years, then formally placed that big thick tome on the wobbling desk in front of me, the kind of tall, wide and dense old fancily-covered rare antique book you’d find in the dark multi-tiered historical library in Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Hospital in colonial Philadelphia, for example, the colonial building where I did my first research in psychiatry in 1966; whose books are so extremely valuable that you can’t walk in there off the street any more, like you could in 1966, without suffering an unwinnable argument with a hospital security guard. Then he sent Marilyn digging in file drawers behind a dining room table literally stacked to the ceiling with books and massive page-magnifiers for the blind and boxes of papers, looking for his own three famous handouts, short papers he had printed up on the subject of Bible mis-translations, and threw those in for good measure. “The Bible,” he said in his usual flat tone, the kind of near-drone, I assume, that comes from being very ancient and unable to see anything around you, “is our history book, but they won’t teach it in the corrupt and evil public schools. In Genesis chapters 12, 15, 18 and 22 God made four covenants with Abraham. That’s World History, The Historical Plan for the Ages, but they won’t teach it in the schools.” And all of this last-minute edification added on top of the sleeping bag they bequeathed me, the same one they lent me when we went camping in Oregon, “It could save your life if your car breaks down and it’s cold,” and on top of the dumbbells, the nice big ice chest, and the piles of food, including one of Marilyn’s famous baked desserts.
“You can
come back,” they said from the front steps as I packed the
books in the car, relieving me of fear I’d worn out a welcome
by losing my infamous temper too many times on car trips over
what I labeled Uncle’s ‘endless negativity and condemnation of
everyone and everything in this wonderful world’. I’d been
hinting that my leaving didn’t have to mean the end of our
friendship and I might come back some day, but for several
days straight they never bit the bait. They had never reacted
to the subject of my possibly coming back, neither one of
them. Now suddenly they invited me back as if they’d never
heard the subject raised before.[43]
Meanwhile, according to my chief helper in Mexico, Judith, things are too dangerous in the state of Michoacán, as of yet, to get my things out of the house in Morelia and bring them back to the states, important ‘things’ including most of my valuable library of books and four tall filing cabinets of notes and pictures needed by Sammy Martinez for re-editing and re-publishing my many books.
Despite that, however, expect to
find a third book of mine being 'looked at' on the B. C. Duvall
website by late this year or early next, Hooked on Cocaland,
which will tell the befuddled tale of my first trip to Colombia
in 1994, just as I was recovering from maybe the worst
psychiatric episode of my long and variedly crazy life, a
two-year, world-hating, psychotic depression (partly
precipitated by an addiction to IV cocaine) that almost did me
in. Mj lorenzo fans have liked it ever since it was first
published in 1998, since it is mj at his worst, meaning best; I
mean best, meaning worst.
But the new version is a much more thorough and telling overview
of the event than the original. [44]
mj lorenzo, spring, 2015
"Some have argued
that this addition to 'a look at mj lorenzo's eleventh book Hooked on Cocaland'
has nothing to do with that subject;
but the Dr. insisted it 'has everything to do with
everything'."
watching the camino
from Robbie's mother's porch
the main thoroughfare through the Los Almendros (Almond Trees) neighborhood
town of Santisima
Cruz, state of Sucre, country of Colombia, South America
Western Hemisphere
Earth
Solar System of the Star called 'Sun'
Milky Way Galaxy
'Local Group' Galaxy Subcluster
Virgo Supercluster
The Known Universe
[1] For an even more basic discussion of the matter of ‘mass psychosis’ at the present website, see Question 7 of Chapter 23 ("And Yet Another Kind of Propundity's...") in B. C. Duvall’s a look at mj lorenzo's fourth book Exactly How Mrs. Nixon's Legs Saved the White House Christmas Concert.
[2] This was the Jung quotation on the frontispiece of the present work: “It is my conviction that the investigation of the psyche is the science of the future. Psychology is the youngest of the sciences and is only at the beginning of its development. It is, however, the science we need most. Indeed, it is becoming ever more obvious that it is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes. The supreme danger which threatens individuals as well as whole nations is a psychic danger.” For the location of the original statement by Jung see the Frontispiece quotation and its footnote 3. But: “the very first book of Jung’s writing mj lorenzo ever read,” an anthology of Jung’s writings put together by Jolande Jacobi, was where he first came across the idea “already on page 14.” See footnote 9 below.
[3] C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (1944). This quote may be found in Jung’s Collected Works, Vol. 12 (1953/1968), paragraph 562; but the Dr. first came across it on page 14 of the Jacobi anthology cited in footnote 9.
[4] Bruce Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic, A History of the Huron People to 1660 (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1976/1987), mostly the second volume, i.e., from p. 455 to end.
[5] Op. cit. For just one small piece of the complex multi-year picture, i.e., of the paranoid Huron suspicions that the Jesuits and their Huron tribal converts were sorcerers intent on harming the tribe by magic, see the short chapter “Sullen Aftermath” p 598ff. In actuality the mass tribal paranoia came and went in waves over a number of years and so is outlined intermittently over many hundreds of Trigger’s later pages.
[6] Will Durant, Caesar and Christ, Vol. 3 of his The Story of Civilization (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1944/1972), p. 281. The Tacitus quote is from his Annals, Vol. xv, p. 44 (Loeb Library).
[7] James Reston, Jr.,
Dogs of God:
[8] Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm, Vol. 1 of his The Second World War (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), p, 9.
[9] The editors of a look at the life and creative artifacts of mj lorenzo, in conjunction with B. C. Duvall and the present website, hope to publish in the near future ‘a look at’ Dr. Lorenzo’s Chockawhoppin Post from the era mentioned, i.e., 2009 and on.
[10] C. G. Jung, Psychological Reflections, A New Anthology of His Writings 1905-1961, ed. by Jolande Jacobi & R.F.C. Hull (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953, 1970).
[11] The ‘holy-roll-y’ congregation at Uncle's church, meaning: not only Fundamentalist (strict Calvinist or near-Calvinist) in doctrine, but also believing in and still practicing the nine ‘gifts of the spirit’ outlined by Paul in I Corinthians 12, ‘gifts’ which most churches these days, as Eddie says, think mistakenly were meant to be practiced only in ‘ancient Apostolic times’: ‘gifts’ which include: faith healing; miracles (given by God, as Eddie says, when needed for ministry and when one is ‘filled by the Holy Spirit’); speaking in ‘tongues’ (unknown languages); interpretation of same; prophesying (preaching in a way that is completely filled by the Holy Spirit); the recognition and casting out of demons; the psychic recognition of another person’s deepest secrets (or, as Eddie puts it, “God gives you some knowledge about someone or something that no one knows, not even you; as, for example, when Jesus met ‘the woman at the well’, a total stranger, and told her how many ‘husbands’ she had had).
OK, but that doesn’t help one to picture the church service, which is two hours and often longer:
The first hour is pure music of
praise, droning, meditative songs all written last week or
last year, which few people have ever heard before, but
which the congregation (which owns no church and therefore
meets in the Fife,
OK, picture this. And try to hear it. The typical or usual Sunday band, consisting of smooth electronic keyboard, two or three electric guitars (one played by the preacher), an awesome wailing blues harp, and three women singing along with two or three men, all in different parts, sounds like a very smooth rock group. Imagine the sound of the Grateful Dead singing the old gospel number as they do, ever so sweetly (for them), “Lay down my dear brothers, Lay down and take your rest. O wontcha lay your head upon your Savior’s breast. I love you. But Jesus loves you the best.....” (which the Dead sometimes did and still do sing, usually at the very end of a concert), with several female voices added, all coming over the PA system, accompanied by the rest of the congregation who mostly are standing and waving their arms gently. That much looks and sounds almost exactly like a Grateful Dead concert. But now add the ‘holy-roll-y’, the voices of the people in the ‘congregation’, all singing whatever part they want, ululating prettily, inventing counter-melodies, adding words that are inspired by the Holy Spirit, we hope, singing and speaking in tongues, but all combined in a melodious flow that sounds like a big sound-ocean moving in waves, now softer, now louder, now a tiny splash, now a big splash, etc.
[12] Luke 6:37. All New Testament quotes in this issue of The Chockawhoppin Post are from J. B Phillips’ translation from Greek, The New Testament in Modern English for Schools (London/Glasgow: Bles/Collins, 1959, 1960).
[13] I began the
‘government’ component of my medical career right on the
first day of medical school, since the multiple-loan and
scholarship-work program Penn designed for me had me working
at the Philadelphia Veterans Hospital drawing blood and
doing lab tests, in exchange for which they gave me free
room and board, specifically a bed in a dorm with other med
students on the top floor of the (Federally-funded) Veterans
Administration hospital, and three free meals a day in the
VA hospital cafeteria. And I then began the ‘government’
part of my psychiatry career during medical school two years
later, in 1966, doing psychiatry research in the
[14] See, for instance, the book, John Calvin on God and Political Duty, the introduction to which saves one the effort of wading through the whole book, since it neatly summarizes the book’s argument. Basically Calvin’s position on government, derived from his astute and sweeping understanding of Scripture, one of the best in history, is that we should respect government authority and only balk at it or defy it if it demands we compromise our faith and religious practice in some way. Of course, his way of saying this was far more beautiful, lovely and inspiring than my curt synopsis here.
[15] Jung, Psychological Reflections, quoted by the editor Jacobi on page 336 of the anthology, who drew it from Jung’s “The State of Psychotherapy Today,” a lecture he delivered (or perhaps an article he wrote; or both) in 1934. It may be found today in C. G Jung’s Collected Works, Vol. 10, Civilization in Transition (1964/1970), paragraph 367.
[16] To get a sense of what a large and mysterious, even ‘numinous’ (holy-feeling), picture Jung painted of the human ‘psyche’, check some of these quotes from the same Jung anthology (Psychological Reflections, pages 3-5): “Every science is a function of the psyche, and all knowledge is rooted in it. The psyche is the greatest of all cosmic wonders.” Or: “The psyche is part of the inmost mystery of life, and it has its own peculiar structure and form like every other organism....” And: “The psyche consists essentially of images. It is a series of images in the truest sense... a structure that is throughout full of meaning and purpose; it is a ‘picturing’ of vital activities.” And finally, “There is no difference in principle between organic and psychic formations. As a plant produces its flowers, so the psyche creates its symbols.” Jung, op. cit. – Once you get into the real nitty-gritty of Jung’s thinking you discover that he even felt that the clinical practice of psychiatry had shown that there was an aspect of the psyche which represented, or contained, or was in most intimate contact with what we call ‘God’, ‘Higher Power’, and/or ‘Higher Self’, depending on how you chose to word that idea. Since he attempted to avoid religious disputes so as to keep his psychology scientifically sound and universal, and therefore useful to patients and practitioners of all faiths, he had a scientific name for it and called that part of the total psyche the ‘Self’.
[17] See footnote 15 above.
[18] Ibid.
[20] Jung, op. cit., page 336. This quote Jacobi drew from “Transformation Symbolism in the Mass,” apparently a lecture or series of lectures by Jung, presumably at an annual Eranos conference in 1941 or 1942. It may be found today in Jung’s Collected Works, Vol. 11, Psychology and Religion: West and East (1958/1969), paragraph 379.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Ibid., footnote.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Calvin, John, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses Called Genesis, translated [into English] from the original Latin and compared with the French edition by The Reverend John King (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1948). All Calvin quotations here are from the first few paragraphs of his preface which he entitled ‘Argument’. See the Bibliography for several colorful details regarding this stellar masterpiece of the Reformation's number one theologian, exponent, and inspiring pillar (though he too, like the rest of us, were also of course imperfect).
[26] Ibid.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Ibid.
[29] ‘Ascetic’ is one of the words the German sociologist and historian, Max Weber, used when attempting to describe the Calvinist weltanschauung (worldview) in his classic paper, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
[30] The English word ‘polytheism’ comes straight from a Greek word made up of two smaller Greek words. ‘Poly’ means ‘many’; and ‘theo’ means ‘god’ or ‘God’.
[33] Jung, op. cit., p. 337. Jacobi drew this Jung quote from his early (1921 – he was 46) classic blockbuster, Psychological Types (paragraph 313), which today is Vol. 6 in Jung’s Collected Works (1970).
[34] Ibid.
[36] Au contraire, mon frere = ‘on the contrary, my brother’ (French language).
[37] Luke writes in Acts, chapter 22 (J. B. Phillips translation from Greek):
“I myself am a
Jew,” Paul went on. “I was born in
[38] Cf. Encyclopedia Britannica, article entitled Gamaliel I: “According to tradition—but not historic fact—Gamaliel succeeded his father, Simon, and his grandfather, the renowned sage Hillel (to whose school of thought he belonged), as nasi (president) of the Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish court. It is certain, though, that Gamaliel held a leading position in the Sanhedrin and that he enjoyed the highest repute as teacher of the Law; he was the first to be given the title rabban.” Encyclopedia Britannica, digital version for computer, 2008 Ultimate Reference Suite. In other words: Paul the Apostle had been blessed with the benefits of a top-of-the-line Jewish religious education.
[39] The story is told by Luke in Acts 9:1-30. It was a favorite sermon subject of my Methodist preacher father, 'Rev' Lorenzo, who especially liked the drama of Paul’s being stopped mid-route on the way to Damascus by a vision of Christ talking to him at bright and sunny high noon, asking why he was persecuting him, Christ, by persecuting Stephen and other disciples and apostles, some of them even to death. My father especially liked the dramatic contrast in such a story, a man starting out HATING Christ, then becoming the greatest Christian missionary of all time.
[40] See footnote #42 below for further explanation of the expressions ‘Mars’ Hill’ and ‘Areopagus’.
[41] Dionysius, a nobleman, became a Christian after the Mars’ Hill sermon, e.g.: see Acts 17:34.
[42] The style of
Paul’s impressive missionary technique is revealed piecemeal
throughout Luke’s Acts
of the Apostles and in Paul’s Epistles (letters)
to the various early congregations which he helped found
around the eastern Roman world. A typically outrageous
summary-picture of Paul’s missionary style is available in Acts, chapter 17,
which begins in Thessalonica and Beroea and culminates
dramatically with Paul’s kibbutzing with Greek-gentlemen
epicurean and stoic philosophers and delivering a powerful
sermon to them and the highest government hierarchy at the
very ancient ‘Areopagus’, the council of elder statesmen
(judicial, administrative and educative) which was held on
“Mars’ Hill,” or ‘The Rocky Hill of the god Ares’ (otherwise
known as Mars), in Athens, near the Parthenon. These men
were
[43] To Uncle Eddie’s
credit, however, despite my repeated criticism of his
constant easy condemnations of most of humanity, I must say
that after a few months under his tutelage and general
influence, and his and Marilyn's love, my religious
experience has shifted its base a bit toward the more
conservative and fundamentalist/Evangelical, traditional
quasi-Calvinist side. Whereas before the sojourn in Seattle
I was in the habit of saying that I found it impossible
to believe in the Virgin Birth and Resurrection and many of
the other 'scientifically unsound', 'hokey', or
'wishful-thinking', fundamental tenets of Fundamentalist
Bible-based belief, yet found myself sometimes foolishly
‘embracing’ the whole package that Eddie and my parents
always endorsed ‘despite my inability to
believe’; I am now a little more able to ‘believe’, even
intellectually and scientifically and logically, or at least
to entertain the notion with great respect, that an omnipotent
God, dang-well could-and-might deign to insert himself into
the fabric of time and space in order to effect a ‘miracle’
or two or three or a thousand, if and whenever 'he' might
like.
How could I have ended
up like this? I've been asking myself. I got pissed I mean
mad at the situation and myself, and suddenly one day after
fifty years of stubbornness I sat down and tried to figure
it out. I knew Eddie was never going to come to my side, the
side of 14-billion-year-long Evolutionary and Geologic
Science, so I tried to see if there was any way I could
INTELLECTUALLY, LOGICALLY AND SCIENTIFICALLY embrace his
viewpoint, and it turned out to be easy. Basically, it's
like this: once you accept the possible existence of an
omnipotent 'GOD', every
other piece of the puzzle flies lightning speed right into
place.
Eddie's Biblical Fundamentalist position can be
seen as only logical, after all, despite all of
our brainwashing by modern science and modernist and
post-modern thinking that tells us we must think it nonsense
and impossible. It IS logical, because:
GOD BY DEFINITION IS OMNIPOTENT
(as most philosophers and theologians have agreed for
millennia); IF
such a God exists (and how NOT when all of this existence
had to come from somewhere, and ALL
explanations are equally incomprehensible and
impossible to the cockroach, dog and human mind).
And, as OMNIPOTENT, 'God' can do whatever he/she wants
whenever (s)he wants, regardless of our flimsy science-guy
protests. In other words: even though, according to
materialistic modern Science and our worship of ‘Reason’,
which observe that Nature seems to conduct itself according
to certain 'immutable' ‘laws’: an omnipotent Creator could
‘break’ that set of (his own) laws and resort to a separate
set of (his own) laws if and when he so quirkily chose, and
he could (because ‘OMNIPOTENT’) do it in a way, like any
real and true miracle-worker or magician, that left us
speechless and at a loss to comprehend how he could operate
things within two apparently contradictory and mutually
canceling sets of laws at once. In fact, thanks to being
around Uncle, my current thinking has gone this far: I would
not be the least bit surprised some day to learn that an
omnipotent God had (1) created and operated a number of
universes all at once, each by a separate set of
‘scientific’ rules, all universes interweaving and
inter-functioning smoothly in time and space; or, more
mind-boggling yet, (2) accomplished all of that within the
confines of a single universe, maybe even ours. Because: 'God' IS by
definition omnipotent. And, after all, and let us sing it
seven times, accompanied by the Amen chorus of
Handel’s Messiah:
ominpotent is omnipotent is omnipotent is omnipotent is
omnipotent is omnipotent................... is omnipotent!
(And anyway, who or what could come up with this incredible Universe BUT
something or someone OMNIPOTENT? And that's logical.)
Considering the power of omnipotence, I've even come to a
position totally heretical (and stake-burnable) to modern
Science: that an omnipotent Creator could have made the
universe in six days six thousand years ago and, as an
omnipotent master trickster, MADE IT LOOK
LIKE IT WAS DONE IN FOURTEEN BILLION YEARS. Because:
omnipotent is omnipotent is omnipotent is omnipotent is
omnipotent is omnipotent................... is omnipotent!
Thus, and isn't this amazing: the Creationists and
Evolutionists of Western Civilization elatedly reunite after
a long divorce. (Celebration music for the
second marriage is the third movement of Messiaen's ecstatic
L'Ascension.)
