Dark Religion: Fundamentalism from The Perspective of Jungian Psychology

by Vladislav Šolc

dark religion hinders a healthy religious approach to the symbolic and thus inhibits one’s ongoing connection to the Self. In its stead one finds a static belief system derived from literalist and concretistic thinking.

This approach obscures the true nature of spirituality and eclipses one’s symbolic relationship to numinous experiences. As a result, fundamentalists believe they have established a literal one-to-one correspondence of identity with God

In this religious endeavor, the “I” (ego) of the fundamentalist hides behind the image of God while

Religious extremists, as we will show, identify with their literalized image of God, substituting an awe of the mystery of things for an absolute certainty of knowing the will of God.

how religion is used in the mind of the individual to hide behind their image of God.

The appearance of religion coincides with the mind’s ability to relate to a transcendent aspect of being that exists beyond immediate, palpable sense reality. Religion depends upon the imaginative and symbol-forming ability of the human psyche.

Is religion a function of our relationship to something transcendent or is it simply a psychological aspect of being without reference to anything beyond the psyche?

numinosum (a quality associated with archetypes that inspires fear, mystery, and awe),

What drives such movements can be understood as archetypal energy, also known as numinous energy.

Religion comes about when there is an attempt to come to terms with a primary archetypal experience.

To a great extent, one’s level of conscious awareness and experience of the symbol-making function, determines the way one’s religiosity manifests.

The difference between science and theology mirrors the difference between phenomenon and noumenon, i.e., between the perceived world of our senses and the world beyond the senses.

Gravity is real despite the physicists’ inability to confirm the existence of the graviton; likewise, the representations and effects of the Self are real despite its “immaterial” nature.

Jungian psychology is foremost a method or tool for approaching the numinosum in such a way that it provides a fuller, deeper, and healthier response to life—

Jung was a Kantian at heart; he believed that any conceivable transcendental object has to remain a Ding an sich (German: unknowable as thing-in-itself)—this is true of archetypes, gods, or God.

The unconscious is vastly more than the residue of psychic life that is barred from conscious awareness; it is like a deep, life-sustaining aquifer.

“God has never spoken to man except in and through the psyche.”

The “organic unity” of psychological and religious experiences, described by Dourly (1984), elevates everyday existence in ways that makes the flesh holy and brings the divine close to the human.

It is a delicate and fragile balance between the conscious and unconscious that protects us from fanatic entrapment on one hand and a feeling of spiritual desertion on the other.

Radical religions and creeds are the expressions of inadequate, non-credible, or poorly

contained numinous archetypal energy by the ego.

Either there is a conscious effort to integrate archetypal energies, or the archetypes take the lead, and our possession by the archetypal forces becomes our

fate.

Religion provides a tool for “framing” reality. It is a force that can hold the world together; without religion the world may appear chaotic, meaningless, and unintelligible.

The task of individuation rests in part on the ability to resist the destructive lure of archetypal forces that can foster depravity and instead, use these energies to discover mundane affairs as sacramental.

The path of individuation is a life lived in the midst of doubt and moral conflict. There may be paths with more certainty but in the end they may be more painful.

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Jungian psychology recognizes that phenomena present themselves to the psyche as polarities existing in a dynamic tension.

Jung (1951e) believed that when the individual remains unconscious about his or her inner tensions, one aspect of the polarity will inevitably be acted out in

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The path of individuation involves a sincere and open relationship to symbols radiating out of the Self and fosters a progressive, constructive morality anchored in conscious deeds.

A central tenet of Jungian psychology proposes that whatever is split off and disconnected from the original unity appears in the form of re-enactment and compulsion that will confront us again and again no matter how big our pitchfork is.

The compulsive urge to seek (desire) is ingrained in living organisms.

seeking is a basic principle of evolution.

Excessive attachment is likely to drive other, incompatible elements into the unconscious.

Moreover such proof is superfluous, for the idea of an all-powerful divine Being is present everywhere, unconsciously if not consciously, because it is an archetype.

There is in the psyche some superior power, and if it is not consciously a god, it is the “belly” at least, in St. Paul’s words. I therefore consider it wiser to acknowledge the idea of God consciously; for, if we do not, something else is made God, usually something quite inappropriate and stupid such as only an “enlightened” intellect could hatch forth.

“No matter what the world thinks about religious experience, the one who has it possesses a great treasure, a thing that has become for him a source of life, meaning, and beauty, and that has given a new splendor to the world and to mankind.”

As a response, the evolutionary movement of the religious impulse is being challenged and transformed into new spiritual forms.

a modernity that has lost touch with the sacred.

The challenge involves the inherent need to critical examine and then retrieve one’s projections (gods, demons, etc.) restoring them to their source in the inner recesses of one’s own psyche.

There is a deep unrest and thirst for experiences of the sacred that institutional and traditional religions no longer mediate.

At that moment, one is likely to hear that traditional religion is viewed as authoritarian and limiting, while spirituality is viewed as personal and liberating.

For it is precisely this energetic (spiritual) dimension that traditional institutional churches and fundamentalism have inadvertently lost touch with — the source of numinous life sustaining and renewing energy.

Thomas Moore offers guidance for developing a “custom spirituality” or “a religion of one’s own” in his book, A Religion of One’s Own.

Fundamentalism, we believe, is one maladaptive and aberrant response to these cultural changes. It is a transitional phenomenon, which attempts to keep alive the spirit of the previous dispensation by returning to a literal rendition of institutional faith. While fundamentalism clings to a literal interpretation to avoid the anxiety of change and the unknown, the S.B.N.R.s tend toward the other extreme by avoiding any trappings of traditional institutional religions in order to assert the greatest personal freedom in determining their spirituality. The S.B.N.R.s also tend to easily cross over and freely borrow fascinating (numinous) religious practices or objects that resonate with their own personal spiritual sensibilities.

The simplest way to define fundamentalism is as a refusal of dialogue—the assertion that only one way of life is authentic or valid. Dialogue is the very condition of a successful pluralistic order.27

Much of what we recognize as “fundamentalism” in any religious tradition is, at least in its hermeneutic posture, a wholesale rejection of all modern critical approaches and a professed return to a given scripture as authoritative in this sense.

archetypes (Jung, 1954b) are the very source of the numinosum,

Often it drives with unexampled passion and remorseless logic towards its goal and draws its subject under its spell,