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Humility, evil and the shadow
DOI link for Humility, evil and the shadow
Humility, evil and the shadow book
Humility, evil and the shadow
DOI link for Humility, evil and the shadow
Humility, evil and the shadow book
ABSTRACT
Jung’s psychology of religion has been analysed by many scholars, including Bishop, Main, Palmer, Segal and Stein. This chapter looks specifically at the Christian side of Jung’s ethics, and in particular at his understanding of the problem of evil. It is argued that Jung interprets ‘good’ and ‘evil’ as objective principles as well as predicates of our (necessarily fallible) judgement and that this reading is both Christian and therapeutic. Furthermore, Jung’s rejection of Augustinian theodicy results in a metaphysical notion of evil conceived as the logical, ontological and chronological opposite of goodness, whereas the idea of evil as a diminishment or privation of goodness is seen as both logically flawed and therapeutically dangerous. Jung’s Answer to Job (1952) is interpreted as a symbolic depiction of a path of ethical growth, where Yahweh stands for amorality, Satan for immorality, Job and Christ for morality and the Holy Ghost era as the ethical stage of humankind. Finally, Jung’s notion of the shadow (which has its origin in the Biblical parable of the mote and the beam) is discussed as his most original contribution to the moral psychology of evil, since most of our judgements of evil and evil actions derive, for Jung, from shadow projection, but it is not a theory of evil such as those articulated by the philosopher Calder or the psychiatrist Baron-Cohen.