I stand in a long, covered corridor outside of a large building. The ground is cement and there are large, curved projections from the wall which extend about three feet and reach six feet high. On the left side of the corridor stands an evil version of myself who is attacking me, throwing dart after dart in my direction. I narrowly avoid a dart, but the next one grazes my shoulder. I run down the corridor and hide behind one of the projections unsure of what to do. My evil double is stronger and I am no match for him. I can sense that he is coming for me. I realize that if I am to beat him that I must incorporate my own evil and use it to fight him. I do so and find that I become darker and stronger, and a blue dragon comes to my aid.
The dragon and I calmly leave the corridor and enter the building. We find ourselves in the sanctuary of a large cathedral. The ceiling is high and at the front of the room is a large stained-glass window which makes up most of the wall. A steady white light shines from behind the window. In the middle of the wall, obscuring part of the window, there sits a great golden throne. We approach the throne and my dragon lets out a blast of fire which melts the throne into a pool of molten gold which begins to run down the steps toward us. All of the people sitting in the pews jump up and turn to flee, but before I leave, I turn back to where the throne stood and see that in the stained-glass window there is a door which is slightly open leading into the light. I can tell that there isn’t much time before the door will close, and that once it does, it will never open again.
Standing outside the door leading into the sanctuary, I resolve that once everyone else leaves, I will go back inside and enter the door to face whatever dangers await.
I’ve been struggling a lot recently with the evil or darkness that exists within me and what to do with it. Though there is a distinction, the Jungians would call this the shadow and the Christians the sinful nature. Part of me wants to run and hide from it, acting as if it didn’t exist. I would live in the light letting the darkness wither away and die of its own accord. While this is certainly how we should live generally, another part of me feels that this approach hardly cuts it when one is faced with true malevolence within oneself. Instead this part of me would face the evil within, incorporating it, putting it under my conscious control, and, if possible, using it for good.
This struggle was clearly portrayed in my dream by the conflict with the evil and stronger version of myself. He was attacking me and I had no defense. Though I ran and hid, it was of no use; he was still coming for me. I realized that the only way to defeat him was to incorporate his power and use it against him. I decided to do this and I found that I was indeed stronger, but was also filled with a heavy sense of darkness. Despite the darkness, I was still myself and in full control. As soon as I did this, I found that a giant blue dragon stood quietly beside me. He represented my darker side and a source of ancient power. He stood calmly and followed me as I went into the cathedral. Both I and the dragon were completely calm and controlled and not at all concerned with the evil version of myself. This shows that part of myself, and maybe the central part, believes that my evil must be acknowledged and incorporated before I can be free from its power and fear.
There were other people seated in the pews, but they didn’t give any notice to me or my dragon as we approached the golden throne at the front of the sanctuary. At first I found this surprising, but eventually interpreted it to mean that others don’t see me as differently as I sometimes think they do. I attend a very conservative church where I often feel that my theological beliefs make me an outsider. However, the failure of the others to even notice my dragon indicates to me that my feeling of separation is entirely self-created. From my actual experience interacting with others in my church, this has been true.
I was still completely calm as I watched my dragon melt the throne with its fiery breath. The scene reminded me of the ending of Game of Thrones where the steel throne is melted and runs down the stone steps. I had finished the show a few nights before.
But instead of representing the tyranny of man, this throne was a symbol for authoritative Christian tradition. It was magnificent, but empty and strangely out of place in a building made by human hands. Such a throne belonged in the throne room of Heaven to be used by God alone. Only when the dragon melted the throne could I see that there was a secret door leading into the light. I understood this to be leading to Heaven or to a place of beauty and peril which was closer to God.
The scene where my dragon melted the throne might appear to some sacrilegious, but I see it differently. The throne was only a symbol and was neither in Heaven nor being sat upon by God. We are not to put our authority or worship in symbols, but in the realities that lie behind them. When we mistake the symbol for the reality, we lose access to the path that leads to God and are left with nothing but an empty idol.
At the same time that a path to heaven was revealed, the molten gold rushed down toward everyone in the cathedral. I wanted to jump around the streams of gold and enter the door, but I didn’t. I followed the crowds rushing to escape in part because of the danger but also because I sensed that entering the door was forbidden and I wanted to do so in secret. It was obvious that I was the only one who had any desire to enter the door. It wasn’t that no one else had seen it, but that they weren’t interested or weren’t willing to break the rules.
I determined that I would return after everyone had left and would enter the door behind the melted throne. I did not know what I might face, but I knew that it led to where God was and I was willing to risk any possible danger.
My depiction of the uninterested, fleeing crowd shows a lot about how I see the traditional church-goer. Not only do I find the beliefs of others to be simplistic and uninteresting, I often question their motive and wonder what they would really do if faced with the terrifying beauty and power of the living God and a path that led closer to him. To be sure this is overly judgmental on my part, but I think that there is some truth to the idea that many of us, myself included, when faced with certain aspects of God tend to draw away instead of drawing near. We prefer the simple and understandable rules, regulations, and symbols of our traditions over the raw being of a transcendent God.
I hope that when I am faced with difficult truths about God and the many paths that lead closer to him —most of which will not appear as grand and appealing as the one in my dream—that I will take them all the same despite any possible discomfort or danger. But as the dream suggests, I will need to incorporate my darker side while keeping evil under control in order to overcome the many obstacles that will lie in my path.
Evil is to be accepted. What we want remains in our hands. What we do not want, and yet is stronger than us, sweeps us away and we cannot stop it without damaging ourselves, for our force remains in evil. Thus we probably have to accept our evil without love or hate, recognizing that it exists and must have its share in life. In doing so, we can deprive it of the power it has to overwhelm us.
— C. G. Jung The Red Book: A Reader’s Edition (pg. 312)
Much of my thinking on this has been influenced by reading Jung’s Red Book in which he states that we must fully incorporate evil within ourselves so that we can control it instead of letting it control us. In Jung’s view, man is a creature which spans between good and evil, between complete fullness and utter emptiness. Evil then, for Jung, is the destructive force by which emptiness would consume all that is full or good.
There are two ways in which we need to incorporate our evil: cognizance and control. Evil undeniably lives within the human soul, and when we fail to recognize it, we make it all the more likely that it will destroy our lives and the lives of others. We will think that we are good when in reality we are only blind. By recognizing the power of evil within us, we can begin to setup psychological safeguards to prevent evil from taking us by surprise. Using this awareness of our evil we can also destroy false images of goodness within us which prevent us from making progress toward the actual good.
According to Jung, when we seek out the good, we must first form an image of it within ourselves. We use this symbolic image of the good to create an external and lasting formation of our character. As soon as the inner formation of the image and the outer formation of our character become congruent, we can easily mistake either for goodness itself. When we do this, not only does the image prevent us from accessing the good, but because the strength by which the outer character was formed no longer has a viable target for change within the self, its force turns outward and begins to coerce others into conformity with itself. We have all experienced the kind of person who upon achieving something good spends all of his energy trying to convince everyone else that they must do the same instead of continuing to progress in his own goodness.
The solution to this problem is to use our awareness of the all-consuming power of evil to destroy the inner formation of the image of good as soon as the outer formation of character is complete. The good that we obtained will remain, but we will no longer confuse it or the image with goodness itself and we will be able to begin the cycle again.
Once we become cognizant of the evil within the self, we will find that we can begin to control it. As long as we see evil as an external entity, whether it be a force of nature or a demonic power, it will elude our control. We can only control things inside of our self so it stands to reason that once evil is recognized as part of the self that it too might be controlled. Through self-control then, we can gain mastery over evil and prevent it from being acted out. However, there is also a darker side to this, because in a world filled with darkness and evil we sometimes must perform truly terrible acts. We see this most clearly in episodes of war and self-defense when people must act in brutal ways to protect themselves and others from harm. At these times, we must be fully aware of and in control of our evil tendencies so that when we use them it will only ever be for the good. If we fail on the one hand to recognize our evil, these situations can result in psychological trauma when we suffer the irreconcilable shock of seeing our previously unknown evil tendencies play out before our eyes. On the other hand, if we fail to control our evil, we will make It far more likely that we overstep the bounds of our self-control and allow our evil tendencies to go beyond what is strictly necessary to protect ourselves and others.
Turn away from evil and do good; so shall you dwell forever.
Psalm 37:27 (ESV)
Part of the reason that I have struggled with the idea of incorporating evil is because it is difficult to interpret from a Christian point of view. The traditional Christian mindset when it comes to evil is that we must turn away from it and flee from it. There are several passages in the Bible commanding us to do this such as Psalm 37:27 and 1st Corinthians 6:18. However, these passages, along with most others dealing with the topic, are referring to our evil actions, thoughts, and tendencies and not to the existence of evil within us. We are certainly never to engage in evil thoughts or actions. The Bible’s view on evil and how to avoid it tends to be pragmatic and not psychological in that it focuses on how to avoid evil and not on the psychological processes by which we do so. Because of this there may still be some hope in understanding these things from a Christian point of view.
There are several places in the New Testament which may support this more Jungian or psychological view of evil. The first is that Jesus’ approach to dealing with evil was specifically to set out and face it. When Jesus was anointed by the Spirit during his baptism, and before his ministry began, he was led by the Spirit into a desert for the sole purpose of being tempted by ultimate evil in the person of Satan. He even went so far as to put himself in a position of weakness by fasting for the forty days prior. Then when confronted by Satan, he did not turn and flee but held his ground and responded to every attack. In the end, it was Satan who was overcome and forced to leave. Second, when Jesus was confronted by the Pharisees and accused of driving out demons by the power of Satan, Jesus’ answer was that he only had power over the evil spirits because he had already dealt with Satan and had him under control. I believe that Jesus’ initial overcoming of Satan in the desert is what he was referring to here. Finally, there is an interesting passage in several of the gospels where Jesus drove out a host of demons from a man and into a herd of pigs which rushed over a cliff fell into a sea where they drowned. Here again we see that Jesus has control over the powers of evil, but this time he used them to bring about good, namely destroying the livelihood of the Jewish pig farmers who were breaking the law by keeping unclean animals. It seems from these examples that as far as we are able to do what Jesus did, we are to face evil, overcome it, and possibly use its power to accomplish the good.
Christ is the ultimate example of incorporating evil, but because he had none of his own, he was able to take upon himself all of the evil of mankind. He not only fully bore our sins within himself, but he himself became sin, showing that he identified with it and allowed it to become part of who he was. When Jesus died, he allowed all of the powers of evil to kill him, symbolized by the fact that both Satan and man, and both Jewish and Gentile rulers were involved in the conspiracy. However, Jesus had already faced ultimate evil and had it under his control, so when the powers of evil engaged in one final struggle against him, the result was that their force was spent and their goal could not remain accomplished. Jesus could not be destroyed by a power that he had already mastered within himself.
Though Jesus’ incorporation of evil may happen in an instant from his point of view, for us we see it drawn out across time in the processes that we call redemption, salvation, and sanctification. Jesus may have taken all evil into himself, but from our point of view we still have evil within us. What if the process by which we are redeemed from our evil is incorporating it and allowing the Spirit which lives within us to control it rendering it harmless? Once the evil within us is taken up by Christ, it has no power over us and may even be used by his Spirit for good. Romans 7 is clear that this struggle between Spirit and sin is a terrible one and the primary one that each Christian deals with, but also that in the final scheme of things, Christ will deliver us from all powers of evil.
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