Moonlight in Christ’s Shadow

IF YOU LOOK AT IT PSYCHOLOGICALLY RATHER THAN THEOLOGICALLY, you’ll discover a fundamental problem with the way we see Christ. The traditional images of Christ, the ones with which we are so familiar, are all unambiguously masculine.

On the one hand, we see Christ, the glorious son of God, ascended into heaven and sitting at the right hand of the Father. On the other hand, we see Jesus, making his heroic sacrifice to atone for our sins. The evangelical formula sums up this range of images in the simple, personal affirmation that Jesus Christ is one’s Lord and Savior.

These traditional images exclude women. Men, in some small, aspirational way, can see themselves reflected in the glorious, heroic images of the Christ, Jesus. Women cannot.

Late in his career, Carl Jung, the sometimes-visionary son of a Swiss Reformed pastor, addressed this problem, but didn’t come to a fully satisfactory solution. Jung understood Christ to be, phenomenologically, an archetypal image of the self, of the center and totality of the psyche. Images of the self, Jung found, are symbols pointing to something felt to be of the highest value, but always partially beyond human understanding. In other words, Jung discovered in his research that “self images” are indistinguishable from “god images.”

As images of the self, therefore, our images of Christ would be images of God. Not exactly a radical discovery on Jung’s part. In fact, it’s only a psychological version of the traditional theological statement of Trinitarian faith. Jung, however, realized that Christ, even as a person in the Trinity, was an inadequate archetypal image of the self. For one thing, the image had no shadow, no “dark side.” For another, it excluded the feminine.

In 1950, the Catholic Church elevated to the status of dogma the long-held popular belief that the Virgin Mary had been taken up into heaven, while still in her body. As a psychologist, Jung saw this re-evaluation of the Assumption of Mary as equivalent to the Church transforming the Trinity into a quaternity by adding a fourth person, a woman, to the masculine trio.

As radical as Jung’s understanding might have been, Mary and the feminine almost immediately slipped from view in his formulation to make way for the shadow, for matter, “evil” and Satan. As a result, Jung’s radical re-imagining of the Trinity as a quaternity remained essentially masculine and fundamentally incomplete. Without Mary as a vital presence, Jung’s heavenly quaternity still excluded women. His expanded image of the self, as radical as it might have been, still lacked the feminine.

Jung’s shortcoming was that his thinking remained too abstract. Ironically, his powerful, intuitive intellect was unable to see beyond the conceptual aspects of the symbols with which he was working.

Had Jung also focused his attention and analytical tools on the more concrete images and symbols of the biblical texts, he almost certainly would’ve seen what I’ve seen in my study of the Gospel of John: There are powerful feminine images throughout the Gospel’s Christological symbolism. In fact, John gives us a symbolic conjunction of the masculine and the feminine. The one-sided, heroic and masculine Jesus Christ that Jung knew, that we know too, is rooted in much richer symbolic soil than traditional doctrine would suggest.

Just over the shoulder of Christ, we can see in the Johannine images, if we have the eyes to see, not only Demeter, Isis, Dionysus (always his mother’s son), and Lady Wisdom (Sophia), but also a handful of powerful, independent women enlarging our understanding of who Christ is and what biblical symbolism can mean.

The image of a god dying and rising on the third day, for example, is a lunar image. It’s a feminine image. If the symbolic implications of this image, so foundational to the gospel proclamation, can be overlooked so completely, what else have we been missing?

The problem with the traditional image of Christ appears to be a problem with our limited and biased collective vision, not a problem with the scriptural symbolism itself. The surplus of meaning in the symbols continues to beckon us. We need to be willing to look deeply enough to see — and hear, and feel, and know.

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For more on Christ as a symbol of the self, see my book, Moonlight Shines in the Darkness: A Psychosymbolic Reading of Jesus and the Feminine in the Fourth Gospel, especially the concluding chapter.