It is one thing to possess an adult conscience of mature contour; it is something else to act in the world in accordance with that inner directive. Our divided consciousness, at least with regard to ethical matters, is notorious: St Paul laments his own moral dilemma in his celebrated words: "We know that the law is spiritual; but I am not; I am unspiritual, the purchased slave of sin. I do not even acknowledge my own actions as mine for what I do is not what I want to do, but what I detest." He continues that the good he wants to do, he fails to do, but what he does is the wrong which is against his will. He discovers the principle that when he wants to do the right, only the wrong is within his reach. In his inmost self he delights in the law of God, but he perceives that there is a different law in his bodily members which fights against the law approved of by his reason. He is made a prisoner under the law that is in his members, the law of sin. This extended passage, from Romans 7.14-25, reaches the conclusion that the human will to do good is impotent except in the strength of God in Christ. And so the acute conscience is being subtly undermined by impulses deep in the unconscious, shadow powers that betray the divine image in which we were all created.
In psychodynamic theory the shadow is seen as the dark unconscious element that is opposed to the active, conscious will to good that should guide the civilized person. It is subtly destructive of all good intentions, and emerges in conscious life as a tendency to self-aggrandisement that acts with stealthy determination to undermine all that stands in the way of one's own schemes of advancement and power. If this aspect of the personality is evaded, repressed or consciously denied, it attains frightening momentum and can invade and overwhelm the conscious life of the person. Not infrequently it is projected on to some other person, who acts as a convenient scapegoat. This projection is typically unconscious, and is the basis of much racism, religious intolerance and xenophobia. What we find intolerable in ourselves is most conveniently jettisoned upon those for whom we harbour an innate suspicion. In this irrational way, using a circular argument, we can actually justify our antipathy, at least to our own deluded minds.
But the shadow side of our psyche also has a more constructive component: it gives an earthy roundness to the personality, which without it would tend to radiate an insipid goodness devoid of effective driving power. It is the energizing focus of the personality, without which no creative good would emerge. If one part of a person's life is service to those around him, the other part directs service to himself. Without elementary concern for our own welfare we would soon be submerged by the voracious tide of life. Enlightened self-concern must therefore take immediate precedence over our concern for our neighbour's welfare. Only when we are strong in our inner psychic life can we proceed with some safety to serve others who are in need. The demands of the insensitive mass of humanity can drain the servant of God to the core. By prayer alone can he be restored in a time of emergency. It is, however, the shadow side that takes a more long term care of the servant, and it will not permit any further draining of inner healing resources. The spiritual life does not so much move beyond personal demands as work towards their integration and ultimate transmutation in an existence that is no longer selfish but dedicated instead to the care of all created things. We should, on the one hand, beware of a tendency towards self-indulgent idleness that satisfies the individual at the expense of the greater community. But the opposite extreme, of becoming a doormat over which the feet of the ungracious masses trample, is equally to be avoided. Apart from its obviously destructive effect on the mind and body of the one who serves, it may also result quite subtly in making him into something of a martyr, at least in his own eyes. Darkness is at its most dangerous when it assumes some of the qualities of light: righteous indignation in the name of religious propriety against deviant groups, leading to their persecution and destruction, is another good example of the same invidious tendency. How then do we distinguish between the light of God that burns away all illusion as a consuming fire and the false light of the shadow consciousness that may seduce the very elect? The uncreated energies of the Deity by which we know of his presence (since no man can see God directly and remain alive) blind us momentarily, as they did St Paul in his Damascus-road experience. Even if our physical sight is not obscured, then at least our normal consciousness with its overtones of complacency and comfortable compliance with the status quo is over-whelmed, as we confront our unworthiness in the light of truth. The call to ministry of the prophets of Israel, especially that of Isaiah, demonstrates this quite clearly; and then we are accepted in a love that raises us to a very different vision of service as a new life opens up to us.
By contrast, the arresting glitter of the shadow consciousness exalts us, promising us great things provided we obey its instructions. The story of the seduction of Eve by the serpent (in Genesis 3) is the archetypal example: the human is initiated into the tantalizing mysteries of life, as he illicitly partakes of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He may be master of the world, but there is no love, which comes of God alone, and all his endeavours end on a mute note of failure, death and oblivion. The temptation of the Fall is repeated in the life of Christ after his baptism and the downflow of the Holy Spirit upon him. But now we have a man full of the love of God who does not need displays of power, whether psychical or political, to substantiate the authority of his perfect humanity. Where there is love there is no need of anything else. But what is love? It is at the very centre of the pearl of great price. The word is used incessantly, promiscuously in fact. But until its chastity is shown, we cannot know a proper human being.
To return to the dichotomy of human nature described and lamented so tirelessly by St Paul, we have a person with his head in the clouds of glory, with Moses on Mount Sinai in the presence of the Deity, and his feet on the soggy earth of desire, lust and gluttony, indeed the wilderness around the sacred mountain. When Moses descends with the tablets of the sacred law, he finds the people worshipping a golden calf fashioned by his brother Aaron, who one might hope would have known better, since he was the mouthpiece of Moses during the time of his interviewing Pharaoh with an eye to the release of his subject brethren. The entire sacred history of the remainder of the Old Testament is an account of the gradual purification of the Jews working towards an elevation of the bodily passions in the supreme service of love to both God and man. And then to the Jews comes the supreme privilege of forming the physical body from which Jesus is fashioned, one in whom there is a perfect union of the human and divine natures. But even his example and the grace that follows his supreme sacrifice can only gradually be assimilated by his disciples and those who follow in the way throughout the subsequent centuries. The giving up of all one has in order to acquire the costly pearl is hard, especially as there is no certainty, in one's more sober moments, that either the pearl exists as an objective reality or that it can in any case be acquired. Perhaps it too was a mere will-o'-the-wisp that led one to an impossible task, an illusion that sprang out of one's psychological inadequacy in the hard cut and thrust of the world of solid reality. And we do not know! Nor can we know except by travelling on an unknown, yet well-charted, path. The way forward is by faith, a faith that the noble outweighs the ignoble, that honesty is preferable to deceit, that service to others is finer than mere proprietorship, that death is, in its many guises, not the end but rather the gateway to a fuller life, whether here on earth (for the one who still lives in the body) or in the larger world beyond our mortal vision. But we can say with Peter, after many would-be disciples left Jesus because of his apparently outrageous teaching, "Lord, to whom shall we go? Your words are words of eternal life. We have faith, and we know that you are the Holy One of God" (John 6.68-69). One can meditate sadly on Peter's ambivalent faith when it was severely taxed, but he did persist in the face of his humiliation and press onwards to a real sanctity.
Did Jesus in fact know of the shadow consciousness, or was he so absolutely spotless that no mortal temptation could resonate within him? Traditional piety would flinch with horror at any such suggestion, but if Jesus was truly fully human, it would be imperative that he should bear the full impact of human passion. This is the inner meaning of the Incarnation. It may have been that as a youth he was so raised above everyday, material things as to be uncontaminated by even their atmosphere, but when his adult ministry began, he accepted a baptism of repentance administered by John in the wilderness. It is interesting that in Matthew's account of the proceedings, John demurs from administering such a baptism to Jesus, declaring that he rather should receive baptism at the hands of Jesus. However, Jesus replies, "Let it be so for the present; we do well to conform in this way with all that God requires" (Matthew 3.13-15). Immediately after the baptism the Holy Spirit descends like a dove to alight upon him, and a voice from heaven acclaims him as his Son, his Beloved on whom his favour rests.
Thereupon Jesus is led into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit to be tempted by the devil. Then in no uncertain way the shadow consciousness descends on Jesus also, more like an enveloping fog than a dove, and it too, like the Holy Spirit, remains with him until his death. Did he respond negatively to this massive incubus, assumed as part of the healing of the world? We remember how the woman, who had suffered from haemorrhages (probably from the womb) for twelve years, drained him when she touched him without permission. We recall his irritation with the disciples at their obtuseness in understanding the nature of his mission, and with his own family, when they tried to insinuate themselves and claim special priority in the course of his teaching work. The Syro-Phoenician woman also evoked his irritation when she sought healing for her daughter, who was not Jewish. "It is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs" (Matthew 15.21-28). He submits in the end but only as a concession to the woman's extreme faith coupled with her humility. All this is very human. Many involved in the healing ministry know how the influx of unceasing demands can provoke increasing agitation, until one is forced to shut down completely for the preservation of one's basic sanity. Jesus was also capable of considerable anger when confronted by hypocrisy, especially the type of religious casuistry that could cheat the underdog. The powerful denunciations of Matthew 23 bear full weight to this assertion.
We remember the words of Hebrews 5.7-10,
In the days of his earthly life he offered up prayers and petitions, with loud cries and tears, to God who was able to deliver him from the grave. Because of his humble submission his prayer was heard: son though he was, he learned obedience in the school of suffering and, once perfected, became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him, named by God high priest in the succession of Melchizedek.
The perfection alluded to may have been a complete acceptance of the darkness around him, no longer provoking his irritation, agitation or anger, but instead consummated in patience, forebearing and forgiveness. These sublime attributes are especially in evidence during the painful humiliation of his passion ending with his death on the cross between two criminals. But this final acceptance and forgiveness is of a different order to a spineless, permissive goodwill that is in fact far removed from the actual facts of earthly life. In other words, Jesus preached personal resurrection, not mere spiritual uplift, and in his ministry he effected something of this rising from the dead in all who were open to him.
We, in imitation of our Lord, also enter the shadow realms after we have committed our lives to his service. Spiritual initiation is succeeded by a descent into the personal shadow area. This is both a test of our dedication to God and a commencement of the vital work of raising up our inner sickness to God for healing. Furthermore, our own psychic darkness is in, as it were, creative tension with that of all other people, since we are all members of the one body. Therefore our individual healing is a presage, indeed a very start, of the healing of the beloved community whose end is the renewal of the entire creation. The yearning for wholeness that we all, no matter how inarticulately, share cannot come about until the sickness is fully exposed with nothing hidden in the darkness. It is written of Adam and Eve that they lived in complete openness to each other and to God in paradise. After the Fall they could no longer face God directly because they knew they were unwholesome. Nor could they face each other with that unselfconscious, child-like trust of paradise any longer because their very sexuality had become strangely polluted. In the same way we bear the impact of that sinfulness whose consequence is to sully all personal relationships, where love has been degraded to physical lust and trust to opportunistic compliance. When Christ was nailed to the cross his naked sexuality was once more made visible to the onlookers, as is indeed our own when we are shortly to die. At last we have nothing to hide as all our most intimate secrets are laid bare for all the world to see. And then we make the shattering discovery that our secrets are held in common with all mankind. But we long for the time when this common inheritance may be shared in the noonday warmth of life and with the innocence that marked the mutual regard of our allegorical ancestors Adam and Eve before they fell from grace. Then at last the shadow will have been embraced in the light of God's love, and healing will be complete.
Meanwhile the way to perfection includes a descent to our own private hell in which all the debris of unrequited passion lies exposed, accepted, and placed on the altar of dedication in the assurance of divine healing. These objects of revulsion are held in common by all mankind, but when even one person can move spiritually towards accepting them in love, somehow the burden they exert on us all is significantly lightened. T. S. Eliot wrote well of the situation in his poem The Hollow Men:
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.
As St Paul says, there is something that always seems to thwart our best intentions, our noblest ideals. It corrupts the decency within us, like the filth inside the cup that spoils the contents, no matter how industriously the rim is cleaned. What lies inside festers until it has been drained as an abscess. The process is always painful, but the relief that follows its completion is so profound that it seems to annul all the previous suffering. The vocation of the Suffering Servant is now fulfilled in the individual life of the believer, "The chastisement he bore is health for us and by his scourging we are healed" (Isaiah 53.5). What he has experienced personally now has to be given to his fellows. In so doing he not only assists others but also grows progressively in spiritual strength with its concomitant authority.
The most superficially placed flaws are obvious enough: uncontrollable sexual desire and a covetousness that drives its victim to crime, even murder. Thus the two most significant encounters in the Bible of evil within the depths of the psyche concern David and Ahab. The former, a valiant warrior, well informed by the Spirit of God and generously endowed with wives and concubines, nevertheless stoops to sordid adultery with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, a faithful soldier in David's army: David conspires to have Uriah slain in battle, after which sin he takes Bathsheba as his wife. All seems well on the surface, but underneath there is a stinking cesspit of murder. And so God sends Nathan the prophet to tell David a parable of a rich man who appropriates the, solitary beloved ewe-lamb of a poor man to serve a passing traveller while he keeps his own larger flock intact. When David denounces the rich man for his ruthlessness, Nathan utters the fateful words, "You are the man" (2 Samuel 12.1-7). The great warrior has been exposed in his naked lust that has not shrunk from killing another man, better than he himself. Although David confesses his sin and Nathan pronounces God's qualified forgiveness, terrible internecine strife ravages the royal family. It culminates in the insurrection and death of David's favourite son Absalom. How often has this drama of family disintegration been enacted, albeit much less violently, in the course of many instances of adultery!
In the case of Ahab who covets the vineyard of Naboth, it is his evil wife Jezebel who conspires to have Naboth condemned to death when he remains adamant in his determination not to yield his property to the king. But as Ahab proceeds to take possession of the unjustly appropriated land, Elijah the prophet confronts the king to his face and denounces him without mitigation (1 Kings 21). The stark theme in both these cases of wickedness is, "You are the man". In one way or another we all seem destined to experience a similar confrontation. It may range from a treacherous betrayal of a friend or colleague, which has been exposed to our shame, to a humiliating brush with the law in respect of a penal offence. We may try to wriggle our way out of the ensuing mess so as to save our face, but both we and those involved in the matter know of the emptiness of our defence, that, like the emperor in Hans Christian Andersen's story, we have no clothes on even if we act as if arrayed in fine apparel. These acts of betrayal, lust and dishonesty are so much part of the human condition that none of us can escape their impact.
In what is probably the most enigmatic of the parables, that of the Dishonest Steward (Luke 16.1-9), Jesus actually appears to advise us to use our worldly wealth to win friends for ourselves. In the Authorized Version of the Bible, worldly wealth is translated much more tellingly as "the mammon of unrighteousness", reminding us that money passes through many hands, most of which are not especially clean, either physically or morally. Yet almost immediately after the parable we are told that no servant can be the slave of two masters because of the divided loyalty that is involved: we cannot serve God and money (Luke 16.13). The reconciliation of these two apparently contradictory teachings of Jesus seems to be related to the maturing of spiritual awareness. The unjust steward is actually commended for his astuteness in getting rapid part-payments from his master's debtors, an action of pure self-interest, inasmuch as he may gain supporters after his likely dismissal from his present employment. It would seem that his master is not only a man of the world who can appreciate his servant's adroitness in saving his own skin as well as getting as much as possible for his employer under difficult circumstances, but also a person blessed with a fine sense of humour. This is also a picture of God and his relationship with us: he accepts our frailty with a gentle humour and is always ready to forgive us. We may hope that, after his narrow escape consequent on the humanity of his master, the steward would deal far more responsibly in the future with the things of this world. He might eventually learn to treat money as a thing of God, to be used to the benefit of the community and not simply for his own ends. If all of us, to reflect on another of Jesus' sayings, were to pay to the worldly power what was its due, and to God what was his due (Mark 12.13-17), even the world's due would be lifted up to God, and the world itself moved onwards, ever so slightly it is true, to its ultimate state of resurrection.
Life, in other words, is seldom a straightforward affair. Its shadow region enmeshes us all in shady undertakings and moral ambiguity. Even if our own lives are genuinely pure, we cannot avoid rubbing up against corruption, vice and violence, in view of the murky background of money itself - often dishonestly acquired and used for very controversial purposes - and the moral disorder of those who handle it. As we enter the service of God, so we have to descend into the pit, not so very different in essence from the lions' pit into which Daniel was hurled after he had refused to pray to king Darius (Daniel 6). But just as Daniel was preserved, in that fine story, from the ferocity of the lions, so are we also protected as long as we put our trust in God and never take our eyes off the present moment. This was the secret of Jesus' inviolability in the face of all the world's temptation and stain. But he was shielded from nothing. Far from it, his sensitivity accentuated his great vulnerability both in the period of triumph and during the barely penetrable gloom of Gethsemane and Calvary.