Theology and Mystical Psychology
Elined Kotschnig
Theology frequently accuses psychology, even religious psychology, of regarding the human mind as being all there is, or at least as being the most important reality about which to know. It denounces “psychologism” and the Luciferian pride that sets man above God. The religious psychologist is often bewildered by this accusation, for he may never have questioned in his own mind that the Godhead is there, independently of man’s experience, or that His significance is absolute and the significance of man’s experience only relative. But man’s experience of God being all that he can know of God, it seems to him a condition inherent in human existence that he should concern himself with that, while freely admitting that it has reference to an Object that stretches beyond experience.
The theologian on the other hand knows just as well as the psychologist that man’s apprehension of God is limited by his finite mind, and that he cannot step out of his mental skin to perceive God as He is in Himself. But this fact seems to him so trite that he does not even mention it. Filled with the great conviction that the rays he receives are poured upon him by the very Source of Light, he speaks of “God revealing Himself,” in a way that often strikes the psychologist as a naive or arrogant assumption of being in the inner counsels of God and exempt from the necessity of filtering the Light of revelation through the cloudy medium of the human mind.
Granted, however, that each has been drawn out to admit that what is explicitly maintained by the other is implicitly assumed by himself. They realize that man’s awareness, even of God, is conditioned by the perceiving subject; they realize equally that they share the same faith in an Objective Reality which infinitely transcends man’s subjective experience of it. Will their differences be thereby removed? Not at all! Watch, for instance, the theologian’s reaction to the statement that “theology is really projected psychology!” Or again witness the baffled irritation of the psychologist when urged to differentiate between faith “as a human attitude” and faith in God, “which is a gift of the Holy Spirit.” In the ensuing debates the first speaker will almost certainly be charged with reverting to “psychologism,” and the second will be reproached for his incomprehensible insistence on lifting man’s attitude to God out of the continuum of human experience.
What causes this ever renewed misunderstanding between men who verbally accept each other’s positions? Is it allied to the fact that each sees the other’s contention as true indeed, but so banal and obvious that he is astonished at the importance that the other attributes to it? He is puzzled whenever he discovers that the other is crusading for a truth he himself has never thought of denying, and he wonders why his own fervent affirmations arouse the other’s opposition all over again on the ground that they imply a position he has repeatedly declared that he does not hold!
What is here described as a conflict between theologian and psychologist can be paralleled within the field of theology by debates between the champions of “faith” and of “experience” respectively. Evidently it is not the beliefs that are opposed but the value laid upon this belief or that belief. Stressing one side only of a total situation, the psychologist seems to his opponent concerned only with man, the subject, and his experience, while the theologian appears in turn to think only in terms of God, the Object, unconditioned by aught but Himself. The theologian rightly sees that the psychologist’s subjective emphasis would end, if pushed to its logical extreme, in solipsism, and uncorrected may easily get stuck in the halfway house of humanistic psychologism. The psychologist in turn may help the theologian to see that his objective emphasis pushed to the same logical absurdity would become “sol-Illism” (if we may coin a word to balance solipsism), an assumption that only God is real and only God acts, that man’s life is consequently a mirage and free-will false. High Calvinism is at least as near to this danger as some psychologies are to the other.
Theology needs the perpetual reminder of psychology that her statements about Ultimate Reality, however high and absolute they may sound, are never unconditioned Truth, but only those categories of human understanding to whose moulds Truth stoops to conform for us. Psychology needs no less the insistence of theology that she shall not become so absorbed in her own Vision of Reality in the small “camera oscura” of human experience, that she forgets to hold by faith to the infinity of the unexperienced Godhead.
If each can open the eyes of the other to the perils of its one-sidedness, they will at last be in a position to see the major importance of that side of the coin which they have hitherto neglected. They will recognize that their argument has been no merely verbal one, but a desperate struggle for life between two complementary and absolutely essential views of reality. When the psychologist insists on our conditioned and finite experience of God, the theologian will no longer answer, “So what?” Nor will he condemn as pernicious and morbid the careful observation and elaborate analysis of the soul’s life in God which grips his friend. He will see that these things are neither subjectivism nor egocentric elevation of man to the throne of the universe, but that they spring from reverent curiosity and ardent homage before the miracle and dignity of the human psyche, as it opens up before him like a great continent of unexplored riches—a continent which theology has viewed too often from ground level, in flat and trivial perspective.
With like generosity the psychologist will listen to theology’s affirmation of the Wholly Other, and not murmur against “abstract speculation.” Nor will he condemn as arbitrary and meaningless the great constructions of dogma and symbol. He will know that these are no insubstantial fancies of the mental stratosphere, but Herculean efforts to express in firm outline and inescapable form That Which has veritably impinged upon and gloriously taken captive man’s heart and mind and soul. Toward That both will now turn together, with faith in the transcendent Whole and with joy in the modest, expanding experience of it vouchsafed to men. A reasoned faith in the Whole that bathes and surrounds experience, giving it depth and vastness, is theology’s ancient stewardship; fuller knowledge of the experience which confirms faith by incarnating its Object, is the contribution which mystical psychology brings. Experience without faith grows trivial or may grow horrific; faith without experience becomes sterile and fails to sustain man’s life.
Elined Prys Kotschnig practices Jungian analysis in Washington, D. C. She is an associate member of the newly constituted Society of Analytical Psychologists of New York.