The Roman Catholic bishops in the U.S. are notorious. They are anti-abortion zealots (they are even against legalized abortion in the first trimester), anti-gay-marriage zealots, and anti-contraception-mandate zealots (for Catholic institutions that they claim are part of their church). But their zealotry is based on their disordered Tradition of thought. So why don't they change their way of thinking?

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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) July 22, 2014: The Roman Catholic bishops in the United States are notorious for their religious zealotry in opposing legalized abortion in the first trimester, opposing the legalization of same-sex marriage, and opposing the contraception mandate as part of health insurance for many other Catholic institutions that they claim are part of their church (e.g., hospitals, colleges, and universities). (Of course the bishops are also notorious for the roles that bishops played in the priest sex-abuse scandal by transferring abusive priests from one parish to another and by covering up their abuses.)

Why do the Roman Catholic bishops resist making changes and adaptations in the official teachings of the Roman Catholic Church as strongly as they do? Once something has been deemed fit to be part of the church's official Tradition of thought, the bishops subsequently resist making any significant changes in it.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York says that Tradition is capitalized for Roman Catholics. Thus the decidedly pre-modern bent of Roman Catholicism today is captured in the Catholic sense of Tradition that many college-educated Roman Catholics today have -- most notably the Roman Catholic bishops.

Now, in the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church (1962-1965), the bishops finally at long last voted to declare that so-called Christian revelation did not somehow supercede for Jews the so-called revelations in the Hebrew Bible. Evidently, the bishops were prompted at long last to finally make this official concession to the Jews as a result of the Holocaust. As this tragic example shows, official change in the position of the Roman Catholic Church proceeds at a glacially slow pace. So don't get your hopes up that any significant changes will occur during Pope Francis's watch.

In the following lengthy essay, I propose to elucidate certain key aspects of the Tradition that Cardinal Dolan values so highly. I will undertake to do this by drawing on the thought of the American cultural historian and theorist Walter J. Ong, S.J. (1912-2003), and of the Swiss psychiatrist and psychological theorist C. G. Jung, M.D. (1875-1961).

As has notes, people in what he describes as primary oral cultures (i.e., pre-literate) tend to change and adapt very slowly also. That is why people in those cultures can aptly be described as traditional, even though they may at times argue with one another about their tradition.

However, naturally the particularities of one culture may vary from the next. As a result, the particularities of being traditional in a given culture vary from one culture to the next.

But irrespective of the particularities involved in specific cultures, primary oral people typically have a strong sense of tradition within their given cultures. So the strong sense of Tradition that Cardinal Dolan and certain other Roman Catholics value so highly can be understood as a manifestation of a residual form of primary oral culture. In my estimate, the time has come for Cardinal Dolan and the other Roman Catholic bishops to undertake a serious revision of their disordered values based on their misguided Tradition of natural-law moral theory.

WALTER J. ONG, S.J.

For close to 50 years now, I have been studying Ong's thought. Arguably Ong's most important contribution to post-colonial studies in cultural studies is his account of primary oral cultures -- and of residual forms of primary oral culture.

But let's start our overview of Ong's thought where he himself started -- with the history of formal logic in Western culture with special reference to the once popular work of the French logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572). In his landmark book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press, 1958), Ong advances the claim that all Western philosophic thought is based on sensory synthesis dominated by sight, not by sound.

DIGRESSION. Two later studies have significantly strengthened Ong's claim about Western philosophic thought being connected with sight dominance: Eric A. Havelock's book Preface to Plato (Harvard University Press, 1963) and Andrea Wilson Nightingale's book Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in Its Cultural Context (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Concerning the visualist tendency of modern philosophy in print culture after Peter Ramus (1515-1572) and his followers, see David Michael Levin's books The Philosopher's Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment (University of California Press, 1999) and Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision University of California Press, 1993) and Gary Shapiro's book Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Hearing (University of Chicago Press, 2003). END OF DIGRESSION.

In Ong's book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Yale University Press, 1967), the expanded version of his 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University, he once again aligns our faculty of seeing (sight, for short) with sensory synthesis dominated by sight, but he then also greatly expands his account of sensory synthesis dominated by sound.

Subsequently, Ong further elaborates his accounts of both sensory tendencies in his books Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of expression and Culture (Cornell University Press, 1971), Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Cornell University Press), and Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Methuen, 1982) -- and elsewhere.

But I prefer to work with the handy contrast of the world-as-event sense of life and the world-as-view sense of life that Ong works with in his article "World as View and World as Event" in the journal American Anthropologist, volume 71, number 4 (August 1969): pages 634-647.

In Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958) and elsewhere, Ong follows the lead of Louis Lavelle in working with the aural-visual contrast that includes ancient Greek philosophy as exemplified in Plato and Aristotle and the entire sweep of Western philosophic thought and medieval and later Catholic theology, Ong attributes the historically unprecedented expansion of the world-as-view sense of life to the influence of the Gutenberg printing press that emerged in the 1450s. Because of the cultural conditioning under the influence of the Gutenberg printing press, Ong refers to the historical emergence of print culture in the early modern period. So print culture includes Ulrich Zwingli (14404-1531), Martin Luther (1483-1546), St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), and John Calvin (1509-1564) -- and the translation of the King James Version of the Bible (1613). Historically, both the KJV and Calvinism have had an enormous impact on American culture. Concerning the enormous scope of Calvinist influence in American culture, see Sacvan Bercovitch's book The Puritan Origins of the American Self, 2nd ed. (Yale University Press, 2011).

But also see the late Jesuit theologian Donald L. Gelpi's perceptive account of what he refers to as the dialectical imagination of American Protestants in his book Varieties of Transcendental Experience: A Study in Constructive Postmodernism (Michael Glazier Book/ Liturgical Press, 2000, pages 82, 132, 164, 172, 174, 192, 193, 206, 223, 224, 280, 281, 282). But I would suggest that what Gelpi refers to as the dialectical imagination of American Protestants can be described in a more historically accurate way as the Ramist dialectical imagination of American Protestants. Gelpi constrasts their style of dialectical imagination with what he refers to as the Catholic analogical imagination, which historically has had little influence in American culture. I should also point out here that Jung says that "for the [primary oral] mind things that are analogous, or of analogous use to [people], are supposed to be substantially the same" (page 749). Also see the Roman Catholic theologian David Tracy's book The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (Crossroad, 1982).

Ong, as noted above, is a member of the religious order in the Roman Catholic Church known as the Society of Jesus (abbreviated as S.J.) that St. Ignatius Loyola founded. Because all fully incorporated Jesuits have made at least two 30-day retreats in silence (except for daily conferences with the retreat director), Jesuits are usually inner-directed. Nevertheless, the emphasis on tradition in the Roman Catholic Church oftentimes makes Roman Catholics tend more toward being tradition-directed than inner-directed. Inner-directedness involves the accentuation of the world-as-view sense of life and a growing inner sense of distanciation.

Now, when you follow the instructions that St. Ignatius Loyola supplies for undertaking the so-called spiritual exercises, you are engaging in what can accurately be described as guided imagistic meditations. In effect, his instructions serve as guidelines for your meditations. However, once you have started your imagistic meditation, you may spontaneously move into contemplation for which he has supplied no instructions. I should point out here that Jung preferred to engage in a form of imagistic meditation that he refers to as active imagination. Because he prefers this kind of unguided imagistic meditation, he severely denounces the kind of guided meditation for which St. Ignatius Loyola supplies instructions in the Spiritual Exercises. For a historical study of medieval memory and imagistic meditation, see Mary J. Carruthers' book The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images (Cambridge University Press, 1998). (There are of course other forms of meditation that do not involve images -- for example, breathing awareness meditation.)

But of course the Protestant Reformation and other cultural factors contributed to what Ong describes as the inward turn of consciousness in print culture in Western culture. Arguably the most perceptive inward turn of consciousness can be found in Bernard Lonergan's book Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (University of Toronto Press, 1992).

But one byproduct of the historical development of the inward turn of consciousness in Western culture is the trend toward what Max Weber has styled the disenchantment of the world -- accompanied by the rise of secularism. Roman Catholic popes and bishops and many of their co-religionists have denounced the rise of secularism and modernity. But Ong does not denounce modernity or secularism.

Of course the disenchantment of the world presupposes a preceding enchantment of the world, as it were. In The Presence of the Word (1967), mentioned above, Ong refers to presence, not to enchantment. I will further discuss presence below momentarily. However, I want to mention here that we can associate presence with the enchantment of the world. Thus the disenchantment of the world involves the receding of the experience of presence, due to the rise of distanciation that Ong associates with the world-as-view sense of life, especially in print culture.

DIGRESSION. For studies of the historical development of inner-directedness in Western culture, see Phillip Cary's book Augustine's Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist (Oxford University Press, 2000), Harold Bloom's book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (Riverhead Books, 1998) and David Riesman's book The Lonely Crowd (Yale University Press, 1950). END OF DIGRESSION.

C. G. JUNG, M.D.

C. G. Jung, M.D. (1875-1961), has also made important contributions to post-colonial studies of primary oral culture. He was an internationally famous Swiss psychiatrist and psychological theorist who was well versed in the comparative study of religion. Jung grew up in Basel, where he heard stories about Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) from people there who had known Nietzsche when he was a professor at the University of Basel and after he had retired from being a professor in 1879 due to health issues. But Jung spent most of his adult life in Zurich. In 1936, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the founding of HarvardCollege in 1936 in Massachusetts Bay Colony, HarvardUniversity conferred an honorary degree on Jung. Subsequently, Jung was invited to deliver the Terry Lectures at YaleUniversity.

I will here focus my attention on Jung's thought as transcribed in the two-volume work titled Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939 by C. G. Jung, edited by James L. Jarrett (Princeton University Press, 1988). The seminar was conducted in English, and they used an English translation of Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

However, Jung happens to use various terminology to refer to primary oral cultures that is no longer fashionable to use in post-colonial studies. For example, he routinely refers to people in primary oral cultures as primitives. But as he uses this term, it usually is nothing more than a descriptive term. In other words, he has extraordinary esteem for most of the people and their customs that he describes as primitive. In what follows, I will substitute Ong's terminology in square brackets. I will then silently alter sentences to work out the correct subject/verb agreement and pronoun/antecedent agreement. I will also modify his generic use of "man" to supply more inclusive language.

Jung makes some remarks about saying "I hear" versus "I see" that strike me as being relevant to Ong's discussion of the world-as-event sense of life and the world-as-view sense of life. However, even though Jung does not happen to advert to it, we should remember the famous injunction in the Hebrew Bible is "Hear, O Israel!" -- not "See, O Israel!"

Jung says, "'I hear' means something quite different from, 'I see.' 'I hear' means that the thing has penetrated your system more, been taken more to heart, while 'I see' need not imply that at all" (page 1264).

Later, Jung says, "When you understand or perceive something that is said to you, you say 'Yes, I see.' Why don't you say, 'I hear,' which would be more apt really? You don't say, 'I hear,' because that has to do with something else that is below consciousness. In that case, you say, 'I hear': Lord, I hear your command, I obey, I receive your words, not in consciousness, but a little bit below, in my heart. Hearing goes to the heart, has to do with feeling, while seeing has to do with the eyes, the intellect, the mind" (page 1381).

Based on his fieldwork in Kenya in 1925, Jung makes further observations that are also relevant to Ong's work. Jung says, "You know, letters, the art of writing, was [sic] an amazing discovery [in the mind of primary oral people in Kenya in 1925]. If [primary oral people] have never seen writing they marvel at it. . . . They cannot get away from the idea that it is only possible to receive a message by mouth; the discovery of the letters, those hooks and circles, black signs that talked, is sheer magic to [them]. They can understand when one makes a picture of something -- yes, one sees it -- but that those hooks could convey any sound or thought is beyond their horizon" (pages 187-188).

On January 23, 1935, Jung articulated the brief account of the animated life-world of primary oral people that I will now quote at length:

" . . . we know that the [primary oral people] set out -- not with the conviction, they do not need to have a conviction about it -- but with the fact that their world is animated, full of spiritual life. Gods are in every tree, in every animal; the demon's voice is everywhere. So the existence of the divine presence was an original fact with which [people] were confronted. In the moment when they were confronted with any physical object, they were also confronted with the fact that this object was animated. The profound original fact is the divine presence. Then very much later people came to the notion that one can make an idea about it -- that one can say, this is such and such a god, having such and such a quality, and one must do such and such things [italics in the original]. But first of all, it was simply animation, a presence, and they did not break their heads over what the presence was; they could hardly give a name to it. Or they simply called it numen, which is the Latin for a hint; it is the nodding of the head, the divine presence or the divine power, like mana [italics in the original]. One doesn't know what mana is; mana is an impression one gets, or it is the magic quality of the thing that impresses itself upon one. It has no form, no personality -- there is no concept that would formulate it -- yet it is an absolute fact.

"So God has never been made. He has always been. Then slowly, with the increase of consciousness, when people discovered that they could make different ideas about the deity, they came to the conclusion that it was nothing but an idea, and they quite forgot the real phenomenon that is behind all the ideas. You see, they became so identical with the products of their own consciousness that they thought they had created him. But such abuse brings about its own revenge. The more people created ideas about God, the more they depleted and devitalized nature. And then it looked as if that primordial fact of the world had only taken place in imagination. Of course, be that process we created consciousness, but we have built up a thick wall between ourselves and primordial facts, between ourselves and the divine presence. We are so far away that nobody knows what one is talking about when one speaks of that divine presence, and if anybody discovers it suddenly, he [or she] thinks it is most amazing; yet it is the most simple [sic] fact. But we are no longer simple enough on account of that thick wall of ideas; we have so many preconceived ideas about what the divine presence ought to be, that we have deprived ourselves of the faculty of seeing it. Yet the primordial facts are still in the world; they happen all the time, only we have given them so many names that we don't see the wood any longer on account of the trees" (pages 334-335).

For a relevant phenomenological account of the world-as-event sense of life that Jung describes here, see David Abram's book The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (Pantheon Books, 1996).

Now, I would like to comment on Jung's statement here that "we have deprived ourselves of the faculty of seeing" the divine presence.

Based on my understanding of Ong's thought, I would word Jung's statement differently. I would say that "we have deprived ourselves of the ability to sense and experience the divine presence in our consciousness" -- unless we are mystics like St. Ignatius Loyola or aspiring mystics as Tony and all other Jesuits were and are.

More to the point of Jung's statement, Ong attributes the dominance of sight in our sensory synthesis to our distanciation from the earlier human experience of sensory synthesis dominated by oral-aural sensory inputs (sound, for short). In effect, Ong aligns what Jung refers to as the experience ("fact") of divine presence in the human psyche.

In other words, the animated life-world of primary oral people that Jung discusses grows out of what Ong described as their world-as-event sense of life. Ong contrasts their world-as-event sense of life with our world-as-view sense of life. Our world-as-view sense of life involves greater distanciation from our immediate sensory experience of the world around us -- greater, that is, than what primary oral people had experienced. Their world-as-event sense of life did not provide them with the kind of distanciation from their immediate sensory experience that our world-as-view sense of life gives.

Now, Jung was the son of a Swiss Reform pastor. Nietzsche's father and both of his grandfathers were Lutheran pastors. So perhaps it is not surprising that Jung happens to agree with Ulrich Zwingli (1440-1531) and disagree with Martin Luther (1483-1546) regarding the Host in the centuries-old Christian ritual memorializing the supposed hero of the Christ myth, Jesus the Christ (pages 175, 290). Of course both Zwingli and Luther were familiar with the Roman Catholic understanding of the Host as supposedly representing the Real Presence. The Roman Catholic doctrine behind the theory about the Real Presence is known as transubstantiation; Luther accepted the doctrine of transubstantiation, but Zwingli rejected it and preferred instead to refer to the Host as symbolic.

Oddly enough, Jung elsewhere sees rituals as integral parts of what he refers to as symbols. See his 1948 essay "On Psychic Energy" in his Collected Works, volume 8. To sum up his position, I would say that he sees the symbol (involving both words and ritual) as the necessary but not sufficient condition for transformation of the individual person.

Thus when Jung explicitly discusses rituals as parts of symbols, as he uses the term symbol, he does not typically refer to the rituals as involving magic. But he explicitly refers to the Catholic "rite of magic" -- presumably because of the deep resonances of the ritual of the Roman Catholic Mass with the unconscious (page 290).

But does his reference to the Catholic ritual of the Mass imply that all symbols, as he uses this term, involve rites of magic?

Conversely, for Jung, what exactly makes the symbol (and/or ritual) of transformation efficacious in bringing about transformation, when it is efficacious? Let us be clear here. Jung is referring to the transformation in a person's psyche. Irrespective of whether or not the Host consecrated by the priest at Mass involves the Real Presence, the real issue for Jung is the transformation of the person who participates in the ritual of the Mass -- either the priest or the people participating in the Mass. Jung does not deny the possibility that the ritual of the Mass can work for some people today as a necessary but not sufficient condition for transformation. To this day, nobody fully understands what the sufficient condition(s) for transformation would be.

DIGRESSION. Concerning the Roman Catholic theory of the Real Presence in the Host consecrated by the priest in the Mass, see Robert Sokolowski's book Eucharistic Presence: A Study in the Theology of Disclosure (Catholic University Of America Press, 1994). For further studies of presence in the ancient and medieval Catholic tradition, see Hans Ur von Balthasar's book Presence and Thought: An Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa (1995; French original 1988), A. N. Williams' book The Divine Sense: The Intellect in Patristic Theology (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Hans Belting's book Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (University of Chicago Press, 1994; German original 1990). I would suggest that the image that Belting studies is connected with the imagistic thinking that Eric A. Havelock discusses in connection with primary oral cultures in his book Preface to Plato (Harvard University Press, 1963). END OF DIGRESSION.

Oddly enough, however, Jung himself does not happen to connect the Roman Catholic theology about the Real Presence with his own statements elsewhere about how primary oral people sense the divine presence in their daily life-world (pages 334-335, quoted below). Instead, Jung characterizes the Roman Catholic theology about the supposed Real Presence with what he characterizes as "magic" (his word). But he does not characterize the experience of primary oral people of "divine presence" (his words) as involving magic.

As a result, I want to use Ong's terminology about residual forms of primary oral culture to say that the Roman Catholic theology about the supposed Real Presence represents one way in which the Roman Catholic tradition can be described as a residual form of primary oral culture.

However, college-educated Roman Catholics today do not experience their daily life-world with the world-as-event sense of life that characterizes people in primary oral cultures.

But a residual form of the world-as-event sense of life was still alive and well even in literate medieval Catholics such as St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Francis of Assisi, John Duns Scotus, Meister Eckhart, Hildegaard of Bingen, and Julian of Norwich -- the entire gang of highly articulate and pious medieval Catholics.

Nevertheless, college-educated Roman Catholics today are still deeply rooted in medieval Catholicism with its residual form of the world-as-event sense of life, which in part is why highly articulate medieval Catholics are still popular among certain college-educated Roman Catholics today. See, for example, Matthew Fox's books Sheer Joy: Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality (1992) and Passion for Creation: The Earth-Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart (2000).

Now, Ong himself sees the anthology of writings known as the Hebrew Bible as a compilation of transcribed (written) forms of primary oral thought and expression -- see, for example, his book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982). So we should expect that college-educated Jews today carry deep in their psyches (in the part of the psyche that Jung refers to as the collective unconscious) a cultural memory of the world-as-event sense of life of their ancient ancestors -- a memory typically reinforced by reading and studying the Hebrew Bible.

But most college-educated Jews in the United States today are not as notoriously conservative as the American Catholic bishops are. Evidently, most college-educated American Jews have adapted to modern American life more so than the American Catholic bishops have. (Historically, both American Jews and American Catholics were discriminated against in the then-dominant white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture that dominated American culture from colonial times down to about 1960, when Senator john F. Kennedy was elected president of the United States -- the first Roman Catholic elected president.)

In the above-quoted lengthy passage from pages 334-335, what Jung refers to as "[t]he profound original fact . . . [of] the divine presence" in their life-world I will refer to as their ordinary experience of their life-world. I introduce this characterization of ordinary because I also want to introduce the characterization of extraordinary experience. At times, primary oral people had certain extraordinary experiences of the divine presence in their life-world.

Jung himself turns his attention to the kind of extraordinary experiences of divine presences when he discusses Rudolf Otto's book that has been translated into English as The Idea of the Holy (Oxford University Press, 1923; German original 1917). Otto (1869-1937) was an eminent Lutheran theologian and distinguished scholar of comparative religion. Once again, I will quote Jung at length:

""Now, we would use the word holy in a case where there is a mana aspect, where the situation has a fascinating, numinous or tremendous character. You know, [Rudolf] Otto makes those three differentiations, numinosum, tremendum and fascinosum, as the three peculiar qualities of what one would call "holy," "sacred," "taboo," or "mana." The mana concept is very useful because it contains all those aspects. So when the immaterial nature of a psychological content has a mana quality, we would call it "holy," and we would call that kind of form or quality a manifestation of the Holy Spirit [as this conceptual construct is used in the orthodox Christian tradition of thought]" (page 985).

Jung then proceeds to explain this kind of deeply moving inner experience should be understood as part of what he refers to as the process of individuation. He allows that the Christ of the Christ myth in Christianity is what he refers to as a symbol of the self. Of course there are also other symbols of the self in other traditions of thought. The process of individuation involves the part of the psyche that he refers to as the self. But the self is not ego-consciousness. Indeed, the self involves the unconscious.

But Jung dwells on the inner experience of the holy. The inner experience of the holy manifests itself in the person feeling enlightenment, or something. It's hard to name the feeling that is involved. Nevertheless, the feeling involved in such a profound inner experience can involve enlightenment -- or at least it can have a noetic impact on the person and his or her thinking and valuing from that point onward in life. In his famous book The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), William James , M.D. (1842-1910), of HarvardUniversity uses the term noetic to characterize the impact of profound mystical experiences. (Ong frequently uses the term noetic in a variety of other contexts.)

DIGRESSION. In ancient and medieval Christian thought, the idea of deification involved what Jung centuries later came to refer to as the process of individuation. Jung says, "Since the beginning of history, the self has nearly always been represented by the god-man" (page 414). In addition, Jung also says of the Christ figure in the Christ myth of Christianity that "[a]s a sort of Dionysos he [Christ] enters into everybody and deifies everybody" (page 448). See Norman Russell's book The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2004) and A. N. Williams' book The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas (Oxford University Press, 1999). END OF DIGRESSION.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Jung's meandering commentary on Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra runs to 1,544 pages in length, not counting the front and back matter. Taking a huge hint from Nietzsche's own use of the terms Dionysius and Dionysian (he famously contrasts the Dionysian spirit with the Apollonian spirit), Jung refers to the Dionysian spirit. Nietzsche had of course been professionally trained in classical philology. So he was familiar with the ancient Greek cult of Dionysius.

Incidentally, because Nietzsche was professionally trained in classical philology, he undoubtedly was familiar with the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Jung even characterizes the flow from one narrative part to the next and then the next as "a sort of Homeric chain" (page 462). But he attributes the associative flow of Nietzsche's narrative the terrible turbulence in his unconscious. He says, "Nietzsche is confronted with all the devils, the temptations of his own nature, all the lowest as well as the highest qualities of [a person], the greatest possibilities of the depths as well as the heights" (page 462; also see pages 1133). In addition, he says "The unconscious contents flow out in such a seemingly chaotic river, which meanders on through nature, and only the water can tell what the next move will be" (page 1339). However, I would point out that Jung excels in meandering -- over 1,544 pages. But is his meandering manifesting the flow of unconscious contents? Perhaps not. But perhaps not everything that strikes Jung as unconscious contents coming out in Nietzsche's Zarathustra are unconscious contents.

In any event, using Nietzsche's terminology, Jung says, "Nietzsche describes how he was digging down into himself, working into his own shaft; there you can see how intensely he experienced the going into himself, till he suddenly produced the explosion of the most original form of spirit, the Dionysian" (page 369). This explosion of the spirit within him led Nietzsche to write Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He wrote each of the first three parts in creative bursts of energy of ten days each. But he worked on the fourth and final part for a lengthier period of time.

But Jung elsewhere suggests that Nietzsche was going through a mid-life crisis when he wrote Zarathustra. In addition, Jung says that what Nietzsche experienced at the time when he wrote Zarathustra was "the Dionysian stage of his initiation; it is the feeling of rebirth which always accompanies the revelation of Dionysos" (page 192). So Nietzsche's mid-life crisis involved the experience of the so-called Dionysian spirit, and the Dionysian stage of his initiation process filled him with a feeling of rebirth and was creative.

Most importantly, Jung suggests that the so-called Dionysian stage of the initiation process is not the culminating stage of the initiation process, but only a stage along the way toward the culminating stage of the initiation process. But Jung does not happen to delineate the further stages of the initiation process that Nietzsche would have to undergo, had he not descended into irreversible madness in 1889. He died in 1900.

Perhaps we can conclude from Jung's various comments that a dramatic mid-life crisis can be an important stage in one initiation process, but further stages will follow it if one lives long enough.

But can we connect Nietzsche's mid-life experience of the so-called Dionysian spirit with the experience of the holy as Otto describes this kind of experience? Or does the experience of the holy involve an entirely different kind of experience of the spirit? Jung himself does not undertake to explain whether or not there is any connection between the so-called Dionysian spirit and the spirit involved in the experience of the holy as described by Otto. Nevertheless, the two different experiences of the spirit are probably related.

Jung repeatedly claims that Nietzsche is a very one-sided person. According to Jung, Nietzsche has over-developed what Jung refers to as his intuitive function, with a secondary strength involving his thinking function. As a result, Jung characterizes Nietzsche as having serious under-developed sensing and feeling/valuing functions.

Jung's claim about Nietzsche having a seriously under-developed feeling/valuing function fits with one central theme in Zarathustra and some of his other works -- namely the theme of revaluing values, especially the conventional Christian values in his time of good and evil. Nietzsche had studied ancient Persian and the Zoroastrian religious scriptures. He saw the Zoroastrian religion as influencing the ancient emerging Christian tradition of thought about good and evil. (The Zoroastrian religion also contributed to the ancient Christian view of Satan.)

Now, as I noted by introducing William James's use of the term noetic, deep experiences of the spirit usually lead a person to undergo something like a revaluation of values in his or her life. Moreover, it strikes me that many people undergo a revaluation of values more than once in their lives. But most people are not quite as dramatic about it as Nietzsche was when he went through his mid-life crisis.

CONCLUSION

Now, Jung likes to work with what he styles two principles of life: (1) the principle of the spirit and (2) the principle of the body (page 401; also see page 808).

Because poor health forced Nietzsche to retire from his position at the University of Basel in 1879, there can be no doubt that he had learned some things about his body the hard way. Not surprisingly, he devotes a subsection to "On the Despisers of the Body." Not surprisingly, he characterizes certain preachers as despisers of the body. As we might suspect, he was referring to Christians preachers as the despisers of the body. Historically, a strong anti-body bias has been a big part of Christianity.

Today the Roman Catholic bishops are among the major perpetrators of the anti-body views in Christianity. For example, they claim that masturbation is "intrinsically evil," that artificial contraception is "intrinsically evil," and that legalized abortion in the first trimester is "intrinsically evil." But these three positions of theirs show how strongly ingrained their anti-body views are. Unfortunately, they are notoriously stubborn. Evidently, their religious zealotry makes it almost impossible to change their anti-body views and attitudes. In addition, their pre-modern Tradition of thought predisposes them not to adapt to the modern world as it has developed since the Gutenberg printing press emerged in the 1450s.

But Jung is probably right when he suggests that the principle of the spirit needs to be connected with the principle of the body. For this reason the religious zealotry of the Roman Catholic bishops in their opposition to masturbation, artificial contraception, and legalized abortion in the first trimester is NOT a healthy spirituality for people in the modern world today. In short, the Roman Catholic bishops represent a disordered approach to life.

DIGRESSION. Concerning a healthy spirituality, see Anthony de Mello's book The Way to Love: Meditations for Life (Image, 2012). Concerning the principle of the body, see Michael Murphy's book The Future of the Body: Explorations Into the Further Evolution of Human Nature (Tarcher, 1992) and Robert Masters and Jean Houston's book Listening to the Body: The Psychophysical Way to Health and Awareness (Delacorte, 1978). END OF DIGRESSION.

(Article changed on July 23, 2014 at 12:56)

Authors Website: http://www.d.umn.edu/~tfarrell

Authors Bio:

Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book WALTER ONG'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO CULTURAL STUDIES: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE WORD AND I-THOU COMMUNICATION (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2000; 2nd ed. 2009, forthcoming). The first edition won the 2001 Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology conferred by the Media Ecology Association. For further information about his education and his publications, see his UMD homepage: Click here to visit Dr. Farrell's homepage.

On September 10 and 22, 2009, he discussed Walter Ong's work on the blog radio talk show "Ethics Talk" that is hosted by Hope May in philosophy at Central Michigan University. Each hour-long show has been archived and is available for people who missed the live broadcast to listen to. Here are the website addresses for the two archived shows:

Click here to listen the Technologizing of the Word Interview

Click here to listen the Ramus, Method & The Decay of Dialogue Interview