The Nuclear Bomb and the Fate of God: On the First Nuclear Fission
Part II
The Will as Supreme Ontological Principle
As long as Being was immersed in the imaginal realm of the anima, the faces of gods looked at man from within things. This means that things laid a claim on man. Things and situations of themselves demanded this or that treatment; they were binding. As images they directly affected, by virtue of their numinosity, the instinctual psyche and thus led to that behavior that we call ritual. Ever since the decline of epiphany and the exodus of the gods from this world into transcendence, the binding force has gone out of things and situations themselves. This force has been released and now has a separate existence in the shape of absolute ethical norms. To these man has to bestow, by an act of will and by his own spiritual effort, any power and reality they may have, because they have no force of their own.
The human ego and its moral attitude now carry the whole burden of responsibility since the divine glance coming forth from reality no longer quite naturally leads to the soul’s ritual activity at the instinctual level. The ethos of the ritualistic age was moored in external reality itself. Not only man’s actions, but the objective world, was, so to speak, ethical in itself. Ethics encompassed both, man and reality. In the case of moralistic ethics, however, man stands all alone with his moral responsibility vis-à-vis the world of things, which is now without obligation, and subject to arbitrary decisions. Things have no will and claim of their own any more, they are, as one says, “ethically neutral.”
In that moment when things are no longer the images of gods, but have their God as their extramundane creator outside of themselves, they have become fair game, mute objects for study and exploitation. Hence, a moral law imposed from above becomes a necessity in order to restrain the use of the now outlawed reality. Thus, the story of God’s splitting himself off from the Golden Calf inevitably also had to be the story of the Ten Commandments cut in stone tables, that is, the story of a change from the psychological and ritualistic relation to the world to a spiritual and moralistic one, and at the same time the story of the installation of man into his new mode-of-being as the willing one.
This reification of reality, however, is not the work of men. Rather, to be exploitable dead matter is the actual nature of things ever since they ceased being divine images and became created things, things made by God. For it is only secondarily and in a roundabout way, i.e., only if man believes in the extramundane creator with a precarious act of faith constantly subject to temptations, that a certain image quality can be supplied to them. But this will always remain a secondhand imaginal quality, an imago dei infinitely removed from God himself.
The second component of the image, God, has also been immersed and subjected to the element of the ego-will, just as was the case with earthly reality. God is now outside the world so that he no longer speaks to the soul through visible epiphanies and no longer forces the overwhelming impression of his unquestionable reality upon it. God is nothing any more by himself; he is now only an idea, a flatus vocis, completely subject to the contingencies and vicissitudes of man’s faith. Only indirectly, only through a spiritual act of man (faith) can God be supplied with that power that gives him a secondary reality. Faith is the volitional affirmation that man bestows upon God. And without this boost from man, “God” remains an empty word, as the history of the modern world proves. Faith thus has a contradictory nature. By what it says as the content of its belief, it sets God up as the creator; but by what it does, by what the act of faith itself amounts to, it makes the reality of God dependent on man’s will. Not God creates man in his image, but Ego creates God.
“True” God and “False” Gods: The Moralization of Being
At this juncture, let us deepen our analysis of the dissociation of Being in the sense of an ontological nuclear fission. God’s split from his image as bull has consequences for the categories of Being as such. What is split here, are, in the last analysis, the true and the real. The God resulting from the split is the “true” God; what is left of the bull after the split is, to be sure, visible and tangible, in other words real, but it is only an idol, a false God. Thus, we can also say that this First nuclear fission parts God’s truth and his reality.
Truth and reality are big words, with manifold meanings depending on the underlying philosophical framework. What is the philosophical basis of my use of these terms? None. I do not apply to our theme the terms truth and reality as prefabricated metaphysical constructs and as elements of my philosophical “system.” I do not claim that there is indeed such a thing as God’s truth or that I have knowledge of the truth of God. Rather, I take the word “truth” and its meaning from our tale. We see that in the story of the Golden Calf a God comes into being who claims to be “the true God.” “Truth” in this emphatic, absolute sense is posited here “for the first time,” so to speak. I am only concerned with that kind of truth that God claims for himself; whether it has any validity outside of the fantasy and terminology of this mythical tale is of no interest in this context. For “the absolute” or “per se” is, as we see, established by this very story, so that methodologically it would make no sense whatsoever to postulate as an a priori and a necessary category of thought what is only a product of a particular event in Western mythology, the splitting of the image.
One can phenomenologically describe the event in our story as follows: all of God’s truth, i.e., God’s godhood (or the predicate God or also the pure idea of a God) is extracted from the God-images and is isolated as a purified distillate of godhood. On the one hand, God turns into the ideal of a God which lacks a convincing realness. On the other, an earthly reality of God arises whose numinosity becomes more and more insistent, but is denied the recognition as divine. The word idol is the resulting “compromise formation” (in Freud’s sense). In the word idol there lie both the acknowledgment of the real, numinous power that certain realities have over the soul and, at the same time the denial of the predicate God for this numinous impact that we feel.
The enormity of what happened here may not have come home to us yet. Originally, truth and realness belonged together as a matter of course. The real was also the true and the true only true to the extent that it was real. The situation in which truth and reality are the same, even though not alike, has the character of phainesthai, appearance, shine. It is the situation of mythical or ritualistic reality. Most clearly, the essential oneness of the true and the real that we find in the mythical world is illustrated in a conversation between C. G. Jung and a chief of the Pueblo Indians. For the chief and his people, the sun was the divine Father. Jung asked the chief whether he did not think that the sun was a ball of fire, shaped by an invisible God. Jung, in other words, used the argument of Augustinus: “God is not the sun, but He who made the sun.” [1] For the Indian this was, Jung tells us, the most awful blasphemy. He merely answered, “The sun is God. Everyone can see that.” “This is the Father; there is no Father behind it.” [2]
This Pueblo chief insisted that the numinous effects of real phenomena on the psyche be granted whole-hearted acknowledgment as God. There is nothing behind the phenomenon. And, therefore, also no mere “external reality.” What manifests itself and impresses the soul (including, above all, the primordial image of manifestation or shine itself: the sun) is true by virtue of its shining, and there is no other notion of truth here. For this reason reality had to be binding and committing in itself. It bore in itself Truth, i.e., God’s godhood, and thus the supreme soul value. The meaning of truth in this context is something that binds or even compels us and that is acknowledged by us without reserve. We must admit that 2 x 2 = 4. Today, however, truth in philosophical or religious contexts is a totally different category from reality. That the nuclear bomb is real inasmuch as it deeply fascinates and frightens us does not at all mean that it is something unquestionably true in today’s sense of the word and that it has binding power over our attitude to it. On the contrary, we have to degrade it along with everything truly numinous into an idol, indeed into something satanic, since the usual subjectivist degradation of numinous factors as a mere illusion or delusion does not seem to succeed in the case of the bomb.
With the distinction between true and false gods, a fundamental confusion takes over. Ontological truth is confounded with logical truth, i.e., the truth of our statements or predicates. Actual Being and our recognition of this actuality as valid and binding are split apart. The recognition becomes something independent, similarly as with paper money, the value of things became a separate entity. It can now be granted to or withheld from any reality ad libitum.
Actually, of course, there can be no false gods. For either they are gods, then they are not false, or they are something else, then they are not false either. The real is simply what it is, and in this does the unshakable truth of everything that exists. There is no true and false weather, no true and false trees, but there are many kinds of weather and trees. “The true God” is about as meaningful as a statement like “Only sunshine is true weather; rain is false weather.” Opinions and statements can be false, but not realities. With the words “idol” and “false gods,” however, one does not criticize a wrong opinion. Rather, a reality - the numinosity of the golden bull, of the sun, of the thunderstorm - is being degraded.
The energy released by way of the destruction of the image quality has become an instrument of power with which certain aspects of reality can arbitrarily [3] be condemned while others are exalted, in other words, with which the world could be manipulated in a certain direction - the direction frequently called development of consciousness, or evolutionary progress. Here we see again that the will has subjugated Being as such. The sword of Moses is the invention of the idea that there are false realities and that the true (or as one likes to say in psychology: the true self) is not seen, is not allowed to be seen, in what really exists.
As long as reality bore in itself the predicate truth, anything having that type of effect on the soul that by way of abbreviation I want to indicate only with the one word numinosity, was itself god or daimon. The actual effect was the only measure of truth. Now, however, the factual effect no longer counts. What and where God is, is determined by a predecided definition laid down in dogma. We now know a priori that certain things, even if they are highly real and numinous, cannot be God, because they must not be God. In this way we get a new formulation for the paradox mentioned earlier: that God by having risen into the highest height of the absolute has in truth submitted to an ideal or standard and that conversely he can be the “true God” only insofar as he subordinates himself to a norm. God now obeys a super-ego, as it were. He cannot simply be and appear as he is, he does not have free play for his nature, but must comply with a once-and-for-all fixed standard (summum bonum, pure love) which is immunized against his real behavior by dogma, doctrinal office and inquisition. It is this that gives the new nature of God the character of an ego-ideal.
Our story demonstrates at the same time the archetypal foundation and genesis of the inferiority feeling and the striving for superiority in their oneness. It is apparent that what fired the ascension of God from a mythic, phenomenal god to “the true God” was a powerful striving for superiority. It is not only God who himself professes to his zeal or jealousy in this very place; Moses too, his human reflection, shows the same striving. What does this zeal mean? God wants to be superior to the visible image of the bull. Above all, he wants the opinion held of him to be higher than that of the bull image. For this purpose an instrument of power, the sword, is necessary, which shows that a claim of superiority having no power of conviction of its own is to be put through by force. God obviously is not satisfied to exist only as mythical epiphany, as phenomenal shine. He considers his primary form as being inferior. He wants to develop “his true self,” as it were, and have a literal existence. From this we see that the inferiority feeling is based on the striving for superiority and vice versa. For only because God takes his true idea (i.e., his ideal) for his absolute standard must he despise his own reality as false. The real natural world becomes inferior.
What happened here has meanwhile - with the coming of the 20th century - seeped down into the personal psychology of individuals. If many patients today feel inferior and think that they have to appear as “more” (more educated, more dignified, richer, morally better, or whatever), then this does not only have its reasons in the personal life history of these people. Rather it is also the late ritual re-enactment of this divine paradigm in the personal life of a human being.
The Change in the Nature of the Image
The destruction of the divine image has not done away with the imaginal quality altogether. It is not that formerly man lived in an imaginal world whereas today we do not. The image has only undergone a fundamental change in quality. The mode of being of the image has become different, but not diminished. In fact, the image underwent the same tremendous intensification into a distillate of image that we have seen occurring with respect to God’s truth. It is readily apparent that there has been an unheard-of inflation of the image, so that we now live in an absurdly imagistic time. Never has the world been so swamped with images: posters, magazines, prints, art books, comics, television, advertising on almost every wrapping, huge collections of pictures in city museums, printed fabrics and wallpaper. … In addition, there is an inflationary increase in figurative uses of language, puns and the like, again showing the dominance of the image.
Once the image was the manifestation of something. In the image of the bull, e.g., the sharply defined inner essence of the bull - the bull God - showed itself. The image always conveyed a reality as a numinous Other distinct from the image itself; but in such a way that the numinous reality manifested itself immediately in the image, shining forth from it, though without being identical with it. The image had an irreducible substantial content, for the sake of which it was image and to which it surrendered itself. Thus the image was image by helping its substantial content to presence, to manifest in such a way that the image was subsumed by its activity of showing its subject. The image was ‘holy’ inasmuch as its reality served to show truth.
The image presented in advertising or television shows has freed itself from any dependence on its content. It is the totally unleashed, purified image, showing only itself. It is no longer there for the purpose of showing something. The image in advertising is absolutely indifferent to what it shows or is an image of. In this indifference lies its complete freedom and thus its absoluteness. For one and the same product you could advertise by means of an image of the tough life of cowboys just as easily as with the opposite image of a refined society living a luxurious life. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony can be the musical background to a soap commercial just as well as to a commercial for cognac or a political party. What matters is only that it is pure show and that it has brought its presence to the highest degree of forcibleness. The correlate in man of this kind of unleashed image is therefore the feeling experience such as in tourism (if the effect is conscious), or the “hidden persuasion” (if it is unconscious).
Here we see again that the imaginal quality too has been subjugated to will. Only an image freed into indifference to its content can arbitrarily be used and exploited for any purpose; only by submitting wholly to the will can the image free itself from being bonded by its subject as a numinous reality of substance, and ascend into absoluteness. Therefore the purpose of financial profit that is intricately connected with advertising confirms the absoluteness of the image and is a condition for it. The financial exploitation of the image is the very guarantee that the image has indeed absolutely overcome its substantial content, and now is shown solely for the purpose of show.
When we hear of an exploitation of image, we tend to react with moral condemnation. Advertising and television are considered base and inferior. That is the general consensus, even if this consensus does not seem to detract from their reality and popularity. But, after what we discussed above, we can no longer think in this condemnatory fashion, because that thought pattern was the very cause of what we now, looking through its glasses, would be condemning. We therefore must try to appreciate advertising, television, and today’s whole flood of images as the modern form of image worship: as the authentic and only possible way to worship the image of the Christian God.
For what is the image of the Christian God? This God, in his Old Testament form as Yahweh, has just now in our story issued a prohibition: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness….” This prohibition is only directed against the natural deities, not against pictorial representations of Yahweh himself. [4] What is rejected here is therefore the worship of the natural inasmuch as it claims to be substantial and divine of its own accord; and what is ipso facto demanded is a cult of a God-image that has left all traces of the natural behind and has no substantial content: in other words, is an imageless image. This exactly corresponds to the new nature of God who has shaken off his natural reality and purified himself into an idealized ‘unreal’ abstraction, into an image in the public relations sense of the word. The Christian God’s existence is not substantial, it lies solely in his prestige, the effect of his ‘public relations,’ in his being believed in by his ‘true believers,’ his ‘fans.’ In brief: he has his essence in the public opinion held of him. For the definition of his nature (“highest good,” “true word,” “all love”) does not contain particular substantial qualities. It only names, quite abstractly, the relation to his public (love, message, Father), or the reputation that he wants to be known to have (summum bonum). Thus he lives entirely for, and is reduced to, his public image, whereas the old gods only became present, only had their epiphany in the image and as image, but what showed forth in the image was their qualitative substantiality and particular essence. Now, the image is empty, even if it portrays the richness of the whole world; it does not make anything manifest any more, positing itself as an end in itself - pure prestige.
A main difference between the so-called pagan gods and the Christian God lies not in that the former are worshipped in images and the latter not, but in the transformation of the nature of the God-image. We today worship the God-image of our God just as much as the ancients worshipped their God-images. The only difference is that our God-image does not have the sensual shape of a natural phenomenon or of a cast, painted, or carved image, but rather the abstract and absolute shape of image per se: the image of public relations. The numinosity once invested in what the image manifested now belongs to the “image for the sake of image.” We need images, more and more images, no matter what of.
The absolute God can only be a single one (monotheism : “that they might know thee the only true God” - John 17:3), and by the same token there is, and can only be, one single absolute image, no matter in how many different “versions” it occurs. It makes no difference whether it is the image of God, or of a politician, of a business firm, of a product, or of a private person - it is always one and the same thing that is shown in the image (in the public relations sense of the word) thanks to its total indifference to any specific content: prestige as such, the praise of the name for the name’s sake; not of a particular name, for this would again be the name of something or somebody. Inasmuch as it is God’s qualitative nature to be image (public opinion as such), any activity cultivating the prestige of something (of one’s own image or of the image of a product or organization, or whatever) is an enactment of God’s nature and as such a sacred act - the cult or worship of our God-image. With every image in advertising or public relations, the absolute God celebrates his ever-new triumph of the absolute God over his substantial bull shape.
In order for Christianity to overcome polytheism definitively, it had to become absolutely indifferent to any particular content of the image, indeed to the very idea of a content. Holy images were merely representations, functional aids, not in themselves holy. Thus, Christianity also had to become indifferent to its own doctrinal contents, its own iconography and mythical substance. The literal theological substance of Christianity, as it is still preached today by the churches, is the last pagan remnant, as it were, in Christianity itself. Only where this remnant of the natural and substantial has been completely transformed into function, and only where the intended noetic contents are totally transmuted into objectively existing form, has Christianity reached its accomplished shape: advertising, entertainment, tourism, public relations, ego-psychology, theory of information, and cybernetics - as shocking as this insight may at first seem. For behind every content that insisted on its remaining content, be it as Christian as can be, there would always be lurking one of the mythical gods, a segment of the autonomous divinity of the natural world: idols.
To still today consider “actual” Christianity to be Christianity in its express theological form would mean to think that the Christian promise could be adhered to by the mere echoing of it instead of by making it good, and to think that the task set by the Christian vision could be fulfilled by the monotonous repetition of this task instead of by its execution. Theological discourse could only be a preliminary representation of the Christian religion because it was Christian only “accidentally,” only by virtue of the conscious intention of the speaking person. With advertising, to mention just one example, this is no longer the case. It is by virtue of the necessities of its essence and independently of the accidentalities of human intentions that advertising is the constant proclamation of salvation and the constant confirmation in the belief in salvation. Here, Christianity (the preaching of the Gospel = the good news and the mission to convert) is no longer a subjective attitude: it has changed over into an objective existence, working its reality upon us even against our ‘wills.’
The Demonization of Reality
As God’s truth was heightened more and more until it reached the absolute summit in the New Testament, his reality became inferior. However, the suppression of God’s reality into the status of idols or, later on, of the devil, does not mean that God’s reality remained frozen in its old condition. On the contrary, only God’s idealized person as pure spirit and pure love was frozen once it had reached its highest possible form with the New Testament. For how could the absolute still progress, how could a truth that has been split from its reality continue to develop? God’s truth had reached its end. Not so God’s reality, now having become inferior. In fact, active fermentation and development was reserved for it.
As long as sensory reality bore the predicate God, it was securely moored in and bound by the name of God. On account of its divine nature, the mythical world bore a pleromatic fullness and gravity in itself which prevented things from striving beyond themselves into boundlessness (hybris, Titanism). This changed in that moment when reality was cut off from its inner mooring in the middle ground of the imaginal by a blow of the sword. From then on things did not have their ontological center, their center of gravity in themselves. That center had been transferred from within them into transcendence, so that the things of this world were brought into an ontological state of inevitable unrest since they now had to yearn for their center in a ceaseless striving. Since then, to use formulations by Nietzsche, the world is rolling from its center into the X, similar to a stream that wants to get to its end [5] - a process that began imperceptibly and became clear to everyone only during the modern age.
Just as God’s truth cut off from his reality had striven for the highest heights like a released balloon, so conversely reality, separated from the name of God and thus unleashed, could, and had to, strive to advance its earthly realness to unheard of degrees of intensity in order to correspond to the intensification reached by the predicate ‘God.’ The tremendous amount of energy, released by its separation from God’s truth, was now available for its completely autonomous development. The whole strength formerly invested in the ritual binding of reality and thus in reality’s trueness, was now for the sole benefit of reality pure and simple. This means reality was charged enormously, it was demonized. Reality too was supposed to acquire a literal existence instead of an imaginal one. The latest result of this development is the nuclear bomb. With it, a degree of reality has been reached behind which the wildness and danger of the bull and all other former God-animals, including Leviathan and Behemoth, fade to nothing.
Natural reality has intensified into technological reality. God’s animal shape tied into the entire complex of life has been surpassed by the abstract and absolutely unleashed machine shape of God. As God’s truth underwent, with the God of pure love and true word, a stylization into the absolute ideal cleansed from all reality, so also reality, released from its bondage to God’s truth, intensified into the sheer distillate of realness. Nuclear energy is, as it were, realness as such, realness absolute, cleansed from all the “cinders” of the ideal that by necessity were originally incorporated in the real.
Our Real Experience of God
With this situation, however, development is reversed. The nuclear bomb is so frighteningly real that it simply forces consciousness to recognize it as an undeniable truth - ugly, depraved, deadly, but still truth. The long degraded and repressed reality has caught up again with that consciousness that had been exclusively fixated on pure truth. In the shape of the bomb, God’s repudiated reality demands from us repayment, with compounded interest, of a gigantic debt, demands the name of God which was withheld from reality for more than two millennia, the unreserved recognition of reality as true God. Western mankind owes reality worship, having disparaged it as idol, false gods, Mammon, Moloch, Kingdom of Satan, the secular, and the like. Western man has praised God’s truth to the skies, indeed so highly that in the end it evaporated; but he disowned reality like a bastard, even though this reality powerfully attracted man’s greed (consumer goods), his curiosity (science), and his industry (big business), thereby proving its irresistible numinosity. Through faith, by believing, mankind abandoned itself blindly to God’s own idol of himself.
Here, we must not forget that it was God himself who cut himself off from his reality and commanded that it be disparaged. With his zeal, God himself pursued his upward stylization to the absolutely true God and demanded faith in this image of himself. But as the psychotherapist would owe something to his patient if he were to believe blindly the latter’s self-representation instead of also perceiving his unconscious reality, so God, too, has been betrayed in a deeper sense precisely because mankind believed his self-representation and complied with the degrading of God’s reality pursued by God himself. It would seem to have been man’s task to be more perspicacious and to try the spirits with critical alertness.
C. G. Jung repeatedly stressed that psychological hygiene requires consciousness to distinguish itself from those archetypal truths that might come over it. It is vital for us not to succumb to them. Above all in therapy, the analyst has to pay dearly for taking the neurotic conjectures of his patient literally. For the unconscious reality pushing to the fore from within the pathology insists on being seen as what it is despite all well-meaning intentions on the part of consciousness. Even the patient himself ultimately wants to be recognized in his reality, as strong as his defenses against such a recognition may be at first and as much as he may insist, in his conscious words, on his truth, i.e., his idealized self. Does not similarly God’s reality in the shape of the bomb insist on recognition without reserve - even against his conscious self-revelation as pure love and creative truth? Does not God, too, want to be seen in his reality?
What in the shape of the nuclear bomb is knocking at our door and wants to be received into consciousness is nothing else but God’s own reality, that reality that he had centuries ago cast away in the form of the bull image and thereby unleashed. Therapeutically, it is an indispensable necessity that the unleashed be bound again, that what has been split off be united with its other half. It must not be said again: “He came unto his own, and his own received him not” (John 1:11). But the binding of the unleashed cannot take place in technology or by political techniques alone. It must also, even primarily, take place psychologically on the objective level of the psyche, i.e., in our ontology and theology. For only then is it not constantly threatened by a collapse of our good-will, but is firmly grounded in a foundation that supports ourselves too. God’s reality must finally be given back its truth, withheld from it for so long. And for that reason I say: The nuclear bomb is God.
It is not I who deifies the nuclear bomb. Objective phenomenology has long done so. In view of the bomb, must we not, to quote Schleiermacher, have the feeling of our absolute dependence? Is the nuclear bomb not, to speak with Tillich, our ultimate concern? In its face, must we not confess, to use Luther’s phrase, “Did we in our own strength confide, Our striving would be losing”? Is it not, to cite Rudolf Otto, the numinous power of our age? It is the supreme ruler over our existence or non-existence. It has the power to drive hundreds of thousands of people to public demonstrations, a modern variety of sacred processions. It causes boundless fears, shows itself to man in countless dreams. And, above all, according to its telos it is all-permeating radiation (radiance), blazing heat, burning fire, all-crushing pressure-wave.
This is what we actually experience. Can we recognize this experience as binding for our thinking and speaking? Do we allow our experience to tell us what name to give to it - or will we be blind to it, and do we situate our thinking and speaking in a cut-off realm of consciousness? Ultimately, the question is whether we grant, along with C. G. Jung, e.g., that phenomenological experience possesses ontological binding power, or whether from a suspended spiritual position we de-realize our psychological experience as “merely” psychological, “merely” subjective. Jung grounded “psychological truth” in the “reality of the psyche.” He said an idea “is psychologically true inasmuch as it exists,” and similarly he said about physical reality, by way of example, that “an elephant is true because it exists.” (CW 11, §4f.). Jung thus brought down the notion of truth from transcendent heaven onto phenomenological earth. “Higher” truth is no longer literally above the world, but it is the depth and essence of the real world itself. If therefore our real experience binds our thinking and speaking, then we must say the nuclear bomb is God, our true God, the God of the Christian West in his reality.
If, on the other hand, we cling to a certain idea of God and immunize it against all actual experience, then we would be pretending to have an absolute knowledge about who and how God is and what and how he can by no means be. In order for us to have such a knowledge, in order for us to possess a transcendent standard by which to measure the divine or not-divine qualities of real phenomena, we would have to be transcendent ourselves or even be superior to God. If, however, our finite nature and the finite nature of our knowledge come home to us, we must understand that we are irrevocably encompassed by our phenomenal world and are thus dependent on acquiring not only our knowledge about individual phenomena, but also the criteria by which to judge them, from phenomenological experience itself.
We do not know “the true God” (as negative theology itself insists), and this is so even if God himself sets up a particular image of himself as the true one and demands faith in it. That God is the “true God” or the absolute is only his attribute or name, only the content of an archetypal structure. As such a content, the statement is true (psychological truth), but this of course does not mean that the archetype of the absolute is himself in fact absolute (just as Muhammed Ali by saying “I am the greatest” must not necessarily be the greatest). We could only think so if our consciousness were infected by the archetypal idea of the absolute or the “true God” as if by a virus and, in an unending attack of “feverish” megalomania, had forgotten its irrevocably finite nature. Is not the mere flirtation with the idea of the infinite a presumption for mortal man? For finite consciousness would not be truly finite if it could in any way have access to something infinite. Is it not time to awaken from this Western frenzy and to see that the idea of an absolute, infinite God is itself a most finite, human, and seasonable idea?
That something as dreadful as the nuclear bomb is supposed to be God, is nothing strange as far as the history and phenomenology of religion are concerned. Even the Christian God was dreadful at the times of the Old Testament. Of course this is in sharpest contrast to his self-revelation as love. But maybe we can apply to our topic a differentiation that Kafka [6] once used and say on the basis of our actual phenomenological experience: yes, truly, God is love, but still more truly is he the terror of Being or, as Jung once formulated it, the almighty shadow, the fear that fills heaven and earth. [7] Yes, indeed, God is his truth, but still more truly is he his reality. Truly - still more truly: this is the relationship that prevails between consciousness and the unconscious, between idealized self and reality.
New Primitivity
The statement, “The nuclear bomb is God” cannot be taken literally. It would be absurd. Rather, this statement explodes our customary literal notion of God as well as our literal understanding of the bomb as a merely technical object. I cannot “believe” in the bomb as God, for then I would have idolized it. But neither can I look for God behind it, behind reality, and attribute a literal existence above the whole world to him. Ultimately this would be an idolization as well, inasmuch as idolatry means that a split-off, partial aspect is worshipped as God in its own right. Let us keep in mind what the Pueblo Indian said: “The sun is God. Everyone can see that. He is the Father, there is no father behind him.” This worshipped sun is of course not the reduced sun of physics or astronomy. It is the full-fledged original sun, the image that looks at the soul from within the sun’s depth. In the same vein, the nuclear bomb is not God as an object of physics, but as the real image of the absolute terror that it throws into the soul and that fills the soul with fear and awe, or it is the image of that inconceivable radiance before which we could not hide our face any more, but would have to retreat to fallout shelters. Here we do not have to mystify: Everyone can see that.
We don’t have to look for anything behind the phenomenon. The real, unreduced sight of the nuclear bomb is God. Literalism, or the metaphysical relation to Being, has been overcome and Being is grounded again in the metaphorical image, in appearance, in the phenomenal shine. The notion of God that had been raised to the metaphysical heaven and, shelved there, has come back down to earth, so that reality can be credited again with the binding power of truth, i.e., with the attribute God, simply because it is so dreadfully real. Nature and spirit are no longer the ultimate components of the world, no longer absolute opposites. They are returned to the psyche, and the psyche in return is reinstated in its hereditary rank as that which surrounds us on all sides and has nothing outside of itself.
We for our part return with this metaphorical, psychological, phenomenological position into a new primitivity; if you wish, into a kind of “animism,” which, as you know, comes from anima. As Jung once stated in a conversation with a man of the church, “I am a primitive; you are a civilized man.” When Jung reported this conversation, he added, “In a certain way, this man is much more wonderful than I am. He can [on account of the means of grace of the church] be a saint; I cannot be a saint - I can only be a nigger, very primitive, going by the next thing - quite superstitious.” (CW 18 §682).
If we stick to the next best in this quite “naïve” way, then we will, I assume, go down on our knees in view of the dreadful terror and the unspeakable radiance looking at us from within the nuclear bomb. Then the worship of the Golden Calf, interrupted at that time, could be concluded, but on the completely new level of the absolute that we have meanwhile arrived at. Does not God’s reality, does not his dreadfulness, does not the nuclear bomb demand of us that we worship it? Is worship not the only real possibility of its propitiation? With worship I of course do not mean to approve of it, to be “for” it. I simply mean that we correspond to the actual experience in our soul by a conscious recognition of the substance of this experience. I mean that we expressly take our place in that which actually is. I mean, figuratively speaking, the dance around our Golden Calf. Can you imagine this? A mankind that dances around the bomb? A mankind whose hardening and contentiousness, whose power competition and protesting would be softened in the dance, a mankind that would swing into the “atomic” music of Being? And a bomb that would not have to be used any more, because it would be the center authorizing the dance? A bomb, which as that center would bind man and by binding us would also be itself bound?
[1] Augustinus, In Johannis Evangelium, XXXIV, 2, col. 2037, tom. III/2: Non est Dominus sol factus, sed per quem sol factus est.
[2] I quote from the reports of this encounter in Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, rev. ed. (New York: Pantheon, 1973), pp. 250f., as well as in CW 18, §688.
[3] This does not mean “as one likes it,” but according to the law inherent in the will. The will is not itself a matter of free choice.
[4] Ulrich Mann, "Ikone and Engel," pp. 9f.
[5] Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Wille zur Macht, comp. Peter Gast (Stuttgart: Kröners Taschenbuchausgabe 78, 1959), #1.5 and "Vorrede," #2.
[6] Franz Kafka, "Das Urteil," in F.K., Das Urteil and andere Erzahlungen (Frankfurt and Hamburg: Fischer Bücherei, 1952), p. 21: "Ein unschuldiges Kind warst du ja eigentlich, aber noch eigentlicher warst du ein teuflischer Mensch!"
[7] Letters 1, March 16, 1943, to Arnold Künzli, p. 333.