Reclaiming the Land from the Sea

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Inner Work, Robert A. Johnson, Shadow Work

Gretchen argues for Faust’s soul–Ist gerettet

 

Having played Gretchen in a college version of Faust (auf Deutsch, natürlich), this is one of my favorite acts of the play. As the drama nears its end, Faust and Mephistopheles have drawn closer, somewhat tempered each other.

Unfortunately, this causes Mephistopheles to want to regain some of his control over Faust. He is the devil, our shadow, after all. So, he asks Faust if there is anything he would like.

Not as such, Faust replies. This is the man “whom infinity would scarcely satisfy” at the beginning of the book. Mephistopheles offers him the moon, but Faust says he would be content with “a piece of coastline so that he might reclaim land from sea.”

“Water, particularly the ocean, is a universal symbol of the unconscious,” Robert Johnson writes, “and Faust is asking for eternal connection with the depths represented by the sea.”

The true work of man in the latter part of his life, he says, is the cultural process of bringing up some of the contents of the unconscious and integrating them into consciousness.”

Goethe symbolizes this by having Faust reclaim land from the sea–dredging canals, building dikes–taking land from the sea and adding it to the land mass. In this process Faust finds great contentment.

But as we know, nothing is ever that simple. When Faust complains to Mephistopheles that a cottage owned by a couple (Baucis and Philemon), who have lived on his newly acquired property all of their lives, blocks his view, tragedy ensues once again. Mephistopheles frightens the old couple to death and burns their cottage to the ground.

Faust is horrified, particularly as he realizes that he is responsible for the tragic results.  It is now that Faust realizes just what his alliance with Mephistopheles is costing him.

“He learns,” Johnson notes, “that he has power over Mephistopheles and that he is capable of misusing that power.”

As he continues to reclaim land from the sea, he does not notice the approach of the “four gray sisters–Want, Debt, Need and Care.” Johnson says these dark forces are the power of necessity. Because of his wealth, Faust can easily ignore the first three as he has everything he needs. But no man can ignore Dame Care. She is something we all need.

When he doesn’t take her seriously, Dame Care blinds Faust. “This leads me to believe,” Johnson writes, “that the blinding was more an inner exchange of sight for insight, a transformation required of every man as he grows old.”

Faust’s excavation now becomes the digging of his own grave as he can no longer see what he is doing. Johnson says that here you can recognize one of the dangers of old age–digging or hacking away at a project out of inertia and habit rather than any sense of purpose.

Just before his death, Faust steps back from his labors and sees a utopian vision of a noble band of people inhabiting his newly claimed land, and utters the fatal words–“Linger, thou art so fair!”

Mephistopheles rushes in to claim Faust’s soul, according to the terms of the contract agreed upon 24 years previously. Faust has lost and Mephistopheles has won! What is the point of inner change if only to have it snatched away by a very human error at the end? Is absolute perfection required of us at the gates of heaven?

But then something miraculous happens. Despite everything, Gretchen’s love for Faust has never waned. She appears at the head of a choir of angels and pleads for Faust’s soul. It was a vision of heaven, they say, that made Faust utter those fatal words, not anything that Mephistopheles created. A technicality, perhaps, but it works. Gretchen leads Faust into heaven where grace, not justice, prevails.

“The masculine stuff of law and order and justice are superseded by grace and love,” Johnson writes.

The Fourth Puer–The Boy Angel

“We have seen no redemption of one in a pair of opposites is possible without the same redemption of the other,” Johnson says. Both Faust and Mephistopheles must be redeemed if either is to find wholeness.

While lamenting his loss, Mephistopheles catches sight of a boy angel in the heavenly band and falls in love with him, neglecting to press his partially limited charges against Faust.

“To understand the multitude of forms in which love may touch you is to gain some sense of its great mystery,” Johnson writes. “Mephistopheles has been touched by that form of love that is specific to his need and his transformation.”

Faust is redeemed by the love of Gretchen; Mephistopheles by his first experience of love. “Ego and shadow each finds its own level of redemption and its own appropriate salvation.”

The boy angel, symbolizing love (not unlike Cupid), is the fourth manifestation of the archetype of puer aeternis. To touch the puer is to touch eternity and love and be delivered from the time-space world, Johnson says.

The play ends with the following lines:

All that is perishable
is but an image;
Here the short-reaching
becomes result.
The indescribable–
here it is done;
The Eternal Feminine
draws us on.

This is more than a hint that wholeness is not attained by means of masculine law or contract. It is a gift from the feminine aspect of God.

Next Week: Conclusion

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Don Quixote

The two-dimensional man.

According to Jungian analyst Robert Johnson, Don Quixote is a “near-perfect representation of two-dimensional man—the simple peasant man.”

For those unfamiliar with the tale, Miguel Cervantes, when he was in his 50s in the early 17^th century, wrote the novel while living in squalor in a single room. Other than having written Don Quixote, Cervantes lived what could essentially be called a failed life. He lost an arm in battle, was captured and served a slave to the Moors for five years, he couldn’t hold down a job once he returned to Spain, he fathered an illegitimate child, married a girl of 19 when he was 50 and then left her to live in poverty while writing Don Quixote.

And while the book was wildly popular, he never made much money off it and died soon after writing a second volume, which wasn’t quite as good. The main character of the book, Don Alonso, has read so many books on chivalry by the time he is 50 years old that he decides to set off on a romantic quest of his own. Don Quixote (essentially Sir Codpiece as he names himself for the piece of armor that covers the thighs and genitals) genuinely believes that his impossible dream will come true.

He hires a squire, Sancho Panza (Mr. Paunch) who is indeed the opposite, perhaps the shadow of Don Quixote—short, fat and practical, and ruled by his appetite. According to Johnson, this is a common pair—from the Bible’s Jacob and Esau and David and Jonathon to today’s Mutt and Jeff or Abbot and Costello or any buddy cop pairing. They are ego and shadow—the parts of us that are opposite yet inseparable.

Johnson quotes W.H. Auden on Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, including: “Don Quixote needs Sancho Panza as the one creature about whom he has no illusions but loves as he is; Sancho Panza needs Don Quixote as the one constant loyalty in his life which is independent of feeling. Take away Don Quixote and Sancho Panza is so nearly pure flesh, immediacy of feeling, so nearly without will that he becomes a hedonist pagan who rejects everything but matter. Take away Sancho Panza, on the other hand, and Don Quixote is so nearly pure spirit that he becomes a Manichee who rejects matter and feeling and nothing but an egotistic will.”

Don Quixote purchases an old horse, Rocinante (she-whom-one-follows) and they set off on their adventure to find Dulcinea, the sweetness of life, whom even the Don admits might not exist though he will give his life for her. Needless to say, they never find her. Dulcinea exists only in the heart of the searcher, which Johnson says is all that matters to the two-dimensional man.

“The two-dimensional man lives constantly in the realm of fantasy and imagination,” Johnson says. “They are the Garden of Eden, perfection, total reliability.” But, fantasy and imagination don’t translate to the outer world.

“Don Quixote is creating poetry, not reality,” says Johnson. “Heaven, love, idealism, hope, justice, chivalry, eternity—all are inner realities as palpable and real as any outer realities our world holds in such high esteem. Don Quixote’s optimism ruins everything around him. . . . He loses every time he relies on his sword; it is ‘pure spirit disguised as fantasy,’ as Thomas Mann once wrote. This is the vision of two-dimensional man and is the stuff of nostalgia and fantasy for every three-dimensional man.”

Next Week: The Adventures

The Paradox of Opposites

I keep putting off writing this, but when my horoscope said recently, “Live with the paradox of knowing that everything is okay and not okay at the very same time,” it seemed very apropos.

It was one of my Zen Transformation cards that set me to pondering the paradox of opposites—the fact that where opposites are involved, there cannot be one without the other. That is, there is no darkness without light, good without evil, etc.

As Osho said, “Mind is a kind of prism—pass a ray of white light through it and immediately it is divided into seven colors. Pass anything through the mind and it becomes dual. Life and death are not life-and-death, the reality is lifedeath. It should be one word, not two; not even a hyphen in between. Lifedeath is one phenomenon. Lovehate is one phenomenon. Darknesslight is one phenomenon. Negativepositive is one phenomenon. But when you pass this one phenomenon through the mind, the one is divided immediately in two. Lifedeath becomes life and death–not only divided but death becomes antagonistic to life. They are enemies. Now you can go on trying to make these two meet, and they will never meet.”

Actually, I think they can meet, but they can never be more than acquaintances. We can introduce ourselves to death and come to terms with it as a fact of life. We will all die. When the sun sets at night, we know that it will rise again in the morning despite the fact the darkness seems unending at the time, and when the trees lose their leaves in the fall, we know that they will return with the spring.

When we work toward wholeness in the process of individuation, we must work with reconciling those opposites, the paradox within our selves.

Psychoanalyst Carl G. Jung states it this way in his book “Answer to Job”, written in 1952:

“The metaphysical process is known to the psychology of the unconscious as the individuation process. In so far as this process, as a rule, runs its course unconsciously as it has from time immemorial, it means no more than that the acorn becomes an oak, the calf a cow, and the child an adult. But if the individuation process is made conscious, consciousness must confront the unconscious and a balance between the opposites must be found. As this is not possible through logic, one is dependent on symbols which make the irrational union of opposites possible. They are produced spontaneously by the unconscious and are amplified by the conscious mind.

“The difference between the ‘natural’ individuation process, which runs its course unconsciously, and the one which is consciously realized, is tremendous. In the first case consciousness nowhere intervenes; the end remains as dark as the beginning. In the second case so much darkness comes to light that the personality is permeated with light, and the consciousness necessarily gains in scope and insight. The encounter between conscious and unconscious has to ensure that the light which shines in the darkness is not only comprehended by the darkness, but comprehends it. The filius solis et lunae is the symbol of the union of opposites as well as the catalyst of their union. It is the alpha and omega of the process, the mediator and intermedius. ‘It has a thousand names,’ say the alchemists, meaning the source from which the individuation process rises and the goal towards which it aims is nameless, ineffable.

“But empirically is can be established, with a sufficient degree of probability, that there is in the unconscious an archetype of wholeness which manifests itself spontaneously in dreams, etc., and a tendency, independent of the conscious will, to relate other archetypes to this centre. Consequently, it does not seem improbable that the archetype of wholeness occupies as such a central position which approximates it to the God-image. The similarity is further borne out by the peculiar fact that the archetype produces a symbolism which has always characterized and expressed the Deity.

“The religious need longs for wholeness, and therefore lays hold of the images of wholeness offered by the unconscious, which, independently of the conscious mind, rise up from the depths of our psychic nature.

“. . . it is well to remind ourselves of Saint Paul and his split consciousness: on one side he felt he was the apostle directly called and enlightened by God, and, on the other side, a sinful man who could not pluck out the ‘thorn in the flesh’ and rid himself of the Satanic angel who plagued him. That is to say, even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth as vast as the sky.”

I’ll leave this with a smidgen of a poem from the Gnostic Gospels that celebrates this paradox:

The Thunder, Perfect Mind

For I am knowledge and ignorance.

I am shame and boldness.

I am shameless; I am ashamed.

I am strength and I am fear.

I am war and peace.

It is a lengthy poem, but you can read it in its (mostly) entirety here at Erik Andrulis’ blog: Anacephalaeosis