The Jesus Image.
The difference between an image and a symbol.
Someone posted a painting of “Jesus” in a group today with the question of what the image invoked in us.
It’s not the painting above, it’s down below and presents a fair skinned Jesus with burning heart wreathed in thorns set against a background of the galaxy and mountains.
Of course, it invoked a wide range of responses from the group.
Most surprising perhaps was the lack of “the way, the truth, and the life.” Instead, some people described the image as peaceful, others said it depicted the sacred masculine or the heart of Universal wisdom.
One man said it was too self-consciously “soft” and blamed that on feminism. (More on that later.)
Another man said the following:
“White imperialism. Hypocrisy. Tribalism. Manipulation. Bait and switch. Toxicity disguised as love.”
The initial poster responded that it was a Rorschach test. He added to this his disappointment that people couldn’t see past their “sectarian dogma,” then gave a nod to the traumas of the past and a pitying word to those who had been hurt.
His premise was that the image represents a cosmic principle. Like many of us, he mistook his own personal experience of an image as the universal gateway to a symbol.
What is a psychological symbol?
A Symbol is an indefinite expression with many meanings to something not easily defined and therefore not fully known.
— Carl Jung. Man and his Symbols
It is important here to distinguish between a literary or artistic symbol and a symbol of the psyche. The former is often a metaphor or a way to reference a thought or emotion.
A psychological symbol is something that touches the core of human experience. It can’t be expressed because it transcends words. It is too deep to dissect into a collection of vowels, consonants, and definitions because it is an experience of the psyche in the body.
The symbol is a living body, corpus et anima. . . The uniqueness of the psyche can never enter wholly into reality; it can only be realized approximately, though it still remains the absolute basis of all consciousness. The deeper “layers” of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness. . . they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body’s materiality. . . in the symbol the world itself is speaking.
— Jung. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious.
A symbol can only be referred to, never fully spoken.
The Dao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Dao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name. (Conceived of as) having no name, it is the Originator of heaven and earth; (conceived of as) having a name, it is the Mother of all things. . .
Where the Mystery is the deepest is the gate of all that is subtle and wonderful.
In a way, symbols are the seed beneath an archetype. They’re the generating power that takes on a face and characteristics to interact with the ego in the psyche.
Literary and artistic symbolism is an attempt to put faces on these deeper meanings.
The rose is a literary or artistic symbol that invokes the deeper psychological experience of the confused state wherein we can love, enjoy, desire, and/or praise something that hurts or wounds us.
The psychological symbol itself is the twist in stomach, the aching chest, the choked throat that wants to scream and cry, it’s the nights spent awake in bed, twisting, longing, it’s the obsessive thoughts, the paradox of relationships with their beautiful highs and the screaming and vicious fights, its the affair and the guilt, the shame that comes with it.
It’s a truth within us that manifests in countless ways and can’t ever be fully described.
The difference between a symbol and an image.
The more archaic and “deeper,” that is the more physiological, the symbol is, the more collective and universal, the more “material” it is. The more abstract, differentiated, and specified it is, and the more its nature approximates to conscious uniqueness and individuality, the more it sloughs off its universal character. Having finally attained full consciousness, it runs the risk of becoming a mere allegory which nowhere oversteps the bounds of conscious comprehension, and is then exposed to all sorts of attempts at rationalistic and therefore inadequate explanation.
— Jung. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious.
A psychological image is an artifact that invokes a symbol for some.
The rose, for instance, has spoken to many of that deep symbol of inner conflict and confusion around beauty, longing, and pain.
The lotus in the East bears a similar message of contrasting pieces. Beauty arises from the muck.
For some Shakespear or a Buddhist poem can summon these deep truths through the metaphors of a rose or lotus.
For others, these works of poetry don’t touch the right cords. They can’t invoke the symbol because they don’t hit upon the personal psyche’s associations and relationships to the symbol.
This is the difference between an image and a symbol.
The symbol is deep down and relatively universal. The image is the more conscious invocation of that symbol but due to its proximity to the conscious personal mind, it is far more subjective.
What did I see when I saw the painting?
- An unrealistic depiction invoking questions of androgyny and projected shadows.
- My own experience from trauma to social justice warrior.
- The polarization of the Christian psyche and the harm it has caused.
Patriarchal shadows and androgyny.
Yeshua’s (Jesus’s) father was a carpenter, he was exiled when young, and spent 40 days fasting and surviving in the desert.
I wouldn’t choose to depict him as “soft.”
This isn’t a criticism of delicate features as much as a longing for realism, wind-worn skin darkened by the Sun and blasted by the sands, rough hands, and the look of one who knows how to survive.
Instead, we have depictions of Yeshua through the centuries as “soft” or delicate. As I’m rather confident it’s not a result of feminism I’m going to hazard a guess that it has unconscious roots.
Most Christian paintings throughout time were done by men for powerful men. Men who often associated masculinity with strength, power, and dominance; “softness” or delicacy was associated with the feminine.
I think it’s hard for someone who identifies their masculinity with power to see a man hanging on a cross. It feels like defeat, submission, so men unconsciously pushed the image of sacrifice off onto a more delicate figure, a feminine figure.
Or maybe it has more to do with androgyny and the fact figures like Christ, Dionysius, and many other sacrificed deities tend to have more androgynous features. Suggesting perhaps the need for integrated duality.
Maybe it’s a bit of both. The shadow side of the male identity doesn’t want to see a man “defeated,” as such it portrays that man in a feminine way, creating an image that contains within it the balance point the man so desperately needs.
In this case, its symbolized by androgyny which represents the blending of the traits associated with both genders, the passion: the submission, the drive and self-sacrifice, the strength and softness.
Personal relationship to the Yeshua image.
I’d be lying if I said the image didn’t invoke my own history.
For years the image of Yeshua represented my trauma and self-martyrdom due to my being raised in a conservative Christian family.
What has added more dimension to this has been some experiences of the last year where I felt other aspects of the story come to life.
Yeshua is the man who told religious leaders that they were snakes and dead men’s to their face.
He’s also the guy who flipped tables and whipped people out of the temple.
I used to see him more as a dreamer, floating by, offering visions of love and then letting himself die because he’s just part of the dream.
Lately, I’ve been looking at him more as a social justice warrior. Someone who woke up each morning with excitement and dread because he knew he wanted to change the world and new that the world would resist being changed.
A reading of the gospels shows how much he got tired of teaching and having people around him and yet he kept doing it all while hanging out with society’s social rejects.
Under this light he represents the tree of Kabbalah to me, holding space for both severity and mercy.
The polarization of the Christian psyche.
The story of Yeshua is a bit too ethical for human application.
He’s a perfect figure which Jung points out necessitates a darker shadow, hence the Christian preoccupation with Satan and hell.
The Yeshua/Christ evolution of God from a force of nature into moral perfection creates a polarity of pure evil to counter the “pure good.” This is different from most traditions that came before where the deities and daemons embodied both positive and negative traits.
Instead, Christianity harkens back to Zoroastrianism with a clear good/evil God/devil dichotomy. As one of my professors put it Christianity has a god and a half.
I believe this gets played out in history through imperialism, racism, and religious zealotry.
People believed they were following the perfect God and thus saw themselves as “good” (or working towards it) hence projecting their demons onto other nations and religions. As a result, we see the genocide and slavery that came of Christian empire.
Not to mention the serfdom (read slavery) of the Christian poor and the repression of women who were often associated with the worldly and cthonic symbols demonized by the Christian psyche.
Let’s not risk creating the illusion that this polarity is trapped in the past. We’re seeing it all around us today.
Whether a person considers themselves Christian the modern psyche has been raised on this dichotomy of polarized good and evil and still projects this out onto the world.
The evolution of a symbol and its images.
In many cases emotion and symbol are actually one and the same thing.
— Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life.
Clearly, the image of Yeshua says a lot to me because it invokes many pieces, touching on subjective experiences or “images” as well as deeper symbols.
The differentiation between image and symbol is important because this is what determines whether we are invoking our personal experience as dogma or making room for people to have their own experience and relationship to the deep symbols of the psyche.
The OP’s response to other’s reactions as unfortunate due to trauma or sectarian mindsets missed the point that images are always subjective and don’t necessarily have the “numen” or energy to invoke an experience of a symbol.
Symbols are something that arise in the unconscious and have a mutable relationship to the psyche’s conscious self or ego.
For example, my relationship with the Yeshua image as a living symbol evolved from my childhood where it was the only image (but never strong enough to invoke the symbol) to a point where it was associated with personal traumas to the current state where it represents to me a balance between justice and mercy while showing an imbalance between good and evil.
The painting that had been shared was an attempt to invoke a particular symbol. It can only do this by presenting images associated with that symbol.
These images, however, will always have a cultural flavor or bias as the culture is the only language that the symbol can be referred to by the artist.
For those who share the same associations as that artist or culture, the image will be able to invoke the symbol within their psyche, creating a powerful experience.
The following is the OP’s description of the image’s effect on them.
“The art is evocative and produces a feeling of peace, equanimity, everything is going to be OK. The ‘sacred heart’ on fire and bound by a belt of thorns is a powerful symbol of love’s flame and sacrifice in behalf of those we love (Storge, Philia) and further applied in loving acts benefiting other people we don’t know personally (Agape, Pragma) — which are to me, sacred masculine qualities.”
Clearly, it touched on the OP’s relationship to the symbol of sacred masculinity within their psyche.
This wasn’t the experience of everyone, however, due to the subjective nature of our psyches.
Image as feeling state and history.
We are living in what the Greeks called the Kairos; the right moment-for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” of the fundamental principles and symbols.
This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing.
— Carl Jung, Civilization in Transition.
The OP shared his sorrow that others couldn’t see beyond their trauma, “division,” and “sectarian” mindsets and experiences.
Knowing him I think he meant this in good faith. The image invoked a powerful experience within him that he wishes others could share.
The problem with this is two-fold.
- While symbols are long enduring, the images used to invoke them are dependent upon subjective experience as well as historic and cultural conditioning.
- Not all symbols are eternal, many are evolving. The unconscious is neither fixed nor static, it is ever so slowly growing, learning, adapting generation to generation.
My own relationship to the image of Yeshua and its relation to a greater symbol whether it be salvation, divine masculinity, or the perfected Anthropos is ever evolving and has its own history.
This history is mixed with my own personal trauma, the traumas of the world, and internal experiences of the image.
At the end of the day, an image will always invoke a historic as well as a symbolic response. Images have a historic root and our psyche, by which we interact with the symbolic, has been conditioned by our history.
If we want a history free image to capture a particular idea something new will have to be created. Whether that is a new symbol devoid of the past associations or a new personal experience of the old symbol in a way that transforms the subjective historic associations.
Because of this, we can’t expect the same image to affect everyone, neither can we assume a person’s response to an image is a result of their relationship to a symbol.
Maybe someone found their relationship to “Christ Conscious” (whatever that is a symbol of) via Buddha, Heracles, M.L.K. or a Sci-Fi character. If that is what holds space for that essence in their psyche then their life and mind have no need to generate an experience to shift their associations with the Jesus figure.
Judging their subjective experience and relationship to this particular image essentially judges their psyche, their life, and the fact they haven’t had the privilege of an experience that rewrites their association with the Jesus figure.
It’s essentially judging people for being traumatized and/or being unmoved by a work of art, story, or image that fails to speak to them.
For instance, while the OP valued the symbolic elements of the painting they simply didn’t have the same effect on me.
The belt of thorns feels like self-martyrdom. I’d much rather see something growing: a vine, a tree, a bush on fire. If it has thorns I want see green life.
I can appreciate the contrast of light and dark at play in the image but to me it looks forced. I’d prefer dirt and mud. Something to show this person is in the world, that they travel it, that they wade through the muck and do the work they are called to do.
The image simply fails to invoke the associations I hold with the deeper symbol while simultaneously succeeding in the minds of others. That’s how it should be.
If the meaning and experience of art was universally communicated it would be math instead.
What is the applicable lesson here?
In order to create a healthy society, we have to make room for the depth of our diversity while maintaining cohesion.
This goes beyond turning a blind eye to the fact people do things differently. If we want a meaningful life we’re going to have to be able to talk about the things that give our life meaning.
We need to be able to share our experiences of our inner lives and their symbols.
To safeguard these attempts to share what is important to us from becoming dogmatic expressions of how others “should” experience their inner lives we need to be aware of the nuances between the deeply lived experience (often more universal) and the way that it has manifested subjectively within our lives and minds.
This is how we form close community bonds based on an understanding of each other's shared human experience while making space for the many ways that deep meaning is expressed.
What about you?
Do you feel you can express the things that give your life meaning in a way that allows you to be seen and not judged?
Do you feel you can hold this space for others?
What would a society look like if we can all do this for each other? How would we go about creating that society?
Love and share.
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