Claire's Wedding
Plus: C.G. Jung's Occultism, Jacques Ellul, La Guadalupana, & Boudin Kolaches
On Saturday afternoon, I’m going to up to St. Francisville for the wedding of my late sister Ruthie’s daughter Claire. She graduated magna cum laude on Thursday, with a degree in nursing. And tomorrow night at this time, she will be Mrs. Osorio. She will be standing in the same place in the same church where her parents stood when they were married, and where her mother’s body lay at her 2011 funeral. Big day for the family tomorrow. If you read The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming (only $1.99 on Kindle, I see) you’ll remember this photo I took of Claire visiting Ruthie in the hospital two days after Ruthie’s terminal cancer diagnosis. Look at that beatific face. Mama.
On February 21, 2010, Andrew Sullivan published this image as his Face Of The Day on his then-blog, The Daily Dish. He wrote:
This is a face of the day — rather than faces — not because Ruthie's is not animated but because her daughter's face seems to me to be quite remarkable. In my faith, God appears before us all the time and yet we do not see God's presence. But sometimes it is so over-powering even we cannot look away. This often happens in moments of great suffering and pain, in my experience, as if the veil we place over our eyes to protect ourselves from God's overwhelming love is somehow lifted paradoxically by suffering. I have never felt closer to God than during some of the worst moments of my life.
Here are Claire and her fiancé, Romulo “Kike” Osorio (pron. “kee-kay”), whose mother and father have flown up from Colombia for the wedding. A beautiful couple:
Buc-ee’s Is America
Got in a few hours ago after an eight-hour drive to Baton Rouge from Austin. Photographed the above delicacy at the Buc-ee’s mega “travel center” in Baytown, on the east side of Houston. It is a glory of American life. Oh, I didn’t try it — a boudin kolache (boo-danh koh-LAH-chee) would be a starch bomb. But I love love love the idea that America is a place where you can cross-breed Czech and Cajun cuisine. The Czech immigrants to central Texas brought their kolaches, which you can find all over Texas now. And boudin is a spicy pork-and-rice dressing stuffed into a sausage casing, and eaten all over south Louisiana. At Buc-ee’s, which is unimaginable anywhere but America, you can have it all.
Ramsay And Our Lady Of Guadalupe
I had breakfast with a friend in Austin, went shopping for tortillas, guacamole, and other delicious things at Central Market, then hit the road for home. I finished listening to Robertson Davies’s novel Fifth Business not long after stopping in Baytown.
Here’s a lovely paragraph from the book about when the protagonist, Dunstan Ramsay, goes to Mexico City to see the miraculous tilma (peasant’s cloak) of Our Lady of Guadalupe:
Here is the image on the tilma, a history of the phenomenon, and an explanation of what it symbolizes:
The Danger In C.G. Jung
By the way, I should warn any of the devout who give Fifth Business a shot because of my enthusiasm for the novel: Davies is not an orthodox Christian of any sort, and the kind of things you read in it are not representative of Christian orthodoxy. It is a deeply Jungian novel. A reader writes to pass on this YouTube link to an old Mars Hill Audio Journal segment about C.G. Jung’s connections with gnosticism and the occult. It’s an interview with Richard Noll, a clinical psychologist and historian of medicine who talks about his 1997 book The Jung Cult. He points out that Jung was formed out of a neopagan revival in early 20th century Germany. I had never heard of Noll, but it turns out that his work criticizing Jung infuriated the Jung family, and caused massive controversy in the Jungian world (see here).
Here is a fascinating 1997 interview with Noll, conducted by psychotherapist Ivan Tyrrell. Noll claims that Jung’s theories are pseudoscientific, and designed by Jung to bring respectability to his attempt to revive ancient paganism and set himself up as a cult leader. Excerpt:
Tyrrell: But, in a way, many cults are fairly harmless: they don't affect that many people, they provide some people with a meaning for their lives and the certainties they provide are not particularly harmful. Indeed, believing in something greater than yourself is now recognised as a factor in psychological health. Was, or is, the Jung cult actually doing any harm?
Noll: Well, some beliefs are more dangerous than others. I wrote the last chapter of The Jung Cult, in part, in order to draw attention to some of the dangers that the Jungian movement presents.
What are the dangers? First, the devaluation of rational thought and the ability to think, which is coupled with the over-valuation of the irrational. Jungians abhor “thinking” and would much rather rely on “feeling” and “intuition” to guide their lives. This lack of ability for logical, focused, rational thought is quite evident in the literature of the Jungian analysts themselves. The works of analysts like Edward Edinger, Marie-Louise von Franz, Andrew Samuels, Rene Papoudopolis and others are idiosyncratic to the point of being bizarre. For this reason, no one outside of the world of psychoanalysis takes them or their ideas seriously.
Second, among Jungians there is too much of an emphasis on “myth” as a universal force throughout history and a lack of regard for historical facts. Jung himself believed that the factual basis of stories didn't matter; it was only how stories made you “feel” that counted.
Third, there is too much of a Fuhrerprinzip in Jungian circles; analysts become the mediator between the transcendent and the individual life of the patient. This only heightens the dependence of the soul-sick patient. Who says Jungian analysts have “special powers” to contact the gods? Yet, the Jungian literature promotes such a value system. And too many distressed people buy into it.
Fourth, in private the Jungians themselves openly promote the religious nature of their movement, but in public statements they make the unconvincing – indeed deliberately misleading – claim that Jung is only saying that “everything is psychological, everything is symbolic” and is making no metaphysical claims. Many psychoanalysts, in fact, make this assertion and it is a frustrating argument because you can't get around it. It's tautological.
I found this stunning (to me) interview that Noll did with The Wanderer, a traditionalist Catholic newspaper, about Jung. The interviewer points out that Noll, who has taught at Harvard and MIT, describes himself as a lapsed Catholic who no longer believes in the teachings of the Catholic Church. N.B., the interview was done in 1994; I don’t know if Noll still believes that. The point is, Noll had no Catholic axe to grind with Jung. Excerpt:
Q. Based on your research, has Jung unlocked the power of the occult for modern man?
A. Let me put it this way. Second only to Julian the Apostate, Jung is probably the most successful pagan prophet in the last 2,000 years. Jung is a very similar figure; he was a polytheist. He was a pagan in the old sense of the word. He believed in the multitude of gods and spirits, and he believed that what made modern man diseased was essentially Judeo- Christianity-that you had to believe in one God and only one God and believe in dogma.
In his way of viewing the world, that was the great trauma of world history - the imposition of monotheism on the people of Europe. …
Anyone who is a true Catholic, and I would include charismatics, cannot teach these things. Jungian teachings are antithetical to Christianity. You can't have it both ways, at least from a Catholic perspective.
From a pagan perspective you can. Probably what has happened is that, as the United States became paganized, people didn't want to let go of the old religion.
It looks like Catholicism is lost in this country, because you have people who think they are Catholic, and they practice Jungian teachings about contacting the great mother goddess, or some other mythical figure.
Essentially, to me, it looks like the battle is over. The people who claim to be both Jungian and Catholic are pagan in the old sense of the word. That's how it was in Julian's world. You could get up in the morning and offer a sacrifice to one god, and burn incense to another in the afternoon, and still call yourself a Christian to your friends.
Anyone who claims he accepts both Jung and the Catholic Church is a pagan.
I need to find a copy of The Jung Cult. I see it’s for sale on Amazon for $46, being long out of print. I don’t want to read it bad enough to pay that kind of money, but I would like to know more about Noll’s ideas. I’ve never been a Jung enthusiast, but through my reading of Davies’s novels, I’ve had a passing interest in his ideas. Discovering Noll through the reader’s warning about Jung was the first time I’ve ever seen such savage criticism of Jung, especially from someone in the field of psychology who is not himself religious. I want to know more.
Jacques Ellul
My friend the novelist Paul Kingsnorth sends me this quote from Jacques Ellul (d. 1994), the unconventional French Protestant philosopher:
“The only successful way to attack these features of modern civilization is to give them the slip, to learn how to live on the edge of this totalitarian society, not simply rejecting it, but passing it through the sieve of God’s judgment. Finally, when communities with a ‘style of life’ of this kind have been established, possibly the first signs of a new civilization may begin to appear.”
Sounds like the Benedict Option to me. This quote appears in Ellul’s first work, published in French in 1948, and translated into English as The Presence of the Kingdom. A more recent translation into English came out in 2016, under the title Presence In The Modern World. Unlike the earlier version, this one is available on Kindle. I just downloaded it, and will read it this weekend, I hope. I would like to know more about this fascinating quote in greater context. I have always meant to read Ellul, but never have.
Finally…
As regular readers know, I impose discipline on myself about not writing this newsletter on the weekends. But I always like hearing from you all, anytime. The volume of mail is more than I can respond to individually, but I read everything. I’m at roddreher — at — substack — dot — com. Unless you specify otherwise, your letter (or portions of it) might be published on this site. I will never use anybody’s name without their express permission.