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Enantiodromia of the Aeon
Enantiodromia of the Aeon
Enantiodromia — Heraclitus’s term for the running of a thing into its opposite — is the structural law by which the Piscean aeon, in Jung’s reading, has inverted toward its dark half. The law is stated directly: “The fatality inherent in the Christian disposition itself, which leads inevitably to a reversal of its spirit — not through the obscure workings of chance but in accordance with psychological law. The ideal of spirituality striving for the heights was doomed to clash with the materialistic earth-bound passion to conquer matter” (Jung 1951, §78). The claim is that the very one-sidedness of the Christ-symbol — its exclusion of the shadow, the earth, the feminine, the fourth — generated the countermovement across the aeon’s two thousand years, visible first as the materialist science of the Renaissance, then as the pathology of modernity, finally as the totalitarian darknesses of the twentieth century.
The thread runs from Heraclitus through the Gnostics to Aion. Heraclitus had named palintropos harmonia — the back-turning accord — as the character of all things. The Gnostics had preserved in their doctrine of the two Christs the duality the Church Fathers erased. Jung, reading the astrology of the precession into Pisces, found the two fishes waiting to figure what the aeon would live out. Enantiodromia is therefore not Jung’s invention but his recovery; his originality is to apply it to the history of the imago Dei itself.