Seba.Health
Thread · Seba Knowledge Graph
Privatio Boni Refused
Privatio Boni Refused
Jung’s most load-bearing theological quarrel is with the doctrine of privatio boni — the Augustinian position, inherited from Origen, that evil has no substance of its own but is merely the accidental absence of the good. Aion develops the argument and the shadow-concept in the same breath; the two are inseparable.
“The Christ-symbol lacks wholeness in the modern psychological sense, since it does not include the dark side of things but specifically excludes it in the form of a Luciferian opponent. Although the exclusion of the power of evil was something the Christian consciousness was well aware of, all it lost in effect was an insubstantial shadow, for, through the doctrine of the privatio boni first propounded by Origen, evil was characterized as a mere diminution of good and thus deprived of substance. According to the teachings of the Church, evil is simply ‘the accidental lack of perfection’” (Jung 1951, Aion §74).
Jung’s charge is empirical: “from the scientific point of view the privatio boni, as must be apparent to everyone, is founded on a petitio principii, where what invariably comes out at the end is what you put in at the beginning” (Aion §98). On the psychological plane — the only plane Jung permits himself to rule on — evil is real: “considering that the evil of our day puts everything that has ever agonized mankind in the deepest shade, one must ask oneself how it is that, for all our progress in the administration of justice, in medicine and in technology, for all our concern with life and health, monstrous engines of destruction have been invented which could easily exterminate the human race” (Jung 1957, The Undiscovered Self §573).
The tradition Jung prefers is Gnostic: “one of the things they taught was that Christ ‘cast off his shadow from himself.‘23 If we give this view the weight it deserves, we can easily recognize the cut-off counterpart in the figure of Antichrist. The Antichrist develops in legend as a perverse imitator of Christ’s life. He is a true image, an imitating spirit of evil who follows in Christ’s footsteps like a shadow following the body” (Aion §75). The archetypal shadow is not a privation; it is the substantial dark twin of the bright figure.
This quarrel is the theological hinge of the whole shadow-concept. An account of shadow that accepts privatio boni cannot account for twentieth-century history. Jung’s refusal of the doctrine is therefore not a metaphysical but a psychological necessity.