The Unfolding God of Jung and MiltonIn this first extensive Jungian treatment of Milton's major poems, James P. Driscoll uses archetypal psychology to explore Milton's great themes of God, man, woman, and evil and offers readers deepened understanding of Jung's profound thoughts on Godhead. The Father, the Son, Satan, Messiah, Samson, Adam, and Eve gain new dimensions of meaning as their stories become epiphanies of the archetypes of Godhead. God and Satan of Paradise Lost are seen as the ego and the shadow of a single unfolding personality whose anima is the Holy Spirit and Milton's muse. Samson carries the Yahweh archetype examined by Jung in Answer to Job, and Messiah and Satan in Paradise Regained embody the hostile brothers archetype. Anima, animus and the individuation drive underlie the psychodynamics of Adam and Eve's fall. Driscoll draws on his critical acumen and scholarly knowledge of Renaissance literature to shed new light on Jung's psychology of religion. The Unfolding God of Jung and Milton illumines Jung's heterodox notion of Godhead as a quarternity rather than a trinity, his revolutionary concept of a divine individuation process, his radical solution to the problem of evil, and his wrestling with the feminine in Godhead. The book's glossary of Jungian terms, written for literary critics and theologians rather than clinicians, is exceptionally detailed and insightful. Beyond enriching our understanding of Jung and Milton, Driscoll's discussion contributes to theodicy, to process theology, and to the study of myths and archetypes in literature. |
From inside the book
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... orthodox dogmas about Godhead as radical as Freud's challenge to Victorian pieties about sex. Now commonplace ... orthodoxy may nonetheless balk at Jung's rejecting science as a modern, secular orthodoxy. For Jung experimental science is ...
... orthodox Christian doctrine, enjoys wide influence. Jungian psychology cannot match the sway of the others, but its influence is growing, nourished by cultural change and new discoveries in physics, biology, linguistics, anthropology ...
... orthodox religious and scientific brethren returning this book to the shelf. For those remaining readers, few but undaunted, I offer two additional caveats, the first about the book's peculiar structure. So autonomous are its four main ...
... orthodox believers, those conventional Jungians who resist acknowledging that our supreme imaginative achievements, King Lear and Paradise Lost, constellate the archetypes of Godhead for our modern era even as the Book of Job, the ...
... orthodox Christians living in the twentieth century choose their values within a modern, not a seventeenth-century, context. Because moderns must reject or embrace important alternatives to orthodoxy (e.g., scientific philosophy, Freud ...