Christs
Bregman, Lucy
IN BRIEF Christs: Meditations on Archetypal Images in Christian THEOLOGY, by David Miller, Sea-bury, $12.95, 200 pp. Archetypal psychology is a challenging development in the interpretation of...
...Archetypal psychology has a religious emphasis too: dethrone the heroic ego of monotheism and restore the polytheism of inward gods...
...Without this firm assumption,, the "Greek connections"-are simply reflections of the interpreter's own discontent with the texts and images available to him...
...This can take the form of a return to "imaginal Greece" (Hillman) or here, in David Miller's Christs, a search through ancient myth and modern literature for a Christ who can, in Hopkins's words, "christ in us...
...Archetypal psychologists may cry "Literalism...
...The style is readable, the project significant...
...This is a profound spiritual claim, but the route that Miller takes to arrive at it, and the specific images he endorses, are simply too quirky to do justice to his deeper intentions...
...Rahner, who never flouts historical detail for the sake of "imaginal" connections, shows how for the Hellenistic mind, the miracle of redemption could be seen in the mandrake root, and the work of the Logos in the lines of Homer...
...Perhaps this reviewer's lack of enthusiasm for Miller's actual results can be clarified by comparing Christs with Hugo Rahner's Greek Myths and Christian Mystery...
...The first third of the book takes up the figure of "the Good Shepherd...
...Finding this an endorsement of perfectionism (I'm still not clear how or why), Miller turns to Hermes the ram then to Polyphemos the grotesque cyclops-shepherd of Homer, for a non-perfectionist re-visioning of Christ...
...James Hillman, in Re-Visioning Psychology, called for a return to psyche or soul as the ground for psychology, with an emphasis on mythic and depth dimensions of the psyche's logos...
...Miller hopes to see through traditional images of Christ to pagan, pluralistic unheroic counter-images buried beneath...
...Then, in order to portray how these images correspond to twentieth-century experience, he invokes the aid of writers such as Wallace Stevens and James Joyce...
...against this objection, for literalism and moralism are the twin villains for Miller and others who follow this method...
...LUCY BREGMAN...
...A Christ who can christ in us must still be a Word made flesh, and this, I'm afraid, Miller fails to bring us...
...This world-view believed that God has so constructed nature and poetry that these could be "read" for endless hidden meanings...
...Praised by Miller as a source for his own project, Rahner's work demonstrates exactly that loving enthusiasm for Hellenistic thought-forms which Miller fundamentally lacks...
...But this reviewer, basically well-disposed toward archetypal psychology, found Christs disappointing and frustrating...
...He believes that imperfection, foolishness and ecstasy speak more authentically to us today than their opposites: moral perfectionism, rationalism, sobriety...
...Archetypal psychology is a challenging development in the interpretation of culture...
...Miller's Christ-Hermes association is arbitrary in a way that even the farfetched allegories of the Greek Church Fathers were not...
...The same pattern is followed in the next two sections, those on Christ the Clown, and Christ the Teacher...
...Greek, anti-hero models are perceived beneath he traditional pictures...
...But there is something so idiosyncratic in Miller's train of associations - from clown make-up to Fliess's "nasal psychology" to Finnegans Wake - that the literalist in me wants more solidity...
Vol. 109 • October 1982 • No. 17
