Psychology: Monotheistic or Polytheistic?
Introduction to James Hillman's controversial 1971 essay
In this essay, Hillman draws a line in the sand between Jung (whose psychology he sees as fundamentally monotheistic) and his own post-Jungian Archetypal Psychology, which is fundamentally polytheistic. This essay was included as an appendix to David Miller’s 1981 book The New Polytheism (see previous post).
The question “polytheism or monotheism” represents a basic ideational conflict in Jungian psychology today. Which fantasy governs our view of soul-making and the process of individuation—the many or the one?
In the conclusion to his late work, Aion, heavily preoccupied with Christian symbolism, Jung writes: “The anima/animus stage is correlated with polytheism, the self with monotheism.” [1] Although he pays high respect to the “numina, anima and animus” [2] and conceives the self as a conjunction, he nevertheless also implies that as anima/animus is a pre-stage of self, so is polytheism a pre-stage of monotheism. Moreover, the self is “the archetype most important for modern man to understand.” [3]
The preference for self and monotheism presented there strikes to the heart of a psychology that stresses the plurality of the archetypes. (Archetypal psychology begins with Jung’s notion of the complexes whose archetypal cores are the bases for all psychic life whatsoever.) A primacy of the self implies rather that the understanding of the complexes at the differentiated level once formulated as a polytheistic pantheon and represented, at its best, in the psyche of Greek antiquity and of the Renaissance, is of less significance for modern man than is the self of monotheism. Were this all, archetypal psychology would be nothing but an anima fantasy or an animus philosophy. Explorations of consciousness in terms of the gods—Eros and Psyche, Saturn, Apollo, Dionysus—would then be only preliminary to something more important: the self. The self archetype would be paramount, and one should be investigating its phenomenology in the quaternio, the conjunctio, mandalas, synchronicity, and the unus mundus. The question “polytheism or monotheism” represents a basic ideational conflict in Jungian psychology today. Which fantasy governs our view of soul-making and the process of individuation—the many or the one?
The very sound of the question shows already to what extent we are ruled by a bias toward the one. Unity, integration, and individuation seem an advance over multiplicity and diversity. As the self seems a further integration than anima/animus, so seems monotheism superior to polytheism.
Placing the psychological part of this question to one side for the moment, let us first depose the ruling notion that in the history of religions or in the ethnology of peoples monotheism is a further, higher development out of polytheism.
Radin devoted a monograph to this subject. [4] He concluded: “… as most ethnologists and unbiased students would now admit, the possibility of interpreting monotheism as part of a general intellectual and ethical progress must be abandoned” (24). He argues forcefully and cogently against the evolutionary view: that monotheism emerges from, or is later or higher than, polytheism or animism (29–30).
Radin bases monotheism not upon developmental stages, but rather upon the idea of temperament. Some people everywhere are by temperament monotheistic; they have a monotheistic psychology. “All the monotheists, it is my claim, have sprung from the ranks of the eminently religious” (25). “Such people are admittedly few in number …” “It is the characteristic of such individuals, I contend, always to picture the world as a unified whole” (ibid.). These are the theological thinkers, a small elite in any culture, sharing a common temperament, and their influence upon their brethren in the same culture is stubborn and effective.
The inexpugnable persistence of monotheistic religion could be psychologically accounted for by Jung’s theory of the self. Then we might be tempted to conclude that monotheism is so strong because it is the theological equivalent of a more complete, integrated, and powerful (numinous) psychic condition. But already two objections crop up. First, Radin says monotheism “has obviously not been the triumph of the unifying principle over the disruptive” (29). I take this to mean that religious and social order and disorder, unity and disunity cannot be correlated with monotheism and polytheism. Second, to base the strength of religious monotheism upon analogy with the psychologically more complete state of the self begs the same question, which is nowhere established: the superiority of monotheism to polytheism. Persistence does not necessarily demonstrate the superiority of monotheism, nor even its victory. Gray [5] points out that two varying attitudes toward God can exist at one and the same time; the monolatry of Yahweh did exist among the Jews (even as late as the Exile period) side by side with the worship of other deities.
Despite the historical evidence of religions, there is a fond notion without adequate foundation that monotheism is the pinnacle and that “the evolution of religion thus manifests, it would seem, a definite tendency toward an integration of our mental and emotional life” (Radin, 6). Jung may not be borne out by the historical facts of religion, but he is borne out by the psychological bias of the historians of religion who put monotheism on top in the name of integration.
Originally published in Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1971). Revised and reprinted in Archetypal Psychology, The Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman, vol. 1 (Putnam, Conn.: Spring Publications, 2004).