Remembering the Repressed with Carl Jung and Rudolf Steiner

Judi: Hello, everybody. It’s my great pleasure to introduce Matt Segall. Matt is a PhD, a transdisciplinary researcher, philosopher, and teacher applying process-relational thought across the natural and social sciences. He is an associate professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Department here at CIIS. His presentation is titled Remembering the Repressed with Jung and Steiner.

Matt Segall: Thanks, Judy. Thanks to the East–West Psychology Department for hosting this conference. I teach in the PCC program, as was mentioned. Jung is celebrated in so many programs and, as Rick was saying, was really a major influence on this entire university. I’m going to be talking about a particular religious tradition and the psychology of that tradition—Christianity—and I do so in the context, first of all, of a school where East and West met decades ago in a place, in a city, where East and West have met and mingled. CIIS, I think, is really one of the places in academia and higher education striving for a planetary culture. There are different ways of approaching what a planetary culture might look like. There’s a way in which consumer capitalism has brought the whole world together, but with a very shallow type of culture that was universal in a sense, but flat and leveling of all cultural difference. I think what CIIS is attempting is a more richly textured and deep form of planetary consciousness and planetary culture that would not require that we give up the particularities of the places and traditions, religions, and spiritualities that we each inherit.

Now, of course, there are many world religions, and each of them has striven for its own form of universality. Christianity, of course, is one of them. Islam, Buddhism. There are attempts to articulate a deep spiritual sense of what the human being is that have come from every continent. I don’t have an answer as to exactly what the achieved planetary culture or consciousness will look like, but I’m going to try to approach a particular tradition—Christianity—of which there are a few billion people who actively identify with that tradition, and then many others of us who are in the West that, whether we like it or not, have been influenced consciously and unconsciously by it. I don’t want to just cover, and I don’t have time to cover, all of the rich archetypal dimensions of this tradition, which itself is very syncretic and was from the very beginning. I want to look in particular at a facet of Christianity that I think is quite relevant today—mainly, the way that Christianity has treated evil.

As Rick Tarnas was hinting at earlier, we’re in a great descent right now. There’s a tremendous split happening in this country and across many countries where we’re tempted to project evil onto the other. Jung was constantly trying to remind us that this tendency towards evil—the shadow—exists in each of us, and unless each of us can pursue what he called individuation, we’ll probably destroy ourselves. I’m going to try to surface this shadow dimension of Christianity and how it has related to the question of evil. I’m going to do so in a comparative way by bringing Jung into dialogue with Rudolf Steiner.

He’s an Austrian philosopher, a spiritual teacher, who contributed to so many different arts and sciences. The headquarters of Anthroposophy in Dornach, Switzerland, is like 50 miles away from where Carl Jung and Emma, his wife, lived on Lake Zurich. Emma Jung would travel to the Goetheanum to study fairy tales. Jung and Steiner certainly knew of each other. Jung barely mentions Anthroposophy and usually does so, and Steiner, in a disparaging way. The same goes for Steiner when he mentions Jung. As often is the case with these great geniuses, it’s hard for them to meet and see each other; the light that each of them was radiating is just a little bit too bright, perhaps. I want to show how they can mutually enhance one another’s insights.

First, a little autobiographical story to situate myself in relation to this topic. My parents are mixed: my father is Jewish, my mother is evangelical Christian. I grew up with these two biblical traditions. By the time I was nine or ten, I remember an episode when I was in middle school. I think it was the second time that Bill Clinton was running for president, and one of my friends, who happened to be quite Baptist—or at least his parents were; we were ten—said to me, “I hope you’ll tell your parents not to vote for Bill Clinton. He’s a devil-worshiper. Did you know that?” I was taken aback. I hadn’t really thought much about politics yet as a nine- or ten-year-old. I hadn’t thought much about religion. My mom, being evangelical, would talk to me a lot about it, but she didn’t force me to go to church. My dad was kind of a lapsed Jew. He thought he was atheist. When I went to undergrad and studied philosophy, I had a talk with him, and he realized he’s agnostic.

This was my first introduction to the strange marriage in the US, despite our founders wanting church and state to be kept distinct. In the course of my lifetime, I’ve seen that gap narrow and narrow, to the point now where Christian nationalism is resurgent and, in many respects, in charge of every branch of government. As a teenager, I started reading Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking and really getting into the sciences in relationship to Christianity and the role that I saw it playing in politics and in our world. It struck me—given what I knew about it from my mother and what I’d experienced in churches that I had been brought to—as, for my 14-year-old imagination, perhaps the most absurd of all the world religions. It was uniquely bizarre. The whole story. I couldn’t quite understand it.

When I was seventeen or eighteen, I had a very influential psychology teacher. His name was Kai Ennis. He introduced me to Carl Jung. I began to learn about the psychology of religion. I realized that, as much as I might want to escape this tradition, the archetypal complexes at play within Christianity and Judaism and the whole biblical tradition were very much inside of me. A little bit later, I had my first psilocybin mushroom experience. At that point, I was more or less identified as a Buddhist, even though I had read my Jung. Jung warns Westerners: don’t go searching far and wide and try to appropriate exotic traditions because you’ll eventually realize that you’re running away from home, as it were, and you need to get in touch with the archetypes that are most present in your local cultural context. I ate some mushrooms for the first time and had a very powerful experience of what I can call the Christ archetype. It made me realize— in addition to reading Jung, now experientially— I couldn’t escape this. That began almost twenty years now of research and an attempt to recover and remember what I had been repressing.

There’s a personal aspect to this, but I also think collectively, for those of us who are citizens of the United States, for those of us who were born and raised in the West—which is not all of us in this room; I can’t assume that—there’s a need to re-engage with a tradition that we may have run from, because it’s very much still present and powerful in our world. If we continue to repress it, I fear that its power will be co-opted by forces that would really bring us further down into this descent and into the underworld and into a terrible civilizational crisis, or an intensification of a crisis that we’re already in.

Jung was always careful to distinguish metaphysical claims from psychological claims. He was constantly saying, “Look, I’m talking about psychic reality,” and whether or not God or Christ or Satan or the angels are metaphysically real is, in a sense, beside the point. They’re real experientially. They live in our psyche, and they affect our behavior. They affect our sense of what is valuable and important. It’s best to engage these complexes—these religious myths and archetypes—with as much consciousness as we can. As Jung puts it, “I regard the psyche as real.” He was speaking there to the predominantly more or less materialist culture that surrounded him: they believe only physical facts and must consequently come to the conclusion that either the uranium itself or the laboratory equipment created the atom bomb. He wanted to remind human beings that we have agency, and that agency—the agency of the ego—is always in tension with the degree to which we are aware of our own unconscious. The individuation process is, in a sense, the descent of the ego so as to become more aware of all of the other archetypal complexes at work in the psyche, the ego being just one among them. Jung continues that God, whatever else we call it, remains an obvious psychic and non-physical fact. From a Jungian perspective, whether or not we consciously believe in God, there is a sense in which everything that is unconscious in relationship to the ego more or less functions as a divine ground, or as God. Reading statements like this from Jung as a teenager was quite revelatory for me.

I want to run through what Jung has to say about how Christianity deals with the question of evil, beginning with Answer to Job, which he wrote late in his life, and then touching a bit on what he has to say in another book that he wrote in the early 1950s called Aion. Then I’ll move through to introduce Rudolf Steiner’s approach and understanding of evil and the role of Christ in holding the tension of the shadow, and then explore a statue—a wood carving that Steiner and others worked on in the late 1910s and early 1920s—called The Representative of Humanity. I think it’s a powerful symbol that can help illustrate the nature of evil for us.

Most of you have read Answer to Job. If you haven’t, the basic idea—Jung wrote this book as a fever dream—was that he was possessed by a struggle he had had for a lot of his life to deal with the imbalance in Christianity. In the Book of Job, Satan tempts Yahweh into torturing this very devoted man, Job, so as to prove to Satan that he really does have faith. Jung interprets a process whereby the creator, Yahweh, realizes, in torturing Job and seeing that Job remains faithful, that the creature becomes more moral than the creator. Jung recognized how the creator is thereby changed by the creature. Applying his understanding of psychological compensation, he thinks that this encounter—whereby Yahweh recognizes Job’s moral superiority—necessitated the Incarnation. Yahweh had to become human; Yahweh had to become, in some sense, identified with and suffer existence, birth, life, and death as a human being in order to reach the moral level that Job was reflecting back. In the Book of Job, Satan functions as a kind of doubting thought in Yahweh, suggesting again that Yahweh was quite unconscious, that there was a huge shadow operative in the Godhead at this stage. A depth-psychological reading of the Bible shows not just the evolution of human consciousness, but the evolution of divine consciousness as well, and the co-creative relationship that the human being and the divine are in over the course of thousands of years. Yahweh must become human; Yahweh must incarnate, and this leads to the Christ event.

As Jung would go on to discuss in more depth in Aion, this incarnation of Christ doesn’t really correct the imbalance, because Christ is often identified as the light and as perfect—the perfect God-human, the perfect image of the divine. From Jung’s point of view, that doesn’t fully complete the need for the reconciliation of the Godhead between light and dark. The Incarnation immediately calls forth, in Jung’s view, the Antichrist, which would be the shadow to the light. Jung calls this Antichrist shadow dimension Lucifer, which is a bit odd because Lucifer is the light-bearer. One reason I bring Steiner into the picture is that he has a more differentiated understanding of evil, where there’s both Lucifer—the being of light, the extreme form of escapist spirituality—and Ahriman, a name he borrows from Zoroastrianism, which is the being of materialistic and rigidly intellectual and reductionistic forces. Rather than evil being contained in one Luciferian or satanic being, Steiner divides these and shows how Christ is trying to hold the tension there.

“Like every other being, I am a splinter of the infinite deity.” We are psychic processes we do not control. Before turning to Steiner, I want to dwell on the importance for Jung of individuation. At the same time that he acknowledges how profoundly interconnected we all are through the collective unconscious, he was very concerned, because he lived through World War II, about the danger of mass-mindedness and collectivist movements that lead to the human being foregoing individuality and becoming possessed by what he thought Wotan, this German pagan deity, had taken over during World War II, leading the Germans into the tragedy we know as the Holocaust. In the U.S., we can similarly see ways in which forms of collectivism can lead us astray. Jung would remind us that the real danger is lurking in the depths of each of us as individuals. Individuation is not individualism. Individuation is, in a sense, finding, in the unique way that only each of us can, our relationship to the collective—not just to our culture and society, but to the deep archetypal ground that reaches back through the entire history of life into the depths of the cosmos itself. As Rick was saying earlier, we are all expressions of this universe, but each of us is a unique expression of the universe. In connecting to that uniqueness through individuation, we can restore a sort of wholeness that would not just be mass-mindedness.

Steiner wrote probably fifteen or so, maybe fifteen or twenty, books in his life, but there are three hundred volumes of lectures that were transcribed. From one lecture: “It achieves nothing to say, ‘I avoid the Luciferic, I avoid the Ahrimanic.’ That is foolish talk, for one cannot do that. One can only establish the balance between the two. But this to-and-fro of the human being between Ahriman and Lucifer must take place; otherwise, the human personality could not develop. If the human did not have the spirit that works and creates through resistance, the human personality would not be able to develop. It’s only through resistance that the human personality develops.” Jung often makes similar statements. Rather than the dominant Christian understanding—going back to Augustine, Aquinas, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, mostly influenced by Plotinus—of evil as a mere privation, as a mere absence, as a lack of good with no positive existence in itself, Jung in Aion, particularly in the chapter on Christ as a symbol of the Self, goes to town, destroying the arguments of these early Church Fathers about evil as privation, the basic logical errors they keep making because they’re possessed by the archetype of Christ as pure light and perfection. Steiner also thinks evil has a positive existence and an important role to play in the evolution of human beings. We can’t just split from it and reject it and say we’re going to defeat and eliminate it. That’s not possible.

My takeaway from what they both tell us about evil is that, rather than thinking of evil as something we could purify ourselves of, isolate, and eliminate, it’s actually that very maneuver that is evil—that very splitting whereby we project all the evil onto the other. In Steiner’s differentiated sense of evil—Lucifer and Ahriman, the being of escapist spirituality and the reductive materialist mechanist impulse—in their right contexts the Ahrimanic intellect and the effort to be worldly and live on the earth are appropriate, and in their proper context spirituality, the arts, mysticism—these Luciferic principles—are also appropriate and important. But we have to hold the balance.

Speaking of that balance, in Aion Jung talks about Christ incarnating in the Age of Pisces. The constellation Pisces is two fish, one vertical, one horizontal. Jung remarks that while in the early Christian period, pre-Renaissance, there was a transcendent orientation like the upward-pointing fish, around the Renaissance—around 1500—there was a dramatic shift. Ficino starts translating dialogues of Plato’s that hadn’t been available in Europe. Natural science comes into its own and there’s a more earthly focus, a horizontal focus. The Age of Exploration begins. Capitalism begins. While it might at first seem that what happened after the Renaissance was anti-Christian, it’s just another side of Christianity that led into secularism, into science, and this monotheistic obsession with the good shifts to a monotheistic obsession with the one scientific truth about nature. Steiner says something similar about this shift, which he dates a bit earlier, early 1400s. A new consciousness forms that directs us to be more attuned to the material world—through exploration, the growth of capitalist economies, the development of natural science—and also more individualized, more interior, in our experience of ourselves as selves, as egos. This is an evolutionary process that both Jung and Steiner see occurring.

While Jung was careful to avoid metaphysical claims and spoke only as a physician, acknowledging religious symbols and complexes and beings as phenomenologically important for people’s experience, he didn’t want to say too much about whether they “really” existed. Steiner, rather than taking that careful psychological orientation, took a spiritual orientation and said that these are real spiritual beings, that there is an angelic hierarchy of many beings involved behind the scenes, shaping the course of cosmic and human evolution. One of the reasons Jung was critical of Steiner is precisely because he didn’t respect the distinction between psychological reality and metaphysical or spiritual reality. We can do a Jungian reading of Steiner, or we can do a Steinarian reading of Jung.

In the late 1910s or around 1920/1921, Steiner worked on carving The Representative of Humanity. This is the Christ figure. Where Jung tends to collapse what Steiner differentiates into Lucifer—similar to Goethe’s Faust, where Mephistopheles is a satanic shadow figure—Steiner thinks that Goethe similarly collapses the Luciferic and Ahrimanic. Most of the time, if you’ve read Faust, Mephistopheles plays the role of Ahriman, trying to bring Faust in that Ahrimanic direction. Steiner’s differentiation really helps us understand why we can’t just run away from evil and split off from it; we need to hold the tension between this dipolar understanding of evil: Lucifer as inflated spirituality—pride, escape from matter—and Ahriman as cold materialistic force, hard intellect, denial of spirituality.

Steiner, in his account of human history, says Lucifer actually incarnated in flesh-and-blood human form around 3000 BCE in China, and that this being was the source of many of the deep spiritual traditions of Asia, like Taoism; that it fed into the mystery religions in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean world; and that that incarnation of Lucifer and deep spiritual wisdom needed to be present for those who witnessed and lived in the first centuries after Christ to understand the Christ event. So you’ve got Lucifer incarnating five thousand years ago; you’ve got Christ incarnating around zero. Steiner also looks ahead to the future—any day now or into the third millennium—when Ahriman will also incarnate in flesh and blood, or perhaps in some kind of cyborg form, appropriate given the rise of computer technology and transhumanism. Whether you take that literally or symbolically—we can read Steiner through Jung or Jung through Steiner—it speaks to the need to hold this tension. There’s no escape from the fact that Ahriman will incarnate, and there’s no escape from the fact that we have to reckon with the tremendous power of technology, which is an Ahrimanic issue.

In the carving, Christ stands in the middle, holding up his left hand; the winged being descending is Lucifer. Christ is not trying to do any harm to Lucifer or Ahriman; Christ is receiving them in love and trying to hold the tension between the two, but Lucifer can’t handle that love, one of Lucifer’s wings breaks, and Lucifer falls, upside down. Beneath Christ, in the hollow of the earth, is Ahriman; Christ’s right hand reaches down to Ahriman. Similarly, Ahriman can’t handle the love. The gold veins of the earth wrap around Ahriman, binding him. There is a doubling: two Lucifers and two Ahrimans, to represent the supersensible nature of Lucifer and the subsensible nature of Ahriman, and also their earthly presence—the way we encounter them every day in mundane activities. Perhaps, in Jungian language: there are the archetypes themselves and the archetypal images. Steiner wanted to depict the way we can step down the intense numinous power of supersensible Lucifer and subsensible Ahriman by meeting them in everyday life in less intense form—an invitation to work with them and not split off from evil, recognizing the challenge of holding the tension.

At the top is what Steiner refers to as “cosmic humor.” Jung wrote about the symbol of the Trinity and its lack of completeness; it was missing the fourth. In his essay on the psychology of the Trinity and the chapter on the problem of the fourth, for Jung the fourth is the material principle, the feminine, the shadow, evil itself—left out of the brilliant symbol of the Trinity articulated by the early Church Fathers. The Catholic Church, through the Assumption of Mary in the mid-20th century, was beginning to address this. That would be an inward example of a transformation trying to occur in the Christian obsession with the light, and the way Roman imperialism and then the Catholic Church, inheriting that imperialist impulse in a spiritual and patriarchal way, could start to bring in more balance. The Church would probably need a female pope, or to allow women to be priests, to fully move in that direction. In Steiner’s Representative of Humanity, a similar quaternity manifests. Cosmic humor prevents us from becoming too sentimental, taking ourselves too seriously in the epic battle between light and dark. We need to be able to laugh at ourselves. That is another way of getting at the missing fourth to complete what would otherwise be a Trinitarian formulation, which, as beautiful as it is, still leaves out the unconscious dimension.

Let me share a line from Jung in Aion—first published in 1951—from “Christ, a Symbol of the Self.” He reflects on differences between the biblical religions, Judaism and Christianity, where there is an exacerbation of the opposites and a sense of the moral importance of differentiating light and dark. In contrast, in Buddhism you don’t get that sense of the significance of sin and trying to overcome sin—though in Christianity, if you look at apocryphal writings like the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, a striking statement is said from Jesus to Mary: “There is no sin.” Early Christianity was a matrix of possibilities, and a particularly more patriarchal form won out. What makes Christianity unique is the all-important difference between good and evil. Jung asks whether this exacerbation of the opposites—much as it increases suffering—may, after all, correspond to a higher degree of truth. He’s not sure. Maybe we can’t escape the moral dimension; it might be too Luciferic, in Steiner’s sense, to think we could rise above the battle between good and evil, even while recognizing that evil is precisely the tendency to split and project evil onto the other. Jung continues: “I should merely like to express the hope that the present world situation may be looked upon in the light of the psychological rule alluded to earlier”—compensation and the importance of bringing the opposites together. He finishes: “Today, humanity as never before is split into two apparently irreconcilable halves. The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate.” As we in this country deal with the rise of a particularly, in my view, idolatrous form of Christianity—Christian nationalism, even Christofascism—the way forward would be to look deeper into these symbols at play, to come into deeper connection and even communion with the meaning of the Christ archetype, the meaning of Antichrist, the Satanic, the Luciferic and Ahrimanic in Steiner’s sense. Let’s not let them have it for themselves. To reach people who feel fervently committed to a particular tradition, perhaps as a kind of judo move, we might deflate their sense of being the pure source of goodness by reminding them of some of the things Jesus said. Rather than throwing this entire tradition into the waste bin, perhaps we could remember what’s been repressed and redeem it, and find a new way forward as a nation and as a species.

Responses to questions:

To hark back to individuation: Steiner says the human being is not just another species of animal or a new kingdom of life. Teilhard de Chardin says something similar. This is not to elevate the human being and say we’re the most important beings on this planet and don’t need to worry about the rest of the community of life. It’s a call to be responsible for our power to take care of this planet. If the human being is a new kingdom of life, each of us is actually our own species. Each individual is a unique species of organism. No one else can tell you how to individuate. No one else can tell you how to reconcile these powers of spirit and matter. There’s no universal prescription that could resolve that for all of us. Jung, especially toward the end of his life with the Cold War heating up, was adamant that the real danger was inside each of us. To the extent that individuals fail to individuate and reconcile these opposites within themselves, to that extent our collective political, cultural, and social situation will continue its downward spiral into fragmentation, mass-mindedness, and the projection of evil onto the other. Jung is not only still relevant; his insight into the nature of individuation is urgent.

On Goethe: that is connective tissue between Jung and Steiner. When Jung writes about the missing fourth, he brings in Goethe as an exemplification of how the four psychological functions—intuition, feeling, sensing, and thinking—play out. In that narrative, Jung sees Goethe expressing his own dominant functions of intuition, feeling, and sensing, and his inferior function of thinking manifests unconsciously through Faust. As a way of understanding Steiner’s Luciferic and Ahrimanic polarities of evil, the Luciferic is all intuition and feeling, and the Ahrimanic is all sensing and thinking. When intuition and feeling become detached from sensing and thinking, you get serious pathologies: a spirituality that’s escapist and narcissistic, fleeing from conflict and embodied life, and a science and technology divorced from the heart and from any sense of the human being as more than a product of an evolutionary process red in tooth and claw. Bringing these four psychological functions back together is a place where Jung and Steiner teach us a lot.

On Jakob Böhme’s Abgrund: Böhme is such a delicacy to read—rich, sensuous imagery, alchemical, Kabbalistic influences. All of that flows into Jung and Steiner; both were deeply influenced by the Gnostics. Steiner doesn’t talk very much about the Godhead or the source of it all. I get the sense he would say: don’t kid yourselves; let’s focus a bit more on the local spiritual situation on the earth, and then we’ve got cycles within cycles of cosmic evolutionary process. Yes, there’s a divine underlying all of that, but let’s be patient; we’ve got a few million more years of evolution before we can begin to fathom what that might be. In terms of materiality as a missing fourth, Jung begins his essay on the problem of the fourth by looking at Plato’s Timaeus. There are many triads: the Same, the Different, and the Mixture—the Same analogous to the fixed constellations, the Different to the movement of the planets, and the Mixture to the World Soul. Where’s the fourth? The dialogue begins with Socrates saying “one, two, three” to his interlocutors, but where’s the fourth? The fourth interlocutor was sick; he couldn’t come. That’s not accidental filler. When Timaeus lays out cosmology, there’s the dark and difficult chōra—the receptacle, the form of formlessness itself. That’s another example of the missing fourth showing up in its absence, at the edge of consciousness. Perhaps that receptacle or chōrais akin to the Abgrund Böhme writes about.

Given that the problem of the fourth is so prevalent, and symbols arise from the depths of the unconscious rather than being consciously engineered, how do we mend the split? One of Jung’s most important insights for me was about symbol and myth: as much as we need a new myth, we can’t engineer one. It has to erupt from the unconscious. Western philosophy has had an ambivalent relationship to imagination. Empiricists and rationalists either prefer the empirical world of measurement or mathematics and logic, and imagination sits unruly in the middle, with ambiguous, erotically charged symbols. Jung cultivated active imagination, as much a process of discovery as of creation—somewhere in between. The most brilliant artists have no idea how they create what they create, yet we acknowledge them as the creators. In terms of recovering or constructing symbols, the practice of active imagination—holding the tension between discovery and creation—allows the symbols and myths we need to rise into consciousness.

On the Antichrist: in Answer to Job, Yahweh is unconscious and has a shadow dimension—a doubting thought—identified with Satan. Job, being faithful, causes Yahweh to realize God needs to become human. For Jung, the Christ event doesn’t resolve the need for balance. There’s still an imbalance because Christ is a being of pure light and perfection. Psychological compensation in the Christian unconscious requires that, just as Christ incarnates, a compensatory Antichrist principle arises. You can see this in Revelation, where John—whether the same as the epistles’ John or not—expresses the compensatory side: Christ returns with a sword. You see the interplay of light and dark and the importance of reconciling the opposites playing out in the New Testament as early Christians undergo a tremendous disruption and transformation of the psyche. I don’t see Trump so much as an Antichrist figure as a symptom of the American id rising to the surface, a mirror. In the anthroposophical or Steinarian register, we live in the time of Ahriman. We’re no longer in the time of the vertical fish; in the horizontal fish we’re dominated by science and technology, and materialism has become common sense. In San Francisco and in the new age, the rebirth of a kind of spirituality is often co-opted by consumer capitalism—an example of Ahriman and Lucifer as collaborators. Steiner says that while they are opposite poles, they collaborate frequently. The “spiritual but not religious” movement that is positive in some sense is easily commodified—an Ahrimanic tendency. If we’re looking for the Antichrist or the incarnation of Ahriman, I’d look more in the direction of Peter Thiel or Elon Musk, or toward attributing consciousness and a kind of godlike power to artificial intelligence. If Steiner were alive today, he might say that’s the incarnation of Ahriman happening. Let’s not attribute more archetypal significance to Trump than we need to.

As for teachings of Christ relevant to the missing fourth and to avoiding splitting: the Pharisees come to Jesus and accuse him of immorally hanging out with the prostitutes and the beggars—perhaps with Mary Magdalene, whom some early Church Fathers identified as a prostitute. They say, “Why are you cavorting with this woman? She’s a sinner.” He doesn’t answer at first; they keep prodding. He says, “Let he among you who is free of sin be the first to cast a stone.” He doesn’t even look up. He asks the woman, “Have they left?” They all walk away because they know they aren’t free of sin. There’s also the Sermon on the Mount. There are examples of Christ being severe in the Gospels, much less in Revelation, but the refusal to judge and the shift from an Old Testament sense of the Law as be-all and end-all, with Yahweh as vengeful and judgmental—there are examples of mercy in the Old Testament too—to Christ as the fulfillment of the Law is a shift from imposed laws to an understanding of love and the refusal to judge others. That could help remind intense Christian nationalists of what their teacher actually wanted to bring to humanity. There is a lot of judgment among everyone on every side, and that’s a hard lesson. How do you defuse and defeat evil? Not by constellating the split and attempting to destroy it, whereby you become evil to defeat evil. As is often the case in literature and world history, evil eats itself. When Christ says, “Turn the other cheek; love thy enemies,” that might be perceived as pacifism, but it’s a recognition that if you fight evil, you feed it; if you meet it with love, it ends up destroying itself.