Beyond Good and Evil - Now and the Future

Beyond Good and Evil – In the Years to Come

After he had experienced the world’s suffering,  God who became man in Jesus and  left behind him a Comforter, the Third Person of the Trinity, The Spirit, the Comforter,  who would make his dwelling in every  individuals still to come, still to be born,  none of whom would enjoy the privilege or even the possibility of being born without sin.

In the Paraclete, (The Spirit) therefore, God is closer to the real man and his darkness than he is in his Son Jesus.  The light of God bestrides the bridge of—Man—from his day side; God’s shadow, from the night side.

What will be the outcome of this fearful dilemma, which threatens to shatter the frail human vessel with unknown storms and intoxications?

It may well be the revelation of the Holy Ghost - Spirit out of man himself.

Just as man was once revealed out of God, so, when the circle closes, God may be revealed out of the man.

But since, in this world, evil is joined to every good, with the twisting of  the indwelling of the Paraclete into a self-deification of a man, thereby causing yet again inaction of self-importance of which we had a foretaste in the case of Nietzsche’s ‘Superman.”

The more unconscious we are of the religious problem in the future, the greater the danger of our putting the divine germ within us to some ridiculous or diabolical use, puffing ourselves up with it instead of remaining conscious that we are no more than the Stable in which the Lord is born.

Even on the highest peak, we shall never be “beyond good and evil,” and the more we experience of this their inextricable entanglement, the more uncertain and confused will our moral judgment be.

In this conflict, it will not help us in the least to throw all moral criterion on the rubbish heap and to set up new tablets after known patterns; for, as in the past, so in the future once again the wrong we have done, thought, or intended will wreak its vengeance on our souls, no matter whether we turn the world upside down or not.

Our knowledge of good and evil has dwindled with our mounting knowledge and experience through the years and will dwindle still more in the future, always without our being able to escape the demands of ethics.

In this utmost uncertainty, that is the very reason we need the illumination of a holy and whole-making spirit—a spirit that can be anything rather than our reason. Carl Jung; CW 11, Psychology and Religion, Pages 179 – 180