Transformation

Religions and Discourse

Edited by James M. M. Francis

Volume 31

PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien
 Eolene M. Boyd-MacMillan

Transformation
A Cognitive
James SemanticSpirituality,
Loder, Mystical Perspective
and James Hillman

The children of this world

are wiser in their generation
than the children of light
(Luke 16:8)

PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek
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ISSN 1422-8998
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Contents

Acknowledgements 7

Abbreviations 9

Introduction 11

Chapter One Ego-Relativization in the Transformation

Theory of James Loder 31

Chapter Two Four Contemporary Authors on Christian

Mystical Spirituality 81

Chapter Three Loder and Christian Mystical Spirituality 139

Chapter Four The Ego-Relativization Theory of James Hillman 175

Chapter Five Loder and Hillman 219

Chapter Six Conclusions 273

Bibliography 283

Index 307
Acknowledgements

Without the persistent encouragement of Dan Hardy I might not have

persevered with this publication. Without the timely support of David
Ford I would not have been able to go forward with it. I am grateful to
both Dan and David and to the Bethune-Baker Fund, Cambridge
Faculty of Divinity, for their grant. At Peter Lang, my thanks go to
Graham Speake and James Francis for their belief in and assistance
with this project.
I would like to thank James Loder (posthumously), Denys
Turner, and James Hillman for reading and commenting on my
analyses of their theories and texts. Dana Wright, formerly of
Princeton Theological Seminary and presently of Fuller Theological
Seminary, has freely shared his time and knowledge of the work of
James Loder. My thanks also to Fraser Watts who introduced me to
the work of James Hillman.
I would also like to thank John and Margaret Bowker for their
interest and support during the research and writing of this text.
Many other people have been supportive during the research,
writing, and revisions of this text and I am deeply grateful to each of
them.
Most of all, I am grateful to my husband, Ronald Boyd-
MacMillan, for his wit, insight, and love.
 For Ronald
‘a cord of three strands is not quickly snapped’
Ecclesiastes 4.12.
Abbreviations

James Loder’s main texts:

EM Educational Ministry in the Logic of the Spirit

KM Knight’s Move: The Relational Logic of Spirit in Theology

and Science

LS Logic of the Spirit: Human Development in Theological

Perspective

TM Transforming Moment 2nd edition

Introduction

James Loder died suddenly of a heart attack on 9 November 2001.

However, he had died every year for almost two decades. He began all
of his courses at Princeton Theological Seminary with a description of
his death and the continued functioning of the world in his absence. It
was an entry into the void, nothingness, what every human being must
face at some point: their own non-existence. Loder wanted his
students to face the void so that they could face God. As people
realize on some level their human limitations, finiteness, they are
‘open’ to deep, transforming engagement with God as both an on-
going process and at particular turning points.
Loder developed his transformation theory over forty years. His
doctoral dissertation examined the nature of ‘reality consciousness,’
understood as consciousness of God, by comparing the theories of
Sigmund Freud and Søren Kierkegaard.1 He examined Freud’s theory
of reality consciousness (non-neurotic, non-pathological conscious-
ness) as relational image. A person’s consciousness responds somat-
ically and creatively to something outside herself through images that
relate body and mind, object and subject. Consciousness is the
relationship. Loder found that Freud’s non-pathological consciousness
agreed with Kierkegaard’s consciousness when responding to a
‘bestowal’ of the ‘Paradox,’ the God-man of Jesus Christ. This
consciousness was free of illusions, neuroses and pathologies.
From that initial research came what Loder later termed the
‘logic of transformation,’ a five-phased process that can occur in any
order, in a moment or over a life-time (the five phases are conflict,
scanning, insight, energy release, and application). The five phases
operate transformationally and characterize human knowing. Loder

1 ‘The Nature of Religious Consciousness in the Writings of Sigmund Freud and

Søren Kierkegaard: A Theoretical Study in the Correlation of Religious and
Psychiatric Concepts.’
uses the following understanding of transformation: ‘whenever, within
a given frame of reference or experience, hidden orders of coherence
and meaning emerge to replace or alter the axioms of the given frame
and reorder its elements accordingly.’2 We can think of examples from
childhood, when we learn about subsets and sets in maths, geography,
and grammar. Other examples include scientific discoveries, artistic
creations, and therapeutic insights that identify meaning and coher-
ence from seemingly random data. In his lectures, Loder drew nine
dots, arranged in three rows and columns, and challenged students to
draw a line through every dot using only four lines and without lifting
their writing instruments from the page. Upon discovering how to
connect the dots by drawing a line outside the box formed by the dots,
one both discovers and creates a hidden coherence that has ordered
seemingly disconnected elements, the dots. The phrase, ‘connecting
the dots,’ has come to represent a flash of insight when one sees
familiar elements in a new way.
Loder asserted that this logic was the structure of creative
knowing, human development, and deep, transforming engagement
with God. The five-phased logic points to the relational nature of
human knowing on many levels: within each phase, between each
phase, and among the phases. Moreover, Loder places human
knowing in a four-dimensional context (lived world, self, void, the
Holy). In human knowing, the five phases and four dimensions all
relate between and among each other. In transformed human knowing,
the hidden but sustaining presence of God emerges to re-order the
elements of one’s life. In Christian transformation, the emergence of
God as the ordering presence is Trinitarian and Christomorphic.
In 1970, Loder experienced a transforming moment. Through a
car accident in which he thought he was going to die, he experienced a
deep, transforming encounter with God. He reviewed his life and
identified two other times when he had encountered God in this way
(during a walk with his depressed younger sister and while mourning
his father’s death). These encounters represented moments of spiritual

2 KM, p. 316.

12
clarity in his long Christian journey, in his engagement with God; the
insight from his car accident operated as a turning-point, although he
notes that he did not really attend to it for two years.3 When he did
attend to it, his research shifted to focus more particularly on human-
divine relationality in Christian transformation.
‘Relationality’ is an awkward term that refers to a relationship
that takes on a life of its own. For example, the love between the
Father and the Son is somehow a third person called the Spirit in
classical Trinitarian theology. Despite the awkwardness of the term
‘relationality,’ I use it because its very awkwardness sets apart the
engagement between a person and God in Christian transformation
from the current use of the word ‘relationship’ to refer to everything
from one’s interaction with one’s automobile to one’s familial
commitments. A person’s relationality with God is different from any
other relationship, although of course there are analogies with human
relationships. Analogies that enable us to grapple with mysteries still,
by definition, contain differences.4
Throughout human life, Loder understood God both to illuminate
the void of human limitations and to offer God-self as the solution to
that humanly insurmountable problem. He placed the human sciences,
human creativity, development, and accomplishments, all in a larger
context of God’s active presence. Moreover, Loder understood all of
these wonderful characteristics of human nature—creativity, growth,
discovery—as themselves transformed through intentional relation-
ality with God. He understood all of creation to be contingent upon
God for its very existence, but in deep, transforming engagement with
God, that contingency is transformed into relationality. The hidden

3 See excerpts from interview with Dana Wright, Redemptive Transformation in

Practical Theology, p. 16.
4 A full consideration of analogies in religious language is beyond the scope of
this discussion, including a discussion about correspondence theory (e.g., as
leads to a critical realist position) and coherence theory (e.g., as leads to a
constructivist position). In Metaphor and Religious Language, Janet Soskice
compares the use of models, metaphors, and analogies in scientific endeavor
with their use in religious contexts, asserting that their truth significance in a
religious context should be the same as in a scientific context.

13
coherence and meaning of human contingency on God emerge and re-
order our lived worlds, our selves, and even the void, through our
relationality with God.
In Christian transformation, the way that a person knows is itself
transformed. Recall Loder’s understanding of transformation: ‘when-
ever, within a given frame of reference or experience, hidden orders of
coherence and meaning emerge to replace or alter the axioms of the
given frame and reorder its elements accordingly.’ The distinction be-
tween human knowing and transformed human knowing lies in its
origin and witness. ‘Transformed’ human knowing originates out of a
person’s relationality with God, rather than out of a person’s ego. Of
course, a person, like all that exists, is contingent on God for her or his
existence. So, in a sense, all knowing originates out of a type of
relationality with God. But, I am distinguishing (and Loder distin-
guishes) between the relationality of contingency on God and the
relationality of deep, transforming engagement with God. In
‘transformed’ human knowing, a person’s insights originate out of an
intentional, deeply engaged relationality with God. Instead of
witnessing to a person’s ego competencies, transformed knowing can
point to, reveal, and bear witness to human-divine relationality.
‘Transformed’ knowing inspires an awe that connects heaven and
earth. The relational and transformational characteristics of all human
knowing can themselves be transformed to reveal what has become a
person’s primary identity, her relationality with God.
Asserting an analogous relationship between the Holy Spirit and
the human spirit, Loder’s theology of the Holy Spirit interacts with
Regin Prenter, George Hendry, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Karl Barth, T.
F. Torrance, and others. The human side of the analogy comes from
psychology, sociology, anthropology and even physics. He studied
physics with Jim Neidhardt and together they co-authored a book.
Psychologically, Loder draws on both depth and neurological theory,
interacting with Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, their descendants, and the
neurological work of Ernst Gellhorn and his colleagues, among others.
In the following chapters I do not assess the accuracy with which he

14
draws upon these other theorists. My analysis is of his understanding
of various concepts as they contribute to his theory. A source criticism
of Loder would be another discussion.5 Throughout my analysis, I use
the words of the primary source authors as much as possible to
demonstrate that my assertions are rooted in their own language.
While discourse analysis rightly alerts us to the multi-layered
meanings and dynamics within any utterance, our only option is not
the complete disconnection of a term from a referent or a signifier
from the thing signified. I use language as a critical realist.
In his examination of human consciousness of God’s trans-
forming presence, Loder identifies an ‘ego-relativization.’ A person’s
ego is ‘relativized’ or made relative to this relational focus of her
personhood. Paradigmatically, her ego is transformed from being the
guiding agency of her interactions with herself and her world, to being
guided by her relationality with God. As discussed, how a person
knows (the transformational, relational nature of the person), is itself
transformed; Loder talks about ‘transformation transformed.’ This
‘transformation transformed’ involves both continuity and discon-
tinuity; a person remains herself, but she is also deeply changed.
Through deep, transforming engagement with God a person, including
her ego, is related to God, human spirit to Holy Spirit, in a dialectical,
‘bi-polar relational unity.’ This inelegant phrase is another way of
speaking about human-divine ‘relationality’ to highlight the respect of
alterity or otherness in the midst of profound engagement. It bears
repeating: a person remains herself, but she is also deeply changed.
All of her creativity, development, and accomplishments are drawn
into the loving, giving perichoresis (circumincessio) of the Trinity
(the co-inherence or relational life of the Trinity). We are all somehow
part of the life of the Trinity simply because we exist. But in ‘deep,
transforming engagement,’ we are drawn more deeply into that life,
into relationality with the sustaining Source of the cosmos.

5 E.g., see Ken Kovacs’s PhD dissertation, ‘The Relational Phenomenological

Pneumatology of James E. Loder: Providing New Frameworks for the Christian
Life.’

15
 In the following chapters I assert that Loder’s theory of ego-
relativization reveals the psychological and theological dynamics of
personal (which is inextricable from social) transformation in
Christian mystical spirituality as presented by four contemporary
authors on mystical spirituality: Andrew Louth, Bernard McGinn,
Denys Turner, and Mark McIntosh. That is, Loder’s interdisciplinary
theory places Christian understandings of knowing God in the context
of all human knowing. To explore this assertion, I begin with an
examination of Loder’s theory in chapter one.6 Chapter two considers
selected texts of Louth, McGinn, Turner, and McIntosh. Chapter three
asserts an overlap in conceptual fields between Loder’s theory and
mystical spirituality as depicted by these four authors. That is, I do not
assert simple semantic connections, but a shared focus. However, in
asserting this conceptual overlap, I do not deny differences among
authors. My point is that each is examining the nature of deep,
transforming engagement with God. In that shared examination, I
assert that Loder’s theory contributes the very interdisciplinary
analysis that the four authors find lacking:
(1) His analysis insists on the inseparability of experience and
interpretation, on the mutually informing exchange of
spirituality and theology (based on the way that human beings
know anything at all and thus rejecting an idea of spirituality
as a ‘free-floating’ experience without thematization); and
(2) His analysis probes without reduction Christian claims to
divine ‘mediated immediacy’ (that is, that they encounter God
in an especially ‘near’ or ‘close’ way, but it is still mediated
through their senses, imagination, and brain processes), an
integral component of mystical spirituality.
He does not reduce such claims to purely psychological processes,
neurological or cognitive. He also does not reduce such claims to
purely theological doctrine stated biblically, fundamentally, or
systematically. Rather, he respects the particularity of the human

6 Before he died, Loder reviewed earlier versions of this chapter and approved
the accuracy of my depiction of his theory (Typed Letter Signed, 20th
December, 2000; Emailed Letter, 20th September, 2001).

16
sciences and Christian theology, while relating them in a way that
illuminates and challenges our understanding of Christian claims to a
‘mediated immediacy’ in deep, transforming engagement with God.
At least five objections may arise as this discussion begins. The
first involves criticisms of Loder, the second involves the use of ‘ego’
language, the third involves the recommendation of ‘ego-
relativization,’ the fourth involves the use of Freudian or depth
psychology and its descendants, and the fifth involves the use of the
term ‘mystical.’ I have italicized the key words of each objection to
enable the reader to skip those objections of no interest.
Criticisms of Loder have generally focused on two areas.7 One
area of criticism asserts that Loder emphasizes change at the expense
of constancy, discontinuity at the expense of continuity, crisis at the
expense of equilibrium, transformation at the expense of formation, or
conversion at the expense of life-long faith journey. I wonder if some
of this criticism stems from the title of Loder’s first major text, The
Transforming Moment, because from my reading of his corpus, he is
at pains not to create these false dichotomies. In a typically Loderian
move, he asserts a fundamental relationality between each pairing.
The words ‘transforming’ and ‘moment’ may embed in readers’ minds
the idea that Loder spurns their opposites, despite his analysis to the
contrary. For example, Loder asserts that in Christian transformation
developmental stages are ‘self-liquidating’ in that the ‘transforma-
tional process may transcend and correct arrested development’ or
even ‘leap over stages of development and incorporate them in an
order of its own.’8 However, he does not assert that this must happen
in an instant, but analyzes how this may occur over a life-time through
the ordinary events of human existence, crises, and both. The process
of transformation itself is a structure of formation. The other general

7 For examples of critical assessments of Loder, see Dykstra, C. (who did his
Ph.D. under Loder) ‘Theological Table-Talk: Transformation in Faith and Morals’ in
Theology Today (April, 1986, pp. 56-64) and Grannell, A. ‘The Paradox of Formation
and Transformation’ in Religious Education (vol. 80, no. 3, Summer 1985, pp. 384-
398).
8 TM, pp. 131, 135.

17
area of criticism aims at his Christo-centrism or Trinitarian-centrism. I
address this criticism in Chapter Three while discussing the
relationship between universality and particularity in mystical
discourse. In a sentence, Loder does write from Christian
commitments. He does not deny the sustaining work of the Holy Spirit
throughout creation, but he does make Trinitarian claims for the
reality of God. Loder does not need an apologist, but potential
contributions of his theory to spirituality discourse and inter-
disciplinarity (and other discussions such as science and religion) have
gone largely un-mined. It may be that the technical language and
denseness of his writing have discouraged greater interaction. I hope
that this discussion demonstrates ways in which the fruits are worth
the effort.
The second potential objection is that ego-language is sometimes
criticized as too culture-bound for contemporary use. My response is
that although ‘ego’ may be an inadequate term cross-culturally, there
is some sort of self-understanding and agency that forms and develops
in individuals. For example, one proposal is that the Chinese word
transliterated from Mandarin as jen, which encompasses ‘the
individual’s transactions with his fellow human beings,’ describes at
least one Chinese self-concept more adequately than the term ‘ego.’9
Yet ‘ego’ as a psychic agency that negotiates a person’s interactions
with her environment can also be understood as transactional or
relational. The distinction might be in how the transactions or relations
are understood and experienced. Outside the scope of this discussion
is whether or not a person in any, many, most, or none of the diverse
Chinese contexts (e.g., Taiwanese, Hong Kong, northern mainland, to
mention a very few that themselves must be broken down further)
responds to the birth trauma, absent face, and external restraint in such
a way that a person creates her jen or ego (as Loder asserts for his own
culture). However named, some sort of psychic agency mediates a
person’s inner and outer worlds, ensuring survival and satisfaction,
even if her culture understands the mediation and goals differently.

9 Francis Hsu, ‘The Self in Cross-Cultural Perspective,’ p. 33, italics original.

18
Similarly, in some way, self and not-self, or even less-self, are
negotiated psychologically. Such cultural inquiry lies beyond the
scope of this discussion, yet requires the groundwork laid in this
discussion.
The third potential objection is to the process of ‘ego-
relativization.’ Feminist scholars might reject a call to ego-
relativization (or similar calls to ‘subordinate’ oneself to the Christian
God) as an appropriate antidote for men, but not for women who
struggle to have an ego at all.10 Sarah Coakley focuses on this issue in
her text Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and
Gender. She considers the fear of ‘heteronomy’11 and asserts that ‘the
apparently forced choice between dependent “vulnerability” and
liberative “power” is a false one.’12 In her first chapter on kenosis and
subversion, she concludes that in deep, transforming human-divine
relationship (such as I assert is the core of Loder’s transformation
theory) is ‘the unique intersection of vulnerable, “non-grasping”
humanity and authentic divine power, itself “made perfect in
weakness”.’13 She asserts that the kenosis embodied by Christ to
which Christians are invited to open themselves can be understood as
a ‘special form of power-in-vulnerability,’14 that ‘true divine
“empowerment” occurs most unimpededly in the context of a special
form of human “vulnerability”.’15 In agreement with Coakley, I argue
that the call to ego-relativization is valid for both genders, noting that
it leads to a particular kind of ‘ego-strengthening’ or enhancement of
ego capacities.
The fourth possible objection involves the use of Freudian and
other depth psychological theory. The journal of The British Psycho-
logical Society, The Psychologist, devoted an issue to a review of

10 E.g., Daphne Hampson, Theology and Feminism, p. 155.

11 Sarah Coakley, Powers and Submission: Spirituality, Philosophy, and Gender,
p. xiv.
12 Ibid., p. xv.
13 Ibid., p. 38.
14 Ibid., p. 5, italics original.
15 Ibid., p. 32, italics original.

19
Freudian theory, focusing on specific tenets in light of modern
research. Most relevant for this discussion is that Freud’s theory of
‘repression proper’ seems to correspond with modern cognitive
theories of selective forgetting or cognitive avoidance.16 Loder’s use
of Freudian theory in ego formation and development focuses on
memories of actual events: the birth process, face phenomenon,
external restraint, and their associated feelings. At the very least,
recent research does not negate Loder’s use of this tenet of
psychoanalytic theory.
And lastly, some may object to the use of the terms ‘mystical’ or
‘mysticism.’ The terms have had a varied and problematic history, as
noted by Louth, McGinn, Turner, and McIntosh. Thus I am at pains to
specify that my use of the term ‘mystical spirituality’ is as these four
authors depict it. Entry into the important but arduous debate about
the sense of the term, its history, and whether or not it should be
discarded is beyond the scope of this discussion.17 In chapter two I

16 According to Chris R. Brewin and Bernice Andrews (‘Psychological defense

mechanisms: The example of repression’), Freud uses ‘repression’ in two ways,
joining the two uses in the second meaning. ‘One usage referred to a process
whereby unwanted material is turned away before it reaches awareness […].
Rather than quietly remaining in the unconscious, however, this material is
likely to enter awareness in disguised ways. In his second usage of the term,
Freud proposes that a person becomes aware of these unwanted derivatives of
the original repressed material and then deliberately attempts to exclude them
from consciousness’ (p. 615). F. LeRon Shultz (‘Pedagogy of the Repressed:
What Keep Seminarians from Transformational Learning?’) draws on Loder’s
theory to suggest that awareness of repressed fears can support transformational
learning among seminarians. After describing Loder’s four dimensions, Shultz
asserts that ‘the ultimate answer to the repression that keeps seminarians from
transformational learning is to fear the only One worth fearing, so that they can
overcome the fears of this “world”’ (p. 161). Fear defined as ‘a response to the
perceived inability to control an existentially relevant object’ (pp. 157, 158) is
an essential part of love that God takes up into God-self in the human-divine
relationality resulting from deep, transforming engagement.
17 For an analysis of the historical influences that contributed to the ‘liberal
Protestant’ reduction of mysticism to an essential core that has contributed to
the confusion and debate about the concept see L. E. Schmidt, ‘The Making of
Modern “Mysticism”.’

20
examine their understandings of the concepts of spirituality, mysti-
cism, and contemplation, proposing the phrase, ‘deep, transforming
engagement with God,’ as a synthesis statement of their presentations.
I then consider their criticisms of what I have called the ‘mysticism-
experience identity.’ All four authors express grave concerns about the
identification of mysticism with experience, apart from thematization
and the rest of cognition. They reject the separation of experience
from thematization, spirituality from theology and ecclesiological
contexts. Lastly, I explore their conclusions about the classical
mystical authors’ claims to divine immediacy or directness. All four
conclude that although the mystical authors use terms like ‘immediate’
or ‘direct,’ their experienced knowing of God is mediated or a partial
immediacy. Yet it is a unique experienced knowing from which
paradoxical language issues in an attempt to articulate the ineffable.
My use of Louth, McGinn, Turner, and McIntosh arises from
their shared concern about the problems inherent to what I call
‘mysticism-experience identity.’ While each of the authors has his
particularities, all four survey classic mystical texts and come up with
similar understandings of mystical spirituality as ‘deep, transforming
engagement with God’ (my summary phrase). And, all four authors
focus on the mystical authors’ claims to divine immediacy in their
deep, transforming engagement with God. My examination of these
contemporary authors’ texts does not assess the accuracy with which
they interpret the mystical authors’ texts or the texts of theologians
who reflect upon mystical spirituality (e.g., Karl Rahner, Bernard
Lonergan). That inquiry would be yet another discussion. My focus is
on the four authors’ views of mystical spirituality as I glean them from
their interactions with classical mystical authors and their selected
theologians.18 To a greater or lesser degree, the careers of all four
overlapped with Loder’s, maintaining my focus on contemporary
analyses of human transformation and mystical spirituality. While
stylistically controversial, I use the present historical tense wherever
possible to emphasize the immediacy of the issues discussed. Also

18 Denys Turner has reviewed chapter three and affirmed my portrayal of his
understandings.

21
potentially controversial is my predominate use of the feminine
pronoun. My major interlocutors are male and making the examples
female seemed the best way to avoid confusion and to be inclusive.
No doubt, this will annoy some, please others, and remain irrelevant to
many. My apologies to the first.
In chapter three, I argue that Loder’s theory examines ‘deep,
transforming engagement with God’ in a way that does not reduce
such engagement purely to experience. I argue also that Loder’s
theory presents an interdisciplinary understanding of divine
immediacy that accords with the analyses of Louth, McGinn, Turner,
and McIntosh. My summary phrase of their four depictions (‘deep,
transforming engagement with God’) operates as an analytical locus
between the four authors and Loder. Loder himself links his
transformational logic in four dimensions and its neural correlates to
mystical dynamics, authors, terms, and patterns. He understands
spirituality and theology as interwoven. Moreover, a central argument
in his formulation of the transformational logic is the inseparability of
experience and knowing (or thematization), of imagination and
reason, in a broad understanding of cognition. Lastly, his portrayal of
the divine ‘mediated immediacy’ in ‘deep, transforming engagement
with God’ accords with the four authors. This agreement between the
four authors and Loder notably involves writers from different
Christian traditions, the four from primarily Catholic and Orthodox
theological commitments, Loder from Reformed commitments. My
assertion does not deny distinctions among these Christian traditions,
or the differences among these authors, but focuses on their shared
investigations into ‘deep, transforming engagement with God.’ I regret
that Loder did not live to probe further the connections that he himself
made and that I identify between his theory and classical mystical
spirituality.
If my assertion about Loder’s theory and mystical spirituality is
justified, then his theory will contribute to debated issues in
contemporary mystical spirituality discourse. One such issue involves
universality and particularity. Or, how to respect the particularity of
each spirituality when every spirituality makes universal assertions
(e.g., Jesus is the only Way; or, There is one God and his name is
Allah; or, Every religion is a different path to the same God; or, There

22
is no transcendent God, we are all Gods). The universal assertion of
each spirituality negates the universal assertions of all other
spiritualities. Yet, if one does away with all universal assertions, then
one has not respected the particularity of any spirituality. Some
interlocutors in mystical spirituality address this problem by
emphasizing human self-transcendence, some by emphasizing divine
agency, some by emphasizing the common elements in spiritualities
from different faith traditions, some by emphasizing the differences.
No one option satisfies everyone.
Consistent with his logic, Loder directly relates the options. He
relates universality and particularity in his affirmation of human
nature and his appropriation of the Chalcedonian formula. His
affirmation of the amazing capabilities of human nature can serve as a
meeting place with other spiritualities that emphasize human self-
transcendence, often referred to as ‘human spiritualities.’ However,
Loder asserts that despite its wondrous capacities, human nature itself
needs transformation through human-divine relationality. Such a
transformation involves both continuities (e.g. the capacity for human-
divine relationality) and discontinuities (e.g. a psychic structural
change, or transformation, via ego-relativization).
Loder envisions human-divine engagement modeled on the
Chalcedonian formula of Christ’s nature, fully human and fully divine.
Loder terms it an ‘asymmetrical’ engagement to distinguish the nature
of Jesus Christ as God incarnate from the human-divine relationality
that is made possible through Christ. In the Incarnation, the otherness
of the human and divine natures is respected while profoundly en-
gaged. The New Testament scriptures describe the Christian as being
conformed to Christ’s nature and classic mystical spirituality texts aim
to nurture such conformity by following his lived example.19 In his
resurrection, the divine nature of Jesus Christ negates the inevitable

19 See J. Zammit-Mangion’s forthcoming doctoral dissertation (University of

Cambridge), which probes Pauline spirituality and the nature of Christian
conformity to Christ. The Ignatian Exercises, for example, support this
conformity through meditation on Christ’s life, following the pattern of Holy
Week and the Passion.

23
destruction of the human nature, revealing that the relationship
between the two natures is asymmetrical, the divine transforms the
human. The ontological prior existence of God as the divine Creator
of humanity, of all other creatures, and of all of the cosmos again
establishes that an asymmetry must characterize human and divine
relationality. Symmetry refers to a mirror image. In human-divine
relationality, a person is reconnected with the original in whose image
she is made, but this reconnection does not involve perfect mirror
images, it is not symmetrical. The asymmetry does not diminish
human participation, the collaboration or co-creation issuing from the
relationality, but recognizes that God is the Creator and humanity
created.
The asymmetry discussed above informs Loder’s inter-
disciplinary methodology. He argues that interdisciplinary research on
Christian transformation must involve both theology (‘a view from
above’) and the human sciences (‘a view from below’). With a
‘marginal’20 priority given to theology by affirming God as an active
reality, in other ways the disciplines can correct and learn from each
other. His concern with interdisciplinary methodology appears even in
his early research. He attempted to put theology and the human
sciences in direct relationship without creating a new discipline or
resorting to philosophical reductionism. He rejected methodologies
that simply noted semantic correlations or conceptual connections
without acknowledging differences in conceptual fields. He focused
theologically on the human experience and understanding of Christian
awareness of God’s presence.
In the context of research into Christian transformation, I place
Loder’s theory in interdisciplinary and inter-faith (broadly understood)
spirituality discourse to suggest a methodology that does not deny or

20 Loder uses the term ‘marginal’ from Michael Polanyi’s ‘marginal control’
principle (M. Grene ed. Knowing and Being, see especially ‘The Logic of Tacit
Inference,’ pp. 138-158). In brief, ‘the “lower” level is said to be subject to dual
control by the laws applying to its component particulars in themselves and by
the distinctive laws that govern the comprehensive unity, i.e., the ‘higher’ level,
formed by them.’ KM, pp. 55.

24
reduce polarized viewpoints. For example, an assertion that ‘Jesus is
the only Way’ can be polarized from an assertion that ‘All ways lead
to God.’ A methodology that insists on creating a direct relationality
between two spiritualities with polarizing assertions will probe the
awkward and competing particularities. The goal is not to remove the
disagreement or even parts of the disagreement, but to prize the
dynamic exchange between polarities as a relationship that can take on
a life of its own to reveal new insights. According to the five-phased
logic, conflict is integral to human knowing, which can come in the
form of disagreement.
To test my proposed methodological principles and examine this
dynamic exchange of disagreement in action, I relate Loder’s theory
directly to James Hillman’s theory of transformation, which may be
considered a ‘human spirituality.’ Relating the two theories tests the
power of my methodology for inter-faith (broadly understood) and
interdisciplinary spirituality discourse. I conceptualized this test while
reading through Loder’s writings and was happy to discover that he
had done something similar in his doctoral research. That finding
encouraged me as I structured my research. As mentioned, he related
the reality consciousness theories of Søren Kierkegaard, a Christian, to
Sigmund Freud, who considered Christianity an illusion. The
exchange that Loder created yielded a relationality that revealed the
insights of both his theory and his methodology.
To relate directly the theories of Loder and Hillman, I must
examine Hillman’s theory as I did Loder’s. Chapter four investigates
the transformation theory of Hillman.21 Sometimes referred to as a
post-Jungian,22 Hillman is the founder of the archetypal psychology
movement. His theory of transformation also involves ego-
relativization, but without a transcendent being. Nor does it involve an
emphasis on the human spirit. He emphasizes the soul, the human soul

21 Like Loder, Hillman reviewed and approved my depiction of his theory in this
chapter (Hillman is still alive): ‘it is excellent work! […] you’ve done as good a
job as any I’ve seen […] I was honored by both your perspicuity and your
assiduousness.’ Hand-written Fax Signed, 16th December, 2000.
22 A. Samuels, Jung and the Post-Jungians.

25
and the ‘soul of the world,’ also referred to as the ‘anima mundi’ and
the ‘archetypal soul.’ This force initiates, superintends, and maintains
the relating of a person’s ego to itself. He calls a person’s ego the
‘heroic ego,’ a short-hand reference to the cultural and social forces in
the ‘Christian’ West responsible for its appearance. In ego-
relativization, a person’s ‘heroic ego’ is related to the archetypal soul
of the world and thereby no longer operates as the guiding force of a
person. Rather, a person’s ‘heroic ego’ recognizes that it is only one of
an infinite number of images from which a person can operate. A
person shifts from a dominating, controlling attitude toward oneself,
other people, and the rest of the cosmos to a respectful, reflective
attitude. A utilitarian or instrumental stance is replaced by an
attentive, contemplative posture toward all that exists.
As evident from even this brief description of Hillman’s theory,
his and Loder’s theories run parallel and diverge in their account of
human transformation. Thus, Hillman’s theory provides an ideal
opportunity to test the power of the methodological propositions made
above for interdisciplinary and inter-faith (broadly understood)
discourse. Although Hillman does not place his theory in the realm of
spirituality discourse, his theory can be understood in this way. As
discussed in chapter four, Hillman himself links his theory to religion
and theophany (although not categorically, and understanding both
terms archetypally). Using the understanding of spirituality articulated
by the anthropological approach of Sandra Schneiders (discussed by
McIntosh and reviewed in both chapters three and four), Hillman’s
theory can be approached as a human spirituality. This understanding
of Hillman’s theory as well as his ‘running engagement with
Christianity’ facilitates my examination of the relationality between
his theory and Loder’s.
Chapter five relates Loder’s and Hillman’s theories in detail.
Taking neither the ‘common core’ approach nor the ‘radical
constructivism’ approach that are part of current mystical spirituality
discourse, my analysis identifies a direct relationality without re-
moving opposing theoretical or world-view tenets. I do not say that
Hillman is really a Christian or that Loder is really an archetypal
psychologist. Rather, in the particularities of each theory, in the points
of agreement and in the differences, there is a relationality: (1) in their

26
critique of ego-centric living as socially, culturally, and educationally
reinforced; and (2) in their analysis of how we can move from ego-
centric living to another way of living. From the dynamic exchange
between the theories, each theory is better understood, as is the
challenge of ego-centric living. Each theory asserts its own
universality that in a sense negates the universality of the other theory,
but the relationality between the two theories is a reality to be prized.
Moreover, contrary to arguments for a purely anthropological
approach, the use of a methodology that acknowledges views from
both above and below facilitates rather than thwarts the discussion.
Including Loder’s theological assertions and Hillman’s criticisms of
Christianity illuminates the other theory as well as their own.
Finally, in chapter six, I state my conclusions from the foregoing
discussion. Without losing sight of the differences between Loder and
the four authors, I identify a relationality among the analyses of all
five in their focus on ‘deep, transforming engagement with God.’
Loder’s analysis of that engagement fills the interdisciplinary
theoretical lacunae identified by the four authors. In the relationality
that I create among all five analyses, God’s sustaining presence that
constantly invites transforming engagement can draw their analyses
ever more deeply into the life of the Trinity where they can continue
the Christian journey of being transformed in conformity with Christ.
In the words of Catholic theologian Edward O’Connor, God’s action
transcends ‘all institutions and hierarchies on earth, even in the
Church’.23 I then place that relationality from within the Christian
tradition in the context of spirituality discourse in general. My
proposed methodology for interdisciplinary research and inter-faith
(broadly understood) dialogue accommodates both the particularities
of Loder’s and Hillman’s theories and the contradictory universal
assertions of each theory. A relationality between the theories of
Loder and Hillman as investigations of ego-centrism, its causes and
antidotes, provides a needed resource for those who are searching ‘for

23 The Pentecostal Movement in the Catholic Church, p. 28f.

27
a new way to see the world’.24 Hillman’s theory rings true for a
popular under-current that is concerned about the degradation of the
environment and disregard for other creatures, about the denigration
of fantasy and imagination in the striving toward empirically set
targets, about the reduction of personhood to technological or
utilitarian formulae. Rightly or wrongly, many, like Hillman, associate
these trends with the dominance of Christianity in the Western world.
The ‘traditional Western source of spiritual guidance—the church—is
perceived as a part of the old cultural establishment that seems to have
created our present predicament.’25 Loder’s theory offers the Christian
resources of ‘deep, transforming engagement with God’ in terms that
affirm the fullness of personhood, including creative imagination in
partnership with reason, as a deeply connected member of creation.
The identified parallels with Hillman’s theory can help to make the
Christian faith more accessible to those wary of Christianity and to
make Hillman’s insights more available to those wary of archetypal
psychology.
Additionally, my examination of Loder’s and Hillman’s theories
demonstrates the power of an approach that is truly interdisciplinary.
That is, approaching spiritualities from both views above and below
enables a deeper interdisciplinarity, rather than involving only
different fields within one discipline (as valuable as that can be). The
five-phased logic in four dimensions can operate as a methodological
guide to enable investigators of spirituality to probe more deeply and
comprehensively, and may even help researchers to avoid ego-centric
investigation. Loder, Hillman, and mystical spirituality as presented
by the four authors all challenge the adequacy of ego-centric knowing.
Throughout his text on the cultural upheavals accompanying our move

24 Drane, J. Cultural Change and Biblical Faith: The Future of the Church.
Biblical and Missiological Essays for the New Century, p. 105.
25 Ibid., p. 9. And Hillman is not the first. Physicist Fritjog Capra and Christian
missiologist Lesslie Newbigin each identify ‘old age’ (as opposed to ‘new age’)
attitudes that are ‘too close to comfort to traditional Christian attitudes’. Ibid., n.
12.

28
into the twenty-first century,26 practical theologian John Drane notes
the appeal of the classic mystical writers to those who might call
themselves spiritual but not religious. Yet, those who mine the
mystical writers for techniques without dogma unwittingly participate
in the reduction of personhood that they protest; they reinforce ego-
centric living by locating themselves as the ultimate arbiter and
replacing one dogma with another, even an anti-dogma that can be as
rigid as the rejected dogma. The connections between Loder, the four
authors, and Hillman can introduce Christians to the resources of
Christian mystical spirituality and enable collaboration with those who
lament the fall-out from ego-centric knowing and living. Moreover,
they can attend to the relational and transformational dynamics of how
they know anything and how they know God. Such attention will
witness to the Source of all knowledge and transform their knowing.
What is at stake is nothing less than the quality of our knowing and
our ability to know at all.

26 Ibid.

29
Chapter One: Ego-Relativization in the
Transformation Theory of James Loder

1. Introduction

If my thesis is that the transformation theory of James Loder connects

with mystical spirituality as presented by four contemporary authors,
then this chapter must set out Loder’s arguments for his theory. A
central feature of Loder’s transformation theory is the paradox1 of the
ego, which he understands as a potentially self-replacing mechanism.
Not self-eliminating, but an agency that functions simultaneously to
deny and find its replacement to which it can be related. The centered,
‘ruling’ ego might be understood as a transitional object for human-
divine relationality via ego-relativization. That is, the ‘centered’ ego
might function as something that helps us transition from being
oriented around our parent or primary caretaker to being drawn into
the life of God. As mentioned later, Loder calls the ego a ‘truth-
producing error.’ But full discussion of the centered ego as transitional
object is for another text. The point here is that this language about the
ego qualifies and critiques the assertions of those writers on Christian
spirituality who identify generic ego-strengthening as spiritual
deepening or growth.2 Perhaps their assertions of ‘graced

1 Loder and Neidhardt, KM, p. 96; Loder, LS, p. 37. Fundamental in all his texts,
is Loder’s engagement with the writings of Søren Kierkegaard in his
exploration of paradox and ‘union in opposition’ (bi-polar relational unity)
embodied in Christ as articulated by the Chalcedonian formual.
2 E.g., Ruth Holgate writes about an aspect of spiritual growth, self-acceptance,
as increased ego-strength, drawing on the work of W. W. Meissner (‘Growing
into God,’ p. 12).
collaboration’3 in ego-strengthening can be understood as referring to
a kind of ego-strengthening that leads to the enhanced ego functioning
of Loder’s relativized ego. The phrase ‘ego-relativization’ communi-
cates the structural change that can be part of human-divine
relationality (or what is sometimes referred to as the ‘integral action of
nature and grace’)4 of Christian spirituality. That is, ego-relativization
can lead to enhanced ego functioning through a particular kind of ego-
strengthening.5
Loder is adamant that he is not arguing for an ‘individualistic,
isolationalist, or conversionist’ understanding of transformation
through ego-relativization.6 Through his insistence and emphasis on
transformation, his theory accommodates various Christian
understandings of soteriology and salvation, although he writes from a
Reformed viewpoint.7 He focuses on ego-relativization (or ego-
transformation)8 as a crucial component in the complex context of
Christian transformation. The following discussion analyzes his
understanding of the human ego, the concepts that he links closely
with the ego (void, ‘self as spirit,’ and face), the process of ego-
relativization, and the results of that process. This chapter sets the
stage for my assertions (primarily articulated in the following chapter)
that his theory connects significantly with the mystical spirituality of
the four authors, who write from primarily Catholic and Orthodox
commitments. I do not deny the significance of their differences in
soteriology and salvation, but assert a common focus on Christian
transformation that historically has appeared in the writings of the
classic mystical writers. Regardless of the different understandings of
the role of ecclesiology and other debated areas in soteriology, all of

3 Ibid., p. 17.
4 Meissner, W. W. ‘The Ignatian Paradox,’ p. 44.
5 For further discussion on this point, please see my article, ‘More than
Collaboration’ in The Way Special Issue 43/4 (October, 2004), pp. 29-40.
6 Loder, EM, chapter 6, p. 2.
7 See, for example, For Us and For Our Salvation: Seven Perspectives on
Christian Soteriology.
8 ‘Ego transformation’ is inter-changeable with ‘ego-relativization.’ Loder, TM,
pp. 140, 166-167; LS, p. 55.

32
the Christian traditions understand transformation to be part of
salvation. This chapter also sets the stage for my assertion that Loder’s
theory and methodology, with expansion and modification, handles
the issue of particularity and universality in a way fruitful for
spirituality discourse.

2. Ego

In Loder’s theory, ‘the “I” or “self” refers to the sine qua non of the
ego.’9 Around the age of fourteen months, I or my ‘self’ creates my
ego to negotiate my ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds.10 As he explains, the
ego

is seen by psychologists as the hypothetical psychic agency that seeks to

equilibrate intrapsychic reality with external reality and so establish a reliable,
realistic pattern of defenses11 and interrelated coping capacities (the part
processes such as thinking, imagining, and speaking). Thereby it ensures
survival and long-term satisfactions in life.12

Whether understood and experienced multiply or singly, corporately

or individually, fluidly or rigidly, a person’s ego distinguishes ‘self’
and ‘non-self,’ ‘in’ self and ‘out of’ self. From the moment of the
ego’s appearance, it controls all of the choices that a person makes as
she self-relates and relates with her environment.13 Through the ego-

9 TM, p. 70.
10 LS, pp. 92-93.
11 E.g., isolation, regression, fantasy formation, sublimation, denial, reaction
formation, projection, and introjection (ibid., pp. 183-184).
12 TM, p. 70.
13 LS, p. 72. Before ego formation, a person is not self-less or lacking personhood.
Her ‘self as spirit,’ the relational movement of a person (considered later in this
chapter), self-relates and relates with the world; with ego formation, she relates
with herself and relates with the world through her ego.

33
relativization of Christian transformation, all of the ego’s functions are
related to human-divine relationality.14
Loder argues that an analogia spiritus between the human spirit
and Holy Spirit is key for ego-relativization through ‘deep,
transforming engagement with God.’15 His analogy asserts that the
imago dei, the Christian assertion of correspondence between human
and Divine natures, manifests through the ‘self as spirit.’ The ‘self as
spirit’ expresses this correspondence through a person’s inner relation-
ality: a ‘paradoxical relationality between exocentricity and centered-
ness,’16 (or, simultaneous inward and outward movement) all
characterized by the five-phased pattern or ‘logic of transformation.’17
Due to sin, the Christian assertion of distortion in the world, a
person’s (humanity’s) manifestation of this correspondence is more or
less distorted.18
Loder cites Wilder Penfield’s experiments to support his un-
derstanding of personhood as inherently intra-relational: ‘he [Penfield]
found in tangible, neurological, and experiential terms the “strange
loops in the brain” that we call self-relatedness.’19 Asserting self-
relatedness differs from asserting that inter-personal relationships

14 Loder distinguishes relationality from relationship. Relationality represents a

relationship that assumes a life of its own (TM, p. 78). See also KM pp. 36-59,
and LS, pp. 13-14. A person’s self-relatedness has ‘a life of its own’ as her
personhood.
15 TM, p. 94, pp. 114-115; KM, pp.1-122; LS, pp. 35-36. In his assertion of
analogia spiritus and its characteristics, Loder refers to Gen. 1.27, 2.7, Proverbs
20.27, 1Cor. 2.10-11, Romans 8.16, and Philippians 2.12-13; he interacts with
R. Prenter (Spiritus Creator), G. Hendry (The Holy Spirit in Christian
Theology), W. Pannenberg (Anthropology in Theological Perspective), H. Kung
(Does God Exist? An Answer for Today), K. Barth (Church Dogmatics, IV:3),
T. F. Torrance (The Ground and Grammer of Theology), among others.
16 LS, p. 117. In noting this paradox, Loder interacts with Prenter, Pannenberg, J.
Piaget, and P. Tillich.
17 LS, p. 35; TM, p. 94.
18 LS, pp. 26-36. Loder interacts with Pannenberg, Barth, Torrance, and Hendry.
19 Ibid., pp. 5-6. Loder notes that Roger Sperry, John Eccles, and Karl Popper
‘fundamentally agree’ with Penfield’s findings (ibid.).

34
precede personhood.20 For Loder, personhood brings an inner rela-
tionality to inter-personal relationships, to all relationships with other
people. In each person, ‘self as spirit’ operates as a unifying ‘force’
that produces or is ‘a quality of relationality,’21 relating mind to body,
just as the love between the Father and the Son in classical Trinitarian
theology is somehow a third entity called the Spirit.22
Loder asserts that the ‘logic’ that characterizes the dynamics of
the ‘self as spirit’ is one of ‘certain elementary structures or patterned
processes [that] underlie and give shape to our general experience.’23
Jung identifies such innate structures as archetypes, but Loder never
refers explicitly to the transformational ‘logic’ as an archetype.24

20 See Harriett Harris, ‘Should We Say that Personhood is Relational?’

21 TM, p. 78; KM, p. 10.
22 Loder identifies his view as ‘Interactionist’ with ‘Neutral Monist’ elements
(KM, p. 45 n. 8). The model Loder uses for the relationality between mind ‘and
body effected by “self as spirit’ is the ‘strange loop of the Möbius band’: the
shape of the loop, though imminent to the mind-body interaction, makes
relationality itself the positive third term in which marginal control works in
favor of mind, as [Michael] Polanyi describes’ (ibid.). By ‘strange loop,’ Loder
means ‘a Möbius band […] which, through a 180° twist in the band, has only
one side and one edge, though two are evident in any cross-sectional view,’
discovered by the grandfather of Paul J. Möbius, ‘a psychoneurologist
frequently cited by Freud and others in discussions of the mind-body
relationship’ (KM, p. 40); ‘What the metaphor of the Möbius band should
convey is that to speak of a unity is not a retreat into “substance and being,” but
the unity is precisely the relationality between the two apparently opposed or
contradictory polarities or viewpoints [e.g., human and Divine]’ (LS, p. 13).
23 ‘Transformation in Christian Education,’ p. 271.
24 Loder explains archetypes as ‘(a phylogenetic inheritance) [that] emerge[s]
from a psychic level (the objective psyche or collective unconscious) deeper
than the personal unconscious (Freud and [Erik] Erikson), and present
themselves through powerful images that have mythic and religious force for
the formation of persons’ (LS, p. 26). Loder criticizes Jung for confusing orders
of knowing and being in his conceptualization of archetype (ibid., p. 307; TM,
pp. 138-140); using the term archetype for the logic as an order of knowing
might have created confusion over the nature of the transformational pattern.

35
Rather, he refers to the ‘logic’ or ‘grammar’25 of transformation as an
ordering movement of five phases:
(1) a conflict, in ego-relativization of existential proportions,
(2) an interlude of scanning for solutions to the conflict,
(3) an insight in which ‘habitually unrelated frames of
reference com[e] together to form a meaningful unity’ that
resolves the conflict,26
(4) a release of energy with a transformed ‘horizon of
perception and understanding,’27 and
(5) interpretation and application of the resolution to other
contexts.28
A person may experience these phases in any order.29 The initial phase
in the particular ego strengthening via ego-relativization of Christian
transformation often involves an existential ‘conflict’ or ‘periodic
upheaval.’30 Developmentally, cognitively, and spiritually, a person
lives concurrently in various phases of this ‘logic’ throughout her life;
the locus of the ‘logic’ is her ‘self as spirit.’31

25 Loder explains that ‘“[g]rammar” may be translated into what I have designated
as transformational logic, the unique sense of order that chracterizes both the
human spirit and the Holy Spirit’ (TM, p. 114). He cites Martin Luther’s use of
the term ‘grammar’ (Werke 39.2, pp. 104-105). See also LS, p. 114.
26 “Transformation in Christian Education,” p. 278.
27 KM, p. 266.
28 TM, pp. 37-40; KM, p. 266; LS, pp. 7-89. Loder describes the pattern in a 1964
article with four rather than five phases (‘Conflict Resolution in Christian
Education,’ pp. 23-24) and in the published version of his Ph.D. dissertation,
where the pattern comes out of his analysis of Kierkegaard with Freud, or
reality consciousness (Religious Pathology and Christian Faith, pp. 189-196).
29 ‘Transformation in Christian Education,’ p. 274.
30 TM, p.100; ‘Transformation in Christian Education,’ p. 277. Prenter emphasizes
conflict in his portrayal of Luther’s spirituality, e.g., Spiritus Creator, p. 197.
31 Loder asserts that the ‘logic’ characterizes a person’s movement through
developmental stage transitions, which supports his contended significance for
a person’s movement through ego-centrism and ego-relativization. He also
understands the ‘logic’ to be integral to all human knowing. See TM, chapter
five.

36
 Loder suggests that humans are predisposed to human-divine
relationality because of the imago dei. ‘Just as the Holy Spirit is
spoken of as the “go-between God,” the human spirit can be spoken of
as the go-between image of God in us.’32 The imago dei leads a person
on a search for her original of which she is an image; sin distorts this
search so that it results in ego-centrism rather than a life centered in
relationality with God.33 Loder argues that the imago dei (‘self as
spirit’) represents the locus for this search that can lead to deep,
transforming engagement with God and replace ego-centrism with
human-divine relationality-centrism (a horribly awkward phrase that
nonetheless underscores the difference between the two centrisms).34

2.1 Ego Formation and Development

Loder explains ego formation through a psychoanalytic view of

birth.35 This view includes a theory of ‘birth trauma,’ (‘so-called partly

32 LS, p. 34; ibid., pp. 28, 110.

33 LS, p. 110.
34 KM, p. 10. Loder cites several Christian biblical texts and Hendry’s The Holy
Spirit in Christian Theology, to support his understanding of human-Divine
relation as spiritual ‘we know the Spirit only in his own medium, so to say’
(TM, p. 93). The biblical texts and their significance include the in-breathing of
the divine breath or Spirit in the creation narrative of Genesis 2.7, the
correspondence of Genesis 2.7 with the creation of human nature in the divine
image in the creation narrative of Genesis 1.27, Jesus’ reference to the Spirit as
‘wind’ (John 3.8), Jesus’ statement that ‘God is Spirit’ (John 4.24), Jesus’
breath on his disciples with the words ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’ (John 20.22-
23), the rush of wind during Pentecost when the Holy Spirit descended upon the
disciples (Acts 2.1-4), and Paul’s assertion that ‘the Spirit searches everything,
even the depths of God. For what human being knows what is truly human
except the human spirit within? So also no one comprehends what is truly
God’s except the Spirit of God’ (1 Corinthians 2.10-11). Ibid., pp. 93-94; KM,
pp. 46-50; LS, pp. 35, 111-112.
35 Loder refers to psychoanalysts such as Phyllis Greenacre (‘The Economy of
Birth’) and Arthur Janov (Imprints), who link anxiety with the birth experience,
and whose attention to birth notes the magnitude of the birth process and its
possible effect on a child (LS, pp. 81, 106). Loder also refers to René Spitz (The

37
because in the normal course of a birth the child comes near to
suffocation’36) as ‘the primal existential negation,’ the first experience
of the threat of death.37 This experience ‘lays down the foundation for
interpreting subsequent experiences of negation. If this psychoanalytic
type of assertion is correct, then, ontogenetically, existential negation
precedes all other forms of negation for the newborn child.’38 All
experiences of negation henceforth are interpreted, on some level, as
containing a threat of death, the effects of sin.
Loder asserts that this first experience of existential negation
during birth (the threat of death) sets the newborn infant on an intu-
itive quest for an ‘organizing principle’ in her new, postnatal world.39
In this quest, ‘what the child is seeking intuitively (as opposed to
consciously) is a center around which to integrate this multiplicity of
new activities and emerging competencies.’40 Such a ‘center’ will
ensure her survival, anchoring her life in her new world.41 In the
course of this quest, her ego forms as the ‘sieve’ through which a
person interacts with herself and her environment.

First Year of Life: A Psychoanalytic Study of Normal and Deviant Development

of Object) who ‘saw a generalized sense of loss that was laid down across the
whole of the child’s brain and recorded in the hypothalamus’ (LS, p. 83). Loder
mentions that ‘Carl Jung, Julian Jaynes, and others see that in the act of birth
the archetype of the birth pattern, which appears in so many different cultures,
is awakened’ (ibid.).
36 TM, p. 162.
37 ‘The emphasis here is not on “trauma” as such but on the existential negation
implied in the radical transition from the life-supporting dependency of
intrauterine existence to the independence of postnatal life. That this is an
existential negation without necessarily being a “trauma” should be evident’
(TM, p. 162); Loder cites M. Heidegger’s, What is Metaphysics? and J. P.
Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (ibid., p. 226); see also LS, p. 82.
38 TM, p. 162. Loder understands negation as negation of something, classifying it
according to what is negated (ibid., pp. 158, 226).
39 LS, pp. 87-95, referring especially to René Spitz’s The First Year of Life. Loder
notes that Spitz refers to Freud’s brief paper ‘Negation,’ which asserts that
psycho-dynamic negation provides a way of ‘taking cognizance’ of the
repressed material without eliminating the repression.
40 TM, p. 162.
41 LS, p. 94.

38
 In line with depth psychology, Loder understands ego-
development through a series of phases. Initially, the infant identifies
the parental or caretaker ‘face’ as the new organizing principle of her
postnatal world.42 Through parental or caretaker interaction, the infant
experiences the ‘face phenomenon,’ also known as ‘imprinting’43 or
‘mirroring.’44 The face ‘is the personal center that is innately sought
by a child’ and Loder interprets the face phenomenon as ‘the focus of
the earliest sense of one’s humanity.’45 ‘[A]t three months, he or she
seeks and learns to respond to the presence of a human face—even a
schematic design of a face will do—and give a smile.’46 He asserts
that ‘what is at work […is] not merely a literal face, but the human
presence, something that may be experienced without being literally
seen.’47 Fundamentally relational, the child participates in the face
phenomenon, making it the first ‘cooperative’ creation of the human
spirit (via the five-phased pattern), ‘a construct created by’ and
‘developed out of the child’s inherent resources and deep-seated
longing.’48 After leaving the stable environment of the mother’s
womb, the infant seeks, finds, and creates, a ‘center’ around which to
organize her world: the face.49

42 TM, pp. 162-163. Regarding the ‘face phenomenon,’ Loder (ibid., n.3) refers to
D. W. Winnicott (Playing and Reality), A. Rizzuto (The Birth of the Living
God: A Psychoanalytic Study), and R. Spitz (No and Yes).
43 Loder (LS, p. 90) refers to Konrad Lorenz (Studies in Animal and Human
Behavior). Inspired by Lorenz, John Bowlby and his colleague Mary Ainsworth
developed ‘attachment theory’, which focuses on the attachment styles
exhibited by infants interacting with parents and care-takers and has led to the
development of an Adult Attachment Index. Bowlby and Ainsworth’s work is
often cited as supportive of the post-Freudian school of ‘object relations’
associated with Donald Winnicott and others.
44 TM, p. 162.
45 Ibid., p. 163.
46 Ibid., p. 162; LS, p. 90.
47 LS, pp. 90-91, 119.
48 Ibid, p. 91. Loder likens the face phenomenon to language, a latent potential
that needs an appropriate environment to flourish.
49 This phenomenon might be understood as an illustration of religion as a
consequence of somatic exploration (Bowker, J. Is God A Virus? Genes,

39
 Agreeing with depth psychologist Erik Erikson ‘and others who
have no particular theological axe to grind,’ Loder finds a religious
significance in the face phenomenon.50 Asserting an analogy between
‘the human face and Jesus Christ as the Face of God,’51 he contends
that the relational ordering of the child’s world through the face
phenomenon represents ‘an incipient sense of the presence of God’
and ‘the primal prototype of the religious experience in which one is
placed with recognition and affirmation in the context of the cosmic
order.’52 Hence, the infant experiences referents both to sin and grace
within the first months of life. At about six months, the child notices
the occasional absence of the affirming, ordering principle (i.e., the

Culture and Religion, p. 152). Bowker notes the research of Eugene d’Aquili
(whom Loder cites, see this chapter, n. 188) which suggests that humans are
prepared in the brain for God-recognizing behaviors (ibid., p. 62), yet asserts
that religions are not therefore varieties on a common somatic theme, but have
fundamental differences (ibid., pp. 164-165).
50 LS, p. 90. ‘Jungians such as Jolanda [sic.] Jacobi, citing Justin Martyr, see the
archetype of the cross in the basic structure of the face […]. Thus, the mandala,
the sacred circle with a cross in the middle where the God appears in the ancient
religions, seems to make the face at least potentially an archetype of the Jungian
self. This, says Jung, is where we experience the presence of God. For several
reasons, Jung’s overall position is fundamentally misleading, although his
insights are helpful on this point’ (ibid., p. 91). Loder gives two Jacobi
references for this point: Complex, Archetype, Symbol (TM, p. 163) and The
Psychology of Jung (LS, p. 107, n. 22).
51 LS, p. 109; TM, pp. 142-143, referring to Martin Luther’s experiences in the
tower in 1512, ‘he could now see that God’s face was open toward him.’
52 Ibid., p. 91. Loder notes that ‘both the Greek and Hebrew words for face
(prosopon and panîm) are also the words for “presence,” so what is at work is
not merely a literal face, but the human presence, something that may be
experienced without being literally seen’ (LS, pp. 90-91). In his study of
transformation that focuses on ‘facing,’ D. Ford interacts with scriptural
references to the face of God (Self and Salvation: Being Transformed).

40
primary caretaker).53 The child experiences great anxiety when the
face is absent, expressing it with wails and tears.54
Loder interprets the child’s anxiety associated with the absent
face as a revisiting of the existential negation experienced during
birth. As the face phenomenon develops, ‘[i]t is as if the primal,
integrative experience of fetal existence, which is lost in the
separation of birth, were now being relived in the interpersonal outer
world.’55 ‘By nine months after birth,’ when the face disappears, ‘the
child has relived the integration and separation that occurred during
fetal life and in the act of birth itself.’56 Simultaneous with anxiety
about her caretaker’s absent face, Loder observes that the child
experiences external restraint, or negation (‘no!’) in various ways.57
This type of negation also produces anxiety.58 By fourteen months, the
child reacts to these combined experiences of anxiety from negation,
interpreted on some level as a threat to survival, by creating the ego.59

53 LS, p. 92. Loder notes that the child usually has focused on one face, not any
face will assuage the child’s anxiety (ibid., p. 91). Spitz makes this assertion in
The First Year.
54 Ibid.
55 TM, p. 164.
56 Ibid.
57 ‘the inevitable “No”-saying of parents (in gesture, word, and effect)’ (TM,
p. 164; LS, p. 92). ‘As parents, we say “No” in a thousand different ways. It’s in
the way we hold our children when their pants are dirty, respond to their having
dumped their cereal too many times, as well as in the verbalized “No” and non-
verbalized rejections of body language’ (EM, chapter 6, p. 5).
58 TM, p. 164; LS, p. 92. Loder notes that Spitz asserts that anxiety is ‘the primary
organizer of the personality at this period’ (LS, p. 92, citing Spitz, First Year of
Life, chapter 8). In Loder’s earlier work, Religious Pathology and Christian
Faith, he quotes Freud’s assertion that, ‘The ego is the actual seat of anxiety’
(p.65, citing Freud from The Future of an Illusion, pp. 77-78).
59 LS, p. 92. Loder agrees with W. Pannenberg (Anthropology in Theological
Perspective) on this point (LS, p. 118). In a lecture (Princeton Theological
Seminary audio tape no.6329), Loder mentions theological support from D.
Bonhoeffer. In Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 3: Creation and Fall: A
Theological Exposition of Genesis 1-3, Bonhoeffer is reported as viewing sin
‘to be an evil will that destroyed community by its “general egoism

41
In a self-protective move, the infant creates her ego to adapt to her
anxiety-producing environment with all the resources of the ‘self as
spirit’ (i.e., the five-phased logic).60

Trapped between inner absence [of the face as ordering principle] and outer
inhibition [“no!”], the child takes the initiative to turn the inner sense of absence
[negation] against the negating environment, and thereafter incorporating and
presuming negation in all personal relationships [via absorption or
abandonment], he or she seeks to set them up on his or her own terms.61

A person creates (via the five-phased pattern) a type of ‘face’ (a ‘false

face’62) to defend against the experiences of anxiety through internal
and external negation.63 Loder does not recommend that caretakers try
to be all-present faces or try not to restrain the child so as to prevent
ego-formation.64 Rather, he argues that he is describing the
outworking of the imago dei and original sin in human development
through the face phenomenon, negation, and ego formation.

2.2 Negation as the core of the ego

In ego creation, Loder argues that the child ‘does the equivalent of a
reaction formation65 on the traumatic situation: that is, she inflicts

[durchgängigen Egoismus].”’ (Communion of Saints, 81 (Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Werke, German Edition 1:247)). See also TM, p. 164.
60 ‘The ego’s aim is adaptation to its physical, social, and cultural environment so
as to maximize satisfaction and ensure survival’ (LS, p. 72).
61 TM, p. 164, italics original.
62 LS, p. 143.
63 TM, p. 164.
64 Brendan Callaghan notes that ‘too-good-mothering’ would prevent feelings of
aloneness and helplessness, both necessary for a person’s openness to God (‘Do
Teddy Bears Make Good Spiritual Directors? Ignatius Loyola Meets Donald
Winnicott’). Spitz argues for the important role of frustration in development
(The First Year).
65 ‘Reaction formation is a defense mechanism in which you do just the opposite
of what you really want to do with all the energy you wanted to do the first

42
“no” on the environment before the environment can inflict “no” on
the child.’66 ‘Reaction formation’ is a form of repression and
‘repression becomes the intrapsychic functional translation of
“no” [or negation].’67 ‘By means of negation [or repression], we
construct the nonself, objective world over against and distinct from
our human subjective sense of self.’68 A person represses her longing
for an orienting connection with the outer world, redirecting that
longing from the missed face to her ego.69 Her ego will now function
as her organizing principle, her face that will never leave, and her
orienting connection with the outer world. Unfortunately, her ego can
be only a functional solution to her existential needs.70 Existentially,
she needs a solution to the problem of human limitations, from which
her ego can only distract not solve.
Relationally, Loder contends that her ego ‘puts the personality in
a double bind: without the defensive ego, absorption follows; with the
defensive ego, no real intimacy is possible.’71 Through her ego’s de-
fenses, a person maintains intra- and inter-personal distance, on some

thing.’ LS, p. 92. A child begins to separate herself from her world with all the
energy with which she actually wants to connect with the outer world.
66 Ibid., italics original; TM, p. 164.
67 LS, p. 93, italics inserted, referring to Freud’s paper ‘Negation’ and Spitz’s
development of it. Loder clarifies: ‘Without the capacity to repress, you could
not sit there and read this book. You repress most of the stimuli that are
bombarding you all the time. If you did not repress, you would be a mass of
confusing responses. So human repression is healthy provided it is flexible and
reversible,’ EM, chapter 4, p. 7.
68 LS, p. 93.
69 I recognize the philosophical constraints around an assertion of universal
longing, and yet ‘Aristotle dared to formulate that all that exists is in motion,
because of its longing for the one who has infinite knowledge of itself; Plato
made Socrates say that everything receives its being and its truth from the
absolute Good which is not an idea, nor a totality, but infinitely different and
more; the classics of Christianity show that the heart of man can only find rest
in its union with God.’ (Peperzak, A. Th., ‘Philosophical Presuppositions of the
Christian Debate on Salvation’ in For Us and Our Salvation: Seven
Perspectives on Christian Soteriology.)
70 TM, pp. 162, 165; LS, p. 135.
71 TM, p. 175.

43
level fearing death in relationships.72 While functionally satisfactory, a
person’s ego fails existentially. Yet, the functional competence of the
ego ensures a person’s survival and satisfaction according to social
and cultural norms,73 thereby reinforcing the ego’s orienting role.74
Social and cultural rewards indicate through socialization processes
(Loder focuses specifically on education)75 that a person’s ego
achievements should satisfy her existential longings for a cosmic or-
dering.76 Collective and individual mechanisms support ego-centrism.
If a person’s ego forms as Loder hypothesizes, then all of the
‘impressive adaptational [ego] competencies (language, intelligence,
moral judgement)’ that appear throughout childhood and later are built
on the child’s experience of loss and negation.77 A person’s creation of
the ego as the ‘sieve’ between herself and her environment is an act of

72 The ego ‘does not let us get too close [to ourselves or others] lest we experience
that primal loss with overpowering force once again’ (ibid.).
73 LS, p. 143.
74 Loder does not denigrate those for whom survival is a daily uncertainty, but
focuses on the mechanisms that truncate our understandings of survival.
75 TM, p. 82. Loder’s earlier writings and the manuscript that he completed just
before his death focus on socialization and transformation. A distinction
between the two appears in the book that came out of his doctoral thesis,
Religious Pathology and Christian Faith. He asserts that both Freud and
Kierkegaard recommend that a person separate herself from the crowd to be her
true self (re Freud, pp. 51, 83; re Kierkegaard, p. 28; re both, p. 52). In EM,
Loder continues the distinction, asserting their inter-dependence: ‘There is no
socialization that does not call upon transformations, and there is no
transformation that does not presuppose some socialization’ (chapter 2, p. 3).
76 Loder writes, ‘it is a widely exercised dynamic in socialization systems from
the achievement-oriented family, the public school classrooms, and American
business practices to any number of other contexts in which “the ritualization of
progress” (Ivan Illich) is fostered’ (TM, p. 166.) The Ivan Illich reference is to
De-Schooling Society, chapter 3. In chapter five of this discussion (p. 157, n. 2),
I note that Loder understands his theory to combine two of Richard Niebuhr’s
types, Christ in paradoxical relation to culture and Christ transforming culture.
However, as Niebuhr asserts in Christ and Culture as being the case for most
Christians, aspects of all five types can be found in Loder’s theory.
77 LS, p. 94.

44
negation, making negation the ego’s foundational ‘core.’78 A person’s
repression of negation is the repression of death. ‘The consequent re-
pression of death and anything that suggests it is the very foundation
of the ego, but this is ignored, denied, or forgotten in every way
possible by the age of eighteen months or two years.’79 This
foundation of negation will cause a person’s ego to self-destruct in
some way. Negation discolors ego achievements and accomp-
lishments, questioning their meaning and purpose, their existential
significance.80
For Loder, all negations point in some way toward what he calls
the ‘void.’81 The term ‘void’ refers to the human experience of aliena-
tion from creation’s sustaining ‘Source,’ or sin.82 Interacting with the
Hebrew scriptures, he comments:

It is especially interesting that in J’s account of ‘the Fall’ in Genesis, there is a

movement from Face-to-Face interaction with God, to anxiety (the woman is
already anxious because she puts words into God’s mouth; God did not say not
to ‘touch’ it, only not to ‘eat’ of it), to a denial or no-saying rejection of God’s
commandment to them, hiding behind fig leaves (not a bad symbol of
repression), and ultimate expulsion from the Garden to wandering on the face
of the earth in search of the restored union with God to overcome the
consequent cosmic loneliness.83

78 ‘We may presume, then, that the ego is constructed over a deep sense of void
[i.e., negation], and all its competencies, from intelligence to its culturally
contrived world views, bear the marks of a defense against an awesome
nothingness.’ TM, p. 168.
79 LS, p. 139. Loder distinguishes the death of the void from the ‘death’ of
‘mortification’ that brings life out of death.
80 Ibid., p. 104. For Loder, meaning and purpose questions open a person to the
sustaining presence of God who simultaneously offers deep, transforming
relationship. Meaning and purpose questions reflect a person’s inner tension
between sin and imago dei. Sin distorts human responses to meaning and
purpose questions while the imago dei (individually and collectively) continues
to search for ‘its original’ (ibid., p. 114).
81 TM, p. 159.
82 Ibid., pp. 81,82.
83 LS, p. 123; TM, p. 165.

45
Loder understands this account to describe a ‘general pattern for
alienation in a number of other contexts that appear regularly in the
course of a lifetime […]. We each repeatedly experience the inevitable
self-alienation of Adam in our own psychic life.’84 Hence, Loder
suggests an analogy between ‘developmental negation’ and original
sin.85
Loder maintains that when a person creates her ego, she
constrains all of her subsequent choices86 to ensure survival and
maximize satisfaction along culturally and socially sanctioned lines.87
Her ego harnesses her whole person to serve her ‘shame-enslaved ego
and its extensions into social structures.’88 She uses all of her energy
to avoid shame by maintaining

defenses against an exposure of one’s deep emptiness, cosmic loneliness, and

the evidence that one has not found centeredness in the Face of God […] In the
ordinary course of things, one has to put on a false face, a defensive ego
posture, which is the ego’s capacity to adapt to demands and expectations of the
social system.89

Yet, only when a person’s ego defenses fall does she have the oppor-
tunity for self-knowledge. Collapsed ego defenses open a person to
the transcendent,90 to the possibility of her ego being made relative (or
related) to God in a dialectical relationality between the human spirit

84 LS, p. 123. Loder notes that ‘this [pattern of alienation throughout a lifetime]
may be called a developmental version of Kierkegaard’s qualitative anxiety’
(ibid.); Religious Pathology, pp. 40-41, 204-205.
85 LS, pp.109, 122-124.
86 TM, pp. 78, 79, 82; KM, p. 256; LS, p. 143.
87 LS, p. 94.
88 Ibid., p. 146.
89 Ibid., p. 143.
90 Coakley notes that ‘in psychological terms, the dangers of a too-sudden uprush
of material from the unconscious, too immediate contact of the thus disarmed
self with God, are not inconsiderable’ (p. 35). Hence Loder’s insistence that
people individually and collectively function to avoid encounter with God.

46
and the spiritual presence of Christ, a Face (presence) who never
leaves.91

2.3 The Ego’s Denial of the Four Dimensions of Human Existence

and the Distortion of Human Nature

Integral to Loder’s portrayal of a person’s ego and ego-relativization

is his understanding of human existence as four-dimensional.92 This
discussion has already referenced the four dimensions,93 presenting
them as they inter-relate and relate to a person’s ego:
(1) ‘world’ (‘a particular, lived composition’94),
(2) ‘self’ (‘the knower’ who is ‘embodied in the lived “world”
and at the same time stands outside it’95),
(3) ‘void’ (‘the possibility of annihilation,’96 sin97), and

91 Loder acknowledges that the face of God can seem absent, as in, for example,
the ‘dark night of the soul’: ‘She had yet to experience deeper losses in the
realm of the spirit, dark nights of the soul and of the spirit without the
lightening flash to guide her.’ LS, pp. 68-69.
92 TM, p. 69.
93 Loder uses the term ‘dimension’ as a ‘geometric metaphor referring to unique
aspects of human existence. These aspects are essential to the structure of
human existence, and in their mutual relatedness they remain distinct but
interdependent in the construction of the whole’ (ibid., p. 223). Although Loder
does not mention this, perhaps perichoresis describes the relations of these
dimensions (see n. 202 and connected discussion, this chapter).
94 Ibid., pp. 69, 71-75.
95 Ibid., pp. 69, 75-80. Loder emphasizes the duality of the self citing W.
Penfield’s experiments (The Mystery of the Mind) and S. Kierkegaard’s
assertion that a person is constituted by self-relationship (ibid., pp. 75-80; LS,
pp. 5-6).
96 TM, pp. 70, 80-85. Loder mentions that other theologians use the terms ‘limit,’
and ‘boundary’ (p. 81), and clarifies that he is referring to ‘separateness of the
self from its Source’ (ibid.).
97 ‘The Christ event—the historical sequence as appropriated by a believer and as
discussed in the foregoing chapter—may be taken as a paradigm of
transformation at the level of existential negation. In that appropriation, Christ
becomes the adequate mediator for contemporary existential transformation

47
 (4) ‘Holy’ (‘being-itself,’98 ‘the ultimate manifestation of being-
itself is Jesus Christ’99).
The ‘self’ creates the ego in the context of the other three dimensions.
In one sentence: the ‘self’ experiences her ‘world’ with historical and
concrete negations that point to the ‘void,’ which is alienation from
the ‘Holy,’ (for Christians, Jesus Christ is the Face of the Holy God)
and responds by ‘creating’ (what in Western psychology is referred to
as) her ego to defend against her pain from this alienation, resulting in
her denial of the void and Holy, reinforced by the world (social and
cultural pressures to understand the world two-dimensionally). Only
relating a person’s ego to the Holy, who ‘negates the negations’ of the
void so that it is no longer the orienting ‘core’ of a person’s ego, will
address adequately a person’s existential problems. Again, in one
sentence: responding to the gracious initiative of the Holy, the self can
embrace the Spiritual Presence of the Holy who ‘negates the
negations’ of the void ‘in’ her ego, relating her to the Holy in a
‘bipolar relational unity’ that connects with and re-understands her
world in light of her human-divine relationality. This human-divine
relationality places a person’s inner conflicts between self-sufficiency
and relational intimacy in a communion-creating presence of love
(koinonia).100
Loder acknowledges that the ‘four-dimensionality of human
being will express itself anyway,’ regardless of human awareness.101
However, he contends that what is at stake is

whether the intentional efforts of the ego cooperate with or distort what it
means to be fully human […] whether the personality will in fact undergo a
recentering that displaces the ego, or will […] persist in […] distorting and

because in his crucifixion he takes ultimate annihilation into himself, and in his
resurrection that ultimate negation is negated. In Christ, death dies; by his
becoming sin, all sin is canceled’ (ibid., p. 161).
98 Ibid., p. 70, referring to Rudolph Otto (The Idea of the Holy).
99 Ibid., p. 71.
100 See note 203.
101 Ibid., p. 166.

48
 tearing two-dimensional life by attempting to stretch it over the four dimensions
of human existence.102

If a person acknowledges and embraces the ‘void’ and the ‘Holy,’

such deep, transforming engagement with God relativizes her ego, a
move that she both desires and dreads.103 An ego-centered person
desires ego-relativization as part of her ego’s mission to ensure
survival; on some level, she knows that her ego cannot ward against
death, however she denies the void. Yet an ego-centered person
dreads ego-relativization as part of her ego’s mission to maximize
satisfaction; she cannot imagine satisfaction outside of her own ego-
controlled social and cultural conformity to two-dimensional ‘nor-
malcy.’ If a person, through her ego, functionally denies death, a
manifestation of the void,104 then the ego-centered person can continue
to stretch her ‘self’ and ‘world’ to cover her existence, at least for a
while.
Loder identifies ‘pervasively unfortunate consequences’105 from
an ego-centered person’s denial of the void, in self and human
distortion. A person’s ego constrains all of the resources of the ‘self as
spirit’ to further the mission of her ego for survival and satisfaction,
usually defined two-dimensionally by her social and cultural groups.
The human spirit remains an enormous source of creativity and power
in each person, but her competencies and achievements serve her
ego’s denial of reality, i.e., the void and the Holy.106 Ironically,
although created to negotiate a person’s relationships, a person’s ego
distorts the relationality of the person herself. Repressing the void
inwardly, the ego inflicts the void outwardly through both positive and
negative aggression.107 Although ‘this is a magnificent move

102 Ibid., pp. 166-167.

103 Ibid., p. 167.
104 As part of the ‘work’ of evil to return everything to nothing (ibid., p. 83).
105 LS, p. 94.
106 TM, pp. 120-121.
107 LS, p. 139. Loder notes that ‘Ad-gredior, the Latin root of aggression, does not
have any negative affective component. It is a neutral notion that simply means
“moving toward” […]. Positive aggression is future oriented, hopeful, and life

49
defensively,’ a person has simply covered over her isolation.108 A
person’s

ego is constructed over a deep sense of void, and all its competencies, from
intelligence to its culturally contrived world views, bear the marks of a defense
against an awesome nothingness. The most competent defense the ego can
employ is, in repetition of its origin, to incorporate all those negations that are
seen, heard, and experienced and to make them the premises of its interactions
with the world.109

In the bedrock of an ego-centered person’s foundation, the void sits

like an earthquake fault.110
Despite (and because of) the enormous accomplishments of a
person via her ego, Loder calls for ego-relativization. He justifies his
call by asserting that

[t]he pattern of reaction that grounds the ego in negation typifies a prominent
distortion of the human spirit […which] implies that in any context where the
developing person may encounter ego failure, the underlying sense of void
intrudes, compelling the threatened ego into developing further competencies,
sharpening those already available, or achieving new goals and reward, all to
the end that the ego’s ‘world’ may be not only recomposed but extended, and
the sense of the void once again repressed. This results in a distortion of the
human spirit not only because there is an unwillingness to recognize that human
being is essentially four-dimensional [world, self, void, Holy], but also because

giving […]. Negative aggression, then, is essentially and ultimately the reverse:
to bring life under the power of death and, if possible, destroy it’ (ibid.).
108 Ibid., p. 93. However, the void appears through the two dimensions (self and
world) in some way, all sustained by the Holy. In Religious Pathology, Loder
asserts agreement between Kierkegaard and Freud on illusory radical freedom
versus true freedom (p. 62). Anxiety and despair lead to fantasies or illusions of
freedom (p. 67). Only in the context of faith is freedom fully alive (p. 208). The
grace of God frees a person to respond to God’s invitation to deep, transforming
relationship (TM, pp. 143, 147).
109 TM, p. 168. A classic exploration of this theme in cultural anthropology is E.
Becker’s Denial of Death. R. Anderson explores the theme theologically in
Theology, Death, and Dying.
110 LS, p. 166.

50
 the void will inevitably overshadow the ego’s “worlds” as does the nostalgia for
the more deeply repressed longing for the enduring Face.111

Inherent in the pretense that a person exists in two dimensions (world,

self), instead of four (world, self, void, Holy), lies the mechanism for
its exposure as an illusion. As the ego-centered person tries to satisfy
her deepest longings, the negation of the ego ‘secretly’ controls her
every move.112 Her ego strains under her denial of the void and the
veneer of being the face longed for. Environmental and internal
‘conflicts’ (including those constantly initiated by God’s invitation to
deep, transforming relationship) force her ‘self as spirit’ to recompose
her world, as directed by her ego. It is a testimony to the power and
resilience of the ‘self as spirit’ that usually she is able to recompose
the world to accommodate her ego. However, ‘the void is too vast and
cannot ultimately be incorporated’;113 there are conflicts in which a
person will be ‘caught’ and the farces of the ego will be exposed.
Through these conflicts, the ego may be relativized.
To summarize, the face of the loving parent or caretaker
temporarily seems to ‘rescue’ the infant from the ‘void’ experienced
by ‘immersion’ into the existential negation of the ‘birth trauma.’114
The infant’s first (‘cooperative’) creation, the ‘face phenomenon,’
involves a ‘prototypical, religious experience’ for the infant in that she
experiences loving recognition and affirmation from another presence
(represented by the ‘face’) who orders her world. ‘The face of the
loving parent is prototypical of the Face of God; the early sense of
[parental or caretaker] absence is prototypical of the ultimate void.’115
Loder suggests that from infancy each person’s known experience
involves ‘the self-alienation of Adam.’ This self-alienation sustains
and destroys people individually and collectively as it works out
through ego-reinforcing competencies and achievements. Yet Loder

111 TM, p. 166.

112 LS, pp. 94, 135.
113 TM, p. 168.
114 ‘All negation in some measure points toward the void, but in existential
negation the person is immersed in it’ (ibid., p. 159).
115 Ibid., p. 174.

51
does not urge obliteration of a person’s ego. He affirms the amazing
achievements of the human ego, commenting that a person’s ego

is constructive for the purpose of repressing hurtful or potentially destructive

inner longings and to weigh outer considerations with appropriate objectivity,
but it is destructive to the true centering of the personality.116

‘True centering’ requires some embrace of all four dimensions of

reality. A person’s ego exists not to do this, but to function
reductively, as if it satisfies a person’s deepest longings without
acknowledging the void or Holy.117

3. Void

Loder points out that the inevitability of death can become harder to
repress as a person ages.118 The ego cannot prevent a person’s ultimate
negation, death.119 The ‘void’ to which all negation points represents a
‘nothingness’ or ‘negative principle’ that operates to ‘reverse creation,
to undo the “ex nihilo” of divine creation, making all that is into
nothing once again.’120 An isolation or cosmic loneliness underlies a

116 Ibid., p. 164.

117 Ibid., p. 166, LS, p. 94.
118 LS, chapter 12.
119 TM, p. 165; the ‘radical, staggering claims of the Creator Spirit of God,
mediated through Jesus Christ, take up both the affirmation of life and its
inevitable annihilation in his cross and resurrection, the ultimate transformation.
In Christ, death is put to death, and the transformation inherent in the human
spirit is itself transformed by the Creator Spirit. This does not mean that the
faithful do not die; it means that death cannot hold them, so they will live again.
Death does not have the final word, but, contrary to its fundamental intent, it
contributes to the declaration of the power of God’s Word spoken decisively in
the resurrection of Jesus Christ to all those who can hear with the ears of the
Spirit’ (LS, p. 340; see also p. 72).
120 TM, p. 121, n. 13; see also p. 83.

52
person’s ego development, surrounds all of her achievements and
erupts throughout life in concrete and historic periodic upheavals.121
These periodic upheavals in time and space signal to a person that her
ego is built on negation, while her ego works hard to deny the
meaning of these signals.122 Marshalling every resource, the ego-
centered person perpetuates the illusion of self-sufficiency in meeting
her deepest longings: regulating these upheavals via the ‘logic of
transformation,’ she re-asserts her control over herself and her world
with new insights that reinforce rather than liberate her from her ego
as her guiding ‘center.’
Loder predicts, however, that some periodic upheavals can
demolish a person’s construction of reality, exposing the void.123
During those upheavals, in concrete and particular ways, the void
‘joins’ the self and the world. A person feels the pain and anxiety of
negation that her ego ‘carries,’ interpreted on some level as a threat to
survival. Glimpsing the abyss in her ego-centered identity, she realizes
in some way that ultimate satisfaction and survival are beyond her
grasp.124 Her ego functions as an organizing principle collapse and she
recognizes that she is organized around a ‘false face’ that offers a
‘false connection’ with herself and her world; she is not who or what
she thinks. Death, accident, illness, financial loss, oppression, depres-
sion, confusion, emptiness, malaise, powerlessness, all contradict a
person’s denial of the ‘void.’
Loder asserts that a person may experience despair if she has
built her world around her ego.

Sartre and Camus, as well as Heidegger, dramatized the absurdity of the day-to-
day existence which the well-adapted ego takes for granted. The point is that if
one awakens to this larger vision [i.e., that one begins to die from the moment
one is born], then the day-to-day scenes look bleak indeed, since it is perfectly

121 LS, p. 94.

122 Ibid., p. 135.
123 Ibid., p. 232.
124 ‘It is as if these periodic upheavals of the ego’s defense are at work in us…lest
we miss the point’ (ibid.).

53
 certain that what the ego values so highly for the sake of satisfaction and
survival will most certainly come to absolutely nothing.125

A person’s realization of her mortality has been termed ‘ego shock,’

the effect to her ego that she cannot truly construct her world.126
As a person’s known experiences of negation can ‘draw the ego
back’ and expose the void as its foundation,127 she can also experience
‘the reversal of those influences that invite despair and drive toward
void.’128 Her ego’s insistence on a two- or three-dimensional existence
(self, world, and void) does not convince her whole self. Scientific
discoveries, aesthetic intuitions, and therapeutic successes signal to a
person the possibility of ‘something’ beyond her (false) self, world,
and void.129 Her ‘secreting secret’ of inner alienation points to her
alienation from God.130 Penetrating her ego defenses, the void can
‘open up’ a person to self-encounter and encounter with God.131
When a person ‘faces’ her ‘contained’ negation, Loder claims
that she is ‘open’ to meeting a Face who adequately addresses that
negation.132 However, from a person’s ego-centric perspective, known
experiences of negation ‘are to be “managed” not embraced and
suffered through.’133 An ego-centered person’s focus on satisfaction
and survival aims to avoid existential conflicts, attempting to construct
her world without conflict.134 She adapts.135 To the extent that her ego

125 KM, p. 257.

126 TM, p. 159; or ‘ego chill,’ LS, p. 115.
127 TM, p. 173.
128 Ibid., p. 85.
129 ‘What appears to [be] scientific, esthetic, or therapeutic knowing is only a
superficial expression of the depth and power of being-itself to bring forth new
being’ (ibid., p. 87). See chapter two of TM.
130 Ibid., p. 173.
131 Loder asserts a psychological, neurological opening through the collapse of a
person’s ego defenses. See discussion in ‘Ego-Relativization’ section.
132 Ibid.
133 Ibid.
134 LS, p. 73.
135 TM, pp. 127-128; LS, p. 72; ‘This well structured ego recognizes and adopts
established social and institutional patterns—and roles within those patterns—

54
adapts successfully, she prolongs her ego-centrism, delays her
awareness of the void as internalized in her ego, and postpones her
awareness of God’s invitation to relationship.136 Accordingly, the pain
of negation can accumulate over the years.137
Loder describes a person’s ego as ‘a kind of tragic hero who
appears to slay the dragon of nothingness, but must eventually
succumb because fundamentally its victory is based on incorporating
the nothingness it is trying to overcome.’138 Not only will the void not
be slain, it will not stay in its dungeon. Despite the best efforts of a
person’s ego, the hot breath of the void isolates a person in a cosmic
loneliness. Confrontation with the void does not need to bring despair.
Some people ‘who have had some of the most horrendous encounters
with the void surrounded by all its faces are most prepared to create
new meaning and remold the world.’139 Such is the power of the ‘self
as spirit.’

4. Self as Spirit

Although the human spirit creates her own task-master when she
creates her ego, Loder contends that a person’s spirit transcends her

by means of which spontaneity and affect can be controlled’ (“Adults in

Crisis,” p. 35).
136 LS, p. 75.
137 See note 84.
138 LS, p. 135.
139 TM, p. 85. Loder suggests that ‘French existentialists, such as Sartre and the
early Camus, have furthered a philosophical movement of atheistic absurdity;
but the books they wrote and the vehemence with which their followers press
their points witness to another reality. To take the void seriously, to let the
magnitude of its implications wash over and soak in, is not to write books,
organize protest, or make pronouncements; it is to fall into deep despair and to
identify with the aggressor’ (ibid., italics original).

55
ego.140 A person’s ego is unsuccessful in creating a conflict-free
world. As anticipated by the analogia spiritus, the ‘self as spirit’
cannot but know her experience through the paradoxically exocentric
and centered movement of the ‘logic of transformation.’ Recall that
this logic involves conflict. Thus, ‘with every new insight, con-
structive act of the imagination, and formation of new stages [in
human development],’ the human spirit transcends her ego, in a sense
indicating that an order exists other than the ego’s.141 The face
phenomenon and the ego represent the human spirit’s resilience and
power142 to create ‘forms of order designed to sustain the developing
person in the face of incipient destruction,’143 the threat of death and
nothingness underlying all negation, the void toward which all
negation points. A person relates to this threat by creating the face
phenomenon and her ego through the ‘logic of transformation.’ The
following subsections integrate the ‘logic of transformation’ with the
earlier discussions of the face and ego. Although presented
sequentially, I have noted that the ‘logic’ is not structural or
hierarchical.

4.1 The Face Phenomenon

The anxiety of negation represents an existential conflict between the

infant and her postnatal environment. The infant intuitively scans for
solutions, i.e., she looks for an ordering principle to organize her
existence, one that will ensure her survival. Her insight comes through
the face phenomenon, which she both finds and creates, and resolves
her conflict with her environment. Via this insight, the infant feels
comforted and protected, experiencing a release of energy from her
transformed horizon of perception and understanding. The face,
representing the presence of another person, connects her to the outer

140 LS, p. 72.

141 Ibid.
142 Ibid., p. 292.
143 Ibid., p. 203.

56
world. She then interprets and applies her insight to the chaos of her
world, ordering her existence around the presence represented by the
face. When she notices the face’s inevitable absence, she again is in
conflict with her environment.

4.2 The Ego

The anxiety of negation from the absent face compounded by the

external restraint when the face is present represents another
existential conflict between the child and her environment. Again, she
feels her survival threatened. The child intuitively scans for solutions
to this conflict, i.e., she looks for an ordering principle to reassure her,
a ‘face’ that will again connect her with her outer world, but never
leave. Her insight appears when she discovers and creates her ego to
defend against future experiences of negation. The insight of her ego
resolves her conflict with her environment by objectifying herself and
her environment, providing an energy release from this transformed
horizon of perception and understanding. She interprets and applies
her insight to every aspect of her existence: her self-relation, her
experience of negation, her relation to her environment. All of her
existence filters through her defensive creation, her ego.
Loder asserts that her ego’s inability to be ‘spirit’ (e.g., truly
relational) will reinforce a person’s inner alienation from herself and
from God.144 Even while ruled by her own creation, the ‘self as spirit’
continues to function according to the paradoxically exocentric-
centered relational dynamic (‘logic of transformation’) that created the
face phenomenon and potentially will lead to ego-relativization. In a
sense, the ‘self as spirit’ acts as a ‘secret agent’ for the void and the
Holy (the Face) while supporting the ego’s denial of their existence.
The ego works through the five-phased logic of the ‘self as spirit,’ but
this logic reveals the inadequacy of the ego.

144 TM, p. 175.

57
5. Face

Loder asserts that although the memory of the face is hidden, it still
affects a person’s ego and thereby the whole self.145 Because a person
(‘self as spirit’) finds and creates her ego in response to the absent
face, her ego is designed to find the face.146 Even at the functional
level, a conflict resides in the ‘core’ of her ego: to find the face and to
deny her memories of the face.147 Although her ego represses
experiences of negation and functions to do what the face did, the

remarkable ego functions, built on the internalized negation at the base of the
ego, are designed to search out, find, and describe the equivalent of the Face in
the outside world extending beyond the entire universe. The primal drive
behind the cognitive construction of the world is the ego’s search beyond itself
for the self-definition it has repressed within.148

Accordingly, a person’s search for a ‘face’ is inherent to human

nature:

human nature is so constituted that built into its ego structure and implicit in its
greatest achievements is a cosmic loneliness that longs for a Face that will do
all that the mother’s face did for the child, but now a Face that will transfigure
human existence, inspire worship, and not go away, even in and through the
ultimate separation of death.149

145 LS, p. 94.

146 Ibid., p. 95. Loder mentions that “Sylvan [sic.] Tomkins, a former research
psychologist at Princeton University, once thought the search for universality
began as a search for the face as repressed” (ibid.). See S. Tomkins, Affect,
Imagery, Consciousness.
147 TM, p. 166; LS, p. 232. Recall Prenter’s depiction of Luther’s emphasis on
conflict.
148 LS, p. 95.
149 Ibid., p. 119.

58
 Loder contends that the search for the face is the search for the
Holy.150 From a Christian perspective, the face (or presence) of the
Holy God can free a person from necessarily being guided by
negation.151 In the language of the ‘logic of transformation,’ the face
of God (the presence of God) appears as an ‘insight’ to a person’s
existential conflict with negation. God has always been present, but a
person is open to and receives an insight into this loving, sustaining
Presence. As the ‘insight,’ the face of God in Jesus Christ through the
power of the Holy Spirit mediates the components of the person’s
conflict. These components are at the level of existence, involving life
and death, love and hate, joy and suffering. The presence of Christ
relates the components of the existential conflicts directly to each
other, without repression or denial, in Himself. Jesus Christ himself
embodies all conflicting polarities. The Face of this mediating insight
(that is, the Presence of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit) relates
her ego to a relationality between her whole person-hood and God,
human spirit to Holy Spirit. The ‘self as spirit’ operates as a person’s
potential locus for engagement with Christ as the Face of God.

6. Ego-Relativization

Loder agrees with Jung that ‘a structure resides in the psyche as an

innate potential’ for ego-relativization.152 However, Loder contends
that Jung ‘confuses the orders of being and knowing’ so that ‘the basic
order of ultimate reality is the Self archetype, for which Christ is a

150 Loder suggests that the longing for the face ‘may be behind our own response
to the compelling account Martin Buber gives to the “I-Thou” relationship and
to the “Thou-I” of Emil Brunner when he speaks of God’s addressing us.
Luther’s powerful longing to look God in the Face was the desire not merely to
be rid of guilt and shame but for a fundamental recentering of his personality on
a Face that would not go away’ (TM, pp. 165-166).
151 TM, pp. 168-169; LS, p. 245.
152 Ibid., p. 152.

59
symbol.’153 For Loder, when a person’s ego is relativized in human-
Divine relationality, then ‘Christ’s being uses but far transcends the
archetype as a way of knowing and refers us back to God’s person,
through whom all things (including archetypes) were made, and who
is yet alive in and for each one of us in our own particularity.’154 The
knowledge conferred by Christ cannot be contained by an archetype.
Such knowledge explodes all structures of knowing although our
imagination brings the knowledge of God to our awareness in ways
that our reason can grasp. Knowledge of the Tri-Une God explodes all
categories and structures, although we use categories and structures in
an attempt to communicate the reality of God’s Presence. As the
Source of all that exists, creating and sustaining all that exists, God in
Christ through the Holy Spirit meets us both individually and
communally for deep, transforming engagement. In Christ’s use of
archetypes, ‘at the deep level of awareness from which our most
imaginative insights are drawn, knowledge finds itself in a space-time
continuum where “space is no longer space and time is no longer
time”.’155 The knowledge of Christ’s presence represents an
experience that transcends the human ego’s formulations of time and
space.
Loder asserts that ‘[i]t is the work of the Spirit first to heighten
the dichotomy between life and death, to slay ego-centeredness by
exposing that it is fundamentally based on nothing and nothing-
ness.’156 A person may become aware of this ‘slaying’ through any
phase of the ‘logic of transformation,’ but in a sense all five phases
coalesce (outside the constructs of the ego and therefore outside time
and space and yet experienced and known in time and space).157

153 LS, p. 307; TM, pp. 138-140.

154 LS, p. 309; TM, p. 146.
155 TM, p. 48.
156 LS, p. 244.
157 Loder affirms cognitive development psychologist J. Piaget who asserts that
‘chronological time and Euclidean space are constructs of the ego and not
necessitated in the final analysis by any external reality’ and comments
therefore that ‘it is all the more feasible to suspect that there may be other views

60
Whether separated out or coalesced,158 the movement of a person’s
ego from the ‘center’ of a person’s world involves a ‘conflict.’ The
‘conflict’ involves ‘existential dichotomies’ (e.g., life and death)
illuminated by Christ. Christ ‘initiates the in-depth struggle with those
[existential] dichotomies,’ because He embodies the resolution of
those dichotomies. His Presence provokes ‘despair over oneself before
God’ and simultaneously provokes rejoicing over one’s life with God.
‘By his initiation, he defines the struggle for which he is the mediating
Presence.’159 Again, a person can be aware of this engagement in a
moment or over a life-time, or through some combination.
The ‘mediating vision,’ i.e., the ‘insight,’ is key for Loder’s ego-
relativization. He credits Jung with describing the process in ‘purely
human terms’160 and recognizing the determining role of the
‘mediating vision.’161 Yet in Loder’s view, Jung does not ‘take
sufficient account of’ the content of the mediating image, or the
identity of the mediator.162 Loder notes that ‘transformation of the ego
may take place in several ways, but whatever way it takes place, the
transformed person will bear the marks of the mediator.’163 The
content or identity of the mediating image is decisive. In the ‘logic of
transformation,’ the insight or

knowing event is the constructive act of the imagination; an insight, intuition,

or vision appears on the border between the conscious and unconscious, usually
with convincing force, and conveys in a form readily available to consciousness
the essence of the resolution.164

of time experienced by the ego as timelessness’ (ibid., p. 305); and Jung who
asserts that ‘the center of the personality is timeless’ (ibid., pp. 306-307).
158 For clarity, this discussion moves through the ‘logic of transformation’
sequentially.
159 TM, p. 147.
160 Ibid., p. 140.
161 Ibid., p. 145.
162 LS, p. 308.
163 Ibid.
164 TM, p. 38, italics original. See also p. 147. Early in his academic career (1966),
Loder asserts that the ‘insight’ represents ‘an intrinsically novel composition of
symbols, derivative from all modes but from nowhere other than the modes’

61
Such insights resolve people’s periodic upheavals, but also
characterize their development, creativity, discoveries, their knowing.
In the insight of ego-relativization, he asserts that

decentering the ego and recentering the personality around a new center capable
of integrating all the powers and extremities unleashed by dethroning the ego
provides a formal statement of the properties for any image that might claim
convictional significance for the personality.165

Such properties explain Loder’s emphasis on the origins of the

mediating image. Unless it is to exacerbate human-divine alienation,
the mediating image must defeat the void.
Crucially, Loder posits a ‘transformation of transformation;’ ego-
relativization transforms the origin and destiny of the ‘logic of
transformation.’ When the spiritual presence of God relativizes a
person’s ego, the resulting human-Divine relationality reinterprets this
dynamic pattern. The transformational logic ‘remains constant,’ but
the Holy Spirit transforms ‘the origin and destiny of transfor-
mation,’166 from the human spirit to human spirit-Holy Spirit

(Religious Pathology, p. 191); ‘modes’ refer to ‘objective, interpretative, and

subjective’ modes of human consciousness (p. 189). After his 1970 car
accident, he focuses on the relationality of the insight between the human and
the divine. As relayed by Dana Wright in his report of his interview of Loder
for the biographical sketch in Redemptive Transformationa (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2004), after 1970, he recognizes that ‘our human participation in the
work of the Spirit is actualized through the conviction-generating power of the
Spirit, and not from the autonomous transformational capacities of the human
spirit alone’ (p. 16). In the next chapter of this discussion, I examine four
authors who focus on the relationships between knowing God and knowing
anything at all, between consciousness and consciousness of God, and between
experiences and interpretations of those experiences. Loder’s theory of ego-
relativization turns on these relationships.
165 TM, p. 146.
166 Ibid., p. 115.

62
relationality.167 The ‘transformation of transformation’ can be illus-
trated with an analogy to myth.
All myth elicits deep human responses and Loder credits this
effect to myth being an expression of the relational ‘self as spirit’
through the ‘logic of transformation.’ As we overcome ‘conflicts’ or
‘periodic upheavals’ via the ‘logic of transformation,’ we construct
mythic worlds in the same way that we construct ‘those elementary
“worlds” with which we are genetically endowed (kinship relations,
language, morality, and so on).’168 Myth ‘is a symbolic world order
generated by the same dynamic pattern [logic of transformation] that
gives growth to the human personality.’169 Loder suggests that C. S.
Lewis, a professor of English literature, describes the transformation
of mythic transformation through ego-relativization. ‘[I]n coming to
Christian conviction he [Lewis] could perceive that in Christ, God
performed on them [mythic transformations] the transformation that
they performed humanly in mythical and poetic terms.’170 The
Christian ‘myth’ relativizes the genre of myth to itself, human myth to
human-Divine ‘myth.’ Analogously, the Holy Spirit relativizes the
‘logic of transformation’ to God-self, in the bi-polar relational unity of
human spirit and Divine Spirit. Loder quotes Lewis’ journal entry:

I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in

Christianity […].

167 The Holy Spirit sustains a person’s existence (or she would not exist), but the
transformation involves a transforming relationality. See Hendry, The Holy
Spirit in Christian Theology.
168 Beyond the scope of this discussion, Loder interacts in detail with E. Erikson
and Piaget regarding human development, acknowledging their contemporary
critics (ibid., p. 130). Loder also notes that ‘the deep structure that underlies our
human construction of the Christ event, as well as the structure by which we
comprehend the work of the Holy Spirit as “Spiritus Creator,” can be put most
concisely in the terminology that Claude Levi-Strauss uses for the construction
and analysis of myth. However, as with Carl Jung, the structure is important but
it is not a saving reality until it becomes “God’s myth”’ (ibid., p. 159 n. 1).
169 Ibid., p. 130.
170 Ibid., p. 152.

63
 What Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of
sacrifice in a pagan story I didn’t mind at all: again, if I met the idea of God
sacrificing himself to himself […] I liked it very much and was mysteriously
moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving God (Balder, Adonis,
Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels.
The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as
profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not
say in cold prose: ‘What it meant.’ Now the story of Christ is simply a true
myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this
tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to
accept it in the same way, remember that it is God’s myth where the other are
men’s myths; i.e., the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the
minds of poets, using such images as He found there while Christianity is God
expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things.’ Therefore it is true, not
in the sense of being a ‘description’ of God (that no finite mind would take in)
but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to
our faculties.171

Embracing the mediating insight that resolves his existential conflict,

Lewis is energized to interpret and apply his insight within his
discipline of English literature, to myth. He notes the transformation
of myth’s transforming effect from divinely sustained human origins
to divine-human relationality (and in doing so, seems to subscribe to
the same Niebuhrian categories as Loder, paradox and transforma-
tion).
For a person’s existential ‘conflict’ to lead to ego-relativization,
Loder’s theory is that she must be unable to recompose satisfactorily
new meanings that transcend the conflict. He explains that ‘the
conflict has the ‘I’ or the alienated self […]. The conflict resonates
through the self into the lived “world” and back again, threatening
ultimate void.’172 Using his language of the four dimensions of human
existence, ‘the face of the void intruding into the two-dimensional
existence of the self-world is the “conflict” that moves transfor-
mational knowing into action.’173 ‘Transformational knowing’ de-

171 Ibid., p. 151, italics original; quote from letter to Andrew Greeves in C. S.
Lewis, A Biography, pp. 115-116.
172 TM, p. 100.
173 Ibid., p. 81.

64
scribes all human knowing. Transformed ‘transformational knowing’
can relativize the ego; it describes known experience that originates in
God’s agency, engages human agency, and can lead to human-divine
relationality.174
During ‘scanning,’ when a person searches for solutions to her
‘conflict,’ Loder asserts that a person’s ‘ego finally comes unbuckled
and enables one to free the longing in oneself for the Spirit of God and
for relationship to God.’175 A person is ‘stripped of […her] defenses
and led back into this abyss, recognizing the inevitable downfall of
[her] ego in its efforts to incorporate and conceal the abyss from [her]
awareness.’176 This ‘stripping’ challenges a person’s previous reso-
lutions to her past ‘periodic upheavals,’ resolved through the ‘logic of
transformation’ with her ego remaining firmly central.177 ‘The self and
all its “worlds” are exposed as alienated from each other and within
themselves.’178 A person scans beyond her previous resolutions for
something more.
In a sentence, the ‘conflict’ and ‘scanning’ represent for Loder ‘a
profound move into the nothingness that lies coiled at the base of the
ego.’179 A person who has tried to meet her longings within herself via
her conflicted ego finds that her self-sufficiency is an illusion.
‘Facing’ the void opens a person to deep, transforming engagement
with God. ‘The dialogue between the Presence of Christ and the self-
in-conflict is the means by which he [God] seeks to reopen the self to
the transcendent.’180 In this profound engagement, the mediating
image of Christ works ‘both to externalize for the personal ego the
underlying threat of nothingness and at the same time supply a new

174 This action follows H. Wolfson’s presentation of perichoresis via Gregory of

Nazianzus and Pseudo-Cyril (The Philosophy of the Church Fathers, p. 418ff);
Loder refers to this text.
175 LS, p. 309.
176 Ibid., p. 115.
177 Ibid., p. 204.
178 TM, p. 115.
179 LS, p. 243.
180 TM, p. 101.

65
context of meaning that embraces and transcends it.’181
Developmentally, ‘the “no” [negation] that underlies the ego is exactly
reversed by the “yes” expressed in the Face of God and all that
implies.’182
Loder affirms the language of Soren Kierkegaard who ‘insisted
with bewildering brilliance that the faces of the void become the faces
of God.’183 An encounter with the face of God ‘reaches back under the
defensive structure of the ego and restores the same conditions for the
mature, differentiated personality that the prototypical facial encounter
introduced for the emerging child ego.’184 A person recognizes God as
the ‘cosmic ordering, self-confirming presence of a loving other’ who
will never leave.185 She discovers that her ego’s ‘defensive maneuvers
are reversible and that the primal absence is now bearable.’186 The
void continues to operate against the ‘self-sufficiency of the ego with
constant reminders’ that invite continual nurturing of a person’s
relationship with ‘the Face that endures, the Face of God.’187 The void
is a dimension of existence but not the repressed guiding ‘center’ of a
person.
In ego-relativization, Loder argues that human creative capacities
encounter the Holy Spirit and present this encounter to awareness in
ways that reason can grasp, through an imaginative insight. ‘[I]magi-
nation is potentially the bearer of truth that far exceeds the individual
and may even bring one into a new understanding of the universe […]
or of one’s unique relation to the Creator God.’188 He is not asserting
an irrationality, but a structure and dynamic of relationality between
imagination and reason that follows the relationality between the
human and Divine. Scientific discoveries, esthetic intuitions, and

181 Ibid., p. 168. The Holy Spirit lovingly and graciously illuminates the problem
(sin) and provides the solution (Christ).
182 LS, p. 271.
183 TM, p. 85.
184 Ibid., p. 173.
185 LS, p. 245.
186 TM, p. 173.
187 Ibid., pp. 173-174.
188 KM, p. 247.

66
therapeutic successes, demonstrate these relationalities, directly and
indirectly.189
Anchoring his theory of transformation in space and time, that is,
in concrete research, Loder points to experiments in psycho-
neurology. He suggests that the ‘model of intensification’190 describes
the neural correlates to an ‘insight.’

This is a model of what happens when the transformational dynamic of the

human spirit, endemic to human development, discovery, and creativity, [is]
totally immersed in resolving the dilemma of how to reconstruct life […] Such
intensive immersion mean[s] that ordinary constraints in maintaining ego
control [are] abandoned […]
The neurologists said that what is happening in the brain can be described
as the interaction between two distinguishable neurological systems […] the
ergotropic system […and the] trophotropic [system…] This reciprocity
[between the two systems] describes in neurological terms the ordinary
psychological behavior of a balanced ego seeking adaptation to its environment.
However, the interaction between the two systems varies, and under conditions
of intensifying disequilibrium, it gives rise to vision, myths, and images of
trans-forming potential.191

189 TM, pp. 64-65.

190 Loder understands ‘intensification’ as: ‘a psychoneurological model for the
constructive capacity of human intelligence in the act of discovery’ (KM, p. 15
n. 18). Loder interacts with research by E. Gellhorn (Principles of Autonomic-
Somatic Integration) and his colleagues who explore the joint arousal of two
brain systems during visionary or convictional moments. Loder quotes
neurologist Eugene d’Aquili’s description of this hyper-arousal of both brain
systems as the brain’s engagement with ‘fundamental polarities of existence’
(ibid., p. 271). In his description, d’Aquili supports Loder’s understanding of
the research as indicating that there are neural correlates to figure-ground
reversals that combine unrelated frames of reference without reduction. He does
not understand the brain states reductively; the brain states indicate that ‘we are
all constituted […] so as to sustain and give expression to these powerful
transforming experiences […]. This is not a reduction [of such experiences…]
but a cosmological enlargement of it.’ LS, pp. 59, 71.
191 LS, pp. 56-57.

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During ‘intensification,’ a person and the mediating ‘insight’ override
her ego’s defense mechanisms.192 Then a person may become aware
of the two dimensions of existence that her ego has tried to deny, the
void and the Holy. If a person embraces the mediating insight of
Christ, made possible by the collapse of the ego’s defenses, then a
person can embrace God’s offer of ‘bi-polar’ relationality. This
relationality is ‘an essential backbone for the faith that has personally
appropriated the union of the divine and the human in Jesus
Christ.’193 The resolving insight to a person’s existential conflict leads
to a ‘release of energy’ used to reinterpret her entire existence, based
on the transformed horizon of perception and understanding. A person
sees herself and her world anew, from the perspective of her
relationality for which God created humanity.
Of critical importance in Loder’s theory is a person’s retention of
individuality and particularity. Ego-relativization does not replace a
person’s personality with the mediating vision of Christ.194 The sense
of alienation is not completely removed. The Holy is other than, alien
to, a person and she retains her particularity even as the Holy rela-
tivizes her ego to God-self.195 Thus, the new ‘center’ of a person and
her world is a dialectical unity, a relationality between the human
spirit and Divine Spirit. The result is a dialectical human-Divine
relationality as the orienting ‘center’ of a person:

192 Ibid., p. 65.

193 Ibid., p. 73, italics original.
194 Ibid., p. 245.
195 ‘The “alien” is ego alien in the sense that one does not identify with Jesus, one
does not etch the face of Jesus into one’s own, as [Erik] Erikson suggested in
his psychohistorical analysis of [Martin] Luther’ (LS, pp. 116-117); ‘There is
no identification of Luther with Christ. Luther sees the Face of God in Jesus
Christ, but he does not etch his own face into Jesus Christ. It is clearly a
dialectical identity for Luther in which the acting ego is passive before the
righteousness of Christ. It is an I-not-I-but Christ position’ (ibid., p. 245). Loder
thereby distinguishes between an absorption into Christ so that a person loses
her identity and a relational union with Christ in which she remains distinct and
yet deeply related.

68
 ‘I-not-I-but-Christ.’ Such a dialectical identity means that the sense of ‘I’ is
affirmed, not primarily on the basis of repression and being good, but on the
basis of grace, the eternal ‘yes’ of God, that brings a cosmic ordering, loving
presence of God, to bear on human life and, in that, confirms the self at a level
that is deeper than guilt or shame, deeper than good or evil […] Transformation
effected by the Creator Spirit disembeds the ego from its bondage to shame, so
that ‘I’ is claimed not on the basis of virtue but on the basis of God’s action.
That is why the ‘I’ is followed by ‘not I,’ that is, not the ‘I’ of the ego but the
transformed ‘I’ bestowed by God […] It is important [also] to be able to say,
‘Christ, yet not Christ, but I.’ This is not pride but intentional appropriation of
the autonomy that grace itself preserves in the divine-human relationship.196

Accordingly, ‘ego transformation should be understood not as

destruction to the ego, but as decisive recentering of the personality
around a transcendental reality that points to the invisible God.’197
The resolution to a person’s existential ‘conflict’ effected by the
‘insight’ is a ‘recentering of the whole person around a spiritual center
that simultaneously nullifies the negation at the base of the ego and
preserves ego functioning as an expression of the ego as
transformed.’198 A person does not ‘lose’ her uniqueness, but ‘gains’ a
new ‘center’ that frees the expression of her uniqueness in ways other
than in the service of satisfaction and survival according to social and
cultural dictates.
Loder argues that ego-relativization effected by the spiritual
presence of Christ ‘actually enhances [a person’s] ego functioning,
because the ego has less need to control or limit perceptions or
understandings of self, world, others.’199 The ‘enhancement’ of a
person’s ego and her energy release can be described within a
paradigmatic ‘before’ and ‘after,’ with the caveat that such trans-
formation may occur over a life-span or in a moment or some
combination, as represented by the Damascus Road and the Road to
Emmaus experiences. Before: ‘The ego-as-center constricts its vision
lest the underlying existential negation come into view and the

196 LS, p. 145.

197 TM, p. 167.
198 LS, p. 246.
199 TM, p. 167.

69
centripedal force of nostalgia for the true center draw it back into
nothingness.’200 After: ‘[O]nce the center is invested with God’s
Presence, the ego’s anguish at absence and abandonment is dissipated
and its defensive energies can be poured into its competencies.’201
Her ego experiences liberation and empowerment, a particular kind of
strengthening, precisely ‘because it is no longer the presumed center
of the personality.’202 A person’s competencies can serve to manifest
the human-Divine union in all of a person’s relations with self, others,
and the world.203 ‘Stated concisely, for a Christian […] the goal of ego
transformation is: to give love and to give it sacrificially with
integrity.’204 That historic and contemporary accounts of Christian
behaviour, both individual and communal, reveal appalling failures
among Christians to live in this way is no secret.205 There have been
notable exceptions, also individual and communal, among Christians
and those of other faiths and no faith, involving remarkable displays
of love and self-sacrifice. And many un-sung heroes people our lives
without textual or verbal publicity. But the failure of many of us to
know this transforming power of self-sacrificial love makes it all the
more important for educators, Christian and other-wise, to probe the
insights of Loder’s theory. Loder understands love as ‘the non-
possessive delight in the particularity of the other one,’ which is how

200 Ibid.
201 Ibid.
202 Ibid.
203 LS, pp. 194-197. Loder uses (1) the biblical concept of koinonia ‘as the
community-creating presence of Jesus Christ’ (ibid., p. 194), referring to Paul
Lehmann’s Ethics in a Christian Context and T. F. Torrance’s The Trinitarian
Faith; and (2) the theological notion of perichoresis ‘first formulated by the
Cappadocian theologian Gregory of Nanzianzus’ (LS, p. 195), referring to H.
Wolfson’s The Philosophy of the Church Fathers, p. 418ff.
204 EM, chapter 6, p. 2.
205 In Will the Circle Be Broken: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a
Faith, Studs Terkel records the angst of a ‘country woman’ who poignantly
asks, ‘Why are people who go to church every Sunday still deep racists?’
p. 257.

70
he understands God to love us, ever offering but not imposing a deep,
transforming relationship.206
In summary, Loder’s call for ego-relativization issues from an
understanding of human nature as created for relationship with the
Holy. Existential conflicts, instigated by Christ’s presence inviting
deep, transforming relationship, reveal a person’s distorted self-
relation and relation with the world. Her ego-directed illusion of a
two-dimensional existence enclosed within ‘the self’ and her ‘lived
world’ stretches until it tears to reveal the void. Her ego defenses
collapse, she experiences her existential conflict, her lived tension
between sin and the imago dei as conditions of her existence. The
resolving insights to previous conflicts that managed to leave her ego
intact as her guiding ‘center’ now appear false. If she embraces the
presence of Christ, then an affirmation from the Face of God replaces
the negation of her ego. Neurologically, a person’s brain systems
intensify, go into over-drive, and present to awareness the presence of
the Holy Spirit in visionary, mythic, imaginative ways. Human brains
seem wired for divine-human engagement.207 A person’s ego is not
destroyed, nor is her individuality engulfed, but her particularity is
related in the human-Divine relationality that can operate as her
orienting ‘center.’ The ‘logic of transformation’ of her relational
agency (the modus operandi of the human spirit) is transformed. For
example, myth as a literary genre expresses the creative power of the
‘self as spirit.’ In ‘Christian myth,’ the genre of myth itself is
transcended and transformed. Analogously, the Holy Spirit transforms
the transformational logic of the human spirit so that it originates in
and supports human-divine relationality.

206 Ibid., p. 14. Loder takes this phrase from Kierkegaard’s ‘Knight of Faith’ (Fear
and Trembling, pp. 67-71). E.g., KM, pp. 2, 279.
207 Or, at least that is a reasonable interpretation of the data from brain research so
far. John Bowker in The Sacred Neuron: Extraordinary New Discoveries
Linking Science and Religion, puts it like this: ‘the conducive properties that
invade the particular architecture of energy that humans happen to be point to a
truth beyond themselves that is not incomplete, the truth to which we give the
name of God’ p. 148.

71
7. Results of Ego-Relativization

Loder affirms the Christian faith as journey and turning points,208

continuity and discontinuity.209 As transformation continues in and
through a person, Loder identifies a ‘reciprocal relationship between
the ego and the divine center of her personality.’210 He clarifies: ‘By
“reciprocity,” I mean the figure-ground reversal whereby the ego and
the Divine Presence are alternately the center of action, but the center
of identification remains the Divine Presence.’211 He presents the
results of ego-relativization in idealized form, presenting the vision
that may inspire a person to respond to God’s gracious invitation.
Loder theorizes that the collapse of a person’s ego defenses open
her to the void and Holy. Hence, I begin this section with how ego-
relativization transforms a person’s defenses. Since a person’s ego is
not eliminated, the ego defenses, too, are not destroyed. All of the
competencies of a person’s ego, ‘free from its defensive posture,’ now
relate to the new orienting ‘center.’212 The result can be ‘counter-
adaptive moves’: ‘forgiving, returning good for evil, loving the
enemy, and, in the face of persecution, rejoicing.’213 In a sense, a
person learns ‘to become a child without ever losing or diminishing

208 See for example, ‘Conflict Resolution in Christian Education,’ p. 36. In another
article, Loder notes that the logic ‘is the repeated dynamic by which one
deepens into the Christian faith through the imitation of Christ’ (‘Commentary
on Practice in Christianity: The Golgotha Mirror,’ p. 3), ‘the inner logic of the
[Kierkegaardian text] Practicing Christianity is fundamentally the logic of the
Holy Spirit’ (ibid., p. 5), ‘in the practice of Christianity one must repeatedly
enter into the offensive lowliness of Christ’s nature to cooperate with God’s
Spirit’ (ibid., p. 8), and ‘the intimacy of prayer is the point at which the depth of
his thought takes hold of his spirit’s transparent groundedness in the Divine
Spirit’ (ibid., p. 9).
209 TM, pp. 40-42.
210 Ibid., p. 170.
211 Ibid.
212 LS, p. 267.
213 Ibid., p. 73.

72
one’s adult ego capacities.’214 The defensive patterns learned in early
childhood can be reversed and a person may recover her ‘strengths
and weaknesses through interpersonal interaction.’215 Described
paradigmatically:

secondary repression, instead of rigidifying and shrinking the ego boundaries,

becomes, through transformation by the divine presence, “patience and self
control”;
projection, instead of putting oneself into another to hide from one’s self
becomes empathy, putting oneself into the other for the sake of feeling in
oneself what the other one feels;
denial, instead of being a partially conscious, partially unconscious effort to
avoid the reality of a situation, becomes forgiveness--a forgiveness that forgives
and forgets that it has forgiven;
all regression is in the service of transcendence, fantasy formation becomes the
vision of God,
introjection becomes vicarious suffering,
isolation becomes concentration, and
reaction formation becomes the capacity to return good for evil.216

These transformed manifestations of psychological defense

mechanisms transform a person’s self-knowledge and relations with
the rest of creation. Indeed a person finds herself within a new
communion (or koinonia),217 among those who have known ‘the same
reconstruction of their existence around the spiritual axis of Christ
(participating in the perichoresis of the Trinity).’218 The interpretation
and application of a person’s dialectical spiritual union with Christ
does not begin or end with the individual.
Loder asserts that a person’s expression of her focal human-
Divine relationality through her defenses relieves them from ensuring
survival and maximizing satisfaction according to social and cultural
dictates. A person may sacrifice satisfaction and even survival. ‘It is
as if the struggle for survival and satisfaction becomes totally relative

214 Ibid., p. 275.

215 Ibid.
216 LS, p. 197, italics and list format inserted.
217 See note 203.
218 LS, p. 74; see note 203.

73
to the center of one’s conviction.’219 Examples of this relativization of
survival can be found in historic and contemporary examples of
martyrdom. ‘Conviction’ refers to the human-Divine relationality that
forms the ‘backbone’ of personal faith; a convicted person is
compelled to reopen the question of reality in light of the Convictor
and the convictional relationship of Christian trans-formation.220 The
‘human spirit, in agreement with divine order, will seek to bring all
ego competencies into line with those purposes [of God], even if it
means counteradaptive behavior and suffering in place of satisfaction
and survival.’221 A person can face her mortality in light of the Face of
God who will never leave, even through death.222 ‘It is the outgrowth
of the decentered ego, an ego in Christ that is able to embrace its own
death and so allow the whole person to derive strength from this
embrace.’223 A person is not existentially isolated either outwardly or
inwardly, although she may know her experience in that way.
While truly connected with the outer world, in contrast to the
‘false connection’ of the ego, Loder notes that a person with a
relativized ego ‘manifests a detached involvement with his world that
allows him to have a non-possessive delight in particularity and a
fascination with the ordinary bearer of the extraordinary.’224 A
person’s inter-personal relations, indeed a person’s relation to her
entire environment, is transformed. She does not need to try to grasp
and to cling to it. Her perspective sees the particular in light of the
transcendent, enabling recognition of God’s sustaining presence and
offer of transformation.

219 TM, p. 203.

220 Ibid., p. 14, citing Willem Zuurdeeg’s An Analytical Philosophy of Religion, but
noting his (Loder’s) focus on the experience of conviction rather than the term’s
use in the philosophy of religion.
221 LS, pp. 72-73.
222 As noted, Loder recognizes the experience of God’s absence, as in the ‘dark
night of the soul’ (LS, p. 69), but agrees with John of the Cross that even in
such experiences of desolation, God is present, as is God’s sustaining presence
‘prior’ to ego-relativization.
223 Ibid., pp. 325-326.
224 KM, p. 279.

74
 As the ‘self becomes truly itself for the first time,’ so ‘its
“worlds” are composed in new ways. Subsequent experience is drawn
into forms of awareness and behavior that include but go beyond two-
dimensional humanity and scandalize the pessimism of three-
dimensional existentialism.’225 As noted earlier, the absence of this
behavior and perspective among many of us who identify ourselves as
Christians has been remarked upon by ourselves as well as by others,
and an academic environment dedicated to the study of every aspect of
the Christian faith can witness to some of the most abhorrent
examples, and some of the most moving inspiring exceptions. But if
genetic engineering will support greater and greater human
achievement, then will the ego’s illusion of self-sufficiency be even
more difficult to expose and will the void of nihilism be further
reinforced through the mis-use of creative scientific discovery? Or
will genetically enhanced human achievement enable more astute
recognition of the void and the ego’s limitations through greater
openness to deep, transforming engagement with God? Even the void
can be seen as ‘essential to human transformation.’226 Similarly, a
person’s ego is appreciated ‘as a truth-producing error.’227
Loder asserts that his theory of ego-relativization might seem
bizarre if an ego-centered, rationalistic view of enlightenment science
is allowed to define nature and science.228 He notes that what some
human scientists may regard as bizarre behavior may be part of a
person’s or communion’s journey in relationship with God.229 He
suggests that in the study of Christian transformation the ‘human
sciences may inform theology as subsciences of its inner intelli-
gibility, but the theological perspective must transform human science

225 TM, p. 89.

226 Ibid. Loder’s assertion is meant descriptively, not prescriptively.
227 LS, p. 320.
228 Ibid., p. 332.
229 Religious Pathology, pp. 212, 222-223.

75
understandings in ways that strive to preserve the integrity of both
sides of the interaction.’230
Paradoxically, Loder questions the fundamental assumptions of
psychological theories of human development; while affirming that
human-divine engagement involves ‘normal’ human development, he
challenges ‘so-called normal’ ego developmental theory.231 It repre-
sents an adaptation to and support of the denial of integral aspects of
human nature and existence:

[T]here is the philosophically dubious but nevertheless functional assumption

that a good fit between established social patterns and this structured ego is the
norm of sanity.232

Clearly, the so-called ‘normal’ course of development puts the ego into a
double-bind situation vis-à-vis the existential condition that underlies it. It
cannot transform or displace itself, and it cannot ultimately deny its need to be
replaced as the center of the personality.233

Thus the ego stages are, in relation to the transformational character of the spirit
and the Spirit, a self-liquidating notion that finally must give way to a deeper
sense of psychic order and the transcendent Presence of the Holy One in the
Face of Christ.234

To put it more sharply, there is something existentially and theologically

abnormal about functional normality; ego adaptation is existentially and
theologically maladaptive.235

230 LS, p. 33. Loder rejects inter-disciplinary methods that ‘cross-fertilize

disciplines by finding semantic connections’ or that assume ‘one-to-one
conceptual correlations that disregard differences between the conceptual fields
involved’ or ‘theological reductionisms’ (‘Normativity and Context in Practical
Theology,’ p. 363 n. 5). Inter-disciplinary methodology is a concern for Loder
from his thesis onwards.
231 The ‘myth of normalcy’ has been a concern of Loder’s since early in his career.
See Religious Pathology, pp. 13-14.
232 ‘Adults in Crisis,’ p.35; see also ‘Developmental Foundations for Christian
Education.’
233 TM, p. 167.
234 Ibid., pp. 154-155.
235 KM, p. 256.

76
 When the so-called normal course of ego development is disturbed from the
beginning […] it is especially clear that the transformational power of the
human spirit must be seen as transcending the constraints of any stage-
development sequence or any distortions that may occur therein.236

‘normal’ will need to be redefined beyond ego-structured reality in terms of

coherence and openness that occurs when the ego is transformed by the
Christomorphic relationality of human spirit and Holy Spirit.237

all subsequent so-called normal development is ego development, so it takes

place on the basis of repression, that is, on the basis of ‘no.’238

From the perspective of his understanding of Christian transformation,

psychological theories that work to strengthen a person’s ego will fail
because they do not recognize that original sin, ‘the geological fault in
the substructure of the psyche, inflicts the ego itself […] with a
fundamental brokenness that it can never resolve.’239 A person will
only be able to continue functioning as if her ego can address such
brokenness. A person’s ego cannot but fail and her ego’s failure is
repressed collectively. Social and cultural affirmation of ego-centric
styles of life240 reinforces the ego’s conformity to social and cultural
definitions of survival and satisfaction. For example, Tom Wolfe’s
latest tome, I am Charlotte Simmons, drops the reader into the three-
dimensional world of undergraduate education in the USA. ‘Binge
drinking, foul language, academic dishonesty, and predatory sex’
welcome a clever, beautiful, small-town young woman into their
destructive arms. In her review, Mary Ann Glendon notes that many
critics have insisted that he reveals nothing new. ‘Some thought it
exaggerated, and some faulted Wolfe for laboring what everyone

236 LS, p. 55.

237 Ibid.
238 Ibid., p. 94.
239 LS, p. 166.
240 EM, chapter 3, explores ‘styles of life,’ otherwise known as ‘ego postures,’
‘core characterstics,’ and ‘personal identity’; the sense is what is more or less
stable in a person’s ‘style of life’ over time. He takes the phrase from C. Ellis
Nelson’s text, Where Faith Begins.

77
already knows: students drink, cheat, and have sex; professors and
administrators have agendas. So what?’241 What Glendon responds, as
a parent and educator herself, is that Wolfe portrays credibly the
devastation that this environment wreaks even on Charlotte Simmons
who comes from a strong, loving home and community, and is
seemingly already formed in her sense of self. A desire to be noticed
and envied accompanied by a loss of any semblance of privacy, and a
profound sense of loneliness, overwhelm her personal goals. This ego-
centric desire for admiration becomes all consuming. Every act, even
of kindness, eventually serves to satisfy this desire as if her very
survival depends on it. And one can almost miss the void permeating
this behavior as Wolfe’s skills as satirist present it as normal, almost
below the threshold of notice. Glendon quotes Wolfe:

Though conceding that ‘sex, booze, and status’ have always been part of the
college [i.e., university] scene, Wolfe declared that the contemporary situation
is different in that, ‘with a few exceptions, universities have totally abandoned
the idea of strengthening character’.

Or, is it that the character traits that are strengthened reflect an ego-
centrism that has become so accepted that we are not bothered? The
pervasiveness of original sin requires a pervasive interpretation and
application of the insight that resolves the existential conflict
embodied by a person’s ego, including the theories of the psyche.
In summary, a person whose ego has been relativized by the
spiritual presence of Christ into a dialectical relationality can respond
non-defensively to her world and thus connect in new ways to herself
and her outer world. She does not understand her world as something
to grasp and use, but as an array of potentiality for expressing love
through paradoxical ‘detached involvement.’ Loder’s theory of Christ-
ian transformation through ego-relativization and a particular kind of
ego strengthening or enhancement re-conceptualizes human develop-

241 Mary Ann Glendon’s review in First Things, p. 41, of Tom Wolfe’s I Am
Charlotte Simmons.

78
ment to account for the void, the Holy, and human-Divine relation-
ality.

8. Conclusion

Loder comments that

the ego may be seen as a kind of tragic hero whose fatal flaw was the negation
it incorporated in order to begin the journey of human development in the first
place. This developmental phenomenon may even be a hidden source of
Athenian drama in which the fatal ironies implicit in the ego’s heralded
competencies are personified and played out on stage for the cathartic relief of
those who can recognize in these dramas a reenactment of the tragic side of
human development.242

Although writing from very different viewpoints Loder and, as

explored in chapter four, James Hillman both identify the ‘centered’
ego with the ‘hero’ of the Greek myths and both recommend ego-
relativization. The stage is set for relating their theories (chapter five).
However, my argument locates this analysis in the context of
Christian mystical spirituality, and the methodological challenges of
particularity and universality. Hence I need to present what I mean by
‘Christian mystical spirituality.’ The next chapter (two) explores this
phrase through four contemporary authors. They lament the absence
of inter-disciplinary collaboration between theology and psychology
on mystical spirituality that does not reduce the phenomenon to pure
human experience, reducing divine agency to an overlay. I assert that
Loder’s theory fills the research lacunae that they note, and firmly
from within theological commitments that may surprise the four
authors. Chapter three explores this assertion.
Before moving to the four authors, one last comment. Loder’s
presentation of the void contrasts with Buddhism; in Buddhism, a

242 LS, p. 115.

79
person embraces the void not to meet the face of God, but to embrace
the void.243 The void is categorically good for the Buddhist, while it
represents evil’s un-doing of creation into nothingness for Loder. At
first glance, it seems that Loder’s depiction of the void does not
describe the nature of reality for a person who is a Buddhist. For that
person, the faceless void is a gift in which she hopes to remain. Loder
himself notes the difference between his depiction of transformation
and the transformation of Zen Buddhism in Transforming Moment,244
while asserting that a transformed person will bear the marks of the
mediator who bears the insight to a person’s knowing experience.
Importantly, the Buddhist concept of void and Loder’s void possibly
represent a semantic connection with vast differences in conceptual
reference. Future research with his theory in the field of spirituality
that is cross-cultural and inter-faith would need to build on the
findings of discussed in this text.

243 See H. de Wit’s comparison of contemplation in Buddhism and Christianity

from a psychological viewpoint in Contemplative Psychology, especially
pp. 164-165 regarding anatman. De Wit asserts a sharp divergence while
reviewing attempts at convergence.
244 TM, pp. 95-97, 106, 110. See also John Kuentzel’s ‘The Heidegger in Loder (Or
How the Nothing Became the Void): Provoking Wonder in Education.’

80
Chapter Two: Four Contemporary Authors
on Christian Mystical Spirituality

1. Introduction

In the last chapter, we explored the transformation theory of James

Loder. In that exploration, I used some phrasing that will re-appear in
this chapter. However, the conceptual connections that I assert to exist
between Loder and Christian mystical spirituality (as it is explored in
this chapter) is not one of simple ‘semantic connections.’ Neither is it
a suggestion of ‘one-to-one conceptual correlations that disregard
differences between the conceptual fields.’ Recall Loder’s protest
against both these types of interdisciplinarity as being superficial. I am
not using Lder’s theory for the very kind of inter-disciplinary analysis
that he decries. Rather, I assert that the conceptual fields of Loder’s
transformation theory and of mystical spirituality (as considered
below) are the same: human response to God’s sustaining presence
that simultaneously invites deep, transforming relationality. I will
explore this assertion of identity in conceptual fields between Loder
and the four authors more fully in the next chapter (three).
The following sections examine the contemporary investigations
of classical texts in mystical theology representing three Christian
traditions in selected texts by Andrew Louth (Orthodox),1 Bernard
McGinn (Roman Catholic),2 Denys Turner (Roman Catholic),3 and

1 Louth, A. The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to

Denys.
2 McGinn, B. The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism, a
five volume series: 1. The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth
Century; 2. The Growth of Mysticism: Gregory the Great through the 12th
Century; 3. The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New
Mark McIntosh (Anglo-Catholic)4 (named in the order that their texts
were published, except for all of McGinn; McGinn’s ‘text’ is actually
a five-volume series on Christian mysticism, the fourth and fifth not
yet out; the other authors’ texts are single volumes). These four
authors reject the reduction of Christian mystical spirituality purely to
a kind of ‘experientialism.’ I refer to this object of their concern as a
‘mysticism-experience identity.’ Recall that this phrase is my short-
hand reference to the four authors’ concern about mysticism being
reduced purely to or identified with experience. This concern could
disqualify Loder’s theory from being useful in the context of Christian
spirituality, at least as these four authors understand it, since the
transformation theory of Loder values experience. Before taking up
that question in the next chapter, I consider the four authors’ concern
about a ‘mysticism-experience identity’ because it represents a major
issue in spirituality discourse.
If mystical experience is reducible purely to experience, then the
understandings of various religious traditions or thought systems are
simply cultural distinctions and not integral to mysticism itself.
Accordingly, exploring their concern raises questions about concepts
and terminology. Do the authors distinguish or identify ‘spirituality,’
‘mysticism,’ and ‘contemplation’? If they distinguish the concepts,
then in what way do the concepts and terms relate? A brief
consideration of these issues is important to substantiate my claim that
they are talking about the same thing. That these four authors all
articulate a concern about the reduction of mysticism purely to
experience, and that they do so without collaboration, from different
academic and geographical locations, merits attention. I examine each
author’s expression of their concern and then focus on one aspect of
mysticism: claims to experiences of divine immediacy. Do the four
authors understand the mystics to claim divine immediacy, or an
unmediated experience of God? If so, then how do they understand the

Mysticism—1200-1350; 4. Continuity and Change in Western Mysticism; 5. The

Crisis of Mysticism.
3 Turner, D. The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism.
4 McIntosh, M. Mystical Theology: The Integrity of Spirituality and Theology.

82
nature of such claims? This discussion might be somewhat confusing
because immediacy is used in two ways: (1) to refer to the mystical
experience of God’s presence; and (2) to refer to the doctrine of God’s
constant sustaining presence as divine or creative immediacy, without
which nothing would exist. From a Christian perspective, all people
have an unmediated experience of God’s presence or they would not
exist. However, most people live unaware or unconscious of this
divine immediacy. If and when such awareness comes, it is a gift and
contemporary understandings of human consciousness and knowledge
suggest that it is still mediated, that humans cannot have unmediated
experience. After arguing against the reduction of mysticism purely to
experience, do the four authors provide warrants for that reductive
understanding by asserting that mysticism involves unmediated
experience of God? And by doing so, do they end up negating their
own assertions that context and content are integral to mysticism?
In this chapter, I do not enter into the debates about textual
interpretation, or evaluate the portrayals, of the mystical authors by
the four authors. Rather, I draw attention to the ways in which each
contemporary author (the publishing dates span 1981-1998) himself
seems to understand Christian spirituality and mysticism as it emerges
from his text(s). This endeavor is complicated by the fact that each
author aims to present what the mystical texts themselves say about
spirituality, mysticism, and contemplation. However, each author
makes evaluative statements of the texts and from these evaluative
statements we can discern their own views. The focus of this
discussion is to identify those views, rather than those of the mystical
authors per se. Similarly, when I consider the four authors’
understanding of divine immediacy, I do not assess their
interpretations of other authors (e.g., Bernard Lonergan or Karl
Rahner). The reader will notice that the sections considering Louth’s
contribution to the discussion are the briefest, that his concern about
the ‘mysticism-experience identity’ is implicit, and that he does not
explore the nature of the mystical claims to divine immediacy.
However, I include him among the four authors because he was one of
the first to remark on the reduction of mysticism to experience and the
separation of spirituality from theology.

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2. Spirituality, Mysticism, and Contemplation: Distinct or
Identical?

In this section I consider the extent to which each author distinguishes

or identifies mysticism, spirituality, and contemplation. Along the
way, the discussion notes the extent of their agreement. The
discussion in this sub-section provides the conceptual frame-work for
the rest of the chapter.

2.1 Andrew Louth

At first glance, Andrew Louth seems to present a fluctuating

relationship between spirituality, mysticism, and contemplation. The
concepts sometimes seem to be inter-changeable and at other times
distinct. This is somewhat true of all four authors, yet, ultimately, all
four distinguish the concepts. Their presentations arise from the inter-
connectedness of the concepts, the breadth of historical survey, and
the complicated uses of the terms within the mystical texts. As noted,
my analysis focuses on the understanding of the four contemporary
authors themselves and, despite the just mentioned challenges, that
understanding is discernible. In brief, they understand mysticism as a
type of spirituality and contemplation as part of mysticism and these
understandings connect with Loder’s inter-disciplinary theory of
transformation.
While discussing the separation of ‘dogmatic’ and ‘mystical’
theology, which he mourns,5 Louth quotes Thomas Merton. Merton
seems to use ‘spirituality’ and ‘mystical theology’ almost
synonymously. Louth makes no comment on whether or not Merton is
using the terms synonymously (e.g., when quoting Merton as follows:
‘dogmatic and mystical theology, or theology and “spirituality”’6) and,
in the very next paragraph, Louth himself uses ‘mystical theology’

5 Louth, p. 199.
6 Ibid., p. xi-xii; quoting Thomas Merton from Seeds of Contemplation, p. 197.

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and ‘spirituality’ similarly.7 This presentation of an ‘almost, but not
quite’ identity between ‘mystical theology’ and ‘spirituality’
characterizes his portrayal of ‘contemplation’ and ‘mystical’ as well.
Louth suggests that the phrase, ‘doctrine of contemplation,’ might be a
better way of naming the ‘mystical theology’ in Plato’s philosophy.8
In his survey of Origen through John of the Cross, Louth describes the
appearance, development, and presence or absence of the doctrine of
contemplation in various authors. ‘[W]hen the greatest of the monastic
rules came to be written, that of St. Benedict, we find no word in it
about contemplation.’9 Louth calls the absence of contemplation an
‘anti-mystical strand in monasticism’ and thereby presents
contemplation as a major part of or perhaps even synonymous with
mysticism.10 However, in the course of his discussion, the nature of
this ‘almost, but not quite the same’ relationship between the concepts
takes the shape of ‘spirituality’ as a broad category, ‘mysticism’ as a
type of ‘spirituality,’ and ‘contemplation’ as a part of ‘mysticism.’
Louth understands ‘the [spiritual] traditions that developed
within monasticism’ to be ‘the basic traditions for later mystical
theology.’11 For example, Augustine’s view of human nature as
spiritual,12 instills in all humans the potential for a mystical ascent13 or
return14 to God who is spiritual. Louth refers to Augustine’s ‘spiritual
theology’15 in the context of his trinitarian ‘dogmatic’ theology that
‘passes over into spiritual theology,’ with both theologies having the
same ‘end’: mystical contemplation of God.16 ‘Spirituality’ refers to
something broader that encompasses mysticism and contemplation.

7 Ibid., p. xii.
8 Ibid., p. 1.
9 Ibid., p. 100.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., p. 131.
12 Ibid., p. 143.
13 Ibid., pp. 138, 141.
14 Ibid., p. 134.
15 Ibid., p. 158.
16 Ibid.

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 In Louth’s concluding chapter, ‘The Mystical Life and the
Mystical Body,’ his use of the term ‘mysticism’ or ‘mystical’ far
outweighs his use of the term ‘spirituality’ or ‘spiritual.’ When he
does use the latter, he presents the sort of relationship with mysticism
suggested above. Spirituality seems to be a general category and
mysticism a specific life within or form of Christian spirituality. For
example, he summarizes the arguments of Père Festugière who finds
‘the philosophical spirituality of these Fathers [to be] simply a variant
of Platonist mysticism,’17 that ‘it is essentially independent of
Christianity. It betrays its independence in that it is a form of
mysticism […] it presents as an ideal a form of life that is exclusively
contemplative and has no place for action, even if that action is
inspired by love.’18 Louth disagrees with Festugière, arguing that
Christian ‘mystical spirituality’ differs from Platonic mysticism in its
understanding of God,19 in its understanding of the soul’s relation to
God,20 and in its union of contemplative love and action.21 In his
disagreement with Festugière, Louth uses ‘mystical’ to qualify
‘spirituality,’ making mysticism a form of spirituality, and places
contemplation within mysticism. He asserts that ‘[j]ust as theology
and spirituality ought not to be separated, and are not in the Fathers,
nor should contemplation and action be separated.’22 Louth explains
that ‘as we perceive that contemplation and action are held together in
Christian love […] we begin to discern what is truly distinctive in
Christian mysticism.’23 He describes contemplation as the ‘search for
a sense of kinship with God’ that is central to mysticism.24
In summary, Louth portrays ‘spirituality,’ ‘mysticism,’ and
‘contemplation’ as inter-connected, but not identical. He portrays
spirituality as a general category that includes mysticism; mysticism is

17 Ibid., p. 193.
18 Ibid., pp. 192-193.
19 Ibid., p. 195.
20 Ibid., p. 197.
21 Ibid., p. 199.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., p. 100.

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a life within or form of spirituality. His use of ‘contemplation’ places
it centrally within mysticism.

2.2 Bernard McGinn

Like Louth, McGinn presents mysticism as a particular type or

expression of Christian spirituality, and contemplation as part of
mysticism. He observes that ‘[t]he past two decades [1970’s and
1980’s] have witnessed a remarkable resurgence of interest in the
study and practice of Christian spirituality, not least in mysticism
traditionally understood as the acme of the spiritual path.’25 Not all
would agree with his ranking of mysticism as the ‘acme’ of Christian
spirituality, as he and Louth both recognize.26 McGinn’s words do not
necessarily imply a ranking of Christians according to their presence
among or outside the mystics sub-set, and indeed the boundaries are
fluid as discussed further on in this section. If mysticism is the acme
of Christian spirituality, it might be offered to all, but accepted by
only a few. Alternatively, mysticism might be part of every
Christian’s spirituality, but unrecognized and/or undeveloped as such.
Whether or not the ‘traditional understanding’ that he describes holds
true for all or most Christian traditions, his texts, as discussed below,
reveal his understanding of a relationship between mysticism and
spirituality that portrays mysticism as a ‘sub-set’ of spirituality. This
portrayal accords with that of Louth.
What I will call the ‘sub-set’ nature of the relationship between
mysticism and spirituality appears throughout McGinn’s three
published volumes. The sub-set relationship emerges as he explains
his use of the word ‘element’ in his working understanding of
mysticism. That ‘element’ refers to a posture of attentiveness to God
in life and a person’s attempt to articulate their consciousness of God
as they live in that attentive posture.27 In volume one, McGinn sources

25 McGinn, 1:p. xi.

26 Ibid., p. 24; Louth, p. xv.
27 McGinn, 1:p. xv-xvii. See also discussion in the next section of this chapter.

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his use of the word ‘element’ to Friedrich Baron von Hügel’s ‘great
book, The Mystical Element of Religion’ which ‘emphasize[s] that
mysticism is only one part or element of a concrete religion and any
particular religious personality.’28 In volume two, McGinn asserts that
‘early medieval mysticism as an element in the Christendom of the
Middle Ages develop[s] in dynamic relation to all these aspects of the
total spirituality of the period.’29 In volume three, he entitles a chapter
section as ‘Mystics among the Spirituals.’30 He describes the ‘mystical
spiritualities’31 of the Franciscans and beguines. Referring to the
beguines, he asserts that their form of life ‘include[s] a strong mystical
element within its understanding of how to live the gospel,’ referring
to ‘[t]he archetype of the early stages of beguine life, and especially of
beguine spirituality.’32 If I understand McGinn correctly, then there
would be such a thing as spirituality that was not mystical, but there
would not be such a thing as mysticism that was not spiritual. All three
volumes seem to relate the terms in this way as he presents various
mystical figures.
While discussing Saint Patrick of Ireland (ca. 390-460), McGinn
remarks that ‘there is another side to Patrick’s spirituality as found in
the Confessions, one that displays a mystical element.’33 Christian
spirituality can display a mystical element, but it does not necessarily
do so. In a discussion about another Irish monk, Columbanus (ca. 543-
615), McGinn asserts that Columbanus ‘is an important representative
of early medieval monastic spirituality in many ways, but he would
not usually be thought of as a mystic, at least by anyone who ever read
his harsh Community Rule (Regula coenobilialis).’34 Yet, McGinn
does not make easy distinctions. ‘[H]is [Columbanus’] twelfth
sermon, “On Compunction,” contains an impassioned and beautiful

28 Ibid., p. xvi.
29 Ibid., p. 19.
30 Ibid., 3:p. 120.
31 Ibid., pp. 32, 186.
32 Ibid., p. 33.
33 Ibid., 2:p. 84.
34 Ibid., p. 32.

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personal prayer that Christ will set him afire with love.’35 McGinn’s
next sentence reveals that, for him, the mystical element, so identified,
permeates all of a person’s life and writings. ‘This artful and yet
moving passage, were it found in a Bernard or a Teresa, would
probably be endlessly cited as a classic example of their
“mysticism”.’36 He comments similarly on other figures or movements
with a spirituality that influences mysticism or contains a mystical
element, avoiding easy distinctions or firm boundaries.
In his discussion of Augustine of Hippo (354-430), McGinn
describes Augustine’s spirituality as containing a mystical theory.37
McGinn’s consideration of Hilary of Poitiers (ca. 315-367) and Peter
Damien (1007-1072) asserts that they make important contributions to
mystical spirituality, although it would ‘be difficult to speak of Hilary
as a mystical author’38 and it ‘would be incorrect to think of Peter as a
mystical author in the full sense of the term.’39 The tenth century
monastic reform movement was inspired by a spirituality that ‘was
often real, and, at times at least, also characterized by mystical
elements.’40 The thirteenth century female ‘spiritual literature’ known
as the ‘Katherine Group’ are ‘not mystical treatises as such,’ but
‘contain reflections on mystical themes.’41 Thus, McGinn’s ‘sub-set’
of mysticism within Christian spirituality contains blurred or fluid
boundaries. These blurred boundaries correspond with Louth’s
seemingly ‘slippery’ presentation of spirituality, mysticism, and
contemplation, and their inter-connectedness.
Lastly, does McGinn equate mysticism with contemplation? Yes,
and no. In his first volume, he states that contemplation is a ‘major
mystical categor[y].’42 However, in his second volume, he asserts that
the term ‘contemplatives’ is ‘more or less what we mean when we use

35 Ibid.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., 1:p. 257.
38 Ibid., p. 198.
39 Ibid., 2:p. 126.
40 Ibid., p. 122.
41 Ibid., 3:p. 187.
42 Ibid., 1:p. xvii.

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the term ‘mystics’ today.’43 In volume three, while discussing the
timing of significant doctrinal changes, he mentions ‘the attempt to
introduce scholastic modes of ordering the doctrine of contemplatio
among the Victorines’ and that ‘for mysticism at least, a more decisive
shift is evident around the year 1200.’44 Also in volume three, he
distinguishes contemplatio from theologia mystica, and argues that
neither is peripheral to a ‘real’ mysticism, but integral to it.45 Hence,
McGinn portrays historical distinctions between contemplation and
mysticism, with contemplation as part of mysticism, while noting that
contemporary usage tends to identify the terms.
In summary, although McGinn uses the phrase ‘spirituality and
mysticism’ in all three volumes,46 which, taken out of context, could
be misunderstood as referring to discrete phenomena, his three-
volume discussion presents mysticism as the acme of spirituality.
Spirituality is a general set and mysticism a sub-set within spirituality.
Identification of the sub-set within the larger set does not involve firm
borders, but the discernment of elements that can characterize
writings, prayers, and lived and/or recommended life-styles
characterized by a posture of attentiveness to God’s presence and an
attempt to articulate experience of God’s presence. The more
pervasive the mystic element in a particular life or movement, the
more likely that the general spirituality will be understood as
specifically mystical. Like Louth, McGinn presents contemplation as a
part of mysticism. McGinn also notes a contemporary identity of the
terms.

43 Ibid., 2:p. ix.

44 Ibid., 3:p. 2.
45 Ibid., p. 26.
46 E.g., McGinn, 1:pp. 85, 196; 2:pp. 159, 160; 3:pp. 6, 151, 188.

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2.3 Denys Turner

Like Louth and McGinn, Turner relates spirituality, mysticism, and

contemplation in a way that portrays mysticism as a form of
spirituality. He focuses on the attempted articulation of experience of
God’s presence. His scrutiny of the use of mystical metaphors in
‘good’ versus ‘bad’ spirituality renders his understanding of the
concepts more complicated to extract.
Turner introduces his text by relating the metaphorical language
of spirituality and mysticism: ‘I began by supposing that it would be
fruitful to look at some elements of the metaphorical lingua franca of
Western Christian writing about “spirituality” and “mysticism”.’47 He
relates spirituality and mysticism via the mystical metaphors that
contemporary Christians use (or mis-use)48 when they ‘seek to
describe the ways of prayer, spirituality and mysticism’,49 metaphors
such as ‘inwardness,’ ‘ascent,’ ‘interiority,’ ‘lightness-darkness.’ The
mis-use of such mystical metaphors to urge one to seek a particular
experience, of darkness for example, creates Christian ‘spiritualities’
that are ‘rather closed’ and ‘anti-intellectual.’50 To seek an experience
of darkness is to detach the metaphor from its theological content,
context, and the dialectical matrix from which it derives meaning. An
example of the dialectical matrix involves an affirmation about God’s
presence, a negation of that affirmation, and a movement beyond
those negations and affirmations to God’s presence, which defies and
yet requires speech. The affirmations and negations in the dialectical
matrix involve both the content and context of the experience of
God’s presence. Seeking experiences of darkness or light or even of
interiority are not mystical in themselves, since the experiences have
become the goal rather than God.
Turner uses Eckhart’s linguistic apophaticism (or paradoxical
metaphors) to criticize these ‘spiritualities.’51 This linguistic

47 Turner, p. 3.
48 Ibid., p. 5.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., p. 8.
51 Ibid., pp. 272-273.

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apophaticism flows from a mystical spirituality that, in contrast to the
unfortunate ‘spiritualities’ just mentioned, guards against idolatry
through the employment of paradoxical mystical metaphors. For
example, we seek union with God ‘out of “something” into “nothing”,
that is, out of our idolatries, into relationality with God who is no
thing; God is not nothing, but cannot be categorized like other things,
is beyond the category of things, is no thing.52 Turner refers to these
paradoxical mystical metaphors as part of a ‘dialectical dynamic.’
This ‘dialectical dynamic’ distinguishes superficial ‘spiritualities’
from the mystical spirituality described by the seven authors that he
surveys (Denys the Areopagite, Augustine, Bonaventure, Eckhart, the
Cloud Author, Denys the Carthusian, and John of the Cross). The very
language of these seven authors, as Turner understands them, warns
against a pseudo-spirituality that mis-uses mystical metaphors. The
next section details his concern about the risk of experientialism that
results from the mis-use of mystical metaphors (as part of the
dialectical dynamic). My focus here is on his interweaving of
spirituality and mysticism. Implicit in this interweaving is his
portrayal of spirituality as a general category and mysticism as a part
of or sub-set in that category.
For example, Turner identifies, with approval, Eckhart’s
criticism of ‘spiritualities’ as technologies of the self, of ways to
achieve a particular experience via the mis-use of mystical
metaphors.53 An example is a person’s search for an experience of
darkness because John of the Cross writes about the dark night of the
soul en route to a deeper knowledge or consciousness of God.
Similarly, Turner asserts that the Cloud Author’s mystical ‘interiority’
criticizes spiritualities of oppositions, dualisms, or polarities that pit a
personal posture of exteriority against one of interiority. Rather, such
postures are interwoven in the life of a mystic. Turner contends that
the Cloud Author’s criticism of oppositions concludes that

52 Ibid.
53 Ibid., p. 185.

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 to seek interiority as opposed to exteriority, is to lack interiority [i.e., to miss
the very thing that such a person is seeking]. It is as Eckhart put it, to be
attached to a ‘way’—perhaps, in one of its forms, it is to be attached to what the
54
Cloud Author sees as a ‘spirituality’.

That is, a person is attached to a recommended way, which becomes

the focus of a spirituality in itself, rather than the spirituality
supporting a person in becoming more and more attached to God; it is
an over-emphasis on the means so that God becomes almost an
afterthought, an optional add-on.
Turner explicitly associates a ‘perverted “spirituality”’55 with the
mis-use of the term ‘mystical.’ He criticizes the proffering of
‘extraordinary—should we say “mystical”—routes to God, such as
specialized “spiritualities” might appear, spuriously, to offer.’56 These
‘mystical routes’ or ‘specialized spiritualities’ consist of a ‘baroque,
over-florid, technology of spiritual experientialism.’57 The ‘anti-
mysticism’ of Eckhart and the Cloud Author urges a ‘deconstruction’
of these ‘technologies.’58 Paradoxically, through such deconstruction,
a person may discover a ‘good’ mystical spirituality of ‘ordinary
means plus detachment’—‘all other “ways” are but diversions.’59
Turner’s identification of a ‘perverted’ spirituality requires the
existence of a non-perverted spirituality. This ‘non-perverted
spirituality’ is associated with the correct use of mystical metaphors,
implying a sub-set relationship between spirituality and mysticism. He
writes of ‘the path of spiritual progress, a path which, following
Augustine, the Cloud Author says must lead’ beyond a distinction
between mystical interiority and exteriority to ‘a “nowhere” which is
an “everywhere”.’60 When a person lives in this everywhere that is
nowhere she delights in ordinary life as the bearer of the extraordinary
presence of God; she is alert to the sustaining presence of God that

54 Ibid., p. 209, italics original.

55 Ibid.
56 Ibid., p. 210.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid., italics original.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid., p. 253.

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simultaneously invites deep, transforming engagement. Similarly,
Turner analyzes Bonaventure’s understanding of the role of images in
‘the spiritual life’61 and the ‘spare, “reduced” [mystical] negativity of
the Cloud Author’s spirituality.’62 Note that within the same author,
the Cloud Author, Turner identifies a spirituality that is condemned
and one that is recommended, with the difference centering on the
mystical metaphors. He contends that his seven authors reveal a ‘one
thousand year tradition of seeking the [spiritual and mystical] terms in
which to state, with a theological precision which alone can sustain an
adequate Christian practice, the relation between the apophatic and the
cataphatic “moments” within the trajectory of the Christian
itinerarium in Deum.’63 As the sub-title of his book states (Negativity
in Christian Mysticism), this tradition is ‘mystical,’ and represents a
form of mystical spirituality recommended by his seven authors.
Implicitly, Turner represents mysticism as a form of spirituality. What
about the term ‘contemplation’?
Like Louth and McGinn, Turner uses the term ‘contemplation’ in
a way that relates it closely to mysticism. He asserts that all seven
authors ‘are of common mind in believing that that contemplation [the
excessus of contemplative love or divine immediacy] is not itself a
“practice,” that it is something no technique or “menes” can stage-
manage, for it is a pure grace, prepared for by good practice, and by
no means guaranteed by it.’64 This contemplation is part of the
mysticism in Denys the Areopagite, in which ‘the force of the word
“mystical” denotes the “hiddenness” of the divine transcendent within
the public, accessible, common cult, a “moment” of negativity within
the affirmative. Denys’ “mysticism” is what that common cult gives
access to.’65 In other words, the mystical refers to the sustaining
presence of God that through the course of an ordinary day, through
the ritual of the daily office or liturgy, offers deep, transforming
engagement. Somehow a person becomes aware of her contingency or

61 Ibid., p. 254.
62 Ibid., p. 256.
63 Ibid.
64 Ibid., p. 258.
65 Ibid., p. 259, italics original.

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dependency on God. Although similar, mysticism and contemplation
are not identical; contemplation can be mistaken for a practice or
technique that cultivates divine immediacy, whereas mysticism
describes the divine immediacy that undergirds all of life, spiritually
speaking. Again implicitly, Turner portrays contemplation as a part of
mysticism.
In summary, Turner identifies ‘bad’ spirituality and mysticism,
while distinguishing ‘good’ mysticism as a part of a ‘good’
spirituality. The former he finds in contemporary usage and warned
against in his seven authors. The latter he finds recommended by his
seven authors. A key difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ spirituality
is the use or mis-use of mystical metaphors in a ‘dialectical dynamic’
of performative language; mystical language is performative. Mystical
metaphors rightly used point to the usually unnoticed and yet all-
sustaining presence of God without becoming focci in and of
themselves. Similarly to Louth and McGinn, Turner implicitly
indicates that the ‘good’ variety of mysticism is a sub-set of the ‘good’
variety of spirituality. Also like Louth and McGinn, Turner portrays
contemplation as a part of mysticism.

2.4 Mark McIntosh

Stated briefly, McIntosh agrees with the other three authors. He

presents mysticism as a sub-set of spirituality and contemplation as a
part of mysticism. He presents ‘spirituality’ as ‘a discovery of the true
“self” precisely in encountering the divine and human other—who
allows one neither to rest in a reassuring self-image nor to languish in
the prison of a false social construction of oneself.’66 In his depiction
of this spiritual encounter, he emphasizes transformation, discovery of
self, new perceptions, new understandings, a new pattern of personal
growth in community, all engendered and empowered by God, and
roots his understanding in the biblical use of the qualifier spiritual

66 McIntosh, pp. 5-6, italics original.

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(pneumatikos).67 The ‘mystical,’ he presents as ‘the depth dimension
of all spirituality,’68 as ‘that transforming knowledge of God which
early Christian writers often saw as the very foundation of theology.’69
Thus, McIntosh understands mysticism as a part of spirituality.
McIntosh traces a change in the meaning of the term ‘spirituality’
over sixteen centuries. During that time, he contends that it comes to
refer to a more privatized, interior state of the soul. Around seventeen
hundred, the term mystical theology is appropriated from Denys the
Areopagite (who wrote c. 500) to refer to something he never intended
(according to McIntosh), namely to a ‘theoretical teaching about the
soul’s process of sanctification.’70 This narrowed and technical focus
contrasts with Denys’ understanding. McIntosh asserts that Denys
uses the term to refer to ‘the “knowledge” disclosed to Christians as
they themselves are known and transformed by an [ultimately]
unknowable God.’71 In McIntosh’s view, during the twentieth century,
‘the term ‘spiritual theology’ was often used interchangeably with
ascetical/mystical theology.’72 He argues for a return to their earlier
meanings, in which mysticism is the depth dimension of all
spirituality, which involves a transformative encounter. I will return to
this change in meaning below, when I discuss the concern of the four
authors about the ‘experientialization’ of mysticism. The focus here is
McIntosh’s contention that both spirituality and mysticism have been
narrowed and privatized in their meanings. He brings the term
‘contemplation’ into this discussion of past and present meanings and
relates it to both ‘mysticism’ and ‘spirituality’.
McIntosh asserts that ‘[t]oday we often use the term “mysticism”
though this is really something of an academic invention; earlier eras
referred to the most intimate and transforming encounter with God as

67 ‘The qualifier pneumatikos (spiritual) in the New Testament is obviously

connected to the pneuma who is understood to be in Jesus and to be the gift of
the risen Lord to the community’ (ibid., p. 6).
68 Ibid., p. 8.
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid.
72 Ibid.

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“contemplation”.’73 However, his use of the terms ‘contemplative’ and
‘mystical’ throughout his text seems both to distinguish the terms, like
the other three authors, portraying contemplation as a part of
mysticism, and identify them. For example, he refers to mystical
journeys and theology, not contemplative journeys and theology. Yet,
the ‘intimate transforming encounter’ can be called mystical or
contemplative. He relates this encounter to the term spirituality:
‘Spirituality is the impression that encounter [mystical or
contemplative] has in the continual transformation of the members of
the church.’74
Even so, McIntosh does seem to relate the terms similarly to the
other three authors. The three terms (spirituality, mysticism, and
contemplation) relate for him in that the ‘aesthetic and hermeneutical
process of contemplating the hidden meaning of scripture and liturgy
is the framework for the theological journey into the mystery of
God.’75 ‘The mystery of God’ describes the “gospel of God’s love for
humanity […] it is the manifestation of God’s love and is therefore
always full of unfathomable depths and richness of meaning […] this
infinity discloses itself in the activity of self-giving love, in God’s
decision not to be God apart from the lost creation.’76 ‘Mystical’ refers
to this mystery—‘principally to the hidden and now revealed divine
will to re-unite all things in Christ.’77 Similarly, ‘spirituality […] is the
activity of being led by the Spirit into Christ’s relationship with the
Father.’78 That is, ‘[t]he mystical journey is in fact an interior sharing
in the spiritual states of Christ as he makes his own journey through
life and death and into glory.’79 McIntosh asserts that ‘for many
writers in the Christian mystical traditions, the mystical life is

73 Ibid., p. 11.
74 Ibid., italics original; McIntosh continues: ‘theology is the expression of that
encounter in the attempt to understand and tell something true of the mystery
whom the believing community encounters,’ italics original.
75 Ibid., p. 54.
76 Ibid., p. 43, italics original.
77 Ibid.
78 Ibid., p. 152, italics original.
79 Ibid., p. 195.

97
fundamentally a sharing in Christ’s life at the deepest spiritual level.’80
At the deepest, mystical, level, a person contemplates this mysterious
encounter as part of her spiritual journey.
In summary, McIntosh understands spirituality, mysticism, and
contemplation similarly to the previous three authors. Mysticism is an
aspect or sub-set of spirituality, and contemplation is a part of
mysticism. In mysticism, a person contemplates or has the deepest
encounter with God that occurs in Christian spirituality. According to
all four authors, the modern study of spirituality and mysticism has
narrowed the meaning of the terms to focus on techniques of human
interiority. Recall that this focus on technologies of human interiority
is the very thing that Turner understands his seven mystical authors to
have warned against, through their use of mystical metaphors. A
reductive focus on spirituality, mysticism, and contemplation can
empty these terms from meaning by eliminating the transforming
divine encounter. The following section considers all four
contemporary authors’ concerns about this reduced understanding of
mysticism and spirituality. As noted, my short-hand reference to this
concern is ‘mysticism-experience identity.’

3. Concern about a ‘mysticism-experience identity’

McGinn, Turner, and McIntosh express most directly their concerns

about a reductive understanding of mysticism, an understanding that
equates mysticism with pure experience as the core of all religions.
Louth’s concern with this reduction is somewhat implicit.
Accordingly, this section begins with the three authors who state their
concern explicitly and concludes with Louth.

80 Ibid., p. 190.

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3.1 McGinn

In the General Introduction to his five-volume series, McGinn argues

against a distinction between mystical experience and understanding.

Mystical theology is not some form of epiphenomenon, a shell or covering that

can be peeled off to reveal the ‘real’ thing. The interactions between conscious
acts and their symbolic and theoretical thematizations are much more complex
than that, as the following volumes will try to show. Rather than being
something added on to mystical experience, mystical theory in most cases
precedes and guides the mystic’s whole way of life.81

He therefore attempts to transfer the focus from the presence or

absence of textual claims of mystical experience to the significance of
what is said about mysticism in the text.82 In the texts that he
considers, he finds that ‘many mystics have insisted [that special
altered states] do not constitute the essence of the encounter with
God.’83 For example, ‘the fundamental aim of monastic spirituality
was not so much to strive to enjoy what later ages would call mystical
experience here below as to encourage contemplatio understood as
burning desire for heaven.’84 He does not exclude experience, but
asserts that the monks ‘stressed the profundity of the gap between the
vision of God in heaven and any brief contemplative experience that
might be attained in this life.’85 Accordingly,

[m]any of the greatest Christian mystics (think of Origen, Meister Eckhart, and
John of the Cross) have been downright hostile to such experiences [of special
altered states], emphasizing rather the new level of awareness, the special and
heightened consciousness involving both loving and knowing that is given in
the mystical meeting.86

81 McGinn, 1:p. xiv.

82 Ibid., p. xv.
83 Ibid., p. xvii.
84 Ibid., 2:p. 140.
85 Ibid., p. 141.
86 Ibid.

99
For this reason, he uses the category ‘consciousness’ rather than
‘experience’ in his working understanding of mysticism. Both Turner
and McIntosh interact with McGinn’s working understanding,
mentioned earlier with reference to his use of the word ‘element.’ I
quote it in full here and it will be discussed both in this and the next
section on immediate or direct consciousness of God’s presence.
McGinn states his working understanding of mysticism twice,
once as a set of three categories and once as a sentence:

I prefer to give a sense of how I understand the term by discussing it under

three headings: mysticism as a part or element of religion; mysticism as a
process or way of life; and mysticism as an attempt to express a direct
consciousness of the presence of God.87

Thus we can say that the mystical element in Christianity is that part of its
belief and practices that concerns the preparation for, the consciousness of, and
the reaction to what can be described as the immediate or direct presence of
God.88

I will refer to his understanding of mysticism as ‘element,

comprehensive context, and consciousness.’ As noted, McGinn
chooses the word ‘consciousness’ to avoid some of the pit-falls
associated with the word ‘experience.’ Turner questions whether
McGinn has been successful.89

3.2 Turner and McGinn

Turner applauds McGinn’s attempt to break ‘the linkage between

“mysticism” and “mystical experience”’ but believes that McGinn still

87 Ibid., 1:p. xv-xvi.

88 Ibid., p. xvii.
89 The following discussion is based on Turner’s textual interaction with McGinn
in The Darkness of God. However, since the publication of that book (1995),
Turner finds himself agreeing more or less with McGinn (personal
communication). As I argue later in this chapter, I believe that an essential
agreement exists in their texts, despite Turner’s concerns.

100
places the discussion ‘within the context of the debate as to what
counts as mysticism, as if there were something about the “mystical”
which distinguishes it as a form of consciousness from ordinary
religious experience.’90 Rather, Turner says, his survey of mystical
authors seems to show that ‘the “mystical” is an exoteric dynamic
within the ordinary,’ that it is ‘the negative dialectics of the
ordinary.’91 That is, it is a revelation of God’s sustaining in the
ordinary warp and woof of life. He understands the dialectical
dynamic to operate as ‘a theological critique of individual religious
experience, a critique which was to be practised immanently within it,
not, at least until the late Middle Ages, to be translated in to the terms
of a private, sui generis experience of “the mystical”.’92 He does not
deny experience, but the extraction of the experience from its
comprehensive context. He refers to the context as a ‘dialectical
dynamic,’ involving the paradoxical mystical metaphors noted in the
previous section.
Turner’s dialectical dynamic involves an experience, a negating
of that experience, and then a negating of the first negation.93 The
individual—as part of the Christian community—‘moves’ beyond or
behind or above or within the negation of her experience to God-self.
This is divine immediacy. The negations insist that God is God and
not an idol in the form of our experience or its opposite. For example,
God loves me like a parent, wanting my best at all times, supporting
me, setting limits to protect me. Yet, God does not love me like a
parent, mistaking personal ambitions for my best, confusing support
with control, and justifying limits with their own fears rather than
wisdom. God loves beyond or behind or above or within the love that
is and is not like parental love.
The dynamic is theologically and ecclesiologically formed. All
four authors tie their criticism of a mysticism-experience identity,
explicit or implicit, to an understanding that spirituality and theology

90 Turner, p. 265, italics original.

91 Ibid., p. 268, italics original.
92 Ibid., pp. 268-269, italics original.
93 Ibid., throughout his text, but summarily on pp. 252-256.

101
are de facto united, or illusorily separated. The theological and
ecclesiological formation of the dialectical dynamic in mysticism is
crucial for Turner. According to Turner, McGinn ‘presupposes the
existence of a distinct phenomenon of “the mystical,”’ which
reinforces the separation of the mystical from ‘ordinary religious
experience.’94 Turner fears that McGinn extracts the mystical from its
context, despite McGinn’s careful affirmation of comprehensive
context.
Two more volumes in McGinn’s series have appeared since the
McGinn text with which Turner interacts.95 In these subsequent
volumes, McGinn retains his working understanding of mysticism
(element, comprehensive context, consciousness) and further stresses
context. For example, in the second volume, McGinn emphasizes that
mysticism is ‘an element in concrete religious communities and
traditions.’96 Mysticism is a consciousness, primarily ‘a process or
way of life rather than being defined solely in terms of some
experience of union with God.’97 He acknowledges that the mystical
writers do describe a ‘goal of an encounter with God that is different
from and deeper than that available in the ordinary course of their
practice of religion.’98 His concern about a mysticism-experience
identity does not deny that experience is integral to mysticism. His
point is to underscore that that goal is interwoven with the ‘beliefs and
practices’ that form all of life.99 Thematization is inherent to and
inextricable from mysticism.
In volume three, McGinn again cautions against reading one
strand within mysticism as the whole tapestry. ‘But to define “real”
mysticism primarily as the “experiential” and visionary mysticism
found in late medieval vernacular texts is to impoverish the richness

94 Ibid., p. 265.
95 The second volume of McGinn’s series, was published a year (1994) before
Turner’s text was published (1995). However, McGinn’s working
understanding has not changed significantly from volumes one to two or three.
96 McGinn, 2:p. x, italics original.
97 Ibid., p. xi, italics original.
98 Ibid.
99 Ibid.

102
of the Western mystical tradition and to hinder rather than to assist the
task of attempting to understand the new mysticism [from 1200
forward] itself.’100 He distinguishes between ‘visionary’ and
‘mystical’ elements in Christianity as ‘distinct, though obviously
interconnected trajectories.’101 He asserts that ‘[t]he fundamental error
behind the equation of mysticism with visionary narrative lies in the
assumption that there is some kind of inner division between the
“experiential” and the “theological” aspects of the Christian mystical
tradition.’102 His criteria for whether or not a vision is mystical are
three-fold: the content (‘the kind of vision presented’), the ‘purpose
for which it is given, and the effect it has on the recipient.’103 Turner
agrees with McGinn that context, including theology, is inseparable
from mysticism, but questions whether or not McGinn succeeds in
portraying this inseparability. In turn, Turner might be understood as
denying completely the role of experience or a particular
consciousness. This can be understood as a misreading of Turner, but
the mistake is understandable.
For example, in his review of The Darkness of God, McGinn
expresses concern over Turner’s apparent dismissal of the role of
experience.104 McGinn faults Turner for selecting mystical authors
from ‘only one aspect of the Western mystical tradition’ and for not
presenting the ‘more complex attitude toward experience, or at least
toward the role of states of consciousness in relation to God’
expressed by the authors that he (Turner) did select. McGinn reads
Turner as not acknowledging adequately the importance of ‘what is
expressible’ while recognizing the limitations of experience and
‘gaining a deeper appreciation of the mystery of God.’ In contrast,
McIntosh105 praises Turner for revealing the self-subverting nature of
the mystical descriptions of experience, their explanations ‘that the
journey into God necessitates a letting go of our experiences and what

100 Ibid., 3:p. 24.

101 Ibid., p. 25.
102 Ibid., p. 26.
103 Ibid., p. 27, italics original.
104 Journal of Religion, 77:pp. 309-311.
105 Anglican Theological Review, 79:pp. 75-79.

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we think of as our “self” in favor of our true self-in-relation-with
God.’ Thus, McIntosh seems to find in Turner what McGinn wishes
he had found. Hence McIntosh, McGinn, and Turner (by McIntosh’s
reading and my own) all agree on the subverting nature of experiential
language that points beyond any experience to a mysterious yet
present God.
As he surveys the writings of seven mystical authors, Turner
wonders ‘whether or not there was any such thing as “mystical
experience”.’106 He finds among the mystic writers either no mention
of mystical experiences or an attitude that ‘attached little or no
importance to them.’107 Furthermore, he asserts that mystical
metaphors (e.g., inwardness or ascent) have been given modern
meanings. Moderns understand them to refer to psychological
experiences while the ‘mediaeval employment of them was tied in
with a “critique” of such religious experiences and practices.’108
Turner criticizes the contemporary ‘psychologizing’ mind of thinking
of the ‘mystical’ in terms of ‘characterising experiences.’109 He aims
to ‘rescue [mystical metaphors of negativity] from a contemporary
“experientialist” misreading.’110
After examining the negative metaphors in Denys the
Areopagite, Augustine, Bonaventure, Eckhart, the Cloud Author,
Denys the Carthusian, and John of the Cross, with glances at other
authors as well, Turner concludes that ‘“[e]xperientialism” in its most
extreme forms is therefore the displacement of a sense of the
negativity of all religious experience [that is, its limits] with the
pursuit of some goal of achieving negative experiences.’111 Turner
argues, and claims that the mystical writers that he surveys argue,
against this ‘psychologistic mysticism of “negative experiences”.’112
For example, he asserts that ‘[i]n both Eckhart and in The Cloud of

106 Turner, p. 2.
107 Ibid.
108 Ibid., p. 4.
109 Ibid., italics original.
110 Ibid., p. 5.
111 Ibid., p. 259, italics original.
112 Ibid., p. 266.

104
Unknowing is found for the first time a conscious employment of the
dialectics of negativity in a polemic against an esoteric and
psychologically reductionist conception of the “mystical”.’113 Turner’s
concern is about the ‘non-dialectical, “experientialist” voluntarisms of
post-medieval “mysticism”’ that has lost the ‘many layers of meaning
and prescriptions’ of a Meister Eckhart who warns against this
‘mysticism’ as idolatrous. 114
Rather than denying that experience is part of mysticism, Turner
seems to deny that experience is the goal of mysticism. The dialectical
dynamic within mysticism that he identifies begins with experience.
Experience is negated, but the negation of the experience is also
negated. The experience is part of ‘all things lead[ing] to a God who is
beyond what they lead to, by means of ways which are the active
practice of the denial of ways.’115 But what about consciousness? Is a
particular consciousness part of the ‘all things leading’ to God? Turner
addresses that too.

And so we can, in a sense, be aware of God, even be ‘conscious’ of God; but

only in that sense in which we can be conscious of the failure of our
knowledge, not knowing what it is that our knowledge fails to reach. This is not
the same thing as being conscious of the absence of God in any sense which
entails that we are conscious of what it is that is absent. God cannot be the
object of any consciousness whatever.116

Again, Turner seems concerned about the understood goal of

mysticism—it is not a particular consciousness any more than it is a
particular experience, although ‘in a sense’ it is both. However, both
linguistic formulations (using experience or consciousness) risk, for
Turner, reducing mysticism to a purely psychological phenomenon,
replacing God with a manipulated idol.
Like McGinn, Turner emphasizes comprehensive context, the
earlier mentioned ‘ordinary religious experience’ through ‘worship,

113 Ibid., p. 270.

114 Ibid., p. 272.
115 Ibid.
116 Ibid., p. 265, italics original.

105
private prayer, sacramental or liturgical action.’117 In this emphasis,
for Turner, like McGinn, mysticism is an element of the Christian life,
the ‘exoteric dynamic within the ordinary.’118 The particular
consciousness component of McGinn’s understanding of mysticism
could be a dividing point between Turner and McGinn. In his text,
Turner certainly seems to think so, but he has since retracted his
disagreement.119 And, while discussing McIntosh, I will suggest a
deeper textual agreement despite apparent disagreement. The point
here is their mutual concern about a mysticism-experience identity, a
reductive psychologization of mysticism in Christian spirituality.
As noted earlier, for McGinn, Turner, and McIntosh, part of the
problem is that a mysticism-experience identity seems to arise from a
separation of mysticism from theology. I have already quoted McGinn
on this. Following are two quotes from Turner before turning to
McIntosh. Regarding Augustine’s Confessions, Turner asserts that
there is ‘little value in, and little justice done to his complex
discussions by, an exegesis which relie[s] upon any sharp contrast
between the “experiential” and the “systematic”.’120 (Again, we find
an indication that Turner does not deny experience, but its
reductionistic use.) Regarding Denys the Carthusian’s De
Contemplatione, Turner asserts that ‘in Denys’ terminology,
“contemplation” is coextensive with “theology” and “mysticism” is
what theology leads to and, ultimately, is.’121

117 Ibid.
118 Ibid., p. 268.
119 Personal communication. Regarding their seeming textual disagreement, as
recently as 1999, Aidan Nichols described Turner as the ‘doyen’ of ‘the anti-
experiential school of interpretation of the mediaeval mystical corpus’
(Thomist, 63:p. 324). Nichols’ reading of Turner seems to disregard his
affirmation of experience as part of the dialectical dynamic.
120 Ibid., p. 170, italics original.
121 Ibid., p. 212.

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3.3 McIntosh, Turner, and McGinn

As indicated by the sub-title of his text (The Integrity of Spirituality

and Theology), McIntosh argues for the necessary reunion of
spirituality and theology, like McGinn and Turner (and, as argued
below, Louth), finding false the separation of practices and
experiences from beliefs and doctrines. Bearing in mind McIntosh’s
assertion that during the twentieth century, ‘spiritual theology’ is used
interchangeably with ‘ascetical/mystical theology,’122 the following
passage describes his dissatisfaction with a mysticism-experience
identity.

While no one would want to discount the significance of experiential

phenomena in the spiritual life, if these are seen as the defining features then
spirituality seems to lose its theological voice. It becomes seen as a particularly
powerful expression of human subjectivity. The analysis of spirituality in terms
of that subjectivity washes out the theological implications of the subject’s
transformation—the trace of the divine other vanishes behind one or another
aspect of human self-consciousness.123

His concern is that the mysticism-experience identity can lead to an

essentialist, core understanding of mysticism that forecloses rather
than includes spirituality’s inter-dependence with theological
reflection.124 A risk inherent in an essentialist understanding of
mysticism is the de-contextualization of experience. He quotes Harvey
D. Egan, SJ, who writes in his book on mysticism that ‘interpretation
is intrinsic to experience.’125 Like McGinn and Turner, McIntosh
argues that the comprehensive context, all of life, is vital for
understanding mysticism. Context includes theology; spirituality and
theology inter-penetrate one another. McIntosh names Turner and

122 McIntosh, p. 8.
123 Ibid., p. 9.
124 Ibid.
125 Ibid., p. 14, quoting from Egan, H., SJ, Christian Mysticism: The Future of a
Tradition, p. 375.

107
McGinn as among those attempting ‘to illuminate the fundamentally
theological concerns of spirituality.’ 126
Recall McIntosh’s assertion that the modern use of the term
‘mysticism’ is an ‘academic invention’ and that ‘earlier eras’ referred
to this ‘most intimate and transforming encounter with God as
“contemplation”.’127 Contemplation, he states, ‘is not particularly
concerned with the inner states of the contemplative (however
interesting, unusual and worthy of study they may be in their own
right), but with the breaking through of wisdom into the
contemplative’s consciousness.’128 This ‘breaking through of wisdom’
means that the contemplative encounter is inherently theological
because it ‘issues in new understanding.’129 Thus, he attributes an
experientialist focus in contemporary studies of mysticism to the
separation of spirituality (thereby including mysticism and
contemplation) as a field or discipline from theology. He locates an
illusory split between spirituality and theology within the mis-
identification of experientialism as the essence of mysticism.
McIntosh’s interaction with three articles written by Sandra
Schneiders130 illustrates further his concern about a mysticism-
experience identity. He notes that Schneiders identifies her approach
to spirituality as anthropological131 and asserts that she thereby opens
herself to the experientialist distortions that Turner describes.132
McIntosh’s concern about mysticism’s identification with personal
experience is that by ‘identifying the human search for wholeness as
the true subject matter of spirituality (as academic discipline), the

126 Anglican Theological Review, 79:p. 78.

127 McIntosh, p. 11.
128 Ibid., p. 12.
129 Ibid., italics original.
130 McIntosh justifies his focused interaction with Schneiders by noting that she is
‘the founder and director of one of America’s leading graduate academic
programs in the study of spirituality’ and describing her views as ‘influential,’
p. 19.
131 Ibid., p. 20. See Sandra Schneiders’ article, ‘Spirituality as an Academic
Discipline: Reflections from Experience,’ Christian Spirituality Bulletin 1/ 2:
p. 15.
132 McIntosh, p. 23, quoting Turner.

108
anthropological approach would seem to render God peripheral.’133 It
presents spirituality as an ‘innate human aspiration towards
ultimacy.’134 He asks, ‘who is this wonderfully transcending self who
happens to have an Ultimate Value of some kind as the reference for
the self’s higher integration?’135 He quotes McGinn as noting ‘wryly:
“if spirituality is everything that is good and positive about what is
human, then all it needs is a round of applause rather than cultivation
and study”.’136
For McIntosh,

[t]he anthropological approach to spirituality would seem to be a continuation

of the post-Cartesian preoccupation with the individual subject, complete with
its private mental states and experiences, so that it is exactly these fascinating
experiences that become identified as one’s ‘spirituality’ and are counted
therefore as the subject matter for the academic discipline that studies
spirituality.137

If spirituality, including mysticism, is identified with discrete human

experience, then the entire focus can be on humanity without any
consideration of God, or possibly without consideration of social
embeddedness. This is why he emphasizes that spirituality involves
encounter, ‘a form of life engendered and initiated by the other—the
human other of the neighbour and the divine other whom I meet
through my love for the neighbour.’138 He emphasizes the dynamic,
relational foundation of spirituality, indeed of human nature. Like
McGinn and Turner, he underscores that God initiates and enables the
spiritual/ mystical/ contemplative encounter.
McIntosh, like Turner, interacts with McGinn’s working
understanding of mysticism, quoted above and seemingly unchanged
significantly in his subsequent two volumes. McIntosh asserts that

133 Ibid., p. 21.

134 Ibid., p. 19, italics original.
135 Ibid., p. 21.
136 Ibid., p. 9.
137 Ibid., p. 21.
138 Ibid., p. 22.

109
 [i]n some recent [c.1998, the same year in which McGinn’s third volume
was published] public lectures, McGinn has continued to refine and revise
this statement moving towards a more actualist language of divine
grounding of consciousness…Divine ‘grounding’ language […] would
suggest a more transcendental idea, a sense of God being newly appreciated
by the mystic as the continual source or ground of all life.139

We must await the fourth and fifth volumes to see if McGinn offers
‘divine grounding language’ as a textual refinement of his working
understanding of mysticism. However, we do not need only to wait.
Some indications of ‘divine grounding language’ appear even in
McGinn’s first volume through his interactions with the ideas of
Joseph Maréchal, Bernard Lonergan, Karl Rahner, Henri Bergson,
Jacques Maritain, and Steven Katz.140 We will explore McGinn’s
interactions with some of these theorists in the next section on divine
immediacy since that issue crystallizes the question of consciousness;
Maréchal is key and I quote McGinn’s acknowledgement of his
dependence on Maréchal just below. In addition to volume one,
McGinn’s presentation of the texts themselves in volumes two and
three hint at ‘divine grounding language.’ In volume two, his
portrayal of the texts authored by, for example, Gregory the Great,141
John Scottus Eriugena,142 Bernard of Clairvaux,143 and William of St.
Thierry144 seem to support such language. In volume three, McGinn’s
presentation of texts authored by, for example, Giles of Assisi145 and
Hadewijch of Antwerp146 also seem to support such language. McGinn
states in volume one, that ‘[i]nspired in part by the seminal work of

139 Ibid., p. 30, italics original. This understanding could be (although does not
need to be) aligned with a non-interventionist view of mysticism, as put
forward by J. Gellman, Mystical Experience of God: A Philosophical Enquiry,
p. 73.
140 McGinn, 1:pp. 297-324.
141 Ibid., 2:pp. 57, 59.
142 Ibid., p. 117.
143 Ibid., p. 190.
144 Ibid., pp. 258, 259, 263.
145 Ibid., 3:p. 75f.
146 Ibid., p. 219.

110
Joseph Maréchal, but especially by my reading of the texts that have
been accepted as mystical classics in the history of Christianity, both
East and West,’ he opts for the term ‘presence’ to convey various
accounts of divine encounter and union.147 It might not be too far a
stretch to understand ‘presence’ as ‘divine grounding language’ even
in volume one. If so, then McGinn’s understanding of mysticism as
consciousness of the divine grounding of ordinary Christian life
agrees with Turner’s understanding of mystical as the ‘exoteric
dynamic within the ordinary.’148 This would represent a textual
understanding between Turner and McGinn.
McIntosh focuses approvingly on McGinn’s choice of the
category ‘consciousness’ over ‘experience’ and argues that the term
‘mystical experience’ has been used to make claims against the noetic
content of the mystical encounter. For McIntosh, the term
‘consciousness’ encompasses the ‘full process of cognition’ and
acknowledges the full-rounded cognitive or perceptual nature of both
the mystical encounter and transformation.149 He warns against
confusing the ‘experience of mystical consciousness with the nature of
the reality encountered’ by insisting that the mystical experience of
pure noetic silence does not cancel out the value of speech.150
Although consciousness of God may involve absolute silence or
negativity (not to be confused with Turner’s negations), McIntosh
asserts that God is inherently self-expressive.151

The speaking of the divine Word is eternal and is never silence in itself but the
gloriously infinite effulgence of meaning—a divine meaning-fullness that
shatters the deathly silence of nothingness in creation and the silence of death
itself in the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead.152

147 Ibid., 1:p. xvii.

148 Turner, p. 268.
149 McIntosh, pp. 32-33.
150 Ibid., p. 32, italics original.
151 Ibid.
152 Ibid., italics original.

111
This assertion of God’s self-expressiveness does not contradict
Turner’s dialectical dynamic because neither McIntosh nor Turner
means negative experience. Turner describes a dynamic of negation
and movement ‘beyond’ the negation (negation of the negation) that
may or may not involve negative experience. Just before quoting
Turner, McIntosh states that

[i]f a mystic said for example that, ‘Darkness is the only way to God,’ the
experientialist interpreter takes this to mean that one must seek some inner state
of ‘darkness,’ rather than hearing it as a warning against reliance on particular
beliefs, aspirations, feelings, or idols of any kind whatsoever in the encounter
with the living God.153

Along with McGinn and Turner, McIntosh’s understanding of the Tri-

Une God undergirds his concern over a mysticism-experience identity:
spirituality is interwoven with theology, experience with reflection
and articulation. Exclusive focus on experience or psychological states
can illusorily detach spirituality, mysticism, and contemplation from
their comprehensive contexts. Most importantly, such an illusory
detachment can serve to deny the relational foundation of human
nature and that God is the primary agent in transformative encounters.
Having reviewed our three authors who directly state their concern
over a mysticism-experience identity, I turn to the fourth author who
is more indirect.

3.4 Louth, McIntosh, Turner, and McGinn

Like the other three authors, Louth regrets the separation of mystical
and dogmatic theology. He writes, ‘[j]ust as theology and spirituality
ought not to be separated, and are not in the Fathers, nor should
contemplation and action be separated.’154 Louth identifies a
difference between the emphasis on experience during modernity and
the early years of mysticism. He comments that an ‘appeal to

153 Ibid., p. 23.

154 Louth, p. 199.

112
experience, convincing for us and for most Westerners, did not have
the same importance for them [the Fathers].’155 Rather, ‘truth, for the
Fathers generally, was to be found in Scripture and therefore their
theology took the form of exposition of Scripture.’156 Yet, Louth is not
saying ‘that they [the Fathers] had no experience, only that it was not
their way to talk about them.’157 He, like the other three authors, links
his understanding of God to his insistence that experience and
thematization, mysticism and theology, can not be separated. ‘[F]or
the Fathers God is a Person. It is not an experience of ultimacy they
are concerned with, but an experience of God.’158 Fundamentally,
Louth asserts that Christian mysticism is ecclesiological and therefore
relational. ‘For the Christian the mystical life is the flowering of the
baptismal life, and baptism is incorporation into the Body of Christ,
his Church.’159 Just as McGinn, Turner, and McIntosh emphasize the
comprehensive context of mysticism, that it is an element within
ordinary religious experience rather than a seeking of experience for
experience’s sake, so Louth concludes his book by highlighting the
active service that is to result from and be part of mysticism or the
contemplative life.160
In sum, like the other three authors, Louth is concerned about the
split between spirituality and theology and the isolation of experience
from the ecclesiological context, including Scripture. Implied in these
concerns is a worry over a mysticism-experience identity; his worry
flows from his understanding of God, his own theology. Mysticism is
part of Christian spirituality, inseparable from life formed
ecclesiologically and theologically.
Although none of the authors deny the role of experience in
Christian spirituality, all four express concern over an exclusive focus
on experience or psychological states. My assertion of essential
agreement on this issue may be contentious with regard to McIntosh

155 Ibid., p. 183.

156 Ibid.
157 Ibid., p. 183, italics original.
158 Ibid., p. 195.
159 Ibid., p. 200.
160 Ibid., pp. 202-204.

113
and Louth. Louth reviewed McIntosh’s text161 with less than whole-
hearted endorsement. Louth’s review of McIntosh contrasts with his
(Louth’s) positive comments on Turner’s text and with his (Louth’s)
positive review of McGinn.162 Louth reads McIntosh as not finding
‘experience’ ‘problematical.’ Louth’s reading of McIntosh contrasts
with my own and the readings of others.163 If McIntosh is understood
as others and I have read him, then Louth’s criticisms of McIntosh
imply that he, Louth, would affirm McIntosh’s text. In this sense, my
assertion of agreement holds. They emphasize the comprehensive
context of any mystical experience, which encompasses all of life, the
‘ordinary’ religious way of life with its ecclesiology and theology. A
fundamental relationality undergirds or grounds this ordinary life of
religious belief and practice. That relationality is both divine and
human and yields transformative encounters. Extracting these
encounters from their comprehensive context eradicates their meaning
and significance and risks idolatry.
In the next section I focus on the nature of the divine relationality
and transformative engagement. Do the four authors understand the
mystic theologians to claim the possibility for immediate experience
of God’s presence? Do they identify immediacy with directness? If I
am arguing for connections with Loder that are more than semantic
correlations and that do not ignore differences in conceptual fields,
then I must examine how the four express their understandings of
mystical awareness of God. For example, if I assert that the four
understand the mystics to claim a qualified or partial immediacy of
God’s presence, then a reader might protest that I had ignored the use
of the qualifier direct to describe experience of God, which again
could be understand as without mediation. This would have at least
two unfortunate consequences. Firstly, if the four authors asserted that
mysticism involved unmediated experience of God, then they could be
undermining their own contentions that context and content were

161 Modern Theology, 16:pp. 267-269.

162 Theology, .96:pp. 77-78.
163 See for example, Kerr, F. New Blackfriars, 79:pp. 406-409; and Horne, B.
Theology, 102:pp. 53-54.

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integral to mysticism. Secondly, Loder’s theory argues that experience
of God’s presence is mediated by the person’s reason and imagination,
the human components of all consciousness and knowledge.
Assertions of directness or immediacy by the four authors or the
mystics themselves could seem to disqualify Loder’s theory from
relevance to mysticism as they understand it and undercut my
assertion that his interdisciplinary theory provides a solution to the
problem of reductive analysis.

4. Mysticism and Spirituality: Direct or Immediate

Experience of God’s Presence?

Generally speaking, all four authors assert that mystical writers claim
some sort of immediate awareness or consciousness of God’s
presence. The importance of this conclusion is in the qualifier, ‘some
sort of.’ What ‘sort of’ immediacy will be examined in the following
discussion. Three of the contemporary authors also use the term
‘direct,’ sometimes inter-changeably with immediate, while the fourth
does not seem to use ‘direct’ at all in this way. Thus, as far as
possible, I have not been blind to any ‘backdoor’ assertions of
unmediated experiences of God.

4.1 Louth

Remaining with the author with whom we concluded the discussion of

the previous section, Louth characterizes mysticism

as a search for and experience of immediacy with God. The mystic is not
content to know about God, he longs for union with God. ‘Union with God’ can
mean different things, from literal identity, where the mystic loses all sense of
himself and is absorbed into God, to the union that is experienced as the
consummation of love, in which the lover and the beloved remain intensely
aware both of themselves and of the other. How the mystics interpret the way

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 and the goal of their quest depends on what they think about God, and that itself
is influenced by what they experience: it is a mistake to try to make out that all
mysticism is the same. Yet the search for God, or the ultimate, for His own
sake, and an unwillingness to be satisfied with anything less than Him; the
search for immediacy with this object [God] of the soul’s longing: this would
seem to be the heart of mysticism.164

Notice his use of the term ‘immediacy’ in the first and second to last
lines. In his discussion about the relationship between mystical and
dogmatic theology, he uses the term ‘direct’:

mystical theology provides the context for direct apprehensions of the God who
has revealed himself in Christ and dwells within us through the Holy Spirit;
while dogmatic theology attempts to incarnate those apprehensions in
objectively precise terms which then, in their turn, inspire a mystical
understanding of the God who has thus revealed himself which is specifically
Christian.165

Louth seems to use ‘immediacy’ and ‘direct’ synonymously and

understands the mystics to claim immediacy with God. Louth does not
indicate his understanding of the nature of this claim and we turn to
the other three authors to explore their understandings of the mystical
claims to immediacy.

164 Louth, p. xv, italics original, emphasis mine.

165 Ibid., p. xi, emphasis mine.

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4.2 McGinn166

As far as Louth goes in his analysis, McGinn agrees: the mystical

writers do claim divine immediacy. In the first volume of his series,
McGinn focuses on the mystics’ claim to immediacy with God.

When I speak of mysticism as involving an immediate consciousness of the

presence of God I am trying to highlight a central claim that appears in almost
all mystical texts. Mystics continue to affirm that their mode of access to God is
radically different from that found in ordinary consciousness, even from the
awareness of God gained through the usual religious activities of prayer,
sacraments, and other rituals. As believers, they affirm that God does become
present in these activities, but not in any direct or immediate fashion. Mystical
religious texts are those that witness to another form of divine presence, one
that can, indeed, sometimes be attained within the context of the ordinary
religious observances, but which need not be. What differentiates it from other
forms of religious consciousness is its presentation as both subjectively and
objectively more direct, even at times as immediate.167

Note the contrast between his first use of ‘direct’ as seemingly

synonymous with ‘immediate’ and his distinction of ‘immediate’ from
‘direct’ in the very last line. In the last instance, he seems to
acknowledge that ‘direct’ is still mediated, and the claim to
immediacy warrants an ‘even.’ Moreover, McGinn notes that there is

166 Of the twenty reviewers I surveyed on McGinn’s three volumes, only one was
thoroughly negative of McGinn’s enterprise and of his scholarship, Simon
Tugwell (Tugwell, S. review of vol.1 and review of vol.2). Tugwell’s concerns
focus on McGinn’s use of his sources. As noted, my aim is not to appraise his
use of mystical primary texts, but to identify McGinn’s (and Louth’s, Turner’s,
and McIntosh’s) understandings of spirituality, mysticism, and contemplation
from their interactions with their sources. Tugwell accuses McGinn of
‘selecting texts from the past to illustrate a theme determined by considerations
alien to the material supposedly being studied’ (44:p. 686) and again, ‘he is
trawling for proof texts’ (47:p. 722). That debate—the extent to which
McGinn’s understanding of mysticism arises from his primary texts versus
being imposed upon them—is beyond the focus of this discussion. I note
Tugwell’s reviews to recognize that McGinn’s portrayal is not without
criticism.
167 McGinn, 1:p. xiv, emphasis mine.

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a radical difference between ordinary and mystical consciousness, but
that mystical consciousness might occur during ordinary religious
practices. Awareness of God’s presence might occur during ordinary
consciousness associated with explicitly religious engagements or not.
McGinn continues:

This experience is presented as subjectively different insofar as it is affirmed as

taking place on a level of the personality deeper and more fundamental than that
objectifiable through the usual conscious activities of sensing, knowing, and
loving. There is also an objective difference to the extent that this mode of the
divine presence is said to be given in a direct or immediate way, without the
usual internal and external mediations found in other types of consciousness.168

In this paragraph, which immediately follows the preceding one, he

seems to use ‘direct’ and ‘immediate’ synonymously again. He
focuses on his use of ‘immediacy’ and continues again in a third and
last paragraph that I will quote in full:

It is important to note that this immediacy describes the actual mystical

encounter itself, not the preparation for it, nor its communication in speech or in
writing. Human consciousness in its total activity is always mediated both by
the subject’s previous history and by the mediations necessarily found in all
thought and speech. What the mystics are talking about is what lies ‘between’
these necessary mediations, if I may express it in this way. The mystics may
well be mistaken about this form of immediacy, but I think that it is important,
at least in a preliminary way, to underline this element in their claims before
subjecting them at a later time to a more intense scrutiny.169

In this last paragraph, McGinn makes it clear that he is discussing a

‘form of immediacy.’ His qualification of the term ‘immediacy’ may
explain why he sometimes seems to distinguish between ‘direct’ and
‘immediate’ and sometimes seems to use them synonymously. He
uses the phrase ‘direct contact’ as he describes the Jewish and Greek
inheritance that informs early Christian mysticism, which nevertheless
insists on the centrality of Jesus Christ.170 In his interactions with

168 Ibid., emphasis mine.

169 Ibid., pp. xix-xx, emphasis mine.
170 Ibid., 1:p. 84.

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Dionysius171 and Augustine,172 McGinn uses some form of the term
‘immediate.’ He presents Augustine as emphasizing that ‘any
consciousness of the presence of God in this life […] is less important
than the real but unconscious union with God that all Christians
possess in the Body of Christ.’173 This emphasis explains something of
what McGinn means in his understanding of mystical claims to divine
immediacy as occurring ‘between’ the ordinary mediations. The
mystical consciousness of divine immediacy represents a new aware-
ness of God’s constant, but more unconscious immediacy.
In his qualified use of the term ‘immediacy,’ McGinn stresses a
by now familiar theme, the ‘interdependence of experience and
interpretation.’174 As noted earlier, he finds this supported by the ‘texts
that have been accepted as mystical classics in the history of
Christianity, both East and West’ and ‘the seminal work of Joseph
Maréchal.’175 The inter-penetration of experience and interpretation or
thematization leads McGinn to prefer the term ‘presence’ over ‘union’
to convey the ‘unifying tendency’ in his working understanding of
mysticism.176 He describes Maréchel as ‘the ancestor of the
“transcendental Thomisms” of Bernard Lonergan and Karl Rahner.’177
McGinn summarizes the thought of all three, and that of Hans Urs von
Balthasar, with the promise that they will appear in his fifth and final
work.178 The following paragraphs describe McGinn’s understanding
of Maréchal, Rahner, von Balthasar, and Lonergan. All four inform
McGinn’s presentation of divine immediacy, which will be important
for the next chapter as we consider Loder’s theory for its connections
with the four authors’ mystical spirituality. The following discussion
notes the connections between Loder’s theory and these four sources

171 Ibid., p. 170.

172 Ibid., 2:pp. 237, 253.
173 Ibid., 1:p. 238.
174 Ibid., p. xiv.
175 Ibid., p. xvii.
176 Ibid.
177 Ibid., p. 297, italics original; also p. 301, where he qualifies the ancestry as
‘however indirectly.’
178 Ibid., pp. 285, 289, 291.

119
of McGinn’s understandings of mysticism to emphasize that the
connections with Loder are not superficial but are anchored deeply
within the theological roots of McGinn’s analysis. McIntosh too
interacts with Rahner and von Balthasar, as considered later in this
chapter.
Maréchal: According to McGinn, the culminating point of
mystical experience for Maréchal is ‘the direct, intuitive, unmediated
contact in this life between intelligence and its goal, the Absolute. In
other words, it is “the intuition of God as present, the feeling of the
immediate presence of a Transcendent Being.”’179 These assertions are
based on the ‘existence of a transcendental dynamism in human
knowing (what Bernard Lonergan would later call “the sheer
unrestricted desire to know”)’ that ‘posits or demands a
Transcendental Object to fulfill it.’180 Might this ‘dynamism in human
knowing’ accord with Loder’s posited search for the Face that will not
go away and his understanding of human knowing as characterized by
the ‘logic of transformation’ that always searches for God’s presence,
symbolized by the Face? Maréchal divides Christian mysticism into
three ‘grades.’181 These three ‘grades’ correspond with Loder’s theory,
discussed in the following chapter. McGinn quotes Maréchal’s
descriptions: the first ‘grade’ involves an ‘“integration of the ego and
its objective content”’; the second involves ‘“the transcendent
revelation of the God to the soul”’; the third involves ‘“a kind of
readjustment of the soul’s faculties” by which it regains contact with
creatures “under the immediate and perceptible influence of God
present and acting in the soul.”’182
McGinn considers Maréchal’s ‘philosophy of mysticism’ as
retaining ‘considerable promise for development even today’ while
recognizing some limitations.183 A limitation in Maréchal relevant to

179 Ibid., p. 299, quoting from the English translation of Études sur la psychologie
des mystiques, in English, Studies in the Psychology of the Mystics, pp. 102,
103, italics original.
180 McGinn, 1:p. 299.
181 Ibid., p. 300.
182 Ibid., quoting Maréchal from Studies in the Psychology of Mystics, p. 322.
183 Ibid., p. 301.

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this discussion is McGinn’s assessment that Maréchal presents a
‘rather crude view of the relation between fact or experience and
interpretation.’184 This relationship is crucial for McGinn, indeed, for
all four authors. McGinn notes that Maréchal himself admitted to
neglecting the affective elements within mysticism, and comments
that it is unfortunate that Maréchal did not develop his ‘analysis of the
role of love in the mystical path, but his basic philosphical position
does not exclude it.’185 After considering these and other
‘weaknesses,’186 McGinn maintains that Maréchal’s theory offers
promise ‘for contemporary study of mysticism.’187
Rahner and von Balthasar: McGinn accepts Rahner’s and von
Balthasar’s disagreement ‘on many issues,’ but asserts that ‘they are at
one in seeing mysticism as a central issue in theology.’188 For
McGinn, the ‘dogmatic key’ to Rahner on mysticism

rests in his distinction between the transcendental experience (i.e., the a priori
openness of the subject to the ultimate mystery) and the supernatural experience
in which divine transcendence is no longer a remote and asymptotic goal of the
dynamism of the human subject but is communicated to the subject in closeness
and immediacy. Rahner insists on the reciprocal unity (not identity) of the
experience of God and the experience of the self that is achieved in
interpersonal relations.189

According to McGinn, Rahner distinguishes the experience itself from

the thematization of the experience and this applies to the
‘transcendental experience’ and the ‘supernatural experience.’190 The
first (transcendental experience) is the ‘basis of all human activity’191
while the second (supernatural experience) is ‘a paradigmatic

184 Ibid.
185 Ibid.
186 Ibid.; e.g,: ‘hidden ambiguities and confusions […] a perhaps unresolved
confusion […] between a philosophy of essence and a philosophy of existence.’
187 Ibid., pp. 301-302.
188 Ibid., p. 289.
189 Ibid., p. 286.
190 Ibid., pp. 286-287.
191 Ibid., p. 287.

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intensification of the experience of God that is open to all.’192 Whether
‘transcendental’ or ‘supernatural,’ such experiences are always
empowered by grace.193 McGinn notes that for Rahner, this grace
comes through Christ who is ‘central for all mystical experience.’194
‘Our relation to Jesus is a unique one in which an immediate relation
to God is communicated through the mediacy of the incarnate
Savior.’195 Rahner’s focus on Jesus Christ as mediator agrees with
Loder’s focus on the mediating presence of Jesus Christ in Christian
transformation. However, McGinn finds some ambiguity in the way
that Rahner relates the two experiences. At times, Rahner seems to
present the ‘supernatural experiences’ as equal to those described by
some Christian mystics; at other times, Rahner seems to present them
as part of everyday life.196
McGinn notes that Rahner leaves to empirical psychology the
question of whether or not the supernatural experiences are ‘integral to
becoming a true human and a true Christian.’197 McGinn is critical of
the way in which Rahner at once seems to call for inter-disciplinary
dialogue and to back off from such engagement.198 Loder calls for and
presents the fruits of such engagement. McGinn wonders if Rahner
neglects the extent to which ‘language and other forms of
objectification help shape experience itself—even a priori
experience.’199 As has been highlighted throughout this chapter, all
four authors emphasize the inter-penetration of experience and
thematization. However, McGinn comments that Rahner’s theology of
mysticism offers ‘original and profound answers to some of the basic
questions in the modern discussion of mysticism.’200 McGinn’s

192 Ibid.
193 Ibid.
194 Ibid., p. 288.
195 Ibid., italics original.
196 Ibid.
197 Ibid.
198 Ibid.
199 Ibid., pp. 288-289.
200 Ibid., p. 288.

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appreciation and criticism of Rahner is consistent with the themes we
have identified in McGinn’s own understanding of mysticism.
McGinn’s presentation of von Balthasar is shorter and does not
mention his understanding of the relationship between experience and
thematization or inter-disciplinary dialogue. However, McGinn asserts
that von Balthasar is more suspicious ‘about mysticism’s place in
Christianity’ than ‘Rahner or most Catholic theologians of the present
century.’201 McGinn presents von Balthasar as if this suspicion shapes
his understanding of mysticism as a dynamic within ordinary life.
Three biblical themes of ‘divine initiative over human effort,’
‘obedience over union as the ultimate religious value,’ and ‘the
uniqueness of the mediation of the Incarnate Word as the expression
of the unknowable God’ lead von Balthasar to relativize ‘the
mysticism found in many classic Christian authors.’202 This
relativization yields ‘corrected’ views of mysticism that satisfy three
criteria:

(1) the norm of the supremacy of the reciprocal love of God and neighbor; (2)
the necessity of conformity to the pattern of Christ; and (3) the insistence on the
continued unknowability of God in and through his manifestation in the Word
made flesh.203

As noted in the next chapter, Loder both connects his theory to

mysticism and is wary that mysticism could lead to a world-denying
attitude. He also understands ‘deep, transforming engagement with
God’ to be a dynamic within ordinary life that results in conformity to
the pattern of Christ. McGinn concludes his description of von
Balthasar with the comment that ‘[a]ll three of these criteria bear
comparison with Rahner’s view of mysticism.’204 Discussed below is
McIntosh’s comparison of the understanding of ‘mystical’ in von

201 Ibid., p. 290.

202 Ibid.
203 Ibid. Loder’s theory can be understood as satisfying these criteria.
204 Ibid.

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Balthasar with that in Rahner; McIntosh finds a possible
complementarity.205
Lonergan: McGinn describes Lonergan’s distinction between
religious and mystical consciousness with respect to mediation and
immediacy.

Religious consciousness is intentional insofar as it is directed to God as its goal;

it therefore partakes of the mediated differentiations inherent in all intentional
drives. Mystical consciousness, on the other hand, is a ‘mediated return to
immediacy’ in which a vital intersubjective relationship of union is experienced
between God and the human person.206

Intersubjectivity recalls Loder’s portrayal of the results of ego-

relativization through Paul’s words ‘I, not I, but Christ’ and his own,
‘Christ, not Christ, but I.’ Unfortunately, ‘Lonergan does not
explicitly discuss the relation between religious and mystical
consciousness.’207 McGinn cites one interpreter of Lonergan, J. R.
Price, who suggests a mutual interaction between the two
consciousnesses that would compare interestingly with Rahner, but ‘in
the absence of explicit treatment in Lonergan it is difficult to be more
precise in comparing the two.’208 McGinn regrets the lack of
development in Lonergan’s treatment of mysticism. ‘The very fact
that the Canadian said so little about mysticism itself, whereas his
disciples have begun to say so much, does not necessarily prove them
wrong, but does give one pause.’209 Still, McGinn appropriates
Lonergan’s phrase ‘mediated immediacy’ as his working heuristic
understanding of mysticism.210
McGinn anticipates drawing on these thinkers in his final volume
in which he will suggest his own construction. However, we can glean
some of his understanding from the above presentations of four
theorists whom he identifies as influential in his thinking and from his

205 McIntosh, p. 113.

206 McGinn, 1:p. 284.
207 Ibid.
208 Ibid.
209 Ibid., p. 284.
210 Ibid., p. xx.

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treatment of divine immediacy in the three volumes that are published
to date. Recall his stated aim that the classic mystical texts themselves
form his understanding.
In his second volume, McGinn emphasizes that the ‘mystical
element’ is primarily a ‘process or way of life’ although mystics do
desire ‘an encounter with God that is different from and deeper than
that available in the ordinary course of their practice of religion.’211
For the monastics, ‘mysticism, understood as the search for the
immediate presence of God in this life, remain[s] bound to the
Bible,’212 as it also did for the visionary Rupert of Deutz.213 The three
founders of early Latin monasticism (‘Ambrose, Augustine, and John
Cassian’) differ on ‘how far immediate contact with God may be
present outside the monastic life.’214 The monks use ‘contemplatio and
its equivalents as the central term to point to those moments in prayer
when some form of more direct contact with God was attained.’215
Those moments require solitude216 and silence.217
McGinn presents key mystical authors as themselves qualifying
divine immediacy. John Scottus Eriugena speaks ‘of “face-to-face” or
“immediate,” contemplation,’ but he ‘always qualif[ies] this
seemingly “direct” contemplation as meaning “more direct, but not
without some mediation.”’218 Bernard of Clairvaux contends that only
contemplatives can hope for any, if brief, divine immediacy.219
William of St. Thierry describes ‘the relation of reason, faith, and love
in the quest for the face-to-face vision of God.’220 William’s depiction
of union with God can be understood as immediate, but with a
qualification. The Holy Spirit draws a person into God, but a person

211 Ibid., 2:p. xi, italics original.

212 Ibid., p. 26.
213 Ibid., p. 333.
214 Ibid., p. 26.
215 Ibid., p. 139.
216 Ibid., pp. 128, 129.
217 Ibid., pp. 130, 131.
218 Ibid., p. 116.
219 Ibid., p. 169.
220 Ibid., p. 228.

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receives this gift, and thus participates in it, which renders the
immediacy partial and mediated. The person’s intellect and will
‘interpenetrate’ the gift of union with God or intellectus amoris.221
McGinn calls William’s analysis the “most detailed and most subtle of
the entire twelfth century.’222 McGinn’s presentation of other mystics
accord with these key authors.223 He asserts that ‘all Christian mystics’
insist that ‘love rather than knowledge or understanding […] leads to
God, however much the latter contributes.’224 Thus, in his second
volume, McGinn’s depiction of divine immediacy agrees with that in
volume one: biblically grounded, partial, embedded in the mystics’
ecclesiastical and doctrinal context, transformative, and involving the
whole person and her or his life.
In volume three, McGinn keeps ‘the notion of consciousness of
God’s presence in a deeper and more immediate way as the
fundamental category for coming to terms with the full range of
Christian mysticism.’225 His treatment of the stigmata of St. Francis of
Assisi illustrates the way in which he interweaves ‘way of life’ with
the ‘deeper and more immediate’ consciousness of God’s presence:
‘the reception of the stigmata does not, of itself, constitute direct proof
for special sanctity of life or of some immediate contact with God. In
cases like that of Francis, where the stigmata constitute an integral
part of a deeply devout Christian life,’ the stigmata seem to represent
‘a sign of his interior transformation.’226 McGinn’s account of
visionaries names three criteria to determine whether or not they
should be classified as ‘mystical’: content, purpose, and
transformative effect.227

221 Ibid., p. 272. As McGinn portrays it, William’s analysis accords with Loder’s
human-divine relationality.
222 Ibid., p. 258.
223 See for example, Isaac of Stella (ibid., pp. 287-296), Baldwin of Ford (ibid.,
p. 305), Aelred of Rievaulx (ibid., p. 318), Hugh of St. Victor (ibid., pp. 390-
395), and Richard of St. Victor (ibid., p. 401).
224 Ibid., p. 390.
225 Ibid., 3:p. xi.
226 Ibid., pp. 60-61.
227 Ibid., p. 27.

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 Despite continuities, in volume three, McGinn does assert shifts
in consciousness of God’s presence, direct or immediate. McGinn
notes a changed attitude toward passion, from an ideal of
passionlessness to an affirmation of passion. He asks whether ‘this
represents a shift in the actual consciousness of immediate contact
with God, or whether it is to be seen as a new mode of literary
presentation of such encounters’ and concludes that it ‘is difficult to
determine.’228 Other shifts are more definite. ‘Monastic mystics like
Bernard of Clairvaux had taught that contemplative awareness of the
direct presence of God was rare and brief—rara hora et parva mora.
Beginning in the thirteenth century, first with beguines like Mary of
Oignies, a new stress on frequent and lengthy ecstasy appears.’229
Other developments within ‘mystical consciousness’ are ‘a totalizing
and somatic character’, ‘the mystical subject or self” becomes ‘less
limited, less bound to its created nature than hitherto.’230 He identifies
‘the female vernacular theologians’ as the first to use explicit
categories of ‘union without intermediary’ and ‘union without
difference,’ later developed by Eckhart and Ruusbroec.231 McGinn
asserts that like them, the female vernacular theologians, such as
Marguerite of Porete, still qualify ‘this lack of mediation and
difference’ with references to God’s grace, Divine Love, or the Holy
Spirit, as primary agent. 232 In this time period, images,233 poetry,234
sacred art,235 physical ailments and suffering,236 and even the physical
act of writing,237 all mediate this consciousness of immediacy.
In sum, McGinn asserts that the mystical writers claim a type of
immediacy for their consciousness of God’s presence and ground their

228 Ibid., p. 156.

229 Ibid., p. 132.
230 Ibid., p. 157.
231 Ibid., p. 263.
232 Ibid.
233 Ibid., pp. 303-304.
234 Ibid., p. 20.
235 Ibid., p. 302.
236 Ibid., p. 301.
237 Ibid., p. 289.

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claim biblically. It may be brief or extended, triggered through
mediums such as art or poetry, affirm passionlessness or passion, and
it may or may not involve visions and somatic experiences, but it is an
inseparable element in the comprehensive context of the mystic and
results in transformed behaviour in the mystic herself and those
around her. The paradoxical presence of these characteristics of divine
immediacy point toward Turner’s dialectical dynamic. The immediacy
is partial and the mystic must await heaven, indeed yearn for heaven,
to have consciousness of ultimate immediacy. McGinn asserts that
even those who claim union without intermediary qualify such claims
by referring to God’s grace, Love, or Spirit.238 The experience of
God’s presence is still mediated to a person in a way that her reason
can grasp. Using Loder’s theory, a person recognizes God as the one
who has been sustaining her all along. This recognition occurs human
spirit to Holy Spirit as an expression of God’s grace or Love, and her
imagination and reason present this experience to her awareness in a
way that she can grasp. McGinn explores theological and
philosophical theories of mysticism that support such claims to divine
immediacy. In that exploration, he identifies four theorists as
informing his own thought to the extent that he will consider them
further in his fifth and final volume. While affirming the mystics’
claim to divine immediacy, McGinn focuses on the paradoxical nature
of these claims through their characteristics and three relationships:
(1) the relationship between ever-present divine immediacy and
mystical consciousness or cognition of it by grace; (2) the relationship
between ordinary and mystical knowing; and (3) the relationship
between fact/experience and interpretation/thematization. These
paradoxical relationships anticipate the next author.

238 Reviewing McGinn’s second volume, Joan M. Nuth remarks, ‘I find it

somewhat puzzling, however, that he uses the adjectives “immediate” and
“direct” in his definition since his whole endeavor seems to imply that all
mystical experience, however, ineffable, is mediated experience’ (Horizons,
24/Spr.:pp. 142-143). From my reading, McGinn’s point is that mystical
experience is ‘mediated immediacy.’

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4.3 Turner

Like Louth and McGinn, Turner understands the mystical authors that
he considers to claim some type of immediacy with God. This
immediacy might be described as ‘ultimate identity’ or ‘union’ or the
highest ‘contemplation.’ Turner comments that ‘[s]ome version of the
soul’s ultimate identity with God is the common stock in trade of the
whole Western mystical tradition, at least until as late as the sixteenth
century.’239 Presenting Bonaventure’s thought, Turner asserts that ‘[a]t
this highest level, contemplation of God becomes in a certain sense
unmediated and “direct”.’240 Note his use of ‘unmediated’ and ‘direct’
in a way that could distinguish or identify the two terms. Regarding
Denys the Carthusian, Turner states that the Carthusian ‘insists upon
the role of love in constituting the experiential immediacy of that
union [with God].’241
Turner links the mystics’ claim to divine immediacy with the
‘doctrine of creative immediacy.’242 He presents this doctrine as
informing the mystical search for union with God in various ways. For
Augustine, union with God is a ‘conscious recognition of the
infrangible union which the soul had always enjoyed with God.’243 For
the Cloud Author and Eckhart, ‘the immediacy of the relation of
creation [is] replicated in the unmediated solitude of the self in the
solitude of God.’244 For Bonaventure, ‘the opposed pressures of the
hierarchical metaphor of “distance” and that of the “immediacy” of
the human soul’s relation with God’245 are reconciled ‘in Christ.’246
Christ draws all creation into the nature of the divine.247 The doctrine
of created immediacy informs these portrayals of divine immediacy in

239 Turner, p. 143.

240 Ibid., p. 127, emphasis mine.
241 Ibid., p. 224, emphasis mine.
242 Ibid., p. 31.
243 Ibid., p. 70.
244 Ibid., p. 256.
245 Ibid., p. 124.
246 Ibid., p. 125.
247 Ibid.

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various ways, but the core assertion is that self-knowledge can lead to
divine immediacy.248 The more a person knows herself, the more she
may recognize her nature as created and sustained by the loving
activity and grace of God.
Turner asserts that ‘from Augustine to John of the Cross […] “I”
am in the last resort what I am in my deepest “interiority.” And if, in
my deepest inwardness, I and God meet’ then language about God and
self—and the limits of such language—is deeply connected.249 For
Turner, this connection between self-knowledge and divine
immediacy, developed from the doctrine of creative immediacy, does
not lead to an understanding of mystical experience as a type of sense
experience. That understanding could attempt to fit divine immediacy
into categories of immediacy and subjectivity, somehow free from
theoretical presuppositions, and therefore ‘pure’ in some way.250 One
purpose of his entire text is to refute a contemporary preoccupation
with this understanding of the mystical authors, which he labels
‘experientialist.’251 However, he does understand the mystical authors,
at least those he surveys, to claim a type of immediacy, a form of
directness. And, this claim of divine immediacy is inter-dependent on
doctrinal beliefs, including the doctrine of creative immediacy. Also
as discussed in the previous section, he strongly contends that any
mystical ‘consciousness’ or ‘experience’ of this immediacy is beyond
the power of language to describe and therefore not a ‘type’ of
consciousness or experience. Turner’s inspection of the metaphors
employed by the mystics reveals the dialectical dynamic, of
experience, negation of experience, and negation of the negation.
While he does use both ‘immediacy’ and ‘direct,’252 he does not
necessarily use them synonymously; the sense of both terms in the
mystical context defies such equations.
Generally, Turner agrees with Louth (as far as he goes) and
McGinn: that the mystical authors claim a type of immediacy, a form

248 Ibid., pp. 81, 99, 100, 142, 174, 209.

249 Ibid., p. 6.
250 Ibid., p. 262.
251 Ibid., p. 5.
252 Ibid., e.g., pp. 112, 205.

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of ‘directness’ that illuminates a constant reality of divine immediacy.
The doctrine of creative immediacy leads the mystics to connect self-
knowledge with divine immediacy. Turner scrutinizes the ways in
which the mystics describe this immediacy and asserts that their
metaphorical language operates self-destructively, exploding all
human categories and understandings, which is what happens when a
human person is aware of being engaged with the Divine loving
presence. The fourth author, Mark McIntosh, also agrees with Turner,
McGinn, and Louth, that the mystical authors claim some sort of
immediacy with God. And, like McGinn and Turner, McIntosh
explores what is meant by these claims of immediacy in light of a
constant immediacy that enables all creation to exist.

4.4 McIntosh

McIntosh treats the mystics’ claims to immediacy or union with God

as self-evident from their language. He does not use the term ‘direct’
in any way significant for these claims. He focuses on the nature of
such immediacy, whether it is best understood as raw data ‘behind’
the thematic descriptions of the mystics or as the ground of all
consciousness.

Say we accept Kant’s strictures on the nature of human knowing, the

constitutitive role of the categories of the human mind in every act of thought
and the irreducible division between the knower and every known object; it has
then generally been assumed in modernity that the mystical, insofar as it
represents some kind of immediate encounter with God (who can hardly be an
object susceptible to categorical knowing) must take place either at the fringes
of human consciousness (William James) or as the very condition for the
possibility of knowing anything at all (Marechal and Rahner).253

As mentioned, McIntosh understands McGinn to express the second

view of immediacy, that identified with Maréchal and Rahner. This is
consistent with McGinn’s self-avowed theoretical dependencies.

253 McIntosh, p. 112, emphasis mine.

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McIntosh’s understanding of McGinn seems to agree with the
direction of McGinn’s textual presentations in all three volumes. And,
this understanding of divine immediacy ‘as the very condition for the
possibility of knowing anything at all,’ seems to resonate with
Turner’s insistence on the ‘exoteric dynamic within the ordinary.’
McIntosh’s presentation of mystical immediacy centers upon
recognition and participation. Mystics recognize that they are called to
participate in the Tri-Une life. This participation is a recognition of
their true identity and existence. ‘It is precisely because the yearning
triune love gives existence immediately to each creature that the
whole creation is not opaque to God but is luminous with divine
glory.’254 McIntosh cites, for example, Maximus the Confessor for
whom ‘the highest stages of mystical life consist in a participation in
the triune relationality.’255 And Aquinas: ‘in mystical
contemplation…the mystic is the one known and loved by God.’256
Bonaventure also: ‘the highest form of mystical knowledge is not an
apprehension of bare deity, but precisely the awareness of the eternal
ekstasis of deity by which the divine draws all creation into loving
union with Christ.’257 And for von Balthasar, ‘mystical consciousness
is the receptive and perceptive impression made in people as they are
drawn hiddenly (mystically) to share in Christ’s own life and
consciousness.’258 This ‘drawing’ does not obliterate individuality, but
is a ‘unity-in-distinction.’259 McIntosh presents Maximus the
Confessor, Aquinas, Bonaventure, and von Balthasar as all portraying
divine immediacy through recognition and participation.
McIntosh asserts a complementarity between von Balthasar and
Rahner that unites the nature of all consciousness with mystical
consciousness of divine immediacy. (Recall (1) that McGinn did not
specify how von Balthasar related all consciousness with mystical

254 Ibid., p. 50, italics original.

255 Ibid., p. 60.
256 Ibid., p. 71, italics original.
257 Ibid., p. 77.
258 Ibid., p. 102, italics original.
259 Ibid., p. 170. This language echoes Loder’s presentation of divine-human
relationality.

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consciousness of divine immediacy, although I noted von Balthasar’s
apparent emphasis on all (ordinary or ‘normal’) consciousness in his
three criteria; and (2) that McGinn finds the nature of this relationship
to be ambiguous in Rahner.) Placing to one side the debate ‘over
whether there can be any pre-categorical experience at all,’260
McIntosh describes the way in which he relates Rahner and von
Balthasar:

But even supposing a fundamental human transcendentality as in Rahner, such

a primordial human dynamic—as the great Jesuit himself points out—is itself
the momentum aroused within human consciousness by the self-communication
of God. Here is exactly where von Balthasar complements Rahner so strongly.
For it is von Balthasar’s contention that all human consciousness is irreducibly
interpersonal, that is, I am aware of myself and of anything at all because ‘I’
have been addressed by another. From the earliest stages of human life in
infancy we come to be who we are precisely because we are drawn into a
network of relationships and responses to those around us. And this is not less
but infinitely more the case in respect of our transcendental consciousness; we
are called into being not because we are ‘addressed’ by a divine silence but by
superabundant speech and expressivity, the very eternal relationality of the
trinitarian life.261

Thus, McIntosh understands Rahner and von Balthasar together to

provide a theoretical basis for the mystical claim to divine immediacy
through a fundamental relationality in human nature reflective of
God’s trinitarian relationality. This is hinted at in McGinn’s analysis
of these two theorists, but not drawn out as in McIntosh; moreover,
these assertions agree with Loder’s depiction of human relationality.
McIntosh understands human existence itself to contain a divine
immediacy, or fundamental relationality, without which no human
would exist. To ‘be human is not so much to discover the secret of
one’s own inner life as it is to discover the secret relationship with
God which has all along been the source of one’s personhood.’262
Mystical consciousness is the discovery of the divine immediacy that

260 Ibid., p. 113, italics original.

261 Ibid. Note that McIntosh is not claiming that inter-personal relations precede
personhood, but that inter-personal relations reveal personhood.
262 Ibid., p. 237.

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enables one to be.263 This divine immediacy is not formless. Rather,
‘we come to know this immanent presence primarily as the love which
arouses us to full personhood by inciting in us a response to (and a
participation in) the personhood of Jesus the Word incarnate.’264 That
is, ‘what is really infinite is the relation between the Father and the
Son in the Spirit, and that this infinity is even greater than the
separation between God and the creature since, as infinite love, it can
and does establish communion across this distance without simply
abolishing it.’265 Thus, McIntosh understands true infinity as
paradoxically particular and relational. With an infinite particularity,
we have hit again upon an example of Turner’s dialectical dynamic.
To summarize Louth, McGinn, Turner, and McIntosh, all agree
that the mystics claim immediacy in their consciousness of God’s
presence. Louth, McGinn, and Turner seem to use directness and
immediacy inter-changeably, while McIntosh does not seem to use
‘direct.’ Louth understands the mystics to claim immediacy with God,
but he does not explore the nature of this claim. McGinn qualifies the
immediacy as a ‘form of immediacy.’ The immediacy may be a
‘mediated immediacy’ or ‘what lies between these necessary
mediations.’ He seems to present this direct or immediate
consciousness of God’s presence as a divine grounding of human
consciousness that from time to time—whether briefly or for longer
periods—is recognized by mystics. That is, a mystical experience
seems to draw back the veil to expose that God is the source of a
person’s existence. Three central questions of relationship occupy
McGinn: (1) between ever-present divine immediacy and mystical
recognition of it by grace; (2) between ordinary and mystical knowing
or consciousness, and (3) between fact or experience and
interpretation or thematization. The third, he, along with Turner and
McIntosh, insists is a relationship of inter-dependence. The first and
second McGinn, along with McIntosh, seems to understand through
the concept of divine grounding of all human consciousness, which

263 Ibid., p. 220.

264 Ibid., p. 158, italics original.
265 Ibid., p. 109, italics original.

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would correspond with Turner’s doctrine of creative immediacy. This
doctrine or grounding connects divine immediacy with self-
knowledge. That is, as we know ourselves better we recognize that
God’s immediate presence sustains us or we would not exist.
Increased self-knowledge leads to knowledge of dependence or
contingency on God. All three understand the immediacy as a form of
recognition of God’s presence that enables all creation to exist.
However, Turner warns that this immediacy is not like other
immediacies, but ‘beyond’ the opposition of mediacy and immediacy.
McGinn, like McIntosh, seems to demonstrate Turner’s dialectical
dynamic in his characterization of divine immediacy and his
appropriation of Lonergan’s ‘mediated immediacy.’ This inevitable
movement toward seeming contradictions or paradoxes arises from the
content of the mystical immediacy, McIntosh’s ‘infinite particularity.’
Like Turner and McGinn, McIntosh understands the mystics’ claim of
immediacy as a form of recognition. This recognition is of a call to
participate in the Trinity’s relationality, a participation that is already
occurring in some way. That sort of recognition that is mystical
immediacy can move the human participant toward linguistic
gymnastics. (The next chapter discusses Loder’s affirmation of
linguistic elasticity in deep, transforming engagement with God.)
Along with the paradoxes of mediated immediacy and infinite
particularity, the terms immediacy and directness become inter-
changeable.

5. Conclusions

In the preceding sections of this chapter, I asserted that Andrew

Louth, Bernard McGinn, Denys Turner, and Mark McIntosh all
understood mysticism similarly, despite some textual disagreements:
mysticism is a form of Christian spirituality and contemplation is a
part of mysticism. Modern usage has tended to blur the distinctions
between all three terms, and their relationships are historically
complicated. This blurring indicates what all four authors perceive as

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a major concern within the mystical texts themselves and just as
relevant today. The focus of this concern is what I have called a
‘mysticism-experience identity.’ This identity reduces mysticism to a
purely human experience of interiority. Thematization and context are
nothing more than an overlay on the ‘pure’ mystical experience. The
authors deny that experience, context, and thematization can ever be
separated. This denial informs their treatment of the mystics’ claims to
immediate or direct experience. The mystics’ doctrinal understandings
of their own contexts are essential for probing the claimed immediacy.
Such claims can be understood as forms of immediacy that remain
partial or mediated outside of heaven. Likewise, for all four authors,
God cannot be rendered peripheral to the discussion of mysticism for
God is central, the primary agent, in the mystics’ cognition or
consciousness of divine immediacy.
The appendix that concludes the first volume of his series records
McGinn as lamenting the paucity of dialogue between psychological
investigators and mystical historians and theorists. As mentioned, he
regrets what he describes as Rahner’s ambiguity regarding inter-
disciplinary collaboration on mysticism. McGinn lays the fault on
both sides.

The stand-off between empiricism and transemperical epistemology is as strong

now as it was at the beginning of the century. Even those, like myself, who are
convinced that a purely empirical reading of mystical texts from a reductive
psychological perspective has only an ambiguous contribution to make to the
present study of mysticism, cannot but be troubled by the lack of conversation
between psychological investigators and those involved in studying the history
and theory of mystical traditions. Both sides seem equally at fault in this
unrealized conversation.266

The question of the next chapter is whether or not Loder’s theory

realizes this conversation in a way that avoids the reductive
mysticism-experience identity. Loder’s transformation theory does
reflect a conversation between psychology and Christian theology.
Whether his theory represents a conversation between psychology and

266 McGinn, 1:p. 343.

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Christian spirituality that does not reductively psychologize or
experientialize remains to be explored explicitly in the following
chapter, although the previous chapters suggest that his theory is not
reductive.
Before moving to the next chapter, I must consider whether or
not the four authors are themselves, somewhat ironically, guilty of the
mysticism-experience identity that they so strongly bemoan. After
carefully arguing against an understanding of mysticism as purely
psychological experience, do they then assert that very understanding
in their treatment of the mystical authors’ claims to immediacy? I
would argue no. The four authors’ concern over a mysticism-
experience identity stems from their understanding of human nature
and the mystical texts themselves. They understand experience to be
part of human cognition in such a way that experience and
thematization always inter-penetrate. Similarly, they understand the
texts to give a great deal of attention to warning against detaching
mystical experience from its theological and ecclesiastical context.
The root of the mystical authors’ concern seems to be another concern
that mystical experience not be understood as a distinct entity in and
of itself, apart from God as primary agent, isolated from thematization
(beliefs and doctrines, community), and separate from the
transforming effects of divine encounter (with moral and ethical
ramifications). Consciousness of divine immediacy is not a purely
psychological experience. That is not to say that divine immediacy is
not at all psychological, but to deny a reductionist understanding of
divine immediacy. It is with this understanding of their concern that
we turn to the next chapter to consider the connections between the
theory of Christian transformation put forward by James Loder and
mystical spirituality as it has been explored in this chapter.

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Chapter Three: Loder and Christian
Mystical Spirituality

1. Introduction

In the previous two chapters, I explored first Loder’s theory of

transformation, the theological and psychological components that he
interweaves in the ‘logic of transformation’ (chapter one), and second
mystical spirituality as represented in selected texts by four
contemporary investigators, Andrew Louth, Bernard McGinn, Denys
Turner, and Mark McIntosh (chapter two). Both chapters laid the
foundation for this chapter. This chapter focuses on the specific
connections between Loder’s theory and the four authors’ Christian
mystical spirituality. My assertion of connections does not imply that
the four authors necessarily would agree with all Loder argues, or vice
versa. But all five focus on deep, transforming engagement with God
and Loder’s inter-disciplinary theory does not, on the one hand,
reduce this engagement purely to experience, or on the other, reduce
human participation to a passive receptacle for grace. Loder’s theory
illuminates in contemporary terms what has been articulated
historically as classic mystical spirituality.

2. That Loder investigates what the four authors present as

Christian mystical spirituality

My analytical locus between Loder and the four authors’ portrayal of

mystical spirituality is my summary phrase: ‘deep, transforming
engagement with God.’ In his theory, ‘deep, transforming engagement
with God’—through Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit—is (1)
The generative source and telos of the insight of the ‘logic of trans-
formation’ in a Christian context,1 (2) The living referent of a trans-
forming vision supported by the neurological intensification process,2
and (3) The redemptive power underlying the classic four-fold pattern
in Christian spirituality that he links to his logic.3 Loder does not focus
on the inter-relationships among the concepts spirituality, mysticism,
and contemplation. Hence, the inter-relationships traced among the
four authors do not appear in Loder’s theory. However, his under-
standing of spirituality as human spirit–Holy Spirit relationality
involves the mysticism and contemplation depicted by the four
authors. Loder refers explicitly to the operation of the transformational
logic in the ‘religious experience’ reported by the ‘great mystics.’4
Louth portrays Augustine as viewing all people as potentially
meeting God human spirit to Holy Spirit, as Loder asserts. Louth’s
insistence that mystical spirituality yields active love also connects
with Loder’s assertions about ego-relativization yielding self-
sacrificial love. Louth describes the mystics’ ‘search for a sense of
kinship with God.’5 Loder argues that the ‘kinship’ is expressed in the
analogia spiritus, in which the imago dei is key. Louth asserts that
‘[t]he mystic is not content to know about God, he longs for union
with God,’6 echoing Loder’s argument that ego-relativization is part of
a person’s personal appropriation of the gospel.
McGinn’s understanding of mysticism as an element of the
Christian spiritual life connects with Loder’s theory. Loder contends
that the element is a gift for the church, insisting that those who
recognize moments of deep, transforming engagement with God in
their lives need those who do not. Those with gradually focused sight

1 Loder, TM, p. 46.

2 Loder and Neidhardt, KM, pp. 282-283.
3 Awakening, Purgation, Illumination, and Toward Unification. Loder and
Neidhardt, KM, p. 284. I am grateful to Dana Wright and John Kuentzel for
their suggestions regarding the phrasing of this triad.
4 Loder, J. and Laaser, M. ‘Authenticating Christian Experience: A Research
Request,’ pp. 121,122.
5 Louth, p. 100.
6 Ibid., p. xv, italics original.

140
of God remind those with moments of clear vision of their goal: to
grow into their relationalities with God; they are encouraged not to
short-circuit the slow maturation process. Those with a moment of
clear sight remind those with gradual vision of their goal: to be
faithful until they see ‘face to face’; they are encouraged not to give
up on this hope.7 McGinn does not make easy distinctions among
those whose spiritualities he would classify as ‘mystical’ and those he
would not. Similarly, Loder emphasizes that the transformational logic
in ego-relativization operates both over many years and in an instant,
it is human-divine relationality that matters. Hence, Loder’s theory
accords with McGinn’s heuristic understanding of mystical spirituality
as ‘beliefs and practices that concer[n] the preparation for, the
consciousness of, and the reaction to what can be described as the
immediate or direct presence of God.’8 Loder names mystical authors
as those whose texts illustrate the movement of his posited
‘transformation of transformation’ in human-divine engagement.9

7 Loder, ‘The Holy Spirit and Human Transformation-Eye of God.’ Princeton

Theological Seminary Audio Tapes, nos.6330-6332. Loder notes that often a
person has ‘an experience that [she] knows is very important, but [she does not]
yet know why it is important. It just stays with [her]. Studies of religious
experience show that they (religious experiences) are important, not only in the
moment of having them, but over long periods of time.’ EM, chapter five, p. 17.
8 McGinn, 1:p. xvii.
9 In LS, Loder engages briefly with Augustine and Hildegaard van Bingen (e.g.,
see pp. 34, 309). He also mentions mystical authors as providing examples of
aspects of his theory (e.g., Teresa of Avila pp. 58, 68, 312; John of the Cross
p. 312; Eckhart pp. 58, 312; Richard of St. Victor p. 313; Nicholas of Cusa
p. 313). He has mentioned some of these authors in earlier texts, but this last
text draws on the greatest number of mystical authors for explication of his
theory. This last text represents Loder’s ‘response’ to his ‘debate’ partner,
James Fowler (Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the
Quest for Meaning). In their written discussion of each other’s texts (Loder of
Fowler’s Stages of Faith and Fowler of Loder’s TM), Fowler noted that Loder
did not offer a theory of spiritual direction. Fowler’s comment may have
contributed to Loder’s greater use of mystical authors in this particular text (see
‘Conversations on Fowler’s Stages of Faith and Loder’s The Transforming
Moment,’ p. 147).

141
 Turner asserts that ‘from Augustine to John of the Cross […] “I”
am in the last resort what I am in my deepest “interiority” […] in my
deepest inwardness, I and God meet.’10 Turner’s assertion accords
with Loder’s theory of ego-relativization in which a person’s ego
defenses fail and the Holy Spirit guides a person into her ‘inner’
negation where she is ‘open’ to meeting Christ. Turner focuses on
negative theology, the performative nature of mystical language that
negates and transcends all experience since God cannot be
experienced like an object. Loder contends that the ‘kind of via
negativa’ implicit in the ‘visions of God in St. Augustine, Hildegaard,
Teresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart, and others’ describes the deep
engagement with God that transforms the operation of the logic in a
human being from ego-centrism to human-divine relationality.11
Loder asserts that ‘the actual reality of the Divine Presence cannot be
made into an object of our perceptual imagination […] the images
rush in to fill the otherwise incomprehensible moment of such a pure
and transparent awareness. When these images come, they are
designed to help us comprehend the incomprehensible.’12 To illustrate
the paradoxical ineffability of and attempt to describe ‘deep, trans-
forming engagement with God,’ Loder quotes from the journal entries
of S. Kierkegaard13 and C. S. Lewis.14 After identifying the movement
of the transformational logic, Loder comments on Kierkegaard’s
entry:

10 Turner, p. 6.
11 Loder, LS, p. 58.
12 Ibid., p. 59, italics original.
13 Loder quotes Kierkegaard’s entry on pp. 1-2 of TM from Walter Lowrie’s A
Short Life of Kierkegaard, p. 100: ‘There is such a thing as an indescribable joy
which glows through us as unaccountably as the Apostle’s outburst is
unexpected: “Rejoice, and again I say, Rejoice!”—not a joy over this or that,
but full jubilation “with hearts, and souls, and voices”: “I rejoice over my joy,
of, in, by, at, on through, with my joy”—a heavenly refrain which cuts short, as
it were, our ordinary song; a joy which cools and refreshes like a breeze gust of
the trade wind which blows from the Grove of Mamre to the eternal mansion.’
Italics original.
14 See quote of Lewis’ entry in chapter two.

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 Søren’s experience essentially exceeds all language or metaphor. Although
Kierkegaard was not a mystic, this is very like a direct knowledge of God in the
classical mystical tradition. The transparency relationship of the human self to
the Divine Presence temporarily bursts the limits of the imagination, but
imagination recoils and images rush like a torrent into the pure light of the
transparency as one shields one’s eyes when surprised by a sudden burst of
sunlight […]. Kierkegaard identifies with St. Paul, and joy, like light, pulsates
back and forth through his soul, ‘over…of, in, by, at, on, through, with….’
Each additional preposition catches some new facet of the ineffable Source, and
then, as if each preposition were still not enough, it is immediately superseded
by a new surge of illumination.15

Bracketing the question of whether or not Kierkegaard was a mystic

and how Loder was using the term, his commentary upon Kierke-
gaard’s language accords with the ‘right’ use of metaphor in a
dialectical dynamic that Turner identifies as part of a ‘good’ mystical
spirituality. An affirmation is negated and then the negation is negated
in a ‘new surge of illumination’ while a person paradoxically attempts
to articulate the ineffable intensity of her known experience.16
The absence of explicit mystical metaphors supremely qualifies
Loder’s theory for Turner’s understanding of mystical spirituality.
Loder avoids their potential mis-use and subsequent ‘closed,’ ‘anti-
intellectual’ spirituality. He does not recommend specific techniques
of the self, but emphasizes God’s use of ordinary human development
and knowing both to sustain a person and offer deep, transformational
relationality. Loder argues that ‘deep, transforming engagement with
God’ is understood and experienced neurologically through intensi-
fication (the joint hyper-arousal of two brain systems). He connects
neurological intensification with the fourth element of union in the
four-fold way.17 Stated paradigmatically, as a person’s imagination

15 Loder, TM, p. 5.
16 In his letter to the Roman church, Paul creates compound verbs to describe his
known experience of Christ’s presence, translated as suffered with Christ, died
with Christ, risen with Christ. I am grateful to J. Zammit-Mangion for this
point.
17 Loder, EM, pp. 59, 71. In LS (the last major text published before his death),
Loder uses the four-fold way to structure his discussion of a case study (chapter
three, pp. 46-78).

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yields to the Divine Presence, Loder asserts that a person experiences
an: ‘(1) awakening to God’s presence […] (2) the effort to purify
oneself [purgation]. Here one is brought to an extremity where one’s
limits are reached and one’s resources are exhausted […] (3)
Illumination follows […] and [leads one] toward (4) unification.’18
This schema must be understood with Loder’s assertion that all of
creation is dependent upon God for its very existence (contingency).
God awakens a person to God’s presence, sustains a person’s entry
into purgation, and continues to beckon the person into the deeper
engagement of illumination. While the four authors do not focus on
the four-fold way, Louth and McGinn refer to the three-fold way of
purgation, illumination, and union.19
McIntosh emphasizes divine encounter yielding self-discovery,
new perceptions and understandings, new communal relations, with
mysticism as ‘the depth dimension of all spirituality,’ as ‘transforming
knowledge of God.’20 Loder applies the term ‘mystical’ to the
experiences of people in his case studies who have known the
‘transformation of transformation’ in themselves, the transformation
of their (transformational) knowing through deep engagement with
God and participation in koinonia.21 McIntosh asserts that spirituality
is ‘the activity of being led by the Spirit into Christ’s relationship with
the Father.’22 This Trinitarian emphasis accords with Loder’s
understanding that ‘deep, transforming engagement with God’ arises
from the perichoresis, or circumincessio of the Trinity, the mutual
interpenetration at all points without loss of identity among the three
persons of the Trinity.23 The loving relationality of the Trinity invites
humans to participate deeply. Wary of the distortions to which

18 Loder, EM, chapter eight, p. 15, emphasis mine.

19 Louth, pp. 54-55, 81-84, 102-103, 163, 171; McGinn, 1:pp. 117, 164-165, 172-
173, 179, 210, 221; 3:pp. 83, 95, 102-105, 108, 144.
20 Ibid., p. 8.
21 E.g., Loder, ‘Negation and Transformation: A Study in Theology and Human
Development,’ pp. 181, 185.
22 Ibid., p. 152, italics original.
23 Loder and Neidhardt, KM, p. 52 n. 15, pp. 201-206; Loder, LS, pp. 195, 276.

144
mystical spirituality is vulnerable,24 Loder nevertheless makes explicit
his focus on ‘deep, transforming engagement with God,’ linking his
theory and mystical dynamics, authors, terms, and patterns.

3. That Loder’s theory does not assert a ‘mysticism-

experience identity’

Recall that ‘mysticism-experience identity’ is my short-hand reference

to the reduction of mysticism purely to experience. Louth, McGinn,
Turner, and McIntosh all bemoan what they view as a false separation
of spirituality from theology, spiritual experience from thematization
and ecclesiological context. Loder focuses on the human spirit as the
human agency of relational, transforming knowing, and acknowledges
the inextricability of spirituality and theology, experience and
thematization. He understands the human spirit’s dynamic exoteric-
centeredness (the paradoxical, simultaneous outward and inward
movement of a person’s focus) as an expression of the imago dei,
spirituality as ‘an intimacy deeper than all the [other] dynamics’ in
which a person lives, and the Trinity as the divine initiator in human-
divine intimacy.25 Those who know deep, transforming engagement
with God seek social contexts that affirm and nurture that intimacy,
while social contexts that nurture human-divine relationality draw
people who seek that nurture.26 In the ecclesiological context of
spiritual transformation, he distinguishes koinonia from community.27
Community is two-dimensional social grouping that can be
transformed by the ‘communion-creating presence of the Holy Spirit’

24 E.g., Loder, TM, p. 79, where he uses the phrase ‘world-denying mysticism.’
Elsewhere he makes a similar point. See: ‘Dimensions of Real Presence,’ and
his review of Between Athens and Berlin, p. 390.
25 Loder, LS, p. 263.
26 Loder, EM, chapter seven.
27 Loder, TM, pp. 112-113, 195; Loder and Neidhardt, KM, pp. 304-306; Loder,
LS, pp. 194-199.

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into four-dimensional koinonia. He describes the relationship between
community and communion as a dialectical dynamic. ‘[T]he
institutional church is a socially con-structed reality based on roles
and role systems, which are the outgrowth of, not the condition for,
koinonia [;…] koinonia and the institutional church, will always be
found together and dialectically related, as the Chalcedonian
understanding of Christ would dictate.’28 The ecclesiological context
of spiritual transformation is created relationally by the Spirit of God
with human beings who fully participate in and contribute to this
context as unique individuals and collectively, ‘with the spiritual
presence of Christ exercising marginal control over the institutional
forms that are created to express it.’29 This context informs and is
formed by individual and communal transforming relationality with
God, a relationality that issues in new knowing.
McGinn, Turner, and McIntosh criticize inter-disciplinary
research that reduces mysticism purely to experience. Loder’s theory
arises from a direct, non-reductive conversation between psychology
and theology on ‘deep, transforming engagement with God.’ His
‘logic of transformation’ is an attempt to describe human knowing ‘in
flight.’ He asserts that all human knowing is relational, trans-
formational, is an event; knowing involves the five phases of the
relational transformational logic.30 Knowing events are situated,
encompassing a person and her lived world in each phase as she
determines the knowing event. ‘It is previous theory, more or less
latent, that determines what we observe and how we observe, and it is
from the imaginative leap of the mind rooted in previously established
theories that our new theories come.’31 Both continuity and
discontinuity are important components. A knower’s assumptional

28 Loder, LS, p. 194.

29 Ibid.
30 ‘These five steps, systematically connected, constitute the “logic of
transformation” inherent in generative intelligence, the spirit of the mind as it
comes forth in the miracles of new understanding’ (Loder and Neidhardt, KM,
p. 232, see also p. 253).
31 Loder, TM, p. 29, italics original. This discussion draws from chapters one and
two of the TM text.

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world determines her understanding and value of new knowledge,
while the insight of new knowledge represents a discontinuity with her
assumptional world. ‘Discontinuity effected by an imaginative
construct is the key and center of the knowing event; indeed, it is just
this discontinuity that makes transformation possible.’32 The
continuity resides in the knower herself, her own relationality with
herself that characterizes her knowing,33 and her continuing desire for
insight.34 The insight that performs a figure-ground reversal, that
creates a bi-polar relational unity, is the ‘leap of the imagination.’
Suggesting a ‘new theory of error,’ he rejects as intellectual
dissimulation any denial that a person’s imagination has contributed to
a new insight. ‘Rational processes can add no knowledge that is not
first imagined.’35
In the book that came out of his doctoral dissertation (Religious
Pathology and Christian Faith), Loder focuses especially on the role
of reason and love (faith, affect, passion) in deep, transforming
engagement with God.’36 Engaging with Kierkegaard, Loder
emphasizes that ‘when reason and the Paradox “encounter each other
happily,” when the pride of reason is set aside,’ then ‘the Paradox
[Jesus Christ] bestows itself.’37 Loder notes that ‘[t]his bestowal is
received with a passion which Kierkegaard calls “faith” […, it] is not
an act of will; the will does not push reason aside and assert the

32 Ibid., p. 41.
33 Recall the discussion in chapter two and Loder’s portrayal of a person as
inherently self-relational (self as spirit). Read after writing my own proposal, F.
LeRon Shults focuses on the relational nature of the knower in his proposed
inter-disciplinary methodology that draws on Loder’s theory; see Shults’s
‘“Holding On” to the Theology-Psychology Relationship: The Underlying
Fiduciary Structures of Interdisciplinary Method.’
34 Loder, TM, pp. 40-41.
35 Ibid., p. 33.
36 Loder’s thesis: ‘The nature of religious consciousness in the writings of
Sigmund Freud and Søren Kierkegaard: A theoretical study in the correlation of
religious and psychiatric concepts.’ Published as: Religious Pathology and
Christian Faith.
37 Loder, Religious Pathology, p. 105.

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absurd.’38 Loder asserts that Christ’s presence brings about a release
of tension between ‘the passion to know and the essentially
unknowable,’ citing Kierkegaard’s own description of ‘indescribable
joy’ from his journal entry of 19 May 1838.39
In the same text, Loder examines the nature of the ‘percept’ in
human knowing, asserting its ‘composite nature.’40 Citing Freud’s
‘Project for a Scientific Psychology,’ Loder asserts that an image in
perception ‘is the relationship between [perceptual] functioning and its
object.’41 That is, a person’s perception of something is made up of
the relationship between the ‘something’ that is the focus of a person’s
attention and the person’s rational, imaginative experience of that
‘something’. Your perception of this sentence is made up of the
relationship between these words and blank spaces on the page and
your rational, imaginative experience of this sentence. That relation-
ship is the image (or percept) that you have of the previous sentience.
Loder understands Kierkegaard to agree with Freud that ‘the image is
the medium in which a relationship between any function of
consciousness and its focus could be established.’42 ‘[P]erception is
therefore rooted in an imaginative experience of the object.’43 Our
perception of ourselves, the world around us, the void, and God is
rooted in an imaginative (not imaginary) experience of ourselves, our
world, the void, and God. According to Loder, both Kierkegaard and
Freud understand feeling or affect as inter-twined with ideas; neurosis,
or pathology, is associated with the imposed or forced separation of
feeling from ideas.44 Consciousness involves the imaginative (again,
not imaginary) and somatic response of a person to her environment;
that is, a whole person interacts with her environment to create her
consciousness of herself, her world, the void, and God. This whole-
person interaction appropriately unites ‘affect and idea; a verifiable

38 Ibid., italics original, emphasis mine.

39 Ibid., pp. 105-106. See note 13.
40 Ibid., p. 151.
41 Ibid., p. 146.
42 Ibid., p. 147.
43 Ibid., p. 148.
44 Ibid., p. 151.

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belief about reality [necessarily requires or] involves both.’45 Thus,
Loder draws upon Kierkegaard and early Freud to assert the
inseparability of emotion and reason in non-pathological conscious-
ness of reality. This assertion bears emphasis: Consciousness that is
connected with reality is both emotional and rational. Separating
emotion and reason is a sign of pathology. Loder’s assertion regarding
emotion and reason agrees with the portrayal of emotion and reason in
mystical spirituality by the four contemporary writers.
Louth, McGinn, Turner, and McIntosh all note the mysterious,
inter-twined relationship between loving and knowing in mystical
spirituality.46 According to Turner, ‘[T]he fulfillment of mystical

45 Ibid., p. 152.
46 Louth: ‘The Platonic doctrine of contemplation is left behind [in Gregory of
Nyssa]; it is beyond theoria, in the darkness of unknowing, that the soul
penetrates more and more deeply into the knowledge and presence of God
through love’ (p. 97). McGinn: ‘all Christian mystics’ indicate that ‘love rather
than knowledge or understanding leads to God, however much the latter
contributes’ (2:p. 390). Turner: ‘When, therefore, Denys [the Areopagite] says
that in the apophatic ecstasy “all intellectual activities must be relinquished” he
means that intellect is transported as intellect beyond what it can do by itself
into its own dazzling darkness; whereas Bonaventure can quote this same
passage and mean: love takes over from intellect, leaving it behind’ (p. 131,
italics original); ‘What Gallus has added to Denys’ account is a conception of
the apophatic “knowing unknowing” in terms not of intellect’s own self-
transcendence, but in terms of a higher kind of knowing than that of intellect,
the “knowing of love” […]. Gone, moreover, is every sense that intellect, upon
entry to the cloud, negates itself, and so self-surpasses into the darkness of
unknowing, for intellect is negated by love, not by itself and is simply bundled
away at the point at which its affirmations fail. In short, the hierarchical
dialectic of negativity found in Denys is replaced by a simple bi-polarity of
knowing and love, which is ultimately transcended in the knowing of love’
(p. 193, italics original); ‘Hence at the point of breakthrough [according to the
Cloud Author] love requires the total abandonment of all cognitivity, a cutting
of all ties with the safe anchorage of the mind in its familiar images,
meditations and narratives of God, leaving all intellectual activity behind, so
that the disciple can launch out on to the intellectually uncharted and
unchartable seas of the knowing of love’ (p. 199); ‘[T]he fulfillment of mystical
theology [according to Denys the Carthusian], what brings about its goal of the

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theology, what brings about its goal of the intellect’s union with God,
and moves and stimulates its practice, is to be found in the soul’s
deepest love.’47 McIntosh contends that ‘[t]he soul’s experience is not
anti-noetic in the sense of implying that the quest for God demands an
infamous sacrifice of the intellect, rather it is an awareness (with a
very definite intellectual component) that the source of one’s desire is
beyond the grasp of the intellect.’48 Gregory the Great’s maxim, that
can be translated as love itself is a knowing,49 summarizes the
paradoxical relationship between love and knowing in mystical texts.
The neurological research of Antonio Damasio argues for an
intertwined understanding of emotions, reason, and feelings, finding a
decrease in reasoning abilities associated with emotions known to be
affected by brain damage in a particular area. The four authors and
Loder agree that ‘deep, transforming engagement with God’ involves
love and knowledge. Loder argues that emotions and reason are
intertwined in all non-pathological knowing, and are separated at great
cost to the individual. In mystical knowing, love and reason are united
as God knows each person in loving embrace.
For Loder, if people know transformationally, according to the
logic, then deep engagement with God transforms their knowing; the
movement of transformational, relational knowing (the logic), is itself
transformed through deep engagement with God. In this engagement,
God, the source of all knowledge and wisdom, can unite with the
human knower and their loving relationality can determine what is

intellect’s union with God, and moves and stimulates its practice, is to be found
in the soul’s deepest love’ (p. 217). McIntosh, see note 48.
47 Turner, p. 217.
48 McIntosh, p. 202. His thought continues: ‘That is not, therefore, a humanly
diminishing mindlessness but a kind of amazement that is exhilarating and
liberating for the whole person; drawn closer to God in this way, Gregory [of
Nyssa] implies, the human self is invited into a realm of possibilities it would
never have imagined’ (ibid.).
49 Amor ipse notitia est. Homelia in Evangelia 27.4 Patrologiae cursus completus,
1207. See Damasio, A. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the
Making of Consciousness, whose neurological research seems to support
Gregory the Great’s maxim.

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known. A person’s assumptional world can now be four-dimensional
(self, world, void, and Holy).
Loder’s double use of the term ‘transformation’ (like his double
use of the term ‘negation’ regarding the Holy Spirit’s negation of the
negation ‘in’ a person’s ego) can make this part of his theory
somewhat confusing. Loder describes human knowing as
transformational and relational since he asserts that it operates
according to the transformational logic. This human knowing is
‘proximate’ to the ‘convictional knowing’ that issues from human-
divine relationality. Human knowing participates ‘sacramentally’ (as
visible signs of an invisible reality) in ‘convictional knowing’
(knowing that compels someone to re-open the questions of reality),
potentially opening a person’s awareness to God’s offer of deep,
transforming relationality. Thus, in a sense, all human knowing is four
dimensional. All four authors and Loder assert that God is the very
condition for the possibility of knowing anything at all.50 But human
knowing is reduced to two dimensions when explanations and
interpretations do not include the void and God; the inclusion of God
does not mean a superficial overlay, but relational embrace of God’s
loving involvement throughout the knowing event.
Loder relates Christian theological premises directly to the
psychological theory, focussing on the relationality, the dynamic
exchange, between the disciplines. This bi-polar relational unity is
non-reductive, non-synthesizing, but asymmetrical in that the
Christian God is included as part of reality. Loder does not contend
that God is absent from ‘human’ knowing. The opposite is his (and the

50 McIntosh, p. 112. McIntosh associates this understanding (‘divine grounding of

consciousness’) with Joseph Maréchal and Karl Rahner. McIntosh (whose text
appeared last among the four authors) understands McGinn to agree with this
statement; indeed, McGinn identifies himself as agreeing with this aspect of
Maréchal’s and Rahner’s ideas (1:pp. 297-324). Turner uses a different phrase:
the ‘exoteric dynamic within the ordinary’ (p. 268, italics original) to express
mystical engagement with creative immediacy, i.e., God’s sustaining presence
that enables anything, including knowing, to exist at all (p. 31). Louth is more
implicit in his description of mystical apprehensions of God through Christ and
the Holy Spirit (p. xi).

151
four authors’) assertion: God is the condition for knowing anything at
all. But there can be a qualitative difference between knowledge that
arises from the human knowing sustained by God’s grace (or else it
would not exist) and human knowing transformed through human-
divine relationality. ‘Can’ because God may move transformatively in
human knowing outside of deep, transforming engagement and
humans may ignore their human-divine relationality, even after ego-
relativization. We know in part, but we may have more or less clear
vision of the whole and we may live more or less in light of that
vision. Loder’s inter-disciplinarity could account for these last two
possibilities as a multi-dimensional matrix of human knowing divinely
sustained and knowing from human-divine relationality.51

4. That Loder’s theory involves a divine immediacy that

is partial or mediated

Recall that the classic mystics claim divine immediacy, but that the
four authors conclude that this immediacy is partial or mediated. This
means that the mystical experience of God’s presence is not a ‘pure’
experience extracted from interpretation, thematization, and context.
Loder’s theory asserts human awareness of God’s presence is
mediated by both emotion and reason. Like Louth, McGinn, Turner,
and McIntosh, Loder emphasizes that ‘deep, transforming engagement
with God’ is an engagement with God as the ‘exoteric dynamic within
the ordinary,’ to use Turner’s phrase. That is, it is a recognition of
God’s sustaining presence in all that exists, the ordinary world that
becomes the bearer of the extraordinary love of God. Loder
emphasizes the dependency of all creation on God’s sustaining
presence as the ‘ordinary dynamic’ of existence. Simultaneously,

51 See diagram, ‘Human Development Reconfigured,’ (Loder, LS, p. 75) for a

schematic depiction of divine and contingent orders with chronological time
and infinity, all permeated by Grace.

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Loder points out that this dynamic of God’s presence (with a
corresponding expression in human nature as part of the imago dei)
constantly invites human beings to deep, transforming engagement.
The dynamic is a mutual searching or longing for human-divine
relationality (the yearning for the ‘face’ that will not go away) that
operates according to the logic.
While articulating their analyses of mystical immediacy, the four
investigators move toward contradictions or paradoxes, with Turner
characterizing it as a ‘dialectical dynamic’ that transcends oppositions,
McGinn appropriating Bernard Lonergan’s phrase, ‘mediated imme-
diacy,’ and McIntosh writing of an ‘infinite particularity.’ (Louth does
not analyze the mystical authors’ claims of divine immediacy,
although he affirms that the claim is present in their texts.) This
linguistic paradox evokes both the paradoxical ‘exoteric-centered’
movement of the human spirit and the paradoxical dynamic of Gods’
sustaining presence and simultaneous invitation to transforming
engagement.
McGinn, Turner, and McIntosh all understand ‘deep,
transforming engagement with God’ to involve a form of recognition
that a person is already participating in the life of the Trinity in some
way or else she would not exist, and a recognition that the invitation is
to deeper, relational participation that transforms human lives,
individually and collectively. For example, in his interactions with
Maréchal, Rahner, von Balthasar, and Lonergan, McGinn focuses on
(1) the paradoxical relationship between ever-present divine
immediacy and mystical recognition of it by grace, and (2) the
relationship between ordinary and mystical knowing or consciousness.
McIntosh’s phrase is ‘the divine grounding of consciousness,’ that he
asserts to be McGinn’s understanding (substantiated in McGinn’s
texts) as well as his (McIntosh’s) own. Turner’s language is the
‘exoteric dynamic within the ordinary.’
McGinn interacts with Maréchal who identifies three ‘grades’ of
mystical spirituality: the integration of the ego with the Other, the
revelation of God to the soul in which there is a cessation of dualism,
and the readjustment of the soul’s faculties under the influence of
God’s activity. Recognizing the limitations in Maréchal’s analysis,
McGinn nevertheless considers it as having great potential for

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contemporary explorations of mystical spirituality. Loder’s ego-
relativization theory of transformation represents an inter-disciplinary
investigation that accords with Maréchal’s focus on ego
transformation.
Loder’s logic involves a figure-ground reversal in which God
who is the condition (or ‘background’) for knowing anything at all
becomes the foreground. The sustaining presence of God is the
exoteric dynamic within the ordinary that is mediated to a person’s
awareness in deep, transforming engagement with God. In Loder’s
assertion that human existence is four dimensional, the fourth
dimension, the Holy, actively enables a person to exist whether or not,
or however vaguely, she realizes her dependency on God (hence
Loder’s assertion that the ego must work actively to repress awareness
of God). A person’s recognition of the Holy is like a figure-ground
reversal in which a person can focus on the ground or condition of her
existence. 52
All aspects of Loder’s theory point to and flow from this central
tenet: all that exists in time and space does so completely dependent or
contingent53 upon God while God’s sustaining presence simul-
taneously offers in concrete historical ways deep, transforming
human-divine relationality both in and beyond time and space.54 (The
four investigators refer to this sustaining and transforming presence of
God as ‘divine’ or ‘creative immediacy.’) The ‘concrete historical
ways’ involve the birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of
Jesus Christ that transforms being and history in the spiritual Presence

52 Loder’s assertions differ from the suggestion of J. Gellman in Mystical

Experience of God. Gellman asserts that God-perceptions might be understood
‘in terms of how God created and designed the world, a world that thereafter
afforded experiences of God in accordance with its stable, ongoing laws and
structures, and in accordance with God’s purposes and intentions’ (p. 72). He
suggests that ‘training in non-egocentrism’ would be necessary to enable people
to recognize that they are experiencing God, but rejects the idea that God
initiates perceptual encounters, ‘an idea employing interventionist metaphysics’
(p. 73).
53 Loder uses T. F. Torrance’s term, ‘contingency.’ See (and Neidhardt), KM,
pp. 50, 190, 197; and Loder, LS, p. 10.
54 Loder and Neidhardt, KM, pp. 140, 216; Loder, LS, p. 74.

154
of Christ55 and the birth, life, and death of ‘selves’56 composing and
composed by the ‘lived world.’57 From his earliest writings (e.g.,
1965, 1966), Loder asserts that the active presence of God’s sustaining
grace ‘makes our real presence possible.’58 Later (1992, 1994), he
suggests that Gödel’s theorem can illustrate how humans can be
unaware of the very condition by which they know anything at all
(that is, our understandings of the universe are intrinsically and
inevitably open-ended); ‘deep, transforming engagement with God’
enacts a figure-ground reversal so that God, the previously
unrecognized ‘ground’ that enables human existence, comes into
focus.59
Loder rarely uses the terms ‘direct’ or ‘immediate’ consciousness
of God. One instance where he does is in his interaction with
Kierkegaard’s journal entry (quoted earlier in this chapter) in which he
uses the phrase, ‘direct knowledge of God.’ However, Loder’s
insistence on the role of imagination in all knowing, including new
insights in the transformational logic, agrees with the ‘mediated
immediacy’ of McGinn. A person’s imaginative reason mediates
divine immediacy, or Divine Presence, to her awareness. Loder’s
depiction accords with McGinn’s appropriation of Lonergan’s
‘immediacy between the mediations’ or ‘mediated return to
immediacy’. For Loder, imaginative reason mediates the immediacy
of God’s presence to human awareness in ways that reason can grasp.
The relationship between Divine Presence and a person’s rational,
imaginative experience of Divine Presence is a person’s mystical
consciousness. Loder’s use of the neurological model of intensi-
fication with his transformational logic also agrees with McGinn’s
exploration of Rahner’s description of mystical knowing as an
intensified experience of God available to all people. And Loder

55 Loder, TM, pp. 147-153.

56 Ibid., pp. 162-168; LS, pp. 82, 90-94, 135.
57 Loder, TM, pp. 69, 71-75.
58 ‘Dimensions of Real Presence,’ LIX/2 (old series):p. 29. See also Religion and
the Public Schools, pp. 96, 99.
59 Loder and Neidhardt, KM, pp. 36, 39-40, 130-131.n.8. See also, ‘Incisions from
a Two-Edged Sword: The Incarnation in Practical Theology.’

155
echoes Turner’s insistence that the divine immediacy of mystical
knowing is not like other immediacies. It involves a unique
engagement that transforms all immediacies. This may explain
Loder’s sparse use of the terms ‘direct’ and ‘immediate’; he, like
Turner, finds the categories of directness or immediacy perhaps
necessary but inevitably unsatisfactory. Loder’s analysis of
Kierkegaard’s journal entry illustrates the explosive nature of
language applied to mystical knowing. McIntosh’s divine grounding
of consciousness corresponds with Loder’s ‘contingency.’ With
McIntosh, Loder emphasizes the dynamic of recognition, invitation,
and participation, as a person discovers a divine immediacy that
enables her to exist. She becomes aware of the yearning triune love
that gives existence immediately to each creature, including herself.
In sum, I assert that Loder’s inter-disciplinary theory begins to
fill the lacunae in inter-disciplinary mystical spirituality discourse
noted by the four investigators. Loder’s theory of transformation
arises from his investigation of the same conceptual field investigated
by the four authors in the texts I have selected. The agreement that I
am detailing between Loder and the four investigators is not merely
semantic (i.e., a note of matching terms; that is not the case) or purely
philosophical (i.e., collapsing everything into a philosophical
reductionism). Although all five authors write from a different inter-
disciplinarity, the reality that they all investigate is ‘deep, trans-
forming engagment with God’ within the Christian traditions.
That Loder’s logic arguably accords with the representations of
mystical spirituality by the four authors is notable. These four authors
are Orthodox (Louth), Roman Catholic (McGinn and Turner), and
Anglo-Catholic (McIntosh). Louth mentions the writing of a book
called The Protestant Mystics in response to W. T. Stace, described as
‘a Protestant,’ who asserted that ‘there are no Protestant mystics.’60
As the title indicates, the responding book by Anne Fremantle and W.
H. Auden asserts the contrary. Louth focuses on those who consider
mysticism to be ‘simply a variant of Platonist mysticism.’ He

60 Louth, p. xv, referring to Anne Fremantle and W. H. Auden who wrote The
Protestant Mystics and quoted W. T. Stace on p. vii, italics original.

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identifies at least three crucial differences between Christian and
Platonic mysticism (understandings of God, soul’s relation to God,
and union of contemplative love and action). Similarly, McGinn
remarks that ‘[s]ome modern Protestant theologians, beginning with
Albrecht Ritschl, have judged the history of Christian mysticism to be
at root nothing more than an invasion of the Christian faith by a
fundamentally different and alien Hellenic religious element.’61 Thus,
from the primarily Catholic and Orthodox ‘side’ there seems to be
concern that mysticism has been misunderstood and rejected. On the
Protestant ‘side’ there seems to be a wariness about mysticism leading
to distortions in spirituality, e.g., a rejection of the world.62 Despite
this history, the focus of all four authors and Loder gathers around the
movement of the Holy Spirit who initiates ‘deep, transforming
engagement with God’ through Christ in the concrete lives of human
beings.
My assertions do not claim to remove distinctions or
disagreement from among the Christian traditions. Rather, I locate
Loder’s theory among those who have responded to God’s
transforming presence throughout the history of the Church. Their
shared attention to ‘deep, transforming engagement with God’ is
undeniable. This common focus reveals a ‘union despite differences’
in the Presence of One who is not confined or delimited by
polarities.63 The unity does not reduce all Christian traditions to the
same thing.64 Nor does it synthesize them into the same thing.65

61 McGinn, 1:p. 24. See his survey of theological, philosophical, and

comparativist and psychological approaches to mysticism in the ‘Appendix:
Theoretical Foundations. The Modern Study of Mysticism’ in volume one,
pp. 265-343.
62 However, in The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New
Testament to St John of the Cross, Rowan Williams argues that Martin Luther’s
theology contains a rich mystical core (p. 149). Loder himself notes the
parallels between the ‘aha’ of the insight phase in the transforming logic and
the mortification (mortificatio) and illumination (illuminatio) of the Spirit’s
work as explored by Luther scholar Regin Prenter in Spiritus Creator (LS,
pp. 114-118).
63 Williams, Wound of Knowledge, p. 149.
64 Loder, KM, p. 228.

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Rather, the Christological insight performs a figure-ground reversal,
as predicted by Loder’s transformational logic.66 The conflicts
between the traditions yield a transforming, relational insight. The
focus shifts from the distinctions to God who gathers all polarities and
sustains the Body of Christ,67 transforming the traditions themselves
in the perichoresis of the Trinity.68 Loder’s theory is part of the
continuing testimony to God’s invitation to ‘deep, transforming
engagement.’
My assertions may be rather provocative to some, as indeed
Loder’s work is to many. The context from which Loder wrote
highlights the tensions surrounding his work. As a theologian with
Reformed commitments, Loder wrote among peers who were and are
Barthian. Karl Barth’s systematic theology has been used to justify
deep suspicions about theological reflections appearing to start from
or affirm any kind of natural theology. Loder counters these
suspicions with his affirmation of T. F. Torrance’s interpretation of
Barth, which asserts an inter-relatedness between revelation and
natural theology. Loder and Neidhardt note

that we are working in agreement with T. F. Torrance, a prominent interpreter

of early church history and of Karl Barth, who claims that Barth was in his later
years quite ready to acknowledge a theology of nature that began with faith
69
seeking understanding.

Earlier in the same text, Loder notes that Barth along with Tillich,
Moltmann, Pannenberg, and ‘many others have all written on the
Spirit, but in each case the doctrine still runs a poor third, as a
derivative from the Trinity and Christology.’70 Hence Loder focuses

65 Ibid., p. 96.
66 Loder, TM, pp. 119, 121, 142, 170.
67 Ibid., p. 194.
68 Loder, LS, pp. 195, 276.
69 Loder and Neidhardt, KM, p. 24, citing Torrance’s Transformation and
Convergence in the Frames of Knowledge, chapter 9.
70 Ibid., p. 20 n. 2. The note continues, ‘Thus, the inner nature of the Spirit is
neglected in deference to the outward activity and mission of the Spirit and the
church, and personal participation in the Spirit is virtually anathema among

158
on the movement of the Spirit as a mediator between revelatory and
natural theology. This inter-relation is expressed as a relationality
from ‘above’ and ‘below’, both within and between theology and the
human sciences. As explored in Chapter One, Loder’s methodology
affirms a mutually critical interaction between theology and other
disciplines, save the fundamental assertion of God’s reality. That
assertion is non-negotiable, and his understanding of God is
Trinitarian. But Loder is committed to learning about God from the
movement of God’s Spirit in creation, through the human sciences and
all disciplines. His theology transcends theological barriers within
Christianity to respond to the movement of God’s Spirit both to
sustain and transform the created world. Not a Pentecostal or
Charismatic theologian, his focus on the Spirit does connect with
tenets of those theological traditions, or such strands within other
traditions. This connection alarms some as much as connections with
Catholic and Orthodox mystical theology alarm others. Loder is more
fearful about being blind to God’s active presence, than he is of
stepping on theological toes within the academy or church. His work
defies neat categories and in so doing seems to reveal the movement
of the Spirit across tidy boundaries.71
Moreover, Loder’s insight about the inter-relatedness between
natural and revelatory theology, about the movement of God’s loving
Spirit in creation and human knowing, appeared out of the theological
tensions and conflicts in the academy of his life’s work. The insights
from his research reveal the dynamics of the Trinitarian, five-phased
logic in four dimensions.

major theologians. This is paradoxical since most would say they are doing
their theology in keeping with the Spirit of Christ.’
71 In The Pentecostal Movement in the Catholic Church, Edward O’Connor
asserts that the presence of the Holy Spirit in traditions other than Catholic
‘may be God’s way of demonstrating to members of the Church that He alone is
sovereign Lord, and that all institutions and hierarchies on earth, even in the
Church, are nothing but instruments and ministers […]. We need to have it
demonstrated for us that God’s action transcends the action of the Church’
p. 28f.

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 If my assertions are valid about Loder’s theory and mystical
spirituality, then what is the ‘power’ of his theory for mystical
spirituality discourse?

5. Particularity and Universality in Mystical Spirituality

Discourse

A debate in mystical spirituality discourse centers on how to handle

particularity and universality.72 William James, Aldous Huxley, W. T.
Stace, and Rudolph Otto each represent voices identified with the
perennial philosophy, or essentialist, universalist approach.73 This
approach translates or reduces all spiritualities into a core essence.
Stephen Katz is often identified with the radical constructivist
approach.74 This approach insists that all spiritualities are so particular
that they are unrelated and not translatable. While I have presented
these approaches as extremes, in fact James (for example) and Katz,
and most, if not all, theories of mystical spirituality represent some
sort of integration of these extremes. These theories account for the

72 See Howells, E. ‘Mysticism and the mystical: The current debate.’ See also
Schneiders, S. ‘Spirituality in the Academy.’ These two articles provide some
justification for the validity of this assertion on either side of the Atlantic
(Howells UK, Schneiders US).
73 James, W. The Varieties of Religious Experience; Huxley, A. The Doors of
Perception; Stace, W. T. Mysticism and Philosophy; Otto, R., Mysticism East
and West. See discussion in Howells, ibid. Placing the discussion of spirituality
within the larger context of religion in general, see J. Bowker’s comments in
The Sense of God: Sociological, Anthropological, and Psychological
Approaches to the Origin of the Sense of God, regarding the untenable nature of
the essentialist or perennial philosophy positions on religion in light of the
diverse particularities within the universal phenomenon of religion (e.g., pp. 44-
45, 141, 147-150).
74 Katz, S. ‘Language, epistemology, and mysticism.’ See Howells for the
argument that Katz is a modification of the Jamesian approach in his separation
of experience from belief.

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particular distinctions of a mystical spirituality and for the universal or
shared features.75
Although not all spiritualities are theistic, the nature of
spirituality discourse itself requires an inter-disciplinary conceptual
framework that remains open to the possible reality, not simply
interpretative use, of divine initiative.76 The possibility of divine
agency as a required part of a conceptual framework of (mystical)
spirituality disallows a view of particularities (e.g., divine initiative, or
any other agency in a spirituality) as add-ons or overlays to the ‘real’
(accessible or inaccessible) spirituality being researched. A spirituality
that is theistic is not simply a non-theistic spirituality with God added
on to it. Thus, as discussed in the previous chapter, McIntosh argues
for the inclusion of God in the study of spirituality by interacting with
three articles written by Sandra Schneiders. She asserts that a
researcher must choose between a ‘view from above’ or a ‘view from
below,’ advocating the ‘view from below’ or an ‘anthropological’
approach. She justifies her selection as best facilitating inter-faith and
inter-disciplinary discussion. This approach avoids the difficulties of

75 Both James (Varieties of Religious Experience) and Katz (‘Language,

epistemology, and mysticism’) separate experience from belief and both
account for particularities through interpretative frameworks or thought
systems. James accounts for universalities through the shared characteristics of
experience, for mystical experience he numbers the shared characteristics at
four. Katz places universalities beyond human reach, although this placement is
stated as a universal that Katz seems able to access. See Howells.
76 Bowker concludes that the disciplines themselves ‘actually seem to demand a
return to that possibility [reality of reference in the term ‘God’] if sense is to be
made of their own evidence.’ (Sense of God, p. 182). He suggests that inter-
disciplinary research (theologies and behavioral sciences) ‘endeavor to specify
what would count as an effect of the claimed object of belief in their own case,
and where such an effect can be discerned. Then […] to the question of whether
indeed God contributes to the sense of God,’ ibid. The nature of divine
initiative would require discussion; e.g., Gellman’s ‘Argument from
Perception’ affirms God’s creative and sustaining initiative, but suggests a non-
interventionist understanding of divine reality in mystical experience (pp. 72-
74). This suggestion seems to contradict the understanding of divine initiative
in Loder and the four authors.

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particular ‘God-talk’ and competing theologies.77 It relates particu-
larity to universality by focusing on a universal human trait of self-
transcendence that particular religions address through their
‘spiritualities.’
Schneiders acknowledges that an anthropological approach to
spirituality can become so broad that ‘it is very difficult to achieve the
clarity and distinction requisite for a useful definition.’78 But lack of
clarity is not the only challenge. An anthropological focus can sideline
the particularities of spiritualities in which God is understood and
experienced as primary agent. God might be appended to
anthropological research into spirituality, but remain non-integral to
the account of spiritual experience.79 Explanatory and descriptive
adequacy on an anthropological, let alone any other, level can thereby
be lost. An approach to spirituality that allows for human-divine
relationality as the starting point for human spiritual understanding
and experience is also anthropological. In any account that attempts to
do justice to its focus of study, ‘God-talk’ is unavoidable even in a
discussion that sets out to be ‘a view from below,’ because many
human beings understand and experience God as the initiator in their
spirituality.80 Conversely, a purely theological focus can sideline non-
theistic spiritualities. Hence Schneiders’ assertion that there is no
‘generic’ spirituality (or, ‘core’ spirituality in an essentialist approach
to mystical spirituality).81 With vast differences, each spirituality

77 My paraphrase of Howells, p. 19.

78 Schneiders, ‘Spirituality in the Academy,’ p. 683.
79 Alistair McFadyen, psychiatric nurse and theologian, calls it the ‘Post-It’™
approach: God is tacked on to the end or beginning of research without making
any difference or leaving any trace if lifted off. McFadyen, A. Bound to Sin:
Abuse, Holocaust and the Christian Doctrine of Sin, p. 11 n. 9.
80 This point was noted as being the conclusion of Bowker in his inter-disciplinary
consideration of The Sense of God. Even those who do not claim any religious
affiliation can report a spiritual experience that they understand as being at
the initiative of ‘God’ or ‘something there.’ See D. Hay and K. Hunt
report on The Spirituality of People Who Do Not Go to Church
(http://www.ctbi.org.uk/ccom/downloads.htm).
81 ‘There is no such thing as generic spirituality or spirituality in general.’
Schneiders, ‘Theology and Spirituality,’ p. 267.

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accounts for human spirituality and theistic spirituality, relating the
two, even if solely to account for theistic spirituality without God.
Yet, these spiritualities are not so different as to defy any relationship
at all.
Loder insists that inter-disciplinary research about Christian
transformation must include a ‘view from above’ (theology) as well as
a ‘view from below’ (human sciences), neither as after-thoughts but as
integral components of the research.82 I am extending and modifying
Loder’s methodology to suggest that in spirituality discourse
involving the human sciences, the ‘view from above’ might be
considered and discarded by a researcher in the human sciences, but
the ‘view from above’ must be acknowledged as a possibility even if
only to be discarded in the end. The over compartmentalization of
research that closes off possibilities through the use of an approach as
definitive for a particular field of enquiry pre-empts investigation
rather than facilitates it.83 In the field of spirituality, the use of a purely

82 Loder, LS, p. 13. Loder uses the Möbius band to model this relationality. He
acknowledges his dependence on Barth: ‘I will make his Christological position
pivotal as God’s revelation of what God means by ‘human’ and at the same
time what God means by “God”’ (LS, p. 30). ‘I accept the Chalcedonian model
as a way of working (both methodologically and materially) from below and
above at the same time, allowing the subjectivity of the revelation to deal
transformatively with the objectivity of the sciences’ (ibid., p. 33). A specific
Barthian text that supports Loder’s approach is in Church Dogmatics: ‘And if
this history in its totality and interconnection speaks as prophetic history it does
so in attestation of this living divine-human unity. Its word is prophecy which
combines rather than divides, which unites rather than separates, because it
comes from the center and proclaims the center where what is above and what
is below, transcendent God and lowly humanity, are together’ (IV/3, first half,
p. 63). However, Loder qualifies his use of Barth on human spirit, the view
from below, understanding Barth to give ‘no weight to it [human spirit],
consigning it to the realm of the unredeemed, the target of his famous “Nein”’
(LS, p. 34). Loder affirms instead G. Hendry’s understanding of incarnational
grace as involving divine condescension and accommodation, Holy Spirit to
human spirit; implicit in this accommodation is divine affirmation of the human
spirit (ibid., pp. 3-35).
83 Brian Lancaster makes this assertion in his article, ‘In defense of the
transcendent.’ Citing J. N. Ferrer, he notes the ‘pitfalls of the emphasis on

163
anthropological approach forecloses research into theistic spirituality
except as an overlay on non-theistic spirituality.
Loder’s exploration of Christian transformation identifies a
human spirituality that is transforming and relational, can itself be
transformed, and exists because of divine spirituality. If the definitive
approach to human (let alone any other kind of) spirituality is purely
anthropological, then research into human spirituality as Loder
identifies it is foreclosed. As a result, research into the human
spirituality of many people is by definition pre-empted or at best very
partial. Spirituality research that combines a view from below with a
view from above has a better chance at explanatory and descriptive
power. That is, it has a better chance at identifying the points of
significant illumination and challenge to pre-conceptions, as well as
areas for potential collaboration among different spiritualities. In
chapter six, I provide warrants for this assertion by relating Loder’s
theory with that of James Hillman.

experience [as including] spiritual narcissism (which includes ego-inflation,

self-absorption, and spiritual materialism); integrative arrestment (meaning that
natural processes through which spiritual realisations are integrated into
everyday life are arrested); reduction of the spiritual into individual inner
experience which is at odds with the testimony of the traditions themselves; and
subtle Cartesiansim (emphasising the separation of the “objects” of experience
from the “subject” having the experience) […] the experiential approach is
significantly at odds with the traditional goals of the spiritual traditions, which
are more towards participation and knowing.’ Lancaster argues that
transcendent reality must be allowed as a possibility in the field of transpersonal
psychology. I formulated my argument before reading Lancaster’s, but am
encouraged to find his article in agreement with my own assertion.

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6. Loder and Particularity and Universality in spirituality

By ‘spirit,’ Loder refers to a quality of relationality fundamental to

human nature and the Trinity.84 In a sentence, the human spirit’s

84 The following extensive references give a sense of the rich understanding that
Loder has of the human spirit and thus human nature, refuting potential
accusations that he does not affirm human structures and dynamics, rendering
humans passive recipients of grace in Christian transformation. The human
spirit is the ‘uninvited guest in every meaningful knowing event,’ ‘the dynamic
that unobtrusively directs and shapes them all,’ ‘characterized as a coherent
pattern of knowing which draws into a differentiated whole the many splintered
ways we are taught to think,’ ‘does not emphasize cognitive behavior’ but ‘its
power to shape cognition is familiar to us in its acts of creativity and scientific
discovery,’ ‘profoundly evident in intuitive and affective ways we know each
other in acts of love and compassion,’ and has as ‘its deepest characteristic […]
its integrity in driving toward meaning and wholeness in every complex and
variegated context’ (TM, pp. 2-3); ‘What we have called the irreducible
relationality of human existence may in this context be called the human spirit’
(Loder and Neidhardt, KM, p. 50); ‘[I]n a provisional sense, the quest for a
generic concept of spirit may come to rest in the proximate relationality of self-
inclusive knowing as it is set in the context of the ultimate relationality
constituting the selfhood of Christ’ (ibid., p. 64; note that Loder relates a
possible generic understanding of spirit with an understanding of God’s
presence and relational initiative in Christ). Loder affirms Pannenberg’s view
that spirit ‘is a central drive toward the construction of meaning in relationship
to another, a meaning which already exists implicitly in the higher intelligibility
through which all things have been made’ (KM, p. 166, referring to W.
Pannenberg’s Anthropology in Theological Perspective, pp. 346ff, 515ff).
However, Loder rejects what he understands as a tendency in Pannenberg to
‘absorb the human spirit into an all-encompassing view of the Divine Spirit’
(LS, p. 34). Using Kierkegaard’s concept of spirit, Loder argues that ‘the human
spirit […] is inherently relational, transformational, self-transcending, and the
dynamic basis of choice; it is the dynamism that drives human development
forward […]. When the self that is “spirit” is transparently grounded in the
power that posits it, to use Kierkegaard’s language, then the basis for an
unlimited openness to the world and to God is established with a wisdom that
includes but transforms the contributions to understanding that come from a
scientifically shaped postmodern mentality’ (ibid., pp. xii-xiii). The human
spirit is the ‘central driving force in human development’ (ibid., p. 4). ‘Human

165
relationality is the simultaneous outward and inward movement
(paradoxical exoteric-centeredness) that manifests a special
correspondence between human and divine natures (the imago dei)
and operates via the ‘logic of transformation’. That is, the human
spirit relates a person to herself and relates this self-relationality to the
world, both forming and being formed by the exchange between the
person and her environment. This exchange both within a person and
between a person and her surroundings occurs via the five-phased
logic: there is scanning, insight, conflict, energy release, and
interpretation going on all the time, simultaneously involving different
aspects of human existence. And in some way, this relational inward
and outward movement of the human spirit that constantly discovers
and probes oneself and one’s world reflects the relational inward and
outward movement of the Trinity, who sustains and invites one to be
drawn into the Tri-Une life. The theories of Erik Erikson (socio-
emotional development) and Jean Piaget (cognitive development)
assert that a person’s awareness develops from herself outward, as her
ego negotiates her widening environment.85 Loder contends that this
outward movement explains in part the universalizing movement in a
person’s reasoning (from concrete to abstract) as she matures. As we
develop and mature, we seek universals to explain particulars. Even an
extreme relativism is an universal assertion. Universalizing
explanations support a homeostatic equilibrium with our
environments. We ensure survival and satisfaction by trying to prevent
conflict. When conflicts erupt, we manage them to reinstate

openness to the world and self-transcendence is what Pannenberg calls

“exocentricity,” and in this one word he designates the human spirit’ (ibid.,
p. 5). ‘Gödel’s incompleteness theory discloses indirectly through mathematics
the inherent incompleteness of the human spirit. It must be grounded beyond
itself if it is to become intelligible even to itself’ (ibid., p. 12).
85 Loder, LS, pp. 255-259. Loder interacts with these theorists in some detail, an
analysis of which is beyond the scope of this discussion, save one comment:
Loder acknowledges that Piaget is controversial, but notes that Piaget’s theory
is more relationally based than the usual textbook presentation conveys.
Loder’s reference to Piaget does not prevent a reinterpretation of his cognitive
development theory to eliminate gender bias.

166
homeostasis. Yet conflicts yield insights, and generate new
knowledge. Human knowing is inherently conflictual and thereby
potentially transformational and relational. The nature of the
transformation and relationship can be creative, destructive, or a
blend. In Christian transformation, the Holy Spirit illuminates
existential conflicts that can lead to transformed transformation and
relationship (the transformation of transformation). ‘Can’ because an
individual or group can always engage with a conflict two-
dimensionally rather than four-dimensionally. Concurrently, the Holy
Spirit can move transformatively without human awareness of divine
agency. If God is the ground of knowing anything at all, and if
human-divine relationality involves existential conflicts, then it
follows that human knowing would be inherently conflictual.
Avoidance of conflict would follow from a person’s ‘negation’ of her
deepest longings (e.g., for human-divine relationality).
Loder maintains that the human-divine relationality of Christian
spirituality cannot be managed through techniques or strategies.
Studying spiritual experience purely as a human trait can render
spirituality another human trait to be managed through techniques and
strategies.86 ‘Human trait spirituality’ can marginalize or devalue a
spirituality that is understood as dynamic human response to divine
initiative. Loder’s theory aims to describe a movement that is both
particular to the concrete history of human individuals in particular
social and cultural groups and universal in its understanding of aspects
of the human person. His theory relates all human knowing (as
transforming and relational) to the transformed transformational and
relational knowing arising from deep engagement with God, which
manifests in the particular history of the Christian God in human

86 Turner notes that this understanding of spirituality is something against which

the mystical authors specifically write (Darkness of God, p. 4). Those who
affirm God as primary agent can also treat spirituality as techniques. See for
example, David Benner’s Care of Souls: Revisioning Christian Nurture and
Counsel, pp. 91-92. See chapter six of this discussion, note 20.

167
history as well as universal in its ontological claims for human-divine
relationality.87
The first edition of The Transforming Moment published in 1981,
sparked some queries about the hospitality of Loder’s theory to other
faith positions. His particularities were seen as preventing discussion
with other particularities. For example, James Fowler concludes his
reflections on the first edition of The Transforming Moment by asking
Loder to ‘acknowledge the power and truth of other religious
apprehensions.’88 Similarly, in a review of the second edition (1989),
Frank Rogers, a former student of Loder’s, asks, ‘How does this
Christocentric perspective allow for the Holy Spirit to work
redemptively in other faith communities?’89 Loder focuses on the
relationship between universality and particularity in his next major
text, The Knight’s Move (1992), co-authored with physicist Jim
Neidhardt.90 There, he asserts that the solution to ‘the dilemma of
human particularity versus the universality of truth is relationality as
the irreducible limit.’91 Only an account of truth that includes the
particular human knower can be adequate.92 Even then, such an

87 The universal ontological claims about human nature within the Christian
tradition (e.g., sin, the need for redemption) cannot be tested universally and
therefore are non-falsifiable as universal claims. However, Gödel’s work shows
that ‘the notion of provability is weaker than the notion of truth’ (LS, p. 39). I
am arguing as an extension of Loder that if a person accepts the Christian faith
premises, then his theory may be a way of working out certain of those
premises with regard to human anthropology and human-divine relationality in
‘deep, transforming engagement with God’ (or, mystical spirituality). I apply
this extended theory to the context of mystical spirituality discourse for inter-
disciplinary and inter-faith (broadly understood) research, thereby modifying
his theory to insist that the view from above must be considered as at least a
possibility by researchers in the human sciences. Theologically located
researchers would consider the view from above as a reality, not just a
possibility.
88 Loder, J. and Fowler, J. ‘Conversations on Fowler’s Stages of Faith and
Loder’s The Transforming Moment,’ 77/2:p. 147.
89 Roger, F. ‘Book Reviews.’ Religious Education, 86:p. 325.
90 Loder and Neidhardt, KM, pp. 188, 189.
91 Ibid., p. 189.
92 Ibid.

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account can be exhaustive only when the understanding of the knower
includes the relationality between the mysterious Divine Presence, ‘in
whom resides ultimate meaning and purpose’ and the human spirit ‘in
its drive to make all things intelligible.’93
In his third major text on transformation, The Logic of the Spirit,
Loder acknowledges that his methodology might be understood as
Christological imperialism.94 He responds by asserting that a
Christological insight of relationality resolves rather than exacerbates
inter-disciplinary conflict.95 By focusing on the relationality, ‘the
dynamism of exchange between these fields of enquiry’ (human
sciences and theology) as a ‘reality to be prized,’ his methodology
enables direct relationship between seemingly polarizing disciplines
and approaches.96 In his estimation, other approaches use a third
‘thing’ or field or discipline through which to relate disciplines and
approaches.97 Loder insists that direct relationship is possible and
preferable.98 Perhaps the best response is that his methodology is as
imperialistic as or no more imperialistic than a radical constructivist or
any other methodology. He does try to honor the particularities of
other disciplines while acknowledging his own theological
assumptions. Moreover, it is possible for a human scientist to

93 Ibid. David Ford suggests seeing the ‘polarity of particularity and universality
mediated through the face’ (Self and Salvation, p. 19). The mediation or
integration is the relationality: ‘The particular face has a capacity to relate to
others that is in principle universal’ (ibid., italics mine). For Ford, the Christian
community is ‘concerned with the transformation of facing before the face of
Christ’ (p. 24). In Loder’s terms, the transformation of facing before the face of
Christ involves ego-relativization in face-to-face engagement with the spiritual
Presence of Christ in the historic, concrete particularities of a person’s lived
world.
94 Loder, LS, p. 37.
95 Ibid.
96 Ibid., p. 41.
97 Ibid., p. 37. Loder rejects the Platonic premise that requires a ‘third thing’ to
mediate the Hellenic dualism of unchanging Being and changeable bodies
(Plato, Timaeus, 31c and 35a). He points to the unchangeable Being God and
the changeable human body united without a ‘third thing’ in the person of Jesus
Christ.
98 Ibid.

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appropriate the methodology of direct relationship modeled by the
Chalcedonian formulation without affirming the reality of the
Incarnation.
In mystical spirituality discourse, one dilemma revolves upon
particular competing claims to universal anthropologies (the nature of
the human knower and therefore the knowing event) and theologies (if
theistic). The anthropologies and theologies are inseparable from one
another, each informing and being informed by the other, a non-
theistic spirituality having an anthropology that informs and is
informed by non-theological tenets. If Loder is correct that a ‘reality
to be prized’ is the relationality between these competing (conflictual)
claims, then relating the competing (conflictual) anthropologies and
theologies to each other will create a valuable dynamism. Rather than
diffusing this dynamism through indirect relationship, Loder’s
methodology values direct relationships of disagreement and
agreement, of conflict (which is part of the transformational logic that
characterizes all human knowing). The aim is not to synthesize or
reduce this dynamic, but to value the exchange between the
spiritualities, acknowledging the universal claims of each particular
spirituality.
Each spirituality will understand other spiritualities from within
its own worldview and Loder’s transformation theory is no exception.
Ultimately, his theory aims to relate and thereby transform other
theories or spiritualities through human-divine relationality according
to the Chalcedonian formula. In this sense, Loder’s theory is
imperialistic, as all world-views can be imperialistic; denying this
imperialism or universal claim denies a particularity of most world-
views and spiritualities. Expanded and modified for inter-disciplinary
research on mystical spirituality, this methodology values the
acknowledgement of the possibility of theistic reality (from those
researchers in the human sciences) that may conflict with particular
anthropologies, even if, in the end, theistic reality is rejected by a
particular researcher or research team (in the human sciences). Each
discipline and spirituality will be known more fully from the
exchange. Expanded and modified for inter-faith (broadly understood)
dialogue on mystical spirituality, this methodology values the
dynamic exchange between different spiritualities with the conflicts or

170
disagreements. The particularities of each faith, perhaps including
some uncomfortable specifics often ignored, will be more accessible
from the exchange. Different religious tenets will always conflict99
and be used to justify physically violent action. Methodologically
enabling spirituality discourse to acknowledge these conflicts as a
reality to be prized rather than bar them from discussion can help with
the challenge of living with conflicts more creatively than
destructively. Christians who recognize that conflict is inherent in
learning and knowing may discover creative insights ‘outside the box’
that transcend present understandings of conflicts within the church,
and with various cultures and other world-views.

7. Conclusion

In this chapter, I have argued for strong connections between Loder’s

theory of transformation and mystical spirituality, as it is portrayed by
four contemporary investigators, Louth, McGinn, Turner, and
McIntosh. The connections coalesce in my summary phrase that
synthesizes the four authors’ presentations: ‘deep, transforming
engagement with God.’ Loder connects his theory with mystical
dynamics, authors, terms and patterns. In his arguments that
contingency can deepen into transforming relationship through figure-
ground reversals and recognized participation, he agrees with the four
authors. Their mystical spirituality involves recognizing divine
immediacy as the ‘exoteric dynamic’ within the ordinary, a dynamic
in which a person always participates or else she would not exist.
Loder’s theory is thoroughly inter-disciplinary yet avoids the
‘mysticism-experience identity’. He argues for the inseparability of

99 Bowker contends that the different religions cannot be reduced to a common

core or perennial theory, ‘they are not the same; there are issues of truth and
salvation between religions’ (World of Faith: Religious Belief and Practice in
Britain Today, p. 302, italics original).

171
experience from interpretations, of spirituality from theology. His
inter-disciplinary approach to the conceptual field of Christian
mystical spirituality seems to be of the very type hoped for by the four
authors (and meets the objections of those preferring a purely
anthropological approach), affirming human dynamism in the dual
agency of Christian spirituality. The use of ego-strengthening
language in inter-disciplinary research on Christian transformation
should be qualified to refer to a particular strengthening via ego-
relativization. Ego functioning is enhanced through de-centering and
in this sense could be said to be strengthened. But the strengthening of
the de-centered or relativized ego differs from the ego strengthening
posited by Freud. This distinction requires investigation beyond the
scope of this discussion, but such research would need to begin with
my assertions of accord between a theory of ego-relativization and
Christian mystical spirituality.
Loder distinguishes ecclesiastical community from ecclesiastical
communion or koinonia, asserting a dialectical relationality between
community and communion and noting that the presence of God
continually offers to transform a two-dimensional community into
four-dimensional communion. In his earliest inter-disciplinary
research, later supported by neurological research, he asserts that
human knowing involves both emotions and reason or else becomes
pathological. Mystical knowing involves a love that is itself a
knowing, arising from the mediated or partial immediacy of God’s
presence. The four authors highlight the paradoxical nature of this
‘dialectical dynamic’ and Loder describes it as a bi-polar relational
unity without synthesis or reduction, as embodied by the Absolute
Paradox.100 Recall that these awkward phrases refer to the respect for
otherness inherent in human-divine relationality, despite the
asymmetry between the Creator and creature.
Despite a history of suspicion among various Christian traditions
regarding mystical spirituality, Loder and the four authors share a

100 Loder attributes this term, ‘Absolute Paradox,’ to Søren Kierkegaard (Loder
and Neidhardt, KM, pp. 62, 96). Loder also uses Arthur Koestler’s term,
bisociation (e.g., TM, p. 38).

172
common focus on ‘deep, transforming engagement with God.’ This
common focus does not remove distinctions but focuses on the One
who graciously sustains and offers to transform all that exists.
Contemporary mystical spirituality discourse debates the dilemmas of
particularity and universality among various spiritualities and how to
relate them. In the context of inter-disciplinary research, if spirituality
is viewed purely as an universal human trait nurtured through
particular spiritualities of particular thought-systems, then research
will ignore those spiritualities that disallow a purely human trait
spirituality. Similarly, viewing spirituality as purely theistic will
ignore those spiritualities that reject theistic spiritualities. I have
expanded and modified Loder’s methodology to argue that the
conflictual relationship between contradictory spiritualities is a reality
to be prized as generative of new insights. Each spirituality will have
its universal assertions as an element of its particularity. As a field of
enquiry, spirituality can facilitate rather than prevent a dynamic
exchange between conflicting assumptions. To test the power of
Loder’s methodology, expanded and modified, I turn to the theory of
James Hillman in the next chapter (four) and then create an exchange
between Loder and Hillman in the chapter after that (five). This
exchange will demonstrate the value of including both views from
above and below, even when a spirituality is not theistic. It will also
demonstrate the power of a direct relationship between conflicting
spiritualities to yield new insights.

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Chapter Four: The Ego-Relativization
Theory of James Hillman

1. Introduction

This chapter lays the foundation for testing my application and

modification of Loder’s methodology for spirituality discourse.
Recall that he formulated his methodology for the inter-disciplinary
study of transformed human knowing through ‘deep, transforming
engagement with God.’ I am applying his methodology to the area
of spirituality discourse, expanding it for inter-faith (broadly
understood) discussion. I have modified it by arguing that
researchers in the human sciences should consider divine reality at
least as a possibility. Of course, Loder’s area of Christian
Education in Practical Theology affirmed God’s active presence as
a reality, not as a possibility. And Christian theological researchers
who focus on spirituality as inter-disciplinarians will also approach
their field with the assumption that God is real. But human science
researchers do not necessarily do so. My argument is that they must
include divine reality as a possibility in their methodology or else
render their research inadequate. The discussion of this chapter
solely analyzes James Hillman’s arguments, following the structure
of the chapter on Loder with the headings of Ego, Ego-
Relativization, and Results.
 As a depth psychologist,1 James Hillman does not deviate from
many of the broad characteristics of classical depth psychology. He
understands it as aiming to bring unconsciousness to consciousness,
asserting that the unconscious affects our thoughts and behavior to a
greater extent than consciousness.2 Sigmund Freud’s ‘topographical
model of personality organization’ illustrates this presupposition:
consciousness represents only the tip of the iceberg, while pre-
consciousness and unconsciousness form the huge structure beneath
and supporting the tip.3 The water-line symbolizes the division
between consciousness and pre-/un-consciousness. If the water-line
can be lowered or the mountainous structure elevated, so that what is
unconscious is made conscious, then, at the very least, a person can
hope for greater self-understanding.
As a neo-Jungian, Hillman also draws on Jung who, according to
Hillman, ‘through his own independent research […] had experi-
mentally stumbled upon the unconscious and therefore he was one of

1 Hillman qualifies his use of the adjective ‘depth.’ ‘The literalization of

downwardness in depth psychology has resulted in a narrowness of meaning:
introverted inwardness within the person, into the “abyss” and “secret chamber”
of the personal self […] For archetypal psychology, the vertical direction refers
to interiority as a capacity within all things. All things have an archetypal
significance and are available to psychological penetration, and this interiority
is manifested by the physiognomic character of the things of the horizontal
world. Depth is therefore not literally hidden, deep down, inside. Rather, the
fantasy of depth encourages us to look at the world again, to reach even for
“something deeper,” to “insearch” […] rather than to research, for yet further
significance below what seems merely evident and natural. The downward
interiorizing fantasy is thus at the very basis of all psychoanalysis. The fantasy
of hidden depths ensouls the world and fosters imagining ever deeper into
things. Depth—rather than a literal or physical location—is a primary metaphor
for psychological thinking (or “psychologizing”)’ (Archetypal Psychology: A
Brief Account, pp. 29-30).
2 ‘depth psychology which is—as the analyst’s own training exhibits—
necessarily a personal encounter with one’s own unconscious,’ Insearch, p. 45;
‘the whole psyche, which is mainly unconscious,’ Myth of Analysis, p. 51.
3 Hjelle, L. & Ziegler, D. (1992). Personality Theories: Basic Assumptions,
Research, and Applications (3rd Edition), p. 86; see p. 88 for diagram. Loder
also includes a diagram in LS, p. 22.

176
the earliest to embrace Freud’s hypothesis of an unconscious mind.’4
Like Jung (and Loder), Hillman deviates from Freud regarding the
goal of therapy. For Freud, the goal of psychoanalysis is to strengthen
the ego. For Hillman, the goal is the ‘relativization of the ego.’5 Ego-
relativization involves elevating the mountainous structure above the
water-line so that the ego tip is made relative to the vast formation on
which it is only a small point. Freudian therapy also raises
unconsciousness so that it becomes part of consciousness, but
strengthens the ego tip as the center of the mountainous structure. For
Hillman’s archetypal psychology, the insight that a person needs her
ego relativized operates as the initial lever.6
According to Hillman, many factors contribute to the insight that
a person’s ego must be relativized. The way is paradoxical. The
minute she resolves to relativize her ego, she strengthens the very
psychic element that she has resolved to relativize.

If we approach ourselves to cure ourselves, putting ‘me’ in the center, it too

often degenerates into the aim of curing the ego—getting stronger, better,
growing in accord with the ego’s goals, which are often mechanical copies of
society’s goals [those of Western culture].7

The sections below consider this paradox.

The rest of this chapter is divided into sections that describe
Hillman’s understanding of the ‘relativization of the ego’ by breaking
down that phrase into its constituent parts. The first section considers
his understanding of the ego. The next sections consider archetype and
soul as the psychic structures to which a person’s ego is made relative,
as well as the integrated forces that initiate and enable the
relativization process. Then follows Hillman’s distinction between a
person’s ego that needs relativizing and her consciousness. The final
sections consider the actual process and results of relativizing the ego.

4 Insearch, p. 52.
5 Archetypal Psychology, p. 53.
6 Myth of Analysis, p. 87.
7 Insearch, p. 76.

177
2. Ego

Hillman uses the term ‘ego’ with a very particular meaning: ‘an
attitude now so habitual that we have come to call it the ‘ego,’
forgetting that it is but another archetypal style.’8 By ‘habitual
attitude,’ he means ways of experiencing the world that are reinforced
by culture,9 and in Hillman’s judgement, narrow and reductive. He
identifies this attitude with the ‘heroic ego,’ after the archetype of the
Greek mythological ‘hero’; it represents particular behavior, images,
consciousness, and attitudes.10 Myth is the primary language in his
archetypal psychology.11 The heroic ego, however, constitutes only a
part of the archetypal ego, a mythic fragment,12 which in turn is only a
partial personality.
Hillman’s conviction that the ego is only a part of any
individual’s personality builds on Jung’s theory:

In Jungian practice the words Shadow, Self, Ego, Anima, and the like refer to
the structural components of the personality. These basic structures are always

8 Re-Visioning Psychology, p. xiv.

9 ‘The hero […] show[s] the collective aspect of any archetype. First, by means
of it we can collect together disparate personal events and discover a sense and
depth in them beyond our individual habits and quirks. Second, the archetypal
perspective provides a common connection between what goes on in any
individual soul and what goes on in all people in all places in all times. It allows
psychological meaning at a collective level. Archetypal, in other words, means
fundamentally human’ (ibid., italics original).
10 “behavior, the drive to activity, outward exploration, response to challenge,
seizing and grasping and extending […] images of Hercules, Achilles, Samson
(or their cinema counterparts) doing their specific tasks […] a style of
consciousness, in feelings of independence, strength, and achievement, in ideas
of decisive action, coping, planning, virtue, conquest (over animality), and in
psychopathologies of battle, overpowering masculinity, and single-mindedness
[…] the heroic attitude,’ (ibid., italics original).
11 The ‘archetypals or universals of the unconscious psyche are to be found in
myth […] myth is the a priori given with the soul itself’ (Myth of Analysis, p.
190).
12 Ibid., p. 87.

178
 imagined to be partial personalities, and the interplay between them is
imagined more as in fiction than in physics.13

If a person considers just a part of her ego, the heroic ego, to be all
that exists of her personality, then she remains unaware of most of
herself. She encounters others with only a part of herself and views
others only partially. Such drastic distortion requires drastic correc-
tion, i.e., ego-relativization.
In Hillman’s theory, a person’s heroic ego is part of a complex,
the ‘ego-complex,’ which in turn is one of many complexes in the
psyche.14 In his use of the term ‘complex,’ Hillman retains the Jungian
notion of ‘linking the personal and the collective,’15 but reworks the
term to refer to the emotions ‘contained’ by the complex. For Jung, a
person’s emotions from a complex ‘derive from the interaction of the
ego position with numerous archetypal configurations.’16 For Hillman,
emotions involve much more than the ego complex and the
archetypes. A person is more than her ego. All the ‘layers’ or riches
of a person, her self, can interact with the infinite collective archetypal
images to produce various emotions. Neither complexes in general nor
the ego-complex itself needs to be dependent upon the heroic ego.
That is, a person’s emotions can be much more varied than normally
allowed by the heroic ego. Hillman claims that Western historical and
cultural forces have supported the collective heroic ego as it manifests
individually until it now functions as if the rest of the psyche needs to
be dependent on it, as if that is all that is there.
To describe a person’s heroic ego as it relates to the rest of the
ego-complex, Hillman uses many term pairings. In their duality, these

13 Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 22, italics original; ‘Jung’s theories definitely do

not present an ego-psychology, since the ego, too, is, and must always remain,
but a partial personality by definition’ (‘Archetypal Psychology: C. G. Jung,’ p.
181).
14 ‘“the ego complex is not the only complex in the psyche” [quoting Jung in
Collected Works, vol.4, para.106] […] the ego is not the whole psyche, only
one member of a commune’ (Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 31).
15 Samuels, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 47.
16 Ibid., italics inserted.

179
pairings indicate the paradoxical nature of the ego-complex. They also
suggest the archetypal mooring of the complex; archetypes, by
definition, are bi-polar.17 The next section considers Hillman’s
understanding of archetype more fully, but whenever considering his
theories, it is useful to keep in mind that he calls his movement
‘Archetypal Psychology,’ after the psychic structure he considers most
fundamental.18 Hillman’s ultimate justification for relativizing the
heroic ego derives from this theoretical foundation for the psyche. He
asserts that the heroic ego distorts archetypal soul, the very source of
its value and importance. As discussed in the sections below, the
archetypal soul is the guiding force of the universe. In the next
chapter, I will consider the historical question of whether the
archetypal soul can be considered a synonym for the Holy Spirit. For
Hillman, relativization of the heroic ego provides the most adequate
form of redress for distortion of the archetypal soul.
Hillman’s paired terms for the ego-complex each refer to and
describe its nature. In the following pairings, the first term refers to
the part of the ego-complex that he considers to be the common
understanding of ‘personality’ or ‘self’, i.e., the heroic ego. The
second term refers to the other part of the ego-complex that is mostly
unconscious. The terms themselves emphasize the contrast between
the heroic ego and the rest of the ego: rational ego and imaginal ego,19
animus and anima,20 consciousness as action and consciousness as
reflection,21 light and dark or shadow,22 ego and unconsciousness23 or
memoria.24 The first terms indicate his understanding of values

17 ‘Senex and Puer: An Aspect of the Historical and Psychological Present,’

p. 12.
18 Re-Visioning Psychology, p. xiii.
19 Myth of Analysis, p. 188.
20 Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, p. 93.
21 Insearch, p. 11.
22 ‘Senex and Puer,’ pp. 19, 31.
23 Myth of Analysis, p. 8.
24 Ibid., p. 185.

180
dominant in his own Western culture,25 and he asserts that his culture
de-values the second terms. His culture values the behavior, images,
consciousness and attitudes of the heroic ego and the heroic ego
expresses his culture’s values. He associates these values with
Christianity and is not the only one to do so. Practical theologian John
Drane writes,

Christians may question—with some justice—the understanding of history and

scripture proposed by people who argue in this way [that Christianity is
responsible for current environmental problems]. But, as with much else for
which Christianity is being blamed today, there is an element of truth
underlying these claims […]
I want to suggest here that Christians today are dealing with the fallout of
a theological and cultural time-bomb left by their forebears’ uncritical
acceptance of the materialist values of the Enlightenment, with its pretentious
optimism about human potential, and which in turn spawned a self-centred
individualism that inevitably led to a reduction in the sense of responsibility
towards other people and for the wider environment.26

In Hillman’s analysis, the symbiotic relationship between culture and

the heroic ego reinforces the misunderstanding of a person’s heroic
ego as her entire personality. What it means to be human, total
personhood, is reduced to the characteristics of the heroic ego. The
other parts of the ego-complex—never mind the other complexes or

25 Under the phrase, ‘dominant in his own culture,’ I am subsuming the cultural
components that Hillman criticizes through his archetypal psychology. He uses
the nomenclature ‘North’ and ‘South’: “Unlike the main psychologies of the
twentieth century which have drawn their sources from Northern Europe—the
German language and Protestant-Jewish monotheistic Weltanschauung—
archetypal psychology starts in the South […]‘South’ is both an ethnic, cultural,
geographic place and a symbolic one. It is both the Mediterranean culture, its
images and textual sources, its sensual and concrete humanity, its Gods and
Goddesses and their myths, its tragic and picaresque genres (rather than the epic
heroism of the North); and it is a symbolic stance ‘below the border’ which
does not view that region of the soul only from a northern moralistic
perspective” (Archetypal Psychology, pp. 30-31).
26 Cultural Change and Biblical Faith: The Future of the Church. Biblical and
Missiological Essays for the New Century, pp. 9; 58-59.

181
ways of being—have been pushed into the darkness of a person’s
unconscious.27
As the primary language of archetypal psychology, Hillman turns
to Greek myth as part of his ‘return’ to ‘the culture of imagination’
and the time when ‘modes of living carried what had to be formulated
[later…] as “psychology”.’28 He laments the displacement of Greek
myth by Christianity and modernism and recommends the use of myth
for post-modern psychology.

If in our disintegration we cannot pull our bits into one monotheistic ego
psychology, or cannot delude ourselves with the progressive futurism or the
natural primitivism that once worked so well, and if we need a complexity to
match our sophistication, then we turn to Greece.29

As suggested by this passage, he rejects the psychological terms

appropriated from the scientific method (e.g., ‘variable’), as well as
traditional personality psychology which he views as inescapably
tainted with monotheistic religious presuppositions, using instead
Greek mythological terms (e.g., anima, animus). Mythological terms
serve as reminders of the archetypal foundation of the human psyche,
as opposed to an egoistic foundation.30
Hillman attributes the following characteristics to the heroic ego
part of the ego-complex: independent,31 an instrument of will and
reason,32 self-objectifying and self–judging,33 developing ‘at the
expense of the whole being, of the Self,’34 using creativity to extend

27 Insearch, pp. 114-115.

28 Archetypal Psychology, p. 30.
29 Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 29.
30 ‘Images are “inner,” “archaic,” “primordial”; their ultimate source is in the
archetypes, and their expression is presented most characteristically in the
formulation of myth’ (Anima, p. 95).
31 Insearch, p. 17.
32 Ibid., p. 20.
33 Ibid., p. 24.
34 ‘The ego develops its focus from infancy onward by gathering to itself the more
diffuse light of general consciousness. Its growth is at the expense of the whole
being, of the Self. On the one hand, this development gives the ego its force for

182
and enhance itself,35 making little room for fantasy except in the realm
of repression,36 imposing the ‘moralistic fallacy’ of good and evil,37
and literalistic toward itself and its view.38 These characteristics of a
person’s heroic ego justify the need to relativize it.
In its independence and development at the expense of the whole
being, the heroic ego, says Hillman, ‘robs consciousness from the
psyche as a whole.’39 If a person’s heroic ego is considered to be the
whole personality, then it alone is responsible for her consciousness. It
does not need the other parts of her psyche.40 Not needing them, her
heroic ego appraises the other parts of her psyche for their usefulness
to her heroic ego. Its values are the ones Hillman finds dominant in his
own culture, named in the term pairings (reason, masculinity, action,
lightness, and consciousness). The rest of the ego-complex and the
other complexes (i.e., emotions and thoughts deemed valueless by the
heroic ego) do not fare well in this selection process. A person’s
heroic ego submerges them into the unconscious, into darkness,41 and
she lives unaware of a vast portion of herself. While human nature
cannot help but express the archetypal soul, a person’s heroic ego
distorts the archetypal images that seek to express themselves through
the human person. This distortion occurs as her heroic ego appraises
and rejects many of the images manifested by the rest of the ego-

specialized directed attention and action. But on the other hand, this
development robs consciousness from the psyche as a whole, leaving much of it
in the dark […] The continued intensification of consciousness to the ego and
by the ego causes more and more darkness, more and more unconsciousness
elsewhere’ (Insearch, pp. 114-115); ‘The ego steals its light from the lumen
naturae, and the ego expands, not at the expense of primordial darkness, where
there is no light to be had, but at the cost of childhood’s godlike, dimmer light
of wonder, of imagination, and the symbolic, natural mind’ (Myth of Analysis,
pp. 45-46).
35 Myth of Analysis, p. 45.
36 Ibid., pp. 182, 185.
37 Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 178.
38 Ibid., p. 48.
39 Insearch, p. 114.
40 ‘but we cannot go it alone. That is the hero’s way,’ (Myth of Analysis, p. 92).
41 Insearch, p. 114.

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complex and the other complexes. The distortion is grave because it
distorts the ‘soul’ inherent in each archetype. For example, a person
with creative and artistic talents is born into a family that allows
creativity and artistry to be expressed only through scientific
experimentation in physics, chemistry, and biology. While this
daughter writes amazing poems and stories and paints with
tremendous artistry, her talents do not fit the confines of acceptable
expressions within her family. She is forced to relegate these writings
and visual works to her fantasy life, expressing her creative gifts only
as her siblings and parents do, in the beauty of elegant equations and
experiments.42 This example involves a family, but each of us lives in
‘families’ of acceptability often determined by nothing more than
cultural definitions of success or excellence. Hillman challenges each
person to explore the potential contributions of his or her whole self.
For Hillman, the bi-polar nature of archetypes is held together by
a core ‘soul.’43 A person’s heroic ego distorts the ‘soul’ by splitting
the archetypes into opposing poles so that an archetype no longer
expresses itself as a delicate balance of two images.44 When her heroic
ego dominates the images by splitting them, the core ‘soul’ is ‘lost,’ or
distorted.45 Relativizing a person’s heroic ego so that it no longer
distorts her expression of archetypal images ‘restores’ her ‘soul.’46
The archetypal soul once again maintains the tension between
archetypal poles and thereby provides a ‘balanced’ perspective that
integrates the images expressed by each pole.47 This balanced
perspective expresses through people (and the cosmos) values other
than those he attributes to his culture. An archetypal culture affirms
rather than represses imagination, femininity, reflection, darkness, and

42 While it may sound far-fetched, this family situation is factual and is a

psychiatric case in Los Angeles with which I am very familiar.
43 ‘Senex and Puer,’ p. 14.
44 Ibid., p. 20.
45 Ibid., p. 14.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid.

184
unconsciousness.48 Using the above example representatively, the
daughter would be affirmed for her creative contributions that are
unique within the family rather than chastised or marginalized for
deviating from the accepted expression. An individual would face his
fears that repress the different parts of himself and bind him to the
heroic ego’s definitions of success and excellence; he would feel
beneath the fears, through however many layers of fears, to whatever
grounding he would find holding him. Through this process he would
connect with the archetypal soul and emerge with a sense of his whole
self, not simply his heroic ego.
Without relativization, Hillman claims that a person’s heroic ego
exerts a sort of internal social control that produces psychic
conformity like a psychic censor. With relativization, the complexity
of the personality can manifest without a dominating force reducing
the expression. Self-knowledge can develop as archetypal images
disentangle from the heroic ego’s grasp and assume their own
identities within a person’s psyche. Hillman states that he and his
colleagues ‘attempt to develop individual self-knowledge through
knowledge of the different collectivities that speak through the ego.
Only as these are made distinct and identified is a person able to
discover who she is. This is differentiating.’49
In its expansive independence, Hillman’s heroic ego champions
will and reason.50 A person’s heroic ego limits the expression of
imagination and fantasy to aggrandize her heroic ego, valuing
creativity only to assert its own competencies.51 Her heroic ego

48 ‘As an early sign of this re-union we may expect a new experience of

ambivalence […] going by way of ambivalence circumvents coniunctio itself as
the tension of opposites’ (ibid., pp. 14, 15).
49 ‘The Feeling Function,’ p. 109, italics original. Differentiation ‘is a term used a
great deal by Jung, and in a number of ways. In his major definition in 1921
(Collected Works vol.6, para.705), he talked of differentiation as the separation
of parts from the whole. For example, concentrating on and being aware of the
relatively separate existence of the complexes or the organs of the psyche’
(Samuels, p. 153).
50 Insearch, p. 20.
51 Myth of Analysis, p. 45.

185
requires all creativity to conform to its own characteristics. Yet,
creativity inherently contains other values and these appear, albeit in a
distorted way. Fundamentally, creativity expresses archetypal soul.52
A person’s heroic ego distorts this expression.
Similarly, Hillman argues that a person’s heroic ego constrains
fantasy. Her heroic ego represses part of itself as it represses fantasy.53
Yet fantasy performs a valuable function, maintaining the other part of
the ego-complex, and the other parts of the personality. However, the
treasure of fantasy goes un-mined. Associated with the precious cargo
it maintains, fantasy is dismissed as useless. For example, fairy tales
are valuable for children, but once a growing child realizes that the
concrete world is the real world and that the fairy tales are ‘just
pretend’ then fairy tales start to collect dust on the shelf. But the fairy
tales embody a part of what it means to be human and when they are
consigned to the shelf so is a part of the person who used to delight in
them. Hillman asserts that a person’s creativity and fantasy can and
should be nurtured as modes of expression that can reveal her soul.
Devalued and untended, those parts of the personality pushed into a
person’s unconscious by her heroic ego ‘surface’ in the forms of
symptoms and dreams.
By valuing creativity only as a tool to demonstrate reason, and
repressing fantasy so that it is a repository for marginalized parts of
the whole self, Hillman concludes that a person’s heroic ego is left
with only a literal view of itself and the world.54 Her heroic ego views
itself as the literal center of the personality, the point through which
all other parts of the personality flow. It believes that the psychic
world it has created is the literal structure of the psyche, rather than an
edifice of its own making. Any inkling that it lives in a world of its
own making is conveniently repressed as a fantasy. A person’s heroic
ego views the world outside the psyche as literally as within; its
constraint of creativity and fantasy denies that there are layers of
meaning in the external world. The layers of meaning that Hillman

52 Ibid., p. 50.
53 Ibid., p. 185.
54 Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 48.

186
finds throughout the cosmos are fundamentally archetypal: ‘[o]uter
historical facts are archetypally ordered so as to disclose essential
psychological meanings.’55
Through all of these characteristics, Hillman asserts that a
person’s heroic ego exercises dominion, judging the person of which
it is part, other people, and the non-human world, all according to its
imbalanced values.56 Her heroic ego creates a morality that reflects its
own characteristics. Anything that does not conform to its own modus
operandi, is judged negatively. Imagination, femininity, reflection,
darkness, and unconsciousness are viewed as literally wrong.
In Hillman’s theory, the heroic ego’s characteristics all issue
from its distortion of the archetypal soul. This distortion affects the
ego-complex itself, which, Hillman asserts, expresses several
archetypes: ‘in a polytheistic psychology [i.e., archetypal psychology]
“ego” reflects any of several archetypes and enacts various
mythologems.’57
Three of the archetypes that Hillman names for the ego-complex
are: (1) ‘senex-puer,’ (2) the ‘Hero,’ and (3.a and 3.b) ‘animus-anima.’

(1) These ego problems are consequents rather than causes: they reflect a prior
disorder in the archetypal ground of the ego. This ground is senex-et-puer,
briefly conceived as its order on the one hand, its dynamus on the other.58

(2) Ego’s archetype is the Hero.59

(3.a) Animus is given with the civilization, and its psychic representation which
we foreshorten into the notion of ego.60

(3.b) the reliance of ego upon a factor behind it, the anima […] the sense of
personal identity is given, not by the ego, but to the ego by the anima.61

55 “Senex and Puer,” p. 7.

56 Insearch, p. 24.
57 Anima, p. 15.
58 “Senex and Puer,” p. 20, italics original.
59 Anima, p. 61.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid., p. 101.

187
When archetypes express themselves through an individual whose ego
has not been relativized, they enter into her heroic ‘ego-
consciousness.’ Upon so entering, the ‘inherent opposition within the
archetype splits into poles.’62 In the ascendancy of a person’s heroic
ego, the archetypes of the ego-complex split. For example, senex and
puer are split into poles, unnaturally separated, rather than balanced
by and in a person’s soul or psyche.
Hillman contends that a person’s heroic ego ‘kills’ her ‘soul,’
which normally maintains the relationship between the opposing poles
in the archetypes. A person without a relativized ego displays ‘the torn
condition of the split archetype[s].’63 Such a person lives cut off from
the vast majority of her consciousness, which is now unconscious
(below the water line).

When the duality […] is split into polarity, then we have met only the
alternating plus and minus valences given by [heroic ego] consciousness to one
half or the other, but we have more fundamental negativity, that of the split
archetype, and its corollary: [heroic] ego consciousness split from the
unconscious.64

This split between her heroic ego and the rest of her psyche affects a
person’s internal and external states, her relationship with herself and
other people:

How the [heroic] ego personality relates internally with the others [the other
archetypal images in the psyche], whose side it takes and whom it opposes, will
also show in one’s relations with the social environment. If I am repressively
domineering toward my interior weaknesses, I will tend to be the same way to
others, not listening to the needs of my associates and patients any more than
my egoism is able to listen to my internal needs.
In Jung’s theory, the roles we play with each other are given by the
partial personalities. Interpersonal relations are based on intrapersonal
relations.65

62 ‘Senex and Puer,’ p. 12.

63 Ibid., p. 14.
64 Ibid., p. 20.
65 Re-Visioning Psychology, p. xiv, italics original.

188
Self-relation is determined by the condition of a person’s soul, the
core of the archetypal images. This in turn determines inter-personal
relations, since soul connects individuals to each other and the world.
According to Hillman, relativizing the ego re-unites the
archetypes, restoring ‘soul’ to an individual as the core of archetypal
polarities.66 The restoration of soul balances the values and traits of a
person’s heroic ego with those of the rest of the ego-complex and the
other complexes in her psyche. Imagination, femininity, reflection,
darkness and unconsciousness surface above the water line of the
psychic mountain without the negative evaluation and constraint of
her heroic ego. The rich multiplicity of a person’s mountainous
psyche can be explored and appreciated. As the various faces of the
mountainous psyche co-exist with each other, so the individual in
whom the ego has been relativized is able to co-exist with the multiple
faces in other people and the non-human world. ‘The work on one’s
own person aims to open the senses and the heart to the life and
beauty of an animated world.’67
In summary, the ego is really an ego-complex, one of several
complexes that populate the human personality. The ego that people
normally mean when using the term ‘ego’ is just a part of the ego-
complex. This part of the ego-complex dominates a person’s entire
psyche, and fulfills the Greek mythological image of the hero.68 Her
heroic ego follows the military strategy of dividing and conquering. It
divides archetypes into poles and believes itself to have conquered
every image. It expands at the expense of the whole being, operates
independently, devalues creativity and fantasy, and functions mainly
on the level of literal meanings. These strategies represent and
conform to the values of Hillman’s own culture. The irony is that

66 ‘Senex and Puer,’ p. 14.

67 Anima, pp. 109, 111.
68 ‘the heroic myths of Hercules, with whose strength and mission we have
become so caught that the pattern of Hercules—clubbing animals, refusing the
feminine, fighting old age and death, being plagued by Mom but marrying her
younger edition—are only now beginning to be recognized as pathology’ (Re-
Visioning Psychology, p. 102).

189
while the heroic ego seems to function as the supreme emperor of the
human personality, the individual continues to be controlled by all the
archetypal images, not just the heroic ego. The relations between the
heroic ego and the other images determine the relations between the
individual and the rest of the world, human and non-human. The
archetypes guide and direct human existence, despite being distorted
by the heroic ego.

3. Archetype

According to Hillman, the ‘habitual modes of experiencing’ that are

identified with the ego,69 but represent only part of the ego-complex,
are not responsible for a sense of self, the sense that I exist. Firstly,
other complexes populate the psyche. Secondly, the source of a sense
of self lies ‘behind’ the ego, behind all the complexes, in the realm of
archetypal soul.

Without this ‘other’ which stands behind ego-consciousness, independent of it,

yet makes personal consciousness possible, there would be no individualized
personality, no subjective center to which events relate and become
experiences. This inner conviction in oneself as a personality Jung also calls
‘vocation.’ […] the sense of personality, the very belief and conviction in one’s
reality as an individual, depends on a factor transcendent to the ego-
personality, beyond its sensorium and its powers of will. Sometimes Jung calls
this factor, on which the individual depends, the ‘self.’ This term can be taken
as a description of substance and as a description of value. I prefer the latter
usage […] By giving “self” this double meaning, both personal and
transcendent, Jung suggests that each person is by definition connected to
something transcendent, or even has a transcendent supreme value beyond his
ego-personality. This gives worth to all manifestations of human nature.70

69 Ibid., p. 43.
70 ‘Archetypal Theory: C. G. Jung,’ pp. 172-173, italics inserted; Archetypal
Psychology, p. 13.

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Hillman locates the value of a human being in her connection to
archetypal soul. If that connection manifests distortion and the culprit
is her heroic ego, then a person must relativize her heroic ego or suffer
disruption of her very source of value. The archetypes will continue to
guide her, but the guidance will be distorted by the interference of her
heroic ego.
Hillman understands archetypes as ‘the deepest patterns of
psychic functioning.’71 An archetype enters a person’s ego-
consciousness, her heroic ego splits the archetype, appropriating that
which conforms to its values and repressing that which conflicts. Any
image trying to express itself through her psyche will be processed by
her heroic ego and forced into its own categories. The result is that the
archetype is expressed as polar images rather than through the
integration of the ‘soul.’ In this way, ‘soul,’ the balancing force
between two poles, is lost. For example, a person’s heroic ego utilizes
the perspectives of animus while disparaging those of anima and
pushing it into the unconscious. By dividing animus from anima the
balanced perspective of the soul is torn apart.
For Hillman, the ‘soul’ has a general mediating role. It does not
mediate only in archetypes, but functions also ‘as a mediating
personality between the whole psyche, which is mainly unconscious,
and the usual [heroic] ego.’72 If a person suspects that her heroic ego is
just a small part of her personality, then she might seek an image that
accurately represents her whole personality. Hillman contends that a
person will find a pantheon of images that together constitute her
whole personality. Some people may seek the source of these images.
These seekers will discover that the images are archetypal, shared by
humanity. In this way, some people will realize that they are
connected to other people via archetypal soul. The soul that mediates
unconsciousness and the ‘usual ego,’ as well as the poles of each
archetype, also mediates each person to other people. The ‘something
transcendent behind’ each individual psyche simultaneously connects
individual psyches to each other.

71 Re-Visioning Psychology, p. xiii, italics original.

72 Myth of Analysis, p. 51.

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 According to Hillman, the ‘soul connection’ is not limited to
human beings. Through the concept of anima mundi, the soul of the
world, he asserts that the non-human world also manifests the
archetypes that form the world.73 If experience is equated solely with
psychic reality, then a person’s heroic ego becomes a necessity.74 The
experience must be experienced by something, an internal witness of
experience.75 A person’s heroic ego fills the need for an internal
witness that organizes all experience. Something analogous is posited
for animals. But the rest of the non-human world is excluded from
psychic reality. In contrast, through the concept of anima mundi,
Hillman replaces self-experience with self-display.76 When my ego no
longer distorts the expression of archetypes through me, ‘I reenter the
Platonic cosmos which always recognizes that the soul of an
individual can never advance beyond the soul of the world, because
they are inseparable.’77
In summary, archetypes are ‘the roots of soul governing’ our
perspectives.78 Archetypes give a person her sense of self, they are the
source of human worth. In a personality dominated by the heroic ego,
the archetypes function in a distorted and disrupted way. This person
fails to live with internal and external relations that reflect archetypal
reality. That is, he lives oblivious to and disconnected from the riches
within himself and the world. This does not eliminate his or her worth

73 Thought of the Heart & The Soul of the World, p. 101. ‘Let us imagine the
anima mundi neither above the world encircling it as a divine and remote
emanation of spirit, a world of powers, archetypes, and principles transcendent
to things, nor within the material world as its unifying panpsychic life-principle.
Rather, let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul-spark, that
seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form […]
Not only animals and plants ensouled as in the Romantic vision, but soul is
given with each thing, God-given things of nature and man-made things of the
street’ (ibid).
74 Ibid., p. 103.
75 Ibid.
76 Ibid.
77 Ibid., p. 105.
78 Re-Visioning Psychology, p. xiii.

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as a human being, for they continue to be connected to the realm of
archetypes, but they are not living as they could. They do not realize
their true worth. They fail to see the soul on self-display through each
human and non-human element of the universe. When a person’s ego
is made relative to the other archetypal images, she begins to live as
she might, expressing and seeing archetypal images from the core or
‘soul’ of the images as the ‘soul’ guides the cosmos.

4. Soul

The soul is constituted by images that mediate between the human

psyche and ‘everything else.’ A person becomes substantive as she
manifests the archetypal images that guide and direct human beings.79

The image is spontaneous, primordial […] these images which are the very
stuff of our souls, are the only givens directly presented. Everything else—the
world, other persons, our bodies—are mediated to consciousness by this poetic
ancestral factor, the image […] There are Gods, and daimons and heroes in our
perceptions, feelings, ideas, and actions, and these fantasy persons determine
how we see, feel, think, and behave, all existence structured by imagination.80

The images constitute the soul and give us our sense of self. ‘Gods’,
‘daimons’, and ‘heroes’ refer to the power and function of the images
in the human psyche to structure all existence.81 If a person allows

79 Archetypal Psychology, p. 14.

80 Healing Fiction, pp. 74-75.
81 ‘Under the rubric of this or that God can be classified a vast assortment of
passions, ideas, events, objects, all of which “hang together” because the
archetypal configuration to which these details belong give them inherent
intelligibility.’ Myth of Analysis, p. 178; ‘Archetypal psychology envisions the
fundamental ideas of the psyche to be expressions of persons—Hero, Nymph,
Mother, Senex, Child, Trickster, Amazon, Puer and many other specific
prototypes bearing the names and stories of the Gods […] They provide the

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distortion of the archetypal realm by constricting consciousness to
heroic ego-consciousness, then she distorts her interaction with
herself, her interactions with other people, and her interactions with
the non-human world.82 She has ‘lost’ her ‘soul’ and effaced the
source of human value. If she makes her heroic ego relative to the
other images in the ego-complex, as well as to the images in the other
complexes, then she ‘finds’ her ‘soul,’ or anima mundi. She realizes
that she is connected to other people and the universe through soul. It
is the perspective of the soul, a perspective given by whole
archetypes, that ego-relativization enables.
Hillman believes that ‘soul’ is the rightful focus of psychology.
Using ‘soul’ and ‘psyche’ interchangeably, he draws on Jung’s maxim
that ‘image is psyche.’83 He uses other terms synonymously with
‘soul,’ e.g., ‘psyche,’ ‘seele,’ and ‘anima.’84 (His use of the latter term
can be confusing because it also refers to one pole of the animus-
anima archetype, as described above.) Rather than a static image (and
not an after-image from perceptions or sensations, or a mental
construct), the soul is an imaging activity.85 To mediate, the soul
needs to be active or fluid. Similarly, the description of ‘soul’ as ‘a
perspective’ that sees ‘all realities as primarily symbolic or
metaphorical’86 also follows from its mediating role. The soul presents
a perspective that relates the images being mediated. Mediated
relationships will necessarily find ‘reality’ in a ‘common ground,’ a

patterns of our thinking as well as of our feeling and doing’ (Re-Visioning

Psychology, p. 128).
82 ‘When we lose sight of these archetypal figures we become, in a sense,
psychologically insane: that is, by not ‘keeping in mind’ the metaphorical roots
we go ‘out of our minds’—outside where ideas have become literalized into
history, society, clinical psychopathology, or metaphysical truths. Then we
attempt to understand what goes on inside by observing the outside, turning
inside out, losing both the significant interiority in all events and our own
interiority as well’ (ibid., p. 128).
83 Jung, Collected Works, vol.13, para.75.
84 Archetypal Psychology, p. 17.
85 Ibid., p. 6.
86 Insearch, p. 42.

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‘space’ that is inherently symbolic or metaphorical. For example, a
person who lives from archetypal soul (rather than heroic ego) ‘sees’
or ‘feels’ layers of meaning in a painting, a sunset, a traffic jam, a
derelict house and their inter-connections as they exist in the cosmos.
Their existence is significant not only as literal realities, but also as,
for example, symbols of life, death, stillness, movement, noise,
silence, crowds, solitude, and so on. The ‘eyes’ of archetypal soul
enable a person to experience, to feel and to know, to mediate, each
minute detail as it contributes to the life of the universe. The
perspective is almost impossible to put into words unless two people
are making the attempt together in person.
For Hillman, the primary reality is archetypal. Archetypal soul is
constituted by mediated images that function as symbols and
metaphors for individual human beings. These symbols and metaphors
are the primary reality in each human psyche or soul (‘image is
psyche’). Since a person’s heroic ego distorts or misses these ‘truths,’
it is imperative that it be relativized to the other images in the soul, to
realize that it is only one image relative to numerous other images, to
gain the perspective of the soul. Only by attending to images other
than those approved by the heroic ego can a person hope to live out of
the primary reality of archetypal soul without distortion or disruption.
‘Soul’ as the mediator between archetypal polarities, between a
person’s heroic ego and her unconscious, between individual human
beings, and between the human and non-human world, represents a
‘self-limiting multiple relationship of meanings, moods, historical
events, qualitative details, and expressive possibilities.’87 These
concepts are slippery. Hillman admits that ‘soul’ is ‘a deliberately
ambiguous concept.’88 It is ‘an unknown human factor that makes
meaning possible, which turns events into experiences’ by relating
them to a person’s ultimate destiny, death.89 It is not clear what
Hillman means by ‘unknown human factor.’ Is he referring to the
interference of a person’s heroic ego that renders the soul ‘unknown’?

87 Archetypal Psychology, p. 8.
88 Insearch, p. 42.
89 Ibid.

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Or, to the inability of quantitative, experimental methods to examine
the soul so that it may be known? In any event, the soul can be known
through its effects: ‘makes meaning possible,’ ‘turns events into
experiences.’ The meaning of every event comes from experiencing it
in relation to a person’s own death.
Again, we encounter Hillman’s justification for relativizing the
heroic ego. If a person lives under the impression that the heroic ego
represents her total personality, then she lives without meaning or
worse, with a distorted understanding of death as the meaning of life.
She might kill others or herself rather than live in light of death as an
inescapable destiny. Indeed, a person’s heroic ego inflicts a type of
death on herself and others through its domination; that is, the
reduction of a person and other people to a heroic ego ‘kills’ the soul
of the human personality.
Fundamentally, Hillman’s argument for relativizing the ego rides
on his understanding of the archetypal soul as the essential perspective
that must replace that of the heroic ego for psychologically healthy
living. If a person’s heroic ego prevents the soul from its mediatory
functions, then she lives with an impoverished sense of self and self-
worth. Through the mediation of the soul, archetypal images bestow a
sense of self and self-worth via symbols and metaphors. Always the
soul points a person toward her death. The perspective of her
inescapable death, paradoxically, gives life. To experience it, a
person’s heroic ego must die to its present modus operandi and
experience rebirth as a member of a community, internal and external.
This community can be called ‘consciousness.’

5. Heroic Ego and Consciousness

While Hillman does not equate a person’s heroic ego with her
consciousness, he thinks that most psychologists do.

Most of the language of psychology developed within the same context which
saw the rise of the modern ego. This language reflects its context, a psyche

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 identified with the head and without eros, an ‘empire’ of the hard, strong,
materialized ego. Thus the descriptions and judgments in this language cannot
help but reflect the point of view of this structure of consciousness, to which we
are so habituated that we have come to call it ‘ego.’ Each of us accepts this
collective structure so unthinkingly, so irrevocably, that each believes it to be
his very own unique and private ‘I’.90

These assertions follow from Hillman’s understanding of archetypal

soul as the ‘something transcendent behind’ each personality. The
‘modern ego’ arose from archetypal images that were distorted by
Western cultural forces. These cultural forces also arose from
archetypal images and also were distorted by the collective
involvement of each person. ‘What we have been calling
“consciousness” all these years is really the Apollonic mode [of
consciousness] as hardened by the hero into a “strong ego”.’91 A
person’s heroic ego “hardened” or identified with the apollonic image
(recall that Greek mythology expresses archetypes) until it understood
itself as the center of her personality, indeed her whole personality,
rather than rightfully understood as part of a person’s ego-complex,
which itself exists among other complexes. Just as her heroic ego
represents only a part of her personality, so her consciousness
produced by her heroic ego is only a part of her consciousness.
The part of a person’s consciousness that the heroic ego produces
is not very valuable, according to Hillman. He disparages it as
presenting ‘the least aware perspectives,’ analogous to being inside
Plato’s cave.92 Consciousness provided by the heroic ego ‘does not
deserve the name of consciousness at all’93 because it is ‘the least
reflectively aware.’94 One of the term pairings used to describe the
ego-complex is consciousness as action and consciousness as
reflection. Reflection is a characteristic of the repressed part of a
person’s ego-complex. Displaying the characteristics of the heroic

90 Myth of Analysis, pp. 93-94.

91 Ibid., p. 290.
92 Anima, pp. 93-94.
93 Ibid.
94 ‘Senex and Puer,’ p. 19.

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ego, consciousness as action is ignorant of the primary realities of
human existence.
Historically, Hillman locates the identification of consciousness
with the heroic ego and the relegation of the other part of the ego-
complex in the nineteenth century West. By his account, there seem to
have been two trends. One trend involved the marginalization of the
imaginal ego and the total identification of the psyche with the
rational, volitional ego.95 The other trend involved the empirical proof
‘of a psyche outside consciousness. With this discovery the position of
the [heroic] ego, till then absolute, became relativized.’96 The former
trend has triumphed, although the latter trend has made its presence
known. The

history of psychology since the Reformation shows the movement of its reason
and the strengthening of its ego, but the history of civilization shows as well the
movement of unreason, the imaginal powers irrupting into reason, inflating it
with ideologies and thereby steering its course.97

The identification of the heroic ego and consciousness in the field of

psychology does not hinder archetypes from exercising their
influence. They are part of the structure of the human psyche. In the
long-term, the archetypes ‘prevail.’ In the short-term, the heroic ego
damages self-knowledge and human and cosmic connection.
Hillman’s distinction between ego and consciousness follows
Jung and Plotinus, both sources for archetypal psychology.98

For both Plotinus and Jung, soul is not ego; true consciousness refers to the
soul’s awareness of itself as a reflection of the universal collective psyche, and
certainly not an awareness of itself as a separated ego subjectivity. What we
today call ‘ego-consciousness,’ the daily level of habitual actions in the realm
of physis, or natural sensible perception, taking the world literally at face value,
is for Plotinus the lowest level of activity and a kind of unconsciousness.99

95 Myth of Analysis, p. 173.

96 Jung, Collected Works vol.9, ii, para.11.
97 Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 222.
98 Archetypal Psychology, pp. 1-5.
99 ‘Plotino, Ficino, and Vico as Precursors of Archetypal Psychology,’ p. 151.

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Just as a person’s consciousness produced by her heroic ego is only
partial consciousness, so her soul manifested by her heroic ego is only
partial soul. Her soul mediates between her unconscious and her
heroic ego, inviting her heroic ego to the self-awareness that it is only
one of many images. Her ego is influenced by her soul, but they are
not the same thing.
For Hillman, ‘true consciousness’ has to do with the soul. Given
the mediating role of the soul, self-awareness in an individual ‘as a
reflection of the universal collective psyche [soul]’ will affect the ego-
complex. But ‘true consciousness’ does not begin in the ego. Rather,
‘true consciousness’ begins in the archetypal soul, the ultimate
foundation of the human psyche. Consciousness must be greater than
the heroic ego, if personhood is rooted in archetypal soul.
Hillman cites various phenomena as evidence that consciousness
is not identical to the heroic ego. He refers to “slips of the tongue, or
what Freud called the psychopathology of everyday life” as evidence
that the ego ‘cannot control everything’.100 ‘There are many things I
do—such as dream, perceive and record, act habitually—which are
indeed conscious though ego is quite out of it.’101 Other evidences for
the non-identity of the heroic ego and consciousness appear in
‘symptoms’102 and dreams.

When I am laid low by the misery of depressions, symptoms, and cravings, I

meet the irrefutable evidence of the independence of psychic forces. Something
lives in me that is not of my own doing. This demon103 that speaks in dreams

100 Insearch, p. 51, italics original.

101 Myth of Analysis, p. 175.
102 By ‘symptom,’ Hillman refers to the Freudian use of psychopathology as his
starting place: ‘Our starting point is in the main tradition of depth psychology,
for like Freud […], we begin in the odd, ununderstandable, and alien symptom
rather than in the familiar ego, and as in all depth psychology we draw our
insights about the familiar from the alien, or as Erik Erikson has put it:
“Pathography remains the traditional source of psychoanalytic insight”’ (Re-
Visioning Psychology, p. 55).
103 Hillman does not use the term ‘demon’ to connote a belief in a spiritual realm
of transcendent beings. He uses the term to refer to an image of experience:
something seemingly outside of oneself that invades and torments one’s psyche

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 and passions and pains will not let go, and I am forced to give recognition to its
value for deepening me beyond my usual notion of myself as ego and for
bringing to my mind a sense of soul and of death.104

If interpreted as evidencing that consciousness is more than heroic ego

consciousness, that ‘more’ being archetypal soul, then symptoms and
dreams begin the process of relativization of the heroic ego.105 Both
symptoms and dreams ‘turn the tables and show the [heroic] ego its
limitations.’106 Other images in her psyche present themselves in
dreams as ‘various styles of consciousness co-present in one scene.’107
If a person attends to her dreams, reflecting upon them, then she
realizes, perhaps only gradually, that her heroic ego is only one ‘style
of consciousness.’ This realization is part of ego-relativization.
In summary, the identification of the heroic ego with
consciousness, a person’s whole personality, and even her soul,
indicates the extent to which the perspective of the soul, the
complexity of the human personality, and the vast depth of
consciousness has been distorted by the tyranny of the heroic ego. As
the ‘tip of the iceberg’ in Freud’s topographical model of the human
personality, her heroic ego produces only a small portion of her
consciousness. This partial consciousness is the perspective that
Hillman perceives his culture to encourage and ennoble. Complex
images await as rich treasures to reward those willing to elevate the
mountainous structure of their psyches above the water-line and to
relativize rather than strengthen the tip of the iceberg, their heroic
egos. Symptoms and dreams represent attempts by the mountain’s
faces to elevate themselves. Attention to them is part of ego-
relativization. But a person’s heroic ego does not allow others to share
its dominion without a fight.

and, contrary to the negative experience, it initiates a positive process, the

relativization of the ego.
104 Myth of Analysis, p. 5.
105 Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 81; Insearch, p. 55.
106 Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 32.
107 Ibid., p. 32.

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6. Ego-Relativization

The paradoxical nature of the process of relativization is evident in

Hillman’s description of a person’s response to dreams through her
heroic ego: interpretation, evaluation, categorization.108 These
processes serve ‘only the ego and ego’s importance, whereas a major
function of the dream is making the ego relative within the psyche as a
whole.’109 However, while a person’s heroic ego moves to bring
dreams within its control, it is encountering the other parts of her
consciousness. Regardless of what it does with the information, her
heroic ego cannot help but be aware that it does not alone represent
her consciousness.110 Most likely, it will repress the awareness,
dismissing it as fantasy. Even so, her heroic ego cannot avoid being
affected by encounters with dream material. Although it goes about its
normal modus operandi as it encounters the other parts of
consciousness in dreams—interpreting, evaluating, and categorizing
them—her heroic ego is affected, simply by being in the presence of
the dream. Hillman suggests that this can occur every morning:

Every morning for a moment or two while we are still in the dream we are
living the symbol, living it in, united in an existential reality, true to life as we
are at that moment. This state is hard to maintain. The press of the day pulls the
ego away […] The meanings which grow from the dream cannot be the
meanings given by the ego’s mind. If that is all there were to it, there would be
no growth, there would only be aggrandizement of the ego, the new pax
romana to which all strange and alien elements must submit.111

It is a person’s soul that provides the perspective that gives meaning,

not her heroic ego. Her heroic ego focuses on perpetuating its own life

108 Insearch, p. 113.

109 Ibid.
110 ‘Even the strongest ego, hard and toughened through its repetitious coping with
its ‘problem,’ is forced ever and again to submit to imaginal powers […] My
fantasies and symptoms put me in my place’ (Myth of Analysis, p. 186).
111 Insearch, p. 58.

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while the soul reminds her of her inevitable death. Her heroic ego
lives only one symbol, while her dream contains innumerable
symbols, all connected to archetypal soul.
The justification for these elements of his theory lies in
Hillman’s fundamental assertion that behind the ego complex, indeed
behind all of consciousness, is a ‘self-sustaining and imaging
substrate—an inner place or deeper person or ongoing presence—that
is simply there even when all our subjectivity, ego, and consciousness
go into eclipse.’112 This ‘self-sustaining and imaging substrate’ is
archetypal soul. For Hillman, this concept explains why a person’s
dream contains so many images that are not expressive of her heroic
ego, symbols that cross time and space. Even so, her heroic ego
maintains its grip on her psyche, despite its encounters with other
archetypal images in her dreams.
When a person’s heroic ego initiates the relativization process,
i.e., cognitively decides to relativize itself for its own psychological
health, Hillman maintains that her heroic ego is itself strengthened. As
her heroic ego cultivates awareness of the other images that are in her
psyche in which it resides, e.g., befriends her dreams, her heroic ego
might feel guilty that it has imposed itself over these other psychic
images. This

guilt supports the ego; it makes us feel that what has happened is ‘mine,’ my
fault to be set right by ‘me.’ Things that go wrong are not allowed by guilt to be
left on that level of bad or unfortuitous happenings; they become problems for
the ego to amend. In this way guilt serves the ego and strengthens its hold, even
allowing the ego to extend its range over happenings by feeling itself
‘responsible’.113

In this way, her ego (intentionally?) short-circuits the whole process

of its own relativization by taking responsibility for it. Yet, there
seems to be no other way to initiate the process since her heroic ego
has developed as the controlling part of her ego-complex; while

112 Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, p. 258.

113 ‘The Feeling Function,’ p. 109.

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relinquishing control, her heroic ego will initially remain dominant
until it is balanced with newly empowered parts of her psyche.
Hillman notes that Jung noticed this, but was not bothered. Jung
regarded this initial strengthening of a person’s heroic ego as part of
the preparation process that nevertheless can lead to relativization of
her heroic ego. ‘Jung called one main method for preparing the
imaginal ego “active imagination,” a term describing the subtle
balance between the three faculties: an active will, an interpretative
understanding, and the independent movement of fantasies.’114 ‘An
active will’ is a tool of a person’s heroic ego. Although using a
strength of her heroic ego, these steps simultaneously prepare it for
relativization, leading to a ‘dethronement’ that revolutionizes her
psyche, in the way that governments can tighten their hold before
losing their mandate to a coup.
Despite initially strengthening a person’s heroic ego, the
intentional entrance into her dreams and symptoms through image
cultivation represents her first step toward relativization.115 By its very
nature, the activity can relativize her heroic ego. Awareness of many
images in her psyche, without the usual repression, forces her heroic
ego to dwell in a context relative to the other archetypal images that
govern her psyche.

Imaginative activity is both play and work, entering and being entered, and as
the images gain in substance and independence the ego’s strength and autocracy
tends to dissolve. But ego dissolution does not mean disorder, since all fantasy
is carried by a deeper, archetypal order. Even the order of the ego comes from
its base in archetypal principles of the hero myth.116

Through the relativization process, a person’s ego is reconnected with

its archetypal roots. This reconnection removes the ‘false’ order that

114 Myth of Analysis, p. 189.

115 ‘Something lives in me that is not of my own doing. This demon that speaks in
dreams and passions and pains will not let go, and I am forced to give
recognition to its value for deepening me beyond my usual notion of myself as
ego and for bringing to me a sense of soul and of death’ (ibid., p. 5).
116 Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 40.

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her ego had set up through its own self-assertion and dominance,
recovering the ‘true’ order established by the archetypal forces that
govern human existence. The ‘false’ burden of ‘keeping it all
together’ is replaced with the ‘true’ burden of maintaining solely its
part in the ego, not her entire psyche. The dictator becomes a private
citizen, relieved of the responsibilities it never should have assumed.
Hillman suggests that one may discern whether or not a person’s
ego is genuinely relativized or has disguised a new Machiavellian
exertion of control over her psychic images by reflecting on her heroic
ego’s role in her psyche.

The best test of authenticity concerning our disciplines of exploring the

imaginal is that the habitual ego senses itself at a loss and is unable to identify
with the images […] They must have full autonomy, and the ego enters their
realm at first as a stalker, then as their pupil, finally as their maintenance man,
performing small adjustments, keeping the building in repair, the fires stoked,
warming.117

Her ego’s ‘true’ role or burden, as determined by the archetypal soul,

is that of maintenance, rather than dominance. Dominance is a
perversion of the facilitating role that her heroic ego would assume if
it had not split its own archetypal base.
According to Hillman, the archetypal base of a person’s ego-
complex includes senex-puer and animus-anima. As her heroic ego is
‘asked’ (by itself, by its culture, by its psychologists) to operate as the
center of her personality, the archetypes split. Intact archetypes do not
marginalize other archetypal images. Although her heroic ego can
resolve to relativize itself, it cannot heal the polar splits that it has
inflicted on the archetypal images.

The binary oppositions, the polar co-ordinates, cannot be healed through an ego
effort of exercising mind and will, since the ego is itself the splitting instrument
[…] This is so because any solution originating from the present ego would be
one-sided; it would be a solution imposed by either the senex or the puer
components of the ego […] All it can do is leave itself open to the possibility of
grace and to a renewal which might then take place in its absence. In the

117 Ibid., p. 41.

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 absence of ego and into its emptiness an imaginal stream can flow, providing
mythical solutions for the psychic connection or “progressive mediation”
between the senex/puer contradictions.118

Although the process begins with her heroic ego intending to

relativize itself, the process progresses to the extent that her heroic ego
relinquishes control. It stops splitting the archetypes and finds itself
unable to identify with the non-repressed, intact, archetypal images.
The ‘absence of ego’ results from the preparatory phase of Jung’s
‘active imagination.’ ‘In short, the first phase is the inhibition of ego
activity for the sake of fantasy consciousness.’119 The whole ego-
complex, other complexes, consciousness, personality, and soul begin
to surface from beneath the water-line. The soul heals the wounds, is
itself the balm.
Hillman compares Jung’s ‘active imagination’ with Augustine’s
thesaurus inscrutiabilis, quoting from Confessions X.8,120 to
emphasize the work and art of cultivating images. Eventually, a
person’s consciousness emerges ‘from the threshold where the ego
stops, beyond the reach of the ego’s senex order and puer
dynamus.’121 A person’s art takes her beyond even the full ego-
complex, to an imagination in which the other innumerable archetypal
images (complexes) self-display without a dominating image.
Hillman follows Jung in calling archetypal images ‘Gods.’ These
images have god-like power to affect a person’s heroic ego, to nudge

118 ‘Senex and Puer,’ pp. 37-38, italics original.

119 Myth of Analysis, p. 186.
120 Ibid., p. 189. “ibi quando sum, posco, ut proferatur quid-quid volo, et quaedam
statim prodeunt, quaedam requiruntur diutius et tamquam de abstrusioribus
quibusdam receptaculis eruuntur, quaedam catervatim se proruunt et, dum aliud
petitur et quaeritur, prosiliunt in medium quasi dicentia: ‘ne forte nos sumus?’
et abigo ea manu cordis a facie recordationis meae, donec enubiletur quod volo
atque in conspectum prodeat ex abditis. Alia faciliter atque inperturbata serie
sicut poscuntur suggeruntur, et cedunt praecedentia consequentibus, et cedendo
conduntur, iterum cum voluero processur.” S. AVGVSTINI CONFESSIONVM
LIBER X, CAP. VIII.
121 ‘Senex and Puer,’ p. 48.

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it toward self-relativization. In the following quote, ‘psychic
objectivity’ refers to a psyche with a relativized ego.

For psychic objectivity, or what Jung calls the objective psyche, we require first
of all psychic objects, powers that relentlessly obstruct the ego’s path as
obstacles, obsessions, obtrusions. And this is precisely how Jung speaks of the
complexes as Gods or daimons that cross our subjective will.122

Archetypal soul both requires and enables the relativization of the ego.
If it is distorted, then it manifests as it can, as ‘obstacles, obsessions,
obtrusions.’ These terms refer to psychopathological symptoms. A
person’s symptoms express, like dreams, repressed archetypal images
and thereby can initiate ego-relativization. Both dreams and symptoms
point out to a person’s heroic ego that it is not unique, that it is but one
of many images.

This same experience of multiplicity can reach us as well through symptoms.

They too make us aware that the soul has other voices and intentions than the
one of the ego. Pathologizing bears witness to both the soul’s inherent
composite nature and to the many Gods reflected in this composition.123

Pathology reveals the archetypal soul. Symptoms, like dreams, reveal

that a person’s heroic ego is keeping a lid on a pot from which the
contents escape from time to time. The escaped contents ‘cross our
subjective will,’ i.e., the will of our heroic egos. They reveal our
vulnerabilities and weaknesses, contrary to the strength of our heroic
egos.

[I]t is mainly through the wounds in human life that Gods enter (rather than
through pronouncedly sacred or mystical events), because pathology is the most
palpable manner of bearing witness to the powers beyond ego control and the
insufficiency of the ego perspective.124

122 Healing Fiction, p. 59.

123 ‘Peaks and Vales: The Soul/Spirit Distinction as Basis for the Differences
between Psychotherapy and Spiritual Direction,’ Puer Papers, p. 71.
124 Archetypal Psychology, p. 39.

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He condemns the pharmacological removal of psychological
symptoms without an attempt to discern their archetypal significance.
His condemnation reflects a divide in the field of psychology
regarding the meaning and treatment of psychological symptoms, such
as depression. For some in the field, depression is a result of a
chemical imbalance best addressed through anti-depressants that
attempt to restore balance. For others, depression occurs when a
person has repressed grief and/or anger and is best addressed through
the ‘talking cure’ that attempts to bring the repressed emotions to
awareness. For others, a combined explanation and treatment is best.
The same discussion occurs about dreams. Are they the ‘royal
road to the unconscious’ (Freud’s phrase with which Hillman agrees),
or a by-product of random brain activity, or representative of the
brain’s transferal of information from short-term memory into long-
term memory, or some combination? Hillman, at the very least, calls
for a combined approach to a person’s dreams and depression.
Symptoms and dreams reveal the archetypal base of the human psyche
and warrant a listening posture.
When Hillman attends to symptoms and dreams, he hears a call
to relativize the ego. The archetypal soul speaks through a person’s
symptoms and dreams, inviting her heroic ego to self-awareness.
Analytical (i.e., Jungian) psychology calls the method for ego-
relativization ‘withdrawing projections’:

First one must withdraw the primary projections upon the ego itself as the sole
carrier of consciousness [and this is] achieved through reflection. This leads to
immersion in the projected field, surrendering to it in love, entering into it to
such an extent that one becomes oneself a projection of the imaginal realm and
one’s ego becomes a fragment of a myth. Reflections may then occur just as
spontaneously as projections, but they will no longer be an achievement of the
will and the ego, which seek to make consciousness by withdrawing
projection.125

This paragraph summarizes ego-relativization while expressing the

paradoxical nature of the process. A person ponders her ego as a

125 Myth of Analysis, p. 87, italics original.

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strategy for uncovering her ‘real’ ego beneath the projections. In so
doing, she ‘enters’ the layers of images that have been projected on to
her ego. Her heroic ego becomes one among many images that are
peeled away from her ego. In determining to withdraw the projections
from itself, her heroic ego thereby eventually loses its power to
determine the person or ‘self.’ A person learns to love each image in
her dreams and symptoms, rather than to dominate them. The
information offered by the archetypal images cannot benefit an
individual without this nurturing attitude. It is a form of waking
dreaming. ‘So the first move in teaching ego how to dream is to teach
it about itself, that it too is an image.’126 Archetypal soul invites the
heroic ego to self-awareness and in so doing at first strengthens and
then relativizes it.
Behind a person’s efforts to relativize her heroic ego moves the
soul, claims Hillman. The mediating soul simultaneously initiates and
empowers the relativization process. Through dreams and symptoms,
the soul invites a person’s heroic ego to explore the psychic lands
outside its sovereignty. ‘Anima [soul] consciousness not only
relativizes the [heroic] ego consciousness but also relativizes the very
idea of consciousness itself.’127 The individual with a relativized ego
lives through a consciousness that is relative to unconsciousness. The
consciousness produced by her heroic ego is made relative to the
consciousness produced by the other parts of her ego-complex and her
other complexes. Consciousness produced by all the complexes, or the
archetypal soul, expresses a person’s soul rather than her heroic ego.
In summary, the soul initiates, fuels, and serves as Hillman’s
justification for ego-relativization. A person’s heroic ego is integrated
into her soul, made relative to all the archetypal images that constitute
her soul. The perspective of her soul is worth going through major
psychic upheaval to attain, for it sees ultimate meanings. Through
symptoms and dreams, the soul invites a person to embrace such
upheaval. If her heroic ego accepts the invitation, then the soul

126 Dream and the Underworld, quoted in the Essential James Hillman: A Blue
Fire, p. 242.
127 Anima, p. 141.

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relieves her heroic ego of its unnecessary burden, replacing it with the
burden of one who is a member of a community, not a dictator. The
soul re-unites a person’s heroic ego with the rest of the ego-complex
and the ego-complex with the other complexes. Fundamentally, the
soul points a person toward her ultimate destiny, enabling her to live
in light of her death.

7. Results of Ego-Relativization

Hillman asserts that the implications of a relativized ego are

theoretical, affecting the discipline of psychology. A person with a
relativized ego will experience life events in terms of their
implications for her ultimate destiny. If a person accepts her soul’s
invitation to explore her psychic hinterlands, then she will meet
innumerable images. She becomes aware of the true nature of
humanity and the universe; this reality is there all the time, but her
heroic ego represses it as fantasy. This new awareness of her ‘true’
existence could lead her to restructure completely her conception of
the human psyche. ‘We might structure the psyche without ego, letting
this concept drop out and experiencing in its place the imaginal
constellations playing through various mythological pairings.’128
Restructuring psychological theory without an ego led Hillman to
found a new psychological movement that attempts to account for the
primary reality of archetypal soul. ‘This leads to an archetypal
psychology: reflection upon the subjective fantasy factors going on all
the time, recognition of the images and their ongoing operations in all
our realities.’129 His archetypal psychology also attempts to produce a
therapeutic method that enables clients to respond positively to the
soul’s invitation.

128 Ibid., p. 179.

129 Healing Fiction, p. 75.

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 The method of Hillman’s archetypal psychology is
imaginative.130 Therapy with an archetypal psychologist involves
image-work, requiring cultural and linguistic knowledge.131 The
cultural knowledge that he recommends is particularly of myths and
symbols. Myth as metaphor, the language of the soul, re-animates the
world; things assumed to be inanimate are re-vitalized.132 (Myths are
‘never’ understood ‘as transcendental metaphysics whose categories
are divine figures.’133) By looking for mythic figures in her language,
actions, and interior world, a person can adopt the perspective that is
soul. In language, a person aims for the ‘recovery of soul in
speech.’134 The distinction between ‘fantasy’ and ‘reality’ collapses;
literal reality is an expression of fantasy, fantasy ‘makes’ reality.135
Recovery of soul, i.e., ego-relativization, requires the loss of the
egocentric viewpoint and expression.
The practice of therapy in archetypal psychology involves story-
telling, re-telling a story more authentically and profoundly, drawing
on George Kelly’s personal construct theory.136 Living my life ‘in the
company of ghosts, familiars, ancestors, guides—the populace of the
metaxy—are also aims of an archetypal therapy.’137 The training
required to practice this therapy follows the imagistic understanding
of soul. Hillman imagines himself as a sculptor and views his work as
crafting: ‘The invisible work of making soul will find its analogies in
the visibility of well-made things.’138 The criterion is aesthetic, ‘the
Neoplatonic understanding’ in which ‘beauty is simply manifestation,
the display of phenomena, the appearance, of the anima mundi; were

130 Archetypal Psychology, p. 4.

131 Ibid., pp. 14, 15.
132 Ibid., pp. 22-23.
133 Ibid., p. 20.
134 Ibid., pp. 14-15.
135 Ibid., p. 23.
136 Ibid., p. 45.
137 Ibid.
138 Thought of the Heart & The Soul of the World, p. 112.

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there no beauty, the Gods, virtues, and forms could not be
revealed.’139
Since archetypal psychology requires such a major paradigm
shift, Hillman requires archetypal psychologists to attend to and
indwell their own souls.140 Indwelling is a contemplative attention to a
person’s own soul, a non-curious posture in which a person actively
listens to herself—her dreams (the imagining activity is most natively
and paradigmatically presented by the dream141), fantasies,
imagination, calls, needs, regrets—to glimpse the underlying
archetypes that unite humanity and structure the psyche.142 The
psychologist does not search for these parts of her soul, but allows
them to arise from her unconsciousness. This listening posture
Hillman finds in contemplative mystics such as St. Bernard of
Clairvaux, the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, St. John of the
Cross, and other mystics in other faith traditions.143
But the implications do not stop with theoretical, disciplinary,
and methodological ones. Hillman believes that the replacement of
ego with ‘imaginal constellations’ affects human self-experience,
experience of others and the non-human world. Rather than
experiencing myself through the eyes of my ego, I experience myself
through the eyes of the ‘imaginal constellations’ or soul. Rather than
interacting with other people as heroic ego to heroic ego, I interact
with other people from the perspective of archetypal soul. Even when
others interact from the perspective of heroic ego, the presence of one
person with the perspective of archetypal soul affects the whole inter-
personal dynamic. The soul’s invitation to those still operating from
the perspective of the heroic ego strengthens with the presence of a
person who already operates from the soul. Rather than approaching
the non-human world as ego to ego-less object, a person experiences
the world as soul to anima mundi, with respect and kinship.

139 Ibid., p. 113, italics original.

140 Insearch, pp. 16-18.
141 Archetypal Psychology, p. 6.
142 Insearch, pp. 24-25.
143 Ibid., pp. 20, 24-25, 30, 32.

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 We need a new way of looking, an imaginative way, a way that starts from
within the imaginal itself, so that everything we look at becomes an example. In
this way we could experience ourselves through the third faculty of the psyche,
by means of an imaginal ego consciousness that is not estranged from the
imagination and its fantasies; and the conventional ego and its usual views
would also become objects of this new consciousness. We could then see
through our habitual ego, see the myths working within it to create our so-called
ego psychology and its usual psychopathology.144

Although a person’s ego might be relativized, and she may not even
structure her psyche with an ego, she continues to live in a world that
seems to Hillman to form and reward her heroic ego. Thus, her new
way of experiencing herself will need to include a constant ‘seeing
through’ her habitual ego.
In short, the result of a relativized ego means an imaginal ego
and ‘an imaginal ego […] means behaving imaginatively.’145 Hillman
does not describe imaginative behavior since that would be an attempt
of the heroic ego to control the behavior before it was imagined.
However, he describes the factors in a psyche no longer centered on
the ego:

the multiple personifications of the soul, the elaboration of the imaginal ground
of myths, the direct immediacy of sense experience coupled with the ambiguity
of its interpretation, and the radically relative phenomenality of the ‘ego’ itself
as but one fantasy of the psyche.146

Hillman’s theory is that when a person knows herself in terms of these

factors, then she behaves imaginatively.
In summary, ego-relativization is the core of what Hillman calls
‘soul-making.’ ‘The chief occupation of soul-making’ is to bring non-
ego forces in the psyche to greater awareness.147 Soul-making148 is the
broad goal of archetypal psychology.

144 Myth of Analysis, p. 201.

145 Ibid., p. 189.
146 Archetypal Psychology, p. 31.
147 Ibid., p. 53.

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 Soul-making is also described as imaging, that is, seeing or hearing by means of
an imagining which sees through an event to its image. Imaging means
releasing events from their literal understanding into mythical appreciation.
Soul-making, in this sense, is equated with de-literalizing—that psychological
attitude which suspiciously disallows the naïve and given level of events in
order to search out their shadowy, metaphorical significances for soul.
So the question of soul-making is, ‘what does this event, this thing, this moment
move in my soul? What does it mean to my death?149

A person who is soul and is in soul will slow down to take intimate
notice (‘notitia’) of the world rather than simply limit herself to her
subjective responses.150 She focuses on creation rather than simply the
individual in creation.151 Things hold value inherently rather than
simply the value given by the beholder.152 Even technology can be
reconsidered, ‘each thing imagined anew in terms of anima mundi.’153
The ideal human expression of soul ‘will thus show cognizance of its
dramatically masked and ambiguous situation’ through irony, humor,
and compassion.154 These are the results of ego-relativization.

8. Conclusions

Hillman’s archetypal psychology revises or ‘re-visions’ the theory and

practice of psychology. From the training of therapists, including their
language, to the methodology and goal, he presents a new paradigm
for his discipline. Rooted in classical depth psychology, he

148 Hillman takes the term ‘soul-making’ from the poets William Blake and John
Keats: “Call the world, if you please, ‘The vale of Soul-making.’ Then you will
find out the use of the world” (ibid., 26); “Peaks and Vales,” p. 58.
149 Archetypal Psychology, p. 27.
150 Thought of the Heart & The Soul of the World, p. 116.
151 Ibid.
152 Ibid.
153 Ibid., p. 124.
154 Archetypal Psychology, p. 53.

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nevertheless differs from Freud’s psychoanalysis and extends a
component of Jung’s analytical psychology to formulate archetypal
psychology.
Hillman’s call to re-visioning does not stop with his own field.
He understands psychology as a product of his culture and historical
trends.

The social, political, and psychiatric critique implied throughout archetypal

psychology mainly concerns the monotheistic hero-myth (now called ego-
psychology) of secular humanism, i.e., the single-centered, self-identified
notion of subjective consciousness of humanism (from Protagoras to Sartre)
[…] a polytheistic psychology is necessary for reawakening reflective
consciousness and bringing a new reflection to psychopathology.155

Secular humanism is not the only historical or cultural villain for

Hillman.

Although it is immensely supportive to an egocentric psyche, monotheistic

psychology is also immensely damaging to our aim of shifting perspectives
away from the ego as sole center of consciousness […] which is, after all, only
the usual Judeo-Protestant monotheism in psychological language […] The
abandonment of psychological monotheism is radical indeed. It not only
collapses the rule of the old ego; it is a reflection in the psyche that in a certain
sense God is dead—but not the Gods.156

Secular humanism, monotheism, modernism, these –isms have

wreaked havoc on the human psyche, injuring the human soul,
denying humanity its place in the cosmos. In psychology, this
wounding has occurred through ‘ego psychology,’ a psychology that
centers the human personality in the heroic ego.
The wounds of the heroic ego fester within and outside each
individual human being, claims Hillman. In its assertion of
dominance, it creates polarities and divisions, thereby tearing apart the
soul at the core of reality. It relegates the vast majority of the human
personality to unconsciousness and attempts to claim for its own a

155 Ibid.
156 Myth of Analysis, p. 265.

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person’s sense of self, self-worth and experience of connection. In
reality, it is the soul that bestows these gifts and the soul continues to
exert its influence despite its wounding.
According to Hillman, the wounding inflicted by the agent of
monotheistic psychology, the heroic ego, requires radical surgery:
ego-relativization. Only a complete re-visioning of the human
personality will begin the healing process in individuals and their
world. Re-visioning the human personality as centered in archetypal
soul, he describes the process by which a person extracts herself from
the grip of her heroic ego. Stepping back from the clutches of this
dominating image, she finds that her heroic ego is just a character in a
drama among many dramas, all enacted within the archetypal soul.
Hillman locates the invitation, the power, and the justification of
ego-relativization process in the archetypal soul. Through dreams and
symptoms, the soul nudges a person’s heroic ego towards surrender.
Only by surrendering its life as it knows it, can it find relief from its
burden of carrying the entire human personality, a task for which it is
not equipped. During surgery, it finds itself among many mythic
figures and unable to control the drama of the personality through will
or reason. The surgery is a success when her heroic ego finds that it is
in partnership with the other images of her ego-complex, as well as
the other complexes of her personality. These partnerships live from
the perspective of archetypal soul. The soul’s perspective places every
experience in the context of a person’s ultimate death.
Some readers may be familiar with the works of Thomas Moore.
His most famous text is Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating
Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life157 and sales hit number one on
the New York Times Bestseller List. What may be relatively unknown
is that James Hillman was Moore’s mentor; Moore popularized
Hillman’s theories and they became popular indeed. Moore’s public
expression of indebtedness was the text he edited, A Blue Fire: The
Essential Writings of James Hillman. Hillman himself and his protégé
Moore have tapped into a deep longing in the US if not greater

157 New York: HaperPerennial, 1992.

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Western psyche, a longing for a ‘new romanticism’ of sorts or a ‘re-
enchantment’ of the world such as has been done through Matthew
Fox’s popularization of the writings of Meister Eckhart. Many
scholars of Eckhart may disagree with Fox’s presentation of Eckhart,
but at least Eckhart is being read again. Similarly, some may disagree
with Hillman’s criticisms of the Christian tradition and with his
championing of the archetypal soul, but his theory enables people to
reconnect with parts of themselves and their world in ways that feel
distantly familiar. For those not wanting to integrate psychological
approaches, Anthony Stevens’ text Archetype Revisited: An Updated
Natural History of the Self charts the research that he argues supports
Jung’s theories, including archetypes. Such research may represent the
heroic ego grasping to continue to control the archetypal soul, or the
archetypal soul reaching through the distortions of the heroic ego.
Either way, Hillman’s theory represents a contemporary reaction
against the reduction of imagination and fantasy, a therapeutic practice
for reclaiming these parts of human existence, and a criticism of ego-
centric societies. This latter may surprise since one might expect
imagination and fantasy to perpetuate ego-centrism. Hillman’s argues
that it does the opposite.
Having explored Loder’s theory, located it in the context of
Christian mystical spirituality as depicted by Louth, McGinn, Turner,
and McIntosh, and investigated Hillman’s theory, I am now ready to
examine the parallels and divergences between Hillman’s and Loder’s
ego-relativization. This examination probes Loder’s Christological
methodology for inter-faith (broadly understood) dialogue.
First I must substantiate my reference to Hillman’s ego-
relativization or transformation theory as a ‘spirituality,’ a non-theistic
understanding of self-transcendence. Hillman champions the soul over
the spirit, yet he links his theory to religion both positively and
negatively. Negatively, Hillman carefully advocates a ‘downward’ or
‘inward’ movement that he identifies with ‘soul-making’ over and
against an ‘upward’ or ‘outward’ movement that he identifies with

216
spirituality.158 Although he asserts that the soul and spirit exist as a
‘married’ unity, the one operating to correct or balance the other, he
insists on championing the soul over the spirit. His advocacy reflects
his conviction that the Christian church has ‘killed’ the soul.
Positively, Hillman himself presents his theory as a ‘human
spirituality,’ though not categorically. While stating that he is talking
psychologically and not religiously,159 he seems to state the opposite
later in the same text: ‘psychology is a variety of religious
experience’160 and ‘since its [psychology’s] inception it has been
actively practicing religion.’161 Already considered in this chapter are
his specified correspondences between his theory and the attentive
posture toward images and all of life recommended by Christian
mystical authors (and those from other faith traditions).
The parallels between Loder’s and Hillman’s theories (explored
in detail in the next chapter) help a researcher consider his theory as a
type of human ‘spirituality,’ strengthened when linked to the
description of spirituality proposed by Sandra Schneiders. Schneiders
understands spirituality as referring to ‘(1) a fundamental dimension
of the human being, (2) the lived experience which actualizes that
dimension, and (3) the academic discipline which studies that
experience.’162 She also describes spirituality as the ‘human quest for
meaning and integration.’163 Connecting Schneiders’ words with
Hillman’s theory, I can say that the world soul represents a
fundamental dimension of human being, soul-making the lived
experience which actualizes that dimension, and archetypal
psychology the discipline which studies that experience; the human
quest for meaning and integration leads a person to manifest the world
soul. In this way, Hillman’s theory can be understood as a type of

158 See ‘Peaks and Vales,’ p. 64f.

159 Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 168.
160 Ibid., p. 227.
161 Ibid., p. 228.
162 Schneiders, ‘Spirituality in the Academy,’ Theological Studies 50:p. 678.
163 Schneiders, ‘Theology and Spirituality: Strangers, Rivals, or Partners?’
Horizons, 13/2:p. 268.

217
‘human spirituality.’ Accordingly, the next chapter examines the
parallels and divergences between Loder’s and Hillman’s theory,
bearing in mind that although it is not explicitly a spirituality, his
presentation of his theory allows me to treat it as a ‘human
spirituality.’ The comparison of their theories tests the ‘power’ of my
expansion and modification of Loder’s methodology for the context of
inter-disciplinary and inter-faith (broadly understood) research in
spirituality discourse.

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Chapter Five: Loder and Hillman

1. Introduction

In chapter three, I discussed the dilemma of particularity and

universality in spirituality discourse and in Loder’s theory. Every
spirituality asserts an universality that in some way negates the
spirituality of all other spiritualities. A spirituality that affirms the
validity of all spiritualities contradicts the assertion of unique validity
from another spirituality. There is no way to prevent disagreement or
contradiction among competing world-views. Simply removing these
universal assertions fails to respect the particularity of each spirituality
and does not solve the dilemma. To bring Hillman’s theory into the
discussion, although he focuses his theory on the human (and world)
soul and not spirit, I argued in chapter four that it could be considered
a human spirituality. Relating Hillman’s theory with Loder’s provides
a test for my methodological assertions in spirituality discourse. That
is, I do not avoid their competing world-views. The created dialogue
between Loder and Hillman, located in the context of mystical
spirituality, also responds to the criticisms of Christianity of which
Hillman is a representative voice. The theories of both Loder and
Hillman argue for personal transformation that recognizes the role of
the imagination and enables people to live in light of their connections
with all of creation (to use Christian terms).
To create the dialogue between Loder and Hillman, this chapter
is organized by three of the same section headings from the separate
chapters on their theories: Ego, Ego-relativization, and Results. The
Ego section includes the concepts that clarify Loder and Hillman’s
understandings of ego and were considered under separate headings
(e.g., void, archetype). The Ego-Relativization section is divided into
five subsections and the Results section into four with headings that
arise from the discussion itself. The most fundamental divergence
between Loder and Hillman is in their worldview and related
conceptual fields of enquiry. For Loder, human existence results from
the active will of the transcendent and yet immanent ‘Holy’ made
known through Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. For
Hillman, the form of all human existence comes from a soul image
that archetypally shapes humans and the world. From time to time in
the following sections, I will summarize the parallels and divergences
between Loder’s and Hillman’s theories, italicizing the category to
facilitate location.

2. Ego

While this section focuses on the nature and functioning of a person’s

(heroic) ego, aspects of the relativization process and results clarify
the theorists’ understandings of the agency needing relativized. Thus,
all three sections overlap.
Both Loder and Hillman begin with what they regard as the
‘usual’ understanding of a person’s ego. Loder asserts that he uses the
understanding of psychologists: a hypothetical psychic agency that
equilibrates inner states with outer states by establishing defenses and
coping mechanisms to guide or orient a person according to social and
cultural norms. Hillman asserts that he uses the understanding of the
majority of the Western population, including psychologists: a
culturally defined attitude representing only one archetypal image or
style, i.e., an attitude or way of being that has been chosen and
nurtured to function as the center of the personality. Hillman’s heroic
ego represents a particular manifestation of Loder’s ego.
Hillman identifies the characteristics of a person’s heroic ego as
rational, masculine, active, light, conscious, independent, an
instrument of will and reason, self-objective and self-judging,
develops at the expense of the whole being, uses creativity to extend
and enhance itself, makes little room for fantasy except for repression,

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imposes a moralistic fallacy of good and evil,1 and is literalistic
toward itself and its view. This list could characterize Loder’s ego, but
it is not limited to these characteristics. Loder criticizes his culture’s
support of ways of being that deny the void and Holy and thereby lead
to achievement obsession, authoritarian, protean, oppressed, and other
‘styles of life’ or ‘ego postures’ that distort the human spirit and
obstruct human-divine relationality.2 Hillman criticizes his culture
because the rewarded and reinforced ways of being distort archetypal
soul. Their criticisms represent a theoretical divergence in content, but
not of immediate aims or specific accusation. Both accuse their
cultures of distorting human nature and preventing recognition of
human existence ‘in reality.’ For both, the (heroic) ego manifests
particular characteristics while equilibrating a person’s inner states
with outer states through defenses and coping mechanisms. Hillman’s
complaint involves a) the heroic ego’s ‘position’ and style; b) that the
heroic ego has become the only style or expression of the psyche; and
c) that the word ‘ego’ now refers to this preferred way of being
instead of referring to one of many possible ways of being, of
manifesting archetypal soul. Although Loder does not find the ego
limited to a particular set of characteristics, his complaint is against
any ‘ego postures’ that deny the void and Holy through existential
presumption.
Loder’s theory of ego-relativization begins with a person’s ego
formation and development. Her ego represents a functional solution
to her existential problem of the void, engendering a conflict at the
‘core’ of an individual. In contrast, Hillman rejects developmental
theories. However, he also views the heroic ego as a functional
solution to an existential problem. For him, the existential problem is
the dominant Western culture’s denial and distortion of archetypal

1 As described in the previous chapter, the moralistic fallacy of good and evil
comes from the domination of the heroic ego: ‘the heroic ego creates a morality
that reflects its own characteristics’ (see chapter four).
2 See EM, chapter three. Loder relates his analysis to Richard Niebuhr’s
typology, combining ‘Christ paradoxically related to culture’ and ‘Christ
transforming culture’ (KM, pp. 27-28, 65.n.2).

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soul. The heroic ego’s agency against the archetypal soul also places a
conflict at the ‘core’ of the individual. For both theorists, the conflict
can lead to ego-relativization.
The theorists’ assertions about ego functioning contain
theoretical parallels. Hillman’s heroic ego and Loder’s non-relativized
ego both function as the center of the personality in a way that a)
constrains choices to its own values, b) denies aspects of human
existence, and c) represses anything that questions its domination.
Both understand the (heroic) ego to repress a dimension of human
existence. They diverge in their understanding of that dimension and
in the number of repressed dimensions. For Hillman, the repressed
dimension (archetypal soul) seeks to self-reveal, illuminate, and
engage a person’s psyche and her environment, and thereby relativize
the ego. For Loder, the process is similar, but involves two repressed
dimensions (Holy, void), neither equivalent to the archetypal soul.
These divergences highlight again the theorists’ world-view
differences.
For example, like Loder’s ‘Holy,’ Hillman’s archetypal soul
enables a form of connection or commonality throughout all parts of
the world. A divergence occurs in the nature of the connection or
commonality, which in turn reflects the nature of the dimension of
human existence that relativizes the ego (‘Holy’ or archetypal soul).
Through creation, the Holy establishes creatureliness as a locus of
connection throughout the world. Creatureliness involves contingency,
that is, dependency on God’s sustaining grace, for existence.3 In
contrast, as the guiding image within the world, the archetypal soul
represents a connecting agency, an aspect of creatureliness perhaps,
but not the original and continuing source of existence. Hillman does
not claim that the archetypal soul created the cosmos. The archetypal

3 ‘the self, as inherently relational, is made for a covenantal relationship to the

Creator God’ (Loder and Neidhardt, KM, pp. 236-237); ‘the coherent unity of
the triune God and the internal, differentiated relationality of the trinity that
constitutes that unity become the ultimate ground for unity-in-relationality and
relationality-in-unity for all subordinate, contingent orders of creation’ (LS,
pp. 74-75).

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soul is in no way other than the cosmos. Additionally, while the
archetypal soul wishes expression, it is not a personal force, as such.
According to Hillman, it issues an invitation, it makes itself manifest
in humanity, it self-reveals, but it denigrates the literal, the
particularity of a historic narrative focused on an individual
personality, in favor of universal imagery. It is not a personal being. In
this sense, the ‘impersonal’ nature of the archetypal soul, made
personal as it manifests, but without personality of its own, without
the power to create ex nihilo, contrasts with Loder’s description of the
Christian ‘Holy Source’ of humanity.4
Loder and Hillman agree that a person’s (heroic) ego represses
‘something(s)’ and that those ‘something(s)’ seek(s) recognition
through her psyche, seek(s) to create relationship throughout the
cosmos. They agree that her (heroic) ego’s continued denial of
this/these ‘something(s)’ distort(s) a person’s self-understanding and
relationship with the rest of the cosmos. But a person’s un-distorted
self-understanding, the relational potential between the human
individual and the denied dimension, among human individuals, and
between themselves and the rest of the cosmos, offered through the
presence of the repressed dimension, all focus the difference between
the dimension behind Hillman’s repressed archetypal images and
Loder’s repressed Holy. As Loder predicts, the nature of the

4 Some have asserted and continue to assert an identity between the anima mundi
and the Holy Spirit. In the twelfth century, the church ruled against this identity
as risking the assertion of two souls for every person, the subordination of the
Holy Spirit by making the third person of the Trinity temporal, and the blurring
of the distinction between monotheism and pantheism. For a historical and
theological survey see McGinn, ‘The Role of “Anima Mundi” as Mediator
Between the Divine and Created Realms in the Twelfth Century.’ In 2001, Peter
Ellard of Siena College, USA, presented a paper at the American Academy of
Religion (‘The Study of Christian Spirituality’ section) entitled ‘The World
Soul: The Spirituality of the School of Chartres and Our Ecological Crisis.’ In
response to McGinn’s query, Ellard asserted that the church’s concerns were
spurious, politically motivated by the schools-cloister conflict. But Ellard did
not address the specific concerns. Loder ‘stress[es] the irreducibly personal
nature of the Holy Spirit’ (KM, p. 23). He ‘opposes […the] view that the Spirit
is an impersonal force emanating from God and detachable from God’ (ibid.).

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dimension that invites relationship or recognition, that relativizes a
person’s (heroic) ego, determines the result of that process.
So far, the identified theoretical parallels between Loder and
Hillman involve (1) the basic understanding of ego as a psychic
agency, (2) the criticism of cultural pressures that reinforce (heroic)
ego-centric living, (3) the functional and existential deficiencies of a
person’s ego as her guiding ‘center’, (4) the repression of at least one
dimension of human existence, (5) the activity of a repressed
dimension that (despite its repression) seeks to reveal the ego’s
deficiencies, to relate the psyche to itself, other humans, and the
cosmos, and (6) the distortion of self-knowledge and relationship with
the rest of the cosmos that occurs if a person’s ego continues to deny
the dimension(s). Three further parallels might be identified from
numbers three and six: (7) the ego’s role in self-deception, (8) the
ego’s inadequate mediation between inner and outer worlds, and (9)
how the ego becomes the ‘center’ and whether it can be avoided. The
theoretical divergences identified so far involve: (1) the
characterization of the (heroic) ego, (2) the characteristics of the
cultural distortions of human nature/existence, (3) the use of
developmental theories, (4) the number of repressed dimensions, (5)
the nature of relativizing dimensions, (6) the un-distorted self-
understanding, and (7) the nature of relations established by the
relativizing dimension with human individuals, among humans, and
between humans and the rest of the world. The following paragraphs
discuss the three further parallels.
Parallel 7, the ego’s role in self-deception: Hillman asserts that
archetypal soul manifests in the human psyche through various
complexes; these complexes form when archetypal images interact
with the human psyche and produce emotions. Disingenuously, as part
of its domination of her psyche, a person’s heroic ego presents itself
as the full expression of her consciousness. But her consciousness
resulting from her heroic ego represents just part of the ego complex,
and the ego complex represents just one among many complexes in
her psyche. Vast swathes of her emotional landscape remain
‘unconscious’ to her individual psyche. If the rest of the ego complex
and the many other complexes represent areas fenced off from self-
knowledge by a person’s heroic ego, then parallels with Loder’s ego

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appear. For Loder, a person’s ego also prevents self-knowledge (e.g.,
her ‘core’ of negation pointing to the void, her memories of the face
phenomenon, yearnings for the face that will never leave that is not
her own). While diverging in nature, the functional self-deception of
Loder’s ego parallels that of Hillman’s heroic ego.
Parallel 8, the ego’s mediation between inner and outer worlds:
Both theorists judge the equilibration of a person’s (heroic) ego
between her inner and outer worlds as ‘false.’ There is an
equilibration, but her inner world that is related to her outer world is
an inner world that is distorted by her (heroic) ego. A person’s
relationship between her inner and outer worlds is between only a part
of her inner world and with only one conception of her outer world,
both as constrained by her dominating (heroic) ego. Her inner world
controlled by her (heroic) ego relates to her outer world only as
something to be used for her (heroic) ego’s purposes. For both
Hillman and Loder, the nature of the equilibration produced by a
person’s (heroic) ego renders the relationship ‘false’ or based on a
distortion of her inner, and a narrow perception of her outer, worlds.
For Loder, a person’s ego mediates her inner and outer worlds
through a false face, a false connection with her world, and an
inadequate organizing principle, based on repression/ negation/ the
void. Through her ego, she interacts with the world via various
defense mechanisms that protect, but isolate. For Hillman, a person’s
heroic ego mediates the inner and outer worlds through an incomplete
consciousness, an incomplete connection with her world, an
inadequate organization of her personality, based on repression/
distortion/ split and torn archetypal soul. Itself representing split
archetypal images, her heroic ego ‘tears’ apart archetypal soul and
distorts both her inner and outer worlds. For both theorists, a person’s
self-deception (or, ‘self-repression’) through her (heroic) ego and its
‘false’ mediation between her inner and outer worlds occur because
her (heroic) ego is conceived of and functions as her guiding ‘center.’
Parallel 9, how a person’s ego becomes the ‘center’ and whether
it can be avoided: In Loder’s theory, a person’s ego assumes ‘center

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stage’ by denying two dimensions of human existence, the void and
the Holy. He describes the anxiety leading to ego formation and
development, human brokenness, as ‘inevitable, but not necessary.’5
In Hillman’s theory, a person’s heroic ego assumes ‘center stage’ by
denying the archetypal soul, i.e., archetypal images other than her
heroic ego. He does not address whether or not an infant or child must
experience the heroic ego as ‘center’ of her personality or may avoid
its ‘center placement’ while enjoying it as one of many archetypal
images. Both theorists cite a mutually reinforcing dynamic between
internal and external forces that ‘center’ a person’s ego.
Moving on from the parallels, both Loder and Hillman note that
in theory, people in their cultures could have come to live otherwise.
Hillman believes that the human psyche could have developed with
another attitude or archetypal image or style to function as the ‘center’
of a person’s personality. The human personality did not need to have
one ‘center’ at all, but could have developed with many ‘centers,’ as
many as there are archetypal images. Loder also believes that the
human psyche could have developed without the ego as the ‘center’ of
the personality. However, he locates the ego ‘centering’ back in
primal time, in the earliest history of humanity, in the Christian
assertion of a ‘Fall.’6 He also agrees that a person’s (heroic) ego may

5 Loder, LS, p. 124.

6 ‘The fundamental point is that the psychological pattern of development in the
genesis of a lifetime, viewed from the Genesis of all creation, deepens meaning
in both directions [origins and destiny]. This is Kierkegaard’s project in The
Concept of Anxiety. [Wolfhart] Pannenberg criticizes Kierkegaard’s analysis,
claiming that he imports egoism into the Adamic situation, making a
consequence into a cause. However, this does not reckon with Kierkegaard’s
distinction between qualitative and quantitative anxiety. Qualitative anxiety
refers to the way in which we are like Adam, bringing self-destruction on
ourselves, individually and corporately. The pattern here bears a close relation
to ego development […] Kierkegaard, in his notion of quantitative anxiety,
argues that consequent manifestations of qualitative anxiety increase and
intensify the probability of self-destruction that follows on qualitative anxiety.
The first is a condition of brokenness; the second refers to the accumulation of
manifestations of brokenness, which makes it more likely that brokenness will
increase and become intensified. Egoism is obviously a part of quantitative

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be made relative to many other ‘centers,’ but he does not describe
them as necessarily archetypal, or equally beneficial to psychic health.
Nor does he recommend that a person operate with no ‘center’ or as
many different ‘centers’ as there are archetypal images. He accepts the
possibility of archetypes existing and functioning through the human
personality, but he specifically rejects the label of archetype for either
the spiritual presence of Christ who relativizes the ego or the offered
‘bi-polar relational unity’ (or, human-divine relationality). Thus, they
agree that a person’s psyche does not need to function with her ego as
the ‘center,’ that social and cultural pressures could be otherwise, and
that archetypes could have a role in the human psyche. But, they
disagree on whether or not a person’s psyche needs a ‘center’ at all,
on the historic specifics that gave rise to a ‘centered’ ego, and on the
role of archetypal images in a person’s psyche. In these divergences,
we again encounter their difference in world-view.
Human-Divine relationality forms the fundamental locus for
human nature in Loder’s theory, and is expressed in a person’s
longing for it in its absence. For Hillman, archetypal relationality
forms the fundamental locus of human nature. If a person’s heroic ego
distorts the archetypes by splitting them, then she has lost her sense of
self. The recovery of her soul through the reunion of archetypal poles
via ego-relativization restores her sense of herself and her relations
with other people and her world. As quoted in the previous chapter
‘Interpersonal relations are based on intrapersonal relations.’7 While
that maxim may correspond with Christian exhortations to self-
knowledge, Hillman’s archetypal understanding of individuals and
their worlds diverges from Loder’s, just as Loder’s Christian
understanding of individuals and their worlds diverges from

anxiety, but it could not be part of the original precipitating event because, as
Kierkegaard realizes, anxiety precedes the formation of the ego. In fact,
Pannenberg himself returns to a restatement of Kierkegaard’s position on
qualitative anxiety when he tries to describe developmentally how we enter into
our unfinished condition’ (Loder, LS, pp. 123-124).
7 Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. xiv, italics original.

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Hillman’s. I continually note the difference between the archetypal
soul and the Holy as the fundamental divide between the two theories.
Continuing with the development of the (heroic) ego in an
individual, Loder’s and Hillman’s descriptions begin at very different
places in the life-span. For Hillman, an infant already functions with
her heroic ego. Although Hillman rejects developmental models,
inherent in his theory of ego-relativization lies a model of
development in which the personality develops into what has always
been there. Whether or not a person’s heroic ego moves aside to allow
expression of archetypal soul through multiple ‘centerings’ of the
personality, archetypal soul is part of her psyche. All the components
are part of her existence whether they are nurtured through ‘soul-
making’ or not. It is not quite accurate to say that the archetypal soul
lies dormant, awaiting the spring of ego-relativization, because the
archetypal soul is active, although its expressions are constrained and
distorted. Yet, the archetypal soul may be seen as representing a
potential for the person that is unrealized and in that sense dormant.
The realization of the potential through ego-relativization represents a
form of development and in this sense Hillman’s theory presents a
type of developmental theory. However, he does not explain how an
individual person comes to be ruled by her heroic ego in infancy.
The only explanation Hillman gives for the heroic ego’s
appearance in individuals is that his own Western culture relates to the
heroic ego in a mutually reinforcing way. The role of social
construction is strong, but how nature also plays a role is unclear. ‘The
ego develops its focus from infancy onward by gathering to itself the
more diffuse light of general consciousness. Its growth is at the
expense of the whole being, of the Self.’8 We do not learn about the
interplay between environmental and genetic forces that causes this
gathering.9 Rather, he states clearly that he does not want to engage in

8 Hillman, Insearch, pp. 114-115.

9 As Bowker argues in Is God a Virus?, asking whether something is a result of
nature or nurture is the wrong question, perpetuating a false dichotomy, because
the two influences are inextricable.

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an aspect of theorizing that he thinks ultimately blames the parents.
He calls it the ‘parental fallacy.’10

If any fantasy holds our contemporary civilization in an unyielding grip, it is

that we are our parents’ children and that the primary instrument of our fate is
the behavior of your mother and father.11

For all our heroic individualism America still clings to a mother-based

developmental psychology that states we are fundamentally results of parenting,
and, as such, fundamentally victims of what happened in the past and left
indelible stains.12

The more I believe my nature comes from my parents, the less open I am to the
ruling influences around me. The less the surrounding world is felt to be
intimately important to my story […] what’s out there is less of a factor than
my close family in the formation of who I am. The parental fallacy is deadly to
individual self-awareness, and it is killing the world.13

Hillman’s remedy for the ‘parental fallacy’ requires a person’s

acceptance of the archetypal soul’s invitation to re-connect with the
archetypal soul of/in herself, others, and the world. He assumes that
she can recognize that she has indulged in the ‘parental fallacy’ and
that she can turn elsewhere for self-understanding. In other words, he
does not presuppose robotic social determinism. Even if a person
recognizes the parental fallacy and ultimately her need for ego-
relativization, perhaps through social influences that counteract the
social influences supportive of her heroic ego (e.g., the presence of
someone with a relativized ego), she must choose between or among
social influences. He presupposes this capability.
This distinction between the two theories involves different
understandings of what it means to be human. For Loder, the model of
development inherent in his theory of ego-relativization does contain
some inherent processes (i.e., the ‘logic of transformation’), but the

10 Hillman, Soul’s Code, p. 20.

11 Ibid., p. 63.
12 Ibid., p. 77.
13 Ibid., p. 87.

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restructuring of the psyche is not a blossoming of what has always
been there. Rather, an Other effects a person’s transformation into
what has not always been there; although the potential for this
transformation is present in a person as part of the imago dei, this
potential requires ‘external’ input to be more than a potential, and
thereby differs from Hillman’s transformation. For Hillman, a person
is archetypal soul; for Loder, a person is not God. There are parallels
with Hillman: (1) whether or not a person’s ego opens to expose the
void and embrace the spiritual presence of the Holy, the void and the
Holy do structure her existence; (2) all the components for ego-
relativization are part of the person’s existence whether or not she
acknowledges and embraces them; and (3) the expressions of the
repressed dimensions are constrained and distorted by a person’s
(heroic) ego.14 But, the parallels diverge here.
While Loder’s void, like the archetypal soul, is inherent in
human nature, the Holy is not. The Holy is immanent and
transcendent,15 not as Hillman depicts the archetypal soul.
Additionally, the void and Holy cannot be seen as representing a

14 This is not to say that humanity can constrain or distort the Christian, Creator,
Holy God. Rather, the (heroic) ego can constrain or distort a person’s known
experience of the Holy, her perception or conceptualization of the Holy, as
Loder explores as ‘religious pathology’ in his publication of that name. (See
also Arterburn, S. & Felton, J. Toxic Faith: Understanding and Overcoming
Religious Addiction). Of course, it is not humanly possible to perceive God
without distortion. All understandings of God are mediated (at ‘most’ a partial
or mediated immediacy, as explored in chapter three) and therefore open to
distortion. The point here is that prior to ego-relativization, a person’s (heroic)
ego applies to the Holy or the archetypal soul the distorting lenses that it applies
to itself and the rest of creation. A person’s ego denies the Holy, or the
archetypal soul, as a threat to her existence. Regarding Hillman, see note 73 in
chapter four of this discussion.
15 Deep, transforming relationship with God ‘liberates intelligence for the fullest
possible grasp of creation because the source and ground of that intelligence is
the One who created the universe ex nihilo; and now, graciously sustaining the
created order, that same One indwells the convicted consciousness that seeks to
understand the external basis of its conviction’ (Loder and Neidhardt, KM,
p. 237).

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potential for the person that is unrealized and in that sense dormant.
The void is not dormant; death is inevitable.16 The Holy does not
represent a human potential, but a personal Being who desires human
relationship.
While Loder begins ego formation with the birth process, or with
primal humanity, he also asserts that self-understanding involves more
than a person’s parental heritage. In a sense, the void is part of her as
negations of her ego (a manifestation of original sin); any ‘new’ self-
understanding that includes the void is still part of her heritage. A
person inherits human brokenness.17 Yet, the void is also outside her,
manifesting in other people, in creation, something bigger than the
individual, even while God graciously sustains all that exists. In
Christian transformation, God, the presence of Christ through the
Holy Spirit, instigates a person’s inner conflict so that her brokenness
‘is brought before God’ and becomes ‘original sin’ that God may offer
deep, transforming relationship.18 Although Loder draws upon

16 ‘From the moment of birth, there are forces at work antithetical to the
paradoxical exocentricity of the human spirit. In fact, these forces will
eventually prevail against our human efforts to sustain life in the Spirit. I have
already introduced the theme of original sin implicitly in discussions of the
Spirit and the image of God, and like these themes, it will continue throughout
development to its end, since the ultimate aim of original sin is death’ (Loder,
LS, p. 122).
17 ‘This developmental perspective suggests that the doctrine of original sin is in
fact something one grows into as much as one falls into’ (ibid., p. 124).
18 ‘Original brokenness becomes “original sin” only when the brokenness, which
Kierkegaard called “despair,” [‘tragic futility and ultimate meaningless of
existence, which he terms “despair”’ (ibid., p. ix)] is brought before God. The
Spiritual Presence of God exposes the condition and simultaneously offers a
real alternative to the brokenness.’ Ibid. And, a few chapters later in the same
text: ‘in Kierkegaard’s Concept of Anxiety, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947), we participate in Adam’s sin
qualitatively by reenacting in our development the inevitable self-alienation
from God implicit in ego formation. In this way, we are like Adam universally.
But we are unlike Adam quantitatively. That is, the results of our human
separation from God accumulate, making further enactment of qualitative sin
more likely in later generations. Original sin, then, is inevitable but not
necessary since transformation is possible’ (ibid., p. 279 n.17).

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developmental theory, he seems to avoid the ‘parental fallacy’ as
Hillman describes it. Loder does not explain a person only from
parenting experiences, as ‘victims of what happened in the past and
left indelible stains.’ He agrees with Hillman that the present and
future surrounding world is ‘intimately important to my story.’
Loder asserts that an infant’s interaction with her parents or
caretakers will lead to ego formation, to the distortion of the infant’s
personhood and her view of human existence. Are humans thereby
victims of indelible stains from their parents or primary caretakers?
Not necessarily. A victim may be described as one who experiences
harm at the ‘hand’ of another.19 A person’s ego is not completely
harmful. Her ego develops wonderful, powerful competencies to
ensure survival and satisfaction. Additionally, it is questionable
whether her ego appears because of another person’s harmful actions.
The birth trauma, the absent face, and external restraint do not in and
of themselves represent harmful actions. Loder describes the resulting
ego as a ‘truth producing error’: an error in that it cannot do more than
functionally what it is asked to do, but truth producing in that the
‘core’ negation that prevents the ego from existentially doing what it
is asked to do also produces the truth of human existence by pointing
to the void. Ego formation does not entail the indelible receipt of harm
from another person. Rather, it protects, while pointing to the true
nature of human existence.20 Ego-centeredness is harmful, but may
operate as a transitional object for ego-relativization.21 Through the
relativization process, a person’s ego and the brokenness of human
nature and existence can be deeply, transformatively related to God.
Loder agrees with Hillman that ‘the surrounding world is
intimately important to my story,’ but ultimately understands it

19 Oxford Concise English Dictionary, ninth edition.

20 The void or original sin is a type of indelible stain in creation. While ego-
relativization reunites an individual with her Creator, the effects of original sin
will still be experienced in herself, others, and the world generally. The stain
can be treated, but not removed completely until the new heaven and new earth.
21 For a discussion about God-images as transitional objects and a concise
statement of Winnicott’s theory, see Callaghan, ‘Do Teddy Bears Make Good
Spiritual Directors: Ignatius Loyola Meets Donald Winnicott.’

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differently. For Hillman, the surrounding world involves an archetypal
soul that connects people and all things in the world.22 And although
he uses verbs that imply that archetypal soul has a personal will and
being (e.g., wanting recognition), he indicates otherwise. Archetypal
soul represents a fundamental structure of the universe that seeks
recognition the way that gravity can be said to seek to exert its
influence. Moreover, there is no claim for the archetypal soul of
historic revelation in human form through which all other revelation
and forms must be filtered, as in the case of the Christian God through
Jesus of Nazareth. The infinitely varied archetypal images, all
expressing archetypal soul, represent expressions of an impersonal
cosmic force in a conceptual field different from the Christian Creator
God of the universe. For Loder ‘the surrounding world is intimately
important to my story’ because humanity shares its creatureliness with
the rest of the created cosmos. Ego-relativization effected by the Holy
Spirit can enable a deepened shared creatureliness oriented toward the
Creator.
To summarize these last two points of comparison, both Loder
and Hillman agree on the error of a person blaming her parents for her
fundamental brokenness. There are additional factors. For Loder, one
additional factor is original sin, for Hillman, one is the distortion of
archetypal soul by Western culture. Both assert a measure of self-
determinacy that enables a person to embrace or reject the overtures of
the relativizing dimensions, but each contends that the relativizing
dimension enables a person’s embrace or rejection. Both agree on the
inherent value of the non-human world. They diverge in their
understanding of the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of the importance. As usual,
this divergence expresses their world-view differences. In light of
these parallels, it is not surprising that they also both criticize the field
of developmental theory in psychology.

22 This understanding of archetypal soul might be translated into the Christian

assertion of creative immediacy or contingency, in that God sustains all that
God creates or it would cease to exist. That translation would further emphasize
the distinction between the archetypal soul and the Holy: the archetypal soul is
creaturely, rather than the Creator.

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 Loder offers a theoretical description of ego formation and
development from birth, while Hillman does not, yet Loder like
Hillman criticizes developmental theory for its attempt to explain ego
formation through constricted horizons. An ego development theory
that omits the void cannot help but consider a person’s (heroic) ego as
the guiding ‘center’ of a person.23 Similarly, if archetypal soul is
denied, then human nature needs a central internal witness. A person’s
heroic ego validates its own view, a consciousness limited to her own
experience that denies archetypal soul. For both theorists, the (heroic)
ego’s theoretical centrality has arisen and continued through
constricted understandings of human nature and existence. While
Hillman considers himself a psychologist and Loder draws heavily
upon psychological theory and practice, both assert that theoretical
lacunae in psychology support the (heroic) ego’s infliction of psychic
pain.
For Hillman, a person’s pain represents split and torn archetypal
images, ‘lost’ archetypal soul. Additionally, the pain represents the
‘longing’ of the archetypal soul for expression, to mediate human
psyches and the cosmic psyche. For Loder, the pain represents a
person’s fears of death, repressed memories and yearnings, isolation,
and cosmic loneliness. Hillman, too, describes a person’s fear of
death, repression, isolation and cosmic loneliness resulting from life
lived unaware of the anima mundi (or archetypal soul) that yearns to
reconnect human beings with themselves, other people, and the rest of
the cosmos via ‘itself.’ But Loder does not describe split and torn
archetypal images or ‘lost’ archetypal soul resulting from life lived
unaware of the void and Holy. Archetypal images and soul alone do
not address the psychic pain of the void. Only the sustaining presence
of the Holy offers to heal the void in deep, transforming relationship
through Christ in the power of the Spirit.
The next six sub-sections consider the supplementary concepts of
the ego, those that contribute to the theorists’ understanding of the ego
and its relativization.

23 Loder, LS, p. 73.

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2.1 Void

For Loder, the concept of the void (sin, alienation from God) is his
ultimate justification for ego-relativization. Hillman does not have any
concept of the void. Although he notes the dangers of psychologism,24
he asserts the comprehensiveness25 and religious nature26 of his
archetypal psychology (and could be seen as doing the very thing he
warns against). Even so, the religious nature of his theories does not
include a Holy Source as Loder means it or indeed any sort of
transcendent and personal God or Higher Power. The separation that
Hillman does lament is between human consciousness dominated by a
person’s heroic ego and the archetypal soul. This is not predicated on
anything analogous to original sin,27 as the void is for Loder. The
separation enacted by a person’s heroic ego occurs in human terms,
without reference to human-Divine relations. If I may say that any
type of void is in his theories, it is purely as an image from the
archetypal soul that requires balancing with its opposite image. This

24 Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 133; and states that he is talking

psychologically and not religiously (ibid., p. 168).
25 ‘all study […] is ultimately psychology’ (ibid., p. 202); ‘psychology cannot be
limited to being one field among others since psyche itself permeates all fields
and things of the world’ (Archetypal Psychology, p. 18).
26 ‘psychology is a variety of religious experience’ (Hillman, Re-Visioning
Psychology, p. 227); ‘since its [psychology’s] inception it has been actively
practicing religion’ (ibid., p. 228).
27 The only concept that might be understood in Hillman as analogous to original
sin is the Jungian concept of the shadow. Early Hillman (1967) followed Jung
in advising acceptance of one’s shadow, integrating or balancing the shadow
side with the light side of one’s self. Later Hillman (1994) rejects this approach,
criticizing it for seeming to affirm Christian morality (Insearch, p. 135). Later
Hillman asserts that ‘the psychopathological shadow at its fundamental level is
neither evil, devil, nor lovelessness, but the shadow of psychology itself, the
psychopathological lacuna in its theory that neglects the soul out there.’
(Insearch, p. 136, italics original). If understood as original sin, the shadow
then is not an ontological fact of human nature, as it is understood within
traditional Christianity, but an archetypal image distorted by the field of
psychology via its non-attention to the archetypal soul.

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image does not involve the dynamics of worship and idolatry, unless
in archetypal senses of the terms.

2.2 Self as Spirit

Although this is Loder’s concept, I begin with Hillman’s views.

Hillman does have a concept of self as spirit, however, it does not
enter into his understanding of ego-relativization, except by exclusion.
He takes an oppositional view of soul and spirit, not a hypostatic
dualism, but an opposition of perspective in which soul is linked with
vales or valleys and spirit with peaks or mountain-tops.28 While he
recommends a soul-spirit ‘marriage’ in which each meets the other’s
longings (‘psychic malaise points to spiritual hunger’ and ‘spiritual
dryness points to a need for psychic waters’),29 his theories
concentrate on soul-making, not the soul-spirit marriage. He justifies
this concentration with his view of Western culture as having favored
the spirit over the soul, under Christianity’s influence. He aims to
counter what he perceives as an unfortunate cultural bias toward the
spirit, arising from what he perceives as Christianity’s overly
transcendent emphasis. He also asserts that the Christian
understanding of spirit is linked with reason, science, and the logos, so
that the transcendence of the spirit lacks imagination, art, and
mythos.30 It is the soul that expresses imagination, art, and mythos.31
While writing from a Christian perspective, Loder’s ‘self as
spirit’ encompasses the attributes that Hillman associates with the
soul. Loder’s ‘logic of transformation’ involves the imagination and is
the pattern by which a person experiences esthetic intuition, scientific
discoveries, and therapeutic insights; it explains the power of the myth
genre. He considers false the separation of imagination from reason,

28 Hillman, Puer Papers, pp. 58-61.

29 Ibid., p. 68.
30 Ibid., pp. 54-65.
31 Ibid.

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art from science, mythos from logos.32 In this area of their theories it
seems that 1) they are using the same terms to mean mostly different
things, and 2) it may be possible to substitute soul for spirit in Loder’s
theory and spirit for soul in Hillman’s theory. Exploring this
possibility results in a few parallels, but fundamental divergences
remain.
The parallels include the activities of the soul and spirit: both
mediate and relate. Fundamentally, the soul and spirit are
perspectives. The divergence occurs in the type of mediation or
relationship provided by each. For Hillman, a person’s soul (which is
part of the archetypal soul) mediates the same entities as Loder’s
spirit, but Hillman’s soul relates everything to archetypal images. For
Loder, a person’s spirit mediates images, but relates everything to
whatever is the ‘center’ of her personality. A person’s spirit is affected
by original sin and thus ‘centers’ her personality on her ego while
continuing to long for relationship with the Source of humanity, the
Face that will never leave (indicating her ego’s paradoxical exocentric
centeredness). While a person’s ego may be a type of archetypal
image, the human-Divine bi-polar relational unity or relationality
cannot be considered an archetypal image or even a relationship
between two archetypal images. Thus, although both Hillman’s soul
and Loder’s spirit relate a person to images, the type of relation and
the fundamental image differ.

2.3 Face

The many faces of Hillman’s polytheistic psyche, a person’s psyche

related to her archetypal soul, might be seen as functioning

32 ‘It is usually assumed that where there is a mistake, there imagination has
worked some foul play at a point where only reason—especially reason refined
by the canons of scientific method—has the right to say what is true. A new
theory of error would be: any assertion of truth that does not recognize and
accept its primary dependency on some leap of the imagination, some insight,
intuition, or vision, is guilty of intellectual dissimulation’ (Loder, TM, p. 26).

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analogously to Loder’s face. In Loder’s theory, the face represents an
ordering principle that provides recognition and affirmation, a
prototypical religious experience for the infant. Later, the face directs
and guides a person’s ego despite having been replaced and repressed
by her centered ego. Similarly, the faces of the archetypal soul, the
‘gods,’ direct and guide human behavior despite being dominated and
repressed by a person’s heroic ego. The divergence is obvious. For
Loder, the face is a taste of something for which the self was created,
human-Divine relationship. This relationship is between creator and
creature. For Hillman, the faces represent parts of a person’s psyche
that are repressed, but still part of the creature, to use Christian
language. Like the Face of God, the polytheistic archetypal faces
connect a person to herself, to other humans, and to the entire world,
but the natures of the connection, humans, and the world all differ. I
turn now to the concepts that contribute to Hillman’s heroic ego.

2.4 Archetype

Hillman understands archetype as ‘the deepest patterns of psychic

functioning.’33 Loder understands archetype as ‘a phylogenetic
inheritance’ that emerges ‘from a psychic level (the objective psyche
or collective unconscious) deeper than the personal unconscious
(Freud and Erikson)’ which presents itself ‘through powerful images
that have mythic and religious force for the formation of persons.’34
These two definitions would seem to be roughly equivalent. Since
both theorists understand archetype through Jung, this is not
surprising. After this initial parallel, however, they diverge.
While Loder acknowledges the possibility of archetypes
operating as a structure of the human psyche, he puts archetypes ‘on a
par with grammar in speech and logic in intelligence […] it is a
structure by which one comes to know one’s personal wholeness; it is

33 Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, xiii, italics original.

34 Loder, LS, p. 26.

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not a structure of being.’35 Christ uses but far transcends the
archetype, referring us back to God’s person, through whom all things
(including archetypes) were made. Loder does not link personal
wholeness necessarily with the presence of God; rather, ‘often when
we are least whole within ourselves […] God is most evident.’36
While Christ ‘will bring forth the sanity and sanctity of holiness,’
personal wholeness is not a prerequisite for or a guarantee of the
presence of God.37 A person may encounter the Holy Spirit and
experience the effects of ego-relativization without knowing personal
wholeness.
In contrast, Hillman understands archetype as not only a structure
of being, but also the source of value in the world. (For Loder, the
value of the world arises from its relation to the Creator God.) The
qualifier ‘archetypal’ ‘connotes both intentional force (Jung’s
“instinct”) and the mythical field of personifications (Hillman’s
“Gods”).’38 Hillman has the personifications in mind when he
suggests that ‘[u]ltimately, we shall admit that archetypal psychology
is theophanic.’39 By ‘theophanic,’ he refers to archetypal images that
function as ‘gods,’ but are not divine beings; they guide and direct
humans, forming a psychic pantheon.40 Archetypal psychology
focuses on (worships?) the ‘gods’ (archetypal images) that direct the
human psyche, and moreover, the soul of the world. A type of
personal wholeness is linked with the presence of the gods. Thus, an
initial parallel between Loder and Hillman ends as he understands
archetype to include significances explicitly rejected by Loder. Any
parallel between them regarding the soul is more tenuous still.

35 Ibid., p. 307.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., p. 308. ‘Another way to put it is that God’s personal nature far exceeds,
and is not contingent on, the impersonal structure of psychic wholeness’ (ibid.).
38 Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, p. 13, referring to himself in the third person.
39 Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 168.
40 Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, p. 3.

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2.5 Soul

Soul for Hillman includes not only humans and living creatures, but
the world; he uses the term anima mundi. ‘The curative or salvational
vision of archetypal psychology focuses upon the soul in the world
which is also the soul of the world (anima mundi).’41 The import
behind archetypal psychology’s goal of ‘soul-making’ is to restore
soul to a person’s psyche. Soul-making is the process of ego-
relativization.
Loder does not include the concept of anima mundi in his theory.
Soul, for Loder, is the subject of psychological study;42 study of the
body and study of the soul enable a discussion of spirituality ‘to avoid
a reductionism upward’ where it could verge on spiritualism or
gnosticism.43 Humans are psychophysical beings; he does not
comment on the presence or absence of souls in animals, plants, or
inanimate objects. While spirit is an active, relational perspective for
Loder, it is not identical to psyche or an image. Nor does it see all
realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical and find meaning only
by relating them to death. Soul and psyche are inter-changeable for
Loder, as they are for Hillman. But for Loder, images are not identical
to soul or spirit. Images involve body, soul, and spirit, as do imaging
as an activity, and seeing symbolic or metaphorical meanings.
Ascribing value to the latter does not devalue physicality or literal
meanings. The spirit mediates images to human awareness, as in the
insight phase of the five-phased logic or pattern, but the mediation
involves the soul and body as well; recall Loder’s use of the
psychoneurological model of intensification to identify neural
correlates for the insight phase. Meaning is found by relating all
events, including death, to life in Christ, not to the human spirit.
Hence, despite an initial parallel, Loder diverges from Hillman in his
understanding of soul.

41 Ibid., p. 26, italics inserted.

42 Loder, Logic of the Spirit, p. 60.
43 Ibid., 64.

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2.6 Consciousness

Hillman distinguishes between a person’s consciousness associated

with her heroic ego and that associated with the rest of the ego
complex and the other complexes of her psyche. The consciousness of
a person’s heroic ego isolates. Ego-relativization locates a person in a
community both within and without through the archetypal soul or
anima mundi, the archetypal soul relating all aspects of human
existence to death. Loder also utilizes Freud’s and Jung’s models of
the psyche, Freud’s topographical model and Jung’s revision, which
distinguishes between the personal and collective unconscious. But
Loder’s aim is not to limit the (heroic) ego’s influence so that the
personal and collective unconscious can become conscious. He
evaluates a person’s (heroic) ego consciousness as it prevents her
awareness of the void and Holy. For Loder, ego-relativization also
enables awareness of death, but with the promise of the Holy’s
companionship through death and resurrection afterwards.
To conclude this section, Hillman and Loder seem to refer to the
same psychic agency when they use the term ‘ego.’ However, Hillman
limits the ego to those traits and characteristics that conform to a
‘heroic’ image. Loder does not limit the traits and characteristics of
the ego to those consistent with the heroic image, although he does
sometimes use that qualifier when describing the ego and its doomed
cause. The ego’s fault lies in its denial of the void and the Holy. For
Hillman, it lies in its denial of archetypal soul.
While Hillman justifies ego-relativization with the heroic ego’s
repression of archetypal soul, Loder justifies ego-relativization with
the ego’s repression of the void and the Holy. For Loder, a person’s
ego attempts to deny her alienation from her Creator. This distorts
human nature. For Hillman, a person’s heroic ego attempts to constrict
her manifestation of archetypal soul. This distorts human nature.
Despite their divergent understandings of human nature—distorted or
not—and of the nature and number of repressed dimensions, they
describe ego functioning very similarly. Both theorists understand the
(heroic) ego as a damaging ‘center’ of the personality, but for different
reasons. The way in which the ego functions to maintain its ‘central’
damaging position parallels, but the reason for the damage (the

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repressed dimensions of human existence) differs. A person’s (heroic)
ego self-deceives (denying death as well as the repressed dimensions
and other aspects of human existence), inadequately mediates a
person’s inner and outer worlds, and creates psychic pain. For both, a
‘centered’ ego is not ‘how it should be’ and ego-relativization
reconfigures a person’s psyche as it ‘should be.’
Although different in nature, the repressed dimension that
relativizes a person’s (heroic) ego operates similarly in the theories.
For both theorists, the repressed and relativizing dimension seeks
recognition from a person’s psyche, to relate her psyche to itself, other
humans, and the rest of the world. The dimensions are ever-present
and ever-active. Self-understanding un-distorted by the centered
(heroic) ego relates a person to the repressed and relativizing
dimensions. For Loder, the Christian Holy God created humanity for
relationship. For Hillman, the world exists to manifest archetypal soul.
The anima mundi gives humanity its value and connects the world in
itself.44 For both, the ‘centered’ (heroic) ego thwarts the purpose of
human existence. Only ego-relativization can solve these problems.

3. Ego-relativization

The discussion in this section is divided into five subsections. Each

subsection focuses on an aspect of ego-relativization that reveals both
extraordinary parallels between the theories and ultimate divergences
stemming from the difference in world-views, in the archetypal soul
and the Tri-Une God.

44 Hillman does not address meaning and purpose questions fully; e.g., why is it
important to manifest archetypal soul? Like Loder, Bowker contends that
meaning and purpose questions ‘are legitimate in the search for causative
explanations of human behavior’ (Is God a Virus? p. 101).

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3.1 The power behind ego-relativization

In both theories, a dimension repressed by the (heroic) ego initiates

and enables the process of ego-relativization, making the ego relative
to ‘itself.’ For Hillman, the archetypal soul becomes the new ‘center’
of a person’s psyche; because the heroic ego is an archetypal image
among many in the archetypal soul, this means that there are many
‘centers’ of the psyche or no one ‘center.’ For Loder, the spiritual
presence of Christ in a dialectical bi-polar relational union with the
human spirit becomes the new ‘center’ of the psyche. There is one
‘center,’ but it is infinitely rich, multiform and varied while also being
single, unitary, consistent and free from contradiction.45 This richness
is the spiritual presence of Christ in the Trinity, the ‘Holy Source’ of
humanity.
For Hillman, the richness comes from the archetypal soul, the
source of all consciousness. The archetypal soul, too, represents
variety within a whole and the seeming contradictions and
inconsistencies (the bi-polar archetypal images) could be seen as
analogous to the dichotomies that Christ unites and transcends (e.g.,
life and death) or the contradictions and inconsistencies in the
narrative of Jesus Christ. The distinction lies in the nature of the
archetypal soul compared with the nature of the Christian God. The
archetypal soul is already part of the human psyche, even if mostly
submerged with only the tip of the iceberg ‘visible’ as a person’s
heroic ego. The Holy Source is not part of the human psyche, even
though a) the Christian doctrine of the imago dei gives humanity some
sort of special correspondence with its Creator; and b) divine
immediacy or creation’s dependency (contingency) upon God’s
sustaining presence for existence means that a person’s psyche is
dependent on God. God is not identical with the human psyche. If
applied to the other, each dimension reduces the other dimension to
something ruled or expressive of itself. The spiritual presence of
Christ becomes an archetypal image and the archetypal image

45 Loder, LS, pp. 37-38.

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becomes a structure of knowing (not being) created and used by the
Holy. The nature of the power behind ego-relativization represents a
major divergence in their theories of the process, even with parallels
in how the power operates (e.g., initiating, enabling, becoming the
new ‘center’).
Both agree that there are many potential ‘centers’ of the
personality, but diverge on the nature of a ‘best center.’ Hillman’s
archetypal soul replaces the heroic ego with many ‘centers’ or no one
‘center’ that expresses what he considers the true polytheistic nature
of the psyche, unnaturally constricted through the cultural and social
influence of monotheism.46 Loder’s dialectical bi-polar relational unity
between human spirit and Holy Spirit de-centers the (heroic) ego with
a relationality that is multi-form and varied, consistent with the
Chalcedonian formulation of the nature of Christ. In a sense,
Hillman’s bi-polar archetypal soul and Loder’s dialectical bi-polar
relational unity share a complexity within an unity, but the archetypal
soul does not relate a person to any transcendent God or the tri-une
Creator God.47 Archetypal soul is very much part of the cosmos and
the cosmos manifests archetypal soul. For Loder, the ‘cosmos’ or
creation points to and manifests relationality with the Creator. The
new ‘center’ of the personality for each theorist shares, but differs in
the kind of, complexity in unity.
Although the relativizing dimensions function somewhat in
parallel to effect relativization, the theorists’ fundamental
disagreement on archetype produces a divergence in results. The
identity of the relativizing dimension determines the results of the
relativization process and the theories must diverge. For Loder, the
results of the relativization process involve a radical structural change
in the human psyche. For Hillman, ego-relativization does change
conceptual structuring of human nature, i.e., without an ego, but he
does not claim an actual structural change. Rather, the psyche
blossoms into and expresses what has always been there. A person’s

46 Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, pp. xiv-xv.

47 Hillman is negative toward monotheism in general, and Christianity in
particular, which he considers the dominant religion of his culture.

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heroic ego recognizes its true state as a participant in the archetypal
soul. For Loder, a person recognizes her true state as alienated from
God and yet participating in creation by God’s sustaining grace; she
can embrace God’s invitation to participate in the loving relationality
of the Trinity through a human-Divine relationality that represents a
structural change. Although one relativization involves a structural
change through relationship with another Being and the other involves
a blossoming through fuller relationship with oneself, the relational
locus and results of ego-relativization might seem like a parallel at
first glance. Both assert a fundamental relationality to human nature
that is somewhat latent and makes ego-relativization imperative. But
the nature of the relationality differs profoundly.
The relational basis of ego-relativization creates only a limited
parallel between the theories. Relational fulfillment for Loder does not
come from within the human psyche, but from the Holy who created
humanity with the imago dei, who overcame original sin (or the void)
through the birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus
Christ, who invites relationship through the spiritual presence of
Christ, and who forms the human-Divine dialectical bi-polar relational
unity to which the ego is made relative. Humanity, individually and
collectively, responds to this potential, but the grace that activates any
response comes from the Divine.48 In contrast, for Hillman, the
fulfillment of cosmic relationship through archetypal soul comes from
within the human psyche.
To summarize the discussion so far, the parallels are that: (1) the
relativizing dimension initiates and enables relativization, relating a
person’s ego to itself as her new ‘center,’ (2) the relativizing

48 ‘It is not correct to say that humanity has lost the image of God; it would be
better to say that humanity has lost its original of which it is the image.
Moreover, there is no way the human spirit by itself as human spirit can reverse
the loss; the created spirit is ontologically incapable of choosing the Creator as
a possibility. Thus, when grace enters the situation, the disoriented human spirit
is not destroyed by grace; it is transformed so that it may choose freely to
testify with God’s Spirit that we are children of God (Rom.8.16). Thus, the
impact of grace on the human spirit is to awaken it to a true sense of its freedom
to be itself as image restored to its original’ (Loder, LS, p. 35).

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dimension in relationship with the person as her new ‘center’ creates a
diversity in unity, a richness, (3) each relativizing dimension is
reduced within the world-view of the other theorist’s relativizing
dimension, (4) there are many potential ‘centers,’ (5) there is a best
‘center,’ (6) there is a fundamental relationality to human nature that
is distorted without ego-relativization, and (7) the relationality is
fulfilled through ego-relativization. The divergences are: (1) the nature
of the personality ‘center’ after relativization, (2) the nature of the best
‘center’ within a person, (3) the kind of psychic diversity in unity
effected by relativization, (4) the relativizing dimension’s relation to a
person’s psyche pre- and post-relativization, (5) the understanding of
archetype within ego-relativization, (6) the nature of relativization: a
structural change in a person’s psyche versus purely blossoming into
what is already there, (7) the nature of the relationality fundamental to
the human psyche, and (8) the nature of the fulfillment of this
relationality.

3.2 Sampling ego-relativization

Both Hillman and Loder identify ways in which people experience

aspects of the ego-relativization process in everyday life. For Hillman,
ego-relativization begins in a person’s dreams and psychopathological
symptoms. Loder also identifies experiences of ego-relativization in
everyday life, but not necessarily through a person’s dreams and
symptoms. For him, ego-relativization may ‘begin’ in any of the five
phases of the ‘logic,’ but often ‘begins’ in existential conflicts.
Insights may come in a dream and/or a conflict may arise through
pathological symptoms, but neither dreams nor symptoms operate as
boundary experiences. A person’s resolution of periodic upheavals
without ego-relativization does not provide her ego with an experience
of relativization itself, but with an experience of the process through
which relativization occurs. In relativization, the process itself is
changed. If I try to extend the parallels between the theorists as far as
possible, then I might a) consider the five-phased ‘logic’ an archetype
and b) suppose its usual origin and destiny involves an archetypal soul
of some sort. The parallel would have to end, however, as the spiritual

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presence of Christ effects ego-relativization and the five-phased
‘logic’ originates in and orients toward God.
For Hillman, the dream and symptom are familiar to a person’s
psyche before ego-relativization, but are not transformed in the
relativization process. The dream and symptom both continue to
originate in and orient a person toward the archetypal soul. The
reconceptualization of a person’s psyche involves that of which it is
already a part, not the introduction of something from outside. The
dream and symptom effect ego-relativization because of their
continuing origin and destiny in archetypal soul. Dreams and
symptoms provide samples of both the relativization process and
relativization itself.
Loder’s (heroic) ego also samples relativization itself. Unlike
Hillman’s ego that samples being related to and guided by the
archetypal soul, Loder’s ego samples being related to and guided by
an inner longing for human-Divine relationship, not an intentional
human-Divine relationship per se.49 The memory of the face
phenomenon, buried within the ‘core’ of a person’s ego, directs her
ego toward the divine and this provides her ego with a taste of ego-
relativization. Even though her ego does not realize that the repressed
face is working to uncover the core of negation and direct her toward
the divine, the workings of the buried face phenomenon provide an
unrecognized experience of ego-relativization. While Hillman’s
dreams and symptoms direct the heroic ego toward that of which they
are all already a part, Loder’s face directs the (heroic) ego toward that
which is discrete from and yet sustaining the human psyche.

3.3 The gift of ego-relativization

Both Hillman and Loder posit that a person’s (heroic) ego can
cooperate with the relativizing dimension, but is incapable of effecting

49 Loder emphasizes the contingency or dependency of creation on God’s

sustaining presence for its very existence. This creates a further parallel with
Hillman’s archetypal soul, while not eliminating the divergence in kind.

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ego-relativization herself. Hillman notes that her heroic ego’s
resolution to undergo relativization actually strengthens the centering
of her heroic ego, until it is balanced by other images and opened to
the possibility of ‘grace in its absence,’ the grace of the archetypal
soul in the absence of her dominating heroic ego. In this process, her
heroic ego is not eliminated. If Loder’s centered ego were to try to
relativize itself, it too would be strengthened, attempting yet again to
solve a person’s existential conflict with its own self-sufficiency. Until
faced with her negation and ‘opened’ to the possibility of the
transcendent, her ego dreads and desires relativization. Her realization
that she cannot ensure her satisfaction and survival can open her ego
to relativization. She has some sort of choice about facing the void,
similar to Hillman’s heroic ego choosing to nurture other images. The
relativizing dimension enables both choices and yet she can refuse or
embrace the ‘enablement.’
For Hillman, a person’s attendance to her dreams and symptoms
means cultivating the images that appear in those phenomena. For
Loder, cultivating dream or symptom images does not necessarily
effect ego-relativization. The Holy Spirit might present the image of
Christ to human awareness through dreams and symptoms. Or, any of
the other four phases might ‘present’ through dreams or symptoms,
but not necessarily. Hillman asserts that image cultivation enables a
person to begin to realize the limitations of her heroic ego. For Loder,
a person’s image cultivation may lead to a realization of her ego’s
limitations (i.e., that it cannot ensure survival or satisfaction), but it
may not. Ego-relativization cannot be stated as a technique. A person
does not need to realize the limits of her ego per se. For Hillman, if a
person suspects that her heroic ego is just a small part (one image) of
her personality, she might seek other images and discover a pantheon
of images. She has discovered the archetypal soul that connects her to
other people and the universe. For Loder, discovering many images in
my psyche does not necessarily lead me into an existential conflict
between the nothingness of the void and the life of the Holy from
which I might emerge with my ego relativized. Even assuming the
archetypal soul that Hillman posits, encountering archetypal soul
would not be the key for Loder. The key is always encountering the
sustaining, transforming spiritual presence of Christ.

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 Hillman also depicts the ego-relativization process as a person
pondering her heroic ego and uncovering the layers of images for
which her heroic ego is not responsible. He uses Jung’s ‘withdrawal of
projections.’ A person thereby differentiates between what is her
heroic ego and what has been projected on to it. At first her heroic ego
is strengthened through this process (since it has decided to do this),
but eventually it cannot help but be relativized as it is immersed in and
recognized as one of many images. Loder’s relativization process can
also involve a person pondering her ego, however, she need not
realize that her ego has repressed the void or taken on roles
inappropriately. The point for Loder is for a person to recognize her
desire for relationship with her Creator, rather than the richness of her
psychic imagery as an end in itself. Encountering the void can open
her to encountering the spiritual presence of Christ, an image
originating outside of her psyche. Whether through dreams and
symptoms or projection withdrawal, using Hillman’s process of ego-
relativization to understand Loder does not produce descriptive and
explanatory power for Loder’s process. I turn to Loder’s five-phased
‘logic’ to consider whether or not it has descriptive and explanatory
power for Hillman’s process.

3.4 Loder’s logic and Hillman’s ego-relativization

For both theorists, there is a conflict: for Hillman, it is between the

heroic ego and the rest of the psyche, the archetypal soul; for Loder, it
is an existential conflict between the nothingness of the void and the
life of the Holy. There is a scanning interlude: for Hillman, a person’s
heroic ego searches for ways to maintain its domination and yet
welcomes the release of its burden of domination; for Loder, a
person’s ego searches for ways to manage the conflict in the service of
survival and satisfaction and searches for the divine face. The
relativizing dimension presents itself as an insight that will resolve the
conflict: for Hillman, the archetypal soul manifests in a person’s
psyche as the rest of her ego complex and the other complexes of her
psyche, relieving her heroic ego of its illusion of ‘centrality’ so that it
can perform its rightful duty of maintenance; for Loder, the spiritual

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presence of Christ bridges the void for a person by offering deep,
transforming relationship that maintains the particularity of each in a
bi-polar relational unity, relating the ego and its competencies and the
entire psyche to this dialectical relationship. Ego-relativization
produces a release of energy: for Hillman, a person’s energy used to
repress and deny the rest of the ego complex and the rest of her psyche
is now used to manifest archetypal soul through herself, human
relations, and relations with the cosmos; for Loder, a person’s energy
used to repress and deny the void and all her associated longings for
the Face is now used to express her relationship with the Holy through
every aspect of her existence in creation. This involves an
interpretation of ego-relativization and application of that experience
to all of life. Loder’s logic seems to have descriptive and explanatory
power for Hillman’s process of ego-relativization.

3.5 Myth and ego-relativization

Both theorists identify the power and significance of myth, finding it

involved in ego-relativization. Loder claims that humans use myth to
overcome conflicts or periodic upheavals. He understands the human
personality to appear through myth, through symbols, images, and
metaphors used to overcome conflicts and construct elementary
worlds (e.g., kinship). The emergence of myth follows the five-phased
‘logic.’ Hillman, too, claims a central role for myth, identifying it as
the primary language of archetypal psychology. A primary activity of
a person’s psyche with a relativized ego involves looking for mythic
figures in language, action, and her interior world. This is the
perspective of the archetypal soul. However, Loder asserts that part of
myth’s power comes from its appearance out of the five-phased
‘logic’ of transformation, rather than from its presentation of
archetypal images. Although both theorists affirm the role of myth,
their reasons are very different. Loder affirms myth for its
embodiment of the five-phased ‘logic’ that expresses the resilience
and creativity of the ‘self as spirit,’ the relationality expressive of the
imago dei. He also values it for its potential as a vehicle for ego-
relativization. Hillman affirms myth for its expression of what is most

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fundamentally human, archetypes. As such, myth unites all that exists
in the anima mundi.

To conclude this section of five subsections, despite their differing

natures, in both theories a repressed dimension initiates and enables
relativization and then in some way becomes the new orienting
‘center’ of a person. Her new ‘center’ has a type of complexity in
unity. However, Hillman specifically rejects a single ‘center’ for the
human personality. He insists that via archetypal soul a person has
many (polytheistic) or no one ‘center.’ Loder agrees that there are
many potential ‘centers,’ but only human-Divine relationality
addresses the void.
The difference in the goal of ego-relativization between the two
theorists reflects the difference in the relationship of a person’s psyche
to the relativizing dimension prior to relativization. Prior to
relativization, her heroic ego and her entire psyche already manifest
archetypal soul, albeit distortedly, thanks to the heroic ego. Since
Hillman understands everything archetypally, whether before, during,
or after relativization, a person manifests archetypal soul. The
distinction is whether her centered heroic ego distorts her
manifestation of archetypal soul or allows it free self-display. Loder
understands everything theologically, as it relates to God. Prior to
relativization, a person’s centered ego reinforces her alienation from
God, while God sustains all that exists. Relativization reveals God’s
transcendent yet sustaining presence, creates relationality, and enables
her to live from this relationality. Archetypes may be a part of this
process, specifically the five-phased ‘logic’ through which the
spiritual presence of Christ offers relationship to the human spirit, but
they are not structures of being as they are for Hillman. Everything is
not archetypal for Loder. While both understand human nature as
fundamentally relational, for Hillman the relationality is archetypal
and for Loder it is theological. Hillman’s process might be part of
Loder’s process, but not necessarily, while the application of Loder’s
five phases to Hillman’s process produces a seemingly accurate
portrayal.
Both theorists identify ways in which a person may sample the
relativization process or the experience itself. For Hillman, image

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cultivation in dreams and symptoms provides a person with samples
of both the process and relativization itself because, to qualify Jung’s
maxim that image is psyche, image is archetypal is reality. In contrast,
the five-phased ‘logic’ gives a person many experiences of the
relativization process (but not relativization itself) throughout life. For
Loder, a person samples relativization itself through her repressed
longing for the face that continues to guide her centered ego despite
her ego’s pretence and repression. Both theorists contend that a person
may sample the process and relativization itself, but her ‘centered’
(heroic) ego cannot relativize without the relativizing dimension that
initiates and enables the process. A person may embrace or reject the
invitation of the relativizing dimension, but the relativizing dimension
enables her embrace.

4. Results

Both theorists describe the individual and social changes resulting

from ego-relativization in ideal or paradigmatic terms. For each, ego-
relativization signifies a turning point that is both immediate and a
process. This discussion will focus on a person’s changed perspectives
and relationships as well as the theorists’ proposed modifications of
psychological theory. Because Hillman’s understanding of the ego’s
problem arises from his criticisms of Christianity, he contrasts the
results of ego-relativization with his views of Christianity.50 This

50 Hillman views Christianity as the product of the heroic ego; its monotheistic
beliefs need to be superceded by polytheistic ones. ‘The soul’s inherent
multiplicity demands a theological fantasy of equal differentiation’ (Archetypal
Psychology, p. 33). Accordingly, Hillman asserts that archetypal psychology
carries out Freud’s and Jung’s criticisms of religion, as Hillman understands
them, to their radical conclusions which he understands as ‘the death of God as
a monotheistic fantasy, while at the same time restoring the fullness of the Gods
in all things and, let it be said, reverting psychology itself to the recognition that
it too is a religious activity’ (Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 227).

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section will note some of his views toward and misunderstandings of
the Christian canon and church history.

4.1 Changed perspectives: behaviors for life and death

Hillman and Loder assert that ego-relativization results in a person’s

changed perspectives toward herself, other people, and the non-human
world. For Hillman, the fundamental perspective given by archetypal
soul is that of a person’s death. In ego-relativization, her heroic ego
recognizes its existence within the archetypal soul. The overall
perspective of the archetypal soul is her mortality. This perspective of
inevitable death then guides her behavior; image cultivation
continuously relates her life to her death. Hillman’s assertion of the
heroic ego’s denial of death parallels Loder’s ego that ensures survival
by denying death until its inevitability makes denial impossible.
However, for Loder, realizing the inevitability of death is not
necessarily the result of ego-relativization, but might be part of the
process. For both theorists, ego-relativization results in a person living
in light of her ultimate destiny and with a sense of preparation for that
destiny. While both identify that destiny as death, Loder’s
understanding of death reflects his Christian theological commitments,
while Hillman rejects Christian existential claims and remains
agnostic regarding life after death.51
In Loder’s ego-relativization, the dialectical bi-polar relational
unity between the human spirit and the Divine Spirit gives another
perspective on life, as well as death. Through human-Divine
relationality, a person’s ego cooperates with what it means to be
human: to be in relationship with her Holy Creator, other humans, and

51 ‘The question of the soul’s immortality is not directly answered by a

metaphysical statement. Rather, the very nature of the soul in the dream—or at
least the perspective of soul toward the dream—shows its inattention to and
disregard for mortal experience as such, even for physical death itself, receiving
into its purview only those faces and events from the mortal world that bear
upon the opus of its destiny’ (Archetypal Psychology, p. 28).

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the rest of creation in light of that relationship. He describes
paradigmatically a person with a relativized ego as engaging with the
world through transformed defense mechanisms. While both theorists
understand ego-relativization as a liberation from the (heroic) ego’s
control, Hillman does not connect the liberation with human-Divine
relationality.
Since he understands reality archetypally, for Hillman all
Christian understandings of God are archetypal images that have
resulted from the domination of the heroic ego; monotheistic images
need to be balanced with polytheistic images. Any feelings of shame
from the void, ‘cosmic emptiness,’ or ‘cosmic loneliness’ reflect a
need for ‘centering’ in the faces of the gods, rather than the Face of
God. Any understanding of relationship with God for Hillman
involves manifesting the gods of archetypal soul. Feelings of shame
must be balanced with their opposite feelings, available in the
archetypal soul through image cultivation. Through the archetypal
soul, a person cooperates with what it means to be human: to manifest
archetypal soul and thereby connect with herself, others, and the rest
of the cosmos. A person serves all of the images in the archetypal soul
rather than the goals of her heroic ego.
While Hillman does describe a person with a relativized ego as
engaging with the world differently, he does not mention defense
mechanisms. However, if we apply his archetypal theory, we may
surmise that he would understand defense mechanisms to manifest in
a person’s psyche through balanced images and guide her behavior
through ‘balanced’ defense mechanisms rather than unbalanced ones.
There is nothing in his theory that would exclude empathy,
forgiveness, vicarious suffering, concentration, and returning good for
evil from being at least possible balancing poles for their respective
defense mechanisms.
For Loder, behavior after ego-relativization ideally conforms to
Christian ideals as embodied by Jesus Christ, revealed in the Christian
canon, and deliberated upon in the Christian church during the past
two thousand years of church history. This leaves scope for divergent
interpretations and both the Christian scriptures and church tradition
have been used to justify abhorrent behavior. The point here is not so
much a person’s specific behavior, but that there are moral and ethical

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results to ego-relativization in the form of changed perspectives and
behavior toward herself, others, and the rest of creation. A person with
a relativized ego no longer uses other people and non-human creation
primarily to ensure her survival and satisfaction. Rather, she
appreciates the ordinary as a bearer of the extraordinary, the particular
as a delight rather than her possession. Such a person participates in
‘the communion-creating activity of the Holy Spirit’ or koinonia.52
This communion includes and transcends usual social boundaries,
depending ‘definitively and ultimately upon common participation of
persons in the Divine Presence of Christ,’ in the perichoresis of the
Trinity.53 It is not a purely spiritual communion, but ‘a thoroughly
concrete social reality,’54 in which people (ideally) cooperate with
what it means to be human.
For Hillman, post-relativization behavior ideally conforms to the
nature of archetypal soul as interpreted by those involved in the
movement of archetypal psychology. Theoretically, this leaves even
wider scope for divergent interpretations since there is no official
canon or history. Practically, Hillman’s writings (as founder of the
movement) seem to serve as a canon and his interpretation of history
seems to rule within the movement; although the present incarnation
of the movement is only decades old, they trace their lineage through
‘the Neoplatonic tradition via Vico and the Renaissance (Ficino),
through Proclus and Plotinus, to Plato (Phaedo, Phaedrus, Meno,
Symposium, Timaeus), and most anciently to Heraclitus.’55 There are
also moral and ethical results to Hillman’s ego-relativization, in the
form of a person’s changed perspectives and behavior toward herself,
others, and the rest of the cosmos. A person’s perspective from her
relativized psyche toward herself is a contemplative posture, a non-
curious attention that looks for and glimpses the archetypes
underlying her images, thoughts, actions. This perspective turns
outward as well as inward. A person no longer dominates (interprets,

52 Loder and Neidhardt, quoting T. F. Torrance in KM, p. 305.

53 Ibid.
54 Ibid.
55 Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, p. 4.

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evaluates, categorizes) other people and non-human creation as an
expression of her heroic ego. She manifests the balancing
characteristics that Hillman thinks his culture devalues (imagination,
femininity, reflection, darkness, and unconsciousness). She views
other people and non-human creation with respect and kinship,
appreciating the self-display of the object itself rather than simply her
own responses.
None of Hillman’s description of the changed perspective and
behavior necessarily diverges from the behavior of someone whose
ego has been related to the human-Divine bi-polar relational unity.
Loder’s detached engagement and attention to the ordinary as the
bearer of the extraordinary seems to parallel Hillman’s contemplative
posture and non-curious attention. However, Hillman does not
mention self-sacrifice. Neither does he mention a thoroughly concrete
community. The bonding that Loder describes produces a more radical
perspective that can lead to more radical behavior.

4.2 The bond of human diginity

Both theorists describe ego-relativization as affecting human relations.

The relativizing dimension deepens bonds between human beings that
can alter their behavior. Their outer behavior flows from their
recognition and the ontological presence of this bonding. The ideal
result is respectful behavior. A person recognizes an inherent value
within human beings, regardless of an individual’s awareness of the
relativizing dimension, that is, regardless of the other person’s
participation in the deepened bonding effected by the relativizing
dimension through ego-relativization. However, we encounter
divergences regarding the justification of the inherent dignity and the
nature of the bond that is deepened.
For Loder, the dignity inherent in a human being arises from
being a creature and the imago dei. For Hillman, the inherent dignity
arises from connection to the archetypal soul. Within Loder’s
worldview, archetypes in and of themselves cannot be said to
represent an inherent structure of being, i.e., a source of dignity.
Within Hillman’s world-view, archetypes are both structures of being

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and knowing. Since he rejects Christian morality and anthropology as
products of the heroic ego’s distortion of archetypal soul, he
understands original sin and imago dei as images that will be balanced
through the restoration of archetypal soul. Any theistic reference is
likewise understood archetypally and therefore ‘poly,’ not ‘mono.’
The starting assumptions regarding human nature differ between the
theorists and so affect the ending place, despite a similarity in
language regarding the relativization process. There is an inherent
dignity in human nature that is affirmed in ego-relativization for both
theorists, but for different reasons and in different ways.
Just as they source human dignity differently, so they understand
the human bond differently. For Loder, the spiritual presence of Christ
creates communion (koinonia) among those who embrace the
invitation of the Holy to overcome the void through deep,
transforming relationship with God. A Being distinct from the psyche
effects a structural change to create human-Divine bi-polar relational
unity.56 This relationship is a deepening of God’s sustaining presence
into human-divine relationship. This relationship creates communion
among all who are in relationship with God. The imago dei creates a
type of communion among all humans, but not as the archetypal soul
does. The imago dei is a feature of each human being, perhaps best
represented corporately, but it explicitly does not unite non-human
creation in the way that the anima mundi does. The imago dei is
specific to humans. Additionally, the imago dei represents a
correspondence with the Creator, while for Hillman, the archetypal
soul has no explicit reference to the Creator.
For Hillman, ego-relativization deepens a person’s manifestation
of archetypal soul, rather than changing it into a relationship. The

56 ‘Although this might seem to be a sub-category under imago dei, the image
restored, from an anthropological standpoint, significant changes in the
structure of human nature occur that need to be accounted for both theologically
and psychologically’ (Loder, LS, p. 36). God sustains all that exists while
always inviting deep, transforming relationship; thus, a sustaining bond already
exists throughout creation. The communion (koinonia) created by the spiritual
presence of Christ represents a new relationship within an existing dependency.

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nature of the connection between a person and the relativizing
dimension pre-relativization determines the nature of the change in
the person effected by ego-relativization. Whether the relativizing
dimension deepens the bond as an already existing connection or
changes the sustaining connection into a relationship, in neither theory
does it obliterate a person’s (heroic) ego.

4.3 The pilgrimage of enhanced ego functioning

According to both theorists, a person must discipline her (heroic) ego

in the post-relativization psyche. For Hillman, a person’s heroic ego is
ever-ready to resume command of her psyche and requires constant
vigilance through her cultivation of imaginative behavior. This
ensures that her heroic ego is always immersed in archetypal soul. For
Loder, a person’s ego is prone to delusions of self-sufficiency. The
void, a constant dimension in human existence whether or not it
constitutes the ‘core’ of the personality via a ‘centralized’ ego,
reminds her ego that self-sufficiency will fail. Since Loder does not
understand a person’s ego to exhibit a limited set of characteristics, he
is not concerned that a person’s ego will reassert itself through
unbalanced characteristics. It is self-sufficiency, a denial of the void
and Holy, that he warns against. Nor does he link ego-relativization
with a person’s psychic wholeness, i.e., balanced imagery. It may be
that when a person is most broken, she is most open to and dependent
upon the Holy. Through their warnings we hit upon the vulnerability
of ego-relativization.
For each theorist, the threat from the (heroic) ego is rather
paradoxical. Hillman’s heroic ego is relieved not to do more than is
consistent with its image (i.e., maintenance as opposed to
domination), yet requires vigilance to ensure that it does not take over
a person’s psyche again. The vigilance needed for Loder’s ego is
similar: it is enhanced and relieved from an unnecessary burden and
yet the void can lure a person back into a deluded self-sufficiency.

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Ego-relativization appears to be a vulnerable process. For Loder, this
is a theological issue, which he does not address directly.57 For
Hillman, this is a psychological issue (recall that he considers
psychology innately religious) which he addresses, like Loder, by
warning against it. Both contend that the relativizing dimension
operates to maintain the relativization: the archetypal soul to keep a
person’s heroic ego in balance, the Holy Spirit to keep a person’s
(heroic) ego in relationship. Hence, relativization effects an immediate
result as well as a process involving the individual and her world, the
relativizing dimension, and her connection with other humans or even
with the cosmos.
In both theories, ego-relativization enhances a person’s ego
functioning. For Hillman, a person’s de-centered heroic ego no longer
dominates or represses her ego complex. Ego-relativization frees her
entire ego complex to self-display. Her heroic ego is no longer
burdened with responsibility for her entire psyche. For Loder, a
person’s (heroic) ego is no longer burdened with the denial of her
death, operating as her ordering ‘center,’ and pretending to satisfy her
longing for the face that will never leave. Her competencies now
service the relationship for which they were created.

4.4 Psychological theory: proposed changes

A person’s changed perspective toward herself and her world leads

both theorists to propose modifications of psychological theory.
Hillman proposes a restructuring of psychological theory in
recognition of the archetypal soul as the foundation of all
consciousness. The restructuring extends to the theory and practice of

57 E.g., whether a person may ‘lose’ her salvation or terminate deep, transforming
relationship with God once embraced and the experience described by Paul in
Romans 7.19: ‘For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is
what I do’ (NRSV). The relevance of this passage rests at least in part on an
interpretative difficulty as to whether Paul is describing pre- or post-Damascus
Road, i.e., pre- or post- deep, transforming engagement with God.

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therapy. While Hillman revisions psychology, changing its practice,
terms, and presuppositions, Loder proposes a restructuring of
psychological theory to include God. He focuses on the definition of
normality and finds it inadequate in light of the four dimensions of
human existence (self, world, void, Holy). A theory of human nature
that presupposes that the ego is an adequate ‘center’ of the personality
misses the innate relationality of human nature. A psychological
theory that acknowledges only the self and the world loses descriptive
and explanatory power. (I will discuss this further in the next section.)
The nature of the dimension that replaces a person’s (heroic) ego as
the ‘center’ of the personality represents a major divergence between
Loder and Hillman as they propose to modify psychological theory.
Accepting Christian premises, Hillman’s theory could be understood
as involving only the self and the world, or uniting them into one
dimension. Conversely, accepting archetypal premises, Loder’s theory
could be understood as an example of heroic ego domination. While
exploring their understandings of the ego, ego-relativization, and the
results of ego-relativization, this fundamental divergence continually
appears.
Fitting one theory into the other changes the sense of the terms
being fitted into the other theory. Within Loder’s system, we could
know humanity, other people, and the rest of the world through an
archetypal soul, but that structure of knowing could not represent the
meaning or purpose of human existence. His four dimensions could
accommodate archetypal soul, as long as archetypal soul remained
part of creation, a structure of knowing and not being. Within
Hillman’s system, the two dimensions of human existence (void,
Holy) used by Loder to justify ego-relativization could be subsumed
in Hillman’s understanding of archetypal soul. His two or one
dimension(s) could accommodate the void and Holy, as long as both
remained images of archetypal soul. In his ego-relativization,
archetypal soul would reconnect both the void and the Holy to the
images that constitute their respective bi-polar archetypes. In Loder’s
ego-relativization, the structural change effected by relating the ego to
the human-Divine bi-polar relational unity would transform archetypal
soul so that its origin and destiny would be in the Holy.

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To conclude this section of four subsections, each theorist has a
different anthropology. From these different understandings of human
nature come different understandings of the fundamental perspectives
gained by ego-relativization. For Hillman, the fundamental
perspective of a person with a relativized ego is her mortality. For
Loder, the fundamental perspective of a person with a relativized ego
is relationship with the tri-une Creator God. While it is possible to fit
the results of ego-relativization from one theory into the other theory,
the fitting changes the senses of the terms. ‘Relationship with God’
can be understood as a result of ego-relativization in Hillman’s theory,
but ‘relationship,’ ‘with,’ and ‘God’ take on very different meanings.
‘Manifestation of archetypal soul’ cannot be understood as a result of
ego-relativization in Loder’s theory, even with a redefinition of the
terms in the phrase.
For Loder, a person is alienated from, but graciously sustained
by, God before she embraces God’s constant invitation to deep,
transforming relationship, human spirit to Divine Spirit. For Hillman,
a person is alienated from the gods of the archetypal images that
populate the archetypal soul before she begins image cultivation
through her dreams and symptoms. Ego-relativization changes a
person’s emotions, morals, and ethics, but the nature of the change is
different. For Hillman, everything is balanced with its opposite image
in archetypal soul. An initial parallel in attitude and posture toward
herself and others diverges at Loder’s description of a person’s self-
sacrifice and concrete community.
Although both affirm the inherent dignity of each human being,
they source it differently. While Hillman’s ego-relativization
strengthens the bond created by the archetypal soul throughout the
entire world, Loder’s ego-relativization creates human-divine
relationality and communion among human beings who share in
relationship with God. Maintenance of this bond deepened through
archetypal soul, or relationality and communion created through the
Holy Spirit, requires effort on the part of the relativizing dimension,
the individual, and other people. Both theorists warn that a person’s
ego might try to ‘center’ itself again, thereby suggesting that a
person’s ego-relativization is vulnerable. Lastly, both suggest
modifications to psychological theory to take into account the

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repressed and relativizing dimensions that each finds fundamental to
human existence. Both affirm the value of psychological enquiry
while accusing the field of helping to maintain a distorted
understanding of human nature and existence.

5. Conclusions

Both theorists recommend ego-relativization, but they differ in their

analyses of the actual ‘problem’ with a person’s ‘centered’ (heroic)
ego and therefore with their recommended solutions. Despite these
fundamental divergences between Loder and Hillman regarding the
natures of (a) the ego’s ‘problem,’ (b) the ‘solution’ effected by ego-
relativization, (c) the relativizing dimension, and (d) the relationship
between the relativizing dimension and a person pre- and post-
relativization, Loder’s five-phased ‘logic’ or process of ego-
relativization can be used to explore Hillman’s theory.58 They describe
the same process in overlapping fields of study. Yet the difference is
key because it marks the divergence in their methodological starting
points.

5.1 Starting with the problem or the solution

Loder shares the starting assumptions of James Clerk-Maxwell, as he

understands them: ‘that God created things in a nondualistic, realistic,
irreducibly relational way.’59 He begins with these assumptions while
studying human nature: ‘approaching the study of human nature
through an understanding of the human spirit in the context of a

58 Loder’s theory of the process of ego-relativization as a five-phased pattern

seems to be hospitable to Hillman’s theory of the process, without there being a
reciprocal hospitality in Hillman’s theory. Niether of the theorist’s results of
ego-relativization seems to be hospitable to the other’s without reductionism.
59 Loder, LS, p. xii.

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Christian theology of the Holy Spirit.’60 In this approach, his theory
presents human nature with the ‘view from below and the view from
above’ not as ‘separate perspectives,’ but as a ‘relationality between
two apparently opposed or contradictory polarities or viewpoints.’61
The view from below is the understanding of human nature based on
human observation and experience, while the view from above is from
the ‘standpoint of the Author of creation as self-revealed in Jesus
Christ and brought to life in the work of the Creator Spirit.’62 He
therefore presents a theory that probes the relationality between
theological and psychological understandings of human nature. The
relationality is based on

the Chalcedonian formulation of the person of Jesus Christ. As one person who
is both fully divine and fully human, he provides the living reality by which and
from which this method derives its structure, historicity, universality, and
ultimate creditability.63

This relationality between understandings of human nature follows an

order of ‘asymmetry that pertains between the divine and human in
Christ, with the divine exercising logical and ontological priority over
the human.’64 Loder begins with God’s vision for human nature as
created to be in human-Divine relationship and relates psychological
understandings to this vision.
Hillman, however, seems to start with the problem of a
‘centered’ ego, ‘the freeing of psychic phenomena from the curse of
the analytical mind,’65 and then to develop his theory of archetypal
soul as the solution to that problem. His theory begins from the
sickness of the soul,66 explored in analysis via ‘symbolic meanings,
insight, eros, body, craziness, and the lower aspect of the Gods,’ as

60 Ibid., p. xiii.
61 Ibid., p. 13.
62 Ibid., p. 10.
63 Ibid., p. 37.
64 Ibid.
65 Hillman, Myth of Analysis, p. 3.
66 Ibid., p. 5.

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phenomena which should not be locked away, but ‘let into life to be
enjoyed.’67 He concludes that these phenomena represent myth-
making, the language of archetypal soul, and the purpose of ego-
relativization.68 He does not begin with the vision of archetypal soul
manifesting through the cosmos. As he notes in the 1994 Postscript,
vestiges of the Christian vision come through in the text of Insearch,
written in 1967. This methodological difference leads to a divergent
understanding of pathology. Although Hillman’s prescription for
moving pathology into the open, ending the useless actions of hiding
and denying, parallels Loder’s prescription for uncovering the void,
Hillman rejects any understanding of pathology that connects it with
original sin.69 Loder understands pathology within the Christian
assertions of original sin and redemption.
Relating the particularity of Hillman’s theory (e.g., his starting
point) to the particularity of Loder’s theory (e.g., his starting point)
through Loder’s ‘logic’ bears out his assertion that the solution to the
dilemma of particularity and universality is in the relationality.
Structuring the relationality through the ‘logic’ affirms the
particularities of two transformation theories coming from different
world-views without synthesis or reduction, highlighting their shared
or ‘universal’ and their distinct or ‘particular’ characteristics. From the
perspective of Loder’s theory, relationality can occur on at least two
levels, the level of human transformation and the level of Christian
transformation that transforms human transformation (transformation
transformed). On the level of human transformation, relating the

67 Ibid.
68 Ibid., pp. 6-7.
69 See note 27 of this chapter, above. Hillman dismisses Jung’s appropriation of
original sin via the concept of the ‘shadow’. Hillman understands the ‘shadow’
as the lacuna in the field of psychology as it fails to nurture the ‘soul’ (as he
defines it, i.e., anima mundi). ‘I am concluding, thirty years after the book was
conceived, that the entire shadow issue so basic to Jungian psychology and
therapy is a by-product of its Christian moral theology and does not actually
face the psychological issue which shadows all Western psychic life, that is,
keeps the Western Christianized psyche in the dark about the world and its soul,
its isolation, its sadness and abuse’ (Insearch, pp. 132-33).

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parallels and divergences between the ego-relativization theories of
Loder and Hillman without synthesis or reduction enables a rich
‘dynamic exchange’ as a ‘reality to be prized.’ The particularities and
universalities of each theory stand out more clearly from the
relationality created in this chapter, suggesting areas for collaboration.
On the level of Christian transformation, the relationality is more
complicated.

5.2 Hillman’s running engagement with Christianity

Although Hillman explicitly rejects Christianity, holding the Christian

church responsible for the woes of the soul (as he identifies them),70

70 Hillman holds the Christian Church responsible for: (1) killing the soul when
the 4th Council in Constantinople (869) rejected a tripartite anthropology for a
dualistic understanding of human nature; Hillman interprets the proceedings of
that Council to have subsumed the soul into the spirit, in effect killing the soul
Archetypal Psychology, p. 5; Puer Papers, p. 54; (2) reducing image to allegory
when the 2nd Council of Nicea (787) ruled that images may be venerated rather
than adored (Puer Papers, 56); (3) imposing literalism via Cromwell and other
iconoclasts (Puer Papers, pp. 54-56; Re-Visioning Psychology, pp. 11, 169); (4)
enforcing the heroic ego by linking it with ‘Christian salvation through upward
resurrection,’ (Archetypal Psychology, pp. 41-42); and (5) denying the anima
mundi via eschatology (human salvation without concern for salvation of the
cosmos) and morality (repentance for one’s sins) (Insearch, pp. 135-141). As
discussed further in notes 75 and 76, Hillman has misunderstood Christian
Church history and traditional doctrine. However, his detailed consideration of
Christianity may explain why his theory of ego-relativization parallels Loder’s
to the extent that it does, and why Hillman’s theory can be understood through
Loder’s five-phased pattern without violating Hillman. In psychological terms,
it might be termed ‘negative fusion’: a strong rejection of something that ties,
rather than separates, one to the very thing that one rejects. In a sense, Hillman
is tied to the Christian world-view he rejects, not only through the
commonalties between a Christian and an archetypal world-view, but also
through the divergences. In Christian theological terms, this might be
considered a manifestation of creation expressed through the debated
relationship between imago dei and sin.

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his treatment of ego-relativization nevertheless constitutes a process
that corresponds remarkably with Christian justification and
sanctification. Hillman’s heroic ego rules a person in a way that
parallels Loder’s ego. Although they understand the problem of the
ego differently, they understand its functioning out of that problem
similarly. For both, the ego (a) constrains choices to its own values,
(b) denies aspects of human existence, (c) represses anything that
questions its domination, (d) distorts self-knowledge and relationship
with the rest of the cosmos, (e) deceives a person about her nature and
her existence, (f) operates as a faulty mediator between inner and
outer worlds, (g) similarly centers itself in individuals, and (h) creates
psychic pain. Beneath these parallels lie fundamental divergences: the
nature of the ego’s deception, the nature of its faulty mediation, and
why it ‘centers’ in the individual, differs in each theory. Each
understands the nature of any phenomenon within his worldview.
Yet, a person’s ego that needs to be relativized functions
similarly for Hillman and Loder and the force that initiates and
enables relativization functions similarly. It seeks recognition from a
person and to relate her to itself, other humans, and the cosmos; it is
present and ever active, despite her ego’s repression. In Hillman’s
reaction against Christianity, he seems to retain what he considers
useful in, or the essence behind, the ‘biased’ Christian overlay. He
seems to create another belief system that equally requires faith,
another faith community for those whose egos have been relativized
by/to archetypal soul. This ‘faith’ understands the deficiencies of an
ego-driven world to be addressed through the initiation of a
relativizing dimension in a way that is analogous to Christian
justification and sanctification, or redemption.
The difference between Hillman’s worldview and the one he
repudiates (Christianity) is that he locates the solution to the problem
within a person, within the system, so to speak. The system can repair
itself. Any mention of a transcendent Other is in reality an archetypal
image. From a Christian perspective, the constriction of Christ to an
image or symbol within the system leaves only a hollow shell of
process. Into this hollow shell, Hillman inserts an archetypal soul to
fuel, drive, and orient the process, with many possible images and
symbols. Accepting Christian premises, despite the richness from

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multiple images and symbols, the archetypal soul fares poorly when
compared to Christ, indeed there really is no comparison. The
archetypal soul is not a personal Being, the Creator, nor is there
kenosis or self-sacrifice in the context of a historical narrative of birth,
life, death, resurrection, and ascension. However, Hillman endows the
archetypal soul with some Christ-like characteristics, e.g., its desire
for relationship of some kind, its constant invitation into relationship,
its enablement of connections within an individual, among humans,
and as part of the cosmos, its perspective toward death, and its
cultivation of a ‘respectful attitude’ toward the world. While
protesting against what he understands to be Christian crimes against
the soul, and protesting against the field of psychology’s
endorsements of those crimes, he unites the understanding of an
Other, the Christian omnipresent God, with the therapeutic ‘third
presence,’ in the form of the archetypal soul. In the practice of
archetypal psychology, the therapist assists the client in ego-
relativization, in acknowledging and nurturing archetypal soul, the
‘third presence,’ or ‘other,’ before which all psychoanalytic therapy
occurs.71
Does Hillman’s theory reveal an influence of a repressed face,
the ‘other,’ guiding the formation of his theories? He would say, ‘Yes,
the archetypal soul,’ while Loder would identify a divine Other. One
way of understanding Hillman’s theory is as a person’s continued
attempt to meet fundamental human longings with herself. The many
faces of the archetypal soul operate as faces that will never leave.
Have existential negations pointing to the unrecognized void, coupled
with a repressed longing for the face that will never leave, produced
the theory of ego-relativization in archetypal psychology? Hillman
would say, ‘Yes, the negations point to the unrecognized archetypal
soul and its many faces that are part of a person’s psyche and
therefore will never leave.’ Loder would say that the negations point
to the void of alienation between God and the individual and that the
repressed longing for the face that will never leave is a repressed

71 See Chris Oakley’s ‘Otherwise Than Integrity.’

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longing for relationship with God. It is possible to understand
Hillman’s theory as an explanation of psychic phenomena without
reference to God, without theological language, as well as with
reference to God.
In the actual process of ego-relativization, Hillman’s theory
parallels Loder’s depiction of Christian justification and
sanctification. Through the initiation of the relativizing dimension: (a)
a person’s psyche recognizes the illusion perpetrated by her ego, (b)
her psyche opens, (c) the relativizing dimension enables her to make
some sort of choice that involves embracing or rejecting the
relativizing dimension, (d) her ego is no longer the ‘center’ of her
personality, and (e) her new ‘center’ involves a fundamental
relationality and richness. Again, these parallels contain important
divergences: the nature of the illusion, the nature of the relativizing
dimension, the nature of the relationality, and the nature of the
richness reflect their divergent world-views. Each theorist describes
the process of ‘redemption’ within his world-view.
Hillman’s system posits a psychic event that can be understood
as paralleling an encounter with the spiritual presence of Christ as
described by Loder. This does not negate what has been said before
about his removal of Christ from the process, which from a
traditionally Christian perspective leaves a hollow shell. Nor does it
negate the distinction between Hillman’s psychic blossoming into
what has always been there and Loder’s psychic restructuring into
what it could not be on its own. Rather, the parallels may indicate that
Hillman is responding to the longings that Loder describes with a
belief system that Hillman offers as a cultural substitute for or antidote
to Christianity. Ironically, the substitute remains theoretically tied to
Christianity through both its similarities and dissimilarities to Loder’s
description of Christian redemption via ego-relativization. In a 1994
‘Preface’ to a text first published in 1967, he cites his use of a phrase
‘Running Engagement with Christianity’ as a chapter title in a 1983
book (Inter Views), and the topic of a chapter in a 1979 book (The

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Dream and the Underworld).72 His engagement with Christianity
continues to describe a major strand of his theory, in which he
criticizes ‘the unconscious Christian dogmas and fantasies that
severely impede deeper psychological understanding—a point made
years ago by Nietzsche, Freud, and also Jung.’73 His reaction against
Christianity, as he understands it, creates a path for affirming his
theory as a resource for Christian spirituality. Loder’s understanding
of orientation toward God does not eliminate or diminish self-
relationship, human relationship, or relationships with the rest of
creation, as Hillman contends. Loder’s theory shares with Hillman’s
theory an emphasis on relationality.74 The Christianity that Hillman
criticizes is one that Loder, and many Christians, would reject,
deriving, at least in part, from misunderstandings of the Christian
canon and church history.
Hillman misunderstands and rejects what he understands to be
the Christian vision, including Church history and the Christian canon.
He misunderstands the 4th Council at Constantinople as it ruled on
human nature and he misunderstands the 2nd Council at Nicea as it

72 Hillman, Insearch, p. 4.
73 Ibid.
74 ‘A different view of the moral agent—the dialectical identity in which the
Spiritual Presence of Christ dwells within us and daily we become more and
more at one with Christ […] The ‘equal regard’ in the trinitarian life is
koinonia, held together by the Spirit, and the koinonia, and the communion-
creating presence of Jesus Christ, [which] is not an option for the ego-centered
personality, but transformation into that communion is always an option’
(Loder, LS, p. 270); ‘the relationality defines the persons, not the other way
around’ (ibid., p. 272); ‘model of intimacy by which persons are drawn out of
incipient or growing isolation’ (ibid., p. 273); ‘What makes it work as a mutual
deepening and personally enhancing interaction is the matrix of grace in which
the identities involved are dialectical and the distance is already bridged by the
Spiritual Presence of Christ. The interaction then is a matter of appropriating
what is already present and alive and at work. Thus, this pattern of interaction
releases the Spirit more fully into the relationship, increasingly giving it a life
of its own. In such a context, the model suggests a way of practicing intimate
interaction within the context of the koinonia, thereby practicing and deepening
the power of God’s love in human life’ (ibid., pp. 223-4).

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ruled on images.75 Elsewhere he seems to misrepresent Paul’s use of
the Greek words for soul and spirit in the Christian canon to support
his view that the Christian church killed the soul.76 However, his

75 Hillman, Puer Papers, p. 56. Along with the rulings of the Second Council of
Nicea (787), Hillman interprets the ruling of the Fourth Council of
Constantinople (869-70) against a trichotomous view of human nature, as
rulings against human soul. If not trichotomous, he reasons, then the church
must advocate a view of human nature as dichotomous—spirit v. body.
Hillman’s connection of the two church councils is due to his understanding of
human soul as archetypal image. He interprets the veneration of images, as
opposed to their adoration, as signifying a denial of the reality of images, a
denial of archetypal soul.
76 Hillman understands the Christian scriptures to elevate human spirit at the
expense of human soul. He interprets New Testament use of ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’
to convey the sense of definite distinction between the two and uses this
distinction to support his view that the Christian church has killed off or at best
ignored the soul. This interpretation ignores Hebrew ‘stereometric’ (a word
referring to a body part can carry the sense of the whole person) and ‘synthetic’
thinking (e.g., throat may refer to breath, which may refer to soul or spirit) (see
Hans Walter Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament, 8) which doubtlessly
influenced the writers of the Pauline corpus. Hillman contrasts the number of
times that Paul uses the world ‘soul’ with its occurrence in the rest of the New
Testament (i.e., he asserts that Paul uses ‘soul’ less often than other New
Testament writers) to justify his contention that Christian influence, particularly
Paul’s legacy, has led to ‘loss of soul’ (Puer Papers, pp. 54-55). Unfortunately,
Hillman’s figures do not appear to represent Pauline or New Testament use of
ȥȣȤȘҏ and ʌȞİȣȝĮ. As opposed to Hillman’s contention, ‘soul’ appears more
often than human spirit. Hillman says that Paul uses the word ‘soul’ four times
(ibid.). The Dictionary of New Testament Theology (DNTT) says that the count
is thirteen. Hillman says that the word ‘soul’ is used fifty-five times in the New
Testament (ibid.). The DNTT numbers it at one hundred and one (vol.3, p.
682). Hillman says that ‘spirit’ occurs two hundred and seventy-four times
(Puer Papers, pp. 54-55). The DNTT says that ‘spirit’ is used to refer to human
spirit forty times and to Spirit of God two hundred and fifty times (vol.3, p.
693). The point is not to haggle over numbers; Hillman does not source his
figures and perhaps he is counting in some way that justifies them. Moreover,
concepts are not always tied to particular vocabularies. (As an aside, it serves as
an example of the way in which Hillman resists classification. He eschews
scientific methodologies dependent upon quantitative approaches and yet
utilizes that very method for his own entry into the Christian canon.) The point

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description of the results of ego-relativization demonstrate his
affirmation of aspects of the Christian vision as Loder depicts it: (a) a
perspective that acknowledges one’s inevitable death, (b) connections
with oneself, other humans, and the rest of the world, (c) an
affirmation of the inherent dignity of human nature, (d) an ethic and
morality, and (e) an affirmation of symbol and image. Yet, the shared
aspects of Loder’s and Hillman’s visions contain fundamental
divergences regarding the nature of these parallels. The results (as
opposed to the process) of one theorist cannot be understood through
the other without changing the terms of the theorist being understood
(recall that Hillman’s process could be understood through Loder’s
‘logic’). At root is the fundamental divergence regarding each
theorist’s definition of the ‘problem’ inherent to a ‘centered’ ego and
the required ‘solution.’

5.3 Layers of discourse

In a discussion of Christian transformation, the particularities of

Loder’s theory relate the particularities of Hillman’s theory to God
through Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. The prized reality of
their relationality is drawn into the life of the Trinity. Some might be
concerned that Hillman’s theory appears as an angel of light, so close
and yet so far away, and advise a policy of non-engagement. Others
might be struck that Hillman’s theory evidences the amazing
capacities of human beings for relationships with themselves, other
people and the rest of creation, as well as a manifestation of the void
and the human longing for a Face or Presence that will never go away.

is that human soul in the Christian scriptures is not downplayed or as distinct

from spirit as he contends. Similar to J. A. Hall’s analysis of Hillman which
says that Hillman manufactures a problem in Jungian theory for which Hillman
then offers a solution (“Differences Between Jung and Hillman”), Hillman
seems to champion a soul supposedly neglected through the cultural influence
of Christianity that the Christian canon and traditional theology has not actually
neglected.

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They might value his criticism of Christianity, even if based to an
extent on misunderstanding, because his impression is shared by
many. They might value him as a spokesperson for voices in
contemporary society who lay our cultural woes at the feet of logos
and cry out for mythos instead. These latter will want to engage.
In spirituality discourse that is inter-faith, broadly understood,
and inter-disciplinary, the direct relationality between Loder and
Hillman points to an insight (a ‘bipolar, or multi-polar, relational
unity’) as the exclusive claims of different ‘faiths’ unite them in their
polarizations; this insight is not a uniting of all faiths into one, but a
relationality in their disagreements. We do not need to try to translate
particular spiritualities into one universal spirituality, or to conclude
that without such a translation there is no conversation at all. Post-
modern or late modern deconstructions of oppressive meta-narratives
rightfully alert spirituality discourse to particularity. But our only
option is not completely disconnected narratives. My expansion and
modification of Loder’s methodology invites spirituality discourse to
focus on inter-disciplinary and inter-faith relationality without
denying the fundamental polarities; indeed, relationality arises from
affirmation of the polarities, not removal of awkward and competing
assumptions.77
In the study of spirituality, we do not need to choose between a
‘view from below’ and a ‘view from above.’ Relating Loder and
Hillman illustrates the way in which two very different views of
human transformation, one explicitly theistic and one explicitly non-
theistic, can be related without reduction or synthesis. The
relationality highlights particularities of each, including each theory’s
particular universalizing assertions about human nature and existence.

77 Hillman also affirms polarities, understood purely archetypally.

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Chapter 6: Conclusions

In ‘connecting the dots’ among Loder’s theory, mystical spirituality as

presented by Louth, McGinn, Turner, and McIntosh, and Hillman’s
theory, I have argued the following:
First, that Loder’s theory fills the interdisciplinary lacunae in the
study of mystical spirituality noted and bemoaned by Louth, McGinn,
Turner, and McIntosh. All five authors focus on ‘deep, transforming
engagement with God’ as a mediated immediacy in which experience
and interpretation, spirituality and theology, are inter-twined.
However, my assertion of this shared focus does not deny the many
differences among the analyses of these five authors and their personal
theological matrices. I place my assertion in the public domain to
invite consideration and discussion.
Second, I have argued that Loder’s theory can contribute to the
debated issue of particularity and universality in spirituality discourse
in at least two ways. The first way is as a view from below. Loder’s
logic provides a conceptual framework for understanding the
movement of human knowing as relational and transformational; this
movement can be understood as the locus of what is referred to as
human self-transcendence and can facilitate discussion among diverse
human spiritualities without synthesis or reduction. For example,
Hillman’s theory can be understood through the logic without
violation of terms or concepts. The second way is as an approach to
Christian spirituality that unites views from below and above, valid
across Christian traditions. The transformation of transformational and
relational knowing (‘transformation transformed’) places all human
knowing within a four dimensional Trinitarian reality that transforms
without reduction or synthesis all particularities in human-divine
relationality. The transformation theory of Loder can face the
particularity of another theory to find the Tri-Une God sustaining and
yet offering transformation to all theories in the knowing of loving
relationship.
 Third, I have proposed an inter-disciplinary methodology for the
field of spirituality and have tested it by placing Loder’s spirituality in
direct relationship with what can be approached as the human
spirituality of Hillman. Specifically, I propose that researchers in the
human sciences approach the focus of their investigation from views
both above and below, the former at least as a possible reality, not
simply as an interpretative tool. Rather than hindering inter-
disciplinarity, such an approach increases explanatory and descriptive
power. And rather than hindering inter-faith dialogue (broadly
understood), such an approach increases explanatory and descriptive
power. Furthermore, such an approach reflects the relational nature of
human knowing, helps to prevent a false separation of experience
from thematization, and assists in challenging ego-centric research. I
claim to have demonstrated these assertions in the direct dialogue that
I created between Loder and Hillman. Again, I put this methodology
into the public domain and invite further testing, particularly for inter-
faith dialogue more narrowly understood (e.g., the Abrahamic faiths).
It is ironic that as post-modern or late modern analyses alert us to the
relational nature of reality, some researchers in the field of spirituality
are limiting disciplinary relationalities by disconnecting views from
below and above and opting for one or the other. Divine agency
considered as at least a possibility for research within the human
sciences allows investigation of both non-theistic and theistic
spiritualties in direct relationship without treating one or the other as a
‘core’ on to which the conceptual fields of the other must be overlaid.
As stated above, connecting the dots among Loder and the four
authors in their analyses of ‘deep, transforming engagement with God’
does not reduce all Christian traditions to the same thing, or synthesize
them into the same thing. The particularities of difference between
Loder’s theory and the four authors’ mystical spirituality are part of
the relationality. Yet, the Christological and Trinitarian insight
performs a figure-ground reversal, as predicted by Loder’s
transformational logic. The focus shifts from the distinctions to God
who gathers all polarities and sustains the Body of Christ, relating and
transcending Christian institutions in the perichoresis of the Trinity.
Ultimately, the relationality promised in a Trinitarian eschatology will
transform the institutions themselves.

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 The direct dialogue that I have methodologically created between
Loder’s Christian spirituality and Hillman’s human spirituality
highlights their particularities, overlaps, and conflicts. Each
spirituality is better known from the dialogue than from separate
analysis alone. Out of that knowing come the insights of possible
collaboration (e.g., on the problem of ego-centric living, the role of
culture in reinforcing ego-centricity, the importance of images and the
imagination in human experience and knowing, the inter-twined
nature of experience and thematization in human knowing) and
definite disagreement (e.g., the reality and value of Christian faith, the
reality and value of archetypes as structures of being). The dialogue
that I created demonstrates how inter-faith (broadly understood), inter-
disciplinary, spirituality discourse can contribute to the creative
interaction of conflicting thought systems through a methodology that
values the dynamics of disagreement as well as agreement.
As a brief aside, Hillman could accuse me of operating according
to form: my heroic ego is taking over, subsuming and dominating his
archetypal theory to reinforce the ‘rule’ of Christianity. Of course, I
could accuse him of the same thing: his heroic ego is attempting to
control my appreciation of his theory according to the dominant
images of his world-view. I leave the reader with the pleasure of
identifying and applying the insight from that conflict, but
acknowledge a possible protest from the archetypal psychology
movement.
I have argued that human knowing is core to the connections
among Loder, mystical spirituality, Hillman, and spirituality
discourse.

1.1 The stakes

Loder’s re-conceptualization of knowing and its operation through

human intelligence challenges institutionalized forms of learning that
reinforce ego-centrism. His earliest analysis of human knowing
identifies a relationality, the dynamic exchange between a person’s
somatic functioning and her environment as her perception. He
understands this relationality in human perception to express the
relational nature of all human knowing, attempting to describe it in

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motion through the transformational logic. In human knowing, a
person’s environment and the person herself, two frames of reference,
are in direct relationality and can reveal hidden orders of meaning and
coherence. For Loder and the four authors meaning and coherence
reside in God who sustains a person’s knowing, is the ground of a
person knowing anything at all. Throughout the Christian life, and
sometimes in moments of clarity, deep, transforming engagement with
God utilizes and transforms the relational, transformational nature of
human knowing by shifting it paradigmatically from an ego-centric to
a human-divine locus.
Human knowing that operates from an ego-centric locus issues
from a defensive posture. Ego-defensiveness ultimately distorts the
inherent relationalities of human knowing, e.g., between imagination
and reason, between personal assumptions and new insights, among a
person, her relationship with herself, and her lived world. In ego-
centred learning:

One becomes a ‘good’ learner, learning how to study but never how to generate
his or her own thought, and one becomes a ‘good’ practitioner but without
thinking. In essence, the perversity is that interpretation is reduced to answers,
albeit ‘good’ ones, and practice is reduced to imitation and following good
advice, with the result that professionalism emerges in the wake of stagnant
ideas and empty jargon.1

At stake is nothing less than the application of insights that lead to

individual and social transformation as nurtured in educational
contexts.

1.2 Education: reconceptualizing the knower and the knowing event

In Religion and the Public Schools, Loder asks whether education is a

‘transmitter’ or ‘transformer’ of culture,2 arguing that education

1 Loder, ‘Transformation in Christian Education,’ p.217.

2 Ibid., p.36f.

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‘functions to preserve its culture.’3 As an institution, public education
in the United States does this by feeding ‘back into the community
young persons whose ideals, behavior patterns, and beliefs perpetuate
the total ideology of modern-day America.’4 He sums it up in his view
of public education as ‘indoctrination,’ an exercise that instills the
values of the middle class,5 school boards, and lobbying groups that
usually reflect the more economically powerful groups.6 Accordingly,
the schools cannot but be the ‘servants of the existing order rather than
pace setters for a new age.’7 Yet, there is a paradox. An ideal of the
United States involves optimism about change and thus the schools
foster an experimental spirit in the next generation.8 This experimental
spirit is part of the society to which the students must adjust.9 Thus,
public education can be both a transmitter and transformer of
individuals, society, and culture.
Loder interacted with the research of Urie Bronfenbrenner10 who
already in 1961 contended that the culture increasingly transmitted in
the US was an ‘achievement’ culture, replacing ‘adjustment’ as the
highest goal. Education organizers themselves adjusted to the culture
of achievement by promoting achievement through ‘excellence.’11 The
movement in social and educational emphasis from adjustment to
achievement retained an underlying understanding of knowing as
adaptation; intelligent adaptation enabled a person to achieve.
Bronfenbrenner contended that from ‘the transaction between [an]
achievement-oriented, democratic family and the culture of
‘excellence’ in public education, young persons emerged who are
more planful and purposeful than the previous generation, but also are

3 Ibid., p.26.
4 Ibid., p.39.
5 Ibid., p.83.
6 Ibid., pp.41-42.
7 Ibid., p.42.
8 Ibid., p.45, citing the influence of John Dewey.
9 Ibid.
10 ‘The Changing American Child—A Speculative Analysis,’ Journal of Social
Issues XVII:pp.6-18.
11 Loder, Religion and the Public Schools, p.89.

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more aggressive, tense, domineering, and cruel.’12 Loder labels the
results of this transaction as dehumanizing.13 He does not advocate
removing achievement from adjustment or adaptation as the ideal goal
for society or education.14 Rather, he urges a reconceptualization of
the knower and the knowing event as relational and transformational.
I suggest that the research methodologies that incorporate this
reconceptualization ultimately will challenge ego-centrism. For
example, as bio-technology genetically engineers achievement, will
the trajectory of aggressive, tense, domineering, and cruel behavior
continue?15 According to both Loder and Hillman, such behavior
reinforces the defensive posture of a person’s ego. Yet, if Loder’s
theory of knowing via the five-phased logic in four dimensions is
valid, then the resulting conflicts (intra- and inter-personal) carry the
possibility for personal and communal insight and transformation.
From a Christian perspective, the conflicts offer opportunities for ego-
relativization via ‘deep, transforming engagement with God’. I
suggest that the field of spirituality can support the movement of
human knowing and methodologically affirm the role of conflict and
difference in the knower and knowing event, and can re-direct or
transform this behavioural trajectory.

12 Loder, ‘Sociocultural Foundations for Christian Education,’ pp.71-84.

13 Ibid., p.124.
14 ‘Evidently the consequences of pursuing “excellence” are as one-sided as the
results of advocating “adjustment.” The development of “intellect” in church or
school according to the standards of “excellence” is an expression of a modern
mystique just as surely as anti-intellectualism, in some quarters, is part of the
Christian mystique.’ ‘The Other Mystique,’ Theology Today 22:pp.283-384.
15 See B. McKibben’s Enough: Genetic Engineering and the End of Human
Nature for an accessible, appraising discussion of developments in genetic bio-
engineering.

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1.3 Reconceptualizing intelligence as transformational relationship

The paradoxical movement of mystical knowing can both sustain and

subvert knowing and intelligence in society.16 The logic in four
dimensions sustains the workings of human intelligence in academic
cultures that reject it. Simultaneously, the very operation of the logic
in four dimensions to produce creative new insights subverts reductive
understandings of intelligence. This paradoxical dynamic is tied to a
deeper structure in reality: while providing the condition for people to
know anything at all, God offers transforming engagement.
Fundamentally, this constant divine offer and our life-long responses
question our understandings of knowing, intelligence, and human
nature; they query our understandings of meaning and purpose;17 they
re-conceptualize intelligence as transformational relationship rather
than mental speed.
This discussion about knowing is not an aside but elemental to
the dynamics of spiritualities that challenge ego-centrism.
Spiritualities or transformation theories that critique social and
cultural norms inevitably support the very norms they critique if they
affirm explicitly or implicitly the accepted understandings of
knowing. That is, they remain fundamentally ego-centric unless they
examine human knowing. This is one source of the power of Hillman’s
theory: Hillman criticizes the accepted understandings of knowing as
ego-centric and emphasizes instead the role and multiplicity of images
in knowing reality. Accepting Christian premises, his portrayal of
human knowing remains two-dimensional, but it is a crucial ‘view
from below.’ When assertions coming from different world-views
begin to coalesce, then a general paradigm shift might be under way.18
From a Christian perspective, it may be that the Holy Spirit is

16 My assertion regarding Loder’s logic in society parallels Loder’s assertion that

a church immersed in socialization and adaptation to mainstream society is
foredoomed and yet has inherent resources for renewal (EM, chapter seven). As
Loder asserts in his earlier text, Religion in the Public Schools (1965)
socialization and transformation are inextricably intertwined.
17 Loder and Neidhardt, KM, p.197.
18 I am grateful to Carol Gilligan for this point (personal communication).

279
exposing the poverty of individual and corporate ego-centric living in
ever more obvious ways, drawing what seems most opposed to God
into the life of the Trinity. The relationality between the analyses of
Hillman and Loder urges us to recognize the images, in our worlds, in
our minds and in our environments, which reinforce ego-centered
living. Selfishness has become heroic. Contrary to those who hold
Christianity as least partially responsible for the images of heroism
that have degraded the environment, disregarded other creatures, and
denigrated imagination, Christianity offers to society images that
affirm the fullness of personhood, including creative imagination in
partnership with reason, as a deeply connected member of creation.
Christians who attend to these images will be able both to critique and
transform ‘consumer is king’, celebrity saturated worlds of instant
gratification where rights are separated from responsibilities and the
autonomous individual’s desires reign. Such transformation will come
from people who have themselves known the particular ego-
strengthening of human-divine relationality. In terms that take
seriously the roles of both human and divine agencies, and connect
with the wisdom of saints who have responded to God over the
centuries, Loder’s theory offers resources to Christians to enable them
to know the transforming engagement of God’s presence in their own
lives.

1.4 The subversion of management techniques and strategies

Reducing the knowing event to adaptation truncates our understanding

of human nature and thereby distorts spirituality. This distortion of
human knowing renders spirituality an adaptive technique or strategy
inherent to human nature rather than a transforming movement
potentially initiated and superintended by God.19 This very distortion

19 For an example of a presentation of mystical spirituality as an adaptive

technique or strategy, see clinical and consulting psychologist David Benner’s
Care of Souls: Revisioning Christian Nurture and Counsel. He describes terms
from Christian mystical spirituality, ‘kataphatic’ and ‘apophatic,’ as
‘techniques’ and ‘classic approaches to meditation. Kataphatic spirituality is

280
of spirituality exercises the four authors. The four authors assert that
the classic mystical authors themselves wrote against understanding
spirituality as a set of techniques or strategies. Although adaptation is
relational and transforming in a sense, transformation differs from
adaptation. A person or group adapts to her environment and thereby
changes and is changed. Adaptive techniques or strategies manage
change. A transforming movement initiated and superintended by God
defies management. A person does not adapt to God. God lovingly
sustains and transforms a person in both time and eternity, outside
prediction.20 The reduction of human knowing to achievement through
adaptive technique can distort even a purely human spirituality, such
as Hillman’s.
Future research can explore human knowing as ego-centric, that
is, as adaptive achievement, and in specific educational contexts
identify instances in which human knowing seems to be understood as
relational and transformational.21 Undoubtedly, the understandings
will be inter-twined in the same contexts, and the dynamic exchange
will be a reality to be valued. My analysis of Loder’s and Hillman’s
theories in direct relationship demonstrates the power of a
methodology that identifies difference and agreement by considering

based on the active use of the imagination […] apophatic spirituality is based
on an emptying technique of meditation’ (pp.91-92). This is precisely what our
four authors insist that apophaticism and cataphaticism are not. For example,
Turner criticizes the contemporary ‘psychologizing’ mind for thinking of the
‘mystical’ in terms of ‘characterizing experiences’ (p.4, italics original).
McIntosh gives the example that ‘[i]f a mystic said for example that, “Darkness
is the only way to God”, the experientialist interpreter takes this to mean that
one must seek some inner state of “darkness,” rather than hearing it as a
warning against reliance on particular beliefs, aspirations, feeling, or idols of
any kind whatsoever in the encounter with the living God’ (p.23).
20 Loder and Neidhardt, KM, pp.186, 235.
21 Two examples of such research are being organized as we go to press, both
with these reconceptualizations of the knower and the knowing event. The first
is ‘Experimental Communities in the Spirit,’ based in Seattle, Washington,
spearheaded by practical theologian Dana Wright, and the second is ‘Jubilee
JumpStart—A Beloved Learning Community’ (for at-risk children and
families) based in Washington, D.C., in the Church of the Savior in the Adams-
Morgan region.

281
views from both above and below. Could this methodology also
facilitate the dynamic exchange between conflicting faculties and
departments within the university, facilitating a dynamic exchange
that can offer insights without losing sight of difference? What might
be discovered through the affirmation of human knowing as relational
and transforming across disciplines?22
My analysis of Loder’s logic identifies a relationality of
continuity and discontinuity between human knowing and knowing
God. This paradox concurs with the depiction of loving knowing in
mystical spirituality as presented by Louth, McGinn, Turner, and
McIntosh (heuristically supported by neurological research). In
addition to the suggestions already mentioned, future research can
relate my analysis to various traditions within Christian mystical
spirituality, initially in separate research endeavors and then in
comparison, to discover the power of my assertions for specific
approaches to loving knowing. Paradoxically, Loder’s logic of
transformed intelligence has appeared within the academy, and the
academy, as the ‘factory’ of (‘American,’ if not other cultures’)
socialization, is integral to the structures that distort human knowing.
The perichoresis of the Trinity may be most evident in what is most
polarized from it, as displayed on the cross of Christ.23 Reductive
methodologies, disciplines, and transformation theories most polarized
from ‘deep, transforming engagement with God’ paradoxically can
reveal the gracious nature of God’s sustaining presence as the
condition of knowing anything at all.

22 F. LeRon Shultz draws on Loder’s theory to ask this question in the context of
inter-disciplinarity between theology and psychology in ‘“Holding On” to the
Theology-Psychology Relationship: The Underlying Fiduciary Structures of
Interdisciplinary Method,’ Journal of Psychology and Theology, 25/3:pp.329-
340.
23 ‘[T]he role of God the Holy Spirit […] has been to draw the Word further and
further into creation, into what is “not-God,” precisely so that creation might be
reconciled and drawn into fellowship with God’ (McIntosh, p.157). See also
Williams, The Wound of Knowledge, p.149.

282
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Index
Aelrod of Rievaulx 126 n .223
Active imagination 203, 205
Adaptation 54, 76, 277, 280-82
Aggression 49 n. 107
Ainsworth, Mary 39 n. 43
Ambrose 125
Analogia Spiritus 56, 140—see also
Imago dei
Anderson, Ray 50 n. 109
Andrews, Bernice 20 n. 16
Anima/us 178, 187, 204, 208
Anima mundi 26, 191-92, 211-13, 240-
42, 250, 257
And Holy Spirit identity 223 n. 4
Aquinas 132
Apophaticism 91
Apophatic and cataphatic 94
Archetype 35, 59-60; throughout chapter
Four, but especially 190-93;
throughout chapter Five, but
especially 238-39
Archetypal images 193-96, 205, 220,
234, 243, 254
Archetypal psychology 25; throughout
chapter Four, but especially 175-
77, 179-80, 209-11
Archetypal soul 26, throughout chapter
Four, but especially 184-85, 187,
190-96, 202, 206, 208, 211;
throughout chapter Five
Aristotle 43 n. 69
Arterburn, Stephen 230 n. 14
Ascetical or mystical theology 96, 107
Attachment theory 39 n. 43
Auden, W. H. 156
Augustine 85, 89, 92, 104, 106, 119,
125, 129, 130, 140, 141 n. 7,
142, 205
Baldwin of Ford 126 n. 223
Barth, Karl 14, 158, 163 n. 82
Becker, Ernst 50 n. 109
Beguines 88, 127
Benedict 85
Benner, David 167 n. 86, 280 n. 19
Bergson, Henri 110
Bernard (of Clairvaux) 89, 110, 125,
127, 211
Bi-polar relationality 15, 68, 147, 151,
172, 179, 184, 227, 243, 244,
253, 256-57—see also Dialec-
tical identity, Relationality
Blake, William 212 n. 148
Bonaventure 92, 93, 104, 129, 132, 149
n. 46
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 41 n. 59
Bowker, John 39 n. 49, 71 n. 207,
160 n. 73, 161 n. 76, 162 n. 80,
171 n. 99, 228 n. 9, 242 n. 44
Bowlby, John 39 n. 43
Brewin, Chris R. 20 n. 16
Bronfenbrenner, Urie 277
Brunner, Emil 59 n. 150
Buber, Martin 59 n. 150
Buddhism 79
Callaghan, Brendan 42 n. 64, 232 n. 21
Camus, Albert 53, 55 n. 139
Capra, Fritjof 28 n. 25
Chalcedonian formula 23, 146,
163 n. 82, 170, 263
Church Councils
4th Council at Constantinople
269-70
2nd Council at Nicea 269-70
Cloud Author 92, 93, 94, 104, 129, 149
n. 46, 210
Clerk-Maxwell, James 262
Coakley, Sara 19, 46 n. 90
Columbanus 88
Connecting the dots 12, 273-74
Consciousness 100, 102, 103, 105-06,
110, 111, 115, 117-19, 124, 126,
127-28, 130, 132, 136-37, 141,
148-49. 153, 155, 176-77, 183,
188, 193, 196-200, 201, 205,
208, 224, 228, 235, 241, 243,
259
Reality 11
Contingency 13, 14, 94, 143, 154, 155,
171, 222, 243, 247 n. 49—see
also Creative immediacy and
Divine immediacy
Creative immediacy (doctrine of) 129,
130, 151 n. 50—see also
Contingency and Divine imme-
diacy
Damasio, Antonio 150
Dark night of the soul 47 n. 91, 74 n. 222
D’Aquili, Eugene 40 n. 49, 67 n. 190
Death 38, 44-45, 49, 52-53, 56, 58-61,
74, 94, 111, 154-55, 195-96,
200, 202, 209, 213, 215, 231,
234, 240-43, 245, 253-56, 259,
267, 271
Deep, transforming engagement with
God 11-29, 34, 37, 49, 65, 75,
123, 135, 139, 142, 145, 146,
150, 152-58, 171, 173, 273-74,
276, 278—see also Encounter
(in spirituality)
Denys the Areopagite 92, 94, 96, 104,
149 n. 46
Denys the Carthusian 92, 104, 106, 129,
149 n. 46
Depression 199, 207
Development
308
Psychological theories of and
‘normalcy’ 76, 221, 224, 228,
232, 233-234, 259-62
Stages of 17
Dewey, John 277 n. 8
De Wit, Hans 80 n. 243
Dialectical identity 46, 69—see also Bi-
polar relationality, Relationality
Dialectical dynamic 92, 95, 101, 104,
128, 130, 134. 143, 146, 153,
172
Differentiating 185
Dionysius 119
Direct or immediate experience of God
114-135, 141
Divine immediacy 82-83, 94, 95, 101,
121-22, 125-26, 128, 130, 133,
152-60, 171, 243
Divine presence 111
Double bind 43, 76
Drane, John 28 n. 24, 29, 181
Dreams 199-203, 206-08, 215, 246-49
Dykstra, Craig 17
Eckhart 91, 92, 93, 99, 104, 127, 129,
141 n. 9, 142
Education 27, 44, 70, 276-78
Egan, H. 107
Ego throughout chapters One, Four, and
Five, but especially 33-52, 177-
89, and 220-242
And Maréchal 120, 153
As functional solution to existen-
tial needs 43, 221, 224, 232
As self-destructing 45
As tragic hero 55, 79
As truth-producing error 75, 76,
232
Complex 179. 182, 187, 189,
190, 197, 204, 224, 241, 259
Consciousness 198
Defenses 43, 46, 72, 142, 221,
254
 Formation and development 37,
226, 228, 234
Egoism 41 n.59
Enhanced function of 19, 69,
172, 258-59
Heroic 26; throughout chapter
Four; throughout chapter Five;
And consciousness 196-200
Language 18
Posture 77 n. 240, 221
Recentering of 48, 62, 69
Relativization of 15, 19, 23, 49,
50, 59-72, 172, 201-209, 242-52
Power behind 243-46
Sampling of 246-47
As Gift 247-49
Hillman’s understood through
Loder’s logic 249-50
And Myth 250-52
Results of relativization 72-79,
209-213, 252-62
Changed perspectives 253-56
Bond of human diginity 256-
58
Pilgrimage of enhanced ego
functioning 258-59
Proposed changes to psycho-
logical theory 259-62
Shock (or Ego chill) 54
Ellard, Peter 223 n. 4
Encounter (in spirituality) 95-99, 102,
108, 109, 111, 112, 114, 118,
125, 127, 131, 137—see also
Deep, transforming engagement
with God
Erikson, Erik 40, 63 n. 168, 68 n. 195,
166
Existential conflicts 71
Dichotomies 61
Exoteric dynamic 101, 106, 111, 132,
145, 151 n. 50, 152-54, 166, 171
Experience and interpretation 16
Experientialization 82, 92, 93, 96, 108,
112, 130
Face (phenomenon) 32, 39-43, 45-48,
51, 53, 56, 58-59, 66, 68, 71,
120, 125, 153, 169 n. 93, 237-38,
247, 254, 259, 267-68, 271
False face 53, 225
Imprinting, mirroring 39
Faith journey 11, 72, 140-41
Fantasy 183-87, 189, 193, 201, 203, 205,
209, 210, 212, 216
Felton, Jack 230 n. 14
Ferrer, J. N. 163 n. 82
Ficino 198 n. 99, 255
Figure-ground 72, 147, 154-55, 158,
171, 274
Ford, David 40 n. 52, 169 n. 93
Four dimensions (self, lived world, void,
Holy) 47, 50, 64, 65, 68, 151,
154, 159, 172, 260, 278-79
Definition of dimension 47 n. 93
Four-fold pattern or way (in spirituality)
140, 143, 144
Fowler, James 141 n. 9, 168
Francis of Assisi 126
Franciscans 88
Fremantle, Anne 156
Freud, Sigmund 11, 14, 19, 43 n. 67, 44
n. 75, 50 n. 108, 148-49, 172,
176, 199, 200, 207, 252 n. 50
Gallus 149 n. 46
Gellhorn, Ernst 67 n. 190
Gellman, Jerome 110 n. 139, 154 n. 52,
161 n. 76
Genetic engineering 75, 278
Giles of Assisi 110
Gilligan, Carol 279 n. 18
Glendon, Mary Ann 77
Gödel 155, 166 n. 84, 168 n. 87
Grannell, Andrew 17
309
Grace 31-32, 40, 69, 94, 122, 127-28,
130, 134, 139, 152-53, 155, 205,
222, 245, 248, 269 n. 74
Greenacre, Phyllis 37 n. 35
Greeves, Andrew 64 n. 171
Grene, Marjorie 24 n. 20
Gregory of Nazianzus 65 n. 171, 70 n.
203
Gregory the Great 110, 150
Gregory of Nyssa 149 n. 46, 150 n. 48
Hadewich of Antwerp 110
Hall, J. A. 270-71 n. 76
Hampson, Daphne 19 n. 10
Hay, David 162 n. 80
Heidegger, 53
Hendry, George 14, 37 n. 34, 63 n. 167,
163 n. 82
Heraclitus 255
Hilary of Poitiers 89
Hildegaard van Bingen 141 n. 9, 142
Hillman’s ‘Running Engagement with
Christianity’ 265-71
Hjelle, Larry 176 n. 3
Horne, Brian 114 n. 163
Howells, Edward 160 n. 72, 161 n. 75,
162 n. 77
Hsu, Francis 18
Hugh of St Victor 126 n. 223
Human spirituality 23, 25, 217-18, 219,
273-74
Human trait spirituality 167, 173
Hunt, Kate 162 n. 80
Huxley, Aldous 160
Ignatian exercises 23 n. 19
Illich, Ivan 44 n. 76
Imago dei 42, 45 n. 80, 71, 140, 145,
153, 166, 230, 243, 245, 250,
256-57, 265 n. 70
Imagination 22, 28, 66, 71, 115, 128,
142, 143-44, 147-48, 155, 181,
185, 187, 189, 210, 216, 219,
236, 256, 258, 275, 280—see
also Active imagination
Infinite particularity 134, 135, 153
Intelligence 44, 45 n. 78, 50, 120, 146 n.
30, 230 n. 15, 238, 275, 279-80
Inter-disciplinarity 16, 22, 24, 26, 27, 28,
76, 81, 114-15, 122, 123, 136-
37, 139, 151-52, 154-55, 158-59,
161-64, 169-71, 175, 218, 259-
60, 263-65, 271-72, 273-75
Inter-faith 24-27, 80-81, 161, 170, 175,
216, 218, 272, 274-75
Isaac of Stella 126 n. 223
Jacobi, Jolande 40 n. 50
James, William 131, 160
Janov, Arthur 37 n.35
John Cassian 125
John of the Cross 74 n. 222, 85, 92, 99,
104, 130, 141 n. 9, 142, 210
John Scottus Eriugena 110, 125
Jung, Carl 14, 59, 61, 63 n. 168;
throughout chapter Four, but
especially 176-79, 194, 198, 203,
205-06, 235 n. 27, 252 n. 50
Kant 131
Katherine Group 89
Katz, Stephen 110, 160
Keats, John 213 n. 148
Kelly, George 210
Kenosis 19, 267
Kerr, Fergus 114 n. 163
Kierkegaard, SǛren 11, 44 n. 75,
46 n. 84, 47 n. 95, 50 n. 108, 66,
71 n. 206, 72 n. 208, 142-43,
147-49, 155, 156, 165 n. 84, 172
n. 100, 226 n. 6
Knowing 11, 12, 14, 16, 21, 22, 25, 28,
29, 59, 60-62, 64-65, 80, 99,
105, 118, 120, 128, 131, 132,
134, 146-47, 149-53, 275-76
Koestler, Arthur 172 n. 100

310
Koinonia 48, 70 n. 203, 73, 144, 145-46,
172, 255, 257
Kovacs, Ken 15
Kuentzel, John 80 n. 244, 140 n. 3
Lancaster, Brian 163 n. 83
Lehmann, Paul 70 n. 203
Lewis, C. S. 63, 142
Levi-Strauss, Claude 63 n. 168
Logic (or grammar) of transformation
11, 25, 28, 34, 36, 42, 53, 56, 57,
59, 60-63, 65, 71, 139-140, 146,
150-51, 153, 155, 158, 159, 166,
236, 240, 246-47, 249-52, 262,
264, 273, 276, 278-79—see also
Transformation
Insight in 61, 67, 147
Mediating image in 61, 62, 65
Lonergan, Bernard 21, 83, 110, 119,
120, 124, 153, 155
Lorenz, Conrad 39 n. 43
Love 13, 20, 35, 48, 59, 70-71, 78, 86,
89, 94, 97, 101, 109, 115121,
123, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129,
132, 134, 140, 149-51, 155, 207
Luther, Martin 40 n. 50, 58 n. 147,
59 n. 150, 68 n. 195
Mandala 40 n. 50
Maréchal, Joseph 110, 119-20, 131, 151
n. 50, 153
Marguerite of Porete 127
Maritain Jacques 110
Martyr, Justin 40 n. 50
Mary of Oignies 127
Maximus the Confessor 132
McFadyen, Alistair 162 n. 79
McKibben, Bill 278 n. 15
Meaning and purpose questions 45 n. 80
Mediated immediacy 16, 17, 22, 124,
128, 134, 135, 153,155, 273
Merton, Thomas 84
Möbius Band 163 n. 82
Model of intensification 67, 71, 140,
143, 155, 240
Modernism 182, 214
Moltmann, 158
Moore, Thomas 215-16
Mystery of God 97, 103-04
Mystical metaphors 91-95, 104, 130, 143
Metaphorical language 131, 142
Mysticism and theology 103, 106—see
also Spirituality and theology
Mysticism-experience identity 21, 82,
98-115, 145-152, 171
Myth 63, 71, 79, 178, 181-82, 189, 210,
212, 236, 250-51, 264
Negation 38, 41-46, 48, 50-59, 66, 69,
71, 79, 91, 101, 105, 111-12,
130, 142-43, 151, 167, 225, 231-
32, 247-48, 267
Existential negation 51
Negative experiences 104
No-saying 41
Nelson, C. Ellis 77 n. 240
Newbigin, Lesslie 28 n. 25
Nicholas of Cusa 141 n. 9
Nichols, Aidan 106 n. 119
Niebuhr, H. Richard 44 n. 76, 64
Nuth, Joan 128 n. 238
Oakley, Chris 267 n. 71
O’Connor, Edward 27, 159 n. 71
Origin 85, 99
Otto, Rudolph 48 n. 98, 160
Pannenberg, Wolfhart 14, 41 n. 59, 158,
165 n. 84,
226 n. 6
Parental fallacy 229, 232
Particularity 22, 27, 68, 71, 74, 160-71,
173, 219, 223, 264, 271, 273-74
Passion 127-28, 148
Penfield, Walter 47 n. 95
Peperzak, Adriaan 43 n. 69
311
Père Festugière 86
Perichoresis 15, 47 n. 93, 65 n. 174, 70
n. 203, 73, 144, 158, 255, 274
Peter Damien 89
Piaget, Jean 60 n. 157, 63 n. 168, 166
Plato 43 n. 69, 85, 86, 255
Neoplatonic 211
Platonic/ism 149 n, 46, 156-57, 169 n.
97, 19
Plotinus 198, 255
Pneumatikos 96
Polanyi, Michael 24 n. 20
Prenter, Regin 14, 58 n. 147, 157 n. 62
Price, James Robinson 124
Proclus 255
Psychologism 235
Psycho-neurology 67, 71, 140, 143, 155,
240
Rahner, Karl 21, 83, 110, 119, 121-124,
131, 132-135, 151 n. 50, 153,
155
Reaction formation 42 n. 65, 43
Relationality 13-15, 17, 23-27, 31, 32,
34, 37, 46, 48, 49, 59, 60, 62, 64-
66, 68, 71, 73, 77, 78, 81,
92,114, 132, 133, 135, 141, 142,
150-51, 162, 166, 170, 221, 227,
237, 244-46, 250-51, 254, 260-
61, 263-65, 268-69, 271-75, 280,
282—see also Bi-polar relation-
ality
Repression 20, 43, 45
Richard of St Victor 126 n. 223, 141 n. 9
Ritschl, Albrecht 157
Rizzuto, Ana-Marie 39 n. 42
Rogers, Frank 168
Ruusbroec 127
Rupert of Deutz 125
Saint Patrick 88
Samuels, A. 25 n. 22, 185 n. 49
Sartre, Jean Paul 53, 55 n. 139
312
Secular humanism 214
Shadow 178, 235 n. 27
Schmidt, Leigh 20 n. 17
Schneiders, Sandra 26, 108, 160 n. 72,
161-62, 217-18
Schultz, F. LeRon 20 n. 16, 282 n. 22
Self 222 n. 3
As spirit 32, 34-37, 49, 51, 55-
57, 58, 59, 63, 71, 236-37
Analogia spiritus 34, 56, 140
Sin 40, 42, 45, 231, 235, 245
‘the Fall’ 45, 46, 66 n. 181, 71
Socialization 27, 44, 46, 69, 145, 188,
244, 276-77, 79, 282
Social conformity 49, 73, 76,
185, 220, 227
Social construction 95, 109, 214,
228-29, 252, 255
Socrates 43 n. 69
Soskice, Janet 13
Soul 184, 191-96, 199, 208-9, 240—see
also Archetypal soul
Soul-making 213, 217-18, 240
Spirituality and theology 16, 101, 107-
08, 112-13, 145, 273—see also
Mysticism and theology
Spitz, René 37 n. 35, 38 n. 39, 39 n. 42,
41 n. 53, n.58, 42 n. 64, 43 n. 67
Stace, Walter T. 156, 160
Stevens, Anthony 216
Teresa (of Avila) 89, 141 n. 9, 142
Terkel, Studs 70 n. 205
Tillich, Paul 158
Tomkins, Sylvan 58 n. 146
Torrance, Thomas F. 14, 70 n. 203, 154
n. 53, 158, 255 n. 52
Transformation 11, 14, 126, 81, 82, 84,
95, 97, 107, 111, 120, 122, 136,
137, 164,167
Of transformation 15, 62, 141,
144, 151, 167, 273
 Transformational knowing 14,
15, 64, 167
Transforming knowledge 96,
144, 145
Transformational logic—see
also Logic of transformation
Transitional object 232
Trinity 15, 27, 73, 135, 144-45, 153,
158, 159, 165, 166, 243, 245,
255, 271, 273-74
Tugwell, Simon 117 n. 166
Union with God 43 n. 69, 45, 92, 102,
115, 119, 125-26, 129, 131, 140,
149 n. 46, 150
Victorines 90
Vico, 198 n. 99, 255
Visionary 102
Void 11, 32, 45, 47, 48-55, 66, 75, 80,
148, 151, 219, 221-22, 224-26,
230-32, 234-36, 240-41, 245,
248-51, 254, 257-58, 260, 264,
267, 271
Von Balthasar, Hans Urs 119, 121-24,
132-33, 153
Von Hugel, Frederich 88
Williams, Rowan 157 n. 62 and 63,
282 n. 23
William St. Theirry 110, 125
Winnicott, Donald 39 n. 42, 232 n. 21
Wisdom 101, 108, 150, 165 n. 84, 280
Wolfe, Tom 77
Wolff, Hans Walter 270 n. 76
Wolfson, Henry 65 n. 174, 70 n. 203
Wright, Dana 13 n. 3, 62 n. 164,
140 n. 3, 281 n. 21
Zammit-Mangion, Josette 23 n. 19,
143 n. 16
Ziegler, Daniel 176 n. 3
Zuurdeeg, Willem 74 n. 220
313
Religions and Discourse
Edited by James M. M. Francis

Religions and Discourse explores religious language in the major world faiths
from various viewpoints, including semiotics, pragmatics and cognitive lin-
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The series will publish monographs and collected essays of a high scholarly
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