The Two Faces of Christianity: A Psychological Analysis

subject.

Introduction

The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom, but rather of his faith and his lovingness. If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind. ¹

– Kahlil Gibran The Prophet

There is a wide diversity of views among those who think of themselves as Christians as to what constitute the core beliefs of that religion. I am writing this book in the belief that, as the profound philosopher and mathematician A. N. Whitehead asserted in his Religion in the Making, You cannot shelter theology from science, or science from theology. There is no short-cut to truth.²

One fundamental difference between science and theology is that, in theory at least, scientists regard all conclusions drawn from the application of scientific method to any subject matter, as provisional truths. They fully expect these will be modified in the course of further research, and indeed welcome such developments. The scientific enterprise is all about finding ever better ways of understanding different aspects of the universe in which we live.

By contrast, generally speaking theology is about the search for eternal, absolute, unchanging truths: What is the ‘right way’ to understand the spiritual world, and its relationship with the material one? Such a search is often marked by dogmatic intolerance, and the belief that certain ‘truths’ of a particular religion are unalterable, defining beliefs of that religion. In the case of Christianity, prominent among those ‘truths’ is a belief in the existence of God as a being who is, in the words of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (hereinafter referred to as the COED), entitled to obedience, reverence, and worship. Also widely believed to be defining characteristics of Christianity are the beliefs that Jesus was ‘the Son of God’, both fully God and fully man,³ that he was born of a virgin, and after his death was resurrected and now sits on the right hand of God. Perhaps most importantly for the majority of Christians, Jesus’ death was set up by God as a substitute punishment for the sins of humanity.

Potential readers of this book should be warned that I do not accept any of those dogmatic statements as true, and believe there are powerful psychological reasons for rejecting them. It is my considered opinion that they have nothing to do with the teachings and beliefs of Jesus. The idea of God as a despotic creator-ruler was around long before the birth of Jesus, and has been simply taken over by most of the Christian Church (and that other great monotheistic religion, Islam). Beliefs about the conception, birth, divine status, and resurrection of Jesus, originated in the early Christian Church. Whether intentionally developed for that purpose or not, the supernaturalist, magical thinking underlying these ideas has for many people the effect of putting them and the religion built around them out of the realm of rational debate. Jesus’ status as an atonement sacrifice for the sins of humanity is simply an expression of sadistic and masochistic authoritarian psychopathology, and has nothing whatsoever to do with spirituality. At the same time it feels appropriate to call myself a Christian because of the way in which the ethical principles taught and demonstrated by Jesus of Nazareth, resonate within me.

In this regard I find myself very much in the same position as Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States (1801-1809), and the principal author of the American Declaration of Independence of 1776. Jefferson believed that Jesus’ ethical principles provided the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. He produced a much-reduced version of the New Testament, containing only what he believed to be those truths. When taken to task by more conservative Christians, he responded by saying that the work he had done on the New Testament, far from disqualifying him from describing himself as a Christian, was proof that I am a Christian.

There is no way of proving that my views (many of them shared by a minority of other Christians) on the nature of God, and the significance of Jesus’ life and death are either right or wrong. In any case the extent to which my views are right or wrong is really a matter of little importance to anyone except myself. What is important is the effect that contact with those ideas has on the religious thinking and spiritual experience of those who encounter them. I believe very strongly in the truth contained in the lines from Kahlil Gibran quoted at the beginning of this introduction.

I am under no illusion that I have said the last word on any of the topics I deal with in this book, but it is my earnest hope that those who read what I have written will find it has brought the whole question of Christian Ethics more clearly to their attention, and that they will find that that experience has liberated them into developing for themselves, notions which strike more deeply into the root of reality.⁴

Chapter 1

The Two Faces of Christianity

Christmas 1924

Peace upon earth, the angels sang.

We pay a thousand priests to ring it.

And after 2000 years of Mass

We’ve got as far as poison gas.

– Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy’s bitter post-World War I reminder of the Christian Church’s failure so far to get anywhere near bringing in the era of the Kingdom of God on earth must be thought-provoking to the more reflective and honest of those of us who are prepared to call ourselves ‘Christians’. Unless engaging in the psychological defence mechanism of denial on a grand scale, Christians must be aware that beyond those towering monuments to the good which has been done in the name of their religion, are some horrendous examples of ‘man’s inhumanity to man’.

The work of Albert Schweitzer (1875 – 1965), who abandoned a promising career as an academic philosopher, theologian, and musician in Germany to study medicine and bring the medical expertise of Western Europe to people in Africa (many of whose physical sufferings in the years before the establishment of the World Health Organisation and other international humanitarian bodies would otherwise have been ended only by their death), is but one example among many, of Christians who have made massive humanitarian contributions to making the world a better place.

But a very different picture of the influence of the Christian religion appears when we think of the brutal attacks on Islam undertaken ‘in the name of God’ under the banner of the Crusades, the persecution and mass killings of Jews which branches of the Christian Church were at times actually complicit in, and at others turned a blind eye to, the appalling barbarities of the Inquisition, and the torture and the killing of heretics and witches. Tragically, recent examples of such religiously inspired (and often sanctioned) cruelties are not hard to find. From the way in which the ‘Born Again Christian’ George Bush, aided and abetted by the ‘devout Christian’ Tony Blair, suppressed whatever stirrings of Christian compassion they may at times have felt in their acquiescence in, and responsibility for the use of waterboarding and other forms of torture of terrorist suspects (many of whom have since been released without the finding of any evidence that they present a danger to humanity), to the recent kicking to death of a Catholic peace worker by Protestant vigilantes in post-‘Civil War’ 21st-century Ireland, the story of the Christian Church’s involvement in the infliction of pain, suffering, and death, is not an inspiring one. Despite the heroic humanitarian efforts of some saintly individuals (many of them unknown and unsung), overall the Christian Church as a whole must be regarded as a dismal failure in effectively promoting those humanitarian ideals which lie at the heart of what most people regard as Christian ethics.

Can this failure of the Christian Church be simply put down to the weaknesses of fallible humans whose ability to live up to the ideals of their religion leaves much to be desired? In this book I want to suggest that that is far too facile an explanation, and one which leaves little hope of the situation ever improving. I believe, however, that there is a better explanation, and a fairly simple one at that. It is, moreover, one that points the way to the possibility of ridding the Christian Church of the psychopathology that has marred the thinking (and therefore behaviour) of many of the adherents of the religion throughout its history. Insofar as we are successful in doing this, we shall see even more of the actualisation of the potential of those powerful positive forces contained within Christian Ethics to make the world an unambiguously better place for all.

It has been said that a compulsive desire to analyse everything as falling into one or other of two categories is so prevalent among academics as to almost warrant describing that behaviour as an ‘academic disease’. Pathological habit or not, the multifarious divisions within Christianity seem to almost beg for some fundamental simplification of the bewildering variety of different religious systems claiming the mantle of Christian orthodoxy. Of course there has in the past been no shortage of two-category analyses within Christianity – Roman Catholic versus Protestant, Established Church versus Non-conformist, Mainstream versus Evangelical Church or Fringe Sect, True Believer versus Heretic, Born Again versus Spiritually Dead, those destined to experience the joys of Heaven for all eternity versus those damned to eternal suffering in Hell, are only a few of the ‘us versus them’ analyses that have long been commonplace within the Christian Church. However, none of these two-category divisions seems to take us further than a simple labelling of relatively superficial differences between the various Christian Churches in terms of belief and practice. Even the differentiation between fundamentalist and more rational approaches to biblical interpretation, which takes us closer to the heart of the issue, is not a significantly helpful distinction to make without deeper analysis.

Almost all religious systems are, to a greater or lesser extent, wracked by internal conflicts. Is it possible to stand outside the narrow confines of any one religious system and find amongst the plethora of competing views within it, any broad trends which do make sense of what is going on between the warring factions? Psychology is obviously one discipline whose insights ought to have something valuable to offer in this respect. That being so it is surprising how few publications appear each year offering any sort of psychological analysis of religious issues. The reason is doubtless the pervasiveness of atheistic beliefs among academic psychologists. Whilst the fact that an atheistic psychologist will inevitably view any religious system as a delusional one does not in itself rule it out as a legitimate object of study, it probably does mean that he or she is less likely than an open-and spiritually-minded psychologist to find it an interesting and important field in which to work.

Why the extremely high rate of atheism among psychologists in Christian and post-Christian societies? I believe there are at least two important reasons. One is probably the very influential rejection by Sigmund Freud of religion as an illusion based on wish-fulfilment. The growth in influence of the psychoanalytic movement seems to have paralleled the decline of Christianity at least in Western Europe, and indeed acceptance of orthodox psychoanalytic dogma does imply that there is something intellectually disreputable about the holding of a religious point of view. As Richard Webster in his Why Freud was wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis⁵ has pointed out, however, Psychoanalysis itself has many of the characteristics of a religious movement and it will be interesting to see whether the decline in influence of its increasingly shaky claims to intellectual respectability leads to any resurgence of interest in questions of religion among academic psychologists.

There is another significant reason for the high atheism rate among psychologists, however, and that is the very real intellectual disreputability, Freud aside, of certain viewpoints perceived by many to be a necessary part of Christianity. I shall argue later in this book that these viewpoints, inevitably unacceptable to the majority of psychologists, are not intrinsic to a religious outlook, Christian or otherwise. One immediately striking example of this is the belief that we are all ‘miserable sinners’, rotten at the core, and need to be ‘saved’ from the consequences of all the wrongdoing with which we fill our lives.

It is unfortunate, but understandable, that so many intellectually able and emotionally intelligent people, repelled by such an unkind and unhelpful view of the human condition, want nothing more to do with a religion that espouses such views. To react in this way seems to me, to draw on an overworked metaphor, to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The first step in avoiding such a waste of the resources available to us to live a happy and meaningful life is to clearly identify what is baby and what is bathwater, and it is to contribute to such clarification that this book has been written.

Two religions, one label

Much of the malaise around religion in post-Christian societies, I believe, exists because of a lack of awareness that under the cloak of Christianity two very different religious and psychological systems of thought exist. There is considerable evidence that a very similar two-fold division exists within other major world religions (certainly in at least Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism), but I shall restrict myself in this book to Christianity, it being the only religion I know well enough to speak about with some authority. Christianity, however, is certainly not unique in having not merely two different religions, but two distinctly different types of religion sharing the same verbal label.

The starting point for my own enlightenment in this matter was the discovery some years ago of an all-too-little-known book by Eric Fromm, a leading figure in the Neo-Freudian movement, called Psychoanalysis and Religion.⁶ In this book, first published in 1950, Fromm differentiates between authoritarian religions (in which an all-powerful, all-good God is seen as having ultimate control over dependent, weak and sinful human beings) and humanistic religions (in which God is seen in a non-personified way as the good within each human).

In authoritarian religions God is seen as existing in an adversarial relationship with humankind, over whose eternal destiny either in heaven or hell he has absolute control.

In humanistic religions God is seen as existing in an intimately integrated, co-operative relationship with humankind, as a power, a source of positive energy within each human being, but having an objective existence as a spiritual being: God is both immanent in nature and transcends it, having an existence beyond that of the individual living creatures of which ‘he’ is a part.

Fromm draws attention to how strongly our conception of what constitutes ‘religion’ is influenced by what is in fact only one type of religion – the authoritarian type. He notes that the Oxford Dictionary definition of religion is a rather accurate definition of authoritarian religion. It reads: [Religion is] recognition on the part of man of some higher unseen power as having control of his destiny, and as being entitled to obedience, reverence, and worship. No wonder that those to whom such a disempowering and abusive view of humankind is unacceptable should reject not just authoritarian religion but religion as a whole, or at least Christianity, if their experience of religion has been restricted to the authoritarian form of that religion.

As Fromm points out, it is not just the recognition that man is controlled by a higher power outside of himself that defines an authoritarian religion. It is the further belief that "this power, because of the control it exercises, is entitled to obedience, reverence, and worship."⁷ This is where the disempowering of the human being comes in. Humankind has no rights to autonomy, to independent thinking or action. The deity is "entitled to obedience, reverence and worship." It is this, I believe, more than any other aspect of Christianity, which sticks in the gullet of enlightened thinkers in general, and psychologists in particular, as a destructively demeaning and belittling view of the nature of the human being.

And of course such a concept has no necessary relationship to religion and one’s conception of spiritual realities at all, the Oxford Dictionary notwithstanding. What such a view of the nature of religion does have a necessary connection with is authoritarian systems in general, in which submission of each layer of a power hierarchy to the layer above is demonstrated through unquestioning obedience to its expressed or implied demands. Recognition of a higher power as having control …and as being entitled to obedience is not a necessary component of a religious point of view, but it is a necessary part of an authoritarian one. Such an authoritarian viewpoint can be imposed on our understanding of spiritual things, but it cannot thereby monopolise the field. Unfortunately though, it can and often does have considerable success in its monopolistic attempts. The extent to which it has done so varies throughout history, due to a complex interaction of many political, economic, educational and cultural factors.

It is my aim in this book to examine key elements of Christian thinking and belief in terms of Fromm’s concept of the distinction between humanistic and authoritarian religions. The more I have thought about this subject the more light this way of looking at things has shed for me on the fundamental psychological reasons why the Christian Church today (as it has been ever since its inception) is a house divided against itself, and why probably almost as much evil as good has been done in its name.

Christianity is not a single religion. It contains within itself two very different systems of thought, which reflect something far more fundamental than the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism, or between either of these and the Eastern Orthodox churches. In this book I have tried to clarify the often incompatible and even contradictory views which comprise Christianity as it exists in the world today. In identifying these conflicting streams of thought as the humanistic and the authoritarian faces of the religion it is not my intention to suggest that the population of all Christians can be divided into just one or other of two rigid categories – humanistic or authoritarian. Most Christians will hold views (consciously or unconsciously) which belong predominantly to one or other of these categories, but also some views which belong to the other. My own belief is that those ideas belonging to the humanistic face of Christianity are profoundly true and of immense potential power to make the world a better place for all living creatures. In so far as anyone holding these views also holds some beliefs stemming from the authoritarian face of Christianity it is my firm conviction that if they were able to recognise the psychopathologies from which those views spring, and let go of them, they would be contributing in a significant way to making the world a better place.

Chapter 2

The Human Condition

If we attend to the general principles which regulate all endeavours after clear statement of truth, we must be prepared to amplify, recast, generalize, and adapt, so as to absorb into one system all sources of experience. ⁸

– Alfred North Whitehead. Religion in the Making

1. What is the fundamental motivator of human behaviour? What do we all constantly seek in life?

To feel OK about ourselves; to feel that whatever faults we may possess as the inevitable result of being human, at least deep down inside each of us is a good and beautiful person, more sinned against than sinning. Feeling guilty is a miserable state to be in, and we will go to great lengths, whether by becoming ill, the use and abuse of alcohol, street-drugs, prescription medication or religious conversion to eliminate, or at least dull the pain of feeling guilty.

2. How do we preserve and enhance our self-esteem?

•  By doing ‘good works’, in other words by doing things that will earn us the approval of at least some other people.

•  By seeking to live in the company of other people who generally approve of the way we live our life and will give us positive feedback about what a valuable member of the human race we are.

•  By using a number of mental mechanisms with which our nervous systems are equipped.

3. What innate mechanisms of the mind exist to protect us from psychological hurt?

One of the most important of several mechanisms that serve this function is what Sigmund Freud, the twentieth-century Austrian neurologist turned psychoanalyst, called ‘Defence Mechanisms’. These are ways in which our mind distorts its picture of reality to exclude from consciousness any thoughts or feelings which we believe it is wrong for us to have, and whose presence in us cause us anxiety when we become aware of them.

So far as religious thinking is concerned, the most important of the defence mechanisms that Freud identified are Denial, Repression, Projection, Reaction Formation, and Rationalisation. An extension of Freud’s thinking in this respect is the concept of our ‘Shadow self’, developed by the twentieth-century Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, who early in his career was a member of Freud’s inner circle.

Denial

Underlying all the defences we shall consider here is the kingpin defence mechanism of denial. This involves a refusal to face facts, either those about the external situation in which we find ourselves, or about our own feelings. Refusing to become aware of the telltale signs of the impending break-up of a relationship, or that a developing relationship is not going to be good for one, or one parent not allowing themselves to become aware of the probability that the other is sexually abusing a child, are all-too-common examples of denial.

Repression

Denying the reality of a feeling does not of course make that feeling go away, no matter how hard we try to keep it out of our consciousness, and denied reality has a nasty habit of constantly rearing its ugly head and intruding itself into our lives, often at the most unexpected times and in the most unexpected places. The presence of repression shows itself by the arousal of anxiety when certain issues or topics are broached. When someone becomes agitated and perhaps very judgemental if a conversation should get around, however light-heartedly to, for example, something like the issue of extra-marital affairs, it might be because that individual has been experiencing some temptation to get involved with someone in just that way. If they are struggling to repress that thought, being part of a conversation in which such a topic is discussed reminds them of something they are trying very hard to forget, and the thought may well make them anxious and even agitated. There are of course also other reasons why people might find a conversation about any particular topic uncomfortable.

Projection

Projection is the defence mechanism whereby we deny responsibility for those of our own thoughts and feelings which are unacceptable to us, and attribute them to others. The defence mechanism of Projection always goes hand in hand with that of Denial. The desire to feel good about ourselves, to feel that ‘I’m OK’, is a universal and most powerful motivator of human behaviour. The less confident we are that we really are ‘a good person’, the more having any thoughts or feelings that cast doubt on how good a person we are will tempt us to deny the reality of those feelings. If the mechanisms of denial and repression alone are not sufficient to make our awareness of any unwanted feelings disappear completely, then one of the other mechanisms that may come into play is Projection, whereby we admit the presence of troublesome feelings but deny that they are ours, and accuse someone else of being the source of them. Yes there is anger around, but it’s not me that is so angry, it’s you who is getting angry with me. The process of projection develops early in life – the semi-playful attribution in childhood of the doing of ‘naughty’ things to the activities of ‘Mr Nobody’ is widespread.

Projection can be applied in an attempt to get rid of any unwanted feelings, but it is those two particularly important emotions – anger and sexual desire – which are the most frequent targets of this defence mechanism. The denial of the presence of these emotions in oneself, and their projection onto others, is one of the key processes in a host of human psychological problems, from jealousy (where the individual projects his or her own interest in exploring wider sexual experience onto their partner, or onto others they believe are seeking such experiences with them), to full blown psychotic disorders in which the individual’s contact with all aspects of their reality becomes tenuous in the extreme.

One of the sad things about the effects of the operation of the defence mechanism of Projection is that it plays into the effects of another powerful psychological process – the Self-fulfilling Prophecy. If we attribute certain of our own feelings to someone else, even if initially they did not have them, we shall behave towards that person as though they did, and that almost guarantees that they will indeed develop such feelings towards us.

If that happens, of course we are likely to feel that we were right all along and that the source of the upsetting anger really is the other person. In this way a self-justifying closed system is set up which protects us from having to take any responsibility for the unhappy situation which has developed. This situation of being at the mercy of someone else’s negative feelings is a very disempowered state to be in, and likely to generate its own set of extremely unhappy, negative emotions in us.

Reaction Formation

Reaction Formation refers to a process whereby we unconsciously ‘put on an act’ which creates the feeling in outside observers (and to at least some extent in ourselves) that our emotional state is exactly the opposite of what it really is; for example, smiling when one’s heart is breaking. One striking example of the operation of the defence mechanism of Reaction Formation in literature is to be found in Charles Dickens’ wonderful pen portrait of the ever so ‘umble Uriah Heep, in his novel David Copperfield. The scene in which Uriah finally drops his mask of sickly obsequiousness and reveals his true feelings of bitter envy and anger towards those whom he had been treating with nauseatingly excessive humility, is one of the outstanding examples of the expression of penetrating psychological insight in literature.

How do we know when someone is not being authentic, not acting in an entirely honest and straightforward way, and where the mechanism of Reaction Formation is probably operating? One telltale giveaway is when we start to feel about someone, Methinks the lady (or gentleman) protesteth too much. A very different way in which Reaction Formation manifests itself is to be seen in some of the most damaging cases of childhood sexual abuse, where the older person not only seeks sexual gratification in their interaction with a child, but also treats him or her in a verbally and/or physically abusive way – for the older person it is a way of denying the presence of any love interest, but for the poor child it is a case of insult being added to injury.

Rationalisation

An amusing, presumably fictitious story which perfectly captures the essence of the defence mechanism of Rationalisation is told by Amy Tan in her novel Saving Fish From Drowning.⁹ The story in question is about a pious man who explained to his followers, It is evil to take lives and noble to save them. Each day I pledge to save a hundred lives. I drop my net in the lake and scoop out a hundred fishes. I place the fishes on the bank, where they flop and twirl. ‘Don’t be scared’, I tell those fishes. ‘I am saving you from drowning.’ Soon enough the fishes grow calm and lie still. Yet, sad to say, I am always too late. The fishes expire. And because it is evil to waste anything, I take those dead fishes to market and I sell them for a good price. With the money I receive, I buy more nets so I can save more fishes.

Rationalisation is to be observed when someone is making a not-entirely-convincing attempt to explain in purely rational terms their reasons for doing something they feel they ought not to have done, or for having failed to do something they feel they ought to have done. When we are rationalising we are giving an explanation for our behaviour in terms of pure reason, suppressing reference to any emotional considerations. The logic may be unassailable, but logical considerations may not have been the most powerful motivator of our actions, and at least to the emotionally intelligent, it shows! Although to describe Rationalisation as ‘telling rational lies’ may be a bit harsh, when the mechanism is in operation we are certainly suppressing part of the truth about why we behaved as we did – the anxiety we were spared by not acting in a certain way or the emotional satisfaction we gained from what we did.

Most smug moralistic explanations for behaviour are at least partly rationalisations. Oscar Wilde captured the essence of the situation perfectly when he wrote, In cases like this it becomes more than a duty to speak one’s mind: it becomes a positive pleasure. The motivation for most psychological acts has both rational and emotional components. When we rationalise we are reporting only the intellectual component (real or created specially for the occasion) of our motivations. There may or may not be some truth in what we are saying, but even if we are telling the truth and nothing but the truth we are certainly not telling the whole truth. And very often that untold part of the truth is the most relevant part. One of St Paul’s less endearing habits, as we shall examine in Chapter 7, is of from time to time assuring readers of his epistles that in saying what he is saying to them, he is only motivated by concern for their welfare, when it is abundantly clear to a dispassionate observer that his real motivation is a much less noble one, like consolidating his position as the pre-eminent apostle to the Gentiles, or making his life of ‘service to the Lord’ more comfortable.

Our Shadow

Another related mechanism which is often used to protect our sense of self-worth, and is closely related to Freud’s concept of Projection, is the creation of our Shadow, a process which Jung brought to our attention. According to Jung, in splitting off from consciousness and repressing what we regard as unacceptable parts of our mind, we create a Shadow-self which as far as possible we keep tucked out of sight. The part of our personality which we show to the world Jung called our Persona, but what the world usually sees is only part of who we really are.

Extremely important in understanding human behaviour are the disowned parts of our personality which we have projected into our Shadow, where they lurk, banished from consciousness, but every now and then emerging into some uncharacteristic behaviour which sometimes shocks and horrifies us and anyone we are interacting with at the time. We find ourselves saying something like, How could I have said that? or, It’s not like me to … These intrusions of untypical thoughts and behaviours by repressed parts of the personality of religious people are frequently attributed to the presence of the Devil or some other ‘evil spirit’ – an unhelpful way at looking at things, but one that, given an appropriate definition of ‘the devil’, is not without some truth in it. The more successfully we disown the parts of ourself which we believe to be bad and wicked, the more our Shadow feels like an invading foreign force which is ‘not me’. However foreign those disowned parts of ourselves may feel though, they are parts of ourselves and unless we take responsibility for having them we shall never be able to control them.

4. How do we minimise the distress our Shadow sometimes causes us?

What sort of a picture we have of the person we want to be is partly determined by our genetic inheritance, but even more strongly by all the life experiences that have come our way. Some life experiences make it relatively easy to live up to the ideals we set for ourselves; others make it very difficult indeed to do so, and tempt us to deny more and more of the (to us painful) reality of who we are, pushing that into our Shadow. The more of ourselves we have shovelled into that Shadow, the more frequently will parts of it erupt into consciousness and cause us anxiety when they do. The best way to minimise that distress is to empty our Shadow of as much of its content as possible by allowing ourselves to become fully conscious of those aspects of ourselves which we had previously been denying; in other words to accept ourselves for what we are, warts and all. None of us are ‘bad’ just because we have the potential for bad behaviour, and sometimes engage in it. We all have the same potential in that respect. But all praise to us when we do not actualise that potential, when we do not become cruel and hurtful when others become that way towards us. Full self-acceptance is a fundamental requirement for that self-love which Jesus’ ethical principles urge upon us if we are to become a blessing to all living things, as discussed in Chapter 5 of this book.

One of the grave disservices which St Paul has done to many people who have read those of his letters which are recorded in the Christian Bible, is to help create in their minds the same deep splits as he had between his Persona and his Shadow, between the biological reality of who he was as a human being (his ‘carnal mind’), and the spiritual side of his being.

5. How can we identify what lies in our Shadow?

This can be a lengthy process, perhaps inevitably a lifelong one, requiring much ruthlessly honest soul-searching. There is, however, one very quick and simple technique to help us to find at least some of our Shadow qualities, and that is succinctly captured in the snappy sentence, If you can spot it, you’ve got it!. It is not always a totally reliable indicator of what is going on in ourselves, but it is a fairly safe bet that when some behaviour or characteristic of someone else really gets under our skin and annoys us more than we might reasonably expect it to, it is because our Shadow contains the potential for engaging in just such behaviours, and expressing in various ways the very attitudes whose presence in someone else annoys us so much.

6. Is it always a bad thing to make a mistake?

There are at least three different fundamental learning processes, through the mechanism of which experience changes our behaviour. The most important of these is trial-and-error learning, in which the probability of our repeating any particular behaviour is influenced by the consequences of that behaviour.¹⁰ Broadly speaking, if anything we do brings us pleasure (short-term or long-term) then we shall be more likely to do that same thing again when we are in the same or a closely similar situation. If the consequences of any behaviour we engage in are unpleasant, we are less likely to engage in that behaviour again in the future.

For trial-and-error learning to occur, two things are essential: the one is to sometimes do something right and the other thing is to sometimes do something wrong, to make a mistake. We rarely make a perfect job of our initial attempts at doing the things we later become skilful at. Making a mistake can sometimes be a disaster but it can also be an invaluable learning experience. It all depends on what happens after we have made the mistake; what happens in terms of the behaviour of other people who witness our mistake, and what we think and do after making that mistake. Even the great Einstein lived with the experience of frequently making mistakes. He wrote, I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right. Fortunate indeed are those who have learned to view adult life not as an examination to assess how thoroughly they have learned the lessons they have been taught in earlier life, but rather as a continuous learning experience.

Trial-and-error learning has the experience of failure, of ‘making an error’, at the very heart of its structure. Failure does not mean we have reached the end of the particular road we have been travelling on; it is a stage in the learning process towards eventual success. In this frame of mind one can sometimes even laugh at one’s failures – they are not the end of the world, and life will go on regardless of them. Whether we go on to ever-greater heights of achievement or to an old age of bitterness and despair depends entirely on our attitude towards that failure. Was it a valuable, albeit painful, learning experience