Depth Theology - posted by Adam Carlton

Spinoza - Nagel's Bat - Jung

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God in the Depths: Theology and the Immanent Unconscious

Abstract

This essay argues for a renewed theology grounded in the irreducibility of consciousness and the symbolic architecture of the psyche. Rejecting both reductive materialism and naïve supernaturalism, it proposes a third path: a theology of the immanent unconscious.

Drawing on the insights of Thomas Nagel, Carl Jung, and Baruch Spinoza, the essay contends that meaning, not mechanism, lies at the heart of the religious impulse. Catholic doctrine, seen through this lens, becomes a symbolic system of deep psychological and moral truth, an archetypal engagement with moral and existential realities.

In recovering the sacred as a depth within and between us, this theology affirms an ontology of God as the structuring mystery of social consciousness, value, and personhood.

It is not an argument for belief, but an invitation to seriousness.

There is a fundamental category error at the heart of contemporary consciousness studies. The prevailing assumption is that if neuroscience were to model every neuronal firing, simulate every synaptic fluctuation, we would thereby explain consciousness. But this is demonstrably false. A complete scientific account of pain does not itself hurt. A full neural description of colour perception does not reveal the redness of red. The map, as always, is not the territory, and consciousness, by its nature, cannot be reduced to its own model.

This is not a trivial epistemological problem. It is an ontological signal. The irreducibility of first-person experience - the raw fact of qualia, the intentionality of thought, the burden of despair, the luminosity of dreams - marks a fault-line in the foundations of physicalism. Philosophers like Thomas Nagel and Frank Jackson have shown that no third-person theory can bridge this explanatory gap.

Consciousness cannot be "naturalised" by data alone.

Yet rejecting reductive materialism solves only half the problem. We must also abandon its opposite: the romantic fiction that consciousness is a sovereign theatre, a sealed chamber where the isolated ego reigns supreme: the Ghost in the Machine. This Enlightenment myth, so foundational to Western individualism, has been decisively undermined by the insights of depth psychology.

The self is not a monad; the psyche is not private property; it is a social ecology.

The Collective Unconscious as Immanent Depth

Carl Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious is often misunderstood: dismissed by many scientists as pseudoscience, or embraced by mystics as vague metaphysics. Properly interpreted, it is neither. It names the deep, inherited architecture of human meaning: a transpersonal symbolic grammar manifest in myth, dream, ritual, and art.

Jung called these structural motifs archetypes. They are neither learned nor invented. They are discovered, appearing spontaneously across cultures, pointing to shared psychic necessity rather than cultural contingency.

From this perspective, the psyche is not reducible to a passive canvas nor a neural by-product. It is a symbolic field in which individual life unfolds. Emotions like love, guilt, awe, and loneliness are not reducible to hormones or evolutionary adaptations. They are meaning-events. They refer us to something larger than ourselves. They bind us to the deep structure of collective human life.

And the unconscious, for Jung, is not just a dark attic of repressed thoughts. It is active. Moral. Alive. To live well is to engage it: to confront the shadow, to integrate contradiction, to enter symbolic dialogue with the archetypal forces that shape who we are. In doing so, we do not merely mature into ourselves; we encounter something sacred.

Reframing Spinoza: Substance as Symbolic Matrix

At this point, Spinoza’s metaphysics becomes startlingly relevant. His God is not a personalised cosmic superintendent, but the immanent substance of all that exists - Deus sive Natura. There is no intervention, no miracle, no heaven in the clouds. Only necessity, unfolding eternally. God is, rightly understood, synonymous with physical reality - but one freighted with meaning.

But what if we reframe this vision? Suppose the substance through which Spinoza's God manifests is not mere matter or extension but meaning. Suppose the symbolic structure of the psyche, rather than physical nature, is where Spinoza’s divine immanence is most intimately encountered.

Then the collective unconscious becomes not only a psychological concept, but a theological candidate: a crucible of archetypal reality; the actual matrix through which sacred depth becomes experientially real.

It's important to understand the structure of the argument here. We are not starting from some pre-existing concept of 'God' defined by sacred texts. Those texts - documenting transcendental experience - are part of what must be explained. Instead we are reflecting on the collective-unconscious, present in every human being as a core of empathy, sensitivity to the other and morality.

Everyone experiences these deontological impulses as prior to their own conscious deliberations. This fabric of meaning is, we argue, the true experience of the sacred. The common human experiences of love, mercy, justice, and forgiveness are felt with driving personal immediacy. The form of their meaning is socially shaped by ritual and by the primal archetypes Jung discerned.

We cannot deduce theology from our studies of the empirical. Science and faith are different categories and cannot contradict each other. But just as the experience of consciousness is not reducible to neuroscience, the experience of the sacred in myth and symbol and emotion and motivation retains its autonomy; its cultural expression: theology.

Religion Without Reduction: The Case of Catholicism

At this point a critic may interject: isn’t this just a sophisticated way of saying that religion is "all in our heads"?

Wrong framing. It is a way of saying that what is in our heads is not trivial. The religious imagination, expressed in sacraments, myths, and moral architecture, is far from arbitrary. It encodes truths. Archetypal truths. Catholicism in particular offers a rich symbolic system for the integration of opposites, the confrontation with suffering, and the aspiration to harmony.

The Trinity, the Crucifixion, the Eucharist, the communion of saints: these are not arbitrary propositions. They are psychic enactments of meaning: the reconciliation of the self with the other, the transformation of pain into participation, the moral weight of judgment, the longing for union. They are true not because they are literally factual, but because they are existentially indispensable.

Seen in this light, doctrine is not dogma. It is symbolic theology. It is the language in which human beings, for centuries, have worked out what it means to be fractured, to hope, to love, and to die.

Toward a New Paradigm: The Immanent Unconscious

This theological framing is neither traditional theism nor reductive atheism. It does not posit a God above the world, nor does it dismiss the sacred as superstition. It offers a third way: a theology of the immanent unconscious.

It begins with the irreducibility of conscious experience. It finds in the psyche not solipsism, but interconnection - the symbolic commons in which we are formed. And it finds there, not an argument for belief, but an invitation to depth.

The sacred is not elsewhere. It is here. In dream. In ritual. In the quiet refusal to hate. It is not accessed through proof, but through participation. Not in certainties, but in symbols. Not through control, but through reverence.

The Apophatic Horizon

Yet even this theology must stop before the final mystery. Why does it feel like anything to be? Why is the world not blank, but charged with value?

We do not know.

This unknowing is not failure. It is fidelity to truth. And in this silence, something ancient stirs. The tradition calls it apophatic theology. The refusal to name God in order to honour the fact that God is not a concept we can grasp.

To say God is mystery is not to evade meaning. It is to recognise that ultimate meaning is not grasped, but entered. Not defined, but encountered - in symbol, in suffering, in sacrament. Not as object, but as the very condition for subjectivity.

This is not alien to Catholicism. It is its mystical core.

God is not less real for being mysterious. The sacred is not less binding for being symbolic. What matters is not whether we can explain God. What matters is whether we live in fidelity to the mystery that speaks through us.

Not everything is merely atoms and the void. Meaning matters. And the mystery that calls us to it may still be what we mean by 'God'.

And that, perhaps, is theology enough to begin again.