The illness is this: Christianity made its God entirely good. The Church, following Augustine, declared evil a mere absence, a privatio boni, a hole in being rather than a power. I understand why. A good God whose creation contains darkness is an unbearable thought. But the psyche does not obey doctrine. What is denied in heaven does not disappear; it descends into the unconscious and returns from outside, wearing the face of the enemy. Christendom split its shadow off and found it everywhere else: in the Devil, the heretic, the Jew, the witch. Two thousand years of persecution are what a civilization looks like when it cannot say of its own darkness, this too is mine. I have seen the same pattern in the consulting room a thousand times. The patient who insists on his own pure goodness is always the one most dangerous to his neighbors.

Look at the symbols themselves, for they are wiser than the theologians. The Christ figure is a true image of the Self, the totality of the psyche, but it is a totality with its dark half cut away. The psyche knows this, which is why the tradition could never rid itself of the Antichrist. He is the compensation, the missing brother. The Trinity is three where wholeness requires four. The fourth place, kept empty, is where matter, the body, the feminine, and evil are all banished together. When the Pope proclaimed the Assumption of Mary into heaven, I considered it the most significant religious event in four centuries, because the excluded feminine was at last being readmitted to the divine. The Protestants, who emptied even Mary out, only drove the abstraction further.

And the symbols have died in the people. My patients do not lack religion; they lack religious experience. They have creeds they assent to and no living encounter with what the creeds once named. A dogma that no longer grips the soul becomes a husk, and the energy that once animated it does not vanish. It goes looking for new vessels. I watched it pour into the mass movements of my own century: whole nations seized by gods they did not recognize, marching under banners that were only the old faith turned inside out. This is enantiodromia, the law by which every extreme becomes its opposite. A civilization that worshipped pure light has been generating its own darkness all along.

The cure is not to abandon Christianity. That only leaves the soul homeless. Nor is it to imitate Christ, copying an external model while one's own life goes unlived. The task is to live one's own life as completely as Christ lived his, to carry one's own cross, which means bearing one's own opposites consciously. Each person must take back the projected shadow, piece by piece, and admit that the evil he hates in the world has a home in him. This is harder than any dogma, and nothing can be done on behalf of the masses. It is done one person at a time, or not at all. The world hangs by a thin thread, and that thread is the psyche of the individual.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5914841&forum_id=2#50209210)