ABSTRACT This article has the purpose of calling attention to C.G. Jung's archetypal concept of the Self as an approach to ethics. The distinction between simple morality and transcendent ethics is established. Comparison is made between the archetype of the Self and Kant's Categorical Imperative. Freud's Superego, however. is assimilated to a "natural" outlook on morality, such as the notion of Altruism in sociobiology. The Superego is only the psychic effect of the current moral code, which could be explained either culturally or as a Lamarckian acquired characteristic of the Unconscious. Jung's transcendent ethics is expressed in an "ethical mandala.

This article has the simple purpose of calling attention to the possibility of an approach to ethics from Jung's archetypal conception of the Self. The whole of Jung's psychology is, of course, up to a certain point, ethical. It is not only a theoretical conception of the psyche and a method of cure, but it also teaches a way of life. Yet there are few essays in which Jung deals specifically with the mystery of moral and ethical behavior. The fundamental work in this connection is a small essay, “A Psychological View of Conscience”, published in 1958 ¹.

Of all the theories published on the subject by Jung's disciples, the best known is Neumann's Depth Psychology and New Ethics.2 I confess, however, that I am often incapable of understanding exactly what, from the point of view of ethics, the concept of "acceptance of evil" or 4'integration of the shadow" means. No clear explanation exists, to my knowledge, of what "aceptance of evil" really entails, nor is there a clear distinction between the two types of evil, the evil we suffer (malum poenae or malum quod patimur of St. Augustine), and evil we do or cause (malum culpae or malum quod agimus). The first type is a central issue in religion, as we know. Jung dealt with it in his controversial “Answer to Job"3 . But only the second type of evil is the direct concern of ethics.

We may ask, then, what does it mean to "accept evil," for instance, in Auschwitz? How could you? Brother Maximilian Kolbe perhaps did accept the malum poenae when he voluntarily offered himself for suffering and death, to replace another prisoner who was condemned to die of hunger in a dark cell. That is how he became a saint. On the other hand, the man who "accepts" the evil that is in himself is simply a criminal. The SS warden for instance, if you take the expression to its full significance. The problem of ethics deals precisely with the inner struggle between opposites, the evil we may suffer and the evil we may cause. Such is the inner struggle that fills an essential and eternal part of the human condition. No amount of lucubration around the “integration of the shadow” as proposed in the process of individuation, seems satisfactory to clarify the issue. If this is not so, then I really never understood the implications of Jung's conception of the dynamics of the psyche.

Another point I would like to challenge is whether or not there is indeed such a thing as “new ethics." The growth of ethics in the perennial philosophy has been a slow and difficult process that started with the Hebrew prophets and the Greek philosophers of the Socratic school; was developed by the Roman stoics, and found its highest expression in the Christian Founding Fathers from St. Paul to St. Augustine. Then it impregnated the whole of Western society at the time of the Protestant Reformation, and became a metaphysical obsession with the philosophes of the Enlightenment. Finally, ethics turned into a renewed issue among modern existentialists and depth psychologists. The questions of ethics are more than 2,500 years old. I find no merit whatsoever in pretending that there could be "new ethics" that would "integrate" evil and "combine" the opposing forces of good and evil in a "new structure." How could you "combine," for instance, a Nazi SS. with a Jewish prisoner at Buchenwald? Or "integrate" an inhabitant of Hiroshima with an exploding atomic bomb? Or a dissident with a warden in the Gulag. Or a dying man with his cancer? Or, for that matter, any innocent child that dies - precisely that type of evil that tormented Dostoievsky and has become a kind of central skandalon in contemporary "existential" literature? Speculations on the "integration of evil" seem often to forget what Jung himself had to say about "absolute evil" in the world. Such meaningless chatter is a sort of psychological alibi for permissiveness, with as little significance as the Scholastic notion of privatio boni that used to irritate Jung so much. Perhaps analytical psychology needs a new Voltaire and a new Candide to disperse the haze of the new euphemisms.

I am not proposing any new approach to ethics, but only suggesting that Jung's concept of the Transcendent Function does not deviate from the lofty tradition of the perennial philosophy. This path to the mystery of ethics in a world contaminated by evil is trodden for the first time by such Hebrew prophets as Jeremiah and such Greek philosophers as Plato and his followers. It postulates an inner moral law which is not imposed from the outside but grows within the heart of the psyche. Let us recall Jeremiah in Chapter 1 – where the soul is built as a fortified city; or where the Lord says, "I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts" (Jeremiah 32:33).

Truly, the only issue of ethics is, to my mind, that which opposes the "natural" or positivistic hypothesis of an "altruistic" inclination grafted to the genetic code, as against the idea that the Categorical Imperative has no possible empirical explanation, but arises out of the Transcendent Function of the psyche. The transcendence of the ethical imperative arises logically from the postulate of the substantial existence of evil in this world. It is, therefore, a point of issue between the sociobiologists or "natural" philosophers, and those who cannot accept such an easy and improvised shortcut. Psychologically, the opposition is that which differentiates Freud's concept of Superego from Jung's Self as a mouthpiece of the Deity, a vox Dei.

This is the gist of my necessarily short argument.

Jung has made an important distinction between the moral conscience and the ethical The first type of conscience refers to the psychic reaction that occurs when the conscious mind decides to abandon the usual path of customs, of habits, and of the mores. In this sense, moral consciousness can hardly be distinguished from the fear of primitive man of everything that is uncommon, extraordinary, or not in accordance with the usual behavior of everybody in such and such circumstances. As such, it constitutes a practically instinctive reaction and could, when all is said, be reducible to an inherited pattern of behavior, to a trait grafted in the genetic code of man.

The ethical consciousness implies, on the other hand, that the reaction in behavior is already reflective, that is, already subject to the conscious judgment of what is right or wrong, according to higher criteria of justice. The problem of ethics is raised when a conflict of duties appears, when there is a discordance between two possible ways of behavior. The imperative requires an option between alternatives that present themselves to consciousness - a Kierkgaardian Enten Eller4, “either... or", in such a way that the mere blind obedience to the code or written law cannot satisfy the moral requirement of the moment any more. The ethical and the supreme commandment as a "leap" of faith always arise in complex situations, such as when the action of good and evil is utterly jumbled and choice becomes a difficult matter. It is in such an emergency that modern ethics has become concerned with the problem of the situation (situation ethics) in which an individual finds himself. "Sick unto death," he is then called to take a decision relevant not only to himself but to other people as well. A good example of this either or ethical dilemma was when Count von Stauffenberg violated the moral code of the German army, his patriotic duty, and his sacred oath of loyalty in order to kill Hitler. Indeed he lied, he betrayed, and he murdered on behalf of a higher ethical duty toward humanity. Thereby he became a hero.

The moral transition from the mores to the ethical would correspond to the "new covenant" in which, as defined by the prophet Jeremiah (31:33), the law would not be written on tables of stone anymore but in the hearts of men. So also said Ezekiel.... . and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh and I will give you-a heart of flesh" (36:26). St. Paul repeated this idea in his second Epistle to the Corinthians (3:3):... the law will henceforth be written not with ink, not on tables of stone but in fleshy tables of the heart." This whole ideal became part of the Judeo-Christian world-view when it merged with the Platonic concept that ethics are to be implanted in the soul by education and culture (Paideia), through the Socratic process of coming-to-know oneself (gnothe seauton). Therefore, I believe that the process of individuation in Jung's terms is but a refined type of Socratic investigation in one's own soul.

In Christianity, the simple negative commandments of the law have become a general positive commandment of love, inspired by faith and moved by hope, which thus replaces the law in the plenitude of the spirit: an inner transformation which was brought about, according to the Scriptures of the believers, by the sacrificial oblation of the Servant of the Lord.

"Only the creative power of the ethos, which expresses the whole man, can pronounce a judgment," Jung asserts. Judgment would therefore become a typical example of what may be called the "transcendental function". It results from the cooperation of rational conscious factors (intelligence and feeling) with the irrational factors of external reality as perceived by the senses, and as significant as immediately understood outside time and space through intuition. In theological language, one would say that judgment teaches a solution through the cooperation of reason and grace. And in this case, we believe it emanates from the unconscious depths of the soul, fully transcending the Ego.

Our approach sets the problem of ethics on a deeper level as against the Freudian concept of Superego. It refutes the hypothesis of an "altruistic" tendency in man, as propounded by modern sociobiology, and generally speaking, it rejects all so-called "naturalistic" solutions to the problems of the ethical imperative. The purpose of this essay is to establish Jung's ethical function of the unconscious in parallel line with Kant's categorical imperative of practical reason5, as fully independent of any possible naturalistic or empirical explanation, originating either from the history of culture or in the extrapolations of sociobiology.

"The concept and phenomenon of conscience contains therefore," Jung explains, "when seen under a psychological light ... two factors well differentiated: on one hand, a calling or admonition through the mores; on the other hand, a conflict of duties and its solution through the creation of a third point of view. The first is the moral aspect and the second the ethical aspect of conscience." Our thesis is simply that only Jung's so-called moral aspect can be analyzed from a naturalistic point of view or as a purely cultural or biological product of the superego; whereas the ethical aspect belongs entirely to the field of the religiously transcendent.

Returning to our example: if Count von Stauffenberg had not done anything in July 1944, he would have remained entirely within the confines of the Nazi mores of that time, and his behavior could be explained by obedience to his German Superego. He would not even have betrayed Kant's Prussian concept of duty. That he went far beyond what is implicitly required by the categorical imperative, that is, that he betrayed, lied, murdered, and behaved altogether in such a way as to be considered fully outside a rational norm of universal application, proves that something transcendental compelled him. His was an act well beyond the call of duty-an act in which a Christian would say that he was moved by grace. Kierkegaard, discussing a similar issue, in Fear and Trembling,6 refers to a skandalon that goes beyond or violates the ethical, to become a religious act inspired by faith. Jung would say that it was an act beyond the moral, a hearing of the vox Dei.

Let us return to our original argument concerning the notion of Superego.

Jung has set a fundamental distinction in his thought about the problem of ethics from the theories of Freud. The “archaic vestiges" suggested by Freud or his “collective mind" raise the possibility that moral ideas or traditions could be inherited, after having been acquired through consciousness. This Lamarckian faux pas could hardly correspond to Jung's framework. The archetypes of the collective unconscious are not “ideas" but “inherited types”, instructive modes of behavior, hereditary patterns of psychic reaction, or "primordial images," the origin of which is unknown- Jung believes it probable that those notions of Freud were concessions to the theory of archetypes, to which he finally surrendered in the latter, more pessimistic, and deeper development of his thinking. I wonder whether or not it could be explained by an unconscious influence of Jung himself upon his former master and friend. Freud's concepts nevertheless raise a fundamental doubt concerning the dependence of the contents of the unconscious upon consciousness - hence, solely upon the history of culture.

We must emphasize that such a departure, inherent in Freud's thesis, implies a certain acceptance by Freud of Lamarck's biological "heresy" - the genetic transmission of acquired characteristics. This, to modern scientists, is an unforgivable sin. Take, for instance, Freud's hypothesis that the conscious act of original parricide and "social contract" among the rebellious sons, while establishing the totemic community and the incest tabu, became, as it were, an acquired "complex" of the species, with moral consequences. We must consider such a Freudian scenario: while ontogenetically the contents of the personal unconscious are made up of the conscious material that has been repressed through censorship, philogenetically the contents of the "collective mind" arise from the traumatic shock suffered by mankind in the early days of its psychic history. Freud, in Totem and Tabu,7 leaves us in no doubt that he believes the original parricide was indeed a fact, a real prehistorical event that left mankind with a collective conscientia peccati. "Im Anfang war die Tat," he quotes from Goethe.

Now this is precisely what Jung objects to when he argues that neither ontogenetically nor philogenetically is the unconscious dependent on consciousness, by the simple fact that the unconscious precedes consciousness. The unconscious in Jung's psychological framework is that part of the psyche that represents an a priori. This idea can easily be confirmed by the fact that the human brain functions in children before the first signs of a conscious functioning and accumulating of memory at three, four, or five years of age. There are strong indications that the psyche functions even before the actual birth of the child - the electroencephalogram reveals such activity.

Jung acknowledges indeed the possibility of transformation and development of the unconscious psyche. He refers often to new archetypes, which seem to appear all along the history of the human mind. However, he refrains from giving any explanation for the fact. We become aware of such a process of development only through the "transformation" (Wandlung) of its symbols, and that is all. Jung argues, furthermore, that the unconscious can be repressed or consciously ignored, but only temporarily and at a cost. Sooner or later it will come to life. If it were not so, there would be no mental problems, no use for psychotherapy, no need to get upset with ethics. We would through intuition and the mere strength of will remodel the unconscious, in accordance with our highest purposes. But Jung concludes that "only unworldly idealists, rationalists. and other fanatics can indulge in such dreams."

The psyche is a natural phenomenon. It is nature itself and is only relatively subject to the impulses of our will. Nature can be cultivated, partially modified, and artificially transformed after much patience, knowledge, and care, but only with serious risks to the balance of our humanity. Man, says Jung, "can be transformed into a sick animal, but not moulded into an intellectual ideal." As a matter of fact, Jung is much closer to biology than Freud, a critical remark that is rather curious, since Freud is generally applauded by positivistically inclined scientists, while Jung is disavowed and criticized as a mystic, an obscurantist, and a contemptor scientiae.

Furthermore, this is the reason why Jung repudiates all utopic endeavor intent upon transforming human nature by putting man in a Procrustean bed. When inspired by one kind or other of ideological panacea, the violation of the archetypal characteristics of the unconscious -that is, of the nature of the human psyche - can only bring about the most dreadful calamity. This has been sufficiently demonstrated in the present century.

The unconscious is exactly that - unconscious. We do not know for sure what it is; neither do we know its limits. We can only surmise that it rises from the activities of the neuro-vegetative and cerebral systems-and that its working corresponds to the labor of the brain. Consciousness represents the modifiable portion of the psyche. The unconscious is the autonomous portion. Culture is, as it were, the collective consciousness. We may suggest, therefore, that the history of man is dialectically ruled by the confrontation between culture and the unconscious. Jung maintains that the best results in education and in psychological analysis would occur when the inflexible nature of the unconscious is recognized. We should, therefore, always look for its cooperation, in which case its compensatory character and its mysterious tendency to healing exercise a beneficial influence.

From all these considerations and from the example of dreams - a typical unconscious phenomenon - Jung is able to conclude that morality represents a basic law of the unconscious, or, at least, that ethics is an essential part of the unconscious and influences its activity. It is also well known that persons who undergo hypnosis are able to resist stubbornly any suggestion that offends the fundamental morality incorporated in their unconscious.

Jung reaches at this point the argument concerning a basic distinction between the moral code as a typical and variable cultural acquisition of consciousness, and ethics as a universal attribute of the human psyche, integrated, as it were, in consciousness as well as in the unconscious. Freud's superego is only the psychic effect of the moral code. It is consciously acquired through education and social imposition, and takes as its model the superego of the parents and teachers. Jung's ethics, on the other hand, are an essential part of the self and therefore transcend the ego.

For a long time I believed that Freud's conception of the superego was very practical. It was simple and clear and could account for the moral structure of the psyche. Little by little, however, I became convinced of the limitations of Freud's theory. Ethics certainly burrows much deeper into the psyche. Ethics emerges from the collective unconscious; and although Jung never proposed a separate category to fit it into, the Jungian superego can in fact be described as the "transcendental ethical function" of the self.

Analytical experience indicates a peculiar type of reaction common to persons who, consciously, strive to follow a strict pattern of moral behavior. To prove this point, Jung tells an amusing story of how, once upon a time, he was consulted by a woman of high social standing. This woman had the most impeccable comportment and cultivated an inner attitude she considered of the highest "spiritual" caliber. She was, in short, a real lady. Now, it happened that this distinguished matron was being assaulted by the most scandalous dreams, in which she watched or impersonated drunken prostitutes, cabaret dancers, and strip-teasers, suffering from venereal diseases and falling into all kinds of sexual perversions. Freud might easily have explained such dreams as intended to satisfy the secret and repressed libidinous wishes of the immaculate woman. Such a version, however, does not seem to satisfy other conditions of the case: the lady was properly married and lived a normal sexual life. The unconscious was simply there - so Jung believed - trying to reestablish an equilibrium against an excessive tendency to fantasies of a "spiritual" incorruptibility. The woman wished simply and deliberately to ignore the sordid realities of the world.

To my mind, this case illustrates the position of the arrogan Puritan psyche. What tremendous profane dreams, erotic and perverse, must have tormented the most severe and strict among the proper Victorians! A curious personality was that of Gladstone, the most celebrated among Queen Victoria's ministers. A man of extraordinary moral strength, Gladstone lived under permanent obsession with moral and humanitarian questions, went to the defense of political prisoners in Naples and of Bulgars against Turkish atrocities, visited the squalid slums of London trying to convert prostitutes to an honest life, and, according to reports, flagellated himself continually with the purpose - as one may presume - of resisting the libidinous temptations that assaulted him. As a matter of fact, what is Freudism itself but a sort of sexual nightmare tormenting the last camp followers of the Victorian age?

In the case of the respectable lady, we may advance the supposition that her torments had quite different roots. They originated from a secret sin that does not fit the psychoanalytical approach - in other words, it was not libidinous but demonic, the sin of pride. Her "spiritual" pretensions masked a pharisaic arrogance. She was being punished by God for that, through her traumatic and polluting dreams.

The most common form of the ethical conflict is, however, that which takes place in the moral conscience resisting the instinctual impulses of the flesh.

The psychology of moral man was admirably analyzed by St. Paul. After discussing the problem of the law in the Epistle to the Galatians, the Apostle proclaimed the liberty of the Christian, that is, the ethical autonomy of conscience in faith, hope, and charity. The law is, as it were, introjected. The Christian is a "new man" who has been liberated by Christ from the law -from the legalistic, strict, and detailed code of Moses. But as he becomes a "spiritual" man, the convert absorbs in himself the Commandments of the Torah. Psychologically speaking, I would dare say that the law formerly imposed and sustained by the superego is now integrated into the self. Christ grants to this new man the strength of the "law of faith”, the "law of the Spirit", of love which is grace. The Platonic conception is absorbed into Christian ethics when Paul of Tarsus refers to the "inner man”, the man of pneuma (pneumatikos) who is opposed to the "outer man”, the man of "flesh" (sarkikos).

Here bursts forth the famous inner struggle as described in the seventh chapter of the Epistle to the Romans. We are faced with the anguish of an emotional and intellectual conflict, the antithesis between two laws or impulses, a moral rational force that arises against the inexorable energy of the libido. "For we know that the law is Spiritual [pneumatic] but I am carnal, sold under sin." The moral polemic within conscience is described as follows: "For that which I do I allow not; for what I would, that do I not, but what I hate, that do I. If then I do that which I would not, I consent unto the law that it is good. Now then it is no more I that do it, but Sin that dwells in me. For I know that in me dwells no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but Sin that dwells in me...." The Apostle perceived "another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin - "which is in my members." And he concludes in desperation: "0 wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"

To my mind, the first Biblical example of an inner conflict between "moral" conscience and the instinctive drive to evil appears quite early in the Bible as the paradoxical tale of Balaam and his ass. The story is interesting insofar as in this case the sin referred to is not carnal but spiritual, the gravest of them all, the sin of pride. We return to the case of the "spiritual" lady who was succored by Jung. Perhaps the dream episode that tormented her was related to the high claims of her pride as far as her own moral values were concerned. In the amusing fable of Balaam, it was precisely the "body," as symbolized by the donkey, that is, the' unconscious, which rebelled against the prosecution of the inauspicious anti-Israelite projects of the last great prophet among the Gentiles. Thanks to the eyes of the donkey, torn between the sword of the Angel of the Lord and the strokes of its master, Balaam was able to "see" the dark path into which he had strayed, under the goading of his own immoderate ambition. The experience with his ass represented, for Balaam, something like a hallucination suggested by the voice of God, vox Dei. God spoke indeed through the voice of an ass to this most intelligent man.

In the passage of the Epistle to Romans that we quoted, St. Paul invokes "the law of my mind" or "the law of my Reason." The Greek term employed is nous, a word with an illustrious philosophical progeny, since it means precisely rational "thinking" as a function of consciousness in Jung's psychology, rational intelligence. Many centuries later, as we know, the concept of a "law of Reason" in ethics attains its full development thanks to Kant and his concept of the categorical imperative of practical reason. The nous corresponds to rational thinking as a function of consciousness in Jung´s psychology, whereas the spirit, pneuma, seems to be related rather to Jung's "intuition". The spirit has to do as much with the supernatural spirit, the Holy Ghost as the third person of the Deity, as with the plain individual spirit in the biblical sense, ruach -- the superior part of man in opposition to the flesh, sarkis. In the following chapter of the same Epistle (the eighth), St. Paul follows at length his discourse on the life of the spirit in Christ, setting an opposition between "those who live according to the spirit, willing that which is spiritual," from "those who live according to the flesh, willing that which is carnal" (8:5-1l).

In the theology of St. Paul-or rather in his psychology-there occurs this very subtle distinction between "flesh" and "body." The body is not destined to destruction as the Greeks believed, but to an eschatological end as wished by the Jews: its final destination is transferred to the end of times, in the Day of Judgment. The body of the Christian has been redeemed by the death of Christ; it has been in principle liberated from the corruption of the flesh and is potentially inhabited by the spirit. This explains why, strictly speaking, the Christian from St. Paul's theological point of view has to believe not in the "immortality of the Soul"-such immortality is not even mentioned in the Credo - but in "Resurrection", a resurrection that in this case is not exactly that of the flesh but of the whole body. One may go so far as to advance that what is promised is the resurrection of the form of the body, in the Aristotelian sense of the term, and not of the material substance of which the body is made. We know incidentally from modern biological science that the chemicals that make up the human body are constantly being renewed: it is the formal organization of the body that survives through life.

In the long philosophical history of Western ethics, it is the concept of nous or reason that is of paramount importance. The conflict between reason and the passions of man, between the rational conscience and the emotional up-thrust of the instincts, was thoroughly examined and analyzed, the examination reaching its culminating point in the metaphysical thinking of the Enlightenment. The crowning achievement in this evolution - let us again be reminded - is to be found in Kant. We see, therefore, how this Greek conception partially adopted by Christianity through St. Paul, which has survived up to the Age of Reason, has been opposed on one side by Freud, and on the other by Jung. Both paradoxically repudiate the Greek model. Freud returns antithetically to the Jewish notion of an external law which is imposed by the Father (in other words the Torah, the Superego), while Jung asserts the properly Christian, concept of virtue as a grace, an inner gratuitous gift emanating freely from God-or from the unconscious.

Let us therefore return to Jung. In his analysis of consciousness, the master emphasizes the paradoxical, ambivalent, and contradictory nature of this psychic category, the archetype. The paradox is an old friend of all those philosophers1 theologians, and moralists who have focused on the subject. Every one of them recognized long ago that, next to a "good" conscience, there is a "bad" conscience such as that which perturbed the distinguished lady, tormented by her obscene nightmares. This bad conscience exaggerates, perverts, and contorts good into evil, and may contaminate even our scruples - everything with the same compulsion. If it were not so, incidentally, there would be no "questions of conscience" or "twinges of conscience," and it would be enough for us simply to surrender to the superficial and momentary dictate of proper behavior. Only a person of an inflexible and monumental strength in faith, a faith like that of St. Paul and of St. Anthony of Egypt, capable of moving mountains, can obey exclusively the dictates of his conscience. The hypocritical Pharisee would remain strictly obedient to the commands of the usual moral code. But in these our permissive days it is much easier to invoke the arguments of "authenticity," "liberation," and so on, and even to caress the flowery alibi of an "enlargement of the field of consciousness." Thereby one finds justification for one's pride, for surrender to one's own libidinous impulses, and for obedience to the pleasure principle. There has certainly been no more abused principle than that that is proposed to a man inspired by love, by the formula "everything is allowed." There is a correlate in the violation of the sublime proposition of Augustine, love and do as thou willest" - ama et fac quod vis.

The following fact is curious: Ethics is no longer very "fashionable" among philosophers. After it became a quasi-universal preoccupation of the thinkers of the eighteenth century, it discreetly retired during the nineteenth to the closed hunting grounds of the existential paradoxes of a Kierkegeard or a Nietzsche. In our century ethics was covered by the heavy shadow of Freud and his worshippers, all of whom were apparently more interested in "freeing" man from his sexual complexes than in formulating ethical principles in the traditional line of Western thought. Furthermore, in this politically obsessed century, it is the question of social justice, peace, freedom, and equality that attracts the paramount attention of social thinkers. For the mature and enlightened spirits we all consider ourselves to be - in this era of tremendous victories in scientific knowledge, marvellous technical breakthroughs, and terrible experiments in political ideology - interest in ethics has been lost. I may turn to our own underdeveloped countries and become convinced of the nearly total disregard into which moral matters have fallen, as far as our mini-philosophers are concerned. On the other hand, it is impossible to deny that the problem of ethics enriches and tremendously fills the content of the best modern literature. The true giant of the moral thinking of the nineteenth century is certainly Dostoievsky, who wrote only novels, and one of whose greatest achievements is a mere detective story, The Brothers Karamazov.

Another excellent contemporary example is Graham Greene. The permanent theme of his novels is the conflict of conscience, evil as related to love, and sin. One of his best and more sombre works is, for instance, The Heart of the Matter,10 which deals precisely with the heart of this ethical issue. The hero is drawn to disgrace and suicide by his drive of compassion - torn as he became between faithfulness to his wife, the love of a young girl whom he tried to help, and the codes of the Catholic Church. The paradox Graham Greene explores is always that of the divided man between love and evil, inextricably interwoven. He returns again and again to Samuel Johnson's dictum that Hell is paved with good intentions. His philosophy is defined by one of his heroes: “Truth ... has never been of any value to human beings - it is simply made for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations, goodness and lies are worth a thousand truths."

Jung remarks that it is really difficult to distinguish the conscience of a conflict of duties from the simple problem of obedience to moral precepts. A superficial outlook reduces conscience to this kind of submission to the moral rule, as imposed by the conventions of the social environment. It is a pure product of culture. This type of morality which relies on the superego is truly so elementary that one can discover it even among animals. My little black poodle, for instance, shows in her sullen behavior the torments of conscience and remorse she undergoes at finding out that her "sin" - to urinate on the living room carpet - has been discovered by my wife.

The ethical problems that perturb and fill the true contemporary moralists with anxiety are those that arise between high conscience and the imperatives - of the law, of tradition, of customs, and of conventional wisdom; and those that have their origin in a conflict between love and moral duty. These are problems such as to revive the ancient Pauline antithesis between the Hebrew Law and the moral autonomy of the Christian. The theme transcends obviously the simplistic antagonism between rational will and the '4passions" of the soul - considering that these passions are not simply those of the flesh like lust, ire, aggressiveness, laziness, and gluttony, but also those of the spirit – selfishness, ambition, vanity, and conceit. Jung recalls the advice of St. John in his First Epistle (4:1) to the effect that we must believe not every spirit but try to find out whether or not such spirits are “of God.” Ours is the most serious responsibility to know whether the spirit is that of truth or that of error.

We must then recall the ancient understanding of conscience as a divine in­tervention, as a dictate from Heaven, as a voice emanating from the beyond, a vox Dei. In accordance with his well-known habit that so often irritates positivist psychologists - of taking seriously as an empirical reality the manifestations of the psyche whatever they are - Jung maintains that the vox Dei is an assertion and an opinion. All psychological facts that cannot be verified by scientific apparatuses and exact methods of measurements are assertions and opinions kept by a considerable number of people during a sufficiently long time. All myths, all legends, all fables, all general opinions and beliefs, even if contrary to the conventional and superficial wisdom of the bien pensants, are psychic realities. It is therefore a "psychological truth" that the voice of conscience as an archetype represents the voice of God. The question that remains is to transfer to the realm of psychology what constitutes an assertion of theology-that is, that the moral autonomy of conscience reflects a transcendental entity and is in fact a simple gift or grace of the Holy Spirit. And this means again, in other words, that the spirit of God speaks to us through the intuition of our conscience.

The dominance or sovereignty of the voice of conscience as vox Dei over conventional morality and the explicit code of the law, embodies the most serious and difficult of all problems of moral philosophy. The classic example is Socrates. When Socrates refused to obey Athens in the name of the daimon, the spirit or intuition that inspired him in his gravest hours, he brought upon himself his death sentence. However, immediately afterwards, when a chance was offered to him to escape from prison into the freedom of exile, Socrates proclaimed his debt to the '4paternal" laws of his city and remained on the spot, so that the unjust sentence could be carried out. St. Peter answered the High Priest who admonished him for teaching in the name of Jesus against the prohibition of the Sanhedrin, with words that repeat nearly ipsis verbis the Socratic precept: "We ought to obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29).

Sören Kierkegaard built the conflict between the "ethical" and the “religious" attitude as a result of the "mortal leap" of faith. This became the lofty subject of his celebrated work, Fear and Trembling.¹¹ It is the tremendous paradox of faith, a paradox that is capable of transforming into a sacred action a most dreadful murder - that of Isaac, the son, by his father, Abraham. Nevertheless, the paradox returns Isaac to Abraham. Such indeed is the paradox that "no thinking may rule, since faith begins precisely where thought abandons."

We may conclude by emphasizing the two points we have tried to develop in this article. The first is that the ethical categorical imperative transcends any possible explanation based on its reduction to a "natural", biological, or genetically ingrained inclination. The attempt of sociobiologists to postulate a genetically transmitted "altruism" that dwells in the Freudian superego is fated to absurdity. One needs only return to Kant's Critique of Practical Reason to reach the conclusion that the categorical imperative is not reducible to what the philosopher of Koenigsberg called a merely empirical law. We may reserve the name of mores to those empirical and culturally acquired strictures that have their origin in the superego. The superego in this context can be considered a purely cultural entity, having to do with the mores or the habitual collective behavior of a particular social group. The title of ethics, on the other hand, should be reserved for those imperatives that go beyond the bounds of simple morality and find their source in the archetypes of the unconscious. The center from which such imperatives emanate is quite rightly surmised by Jung to be the Self itself.

The second point is that if the ethical center of the soul lies in the Self, ethics cannot be reduced merely to a natural and existential virtue in the empirical reality of life in this world. Neither can it be metaphysically proposed as a function of rational thought, as Kant tried to do. Nor still can it be explained as the highest feelings of love, or as a Platonic intuition of the supreme good. It is not one but all of these things together, intimately bound up into a unity.

In our ethical mandala, so to speak, we may place the vox Dei at the center. From this center it will emerge intellectually and rationally as a categorical imperative or commandment of faith. It will be felt from the depth of the heart as a gift of love, or as grace, or as any of its variable expressions - altruism, sympathy, charity, affection, friendship, pity, compassion, and so on. It bursts forth as a hopeful intuition that, in the future, love, justice, truth, beauty, happiness, or any other of these ethical archetypes will ultimately come to perfection. And it expresses itself in the here and now of human existence through the exercise of the well-known "natural", existential, or pragmatic virtues of courage, patience, temperance, wisdom, justice, truthfulness, purity, or any other that may be considered.

You will already have perceived that I am trying to fit into my mandalic picture of the ethical self the virtues which for more than 2,000 years have been considered by the perennial philosophy of the Judeo-Greco-Roman-Christian West in its metaphysical endeavors. For the convenience of exposition, seven main virtues have been recognized. Four of them lie at the bottom of the mandala as related to the fonction du réel or sensation of our immediate environment: courage, wisdom, temperance, justice. The other three are the so-called cardinal or supernatural virtues: faith as the virtue of thinking about the truth, hope as an intuition of future perfection, and love as the highest feeling for the idea of the good. But remember that the Apostle says in the famous thirteenth chapter of his first Epistle to the Corinthians: "And now abide Faith, Hope, Love, these three, but the greatest of these is Love."

May we conclude that those virtues, as expressions of the supreme ethos of the self, are united in the soul in its quadripartition: the cross symbolizes their union in totality as it symbolizes also the suffering and contradictions of their action into the world. Pain, sin, and evil are always to be experienced by whoever quits the center.

References
1. Jung. C.G. -. "A Psychological view of Conscience." In Civilization in Transition, Collected Works, vol. 10. London. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958.

2. Neumann. E. - Depth Psychology and New Ethics. New York. Putnam's Sons. 1969.

3. Jung. C.G.-. "Answer to Job." In Psychology and Religion, Collected Works. Vol. 11. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952.

4. Kierkegaard. S. - Either-Or. Princeton University Press. 1944.

5. Kant. I.- Critique of Practical Reason.

6. Kierkegasrd. S. - Fear and Trembling. Princeton University Press. 1941.

7. Freud, S. - Totem and Tabu. London. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950.

8. Jung. C.G. -. Symbols of Transformation. Collected Works. vol 5. London. Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1912.

9. Dostoievsky, F. - The Brothers Karamazov. New York, Dell Publishing Co., 1956.

10. Greene, G.. - The Heart of the Matter. In The Portable Graham Greene. New York, Penguin Books. 1977.
11. Kierkegaard, S. - Fear and Trembling, opus cit