While I do not agree with what James Hillman says about the Old Testament (and he seems to partake of that Jungian pattern in which anti-semitic attitudes are redirected towards Christians), nevertheless, he has something very important to say about ancient (and by implication Patristic) modes of pre-Enlightenment consciousness. He observes that it is not so much the case that "primitive" man *personifies*, as that modern man *de-personalizes* and *de-personifies* even to the point of labelling any concerted attempt to *recover* personality *regressive* and *psychotic*: "Western philosophical tradition from its beginnings in the Presocratics and in the Old Testament has been prejudiced against images (*phantasia*) in favour of thought-abstractions. In the period since Descartes and the Enlightenment, during which conceptualization has held preeminence, the psyche's tendency to personify has been distainfully put down as anthropomorphism. One of the main arguments against the mythical mode of thinking has been that it works in images, which are subjective, personal, sensuous. This above all must be avoided in epistemology, in descriptions of nature. To personify has meant to think animistically, primitively, pre-logically. The senses deceive; images that would relay truth about the world must be purified of their anthropomorphic elements; the only persons in the universe are human persons. Yet the experience of the Gods, of heroes, nymphs, demons, angels and powers, of sacred places and things, *as persons* indeed precedes the concept of personification. It is not that we personify, but that the epiphanies come as persons..."A cry went through late antiquity: "Great Pan is dead!" Plutarch reported it in his "On the failure of the Oracles"(*de def. or. 17*), yet the saying has itself become oracular, meaning many things to many people in many ages... Nature no longer spoke to us -- or we could no longer hear. The person of Pan the mediator, like an aether who invisibly enveloped all natural things with personal meaning , with brightness, had vanished. Stones became only stones -- trees, trees, things, places, and animals no longer were this God or that, but became `symbols' or were said to `belong' to one God or another. When Pan is alive then nature is too, and it is filled with Gods, so that the owl's hoot *is* Athene and the mollusc on the shore *is* Aphrodite. These bits of nature are not merely attributes or belongings. They are the Gods in their biological forms. And where better to find the Gods than in the things, places and animals that they inhabit, and how better to participate in them than through their concrete natural presentations. Whatever was eaten, smelled, walked upon or watched, all were sensuous presences of archetypal significance. When Pan is dead, then nature can be controlled by the will of the new God, man, modelled in the image of Prometheus or Hercules, creating from it and polluting in it without a troubled conscience... Panic, especially at night when the citadel darkens and the heroic ego sleeps, is a direct *participation mystique* in nature, a fundamental, even ontological experience of the world as alive and in dread. Objects become subjects; they move with life while one is oneself paralyzed with fear. When existence is experienced through instinctual levels of fear, aggression, hunger or sexuality, images take on compelling life of their own. The imaginal is never more vivid than when we are connected with it instinctually. The world alive is of course animism; that this living world is divine and imaged by different Gods with attributes and characteristics is polytheistic pantheism. That fear, dread, horror are natural is wisdom. In Whitehead's term "nature alive" means Pan, and panic flings open a door into this reality" (James Hillman, pp.xxi, xxii-xxiii,xxxi of _Pan and the Nightmare_(Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher, _Ephialtes: A Pathological-Mythological Treatise on the Nightmare in Classical Antiquity_(1900) together with James Hillman, _An Essay on Pan_ (1972), New York: Spring Publications (Dunquin Series 4).

---

Pan alive? Lucifer? Serpent symbol of both Christ and Satan? No, Christ is Risen! ? <"The Archangel is reborn, the devil dies, And I erase the evil night, and naught remains. Satan is dead; rise up, celestial Lucifer" (From Victor Hugo, *La fin du Satan*, quoted by Giovanni Papini)>? No, Christ is Risen! Indeed He is Risen! Nature alive? No, Nature Restored and Renewed in Christ! Nature alive in a Whole New Way! Creation Restored! Pan restored? Christ is Risen! Indeed he is Risen! Osiris? No, Christ is Risen! Indeed He is Risen!

Clement of Alexandria, _Selections from the Protreptikos_, New York: New Directions, 1962 (An essay and Translation by Thomas Merton). I. Clement of Alexandria/ II. The New Song / II. Diatribe Against the Old Gods 1. Zeus is Dead 2. The Idol of Sarapis 3. The Priests of the Old Gods IV. The Logos our Teacher V. Soldiers of Peace. "Now it seems to me that since the Word Himself has come down from heaven to us, we no longer have any need for the schooling of men, / Nor need we get excited any more over Athens or the rest of Greece, or Ionia either. / For if we have as Master the One who fills all things with His sacred strength by the Creation, salvation and the doing of all good, / By His laws, prophesies and teachings, / He is our teacher in all things, / And the whole world is now become Athens and Greece because of the Word. / Do not then give your belief to the poetic myth of Minos the Cretan living in fellowship with Zeus, and refuse us your belief when we have become the disciples of God. / For we hold in trust the only true wisdom / Which the greatest philosophers have barely glimpsed / But which the disciples of Christ have received and announced to the world..." (From page 23 of _The Logos our Teacher_).

---

M. A. Screech, _Ecstasy and the Praise of Folly_, London: Gerard Duckworth & Co. Ltd., 1980.

M. A. Screech, _Good Madness in Christendom_, in W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd (eds.), _The Anatomy of Madness Essays in the History of Psychiatry_, London and New York: Tavistock Publications, 1985, Volume I.

Stanislav Grof, M. D., and Christina Grof (eds.), _Spiritual Emergency *When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis*_, Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc., 1989.

John Savard, _Perfect Fools Folly for Christ's Sake in Catholic and Orthodox Spirituality_, Oxford University Press, 1980.

Herbert Thurston, _The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism_, London: Burns, 1952.

Johann H. Diemer, _Nature & Miracle_, Toronto: Wedge Publishing Foundation, 1977 [trans. Wilma Bouwma of Part I of _Natuur en Wonder_, Amsterdam: Buijten en Schipperheijn, 1963 (Christelijk Perspectief series)].

June, 1996

mmm

Index