Self & Ego

A Eucharistic Psychology

§1: The Jungian distinction between the Self and the Ego—the Self being the transpsychological totality, of which the localized soul is a particular instantiation and franchisee, the Ego being the particular social fiction, symbol, token, or emissary of the Self which is part of the Self but not the whole Self—is a logical consequence of any nondualistic theology, cosmology, and anthropology. To say that God is infinite is to say that God includes the world and the human being; to say that God includes the world and the human being is to say that God is both the formal and final cause of world and humanity; and to say that God is formal and final cause of world and humanity is to say that God is both innermost and ultimate, interior intimo superiorque summo, identical, ubiquitous Self of both world and human being. This necessitates that we come to understand, in other words, how God may include without being delimited by the psychological peculiarities of individual beings, minds, and lives within creation. In Vedantic thought this is represented by the difference between the atman which is brahman, on the one hand, and the jiva on the other; in Platonic psychology, it is the difference between the true, higher Soul that is undescended, encircling the intellect, and the descended soul which is embodied in its pneumatic vehicle and its outer, fleshy sheath; in the Christian tradition, it is the distinction between the theandric spirit within and the soul which mediates between it and the body. Here, for convenience, I will use the Jungian idiom of Self and Ego, but there are many available idiomata that the reader may wish to draw on in different contexts.