112 -Evil: The Shadow Side of Reality

Evil: The Shadow Side of Reality
By John A. Sanford
New York, Crossroad, 1981. 161 pp. $10.95.

This study adds clarity and depth to Jung's unsystematic and often inconsistent writings on these subjects. The author writes as a priest and seeks to relate the archetypes to the biblical and traditional foundations of Christianity. His central thesis remains

113 -Evil: The Shadow Side of Reality

Jungian: in Christianity the gradual splitting off of the shadow and evil from the images of God, Christ, and the good has led to a dangerous double strategy-repression and denial of evil, on the one hand, and projection of repressed capacities for evil onto others, on the other hand.

He traces the emergence of this strategy in the Bible and early Christianity, gives interesting accounts of myths and images from pagan traditions which, when rejected as religiously suitable by Christianity, became vehicles for the expression of evil in Western culture. In the final sections, he undertakes a thoughtful reconciliation of Jung's critique of Christian teachings about evil with a fresh interpretation of the Augustinian teaching that evil is derivative from, and a distortion of, good.

Chapters on the shadow and "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" are the most informative. He insists that the shadow and our capacities for evil must be integrated into consciousness in the individuation process. Yet I wish he had given concrete case studies illustrating this process from his practice or observations. In neglecting the Protestant Reformation's recovery of the doctrine of original sin, especially in the Calvinist notion of "total depravity" (there is no human faculty left untouched by the fall), Sanford has overlooked the most powerful way Christianity, in modernity, has sought both to acknowledge the power of evil within us and to avoid projecting it on others.

James W. Fowler
Emory University
Atlanta, Ga.