That both science and religion have a pervasive influence on modern life is beyond serious dispute. However, the nature of each influence and, more particularly, the interplay between the two kinds of influence remain highly contentious. One issue that has continued to tax reflective individuals is how to understand the relationship itself between science and religion. Voluminous works address the issue from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives (see indicatively Brooke ; Barbour ; Clayton and Simpson ). In this article, I shall explore one recently promoted framework for understanding the relationship—panentheism—vis‐à‐vis another perspective—disenchantment—that historically has been highly influential. I shall argue that panentheism establishes different, more reconciliatory relations between science and religion than those implied by the perspective of disenchantment, but that these more reconciliatory relations may also entail revising how science and religion themselves are understood.

In developing this argument I shall first draw on recent work in the history of religions to set out the epistemological implications of disenchantment, including for the relationship between science and religion. I shall also note some of the undesirable social and cultural effects that have been attributed to disenchantment and have driven the search for alternatives. In the next section, I shall highlight that disenchantment has its roots in the metaphysics of theism, a view of the relationship between God and the world that has dominated Western religions and also implicitly influenced the development of science. I shall then provide a brief historical and conceptual account of the alternative metaphysical perspective of panentheism. From this account I shall adopt a generic definition of panentheism for orientation through the subsequent discussion.

The central sections of the article will use the explicated understandings of disenchantment and panentheism to demonstrate conceptually how panentheism undoes, that is, renders untenable, disenchantment and its epistemological implications. I shall elaborate these core sections of the argument using the example of Jungian psychology as an instance of modern panentheistic thought, an identification that has not previously been made in such detail. With particular reference to Jung's simultaneously published scientific essay “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle” ([1952b]1969) and religious essay “Answer to Job” ([1952a]1969), I shall demonstrate closely how Jung's psychological model, first, fits the generic definition of panentheism; second, counters each of the epistemological implications of disenchantment, thereby easing tensions in the relationship between science and religion; but, third, seemingly generates an alternative tension between panentheistic and disenchanted understandings of science and religion.

In conclusion, I shall return to the discipline from which the concept of disenchantment arose, sociology, to suggest that the exposure of this tension between panentheistic and disenchanted perspectives may be helpful for understanding some of that discipline's recent theoretical debates and potential interdisciplinary engagements.

DISENCHANTMENT AND THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION

An influential statement of how relations between science and religion are to be understood in modern times was provided in Max Weber's (1864–1920) lecture “Science as a Vocation” ([1918]), specifically in relation to his notion of “the disenchantment of the world” (155). According to Weber, the rationalization and intellectualization that characterize modern culture has resulted in an epistemological situation very different from that of earlier ages. In former times it was believed that in order to obtain full knowledge of and mastery over nature it would be necessary to have “recourse to magical means” and “to implore the spirits” (139). In the modern, disenchanted world, by contrast, “there are no mysterious, incalculable forces that come into play, but rather … one can, in principle, master all things by calculation” (139). As Egil Asprem elucidates, this amounts to a form of “epistemological optimism,” the affirmation that “nature can in principle be understood by empiricism and reason” (2014, 36).

However, the scope of such optimism was limited for Weber. While knowledge of empirical reality could be endlessly pursued in this modern vision, knowledge of any realities deemed to be beyond the empirical—for example, knowledge of God or spirits (Weber [1918]1946, 142), or of Platonic Forms (Weber [1918]1946, 140), or of Kantian “things‐in‐themselves”—was unobtainable. Asprem dubs this limitation “metaphysical scepticism”: the view that “science can know nothing beyond the empirically given” and therefore that “metaphysics is impossible” (2014, 36).

Also unobtainable to disenchanted modern science, in Weber's view, was any knowledge of values or meaning. “Who,” Weber asked rhetorically, “still believes that the findings of astronomy, biology, physics, or chemistry could teach us anything about the meaning of the world?” ([1918]1946, 142). The sciences have their presuppositions about the value of obtaining knowledge of the natural world, but these presuppositions cannot be proved correct (143–44); “still less,” Weber emphasized, “can it be proved that the existence of the world which these sciences describe is worthwhile, that it has any ‘meaning,’ or that it makes sense to live in such a world” (144). Any attempt to make such valuations would interfere with the proper activity of science: as Weber put it, “whenever the man of science introduces his personal value judgment, a full understanding of the facts ceases” (146). Asprem refers to this insistence on the “separation of facts and values” and the consequent view that “science can know nothing of meaning” as “axiological scepticism” (2014, 36).

For Weber, the combination of epistemological optimism with metaphysical and axiological skepticism had clear implications for the relations between science and religion. Since none of the deliverances of empiricism and reason provided any evidence for the putative transcendent realities and values of religion, one could only make the step into religion by abandoning science and reason, making an “intellectual sacrifice” ([1918]1946, 155; Asprem , 36). Weber considered this course of action morally weak, something to be recommended only to “the person who cannot bear the fate of the times [i.e., disenchantment] like a man” ([1918]1946, 155). Nevertheless, he judged the intellectual sacrifice preferable to indecisiveness or lack of clarity in matters of religion: “an intellectual sacrifice in favor of an unconditional religious devotion,” he wrote, “is ethically quite a different matter than the evasion of the plain duty of intellectual integrity, which sets in if one lacks the courage to clarify one's own ultimate standpoint and rather facilitates this duty by feeble relative judgments” (155).

In terms of Ian Barbour's () framework of possible relationships between science and religion—conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration (77–105)—Weber clearly held out no hope for their integration and similarly saw little point in pursuing dialogue between them. Weber's formal position was that science and religion were independent. As he confidently asserted, “the tension between the value‐spheres of ‘science’ and the sphere of ‘the Holy’ is unbridgeable” (154). Indeed, in the dim regard Weber had for the intellectual sacrifice, it is probably fair also to detect an informal view of science and religion as being in conflict, with science the prevailing antagonist.

Asprem notes that Weber's account of disenchantment is, in Weber's own terms, “ideal‐typical,” that is, it represents the position that a disenchanted person or culture ideally would hold if they were disenchanted in a fully rational way (2014, 39–40). A large part of Asprem's own study, The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse 1900–1939 (), is occupied with showing that, even in the mainstream sciences of physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology in the early twentieth century, where one might expect fully rational disenchantment, in reality many different and partial positions were adopted (93–286); and the diversity is greater again if one takes account of non‐mainstream disciplines and knowledge cultures such as psychical research, parapsychology, and occultism (289–553). Many other historians of science, religion, and culture reinforce this picture of complex and varied engagements (e.g., Brooke ; Brooke and Cantor ; Harrington ). Nevertheless, Weber's account of the disenchantment of the modern world presents what probably has been the predominant view of relations between science and religion, at least among academic and cultural élites, from the early twentieth century through to the present.

Although Weber considered that disenchantment, with its implied separation between science and religion, had become “the fate of our times” ([1918]1946, 155), he was far from optimistic about its social and cultural consequences. Bound up as it was with increasing rationalization and intellectualization (155), disenchantment, he believed, while freeing people from illusion and promoting extraordinary scientific and economic advance, would at the same time lead to an ever more thoroughly bureaucratized society ([1922]1946). He depicted the nature of such a society in a variety of bleak metaphors: it would encase individuals in its “iron cage” ([1904–05]2001, 123), turn each into “a single cog in an ever‐moving mechanism” ([1922]1946, 228), and lead them relentlessly towards “a polar night of icy darkness and hardness” ([1919]1946, 128).

Weber's view tallied with that of a range of contemporary thinkers who, as Anne Harrington notes, had already identified this vision of the world transforming into a “causal mechanism” (Weber [1915]1946, 350) as “a chief culprit in a variety of failed or crisis‐ridden cultural and political experiments” (Harrington , xv). Writes Harrington: “It was said that the spread of mechanistic, instrumentalist thinking into all areas of professional and cultural life had given rise to a cynical, this‐worldly attitude and a decline in morality and idealism. Traditional ideals of learning and culture were in crisis, the young people were alienated, and the arts had degenerated into exercises in absurdity and self‐absorption” (Harrington , xv). The Weberian scholar Lawrence Scaff similarly summarizes that the disenchanted perspective on modernity has resulted in “the disruptive sense of disengagement, abstraction, alienation, homelessness, and the ‘problem of meaning’ that [has begun] to gnaw at the vital core of modern experience and social philosophy” (2000, 105).

In view of these problematic social and cultural consequences of disenchantment, there have been many attempts to critique, reverse, or “undo” disenchantment, both contemporaneously with Weber (Harrington ; Lundy and Saler ; Asprem ) and in the later twentieth‐ and early twenty‐first centuries (Berman ; Griffin ; Partridge ). An important element within some of these critiques has been to expose, question, and propose alternatives to the metaphysical presuppositions that have historically informed disenchantment (Berman ). While such a strategy needs to guard against the risk of relying on oversimplified historiographical accounts (Asprem , 54–61), if it can avoid this danger it has the potential to yield some productive insights and perspectives.

THE THEISTIC ROOTS OF DISENCHANTMENT

Though apparently a modern and anti‐religious phenomenon, disenchantment is actually, Weber argued, the outcome of a “great historical process in the development of religions, the elimination of magic from the world” ([1904–05]2001, 61, 178; cf. [1918]1946, 138). Beginning with the Hebrew prophets and furthered by “Hellenistic scientific thought,” the process reached its “logical conclusion” in Puritanism, which was in turn, in Weber's analysis, one of the main factors contributing to the rise of capitalism and the modern rationalization and bureaucratization of society ([1904–05]2001, 61; [1915]1946, 350).

In relation to the role of the Hebrew prophets, Weber wrote: “The peculiar position of the old Hebrew ethic, as compared with the closely related ethics of Egypt and Babylon, and its development after the time of the prophets, rested … entirely on this fundamental fact, the rejection of sacramental magic as a road to salvation” ([1904–05]2001, 178 note 19). The contrast here between the Hebrew and Egyptian/Babylonian systems of ethics anticipates a distinction made by the Egyptologist Jan Assmann () between “biblical monotheism” and “evolutionary monotheism,” which has been important for some recent commentators on panentheism (Hanegraaff , 371, 375–76; Asprem , 281–83). Evolutionary monotheism, as it developed in Egyptian religion for instance, is based on the idea of “the world as the embodiment of a soul‐like god and of god as a soul animating the world” (Assmann , 273, cited in Asprem , 282). Such monotheism “evolves” from polytheism through the realization that ultimately “all gods are one”; as Asprem notes, it “continues to stress the co‐dependence of god and the world” (2014, 282). By contrast, biblical monotheism, as it emerged in the Hebrew tradition and subsequently developed into what Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke refer to as “classical philosophical theism” (2004, xviii, 73), results from the idea that God and the world are radically separate. As Assmann summarizes: “The Bible does not say ‘All Gods are One’ but rather that God is One and ‘Thou shalt have no other gods.’ It does not establish a connection but rather draws a distinction between God and gods. Ultimately this distinction is one between God and world” (Assmann , 74, cited in Asprem , 282).

The subsequent story of disenchantment or the progressive elimination of magic from the world has been elaborated from different perspectives by various scholars—for example, in relation to the development of secularity (Taylor ) and the historiography of Western esotericism (Hanegraaff ; Asprem ). In a nutshell: From the establishment of the exclusivist monotheism of the Bible, to the anti‐pagan and anti‐magical polemics of both Catholicism and Protestantism, to the deism and rationalism of the Enlightenment, to the atheism and agnosticism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there has been overall an increasing separation of God from the world, an ever‐purer sense of God's transcendence, to the point where God has been so far removed from the world of experience as to have become for many, as famously for Pierre‐Simon Laplace (1749–1827), an irrelevant hypothesis (Barbour , 34–35).

From the perspective of this narrative, disenchantment, the relations between science and religion that disenchantment implies, and modern knowledge practices embedding the epistemological presuppositions of disenchantment, can be considered to be constituted, albeit negatively, by the metaphysics of theism. However, alongside the development of disenchantment from theism and largely occluded by it there has been an alternative tradition of thinking about relations between God and the world, an alternative metaphysics, in which divine immanence, including even the possibility of “enchanted” (magical and mystical) engagements with nature, has been more emphasized. This alternative tradition has come to be known over the past two hundred years as panentheism.

PANENTHEISM

Panentheism is a particular view, or family of views, of the relationship between God (the divine) and the world (nature, the cosmos, the universe). Composed of the Greek words “pan” = all, “en” = in, and “theos” = God, the term “panentheism” means literally “a doctrine [‐ism] that everything exists in God.” The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (, 2080) defines it as “the belief or doctrine that God includes and interpenetrates the universe while being more than it.”

Panentheism was first used as a term by the German philosopher Karl Krause (1781–1832) in the nineteenth century, shortly afterwards receiving classic, though different, formulations in the thought of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), partly in the context of debates about Baruch Spinoza's (1632–1677) pantheism (Cooper , 67; Culp ). The American philosophers Charles Hartshorne and William Reese ([1953]), especially the former, revived the term in the mid‐twentieth century, drawing on the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947). Since then the notion has quietly but steadily gained in influence to the point where, by the beginning of the twenty‐first century, it has become the focus of considerable interest among Christian theologians (Clayton and Peacocke ; Cooper ; Brierley ), process philosophers (Griffin ), historians of Western esotericism (Hanegraaff ; Asprem ), scholars of non‐Christian religious traditions (Biernacki and Clayton ), and researchers attempting to find adequate ways of theorizing the well‐testified “rogue phenomena” of psi and mysticism (Kelly, Crabtree, and Marshall ).

Even before the term existed, however, the idea to which it referred had long informed religious and philosophical thought not just in the West (Cooper ) but also across the globe (Hartshorne and Reese [1953] ; Culp ; Biernacki and Clayton ). Most influentially, though not exclusively, it is associated with currents of thought stemming from Platonism and Neoplatonism (Cooper , 18–19). In theological terms, it relates to the evolutionary monotheism described by Assmann (), which stresses the connection and even coinherence and co‐dependence of God and the world.

Just as with other views of the relationship between God and the world, panentheism is not a single, clearly defined position but rather a set of related positions. There are therefore a number of varieties of panentheism (see, for example, the discussions in Clayton ; Gregersen ; Cooper ; Brierley ; and more critically in Thomas ). Nevertheless, attempts have been made to arrive at a generic definition of the term (Clayton , 250–52; Brierley , 636–41). Most helpfully for present purposes, Michael Brierley () considers a range of characteristics and varieties and concludes that “panentheism's distinctiveness … can be expressed in terms of three premises: first, that God is not separate from the cosmos …; second, that God is affected by the cosmos …; and third, that God is more than the cosmos” (2008, 639–40).

In the light of Brierley's generic definition, panentheism can be concisely differentiated from other possible positions on the relationship between the divine and the world as follows. Unlike atheism and agnosticism, panentheism affirms the existence of the divine. Unlike theism and deism, panentheism considers the divine to be not separate from the world and even to be affected by the world (immanent and passible as well as transcendent). And unlike pantheism, panentheism considers the divine to be more than the world (transcendent as well as immanent). Formulations of panentheism often stress its intermediary status between theism and pantheism, as in the following statement by Asprem: “Panentheism can be described as a position that attempts to balance the transcendence of theism with the immanence of pantheism, while avoiding both the strict separation of god and nature characteristic of the former, and the identification of nature and god in the latter” (2014, 281).

For the present discussion what is important to note is the difference between theism and panentheism. Theism separates God and the world in a way that leads to disenchantment. Panentheism stresses the connection between God and the world in a way that, I shall argue, undoes disenchantment and its epistemological implications as articulated by Weber and clarified by Asprem. In order to illustrate how panentheism undoes disenchantment and arguably opens up alternative ways of framing and addressing the problems that disenchantment entails, I shall focus attention on a particular instance of modern panentheistic thought: Jungian psychology.

JUNGIAN PSYCHOLOGY AS AN INSTANCE OF MODERN PANENTHEISTIC THOUGHT

Carl Gustav Jung's (1875–1961) analytical or, as he later preferred to call it, complex psychology (Shamdasani , 13–14) provides a particularly interesting site for exploring the relationship of science and religion under the contrasting perspectives of disenchantment and panentheism, for at least three reasons. First, the problem of the relationship between science and religion was one that occupied Jung throughout his long life (Homans [1979]; Main , 91–114). He had backgrounds and continuing personal and professional involvements in the worlds of both science and religion, and seems always to have striven to respect scientific and religious perspectives equally, not allowing one perspective to eclipse the other (Main ). The concepts that underpin the distinctiveness of his psychological model—such as the collective unconscious, archetypes, individuation, the self, and synchronicity—all bear witness to his dual commitment to science and religion (Main , 376–77). For example, Jung's signature concept of the archetype was influenced by biology and physics, on the one hand, and Platonic philosophy and Augustinian theology, on the other, and it was explicitly characterized in Jung's later writings as having both an instinctual and a spiritual pole ([1947/1954]1969, paras. 397–420). In a sense, Jung's psychological model was the product of a sustained dialogue and attempted reconciliation of science and religion.

Second, Jung experienced disenchantment or, as he referred to it, “the historical process of world despiritualization” ([1938/1940]1969, para.141) as an acute problem of his time, which much of his work can be understood as an attempt to address (Main ; , 280–84; ; 2014). At various points in his writings he acknowledges that his psychological model, with its emphasis on the need to withdraw psychological projections, actively contributes to disenchantment (Main , 131–32, 135). He offers, with his concept of synchronicity, resources for “re‐enchanting” the physical world as well as the psychological world (Main , 135–36). And he recognizes the limits even of this form of re‐enchantment beyond projection (Main , 154–56). Overall, though, the trajectory of his thought was to overcome disenchantment: “The modern world is desacralized,” he told Mircea Eliade in 1952, “that is why it is in a crisis. Modern man must rediscover a deeper source of his own spiritual life” (McGuire and Hull , 230).

Third, while the studies of Jung's psychology of religion are numerous—a bibliographic essay published in 1973 already included 442 items (Heisig )—there does not yet appear to have been a detailed consideration of his psychology in relation to panentheism. A few previous commentators have mentioned in passing that Jung's psychology might be viewed as panentheistic, some seeing promise in this characterization (Griffin , 56, 66, 245; Tacey , 186; , 117), others seeing confusion (Dourley , 21–22), and others again simply noting the possibility (Asprem , 284). But no detailed case has been made for this view, and its importance for understanding not only Jung's conception of the relationship between science and religion but the filiation and reception of his work has not hitherto been recognized.

A first indication that Jungian psychology merits consideration as a form of panentheistic thought can be found in the wider and longer history of panentheism. John Cooper, in his book Panentheism: The Other God of the Philosophers—From Plato to the Present (), has traced this history through Western religious and philosophical thought. Throughout his narrative we continually encounter thinkers and currents of thought on which Jung either explicitly drew or which can be shown to have directly or indirectly influenced him. These thinkers and currents include Plato, Neoplatonism, Pseudo‐Dionysius, John Scotus Eriugena, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, Jakob Boehme, Renaissance esotericism, early German romanticism, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Schelling, Hegel, Gustav Fechner, William James, and Henri Bergson (Cooper , 7; Jung 1979).

In addition to thinkers who may have influenced Jung, Cooper discusses as panentheists other, contemporaneous thinkers to whom Jung does not refer but with whom scholars have subsequently considered it fruitful to compare him. These include, for example, Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), Paul Tillich (1886–1965), Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948), and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) (Cooper , 8; Griffin ; Dourley ; Nicolaus ; Gustafson ).

Although panentheism as a term emerged and has mostly been used in the context of recent Western thought, panentheistic dimensions and currents have also been identified within non‐Western traditions, both ancient and living. In their recent edited book Panentheism across the World's Traditions (), Loriliai Biernacki and Philip Clayton have assembled a set of essays that find panentheistic discourses not only within Christianity, Judaism, and Islam but also within Tibetan Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, and Confucianism. Jung's own cross‐cultural sorties into non‐Western traditions, including some of those discussed in Biernacki and Clayton's book, likewise focus on variants of them—for example, in Tibetan Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, yoga, and Taoism (1958)—that have panentheistic characteristics.

Jung's panentheistic sources and affinities can be seen especially clearly in relation to his essay “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle” ([1952b]1969). In this essay Jung proposed that a principle of acausal connection through meaning be introduced into philosophy of science as a complementary explanatory principle to that of causality. The main areas of inspiration and support on which Jung drew for the essay were precisely ones that have recently attracted intense interest in relation to panentheism. Specifically, Jung's essay drew on Western esoteric thought, including magic, divination/astrology, and alchemy (paras. 859–60, 863–69, 924–36, 962; cf. Hanegraaff ; Asprem ); on psychical research, parapsychology, and mind‐matter research (paras. 830–40, 846–57, 872–915, 949–54; cf. Asprem , 287–412; Kelly et al. ); on Eastern thought (paras. 863–66, 916–24; cf. Biernacki and Clayton ); and implicitly on the project of improving dialogue between science and religion (Main , 91–114; cf. Clayton and Peacocke ).

It is also notable that arguably the three most significant philosophical frameworks that have been invoked in recent years to illuminate Jung's concept of synchronicity and indeed Jung's psychological model generally—namely, emergence (Cambray ), Whiteheadian process philosophy (Haule , 173–78), and dual‐aspect monism (Atmanspacher )—have roots in or close association with panentheistic thought (Asprem , 245; Griffin ; Kelly , 535). As Asprem remarks, Samuel Alexander (1859–1938) and Conway Lloyd Morgan (1852–1936), the originative emergentist thinkers, as well as Whitehead, the originative process thinker, “all seem to share a tendency towards panentheism, which stems from taking considerations of evolution, emergence, and organicism as the basis for metaphysical speculation” (Asprem , 245). And Spinoza, the prototypical dual‐aspect monist thinker, was also, as noted above, the source of the pantheism in differentiation from which Schelling's “true pantheism,” that is, his panentheism, was later elaborated (Cooper , 94–105).

Most decisive, though, for confirming the panentheistic character of Jungian psychology is its fit with the three characteristics of Brierley's generic definition of panentheism: God's being not separate from the cosmos, God's being affected by the cosmos, and God's being more than the cosmos (2008, 639–40). This fit can be demonstrated especially from Jung's “Answer to Job” ([1952a]1969), though also from other works.

To understand the intellectual moves Jung makes and the language he uses, it is important to appreciate that, despite his frequent disavowal of any metaphysical intentions (of which more later), he effectively equated the unconscious with God: “Recognizing that [numinous experiences] do not spring from his conscious personality, [man] calls them mana, daimon, or God,” he wrote, adding: “Science employs the term ‘unconscious’” ([1963] 1995, 368). Jung's apparent ontological ambiguity here is deliberate: if his statement seems to psychologize a religious concept (God), it equally sacralizes a psychological one (the unconscious) (cf. Hanegraaff , 224–29). With this equation and ambiguity in mind, I note in the following how Jung's thought fits with panentheism first in terms of his psychological concepts and then in statements where he used the term “God” directly.

First, in Jung's thought as in generic panentheism, God is not separate from the world. In terms of his psychological model, insofar as Jung treated the unconscious as a synonym of God and, by implication, consciousness as a synonym of the world, it is clear that for him God was not essentially separate from the world, any more than the unconscious was essentially separate from consciousness ([1947/1954]1969, paras. 381–87). Similarly, the unknowable archetype, including the God archetype, was not essentially separate from the known archetypal images, including archetypal images of God ([1952a]1969, paras. 557–58).

When Jung talked directly of God, he was explicit about God's non‐separation from the world, specifically from humanity: “It is … psychologically quite unthinkable for God to be simply the ‘wholly other’,” he wrote in Psychology and Alchemy with implicit reference to Rudolf Otto's ([1917]) concept of the numinous, “for a ‘wholly other’ could never be one of the soul's deepest and closest intimacies—which is precisely what God is” ([1944]1968, para.11 note 6). The non‐separation was expressed most vividly, though, in “Answer to Job,” where Jung asserted: “It was only quite late that we realized (or rather, are beginning to realize) that God is Reality itself and therefore—last but not least—man” ([1952a]1969, para. 631).

Second, in Jung's thought as in generic panentheism, God is affected by the world. In terms of Jung's psychology, this too follows from his synonymizing God and the unconscious. Such a relationship is suggested, for instance, by the fact that what the unconscious expresses in the form of dreams is conditioned to some extent by the attitude consciously taken towards prior dreams ([1944]1968, paras. 44–331). Similarly in the process Jung termed “active imagination,” consciously dialoguing with figures symbolizing aspects of the unconscious sometimes results in those figures being affected by what the conscious mind has to say on its side of the dialogue (Jung ). More deeply, Jung considered that the constellation of archetypes in the unconscious could change ([1958]1964, para. 589; [1951]1959), and he suggested that human efforts to become conscious could play a decisive role in such changes. As he stated at the end of his life, “just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious” ([1963]1995, 358).

Using the term “God” directly, Jung stated explicitly and repeatedly in “Answer to Job” that God could be affected by the creation: “Job,” he argued, “by his insistence on bringing his case before God, even without hope of a hearing, had stood his ground and thus created the very obstacle that forced God to reveal his true nature” ([1952a]1969, para. 584). Further: “Whoever knows God has an effect on Him” (para. 617), for “The encounter with the creature changes the creator” (para. 686). In Memories, Dreams, Reflections Jung suggested that through the development of human consciousness “the Creator may become conscious of His creation,” such that the emergence of human consciousness could be considered “the second cosmogony” ([1963]1995, 371). Even more clearly, in a letter (14 March 1953) to a correspondent who had written an essay about “Answer to Job,” Jung asked rhetorically: “what in the world would be the motive of the Incarnation if man's state didn't affect God?” (1976, 110)

Third, in Jung's thought as in generic panentheism, God is more than the world. In terms of Jung's psychological model, the unconscious is more than consciousness, and the archetype is not exhausted by any number of archetypal images ([1947/1954]1969, paras. 356–64, 397–420). Using the term “God” directly in “Answer to Job,” Jung was emphatic about this “more”: “the image and the statement [i.e. the God‐image and any statement about God] are psychic processes which are different from their transcendental object” ([1952a]1969, para. 538), he wrote. Later in the same essay he asserted: “There is no doubt that there is something beyond these images that transcends consciousness” (para. 555). And he concluded “Answer to Job” with the observation that “even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky” (para. 758).

There are several other features of panentheistic thought, though not among those identified as generic by Brierley, which could provide points of comparison with Jungian psychology. For example, Jung's formulation of a distinction between the archetype‐in‐itself and the archetypal image, as well as his notion of the archetype as having both a spiritual and an instinctual pole ([1947/1954]1969, paras. 397–420), could be compared with the dipolarity of process panentheism, which presents God as having both a primordial (eternal, unchanging) and a consequent (temporal, evolving) nature (Hartshorne and Reese [1953], 1–25). Again, Jung's reflections on the transformation of the God image ([1951]1959; [1952a] 1969) could be considered in relation to the evolutionary thinking that entered modern conceptions of panentheism with Schelling and Hegel (Murphy ). And the way in which Jung models consciousness as having emerged from and still being in some sense within the unconscious ([1951]1959, para. 57) has affinities with ways in which the “in” of panentheism—in what sense everything is in God—have been discussed (Clayton , 252–53; Brierley , 636–39).

Hartshorne and Reese ([1953]) revived the concept of panentheism within theological discourse at almost exactly the same time as Jung published “Answer to Job” ([1952a]1969) and “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle” ([1952b]1969). Whether Jung would have used or engaged with the concept within these works, had he been aware of it, is uncertain. He may still not have wanted to identify his implicit metaphysics (McGrath ). He may have felt that too strong an endorsement of even a congenial theological position would compromise the careful balance he attempted to maintain between secular and religious perspectives (Main ; ). Or the same reasons that caused him to pay scant attention to some of the most important thinkers within the history of panentheism—Spinoza, Schelling, and Hegel (Cambray , 42–49; McGrath )—may have caused him also not to attend to panentheism itself. However, for the purposes of the present argument, the panentheistic character of Jungian psychology has been sufficiently established to warrant a consideration, next, of how such psychology, by virtue of being panentheistic, undoes disenchantment.

THE UNDOING OF DISENCHANTMENT

Referring back to the characteristics of disenchantment identified by Asprem—epistemological optimism, metaphysical skepticism, axiological skepticism, and the consequent need for an intellectual sacrifice in order to possess religion—we can see that each of these is rendered untenable by features of Jungian psychology underpinned by an implicit panentheistic metaphysics.

In general terms, panentheism undoes the epistemological optimism of disenchantment because the coinherence of the divine and the world, together with the divine's being more than the world, ensures that there will always remain aspects of the world that are not fully comprehensible to empiricism and reason. In the case of Jungian psychology, concepts such as those of an inexhaustible unconscious and ultimately unknowable archetypes that are continually operative on the world of experience ensure that even in principle reality as a whole is not fully knowable by empiricism and reason but remains replete with “mysterious, incalculable forces.” Jung often signaled this irreducible mystery and incalculability by referring to the numinosity of the archetypes ([1947/1954]1969, para. 405). But he also expressed the idea more plainly and directly. As he wrote at the end of his life: “A man … must sense that he lives in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not everything which happens can be anticipated. The unexpected and the incredible belong to this world. Only then is life whole. For me the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable” ([1963]1995, 390).

In general terms, panentheism undoes the metaphysical skepticism of disenchantment because the coinherence of the divine and the world allows for the possibility of knowing the divine through the empirically given—albeit not exhaustively, because of the divine's also being more than the world. In the case of Jungian psychology, it might seem at first that Jung shared the attitude of metaphysical skepticism. His writings, after all, are peppered with disclaimers that he was not doing metaphysics and was not a philosopher or a theologian; he was, he asserted, a scientist, an empiricist, a phenomenologist (e.g., [1938/1940]1969, para. 2; [1939/1954]1969, paras. 759–60; 1976, 249). However, these disclaimers need to be seen in context. Jung was working at a time when psychology was still trying to differentiate itself from philosophy and theology, the traditional disciplines for discussing the mind and soul (Shamdasani , 4). He also seems to have held an unnecessarily cynical view of metaphysics as being just baseless speculation, whereas it can, as Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) for example had argued, more fruitfully be viewed in terms of abduction, that is, as a form of reasoning that infers (or intuits) on the basis of observation of phenomena the best explanation for those phenomena (Crabtree , 424–47; Segal , 95–96; see also McGrath ).

In practice, and despite his disclaimers, Jung did not treat metaphysics as impossible (Chapman ; Main ; McGrath ), and he found several ways by which his science could indeed “know things beyond the empirically given” (Asprem , 36). For one, he did not disregard phenomena whose nature and behavior were not easily reducible to established categories of empirical knowledge—phenomena variously designated as “paranormal,” “anomalous,” “psi,” or—reflecting their growing recognition—“exceptional experiences” (Fach et al. ). He allowed that such anomalousness—particularly where it seemed to involve transcendence of time, space, and causality—could be indicative of a transcendent aspect of reality ([1952b]1969, paras. 912, 931, 948; [1963]1995, 335–42). Throughout his life Jung remained uncommonly open to extraordinary and mystical experiences (Main ; ).

Again, even where there was no such radical anomalousness, Jung was willing to allow that the transcendent could be known hermeneutically through its expression in the immanent. This was implicit in Jung's understanding of the symbol as an expression of something partly known or conscious (immanent) and partly unknown or unconscious (transcendent) ([1921]1971, paras. 814–29), and of the archetypal image as a phenomenal (immanent) expression of the unknowable (transcendent) archetype ([1947/1954]1969, paras. 417–20). But it was most clearly expressed in some of his statements about myth. Myth for Jung was the consciously elaborated expression of the collective unconscious mind and its archetypes (Segal , 40–41). Through the images and narratives of myth the unconscious could reveal archetypal truths that could not otherwise be grasped: “it is not that ‘God’ is a myth,” wrote Jung, “but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth, rather it speaks to us as a Word of God” ([1963]1995, 373). Unlike explicit metaphysical speculation, which Jung claimed to repudiate on Kantian epistemological grounds (1976, 249), mythic speculation was for him empirically legitimate because it “expressed a view which springs from our psychic wholeness, from the co‐operation between conscious and unconscious” ([1963]1995, 373); not from “biased speculation” but from, as he put it, “the unfathomable law of nature herself” (1976, 448). In the guise of myth he was therefore able to address numerous problems that might ordinarily be deemed metaphysical: the nature of reality ([1963] 1995, 207–08), the problem of evil ([1963]1995, 359–66), the origin of consciousness ([1963]1995, 284–85), the meaning of life ([1963]1995, 371–72; cf. 1976, 494–95), and the possibility of surviving death ([1963] 1995, 330–58).

Jung even seemed to entertain the possibility of knowing things beyond the empirically given through a form of mystical or gnostic cognition involving participative identification between knower and known. This is suggested by his visionary experiences following his near‐fatal heart attack in 1944, as described in Memories, Dreams, Reflections ([1963], 320–29). In these experiences, Jung, the physical environment of his hospital room, and the content of his numinous visions seemed to be “interwoven into an indescribable whole” which he was yet able to observe “with complete objectivity” (327). He described the state of unity accessed through this “objective cognition” (328) as a manifestation of the “mysterium coniunctionis [the mystery of the conjunction],” the “consummation” of which, he later wrote (seemingly with these experiences in mind), could “be expected only when the unity of spirit, soul, and body is made one with the original unus mundus [one world]” ([1955–56]1970, para. 664) or, in psychological terms, when there was “a synthesis of the conscious with the unconscious” ([1955–56]1970, para. 770).

If Jung was not in the end constrained by the metaphysical skepticism of the disenchanted perspective, neither was he constrained by its axiological skepticism. In general terms, panentheism undoes axiological skepticism because part of what can be known through the empirically given (as a result of the co‐inherence of the divine and the world) are the values and meanings underpinned by divine immanence. In the case of Jungian psychology facts and values, far from being irreconcilably separate, are both integral to the kind of “whole judgment” that Jung's psychological model fosters ([1952b]1969, para. 961; cf. [1921]1971, para. 85; [1944]1968, para. 20). This was prefigured in Jung's thinking about typology and became integral to his concept of synchronicity.

Part of Jung's typological model is its recognition of four basic functions of consciousness, which can be variously pronounced in different individuals. Briefly, sensation perceives that a thing exists, thinking judges what it is, intuition perceives what its possibilities are, and feeling judges its value ([1923]1971, para. 900). “For complete orientation,” Jung stated, conceding that this would be an ideal case, “all four functions should contribute equally” ([1923]1971, para. 900). A whole judgment of a thing or situation thus involves not just thinking and sensation, which establish the thing or situation as a fact, but also feeling and intuition, which assess its value and wider meaning. That these facts, values, and meanings were for Jung not just subjective constructions became clearer when he formulated his concept of synchronicity. According to synchronicity, physical events and psychic events can be connected acausally through archetypally based patterns of meaning that they jointly express (Jung [1952b]). For Jung, psychic properties of meaning and value can thus be as inherent in a thing or situation as the physical properties that establish it as an empirical fact. Facts and values here are complementary, ultimately inseparable aspects of the same unitary reality.

Finally, as an implication of the undoing of epistemological optimism and metaphysical and axiological skepticism, panentheism also undoes the need, according to the disenchanted view, for intellectual sacrifice in order to possess religion. In general terms this means that the empirical world of science is not in principle sealed off from the metaphysical world of religion: religious insights can have implications for science, and scientific insights for religion; and exploring such implications does not necessarily involve any diminution of intellectual integrity. Clearly this is a situation conducive to dialogue and fuller reconciliation between science and religion.

In the case of Jungian psychology, such dialogue and reconciliation are exactly what we find. Insights that Jung obtained through visionary experiences, as related throughout his Red Book (), later provided concepts and frameworks for his scientific works (Jung [1963]1995, 225; Shamdasani ). For instance, he related that various fantasy figures with whom he conducted visionary dialogues brought home to him “the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life” ([1963]1995, 207)—an insight formalized in his concepts of the reality and autonomy of the psyche ([1938/1940]1969, paras. 16–18; [1952a]1969, para. 555). Conversely, data gathered in the course of his empirical work—such as the parallelisms between images in the dreams and fantasies of modern individuals and in the myths, religions, and literatures of cultures from widely differing times and places ([1944]1968)—led him to formulate concepts such as those of the collective unconscious, archetype‐in‐itself, and individuation to which he was willing to accord religious significance ([1938/1940]1969; [1944]1968).

As has been demonstrated in detail elsewhere in relation to particular concepts, such as synchronicity, the overall tenor of Jung's work was towards increasing possibilities of dialogue and reconciliation between science and religion (Main , 91–114). With that aim, Jung engaged in extended dialogues with both scientists, such as the Nobel prize‐winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli (Meier ), and theologians, such as the Dominican Father Victor White (Lammers and Cunningham ). Jung even stated that he pressed for his scientific essay “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle” ([1952b]1969) and his religious essay “Answer to Job” ([1952a] 1969) to be published at the same time, recognizing the significant overlap or even complementary relationship between the issues with which they were engaging (Meier , 98).

In sum, in Jung's implicitly panentheistic view, far from it being necessary to sacrifice the intellect in order to possess religion, it would be one‐sided not to attend to the domain of religion, at least as translated into psychological terms such as those of Jung's model, because one would thereby be denying an essential dimension of one's human wholeness. Conversely, it would be one‐sided for those involved in religion not to attend to the domain of science.

PANENTHEISTIC VIS‐À‐VIS DISENCHANTED SCIENCE AND RELIGION

While the metaphysics of panentheism may be more conducive than the metaphysics of theism to dialogue and reconciliation between science and religion, it is important to note that panentheism achieves this greater dialogue and reconciliation largely by operating with heterodox understandings of science and religion. In relation to understandings of religion, the heterodoxy is implied by the very exercise of shifting from a theistic to a panentheistic theological perspective. For example, the coinherence of the divine and the world in panentheistic religious orientations implies that humans, as part of the world, have the potential for “gnosis,” that is, direct, experiential access to, and even realization of unity with, the divine in a way that has typically been considered heterodox if not heretical to adherents of theistic religions (Hanegraaff , 372–73; ). In relation to understandings of science, the co‐inherence of the divine and the world in panentheism affirms both the reality and the empirical relevance of the divine and thereby makes untenable the physicalism that is almost ubiquitously presupposed within disenchanted science (Kelly et al. ).

It is no accident that the two works of Jung's in which evidence of implicitly panentheistic thinking can most readily be discerned, “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle” and “Answer to Job,” are both conspicuously heterodox in their principal fields. Jung's proposal, with his concept of synchronicity, that philosophy of science needs to be broadened to include a principle of acausal connection through meaning runs directly counter to the emphasis on causality and the avoidance of questions of meaning within modern science. His notion was not well received even by scientists and philosophers sympathetic to the study of anomalous phenomena (Price ; Beloff ). Similarly, the proposal in “Answer to Job” that the image of God in Christianity be revised to include factors that would bring it closer to the realm of human experience and make it more psychologically pertinent (factors variously identified as evil, the feminine, nature, or matter) alienated even theologians, such as White, who had been ready to collaborate with Jung (Lammers and Cunningham ).

It seems that, while the tension between science and religion can be considerably eased within a panentheistic framework, this may come at the cost of introducing an alternative tension: between panentheistically informed science and religion, on the one hand, and mainstream forms of science and religion informed by the perspective of disenchantment on the other. This is not to say that attempts to promote dialogue between science and religion based on panentheistic metaphysics necessarily always involve models of science and religion that are as radically innovative as Jung's. As Edward Kelly notes, most of the contributors to Clayton and Peacocke's In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being () explore possibilities for dialogue between “antecedently held theological views” and “conventional physicalist science, or something very close to it” (2015, 532). However, as Kelly has argued on the basis of his own and his colleagues’ research (Kelly et al. ), fuller reconciliation between science and religion might be achieved if one were to adopt “an expanded vision of science itself” together with “a full‐fledged evolutionary panentheism” (Kelly , 532).

CONCLUSION

The concept of disenchantment was introduced by Weber and has been particularly influential within sociology, the discipline that Weber helped to establish. Indeed, sociology, being self‐consciously founded on secular principles to study the increasingly secularized world of which it was itself a product (Lassman and Velody, , 160), has arguably been the paradigmatic disenchanted discipline. As an indication of the wider significance of the preceding argument, I should therefore like to conclude by briefly noting two indicative areas where the kind of undoing of disenchantment by panentheism and the exposure of the tension between panentheistic and disenchanted perspectives that have been discussed in this article may have implications within contemporary sociology.

First, within sociological theory itself there are areas of ongoing debate in which the tension between panentheistic and disenchanted perspectives figures directly. One such area concerns the so‐called “spiritual turn” in critical realism. This refers to a development initiated by the originative critical realist philosopher Roy Bhaskar. He and other critical realists had formerly deployed a form of immanent critique to reveal problematic “absences in the philosophical discourse of modernity”—“the absence of ontology, of a concept of absence, of an adequate account of internal relationality, and of intentionality or transformative praxis” (Hartwig and Morgan , 3). From the mid 1990s, Bhaskar expanded his critique to address also the absence of spirituality and religion (Hartwig and Morgan , 3). As Mervyn Hartwig and Jamie Morgan summarize, Bhaskar's spiritual turn “issued first in a work that attempts to synthesize West and East, science and religion, materialism and idealism, atheism and theism (From East to West [2000]), and then in 2002 in the philosophy of meta‐reality, which seeks to transcend or move beyond such dichotomies by articulating a spirituality that can appeal both to the secularly minded and to the religious” (2012, 3). Bhaskar's spirituality in his “philosophy of meta‐reality” is essentially panentheistic, as several commentators have noted (Wright , 23; Job ).

These radical developments in Bhaskar's thought alienated not only many of the more staunchly disenchanted thinkers who had previously been sympathetic to critical realism (McLennan ) but also, ultimately, some who were generally enthusiastic about the spiritual turn. For example, Margaret Archer, Andrew Collier, and Douglas Porpora published in 2004 a book, Transcendence: Critical Realism and God (Archer, Collier, and Porpora ), of which Bhaskar was originally to have been a co‐author. However, Archer, Collier, and Porpora, all of whom have identified themselves as Christians of one form or another, drew back from endorsing Bhaskar's full‐fledged spiritual views precisely at the point where he “moved toward a more immanent conception of transcendence” (Archer et al. , ix)—that is, “in classical theological terms … an account of God [that] appears to constitute a form of panentheism” (Wright , 23). As Andrew Wright remarks, the planned book between the four of them foundered, by all accounts, over the issue of “God's immanence in the world, and in particular Bhaskar's panentheistic conceptualisation of the immanence of God within, yet teleologically transcendent of, the world's categorical structure” (Wright , 40). Fuller awareness of the relationship between panentheism, disenchantment, and theism, as elaborated in this article, could be helpful for understanding positions within this continuing debate (Hartwig and Morgan ; Job ).

Second, the tension between disenchanted and panentheistic perspectives may help to explain the relationship, or conspicuous lack of relationship, between sociology and Jungian psychology. The lack of attention to Jung's thought among sociologists, in contrast to the extensive attention sociologists have given to the thought of other depth psychologists such as Sigmund Freud, has struck even sociological commentators as curious (Scott and Marshall , 329). Jung, after all, theorized explicitly about the relationship between the individual and society (Shamdasani , 271–352), and also commented extensively on a wide range of topics of interest to sociologists—health, sexuality, gender, families, education, politics, race, religion, national and cultural identities, and the overall nature of modernity (Jung ), including its being disenchanted or “desacralized” (McGuire and Hull , 230). It has previously been argued that one of the principal reasons for this disregard by sociologists is Jung's seeming tendency to credit, and be informed by, religious and non‐rational perspectives (Main ). In light of the preceding discussion it is now possible to be more specific and to identify the prime cause of Jung's disregard by sociologists as his implicitly panentheistic metaphysics, with its assumptions that so fundamentally contradict those of the disenchanted worldview that paradigmatically informs sociology. Any attempts to improve engagements between sociology and Jungian psychology or to develop a distinctive form of Jungian psychosocial studies could benefit from awareness of the deep metaphysical tension to which this article has drawn attention. More widely, the same may apply to possible engagements between sociology and other forms of explicitly or implicitly panentheistic thought.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This article is based on a presentation at the International Conference on “The Many Faces of Panentheism: Reinforcing the Dialogue between Science and Religion,” held at the Collegium Helveticum, Zurich, 3–4 June 2016. I should like to thank Dr. Harald Atmanspacher and Dr. Hartmut von Sass for the invitation to present at that event.

Work on the article was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/N003853/1].