Dingir.cz | Review of Dark Religion: Fundamentalism from The Perspective of Jungian Psychology
This review originally appeared in Czech at dingir.cz.
Vladislav Šolc, George J. Didier, Dark Religion: The Psychology of Denying and Discovering Reality, Prague: Malvern, 2025, 398 pages.
I opened Vladislav Šolc and George Didier’s Dark Religion expecting a scholarly Jungian study of fundamentalism and was pleasantly surprised by how much space it gives to many of the questions I ask myself at my own therapeutic desk—for example, where does healthy faith end and possession by one’s own image of God begin, and where do the concepts of psychotherapeutic work end and a genuine spiritual crisis begin?
Central Concepts: Theocalypsis and Theonemesis
The authors, both Jungian analysts, distinguish between religion, understood as a living relationship to the numinous that can never be fully grasped, and creed, a confession of faith that can so easily preserve this relationship in the form of dogmas, rituals, and institutions. According to the authors, religion becomes “dark” when creed becomes severed from its living source in the unconscious and begins to serve a defensive purpose—concealing what a person does not wish to see about themselves and about reality.
The central mechanism is what the authors call theocalypsis: a person does not hide from God but behind God. One confuses one’s own will with God’s and believes that one is acting directly in His name. When this illusion collides with reality, theonemesis follows. In Jung’s words: what we have refused to make conscious returns to us as fate.
The concept of theocalypsis is compelling and aptly named; its mechanism builds upon the classical Jungian concepts of ego inflation and identification with the archetype. The authors develop it further into a specific, application-oriented system—together with theonemesis, dispensation, and aidos—designed to map the dynamics of religious and political fanaticism.
Three Forms of Time: From Morning to Afternoon
While reading the book, I was reminded again of the Jungian analogy also referenced by Professor Tomáš Halík in The Afternoon of Christianity. The morning of ordinary and religious life is a time of expansion; noon is a time of short, sharp shadows, institutional certainties, and clearly defined boundaries. In the afternoon, however, the sun descends and the shadows once again lengthen and become blurred. Boundaries soften, yet the spiritual search does not disappear; it changes.
Šolc and Didier describe a similar phenomenon from within clinical experience and do so with great clarity. In this analogy, dark religion is an attempt to remain forever at “noon”—in sharp, unquestionable certainty—even though time has long since advanced into the afternoon, when certainty must yield to humility before mystery. Fundamentalism thus becomes a form of immature faith afraid of its own ageing; it is the ego afraid to integrate what it has not yet learned to bear.
Mature Faith versus Neurotic Distortion
Tillich’s distinction between faith as the courage to accept the uncertainty inherent in every human relationship to the infinite, and what he himself calls neurotically distorted faith—the attempt to construct certainty without doubt—is an axis around which the entire book revolves. The rigid, literal, black-and-white thinking that the authors describe as the core of dark religion has the same structure that we encounter, for example, in addictions, in various defence mechanisms such as splitting, or in various personality disorders.
It is a fixation upon a single object or interpretation that promises relief from unbearable uncertainty while simultaneously enslaving the person. The dialectical process found in Jung, but also in other therapeutic systems and philosophies, teaches the same thing that the authors require of mature religious consciousness: the ability to hold two seemingly contradictory truths at once—acceptance and change—without one excluding the other.
A Theravāda Buddhist Perspective
It would also be interesting to develop the perspective of Theravāda Buddhism, which can be sensed in the authors’ work. The positively formulated Jungian model of individuation understands itself as a path towards the integration of ego and Self into an enriched, broader whole of consciousness. From the perspective of Theravāda Buddhism, this process still remains within the framework of upādāna, because even a relationship to an expanded Self constitutes a form of clinging as long as it retains any notion of a permanent substance or centre of identity.
The Buddhist path, by contrast, does not aim at the enrichment of the self but at seeing through the fact that any self—whether small and egoic or great and archetypal—is itself an illusion. Some comparative studies even suggest that Jung’s Self may unconsciously reproduce a subtler form of the same grasping—in Yogācāra terminology, manas—that it criticises at the level of the ego. Clinging to an image of God, which the authors call dark religion, is from this perspective a particular instance of the more general principle of upādāna: the clinging that gives rise to suffering regardless of whether its object is God, a drug, or one’s own certainty that one already understands everything. Within the Buddhist framework, there is no qualitative difference between clinging to sensual pleasure, to a view, to ritual, or to a belief in one’s own self (attavādupādāna).
The Dark Night of the Soul: The Mirror Opposite of Theocalypsis
The book thus touches upon a theme that deserves deeper elaboration. Specifically, while reading it I found myself considering the relationship between dark religion and the dark night of the soul. John of the Cross describes the night of the senses and the night of the spirit as phases in which God gradually deprives the soul of all the consolations, images, and certainties upon which it has hitherto based its relationship with Him. This occurs not as punishment but as purification, intended to prepare a space for a union that no longer depends upon feeling, image, or concept.
Structurally, this is almost a mirror opposite of theocalypsis: whereas theocalypsis is the excessive, uncritical filling of the ego with certainty and power (“I am an instrument of God’s will”), the dark night is its radical emptying and the removal of even the most fundamental certainty that God is present at all. Unlike Jungian deflation, which is a sudden and often violent collapse of the inflated ego back to its actual proportions, John of the Cross’s dark night of the spirit is a purposeful, structured process, teleologically oriented towards unity. It is therefore not a descent into bottomless emptiness but a precisely guided purification unfolding in three phases—dusk, midnight, and the dawn of faith—whose apparent bottomlessness is paradoxically the condition for union. Psychologically speaking, then, theocalypsis is inflation, while the dark night is its opposite—not, however, a pathological and purposeless deflation without a bottom, but a meaningful purification in which the absence of certainty is not a loss but a gateway to a unity transcending every image or feeling.
Distinguishing a “Healthy” Crisis from a Pathological One
From an external perspective, both experiences can confuse us, including in therapy. A person undergoing a genuine dark night may outwardly appear disoriented, dejected, and “religiously dysfunctional,” much like someone whose faith has just collapsed into depression or a psychotic crisis. Conversely, someone seized by theocalypsis may outwardly appear to embody pious certainty and composure, while inwardly undergoing the very inflation about which the authors write.
In other words, outward appearances can deceive in both directions. The person who appears “decompensated” may be undergoing a healthy transformation; the person who appears “stable and certain” may in fact be in a pathological state of theocalypsis. The distinguishing criterion is not the intensity or painfulness of the experience but its direction: the dark night, although apparently destructive, usually preserves a subtle thread of trust that leads the soul onwards, deepens the capacity to tolerate paradox, and opens it towards greater humility and love, even if the capacity for outward functioning is temporarily diminished. A crisis that, by contrast, fragments reality, loses contact with relationships and meaning, and progressively deteriorates without any indication of integration may require diagnostic and therapeutic, and possibly psychiatric, attention.
The Boundary between Theocalypsis and Unio Mystica
The authors themselves search for a similar boundary, although not in the language of the mystics. Against theocalypsis as a “complete or permanent possession by the Self,” in which the objective observer disappears, they elsewhere set unio mystica, in which the ego experiences itself simultaneously as the Self and as the witness of its own experience. Immersion therefore remains partial and reversible. Elsewhere, they describe the healthy response to an encounter with the numinous as the “relativisation of the ego,” its humbling and surrender of control, referring to Jung’s statement that the experience of the Self is always a defeat for the ego. The solar, expansive pole—the inflation of the ego into certainty and power—is not described by the authors in isolation; it has its counterbalance.
Limitations of the Book—Missing Dimensions
Some readers may find that certain aspects that could deepen the subject are missing from the book. First, there is theological and contemplative language: although the authors cite mystics—Jacob Boehme, a fragment from Eckhart, Rahner’s reference to the “German mystical tradition”—they do so more illustratively than as systematic sources. What is missing is precisely the tradition that explores the process of emptying in depth: John of the Cross and his teaching on the night of the senses and the night of the spirit, apophatic theology, and perhaps their counterparts outside Christianity, such as the Sufi pair of states qabd and bast, or the Kabbalistic tzimtzum.
Second, there is a lack of more systematic guidance on how, in practice, to distinguish a crisis that deepens the soul from one that destroys it and requires therapeutic, and possibly psychiatric, attention. At the same time—and paradoxically—an excessive psychologisation of the entire subject, however sensitive, can itself become precisely what the book warns against: the illusion that we already know how things are “supposed” to turn out.
An Invitation to Aidos
Above all, however, the book is an honest, clinically grounded guide to questions that today are not merely theoretical but also political and social. Šolc and Didier have the courage to answer these questions and to illustrate them through specific contemporary leaders, in whom they describe the same “victim mentality” familiar not only from therapeutic work with people who abuse their power over others. In the end, I finished the book with a sense of joy—as an invitation to aidos, reverence before mystery, without which every creed, even the best one, and every therapeutic or spiritual practice, however valuable, may ultimately become a new idol.
About the reviewer: Mgr. Jan Kozák is a psychotherapist and researcher whose practice includes analytical psychology, DBT, and addiction studies. He currently works in private practice and as an instructor in mindfulness and DBT courses at the National Institute of Mental Health (the GRADIENT project). He previously worked as a therapist at Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital and at the SANANIM contact centre.