Continued ....

Nor will any dogma liberate the human being, because truth does not reside in dogma; it resides in human nature.

Dostoevsky recognises only one path to salvation: simplicity and love.
It is precisely for this reason, the source says, that Dostoevsky himself never went to church and made the extraordinary statement that if he knew truth existed somewhere outside Jesus Christ and he were forced to choose between Christ and truth, he would choose Christ.

The reason for this statement, as I understand it, is that between knowledge and dogma that structure truth, on the one hand, and the simplicity, love and freedom embodied in the person of Christ, on the other, he would without hesitation choose the latter.

If Jung could speak with Shariati, he would tell him that nothing—nothing, nothing—is as dangerous in a human being as projecting one’s unresolved personal problems onto society and onto others:
those who do not see the darkness within themselves and rise to eliminate darkness in the external world;
those who regard their chosen dogma as truth and light and, because they believe that dogma is light, imagine that they themselves too are made of light.
Blinded to their own shadows, they search for darkness in the external world so that they may destroy it.

These luminous despots have drawn such a veil of light across their eyes that they see nothing except the reflection of their own image in the mirror of their dogma.

They want to create a utopia emptied of dark others, a place inhabited only by luminous people like themselves. On this path they soon become emptied of love, simplicity and compassion, and their cruelty and hard-heartedness will set the world on fire.
This is how revolutions possess a unique capacity to create despotism and repression.

Jung would also tell Shariati that the belief that the growth of human consciousness and spirituality necessarily culminates in revolution is a dangerous presupposition that leads to archetypal inflation among the political leaders of revolutions.

They will imagine themselves to be the most conscious and developed of human beings.
For they are the ones who believe they have escaped the snare of the ego and have now come to remove the chains from the feet of others. Whenever spirituality becomes a political instrument, despotism will follow behind it.

And finally, if Kierkegaard could speak with Shariati, he would say that genuine revolution occurs only in the individual, not in the collective, and that revolutions founded upon shapeless masses of people destroy first of all the sacred and divine individuality of the human being.
The crowd can never move on the basis of truth, because the birthplace of truth is the individual, not the crowd.

No error would be more deadly in Kierkegaard’s eyes than turning faith into an instrument for achieving political freedom and liberation, because faith will inevitably become a weapon of politics.

What causes Shariati’s thought, when tested by history, to fail like every idealist philosophy founded upon a romantic simplification of human personality and existence is not his motive or his ideals, but his simplistic understanding of human existence and nature, the lack of psychoanalytic depth in his thought, and his elevation of the collective above human individuality. This is a price our society pays every day within its own fabric, culminating in the tragic condition in which the person who represses at home wants to become the saviour of the world—without understanding that without love and wisdom there is no salvation within, none at home, and none in the world outside.

Aydin Areta