The Modern Burden of Soul: The Unconscious Theology of Moral Relativity

‘by Brenton L. Delp

The Modern Burden of Soul: The Unconscious Theology of Moral Relativity
The cultural and philosophical landscape of our era is defined not by the recovery of old truths, but by the profound exhaustion of living without them. As we shift our analytical focus from isolated clinical pathologies—such as the clinical logic of addiction—to the broader existential condition, we encounter what can be termed the “modern burden of soul.”¹ This burden is the heavy, inescapable weight placed on the individual to navigate a universe where transcendent structures have collapsed. Nowhere is this struggle more vividly dramatized than in the closing dialogue of The X-Files, which serves as a perfect symptom of our post-absolute reality. By examining the unconscious religious architecture of its characters—specifically the shared Catholicism of Dana Scully and Father Joe, contrasted with Mulder’s “Let’s just say I want to believe”—we witness a popular culture wrestling with moral relativity that transcends the plot, becoming a profound theological crisis of the modern spirit.
The Catholic Mirror and the Shadow Self
The core tension of the narrative is not merely between a federal agent and a suspect, but between two fractured manifestations of the same Catholic soul. Scully and Father Joe share a foundational metaphysical vocabulary of sin, confession, asceticism, and redemption. Yet they stand on opposite sides of an empirical abyss. Scully represents the empirical ego trying to hold onto the structure of faith and reality, while Father Joe represents what Jung termed the “suppressed fourth”—the shadow, the repressed appetites, and the monstrous dimensions of the soul that the institution failed to contain.² When Scully confronts Father Joe, she is not just interrogating a stranger; she is confronting her own shadow-self, the part of the Catholic soul that has been driven underground by the collapse of public doctrine.
This unconscious mirroring explains the specific, visceral nature of Scully’s anger. When Father Joe claims he doesn’t know why he told her “Don’t give up,” Scully’s reaction is immediate and heated: “You said them to my face!”³ This is not merely confusion; it is an emotional recoil from someone who is speaking her language from a place of absolute corruption. She demands to know if he knows anything about her or what she does, seeking a connection in a shared reality.⁴ But Father Joe’s response reveals the depth of the fracture: “All I’ve ever wanted was to serve him. All I’ve ever wanted was to serve God.”⁵
Here, the “modern burden of soul” becomes terrifyingly visible. Father Joe has internalized the infinite weight of the divine in a way that has completely destroyed his empirical humanity. He describes his “sickening appetites” and his self-castration at age twenty-six as attempts to manage a soul that has been forced to bind its own anxieties.⁶ As the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach and later W. Giegerich suggested, when the soul loses its public container, it begins to map metaphysical significance onto empirical reality, often with horrific results.⁷ Father Joe is the literalization of the soul’s desperate need to bind the void, creating a “micro-absolute” of suffering to replace the lost macro-absolute of God. His pathology is the ultimate logic of addiction: the construction of a private, ritualized structure to hold back the chaos of a godless universe.
When Scully finally demands, “Don’t quote Scripture to me,” and presses him with “What are you afraid of?” she is stripping away the institutional scaffolding to find the raw, trembling human beneath.⁸ But Father Joe is also afraid of the very thing Scully is trying to escape: the realization that the divine container is empty, and that the “sickening appetites” are the only things left to fill it. His “visions” are the soul’s desperate, unhinged attempt to create order in a chaotic, godless universe. He is trying to serve a God that no longer speaks, resulting in a terrifying, literalized devotion that consumes him entirely.
The Dual Burden of “Don’t Give Up”
It is precisely here that we must examine the phrase “Don’t give up,” as it carries a devastating dual weight within Scully’s own fractured psyche. Father Joe’s command does not merely echo in the room; it splits Scully’s consciousness into two distinct, warring imperatives.
On the empirical and professional level, “Don’t give up” is the drive to find Mulder and solve the case. It is the stubborn adherence to procedure, evidence, and logical deduction in a world that has gone mad. It represents Scully’s commitment to the visible world, the realm where she can still exert control, where cause and effect still operate, and where the darkness can be mapped, documented, and ultimately apprehended. This is the first layer of her burden: the exhaustion of trying to maintain order through empirical rigor when the metaphysical foundations have turned against her.
But beneath that lies the second, far heavier level: What to do about the boy? This is the moral and metaphysical burden. The boy represents the innocent caught in the crossfire of collapsed absolutes. When Mulder later pleads with her, “If you have any doubts… any doubts at all… just call off that surgery,” he is offering her an escape from this second burden.⁹ The surgery is not just a medical procedure; it is a secular sacrament. It is Scully’s attempt to bind the suffering of the innocent through her own skilled hands, to act as a vessel of grace in a world where the priests have failed. To “not give up” on the boy is to accept the terrifying responsibility of bearing witness to trauma without the promise of divine redemption. It is the decision to stand in the operating room, to wield the scalpel, and to carry the weight of a life that the institutional church could not save. These two levels—the professional pursuit of truth and the moral bearing of suffering—forge Scully into the modern hero, one who must navigate both the empirical void and the metaphysical abyss.
Mulder as the Outsider
This dynamic is profoundly complicated by the presence of Mulder. Mulder represents a third, essential perspective: the “faith” without the specific institutional burden of Catholic dogma, confession, and original sin. He is the outsider looking in, the one who says “I want to believe,” bridging the gap between Scully’s empirical Catholicism and Father Joe’s monstrous Catholicism. Mulder’s role highlights the “divided agency” of the modern condition. He loves Scully for her “stubbornness”—her refusal to give up on the empirical truth even when the metaphysical darkness threatens to consume her.¹⁰
Mulder’s Jewish identity is crucial here. Where the Catholic tradition in this narrative is weighed down by the burden of “sickening appetites,” self-mutilation, and the terrifying proximity of the devil, Mulder’s faith is more navigational. It is a faith that operates in the void without demanding the same rigid, ascetic sacrifice. He is the witness to the burden, the one who stands at the threshold of the Catholic unconscious, offering a faith that is not bound by the specific history of sin and confession that destroys Father Joe. He represents a different kind of endurance—one that does not require the soul to castrate itself to prove its devotion.
The Devil, the Shadow, and the Larger Answer
The ultimate collision of these forces occurs when Mulder articulates the larger answer to moral relativity: “If Father Joe were the devil… why would he say the opposite of what the devil might say?”¹¹ This question captures the sheer vertigo of the modern condition. If the devil can speak through the vessel of a priest—a man who shares Scully’s own soul-language—then the traditional markers of good and evil have lost their diagnostic power. The “devil” is no longer an external enemy; he is the shadow of the soul itself, the result of the burden of trying to carry the infinite in a finite body.
Scully’s response is quiet but monumental: “Maybe that’s the answer. The larger answer… Don’t give up.”¹² Here, she internalizes the command completely. She no longer needs Father Joe, or God, or the church to tell her to persist. The command has been stripped of its theological baggage and reclaimed as a purely human imperative. The “larger answer” is that the darkness is no longer an external anomaly to be defeated by light; it is the very medium in which we must swim. Truth can emerge from corrupted sources, and good can be spoken by the shadow, precisely because the soul’s desperate need to persist transcends the moral binaries of a dead God.
Second-Order Inhabitation and Secular Heroism
Ultimately, the resolution of this struggle is not a return to naive faith, but a commitment to “second-order inhabitation.” Scully’s final realization captures this ethical reorientation perfectly. When Mulder suggests they flee the narrative, she refuses the easy escape: “I’m not sure it works that way. I think maybe the darkness finds you… and me.”¹³
This is the refusal of the therapeutic cure or the easy absolution. Scully realizes that the darkness—negativity, trauma, the void—is not an external anomaly to be cured or fled, but the very condition of modern existence. Mulder acknowledges this shared fate: “I know it does.” And Scully delivers the final, heroic command: “But let it try.”
This is the decision to maintain agency and persist in the face of absolute negation, armed only with the fragile, self-constructed micro-absolutes of our own making. It is the commitment to perform the surgery, to solve the case, to bear the innocent, and to face the shadow without flinching.
The modern burden of soul is not a pathology to be solved, but a historical reality to be carried. We are not looking backward to recover the lost absolutes of the past; rather, we are looking forward at the sheer fortitude required to stand firm in a godless world. The burden is the decision to persist, to “not give up,” precisely because there is no divine guarantee of victory. In the end, we are left with only our stubbornness, our shared humanity, and the courage to let the darkness try.

Notes

1. The Absolute After Transcendence outlines the historical shift where the collapse of public metaphysical structures forces the individual to internalize infinite meanings, creating a “general neurosis” or burden of soul.
2. Jung’s concept of the “suppressed fourth” refers to the repressed dimensions of matter and shadow that Western metaphysics sought to exclude, which return as collective psychic epidemics.
3. The X-Files transcript
4. The X-Files transcript
5. The X-Files transcript
6. The X-Files transcript (SRT),
7. This reflects the Giegerichian insight that we mistakenly map metaphysical significance onto empirical realities when the soul’s public container is lost.
8. The X-Files transcript
9. The X-Files transcript
10. The X-Files transcript
11. The X-Files transcript
12. The X-Files transcript
13. The X-Files transcript