To Father Victor White
from Jung, C. G.
(1976). Letters 2: 1951-61. Selected and edited by Gerhard Adler in
collaboration with Aniela Jaffé. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul.
[ORIGINAL IN ENGLISH]
Dear Victor,
Bollingen, 10 April 1954
Your letter1 has been lying on my desk
waiting for a suitable time to be answered. In the meantime I was still busy
with a preface I had promised to P. Radin and K. Kerenyi. They are going to
bring out a book together about the figure of the trickster.2 He is
the collective shadow. I finished my preface yesterday. I suppose you know the
Greek-Orthodox priest Dr. Zacharias?3 He has finished his book
representing a reception, or better—an attempt—to integrate Jungian psychology
into Christianity as he sees it. Dr. Rudin S.J. from the Institute of
Apologetics did not like it. Professor Gebhard Frei on the other hand was very
positive about it.
I am puzzled about your conception of Christ
and I try to understand it. It looks to me as if you were mixing up the idea
of Christ being human and being divine. Inasmuch as he is divine he knows, of
course, everything, because all things macrocosmic are supposed to be
microcosmic as well and can therefore be said to be known by the self. (Things
moreover behave as if they were known.) It is an astonishing fact, indeed, that
the collective unconscious seems to be in contact with nearly everything. There
is of course no empirical evidence for such a generalization, but plenty of it
for its indefinite extension. The sententia,therefore: animam Christi
nihil ignoravisse4 etc. is not contradicted by psychological
experience. Rebus sic stantibus, Christ as the self can be said ab
initio cognovisse omnia etc. I should say that Christ knew his
shadow—Satan—whom he cut off from himself right in the beginning of his career.
The self is a unit, consisting however of two, i.e., of opposites, otherwise it
would not be a totality. Christ has consciously divorced himself from his
shadow. Inasmuch as he is divine, he is the self, yet only its white half.
Inasmuch as he is human, he has never lost his shadow completely, but seems to
have been conscious of it. How could he say otherwise: “Do not call me good ...
.“?5 It is also reasonable to believe that as a human he was not wholly
conscious of it, and inasmuch as he was unconscious he projected it
indubitably. The split through his self made him as a human being as good as
possible, although he was unable to reach the degree of perfection his white
self already possessed. The Catholic doctrine cannot but declare that Christ
even as a human being knew everything. This is the logical consequence of
the perfect union of the duae naturae. Christ as understood by the Church
is to me a spiritual, i.e., mythological being; even his humanity is divine as
it is generated by the celestial Father and exempt from original sin. When I
speak of him as a human being, I mean its few traces we can gather from the
gospels. It is not enough for the reconstruction of an empirical character.
Moreover even if we could reconstruct an individual personality, it would not
fulfill the role of redeemer and God-man who is identical with the
“all-knowing” self. Since the individual human being is characterized by a
selection of tendencies and qualities ties, it is a specification and not a
wholeness, i.e., it cannot be individual without incompleteness and
restriction, whereas the Christ of the doctrine is perfect, complete, whole and
therefore not individual at all, but a collective mythologem, viz, an
archetype. He is far more divine than human and far more universal than
individual.
Concerning the omniscience it is important
to know that Adam already was equipped with supernatural knowledge according
to Jewish and Christian tradition,6 all the more so Christ.
I think that the great split7 in those
days was by no means a mistake but a very important collective fact of
synchronistic correspondence with the then new aeon of Pisces. Archetypes, in
spite of their conservative nature, are not static but in a continuous
dramatic flux. Thus the self as a monad or continuous unit would be dead.
But it lives inasmuch as it splits and unites again. There is no energy without
opposites!
All conservatives and
institutionalists are Pharisees, if you apply this name without prejudice. Thus
it was to be expected that just the better part of Jewry would be hurt most by
the revelation of an exclusively good God and loving Father. This novelty
emphasized with disagreeable clearness that the Yahweh hitherto worshipped had
some additional, less decorous propensities For obvious reasons the orthodox
Pharisees could not defend their creed by insisting on the bad qualities of
their God. Christ with his teaching of an exclusively good God must have been
most awkward for them. They probably believed him to be hypocritical, since
this was his main objection against them. One gets that way when one has to
hold on to something which once has been good and had meant considerable
progress or improvement at the time. It was an enormous step forward when
Yahweh revealed himself as a jealous God, letting his chosen people
feel that he was after them with blessings and with punishments, and that Cod’s
goal was man. Not knowing better, they cheated him by obeying his Law
literally. But as Job discovered Yahweh’s primitive amorality, God found out
about the trick of observing the Law and swallowing camels.8
The old popes and bishops succeeded in
getting so much heathendom, barbarism and real evil out of the Church that it
became much better than some centuries before: there were no Alexander VI,9 no
auto-da-fes, no thumbscrews and racks any more, so that the compensatory
drastic virtues (asceticism etc.) lost their meaning to a certain extent. The
great split, having been a merely spiritual fact for a long time, has at last got
into the world, as a rule in its coarsest and least recognizable form, viz, as
the iron curtain, the completion of the second Fish.10
Now a new synthesis must begin. But how can
absolute evil be connected and identified with absolute good? It seems to be
impossible. When Christ withstood Satan’s temptation, that was the fatal moment
when the shadow was cut off. Yet it had to be cut off in order to enable man to
become morally conscious. If the moral opposites could be united at all, they
would be suspended altogether and there could be no morality at all. That is
certainly not what synthesis aims at. In such a case of irreconcilability the
opposites are united by a neutral or ambivalent bridge, a symbol expressing
either side in such a way that they can function together.11 This symbol
is the cross as interpreted of old, viz, as the tree of life or simply as the
tree to which Christ is inescapably affixed. This particular feature points to
the compensatory significance of the tree: the tree symbolizes that entity from
which Christ had been separated and with which he ought to be connected again
to make his life or his being complete. In other words, the Crucifixus is the
symbol uniting the absolute moral opposites. Christ represents the light; the
tree, the darkness; he the son, it the mother. Both areandrogynous (tree =
phallus).12 Christ is so much identical with the cross that both terms
have become almost interchangeable in ecclesiastical language (f.i. “redeemed
through Christ or through the cross” etc.). The tree brings back all that has
been lost through Christ’s extreme spiritualization, namely the elements of
nature. Through its branches and leaves the tree gathers the powers of light
and air, and through its roots those of the earth and the water. Christ was
suffering on account of his split and he recovers his perfect
life at Easter, when he is buried again in
the womb of the virginal mother. (Represented also in the myth of Attis by the
tree, to which an image of Attis was nailed, then cut down and carried into the
cave of the mother Kybele.13 The Nativity Church of Bethlehem is erected
over an Attis sanctuary!)14 This mythical complex seems to represent a
further development of the old drama, existence becoming real through
reflection in consciousness, Job’s tragedy.15 But now it is the
problem of dealing with the results of conscious discrimination. The first
attempt is moral appreciation and decision for the Good. Although this decision
is indispensable, it is not too good in the long run. You must not get stuck
with it, otherwise you grow out of life and die slowly. Then the one-sided
emphasis on the Good becomes doubtful, but there is apparently no possibility
of reconciling Good and Evil. That is where we are now.
The symbolic history of the Christ’s life
shows, as the essential teleological tendency, the crucifixion, viz, the union
of Christ with the symbol of the tree. It is no longer a matter of an
impossible reconciliation of Good and Evil, but of man with his vegetative (=
unconscious) life. In the case of the Christian symbol the tree however is dead
and man upon the Cross is going to die, i.e., the solution of the problem takes
place after death. That is so as far as Christian truth goes. But it is
possible that the Christian symbolism expresses man’s mental condition in the
aeon of Pisces, as the ram and the bull gods do for the ages of Aries and
Taurus. In this case the post-mortal solution would be symbolic of an entirely
new psychological status, viz. that of Aquarius, which is certainly a oneness,
presumably that of the Anthropos, the realization of Christ’s allusion; “Dii
estis.”16 This is a formidable secret and difficult to understand, because
it means that man will be essentially God and God man. The signs pointing
in this direction consist in the fact that the cosmic power of self-destruction
is given into the hands of man and that man inherits the dual nature of the
Father. He will [mis]understand it and he will be tempted to ruin the universal
life of the earth by radioactivity. Materialism and
atheism, the negation of God, are indirect
means to attain this goal. Through the negation of God one becomes deified,
i.e., god-almighty-like, and then one knows what is good for mankind. That is
how destruction begins. The intellectual schoolmasters in the Kremlin are a
classic example. The danger of following the same path is very great indeed. It
begins with the lie, i.e., the projection of the shadow.
There is need of people knowing about their
shadow, because there must be somebody who does not project. They ought to be
in a visible position where they would be expected to project and unexpectedly
they do not project! They can thus set a visible example which would not be
seen if they were invisible.
There is certainly Pharisaism, law
consciousness, power drive, sex obsession, and the Wrong kind of formalism in
the Church. But these things are symptoms that the old showy and easily
understandable ways and methods have lost their significance and should be
slowly replaced by more meaningful principles. This indeed means trouble with
the Christian vices. Since you cannot overthrow a whole world because it
harbours also some evil, it will be a more individual or “local” fight with
what you rightly call avidya. As “tout passe,” even theological books
are not true forever, and even if they expect to be believed one has to tell
them in a loving and fatherly way that they make some mistakes. A true and
honest introverted thinking is a grace and possesses for at least a time divine
authority, particularly if it is modest, simple end straight. The people who
write such books are not the voice of God. They are only human. It is true that
the right kind of thinking isolates oneself. But did you become a monk for the
sake of congenial society? Or do you assume that it isolates only a theologian?
It has done the same to me and will do so to everybody that is blessed with it.
That is the reason why there are
compensatory functions. The introverted thinker is very much in need of a
developed feeling, i.e., of a less autoerotic, sentimental, melodramatic and
emotional relatedness to people and things. The compensation will be a hell of
a conflict to begin with, but later on, by understanding what nirdvanda17 means,
they18 become the pillars at the gate of the transcendent function, i.e.,
the transitus to the self.
We should recognize that life is a transitus. There
is an old covered bridge near Schmerikon19 with an inscription: “Alles ist
Uebergang.”20 Even the Church and her sententiae are only alive
inasmuch as they change. All old truths want a new interpretation, so that they
can live on in a new form. They can’t be substituted or replaced by something
else without losing their functional value altogether. The Church certainly
expects of you that you assimilate its doctrine. But in assimilating it, you
change it imperceptibly and sometimes even noticeably. Introverted thinking is
aware of such subtle alterations, while other minds swallow them wholesale. If
you try to be literal about the doctrine, you are putting yourself aside until
there is nobody left that would represent it but corpses. If on the other hand
you truly assimilate the doctrine you will alter it creatively by your
individual understanding and thus give life to it. The life of most ideas in
their controversial nature, i.e., you can disagree with them even if you
recognize their importance for a majority. If you fully agreed with them you
could replace yourself just as well by a gramophone record. Moreover, if you
don’t disagree, you are no good as a directeur de conscience, since
there are many other people suffering from the same difficulty and being badly
in need of your understanding.
I appreciate the particular moral problem
you are confronted with. But I should rather try to understand why you were put
into your actual situation of profound conflict before you think it is a
fundamental mental mistake. I remember vividly your charta geomantica21 that
depicts so drastically the way you became a monk. I admit there are people with
the peculiar gift of getting inevitably and always into the wrong place. With such
people nothing can be done except get them out of the wrong hole into another
equally dubious one. But if I find an intelligent man in an apparently wrong
situation, I am inclined to think that it makes sense somehow. There may be
some work for him to do. Much work is needed where much has gone wrong or where
much should be improved. That is one of the reasons why the Church attracts
quite a number of intelligent and responsible men in the secret (or
unconscious?) hope that they will be strong enough to carry its meaning and not
its words into the future. The old trick of law obedience is still going
strong, but the original Christian teaching is a reminder. The man who allows
the institution to swallow him is not a good servant.
It is quite understandable that the
ecclesiastical authorities must protect the Church against subversive
influences. But it would be sabotage if this principle were carried to the
extreme, because it would kill the attempts at improvement also, The Church is
a “Durchgang” [passage] and bridge between representatives of higher and lower
consciousness and as such she quite definitely makes sense. Since the world is
largely sub principatu diaboli, it is unavoidable that there is just
as much evil in the Church as everywhere else, and as everywhere else you have
got to be careful. What would you do if you were a bank-clerk or a medical
assistant at a big clinic? You are always and everywhere in a metal conflict
unless you are blissfully unconscious. I think it is not only honest but even
highly moral and altruistic to be what one professes to be as completely as possible,
with the full consciousness that you are making this effort for the weak and
the unintelligent who cannot live without a reliable support. He is a good
physician who does not bother the patient with his own doubts and feelings of
inferiority. Even if he knows little or is quite inefficient the right persona
medici might carry the day if seriously and truly performed for the
patient. The grace of God may step in when you don’t lose your head in a
clearly desperate situation If it has been done, even with a lie, in favor of
the patient it has been well done, and you are justified, although you never
get out of the awkward feeling that you are a dubious number. I wonder whether
there is any true servant of God who can rid himself of this profound
insecurity balancing his obvious rightness. I cannot forget that crazy old
Negro Mammy22 who told me: “God is working in me like a clock—funny and
serious.” By “clock” seems to be meant something precise and regular, even monotonous;
by “funny and serious” compensating irrational events and aspects—a humorous
seriousness expressing the playful and formidable nature of fateful
experiences.
If I find myself in a critical or doubtful
situation, I always ask myself whether there is not something in it, explaining
the need of my presence, before I make a plan of how to escape. If I should
find nothing hopeful or meaningful in it, I think I would not hesitate to jump
out of it as quick as possible. Well, I may be all wrong, but the fact that you
find yourself in the Church does not impress me asbeing wholly
nonsensical. Of course huge sacrifices are expected of you, but I wonder
whether there is any vocation or any kind of meaningful life that does not
demand sacrifices of a sort. There is no place where those striving after
consciousness could find absolute safety. Doubt and insecurity are
indispensable components of a complete life. Only those who can lose this
life really, can gain it. A “complete” life does not consist in a
theoretical completeness, but in the fact that one accepts, without
reservation, the particular fatal tissue in which one finds oneself embedded,
and that one tries to make sense of it or to create a cosmos from the chaotic
mess into which one is born. If one lives properly and completely, time and
again one will be confronted with a situation of which one will say: “This is
too much. I cannot bear it any more.” Then the question must he answered: “Can
one really not bear it?”
Fidem non esse caecum sensum religionis e
latebris subconscientiae erumpentem,23 etc., indeed not! Fides in
its ecclesiastical meaning is a construction expressed by the wholly artificial
credo, but no spontaneous product of the unconscious. You can swear to it in
all innocence, as well as I could, if asked. Also you can teach, if
asked, the solid doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas, as I could if I knew
it. You can and will and must criticize it, yet with a certain discrimination,
as there are people incapable of understanding your argument.Quieta movere24 is
not necessarily a good principle. Being an analyst, you know how little
you can say, and sometimes it is quite enough when only the analyst knows.
Certain things transmit themselves by air when they are really needed.
I don’t share at all X.’s idea that one
should not be so finicky about conscience, it is definitely dishonest
and—sorry—a bit too Catholic. One must be finicky when it comes to a moral
question, and what a question! You are asked to decide whether you can deal
with ambiguity, deception, “doublecrossing” and other damnable things for the
love of your neighbour’s soul. If it is a case of “the end justifying the
means,” you had better buy a through ticket to hell. It is a devilish hybris
even to think that one could be in such an exalted position to decide about the
means one is going to apply. There is no such thing, not even in psychotherapy.
If you don’t want to go to the dogs morally, there is only one question, namely
“Which is the necessity you find yourself burdened with when you take to heart
your brother’s predicament?” The question is how you are applied in
the process of the cure, and not at all what the means are you could offer to
buy yourself off. It depends very much indeed upon the way you envisage your
position with reference to the Church. I should advocate an analytical
attitude, which is permissible as well as honest, viz, take the Church as your
ailing employer and your colleagues as the unconscious inmates of a hospital.
Is the LSD-drug mesca1in?25 It has
indeed very curious effects— vide Aldous Huxley26 —of which I
know far too little. I don’t know either what its psychotherapeutic value with
neurotic or psychotic patients is. I only know there is no point in wishing
to know more of the collective unconscious than one gets through
dreams and intuition. The more you know of it, the greater and heavier becomes
our moral burden, because the unconscious contents transform themselves into
your individual tasks and duties as soon as they begin to become conscious. Do
you want to increase loneliness and misunderstanding? Do you want to find more
and more complications and increasing responsibilities? You get enough of it.
If I once could say that I had done everything I know I had to do, then perhaps
I should realize a legitimate need to take mescalin. But if I should take it
now, I would not be sure at all that I had not taken it out of idle curiosity.
I should hate the thought that I had touched on the sphere where the paint is
made that colours the world, where the light is created that makes shine the
splendour of the dawn, the lines and shapes of all form, the sound that fills
the orbit, the thought that illuminates the darkness of the void. There are
some poor impoverished creatures, perhaps, for whom mescalin would be a
heaven-sent gift without a counterpoison, but I am profoundly mistrustful of
the “pure gifts of the Gods.” You pay very dearly for them. Quidquid id
est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.27
This is not the point at all, to know of or
about the unconscious, nor does the story end here; on the contrary it is how
and where you begin the real quest. If you are too unconscious it is a great
relief to know a bit of the collective unconscious. But it soon becomes
dangerous to know more, because one does not learn at the same time how to
balance it through a conscious equivalent. That is the mistake Aldous Huxley
makes: he does not know that he is in the role of the “Zauberlehrling,” who
learned from his master how to call the ghosts but did not know how to get rid
of them again:
Die ich rief, die Geister,
Werd ich nun nicht los!28
It is really the mistake of our age. We
think it is enough to discover new things, but we don’t realize that knowing more
demands a corresponding development of morality. Radioactive clouds over
Japan, Calcutta, and Saskatchewan point to progressive poisoning of the universal
atmosphere.
I should indeed be obliged to you if you
could let me see the material they get with LSD. It is quite awful that the
alienists have caught hold of a new poison to play with, without the faintest
knowledge or feeling of responsibility. It is just as if a surgeon had never
leaned further than to cut open his patient’s belly and to leave things there.
When one gets to know unconscious contents one should know how to deal with
them. I can only hope that the doctors will feed themselves thoroughly with
mescalin, the alkaloid of divine grace, so that they learn for
themselves its marvellous effect. You have not finished with the conscious side
yet. Why should you expect more from the unconscious? For 35 years I have known
enough of the collective unconscious and my whole effort is concentrated upon
preparing the ways and means to deal with it.
Now to end this very long epistle I must
say how much I have appreciated your confidence, frankness, courage and
honesty. This is so rare and so precious an event that it is a pleasure to
answer at length. I hope you will find a way out to Switzerland.
The winter, though very cold, has dealt
leniently with me. Both my wife and myself are tired, though still active, but
in a very restricted way.
I am spending the month of April in
Bollingen procul negotiis29 and the worst weather we have known for
years.
Cordially yours, C. G. JUNG
1. W. wrote a long letter on 3 Mar. 54 in
answer to Jung’s of 24 Nov. 53, expresssing agreement with most of what he said
It deals largely with Jung’s views on the
problem of “Christ’s shadow,” which
contradict the Catholic doctrine that Christ knew everything (and therefore
could not have a shadow).
2. Jung’s commentary “On the Psychology of
the Trickster Figure” (CW 9. i) for Paul Radin, The Trickster (1956;
orig. Der gottliche Schelm, 1954). Kerenyi wrote the other
commentary.
3. Cf. Zacharias, 24 Aug. 53.
4. “Christ’s soul was not ignorant of
anything.” This and the following ab initiocognovisse omnia (“from the
beginning he knew everything”) are two statements of the Holy Roman Office (one
of the eleven departments of the Roman Curia) laid down in 1918 and quoted by
W.
5. Cf. Matthew 19:17, Mark 10:18, Luke
18:19.
6. Mysterium, CW 14, pars. 570ff.
7. The separation of Christ, the epitome of
good, from his shadow, the devil.
8. Matthew 23:24: “Ye blind guides, which
strain at a gnat, and swallows camel.”
9. Rodrigo Borgia (1431—1503), the most
notorious of the corrupt and venal popes of the Renaissance.
10. The astrological sign of Pisces
consists of two fishes which were frequently regarded as moving in opposite
directions. Traditionally, the reign of Christ corresponds to the first fish
and ended with the first millennium, whereas the second fish coincides with the
reign of Antichrist, now nearing its end with the entry of the vernal equinox
into the sign of Aquarius. Cf. Aions, CW 9, ii, pars. 148f., and
“Answer to Job,” CW 11, par. 725.
11. The bridge is the “uniting symbol,”
which represents psychic totality, the self. Cf. Psychological Types, CW
6, par. 828
12. The tree often symbolizes the mother
and appears as such in the numerous treebirth myths (cf. Symbols of
Transformation, CW 5, Part II, ch. V). But it is also a phallic symbol and
thus has an androgynous character. (For Christ’s androgyny cf. Mysterium, pars. 526,
565 & n. 63.)
15. Attis was one of the young dying gods,
the lover of Kybele, the Great Mother goddess of Anatolia. In her rites, taking
place in March, a pine tree, symbol of Attis, was carried into her sanctuary. Cf.
White, 25 Nov. 50, n. 5.
14. A sanctuary of Adonis, another
young dying god closely related to Attis, existed since ancient times in a cave
at Bethlehem. It is supposed to be identical with
Christ’s birthplace, over which Constantine
the Great (ca. 288—337) had a basilica built.
15. Cf. Memories, pp. 338f./312,
and Neumann, so Mar. 59.
16. “Ye are gods.” John 10:34.
17. Nirdvandva (Skt.), “free from
the opposites” (love and hate, joy and sorrow, etc.). Cf. Psychological
Types, pars. 327ff.
18. Here “they” refers to the compensatory
(or inferior) functions. Cf. ibid., Def. 30.
19. A village in Canton St. Gallen, on the
Upper Lake of Zurich, near the Tower at Bollingen.
20. = “All is transition.”
21. In geomancy, an ancient method of
divination still widely practiced in the Orient, especially the Far East, earth
or pebbles are thrown on the ground and the resultant pattern is interpreted.
In Europe the pattern was known as thecharta geomantica A later
development was to make dots at random on a piece of paper: the “Art of
Punctation.” (Cf. “Synchronicity,” CW 8, par. 866.) Jung was fond of
experimenting with all such mantic methods in order to test synchronistic
events. He became acquainted with the An Geomantica through “De animae intellectualis
scientia seu geomantica,” Fasciculus geomanticus (Verona, 1687), by
the English physician and mystical philosopher Robert Fludd (1574-1637), who is
discussed in Pauli’s “The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific
Theories of Kepler,” The Interpretation of Nature and the
Psyche (tr., 1955)
22. Possibly a patient Jung interviewed
during his work with mentally deranged Negroes at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital an
Washington, D.C., in 1912. Cf. TheFreud/Jung Letters, 323J, n. 3.—And
cf. Loeb, 26 Aug. 41, n. 0.
23. On 1 Sept. 1910 Pius X edited a motu
proprio (a document issued by the Pontiff on his own initiative) in which the
sentence occurs: “Certissime teneo ac
sincere profiteor fidem non esse caecum
sensum religionis e latebris subconscientiae . . . erumpentem” (I maintain as
quite certain and sincerely avow that faith is not a blind religious feeling
which breaks out of the darkness of the subconscious).
24. Lit. “to move what is at rest”; more
colloquially, “rousing sleeping dogs.”
25. W. mentioned that he had been invited
to a lunatic asylum “to talk to the staff, and (as I found) try to lend a band
with religious-archetypal material which patients were producing under the
L.S.D. drug.” — Jung wrote “mescal”
26. Aldous Huxley. The Doors
of Perception (1954).
27. “[Men of Troy, trust not the horse!] Be
it what it may, I fear the Danaans, though their hands proffer gifts”
(Virgil, Aeneid, I, 48).
28. Goethe’s poem “The Magician’s
Apprentice”: “I cannot get rid / Of the spirits I bid.”
29. = away from work.
_____________
from Jung on Mythology
Selected and introduced by Robert A. Segal
1998 ISBN: 0-691-01736-0 288 pp.
1998 ISBN: 0-691-01736-0 288 pp.
To Dorothee Hoch
Dear Dr. Hoch,
3 July 1952
I am very grateful that this time you have
met my endeavour with more friendliness and understanding. I certainly admit
that personal motives creep in everywhere in an exasperating way, but I still
think it is a bit too glib to suspect an objective argument of personal
resentment without closer and surer knowledge of the circumstances. Only at the
end of a discussion, when all objective elements have run out, may one hazard
the question whether personal motives have also had a hand in it. But I won’t
make any annotations to Knigge’sUmgang mit Menschen.1
You are surprised at my reaction to your
avowed faith is a personal meeting with Christ. I thought I ought not to
conceal from you that such an avowal has a thoroughly intimidating effect on
many people, because they feel (with good reason, I think) that this only
happens to one of the elect, who has been singled out from the human community
of the unblest, the wayward, the unbelievers, the doubters and the
God-forsaken, and, especially if they are religious people, it makes them feel
inferior. Many theologians make themselves unpopular on that account and so
make the doctor, who is expected to have a better understanding of the
ordinary, uninitiated person, appear as a more desirable proposition.
I do, to be sure, maintain that the Bible
was written by man and is therefore “mythological,” i.e., anthropomorphic. God
is certainly made vivid enough in it, but not visible. That would be
a bit too much for our human inadequacy, even if we could see him in his incarnate
form. This is the morfh donlon after the kenosis2 had taken
place, the well-attested pagan figure of the katacoV3 and the Old
Testament “servant of God,”4 or the unsuccessful, suffering hero like
Oedipus or Prometheus.
The insistence on the uniqueness of
Christianity, which removes it from the human sphere and doesn’t even allow it
a mythological status conditioned by history, has just as disastrous an effect
on the layman as the aforementioned “avowal.” The gospel becomes unreal; all
possible points of contact with human understanding are abolished, and it is
made thoroughly implausible and unworthy of belief. It is really and truly
sterilized, for all the psychic propensities in us which would willingly accept
it are brusquely thrust aside or suppressed and devalued. This
short-sightedness is neither rational nor Christian and empties the Protestant
churches in the most effective way; but it is very convenientbecause then
the clergyman doesn’t have to bother about whether the congregation understand
the gospel or not but can comfortably go on preaching at them as before.
Educated people, for instance, would be much more readily convinced of the
meaning of the gospel if it were shown them that the myth was always there to a
greater or lesser degree, and moreover is actually present in archetypal form
in every individual. Then people would understand where, in spite of its having
been artificially screened off by the theologians, the gospel really touches
them and what it is talking about. Without this link the Jesus legend remains
a mere wonder story, and is understood as little as a fairytale that merely
serves to entertain. Uniqueness is synonymous with unintelligibility. How do
you make head or tail of a apax legomenon?5 If you are not
fascinated at the first go, it tells you absolutely nothing. How can you “meet
people in their lives” if you talk of things, and especially of unique events,
that have nothing to do with the human psyche?
You refer me to your sermon. You talk there
of rebirth, for instance, something the man of antiquity was thoroughly
familiar with, but modern man? He has no inkling of the mysteries, which anyway
are discredited by Protestant theology, because for it there is only one truth,
and whatever else God may have done for man is mere bungling. Does modern man
know what “water” and “spirit” signify? Water is below, heavy and
material; wind above and the “spiritual” breath body. The man of antiquity
understood this as a clash of opposites, a complexio oppositorum, and
felt this conflict to be so impossible that he equated matter with evil
outright. Christ forces man into the impossible conflict. He took himself with
exemplary seriousness and lived his life to the bitter end, regardless of human
convention and in opposition to his own lawful tradition, as the worst heretic in
the eyes of the Jews and a madman in the eyes of his family. But we? We imitate
Christ and hope he will deliver us from our own fate. Like little lambs we
follow the shepherd, naturally to good pastures. No talk at all of uniting our
Above and Below! On the contrary, Christ and his cross deliver us
from our conflict, which we simply leave alone. We are Pharisees, faithful to
law and tradition, we flee heresy and are mindful only of the imitatio
Christi but not of our own reality which is laid upon us, the union of
opposites in ourselves, preferring to believe that Christ has already achieved
this for us. Instead of bearing ourselves, i.e., our own cross, ourselves, we
load Christ with our Unresolved conflicts. We “place ourselves under his cross,”6 but
by golly riot under our own. Anyone who does this is a heretic, self-redeemer,
“psychoanalyst” and God knows what. The cross of Christ was borne by
himself and was his. To put oneself under somebody else’s cross,
which has already been carried by him, is certainly easier than to carry your
own cross amid the mockery and contempt of the world. That sway you remain
nicely ensconced in tradition and are praised as devout. This is
well-organized Pharisaism and highly un-Christian. Whoever imitates Christ and
has the cheek to want to take Christ’s cross on himself when he can’t even
carry his own has in my view not yet learnt the ABC of the Christian message.
Have your congregation understood that they
must close their ears to the traditional teachings and go through the
darknesses of their own souls and set aside everything in order to become that
which every individual bears in himself as his individual task, and that no one
can take this burden from him? We continually pray that “this cup may pass from
us” and not harm us. Even Christ did so, but without success. Yet we use
Christ to secure this success for ourselves. For all these reasons theology
wants know nothing psychology because through discover our own cross But we
only want to talk of Christ’s cross, and how splendidly his crucifixion has
smoothed the way for us and solved our conflicts. We might also discover, among
other things, that in every feature Christ’s life is a prototype of
individuation and hence cannot be imitated: one can only live one’s own life
totally in the same way with all the consequences this entails. This is
hard and must therefore be prevented. How this is done is shown among other
things by the following example. A devout professor of theology (i.e., a lamb
of Christ) once publicly rebuked me for having said “in flagrant contradiction
to the word of the Lord” that it is unethical to “remain” a child.
The “Christian” ought to remain sitting on his father’s knee and leave the
odious task of individuation to dear little Jesus. Thus naively, but with
unconscious design, the meaning of the gospel is subverted, and instead of catechizing
ourselves on the meaning of Christ’s life we prefer, in ostensible agreement
with the word of the Lord, to remain infantile and not responsible for ourselves.
Thus an exemplary didauukaloV tou Israhl7 who can’t even
read the New Testament properly.8 No one but me protested because it suits
everybody’s book. This is only one of many examples of the way we are cheated
in all godliness. Without anybody noticing it, Protestantism has become a
Judaism redivivus.
Denominationalism has likewise become a
flight from the conflict: people don’t want to be Christians any more because
otherwise they would be sitting between two stools in the middle of the schism
of the Church. Allegiance to a particular creed is—heaven be
praised—un-ambiguous, and so they can skulk round the schism with a good conscience
and fight “manfully” for a one-sided belief, the other fellow— alas—being
always in the wrong. The fact that I as a Christian struggle to unite
Catholicism and Protestantism within myself is chalked up against me in tine
Pharisaic fashion as blatant proof of lack of character. That psychology is
needed for such an undertaking seems to be a nuisance of the first order. The
resistance to and devaluation of the soul as ‘“only psychic” has become a
yardstick for Pharisaic hypocrisy. Yet people should be glad that dogmatic
ideas have psychological foundations. If they hadn’t, they would remain
eternally alien to us and finally wither away, which they are already doing
very speedily in Protestantism. But that is what people unconsciously want,
because then they wouldn’t be reminded of their own cross and could talk all
the more uninhibitedly about Christ’s cross, which takes them away from their
own reality, willed by Cod himself. Therefore, by entrenching themselves behind
a creed, they calmly perpetuate the hellish scandal that the so-called
Christians cannot reach agreement even among themselves.
Even if you thought there is anything to my
reflections you could hardly preach a sermon about them to your congregation.
This “cross” would presumably be a bit too heavy. But Christ accepted a cross
that cost him his life. It is fairly easy to live a praiseworthy truth, but difficult
to hold one’s own as an individual against a collective and be found
unpraiseworthy. is it clear to your congregation that Christ may possibly mean
just this?
These reflections came to me as I read the
sermon you have kindly placed at my disposal. I was particularly affected by
your thesis of “total surrender.” Is it clear to you what that means: absolute
ex-posure? A fate without if’s and but’s, with no assurance that it will
turn out harmlessly, for then one would have ventured nothing and risked
nothing for God’s sake. It was these rather sombre undertones, so true two
reality, that I missed in your sermon. With best greetings,
Yours sincerely, C. G. JUNG
1 By Adolf Freiherr von Knigge (1752—96),
an immensely popular book (1788) on etiquette and good manners.
2 = “emptying”: cf. Phil. 1:7; “… Christ
Jesus who ... emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the
likeness of men” (DV) - Cf. also Mysterium,
par. 29 & n. 195.
3= prisoner.
4 Isaiah 42:1—7, 49:1—6, 50:4—9, 52:13,
53:11
5 An expression used only once.
6 These words occur in a sermon of H.’s
which she enclosed with her letter.
7=teacher of Israel
8 Matthew 18:3.
----------------------------
Letter To Upton Sinclair
[ORIGINAL IN ENGLISH]
from Jung on Mythology
Selected and introduced by Robert A. Segal
1998 ISBN: 0-691-01736-0 288 pp.
1998 ISBN: 0-691-01736-0 288 pp.
Dear Mr.
Sinclair,
7 January I955
Having read your novel Our Lady1 and having enjoyed every page of it, I cannot refrain from
bothering you again with a letter. This is the trouble you risk when giving
your books to a psychologist who has made it his profession to receive
impressions and to have reactions.
On the day after I had read the story, I
happened to come across the beautiful text of the “Exultet” in the Easter night
liturgy:
0 inaestimabilis dilectio caritatis
Ut servum redimeres, Filium tradidisti!
0 certe necessarium Adae peccatum,
Quod Christi morte deletum est!
O felix culpa
Although I am peculiarly sensitive to the
beauty of the liturgical language and of the feeling expressed therein,
something was amiss, as if a corner had been knocked off or a precious stone
fallen from its setting. When trying to understand, I instantly remembered the
bewildered Marya confronted with the incongruities of the exorcism, her beautiful
and simple humanity caught in the coils of a vast historical process which had
supplanted her concrete and immediate life by the almost inhuman superstructure
of a dogmatic and ritual nature, so strange that, in spite of the identity of
names and biographical items, she was not even able to recognize the story of
herself and of her beloved son. By the way, a masterful touch! I also
remembered your previous novel3 about
the idealistic youth who had almost become a saviour through one of those
angelic tricks well known since the time of Enoch (the earthly adventure of
Samiasaz4 and his angelic
host). And moreover, I recalled your Jesus biography.5 Then I
knew what it was that caused my peculiarly divided feeling: it was your common
sense and realism, reducing the Holy Legend to human proportions and to
probable possibilities, that never fails in knocking off a piece of the
spiritual architecture or in causing a slight tremor of the Church’s mighty
structure. The anxiety of the priests to suppress the supposedly satanic
attempt at verisimilitude is therefore most convincing, as the devil is
particularly dangerous when he tells the truth, just as he often does (vide the
biography of St. Anthony of Egypt by St. Athanasius).
It is obviously your laudabilis
intentio to extract a quintessence of truth from the incomprehensible
chaos of historical distortions and dogmatic constructions, a truth of human size
and acceptable to common sense. Such an attempt is hopeful and promises
success, as the “truth” represented by the Church is so remote from ordinary
understanding as to be well-nigh unacceptable. At all events, it conveys
nothing any more to the modern mind that wants to understand since it is
incapable of blind belief. In this respect, you continue the Strauss-Renan
tradition in liberal theology.
I admit it is exceedingly probable that
there is a human story at the bottom of it all. But under these conditions I
must ask: Why the devil had this simple and therefore satisfactory story to be
embellished and distorted beyond recognition? Or why had Jesus taken on unmistakably
mythological traits already with the Gospel writers? And why is this process
continued even in our enlightened days when the original picture has been
obscured beyond all reasonable expectation? Why the Assumptio of 1950 and the
Encyclical Ad caeli Reginam7 of Oct.
11, 1954?
The impossibility of a concrete saviour, as
styled by the Gospel writers, is and has always been to me obvious and
indubitable. Yet I know my contemporaries too well to forget that to them it is
news hearing the simple fundamental story. Liberal theology and incidentally
your laudabilis intentio have definitely their place where they make
sense. To me the human story is the inevitable point de depart, the
self-evident basis of historical Christianity. It is the “small beginnings” of
an amazing development. But the human story—I beg your pardon—is just ordinary,
well within the confines of everyday life, not exciting and unique and thus not
particularly interesting. We have heard it a thousand times and we ourselves
have lived it at least in parts. It is the we—known psychological ensemble of
Mother and beloved Son, and how the legend begins with mother’s anxieties and
hopes and son’s heroic fantasies and helpful friends and foes joining in,
magnifying and augmenting little deviations from the truth and thus slowly
creating the web called the reputation of a personality.
Here you have me—the psychologist—with what
the French call his deformationpro professionnelle. He is blase, overfed
with the “simple” human story, which does not touch his interest and
particularly not his religious feeling. The human story is even the thing to
get away from, as the small story is neither exciting nor edifying. On the contrary,
one wants to hear the great story of gods and heroes and how the world was
created and so on. The small stories can be heard where the women wash in the
river, or in the kitchen or at the village well, and above all everybody lives
them at home. That has been so since the dawn of consciousness. But there was a
time in antiquity, about the fourth century B.C. (I am not quite certain about
the date.
Being actually away on vacation, I miss my
library!), when a man Euhemeros8 made himself a name
through a then new theory: The divine and heroic myth is founded upon the small
story of an ordinary human chief or petty Icing of local fame, magnified by a
minstrel’s fantasy. All-Father Zeus, the mighty “gatherer of clouds,” was originally
a little tyrant, ruling some villages from his maison forteupon a hill,
and “nocturnis ululatibus horrenda Prosperpina”9 was
presumably his awe-inspiring mother-in-law. That was certainly a time sick of
the old gods and their ridiculous fairy stories, curiously similar to the
“enlightenment” of our epoch equally fed up with its “myth” and welcoming any
kind of iconoclasm, from the Encyclopedie10 of the
XVIIIth century to the Freudian theory reducing the religious “illusion” to the
basic “family romance” with its incestuous innuendos in the early XXth century.
Unlike your predecessor, you do not insist upon thechronique scandaleuse of
the Olympians and other ideals, but with a loving hand and with decency like a
benevolent pedagogue, you take your reader by the hand: “I am going to tell
you a better story, something nice and reasonable, that anybody can accept. I
don’t repeat these ancient absurdities, these god-awful theologoumena11 like the
Virgin Birth, blood and flesh mysteries, and other wholly superfluous miracle
gossip. I show you the touching and simple humanity behind these gruesome
inventions of benighted ecclesiastical brains.”
This is a kind-hearted iconoclasm far more
deadly than the frankly murderous arrows from M. de Voltaire’s quiver: all
these mythological assertions are so obviously impossible that their refutation
is not even needed. These relics of the dark ages vanish like morning mist
before the rising sun, when the idealistic and charming gardener’s boy
experiments with miracles of the good old kind, or when your authentic Galilean
grandmother “Marya” does not even recognize herself or her beloved son in the
picture produced by the magic mirror of Christian tradition.
Yet, why should a more or less ordinary
story of a good mother and her well-meaning idealistic boy give rise to one of
the most amazing mental or spiritual developments of all times? Who or what is
its agens? Why could the facts not remain as they were originally?
The answer is obvious: The story is so ordinary that there would not have been
any reason for its tradition, quite certainly not for its world-wide expansion.
The fact that the original situation has developed into one of the most
extraordinary myths about a divine heros, a God-man and his cosmic
fate, is not due to its underlying human story, but to the powerful action of
pine-existing mythological motifs attributed to the biographically almost
unknown Jesus, a wandering miracle Rabbi in the style of the ancient Hebrew
prophets, or of the contemporary teacher John the Baptizer, or of the much
later Zaddiks of the Chassidim12 The immediate source and origin of the
myth projected upon the teacher Jesus is to be found in the then popular Book
of Enoch and its central figure of the “Son of Man” and his messianic mission.
From the Gospel texts it is even manifest that Jesus identified himself with
this “Son of Man.” Thus it is the spirit of his time, the collective hope and
expectation which caused this astounding transformation not at all the more or
less insignificant story of the man Jesus.
The true agens is the archetypal
image of the Cod-man, appearing in Ezekiel’s vision13 for
the first time in Jewish history, but in itself a considerably older figure in
Egyptian theology, viz., Osiris and Horus.
The transformation of Jesus, i.e., the
integration of his human self into a super- or inhuman figure of a deity,
accounts for the amazing “distortion” of his ordinary personal biography. In
other words: the essence of Christian tradition is by no means the simple man
Jesus whom we seek in vain in the Gospels, but the lore of the God-man and his
cosmic drama. Even the Gospels themselves make it their special job to prove
that their Jesus is the incarnated God equipped with all the magic powers of
a kurioV tvn pneumatwn.14 That is why they are so liberal
with miracle gossip which they naively assume proves their point. It is only
natural that the subsequent post-apostolic developments even went several
points better in this respect, and in our days the process of mythological
integration is still expanding and spreading itself even to Jesus’ mother,
formerly carefully kept down to the human rank and file for at least 500 years
of early church history. Boldly breaking through the sacrosanct rule about the
definability of a new dogmatic truth, viz., that the said truth is only definibilis inasmuch
as it was believed and taught in apostolic times, explicite or implicite, the
pope has declared the Assumptio Mariae a dogma of the Christian
creed. The justification he relies on is the pious belief of the masses for
more than 1000 years, which he considers sufficient proof of the work of the
Holy Ghost. Obviously the “pious belief” of the masses continues the process of
projection, i.e., of transformation of human situations into myth.
But why should there be myth at all? My
letter is already too long so that I can’t answer this last question any more,
but I have written several books about it. I only wanted to explain to you my
idea that in trying to extract the quintessence of Christian tradition, you
have removed it like Prof. Bultmann in his attempt at “demythologizing” the
Gospels. One cannot help admitting that the human story is so very much more
probable, but it has little or nothing to do with the problem of the myth
containing the essence of Christian religion. You catch your priests most
cleverly in the disadvantageous position which they have created for themselves
by their preaching a concrete historicity of clearly mythological facts.
Nobody reading your admirable novel can deny being deeply impressed by the
very dramatic confrontation of the original with the mythological picture, and
very probably he will prefer the human story to its mythological “distortion.”
But what about the euanggelion, the
“message” of the God-man and Redeemer and his divine fate, the very foundation
of everything that is holy to the Church? There is the spiritual heritage and
harvest of 1900 years still to account for, and I am very doubtful whether the
reduction to common sense is the correct answer or not. As a matter of fact, I
attribute an incomparably greater importance to the dogmatic truth than to the
probable human story. The religious need gets nothing out of the latter, and at
all events less than from a mere belief in Jesus Christ or any other dogma.
Inasmuch as the belief is real and living, it works. But inasmuch as it is mere
imagination and an effort of the will without understanding, I see little merit
in it. Unfortunately, this unsatisfactory condition prevails in modem times,
and in so far as there is nothing beyond belief without understanding but doubt
and scepticism, the whole Christian tradition goes by the board as a mere
fantasy. I consider this event a tremendous loss for which we are to pay a
terrific price. The effect becomes visible in the dissolution of ethical values
and a complete disorientation of our Weltanschauung. The “truths” of
natural science or “existential philosophy” are poor surrogates. Natural
“laws” are in the main mere abstractions (being statistical averages) instead
of reality, and they abolish individual existence as being merely exceptional.
But the individual as the only carrier of life and existence is of paramount
importance. He cannot be substituted by a group or by a mass. Yet we are
rapidly approaching a state in which nobody will accept individual
responsibility any more. We prefer to leave it as an odious business to groups
and organizations, blissfully unconscious of the fact that the group or mass
psyche is that of an animal and wholly inhuman.
What we need is the development of the
inner spiritual man, the unique individual whose treasure is hidden on the one
hand in the symbols of our mythological tradition, and on the other hand in
man’s unconscious psyche. It is tragic that science and its philosophy
discourage the individual and that theology resists every reasonable attempt to
understand its symbols. Theologians call their creed a symbolum,15 but they refuse to call their truth “symbolic.” Yet, if it
is anything, it is anthropomorphic symbolism and therefore capable able of
re-interpretation.
Hoping you don’t mind my frank discussion
of your very inspiring writings,
I remain, with my best wishes for the New
Year,
Yours sincerely, C. G. JUNG
P.S. Thank you very much for your
kind letter that has reached me just now. I am amazed at the fact that you
should have difficulties in finding a publisher.16 What is
America coming to, when her most capable authors cannot reach their public any
more? What a time!
This letter was published, with
minor changes and some omissions, in New Republic, vol 132, no.8, issue 2100
(21 Feb. 1955).—As some of Jung’s comments will hardly be intelligible to
readers unfamiliar with Our Lady, a brief summary is given: The heroine of
the story is Marya, a widow and grandmother, a peasant woman of ancient
Nazareth speaking only Aramaic. Her son Jeshu, who is depicted as a religious
and social revolutionary, has gone away on a mission, and in an agony of fear
as to his future she consults a sorceress. Under a spell, she awakens in a
great city (Los Angeles), moving with the crowd into a stadium where she
witnesses what she takes to be a battle: the football game between Notre Dame
U., Indiana, and the U. of California. Sitting next to her is a professor of
Semitic languages at Notre Dame; on addressing the utterly bewildered woman he
learns to his astonishment that she speaks ancient Aramaic. He hears her story
and takes her to the bishop, who exorcises the demons and sends her hack to
Nazareth with no enlightenment whatever. There she rebukes the sorceress,
saying: ‘I asked to see the future of myself and my son: and nothing I saw has
anything to do with us.”
2 The
Missale Romanum (liturgy of the Roman Catholic Mass), has the
following text for Holy Saturday: “Oh unspeakable tenderness of charity! In
order to redeem the servant, Thou bust given the son. Oh truly necessary sin of
Adam which has been redeemed through the death of Christ. Oh happy guilt which
has found so great a Redeemer!” — The term “Felix culpa” (happy fault) goes
back to St. Augustine.
3 What
Didymus Did (London, 1954), the story of a young gardener in a suburb of
Los Angeles who is visited by an angel and receives the power to perform
miracles
(Didymus, “twin,” is the name of the
apostle Thomas. Cf. John 11:16.)
4 In
the Book of Enoch, Samiasaz is the leader of the angels who took human wives
(Gen. 6:2). Cf. “Answer to Job,” CW 11, par. 689.
6. St. Athanasius (ca. 293—373),
archbishop of Alexandria, wrote a biography of St. Anthony (ca. 250—350), the
first Christian monk. St. Anthony is noted for his fights with the devil, who
appeared to him under manifold disguises. In one story the devil admits defeat
by the saint, hoping to seduce him into the sin of pride. A long excerpt from
the biography, “Life of St. Anthony,” inThe Paradise or Garden
of the Holy Fathers (1904), is in Prychological Types,CW 6,
par. 82.
7 After
having promulgated the dogma of the bodily assumption of Mary into heaven
in Munificentissimus Deus, Nov. 1950, Pius XII confirmed it in his
En. cyclical Ad Caeli Reginam, 11 Oct. 1954, which established a
yearly feast in honour of Mary’s “royal dignity” as Queen of Heaven and Earth.
8.Euhemeros, Greek philosopher (fl. 4th—3rd
cent. B.C.). He taught that the Olympians were originally great kings and war
heroes.
10 Encyclopedie
ou Dictionnaire raisonee des sciences, des arts et des metiers, edited by
Diderot (1713-84) became one of the most important influences in the French
Enlightenment.
11Teachings not part of Church dogma but
supported by theologians; more generally theological formulations of the nature
of God.
12 The Chassidim (or Hasidim) were a
mystical sect of Judaism, founded shortly before the middle of the 18th cent.
by the mystic Israel Baal Shem (“Master of the Holy Name”; 1700-1760). The
leaders were called Zaddiks (righteous men).
14= Lord of the spirits.
15 symbolum, in
the theological sense, is the formulation of a basic tenet of Christian faith;
the creeds were symbola. Cf. “Dogma of the Trinity,” CW 11,
pars. 210ff.
16 In
his letter S. spoke of his difficulties in finding a publisher for What
Didymus Did. It was never published in America but only in England. — This
postscript was added in handwriting.