God loves human beings more than the angels
C.G. Jung Letters, Vol. 1: 1906-1950
To Olga Frobe-Kapteyn
Dear Frau Frobe, Bollingen, 20 August 1945
The opus consists of three parts: insight, endurance, and action. •
Psychology is needed only in the first part, but in the second and third parts moral strength plays the predominant role.
Your present situation is the result of pressure of circumstances which are unavoidable.
It is conflicts of duty that make endurance and action so difficult.
Your life’s work for Eranos was unavoidable and right.
Nevertheless it conflicts with maternal duties which are equally unavoidable and right.
The one must exist, and so must the other.
There can be no resolution, only patient endurance of the opposites which ultimately spring from your own nature.
You yourself are a conflict that rages in itself and against itself, in order to melt its incompatible substances, the male and the female, in the fire of suffering, and thus create that fixed and unalterable form which is the goal of life.
Everyone goes through this mill, consciously or unconsciously, voluntarily or forcibly.
We are crucified between the opposites and delivered up to the torture until the “reconciling third” takes shape.
Do not doubt the rightness of the two sides within you, and let whatever may happen, happen.
Admit that your daughter is right in saying you are a bad mother, and defend your duty as a mother towards Eranos.
But never forget that Eranos is also the right thing and was latent within you from the beginning.
The apparently unendurable conflict is proof of the rightness of your life.
A life without inner contradiction is either only half a life or else a life in the Beyond, which is destined only for angels.
But God loves human beings more than the angels.
With kindest regards,
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung, ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 375
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