C.G. Jung Letters, Vol. 1: 1906-1950

To Pastor H. Wegmann

Dear Pastor Wegmann, 19 December 1943

Your review of Dr. Aeppli’s book in the NZZ delighted as much as it interested me, particularly because Kohler’s review of Aeppli’s last book was so deplorably compromising.

I admire your review for its courage, manliness, and honesty, qualities we so often painfully miss but which are vitally important for “Protestantism” (in the best sense of this unfortunate term).

It is indeed quite wrong for the “reformed Church” to want to act in every respect like the Catholic.

The latter possesses the whole wealth of tradition, the former is poor and should be poor, since it must relinquish all our yesterdays again and again in order to live wholly in the ever-procreative spirit which
is its truest foundation.

What it leaves behind is always the katholicon, and what it finds before it is the presence of God in the living individual human being, the only place where God can be met with beyond a peradventure.

And if it is not an ecclesia spiritualis, then it is nothing but a Catholic memory, for which there is certainly much to be said, or there could not be so many people who are satisfied with the anamnesis alone.

Its supreme and unique meaning, it seems to me, is that it lives in and with the creative spirit and shares its adventures, tragedies, perils, and triumphs.

The Catholic Church arranges the codification of memories and the lessons of history so much better.

The conservation of so much classical paganism is of inestimable value.

Therefore the Catholic is the Christian Church par excellence.

But a confession of faith in the Holy Spirit is beyond Christ (for which I politely beg your pardon) and hence, it seems to me, more helpful for the attainment of salvation (which still hasn’t materialized)
than that backward-looking memory of the prefiguring God-man who prepared the way for the Paraclete.

And it is the Paraclete that represents the revelation of God in the individual-as-he-is, the nothing-hut-man.

This is but a token of my gratitude to you for having made me feel in your review something one so often longs to hear and so seldom does hear-an avowal of the living presence of the spirit.

Yours sincerely,

C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 339-340.