What would have happened if St. Paul had allowed himself
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St. Paul for instance was not converted to Christianity by intellectual or philosophical endeavour or by a belief, but by the force of his immediate inner experience. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 183.
What would have happened if Paul had allowed himself to be talked out of his journey to Damascus? ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 529
The idea of angels, archangels, “principalities and powers” in St. Paul, the archons of the Gnostics, the heavenly hierarchy of Dionysius the Areopagite, all come from the perception of the relative autonomy of the archetypes. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 104.
St. Paul was definitely not insane nor was his vision extraordinary. I know quite a number of cases of visions of Christ or auditions of a voice from within. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 380.
St. Paul’s teacher, Gamaliel, was a noted Cabbalist. ~Carl Jung, Meetings with Jung, Page 301
These signs appear in Gnosticism, St. Paul’s sayings are undoubtedly connected with Gnosticism. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8March1935, Pages 199.
What, finally, does it mean when St. Paul confesses: “The evil which I would not, that I do”? ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 353
I sometimes feel that Paul’s words ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love” might well be the first condition of all cognition and the quintessence of divinity itself. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 353
Please give X. my best greetings and tell him-because his love is all too easily injured-he should meditate on Paul’s words in the Epistle to the Corinthians: “Love endureth all things.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 120.
The new man of St. Paul’s early Christian teaching is exactly the same thing as the subtle body. It is an archetypal idea, exceedingly profound, which belongs to the sphere of the immortal archetypes. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 116
The tragedy of my youth was that I saw my father, before my eyes, so to speak, break to pieces against the problem of his faith and come to an early death. This was the objective, external event that opened my eyes to the significance of religion. Subjective, inner experiences prevented me from drawing from my father’s fate negative conclusions with regard to faith that would otherwise have been obvious. I grew up, after all, in the heyday of scientific materialism …. I had to rely on experience alone. Paul’s experience in Damascus was always before me …. Carl Jung, Jung by Gerhard Wehr, Page 49
The tragedy of my youth was that I saw my father, before my eyes, so to speak, break to pieces against the problem of his faith and come to an early death. This was the objective, external event that opened my eyes to the significance of religion. Subjective, inner experiences prevented me from drawing from my father’s fate negative conclusions with regard to faith that would otherwise have been obvious. I grew up, after all, in the heyday of scientific materialism …. I had to rely on experience alone. Paul’s experience in Damascus was always before me …. Carl Jung, Jung by Gerhard Wehr, Page 49
Psychology teaches us that, in a certain sense, there is nothing in the psyche that is old; nothing that can really, finally die away. Even Paul was left with a thorn in the flesh. Whoever protects himself against what is new and strange and regresses to the past falls into the same neurotic condition as the man who identifies himself with the new and runs away from the past.
The only difference is that the one has estranged himself from the past and the other from the future. In principle both are doing the same thing: they are reinforcing their narrow range of consciousness instead of shattering it in the tension of opposites and building up a state of wider and higher consciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 767
Nobody but the absolute believer in the inviolability of traditional marriage could perpetrate such breaches of good taste, just as only the believer in God can really blaspheme. Whoever doubts marriage in the first place cannot infringe against it; for him the legal definition is invalid because, like St. Paul, he feels himself beyond the law, on the higher plane of love. But because the believers in the law so frequently trespass against their own laws, whether from stupidity, temptation, or mere viciousness, the modern woman begins to wonder whether she too may not belong to the same category. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 265
As experience shows, the figure one sees is not necessarily identical with the person one identifies with it, just as the picture by an artist is not identical with the original; but it is obvious that the vision of Christ was a most important religious experience to St. Paul. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 380.
In this you can easily see the origin of my psychology: only by going my own way, integrating my capacities headlong (like Paul), and thus creating a foundation for myself, could something be vouchsafed to me or built upon it, no matter where it came from, and of which I could be reasonably sure that it was not merely one of my own neglected capacities. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 258.
The Christian during contemplation would never say “I am Christ,” but will confess with Paul: “Not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Gal. 2:20). Our sutra however, says: “Thou wilt know that thou art the Buddha.” At bottom the two confessions are identical, in that the Buddhist only attains this knowledge when he is atman, ‘without self.’ But there is an immeasurable difference in the formulation. The Christian attains his end in Christ, the Buddhist knows he is the Buddha. The Christian gets out of the transitory and ego-bound world of consciousness, but the Buddhist still reposes on the eternal ground of his inner nature, whose oneness with Deity, or with universal Being, is confirmed in other Indian testimonies. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 949
In Christianity the life and death of the God-man, as a unique sacrifice, bring about the reconciliation of man, who craves redemption and is sunk in materiality, with God. The mystical effect of the God-man’s self-sacrifice extends, broadly speaking, to all men, though it is efficacious only for those who submit through faith or are chosen by divine grace; but in the Pauline acceptance it acts as an apocatastasis and extends also to non-human creation in general, which, in its imperfect state, awaits redemption like the merely natural man ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 415
This strange usage is explained by the fact that the majority of the patristic allegories have in addition to their positive meaning a negative one. Thus in St. Eucherius 168 the rapacious wolf “in its good part” signifies the apostle Paul, but “in its bad part” the devil ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 147
I want to make clear that by the term “religion” I do not mean a creed.
It is, however, true that every creed is originally based on the one hand upon the experience of the numinosum and on the other hand upon, that is to say, trust or loyalty, faith and confidence in a certain experience of a numinous nature and in the change of consciousness that ensues.
The conversion of Paul is a striking example of this.
We might say, then, that the term “religion” designates the attitude peculiar to a consciousness which has been changed by experience of the numinosum. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 9
The materialistic error was probably unavoidable at first.
Since the throne of God could not be discovered among the galactic systems, the inference was that God had never existed.
The second unavoidable error is psychologism: if God is anything, he must be an illusion derived from certain motives—from the will to power, for instance, or from repressed sexuality.
These arguments are not new.
Much the same thing was said by the Christian missionaries who overthrew the idols of heathen gods.
But whereas the early missionaries were conscious of serving a new God by combatting the old ones, modern iconoclasts are unconscious of the one in whose name they are destroying old values.
Nietzsche thought himself quite conscious and responsible when he smashed the old tablets, yet he felt a peculiar need to back himself up with a revivified Zarathustra, a sort of alter ego, with whom he often identifies himself in his great tragedy Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Nietzsche was no atheist, but his God was dead.
The result of this demise was a split in himself, and he felt compelled to call the other self “Zarathustra” or, at times, “Dionysus.”
In his fatal illness he signed his letters “Zagreus,” the dismembered god of the Thracians.
The tragedy of Zarathustra is that, because his God died, Nietzsche himself became a god; and this happened because he was no atheist.
He was of too positive a nature to tolerate the urban neurosis of atheism.
It seems dangerous for such a man to assert that “God is dead”: he instantly becomes the victim of inflation.
Far from being a negation, God is actually the strongest and most effective “position” the psyche can reach, in exactly the same sense in which Paul speaks of people “whose God is their belly” (Phil. 3: 19).
The strongest and therefore the decisive factor in any individual psyche compels the same belief or fear, submission or devotion which a God would demand from man.
Anything despotic and inescapable is in this sense “God,” and it becomes absolute unless, by an ethical decision freely chosen, one succeeds in building up against this natural phenomenon a position that is equally strong and invincible.
If this psychic position proves to be absolutely effective, it surely deserves to be named a “God,” and what is more, a spiritual God, since it sprang from the freedom of ethical decision and therefore from the mind.
Man is free to decide whether “God” shall be a “spirit” or a natural phenomenon like the craving of a morphine addict, and hence whether “God” shall act as a beneficent or a destructive force. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 142
From the reactions the lecture provoked, it was plain that some of my readers found a psychological discussion of Christian symbols objectionable even when it carefully avoided any
infringement of their religious value.
Presumably my critics would have found less to object to had the same psychological
treatment been accorded to Buddhist symbols, whose sacredness is just as indubitable.
Yet, what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
I have to ask myself also, in all seriousness, whether it might not be far more dangerous if Christian symbols were made inaccessible to thoughtful understanding by being banished to a sphere of sacrosanct unintelligibility.
They can easily become so remote from us that their irrationality turns into preposterous nonsense.
Faith is a charisma not granted to all; instead, man has the gift of thought, which can strive after the highest things.
The timid defensiveness certain moderns display when it comes to thinking about symbols was certainly not shared by St. Paul or by many of the venerable Church Fathers.
This timidity and anxiety about Christian symbols is not a good sign.
If these symbols stand for a higher truth—which, presumably, my critics do not doubt—then science can only make a fool of itself if it proceeds incautiously in its efforts to understand them.
Besides, it has never been my intention to invalidate the meaning of symbols; I concern myself with them precisely because I am convinced of their psychological validity.
People who merely believe and don’t think always forget that they continually expose themselves to their own worst enemy: doubt.
Wherever belief reigns, doubt lurks in the background.
But thinking people welcome doubt: it serves them as a valuable stepping-stone to better knowledge.
People who can believe should be a little more tolerant with those of their fellows who
are only capable of thinking.
Belief has already conquered the summit which thinking tries to win by toilsome climbing.
The believer ought not to project his habitual enemy, doubt, upon the thinker, thereby suspecting him of destructive designs.
If the ancients had not done a bit of thinking we would not possess any dogma about the Trinity at all.
The fact that a dogma is on the one hand believed and on the other hand is an object of
thought is proof of its vitality.
Therefore let the believer rejoice that others, too, seek to climb the mountain on whose peak
he sits. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 170
This creed is still entirely on the level of the gospels and epistles: there are three divine figures, and they do not in any way contradict the one God.
Here the Trinity is not explicit, but exists latently, just as Clement’s second letter says of the
pre-existent Church: “It was spiritually there.”
Even in the very early days of Christianity it was accepted that Christ as Logos was God himself (John i : i).
For Paul he is pre-existent in God’s form, as is clear from the famous “kenosis” passage in Philippians 2:6 (AV): “Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God”.
There are also passages in the letters where the author confuses Christ with the Holy Ghost, or where the three are seen as one, as in Corinthians 3:17 (DV): “Now the Lord is the spirit.” (
When the next verse speaks of the “glory of the Lord,” “Lord” seems to refer to Christ.
But if you read the whole passage, from verses 7 to 18, it is evident that the “glory” refers equally to God, thus proving the promiscuity of the three figures and their latent Trinity. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 212
The sequence of creeds illustrates the evolution of the Trinity idea through the centuries. In the course of its development it either consistently avoided, or successfully combated, all
rationalistic deviations, such as, for instance, the so-plausible looking Arian heresy.
The creeds superimposed on the trinitarian allusions in the Holy Scriptures a structure of ideas that is a perpetual stumbling-block to the liberal-minded rationalist.
Religious statements are, however, never rational in the ordinary sense of the word, for they always take into consideration that other world, the world of the archetype, of which reason in
the ordinary sense is unconscious, being occupied only with externals.
Thus the development of the Christian idea of the Trinity unconsciously reproduced the archetype of the homoousia of Father, Son, and Ka-mutef which first appeared in Egyptian theology.
Not that the Egyptian model could be considered the archetype of the Christian idea.
The archetype an sich, as I have explained elsewhere, is an “irrepresentable” factor, a “disposition”
which starts functioning at a given moment in the development of the human mind and arranges the material of consciousness into definite patterns.
That is to say, man’s conceptions of God are organized into triads and trinities, and a whole host of ritualistic and magical practices take on a triple or trichotomous character, as in the case of thrice-repeated apotropaic spells, formulae for blessing, cursing, praising, giving thanks, etc.
Wherever we find it, the archetype has a compelling force which it derives from the unconscious, and whenever its effect becomes conscious it has a distinctly numinous quality.
There is never any conscious invention or cogitation, though speculations about the Trinity have often been accused of this.
All the controversies, sophistries, quibbles, intrigues, and dissensions that are such an odious blot on the history of this dogma owe their existence to the compelling numinosity of the archetype and to the unexampled difficulty of incorporating it in the world of rational thought.
Although the emperors may have made political capital out of the quarrels that ensued, this singular chapter in the history of the human mind cannot possibly be traced back to politics, any more than social and economic causes can be held responsible for it.
The sole reason for the dogma lies in the Christian “message,” which caused a psychic revolution in Western man.
On the evidence of the gospels, and of Paul’s letters in particular, it announced the real and veracious appearance of the God-man in this humdrum human world, accompanied by all the marvellous portents worthy of the son of God.
However obscure the historical core of this phenomenon may seem to us moderns, with our hankering for factual accuracy, it is quite certain that those tremendous psychic effects, lasting for centuries, were not causelessly called forth, by just nothing at all.
Unfortunately the gospel reports, originating in missionary zeal, form the meagrest source imaginable for attempts at historical reconstruction.
But, for that very reason, they tell us all the more about the psychological reactions
of the civilized world at that time.
These reactions and assertions are continued in the history of dogma, where they are
still conceived as the workings of the Holy Ghost.
This interpretation, though the psychologist has nothing to say in regard to its metaphysical validity, is of the greatest moment, for it proves the existence of an overwhelming opinion or conviction that the operative factor in the formation of ideas is not man’s intellect
but an authority above and beyond consciousness.
This psychological fact should on no account be overlooked, for any theoretical reasons whatsoever.
Rationalistic arguments to the effect that the Holy Ghost is an hypothesis that cannot be proved are not commensurable with the statements of the psyche.
A delusional idea is real, even though its content is, factually considered, nonsense.
Psychology’s concern is with psychic phenomena and with nothing else.
These may be mere aspects of phenomena which, in themselves, could be subjected to a number of quite different modes of observation.
Thus the statement that dogmas are inspired by the Holy Ghost indicates that they are not the product of conscious cogitation and speculation but are motivated from sources outside consciousness and possibly even outside man.
Statements of this kind are the rule in archetypal experiences and are constantly associated with the sensed presence of a numen.
An archetypal dream, for instance, can so fascinate the dreamer that he is very apt to see in it some kind of illumination, warning, or supernatural help.
Nowadays most people are afraid of surrendering to such experiences, and their fear proves the existence of a “holy dread” of the numinous.
Whatever the nature of these numinous experiences may be, they all have one thing in common: they relegate their source to a region outside consciousness.
Psychology uses instead the concept of the unconscious, and specially that of the collective unconscious as opposed to the personal unconscious.
People who reject the former and give credence only to the latter are forced into personalistic explanations.
But collective and, above all, manifestly archetypal ideas can never be derived from the personal sphere.
If Communism, for instance, refers to Engels, Marx, Lenin, and so on as the “fathers” of the movement, it does not know that it is reviving an archetypal order of society that existed even in primitive times, thereby explaining, incidentally, the “religious” and “numinous” (i.e., fanatical) character of Communism.
Neither did the Church Fathers know that their Trinity had a prehistory dating back several thousand years. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 222
Naturally, it never occurs to these critics that their way of approach is incommensurable with their object.
They think they have to do with rational facts, whereas it entirely escapes them that it is and always has been primarily a question of irrational psychic phenomena.
That this is so can be seen plainly enough from the unhistorical character of the gospels, whose only concern was to represent the miraculous figure of Christ as graphically and impressively as possible.
Further evidence of this is supplied by the earliest literary witness, Paul, who was closer to the events in question than the apostles.
It is frankly disappointing to see how Paul hardly ever allows the real Jesus of Nazareth to get a word in.
Even at this early date (and not only in John) he is completely overlaid, or rather smothered,
by metaphysical conceptions: he is the ruler over all daemonic forces, the cosmic saviour, the mediating God-man.
The whole pre-Christian and Gnostic theology of the Near East (some of whose roots go still further back) wraps itself about him and turns him before our eyes into a dogmatic figure who has no more need of historicity.
At a very early stage, therefore, the real Christ vanished behind the emotions and projections that swarmed about him from far and near; immediately and almost without trace he was absorbed into the surrounding religious systems and moulded into their archetypal exponent.
He became the collective figure whom the unconscious of his contemporaries expected to appear, and for this reason it is pointless to ask who he “really” was.
Were he human and nothing else, and in this sense historically true, he would probably be no
more enlightening a figure than, say, Pythagoras, or Socrates, or Apollonius of Tyana.
He opened men’s eyes to revelation precisely because he was, from everlasting, God, and therefore unhistorical; and he functioned as such only by virtue of the consensus of unconscious expectation.
If nobody had remarked that there was something special about the wonder-working Rabbi
from Galilee, the darkness would never have noticed that a light was shining.
Whether he lit the light with his own strength, or whether he was the victim of the universal longing for light and broke down under it, are questions which, for lack of reliable
information, only faith can decide.
At any rate the documentary reports relating to the general projection and assimilation of the Christ-figure are unequivocal.
There is plenty of evidence for the co-operation of the collective unconscious in view of the abundance of parallels from the history of religion.
In these circumstances we must ask ourselves what it was in man that was stirred by the Christian message, and what was the answer he gave. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 228
It was this archetype of the self in the soul of every man that responded to the Christian message, with the result that the concrete Rabbi Jesus was rapidly assimilated by the constellated archetype.
In this way Christ realized the idea of the self.”
But as one can never distinguish empirically between a symbol of the self and a God-image, the two ideas, however much we try to differentiate them, always appear blended together, so that the self appears synonymous with the inner Christ of the Johannine and Pauline writings, and Christ with God (“of one substance with the Father”), just as the atman appears as the
individualized self and at the same time as the animating principle of the cosmos, and Tao as a condition of mind and at the same time as the correct behaviour of cosmic events.
Psychologically speaking, the domain of “gods” begins where consciousness leaves off, for at that point man is already at the mercy of the natural order, whether he thrive or perish.
To the symbols of wholeness that come to him from there he attaches names which vary according to time and place. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 231
Third, the Trinity lays claim not only to represent a personification of psychic processes in three roles, but to be the one God in three Persons, who all share the same divine nature.
In God there is no advance from the potential to the actual, from the possible to the real, because God is pure reality, the “actus purus” itself.
The three Persons differ from one another by reason of the different manner of their origin, or their procession (the Son begotten by the Father and the Holy Ghost proceeding from both—procedit a patre filioque).
The homoousia, whose general recognition was the cause of so many controversies, is absolutely necessary from a psychological standpoint, because, regarded as a psychological symbol, the Trinity represents the progressive transformation of one and the same substance, namely the psyche as a whole.
The homoousia together with the filioque assert that Christ and the Holy Ghost are both of the same substance as the Father.
But since, psychologically, Christ must be understood as a symbol of the self, and the descent of the Holy Ghost as the self’s actualization in man, it follows that the self must represent something that is of the substance of the Father too.
This formulation is in agreement with the psychological statement that the symbols of the
self cannot be distinguished empirically from a God-image.
Psychology, certainly, can do no more than establish the fact that they are indistinguishable.
This makes it all the more remarkable that the “metaphysical” statement should go so much
further than the psychological one. Indistinguishability is a negative constatation merely; it does not rule out the possibility that a distinction may exist.
It may be that the distinction is simply not perceived.
The dogmatic assertion, on the other hand, speaks of the Holy Ghost making us “children of God,” and this filial relationship is indistinguishable in meaning from the (sonship) or filiatio of Christ.
We can see from this how important it was that the homoousia should triumph over the
homoiousia {similarity of substance); for, through the descent of the Holy Ghost, the self of man enters into a relationship of unity with the substance of God.
As ecclesiastical history shows, this conclusion is of immense danger to the Church—it was, indeed, the main reason why the Church did not insist on any further elaboration of the doctrine of the Holy Ghost.
Its continued development would lead, on a negative estimate, to explosive schisms, and on a positive estimate straight into psychology.
Moreover, the gifts of the Holy Ghost are somewhat mixed: not all of them are unreservedly welcome, as St. Paul has already pointed out.
Also, St. Thomas Aquinas observes that revelation is a gift of the spirit that does not stand in any clearly definable relationship to moral endowment.
The Church must reserve the right to decide what is a working of the Holy Ghost and what is not, thereby taking an exceedingly important and possibly disagreeable decision right out of the layman’s hands.
That the spirit, like the wind, “bloweth where it listeth” is something that alarmed even the Reformers.
The third as well as the first Person of the Trinity can wear the aspect of a deus ahsconditus and its action, like that of fire, may be no less destructive than beneficial when regarded from a purely human standpoint. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 289
The dual meaning of deipnon and thysia is implicitly contained in the words of the sacrament: “the body which (was given) for you.”
This may mean either “which was given to you to eat” or, indirectly, “which was given for you to God.”
The idea of a meal immediately invests the word ‘body’ with the meaning of ‘flesh’ (as an edible substance).
In Paul, Body and Flesh are practically identical. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 304
Granted such tendencies, the conflicts into which people may fall are not hard to imagine.
I can well understand that one would like to do everything possible to protect one’s fellow beings from such adventures.
But curiously enough we find ourselves without means to do this.
All the old arguments against unreasonableness, self-deception, and immorality, once so potent, have lost their attraction.
We are now reaping the fruit of nineteenth-century education.
Throughout that period the Church preached to young people the merit of blind faith, while the universities inculcated an intellectual rationalism, with the result that today we plead in vain whether for faith or reason.
Tired of this warfare of opinions, the modern man wishes to find out for himself how things are.
And though this desire opens the door to the most dangerous possibilities, we
cannot help seeing it as a courageous enterprise and giving it some measure of sympathy.
It is no reckless adventure, but an effort inspired by deep spiritual distress to bring meaning once more into life on the basis of fresh and unprejudiced experience.
Caution has its place, no doubt, but we cannot refuse our support to a serious venture which challenges the whole of the personality.
If we oppose it, we are trying to suppress what is best in man—his daring and his aspirations.
And should we succeed, we should only have stood in the way of that invaluable experience which might have given a meaning to life.
What would have happened if Paul had allowed himself to be talked out of his journey to Damascus? ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 529
It goes without saying that a quite special interest attaches to the character and fate of the incarnate son of God.
Seen from a distance of nearly two thousand years, it is uncommonly difficult to reconstruct a biographical picture of Christ from the traditions that have been preserved.
Not a single text is extant which would fulfil even the minimum modern requirements for writing a history.
The historically verifiable facts are extremely scanty, and the little biographically valid material that exists is not sufficient for us to create out of it a consistent career or an even remotely probable character.
Certain theologians have discovered the main reason for this in the fact that Christ’s
biography and psychology cannot be separated from eschatology.
Eschatology means in effect that Christ is God and man at the same time and that he therefore suffers a divine as well as a human fate.
The two natures interpenetrate so thoroughly that any attempt to separate them mutilates both.
The divine overshadows the human, and the human being is scarcely graspable as an empirical personality.
Even the critical procedures of modern psychology do not suffice to throw light on all the obscurities.
Every attempt to single out one particular feature for clarity’s sake does violence to another which is just as essential either with respect to his divinity or with respect to his humanity.
The commonplace is so interwoven with the miraculous and the mythical that we can never be sure of our facts.
Perhaps the most disturbing and confusing thing of all is that the oldest writings, those of St. Paul, do not seem to have the slightest interest in Christ’s existence as a concrete human being.
The synoptic gospels are equally unsatisfactory as they have more the character
of propaganda than of biography. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 645
Since the Holy Ghost is the Third Person of the Trinity and God is present entire in each of the three Persons at any time, the indwelling of the Holy Ghost means nothing less than an
approximation of the believer to the status of God’s son.
One can therefore understand what is meant by the remark “you are gods.”
The deifying effect of the Holy Ghost is naturally assisted by the imago Dei stamped on the elect.
God, in the shape of the Holy Ghost, puts up his tent in man, for he is obviously minded to realize himself continually not only in Adam’s descendants, but in an indefinitely large number of believers, and possibly in mankind as a whole.
Symptomatic of this is the significant fact that Barnabas and Paul were identified in Lystra
with Zeus and Hermes: “The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men.”
This was certainly only the more naive, pagan view of the Christian transmutation, but precisely for that reason it convinces.
Tertullian must have had something of the sort in mind when he described the “sublimiorem Deum” as a sort of lender of divinity ”who has made gods of men.” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 656
It is the task of the Paraclete, the “spirit of truth,” to dwell and work in individual human beings, so as to remind them of Christ’s teachings and lead them into the light.
A good example of this activity is Paul, who knew not the Lord and received his gospel not from the apostles but through revelation.
He is one of those people whose unconscious was disturbed and produced revelatory ecstasies.
The life of the Holy Ghost reveals itself through its own activity, and through effects which not
only confirm the things we all know, but go beyond them.
In Christ’s sayings there are already indications of ideas which go beyond the traditionally “Christian” morality—for instance the parable of the unjust steward, the moral of which agrees with the Logion of the Codex Bezae, and betrays an ethical standard very different from what is expected.
Here the moral criterion is consciousness and not law or convention.
One might also mention the strange fact that it is precisely Peter, who lacks self-control and is fickle in character, whom Christ wishes to make the rock and foundation of his Church.
These seem to me to be ideas which point to the inclusion of evil in what I would call a
differential moral valuation.
For instance, it is good if evil is sensibly covered up, but to act unconsciously is evil.
One might almost suppose that such views were intended for a time when consideration is given to evil as well as to good, or rather, when it is not suppressed below the threshold in the dubious assumption that we always know exactly what evil is. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 696
One could hardly imagine a more suitable personality for the John of the Apocalypse than the author of the Epistles of John.
It was he who declared that God is light and that “in him is no darkness at all.” (Who said there was any darkness in God?)
Nevertheless, he knows that when we sin we need an “advocate with the Father,” and this is Christ, “the expiation for our sins,” even though for his sake our sins are already forgiven.
(Why then do we need an advocate?)
The Father has bestowed his great love upon us (though it had to be bought at the cost of a human sacrifice!), and we are the children of God.
He who is begotten by God commits no sin. (Who commits no sin?)
John then preaches the message of love.
God himself is love; perfect love casteth out fear.
But he must warn against false prophets and teachers of false doctrines, and it is he who announces the coming of the Antichrist.
His conscious attitude is orthodox, but he has evil forebodings.
He might easily have dreams that are not listed on his conscious programme.
He talks as if he knew not only a sinless state but also a perfect love, unlike Paul, who was not lacking in the necessary self-reflection.
John is a bit too sure, and therefore he runs the risk of a dissociation.
Under these circumstances a counter-position is bound to grow up in the unconscious, which can then irrupt into consciousness in the form of a revelation.
If this happens, the revelation will take the form of a more or less subjective myth, because,
among other things, it compensates the one-sidedness of an individual consciousness.
This contrasts with the visions of Ezekiel or Enoch, whose conscious situation was mainly characterized by an ignorance (for which they were not to blame) and was therefore compensated by a more or less objective and universally valid configuration of archetypal material. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 698
In these circumstances it is well to remind ourselves of St. Paul and his split consciousness: on one side he felt he was the apostle directly called and enlightened by God, and, on the other side, a sinful man who could not pluck out the “thorn in the flesh” and rid himself of the Satanic angel who plagued him.
That is to say, even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 758
