Carl Jung on the Trinity – Anthology
The dream was of the general form of three elements being differentiated and a fourth less well developed; he elaborated at great length the problem of adding the fourth element to the existing trinity of faculties and the implications of this development. . ~Robert Johnson, C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 36-39
Go not outside, return into thyself: truth dwells in the inner man.” Augustine, Liber de vera religione. Motto to: “A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 466-467.
“God imagined the world. The Trinity is imaged in the creature.” In spite of exhaustive inquiries the source remains unidentified. But cf. von Franz, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas, p. 186, n. 141: “God created all visible things through imagination and manifests himself in everything . . . . Thus the creative fantasy of God is contained in the visible. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 400, Footnote 6.
My view comes very close to Koepgen’s lapidary formula, which moreover bears the ecclesiastical imprimatur: “The Trinity is a revelation not only of God but at the same time of man.” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 74.
The suffering God-Man may be at least five thousand years old and the Trinity is probably even older. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 46.
In reality the orthodox Christian formula is not quite complete, because the dogmatic aspect of the evil principle is absent from the Trinity and leads a more or less awkward existence on its own as the devil. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 59.
It was, indeed, a great problem to the Middle Ages, this problem of the Trinity and the exclusion, or the very qualified recognition, of the feminine element, of the earth, the body, and matter in general, which were yet, in the form of Mary’s womb, the sacred abode of the Deity and the indispensable instrument for the divine work of redemption. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 72.
The Trinity is a revelation not only of God but at the same time of man. ~Carl Jung citing Koepgen, CW 11, Page 74.
Even among professing Christians there are very few who think seriously about the Trinity as a matter of dogma and would consider it a possible subject for reflection—not to mention the educated public. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 112.
Arrangement in triads is an archetype in the history of religion, which in all probability formed the basis of the Christian Trinity. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 113.
The quaternity is the sine qua non of divine birth and consequently of the inner life of the trinity. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, para 125.
“God” in this sense is a biological, instinctual and elemental “model,” an archetypal “arrangement” of individual, contemporary and historical contents, which, despite its numinosity, is and must be exposed to intellectual and moral criticism, just like the image of the “evolving” God or of Yahweh or the Summum Bonum or the Trinity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 254-256.
On the other hand it is just the Trinity dogma, as it stands, that is the classical example of an artificial structure and an intellectual product, so much so that no theologian has yet recognized or admitted its origin in Egyptian theology. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 422-423.
The mystery of the Virgin Birth, or the homoousia of the Son with the Father, or the Trinity which is nevertheless not a triad—these no longer lend wings to any philosophical fancy. They have stiffened into mere objects of belief. So it is not surprising if the religious need, the believing mind, and the philosophical speculations of the educated European are attracted by the symbols of the East—those grandiose conceptions of divinity in India and the abysms of Taoist philosophy in China—just as once before the heart and mind of the men of antiquity were gripped by Christian ideas.
There are many Europeans who began by surrendering completely to the influence of the Christian symbol until they landed themselves in a Kierkegaardian neurosis, or whose relation to God, owing to the progressive impoverishment of symbolism, developed into an unbearably sophisticated I-You relationship—only to fall victims in their turn to the magic and novelty of Eastern symbols. This surrender is not necessarily a defeat; rather it proves the receptiveness and vitality of the religious sense.
We can observe much the same thing in the educated Oriental, who not infrequently feels drawn to the Christian symbol or to the science that is so unsuited to the Oriental mind, and even develops an enviable understanding of them. That people should succumb to these eternal images is entirely normal, in fact it is what these images are for. They are meant to attract, to convince, to fascinate, and to overpower. They are created out of the primal stuff of revelation and reflect the ever-unique experience of divinity. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para II
