Carl Jung on God Anthology
Carl Jung on “God” in The Red Book aka Liber Novus – Anthology
The ancients called the saving word the Logos, an expression of divine reason. So much unreason / was in man that he needed reason to be saved. If one waits long enough, one sees how the Gods all change into serpents and underworld dragons in the end.
The goal of Eastern religious practice is the same as that of Western mysticism: the shifting of the center of gravity from the ego to the self, from man to God. This means that the ego disappears in the self, and man in God. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 958
Religion appears to me to be a peculiar attitude of mind which could be formulated in accordance with the original use of the word religio, which means a careful consideration and observation of certain dynamic factors that are conceived as “powers”: spirits, daemons, gods, laws, ideas, ideals, or whatever name man has given to such factors in his world as he has found powerful, dangerous, or helpful enough to be taken into careful consideration, or grand, beautiful, and meaningful enough to be devoutly worshipped and loved. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 8.
I am not, however, addressing myself to the happy possessors of faith, but to those many people for whom the light has gone out, the mystery has faded, and God is dead. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 148.
His gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 82
Consequently, the work of salvation is intended to save man from the fear of God. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 659.
It was from the spirit of alchemy that Goethe wrought the figure of the “superman” Faust, and this superman led Nietzsche’s Zarathustra to declare that God was dead and to proclaim the will to give birth to the superman, to “create a god for yourself out of your seven devils.” ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 163.
I did not say in the broadcast, “There is a God.” I said, “I do not need to believe in a God; I know.” ~Carl Jung, The Listener, 21 Jan. 1960
Enlightenment, which stripped nature and human institutions of gods, overlooked the God of Terror who dwells in the human soul. ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 302
We find numberless images of God, but we cannot produce the original. There is no doubt in my mind that there is an original behind our images, but it is inaccessible. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1589
He who can risk himself wholly to it finds himself directly in the hands of God, and is there confronted with a situation which makes “simple faith” a vital necessity; in other words, the situation becomes so full of risk or overtly dangerous that the deepest instincts are aroused. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1539
“Oh God!” is what we say, irrespective of whether we say it by way of a curse or by way of love. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 64.
Without knowing it man is always concerned with God. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 249
If you avoid error you do not live; in a sense even it may be said that every life is a mistake, for no one has found the truth. When we live like this we know Christ as a brother, and God indeed becomes man. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 98
With our human knowledge we always move in the human sphere, but in the things of God we should keep quiet and not make any arrogant assertions about what is greater than ourselves. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 125.
It seems to me, however, that when belief enters into practical life we are entitled to the opinion that it should be coupled with the Christian virtue of modesty, which does not brag about absoluteness but brings itself to admit the unfathomable ways of God which have nothing to do with the Christian revelation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 125.
God has never spoken to man except in and through the psyche, and the psyche understands it and we experience it as something psychic. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 98
God wants to be born in the flame of man’s consciousness, leaping ever higher. And what if this has no roots in the earth? If it is not a house of stone where the fire of God can dwell, but a wretched straw hut that flares up and vanishes. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 65-66
One must be able to suffer God. That is the supreme task for the carrier of ideas. He must be the advocate of the earth. God will take care of himself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 65-66
God needs man in order to become conscious, just as he needs limitation in time and space. Let us therefore be for him limitation in time and space, an earthly tabernacle. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 65-66
I don’t believe [in a personal God], but I do know of a power of a very personal nature and an irresistible influence. I call it “God.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 274-275
This psychological definition of God has nothing to do with Christian dogma, but it does describe the experience of the Other, often a very uncanny opponent, which coincides in the most impressive way with the historical “experiences of God.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 271-272
His [God’s] moral quality depends upon individuals. That is why He incarnates.
Individuation and individual existence are indispensable for the transformation of G0d the Creator. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 314.
Instead of the propitiating praise to an unpredictable king or the child’s
prayer to a loving father, the responsible living and fulfilling of the divine will in us will be our form of worship and commerce with G0d. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 316.
Let us hope that G0d’s good spirit will guide him in his decisions, because it will depend upon man’s decision whether G0d’s creation will continue. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 316.
The idea that God is necessarily good and spiritual is simply a prejudice made by man. We wish it were so, we wish that the good and spiritual might be supreme, but it is not. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, Pages 512-513.
Just as nobody but the believer who surrenders himself wholly to G0d can partake of divine grace, so love reveals its highest mysteries and its wonder only to those who are capable of unqualified devotion and loyalty of feeling. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 112
This privatio boni business is odious to me on account of its dangerous consequences: it causes a negative inflation of man, who can’t help imagining himself, if not as a source of the [Evil], at least as a great destroyer, capable of devastating G0d’s beautiful creation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 539-541
G0d is the mystery of all mysteries, a real Tremendum. Good and Evil are psychological relativities And as such quite real, yet one does not know what they are. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 539-541
If the Assumptio means anything, it means a spiritual fact which can be formulated as the integration of the female principle into the Christian conception of the Gd-head. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 566-568
You have hit the mark absolutely: all of a sudden and with terror it became clear to me that I have taken over Faust as my heritage, and moreover as the advocate and avenger of Philemon and Baucis, who, unlike Faust the superman, are the hosts of the gd0s in a ruthless and godforsaken age. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 309-310
This bi-sexuality of Christ is called androgynous, from aner (man) and gyne (woman). This is not only a Christian idea, the gods in most religions have an androgynous nature ascribed to them in some form orother. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8th Dec 1939
We could say that western man became conscious of the fact that this man, this teacher Jesus, was the divine man, whose path had been prepared for thousands of years by Osiris in Egypt and as the idea of the coming of the Messiah in Israel.
This was no human conspiracy, probably Christ had a convincing effect, there was something about him which carried the conviction that he was filled with the spirit of G0d, that he was a prophet. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8th Dec 1939
We have our bete noire and say with the old Pharisee: “God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are.” We don’t want to know that we are the “other men.” ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 27 Jan 1939
No, the Virgin was the archetypal figure of the soul of man, the anima, and it is only in the soul of man that G0d can be born, where else could it be? ~E.A. Bennet, Meetings with Jung, Page 32
We can have ideas about G0d; but whether they are ‘true’ or not, or whether they are ‘absolute’, cannot be answered. ~Carl Jung, Meetings with Jung, Page 305.
A mathematician once remarked that everything in science was man-made except numbers, which had been created by God himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, ¶356, note 24.
Myth is the revelation of divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth; rather it speaks to us as a Word of Gd. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 340.0
No science will ever replace myth, and a myth cannot be made out of any science. For it is not that “G0d” is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 340.
It is not we who invent myth; rather it speaks to us as a Word of G0d. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 340.
True, what the soul imagines happens only in the mind, but what G0d imagines happens in reality. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 280.
So it is not the case at all that I begin by classifying my patients into types and then give them the corresponding advice, as a colleague of mine whom God has endowed with a peculiar wit once asserted. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 186-187
Man is the mirror which G0d holds up to himself, or the sense organ with which he apprehends his being. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 112
Instead of these being dissipated, they have made within the inner rotation of monad a center of life which is independent of bodily existence. Such an ego is a g0d, deus, shen. ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 17
The beauty of the ritual action is one of its essential properties, for man has not served G0d rightly unless he has also served him in beauty. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Paragraph 379.
In the experience of the self it is no longer the opposites “G0d” and “man” that are reconciled, as it was before, but rather the opposites within the G0d-image itself. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 338.
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