The two great world-religions, Buddhism and Christianity
Mysterium Coniunctionis (Collected Works of C.G. Jung Vol.14
[Notably the passage below is the final paragraph in Dr. Jung’s last great work “Mysterium Coniunctionis.”]
That a psychological approach to these matters draws man more into the center of the picture as a measure of all things cannot be denied. But this gives him a significance which is not without justification. The two great world-religions, Buddhism and Christianity, have each in its own way, accorded man a central place, and Christianity has stressed this tendency still further by the dogma that God became very man. No psychology in the world could vie with the dignity that God himself has accorded to him. ~Carl Jung; Mysterium Coniunctionis; Page 553; Para 789
Carl Jung on Christianity.
C.G. Jung Psychological Reflections : A New Anthology of His Writings, 1905-1961
We always think that Christianity consists in a particular confession of faith and in belonging to a Church.
No, Christianity is our world.
Everything we think is the fruit of the Middle Ages and indeed of the Christian Middle Ages.
Our whole science, everything that passes through our head, has inevitably gone through this history.
It lives in us and has left its stamp upon us for all time and will always form a vital layer of our psyche, just like the phylogenetic traces in our body.
The whole character of our mentality, the way we look at things, is also the result of the Christian Middle Ages; whether we know it or not is quite immaterial.
The age of rational enlightenment has eradicated nothing.
Even our method of rational enlightenment is Christian.
The Christian Weltanschauung is therefore a psychological fact that does not allow of any further rationalization; it is something that has happened, that is present.
We are inevitably stamped as Christians, but we are also stamped by what existed before Christianity. ~Carl Jung, Psychological Reflections, Pages 341-342.
All of us who have had a religious education are deeply impressed by the idea that Christianity entered into history without an historical past, like a stroke of lightning out of a clear sky.
This attitude was necessary, but I am convinced it is not true.
Everything has its history, everything has “grown,” and Christianity, which is supposed to have appeared suddenly as a unique revelation from heaven, undoubtedly also has its history.
Moreover, how it began is as clear as daylight. I need not speak of the rites of the Mass and certain peculiarities of the priests’ clothing which are borrowed from pagan times, for the fundamental ideas of the Christian Church also have their predecessors.
But a break in continuity has occurred because we are all overcome by the impression of the uniqueness of Christianity.
It is exactly as if we had built a cathedral over a pagan temple and no longer knew that it is still there underneath.
The result is that the inner correspondence with the outer God-image is undeveloped through lack of psychic culture and has remained stuck in paganism. ~Carl Jung, Psychological Reflections, Pages 342.
Carl Jung on the “Christian Message.”
Letters of C. G. Jung: Volume 2, 1951-1961
To Pastor W. Niederer
Dear Pastor Niederer, 1 October 1953
I will answer your points a s best I can in writing.
1 . My interest in the first place was to understand the meaning of the Christian message myself, in the second place to convey this understanding to those of my patients who felt a religious need, and in the third place to salvage the meaning of Christian symbols in general.
- I don’t do anything to God at all, how could I?
I criticize merely our conceptions of God. I have no idea what God is in himself.
In my experience there are only psychic phenomena which are ultimately of unknown origin, since the psyche in itself is hopelessly unconscious.
My critics all ignore the epistemological barrier which is expressly respected by me.
Just as everything we perceive is a psychic phenomenon and therefore secondary, so is all inner experience.
We should be truly modest and not imagine we can say anything about God himself.
Truly we are confronted with frightful enigmas.
We must in fact be conscious that an unconscious exists.
I don’t dare to formulate what the theologian does, but what I do is try to make people conscious enough to know where they can exercise their will and where they are confronted with the power of a non-ego.
So far as I can observe the workings of this non-ego it is possible for me to make statements about it.
I have no real cognitive means (only arbitrary decisions) which would enable me to distinguish the unknowable non-ego from what men since the remotest times have called God (or gods, etc.).
For instance the-so far as I can supreme God archetype of the self has a symbolism identical with the traditional
Christian God-image.
How all this can be understood without a knowledge of the psychology of the unconscious, or without self-knowledge,is utterly beyond me. In psychology one understands only what one has experienced.
The archetype is the ultimate I can know of the inner world.
This knowledge denies nothing else that might be there.
3· If one assumes that God affects the psychic background and activates it or actually is it, then the archetypes are, so to speak, organs
(tools ) of God.
The self “functions” like the Christ-image.
This is the theological Christus in nobis.
It is not only I who think this way, but ail the ancients right back to Paul.
I take my stand clearly on the empirical plane and speak a psychological language where the theologian speaks an analogous theological or mythological language.
Of course theological statements about the Christian aeon do not agree at all points with psychological empiricism, for instance in regard to God as the Summum Bonum or Christ as a one-sided pneumatic light-figure.
But everything that is alive changes; it even develops, so that Christianity is no longer what it was woo let alone 1900 years ago.
It can differentiate itself still further, i.e., go on living, but to do that it must be interpreted anew in every aeon.
If that does not happen (it happens even in the Catholic Church) it suffocates in traditionalism.
But the foundations, the fundamental psychic facts, remain eternally the same.
4- Here I can only say: 0 sancta simplicitas!
I realize I am fit for the stake ad maiorem Dei gloriam.
I consider myself a Christian, but that didn’t do Savonarola or Servetus much good, and not even Christ himself escaped this fate.
“Woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!”
How about these parsons and the true imitatio Christi?
Where are they crucified?
They· are redeemed scot-free of all pain, and Christ can take care of everything else.
With respects to your wife and kind regards,
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 129-131.
