Christ lived a concrete, personal, and unique life
The life of Christ is understood by the Church on the one hand as an historical, and on the other hand as an eternally existing, mystery. This is especially evident in the sacrifice of the Mass. From a psychological standpoint this view can be translated as follows:
Christ lived a concrete, personal, and unique life which, in all essential features had at the same time an archetypal character. This character can be recognized from the numerous connections of the biographical details with worldwide myth-motifs.
These undeniable connections are the main reason why it is so difficult for researchers into the life of Jesus to construct from the gospel reports an individual life divested of myth. In the gospels themselves factual reports, legends, and myths are woven into a whole.
This is precisely what constitutes the meaning of the gospels, and they would immediately lose their character of wholeness if one tried to separate the individual from the archetypal with a critical scalpel.
The life of Christ is no exception in that not a few of the great figures of history have realized, more or less clearly, the archetype of the hero’s life with its characteristic changes of fortune.
But the ordinary man, too, unconsciously lives archetypal forms, and if these are no longer valued it is only because of the prevailing psychological ignorance. Indeed, even the fleeting phenomena of dreams often reveal distinctly archetypal patterns.
At bottom, all psychic events are so deeply grounded in the archetype and are so much interwoven with it that in every case considerable critical effort is needed to separate the unique from the typical with any certainty.
Ultimately, every individual life is at the same time the eternal life of the species. The individual is continuously “historical” because strictly time-bound; the relation of the type to time, on the other hand, is irrelevant.
Since the life of Christ is archetypal to a high degree, it represents to just that degree the life of the archetype.
But since the archetype is the unconscious precondition of every human life, its life, when revealed, also reveals the hidden, unconscious ground life of every individual. That is to say, what happens in the life of Christ happens always and everywhere.
In the Christian archetype all lives of this kind are prefigured and are expressed over and over again or once and for all.
And in it, too, the question that concerns us here of God’s death is anticipated in perfect form.
Christ himself is the typical dying and self-transforming God. Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Paragraph 146.
The Holy Ghost, Christ, Anti-Christ, Crucifixion
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group
“The continuing, direct operation of the Holy Ghost on those who are called to be God’s children implies, in fact, a broadening process of incarnation.
Christ, the son begotten by God, is the first-born who is succeeded by an ever-increasing number of younger brothers and sisters.
There are, however, neither begotten by the Holy Ghost nor born of a virgin. . . .
Their lowly origin (possibly from the mammals) does not prevent them from entering into a close kinship with God as their father and Christ as their brother.” – Carl Jung; Answer to Job
Image: The Holy Spirit depicted as a dove descending on the Holy Family, with God the Father and angels shown atop, by Murillo, c. 1677.
“Although the attributes of Christ (consubstantiality with the Father, co-eternity, filiation, parthenogenesis, crucifixion, Lamb sacrificed between opposites, One divided into Many, etc.) undoubtedly mark him out as an embodiment of the self, looked at from the psychological angle he corresponds to only one half of the archetype.
The other half appears as the Anti-Christ.
The latter is just as much a manifestation of the self, except that he consists of its dark aspect.
Both are Christian symbols, and they have the same meaning as the image of the Savior crucified between two thieves.
This great symbol tells us that the progressive development and differentiation of consciousness leads to an ever more menacing awareness of the conflict and involves nothing less than a crucifixion of the ego, its agonizing suspension between irreconcilable opposites. ~Carl Jung
“The utter failure came at the Crucifixion in the tragic words, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’
If you want to understand the full tragedy of those words you must realize what they meant: Christ saw that his whole life, devoted to the truth according to his best conviction, had been a terrible illusion.
He had lived it to the full absolutely sincerely, he had made his honest experiment, but it was nevertheless a compensation.
On the cross his mission deserted him. But because he had lived so fully and devotedly he won through to the Resurrection body.” – Carl Jung; C.G. Jung Speaking
