Every life is at the same time the eternal life of the species and the Life of Christ.
The life of Christ is understood by the Church on the one hand as 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 the same time and archetypal character.
This character can be recognized from the numerous connections of the biographical details with world-wide myth-motifs. These undeniable connections are the main reasons 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 to 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, Pages 88-89, Paragraph 146.
Carl Jung on “Christification” – Christ Quotations
The Christian Church has hitherto [recognized] Christ as the one and only God-man. But the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, the third Divine Person, in man, brings about a Christification of many, and the question then arises whether these many are all complete God-men. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 470.
Therefore Nietzsche became one stigmatized by the spirit; like Saul he had to experience Christification, when the “other” whispered the “Ecce Homo” in his ear.
Which of them “broke down before the cross”—Wagner or Nietzsche? ~Carl Jung, CW 7 Para 43
The quotation from John is taken from the fourteenth chapter, where Christ teaches that whoever sees him sees the Father.
He is in the Father and the Father is in him.
The disciples are in him and he in them, moreover they will be sent the Holy Ghost as Paraclete and will do works that are greater than his own.
This fourteenth chapter broaches a question that was to have great repercussions for the future: the problem of the Holy Ghost who will remain when Christ has gone, and who intensifies the interpenetration of the divine and the human to such a degree that we can properly speak of a “Christification” of the disciples.
Among the Christian mystics this identity was carried again and again to the point of stigmatization.
Only the mystics bring creativity into religion.
That is probably why they can feel the presence and the workings of the Holy Ghost, and why they are nearer to the experience of brotherhood in Christ. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 530
QUESTION 15. One of Job’s greatest problems was: Can I believe in a just God?
Individuation, “the Christification of many,” the solution given in “Answer to Job” [p. 470], does not do justice to Job’s question.
Did not Job want meaning, a good God and not simply individuation?
He was concerned with metaphysical and theological issues, and the modern Job is too, and just as man cannot live by bread alone, so is he unlikely to feel that he can live by individuation alone which, at its most successful, would appear to be little more than a preparatory process enabling him to face these issues more objectively.
Job wanted justice. He saw that he could not obtain it. Yahweh cannot be argued with. He is unreflecting power.
What else is left to Job but to shut his mouth?
He does not dream of individuation, but he knows what kind of God he is dealing with.
It is certainly not Job drawing further conclusions but God.
He sees that incarnation is unavoidable because man’s insight is a step ahead of him.
He must “empty himself of his Godhead and assume the shape of the i.e., man is his lowest form of existence, in order to obtain the jewel which man possesses in his self-reflection.
Why is Yahweh, the omnipotent creator, so keen to have his “slave,” body and soul, even to the point of admitted jealousy? ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1623
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