Spirit | Spirit cannot be learned, it is given to us by God’s grace

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Spirit cannot be learned, it is given to us by God’s grace

C.G. Jung Letters, Vol. 1: 1906-1950

To the Secretary of the Union Mondiale
de la Femme pour la Concorde
Internationale, Geneva

Dear Madame, 27 January 1941

I agree with you entirely that it would be desirable if we could make humanity more reasonable simply by instruction and by good intentions.

But are good intentions enough to impress men?

If they were impressionable, the last war with all its atrocities should have served as a lesson.

Yet we have to assume that it produced no effect since hardly a generation later everything is forgotten.

That is why it seems to me useless to try to educate men by talking to them and instructing them .

Men have to be gripped, because only those who are gripped can grip others.

Spirit cannot be learned, it is given to us by God’s grace, which cannot be had by force or reason.

But if men if good will applied themselves to the solution of the conflicts and the causes of the conflicts in their own vicinity, and tried to free themselves from outside influences, they could at least set an example.

As we know, example is more effective than admonition.

In ten lectures I could not add anything at all to what I have just said.

I know that this way of looking at things is neither brilliant nor inspiring, and that-precisely because of its simplicity-it would not have any popular effect.

But since it is my conviction, I could not say anything else in speaking publicly.

This point of view being doubtless out of key with the aim of your organization, it seems to me that you would do better not to receive me among your lecturers.

Thanking you nevertheless for your amiable intention,

I am,

Yours sincerely,

C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 293.

Instinct wants to be transformed into spirit

In his study entitled “The Incest Taboo and the Virgin Archetype,” John Layard makes clear that the word “virgin” was not synonymous with “chaste” in either its Greek or Hebrew origins.

Referring to the Virgin Mary and to other mothers of divine heroes, he says, It would appear that to be a virgin in the mythological sense the woman must conceive outside or before the marriage bond. . .

What then do we mean by “virgin”? It may help us to examine those ways in which we use the word which are not directly concerned with sex.

We speak of a “virgin forest” as being one in which the powers of nature are untrammelled and untouched by man.

But we can think of this from two diametrically opposite points of view.

We can think of it either from the view of the agricultural pioneer, who would regard it as something to be destroyed and uprooted as soon as possible; or else we can think of it from the point of view of a nature lover who would regard the virgin forest with awe as a supreme manifestation of pregnant nature, and who would oppose all the most enlightened efforts of the agriculturalist or town-builder to destroy its primitive beauty,—who would, in fact, treat it as inviolably holy.

The one would represent “law and order” and the other ”nature”.

So that we have here two opposite principles, both valid, the law of man in apparently open conflict with the law of God.

Yet it is the law of God, the untrammelled law of pregnant though as yet chaotic nature that we dub “virgin”, and it is the reduction of that chaos which we call Law and Order.

Thus in this sense the word “virgin” does not mean chastity but the reverse, the pregnancy of nature, free and uncontrolled, corresponding on the human plane to unmarried love, in contrast to controlled nature corresponding to married love, despite the fact that from the legal point of view sexual intercourse within the marriage bond is the only kind which is regarded as “chaste”.

It will be seen that this argument has landed us in the midst of a paradox, a paradox only to be solved either

a) by regarding the whole biblical story of the Virgin Birth as purely allegorical, which the Church asserts it is not, it being, as she maintains, a unique historical event; or else

b) by reconciling the two through the realization that instinct wants to be transformed into spirit, and that the Virgin Birth is the supreme example of this having been achieved, that is to say that Our Lady’s womanhood was so complete and so closely united with God that it became self-reproductive. — Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin, Page 80.