Stephan Hoeller: To believe is vastly inferior to perceiving the symbols whereby truth is revealed.
The time passed and the world changed, the Seven Sermons remained an object of wonder and interest to their one-time scribe.
Thirteen years later, in distant California, the dead “came back” to their enthusiastic admirer once more.
They did not come from Jerusalem but from Zurich, and they appeared in a book then just issued by the publishing house Rascher Verlag under the title Erinnerungen Traume Gedanken von C.G. Jung (Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G. Jung).
A German prepublication copy having been presented to him by a Swiss friend, our protagonist quickly discovered that the appendix of this book contained the German text of the mysterious Sermons.The page introducing the Sermons contained an ominous footnote:
“To be published only in the German edition.”
Once again the enthusiasm of the scribe rose to a great pitch.
The suggestion came to his mind with some force that the German text ought to be made available to many good people who read only English, but who should not be deprived of this experience for that reason.
Now came another somewhat less romantic but still intriguing piece of work, which consisted of his translation of the text into English from the German original.
This translation came to be privately printed and distributed to a select number of personal friends, very much like the original German edition had been distributed by Jung himself. By this time, of course, the wise old man of Zurich and Kusnacht had departed from the stage of his earthly career.
His personality, still subject to speculation and obscure gossip, had already emerged with far greater clarity than had been the case earlier. Jungian psychology was slowly gathering momentum outside of the German-speaking world, and its founder’s unconventional spiritual interests were already in part documented by the appearance of his great works on alchemy, and by his Gnostic assault on conventional theology in his Answer to Job. ― Stephan Hoeller, The Gnostic Jung, Page xiii
This process of confrontation and experience has been characterized-once again by Jung himself-as a “Gnostic process”.
Another useful analogy to the modern psychological Gnostic process is the fourfold structure of the classical Greek drama: agone or contest; pathos or defeat; threnos, or lamentation; and theophania, or a divinely accomplished redemption.
It is significant to note that, of the four stages of development, only the fourth and last may be described as pleasant and joyous, while the other three are characterized by struggle, defeat and mourning.
Is this pessimism? Yes, but by no means a hopeless, despairing pessimism.
The pessimistic view of the present existential condition of the soul or psyche is more than compensated by the hope of the potential ultimate denuhent of wholeness and redemption.
Similarly, in the classical ancient form of Gnosticism, the so-called cosmic pessimism (recognition of the existential evils of life in the cosmos) was set off against the glorious eschatological vision of the liberation of the soul from the bonds of darkness, oppression and ignorance and its reunion with the Pleroma, the transcendental fullness of being.
Philosophers may argue endlessly and theologians may speculate fruitlessly about the abstract issues of the goodness or evil of the created world, but the psychologist has little reason to doubt that the psyche aspiring toward wholeness must first experience keenly and fully those unpleasant existential conditions of alienation and darkness which alone may convince it of the true necessity for growth.
The sick person unaware of his or her illness is less likely to seek for means of healing than someone who experiences the symptoms of the disease.
As Buddha taught suffering and the cessation of suffering, so Jungian psychological teaching recognizes that those unaware of suffering are much more likely to have their development arrested at the level of shallow, personalistic concerns than their fellows who are aware of the facts of suffering.
The neurotic personality, resentful and fearful of the growing pains of the soul, tends to seek refuge in self-deception and thus frequently convinces itself that growth is really unnecessary, for things are quite satisfactory just as they are at present. ― C.G. Jung, The Gnostic Jung, Page 40
It is interesting to note that in the Kabbalah, which has been aptly called Jewish Gnosticism, the unitary concept is amplified and modified by the image of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life with its ten vessels, twenty-two paths and countless hierarchies of angelic, planetary, zodiacal and other attributions.
Similarly, Islamic mysticism, which has appropriated many features of the Kabbalah, takes on a symbolic dimension of complex imagery, totally different from the stark, unimaginative worship of the solitary, transcendental God Allah in orthodox Muslim practice.
Everywhere Gnosis appears, the many appear to supplement the one, even if not replacing it totally.
“Truth did not come into the world naked, but it came in the types and images,” thus declares one of the celebrated treatises of the Nag Hammadi collection, the Gospel of Philip.
Images and images of images bring the light of the Pleroma to earth for the enlightenment and healing of human souls.
To believe is vastly inferior to perceiving the symbols whereby truth is revealed.
The symbols of the Gnostics were not artificially created glyphs and disguises for dogmatic or philosophical preachments; rather they resembled Jung’s own concept of true symbols, which regards a symbol, not as describing something outside of itself, but as containing the mystery within its own structure.
No wonder Jung stated that the Gnostics gave a better symbolic expression to the spiritual and transformative content of the unconscious than their orthodox fellows and successors.
Jung regarded Gnostic symbols as natural symbols, having an organic relationship to the archetypes of the collective unconscious and being spontaneous expressions of the interior realities of the soul, from whence the religious experience originates.
Thus regarding the cross and the figure of Christ as found in Gnosticism, Jung explicitly stated:
[The Gnostic] cross had exactly the same function that the atman or Self has always had for the East . . . . [The] Gnostic Christ figure and the cross are counterparts of the typical mandalas spontaneously produced by the unconscious.
They are natural symbols and they differ fundamentally from the dogmatic figure of Christ in whom all darkness is expressly lacking. ― C.G. Jung, The Gnostic Jung, Page 128-129
The most enigmatic model for metaphysical fascinations of the mind in our age is undoubtedly the Eastern, particularly the Hindu, which consistently employs metaphysical and cosmological language to express what to Jung would appear to be psychological statements.
Jung contended that the search for the wisdom of the East had almost darkened the mind of the West and that, in fact, it is a search that continues to lead countless persons astray.
The alms of the East should not be accepted by us as if we were beggars, said Jung, and the thinking of the great alien cultures of the Orient should not be imitated by Westerners unthinkingly.
In the words of Jung, those who, after the fashion of homeless pirates, settle with thievish intent on foreign shores are in the gravest of all dangers, that of losing their souls.
(See C.G. Jung’s Commentaries on The Secret of the Golden Flower, and also “Yoga and the West,” in Jung’s Collected Works, Vol. 11, pp. 529-539.)
The greatest peril we may run with such imitative exercises, however, is not merely the result of the alien cultural impact of the traditions thus imitated, but of some of their content.
The approach of much Indian thinking, Hindu and Buddhist alike, appears to be the very obliteration of individual consciousness which Jung warns us about in connection with the submerging of the soul into the Pleroma.
When desire is killed out by a variety of methods of meditation and contemplation, what remains is a psychic corpse from which the libidinal cosmic force of the vital surge has been artificially removed.
One can perish of psychic pernicious anemia as well as from its physiological analogue, and the fulfillment of such objectives as desirelessness and egolessness may very well lead to just such a condition.
The desire for self knowledge is just as much a desire as the desire for food or sex. ― Stephan A. Hoeller, The Gnostic Jung, Page 71-72
Contemplating the mysterious panorama of the Seven Sermons, one is reminded of a saying of the philosopher Bacon: “Animus ad amplitudinem Mysteriorurn pro modulo suo dilatetur; non Mysteria ad angustias animi constringantur.”
(Let the mind, so far as it can, be open to the fullness of the mysteries; let not the mysteries be constrained to fit the narrower confines of the mind.)
It is, perhaps, more than befitting that Jung should close the Sermons with an incomprehensible anagram, never to be deciphered by any reader.
It may well be that this was his way of conveying a quality of mysterious infinitude, of a curiously suggestive open-endedness to this treatise.
No matter how open our minds may fancy themselves to be to the mysteries contained in the Sermons, these same mysteries can never be contained by the confines of the conscious mind.
Like all genuine manifestations of the Gnosis, the contents of the Sermons may be likened to the ocean, wherein a child can cool his feet in the shallows, while at the same time bold navigators may attempt to explore its expanse, and skilled deep-sea divers may plunge into its watery depth in search of sunken treasure.
Contrary to the assertions of many orthodox critics, Gnosticism was never guilty of seeking to subject the mystery to the comprehension of the human ego, and of diverting the transcendental power of the greater for the service and aggrandizement of the lesser.
The Gnosis of old was always a Gnosis kardias, a knowledge of the heart, rather than the ego knowledge of the head.
Similarly, Jung’s present-day approach to the Gnosis was never content with anything short of a knowledge of the heart when it came to the “mysterium tremendurn et fascinans” (the awesome and bewitching mystery) of the unconscious.
Not for him the simplistic, conscious approach of the growth psychologies, the humanistic and holistic trends which in more recent times so frequently avail themselves of Jung’s name and of his concepts.
These inhabitants of the spiritual halfway houses toward Gnosis overemphasize personalistic feelings and the expansion of consciousness, inward turned to what Goethe would have called the realm of the mothers, away from the practical realities of the dull, everyday world.
Some of this school claim that the way to enlightenment consists in holding dialogues with the archetypes, fantasy figures of the objective psyche, surrounding yourself with the personified projections of your mind in the form of “higher selves” and “inner guides.”
Not so, says the voice of the once and future Gnosis, for this is precisely what your mother, Sophia, did long ago.
Sophia, so Valentinus informs us, in her hubris lusted for the impossible task of personally comprehending the fathomless Abyss.
Thus she fell into the dark anguish and pain, imprisoned by the elements of earth, water, fire, and air, which arose as projected manifestations of her grief, fear, bewilderment, and ignorance, and she gave birth to monstrous children of arrogance, who became rulers and lords of limitation of her very consciousness.
The personal mind is no fit vehicle for the forces of the vast and mighty mysteries of eternity.
To adopt a facile attitude toward the dreadful darkness of the depths of being can yield no satisfactory result.
It would be both fatal and regrettable if present-day psychology committed the ancient error of philosophy and attempted to trivialize the ineffable greatness.
Similarly, the “new age” optimism and superficiality of those who reduce the dark mysteries of Jung’s Gnosis to the shallow level of their own limitations are apt to make people into the victims of the very unconscious they tend to treat so lightly.
Those who naively wish to use the archetypes for their personalistic ends will be made subject to their cruel tyranny. ― C.G. Jung, The Gnostic Jung, Page 202-203
The religions of the masses demand obedience to God’s will, while the Gnosis demands both obedience and isobedience.
Not all commandments come from the true God, said the ancient Gnostics, for many come from a Demiurge, whose law may be useful to the unenlightened (the psychics, or men of soul) but is counterproductive to the true Gnostics (the pneumatics, or men of spirit).
The will of nature is not that of supernature; the law of the morning which is appropriate for spiritual infants must be broken by those who have progressed to the law of the evening, where the light of differentiated consciousness must be dimmed in order to admit the luminosity of the midnight sun of individuation.
The Jewish Gnosis of the Kabbalah recognized this when it capitalized on the divine statement (in Isaiah 45:7): “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace and create evil; I the Lord do all these things.”
In Kabbalistic writings we encounter the teaching of the two “inclinations” Qeser) and the advice that the Kabbalistic Gnostic is to love God with both of these.
The right-and left-hand pillars of the Tree of Life, and even more the doctrine regarding the terrifying klippoth or evil principles existing in conjunction with the same Tree, bring to our attention a doctrine that postulates evil as a metaphysical reality in God. Isaac Luria, the most Gnostic of all the Kabbalistic teachers, said that the root of all evil lies in the very nature of divine creation, inasmuch as God created in order to manifest everything hidden in His own mysterious nature.
The Christian mystic Jacob Boehme similarly regarded God’s love and wrath, His brilliant light and burning fire, as belonging inseparably together, both being the effluence of God’s eternal word, for life can only be when good and evil exist together, both in God and in man.
The Kabbalah as well as the more daring forms of Christian mysticism are, of course, rooted in the wisdom of the ancient Gnostics who declared in the Gospel of Philip: “The light and the darkness, life and death, the right and the left, are brothers one to another.
It is not possible to separate them from one another.
Because of this, neither are the good good, nor the evil evil, nor is life a life, nor death a death.
Because of this each will be resolved into its origin from the beginning. “‘
We find then that the two manifest principles called in the Second Sermon God and Devil are the two Gnostic categories of our own being, which were ever experienced by those possessing Gnosis as a duality rooted in an underlying unity.
The Self of Jung’s psychology belongs to a transconscious realm, and therefore is not directly susceptible to conscious cognition; it is rather experienced through its good and evil manations.
The former of these might appear as the light and rectitude of the accepted values of consciousness, while the latter is the shadow that accompanies the light and acts as the demonic half of the psyche. ― C.G. Jung, The Gnostic Jung, Page 81-82
Another conclusion that should be considered is that Jung’s essential message cannot be regarded as an isolated, contemporary phenomenon, but rather as an organic outgrowth, nay perhaps even the culmination, of a distinguished spiritual tradition of great antiquity as well as of timeless relevance.
In short, Jung’s insights need to be considered as one of the latest and greatest manifestations of the stream of alternate spirituality which descends from the Gnostics.
It is to be expected that this position will find its critics and that some of these critics will be precisely persons who are quite attached to Jung’s psychology and in some cases are practitioners of his therapy.
To link Jung’s name unequivocally with the most abominated heresy of Christian history may appear to some as a disservice rendered to Jung and to his psychology. Perhaps the timid and the faint-hearted need to be reminded that immediate advantages must often be sacrificed in order to benefit distant but larger objectives.
What will it profit Jung’s admirers if they should gain the whole world in terms of acceptance and academic respectability, while modem man at large still wanders in search of his lost soul?
The world, especially the Western world, is in evident need of a new Gnosis, even of a new Gnosticism.
Fascinating and inspiring though it is, the old Gnosticism of 1700 years ago labors under some obvious limitations when its applicability to contemporary spiritual problems is considered.
Yet, at the same time it must be evident to any unprejudiced student of Gnosticism that it still has much to offer to contemporary humanity when it is stripped of certain archaic and outdated historical features.
It is because of these features that it appears imperative that Gnosticism should not be confined to the limited interests of a backward-looking antiquarianism.
Some way must be found to rescue ancient Gnosticism from the ivory towers of those who delight more in the subtleties of Coptic and Greek phrases than in the living realities of the soul, to which the ancient Gnostics were in fact addressing themselves.
It appears to us that such a way can be found, and that it must of necessity be composed of two main sources ― Stephan Hoeller, The Gnostic Jung, Page 32-33
