June Singer, Jung and the Lost Gospels
Foreword
When the canon of the Bible was closed, those who determined what should constitute the Holy Writ and stand as a bulwark against heathenism and heresy had their reasons for excluding some writings while including others.
Surely there were questions of authenticity and quality, but there was also an urgency to establish a standard by which all other religious expressions could be measured in the future.
Both Judaism and Christianity had suffered the necessity of clarifying and strengthening their doctrines so that their adherents would have a firm basis for withstanding the opposition they faced from the pagan world and from Rome.
These formulations necessarily left little room for individual interpretation or variance from the newly established norms. Among Jews and also among the early Christians,
there were those dissidents whose points of view differed from that proclaimed in the Bible concerning what constitutes the spiritual life and, in Christianity, what was the true nature and teaching of the Anointed One sent by God to proclaim His message to humankind.
Their writings, contemporary with the biblical books, were considered dangerous or spurious by the reigning religious authorities, and the writers of those extra-canonical works were branded as heretics—which indeed they were if heresy means taking a position in opposition to the orthodoxy of the times.
The writings nevertheless became touchstones for communities whose members sought freedom of thought and of worship, relief from the imposition of authority, and an opportunity to experience
God directly without mediation by a churchly hierarchy. Much of the content of these works had to do with eschatology, the portents of the Last Days when God would rain down destruction upon His people because of their having capitulated to the forces of evil in the world.
Also expressed in these works was a hope for eventual redemption, depicted among Jews as the coming of a Messianic Age and in Christianity as the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Over the years many of these works were lost, some were preserved and continued to be read as more or less esoteric literature, and some were secreted in caves and other unlikely places awaiting another time when the world might be more ready to attend to their messages.
Until 1945, only a few fragments of the lost gospels were available for reading by the public. Here and there some scholars and seekers learned of the existence of certain of the writings and studied them.
Among these was the great Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung. It was in 1945, you will remember, when the United States, in the cause of peace, dropped atomic bombs upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Curiously enough, within a year or two of that date, were discovered the two most important finds of this lost sacred literature in modem history. One was the Dead Sea Scrolls, the work of the men of the ascetic Jewish community of Essenes at Qumran, near Jerusalem;
the other was the Nag Hammadi library, a collection of papyrus books written by members of a Gnostic sect within two or three hundred years after the time of Jesus and found in a jar in a cave in upper Egypt.
From the time of their discovery until now, the new-found treasures have kept teams of scholars occupied in piecing them together, deciphering them, and attempting to understand them.
Indispensable as the work of these learned men and women has been, their scholarship is only the vital opening act to a drama of cosmic proportions. These scholars’ contribution in their first act was to understand the words and then the context from which they were written before any interpretation could be undertaken.
The second act would have to concern apprehending the personal psychological significance of this material for people today, and the third would consist of understanding this mythic material in terms of its wider, even global, significance.
Scholars and translators working on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi books have been pursuing their endeavor with the requisite dedication to objectivity. Consequently one rarely detects in their work any indication of the degree to which they themselves are or are not in sympathy with the particular perspectives that characterize these texts.
If one were to describe these documents in a single word, that word would be heterodox, in the sense of differing from, or contrary to, an established religious point of view.
These works are radical departures from the normative Judaism or orthodox Christianity of their times. The early Church Fathers had no difficulty declaring the Gnostic Gospels heretical.
Scholars today who undertake the study of religious texts in the ancient Semitic or Coptic languages as a rule come from fields such as biblical theology and criticism. The academic rigor of the translators and editors who worked with these writings allowed for little overt expression of personal opinion, much less for a passionate response.
As a Jungian analyst, I cannot help wondering what those exegetes really think, in their private thoughts, of these works that so dramatically challenge the accepted doctrines of their day, as well as our own.
It was C. G. Jung who discovered for himself and became enraptured by the literature of the Jewish and Christian Gnostics, whose writings included the Lost Gospels. The word “enraptured” can be used advisedly, for Jung did not come to these materials as a scholar who relied on the researches and support of predecessors and colleagues.
He encountered the personifications of the myths directly, through the medium of the unconscious—as an eruption of mysterious ideas and images of unknown origin carrying messages about the nature and workings of the human psyche. The story of how the Gnostic material revealed itself to Jung is found in his autobiographical work Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
Only after meeting with Gnostic ideas, in the form of dreams or fantasies or active imagination, was Jung inspired to look to myth and literature for amplifications of what he had experienced. Here he detected astonishing parallels to his own findings in material that was only just emerging from the translations of the Nag Hammadi Library, as well as from other Gnostic texts in Jewish and Christian sources.
As a psychiatrist, Jung was interested in why people think as they think and believe what they believe. He sought for clues in mythology, especially for that which gives rise to religious and spiritual traditions.
He understood the spiritual thrust in men and women as expressive of the human psyche and its yearning toward the Source of Being. When he became interested in pursuing the study of the ancient Gnostic texts, it was to support and amplify his own experience as well as that of certain of his patients whose orientations were toward the life of the spirit Jung did not pretend to be neutral about this material.
He used it freely when it illuminated such issues as the necessity of reclaiming an interior view of oneself and the world in which we live. He understood and reframed much of the Gnostic mythology in psychological terms, recognizing in the manifold characters of Gnostic mythology the same archetypal images that reside in the human psyche everywhere, driving people to love, fear, hate, covet, and all else they would not do of their own conscious free will.
Yet Jung, for all his awareness of what Gnosticism means and for all his fascination with its symbolic manifestations, stopped short of identifying himself openly as a Gnostic. First and last, he thought of himself as a psychiatrist and a healer of souls.
He explored in great depth the ideas about God and about the gods as they appear in the human psyche. He insisted that he did not feel comfortable in saying who or what God is—although in one memorable and often quoted interview he revealed, “I do not need to believe in God; I know.” But this is stated with a twinkle in his eye, as if to say to the interviewers that if they do not know what he means by this, he will not tell them.
Now the time has come for one who is openly a Gnostic to speak out of his own conviction and commitment. Dr. Stephan A. Hoeller’s exposition of historical Gnosticism and its contemporary implications brings this ancient discipline out of the past and into immediate confrontation with the crucial issues we face today.
He finds in the psychology of Jung an appreciation of the spirit of Gnosticism as well as some answers to the most vital question: What has Gnosticism to do with the predicaments in which our world finds itself today?
Hoeller addresses the fundamental concerns of the Gnostic who goes in search of self-knowledge: Where have we come from? How did we get to this place? What is our purpose here? Where are we going? Human beings have been asking these questions since the dawning of conscious awareness.
Based on his own personal experience of Gnosis and his studies in comparative religion and philosophy, Hoeller serves as a spiritual teacher, throwing light on the meaning and significance of these
questions.
The first part of the book graphically portrays that other earlier time when the traditions of Church and State had lost their luminosity. In Judea, the once inspired teachings of the kings and prophets had become rigidified and limiting: legalism obscured the noble intentions of the commandments; minutiae hid the sense of the grandeur of the divine; and political considerations overly occupied the religious leaders.
The small band of Essenes withdrew from what they saw as a corrupt society and founded their own ascetic community in the Judean desert. Some suggest that when the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 A.D. the Essenes took the Temple treasures, including some precious scrolls,
into the desert for safekeeping until the time should come when the world would be ready to receive them. Similarly, in the early days of Christianity, the presence and the teachings of Jesus and the apostles inspired their followers.
These men and women were ready to undergo any privation or martyrdom for the sake of their eternal souls. But when Christianity had to bolster its defense against the threat of Rome, the faith became an institution with all the credos, rules, and strictures that institutionalism implies.
There were those who left the Church to seek spiritual freedom and a direct personal experience of the holy. These Gnostics took with them, or created in their self-imposed exiles, the secret knowledge that came to them from within, from what they understood to be an immanent God. In a way that enables us to compare those times to our own,
Hoeller tells us how this came to pass, and he relates the fragmentation of those times to our own sense of spiritual fragmentation. The quest of those early seekers for wholeness is shown to be not different from our own desire to understand how so much evil can exist in the phenomenal world and how we may take a position with respect to it.
The major part of Dr. Hoeller’s book relates and interprets the strange and marvelous mythology of the Gnostics. He presents the myths in their demonic terror and angelic glory, so that we are carried by them into the farther reaches of our own imagination.
Then, taking his inspiration from Jung, Hoeller brings insights from contemporary depth psychology to interpret each of these legends. Through this process, he makes it clear that mythology is truly the language of the soul—and not only of the ancient soul but of our own.
The Epilogue is surprising and startling. Hoeller reminds us that the bomb fell on Hiroshima in the very year that the lost gospels were discovered. This synchronicity is doubly striking, for in 1945, as in the time of the original writing of the lost gospels, predictions and prognostications of world-wide catastrophe filled the air.
During the past forty years or more since that time, portents for the future have been looking even more grave. In the old days people believed that God would destroy the world because of the evil acts of human beings. Today we do not need God for that; we humans have become capable of bringing total destruction down upon ourselves.
As we move ever more swiftly toward the End of Days, Hoeller seeks and finds in the writings of the Gnostics some hints as to what we may do to avert the final catastrophe.
But he also does something not many have the courage to do—to consider what if: What if we do not manage to avoid nuclear disaster or the systematic destruction of earth’s atmosphere? What then? Is this material world all that exists? Or, is there something other?
These are questions we cannot avoid unless we cling desperately to our ignorance and unconsciousness. Stephan Hoeller addresses the issues directly. His reflections give us much to ponder. ~June Singer, Jung and the Lost Gospels, Foreword, Page ix-xvi
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