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Jung’s e Red Book Dialogues with the Soul
Herald of a new Religion?
On January 5, 1922, in an active imagination Jung complains to his soul that he is tired, but the soul will not let him sleep (2009, 211). He asks his soul why it is keeping him awake. e soul replies that this is no time to sleep; the great work begins.
soul tells him that the work is di‑cult, and he has been unconscious for too long. soul announces: “To no longer be a Christian is easy. But what next? For more is yet to come . . .” soul goes on to say that Jung has received a revelation that he should not hide. His calling should take priority, and his calling is the new religion and its proclamation.
Jung is startled by this and has no idea how to carry out this task, but the soul says that no one knows it as he does and no one could say it as well as he could. He has the requisite knowledge, and he should publish his material. As the conversation goes on, the problem becomes how to embody this knowledge in daily life. e soul tells him that, rather than being a rational process, “e way is symbolic.” What follows is well known to us. e symbolic manifestations of the soul become a main focus of analytical psychology.
is and other dialogues raise the question of whether Jung’s psychology represents the beginning of a new form of spirituality that is arising alongside our existing religious traditions.1
Jung has often been accused of trying to start a religion, initially by Freudians and more recently by Richard Noll (1997a, 1997b), to whose criticisms I return later. Sonu Shamdasani has shown that Noll’s charge is baseless, but it is typical of the kind of misunderstanding that Jung’s approach engenders (1998). We might see more of this kind of criticism as reviews of e Red Book emerge because of a lack of understanding of the process of active imagination.
Is Jung a Christian?
In what way is Jung “no longer a Christian”? Aer all, a great deal of Christian and biblical imagery appears in e Red Book, and in one of the dialogues, Jung even experiences a momentary identication with Christ.
However, Jung points out that we cannot Christianize the unconscious because the unconscious is autonomous (1938/1969, CW 11, ¶¶40–44); it spontaneously produces numinous imagery that may or may not take traditional Judeo-Christian forms (Corbett 2006). James Hall points out that when our authentic spirituality is repressed, perhaps because it is too unusual or idiosyncratic, it may emerge in dream imagery in a form that is radically different than our expectations (1993).
For example, Ulanov reports a dream in which a man sees himself worshiping a giant pig (1986). When numinous imagery is linked to our psychological structures in this kind of way, religion becomes personal, internal rather than external, and no longer projected onto outer savior figures. divine is no longer located purely in a transcendent realm; it is now found deeply within our subjectivity.
No longer is everything we need found in the Bible and the Church. e fact that the Self or the transpersonal levels of the psyche produce novel, personally relevant numinous imagery is particularly important for people for whom the Judeo-Christian tradition no longer contains much emotional power.
If the sacred manifests itself by means of the unconscious—in dreams, visions, and synchronistic events—we have direct contact with it, with no need for liturgy or prayer books or a Church hierarchy. Jung is, therefore, not a traditional Christian, although in a 1959 letter he said, “I think of myself as a Christian, since I am based entirely upon Christian concepts” (1975, 524).
Jung interprets the Christian story in his own way. For example, according to Jung, we can no longer load everything onto Christ; every person has to carry God; the descent of spirit into matter is complete:
“We all must do what Christ did. We must make our experiment . . . we must live out our own vision of life . . .
When we live like this we know Christ as a brother, and God indeed becomes man . . . then only does God become man in ourselves” (McGuire and Hull 1977 97–98). is sounds like theology, but in this interview, Jung goes on to deny that he is a religious leader, saying he has no message or mission but speaks as a philosopher who just tries to understand what he observes.
Jung may have found some justification for his reinterpretation of the meaning of Christ in his Red Book conversation with the anchorite Ammonius, who points out that we do not know the hidden meaning of the Gospels; their meaning is yet to come: “Every subsequent form of religion is the meaning of the antecedent” (2009, 272).
Religion proceeds in stages, and we only know the meaning of the previous stage when we are in the new stage.
Jung would oen deny that he was doing theology, insisting that he was simply an empirical observer of the psyche. But perhaps Jung is being too modest, because he makes statements that are incompatible with traditional notions of a transcendent divinity. Consider comments like this: “It was only quite late that we realized (or rather are beginning to realize) that God is Reality itself and therefore—last but not least—man. is realization is a millennial project” (1939/1954/1969, CW 11, ¶631).
Most radically, as Dourley points out, the defining characteristic of Jung’s approach is that he recalls the gods back to their origin in the psyche (2009). So, unlike Rudolph Otto (1958), for whom the divine is wholly other, for Jung the experience of the numinous is immanent, located within the psyche. Jung’s description of numinous experience is intended to be psychological and not metaphysical (1955–56/1970, CW 14, ¶781).
He insists he is not talking about the nature of the divine itself. He is talking about people’s experience, and he is not trying to impose a metaphysical system.
eologians are oen not happy with Jung’s vision of the numinous as radically immanent because they want to preserve the notion of a divinity that is transcendent and accessible only by means of the sacraments or rituals of a particular institution and priesthood.
For example, as John Dourley points out, the Vatican does not approve of Jung; in a document titled Jesus Christ, the Bearer of the Water of Life,2 Jung is explicitly mentioned and rejected as a founding member of so-called New Age spirituality (2009, 6).
Various elements of Jungian psychology are said to be incompatible with Christianity.
Jung is in good company; this Vatican document does not approve of William James or Pierre Teilhard de Chardin either. In fact, I believe that Jung is a greater threat to the religious establishment than Freud; Freud said that religion is based on projection and illusion, whereas Jung not only insists that religion is important, but he also seems to oer an alternative to established traditions.
In Jung’s e Red Book, dialogues with the soul often contrast the spirit of the depths (SD) with the spirit of the times (ST). e ST is a system of rational thought that began with the Enlightenment’s veneration of reason, followed by the development of positivist science.
One of the main points of e Red Book dialogues is that the ST, or an excessive emphasis on rationality, alienates us from symbolic thinking.
Jung points out that although traditional religious symbols are derived from the archetypallevel of the psyche and were originally emotionally powerful, today religionmeans collective consciousness or mass-mindedness, which is dangerous to humanity (1916/1969, CW 8, ¶426). only counterweight to this is to attend to the SD, the objective psyche, and the process of individuation, which is a spiritual journey.
Traditional collective religions have lost the deepest meaning of their symbols by making them literal and historical.
Collective religion has now become part of the ST, either a matter of believing in some kind of dogma or reading a book about what happened to someone else a long time ago—what William James called secondhand religion. In this way, collective religion has severed people from their depths.
Jung is in the tradition of writers such as William James who find the sources of religion in personal experience. Jung was most concerned with individual experience of the numinosum because he had seen from his father’s difficulties that a focus on belief, doctrine, and dogma alone leads nowhere. Numinous experiences are usually very relevant to the psychology of the individual, and they oen have a healing effect—hence Jung’s letter of 1944 in which he says that his theory of therapy is based on contact with the numinosum (1973, 377).
For Jung, healing in psychotherapy requires a religious attitude but not necessarily adherence to a particular tradition. this attitude means paying attention to spontaneous numinous experience. ~Lionel Corbett, Jung’s e Red Book Dialogues with the Soul Herald of a new Religion? Page 63-66
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