Philip Sherrard -Christianity and the Religious Thought of C. G. Jung
Two preliminary remarks must preface this chapter. The first concerns the source material on which it is based. Jung had no “religion” in the commonly accepted sense of the word. He did not belong to any branch of the Christian Church, nor did he affiliate himself to any other explicit religious tradition, like Islam or Buddhism. Therefore on the face of it he did not accept any system of doctrine or dogma based on revelation and elaborated by the spiritual interpreters of the tradition in question.
On the contrary, he claimed that he was a natural scientist, and that such religious ideas as he had were developed over the course of his life in relation to his empirical experience as a psychologist and the reading he undertook in order to reach an understanding of what he had experienced. If this is true, then his religious thought was in a continual state of growth and modification.
It was fluctuating, rather than stable. What he perceived or believed at certain times might be altered or even reversed by subsequent experience and reading. Therefore
one would risk being unfair to Jung if one were to extract concepts and thoughts from the developing body of his work and to say that these represent his religious ideas.
One would have to make sure that they were concepts or thoughts he maintained up to the end, and did not reject or modify out of recognition. Consequently, for the purposes of this chapter, it has seemed best to confine attention to his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (London, 1963), put together during the last years of his life and expressing his ideas at their most mature and most intimate level.
This has the additional advantage that this book—at least the English edition—has been supplied with a glossary giving, through extracts from earlier works, explanations of his central psychological concepts and terminology. The second remark can be put in the form of a question: to what extent are we entitled to speak of “religious thought” at all where Jung is concerned? Religious ideas normally speaking derive from and refer to a world or truths that are regarded as supernatural or metaphysical.
They are to do with metaphysical realities. It is not that Jung refused to discuss problems commonly called religious. It is even stated in the introduction to his autobiography that he “explicitly declared his allegiance to Christianity.” But, as the introduction continues, he looked at religious questions from “the standpoint of psychology, deliberately setting a bound between it and the theological approach.” In fact, this is an understatement, at least where intention is concerned. Jung not only sought to set a
bound between psychology and theology. He denied the very basis of theological statement altogether.
This he did from, as it were, both ends. First, he denied the objective existence of those metaphysical or metapsychical realities which theological statements presuppose, and affirmed that there is no truth but purely subjective truth. “We are still a long way from understanding what it signifies,” he writes (p. 15), “that nothing has any existence unless some small—and oh, so transitory—consciousness has become aware of it.”
Then he denied—as a necessary consequence, it might be said, of this initial denial—that there can be any statement or comprehension at all other than the psychological.
The passage is worth quoting in full, since it shows how far Jung was willing to go in rejecting the validity of the theological standpoint (at least as theologians themselves understand it), and illustrates the contradictions in which he is involved as a result.
“All conceivable statements,” he writes (pp. 322-323), “are made by the psyche. . . . The psyche cannot leap beyond itself. It cannot set up any absolute truths, for its own polarity determines the relativity of its statements. . . . In saying this we are not expressing a value judgement, but only pointing out that the limit is very frequently overstepped.
. . . In my effort to depict the limitations of the psyche I do not mean to imply that only the psyche exists. It is merely that, so far as perception and cognition are concerned, we cannot see beyond the psyche. . . . All comprehension and all that is comprehended is in itself psychic, and to that extent we are hopelessly cooped up in an exclusively psychic world.”
There are, in other words, no supra-psychic realities that man can comprehend, and all so-called theological statements that pretend to derive from and refer to such realities are really no more than psychological statements (if that) invested by their authors with a status which in the nature of things they cannot possess.
As is so often the case with those over-anxious to deny a point of view other than their own, Jung in fact is led into a position which contradicts what he wishes to affirm. In saying that “every point of view is necessarily relative” (p. 198), and that “all conceivable statements are made by the psyche,” and that “all comprehension and all
that is comprehended is in itself psychic,” clearly what he wishes to emphasize is that no theological or metaphysical statement has the significance which a theologian or metaphysician would claim for it.
It must in the nature of things be subjective, relative, psychic, and refer only to subjective, relative, and psychic realities. We are exclusively doomed to this relative, subjective, psychic world.
Yet if that is the case, Jung’s statements themselves are not exempt from these conditions. They too are relative, subjective and psychic. In that case, their categorical appearance is all bluff. Objectively, as enunciations of general truths they can have no significance. To say that “every point of view is necessarily relative” is virtually a meaningless thing to say, since, taken at its face value, then it itself represents but a relative point of view and so cannot apply as a general statement valid for every point of view. For a statement to be valid for every point of view there must be some point of view which is not relative but capable of embracing all points of view
Similarly, if all comprehension and all that is comprehended is in itself psychic, then Jung’s statement that “all conceivable statements are made by the psyche” is again virtually meaningless. It has no status at all as a general truth, applicable to all statements, but simply represents Jung’s own relative and subjective point of view. It
could only have a general validity applicable to all statements on condition that it is true in a non-relative and non-subjective manner.
But, Jung says, it is impossible for any statement to be non-relative and non-subjective. Why, then, does Jung make this statement in such categorical terms, as if he were making a pronouncement which applies to all statements? Why, in effect, is he issuing a dogma—one, it is true, designed to undermine the traditional basis of religious dogma, but no less a dogma on that account?
The answer would seem to be fairly clear. Indeed, it is precisely this, that he did wish to undermine the traditional basis of religious dogma, as well as of all theological thought of the traditional kind. He wanted to clear the ground, establish a kind of tabula rasa on which to build afresh. So long as the great structure of Christian doctrine and dogma, regarded as sacred and inviolate, stood in the way, his own ideas could make little progress.
But if he could show that this structure shared in all the necessary limitations of human thought as he conceived them, and was in fact essentially subjective and relative and psychic, its authority would be shaken. It would be seen to have no greater claims to validity and belief than any other system of thought. Indeed, it might even have fewer claims than other such systems, since these could often point to what is called empirical evidence in their support, whereas many of the dogmatic formulations of Christianity appear to flout such empirical evidence. Jung’s task had therefore a twofold direction. First he had to demonstrate that the claim of theology and dogma to possess a kind
of eternal and objective statusindependent of the judgement and even the consciousness of particular individuals was groundless, and that in the nature of things they could possess no greater or more significant—less relative and subjective—status than any other thought-forms or mental formulations; and this he attempted to do in the way we have shown, by insisting that all statements are made by the psyche and that where our understanding is concerned we are hopelessly cooped up in an exclusively psychic world.
And second, he then had to create his own system of thought, and to put it forward not as the truth in a theological sense, but simply as a series of tentative, limited observations based upon his purely pragmatic investigations of the human psyche.
In other words, Jung’s system of thought could claim validity not because it was metaphysical, but precisely because it was not metaphysical; and he frequently asserts that unlike the theologians he does not overstep the limit, but bases what he has to say, individual and relative as it is, on solid scientific ground. “My Answer to Job,” he
writes (pp. 206-207), “was meant to be no more than the utterance of a single individual. . . . I was far from wanting to enunciate a metaphysical truth. Yet the theologians tax me with that very thing, because theological thinkers are so used to dealing with eternal truths that they know no other kinds.
When the physicist says the atom is of such and such a composition, and then he sketches a model of it, he does not intend to express anything like an eternal truth. But theologians do not understand the natural sciences, particularly, psychological thinking.”
This is very disarming, and one might well be taken in by it were it not for the fact that when it comes to the point Jung is quite as capable of making categorical statements lacking all so-called empirical basis as the most dogmatic theologian.
Those few already cited could be matched by others occurring throughout the book. Indeed, it is quite clear from a reading of this book that Jung’s thought is essentially religious. It may even be said that he regarded himself as the apostle of a new religion, one that should replace for western man the exhausted formulas of Christianity, and one that in this scientific age would stand a far greater chance of acceptance if its own tenets could be presented in the guise of scientific theory, underpinned by solid psychological, observation.
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
#AnalyticalPsychology #DepthPsychology #CarlJung #TheUnconscious #JungianPsychology #Psyche #JungianConcepts #PsychologicalType #Archetypes #Individuation
