Carl Jung: I have become an ascetic, a hermit in the pleasure gardens of the earth
“Dear Hedy Wyss!
Your letter presses deeply into the strings, sounding out chords that reverberate into the unfathomable.
Yes, that’s it precisely, and that’s what women look like when they love. And I should not beg forgiveness that I exist! This has been the pain and sorrow of an entire life, after realizing early on how women are able to love me, and then, how the Goddess herself descends into them and conjures up an ineffable springtime. That is why I fled from women. It was always ‘touch and go,’ because I am only One, one lone small male; but I suspected and feared that, somehow, I was beset by a god, invisible to myself, incomprehensible.
In the solitude and silence of nature, or in research work, he was close to me, bearable in tremendous rapture or in abysmal distress and heaviness. But I found him to be unbearably painful when he confronted me in women and, as now, confronts me in you. I felt and feel like a cursed man. I am able to see divine beauty and, being deeply moved, to worship it, but it should not turn toward me, for how should I be capable of a response? I have tried to the point of exhaustion, and I am walled in by my loyalty and devotion.
Out of sheer devotedness, I have become an ascetic, a hermit in the pleasure gardens of the earth, surrounded by beckoning butterflies and chirping colorful birds, enveloped by the scent of roses.
The shyest creature of the forest approaches me; the rarest of flowers open beneath my hand. Why? Because I am not a brutal, but a shy and fleeting, animal myself, in the grips of the God who cherishes all living things, of that love which remains ever true to itself and can never deny itself. I have nothing to oppose it with, and that is why I cannot respond.
The deity is too big, and I am too small. I can say neither yes nor no. I would prefer to remain silent and to ask God to not appear to me in women. Alone, I can bear his presence, but let him not move me through the woman, for I can give her no answer without presuming some likeness to God. Of me, there is but One, but of women, there are many, and one should give each of them a full answer, for anything else is too little and violates the holy commandment of love.
Though I must answer, for it would be inhuman not to, I must tell you that, as I breathe the fragrance of the rose, behold the light of day, and hear the rustle of the wind in the forest, I see the splendor of the eternal Deity in you. I thank nature and women who love for being beautiful. Nature is bearable, for she never expects more of me than my own nature can accomplish.
She is satisfied if I breathe deeply, or if I greet the New Moon, or if I sit down quietly in the grass by the wayside, or perhaps just look yearningly out of my window. But what satisfies a woman, and especially one who loves? The only satisfying answer is the one that violates all the laws of love.
But if I were to do that, only one woman would have loved me and turned away from me in disappointment. I am loved by so many women precisely because they feel that I am a lover of love and hold its commandments sacred. And yet they all want me to break those very commandments, unaware that I would then no longer be the one they were searching for and loved.
It would be easy for me to heedlessly pass love by, like a Buddha, but this I cannot do for love’s own sake. I also cannot follow love, again for love’s own sake. I want to tell you ‘Touch me not’ [John 20:17] because you are only touching mortal imperfection, ‘suffering, old age and death’; I am only One. The splendor that surrounds me has been spread by a god. Do not seek this splendor in me, or I will sink into an abyss of shame for my pitiful poverty and limitations. Don’t be fooled by my seemingly lengthy response to your feelings: I cannot deny giving you this response.
But it is also all that I can do. I cannot pick flowers; I cannot shoot creatures of the forest. I cannot claim any beauty in the world for myself, for I am unable to restore it. For some unknown reason, God has determined for me to be a friendly beast in the forest of this world. It wanders alone, yet it is always surrounded. Wherever it appears, it’s springtime.
One could also say that it follows the spring. Either way, it can’t make spring, and it doesn’t do anything with spring, like a white bear that lives according to bear law and can’t imagine anything beyond that. Both God and animal come together in humankind, evoking suffering and beauty, and never the one without the other. One is left with only a small garden of flowers and vegetables that demands all that one has to give.” — Carl Jung, Letters to Hedy Wyss 1936 – 1956, Page 26–27
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