“Consciously, I was religious in the Christian sense, though always with the reservation: “But it is not so certain as all that!’ or “What about that thing under the ground?” And when religious teachings were pumped into me and I was told, ‘This is beautiful and this is good,’ I would think to myself: ‘Yes, but there is something else, something very secret that people don’t know about.’”[1]
“… God could be something terrible. I had experienced a dark and terrible secret. It overshadowed my whole life, and I became deeply pensive.”[2]
“… we do not know the will of God at all, for if we did we would treat this central problem with awe, if only out of sheer fear of the overpowering God who can work His terrifying will on helpless human beings, as He had done with me. …”[3]
“For God’s sake I now found myself cut off from the Church and from my father’s and everybody else’s faith. Insofar as they all represented the Christian religion, I was an outsider. This knowledge filled me with a sadness which was to overshadow all the years until the time I entered the university.”[4]
“The risk of inner experience, the adventure of the spirit, is in any case alien to most human beings. The possibility that such experience might have psychic reality is anathema to them. All very well if it has a supernatural or at least a ‘historical’ foundation. But psychic? Face to face with this question, the patient will often show an unsuspected but profound contempt for the psyche.”[5]
A person’s religious history is, by definition, subjective, so our major source for an account of Jung’s story is his memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.[6] Since such a history, with its focus on things spiritual, tends to be atemporal,[7] specific dates are few and far between. We have sufficient dates, however, to create a chronological account, but the main emphasis in this chapter is more on content of Jung’s experiences than on dates, names and places.
Jung was born in 1875 in a small Swiss village,[8] to a parson in the Swiss Reformed Church[9] and his wife,[10] a woman with a sensitive, psychic temperament.[11] Jung’s early years were lived in an environment that was permeated with religion,[12] but also with conflict. His father Paul was a minister who
“… did a great deal of good—far too much—and as a result was usually irritable. Both parents made great efforts to live devout lives, with the result that there were angry scenes between them only too frequently.”[13]
This, because they were out-of-balance, too good, which (Jung later came to understand) constellated the negative in the unconscious.[14]
Paul was one of nine ministers in the family. Eight of Jung’s uncles were also ministers, six on his mother’s side and two on his father’s.[15] In the following generation, among Jung’s cousins, two were also ministers.[16] So one might say that religion was the family business.
Jung noted eighty years later how his external environment was a significance influence on him: “Although we human beings have our own personal life, we are yet in large measure the representatives, the victims and promoters of a collective spirit…”[17] and “Children react much less to what grown-ups say than to the imponderables in the surrounding atmosphere….The peculiar “religious” ideas that came to me even in my earliest childhood were spontaneous products which can be understood only as reactions to my parental environment and to the spirit of the age.”[18]
Jung’s earliest memories going back to age three (1878) indicate that he was a sensitive, impressionable child. He recalled witnessing burials,[19] with all the black clothes and boots, the hole in the ground, and somber faces. About the same time he was taught a bedtime prayer about Lord Jesus taking children to him, as their protector.[20] Far from comforting the three-year-old Jung this prayer seemed to associate “Lord Jesus” with death, burials and black boxes, and this led to his beginning to distrust Lord Jesus:
“Lord Jesus never became quite real for me, never quite acceptable, never quite lovable, for again and again I would think of his underground counterpart, a frightful revelation which had been accorded me without my seeking it. …Lord Jesus seemed to me in some ways a god of death, helpful, it is true, in that he scared away the terrors of the night, but himself uncanny, a crucified and bloody corpse. Secretly, his love and kindness, which I always heard praised, appeared doubtful to me, chiefly because the people who talked most about ‘dear Lord Jesus’ wore black frock coats and shiny black boots which reminded me of burials….”[21]
This distrust of Jesus lasted until 1890, until Jung’s confirmation.[22] In these years he “made every effort to force myself to take the required positive attitude to Christ. But I could never succeed in overcoming my secret distrust.”[23]
Jung’s fears extended beyond funerals and Jesus. Around the age of three or four he was alone outside one day when he saw a Catholic priest coming along in his long black robe, and Jung fled into the house and up into the attic in terror.[24] Thereafter he had for years fears of funerals, Jesuits, and Catholic priests and churches.[25] It was only c. 1905 (when he was in his 30’s) that Jung was “able to confront Mater Ecclesia without this sense of oppression. The first time was in St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna.”[26]
In the years before he could read (c. 1878-1880) Jung’s mother read to him from Orbis Pictus, an old illustrated children’s book full of exotic religions, especially of Hindus, and he was very interested in illustrations of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. He felt an affinity between them and his early dreams. So Jung was exposed to other religions at an early age, but he noticed his mother’s “faint tone of contempt” when she spoke of them.[27]
As a child Jung hated going to church, except on Christmas; it was the only Christian festival he could “celebrate with fervor. All others left me cold….”[28] Perhaps this was because, all through his childhood Jung was “… constantly on the lookout for something mysterious. …”[29] This led to his being skeptical of the claims of Christianity:
“Consciously, I was religious in the Christian sense, though always with the reservation: “But it is not so certain as all that!’ or “What about that thing under the ground?” And when religious teachings were pumped into me and I was told, ‘This is beautiful and this is good,’ I would think to myself: ‘Yes, but there is something else, something very secret that people don’t know about.’”[30]
Jung’s early intuitions about mysteries and the claims of Christianity came into stark relief when Jung was eleven. The year 1886 was a very significant year in Jung’s life, for several reasons:
- he began to distinguish between Jesus and God:
“While it became increasingly impossible for me to adopt a positive attitude to Lord Jesus, I remember that from the time I was eleven the idea of God began to interest me. I took to praying to God, and this somehow satisfied me because it was a prayer without contradictions. God was not complicated by my distrust. Moreover, he was not a person in a black robe, and not Lord Jesus of the pictures,… Rather he was a unique being of whom, so I heard, it was impossible to form any correct conception. He was, to be sure, something like a very powerful old man. But to my great satisfaction there was a commandment to the effect that ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of anything.’ Therefore one could not deal with him as familiarly as with Lord Jesus, who was no ‘secret.’…”[31]
- in his school days he found “Divinity classes were unspeakably dull,…”,[32] but, as if to make up for this dullness, Jung had one of the most important, memorable experiences of his life: his vision of the turd falling on Basel cathedral.[33] Since this event was one of the milestones in his personal religious history, it warrants lengthy description.
The experience began very positively, when he came out of school one day at noon and stood in the cathedral square and the sun was shining and he was overwhelmed with the beauty of the sight and thought how “… God made all this and sits above it far away in the blue sky on a golden throne and…” and then Jung sensed a
“hold in my thoughts, and a choking sensation. I felt numbed, and knew only: ‘Don’t go on thinking now! Something terrible is coming, something I do not want to think, something I dare not even approach. Why not? Because I would be committing the most frightful of sins… the sin against the Holy Ghost, which cannot be forgiven…. All I need do is not go on thinking.’”[34]
And Jung tried to keep the thought at bay for three days. But “… On the third night, the torment became so unbearable that I no longer knew what to do. I awoke from a restless sleep just in time to catch myself thinking again about the cathedral and God….”[35] and Jung had a tortuous conversation with himself, how he did not want to think the thought, but found himself up against a “terrible will” that had “…come on me like a bad dream.”[36]
Jung wrestled with his thoughts, finally coming to the insight that God had created Adam, Eve and the serpent, so God “… in His omniscience had arranged everything so that the first parents would have to sin. Therefore it was God’s intention that they should sin.”[37] With this thought Jung felt “liberated … from my worst torment, since I now knew that God Himself had placed me in this situation.”[38] and this led Jung to realize that “God had landed me in this fix without my willing it and had left me without any help. I was certain that I must search out His intention myself, and seek the way out alone. …”[39]
He knew that sin should be avoided but he knew he “could not go on doing it….This could not go on. At the same time, I could not yield before I understood what God’s will was and what he intended. For I was now certain that He was the author of this desperate problem. …”[40]
Jung noted 70+ years later that he never thought the devil might be playing a trick, as the devil did not figure much in his mental world at that time, and he regarded the devil as powerless compared with God.[41] He interpreted the dilemma he was in here as a test:
“ … there was no question in my mind but that God Himself was arranging a decisive test for me, and that everything depended on my understanding Him correctly. I knew, beyond a doubt, that I would ultimately be compelled to break down, to give way, but I did not want it to happen without my understanding it, since the salvation of my eternal soul was at stake.”[42]
Jung came to feel that God wanted to “test my obedience by imposing on me the unusual task of doing something against my own moral judgment and against the teachings of my religion, and even against His own commandment, something I am resisting with all my strength because I fear eternal damnation?…”[43] Jung could not be sure, so he decided to “think it all through once more.”[44] He came to the same conclusion, with the added sense that “God also desires me to show courage, … If that is so and I go through with it, then He will give me His grace and illumination.”[45] So Jung allowed the thought to come and it was in the form of a vision of the cathedral, the blue sky, God on his throne and, “… from under the throne an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral asunder.”[46]
At this point Jung then felt “… an enormous, an indescribable relief.”[47] for, instead of the damnation he expected, he received grace
“… and with it an unutterable bliss such as I had never known. I wept for happiness and gratitude. This wisdom and goodness of God had been revealed to me now that I had yielded to His inexorable command. It was as though I had experienced an illumination….”[48]
Illumination was not the only legacy Jung gained from this vision and its aftermath. His concept of God’s complex nature—being both good/loving and evil/testing or tempting—had its origins in this experience. He took from it
“… the dim understanding that God could be something terrible. I had experienced a dark and terrible secret. It overshadowed my whole life, and I became deeply pensive.”[49]
Jung also recognized the necessity of yielding to God’s commands.
“…He [God] could… demand something of me that I would have had to reject on traditional religious grounds. It was obedience which brought me grace, and after that experience I know what God’s grace was. One must be utterly abandoned to God; nothing matters but fulfilling His will. Otherwise all is folly and meaninglessness. From that moment on, when I experienced grace, my true responsibility began….”[50]
That humans can experience the Divine, come to know God, and thence savor grace and bliss were other lasting insights Jung took away from this experience. Naturally the young boy wondered if other people had had similar experiences, so he began to read whatever he could find on religion and spirituality. To no avail: “I never succeeded in discovering so much as a trace of them in others. As a result, I had the feeling that I was either outlawed or elect, accursed or blessed….”[51]
Given his environment—living in a parsonage, with a father who was devoutly religious (and thus sunk in orthodox precepts which limited his ability to think freely or get in touch with his own inner life)[52]—Jung sensed the “strict taboo [that] hung over all these matters,”[53] so he never thought about sharing his experiences of God with others. He knew his experience would not be either understood or appreciated. The result was that, with his active inner life full of unorthodox visions, Jung grew up in “… an almost unendurable loneliness….” because he knew “… things… which other people do not know, and usually do not even want to know.”[54] So, because he could not share this part of his reality with anyone, a pattern was established that remained his whole life: “… I resisted the temptation to talk about it with anyone. Thus the pattern of my relationship to the world was already prefigured: today as then I am a solitary….”[55]
Jung turned thirteen in 1888 and during his teenage years he became more and more the religious skeptic,[56] disillusioned with orthodox religion, for several reasons. These included:
- his witnessing many theological discussions among his relatives.[57] With six parsons on his mother’s side, two parson uncles on his father’s side, plus cousins who were clerics, there were many such religious conversations, discussions and sermons, but in none of them did Jung have any sense that the men had experienced God’s grace. They all seemed to him to be “safely ensconced in a self-evident world order…”[58] that took no cognizance of people like Nietzsche (who proclaimed “God is dead.”).[59] Jung could see that they lived “… in a world of social and intellectual certitudes,… totally unconscious of the fact that God Himself can wrench a person out of his orderly spiritual world and condemn him to blaspheme.”[60]
- his experiences in church. Listening to his father’s weekly preaching, which sounded “stale and hollow” as if it were “hearsay,” Jung began to doubt everything his father said.[61] When his father would speak of the “good” God and praise His love for man, Jung grew uneasy and even more doubtful, for Jung recognized that God could be “so unexpected and so alarming–…” so full of contradictions and “overpowering” in His ability to “work His terrifying will on helpless human beings, as He had done with me….”[62]
- his experiences around his confirmation. At age fifteen (1890) Jung was prepared for his confirmation. His father was the cleric who instructed him,[63] and while most of the process was hum-drum, Jung did look forward to the section on the Trinity, which he found mysterious. He was hoping his father would explain this difficult concept, but, to his great disappointment, his father simply said that they would skip it, as he never understood it himself.[64] Jung’s disappointment continued into the service itself. Jung watched as his father went through the forms and rituals with the bread and wine, anticipating that he would enjoy an experience of the mystery that the Communion service supposedly represented. But when it was over, Jung felt empty.[65] After several days of reflection, Jung had to admit to himself that nothing at all had happened, that the ceremony contained no trace of God.[66]
- his growing pity for his father:[67] Unable to share his religious difficulties with his father (knowing he would only revert to his office, by giving Jung the orthodox pieties), Jung came to conclude that his father refused to think because he “was consumed by inward doubts. He was taking refuge from himself and therefore insisted on blind faith. He could not receive it as a grace because he wanted to ‘win it by struggle,’ forcing it to come with convulsive efforts.”[68] Such efforts never work, and Jung grew more and more “disillusioned and indignant…” that his father had fallen “victim to this mumbo-jumbo [religious orthodoxy].”[69]
So Jung avoided going to church as often as he could and he never went to Communion.[70]
“The farther away I was from church, the better I felt. The only things I missed were the organ and the choral music, but certainly not the ‘religious community.’ The phrase meant nothing to me at all, for the habitual churchgoers struck me as being far less of a community than the ‘worldly’ folk. The latter may have been less virtuous, but… they were much nicer people, with natural emotions, more sociable and cheerful, warmer-hearted and more sincere.”[71]
But no more enlightening about the nature of God. For that Jung continued to search, and his was a lonely quest. He found strength to endure a solitary spiritual life through his
“conviction that it was enjoined upon me to do what God wanted and not what I wanted. That gave me the strength to go my own way. Often I had the feeling that in all decisive matters I was no longer among men, but was alone with God. And when I was ‘there,’ where I was no longer alone, I was outside time; …He who always is was there. These talks with the ‘Other’ were my profoundest experiences: on the one hand a bloody struggle, on the other supreme ecstasy.”[72]
While Jung tried to contain all his thoughts and feelings, his mother (with her psychic #2 personality)[73] sensed his inner turmoil and around this time (1890) suggested he read Goethe’s Faust.[74] Jung found Goethe’s masterpiece wonderful, for showing him that there were people who saw evil and its universal power and the “mysterious role it played in delivering man from darkness and suffering.”[75]
Reading Faust also led Jung to turn from theology books to philosophers.[76] He delved into the pre-Socratics (Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Empedocles), Plato, Meister Eckhart, Schopenhauer and Kant.[77] But all his readings “in the realm of religious questions”[78] led to “locked doors, and if ever one door should chance to open I was disappointed by what lay behind it. Other people all seemed to have totally different concerns….”[79] and none of these spoke to his concerns about God’s will and the experience of grace. This led Jung to conclude that “… I had to find the answer out of my deepest self, that I was alone before God, and that God alone asked me these terrible things.”[80]
Jung felt he had a destiny, “… as though my life was assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled. This gave me an inner security, and, thought I could never prove it to myself, it proved itself to me. I did not have this certainty, it had me….”[81] This certainty and inner sense of safety helped Jung cope with the “fog”[82] of his early teen years (c. 1888-1890).
Looking back 70 years later, Jung described the “fog” as lifting thereafter, bringing more clarity but no more joy. The years 1890-1894—Jung’s years at the gymnasium—were filled with classes that Jung found boring,[83] and life outside school was no better:
“For God’s sake I now found myself cut off from the Church and from my father’s and everybody else’s faith. Insofar as they all represented the Christian religion, I was an outsider. This knowledge filled me with a sadness which was to overshadow all the years until the time I entered the university.”[84]
With church a “total loss,”[85] and religion “an absence of God,”[86] a place not full of life but full of death,[87] Jung could not turn to it for solace. Social contacts were no better: When Jung sought out people to talk with, he felt only “estrangement, a distrust, an apprehension which robbed me of speech.”[88] While his “#2 personality” (his intuitive, psychic inner life) suffered isolation, his #1 personality (the side of him attuned to the outer world) slowly came to the fore. As he approached his graduation from the gymnasium his family—parents but also uncles—began to press him to identify his career path.[89] Some of his clerical uncles tried to push him in the direction of theology, but this made Jung “distinctly uncomfortable,…”.[90] Science then? Jung found both science and religion wanting, as science lacked the “factor of meaning” while religion lacked the factor of empiricism.[91] Eventually Jung decided on the profession his grandfather had pursued: medicine.[92]
Like most universities in the Western world of the late 19th century, the University of Basel “was thoroughly saturated with the scientific materialism of the time.”[93] and Jung’s #1 personality took it all in, even as his #2 personality remained well aware of the other whole reality—subjective, qualitative, intuitive, holistic—that existed simultaneously with scientism.[94] The Extraverted shadow side of Jung appeared during his university years. He got involved in the Zofingia group, gave speeches and joined in the rough and tumble of the typical collegian.[95]
He also grew more deeply into his true self, which meant some “vehement discussions”[96] with his father when he was home from college in the years 1892-1894. Since Jung’s description of these discussions throws useful light on Jung’s own religious orientation, it warrants more than cursory examination.
Jung’s father had been a star at Göttingen, even earning a doctorate in Oriental languages,[97] but “His days of glory had ended with his final examination.” Thereafter he became a country parson, “forgot his linguistic talent,… [and] lapsed into a sort of sentimental idealism….”.[98] As Jung matured, his father diminished, becoming more irritable and discontent. Jung tried to fathom what he was experiencing and came to conclude that
“… he suffered from religious doubts. This, it seemed to me, was bound to be the case if the necessary experience had not come to him….. I saw that my critical questions made him sad, but I nevertheless hoped for a constructive talk, since it appeared almost inconceivable to me that he should not have had experience of God, the most evident of all experiences. … He had to quarrel with somebody, so he did it with his family and himself. Why didn’t he do it with God…? God would assuredly have sent him by way of an answer one of those magical, infinitely profound dreams which He sent to me even without being asked, and which had sealed my fate. … Yes, He had even allowed me a glimpse into His own being. This was a great secret which I dared not and could not reveal to my father. I might have been able to reveal it had he been capable of understanding the direct experience of God. But in my talks with him I never got that far, never even came within sight of the problem,… Theology had alienated my father and me from one another. … Once I heard him praying. He struggled desperately to keep his faith. I was shaken and outraged at once, because I saw how hopelessly he was entrapped by the Church and its theological thinking. They had blocked all avenues by which he might have reached God directly, and then faithlessly abandoned him. Now I understood the deepest meaning of my earlier experience: God Himself had disavowed theology and the Church founded upon it…. a ‘theological religion’ seemed quite inadequate to me, since there was nothing to do with it but believe it without hope. This was what my father had tried valiantly to do, and had run aground. He could not even defend himself against the ridiculous materialism of the psychiatrists. … This was borne out by his admonitions that if I studied medicine I should in Heaven’s name not become a materialist. …I was in no danger of succumbing to materialism, but my father certainly was…. his psychiatric reading made him no happier. His depressive moods increased in frequency and intensity, and so did his hypochondria….”[99]
Jung’s father had complained of abdominal problems for years, and neither Jung nor his mother took this seriously. But by the end of the summer of 1895 they called in the doctor, and by late autumn his father had become bedridden. He died early in 1896.[100] From her psychic “#2 personality” Jung’s mother remarked that “He died in time for you.”[101] And “a bit of manliness and freedom awoke in…”[102] Jung.
In describing his father’s final years and their wrestling with his father’s situation, Jung revealed key points of his personal religion. First, the value—more, the necessity—of personal experience of God, as the only way to avoid religious doubt. Second, that experience of God is “evident,”[103] i.e. available to anyone, anywhere, in a variety of forms—natural (trees, animals, sunsets), nocturnal (dreams), daily life (synchronicities), shattering events (accidents, deaths of significant persons). Third, that we can, and should, quarrel with God,[104] much as Job did (a discovery that Jung made only later on, when he came to read the Book of Job as an adult),[105] with the assurance that God will not be offended by blasphemy, and will provide a response. Fourth, that God will grant us a “glimpse into His own being,”[106] when we summon our courage[107] and open ourselves to Him. Fifth, that theology, orthodox belief and dogma is entrapping and will block “all avenues by which [we] might … reach God directly,…”[108] Sixth, that God Himself had “disavowed theology and the Church founded upon it…”.[109] And seventh, that a ‘theological religion’ …”[110] was inadequate, in being build upon mere belief. For the rest of his life Jung insisted that belief was a weak reed upon which to build one’s life.[111] We want to know God, not merely believe what some cleric or catechism tells us.
The rest of Jung’s life saw refinements of these points, but no major changes. In 1908 Jung and Emma built a house in a suburb of Zurich[112] and Jung had his religious testament carved over the front door: Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit—“Called or not called, God will be here.” When asked about it toward the end of his life, Jung replied:
“Well, that is a very complicated story. It has been my experience that these religious phenomena are to be met with everywhere, whether they are intentional or not. It only needs an emergency, a serious emergency, and then these religious utterances burst out again. Thus, when one is greatly astonished or surprised, everyone, even if he doesn’t believe in God, says ‘Oh God’ or “By God,’ and these are involuntary exclamations of a religious nature, because they use the name of God.”[113]
The plaque reminded Jung that God is ever-present, whether we think to call upon God or not.
Jung’s early fear of Catholicism gradually faded and he was able to say in a press conference in 1928 that
“… no creed is as closely akin to psychoanalysis as Catholicism. The symbols of the Catholic liturgy offer the unconscious such a wealth of possibilities for expression that they act as an incomparable diet for the psyche.”[114]
As for Protestantism, Jung was far more critical, decrying its loss of symbolism, its elimination of mysticism, and the sterility of its dogma.[115] He found Catholics “easier to cure than Protestants and Jews,”[116] who tend to suffer more from neurosis than Catholics.
Working with hundreds of patients over the years taught Jung that his way
“… of inner experience, the adventure of the spirit, is… alien to most human beings. The possibility that such experience might have psychic reality is anathema to them. All very well if it has a supernatural or at least a ‘historical’ foundation. But psychic? Face to face with this question, the patient will often show an unsuspected but profound contempt for the psyche.”[117]
Our Western materialism certainly does not help to attune people to psychic reality, so Jung essentially took upon himself the Herculean task to challenge not only mainstream Western religious thought but the whole Weltanschauung of Western culture.[118] In doing so he was frequently misunderstood and this caused him intense frustration. His writing style—the convoluted non-linear style of the Introverted Thinking type[119]—did not help to clarify his ideas, but for the first several decades of his publishing career (1905 to 1944) Jung did try to write for public consumption.[120]
Then in 1944 he had health problems, first a broken leg, then a heart attack.[121] For several weeks it was not clear that he would live. In his memoir he described his near-death experience in which he was off the earth, in space, seeing a temple and knowing it was where he was supposed to be, but not being permitted to go there, finding the whole atmosphere sublimely wonderful, then waking up in the day lamenting that he had come back to life on the material plane.[122] As is usually the case with near-death experiences (NDEs), Jung was changed: thereafter, when he was fully healed, he no longer sought to write for others. He wrote only for himself, and the works of his post-coronary years (1945-1961) are regarded as his masterpieces.[123] These dealt mostly with alchemy, which Jung recognized as a process of psychological transformation he termed “individuation.”[124]
Between his alchemical research, his weekly analytic hours with his patients, and his need for rest (he was now in his 70’s), it is a wonder that Jung found time to keep up with his correspondence, but he did, and Jung’s letters are often the most explicit, even coarse language of all his writings.[125] In his 100+ letters to clergy Jung repeatedly criticized Christianity for its one-sidedness (in seeing God as good, and evil as merely a privatio boni, an absence of good)[126] and its rationalism, which cost it “the living connection to the unconscious.”[127] Knowing from his own personal experience just how evil God can be, Jung had no truck with the doctrine that dismissed the reality of evil. Being an intellectual himself,[128] Jung knew just how soul-deadening academic discourse and reasoning can be, and he felt rationalism had no place in the life of the spirit.
By the early 1950’s, after dozens of letters from priests, ministers and pastors,[129] Jung could see that eventually he would have to “express myself more clearly about the religious problem of modern man.”[130] But he hesitated for years because he “… was fully aware of the storm I would be unleashing. But at last I could not help being gripped by the problem, in all its urgency and difficulty, and I found myself compelled to give an answer….”[131] This was his essay Answer to Job.
Where the teenage Jung foraging in his father’s library had passed over the Book of Job in his search for someone who shared his experience of God,[132] the adult Jung came to see that this book of the Old Testament described a similar encounter. When the time was right (1952), Jung was held “in the grip of the daimon”[133] and could do little but allow the words to flow.
Jung was correct in anticipating negative reactions, by both laypeople and the clergy. Theologians “taxed” him with metaphysical truth because that is what they are used to dealing with.[134] But Jung, ever the empiricist, was never interested in metaphysical truths or anything that could not be proved by personal experience. He was inundated with letters after Answer to Job appeared and he had to remind people over and over that he was not a theologian but a doctor, a psychologist, and was speaking not about beliefs, but about facts based on empirical evidence, i.e. experiences. Since very few people shared his experience of the Divine, few understood him or where he was coming from.[135] Those still “contained”[136] in religion could not revision a “God-image”[137] which was more a process[138]—an ongoing experience of relationship–than an entity like “father.”
The last essay that Jung wrote before he died in 1961 was an essay “Approaching the Unconscious,” in Man and His Symbols. He finished working on it just 10 days before his death on June 6th.[139] Although he was frail and in failing health, his spirit remained strong and as contentious as ever, for he noted that
“Anthropologists have often describe what happens to a primitive society when its spiritual values are exposed to the impact of modern civilization. Its people lose the meaning of their lives, their social organization disintegrates, and they themselves morally decay. We are now in the same condition. But we have never really understood what we have lost, for our spiritual leaders unfortunately were more interested in protecting their institutions than in understanding the mystery that symbols present…. We have stripped all things of their mystery and numinosity; nothing is holy any longer.”[140]
Jung was not sanguine about where this would lead. Ten days later, as he lay on his deathbed, he had visions which his daughter recorded and later shared with Jung’s devoted student, Marie-Louise von Franz. Years later von Franz spoke of these visions in an interview.[141] In them Jung saw a large part of the world desolate, but not the entire world. There were still pockets of humanity but clearly the civilization that we have known had succumbed to the “Luciferan fires”[142] that Jung years before had mentioned in a letter to a friend.
Will this be our fate? Perhaps not, if we can shift from religion—with its sects that war against each other, its clergy that focus on secular concerns (like money, power and protection of institutions,[143] and its rationalism that strips the power out of symbols)[144]—to a spirituality that fosters personal experience of the Divine.
This essay was drawn from a new book, The Spiritual Adventure of Our Time, an explication of Jung’s ideas on spirituality, the evolution of religion, and the emergence of the “new dispensation.” This book is available on Amazon, if you are interested in learning more about these ideas.
Sue Mehrtens is the author of this essay.
[1] MDR, 22.
[2] Ibid., 40.
[3] Ibid., 47.
[4] Ibid., 56.
[5] Ibid., 141-142.
[6] Jung wrote his memoir with the help of his secretary Aniela Jaffé, and it was not published until 1965, four years after his death. For the tortuous history of the book, see Bair (2003), 585-617 and 626-640.
[7] “Atemporal,” because spirit and psyche exist outside time. This is obvious to anyone who dreams.
[8] Kesswil
[9] Johann Paul Achilles Jung, called Paul (1842-1896); Bair (2003), 13.
[10] Emilie Jung-Preiswerk (1848-1923); Bair (2003), 7, 323.
[11] Jung called this her #2 personality; MDR, 48-49, 90.
[12] Ibid., 90.
[13] Ibid., 91.
[14] Illustrating the principle of the enantiodromia; for Jung’s definition of this term, see CW 6 ¶s 708-709. For more on it, see the three-part essay “Jung on the Enantiodromia,” archived on the Web site of the Jungian Center; www.jungiancenter.org.
[15] MDR, 42.
[16] Ibid., 23.
[17] Ibid., 91.
[18] Ibid., 90.
[19] Ibid., 10.
[20] Ibid., 9-10.
[21] Ibid., 13.
[22] Ibid., 13-14.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ibid., 11.
[25] Ibid., 13.
[26] Ibid., 17.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Ibid., 19.
[29] Ibid., 22.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Ibid., 27.
[32] Ibid.
[33] Ibid., 36-40.
[34] Ibid., 36.
[35] Ibid., 37.
[36] Ibid.
[37] Ibid., 38.
[38] Ibid.
[39] Ibid.
[40] Ibid., 38-39.
[41] Ibid., 39.
[42] Ibid.
[43] Ibid.
[44] Ibid.
[45] Ibid.
[46] Ibid.
[47] Ibid., 40.
[48] Ibid.
[49] Ibid.
[50] Ibid.
[51] Ibid.
[52] Ibid., 93.
[53] Ibid., 41.
[54] Ibid., 42.
[55] Ibid, 41-42.
[56] Ibid., 46 & 50.
[57] Ibid., 42.
[58] Ibid., 73.
[59] Ibid.
[60] Ibid., 74.
[61] Ibid., 42-43.
[62] Ibid., 47.
[63] Ibid., 52.
[64] Ibid., 53.
[65] Ibid., 54.
[66] Ibid., 53-54.
[67] Ibid., 59.
[68] Ibid., 73. Part of the problem in Jung’s relationship with his father might have been a typological difference: Jung was a Thinking type and the fact that his father was content to believe, i.e. to not understand religious ideas, suggests that he might have been a Feeler.
[69] Ibid., 59.
[70] Ibid., 75.
[71] Ibid.
[72] Ibid., 48.
[73] This was Jung’s term for how his mother seemed to have different personalities: by day she was an ordinary woman, but at night and certain other times she became psychic—so attuned as if she could read minds, or intuit so deeply into situations that she scared her young son. Jung himself inherited this keen intuition, which apparently ran in her family. Jung called his own version of this psychic capability his “#2 personality.”
[74] Ibid., 60.
[75] Ibid.
[76] Ibid., 61.
[77] Ibid.
[78] Ibid., 63.
[79] Ibid.
[80] Ibid., 47.
[81] Ibid., 48.
[82] Ibid., 68.
[83] Ibid., 64.
[84] Ibid., 56.
[85] Ibid., 55.
[86] Ibid.
[87] Ibid.
[88] Ibid., 63.
[89] Ibid., 72-73.
[90] Ibid., 73.
[91] Ibid., 72.
[92] Ibid., 86. Cf. Bair (2003), 7.
[93] MDR, 95.
[94]E.g. the degenerate form of science. For more on scientism, including a more elaborate definition, see Tart (2009), 24-25.
[95] MDR, 95.
[96] Ibid., 91.
[97] Ibid.
[98] Ibid.
[99] Ibid., 92-93.
[100] Ibid., 95.
[101] Ibid., 96.
[102] Ibid.
[103] Ibid., 92.
[104] Ibid.
[105] Ibid., 42.
[106] Ibid., 93.
[107] Ibid., 39.
[108] Ibid., 93.
[109] Ibid.
[110] Ibid.
[111] CW 10 ¶521.
[112] Küsnacht; Bair (2003), 124-125.
[113] JS, 454.
[114] Ibid., 40.
[115] CW 11 ¶76.
[116] JS, 45.
[117] MDR, 141-142.
[118] CW 8 ¶731.
[119] MDR, 51, and CW 6 ¶634.
[120] Edinger (1996b), 11.
[121] MDR, 289-292.
[122] Ibid., 292.
[123] CW 9ii, CW 12, CW 13, CW 14; Hopcke (1989), 126.
[124] For a definition and in-depth discussion of individuation, see the four-part essay “Components of Individuation,” archived on the Jungian Center Web site: www.jungiancenter.org.
[125] E.g. see Jung’s letter to Walter Robert Corti, in which he refers to Corti’s doctor as a “stupid shitbag.” 30 April 1929; Letters, I, 65.
[126] Cf. Letters, I, 450, 539n, 540, 555; II, 52-53, 58-61, 71-73, 74n, 79 & note, 93 & note, 147, 153, 213 & note, 236, 238n, 268, 277, 281, 484, 519 and 611. For more on the privatio boni in the context of an in-depth debate, see the Jung-White Letters, edited by Ann Lammers and Adrian Cunningham,
[127] Stein (1999), 20.
[128] JS, 443.
[129] In Letters I, 97, 117-119, 191, 195, 215, 216, 229, 235, 245, 256, 339, 353, 355, 359, 368, 372, 381, 382, 391, 395, 398, 401, 406, 408, 412, 414, 415, 419, 448, 449, 452, 457, 466, 471, 474, 479, 481, 483, 489, 490, 501, 506, 514, 516, 539, 555, 566; II, 11, 13, 24, 39, 50, 52, 58, 71, 79, 128, 129, 133, 139, 144, 155, 163, 208, 212, 225, 238, 244, 251, 254, 257, 267, 268, 334-336, 369, 391, 422, 434, 471, 482, 516, 518, 536, 544, 546, 552, 554, 566, 575, 581, 584, 603, 621, 625, 630.
[130] MDR, 216-217.
[131] Ibid.
[132] Ibid., 42.
[133] Ibid., 356.
[134] Ibid., 216-217.
[135] Ibid.
[136] Edinger (1984), 61.
[137] Edinger (1996b) discusses the god-image in depth.
[138] Stein (1999), 22.
[139] Freeman, in MHS, viii.
[140] MHS, 84.
[141] Wagner (1998-9), 12-39.
[142] “Letter to Adolf Keller,” 25 February 1955; Letters II, 229-230.
[143] MHS, 84. We certainly have seen in recent years just how right Jung was, given the sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church. At the highest levels the church protected priests even when it meant exposing children to sexual abuse.
[144] CW 18 ¶625.
