Religious Aspects in Jung's Works
by Vera von der Heydt
It is a formidable task to speak about religious aspects in Jung's work although he was quite consistent in his writing and in his attitude to religion.
The difficulty is to find a way to get his fundamental ideas across; much of what he thought and wrote has been misunderstood, and so I can only hope that I may be able to clarify some of his ideas without distorting them. In order to understand his attitude to and interest in religious matters one has to take into account several things: first of all his background; secondly his concern for patients, as he always thought of himself to be primarily a physician and a specialist in nervous and mental diseases: then he wanted his medical colleagues to see and look at the new avenues of research he had opened; and finally he was offering theologians psychological proofs which corroborated the rightness of their statements on empirical grounds.
Jung was the son of a Swiss Reformed clergyman, and eight of his uncles were clergymen too. He was brought up in the atmosphere of a conventional manse questions about religious matters were not encouraged; his father's attitude was a very common one of a particular type of religious person: one does not need think about one's beliefs, nor understand them, one only needs faith. This attitude was impossible for Jung. He was frustrated and unhappy.
Then, one day, he was about sixteen, he was walking home from school on a brilliantly sunny day, passing the cathedral of Basle; he looked up into the sky and he saw God sitting on his throne, and the spire of the cathedral sparkling in the sun. Suddenly, a thought began to form in his mind; he could not allow it to come -- he could not -- he had a choking sensation, felt numbed and knew only that he must not go on thinking, because a terrible thing was coming, a thought he did not want to think, because it would be a frightful sin, a sin against the Holy Ghost. He did not dare tell his parents about it: they would have been too upset. So for three days and nights he was in agony of mind; again and again the forbidden thought tried to break through though he did not yet know what it really was. During the third night the crisis came: he thought how could it be that thoughts came that one did not want; where did they come from; surely if God was omnipotent and omniscient it must be He who put them there -- just as He had arranged everything so that the first parents sinned it had been His intention, just as it was his intention that he should be alone in his situation and seek and find out what it was that He wanted from him. Eventually the thought came that perhaps God was testing his obedience by imposing a task which incurred doing something against his moral judgment, against the teachings of his religion, and even against His own commandment, and perhaps God also wanted him to show courage. Again and again Jung tried to think it out, he always came to the same conclusion to finally be allowed the terrible thought to come: God was sitting on His golden throne, high above the world, and from under the throne an enormous turd fell upon the sparkling new roof of the cathedral, shattering it and breaking the walls of the cathedral asunder. That was it; Jung felt an enormous indescribable relief. Instead of the expected damnation, grace had come upon him, and with it an unutterable bliss such as he had never known.
Questions however remained: Why did God befoul his own Cathedral, or why did he force a helpless being into thinking something he did not want to think? This was a terrible thought -- and also not to know what the will of God was -- How did one know? With these questions and uncertainties came the dim understanding that God could be terrible. Jung knew that he was in possession of a dark terrible secret which separated him for ever from his father, his family, and from all those who could listen to religious jargon without reflecting on it or questioning the statements made. Jung realised from then on how alone he was; somehow he felt that having such a secret was shaming and sinister; it meant that one was different yet, he needed to understand, to know, to experience.
I have told this early experience of Jung's at some length because it shows the way his mind worked even when he was a boy. Later he was to ask the same kind of questions, he would continue to observe his own unconscious material with meticulous critical care. He did the same for his patients. Attempting to understand better and to know more he undertook his studies of religions and mythologies; he found in them similar images and symbols to those appearing in the dreams, fantasies and experiences of modern men and women. It convinced him that the concept of the unconscious containing only personal material that had been forgotten or repressed was too limited; it could neither describe nor explain phenomena of an altogether different kind which break through into consciousness. These came from another unconscious realm, the realm of a universal disposition in man which Jung called the collective unconscious or the inner reality. This is the realm of super-personal factors, or unconscious organizers of our ideas which Jung called he archetypes: we do not know their nature; neither do we know the nature of instinct, but we do know of the tremendous and overwhelming effect they have on an individual, and on groups, when they are activated. In the same way as new laws, new dimensions for the understanding of the universe had been discovered, so Jung uncovered layers and contents in the psyche widening the concept of the psyche and adding a dimension; an individual can discover this for himself, if he wants to understand himself better. Concentrating on the importance of consciousness and the ego, modern man forgot that his real centre would have to be the centre of his totality: his conscious as well as his unconscious side. This centre of the total personality which unites all aspects Jung called the self. This centre, however, is not static, but a dynamic process: it is from that area that the constant longing for completeness springs, and that wholeness, and God is experienced. These longings and experiences are archetypal phenomena, and myths give expression to these unconscious processes and so do religions. When myths are retold as once they were, and religious dogmas experienced unconscious processes come alive again and re- establish the connection between the conscious and the unconscious. The denial of the existence of the deep inner reality, its belittling and ridiculing has produced the dissociation between the two parts, an alienation of man from his roots and this Jung called the neurosis of our times. Opposites never unite at their own level, a third is always required in which the two can come together: this third is the symbol. This reconciliation takes place when an individual discovers or re-discovers his religion, which has nothing to do with creed or belonging to a Church.
The Latin word 'religio' derives from the verbs relegere or religare; relegere means: a careful and scrupulous observation of the numinous (the awe-inspiring presence of divine power); religare means to link back, bind back, reconnect. Both these definitions are of importance as they suggest two aspects of an active dynamic attitude of the ego towards psychic life, inner states, happenings in relation to external reality. To "have religion" is therefore an attitude to life, to the whole of life inner and outer.
Christian doctrine expresses for Western man the essence of inner experience, but it uses a language which has become meaningless to most people today. Dogma is no longer experienced, but believed in, or thrown overboard. When it is "believed in", thoughtlessly an individual subscribes to a creed. A creed is a systematized form of belief, enshrining dogmatic teachings carefully formulated by theologians, and it is enriched by ritual and outer observances. Nowadays many people have nothing but negative feelings with regard to a creed because they see in it only hypocrisy and being caught in rigid prejudice. Jung was ambivalent. On the one hand he called a creed 'a substitute for religion', on the other he attributed to it an important function. A creed is taught from above, one is told what to believe and that this truth is absolute and may not be questioned; this makes direct experience very difficult if not impossible. So a creed stands in the way of spiritual development, and becomes a haven for those who shun responsibility, personal involvement, consciousness and maturity. However, a creed can be protection against the onslaughts of immediate experience for those whose ego- position is too weak to tolerate loss of certainties, and the despair and confusion generated by feelings of isolation and the guilt of being a lone wolf. A creed is a positive frame-work when the symbols of the Church are alive and meaningful; when dogma, the creed is a personal experience; belief then is faith, pistis, trust, and the opposites religion and creed are united. One aspect of Christianity about which Jung was very concerned, exists within it; the split which most Christians are unconscious of is the fact that the schism affects us, and that inasmuch we proclaim to have to possess the whole, absolute truth, the more there is a split in us that has to be healed, a bridge has to be sought. We all could know by now what this aspect of Christian intolerance has done and is doing in the outside world; unfortunately there is as yet far too little insight that rigidity is also destructive in the inner world-in other words causes neurosis.
Jung thought that he had made his position quite clear with regard to the question of belonging to a particular church and therefore never ceased to be astonished when he got letters from well-meaning theologians, Catholic and Protestant, urging him to declare the rightness, the absolute rightness of one Church alone. His answer was :
"Though I know little of Catholic doctrine, that little is enough to make it an inalienable possession for me. And I know so much about Protestantism that I could never give it up. With regard to this indecision I have consciously and deliberately decided for it. Since no man can serve two masters, I can submit neither to one creed nor to the other, but only to the one which stands above the conflict: I must be satisfied with being a Christian who finds himself in the same conflict as Christendom is in. I cannot disavow my brother who, in good faith and for reasons I cannot invalidate with a good conscience, is of a different opinion".
This attitude did not mean that he rejected or despised anyone who felt fulfilled in their church. He himself remained a member of the Swiss Reformed Church to the end of his life. Jung was aware that many people were turning to the East, particularly to Indian spirituality to get answers they felt Christianity was unable to give them. Jung had studied Indian and Chinese philosophy and religious systems; and their impact on his thought had been considerable. He expressed this in several of his writings. At the same time he stressed the importance of Western man to come to terms with his own spiritual background and heritage by consciously facing it and learning to be open to and experience the images and symbols contained in it by looking at them in a new way.
Jung's insistence on experience has made people diffident; they feel as if again something is expected from them which they cannot do. They do not realise that it is they themselves who shut doors because they have notions and expectations of what a religious experience should be like: often it is not recognized, it seems too insignificant; because of our negative attitude to ourselves. We cannot believe that we carry the God-image within ourselves. Not God, but the God-image.
Jung always said that he was unable to make any statement about God as this was the province of the theologians and metaphysics. He only knew of the God-image which appeared from within the psyche. It is experienced in waking life as well as in dreams; it is a deeply moving and mysterious experience which is accompanied by feelings of wholeness and fulfilment, it can be frightening and shattering: it is absolute. It is a psychic event which happens and which cannot be deliberately willed. In whatever way the God-image is experienced it is modified by the individual's conditioning and general outlook; in other words the ego plays a part in the phenomenon arising from the self. In the case of the boy Jung for instance 'it happened' in a kind of fantasy reinforced by thought. Such an experience by itself, however, is of little value; it has to be integrated into the fabric of the total personality. This is difficult; such an experience can be so numinous that one dreads to look at it with the eyes of consciousness, one would rather leave it in the twilight for fear of it losing some of its strange quality.
As an illustration of my point I will tell you some experiences: one rather lovely one of a young girl; onother which included the moral conflict of a young woman; and finally a kind of vision of an older woman which speaks for itself. A woman once told me that when she was fifteen years old she was on holiday with her family and went down with scarlet fever. She was taken to a kind of cottage isolation hospital run by nuns. She was Jewish with no religious background. A couple of days after her admission she heard some beautiful singing: her immediate reaction was this must be the angels singing, I am dead, and now God will come in and I will see him. At that moment Matron came in and asked her if she wanted anything; for a few moments she was completely confused and she did not know if God was Matron or Matron God, or what was happening. She never forgot the sense of peace she had had at the thought of seeing God.
A young Roman Catholic woman of about twenty-two years was a very different case; to the horror of her family she suddenly was refusing to go to holy Communion, and refused to give a reason. After she herself had spoken to a priest she came to see me. After a while she was able to tell me that she could not go to Communion, because every time the Host touched her tongue she had an orgasm. This was for her utterly blasphemous, wicked and terrifying; because she regarded her body and its needs as wicked and terrifying whatever the cause. We worked through this and, eventually she recognised that she had to link this experience to her total attitude of 'hate' for her body, and that from the centre of her being 'something' was pushing her to recognise the reality of her bodily needs as well as those of her spiritual side. There is one more experience I want to mention. It is an experience a woman of about forty- five had in analysis. She was a Roman Catholic, she was fairly disturbed by material that was coming up from the unconscious, and so one day she went into a smallish Church, just to be there and sit for a while. It was darkish: there were three altars; the high Altar in the middle and right and left of it side Altars. She sat on the right hand side, and noticed that a priest was approaching the main altar, and was beginning quite obviously to say Mass. She was surprised as she did not think it was a time for Mass. She watched the priest, suddenly he turned round walking towards the altar-rails where she was, and she saw that it was Christ Himself who was offering her the Host. She took it; then He offered her the Chalice, she drew back, but it was offered to her again, and she knew that she had to drink it. She said: it was bitter, bitter, bitter: and yet, He was there and it had to be. Then He was no longer there. In spite of the intense feeling that was connected with this experience, the woman wanted to look at it, understand its meaning so that it could become part of her life and incorporate it into her whole being; she did not want to keep it locked away in the attic of her mind as 'just an experience.' It is not possible to give a full interpretation of this vision, but one important aspect is that according to this woman's religious background it was almost unbelievable that she was offered the chalice. The significance for her was the implied healing of a rift. We are not accustomed to take our dreams, visions, fantasies seriously; for too long they have been considered to be nothing but silliness or illusions, even delusions'; Jung insisted on the eminently practical aspect of his findings with regard to the collective unconscious, still the archetypal nature of the God-image seems strange. Yet he made a new approach to the psyche possible, he opened a way for reason and feeling to come together from the psychological point of view by consciously paying attention to the psyche's manifestations; from the religious point of view by understanding the truth religious images convey through feeling being activated, and even to apprehend the real meaning of dogmatic statements: for instance the meaning of the Dogma of the Trinity, or the meaning of the Symbols of Transformation of the Mass. Jung had strong feelings about the importance of dogma, and conveyed this in his essays on these subjects. Theologians were disturbed by the notion of the indwelling God- image particularly as Jung pointed again and again to the dark, terrible side of the deity. Traditionally not only the transcendent God is pictured as nothing but light and all-good (omnipotent, and omniscient as well), whenever the immanent God is mentioned He is spoken about as 'inner light' or 'grace.' Yet, the idea of God's dark side has existed always and has been expressed by man in his Holy Books: God is acclaimed as the Creator of the Universe, and as its Lord; He is Creator of all that exists, of Good and Evil as well as of all other pairs of opposites. As these ideas appeared from within man, they exist within him, and it is from those ideas that the image of God was formed. No scientist can prove the existence of God, that is metaphysics, but what a scientist did do was to prove the existence of the God-image in man in the collective psyche, and that this is an archetypal image of God. It follows that this archetypal image contains the light as well as the dark demonic side of the Creator. Particularly in Christianity 'this dark side' has been repressed. It was always emphasised in the Church's teaching that God's wrath was only visited on sinners; from Scripture we know that this is not so. Abraham and Job in the Old Testament; in the New Testament the Holy Innocents, the man born blind, or the death of Lazarus and the grief of his sisters are examples which spring to mind immediately.
This kind of knowledge is disquietening and so difficult to grasp that it is better ignored. It is easier to pretend that there is no darkness in God, but only in man. But in man only because of his own fault; darkness, sin, evil do not need to exist; they 'are only a mistake due to external circumstances or illness: evil is just an absence of good. And so evil is and remains unrecognized as a powerful reality in the nature of things, in the nature of God as in the nature of man, and no one is willing to take responsibility even for the evil which exists in himself. Jung always opposed the concept of the privatio boni and had many long and impassioned discussions about it with the Dominican Father Victor White; equally Jung opposed the notion of man being totally bad, the carrier of all evil, which came in with the Reformation; blindness with regard to the consequences of the one tenet and the possible result on man seeing him in such a negative light, did not seem to have struck theologians. This sorry attitude to the nature of man reinforced by the psychological teaching that man depended entirely and totally on external circumstances and was determined by them. "Call a-man-a name, and he will deserve it."
People experience God in the peaceful beauty of nature or in its grandeur; very few would be able to do so in the horror of earthquake or avalanche acts of God. Men of science are attempting to mitigate these natural catastrophies; man has not yet understood that eruptions and floodings from within his inner nature cause as much destruction as the outer ones, and that perhaps it might be within his potential, to look at and observe himself with the same kind of patience as the scientist does nature without.
Once upon a time there were scientists who did just that: the alchemists. They deliberately undertook the opus contra naturam the great work of uniting opposites and transforming the given basic material into the highest value. They knew of the dangers of this undertaking; the knowledge that their work could be successful only, Deo volente, was their protection against inflation and against being overwhelmed by their images; they knew also that intellectual knowledge by itself has little value: transformation implies insight, a re-cognition, seeing, realising on all levels and centres, which then perhaps is nearer to the idea of wisdom than of knowledge. This idea was expressed in their adage: Rumpite libros ne corda vestra rumpantur. The prima materia with which the process of transformation is initiated has to be discovered individually by each alchemist. No one can be shown or told: one has to find it for oneself. The patient, bent on individuation also has to work through his basic darkness and unconsciousness. He may know neither about what that consists of, nor does he know what his highest value is. Is it God? What God? The golden calf? Mammon? His Belly? In more modern terms: money, power, sex, or whatever else is the strongest motive power in one. "Anything despotic and inescapable is in this sense God", Jung wrote, "and it becomes absolute unless by an ethical decision freely chosen, one succeeds in building up against this natural phenomenon a position which is equally strong." To undertake the analytical procedure is an ethical decision freely chosen. There are many similarities between the various stages in the alchemical process and those in depth psychology including images and experiences. Of particular interest to Jung was the Alchemists concern with the figure of Christ. Christ and Anti-Christ; the Son of God and the Son of Man: the conflict between those two aspects, the problem of the crucifixion, the meaning of sacrifice and suffering, and of reconciliation and redemption.
This conflict, these problems are still with us in one form or another and have to be resolved. In his book Aion Jung had dealt with the psychology of Christianity in a detached and objective way. But his feelings were not so detached; suffering man and the suffering of Christ and the suffering of Job were all linked together in his mind. For a long time he hesitated to express his feelings, but finally he was unable to withstand the inner pressure and he wrote Answer to Job. Though he explained that he was not expressing eternal truths but that he wanted to state the religious problem of modern man more clearly, this book unleashed a storm of indignation.
Illness, failure, humiliation, tragic happenings are inflicted on Job; they are sent not by a loving Father God, but by a God who lets his dark son Satan have his way in order to see what Job's attitude would. turn out to be. Job's friends tell him to repent of his sins; had he not sinned God would not punish him; Job rejects all such advice because he cannot lie to his God. He has patience, he remains steadfast in his faith and holds on to his trust that hidden within the uncaring terrible God there is the advocate who will speak for him. Job, the Jew, exclaims "I know that my Redeemer lives." The Redeemer is God's other side: His love and His wisdom. Job's insight into God's double nature "Lo, mine eyes have seen and mine ears have understood it" bring about the transformation in the divinity. But, God has to atone for the sin He committed against man: He had to become man Himself to suffer the lot of man. God remembered wisdom. The wisdom of God is the feminine principle: Mary. In the second part of the Answer to Job Jung commented on the new Dogma of Our Lady's Assumption. The feminine principle, the dark prince, the earth, and wisdom had joined God, Christ and the Spirit of Love. Jung saw Job as a prefiguration of Christ and at the same time as the man who stood up against the God whose force is beyond moral judgment; and standing up keeping his integrity transformed and humanised him.
The primitive angry self/God image confronted by an ego who knows of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil no longer needs to rampage. And then man can take responsibility for his own darkness and integrate it into his totality. When there is a dialogue between ego and self the light and dark sides may come together-and this is the beginning of an inner liberation.
Jung affirmed that the indwelling God image was a paradox: archetypal good/evil and at the same time personal good/evil. And also in man there is an image of the One whose name we do not know. "Even when men is enlightened he remains what he is and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells in him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abyss of the earth and vast as the sky." This is the last sentence of Answer to Job, and it shows well Jung's feelings. And some of us who are here and who had the good fortune of seeing Jung in his home, may remember the inscription over his house: Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit (Called or not called, God is always there).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jung, C G. CW, 9 ii: Aion
Jung, C G. CW 11: Psychology and Religion West and East
Jung, C G. CW 12: Psychology and Alchemy
Jung, C G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Jung, C G. Letters, 1st volume: 1906- 1950
Jung, C G. The Symbolic Life. Guild of Pastoral Psychology, No.80
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