This week I had the pleasure of giving a research paper to my colleagues at St Mary's: 'Carl Jung - Friend or Foe of Christianity'. I first gave this paper to a group of psychologists in Bangalore earlier in the year and after thinking about their comments changed it for St Mary's. As in India, it provoked an interesting discussion - not least scepticism about Jung's project of rediscovering the transcendent... as one colleague suggested - Jung replaced one sort of idolatry (secular materialism) with another (the ego bound psychology). I found myself in the uncommon position of defending Jung and the Jungians! Anyway, I include below the first and last sections of the paper. If you would like to read the whole paper it will be published in
Vinayasadhana later this year and some of the material is also found towards the end of my
Teresa of Avila - Doctor of the Soul. One thing is for sure, Jung still excites strong passions in academic circles!
Best wishes
Peter
Carl Jung: Friend or
Foe of Christianity?
Dr Peter Tyler
Introduction
In
his famous 1959 television interview with John Freeman (the only one he gave),
Carl Jung was asked if he believed in God. His response, ‘I don’t believe, I
know’ has gone down in the annals of psychotherapy as one of the defining
moments of analytical psychology’s relationship to religion in general and
Christianity in particular. In this short paper I aim to pitch into the
tumultuous sea surrounding the relationship between Jung’s analytical
psychology and Christianity to see how far we can regard Jung as a ‘believer’
and if so, what sort. In deference to the ongoing nature of this dialogue I
have drawn readily upon The Red Book,
written by Jung at the height of his psychotic disturbances during the Great
War and only recently published (Jung RB 2009)
Jung and the Christian Way
Jung
once wrote:
Among all my patients in the second
half of life – that is to say, over thirty-five – there has not been one whose
problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.
It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost what the
living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them
has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook. (Jung CW:
11.509 published originally as Die Beziehungen der Psychotherapie zur
Seelsorge, Zurich 1932)
In
the same work he went so far as to suggest that anyone he encountered at this stage of
development who was experiencing mental crisis and who had had some previous
religious formation should be encouraged to return to their religious roots if
they were to stand a chance of being mentally healed. Thus, from its beginnings
Jungian analytical psychology has preferenced the transcendent and the need for
each individual psyche to make friends with the transcendent, for not doing so,
warns Jung, will lead to severe psychological problems.
There is no doubt that there is much
in Jung’s writing that is inimical and downright erroneous for a
straightforward Christian seeker trying to reconcile her faith with Jungian
transpersonal analysis. Yet, despite some of the excesses that are to be found
in his work, his map of the soul provides a corrective to the rising tide of
materialism that has swamped early twenty-first century culture. As Dueck puts
it in his perceptive short book on the relationship between Jung and
Christianity,The Living God and Our Living Psyche: What Christians Can Learn
from Carl Jung (2008):
Rising through the last several
centuries, modernity had reached an apex of its power in the first half of the
twentieth century, and its capitulation to science had drained away much of the
healing power of Christian practices. Jung sought to recover this vitality. (Ulanov
and Dueck 2008:5)
Thus,
suggests Dueck, Jung attempted ‘a pastoral attempt to counter the personally
debilitating effects of modernity’. His primary concern was healing. Not only
the healing of the individual psyche but the healing of the collective psyche. Accordingly,
his ‘epistemology is not positivist, but diverse enough to include narrative,
dreams, fantasy, propositional truth and ethical pronouncements’ (Dueck 2008:9).
The Creation of the
Symbol
As
we have seen above many contemporary commentators have found much that is
useful in Jung’s approach and he still finds many enthusiastic followers from
within Christianity. As I have already stated, in my opinion, one of Jung’s
primary concerns, certainly after the expression and style of the Red Book, was to recapture key elements
of the style and process of medieval thinking for the (post-) modern
reader/seeker. In this respect I feel the most important aspect of Jung
presented from this perspective is his revival of the importance of the symbol
as an entré into postmodern discourse.
In the recovery of the symbolic Jung
was not alone. Whilst his own researches into the nature of the symbol were to
prove so important, other mid 20th Century ressourcement writers such as Marie-Dominique Chenu (1895 – 1990)
had also begun to appreciate the significance of the symbolic for interpreting
the medieval mindset. In his perceptive essay on Victorine spirituality Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth
Century (Chenu 1997), Chenu alludes to the role of the symbolic for the
medievals as being largely anagogical, i.e. the symbol is the means whereby the
heavenly order is reflected in the earthly order:
Creation was a theophany, a
manifestation of God, and symbolism was the
means appropriate to that manifestation; even granting a dialectical tension between the power
of creation to manifest God and its
complete inferiority to God, symbolism revealed nothing less than God’s transcendence (Chenu 1997:128)
As
well as this anagogical element, the symbolic for the medievals was another
mode of thought, in contradistinction to, for example, the dialectics of the
schools. In this respect, the symbolic for the medievals was not considered
another form of logic but a different way of ‘showing’ truth. As Chenu states:
To bring symbolism into play was not
to extend or supplement a previous
act of the reason; it was to give primary expression to a reality which reason could not attain
and which reason, even afterwards,
could not conceptualize. (Chenu 1997:103)
It
is therefore apparent how this ‘alternative to logic’ would appeal to the
medievalist (or at least contra-modern) Jung. For him the symbol will become
the means whereby the ‘meta-rational’ components of the greater ‘Self’/Selbst, will become accessible to the
more circumscribed ‘I’/Ich. The
symbol, in Jung’s hands will become the linking point between the known ‘I’ and
the unknown ‘Self’, thus performing a crucial function in his psychology:
In practice, opposites can be united
only in the form of a compromise, or
irrationally, some new thing arising between them which, although different from both, yet has the power
to take up their energies in equal
measure as an expression of both and of neither. Such an expression cannot be contrived by
reason, it can only be created through
living. (Jung CW: 6.169)
The
mediating axis for this process is the symbol:
The mediating position, between the
opposites can be reached only by the
symbol (Jung CW: 6.162)
This
symbol will therefore represent ‘something that is not wholly understandable,
and that it hints only intuitively at its possible meaning’ (Jung CW6: 171).
This function will also be a ‘playful’ function:
Schiller calls the symbol-creating
function a third instinct, the play
instinct; it bears no resemblance to the two opposing functions, but stands
between them and does justice to both natures. (Jung CW: 6.171)
So,
the symbolic function is, for Jung:
- Neither rational or irrational.
- Playful and creative.
- Allowing the conscious to grasp
the unconscious.
- A gateway to the Gnostic/Dionysian
Jungian god.
Therefore
religion, for Jung, becomes the acceptance of the reality of the symbol (Jung
CW: 6.202). For him, the symbolic and
the religious (whether that is
represented by Christianity, Hinduism or Taoism is irrelevant) are coterminous:
The solution of the problem in Faust, in Wagner’s Parsifal, in Schopenhauer, and even in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, is religious (Jung CW: 6.324)
Conclusion: Carl Jung –
Friend or Foe of Christianity?
To
conclude this paper I know return to my original question: ‘Is Carl Jung a
friend or foe of Christianity?’ Well, if we understand Christianity in terms of
the doctrines or creeds of Orthodoxy then he is no foe, but rather someone who
fails to understand the implications of Orthodox Christianity for an
interpretation of the nature of Christ and ultimately of Christian life. If we
follow the version of Christianity presented by Jung we are no longer following
Orthodoxy but rather a late Gnostic version of Christianity.
Is
that such a bad thing?
In a world almost swallowed up in
reductive materialism Jung saw his fundamental task as preserving the spiritual
from the ravages of reductive empirical materialism. This he termed the
‘religious outlook to life’ which he felt was fundamental in preserving good
mental health (See Jung CW: 11.509). His spiritual life was as much for
‘unbelievers’ as ‘believers’ to the former of which he explicitly claimed to be
addressing his writing:
I am not… addressing myself to the
happy possessors of faith, but to those
many people for whom the light has gone out, the mystery has faded, and God is dead. For most of them
there is no going back, and one does
not know either whether going back is always the better way. To gain an understanding of religious
matters, probably all that is left us
today is the psychological approach. (Jung CW: 11.148)
In
this respect, for Jung all religions are equal. None has the monopoly on the
‘cure of souls’:
Yes, I agree, the Buddha may be just
as right as Jesus. Sin is only relative
and it is difficult to see how we can feel ourselves in any way redeemed by the death of Christ. (Jung CW:
11.518)
As
with his views on god/God, Jung betrays his theological naivety. He does not
seem to understand that, for example, Christianity and Buddhism have
fundamentally mutually exclusive views on the metaphysics of human salvation.
Be that as it may, if we see reductive materialism as the enemy of Christianity
then on the theory that an enemy’s enemy is a friend, Jung therefore belongs on
the side of the angels and a guardian of Christianity in a world that has
rapidly become a stranger to the spiritual – or at least the ability to express
that spiritual life in a comprehensible language. In Seelsorge, for example, he is quite bullish about the rights of the
clergy to trespass on to the realm of the materialist psychologist:
I therefore hold that psychological
interest on the part of the Protestant
clergy is entirely legitimate and even necessary. Their possible encroachment upon medical territory is more than balanced
by medical incursions into
religion and philosophy, to which doctors naively
believe themselves entitled (witness the explanation of religious processes in terms of sexual symptoms or
infantile wish-fantasies). (Jung CW:
11.548)
There
is no doubt that Jung’s transpersonal psychological language has given a means
for a whole generation to communicate its unease with the astringent
materialism of our time. For this, perhaps, Christianity owes him a debt.
Although we might want to baulk at awarding him the title ‘Defender of the
Faith’ he certainly deserves the title ‘Defender of Faith’. White recognised
this when he saw that Jung was a prophet warning against a collapse of the
Western psyche brought about by one-sided materialism. In the opening of his
‘God and the Unconscious’ he quotes with approval Jung’s words from
‘Psychological Types’:
Our age has a blindness without
parallel. We think we have only to declare
an acknowledged form of faith to be incorrect or invalid, to become psychologically free of all the
traditional effects of the Christian or
Judaic religion. We believe in enlightenment, as if an intellectual change of opinion had somehow a deeper
influence on emotional processes
or indeed upon the unconscious! We entirely forget that the religion of the last two thousand years
is a psychological attitude, definite
form of adaptation to inner and outer experience, which moulds a definite form of civilization; it has therefore created an
atmosphere that remains wholly
uninfluenced by any intellectual disavowal.
(Jung CW: 6.313)
Jung’s
critique was as much a critique of Christian culture and mindset as it was of
Christianity itself. For him, the ‘Christian mindset’ still continued to mould
and shape our everyday realities, even in the 21st century, perhaps
more than we would care to admit:
Everything we think is the fruit of
the Middle Ages and indeed of the Christian Middle Ages. Our whole science,
everything that passes through our head, has inevitably gone through this
history. The latter lives in us and has left its stamp upon us for all time and
will always form a vital layer of our psyche, just like any phylogenetic traces
in our body… The Christian Weltanschauung
is therefore a psychological fact which does not allow of any further rationalization;
it is something which has happened, which is present. (White 1960:67 quoting an
address by Jung given in 1934)
Jung’s
analysis of the individual, of religions such as Christianity and ultimately of
Western Cultural Patterns emphasises the need for a correction. Or as he calls
it an ‘enantiodromia’ – a new openness to the transcendental and a balance to
the hard ossification that has clearly happened on both sides of the
religion/materialist divide over the past century. His psychology, with all its
ambiguity and slipperiness, does offer an alternative for the psyche to breathe
and rearrange itself in a time of change and realignment of priorities. Jung
seems to say that religion may choose to stay on the sidelines of that
realignment, but no-one, least of all the psychologists, will in the long term
thank it for its self-immolation.
See, for example, Hugh of St
Victor: ‘Symbolum,
collatio videlicet, id est coaptatio visibilium formarum ad demonstrationem rei
invisiblis propositarum’ /‘A symbol is a juxtaposition, that is a gathering
together of visible forms in order to demonstrate invisible things’
Hugh of St
Victor ‘On the Celestial Hierarchy’iii. PL CLXXV 960D.
