Religious Experience and God
The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), p. 325.
The religious attitude, it is quite different, and above all it is not conscious. You can profess whatever you like consciously while your unconscious attitude is totally different.
Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934, Vol. I (29 October 1930), p. 41.
It is the role of religious symbols to give a meaning to the life of man. The Pueblo Indians believe that they are the sons of Father Sun, and this belief endows their life with a perspective (and a goal) that goes far beyond their limited existence. It gives them ample space for the unfolding of personality and permits them a full life as complete persons. Their plight is infinitely more satisfactory than that of a man in our own civilization who knows that he is (and will remain) nothing more than an underdog with no inner meaning to his life.
“Approaching the Unconscious” (1964), Man and His Symbols, p. 89.
“Called or uncalled, God is present!” It is a Delphic oracle. The translation is by Erasmus. You ask whether the oracle is my motto. In a way, you see, it contains the entire reality of the psyche. “Oh God!” is what we say, irrespective of whether we say it by way of a curse or by way of love.
“On Creative Achievement” (1946), C. G. Jung Speaking, p. 164.
[I]f I can help it, I never preach my belief. If asked I shall certainly stand by my convictions, but these do not go beyond what I consider to be my actual knowledge. I believe only what I know. Everything else is hypothesis and beyond that I can leave a lot of things to the Unknown. They do not bother me. But they would begin to bother me, I am sure, if I felt that I ought to know about them.
Psychology and Religion (1938/1940), CW 11, § 79.
I am very grateful for the spiritual help you extend to me. I am in need of it with this gigantic misunderstanding which surrounds me. All the riches I seem to possess are also my poverty, my lonesomeness in the world. The more I seem to possess, the more I stand to lose, when I get ready to approach the dark gate. I did not seek my life with its failures and accomplishments. It came on me with a power not my own. Whatever I have acquired serves a purpose I have not foreseen. Everything has to be shed and nothing remains my own. I quite agree with you: it is not easy to reach utmost poverty and simplicity. But it meets you, unbidden, on the way to the end of this existence.
To the Mother Prioress of a Contemplative Order, September 1959, Letters, Vol. II, p. 516.
All that I have learned has led me step by step to an unshakeable conviction of the existence of God. I only believe in what I know. And that eliminates believing. Therefore I do not take His existence on belief—I know that He exists.
“Men, Women, and God” (1955), C. G. Jung Speaking, p. 251.
I don’t believe [in a personal God], but I do know of a power of a very personal nature and an irresistible influence. I call it “God.” I use this term because it has been used for this kind of experience since time immemorial. From this point of view, any gods, Zeus, Wotan, Allah, Yahweh, the Summum Bonum [the Highest Good], etc., have their intrinsic truth. They are different and more or less differentiated expressions or aspects of one ineffable truth.
Letter to Palmer A. Hilty, 25 October 1955, Letters, Vol. II, pp. 274–75.
Happy am I who can recognize the multiplicity and diversity of the Gods. But woe unto you, who replace this incompatible multiplicity with a single God. In so doing you produce the torment of incomprehension, and mutilate the creation whose nature and aim is differentiation. How can you be true to your own nature when you try to turn the many into one? What you do unto the Gods is done likewise unto you. You all become equal and thus your nature is maimed.
The Red Book (1915/2009), p. 351.
The real purpose of the religious ceremonial is to revivify. It was created to lift man out of the ordinary, to disturb his habitual ways, that he may become aware of things outside.
Dream Analysis: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1928–1930 (20 November 1929), p. 399.
The majority of my patients consisted not of believers but of those who had lost their faith. The ones who came to me were the lost sheep. Even in this day and age the believer has the opportunity, in his church, to live the “symbolic life.” We need only think of the experience of the Mass, of baptism, of the imitatio Christi [the imitation of Christ], and many other aspects of religion. But to live and experience symbols presupposes a vital participation on the part of the believer, and only too often this is lacking in people today. In the neurotic it is practically always lacking. In such cases we have to observe whether the unconscious will not spontaneously bring up symbols to replace what is lacking. But then the question remains of whether a person who has symbolic dreams or visions will also be able to understand their meaning and take the consequences upon himself.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), p. 140.
[R]eligious statements without exception have to do with the reality of the psyche.
Answer to Job (1952), CW 11, § 752.
It is only through the psyche that we can establish that God acts upon us, but we are unable to distinguish whether these actions emanate from God or from the unconscious. We cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities. Both are border-line concepts for transcendental contents. But empirically it can be established, with a sufficient degree of probability, that there is in the unconscious an archetype of wholeness which manifests itself spontaneously in dreams, etc., and a tendency, independent of the conscious will, to relate other archetypes to this centre. Consequently, it does not seem improbable that the archetype of wholeness occupies as such a central position which approximates it to the God-image.
Answer to Job (1952), CW 11, § 757.
John Freeman: “Do you now believe in God?” Jung: “Now? [Pause] Difficult to answer. I know. I don’t need to believe. I know.”
“The ‘Face-to-Face’ Interview” (1959), C. G. Jung Speaking, p.383.
I did not say in the broadcast, “There is a God.” I said, “I do not need to believe in a God; I know.” Which does not mean: I do know a certain God (Zeus, Jahwe, Allah, the Trinitarian God, etc.) but rather I do know that I am obviously confronted with a factor unknown in itself, which I call “God” in consensium omnium [by common consensus] (“quod semper, quod ubique, quod omnibus creditor” [what is always believed everywhere and by everyone]). I remember Him, I evoke Him, whenever I use His name overcome by anger, or by fear, whenever I involuntarily say: “Oh God.” That happens when I meet somebody or something stronger than myself. It is an apt name given to all overpowering emotions in my own psychical system subduing my conscious will and usurping control over myself. This is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans, and intentions and change the course of my life for better or for worse. In accordance with tradition I call the power of fate in this a positive as well as negative aspect, and inasmuch as its origin is out of my control, “God,” a “personal god,” since my fate means very much myself, particularly when it approaches me in the form of conscience as vox dei [the voice of God], with which I can even converse and argue. (We do and, at the same time, we know that we do. One is subject as well as object.)
Jung’s response to many letters, The Listener (21 January 1960), in Bennet, What Jung Really Said, pp. 167–68.
[I] understood religion as something that God did to me; it was an act on His part, to which I must simply yield, for He was the stronger. My “religion” recognized no human relationship to God, for how could anyone relate to something so little known as God? I must know more about God in order to establish a relationship to him.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), p. 57.
[A] true religion is exceedingly simple. It is a revelation, a new light.
Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928–1930 (4 December 1929), p. 419.
From the psychological standpoint religion is a psychic phenomenon which irrationally exists, like the fact of our physiology or anatomy. If this function is lacking, man as an individual lacks balance, because religious experience is an expression of the existence and function of the unconscious. It is not true that we can manage with reason and will alone. We are on the contrary continually under the influence of disturbing forces that thwart our reason and our will because they are stronger. Hence it is that highly rational people suffer most of all from disturbances which they cannot get at either with their reason or their will. From time immemorial man has called anything he feels or experiences as stronger than he is “divine” or “daemonic.” God is the Stronger in him. This psychological definition of God has nothing to do with Christian dogma, but it does describe the experience of the Other, often a very uncanny opponent, which coincides in the most impressive way with the historical “experiences of God.”
Letter to Piero Cogo, 21 September 1955, Letters, Vol. II, pp. 271–72.
Religion gives us a rich application for our feelings. It gives meaning to life.
“The World on the Verge of Spiritual Rebirth” (1934), C. G. Jung Speaking, p. 69.
The great difficulty of course is the “Will of God.” Psychologically the “Will of God” appears in your inner experience in the form of a superior deciding power, to which you may give various names like instinct, fate, unconscious, faith, etc. The psychological criterion of the “Will of God” is forever the dynamic superiority. It is the factor that finally decides when all is said and done. It is essentially something you cannot know beforehand. You only know it after the fact. You only learn it slowly in the course of your life. You have to live thoroughly and very consciously for many years in order to understand what your will is and what Its will is. If you learn about yourself and if eventually you discover more or less who you are, you also learn about God, and who He is.
Letter to William Kinney, 26 May 1956, Letters, Vol. II, p. 301.
There is no escape. So it is that you come to know what a real God is. Now you’ll think up clever truisms, preventive measures, secret escape routes, excuses, potions capable of inducing forgetfulness, but it’s all useless. The fire burns right through you. That which guides forces you onto the way.
The Red Book (1915/2009), p. 291.
His craving for alcohol was the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God.
How could one formulate such an insight in a language that is not misunderstood in our days?
The only right and legitimate way to such an experience is that it happens to you in reality, and it can only happen to you when you walk on a path which leads you to higher understanding. You might be led to that goal by an act of grace or through a personal and honest contact with friends or through a high education of the mind beyond the confines of mere rationalism. I see from your letter that Roland H. has chosen the second way, which was, under the circumstances, obviously the best one.
I am strongly convinced that the evil principle prevailing in this world leads the unrecognized spiritual need into perdition, if it is not counteracted either by a real religious insight or by the protective wall of human community. An ordinary man, not protected by an action from above, and isolated in society, cannot resist the power of evil, which is called very aptly the Devil. But the use of such words arouses so many mistakes that one can only keep aloof from them as much as possible.
These are the reasons why I could not give a full and sufficient explanation to Roland H. But I am risking it with you because I conclude from your very decent and honest letter that you have acquired a point of view about the misleading platitudes one usually hears about alcoholism.
You see, alcohol in Latin is spiritus and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula therefore is: spiritus contra spiritum [spirit against spirit].
Letter to William G. Wilson, 30 January 1961, Letters, Vol. II, pp. 624–25.
The divine voice, as I said, is simply a mana value—a powerful voice, a sort of superior fact which takes possession of one. That is the way in which the gods or any superior spiritual facts have always worked; they took possession of man. And where there is a demonstration of divine power, it does not come under the category of natural phenomena but it is a psychological fact. When human life is inferior, when conscious intentions are disturbed, there one sees divine intercession, intercession through the unconscious, through powerful fact. Naturally one has to dismiss moral categories altogether. The idea that God is necessarily good and spiritual is simply a prejudice made by man. We wish it were so, we wish that the good and spiritual might be supreme, but it is not. To arrive again at a primordial religious phenomenon, man must return to a condition where that functioning is absolutely unprejudiced, where one cannot say that it is good or that it is evil, where one has to give up all bias as to the nature of religion; for as long as there is any kind of bias, there is no submission.
Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928–1930 (5 March 1930), pp. 512–13.
[B]elief or faith is your own activity, as what you touch and see, what you experience, is all your own making. You are entirely in the world of known things, even if you approach God, which is the strangest thing you can imagine. You discover that you believe in God and if you did not he would not be. God would be nowhere, he could do nothing. You must believe and then he begins to operate.
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939, Vol. I (5 December 1934), p. 294.
“Legitimate” faith must always rest on experience.
Symbols of Transformation (1912/1952), CW 5, § 345.
[T]he soul must contain in itself the faculty of relationship to God, i.e., a correspondence, otherwise a connection could never come about. This correspondence is, in psychological terms, the archetype of the God-image.
Psychology and Alchemy (1944), CW 12, § 11.
With our human knowledge we always move in the human sphere, but in the things of God we should keep quiet and not make any arrogant assertions about what is greater than ourselves. Belief as a religious phenomenon cannot be discussed. It seems to me, however, that when belief enters into practical life we are entitled to the opinion that it should be coupled with the Christian virtue of modesty, which does not brag about absoluteness but brings itself to admit the unfathomable ways of God which have nothing to do with the Christian revelation.
Letter to Paul Maag, 12 June 1933, Letters, Vol. I, p. 125.
The human psyche and the psychic background are boundlessly underestimated, as though God spoke to man exclusively through the radio, the newspapers, or through sermons. God has never spoken to man except in and through the psyche, and the psyche understands it and we experience it as something psychic.
Letter to Pastor Damour, 15 August 1932, Letters, Vol. I, p. 98.
I believe we have the choice: I preferred the living wonders of the God. I daily weigh up my whole life and I continue to regard the fiery brilliance of the God as a higher and fuller life than the ashes of rationality. The ashes are suicide to me. I could perhaps put out the fire but I cannot deny to myself the experience of the God. Nor can I cut myself off from this experience. I also do not want to, since I want to live. My life wants itself whole.
The Red Book (1915/2009), p. 339.
Without knowing it man is always concerned with God.
“Men, Women, and God,” (1955), C. G. Jung Speaking, p. 249.
This symbolic process within us, or that need to express unknown, unknowable, inexpressible facts, culminates in religion. Religion is a symbolic system by which we try to express our most important impressions of unknown things, say, the concept of God. Perhaps something overwhelming happens to us; we cannot say that an animal has jumped on us, or that a house has collapsed on us, but something has happened, we don’t know what, and we are overwhelmed and call it God. So when something overwhelming happens, we exclaim, “God!”
Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934, Vol. II (15 June 1932), pp. 742–43.
The primordial experience is not concerned with the historical bases of Christianity but consists in an immediate experience of God (as it was had by Moses, Job, Hosea, Ezekiel among others) which “convinces” because it is “over-powering.” But this is something you can’t easily talk about. One can only say that somehow one has to reach the rim of the world or get to the end of one’s tether in order to partake of the terror or grace of such an experience at all. Its nature is such that it is really understandable why the Church is actually a place of refuge or protection for those who cannot endure the fire of the divine presence.
Letter to Herr N., 13 March 1958, Letters, Vol. II, p. 424.
God is not human, I thought; that is His greatness, that nothing human impinges on Him. He is kind and terrible—both at once—and is therefore a great peril from which everyone naturally tries to save himself.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), pp. 55–56.
[T]he unconscious is the only available source of religious experience. This is certainly not to say that what we call the unconscious is identical with God or is set up in his place. It is simply the medium from which religious experience seems to flow. As to what the further cause of such experience might be, the answer to this lies beyond the range of human knowledge. Knowledge of God is a transcendental problem.
The Undiscovered Self (1957), CW 10, § 565.
Religion means dependence on and submission to the irrational facts of experience.
The Undiscovered Self (1957), CW 10, § 505.
You may have, say, a religious attitude, which means an attitude of great totality, so that you receive the next leaf that falls from the tree as a message from God, and it works.
Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934, Vol. II (22 February 1933), p. 919.
The unconscious is ambivalent; it can produce both good and evil effects. So the image of God also has two sides, like YHWH or the God of Clement of Rome with two hands; the right is Christ, the left Satan, and it is with these two hands that he rules the world.
“Letter to Père Lachat” (27 March 1954), CW 18, § 1537.
Like God, then, the unconscious has two aspects; one good, favourable, beneficient, the other evil, malevolent, disastrous. The unconscious is the immediate source of our religious experiences.
“Letter to Père Lachat” (27 March 1954), CW 18, § 1538.
[W]hen you are just one with a thing you are completely identical—you cannot compare it, you cannot discriminate, you cannot recognize it. You must always have a point outside if you want to understand. So people who have problematical natures with many conflicts are the people who can produce the greatest understanding, because from their own problematic natures they are enabled to see other sides and to judge by comparison. We could not possibly judge this world if we had not also a standpoint outside, and that is given by the symbolism of religious experiences.
The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1932 (19 October, 1932), p. 27.
[T]he spirit of the depths opened my vision and let me become aware of the birth of the new God.
The divine child approached me out of the terrible ambiguity, the hateful-beautiful, the evil-good, the laughable-serious, the sick-healthy, the inhuman-human and the ungodly-godly.
I understood that the God whom we seek in the absolute was not to be found in absolute beauty and goodness, how should he encompass the fullness of life, which is beautiful and hateful, good and evil, laughable and serious, human and inhuman? How can man live in the womb of the God if the Godhead himself attends only to one-half of him?
The Red Book (1915/2009), p. 243.
[O]ne can never know in what form a man will experience God.
“Brother Klaus” (1933), CW 11, § 482.
The idea of God originated with the experience of the numinosum. It was a psychical experience, with moments when man felt overcome. Rudolf Otto has designated this moment in his Psychology of Religion as the numinosum, which is derived from the Latin numen, meaning hint, or sign.
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939, Vol. II (5 May 1937), p. 1038.
Religions are not necessarily lovely or good. They are powerful manifestations of the spirit and we have no power to check the spirit. Surely great catastrophes such as earthquakes or fires are no longer convincing to the modern mind, but we don’t need them. There are things much more gruesome, namely man’s insanity, the great mental contagions from which we actually suffer most indubitably.
Letter to Leslie Hollingsworth, 21 April 1934, Letters, Vol. I, p. 159.
Religion appears to me to be a peculiar attitude of mind which could be formulated in accordance with the original use of the word religio, which means a careful consideration and observation of certain dynamic factors that are conceived as “powers”: spirits, daemons, gods, laws, ideas, ideals, or whatever name man has given to such factors in his world as he has found powerful, dangerous, or helpful enough to be taken into careful consideration, or grand, beautiful, and meaningful enough to be devoutly worshipped and loved.
Psychology and Religion (1938/1940), CW 11, § 8.
I profess no “belief.” I know that there are experiences one must pay “religious” attention to. There are many varieties of such experiences. At first glance the only thing they have in common is their numinosity, that is to say their gripping emotionality. But on closer inspection one also discovers a common meaning. The word religio comes from religere, according to the ancient view, and not from the patristic religare. The former means “to consider or observe carefully.” This derivation gives religio the right empirical basis, namely, the religious conduct of life, as distinct from mere credulity and imitation, which are either religion at second hand or substitutes for religion.
Letter to Günther Wittwer, 10 October 1959, Letters, Vol. II, p. 517.
Numinosity, however, is wholly outside conscious volition, for it transports the subject into the state of rapture, which is a state of will-less surrender.
“On the Nature of the Psyche” (1947/1954), CW 8, § 383.
[I]n the least the greatest will appear—such is your expectation. And that is the numen, the hint of the god.
Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1933–1934, Vol. II (22 February 1933), p. 919.
Religion, as the Latin word [religio] denotes, is a careful and scrupulous observation of what Rudolph Otto aptly termed the numinosum, that is, a dynamic agency or effect not caused by an arbitrary act of will. On the contrary, it seizes and controls the human subject, who is always rather its victim than its creator. The numinosum, whatever its cause may be, is an experience of the subject independent of his will. At all events, religious teaching as well as the consensus gentium [general consensus] always and everywhere explain this experience as being due to a cause external to the individual. The numinosum is either a quality belonging to a visible object or the influence of an invisible presence that causes a peculiar alteration of consciousness.
Psychology and Religion (1938/1940), CW 11, § 6.
“Holiness” means that an idea or thing possesses the highest value, and that in the presence of this value men are, so to speak, struck dumb. Holiness is also revelatory: it is the illuminative power emanating from an archetypal figure. Nobody ever feels himself as the subject of such a process, but always as its object. He does not perceive holiness, it takes him captive and overwhelms him; nor does he behold it in a revelation, it reveals itself to him, and he cannot even boast that he has understood it properly. Everything happens apparently outside the sphere of his will, and these happenings are contents of the unconscious. Science is unable to say anything more than this, for it cannot, by an act of faith, overstep the limits appropriate to its nature.
“A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity,” (1942/1948), CW 11, § 225.
But, fortunately, the man [Wolfgang Pauli] had religio, that is, he “carefully took account of” his experiences and he had enough pistis, or loyalty to his experience, to enable him to hang on to it and continue it. He had the great advantage of being neurotic and so, whenever he tried to be disloyal to his experience or to deny the voice, the neurotic condition instantly came back. He simply could not “quench the fire” and finally he had to admit the incomprehensibly numinous character of his experience. He had to confess that the unquenchable fire [in a dream] was holy. This was the sine qua non of his cure.
Psychology and Religion (1938/1940), CW 11, § 74.
Deviation from the numen seems to be universally understood as being the worst and the most original sin.
Letter to the Rev. H. L. Philp, 11 June 1957, Letters, Vol. II, p. 370.
There is religious sentimentality instead of the numinosum of divine experience. This is the well-known characteristic of a religion that has lost its living mystery. It is readily understandable that such a religion is incapable of giving help or of having any other moral effect.
Psychology and Religion (1938/1940), CW 11, § 52.
You are quite right, the main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy and in as much as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology. Even the very disease takes on a numinous character.
Letter to P. W. Martin, 20 August 1945, Letters, Vol. I, p. 377.
Healing may be called a religious problem.
“Psychotherapists or the Clergy” (1932), CW 11, § 523.
[R]eligion is the fruit and culmination of the completeness of life, that is, of a life which contains both sides.
Psychology and Religion (1938/1940), CW 11, § 71.
It seems to me to be the Holy Spirit’s task and charge to reconcile and unite the opposites in the human individual through a special development of the human soul. The soul is paradoxical like the Father; it is black and white, divine and demon-like, in its primitive and natural state. By the discriminative function of its conscious side it separates opposites of every kind, and especially those of the moral order personified in Christ and the Devil. Thereby the soul’s spiritual development creates an enormous tension, from which man can only suffer.
“Letter to Père Lachat” (27 March 1954), CW 18, § 1553.
A religious conversation is inevitable with the devil, since he demands it, if one does not want to surrender to him unconditionally. Because religion is precisely what the devil and I cannot agree about. I must have it out with him, as I cannot expect that he as an independent personality would accept my standpoint without further ado.
The Red Book (1915/2009), 261.
She [an assimilated young Jewish woman] had no mythological ideas, and therefore the most essential feature of her nature could find no way to express itself. All her conscious activity was directed toward flirtation, clothes, and sex, because she knew of nothing else. She knew only the intellect and lived a meaningless life. In reality she was a child of God whose destiny was to fulfill His secret will. I had to awaken mythological and religious ideas in her, for she belonged to that class of human beings of whom spiritual activity is demanded. Thus her life took on a meaning, and no trace of the neurosis was left.
In this case I had applied no “method,” but had sensed the presence of the numen. My explaining this to her had accomplished the cure. Method did not matter here; what mattered was the “fear of God.”
Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), pp. 139–40.
Since neurosis is an attitudinal problem, and the attitude depends on, or is grounded in, certain “dominants,” i.e., the ultimate and highest ideas and principles, the problem of attitude can fairly be characterized as a religious one. This is supported by the fact that religious motifs appear in dreams and fantasies for the obvious purpose of regulating the attitude and restoring the disturbed equilibrium. These experiences compelled me to come to grips with religious questions, or rather to examine the psychology of religious statements more closely. My aim is to unearth the psychic facts to which religious statements refer. I have found that, as a rule, when “archetypal” contents spontaneously appear in dreams, etc., numinous and healing effects emanate from them. They are primordial psychic experiences which very often give patients access again to blocked religious truths. I have also had this experience myself.
Letter to Vera von Lier-Schmidt Ernsthausen, 25 April 1952, Letters, Vol. II, pp. 56–57.
Among all my patients in the second half of life—that is to say, over 35—there has been not 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. This of course has nothing to with a particular creed or membership of a church.
“Psychotherapists or the Clergy” (1932), CW 11, § 509.
As a neurosis starts from a fragmentary state of human consciousness, it can only be cured by an approximate totality of the human being. Religious ideas and convictions from the beginning of history have the aspect of the mental pharmakon [pharmacy]. They represent the world of wholeness in which fragments can be gathered and put together again. Such a cure cannot be effected by pills and injections.
Letter to Father David, 11 February 1961, Letters, Vol. II, p. 625.
It is also a fact that under the influence of a so-called scientific enlightenment great masses of educated people have either left the Church or become profoundly indifferent to it. If they were all dull rationalists or neurotic intellectuals the loss would not be regrettable. But many of them are religious people, only incapable of agreeing with the existing forms of belief.
Psychology and Religion (1938/1940), CW 11, § 34.
I am not, however, 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. That is why I take these thought-forms that have become historically fixed, try to melt them down again, and pour them into moulds of immediate experience. It is certainly a difficult undertaking to discover connecting links between dogma and immediate experience of psychological archetypes, but a study of natural symbols of the unconscious gives us the necessary raw material.
Psychology and Religion (1938/1940), CW 11, § 148.
Religion is a very apt instrument to express the unconscious. The main significance of any religion is that its forms and rites express the peculiar life of the unconscious. The relationship between religion and the unconscious is everywhere obvious: all religions are full of figures from the unconscious.
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939, Vol. II (19 October 1938), p. 1351.
Religions are psychotherapeutic systems in the truest sense of the word, and on the grandest scale. They express the whole range of the psychic problem in mighty images; they are the avowal and recognition of the soul, and at the same time the revelation of the soul’s nature.
“The State of Psychotherapy Today” (1934), CW 10, § 367.
I find I am incapable of knowing the infinite and eternal or paradoxical; it is beyond my powers. I may say that I know what is infinite and eternal; I may even assert that I have experienced it; but that one could actually know it is impossible because man is neither an infinite nor an eternal being. He can know only the part but not the whole, not the infinite and eternal. So when the believer assures me that I do not possess the organ he possesses, he makes me aware of my humanity, of my limitation which he allegedly does not have. He is the superior one, who regretfully points out my deformity or mutilation. Therefore I speak of the beati possidentes [those blessed with being able to believe] of belief, and this is what I reproach them with: that they exalt themselves above our human stature and our human limitation and won’t admit to pluming themselves on a possession which distinguishes them from the ordinary mortal. I confess with the confession of not knowing and not being able to know; believers start with the assertion of knowing and being able to know. There is now only one truth, and when we ask the believers what this truth is they give us a number of very different answers with regard to which the one sure thing is that each believer announces his own particular truth. Instead of saying: To me personally it seems so, he says: It is so, thus putting everybody else automatically in the wrong.
Letter to Bernhard Lang, June 1957, Letters, Vol. II, pp. 375–76.
Only the mystics bring creativity into religion. That is probably why they can feel the presence and the workings of the Holy Ghost, and why they are nearer to the experience of the brotherhood in Christ.
Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955–56), CW 14, § 530.
The teaching of the past, for example, of St. Paul or Jesus, can be edifying, but in itself does nothing, Paul himself had a sudden revelation. Unless there is a personal religious experience—realizing from the inside what it means—nothing happens. Such an experience can take many forms, for instance falling in love; anything which is really lived.
Conversation with E. A. Bennet, 7 July 1959, Meetings with Jung, pp. 92–93.
Only those people who can really touch bottom can be human. Therefore Meister Eckhart says that one should not repent too much of one’s sins because it might keep one away from grace. One is only confronted with the spiritual experience when one is absolutely human.
Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934, Vol. I (3 June 1931), p. 394.
Christians often ask why God does not speak to them, as he is believed to have done in former days. When I hear such questions, it always makes me think of the rabbi who was asked how it could be that God often showed himself to people in the olden days while nowadays nobody ever sees him. The rabbi replied: “Nowadays there is no longer anybody who can bow low enough.”
“Approaching the Unconscious” (1964), Man and His Symbols, p. 102.
GEORGES DUPLAIN: How can you speak of the grace of God?
JUNG: And why not? A good dream, for example, that’s grace. The dream is in essence a gift. The collective unconscious, it’s not for you, or me, it’s the invisible world, it’s the great spirit. It makes little difference what I call it: God, Tao, the Great Voice, the Great Spirit. But for people of our time God is the most comprehensible name with which to designate the Power beyond us.
“On the Frontiers of Knowledge” (1959), C. G. Jung Speaking, p. 419.
The “relativity of God,” as I understand it, denotes a point of view that does not conceive of God as “absolute,” i.e., wholly “cut off” from man and existing outside and beyond all human conditions, but as in a certain sense dependent on him; it also implies a reciprocal and essential relation between man and God, whereby man can be understood as a function of God, and God as a psychological function of man. From the empirical standpoint of analytical psychology, the God-image is the symbolic expression of a particular psychic state, or function, which is characterized by its absolute ascendancy over the will of the subject, and can therefore bring about or enforce actions and achievements that could never be done by conscious effort. This overpowering impetus to action (so far as the God-function manifests itself in acts), or this inspiration that transcends conscious understanding, has its source in an accumulation of energy in the unconscious. The accumulated libido activates images lying dormant in the collective unconscious, among them the God-image, that engram or imprint which from the beginning of time has been the collective expression of the most overwhelmingly powerful influences exerted on the conscious mind by unconscious concentrations of libido.
Psychological Types (1921), CW 6, § 412.
I know people who feel that the strange power in their own psyche is something divine, for the very simple reason that it has given them an understanding of what is meant by religious experience.
“The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man” (1933/1934), CW 10, § 312.
The religious myth is one of man’s greatest and most significant achievements, giving him the security and inner strength not to be crushed by the monstrousness of the universe.
Symbols of Transformation (1912/1952), CW 5, § 343.
[M]yth is not fiction: it consists of facts that are continually repeated and can be observed over and over again. It is something that happens to man, and men have mythical fates just as much as the Greek heroes do.
Answer to Job (1952), CW 11, § 648.
Religious observances, i.e., the retelling and ritual repetition of the mythical event, consequently serve the purpose of bringing the image of childhood, and everything connected with it, again and again before the eyes of the conscious mind so that the link with the original condition may not be broken.
“The Psychology of the Child Archetype” (1940), CW 9i, § 275.
A revelation always means a revealing will, a will to manifest which is not identical with your own will and which is not your activity. You may be overcome by it; it falls upon you.
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939, Vol. II (4 March 1936), p. 876.
All these yoga methods, and practices similar to them, will bring about the desired condition, but only if God be willing, so to speak; that is to say, there is another factor involved which is necessary, but the nature of which we do not know. All kinds of primitive practices are to be understood as an effort on the part of man to make himself receptive to a revelation from nature.
Introduction to Jungian Psychology: Notes from the Seminar on Analytical Psychology Given in 1925, p. 88.
Whereas a true religion is exceedingly simple. It is a revelation, a new light.
Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928–1930 (4 December 1929), p. 419.
That is what comes to the man who is outside the church: he has to learn to feed himself, with no longer a mother to push the spoon into his mouth. There is no human being who can provide what is provided by the church. The church provides for all that naturally; inasmuch as you are a member of the church you get the panis super substantialis [the most substantial bread]; in partaking of the communion, you receive the spiritual food and are spiritually transformed. Do you think that any father or mother or godmother or aunt or any book can produce the miracle of transubstantiation? If you yourself can provide for it, then you are the whole mystery of the church: you are the transubstantiation. If you understand that, you can have the spiritual food every day; then you know what it costs and you understand what the church costs and what the church means.
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939, Vol. II (17 June 1936), pp. 1012–13.
Christianity, like every closed system of religion, has an undoubted tendency to suppress the unconscious in the individual as much as possible, thus paralyzing his fantasy activity. Instead, religion offers stereotyped symbolic concepts that are meant to take the place of his unconscious once and for all. The symbolic concepts of all religions are recreations of unconscious processes in a typical, universally binding form. Religious teaching supplies, as it were, the final information about the “last things” and the world beyond human consciousness. Wherever we can observe a religion being born, we see how the doctrinal figures flow into the founder himself as revelations, in other words, as concretizations of his unconscious fantasy. The forms welling up from his unconscious are declared to be universally valid and thus replace the individual fantasies of others.
Psychological Types (1921), CW 6, § 80.
Religion is a “revealed” way of salvation. Its ideas are products of a pre-conscious knowledge which, always and everywhere, expresses itself in symbols. Even if our intellect does not grasp them, they still work, because our unconscious acknowledges them as exponents of universal psychic facts. For this reason faith is enough—if it is there. Every extension and intensification of rational consciousness, however, leads us further away from the sources of the symbols and, by its ascendancy, prevents us from understanding them. That is the situation today.
“A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity” (1942/1948), CW 11, § 293.
The fact of God’s “unconsciousness” throws a peculiar light on the doctrine of salvation. Man is not so much delivered from his sins, even if he is baptized in the prescribed manner and thus washed clean, as delivered from fear of the consequences of sin, that is, from the wrath of God. Consequently, the work of salvation is intended to save man from the fear of God.
Answer to Job (1952), CW 11, § 659.
Religious rites and their stock of symbols must have developed in much the same way from beginnings now lost to us, and not just in one place only, but in many places at once, and also at different periods. They have grown spontaneously out of the basic conditions of human nature, which are never invented but are everywhere the same.
“Transformation Symbolism in the Mass” (1942/1954), CW 11, § 339.
To the degree that the modern mind is passionately concerned with anything and everything rather than religion, religion and its prime object—original sin—have mostly vanished into the unconscious. That is why, today, nobody believes in either. People accuse psychology of dealing in squalid fantasies, and yet even a cursory glance at ancient religions and the history of morals should be sufficient to convince them of the demons hidden in the human soul. This disbelief in the devilishness of human nature goes hand in hand with the blank incomprehension of religion and its meaning. The unconscious conversion of instinctual impulses into religious activity is ethically worthless, and often no more than an hysterical outburst, even though its products may be aesthetically valuable. Ethical decision is possible only when one is conscious of the conflict in all its aspects. The same is true of the religious attitude: it must be fully conscious of itself and of its foundations if it is to signify anything more than unconscious imitation.
Symbols of Transformation (1912/1952), CW 5, § 106.
It is my practical experience that psychological understanding immediately revivifies the essential Christian ideas and fills them with the breath of life. This is because our worldly light, i.e., scientific knowledge and understanding, coincides with the symbolic statement of the myth, whereas previously we were unable to bridge the gulf between knowing and believing.
“Jung and Religious Belief” (1958), CW 18, § 1666.
I want to make clear that by the term “religion” I do not mean a creed. It is, however, true that every creed is originally based, on the one hand, upon the experience of the numinosum and, on the other hand, upon pistis, that is to say, trust or loyalty, faith and confidence in a certain experience of a numinous nature and in the change of consciousness that ensues. The conversion of Paul is a striking example of this. We might say, then, that the term religion designates the attitude peculiar to a consciousness which has been changed by experience of the numinosum.
Psychology and Religion (1938/1940), CW 11, § 9.
What is ordinarily called “religion” is a substitute to such an amazing degree that I ask myself seriously whether this kind of “religion,” which I prefer to call a creed, may not after all have an important function in human society. The substitute has the obvious purpose of replacing immediate experience by a choice of suitable symbols tricked out with an organized dogma and ritual.
Psychology and Religion (1938/1940), CW 11, § 75.
In my profession I have encountered many people who have had immediate experience and who would not and could not submit to the authority of ecclesiastical decision. I had to go with them through the crises of passionate conflicts, through the panics of madness, through desperate confusions and depressions which were grotesque and terrible at the same time, so that I am fully aware of the extraordinary importance of dogma and ritual, at least as methods of mental hygiene.
Psychology and Religion (1938/1940), CW 11, § 76.
A creed gives expression to a definite collective belief, whereas the word religion expresses a subjective relationship to certain metaphysical, extra-mundane factors. A creed is a confession of faith intended chiefly for the world at large and is thus an intramundane affair, while the meaning and purpose of religion lie in the relationship of the individual to God (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) or to the path of salvation and liberation (Buddhism). From this basic fact all ethics are derived, which without the individual’s responsibility before God can be nothing more than conventional morality.
The Undiscovered Self (1957), CW 10, § 507.
A creed coincides with the established Church or, at any rate, forms a public institution whose members include not only true believers but vast numbers of people who can only be described as “indifferent” in matters of religion and who belong to it simply by force of habit. Here the difference between a creed and a religion becomes palpable.
The Undiscovered Self (1957), CW 10, § 508.
Creeds are codified and dogmatized forms of religious experience. The contents of the experience have become sanctified and are usually congealed in a rigid, often elaborate structure of ideas. The practice and repetition of the original experience have become a ritual and an unchangeable institution. This does not necessarily mean lifeless petrification. On the contrary, it may prove to be a valid form of religious experience for millions of people for thousands of years, without there arising any vital necessity to alter it. Although the Catholic Church has often been accused of particular rigidity, she nevertheless admits that dogma is a living thing and that its formulation is therefore capable of change and development. Even the number of dogmas is not limited and can be multiplied in the course of time. The same holds true of the ritual.
Psychology and Religion (1938/1940), CW 11, § 10.
If I find myself in a critical or doubtful situation, I always ask myself, whether there is not something in it, explaining the need of my presence, before I make a plan of how to escape. If I should find nothing hopeful or meaningful in it, I think I would not hesitate to jump out of it as quick as possible. Well, I may be all wrong, but the fact that you find yourself in the Church does not impress me as being wholly nonsensical. Of course huge sacrifices are expected of you, but I wonder whether there is any vocation or any kind of meaningful life that does not demand sacrifices of a sort. There is no place where those striving after consciousness could find absolute safety. Doubt and insecurity are indispensable components of a complete life. Only those who can lose this life really, can gain it really. A “complete” life does not consist in a theoretical completeness, but in the fact, that one accepts the particular fatal tissue in which one finds oneself embedded without reservation, and that one tries to make sense of it or to create a Kosmos from the chaotic mess into which one is born. If one lives properly and completely, time and again one will be confronted with a situation, of which one will say: “This is too much. I cannot bear it any more.” Then the question must be answered: “Can one really not bear it?”
Letter to Father Victor White, 10 April 1954, The Jung-White Letters, p. 240.
This woman is seeking an attitude which will help her to meet the problems of her life. She has not found the conviction or the attitude which would help her to accept life as it is—one cannot say life in general, but her own individual fate; for that she needs a sort of religious attitude which she can find nowhere else.
Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934, Vol. I (27 May 1931), p. 372.
The renewed God signifies a regenerated attitude, a renewed possibility of life, a recovery of vitality, because, psychologically speaking, God always denotes the highest value, the maximum sum of libido, the fullest intensity of life, the optimum of psychological vitality.
Psychological Types (1921), CW 6, § 301.
I want to love my God, the defenseless and hopeless one. I want to care for him, like a child.
The Red Book (1915/2009), p. 286.
“What does God want? To act or not to act? I must find out what God wants with Me, and I must find out right away.”
Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), p. 38.
From the beginning I had a sense of destiny, as though my life was assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled. This gave me an inner security, and although I could never prove it to myself, it proved itself to me. I did not have the certainty, it had me. Nobody could rob me of the 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; I belonged to the centuries; and He who then gave answer was He who had always been, who had been before my birth. He who always is was there.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), p. 48.
It is of the highest importance that the educated and “enlightened” public should know religious truth as a thing living in the human soul and not as an abstruse and unreasonable relic of the past.
Letter to Father Victor White, 5 October, 1945, The Jung-White Letters, p. 10.
[T]he soul possesses by nature a religious function.
Psychology and Alchemy (1944), CW 12, § 14.
So long as religion is only faith and outward form, and the religious function is not experienced in our own souls, nothing of any importance has happened. It has yet to be understood that the mysterium magnum [the great mystery] is not only an actuality but is first and foremost rooted in the human psyche. The man who does not know this from his own experience may be a most learned theologian, but he has no idea of religion and still less of education.
Psychology and Alchemy, (1944), CW 12, § 13.
If you try to be literal about the doctrine, you are putting yourself aside until there is nobody left that would represent it, but corpses. If, on the other hand, you truly assimilate the doctrine, you will alter it creatively, by your individual understanding and thus give life to it. The life of most ideas consists in their controversial nature, i.e., that you can disagree with them, even if you recognize their importance for a majority. If you fully agree with them, you could replace yourself just as well by a gramophone record.
Letter to Father Victor White, 10 April 1954, The Jung-White Letters, p. 238.
By removing yourself from the dogma you get into the world which is increasingly chaotic and primitive, in which you must find or create a new orientation. You must create a new cosmos out of the chaos into which you fall when you leave the Christian church. The church has been a cosmos, but it is no longer, we are living in chaos; therefore the general confusion and disorientation. We are profoundly bewildered through this experience which we cannot put into the frame of things that we have hitherto known.
Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934, Vol. II (1 February 1933), p. 905
Nietzsche’s idea is that out of that lack of order, a dancing star should be born.
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939, Vol. I (13 June 1934), p. 106.
If one fulfills the will of God one can be sure of going the right way.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), p. 40.
[I]t is tremendously important that people should be able to accept themselves; otherwise the will of God cannot be lived. They are sort of cramped or blighted, they don’t really produce themselves as the whole of the creative will which is in them, they assume a better judgment than God himself, assuming that man ought to be so-and-so. In that way they exclude many of their real qualities, with the result that they are like the apple tree that produces carrots, or the famous good tiger that eats apples, which surely is not the original meaning of God. Now to bring forth what the original will intended is really the task of a whole lifetime, a very serious undertaking.
Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934, Vol. I (3 June 1931), p. 391.
[T]he paradox is one of our most valuable spiritual possessions, while uniformity of meaning is a sign of weakness. Hence a religion becomes inwardly impoverished when it loses or waters down its paradoxes; but their multiplication enriches because only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life. Non-ambiguity and non-contradiction are one-sided and thus unsuited to express the incomprehensible.
Psychology and Alchemy (1944), CW 12, § 18.
A dogma is always the result and fruit of many minds and many centuries, purified of all the oddities, shortcomings, and flaws of individual experience. But for all that, the individual experience, by its very poverty, is immediate life, the warm red blood pulsating today. It is more convincing to a seeker after truth than the best tradition.
Psychology and Religion (1938/1940), CW 11, § 88.
When, through mass rule, the individual becomes social unit No. so-and-so and the State is elevated to the supreme principle, it is only to be expected that the religious function too will be sucked into the maelstrom. Religion, as the careful observation and taking account of certain invisible and uncontrollable factors, is an instinctive attitude peculiar to man, and its manifestations can be followed all through human history. Its evident purpose is to maintain the psychic balance, for the natural man has an equally natural “knowledge” of the fact that his conscious functions may at any time be thwarted by uncontrollable happenings coming from inside as well as outside. For this reason he has always taken care that any difficult decisions likely to have consequences for himself and others shall be rendered safe by suitable measures of a religious nature. Offerings are made to the invisible powers, formidable blessings are pronounced, and all kinds of solemn rites are performed.
The Undiscovered Self (1957), CW 10, § 512.
Here each of us must ask: Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving in the crowd?
The Undiscovered Self (1957), CW 10, § 564.
It was obedience which brought me grace, and after that experience I knew what God’s grace was. One must be utterly abandoned to God; nothing matters but fulfilling His will. Otherwise all is folly and meaninglessness.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), p. 40.
[T]he creation of a God is a creative act of highest love.
The Red Book (1915/2009), p. 291.
Surrender to God is a formidable adventure, and as “simple” as any situation over which man has no control. He who can risk himself wholly to it finds himself directly in the hands of God, and is there confronted with a situation which makes “simple faith” a vital necessity; in other words, the situation becomes so full of risk or overtly dangerous that the deepest instincts are aroused. An experience of this kind is always numinous, for it unites all aspects of totality.
“Letter to Père Lachat” (27 March 1954), CW 18, § 1539.
When, therefore, we make use of a concept of a God we are simply formulating a definite psychological fact, namely the independence and sovereignty of certain psychic contents which express themselves by their power to thwart our will, to obsess our consciousness and to influence our moods and actions. We may be outraged at the idea of an inexplicable mood, a nervous disorder, or an uncontrollable vice being, so to speak, a manifestation of God. But it would be an irreparable loss for religious experience if such things, perhaps even evil things, were artificially segregated from the sum of autonomous psychic contents.
The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious (1916/1928), CW 7, § 400.
God has a terrible double aspect: a sea of grace is met by a seething lake of fire, and the light of love glows with a fierce dark heat which it is said, ‘ardet non lucet’—it burns but gives no light. That is the eternal, as distinct from the temporal, gospel: one can love God but must fear him.
Answer to Job (1952), CW 11, § 733.
The paradoxical nature of God has a like effect on man: it tears him asunder into opposites and delivers him over to a seemingly insoluble conflict. What happens in such a condition? Here we must let psychology speak, for psychology represents the sum of all the observations and insights it has gained from the empirical study of severe states of conflict. There are, for example, conflicts of duty no one knows how to solve.
Answer to Job (1952), CW 11, § 738.
Suffering that is not understood is hard to bear, while on the other hand it is often astounding to see how much a person can endure when he understands the why and the wherefore. A philosophical or religious view of the world enables him to do this, and such views prove to be, at the very least, psychic methods of healing if not of salvation.
“On the Discourses of the Buddha” (1956), CW 18, § 1578.
What does man possess that God does not have? Because of his littleness, puniness, and defenselessness against the Almighty, he possesses, as we have already suggested, a somewhat keener consciousness based on self-reflection; he must, in order to survive, always be mindful of his impotence. God has no need of this circumspection, for nowhere does he come up against an insuperable obstacle that would force him to hesitate and hence make him reflect on himself.
Answer to Job (1952), CW 11, § 579.
Job realizes God’s inner antinomy, and in the light of this realization his knowledge attains a divine numinosity.
Answer to Job (1952), CW 11, § 584.
Although the divine incarnation is a cosmic and absolute event, it only manifests empirically in those relatively few individuals capable of enough consciousness to make ethical decisions, that is, to decide for the Good. Therefore God can be called good only inasmuch as He is able to manifest His goodness in individuals. His moral quality depends upon individuals. That is why He incarnates. Individuation and individual existence are indispensable for the transformation of God the Creator.
Letter to Elined Kotschnig, 30 June 1956, Letters, Vol. II, p. 314.
Yahweh’s decision to become man is a symbol of the development that had to supervene when man becomes conscious of the sort of God-image he is confronted with. God acts out of the unconscious of man and forces him to harmonize and unite the opposing influences to which his mind is exposed from the unconscious. The unconscious wants both: to divide and to unite. In his striving for unity, therefore, man may always count on the help of a metaphysical advocate, as Job clearly recognized. The unconscious wants to flow into consciousness in order to reach the light, but at the same time it continually thwarts itself, because it would rather remain unconscious. That is to say, God wants to become man, but not quite. The conflict in his nature is so great that the incarnation can only be bought by an expiatory self-sacrifice offered up to the wrath of God’s dark side.
Answer to Job (1952), CW 11, § 740.
We can, of course, hope for the undeserved grace of God, who hears our prayers. But God, who also does not hear our prayers, wants to become man, and for that purpose he has chosen, through the Holy Ghost, the creaturely man filled with darkness—the natural man who is tainted with original sin and who learnt the divine arts and sciences from the fallen angels.
Answer to Job (1952), CW 11, § 746.
I don’t know what Job is supposed to have seen. But it seems possible that he unconsciously anticipated the historical future, namely, the evolution of the God-image. God had to become man. Man’s suffering does not derive from his sins but from the maker of his imperfections, the paradoxical God. The righteous man is the instrument into which God enters in order to attain self-reflection and thus consciousness and rebirth as a divine child trusted to the care of adult man.
“Jung and Religious Belief” (1958), CW 18, § 1681.
In the experience of the self it is no longer the opposites “God” and “man” that are reconciled, as it was before, but rather the opposites within the God-image itself. That is the meaning of divine service, of the service which man can render to God, that light may emerge from the darkness, that the Creator may become conscious of His creation, and man conscious of himself.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), p. 338.
Since the Apocalypse we now know again that God is not only to be loved, but also to be feared. He fills us with evil as well as with good, otherwise he would not need to be feared; and because he wants to become man, the uniting of his antinomy must take place in man. This involves man in a new responsibility. He can no longer wriggle out of it on the plea of his littleness and nothingness, for the dark God has slipped the atom bomb and chemical weapons into his hands and given him the power to empty out the apocalyptic vials of wrath on his fellow creatures. Since he has been granted an almost godlike power, he can no longer remain blind and unconscious. He must know something of God’s nature and of metaphysical processes if he is to understand himself and thereby achieve gnosis of the Divine.
Answer to Job (1952), CW 11, § 747.
God wants to be born in the flame of man’s consciousness, leaping ever higher. And what if this has no roots in the earth? If it is not a house of stone where the fire of God can dwell, but a wretched straw hut that flares up and vanishes? Could God then be born? One must be able to suffer God. That is the supreme task for the carrier of ideas. He must be the advocate of the earth. God will take care of himself. My inner principle is: Deus et homo. God and man. God needs man in order to become conscious, just as he needs limitation in time and space. Let us therefore be for him limitation in time and space, an earthly tabernacle.
Letter to Walter Robert Corti, 30 April 1929, Letters, Vol. I, pp. 65–66.
One should make clear to oneself what it means when God becomes man. It means more or less what Creation meant in the beginning, namely an objectivation of God. At the time of the Creation he revealed himself in Nature; now he wants to be more specific and become man. It must be admitted, however, that there was a tendency in this direction right from the start. For, when those other human beings, who had evidently been created before Adam, appeared on the scene along with the higher mammals, Yahweh created on the following day, by a special act of creation, a man who was the image of God. This was the first prefiguration of his becoming man. He took Adam’s descendants, especially the people of Israel, into his personal possession, and from time to time he filled this people’s prophets with his spirit. All these things were preparatory events and symptoms of a tendency within God to become man. But in omniscience there had existed from all eternity a knowledge of the human nature of God or of the divine nature of man. That is why, long before Genesis was written, we find corresponding testimonies in the ancient Egyptian records. These intimations and prefigurations of the Incarnation must strike one as either completely incomprehensible or superfluous, since all creation ex nihilo [from nothing] is God’s and consists of nothing but God, with the result that man, like the rest of creation, is simply God become concrete. Prefigurations, however, are not in themselves creative events, but are only stages in the process of becoming conscious. It was only quite late that we realized (or rather, that we are beginning to realize) that God is Reality itself and therefore—last but not least—man. This realization is a millennial process.
Answer to Job (1952), CW 11, § 631.
Man’s relation to God probably has to undergo a certain important change. Instead of the propitiating praise to an unpredictable king or the child’s prayer to a loving father, the responsible living and fulfilling of the divine will in us will be our form of worship and commerce with God. His goodness means grace and light and His dark side the terrible temptation of power. Man has already received so much knowledge that he can destroy his own planet. Let us hope that God’s good spirit will guide him in his decisions, because it will depend upon man’s decision whether God’s creation will continue. Nothing shows more drastically than this possibility how much of divine power has come within the reach of man.
Letter to Elined Kotschnig, 30 June 1956, Letters, Vol. II, p. 316.
[E]ven the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky.
Answer to Job (1952), CW 11, § 758.