All Outside

I pulled out C.G. Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy (volume 12 of the collected works) last week for the first time in several years. It’s a large book, and a lot of it is aimed strictly at the practicing Jungian psychologist and is fairly unintelligible. However, the opening essay, “Introduction to the Religious and Psychological Problems of Alchemy,” is a lot more interesting than it sounds. Anyone who’s read Jung’s “Modern Man in Search of a Soul” or “The Undiscovered Self” will recognize some of the same themes. Here are some points I consider exceptionally well-put:

“Western man is held in thrall by the ‘ten thousand things;’ he sees only particulars, he is ego-bound and thing-bound, and unaware of the deep root of all being. ... The Western attitude, with its emphasis on the object, tends to fix the ideal – Christ – in its outward aspect and thus to rob it of its mysterious relation to the inner man.”

“Christ the ideal took upon himself the sins of the world. But if the ideal is wholly outside, then the sins of the individual are also outside, and consequently he is more of a fragment than ever, since superficial misunderstanding conveniently enables him, quite literally, to ‘cast his sins upon Christ’ and thus evade his deepest responsibilities – which is contrary to the spirit of Christianity. ... If the supreme value (Christ) and the supreme negation (sin) are outside, then the soul is void: its highest and lowest are missing.”

“It may easily happen ... that a Christian who believes in all the sacred figures is still undeveloped and unchanged in his inmost soul because he has ‘all God outside’ and does not experience him in the soul. His deciding motives, his ruling interests and impulses, do not spring from the sphere of Christianity but from the unconscious and undeveloped psyche, which is as pagan and archaic as ever. The great events of our world as planned and executed by man do not breathe the spirit of Christianity but rather of unadorned paganism. ... Christian civilization has proved hollow to a terrifying degree: it is all veneer, but the inner man has remained untouched and therefore unchanged. His soul is out of key with his external beliefs; in his soul the Christian has not kept pace with external developments. Yes, everything is to be found outside – in image and in word, in Church and Bible – but never inside. Inside reign the archaic gods, supreme as of old. ...”

“The Christian missionary may preach the gospel to the poor naked heathen, but the spiritual heathen who populate Europe have as yet heard nothing of Christianity. Christianity must indeed begin again from the very beginning if it is to meet its high educative task. 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 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 ....”