To Dorothee Hoch
Dear Dr. Hoch,
3 July 1952
I am very grateful that this time you
have met my endeavour with more friendliness and understanding. I
certainly admit that personal motives creep in everywhere in an
exasperating way, but I still think it is a bit too glib to suspect an
objective argument of personal resentment without closer and surer
knowledge of the circumstances. Only at the end of a discussion, when
all objective elements have run out, may one hazard the question whether
personal motives have also had a hand in it. But I won’t make any
annotations to Knigge’s Umgang mit Menschen.1
You are surprised at my reaction to your
avowed faith is a personal meeting with Christ. I thought I ought not to
conceal from you that such an avowal has a thoroughly intimidating
effect on many people, because they feel (with good reason, I think)
that this only happens to one of the elect, who has been singled out
from the human community of the unblest, the wayward, the unbelievers,
the doubters and the God-forsaken, and, especially if they are religious
people, it makes them feel inferior. Many theologians make themselves
unpopular on that account and so make the doctor, who is expected to
have a better understanding of the ordinary, uninitiated person, appear
as a more desirable proposition.
I do, to be sure, maintain that the
Bible was written by man and is therefore “mythological,” i.e.,
anthropomorphic. God is certainly made vivid enough in it, but not
visible. That would be a bit too much for our human inadequacy, even
if we could see him in his incarnate form. This is the
morfh
donlon
after the kenosis had taken
place, the well-attested pagan figure of the
katacoV
and the Old Testament “servant of God,”
or the unsuccessful, suffering hero like Oedipus or Prometheus.
The insistence on the uniqueness of
Christianity, which removes it from the human sphere and doesn’t even
allow it a mythological status conditioned by history, has just as
disastrous an effect on the layman as the aforementioned “avowal.” The
gospel becomes unreal; all possible points of contact with human
understanding are abolished, and it is made thoroughly implausible and
unworthy of belief. It is really and truly sterilized, for all the
psychic propensities in us which would willingly accept it are brusquely
thrust aside or suppressed and devalued. This short-sightedness is
neither rational nor Christian and empties the Protestant churches in
the most effective way; but it is very convenient because then
the clergyman doesn’t have to bother about whether the congregation
understand the gospel or not but can comfortably go on preaching at them
as before. Educated people, for instance, would be much more readily
convinced of the meaning of the gospel if it were shown them that the
myth was always there to a greater or lesser degree, and moreover is
actually present in archetypal form in every individual. Then people
would understand where, in spite of its having been artificially
screened off by the theologians, the gospel really touches them and what
it is talking about. Without this link the Jesus legend remains a mere
wonder story, and is understood as little as a fairytale that merely
serves to entertain. Uniqueness is synonymous with unintelligibility.
How do you make head or tail of a
apax
legomenon?
If you are not
fascinated at the first go, it tells you absolutely nothing. How can you
“meet people in their lives” if you talk of things, and especially of
unique events, that have nothing to do with the human psyche?
You refer me to your sermon. You talk
there of rebirth, for instance, something the man of antiquity was
thoroughly familiar with, but modern man? He has no inkling of the
mysteries, which anyway are discredited by Protestant theology, because
for it there is only one truth, and whatever else God may have
done for man is mere bungling. Does modern man know what “water” and
“spirit” signify? Water is below, heavy and material; wind above
and the “spiritual” breath body. The man of antiquity understood this as
a clash of opposites, a complexio oppositorum, and felt this
conflict to be so impossible that he equated matter with evil outright.
Christ forces man into the impossible conflict. He took himself with
exemplary seriousness and lived his life to the bitter end, regardless
of human convention and in opposition to his own lawful tradition, as
the worst heretic in the eyes of the Jews and a madman in the eyes of
his family. But we? We imitate Christ and hope he will deliver us from
our own fate. Like little lambs we follow the shepherd, naturally to
good pastures. No talk at all of uniting our Above and Below! On the
contrary, Christ and his cross deliver us from our conflict,
which we simply leave alone. We are Pharisees, faithful to law and
tradition, we flee heresy and are mindful only of the imitatio
Christi but not of our own reality which is laid upon us, the union
of opposites in ourselves, preferring to believe that Christ has
already achieved this for us. Instead of bearing ourselves, i.e., our
own cross, ourselves, we load Christ with our Unresolved conflicts. We
“place ourselves under his cross,”
but by golly riot under our own. Anyone who does this is a heretic,
self-redeemer, “psychoanalyst” and God knows what. The cross of Christ
was borne by himself and was his. To put oneself under
somebody else’s cross, which has already been carried by him, is
certainly easier than to carry your own cross amid the mockery and
contempt of the world. That sway you remain nicely ensconced in
tradition and are praised as devout. This is well-organized Pharisaism
and highly un-Christian. Whoever imitates Christ and has the cheek to
want to take Christ’s cross on himself when he can’t even carry his own
has in my view not yet learnt the ABC of the Christian message.
Have your congregation understood that
they must close their ears to the traditional teachings and go through
the darknesses of their own souls and set aside everything in order to
become that which every individual bears in himself as his individual
task, and that no one can take this burden from him? We continually pray
that “this cup may pass from us” and not harm us. Even Christ did so,
but without success. Yet we use Christ to secure this success for
ourselves. For all these reasons theology wants know nothing psychology
because through discover our own cross But we only want to talk of
Christ’s cross, and how splendidly his crucifixion has smoothed the way
for us and solved our conflicts. We might also discover, among other
things, that in every feature Christ’s life is a prototype of
individuation and hence cannot be imitated: one can only live one’s
own life totally in the same way with all the consequences this
entails. This is hard and must therefore be prevented. How this is
done is shown among other things by the following example. A devout
professor of theology (i.e., a lamb of Christ) once publicly rebuked me
for having said “in flagrant contradiction to the word of the Lord” that
it is unethical to “remain” a child. The “Christian” ought to
remain sitting on his father’s knee and leave the odious task of
individuation to dear little Jesus. Thus naively, but with unconscious
design, the meaning of the gospel is subverted, and instead of
catechizing ourselves on the meaning of Christ’s life we prefer, in
ostensible agreement with the word of the Lord, to remain infantile
and not responsible for ourselves. Thus an exemplary
didauukaloV
tou
Israhl7
who can’t even read the New Testament properly.8 No one but
me protested because it suits everybody’s book. This is only one of many
examples of the way we are cheated in all godliness. Without anybody
noticing it, Protestantism has become a Judaism redivivus.
Denominationalism has likewise become a
flight from the conflict: people don’t want to be Christians any more
because otherwise they would be sitting between two stools in the middle
of the schism of the Church. Allegiance to a particular creed is—heaven
be praised—un-ambiguous, and so they can skulk round the schism with a
good conscience and fight “manfully” for a one-sided belief, the other
fellow— alas—being always in the wrong. The fact that I as a Christian
struggle to unite Catholicism and Protestantism within myself is
chalked up against me in tine Pharisaic fashion as blatant proof of lack
of character. That psychology is needed for such an undertaking seems to
be a nuisance of the first order. The resistance to and devaluation of
the soul as ‘“only psychic” has become a yardstick for Pharisaic
hypocrisy. Yet people should be glad that dogmatic ideas have
psychological foundations. If they hadn’t, they would remain eternally
alien to us and finally wither away, which they are already doing very
speedily in Protestantism. But that is what people unconsciously want,
because then they wouldn’t be reminded of their own cross and could talk
all the more uninhibitedly about Christ’s cross, which takes them away
from their own reality, willed by Cod himself. Therefore, by entrenching
themselves behind a creed, they calmly perpetuate the hellish scandal
that the so-called Christians cannot reach agreement even among
themselves.
Even if you thought there is anything to
my reflections you could hardly preach a sermon about them to your
congregation. This “cross” would presumably be a bit too heavy. But
Christ accepted a cross that cost him his life. It is fairly easy to
live a praiseworthy truth, but difficult to hold one’s own as an
individual against a collective and be found unpraiseworthy. is it clear
to your congregation that Christ may possibly mean just this?
These reflections came to me as I read
the sermon you have kindly placed at my disposal. I was particularly
affected by your thesis of “total surrender.” Is it clear to you what
that means: absolute ex-posure? A fate without if’s and but’s,
with no assurance that it will turn out harmlessly, for then one would
have ventured nothing and risked nothing for God’s sake. It was these
rather sombre undertones, so true two reality, that I missed in your
sermon. With best greetings,
Yours sincerely, C.
G. JUNG
1 By Adolf Freiherr von Knigge
(1752—96), an immensely popular book (1788) on etiquette and good
manners.
2 = “emptying”: cf. Phil. 1:7; “… Christ
Jesus who ... emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made
in the likeness of men” (DV) - Cf. also Mysterium,
par. 29 & n. 195.
3= prisoner.
4 Isaiah 42:1—7, 49:1—6, 50:4—9,
52:13, 53:11
5
An expression used only once.
6 These words occur in a sermon of H.’s
which she enclosed with her letter.
7 = teacher of Israel.
8 Matthew 18:3: “Except ye …
become
as little children, ye shall not enter
into the kingdom of heaven.”