To Upton Sinclair
[ORIGINAL IN ENGLISH]
Dear Mr. Sinclair,
7 January I955
Having read your novel Our Lady
and having enjoyed every page of it, I cannot refrain from bothering you
again with a letter. This is the trouble you risk when giving your books
to a psychologist who has made it his profession to receive impressions
and to have reactions.
On the day after I had read the story, I
happened to come across the beautiful text of the “Exultet” in the
Easter night liturgy:
0 inaestimabilis dilectio caritatis
Ut servum redimeres, Filium
tradidisti!
0 certe necessarium Adae peccatum,
Quod Christi morte deletum est!
O felix culpa
Quae talem ac
tantum meruit habere Redemptorem!
Although I am peculiarly sensitive to
the beauty of the liturgical language and of the feeling expressed
therein, something was amiss, as if a corner had been knocked off or a
precious stone fallen from its setting. When trying to understand, I
instantly remembered the bewildered Marya confronted with the
incongruities of the exorcism, her beautiful and simple humanity caught
in the coils of a vast historical process which had supplanted her
concrete and immediate life by the almost inhuman superstructure of a
dogmatic and ritual nature, so strange that, in spite of the identity
of names and biographical items, she was not even able to recognize the
story of herself and of her beloved son. By the way, a masterful touch!
I also remembered your previous novel
about the idealistic youth who had almost become a saviour through one
of those angelic tricks well known since the time of Enoch (the earthly
adventure of Samiasaz
and his angelic host). And
moreover, I recalled your Jesus biography.
Then I knew what it was that caused my peculiarly divided feeling: it
was your common sense and realism, reducing the Holy Legend to human
proportions and to probable possibilities, that never fails in knocking
off a piece of the spiritual architecture or in causing a slight tremor
of the Church’s mighty structure. The anxiety of the priests to suppress
the supposedly satanic attempt at verisimilitude is therefore most
convincing, as the devil is particularly dangerous when he tells the
truth, just as he often does (vide the biography of St. Anthony
of Egypt by St. Athanasius).
It is obviously your laudabilis
intentio to extract a quintessence of truth from the
incomprehensible chaos of historical distortions and dogmatic
constructions, a truth of human size and acceptable to common sense.
Such an attempt is hopeful and promises success, as the “truth”
represented by the Church is so remote from ordinary understanding as
to be well-nigh unacceptable. At all events, it conveys nothing any more
to the modern mind that wants to understand since it is incapable of
blind belief. In this respect, you continue the Strauss-Renan tradition
in liberal theology.
I admit it is exceedingly probable that
there is a human story at the bottom of it all. But under these
conditions I must ask: Why the devil had this simple and therefore
satisfactory story to be embellished and distorted beyond recognition?
Or why had Jesus taken on unmistakably mythological traits already with
the Gospel writers? And why is this process continued even in our
enlightened days when the original picture has been obscured beyond all
reasonable expectation? Why the Assumptio of 1950 and the Encyclical
Ad caeli Reginam
of Oct. 11, 1954?
The impossibility of a concrete saviour,
as styled by the Gospel writers, is and has always been to me obvious
and indubitable. Yet I know my contemporaries too well to forget that to
them it is news hearing the simple fundamental story. Liberal theology
and incidentally your laudabilis intentio have definitely their
place where they make sense. To me the human story is the inevitable
point de depart, the self-evident basis of historical Christianity.
It is the “small beginnings” of an amazing development. But the human
story—I beg your pardon—is just ordinary, well within the confines of
everyday life, not exciting and unique and thus not particularly
interesting. We have heard it a thousand times and we ourselves have
lived it at least in parts. It is the we—known psychological ensemble
of Mother and beloved Son, and how the legend begins with mother’s
anxieties and hopes and son’s heroic fantasies and helpful friends and
foes joining in, magnifying and augmenting little deviations from the
truth and thus slowly creating the web called the reputation of
a personality.
Here you have me—the psychologist—with
what the French call his deformation pro professionnelle.
He is blase, overfed with the “simple” human story, which does
not touch his interest and particularly not his religious feeling. The
human story is even the thing to get away from, as the small story is
neither exciting nor edifying. On the contrary, one wants to hear the
great story of gods and heroes and how the world was created and so on.
The small stories can be heard where the women wash in the river, or in
the kitchen or at the village well, and above all everybody lives them
at home. That has been so since the dawn of consciousness. But there was
a time in antiquity, about the fourth century B.C. (I am not quite
certain about the date.
Being actually away on vacation, I miss
my library!), when a man Euhemeros8
made himself a name through a then new theory: The divine and heroic
myth is founded upon the small story of an ordinary human chief or petty
Icing of local fame, magnified by a minstrel’s fantasy. All-Father Zeus,
the mighty “gatherer of clouds,” was originally a little tyrant, ruling
some villages from his maison forte upon a hill, and “nocturnis
ululatibus horrenda Prosperpina”
was presumably his awe-inspiring
mother-in-law. That was certainly a time sick of the old gods and their
ridiculous fairy stories, curiously similar to the “enlightenment” of
our epoch equally fed up with its “myth” and welcoming any kind of
iconoclasm, from the Encyclopedie
of the XVIIIth century to the Freudian theory reducing the religious
“illusion” to the basic “family romance” with its incestuous innuendos
in the early XXth century. Unlike your predecessor, you do not insist
upon the chronique scandaleuse of the Olympians and other ideals,
but with a loving hand and with decency like a benevolent pedagogue,
you take your reader by the hand: “I am going to tell you a better
story, something nice and reasonable, that anybody can accept. I don’t
repeat these ancient absurdities, these god-awful theologoumena11
like the Virgin Birth, blood and flesh mysteries, and other wholly
superfluous miracle gossip. I show you the touching and simple humanity
behind these gruesome inventions of benighted ecclesiastical brains.”
This is a kind-hearted iconoclasm far
more deadly than the frankly murderous arrows from M. de Voltaire’s
quiver: all these mythological assertions are so obviously impossible
that their refutation is not even needed. These relics of the dark ages
vanish like morning mist before the rising sun, when the idealistic and
charming gardener’s boy experiments with miracles of the good old kind,
or when your authentic Galilean grandmother “Marya” does not even
recognize herself or her beloved son in the picture produced by the
magic mirror of Christian tradition.
Yet, why should a more or less ordinary
story of a good mother and her well-meaning idealistic boy give rise to
one of the most amazing mental or spiritual developments of all times?
Who or what is its agens? Why could the facts not remain as they
were originally? The answer is obvious: The story is so ordinary that
there would not have been any reason for its tradition, quite certainly
not for its world-wide expansion. The fact that the original situation
has developed into one of the most extraordinary myths about a divine
heros, a God-man and his cosmic fate, is not due to its underlying
human story, but to the powerful action of pine-existing mythological
motifs attributed to the biographically almost unknown Jesus, a
wandering miracle Rabbi in the style of the ancient Hebrew prophets, or
of the contemporary teacher John the Baptizer, or of the much later
Zaddiks of the Chassidim12 The immediate source and origin of
the myth projected upon the teacher Jesus is to be found in the then
popular Book of Enoch and its central figure of the “Son of Man” and his
messianic mission. From the Gospel texts it is even manifest that Jesus
identified himself with this “Son of Man.” Thus it is the spirit of his
time, the collective hope and expectation which caused this astounding
transformation not at all the more or less insignificant story of the
man Jesus.
The true agens is the archetypal
image of the Cod-man, appearing in Ezekiel’s vision
for the first time in Jewish history, but in itself a considerably older
figure in Egyptian theology, viz., Osiris and Horus.
The transformation of Jesus, i.e., the
integration of his human self into a super- or inhuman figure of a
deity, accounts for the amazing “distortion” of his ordinary personal
biography. In other words: the essence of Christian tradition is by no
means the simple man Jesus whom we seek in vain in the Gospels, but the
lore of the God-man and his cosmic drama. Even the Gospels themselves
make it their special job to prove that their Jesus is the incarnated
God equipped with all the magic powers of a
kurioV
tvn
pneumatwn.14
That is why they are so
liberal with miracle gossip which they naively assume proves their
point. It is only natural that the subsequent post-apostolic
developments even went several points better in this respect, and in
our days the process of mythological integration is still expanding and
spreading itself even to Jesus’ mother, formerly carefully kept down to
the human rank and file for at least 500 years of early church history.
Boldly breaking through the sacrosanct rule about the definability of a
new dogmatic truth, viz., that the said truth is only definibilis
inasmuch as it was believed and taught in apostolic times, explicite
or implicite, the pope has declared the Assumptio Mariae a
dogma of the Christian creed. The justification he relies on is the
pious belief of the masses for more than 1000 years, which he considers
sufficient proof of the work of the Holy Ghost. Obviously the “pious
belief” of the masses continues the process of projection, i.e., of
transformation of human situations into myth.
But why should there be myth at all? My
letter is already too long so that I can’t answer this last question any
more, but I have written several books about it. I only wanted to
explain to you my idea that in trying to extract the quintessence of
Christian tradition, you have removed it like Prof. Bultmann in his
attempt at “demythologizing” the Gospels. One cannot help admitting that
the human story is so very much more probable, but it has little or
nothing to do with the problem of the myth containing the essence of
Christian religion. You catch your priests most cleverly in the
disadvantageous position which they have created for themselves by their
preaching a concrete historicity of clearly mythological facts. Nobody
reading your admirable novel can deny being deeply impressed by the
very dramatic confrontation of the original with the mythological
picture, and very probably he will prefer the human story to its
mythological “distortion.”
But what about the
euanggelion,
the “message” of the God-man and Redeemer and his divine fate, the very
foundation of everything that is holy to the Church? There is the
spiritual heritage and harvest of 1900 years still to account for, and I
am very doubtful whether the reduction to common sense is the correct
answer or not. As a matter of fact, I attribute an incomparably greater
importance to the dogmatic truth than to the probable human story. The
religious need gets nothing out of the latter, and at all events less
than from a mere belief in Jesus Christ or any other dogma. Inasmuch as
the belief is real and living, it works. But inasmuch as it is mere
imagination and an effort of the will without understanding, I see
little merit in it. Unfortunately, this unsatisfactory condition
prevails in modem times, and in so far as there is nothing beyond belief
without understanding but doubt and scepticism, the whole Christian
tradition goes by the board as a mere fantasy. I consider this event a
tremendous loss for which we are to pay a terrific price. The effect
becomes visible in the dissolution of ethical values and a complete
disorientation of our Weltanschauung. The “truths” of natural
science or “existential philosophy” are poor surrogates. Natural “laws”
are in the main mere abstractions (being statistical averages) instead
of reality, and they abolish individual existence as being merely
exceptional. But the individual as the only carrier of life and
existence is of paramount importance. He cannot be substituted by a
group or by a mass. Yet we are rapidly approaching a state in which
nobody will accept individual responsibility any more. We prefer to
leave it as an odious business to groups and organizations, blissfully
unconscious of the fact that the group or mass psyche is that of an
animal and wholly inhuman.
What we need is the development of the
inner spiritual man, the unique individual whose treasure is hidden on
the one hand in the symbols of our mythological tradition, and on the
other hand in man’s unconscious psyche. It is tragic that science and
its philosophy discourage the individual and that theology resists every
reasonable attempt to understand its symbols. Theologians call their
creed a symbolum,
but they refuse to call their truth “symbolic.” Yet, if it is
anything, it is anthropomorphic symbolism and therefore capable able of
re-interpretation.
Hoping you don’t mind my frank
discussion of your very inspiring writings,
I remain, with my best wishes for the
New Year,
Yours sincerely, C. G. JUNG
P.S. Thank you very much for your
kind letter that has reached me just now. I am amazed at the fact that
you should have difficulties in finding a publisher.
What is America coming to, when her most capable authors cannot reach
their public any more? What a time!
This letter was published, with minor changes and some omissions, in New
Republic, vol 132, no.8, issue 2100 (21 Feb. 1955).—As some of Jung’s
comments will hardly be intelligible to readers unfamiliar with Our
Lady, a brief summary is given: The heroine of the story is Marya, a
widow and grandmother, a peasant woman of ancient Nazareth speaking only
Aramaic. Her son Jeshu, who is depicted as a religious and social
revolutionary, has gone away on a mission, and in an agony of fear as to
his future she consults a sorceress. Under a spell, she awakens in a
great city (Los Angeles), moving with the crowd into a stadium where she
witnesses what she takes to be a battle: the football game between Notre
Dame U., Indiana, and the U. of California. Sitting next to her is a
professor of Semitic languages at Notre Dame; on addressing the utterly
bewildered woman he learns to his astonishment that she speaks ancient
Aramaic. He hears her story and takes her to the bishop, who exorcises
the demons and sends her hack to Nazareth with no enlightenment
whatever. There she rebukes the sorceress, saying: ‘I asked to see the
future of myself and my son: and nothing I saw has anything to do with
us.”
(Didymus, “twin,” is the name of the apostle Thomas.
Cf. John 11:16.)
12 The Chassidim (or Hasidim) were a mystical sect of
Judaism, founded shortly before the middle of the 18th cent. by the
mystic Israel Baal Shem (“Master of the Holy Name”; 1700-1760). The
leaders were called Zaddiks (righteous men).