To Father Victor White
[ORIGINAL IN ENGLISH]
Dear Victor,
Bollingen, 10 April 1954
Your letter
has been lying on my desk waiting
for a suitable time to be answered. In the meantime I was still busy
with a preface I had promised to P. Radin and K. Kerenyi. They are going
to bring out a book together about the figure of the trickster.
He is the collective shadow.
I finished my preface yesterday. I suppose you know the Greek-Orthodox
priest Dr. Zacharias?
He has finished his book representing a reception, or better—an
attempt—to integrate Jungian psychology into Christianity as he sees
it. Dr. Rudin S.J. from the Institute of Apologetics did not like it.
Professor Gebhard Frei on the other hand was very positive about it.
I am puzzled about your conception of
Christ and I try to understand it. It looks to me as if you were mixing
up the idea of Christ being human and being divine. Inasmuch as he is
divine he knows, of course, everything, because all things macrocosmic
are supposed to be microcosmic as well and can therefore be said to be
known by the self. (Things moreover behave as if they were known.) It is
an astonishing fact, indeed, that the collective unconscious seems to be
in contact with nearly everything. There is of course no empirical
evidence for such a generalization, but plenty of it for its indefinite
extension. The sententia, therefore: animam Christi nihil
ignoravisse4 etc. is not contradicted by psychological
experience. Rebus sic stantibus, Christ as the self can be said
ab initio cognovisse omnia etc. I should say that Christ knew his
shadow—Satan—whom he cut off from himself right in the beginning of his
career. The self is a unit, consisting however of two, i.e., of
opposites, otherwise it would not be a totality. Christ has consciously
divorced himself from his shadow. Inasmuch as he is divine, he is the
self, yet only its white half. Inasmuch as he is human, he has never
lost his shadow completely, but seems to have been conscious of it. How
could he say otherwise: “Do not call me good ... .“?
It is also reasonable to believe that as a human he was not wholly
conscious of it, and inasmuch as he was unconscious he projected it
indubitably. The split through his self made him as a human being as
good as possible, although he was unable to reach the degree of
perfection his white self already possessed. The Catholic doctrine
cannot but declare that Christ even as a human being knew everything.
This is the logical consequence of the perfect union of the duae
naturae. Christ as understood by the Church is to me a spiritual,
i.e., mythological being; even his humanity is divine as it is generated
by the celestial Father and exempt from original sin. When I speak of
him as a human being, I mean its few traces we can gather from the
gospels. It is not enough for the reconstruction of an empirical
character. Moreover even if we could reconstruct an individual
personality, it would not fulfill the role of redeemer and God-man who
is identical with the “all-knowing” self. Since the individual human
being is characterized by a selection of tendencies and qualities ties,
it is a specification and not a wholeness, i.e., it cannot be individual
without incompleteness and restriction, whereas the Christ of the
doctrine is perfect, complete, whole and therefore not individual at
all, but a collective mythologem, viz, an archetype. He is far more
divine than human and far more universal than individual.
Concerning the omniscience it is
important to know that Adam already was equipped with
supernatural knowledge according to Jewish and Christian tradition,6
all the more so Christ.
I think that the great split7
in those days was by no
means a mistake but a very important collective fact of synchronistic
correspondence with the then new aeon of Pisces. Archetypes, in spite
of their conservative nature, are not static but in a continuous
dramatic flux. Thus the self as a monad or continuous unit would be
dead. But it lives inasmuch as it splits and unites again. There is no
energy without opposites!
All
conservatives and
institutionalists are Pharisees, if you apply this name without
prejudice. Thus it was to be expected that just the better part of Jewry
would be hurt most by the revelation of an exclusively good God and
loving Father. This novelty emphasized with disagreeable clearness that
the Yahweh hitherto worshipped had some additional, less decorous
propensities For obvious reasons the orthodox Pharisees could not
defend their creed by insisting on the bad qualities of their God.
Christ with his teaching of an exclusively good God must have been most
awkward for them. They probably believed him to be hypocritical, since
this was his main objection against them. One gets that way when one has
to hold on to something which once has been good and had meant
considerable progress or improvement at the time. It was an enormous
step forward when Yahweh revealed himself as a jealous God,
letting his chosen people feel that he was after them with blessings and
with punishments, and that Cod’s goal was man. Not knowing better, they
cheated him by obeying his Law literally. But as Job discovered Yahweh’s
primitive amorality, God found out about the trick of observing the Law
and swallowing camels.8
The old popes and bishops succeeded in
getting so much heathendom, barbarism and real evil out of the Church
that it became much better than some centuries before: there were no
Alexander VI,9
no auto-da-fes, no
thumbscrews and racks any more, so that the compensatory drastic virtues (asceticism
etc.) lost their meaning to a certain extent. The great split, having
been a merely spiritual fact for a long time, has at last got into the
world, as a rule in its coarsest and least recognizable form, viz, as
the iron curtain, the completion of the second Fish.
Now a new synthesis must begin. But how
can absolute evil be connected and identified with absolute good? It
seems to be impossible. When Christ withstood Satan’s temptation, that
was the fatal moment when the shadow was cut off. Yet it had to be cut
off in order to enable man to become morally conscious. If the moral
opposites could be united at all, they would be suspended altogether and
there could be no morality at all. That is certainly not what synthesis
aims at. In such a case of irreconcilability the opposites are united by
a neutral or ambivalent bridge, a symbol expressing either side in such
a way that they can function together.
This symbol is the cross as interpreted of old, viz, as the tree of life
or simply as the tree to which Christ is inescapably affixed. This
particular feature points to the compensatory significance of the tree:
the tree symbolizes that entity from which Christ had been separated and
with which he ought to be connected again to make his life or his being
complete. In other words, the Crucifixus is the symbol uniting the
absolute moral opposites. Christ represents the light; the tree, the
darkness; he the son, it the mother. Both are
androgynous
(tree = phallus).
Christ is so much identical with the cross that both terms have become
almost interchangeable in ecclesiastical language (f.i. “redeemed
through Christ or through the cross” etc.). The tree brings back all
that has been lost through Christ’s extreme spiritualization, namely the
elements of nature. Through its branches and leaves the tree gathers the
powers of light and air, and through its roots those of the earth and
the water. Christ was suffering on account of his split and he recovers
his perfect
life at Easter, when he is buried again
in the womb of the virginal mother. (Represented also in the myth of
Attis by the tree, to which an image of Attis was nailed, then cut down
and carried into the cave of the mother Kybele.
The Nativity Church of Bethlehem is erected over an Attis sanctuary!)
This mythical complex seems to represent a further development of the
old drama, existence becoming real through reflection in
consciousness, Job’s tragedy.
But now it is the problem of
dealing with the results of conscious discrimination. The first attempt
is moral appreciation and decision for the Good. Although this decision
is indispensable, it is not too good in the long run. You must not get
stuck with it, otherwise you grow out of life and die slowly. Then the
one-sided emphasis on the Good becomes doubtful, but there is apparently
no possibility of reconciling Good and Evil. That is where we are now.
The symbolic history of the Christ’s
life shows, as the essential teleological tendency, the crucifixion, viz,
the union of Christ with the symbol of the tree. It is no longer a
matter of an impossible reconciliation of Good and Evil, but of man
with his vegetative (= unconscious) life. In the case of the Christian
symbol the tree however is dead and man upon the Cross is going to die,
i.e., the solution of the problem takes place after death. That is so as
far as Christian truth goes. But it is possible that the Christian
symbolism expresses man’s mental condition in the aeon of Pisces, as the
ram and the bull gods do for the ages of Aries and Taurus. In this case
the post-mortal solution would be symbolic of an entirely new
psychological status, viz. that of Aquarius, which is certainly a
oneness, presumably that of the Anthropos, the realization of Christ’s
allusion; “Dii estis.”
This is a formidable secret
and difficult to understand, because it means that man will be
essentially God and God man. The signs pointing in this direction
consist in the fact that the cosmic power of self-destruction is given
into the hands of man and that man inherits the dual nature of the
Father. He will [mis]understand it and he will be tempted to ruin the
universal life of the earth by radioactivity. Materialism and
atheism, the negation of God, are
indirect means to attain this goal. Through the negation of God one
becomes deified, i.e., god-almighty-like, and then one knows what is
good for mankind. That is how destruction begins. The intellectual
schoolmasters in the Kremlin are a classic example. The danger of
following the same path is very great indeed. It begins with the lie,
i.e., the projection of the shadow.
There is need of people knowing about
their shadow, because there must be somebody who does not project. They
ought to be in a visible position where they would be expected to
project and unexpectedly they do not project! They can thus set a
visible example which would not be seen if they were invisible.
There is certainly Pharisaism, law
consciousness, power drive, sex obsession, and the Wrong kind of
formalism in the Church. But these things are symptoms that the old
showy and easily understandable ways and methods have lost their
significance and should be slowly replaced by more meaningful
principles. This indeed means trouble with the Christian vices. Since
you cannot overthrow a whole world because it harbours also some evil,
it will be a more individual or “local” fight with what you rightly call
avidya. As “tout passe,” even theological books are not true
forever, and even if they expect to be believed one has to tell them in
a loving and fatherly way that they make some mistakes. A true and
honest introverted thinking is a grace and possesses for at least a time
divine authority, particularly if it is modest, simple end straight. The
people who write such books are not the voice of God. They are only
human. It is true that the right kind of thinking isolates oneself. But
did you become a monk for the sake of congenial society? Or do you
assume that it isolates only a theologian? It has done the same to me
and will do so to everybody that is blessed with it.
That is the reason why there are
compensatory functions. The introverted thinker is very much in need of
a developed feeling, i.e., of a less autoerotic, sentimental,
melodramatic and emotional relatedness to people and things. The
compensation will be a hell of a conflict to begin with, but later on,
by understanding what nirdvanda
means, they
become the pillars at the gate of the transcendent function, i.e., the
transitus to the self.
We should recognize that life is a
transitus. There is an old covered bridge near Schmerikon19
with an inscription: “Alles ist Uebergang.”20 Even the
Church and her sententiae are only alive inasmuch as they change.
All old truths want a new interpretation, so that they can live on in a
new form. They can’t be substituted or replaced by something else
without losing their functional value altogether. The Church certainly
expects of you that you assimilate its doctrine. But in assimilating it,
you change it imperceptibly and sometimes even noticeably. Introverted
thinking is aware of such subtle alterations, while other minds swallow
them wholesale. 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 in their controversial nature,
i.e., you can disagree with them even if you recognize their importance
for a majority. If you fully agreed with them you could replace yourself
just as well by a gramophone record. Moreover, if you don’t disagree,
you are no good as a directeur de conscience, since there are
many other people suffering from the same difficulty and being badly in
need of your understanding.
I appreciate the particular moral
problem you are confronted with. But I should rather try to understand
why you were put into your actual situation of profound conflict before
you think it is a fundamental mental mistake. I remember vividly your
charta geomantica21 that depicts so drastically the way
you became a monk. I admit there are people with the peculiar gift of
getting inevitably and always into the wrong place. With such
people nothing can be done except get them out of the wrong hole into
another equally dubious one. But if I find an intelligent man in an
apparently wrong situation, I am inclined to think that it makes sense
somehow. There may be some work for him to do. Much work is needed where
much has gone wrong or where much should be improved. That is one of the
reasons why the Church attracts quite a number of intelligent and
responsible men in the secret (or unconscious?) hope that they will be
strong enough to carry its meaning and not its words into the future.
The old trick of law obedience is still going strong, but the original
Christian teaching is a reminder. The man who allows the institution to
swallow him is not a good servant.
It is quite understandable that the
ecclesiastical authorities must protect the Church against subversive
influences. But it would be sabotage if this principle were carried to
the extreme, because it would kill the attempts at improvement also, The
Church is a “Durchgang” [passage] and bridge between representatives of
higher and lower consciousness and as such she quite definitely makes
sense. Since the world is largely sub principatu diaboli, it is
unavoidable that there is just as much evil in the Church as everywhere
else, and as everywhere else you have got to be careful. What would you
do if you were a bank-clerk or a medical assistant at a big clinic? You
are always and everywhere in a metal conflict unless you are blissfully
unconscious. I think it is not only honest but even highly moral and
altruistic to be what one professes to be as completely as possible,
with the full consciousness that you are making this effort for the weak
and the unintelligent who cannot live without a reliable support. He is
a good physician who does not bother the patient with his own doubts and
feelings of inferiority. Even if he knows little or is quite inefficient
the right persona medici might carry the day if seriously and
truly performed for the patient. The grace of God may step in when you
don’t lose your head in a clearly desperate situation If it has been
done, even with a lie, in favor of the patient it has been well done,
and you are justified, although you never get out of the awkward feeling
that you are a dubious number. I wonder whether there is any true
servant of God who can rid himself of this profound insecurity balancing
his obvious rightness. I cannot forget that crazy old Negro Mammy
who told me: “God is working in me like a clock—funny and serious.” By
“clock” seems to be meant something precise and regular, even
monotonous; by “funny and serious” compensating irrational events and
aspects—a humorous seriousness expressing the playful and formidable
nature of fateful experiences.
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. A
“complete” life does not consist in a theoretical completeness, but in
the fact that one accepts, without reservation, the particular fatal
tissue in which one finds oneself embedded, and that one tries to make
sense of it or to create a cosmos 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 he answered: “Can one
really not bear it?”
Fidem non esse caecum sensum
religionis e latebris subconscientiae erumpentem,
etc., indeed not! Fides
in its ecclesiastical meaning is a construction expressed by the
wholly artificial credo, but no spontaneous product of the unconscious.
You can swear to it in all innocence, as well as I could, if asked.
Also you can teach, if asked, the solid doctrine of St.
Thomas Aquinas, as I could if I knew it. You can and will and must
criticize it, yet with a certain discrimination, as there are people
incapable of understanding your argument. Quieta movere24
is not necessarily a good principle. Being an analyst, you
know how little you can say, and sometimes it is quite enough when only
the analyst knows. Certain things transmit themselves by air when they
are really needed.
I don’t share at all X.’s idea that one
should not be so finicky about conscience, it is definitely dishonest
and—sorry—a bit too Catholic. One must be finicky when it comes to a
moral question, and what a question! You are asked to decide whether you
can deal with ambiguity, deception, “doublecrossing” and other damnable
things for the love of your neighbour’s soul. If it is a case of
“the end justifying the means,” you had better buy a through ticket to
hell. It is a devilish hybris even to think that one could be in such an
exalted position to decide about the means one is going to apply. There
is no such thing, not even in psychotherapy. If you don’t want to go to
the dogs morally, there is only one question, namely “Which is the
necessity you find yourself burdened with when you take to heart your
brother’s predicament?” The question is how you are applied in
the process of the cure, and not at all what the means are you could
offer to buy yourself off. It depends very much indeed upon the way you
envisage your position with reference to the Church. I should advocate
an analytical attitude, which is permissible as well as honest, viz,
take the Church as your ailing employer and your colleagues as the
unconscious inmates of a hospital.
Is the LSD-drug mesca1in?
It has indeed very curious
effects— vide Aldous Huxley
—of which I know far too little.
I don’t know either what its psychotherapeutic value with neurotic or
psychotic patients is. I only know there is no point in wishing to
know more of the collective unconscious than one gets through dreams
and intuition. The more you know of it, the greater and heavier becomes
our moral burden, because the unconscious contents transform themselves
into your individual tasks and duties as soon as they begin to become
conscious. Do you want to increase loneliness and misunderstanding? Do
you want to find more and more complications and increasing
responsibilities? You get enough of it. If I once could say that I had
done everything I know I had to do, then perhaps I should realize a
legitimate need to take mescalin. But if I should take it now, I would
not be sure at all that I had not taken it out of idle curiosity. I
should hate the thought that I had touched on the sphere where the paint
is made that colours the world, where the light is created that makes
shine the splendour of the dawn, the lines and shapes of all form, the
sound that fills the orbit, the thought that illuminates the darkness of
the void. There are some poor impoverished creatures, perhaps, for whom
mescalin would be a heaven-sent gift without a counterpoison, but I am
profoundly mistrustful of the “pure gifts of the Gods.” You pay very
dearly for them. Quidquid id est, timeo
Danaos et dona ferentes.27
This is not the point at all, to know of or about the unconscious, nor
does the story end here; on the contrary it is how and where you begin
the real quest. If you are too unconscious it is a great relief to know
a bit of the collective unconscious. But it soon becomes dangerous to
know more, because one does not learn at the same time how to balance it
through a conscious equivalent. That is the mistake Aldous Huxley makes:
he does not know that he is in the role of the “Zauberlehrling,” who
learned from his master how to call the ghosts but did not know how to
get rid of them again:
Die ich rief, die Geister,
Werd ich nun nicht
los!
It is really the mistake of our age. We
think it is enough to discover new things, but we don’t realize that
knowing more demands a corresponding development of morality.
Radioactive clouds over Japan, Calcutta, and Saskatchewan point to
progressive poisoning of the universal atmosphere.
I should indeed be obliged to you if you
could let me see the material they get with LSD. It is quite awful that
the alienists have caught hold of a new poison to play with, without the
faintest knowledge or feeling of responsibility. It is just as if a
surgeon had never leaned further than to cut open his patient’s belly
and to leave things there. When one gets to know unconscious contents
one should know how to deal with them. I can only hope that the doctors
will feed themselves thoroughly with mescalin, the alkaloid of divine
grace, so that they learn for themselves its marvellous effect. You
have not finished with the conscious side yet. Why should you expect
more from the unconscious? For 35 years I have known enough of the
collective unconscious and my whole effort is concentrated upon
preparing the ways and means to deal with it.
Now to end this very long epistle I must
say how much I have appreciated your confidence, frankness, courage and
honesty. This is so rare and so precious an event that it is a pleasure
to answer at length. I hope you will find a way out to Switzerland.
The winter, though very cold, has dealt
leniently with me. Both my wife and myself are tired, though still
active, but in a very restricted way.
I am spending the month of April in
Bollingen procul negotiis29 and the worst weather we
have known for years.
Cordially yours, C. G. JUNG
1. W. wrote a long letter on 3 Mar. 54 in answer to
Jung’s of 24 Nov. 53, expresssing agreement with most of what he said It
deals largely with Jung’s views on the
problem of “Christ’s shadow,” which contradict the
Catholic doctrine that Christ knew everything (and therefore
could not have a shadow).
2. Jung’s commentary “On the Psychology of the Trickster
Figure” (CW 9. i) for Paul Radin, The Trickster (1956; orig. Der
gottliche Schelm, 1954). Kerenyi wrote the other commentary.
3. Cf. Zacharias, 24 Aug. 53.
4. “Christ’s soul was not ignorant of anything.” This and
the following ab initio cognovisse omnia (“from the beginning he
knew everything”) are two statements of the Holy Roman Office (one of
the eleven departments of the Roman Curia) laid down in 1918 and quoted
by W.
5. Cf. Matthew 19:17, Mark 10:18, Luke 18:19.
6. Mysterium, CW 14, pars. 570ff.
7. The separation of Christ, the epitome of good, from
his shadow, the devil.
8. Matthew 23:24: “Ye blind guides, which strain at a
gnat, and swallows camel.”
9. Rodrigo Borgia (1431—1503), the most notorious of the
corrupt and venal popes of the Renaissance.
10. The astrological sign of Pisces consists of two
fishes which were frequently regarded as moving in opposite directions.
Traditionally, the reign of Christ corresponds to the first fish and
ended with the first millennium, whereas the second fish coincides with
the reign of Antichrist, now nearing its end with the entry of the
vernal equinox into the sign of Aquarius. Cf. Aions, CW 9, ii,
pars. 148f., and “Answer to Job,” CW 11, par. 725.
11. The bridge is the “uniting symbol,” which represents
psychic totality, the self. Cf. Psychological Types, CW 6, par.
828
12. The tree often symbolizes the mother and appears as
such in the numerous treebirth myths (cf. Symbols of Transformation,
CW 5, Part II, ch. V). But it is also a phallic symbol and thus has
an androgynous character. (For Christ’s androgyny cf. Mysterium,
pars. 526, 565 & n. 63.)
15. Attis was one of the young dying gods, the lover of
Kybele, the Great Mother goddess of Anatolia. In her rites, taking place
in March, a pine tree, symbol of Attis, was carried into her sanctuary.
Cf. White, 25 Nov. 50, n. 5.
14. A
sanctuary of Adonis, another young dying god closely related to Attis,
existed since ancient times in a cave at Bethlehem. It is supposed to be
identical with
Christ’s birthplace, over which Constantine the Great
(ca. 288—337) had a basilica built.
15. Cf. Memories,
pp. 338f./312, and Neumann, so Mar.
59.
16. “Ye are gods.” John 10:34.
17. Nirdvandva (Skt.), “free from the opposites”
(love and hate, joy and sorrow, etc.). Cf. Psychological Types,
pars. 327ff.
18. Here “they” refers to the compensatory (or inferior)
functions. Cf. ibid., Def. 30.
19. A village in Canton St. Gallen, on the Upper Lake of
Zurich, near the Tower at Bollingen.
20. = “All is transition.”
21. In geomancy, an ancient method of divination still
widely practiced in the Orient, especially the Far East, earth or
pebbles are thrown on the ground and the resultant pattern is
interpreted. In Europe the pattern was known as the charta geomantica
A later development was to make dots at random on a piece of paper:
the “Art of Punctation.” (Cf. “Synchronicity,” CW 8, par. 866.) Jung was
fond of experimenting with all such mantic methods in order to test
synchronistic events. He became acquainted with the An Geomantica
through “De animae intellectualis scientia seu geomantica,”
Fasciculus geomanticus (Verona, 1687), by the English physician and
mystical philosopher Robert Fludd (1574-1637), who is discussed in
Pauli’s “The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of
Kepler,” The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche (tr.,
1955)
22. Possibly a patient Jung interviewed during his work
with mentally deranged Negroes at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital an
Washington, D.C., in 1912. Cf. TheFreud/Jung Letters, 323J, n.
3.—And cf. Loeb, 26 Aug. 41, n. 0.
23. On 1 Sept. 1910 Pius X edited a motu proprio (a
document issued by the Pontiff on his own initiative) in which the
sentence occurs: “Certissime teneo ac
sincere profiteor fidem non esse caecum sensum religionis
e latebris subconscientiae . . . erumpentem” (I maintain as quite
certain and sincerely avow that faith is not a blind religious feeling
which breaks out of the darkness of the subconscious).
24. Lit. “to move what is at rest”; more colloquially,
“rousing sleeping dogs.”
25. W. mentioned that he had been invited to a lunatic
asylum “to talk to the staff, and (as I found) try to lend a band with
religious-archetypal material which patients were producing under the
L.S.D. drug.” — Jung wrote “mescal”
26. Aldous Huxley. The Doors of Perception
(1954).
27. “[Men of Troy, trust not the horse!] Be it what it
may, I fear the Danaans, though their hands proffer gifts” (Virgil,
Aeneid, I, 48).
28. Goethe’s poem “The Magician’s Apprentice”: “I cannot
get rid / Of the spirits I bid.”
29. = away from work.