[clarification] [>comments] (page#)

⚠️ It is written as Yahweh(he/him/his, etc.) in the original text, but I use YHWH

⚠️ TABLE OF CONTENTS: Introduction(21) I(25) II(34) III(56) IV(75) V(79) VI(84) VII(91) VIII(97) IX(103) X(109) XI(115) XII(132) XIII(142) XIV(158) XV(165) XVI(170) XVII(173) XVIII(183) XIX(187) XX(201)

⚠️ Quotes are organized as regards their theme (set by me)

⁰I’ve tried to apply the method taught by Prof. Kim Ik-Han

Recall⁰

Lectori Benevolo 13

• Chapter XIII was very cynical and funny (to the point that it seemed like Jung was at the summit of Anti-Christianity)
• The “Personality” of YHWH
  • Yahweh is not split but is an antinomy—a totality of inner opposites—and this is the indispensable condition for his tremendous dynamism, his omniscience and omnipotence. (28)
  • But he[YHWH] is too unconscious to be moral. Morality presupposes consciousness. (…) He is everything in totality; therefore, among other things, he is total justice, and also its total opposite. (33)
  • Loudly as his power resounds through the universe, the basis of his existence is correspondingly slender, for it needs conscious reflection in order to exist in reality. Existence is only real when it is conscious to somebody. That is why the Creator needs conscious man even though, from sheer unconsciousness, he would like to prevent him from becoming conscious. (34)
  • He turns the tables on Job and blames him for what he himself does: man is not permitted to have an opinion about him, and, in particular, is to have no insight which he himself does not possess. (43)
  • But, to his[Job’s] horror, he has discovered that YHWH is not human but, in certain respects, less than human, that he is just what YHWH himself says of Leviathan (the crocodile) (Job 41:25; cf. 41:34):
    • He beholds everything that is high:/He is king over all proud beasts.
  • Unconscious has an animal nature. Like all old gods YHWH has his animal symbolism with its unmistakable borrowings from the much older theriomorphic gods of Egypt, especially Horus and his four sons. Of the four animals of YHWH only one has a human face. That is probably Satan, the godfather of man as a spiritual being. (50-51)
  • 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 of 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. (169)
• Mary and Sophia
  • The divine immaculateness of her[Mary’s] status makes it immediately clear that she not only bears the image of God in undiminished purity, but, as the bride of God, is also the incarnation of her prototype, namely Sophia. (…) For Mary, the blessed among women, is a friend and intercessor for sinners, which all men are. Like Sophia, she is a mediatrix who leads the way to God and assures man of immortality. Her Assumption is therefore the prototype of man’s bodily resurrection. As the bride of God and Queen of Heaven she holds the place of the Old Testament Sophia. (76-77)
  • …her freedom from original sin sets Mary apart from mankind in general, whose common characteristic is original sin and therefore the need of redemption. The status ante lapsum is tantamount to a paradisal, i.e., pleromatic and divine, existence. By having these special measures applied to her, Mary is elevated to the status of a goddess and consequently loses something of her humanity: she will not conceive her child in sin, like all other mothers, and therefore he also will never be a human being, but a god. (…) Both mother and son are not real human beings at all, but gods. (77-78)
  • As God he has always been God, and as the son of Mary, who is plainly a copy of Sophia, he is the Logos (synonymous with Nous), who, like Sophia, is a master workman, as stated by the Gospel according to St. John. The identity of mother and son is borne out over and over again in the myths. (80)
  • Just as the person of Christ cannot be replaced by an organization, so the bride cannot be replaced by the Church. The feminine, like the masculine, demands an equally personal representation. (193)
• Jesus
  • YHWH must become man precisely because he has done man a wrong. He, the guardian of justice, knows that moral law is above even him. Because his creature has surpassed him he must regenerate himself. (88)
  • Today we have an empirical psychology, which continues to exist despite the fact that the theologians have done their best to ignore it, and with its help we can put certain of Christ’s statements under the microscope. If these statements are detached from their mythical context, they can only be explained personalistically. But what sort of conclusion are we bound to arrive at if a statement like “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me” (John 14:6) is reduced to personal psychology? Obviously the same conclusion as that reached by Jesus’ relatives when, in their ignorance of eschatology, they said, “He is beside himself.” (Mark 3:21) What is the use of a religion without a mythos, since religion means, if anything at all, precisely that function which links us back to the eternal myth? (95)
  • God’s Incarnation in Christ requires continuation and completion because Christ, owing to his virgin birth and his sinlessness, was not an empirical human being at all. As stated in the first chapter of St. John, he represented a light which, though it shone in the darkness, was not comprehended by the darkness. He remained outside and above mankind. Job, on the other hand, was an ordinary human being, and therefore the wrong done to him, and through him to mankind, can, according to divine justice, only be repaired by an incarnation of God in an empirical human being. This act of expiation is performed by the Paraclete; for, just as man must suffer from God, so God must suffer from God, so God must suffer from man. Otherwise there can be no reconciliation between the two. (105-106)
• Religion and Myth
  • In view of these portentous impossibilities, it has been assumed, perhaps as the result of a growing impatience with the difficult factual material, that Christ was nothing but a myth, in this case no more than a fiction. But myth 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. The fact that the life of Christ is largely myth does absolutely nothing to disprove its factual truth—quite the contrary. I would even go so far as to say that the mythical character of a life is just what expresses its universal human validity. It is perfectly possible psychologically, for the unconscious or an archetype to take complete possession of a man and to determine his fate down to the smallest detail. At the same time objective, nonpsychic parallel phenomena can occur which also represent the archetype. It not only seems so, it simply is so, that the archetype fulfils itself not only psychically in the individual, but objectively outside the individual. My own conjecture is that Christ was such a personality. The life of Christ is just what it had to be if it is the life of a god and a man at the same time. It is a symbolum, a bringing together of heterogeneous natures, rather as if Job and YHWH were combined in a single personality. YHWH’s intention to become man, which results from his collision with Job, is fulfilled in Christ’s life and suffering. (96)
  • To believe that God is the Summum Bonum is impossible for a reflecting consciousness. Such a consciousness does not feel in any way delivered from the fear of God, and therefore asks itself, quite rightly, what Christ means to it. That, indeed, is the great question: can Christ still be interpreted in our day and age, or must one be satisfied with the historical interpretation? (115)
  • One has only to consider what YHWH’s injustice, his downright immortality, must have meant to a devout thinker. It was no laughing matter to be burdened with such an idea of God. A much later document tells us of a pious sage who could never read the Eighty-ninth Psalm, “because he could not bear it.” When one considers with what intensity and exclusiveness not only Christ’s teaching, but the doctrines of the Church in the following centuries down to the present day, have emphasized the goodness of the loving Father in heaven, the deliverance from fear, the Summum Bonum, and the privatio boni, one can form some conception of the incompatibility which the figure of YHWH presents, and see how intolerable such a paradox must appear to the religious consciousness. And this has probably been so ever since the days of Job. (129-130)
  • One might also mention the strange fact that it is precisely Peter, who lacks self-control and is fickle in character, whom Christ wishes to make the rock and foundation of his Church. These seem to me to be ideas which point to the inclusion of evil in what I would call a differential moral valuation. For instance, it is good if evil is sensibly covered up, but to act unconsciously is evil. (140)
  • The fact that John uses the myth of Leto and Apollo in describing the birth may be an indication that the vision, in contrast to the Christian tradition, is a product of the unconscious. But in the unconscious is everything that has been rejected by consciousness, and the more Christian one’s consciousness is, the more heathenishly does the unconscious behave, if in the rejected heathenism there are values which are important for life—if, that is to say, the baby has been thrown out with the bath water, as so often happens. (151-152)
  • Consciously, of course, John was very far from thinking of Christ as a symbol. For the believing Christian, Christ is everything, but certainly not a symbol, which is an expression for something unknown or not yet knowable. And yet he is a symbol by his very nature. Christ would never have made the impression he did on his followers if he had not expressed something that was alive and at work in their unconscious. Christianity itself would never have spread through the pagan world with such astonishing rapidity had its ideas not found an analogous psychic readiness to receive them. It is this fact which also makes it possible to say that whoever believes in Christ is not only contained in him, but that Christ then dwells in the believer as the perfect man formed in the image of God, the second Adam. (152-153)
  • We can say that just because John loved Gd and did his best to love his fellows also, this “gnosis,” this knowledge of God, struck him. Like Job, he saw the fierce and terrible side of YHWH. For this reason he felt his gospel of love to be one-sided, and he supplemented it with the gospel of fear: God and be loved but must be feared. (167-168)
  • Agnosticism maintains that it does not possess any knowledge of God or of anything metaphysical, overlooking the fact that one never possesses a metaphysical belief but is possessed by it. (…) Is not something that is and has real existence for us an authority superior to any rational judgment, as has been shown over and over again in the history of the human mind? (…) The only thing which is beyond doubt is that there are metaphysical statements which are asserted or denied with considerable affect precisely because of their numinosity. (…) It is objectively real as a psychic phenomenon. The same applies naturally to all statements, even the most contradictory, that ever were or still are numinous. (171-172)
  • It was he[Meister Eckhart] who knew that God alone in his Godhead is not in a state of bliss, but must be born in the human soul(”Gott ist selig in der Seele”). The incarnation in Christ is the prototype which is continually being transferred to the creature by the Holy Ghost. (179)
  • Naturally, a certain degree of rationalism is better suited to Protestantism than it is to the Catholic outlook. The latter gives the archetypal symbolisms the necessary freedom and space in which to develop over the centuries while at the same time insisting on their original form, unperturbed by intellectual difficulties and the objections of rationalists. In this way the Catholic Church demonstrates her maternal character, because she allows the tree growing out of her matrix to develop according to its own laws. Protestantism, in contrast, is committed to the paternal spirit. (194)
• Human unconscious
  • Everything now depends on man: immense power of destruction is given into his hand, and the question is whether he can resist the will to use it, and can temper his will with the spirit of love and wisdom. (183)
  • Before the bar of nature and fate, unconsciousness is never accepted as an excuse; on the contrary there are very severe penalties for it. Hence all unconscious nature longs for the light of consciousness while frantically struggling against it at the same time. (184)
  • It is the task of the conscious mind to understand these [unconscious] hints. If this does not happen, the process of individuation will nevertheless continue. The only difference is that we become its victims and are dragged along by fate towards that inescapable goal which we might have reached walking upright, if only we had taken the trouble and been patient enough to cross our path. The only thing that really matters now is whether man can climb up to a higher moral level, to a higher plane of consciousness, in order to be equal to the superhuman powers which the fallen angels have played into his hands. But he can make no progress with himself unless he becomes very much better acquainted with his own nature. (…) However, in the most unexpected quarters nowadays we find people who can no longer blink the fact that something ought to be done with man in regard to his psychology. (184-185) >Directly contradicts Bataille?
  • He[Man] can no longer wriggle out of it[new responsibility] 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. (186) >Directly contradicts Bataille?
  • I do not underestimate the psyche in any respect whatsoever, nor do I imagine for a moment that psychic happenings vanish into thin air by being explained. Psychologism represents a still primitive mode of magical thinking, with the help of which one hopes to conjure the reality of the soul out of existence, after the manner of the “Proktophantasmist” in Faust:
    • Are you still here? Nay, it’s a thing unheard./Vanish at once! We’ve said the enlightening word.
  • (…) What most people overlook or seem unable to understand is the fact that I regard the psyche as real. They believe only in physical facts, and must consequently come to the conclusion that either the uranium itself or the laboratory equipment created the atom bomb. That is no less absurd than the assumption that a non-real psyche is responsible for it. God is an obvious psychic and non-physical fact, i.e., a fact that can be established psychically but not physically. Equally, these people have still not got it into their heads that the psychology of religion falls into two categories, which must be sharply distinguished from one another: firstly, the psychology of the religious person, and secondly, the psychology of religion proper, i.e., of religious contents. (190-191)
  • Only that which acts upon me do I recognize as real and actual. But that which has no effect upon me might as well not exist. The religious need longs for wholeness, and therefore lays hold of the images of wholeness offered by the unconscious, which, independently of the conscious mind, rise up from the depths of our psychic nature. (200)
  • …Even 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. (203)
• Jung’s Note:
  • Psychologically the God-concept includes every idea of the ultimate, of the first or last, of the highest or lowest. The name makes no difference. (XVII, footnote 48)
  • Owing to the undervaluation of the psyche that everywhere prevails, every attempt at adequate psychological understanding is immediately suspected of psychologism. It is understandable that dogma must be protected from this danger. If, in physics, one seeks to explain the nature of light, nobody expects that as a result there will be no light. But in the case of psychology everybody believes that what it explains is explained away. However, I cannot expect that my particular deviationist point of view could be known in any competent quarter. (XIX, footnote 54)
• Editor’s Note:
  • These “shards,” also called “shells” (Heb. kelipot), form ten counterpoles to the ten sefiroth, which are the ten stages in the revelation of God’s creative power. The shards, representing the forces of evil and darkness, were originally mixed with the light of the sefiroth. The Zohar describes evil as the by-product of the life process of the sefiroth. Therefore the sefiroth had to be cleansed of the evil admixture of the shards. This elimination of the shards took place in what is described in the cabalistic writings—particularly of Luria and his school—as the “breaking of the vessels.” Through this the powers of evil assumed a separate and real existence. Cf. G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (3rd ed., New York, 1954), p.267