The Ideas of Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion — Concluding Thoughts
This is the last in a series about the ideas of Carl Jung. In the previous few articles I’ve been discussing the parallels between his thinking and other spiritual traditions — Sufism, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and a brief excursion into Kabbalah (for details and links to articles please click the link above). There is also a separate series which includes several articles on his relationship to shamanism (please see this list).
Along the way I have unsurprisingly received some critical comments from Christians. After all, as John Dourley concludes, Jung could be “hailed as a great apologist for Christianity, but also one of its greatest heretics”. This was because he “sought to give new life and relevance to what had often become dead dogma”. This attracted hostility from conventional Christians.
I’ve also received some critical comments from Buddhists. Their main complaint is that I don’t have a sufficiently in-depth knowledge of the Buddhist tradition, and have therefore oversimplified what it is saying. This is a criticism I’m happy to accept.
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EDIT
On that point Wes Hansen, who is generally critical of Jung and my appreciation of him, has written an article in response.
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All that notwithstanding, here are a few concluding thoughts about Jung from the other side of the argument.
Jung believed that humans are naturally religious. It might be controversial to say so, but a reasonable deduction would be that fervent atheists, and physicalists of all persuasions have a psychological problem, are in a state of denial, although they would not thank you for saying so. Nietzsche said that we have killed God. Perhaps God is not dead, however, rather something has died in many people in the secular West following the so-called ‘Enlightenment’.
Jung believed that the reality of religion is embedded in the fabric of the human soul, and that it finds inevitable expression in the consciousness that arises from such depths. As such, religion cannot be eradicated from the human condition. He contends that the reality of religion, when it loses its specifically religious trappings, reappears in the guise of political, social, or philosophical and cultural notions, or indeed in anything to which can be appended the suffix ‘ism’ ”. That would obviously include atheism. When science becomes worshipped as a religion, it is called scientism.
Jung therefore considered the study and engagement of world religions to be indispensable in the psychotherapeutic treatment of individuals, especially in the second half of life. One of the most important tasks of our time may therefore be to connect mental health with what can be called a religious, or spiritual, attitude.
Much earlier in the series, I suggested that Jung could be considered the founder of a new religion, or at least the renaissance of the old religion of Gnosticism for modern times. It is relevant to ask therefore to what extent he was actually a Gnostic.
When he was publicly accused of this by the theologian Martin Buber, he vehemently denied it, although this seems to have been an attempt to cover his tracks, since it was at a time when he was desperate to maintain his image as a psychologist and ‘scientist’.
Along those lines, June Singer, Jungian analyst and Gnostic commentator, says: “Yet Jung, for all his awareness of what Gnosticism means and for all his fascination with its symbolic manifestations, stopped short of identifying himself openly as a Gnostic. First and last, he thought of himself as a psychiatrist and a healer of souls. He explored in great depth the ideas about God and about the gods as they appear in the human psyche”.
However, in the same book Stephan Hoeller, Gnostic scholar and bishop, describes Jung as, “the greatest of modern Gnostics. His sympathetic insight into the myths, symbols, and metaphors of the Gnostics, whom by his own admission he regarded as his long-lost friends, continues as the brightest beacon of our day, capable of illuminating the Gnostic gospels and their precursors, the Dead Sea Scrolls”¹.
Therefore the well-known expression, including the bad grammar, seems appropriate. “You pays your money and you takes your choice”.
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Jung has been described as a master of finding common ground in the major spiritual traditions of the world. I hope that my series has gone some way to informing and persuading you of that.
The Theosophical Society has three founding principles, the second of which is “to encourage the study of Comparative Religion, Philosophy and Science”, I hope I have shown that it is hard to imagine a better example than Carl Jung.
And finally, here again is Stephan Hoeller: “The thought of C. G. Jung is currently receiving an increasing amount of sympathetic interest in Western culture. A synthesis of human knowledge seldom before achieved by anyone discloses itself to those who seriously investigate the work bequeathed to us by this remarkable man. Beginning as a physician concerned with the welfare of the mind, he discovered in his patients and in his own soul the great truth of the reality of the psyche, and he explored its phenomenology at a depth to which others did not dare venture. His systematic observation of the workings of the deepest strata of the human mind in turn enable him to cast his glance with singular insight into the great forces within human culture — myth, religion, art, philosophy, and literature”².
I hope you have enjoyed this article, and the whole series. I have written in the past about other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, psychology, science, Christianity, politics and astrology. All of those articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website (click here and here). My most recent articles, however, are only on Medium; for those please check out my lists.
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Footnotes:
- Jung and the Lost Gospels, Quest Books, 1989, 5th printing 2002, Pxviii. The Singer quote is from the foreword.
- ibid., p1
