Meeting the Messiah: 3 – it's all in the mind

In researching Irene Pickard's archive, ignoring the foundational myth of Christianity was simply not an option. It was far to important to her, to the others whose papers were in her archive, to the Quaker and other circles in which she moved, and to Jung, who became her guide in trying to make sense of the phenomena.

Jung was first-most and foremost a psychologist. He was clear about the boundaries beyond which his speculations should not stray: he was an explorer of the human mind – the psyche – as informed by his clinical practice. This applied just a much to his understanding of religion, as it did to any other aspect of human life. Ultimately for Jung, psychological life is human life as lived, as experienced: all we know, we know via mental phenomena.

That is why whenever we speak of religious content we move in a world of images that point to something ineffable. We do not know how clear or unclear these images, metaphors, and concepts are in respect of their transcendental object. If, for instance, we say “God” we give an expression to an image or verbal concept which has undergone many changes in the course of time. We are, however, unable to say with any degree of certainty — unless it be by faith — whether these changes affect only the images and concepts, or the Unspeakable itself. After all we can imagine God as an eternally flowing current of vital energy that endlessly changes shape just as easily as we can imagine him as an eternally unmoved unchangeable essence. Our reason is sure of one thing: that it manipulates images and ideas which are dependent on human imagination and its temporal and local conditions, and which have therefore changed innumerable times in the course of their long history.    C G  Jung: Answer to Job (1954)

I love Jung's referring to 'God' as the 'Unspeakable' – I suspect the connotation in English is not quite the same as the original German! I think he literally meant 'cannot be spoken about'. But he is right, all we can speak about first hand is our experience. That is the psychological experience of 'God' – the 'God' we encounter, if we do. The other is the shrivelled construct of theology – a verbal shuttlecock batted between players in the game of god-talking. 

What are profound, and Jung knew this, are numinous experiences. They are capable of utterly altering life. In the theistic framework of the Western mind – being touched by God; in the framework of the Eastern mind, satori – sudden awakening, liberation;  to the post-modern mind – being awestruck, overwhelmed with wonder, dumbfounded; even in the probably fictional teachings of Don Juan as told by Carlos Castañeda – much loved in the New Age circles – it plays the fundamental role of 'stopping the world'. 

I think the rise of the New Age movement, with its syncretic appropriations – a pick and mix approach to spirituality and religion – would have fascinated Jung. It would fit with his suggestions that the age of Christianity was coming to an end, and that people would start searching for spiritual replacements. The term 'New Age' itself owes a lot to borrowings from Jung, who suggested the process in Aion (1951).

I think he would also have found the attraction of so many people to the range of many quite bizarre conspiracy theories that have arisen in recent years, as another symptom, just as he did the emerging belief which he wrote about in Flying Saucers: a Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (1958): all are examples of the yearning of the human soul for a centre, a point of gravity around which all those otherwise discomforting and confusing feelings that comprise the vitality of spirituality can circulate.

But what of the founding hero figure of Christianity – the messiah? The failed god nailed to a cross. 

A sense of wider meaning to one’s existence is what raises man beyond mere getting and spending. If he lacks this sense, he is lost and miserable. Had St. Paul been convinced that he was nothing more than a wandering tent-maker he certainly would not have been the man he was. His real and meaningful life lay in the inner certainty that he was the messenger of the Lord. One might accuse him of suffering from megalomania, but this opinion pales before the testimony of history and the judgement of subsequent generations. The myth that took possession of him made him something greater than a mere craftsman. Such myth, however, consist of symbols that have not been invented consciously. They have happened. It was not the man Jesus who created the myth of the god-man. It existed for many centuries before his birth. He himself was seized by this symbolic idea, which, as St. Mark tells us, lifted him out of the narrow life of the Nazarene carpenter.  C G Jung: Man and his Symbols (1964)

Irene had already encountered the idea from Rendel Harris – her employer and mentor – that the man Jesus became infused with God's wisdom at the time of his baptism by John. Jung takes that idea further, suggesting that pre-existing god-man symbol was projected over the man Jesus, perhaps by himself taking on that mantle, but especially by subsequent generations, starting with Paul. 

For Jung the god-man symbol had existed for a long time before Jesus, being embedded in myth and projected over different candidates: but he felt that it had stuck so strongly with Jesus because the myth had evolved with the absorption of Sophia – the wisdom of God manifest as love – making Jesus a new and transformed version of God – God 2.0, if you will – as he tried to explain in Answer to Job: 

Just as the decision to become man apparently makes use of the ancient Egyptian model, so we can expect that the process itself will follow certain prefigurations. The approach of Sophia betokens a new creation. But this time it is not the world that is to be changed; rather it is God who intends to change his own nature. Mankind is not, as before, to be destroyed, but saved. In this decision we can discern the “philanthropic” influence of Sophia: no new human beings are to be created, but only one, the God-man. For this purpose a contrary procedure must be employed. The Second Adam shall not, like the first, proceed from the hand of the Creator, but shall be born of a human woman. … C G Jung: Answer to Job (1954)

Jung goes on the explain how the myth has evolved by the absorption of the female, in the form of Mary, as an aspect of the divine, as part of the celestial. Mary's immaculate conception does not occur in anywhere in the New Testament, but was confirmed by Pope Pius IX in 1858, whose commission stated that neither scriptural proof nor ancient tradition were necessary for this. Her assumption into heaven was then confirmed by Pope Pius XII in 1950. Yet further evidence of a living and evolving myth – of myth making – at a very deep and spiritual level: the church having to concede to the popular process of progressive enthronement of the female as a fourth denizen of heaven. A process that was manifest in the increasing devotion to Mary over the proceeding millennium. The human need to have a female as an integral part of heaven being a projection of developments in the collective unconscious – evolution at work in the deep mind.

… Thus Mary, the virgin, is chosen as the pure vessel of the coming birth of God. Her independence of the male is emphasised by her virginity as the sin qua non of the process. She is a “daughter of God” who, as a later dogma will establish, is distinguished at the outset by the privilege of an immaculate conception and is thus free from the taint of original sin. It is therefore evident that she belongs to the state before the Fall. This posits a new beginning. The divine immaculateness of her status makes it clear that she not only bears the image of God in undiminished purity, but, as the bride of God, as also the incarnation of her prototype, namely Sophia. Her love of mankind, widely emphasised in the ancient writings, suggests that in this newest of creations of his Yahweh has allowed himself to be largely influenced by 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 led 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 hold the place of the Old Testament Sophia. (ibid)

 Jung's profoundest suggestion is that myths are externalisations of the structures and processes of the deep mind. As humans have evolved, so have their myths. Their function is is to act as programming algorithms – as we might say these days – affecting the deep mind and helping the individual to adapt and mature. They model what is needed, and act out in symbolic form the maturation processes required within. They are essential ingredients of human growth and individuation (as he called the process of self-actualisation, of becoming an independent and evolving adult). They are only truly affective in so far as they are engaged with and believed.  

Any attempt to deconstruct a myth destroys its magic – our participation with its mystique – and blocks its effect. That is a cause of much of the modern malaise which he detected: our over rational brains had deconstructed the dominant myths of the West so that it can no longer play its part in maturing the soul – in the spiritual maturation of the deep mind. 

However, the deep mind still yearned for meaningful myths to attach itself to, as was evident in the passion with which people bound themselves to the myths of Nationalism or Communism; each resulting in tragic loss of life on an unprecedented scale. Incidences, in Jung's estimation, of mass psychosis: collective delusion that can powered appalling acts of cruelty, violence and destruction.  

Perhaps the only way for modern man to return to realising the efficacy of earlier myths is to suspend disbelief, and engage with their narratives, as would we would with an enthralling book or film? Such re-engagement with the myths should, according to Jung, help shape and encourage maturation at a deep level. 

However, such re-engagement will not be as before, because the myth will be seen with new eyes – eyes that have known the disenchantment. It will need to evolve by being infused with new elements if it is to re-enchant. Jung's own fascination with the Christian mystical tradition of alchemy led to his suggestion that the trinity would need to evolve into a quaternary in order to reflect more accurately the structures of the deep mind. Such an evolution would re-empower the myth's ability to invoke the processes of individuation, of maturation. 

For Jung, religions were not just alternative entertainments, distractions, competing in the attention market place. They encoded pathways of maturation in their symbols, and so were essential to human need; which is why they had evolved in the first place, and why they had been so passionately engaged with, why they have had such an central place in human societies: they encode the vitality of life's growth pathways – they orchestrate and evoke maturation. They are alchemic. 

Christianity, the cultural manifestation of the Western mind, and therefore the one that best suits the Western mind according to Jung, will continue evolving if it is not to wither away. If it does not evolve, then it will simply be replaces by some new symbolic system, just as Christianity itself replaced the Paganism of the Roman world. Its ability to answerer to the needs of  the deep mind will determine its fate. 

So how is Christianity evolving? What are its rivals that it must accommodate or be replaced by? It may be that evolving in a New Age direction, or perhaps by absorbing components from other faith tradition in a universalist direction, or by unearthing the perennial philosophy that is supposed to underlie all faiths, or by adopting a non-theistic, or possibly post theistic, guise. Or it may be retrenching into a more dogmatic, literalist fortress, answering to the needs of a diminishing but trenchant minority.

So, once more, what of the messiah? What have I understood from Jung about the god-man whose life, real or otherwise, has been so fundamental to the Western mind? If nothing else it must be to focus on the potency of the symbol of the god-man set within its cosmic drama – within its narrative – rather than any questions of its historicity. To ask such analytic questions is to step outside the myth and destroy it. There is a need to become re-enchanted.