Jesus Christ Cefalu cathedral apse

This is from Jung’s work ‘Answer to Job’:

‘Although the birth of Christ is an event that occurred but once in history, it has always existed in eternity … the identity of a nontemporal, eternal event with a unique historical occurrence is something that is extremely difficult to conceive.’

Jung’s thinking is that ‘time’ is a relative concept, and so needs to be held alongside the ‘simultaneous’ existence in the spiritual universe of all historical processes. Jung calls the spiritual dimension the pleroma – here he’s taking this from Gnosticism and he means an eternal process that is repeated in time in an irregular fashion.

‘All the world is God’s and God is in all the world from the very beginning’ yet the incarnation is for Jung ‘a world-shaking transformation of God.’ God first of all revealed himself through nature at the creation, and then in the birth of Jesus he became human. There were earlier intimations of this which Jung sees as a pattern of the life of a hero across all religious traditions and cultures, but Christ is to become the universal saviour where the everyday is interwoven with the miraculous and the mythical – the divine and the human.

The human side of Christ, Jung writes, stands out in his love for others, and yet it is when Christ cries despairingly from the cross: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ that his human nature attains divinity:

‘at that moment God experiences what it means to be a mortal man and drinks to the dregs what he made his faithful servant Job suffer … And at this moment where one can feel the human being so absolutely, the divine myth is present in full force.’

But myth doesn’t mean fiction, but rather facts that are continually repeated, and can be observed over and over again. It is something that happens to everyone, and we also have mythical fates. Jung writes:

‘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 … 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.’

 A bringing together of different natures: ‘Yahweh’s intention to become man … is fulfilled in Christ’s life and suffering.’ The incarnation for each of us is then the intuition and realization of ‘Christ within us’, and for Jung this is about how what he calls ‘unconscious wholeness’ penetrates into the psychic realm of our inner experience, and we become aware of our true nature.

Jung, writing later in his autobiography, ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’ sees how in the twentieth century Christianity has been undermined, and how this is evidenced in an ‘outpouring of evil’.

‘We stand in need of reorientation … the individual who wishes to have an answer to the problem of evil, as it is posed today, has need, first and foremost of self-knowledge, that is, the utmost possible knowledge of their own wholeness. How much good we can do, and the opposite too.’

And so, we travel on in time to 2025 … aware also of the eternal.