The Rose window at Chartres Cathedral – the archetypal circle
In June 1955, Carl Jung writes interestingly about subjective religious experiences. He is responding to a book that Pastor Walter Bernet, had written with the translated title: ‘Content and limits of religious experience’. Replying to Bernet, Jung explains how theological thinking is alien to him. This may be because, or, in spite of the fact that he, Jung, came from ‘a theological milieu’ on his mother’s side and Jung’s father was himself a clergyman.
‘It was the tragedy of my youth to see my father cracking up before my eyes on the problem of his faith and dying an early death. This was the objective outer event that opened my eyes to the importance of religion. Subjective inner experiences prevented me from drawing negative conclusions about religion from my father’s fate, much as I was tempted to do so.’
Jung goes on to explain how he grew up in the heyday of scientific materialism, studying medicine and natural sciences, and his education only offered arguments against religion. He was left, as he says, to fall back on experience alone, going his own way, integrating his capacities to be open to experience no matter where from.
‘The only way open to me was the experience of religious realities which I had to accept without regard to their truth. In this matter I have no criterion except the fact that they seem meaningful to me and harmonize with man’s best utterances.’
Jung then writes of this subjective experience. Given that the number of possibilities of our experiences are consciously limited, we quickly come to the frontier. This experience of coming to the edge of what seems known and rational means ‘what is experienced is an endless approximation’. Our religious experiences are often very difficult to describe or explain, even to ourselves: we feel and experience them, and try to link to something familiar.
Jung writes how these experiences can be represented by what he calls ‘archetypal symbols’ that come to represent something like a circle – this is an ‘empty’ circle that we cannot fill with our limited understanding, and the emptiness of the circle can be described as ‘God’.
‘Emptiness in this sense doesn’t mean “absence” or “vacancy”, but something unknowable which is endowed with the highest intensity … An interminably large part of my own being is included in it, but because this part is the unconscious I cannot indicate its limits or extent … This brings us directly to the frontier of transcendence, beyond which human statements can only be mythological.’
Perhaps this is what can happen in silent meditation, at best we enter a state of consciousness outside of time. In this dimension, the limit of conscious experience is reached, as Jung believes the ego then dissolves as the refence point of our thinking. Our ego can only affirm that something vitally important is happening to it.
This idea of the frontier, needing to go beyond, and the dissolving of the ego is also found in the writings of Thomas Merton – early in his life as a monastic (1949) he writes:
‘Inside me, I quickly come to the barrier, the limit of what I am, beyond which I cannot go by myself. It is such a narrow limit and yet for years I thought it was the universe. Now I see it is nothing. Shall I go on being content with this restriction? … Desire always what is beyond and all around you, you poor sap! Want to progress and escape and expand and be emptied and vanish into God.
How quickly my limits accuse me of my nothingness and I cannot get beyond. I pause and reflect and reflection makes it more final. Then I forget to reflect anymore and by surprise I make a little escape, at least to the threshold, and love moves in darkness just enough to tell …that there is freedom.’