June 2002 Print

Dr. Gyula A. Mago

 

Now the Spirit manifestly saith, that in the last times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to spirits of error; and doctrines of devils. —I Tim 4:1

In 1957, psychologist Carl Gustav Jung stated his creed:

...[T]he standpoint of creeds is archaic; they are full of impressive mythological symbolism which, if taken literally, comes into insufferable conflict with knowledge. But if, for instance, the statement that Christ rose from the dead is to be understood not literally but symbolically, then it is capable of various interpretations that do not collide with knowledge and do not impair the meaning of the statement.

The objection that understanding it symbolically puts an end to the Christian's hope of immortality is invalid, because long before the coming of Christianity mankind believed in a life after death and therefore had no need of the Easter event as a guarantee of immortality. The danger that mythology understood too literally, and as taught by the Church, will suddenly be repudiated lock, stock, and barrel is today greater than ever. Is it not time that the Christian mythology, instead of being wiped out, was understood symbolically for once?¹

Already in 1907 Pope St. Pius X condemned modernist ideas like these in Pascendi Dominici Gregis. So why speak of someone who is not a theologian but a psychologist holding such wrong views in 2002? Jung is increasingly popular and his influence is far-reaching not because he invented this way of thinking, but because he found a seductive and seemingly plausible way of justifying it.

In 1933, Jung perceptively described the trend toward a preoccupation with the psyche. This would gather much momentum from his work and become later in the 20th century the volcanic eruption known as the New Age Movement:

Modern man has lost all the metaphysical certainties of his medieval brother, and set up in their place the ideals of material security, general welfare and humaneness....But science destroyed even the refuge of the inner life....The rapid and world-wide growth of a "psychological" interest over the last two decades shows unmistakably that modern man has to some extent turned his attention from material things to his own subjective processes.

...he is somehow fascinated by the almost pathological manifestations of the unconscious mind. We must admit the fact, however difficult it is for us to understand that something which previous ages have discarded should suddenly command our attention. That there is a general interest in these matters is a truth which cannot be denied, their offense to good taste notwithstanding. I am not thinking merely of the interest taken in psychology as a science, or of the still narrower interest in the psychoanalysis of Freud, but of the widespread interest in all sorts of psychic phenomena as manifested in the growth of spiritualism, astrology, theosophy, and so forth. The world has seen nothing like it since the end of the seventeenth century. We can compare it only to the flowering of Gnostic thought in the first and second centuries after Christ. The spiritual currents of the present have, in fact, a deep affinity with Gnosticism. There is even a Gnostic church in France today, and I know of two schools in Germany which openly declare themselves Gnostic. The modern movement which is numerically most impressive is undoubtedly Theosophy, together with its continental sister, Anthroposophy; these are pure Gnosticism in a Hindu dress. Compared with these movements the interest in scientific psychology is negligible. What is striking about Gnostic systems is that they are based exclusively upon the manifestations of the unconscious, and that their moral teachings do not balk at the shadow-side of life. Even in the form of its European revival, the Hindu Kundalini-Yoga shows this clearly. And as every person informed on the subject of occultism will testify, the statement holds true in this field as well.

I do not believe that I am going too far when I say that modern man, in contrast to his nineteenth-century brother, turns his attention to the psyche with very great expectations; and that he does so without reference to any traditional creed, but rather in the Gnostic sense of religious experience. We should be wrong in seeing mere caricature or masquerade when the movements already mentioned try to give themselves scientific airs; their doing so is rather an indication that they are actually pursuing "science" or knowledge instead of the faith which is the essence of Western religions.²

But we do not yet realize that while we are turning upside down the material world of the East with our technical proficiency, the East with its psychic proficiency is throwing our spiritual world into confusion.³

To me the crux of the spiritual problem of today is to be found in the fascination which psychic life exerts upon modern man. If we are pessimists, we shall call it a sign of decadence; if we are optimistically inclined, we shall see in it the promise of a far-reaching spiritual change in the Western world.⁴

Modern man is caught between the mysterious depth of God and the absurd depth of his own being. Faith, which is God-centered, gives us the first, whereas Gnosticism and Jungian psychology, both man-centered pursuits, the second.

 

Terminology

A few words about terminology before we proceed. Since Socrates, "psyche" meant "soul," and thus psychology is supposed to mean the science of the soul. The human soul is the substantial form of the body: the body alone is not man, and the soul alone is not man. The soul is the reality which makes man different from a corpse. We know that a man is alive because he exhibits all vital operations: vegetative, sensory, and rational. The human soul is intrinsically independent of matter for its rational operations, therefore it is spiritual. For vegetative and sensory operations, the human soul is intrinsically dependent on matter. [An angel or a separated soul cannot digest or feel, for instance, because neither has bodily organs.–Ed.] Both Freud and Jung treat the vegetative and sensory operations (instincts, emotions, imagination) as all-important, and treat the rational and spiritual as insignificant. So in modern usage the word "psyche" tends to exclude the spiritual. Confusing spirit with psyche means either mistaking the manifestations of the psyche (in the modern sense) for the spiritual or pretending that the manifestations of the psyche are the spiritual.

The temptation to replace man's aspiration toward God, which aspiration springs from his spiritual nature, with a preoccupation with the psyche, to jump into the maelstrom of the unconscious and risk drowning in it, appears to be demonic in origin. This is not surprising, since it is Catholic doctrine that the demons, being of angelic nature, can cause the movement of matter, and thus be one–but not the sole or sufficient–cause of human activity.

Demons have admitted how much they benefit from the spirit-psyche confusion. In one of the possessions described by Malachi Martin in his Hostage to the Devil: The Possession and Exorcism of Five Living Americans, demons explained how they faked "astral travels" and clearly state: "Once spirit is confused with the psyche, we can let anybody see, hear, touch, taste, know, desire the impossible. He is ours. He is of the Kingdom [of Satan]."⁵

The demonic inspiration of Gnosticism is a plausible speculation, but that of Jung is an easily demonstrable fact. These two we shall briefly examine in turn.

 

Gnosticism

Jung's comment on Gnosticism:

I attribute a positive value to biology, and to the empiricism of natural science in general, in which I see a Herculean effort to understand the human psyche by approaching it from the outer world. I regard the Gnostic religions as an equally prodigious undertaking in the opposite direction: as an attempt to draw knowledge of the cosmos from within.⁶

So Gnosticism does not reveal to us the depths of God of which Saint Paul spoke, but informs us of the depths of man, the troubled depths out of which consciousness arises.

Gnosticism is best remembered from antiquity as a Christian heresy. It was the first "great heresy," which represented a grave danger, because the Church was less well-prepared to deal with it than with Judaism. Fortunately, Gnosticism was anti-Jewish, so the two heresies could not join forces. Gnosticism posed then as it does today as the bearer of a secret tradition stemming from Christ or the Apostles. Its principal representatives were Basilides, Valentinus, Carpocrates and Marcion–four dark and powerful figures analogous to the four Evangelists. They were considered as successors of Simon Magus mentioned in the New Testament.

The Fathers of the Church responded quickly to eliminate this danger. Most effectively countering Gnosticism were St. Irenaeus and Tertullian in the West. At the same time in the East, Clement of Alexandria and Origen worked to build up a "Christian gnosis," that is, science in service of the Faith and, hence, Catholic theology was born. Gradually it became clear that Gnosticism was more than a Christian heresy. It did not share the typical Hellenic attitude of religious reverence towards the natural world as a manifestation of intelligence and order. Its origins are in the religions of the East–India, and Persia–which are essentially ways of "deliverance," that is, how man could extricate himself from the world and bodily existence.⁷ For many years St. Augustine was a victim of one such religion, Manichaeism, which came from Persia.

Since original Gnostic sources are scarce, the discovery of a rich Gnostic library at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt (1945) was an important turning point. [A few of the 13 books, which bind a total of 52 manuscripts, are pictured in the superimposition on Jung's forehead on the title page. It is believed they were buried in the fourth century. In one manuscript Jesus is reported to say: "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."–Ed] The publication of a heretofore unknown Gnostic gospel comprising over 40 treatises, most of them previously unknown, resulted. Since then, interest in Gnosticism has increased and even versions of the old "Gnostic Catholic Church" have been revived.

The Gnostics were profoundly pessimistic in their attitude toward life and the whole cosmic order, which they regarded as under the domination of demonic powers. They sought for some way of salvation which would deliver them not only from the body but from the world and from the evils of birth and procreation. Lest I distort the Gnostic position, I will let a representative of a present-day "Gnostic Catholic Church," Bishop Stephen A. Hoeller of Ecclesia Gnostica, speak for Gnosticism. I will summarize the Catholic response following his statements:

Gnosticism expresses a specific religious experience, an experience that does not lend itself to the language of theology or philosophy, but which, instead, expresses itself through the medium of myth, in a distinctly poetic and imaginative language.⁸

1. With Gnostics, we find ourselves in a fantastic world of dreamers. It is a world of disordered imaginings, dreams, not to say nightmares: it is like listening to a psychoanalysis. The Gnostic never claims that these teachings refer to anything objectively existing.

It is an example of religious dualism, which means that there are two principles of being. One is the cause of good, the other is the cause of evil. So the blame of evil, for the failings of the world, lies not with humans, but with the creator.⁹

2. This is obviously blasphemy for a Catholic. But it is important to understand that to Gnostics the very existence in time is evil per se, which is a profound misunderstanding of the true nature of evil.

The Gnostic God concept is more subtle than that of most religions. In its way, it unites and reconciles the recognitions of Monotheism and Polytheism, as well as of Theism, Deism, and Pantheism.¹⁰

3. Concepts that contradict each other cannot be united and reconciled. Remember, however, Gnosticism doesn't promise truth; it promises myths.

There is a Good God, inaccessible, who never created anything, but from whom everything emanates. So in a sense, all is God, for all consists of the substance of God. But some portions of the divine essence have been projected so far that they became corrupt. There are many Aeons, intermediate deific beings, who exist between the Good God and ourselves. One of the Aeons, the Demiurge [a polemical caricature of the God of the Old Testament–Ed.] has a flawed consciousness, who creates the material world in the image of his own flaw.¹¹

4. The stories are extremely convoluted, and only by getting into more detail would it be possible to show convincingly that Gnosticism is an array of absurd and extravagant doctrines, containing a catalog of theological monstrosities.

Man has a perishable component plus the divine spark, which is a fragment of the divine essence.¹²

5. This is to say that evil is not part of man as man. Man is separated from God only by flawed creation, but not by the distance of sin. Man occupies the par excellence spiritual role in the universe both in Gnosticism, where God is removed from creation, and in Pantheism, where God is absorbed in creation.

Humans are generally ignorant of the divine spark resident within them. This ignorance is fostered in human nature by the influence of the false creator, intent upon keeping men and women ignorant of their true nature and destiny. Anything that causes us to remain attached to earthly things serves to keep us in enslavement to these lower cosmic rulers. Death releases the divine spark from its lowly prison, but if there has not been a substantial work of Gnosis undertaken by the soul prior to death, it becomes likely that the divine spark will be hurled back into, and then re-embodied within, the pangs and slavery of the physical world.¹³

6. Gnosis is a knowledge that arises in the heart in an intuitive and mysterious manner. Obviously, reincarnation is implied.

Not all humans are spiritual (pneumatics) and thus ready for Gnosis and liberation. Some are earthbound and materialistic beings (hyletics), who recognize only the physical reality. Others live largely in their psyche (psychics). Such people usually mistake the Demiurge for the True God and have little or no awareness of the spiritual world beyond matter and mind.¹⁴

7. This way of dividing the faithful into groups and reserving perfection to the initiates changes the Christian outlook, undermines discipline, and casts doubt on the universality of the True Church. Gnosticism attacks the very essence of the Christian message: the idea of the Good News proclaimed to all.

From earliest times Messengers of the Light have come forth from the True God in order to assist humans in their quest for Gnosis. Only a few of these salvific figures are mentioned in Gnostic scripture; some of the most important are Seth (the third Son of Adam), Jesus, and the Prophet Mani. The majority of Gnostics always looked to Jesus as the principal savior figure (the Soter). Gnostics do not look to salvation from sin (original or other), but rather from the ignorance of which sin is a consequence. Ignorance–whereby is meant ignorance of spiritual realities–is dispelled only by Gnosis, and the decisive revelation of Gnosis is brought by the Messengers of Light, especially by Christ, the Logos of the True God. It is not by His suffering and death but by His life of teaching and His establishing of mysteries that Christ has performed His work of salvation.¹⁵

8. The Gnostics, especially Marcion, purged the Gospel of everything that humanized Jesus. Without birth, growth, suffering, or final agony–entirely a phantom or an apparition–the mediation of Jesus Christ was suppressed and He became a religious myth instead of historical reality. Marcion said: "Everything is true in the Creed except the words 'under Pontius Pilate.'" Those who "demythologize" the Gospel are Marcion's spiritual children.

If the words ethics or morality are taken to mean a system of rules, then Gnosticism is opposed to them both. Such systems usually originate with the Demiurge and are covertly designed to serve his purposes. To the Gnostic, commandments and rules are not salvific; they are not substantially conducive to salvation. Rules of conduct may serve numerous ends, including the structuring of an ordered and peaceful society, and the maintenance of harmonious relations within social groups. Rules, however, are not relevant to salvation; that is brought about only by Gnosis. Morality therefore needs to be viewed primarily in temporal and secular terms; it is ever subject to changes and modifications in accordance with the spiritual development of the individual.¹⁶

9. The absurd axiom of religious dualism pays off here. Salvation is within me. I do not run the risk of losing it. Instead of the effort of faith, I only need an initiation into a secret knowledge–gnosis or theosophy. Whoever has knowledge, no longer needs faith or law. He need not become perfect, grow, mature, run the risk of freedom, fall and pick himself up, or ask for forgiveness. He is saved whatever he may do. Gold remains gold even when fallen into mud. Thus the Gnostic is self-centered, needs no mediator, no worship, no "grotesque divine ornaments." There is no other wisdom outside the one he discovers in himself, no other divinity except the one he bears in his own depth.

There are many variations of Gnosticism, but an attempt has been made to identify a core of their beliefs as follows:¹⁷

• The Gnostics posit an original spiritual unity that came to be split into a plurality.

• As a result of the pre-cosmic division the universe was created. This was done by a leader possessing inferior spiritual powers and who often resembled the Old Testament Jehovah.

• A female emanation of God was involved in the cosmic creation (albeit in a much more positive role than the leader).

• In the cosmos, space and time have a malevolent character and may be personified as demonic beings separating man from God.

• For man, the universe is a vast prison. He is enslaved both by the physical laws of nature and by such moral laws as the Ten Commandments.

• Mankind may be personified as Adam, who lies in the deep sleep of ignorance, his powers of spiritual self-awareness stupefied by materiality.

• Within each natural man is an "inner man," a fallen spark of the divine substance. Since this exists in each man, we have the possibility of awakening from our stupefaction.

• What effects the awakening is not obedience, faith, or good works, but knowledge.

• Before the awakening, men undergo troubled dreams.

• Man does not attain the knowledge that awakens him from these dreams by cognition but through revelatory experience, and this knowledge is not information but a modification of the sensate being.

• The awakening (i.e., the salvation) of any individual is a cosmic event.

• Since the effort is to restore the wholeness and unity of the Godhead, active rebellion against the moral law of the Old Testament is enjoined upon every man.

Gnosticism is not a primitive religion, and it is primarily concerned with evil. Neo-Platonism and Hinduism regard evil as an illusion, and knowledge will cause it to disappear. In Christianity, evil comes as a result of created liberty. It has no independent existence. It is the privation, corruption, or perversion of something good. But in Gnosticism, evil is a reality which has its own existence and owes nothing to God nor man. And Gnosticism is unique among the Christian heresies because it expresses explicit hatred for the God of the Old Testament and the Ten Commandments.

The refutation of Gnosticism by the Church Fathers clarified Catholic teaching. In contrast to Gnosticism, the Catholic Church became fully aware of God's nearness to man. God was not in the distant heavens. The creature was His own immediate handiwork. The Word bespoke His presence. Man is not saved from the body, but in the body. The Old Testament was the pre-history of the New, not its antithesis. Lastly, Christ was not a stranger to history. In Him the Word became flesh and so had transfigured all matter.

Gnosticism has endured. Catharism and heretical movements related to it were Gnostic. There were Gnostics among Protestants: Jakob Boehme, Emanuel Swedenborg, William Blake, George Fox (founder of Quakers). Theosophy and Christian Science are related to Gnosticism, as are modern-day Protestant Pentecostals and Catholic Charismatics. Certain philosophical systems such as Idealism (Hegel), Phenomenology (Husserl) and especially Existentialism (Heidegger) are relatives of Gnosticism.

Jung wrote about the tenacity of Gnosticism:

When I began to understand alchemy I realized that it represented the historical link with Gnosticism, and that a continuity therefore existed between past and present. Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.¹⁸

Alchemy, an attempt to change one substance into another, notably to turn base metal into gold, is often thought as an early, primitive phase of chemistry. But it is usually accompanied by a cryptic, symbolic art, which Jung viewed as a religious philosophy.¹⁹

 

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)

As one of the great founders with Freud of modern psychoanalysis, Jung is best known for his theory of psychological types (extroverted or introverted). Our interest, however, is not in the efficacy of Jungian psychotherapy, but with the ideas of Jung as a source of the gravest errors of our age. When atheism is discussed, Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Marx, Camus, Sartre, Heidegger and Freud are usually said to bear much of the intellectual blame. But the returning to paganism, polytheism, pantheism is a much more recent phenomenon, and Jung will eventually be found to bear much of the blame for preparing our world for it.

 

Jung and Religion

The two major methods of "explaining religion away" are the sociological (e.g., Marx) and the psychological (e.g., Freud).²⁰ Jung is not commonly thought to have tried either of these, but in fact he did, in a more subtle and apparently more successful way.

Unlike Freud, who was a materialist, Jung at least believed in a human soul, and often protested against "psychology without a psyche." For his recognition of what he loosely termed a "religious instinct" in man he had to endure being called a "mystic" by his materialist rivals. Jung concluded²¹ that men have a strong need for religious beliefs and experiences. Religious beliefs, Jung said, cannot be shown to be true, but he held that they cannot be shown to be false either. Whether to believe or not is thus a matter of choice on purely pragmatic grounds. While Freud argued that religions are delusionary and therefore evil, Jung contended that all religions are imaginary but good. While Freud considered religion as "the universal obsessional neurosis of mankind," the anti-Freudian Jung termed religion an alternative to neurosis, and expressed his belief that it is a healthy outcome. Of course, for a religious person, this is not the aim of religion. For the Catholic, God and the spiritual world are realities and the proper end of man is to know, love, and serve God. He regards this service and love as an end in itself, not as a means to promote peace of mind or mental health.

But Jung did not endorse Christianity. "Indeed, he dated the disorientation of modern man partly from the original Christian break with paganism, but more importantly from the Enlightenment."²²Although Jung was certainly familiar with the Protestant and Catholic religions as an outside observer, it is unlikely that he ever held Christian views. Erich Fromm, in a review of Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections gives this summary:

Jung was certainly not a religious man in the Christian, Jewish, Moslem or Buddhist sense. He was essentially a pagan, more specifically a worshipper of evil gods and goddesses rather than those of the Olympian religion. Jung with his mixture of sophisticated superstition, vague pagan idolatry, and equally vague talk about God, together with his claim that he was building a bridge between religion and psychology, offered the right mixture to an age of little faith and little reason.²³

Jung explains:

I find I must emphasize over and over again that neither the moral order, nor the idea of God, nor any religion has dropped into man's lap from outside, straight down from heaven, as it were, but that he contains all this in nuce [in a nutshell–Ed.] within himself, and for this reason can produce it all out of himself. It is therefore idle to think that nothing but enlightenment is needed to dispel these phantoms. The ideas of moral order and of God belong to the ineradicable substrate of the human soul. That is why any honest psychology, which is not blinded by the garish conceits of enlightenment, must come to terms with these facts. They cannot be explained away and killed with irony.²⁴ [In short,] religion can be replaced only by religion.²⁵

Jung's neo-paganism and his desire to replace Christianity with his own concept of psychoanalysis can be seen in a letter he wrote to Freud:

I imagine a far finer and more comprehensive task for [psychoanalysis] than alliance with an ethical fraternity. I think we must give it time to infiltrate into people from many centers, to revivify among intellectuals a feeling for symbol and myth, ever so gently to transform Christ back into the soothsaying god of the vine, which he was, and in this way absorb those ecstatic instinctual forces of Christianity for the one purpose of making the cult and the sacred myth what they once were–a drunken feast of joy where man regained the ethos and holiness of an animal.²⁶

 

The Key to Understanding Jung: the Demonic

One of the "discoveries" of Jung is called synchronicity, "the meaningful coincidence of events not causally related" (e.g., mirror breaking, picture falling, or clock stopping when the owner dies²⁷), which can have a perfectly simple causal explanation if one does not stubbornly deny the existence of evil spirits and their ability and eagerness to interfere in human affairs. An example of a "meaningful coincidence" is this one from Jung himself:

An old peasant discovered that two of his cows had evidently been bewitched and had got their heads in the same halter. "How did that happen?" asked his small son. "Boy, one does not talk about such things," replied his father.²⁸

There is a lot of evidence of demonic influences on Jung throughout his life which he recorded in his memoirs,²⁹ but apparently "one does not talk about such things." They are sidestepped by most of Jung's commentators. Since it would have been inconceivable for Jung to admit in his professional writings that he had regular contacts with evil spirits most of his life, he prudently delayed the publication of his memoirs until after his death. It is revealing that his memoirs "became something of a counter-culture classic" (U.S. News & World Report, 1992) and was considered "one of the primary spiritual documents of the twentieth century."³⁰ His followers do not talk about such things because they believe that a part of your psyche can become an independent person with whom you can converse. Most of his critics never talk about such things either because they refuse to believe in evil spirits.

Jung was subjected to a pivotal dream between the ages of three and four which influenced his whole life and career. Later in life, he alluded to this dream, which also illustrated his Gnostic tendencies:

[Jung's father] had to quarrel with somebody, so he did it with his family and himself. Why didn't he do it with God, the dark author of all created things who alone was responsible for the sufferings of the world? God would assuredly have sent him by way of an answer one of those magical, infinitely profound dreams which he had sent to me even without being asked, and which sealed my fate [emphasis added].³¹

To understand the significance for Jung of this crucial dream, this unsought demonic revelation, it is important to know that Jung's parents were Protestants and his father a parson of the Swiss Reformed (Calvinist) Church. Eight of his uncles were Protestant clergymen, too. We know the background of this dream was his preoccupation with Jesus Christ and the image of a Jesuit priest. The complex dream itself contained pagan sexual symbolism plus the cryptic words of his mother: "Yes, just look at him. That is the man-eater."³² This dream remained vivid and preoccupied him all his life: "Who was it speaking in me? Whose mind devised it? What kind of superior intelligence was at work? Who talked of problems far beyond my knowledge?" He always tried to construct explanations for it, most of them blasphemous ones. His gradual conclusions determined many important aspects of his professional career:

• Dream came from God, so it had to have deep significance. Later on, Jung would say dreams always came from the psyche.

• Dream was evil. God is source of evil (i.e., a Gnostic tendency).

• Dream was frightening. He kept it a secret till age 65.³³

• Dream was incomprehensible. For a while he had no idea what it meant.

• He had to find the meaning of dream. This led him into depth psychology.

• He was chosen to be the keeper of a great secret. Jung's later interpretation was that he was chosen to be the bringer of light to mankind.

• True religion was the "certain and immediate experience" of God (i.e., like his dream).

• He could find no explanation for his dream among the few Protestant theology books of his father, therefore, theology, dogmas, and rituals were dead and have nothing to do with true religion. ]ung never accepted metaphysics and theology as genuine ways of knowing.

• As instructed by later dreams, he eventually concluded Christianity was mere mythology. Jung believed his personal understanding of Christianity superior to the "common" one (another Gnostic tendency).

In 1898 unexplainable phenomena began occurring in the parental home.³⁴ A solid walnut table split in a most unlikely manner, sounding like a pistol shot, witnessed by most of the family. Two weeks later a single deafening noise signaled a steel knife having broken into several pieces. Jung said that these things "influenced him profoundly."

A few weeks later I heard of certain relatives who had been engaged for some time in table-turning, and also a medium, a young girl of fifteen and a half. The group had been thinking of having me meet the medium, who produced somnambulistic states and spiritualistic phenomena. When I heard this, I immediately thought of the strange manifestations in our house, and conjectured that they might be somehow connected with this medium. I therefore began attending the regular seances which my relatives held every Saturday evening."³⁵

These séances lasted for two years, and resulted in Jung's doctoral dissertation, On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena: A Psychiatric Study (1902). He got married in 1903, and the following happened soon after his marriage:

I too have this archaic nature, and in me it is linked with the gift–not always pleasant–of seeing people and things as they are....This was something I did not realize until much later, when some very strange things happened to me. For instance, there was the time when I recounted the life story of a man without knowing him. It was at the wedding of a friend of my wife's; the bride and her family were all entirely unknown to me. During the meal I was sitting opposite a middle-aged gentleman with a long, handsome beard, who had been introduced to me as a barrister. We were having an animated conversation about criminal psychology. In order to answer a particular question of his, I made up a story to illustrate it, embellishing it with all sorts of details. While I was telling my story, I noticed that a quite different expression came over the man's face, and a silence fell on the table. Very much abashed, I stopped speaking. Thank heavens we were already at the dessert, so I soon stood up and went into the lounge of the hotel. There I withdrew into a corner, lit a cigar, and tried to think over the situation. At this moment one of the other guests who had been sitting at my table came over and asked reproachfully, "How did you ever come to commit such a frightful indiscretion?" "Indiscretion?" "Why yes, that story you told." "But I made it all up!"

To my amazement and horror it turned out that I had told the story of the man opposite me, exactly and in all its details. I also discovered, at this moment, that I could no longer remember a single word of the story–even to this day I have been unable to recall it.³⁶

Freud hoped to turn Jung into his successor, and instructed him accordingly:

"My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most essential thing of all. You see, we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark."...In some astonishment I asked him, "A bulwark–against what?" to which he replied, "Against the black tide of mud"–and here he hesitated for a moment, then added, "of occultism." This was the thing that struck at the heart of our friendship. I knew that I would never be able to accept such an attitude.³⁷

The occasion which first set Jung on the track of the collective unconscious is worth relating, because it seems to be a significant example of "meaningful coincidences":

In 1906 he was treating a patient who believed that he could see a tube coming out of the sun and it is through this tube that the wind comes to us; four years later scholars discovered the Greek text of a Mithraic liturgy which accounts for the origin of the wind in the same way as Jung's patient. From that moment onwards Jung began to be alive to the number of times that he found symbols and images in his patients almost identical with the symbols, images, and myths from the ancient peoples and the literature and folklore of many countries. On the basis of these similarities Jung postulated that there is a collective unconscious which each of us inherits from the past of our race. The contents of this collective unconscious may be symbolized in our dreams just as they have been symbolized in the myths of our ancestors, and this information allows us to argue from the meaning of the myths to the meaning of our dreams. Thus we are in a position, so to speak, to interpret what is going on in the unconscious.³⁸

By 1909, the demons were already doing his bidding:

It interested me to hear Freud's views on precognition and on parapsychology in general. When I visited him in Vienna in 1909 I asked him what he thought of these matters. Because of his materialistic prejudice, he rejected this entire complex of questions as nonsensical, and did so in terms of so shallow a positivism that I had difficulty in checking the sharp retort on the tip of my tongue. It was some years before he recognized the seriousness of parapsychology and acknowledged the factuality of "occult" phenomena.

While Freud was going on this way, I had a curious sensation. It was as if my diaphragm were made of iron and were becoming red-hot–a glowing vault. And at that moment there was such a loud report in the bookcase which stood right next to us that we both started up in alarm, fearing the thing was going to topple over on us. I said to Freud: "There, that is an example of so-called catalytic exteriorization phenomenon."

"Oh come," he exclaimed. "That is sheer bosh."

"It is not," I replied. "You are mistaken, Herr Professor. And to prove my point, I now predict that in a moment there will be another such loud report!"

Sure enough, no sooner had I said the words than the same detonation went off in the bookcase. To this day I do not know what gave me this certainty. But I knew beyond all doubt that the report would come again. Freud only stared aghast at me. I do not know what was in his mind, or what his look meant. In any case, this incident aroused his mistrust of me, and I had the feeling that I had done something against him. I never afterward discussed the incident with him.³⁹

After his break with Freud in 1911, which represented a great crisis in his life, his "spirit guide"–New Age parlance for an evil spirit–made himself manifest:

Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I....Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight. He was a mysterious figure to me. At times he seemed to me quite real, as if he were a living personality. I went walking up and down the garden with him, and to me he was what the Indians call a guru....

I could have wished for nothing better than a real, live guru, someone possessing superior knowledge and ability, who would have disentangled for me the involuntary creations of my imagination. This task was undertaken by the figure of Philemon, whom in this respect I had willy-nilly to recognize as my psychagogue. And the fact was that he conveyed to me many an illuminating idea.

More than fifteen years later a highly cultivated elderly Indian visited me, a friend of Gandhi's, and we talked about Indian education–in particular, about the relationship between guru and chela. I hesitantly asked him whether he could tell me anything about the person and character of his own guru, whereupon he replied in a matter-of-fact tone, "Oh yes, he was Shankaracharya."

"You don't mean the commentator on the Vedas who died centuries ago?" I asked.

"Yes, I mean him," he said, to my amazement.

"Then you are referring to a spirit?" I asked.

"Of course it was his spirit," he agreed.

At that moment I thought of Philemon.

"There are ghostly gurus too," he added. "Most people have living gurus. But there are always some who have a spirit for teacher."

This information was both illuminating and reassuring to me. Evidently, then, I had not plummeted right out of the human world, but had only experienced the sort of thing that could happen to others who made similar efforts [emphasis added].⁴⁰

In 1935 he started building Bollingen Tower, a stone building by a lake, which "represented himself." After the death of his wife in 1955, he so considered Bollingen his true home that he had "Shrine of Philemon" inscribed over its entrance.⁴¹

Another long quote is needed to show that one of Jung's "great scientific discoveries," the so-called anima, also involved a demon:

When I was writing down these fantasies, I once asked myself, "What am I really doing? Certainly this has nothing to do with science. But then what is it?" Whereupon a voice within me said, "It is art." I was astonished. It had never entered my head that what I was writing had any connection with art. Then I thought, "Perhaps my unconscious is forming a personality that is not me, but which is insisting on coming through to expression." I knew for a certainty that the voice had come from a woman. I recognized it as the voice of a patient, a talented psychopath who had a strong transference to me. She had become a living figure within my mind. Obviously what I was doing wasn't science. What then could it be but art? It was as though these were the only alternatives in the world. That is the way a woman's mind works.

I said very emphatically to this voice that my fantasies had nothing to do with art, and I felt a great inner resistance. No voice came through, however, and I kept on writing. Then came the next assault, and again the same assertion: "That is art." This time I caught her and said, "No, it is not art! On the contrary, it is nature," and prepared myself for an argument. When nothing of the sort occurred, I reflected that the "woman within me" did not have the speech centers I had. And so I suggested that she use mine. She did so and came through with a long statement.

I was greatly intrigued by the fact that a woman should interfere with me from within. My conclusion was that she must be the "soul," in the primitive sense, and I began to speculate on the reasons why the name "anima" was given to the soul. Why was it thought of as feminine? Later I came to see that this inner feminine figure plays a typical, or archetypal, role in the unconscious of a man, and I called her the "anima."⁴²

In 1916, Jung received the best-documented help from demons:

It began with restlessness, but I did not know what it meant or what "they" wanted of me. There was an ominous atmosphere all around me. I had the strange feeling that the air was filled with ghostly entities. Then it was as if my house began to be haunted. My eldest daughter saw a white figure passing through the room. My second daughter, independently of her elder sister, related that twice in the night her blanket had been snatched away; and that same night my nine-year-old son had an anxiety dream.

Around five o'clock in the afternoon on Sunday the front doorbell began ringing frantically. It was a bright summer day; the two maids were in the kitchen, from which the open square outside the front door could be seen. Everyone immediately looked to see who was there, but there was no one in sight. I was sitting near the doorbell, and not only heard it but saw it moving. We all simply stared at one another. The atmosphere was thick, believe me! Then I knew that something had to happen. The whole house was filled as if there were a crowd present, crammed full of spirits. They were deep right up to the door, and the air was so thick it was scarcely possible to breathe. As for myself, I was all a-quiver with the question: "For God's sake, what in the world is this?" Then they cried out in chorus, "We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought."

That is the beginning of the Septem Sermones. Then it began to flow out of me, and in the course of three evenings the thing was written. As soon as I took up the pen, the whole ghostly assemblage evaporated. The room quieted and the atmosphere cleared. The haunting was over.⁴³

Only the second edition of the memoirs includes this title:

Septem Sermones ad Mortuos. 1916

THE SEVEN SERMONS TO THE DEAD WRITTEN
BY BASILIDES IN ALEXANDRIA, THE CITY
WHERE THE EAST TOUCHETH THE WEST.

Transcribed by Carl Gustav Jung.⁴⁴

 

Basilides [one of the "dark figures" of Gnosticism–Ed.] was born in Syria, and he taught in Alexandria about the years A.D. 133-155. The Septem Sermones were given to Jung by what we today call "trance channeling." The Sermons contain

hints or anticipation of ideas that were to figure later in his scientific writings, more particularly concerning the polaristic nature of the psyche, of life in general, and of all psychological statements.⁴⁵

Jung always understood the dangers of studying the unconscious and the "disordered imaginings" of the human mind: "...[T]he approach of the unconscious induces a panic fear in civilized people, not least an account of the menacing analogy with insanity."⁴⁶ Not surprisingly, he did fear for his own sanity:

For me, reality meant scientific comprehension. I had to draw concrete conclusions from the insights the unconscious had given me–and that was to become a life work....But the unconscious contents could have driven me out of my wits.⁴⁷

Jung had a life-long fascination with Nietzsche, but he realized the need to distance himself from Nietzsche⁴⁸ for fear that he might be like him and therefore suffer the same fate. Nietzsche (1844-1900) became hopelessly insane towards the end of his life. [See "Humility and the Great-Souled Man," The Angelus, August 2000–Ed.] Nietzsche's little poem titled "Sils Maria" shows us how close his Zarathustra was to Jung's Philemon:

Here I sat, waiting–not for anything–
Beyond Good and Evil, fancying
Now light, now shadows, all a game,
All lake, all noon, all time without all aim.
Then, suddenly, friends, one turned into two–
And Zarathustra walked in view.

His remarks at the end of his life are telling:

All my writings may be considered tasks imposed from within; their source was a fateful compulsion. What I wrote were things that assailed me from within myself. I permitted the spirit that moved me to speak out....There was a daimon in me, and in the end its presence proved decisive. It overpowered me, and if I was at times ruthless it was because I was in the grip of the daimon.⁴⁹

In 1919, while writing The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirits, Jung was still adamant: "But in all this I see no proof whatever of the existence of real spirits." In 1948, he added a footnote to a revised and expanded edition commenting on this sentence: "After collecting psychological experiences from many people and many countries for 50 years, I no longer feel as certain as I did in 1919, when I wrote this sentence."⁵⁰ In his late professional writings⁵¹and in his memoirs there is no evidence that he ever admitted the reality of spirits. For him, they always remained merely "psychic facts."

Fifty years ago Freud looked more influential and destructive of religion than Jung. Today it looks just the other way around. The apparent demonic inspiration of the originally innocent-looking ideas of Jung may explain their more lasting effect.

Next we examine Jung's analytical psychology, the "scientific basis" for his destructive ideas. 

 

Analytical Psychology

In Jung's forehead here is his chiselled relief of one of his imaginings which he called, "The Trickster," carved by Jung on the wall at Bollingen, the dream castle he built from 1923-56.

A disciple of Jung, Jolande Jacobi, says of Jung: "...[H]is edifice is no abstract theory born of the speculative intellect, but a structure resting entirely upon the solid foundation of experience."⁵²

Dreams were the most important "raw material" of Jung's work and theories.⁵³ Every dream is treated by Jung as a direct, personal, and meaningful communication to the dreamer, as he said: "I hold that the dream is a spontaneous self-portrayal, in symbolic form, of the actual situation in the unconscious."⁵⁴ It was his naive view of dreams–different from that of Freud–that ultimately made him a plaything of demons:

I was never able to agree with Freud that the dream is a facade behind which its meaning lies hidden–a meaning already known but maliciously, so to speak, withheld from consciousness. To me dreams are a part of nature, which harbors no intention to deceive, but expresses something as best it can.⁵⁵

What the last sentence expresses is merely a naive belief. Philosophers since Plato have treated dreams as due to the imagination no longer under the control of the intellect or the senses. Unless they are sure to have come from God, the Catholic Church urges us to ignore dreams precisely because they are so easily manipulated by evil spirits. Dreams, however, are the foundation of Jung's "empirical science."

 

The Conscious and the Unconscious

Jung summarizes his analytical psychology⁵⁶ by introducing the reader to the unconscious, to the archetypes and symbols that form its language, and to the dreams by which it communicates. For Jung, the psyche was composed of the conscious and the unconscious.

The "personal unconscious" was used by others before Jung. Freud is usually credited with its first detailed examination, although their definitions differ. In 1937 Mortimer Adler⁵⁷ and in 1938 Jacques Maritain⁵⁸ gave detailed evaluations of Freud. Although severely critical of Freud, both state that the existence of the personal unconscious as defined by Freud must be admitted. In his Moral Philosophy⁵⁹ Maritain explains how some of the findings of Freud about the personal unconscious can be reconciled with morality.

"Jung's definition of the unconscious is very different, and I have never seen a responsible Thomist evaluation of it." A footnote by Mortimer Adler states: "The theories of Schopenhauer and Bergson have a bearing on the form which the doctrine of the unconscious takes in Jung."⁶⁰ Maritain writes in his Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry:

My contention, then, is that everything depends, in the issue we are discussing, on the recognition of the existence of the spiritual unconscious, or rather preconscious, of which Plato and the ancient wise men were well aware, and the disregard of which in favor of the Freudian unconscious alone is a sign of the dullness of our times.⁶¹

Again, only a footnote is devoted to Jung, comparing the definitions of Jung with those of Freud.⁶²

The ideas of Jung are intimately connected with evolution theory, extending the idea of evolution from body to psyche:

Just as the body has an anatomical prehistory of millions of years, so also does the psychic system. Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The "newness" in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character.⁶³

Whereas Freud's personal unconscious is related only to the animal nature of man, Jung's definitions both have a spiritual dimension. Since the human spiritual soul is a special creation, the (supposed) connection with evolution theory is especially problematical for Jung.

 

Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

The "collective unconscious" on the other hand, is an invention of Jung, central to his theories. This concept, however, is a very dubious one. In dreams and fantasies of his patients Jung found ideas whose origins could not be traced to the individual's personal experience:

There are many symbols, however, ...that are not individual but collective in their nature and origin. These are chiefly religious images. The believer assumes that they are of divine origin, that they have been revealed to man. The skeptic says flatly that they have been invented. Both are wrong....[T]hey are in fact "collective representations," emanating from primeval dreams and creative fantasies. As such, these images are involuntary spontaneous manifestations and by no means intentional inventions.⁶⁴

The resemblance of these ideas to religious and mythical themes led Jung to refer to them as primordial images or archetypes (e.g., the persona, the shadow, the animalanimus, the mother, the child, the wise old man, the self, etc.]. For example, to Jung the self is a representation of the "god within us." Jung thought this collective unconscious was shared by all people and therefore universal. However, since it is un-conscious, not all people are able to tap into it. The collective unconscious therefore consists of the inheritance of the psychic experiences of mankind.

Of course, Jung is only concerned with phenomena. The possibility of making observations and linking them together satisfies him, but what things are-in-themselves does not interest him. The Thomist is justified in wondering how this "inheritance of the psychic experiences of mankind" gets transmitted to the individual. My dreams may derive from my own personal experiences, they may come from God or from demons, but how would "the psychic experiences of mankind" be able to influence my dreams? The problem is that the collective unconscious has a spiritual component, and spiritual things cannot be inherited. Saying that the collective unconscious "is carried by genes" means that the spiritual dimension is overlooked.

The Jungian "solution" should put us on guard: "Jung's collective unconscious is the atemporal realm of archetypes, it operates via synchronicity, or acausally rather than through causal influence, or transmission." The credibility of the collective unconscious would be further reduced if indeed the concept of synchronicity is needed for its explanation.

The collective unconscious is a mere hypothesis resulting from empirical observations of the same symbols recurring in dreams, day-dreams, magical figures and emblems, myths and fairy stories, Gnostic visions, alchemy, automatic writing, and "inspired" utterances. Even secular sources admit that

The question whether the collective unconscious exists cannot be answered by any possible observation or experiment..[i.e., it can never claim to be science–Ed.]. At the root of the problem [with the collective unconscious] lies an ambiguous set of ontological claims. Jung insisted that the contents of the psyche are as real as what exists in the external world....What he means by this remains unclear. Sometimes he seems to have treated the archetypal images as autonomous agents and the collective unconscious as a realm where they dwell.⁶⁵

"The archetypal image as an autonomous agent" easily may even refer to a demon as it is traditionally understood.

Martin D'Arcy, S J., helps us sort out the confusion. In 1931, he gave a rare and clear explanation of "psycho-analytic philosophy," very critical of the mistaken notion that beliefs are solely the products–"rationalizations"–of desire:

If the mind be of the stuff of matter, or so closely interwoven with the body as to be nothing else than an expression of it, then there is an end to truth, and the whole building of science and philosophy comes tumbling down. Now we have a more insidious foe, who is more within than without. He says that of course there is life that is other than physical....But with the development of knowledge we have at last reached a stage in which we can give a true account of this psychic life and even state it scientifically [psychoanalysis–Ed.]. The clue to the truth is the recognition of the all-importance of desire [emphasis added]. Whereas before it was thought that the combination of thought and desire [i.e., intellect and will] left both activities autonomous, now investigation proved that desire is not only an active agent but the sole efficacious agent; where thought was supposed to act calmly and disinterestedly we now know that desire was at work in subterranean ways.⁶⁶

Fr. D'Arcy examines modern psychology as it is being turned surreptitiously into philosophy:

...[Modern psychology is] a hypothesis, which has nothing except a provisional and practical value, has been erected into a philosophy. It is this philosophy which we must examine, not in its entirety but so far as it bears on the problem of belief. The psycho-analyst tends to regard what he calls the Unconscious as of more importance than the conscious. The Unconscious is the Stock Exchange, and the conscious is little more than the newspaper report of its proceedings, with the inner history of what has happened left out. The life of mind is thought of in terms very similar to that of the energy of the body, only it is psychical energy.

This is...little more than a metaphor. There is a danger in substantiating and materializing what we have to recognize as just not substance. Both consciousness and unconsciousness are made into subjects, and the various energies are thought of as tides or clusters of ferees which act with a power of their own. Much of this is a world of make-believe.

...[I]deas exist only as thought of; they have no separate existence, no manner of behaving of their own....Summarily, then, the new psychology has nothing to teach us about the nature of truth....

This explains how such faulty thinking allowed Jung "the crucial insight that things happen in the psyche that are not produced by conscious intention: they possess a life of their own." So he routinely conversed with demons thinking they were part of his being while stubbornly insisting: 'The world of gods and spirits is truly nothing but the collective unconscious inside me" (Commentary on the Tibetan Book of the Dead).⁶⁷ "Jung is open to criticism for treating the collective unconscious not...an as yet untested hypothesis but as something whose existence is an established fact."⁶⁸ Half a century later, hundreds of books are being published which treat the collective unconscious as an established fact.

The similarity of Jung with Darwin, and Jungian Psychology with evolution theory is striking: a nebulous hypothesis–the collective unconscious–becomes a "cornerstone" of modern man's thinking.

 

Jung and His Followers

In a seminar on Analytical Psychology (London, 1990), John Costello classified Jung's followers into three groups.

Since Jung was a psychologist/psychiatrist, the first group are themselves academic psychologists and psychotherapists.

A second group are the "religious Jungians." Despite all protestations to the contrary, Jung was a "closet" theologian. Books on Jungian psychology are found in the religion departments of many libraries. The religious Jungians are often found among the clergy, or among psychologists who once were priests or clergymen. It is their hope that Jungian psychology will rejuvenate the teachings and rituals of the mainline Christian churches.

A final category are the "shamanistic Jungians." Many agree that Jung was a shaman. Synchronistic events seemed to happen wherever he was present. Astrology interested him greatly and many of his experiences seemed to have occurred outside time and space. The shamanistic Jungians work mostly in the Jungian "underground" and are probably the most numerous of the three groups. They often experience para-psychological events and dreams for them are not only a reflection of the psyche but function as oracles which have portents for the future, otherwise known as the sin of "divination." Some of them attempt "rebirthing," and most of them are very close to the New Age Movement.

 

Jungian vs. Catholic Conceptions of Man

Modern depth psychology suggests that although people like to think of themselves as rational and self-determining, they are actually driven by powerful unconscious forces. Jung states specifically:

I do not believe that reason can be the supreme law of human behavior, if only because experience shows that in decisive moments behavior is precisely not guided by reason but by overpowering unconscious impulses (Letter 12, Dec. 1945).

According to Jung, the purpose of life is "to build the wholeness of personality"⁶⁹–a process determined by the unconscious. And close to the end of his life he says: "As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being." This shows the influence of Schopenhauer.⁷⁰

This cannot be reconciled with Catholicism, which holds that the end of man is eternal life and the purpose of this life is reaching perfection and sanctity. Pope Pius XII warned psychologists about this:

You, psychologists and psychic healers, must bear this fact in mind: the existence of each psychic faculty and function is explained by the end of the whole man. What constitutes man is principally the soul, the substantial form of his nature. From it, ultimately, flows all the vital activity of man. In it are rooted all the psychic dynamisms with their own proper structure and their organic law. It is the soul which nature charges with the government of all man's energies, in so far as these have not yet acquired their final determination.

Given this ontological and psychological fact, it follows that it would be a departure from reality to attempt, in theory or in practice, to entrust the determining role of the whole to one particular factor, for example, to one of the elementary psychic dynamisms and thus install a secondary power at the helm. Those psychic dynamisms may be in the soul, in man. They are not, however, the soul nor the man. They are energies of considerable intensity perhaps, but nature has entrusted their direction to the centerpost, to the spiritual soul endowed with intellect and will, which is normally capable of governing these energies. That these energies may exercise pressure upon one activity does not necessarily signify that they compel it. To deprive the soul of its central place would be to deny an ontological and psychic reality.⁷¹

 

Religion Originates in the Psyche?

To explain the confusion around Jungian psychology pretending to relate to religion and more specifically that the collective unconscious is the ultimate reality from which religion springs, we will analyze the premises and conclusion of this false syllogism:

 

 

Major Premise: All myths originate in the human psyche (most likely, FALSE).

The Jungian approach to mythology rests upon belief in a common human access to the collective unconscious. The individual continually finds himself giving expression to an archetypal symbolism which dominates not only mythology, but also much of the sophisticated literature of the world. The same myths recur in different times and places because all mythology has a common source. Modern man, who has overdeveloped the rational side of his nature, encounters in his dreams the same figures that appear in ancient and primitive mythology. The source of myth, according to Jung, is a universal, primordial psychic reservoir of images and symbols. Jung's explanation is in vogue today as Bishop Stephen Hoeller of Ecclesia Gnostica testifies:

Throughout the 20th century the new scientific discipline of depth psychology has gained much prominence. Among the depth psychologists who have shown a pronounced and informed interest in Gnosticism, a place of signal distinction belongs to C.G. Jung. Jung was instrumental in calling attention to the Nag Hammadi library of Gnostic writings in the 1950's because he perceived the outstanding psychological relevance of Gnostic insights.

The noted scholar of Gnosticism, G. Filoramo, wrote: "Jung's reflections had long been immersed in the thought of the ancient Gnostics to such an extent that he considered them the virtual discoverers of 'depth psychology'... [A]ncient Gnosis, albeit in its form of universal religion, in a certain sense prefigured, and at the same time helped to clarify, the nature of Jungian spiritual therapy." In the light of such recognitions one may ask: "Is Gnosticism a religion or a psychology?" The answer is that it may very well be both [emphasis added].⁷²

Elsewhere Hoeller is even more explicit:

Personally I have devoted the major part of my life to exploring the relationship of Jung's thought to Gnosticism....My studies have convinced me that Jung did not intend to locate the content of Gnostic teachings in the psyche pure and simple. To say that Gnosticism is "nothing but" psychology would have horrified Jung, for he opposed the concept of "nothing but." What made Jung's view radically different from those of his predecessors was simply this: he believed that Gnostic teachings and myths originated in the personal psycho-spiritual experience of the Gnostic sages [emphasis added]. What originates in the psyche bears the imprint of the psyche. Hence the close affinity between Gnosticism and depth psychology.⁷³

But Jung's explanation is not really accepted in anthropology.⁷⁴ There are many other, less incoherent, explanations for the recurrence of mythological themes and symbols. For example, Giambattista Vice's contention is, "The fables of the gods are true histories of customs."

Minor Premise: All religions are myths (FALSE).

Myths can be defined various ways. Chesterton says in The Everlasting Man, "It seems strangely forgotten nowadays that a myth is a work of the imagination and therefore a work of art." Christians usually treated myths as false theological accounts, descriptions of false religions, rivals to the one true theological account. Simply put, myths are much like made-up stories and can be said to have a kind of a truth all made-up stories have: poetical truth. It is true that many religions, including paganism and Gnosticism, are mythologies having only poetical truth. They contain no objective, factual or logical truth. But this does not apply to the Catholic religion, which is factually true, and which, as a consequence, is reconcilable to all other truths: philosophy, science, history, etc.

This false assertion that all religions are myths comes from Jung, who viewed all religions, including Christianity, to be collective mythologies not real in essence but having a real effect on the human personality. This view has been popularized by people like Joseph Campbell, whose book The Power of Myth was based on a popular PBS series he did with Bill Moyers. Typical of Jungians, Campbell uses incessant rhetoric and innuendo but never logically argues his premise that all religions are just misconstrued mythologies.

The second point I wish to make is about a particular characteristic of argumentative method that is common to all the writers of this book–perhaps of all Jungians....Their dialectical method is itself symbolic and often devious. They convince not by means of the narrowly focused spotlight of the syllogism, but by skirting, by repetition, by presenting a recurring view of the same subject seen each time from a slightly different angle–until suddenly the reader who has never been aware of a single conclusive moment of proof finds that he has unknowingly embraced and taken into himself some [pretended–Ed.] truth.⁷⁵

Today there are many urging a Jungian-Christian dialogue. We know how much good a dialogue with Marxism ever did, and what the "long-awaited fruits" of such a dialogue would be. Fr. John P. Dourley, a Jungian analyst, prefers to skip the whole dialogue and go straight to the "long-awaited fruits":

Jung, through his understanding of the religious propensities of the psyche, in league with prominent individuals in the Western mystical tradition, anticipates and fosters a new societal myth and religiosity which is indebted to the very Christianity it works to supersede. The newer myth would be sensitive to the origin of all religion in the psyche and so ground religion, as human resource and threat, in an inescapable dimension of humanity's experience of itself. Such mythic consciousness, through its gracious relativity, would dissolve absolute religious claims, especially but not only among the monotheisms, and so offset the possibility of religious conflict prematurely terminating the joint human venture. Because the supplanting myth would emerge from a deeper level of the human it would also resacralize much that the presiding myth cannot and so give rise to a richer Spirit imbued with a more encompassing embrace.⁷⁶

Conclusion: All religions originate in the human psyche (FALSE).

The grave error contained in this false statement is spreading confusion, undermining the Catholic Faith, and making the world pagan once again. For example, Greek goddesses and gods as the personification of Jungian archetypes is the subject of two popular books, Goddesses in Everywoman (1984) and Gods in Everyman (1989), by Jean Shinoda Bolen, a trained Jungian psychiatrist. In a foreword to Goddesses in Everywoman, Gloria Steinem wrote that "we imagine god and endow her or him with the qualities we need to survive and grow." This is neither science nor religion but merely make-believe, yet an increasingly widespread phenomenon. The warning in 1953 of Pope Pius XII against this wrong conclusion could not have been more clear and emphatic:

If it is stated that this dynamism [in the depth of the psychic being] is at the origin of all religions, that it manifests the element common to all, We know on the contrary that religions, the natural and supernatural knowledge of God and worship of Him, do not proceed from the unconscious or the subconscious, nor from an impulse of the affections, but from the clear and certain knowledge of God by means of His natural and positive revelation. This is the doctrine and the belief of the Church, beginning with the word of God in the Book of Wisdom and the Epistle to the Romans, down to the Encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis (On Modernism) of Our Predecessor, Blessed Pius X.⁷⁷

 

Jung and Religious Experience

Jung is often presented as a "profoundly religious person" who had a "deep religious sense." But for Jung, this was not a matter of faith in the way Catholics understand it. For him religion was nothing except what could be experienced. Late in his life Jung wrote: "My studies offered me nothing but reasons against religious faith, and the charisma of faith itself was denied me. I had to rely on experience alone" (Letter 13, June. 1955).

The Council of Trent boldly affirmed that justifying faith is primarily an intellectual assent to divinely revealed truths. Catholics know that religious experience, if it exists, demands interpretation. The intelligence must intervene to render these experiences and facts intelligible. Since Luther, Protestants have used trust, reliance, confidence, abandonment to denote the essence of their faith, clearly revealing the emphasis on the affective or emotional element to the disparagement of the intellect. The Lutheran "trust" has culminated in Modernism. According to Modernism, our certitude of God's existence is to be based on religious experience. And what is "religious experience"? It is a religious sentiment, a certain intuition of heart, by which we immediately and directly, without the aid of any intermediary, attain the reality of "God." For Jung, "religious experience" primarily meant dreams, which led him to connect religious experience with the symbolic. Since he also held the view that dreams were always honest always carried deep meaning it was almost inevitable that this disposition would make him an instrument of demons.

Jung was about 12 years old, a student in the Gymnasium in Basel, when demons started teaching him "religion" by the following vision:

I saw before me the cathedral, the blue sky. God sits on His golden throne, high above the world–and from under the throne an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral asunder. So that was it! I felt an enormous, an indescribable relief...! wept for happiness and gratitude....

A great many things I had not previously understood became clear to me. That was what my father had not understood....He had taken the Bible's commandments as his guide; he believed in God as the Bible prescribed it. He did not know the immediate living God who stands, omnipotent and free, above His Bible and above His Church.

With the experience of God and the cathedral I at last had something tangible that was part of the great secret [which started with the first great dream–Ed.]....My entire youth can be understood in terms of this secret....My one great achievement during those years was that I resisted the temptation to talk about it with anyone. Thus the pattern of my relationship with the world was already prefigured: today as then I am a solitary, because I know things and must hint at things which other people do not know....⁷⁸

Jung believed only what was "empirically revealed" to him. For example, he did not believe in reincarnation for a long time, but eventually, a few dreams made him change his mind and a few more dreams would have probably made all this "science":

The question of karma is obscure to me, as is also the problem of personal rebirth or of the transmigration of souls. "With a free and open mind" I listen attentively to the Indian doctrine of rebirth, and look around in the world of my own experience to see whether somewhere and somehow there is some authentic sign pointing toward reincarnation. Naturally, I do not count the relatively numerous testimonies, here in the West, to the belief in reincarnation. A belief proves to me only the phenomenon of belief, not the content of the belief. This I must see revealed empirically in order to accept it [emphasis added]. Until a few years ago I could not discover anything convincing in this respect, although I kept a sharp lookout for any such signs. Recently, however, I observed in myself a series of dreams which would seem to describe the process of reincarnation in a deceased person of my acquaintance. But I have never come across any such dreams in other persons, and therefore have no basis for comparison. Since this observation is subjective and unique, I prefer only to mention its existence and not to go into it any further. I must confess, however, that after this experience I view the problem of reincarnation with somewhat different eyes, though without being in a position to assert a definite opinion.⁷⁹

For Jung, dreams and other "empirical revelations" always override and correct every other source of knowledge:

When I wrote the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, it was the dead who addressed crucial questions to me. They came–so they said–"back from Jerusalem, where they found not what they sought." This had surprised me greatly at the time, for according to the traditional [Christian–Ed.] view the dead are possessors of great knowledge. People have the idea that the dead know more than we, for Christian doctrine teaches that in the hereafter we shall "see face to face." Apparently, however, the souls of the dead know only what they knew at the moment of death, and nothing beyond that.⁸⁰

 

Jung and Christianity

Some say, defending Jung, that he was an empirical scientist who wanted to stay within his field and had no thought of talking of God, but only of the god-image that could be seen in the psyche. The implication is, that outside his professional publications, he really did believe in God as He really is, but that is manifestly false. This is Jung describing himself:

I grew up in a house 200 years old, our furniture consisted mostly of pieces about 300 years old, and mentally my hitherto greatest spiritual adventure had been the study of the philosophies of Kant and Schopenhauer. The great news of the day was the work of Charles Darwin. Shortly before this, I had been living with the still medieval concepts of my parents, for whom the world and men were still presided over by divine omnipotence and providence. This world had become antiquated and obsolete. My Christian faith had become relative through its encounter with Eastern religions and Greek philosophy.⁸¹

Jung knew exactly how far his views were from Christianity. According to Aniela Jaffe, editor of the memoirs: "More than once he said grimly, 'They would have burned me as a heretic in the Middle Ages!'"⁸²

But when it comes to details, it is impossible to be certain what is due to ignorance and what is due to malice in Jung, how much he really never knew about Christianity, and how much he knew and deliberately rejected. He considered himself as a critic, defender and reformer of religion, and as a result, he felt free to reinterpret the dogmas of Christianity. "Even now I can do no more than tell stories–'mythologize.'"⁸³

Myths comprise the "theology" of pagan religions: some myths have for their object the generation of the world, others have bearing on the essential realities of life, for example, cultivation of the earth, work of the weaver and the smith, first moments of the newborn child and the onset of puberty, marriage and child-birth, death and burial. In the mythical realm gods and heroes perform eternal acts which men repeat. Primitive, cosmic religions are bound up with permanent patterns, and only what is repeated has value. But Jung refused to accept the obvious, stated here by Jean Danielou:

Christian biblical revelation owes nothing to myths. It deals with unique divine acts, unprecedented and unfounded in human life. The veneration of Mary is not, as Jung claims, that of the feminine element in divinity, like the virgin mothers of Hellenism or Hinduism, but it rests exclusively on her role at a unique moment in the history of salvation. The Cross of Christ is not a cosmic symbol of the four dimensions, but the wretched gibbet on which the Savior of the world was hanged. The vine is not the symbol of Dionysian immortality, but that of the people of Israel planted by Yahweh. The resurrection of Christ is not the expression of the cyclical triumph of life over death in the spring of every year, but the unique event which, once for all, introduced man into the sphere of the life of the Trinity....Christ died and rose again once, on behalf of all. Adonis, the symbol of biological life, dies every autumn and is reborn every spring. It is with Christianity that time assumes a value as the locus where a divine plan is worked out.⁸⁴

Of course, since Catholic doctrine is rich in poetic possibilities, the Catholic art it inspired is vast as an ocean. Since Catholic dogma has remained unaltered in all ages and in all lands, the imaginative constructs, symbols, allegories, and similes germinated from that dogma were kept in harmony with it. The numberless symbols of the Blessed Virgin Mary in art alone give the lie to the speculations of Jung. Catholic symbols were derived from Catholic dogma, not the other way around.

In addition to Jung's large-scale studies of Catholic themes, Christ, a Symbol of the Self*' and Transformation Symbolism in the Mass*, his writings are full of comments on Catholic themes, treating details of the Catholic religion as "mythology." To a Catholic, these are blasphemous. A few examples are illustrative:

In the case of Christ the sins of the world are the cause of suffering, and the suffering of the Christian is the general answer. This leads to the inescapable question: Who is responsible for these sins? In the final analysis it is God who created the world and its sins, and who therefore became Christ in order to suffer the fate of humanity.⁸⁷

It would be a serious misunderstanding to regard as "mere chance" the fact that Jesus, the carpenter's son, proclaimed the gospel and became the savior of the world. He must have been a person of singular gifts to have been able so completely to express and to represent the general, though unconscious, expectations of his age.⁸⁸

[People] do not realize that a myth is dead if it no longer lives and grows. Our myth has become mute, and gives no answer. The fault lies not in it as it is set down in the Scriptures, but solely in us, who have not developed it further, who rather have suppressed any such attempts. The original version of the myth offers ample points of departure and possibilities for development. For example, the words are put into Christ's mouth: "Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves." For what purpose do men need the cunning of serpents? And what is the link between this cunning and the innocence of the dove? "Except ye become as little children...." Who gives thought to what children are like in reality? By what morality did the Lord justify the taking of the ass which he needed in order to ride in triumph into Jerusalem? How was it that, shortly afterward, he put on a display of childish bad temper and cursed the fig tree?⁸⁹

Jung says that "Faust was plainly a bit of a windbag,"⁹⁰ a description that fits Jung much better.

For Jung, real truth was what he received in his demonic "revelations," and he was convinced that Christianity should be adjusted to his "superior truth."

I prefer the term "unconscious," knowing that I might equally well speak of "God" or "daimon" if I wished to express myself in mythic language..."daimon" and "God" are synonyms for the unconscious–that is to say, we know just as much or just as little about them as about the latter. People only believe they know much more about them–and for certain purposes that belief is far more useful and effective than a scientific concept. The great advantage of the concepts "daimon" and "God" lies in making possible...a personification of it.⁹¹

He kept repeating that he had no doctrine and no philosophical system, that he only reported "empirical facts." Just prior to his death, Jung wrote:

I cannot define for you what God is. I can only say that my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man, and that this pattern has at its disposal the greatest of all his energies for transformation and transfiguration of his natural being. Not only the meaning of his life but his renewal and his institutions depend on his conscious relationship with this pattern in his collective unconscious.

So the meaning of man's life depends not on his relationship with God, but on his relationship with the "God-image" in his psyche. Jung spent his last years exploring this relationship between individual man and the pattern of God in the human spirit. He was convinced that our spent selves and worn-out societies could not renew themselves without renewing their concept of God and so their whole relationship with it. Since, according to Jung, both Yahweh and Christ lack wholeness, they lack the dark side, the element of evil, one can imagine the blasphemies such "renewal" would lead to.

 

"Wholeness": Uniting Good and Evil

The Gnostic understanding of evil is flawed. According to Jean Guitton:

The Gnostic cherishes the hallucination of defilement, which is very different from the consciousness of sin. For defilement is essentially like a spot on a garment, it is outside of myself, while sin is within me: my conscience tells me that I have to answer for my actions. The success of psychoanalysis is due to the fact that it transforms a sin into a stain, confession into riddance, the examination of conscience into an analysis of the contents of consciousness, the confessor into a physician: psychoanalysis gnosticizes.⁹²

Although generally Jung had a great affinity with Gnosticism, when it came to evil, his ideas were not Gnostic. His theory about individuation (that is, being "made whole"; to become a "whole person"; the "realization of self") implies that one's personality should incorporate a series of polar opposites: rationality and irrationality; the animal and the spiritual; the masculine and the feminine, and also good and evil. "Everything requires for its existence its opposite, or it fades into nothingness."⁹³ This key idea was certainly inspired by the demons because it is in the Septem Sermones.⁹⁴It became one of the cornerstones of Jung's thinking.

We must beware of thinking of good and evil as absolute opposites. The criterion of ethical action can no longer consist in the simple view that good has the force of a categorical imperative, while so-called evil can resolutely be shunned. Recognition of the reality of evil necessarily relativizes the good and the evil likewise, converting both into halves of a paradoxical whole. In practical terms this means that good and evil are no longer so self-evident. We have to realize that each represents a judgment....For moral evaluation is always founded upon the apparent certitudes of a moral code which pretends to know precisely what is good and what is evil. But once we know how uncertain the foundation is, ethical decision becomes a subjective, creative act.⁹⁵

His idea of "the supreme god, Abraxas" is in Sermo III: "Abraxas begetteth truth and lying, good and evil, light and darkness, in the same word and in the same act. Wherefore is Abraxas terrible."⁹⁶This is obviously not "empirical science" but false philosophy: "For St. Thomas, it is impossible that contradictories should exist together," writes Martin D'Arcy, S.J.⁹⁷

One must read the memoirs to see how deeply ingrained these ideas became in Jung. For example, while commenting on Goethe's Faust, in which Faust sells his soul to the Devil, Mephistopheles, Jung writes:

To that extent Goethe became, in my eyes, a prophet. But I could not forgive him for having dismissed Mephistopheles by a mere trick, by a bit of jiggery-pokery. For me that was too theological, too frivolous and irresponsible, and I was deeply sorry that Goethe too had fallen for those cunning devices by which evil is rendered innocuous.⁹⁸ The dichotomy of Faust-Mephistopheles came together within myself into a single person, and I was that person.⁹⁹

Freedom from moral obligations, confusing good and evil, and embracing both in order to become "whole," are great attractions of occult practices, which explains why Jung is revered by the more knowledgeable representatives of the New Age Movement.

 

Conclusion

With the Catholic hierarchy appearing to have a death-wish for the Church and the world abandoning Christianity, mankind is becoming increasingly irrational. The extermination of rational thought and reliance on emotions and imagination results in a spiritual chaos in which good and evil, rational and irrational are confusedly mingled. Gnosticism and "the coming pagan resurgence under the banner of depth psychology"¹⁰⁰ demonstrate this beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Our Lord has said that the devil is a liar and the father of lies. All the temptations that assail mankind are at his disposal and at his control. No matter what their kind, all of them tend towards untruth, unreality, and illusion. Replacing the Catholic Truth with make-believe religions that are mere products of the psyche will have disastrous consequences, because their essence is untruth, unreality, and illusion.

C.S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters (1941) summarized the whole problem with uncanny accuracy. Screwtape, a senior devil, is instructing his nephew, Wormwood, a junior devil, on how to deal with human beings:

We are really faced with a cruel dilemma. When the humans disbelieve in our existence we lose all the pleasing results of direct terrorism and we make no magicians. On the other hand, when they believe in us, we cannot make them materialists and sceptics. At least, not yet. I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalise and mythologise their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, a belief in us, (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy [God]. The "Life Force," the worship of sex, and some aspect of Psychoanalysis, may here prove useful. If once we can produce our perfect work–the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls "Forces" while denying the existence of "spirits"–then the end of the war will be in sight.¹⁰¹

Dr. Gyula Mago was born in 1938 in Hungary and raised a Catholic. He lived under Communist rule for 20 years. Dr. Mago obtained his Ph.D. from Cambridge University, England, in 1970, and was a professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1970-1999). He presently lives in retirement in Durham, NC, and assists at the Latin Mass at Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in Raleigh, NC. There he presides over the meetings of the League of the Kingship of Christ.

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1. C. G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self (Mentor Books, 1958), pp. 48-9.

2. C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (Harvest Books, 1933), pp. 204-207.

3. lbid., p. 215.

4. lbid., p. 215.

5. Malachi Martin, Hostage to the Devil: The Possession and Exorcism of Five Living Americans (Reader's Digest Press, 1976), p. 386.

6.   Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, pp. 119, 120.

7. J. P. Arendzen, "Gnosticism," Catholic Encyclopedia  (1909), Vol. 6, p. 594.

8. Stephen Hoeller, The Gnostic World View: A Brief Summary of Gnosticism (http: //www.gnosis.org/gnintro. htm).

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Emery Clark, William Blake: The Book of Urizen (University of Miami Press, 1966), pp. 13-14.

18. C. G. Jung, Memories. Dreams, Reflections, revised ed. (Vintage Books, 1989), p. 201.

19. Ibid., p. 209.

20. A. D. Tanquerey, A Manual of Dogmatic Theology (Desclee, 1959), pp. 16-17, and Alston, William, "Psychological Explanations of Religion," Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 7 (Macmillan, 1967).

21. Alasdair MacIntyre, "Jung," Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 3 (Macmillan, 1967).

22. Ibid.

23. Erich Fromm, "C. G. Jung: Prophet of the Unconscious," Scientific American (1963), p. 209.

24. C. G. Jung, Dreams, Bollingen Series (Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 64.

25. Jung, C. G. (1910) The Freud-Jung Letters, edited by William McGuirc (Hogarth & Routledge & Regan Paul, 1974), Letter 178J.

26. Richard Noll, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement (Free Press, 1997), p. 188.

27. C. G. Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (Dell, 1964) p. 41.

28. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 103.

29. Ibid.

30. Noll, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement.

31. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 92.

32. Ibid., pp. 11-15.

33. Ibid., p. 41.

34. Ibid., pp. 104-6.

35. Ibid., pp. 106-7.

36. Ibid., pp. 51-2.

37. Ibid., p. 150.

38. Donald Nicholl, Recent Thought in Focus (Sheed & Ward, 1953), p. 209.

39. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 155-6.

40. Ibid., pp. 183-4.

41. Ibid., p. 235.

42. Ibid., pp. 185-6.

43. Ibid., pp. 190-1.

44. Ibid., Appendix V, pp. 378-390.

45. Ibid., p. 378.

46. Jung, Dreams, p. 126.

47. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 188,189.

48. Ibid., pp. 177, 189.

49. Ibid., pp. 222, 356.

50. C. G. Jung, Psychology and the Occult, Bollingen Series (Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 125.

51. Jung, C. G., Psychology and the Occult, Bellinger Series (Princeton Univ. Press, 1981), p. 153.

52. Jolande Jacobi, The Psychology of C. G. Jung (Yale University Press, 1966), p. 2.

53. Jung, Dreams.

54. Ibid., p. 49.

55. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 161.

56. Jung, Man and His Symbols.

57. Mortimer Adler, What Man Has Made of Man: A Study of the Consequences of Platonism and Positivism in Psychology (Frederick Ungar 1957).

58. Jacques Maritain, Freudianism and Psychoanalysis in Scholasticism and Politics (Image, 1960).

59. Jacques Maritain, Moral Philosophy (Charles Scribner & Sons, 1964), pp. 450-1.

60. Adler, What Man Has Made of Man, p. 116.

61. Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, Bollingen Series, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 91.

62. Ibid., p. 92.

63. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 348, 235.

64. Jung, Man and His Symbols, p. 43.

65. MacIntyre, Alasdair, "Jung," Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 3 (Macmillan, 1967).

66. M. C. D'Arcy, The Nature of Belief (Herder, 1958 [first published in 1931]), pp. 54-58.

67. C. G. Jung, Psyche and Symbol: A Selection from the Writings of C. G. Jung (Anchor Original, 1958), p. 300.

68. MacIntyre, "Jung."

69. Jacobi, The Psychology of C. G. Jung, p. 145.

70. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 326.

71. Pope Pius XII, "On Psychotherapy and Religion," an Address to the Fifth International Congress on Psychotherapy and Clinical Psychology (April 13, 1953).

72. Hoeller, The Gnostic World View: A Brief Summary of Gnosticism.

73. Stephen Hoeller, "What Is a Gnostic?" Gnosis: A Journal of Western Inner Traditions (No. 23, Spring 1992).

74. Alasdair MacIntyre, "Myth," Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 3.

75. Jung, Man and His Symbols, p. x.

76. carleton.ca/socanth/Faculty/JohnDourley.htm.

77. Pope Pius XII, "On Psychotherapy and Religion."

78. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 39-42.

79. Ibid., p. 319.

80. Ibid., p. 308.

81. Jung, Man and His Symbols, p. 43.

82. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. xi.

83. Ibid., p. 299.

84. Jean Danielou, God and the Ways of Knowing (Meridian, 1957), pp. 31, 32.

85. Jung, Psyche and Symbol: A Selection from the Writings of C. G. Jung, pp. 35-60.

86. Ibid., pp. 148-224.

87. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 216.

88. Ibid., p. 212.

89. Ibid., p. 332.

90. Ibid., p. 60.

91. Ibid., p. 337.

92. Jean Guitton, Gnosticism in Great Heresies and Church Councils (Harper & Row, 1963).

93. Jung, Psychology and the East, p. 184.

94. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 380

95. Ibid., pp. 329, 330.

96. Ibid., p. 384.

97. M. C. D'Arcy, Thomas Aquinas (Newman, 1944), p. 78.

98. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp.60, 61.

99. Ibid., p. 235.

100. Jeffrey Burke Satinover, "Jungians and Gnostics," First Things (Oct. 1994), pp. 41-48.

101. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Macmillan, 1953), Letter VII.