On Religion
Reflections on Ch. 4 (The Hymn of Creation), Part I, Symbols of Transformation by Carl Jung
1.
“The God image thrown up by a spontaneous act of creation is a living figure, a being that exists in its own right and therefore confronts its ostensible creator autonomously. As proof of this, it may be mentioned that the relation between the creator and the created is a dialectical one, and that, as experience shows, man has often been the person who is addressed.”
- Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation.
When one communicates with one’s unconscious, it hurls back the God-image that replies to our invocations. Prayer evolved as a means of dialogue with the collective unconscious (which also contains the God figure that humans represent inwardly and outwardly). Beginning our prayers with “Almighty God” or “Our father who art in Heaven”, we constructed the “omnipotent” to represent all that we knew and all that we didn’t. We spoke not to someone in the sky, but to the individual and collective unconscious in us.
“I am therefore of the opinion that, in general, psychic energy or libido creates the God-image by making use of archetypal patterns, and that man in consequence worships the psychic force active within him as something divine.”
- Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation.
Etymologically speaking, the word ‘god’ was derived from the Proto-Germanic word guthan, which means ‘that which is invoked’. The word ‘invoke’ was, in turn, derived from the Latin words in (within) and vocare (to call). I believe this is strong evidence that to pray to God was nothing but to invoke something WITHIN ourselves rather than without. Perhaps, we gave it the name “God” because we find it easier to speak when we have an audience.
“And perhaps that I purposely imagine an audience before me in order that I may be more dignified while I write.”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground.
2.
“From this the naive-minded person concludes, rightly or wrongly, that the figure produced exists in and for itself, and he is included to presume that it was not he who fashioned it, but that it fashioned itself in him...The naive intellect cannot help taking its autonomy into account and putting the dialectical relationship to practical use. It does this by calling upon the divine presence in all difficult or dangerous situations, for the purpose of unloading all its unbearable difficulties upon the Almighty and expecting help from that quarter. In the psychological sense, this means that complexes weighing on the soul are consciously transferred to the God image.”
- Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation.
Let us not slash open the faith of the believers at this point with the sword of our intricately seasoned atheistic philosophies that we have arrived at with the cumulative forces of our education and the situations life threw us in: situations that we did not choose and we WOULD NOT have chosen even if we could; situations wherein we were thrust because of the part we played in a pantomime. We entered these situations flailing and cursing, not in the dignified demeanor we assume today. When confronted with our realities, our educated minds jostled with rudimentary thoughts and illusions, for years on end, to articulate what we believe in today. Of course, it stands to our credit that we made the most of our turmoil, but let us not deceive ourselves and puff up our vanity and say that we did it by choice. Let us not scoff at others because they have not yet arrived at the bridges we crossed or because they took different roads through the marshes. Let us not EVEN make light of the ones we lost along the way.
“At that last crossroad where thought hesitates, many men have arrived and even some of the humblest. They then abdicated what was most precious to them, their life. Others, princes of the mind, abdicated likewise, but they initiated the suicide of their thought in its purest revolt. The real effort is to stay there, rather, in so far as that is possible, and to examine closely the odd vegetation of those distant regions. Tenacity and acumen are privileged spectators of this inhuman show in which absurdity, hope, and death carry on their dialogue.”
- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.
In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche talks about how each step towards knowledge is an act of cruelty towards oneself because it flies in the face of our instinct for appearance and superficiality. This instinct may be too strong for the noblest of men to fight, which is why they adopt low-resolution perspectives of life and take comfort in the rigidities of their thoughts.
“Finally, let us consider that even the seeker of knowledge operates as an artist and glorifier of cruelty, in that he compels his spirit to perceive against its own inclination, and often enough against the wishes of his heart:—he forces it to say Nay, where he would like to affirm, love, and adore; indeed, every instance of taking a thing profoundly and fundamentally, is a violation, an intentional injuring of the fundamental will of the spirit, which instinctively aims at appearance and superficiality,—even in every desire for knowledge there is a drop of cruelty.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
3.
“But in any religious discipline, it is of the highest importance that one should remain conscious of one’s difficulties, in other words, of one’s sins. An excellent means to this end is the mutual confession of sin (James 5:16) which effectively prevents us from becoming unconscious.”
- Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation.
By speaking to our unconscious, or a part thereof, which is to say, God, we are shaking ourselves out of our reverie in which we automatons spend much of our day, and becoming conscious of our acts and conflicts, through confessing and asking for forgiveness. We ask the tyrant WITHIN us to forgive our trespasses, but make it look like we are asking one without, so that even the most unforgiving part of us may believe our act of repentance.
4.
“The conscious projection at which Christian education aims therefore brings a double psychic benefit: firstly, one keeps oneself conscious of the conflict (“sin”) of two mutually opposing tendencies, thus preventing a known suffering from turning into an unknown one, which is far more tormenting, by being repressed and forgotten; and secondly, one lightens one’s burden by surrendering it to God, to whom all solutions are known.”
- Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation.
It seems more important to LIVE RELIGIOUSLY than to actually practise religion. The psychic benefit that is offered by religion seems to offer a crutch to most of us who are unable to arrive, by ourselves, at the realization of the value of consciousness of conflict and moving beyond it. Even to those of us who do stumble upon it ultimately, there is the danger of succumbing to other, overpowering wills whose voices scream louder at the time of decision. It is only too easy to question the validity of religion on the grounds that it does not carry literal truth. Yes, they are not literally true, but why should that mean that they are not meaningful?
“The documents that give us information about the origin of Christianity are of such a nature that in the present state of historical science, no student would venture to use them for the purpose of compiling a biography of a historical Jesus...To look behind these evangelical narratives for the life of a natural historical human being would not occur to any thoughtful men of today if it were not for the influence of the earlier rationalistic theologians.”
- Albert Kalthoff, The Rise of Christianity.
5.
“Science has no competence to pass judgement on this equation: on the contrary, it must pursue its explanations without resorting to any such hypostasis...The scientific approach makes the divine figure, which faith posits as being the supreme certainty, into a variable and hardly definable quantity, although it cannot cast doubts on its actuality (in the psychological sense). Science therefore puts, in place of the certainty of faith, the uncertainty of human knowledge. The resultant change of attitude is not without serious consequences for the individual: his conscious mind sees itself isolated in a world of psychic factors, and only the utmost caution and conscientiousness can prevent him from assimilating them and identifying them with himself.”
- Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation.
Human beings are sticklers for certainty, which is why the modern man embraces science, with its laws and principles that do not change, instead of the unreason of faith, or even worse of an existence that clings neither to faith nor to science for assurance. Be it religion or science, we wish to find a floating log in the vast sea, while we attempt to juggle out of existence the chaos and uncertainty that yawns before our unsettled psyches.
“Indeed, we are so much convinced of all the uncertainty and caprice of our judgments, and of the everlasting change of all human laws and conceptions, that we are really astonished how persistently the results of science hold their ground!...To soar! To stray! To be mad!—that belonged to the paradise and the revelry of earlier times; while our felicity is like that of the shipwrecked man who has gone ashore, and places himself with both feet on the old, firm ground—in astonishment that it does not rock.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom.
6.
“Man has gradually become a visionary animal, who has to fulfil one more condition of existence than the other animals: man must from time to time believe that he knows why he exists; his species cannot flourish without periodically confiding in life.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom.
That being said, with all the certainty the science lays at our feet, there is an uncertainty in its finitude, just as there is reason in an unreasonable religion. It is interesting how religion, which in the modern era, is criticized for being inconsistent with reason, is actually in place to provide reason for living itself! Since man cannot grapple with the arbitrariness of existence and emerge unscathed, he finds design in it, so that it may appeal to him as “reason and ultimate command”. Nietzsche calls this the act of devising “a second and different existence”, namely, devising the existence of god, or a designer, and by participating in this act, man can “lift the old common existence off its old common hinges”, i.e. his own insignificant existence repeated generation after generation with no consequential change. Man needs to know why he exists, and more importantly, why he SHOULD exist, and to be reminded of it from time to time, else his existential angst will get the better of him.
“One could almost say that if all the world’s traditions were cut off at a single blow, the whole of mythology and history of religion would start all over again with the next generation.”
- Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation.
7.
“If we bear in mind the psychological and moral conditions under which Christianity came to birth, in an age when the crudest brutality was an everyday spectacle, we can understand the religious convulsion of the whole personality and the value of a religion that protected people living in the Roman sphere of culture from the visible onslaughts of wickedness. It was not difficult for those people to remain conscious of their sin, for they saw it everyday spread out before their eyes.”
- Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation.
The rain storms our barn and we sit at our hearth, deriding the ones caught in the gale, who took longer than we did to find the nearest port. These storms will not drown us: we are ensconced in the Ark of our education; we complain about the labour of building it, the undulations of the flood lull our passions and we sleep soundly.
8.
“Modern rationalism is a process of sham enlightenment and even prides itself morally on its iconoclastic tendencies. Most people are satisfied with the not very intelligent view that the whole purpose of dogma is to state a flat impossibility. That it could be the symbolic representation of a definite idea occurs to hardly anybody. For how can one possibly know what that idea really is! And what “I” do not know simply does not exist. Therefore, for this enlightened stupidity, there is no non-conscious psyche.”
- Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation.
How shallow and limited would you have to consider yourself, to be able to say that you know who you are? If you know yourself, then perhaps, there isn’t much to know. Man is incredibly tiered: he believes himself the master of his house; he maintains that he has his own, one true will, but he is the sanctum for a thousand entangled wills, each with a voice that wants to make itself heard. Many of these wills carry out their workings in the chasms of our unconscious, only to resurface fitfully to spit back strange images that lie prostrate to be gawked at by our conscious.
"Here where the island grew amid the seas,
Like a high towering sacrificial rock,
Here under the darkling heavens,
Zarathustra lights his mountain fires...
The flame with its grey white belly
Hisses its desire into the chill distances,
Stretching its neck to ever purer heights -
A snake upreared in impatience:
This emblem I set up before me.
This flame is my own soul
Insatiable for new distances,
Sending upwards its blaze of silent heat...
To all the lonely I now throw my fishing rod:
Give answer to the flame's impatience,
Let me, the fisher on high mountains,
Catch my seventh, last solitude."
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is.
Explore more:
1. Symbols of Transformation - Carl Jung
2. Notes from Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky
3. The Myth of Sisyphus - Albert Camus
4. The Rise of Christianity - Albert Kalthoff and Joseph McCabe
5. Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche
6. The Joyful Wisdom - Friedrich Nietzsche
7. Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is - Friedrich Nietzsche
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