Yes, but you see, we were told in Psych. class that when Jung referred to religious imagery, and to ‘God’ he was talking pyschologically, not about the theological existence/attributes of a God-who-exists-in-reality
Yes, that is my point. “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain”. “Let your ‘yes’ be ‘yes’ and your ‘no’ be ‘no’”. Jung’s ‘God’ is not God.
Let’s imagine your name is Jim Briggs. You hear Bill telling Bob that he just has to meet Jim and your ears prick up. “That’s me” you say, but Bill says, “No, I have no interest in whether you exist, I want Bob to meet his inner Jim, the one that is part of himself”. Both you and Bob might understandably feel aggrieved as well as confused.
This is what Jung does to God and to spiritual seekers. By confusing the spiritual and psychological dimensions of the human person and by depersonalizing God, he makes his own mind and those of his patients into gods. This is a grave sin against the first commandment and turns the self into a hideous idol, I would argue. Our hearts were made for Him and cannot find rest outside of Him. Jung’s Gnostic pseudo religion is a counterfeit of the promise of the Gospel. It’s not worth exchanging our birthright as adopted sons and daughters of the Beloved Father for the mess of pottage of Jung’s false teaching. Believe me, I have been there and speak from experience.
However, you must decide for yourself. Here’s an article for, and one against:
FOR
Full Text :COPYRIGHT 1999 America Press, Inc.
Thomas M. King, S.J., is a professor of theology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. His book, Jung’s Four & Some Philosophers, is shortly to be published by the University of Notre Dame Press.
…Jung wondered: “Was the urge of the unconscious perhaps only apparently reaching out towards the person [the psychiatrist himself], but in a deeper sense towards a god? Could the longing for a god be a passion welling up from our darkest instinctual nature, deeper and stronger perhaps than the love for a human person?” These questions would have immense implications for the directions his thoughts would take.
As Jung continued working with the woman referred to above, he found that an inner “function” of sorts began to gather to itself the excessive esteem that had been projected onto him, the psychiatrist. The over-valuations began expressing themselves beyond Jung in what he termed a “trans-personal control-point” or “a vision of God,” a “divine image.” With the appearance of this image the transference had passed, and the woman could end her treatment. She had found a god or a god- image beyond her therapist. Her unconscious seemed to have produced an understanding of “God,” and by that very process she was healed.
Discovering this drive for “God” soon became central in Jung’s therapy. If he were working with a Catholic (he tells of working with only a few) he would insist the Catholic first be reconciled with the church. This assisted both in the healing and in ending the transference. “Catholics and some Protestants can return to the mysteries of the church…all others, unless there is a violent and injurious solution, get stuck in the transference relationship.”
Consider the question Jung had asked himself: “Could the longing for a god be a passion welling up from our darkest instinctual nature?” Freud had maintained that our libido was fundamentally sexual; but Jung came to understand the libido in a broader sense, and at its center he saw a religious passion. Apart from the rational assent our conscious mind might make to God, Jung saw an unrecognized drive to God rising “from our darkest instinctual nature.” By encouraging this “passion” he would lead his troubled patient to an inner healing. This connection of healing with the discovery of God could remind one of a phrase of St. Augustine, “You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.” For centuries Catholic spiritual directors had echoed St. Augustine as they sought to bring rest to restless hearts. Could a modern psychiatrist be coming to the same conclusion?
…
By presenting such ideas in the 1930’s, Jung soon attracted attention in church circles. (In 1934 Teilhard de Chardin found Jung’s ideas “curiously akin” to his own.) He asked to work with a Catholic theologian, and Victor White, O.P., who was teaching at Blackfriars, Oxford, began cooperating with him closely. Father White’s taste for psychology and Jung’s taste for theology gave them a working relationship and a stormy friendship that lasted a decade. In 1952 Jung brought White to his private country retreat, where they spent 10 days working together. Jung would insist he was only an empiricist studying the human soul, while White would press him to use greater care in speaking of philosophy and theology. In 1952 White published a highly insightful book, God and the Unconscious, to which Jung contributed a foreword: “It is now many years since I expressed a desire for cooperation with the theologian, but I little knew-or even dreamt-how or to what extent my wish was to be fulfilled.” Jung also met or corresponded with other priest-theologians: Raymond Hostie, S.J., from Louvain; Josef Ruden, S.J., from Innsbruck, and the Rev. Josef Goldbrunner from Regensburg.
…Today both Christians and devotees of the New Age can learn something from Carl Jung.
AGAINST
Full Text :COPYRIGHT 2004 Catholic Insight
The following is a summary of two articles which appeared in the Priests for Life Bulletin, fall of 2003: Fr. Jim Whalen, “Assessment of the New Age Movement” and Fr. Paul Burchat, “New Age and Christian Faith in Contrast.” The summary is by Catholic Insight staff. --Editor
Father Whaleri describes the New Age Movement as a subtle but real danger to the Catholic faith, following the document published by the Vatican in April 2003 (see “Vatican on New Age”, C.I., June 2003, p.17). “The time is sure to.come,” said St. Paul in 2 Tim., “when people will not be content with sound teaching but will turn to the latest novelty.”
New Age is an almost indefinable movement, which adheres to myths rather than objective truth; it teaches ethical relativism, which allows each person to choose from different alternatives, so that ethics becomes a matter of personal opinion. If someone wants to be pro-contraception and pro-abortion, his decision is regarded as right for him.
Gnosticism
Pope John Paul says that New Age is only a new way of practising Gnosticism and ancient heresies which replace God’s Word with purely human words. Gnosticism suggested that individuals should tune in to a universal consciousness using any method that works, from crystal balls to drugs and dream therapy. It taught that enquiry into spiritual truth was more important than faith, that salvation was attainable only by the few whose faith enabled them to transcend matter, and that Christ was non-corporeal. New Age ideas may influence even practising Catholics, who may not see the incompatibility of these ideas with Church doctrine. It preaches that “As long as what you do is done with love, and don’t harm anyone, then it’s O.K.”–implying tolerance of immoral sexual relationships and undermining marriage and family life. In fact, Cardinal Poupard has said that Catholics would be better off believing in “encounters with aliens” than in the New Age Movement.
Whalen writes that New Age incorporates beliefs and practices from many different sources. It involves a complete break with traditions, however. Archbishop Norberto Rivera points out how it “depersonalizes the God of Christian revelation … disfigures the person of Jesus Christ, devalues His mission, and ridicules His redeeming sacrifice… It discards the human person’s moral responsibility and denies the existence of sin.”
What the New Age Movement attempts to do, Fr. Whalen writes, “runs counter to Christian revelation. Christians must root themselves evermore firmly in the fundamentals of faith and … understand the often silent cry in people’s hearts, which leads them elsewhere if they are not satisfied by the Church.’”
Christian faith
Father Whalen’s “Assessment” is followed by one by Father Paul Burchat on “New Age and Christian Faith in Contrast.” In this system, he writes, “God loses His transcendence and His unique personality and now everyone and everything becomes God. Ultimately, God is what I want Him to be and I control God and not vice versa.” Jesus becomes one among many wise men and not the Son of God.
New Age claims that through various techniques we should be able to reproduce mystical states at will, re-invent the core of our being, achieve a state of union with the cosmos which denies our separation from it as distinct entities, and so on. In New Age thought, we save ourselves. This notion is at the heart of such catch phrases as “self-fulfillment”, “self-realization,” and “self-redemption.” And New Age truth is a matter of finding one’s own truth in accordance with the “feel-good” factor.
Jungian influences
Father Whalen concludes with an article on “Deceptive mythic perspectives?” Carl Jung believed that his knowledge of the psyche (the collective unconscious and its archetypes) unlocked the real meaning of religion and personality. States another writer: "Jung, indeed … not only psychologized esotericism but he also sacralized psychology, by filling it with the contents of esoteric speculation.
“The result was a body of theories, which enabled people to talk about God while really meaning their own psyche, and about their psyche while really meaning the divine.”
Jung thought that “psychology is the modern myth and only in terms of the current myth can we understand faith.”
Jung’s thought is subtle and difficult. However, his God is not the Christian God–for one thing, he is a being in whom both good and evil meet.
Father Jim Whalen is an Ottawa parish priests for Life Canada. Fr. Paul Burchat is associated with Madonna House, Combermere, ON.
