What is remarkable about Christianity is that in its system of dogma it anticipates a metamorphosis in the divinity, a process of historic change on the "other side." ~Carl Jung, MDR, Page 327.
But it cannot be denied that in the course of the last two centuries Christianity, no less than Confucianism in China and Buddhism in India, has largely forfeited its educative activity. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 326
attitude of that day: (a) Crucifixes were found in Mexico, which undermined the belief in the uniqueness of the Christian religion where the crucifixion was the central teaching, (b) The rediscovery of Gnosticism, the Dionysian myth and so forth, which showed that teachings similar to Christianity had been prevalent before the birth of Christ. ~Carl Jung; Cornwall Seminar; Page 15.
Christianity itself would never have spread through the pagan world with such astonishing rapidity, had its ideas not found an analogous psychic readiness to receive them. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 441.
The individuation process is a development on the native soil of Christianity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 395-398.
I thank God every day that I have been permitted to experience the reality of the imago Dei in me. Had that not been so, I would be a bitter enemy of Christianity and of the Church in particular. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 486-489.
Like Wotan's oaks, the gods were felled and a wholly incongruous Christianity, born of monotheism. The Germanic man is still suffering from this mutilation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 39-41.
We live in the age of the decline of Christianity, when the metaphysical premises of morality are collapsing. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 69-70.
The great events of our world as planned and executed by man do not breathe the spirit of Christianity but rather of unadorned paganism. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Page 11.
The Christian missionary may preach the gospel to the poor naked heathen, but the spiritual heathen who populate Europe have as yet heard nothing of Christianity. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Page 12.
Buddha would settle our account too early, and then it would go with us as it did when we European barbarians had that sudden arid shattering collision with the ripest fruit of antiquity-Christianity-not to the advantage of our inner development. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 538.
I only wish the Christians of today could see for once that what they stand for is not Christianity at all but a god-awful legalistic religion from which the founder himself tried to free them by following his voice and his vocation to the bitter end. Had he not done so there would never have been a Christianity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 518-522.
A genuine and proper ethical development cannot abandon Christianity but must grow up within it, must bring to fruition its hymn of love, the agony and ecstasy over the dying and resurgent god the mystic power of the wine, the awesome anthropophagy of the Last Supper-only this ethical development can serve the vital forces of religion. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 17-19.
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. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 17-19.
The idea that Christianity dropped from Heaven as a direct revelation is an historical forgery. Its essential content is rich in philosophical ideas which reach back beyond Plato and Pythagoras. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 137.
Alchemy began about the same time as Christianity, in fact we find alchemical ideas in China long before our era, so one can only be sure that the symbolism and language of the Fathers of the Church play an enormous role in alchemy. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Pages 161-162.
In alchemy, the redemption of man is brought about through the opus; in contrast to Christianity, where redemption depends entirely on the grace of God. The eastern concept is identical with the alchemical idea: it is the task of the individual to redeem himself. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Page 110.
He [Neitzche] expressed it as “God is dead” and he did not realise that in saying this he was still standing within the dogma, for Christ's death is one of the secret mysteries of Christianity. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 197.
We think we have conjured away this danger when we call it God, for Christianity has forgotten the dark side of God. The old Church knew that God was dangerous. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 215.
Through diligent study and religious exercises, one can attain an art or knowledge which exists somehow beside Christianity. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V. Page 161.
I use the word "Gnosis" intentionally, because alchemy retained, or rediscovered, a great many things which played a very important role in the early days of Christianity. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V. Page 162.
Christianity really arose from the spirit of Gnosticism, but came into conflict with it later, because the Gnostics threatened to dissolve Christianity with their philosophical speculations. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V. Page 162.
It may not be quite clear why I call certain dogmas "immediate experiences," since in itself a dogma is the very thing that precludes immediate experience. Yet the Christian images I have mentioned are not peculiar to Christianity alone (although in Christianity they have undergone a development and intensification of meaning not to be found in any other religion). ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 46.
A genuine and proper ethical development cannot abandon Christianity but just grow up within it, must bring to fruition its hymn of love, the agony and ecstasy over the dying and resurgent god/ the mystic power of the wine, the awesome anthropophagy of the Last Supper-only this ethical development can serve the vital forces of religion. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 18.
I positively do not believe that Christianity is the only and the highest manifestation of the truth. There is at least as much truth in Buddhism and in other religions too. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 127.
I only wish the theologians would accept the Kabbala and India and China as well so as to proclaim still more clearly how God reveals himself. If in the process Christianity should be relativized up to a point, this would be ad majorem Dei gloriam [for the greater glory of God] and would do no harm to Christian doctrine. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 391-393.
Eastern philosophy fills a psychic lacuna in us but without answering the problem posed by Christianity. Since I am neither an Indian nor a Chinese, I shall probably have to rest content with my European presuppositions, otherwise I would be in danger of losing my roots for a second time. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 238.
"The Christian symbol is a living being that carries the seeds of further development in itself." "its foundations remain the same eternally," "Christianity must be interpreted anew in each aeon," otherwise "it suffocates in traditionalism." ~Carl Jung, Wounded Healer of the Soul, Page 149.
There are often elements in the psyche that are absolutely heathen. They have to be domesticated in some way in Christianity, but there are still certain heathen elements that even the Church has not been able to absorb. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 45.
It [Alchemy] is also called Hermetic Philosophy, though, of course, that conveys just as little as the term alchemy. —It was the parallel development, as Narcissism was, to the conscious development of Christianity, of our Christian philosophy, of the whole psychology of the middle ages. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 17.
St. Paul for instance was not converted to Christianity by intellectual or philosophical endeavour or by a belief, but by the force of his immediate inner experience. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 183-184.
It would perhaps be worth the effort to make Christianity comprehensible to educated people today instead of leaving this urgent task to the psychiatrist. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 65-68.
1500 years ago St. Benedict could pour the new wine into new bottles; or rather, the seeds of a new culture germinating in the decay were bedded in the new spirit of Christianity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 225-226.
Christianity has envisaged the religious problem as a sequence of dramatic events, whereas the East holds a thoroughly static view, i.e., a cyclic view. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 312-316.
Wotan was banished by Christianity to the realm of the devil, or identified with him, and the devil is the Lord of rats and flies. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 330-332.
I am definitely inside Christianity and, as far as I am capable of judging about myself, on the direct line of historical development. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 334-335.
Surely the times of primitive Christianity were bad too, but not as bad as the world is now. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 346.
The Mediterranean man, to whom the Jews also belong, is not exclusively characterized and moulded by Christianity and the Kabbalah, but still carries within him a living heritage of paganism which could not be stamped out by the Christian Reformation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 358-359.
Our Christianity with its Summum Bonum conception has entirely forgotten that one of the main aspects of real religion is fear. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 362-363.
The same is the case in the West, where one makes futile attempts to give life to our Christian tenets; but they have gone to sleep. Yet in Buddhism as well as in Christianity there is at the basis of both a valid truth, but its modern application has not been understood yet. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 385-386.
The primordial experience is not concerned with the historical bases of Christianity but consists in an immediate experience of God (as was had by Moses, Job, Hosea, Ezekiel among others) which "convinces" because it is "overpowering." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 423-424
These people in the early Christian era were unaware of the general movement contemporaneous with them. They could not realize they were Christians, yet they were seeking initiation into all sorts of mysteries in search of the thing Christianity was offering. They could not accept it because of its origin in the hands of despised peoples. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 75
You may remember that Cumont remarks that if something had happened to disrupt Christianity in the third century, the world would be Mithraic today. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 108
In itself this religion [Mithraic] is as antiquated as can be. It is only relatively important as being the brother of Christianity, which has assimilated some elements from it. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 112
Take the goodness expressed in Christianity, for instance. That is apparent to us, but get outside of your own skin and into that of a Polynesian native, and Christianity looks very black indeed. Or ask the Spanish heretics who have been burned for the glory of God what they think of Christianity. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 119
To be exact, I must say that, although I profess myself a Christian, I am at the same time convinced that the chaotic contemporary situation shows that present-day Christianity is not the final truth. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 631-632
Christianity, like every closed system of religion, has an undoubted tendency to suppress the unconscious in the individualas much as possible, thus paralyzing his fantasy activity. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 80
It was not I who invented all the fish symbols there are in Christianity: the fisher of men, the pisciculi christianorum. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 410-423
Christianity has marked us deeply because it incarnates the symbols of the era so well. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 410-423
I have an idea that the Dionysian frenzy was a backwash of sexuality, a backwash whose historical significance has been insufficiently appreciated, essential elements of which overflowed into Christianity but in another compromise formation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 14-16
I think I understand ecclesiastical Christianity but the theologians do not understand me. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 423-424
Good as a rule is not followed by better but by worse. There is no chance to get out of sin. Where is the world after 2000 years of Christianity?" ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 471-473
Such a situation presented itself at the time of the spread of Christianity two thousand years ago. The spiritual values had at that time sunk into the unconscious, and in order to realize them again, people had to go to tremendous lengths in the repudiation of material values. Gold, women, art—all had to be given up. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 74
To the extent that the Christianity of this time lacks madness, it lacks divine life. Take note of what the ancients taught us in images madness is divine. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 238.
May it suffice in terms of transgression that you do not imitate Christ, since thereby you take a step back from Christianity and a step beyond it. Christ brought salvation through adeptness, and ineptitude will save you. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Pages 297.
What seeks to distance you from Christianity and its holy rule of love are the dead, who could find no peace in the Lord since their uncompleted work has followed them. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Pages 297.
I think of Christianity in the desert. Physically, those ancients went into the desert. Did they also enter into the desert of their own self? Or was their self not as barren and desolate as mine? There they wrestled with the devil. I wrestle with waiting. It seems to me not less since it is truly a hot hell ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Footnote 74, Page 236.
You still have to learn this, to succumb to no temptation, but to do every~ thing of your own will; then you will be free and beyond Christianity. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 235.
It is better to be thrown into visible chains than into invisible ones. You can certainly leave Christianity but it does not leave you. Your liberation from it is delusion. Christ is the way. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 293.
I: "But don't you think that Christianity could ultimately be a transformation of your Egyptian teachings?"
Anchorite: "If you say that our old teachings were less adequate expressions of Christianity, then I'm more likely to agree with you." ~Carl Jung and the Anchorite, Liber Novus, Page 272.
The Draft continues: "My friends, as you can see, mercy is granted to the developed, not the childish. I thank my God for this message. Do not let the teachings of Christianity deceive you! Its teachings are good for the most mature minds of bygone time. Today, it serves immature minds. Christianity no longer promises us grace, and yet we still need mercy. That which I tell you is the way of what is to come, my way to mercy" (p. 27). ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 234, Footnote 60
Black Book 2 continues: "I think of Christianity in the desert. Physically, those ancients went into the desert. Did they also enter into the desert of their own self? Or was their self not as barren and desolate as mine? There they wrestled with the devil. I wrestle with waiting. It seems to me not less since it is truly a hot hell" (p. 35). ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 236, Footnote 74
