Carl Jung: God needs man in order to become conscious, just as he needs limitation in time and space.

To Walter Robert Corti

Dear Herr Corti, 30 April 1929

It doesn’t surprise me that you were rather offended by my letter.

I had to write to your father and tell him honestly what my “diagnosis” is.

"Diagnosis" does not mean saying someone is pathological: 1t means “thorough knowledge," that is to say of your psychological state.

Hypertrophy of mtellectual intuition" is a diagnosis I would apply also to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and many others.

I myself am one-sided in this respect.

One compensates for· it with a feeling of inferiority. Diagnoses like this only hurt our vanity.

But we must see where we stand, otherwise we are immoral illusionists. This isn’t to say that a person is pathological, let alone mad.

Your medical man is a stupid shitbag who ought to become a psychiatrist so that he can be better acquainted with X., whose sister I saved from the madhouse.

There is too much of this sorry medical rabble running around Switzerland judging me without knowing me.

I expected my letter would dismay your, because you don’t yet have the distressing capacity of seeng yourself from outside.

You must hasten to acquire it without letting it upset your.

Jesus said to the man who was working on the Sabbath: “Man, if indeed thou knowest what thou doest, thou art blessed; but if thou knowest not, thou are cursed, and a transgressor of the law.”

We live not only inwardly, but also outwardly.

O you crriers of ideas, why do you have to make buffoons of them by the idiotic life you lead? Nietzsche preached: “You should make friends with the nearest things.”

I would hold his world-negating life responsible for this did I not know what syphilis lurked in him and that paralysis hung over him like the sword of Damocles.

Loo, the Catholic priest is the most faithful, the closest to the earth..He is living history, and no Holzapfel.

That you “live for God” is perhaps the healthiest thing about you – “He that is near me is near the fire,” so runs a Gnostic saying of the Lord.

But where God is nearest the danger is greatest.

God wants to be born in the flame of man’s consciousness, leaping ever higher. And what if this has no roots in the earth?

If it is not a house of stone where the fire of God can dwell, but a wretched straw hut that flares up and vanishes?

Could God then be born?

One must be able to suffer God.

That is the supreme task for the carrier of ideas. He must be the advocate of the earth.

God will take care of himself.

My inner principle is: Deus et homo.

God needs man in order to become conscious, just as he needs limitation in time and space. Let us therefore be for him limitation in time and space, an earthly tabernacle.

Jesue-Mani-Buddha-Lao-tse are for me the four pillars of the temple of the spirit.

I could give not preference over the other.

Sometime I will show you some Manichean “Turfan frescoes.”

Next Saturday I shale be at my country seat, a tower by the Upper Lake, halfway between Bollingen and Schmerikon. You can come to see me there,
With best regards,

Dr. C.G. Jung Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 64-66