Carl Jung: I share your conviction that genuine religiosity is the best cure for all psyche suffering.

To Pastor Josef Schattauer

Dear Pastor Schattauer, 20 February 1933

I can only agree with you when you equate St. Francis with the essence of primitive religiosity, but even so a special illumination is needed for a person living in more highly developed centuries to become as simple again as a primitive.

Equally I share your conviction that genuine religiosity is the best cure for all psyche suffering.

The pity of it is that it is exceedingly difficult nowadays to inculcate into people any conception of genuine religiosity.

I have found that religious terminology only scares them off still more, for which reason I always have to tread the path of science and experience, quite irrespective of any tradition, in order to get my patients to acknowledge spiritual truths.

When you say that the Reformation undermined very many of them, I must add that modern science has undermined them still more thoroughly, so thoroughly that in the psyche of educated people today there is only a big black hole.

This has forced me to build up a psychology which will open the door again to psychic experience.

The Catholic Church must hold fast to what still remains from earlier times of living religiosity; I on the contrary must do pioneer work in a world where everything pristine has vanished.

With kind regards,

Yours sincerely,

C.G. Jung, Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 118