1
Jung and the Coincidence of Opposites: God, Universe and Individual |
| In the common thought of today, God, universe and individual are usually considered, where they are considered at all, as opposites, as discontinuousneither sharing a common ground nor taking part in any common being. The brunt of Western theology, and the cultural consciousness to which it has contributed, conceive of God as so transcending the universe and the individual that the latter two come to be seen as contingent products of an arbitrary divine creativity, an afterthought to Trinitarian self-sufficiency. |
| In severing the immediate and ontological link between the divine and the human, this kind of theological imagination has divorced the individual from a sense of his or her immediate continuity both with the divine and with the universe. The individual is cut adrift in an atomistic, unrelated cosmos emptied of any unifying or communion-making divine ground. The consequence is one of alienation in which the individual, dubiously gifted with self-consciousness, looks out, from a self-enclosed and lonely isolation, upon the immensities of an alien universe, peopled by equally isolated fellow human beings and, somewhere, by a God who presides from beyond over a multiplicity which proceeds from his hands but is divested of his being. |
| In this view individual, universe and God remain strangers in principle, and the approach of any of the three to the others needs be an experience of invasion, intrusion, manipulation or, in the case of God, omnipotent coercion. |
| In this chapter I will present a synopsis of the model of the psyche as conceived by Carl Jung, and suggest that the most distinguishing feature of his thought is the teleology or direction he discerns in the movement of the psyche to its maturation. In response to the perhaps too bleak description of modern consciousness I have drawn in my opening paragraph, I will concentrate on those features |
|
