Our guest blogger is Gary Sparks, a 1982 Diploma Graduate of the C.G. Jung Institute-Zürich. He’s the author of At the Heart of Matter: Synchronicity and Jung’s Spiritual Testament (2007), Valley of Diamonds: Adventures in Number and Time with Marie-Louise von Franz (2010), and Carl Jung and Arnold Toynbee: The Social Meaning of Inner Work (2017) – all published by Inner City Books.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) may be the most important liminal voice of our time when he decreed, in part one of his Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), that “God is Dead.” [1]
Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961), the Swiss psychiatrist and pioneer of the psychology that is known by his name, found the words of Nietzsche an important beginning for today’s liminality, but not an adequate ending to it. Jung held that it is our image of God, our understanding of God, that is dying, that needs to die — but die in order to be reborn. The unrealistically good and lily white Christ of the New Testament is no longer an adequate representation of divinity in the twenty-first century. This Jung heard in increasing numbers from his patients concerning their despair. A God which represents a fuller portrait of the instinctual complexity of life, Jung soon realized, needs to be born out of the dying erstwhile images of God that have held sway in the last millenia of our Western history, but which have become decidedly hollow. Hence Jung’s extensive investigations into what he termed “the transformation of the God-image.” [2]
Jung accordingly wrote:
The idea of a new god always comes into existence when an old concept begins to break up, the unconscious then prepares a new idea. There are always periods in history in which the concept of god is valid and unanimously believed; and then follows another period in which this image decays, and in those times such [restorative] creations are to be found in the unconscious. [3]
The liminality of our time is this “betwixt and between,” as the old and the new experience of the sacred mingle, and a new image of God — often painfully — begins to take hold. [4] Jung’s interest in the dreams of his patients and others delving deeply into themselves yielded the unmistakable recognition of the new image of God being prepared in the hinterland of our lives. From within these observations, Jung found reference to the images of God which were once held by the ancient Gnostics, a sect of Christians that was eventually declared a heresy by the growing Church. [5] Primary among these images was the figure of Abraxas, a threatening aspect of God who also held the promise of renewal. [6, 7, 8] It is images like these that Jung explored extensively as representing those elements of previously persecuted understandings of the sacred, and as representing those elements of human nature, that were pressing to be included in a fresh image of God.
It is the task of our liminal era to turn to this challenge and watch within the depths of our dreams and fantasies the creation of a fuller grasp of God to replace the loss of previous religious certainty. In this spirit, a professional man in his mid-forties dreamed with succinct clarity of his personal role in the larger spiritual reevaluation that is observably evoked in the soul of genuine religious persons today:
I am in a church. The religion here seeks the sacred in discarded and overlooked things.
This seeking in our transitional time is intent on birthing a fuller grasp of the meaning of things, offering the possibility of significant and creative engagement in the uncertainty of our turbulent future.
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, tr. Walter Kauffman, The Viking Press, 1966, p. 12.[2] Edward Edinger, The New God-Image: A Study of Jung’s Key Letters Concerning the Evolution of the Western God-Image, Chiron Publications, 2015. [3] C.G. Jung, Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930 – 1934, Princeton University Press, 1997, p. 851. More on Abraxas can be found on pp. 806 – 860 and 1041 – 1042. [4] Louise Mahdi, et. al., eds, Betwixt and Between: Patterns of Masculine and Feminine Initiation, Open Court Publishing, 1987. See, in particular, Anne Maguire’s essay, “Jung’s First Dream,” pp. 60 – 66. [5] Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, Random House, 1979. [6] C.G. Jung, The Red Book, W.W. Norton, 2009, pp. 349 – 355. [7] C.G. Jung, The Red Book: A Reader’s Edition, W.W. Norton, 2012, pp. 517 – 538. [8] J. Gary Sparks, “Abraxas: Then and Now,” in Murray Stein and Thomas Arzt, eds., Jung`s Red Book For Our Time: Searching for Soul under Postmodern Conditions Vol. 2, Chiron Publications, 2018, pp. 109 – 128.
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