Faith, quite as much as science with its traditional objectivity, is absolute, which is why faith and knowledge can no more agree than Christians can with another.
Christian doctrine is a highly differentiated symbol that expresses the transcendent psychic - the God image and its properties. This comprises practically everything of importance that can be ascertained about the manifestations of the psyche in the field of inner experience, but it does not include Nature, at least not in any recognizable form. Consequently, at every period of Christianity there have been subsidiary currents or undercurrents that have sought to investigate the empirical aspect of Nature not only from the outside but also from the inside.
...Though we can learn a lot from Indian thought, it can never express the past that is stored up within us. The premise we start with is and remains Christianity, which covers anything from eleven to nineteen centuries of Western life...
The bridge from dogma to the inner experience of the individual is broken down...
when a living organism is cut off from its roots, it loses the connections with the foundations of its existence and must necessarily perish...
The problems which the integration of the unconscious sets for modern doctors and psychologists can only be solved along the lines traced out by history, and the upshot will be a new assimiliation of the traditional myth. This, however, presupposes the continuity of historical development. Naturally the present tendency to destroy all tradition or render it unconscious could interrupt the normal process of development for several hundred years and substitute an interlude of barbarism. Whereever the Marxist utopia prevails, this has already happened...
Loss of roots and lack of tradition neuroticize the masses and prepare them for collective hysteria. Collective hysteria calls for collective therapy, which consists in abolition of liberty and terrorization. Where rationalistic materialism holds sway, states tend to develop less into prisons than into lunatic asylums...
We now have a new symbol in place of the fish, a psychological concept of human wholeness. In as much or in as little as the fish is Christ does the self mean God. It is something that corresponds, an inner experience, an assimilation of Christ into the psychic matrix, a new realization of the divine Son, no longer in theriomorphic form, but expressed in a conceptual or "philosophic" symbol. This compared with the mute and unconscious fish, marks a distinct increase in conscious development.
Carl Jung, AION
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