Jung and Divine Self-Revelation

Abstract

The Seven Sermons to the Dead provides what Jung called the “supreme meaning” of his opus, which is the reconciliation of opposites. However, his choice of a Pleroma in the Sermons that consists of both fullness and nothingness hints at a deeper meaning veiling a mystical vision he must have had but never revealed. In choosing to follow Basilides's concept of a Pleroma, the deeper meaning, as asserted in this paper, is divine self-reflection: making the purpose of individuation to become an instrument through which the divine can witness its own creation. It was not until Answer to Job that Jung referred to man as being the “instrument into which God enters to attain self-reflection” but that mystical vision is exposed in the Sermons and, therefore, informed his later work.

Keywords::

• Basilides
• coniunctio
• divine self-revelation
• Gnosticism
• Pleroma
• The Red Book
• Seven Sermons to the Dead
• Sonship

Notes

^1. This is not a tenet of Christianity, where God is not self-reflective as He is not related to anything outside His interiority; He is “ipsum esse subsistens” (Hart 2003, 72–73).

^2. Set out as the basis of Christian Orthodoxy in Evdokimov: “It is rational in form only because it was mystical at first; and this is the history of all doctrines” (2011, 25).

^3. Jung explains later that the “divine child” is the birth or creation of the inner man or Anthropos that contains within it the seeds of the realization of the divine (1966, CW 16, ¶482, n10).

^4. Jung's expositions of the vision and the mystical insights described in Sufism or Tantra or by Meister Eckhart are not similar. However, the vision has a common core: the individual is an instrument of the divine to permit the divine to apprehend itself. The “common core” thesis of all mystical experience is discussed in Chen (2011).

^5. Segal suggests that the Pleroma is the “incipient unconscious” and that Creatura (creation) is the ego (1992, 40); Heisig asserts that the Pleroma is the collective unconscious (1972).

^6. Hoeller refers to the comparison between Jung and Basilides as “remarkable,” calling Jung a twentieth-century Basilides (1982, 67); Heisig (1972) and Brenner (1990) decry Jung's dependence on Basilides.

^7. Brenner concludes: “I believe he was influenced by many Gnostic sources, including the Naassene Exegesis, the Valentinian system of Ptolemaeus, the Hermetic writings, the Sethian-Ophites, and other Gnostic thinkers such as Carpocrates and Saturnus” (1990).

^8. Overfield (1979) suggests the term is used differently in the New Testament but with the same implications.

^9. Rudolph argues, however, that Basilides's doctrinal viewpoint was already pre-existing in Gnostic thought (1987, 62).

^10. For example, The Gospel of Philip (Robinson 1988, 139–160).

^11. See the postmodern slant on “transcendence of transcendence” in Keller (2007, 130).

^12. It is argued convincingly that Jung was indeed aware of this concept in 1912 in his first writing of the Symbols of Transformation; although it is argued unconvincingly, based on the dates of publications of works he cited from Nicholas of Cusa, that he was not aware of Cusanus's writings until after the 1920s (Henderson 2010, 102n3).

^13. But can never merge with God (Jufresa 1981).

^14. In Kabbalah, man does not exist for his own sake but for carrying out God's work (Buber 1958, 162–166).

References to The Collected Works of C. G. Jung are cited in the text as CW, volume number, and paragraph number. The Collected Works are published in English by Routledge (UK) and Princeton University Press (USA).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Leslie Stein

LESLIE STEIN, LLM, is a Senior Fellow at Pace University in New York and an Analyst in Training at the C. G. Jung Institute of New York. He is the author of the book Becoming Whole: Jung's Equation for Realizing God (Helios Press, 2012), the Jungian allegory The Journey of Adam Kadmon: A Novel (Arcade Publishing, 2000/2012), and, most recently, “Global Warming: Inaction, Denial and Psyche” Spring 88 (2013). He is also a contributor to Volume 90 of SpringJournal on the topic of “Jung and Tantra.” Correspondence:[email protected].