scious, it does so by making use of a language and outlook that have become alien to our present way of thinking. The word
"dogma" has even acquired a somewhat unpleasant sound and frequentlyservesmerelytoemphasizethe rigidityofaprejudice.
For most people living in the West, it has lost its meaning as a symbolfora virtuallyunknowable andyet "actual" i.e., opera- tivefact. Even in theological circles any real discussion of dogma hadasgoodas ceased until therecent papal declarations, a sign that the symbol has begun to fade, if it is not already withered. This is a dangerous development for our psychic health, as we knowofno othersymbol that better expresses the world of the unconscious. More and more people then begin lookinground for exotic ideas in the hope of finding a substi- tute, for example in India. This hope is delusory, for though the Indian symbols formulate the unconscious just as well as the Christian ones do, they each exemplify their own spiritual
past. The Indian teachings constitute the essence of several thousand years of experience of Indian life. 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 from is and remainsChristianity,whichcoversanythingfromeleventonine- teen centuries ofWestern life. Before that, there was for most Westernpeoplesaconsiderablylonger periodofpolytheismand polydemonism. Incertain parts ofEuropeChristianitygoesback notmuch more than fivehundredyears ameresixteen genera- tions. The last witch was burnt in Europe the year my grand- fatherwas born, and barbarism with its degradation of human
naturehasbroken out again in the twentiethcentury.
272 I mention these facts in order to illustrate how thin is the wall that separates us from pagan times. Besides that, the Ger- manic peoples never developed organically out of primitive polydemonism to polytheism and its philosophical subtleties,
butin many placesaccepted Christian monotheism and its doc- trine ofredemption only atthe sword's point of the Roman le- gions,asinAfricathemachine-gunisthelatentargument behind
the Christian invasion.2 Doubtless the spread of Christianity
amongbarbarian peoplesnotonly favoured, butactually neces- sitated, a certain inflexibility of dogma. Much the same thing
2Iwas ableto convince myselfonthe spot ofthe existence of this fear.
175
AION
can be observed in the spread of Islam, which was likewise obligedto resort tofanaticismandrigidity. In India the symbol developed far more organically and pursued a less disturbed course. Even the great Hindu Reformation, Buddhism, is grounded, intrueIndianfashion,onyoga,and, inIndiaatleast,
itwas almost completelyreassimilated by Hinduismin less than a millennium, so that today the Buddha himself is enthroned in the Hindu pantheon as the avatar of Vishnu, along with
Christ, Matsya (the fish), Kurma (the tortoise), Vamana (the
dwarf), anda host of others.
273 Thehistoricaldevelopmentofour Westernmentalitycannot be compared in any waywith the Indian. Anyone who believes thathe cansimply takeover Eastern forms ofthoughtis uproot- ing himself, for they do not express our Western past, but re-
main bloodlessintellectualconcepts thatstrike no chord in our inmostbeing. We are rootedin Christian soil. This foundation does not go very deep, certainly, and, as we have seen, it has provedalarmingly thin in places, so that the original paganism, in altered guise, wasable to regain possession of a large part of Europe and impose on it its characteristic economic pattern of slavery.
274 This modern developmentis in linewith thepagan currents that were clearly present in alchemy and had remained alive beneath the Christian surface ever since the days of antiquity.
Alchemy reached its greatest efflorescence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then to all appearances it began to die
out.Inrealityitfounditscontinuationinnaturalscience,which
led in the nineteenth century to materialism and in the twen- tiethcenturyto so-called"realism/'whose endisnotyet insight.
Despite well-meaning assurances to the contrary, Christianity is a helpless bystander. The Church still has a little power left, but shepastures her sheep onthe ruins ofEurope. Her message
works, if one knows how to combine her language, ideas, and customs withanunderstandingofthepresent. Butformanyshe nolongerspeaks,as Paul didin themarket-placeofAthens, the language of the present, but wraps her message in sacrosanct words hallowed byage. Whatsuccesswould Paul have had with
hispreachingifhe had hadtousethelanguage and mythsof the
. Minoan age in orderto announce the gospel to the Athenians?
We overlook the unfortunate fact that far greater demands are 176
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CHRISTIAN ALCHEMICAL SYMBOLISM made onpresent-daymanthanwere evermade on peopleliving
in the apostolic era: for them there was no difficulty at all in believing in the virgin birth of the hero and demigod, and
JustinMartyr was still able to use this argument in hisapology.
Nor was theidea of a redeeming God-mananythingunheardof, since practically allAsiatic potentates together with the Roman
Emperor were of divine nature. But we have no further use even for the divineright of kings! The miraculous tales in the gospels, which easily convinced people in those days, would be apetrascandali in any modern biography and would evoke the very reverse of belief. The weird and wonderful nature of the gods was a self-evident fact in a hundred living myths and as-
sumed a special significance in the no less credible philosophic refinements ofthosemyths."Hermesterunus" (Hermes-Thrice- One) was not an intellectual absurdity but a philosophical truth. On thesefoundations the dogmaof theTrinity could be builtup convincingly. For modern man thisdogma is eitheran
impenetrable mystery or an historical curiosity, preferably the
latter. For the man of antiquity the virtue of the consecrated water or the transmutation of substances was in no sense an enormity, because there were dozens of sacred springs whose workings were incomprehensible, and any amount ofchemical changes whose nature appeared miraculous. Nowadays every schoolboy knows more, in principle, about the ways of Nature than all the volumes of Pliny's Natural History put together.
275 IfPaul werealive today, and shouldundertake to reach the ear of intelligent Londoners in Hyde Park, he could nolonger content himself with quotations from Greek literature and a smatteringof Jewish history, but would have to accommodate
his language to the intellectual faculties of the modern English
public. If he failed to do this, he would have announced his
messagebadly, forno one, except perhapsaclassical philologist,
would understand half ofwhat he wassaying. That, however, is the situationinwhich Christiankerygmatics3 finds itself today.
Notthatit uses a deadforeign language in theliteral sense,but
itspeaks inimages thaton theone hand arehoarywith age and look deceptively familiar, while on the other hand they are miles away from a modern man's conscious understanding,
3Kerygmatics rr preaching, declaration ofreligious truth.
177
addressingthemselves,atmost,to hisunconscious,andthen only
if the speaker's whole soul is in his work. The best that can
happen, therefore, is that the effectremains stuck in the sphere offeeling, thoughinmostcases itdoesnot get even that far.
276 The bridgefrom dogmato the inner experience of the indi- vidual has broken down. Instead, dogma is "believed";4 it is
hypostatized, as the Protestants hypostatize the Bible, illegiti- mately making it the supreme authority, regardless of its con- tradictions and controversial interpretations. (As we know, any-
thing can be authorized out of the Bible.) Dogma no longer formulates anything, no longer expresses anything; it has be- comea tenettobeacceptedinandforitself,with nobasisin any experience thatwould demonstrate its truth.5 Indeed, faith has
itselfbecome that experience.The faithof amanlike Paul, who had never seen our Lord in the flesh, could still appeal to the overwhelming apparition on the road to,Damascus and to the
revelation of the gospel in a kind of ecstasy. Similarly, the faith ofthemanof antiquityandof themedieval Christiannever ran counterto the consensus omnium but was on the contrary sup- ported by it. All this has completely changed in the last three hundredyears. But what comparable changehaskept pace with
this in theological circles?
*77 The danger exists and of this 'there can be no doubt that the new wine will burst the old-bottles, and that what we no longer understand will be thrown into the lumber-room, as happened once before at the time of the Reformation. Prot- estantism then discarded (except for a few'pallid remnants) the ritual that every religion needs, and now relies solely on the sola fides standpoint. The content of faith, of the symbolum, is
continuallycrumblingaway. Whatis still left ofit? The person
of Jesus Christ? Eventhemost benighted layman knows that the
4Father VictorWhite,O.P.,has kindlydrawnmy attentionto the concept of the veritasprima inSt,ThomasAquinas(Summatheol,II,II,i, i and2): This"first
truth'* is invisible and unknown. It is this, and not the dogma, that underlies
belief.
5This is not to contest the legitimacyand importance of dogma. The Church
is not concerned only with people who have a religious life of their own, but alsowith thosefromwhomnomorecan beexpected thanthat theyshould hold atenet tobetrueandconfessthemselvessatisfiedwiththisformula.Probably the greatmajorityof "believers"donotgetbeyondthislevel.Forthemdogmaretains
itsrole as a magnet andcan therefore claim tobe the "final" truth.
178
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CHRISTIAN ALCHEMICAL SYMBOLISM personality ofJesus Is, for the
biographer, the obscurest Item of all in the reports of the New Testament, and that, from a
human and psychological point of view, his personality must remain an unfathomable enigma. As a Catholic writer pithily remarked, the gospelsrecord the history of a man and a god at
thesametime. Oris onlyGodleft? In that case,what about the Incarnation, the mostvital part of the symbolum? In my view
one would bewelladvisedtoapplythepapal dictum: "Letitbe
as it is, ornot beat all,"6 to the Creed and leave it at that, be- cause nobodyreally understands what it is all about. How else
can one explain the notorious drift away from dogma?
278 Itmay strikemy reader as strange thatt a physician and psy-
chologist should be so insistent about dogma. But I must emphasize it, and forthe same reasons that once moved the al-
chemist to attach special importance to his "theoria." His doc- trine was the quintessence of the symbolism of unconscious processes, just as the dogmas are a condensation or distillation of "sacred history," of the myth of the divine being and his deeds. Ifwe wishtounderstand whatalchemical doctrinemeans, we must go back to the historical as well as the individual phenomenology of the symbols, and if we wish to gain a closer understanding of dogma, we must perforce consider first the myths of the Near and Middle East that underlie Christianity,
andthenthewholeofmythologyas the expressionofauniversal disposition Inman. This disposition I have called the collective unconscious, the existence of which can be inferred only from individualphenomenology. In bothcases the Investigator comes back to the individual, for what he is all the time concerned with are certain complex thought-forms, the archetypes, which must beconjecturedas the unconscious organizers of our ideas.
The motive force that produces these configurations cannot be distinguished from the transconscious factor known as instinct.
There is, therefore, nojustification for visualizing thearchetype as anything other than the image ofthe instinct.7
279 From this one should not jump to the conclusion that the world of religious ideas can be reduced to "nothing but" a biological basis, and it would be equally erroneous to suppose
that, when approached in this way, the religious phenomenon
6"Sit, utest, autnon sit."
"i"OntheNature ofthePsyche'*(1954/55 edn., p. 423).
179
is "psychologized" and dissolved in smoke. No reasonable per- son wouldconclude that the reduction of man's morphology to
a four-legged saurian amounts to a nullification of the human
form, or, alternatively, that the latter somehow explains itself.
For behind all this looms the vast and unsolved riddle of life itselfandofevolutionin general,andthequestionofoverriding importancein theendisnotthe origin ofevolutionbut its goal.
Nevertheless,when a livingorganism iscut offfrom its roots, it loses the connections with the foundations of its existence and must necessarily perish. When that happens, anamnesis of the originsisamatteroflifeand death.
280 Myths and fairytales give expression to unconscious proc-
esses, and their retelling causes these processes to come alive againand berecollected, therebyre-establishing the connection between consciousand unconscious. What theseparation of the two psychic halves means, the psychiatrist knows only too well.
He knows it as dissociation of the personality, the root of all neuroses: the conscious goes to the rightandthe unconscious to theleft.Asoppositesnever uniteattheirownlevel (tertium non
datur!), a supraordinate "third" is always required, in which the two parts can come together. And since the
symbol^derives asmuch from the consciousasfrom the unconscious,it isableto unite them both, reconciling their conceptual polarity through
its form and their emotional polarity through its numinosity.
281 For this reason the ancients often compared the symbol to water, a case inpoint beingtao3where yang andyin are united.
Tao is the "valley spirit," the winding course of a river. The symbolum of the Church is the aqua doctrinae, corresponding to thewonder-working"divine"water ofalchemy,whose double aspect is represented by Mercurius. The healing and renewing
properties ofthis symbolical water whether it be tao, the bap- tismal water, ortheelixir point to thetherapeutic character of themythologicalbackground from whichthis ideacomes. Physi- cianswho wereversedinalchemy had longrecognizedthat their
arcanum healed, orwas supposed to heal, not only the diseases ofthe body but also those of the mind. Similarly, modern psy-
chotherapy knows that, though there are many interim solu-
tions, there is,at the bottomofeveryneurosis, a moral problem
of opposites that cannot be solved rationally, and can be an- swered only by a supraordinate third, by a symbol which ex~
180