Page 101 - Eclipse of God

74 Chapter 5

simply regards it as belonging to man as man, that court within
the soul which concerns itself with the distinction between the
right and the wrong in that which has been done and is to be
done and proceeds against that which has been determined as
wrong. This is not, of course, simply a question of upholding
a traditional law, whether of divine or social origin. Each one
who knows himself, for example, as called to a work which he
has not done, each one who has not fulfilled a task which he
knows to be his own, each who did not remain faithful to his
vocation which he had become certain of— each such per-
son knows what it means to say that “his conscience smites
54
him.” And in Jung himself we find an excellent explication
of that which we call “vocation.” “Who has vocation (Bestim-
mung) hears the voice (Stimme) of the inner man.” By this Jung
55
means, it is true, a voice which brings near to us just that
which appears to be evil and to which, in his opinion, it is nec-
essary to succumb “in part.” I think, however, that he who has
vocation hears at times an inner voice of an entirely different
kind. This is just the voice of conscience, which compares that
which he is with that which he was called to become. In clear
distinction from Jung, moreover, I hold that each man in some
measure has been called to something, which, to be sure, he in
general successfully avoids.
But now, once again, what does it mean to set the soul in
the place of the direction- giving and direction- preserving, the
litigating and judging conscience? In the context of Jung’s
thought it cannot be understood in any other way than “in the
Gnostic sense.” The soul which is integrated in the Self as the
unification in an all- encompassing wholeness of the opposites,
especially of the opposites good and evil, dispenses with the
conscience as the court which distinguishes and decides be-
tween the right and the wrong. It itself arbitrates an adjust-
ment between the principles or effects the preservation of ac-