Page 104 - Eclipse of God

Religion and Modern Thinking 77

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also expresses itself in his male- femaleness, is a Gnostic figure,
which probably is to be traced back ultimately to the ancient
Iranian divinity Zurvan (not mentioned, so far as I know, among
Jung’s numerous references to the history of religions) as that
out of which the light god and his dark counterpart arose.
From the standpoint of this basic Gnostic view Jung recasts
the Jewish and Christian conception of God. In the Old Testa-
ment the Satan, the “Hinderer,” is only a serving element of God.
God allows Himself to be represented by Satan, particularly for
the purpose of “temptation,” that is, in order to actualize man’s
uttermost power of decision through affliction and despair. Out
of this God of the Old Testament Jung makes a demiurge who
is himself half- Satanic. This god then for the sake of his “guilt,”
the miscarried creation of the world (I now quote literally from
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Jung’s speech of 1940, the like of which is nowhere to be found
in the Gnostic literature to which he refers), “must be subject
to ritual killing.” By this Jung means the crucifixion of Christ.
The Trinity, moreover, is enlarged to a Quaternity in which the
autonomous devil is included as “the fourth.” 66
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These, to be sure, are all, as Jung emphasizes, “projections
of psychic events,” “human spiritual products to which one
may not arrogate any metaphysical validity.” The self seems
to him the prototype of all monotheistic systems, which are
here unmasked as hidden Gnosis. But, on the other hand, he
sees it at the same time as the imago Dei in homine. The soul
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must indeed, he says once in a formulation which so far as I
know is without analogy in his other statements, have within
it something which corresponds to the being of God. In any
case, the self, the bridal unification of good and evil, is elevated
by him to the throne of the world as the new “Incarnation.” “If
we should like to know,” he says, “what happens in the case in
which the idea of God is no longer projected as an autonomous
essence, then this is the answer of the unconscious soul: the