Page 93 - Eclipse of God

66 Chapter 5

He is not to be blamed for including among these observa-
tions an abundance of phenomena which I must characterize
as pseudo- religious. I characterize them so because they do not
bear witness to an essential personal relation to One who is
experienced or believed in as being absolutely over against one.
Jung properly explains he does not wish to overstep the self-
drawn boundaries of psychology. This psychology offers no
criterion for a qualitative distinction between the two realms,
the religious and the pseudo- religious, even as little as, say, so-
ciology as Max Weber understood it enabled him to make a
distinction in kind between the charisma of Moses and that
of Hitler. What Jung is to be criticized for instead is that he
oversteps with sovereign license the boundaries of psychology
in its most essential point. For the most part, however, he does
not note it and still less account for it.
There is certainly no lack in Jung of exact psychological
statements concerning religious subjects. Many times these are
even accompanied by explicit emphasis on the limited validity
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of the statement. An example is when revelation, as “the dis-
closure of the depths of the human soul,” is termed “to begin
with a psychological mode . . . from which, of course, nothing
is to be concluded about what it may otherwise be.” Occasion-
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ally, moreover, he declares on principle that “any statement
about the transcendent” shall “be avoided,” for such a state-
ment is “always only a ridiculous presumption of the human
mind which is unconscious of its boundaries.” If God is called
a state of the soul, that is “only a statement about the know-
able and not about the unknowable, about which [here the
formula which has just been cited is repeated word for word]
simply nothing is to be concluded.” Such sentences express
the legitimate position of psychology, which is authorized, like
every science, to make objectively based assertions so long as in
doing so it takes care not to overstep its boundaries.