Page 95 - Eclipse of God

68 Chapter 5

“that one is unaware of the fact that the action arises from one’s
own inner self.”
It is thus unequivocally declared here that what the believer
ascribes to God has its origin in his own soul. How this asser-
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tion is to be reconciled with Jung’s assurance that he means
by all this “approximately the same thing Kant meant when he
called the thing in itself a ‘purely negative, borderline concept ”
is to me incomprehensible. Kant has explained that the things
in themselves are not to be recognized through any categories
because they are not phenomena, but are only to be conceived
of as an unknown something. However, that that phenome-
non, for example, which I call the tree before my window orig-
inates not in my meeting with an unknown something but in
my own inner self Kant simply did not mean.
In contradiction to his assertion that he wishes to avoid
every statement about the transcendent, Jung identifies him-
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self with a view “according to which God does not exist ‘ab-
solutely,’ that is, independent of the human subject and beyond
all human conditions.” This means, in effect, that the possibil-
ity is not left open that God— who, if the singular and exclu-
sive word “God” is not to lose all meaning, cannot be limited
to a single mode of existence as if it were only a question of
one among many gods— exists independent of as well as re-
lated to the human subject. It is instead made clear that He
does not exist apart from man. This is indeed a statement about
the transcendent. It is a statement about what it is not and
just through this about what it is. Jung’s statements about the
“relativity” of the divine are not psychological but metaphysi-
cal assertions, however vigorously he emphasizes “his content-
ment with the psychically experienceable and rejection of the
metaphysical.” 41
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Jung could cite in opposition to this a statement he once
made. “Metaphysical statements are expressions of the soul,