Page 97 - Eclipse of God

70 Chapter 5

them. This soul, however, can never legitimately make an as-
sertion, even a metaphysical one, out of its own creative power.
It can make an assertion only out of a binding real relation-
ship to a truth which it articulates. The insight into this truth
cogitatively grows in this soul out of what happens to it and
what is given it to experience. Anything other than this is no
real assertion but merely literary phraseology or questionable
combination.
The real individual soul can never be regarded as “the meta-
physically real.” Its essential life, whether it admits it or not,
consists of real meetings with other realities, be they other
real souls or whatever else. Otherwise, one would be obliged
to conceive of souls as Leibnizian monads. The ideal conse-
quences of this conception, in particular God’s eternal inter-
ference, Jung would undoubtedly be most unwilling to draw.
Or the empirical real realm of individual souls, that province
given over to psychology, should indeed be overstepped and a
collective being called “soul” or “the soul,” which only reveals
itself in the individual soul and is thus transcendent, admitted.
Such a metaphysical “setting” would then necessitate an ade-
quate philosophical determining and foundation such as, to
my knowledge, we nowhere find in Jung, even in the lecture
on the spirit of psychology which specifically deals with the
conception of the soul.
The decisive significance which this indistinct concep-
tion of the soul has for Jung’s essential attitude toward reli-
47
gion becomes evident in the following two sentences which
have a common subject. “Modern consciousness, in contrast
to the nineteenth century, turns with its most intimate and
intense expectations to the soul.” “Modern consciousness ab-
hors faith and also as a result the religions that are founded
on it.” Despite his early protest that one can find in his teach-