Page 98 - Eclipse of God

Religion and Modern Thinking 71

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ing no “barbs . . . against faith or trust in higher powers,” it
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is evident to any careful reader that Jung identifies himself
with the modern consciousness that “abhors” faith. According
to Jung, this modern consciousness now turns itself with its
“most intimate and intense expectations” to the soul. This can-
not mean anything other than that it will have nothing more
to do with the God believed in by religions, who is to be sure
present to the soul, who reveals Himself to it, communicates
with it, but remains transcendent to it in His being. Modern
consciousness turns instead toward the soul as the only sphere
which man can expect to harbour a divine. In short, although
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the new psychology protests that it is “no world- view but a
science,” it no longer contents itself with the rôle of an inter-
preter of religion. It proclaims the new religion, the only one
which can still be true, the religion of pure psychic immanence.
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Jung speaks once, and with right, of Freud’s inability to
understand religious experience. He himself concludes his
wanderings through the grounds and abysses of religious ex-
perience, in which he has accomplished astounding feats, far
outstripping all previous psychology, with the discovery that
that which experiences the religious, the soul, experiences sim-
ply itself. Mystics of all ages, upon whom in fact Jung also
rests his position, have proclaimed something similar; yet there
are two distinctions which must be kept in mind. First, they
meant by the soul which has this experience only that soul
which has detached itself from all earthly bustle, from the con-
tradictoriness of creaturely existence, and is therefore capable
of apprehending the divine which is above contradictions and
of letting the divine work in it. Second, they understood the
experience as the oneness and becoming one of the soul with
the self- contained God who, in order to enter into the reality
of the world, “is born” ever again in the soul.