Religion: Symbols & Religion

We now enter the church. The interior resembles a mosque rather than a church, as a matter of fact it is particularly like the Hagia Sophia.) There are no chairs, which produces a wonderful effect of space. There are also no images. There are only framed sentences on the walls (like those in the Hagia Sophia).† One of these sentences reads: “Do not flatter your benefactor.” The same woman who nodded approval before to me begins to weep and says: “Then there is nothing left at all.” I reply: “I think that is perfectly all right,” but she vanishes.

This dream, one of 400 which a patient transcribed for Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, is one of thousands of fantasies which have been analyzed by the great onetime disciple of Sigmund Freud. Last year, lecturing at Yale University on “Religion in the Light of Science and Philosophy,” tall, magnetic Dr. Jung let his listeners in on some of the dreams his work is made of. Last week his views were given wider currency, when his three closely-reasoned, fact-packed lectures* were published.

Although Dr. Jung stipulates that there is “an authentic religious function in the unconscious mind,” orthodox religionists will not thank him for the left-handed compliment. “What is usually and generally called religion,” he declares, “is to such an amazing degree a substitute that I ask myself seriously whether this kind of ‘religion,’ which I prefer to call a creed, has not an important function in human society. The substitution has the obvious purpose of replacing immediate experience by a choice of suitable symbols invested in a solidly organized dogma and ritual. The Catholic Church maintains them by her indisputable authority, the Protestant Church (if this term is still applicable) by insistence upon faith and the evangelical message. As long as those two principles work, people are effectively defended and shielded against immediate religious experience.”

True religious experience, however, proved salutary for Dr. Jung’s patient of the 400 dreams. An intelligent man, the patient believed he was irreligious, but Dr. Jung knew better. The dream of the mosquelike church (preceded and followed by equally revealing dream-imagery) demonstrated an inner approval of the Church coupled with a pagan point of view, to which the woman, “a very important minority”—the anima or feminine side of the man’s unconscious—makes vigorous objection. In a subsequent climax-dream the patient felt an “impression of the most sublime harmony,” which marked the turning point of his psychological development or, in terms of religion, his conversion. This dream, a vision of what the patient called a “world clock,” was in the form of symbols which had appeared in previous dreams, and which Dr. Jung, making the chief point of his lectures, declares have been in men’sunconscious minds for 2,000 years—regardless of whether or not at times they have dropped out of men’s spoken thoughts, written words or works of art.

In dreams and in researches he made among theological, philosophical and mystical works, Dr. Jung found the quaternity symbol everywhere. The square, the circle, the mystic squared circle suggest four; the Buddhist mandala-symbol is usually a circular lotus containing a square building with four gates; there are four seasons, four points of the compass, four Evangelists, etc. In the patient’s dream of the “world clock” appeared “four little men,” just as people in groups of four tended to appear in all his dreams. Only the Christian symbol of the Trinity fails to conform to this system of fours, and Dr. Jungbelieves that the unconscious mind therefore tends to augment it with a fourth element. This is probably woman—the anima, or earth mother; although Dr. Jung points out that the element of evil, or the devil, is also excluded from the God-symbol, in which it might logically take part. At this point Dr. Jung excuses himself, declaring: “The church, I assume, has to invalidate any attempt at taking such resultsseriously. She must even condemn any approach to these experiences, since she cannot admit that nature unites what she has separated. . . . Close parallels to the psychology of dreams are to be found among Latin alchemical tracts and are, like these, full of heresy.”

†The great mosque in Constantinople.*Psychology and Religion—Yale University Tress ($2).