This picture is of the trinitarian fountain of pagan dieties Diana, Bacchus and Theseus united under the protecting hand of Apollo. It is across the road from St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney. Carl Jung would have been pleased with the symbolism !
Thirty years ago we were in the heady days of renewal. I was hearing expressions from our spiritual leaders like, “Get in touch with your shadow self”, “You have got to love yourself first”, “Pay attention to your dreams”, “Active imagination”, “Journalling” and we were all-abuzz with combinations of letters, INFJ and ESTP from the Myers-Briggs personality-type questionnaire. Swept aside from Catholic spirituality were expressions like “purgative, illuminative and unitive ways”, “discerning the will of God” and “being formed by the Word”.
Carl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychotherapist, was the main influence in this shift. He sounded spiritual and good. He provided us with a spirituality with which we could have ‘meaningful dialogue’ with the world. What we were not told was that he hated the Catholic Church, that his mother was a psychic and his paternal grandfather was an illuminated freemason.
We were not told that he had a falling out with Sigmund Freud because Freud wanted to keep religion out of psychotherapy and Jung wanted Christianity to be replaced by psychotherapy as the religion of Europe. He wrote to Freud ‘Religion can only be replaced by religion’ and he induced his clients to emotionally experience pagan myths. This meant that they were to attain an illuminated state in which they were to experience themselves as a god. Obviously, the word ‘illumination’ has a very different meaning from its use in Catholic spirituality, where it means living by the light of faith.
We were not told that Jung was suicidal and kept a loaded pistol beside his bed because he was so depressed with many of his followers turned away from him rather than turn away from Christianity.
Carl Jung signed one of his works as “Philemon’s Gateway.” If you use a search engine on the words ‘Jung’ and ‘Philemon’, you will find that Philemon was Jung’s familiar spirit. In his writings that he claimed were inspired by Philemon he taught that Salvation is found in coming to terms with oneself and not with matching up with an external rule.
“Active imagining” is a popular activity we learnt from Carl Jung. It means getting into an imaginary scene and inter-acting with the characters in our mind. This activity has been encouraged from the pulpit and in Catholic retreats. What most of us don’t know is that this is an occult way to get in touch with familiar spirits.
Through Jung’s influence the occult has come into Catholic practice. A book that I have found very helpful is The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung by Richard Noll and written in 1997 (ISBN 0-679-44945-0). Noll wrote on page 130:
"Yet the ancient pagan mysteries continued to occupy the imagination of humankind in an only nominal Christian Europe. Throughout the centuries their symbols and initiatory rites, their gods and goddesses, daemons and genii all found their way into the occult underground in the traditions of Gnosticism, Hermeticisim, alchemy, astrology, the Kabbalah, the Tarot, ritual and ceremonial magic, Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, and especially in the occult revivals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They live on in the works of C.G. Jung and those who practice therapy in his name."
This is not to say that all these things are practiced in the Church. But it does mean that we need to be alert to spirituality with a focus on oneself instead of on God, with integrating one’s “shadow” instead of admitting our sins, with engaging in “active imagination” instead of imagining Gospel scenes, with recognizing psychic energy instead of recognizing the Spirit of Christ.
Carl Jung is the darling of the ‘one world religion’ advocates within the New World Order. They must drain Christian spirituality out of the Catholic (i.e., Universal) Church to make the one world religion a success. So, we have a challenge right in our midst.
As quickly as they drain Christian spirituality out we need to refill the Church. Through the centuries God had provided us with many streams of spirituality, such as the Augustinian, Benedictine, Carmelite, Franciscan and Ignatian which cater to different personality types and all of them stress the way to find God is through the cross, “per crucem ad lucem”. We have a rich heritage to draw on, but beware of modernizers who adulterate the original teaching with psychology.
Some websites I have found helpful with recognizing Jung’s influence on the Church are:
http://www.catholicculture.org/library/view.cfm?recnum=545
http://theconstructivecurmudgeon.blogspot.com/2006/07/carl-jung-beware.html
http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/palette/187/session11.html
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