Carl Jung was reading Teilhard de Chardin during the last few days of his life. According to Miguel Serrano, when he visited Jung on May 10, 1961,
"On the small table beside the chair where Jung was sitting, was a book called The Human Phenomenon by Teilhard de Chardin. I asked Jung whether he had read it. 'It is a great book,' he said. His face was pale, but seemed strangely illuminated by an inner light."
(Miguel Serrano, C.G. Jung and Hermann Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships [New York: Schocken Books, 1968] pp. 100-101)
Carl (Karl) Gustav Jung and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin... one probed the collective unconscious, the other contemplated the cosmic nature of the human mind. Divergent though they were, Jung and Teilhard both shed light on a previously unknown domain of the human psyche, one that is collective, or inter-subjective, and that holds a key to our understanding of evolution.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) and Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) were contemporaries -born within 350 miles of one another.
They are the two thinkers most frequently named as having a profound influence on participants in a survey carried out by Marilyn Ferguson for her book The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980). Teilhard and Jung occupied first and second place respectively. The title of Ferguson's book was, she tells us, largely inspired by Teilhard's idea of a "conspiracy of love".
Both Teilhard and Jung enjoyed an extraordinary posthumous popularity. After his death in 1955, Teilhard's religious, spiritual and philosophical writings, once banned by his superiors in the Society of Jesus, were translated into every major language and were sold in their millions. Teilhard had always been free, of course, to publish his strictly scientific work. Jung's works never suffered from such restrictions. They were always freely available and, today, would, I suspect, be much better known to a far wider audience than Teilhard's. And yet it remains true that just as many Jungians are instinctively drawn to the vision of Teilhard de Chardin, many Teilhardians are equally drawn to the vision of Jung.
Teilhard and Jung were -to adapt a description originally applied to Teilhard- "European humanists with a planetary vocation" (Pierre Noir SJ). They were truly "citizens of the universe" who shared a common cultural heritage. They were both steeped in the Christian religion -even if one was French and Catholic and the other Swiss German and Protestant. Their spirituality, nurtured, for Teilhard, in the volcanic hills of the French Auvergne and, Jung in the mountains, rivers and lakes of the Swiss Alps, can be understood as both a reaction to and a development of their Christian upbringing.
Their Origins and Their Families
Pierre Marie Joseph Teilhard de Chardin was born on Sunday 1 May 1881, the fourth of eleven children, in the family home in Sarcenat in the Puy-de-Dome in the Auvergne. He died on Easter Sunday 10 April 1955 in New York. Carl Gustav Jung was born earlier and died later. He was born on Monday 26 July 1875, the elder of two surviving children, in Kesswil on the Bodensee in the Swiss Canton of Thurgau. He died on Tuesday, 6 June 1951 in Küsnacht on the Zürchersee in the Canton of Zürich. Their family circumstances were very different. Teilhard came of aristocratic stock. One ancestor had been ennobled by Francis I (1494-1515-1547). Another had nearly lost his head in the French Revolution. His father Emmanuel (1844-1932) was distantly related ta Pascal (1623-1662). His mother Berthe-Adele de Dompierre d'Hornoy (1853-1936) was a great grand-niece of Voltaire (1694-1778).
Jung came from a professional background. His grandfather Carl Gustav (b. 1795) had been a distinguished professor of medicine at the University of Basel. Jung himself was surrounded by pastors. His father Johann (1842-1896) was a reformed pastor (and philologist) and two of his paternal uncles were also pastors. And on the side of his mother, Emilie Preiswerk (1848-1923), no less than six uncles were pastors. Teilhard spent his early childhood at Sarcenat (1881-1892). Jung spent his early years at Laufen (1875- 1879) and at Klein-Hüningen (1879-1900) near Basel.
Jung's parents knew hard times. The pay of a pastor was far from generous. He was devoted to his parents, and they were devoted to him. His mother contributed more to his development than his father with whom he felt he could never really speak freely about the religious problems that concerned him from an early age.
Teilhard's family circumstances were comfortable. His parents with whom he had an excellent rapport were happily married. From his father he learned love of the earth. And from his mother he learned love of God. The resolution of the apparent contradiction between these two loves was to preoccupy him for the whole of his life.
Teilhard's formative years were spent in Cairo (1905-1908), Hastings (1908-1912) and Paris (1912-1914). He served as a stretcher-bearer on the Western Front throughout the Great War (1914-1919).
After demobilization, he returned to Paris as a lecturer in geology on the staff of the Catholic Institute (1920- 1928). His "moment of truth" came at the age of 43 in late 1924 when he found that during his absence on a trip to China (1923-1924) a private discussion paper, "Note on Some Possible Historical Representations of Original Sin", which saw the Fall as a cosmic event over time, not in time, had somehow been removed from his desk and sent to the Jesuit Curia in Rome. The paper had been frankly evolutionary. It had clearly rejected the idea of a primeval "earthly paradise."
His line of thinking alarmed his superiors who found themselves under constant pressure from Merry del Val (1865-1930), Secretary of the Holy Office (1914-1930), to take a closer look at the orthodoxy of the philosophical leanings of its members. Despite protests from the head of the Catholic Institute, Teilhard was ordered to return to China where -interspersed with frequent trips abroad- he was to spend the next twenty years (1926-1946).
Jung, meanwhile, following training at the Salpêtrière in Paris (1902-1903), had spent his early years as a physician at the Burghölzli Hospital in Zürich (1900-1909) and lecturer at the University of Zürich (1905- 1913). In 1907 he began cooperating with Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Freud even went so far as seeing Jung as his chosen successor. But Jung never saw himself as one of Freud's school and their collaboration soon soured.
His "moment of truth" came when he broke with Freud in 1913. From then on he struck out on his own. And important differences of approach immediately emerge. For Freud, God is the first image of the parent. For Jung, the parent is the first image of God. For Freud, God is not only an unnecessary hypothesis but also a delusional idea stemming from unresolved childhood conflicts -infantile helplessness, wish-fulfillment, expiation of the Oedipus guilt complex. For Jung, there is an inherited collective unconscious of the human species underlying the experience of the human individual which contains "archetypes" expressing themselves in symbolic images.
Jung believes our psychic health and stability depend on our proper expression of our religious feelings. He sees organized religion expressing in words the meaning of "archetypes" -by which he appears to mean a form of apprehension or intuition about something which exists below the level of consciousness. It is a sense common to the whole of humankind - hence the expression "the collective unconscious". Organized religion tries to provide satisfying forms and symbols to express our deep human needs.
Jung, like Teilhard, was cradled in religion. But he came to be suspicious of the religious ideals and beliefs in which he had been brought up. And he came to believe that much of the religion practiced in his father's church was a sham, a make-believe. The church goers had no real conviction of the truth of the words they said or sang.
He was critical of protestant theology that had rejected all that was feminine in Christianity and had increasingly abhorred the symbolism that had illuminated it. He thought Catholics tended to be closer to their own collective primitivity through the symbolism of a maternal church. He saw Protestants, on the other hand, as being the product of a more exclusively rationalist development which cut them off from their natural selves.
Jung was concerned throughout his life with knowing God, with the immediate intuitive experience of God. He thought that a religion that relied on a rational interpretation at the expense of intuitive knowledge was seriously defective.
Teilhard would agree.
Jung was highly critical of theologians who were out of touch with the needs of modern men and women. Teilhard was equally critical of theologians "who could not see beyond their noses".
Jung long preferred to keep his academic independence. He only returned to university life when he became professor of psychology at the University of Zürich (1933-1941 ) and professor of medical psychology at the University of Basel (1943-1944). He was no mere theorist. He worked through 67,000 dreams before even attempting to theorize about them.
Their Writings
Jung wrote prolifically - usually in German, sometimes in English. His Collected Works were published in twenty volumes. His writings include:
The Secret of the Golden Flower (with Richard Wilhelm), 1929;
Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Eng. trans.,1933;
Essays on Contemporary Events, Eng. trans.,1947;
Answer to Job, Eng. trans.,1954;
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Eng. trans.,1963; and
Man and His Symbols, Eng. trans.,1964.
He completed his last work, Approaching the Unconscious, on 26 May 1961.
Teilhard's writings are usually in French, sometimes in English. His scientific writings were published in eleven volumes. His other more philosophical works including his spiritual and religious writings were published posthumously. They include:
• The Divine Milieu, 1927;
• The Human Phenomenon, 1938-1940;
• My Fundamental Vision, 1948;
• The Heart of Matter, 1948; and
• The Christic, 1955.
He completed his last essay, Research, Work and Worship towards the end of March 1955.
Teilhard spent much of his life in exile in places far from his native France where his religious superiors thought he could do the least theological harm. Jung spent most of his life in his native Switzerland.
Did their paths ever cross? Did they ever meet? The answer is almost certainly "no." Did they know of each other's work? The answer is definitely "yes".
Jung on Teilhard
Miguel Serrano, a former Chilean ambassador to Austria, records Jung describing in their last conversation Teilhard's seminal work, Le Phénomène humain, as a "great book." Jung would not, of course, have been able to read the book before its publication in France in December 1955.
Jung may have known of Teilhard earlier but I do not know whether there are any references to Teilhard in Jung's writings or correspondence -or whether he might have read any of Teilhard's articles in the French magazine Psyche to which he had been invited to contribute after his return to France in 1946.
Teilhard on Jung
Teilhard was certainly aware of Jung -certainly from the early fifties and quite probably much earlier in the light of his connection with Psyche. On his return from Peiping to Paris in 1946, Teilhard had been invited by Maryse Choisy to join the committee of patronage (comité d'honneur) of Psyche, the international review of psychoanalysis and the human sciences, of which she was founder and editor. Teilhard wrote a number of articles for which he obtained the nihil obstat.
In his last letter to Maryse Choisy written only a few days before his death on 10 April 1955, referring to a long article on Jung that had recently been published in Time, Teilhard expresses reservations about what he sees as the essentially masculine reasoning which had led to the definition of the Dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Munificentissimus Deus by Pope Pius XII (1939-1958) on 1 November 1950.
He had no problem with the dogma expressis verbis. He was more troubled by the masculine language used to express it. In a letter of 18 August 1950 to Pierre Leroy SJ (1900-1992) he writes:
"I am too convinced of the bio-psychological necessity of the `marian' (to counterbalance the 'masculinity' of Yahweh) not to feel the profound need for this gesture".
Jung welcomed the definition because he saw the feminine soul in the human being as the intermediary and guide to what he calls the reconciliation of the human and its shadow. He did not understand the definition literally but symbolically -unlike many Catholic intellectuals who pronounced the dogma a religious scandal.
Teilhard, however, is concerned with the fact that the definition was the work of men. He had long been deeply conscious of the failure to give adequate recognition to the place of woman in the Church. In a letter of 7 October 1929 to Christophe Gaudefroy ( 1878-1971 ) he anticipated Vatican II:
"It sometimes seems to me there are three weak stones sitting dangerously in the foundations of the modern Church: first, a government that excludes democracy; second, a priesthood that excludes and minimizes women; third, a revelation that excludes, for the future, prophecy."
Dutch parapsychologist Dr. Michael Pobers recalls in a letter of 7 July 1955 to Teilhard's biographer Claude Cuenot (1911-1992) the conversation that he had had with Teilhard over dinner in New York in late 1952. Pobers had been telling Teilhard of the experiments he was conducting in cooperation with Jung and his institute in Zürich:
"I was greatly impressed by his extensive knowledge and deep understanding of Jungian theory, in particular the notions of the archetype and the collective unconscious. Although very reserved about psychoanalysis in general, Fr Teilhard nevertheless made a sharp distinction between the theories of [Sigmund] Freud [1856-1939], [Alfred] Adler [1870-1937] and [Karen] Horney [1885-1952], and Jungian ideas, with which his own thought had something in common. We soon agreed about the impossibility of analyzing the particular aspects of the psychology or psychopathology of the individual without first addressing the problem of 'the whole of man', perhaps even without first integrating a still wider whole, 'the human universe'. It was in this connection that he gave me a brief sketch of his theory of the biological success of man".
As said before, Teilhard and Jung never met, even though their paths must have crossed many times in Europe, Africa or America, e.g. in 1937 when Jung was lecturing in New Haven and Teilhard was speaking at Villanova University. But if they had met, how would they have appeared to each other, how would they have communicated, what would they have spoken about?
Their Appearance
How would they have appeared to each other? We have many clues as to their appearance which take us way beyond the photographic record.
Those who knew Teilhard speak of "a 'climate' of deep spirituality and pure science which enveloped him wherever he went". They remember "his warm welcome and graceful manner; his aristocratic bearing, slightly ironic smile and twinkling clear eyes". Others mention his face, "long and thin, exuding charm like others exude boredom. His nose, slightly hooked, seemed to hover between cheeks etched with lines which appeared to radiate from magnificent pearl gray eyes". Here was someone who loved good music, good stories and good food. For his friend and confrère Pierre Leroy, "He was ever ready to display his natural sense of humor." "What struck me", he adds, "was his look: his eyes pierced you without harming you. His face radiated a natural kindness". And for his superior André Ravier (1905-1981) Teilhard was, "above all, a religious, a son of St Ignatius, a priest and a missionary." This was something, Ravier says, we should never forget.
Their Language
Like President Giscard d'Estaing and Chancellor Schmidt many years later, Jung and Teilhard would probably have spoken in English. English was their second language.
Their 'Second Journeys'
It is almost impossible to imagine two such inveterate travelers of "inner space" failing, sooner or later, to touch on what we now call their "second journeys".
Teilhard's own second journey began before the First World War: "I was thirty (1911)," -he wrote many years later- "when abandoning the old static dualism, I emerged into a process of guided evolution. What an intellectual revolution!" Many could not then in the Church follow Teilhard in his idea of "evolutionary creation." It is not, he said, evolution that is creative but creation that is evolutionary.
The church authorities were ever-ready to find evidence of modernism where none existed. This was something that was to cause Teilhard much pain and suffering. The crisis with his superiors broke in 1925 when he was 44. Teilhard was silenced and exiled but he was never condemned.
None of this is to suggest Jung's second journey which may well have begun when he was 38 with the breach with Freud in 1913 was necessarily any easier. He, too, found that suspicions engendered by the breach were to follow him to the grave, and beyond.
Their Vision and Their Spirituality)
Jung and Teilhard are brought together by their spirituality. "Spirituality" has traditionally been understood in the sense of "that which is spiritual (and non material or relative to biological instincts)" or, more simply, "the life of the spirit."
Both Teilhard and Jung would have been unhappy with the dualism implicit in these definitions. For Teilhard, spirit is ultimate reality. A spiritual outlook is indeed the only authentic outlook. At the human level, all life is spiritual -or it is, quite literally, meaningless. Spirituality gives meaning to life.
Teilhard looks towards a spiritual restoration - what he calls in a letter of 16 August 1936 to Bruno de Solages OCarm (1895-1983) "a naturally contagious Christianity". He develops his thinking in a letter of 11 October 1936 to Christophe Gaudefroy.
"Christianity is the only living phylum which retains a divine personality." Teilhard frequently uses the verb "en-globe" to express the idea of "enfolding" within a globe, sphere or circle. This is something he shares in the context of a universe in evolution with the medieval mystic Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) when he speaks of the divine being the enfolding of the universe and the universe being the unfolding of the divine.
This is an image with which both Teilhard and Jung would have felt perfectly at home.
Their 'Legacies'
Jung's concept of the collective unconscious implies a link (1) between the individual and the collective and (2) between the individual and the cosmos that cannot be understood within a mechanistic framework but is wholly consistent with what Fritjof Capra describes as the systems view of mind. Jung sees the mind as a self-regulating system or, in the systems language popularize, inter alia, by Erich Jantsch (d. 1980), a self organizing system. His seemingly esoteric ideas and his emphasis on spirituality have not endeared him to some psychoanalytic circles. This says, Capra, is bound to change with the growing recognition of the increasing consistency between Jungian psychology and modern science.
Jung’s theories have penetrated more deeply inside the Catholic Church than those of any other therapist. There is an apparent mystical aura which surrounds his name as compared to the overt atheism of Freud or humanism of Carl Rogers. His friend, the Dominican father Victor White, wrote that assessing a person's dream sequence seemed like an interior religious pilgrimage.
Jung claimed that he was interested in religion from a psychological perspective. Psychology "opens peoples' eyes to the real meaning of dogmas." For Jung religious experiences and ideas are found in the human psyche and not in the supernatural. He developed a particular interest in Gnosticism and claimed that the Gnostics were great psychologists -the highest compliment possible.
Teilhard, meanwhile, is the western mystic whose thought comes closest to the new systems biology. He tries to integrate his scientific insights, his mystical experiences and his theological ideas into a coherent world view that is dominated by process thinking and centered on the phenomenon of evolution.
His ideas, like Jung's, show remarkable similarities with systems theory. Its key concept is the theory of complexity-consciousness which holds (1) that evolution proceeds in the direction of increased complexity and (2) that increasing complexity is accompanied by a corresponding rise of consciousness culminating in our small corner of the universe in human spirituality.
Teilhard uses "consciousness" in the sense of awareness. He defines it as "the specific effect of organized complexity". Hence human awareness entrains human responsibility. Thus the story of the Fall could be said to be the story, not only of hominization, but also of human responsibility. Teilhard sees time and purpose converging at a Point Omega beyond the human.
Their Complementarily
Both Teilhard and Jung are builders of bridges:
• Teilhard seeking to bridge the gap between science and religion; and
• Jung seeking to bridge the gap between psychology and religion.
Teilhard was a paleontologist. Jung had wanted to be an archaeologist. And this, in a way, is what he became, 'an archaeologist of the mind.'
Both thinkers stress the fundamental unity of all things. Both are wholistic. Teilhard raises the idea of wholism, first used expressis verbis by Jan Christiaan Smuts (1870-1950) in 1926, to the level of an evolutionary doctrine of universal application to express the fundamental unity of all things. Both Teilhard and Jung reject the cartesian dualism between spirit and matter that has be-devilled human thinking since the Renaissance and Reformation: "There is neither spirit nor matter in the world," says Teilhard, "the 'stuff of the universe' is spirit-matter. No other substance is capable of producing the human molecule."
Both would agree that the story of the development of humankind is the story of the gradual evolutionary development of consciousness -the process of conscientisation. Jung is very critical of Protestant liberal theology and its failure to honor adequately symbolic language. In a letter written in 1951 he criticizes Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976) whose program of demythologisation is seen as a product of a Protestant rationalism which leads to an ever greater impoverishment of symbolism.
Catholics emphasize the "real presence" in the Eucharist which many Protestants consider a materialistic distortion. But once the true meaning of the symbol - to which Jung and others have pointed -is accepted then neither Catholic nor Protestant need have any difficulty with the "real presence." The Christian myth, which inspired Dante to write La divina commedia, needs further development. The way we conceive and interpret Christianity has lost meaning in the face of the new world view presented and reinforced by the new physics. Hence the importance of the work of writers and researchers like Diarmuid Ó Murchú MSC in his new book.
Quantum Theology
This allows us to see the "truths" of the Bible in a new light. The Bible, for example, tells us Jesus being "carried up into heaven." This no longer has to be taken literally. Jesus was "taken up", not into "outer space" -at the speed of light he would still only be in the Home Galaxy -but into "inner space," into what Joseph Campbell calls the consciousness that is the source of all things.
Conclusion
Both Jung and Teilhard are concerned with the feminine. Both thinkers are wholistic. Both stress the fundamental unity of all things. Both are pathfinders and explorers of inner space. Both are driven by powerful intellects balanced by insight and vision. Both see spirituality as part of a historic process necessary for the development of consciousness.
"Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire."
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
"Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire."
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
