C. G. Jung and God

Abstract

Jung grappled with the experience of God over the course of his life. In later years, when asked whether he believed in God, he replied, “I know.” This essay traces Jung’s understanding of God as it developed during the years he labored on The Red Book: Liber Novus, and as further elucidated in his private contemporaneous journals of his experiences, The Black Books: 1913 to 1932. The visionary events recounted there are the primal source of Jung’s declarations about the nature of divinity audaciously pronounced in his controversial 1952 publication, Answer to Job.

Acknowledgments

A preliminary version of this essay appeared in Jung’s Red Book for Our Time: Searching for Soul in the 21st Century (Stein, 2022, pp. 297–317).

Notes

1 Filmed records of Jung, including this 1959 Face to Face interview, are available at http://gnosis.org/gnostic-jung/Jung-on-film.html. A transcript of the full 1959 interview appears in C. G. Jung Speaking (Jung, 1993a, pp. 424–439).

2 The published journals, The Black Books 1913–1932, exclude the last approximately 70 pages Jung entered into his journal during the 1940s. These last pages almost certainly contain Jung’s private account of his near-death visions in 1944. It is unclear why this concluding portion of his last journal was not disclosed or published.

3 For a detailed discussion of the “Last Quartet,” see Owens (2015, pp. 7–9).

4 Excerpted from a letter from Ximena Roelli to Cary Baynes, August 8, 1951 (Baynes, 2015).

5 The full quotation is: “Elkisch wrote that somewhere he had read words which he never forgets in which Jung said: ‘I have a huge correspondence, see innumerable people but have only two real friends with whom I can speak about my own difficulties; the one is Erich Neumann and he lives in Israel and the other is Father Victor White in England.’” Where Elkisch read this remains unknown.

6 Jung later gave this painting to H. G. Baynes, who translated the Septem Sermones into English for private publication in 1925.

7 Ka was one of the imaginal figures with whom Jung was conversing in this period.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lance S. Owens

Lance S. Owens is a physician in clinical practice and an historian with a focused interest in Jung, Gnosticism, and the Western visionary traditions. For over two decades he has served on the clinical staff of the University of Utah, specializing in Emergency Medicine. He has lectured and written extensively about the history of C. G. Jung. He is the author of Jung in Love: The Mysterium in Liber Novus, and of several book chapters addressing Jung’s visionary experiences. He was the editor of Alfred Ribi’s book, The Search for Roots: C. G. Jung and the Tradition of Gnosis, wherein he added an extensive introduction detailing Jung’s interest in Gnosticism. These works and his numerous other published essays on Jung, including his two previously published articles in Psychological Perspectives, are all available online at: https://utah.academia.edu/LanceSOwens