Jung and his Mystics: In the end it all comes to nothing by John P. Dourley

Author:John P. Dourley [Dourley, John P.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781317750031
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2014-04-03T04:00:00+00:00

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JUNG ON BOEHME

The co-redemption of the divine and human

Jacob Boehme shares a primacy of place with Eckhart in Jung’s treatment of specific Western mystics. Even more than with Eckhart foundational elements in Boehme’s mystical experience clearly anticipate essential elements in Jung’s psychology. Such resonance does not mean that Jung simply copied dominant themes of Boehme’s experience into his depiction of the psyche’s deeper movements. Jung’s psychology is not a pastiche made up of various sympathetic historical sources cobbled together into a psychology. Rather Jung saw in Boehme’s narrative experiences dramatically similar to those of the contemporary psyche which he witnessed in his patients’ material. In fact one of Jung’s most expansive treatments of Boehme is an amplification of the artwork of one of his clients.

Boehme shared certain experiences with Eckhart. But the affective tonality and overall directionality of his experience is significantly different. Whereas the movement of Eckhart’s experience is inward and culminates in the calm frugality of the desert in the nothingness of the Godhead, Boehme’s language and imagery is charged with an emotional volatility and intensity verging on the unintelligible (Dourley 2010f: 223–226). Indeed Boehme does follow Eckhart inward to the experience of what Boehme calls the ungrund, analogous to Eckhart’s Godhead. Yet he differs significantly from Eckhart in the emphasis he places on the return from the One or nothing and the consequences the return has for the divine and human as they both emanate from a common maternal origin.

Put summarily as a stance to be further delineated, Boehme’s experience is that the conflict within the divine has not been resolved eternally either in a Godhead beyond the Trinity or in self-contained Trinitarian life itself but must be resolved in human historical consciousness created for that purpose. Whereas Eckhart identifies a fourth in the Godhead beyond the creating Trinity, Boehme completes the picture, identifying humanity as the fourth in which divinity completes itself in history. When their experience is combined it constitutes a double quaternity, a plunge into the depths of divinity, a fourth beyond the trinity, consummated in a humanity itself completing the divine in the unfolding of history. Eckhart’s Godhead is the fourth beyond the Trinity in divinity. Boehme’s humanity is the fourth beyond the Trinity in finite existence. In terms of Jungian psychology Boehme’s experience is that of the redemption of the divine in the human framed as the unconscious progressively emerging into consciousness as the underlying meaning and telos of history itself (Dourley 2004: 60–71). This perspective would add a powerful religious, psychological and historical note to current theories of emergence.

The question then arises of how best to present Boehme in himself and Jung’s appropriation of Boehme. The core affinity rests in their joint understanding of human subjectivity, the psyche, as the sole historical theatre of the mutual redemption of the divine in the human and of the human in the divine. Such internal resolution serves, then, as the basis of external resolution in the fields of archetypal conflict, especially religious and political.

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