Jung, Buddhism, and the Incarnation of Sophia by Henry Corbin

Author:Henry Corbin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spirituality/Mysticism
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2018-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

II

We need therefore to point out the major structures of Answer to Job, the three grand acts of a divine drama of which the story of Job will be the point of departure. We need to specify here the reading conditions that will not distort either the tone or the intention of the book. A first condition would be that we give up opposing it by “sticking” historical exegesis and criticism onto it; to do so would be ridiculously pedantic (there are always people, it is true, for whom the cure must not be gotten without following the rules, even if such people don’t taste, above all, the consolation of knowing the ill person was cured but instead died). Then, if you please, for the reasons mentioned earlier, we must not give in to the old habit of incriminating with “psychologizing” anyone who refers to the experience of the soul, which includes just as much the “psychic” as the “spiritual” (unless someone can tell us what would be for the human being another place or location for this experience, or, dispensing with that, unless someone can tell us what divine figures or theological propositions have still a meaning and for whom). It is not just simply a provisional or negative attitude that is required here. It is an affirmation of the primacy of the soul that C. G. Jung solemnly reminds us about at the beginning of his book.

There are experiences, events, and truths that are physical; and there are experiences, events, and truths that are psychic. The confusion between one and the other and the inability to recognize the autonomy of the second triad is the greatest calamity that can befall a consciousness, not to mention a whole “spiritual” culture. Has it always and everywhere been this way—that a thing is not recognized as true unless its reality is presented or conceived of as physical? This “naturalization” has reached such a point that if one denies the physical reality of a historical fact, it seems that one makes everything tumble down, whereas it ought to be just the opposite: degrading the misunderstood facts and reality of the Spirit, of the Mind to the level of events having a physical sense, inserting physical events into the web of history—that is what ought to be experienced as the crumbling of our faith and of our hope. Many blasphemies, conscious and unconscious, would never have been spoken concerning the fact of the virginal conception of Christ if Christianity had not been prey to this inability.*78 And that is the reason why the touching pages devoted by Jung to the dogma of the Assumption of Mary (accepted in its literal truth, which, specifically as such, is not a physical truth) will be appreciated only with difficulty by that one of the churches that most especially ought to be happy with it.

Now, the question that the book of Job is going to pose will not be that of knowing how the men of the

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