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The Son of the Mother : Jung's Christ of Green Gold

by Nick Baker

For further discussion with Nick Baker: nick@baker4400.freeserve.co.uk

In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Jung relates the following incident.

"In 1939 I gave a seminar on the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola. At the same time I was occupied on the studies for Psychology and Alchemy. One night I awoke and saw, bathed in bright light at the foot of my bed, the figure of Christ on the Cross. It was not quite life-size, but extremely distinct; and I saw that his body was made of greenish gold. The vision was marvellously beautiful, and yet I was profoundly shaken by it. ...I had been thinking a great deal about the Anima Christi, one of the meditations from the Spiritual Exercises. The vision came to me as if to point out that I had overlooked something in my reflections: the analogy of Christ with the aurum non vulgi and the viriditas of the alchemists. When I realized that the vision pointed to this central alchemical symbol, and that I had had an essentially alchemical vision of Christ, I felt comforted. The green gold is the living quality which the alchemists saw not only in man but also in inorganic nature. It is an expression of the life-spirit, the anima mundi or filius macrocosmi, the Anthropos who animates the whole cosmos. This spirit has poured himself out into everything, even into inorganic matter; he is present in metal and stone. My vision was thus a union of the Christ-image with his analogue in matter, the filius macrocosmi. If I had not been so struck by the greenish-gold, I would have been tempted to assume that something essential was missing from my "Christian" view. ...The emphasis on the metal, however, showed me the undisguised alchemical conception of Christ as a union of spiritually alive and physically dead matter". (Jung 1961, pp.210-211)

What, then, about the actual content of the vision? If we follow Jung's thought and associations into alchemy the greenish-gold Christ on the Cross at the foot of his bed is the traditional symbol of Christianity, but with a difference: He is an image of the filius philosophorum of the alchemists, but this figure has been assimilated to, or takes the form of, the Christ of Christian tradition. Who is this other figure, the filius philosophorum? He is the son of the Mother, of matter, in contradistinction to the son of the Father, of spirit. This image represents the response of the unconscious to the conscious attitude of the Christian dominant. The Christian dominant expresses itself in the structure of patriarchal values and thought-patterns. This is symbolized in the Trinity, which excludes matter, earth, the feminine, the chthonic, the dark, the instinctual, and the body from the doctrine of God. The filius philosophorum, on the other hand, represents the psyche's compensatory response to the patriarchal development of the last two millennia. In his more frequent form, he is Mercurius duplex, a highly problematical agent, the spirit of the earth and the unconscious, of instinctuality and impulse, of tricksterism and deception. This Mercurius is precisely one who will not be committed and tied down, crucified, nailed to the cross for the sake of anyone. He is, if anything, the spoiled child of the mother, the second son, the wilful spirit of the rejected mother who is not to be tamed or fettered to authority's structures.

It was the perennial concern of the alchemists to redeem this spirit, to bring it to consciousness and to hold it there. This would require violating the prohibition that patriarchal Christianity had placed upon matter, the body, nature, and instinct. Their intuition was that body and nature were not altogether corrupt and evil, but rather that they contained a spark of divinity, a bit of God, and this value needed to be redeemed. This would appear as gold, upon which was projected the kernel of divine substance in matter. On a psychological level, Jung felt compelled to release the treasure within the unconscious, below the repression of tradition, which would lead to a personal experience of the God within, a revelation of the Self.

This numinosity within, the spark of gold within the realm of matter and nature, appear in Jung's vision of the green Christ. This vision was the response of the unconscious to Jung's shamanic incubation of the problems of Christianity. The filius philosophorum, the child of nature, but in the image of the son of the Heavenly Father, was similarly sacrificing himself upon the cross of wholeness. This is a sign, or symbol, of nature's cooperation, finally, with the Judaeo-Christian line of development: The unconscious may be prepared to come along if given its due.

For Jung the vision of the green Christ symbolized healing the split between spirit and nature that had plagued his own life, as it had the lives of his father and his other Christian forebears. In this vision, the spirit" of nature and the son of the heavenly Father are brought together in a single image. Father and Mother are uniting and cooperating. This image also shows us, who are Jung's readers and students, that his soul was, finally, Christian, and not European "pagan." His unconscious showed its character in the figure of the green Christ, and this figure is surprisingly close to being identical to the Christ of Christian tradition.

To get to this point, however, Jung had had to suffer the trials of modernity: The cathedral was smashed; he had experienced disillusionment with the traditional images and understandings of God; and he had been forced to mature beyond the need for the transference God of traditional Christianity. But he had gone further, and for this reason we must consider him to be a post-modern man. After opening himself to the chaos of the unconscious and to years of stumbling in the dark in search of a new centre of religious existence, he found it. And this places him beyond the wasteland of modernity. One of the points of resolution for him came in the figure of the green Christ, the return of a traditional image, but with an essential difference: The figure was of greenish gold; it was the son of nature.

If we take Jung's life as having collective significance, we must now ask: Of what possible therapeutic value for Christianity is the resolution that Jung found to the problem of modernity? How can the panacea produced by this physician, Jung, be of use to this patient, Christianity? How can Jung's individuation speak to the healing of Christianity and to its transformative evolution? On the supposition that no man is an island, I think we can at least say, modestly, that the way in which Jung resolved the problem of modernity and traditional religion could point to a possible way for others. But beyond that, can we see how the Christian tradition itself might benefit? If the Christian tradition were to look to Jung as a possible healer of its ailments, could it find something there, perhaps not so much in his words as in his life, that would stimulate a transformational process? Let me speculate and imagine a little.

If we personify Christianity and imagine it as a patient who needs inner healing to overcome its age-old splits and prepare itself for the next phase of its development, I think it would come away from Doctor Jung with a clear message, spoken or unspoken. The message to Christianity would be:

Open yourself to the unconscious. Honour the dream. Allow the unconscious to smash the Cathedral and to show you a larger image of God, because your God is too small and too confined in the boxes of dogma and habit. Recognize that your tribalism is based on wish and projection and has very little or nothing to do with reality, and is very distorted. Allow yourself to consider all the other paths to God as equally valid and legitimate, and possibly equally tribal and limited, but do not abandon your history, and do not think the other traditions can bail you out if you will just learn some new tricks from them. Instead, concentrate yourself on your own symbols and on your own history, and let your unconscious respond, trusting that the God who revealed himself in the beginning will respond with symbols of transformation and renewal. But you must be prepared to take responsibility for these new revelations, to test them by your very best means of interpretation and discernment, not according to what you have already known, but according to what you know you need and have not yet found. And be ready to be surprised. Above all, be prepared to let God be whole. This is a great task, but your life depends on it.

There is a set of famous church windows in Zurich that were designed by the Russian-Jewish artist, Marc Chagall. Chagall's Christ is green. The central window is named "Christ glorified. " Green is, of course, the colour of springtime, of verdant earth, of hope and new life, of the earth reborn. This is the Christ of the resurrection and ascension, having been crucified and now reborn. In this image we can also see the green and golden elements that were found in Jung's vision. As far as I have been able to determine, this window was designed completely independently of any knowledge of Jung's vision.

The windows were completed in 1970; some thirty years after Jung beheld his vision in his house in Kusnacht. They are located in the Fraumuenster Church (the "women's cloister") in the oldest section of Zurich, about five miles up the lake from Jung's home. I consider this falling together of images to be synchronistic and not merely fortuitous. Having occurred in the consciousness of two creative individuals in our time at that place, it may be a "sign of the times" that the split between spirit and nature is being healed within Christianity and that the filius philosophorum, the son of nature, is being assimilated to the tradition, also that the spiritual tradition is being transformed by nature. Surely Chagall could not have intended, consciously, to smuggle the alchemical Christ into the very heart of Christian tradition through the door of the windows, in the church of the women, in Zurich! Yet that's what he did.

What the concrete outcomes and implications of this new development may be for a future Christianity will take decades, or centuries, to become evident. But the movement toward healing the rift between spiritual and physical/material realms is certainly under way, and Jung's Green Christ vision is a harbinger of it.

References

Donne, J. 1923. Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, ed. John Sparrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Jung, C. G. 1961. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Random House.

Stein, M. 1985. Jung's Treatment of Christianity. Wilmette, Ill.: Chiron Publications.

Stern, P. 1976. C. G. Jung: The Haunted prophet. New York: George Braziller.

Til1ich, P. 1973. Systematic Theology, vol. JII. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

For further discussion with Nick Baker: nick@baker4400.freeserve.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
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