It is rather astonishing ... that the Protestant schism could not have been avoided. But since Protestantism became the creed of the adventurous Germanic tribes with their characteristic curiosity, acquistiveness, and recklessness, it seems possible that their peculiar nature was unable to endure the peace of the Church, at least not for any length of time. It looks as if they were not yet advanced enough to suffer a process of salvation and to submit to a deity who was made visible in the magnificent structure of the church. There was, perhaps, too much of the Imperium Romanum or of the Pax Romana in the church - too much, at least, for their energies, which were and still are insufficiently domesticated. It is quite likely that they needed an unmitigated and less controlled experience of God, as often happens to adventurous and restless people who are too youthful for any form of conservatism or domestication. They therefore did away with the intercession of the Church between God and man, some more and some less. With the demolition of protective walls, the Protestant lost the sacred images that expressed important unconscious factors, together with the ritual which, from time immemorial, has been a safe way of dealing with the unpredictable forces of the unconscious. A vast amount of energy was thus liberated and instantly went into the old channels of curiosity and acquisitvieness. In this way, Europe became the mother of dragons that devoured the greater part of the earth.
Since those days Protestantism has become a hotbed of schisms and, at the same time, of rapid advances in science and technics which cast such a spell over man's conscious mind that it forgot the unpredictable forces of the unconscious. The catastrophe of the first World War and the extraordinary manifestations of profound spiritual malaise that came afterwards were needed to arouse a doubt as to whether all was well with the white man's mind. Before the war broke out in 1914 we were all quite certain that the world could be righted by rational means. Now we behold the amazing spectacle of states taking over the age-old totalitarian claims of theocracy, which are inevitably accompanied by suppression of free opinion. Once more we see people cutting each other's throats in support of childish theories of how to create paradise on earth. It is not very difficult to see that the powers of the underworld - not to say of hell - which in former times were more or less successfully chained up in a gigantic spiritual edifice where they could be of some use, are now creating, or trying to create, a State slavery and a State prison devoid of any mental or spiritual charm. There are not a few people nowadays who are convinced that mere human reason is not entirely up to the enormous task of putting a lid on the volcano.
This whole development is fate. I would not lay the blame either on Protestantism or on the Renaissance. But one thing is certain - that modern man, Protestant or otherwise, has lost the protection of the ecclesiastical walls erected and reinforced so carefully since Roman days, and because of this loss has approached the zone of world-destroying and world-creating fire. Life has become quickened and intensified. Our world is shot through with waves of uneasiness and fear.
Protestantism was, and still is, a great risk and at the same time a great opportunity. If it goes on disintegrating as a church, it must have the effect of stripping man of all his spiritual safeguards and means of defense against immediate experience of the forces waiting for liberation in the unconscious. Look at all the incredible savagery going on in our so-called civilized world: it all comes from human beings and the spiritual condition they are in! Look at the devilish engines of destruction! They are invented by completely innocuous gentlemen, reasonable, respectable citizens who are everything we could wish. And when the whole thing blows up and an indescribable hell of destruction is let loose, nobody seems to be responsible. It simply happens, and yet it is all man-made. But since everybody is blindly convinced that he is nothing more than his own extremely unassuming and insignificant conscious self, which performs its duties decently and earns a moderate living, nobody is aware that this whole rationalistically organized conglomeration we call a state or a nation is driven on by a seemingly impersonal, invisible but terrifying power which nobody and nothing can check. This ghastly power is mostly explained as fear of the neighboring nation, which is supposed to be possessed by a malevolent fiend. Since nobody is capable of recognizing just where and how much he himself is possessed and unconscious, he simply projects his own condition upon his neighbor, and thus it becomes a sacred duty to have the biggest guns and the most poisonous gas. The worst of it is that he is quite right. All one's neighbors are in the grip of some uncontrolled and uncontrollable fear, just like oneself. In lunatic asylums it is a well-known fact that patients are far more dangerous when suffering from fear than when moved by rage or hatred.I love how he talks about the collective insanity of the human race. I visited Auschwitz about a month ago. I am still working through the pain of that experience, having seen so much tangible evidence of our collective insanity and the violence and suffering that it can engender. The quotes in this blog post come from a series of lectures Jung gave in 1937, so he does not refer to the second World War and the holocaust. But his analysis seems very prescient of those later events.
Jung continues:
The Protestant is left to God alone. For him there is no confession, no absolution, no possibility of an expiatory opus divinum of any kind. He has to digest his sins by himself; and, because the absence of a suitable ritual has put it beyond his reach, he is none too sure of divine grace. Hence the present alertness of the Protestant conscience - and this bad conscience has all the disagreeable characteristics of a lingering illness which makes people chronically uncomfortable. But, for this very reason, the Protestant has a unique chance to make himself conscious of sin to a degree that is hardly possible for a Catholic mentality, as confession and absolution are always at hand to ease excess of tension. The Protestant, however, is left to his tensions, which can go on sharpening his conscience. Conscience, and particularly a bad conscience, can be a gift from heaven, a veritable grace if used in the interests of the higher self-criticism. And self-criticism, in the sense of an introspective, discriminating activity, is indispensable in any attempt to understand your own psychology. If you have done something that puzzles you and you ask yourself what could have prompted you to such an action, you need the sting of a bad conscience and its discriminating faculty in order to discover the real motive of your behavior. It is only then that you can see what motives are governing your actions. The sting of a bad conscience even spurs you on to discover things that were unconscious before, and in this way you may be able to cross the threshold of the unconscious and take cognizance of those impersonal forces which make you an unconscious instrument of the wholesale murderer in man. If a Protestant survives the complete loss of his church and still remains a Protestant, that is to say a man who is defenseless against God and no longer shielded by walls or communities, he has a unique spiritual opportunity for immediate religious experience.I feel like Jung is saying that we have an opportunity to wake up, to bring into conscious awareness the unconscious forces that drive us. If we have stripped away the ritual, the symbolism, and the dogma, we have a risk and an opportunity of facing our unconscious demons head-on. This could drive us insane or it could be the catalyst for a spiritual experience, a profound awakening, and a deep transformation.
I think that's worth thinking about. And worth experiencing.
