Jung on the moment of identity and its loss as history

Abstract

ABSTRACTJung understands Eckhart’s religious experience to culminate in a point of unqualified identity between ego and unconscious, and so, effectively, between the divine and the human. This identity occurs in an undifferentiated pool of infinite energy, prime matter, whose archetypal differentiation becomes the substance of history as the numinous manifests in religion and its secular equivalents. The dynamic of history becomes the repeated emanation of consciousness from and its return to its source. Effectively Jung is affirming the eternity of matter as potential and so as energy. In two accounts of the history of religion Jung suggests the current emergence of a surpassing myth of humanity and divinity as mutual creators engaged in reciprocal redemption as the meaning of history itself. Jung’s revisionary perspective reveals the danger to the species of the monomind, religious or political, as a premature and truncated claim to the exhaustion of archetypal manifestation. It extends the sacred to ev...