Mysterium Coniunctionis, Part 3

Jung's Treatment of Christianity: The Psychotherapy of a Religious Tradition, Murray Stein's book on how the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961) applied his theory of the unconscious to healing the "mind" of the Christian church, shows that Jung (though he was a Protestant) felt the Roman Catholic dogma of the bodily assumption into heaven of Mary, the mother of Jesus, augured a healing of the contemporary church.

This is installment three in my Mysterium Coniunctionis series about this subject.

In 1950, Pope Pius XII issued a papal bull, Assumptio Mariae, the Assumption of Mary, declaring that the "Mother of God," the Virgin Mary, has not only gone to heaven in soul and spirit, but also in body as well. For a physical body to enter heaven, even the body of the most holy human personage ever born, represented earth-shaking news among Catholics ... even if the idea of the bodily assumption of Mary had been talked about behind theological hands for decades. The general thrust of Christian doctrine had for centuries been opposed to the notion that anything as base and corrupt as physical matter had no place in heaven, and Mary's body was made of physical matter like everyone else's.

To Jung, the relegation of physical matter to the dustbin of reality was a sign of the traditional church's having split life into two ostensibly severable parts, the spiritual and the physical, and then relegated one of the parts to nothingness. The spiritual half had its real home with the Trinitarian God-in-Three-Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The physical half was identified with all that is potentially base and corrupt, sinful and evil, and was thus to be left behind and discarded.

In medieval times the pseudoscience of alchemy — whose stated aim was to achieve the mysterium coniunctionis that would conjoin various base elements such as the metal lead into a "higher" substance such as gold — was a philosophical stand-in, said Jung, for what the Church was carefully leaving out of its belief system. By deprecating the material and physical in favor of the spiritual, taken by itself, Christianity was failing to come to grips with its own "shadow."

In Jung's theory of the mind, the shadow represents those very real aspects of the psyche that contradict what we normally hold dear. For instance, if a man holds the idea of his own masculinity most dear, he carries the mind's intrinsic model for masculinity in his conscious "persona." The mind's equally intrinsic model for femininity is still there in the psyche, but the typical man buries it in his unconscious mind as the "anima." It lurks in the "shadow" of the psychological structure at the center of the field of his conscious awareness. Jung called the center of consciousness the "ego."

The human mind's intrinsic models for various crucial life experiences were, to Jung, the "archetypes" of the psyche's "collective unconscious." These reside deep in the psyche of every human being. Because they come complete with their own intrinsic stores of psychic energy, called the "numen," they are capable of pushing themselves forward into consciousness via coded symbols present in dreams and myths, in imaginings and philosophies, and occasionally in a newly declared Church doctrine.

The new doctrine of the Assumption of Mary was the latter-day realization of one key symbol in the alchemists' vast repertoire of symbols from many centuries before, that of the coniunctio. The coniunctio was the notion of a (successive) rejoining of (multiple) formerly split entities. When lead and other base elements were combined to form gold, that would be an example of the philosophical coniunctio made tangible and complete.

According to the alchemical doctrine of the coniunctio, the first step would be seemingly in the opposite direction: the severing of soul from body, such that soul might then be conjoined with spirit. This was in fact the situation already achieved in the medieval church, Jung noted. According to the church's understanding, we are each born into this world with a soul which is joined in some way to our body. But only by means of holy baptism, faith, works, and other church sacraments besides baptism does the soul part from the physical substrate and cleave to the Holy Spirit of God.

The fact that Protestantism quarrels with Rome about the efficacy of works and of many of the sacraments other than baptism makes no difference to this discussion. In effect, said Jung, the traditional model of the Christian life accomplishes the first stage of the coniunctio, in that it conjoins soul with spirit. That is as true of Protestant Christianity as it is of Catholic faith.


This first stage of the coniunctio, unfortunately, splits off the soul/spirit from the base and merely physical substance of the body which is potentially under the power of Satan, and it shows us no way by which the body as such can be saved. True, some conceptions of the afterlife feature the notion of a "resurrection body," a new house for the soul to live in, free of corruption. But our present body cannot be redeemed.

To Jung, this splitting strategy was one by which the church put aspects of human experience into the shadow and repressed them. Jung took it as an article of faith that split off and repressed aspects of the psyche, including those related to our manifest bodiliness, would one day find their way back into Christian acceptance. This is exactly what Assumptio Mariae represented to Jung. It was the first time that an actual body that had trod this earth was admitted into heaven.

The Assumption of Mary therefore made real the second stage in the alchemists' process of the coniunctio. If the first stage was the conjoining of the soul to the Spirit of God (after severing it symbolically from the body), then the second stage would be the rejoining of the resulting unit — called by the alchemists unio mentalis, or "union of the mind" — with the physical body.

The conjunction of the reintegrated mind/soul/spirit with the the bodily basis of life was to Jung a necessary step toward wholeness, for the church. The thought of the medieval alchemists, which Jung took to represent the unconscious strivings of Christendom in their day, was simply for Jung a prefiguring of what would actually become accepted Christian belief centuries later. First, unio mentalis, which had already been achieved via church practice in the Middle Ages; then, eventually, conjunction of the mind with the physical body as the vessel for salvation of the soul ... as ushered into Christian doctrine by the promulgation of Assumptio Mariae in 1950.

But there was yet a third stage of the coniunctio in alchemical lore. That stage will be the subject of my next post in this series, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Part 4.