The God of Synchronicity

Carl Jung and Christian Spirituality: A Reader, edited by Robert L. Moore, contains an article that is required reading for anyone such as I who would like to bring Christian thought into harmony with Jungian psychological theory. Eugene C. Bianchi's essay "Jungian Psychology and Religious Experience" discusses five major points of conflict between traditional theology and Jungian imperatives. The first is the tension between the traditionalist view that the truths of Christ and his church are manifestly objective and historical, whereas Jungians emphasize the personal inwardness and subjectivity of all religious experience.

Bianchi admits he is biased in the Jungian direction, yet disturbed by the "discontinuities and inadequacies" of Jung's ideas about religion (p. 17). For example, he understandably feels Jungians' emphasis on pure spiritual inwardness "can lead to a diminishing of community responsibility ... [and] submerge social consciousness and civic responsibility" (p. 22).

Jung, for his part, held that universal archetypes common to all human beings produce images in the unconscious mind that show up always and everywhere in dream and myth. These images present themselves consciously as symbols. The conscious mind sees, not the archetypes themselves, but the symbols that the archetypes lie behind.

Furthermore, Jung found that there was often an uncanny coincidence between symbols appearing in our dreams and "real-world" events that transpire at roughly the same time. He called these coincidences "synchronicity."


The cross of Christ is such an archetypally derived symbol. Because of its balanced shape, it is typical of all symbols of symmetry and wholeness. The rose window of Notre Dame Cathedral, depicted on the book's cover, is likewise a symbol of the archetype for wholeness.

Jung identified the archetype behind such wholeness symbols/images as the Self. The Self, if realized, is capable of bringing the psyche or soul into balance by harmonizing its internal tensions and bridging between its inherent pairs of opposites such as male-female or light-dark. It is the most important and potent of the archetypes ... and the most mysterious.

In earlier installments of my Quest for the Self series, I tried to show what the Jungian Self is all about. In the final two of those posts, I discussed the key related concept of "synchronicity." I believe this concept is capable of resolving Bianchi's doubts about joining Christian thought to Jungian.


Jung's idea of synchronicity covers many bases, to use a baseball metaphor. Jung's "first base of synchronicity," as it were, is the notion that there are uncanny coincidences between events that happen in the "real world" and events that happen in the psyche.

The events that happen in the "real world" are objective events that occur in time and space and are caused in the usual way. The events that happen in the psyche, often in visions and dreams, are archetypally produced images. The external events and the archetypal images, in confirming one another, give rise to a sense of deep meaning.

Such a synchronistic, confirming event occurred to my father at the time that his brother Ralph was released by death from his long, painful struggle against inoperable, incurable cancer. At the time that it happened, my father was away from home on the island of Guam, while Ralph was in Maryland with his family. My mother and I were living near Ralph Stewart and his family.

When Ralph finally succumbed to his terrible disease and was pronounced dead in the hospital by his doctor, it was night on Guam, and my father wakened from a dream — he later reported it to my mother — with the feeling of a great weight having been lifted from him. She and he calculated that his awakening from dream had taken place at very possibly the exact moment Ralph died. Thus the uncanny synchronicity of two events, one objective and "real," the other personal and psychic.

I never learned from Dad what the actual content of his dream had been, but in later years he often spoke of his fascination with widespread reports of near-death experiences, in which people who have almost died have come back to life saying they have "seen" a bright light at the end of a tunnel and even the figures of loved ones waiting to welcome them "to the other side." The contents of such near-death dreams and imaginings are so persistent and ubiquitous that they simply must be produced by archetypes, any follower of Jung would say. I wonder if Dad's synchronistic dream was not such an archetypally-driven near-death experience that he had on Ralph's behalf.


Extending the baseball metaphor to include Jung's "home plate of synchronicity," as I'll call it, involves making the assertion that the archetypes that "speak to us" so uncannily, in the guise of inexplicable coincidences between inner images and outer events, are objectively real in and of themselves. Furthermore, Jung said, they are "transgressive" — not in the sense of being sinful, but in the sense of traducing the ordinary boundaries of time, space, and causality.

Jung originally placed the archetypes in the individual's "collective unconscious," a part of the hidden psyche common to us all. Later, he came to realize that there was a distinction to be drawn between the archetypal images/ideas that well up in the deep unconscious of every individual human being, and the archetypes proper which produce them. The archetypes, he came to believe, must actually reside in a "psychoid" — i.e., psyche-like — region of the individual, a place outside the psyche per se which is part-mind, part-body.

Then, in expanding upon his "first base of synchronicity" idea, as I am calling it — the idea that external events and internal images uncannily co-occur — he said that archetypes actually exist on their own in a manner that is independent of the individual psyche. They pre-exist the psyche of any particular person, and they persist when each one of us dies.

Synchronicity writ large — my "home plate of synchronicity" — is Jung's idea that powerful, numinous, uncanny patterns show up in the world and its events, and are matched by similar events in the mind, because the archetypal potencies behind the events are godlike and very, very real.


Jung called these archetypal potencies "transgressive," a choice of terms that is not calculated to endear the idea to Christians for whom "transgression" and "sin" are synonyms. If he had called synchronicity's uncanny effects "miraculous" instead, ordinary believers might have welcomed Jung's ideas with open arms.

For what Jung had in mind by synchronicity was a way of explaining the "acausal orderedness" in the world.

That the world exhibits more order than it has any right to expect to have is a point of agreement between Christians and Jungians ... and, increasingly, among secular scientists who champion, say, Darwin's theory of evolution.

The secular point of view has it that the world is "causally closed," meaning that there is simply no way for a deity to reach into the intact causal chains by which events normally proceed and alter their outcomes.

If synchronicity were causal — bound by ordinary chains of cause and effect — it would violate that assumption. But Jung very carefully stated that synchronicity was at the opposite end of a conceptual axis from causality. Causality and synchronicity together explain events, Jung held, including the uncanny relationships between objective, factual, "real" events and internal, personal, psychic events.


In his article, Eugene Bianchi has trouble with what he perceives as a tendency among Jungians to overemphasize "symbolic causation," which "appears to proceed almost exclusively from the inward to the outward" (p.21), and underemphasize "external causality" (p. 22). Presumably, "external causality" is what the miracles, teachings, and life-death-resurrection of Jesus affirm to ordinary believers. That is, all that is told of in the Gospels actually happened and is objectively real ... even the miracles.

On the other hand, a Jungian perspective seems to Bianchi to suggest that such events as the Resurrection might have been dreamlike illusions, mere images welling up in the psyche of the Apostles due to the influence of internal archetypes.

But that is not what anyone who fully accepts Jung's ideas about synchronicity would hold, any more than they would hold that only in my father's dream did his brother Ralph die and "go to heaven." Ralph died objectively and really ... and may or may not now be in heaven, who can say? My father's dream did not cause his death. Nor did his death cause my father's dream. Rather, the two in their coincidence were an example of acausal order appearing in the world we know.

Likewise, for us believers to note that Jesus' Resurrection was an example of an archetypal image and a real-world event "falling together" need not imply that one of the pair was logically (or temporally) prior to, or any more "real" than, the other. Jung carefully insisted that in any such case of "falling together," the provision by an archetype of an internal image or symbol and the arranging by the same archetype of an external event whose meaning is given by the symbol are equally real.


Admittedly, this is an odd way for us to look at things. As creatures of modernity, we are so wedded to explaining things "rationally" by relying exclusively on ordinary notions of causality that there doesn't seem to be much room for synchronistically-based explanations.

This is in part why we, when we wear our hats as scientists, ascribe certain so-called "random" events to chance. The result of a flip of a coin is supposedly a chance event — either that, or we tend to go to elaborate lengths to qualify such a statement by saying that if we could only know all the factors leading up to the instant of the coin flip with sufficient precision, we would find the outcome to be as causally deterministic and predictable as the orbit of Jupiter.

Similarly, we say that the occurrence of genetic mutations in producing new types of organisms and accounting for biological evolution is chance or random, and has no cause.

In other words, all events have causes that arise naturally in a causally closed cosmos, or they have no cause at all, and are purely random.

Jung in effect said that causality (or its absence) isn't the whole story. Synchronicity plays a real, acausal, non-random role in explaining worldly events. And synchronicity is produced by archetypes that are as real as real can be. The archetypes, most notably the Self, are patterns that give meaning to what goes on in the world. They do so by influencing objective events and subjective ideas, in tandem with one another.

If Eugene Bianchi would have given full credit to Jung's ideas of the synchronistic workings of the Self, he might have seen that the Christian God of redeeming miracle and the Jungian God of uncanny synchronicity were one and the same God.