Bob Bongiovanni, MA
In the Christian calendar, this Sunday represents the highest of all holy days, a day far more significant that Christmas or the other feast days. This day commemorates the central event that proved the divinity of the historical Jesus, for he proved he was the Christ and Messiah by conquering death itself. For the more literal minded, Easter represents a commemoration of this historical event, and a celebration that those who are worthy will share in everlasting life. All around us people are hearing sermons that are variations on this theme.
Following in the tradition of Carl Jung, we cannot dismiss this belief as mere superstition or nonsense, but we can strive to understand it on a new level. To do so, one must rethink the context of the full story of Jesus, taking it out of the realm of history and into the realm of symbol. In that sense, whether or not this death and resurrection literally happened is beside the point. Millions of people have believed it, have been transformed by this belief, and continue to hold it as the central myth of their lives. It contributes to the shaping of our culture, regardless of its historical veracity.
From a Jungian perspective, the story of Jesus is an individuation tale. An infant is born in seeming obscurity, not an obvious heir to the power of the collective, but under auspicious conditions for those who knew the hidden signs. He was born in a place that was literally under the boot of the negative Father, where the ruthless power of the state vied with the ruthless power of an all-too-worldly clergy in preserving the privilege of bullying the common people. The emperor had installed himself as the central god of Rome; the god of the Jews was a distant lawgiver, prone to smiting those who dared defy his law. Where could the common person turn in his search for deeper significance in life?
Then came Jesus. His sermons blended profound themes in a refreshing way. First, all humans are worthy of compassion, particularly the shunned, maligned, and misunderstood. Second, the spiritual realm is accessible to all, if only you will open your eyes. Third, the greatest sin is the failure to live authentically, choosing the hypocrisy of the persona over the divine destiny we have as children of God. Jesus didn’t copy these messages out of a book. He didn’t spout them because they made him popular. He said them because they were his lived experience. And indeed, they made him very unpopular with those who had a vested interest in shunning outsiders, preserving power, roping off spiritual awareness, and generally living as comfortable, superficial hypocrites. We have no scarcity of such folks even today, and they know how to deal with rabble-rousers.
Ultimately, Jesus died a most ignoble death – viciously crucified like a political prisoner by an unholy alliance of church and state. If the story ended there, it would be like so many other stories of young people who rallied for humane change and were destroyed by the negative Father. But, it did not end there. The negative Father deployed his most fearsome instruments on Jesus: public humiliation, imprisonment, physical torture, and capital punishment. These tried-and-true means have always prevailed over those who dared defy him. The mere threat of them sends most people into a compliant complex. But, of course, this was no ordinary, literally execution. This was the crucifixion of the god-man, with all the symbolic significance of such an event. As Edward Edinger put it, the crucifixion was the merger of Jesus as ego and Christ as Self. In that event, the Self suffered nailing to and suspension in order to fully achieve temporal realization. The ego suffers a paralyzing suspension – a seeming failure of all that was hoped and dreamed for – forsakenness. By a willing acceptable of this fate, the ego made rebirth possible – a victory snatched out of the jaws of defeat. That’s the resurrection, on a symbolic level.
Surprisingly, Jung does not write extensively on the resurrection, but what he does say is profound. In Volume 9, in his essay titled “Concerning Rebirth,” Jung talks about rebirth as a psychic reality, among the most primordial affirmations of humankind throughout the ages. The defining symbolic quality of rebirth is the suspension or abandonment of a former life followed by a new life, experienced as a profound transformation. So, then, Jung cites reincarnation is an example of rebirth, along with other transmigrations of soul that don’t necessarily involve a continuity of personality. Another example of rebirth cited by Jung can be found in powerful rituals, such as the Elusinian Mysteries, that have been experienced as transformational. Then, Jung cites the experience of being born again – not just the exclusive domain of evangelical Christians, but actually a cross-cultural phenomenon – that is a renewal and healing of the personality at a profound level, akin to the transfiguration and ascension of Christ. To this list of examples of rebirth, Jung adds the example of resurrection, which he defines as “re-establishment of human existence after death,” and which may involve a literal human body or a so-called “subtle body” that is beyond gross matter and incorruptible.
What do all these forms of rebirth have in common, according to Jung? At their root, they are all about individuation. Individuating people are constantly dying and being reborn, at least symbolically. They are continually abandoning limiting conceptions of themselves, releasing the complexes that have bound and narrowly defined them, re-awakening to a larger and greater personality. These are often not easy releases and abandonments. They can feel like true deaths and rebirths, to the individuating perople and to those who know and love them.
In Volume 18, Jung elaborates on the Christian dogma of the Resurrection and its relation to individuation. At the outset, Jung states his personal belief that “the historical fact of the Resurrection is historically doubtful.” He points out that the Gospel versions of the event are, themselves, contradictory of each other. The belief in the Resurrection as a historical event, he asserts, can be attributed to the tendency of Christian believers to concretize what was most significant at the symbolic level and what it teaches us about the archetype of the Self, the archetype of wholeness that is beyond the individual in time and space. How could such an archetype be subjected to the corruptibility of one body? Indeed, to be touched by the Self is to feel connected with a feeling of timelessness, eternity, and immortality. In that context, the Christian myth could be seen as the story of the continuous incarnation of the Self in every living moment. As Jung says, “Whether he was the eternally living Christ and Logos, we don’t know. It makes no difference anyhow, since the image of the God-man lives in everybody and has been incarnated (that is, projected) in the man Jesus to make itself visible so that people could realize him as their Self.”
I would like to close with a quote from Volume 18 which, for me, captures the Jungian significance of the Resurrection story at its essence:
Since we are psychic beings and not entirely dependent on space and time, we can easily understand the significance of the resurrection idea: we are not completely subjected to the powers of annihilation because our psychic totality reaches beyond the barrier of space and time. Through the progressive integration of the unconscious we have a reasonable chance to make experiences of an archetypal nature, providing us with the feeling o continuity before and after our existence. The better we understand the archetype, the more we participate in its life, and the more we realize its eternity or timelessness.