Brother John, Mar 14, 2022
Dear David,
Profiting from some days alone in Italy and inspired by a second reading of your book, I wrote the article about Illich and apocalypse that you suggested. I'm sending it along to you, because I have no idea what to do with it. Personally I don't have access to any journals or publications that would publish it. If you have ideas, wonderful.
You'll see that I take issue to a certain extent with your own reading of the New Testament. I think Illich is far closer to the Book of Revelation than you (or perhaps even he) thought. But we agree on everything else, and I don't need to say again how indebted I am to your book to show me the unity of Illich's thought.
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David, Mar 15, 2022,
Dear John,
I was happy to receive your letter and happier still with your "Apocalypse Now."
As to what you say, I think we essentially agree, although emphasizing different aspects of John's apocalypse. [Revelations is] a book that makes me uneasy from the outset - the failings of the seven churches that are in Asia - and that feeling - that a spirit of schadenfreude and revenge is at work in the background - never really leaves me. I'm sure that influences my reading, as does the reception history of the book. I know it can be read as you do and all the violence, and swords in teeth, etc. resolved into symbolism, and I'm respectful of that reading. "Mythological" might have been an ill-judged word on my part - I was struggling for a term to convey what Ivan accepted and what he didn't accept. It was probably also clumsy to call him a non-apocalyptic thinker, even if I specified the sense in which I spoke, since I clearly think he is an apocalyptic thinker through and through, and I am delighted by your designating his work as a whole as a contemporary apocalypse.
Many thanks to you for this essay. There has been little engagement so far with the aspects of the book you take up, and I think they are crucial in understanding Illich. May I also share your essay with a reading group here in Canada that has been meeting monthly by Zoom to discuss the book? The Apocalypse chapter is on the agenda for this month, and I'd like to throw your essay into the discussion.
all best for now,
David
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Brother John, Jun 26, 2025
Dear David,
It was great to see you in Lucca and glad you made it home safely.….. I promised to send the manuscript I completed on the man-woman dichotomy in the Bible, a thorny subject today if there ever was one. My conclusion is "equal but different" which may dissatisfy everyone. Don't know if and when it will be published so I send you the manuscript.
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David, Jun 26, 2025
Dear John,
I'm glad to have your manuscript. Thank you. I'll have it printed out next time I'm by my favourite copy shop. I can only stand so much screen reading. I'm sure it will advance my thinking. Do you know the passage in The Rivers North of the Future - on p. 198, if you have it - in which Ivan explains Hugh of St. Victor's account of why "male and female [God] created them" and his own idea of "dysymmetrical complementarity"?
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Tue, May 26, 2026 12:44 PM
Dear John,
I've read your book, your comments on my Jung essay, and the First Things article on Jung's Gnosticism that you linked.
Springtime, first of all, is wonderful – wonderfully concise, which I appreciated, but also inspiring. It agrees very well with part of my understanding of Ivan's corruptio as a call to return to the source. You emphasize more the disintegration of "Christian" civilization, while he talks more of its perverse fulfillment, but I think there is a lot of agreement there.
The disagreement appears more in your comments on my Jung essay, and, a fortiori, in Satinover's critique of Jung. I want to say first that I don’t think Jung is a consistent thinker, or a man with a “system.” But, of course, he did elaborate a system of a sort, and a vocabulary to go with it, and I think that generates a lot of confusions and misunderstanding, and opens the door for cramped, hostile misreadings of the kind which I think Satinover is sometimes guilty. For me, as I think I said in that essay, Jung is a Christian who is trying to understand what that means in view of the crisis of faith that he already observed in his parent’s generation. And he is a pilgrim soul – a man in process, if you like - who is trying to use a language - science - which is often refractory to his purposes but which he sometimes succeeds in enlarging in promising ways.
I think I probably identify with Jung as someone who feels himself to be in the same situation. I was deeply steeped in Anglican Christianity as a boy, so much so that it became, I would say, the very structure, or substructure of my understanding. But, as my horizons widened, what I had understood was subject to challenges that I could barely grasp, let alone respond to. Jung’s Aion, like Bonhoeffer’s (very different) prison letters, pushed me to the thought of a new age – of a reformulation and a reworking of what had been handed over to us in the light of an increasingly apocalyptic reality.
The essay that you read is an attempt to bring what I took from Ivan into consonance with this earlier intuition on which Jung had such an influence. I was very conscious in writing it that I was working at the limits of my understanding, and certainly at the limits of what I could express in intelligible sentences. In responding you have made a distinction between the God image and the Living God, to whom, you say, only Jesus offers perfect access. But I wonder about this distinction. Doesn’t it tend to disqualify what appears to the seeker who can’t know in advance what he’s seeking, and put God – as the “living God” – securely into the exclusive possession of those with faith? Isn’t the living God mediated by the images we form, even if they seem to form themselves? Jung, in his explorations during the First World War, working at the edge of what might easily have been madness, didn’t know what he was doing. I would say he put himself into the hands of the living God with unusual courage, and gave testimony to the complacent of how terrible the living God can be.
Jung said that because he lacked faith, he was thrown back on experience. That’s a way of speaking. But what do we mean by faith and what by experience? If God and humanity change in relation to one another – the bold supposition that Jung shares with Eckhart and others in his lineage – then can faith be said to apprehend some unchanging essence? Experience is an equally layered word, and a very confusing one in Jung because of his real, but also pretended, empiricism.
You imagine a new age of the church, and I think that is right. The Church was the first intuition of a universal community, and must somehow be the incipient or ghostly form of the coming community. But how? We have intuitions, like Illich’s “powerless,” declericalized church, Bonhoeffer’s religionless Christianity, or Rosenstock-Huessy’s “unlabelled…listening church” (in his wonderful The Christian Future, or the Modern Mind Outrun – I’ve take a crack at an introduction to the little known R.H. here: https://www.davidcayley.com/blog/2025/6/2/rosentock-huessy) But these are only hints, and reachings after something untried and unknown. More will not be discovered without epistemic humility – a real, and not merely pretended state of not knowing.
Jung’s claims – for quadernity over trinity, for the inclusion of evil, matter and the feminine element in God, for a new style of “imitation” of Christ – are guesses, probes, as McLuhan’s says, explorations in a language that will hardly bear the weight of what it’s being asked to carry. I entertain these claims – odd word – test them – try to see through them or with them. I don’t say that I know what is the case. It’s the confident tone – Satinover sometimes gives examples of it – that needs to be dispelled in favour of the questioning tone, but the questioning tone – firm and tentative at the same time – is just as elusive as the future church.
Is the Gospel a closed book, the Incarnation a last word, or is there more still to be disclosed – a more towards which we can dispose ourselves in humility and attentive anticipation, but whose arrival we can’t hurry or force? Nicolas of Cusa says – if I’ve understood him correctly in his The Vision of God - that at the wall of paradise, which I take to mean the extremity of our discursive understanding, God appears as a coincidentia oppositorum. I’m not sure Jung says any more than this. To say that God contains, or even is, evil seems bizarre, and obviously Gnostic, in the despised and rejected sense of that word. And yet…does Ivan not confess to a temptation to “curse the Incarnation” when he contemplates the mystery of evil, and does he not come within a hair of saying that this mystery is inherent in the Incarnation and can therefore be understood as the will of God?
That’s where I am…at least as well as I can tell you in a short letter which I must now bring to an end. I’m glad to be in conversation with you.
In friendship,
David
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May 28, 2026, Dear David,
Thanks for your reply. I appreciate your remarks on my latest manuscript and that you see it as basically consonant with Illich’s thought, from a different perspective. Coming from you, that means a lot.
To continue our discussion, I’d like to clarify my distinction between “the God-image” and “the living God,” which seemed problematic to you, if I understood correctly. From certain things you say in your latest letter, I don’t think our positions are that far apart. Let me try again.
First of all, I certainly don’t think that, as you put it, my outlook “tend[s] to disqualify what appears to the seeker who can’t know in advance what he’s seeking, and put God – as the ‘living God’ – securely into the exclusive possession of those with faith.” I don’t think those who consider themselves believers, nor the church as a whole, have any more of a monopoly on who God definitively is than anyone else. What they (we) have is rather the conviction that the revelation who God is in him/her/itself inevitably passes through the figure of Jesus the Christ.
And so for us the question also becomes “Who is Jesus?” The church(es) have sometimes acted as if they had a monopoly on knowing the identity of Jesus, and a complete knowledge of that identity, but I think that is incorrect. (In the gospels already the first disciples often got it wrong.) What I call “the living God” is so far beyond what our minds can capture—and therefore Jesus as the revealer of God is equally more than we imagine at any given moment—that we are all permanently seekers.
To put it in human terms, I would compare, analogically, the distinction between the God-image and the living God with the case of someone with whom we gradually establish a friendship. After meeting that person, we have an image of them in our mind. As the relationship grows, we refine that image, discarding some previous ideas and “getting to know them better,” as we would say. But the way we see that person is never simply identical to that person as they are in themselves. They are the “limit case,” to put it in mathematical terms, that we approach asymptotically.
This leads to the question of Jung’s own personal beliefs. I fully agree that he was not the builder of a hard-and-fast system, but rather a seeker with an amazing knowledge of all kinds of trends and thinkers. That, paradoxically, makes it harder to grasp where he stood, because one can find all sorts of quotes by him that seem to go in different directions. You see him as “a Christian who is trying to understand what that means in view of the crisis of faith that he already observed in his parent’s generation.” You may be right, and you certainly have read more Jung than I have, but there seem to be other quotes where he calls himself an agnostic or even someone interested in creating, out of the fragments of Christianity, a new religion relevant to our day. Naturally people are allowed to evolve, and do not always explain their thinking adequately, but the key question here seems to me to be the following:
Either one believes that God is a Reality beyond our understanding but existing in him/her/itself, that we have somehow encountered and which we can try and know more deeply, like the friend I talked about earlier, in which case all of our searching—based in part on our own experience, and for Christians in part on the witness of other believers across the ages, beginning with the Bible—is helpful, necessary and never-ending (no one has a monopoly).
Or else we don’t believe in that God who exists, or are not sure if there is anything “out there” independent of the human condition at all, and then it is logical to focus on the God-image in our minds, based on our experience and that of others. But, in the end, is that not just something we create, unless we have an inkling that there is something beyond our creation?
Here we come to the “epistemic humility” you mention; it is essential, and it is just as arduous for the non-believer as it is for the believer, though for different reasons. For both groups, to use my language, it is hard not to equate our God-image with the living God beyond our minds.
(By the way, I too found the Sandover article a little bit deficient in that humility. His tone is a bit too ex cathedra, too knowing. But I thought he had some good insights. I had the sense that he saw in Jung himself different outlooks that made him hard to categorize, though I may be wrong.)
So, to the extent that Jung was indeed a Christian trying to find a better way of understanding what it means to believe today, more power to him. If instead he saw the Christian view of reality as a kind of raw material that he could recompose into something more congenial to his own personal worldview, in the end that is less helpful for people like me.
I do realize that some Christian theologians—and here you and I probably differ—would agree, as you say, that “God and humanity change in relation to one another.” I’ve never gotten into Meister Eckhart, so I don’t know really what he meant, but certainly someone like Jürgen Moltmann might say that. To me that all goes back to Hegel, and it seems to me highly dubious.
I am not a Thomist per se, but I remain convinced that God is God and, though deeply involved with creation to the point of becoming one of us, God cannot change in his/her/its ultimate essence or identity, what the tradition calls his transcendence. I concede, to go back to my analogy with a human person (and it is only an analogy), that in a relationship we cause aspects of the personality of the other, previously only implicit, to be revealed, but nonetheless the person exists independently of the relationship.
This brings us to another question, that of the Incarnation and its meaning. But that is for another time.
Thanks again for giving me the opportunity to share thoughts.
John
PS After writing all this, I had a thought which I have no way of verifying, since I am not so acquainted with Jung’s life. I wondered if the problem many have of “classifying” him regarding his beliefs might not be due to the fact that not only did he evolve during his life, but that there was a real struggle in him between someone faithful to the Christian faith and someone in reaction against it and trying to replace it. It would be fascinating to see if one could demonstrate this from his biography.
PPS Thanks for the link to your introduction to Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. I started reading his book The Christian Future some time ago and got bogged down.
Jun 8, 2026, David
Dear John,
Here I am at last - with an answer to your last letter. Thanks for trying to clarify the issue we've been discussing.
Jung is various and changing, as we've both now said, but I'm interested mainly in the old man, who wrote once to a young scholar who inquired about something he had said forty years before about "the incredible folly that filled the days of my youth”- perhaps I cite this remark in my essay. My sources are mainly Aion, Answer to Job, and the letters, particularly the ones that Edward Edinger collected in a useful book called The New God-Image (Chiron, 1996). There seems to me to be no doubt that, for Jung, at this late period, God is real, or that, as you say, "God is God." Peter Kingsley even quotes him as saying that he wants to "let God be God" free of human projection. The last words of Answer to Job, where he speaks of “the One who dwells within [us], whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses [us] on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky,” could have come from the mouth of the Psalmist. A "within us" that at the same time "encompasses us" without height, depth or limit, is not what we normally mean by "within" or by "subjectivity." These and other passages seem to me to bespeak an encounter with the living God, rather than an attempt, in your words, "to recompose [God] into something more congenial."
On the other hand there is no doubt that for Jung, a "new God-image" is an intelligible idea, though the phrase is Edinger's, not Jung's. He says that our image of God must be revised to include elements that have been excluded from God - matter, evil and the feminine essentially - and that quadernity is preferable to a trinity as an image of the divine. And he seems broadly sympathetic to the ideas he encounters in various mystical and esoteric literatures that humanity and God are finally inseparable, and even, when the idea is stated in its boldest form, like Hegel's saying that God's knows himself as a self-consciousness in man , or Silesius's "without me God can no moment live," that God becomes conscious in humanity.
These positions - that God is something that happens to us, not something we invent, but is also something that happens to us progressively, and in changing forms, through time - are reconciled for Jung in the figure of psyche, or as he sometimes says "objective psyche" - in order to stress exactly the element you're insisting on - that God "exists in his/her/itself." When psyche is translated into "psychology," and psychology into some sort of art of self-care and self-manipulation, and Jung himself is not blameless here, a lot of what is helpful in Jung's conception of psyche gets lost.
I wrote the essay I sent you to see if I could make my intuition that Illich, in his conception of "a mystery of evil," that shadows the Incarnation, and is, for all intents and purposes, inherent in it, can be related to Jung's suggestion that Christianity is not a finished structure - a story foretold that only awaits its inevitable dénouement - but rather a continuing revelation. I have that intuition - it is a germ, or a seed, or a bud of some kind - but I lack the language, and, in part, the confidence, to carry it much farther forward than I have done. That's why interlocutors like you are important to me at this stage.
I think perhaps that's all I can say at this point. Please don't feel any obligation to respond punctually. I'll be happy to hear from you, if you have something you want to tell me. And I'll certainly be in touch with you when I have more to say.
A warm embrace to you in the meanwhile,
David