in the words of Carl Gustav Jung“I sometime feel that Paul’s words- “Through I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love” –might well be the first condition of all cognition and the quintessence of divinity itself. Whatever the learned interpretation may be of the sentence “GOD is love,” the words affirms the complexio oppositorum of the Godhead. In my medical experience as well as in my own life I have again and again been faced with the mystery of love, and have never been able to explain…. Love “bears all things” and “endures all things (1 cor. 13:7). These words say all there is to be said; nothing can be added to them. For we are in the deepest sense the victims and the instruments of cosmogonic “love”. I put the word [love] in quotations marks to indicate that I do not use it in its connotations of desiring, preferring, favoring, wishing, and similar feelings, , but as something superior to the individual, a unified and undivided whole. Being a part, man cannot grasp the whole. He is at its mercy. He may assent to it, or rebel against it; but he is always caught up by it and enclosed within it. He is dependent upon it and is sustained by it. Love is his light and his darkness, whose end he cannot see. “Love ceases not” —whether he speaks with the “tongues of angels,” or with scientific exactitude traces the life of the cell down to its uttermost source. Man can try to name love, showering upon it all the names at this command, and still he will involve himself in endless self-deceptions. If he possesses a grain of wisdom he will lay down his arms and name the unknown by the more unknown,ignotum per ignotius–that is, by the name of GOD. This is a confession of his subjection, his imperfection, and his dependence; but at the same time a testimony to his freedom to choose between truth and error”
Selected Writings
Carl Gustav Jung – late thought
Symbols of Transformation copy write 1956 by
Bollingen Foundation Inc.New York, NY
