Christ as Archetype

Jung’s treatment of Christ — most fully in Aion (CW 9ii) and Answer to Job (CW 11) — reads the figure of Christ not as a historical person to be believed or doubted but as an archetypal image of the self. Christ is, for Jung, the Western tradition’s most developed symbol of the individuated human: the incarnation of the god in a particular life, the imago Dei realized in the person.

The position is not reductive. Jung insists that the archetypal reading does not dissolve the religious reality but discovers its psychological depth. The shadow of the Christ-archetype — the Antichrist — belongs to the same symbolic structure: a totality requires its dark half, and the aeon of Christ is shadowed by what it excluded. See also ichthys-as-self and lapis-christ-parallel.

Relationships

• carl-jung
• jung-aion
• self
• antichrist-as-shadow-of-the-aeon