Continuing Incarnation

The continuing incarnation is Edinger‘s name for the psychological thesis that Jung advanced in Answer to Job and his late letters: that the divine becomes conscious through human consciousness, and that this incarnation is not a historical event completed two millennia ago but an ongoing process carried by individuals capable of bearing it.

Edinger describes three successive dispensations: “In essence, the Jewish dispensation was centered in the law, the Christian dispensation was centered in faith and the psychological dispensation is centered in experience. God is now to be carried experientially by the individual. This is what is meant by the continuing incarnation” (Edinger 1984).

The individuating ego, in this reading, is “commandeered by the transpersonal psyche (God, Self) and drafted like Job into the service of making it more conscious” (Edinger 1984). Jung’s own late formulation, cited by Edinger, names the cost: “man is indispensable for the completion of creation … he himself is the second creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence” (Jung, cited in Edinger 1984).

The thesis governs The Creation of Consciousness and Transformation of the God-Image, and is the lens through which Edinger reads the evolving God-image of the Western tradition. It grounds the claim that depth psychology is not a substitute for religion but its present form.

Relationships

• religious-function-of-the-psyche
• god-image
• ego-self-axis
• individuation
• jung-answer-to-job

Primary sources

• edinger-creation-of-consciousness (Edinger 1984)
• edinger-transformation-god-image (Edinger 1992)