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Cross as Quaternity of the Self

Cross as Quaternity of the Self

The cross is structurally a quaternity — a fourfold organizing schema — and the Self is the figure quaternity images. Jung states the equation directly: “the central Christian symbol, the Cross, is unmistakably a quaternity. The Cross, however, symbolizes God’s suffering in his immediate encounter with the world” (Psychology and Religion: West and East, par. 250). The quaternio is, for Jung, “an organizing schema par excellence, something like the crossed threads in a telescope. It is a system of co-ordinates that is used almost instinctively for dividing up and arranging a chaotic multiplicity” (Aion, par. 381).

The Lineage gives the cross-as-quaternity in two registers. As cosmic image, the cross is prefigured in Plato‘s Timaeus, where the demiurge splits the world-soul “lengthwise into two halves which he placed crosswise at their middle points to form the shape of the letter Chi” (Timaeus 36b–c). As anthropological image, Edinger cites the Adam-quaternity in Mysterium Coniunctionis: Adam is composed of “red, black, white, and green dust from the four corners of the earth,” and the Book of the Cave of Treasures “states that Adam stood on the spot where the cross was later erected, and that this spot was the centre of the world” (Mysterium Coniunctionis, par. 555). The four letters INRI attached to the cross are read by Edinger as a “new tetragrammaton” repeating “the dilemma of the three and four” (The Christian Archetype, with reference to Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12, par. 31). The cross is the Self’s diagram: four quarters held in tension at a center that suffers.

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