Imago Dei

The image of God in the soul is, for Jung, an empirical phenomenon. The unconscious produces images — quaternities, mandalas, the figure of Christ — that exhibit the same structure and the same numinous valence as the inherited theological imago Dei. “The quaternity is a symbol of the self … it is impossible to distinguish the self from a God-image”; “one can … explain the God-image aspect of the quaternity as a reflection of the self, or, conversely, explain the self as an imago Dei in man” (Jung 1958, par. 281). Jung holds the two empirically indistinguishable and refuses to decide metaphysically between them: “here faith or philosophy alone can decide, neither of which has anything to do with the empiricism of the scientist”.

This is what makes Jung’s psychology of religion neither apologetic nor reductive. The imago Dei is not a projection in the deflationary sense (it is autonomous, transpersonal, and constitutive of psychic wholeness), nor is it a metaphysical claim about a being outside the psyche (Jung brackets that question). It is a fact about how the psyche is structured: the soul produces, spontaneously, the image of its own ground, and this image bears the marks of divinity — wholeness, numinosity, the coniunctio of opposites that the orthodox Christ figure, sine macula peccati, conspicuously lacks (Jung 1958, par. 283; cf. jung-aion).

Edinger reads the consequence clinically: where the ego loses its relation to this God-image, alienation follows; where it recovers the relation, the ego-self-axis is restored (Edinger 1972). The imago Dei is the inner pole of the religious function.

Relationships

• self
• religion
• ego-self-axis
• cross-as-quaternity-of-the-self
• religious-function-of-the-psyche

Primary sources

• jung-psychology-religion-west (Jung 1958)
• jung-aion (Jung 1951)
• edinger-ego-and-archetype (Edinger 1972)