Creature

The term ‘creature’ occupies a philosophically weighted position in the depth-psychology corpus, serving as the ontological counterpart to both creator and pleroma. Its most rigorous treatment emerges in Jung’s Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, where ‘creature’ names that which has differentiated itself from the undifferentiated pleroma — differentiation being, in this framework, the very essence and survival strategy of the creature. The principium individuationis is nothing less than the creature’s constitutive drive against dissolution back into pleroma. Edinger elaborates this into a typology of religious positions: credo containment, secular inflation, and ego/Self dialogue — each defined by how the ego relates to its status as creature before a creator. The Gnostic-alchemical strand in Jung further specifies that creation itself is differentiation, while the Red Book frames creatures as arising precisely where the pleroma becomes self-distinguishing. Beyond Jung, the term intersects with Platonic cosmology, Islamic mystical theology (Ibn ‘Arabi’s creator-creature dialectic of love), Meister Eckhart’s claim that every creature is a vestige of God, and Aristotelian ethics, where creature-hood marks the animal basis from which deliberate choice emerges. The tension between creature as limitation and creature as locus of divine manifestation runs throughout, making this term a nodal point for questions of individuation, theodicy, and ontological status within depth-psychological and adjacent traditions.

In the library 13 passages

The encounter with the creature changes the creator. … Basically there are three possible religious positions concerning these terms creature and creator. First is what I call credo containment. Second is secular, rationalistic alienation, usually accompanied by inflation. And third is ego/Self dialogue, or individuation.

Edinger takes Jung’s axiom that the creature-creator encounter is mutually transformative and develops it into a tripartite typology of religious stances, making ‘creature’ the hinge-concept for diagnosing one’s psychological relation to existence.

Edinger, Edward F., Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s Answer to Job, 1992thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

This is the death of the creature. Therefore we die in such measure as we do not distinguish. Hence the natural striving of the creature goeth towards distinctiveness, fighteth against primeval, perilous sameness. This is called the PRINCIPIUM INDIVIDUATIONIS. This principle is the essence of the creature.

In the Septem Sermones, Jung identifies the creature’s very essence with the principium individuationis: to cease distinguishing oneself is to dissolve back into the pleroma, which is the death of the creature.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

We fall into the pleroma itself and cease to be creatures. We are given over to dissolution in the nothingness. This is the death of the creature. Therefore we die in such measure as we do not distinguish. Hence the natural striving of the creature goeth towards distinctiveness, fighteth against primeval, perilous sameness.

Edinger reproduces and contextualizes Jung’s Gnostic formulation to show that creature-hood is maintained only through active differentiation from the pleroma’s undifferentiated totality.

Edinger, Edward F., Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Creatures came into being, but not creation: since creation is the very quality of the Pleroma, as much as noncreation, eternal death. Creation is ever-present, and so is death. The Pleroma has everything, differentiation and nondifferentiation. Differentiation is creation.

The Red Book distinguishes creation as an eternal quality of the pleroma from creatures as individuated, differentiated instances of that creative principle made manifest in time.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

a divine love (ḥibb ilāhī), which is on the one hand the love of the Creator for the creature in which He creates Himself, that is, which arouses the form in which He reveals Himself, and on the other hand the love of that creature for his Creator, which is nothing other than the desire of the revealed God

Corbin presents Ibn ‘Arabi’s theology of love as a mutual reflexive movement in which Creator and creature are constituted through their longing for one another, anticipating Jung’s axiom that the encounter with the creature changes the creator.

Corbin, Henry, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

we recognise the Lord Christ as no creature, for indeed He is none such; nor as something that has been made, since He is Himself the Lord of all things that are made

John of Damascus deploys the creature/creator distinction as a Christological boundary marker, insisting that the Son’s nature categorically exceeds the creature’s ontological status.

John of Damascus, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

we begin the educational process not with a creature who is simply there to be causally affected and manipulated, but with a creature that responds selectively to its world via cognition and orexis, and whose movements are explained by its own view of things

Nussbaum’s Aristotle defines the creature as a self-interpreting, desire-driven agent rather than a passive object, grounding ethical development in creature-hood’s inherent selectivity.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

This kind of consciousness is sometimes called creature consciousness, and contrasts with state consciousness, or as we’ll call it here, mental state consciousness, which is the ability to be aware that one is experiencing something.

LeDoux introduces ‘creature consciousness’ as a technical term for basic wakefulness and organism-level alertness, distinguishing it from the higher-order awareness relevant to fear and anxiety.

LeDoux, Joseph, Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety, 2015supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

not only) literally kill the stag as existing creature, but (also) ‘killed’ logically what was merely-natural, positive, about it. It ‘killed’ the positivistic status in which the natural phenomenon of a stag was initially perceived

Giegerich argues that psychological transformation requires the logical ‘killing’ of the creature as a merely natural, positive entity so that its deeper truth can be disclosed.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

I have no creature to answer for me. Alas it is an heavy case!

A medieval ars moriendi text uses ‘creature’ in the archaic sense of any fellow being or person, here dramatizing the dying soul’s absolute solitude before divine judgment.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the word itself, animal, is from the Latin, meaning a living creature, even more properly ‘anything living,’ and especially, animalis: having the breath of life, from anima, meaning air, breath, and life.

Estés traces the etymology of ‘animal’ back to ‘creature’ in the sense of any breath-endowed, ensouled living being, arguing against the denial of soulfulness to non-human creatures.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Related terms