Divine Man

The term ‘Divine Man’ circulates through the depth-psychology corpus along two principal axes that rarely converge without friction. The first is the christological axis, in which patristic authors — John of Damascus, the Philokalia translators, and the theologians they transmit — labour over the paradox of a figure who is simultaneously and without confusion perfect God and perfect man. Here the term carries ontological weight: the Divine Man is not a symbolic convenience but a hypostatic union, the pivot on which human salvation and the entire economy of incarnation turn. The second axis is archetypal and psychological, most forcefully prosecuted by Jung and amplified by Edinger. For these writers the Divine Man — whether named Son of Man, Anthropos, or primal Man — is the constellation of a Self-symbol that precedes and exceeds any single historical instantiation; it is the collective psyche encountering its own transcendent ground. Von Franz situates the Anthropos within this same framework, linking it to the collective unconscious. The tension between the two axes is productive: patristic sources insist on unique historical particularity, while analytical psychology reads that particularity as one expression of an eternally recurring archetype. The term thus becomes a site at which soteriology, symbolic theory, and the psychology of the God-image meet — and meet uneasily.

In the library 16 passages

Son of Man refers to the original man, or Anthropos, that first appeared in early Near Eastern myth. So that a synonym for Son of Man according to the archetypal interpretation might be ‘primal Man’ — Man spelled with a capital M.

Edinger explicates the archetypal reading of ‘Son of Man’ as equivalent to the Anthropos or Divine Man — a primordial, capital-M figure from Near Eastern myth rather than a merely historical person.

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

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in the same measure as God sets out to become man, man is immersed in the pleromatic process. He becomes, as it were, baptized in it and is made to participate in the divine quaternity (i.e., is crucified with Christ).

Jung argues that the incarnation is a reciprocal process: as God descends into humanity, the human being is drawn upward into the divine drama, becoming a participant in the pleromatic life of the Divine Man.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis

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because he wants to become man, the uniting of his antinomy must take place in man…. He must know something of God’s nature and of metaphysical processes if he is to understand himself and thereby achieve gnosis of the Divine.

Edinger, glossing Jung, presents the Divine Man as the locus where God’s own antinomial nature is resolved — human consciousness becomes the arena in which the divine self-contradiction achieves integration.

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

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the incarnation of the Deity in man. As a consequence the sacrifice was a self-destruction of the amoral God, incarnated in a mortal body. Thus the sacrifice takes on the aspect of a highly moral deed, of a self-punishment, as it were.

Edinger reads Christ’s sacrificial death as the destruction of an amoral divine nature through its incarnation as a mortal Divine Man, rendering the ethical transformation of the God-image visible in history.

Edinger, Edward F., The New God-Image: A Study of Jung’s Key Letters Concerning the Evolution of the Western God-Image, 1996thesis

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God being perfect becomes perfect man, and brings to perfection the newest of all new things.

John of Damascus asserts the full symmetry of the hypostatic union — the Divine Man is neither diminished divinity nor elevated humanity but the perfection of both natures simultaneously.

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

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He does not cease to be God because He becomes man, nor fail to be man because He remains for ever God. This is the true faith for human blessedness, to preach at once the Godhead and the manhood.

The passage articulates the classical patristic definition of the Divine Man as permanently and simultaneously divine and human, refusing any reductive solution to the paradox.

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

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He became Himself in essence and truth man, that is He caused flesh animated with the intelligent and reasonable to subsist in His own subsistence, and Himself became subsistence for it.

John of Damascus grounds the Divine Man in the technical vocabulary of subsistence — the Word does not merely dwell in a human frame but constitutes the very hypostatic ground of the humanity assumed.

John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, 2021supporting

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God and man are exemplars of each other. Man’s ability to deify himself through love for God’s sake is correlative with God’s becoming man through compassion for man’s sake.

The Philokalia passage positions the Divine Man not as a static dogmatic category but as the ground of a mutual exemplarity — the God-become-man and the man-becoming-divine mirror and generate each other.

Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 2, 1981supporting

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that which anointed became man, and that which was anointed became God. For these words do not mean any change in nature, but rather the oeconomical union.

The passage interprets the mutual exchange of divine and human predicates as a function of the economic union rather than ontological transformation, preserving the integrity of each nature within the Divine Man.

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

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since He was Himself wholly God although also man, and wholly man although also God, He Himself as man subjected in Himself and by Himself His human nature to God and the Father.

John of Damascus describes the Divine Man’s inner moral act — the voluntary subordination of human will to divine will within the one person — as the supreme type and example for human moral agency.

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

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collective psyche, Anthropos as… Christ as archetype of collective consciousness… God-image in… collective unconscious.

Von Franz’s index entry clusters the Anthropos with Christ as the archetype of collective consciousness, placing the Divine Man within the structural framework of Jung’s collective unconscious.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, 1975supporting

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The encounter with the creature changes the creator. In the Old Testament writings we find increasing traces of this development from the sixth century B.C. on.

Jung traces the impulse toward incarnation to Yahweh’s inner instability, implying that the emergence of the Divine Man is not arbitrary but the inevitable outcome of God’s encounter with a morally conscious creature.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Answer to Job, 1952supporting

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religious man assumes a humanity that has a transhuman, transcendent model. He does not consider himself to be truly man except in so far as he imitates.

Eliade frames the general structure of imitative religious behaviour as dependent on a divine exemplar, providing a phenomenological context within which the concept of the Divine Man functions as the paradigmatic model for human self-understanding.

Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957aside

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God became man in order that we may become gods. All three authors are giving voice to the Eastern teaching that the entire purpose of the Incarnation was the theosis, or deification, of human beings.

The annotation summarises the patristic consensus that the Divine Man’s descent is teleologically ordered toward the deification of humanity, linking christology to the doctrine of theosis.

Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 1, 1979aside

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From a God who is a loving father, who is actually Love itself, one would expect understanding and forgiveness. So it comes as a nasty shock when this supremely good God only allows the purchase of such an act of grace through a human sacrifice.

Jung underscores the moral paradox embedded in the Divine Man’s sacrificial role, questioning the theological coherence of a doctrine that demands the death of the God-man to appease the God of love.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958aside

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