The term ‘God Man’ occupies a pivotal position across the depth-psychology corpus, operating simultaneously as a christological category, a psychological symbol, and an index of the evolving relationship between divinity and human consciousness. John of Damascus anchors the term in its classical Chalcedonian register, elaborating the hypostatic union through which the divine Word assumes full humanity without ceasing to be God — a ‘compound subsistence’ uniting two perfect natures. Jung appropriates this theological architecture for psychological ends, reading the God Man not as a finished metaphysical fact but as a symbol of an ongoing, incomplete process: God’s drive to become conscious through incarnation in human beings. The dual aspect — ‘very God and very man’ — maps onto Jung’s understanding of the self as a coincidentia oppositorum, and the cry of dereliction from the Cross becomes the archetypal signal of that tension at its most extreme. Edinger, following Jung, radicalizes this further: the God Man is a transitional figure, the incarnation remaining incomplete until it extends to ‘the many’ through individuation. Hoeller adds the Gnostic-Aquarian dimension, noting that even the God Man appears to be dissolving into common humanity in the contemporary aeon. The term thus spans dogmatic fixity, psychological transformation, and eschatological openness.
the dual aspect of God and the God-man, who, although they are by nature a unity, nevertheless represent a duality in the ritual drama… This contradiction must exist if the formula ‘very God and very man’ is psychologically true.
Jung argues that the God Man’s inherent duality — unity in nature, division in experience — is psychologically necessary for the sacrificial drama to possess genuine reality rather than mere ceremonial form.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis
Yahweh’s decision to become man is a symbol of the development that had to supervene when man becomes conscious of the sort of God-image he is confronted with… God wants to become wholly man; in other words, to reproduce himself in his own dark creature.
Jung reads the incarnation as a psychic symbol of the unconscious pressing toward consciousness, with the God Man representing only the first, partial phase of a fuller divine self-realization that includes the dark side.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis
One should make clear to oneself what it means when God becomes man. It means nothing less than a world-shaking transformation of God… an objectivation of God.
Edinger distills Jung’s central claim that the God Man event constitutes a cosmic transformation of the divine itself, understood psychologically as the humanization of the unconscious.
, Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s Answer to Job, 1992thesis
He, being of two natures united for that Mediatorship, is the full reality of each nature… He does not cease to be God because He becomes man, nor fail to be man because He remains for ever God.
John of Damascus provides the classical dogmatic formulation: the God Man is the complete and simultaneous instantiation of both divine and human natures, without diminution of either, in the one mediatorial Person.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016thesis
the gods first lived in superhuman power… Later on they drew together into one god, and then that god became man. But in our days even the God-man seems to have descended from his throne and to be dissolving himself in the common man.
Hoeller, citing Jung, traces the full trajectory of the God Man symbol from polytheistic multiplicity through monotheistic concentration to incarnation, culminating in a contemporary dissolution into collective humanity.
, The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1982thesis
the subsistence of the Word, which was formerly simple, became compound, yea compounded of two perfect natures, divinity and humanity… bearing the characteristic and distinctive property of the divine Sonship of God the Word.
John of Damascus elaborates the metaphysical mechanics of the hypostatic union, showing how the previously simple divine subsistence becomes compound in the God Man without losing its identity.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting
The ability to carry the opposites consciously ushers in the possibility of the continuing incarnation… we are ‘the children and the heirs of the Deity suffering in the body of the slave.’
Edinger extends the God Man symbol into the doctrine of continuing incarnation, whereby individual human beings who carry opposites consciously become vehicles for the ongoing divine self-realization.
, The New God-Image: A Study of Jung’s Key Letters Concerning the Evolution of the Western God-Image, 1996supporting
If God is born as a man and wants to unite mankind in the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, he must suffer the terrible torture of having to endure the world in all its reality. This is the cross he has to bear, and he himself is a cross.
Jung reframes the suffering of the God Man not as atonement in the juridical sense but as the existential cost of full immersion in material and psychological reality, the whole world constituting God’s suffering.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting
the holy Virgin did not bare mere man but true God: and not mere God but God incarnate… the purpose of God the Word becoming man was that the very same nature, which had sinned and fallen and become corrupted, should triumph.
John of Damascus insists on the soteriological necessity of the God Man’s dual nature: redemption requires that the identical corrupted nature be assumed and transformed, not a substitute or surrogate humanity.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting
Being, then, Man with this body, Jesus Christ is both the Son of God and Son of Man, Who emptied Himself of the form of God, and received the form of a servant. There is not one Son of Man and another Son of God.
John of Damascus refutes any bifurcation of the God Man into two persons, insisting on the identity of the Son of God and Son of Man as a single individual who traverses both modes of being.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting
a further incarnation, this time in sinful man, which will bring about the ‘Christification of many,’ which Jung says is known psychologically as individuation.
Edinger identifies the telos of the God Man symbol as the ‘Christification of many,’ equating the theological concept with Jung’s individuation process as the extension of incarnation beyond a single historical figure.
, Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s Answer to Job, 1992supporting
It needed the assertion that he was the Son of the Father, that is, 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.
Edinger, glossing Jung, reads the God Man’s sacrifice as the self-destruction of God’s amoral aspect, the incarnation serving as the mechanism by which the divine undergoes ethical transformation through mortality.
, The New God-Image: A Study of Jung’s Key Letters Concerning the Evolution of the Western God-Image, 1996supporting
Job’s encounter with Yahweh… had the effect of generating a mediating figure called the Son of Man, who makes an approach to Yahweh and starts to build a bridge between the ego and the Self.
Edinger traces the psychological genesis of the God Man figure to Job’s confrontation with Yahweh, arguing that the Son of Man emerges as a necessary mediating symbol between human consciousness and the archetypal Self.
, The New God-Image: A Study of Jung’s Key Letters Concerning the Evolution of the Western God-Image, 1996supporting
in the case of our Lord Jesus Christ, seeing that we recognise that He has two natures but only one subsistence compounded of both… sometimes use terms that have reference to His double nature, as ‘Christ,’ and ‘at once God and man,’ and ‘God Incarnate.’
John of Damascus systematizes the linguistic conventions governing the God Man, showing how the same subject can bear both divine and human predicates by virtue of the compound hypostasis.
, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, 2021supporting
he called Him both Adam and Lord, thus indicating His double nature. For Adam is, being interpreted, earth-born… but the title Lord signifies His divine essence.
Through Pauline exegesis John of Damascus grounds the God Man’s dual naming — Adam and Lord — as scriptural evidence for the two natures united in the single Person of Christ.
, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, 2021supporting
In the Christian myth the Deity, the self, penetrates consciousness almost completely, without any visible loss of power and prestige. But in time it becomes obvious that the Incarnation has caused a loss… the indispensable dark side has been left behind.
Edinger diagnoses the God Man’s incomplete incarnation as leaving the divine dark side unassimilated, necessitating a further act of incarnation that would incorporate the feminine, corporeal, and shadow dimensions.
, The New God-Image: A Study of Jung’s Key Letters Concerning the Evolution of the Western God-Image, 1996supporting
Yahweh’s decision to become man is a symbol of the development that had to supervene when man becomes conscious of the sort of God-image he is confronted with. God acts out of the unconscious of man.
Edinger’s commentary underscores Jung’s equation of Yahweh’s incarnatory decision with the psychological moment when humanity’s growing consciousness forces the unconscious to seek new forms of expression.
, Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s Answer to Job, 1992supporting
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’s critique of the sacrificial logic surrounding the God Man reveals the psychological paradox at the heart of Christian soteriology: a loving God who requires violent atonement through his own Son.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958aside
The encounter with the creature changes the creator… The inner instability of Yahweh is the prime cause not only of the creation of the world, but also of the pleromatic drama for which mankind serves as a tragic chorus.
Jung establishes the psychological precondition for the God Man event: Yahweh’s inner instability, exposed through Job’s moral challenge, initiates a divine drama that culminates in incarnation.
, Answer to Job, 1952aside
God remained unchanged, whether He were seen in the appearance, or born in the reality, of manhood… He does not cease to be God because He becomes man, nor fail to be man because He remains for ever God.
John of Damascus argues for ontological continuity across the theophanies of the Old Testament and the New Testament incarnation, presenting the God Man’s appearance in history as the fulfilment of a consistent divine pattern.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016aside