And what is the divine child? The honest attempt of man. The last remnant of something divine is the honest attempt of man, made through that derivation to a sort of God. You will laugh that I bring in H. G. Wells, but in his book God the Invisible King,'7 God is a youth, and I know that figure from innumerable dreams. We have often spoken of it, the Puer Aeternus who represents the more or less heroic attempt of man, which becomes or, in a way, takes the place of a deity. A peculiar kind of deity, for what is weaker than a human attempt? What is more miserable, more helpless? It is an exceedingly small seed in the beginning. It has to grow, and one has to take care of it to enable it to grow, and that is, of course, not one's idea of the divine-a thing so helpless and weak. But if it is true, as Eckhart says, that God has to be born in the soul again and again, then God is born necessarily as-well, an embryo, a little child, absolutely inefficient, that has to become. So it shouldn't shock our religious feelings too much when we attribute the divine quality to the
— C.G. Jung
Jung is not consoling anyone here. He is pointing at something that resists every strong idea of the divine — the fact that what wants to be born in the psyche arrives helpless. Not as power, not as illumination, not as the higher self descending in recognizable majesty, but as something so small and unformed that calling it divine feels like a category error. The soul's hunger for a god that already works, that arrives complete and capable, is precisely what this figure refuses to satisfy. Eckhart knew it: the birth has to happen again, which means it has not happened yet, which means you are standing in front of something that needs tending before it can do anything.
What makes this hard to receive is that the weakness is not a phase to endure on the way to strength. The embryonic quality is not a temporary embarrassment. The Puer Aeternus is the figure of the honest attempt — and honest attempts are, structurally, inadequate to what they reach toward. That is not a failure of the attempt. It is the only form in which something genuinely new enters. The god that arrives already effective is not being born; it is being imported, and the soul knows the difference, even when it would prefer not to.
C.G. Jung·Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930·1984