Jung is describing something the Church has always known and keeps forgetting it knows: a myth does not die by being doubted, it dies by being literalized past the point where anyone can breathe inside it. The prefigurations he mentions — the typological reading of the Hebrew Bible as anticipating Christ — were already a re-interpretation, a Hellenistic frame bolted onto older material to keep it alive for a new world. The Reformation did the same work, badly and brilliantly, by refusing the medieval accommodation and forcing the myth back through a different vernacular. Neither movement was archaeology. Both were urgent creative acts dressed as retrieval.

What Jung leaves open is the harder question his own formulation raises. When he says Christianity stands in need of a new union with the atomic age, the implied direction is upward — a new spiritual language, new wine, pneumatic renovation. But if the devitalization he names is real, it may not be curable by better interpretation. The myth may be announcing not its need for renewal but its completion. The soul reaching toward a more adequate container is not the same motion as the soul discovering that the longing for a container is itself what requires examination. Jung points at the threshold and calls it a doorway. Whether it is a doorway is exactly what the image cannot settle from inside itself.