Seba.Health
Thread · Seba Knowledge Graph
Christian Resistance to the Fourth
Christian Resistance to the Fourth
The Piscean aeon held its Self in a Trinity and refused the fourth. The index of Psychology and Religion: West and East records the fault line explicitly: “quaternity… Christian resistance to, 170; the devil and, 59f, 170” (Jung 1958, index). Jung’s diagnosis in Aion and its companion volume is that official Christian theology, by refusing a quaternary completion of the godhead, expelled the fourth — variously the feminine, the earth, the material, and the dark — into the figure of the devil. What the theology could not contain as fourth, it persecuted as opposite.
The psychological correction runs the other direction. “Trinity and quaternity symbols occur fairly frequently in dreams, and from this I have learnt that the idea of the Trinity is based on something that can be experienced and must, therefore, have a meaning. This insight was not won by a study of the traditional sources” (Jung 1958, §281). The unconscious, in its dreams, produces quaternities where theology produces trinities. The quaternity is the archetype of the self in its completed form; the Trinity is an incomplete articulation that generates its own fourth as shadow. The Christian resistance to the fourth is therefore the dogmatic expression of the same structural one-sidedness that Aion reads across the imago of Christ: a one-sided wholeness that cannot remain one-sided and will find its missing member whether the dogma permits it or not.