Coagulatio as axis of Jungian incarnational theology

A single thread runs through Jung’s late alchemy, Edinger’s whole corpus, and the Answer to Job trajectory: the claim that the individuation of the human person and the incarnation of God are the same event, and that the event is a coagulatio.

The Jung letter Edinger quotes in the conclusion of the Anatomy’s coagulatio chapter states the position directly: “God wants to be born in the flame of man’s consciousness, leaping ever higher. And what if this has no roots in the earth? If it is not a house of stone where the fire of God can dwell, but a wretched straw hut that flares up and vanishes? Could God then be born? One must be able to suffer God… God needs man in order to become conscious, just as he needs limitation in time and space. Let us therefore be for him limitation in time and space, an earthly tabernacle” (Jung, Letters, in Edinger 1985). The earthly tabernacle is the alchemical image of the coagulated body; the suffering of God is the fixatio on the cross.

Edinger’s Transformation of the God-Image (1992) extends the line: “When something descends from an upper spiritual level to a lower realm, it takes on body as it descends. That is the process of coagulatio.” Sophia’s fall into matter and Christ’s incarnation and the individual’s labor of ego-development are, for Edinger, three versions of one operation. The Jungian position is that the Self cannot realize itself without this operation; the work of the ego is to provide it.

The thread is what makes Jungian alchemy theologically load-bearing in a way that Jung’s earlier typological and developmental work is not. It is also what makes the operations tradition lineally continuous with Christian mysticism. Edinger‘s Christian Archetype (1987) reads the whole Passion sequence as coagulatio symbolism. This is the territory where alchemy, Christology, and depth psychology converge.

Sources

• carl-jung: Letters — God “needs limitation in time and space, an earthly tabernacle” (quoted in Edinger 1985)
• edward-edinger: Anatomy of the Psyche — coagulatio as ego-formation and individuation culminating in the Self’s incarnation (Edinger 1985)
• edward-edinger: Transformation of the God-Image — coagulatio as the descent of spirit into matter (Edinger 1992)
• edward-edinger: The Christian Archetype — the Passion as coagulatio imagery (Edinger 1987)