The Christian Archetype

Edinger‘s The Christian Archetype reads the events of the life of Christ as stages of the ego-Self drama — the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Baptism, the Temptation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection — each treated as a structural moment in the individuation process. The work follows Ego and Archetype (1972) in method: the Christian narrative is taken as the most fully developed Western symbolism of the Self, and the events of the gospel as images that “the soul is by nature Christian” produces of itself.

The chapter on the Crucifixion is the work’s load-bearing center for the present recon. Edinger names the crucifixion as the coniunctio of opposites and the ego‘s suspension on the mandala-cross of the Self: “The crucifixion pictures the juxtaposition of opposites. It is the moment of intersection between the human and the divine. Ego and Self are superimposed. The human figure representing the ego is nailed to the mandala-cross representing the Self.” Augustine’s image of the cross as marriage-bed and the INRI as a “new tetragrammaton” are read as direct expressions of the Self‘s quaternary structure. The work is a primary substrate for any concept of ratio-crucis insofar as it furnishes the explicit Jungian grammar of the cross as both coniunctio and quaternio.

Concepts introduced or developed

• crucifixion-as-coniunctio
• cross-as-quaternity-of-the-self
• ego-self-axis
• anthropos

Cited by

• ratio-crucis
• passio-as-pathologizing (as the Jungian reading Hillman contrasts with)