5 Conclusion Jung’s attitude towards religion was always ambivalent. From the very beginning he criticizes the inhibitory nature of religion, but over the course of his career he starts to appreciate potential healing capacities of religion: for a believer, religious symbolism can become a means of finding a balanced relationship with own unconscious. Christianity in particular, according to Jung, is quite effective in this intermediary function. At the same time, though, Christianity is also rather destructive in pursuing collectivism that swallows an individual up and hence degrades one’s inner values. Until his death Jung stood firm on the idea of “helping” believers, that means partially placing competencies of religion to psychology. He does not consider a religious ritual a full expression of spiritual content but as something that is needed to analyze and explain further so that a man can be ridden of shackles of ignorance. In one of the letters to Hans Schmid (6 November 1915) he writes: “We must help people towards those hidden and unlockable symbols, where the germ lies hidden like the tender seed in the hard shell.“ (Letters 1, 32). I have demonstrated that Jung does never entirely gives up an interpretation of God’s image partially as an attempt to fulfil desire for parents and security, but he refuses to interpret the God’s image in a Freudian way, purely as a symptom of personal neuroses. He states that as an archetypal symbol God is a source of inexhaustible intelligibility and a bearer of possible, unpredictable meanings, therefore, never to be fully explained. Jung is not an unbiased commentator of the end of Christianity in Europe. He starts to see the danger in inability of a modern man to acknowledge deep roots that Christianity sent out into the Western culture. That then leads to filling the spiritual vacuum by theosophy, anthroposophy and Eastern religions (CW 11, 531; CW 9, 14–15, 22; CW 8, 58–59, 336; CW 10, 83–91; CW 6, 36; CW 4, 326). In the introduction I have already outlined the extent in which the speculations about Jung’s personal opinion on religion fluctuate; the speculation about whether he had any particular religion, or whether he himself regarded as a prophet. The truth is that Jung analyses Christian dogmas in depth. He discusses the nature of God and he attempts to prove that the principle of Trinity “does not function” psychologically. Does it mean then that Jung sets out for own “remedial metaphysical expedition” or does he only state what symbols and principles do not correspond with his clinical practice? Jung himself never admitted the first option and he also explicitly resisted it many times. Yet he threaded a thin line his entire life teasing the imagination of his readers and commentators to the maximum. Finally, let me present one more quotation from a letter to Robert Corti, dated 30 April 1929: “God wants to be born in flame of man’s consciousness, leaping even higher (...) One must be able to suffer God. That is the supreme task for the carrier of ideas. He must be the advocate of the earth (...) My inner principle is: Deus et homo. God needs man in order to become conscious, just as he needs limitation in time and space. Let us therefore be for him limitations in time and space, an earthly tabernacle.“ (Letters 1, 65). 60 Ivana Ryška Vajdová
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