Resurrection

… if a solution is described as taking place after death, it means that the conscious means for realization have not yet been found in this reality.  That is why in Christianity victory over evil and the union of the opposites is projected into the time after the Day of Judgment.  Paradise comes after death.  In Faust, Faust finds redemption after death, and in The Kingdom without Space the solution is again projected into the afterlife.  Here it is clear that the bridge to realization has not been found because in this fight the reality of the psyche is not realized.  It is all fought in the projection – intellect against the archaic reality of the unconscious – but having no name for it and not seeing its reality, the author mixes psychic reality with concrete reality. 

This is also the ominous background of our present-day problem, in connection with which I would like to quote a saying of Rabelais to which Jung drew my attention:  La verité dans sa matière brute est plus fausse que la faux (Truth in its prima materia, in its first appearance, is falser than falseness itself.)  And that is very true of what we have just experienced.  But in spite of it all, these are attempts to bring forth a new creative religious attitude and also a renewal of cultural creativity – which can only manifest in a psychological and individual form.  The trouble is that it comes up with such a disgustingly false political twist that it is more false than falseness itself.  In spite of this, however, we must turn toward it and discriminate the seeds in it.  Otherwise, we are stuck, forever, building light, “rosy-colored” buildings upon burnt-out ruins.  TPoPA 274

It’s my belief that St. Paul’s great insight on the road to Damascus was that the death of Jesus Christ on the cross could be interpreted in terms of the mystery religions’ understanding of the death and the resurrection of the savior – that is, as the death of one’s purely material, animal existence and the birth, then, of the spiritual life.  This is symbolized in Christian terminology by the transformation of the old Adam into the new Adam.  Then we have the refrain of O felix culpa, “O happy fault” – original sin – and the notion that the fall of man into the field of time out of the timeless rapture of Eden was followed by the coming of the Savior, who represented a sublimation – a higher manifestation of the consciousness of humanity than that which had been represented in the garden – and so, without the fall, there would have been no savior.  Well, all of this is really mystic language from the Greek mysteries.  TMTT 190