ABSTRACT
Both Tillich and Jung were severe critics of a society, theirs, which had been uprooted from the depths of its own humanity. In the severance society had lost touch with its native religious sensibility and grown deaf to symbolic discourse and the humanizing wealth such discourse could proffer. Both Tillich and Jung traced the more remote origin of this disorientation to the intellectualism of thirteenth century scholasticism and especially to the victory Aristotelianism won then and continued to win in the subsequent Western history. Jung will refer to this dubious triumph as “a turning away from our psychic origins as a result of Scholasticism and Aristotelianism”. (Jung 1973b: 317) The psychic origins turned away from were the variations of Platonism in earlier Christianity with its much livelier sense of the presence of the transcendent to finite consciousness. Jung closely relates this natural sense of the transcendent to alchemy and to alchemy’s paganism manifest in the light of nature, the lumen naturae, which he equates with “individual revelation”. (Jung 1973b: 318) Such revelation was better able to sponsor a theophanous consciousness allowing the divine to become transparent in all of nature including human nature than a philosophy such as Aristotle’s and Aquinas’, whose point of departure remained the senses and the limited reality discernible to them. Rather than locating the sense of God as a native sentiment of humanity alone enabling and insuring consequent and more specific revelation to be truly humane, Aristotelian theology understood this sense to be generated by a divine agency originating beyond the human psyche and addressing it from without.
