ABSTRACT
Carl Jung's psychology, taken in its totality, contains a radical critique of current Western societal religiosity and the spirituality attaching to it. When his psychology is read as itself an expression of and contributor to a widespread emerging religious consciousness, it is found to promote a new societal myth which both appreciates and undermines all three mainstream monotheistic variants on which the Western religious tradition rests. The myth embedded in Jung's psychology would radically revision the relation of the divine to the human and in so doing sponsor a new individual and societal religiosity with far-reaching repercussions on Western culture and its religious foundations. For these reasons a closer examination of the spirituality endemic to Jung's myth is of some interest and value in offering a critical understanding and discerning appreciation of the shifts in current religious sensitivities within what is loosely called current Western culture.
The latter section of this question should be answered ®rst. The term ``spirituality'' has gained its current widespread currency in the wake of the failure of institutional agencies to provide their constituencies with the resources needed to nourish and sustain the human spirit. The paradox at the heart of this situation is that spirituality is now a growing personal and social concern because its traditional sponsors and mediators have lost their ability to ful®ll this role. The current usage of the term with its peculiar meaning may be new but as a noun the term dates from the ®fth century (Wulff 1997: 5). It is also a term with a wide range of meanings. In its narrowest and more historical sense, it usually described the spiritual discipline and practice of a given speci®c religious tradition exercised in the interests of imbuing the practitioner with the spirit of divinity at the heart of that tradition. One can speak of a Hindu or a Buddhist or a Christian spirituality and distinguish many variant spiritualities in each of these larger categories. Thus within Christianity one might speak of a spirituality based on the exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, or John of the Cross or the
Rhineland mystics or Luther or Calvin. However in contemporary usage spirituality has taken on another and wider meaning. It has come to describe a religious consciousness and discipline entirely free of a conscious and committed relation to any religious institution (Wulff 1997: 5±7). Analysts of contemporary religiosity now identify a signi®cant segment of the religiously concerned who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious. They mean their spirituality has for them no relation to an institutional religion. People in this stance usually do not form counter or alternative institutions. On the contrary, frequently they are explicitly seeking a religious life free of signi®cant institutionalization. The experience of people in this situation has convinced them that institutional religion is irrelevant to and even repressive of their personal spiritual needs. They tend to go it alone in the face of a frowning sociology which cannot understand their concern and so brands and rejects their efforts as ``privatization'', i.e., not easily ®tting into existing sociological categories and consciousness.
