Dear friends,
Lately, I have been slowly finding my way back to the Christian tradition. Or it may be more accurate to say that I am finding my way to it anew, now that I have spent years focused on the contemplative traditions of the East and on the insights of depth psychology.
In any case, I have been reading John A. Sanford’s book, The Kingdom Within, where he applies Jungian concepts in his reading of the Gospels to reveal the hidden meanings of Jesus’ teachings. (You can read it for free here.) It is a wonderful book, and here I wanted to share with you one interesting observation the author makes on how Jesus uses language.
Sanford points out that Jesus’ parables release meaning in the same way that our dreams do. In Jungian terms, Jesus’ language is not semiotic, nor allegorical, but symbolic.
A semiotic expression would be to say, “I’m travelling to the Big Apple”. Here, I say one thing which both you and I know means some other specific thing. “Big Apple” means “New York City”.
An allegorical expression would be to say, “A relationship is like a tree, and good memories are like the fruit of the tree, so tend to the tree if you wish to reap the fruit.” Here, I am using images to illustrate some facts from life we are both familiar with. I am paraphrasing reality in the language of images. We may easily assume this is what Jesus is doing in his teachings, but we would then miss out on the true depth he is offering.
Jesus speaks symbolically, which Carl Jung defines so:
[T]he best possible formulation of a relatively unknown thing, which for that reason cannot be more clearly or characteristically represented, is symbolic…
C.G. Jung, Psychological Types
