Intellectual Autobiography of a Jungian Theologian

This book describes the development of the author’s thinking on religion. It begins with his theological initiation into the supernatural and Aristotelian dualism of Aquinas in the seminary of the late 1950s and early 1960s. It continues through his turn to the immanental theology of Paul Tillich and, through Tillich, to the even deeper interiority of Carl Jung’s psychology and to his decision to train as a Jungian analyst. Jung’s thought led him to an appreciation of the apophatic mystical tradition and its moment of the immersion of the individual in that nothingness beyond the distinction between the divine and the human. The volume also contains an early work in which the author attempts to bridge the gap between the worlds of theology and psychology by relating Tillich’s immanentalism to Jung’s understanding of the “religious function” of the psyche and its role in generating humanity's sense of God. The last work in the volume is a series of essays dealing with the interface of psychology and theology containing essays on Jung’s appreciation of mysticism and a critical analysis of the difficulty in bringing fully together Tillich’s Christian theology and Jung's psychology.