Jung and the Religious Alternative the Rerooting

The work presents all pertinent material on Jung's dialogues with Victor White and Martin Buber. It argues that both these dialogues failed for the same reason. Buber and White held to a conception of divine transcendence and otherness incompatible with the more intimate divine-human relation foundational to Jung's understanding of the psyche. A transitional chapter presents the thought of Paul Tillich and Teilhard de Chardin as concerned with establishing similar synthetic views of the divine-human relation as exists in Jung's understanding of the psyche. The work contends that neither of these major correlations of the divine and human is as thorough as Jung's. The work then goes on to show the philosophical and theological implications of Jung's appreciation of mystical experience as the primordial form of religious experience, an experience he functionally equates with the further reaches of human maturity. Thus the work explains the paradox of Jung's inability to agree with major representatives of religious orthodoxies and his high appreciation of that immediate religious experience termed mystical.