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Catholicism and Myth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 October 2024

Norbert Drewitt O.P.
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‘It is to be held as an article of faith,” wrote Pope Pius IX, “that outside the apostolic Roman Church no man can be saved, for it is the sole ark of salvation.”

Nevertheless, we find in the same pronouncement, we are to hold with equal certainty “that those who are afflicted by ignorance of the true religion, provided that ignorance is invincible, are not accounted in any way guilty by God on that account.”

The Church’s language is that of paradox. Her decrees, her definitions, sketch out supernatural cosmic realities in huge, generous, sweeping outlines. There is little refinement, distinction, qualification. The faith-lit mind is trusted to press on behind these symbols to the grand totalities symbolized. Thus the Church guards us against seizing the relative sign for the absolute thing, the letter for the Divine Word, representing for us infinitesimal fragments of the integral reality to be believed and loved.

Type
Research Article
Information
Blackfriars , Volume 18 , Issue 203 , February 1937 , pp. 103 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © 1937 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Cf. Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum, 1647.

2 I.e. the total psychic dvive, or torrent of energy, of the whole being. “Libido” does not mean merely sexual energy for Jung. We are using it in Jung's sense, not in Freud's. Cf. Analytical Psychology, pp. 156, 288 and 347: “I postulate a hypothetical fundamental striving which I designate libido. This energy may also be designated as horme., force, attack, press, impetuosity, violence, urgency, zeal”. The metaphysical principle underlying Jung's concept is that of finality. Cf. his Psychology of the Unconscious, p. 42: “The people of the age of Nero had grown ripe for identification with the Logos‘become flesh’ for the founding of a new fellowship, united by one idea, in the name of which people could love each other and call each other brothers. The meaning of this cults—I speak of Christianity and Mithraism—is clear; it is a moral restraint of animal impulses. The dynamic appearance of both religions betrays something of that enormous feeling of redemption which animated the first disciples and which we to-day scarcely know how to appreciate, for these old truths are empty to us. Most certainly we should still understand it, had our customs even a breath of ancient brutality, for we can hardly realize in this day the whirlwinds of the unchained libido which roared through the ancient Rome of the Caesars. The civilized man of the present day seems very far removed from that. He has become merely neurotic. The elementary emotions of the libido have come to be unknown to us, for they are camed on in the unconscious: therefore the belief that combats them has become hollow and empty”.

3 But even here is a vague anticipation of the Mithraic ideal, in the renunciation of the temble Ishtar by the hero.

4 Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious, p. 162.

5 Cf. Max Müller, Egyptian Mythology, pp. 122. 123.

6 Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious, p. 226.

7 Cf. Summa Theologia, IIIa, p. 74, a. 6. “Cum in calice vino aqua miscetur, Christo populus adumtur”. Note the gentle concession to the archaic mysteries, in the mother symbolism.

8 Psychology of the Unconscious, ibid.

9 Von Hügel, Letters to a Niece, p. 9.

10 It is interesting to compare the archaic background of “mimetic” dances d ancestral communion, in Frazer, Golden Bough, vii, pp. 378–383. Google Scholar