God Has Not Uttered His Last Word

The Sanctification of the Seventh Day of Creation. Woodcut in text from Liber Chronicarum (The Nuremburg Chronicle), 1493. Image via Bibliodyssey.

To a theologian, God is bound to His own books and is incapable of further publications. […] We have a humbler attitude than theologians.  […] To us the experience of God is greater and more unknown and therefore we consult Him again each time. We have not the idea that He has uttered His last word. That is the great contrast between psychology and theology. We think of God as a reality who can speak in our psyche. One never knows what God may ask of an individual. That is why every analysis is an adventure, because one never knows what God is going to ask of this particular person.

—Marie-Louise von Franz, in a lecture given at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland in 1959. English translation published in Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, pp. 139 & 142.

~ by emilypothast on February 18, 2010.