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Advanced English Skills

17 Oct 2024 15:34

Language Log
An unusual view of divine revelation

The middle two panels of a recent SMBC: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/SMBC_JungScience0.png This might be an (unfair) attack on Blinkist, but it isn't.
It's partly an attack on Carl Jung, and simultaneously a joke about the attacker. Here's the whole of the comic: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/SMBC_JungScience.png Mouseover title: "The best part of the book is his descriptions of Freud fainting because Jung didn't believe sex was the cause of everything."

And the AfterComic is the relevant quote from Jung's memoir:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/SMBC_JungScienceAfter.png

Ironically, the comic's treatment of God's bowel movement is incomplete and misleading. Here's more of the context, from Jung's memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections (translation by Clara and Richard Winston of Erinnerungen, Träume, Gedanken):

One fine summer day that same year [1886, when he was 11 years old] I came out of school at noon and went to the cathedral square. The sky was gloriously blue, the day one of radiant sunshine. The roof of the cathedral glittered, the sun sparkling from the new, brightly glazed tiles. I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the sight, and thought: “The world is beautiful and the church is beautiful, and God made all this and sits above it far away in the blue sky on a golden throne and …” Here came a great hole in my thoughts, and a choking sensation. I felt numbed, and knew only: “Don’t go on thinking now! Something terrible is coming, something I do not want to think, something I dare not even approach. Why not? Because I would be committing the most frightful of sins. What is the most terrible sin? Murder? No, it can’t be that. The most terrible sin is the sin against the Holy Ghost, which cannot be forgiven. Anyone who commits that sin is damned to hell for all eternity. That would be very sad for my parents, if their only son, to whom they are so attached, should be doomed to eternal damnation. I cannot do that to my parents. All I need do is not go on thinking.”

That was easier said than done. On my long walk home I tried to think all sorts of other things, but I found my thoughts returning again and again to the beautiful cathedral which I loved so much, and to God sitting on the throne—and then my thoughts would fly off again as if they had received a powerful electric shock. I kept repeating to myself: “Don’t think of it, just don’t think of it!” I reached home in a pretty worked-up state. My mother noticed that something was wrong, and asked, “What is the matter with you? Has something happened at school?” I was able to assure her, without lying, that nothing had happened at school. I did have the thought that it might help me if I could confess to my mother the real reason for my turmoil. But to do so I would have to do the very thing that seemed impossible: think my thought right to the end. The poor dear was utterly unsuspecting and could not possibly know that I was in terrible danger of committing the unforgivable sin and plunging myself into hell. I rejected the idea of confessing and tried to efface myself as much as possible.

That night I slept badly; again and again the forbidden thought, which I did not yet know, tried to break out, and I struggled desperately to fend it off. The next two days were sheer torture, and my mother was convinced that I was ill. But I resisted the temptation to confess, aided by the thought that it would cause my parents intense sorrow.

On the third night, however, the torment became so unbearable that I no longer knew what to do. I awoke from a restless sleep just in time to catch myself thinking again about the cathedral and God. I had almost continued the thought! I felt my resistance weakening. Sweating with fear, I sat up in bed to shake off sleep. “Now it is coming, now it’s s[...]