Archetypes and the Lives of the Saints

One of the most famous aspects of Carl Jung’s thought was the idea of archetypes. We can think of archetypes as the stock characters, plots, and tropes that form the basis of our stories and understanding of the world. While these have strong cultural elements (for example, the archetype of the dutiful son is far more central to East Asian culture than it is here in the West, whereas the independent pioneer or cowboy archetype is stronger in North American culture than it is elsewhere), Jung believed that they go deeper than culture, that somehow their essential natures are hardwired into us, instinctive modes of being in the world: “The archetype is … an inherited tendency of the human mind to form representations of mythological motifs — representations that vary a great deal without losing their basic pattern” (Jung, The Undiscovered Self, p. 108 par 523).*

Christianity presents an interesting case in that it presents one major archetype through which it understands the whole world: Christ. We’ve seen already how Jung described this archetype in terms of individuation, or the full maturation of the free and whole Self. Ancient Christianity expressed a similar idea in its language of the Logos, or Word of God: the logic and grammar of the whole universe, humanity included, made ‘flesh’ in the person of Jesus. While the Scriptures and Tradition do contain other archetypes — the Patriarch, Prophet, Priest, and King figures of the Hebrew Bible, and medieval Christianity’s saintly archetypes of the Martyr, Mystic, Bishop, Monk, Soldier, Mother, Virgin, (Reformed) Harlot, and Crone — these are not at the centre of things and are themselves interpreted through the lens of Christ. That is, they are archetypal only inasmuch as they point to Christ.

This strikes me as very much on point. There’s a paradoxical relationship in the Scriptures between individuation and Christlikeness: the more we follow Christ, the more we will become our true selves in all our specificity and uniqueness; the more we become our true selves, the more strongly we will resemble Christ. Because Christianity didn’t have recourse to creating new gods, its more particular archetypes are found in the Lives of the Saints. While this should theoretically provide us with myriad different patterns, in practice, historically many of the Lives of the Saints were reduced into a handful of similar archetypal patterns such as the ones mentioned above, as though there were only a few ways holiness could be manifest in the world. Over-reliance on such archetypes can easily leave us blinded to other alternatives, when, in reality, there are as many paths to holiness as there are people. And we need such alternatives because, as much as archetypes can be helpful guides, they can also trap us if we come to identify too strongly with any one of them (or project them onto others too strongly, as often happens in families, where we think of our parents solely in terms of their parental roles, or where parents often try to force their children into their preset understandings rather than getting to know and love the unique children they’ve been given). To cite a classic (one may say archetypal) example from our culture, a woman may gain a lot of meaning and find a lot of joy by leaning into the ‘mother’ archetype, but if she reduces her identity to that archetype, she may lose sight of important parts of her personality, or struggle to let go when her children are grown. In the same way, if we limit ourselves to a particular archetype of faithfulness, we might lose a lot in the process. The example that always comes to mind for me is how in the early church, Christian witness became so identified with persecution that being faithful essentially came to mean martyrdom. (We see this in our word ‘martyr’ itself, which comes from a Greek word that literally just means ‘witness’.)

Partly for this reason, my Lenten series this year will include daily reflections on the Lives of the Saints, and I’m going to try to find as varied stories as possible, to open our hearts and minds to the many ways Christ can be revealed in and through the faithful.