Active Imagination and the Mystical Life: Jung and Ignatius Loyola

Jung, a Swiss Liberal Protestant, and Ignatius Loyola, a Counter-Reformation Catholic Saint, might seem like odd bedfellows but as Jung saw, there are important connections between their visions of God and religious life. Jung lectured on Ignatius’s ‘Spiritual Exercises’ between 1933 and 1941, after recent engagement with Eastern forms of meditation.

This Conference will discuss his interpretation both of the Exercises and of a crucial mystical vision of Ignatius, which resonated positively and negatively with Jung’s own experience. It will be suggested that he saw Ignatius’s imaginative meditation programme as analogous to his own practice of active imagination and as a vital recuperation of the imagination, after centuries of neglect by the Christian mystical tradition. Finally, Jung’s developing ideas on religious experience as he approached the study of alchemy will be explored, suggesting that for both Jung and Ignatius a religion which is not experiential is effectively psychologically useless.