Correspondence

Author of The Intelligent Agnostic's Introduction to Christianity Translator of Creative Man by Erich Neumann

May I Amplify Agnes Wilkinson's perceptive, not uncritical, but on the whole overwhelmingly positive review of Vincent Brome's Jung: Man and Myth (in JAP Vol. 25, No. 2, April 1980)? She mentions Brome's ‘popular, but hasty … and naive conclusion’ about ‘Jung's famous “flash” answer to an equally “flash” question’. Brome writes (p. 53, lines 18-21): ‘Extraordinarily, at the age of eighty-three, after a lifetime spent redefining what religious experience meant, Jung turned full circle and answered John Freeman's television question “Do you believe in God?” with “I don't need to believe. I know”’. She goes on to say, ‘It is a pity that Brome does not refer readers at this point to p. 255 where … he quotes a most illuminating amplification of this answer from Jung himself’. Jung told Frederick Sands (Daily Mail, 29 April, 1955): ‘All that I have learned has led me step by step to an unshakeable conviction of the existence of God … I do not take His existence on belief—I know that He exists’. In a letter to a Mr Leonard, who enquired about this point, Jung explained: ‘Mr Freeman fired the question … in a somewhat surprising way, so that I was perplexed and had to say the next thing which came into my mind’. Immediately ‘he knew he had said something controversial, puzzling and even ambiguous’ (p. 255).

Jung received so many letters on this point that he finally wrote to The Listener, which had published ‘Dr Jung on Life and Death’ (a version of the Freeman interview) in their ‘Face to Face’ television series on 29 October, 1959. Jung's letter appeared on 21 January, 1960. It is just over 500 words long and contains a subtle and profound statement of jung's position. Jung states inter alia: ‘I did not say in the broadcast: “There is a God”. I said: I do not need to believe in God; I know. Which does not mean: I do know a certain God (Zeus, Jahwe, A