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The illness referred to in the eye-catching title of this illuminating book is that identified by Jung as afflicting the post-Enlightenment Western world and affecting individuals within it. We ordinarily think of ourselves as having this or that illness rather than being an illness, and this way of putting it reflects the author's open acknowledgement of his and our being caught up in the state of illness which he is describing and the suffering which is involved in overcoming it. The author is a Christian and a Jungian analyst (a Roman Catholic priest who trained at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich) and it is evident that the book stems from the dialectic which has arisen within him as he has sought to find the truth in both Christianity and the depth psychology of Jung.
The book is true to its subtitle and develops a commentary based on Jung's writings on Christian belief as embodied in the Protestant and Catholic traditions. The diagnosis concerns the state of alienation that is inherent in the predominant theology of transcendence in the mainstream Christian tradition. The church's belief that embodies the ‘final revelation’ is the great stumbling block to its essential task of leading its followers to an experience of the divine. Demands for blind faith in ‘sacrosanct unintelligibility’ lead both pastor and flock to spiritual emptiness.
In a well-developed chapter on ‘Theopathology and Christopathology’, the author succinctly describes the three essential areas which Jung found missing or underdeveloped in the Christian myth. These are the realities of matter (most