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This book is not as its subtitle might suggest, an exposition of Jung's attitude to religion. It is instead an attempt, using some of Jung's ideas, to explore the religious attitudes which underlie particular religious frameworks but are not to be identified with them. He defines ‘religious attitudes’ as the way in which we approach life and relate to the world. The author further states his intention of presenting ‘a psychologically and historically-based description of the principles which had made some religious cultures what they are today’. He acknowledges that this has to be a somewhat subjective activity and sets out in the preface an autobiographical sketch which gives an account of his own search, from a fundamentalist Christian childhood in America, through a variety of churches all leaving him unsatisfied, until eventually he discovered Jung and trained in Zurich as an analyst.
After an examination of the various meanings of ‘religion’ he proceeds to give an account of first, Buddhism with side glances at Hinduism, and then Christianity with references also to Judaism and Islam. He goes on to examine the nature of Mysticism as a feature of both theistic and non-theistic religions and also of drug cultures. Two other scholars contribute chapters on North American Indian and Australian Aboriginal religions respectively and the author returns to pull the whole thing together in the concluding chapter.
The concern of the book is to explore differences and find where possible underlying common ground, particularly between what the author sees as the three main religious groups, Western theistic, Eastern non-theistic, and ‘native’ religious cultures. His touchstone of religion is what unites man with himself, his fellows, his environment and the wider reality of the evolving planet, which he relates to Jung's concept of individuation.
Broadribb quotes Toynbee as describing Christianity as an ‘extroverted thinking’ religion and emphasizes its credal, intellectual n