" . . . we know that the [primary oral people] set out -- not with the conviction, they do not need to have a conviction about it -- but with the fact that their world is animated, full of spiritual life. Gods are in every tree, in every animal; the demon's voice is everywhere. So the existence of the divine presence was an original fact with which [people] were confronted. In the moment when they were confronted with any physical object, they were also confronted with the fact that this object was animated. The profound original fact is the divine presence. Then very much later people came to the notion that one can make an idea about it -- that one can say, this is such and such a god, having such and such a quality, and one must do such and such things [italics in the original]. But first of all, it was simply animation, a presence, and they did not break their heads over what the presence was; they could hardly give a name to it. Or they simply called it numen, which is the Latin for a hint; it is the nodding of the head, the divine presence or the divine power, like mana [italics in the original]. One doesn't know what mana is; mana is an impression one gets, or it is the magic quality of the thing that impresses itself upon one. It has no form, no personality -- there is no concept that would formulate it -- yet it is an absolute fact.
"So God has never been made. He has always been. Then slowly, with the increase of consciousness, when people discovered that they could make different ideas about the deity, they came to the conclusion that it was nothing but an idea, and they quite forgot the real phenomenon that is behind all the ideas. You see, they became so identical with the products of their own consciousness that they thought they had created him. But such abuse brings about its own revenge. The more people created ideas about God, the more they depleted and devitalized nature. And then it looked as if that primordial fact of the world had only taken place in imagination. Of course, be that process we created consciousness, but we have built up a thick wall between ourselves and primordial facts, between ourselves and the divine presence. We are so far away that nobody knows what one is talking about when one speaks of that divine presence, and if anybody discovers it suddenly, he [or she] thinks it is most amazing; yet it is the most simple [sic] fact. But we are no longer simple enough on account of that thick wall of ideas; we have so many preconceived ideas about what the divine presence ought to be, that we have deprived ourselves of the faculty of seeing it. Yet the primordial facts are still in the world; they happen all the time, only we have given them so many names that we don't see the wood any longer on account of the trees" (pages 334-335).
For a relevant phenomenological account of the world-as-event sense of life that Jung describes here, see David Abram's book The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (Pantheon Books, 1996).
Now, I would like to comment on Jung's statement here that "we have deprived ourselves of the faculty of seeing" the divine presence.
Based on my understanding of Ong's thought, I would word Jung's statement differently. I would say that "we have deprived ourselves of the ability to sense and experience the divine presence in our consciousness" -- unless we are mystics like St. Ignatius Loyola or aspiring mystics as Tony and all other Jesuits were and are.
More to the point of Jung's statement, Ong attributes the dominance of sight in our sensory synthesis to our distanciation from the earlier human experience of sensory synthesis dominated by oral-aural sensory inputs (sound, for short). In effect, Ong aligns what Jung refers to as the experience ("fact") of divine presence in the human psyche.
In other words, the animated life-world of primary oral people that Jung discusses grows out of what Ong described as their world-as-event sense of life. Ong contrasts their world-as-event sense of life with our world-as-view sense of life. Our world-as-view sense of life involves greater distanciation from our immediate sensory experience of the world around us -- greater, that is, than what primary oral people had experienced. Their world-as-event sense of life did not provide them with the kind of distanciation from their immediate sensory experience that our world-as-view sense of life gives.
Now, Jung was the son of a Swiss Reform pastor. Nietzsche's father and both of his grandfathers were Lutheran pastors. So perhaps it is not surprising that Jung happens to agree with Ulrich Zwingli (1440-1531) and disagree with Martin Luther (1483-1546) regarding the Host in the centuries-old Christian ritual memorializing the supposed hero of the Christ myth, Jesus the Christ (pages 175, 290). Of course both Zwingli and Luther were familiar with the Roman Catholic understanding of the Host as supposedly representing the Real Presence. The Roman Catholic doctrine behind the theory about the Real Presence is known as transubstantiation; Luther accepted the doctrine of transubstantiation, but Zwingli rejected it and preferred instead to refer to the Host as symbolic.
Oddly enough, Jung elsewhere sees rituals as integral parts of what he refers to as symbols. See his 1948 essay "On Psychic Energy" in his Collected Works, volume 8. To sum up his position, I would say that he sees the symbol (involving both words and ritual) as the necessary but not sufficient condition for transformation of the individual person.
Thus when Jung explicitly discusses rituals as parts of symbols, as he uses the term symbol, he does not typically refer to the rituals as involving magic. But he explicitly refers to the Catholic "rite of magic" -- presumably because of the deep resonances of the ritual of the Roman Catholic Mass with the unconscious (page 290).
But does his reference to the Catholic ritual of the Mass imply that all symbols, as he uses this term, involve rites of magic?
Conversely, for Jung, what exactly makes the symbol (and/or ritual) of transformation efficacious in bringing about transformation, when it is efficacious? Let us be clear here. Jung is referring to the transformation in a person's psyche. Irrespective of whether or not the Host consecrated by the priest at Mass involves the Real Presence, the real issue for Jung is the transformation of the person who participates in the ritual of the Mass -- either the priest or the people participating in the Mass. Jung does not deny the possibility that the ritual of the Mass can work for some people today as a necessary but not sufficient condition for transformation. To this day, nobody fully understands what the sufficient condition(s) for transformation would be.
DIGRESSION. Concerning the Roman Catholic theory of the Real Presence in the Host consecrated by the priest in the Mass, see Robert Sokolowski's book Eucharistic Presence: A Study in the Theology of Disclosure (Catholic University Of America Press, 1994). For further studies of presence in the ancient and medieval Catholic tradition, see Hans Ur von Balthasar's book Presence and Thought: An Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa (1995; French original 1988), A. N. Williams' book The Divine Sense: The Intellect in Patristic Theology (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Hans Belting's book Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (University of Chicago Press, 1994; German original 1990). I would suggest that the image that Belting studies is connected with the imagistic thinking that Eric A. Havelock discusses in connection with primary oral cultures in his book Preface to Plato (Harvard University Press, 1963). END OF DIGRESSION.
Oddly enough, however, Jung himself does not happen to connect the Roman Catholic theology about the Real Presence with his own statements elsewhere about how primary oral people sense the divine presence in their daily life-world (pages 334-335, quoted below). Instead, Jung characterizes the Roman Catholic theology about the supposed Real Presence with what he characterizes as "magic" (his word). But he does not characterize the experience of primary oral people of "divine presence" (his words) as involving magic.
As a result, I want to use Ong's terminology about residual forms of primary oral culture to say that the Roman Catholic theology about the supposed Real Presence represents one way in which the Roman Catholic tradition can be described as a residual form of primary oral culture.
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