The Sacred Symbol
Carl Jung, Sacramentality, and the Mystery at the Heart of Anglican Worship
Symbols are not mere decorations. They are the language of the soul.
For the Anglo-Catholic, the beauty and mystery of the liturgy are not simply aesthetic niceties but living, grace-filled signs. Each candle, each genuflection, each word of the Eucharistic prayer serves not only to teach or remind, but to reach deeper—into the very psyche of the worshipper, to stir the soul toward God. Here, the psychological insight of Carl Jung meets the theological vision of the Church: the world of symbol is not opposed to truth; it is its dwelling place.
Jung and the Power of Symbols
Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst and founder of analytical psychology, understood human beings not merely as rational creatures but as symbolic beings. For Jung, symbols were not signs pointing to known things, like road markers. Rather, a true symbol points to something as yet unknown—something transcendent. A symbol, he wrote, “is the best possible expression for something we do not yet fully understand.”¹
This is where Jungian psychology and sacramental theology intersect. The Church does not hand us dry doctrines or naked rituals; it wraps truth in symbol—bread and wine, water and oil, fire and ash, the laying on of hands. In doing so, it meets the deepest structures of the human mind and soul.
Sacraments as Archetypal Acts
In Jung’s framework, the human psyche is shaped by archetypes—primordial forms and patterns deeply rooted in the collective unconscious. These include the Mother, the Hero, the Journey, the Sacrifice, the King. In Christian sacramentality, we encounter these very patterns:
Baptism enacts the archetypal image of death and rebirth.
Holy Communion evokes the archetype of the sacred meal, the divine banquet, and the union of God with man.
Holy Orders connect to the archetype of the wise elder or priest, mediator between the sacred and the profane.
Anointing of the Sick brings to life the archetype of healing and restoration, both bodily and spiritual.
The genius of the Anglican tradition lies in its embrace of mystery alongside reason. We do not require total psychological comprehension of every rite; we enter the liturgy to be shaped, not merely informed.
The Symbol Heals
Jung observed that many modern neuroses stem from a loss of meaning—a failure to connect with symbols that transcend the individual ego. He believed that religion, rightly practiced, offers the psychic structure and nourishment human beings crave. In this way, the Church’s sacraments are not only vehicles of divine grace (as theology rightly insists), but also instruments of psychological integration.
When we confess our sins and receive absolution, we do not only restore our standing before God—we symbolically reconcile with the rejected parts of ourselves, the shadow we have feared to face.
When we kneel to receive the Eucharist, we enact not only a ritual of remembrance but a mystical union with the archetype of the Self, the divine image within, represented in Christ.
When we cross ourselves, light a votive, or bow before the altar, we are not acting out dead tradition. We are stirring the ancient depths of the soul, where the symbol speaks more clearly than words.
Anglicanism: The Middle Way of Meaning
Unlike the stark iconoclasm of some Protestant traditions, or the rigid scholasticism of certain Roman expressions, Anglicanism at its best lives in the tension between sign and substance, mystery and message. The Prayer Book liturgy speaks with poetic clarity, but it also gestures toward the ineffable. It teaches in the rhythms of symbol: the turning of the seasons, the vestments of the priest, the slow lighting of candles on a darkened Advent wreath.
Jung would have recognized in this the therapeutic power of the Church at her most faithful. She does not dissect the mystery; she invites us into it.
Toward a Symbolic Recovery
In an age flattened by materialism and distracted by the trivial, the Church must recover the sacred symbol. Not as ornamentation. Not as medieval holdover. But as the divine language through which God speaks to the soul.
To restore sacramentality is to restore wholeness. It is to proclaim again that God is not merely heard but seen in the breaking of bread, felt in the waters of baptism, encountered in the oil that anoints.
As Jung might say, the Church must return to the archetype—not by retreating into mysticism, but by embracing its role as steward of the symbols that bind heaven and earth.
In doing so, we do not abandon reason—we transcend it. And we find ourselves, once more, in the presence of the Holy.
¹ Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, 1964.