Active Imagination and the Mystical Life: Jung and Ignatius Loyola

Notice: Booking for this event is expected to open early Autumn 2024

Date: Saturday 30th November 2024 Location: Online
Start time: 2:00pm End time: 5:30pm Type: Webinar

Jung, a Swiss Liberal Protestant, and Ignatius Loyola, a Counter-Reformation Catholic Saint, might seem like odd bedfellows but as Jung saw, there are important connections between their visions of God and religious life. Jung lectured on Ignatius’s ‘Spiritual Exercises’ between 1933 and 1941, after recent engagement with Eastern forms of meditation.

This Conference will discuss his interpretation both of the Exercises and of a crucial mystical vision of Ignatius, which resonated positively and negatively with Jung’s own experience. It will be suggested that he saw Ignatius’s imaginative meditation programme as analogous to his own practice of active imagination and as a vital recuperation of the imagination, after centuries of neglect by the Christian mystical tradition. Finally, Jung’s developing ideas on religious experience as he approached the study of alchemy will be explored, suggesting that for both Jung and Ignatius a religion which is not experiential is effectively psychologically useless.

Please note that booking for all webinars closes two hours before the advertised start time.

Image: Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Church of the Gesù, Rome

Speaker: Earl Collins

Earl Collins, a native of Belfast, studied philosophy and Byzantine Studies in Belfast and Athens, completing a PhD in Byzantine mystical theology. He also studied at the Zurich Jung Institute. He was a Benedictine monk in Ireland and Israel for many years before joining the Church of England in 2017. Earl has taught theology in Rome, Ireland, the UK, the USA, and Africa, and teaches for the New York Centre for Jungian Studies (in Prague, Lisbon, and Madrid). He is a vicar and Officer for Continuing Ministerial Development in the Diocese of Chichester, running seminars in theology, psychology, and spirituality. He has published, 'The Glenstal Book of Icons' and 'Meeting Christ in his Mysteries'.