I would add that the ambiguous conflation of “soul” and “self” with “man” does not begin with Renaissance scholarship but is in an important sense central to the birth of the modern self in the Renaissance, visible in Pico and Ficino and in the larger ethos of the age. This underlying ambiguity in Renaissance Humanism permitted an empowerment of the human self that was in turn greatly heightened by the further unconscious conflation of human reason with the image of divine reason, the transcendent Solar Logos, that emerged in the course of the Copernican revolution, Scientific Revolution, and Enlightenment. Both of these “humanistic” developments—the human appropriation of both psyche and logos—had roots and precedents in ancient Greek thought, as well as in the biblical tradition. In the modern secular context, however, freed of the transcendental constraints of the classical religious sensibility, these developments took dramatically new forms with new consequences.
3. Whereas Augustine interpreted his synchronistic reading of St. Paul’s words as a foundation for overcoming an intense inner conflict and permanently redirecting his life in accordance with his revelation, Petrarch’s reading of Augustine’s words seems to have produced a more complex result, one appropriate to the modern self of which he was a major precursor. Over the past two centuries, Petrarch’s ascent of Mont Ventoux in 1336 has been interpreted by many prominent scholars as an extraordinarily epochal event that heralded the new spirit of the Renaissance and modernity, yet they have interpreted that event in remarkably diverse and at times entirely opposite ways. The nineteenth-century historian Jacob Burckhardt saw Petrarch’s ascent as a great milestone in the modern discovery of the beauty of nature and landscape (The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Part Four, “The Discovery of the World and of Man”). Jean Gebser declared that the ascent signified “the first dawning of an awareness of space that resulted in a fundamental alteration of European man’s attitude in and toward the world…an unprecedented extension of man’s image of the world,” and that it prophetically “inaugurates a new realistic, individualistic, and rational [perspectivally objective] understanding of nature” (The Ever-Present Origin, trans. N. Barstad and A. Mickunas, rev. ed.[Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991], pp. 12–15). Petrarch’s biographer Morris Bishop called him the first modern mountain climber, whose novel motivation was to scale the peak for its own sake (Petrarch and his World, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963, pp. 103–04).
Representing the mainstream of twentieth-century scholarship, Paul O. Kristeller stated that Petrarch’s response to reading Augustine on the mountain, and his life work generally, “expresses for the first time that emphasis on man which was to receive eloquent developments in the treatises of later humanists and to be given a metaphysical and cosmological foundation in the works of Ficino and Pico. This is the reason that the humanists were to adopt the name ‘humanities’ (studia humanitatis) for their studies” (The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “Petrarch,” vol. 6, ed. P. Edwards [New York: Macmillan and Free Press, 1967, 1972], p. 127; see also “Augustine and the Early Renaissance,” Studies in Renaissance Thought [Rome: Storia e Letteratura, 1969], pp. 361–62).
In contrast to the latter position, James Hillman evoked not a new “emphasis on man” but rather a “return to soul” as genuinely emblematic of the Renaissance. In Hillman’s rendering, Petrarch’s attention to the boundless mystery of interiority, his care for the intellectual imagination, his devotion to the classical authors, his passion for writing and excellence of style, and his enduring attachment to the image of Laura all represented a cultivation of soul, not only as opposed to a “return to man” but also, ultimately, as a movement away from the spiritual path represented by Augustine. “Petrarch’s experience is called the Ascent of Mont Ventoux. But the crucial event is the descent, the return down to the valley of soul” (Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 197).
Petrarch himself, however, in his famous letter carefully describing the experience to his friend and confessor, portrays the event above all as a powerful metaphor for the arduous spiritual ascent to God, and he depicts his reading of Augustine’s words as dramatically, even chastisingly, calling him back to that most important commitment. Though this perspective on the event is surprisingly absent, even suppressed, in the major commentaries and interpretations just cited, it is clearly the most compelling dimension of the experience for Petrarch himself. After mentioning the synchronicity involved in Augustine’s conversion experience, Petrarch recalled yet another example of such a coincidence and its transformative consequences, and then began his larger meditation on the spiritual challenge of life:
The same thing happened earlier to Saint Anthony, when he was listening to the Gospel where it is written, “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.” Believing this scripture to have been read for his especial benefit, as his biographer Athanasius says, he guided himself by its aid to the Kingdom of Heaven. And as Anthony on hearing these words waited for nothing more, and as Augustine upon reading the Apostle’s admonition sought no farther, so I concluded my reading in the few words which I have given. I thought in silence of the lack of good counsel in us mortals, who neglect what is noblest in ourselves, scatter our energies in all directions, and waste ourselves in a vain show, because we look about us for what is to be found only within. I wondered at the natural nobility of our soul, save when it debases itself of its own free will, and deserts its original estate, turning what God has given it for its honour into dishonour. How many times, think you, did I turn back that day, to glance at the summit of the mountain which seemed scarcely a cubit high compared with the range of human contemplation—when it is not immersed in the foul mire of earth? With every downward step I asked myself this: If we are ready to endure so much sweat and labour in order that we may bring our bodies a little nearer heaven, how can a soul struggling toward God, up the steeps of human pride and human destiny, fear any cross or prison or sting of fortune? How few, I thought, but are diverted from their path by the fear of difficulties or the love of ease!…How earnestly should we strive, not to stand on mountaintops, but to trample beneath us those appetites which spring from earthly impulses. With no consciousness of the difficulties of the way, amidst these preoccupations which I have so frankly revealed, we came, long after dark, but with the full moon lending us its friendly light, to the little inn which we had left that morning before dawn. (“The Ascent of Mount Ventoux: To Dionisio da Borgo San Sepolcro,” in Petrarch: The First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters, ed. and trans. J.H. Robinson [New York: Putnam, 1898], pp. 318–19)
It is certainly true that the impulse and will to make the ascent at all and the sharply polarized nature of the inner dialogue he conducts with himself as he climbs the mountain and later reflects on the event suggest that Petrarch is indeed, in spite of himself, beginning to break from the powerful hold of the Augustinian medieval spirit while simultaneously assimilating it. But his own account makes clear just how immense was the struggle to do so. We should also note that the Latin word Petrarch uses that Hillman and others translate as “soul” is not anima but animus. This can also be translated as “spirit,” or as the “soul” in the Christian spiritual sense rather than as the more psychological and imaginative “soul” developed by Hillman and archetypal psychology.
Finally, in yet a further dimension of the ascent that is implicitly recognized and enlisted by all these interpretations—those of Burckhardt, Gebser, Bishop, Kristeller, Hillman, and Petrarch himself—it is especially the inspiration and recovery of the great authors of classical antiquity, from Virgil and Ovid to Augustine himself, that permeates the event and pervades Petrarch’s account from beginning to end, as their eloquence and wisdom are brought to bear on every aspect of his experience as it unfolds that day. Even the idea of making the ascent was catalyzed by Petrarch’s reading of another ancient author on the day before: “The idea took hold upon me with e
special force when, in rereading Livy’s History of Rome, yesterday, I happened upon the place where Philip of Macedon, the same who waged war against the Romans, ascended Mount Haemus in Thessaly, from whose summit he was able, it is said, to see two seas, the Adriatic and the Euxine” (Robinson, ed., Petrarch, p. 308). Here as well, then, can be seen the birth of both Renaissance classicism and the modern man of letters.
We can perhaps understand the now-famous ascent on that long clear day in April 1336 in its more encompassing significance by recognizing that it is this newly articulate complexity and conflict of values, motivations, and experiences to which Petrarch gave voice in his account that we must see as central—spiritual and moral, literary and humanistic, naturalist and perspectival, aesthetic and romantic, scholarly and classicist. The event was a great complexio oppositorum, a complex interplay and synthesis of opposites: at once reflective and questing, looking both to the past and to the future, both outward and inward, both ascending and descending. It is precisely this divergent multiplicity of values, this tension of many conflicting impulses, by which Petrarch heralds the new sensibility of the Renaissance and the emergence of the modern self with its unprecedentedly multiform character. The Ascent of Mont Ventoux, and the descent afterwards, is a superbly ambiguous event, and in just this complex multivalence lies its essential character and magnitude.
4. Robert Aziz comments: “For Jung, the call to individuate arises from the deepest sources of life and is supported inwardly and outwardly by the compensatory activities of nature. It is a call, therefore, that is not to be taken lightly. Both inwardly and outwardly nature strives unceasingly to bring about the realization, in the life of the individual, of a unique pattern of meaning…. [A]s evidenced by his own writings on synchronicity and, perhaps more importantly, by the way he lived his own life, the individuation process extends beyond the psychological realm and assumes the character of a drama that takes the whole of nature for its stage. What we normally regard as the discontinuous inner and outer worlds become enclosed within the same circle of wholeness. Inwardly and outwardly nature works, through the compensatory patterning of events, to further the movement of the individual toward wholeness…. Now one is challenged to achieve a full understanding of the meaning that conjoins one, not only to the unconscious, but to nature in its entirety. This is the new spiritual challenge of individuation. It is the task of experiencing within the sacred circle of nature as a whole the meaning of an individual existence” (C. G. Jung’s Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity, pp. 165–66).
Jung’s attitude closely resembles the characteristic primal and shamanic alertness to nature’s symbolically significant patterning, as well as ancient Chinese Taoist philosophy, in which the dominant principles are pattern, order, symbolic correlations, the unity of human and cosmos, and the interdependence of all things. Cf. Richard Wilhelm, The Secret of the Golden Flower: “[Chinese philosophy] is built on the premise that the cosmos and man, in the last analysis, obey the same law; that man is a microcosm and is not separated from the macrocosm by any fixed barriers. The very same laws rule for the one as for the other, and from the one a way leads into the other. The psyche and the cosmos are to each other like the inner world and the outer world. Therefore man participates by nature in all cosmic events, and is inwardly as well as outwardly interwoven with them” (trans. C. F. Baynes [New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1931, 1962], p.11, quoted in Aziz, p. 135). Cf. also Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China: “The keyword in Chinese thought is Order and above all Pattern…. The symbolic correlations or correspondences all formed part of one colossal pattern. Things behaved in particular ways not necessarily because of prior actions or impulsions of other things, but because their position in the ever-moving cyclical universe was such that they were endowed with intrinsic natures which made that behaviour inevitable for them…. They were thus parts in existential dependence upon the whole world-organism. And they reacted upon one another not so much by mechanical impulsion or causation as by a kind of mysterious resonance” ([Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956, 1991], vol. 2, p. 281).
5. This formulation of synchronicity in terms of qualitative time, from 1930, reflects Jung’s early astrological research, beginning in 1911, and his experiments throughout the 1920s with the I Ching: “Jung’s first theorizing about synchronicity was done with reference to astrology and the I Ching and focused on the fact that things arising in a particular moment of time all share the characteristics of that moment. It appears to have been this understanding of the role of time, an understanding in which simultaneity does indeed play an essential part, which led Jung to coin the term ‘synchronicity,’ with its emphasis on the element of time (Gk. syn = together, chronos = time)” (R. Main, Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal, p. 23).
In later years, Jung increasingly focused on synchronicity’s parallels with twentieth-century physics. He was influenced first by his conversations about relativity with Einstein (a dinner guest on several occasions in the 1909–12 period) and several decades later through his discussions about quantum mechanics with his patient and friend Wolfgang Pauli. Reflecting the parallels with both physics and the parapsychological experiments of J. B. Rhine at Duke University that started in the 1930s, Jung began to broaden the concept of synchronicity to include many phenomena—various paranormal phenomena such as precognition and telepathy, the discontinuities of modern physics, the properties of natural numbers—for which simultaneity, qualitative time, and meaning were not always relevant factors. Instead, he began to stress “the psychic relativization of time and space” and “general acausal orderedness.” However, as many commentators have noted (Koestler, Aziz, Mansfield, Main), some of these additions stretched the parameters of the concept to include phenomena for which the original term “synchronicity” was now problematic and less obviously appropriate.
In his efforts to include the various phenomena from parapsychology and physics, Jung essentially combined into one overarching concept several separate classes of events which in many cases seemed to confuse and overlook their fundamental differences. For example, an especially important difference was concealed by Jung’s conflation of two basic categories, the meaningful coincidence of simultaneous events and the experience of clairvoyant cognition. The first category can be said to represent the classic form of synchronicity, illustrated by the paradigm case of the golden scarab, in which the outer world unexpectedly brought forth a concrete external event that closely paralleled in meaning a simultaneous psychological state. The second category was centered on cases in which an individual experienced internally—by intuition, dream, or vision—some external event in a future time or at a distant location.
But it is only in the first category—the one on which Jung placed far greater emphasis—that the crucial possibility of a meaning-embedded world presents itself, one that has all the metaphysical implications associated with the concept of synchronicity. By contrast, in cases of paranormal experiences like clairvoyance, telepathy, and precognition, the individual in question can be seen as simply exercising some not yet understood perceptual or cognitive faculty that has no implications for the outer world’s capacity to embody meaning in a manner that transcends the human psyche. Such cases would thus provide evidence pointing only to the need for a revised understanding of human abilities and the parameters of human consciousness. Other cases, such as those in the parapsychological experiments and in quantum physics, present comparable differences, as well as additional ones that eliminate the presence of meaning as a central factor altogether.
It seems likely that the scientific status of physics and the statistical-experimental nature of the parapsychological research played a significant role in moving Jung in the above direction, encouraging him to modify the terms of his original concept and add further categories to it in his hope to elevate the viability of his challenging hypothesis in the science-dominated intellectual ethos of the mid-twentieth century (see,
for example, Ira Progoff, Jung, Synchronicity, and Human Destiny [New York: Dell, 1973], p. 143; Aziz, p. 2; Mansfield, pp. 33–34; and Main, pp. 15–17, 23–27). This also perhaps explains Jung’s 1954 letter to André Barbault in which he contrasted synchronicity with the qualitative time hypothesis he had earlier proposed, suggesting now that the idea of synchronicity replaced rather than manifested the principle of qualitative time (C. G. Jung, Letters 2: 1951–1961, ed. G. Adler, A. Jaffé, trans. R. F. C. Hull [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976], p. 176). Jung here described the latter concept as tautological because “time in itself consists of nothing” and is only “qualified” or defined by events.
This apparent change in Jung’s position probably reflected not only his larger shift in emphasis towards a more broadly inclusive and science-oriented formulation of the synchronicity principle, but also his desire to locate the essence of synchronistic phenomena in the parallel patterning of the phenomena themselves rather than in some a priori characteristics of time apart from the phenomena. Thus, contrary to some commentaries on this topic, Jung’s later objection was not to the idea of time having a de facto qualitative dimension but rather to the idea that time itself was the a priori determining factor of the observed qualities. Instead, Jung clearly viewed the determining factor, in the sense of what “arranged” the qualitative patterning in the flux of events, to be not time per se but rather the constellated archetype. In Aristotelian terms, the archetype is the formal cause of the synchronicity. Time is thus regarded as possessing a qualitative dimension, but the quality that will be manifest at any given time is indeterminate and potential until a specific archetype is constellated.
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