The Evolutionary Archetype: Uniting Jung and Teilhard

We see no need to make a split between Carl Jung and Teilhard de Chardin, where Teilhard's spiritual yearning is wrongly judged as only evolutionary and not archetypal. The yearning for God is found within the Evolutionary Archetype. The urge comes not only from the depths of our psyche but also from the depths of the Kosmos where God dwells.

Jung need not be confined to the past, to ancient archetypes, and Teilhard to future evolution, since the Evolutionary Archetype contains both, and these great thinkers saw aspects of the same archetype.

As Carter Phipps pointed out, the root of the word archetype is “arche,” which means “first principle,” and the Evolutionary Archetype is the first principle in both the past and the future.

Jung's archetypes need not be placed merely in the conservative camp and Teilhard's in the progressive, since Jung's archetypes and Teilhard's evolutionary force are united in the Evolutionary Archetype. This means we need not speak of “post-traditional” or “post-mythological” as Ken Wilber and the New Age tend to do.

Jung might have been trying to align his concept of archetypes with the process of evolution. On his bed stand three weeks before his death was a copy of Teilhard's book, “The Phenomenon of Man.”