The great sacrifice... and the reward

Ugh, it's been harder to get back in the saddle than I thought it would be! Stuff has been going on with my personal health and I've been pretty much absorbed with that. I really want to get back to Jung though. I'm working on finishing the series on personality that I stopped midway through but that is going to take some time. In the meantime, here's a great quote from MLvF!

In Tertullian and Origen we see that this transformation involves the sacrifice of the superior function. Tertullian sacrificed his intellect, thereby gaining depths of feeling through which he arrived at his famous paradoxical view of Christ. Origen, on the other hand, through self-castration, sacrificed his extraversion, his relation to the outer world, and won the wealth of Gnostic thinking. Augustine, from the point of view of typology, resembled Tertullian; until the time of his conversion he was a thinking type. The inferiority of his feeling is indicated by the licentious life he had previously led. His feeling was in the dark, until it emerged along with the violent breakthrough of his inferior function. His genuine feeling, which until then had been tied to his mother, now turned to Christ and the church. Since Augustine was an introvert, his fourth function had of necessity to be of an extraverted character and therefore it moved toward outer objects, that is, to the visible Roman Catholic church.

… With Saint Augustine the breakthrough of his feeling function was the solution. The inferior function, whatever it may be, contains the highest value, although it is experienced as the greatest handicap.

- Marie Louise von Franz, Dreams, p. 9