From St. John of the Cross and Dr. C. J. Jung, Part III, Chapter 9. Inner Growth Books, 1986.

An Anti-mystical Atmosphere

 The asceticism of St. John of the Cross with its practical character and its foundation in the actual contemplative experience was picked up and wielded as a bludgeon by a very different kind of personality. If the door was shut on mysticism, these rigorists attempted to shut it on human nature as well, all under the pretext of avoiding danger, but undoubtedly fed by an external legalistic mentality that saw piety more in the fulfillment of humanly conceived laws and regulations than in the loving submission to a mysterious reality that transcended the limits of any conceptual statement. People were cut off from their roots below and their roots above. They were urged to flee from their human nature under the pretext not clearly voiced, and therefore all the more insidious, that this nature was completely corrupted by original sin. The thoroughgoing affective and volitional mortification of the mystic for the sake of divine union was degraded into gloomy moral prohibitions that issued from a desiccated theology which was in the process of decay precisely because it had cut itself off from its own sources of life.

Therefore, it became inevitable when at the time of renewal of religious life and theology in the years just after the second Vatican Council that Christians, especially religious, who had borne the brunt of these deficient ideas would find within themselves a tremendous thirst for human things. They would exalt them in the place of what seemed to them the soul-deadening spiritualities under which they had led their lives. They were in no mood to listen to talk about prayer and piety because it was under the guise of such things that this process of dehumanization had wrought its damage. Yet this exaltation of the human could only sustain itself for a limited amount of time, especially when lived out in the world instead of the cloister. What was missing was not simply human, but inner religious experience as well. This was the problem that Jung addressed himself to primarily with people who had lost all living contact with the Christian churches or any living religion, and this is the same problem that still lies at the heart of the renewal of religious life and the life of the Church.