The Last Supper, Michael Price, mineral pigments in tempera and oil

The Last Supper by Michael Price, details

The Last Supper
The artist has presented some
quotations from Volume 14,
"Mysterium Coniunctionis"
from the collected writings of the
Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung.
These quotations were
instrumental in the development
of the artist's painting of "The Last
Supper". Contrary to Platonic
philosophy and its development in
Christianity, the artist believes
the body of man to be an extension
of the soul.
The following quotations form the
compliment to "The Last Supper".
"Mysterium Coniunctionis"
P. 124:
"…even today most of us have not
got round to understanding Christ
as the psychic reality of an
archetype, regardless of the
historicity. I do not doubt the
historical reality of Jesus of
Nazareth, but the figure of the
Son of Man and of Christ the
Redeemer has archetypal
antecedents."
P 347:
"The ultimate fate of every dogma
is that it gradually becomes
soulless. Life wants to create new
forms, and therefore, when a
dogma loses its vitality, it must
perforce activate the archetype
that has always helped man to
express the mystery of the soul.
…Only experience can establish
which archetype has become
operative, but one can never
predict that it must enter into
manifestation. Who for instance
could logically have foretold that
the Jewish prophet Jesus would
give the decisive answer to the
spiritual situation in the age of
Hellenistic syncretism, or that the
slumbering image of the
Anthropos (true man) would
waken to world dominion?"
P551:
"It (the realm responsible for
inspirations and such happenings)
presents a world of relatively
autonomous "images", including
the manifold God-images, which
whenever they appear are called
"God" by naive people, and
because of their numinosity (the
equivalent of autonomy!), are
taken to be such. The various
religious denominations support
this traditional viewpoint, and
their respective theologians
believe themselves, inspired by
God’s word, to be in a position to
make valid statements about him.
Such statements always claim to
be final and indisputable.
...Thus Christianity, the religion
of brotherly love, offers a
lamentable spectacle of one great
and many small schisms, each
faction helplessly caught in the
toils of its own unique rightness.
… The existence of a
transcendental reality is indeed
evident in itself, but is
uncommonly difficult for our
consciousness to construct
intellectual models which would
give a graphic description of the
reality we have perceived.
… That the world inside and
outside ourselves rest on a
transcendental background is as
certain as our own existence, but
it is equally certain that the direct
perception of the archetypal world
inside us is just as doubtfully
correct as that of the physical
world outside us."