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Though the Christian view of the world has paled for many people, the symbolic treasure-rooms of the East are still full of marvels that can nourish for a long time to come the passion for show and new clothes. What is more, these images—be they Christian or Buddhist or what you will—are lovely, mysterious, richly intuitive. Naturally, the more familiar we are with them the more does constant usage polish them smooth, so that what remains is only banal superficiality and meaningless paradox. The mystery of the Virgin Birth, or the homoousia of the Son with the Father, or the Trinity which is nevertheless not a triad—these no longer lend wings to any philosophical fancy. They have stiffened into mere objects of belief.

So it is not surprising if the religious need, the believing mind, and the philosophical speculations of the educated European are attracted by the symbols of the East—those grandiose conceptions of divinity in India and the abysms of Taoist philosophy in China—just as once before the heart and mind of the men of antiquity were gripped by Christian ideas. There are many Europeans who began by surrendering completely to the influence of the Christian symbol until they landed themselves in a Kierkegaardian neurosis, or whose relation to God, owing to the progressive impoverishment of symbolism, developed into an unbearably sophisticated I-You relationship—only to fall victims in their turn to the magic and novelty of Eastern symbols. This surrender is not necessarily a defeat; rather it proves the receptiveness and vitality of the religious sense.

— The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious by Carl Jung (Collected Works, #9i)

But if we try to establish what an archetype is psychologically, the matter becomes more complicated. So far mythologists have always helped themselves out with solar, lunar, meteorological, vegetal, and other ideas of the kind. The fact that myths are first and foremost psychic phenomena that reveal the nature of the soul is something they have absolutely refused to see until now. Primitive man is not much interested in objective explanations of the obvious, but he has an imperative need—or rather, his unconscious psyche has an irresistible urge—to assimilate all outer sense experiences to inner, psychic events. It is not enough for the primitive to see the sun rise and set; this external observation must at the same time be a psychic happening: the sun in its course must represent the fate of a god or hero who, in the last analysis, dwells nowhere except in the soul of man. All the mythologized processes of nature, such as summer and winter, the phases of the moon, the rainy seasons, and so forth, are in no sense allegories of these objective occurrences; rather they are symbolic expressions of the inner, unconscious drama of the psyche which becomes accessible to man’s consciousness by way of projection—that is, mirrored in the events of nature.

— The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious by Carl Jung (Collected Works, #9i)

Thus our tribulation, without ceasing to be tribulation or to be felt to be tribulation, is transformed. We must suffer, as we have suffered before. But our suffering is no longer a passive, dangerous, poisonous, destructive tribulation and perplexity, such as the souls of those who hate the Judge, but is transformed into a tribulation and perplexity which are creative, fruitful, powerful, promising, by which men are dissolved, cast to the ground, pressed into a corner, and imprisoned, by God. By tribulation we are braced to patience. Defence is turned into offence. The questionableness of our situation becomes a source of strength; for we are encouraged by the knowledge that this is God's way of saving us, and that it cannot be otherwise. We may doubt, but it is in God we doubt. We may kick against the pricks, but they are God's pricks. Blasphemy even, even the blasphemy of Job, is blasphemy against God.

— The Epistle to the Romans by Karl Barth (Page 156)