A few days ago a fellow flocker asked for a theological analysis of Jung’s notion of Synchronicity. Admittedly, I haven’t read any of his work for about five years but his question was less academic and more concerned with the broad perspective of coincidence and meaning so wikipedia was a reasonable place to start for information on the subject:
Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events which occur in a meaningful manner, but which are causally un-related. In order to be synchronous, the events must be related to one another conceptually, and the chance that they would occur together by random chance must be very small.
In other words, there is acausal meaning for coincidences which aren’t from God. Hence my friend wrote, “I think Christians are conspicuously firm in disregarding synchronicity, but certainly there are, at least for me in my research, questions regarding what happens in our free will that appear to have meaning, a synchronicity, yet the answer is not revealed or may never be revealed so we can feel strongly that it isn’t from God,” and then posed this question: “If there’s meaning and we conclude that it isn’t of God, then is it the universe? Time and space to connect with the subconscious?”
I took, not surprisingly to those who know me, a fairly circuitous route to answer the question. The first part gives some context and analysis of the Christian perspective of human free agency and God’s will and the second discusses the question posed. Below is a revised and reformatted version of my answer, rough but ready enough.
An interpreter is a decipherer and communicator of meanings. He is a translator between languages, between cultures and between performative conventions. He is, in essence, an executant, one who ‘acts out’ the material before him so as to give it intelligible life. Hence the third major sense of ‘interpretation’. An actor interprets Agamemnon or Ophelia. A dancer interprets Balanchine’s choreography. a violinist a Bach partita. In each of these instances, interpretation is understanding in action; it is the immediacy of translation.
Such understanding is simultaneously analytical and critical. Each performance of a dramatic text or musical score is a critique in the most vital sense of the term: it is an act of penetrative response which makes sense sensible. The ‘dramatic critic’ par excellence is the actor and the producer who, with and through the actor, tests and carries out the potentialities of meaning in the play. The true hermeneutic of drama is staging (even reading out loud of a play will, usually, cut far deeper than any theatrical review). In turn, no musicology, no music criticism can tell us as much as the action of meaning which is performance. It is when we experience and compare different interpretations, this is to say performances, of the same ballet symphony or quartet, that we enter the life of comprehension.
Over Easter I had a fun conversation with a professional metaphysician. He was a nice fellow who put up with a wine and pork glutted man’s complaints about academic philosophy. Were I to repeat the conversation, I would have handed him this essay and muttered something disparaging about the state of graduate students (it probably would have gotten a vigorous nod):
For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. We who were scandalized in 1940 when men were sent to fight armored tanks with rifles, are not scandalized when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with a smattering of “subjects”; and when whole classes and whole nations become hypnotized by the arts of the spell binder, we have the impudence to be astonished. We dole out lip-service to the importance of education–lip- service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone the school-leaving age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachers slave conscientiously in and out of school hours; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it.