Answer to Job
Answer to Job is an attempt by the elderly Carl Jung to explore a number of theological issues relating to the Biblical Book of Job. The story of Job basically goes like this: God sees that Job is the most righteous and faithful of all men, but Satan (still an angel of God at this point in the mythological development — indeed, even a ‘son of God’) questions this to stir up shit and bets God that if things weren’t going so well for him, he wouldn’t be such a model human being. Without a second thought, God kills his livestock, servants, even his children — and smites him with a terrible, debilitating disease. Job remains faithful but cries out to know why he is being punished, what he could possibly have done to deserve this. Eventually, God Himself appears on the scene and, instead of giving him any kind of answer, rants on and on about his immeasurable strength and power. Cowed by this, Job seals his lips and accepts that God can do whatever the fuck he likes.
After this ordeal, Job gets well again, and new children and riches to boot. Interestingly, the tricksy angel who started all this goes entirely without punishment. But why, asks Jung, could God not give an adequate answer to Job? Jung minces no words here, and declares God’s behaviour to be outrageously unjust, directly violating a number of his own Commandments and generally treating human life like it’s nothing. Essentially, Jung calls God a great big child, pointing out the massive mood swings He is subject to throughout the Old Testament, going from loving and just to genocidally vengeful and back again in an instant.
He’s psychoanalysing God. God needs a sense of affirmation and, like all unconscious individuals, must derive this from something outside Himself. That is why He created the universe and that is why he demands of His creatures continual acknowledgement of His greatness. So long as He can lord His brute power over them He is content, but in man is something new and dangerous: man has a moral conscience. This alone raises him above God, and when Satan points out Job as the greatest example of this, God unleashes His repressed uneasiness as fury upon him. The very language God uses in challenging him (for, essentially, asking why he’s suffering) is out of all proportion to the situation — is as though God were challenging an equal and not a puny mortal whose existence He could effortlessly exstinguish. But God is challenging an equal: He’s challenging Himself.
“But what does man possess that God does not have? Because of his littleness, puniness, and defencelessness against the Almighty, he possesses … a somewhat keener consciousness based on self-reflection: he must, in order to survive, always be mindful of his impotence. God has no need of this circumspection, for nowhere does he come up against an insuperable obstacle that would force him to hesitate and hence make him reflect on himself. Could a suspicion have grown up in God that man possesses an infinitely small yet more concentrated light than he, Yahweh, possesses?”
Man is more conscious than God. God unconsciously suspects this and tries to suppress it with brute strength. What transpires is that Job finally sees that God is not an all-benevolent being, but merely an all-powerful one, with a dark side as dark as his light side is light. Of course, says Jung, Job doesn’t tell Him that — for that would be suicide. Instead, he merely submits to the blustering tyrant, yet with his moral integrity intact.
Over time God reflects on why He’s such a dick, and resolves to put Himself in Job’s shoes — that is to say, He decides to become human. With this he’s paying a debt to man incurred through His ruthless behaviour toward Job and general dickishness since the beginning of mankind. He’s decided to become good, not just powerful. Satan finally gets seen for what he is and cast out of heaven, and God comes to earth in the form of a man.
In the person of Christ lies the real answer to Job. The Incarnation is meant to improve God just as much as man, and pretty much reconcile them to each other. The problem, Jung suggests, is this doesn’t quite succeed. The person of Christ is not an ordinary man, but a sinless individual born of a sinless virgin mother and no human father. To all intents and purposes, Christ is a demi-God. Though the Incarnation undoubtedly elevates the inner life of God, it doesn’t quite have the desired effect on man. For this a further incarnation will be necessary: the incarnation of the Holy Spirit in ordinary, everyday, imperfect man.
Jung believes God has gone from being mostly unconscious to one-sidedly conscious. His dark side still lies dormant in the unconscious and hasn’t yet been integrated. The second Incarnation ought to solve this. The latter half of the book explores the Book of Revelation at the very end of the Bible. In this, a man called John witnesses an horrific vision of the end of the world. What Jung notes about this is that its atmosphere and values are diametrically opposite that of the Gospels. Christ appears as a monstrous seven-horned lamb and unleashes His wrath upon the world. There is ceaseless vengefulness and killing, while the selfless love of the Gospel seems to have disappeared entirely. And yet this revelation occurred to a devout early Christian, perhaps the very same man who was Christ’s Beloved Disciple. Why this change from peace and love to wrath and vengeance?
Jung believes this was the shadow side of John — and the shadow side of God — finally unleashing itself. John would have repressed many of his strongest and most basic instincts, all his vengefulness and hatred and sadism, for the sake of being a true Christian. Suddenly these all erupted in a cataclysmic vision of violence. Furthermore, Jung believes these images prophesy the times we’re living in now: times of unlimited war and the continual threat of nuclear annihilation. Man must wrestle with his darkest instincts if he is to expand in consciousness. And this very expansion of consciousness will be synonymous with the second incarnation of God in man.
God is, in a sense, working out His own salvation through man. And man, likewise, needs the God-image to make sense of his world and guide him. Man and God need each other, and neither of them are perfect. Perhaps here would be the appropriate place to point out that Jung does not believe the existence of God can be proven, or even that it’s necessary to prove it. What he believes to be proven is the existence of the God-image in the human psyche — the archetype of wholeness which every human being possesses, regardless of how they interpret it. Thus the whole book can be read as a history of God or merely of the God-image. Christ could be the actual Incarnation of God in man, or the possession of one man by a psychological archetype, without it making any practical difference.
Ultimately, however, Jung does believe in God — and I think this comes through quite clearly in the book. He identifies as a Christian, albeit an extremely unconventional one, and believes the Christian myth is still vitally relevant to Western civilisation today. Being an extremely unconventional theist myself, I felt a lot of sympathy for his views while reading the book. I’ve always tended to see God as an essentially amoral or imperfect being — a being essentially like us — which is perhaps just to say, essentially a being. The traditional Christian conception of God is too wrapped up in paradoxes to really be compelling to me, and abstract notions of an Ultimate Reality lack the emotional appeal and psychological utility of a God figure. I love the idea that the Ultimate Being is growing as I’m growing, learning as I’m learning, loving and raging and enjoying creation in a way not fundamentally different from me. That He’s all the darkness and all the light.
