Reading Jung's "Answer to Job"

Reflections on the second half of Jung's 1952 text

In my dialogue with Tim Jackson a few days ago, we began exploring perhaps Jung’s most important book, Answer to Job. We’ll be meeting again tomorrow to record a part 2. In the meantime, below are some of my preliminary reflections on the second half of the text.

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Jung explores the psychospiritual implications of the biblical story of Job and the evolving relationship between God and humanity. The power of the old pagan gods no less than the Old Testament Yahweh decayed due to their lack of moral consistency. The story of Job signals a disturbance in the divine unconscious, causing a flow of potential from the unconscious towards consciousness, manifesting in dreams, visions, and revelations.

Jung examines the archetypal visions of Ezekiel and Daniel, as well as the account in the Book of Enoch of the sons of God descending into the world of men. This is seen as a fall of a cadre angels who impregnated human women and bestowed the gifts of art and science to man, leading to cultural inflation. To restore order, Yahweh unleashes a flood, unjustly killing all but Noah and his family. Jung notes that “this intermezzo proves that the sons of God are somehow more vigilant, more progressive and more conscious than their father” [para. 671].

Enoch's journey to the four corners of Heaven and the center of the Earth signals that he is now a participant in the divine drama, not just a recipient of revelation. His emphasis on righteousness is responsive to the desire of both God and man to escape from blind injustice. Jung asserts that “the inner instability of Yahweh is the prime cause not only of the creation of the world but also of the pleromatic drama for which mankind serves as a tragic chorus.” What’s more, “the encounter with the creature changes the Creator” [para. 686].

But Jung questions why Yahweh tries to prove his goodness by sacrificing his son, suggesting that something remains unfinished even after the birth, death, and resurrection of a sinless and not fully human Christ. Jung speculates that Yahweh may have gotten into a fearful dissociation through the incarnation, overly identifying with his light side and repressing his dark side.

Analyzing the Book of Revelation, Jung believes it would be psychologically appropriate that its author John of Patmos is the same John who wrote the epistles. John's emphasis on love and divine light in the epistles needed compensation to show God's dark side. Jung reads his vision in Revelation as the Holy Spirit becoming more aware of undefeated evil and the incompleteness of the incarnation. Thus Revelation announces the coming of the Antichrist, despite the orthodox emphasis on salvation. He states, “The more consciousness insists on its own luminous nature and lays claim to moral authority, the more the self will appear as something dark and menacing” [para. 716]. Jung argues that John's vision of the city of God does not reconcile opposites but clearly represses human sin and sexual life altogether.

Jung criticizes the Enlightenment for operating with an inadequate rationalistic concept of truth and agnosticism for neglecting the fact that one does not possess a belief but is possessed by it. Incidentally, Jung’s view aligns with Schelling's Positive Philosophy, which asserts that the facticity of existence itself has superiority over any rational judgment about it. Modern humanity has witnessed unspeakable horrors, making the question of God's goodness urgently topical.

Jung claims that “God wants to become man and still wants to,” echoing Meister Eckhart's idea that God wants to be born in the human soul. The announcement of the Assumption of Mary by Pope Pius XII is understood by Jung as a repetition of Yehweh’s anamnesis of Sophia and as a response to a living religious process then emerging in the popular imagination. Jung claims that this is the most important religious event since the Reformation, and that the male-centric Protestant standpoint has lost ground as a result.

Humanity cannot deal with its technological power in a wise and loving way merely with its own unaided resources. As Jung’s biblical psychoanalysis makes clear, sinful human beings have been chosen as a vessel for incarnation, and so we must now take responsibility for the birth of God: we must come to “know something of God's nature and of metaphysical processes if [we are] to understand [ourselves] and thereby achieve gnosis of the divine” [para. 747]. The freedom to doubt has been hard one, and with it scientific empiricism and the need for logical consistency. But the ultimate nature of reality transcends all rationality and is only approachable via symbol, myth, and metaphor. The old certainties of blind belief nor the usefulness of finite technical knowledge can aid us in approaching the divine mystery, the coniunctio oppositorum.

“I regard the psyche as real, they believe only physical facts and must consequently come to the conclusion that either the uranium itself or the laboratory equipment created the atom bomb” [para. 751]. In this sense, “God,” whatever we call it, “remains an obvious psychic and non-physical fact.”

In a condensed restatement of his psychological prescription for modern man added to the end of Answer to Job, Jung acknowledges that we cannot tell on empirical grounds alone whether God and the unconscious are two different entities. The most he can say is that God is akin to the Self or archetype of psychic wholeness. He suggests that “the differentiation of consciousness can be understood as the effect of transcendentally conditioned dynamisms” [para. 758] and that the ego-self dialogue can be seen as a “reciprocal action between relatively autonomous factors.” In more religious terms, Jung is envisioning a “Christification of many” by the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit to incarnate God in each human heart.