Answer to Job

Just as Freud wrote Moses and Monotheism at the end of his career, in which he analyzed the Hebrew religious tradition; Jung wrote Answer to Job late in life as an attempt to integrate the Christian God. It is sometimes hilariously chatty, as when he remarks that "the family life of our first parents was not all beer and skittles." (p. 31) The central thesis is that the motive for the Christian Incarnation was to redeem God, whose moral inferiority had been disclosed by the events of Job. Jung's text culminates in a discussion of the Apocalypse.

Although Jung at first claims to be limiting his treatment to the psycho-symbolic dimensions of the Apocalyptic narrative, without discussing their parallels in historical events, he eventually show more succumbs to the latter temptation. Specifically, he points out the Roman Catholic church's doctrinal acceptance of the Assumption of the Virgin as a socio-historical realization of the Patmos vision of the Woman Clothed with the Sun.

In my reading, it occurred to me that the Catholic church can function like a great mythic barometer of Western society, because of its vast population, tightly integrated through an organismic hierarchy. And I wondered what "archetypal" conditions might be augured by that church's current focus of attention: priestly child abuse. The paternal figure of the priest, denoted as benevolent and an agent of divine forgiveness, is now shown to have a terrible hidden aspect more fearsome than that of the God of Job. While that God was merely unjust in authorizing the torment of a righteous man, the God of the abusive priest is cruel in having his ministers victimize the innocent.

Of course, this cruelty is not entirely without biblical precedent. The plague on the firstborn of Egypt was, at least, visited on the offspring of tyrannous, non-Yahweh-respecting, unregenerate pagans who were thus understood as estranged from God. But the molestation of Roman Catholic children who have been brought to church for blessing and instruction is more reminiscent of Herod's massacre of the innocents, which usually portends an array of dark and worldly forces opposing God's attempt at sacrificial incarnation. In this case, though, it is God who sends the sacerdotal predators, like He sends the locusts from the bottomless pit in Revelation IX:

"For their power is in their mouth, and in their tails: for their tails [were] like unto serpents, and had heads, and with them they do hurt." (v. 19) show less

This is not a theological or a religious book. This will probably go over any biblical literalist's head. It is a psychological address of the Christian culture's general propensity to divide their conscious attitude into light (good) and dark (evil) while repressing the dark attributes (metaphorically banishing the shadow to the underworld) into the unconscious. Jung recognized that this habit created a lot of unconscious neurotic and psychotic behavior in Christian culture at large and wanted to heal this rift. Jung uses his discussion of The Book of Job as a folkloric aid in unifying these pairs of opposites. It should be noted that Jung also presents this exact point with the gnostic notion of Abraxas in "Seven Sermons to the Dead."

Four stars because it greatly expanded my view of the interpersonal dynamics of important Biblical events.

It's sometimes difficult to tell where Jung stands, vis-à-vis historical/biblical scholarship (even though, admittedly, that's not his focus at all).

3.75

"Jung. . . .points out that the psychology of religion has two aspects, the psychology of religious persons and the psychology of religious 'contents.' He has himself, in this book, made a rare and original contribution to the latter."--A.M. Silver, British Journal of Psychology

REPONSE A JOB

Le Livre de Job est comme un point de repère au sein
des péripéties d'un drame divin. Lorsqu'il prit naissance,
de nombreux témoignages antérieurs évoquaient déjà une
image pleine de contradictions de Yahvé: celle d'un dieu
qui, dans ses émotions, dépasse toute mesure et souffre
précisément de cette démesure.
Ce dieu doit s'avouer luimême que la colère et la jalousie le consument et qu'il lui est douloureux de le constater. La réflexion et la connaissance résident en lui à côté de l'irréflexion et de l'ignorance de soi-même, comme résident aussi la bonté à côté de la cruauté, et la force créatrice à côté de la volonté de détruire. Tous ces éléments sont présents et aucun ne gêne l'autre. Un show more tel état mental n'est pensable à nos yeux qu'en l'absence de toute conscience réfléchie, ou bien, si cette conscience existe, cela signifie que la réflexion y est alors occasionnelle, passive, impuissante. Un état semblable, avec des caractéristiques de cette sorte, ne peut se qualifie autrement que d'amoral.
Le témoignage des Ecritures nous apprend comment les
hommes de l'Ancien Testament ont éprouvé leur Dieu.... show less