On Jung’s “Answer to Job” (dialogue with Timothy Jackson)

This recording is our first of at least two dialogues on a book I’ll never be done reading.

Below is my own brief summary after re-reading roughly the first half of the text:

Physical facts aren’t the only basis for truth. According to Jung, there are also psychic truths, and they are no less valid, and, for human beings at least, may even possess an overriding importance. Beliefs, Jung asserts, represent facts about human psychology regardless of their empirical accuracy. In considering the history of human religious experience, Jung claims that “miracles appeal only to the understanding of those who cannot perceive the meaning” [para. 554].

In his prefatory note for Answer to Job (1952), Jung offers an apologia for his book as an attempt to reimagine the duality between good and evil in the human psyche and its God-image. This may seem irrelevant to the major problems faced by contemporary civilization. But his reimagination is responsive precisely to our unprecedented modern situation: the death of God and birth of enlightened Man, who after attempting the technoscientific rationalization of both human and physical nature had thus far (by the time of Jung’s writing) only world war, holocaust, and the threat of total nuclear annihilation to show for it. More than half a century after Jung’s death, we must add the increasing inevitability of planet-wide ecological collapse. 

Psychically speaking, Jung diagnoses the etiology of this whole situation by pointing to the metaphysical and moral scandal of monotheism. The old idea of evil as merely a “privation” or absence (of God) no longer captures our attention or inspires moral courage. Jung recognizes (again, psychologically) that evil is a positive reality in God and in Man. The challenge, then, is to justify the ways of God—not just to Man but also to Woman—as an unprethinkable coincidentia oppositorum. 

Jung wrestles with the Biblical story of Job, highlighting how Job seeks divine aid against the same God who is unfairly testing him. The concept of divinity is approached as both a subject and an object, i.e., as an evolving personality as well as a mirror image for humanity. He describes Yahweh as only just beginning to reflect on his own nature, which makes him an amoral natural force or divine darkness. Jung contrasts Yahweh with Greek gods like Zeus because of Yahweh’s intense interest in humanity. Yahweh, it seems, requires human consciousness to establish his own existence (a dialectic that bears some resemblance to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic).

Job, who feels defenseless against God’s omnipotence, possesses a keener consciousness due to his capacity for self-reflection. Yahweh becomes jealous of Job’s moral insight, which reflects Job’s likeness to God, implanted at creation. Jung identifies Ahriman as the “doubting thought” within God (para. 579, note 3), suggesting that Yahweh hides his own dark side. Lucifer is another aspect of Yahweh’s unconscious, he who often appears more prescient than his supposedly omniscient Creator.

In the Book of Job, Yahweh spends 71 verses asserting his omnipotence, but Jung sees this as a diversion from the real issue, implying that Yahweh’s anger is not directed at Job but at Satan. Job serves as an external catalyst for an inner dialectical process in God. After Job’s moral superiority elevates him above the stars in heaven, Yahweh is compelled to recall Sophia, the divine wisdom. In Jewish Kabbalistic teachings, Job’s dawning awareness of Yahweh’s dark side is understood by Jung to be mirrored in the sefirothic counterpole, the shards or “kelipot” [para. 595, note 8].

Yahweh reveals himself to be “less than human,” an amoral force of nature, leading to the aforementioned metaphysical scandal. Jung here introduces Sophia as an advocate for humanity, linking her archetypally to Chokmah, Logos, and Shakti. Sophia, the “unspotted mirror of the power of God,” leads Yahweh to reassess his overly masculine nature and remember feminine divine wisdom. 

In the patriarchal mythology of Genesis, but also in Jung’s reading of the archetypes of the collective unconscious, masculinity implies perfection while femininity embodies completion, creating opposites that require reconciliation.

After his encounter with Job, Yahweh realizes he must incarnate as a human being, a deed which will require a new creation, but a new creation of the divine nature rather than of the physical world. Thus Mary, Queen of Heaven and Mother of God, is elevated to divine status as the second Eve, whose immaculate conception gives birth to the God-man. Mary becomes the incarnate Sophia, a divine reflection free from original sin. This divine elevation of Mary to the level of perfection, associated with the masculine, in Jung’s terms “queers the pitch for a genuine incarnation” [para. 626]. Mary lacks the completeness essential to the feminine (yes, Jung is a bit of an essentialist), thus masculine perfectionism overplays its hand by usurping feminine completeness. Further compensation will be needed to bring balance, as Jung says, “we have not by any means heard the last of it” [para. 627].

Jung emphasizes that the crucifixion symbolizes the reconciliation of opposites, with the cross as the vessel for transformation of divine conflict into wholeness. He attributes schisms in Christianity and even in politics to differing partial interpretations of this symbol. 

Ultimately, for Jung, the divine mystery can only be met as a coincidentia oppositorum. Bearing the cross means reconciling these opposites in one’s Self, a challenge that continues eternally among the angels in heaven as much as individually in each earthly human being.