Continuing on .... PART 3

Carl Jung - "Answer to Job" in "The Portable Jung" Edited by Joseph Campbell (Penguin 1971) pp 571 -574

My comments marked with #

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It is only the careful and farsighted preparations for Christ's birth which show us that omniscience has begun to have a noticeable effect on Yahweh's actions. A certain philanthropic and universalistic tendency makes itself felt. The "children of Israel" take something of a second place in comparison with the "children of men." After Job, we hear nothing further about new covenants. Prov­erbs and gnomic utterances seem to be the order of the process include: day, and a real novum now appears on the scene, namely apocalyptic communications. This points to metaphysical acts of cognition, that is, to "constellated" unconscious contents which are ready to irrupt into consciousness. In all this, as we have said, we discern the helpful hand of Sophia.

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# Jung views Sophia (wisdom) as God's "anima" or female side.

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It we consider Yahweh's behaviour, up to the reappear­ance of Sophia, as a whole, one indubitable fact strikes us-the fact that his actions are accompanied by an in­ferior consciousness. Time and again we miss reflection and regard for absolute knowledge. His consciousness seems to be not much more than a primitive "awareness' which knows no reflection and no morality. One merely perceives and acts blindly, without conscious inclusion of the subject, whose individual existence raises no problems. Today we would call such a state psychologically "uncon­scious," and in the eyes of the law it would be described as non compos mentis. The fact that consciousness does not perform acts of thinking does not, however, prove that they do not exist. They merely occur unconsciously and make themselves felt indirectly in dreams, visions, revelations, and "instinctive' changes of consciousness, whose very nature tells us that they derive from an "un­conscious" knowledge and are the result of unconscious acts of judgment or unconscious conclusions.

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# This is a psycho-analysis of God in the book of Job.

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Some such process can be observed in the curious change which comes over Yahweh's behaviour after the information through conscious or Job episode. There can be no doubt that he did not im­mediately become conscious of the moral defeat he had suffered at Job's hands. In his omniscience, of course. this fact had been known from all eternity, and it is not unthinkable that the knowledge of it unconsciously brought him into the position of dealing so harshly with Job in order that he himself should become conscious of something through this conflict, and thus gain new insight. Satan who, with good reason later on received the name of "Lucifer," knew how to make more frequent and better use of omniscience than did his father. It seems he was the only one among the sons of God who developed that much initiative. At all events, it was he who placed those unforeseen incidents in Yahweh's way, which of omniscience knew to be necessary and indeed indispensable for the unfolding and completion of the divine drama. Among these the case of Job was decisive, and it could only have happened thanks to Satan's initiative.

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# Jung views Satan as a fallen son of God who is the "Shadow" of Christ. (An evil counterpoint to Christ)

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The victory of the vanquished and oppressed is obvious. Job stands morally higher than Yahweh. In this re­spect the creature, has surpassed the creator. As always when an external event touches on some unconscious knowledge, this knowledge can reach consciousness. The event is recognized as a deja vu, and one remembers a pre-existent knowledge about it. Something of the kind must have happened to Yahweh. Job's superiority cannot be shrugged off.

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# Job is the moral victor in the book of Job. This has consequences for God.

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Hence a situation arises in which real reflection is needed. That is why Sophia steps in. She reinforces the much needed self-reflection and thus makes possible Yahweh's decision to become man. It is a decision fraught with consequences. He raises himself above his earlier primitive level of consciousness by indirectly acknowledging that the man Job is morally superior to him and that therefore he has to catch up and become human himself. Had he not taken this decision he would have found himself in flagrant opposition to his omnis­cience. Yahweh must become man precisely because he has done man a wrong. He, the guardian of justice, knows that every wrong must be expiated, and Wisdom - knows that moral law is above even him. Because his creature has surpassed him he must regenerate himself.

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# Jung poses this as a reason for the birth of Christ. This is looking at the story from God's "Fall" in the book of Job rather than from man's "Fall" in Genesis. it is worth considering if the story of Job is history.

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As nothing can happen without a pre-existing pattern, not even creation ex nihilo, which must always resort to the treasure-house of eternal images in the fabulous mind of the "master workman" the choice of a model. for the son who is now about to be begotten lies between Adam (to a limited extent) and, Abel (to a, much greater extent). Adam's limitation lies in the fact that, even if he is the Anthropos, he is chiefly a creature and a father. Abel's advantage is that he is the son well pleasing to God, be­gotten and not directly created. One disadvantage has to be accepted: he met with an early death by violence, too early to leave behind him a widow and children, which ought really to be part of human fate if lived to the full. Abel is not the authentic archetype of the son well pleasing to God; he is a copy, but, the first of the kind to be.met with in the Scriptures. The young dying god is also well known in the contemporary pagan religions, and so is the fratricide motif. We shall hardly be wrong in as­suming that.Abel's fate refers back to a metaphysical event which was played out between Satan and another son of God with a "light" nature and more devotion to his father. Egyptian tradition can give us information on this point (Morus and Set). As we have said, the disadvan­tage prefigured in the Abel type can hardly be avoided, because it is an integral part of the mythical-son drama, as the numerous pagan variants of this motif show. The short, dramatic course of Abel's fate serves as an excellent para­digm for the life and death of a God become man.

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# Jung sees typology of Christ in the Old Testament stories. This is linked to his theory of a collective unconsciousness.

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To sum up: the immediate cause of the Incarnation lies in Job's elevation, and its purpose is the differentiation of Yahweh's consciousness. For this a situation of extreme gravity was needed, a peripeteia charged with affect, without which no higher level-of consciousness can be reached.