In this short book, Jung brings his close reading of Biblical texts to an esoteric interpretation of the story of Job. He begins by putting himself in Job’s head. “[Job] has to admit that no one except Yahweh himself is doing him injustice and violence…. This is perhaps the greatest thing about Job, that, faced with this difficulty, he does not doubt the unity of God…. As certain as he is of the evil in Yahweh, he is equally certain of the good…. [Yahweh] is both a persecutor and a helper in one, and the one aspect is as real as the other. Yahweh is not split but is an antinomy—a totality of inner opposites—and this is the indispensable condition for his tremendous dynamism, his omniscience and omnipotence.” This dualism in no way contradicts monotheism, the opposites are contained within one god. “The Book of Job places this pious and faithful man, so heavily afflicted by the Lord, on a brightly lit stage where he presents his case to the eyes and ears of the world. It is amazing to see how easily Yahweh, quite without reason, had let himself be influenced by one of his sons, by a doubting thought, and made unsure of Job’s faithfulness.” Jung makes the case that Yahweh wantonly chooses not to consult his own omniscience and, instead, is swayed by his son, Satan. “His faithful servant Job is now exposed to a rigorous moral test, quite gratuitously and to no purpose, although Yahweh is convinced of Job’s faithfulness and constancy, and could moreover have assured himself beyond all doubt on this point had he taken counsel with his own omniscience.”
Jung goes into more detail about the nature of God. “It is behaviour of an unconscious being who cannot be judged morally. Yahweh is a phenomenon and, as Job says, “not a man.”” In a footnote, Jung expands, “The naive assumption that the creator of the world is a conscious being must be regarded as a disastrous prejudice which later gave rise to the most incredible dislocations of logic…. Divine unconsciousness and lack of reflection, on the other hand, enable us to form a conception of God which puts his actions beyond moral judgment and allows conflict to arise between goodness and beastliness.” This god-beyond-morality is how Jung allows evil and suffering into our world.
Job is singled out as the scapegoat. As with the Girardian scapegoat mechanism, here the scapegoat is the most innocent among men. He is the victim and the one who is wronged. “One cannot doubt Yahweh’s connivance. His readiness to deliver Job into Satan’s murderous hands proves that he doubts Job precisely because he projects his own tendency to unfaithfulness upon a scapegoat…. This vaguely suspected unfaithfulness causes him, with the help of Satan, to seek out the unfaithful one, and he infallibly picks on the most faithful of the lot, who is forthwith subjected to a grueling test. Yahweh has become unsure of his own faithfulness…. Self-reflection becomes an imperative necessity, and for this Wisdom is needed. Yahweh has to remember his absolute knowledge; for, if Job gains knowledge of God, then God must also learn to know himself…. The failure of the attempt to corrupt Job has changed Yahweh’s nature.”
Man was first corrupted when he chose knowledge over faith in the Garden. Wisdom has become a corrective for Yahweh’s wrath. “Fear of God is regarded by man in general as the principle and even as the beginning of all wisdom.” Jung posits that after Job, Yahweh has changed. He wants to feel human. “There is no evidence that Christ ever wondered about himself, or that he ever confronted himself. To this rule there is only one significant exception—the despairing cry from the Cross: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Here his human nature attains divinity; at that moment God experiences what it means to be a mortal man and drinks to the dregs what he made his faithful servant Job suffer…. Yahweh’s intention to become man, which resulted from his collision with Job, is fulfilled in Christ’s life and suffering.”
Jung makes much of opposites in his discussion of Saint John’s Revelation and the Apocalypse. Unsurprisingly, he also brings the unconscious to the fore. “But in the unconscious is everything that has been rejected by consciousness, and the more Christian one’s consciousness is, the more heathenishly does the unconscious behave.” John tries to see only a loving God, but must resign himself to his terrible nature, as well. “Just because John loved God and did his best to love his fellows also, this “gnosis,” this knowledge of God, struck him. Like Job, he saw the fierce and terrible side of Yahweh. For this reason he felt his gospel of love to be one-sided, and he supplemented it with the gospel of fear: God can be loved but must be feared.” God is the totality of consciousness and the unconscious. “God acts out of the unconscious of man and forces him to harmonize and unite the opposing influences to which his mind is exposed from the unconscious. The unconscious wants both: to divide and to unite…. The unconscious wants to flow into consciousness in order to reach the light, but at the same time it continually thwarts itself, because it would rather remain unconscious. That is to say, God wants to become man, but not quite…. The God-concept, as the idea of all-embracing totality also includes the unconscious, and hence, in contrast to consciousness, it includes the objective psyche, which so often frustrates the will and intentions of the conscious mind. Prayer, for instance, reinforces the potential of the unconscious.” The human quest for enlightenment is bound to fail, because it can never be the complete totality of experience. “Even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowledge boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky.”
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