Hostname: page-component-7bb8b95d7b-lvwk9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-09-27T09:21:45.286Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Jung on Job

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2024

Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

If ever there were grist for the Jungian mill it was, one might suppose, the Book of Job. It can be read almost as a paradigm of the ‘integration process’ as Jung himself has repeatedly described it. For here we have a man ‘perfect and upright, fearing God and eschewing evil’—as well he might, never having experienced it, and abounding in cosy piety and worldly prosperity. He has, as Satan points out, ‘a fence about him, and his house, and his substance’. Anybody can be ‘good’ in such narrow, sheltered confines as these; but he can hardly be a grown-up man let alone a hero, a prototype of the way of salvation through crucifixion and resurrection. Any psychologist should know he is heading for a crash. Any theologian should know that such easy and complacent virtue cannot continue long in this post-lapsarian world. Job’s professed love for God—and God’s for him—must grow up from this agreeable but infantile and unconscious, autoerotic phase. Job’s idol of a merely intelligible and amiable God must be smashed: he must learn the lesson which the New Testament writers were to see it was the function of the Old Testament heroes to teach: that man’s righteousness before God is not wrought by moral works without ‘faith in the Absurd’, the Unseen and the Unknown. So the psychologically and theologically inevitable happens: Job’s fences are down; evils rush in.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1955 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Answer to Job. By C. G. Jung, translated from the German by R. F. C. Hull. (Routledge & Kegan Paul; 12s. 6d.)

2 A very noteworthy exception is the deeply sympathetic but critical Assessment of Jung's ‘Answer to Job’ by the Rev. Erastus Evans, obtainable for is. 7d. from the Guild of Pastoral Psychology, 124 Pepys Road, London, S.W.20. A brief but penetrating critique from the standpoint of a Catholic exegete appeared in Dominican Studies, 1952, pp. 228 ff., Both are to be recommended for their presentation of other aspects of this many‐sided book.

3 Jung asserts that the hieros gamos with which the Apocalypse doses ‘takes place in heaven … high above the devastated world’. This is unfortunately characteristic of his reading of a ‘pie in the sky’ Christianity into the Bible, even (in this case) to the extent of defying the explicit text. Apoc. 21, 1‐3 could hardly be more clear to the contrary: there is ‘a new heaven and a new earth’, the old heaven‐earth opposition is destroyed, the bride ‘comes down out of heaven from God’ and the ‘dwelling of God is with men’.