Psychology and Religion (The Terry Lectures Series)
[Carl Jung – “Answer to Job” was” the utterance of a single individual” and not “proclaiming some eternal truth.]
There were outside forces, too, which impelled me to write this book.
The many questions from the public and from patients had made me feel that I must express myself more clearly about the religious problems of modern man.
For years I had hesitated to do so, because I was fully aware of the storm I would be unleashing.
But at last I could not help being gripped by the problem, in all its urgency and difficulty, and I found myself compelled to give an answer.
I did so in the form in which the problem had presented itself to me, that is, as an experience charged with emotion.
I chose this form deliberately, in order to avoid giving the impression that I was bent on proclaiming some eternal truth.
My Answer to Job was meant to be no more than the utterance of a single individual, who hopes and expects to arouse some thoughtfulness in his public.
I was far from wanting to enunciate a metaphysical truth.
Yet the theologians tax me with that very thing, because theological thinkers are so used to dealing with eternal truths that they know no other kinds.
When the physicist says that the atom is of such and such a composition, and when he sketches a model of it, he too does not intend to express anything like an eternal truth.
But theologians do not understand the natural sciences and, particularly, psychological thinking.
The material of analytical psychology, its principal facts, consist of statements of statements that occur frequently in consistent form at various places and at various times. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections
