Carl Jung and Answer to Job
• From the ancient records we know that the divine drama was enacted between God and his people, who were betrothed to him, the masculine dynamis, like a woman, and over whose faithfulness he watched jealously.
A particular instance of this is Job, whose faithfulness is subjected to a savage test. As I have said, the really astonishing thing is how easily Yahweh gives in to the insinuations of Satan.
If it were true that he trusted Job perfectly, it would be logical for Yahweh to defend him, unmask the malicious slanderer, and make him pay for his defamation of God’s faithful servant.
But Yahweh never thinks of it, not even after Job’s innocence has been proved.
We hear nothing of a rebuke or disapproval of Satan.
Therefore we 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.
There is reason to suspect that he is about to loosen his matrimonial ties with Israel but hides this intention from himself. (Book of Job; Para. 616)
• “Yahweh [God] 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” (Book of Job; Para. 640)
• “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 knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky” (Book of Job, Para. 758).
That higher and “complete” man is begotten by the “unknown” father and born from Wisdom, and it is he who, in the figure of the puer aeternus—”vultu metabolism albums et ater”—represents our totality, which transcends consciousness.
It was this boy into whom Faust had to change, abandoning his inflated one-sidedness which saw the devil only outside. Christ’s “Except ye become as little children” is a prefiguration of this, for in them the opposites lie close together; but what is meant is the boy who is born from the maturity of the adult man, and not the unconscious child we would like to remain. ~Answer to Job, R. Hull, trans. (1984), pp. 157-158
Image: Job and his False Comforters
