Yahweh of the Old Testament and the Gnostic Demiurge
[The difference between Yahweh of the Old Testament and the Gnostic Demiurge.]
The character thus revealed fits a personality who can only convince himself that he exists through his relation to an object. Such dependence on the object is absolute when the subject is totally lacking in self-reflection and therefore has no insight into himself.
It is as if he existed only by reason of the fact that he has an object which assures him that he is really there. If Yahweh, as we would expect of a sensible human being, were really conscious of himself, he would, in view of the true facts of the case, at least have put an end to the panegyrics on his justice. But he is too unconscious to be moral. Morality presupposes consciousness.
By this I do not mean to say that Yahweh is imperfect or evil, like a Gnostic demiurge. He is everything in its totality; therefore, among other things, he is total justice, and also its total opposite.
At least this is the way he must be conceived if one is to form a unified picture of his character. We must only remember that what we have sketched is no more than an anthropomorphic picture which is not even particularly easy to visualize.
From the way the divine nature expresses itself we can see that the individual qualities are not adequately related to one another, with the result that they fall apart into mutually contradictory acts.
For instance, Yahweh regrets having created human beings, although in his omniscience he must have known all along what would happen to them. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Answer to Job, Page 372, Paragraph 575.
