“Answer to Job” has not yet appeared in the USA
I am frankly relieved that “Answer to Job” has not yet appeared in the USA! …
Already of course I am getting perplexed and indignant letters from England asking “What the hell…”
It cost quite some sleepless nights, trying to write an article to explain what I think …
I hope you find the result (which I will send you if and when is published) not too distressing; and especially that you will take into consideration for whom it is written ~Victor White, Jung-White Letters, Page 254
I am grateful for the fact that you call me to order and that your judgment—be it correct or not—does not spare me, so I assume God will listen to a mortal voice, just as much he has given His ear to Job, when this little tortured worm complained about His paradoxical, amoral nature.
Just as Job lifted his voice so that everybody could hear him, I have come to the conclusion, that I better risk my skin and do my worst or best, to shake the unconsciousness of my contemporaries. […]
in our time everything is at stake, and one should not mind the little disturbance I am causing […]. I have hesitated and resisted long enough, until I have made up my mind to say what I think ~Carl Jung, Jung-White Letters, Page 261-262
Answer to Job is presumably to be read, not as an essay in theology, metaphysics or exegesis, but in practical psychology… What then is its practical psychological content and implication? First and foremost it seems to be this: God (not me) is unconscious, divided in himself, moody, capricious, purposeless—but notably evil as well as good. Evil is an ultimate and irreducible constituent of reality to be accepted—not a privation which can be supplied by good, or out of which good can be brought.
My ‘evil’ is no more my concern. It is ‘all God’s fault’ and I can and should lay all the blame there … the personal shadow is transferred to the ‘divine’, ‘collective’ sphere and left there. If these are not the psychological implications of the book, they are the obvious ones which in fact are being drawn, and urgently need the author’s corrections. ~Victor White, Jung-White Letters, Page 268-272
