Paul Bishop, Jung’s Answer to Job
KNOWLEDGE OR FAITH?
In addition to the tradition of theological and philosophical commentary on the Book of Job, there is a broader socio-theological context in terms of which the composition of Answer to Job should be seen: the continuing decline in religious belief in general, and in Christianity in particular, which has been a feature of intellectual life in Europe since the Enlightenment.
After all, Kant had written in the preface to the second edition (1787) of his Critique of Pure Reason that he had found it necessary ‘to deny knowledge [Wissen] in order to make room for faith [Glauben]’, and in a letter to Fichte of 1799, Jacobi had gone as far as astigating philosophical idealism as leading to ‘nihilism’.
So although nihilism is frequently regarded as part of the ‘modernist’ or ‘postmodernist’ condition, its roots go back at least as far as the post-Kantian philosophy of Fichte.
The decline of organized religion and the growth of nihilism were, in turn, both welcomed by Nietzsche, who was to speak, in his notes for The Will to Power, of nihilism as ‘the uncanniest of all guests’, standing right before our door.
In so doing, Nietzsche was taking up again a theme that had preoccupied him from The Birth of Tragedy (1872) onwards. In that work, Nietzsche described myth as ‘the necessary prerequisite of every religion’, and lamented its paralysis and consequent subjugation in Wihelmine Germany at the hands of optimism, ‘the germ of destruction in our society’.
The suppression of myth, Nietzsche argued, represented nothing less than the death of religion:
For this is the way in which religions are wont to die out: under the stern, intelligent eyes of an orthodox dogmatism, the mythical premises of a religion are systematized as a sum total of historical events; one begins apprehensively to defend the credibility of the myths, while at the same time one opposes any continuation of their natural vitality and growth; the feeling for myth perishes, and its place is taken by the claim of religion to historical foundations.
If, in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche was hoping for a renewal of myth, not in the form of a revival of Christianity, of course, but in the form of the Dionysian music of Richard Wagner, he would later turn away from Wagner and create Zarathustra, his own symbol of the qualities required for willing the anti-Christian, antioptimistic figure of the Superman.
For his part, Wagner saw his music drama as meeting a specific historical need. In Religion and Art (1880), written at the time when he was composing Parsifal, he claimed that art could act as a substitute for religion:
One might say that where Religion becomes artificial, it is reserved for Art to save the spirit of religion by recognising the figurative value of the mythic symbols which the former would have us believe in their literal sense, and revealing their deep and hidden truth through an ideal presentation.
And it was not artists and philosophers alone who understood that the status of the mythical element in religion, especially Christianity, had become extremely problematic. For example, there was the theologian David Friedrich Strauss (1808–74), whom Nietzsche savagely attacked in the first of his Untimely Meditations in 1873 for undermining the revival of the kind of ‘tragic culture’ that The Birth of Tragedy had envisaged.
Writing in the historico-critical tradition of the nineteenth century that went back to Schleiermacher’s Life of Jesus (1832), in The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1846) Strauss stripped the figure of Jesus of its supernatural trappings, and in The Old Faith and the New (1872) the idea of a personal God was rejected.
Denied its ‘mythical’ status, ‘the ideal Christ’ which remained for Strauss was not even an historical figure, but ‘mankind’s moral exemplar’. In France, the historian, scholar, and critic Ernst Renan (1823–92) published, in 1863, his Life of Jesus (the first volume of his larger project,
The Origins of Christianity (1863–83)). In his biography of Jesus, the Hegelianinfluenced Renan drew on recent German scholarship (including Strauss) for its exegesis of the Bible, offering a rationalized and, above all, psychological interpretation of the figure of Christ.
In fact, the late nineteenth century saw such a proliferation of biographies of the founder of Christianity that Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965), the Swiss biblical scholar turned missionary, saw the need to provide an overview of them in Die Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung (1906; trans.
The Quest for the Historical Jesus, 1910), as well as contributing his own views to the theological debate in Das Messianitäts- und Leidensgeheimnis (1901).
That Jung was aware of this nineteenth-century debate is made clear in his letter of 3 November 1952 to Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) (himself the author of a book about Christ), to whom he wrote:
Being the son of a parson, and having grown up in an atmosphere steeped in theology, I learnt about a number of attempts such as those of Strauss, Renan, Moore, etc., and in later years I was an ardent reader of A. Schweitzer’s work. I have repeatedly, i.e., at different phases of my life, tried to realize what kind of personality – explaining the whole effect of its existence – could be reconstructed from the scanty historical evidence offered by the New Testament.
Having had a good deal of psychological experience, I should have been sufficiently equipped for such a task, but in the end I came to the conclusion that, owing on the one hand to the paucity of historical data, and on the other to the abundance of mythological admixtures, I was unable to reconstruct a personal character free from rather fatal contradictions. (L2, pp. 87–88)54
This ‘reconstruction’ of the figure of Christ could refer, at least in part, to Jung’s discussion of ‘Christ as Archetype’ in his essay ‘A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity’ (1942/48) (CW 12 §§226–33), but also to his psychological analysis of Christ in Answer to Job.
(Whilst Jung’s attitude to Renan seems to have been largely positive, his attitude towards Schweitzer was far more ambivalent: in 1952, he wrote that Schweitzer was ‘urgently needed in Europe but prefers to be a touching saviour of savages and to hang his theology on the wall’, adding that ‘we have a justification for missionizing only when we have straightened ourselves out here, otherwise we are merely spreading our own disease’; and in 1953, he wrote:
‘I rate this man and his scientific achievements very highly and admire his gifts and versatility’; but: ‘I can see no particular merit in his recognition that Christ and his apostles erred in their expectation of the parousia and that this disappointment had repercussions on the development of ecclesiastical dogma’; and: ‘Faced with the truly appalling afflictio animae [= affliction of the soul] of the European man, Schweitzer abdicated from the task incumbent on the theologian, the cura animarum [ = cure of souls], and studied medicine in order to treat the sick bodies of natives’.55)
Whereas Albrecht Ritschl (1822–89), Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930), and other liberal thinkers were equally concerned to present Christianity in a form acceptable to contemporary society (but were criticized for their approach by, among others, the early Jung),56 it was, amongst subsequent German theologians, Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) who argued most consistently for what he called the ‘de-mythologization’ (Entmythologisierung) of Christianity.57 In Kerygma and Myth (1952), Bultmann defined ‘myth’ as follows:
Mythology is the use of imagery to express the otherworldly in terms of this world and the divine in terms of human life, the other side in terms of this side. For instance, divine transcendence is expressed as spatial distance. It is a mode of expression which makes it easy to understand the cultus as an action in which material means are used to convey immaterial power.
If, as is often said, Hegel in his Life of Jesus (1795) presented a figure of Christ who spoke the language of Kant’s moral philosophy, then Bultmann presented a version of Christianity that took as its framework the existentialist philosophy of Martin Heidegger (a close friend and colleague).
To Jung, however, Bultmann’s entire approach was anathema and, in a letter of 17 March 1951, he described Bultmann’s attempt at demythologization as ‘a consequence of Protestant rationalism’ which would lead to ‘the progressive impoverishment of symbolism’.
(The psychologist and philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) likewise argued, contra Bultmann, that the significance of symbols lay precisely in the way they eluded rational understanding.
‘What is left over’, Jung believed, ‘does not suffice to express the prodigal (and dangerous) world of the unconscious, to join it to consciousness or, as the case may be, to hold it in check’ (L2, p. 7).
With reference to a case he had once seen,60 Jung concluded his attack on Bultmann as follows: ‘“Demythologization”! What hybris! Reminiscent of the disinfection of heaven with sublimate of mercury by a crazy doctor who then declared God could [not] be found. Yet God is the mythologem kat ‘exochen [= par excellence]’ (L2, p. 9).61 His Answer to Job is, in some respects, an answer to Bultmann too.
Jung’s response to Bultmann points to a completely different understanding of myth. Indeed, for Jung, religion is ‘precisely that function which links us back to the eternal myth’, and so to strip the myth away from religion is to destroy religion entirely (CW 11 §647).
Jung’s view of the importance of myth was derived from Nietzsche and, in particular, The Birth of Tragedy: ‘Without myth every culture loses the healthy natural power of its creativity: only a horizon defined by myths completes and unifies a whole cultural movement.’62 Consequently, Jung argues that it is a mistake to equate ‘myth’ with mere ‘fiction’ since, for him, ‘myth is not fiction: it consists of facts that are continually repeated and can be observed over and over again’ (CW 11 §648).
Hence the ‘mythical character’ of a life is ‘just what expresses its universal human validity’, and Jung goes on to speculate that ‘it is perfectly possible, psychologically, for the unconscious or an archetype to take complete possession of someone and to determine his or her fate down to the smallest detail’. For Jung, Christ was ‘just such a personality’.
In the case of these individuals, the archetype is also represented by ‘objective, non-psychic parallel phenomena’, suggesting that ‘the archetype fulfils itself not only psychically in the individual, but objectively outside the individual’ (§648).
(Such a coincidence of objective and subjective archetypal phenomena was what Jung, in a controversial paper published in 1952, called ‘synchronicity’.)
The post-Nietzschean, theological background to Jung’s psychology can be most clearly seen in his early writings. In Transformations and Symbols of the Libido (1911/12), Jung had, in effect, reversed Kant’s formula, proposing instead to abolish faith and replace it with knowledge – knowledge, that is, of the psychological symbol:
The religious myth meets us here as one of the greatest and most significant human institutions which, despite misleading symbols,
nevertheless gives man assurance and strength, so that he may not be overwhelmed by the monsters of the universe. The symbol, considered from the standpoint of actual truth, is misleading, indeed, but it is psychologically true, because it was and is the bridge to all the greatest achievements of humanity. […]
This would be the course of moral autonomy, of perfect freedom, when man could without compulsion wish that which he must do, and this from knowledge, without delusion through belief in the religious symbols. […] I think belief [der Glaube] should be replaced by understanding [das Verstehen]; then we would keep the beauty of the symbol, but still remain free from the depressing results of submission to belief. This would be the psychoanalytic cure for belief and disbelief.
The redemption, in psychological terms, of both faith and non-belief thus lay, for Jung, in a post-Nietzschean transformation of faith into a ‘secular religion’, although the extent to which the practice and institutions of analytical psychology can be understood in terms of a ‘religion’, or even a ‘cult’, remains controversial. Rejecting the accusation that he was out to establish a ‘Jungian Church’ as ‘sheer defamation’, in 1956 Jung told the British psychologist and theologian H.L. Philp, he knew ‘a considerable number of people that have converted to the Catholic Church after they were analysed by myself’.
In this same letter, Jung claimed: ‘I am definitely inside Christianity and, as far as I am capable of judging about myself, on the direct line of historical development.’ Characteristically, however, Jung set up a parallel between himself and the Pope, whilst at the same time aligning himself with the Reformation, Protestantism, and even ‘heresy’!
If the Pope adds a new and thoroughly unhistorical dogma to Catholicism, I add a symbolic interpretation of all Christian symbols. At least I am trying to. If the Reformation is a heresy, I am certainly a heretic too. […]
Looked at from a strictly Catholic point of view I make very heretical statements indeed; but there are plenty of reformers that have done the same thing, including the present Pope, declaring the dogma [of the Assumption] without the slightest apostolic authority and without the consent even of his own Church, which has emphatically resisted any such declaration during at least the 600 years of its early history. […] Thus far I am a Protestant in my soul and body, even if most of the Protestant theologians are just as childishly prejudiced as the Catholic priests. (L2, pp. 334–35)
If we examine Jung’s remarks in his correspondence, or at least in that portion of it which has been published, we find there is a remarkable continuity between his concern with the psychological significance of religion in the first decade or so of the century and his attitude, as a psychologist, towards religion in the 1950s, that is, during the time of the composition of Answer to Job.
For example, in his letter of 17 March 1951 to a correspondent known as Dr H., Jung wrote that he was fighting ‘for the reactivation of symbolic thinking, because of its therapeutic value, and against the presumptuous undervaluation of myth, which only a very few people have the least understanding of anyway’ (L2, p. 8).
Writing to a Protestant minister in Basle, Dorothee Hoch, on 28 May 1952, Jung pointed out: ‘My documentation is concerned with the historical development of ideas in Western culture’; and on 3 November 1952 he told the American novelist Upton Sinclair that the problem of Christ ‘can only be approached through [the history of man] and comparative psychology of symbols’ (L2, pp. 66 and 91).
When asked in 1955 by the editor of the journal of the Pastoral Psychology Book Club in New York, Simon Doniger, how Answer to Job came to be written, Jung replied by describing the aim of his work as being ‘to point out [the] historical evolution [of the problem of Job] since the time of Job down through the centuries to the most recent symbolic phenomena like the Assumption Mariae, etc.’ (L2, p. 282).
And in a letter of 7 May 1960 to an unnamed correspondent, Jung wrote that the Preface and Introduction to Answer to Job showed that he was approaching the biblical text, not in terms of personal belief, but in terms of ‘the history of symbols’ (L2, p. 556).
True to what he regarded as his Kantian roots, in his letter to G.A. van den Bergh von Eysinga of 13 February 1954, Jung had recourse, when speaking about God, to the notion of ‘symbolic anthropomorphism’ as presented in Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783):
We hold ourselves to [the boundary of experience] if we limit our judgment merely to the relation that the world may have to a being whose concept itself lies outside all cognition that we can attain within the world.
For we then do not attribute to the supreme being any of the properties in themselves by which we think the objects of experience, and we thereby avoid dogmatic anthropomorphism; but we attribute those properties, nonetheless, to the relation of this being to the world, and we allow ourselves a symbolic anthropomorphism, which in fact concerns only language and not the object itself.
By aligning himself with Kant’s concern for, as Jung put it, ‘“language” (and mimic representation in general) but not the object itself ’, Jung believed himself to be right to distinguish between God and the God-image, ‘an autonomous archetypal pattern’ (L2, p. 154) – a point that proved to be of central importance in his debate with Martin Buber (see Chapter 2), as well as in his Answer to Job.
It is difficult to judge what religious convictions Jung actually held, let alone the sincerity with which he may have held them. In response to a questionnaire sent to him in 1955 by Palmer A. Hilty, a professor of English at the State College of Washington, Jung had no hesitation in describing himself as a Protestant in the Swiss Reformed tradition (L2, p. 274), and he spoke, on this occasion and on several others,65 of having, not belief in God, but knowledge: ‘I don’t need to believe, I know.’
Although he interpreted this remark to Valentine Brooke as meaning that he knew ‘of the existence of God-images’, Jung was nevertheless buried, following a funeral service at the local Protestant church, in the family grave in the cemetery at Küsnacht.
According to his biographer Vincent Brome, ‘what one witness described as a “hushed assembly” came to the Protestant church in Küsnacht where the pastor celebrated his passing as a prophet who had stemmed the flood of rationalism “and given man the courage to have a soul again”’.
He Lectured with enthusiasm on religious themes, including the Terry Lectures at Yale
University on ‘Psychology and Religion’ (1938), and his lectures at the Eranos conferences tackled such themes as ‘A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity’ (1942) and ‘Transformation Symbolism in the Mass’.67 On 30 April 1960, Jung told the psychotherapist Josef Rudin (b. 1907) that his client base came from ex-believers, non-believers, or believers in religions other than Christianity: ‘I have in the main to do with people who have either lost their Christianity or never had any, or with adherents of other religions who nevertheless belong to the human family’ (L2, p. 553).
He went on to make the following point: ‘It is impossible for me to subscribe to the view of a theological friend who said: “Buddhists are no concern of ours”.
In the doctor’s consulting-room they are very much our concern and deserve to be addressed in a language common to all men’ (pp. 553–54). Given this remark, it is not surprising that Jung also wrote commentaries on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (1935) and the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation (1939), and provided forewords to Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki’s Introduction to Zen Buddhism (1939) and Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the I Ching (1950).
There is evidence that the 1950s saw an intensification of Jung’s interest in the question of religion, of which his writing of the Answer to Job is arguably the most important example. For instance, in 1950 Jung published the fourth version of Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, now retitled Symbole der Wandlung (Symbols of Transformation).
In this substantially revised version, Jung greatly expanded the material discussed between his observation that ‘sentimentality is repressed brutality’ (1911/12)/‘sentimentality is sister to brutality’ (1950) (PU §690/CW 5 §668) and his statement that, in mythology, the annual sacrifice of the maiden to the
dragon represented an ideal (symbolic) sacrifice (PU §692/CW 5 §671). This material includes a digression on the etymology of the word religion, derived (according to the OED) by Cicero from religere (= to read over again), but connected by later authors to religare (= to bind).
To his observation that ‘(the part of) the libido which erects religious structures regresses/is fixed in the last analysis to/in the mother, and thus represents the real bond through which we are (permanently) connected with our origins’ (PU §691/CW 5 §669), Jung appended the following remark:
‘When the Church Fathers derive the word religio from religare (to reconnect, link back), they could at least have appealed to this psychological fact in support of their view’ (CW 5 §669). And, in a footnote, he added that ‘the original derivation from religere (to go through again, think over, recollect) is the more probable’ (n. 71).
Nine years later, in a letter to a pastor in Kronbühl, Canton St Gallen, etymological considerations were once again at the base of Jung’s distinction between ‘religion’ (now derived, he said, from relegere or religere (to ponder, to take account of, to observe, e.g., in prayer))70 and ‘creed’. By ‘religion’ (Religion), Jung told Pastor Tanner, he meant ‘a kind of attitude which takes careful and conscientious account of
certain numinous feelings, ideas, and events[,] and reflects upon them’, whereas, for him, ‘belief’ or ‘creed’ (Konfession) meant ‘an organized community which collectively professes a specific belief or a specific ethos and mode of behaviour’ (L2, pp. 483–84).
In practice, then, ‘faith without religion’ could be translated, he claimed, as ‘“(non-denominational) religion without creed”, manifestly an unorganized, non-collective, entirely individual exercise of the “religious function”’, a trend which Jung regarded as ‘characteristic of presentday humanity, especially the young’. Going on to diagnose this social condition, Jung argued that ‘people have grown rather tired of believing [daß die Leute etwas glaubensmüde sind] and are worn out by the effort of having to cling on to ideas which seem incomprehensible to them and are therefore quite literally unbelievable’.
In these circumstances, he claimed, theologians such as Bultmann had responded by ‘purifying’ the tenets of belief and relieving them of ‘their principal encumbrances, which for the rationalist are their particularly obnoxious “mythological” elements’ (L2, p. 484).
Yet even the approach of Bultmann and his followers, he insisted, betrayed the persistence of the need for mythology. Cunningly, Jung even found a link between materialism and the dogma of the Assumption: But if the believer without religion now thinks that he has got rid of mythology he is deceiving himself: he cannot get by without ‘myth’.
Religio is by its very nature always an erga, a ‘towards’, no matter whether the following accusative be ‘God’, ‘Redeemer’, a philosophical idea or an ethical principle; it is always a ‘mythic’ or transcendental statement. This is naturally also the case when the ultimate principle is called ‘matter’.
Only the totally naïve think this is the opposite of ‘myth’. Materia is in the
end simply a chthonic mother goddess, and the late Pope [Pius XII] seems to have had an inkling of this. (Cf. the second Encyclical to the dogma of the Assumption!) (L2, pp. 484–85)
Like Nietzsche, Jung saw myth as an essential constituent of religion, without which even the very possibility of religious experience may be no more.
Further on in his letter to Pastor Tanner, he explained:
With this radical ‘demythologization’ religious communication comes to a dead end too. Myth is pre-eminently a social phenomenon: it is told by the many and heard by the many. It gives the ultimately unimaginable religious experience an image, a form in which to express itself, and thus makes community life possible, whereas a merely subjective religious experience lacking the traditional mythic imagery remains inarticulate and asocial, and, if it does anything at all, it fosters a spiritually anchoritic life. (L2, p. 486)
The flip-side of this particular coin was, however, Jung’s belief that myth, whilst it might have decayed, nevertheless remained a potential force for psychological good:
Myths are descriptions of psychic processes and developments, therefore. Since these, so long and so far as they are still in the unconscious state, prove to be inaccessible to any arbitrary alteration, they exert a compelling influence on consciousness as pre-existent conditioning factors. This influence is neither abolished nor corrected by any environmental conditions. From ancient times, therefore, it has been deemed a daemonium. No amount of reason can conjure this empirical fact out of existence. (L2, p. 487)
Towards the end of what even Jung himself described as an ‘unusually prolix’ letter to Pastor Tanner, however, he speculated on the possibility that, despite the forces ranged against it, myth might not prove to be ineradicable, and suggested that it would be thanks to psychology, not to the theology of Bultmann, that Christianity or ‘the Christian myth’, as he put it – would be revived:
These new insights enable us to gain a new understanding of mythology and of its importance as an expression of intrapsychic processes. And from this in turn we gain a new understanding of the Christian myth, and more particularly of its apparently obnoxious statements that are contrary to all reason.
If the Christian myth is not to become obsolete – which would be a sell-out with quite unpredictable consequences – the need for a more psychologically oriented interpretation that would salvage its meaning and Guarantee its continuance forces itself upon us. The danger of its final destruction is considerable when even the theologians start to demolish the classic world of mythological ideas without putting a new medium of expression in its place. (L2, p. 488)
Thus, contrary to the claims of such recent critics as Richard Noll, who has ventured the opinion that, ‘as an individual, [Jung] ranks with the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate (fourth century CE) as one who significantly undermined orthodox Christianity and restored the polytheism of the Hellenistic world in Western civilization’, and moreover that, in important respects, ‘Jung has succeeded where Julian failed’, Jung sought to defend and protect Christianity. Yet Jung’s analytical psychological version of ‘the Christian myth’ was undeniably unconventional, insisting as it did on the pagan roots of Christianity.
In a programmatic letter sent to Freud as early as 11 February 1910, Jung had written of ‘a far finer and more comprehensive task for Ψα [i.e., psychoanalysis] than alliance with an ethical fraternity’: I think we must give it time to infiltrate into people from many centres, to revivify among intellectuals a feeling for symbol and myth, ever so gently to transform Christ back into the soothsaying god of the vine, which he was, and in this way absorb those ecstatic instinctual forces of Christianity for the one purpose of making the cult and the sacred myth what they once were – a drunken feast of joy where man regained the ethos and holiness of an animal. […]
A genuine and proper ethical development cannot abandon Christianity but must grow up within it, must bring to fruition its hymn of love, the agony and ecstasy over the dying and resurgent god [i.e., Dionysos-Zagreus], the mystic power of the wine, the awesome anthropophagy of the Last Supper – only this ethical development can serve the vital forces of religion. (Freud/Jung, p. 294) ~Paul Bishop, Jung’s Answer to Job, Page 31-42
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