Svar på Job

by C.G. Jung

En presentasjon av C. G. Jungs religiøse og moralfilosofiske tenkning har vi hittil savnet i rekken av hans bøker på norsk. SVAR på JOB gir svaret. Det er en av de viktigste kilder til å forstå denne siden ved en dristig og original tenker som har bygget sitt forfatterskap omkring sine egne indre erfaringer. Her kommer han oss nærmere enn noen andre steder, kanskje bortsett fra selvbiografien. - Det henger sammen med at SVAR PÅ JOB behandler problemer som ligger midt imellom teologi, psykologi og moralfilosofi og som vanskelig lar seg besvare vitenskapelig. Av den grunn blir også stilen mer personlig her, og argumentasjonen mer almengyldig enn i et rent vitenskapelig arbeid.

Genres: Psychology, Philosophy, Religion, Nonfiction, Theology, Spirituality, Christianity

139 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1952

About the author

Carl Gustav Jung (/jʊŋ/; German: [ˈkarl ˈɡʊstaf jʊŋ]), often referred to as C. G. Jung, was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology. Jung proposed and developed the concepts of extraversion and introversion; archetypes, and the collective unconscious. His work has been influential in psychiatry and in the study of religion, philosophy, archeology, anthropology, literature, and related fields. He was a prolific writer, many of whose works were not published until after his death.

The central concept of analytical psychology is individuation—the psychological process of integrating the opposites, including the conscious with the unconscious, while still maintaining their relative autonomy. Jung considered individuation to be the central process of human development.

Jung created some of the best known psychological concepts, including the archetype, the collective unconscious, the complex, and synchronicity. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a popular psychometric instrument, has been developed from Jung's theory of psychological types.

Though he was a practising clinician and considered himself to be a scientist, much of his life's work was spent exploring tangential areas such as Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, and sociology, as well as literature and the arts. Jung's interest in philosophy and the occult led many to view him as a mystic, although his ambition was to be seen as a man of science. His influence on popular psychology, the "psychologization of religion", spirituality and the New Age movement has been immense.

Reviews

[max · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Jung's dense and wild meditation on Christianity, published nine years before his death, he seeks some lofty antecedents, but lets his fast and loose language of archetype cover for some questionable footwork.

Jung clearly built his book as an homage to Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, substituting the philosopher's exegesis of Isaac and Abraham for an inquiry into the nature of Job. For Kierkegaard, several Rashoman-like retellings of the story eventually yield to furious, brooding analysis in the face of the absurdity: A father willing to kill his son for his faith. Kierkegaard's study culminates with the introduction of Jesus Christ as the Christian password to an intractable Old Testament cipher. Jung, however, has chosen a parable with considerably fewer hand-holds. Instead of father and son as human protagonists, the bible presents only Job (with a supporting cast of his friends). Instead of a denouement on Mount Moriah, Job's trial culminates with Elihu's mediation on behalf of his friend.

While Kierkegaard sucks the ethical marrow from his story through painstaking study, Jung blasts at the story of Job with his full arsenal of newfangled clinical terms, launching his little book into an atmosphere of conjecture that better befits his heady era than ours. His basic thesis is that a) the god of Job is an unconscious psyche with no capability for self-reflection, and hence an enormous capacity for breaking his own laws, and b) this god envies man's moral and self-reflective abilities and wishes to become a man himself.

If Jung had left things at that, this book would be shorter, neater, and more widely accepted into the philosophical canon. Instead, Jung, at full warp-drive capacity, speeds directly to Revelations via the Book of John, which he assures us, via his clinical authority, share the same author. Large heapings of apocrypha serve to further muddy things, wherein Jung seems convinced his reader (or followers) will accept Sophia as God's queen, Lilith as Seth's mother, the Virgin Mary as an incarnation of Sophia, and many, many other staples of New Age, Kabbalah-drenched Christianity.

Nevertheless, Jung presents a fascinating notion of a many-sided god who seeks to compensate for his Old Testament extremes by continuously incarnating himself in Jesus, the Holy Ghost, and in Jung's mind, many other characters, including, if you read long enough, you and I. Brave and bold surveys of metaphysics should certainly consider adding Jung's early chapters on Job's plight as a rider to Kierkegaard's seminal examination of the ethics of faith.

[Jason , etc. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Job is the most beautifully written book in the bible, period. It's more prose than anything else. Jung's Answer to Job's cry of 'Why' is amazing. Jung believed in God, which is pretty amazing when considering the stance of most of his contemporaries. His answer to the ultimate question of suffering is worthy of anyone's time, believer or not.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. A 108 page pyscho-social analysis from both the individual and society levels of the bible—meaning the Old and New Testaments. This book uses the Story of Job in the Old Testament as the event after which man and God’s relationship was forever altered and required Jesus to become incarnate.

This was a fascinating, but super dense read. It rang more as more authentically Christian than well, mainstream Christianity. This story is much more compassionate, self-sacrificial and self-esteem imbuing (for us humans) as opposed to the originally tainted with sin stuff.
For Jung, Jesus did not die for man’s sins, Jesus became incarnate in order to die for Yahweh’s sins.

Hmmm. That’s a bit different. Yahweh, in addition to smoting people left and right like a conscience-lacking phenomena rather than an entity after which man was modeled, had unleashed all sorts of needless torments and suffering on Job. Job, feeling justifiably screwed, argues his case, mistakenly believing Yahweh to be rational. True to form, God responds with a temper tantrum and Job realizes God is whack, so he drops his case.

Job shows himself to be more mature and wiser. He turned his cheek. This could not go unnoticed by man, consciously or not. This is where Jung’s theorizing on the collective unconscious, its archetypes, ie, the hero, virgin, etc come in as well as an implicit and fascinating concept of an interplay between God, the collective unconscious and the individual—surely spurred along by the quantum science discoveries being made during Jung’s time.

How can an omnipotent and omniscient being face defeat and continually be fooled by the devil he created? Did man force Yahweh to bring forth Jesus? If Jesus did come forth because of man demanding it and Yahweh recognizing “his bads”, Jung sees that there is still something wrong. God did evolve with a bit more of the feminine, but did he evolve with enough gentleness and wisdom? If so, why does the Holy Ghost need to “stick around” after Jesus? Someone (i.e. the holy ghost) still needs to have our back with God.

And let’s not get Jung started on the Book of Revelations--which he covers in this book as well.

God sends Christ to die as a mea culpa for all the devil-induced suffering and potentially--in recognizing man’s progress via Job--to get the bittersweet taste of mortality. This recognizes Job was a darn impressive dude. This is some good old honest self-sacrifice within the immediate celestial family, where it is needed--a sending forth of its son with a radical new living philosophy born of God learning (more or less) from his defeat by Job.

[Night0vvl · Rating 4 out of 5]

اگرچه كه به اندازه ساير آثار يونگ از اين كتاب لذت نبردم اما كتاب خوبي بود و ديدگاه جالبي داشت. در حقيقت يونگ به نحوي به تحليل شخصيت يهوه و دوگانگي وجودي وي در قالب همان نظريه سايه، پرداخته بود و تحليلي روانشناسانه از يك سري عقايد مذهبي خاص ارائه داده بود. بايد اعتراف كنم كه تحليل مكاشفات يوحنا چندان به دلم ننشست و به نظرم تحليل جامع و مانعي نبود اما بيان كننده ي بعدي بود كه به نظر كمتر كسي به آن توجه مي كند.

[Jon Ungerland · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book challenges any christian to examine our somewhat naive concept of the shadow of god, and encourages us to reach past our all-too-often childish understanding of salvation.

[hayatem · Rating 5 out of 5]

يبحث كارل يونغ في هذا الكتاب برؤية نقدية تحليلية في الفكر اللاهوتي المسيحي في العهد القديم . عرف عن يونغ اشتغاله وبشكل مكثف على لاهوت القرون الوسطى و إبحاره في الغنوصية الباطنية والمسيحية، وبدى ذلك في فكره حول الخلاص والتحرر أو التوحد مع الله إلى جانب اهتمامه ب التحولات التاريخية للمسيحية، وتاريخية الأشكال الرمزية. اشتغل في هذا البحث أو الدراسة على عدد من المسائل من مثل : "أنثروبولوجيا الدين- الله ككائن ينتمي للعقل- الله ككائن أخلاقي وقانون." تناول على ضوء ذلك وبإسهاب مسأله يعقوب وصراعه مع الرب " الإله يهوه" كما جاء في الكتاب المقدس - العهد القديم ، سفر أيوب.
وما أسفر عنه من مسائل جدلية أو معضلات مثل :الخير والشر بين الدين والعقل- إشكالية الشر في الثيولوجيا وفلسفة الدين"هل الله شرير؟". ومسألة صورة الله التي تتداخل مع اللاوعي. جدل الوجود والماهية. إضافة إلى التأمل العقلاني في علاقة الطبيعة الإنسانية بالدين، كمنظومة رمزية، ونقد التصورات حول الله سواءً كانت تنزيهية أو تشبيهية. كذلك العلاقة بين الوعي الإنساني والإله أو الله. وأخيراً تجسد الله وأنسنة الإنسان.

الكتاب مثير للمهتمين بعلم النفس واللاهوت.

الترجمة رائعة.

[Iver Raknes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Close to his death, Jung once was asked whether he would rewrite any of his books if he had the chance. He answered that he would re-write all of them only with one exception: his Answer to Job.

Jung was brought up during the mid 19th century. Jung had problems with his faith from an early age. A particular instance of this was a dream he had during his early childhood; In the dream, he saw God defecating on the church of his father-breaking through the roof and destroying the building. Jung spent many years wrestling with his faith and reading a wide variety of literature on Gnosticism as well as all the religious texts he managed to get a hold. He was troubled by the break between Catholicism and Protestantism, and he thought it necessary to unite them in some way. Even throughout reading his thoughts on religion it became apparent that he had a unique problem with the Protestants. Jung spent about forty years of his life writing Answer to Job. Debating whether or not he would ever pen down his thoughts, he knew it would get radical opposition from both scientists and Christians. He attempts to psychoanalyse the words of the Bible, with the particular interest in the interpretation of the God image where his ontology is more clearly laid out than in any other book of his. The book is short and swiftly written in a dryly sardonic style- an exploration of the need to update Christianity or monotheism in general, so that the stories can face the dangers of the atomic age.

From the Jungian perspective, all religious documents should read as truths of the psyche, not truths of the material world. Of course, then religion could not fall into the realm of the natural sciences. Answer to Job is a thesis that states that Judeo-Christian monotheism dangerously denies God as a concept of wholeness and totality. God must contain both Evil and the feminine. In much of western religious history, there has been an attempt to readdress these imbalances in the deity; the moral protest against God’s justice in the Book of Job to Pope Pius XII’s 1950 doctrine of Mary’s Assumption articulate well the struggle between the two.

Jung argues that we cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities. One could claim that the Old Testament God is that of the King rather than a sort of wholeness- both the tyrannical and the liberal. Jung wants to convince us that the modern man should strive to reach wholeness in God, and since the image of the self is the same as the archetype of wholeness, one cannot tell God from the self. Our idea of God is, in a sense, our self-concept. Now that we have the power to destroy the world, we cannot afford to be disconnected with our dark side or to the appeal of effect and values apart from the masculine tyranny. The modern man has yielded an almost godlike power, and cannot any longer be careless and unconscious. He must comprehend something of God’s nature and metaphysical processes if he is to know himself. Jung's method of demonstrating these theses- which will probably not persuade the Biblical scholar or contemporary psychologists, but should not offend the layman - is to vi the books of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation as a single unbroken story, albeit composed of different historical moments by different sensibilities. They demonstrate the development of God’s personality from the jealous, tyrannical deity of the early books through the incarnation in the New Testament, back to the unintegrated Omni-destructive force described by John of Patmos.

Throughout the Bible, Jung claims, both God and His people made many attempts to reform the God-Image. Job is a turning point because it is the first time the mortal man calls God to moral account after his own rules. As Job continues despite his suffering to believe in God’s justice, and thus, according to Jung, becomes more just than God. “A mortal man is raised by his moral behaviour above the stars in heaven, from which position of an advantage he can see the back of Yahweh,” Jung writes *. The Book of Job coincides, Jung further argues, with a body of Hebrew wisdom writing that describes a feminine force called Sophia, who supplements the excessively masculine deity with a feminine counterpart. Jung reason that “perfection is a masculine desideratum, while woman inclines by nature to completeness,” meaning this “anamnesis of Sophia” portends the next stage in God’s development. God — through the agency of a moral but perfect woman — will incarnate himself as a man in continuing the quest for wholeness rather than unconscious self-division. In the crucifixion, we find the “Answer to Job” of Jung’s title: “God experiences what it is to be a mortal man and drinks to the dregs what he made his faithful servant Job suffer.” God’s dispatch of the holy Spirit to dwell in humanity implies that all human beings, not only Christ, should incarnate God, a “Christification” of man that will realise divinity on earth. Although, as long as God remains newly feminised or humanised, it is an impossible idea of perfect goodness. The evil part of the psyche remains un-integrated, which means that it will continue to express itself in destructively unconscious ways. Therefore the Bible’s concluding outburst in the wild violence and apocalypticism of Revelations.

What should we make of Jung's ideas in this modern light? As long as they are is stated at a high level of generality, I mostly agree with them. An immense amount of unnecessary suffering in the world caused by wishing away unpleasant, intractable emotions and psychic forces by imputing them wholly to "the enemy," in which locus can shatter. Jung's recommendation of psychic balance based on a realistic assessment of the individual and collective personality. What I cannot help but contain seems unexceptionable to me and even timely. We may be in less risk of thermonuclear annihilation than in Jung's time, but it's hard to deny that American, and perhaps international politics, is in a death spiral of self-devouring self-righteousness and hypertrophic "identities" that accuse all the evils of the world on others. While there is very often a real justification for blaming others for bad behaviour, this cannot accompany a refusal to recognise the complexity of the self or the universal human ability for evil. Have this Jungian sentence in mind as you browse social media: "Irritability, bad moods, and outbursts of effect are the classic symptoms of chronic virtuousness." In this way, Jung is faithful to Freud's Enlightenment intention for psychoanalysis: we cannot deny the irrational but must strive to understand it so that we are not wholly under its control.

[Yousef Nabil · Rating 4 out of 5]

كتاب مرعب.
أحيانًا أشعر أن يونج يهبط إلى طبقات عميقة جدا جدا يخشى المرء أن يفكر فيها. منذ فترة طويلة وقراءة سفر أيوب التوراتي تصيبني بغضب شديد، وفي هذا الكتاب العميق يُحلِّل أيوب طبيعة العلاقة بين يهوه وأيوب وتطور الأمر وصولا إلى المسيحية وختامًا برؤيا يوحنا اللاهوتي. الأمر كله قائم على فهم الأساس النظري ليونج عن ادلين وهو يشرحه في بادية الكتاب ونهايته باختصار، لكنه منظور صعب بعض الشيء على من تعودوا النظر إلى الدين من منظور إيماني أو فلسفي أو حتى نفسي بمعنى تحليل نفسية المؤمنين. هنا يونج يحلل نفسية الدين نفسه إذا جاز التعبير، وينظر إليه بوصفه حقيقة نفسية ويربطه بفكرة النماذج البدئية التي يُشيِّد عليها هيكل منهجه النفسي.
كتاب غني ومهم جدًا. لا يمكنني الول أني أتفق معه بشكل كامل، ولا حتى أني فهمته بشكل كامل، لكنه أثار أفكارًا وتأملات كثيرة أظن أني سأفكر فيها مع مرور الوقت.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This work puts the old testament biblical god under the psychiatrist's microscope. Carl Jung doesn't concern himself with the truth or non-truth of biblical events and nor does he see that as important. Jung concerns himself with the truth or reality of the psyche itself freeing himself up to just focus on the functional structure and patterns of mythology (be it traditional myth or just scriptural accounts whose devotees would take offense to being lumped into the mythological category).

Jung outlines a process of psychological evolution the biblical god progressed through starting with illustrating the suppressed shadow side of the manic old testament deity. Yahweh is a jealous god who was greatly feared by his followers and this is often brushed over by modern followers. Though they loved him, the ancient Hebrews were genuinely afraid of this deity. The turning point for this deity's evolution seemed to be his unjust treatment of the faithful servant Job. Job saw this deity for how loving and how cruel he was, elevating his own morality and understanding of justice above that of the deity. This created a need for god to become man, not because man did wrong against god but because god did wrong to man. It was to repair the widening gap that deity created through his cruelties.

Jung is well-versed in old and new testament scriptures as well as apocryphal texts and thoroughly references these and presents his hypothesis intelligently, respectfully, and logically.

For those unfamiliar with Jung it would be useful to read a short bit on his explanations of archetypes and the collective unconscious. For me, this book was read as the last chapter in a collected work called The Portable Jung, so the preceding papers, essays and excerpts built into this work wonderfully. The important idea to specifically understand before reading these is there are common, recurring mythological motifs and characters in all world cultures which are loosely defined as "archetypes". These archetypes are ideas human beings share and according to Jungian psychology they also are somewhat autonomous and defined outside of man's personal unconscious mind. These archetypes can change over time and assume different forms in dreams, myths, and visions, so in this work the psychologist Carl Jung analyses one specific of these archetypal forces, examining scriptural writings to give the reader a better understanding of how it changed and morally evolved over time.

[Hala · Rating 5 out of 5]

كنت في قراءة مدهشة لهذا الكتاب

يتحدث كارل يونغ من وجهة نظر نفسية عن تاريخ السجال الديني بين " يهوه " وشعبه . بدايةً مع شخصية أيوب الذي تآمر الشيطان مع يهوه لإمتحانه بصنوف العذاب الذي قبله بالصبر والجَلد الخارق الذي - دون في العديد من النصوص الادبية بالاضافة إلى سفر أيوب -
وكان من شأن يهوه نفسه أن يُشكِك بأن أيوب ذو صفات إلهيه وأعتبره منافساً له .

وكيف أن هذه الفكرة أعادت رسم العلاقة بين البشر ويهوه بشكل آخر في النصوص الأدبية / الدينية اللاحقة والتغيرات التي طرأت على صورة يهوه نفسه نتيجة لتطور الاحداث التاريخية ..

من أمتع الكتب اللي قرأتها في مجال التحليل النفسي الديني ..

[Richard Wu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Any fictional universe of sufficient salience will create among those who consume it a devoted cadre of individuals known as “fans,” from fanatic, who hunger for verisimilitude between the stated details of that universe and their memories of them. If one should in the course of conversation with an X-Men fan casually toss around a few thoughts about something something “Wolverine’s titanium claws,” then like clockwork will he correct you with something like, “You mean adamantium,” and of course refuse to move on with the discussion unless you concede the fact. Engineers, by the way, are fans of our physical universe.

Now among the category of fans there exists a certain selection deserving of the full epithet, fanatic. These fanatics have so fully internalized the nooks and crannies of their favorite worlds that they feel ready to contribute fan theories, and these theories are usually so fleshed-out that only those with a prior and in-depth understanding of said worlds can appreciate the full extent of their complexity. Here is an example of a fanatic who claims that the black rectangle in Kubrick’s 2001 is supposed to represent nothing other than the movie screen itself, which I admit, if true, may be the single greatest prank any director has ever pulled on the audience in the history of cinema, and trust me, I’ve seen a lot of movies. Only problem is, we can’t resurrect Kubrick and ask him if it’s true, and even if we could, he’d probably deflect the question or laugh and say why that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. So we’d actually need to build a machine that could travel back in time and read the intent in Kubrick’s mind while he was writing the script or while he was directing the film, because only then might we learn the truth behind this prank, a secret so compelling that any genius who came up with it would naturally want to take it to the grave.

The surer position, however, is to say that every narrative operates according to a logic, a system of rules and constraints that limits and defines its realm of possibility. Every word, paragraph, and chapter opens a space for events to unfold by creating a precedent for future developments. Note however that the end of a story is not the end of its lifeworld, but simply the point at which its author reached satisfaction with regards to tying threads he considered of particular import. Indeed, no author is, or can ever be, wholly privy to the implications set forth by his imagination. Thus criticism, thus hermeneutics, thus fanfiction. And who should be the singular Carl Jung but the spitting archetype of the Bible fanatic?

From the human point of view Yahweh's behaviour is so revolting that one has to ask oneself whether there is not a deeper motive hidden behind it.

It is clear that Jung reads Job through at least two paradigms, that of Christianity and that of his analytical psychology. But another undercurrent runs through and arguably animates the whole edifice, the spirit of Victorian politesse. Jung speaks as if “the human point of view” is the most self-evident thing in the world, and furthermore with the confidence that he is in full possession of such an artifact. Now don’t get me wrong, I believe it is absolutely the case that if we polled the generality of his contemporaries—or perhaps even ours—regarding the conduct of God towards Job (with the names changed), it would opine in the disapproving negative, sharing for the most part the cultural presuppositions required for the formation of such opinions. But as we are, like Jung, in the business of investigating root causes, we should not pretend as if his flabbergastion at the (perceived) sheer barbarity of the omniscient from which this whole instigation was derived were not itself a vital gear in some ulterior narrato-logic, some metastory whose resolution could only be achieved when its Jung character managed to reconcile his own internal turmoil with a satisfactory just-so object logic, the nigh-mathematical product of which being of course this very volume.

Yahweh is not split but is an antinomy—a totality of inner opposites—and this is the indispensable condition for his tremendous dynamism, his omniscience and omnipotence. Because of this knowledge Job holds on to his intention of “defending his ways to his face,” i.e., of making his point of view clear to him, since notwithstanding his wrath, Yahweh is also man’s advocate against himself when man puts forth his complaint.

Given one is kind enough to entertain them, Jung’s trains of thought are quite the joyride. Bizarre and uncanny are the twists and turns required to conform the aforementioned paradigms with each other, and I am pleased to inform my readers that our beloved psychologist has more than enough erudition and panache to attempt such a task in good faith. Here one would do well to imagine himself in the writer’s shoes to get a richer impression of what was at stake for him, namely the relationship between religion, mythology, empirical science, and personal psychology. Above all this is an urgency to convey these discoveries, as if the fate of the future depended on it:

[Man] can no longer wriggle out of it on the plea of his littleness and nothingness, for the dark God has slipped the atom bomb and chemical weapons into his hands and given him the power to empty out the apocalyptic vials of wrath on his fellow creatures.

Asks Jung: In what world would the life of Jesus be not a contingent event but a logical necessity? Answer to Job is an argument that that world is this world; perhaps we would do well to pay attention. Not because it’s correct per se (unlikely, let’s be honest), but because it demonstrates well the limits of scholarship, and because it’s fun.

Favorite quotes
“God does not want to be just; he merely flaunts might over right. Job could not get that into his head, because he looked upon God as a moral being. He had never doubted God's might, but had hoped for right as well.”

“For, just as completeness is always imperfect, so perfection is always incomplete, and therefore represents a final state which is hopelessly sterile. "Ex perfecto nihil fit," say the old masters, whereas the imperfectum carries within it the seeds of its own improvement. Perfectionism always ends in a blind alley, while completeness by itself lacks selective values.”

“As always when an external event touches on some unconscious knowledge, this knowledge can reach consciousness. The event is recognized as a déjà vu, and one remembers a pre-existent knowledge about it. Something of the kind must have happened to Yahweh.”

“If one knows that one has been singled out by divine choice and intention from the beginning of the world, then one feels lifted beyond the transitoriness and meaninglessness of ordinary human existence and transported to a new state of dignity and importance, like one who has a part in the divine world drama.”

“To this rule there is only one significant exception—the despairing cry from the Cross: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ Here his human nature attains divinity; at that moment God experiences what it means to be a mortal man and drinks to the dregs what he made his faithful servant Job suffer. Here is given the answer to Job, and, clearly, this supreme moment is as divine as it is human, as ‘eschatological’ as it is ‘psychological.’”

“A rationalistic attempt of that sort would soak all the mystery out of his personality, and what remained would no longer be the birth and tragic fate of a God in time, but, historically speaking, a badly authenticated religious teacher, a Jewish reformer who was hellenistically interpreted and misunderstood—a kind of Pythagoras, maybe, or, if you like, a Buddha or a Mohammed, but certainly not a son of God or a God incarnate.”

“Christ would never have made the impression he did on his followers if he had not expressed something that was alive and at work in their unconscious.”

“If, in physics, one seeks to explain the nature of light, nobody expects that as a result there will be no light. But in the case of psychology everybody believes that what it explains is explained away.”

[Κωνσταντίνος Τσεντεμεΐδης · Rating 5 out of 5]

Πρόκειται για την γενεαλογία της εβραϊκής μυθολογίας, υπό τα πρίσμα της ψυχολογίας φυσικά, γιατί μόνο έτσι θα μπορούσε να ερμηνευθεί ένα έργο όπως οι διαθήκες. Το βιβλίο ξεκινάει με τον Ιώβ, ο οποίος υποφέρει τα πάνδεινα, εξευτελίζεται, ταπεινώνεται πονάει και τιμωρείται από έναν θεό που ελαφρά τη καρδία καταπατά τις παρακαταθήκες και τους διακανονισμούς του με τον Δαυίδ και κατ επέκταση το αγαπητό του έθνος, γιατί βρίσκεται σε μια αρχέγονη εκστατική κατάσταση πρώιμης συνειδητότητας- σχεδόν ασυνείδητης. Έτσι ξεκινάει το στόρυ. Ο Ιεχωβάς στο βιβλίο της δημιουργίας, είναι ο ίδιος θεός που όντας ένα commistionem oppositorum (συνδυασμός αντιθέτων), είναι τόσο απορροφημένος από την μεγαλειότητα της γέννεσης του κόσμου που έπλασε, όπου διακατέχεται από μια ακατανίκητη οίηση, κρατώντας μια στάση τουλάχιστον ναρκισσιστική (αυτοερωτική ίσως θα έλεγε ο φρόυντ), που όπως καταλαβαίνετε, δεν έχει χρόνο για διαθήκες και ηθικές αναστολές. Η φιλαυτία του ξεπερνάει τα όρια της προπέτειας απέναντι στο δημιούργημα του, η οποία με την σειρά της φτάνει στον αμοραλισμό, και τον φόνο. Κάτι ακριβώς σαν τον ωχρό εγκληματία του Νίτσε. Ο Ιεχωβάς όχι μόνο δεν αναγνωρίζει ότι βρίσκεται υπό την σαγήνη του μεγάλου του γιού του σατανά, αλλά ταυτόχρονα προβάλλει την εικόνα του πάνω στον κακόμοιρο τον Ιώβ, όπως ακριβώς ο Φάουστ στον Μεφιστοφελή. Η φυσιολογία του θεού είναι πολύ απλή. Όσο είναι κακός, άλλο τόσο είναι και καλός. Πέρα απ την μορφή του σατανά που ενυπάρχει και καταδυναστεύει τα χθόνια βάθη του πλάστη, υπάρχει και η μορφή της σοφίας, της θηλυκής anima του θεού, που του δίνει την διαλλακτικότητα και την παντογνωσία ενός φιλέσπαχνου δημιουργού. Παρ όλα αυτά αρνείται να αγκαλιάσει την συγκαταβατική του φύση, γιατί όπως και να το κάνουμε η ύπαρξη μιας οποιαδήποτε ηθικής, δρα σαν τροχοπέδη στις αχαλίνωτες ορμές που ζητούν ικανοποίηση. Τον ρόλο της γέννησης της συνείδησης παίρνει ο Ιώβ, ο οποίος χθαμαλός και κατατρεγμένος κάνει έκκληση στα στοιχεία που ο Ιεχωβάς έχει αποκόψει από πάνω του, δηλαδή την δικαιοσύνη και την καλοσύνη του. Η σχολαστικότητα του αποδεικνύεται τελικά ικανή να πυροδοτήσει μια φλόγα αυτοκατανόησης στον Θεό, και τα σκοτεινά τεκταινόμενα στην φύση του θεού αρχίζουν να αναστέλλονται σταδιακά. Ο Ιώβ τελικά φτάνει σε ένα ηθικό επίπεδο ανώτερο του Ιεχωβά, και αυτό έχει ως αποτέλεσμα την ανανέωση του συμβολαίου μεταξύ θεού και Ιουδαίων. Και λογικά το καταλάβατε, τελειώνει η παλαιά, και αρχίζει η καινή διαθήκη όπως όλοι γνωρίζουμε και αγαπήσαμε. Ο Θεός για να εξιλεωθεί θυσιάζεται για τον άνθρωπο, ανασύροντας απ το σκότος ,ξανά στο φως την ψυχή του. Καθώς ο Χριστός ψυχορραγεί και πεθαίνει στον σταυρό του, τότε δίδεται η απάντηση στον Ιώβ. Και τότε ξεκινάει η αρχετυπική πορεία της εξατομίκευσης του ανθρώπου προς την ολοκλήρωση. In a nutshell, η μετάβαση από την παλαιά στην καινή σηματοδοτεί την μετουσίωση του ανθρώπου από ένα στάδιο συνειδητότητας σε ένα άλλο ανώτερο. Αυτό που έχει ιδιαίτερο ενδιαφέρον ωστόσο είναι η περίοδος μετά την βασιλεία του Χριστού, δηλαδή κατά τα τελειώματα της καινής, την οποία διαδέχονται οι αποστολικές γραφές. Και συγκεκριμένα η αποκάλυψη του Ιωάννη. Στην εποχή του ιχθύος, όπου ο σατανάς είναι κλεισμένος στο κελί του και καίγεται σε έναν πύρινο λάκκο, και φαινομενικά όλα πηγαίνουν τζετ, μια ένταση χτίζεται που απελευθερώνεται με παγανιστική δυναμικότητα στο βιβλίο της αποκάλυψης. Στα μάτια του Ιωάννη αποκαλύπτεται ξανά ένας κτηνώδης θεός, ο οποίος έχει παλινδρομήσει στην πρώιμη φύση του, και τώρα δεν υπάρχει τίποτα να αποδοθεί στον κατεργάρη Εωσφόρο, γιατί ο κακομοίρης σαπίζει στο κελί του. Είναι αιμοδιψής, στυγνός, αδίστακτος, μα το πιο ανησυχητικό κομμάτι είναι πως αυτή είναι αμιγώς η μορφή του θεού. Οι σκηνές που παρουσιάζει ερμηνεύονται με παγανιστική ακρίβεια, καθώς όπως μας λέει και ο Γιουνγκ, το ασυνείδητο ψάχνει πάντα την μπαλάτζα. Τουτέστιν, όσο περισσότερο καμώνεσαι τον ενάρετο με την χριστιανική ασκητική, τόσο περισσότερο θα σιγοκοχλάζει ένας Διόνυσος η ένα ράιχ μέσα στην ψυχή σου, που ιστορικά θαρρώ πως απεικονίζει την εποχή της μετάβασης απ το μπαρούτι προς την ατομική βόμβα. Η επέλαση του αντίχριστου φτάνει και είναι τρομακτικά εύστοχη ιστορικά. Πραγματικά έπαθα πλάκα με το πόσο προφητικά απεικονίζει ο χριστιανισμός- που τώρα τον περιχαρακώνουμε σκωπτικά σε κάποια γωνίτσα της ψυχικής μας εξέλιξης σαν νικητές πάνω απ τον νικημένο-τα γεγονότα που συγκλόνισαν τον πλανήτη. Τα σημάδια ήταν πάντα εκεί, απλά οι μύστες που ήξεραν τις ερμηνείες τους αφανίστηκαν από μια σωρεία δογμάτων, ξεκινώντας απ τον προτεσταντισμό, και φτάνοντας μέχρι τον απαρέγκλιτο μαθηματικό ορθολογισμό. Και ο Γιουνγκ είναι ένας τέτοιος μύστης. Φαντάζομαι πως αυτό που με σοκάρει περισσότερο είναι η ικανότητα της ανθρώπινης ψυχής για το κακό, αλλά και για το καλό. Τα άκρα είναι πάντα τρομακτικά, και δυστυχώς τα κουβαλάει η ίδια μήτρα. Μακάρι να υπήρχε τέτοιου είδους παιδεία, μακάρι να υπήρχαν τέτοιου είδους ψυχικές υποδομές για να σφυριλατήσουν τον άνθρωπο ώστε να τον κρατήσουν στο μονοπάτι της ψυχής. Δεν εύχομαι την άρση του κακού, μόνο την κατανόηση του. Δυστυχώς, όντως, εάν δεν κάνεις το ασυνείδητο συνειδητό, θα διαφεντεύει τη ζωή σου, κάτι που εσύ θα αποκαλείς μοίρα... 5 αστερια, γιατί μπορείς να βάλεις μονο 5 αστέρια....

[Billy · Rating 5 out of 5]

First off, I'm a Freudian. So whenever I pick up anything written by Jung it is always with a sense of reluctance. His work is both the furthest departure from his great mentor (Freud himself), and at the same time completely saturated with Freudian Thought.

The last and by far most controversial work by the master's star pupil, this book is at times a breathless read and at others a walk through a swamp. For all of his brilliant insight Dr. Jung was, in my opinion, limited at least to a small degree by his strict Christian rearing and frequent forays into the mysterious subject of Alchemy.

Having said all this, I loved it. Jung is never an easy read, and this book is by no means an exception. His vocabulary is abstruse and he darts wrecklessly from one idea to the next. But this serves less as a distraction and more a testament to his genius.

How could anyone possibly justify the morally repugnant suffering bestowed upon a completely loyal servant? Jung's got a theory, and like Jung himself, it's brilliant.

[Rob the Obscure · Rating 5 out of 5]

(chuckle....smile....expel air) wow.....

[Scriptor Ignotus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Jung's Answer to Job enlivened an otherwise boring day for me. One would assume from the title that the text would be primarily about the Book of Job, but a great deal of Jung's analysis extends through the entire Old and New Testaments, becoming something of a whirlwind biblical exegesis. Jung conceives of God as a personality; one that was originally capricious and infantile on account of its unreflective omnipotence and omniscience and had to be gradually enlightened by its interaction with his creation.

Jung speaks of the volatile Yahweh of the Pentateuch as a personality who is unwilling to "consult his omniscience" due to his limitless nature. Mankind, in contrast, developed a self-awareness and self-reflection due to its finite nature that made it possible for the human individual to achieve an enlightenment which God did not have. Job was the first to prove himself morally superior to Yahweh. In the Book of Job, Yahweh is easily manipulated by Satan, his shadow side, into testing Job's faith with an outpouring of persecution and torment. In the midst of his own cruelty and Job's endurance, Yahweh seems unable to realize that he is projecting Satan's deceptions, occurring within the personality of God, onto Job, viciously suspecting Job as a secret dissenter from his will while all the while it is the darkness within God which causes him to act this way. God is a personality of pure masculine perfectionism, who is missing a necessary complementary relationship with the co-existing eternal feminine spirit within the godhead: Sophia. Without the feminine spirit of completeness, the masculine spirit of perfectionism becomes narrow and myopic. Without a conception of Sophia, God wed himself to the Israelites, and it was they who played the role of feminine foil to God's harshness.

In expressing the possibility of finding a helper within God while God was actively persecuting him, i.e. that the God of punishment was merely one of multiple personalities within the godhead, and that God himself lacked the self-awareness to come to terms with these unconscious impulses, Job unconsciously viewed the rear side of God, as Jung puts it. He saw God from a perspective from which God could not see himself. It was when God finally discovered this, according to Jung, that he began to move toward humanity in an effort that would culminate in the incarnation. Realizing that he lacked the self-awareness possessed by men, God had to become a man in order to "catch up" as it were. He argues that several mystical Hebrew texts, such as the books of Daniel and Enoch, point to the prospect of a "son of man" begotten by God the father, and thus the concept of the incarnation was not wholly foreign to the religious tradition of Jesus's time. When Christ cries out on the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?", this is the moment at which God finally sees things from Job's perspective. This sacrifice of God makes it possible, in a sense, for the people of God to become "like God", by meeting him in the middle, so to speak. The Satanic shadow is banished from Heaven, giving way to a self-aware God of love and forgiveness; but he continues to lurk "in the air", with the possibility of a revival.

Jung expresses fascination at the Book of Revelation, and entertains the prospect that the John of Patmos who wrote Revelation was the same person as the John who wrote the epistles ("God is love"). He conjectures that the John of the epistles was compelled by his station to live an extremely selfless and loving life, as he felt to be his calling as a Christian, but that a lack of engagement with his own darker aspects coupled with a general lack of self-awareness relegated the negative impulses within him to the realm of the unconscious, where they burst forth into consciousness as a dark vision of the apocalypse. The prospect of an antichrist and the rule of "The Beast" suggest that the inner darkness of God has not been banished forever, and still lurks in the unconscious of God and his followers, ready to reemerge and exert their corrupting influence. Jung suggests that God should actually have four facets to him, rather than merely three. Apparently, the four archangels and the four evangelists represent four quadrants of God's personality, which Jung inevitably ties to his fascination with mandala symbolism. One of these archangels was said to be tasked with warding off Satan. So if there is to be a fourth part of the triune God, it should reflect God's ever-present darkness.

[Parastoo · Rating 4 out of 5]

خیال میکردم این کتاب در مورد ایوب است، برای همين انتخابش کردم، اما همان طور که میشد از روی اسمش حدس زد، در مورد ماجراهای پس از ایوب است، یعنی تکوین یهوه در درام الهی. خلاصه این که ایوب (بشر) در مقابل یهوه (خدای ايوب که مرا یاد طبیعت می اندازد) بسیار ناتوان و خوار و ضعیف است و یهوه پس از شرط بندی با شیطان پدر بیچاره را در میاورد، یعنی رفتار یهوه با ایوب نه تنها رحيمانه نیست، بلکه از عدالت به دور است، به نوعی شیطانی است، ولی ایوب پایبند اخلاق میماند. پس از این آزمایشها یهوه دوست دارد به شکل ایوب (بشر) در آید، به بیانی ناخودآگاه تمایل به ظهور در خودآگاه دارد. اینجا سوفیا (حکمت) پا در ميانى میکند و خدا از رحم انسان زاده میشود: مسیح. در عین حال ناخودآگاه تمایل به تبدیل کامل به خودآگاه ندارد، پس خدا پدر پسر خود را هم در می آورد. به علاوه، اگر این انقلاب فرهنگی (ظهور خدای مسیحی) نبود، یهوه با آن همه قساوت دیگر مشتری چندانی برای روان انسان نداشت و بیم آن میرفت که بشر یکسره ارتباط خود را با ناخودآگاهی قطع کند و به صورت جنون آمیزی تسلیم منطق و خودآگاهی شود. آخر هم تعبیر رویاهای یوحنا (مکاشفه یوحنا).

برای من جذابیت یونگ در نوع نگاه کلی است که یک بار فهمیده شود. تزریق جزئیاتش در هر موردی از جمله در تفسیر درام الهی باب طبعم نیست. جاهایی برایم جذاب بود و جاهایی اعصابم را خرد میکرد.

ترجمه فارسی ویرایش نشده بود.

[Gerald Jerome · Rating 2 out of 5]

Even now after having just finished the book I find myself equally confused and apathetic toward the entire process of reading it. I thought that Rogers was tangential in his writing but this is even worse. I was afraid that the introduction notes were a sign of what was to come, and my fears were well established halfway through the book.

From the best of what I understand, Jung psychoanalyzed God and Christianity, but with his own brand of psychoanalysis or analysis or whatever it was. For Jung's benefit, I'm sure that my literary palette was not necessarily primed to tackle all the Jungian or religious references (even though before this I figured myself to be rather acquainted with the matter of Christianity). That being said, the title and introduction themselves are misleading, forgetting about the book of Job halfway through and instead talking about God knows what (literally) for the rest of the book. I kept waiting for Jung to offer me a rope to pull me out of the mire that was his discursive monologue, yet on and on he continued muttering to himself. At the risk of being crass and dismissive, it came off as a drawn out session of intellectual masturbation. I'm still not sure whether Jung was addressing Christianity from a Christian's point of view or from a psychoanalyst's point of view, objectifying it aside from its subjectivity. Either way, the discussion is doomed.

The entire point of the Christian doctrine is that the will and mind of God stands aside from human comprehension. So to try and understand God from a Christian standpoint is limiting. To try and understand it from a place of psychoanalysis removes it from the subjective interpretation that is necessary for its logical progression and again nullifies it. This is not to say that Christian theology cannot be studied objectively, but the way Jung tackled it was just clumsy. It's hard for me to explain this, still not understanding what Jung was attempting to explore here.

I enjoy this book for the fresh perspective it gave me and it did raise some questions about the Christian God in regard to what man is needed for in all of this and the contradictory nature of behaviors. That being said, I'm glad it was a 100-page read and that it's over now. Maybe I'm coming from a bad place, not having been introduced to Jung's theories until now. I still wonder if other people rating this material actually understood it or if I'm really missing something here.

[Anya]

"It is just by following Christian morality that one gets into the worst collisions of duty. Only those who habitually make five an even number can escape them. The fact that Christian ethics leads to collisions of duty speaks in its favour. By engendering insoluble conflicts and consequently an afflictio animae, it brings man nearer to a knowledge of God. All opposites are of God, therefore man must bend to this burden; and in so doing he finds that God in his “oppositeness” has taken possession of him, incarnated himself in him. He becomes a vessel filled with divine conflict. We rightly associate the idea of suffering with a state in which the opposites violently collide with one another, and we hesitate to describe such a painful experience as being “redeemed.” Yet it cannot be denied that the great symbol of the Christian faith, the Cross, upon which hangs the suffering figure of the Redeemer, has been emphatically held up before the eyes of Christians for nearly two thousand years. This picture is completed by the two thieves, one of whom goes down to hell, the other into paradise. One could hardly imagine a better representation of the “oppositeness” of the central Christian symbol. Why this inevitable product of Christian psychology should signify redemption is difficult to see, except that the conscious recognition of the opposites, painful though it may be at the moment, does bring with it a definite feeling of deliverance. It is on the one hand a deliverance from the distressing state of dull and helpless unconsciousness, and on the other hand a growing awareness of God’s oppositeness, in which man can participate if he does not shrink from being wounded by the dividing sword which is Christ. Only through the most extreme and most menacing conflict does the Christian experience deliverance into divinity, always provided that he does not break, but accepts the burden of being marked out by God."

[David Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is not an easy beach read, but capital L Literature. It's dry, full of big words, greek, and latin phrases, and requires at least a basic knowledge of not just the mainstream bible but apocrypha such as Enoch. For a book written by a famed psychologist the book is mostly theology, which I found surprising. For as difficult as it is to read, it's also mercifully short at 108 pages.

On to the content. Jung believes Christ is the titular Answer to Job, in that god wanted to become man, and still wants to, in order to comprehend the suffering he inflicted not on merely Job but all of humanity. He typifies God as wrathful, unreliable, injust, and cruel. God is a creature that cannot stand seeing his creation fall for Satan's wiles, when he himself was even fooled into torturing poor Job. Additionally, he goes on to say that in God's lack of self-reflection and wildly fluctuating temper, he is actually unconscious, and man's consciousness is higher than God's.

While the title refers to Job, he also discusses the female incaration of God in Sophia, and goes on a bit of a tangeant about Revelation.

One particular quote I found interesting was that "myth is not fiction: it consists of facts that are continually repeated and can be observed over and over again" and another is "the fact that the life of christ is largely myth does nothing to disprove its factual truth-- quite the contrary."

Finally, one bit that I found curious was "[I] emphatically state that visions and their accompanying phenomena cannot be uncritically evaluated as morbid." I don't know if this has changed since 1973, but I fail to see how literal visions could be anything but morbid, but hey, I'm not the famed psychologist here.

[Seth Austin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Access: Chatswood Public Library

I remain somewhat unconvinced that Jung's interwoven theses gel together eloquently within the same exploratory study. Grandiose musings on God's latent desires to become Man while also toying with ideas about the psychology of the unconscious. Perhaps my theological (and indeed psychological) education has proven insufficient to grasp the interplay, or I really am on firm ground when I say he should pick a lane. His chapter-by-chapter progression from historical regurgitation marching further into apocalyptical projection felt clunky at moments, yet that may also be the result of me biting into it one chapter at a time. Irrespective of the mechanics of his writing, the suggestions (and indeed proposals) presented here are profound, deeply unsettling to my Catholic education, and fascinating to consider. I likely haven't understood everything I've read, but I can't say I'm worse off for having tried.

[Nick Mehn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whence evil, if we know God to be all-powerful and all-knowing?

Jung explores what God is to man within the context of man’s ever-growing consciousness and finds within the coniunctio oppositorum the individuation of God’s own consciousness — reflected in the archetypes of wholeness and totality that emerge.

This book broke my brain. Quite a bit of the second half dealing with Sophia and the Assumption of Mary was beyond what I was able to comprehend. Will definitely read again when I’m a big boy who can read big words.

“That is to say, 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.”

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

As is usual with Jung’s works, you begin in one place and end up in another place, a bit confused as to how you got there. Jung starts off with a psychical explanation of the Book of Job - Job, as a man, is morally better than God who despite being omniscient does not want to admit to Himself that He cannot or will not see His own darkness. Taking winding roads that feel a bit like free-association, Jung ends up exploring Revelation which leads him to some rather remarkable speculations.

I think I would have been completely lost if I hadn’t already read Jung’s Aion. Someone else recommended Kierkegaard as suggested preliminary reading - it can’t hurt. Aleister Crowley also strikes me as extremely relevant.

[Catherine⁷]

My father once said to me, "The existence of suffering does not deny the existence of God just as much as the existence of God does not deny the existence of suffering." The book of Job teaches this principle beautifully, and it has taken a place in my heart for years. It is my personal favorite of all the books in the Old Testament. The writing is beautiful, and the lessons are so impactful and personally compelling.

Suffering is an inevitable and random process, most of which I like to believe are untouched by God. I think it is foolish to believe God that plays with suffering like various pieces on a board game for His personal pleasure. I do not believe in a God who micromanages His people. Rather, I believe in a loving God who respects the agency and will of His people and gives us space to learn and grow (no matter how painful and excruciating that process may be). I believe most suffering is self-inflicted (as a result of our ignorance or unwillingness to be teachable), comes because of the poor decisions of others, and/or is the inevitable result of living in the currently fallen condition of this world. I have never been closer to God than when I have chosen to pass through sorrow bravely rather than remain in ignorance.

Answer to Job is such a fascinating commentary and conversation Carl Jung has with himself. This book is rightfully Jung's most controversial work because it is a vulnerable look at Jung's thinking process and gathering of ideas. I enjoyed the process of both agreeing and disagreeing with many of his major points. What makes this book amusing is that Jung gives such a clear disclaimer at the beginning so as to be given freedom to explore his varying thoughts and ideas:

"The book does not pretend to be anything but the voice or question of a single individual who hopes or expects to meet with thoughtfulness in the public."

And

"I cannot, therefore, write in a coolly objective manner, but must allow my emotional subjectivity to speak if I want to describe what I feel when I read certain books of the Bible, or when I remember the impressions I have received from the doctrines of our faith."

This desire for open dialogue and discussion, while acknowledging his subjective bias, is why I carry respect for what Jung did for the field of psychology and religious commentary. I, too, hope to acknowledge my subjective bias, share my personal feelings in reviews like this one, and encourage thoughtfulness in the public. Here are some thoughts from this book I found most valuable (featuring some of my own commentary):

- "Existence is only real when it is conscious to somebody" (pg 11).

- "...'each thing after its kind' is the most precious, the most desirable, the tenderest thing in the world, being a reflection of the infinite love and goodness of the Creator" (pg 11).

- "Job is no more than the outward occasion for an inward process of dialectic in God" (pg 16).
Commentary: Suffering is the means by which we can become transformed in the divine, as is reflected in the book of Job. The book of Job is a reflection of God as someone who does not micromanage His people, while still maintaining a divine hand. Suffering is both meaningful and consistently random and tragic.

- "At any rate the family life of our first parents was not all beer and skittles..." (pg 31).
(This line made me chuckle).

- "Perfectionism always ends in a blind alley, while completeness by itself lacks selective values" (pg 33).

- "What is the use of a religion without a mythos, since religion means, if anything at all, precisely that function which links us back to the eternal myth?
"...myth is not fiction: it consists of facts that are continually repeated and can be observed over and over again...
"The fact that the life of Christ is largely myth does absolutely nothing to disprove its factual truth--quite the contrary. I would even go so far as to say that the mythical character of a life is just what expresses its universal human validity" (pg 47).

- "One ought not to make oneself out to be more stupid and more unconscious than one really is, for in all other aspects we are called upon to be alert, critical, and self-aware, so as not to fall into temptation" (pg 54).
Commentary: This reminds me of how important it is to avoid "false humility." It does no one any service to downplay your achievements or intelligence when they are clearly there. False humility is self-deprecating and foolish. Humility and confidence are possible insofar as one is willing to recognize their skills while acknowledging possible improvements.

- "We rightly associate the idea of suffering with a state in which the opposites violently collide with one another, and we hesitate to describe such a painful experience as being 'redeemed'" (pg 54-55).
Commentary: Suffering can lead to conversion. Conversion from suffering is a distinct choice. It's like the saying, "You either get bitter or you get better." Your life and suffering is a symbolic representation of Christ's sacrifice. When you "take up your cross" with Christ, you accept the conditions of your life, seek ways to change, and mourn as a means of coming closer to God. Suffering can lead to conversion.

- "Only through the most extreme and most menacing conflict does the Christian experience deliverance into divinity, always provided that he does not break, but accepts the burden of being marked out by God...In principle it does not seem to fit God's purpose to exempt a man from conflict and hence from evil" (pg 55).

- "Christ would never have made the impression that he did on his followers if he had not expressed something that was alive and at work in their unconscious. Christianity itself would never have spread through the pagan world with such astonishing rapidity had its ideas not found an analogous psychic readiness to receive them" (pg 79).

- "If one has no religious beliefs, then one does not like to admit the feeling of deficit, but prates loudly about one's liberal-mindedness and pats oneself on the back for the noble frankness of one's agnosticism" (pg 90).

- "...psychology represents the sum of all the observations and insights it has gained from the empirical study of severe states of conflict" (pg 91).

- "Faith is certainly right when it impresses on man's mind and heart how infinitely far away and inaccessible God is; but it also teaches his nearness, his immediate presence, and it is just this nearness which has to be empirically real if it is not to lose all significance" (pg 107).

- "...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" (pg 108).

I clearly have a bias within all of the reviews I write. But I try to excavate a greater whole of truth and lessons that are meaningful to me because of what I have been through. Like Jung, I cannot write in a coolly objective manner, but must allow my emotional subjectivity to speak if I want to describe what I feel when I read certain books.

[Ali Jones Alkazemi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I boken Answer to Job analyserer Jung menneskets psykologiske forhold til arketyper og gud som underbevisst fenomen. Man ser til og med at Jung flere ganger har vansker med å skille mellom det underbevisste og gud ettersom begge to konstitueres av en fundamental antinomi som forutsetter muligheten til å handle seg til fullkommenhet overhodet. Gud ville finne et troløst individ, dermed valgte han å bringe terror over den mest troende og gudfryktige av alle, kun siden gud stadig ville gjøre rede for menneskets iboende trang til dødelighet og hovmod - Job rettferdiggjorde guds veddemål med satan ved å forstå seg på nødvendighetens form i verden. Det gud utøver mot mennesket er ikke nødvendigvis godt for subjektet ved spontan analyse, men en innser snart at det ikke er noe gud gjør som ikke er godt og at det ikke kan være noe annet utgangspunkt enn dette.
Jeg anbefaler denne til alle som ser verdien i røttene som den vestlige sivilisasjonen er bygget opp av, og til dem som er interessert i underbevissthetens funksjon i psykologien - 4/5.

[Jake · Rating 4 out of 5]

Once upon a time the all-knowing God made a bet with Satan about the faithful Job and whether he could stand all manner of persecution. A couple of thousand years later, Jung wrote about it and it was much more enlightening than the thoughts of the Pharisees and Saducees. Was this the turning point in the old school yin/yang love-you/kill-you God of great fear and trembling into the modern God of love? Or does the Book of Revelations prove that God is still very angry at you? Read this to find out.

[Allie Richardson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This completely reframed for me a new way to look at the Bible and the intricate meanings, symbolisms and connecting of dots I’ve never seen before in scripture. Each page was so weighty, I found myself not wanting to rush ahead or miss anything. Left each page with more mind expanding perspectives. Felt pretty fortuitous how this little book found me on the shelves at Half Price. I needed it so and look forward to further reading.

[John]

Jung fun. Jung. Fun!!

[Gerard Kornacki · Rating 3 out of 5]

It would be dishonest of me to claim that I fully understood this book. To add to Gadamer’s “we cannot understand without wanting to understand”, we also cannot understand without having the requisite background conducive to understanding. And indeed, I found myself lacking said background.

The nature and existence of “psychic facts” notwithstanding, the book is dense with nomenclature—“pneuma”, “pleroma”, “anumen”, “individuation”, “anima/animus”, etc. If one is not already situated within the Jungian tradition of psychoanalysis (and psychoanalysis by and large for that matter), this will be a difficult book. Background reading is almost necessary. Failing to do so, however, can only be blamed on the reader. After all, “Answer to Job” is located within the latter chronological sphere of the Jungian library. It is to be expected, then, that Jung would assume familiarity with his writings at this stage.

Nevertheless, Jung’s book is still a strong catalyst for thought. His writing is lucid and sophisticated. It is clear that it is a work of genius, brimming with substantial contributions to theology, philosophy, and psychology. And indeed, the challenge posed by reading this book has been less of a Sisyphean struggle, but a motivation for further inquiry.

At the forefront of my mind has been the idea that religion, spirituality, and the idea of ‘God’ belong to the realm of the unconscious. This is the question I will briefly reflect on here. At the outset, we should be clear to distinguish the individual unconscious and the collective unconscious. Both are tackled by Jung, but I shall focus on the latter, which I understand as that aspect of the unconscious which is innate and inherited by all humans (in contrast to the eccentricities of an individual’s unconscious).

In the preface, Jung aptly notes that debates between theists and atheists have become stale. Though the book was published in 1952, the sentiment, I believe, is just as real today. One seldom finds theists convinced by atheist arguments, and atheists (despite their opposition) are often just as unmoving in their dogmas. Indeed, debates often devolve into lexical disagreements—what one understands by “exist”, “believe”, etc. Atheists often objurgate theists for being ungrounded mystics, while theists judge atheists to be close-minded. Jung diagnoses their disagreement as a failure to distinguish “physical” from “psychic” facts. Perhaps this is true, though I am still unclear on the nature of psychic facts. In my eyes, the deep disagreement between the two parties stems from the priority one gives to science.

The typical atheist is a scientist, in the sense that they view science as privileged (and perhaps uniquely privileged) for answering ontological (and epistemological) questions. In other words, it is science (and only science) that tells us what exists. Of course, this substantial thesis cannot itself be substantiated by science, but that is an issue to bracket for now. The thrust of the position is that the ‘scientific method’ tells us, broadly, what exists. Thus, given that scientifically we cannot substantiate God’s existence, we should not believe in Him. Or, at the very least, we should withhold assent as to whether or not He exists.

By contrast, the apologist, with some degree of sophistication, is likely to answer that it is ill-conceived to suggest that God’s existence can be substantiated by science. It is said that “God is not a scientific hypothesis”. Why believe in God then? Paths diverge. Kierkegaard would take belief in God to be a “leap of faith”—something that is not meant to be rational or even subject to evidence. More common is the belief that God’s existence stems from a “deep feeling”. A feeling that is individually experienced, unique to the individual, though still ‘overwhelmingly true’. William James’ in “The Varieties of Religious Experience” details such a position. Nonetheless, whatever the theists’ persuasion may be, it is easy to see how the two parties can talk past each other. The atheist demands evidence conducive to scientific scrutiny, whereas the theist denies that such evidence is possible.

Jung’s way of breathing new life into the debate is to reconceive how we view religious statements as a whole. Here is a brief rundown. The broad idea is that the subject matter of religion is not physical facts about the mind-independent world. Rather, religious statements are concerned with psychological phenomena—specifically, the realm of the unconscious. These so-called “psychic facts” detail the inner workings of our mental architecture. When discussing ‘God’, for instance, our concern is not with an agential ‘omni-man’ seated in the heavens above. Instead, reference and talk of ‘God’ concerns the mechanisms that underpin our minds—something observable, but otherwise difficult to investigate empirically. Jung seems to conceive of these “psychic facts” as being products of evolution. Though, existing in the realm of the unconscious, he also takes them to be “transcendental” to investigation by conscious minds.

By and large, these religious statements take the form of symbols and myths that detail “archetypes”—recurring patterns of personality engrained within our collective psyche. For instance, consider the biblical story of Cain and Abel: The first murder and fratricide in the “divine drama”, provoked by the jealousy of Cain toward his brother, Abel. Jung’s idea seems to be that the personalities of Cain and Abel are manifest (to varying degrees) within our collective psyche. Such that, some individuals are manifestly ‘Cain-types’ by exhibiting fraternal jealousy to a degree of moral apprehension. Of course, the story has further complexities that supply further insight into the nature of these archetypes. Perhaps the consequences of Abel’s murder supply some insight into the nature of familial or brotherly relations. Indeed, it appears to be the job of the theologian and psychoanalyst to investigate these stories to understand the relevance and importance of these psychic facts, much like the scientist's job is to understand physical facts.

But why symbols and myths? The inspiration appears broadly Wittgensteinian: Language is a fundamentally limited medium. Specifically, language is limited in its expressibility of matters concerning the “transcendental”. That is, matters beyond empirical investigation. The best we can do when talking about a domain to which our conscious minds have limited access (the unconscious) are symbols and myths that don’t appear to directly speak about the world. Moreover, myths and symbols are multiply realisable through token instances—the character of Cain can be multiply instantiated in many individuals.

How, then, does all this bear on the debate between theists and atheists? Take the locus of the debate—the question “Does God exist?” We have already detailed how the two opposing parties quickly reach a stalemate when faced with this question. The Jungian, by contrast, won’t be concerned with an investigation into the postulated physical fact regarding the existence of some entity—leave that to the domain of science. What matters to the Jungian is whether the character of God supplies some insight into the psychic facts underpinning the human unconscious. In some sense, then, the Jungian yields both to the atheist and theist: Science helps settle matters of ontology when concerned with the physical, but there is a realm outside of science, the unconscious, that cannot be investigated using empirical means. Whether this precipitates a mysticism is an interesting question…

From this, we can take the Jungian theist as adopting a positive stance in the debate: ‘God’, and the Bible as a whole, supply substantive insight into psychic facts concerning the human unconscious. By contrast, the atheist we may define via negativa: ‘God’, and the Bible, hold no substantive insights into the human psyche. Or, perhaps in the extreme, there are no psychic facts to be discovered simpliciter.

The suggestion is sure to be controversial. For one, many Christians are unlikely to forgo a belief in an agential God. Worse, modern Christians take themselves as minimally committed to the existence of Jesus and his resurrection as a physical fact—something the Jungian isn’t (necessarily) committed to. Atheists, too, are likely to demur that Jung’s suggestion shifts the goalposts: “We don’t care to discuss psychic facts, our contention is against the typical Christian who believes in an agential God as a physical fact”.

Not much can be said against these characters. The debate concerning the physical fact of God’s existence is deeply entrenched in our social lives and is sure to persist. It would be an Archimedean task to dissolve a debate that has endured through times immemorial. And, to be sure, we are likely to unearth kernels of truth in our investigation.

We may, however, also liken our position to that of a decorated teacher presented with new research on education methods. Their response is expected: “My methods have worked for years, why should I change my approach now?”

The impetus of Jung’s suggestion is akin to how the new education research relates to the decorated teacher. Sure, the traditional methods have been fruitful for some time. But now we are presented with new avenues. There are more interesting and fruitful questions to ask. Of course, whether one asks said questions is a matter of how frustrated one is with the contemporary debate. We must ask ourselves: Is there more to be gained by investigating Jung’s questions instead? To my eyes, the Jungian shift is welcome.

3/5

G.K.

[Monika Sitarz · Rating 5 out of 5]

W tej książce Jung w erudycyjny sposób podjął się analizy biblijnego Jahwe, którego obraz w wielu miejscach jest ze sobą sprzeczny. Jung podjął się ogromnego wyzwania, próbując odpowiedzieć na szereg trudnych pytań: dlaczego Bóg stworzył człowieka, dlaczego pozwolił na cierpienie Hioba, jaką rolę w dramacie pomiędzy Bogiem a człowiekiem odegrał Chrystus. Jego argumentacja jest bardzo przekonywującą i podparta szczegółową analizą innych tekstów - zarówno tych biblijnych, jak i apokryficznych czy mitologicznych. Esej jedyny w swoim rodzaju, rzucający całkiem nowe spojrzenie na chrześcijańskiego Boga i sens stworzenia.

[Irka Bree · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ciekawe przemyślenia , ale ciężko się czyta.