God on the couch

"Answer to Job" is a slightly bizarre book, written by controversial Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung. It contains Jung´s analysis (pun intended) of the Biblical "Book of Job", or perhaps his answer to the unfortunate Job. Jung apparently feared that the book would be considered both heretical and blasphemous by many readers. He was probably right on that score. Often, he comes across psychoanalyzing God! To paraphrase C S Lewis, Jung is placing God on the couch. Ironically, however, Jung´s answer to Job is even worse than the standard Christian one...

Jung´s central claim is that both good and evil comes from God. There is a fundamental dualism or antinomy within God´s own nature between light and darkness. Originally, Yahweh was completely amoral, had contradictory feelings (often evil and destructive ones), and absolutely no self-insight. Yahweh is an "unvarnished spectacle of divine savagery and ruthlessness". Job´s cry for a Vindicator expresses a faith in the duality of God, that God has a good side alongside the evil-amoral side with which he crushes Job. However, Yahweh himself is unconscious of the contradictions within himself. He is obsessed with the object (humanity) precisely because he has no insight nor self-reflection as a subject. Yahweh needs humans to become conscious of himself, and in this sense, humans are in a sense "higher" than God. Job was the first human to realize God´s antinomy. By dint of his morality, Job is higher than the stars and sees "the back of Yahweh", the "sherds" (kelipot), i.e. Yahweh´s evil aspects. 

Yahweh has forgotten his original unity with Sophia in the pleroma. He is constantly tricked by Satan. However, God´s failure to corrupt Job, his most faithful follower, has cleansed the divine nature. God realized that Job was higher than him, and that he must therefore become man himself. God´s nature changes when he incarnates as Jesus. Jung interpreted Mary as an incarnation of Sophia, God´s long-lost partner. Satan was banished from Heaven only at the time of the incarnation. This makes God good and just. Jesus suffered on the cross as a reparation for a wrong done by God to man. 

However, there is still a risk that the dark side might come back. This is proven by the Lord´s Prayer in which humans ask God not to lead them into temptation. Another piece of evidence is Paul, who was a split personality, at the same time both an apostle and a sinner. An even better example is the murder and mayhem in the Book of Revelation! Ultimately, however, Jung embraces and affirms the antinomy within God. "Salvation" and "redemption" means to become conscious of God´s "oppositeness" and experience torment and suffering just as God does. For this reason, Jung dislikes the last chapters of Revelation, where God once again becomes wholly good and identifies with his pneumatic (and pleromatic) side. The Biblical apocalypse isn´t a "reconciliation of the opposites", but rather their final severance. Bizarrely, this is unacceptable to Jung, who rather wants there to be no solution at all, the antinomy being eternal. His concept of the Divine is really pantheistic, but a pantheism leaning towards the dark and infernal side of existence. 

"Answer to Job" could be read as a dramatic metaphor for Jung´s version of psychoanalysis. Does it also tell us something about God? That´s less likely. Had I been a complete skeptic, I would have argued that Jacob Böhme´s mysticism (probably one source of inspiration for Jung´s book) is really a warped description of the individual unconscious, and how the Self and goodness arise from a psyche that is originally in chaotic turmoil. Since I´m not, I might as well offer the following speculation: yes, the being Jung calls "Yahweh" or "God" has indeed forgotten his origins in the pleroma, but that´s because he *isn´t* God to begin with but rather the Demiurge or World-Soul which has to gradually win its way back to the pleroma. In general, I think Jung (who in my opinion was an occultist rather than a scientist) was too oriented "downwards", towards spiritual dimensions that are disctinctly unpleasant. 

I´m not sure if that counts as a good answer, neither to Job nor to God...