Jung's Answer to Job: A Commentary by Paul Bishop

Author:Paul Bishop [Bishop, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781317710707
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2014-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

Christ’s life and its consequences

Christ, Jung notes, first appears as ‘a Jewish reformer and prophet of an exclusively good God’, but he proves himself to be a saviour in the first instance by saving ‘the threatened religious continuity’: ‘he preserves humankind from loss of communion with God and from getting lost in mere consciousness and its “rationality”’ (CW 11 §688). From the beginning of time, Jung notes, humankind has been threatened by a ‘loss of soul’ (Seelenverlust), ‘something like a dissociation between consciousness and the unconscious’. When this condition occurs, humankind ‘gets into danger of overlooking the necessary irrationalities of the psyche, and of imagining that it can control everything by will and reason alone’, forgetting that there is always something we had not reckoned with (§688). For Jung (not noted for his progressive political views), Socialism and Communism were examples of this ‘unnatural and even pathological condition’.

Jung works out his idea of the symbolic significance of Christ by discussing the central feature of his human aspect, namely, his love of humankind. This feature is, however, countered by the hints of predestinarianism (the doctrine that some individuals are infallibly guided to eternal salvation) in some of Christ’s remarks. Taken literally, Jung argues, the doctrine of predestination stands opposed to the rest of the Christian message; but, taken psychologically, it is a way of expressing the feeling of distinction (CW 11 §646). (Elsewhere in Answer to Job, Jung dismisses the doctrine of predestination, for opposite reasons, as ‘rank pessimism’ [ungeschminkter Pessimismus] (§718).) Yet his character, in the case of Christ, often also displays ‘a certain irascibility’, interpreted by Jung as indicating ‘a lack of self-reflection’ (ein Mangel an Selbstreflexion) (§647). (The episode where Christ casts the sellers and money-changers out of the temple (Mark 11) would presumably offer a good example of this behaviour.) This characteristic recalls Yahweh’s earlier lack of self-reflection (see CW 111 §574, §617, and §638) and Jung can only think of one occasion, albeit a literally crucial one, when this lack of self-reflection disappears, as we shall see below (see p. 127).

In section VII of Answer to Job, Jung discusses the implications of some of the events in the life of Christ. In Herod’s massacre of the Innocents, the temptation of Christ in the desert, the betrayal by Judas, we see, says Jung, the hand of Satan. Drawing on the Gospel of St Luke, Jung considers in detail Christ’s statement: ‘I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven’ (Luke 10:18). According to Jung, this ‘curious metaphysical phenomenon’ witnessed in this vision is ‘a metaphysical event’ that has ‘become temporal’ – ‘it indicates the historic and (for the time being) final separation of Yahweh from his dark son’ (CW 11 §650). So it is incorrect, Jung argues, to blame Satan for the death of Christ, ‘because, through its prefiguration in Abel and in the young dying gods, the sacrificial death was a fate chosen by Yahweh as reparation for the wrong done to Job on the one hand, and on the other as a fillip to the spiritual and moral development of humankind’ (§650).

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