In this series I discuss the books on Jordan Peterson’s Great Book List in no particular order. My hope is to help those interested understand what they’re getting into and choose which books they decide to take on.
Is God moral, immoral, or amoral? Why would God torture a good man just to make a point? How does the story of Job tie into the development of man’s consciousness which changes God himself and also gives us a preview for the necessity of Christ?
These are the types of questions posed and discussed by Carl Jung in Answer to Job. If a deep, slow, one-hundred pages of the psychoanalysis of Job and God with a discussion on the development of consciousness of all mankind are for you, dive on in. The water is murky.
This read was a bit of work. At only one-hundred pages, it should fly by in a couple days, but it is so packed with deep analysis that I found it hard to get through a few pages without pausing. Even on the days I decided to push through and not stop to think every few minutes, I found my mind turning to mush trying to hold all of the ideas together. So I had to again slow down. And this is not my first foray into this type of discussion.
I came to this book already having read a bit on religion myth and consciousness from people like Erich Neumann, Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade and other books by Jung. Here, Jung does not go into the explanations of some of the complicated concepts he discusses, so having some familiarity with the ideas would be a big help. Understanding the story of Job as well would likely be something to do before diving into Jung’s psychoanalysis of its characters.
The Book of Job
Briefly, The Book of Job is somewhat like a Platonic dialogue which contains several conversations on the nature of God and justice. Job asks these questions because he is an incredibly righteous man who has everything taken from him so he looks for an explanation. After several conversations with friends and family, God takes up his question directly. His question, “Is God Just?”, isn’t answered directly. God tells Job that He, the nature of being itself, is too vast for the mind of a human to understand much less judge. It’s best to trust that the nature of being is good in spite of the suffering of the world and walk that narrow path faithfully.
I really appreciate this perspective as it is a good reminder of the need for humility. The more you think you know, the less you are willing to be open to learning. However wonderful our ability to reason is, it can never be enough on its own. This ties into the ideas discussed by Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment.
What Jung does is to read The Book of Job from the perspective of a psychoanalyst concerned with the state of consciousness of the two major players: Job and God.
As a preview, I’ll cover just a couple of the ideas Jung puts forth.
Is God Moral?
Morality for Jung presupposes consciousness. To be moral, you would have to be aware of and be able to make decisions between good and bad, moral and immoral. So then, how can God be a moral being if He is the nature of being itself that exists beyond judgement? Job, or anyone reading about Job for that sake, who criticizes the just nature of God, would be starting with some bad presumptions to question the just nature of a God who is not himself conscious nor self-aware.
Based on the common perception of God, that might sound like a heresy. But Job himself hints at such a conclusion when stating, “He is not a [man] like me that I might answer him, that we might confront each other in court.” Job understands that he is posing a question towards someone, if the term someone even applies, who cannot be thought of as human. So what is it about humanity that does and does not apply to God?
This can be confusing since we commonly refer to God as “He” which is a term to describe a male human, and stories like this one place Him in a position to make decisions and even place bets. But it’s important to understand that humans are incredibly complicated and social creatures. The best way for us to communicate complicated concepts is to turn them into personalities. What I found helpful was Jung’s description of God as a “phenomenon” as opposed to a being like humans. It’s similar to God’s own description of Himself in Exodus when he speaks to Moses from the burning bush and uses a Hebrew word without tense that translates into “I was, I am, I will always be.”
Jung’s lengthy discussion of this question evolves into what happens when a conscious being — a human — who is self aware, peers back at God.
Does God Evolve?
What Jung discusses in reference to God changing is somewhat like the observer effect in scientific measurement. Anytime we observe a phenomenon, the manner in which we measure or take account of it affects the phenomenon itself.
Being self-aware puts humanity in a unique position to judge themselves and their effect on the nature of reality itself. Being a phenomenon and not a conscious being that is self-aware, what happens to God when a conscious being observes Him? What effect does that have on Him?
“…a mortal man is raised by his moral behavior above the stars in heaven, from which position of advantage he can behold the back of Yahweh…”
It’s as if consciousness, which breeds the opportunity for moral choices, lifts man up above the majesty of the natural world to peer back at it and himself. There’s a magic in being a conscious observer. A phenomenon without limitations couldn’t do that. It is important to remember that Jung is not stating that man is superior to God, but just different.
There’s an old Jewish parable of sorts that asks the question, “What does God lack?” The answer is that God lacks limitation. Our limitations are often seen as barriers to overcome but this observation by Jung is a good reminder that it is also our limitations that define us. And without definition, which is a sort of limitation, we can be little more than a puddle as compared to a river with its well defined banks which is limited but has energy and direction.
Jung takes these ideas and then evolves them into his own version of an answer for Job that weaves in the whole of the Biblical narrative. He spends a lot of time on Ezekiel’s visions, feminine and masculine dualities as seen with Sophia, Mary and Christ, and the Incarnation. It’s presented as an evolution of God and man together seen as an evolution of consciousness itself. As man grows to know and observe God, God grows to become more supple and answers Job’s question by sacrificing his own son as an antidote to the suffering all humans must experience.
Even though it is incredibly deep and abstract, I did enjoy the ideas. It really stretches your mind and is a good reminder that our ancestors were not simply putting together incoherent and arbitrary fantasies, but were often incredibly deep thinkers who simply spoke a different language working from a different cosmology.
I hope this short introduction can help you decide if it’s something you too would like to read. If you have read it, let me know what you thought and what kind of ideas it sparked for you.