ANSWER TO JOB: THE COLLECTED WORKS OF C. G. JUNG VOLUME 11 PDF, EPUB, EBOOK C. G. Jung,R. F. C. Hull,Sonu Shamdasani | 152 pages | 14 Nov 2010 | Princeton University Press | 9780691150475 | English | New Jersey, United States Answer to Job (From Vol. 11 of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung) When I say that he could not help doing this, I do not imply any limitation of his omnipotence; on the contrary, it is an acknowledgment that all possibilities are contained in him, and that there are in consequence no other possibilities than those which express him. Answer to Job, Pages , Paras Search for: Search. Date: December 9, Author: Mr. Like this: Like Loading Previous Previous post: Carl Jung: I am an irritating person. 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 spe Close to his death, Jung once was asked whether he would rewrite any of his books if he had the chance. 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. 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. 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. Job is a turning point because it is the first time the mortal man calls God to moral account after his own rules. 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. 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. 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. 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. Sep 12, Rob the Obscure rated it it was amazing. Feb 21, Jake rated it really liked it. 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. Or does the Book of Revelations prove that God is still very angry at you? Read this to find o 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. Read this to find out. 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 interactio Reading Jung's Answer to Job enlivened an otherwise boring day for me. 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. 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 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.