ANSWER TO JOB from The Collected Works of C. G. Jung VOLUME 11 BOLLINGEN SERIES XX ANSWER TO JOB C. G. Jung With a new foreword by Sonu Shamdasani Translated by R.F.C. Hull BOLLINGEN SERIES COPYRIGHT © 1958 BY BOLLINGEN FOUNDATION, NEW YORK, N.Y. SECOND EDITION COPYRIGHT © 1969 BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS FOREWORD TO THE 2010 EDITION COPYRIGHT © 2011 BY SONU SHAMDASANI PUBLISHED BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 41 WILLIAM STREET, PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY 08540 PRESS.PRINCETON.EDU All Rights Reserved First Princeton / Bollingen Paperback Edition, 1973 Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition, 2002 Paperback reissue, with a new foreword by Sonu Shamdasani, 2010 Extracted from Psychology and Religion: West and East, Vol. 11 of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung. All the volumes comprising the Collected Works constitute number XX in Bollingen Series, under the editorship of Herbert Read (d. 1968), Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler; executive editor, William McGuire. “Answer to Job,” as it appeared in the first edition of Psychology and Religion: West and East, was published in a Meridian Books paperback edition (New York, 1960). LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2010934517 ISBN: 978-0-691-15047-5 Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS FOREWORD TO THE 2010 EDITION PREFATORY NOTE “Lectori Benevolo” Answer to Job BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX FOREWORD TO THE 2010 EDITION READING JUNG AFTER THE RED BOOK With the publication of Liber Novus—Jung’s Red Book1—a new chapter opens in the reading of Jung’s works. For the first time, one is in a position to grasp the constitution of Jung’s work from 1914 onward, and to trace the intimate connections between his self-experimentation and his attempts to determine the typical features of this process through his work with his patients and translate his insights into a language acceptable to a medical and scientific public. Thus, reading Liber Novus brings with it the task of rereading Jung’s Collected Works —much of which appears in a wholly new light. In the winter of 1913, Jung embarked on a process of self-experimentation. He deliberately gave free rein to his fantasy thinking and carefully noted what ensued. He later called this process “active imagination.” He wrote down these fantasies in the Black Books. These are not personal diaries, but rather the records of a self-experimentation. The dialogues that form these active imaginations can be regarded as a type of thinking in a dramatic form. When World War I broke out, Jung considered that a number of his fantasies were precognitions of this event. This led him to compose the first draft of Liber Novus, which consisted of a transcription of the main fantasies from the Black Books, together with a layer of interpretive commentaries and lyrical elaboration. Here Jung attempted to derive general psychological principles from the fantasies, as well as to understand to what extent the events portrayed in the fantasies presented, in a symbolic form, developments that were to occur in the world. Jung recopied the manuscript in an ornate Gothic script into a large red leather folio volume, which he illustrated with his own paintings. The overall theme of the book is how Jung regains his soul and overcomes the contemporary malaise of spiritual alienation. This is ultimately achieved by enabling the rebirth of a new image of God in his soul and developing a new worldview in the form of a psychological and theological cosmology. Between 1916 and 1928, Jung published a number of works in which he attempted to translate some of the themes of Liber Novus into contemporary psychological language. In 1928, the sinologist Richard Wilhelm sent him a copy of the Taoist alchemical treatise The Secret of the Golden Flower, inviting him to write a commentary. Struck by the parallelism between the imagery of the text and some of his own mandalas, Jung finally decided to set aside his work on Liber Novus and not publish it. Instead he devoted himself to the cross-cultural study of the individuation process, focusing on medieval alchemy in particular, using parallels with his own material as a means to present the process in an indirect and allegorical form. Until now, this has presented formidable challenges for readers outside of Jung’s inner circle. ANSWER TO JOB On 29 May 1951, Jung wrote to Aniela Jaffé from his tower at Bollingen, “I have landed the great whale; I mean ‘Answer to Job.’ ”2 Shortly thereafter, Ximena Roelli wrote a letter to her mother, Cary Baynes: [T]here is a kind of theological tract he [Jung] has been writing, called “Antwort auf Hiob” (answer to Job) in which C. G. says Job was right and put a lot of good questions, and Jahweh should have answered them. M-J [Marie-Jeanne Schmid] said when she typed the first version of this MS the protestant pastors in her ancestry rose in revolt, and she had a terrible time of it. Evidently it was very violent and blasphemous in tone, very negative toward Christianity. She was most upset. He has now toned it down, and she thinks before he is ready to publish it, he may do some more.3 As Marie-Louise von Franz recalled, Jung “wrote in one burst of energy and with strong emotion, during an illness and after a high fever, and when he finished it he felt well again.”4 He later remarked to von Franz that “he would like to rewrite all of his books except Answer to Job . he would leave that one just as it stands.”5 In his prefatory note, Jung wrote that he had been occupied with the central problem of the book for years. No wonder: for it was in Answer to Job that the theology first articulated in Liber Novus—the themes of the progressive incarnation of the God, the necessity for “Christification,” and the replacement of the one-sided Christian God image with one that encompassed evil within it—found its definitive expression and elaboration. In Jung’s fantasies during World War I, a new God had been born in his soul, the God who is the son of the frogs, the son of the earth: Abraxas. Abraxas is the God who is difficult to grasp. His power is greatest, because man does not see it. From the sun he draws the summum bonum; from the devil the infinum malum; but from Abraxas LIFE, altogether indefinite, the mother of good and evil.6 Jung saw this figure as representing the uniting of the Christian God with Satan, and hence as depicting a transformation of the Western God-image: I understood that the new God would be in the relative. If the God is absolute beauty and goodness, how should he encompass the fullness of life, which is beautiful and hateful, good and evil, laughable and serious, human and inhuman? How can man live in the womb of the God if the Godhead himself attends only to one-half of him?7 Answer to Job is faithful to the force of Jung’s theophany, now presented in the form of psychotheological and historical argument. On November 25, 1953, Jung wrote to Richard Hull that “the clouds of dust it has raised at times nearly suffocated me!”8 To this day, the controversies around this work have not been stilled.9 1 C. G. Jung, The Red Book, edited and introduced by Sonu Shamdasani and translated by Mark Kyburz, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani, Philemon Series (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009). 2 Gerhard Adler, ed., in collaboration with Aniela Jaffé, C. G. Jung Letters, volume 2 : 1951–1961, trans. R.F.C. Hull, Bollingen Series (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 17–18. 3 August 8, 1951 (Baynes papers, Contemporary Medical Archives, Wellcome Library). Marie-Jeanne Schmid was Jung’s secretary. In her interview with Gene Nameche, she recalled that the “blasphemous” first pages were omitted (Jung biographical archive, Countway Library of Medicine, Boston, p. 55). Strikingly—in contrast to nearly all his other works—the original manuscript is not to be found in his papers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. 4 Marie-Louise von Franz, C. G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, trans. William Kennedy (New York: C. G. Putnam, 1975), p. 161. 5 Ibid. In her interview with Gene Nameche, Sabi Tauber recalled that her husband, Ignaz Tauber, “asked Jung what was the happiest moment for him. C. G. told of the event sailing on the lake after he had started so hard writing Answer to Job, that . he heard the voice of his father, saying, ‘you have done the right thing, and I thank you for that’ ” (Jung biographical archive, p. 18). In his interview with Nameche, Ignaz Tauber recalled that “once I asked him, ‘what was your most beautiful experience?’ Jung answered, ‘well I can answer that immediately. It was Sunday; I was sailing on the ‘Obersee.’ It was about noon time, the sky was completely blue and I fell slightly asleep. And then my father appeared . patted my shoulder and said, ‘you have done it rightly; I thank you’ ” (Jung biographical archive, p. 2). 6 The Red Book, p. 350. 7 Ibid., p. 243. 8 Jung collection, Library of Congress. 9 See Paul Bishop, Jung’s Answer to Job: A Commentary (London: Brunner-Routledge, 2002); and Ann Conrad Lammers and Adrian Cunningham, eds., The Jung-White Letters, Philemon Series (London: Routledge, 2007). PREFATORY NOTE1 The suggestion that I should tell you how Answer to Job came to be written sets me a difficult task, because the history of this book can hardly be told in a few words.