Answer to Job

Carl Jung psychoanalyses God in his relation of absence to Job. The story of Job, a good man forsaken by God to the evil rule of Satan, is a central story of the fall of man. Jung's short book, Answer to Job, is an absolute classic of modern thought.

I present here my own analysis of the story of Job. I view theology in terms of astronomy. Astronomy presents immense events of great duration. The stars of the night sky appear in the Book of Job as indicators of the power of God. Modern astronomy has found out immensely more than was known in Job’s day about the actual nature of the universe. And yet, it is possible to see that Job in some sense had a coherent astronomy.

The astronomy of the earth explains the story of Job. The main long term stable structure of the earth is the spin wobble, causing precession of the equinox and the poles. The stability of this wobble is seen in its measurability over millions of years, through the trace it has left in old ice. Polar ice cores tell the story of the temperature of the earth, of its regular cycles caused by orbital factors. Chief among these factors is the spin wobble, a roughly 26,000 year period (physically caused by the sun and moon torquing the equatorial oblation). In climate science, the spin wobble combines with another factor, the rotation of the orbit, whereby the position closest to the sun, the perihelion, itself orbits around the background stars every 130,000 years or so. Together, these orbital cycles mean the earth has a cycle of light and dark of duration 21,600 years. This cycle is clearly visible in the glacial record. When northern summer is at perihelion, ice is at a minimum, and when northern winter is at perihelion ice is at maximum.

How does it relate to Job? Over the 20,000 years since the last glacial maximum, when ice covered the temperate continents and the sea was 150 meters lower, earth experienced a ten thousand year warming until the dawn of the Holocene followed by ten thousand years of mild cooling, measured by the amount of summer light in the Northern Hemisphere.

So, things were getting better until the legendary Golden Age ten thousand years ago, and have been getting worse since then. Luck was aligned to the cosmos while summer light was increasing, and misaligned while summer light was decreasing. God was with the world in the ten millennia of ascending light, and then gradually became absent from the world in the ten thousand years of descending light.

Job was a man of light living in a time of growing dark. God gradually abandoned the world to Satan when the light began to decrease, and a world of harmony was gradually replaced by a world of war. Job was a man of harmony living in a world of war, at the time when summer light was decreasing most rapidly.

God therefore abandons Job to the power of evil. But Job's story is one of loyalty to truth despite the evil of the world. Job knows that evil is a form of false consciousness and delusion. He knows the deep unconscious transcendental reality is that God will be vindicated as good.

Job lived at a time when northern summer light was most rapidly decreasing. Since then, light reached its bottom point, measured at the equator, in 1300 AD, when the December solstice precessed past the perihelion, the orbital position closest to the sun. Since then, summer light has slowly begun to increase. However, another orbital factor, obliquity, means the turning point is gradually moving north, and will not reach the north pole until about 2700 AD.

Job was a man of God living in hell. Jung analyses how God dealt with Satan to deliver Job over to the power of evil. Jung defines this strange story in terms of what he calls an antinomy of God, a term from the philosophy of Kant meaning the totality of opposites: “Yahweh is not a human being: he is both a persecutor and a helper in one, and the one aspect is as real as the other. Yahweh is not split but is an antinomy – a totality of inner opposites – and this is the indispensible condition for his tremendous dynamism, his omniscience and omnipotence.” (Carl Jung, Answer to Job, page 7)

The persecutor is helper because in the time of fall God manifests presence as absence. An echo of the former time of harmony remains in the time of discord. Job is at one with God in his inner essence, providing him with an unshakable faith, despite all adversity.

Over the next ten thousand years, northern summer light will slowly increase from its present low level. This means that the fallen alienated theologies that have dominated the last epochs, such as those false prophets who mock Job, will give way to theology that is attuned to nature. A new scientific theology, based on understanding of climate cycles, can be like Job in showing unwavering loyalty to truth, but the times will gradually come to suit such a natural theology, instead of seeking to destroy it, as happened in the time of Job.

I explain some of the science behind this thread at Milankovitch Cycle in Myth

Robert,
I am not up to commenting on the Malinkovitch cycles, except to say that it is interesting stuff. Nor have I read the book. But I think your interpretation (or Jung's) of Job makes tremendous sense. I have pulled together a few parts not directly connected in your post. Job's "unshakeable faith" is, I think, his loyalty to truth despite the evil of the world. I have been told that Job probably came out of the exile experience. The Jeremiah trajectory considers the exile to be punishment. The author(s?) of Job will have none of that (over and over). Sometimes life is horrible, they say plainly, but truth still matters.

As Henry Nouwen has pointed out, Jesus led us on the "downward path." When we think we have to be successful, we fail ourselves. When we think we have to be powerful, we undermine the purpose we want the power to serve. When we think we have to get others to agree with us, we induce them to distrust us.

Antinomy is the condition of refusing to sacrifice one part of truth because of the urgency of another. It is going by the name "dialectic" these days, and the most successful exponent I am aware of is Parker Palmer, who has a gift for examples and a calling as a teacher to help him keep his bearings. Palmer shows how the temptation to abandon an important part of truth is always a kind of self-sabotage. For example, if the teacher gives up the value of the discipline, or gives up the importance of the student's experience and ability to integrate the gifts of the discipline, teaching breaks down.

Interestingly, I first experienced this when becoming an active father to my twins. I could not surrender discipline - that would not be loving. Nor could I surrender caring about their feelings - that would make it too hard for them to find my love. I began to find references in the literature (Between Parent and Teenager is probably the classic) to the possibility that one can hold on to both. Parents magazine has been fleshing out the principle for several decades now. I quite literally gave both messages: "Yes, it is frustrating to have to go now. But we have to go now." And they did not end up schizoid or even confused. Rather, they ended up being able to make sense of the world and of their feelings.

Harry
Thanks for your response. You are talking about the need to work through apparent paradox to find a higher truth, in this case the apparent oxymoron of tough love. It is the idea that if you really love those you are responsible for you will not shield them from reality in ways that will harm them in the long term.

Carl Jung says that Yahweh exercises tough love. In the mythology of the Bible, God does not always act as a single omniscient and omnipotent being, but is constantly surprised by the trickery of Satan, who tempts man in the Garden of Eden without God really expecting it, and then seeks to destroy Job and finally destroys Christ on the cross. Jung observes that Satan's power in taking Christ to the cross was only partial, and was less than the power of God in Christ manifest in resurrection.

I hasten to note that Jung sees Christ as a myth, in that the virgin birth and the eternal nature of Christ mean that he is not simply a man. Jung also sees God as subordinate to fate.

The antinomy of persecution and help does produce a dialectic of tough love, in that a force that is really helpful will not simply do what ever we want out of boundless compassion, but will be subordinate to reality.

I have still only read the first part of Jung's Answer to Job, and am finding it utterly brilliant and insightful in its honest appraisal of theology, not flinching from the apparent scientific contradictions within conventional faith.

The material on orbital cycles is my own interpretation, and I confess it is entirely new, so it is not surprising if people find it hard to understand. However, I maintain that it provides a rigorous natural frame to explain mythology. I am very happy to explore it further. The key theme is that the natural planetary cycles of light and dark map precisely onto the mythological cycles of rise and fall, enframing a long ten thousand year period of spiritual decline that is now turning around. God was manifest as absence in the period of declining light, and will manifest as presence in the period of rising light.

Robert,

I don't think your explanation of the cycles is hard to understand. You have it down pretty well, now. You may be overclaiming, a bit, about how the cycles have driven religious experience, but as "mythological cycle" I think it works rather well.

I am concerned that Jung may slip between omnipotent God, who is essentially Fate, or The Universe, but as such doesn't relate to us except as stony-faced silence, and on the other hand the seeking God, Yahweh, the god of encounter, who gives strange promises such as those to Abraham and Jacob that are fulfilled through deep currents of the collective psyche that are not understood by us. Persecution is an activity of the former, but tough love is an attribute of the latter. Perhaps I have given clues already that I favor the latter, both as more evolved theology and as better psychology.

The methodology of antinomy leads us to suspicion when we come down firmly for one option. Nevertheless, I do not find fate to be something I can relate to, while the God who dialogues with us out of tough love is getting to be a friend, albeit sometimes a dangerous, unpredictable and intimidating friend.

Robert Tulip,
Thank you for a provocative post. My background is not in science as it seems that yours is, though I appreciate that you stated your premise in terms I could understand. I am from a "soft," or abstract orientation, and I often find that I cannot artiulate the empirical support for my points of view as you do. That said, I find some validation when the two ostensibly dichotomous schools of thought are congruent. I am increasingly aware that science and what I call spirit are in harmony. Perhaps this is what Jung would call synchronicity, when the rhythms are in sync.
So with your premise of cycles in mind, but manifest with another vocabulary, I quite appreciate the idea of Job (as myth, as symbol) who rejects temptation in favor of Truth. Jung made reference to our shadow selves, those pieces of ourselves that we deny and hide in shame. The challenge is to integrate both the "dark" and the "light." My own struggle has been to accept what I have deemed "ugly" as part of my whole. As I have grown older I have come to understand paradoxes, and it has meant that my vocabulary has been refreshed. I have learned to find freedom in surrender. What you describe in terms of astronomy I understand as an energy, or spirit. They are not in contradiction.
I am a trauma survivor, something I mention not to elicit pity but because it illustrates what I so clumsily am trying to communicate here. For much of my life I tried to hide the details of those experiences, ran fast & far to distance myself from that little girl who endured something so ugly. It was not until I embraced it as one of the integers that creates my sum that my healing began. I found value, began to use the past to enrich my world view. My personal tapestry is threaded with a richness I would not otherwise have known.

many thanks Harry and Murrill for your comments. I plan to go through this book drawing out more provocative comments. Jung is castigated by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion for his assertion that he knows that God exists, but if you read a book such as Answer to Job it becomes apparent that Jung is entirely scientific in his outlook, so Dawkins' criticism is unjustified. It is all about how you define God. Jung even accepts that Jesus Christ is in large part a myth, so it is wrong for Dawkins to put Jung at the evangelical end of the theism-atheism spectrum.

Effectively, Jung says the unconscious is God. What this means, as a scientific proposition, is that there are currents within nature and the psyche of which we are unaware, but which condition our conscious awareness and ego, and that attunement to these universal unconscious archetypes is the source of salvation. Prophetic intuition gains a vision of these unconscious currents, and resonates with readers who see that it expresses a deep eternal truth.

Job is actually the oldest book in the Bible, and is possibly a re-write of even older texts. The author of the Book of Job is perturbed by the problem of evil - that good people suffer unjustly. Jung's Answer to Job is an effort to address this problem, known as theodicy, by analysis of who Yahweh, the God of the Bible, actually is.

Jung notes that Yahweh changes through time, differing in His mythic identity over the course of cultural evolution. After walking in the garden of Eden with Adam and Eve in the cool of the evening, where He is gobsmacked by Satan's tricks, God cuts a deal with the devil, inviting the evil one to do everything he can to get Job to renounce his faith in God. How does this strange deal resonate emotionally?

We know the world is full of evil, and that innocent people suffer injustice. This shows that there is no supernatural entity that can overrule natural law. But does it mean God does not exist? My reading of Answer to Job centers on the concept of the fall from grace, and finding a scientific meaning in this metaphysical idea. Essentially, the argument is that humanity used to be in tune with divine nature, but corruption entered the world alongside the growth of technology, which Jung says was mythically the gift of the 'fallen angels'. The corruption of human desire and power is the source of evil and the cause of the fall from grace.

The match to the long term climate cycle of the earth is intriguing. As I explained above, northern summers got steadily longer from 20,000 to 10,000 BC, shorter from 10,000 BC to about the present, and will get longer over the next ten thousand years. This is all apparent in ice records, matching to orbital cycles. So, it opens the question of whether life actually was more pleasant ten thousand years ago, at the time mythically known as the golden age. This was when the June solstice passed perihelion. As summers subsequently received less light, the underlying causal economic trend was to more difficult life. People responded through technology. What we do not know is to what extent the rise of technology brought a numbing of spirituality. It remains entirely possible that people in the distant past were happier, even though they had only rudimentary technology. The slow increase in difficulty produced a response of progress, but it could be that our material progress has been at the cost of spiritual decline.

Robert,
I think there is ample evidence that "things," e.g. computers, cell phones, TV, etc., have insulated us from making spiritual connections. There is some irony that we have access to innumerable means to communicate with each other, yet the disconnect is apparent: We can hide behind the anonymity that forums such as this afford; hundreds of text messages communicate little beyond OMG! BRB! LOL!
Some of my younger co-workers (those in their 20s) seem unable to carry on a conversation in person because they so frequently interrupt to respond to cell phones or other electronic messages. On Friday I was speaking with one such co-worker & she stopped the discussion to send a picture of her calender to the boyfriend du jour. It seems that the communication is designed to serve (and perhaps encourage) this generation's diagnosis of choice, ADD. Just seems very superficial to me, and I do not understand how any kind of emotional intimacy is established under these circumstances. But perhaps that is the point.
During periods of stress or difficulty I refer to existentialist Viktor Frankl, who refined his philisophical orientation while interred in a Nazi concentration camp. I am reminded that I can attend to my spirit in the face of adversity. In fact, that is when I am most likely to be grittily honest with myself. As a younger person I would put my spiritual health "on hold" until I had resolved the crisis of the moment. In fact, I became fairly adept at "crisis management": If there is no crisis, create one. It served to distract me. Today I recognize that if I am surrounding myself with "stuff" that I might be running from something. Material aquisitions are the smoke & mirrors that camoflauge my spiritual drift. In recent years I have become more cognizant of this. Growing older--I am 52--may have something to do with my willingness to shed the trappings of "success." I am not wealthy, by any means, but I grew up in a home of some privilege. It was a cold and lonely place. Today I am comfortable; I have no desire for more "stuff."