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A review by sizrobe
Answer to Job by C.G. Jung
4.0
This book is not an easy beach read, but capital L Literature. It's dry, full of big words, greek, and latin phrases, and requires at least a basic knowledge of not just the mainstream bible but apocrypha such as Enoch. For a book written by a famed psychologist the book is mostly theology, which I found surprising. For as difficult as it is to read, it's also mercifully short at 108 pages.
On to the content. Jung believes Christ is the titular Answer to Job, in that god wanted to become man, and still wants to, in order to comprehend the suffering he inflicted not on merely Job but all of humanity. He typifies God as wrathful, unreliable, injust, and cruel. God is a creature that cannot stand seeing his creation fall for Satan's wiles, when he himself was even fooled into torturing poor Job. Additionally, he goes on to say that in God's lack of self-reflection and wildly fluctuating temper, he is actually unconscious, and man's consciousness is higher than God's.
While the title refers to Job, he also discusses the female incaration of God in Sophia, and goes on a bit of a tangeant about Revelation.
One particular quote I found interesting was that "myth is not fiction: it consists of facts that are continually repeated and can be observed over and over again" and another is "the fact that the life of christ is largely myth does nothing to disprove its factual truth-- quite the contrary."
Finally, one bit that I found curious was "[I] emphatically state that visions and their accompanying phenomena cannot be uncritically evaluated as morbid." I don't know if this has changed since 1973, but I fail to see how literal visions could be anything but morbid, but hey, I'm not the famed psychologist here.
On to the content. Jung believes Christ is the titular Answer to Job, in that god wanted to become man, and still wants to, in order to comprehend the suffering he inflicted not on merely Job but all of humanity. He typifies God as wrathful, unreliable, injust, and cruel. God is a creature that cannot stand seeing his creation fall for Satan's wiles, when he himself was even fooled into torturing poor Job. Additionally, he goes on to say that in God's lack of self-reflection and wildly fluctuating temper, he is actually unconscious, and man's consciousness is higher than God's.
While the title refers to Job, he also discusses the female incaration of God in Sophia, and goes on a bit of a tangeant about Revelation.
One particular quote I found interesting was that "myth is not fiction: it consists of facts that are continually repeated and can be observed over and over again" and another is "the fact that the life of christ is largely myth does nothing to disprove its factual truth-- quite the contrary."
Finally, one bit that I found curious was "[I] emphatically state that visions and their accompanying phenomena cannot be uncritically evaluated as morbid." I don't know if this has changed since 1973, but I fail to see how literal visions could be anything but morbid, but hey, I'm not the famed psychologist here.