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White examines Jung's famous address to Job's questioning of god
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The Faith of Carl Jung: Musings on Answer to Job
John R White
I
One of the things the title Answer to Job suggests to us is that this book is not
really about Job. It is rather about someone answering Job or answering some
question or problem that Job raises. We might speculate on just who it is that
is answering Job. On one level, it is clearly Jung who is answering Job: Jung
analyzes Job, his family and counselors, and above all Yahweh himself, the
figure who represents God or the divine principle or the Self. And Jung makes
explicit the answer he would give to Job by claiming that the process
described in The Book of Job is really a step in the process toward divine
consciousness, in and through human beings.
On the other hand, though Jung authors this text, he apparently does
not think that he is speaking only for himself. For example, though Jung tries
to persuade us that he is speaking throughout this book only of the God-
image and only as an analytical psychologist, in practice he speaks directly
about God as the Self. By claiming that the divine principle is trying to
become conscious in us, he is clearly not speaking only of a God-image but
quite directly of the God who is imaged, the divine principle itself, and its
relation to the collective and individual souls.
This point underlines the question of who might be answering Job.
Though Jung himself is clearly answering Job, Jung evidently feels he is also
speaking for an Other: namely, for the Self, for God, in an age which barely
understands that the realization of the Self is the essence of religion. As
much therefore as Jung wants to claim a purely scientific and psychological
viewpoint in his Answer to Job, it is not only Jung the analytical psychologist
speaking here: it is also Jung the mystic, Jung the metaphysician, Jung the
religious thinker – indeed, Jung the prophet, speaking in the name of the
divine principle or Self, to an age who has forgotten how to hear it.
II
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I believe these points need to be made at the outset, if we are to understand
what I will call the faith of Carl Jung. As with anyone who writes, Jung not only
expresses what he means in the text, i.e. not only what he is conscious of,
but also some of his unconscious. Jung’s treatment of The Book of Job – and
especially his treatment of Yahweh in this book – seems to me to show that
he is, as the expression goes, ‘of two minds’ with regard to faith. And these
two minds are the consequences of an interpretation Jung makes of himself
and his age, an interpretation which needs to be brought into light.
Jung often described himself as a man without faith. Indeed, in many
places in his work, he speaks as if ‘modern man’ cannot believe nor have
faith, that faith is incoherent, we could say, with modern sensibilities. In fact,
Jung frequently poses himself as representative of ‘modern man’. But who
exactly is this ‘modern man’ in whose name Jung believes himself to speak?
For, after all, like it or not, faith in some sense still existed in Jung’s time, just
as it does in our own, and still had some power in Jung’s Europe, even if not
so much in the intellectual class to which Jung belonged. It is worth
wondering, therefore, who this is that Jung calls ‘modern man’.
One does not have to look far, either in Jung’s biography or in his texts,
to see who ‘modern man’ is – or, more precisely, in what manner Jung
fantasizes this ‘modern man’ he feels he represents. I think ‘modern man’ is,
for Jung, a category of people imbued with the values of the Enlightenment,
especially regarding its assumptions about the ultimate validity of natural
science and its conviction that empirical research is, in principle, the criterion
of the truth of any claim. Throughout Jung’s writings, one finds this side of his
personality, the side that insists that he is a scientist, frequently rising to the
fore. This is usually accompanied with claims, sometimes sounding rather like
pleadings, that his work in psychology is ‘science,’ in the Enlightenment
sense of the term, and that Jung himself is not a mystic but an empiricist, not
a believer but a knower.
Yet, these claims notwithstanding, Jung seems to write Answer to Job
out of profound metaphysical and religious convictions. Though Jung’s
convictions about the divine may be empirically based, it does not follow that
they are not simultaneously the fruit of these metaphysical and religious
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convictions or that these convictions do not color his work. Quite the
contrary, I think this work gives witness to the faith of Carl Jung.
III
There is a common trope in 20th century European Christianity and Christian
theology, one written about frequently, in fact, just at the time that Jung was
writing and often treated of by Swiss theologians, interestingly enough,
including some working in the environs of Basel and Zurich. It concerns two
different meanings of ‘faith’ or ‘belief’. In many languages, including in
English to some extent, but to a greater extent in the ancient languages in
which many of Christianity’s basic texts were written, the terms used to
express ‘faith’ or ‘belief’ characteristically imply the notion of ‘trust’. Or, to
put the point in more properly historical terms, we could say that the early
Christian notion of ‘faith’ had somewhat different overtones than the modern
notion, because the older version had a much stronger notion of trust in it
than more modern versions.
Thus 20th century theologians attempted to recover that earlier notion
of trust by differentiating between two linguistic expressions: “belief that” or
“believing that something is the case,” on the one hand, and “belief in” or
“believing in God, Christ, the Trinity, etc.” on the other. These two senses of
belief or faith are in principle quite different and can express quite different
attitudes. The first sense, the expression “I believe that x,” is usually followed
by some claimed fact or proposition, such as “I believe that: God exists, Jesus
is God, Mary was assumed into heaven, etc.” In other words, the first sense of
“belief” or “faith” is a specifically cognitive meaning: it implies a relation to
what one thinks is true and the evidence one has for it. And if we assume this
purely cognitive meaning of the term belief, it is clear that belief is something
less than knowledge: it implies a lack of knowledge or, at least, a lack of
evidence. Thus, according to this usage, you have mere belief because you
have not yet attained to knowledge, the latter being the result of scientific
and empirical research.
The second meaning of belief or faith, however, that verbalized in the
expression “belief in,” is the older and more traditional Christian sense of
belief. It is this second meaning which includes the sense of ‘trust,’ as when
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one says one believes in God or, analogously, that one believes in some
person. “Belief in” expresses something of that ancient sense of trust: that
one trusts in someone or, perhaps better put, that one entrusts oneself to
someone, such as God or to some human person. Now clearly, this second
meaning of belief or faith is not explicitly cognitive: it is not the assertion of a
lack of knowledge but the assertion of trusting and entrusting oneself to
someone. One would not say to one’s spouse or to a beloved family member:
“I merely believe in you and entrust myself to you, I do not know you.” The
sentence barely makes sense, in fact, because the issue of believing in
someone and entrusting oneself to someone is not an essentially cognitive
question in the first place, as “believing that” is. Believing in someone is a
question rather about what is important and meaningful in one’s life and how
much one is willing to give oneself over to that meaning.
IV
This distinction may help us to understand something of Jung’s project in
Answer to Job and perhaps some of the confusion that people have with
Jung’s attitude toward religion, a confusion, I would suggest, which is in some
measure rooted in how Jung speaks about these issues himself. Jung thinks
he represents ‘modern man’: he is a scientist, a man without faith. It seems
to me, to the contrary, that he is a man of profound faith. But much hinges on
whether we are using the discourse of “belief that,” i.e. the discourse of
modernity, with the latter’s generally skeptical attitude toward religion born
of modern science, or whether we mean the older religious sense of “belief
in”. If we mean the first, Jung is definitely not a man of faith.
But if we mean by “belief” or “faith” the trust in an Other, or the
entrustment of oneself to an Other, then who better represents faith than
Carl Jung, the man who entrusted his entire life – his profession, his family
relationships, the achievement of his hopes – to the divine Other, to the Self?
Isn’t the nature of Jung’s critique of contemporary religion, and especially of
contemporary Christianity, that it fails to do to just that, i.e. that it fails to
lead its practitioners to entrust themselves ever more fully to the ultimate,
divine principle, which Jung often calls the Self? Isn’t his purpose, in fact, to
show that religion fails in its function insofar as it allows its energies to be
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absorbed by issues of dogma and confessional differences – that is to say,
issues associated with the discourse of “believing that” – rather than in the
imaginative value religious myths and symbols have for linking oneself to the
divine source and for aiding the process of individuation, often defined in
terms of the realization of the Self? Indeed, can we not hear just this point
when analysts talk of having to ‘trust in the process’: i.e. the call to trust, to
entrust oneself, to a process – a process which is not so much a process of
the Self, as the Self itself, manifested in consciousness?
V
I am not as convinced as Jung himself seems to be that he has deviated from
the deepest impulses of religion in general or Christianity in particular in his
Answer to Job, though he has certainly deviated from what counts nowadays
as orthodox Christianity. It seems to me rather that Jung’s perception of a
deviation arises from his assumption of the Enlightenment discourse of
“belief that” in the first place: his unquestioned self-interpretation that he is
representative of ‘modern man,’ that he is a man of science and therefore
must be true to the ideal of Enlightenment science, an ideal which includes
skepticism about all that cannot be proved, is left too much in the
unconscious.
Yet here, I think, is where we see the consequences of this point for
the consulting room. Whatever the merits or demerits of Jung’s
Enlightenment attitude – and there are a good deal of each, it seems to me –
it is important to recognize that, historically speaking, there was an important
compensatory reaction to Enlightenment science, precisely because of its
excessive skepticism to supernatural realities: namely, fundamentalism.
Fundamentalism, like Enlightenment science, is an attitude which also does
not deal with the discourse of “belief in” but rather insists that it has perfect
knowledge of propositions and facts – it arises from the discourse of “belief
that” – though on grounds other than science. In other words,
fundamentalism is born of the discourse of Enlightenment modernity, but is
the compensatory opposite or enantiadromia of Enlightenment science, born
of the same logic, just substituting blind acceptance of some realms of truth
claims for skepticism about those same truth-claims.
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My point, then, is that, in our age where there is a good deal of
splitting, both in individual and collective consciousnesses, between the
excess of Enlightenment skepticism and the perhaps greater excess of
counter-reactionary fundamentalism, we need to see that Jung and a Jungian
therapeutic approach is, at least in spirit, really neither of these, however
much Jung wanted to be counted on the side of the Enlightenment when it
came to his research. Indeed, it may well be that Jung exemplifies this split
himself in significant ways, even if his work may also give one of the
soundest routes to the healing of that split. It would seem to me, therefore,
that it becomes one of the responsibilities of the Jungian analyst to heal both
Jung’s thought and Jungian psychotherapy from the logic of this split and
recognize a kind of faith in the Self which falls outside both the logic of
scientific skepticism and fundamentalism.
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