White, John R - The Faith of Carl Jung; Musings on Answer to Job

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

The Faith of Carl Jung: Musings on Answer to Job Page 1 of 6

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


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


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


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.


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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White, John R - The Faith of Carl Jung; Musings on Answer to Job