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
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prophet, speaking in the name of the divine principle or Self, to an age who has forgotten how to hear it.

II 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. Jungs 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 Jungs time, just as it does in our own, and still had some power in Jungs 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 Jungs 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 Jungs writings, one finds this side of his personality, the side that

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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 Jungs 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 Christianitys 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

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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 ones 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 ones life and how much one is willing to give oneself over to that meaning.

IV This distinction may help us to understand something of Jungs project in Answer

to Job and perhaps some of the confusion that people have with Jungs attitude

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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 latters 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? Isnt the nature of Jungs 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? Isnt 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

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Job, though he has certainly deviated from what counts nowadays as orthodox
Christianity. It seems to me rather that Jungs 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 Jungs 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

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me, therefore, that it becomes one of the responsibilities of the Jungian analyst to heal both Jungs 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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