Jung on Job

Extract

If ever there were grist for the Jungian mill it was, one might suppose, the Book of Job. It can be read almost as a paradigm of the ‘integration process’ as Jung himself has repeatedly described it. For here we have a man ‘perfect and upright, fearing God and eschewing evil’—as well he might, never having experienced it, and abounding in cosy piety and worldly prosperity. He has, as Satan points out, ‘a fence about him, and his house, and his substance’. Anybody can be ‘good’ in such narrow, sheltered confines as these; but he can hardly be a grown-up man let alone a hero, a prototype of the way of salvation through crucifixion and resurrection. Any psychologist should know he is heading for a crash. Any theologian should know that such easy and complacent virtue cannot continue long in this post-lapsarian world. Job’s professed love for God—and God’s for him—must grow up from this agreeable but infantile and unconscious, autoerotic phase. Job’s idol of a merely intelligible and amiable God must be smashed: he must learn the lesson which the New Testament writers were to see it was the function of the Old Testament heroes to teach: that man’s righteousness before God is not wrought by moral works without ‘faith in the Absurd’, the Unseen and the Unknown. So the psychologically and theologically inevitable happens: Job’s fences are down; evils rush in.