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Answer to Job
Answer to Job
Answer to Job (CW 11), written in 1951 and published in 1952, is Jung’s most personal late work — a prophetic-scholarly reading of the Book of Job as the moment in the biblical record when an unconscious God is forced into self-knowledge by the suffering of one righteous man. The book stages the inner drama of the Yahweh-Sophia relation: Sophia, Yahweh’s coeternal consort, has been forgotten or repressed; Yahweh’s behavior toward Job — jealous, capricious, willing to torture his most faithful servant on a wager with Satan — is the symptomatic expression of that absence. “Yahweh has no Eros, no relationship to man… The faithfulness of his people becomes the more important to him the more he forgets Wisdom” (Jung 1952).
The work’s positive movement is the recovery of Sophia in the late Wisdom literature. Jung quotes Proverbs 8, Ecclesiasticus 24, and the Wisdom of Solomon at length: Sophia speaks in the first person as the craftswoman of God, the cosmogonic Pneuma, the philanthropos — “the loving spirit, kind to man.” Her hypostasis in these texts is, for Jung, “the gentle touch of the pre-existent Sophia” by which the late-classical psyche “compensates Yahweh and his attitude, and at the same time complete[s] the anamnesis of Wisdom” (Psychology and Religion: West and East, §623, paralleling the Job text).
The book closes on the Marian Assumption, dogmatized in 1950 and read by Jung as the modern ecclesial recognition of the feminine return to the Godhead. Answer to Job is therefore the load-bearing text for any account of sophia in the Lineage.