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Why the Church Calls Carl Jung Dangerous — His Gnosticism, Answered From His Own Books — Transcript

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0:00If the one thing in you that you can
0:01never quite agree with turned out to be
0:03the very part of you that was telling
0:04the truth about the one you were taught
0:06to revere,
0:08would you go on walking beside it in
0:09silence, or would you finally ask it to
0:12speak?
0:13Many people carry this without ever
0:15naming it. It is the state of walking
0:17alone with a grievance against the one
0:19you were taught to trust. You may still
0:21go to the place you were raised to go.
0:24You may still say the words,
0:26but somewhere beneath the words, there
0:28is a quiet argument that has never been
0:30settled.
0:32A sense that something was done, or
0:34allowed, or left unexplained,
0:37and that no one has ever answered you
0:39honestly.
0:40You have not left. You have not
0:43rebelled. You simply walk, and the
0:45grievance walks beside you, and neither
0:47of you says very much.
0:49There is an old picture of this in the
0:50book of Job, in chapter 31.
0:53Job has lost nearly everything, and he
0:55does not curse, and he does not run.
0:58Instead, he lays out his case line by
1:00line, like a man swearing an oath before
1:03a judge. "If I have walked in
1:04falsehood," he says,
1:06"if I have turned away the poor,
1:08then let the consequences fall on me."
1:10Then he comes to the end, and he wishes
1:13that someone would hear him,
1:15and that the one who accuses him would
1:17write down the charge.
1:19It is a grievance carried quietly, with
1:22great care, and without any answer.
1:26The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung read
1:29that picture very closely. In the
1:30preface and the opening pages of Answer
1:32to Job, written in the early 1950s,
1:35he says that he is not offering a
1:37doctrine, but giving the personal
1:39response of someone who was moved, and
1:42perhaps troubled, by what the old book
1:44contains.
1:46He begins with Job, a blameless man
1:49treated unjustly.
1:50And he asks what it would mean if Job
1:52saw something about God that God did not
1:55see about himself. Welcome to
1:57Enlightened Gnosis.
1:59On this channel, we read Carl Jung
2:00beside the Gnostic texts.
2:03One work against one text,
2:05and let each speak in its own voice.
2:08In this video, the work is Jung's Answer
2:10to Job,
2:12and the text is the Apocryphon of John,
2:15a Gnostic scripture from the Nag Hammadi
2:17library,
2:18which tells of an ignorant maker who
2:20believes that he alone is God. If you
2:22were with us for the last video, you
2:24will remember that it took up Job's
2:26moral standing above his God, and
2:29Marcion, who made that claim in the 2nd
2:31century.
2:33This one goes further in, and it goes
2:35more slowly.
2:36The title promises something, and it
2:39should be kept. The question of why Carl
2:41Jung has been called dangerous,
2:43and what his Gnosticism really amounts
2:45to,
2:46is answered in chapter 11,
2:49where Martin Buber's charge and Jung's
2:51own reply are heard side by side.
2:54Until then,
2:56you're not being asked to believe
2:57anything.
2:58You're being asked to keep company with
3:00a long question. Whoever walks beside
3:02you has walked beside many others, and
3:04we can take the road together. Before we
3:06go any further into the old texts, it is
3:09worth stopping to ask what the title of
3:11this video is really asking of us.
3:14The title says that the church calls
3:16Carl Jung dangerous,
3:18and that the reason is his Gnosticism.
3:21Put that way, it sounds like a verdict,
3:25but it is better understood as a
3:26question with a history,
3:28and a fairly specific one.
3:30The word church there does not mean one
3:32voice. It covers Catholic and Protestant
3:35theologians, a few Jewish thinkers, and
3:37a number of scholars of religion,
3:39writing at different times and for
3:40different reasons. What they share is a
3:43worry, and the worry can be stated
3:45plainly,
3:46that Jung took the language of the
3:48sacred, and especially the language of
3:50God, and turned it into the language of
3:53the human mind.
3:55And that in doing so, he did something
3:57that looks very much like what the
3:59Gnostic teachers did in the 2nd century.
4:02That is the charge in its mildest form.
4:04In its sharper form, it says that Jung
4:07did not merely describe religious
4:09experience, but offered a new religion,
4:12a knowledge that saves, set up beside
4:15the faith of the churches and in quiet
4:17competition with it.
4:19This is the accusation Martin Buber made
4:22in 1952,
4:23and we will hear it in full when we come
4:25to him.
4:27For now, it is enough to notice what
4:29kind of accusation it is. It is not
4:31about whether Jung was a kind man or a
4:33careful one.
4:35It is about what he thought he was doing
4:37when he wrote about God.
4:40And here Jung has an answer which he
4:41gave more than once and with some
4:43irritation.
4:44In his reply to Buber, published in the
4:46same year, he insisted that he was
4:48speaking as a psychologist and that a
4:51psychologist deals with what appears in
4:53the psyche,
4:54not with what lies beyond it. He argued
4:56that when he spoke of God, he meant an
4:58image found in human experience, in
5:01dreams, in myth, in the way people
5:03actually feel and behave,
5:05and that he made no claim about whether
5:07anything stands behind the image.
5:09He said, in effect, that he could not
5:12step outside the mind to check.
5:14As he put it in that reply, he was
5:16concerned with psychic facts and not
5:19with metaphysical ones. That is Jung's
5:21own account of his stance, and a fair
5:23listener should hold it in view from the
5:25beginning.
5:27His critics reply that the distinction
5:29is harder to keep than he made it sound.
5:31If you write a whole book about the
5:32character of God, as he does in Answer
5:35to Job, and you say that God was
5:37unconscious of his own contradictions
5:40and needed man to become aware of them,
5:42then it is difficult to read that as
5:44merely a report about images. It sounds
5:47like a claim, whether it is one or
5:49whether Jung founded genuinely different
5:51way to speak is the heart of the matter,
5:54and we will return to it at length.
5:57So, there are two figures we need to
5:58keep apart.
6:00One is Jung, the empirical psychologist,
6:03who describes himself as a man gathering
6:05observations from patients, from dreams,
6:07from the history of symbols, and who
6:09says again and again that he is no
6:12prophet and has founded no creed.
6:15The other is Jung, the supposed prophet,
6:17the figure his critics sometimes see
6:19behind the books, a man who speaks with
6:21the confidence of a revealer. The two
6:23are not simply the same person seen from
6:25different angles.
6:27And part of our work is to notice where
6:28each one speaks.
6:30Jung himself gives us a useful hint
6:32about the first figure in Memories,
6:34Dreams, Reflections,
6:36the account of his life that he composed
6:38with Aniela Jaffé near its end. There he
6:41says something that is often quoted in a
6:43filmed interview and in his writing
6:45about belief and knowledge.
6:47Asked whether he believed in God, he
6:50answered in the interview that he did
6:51not need to believe because he knew.
6:55It is a startling sentence, and it has
6:57been used by his admirers and his
6:59opponents alike.
7:01But read beside the rest of his remarks,
7:03it does not seem to mean a doctrine. He
7:05seems to mean that he had met something
7:07in experience that he could not honestly
7:09deny,
7:10and that he preferred to call it
7:12knowledge of an experience, not belief
7:14in a proposition.
7:16Whether you find that persuasive is up
7:18to you.
7:19It is worth noticing, though, that it is
7:22a claim about what happened to him, not
7:24about how the universe is built. That is
7:26the thread to hold. The question
7:28underneath the title is not really
7:30whether Jung was dangerous.
7:32It is whether a man can describe the
7:34dark side of God,
7:36as Jung does in Answer to Job,
7:39and as the Apocryphon of John does in
7:41its own way
7:42without either founding a faith or
7:45abandoning one.
7:46The church's worry and Jung's defense
7:49are both attempts to answer that. Now to
7:51how we will proceed since the work ahead
7:53is long and you should know the road.
7:56In each of the body chapters, we will
7:58listen to three voices in turn.
8:01The first voice is the text speaking on
8:03its own terms.
8:05Sometimes that will be Answer to Job or
8:08the Book of Job itself
8:10or Jung's Seven Sermons to the Dead or
8:12his book Aion or his memoir. Sometimes
8:15it will be a Gnostic source
8:17such as the Apocryphon of John
8:19the Hypostasis of the Archons
8:22or Pistis Sophia. Where a translation is
8:24in the public domain such as Baynes's
8:26Seven Sermons or Mead's Pistis Sophia
8:30we can hear it read at some length.
8:31Where a translation is still under
8:33copyright as with Jung's books and the
8:36modern Nag Hammadi editions
8:38I will tell you in my own words what the
8:41text says and quote only a sentence or
8:44two. The second voice is the church
8:45father who wrote against such teaching.
8:49Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Epiphanius, and
8:52Tertullian are our main witnesses
8:55and we should be honest about them. They
8:57are our chief sources for much of what
8:59we know of the Gnostic schools
9:01and they were also opponents writing to
9:03refute.
9:05Their accounts are valuable
9:07and they are not neutral. When a father
9:09describes a Gnostic teaching, I will say
9:11so and I will say that it is a
9:13description from a hostile pen.
9:17The third voice is that of a modern
9:19reader
9:20with Jung as a guide.
9:22This is where we ask what the passage
9:24might mean for someone living now
9:26with a grievance and a conscience and a
9:28long habit of silence.
9:31And there is one rule that governs all
9:33three.
9:34Whenever we cross from Jung to a Gnostic
9:36text, from one tradition to the other,
9:39I will mark it plainly. If it is Jung
9:41who makes the connection, I will say
9:43that this is Jung's reading.
9:46If the connection is one I am drawing,
9:48I will say that it is the channel's
9:50reading.
9:52Neither is a fact about history.
9:55Jung was reinterpreting, and so am I.
9:58And the difference between a text and an
10:00interpretation of it
10:01is exactly the thing a careful listener
10:04ought to be able to see. There is some
10:06comfort in that rule, and I mean it as
10:08comfort.
10:09You do not have to accept that Jung was
10:12a Gnostic, or that the Gnostics were
10:14psychologists, or that the old maker
10:16Yaldabaoth is secretly a figure for
10:19anything.
10:20You only have to follow what each source
10:22says, and notice with me where the
10:25bridges are built, and by whom.
10:28So, we begin, as Jung did, with a book
10:30written in a time of sickness. Some
10:32books arrive the way a sentence arrives
10:34in the middle of a fever, whole and
10:36unasked for. And Answer to Job is one of
10:39them. Let us set down the circumstances
10:42plainly, because they matter more here
10:44than they do for most books.
10:46Carl Jung was in his 70s when he wrote
10:48it. He had been ill in the winter of
10:501951, a serious illness by his own
10:53account.
10:54And he wrote the book in the months that
10:56followed, during 1951 and into 1952.
11:00It was published in Zurich in 1952,
11:03and later took its place in the 11th
11:05volume of the collected works in the
11:07English translation of R. F. C. Hull.
11:11That is the whole outward story. It was
11:13written quickly by an old man, soon
11:16after he had been unwell.
11:18And it was sent into the world with very
11:20little delay.
11:21To understand why that detail carries
11:23weight,
11:24it helps to remember an earlier and far
11:26graver illness. In 1944, Jung broke his
11:30foot, and then suffered a heart attack.
11:33And in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he
11:35describes what followed as a period of
11:37visions on the edge of death.
11:40He writes of seeing the Earth from a
11:41great height, of a dark stone floating
11:44in space,
11:45of a temple carved into it,
11:47and of the sense that everything he had
11:49been was being stripped away. He also
11:51describes, with some feeling, the
11:53aftermath.
11:55A long and reluctant return to life,
11:58a sense that the world of ordinary
11:59things had become a kind of box-like
12:01stage,
12:03and a conviction that he now had to
12:04write what he had seen as truthfully as
12:07he could. I am paraphrasing, and I want
12:09to be careful here, because Jung is
12:12describing an experience and his own
12:14interpretation of it. And I am not in a
12:16position to confirm or deny what he saw.
12:19What we can say is that he himself
12:21treated those weeks as a turning point,
12:23and that the books of his last 15 years
12:25carry a different weight from the
12:27earlier ones.
12:29Answer to Job belongs to that last
12:31period.
12:33In the preface, Jung says something that
12:35a reader should hold on to from the
12:37start.
12:39He writes that he is not offering a
12:40metaphysical claim,
12:42and that he is not speaking as a
12:43theologian. He says, in effect, that he
12:46is a layman and an empiricist,
12:49and that what he is presenting is the
12:51voice of a questioning man,
12:53one who has been affected by a subject
12:56and cannot stay silent about it.
12:59He also admits, in a way that is unusual
13:01for a scholar,
13:02that the book grew out of something that
13:04had been pressing on him for years. He
13:06had a long acquaintance with the Book of
13:07Job, he tells us,
13:09and he had been turning over a question
13:11about it.
13:12What he finally wrote, he says,
13:14he wrote almost as though it were
13:16demanded of him.
13:18He even says that he did not plan the
13:19work in the way he had planned others,
13:22and that he had delayed it because he
13:23knew it would provoke strong reactions.
13:27That admission is worth pausing on
13:29because it tells us something about the
13:30manner of the book.
13:32It is not a calm treatise.
13:35It moves fast. It changes ground.
13:38And it carries a kind of pressure under
13:40the sentences. Jung begins with Job, the
13:42blameless man afflicted by God,
13:45and then travels through wisdom
13:46literature, through the apocalyptic
13:48writings, through the Gospels and the
13:50Book of Revelation,
13:52and ends with the church's proclamation
13:54of the assumption of Mary in 1950, which
13:57he treats as a sign of something still
13:58unfinished in the Christian story. He
14:00does not stop to qualify everything,
14:03and he does not build a wall of
14:04footnotes.
14:06That is the book on its own terms,
14:08a long argument made in one pressured
14:10movement by a man who says he is
14:12describing what he has experienced of
14:14the psyche
14:15and not issuing a doctrine.
14:18What is the argument in outline?
14:21We will take it slowly across the
14:22chapters to come, but a first outline
14:24helps. Jung reads the biblical God as he
14:27appears in the Book of Job
14:29as a being who is not fully conscious of
14:32his own contradictions.
14:34He is loving and terrible,
14:36faithful and capricious.
14:39And Jung suggests that in the story of
14:41Job,
14:42a human being sees this more clearly
14:44than the divine figure does. That, in
14:46his reading, begins a process in which
14:48the divine is changed by the encounter,
14:51a process he follows through to the
14:53incarnation and beyond.
14:56I will mark this now, and I will keep
14:58marking it.
14:59This is Jung's reading. It is a
15:01psychological reading of a religious
15:03image, and he is open that he is doing
15:06so. Now, the second voice, the voice of
15:07objection, and here the record is plain.
15:10Theologians reacted strongly. Some of
15:13the sharpest responses came from
15:15Christian thinkers who felt that Jung
15:17had mistaken the nature of what he was
15:18describing. The Dominican priest Victor
15:21White, who had been a friend and
15:22correspondent, wrote critically of the
15:24book. And the exchange between them was
15:26painful on both sides. The more general
15:29objections can be summarized fairly.
15:32First, they said that Jung treated the
15:34idea of God as though it were a content
15:36of the human mind
15:38and so reduced it to psychology. Second,
15:41they said that he read the Bible in a
15:43way that ignored the long tradition of
15:45interpretation, which had already
15:46addressed the problem of suffering and
15:49divine justice with great care. Third,
15:51and most seriously,
15:53they said that his picture of a God who
15:54needs to become conscious through human
15:56beings was not the God of Christian
15:58faith at all,
16:00but something nearer to the old Gnostic
16:02maker,
16:03an ignorant or divided creator. Jung
16:06responded that he was speaking of the
16:07image of God in the psyche
16:10and that this was all an empiricist
16:12could responsibly claim.
16:14But the objection stayed with the book.
16:17It is also the question that gives this
16:18video its title.
16:20And we will come back to it in its
16:22proper place. The third voice, the
16:24modern reader. Why was the book so
16:26unsettling? And why does it still
16:28unsettle people who have never opened a
16:30theological work? I would offer one
16:33thought, and I offer it as the channel's
16:35reading.
16:36Most of us were taught, in one form or
16:39another,
16:40to trust a figure of ultimate goodness,
16:43whether that was a God,
16:44a parent, a tradition,
16:47or institution. And most of us, at some
16:49point, have felt a quiet grievance
16:52against that figure that we did not know
16:54how to voice.
16:56The grievance is not a denial.
16:58It is closer to a complaint made from
17:01inside the relationship. What Jung did,
17:03and what makes the book feel dangerous
17:05to some and liberating to others, is
17:07that he took such a complaint seriously
17:10and treated it as possibly the more
17:11conscious party in the conversation. A
17:14reader does not have to agree with him
17:16to feel the force of that move. It tells
17:19you that the argument you have been
17:20having in silence is not a private
17:22failing and that it has a long history.
17:25And the speed of the book matters here.
17:28A book written slowly can hide its
17:30pressure. This one does not. You can
17:32feel the old man writing against time
17:35wanting to say it before the chance
17:37passes and trusting that the questions
17:40were honest even where the answers were
17:42rough.
17:44Jung himself later spoke of it as
17:45something that had to be written and he
17:48did not retract it. So, we have the
17:50circumstances.
17:51An illness, a long preparation,
17:54a short and intense period of writing,
17:56and a publication that drew objections
17:58he had expected. With that in mind, we
18:00can turn to the text it all begins with,
18:02the story of a wager.
18:05The story begins in the land of Uz
18:08with a man the text calls blameless and
18:10upright,
18:11one who feared God and turned away from
18:14evil.
18:15And it is worth hearing it slowly
18:17as if for the first time.
18:19The Book of Job opens by building a
18:21picture of completeness. Job has seven
18:24sons and three daughters.
18:25He has flocks of sheep and camels and
18:27oxen in great number.
18:29And he is described as the greatest of
18:31all the people of the East.
18:33He is also careful in his devotion.
18:35When his children hold their feasts, Job
18:38rises early and offers sacrifices on
18:40behalf of each of them
18:41thinking that perhaps they have sinned
18:43and cursed God in their hearts. The text
18:45tells us this was his regular practice.
18:48So, before anything happens, we are
18:50given a man whose goodness is not in
18:52doubt
18:53and whose goodness the narrator vouches
18:55for in his own voice.
18:58Then the scene changes and the reader is
19:00lifted out of Uz into another place
19:02altogether. In the first chapter, we are
19:04told there was a day when the sons of
19:06God came to present themselves before
19:08the Lord and that Satan came among them.
19:11In the Hebrew, the word carries the
19:13article, so it reads the adversary or
19:16the accuser.
19:17And many scholars have noted that this
19:19figure is not yet the lord of hell he
19:21later became. He is closer to a member
19:23of the court,
19:25an officer whose task is to roam the
19:27earth and report.
19:29The lord asks him where he has come
19:31from,
19:32and he answers that he has been going to
19:34and fro on the earth,
19:36walking up and down in it. And then
19:38comes the sentence that the whole book
19:39turns on.
19:41The lord says to him, "Have you
19:42considered my servant Job, that there is
19:44none like him in the earth, a blameless
19:47and upright man?"
19:49It is God who raises the subject.
19:51The adversary does not point Job out.
19:53God offers him.
19:55The adversary replies with a question
19:57that sounds almost reasonable.
19:59"Does Job fear God for nothing? Have you
20:01not put a hedge around him and his house
20:03and all that he has?
20:06You have blessed the work of his hands,
20:07but stretch out your hand and touch what
20:09he has, and he will curse you to your
20:12face."
20:14The lord answers, "Behold, all that he
20:17has is in your power.
20:19Only upon the man himself do not put
20:21forth your hand."
20:23And the adversary goes out from the
20:25presence of the lord. In the span of a
20:27few verses, a wager has been made, and
20:30the one who will pay for it knows
20:31nothing about it.
20:33What follows is told with great economy.
20:36In a single day, messengers arrive one
20:38after another, each one speaking while
20:41the previous one is still speaking.
20:43Raiders have taken the oxen and the
20:45donkeys and killed the servants.
20:48Fire has fallen from heaven and consumed
20:51the sheep. Another raiding party has
20:53taken the camels.
20:54And last, a great wind from the
20:56wilderness has struck the house where
20:58his sons and daughters were feasting,
21:00and all 10 of them are dead.
21:03Job rises, tears his robe, shaves his
21:06head, and falls to the ground in
21:08worship.
21:09He says that the Lord gave and the Lord
21:11has taken away.
21:12Blessed be the name of the Lord. And the
21:14narrator adds that in all this, Job did
21:17not sin, nor charge God with wrong.
21:21The second chapter repeats the heavenly
21:22scene almost word for word, which is
21:25itself strange, as if the text wanted us
21:27to hear it twice.
21:29Again, the sons of God present
21:31themselves. Again, the adversary comes.
21:34Again, the Lord asks about Job, and this
21:37time adds something that deserves
21:38attention. He says that Job still holds
21:41fast his integrity.
21:43Although, in the Lord's own words,
21:45you moved me against him
21:47to destroy him without cause.
21:51The adversary answers with an old
21:52saying,
21:53skin for skin,
21:56and proposes a second test.
21:58Touch his bone and his flesh,
22:01and he will curse you to your face.
22:04The Lord says,
22:05he is in your hand.
22:07Only spare his life. And Job is struck
22:10with sores from the sole of his foot to
22:12the crown of his head, and sits among
22:14the ashes scraping himself with a piece
22:16of broken pottery.
22:18His wife asks him whether he still holds
22:20to his integrity, and tells him to curse
22:23God and die.
22:25He answers that we receive good from
22:27God, and should we not receive evil?
22:30And again, the text says that in all
22:32this, Job did not sin with his lips.
22:35That is the prologue. And I would ask
22:37you to notice how plainly it is told.
22:40There is no commentary.
22:42The narrator does not pause to explain
22:45why God would permit this,
22:47or to soften it.
22:49The reader is simply shown a council,
22:52a conversation,
22:53and a consequence.
22:55Now, we turn to Jung, and I want to be
22:57careful here to say what he did and did
23:00not claim.
23:02In Answer to Job, which he published in
23:041952,
23:05he reads this scene as a psychologist
23:08reading a text and not as a scholar of
23:10Hebrew or a theologian.
23:13He takes the heavenly council seriously
23:15as a picture.
23:17And the picture he sees is of a god who
23:20is, in his phrase, not entirely at ease.
23:24Jung argues that Yahweh is moved here by
23:26something like suspicion,
23:28the doubt about the faithfulness of the
23:30man he has just praised,
23:32and that the adversary is able to
23:34exploit it.
23:36In his reading, the adversary is not an
23:38outsider to the divine household, but
23:40something close to a thought that arises
23:43within it,
23:44a kind of second mind. And what troubles
23:46Jung most is that Yahweh does not seem
23:49to recognize what he is doing.
23:52He allows a blameless man to be wounded,
23:54and the ruin of 10 children and a
23:56household is treated, in the scene
23:58itself,
23:59as the price of settling a question.
24:01Jung also draws attention to the
24:03jealousy he sees in the older scriptural
24:05god, the one who in the Hebrew Bible
24:07speaks of himself as a jealous god. He
24:10suggests that the wager makes sense if
24:11you imagine a power who is both watchful
24:14over his people and anxious about their
24:16loyalty,
24:18and who has not yet become conscious of
24:20how those two things sit together.
24:22This is the center of his
24:23interpretation, a god who is unconscious
24:26of his own contradiction, who is at once
24:29the source of Job's goodness and the
24:31author of his suffering. I will come
24:32back to that phrase because it is the
24:35thread we will follow for the rest of
24:37this video.
24:38It must be said clearly that this is
24:40Jung's reading, offered as his own, and
24:42that he admits as much.
24:44He was not writing a commentary for a
24:46seminary.
24:47He described the book as the response of
24:49a layman, and he says he wrote it as a
24:52personal answer to a question that had
24:54pressed on him for many years. Other
24:56readers across many centuries have taken
24:58the prologue quite differently.
25:00The long tradition of Christian
25:02interpretation, including Augustine,
25:04tended to hold that God permits evil
25:07without being its author.
25:09And that suffering can serve purposes a
25:10human being cannot see. In that view,
25:12the adversary acts only within the
25:14limits God sets.
25:16As the text itself shows, when God says,
25:19"Only upon the man himself do not put
25:21forth your hand."
25:23The permission is real, but so is the
25:25boundary.
25:27Later commentators, among them Gregory
25:29the Great in his long work on Job,
25:31read the trial as a school of patience,
25:34in which Job's endurance becomes a
25:36pattern for the faithful. And many
25:37modern scholars have noted that the
25:39prologue may have been an older folk
25:41tale, which the poet of the dialogues
25:44took up and set before a far harder set
25:46of questions.
25:48So, the same few verses have been heard
25:50as a lesson in endurance, as a story of
25:53divine permission within limits,
25:55and as an unsettling glimpse of a God
25:58who has not examined himself. They are
26:00not forced into one meaning by the text,
26:03which is part of why the story keeps its
26:04strangeness,
26:06even for those who have heard it many
26:07times.
26:09If the God of the prologue has not
26:11looked closely at himself,
26:13there is an older text that imagines a
26:15maker who cannot.
26:16And it is to that text we turn now. The
26:19Apocryphon of John is among the most
26:21important writings found at Nag Hammadi
26:23in 1945.
26:25It survives in four copies, three in the
26:28Nag Hammadi library in codex two, codex
26:31three, and codex four,
26:33and one in the Berlin codex, which was
26:35known to scholars earlier. It was
26:36composed in Greek, probably in the 2nd
26:38century, and it is a revelation in which
26:41the risen Christ appears to John, the
26:43son of Zebedee, and explains how the
26:45world came to be as it is.
26:47The story it tells is long and strange,
26:50and we will meet only part of it here.
26:52It begins far above this world
26:55with a god beyond all naming,
26:58an invisible spirit, and it describes a
27:01series of emanations from that spirit.
27:04Among them, the figure called Barbelo.
27:07The lowest of these emanations is
27:08Sophia, wisdom.
27:11And in the Apocryphon, her fault is the
27:13beginning of the trouble. She acts
27:15without her partner and without the
27:17consent of the spirit.
27:19And from this error comes a child,
27:21misshapen and lion-faced, whom she hides
27:24in a cloud so that none of the other
27:26beings may see him.
27:28His name is Yaldabaoth.
27:32In Marvin Meyer's translation, which I
27:34am paraphrasing here because it is in
27:36copyright, Yaldabaoth takes a great
27:38power from his mother and goes away from
27:40her. He creates for himself a company of
27:43rulers, the Archons, and he sets them
27:45over the lower heavens and over the
27:48making of the world. Then comes the
27:49moment that matters for us. Looking at
27:51what he has made and at the rulers who
27:54serve him, he declares that he is god
27:57and that there is no other god beside
27:58him.
28:00The text says he does this because he is
28:02ignorant.
28:03He does not know where his power came
28:05from.
28:06He does not know that there is a mother
28:08above him or a spirit above her. He is
28:11not simply proud in the way a tyrant is
28:13proud.
28:14He is unaware and his claim to be alone
28:17is the claim of someone who has never
28:19seen beyond the edge of his own work.
28:23Then the passage turns.
28:25A voice comes from the higher realm and
28:27answers him.
28:29In the versions of the Apocryphon,
28:31the voice says that the human being
28:33exists and that the son of the human
28:35being exists. Yaldabaoth and his rulers
28:38are disturbed by this. The claim of
28:40being alone has been contradicted and it
28:43has been contradicted from outside the
28:44world he made. The text does not
28:47describe him repenting. It describes a
28:49maker who has been told, in effect, that
28:52he is not what he thinks he is, and who
28:54goes on to act under that disturbance,
28:57shaping the first human being in the
28:59likeness of an image that appeared in
29:01the waters, an image he did not make
29:04himself. Hold that picture beside what
29:06Jung wrote in answer to Job, which I
29:09will also paraphrase, with only a
29:11sentence or two quoted at a time.
29:14In the third chapter, we saw that Jung
29:16wrote the book in 1951 and 52,
29:19and that its argument turns on one
29:21observation about the God of the Book of
29:23Job.
29:25Jung argued that this God is not a moral
29:28monster,
29:29and also not a being who has examined
29:31himself.
29:33He is, in Jung's phrasing, an antinomy,
29:36a union of opposites,
29:38kindness and fury,
29:40creative power and destructive power.
29:43And the decisive point is that he does
29:46not seem to know it.
29:48Jung says that Yahweh is not conscious
29:50of his own contradiction. He can be
29:52loving to his people and terrible to a
29:55blameless man in the same breath.
29:58And the two do not trouble each other
30:00because there is no inner witness that
30:02holds them together. For Jung, this is
30:05why the God of Job can be so careless
30:07with Job's life, and why Job, by
30:10comparison, appears to be the more
30:12conscious party. I want to be careful
30:14about what is being said here and what
30:16is not. Jung is not saying that the God
30:19of Job is Yaldabaoth.
30:21He does not make that identification in
30:23answer to Job, and he is not writing as
30:25a Gnostic teacher laying out a
30:27cosmology.
30:29He is describing, as he understood it,
30:31how the image of God in the Old
30:33Testament behaves when read as a
30:35psychological document.
30:38And the Apocryphon is not describing a
30:40psychology at all. It is telling a story
30:42of origins in which the maker of the
30:45visible world is a lesser being flawed
30:48by ignorance.
30:50The two texts have different aims,
30:53different centuries, and different
30:55reasons for speaking.
30:57What they share is a single recognizable
30:59figure.
31:01A power that creates and rules, that
31:03says it is alone,
31:05and that does not know the whole of what
31:08it is. That is the pairing this video
31:10will hold from here to the end.
31:12The unconscious God of Answer to Job
31:14beside Yaldabaoth,
31:16the ignorant maker of the Apocryphon of
31:17John. Whenever the two are joined, I
31:20will say that it is a crossing,
31:22and whose reading it is. The church
31:24fathers knew a version of this story,
31:27and they did not like it. Irenaeus,
31:29bishop of Lyon in the late 2nd century,
31:32wrote Against Heresies to answer the
31:35teachings of those he considered false.
31:38And in the first book, in chapters 29
31:40and 30, he describes what scholars now
31:42call Barbeloite and Ophite teaching. The
31:46translation by Roberts and Rambeau from
31:48the 19th century is in the public
31:51domain. In chapter 29, Irenaeus gives an
31:54account of the Barbelo and her
31:55emanations that resembles the upper part
31:58of the Apocryphon closely enough that
32:00many scholars believe he had a source
32:02very near to it. In chapter 30, he turns
32:05to a group he describes through the
32:06serpent,
32:07the Ophites,
32:09whose version of the story has the
32:10maker, Yaldabaoth,
32:13boasting that he is father and God,
32:16and being told otherwise by a higher
32:17power.
32:19Irenaeus is not a neutral reporter.
32:23He presents these teachings in order to
32:25refute them,
32:26and he often tells them with a kind of
32:28weary mockery,
32:30stacking up names to show how absurd
32:32they seem.
32:34His central objection is plain, and it
32:36comes from his own faith.
32:39The God who made the world, and the God
32:41who is the father of Jesus Christ, are
32:43one and the same.
32:45And to divide them is to dishonor both.
32:48For Irenaeus, the story of an ignorant
32:50maker is not a profound riddle.
32:53It is a slander on the creator.
32:56We should keep in mind, too, that we
32:58know these groups largely through his
32:59description,
33:01and that the Nag Hammadi texts allow us
33:03to hear them in their own words, which
33:05is not always the same thing. Now, a
33:07modern reader, and here I am speaking in
33:10the channel's own voice, not asserting a
33:12fact about either text.
33:14Someone who has walked a long time
33:16beside a grievance against the one they
33:18were taught to trust may find that the
33:20pairing gives that grievance a shape.
33:23Yaldabaoth, in the Apocryphon, is a
33:26figure of authority who has never been
33:28questioned from outside, and the voice
33:30that answers him is the first sign that
33:33something else is present.
33:36Jung, in Answer to Job,
33:39suggested that something like this had
33:40happened in the history of the image of
33:42God,
33:43that a question was forced upon the
33:45divine by a human being who would not
33:47stop asking. Whether one takes that as
33:49theology, as psychology,
33:52or as neither,
33:54it is worth noticing that both texts
33:56treat the quarrel as the beginning of
33:58consciousness,
33:59rather than the end of faith. That is
34:02only the first meeting of these two
34:03figures.
34:05The chapters ahead will return to them
34:07again and again,
34:08and we will see whether the likeness
34:10holds
34:11or breaks as the texts grow more
34:14particular. Before the maker speaks
34:16again, we should spend some time with
34:18the man who is standing in front of him,
34:20because everything in Jung's book
34:21depends on what Job does and what he
34:24refuses to do.
34:26Begin with the third voice of this
34:27essay, held back for a moment, and let
34:30the text speak first.
34:32In the ninth chapter of the book of Job,
34:35Job answers his friend Bildad, and he
34:37does not begin with an accusation. He
34:39begins by conceding the argument.
34:42He says that he knows it is so,
34:44that no mortal can be right before God.
34:47Then he asks how.
34:49And the question is a real one.
34:51If one wished to contend with God, one
34:54could not answer him once in a thousand
34:56times.
34:57The difficulty is not that God is
34:59certainly wrong.
35:01The difficulty is that there is no
35:02ground on which the case could be heard.
35:04God is wise in heart and mighty in
35:06strength, Job says.
35:09And who has hardened himself against him
35:11and prospered?
35:12Then the complaint turns sharper.
35:15God removes mountains and they do not
35:17know it.
35:19He shakes the earth out of its place.
35:22If he passes by, Job cannot see him. If
35:24he takes away,
35:26who can hinder him? And who can say to
35:29him,
35:29"What are you doing?" A little further
35:31on comes the sentence that Jung would
35:33return to in his book. Job says that
35:36even if he were righteous,
35:38he could not answer,
35:40and that he would have to plead for
35:41mercy from his own judge. And then, in
35:44the same chapter,
35:46the longing,
35:47"There is no umpire between us."
35:50No one who might lay a hand upon us
35:52both. Job wants a third party.
35:54He wants a court that stands above the
35:56one who is accusing him.
35:58And he knows, while he wants it, that no
36:01such court exists. The 16th chapter has
36:03a different temper.
36:05Here Job is tired of his comforters, and
36:08he calls them miserable, troublesome
36:10consolers.
36:11He speaks of God as one who has torn him
36:14in his wrath, who has set him up as a
36:16target. But in the middle of the
36:17bitterness, there is something that has
36:19puzzled readers for centuries.
36:22Job says that even now his witness is in
36:24heaven,
36:25and that his advocate is on high.
36:28He appeals in other words to God against
36:31God.
36:32The earth, he says, should not cover his
36:35blood
36:36and his cry should find no resting place
36:38until it has been heard.
36:40The grievance is not withdrawn. It is
36:43carried upward
36:44to the only address it has.
36:47Then we come to the 31st chapter and the
36:50tone changes again.
36:52This is Job's great oath of innocence.
36:55He lists what he has not done.
36:57He has made a covenant with his eyes.
37:00He has not walked with falsehood.
37:03He has not despised the cause of his
37:04servant nor withheld the poor from their
37:07desire
37:08nor eaten his morsel alone while the
37:10orphan went without. After each
37:12protestation, he calls down a curse on
37:13himself should it be untrue.
37:16And at the end, he says the words that
37:18close the case.
37:19Here is my signature. Let the Almighty
37:22answer me.
37:23Let my adversary write out his
37:25indictment.
37:26Job does not ask to be pardoned. He asks
37:29to be charged so that the charge can be
37:32read and answered. Now, Jung in answer
37:35to Job, published in 1952, he reads this
37:38man in a way that few theologians had.
37:40And I will say plainly that this is
37:42Jung's own reading, an argument he makes
37:45and not a finding about the ancient
37:46text.
37:48Jung argued that Job stands on firm
37:50moral ground. He has been wounded for no
37:53cause and he knows it. And he will not
37:55say otherwise to please his friends.
37:57What interested Jung most was a
38:00consequence of this.
38:01Because Job insists on his innocence and
38:04also keeps faith that God will hear him.
38:07Job comes to know something about God
38:09that God in the story
38:12has not yet looked at in himself.
38:15Job has seen that the one who is
38:17supposed to be the guardian of justice
38:20has acted unjustly
38:22and that same one is also, somehow,
38:25the only possible advocate. Jung
38:27described this as a kind of knowledge
38:29held in a single human being that the
38:31divine, in the book's frame, does not
38:34yet have of itself.
38:36He wrote of Job's insight as something
38:38that places a man, in a limited sense,
38:41above his maker, since the man is
38:43conscious of the contradiction, and the
38:45maker, Jung suggests, is not. Hold that
38:48beside the figure from the last chapter.
38:51And the resemblance is plain even before
38:53we say what it means.
38:55Yaldabaoth, in the Apocryphon of John,
38:58says that there is no other god beside
39:00him,
39:01and is ignorant that there is one.
39:04Job, in Jung's account,
39:07is the human being who knows that there
39:09is a larger and more troubling thing
39:11than the god who is speaking to him. I
39:13want to be careful, though. The
39:14Apocryphon of John tells a story about
39:17the origin of the world, and the voice
39:19that rebukes the archon comes from above
39:21him.
39:22Jung is talking about a man on a
39:24dunghill.
39:25The likeness is in the shape of the
39:27situation,
39:28a power that has not looked at itself,
39:31and a witness who has,
39:33and not in any claim that the two texts
39:35say the same thing. The church fathers,
39:37for the most part, read Job in another
39:39way,
39:40and it is fair to hear them in their own
39:42terms.
39:44The author of the Letter of James, in
39:46the New Testament, had already pointed
39:49to the patience of Job,
39:51and the later tradition took that as its
39:52key. Gregory the Great, in the 6th
39:55century, wrote a long commentary on the
39:57book The Moralia, in which Job is a
39:59figure of endurance and, in places, a
40:01foreshadowing of Christ, a righteous man
40:04who suffers and is vindicated. For
40:06Gregory, the complaints are the honest
40:08speech of a person under trial, and the
40:11lesson is that suffering is not a sign
40:13of abandonment. Augustine, too, had held
40:15up Job as a witness that the good may be
40:18afflicted without being rejected.
40:21This is a serious reading, and it has
40:23consoled a great many people.
40:26The one thing it tends to do is to
40:28soften the force of the complaints, to
40:30treat them as understandable excess
40:32within a larger submission.
40:35Jung did not accept that softening.
40:37He thought the complaints were the
40:39point. But notice that he did not make
40:41Job a rebel, either.
40:43Job does not curse God in the way his
40:45wife urges him to in the second chapter.
40:48And he does not abandon the
40:49conversation.
40:51This is what I would call the grievance
40:52that does not turn into rebellion.
40:55And a modern reader may find it the most
40:56useful thing in the book.
40:58Job does not leave. He does not pretend.
41:01He holds the complaint and the faith
41:03together.
41:05And refuses to give up either.
41:08So here, I speak in the channel's voice.
41:11If you have been walking for a long time
41:13beside a quarrel with the one you were
41:14taught to trust, you may have wondered
41:17whether the quarrel was a failing.
41:19Job suggests another possibility.
41:22His argument goes on for chapter after
41:24chapter. It is never tidy, and it is
41:27never answered in the terms he asks. And
41:29still, it is allowed to stand in
41:31scripture.
41:32In the text that people have read in
41:34synagogues and churches for 2,000 years.
41:38Your long argument has a precedent.
41:39[music]
41:40And it is not an outside one.
41:43It sits in the middle of the book.
41:45Job has asked again and again for a
41:47hearing.
41:48>> [music]
41:49>> And in the 38th chapter of the book that
41:50bears his name, the hearing finally
41:53comes.
41:54It comes out of a whirlwind. The text
41:56says that the Lord answered Job out of
41:58the storm.
42:00And the first thing the voice does is
42:01turn the questions around.
42:04"Who is this?" it asks.
42:06"That darkens counsel by words without
42:08knowledge? Gird up Gird like a man, for
42:11I will question you.
42:13And you will answer me. Then comes one
42:15of the most remarkable stretches of
42:17poetry in the Hebrew Bible. Where were
42:19you when I laid the foundations of the
42:21earth?
42:22Who shut in the sea with doors when it
42:24burst out of the womb?
42:26Have you commanded the morning since
42:28your days began?
42:30Have you entered the springs of the sea
42:32or walked in the recesses of the deep?
42:35Have the gates of death been opened to
42:37you?
42:38Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades
42:41or loose the cords of Orion? Who
42:43provides for the raven its prey?
42:46And do you know when the mountain goats
42:48give birth?
42:50The speech goes on through the 39th
42:52chapter with the wild ass, the wild ox,
42:54the ostrich, the war horse, and the
42:56hawk. It is not a hostile list.
42:59There is a kind of delight in it. The
43:01war horse paws the valley and rejoices
43:04in its strength.
43:06And it says among the trumpets,
43:08"Aha!" The voice is describing a world
43:10that is vast, strange, and full of
43:13creatures who live far beyond any human
43:15concern.
43:17Job is asked to look at it, and he is
43:19silent.
43:21At the opening of the 40th chapter, he
43:23says that he is of small account and
43:26that he will lay his hand on his mouth.
43:28But the voice is not finished.
43:30It speaks a second time.
43:32And now it turns to two creatures,
43:33[music]
43:34Behemoth and Leviathan.
43:36Behemoth is described as the first of
43:38the works of God, a creature who eats
43:41grass like an ox, whose strength is in
43:43his loins, whose bones are tubes of
43:46bronze.
43:47Leviathan takes up most of the 41st
43:50chapter.
43:51Can you draw him out with a fishhook?
43:53Will he make a covenant with you? His
43:55sneezings flash forth light. Out of his
43:58mouth go flaming torches, and on earth
44:00there is nothing like him, a creature
44:02made without fear.
44:04The chapter ends by calling him king
44:06over all the sons of pride.
44:09That is the speech. Now I want to set
44:11beside it what Jung made of it in answer
44:13to Job,
44:14published in 1952.
44:16And I want to do so carefully because it
44:19is easy to hear the argument as harsher
44:21than it is. Jung noticed first what the
44:23speech does not do. Job's complaint,
44:25from the ninth chapter onward, had a
44:27particular shape.
44:29He said that he was blameless, that he
44:31had been afflicted without cause, and
44:33that the one who afflicted him was not
44:35bound by any court.
44:37He wanted a hearing, and he wanted a
44:39reason.
44:40The voice from the whirlwind gives him
44:42neither.
44:43It does not say that Job had sinned. It
44:45does not mention the wager in the first
44:47two chapters, in which Job was handed
44:49over to suffering.
44:52It does not defend itself against the
44:53charge of injustice.
44:56It simply displays power,
44:58and displays it on a scale no human
45:00being could answer. Jung argued that
45:02this was an overwhelming answer to a
45:04question that had not been asked.
45:07Job had asked whether he was treated
45:09justly. The reply was that the one
45:11speaking made the world, and that Job
45:13did not.
45:15Jung read this as a god who, in his
45:17view, was not able to take up the moral
45:19question, and who responded with a show
45:21of strength instead. He called the
45:23speech, in effect, a demonstration of
45:25might.
45:27And he observed that Job, who was far
45:29more morally conscious than the voice
45:30that addressed him,
45:32understood perfectly well what had
45:34happened.
45:36Job did not need to be shown the power.
45:39He had never doubted it.
45:41Jung's point was that the power was not
45:43the issue,
45:44and that the voice had answered a
45:45different question from the one put to
45:47it.
45:49Jung also drew attention to a detail.
45:52The creatures at the end, Behemoth and
45:54Leviathan, are monsters.
45:57To Jung, they seem to show something
45:58about the one who made them,
46:00a side of the divine nature that was
46:02untamed and not governed by the kind of
46:05conscience Job was appealing to. In his
46:07reading, Job came away from the
46:09encounter with knowledge that God had
46:11not intended to give him.
46:13That the divine could be both enormous
46:16and morally unaware.
46:19That is Jung's reading. And he says in
46:21the book that he is offering it as a
46:22psychological observation,
46:24not as a rewriting of doctrine.
46:27There are other ways to hear the speech,
46:30and a fair account has to give them
46:31room. The Christian commentators from
46:33the early centuries onward mostly read
46:35the whirlwind as a lesson in humility
46:38and in the limits of understanding.
46:40Gregory the Great, in his long
46:42commentary on Job, the Moralia, read the
46:44voice as correcting Job's pride, even
46:47while he honored Job's patience. Thomas
46:50Aquinas, in his own commentary, took the
46:52speech as an argument about providence,
46:55that the order of the world is wiser
46:56than any single human viewpoint can
46:59grasp,
47:00and that God's care extends to creatures
47:02Job had never considered.
47:05Many later readers, Jewish and
47:07Christian, have added that the speech is
47:09itself a kind of answer
47:11because it shows Job that he is
47:13addressed at all. The voice speaks to
47:16him.
47:17After so many chapters of silence,
47:19that is not nothing. And Job's own reply
47:22in the 42nd chapter,
47:24that he had heard of God by the hearing
47:26of the ear,
47:28but now his eye sees him,
47:30has been read as a real change,
47:32a passage from received belief to direct
47:35meeting.
47:37Those readings are serious, and they do
47:40not depend on any hostility to Job's
47:42complaint.
47:44They simply place the weight elsewhere.
47:47Where Jung hears evasion, they hear a
47:49widening of the frame. Where Jung hears
47:52a God who does not answer the moral
47:53question, they hear a God who answers by
47:56giving the question a larger setting.
47:59It is possible to hold that Jung read
48:01the text with great perceptiveness and
48:03still think he left something out,
48:06such as the beauty of the speech, its
48:08tenderness toward the wild creatures,
48:10and the fact that Job is satisfied by
48:12it. Here I would offer a third
48:14consideration in the channel's voice.
48:17Jung was not, by his own account,
48:18writing as a theologian.
48:20He called himself an empirical
48:22psychologist, and the book is best
48:24understood as a reading of what happens
48:26inside a person when a religious image
48:29stops working in the usual way. On that
48:31footing, the whirlwind is less a claim
48:33about the nature of God than a
48:35description of an experience that many
48:37people recognize.
48:39You bring a real, reasoned grievance to
48:41the highest authority you know,
48:44and what comes back is magnificent,
48:47immense, and beside the point.
48:50You are not refuted, and you are not
48:52answered.
48:53You are simply made to feel small. Many
48:55people know that moment without any
48:57reference to Job. It may come from an
48:59institution, a parent, a teacher, or a
49:02faith.
49:03And the tone is always the same.
49:05Look how much greater this is than you.
49:08Jung's reading suggests that the feeling
49:10of being overwhelmed and the feeling of
49:12being answered are two different things,
49:16and that it matters not to confuse them.
49:18That is a psychological point, and it
49:20can be held by someone who disagrees
49:22entirely with his theology.
49:25What Job does next is worth noticing.
49:28He does not pretend that the question
49:30was answered.
49:32He says that he has spoken of things too
49:34wonderful for him,
49:36and he repents in dust and ashes.
49:39Readers have disagreed for centuries
49:41about what exactly that repentance
49:43means,
49:44and the Hebrew will bear more than one
49:46sense.
49:47Jung took it as Job's quiet knowledge
49:50that he had met something larger than he
49:51was and that it was not his to correct.
49:55Others take it as a real turning.
49:58The text lets both stand.
50:00So, the whirlwind leaves us with a
50:02problem that is still open. The voice
50:04has spoken, the power has been shown,
50:06and the complaint has not been taken up.
50:09In the next part of our work, we leave
50:11Job for a time and go to a text that
50:13heard that same silence differently and
50:15asked who it was exactly that spoke from
50:18the storm. We turn now from the storm to
50:21a scene in which someone answers the one
50:23who boasts. And the voice that answers
50:25comes from above him rather than from
50:27the dust.
50:29The scene appears in two of the Nag
50:31Hammadi texts. And it is worth hearing
50:34each on its own terms. In the Apocryphon
50:36of John, as Marvin Meyer's translation
50:38renders it, the ruler Yaldabaoth has
50:41been made from Sophia's fault, and he
50:43sets himself over the lower powers he
50:45creates. He is surrounded by
50:47authorities. He takes the power of his
50:49mother and leaves her behind.
50:51And he declares that he is God and that
50:53there is no other God beside him.
50:56The text says plainly that in saying so,
50:59he showed his ignorance of the place
51:01from which he came. Then, in that
51:03account,
51:04a voice comes from the heights and says
51:06that the human exists
51:08and that the child of the human exists.
51:10The effect is a correction delivered in
51:14a few words to a ruler who did not know
51:16there was anything above him. The
51:18Hypostasis of the Archons, which is the
51:21fourth tractate of Codex II,
51:24tells the scene with a sharper edge.
51:26Its ruler is called Samael,
51:29which the text glosses as the blind god
51:33and also Saklas, the fool. In Bentley
51:37Layton's rendering, he becomes arrogant
51:39in his power and says that it is he who
51:42is God
51:43and that there is none besides him.
51:46A voice then comes from the realm of
51:48incorruptibility and says that he is
51:51mistaken.
51:52The ruler asks who is speaking and the
51:55reply, as the tractate gives it, is the
51:58sudden shining of a light that he cannot
52:00contain.
52:01The tractate does not linger over his
52:03reaction. It simply lets the boast and
52:05the correction stand next to each other.
52:08And the reader is left to feel the
52:10distance between what the ruler says he
52:12is
52:13and what he is.
52:15I want to mark what is and is not being
52:17claimed here.
52:19These are texts written in Coptic and
52:21translated from Greek
52:23in the third or fourth century copies we
52:25have
52:26and they are mythic narratives.
52:29They say nothing about psychology. They
52:31tell a story about a maker who does not
52:33know what is above him
52:35and about a voice that tells him so.
52:38Whatever we say next about Jung belongs
52:40to Jung or to this channel
52:42and I will try to name which as we go.
52:45The church fathers who wrote against
52:47such stories read them as an insult.
52:49Epiphanius, the bishop of Salamis, who
52:51wrote his long catalog of heresies, the
52:53Panarion, in the later fourth century,
52:56describes groups he calls Gnostics and
52:58Sethians and gives their teaching about
53:01the arrogant ruler with evident
53:02distaste.
53:04His complaint is not subtle. The story
53:05that makes the maker of the world
53:07ignorant and even foolish
53:10seemed to him to blaspheme the God of
53:11the scriptures
53:13who says in Isaiah that there is no
53:15other.
53:16Hippolytus,
53:17writing earlier in Rome in his
53:19Refutation of All Heresies,
53:21treated such systems as borrowed
53:23philosophy dressed as revelation
53:26and he was concerned that they
53:27undermined the unity of the creator and
53:30the redeemer. Both men were defending a
53:31real conviction that the God who made
53:34the world and the God who saves it are
53:36one.
53:37We should be fair to that. For them, the
53:39Gnostic scene was not a clever literary
53:41device.
53:43It was an attack on the thing they most
53:45needed to be true.
53:47We should also remember that both men
53:49are reporting hostile summaries in
53:51quotations, and that they are reading
53:53the texts for their errors, not for
53:55their meaning.
53:57Now to Jung. In Aion, whose second
53:59chapter is titled The Shadow,
54:02Jung writes about a part of the
54:03personality that a person does not know
54:06or does not wish to know,
54:07and which therefore acts unseen.
54:11As Hull translates him,
54:13the shadow is a moral problem that
54:14challenges the whole ego personality,
54:17and nobody can become conscious of it
54:19without considerable moral effort.
54:21Jung's argument there is that what we
54:23refuse to see in ourselves does not go
54:25away.
54:27It gets projected onto others,
54:29and it shapes our conduct from behind
54:31our backs.
54:33He says that this is a matter of
54:34experience,
54:36something he met in people repeatedly,
54:39and he is careful to present it as
54:40observation,
54:42and not as a creed.
54:45Here is where the channel puts the two
54:46sides together,
54:48and I want to be plain that this is our
54:50reading,
54:51and not a fact about either source.
54:54The arrogant Archon is a figure of
54:56someone who does not know his own
54:58shadow.
55:00He announces that he is everything,
55:02and the announcement is the sign that
55:04there is more he has not seen. Jung's
55:06account of the shadow describes the same
55:08pattern in a person, a confidence in
55:11one's own wholeness that depends on not
55:13looking at what is left out. The voice
55:15that corrects Samael is, on this
55:18reading, a picture of the thing that
55:20interrupts that confidence.
55:21>> It does not argue. It simply says that
55:24he is mistaken, and the light that
55:26follows is more than he can hold. Jung
55:29himself did not draw this exact parallel
55:31in Aion, and I do not want to put the
55:34words in his mouth.
55:35What he does say in the fifth chapter
55:37titled Christ a symbol of the self
55:40is that the figure of Christ in Western
55:42tradition expresses an image of
55:44wholeness
55:45and that this image is lopsided since it
55:48is all light and leaves the dark side to
55:50Satan. His argument is that the self in
55:52his psychological sense would have to
55:54include both and that the Christian
55:56image so understood is incomplete.
55:59This is Jung reinterpreting a symbol and
56:02he knew that theologians would disagree.
56:05It is a claim about psychic images and
56:07what they do in the mind, not a claim
56:09about what God is and he said so
56:11repeatedly in his later defenses.
56:13Whether one accepts the distinction is a
56:15question we will take up properly when
56:17we reach his reply to Martin Buber.
56:20The modern reader, then, has something
56:22to hold from both sides and something to
56:24be careful about.
56:27From the texts, there is the image of a
56:29maker whose certainty rests on ignorance
56:32and of a voice that does not destroy
56:34him, but tells him the truth. From Jung,
56:37there is the observation that a sense of
56:38completeness is often bought by not
56:40looking
56:42and that the part we have not looked at
56:43keeps working anyway. Put together
56:46they give a way to understand a
56:47particular kind of inner grievance. If
56:50you have walked a long way beside some
56:52authority you were taught to trust
56:54and you have felt a quiet voice in
56:56yourself
56:57that keeps saying something is missing
56:59from the account
57:01then the old story is not telling you
57:03that the voice is right in every detail.
57:06It is telling you
57:07that such a voice has been recognized
57:09before
57:11and that it has been taken seriously by
57:13people who wrote it down. There is a
57:15caution to add.
57:16The voice in the myth is a voice from
57:18above, from the realm of light and not
57:20simply any objection we happen to feel.
57:23Jung's shadow is quite different in this
57:25respect since he describes it as
57:27something we often find unpleasant and
57:30not as a source of wisdom to be obeyed.
57:33So, the pairing does not tell us to
57:34trust every inner grievance. It asks us
57:37to examine it, to ask what it is made
57:40of, and who in us is speaking, which is
57:43more demanding than either agreeing or
57:45silencing it. In the next part, we stay
57:47with Aion and follow Jung into his claim
57:49about Christ and Satan as a pair.
57:52And into the old argument about whether
57:54evil is something or only the absence of
57:57good. Let us take up the claim that gave
57:59Jung's critics the most trouble,
58:02which is that the figure of light and
58:04the figure of darkness in the Christian
58:06story belong together as a pair. In
58:08Aion, in the chapter on Christ as a
58:10symbol of the self, Jung makes an
58:12argument that is easy to state and hard
58:15to sit comfortably with.
58:17He begins from the old Christian idea
58:19that Christ is the image of wholeness,
58:22the perfect man,
58:24the figure in whom nothing is lacking.
58:27Then he asks a psychologist's question
58:29about [music] it.
58:31If this image is meant to stand for the
58:33whole self,
58:34why is it so entirely light? Wherein is
58:37the dark side that every living person
58:39carries? His answer, put in his own
58:41terms, is that the tradition did not
58:44abolish the dark side.
58:45It gave it a separate name and a
58:47separate figure.
58:49And the name was Satan,
58:51or in the later and more pointed phrase,
58:54the Antichrist. So, the Christ of the
58:56creeds, he argued, is not the whole of
58:58the self,
59:00but it's luminous half.
59:02And the other half has been standing
59:03beside it,
59:05outside the picture,
59:06for almost 2,000 years.
59:10It matters to say plainly what kind of
59:12claim this is.
59:13Jung is not reporting what the church
59:15taught. The church did not teach that
59:17Christ and Satan are two halves of one
59:20thing,
59:21and Jung knew it did not.
59:23He is reading the Christian symbols as
59:25as psychologist reads dream images,
59:27asking what pattern in the human psyche
59:29they express.
59:31And he says as much in the book. A
59:33theologian asks whether a doctrine is
59:35true.
59:36Jung, in Aion, asks what a doctrine does
59:39to the person who holds it.
59:42Those are different questions, and much
59:44of the quarrel over his work comes from
59:46treating the second as though it were an
59:48answer to the first. To support his
59:50reading, Jung turns to the old Christian
59:52teaching on evil, which is the privatio
59:56boni,
59:56the idea that evil is not a thing in
59:58itself, but a privation,
1:00:00>> [music]
1:00:00>> a lack of good.
1:00:02Augustine is its great voice in the
1:00:04Latin West. In his Confessions and in
1:00:07his work on the nature of the good,
1:00:09Augustine argued that everything God
1:00:10made is good, that evil therefore cannot
1:00:13be a substance, and that what we call
1:00:15evil is the corruption or absence of
1:00:17good in a being that was made good.
1:00:20Blindness is not a thing added to the
1:00:22eye, it is the lack of sight.
1:00:25Later theologians, Aquinas among them,
1:00:28developed the idea with great care.
1:00:30There is real wisdom in it. It protects
1:00:32the belief that God is wholly good and
1:00:34the author of no evil.
1:00:37And it answers an old and painful worry,
1:00:39that if evil were a substance, it would
1:00:41need a maker,
1:00:43and the maker would have to be God. Jung
1:00:45did not dismiss this. He granted that it
1:00:47had a purpose, but in Aion, he pressed
1:00:49an objection from experience.
1:00:52"If evil is only an absence?" he asked.
1:00:55"Why does it feel so much like a
1:00:56presence?"
1:00:58Anyone who has met cruelty or felt a
1:01:00real malice in themselves knows that it
1:01:02does not feel like a mere gap. It acts,
1:01:05it plans, it has force. In his judgment,
1:01:08to call evil a nothing was to lower our
1:01:11guard against it.
1:01:12And worse, to let us believe that the
1:01:14dark we meet in ourselves is only a
1:01:17shortage of virtue,
1:01:19something that more effort will fill.
1:01:21He thought this made people less honest
1:01:23with themselves, not more. And he added
1:01:25a point that often surprises readers,
1:01:28that the doctrine had in fact been
1:01:29argued over inside the church for
1:01:32centuries, with some fathers speaking of
1:01:34the devil in language that gave him a
1:01:36real standing.
1:01:38Jung's position was a reading of that
1:01:40unsettled history, and he said it was a
1:01:43psychological necessity, not a revealed
1:01:46truth. Here the Gnostic schools come
1:01:48into view.
1:01:49And here we have to be careful
1:01:51because almost everything we are about
1:01:53to hear about them comes from their
1:01:55opponents.
1:01:56Irenaeus, in the first book of Against
1:01:58Heresies, in chapter 24,
1:02:01describes the teaching of Basilides,
1:02:04who taught in Alexandria in the early
1:02:062nd century. In Irenaeus's account,
1:02:09Basilides spoke of an unborn and
1:02:11nameless father,
1:02:12of a descending series of powers and
1:02:14heavens, 365 of them, and of angels who
1:02:18made the world and who were responsible
1:02:21for the nations. He says the chief of
1:02:22these angels was the God of the Jews,
1:02:25and that this God wished to subject the
1:02:27other nations to his own people,
1:02:29so that the other angels stood against
1:02:31him. Irenaeus also reports that
1:02:34Basilides taught that Christ did not
1:02:36truly suffer,
1:02:37and that Simon of Cyrene was crucified
1:02:39in his place. He reports a teaching
1:02:41about mockery, about the wise knowing
1:02:44who they are and denying nothing.
1:02:47And he treats the whole as a scandal and
1:02:49a tangle.
1:02:51We should read that report as what it
1:02:53is.
1:02:54Irenaeus wrote to refute, and he was
1:02:56writing against a way of thinking that
1:02:58he believed had led people away from the
1:03:00common faith.
1:03:02He is often vivid, sometimes sarcastic,
1:03:05and not always fair. Modern scholars
1:03:07have noted that his picture of Basilides
1:03:09does not always agree with the account
1:03:10given by Hippolytus
1:03:12a generation later,
1:03:14and that Hippolytus seems to describe a
1:03:16quite different and more philosophical
1:03:18system. So, when we say that the
1:03:20Gnostics were dualists,
1:03:22we are really saying that the fathers
1:03:23described them so. And the texts we now
1:03:26hold from Nag Hammadi show a much more
1:03:29varied picture.
1:03:31Some of them speak of a flawed maker and
1:03:33a realm of light apart from him.
1:03:36Others, as we will see in the sermons,
1:03:38speak of a fullness in which opposites
1:03:41are held.
1:03:42The single word dualism hides a good
1:03:45deal.
1:03:46Still, the fathers were right that
1:03:48something in these schools pressed hard
1:03:50on the problem of evil.
1:03:52If the maker of this world is ignorant
1:03:54or arrogant, as the Apocryphon of John
1:03:56says of Yaldabaoth, then the darkness of
1:03:59the world need not be laid at the door
1:04:01of the highest God.
1:04:03That answer is a bold one, and it has
1:04:05its own cost, since it divides the
1:04:08divine into a good beyond and a lesser
1:04:10maker here. The church's answer, the
1:04:13privatio boni, keeps God whole and good,
1:04:16but asks us to say [music] that the dark
1:04:18we feel is not a substance.
1:04:21Jung's answer sits oddly between them.
1:04:23He does not want a flawed maker set
1:04:25apart from the true God, and he does not
1:04:28want evil explained away as an absence.
1:04:30He wants the darkness acknowledged as
1:04:32real and held inside the whole.
1:04:35And that is what draws the charge of
1:04:36Gnosticism, and also what separates him
1:04:39from it.
1:04:41I want to leave the difficulty standing
1:04:43as a difficulty. There are serious
1:04:45people in theology and out of it who
1:04:47think the privatio boni is among the
1:04:49great achievements of Christian thought,
1:04:52and serious people who think it has
1:04:54never survived contact with real
1:04:55suffering. Jung's pairing of Christ and
1:04:58Satan is not offered as a proof of
1:05:00anything. It is his attempt, as a
1:05:02physician of the mind, to say what it
1:05:04costs to hold a perfectly light image of
1:05:07the sacred while the dark goes on
1:05:09working unnamed.
1:05:12If you are the walker with a grievance,
1:05:14you do not have to settle this tonight
1:05:16or at all. It may be enough to notice
1:05:18that the question you carry has been
1:05:20carried in different words by Augustine,
1:05:23by Basiledes, and by an old man in
1:05:26Kusnacht,
1:05:27and that none of them found it light.
1:05:29There is one more place where Jung held
1:05:31a god of both light and dark in his own
1:05:33hands.
1:05:35And it is a small book he wrote 40 years
1:05:37before Answer to Job.
1:05:39In the middle of the First World War, in
1:05:411916, in his house at Kusnacht, Jung
1:05:45wrote the Seven Sermons to the Dead,
1:05:47in the Latin, Septem Sermones ad
1:05:50Mortuos.
1:05:51By his own account, in Memories, Dreams,
1:05:53Reflections, written down with Aniela
1:05:56Jaffe and published in 1962,
1:05:59the house had grown restless that
1:06:01spring. He describes a sense of crowding
1:06:03in the rooms, a doorbell that rang with
1:06:05no one at it, and a feeling that the air
1:06:07was full of presences.
1:06:09Then, over a few evenings, he wrote the
1:06:12sermons almost without pause,
1:06:14and he says the atmosphere settled once
1:06:16they were done.
1:06:17He printed the text privately and gave
1:06:19it to a few friends.
1:06:21Notably, he did not sign it with his own
1:06:24name. He put it under the name of
1:06:26Basiledes of Alexandria,
1:06:28a teacher of the early 2nd century, and
1:06:30wrote it in the voice of that ancient
1:06:32master addressing the dead who had come
1:06:34back from Jerusalem not having found
1:06:36what they sought.
1:06:39I want to read from it because this is
1:06:41the one work in the whole discussion
1:06:43where we may hear Jung's imagery in a
1:06:45translation that is in the public
1:06:47domain. This is the English of H. G.
1:06:50Baynes from 1925. The first sermon
1:06:53begins with the dead crying out.
1:06:56And the voice answers, "Harken.
1:06:59I begin with nothingness.
1:07:01Nothingness is the same as fullness.
1:07:04In infinity, full is no better than
1:07:06empty."
1:07:07Nothingness is both empty and full.
1:07:11You might as well say anything else
1:07:13about nothingness, as for instance,
1:07:15white it is or black, or again, it is
1:07:19not or it is. A thing that is infinite
1:07:21and eternal has no qualities,
1:07:24since it has all qualities.
1:07:27This nothingness or fullness we name the
1:07:29pleroma.
1:07:31Pause on that last word.
1:07:33Pleroma is the Greek for fullness, and
1:07:36it is a technical term in the
1:07:38Valentinian and related schools, where
1:07:40it names the realm of the divine aeons,
1:07:44the world above the lower world of
1:07:46making.
1:07:47Jung borrows the word and bends it. In
1:07:50the sermons, the pleroma is not a place
1:07:52of pure light from which a flaw has
1:07:54fallen away.
1:07:56It is a fullness in which every quality
1:07:59and its opposite are present together.
1:08:02And so, as the text says,
1:08:04"None can be told apart." Where the
1:08:06Apocryphon of John pictures a perfect
1:08:08realm and a blind maker below it,
1:08:11the sermons picture a single fullness
1:08:15in which the distinction between perfect
1:08:17and blind has not yet been drawn.
1:08:20That is a significant difference, and I
1:08:22will return to it.
1:08:25The second part of the first sermon says
1:08:27that we are ourselves the pleroma,
1:08:29in a manner of speaking, but that we are
1:08:32creatures,
1:08:33and that creatures are distinguished,
1:08:35and that distinction is our essence. In
1:08:38Baines' rendering, the dead are told
1:08:40that we are in the pleroma,
1:08:42yet we are also not in it, because we
1:08:44are made of difference. The words are,
1:08:47and I quote the sense closely,
1:08:49that the pleroma is the whole,
1:08:52and the creature is the part that has
1:08:54been set apart, and so is able to be
1:08:57something. Now, the passage that
1:08:58mattered most to Jung's later readers,
1:09:01from the sermon on Abraxas.
1:09:03Baynes gives it this way.
1:09:05The dead ask about the god beyond the
1:09:08god they knew.
1:09:09And the voice replies,
1:09:12"Abraxas is the god who is hard to know.
1:09:14His power is the greatest because man
1:09:17perceives it not.
1:09:18From the sun, he draws the summum bonum.
1:09:21From the devil, the infinum malum.
1:09:23But from Abraxas, life.
1:09:26Altogether indefinite. The mother of
1:09:28good and evil. Smaller and weaker life
1:09:31seems to be than the summum bonum.
1:09:34Wherefore is it also hard to conceive
1:09:36that Abraxas transcends even the sun in
1:09:39power,
1:09:40who is himself the radiant source of all
1:09:42the force of life?" And a little further
1:09:44on,
1:09:45"Abraxas is sun, and at the same time
1:09:47the eternal sucking more of the void,
1:09:50the belittling and dismembering devil.
1:09:52Abraxas is the begetter and the
1:09:54destroyer.
1:09:55The one who gives life and the one who
1:09:57ends it.
1:09:58He is the god of truth and also of
1:10:00falsehood, of good and of evil,
1:10:03of light and of darkness.
1:10:05In the same word and the same act,
1:10:07Abraxas is terrible."
1:10:10Notice what the sermon does with the sun
1:10:12and the devil.
1:10:13They are not erased.
1:10:15The highest good and the deepest [music]
1:10:17evil are both kept, named, given their
1:10:21own places.
1:10:23What lies above them is a life that is
1:10:25the mother of both.
1:10:27And it is for that reason
1:10:29harder to love than the sun
1:10:31and harder to fear than the devil.
1:10:34This is the center of the work. I will
1:10:37say plainly that this is Jung writing in
1:10:39a visionary mode,
1:10:41in the pseudonym of an ancient teacher,
1:10:43and not a report on what Basilides
1:10:45taught.
1:10:47So, what did Basilides teach?
1:10:49Here we have a problem that scholars
1:10:51still argue over because we have almost
1:10:53nothing from his own hand,
1:10:55only fragments quoted by others. The two
1:10:57main reports come from Irenaeus in
1:10:59Against Heresies book 1 chapter 24.
1:11:03And from Hippolytus in The Refutation of
1:11:06All Heresies book 7.
1:11:08They do not agree with each other.
1:11:09Irenaeus describes a system of many
1:11:12heavens
1:11:13an angelic order that made the world
1:11:16and a god named Abraxas or Abrasax
1:11:20who stands over 365
1:11:23heavens
1:11:24the number of days in the year.
1:11:26Hippolytus, writing a generation later
1:11:28and apparently working from different
1:11:29material, describes something stranger.
1:11:33A first state in which there is not even
1:11:35nothing
1:11:36a non-existent god who makes a
1:11:38non-existent world out of what does not
1:11:41exist
1:11:42from a seed that holds all things within
1:11:44it
1:11:45like a mustard seed holding the tree.
1:11:48Both are hostile reports and Hippolytus
1:11:51is the harsher. His whole project in The
1:11:53Refutation is to show that the heresies
1:11:55derive from Greek philosophy and pagan
1:11:58mysteries rather than from the apostles.
1:12:01And he presents Basilides as a student
1:12:03of Aristotle dressed in Christian words.
1:12:07We should weigh him accordingly. He is a
1:12:09source for what a Roman bishop wished
1:12:11his readers to think Basilides said. And
1:12:14also because he quotes at some length a
1:12:16source for the odd austere language
1:12:19Basilides really seems to have used.
1:12:21Modern scholars are divided on which
1:12:23report is closer to the man.
1:12:25And some think the two describe
1:12:27different stages of a school rather than
1:12:29one founder. Jung, for his part, did not
1:12:32claim to be reconstructing any of this.
1:12:34In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he
1:12:36says he wrote the sermons from a
1:12:38compulsion
1:12:39that the dead seemed to be asking him
1:12:41questions and that the Basilides name
1:12:43was a way of giving the voice a home in
1:12:45the past.
1:12:47Later, he was reserved about the work.
1:12:49He called it a prelude
1:12:51an early and unfiltered statement of
1:12:53what he spent the rest of his life
1:12:55working out in more careful terms.
1:12:58And he did not include it in the
1:12:59collected works.
1:13:02It circulated privately and, much later,
1:13:05appeared as an appendix to the English
1:13:07edition of the memoir.
1:13:10Why then was a god containing both good
1:13:12and evil the center of this early work?
1:13:16Here I speak as the channel, not as
1:13:18Jung.
1:13:19In 1916, Jung was a man who had left
1:13:22Freud,
1:13:23lost his academic footing in his own
1:13:25eyes, and was walking through the
1:13:27confrontation with the unconscious that
1:13:29fills the Red Book. The image of a
1:13:31perfectly good god had in the war years
1:13:33become hard to hold beside what Europe
1:13:35was doing to itself.
1:13:38The sermons are one answer to that
1:13:39strain. They say that what you worship
1:13:42as light and what you fear as dark may
1:13:44come from one source that is neither.
1:13:47And that the effort to keep them in
1:13:48separate rooms is part of what makes us
1:13:50creatures. 40 years later, in answer to
1:13:53Job, Jung would put the same intuition
1:13:56in the language of a physician and a
1:13:58theologian.
1:13:59In the sermons, it is still a vision.
1:14:02And a vision is often where a question
1:14:03lives before it learns to argue. Every
1:14:06accusation in the title of this video
1:14:08has been waiting for this point because
1:14:10it was here, in 1952, that someone of
1:14:14real standing put the charge to Jung in
1:14:16plain words and Jung answered it.
1:14:19The someone was Martin Buber, the
1:14:21philosopher of dialogue, author of I and
1:14:24Thou,
1:14:25a Jewish thinker steeped in Hasidic
1:14:26tradition and no friend of reductive
1:14:29accounts of religion. Buber had read
1:14:31Jung with care and, in an essay on
1:14:33religion and modern thinking, published
1:14:35in German in 1952,
1:14:38he argued that Jung was, in effect, a
1:14:40modern gnostic. Part of the occasion was
1:14:42Answer to Job, which had appeared that
1:14:44same year.
1:14:46But Buber's argument reached back over
1:14:48Jung's whole body of work, including the
1:14:50early Seven Sermons to the Dead,
1:14:53which we heard a moment ago.
1:14:55His complaint had several strands,
1:14:58and it is fair to give them as he made
1:14:59them.
1:15:01The first strand concerned God. Buber
1:15:03said that when Jung speaks of God as an
1:15:05image arising in the soul, as a content
1:15:08of the psyche, he has quietly replaced a
1:15:10God who stands over against us with a
1:15:13God who is a process within us.
1:15:15For Buber, the whole of biblical faith
1:15:17lives in the meeting between two real
1:15:19beings, a person and a God who is not
1:15:22the person.
1:15:24If God becomes a movement inside the
1:15:25psyche, that meeting is lost. The second
1:15:28strand concerned knowledge.
1:15:30Buber thought Jung treated religious
1:15:32experience as a way of knowing the
1:15:34hidden structure of things, an inner
1:15:36knowledge that saves,
1:15:38and that this was exactly what the old
1:15:40Gnostic schools had claimed.
1:15:43The third strand concerned the divine
1:15:45itself. He took Jung to be saying that
1:15:47God is incomplete,
1:15:49that God needs human consciousness in
1:15:51order to become whole,
1:15:52and that the opposites of good and evil
1:15:55are reconciled inside the divine.
1:15:58Buber saw in this a revival of an
1:16:00ancient teaching in which the world is
1:16:02the scene of a divine drama of fall and
1:16:05recovery.
1:16:06>> And he thought a psychologist had no
1:16:07business making any of these statements
1:16:10while claiming to speak only as a
1:16:11scientist. Jung replied in the same year
1:16:14in a letter to the editor of the journal
1:16:16where Buber's piece had appeared, now
1:16:18printed in volume 18 of the collected
1:16:20works.
1:16:21His tone is sharp in places, and I will
1:16:23give his case in my own words, since the
1:16:25text is in copyright.
1:16:28Jung begins by refusing the label. He
1:16:30says he is an empirical psychologist,
1:16:33and that what he reports are facts about
1:16:35the psyche,
1:16:37that people in every age produce images
1:16:39of God,
1:16:41that these images have a definite
1:16:42character
1:16:44and that they behave in the mind as
1:16:46powerful realities with effects.
1:16:49He says that this is a statement about
1:16:51experience and he does not claim that it
1:16:54settles what lies beyond experience.
1:16:56When he speaks of a God image, he
1:16:58insists, he is speaking about the image
1:17:01and the question of whether there is a
1:17:03being behind it is one he does not
1:17:05pretend to answer.
1:17:07He also turns the charge of Gnosticism
1:17:09around.
1:17:10A Gnostic, he says, claims knowledge of
1:17:12the transcendent and that is precisely
1:17:15what he disclaims. He argues that Buber,
1:17:18in saying that Jung denies a God beyond
1:17:20the psyche,
1:17:21is the one who is making a metaphysical
1:17:22assertion
1:17:24because only a metaphysician could know
1:17:26that nothing lies behind the image. Jung
1:17:29stays agnostic on that point
1:17:31and thinks the agnostic position is the
1:17:33only one for a scientist.
1:17:36On the second strand, Jung defends the
1:17:38use of the old Gnostic material by
1:17:40saying that he came to it late and from
1:17:43the side.
1:17:44He had found in the dreams and fantasies
1:17:46of his patients and in his own images
1:17:49that resembled what the ancient texts
1:17:51describe
1:17:52and he went to the texts to learn how
1:17:54such images had been understood before.
1:17:57That, he says, is comparison as an
1:17:59anatomist compares forms across species
1:18:02and it does not amount to a creed.
1:18:05As for the idea of an incomplete God
1:18:07he answers that he describes what the
1:18:09God image does in the human psyche
1:18:13where the opposites really do appear
1:18:14together and demand to be held together.
1:18:17That is a claim about psychic
1:18:19experience.
1:18:20And he says that Answer to Job is
1:18:22written as the personal reaction of one
1:18:24man to a text that troubled him.
1:18:27An interpretation he never offered as
1:18:29revelation.
1:18:31Here I should say plainly where this
1:18:33leaves the claim in the title.
1:18:36The church has called Jung dangerous,
1:18:38and in this case, the accusation rests
1:18:40on two things that are both true. The
1:18:42first is a real kinship of imagery.
1:18:45Jung did use the figures of the Gnostic
1:18:47texts, the ignorant maker, the Pleroma,
1:18:50Abraxas, Sophia, the divine spark that
1:18:53must be gathered back.
1:18:55In Aion and in Answer to Job, he treated
1:18:58them as symbols that tell us something
1:18:59about the structure of the mind, and he
1:19:01was frank that they spoke to his own
1:19:03questions.
1:19:04>> A reader who sees an unconscious God
1:19:06beside Yaldabaoth is not inventing the
1:19:08resemblance.
1:19:10>> The second thing is a real difference of
1:19:12method. The Gnostic teachers, by the
1:19:14testimony even of hostile sources, and
1:19:17by the evidence of their own texts,
1:19:19claim saving knowledge of what is,
1:19:22a knowledge that frees the soul from a
1:19:24flawed world.
1:19:26Jung claimed to describe what appears in
1:19:28the psyche,
1:19:30and to leave the question of what is
1:19:31beyond it open.
1:19:33Whether he kept that line cleanly is
1:19:36exactly what Buber doubted,
1:19:38and I will come back to that. Now
1:19:39consider how the fathers drew their own
1:19:41line, because it helps us see what is at
1:19:43stake.
1:19:45Irenaeus, in Against Heresies, book
1:19:47three,
1:19:48in the public domain translation,
1:19:51sets out what he calls the rule of
1:19:52truth, received at baptism and handed
1:19:55down in the churches from the apostles.
1:19:57In this account, there is one God, maker
1:19:59of heaven and earth,
1:20:01who is also the father of Jesus Christ,
1:20:04and the scriptures speak of this one God
1:20:05from beginning to end.
1:20:08Irenaeus argues that the Valentinians
1:20:10and others split the maker from the
1:20:12father,
1:20:13set a hidden knowledge above the public
1:20:14teaching, and read the scriptures
1:20:16through a key available only to the
1:20:18initiated. For him, faith is public,
1:20:21handed on, and checked against the
1:20:23common witness of the churches,
1:20:25while gnosis is private and
1:20:27self-authorizing.
1:20:28Notice that this is a line of method as
1:20:31much as of doctrine, And on that ground,
1:20:33Irenaeus would have found Jung hard to
1:20:35place. Jung does not hand down a rule
1:20:37and does not claim an apostolic chain.
1:20:40Yet, by his own account, he claims no
1:20:42secret knowledge of God, either.
1:20:44How then might a modern reader weigh the
1:20:46exchange? Here I speak as the channel.
1:20:50I think Buber was right that Jung's
1:20:52language often drifted.
1:20:54When Jung writes in Answer to Job that
1:20:57God must become human in order to become
1:20:59conscious,
1:21:01the grammar is that of a statement about
1:21:03God, whatever his disclaimers.
1:21:06And I think Jung was right that a
1:21:08psychologist can report that such images
1:21:10exist
1:21:12and what they do
1:21:13without joining the ancient schools.
1:21:15Both men seem to me to have seen
1:21:17something true.
1:21:18The listener who has walked along with a
1:21:20grievance against the one they were
1:21:21taught to trust can hold both.
1:21:24That the images are old and shared with
1:21:26the Gnostic texts.
1:21:27And that the one who gathered them said,
1:21:29in his own words and in his own year,
1:21:32that he was describing the soul and not
1:21:34founding a church. Having weighed what
1:21:36Buber charged and how Jung replied, we
1:21:39can turn from argument to a story,
1:21:42because the old texts do not only argue,
1:21:45they also console.
1:21:47And the one I want to read now was sung
1:21:48long before it was ever debated.
1:21:51The Hymn of the Pearl stands inside the
1:21:53Acts of Thomas,
1:21:55a 3rd-century Syriac work, and it is not
1:21:58part of the canon of any church. It has
1:22:00been read as a Gnostic song, though
1:22:02scholars still discuss how far it
1:22:03belongs to that world. And I will say
1:22:05only that it was copied and loved by
1:22:07people who thought of the soul as a
1:22:08stranger far from home. I read from
1:22:11George Robert Stowe Mead's translation
1:22:13of 1908, which is in the public domain.
1:22:17The prince, who is the speaker, begins
1:22:19by telling of his father's house.
1:22:22In Mead's rendering, he says,
1:22:25"When I was a little child and dwelling
1:22:27in my kingdom, in my father's house, and
1:22:29was content with the wealth and the
1:22:31luxuries of my nurturers
1:22:33from the east, our home,
1:22:35my parents equipped me and sent me
1:22:37forth.
1:22:39They took off from him the bright robe,
1:22:41and they made a covenant with him and
1:22:43wrote it in his heart that he might not
1:22:46forget it. He was to go down into Egypt
1:22:48and bring back the one pearl which lies
1:22:50in the sea, hard by the loud-breathing
1:22:52serpent. If he brought it, he would put
1:22:55on again his glittering robe, and with
1:22:57his brother, who was next to the king,
1:23:00he would be heir in the kingdom. So, he
1:23:02goes down, he comes to Egypt, and he
1:23:04goes straight to the serpent, and he
1:23:05settles near its dwelling, waiting until
1:23:08it should sleep so that he might take
1:23:10the pearl. Being alone, Mead has him
1:23:12say,
1:23:14he was a stranger to his fellow lodgers.
1:23:16Then he sees one of his own race, a fair
1:23:19and well-favored youth, and they become
1:23:21friends, and he warns him against the
1:23:23Egyptians and against contact with the
1:23:25unclean. But the Egyptians, as the
1:23:28prince tells it, wove a guile against
1:23:30him.
1:23:31And he tasted of their food,
1:23:34and he forgot that he was a son of
1:23:36kings, and he served their king. He
1:23:39forgot the pearl for which his parents
1:23:41had sent him.
1:23:43And because of the heaviness of their
1:23:44nourishment, he fell into a deep sleep.
1:23:48Now the song turns,
1:23:50and this is the part I want you to hear
1:23:52slowly. His parents know what has
1:23:53happened to him, and they grieve, and a
1:23:56proclamation is made that all should
1:23:58come to their gate.
1:24:00Then they write him a letter,
1:24:02and every noble signs it. In Mead's
1:24:05words, "From thy father, the king of
1:24:07kings, and by mother, the mistress of
1:24:09the east, and from thy brother,
1:24:12>> [music]
1:24:12>> our next in rank, to thee, our son, in
1:24:15Egypt, greeting.
1:24:17Up and arise from thy sleep, and listen
1:24:20to the words of our letter.
1:24:22Call to mind that thou art a son of
1:24:24kings.
1:24:25See the slave whom thou servest.
1:24:28Remember the pearl for which thou wast
1:24:29sent to Egypt. The letter then does
1:24:31something unusual. It flies
1:24:34in the form of an eagle,
1:24:36the king of all winged birds,
1:24:39and it alights beside him
1:24:41and becomes speech.
1:24:43The prince says that at its voice and
1:24:45the sound of its winging, he woke and
1:24:47arose from sleep,
1:24:49took it, kissed it,
1:24:51broke its seal,
1:24:53and read
1:24:54the words written there,
1:24:56but what was written in his heart. He
1:24:58remembered that he was a son of kings
1:25:00and that his freedom longed for its own
1:25:02nature.
1:25:04He remembered the pearl.
1:25:06And he charmed the terrible serpent by
1:25:08naming his father's name over it, and he
1:25:10snatched the pearl and turned to take
1:25:12his way to his father's house. He
1:25:14stripped off the filthy garment and left
1:25:16it in their land. And the letter that
1:25:18had awakened him met him on the road and
1:25:21guided him, calling him with its voice
1:25:23and leading him on with its love.
1:25:26When at last he saw again the robe, it
1:25:28seemed to him like a mirror of himself,
1:25:31and he saw it wholly in himself, and in
1:25:33it he saw himself wholly. Now I step out
1:25:36of the text and speak as the channel,
1:25:39and I mark this plainly as our reading
1:25:42and not as anything the song or Jung
1:25:44claims.
1:25:45What strikes me is how little the song
1:25:48blames the sleeper.
1:25:50He is not cast out for a sin.
1:25:52He is sent.
1:25:54He forgets, and he is recalled.
1:25:57The one who woke him was not a stranger,
1:25:59but his own household,
1:26:01writing in the language that was already
1:26:03inside him. For a person who has walked
1:26:05a long way alone with a grievance
1:26:07against the one they were taught to
1:26:08trust,
1:26:10there is a quiet consolation in an image
1:26:11where the distance is not the end of the
1:26:13story,
1:26:14and where the letter is addressed to the
1:26:16one who has been wandering and not to a
1:26:18better version who never left. Beside
1:26:21this, I want to set a scene from Jung
1:26:23told in Memories, Dreams, Reflections,
1:26:26the book he made with Aniela Jaffé in
1:26:28his last years and which appeared in
1:26:301962.
1:26:32It is not a story of the road but of a
1:26:35child. Jung says that at about three or
1:26:37four years old, he had a dream which he
1:26:40remembered all his life of a hole in a
1:26:43meadow with a stone stairway leading
1:26:45down into the earth
1:26:47and beneath a curtain in a chamber a
1:26:50golden throne and on it something
1:26:52enormous, a tree trunk of flesh with a
1:26:55single eye gazing upward.
1:26:57He heard his mother's voice say that
1:26:59this was the man-eater. He lay
1:27:01frightened for many nights afterward.
1:27:04The other scene from his boyhood is the
1:27:06vision of the cathedral.
1:27:09Jung tells that he was 12 walking home
1:27:11beneath a bright sky when the thought
1:27:14came of the cathedral of Basel, of the
1:27:16sun upon its new roof and of God sitting
1:27:19on his golden throne above the world.
1:27:22Then came a thought he was terrified to
1:27:24finish.
1:27:26He resisted for three days, tormented,
1:27:29and told no one. At last he understood
1:27:31that God was testing his obedience and
1:27:33that to refuse the thought would be the
1:27:35greatest sin.
1:27:36He let it come and he saw God upon his
1:27:39throne let fall an enormous turd that
1:27:41shattered the roof of the cathedral.
1:27:44Jung says that what followed was an
1:27:45indescribable relief and in his words,
1:27:48"Instead of damnation, grace had come
1:27:51upon him." Notice what he draws from it
1:27:53in his own telling.
1:27:55He writes that the experience taught him
1:27:57to obey the will of God and not to rely
1:27:59on the teaching he had been given.
1:28:02That is Jung's account and it is the
1:28:04account of a boy who had his private
1:28:06quarrel with the one he was told to
1:28:07trust and who found that the quarrel did
1:28:10not end in ruin. Here is where Answer to
1:28:12Job from 1952 comes in, and I will keep
1:28:16to what Jung argues there.
1:28:18He reads the incarnation as God's reply
1:28:20to Job.
1:28:22In his reading, God has wronged a man,
1:28:25and the wrong cannot be undone by a
1:28:27speech from a whirlwind. So, God must
1:28:29enter the human condition and suffer
1:28:32what the creature suffers. Jung is not
1:28:34reporting a doctrine here, but
1:28:36reinterpreting one. And theologians, as
1:28:38we saw earlier, objected strongly.
1:28:42But, the shape of the argument is close
1:28:45to the shape of the song.
1:28:47In both, the one above is not
1:28:49indifferent to the one below,
1:28:52and something is sent down to be
1:28:53forgotten in the dark,
1:28:55so that it might be remembered.
1:28:58I will say once more that the pairing is
1:29:01ours. Jung does not cite the Hymn of the
1:29:03Pearl in these places, and the song does
1:29:05not speak of a dark side of God.
1:29:08What they share is a direction, a
1:29:10movement of return, and the sense that
1:29:13the wanderer is awaited.
1:29:15If you have kept going alone, you may
1:29:17find that an image like that asks
1:29:19nothing of you tonight except to be
1:29:22heard and to be set beside your own long
1:29:24walk. There is one figure in these pages
1:29:27we have not yet let speak at length,
1:29:29and she is the one who stands nearest to
1:29:31the listener who has walked a long way
1:29:33alone.
1:29:35Her name is Sophia, which is the Greek
1:29:37word for wisdom,
1:29:38and in the Askew Codex, the book Mead
1:29:41translated as Pistis Sophia in 1921,
1:29:45she is a power of the upper world who
1:29:47falls.
1:29:49The text does not say she sinned out of
1:29:51malice. It says she looked toward the
1:29:53light that was higher than she could
1:29:54reach, desired it, and was drawn away
1:29:57from her own place into the darkness
1:29:59below, where the rulers of that region
1:30:02pressed upon her and took her power from
1:30:04her. In Mead's rendering, she cries out
1:30:06in the first of her repentances.
1:30:09And I will read a little of it as he
1:30:10gave it.
1:30:12I have seen the light and I have
1:30:13believed in it. Now, oh light of lights,
1:30:17I have been lifted up unto thee.
1:30:19And if thou wilt, oh light, save me.
1:30:22For I have fallen into this chaos. That
1:30:24is the sense of the opening and the text
1:30:26goes on in the voice of the Psalms.
1:30:28Because the author of the Pistis Sophia
1:30:30gives her words borrowed from the Odes
1:30:32and from the Psalms of David.
1:30:34And has the risen Jesus explain to his
1:30:36disciples that these old songs were
1:30:39really hers. Her repentances are 13 in
1:30:41number.
1:30:43And what strikes a reader is how little
1:30:45they resemble a confession of guilt in
1:30:46the ordinary sense.
1:30:48She says that she is oppressed.
1:30:50But a lion-faced power has devoured her
1:30:52strength.
1:30:53>> [music]
1:30:53>> That she is troubled and cannot find the
1:30:55way back.
1:30:57She says, in Mead's words,
1:30:59"I am afflicted in the matter
1:31:01and have not strength to go out of it."
1:31:04She does not accuse, but she also does
1:31:06not pretend that the place she has
1:31:08fallen into is just.
1:31:10She waits. She repeats her cry.
1:31:13And each time the light answers by
1:31:15sending something down.
1:31:17A power.
1:31:18A rescuer.
1:31:20At last, the savior himself.
1:31:23Who draws her up out of the chaos.
1:31:26And sets her feet on a rock to use the
1:31:28Psalms image.
1:31:30And gives her a new song.
1:31:33Notice who is absent from this story.
1:31:35There is no maker proclaiming that there
1:31:37is no other god. As Yaldabaoth does in
1:31:40the Apocryphon of John.
1:31:42The ignorant ruler is somewhere in the
1:31:43background. But the weight of the text
1:31:46falls on the one who fell and the long
1:31:48patience of her asking. The Gnostic
1:31:50teachers who told it,
1:31:52the Valentinians among them,
1:31:53also spoke of Sophia as the one whose
1:31:55suffering explains why the world is as
1:31:58it is.
1:31:59And so her story is, among other things,
1:32:02an answer to the grievance.
1:32:04Something went wrong above before any of
1:32:06us arrived,
1:32:08and the wrongness is not ours to carry
1:32:10alone.
1:32:12Now, Jung, in the closing chapters of
1:32:14Answer to Job, he turns to what he calls
1:32:16the figure of Sophia,
1:32:18the divine wisdom who, in the Hebrew
1:32:20books of Proverbs, Sirach, and the
1:32:22Wisdom of Solomon, stands beside God
1:32:24before the world is made as a kind of
1:32:26companion and delight.
1:32:29Jung argues that in the story he has
1:32:31been following, God has acted without
1:32:33this wisdom, and the cost fell on Job.
1:32:35The incarnation, in his reading, is the
1:32:38beginning of a repair, and the repair is
1:32:40not finished.
1:32:41He says that the work continues through
1:32:43the Holy Spirit in the lives of human
1:32:45beings, and that the Catholic Church
1:32:48had, in the dogma of the Assumption of
1:32:50Mary, made a decisive and surprising
1:32:52step. That dogma was defined by Pope
1:32:54Pius XII in 1950, only 2 years before
1:32:58Jung's book appeared.
1:33:00It declares that Mary, at the end of her
1:33:02earthly life, was taken up body and soul
1:33:05into heavenly glory. Jung said he
1:33:06regarded the definition as the most
1:33:08important religious event since the
1:33:10Reformation.
1:33:12We should be careful about what he
1:33:13meant.
1:33:15He was not affirming the miracle as a
1:33:16historical fact,
1:33:18and he was not speaking as a believer
1:33:20within the church. He was speaking as a
1:33:22psychologist who saw in the proclamation
1:33:24a symbol that the feminine, the bodily,
1:33:27and the earthly had at last been taken
1:33:29into the heavenly company,
1:33:31which had long been described in only
1:33:33masculine terms.
1:33:35In his own idiom, matter and the
1:33:37feminine were being admitted to the
1:33:39divine circle.
1:33:41That is Jung's reading, and it is a
1:33:43reinterpretation. The church's own
1:33:45teaching rests on tradition and on the
1:33:47faith of the people, not on his
1:33:49psychology.
1:33:51How did those who came before and after
1:33:53receive such images?
1:33:55The fathers who wrote against the
1:33:57Gnostics, Irenaeus in particular, were
1:34:00unsparing about the myth of a fallen
1:34:02Sophia. In Against Heresies, book one,
1:34:05he describes the Valentinian account of
1:34:07her passion
1:34:09and calls it an invention that places a
1:34:11fault inside the divine fullness itself,
1:34:14which he could not accept.
1:34:17For him, God lacks nothing, suffers no
1:34:20fall,
1:34:21and is not ignorant of himself. Later
1:34:23Catholic theologians who approved the
1:34:25assumption
1:34:26did not borrow from the Gnostic Sophia
1:34:28at all. They pointed to the ancient
1:34:30devotion to Mary, the feast kept in the
1:34:33East from the 6th century, and the long
1:34:35reflection of the church that the mother
1:34:37of Christ shared in his victory over
1:34:39death. Several of them, when they read
1:34:41Jung, answered that he had [music]
1:34:42mistaken a doctrine of grace for a
1:34:45symptom of the psyche.
1:34:47Others, including some who were
1:34:48sympathetic to him, said that he had at
1:34:51least noticed what [music] the faithful
1:34:52already felt,
1:34:54that something of the human and the
1:34:55maternal had always been present in
1:34:57worship.
1:34:59So, how might a modern reader take all
1:35:01this? I would suggest,
1:35:03and this is the channel's reading and
1:35:05not Jung's,
1:35:06that the two Sophias,
1:35:08the fallen one of the Askew Codex and
1:35:10the companion of the wisdom books that
1:35:12Jung invoked,
1:35:14are not the same figure
1:35:16and that we should not collapse them.
1:35:18The Gnostic text is a myth of rescue
1:35:21told by a community that believed the
1:35:23world itself was a wound. Jung's pages
1:35:25are an argument about what a tradition
1:35:27may have to include to be whole.
1:35:30What they share is a persistent human
1:35:31intuition that wisdom has been separated
1:35:34from the one who ought to hold her
1:35:36and that her return matters.
1:35:39Notice also what neither source does.
1:35:42Neither demands that you leave a faith
1:35:44in anger. The Pistis Sophia is a book of
1:35:47prayer cast in the language of the
1:35:49Psalms and Jung's last pages are those
1:35:52of a man who had spent his childhood
1:35:54quarreling with the God he was given,
1:35:56and ended by asking, with evident
1:35:58seriousness, how that God might be
1:36:00completed. One can disagree with either
1:36:03of them, as Irenaeus did, and as the
1:36:06theologians did.
1:36:07But what remains, when the controversy
1:36:10is settled,
1:36:11is a record of people asking honest
1:36:13questions of the one they had been
1:36:15taught to trust,
1:36:16and waiting,
1:36:18like Sophia in the chaos,
1:36:20for an answer that would not insult the
1:36:22asking. We began with a question,
1:36:25and it is fitting to come back to it
1:36:26now. If the one thing in you that you
1:36:28can never quite agree with turned out to
1:36:31be the very part of you that was telling
1:36:32the truth about the one you were taught
1:36:34to revere,
1:36:36would you go on walking beside it in
1:36:37silence,
1:36:39or would you finally ask it to speak?
1:36:42We have spent a long time with that
1:36:43walker,
1:36:44the one who goes on alone with a
1:36:46grievance against the one they were
1:36:47taught to trust. We have not tried to
1:36:50talk that person out of the grievance.
1:36:52We have tried to show that it has
1:36:53company,
1:36:55and that people far more learned and far
1:36:57more stubborn than most of us have
1:36:59carried it into books. So, let me gather
1:37:02what holding the two sources side by
1:37:04side has shown. On one side stands
1:37:07Jung's Answer to Job, written in 1951
1:37:11and published in 1952. On the other
1:37:13stands the Apocryphon of John, with its
1:37:16Yaldabaoth, the maker who says that he
1:37:18is God and that there is no other, and
1:37:21who does not know that a voice above him
1:37:23knows better.
1:37:25What the pairing showed is an image they
1:37:27share,
1:37:29a maker who does not know his own
1:37:31darkness. In the Apocryphon of John,
1:37:33that ignorance is told as myth,
1:37:36a drama of archons and of light that was
1:37:38borrowed and must be recovered.
1:37:41In Jung's book, it is told as a reading
1:37:43of the Book of Job, in which a God of
1:37:45terrible power wounds a blameless man
1:37:49and then answers from the whirlwind
1:37:50without ever addressing what Job asked.
1:37:53Jung argued that the god of that story
1:37:56was not conscious of his own
1:37:58contradiction.
1:37:59And that Job, who suffered and held to
1:38:02his integrity,
1:38:03knew more of the divine than the divine
1:38:06knew of itself. Yet, the purposes
1:38:07differ.
1:38:08And that difference matters as much as
1:38:11the likeness. The authors of the
1:38:12Apocryphon of John, as Irenaeus
1:38:15described the circles around them,
1:38:17offered a saving knowledge about where
1:38:19the world came from and how a soul might
1:38:21leave it.
1:38:23Jung, by his own account, offered
1:38:26nothing of the kind. In the preface to
1:38:28Answer to Job, he presented the book as
1:38:31an honest effort, the response of one
1:38:33person to a question that had pressed on
1:38:35him, and not as a doctrine to be
1:38:37believed.
1:38:38In his reply to Martin Buber, he said,
1:38:40in substance, that he was describing
1:38:42psychic experience as a physician, an
1:38:45empirical observer, and that he made no
1:38:47claim to know the nature of God himself.
1:38:49That is why the title of this video was
1:38:51answered in the chapter on Buber.
1:38:53The charge of Gnosticism rests on a real
1:38:56kinship of imagery.
1:38:58And Jung himself conceded how strongly
1:39:00those old images spoke to him
1:39:02in the Seven Sermons to the Dead, in
1:39:04Aion, and in the pages of Memories,
1:39:07Dreams, Reflections.
1:39:09But, it also meets a real difference of
1:39:10method. One tradition asked its
1:39:12followers to believe in a map of the
1:39:14heavens.
1:39:15The other asked its reader to look at
1:39:17what rose up in the mind and to take
1:39:19responsibility for it. It is worth
1:39:22recalling how Job's own argument ends
1:39:25because it ends quietly. In the 42nd
1:39:27chapter, after the whirlwind has spoken,
1:39:30Job says that he had heard of God by the
1:39:32hearing of the ear, but now his eye sees
1:39:35him, and he repents in dust and ashes.
1:39:38Readers have long disagreed about what
1:39:40that repentance means.
1:39:42The fathers heard patience and humility.
1:39:44Young heard something more ambiguous.
1:39:46A man who had been overwhelmed and had
1:39:48fallen silent. Not a man who had been
1:39:51answered.
1:39:52I will not settle that for you.
1:39:54I would only say that the argument does
1:39:56not end in a shout. It ends in a
1:39:58stillness.
1:39:59And the stillness is where a person
1:40:01begins to find out what they actually
1:40:03think.
1:40:05Which brings us back to the voice you
1:40:07keep walking beside.
1:40:09Nothing in Young or in the Gnostic texts
1:40:11obliges you to treat it as an enemy or
1:40:14as an oracle either.
1:40:16Young's counsel, read carefully, was
1:40:19closer to this.
1:40:20That what we refuse to look at in
1:40:22ourselves does not vanish but acts on us
1:40:25unseen.
1:40:26And that a grievance we have never
1:40:27spoken may govern us more than one we
1:40:30have examined. The texts do not hand you
1:40:32an answer.
1:40:34They show that the asking has a long
1:40:35history
1:40:37and that people have done it inside
1:40:38faith as often as outside it.
1:40:41So the question stays open
1:40:44as it should.
1:40:45You may decide that the voice deserves a
1:40:47hearing.
1:40:49And you may decide to wait. Either way,
1:40:52you now know you are not the first to
1:40:54walk this road.
1:40:55And that the road has been mapped in
1:40:57part
1:40:58by people who loved what they
1:41:00questioned. In the next video, we turn
1:41:02to the book Young kept in a locked
1:41:04cabinet for most of his life
1:41:06and take up why he kept the Red Book
1:41:08private
1:41:10and what is actually inside it.

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