God and Satan

I just finished reading Jung’s “Answer to Job”. He said something that stuck with me in that book. To paraphrase: Perfection is incomplete and what is complete is not perfect at the same time. For that reason the perfection of God meant the incompleteness of God. The more perfect, loving, good etc, He became, the greater the role of Satan played, a vessel that began to fill with what the previously whole God was discarding.
Now, Jung does not say all that. He says much that makes little sense, but it was this part that resonated in me. Because I’ve always wondered as to why God went from the cause of all good and bad to only the exclusive cause of good and Satan the exclusive cause of evil. Formelly one could say that the religion was monotheistic: One God in eternity. But in the latter religion, where Satan is given his own realm of Fire and co-eternity, one wonders if Satan has not become a second god. Perhaps we are not talking polytheism but perhaps close to henotheism here. But is Satan a god?
Jung took Satan and Jesus as symbols of the warring sons: Cain and Abel. Only this time Abel gets the better part of the conflict. If Jesus is identified as an aspect of God, would not Satan also? Jung believed so.
Else, why would the potter battle his pottery? Why does He not simply smash it? Why is Satan given eternity instead of utter annihilation? Satan is seen falling from the sky in a ball of fire. Satan is locked forever away…is this but a hope. Why would Hell keep in what even Paradise could not keep out?
Satan is that trickster that forever tramples reason…darkens counsel. But is it a part of God himself? Is it, as Jesus, an aspect, albeit a darker aspect in the mind of God? Could the conflict of Jesus and Satan be but the conflict in the divine God-head? Could it be that God sits with Jesus sitting on one shoulder, perhaps His right shoulder and Satan sitting on the left one?

Comments and attempts at an answer are welcome.

Satan is awsome.

Satan is needed to keep the orderlies in line. Some think headmasters of orderlies are cool because they have the power to make you fear them.

A satanless world is one without the need for most religions. And to some this is too dangerous to conceive for fear of an imaginary chaos without him.

Satan is needed as much as God is needed in Christianity (for ex)

The shadow archetype in the Answer to Job, lies not so much in Satan, as it does in the dark side of Yaweh Himself.

Satan in the Book of Job is not so much the principle of evil, as he is the sly and manipulative prosecutor exposing the dark side of Yaweh.

For Jung, the journey to selfhood and self-realization is the union of opposites. The ‘good’ lies not so much in identification with what is seen as good from the relativist perspective of any particular human, but in a sense it lies in going beyond good and evil altogether.

Like two sides of a coin, good and evil after all are relative terms, co-dependants of each other.

Absolute value therefore must lie in transcending the moral world of the good and evil altogether.

For the dark side of life is an essential of existence too. Accepting the existence of those facets of ourself that are socially unacceptable, and amoral is as necessary as our rationality and our virtue.

For Jung also points out that it is in the shadowy netherworld of our dark side that the impetus towards creativity is born.

We are after all a reflection of God. To the extent that our conception of God is a true one then, the darkness of our own lives must be contained within God too.

Perhaps Jung’s analysis is right, and Job was the moral superior to Yaweh in the Book of Job.
But could it be that Jesus was correct too in stating that only God is good?

As Satan so adeptly points out in luring Yaweh into accepting his amoral wager, if we are to accept the truth of this adage of Jesus, the goodness of God must therefore lie beyond accepting the conventional morality of what is good and what is evil.

I can see that this Coyote is versed in psychology:

[b]O- Exactly. This answer is not new. His ways are not our ways and therefore His “good” is not what we take to be good. But if this is so then what is left but the irrational? What is left but misunderstanding? What is left for the righteous but to suffer without knowing why? Perhaps that is why the greatest commandment is to Love God, for then one can leave his own reason at the door. Love needs no reason… as if by Grace.

But that is another story…[/b]

Answer to Job is one of Jung’s most profound and provactive works. This also helps illumnate his psychology of wholeness. The comments he makes about the split in Christian conscious as exhibited in the Epistles of John are relevant to Christians today. I think that the way to unifed consciousness is available internally to Biblical Christianity. But it is often missed. Jung diagnoses a real problem that exists among the religious and the theology that it fosters.

Now, suffering was not new to the world of the jews and they, like Job’s friends, understood suffering as retaliation from God for their behaviour or, later, as the sounding, the testing, of righteousness. Jung points that out too, but then where is His omnisense? God knows the result of the experiment, or wager with the Devil, beforehand, so what is the use of making Job suffer?

The God of the Philosphers was, by definition, omniscient.
The personality of God in the book of Job-really in much of Scriptures- displays no such omniscience…(as far as I can recall?)

Omnisicence can only exist from a perspective that lies outside of time, or from the perspective of the fullness of time.
Scripture certainly would not deny God such an attribute, but at any given moment as Yaweh interacts with mankind, omniscience is not really a part of the literature. This is especially true for the Book of Job.

From within history, and, even if the history is a sacred history as is the Bible, Jung’s conception of God as essentially archetypal form wthout consciousness is more scripturally correct one.

Indeed, billions of years or random evolutionary processes do not reveal our Creator as essentialy conscious, but just the opposite.
It is only in relationship to man himself, that God becomes conscious, and becomes self-aware.
Man is truly the crown of creaton, for it is only in man, that God becomes conscious of Himself.

This, I think was Jung’s primary insight about God as pertaining to the Book of Job.

Job’s insight, on the other hand, was that the nature of creation was not just unknown, but in the end unknowable.

And how can you judge what you cannot fully understand?
More to the point, how can you condemn the creator without condemning your own life.

What comes across is the message that we cannot judge the Judge. That it is impossible to judge what occurs in Heaven when one cannot even judge what occurs on earth. If we understood completely what happened on earth, at our level, then perhaps we could understand His ways. And I think that is God’s point at the end of Job. God lists his tasks, His resume to remind Job of his limits of reason as well as power- an explanation already ventured by Job during the dialogue, but perhaps half-heartedly-- only now, in the presence of God does he beging to understand what before he only could imagine and guess at.

Like Sysyphus and his rock, with Jesus and his cross the acceptance of God is not at all half-hearted.
Not so much a question of faith, but love of life itself is its own reason.
Accepting capricious suffering need not negate the value of life, but to love life over and above even great suffering affirms life absolutely.

The Jewish perspective is interesting too, and at least as relevant to ancient Hebrew literature.

jewishworldreview.com/0105/fohrman12.php3
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  1. This idea is expressed nicely in another Midrashic comment made by the sages. We quoted their saying in Serpents of Desire, but it is worth calling attention to it again:

The Holy One, Blessed be He, said to man: I have created the Evil Inclination, and I have created Torah, its “tavlin”. If you take the “tavlin”, you will be fine; if not, you will be endangered… The word tavlin here is often translated as antidote, as if to suggest that the Evil Inclination is a sickness that must be cured, a cancer that must be gotten rid of. But that is not the literal meaning of the word tavlin. In Hebrew, tavlin actually means “spice” — the stuff you go into a supermarket and get to help you with dinner that night. The sages are in fact saying something remarkable. What is it that we put spice on? We put it on food, we put it on meat. If the Torah is spice, the Evil Inclination is food. Passion is the meat, the stuff of life itself. Torah is the spice that directs how it tastes. Without Torah, passion is bland — undirected, and ultimately dangerous. With Torah, passion is the dish of kings.

jewishworldreview.com/david/ … bel12.php3

Can the Evil Inclination really be classified as ‘very good’? It seems impossible! Rather, were it not for the Evil Inclination, a man would not build a house and would not marry a woman; he would not have children, and would not engage in business… (Bereishis Rabbah, 9:7).

So if the Evil Inclination is so good, why is it so bad?


That, I think is precisely what G-d was trying to explain to Cain in His speech.

The passions are not in and of themselves evil. They constitute a powerful life force, inherently benign, whose only “desire”, as it were, is to establish a relationship with you. They want to overflow, to give of themselves to you. But the power of these passions is awesome — and awesome power, when left raw and undirected, can indeed lead to great evil.

Quick reply:
Even if we suppose that at any given moment, or at least in Job, God was not fully omniscent, the author did not make this an issue. If this was the case then, as I said before, God’s answer to Job might have been more rational:
“I needed to see if indeed Satan was wrong about you…”
Yet what would that make of God? Another Doubting Thomas?

You say:

  • “Accepting capricious suffering need not negate the value of life, but to love life over and above even great suffering affirms life absolutely.”

Very Nietzschean, but unacceptable to a religion based, in the end, on a covenant between man and God. This is the point of jewish religion. No senseless suffering is affirmed. The sufferer must be unrighteous or rewarded. The righteous- those keeping their end of the bargain with God- by the dictates of the covenant should not be made to suffer. If they do then what is the point of it all. How shall we answer the writer of Ecclesiastes? Is it all indeed meaningless?
Capricious suffering may not negate the value of life directly, but certainly it’s meaning, and who knows if a meaningless life is valuable in the end.

But the Book of Job is an essential scripture for the Jewish religion too!
It places th covenenat in a new light.And is the point of this book really only to demonstrate that suffering is meaningless?

Perhaps so, but not necessarily so.
From the perspective of a system of appeasing God through sacrifice, and suffering/pleasure as a system of divine reward and punishment, the meaningless of suffering is indeed affirmed.

What other meanings suffering may have for us is left open-ended in the Book of Job certainly.
This however does not mean that we cannot affirm the meaningfullness of suffering in our own lives though.
For Nietazche suffering is affirmed as a good in that its overcoming leads to the aggrandizement of power, for Solomon, wisdom was gained through suffering.
For Job too, there came wisdom through suffering. His own suffering led him to seek for a deeper truth that his conventional religion would afford him.

We can see the seeds of ‘slave morality’.

Yes, what was God and good (Master morality) is now flipped on its head and labeled evil by slave morality. God then becomes only good… and not the supreme God.

Ahhh yes… Does god have freewill? Is Satan the embodiment of God’s ability to choose ‘other’ than good? How can God ONLY be good?..

In short, he can’t. There never was God.

If Satan and Jesus, Cain and Abel, are both reflections of aspects of the Godhead, and if if demonizing the unfavored son will inevitably to over-compensation aggrandizing his evil effect, it is crucial that we not make a god out of spiritual darkness, or make a devil out of our passions and desires and asocial tendencies.

For our passions (our “evil” tendencies) and desires are good too, and the source of life.

To quote:

But… to make passions the goal of life would lead to evil.

Alpha and Omega, God calls himself. But the Alpha is not the Omega, the source cannot be the goal.

The unconscious, powerful, creative processes of our Creation fulfill themselves by becoming directed by consciousness,and intelligence, a sense for justice and fairness, and all this only becomes a possibility with the advent of humanity.

It is humanity that introduces the possibility of making Creation a conscious process, with a set of value-driven goals.

A little more Jungian, a little less Nietzchean, perhaps this reformulation of the process of individuation might be a little more agreeable to the process of individuationm and to you as well?

I see that you were busy with replies.
First reply:

— But would it really be more rational to stray from the actual reality of Job’s suffering?
O- Not at all and that is the challenge to the spiritual man’s drive for, or towards, unity.

— The irrationality was in the ritualistic religion itself, which aimed at appeasing the wrath of God through sacrafice, and viewed suffering as a punishment for bad behavior.
O- The ritual is a natural development of religiousity extending itself in the culture. Ritual is not deadly in itself but when it closes itself from the influence of new developments of the religious spirit. Religiosity itself needs rituals as signs that transmit the soil of the past to the growth of the present.
That said, the problem of the righteous sufferer predated the Temple worship and certainly can be found in all articulations of a loving, omnipotent God to this day. Only a drive for completeness, as you find in the prophets that claim both good and evil in God- as Job himself does- can overcome such problem of evil. However, and this is Jung’s point, the end result, while complete, is not Perfect.
Martin Buber took a refreshing view of the matter and suggested the embrace of both our drives and our reason in the process of creation. Perhaps the same can be applied to God and a reassessment could be in order of God’s attributes. Perhaps it is time that we postulate Satan as God’s shadow that is reabsorbed onto The Creator. Not just an infinitely Loving God, but a God that is Master of the Satanic part of Himself- Who subjects both His Reason, His Word, and His Passion to Create.
Yet, this Unity, while possible and refreshing to the mind of thinkers such as Bubers, may not suffice the needs of the masses, the poor, the hungry, and Buber’s dream is more top-down than down-up the social scale. He still must answer what must be done with the undesirables within his little Utopia: Those who resist communism.

— This is what God rejected. He affirms Job’s experience of suffering. He affirms the reality that suffering and morality are only tangentially related at best.
O- Then God is disolving His own Commandments, His own Covenant as sent to Moses. The God os Moses is not the God of Job. He cannot be. For the God of Moses promises the removal of suffering and the reward of morality in this world.

— But the Book of Job is an essential scripture for the Jewish religion too!
It places th covenenat in a new light.And is the point of this book really only to demonstrate that suffering is meaningless?
O- In a way, yes. What you get is not not the negation of Job’s suffering: The jews were always too honest for that. Instead, it is the affirmation of mystery in God and His power. When God is God what matters our particular suffering? In the great scheme of things, it might ask, what is the value of our suffering? Shall the whole Universe stop it’s course to supplement the need of one? What then is the value of righteousness? Does the fact that one helps the poor and feeds the widow endow one with complete invulnerability to the vicicitudes of life? Immune to suffering because God will remove every rock from our parth that we may not stumble? These, seem to me, to be questions raised by the conclusion of Job. Job suffering is not denied- neither Job’s righteousness and integrity, but what is denied is the belief that God owed something to Job. Maybe the covenant places certain obligations on man, but, Job’s point, it can never place obligations on God.

— What other meanings suffering may have for us is left open-ended in the Book of Job certainly.
This however does not mean that we cannot affirm the meaningfullness of suffering in our own lives though.
For Nietazche suffering is affirmed as a good in that its overcoming leads to the aggrandizement of power, for Solomon, wisdom was gained through suffering.
For Job too, there came wisdom through suffering. His own suffering led him to seek for a deeper truth that his conventional religion would afford him.
O- So is that God’s answer to Job?
“I made you suffer that you may gain wisdom about Me.”

But I don’t see that. Instead, what I see, is Job as knowing just as much about God before his suffering- he questions and doubts his own desire for an audience with his God. God simply reaffirms his own fears that he was being foolish. What is the point of restituting all of Job’s loses, his health, heirs, wealth etc, when he was better served by his continued suffering?

What Job recieves from his suffering remains open-ended and undefined. One can only conjecture and marvel that Job remained true to life.

There is a saying that history is first experienced as trajedy, and then repeats itself as farce.

A cow may just be a cow, but sons and daughters are of irreplaceable value to virtually any father.
It would therefore be farcical to think that this restitution of Job’s wealth could in any way make up for what has been lost.

Their is a cruelty to our experience of the world of Spirit that is unfathomable.
Jobe however, demonstrates that the resilience of the human spirit is unfathomable too.

Job never does curse God and die. He accepts the capriciousness of God in his fullness, and he lives on, bearing his stigmata and unhealable wounds into his next life, no doubt as badges of honor.

Hello Coyote:

— The expectation seemed to be that fulfillment of the rites of sacrafice and ethical living would appease the wrath of diety. It is a form of magical thinking that motivates much religion even today.
The story of Job however, demonstrates that such an expectation is not empirically valid.
This is a huge problem for the Covenant, fora covenant is a legal document with contractual obligations for both sides.
O- Josiah Royce said it plainly, and I’ll paraphrase here, that given Job’s initial assumptions, the Problem of Suffering is indeed unsolvable. Some traditional attribute ends up in the dust-bin. The terms of the covenant are re-examined in Job. Two parties enter the covenant, but not on equal footing. The power of God makes the observation of the covenant His mercy, not His obligation, no matter how many times the psalmist wishes to assure himself otherwise.
But in the face of his problems, Job does not give in to the nihilism of Ecclesiastes. He “sees” God, whatever that may mean, and receives a hearing. No answer is given to Him other than to inform him of his limits of reason. How shall the finite reason with the infinite?
What other outcome could we contemplate? Job might as well had seen Zeus holding in his right hand The Scales of Fate, to which both god and man must submit, waiting to see how they will swing. Is that a better solution to Job? No.
Psalm 89 expresses the confusion, the frustration of the sufferer, but it ends, like Job, short of nihilism, short of accepting a reality governed by mere caprise that would utterly rob his existence of meaning and all possible purpose. Whether Job existed or not, or God for that matter, is not the central issue. But the message is one of renewal, of creation. His ordeal does not drive Job to suicide, but he continues to hope. Same with the Pslamist. Rather than simply give up his magical illusion, which is a useful illusion at times, he continues to wait on for another day to come in the optimist belief that God, in the end, however unfathomable His ways, is good.
Job’s ordeal might be considered a necessity.
God points to Job’s righteousness. Satan to the reasons for Job’s righteousness, none of which is God Himself. Job, by Satan’s efforts, is left with no other reason to praise God but for God’s own sake. I like the story because it shatters teleological explanations for being moral. Being good, moral etc, is not a means to an end but ends in themselves. God, seems to me, was correct in saying that Job was righteouss, but in ways that not even Job knew. Job was not righteous because he feed the poor and the widow, but for loving God, the poor, the widow, regardless of what this “got” for him.

— It would take some very sophisticated semantics to redefine perfect or omnibenevolent with the diety that is presented to us in Job.
O- Yet, if God is God, then all semiology and interpretation should, as a rule, fail. Don’t get me wrong. One should try, but one should not expect some universal truth revealed to him. I am sure that Job continued to redefine his conception of God, but his friends could not be told about what these were. They could not even be told that subjective condition Job was going through. After all, they question the very integrity of Job which is the root of his demands.

— The basic desire of the mainstream in religion is towards magic. It is toward appeasing the wrath of the deity and receiving the benefits of a deities grace throguh correct ritual, or correct belief, or placing oneself in a correct relationship wiht deity.
As such magic becomes less and less empirically valid through history, the emphasis shifts from God fulfilling the covenant in this life to abelief in covenenant fulfillment in the next.
It is a new covenant where perfection is deferred.
O- If God’s demand from man was heeded: Thou shall be holy-- would you need an afterlife? If people would do what Jesus did-- to love their neighbor as the would themselves-- would we not see his kingdom right now? The prophets and Jesus call for social justice, yet no one has ears to hear. They have divided the world between Caesar and God and His kingdom from the world. Yet not of that followed from scripture. Paul’s claim that no one is righteous was taken at face-value and elevated so that you needed an afterlife and a key to a kingdom far and away.
The kingdom of God is unconditional therefore not like the kingdoms of this.

— In a sense, Job becomes an athiest by the end of the book. the diety that he, his wife and his associates believed in before his travail disolves.
O- Only from the perspectives of priests busy at the Temple fire.

— When God reveals his face to be impenetrable mystery, Satan loses his wager.
For Job’s response is not to curse god and die, but to hold onto his truth, honor they Mystery.
O- I agree.

I enjoyed your ideas throughout this thread Omar, and learned something from this discussion.
Maybe, as a final comment for a bit, I’ll reflect on the below comment for a bit.

Jung focusses on the unconscious aspect of God becoming conscious, but in the end it was God who is more aware of the rigteousness of Job. To a greater extent that either Satan was, or even Job himself was, God knew the truth about his servant Job. Through his trials though, Job came to share God’s intuitive understanding of this righteousness that characterized Job’s life.

Certainly the ritual and the magical thinking serve as necessary signs to lead one down a path of righteousness before one is mature enough to understand. Through his suffering Job came to understand his own righteousness, and that being righteous for the sake of righteousness was its own reward. He was not compelled to be righteous for reward, or on threat of horrible pain and death, but acted in a righteous manner because righteousness was a part of his nature.

His desire was for righteousness.

Just as a final comment on Satan and God in Job, it is in God more than Satan that is the archetype of the shadow. Maybe Satan is like the scientist that proposes an experiment withouth fully regarding the ethical consequences, and there is an aspect of playing the part of the trickster as his wager ‘cons’ God into showing the malevolence of his hand as he strikes against Job time and again, but in the main Satan is a literary characterization for the ego, and for rational query.

God on the other hand is sheer terror. Even in his thundering answer to Job, there is only allusions to power and majesty and none to warmth or the value of kindness that are the hallmarks of moral thinking.
God seems the most fitting embodiment of the shadow archetype in this story.

But it is in Job that all aspects of the story become embodied into an archetype of the integrated self. His persona was the face of his society shared by his family and friends, peforming the required righteous behavior to maintain his position in the family and the society. His experience led to a broadening and a deppening of this social persona, and he owned his righteousness for its own sake.

Like Satan, his voice was also the voice of reason, rejecting what did not conform to his experience of reality, and persisting to question why such suffering could come about. To the very edge of nihilism and the void (but not beyond), Job persisted in seeking the truth.

And in the end, he accepted even the wrath and darkness and mystery of God too, and integrated even the irrational aspects of the human experience into his individuation process as well.

thanks for a good discussion on something I haven’t thought much about for a long while.

Nice reply Zealot! Fits the name.

The eternal nature of the human soul is a product of it’s divine origin. But “The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away;
may the name of the LORD be praised.”
The eternal quality of the soul is dependent on Him, not, as you seem to believe, something God has to put up with.

The concept of Satan and Hell is a defense mechanisum for people to stay fearful and keep going to church and giving up their money.

Interesting thought provoked thow. Does the concept of satan mirrior God? I mean is he just as powerful because he is the opposite?

Is ‘Satan’ really evil? I thought that he was one who was exiled because he loved God too much.

There are too many variations of Satan. Hell too. It went from fire and lava to cold ‘as hell’, and back again. Is hell even described in the Bible?