Living With Books

...Certainly American literature, in the period since James and Henry Adams, has found no adequate images for archetypal femininity...

...It presented God as a comic figure, who finally confessed apologetically to Job: "I was just showing off to the Devil, Job, as is set forth in chapters One and Two...

...No harm done...

...By contrast, MacLeish's conclusion is meager and minimal...

...It is Job who, in the conversation with the three comforters, upholds justice, individual human responsibility, the meaningfulness of guilt, the disinterestedness of love...

...Jung does not take the Book of Job as absolute, however, or any kind of final comment on our present situation...

...is better seen and heard, because of language and setting, it still needs to be read for full appreciation of the subtle equipose of its theodicy...

...Yet Job accepts, and will continue to love and be just...

...The play within a play, however, turns out to be no fiction...

...This problem obsessed Ivan in The Brothers Karama-zov...

...Jung feels free, therefore, to deal with their contents in thoroughly critical and almost Voltairean terms...

...needs to be seen and heard...

...MacLeish is far more serious than Robert Frost was in Frost's verse drama about Job...

...Jung's brilliant interpretation can hardly be summarized in a few paragraphs...

...I will give you new and better ones.'" Jung's early chapters on Job have much in common with MacLeish's J.B...

...By the testimony of our own imaginative literature, it is not clear that Americans continue to have the confidence in their history and their creative resourcefulness required for the vision of a social future which they will help choose and determine...

...J.B.'s wife returns to him, bringing a twig of forsythia, which had been growing gold among the ashes which completely covered the city...

...stepping in and out of his part, casts bitter, witty aspersions throughout the play on God's purposes and character...

...The doctrine of the Assumption, he says, has left "Protestantism with the odium of being nothing but a man's religion, which allows no metaphysical representation of woman...

...God is without Eros, impulsive, disregardful of his omniscience...

...But it has an imaginative boldness which does appreciative justice to the rich materials it interprets, and which, above all, gives a sense of "openness," of possibility, of strength and creativity in human transactions with the Divine, and hence in transactions among themselves...

...Nickles...

...The Incarnation is part of God's answer to Job, but for Jung it raises even more difficult questions unless it is understood as a stage in the development and differentiation of God's consciousness...

...For Jung, Jesus on the cross crying "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me...

...All the world is God's," he writes, "and God is in all the world from the very beginning...

...But no more than that...

...But if J.B...

...He takes the Behemoth as paragon of creation, and yet he must have man as collaborator and approver...

...Acceptance is harder for Sarah, Job or J.B.'s wife...

...Though more serious, MadLeish's drama confronts the same dilemma...

...The two circus men, though they continue to argue about their parts, soon come to realize that greater Presences are speaking through them...

...Even more than the Book of Job, the Revelation of St...

...If this he true, then in any effective sense, we have already ceased to survive...

...Jung is defining in another way the feeling which Henry Adams expressed in Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres...

...Jung sees feminine and reconciling elements at work, too, over the centuries, especially in the increasing ascendancy of the Virgin, who had been prefigured in the Sophia of the Old Testament...

...God is, of course, a creative force beyond human measure and judgment...

...It is a true picture of our present situation and of the human situation always...

...But, insofar as his testing of Job is an encounter of persons, then God, despite his magnificent rhetoric, comes off second best...

...It shifts somewhat arbitrarily from rhyme to alliteration to the phrasal patterns of Panic...

...Through his hypothesis of the archetypes—transcendental numinous forces which are unconscious yet act on the consciousness—Jung puts himself in an excellent strategic position for bold Biblical commentary...

...Job is not the man of Uz with his camels and oxen and she-asses...

...In Answer to Job (Routledge & Kegan Paul, $3.00), Carl Jung says of Yahweh: "If the mood takes him, he can play the feudal grand seigneur and generously recompense his bondslave for the havoc wrought in his wheat-fields...

...Frost's The Masque of Reason, full of puns and political allusions, touched very lightly on human suffering...

...John's vision concludes the Bible, but does not mark the end of a developing relationship with the Divine which has continued since his time...

...For Jung it represents one stage in a developing human relationship to the Divine...

...Indeed, this book is much wittier than most of his writing...

...To be judged properly as a play, J.B...

...On the other hand, since he holds that the religious visions are occasioned by entities which transcend the individual consciousness and are real, Jung can protest against charges that his analysis is reductive or lessens the meaning of that which he interprets...

...Yahweh at this stage is a God at odds with himself, trying to contend with Satan, his shadow, sometimes described as his son, sometimes as his own thoughts...

...The two views are brought together dramatically by improvising a play within a play in the manner of Pirandello...

...With it, for instance, in the sixth book of Virgil's Roman and religious epic, Aeneas descended into the underworld of the unconscious, and there, confronting the shades of the past, was given the vision of a universal future which his courage and specific purposiveness should create...

...A pair of broken-down actors, sunk to selling balloons and popcorn in the circus, are shown alone in a corner of the deserted main tent, which is also the universe...

...John of Patmos describes a "veritable orgy of hatred, wrath, vindictiveness, and blind destructiveness the destruction of all beauty and of all life's joys, the unspeakable suffering of the whole of creation that once sprang from the hand of a lavish Creator...

...He is a prosperous, modern New Englander who sees his beloved children die a succession of cruel, unnecessary deaths, and all the life around him burned to ashes in an only-too-believable atomic disaster...

...John speaks to our present world fears...

...Why is human sacrifice necessary...

...Do you mind...

...Though they are awed by their roles, they debate them back and forth as they play them...

...Moreover, like most of his writing, it makes free use of a psychoanalytic logic in which entities which resemble each other in any respect, or which are caused one by another, or which are opposite one another, may be treated as identities...

...Named suggestively Zuss and Nickles, they decide to act, in masks, the roles of God and Satan in the Book of Job...

...The golden bough might evoke much more...

...Certainly the interpretation is an extremely daring one...

...repeats on a higher level the situation of Job...

...God transcends Job's values, but also violates them, and demands at the end that Job behold the subhuman Behemoth, rather than any spectacle of love or justice...

...The man and his wife survive, work, start over again as isolated representatives of mankind in general...

...On the printed page, the verse is not often impressive...

...It is like the abstract rhetoric of Faulkner's Nobel Prize address which also promised man mere general survival...

...Her children have been brutally killed with God's foreknowledge and consent: "They are Dead and they were innocent: I will not let you sacrifice their deaths To make injustice justice and God good...

...In the last book of the Christian Bible, Revelation, the unreconciled antinomies in the Divine nature find their most dramatic expression...

...by Archibald MacLeish (Houghton Mifflin, $3.50) treats the Book of Job in two ways: It is an absurd, archaic encounter between God and Satan, to be re-enacted with ironic modern asides...

...Jung begins with Job "because of the shattering emotion that the unvarnished spectacle of divine savagery and ruthlessness produces in us...

...Frequently there are reminiscences of MacLeish's early poems or those of his contemporaries, especially Auden and Eliot...

...So you have lost your sons and daughters...

...For him the conscious images in religious visions are thoroughly human products, not the same as the transcendental entities to which they refer and which evoke them...

...Why, then, the tour de force of the Incarnation...

...It seems to be Job who forgives and God who needs forgiveness...