The Book of Job begins with a terrible and apparently unanswerable problem. A good man suffers catastrophic loss, seemingly because of a wager made between God and Satan. Job loses his children, his possessions, his health and, perhaps most importantly, his confidence in the moral order of the world. His friends try to explain his suffering. Job refuses their explanations. He demands an answer from God. More than two thousand years later, C. G. Jung took up Job’s challenge in one of his most personal, provocative and controversial works, Answer to Job. The question of why human beings suffer runs throughout the book, but Jung goes considerably further. What does Job’s suffering reveal about God? And what happens when a human being finds himself morally at odds with the divine order itself?
Over six weeks we will read the Book of Job alongside Jung’s Answer to Job, allowing these two extraordinary texts to open a wider exploration of suffering, loss, meaning and the limits of explanation. At the centre of the programme is the experience of irrevocable loss: events after which life cannot simply be restored to what it was before. The death of someone we love is one form of such loss. Many others: the loss of a relationship, health, youth, innocence, faith, a future we had imagined, or a way of understanding ourselves and the world that can no longer be sustained.
We will consider what happens when the explanations we use to make suffering bearable cease to satisfy us. What are we entitled to protest? What happens when life appears to betray the assumptions upon which we have built it? How do we live when there is no possibility of returning to the person we were before? There may be experiences for which no satisfactory explanation is available. Job himself refuses the consolations offered to him by those who insist that his suffering must somehow make sense. His refusal, his anger, and his demand that God answer him are central to the story’s extraordinary psychological power.
Our concern will be what happens afterwards: how a person continues to live when something cannot be undone, and what new relationship to life might emerge from that knowledge.
Webinars are presented on Sundays. 4 pm London and 11:00 AM NYC.
