Before turning to the question of how the germ of unrest developed further, we must turn back to the time when the Book of Job was written. Unfortunately the dating is uncertain. It is generally assumed that it was written between 600 and 300 B.C. — not too far away, therefore, from the time of the Book of Proverbs (4th to 3rd century). Now in Proverbs we encounter a symptom of Greek influence which, if an earlier date is assigned to it, reached the Jewish sphere of culture through Asia Minor and, if a later date, through Alexandria. This is the idea of Sophia, or the Sapientia Dei, who is a coeternal and more or less hypostatized pneuma of feminine nature that existed before the Creation:
The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way,
before his works of old.
I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning,
or ever the earth was.
When there were no depths, I was brought forth;
when there were no fountains abounding with water.
When he established the heavens, I was there,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was by him, as a master workman,
and I was his delight,
rejoicing always before him,
rejoicing in his habitable earth;
and my delights were with the sons of men.
[Proverbs 8 : 22-24 (AV), 27, 29-31 (AV, modified)]
This Sophia, who already shares certain essential qualities with the Johannine Logos, is on the one hand closely associated with the Hebrew Chochma, but on the other hand goes so far beyond it that one can hardly fail to think of the Indian Shakti. Relations with India certainly existed at that time (the time of the Ptolemys). A further source is the Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach, or Ecclesiasticus, written around 200 B.C. Here Wisdom says of herself:
I came out of the mouth of the most High,
and covered the earth as a cloud.
I dwelt in high places,
and my throne is in a cloudy pillar.
I alone encompassed the circuit of heaven,
and walked in the bottom of the deep.
I had power over the waves of the sea, and over all the
earth,
and over every people and nation.
He created me from the beginning before the world,
and I shall never fail.
In the holy tabernacle I served before him;
and so was I established in Sion.
Likewise in the beloved city he gave me rest,
and in Jerusalem was my power,
I was exalted like a cedar in Libanus,
and as a cypress tree upon the mountains of Hermon.
I was exalted like a palm tree in En-gaddi,
and as a rose plant in Jericho,
as a fair olive tree in a pleasant field,
and grew up as a plane tree by the water.
I gave a sweet smell like cinnamon and aspalathus,
and I yielded a pleasant odour like the best myrrh . . .
As the turpentine tree I stretched out my branches,
and my branches are the branches of honour and grace.
As the vine brought I forth pleasant savour,
and my flowers are the fruit of honour and riches.
I am the mother of fair love,
and fear, and knowledge, and holy hope:
I therefore, being eternal, am given to all my children which are chosen of him.
[Ecclesiasticus 24 : 3-18 (AV, modified)]
It is worth while to examine this text more closely. Wisdom describes herself, in effect, as the Logos, the Word of God ("I came out of the mouth of the most High"). As Ruach, the spirit of God, she brooded over the waters of the beginning. Like God, she has her throne in heaven. As the cosmogonic Pneuma she pervades heaven and earth and all created things. She corresponds in almost every feature to the Logos of St. John. We shall see below how far this connection is also important as regards content.
She is the feminine numen of the "metropolis" par excellence, of Jerusalem the mother-city. She is the mother-beloved, a reflection of Ishtar, the pagan city-goddess. This is confirmed by the detailed comparison of Wisdom with trees, such as the cedar, palm, terebinth ("turpentine- tree"), olive, cypress, etc. All these trees have from ancient times been symbols of the Semitic love- and mother-goddess. A holy tree always stood beside her altar on high places. In the Old Testament oaks and terebinths arc oracle trees. God or angels arc said to appear in or beside trees. David consulted a mulberry-tree oracle. The tree in Babylon represented Tammuz, the son-lover, just as it represented Osiris, Adonis, Attis, and Dionysus, the young dying gods of the Near East. All these symbolic attributes also occur in the Song of Songs, as characteristics of the sponsus as well as the sponsa. The vine, the grape, the vine flower, and the vineyard play a significant role here. The Beloved is like an apple-tree; she shall come down from the mountains (the cult places of the mother-goddess), "from the lions' dens, from the mountains of the leopards"; her womb is "an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits, camphire with spikenard, spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense, myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices." Her hands "dropped with myrrh" (Adonis, we may remember, was born of the myrrh). Like the Holy Ghost, Wisdom is given as a gift to the elect, an idea that is taken up again in the doctrine of the Paraclete.
The pneumatic nature of Sophia as well as her world- building Maya character come out still more clearly in the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon. "For wisdom is a loving spirit," "kind to man." She is "the worker of all things," "in her is an understanding spirit, holy." She is "the breath of the power of God," "a pure effluence flowing from the glory of the Almighty," 5I "the brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God," 55 a being "most subtil," who "passeth and goeth through all things by reason of her pureness." 5G She is "conversant with God," and "the Lord of all things himself loved her." "Who of all that are is a more cunning workman than she?" She is sent from heaven and from the throne of glory as a "Holy Spirit." As a psychopomp she leads the way to God and assures immortality.
The Wisdom of Solomon is emphatic about God's justice and, probably not without pragmatic purpose, ventures to sail very close to the wind: "Righteousness is immortal, but ungodly men with their works and words call death upon themselves." The unrighteous and the ungodly, however, say:
Let us oppress the poor righteous man,
let us not spare the widow,
nor reverence the ancient gray hairs of the aged.
Let our strength be the law of justice:
for that which is feeble is found to be nothing worth.
Therefore let us lie in wait for the righteous;
because , . . he upbraideth us with our offending
the law,
and objecteth to our infamy. . , ,
He professeth to have the knowledge of God;
and he calleth himself the child of the Lord,
He was made to reprove our thoughts.
Let us see if his words be true:
and let us prove what shall happen in the end of him.
Let us examine him with despitefulness and torture,
that we may know his meekness, and prove his patience.
Where did we read but a short while before: "And the Lord said to Satan, Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil? He still holds fast his integrity, although you moved me against him, to destroy him without cause"? "Wisdom is better than might," saith the Preacher.
Not from mere thoughtfulness and unconsciousness, but from a deeper motive, the Wisdom of Solomon here touches on the sore spot. In order to understand this more fully, we would have to find out in what sort of relation the Book of Job stands to the change that occurred in the status of Yahweh at about the same time, i.e., its relation to the appearance of Sophia. It is not a question of literary history, but of Yahweh's fate as it affects man. From the ancient records we know that the divine drama was enacted between God and his people, who were betrothed to him, the masculine dynamis, like a woman, and over whose faithfulness he watched jealously. A particular instance of this is Job, whose faithfulness is subjected to a savage test. As I have said, the really astonishing thing is how easily Yahweh gives in to the insinuations of Satan. If it were true that he trusted Job perfectly, it would be only logical for Yahweh to defend him, unmask the malicious slanderer, and make him pay for his defamation of God's faithful servant. But Yahweh never thinks of it, not even after Job's innocence has been proved. We hear nothing of a rebuke or disapproval of Satan. Therefore, one cannot doubt Yahweh's connivance. His readiness to deliver Job into Satan's murderous hands proves that he doubts Job precisely because he projects his own tendency to unfaithfulness upon a scapegoat. There is reason to suspect that he is about to loosen his matrimonial ties with Israel but hides this intention from himself. This vaguely suspected unfaithfulness causes him, with the help of Satan, to seek out the unfaithful one, and he infallibly picks on the most faithful of the lot, who is forthwith subjected to a gruelling test. Yahweh has become unsure of his own faithfulness.
At about the same time, or a little later, it is rumoured what has happened: he has remembered a feminine being who is no less agreeable to him than to man, a friend and playmate from the beginning of the world, the first-born of all God's creatures, a stainless reflection of his glory and a master workman, nearer and dearer to his heart than the late descendants of the protoplast, the original man, who was but a secondary product stamped in his image. There must be some dire necessity responsible for this anamnesis of Sophia: things simply could not go on as before, the "just" God could not go on committing injustices, and the "Omniscient" could not behave any longer like a clueless and thoughtless human being. Self-reflection becomes an imperative necessity, and for this Wisdom is needed. Yahweh has to remember his absolute knowledge; for, if Job gains knowledge of God, then God must also learn to know himself. It just could not be that Yahweh's dual nature should become public property and remain hidden from himself alone. Whoever knows God has an effect on him. The failure of the attempt to corrupt Job has changed Yahweh's nature.
We shall now proceed to reconstruct, from the hints given in the Bible and from history, what happened after this change. For this purpose we must turn back to the time of Genesis, and to the protoplast before the Fall. He, Adam, produced Eve, his feminine counterpart, from his rib with the Creator's help, in the same way as the Creator had produced the hermaphroditic Adam from the prima materia and, along with him, the divinely stamped portion of humanity, namely the people of Israel and the other descendants of Adam. 04 Mysteriously following the same pattern, it was bound to happen that Adam's first son, like Satan, was an evildoer and murderer before the Lord, so that the prologue in heaven was repeated on earth. It can easily be surmised that this was the deeper reason why Yahweh gave special protection to the unsuccessful Cain, for he was a faithful reproduction of Satan in miniature. Nothing is said about a prototype of the early-departed Abel, who was dearer to God than Cain, the go-ahead husbandman (who was no doubt instructed in these arts by one of Satan's angels). Perhaps this prototype was another son of God of a more conservative nature than Satan, no rolling stone with a fondness for new and black-hearted thoughts, but one who was bound to the Father in childlike love, who harboured no other thoughts except those that enjoyed paternal approval, and who dwelt in the inner circle of the heavenly economy. That would explain why his earthly counterpart Abel could so soon "hasten away from the evil world," in the words of the Book of Wisdom, and return to the Father, while Cain in his earthly existence had to taste to the full the curse of his progressiveness on the one hand and of his moral inferiority on the other.
If the original father Adam is a copy of the Creator, his son Cain is certainly a copy of God's son Satan, and this gives us good reason for supposing that God's favourite, Abel, must also have his correspondence in a "supra- celestial place." The ominous happenings that occur right at the beginning of a seemingly successful and satisfactory Creation — the Fall and the fratricide — catch our attention, and one is forced to admit that the initial situation, when the spirit of God brooded over the tohubohu, hardly permits us to expect an absolutely perfect result. Furthermore the Creator, who found every other day of his work "good," failed to give good marks to what happened on Monday. He simply said nothing — a circumstance that favours an argument from silence! What happened on that day was the final separation of the upper from the lower waters by the interposed "plate" of the firmament.
It is clear that this unavoidable dualism refused, then as later, to fit smoothly into the concept of monotheism, because it points to a metaphysical disunity. This split, as we know from history, had to be patched up again and again through the centuries, concealed and denied. It had made itself felt from the very beginning in Paradise, through a strange inconsequence which befell the Creator or was put over on him. Instead of following his original programme of letting man appear on the last day as the most intelligent being and lord of all creatures, he created the serpent who proved to be much more intelligent and more conscious than Adam, and, in addition, had been created before him. We can hardly suppose that Yahweh would have played such a trick on himself; it is far more likely that his son Satan had a hand in it. He is a trickster and spoilsport who loves nothing better than to cause annoying accidents. Although Yahweh had created the reptiles before Adam, they were common or garden snakes, highly unintelligent, from among whom Satan selected a tree-snake to use as his disguise. From then on the rumour spread that the snake was "the most spiritual animal." Later the snake became the favourite symbol of the Nous, received high honours and was even permitted to symbolize God's second son, because the latter was interpreted as the world-redeeming Logos, which frequently appears as identical with the Nous. A legend of later origin maintains that the snake in the Garden of Eden was Lilith, Adam's first wife, with whom he begot a horde of demons. This legend likewise supposes a trick that can hardly have been intended by the Creator. Consequently, the Bible knows only of Eve as Adam's legitimate wife. It nevertheless remains a strange fact that the original man who was created in the image of God had, according to tradition, two wives, just like his heavenly prototype.
Just as Yahweh is legitimately united with his wife Israel, but has a feminine pneuma as his intimate playmate from all eternity, so Adam first has Lilith (the daughter or emanation of Satan) to wife, as a Satanic correspondence to Sophia. Eve would then correspond to the people of Israel. We naturally do not know why we should hear at such a late date that the Ruach Elohim, the "spirit of God," is not only feminine but a comparatively independent being who exists side by side with God, and that long before the marriage with Israel Yahweh had had relations with Sophia. Nor do we know why, in the older tradition, the knowledge of this first alliance had been lost. Likewise it was only quite late that one heard of the delicate relationship between Adam and Lilith. Whether Eve was as troublesome a wife for Adam as the children of Israel, who were perpetually flirting with unfaithfulness, were for Yahweh, is equally dark to us. At any rate the family life of our first parents was not all beer and skittles: their first two sons are a typical pair of hostile brothers, for at that time it was apparently still the custom to live out mythological motifs in reality. (Nowadays this is felt to be objectionable and is denied whenever it happens.) The parents can share the blame for original sin: Adam has only to remember his demon-princes, and Eve should never forget that she was the first to fall for the wiles of the serpent. Like the Fall, the Cain-Abel intermezzo can hardly be listed as one of Creation's shining successes. One must draw this conclusion because Yahweh himself did not appear to be informed in advance of the above- mentioned incidents. Here as later there is reason to suspect that no conclusions were ever drawn from Omniscience: Yahweh did not consult his total knowledge and was accordingly surprised by the result. One can observe the same phenomenon in human beings, wherever in fact people cannot deny themselves the pleasure of their emotions. It must be admitted that a fit of rage or a sulk has its secret attractions. Were that not so, most people would long since have acquired a little wisdom.
From this point of view we may be in a better position to understand what happened to Job. In the pleromatic or (as the Tibetans call it) Bardo state, there is a perfect interplay of cosmic forces, but with the Creation — that is, with the division of the world into distinct processes in space and time — events begin to rub and jostle one an- other. Covered by the hem of the paternal mantle, Satan soon starts putting a right touch here and a wrong touch there, thus giving rise to complications which were apparently not intended in the Creator's plan and which come as surprises. While unconscious creation — animals, plants, and crystals — functions satisfactorily so far as we know, things are constantly going wrong with man. At first his consciousness is only a very little higher than that of the animals, for which reason his freedom of will is also extremely limited. But Satan takes an interest in him and experiments with him in his own way, leading him into all sorts of wickedness while his angels teach him the arts and sciences, which until now had been reserved for the perfection of the pleroma. (Even in those days Satan would have merited the name of "Lucifer"!) The peculiar, unforeseen antics of men arouse Yahweh's wrath and thereby involve him in his own creation. Divine interventions become a compelling necessity. Irritatingly enough, they only meet with temporary success. Even the Draconian punishment of drowning all life with a few choice exceptions (a fate which, according to old Johann Jacob Scheuchzer on the evidence of the fossils, not even the fishes escaped), had no lasting effect. Creation remained just as tainted as before. The strange thing is that Yahweh invariably seeks the reason for this in man, who apparently refuses to obey, but never in his son, the father of all tricksters. This false orientation cannot fail to exasperate his already touchy nature, so that fear of God is regarded by man in general as the principle and even as the beginning of all wisdom. While mankind tried, under this hard discipline, to broaden their consciousness by acquiring a modicum of wisdom, that is, a little foresight and reflection, it is clear from the historical development that Yahweh had lost sight of his pleromatic co-existence with Sophia since the days of the Creation. Her place was taken by the covenant with the chosen people, who were thus forced into the feminine role. At that time the people consisted of a patriarchal society in which women were only of secondary importance. God's marriage with Israel was therefore an essentially masculine affair, something like the founding of the Greek polls, which occurred about the same time. The inferiority of women was a settled fact. Woman was regarded as less perfect than man, as Eve's weakness for the blandishments of the serpent amply proved. Perfection is a masculine desideratum, while woman inclines by nature to complete- ness. And it is a fact that, even today, a man can stand a relative state of perfection much better and for a longer period than a woman, while as a rule it does not agree with women and may even be dangerous for them. If a woman strives for perfection she forgets the complementary role of completeness, which, though imperfect by itself, forms the necessary counterpart to perfection. For, just as completeness is always imperfect, so perfection is always incomplete, and therefore represents a final state which is hopelessly sterile. "Ex perfecto nihil fit," say the old masters, whereas the imperfection carries within it the seeds of its own improvement. Perfectionism always ends in a blind alley, while completeness by itself lacks selective values.
At the bottom of Yahweh's marriage with Israel is a perfectionist intention which excludes that kind of relatedness we know as "Eros/' The lack of Eros, of relationship to values, is painfully apparent in the Book of Job: the paragon of all creation is not a man but a monster! Yahweh has no Eros, no relationship to man, but only to a purpose man must help him fulfill. But that does not prevent him from being jealous and mistrustful like any other husband, though even here he has his purpose in mind and not man.
The faithfulness of his people becomes the more important to him the more he forgets Wisdom. But again and again they slip back into unfaithfulness despite the many proofs of his favour. This behaviour naturally does nothing to mollify Yahweh's jealousy and suspicions, hence Satan's insinuations fall on fertile ground when he drips his doubt about Job's faithfulness into the paternal ear. Against his own convictions Yahweh agrees without any hesitation to inflict the worst tortures on him. One misses Sophia's "love of mankind" more than ever. Even Job longs for the Wisdom which is nowhere to be found.
Job marks the climax of this unhappy development. He epitomizes a thought which had been maturing in mankind about that time — a dangerous thought that makes great demands on the wisdom of gods and men. Though conscious of these demands, Job obviously does not know enough about the Sophia who is coeternal with God. Because man feels himself at the mercy of Yahweh's capricious will, he is in need of wisdom; not so Yahweh, who up to now has had nothing to contend with except man's nothingness. With the Job drama, however, the situation undergoes a radical change. Here Yahweh comes up against a man who stands firm, who clings to his rights until he is compelled to give way to brute force. He has seen God's face and the unconscious split in his nature. God was now known, and this knowledge went on working not only in Yahweh but in man too. Thus it was the men of the last few centuries before Christ who, at the gentle touch of the pre-existent Sophia, compensate Yahweh and his attitude, and at the same time complete the anamnesis of Wisdom. Taking a highly personified form that is clear proof of her autonomy, Wisdom reveals her- self to men as a friendly helper and advocate against Yahweh, and shows them the bright side, the kind, just, and amiable aspect of their God.
At the time when Satan's practical joke with the snake compromised the paradise that was planned to be perfect, Yahweh banished Adam and Eve, whom he had created as images of his masculine essence and its feminine emanation, to the extraparadisal world, the limbo of "shards." It is not clear how much of Eve represents Sophia and how much of her is Lilith. At any rate Adam has priority in every respect. Eve was taken out of his body as an afterthought. I mention these details from Genesis only because the reappearance of Sophia in the heavenly regions points to a coming act of creation. She is indeed the "master workman"; she realizes God's thoughts by clothing them in material form, which is the prerogative of all feminine beings. Her coexistence with Yahweh signifies the perpetual hieros gamos from which worlds are begotten and born. A momentous change is imminent: God desires to regenerate himself in the mystery of the heavenly nuptials — as the chief gods of Egypt had done from time immemorial — and to become man. For this he uses the Egyptian model of the god's incarnation in Pharaoh, which in its turn is but a copy of the eternal hieros gamos in the pleroma. It would, however, be wrong to suppose that this archetype is merely repeating itself mechanically. So far as we know, this is never the case, since archetypal situations only return when specifically called for. The real reason for God's becoming man is to be sought in his encounter with Job. Later on we shall deal with this question in more detail.
IV
Just as the decision to become man apparently makes use of the ancient Egyptian model, so we can expect that the process itself will follow certain prefigurations. The approach of Sophia betokens a new creation. But this time it is not the world that is to be changed; rather it is God who intends to change his own nature. Mankind is not, as before, to be destroyed, but saved. In this decision we can discern the "philanthropic" influence of Sophia: no new human beings are to be created, but only one, the God-man. For this purpose a contrary procedure must be employed. The Second Adam shall not, like the first, proceed directly from the hand of the Creator, but shall be born of a human woman. So this time priority falls to the Second Eve, not only in a temporal sense but in a material sense as well. On the basis of the so-called Proto-Evangelium, the Second Eve corresponds to "the woman and her seed" mentioned in Genesis 3 : 15, which shall bruise the serpent's head. And just as Adam was believed to be originally hermaphroditic, so "the woman and her seed"' are thought of as a human pair, as the Queen of Heaven and Mother of God and as the divine son who has no human father. Thus Mary, the virgin, is chosen as the pure vessel for the coming birth of God. Her independence pf the male is emphasized by her virginity as the sine qua non of the process. She is a "daughter of God" who, as a later dogma will establish, is distinguished at the outset by the privilege of an immaculate conception and is thus free from the taint of original sin. It is therefore evident that she belongs to the state before the Fall. This posits a new beginning. The divine immaculateness of her status makes it immediately clear that she not only bears the image of God in undiminished purity, but, as the bride of God, is also the incarnation of her prototype, namely Sophia. Her love of mankind, widely emphasized in the ancient writings, suggests that in this newest creation of his Yahweh has allowed himself to be extensively influenced by Sophia. For Mary, the blessed among women, is a friend and intercessor for sinners, which all men are. Like Sophia, she is a mediatrix who leads the way to God and assures man of immortality. Her Assumption is therefore the prototype of man's bodily resurrection. As the bride of God and Queen of Heaven she holds the place of the Old Testament Sophia.
Remarkable indeed are the unusual precautions which surround the making of Mary: immaculate conception, extirpation of the taint of sin, everlasting virginity. The Mother of God is obviously being protected against Satan's tricks. From this we can conclude that Yahweh has consulted his own omniscience, for in his omniscience there is a clear knowledge of the perverse intentions which lurk in the dark son of God. Mary must at all costs be protected from these corrupting influences. The inevitable consequence of all these elaborate protective measures is something that has not been sufficiently taken into account in the dogmatic evaluation of the Incarnation: her freedom from original sin sets Mary apart from mankind in general, whose common characteristic is original sin and there- fore the need of redemption. The status ante laps urn is tantamount to a paradisal, i.e., plerornatic and divine, existence. By having these special measures applied to her, Mary is elevated to the status of a goddess and consequently loses something of her humanity: she will not conceive her child in sin, like all other mothers, and therefore he also will never be a human being, but a god. To my knowledge at least, no one has ever perceived that this queers the pitch for a genuine Incarnation of God, or rather, that the Incarnation was only partially consummated. Both mother and son are not real human beings at all, but gods.
This arrangement, though it had the effect of exalting Mary's personality in the masculine sense by bringing it closer to the perfection of Christ, was at the same time injurious to the feminine principle of imperfection or completeness, since this was reduced by the perfectionist tendency to the little bit of imperfection that still distinguishes Mary from Christ. Phoebo propior lumina perdit! Thus the more the feminine ideal is bent in the direction of the masculine, the more the woman loses her power to compensate the masculine striving for perfection, and a typically masculine, ideal state arises which, as we shall see, is threatened with an enantiodromia. No path leads beyond perfection into the future — there is only a turning back, a collapse of the ideal, which could easily have been avoided by paying attention to the feminine ideal of completeness. Yahweh's perfectionism is carried over from the Old Testament into the New, and despite all the recognition and glorification of the feminine principle this never prevailed against the patriarchal supremacy. We have not, therefore, by any means heard the last of it.
The older son of the first parents was corrupted by Satan and not much of a success. He was an eidolon of Satan, and only the younger son, Abel, was pleasing to God. In Cain the God-image was distorted, but in Abel it was considerably less dimmed. If Adam is thought of as a copy of God, then God's successful son, who served as a model for Abel (and about whom, as we have seen, there are no available documents), is the prefiguration of the God-man. Of the latter we know positively that, as the Logos, he is preexistent and coeternal with God, indeed of the same substance (opoovvios) as he. One can therefore regard Abel as the imperfect prototype of God's son who is about to be begotten in Mary. Just as Yahweh originally undertook to create a chthonic equivalent of himself in the first man, Adam, so now he intends something similar, but much better. The extraordinary precautionary measures above-mentioned are designed to serve this purpose. The new son, Christ, shall on the one hand be a chthonic man like Adam, mortal and capable of suffering, but on the other hand he shall not be, like Adam, a mere copy, but God himself, begotten by him- self as the Father, and rejuvenating the Father as the Son. As God he has always been God, and as the son of Mary, who is plainly a copy of Sophia, he is the Logos (synonymous with Nous), who, like Sophia, is a master workman, as stated by the Gospel according to St. John. This identity of mother and son is borne out over and over again in the myths.
Although the birth of Christ is an event that occurred but once in history, it has always existed in eternity. [John 1:3: "All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made."] For the layman in these matters, the identity of a nontemporal, eternal event with a unique historical occurrence is something that is extremely difficult to conceive. He must, how- ever, accustom himself to the idea that "time" is a relative concept and needs to be complemented by that of the "simultaneous" existence, in the Bardo or pleroma, of all historical processes. What exists in the pleroma as an eternal process appears in time as an aperiodic sequence, that is to say, it it repeated many times in an irregular pat- tern. To take but one example: Yahweh had one good son and one who was a failure. Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, correspond to this prototype, and so, in all ages and in all parts of the world, does the motif of the hostile brothers, which in innumerable modern variants still causes dissension in families and keeps the psychotherapist busy. Just as many examples, no less instructive, could be found for the two women prefigured in eternity. When these things occur as modern variants, therefore, they should not be regarded merely as personal episodes, moods, or chance idiosyncrasies in people, but as fragments of the pleromatic process itself, which, broken up into individual events occurring in time, is an essential component or aspect of the divine drama.
When Yahweh created the world from his prima materia, the "Void," he could not help breathing his own mystery into the Creation which is himself in every part, as every reasonable theology has long been convinced. From this comes the belief that it is possible to know God from his Creation. When I say that he could not help doing this, I do not imply any limitation of his omnipotence; on the contrary, it is an acknowledgment that all possibilities are contained in him, and that there are in consequence no other possibilities than those which express him.
All the world is God's, and God is in all the world from the very beginning. Why, then, the tour de force of the Incarnation? one asks oneself, astonished. God is in everything already, and yet there must be something missing if a sort of second entrance into Creation has now to be staged with so much care and circumspection. Since Creation is universal, reaching to the remotest stellar galaxies, and since it has also made organic life infinitely variable and capable of endless differentiation, we can hardly see where the defect lies. The fact that Satan has everywhere intruded his corrupting influence is no doubt regrettable for many reasons, but it makes no difference in principle. It is not easy to give an answer to this question. One would like to say that Christ had to appear in order to deliver mankind from evil. But when one considers that evil was originally slipped into the scheme of things by Satan, and still is, then it would seem much simpler if Yahweh would, for once, call this "practical joker" severely to account, get rid of his pernicious influence, and thus eliminate the root of all evil. He would then not need the elaborate arrangement of a special Incarnation with all the unforeseeable consequences which this entails. One should make clear to oneself what it means when God becomes man. It means nothing less than a world-shaking transformation of God. It means more or less what Creation meant in the beginning, namely an objectivation cf God. At the time of the Creation he revealed himself in Nature; now he wants to be more specific and become man. It must be admitted, however, that there was a tendency in this direction right from the start. For, when those other human beings, who had evidently been created before Adam, appeared on the scene along with the higher mammals, Yahweh created on the following day, by a special act of creation, a man who was the image of God. This was the first prefiguration of his becoming man. He took Adam's descendants, especially the people of Israel, into his personal possession, and from time to time he filled this people's prophets with his spirit. All these things were preparatory events and symptoms of a tendency within God to become man. But in omniscience there had existed from all eternity a knowledge of the human nature of God or of the divine nature of man. That is why, long before Genesis was written, we find corresponding testimonies in the ancient Egyptian records. These intimations and prefigurations of the Incarnation must strike one as either completely incomprehensible or superfluous, since all creation ex nihilo is God's and consists of nothing but God, with the result that man, like the rest of creation, is simply God become concrete. Prefigurations, however, are not in themselves creative events, but are only stages in the process of becoming conscious. It was only quite late that we realize (or rather, arc beginning to realize) that God is Reality itself and therefore — last but not least— man. This realization is a millennial process.
From Psychology and Religion: West and East. Collected Works, Vol. II. [First published as a book, Antwort an) Hiob (Zurich, 1952). The present translation was first published, in book foim, in London, 1954; for it, Professor Jung made some half-dozen alterations to the original text and added or authorized an occasional footnote. In 1956, it was reprinted and published by Pastoral Psychology Book Club, Great Neck, New York. Only minor stylistic alterations have been made in the version here published. — Editors of The Collected Works]