I mention these future apocalyptic events only to illustrate the doubt which is indirectly expressed in the sixth petition of the Lord's Prayer, and not in order to give a general interpretation of the Apocalypse. I shall come back to this theme later on. But, before doing so, we must turn to the question of how matters stood with the Incarnation after the death of Christ. We have always been taught that the Incarnation was a unique historical event. No repetition of it was to be expected, any more than one could expect a further revelation of the Logos, for this too was included in the uniqueness of God's appearance on earth, in human form, nearly two thousand years ago. The sole source of revelation, and hence the final authority, is the Bible. God is an authority only in so far as he authorized the writings in the New Testament, and with the conclusion of the New Testament the authentic communications of God cease. Thus far the Protestant standpoint. The Catholic Church, the direct heir and continuator of historical Christianity, proves to be somewhat more cautious in this regard, believing that with the assistance of the Holy Ghost the dogma can progressively develop and unfold. This view is in entire agreement with Christ's own teachings about the Holy Ghost and hence with the further continuance of the Incarnation. Christ is of the opinion that whoever believes in him — believes, that is to say, that he is the son of God — can "do the works that I do, and greater works than these." 79 He reminds his disciples that he had told them they were gods. 80 The believers or chosen ones are children of God and "fellow heirs with Christ." 81 When Christ leaves the earthly stage, he will ask his father to send his flock a Counsellor (the "Paraclete"), who will abide with them and in them for ever. 82 The Counsellor is the Holy Ghost, who will be sent from the father. This "Spirit of truth" will teach the believers "all things" and guide them "into all truth." 83 According to this, Christ envisages a continuing realization of God in his children, and consequently in his (Christ's) brothers and sisters in the spirit, so that his own works need not necessarily be considered the great- est ones.
Since the Holy Ghost is the Third Person of the Trinity and God is present entire in each of the three Persons at any time, the indwelling of the Holy Ghost means nothing less than an approximation of the believer to the status of God's son. One can therefore understand what is meant by the remark "you are gods." The deifying effect of the Holy Ghost is naturally assisted by the imago Dei stamped on the elect. God, in the shape of the Holy Ghost, puts up his tent in man, for he is obviously minded to realize himself continually not only in Adam's descend- ants, but in an indefinitely large number of believers, and possibly in mankind as a whole. Symptomatic of this is the significant fact that Barnabas and Paul were identified in Lystra with Zeus and Hermes: "The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men." 84 This was certainly only the more naive, pagan view of the Christian trans- mutation, but precisely for that reason it convinces. Tertullian must have had something of the sort in mind when he described the "sublimiorem Deum" as a sort of lender of divinity "who has made gods of men." 85
God's Incarnation in Christ requires continuation and completion because Christ, owing to his virgin birth and his sinlessness, was not an empirical human being at all. As stated in the first chapter of St. John, he represented a light which, though it shone in the darkness, was not comprehended by the darkness. He remained outside and above mankind. Job, on the other hand, was an ordinary human being, and therefore the wrong done to him, and through him to mankind, can, according to divine justice, only be repaired by an incarnation of God in an empirical human being. This act of expiation is performed by the Paraclete; for, just as man must suffer from God, so God must suffer from man. Otherwise there can be no reconciliation between the two.
The continuing, direct operation of the Holy Ghost on those who are called to be God's children implies, in fact, a broadening process of incarnation. Christ, the son begotten by God, is the first-born who is succeeded by an ever-increasing number of younger brothers and sisters. These are, however, neither begotten by the Holy Ghost nor born of a virgin. This may be prejudicial to their metaphysical status, but their merely human birth will in no sense endanger their prospects of a future position of honour at the heavenly court, nor will it diminish their capacity to perform miracles. Their lowly origin (possibly from the mammals) does not prevent them from entering into a close kinship with God as their father and Christ as their brother. In a metaphorical sense, indeed, it is actually a "kinship by blood," since they have received their share of the blood and flesh of Christ, which means more than mere adoption. These profound changes in man's status are the direct result of Christ's work of redemption. Redemption or deliverance has several different aspects, the most important of which is the expiation wrought by Christ's sacrificial death for the misdemeanours of mankind. His blood cleanses us from the evil consequences of sin. He reconciles God with man and delivers him from the divine wrath, which hangs over him like doom, and from eternal damnation. It is obvious that such ideas still picture God the father as the dangerous Yahweh who has to be propitiated. The agonizing death of his son is supposed to give him satisfaction for an affront he has suffered, and for this "moral injury" he would be inclined to take a terrible vengeance. Once more we are appalled by the incongruous attitude of the world creator towards his creatures, who to his chagrin never behave according to his expectations. It is as if someone started a bacterial culture which turned out to be a failure. He might curse his luck, but he would never seek the reason for the failure in the bacilli and want to punish them morally for it. Rather, he would select a more suitable culture medium. Yahweh's behaviour towards his creatures contradicts all the requirements of so-called ”divine" reason whose possession is supposed to distinguish men from animals. Moreover, a bacteriologist might make a mistake in his choice of a culture medium, for he is only human. But God in his omniscience would never make mistakes if only he consulted with it. He has equipped his human creatures with a modicum of consciousness and a corresponding degree of free will, but he must also know that by so doing he leads them into the temptation of falling into a dangerous independence. That would not be too great a risk if man had to do with a creator who was only kind and good. But Yahweh is forgetting his son Satan, to whose wiles even he occasionally succumbs. How then could he expect man with his limited consciousness and imperfect knowledge to do any better? He also overlooks the fact that the more consciousness a man possesses the more he is separated from his instincts (which at least give him an inkling of the hidden wisdom of God) and the more prone he is to error. He is certainly not up to Satan's wiles if even his creator is unable, or unwilling, to restrain this powerful spirit.
The fact of God's "unconsciousness" throws a peculiar light on the doctrine of salvation. Man is not so much delivered from his sins, even if he is baptized in the prescribed manner and thus washed clean, as delivered from fear of the consequences of sin, that is, from the wrath of God. Consequently, the work of salvation is intended to save man from the fear of God. This is certainly possible where the belief in a loving father, who has sent his only- begotten son to rescue the human race, has repressed the persistent traces of the old Yahweh and his dangerous affects. Such a belief, however, presupposes a lack of reflection or a sacrificium intellectus, and it appears questionable whether either of them can be morally justified. We should never forget that it was Christ himself who taught us to make usurious use of the talents entrusted to us and not hide them in the ground. One ought not to make oneself out to be more stupid and more unconscious than one really is, for in all other aspects we are called upon to be alert, critical, and self-aware, so as not to fall into temptation, and to ”examine the spirits" who want to gain influence over us and "see whether they are of God," 8G so that we may recognize the mistakes we make. It even needs superhuman intelligence to avoid the cunning snares of Satan. These obligations inevitably sharpen our understanding, our love of truth, and the urge to know, which as well as being genuine human virtues are quite possibly effects of that spirit which "searches everything, even the depths of God." 87 These intellectual and moral capacities are themselves of a divine nature, and therefore cannot and must not be cut off. It is just by following Christian morality that one gets into the worst collisions of duty. Only those who habitually make five an even number can escape them. The fact that Christian ethics leads to collisions of duty speaks in its favour. By engendering insoluble conflicts and consequently an afftictio animae, it brings man nearer to a knowledge of God. All opposites are of God, therefore man must bend to this burden; and in so doing he finds that God in his "oppositeness" has taken possession of him, incarnated himself in him. He becomes a vessel filled with divine conflict. We rightly associate the idea of suffering with a state in which the opposites violently collide with one another, and we hesitate to describe such a painful experience as being "redeemed." Yet it cannot be denied that the great symbol of the Christian faith, the Cross, upon which hangs the suffering figure of the Redeemer, has been emphatically held up before the eyes of Christians for nearly two thousand years. This picture is completed by the two thieves, one of whom goes down to hell, the other into paradise. One could hardly imagine a better representation of the "oppositeness" of the central Christian symbol. Why this inevitable product of Christian psychology should signify redemption is difficult to sec, except that the conscious recognition of the opposites, painful though it may be at the moment, does bring with it a definite feeling of deliverance. It is on the one hand a deliverance from the distressing state of dull and helpless unconsciousness, and on the other hand a growing awareness of God's oppositeness, in which man can participate if he does not shrink from being wounded by the dividing sword which is Christ. Only through the most extreme and most menacing conflict does the Christian experience deliverance into divinity, always provided that he does not break, but accepts the burden of being marked out by God. In this way alone can the imago Dei realize itself in him, and God become man. The seventh petition in the Lord's Prayer, "But deliver us from evil," is to be understood in the same sense as Christ's prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane: "My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me." 88 In principle it does not seem to fit God's purpose to exempt a man from conflict and hence from evil. It is altogether human to express such a desire but it must not be made into a principle, because it is directed against God's will and rests only on human weakness and fear. Fear is certainly justified up to a point, for, to make the conflict complete, there must be doubt and uncertainty as to whether man's strength is not being overtaxed.
Because the imago Dei pervades the whole human sphere and makes mankind its involuntary exponent, it is just possible that the four-hundred-year-old schism in the Church and the present division of the political world into two hostile camps are both expressions of the unrecognized polarity of the dominant archetype.
The traditional view of Christ's work of redemption reflects a one-sided way of thinking, no matter whether we regard that one-sidedness as purely human or as willed by God. The other view, which regards the atonement not as the payment of a human debt to God, but as reparation for a wrong done by God to man, has been briefly outlined above. This view seems to me to be better suited to the power situation as it actually exists. The sheep can stir up mud in the wolfs drinking water, but can do him no other harm. So also the creature can disappoint the creator, but it is scarcely credible that he can do him a painful wrong. This lies only in the power of the creator with respect to the powerless creature. On this view, a wrong is imputed to God, but it is certainly no worse than what has already been imputed to him if one assumes that it was necessary to torture the son to death on the Cross merely in order to appease the father's wrath. What kind of father is it who would rather his son were slaughtered than forgive his ill-advised creatures who have been corrupted by his precious Satan? What is supposed to be demonstrated by this gruesome and archaic sacrifice of the son? God's love, perhaps? Or his implacability? We know from chapter 22 of Genesis 89 and from Exodus 22 : 29 that Yahweh has a tendency to employ such means as the killing of the son and the first-born in order to test his people's faith or to assert his will, despite the fact that his omniscience and omnipotence have no need whatever of such savage procedures, which moreover set a bad example to the mighty ones of the earth. It is very understandable, therefore, that a naive mind is apt to run away from such questions and excuse this manoeuvre as a beautiful sacrificium intellectus. If one prefers not to read the Eighty-ninth Psalm, the matter will not end there. He who cheats once will cheat again, particularly when it comes to self-knowledge. But self-knowledge, in the form of an examination of conscience, is demanded by Christian ethics. They were very pious people who maintained that self-knowledge paves the way to knowledge of God.
XI
To believe that God is the Summum Bonum is impossible for a reflecting consciousness. Such a consciousness does not feel in any way delivered from the fear of God, and therefore asks itself, quite rightly, what Christ means to it. That, indeed, is the great question: can Christ still be interpreted in our day and age, or must one be satisfied with the historical interpretation?
One thing, anyway, cannot be doubted: Christ is a highly numinous figure. The interpretation of him as God and the son of God is in full accord with this. The old view, which is based on Christ's own view of the matter, asserts that he came into the world, suffered, and died in order to save mankind from the wrath to come. Furthermore he believed that his own bodily resurrection would assure all God's children of the same future.
We have already pointed out at some length how curiously God's Salvationist project works out in practice. All he does is, in the shape of his own son, to rescue mankind from himself. This thought is as scurrilous as the old rabbinical view of Yahweh hiding the righteous from his wrath under his throne, where of course he cannot sec them. It is exactly as if God the father were a different God from the son, which is not the meaning at all. Nor is there any psychological need for such an assumption, since the undoubted lack of reflection in God's consciousness is sufficient to explain his peculiar behaviour. It is quite right, therefore, that fear of God should be considered the beginning of all wisdom. On the other hand, the much-vaunted goodness, love, and justice of God should not be regarded as mere propitiation, but should be recognized as a growing experience, for God is a coincidentia oppositorum. Both are justified, the fear of God as well as the love of God.
A more differentiated consciousness must, sooner or later, find it difficult to love, as a kind father, a God whom on account of his unpredictable fits of wrath, his unreliability, injustice, and cruelty, it has every reason to fear. The decay of the gods of antiquity has proved to our satisfaction that man does not relish any all-too-human inconsistencies and weaknesses in his gods. Likewise, it is probable that Yahweh's moral defeat in his dealings with Job had its hidden effects: man's unintended elevation on the one hand, and on the other hand a disturbance of the unconscious. For a while the first-mentioned effect remains a mere fact, not consciously realized though registered by the unconscious. This contributes to the disturbance in the unconscious, which thereby acquires a higher potential than exists in consciousness. Man then counts for more in the unconscious than he does consciously. In these circumstances the potential starts flowing from the unconscious towards consciousness, and the unconscious breaks through in the form of dreams, visions, and revelations. Unfortunately the Book of Job cannot be dated with any certainty. As mentioned above, it was written somewhere between 600 and 300 B.C. During the first half of the sixth century, Ezekiel, 9u the prophet with the so-called "pathological" features, appears on the scene. Although laymen are inclined to apply this epithet to his visions, I must, as a psychiatrist, emphatically state that visions and their accompanying phenomena cannot be uncritically evaluated as morbid. Visions, like dreams, are unusual but quite natural occurrences which can be designated as "pathological" only when their morbid nature has been proved. From a strictly clinical standpoint Ezekiel's visions are of an archetypal nature and are not morbidly distorted in any way. There is no reason to regard them as pathological. 91
The vision in which he received his call occurred in 592 B.C. 91 It is altogether wrong to assume that visions as such are pathological. They occur with normal people also — not very frequently, it is true, but they are by no means rare.
They are a symptom of the split which already existed at that time between conscious and unconscious. The first great vision is made up of two well-ordered compound quaternities, that is, conceptions of totality, such as we frequently observe today as spontaneous phenomena. Their quinta essentia is represented by a figure which has "the likeness of a human form." 92 Here Ezekiel has seen the essential content of the unconscious, namely the idea of the higher man by whom Yahweh was morally defeated and who he was later to become.
In India, a more or less simultaneous symptom of the same tendency was Gautama the Buddha (b. 562 B.C.), who gave the maximum differentiation of consciousness supremacy even over the highest Brahman gods. This development was a logical consequence of the purusha-atman doctrine and derived from the inner experience of yoga practice.
Ezekiel grasped, in a symbol, the fact that Yahweh was drawing closer to man. This is something which came to Job as an experience but probably did not reach his consciousness. That is to say, he did not realize that his consciousness was higher than Yahweh's, and that consequently God wants to become man. What is more, in Ezekiel we meet for the first time the title "Son of Man," which Yahweh significantly uses in addressing the prophet, presumably to indicate that he is a son of the "Man* on the throne, and hence a prefiguration of the much later revelation in Christ. It is with the greatest right, therefore, that the four seraphim on God's throne became the emblems of the evangelists, for they form the quaternity which expresses Christ's totality, just as the four gospels represent the four pillars of his throne.
The disturbance of the unconscious continued for several centuries. Around 165 B.C., Daniel had a vision of four beasts and the "Ancient of Days," to whom "with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man." Here the "son of man" is no longer the prophet but a son of the "Ancient of Days" in his own right, and a son whose task it is to rejuvenate the father.
The Book of Enoch, written around 1oo B.C., goes into considerably more detail. It gives a revealing account of the advance of the sons of God into the world of men, another prefiguration which has been described as the "fall of the angels." Whereas, according to Genesis, Yahweh resolved that his spirit should not "abide in man for ever," and that men should not live to be hundreds of years old as they had before, the sons of God, by way of compensation, fell in love with the beautiful daughters of men. This happened at the time of the giants. Enoch relates that after conspiring with one another, two hundred angels under the leadership of Samiazaz descended to earth, took the daughters of men to wife, and begat with them giants three thousand ells long. 9 '"' The angels, among whom Azazel particularly excelled, taught mankind the arts and sciences. They proved to be extraordinarily progressive elements who broadened and developed man's consciousness, just as the wicked Cain had stood for progress as contrasted with the stay-at-home Abel. In this way they enlarged the significance of man to "gigantic" proportions, which points to an inflation of the cultural consciousness at that period. An inflation, however, is always threatened with a counter- stroke from the unconscious, and this actually- did happen in the form of the Deluge. So corrupt was the earth before the Deluge that the giants "consumed all the acquisitions of men" and then began to devour each other, while men in their turn devoured the beasts, so that "the earth laid accusation against the lawless ones."
The invasion of the human world by the sons of God therefore had serious consequences, which make Yahweh's precautions prior to his appearance on the earthly scene the more understandable. Man was completely helpless in face of this superior divine force. Hence it is of the greatest interest to see how Yahweh behaves in this matter. As the later Draconian punishment proves, it was a not unimportant event in the heavenly economy when no less than two hundred of the sons of God departed from the paternal household to carry out experiments on their own in the human world. One would have expected that information concerning this mass exodus would have trickled through to the court (quite apart from the fact of divine omniscience). But nothing of the sort happened. Only after the giants had long been begotten and had already started to slaughter and devour mankind did four archangels, apparently by accident, hear the weeping and wailing of men and discover what was going on on earth. One really does not know which is the more astonishing, the bad organization of the angelic hosts or the faulty communications in heaven. Be that as it may, this time the archangels felt impelled to appear before God with the following peroration:
All things are naked and open in Thy sight, and Thou seest all things, and nothing can hide itself from Thee. Thou seest what Azazel hath done, who taught all unrighteousness on earth and revealed the eternal secrets which were preserved in heaven. . . . [And enchant- ments hath Samiazaz taught], to whom Thou hast given authority to bear rule over his associates. . . . And Thou knowest all things before they come to pass, and Thou seest these things and Thou dost suffer them, and Thou dost not say to us what we are to do to them in regard to these.]
Either all that the archangels say is a lie, or Yahweh, for some incomprehensible reason, has drawn no conclusions from his omniscience, or — what is more likely — the archangels must remind him that once again he has preferred to know nothing of his omniscience. At any rate it is only on their intervention that retaliatory action is re-* leased on a global scale, but it is not really a just punishment, seeing that Yahweh promptly drowns all living creatures with the exception of Noah and his relatives. This intermezzo proves that the sons of God are somehow more vigilant, more progressive, and more conscious than their father. Yahweh's subsequent transformation is therefore to be rated all the higher. The preparations for his Incarnation give one the impression that he has really learnt something from experience and is setting about things more consciously than before. Undoubtedly the recollection of Sophia has contributed to this increase of consciousness, Parallel with this, the revelation of the metaphysical structure becomes more explicit. Whereas in Ezekiel and Daniel we find only vague hints about the quaternity and the Son of Man, Enoch gives us clear and detailed information on these points. The underworld, a sort of Hades, is divided into four hollow places which serve as abodes for the spirits of the dead until the Last Judgment. Three of these hollow places are dark, but one is bright and contains a "fountain of water." 98 This is the abode of the righteous.
With statements of this type we enter into a definitely psychological realm, namely that of mandala symbolism, to which also belong the ratios I : 3 and 3 : 4." The quad* ripartite Hades of Enoch corresponds to a chthonic quaternity, which presumably stands in everlasting contrast to a pneumatic or heavenly one. The former corresponds in alchemy to the quaternio of the elements, the latter to a fourfold, or total, aspect of the deity, as for instance Barbelo, Kolorbas, Mercurius quadrants, and the fourfaced gods all indicate.
In fact, Enoch in his vision sees the four faces of God. Three of them are engaged in praising, praying, and supplicating, but the fourth in ”fending off the Satans and forbidding them to come before the Lord of Spirits to accuse them who dwell on earth." ,(H)
The vision shows us an essential differentiation of the God-image: God now has four faces, or rather, four angels of his face, who are four hypostases or emanations, of which one is exclusively occupied in keeping his elder son Satan, now changed into many, away from him, and in preventing further experiments after the style of the Job episode. 101 The Satans still dwell in the heavenly regions, since the fall of Satan has not yet occurred. 1 he above- mentioned proportions are also suggested here by the fact that three of the angels perform holy or beneficial functions, while the fourth is a militant figure who has to keep Satan at bay.
This quaternity has a distinctly pneumatic nature and is therefore expressed by angels, who are generally pictured with wings, i.e., as aerial beings. This is the more likely as they are presumably the descendants of Ezekicl's four seraphim. 102 The doubling and separation of the quaternity into an upper and a lower one, like the exclusion of the Satans from the heavenly court, points to a metaphysical split that had already taken place. But the pleromatic split is in its turn a symptom of a much deeper split in the divine will: the father wants to become the son, God wants to become man, the amoral wants to become exclusively good, the unconscious wants to become consciously re- sponsible. So far everything exists only in statu nastendi.
Enoch's unconscious is vastly excited by all this and its contents burst out in a spate of apocalyptic visions. It also causes him to undertake the pcrcgiinatio, the journey to the four quarters of heaven and to the centre o\ the earth, so that he draws a mandala with his own movements, in ac- cordance with the "journeys" of the alchemistic philosophers and the corresponding fantasies of our modern unconscious.
When Yahweh addressed Ezekiel as "Son of Man," this was no more at first than a dark and enigmatic hint. But now it becomes clear: the man Enoch is not only the recipient of divine revelation but is at the same time a participant in the divine drama, as though he were at least one of the sons of God himself. This can only be taken as meaning that in the same measure as God sets out to become man, man is immersed in the pleromatic process. He becomes, as it were, baptized in it and is made to participate in the divine quaternity (i.e., is crucified with Christ). That is why even today, in the rite of the benedictio fontis, the water is divided into a cross by the hand of the priest and then sprinkled to the four quarters.
Enoch is so much under the influence of the divine drama, so gripped by it, that one could almost suppose he had a quite special understanding of the coming Incarna- tion. The "Son of Man" who is with the "Head [or Ancient] of Days" looks like an angel (i.e., like one of the sons of God). He "hath righteousness"; "with him dwelleth righteousness"; the Lord of Spirits has "chosen him"; "his lot hath the preeminence before the Lord of Spirits in up- rightness." 1(W It is probably no accident that so much stress is laid on righteousness, for it is the one quality that Yahweh lacks, a fact that could hardly have remained hidden from such a man as the author of the Book of Enoch. Under the reign of the Son of Man ". . . the prayer of the righteous has been heard, and the blood of the righteous . . . [avenged] before the Lord of Spirits." 104 Enoch sees a "fountain of righteousness which was inexhaustible."
The Son of Man
. . . shall be a staff to the righteous. . . . For this reason hath he been chosen and hidden before
him,
Before the creation of the world and for evermore
And the wisdom of the Lord of Spirits hath revealed him . . . ,
For he hath preserved the lot of the righteous. 100 For wisdom is poured out like water. . . . He is mighty in all the secrets of righteousness, And unrighteousness shall disappear as a shadow. . , . In him dwells the spirit of wisdom, And the spirit which gives insight, And the spirit of understanding and of might. 107
Under the reign of the Son of Man
. . . shall the earth also give back that which has been entrusted to it,
And Sheol also shall give back that which it has re- ceived,
And hell 108 shall give back that which it owes. . , .
The Elect One shall in those days sit on My throne, And his mouth shall pour forth all the secrets of wisdom and counsel. 1011
"All shall become angels in heaven." Azazel and his hosts shall be cast into the burning fiery furnace for "becoming subject to Satan and leading astray those who dwell on the earth." n
At the end of the world the Son of Man shall sit in judgment over all creatures. "The darkness shall be destroyed, and the light established for ever." m Even Yahweh's two big exhibits, Leviathan and Behemoth, arc forced to succumb: they are carved up and eaten. In this pas- sage 112 Enoch is addressed by the revealing angel with the title "Son of Man," a further indication that he, like Ezekiel, has been assimilated by the divine mystery, is included in it, as is already suggested by the bare fact that he witnesses it. Enoch is wafted away and takes his seat in heaven. In the "heaven of heavens" he beholds the house of God built of crystal, with streams of living fire about it, and guarded by winged beings that never sleep. 113 The "Head of Days" comes forth with the angelic quaternity (Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Phanuel) and speaks to him, saying: "This is the Son of Man who is born unto righteousness, and righteousness abides over him, and the righteousness of the Head of Days forsakes him not." 114
It is remarkable that the Son of Man and what he means should be associated again and again with righteousness. It seems to be his leitmotif, his chief concern. Only where injustice threatens or has already occurred does such an emphasis on righteousness make any sense. No one, only God, can dispense justice to any noticeable degree, and precisely with regard to him there exists the justifiable fear that he may forget his justice. In this case his righteous son would intercede with him on man's behalf. Thus "the righteous shall have peace." n3 The justice that shall prevail under the son is stressed to such an extent that one has the impression that formerly, under the reign of the father, injustice was paramount, and that only with the son is the era of law and order inaugurated. It looks as though, with this, Enoch had unconsciously given an answer to Job.
The emphasis laid on God's agedness is logically connected with the existence of a son, but it also suggests that he himself will step a little into the background and leave the government of the human world more and more to the son, in the hope that a juster order will emerge. From all this we can see the aftereffects of some psychological trauma, the memory of an injustice that cries to heaven and beclouds the intimate relationship with God. God himself wants a son, and man also wants a son to take the place of the father. This son must, as we have conclusively seen, be absolutely just, and this quality is given priority over all other virtues. God and man both want to escape from blind injustice.
Enoch, in his ecstasy, recognizes himself as the Son of Man, or as the son of God, although neither by birth nor by predestination does he seem to have been chosen for such a role. 110 He experiences that godlike elevation which, in the case of Job, we merely assumed, or rather inferred as the inevitable outcome. Job himself seems to have suspected something of the sort when he declares: 4 i know that my Vindicator lives." 11T This highly remarkable statement can, under the circumstances, only refer to the benevolent Yahweh. The traditional Christian interpretation of this passage as an anticipation of Christ is correct in so far as Yahweh's benevolent aspect incarnates itself, as its own hypostasis, in the Son of Man, and in so far as the Son of Man proves in Enoch to be a representative of justice and, in Christianity, the justificr of mankind. Furthermore, the Son of Man is pre-existent, and therefore Job could very well appeal to him. Just as Satan plays the role of accuser and slanderer, so Christ, God's other son, plays the role of advocate and defender.
Despite the contradiction, certain scholars have wished to see Enoch's Messianic ideas as Christian interpolations. For psychological reasons this suspicion seems to me unjustified. One has only to consider what Yahweh's injustice, his downright immorality, must have meant to a devout thinker. It was no laughing matter to be burdened with such an idea of God. A much later document tells us of a pious sage who could never read the Fight) -ninth Psalm, "because he could not bear it." When one considers with what intensity and exclusiveness not only Christ's teaching, but the doctrines of the Church in the following centuries down to the present day, have emphasized the goodness of the loving Father in heaven, the deliverance from fear, the Summum Bonum, and the privatio boni, one can form some conception of the incompatibility which the figure of Yahweh presents, and see how intolerable such a paradox must appear to the religious consciousness. And this has probably been so ever since the days of Job.
The inner instability of Yahweh is the prime cause not only of the creation of the world, but also of the pleromatic drama for which mankind serves as a tragic chorus. The encounter with the creature changes the creator. In the Old Testament writings we find increasing traces of this development from the sixth century B.C. on. The two main climaxes are formed firstly by the Job tragedy, and secondly by Ezekiel's revelation. Job is the innocent sufferer, but Ezekiel witnesses the humanization and differentiation of Yahweh. By being addressed as "Son of Man," it is intimated to him that Yahweh's incarnation and quaternity are, so to speak, the pleromatic model for what is going to happen, through the transformation and humanization of God, not only to God's son as foreseen from all eternity, but to man as such. This is fulfilled as an intuitive anticipation in Enoch. In his ecstasy he becomes the Son of Man in the pleroma, and his wafting away in a chariot (like Elijah) prefigures the resurrection of the dead. To fulfil his role as minister of justice he must get into immediate proximity to God, and as the pre-existing Son of Man he is no longer subject to death. But in so far as he was an ordinary human being and therefore mortal, other mortals as well as he can attain to the vision of God; they too can become conscious of their saviour, and consequently immortal.
All these ideas could easily have become conscious at the time on the basis of the assumptions then current, if only someone had seriously reflected on them. For that no Christian interpolations were needed. The Book of Enoch was an anticipation in the grand manner, but everything still hung in mid air as mere revelation that never came down to earth. In view of these facts one cannot, with the best will in the world, see how Christianity, as we hear over and over again, is supposed to have burst upon world history as an absolute novelty. If ever anything had been historically prepared, and sustained and supported by the existing Weltanschauung, Christianity would be a classic example.