King Lear, Answer to Job: The Archetypes of Godhead

Abstract

William Shakespeare’s King Lear is often deemed the penultimate tragic drama. To fully grasp its archetypal reach, we must apply the insights of Carl Jung. Before Lear gives away his kingdom, he is as arbitrarily willful and irrational as the intemperate Yahweh whom Jung portrays in Answer to Job. Yahweh is a primitive, unconscious storm deity who must redeem himself from the injustices he inflicted upon Job by suffering the common lot of humanity as Jesus. Jung saw in the Bible a story of Yahweh’s struggle to gain Job’s humane consciousness. Shakespeare, the visionary artist, adopts this same basic narrative when Lear in the storm scene becomes the suffering Job, then gains insight and compassion with his Fool and later with his daughter, Cordelia. When Cordelia dies, Lear responds with Promethean defiance. Shakespeare presents his own vision of Jung’s quaternal Godhead with Lear first playing Yahweh, then suffering Job, and finally, Job’s Promethean opposite. The prototypical face of Godhead, the Wise-figure archetype embodying truth and wholeness, is Cordelia, who manifests both Christ as a symbol of the self and Sophia as Holy Spirit. In this way, Shakespeare solves Jung’s problem of the Godhead’s missing feminine. As a literary treatment of the Godhead’s archetypes and tragic nature, King Lear is a singularly important work. By illumining Lear’s archetypal patterns, Answer to Job demonstrates the depth and profundity of Jung’s religious insights on the Godhead.

Acknowledgments

This essay is adapted from the chapter on King Lear in my book Shakespeare’s Identities (2019b). I’d like to thank the publisher Paul du Quenoy for permission to reuse it here. Special thanks also to my editor with Psychological Perspectives, Dr. Vicky Jo Varner, for her invaluable and unfaltering efforts to clarify and strengthen the language and argument of this complex paper.

Notes

1 I have relied herein on the Arden edition of King Lear (Shakespeare, 1966).

2 The term “collective autonomous complex” is not synonymous with actual God, a term that occasionally appears in Jung’s works. For more detailed discussions of these two terms/concepts see Driscoll (2019a, 2020).

3 See also related works by Edinger. For example, The New God Image (1996).

4 The “Overton Window” refers to a set of boundaries for acceptable discourse on ideas and positions within a culture, subject field, or profession. An example might be that of parapsychology, which is within the window in some areas, but not in others.

5 I have expanded on these ideas in Shakespeare and Jung: The God in Time (Driscoll, 2019a).

6 Jung dismisses privatio boni, the Augustinian and orthodox Christian solution to the problem of evil, as a mere evasion. He maintains that as the Christian era draws to a close, evil will more and more be recognized as a power in its own right. See Aion (Jung, 1951/1979, pp. 72–94). Jung perceives in the Renaissance the inception of a new spirit that grasps the independence of evil: “The time of the Renaissance begins in the immediate vicinity of the second fish, and with it comes that spirit which culminates in the modern age” (p. 94). The second fish, of course, is the devil. Jung could have found in King Lear a striking example of the historical change marked by the rise of the second fish—the sea monster cruelty Goneril displays. Astrological symbolism suggests the emergence of the Goneril/sea monster, along with Lear’s Promethean defiance and Cordelia’s sublime serenity, signal a myth that marks a turning point in the history of the Western spirit no less significant than the turning point marked by the myth promulgated in the four Gospels.

7 Jung develops this theory in Aion (1951/1979), in Psychology and Alchemy (1944/1980), and in Alchemical Studies (1983). He argues with the frequency and insistence of a leitmotif that the Christ of orthodox theology presents an inadequate symbol for wholeness (e.g., Jung, 1951/1979, p. 41).

8 Edward Whitmont (1969) delineates four chief masculine archetypes: Father, Son, Hero, and Wise Man (pp. 181–184). Whitmont does not present these archetypes as stages in a developmental process involving the emergence of the Christian Godhead. Nonetheless, the relationship is clear between the Father and Yahweh, the Son and Job, the Hero and Prometheus on one hand, and on the other the Wise Man and the wholeness that Lear seeks and Cordelia embodies.

9 The optimist’s position has, in my opinion, been effectively confuted in books and articles by several scholar-critics, most notable among them being The Story of the Night (Holloway, 1961, pp. 75–98) and “The Catharsis of King Lear” (Stampfer, 1960, pp. 11–190). See also William Elton’s (1980) King Lear and the Gods, which furnishes a definitive examination of the “validity of the currently widespread view that Lear is an optimistically Christian drama” (p. 3).

10 My reading of King Lear uses Jung, especially Answer to Job (1952/1969), Symbols of Transformation (1952/1977), Psychology and Alchemy (1944/1980), Mysterium Coniunctionis (1970), The Red Book (2009), Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (1988), and Aion (1951/1979) as guides, but I make no claims to being “Jungian” in a restrictive psychoanalytic or clinical sense. See also James Kirsch’s (1966) Shakespeare’s Royal Self for an interpretation of King Lear that attempts to follow Jung’s psychoanalytic procedures without focusing on the play’s parallels to Answer to Job and Aion, and reaching conclusions that diverge sharply from those in this study.

11 Jung treats the “Wise Old Man” as a major archetype and discusses it frequently. This “grandfather” archetype stands at the last stage in the quest for wholeness. Figures that embody it sometimes clearly symbolize wholeness and are characterized by a superior insight and integration that enables them to face death serenely. Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest exemplifies this archetype as well as the Magician archetype.

12 For two notable explorations of the incest motif in King Lear, the first from a psychoanalytic perspective and the second from a critical one, see “Psychopathology of Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’” by Arpad Pauncz (1952) and Lear’s Self-Discovery by Paul Jorgensen (1967, pp. 124–135).

13 In his essay, “Mystical Man,” Neumann (1968) investigates the “creative nothingness” at the center of man’s selfhood that makes wholeness possible (p. 8).

14 In Aion, Jung (1951/1979) traces the development of fish symbolism from the Gnostic period into the Renaissance (pp. 72–172).

15 One intriguing facet of the historical background of the word “nothing” has received scant attention from literary critics: the negative theology of Pseudo-Dionysus, which influenced the Renaissance through such figures as Nicholas of Cusa, Ficino, Bruno, Pico, and Fludd. A basic insight of this movement is that God is all and nothing, has every name and no name. The idea of “God as Nothing” contributed to the development of Deus Absconditus theology, which William Elton deems central to the theological meaning of King Lear (Elton, 1980, p. 30). A brief account of negative theology appears in Frances Yates’ (1969) book, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (pp. 120–126).

16 Jung’s most extended discussion of the incest motif in myth appears in Symbols of Transformation (1952/1977). Jung comments pointedly on the essential role the incest taboo takes in forming consciousness:

The separation of the son from the mother signifies man’s leavetaking from animal unconsciousness. It was only the power of the “incest prohibition” that created the self-conscious individual, who before had been mindlessly one with the tribe; and it was only then that the idea of the final death of the individual became possible. Thus through Adam’s sin, which lay precisely in his becoming conscious, death came into the world. The neurotic who cannot leave his mother has good reasons for not doing so: ultimately, it is the fear of death that holds him there. (p. 271)

Jung’s theory that fear of death is linked to incestuous retreat to the mother suggests Lear’s fear of death (and consciousness) fosters a wish to make the daughters his mothers. At the same time he overcompensates for this regressive impulse with an attempt to establish complete paternal dominance; hence the father-daughter incest.

17 In his book, Soul of the Age, Jonathan Bate (2009) speaks for a consensus of critics when he writes: “Albany demonstrates the inadequacy of belief in divine justice…. Albany tries to orchestrate events to bring order out of chaos, but each of his resolutions is followed by disasters” (p. 364).

18 In his book, The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode (1967) finds that in King Lear, everything tends toward a conclusion that does not occur and for this reason he characterizes the play as a “broken apocalypse” (pp. 82–89). King Lear, I agree, presents no traditional apocalypse. However, if we define “apocalypse” in a general way as a revelation of some ultimate, intuited truth about reality, then Edgar, Albany, and Kent can be said to have glimpsed their apocalypse. The “broken apocalypse,” one of many ironic reversals of Christian myth in King Lear, closely relates to the most important of the play’s reversals: that hanged Cordelia, the Christ figure, has no subsequent resurrection and all Lear’s sorrows must pass unredeemed.

19 Other candidates might be the “Book of Job,” the four Gospels, Dante’s Inferno, Don Quixote, Milton’s epics (including Samson Agonistes), Moby-Dick, The Brothers Karamazov, and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. But the most powerful, truest, and most universal of the group is probably King Lear. Tragedy is an art form that most scholars consider unique to Western civilization. It should be no surprise that our greatest tragedy, King Lear, should reveal more fully than any other work the archetypes of our God.

20 Those who want to explore further my views on Jung, the Godhead, and religion can do so in my book Shakespeare’s Identities (Driscoll, 2019b), as well as in my books The Unfolding God of Jung and Milton (Driscoll, 1992), Shakespeare and Jung: The God in Time (Driscoll, 2019a), and Jung’s Cartography of the Psyche (Driscoll, 2020).

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James Driscoll

James Driscoll has a PhD in English literature in Shakespeare. He has applied Jungian psychology to literature, philosophy, and social issues. His published books are: Identity in Shakespearean Drama (1983); The Unfolding God of Jung and Milton (1992); Shakespeare and Jung: The God in Time, (2019a); Shakespeare’s Identities (2019b); How AIDS Activists Challenged America (2021a); Jung’s Cartography of the Psyche (2020); The Devil and Dr. Fauci (2021b); Carl versus Karl: Jung and Marx, Two Icons for our Age (2022). He became prominent in the movement to speed FDA approval for AIDS and cancer drugs in the 1990s. His How AIDS Activists Challenged America reviews his career as an AIDS, LGBTQ, and FDA reform activist.