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.