Illustrations to Job - Introduction

In 1794, near the beginning of Blake's serious career,  he came forth with the  Gates of Paradise; it set his agenda for the years ahead, pointing to the cycle of life, from babyhood to the end of life.

In 1826, near the end of Blake's life his benefactor and friend, Capt. Butts, asked him about The Book of Job.  In consequence Blake created a work called Illustrations of the Book of Job.  It has a remarkable consistency with the work done 32 years before.

Job, one of the latest O.T. books, produced at some time fairly near the advent of the Son, consists of a chapter or two of novelistic material at the beginning and then at the end.  Between, the author wrote many pages of poetic material.  The casual Bible reader may read the 'novelistic' and let the poetry go.

The cover page (in this link) precedes  21 plates illustrating Job, his family and friends, and his adventures.  The first thing I noticed was the marked resemblance between Job in the middle layer and Job's God above; from this we may infer that Job's image of God was internal, an element of his psyche. (Our experience consists of nothing except our images of reality.)

Blake also concentrated on the prose story but used it in extremely poetic ways.  21 pictures make up this work with the words of Job scribbled around the edges.

Like so many of Blake's pictorial creations we see three layers: a 'God-like or Eternal upper one, a middle one representing the conscious mind, and the lower for the Unconscious fountain.

With these plates Blake described the cycle of Life: Albion's, Blake's, mine and yours.

C.G.Jung, a poet masquerading as a Scientist and perhaps the closest thing to Blake that the 20th Century gave us, also found in Job a central mystery, which he tried to fathom, much like Blake had.  The record of Jung's  Answer to Job appears in pages 519-650 of a translated work called The Portable Jung.

At 76 Jung found the courage to confess his feelings about Job's God.  When he began this he decided that he would treat the psychic fact of God as a person , just as religionists do.  (Doing this of course, he gave up the guise of a Scientist to speak poetically -- a more direct approach to Truth IMO, reminiscent of the four year old's dream of the gigantic turd falling on the cathedral.  In effect Jung denounced the conventional picture of a God as a Rewarder of the righteous.

All of this bears on our discussion of the central mystery of Illustrations of the Book of Job.  Here is a scholarly paper on the subject of Blake and Jung.