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Semeia 07: Studies in the Book of Job |
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Semeia 07: Studies in the Book of Job |
The Book of Job continues to evoke radically diverse interpretations. In particular, the problem of the dominant genre of the book has perennially challenged and frustrated interpreters. My own thesis is that when the poem of Job is set in its full and final literary context, replete with Prologue and Epilogue as well as the Elihu speeches, the most apt generic designation of the book is comedy . In proposing a comic interpretation, I wish to avoid an oversimplified equation between comedy and laughter and want rather to focus on that vision of comedy which has at least two central ingredients: (1) its perception of incongruity and irony; and (2) its basic plot line that leads ultimately to the happiness of the hero and his restoration to a harmonious society. When viewed from this perspective, Job emerges as "the great reservoir of comedy" (Christopher Fry). Thus we find such comic elements as caricature and parody in the depictions of Job's friends, young Elihu, God, and even Job himself. Moreover, the "happy ending" of Job¾long a problem for interpreters¾alters the tragic movement of the book and helps to confirm its comic side. In my judgment, the category of comedy is sufficiently broad and comprehensive to embrace the wealth of disparate genres and traditions which have long been noted in the book of Job.
0. The book of Job, like all literary masterpieces, has the power to evoke radically diverse interpretations; its ambiguity continues both to challenge and frustrate interpreters in their ongoing quest for solutions to its enigmas. So it is presumptuous to say that any one key unlocks all of its doors, and diffidence is surely demanded.
0.1 No part of the interpretation of Job is more clouded with uncertainty than the identification of genre. The parallels offered do not quite fit, and most scholars end up by concluding that Job belongs to no literary category: it simply is! To be sure, there is no dearth of suggestions: Job has variously been called a "wisdom disputation," an "answered lament," a "rîb " or "trial," a "theodicy," an "epic," a "trial," etc. 
. It is not necessary for my purpose to repeat the various arguments pro or con for these alternatives, nor to enumerate other possibilities which have been proffered. Suffice it to say that many of these proposals are outgrowths of an exercise of one type of literary criticism¾legitimate in itself¾which reconstructs different stages in the book's development and applies a generic label to each stage¾especially that of the alleged autograph of the original Job. I am in full agreement with Good's wise comments on the pitfalls that await the literary critic who seeks to find the autograph and then tries to interpret it as the authentic Job (1973). That the book of Job experienced several stages of growth is no doubt true, but that fact does not exempt the interpreter from the responsibility of coming to grips with the book's final form. One of the strengths of Polzin's recent structural analysis of Job is that he takes seriously the necessity and importance of interpreting Job's present form. It will likewise be my starting-point to take the book as it now stands and attempt to interpret the totality of its parts.
0.2 With these preliminary remarks in mind, I now return to the problem of the overarching genre of the book of Job. As mentioned, one of the long-standing positions is that Job is a tragedy. At least as far back as Theodore of Mopsuestia, scholars have observed affinities of Job with Greek drama . The "tragic" view of Job received its most extreme statement in H. Kallen's book in which he argues for an explicit dependence of the Joban poet on
Greek tragedians¾Euripides in particular¾and then proceeds to rearrange and rewrite Job à la Euripidean tragedy. The deficiencies of Kallen's approach have been amply demonstrated, but the view of Job as tragedy persists. Its most recent champion is S. Terrien, a most distinguished critic of Job. His thesis is that Job is a "festal tragedy" in which the poet articulates two interwoven and controlling mythical patterns: first, the theme of royal expiation that centers in the vicarious suffering of the king; secondly, the rhythm of the seasons with the accent on the renewal of the earth through the life-giving rains of autumn (Terrien: 507). Early in the exile (c. 575 B.C.E.), an Israelite poet experimented with cultic forms and forged out his masterpiece "as a paracultic drama for the celebration of the New Year Festival..." (509). The Joban poet used diverse genres¾e.g., lament, hymn, judicial discussion, wisdom dispute, prophetic vision, onomasticon, theophany¾to create a new genre, "the festal tragedy."
0.3 Terrien's interpretation is stimulating and suggestive. He goes far toward explaining the presence of certain "tragic" elements long noted in Job, but he does so with full awareness of the traditional genres and motifs embedded in Job. One of my chief differences with Terrien, however, hinges on his limitation to the poem of Job; his is still another example of that species of literary criticism which limits the "genuine" poetic production to a given stage and then interprets that stage in terms of genre, setting, and intention. As indicated above, I think this is a legitimate mode of criticism, but I think it is also imperative to take full measure of the whole book of Job. In contrast therefore to Terrien, it is my thesis that once the poem is set in its full and final literary context, replete with Prologue and Epilogue as well as the Elihu speeches, the most apt and compelling generic designation of the book of Job is comedy . In
my judgment, the broad, overarching category of comedy is able to illuminate best the wealth of disparate genres, formulas, and motifs which are now interwoven in the total structure of the book.
0.4 At first blush many will recoil from the suggestion that Job is comedy and will dismiss my thesis as downright crazy or a bad joke in the worst tradition of gallows' humor. How can a book so filled with agony and despair, so dominated with the images of suffering and death, be considered a comedy? This type of reaction is rooted in the identification of comedy with laughter and light humor. I would only counter that literary criticism has long recognized that it is a mistake to make an easy and absolute equation between comedy and laughter . Comedy can be profoundly serious; in fact, it has often served as one of the most compelling strategies for dealing with chaos and suffering, the most obvious example being so-called "dark comedy" (Styan, Guthke). Moreover, critics have perceived at least since the time of Socrates a subtle and powerful interplay between comedy and tragedy. So my interpretation of Job as comedy does not depend on elements we might consider to be funny. Also, how does one accurately define what might be considered funny? Thanks to Freud and others we are all aware of the difficulty of defining laughter in our own context¾let alone a context distant from us in time and tradition. Thus we do not exactly know what might have elic
Israelites or any of their contemporaries in the Near East. From the evidence of some Near Eastern and biblical texts, we might be surprised as to the degree some of this literature was able to evoke laughter from its original audiences . But at any rate I wish to avoid an oversimplified equation between comedy and laughter and want to focus rather on that vision of comedy which has two central ingredients: first, its perception of incongruity that moves in the realm of the ironic, the
ludicrous, and the ridiculous; and secondly, a basic plot line that leads ultimately to the happiness of the hero and his restoration to a serene and harmonious society .
1.0 Now I want to look at the overarching structure of Job and argue more precisely my case for the comedy of Job. It is important initially to observe that the poet has framed his poetic speeches with a prose narrative, now broken up into a prologue (Job 1-2) and epilogue (Job 42: 7ff.). It is a long held view that the poet borrows a didactic folktale or legend¾i.e., a prose narrative that describes the fall and ultimate restoration of a folk hero in the days of yore. A number of literary conventions and typical motifs show that the narrative is best construed as a folktale (see Robertson, Williams, Polzin). It has the customary "once upon a time" fairy tale beginning: "There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job" (1:1). The setting in a non-Israelite locale, the vaguely defined land of Uz, heightens this dimension. The stylized numbers¾seven sons and three daughters, seven thousand sheep and three thousand oxen¾contribute further to the folktale flavor, as does the adroit use of repetition (a twofold test, a four-fold series of disasters each of which is laconically reported by an anonymous messenger, a twofold audience between Yahweh and the Satan). Moreover, the characters are stylized, being defined by formulas and motifs typical of folktales. So Job is the best of men, "the greatest of all the people of the east" (1:3b). He always does the right thing at the right time¾whether in prosperity or adversity (cf. 1:5, 1:20-22, 2:10). His response to his traumatic trials is exactly what we would expect from such a figure and is comparable to that of Abraham in the story about the sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22). Lastly, and important for a comic movement, the plot is not only similar to that of other folktales but it is also typical of comedy. In such stories, the hero is usually subjected to a test from which he comes out on top only by the utmost effort and the demonstration of his prowess. So it is with Job, who endures his sufferings with unflinching faith, and in the end is restored to a harmonious relationship with God and man. He has all his possessions doubled, he receives a new set of children, and his daughters are renowned far and wide for their beauty. He himself lives to the grand old age of 140 years¾exactly double the proverbial three score and ten mentioned in Psalm 90¾and dies a fulfilled and satisfied man. Such a story follows the plot line of many comedies. As Northrup Frye observes, "Comedy has a U-shaped plot, with the action sinking into deep and often potentially tragic complications, and then suddenly turning upward into a happy ending" (1963:25).
1.1 It is important to stress that the poet has retained the basic plot of the folktale, even though he has altered the old tale by cutting it in two parts and making it into a prologue and epilogue. The genre and intention are thereby transformed. By breaking the tale into two pieces and inserting the long poetic speeches as the literary centerpiece, he has fractured the integrity of the original narrative and forced it to serve dual functions: it supplies the framework in which the poetic dialogues unfold, and at the same time it provides the fundamental story line. The intention of the "frame story" lies on multiple levels: (1) it describes "what is to be considered the normal and 'right' condition of the world and the characters" (Shapiro: 54); (2) it gives the reader decisive information which is kept from the protagonists of the story but which defines and conditions their actions and words; (3) it provides the "U-shaped plot" for the whole book.
1.2 Of crucial significance is that the prologue contains presuppositions and questions that trigger the movement of the book. First, by taking a figure famed for his righteousness, the poet intensifies and authenticates the agony of the innocent sufferer. Moreover, by stating explicitly that Job's suffering is in no way due to sin, the poet puts his readers in a privileged position: we know what neither Job nor his counselors know¾that Job is afflicted because of a chain of events that occurred in a mysterious divine council. This fact throws the whole ensuing dialogue into extreme tension and creates one of the fundamental incongruities of the entire book. The knowledge gained in the prologue shows the major debate to be misplaced and wide of the mark; this perspective is sharpened by what T. R. Henn calls the "infinity of repetition" in which Job's antagonists keep on giving wrong answers with a thudding monotony. Incongruity¾which at least is potentially comic¾stands at the heart of the main course of the dialogues.
Secondly, the prologue foreshadows the theme of God's ambiguous personality, a theme richly developed in the poem (cf. chaps. 7, 9, 12). Even if we accept E. Good's explanation that the Satan's self-curse and not a wager per se motivates God's action against Job, ambiguity still colors the representation of God (1973:475ff.). Good is probably correct in pointing out the way this curse by necessity elicits the divine response, but we still have Yahweh's potentially self-incriminating acknowledgement: "you have incited me against him/To destroy him without cause" (2:3b). This theme of divinely caused suffering that capriciously strikes innocent and guilty alike will reappear: "'Tis all the same... .,'" Job later asserts, "guiltless as well as wicked he destroys" (9:22). So an aura of ambiguity hovers over the old tale which will penetrate the later dialogues.
Thirdly, an age-old mythical motif¾the determination of a man's fate in the divine council¾is used in the prologue, only to come under attack in the poem. It seems that the poet unveils this vision of mythical action in order to challenge its ultimate adequacy. Such a God may still have the power to determine a man's destiny, but already the question is implicit whether this kind of God is still righteous and trustworthy.
1.3 The epilogue is equally crucial for understanding the total literary work and cannot so easily be set aside as many literary critics have suggested. By retaining the restoration scene in the epilogue, the poet suddenly shifts the direction of the whole poem and returns to the prologue's vision of an idyllic society into which the main protagonists are now reintegrated. There is an upturn in the fortunes of the hero which resembles formally at least the comic upturn found in the happy ending.
2.0 The poetic speeches open with Job's soliloquy (chap. 3) which begins on a dark, discordant note totally dissonant from Job's pious words in the prologue. The hero has fallen! His dramatic curse of his birthday represents a sudden, sharp downturn into despair. As Good has noted, the self-curse of the Satan that evokes the action of the prologue and expects a curse from Job has been partially effective, though it is not as clearly directed as the Satan had claimed (1973:475ff.). Job's curse is ambiguous: does it only concern Job's own existence? ¾"Damn the day I was born" (3:3a); or is it also implicitly a curse against the Creator? D. Robertson answers the latter question affirmatively (449f.), but I share Good's reluctance to be so sure as to the ultimate thrust of the curse (476). It does seem clear, however, that Job hurls a curse and a challenge against the whole creation. This intention is epitomized in Job's appeal to mythological tradition: "May those who curse Yam curse it, those skilled in rousing Leviathan " (3:8). Job calls the old creation myth to mind in order to reverse its effects; he desires to throw all of creation back into primordial chaos. So whether or not Job indirectly curses God, the incongruity between the Job of the prologue who blesses and the Job of the poem who curses is sharply drawn. The Satan was at least partially right in his assessment of the situation.
2.1 Job's soliloquy reveals still another attack on normative Hebraic tradition. Job goes counter to the Hebraic preference of life over death and reverts to what seems to be more compatible with the Egyptian expectation of the afterlife where restful ease greets the one who is fortunate enough to find his way to the grave (3:13, 22). In fact, it is not inappropriate to call this reversal of tradition a parody of the usual Hebraic emphasis on life over against death¾an emphasis found especially in the Complaint Psalms (cf. Psalm 88). Later on in his discourses Job will return to the normative Hebraic view of death as a gray, gloomy form of existence (cf. 7:9f.; 10:21, 22; 14:1ff.), but for now at least death seems better than life.
2.2 In sum, Job 3 represents on the one hand a jarring contrast to how Job was initially portrayed in the prologue, but on the other hand it sets a fundamental tone for the succeeding speeches. That Job's outburst counters elements in normative Hebraic tradition and thus stands in an incongruous relationship to that tradition is evidence of its radicality and newness.
3.0 After the bitter curse in chap. 3, the three friends now begin to offer their contribution. The friends are initially presented in a favorable light; they are sensitive and compassionate to Job: "When they saw him from afar, they could not recognize him, and they raised their voices and wept; each tore his robe and sprinkled dust on his head. They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one said a word to him, for they saw that his anguish was very great" (2:12-13). The friends engage in customary mourning rites, and one should understand their silence primarily from this point of view. But when one remembers Job's later sarcastic wish: "Oh that you would keep silent, and it would be your wisdom!" (13:5), it is not remiss to suggest that this initial period of silence in retrospect is represented incongruously as their finest hour.
3.1 Although the friends' speeches can be read on several different levels, it seems that the poet has created a magnificent caricature of the wise counselor. Eliphaz' opening speech has typical elements which are carried through the ensuing speeches of the friends. Decades ago K. Fullerton pointed to the presence of "double entendre" in this speech. And Eliphaz indeed evokes an ambivalent response, as D. Robertson has recently argued (451ff.). On the positive side, Eliphaz appears to be motivated by a genuine concern for Job. He begins very solicitously: "If one ventures a word with you, will you be offended" (4:2a). Moreover, he seems convinced that Job is what he claims to be¾an innocent sufferer. Nowhere in his first speech does he resort to direct accusation or name-calling. He explains Job's present misfortunes by an appeal to a dramatic visionary revelation about the inherent and thus inevitable sinfulness of mankind (4:13ff.). Job is only implicated because he is a member of the human race, not because of any particular sin he has committed. Finally, even though Eliphaz was not privy to the proceedings of the divine council, he seems on one level to have Job's situation analyzed fairly well. Job's suffering is a disciplinary test; so Job has only to hang on to his integrity and be confident in his piety and his God. If Job therefore commits his cause to God, "who does great things and unsearchable, marvelous things without number," then Job may expect full restoration, replete with his possessions, numerous descendants, and the expectation of dying "in ripe old age" (cf. 5:24-26). In fact, Eliphaz accurately albeit ironically predicts the final denouement of the whole book, as will also his two companions (cf. 8:5-7; 11:13ff.).
3.2 But Eliphaz' speech can be viewed from another angle, which gives a negative slant to his words. Eliphaz and his two cohorts rely heavily on their accumulation of proverbial wisdom gained from traditional lore as well as their own personal observation; thus they strike the pose of exemplary sages. Eliphaz even goes beyond the usual ambiance of the sage when he describes an awesome night vision in order to authenticate his wise counsel, though there is a curious incongruity between the elaborate portrayal of the vision and the rather commonplace information contained therein (cf. 4:14ff.). So on another level Eliphaz comes across as a rather pompous, pretentious counselor, who must in the end resort to general maxims which simply fail to apply in this specific situation (cf. 4:8-11; 5:2-4), even though these maxims be clothed in the language of a mysterious visionary experience.
3.3 Though Bildad and Zophar by no means may be considered carbon copies of Eliphaz and sometimes formulate their arguments differently (e.g., Bildad especially emphasizes the authority of the fathers whereas Zophar appeals to the impenetrable mysteries of the divine nature), they both begin with the same basic premise as Eliphaz: there is a necessary and universal correlation between suffering and sinning. It is no surprise therefore that their essential advice is the same: repent and trust God (cf. 8:5-7; 10:13ff.).
3.4 In the second and third cycles of speeches the friends resort more and more to stereotyping as they indulge in long, lurid portrayals of the grim destiny of the wicked (cf. chaps. 15, 18, 20, 22, 27:13ff.). In so
behaving the friends become increasingly ludicrous as they engage in an "infinity of repetition." "Exaggeration," remarks Bergson, "is always comic when prolonged and especially when prolonged" (quoted in Cox: 141). To put it another way: "In ridiculing [they] become ridiculous" ¾which is a fundamental but paradoxical ingredient of comedy. From the outset both Job and the reader¾albeit on different levels of knowledge¾are keenly aware of the utter incongruity between the friends' speeches and Job's situation. The friends become cruelly and grotesquely comic as they strive with increasing dogmatism to apply their faulty solutions to the wrong problem¾and the wrong person.
3.5 Job's sarcastic and satirical rejection of the friends and their irrelevant advice is sharp and bitter, but not unmerited:
No doubt you are the gentry; and with you wisdom will die.
But I have a mind as well as you; I am not inferior to you.
Who does not know such things? (12:2-3)
...Ask the beasts, they will teach you;
The birds of the air they will tell you (12:7).
Galling comforters are you all. Have windy words a limit?
What moves you to prattle on? I, too, could talk like you.
If you were in my place. I could harangue with words,
Could shake my head at you. I could strengthen you with my mouth,
My quivering lips would soothe you (16:2b-5).
How you have helped the powerless,
Aided the arm that had no strength!
How you have counseled the unwise,
Offered advice in profusion!
With whose help have you uttered words,
Whose breath came forth from you? (26:2-4).
3.6 According to Roger Cox in a recent essay on comedy, Schopenhauer "classified pedantry as a form of folly and says that 'the pedant, with his general maxims, almost always misses the mark in life, shows himself to be foolish, awkward, and useless!'" (137). In Schopenhauer's sense, Job's "comforters" may be termed pedants, who though claiming to be wise in fact emerge as fools. Job's cutting retort to his friends dramatizes this perception: "Your maxims are ashen aphorisms/Defenses of clay are your defenses" (13:12). In his article Cox goes on to argue that "moralizing leads toward incongruity for several reasons, not least of which is the fact that it usually takes the form of universal statements. Obviously universal statements gather so many things under a single heading that there is almost bound to be incongruity among the things brought together under that heading" (148). Cox ends his discussion with an observation that strikingly bears on the Joban poet's parody of the wise comforter: "The pedant with his general maxims is simply a caricature of the basic comic character, who strives constantly...to justify and preserve his invented self against the onslaughts of the realities he encounters" (148).
3.7 In conclusion, the poet has created a brilliant caricature of the friends in their role as wise counselors, who indeed say some "right things about God" but who become ridiculous in their approach to Job because of the irrelevance of their counsel. The would-be wise men become fools, the mockers become a mockery. The friends resemble the classical comic figure of the alazon ¾the imposter, the offender, and finally the enemy of God (cf. 42:7) . As imposters the friends are finally reduced to silence and confusion. Elihu's words, though selfserving, are nevertheless illuminating of what happens to the friends in the course of the debate and are anticipatory of Yahweh's condemnation of the friends: "I paid close attention to you, but none of you confuted Job. None of you answered his words (32:12); "Dismayed, they answer him no more: Words have forsaken them" (32:15). According to Sypher this is typical of what happens to the alazon :"... in the course of the comic debate the supposed wisdom of the alazon is reduced to absurdity, and the alazon himself becomes a clown" (42). Thus in the end,
the friends become comic characters, and their pretentious pose vis-à-vis Job and God is exposed and ridiculed.
4.0 When one examines the speeches of Job it is all but impossible to find any systematic and orderly progression¾despite the best efforts of scholars. Rather the poet has built a rambling discursiveness into the dialogues which seems to heighten the sense of chaos that is so terribly threatening. I want to highlight two facets of this discursiveness. First, one notices that the poet has built into Job's responses to his friends the stylistic feature of delayed reaction: Job often seems to ignore the immediately preceding speech in order to deal with an earlier argument of one of the comforters (cf. 9:2 which is the answer to Eliphaz in 4:17). Thus a certain incongruity is present in the very structuring of the speeches. The various speakers are sometimes portrayed as talking past one another. Secondly, Job's speeches sometimes shift addressees in midstream, often without forewarning; suddenly Job is no longer speaking to the friends but is addressing God (cf. 7:7ff.; 13:20ff.; 17:3f.). What this observation reveals is that Job is keenly aware that he is fighting a battle on two fronts against two different adversaries: his erstwhile human friends have become his enemies (cf. 6:14ff.; 19:19), and God, likewise his onetime friend (29:4), has become his foe. Throughout the entire course of the dialogues Job confronts first one adversary and then another without always explicitly informing the reader. Job's speeches, therefore, are operating on different levels, a fact which gives them an incongruous cast.
4.1 To Job, however, it is his second adversary¾God¾who presents the most awesome threat. Job moves from his own plight to a radical and comprehensive indictment of God and a frontal challenge to God's justice in the universe. As D. Robertson has argued, what began as a test of Job has now turned into a test of God (451); thus the moral vision of the universe comes to stand under a severe and searching scrutiny. Since Job is convinced that his suffering is not attributable to any particular sin, he senses that his misfortune is symptomatic of a grave and general disorder of the universe. His language of attack against God is probably the most searing in the Hebrew Bible. God often emerges as a grotesque, demonic deity. The following is a typical catalogue of divine terrors:
His anger rips and rages against me; He gnashes at me with his teeth;
My enemy whets his eye against me.
God puts me in custody of the vicious; Tosses me into the hand of the wicked.
I was at ease and he crushed me; Grabbed me by the neck and mangled me.
He sets me up as his target; His archers ring me round.
He stabs my vitals without pity; Pours out my guts on the ground.
He rends me rift upon rift; Rushes at me like a warrior (16:9, 11-14).
To Job the contest is grotesquely unequal; yet God persists in treating Job not as a piece of frail flesh, but as some primordial monster of the deep (cf. 7:12). If one is looking for the dark comedy of the grotesque, Job is indeed a fertile field.
4.3 It is possible to view Job's speeches as a collage of brilliant parodies, where at almost every crucial juncture Job takes up diverse parts of his traditional heritage only to twist them and make them ludicrous: Job's parody of Psalm 8 is the most frequently quoted example (7:17-18). But he bitingly parodies the complaint genre time and again (cf. Job 3, 7, 14). His speeches reach a crescendo of bitter irony when he catalogues examples of the pervasive chaos in creation under the generic pattern of the hymn of praise:
Truly I know that it is so: But how can a man be just before God?
If one wished to contend with him, one could not answer him once in a thousand times.
He is wise in heart, and mighty in strength¾who has hardened himself against him and succeeded? ¾
he who removes mountains and they know it not, when he overturns them in his anger;
who shakes the earth out of its place, and its pillars tremble;
who commands the sun, and it does not rise; who seals up the stars;
who alone stretched out the heavens, and trampled the waves of the sea;
who made the Bear and Orion, the Pleiades and the chambers of the south;
who does great things beyond understanding, and marvelous things without number (9:2-10 in the RSV translation).
It should not be missed that this speech answers Eliphaz and not the immediately preceding Bildad; it also parodies elements in Eliphaz' speech (cf. 4:17 and 9:2; 5:9 and 9:10). What results is an ironic parody of a doxological hymn, which is used only in order to twist its intention and convey an opposite meaning: it no longer serves to praise Yahweh as just and merciful in his role as Creator, but rather portrays him as a God of terror who revels in destruction. When Job concludes his hymnic catalogue of divine attributes with an almost verbatim quotation of Eliphaz' earlier lines ("who does great things without understanding and marvelous things without number"¾5:9 and 9:10), he brings to a fitting climax his sardonic song to the God of chaos.
4.4 Throughout his arguments Job continually reverts to the certainty of his innocence and integrity as the cornerstone of his case (cf. 9:3ff.). If there be any equal justice in the universe, Job is convinced that he must be vindicated. So early on in the dialogue Job calls for a cosmic trial, where he will be the defendant and Yahweh the plaintiff. If he can at all get a fair trial, God must acquit him. But no sooner has he broached this idea than he realizes that he is sure to lose. God will
rig the trial and overpower Job with his superior strength and wisdom and especially his rhetorical prowess (cf. 9:14-23). So the dominant and guiding metaphor of a trial has a "self-destruct" mechanism : to the Joban poet it simply is not sufficient to deal with the case of Job vs. God.
4.5 It is because of Job's fears which are born of his sense of inequality that he conceives of having a mysterious third party who will insure a just and fair trial. The first time we hear of such a figure, Job promptly negates the notion: no such arbitrator really exists (9:32, 33). But the second time Job is more confident and he has also modified the character of the mediatorial figure; the umpire or arbitrator has become one who will vouch for Job on high and guarantee a fair trial (16:19). This theme reaches its climax in the famous "Redeemer" passage (19: 23ff.). Although no one pretends to understand this text completely (it is next to impossible to translate it!), what clearly stands out is that Job is absolutely confident that his Redeemer/Vindicator/Avenger lives. Job is therefore assured of some sort of ultimate vindication, but what exactly is entailed in this vindication is unclear. D. Robertson has proposed the most extreme interpretation: Job conjures up here the image of one who will vindicate him by murdering God (Robertson: 460). It is rather a grotesque thought, but it is a possible interpretation given the semantic range of the word gô'el . What is interesting for my purpose is that in Job's dramatic confrontation with Yahweh there is ironically no mediator in view except we do meet again the term "umpire" (môkÉah) now applied to Job (40:2), which heightens the irony of the absence of any bona fide mediator At any rate, the absence of the mediator negates Job's utter sense of confidence in 19:25f. What to many interpreters is the high point in Job's odyssey of faith is finally submerged in the sea of incongruities that surge through the book.
4.6 Job concludes his appeal for a trial in chap. 31 where he utters an oath of clearance in the form of a series of self-curses. In my judgment, Robertson is convincing in his interpretation of this oath as an effective means of forcing God's hand (461). It now becomes necessary for God to make a personal appearance. Job's final challenge to God is Job at his Promethean best:
O that someone would listen to me! Behold my signature, let Shaddai answer me. Let my opponent write a document. I would wear it on my shoulder, I would bind it on like a crown. I would tell him the number of my steps; I would approach him like a prince (31:35-37).
5.0 When one turns from Job's heroic challenge to God for a personal encounter, he is primed for a dramatic visitation of God; he is therefore taken aback by the appearance of the young interloper¾Elihu. It is this sharp sense of disconnection with what precedes and follows, coupled with stylistic and linguistic differences, which has led the vast majority of scholars to relegate Elihu's speeches to the heap of secondary and inferior materials. Such overblown, bombastic language, so the argument runs, could never be the work of the poet of the authentic Job! Perhaps this is correct, but then again perhaps it misses something. As H. H. Rowley points out, "Whoever wrote the Elihu speeches probably deliberately put banal lines into his mouth, since his purpose was rather to expose this type of character than to exalt it" . I think Rowley is on the right track with this remark, but he does not go far enough with it. In my opinion, a reading of these speeches in the whole context of Job shows that Elihu is comic character whom the writer seeks to expose by the timing of Elihu's appearance and the type of language he uses . From everything that precedes Elihu's entrance, the reader surely expects Yahweh to appear; but instead of the mighty God young Elihu steps boldly onto the scene.
Elihu appears as "the Johnny-come-lately, who pops up from nowhere in chap. 32, disappears after chap. 37, and is never heard of again" (Good: 208). The effect is an ironic reversal of expectation and a jarring example of incongruity. We expect God¾and we get Elihu!
5.1 Elihu emerges as the proverbial and prototypical "angry young man" who attempts to speak for God and to straighten out his elders. His long, verbose introduction sets the tone for his whole contribution:
I am young in years, and you are venerable men;
So I recoiled and was afraid to declare my knowledge to you.
I thought, "Days should speak,"
"Many years ought to teach wisdom."
But it is a spirit in man, The breath of Shaddai gives insight.
Seniors may not be sage, Nor elders understand aright.
So I say, "Listen to me, I too will state my view."
I waited for you to speak, I gave ear to your arguments while you tested words.
I paid close attention to you, But none of you confuted Job.
None of you answered his words.
... .... ....
I will now say my piece; I will declare what I know.
For I am brimming with words, Wind bloats my belly.
My belly is like unvented wine, Like new wineskins ready to burst.
I must speak and get relief, Open my lips and reply (32:6b-12, 17-20).
After such "windy" words one would imagine that Elihu is finally ready to begin his subject. But he continues on a similar note in vss. 1-7 of chap. 33 which are an exordium directed more particularly to Job. "It has pleased the author," remarks Dhorme, "to depict the new speaker as interminably prosy" (415). Is not this one sort of firstclass parody¾to put banal, verbose lines in the mouth of a pretentious interloper? According to Davidson and Toy, many ancient scholars branded Elihu as a buffoon, "a boastful youth whose shallow intermeddling is only to be explained by the fewness of his years, the incarnation of folly, or the Satan himself gone a-mumming" (99). From a comic perspective Elihu, like the three friends, seems to play the role of the alazon or a buffoon, and it seems that the author's intent is to expose him as such. Just as we find a caricature of the friends in their role as "old" sages, so we have a caricature of the "angry young man" who now aspires to be the one who would defend the ways of God. Though there may be "no fool like an old fool," Elihu, as a young fool, comes close. He not only reiterates and expands essentially the same views as the three friends (even the disciplinary view of suffering was first mentioned by Eliphaz [5:17], though Elihu modifies it by combining it with a mediatorial figure); but he also anticipates some of the themes of the Yahweh speeches (cf. esp. chap. 37). In the first instance he basically repeats the tired arguments of friends, which were based on the premise that Job's suffering must be tied to his sinfulness; and in the second, he shows how different it is when a brash young man speaks in God's behalf and when God himself speaks out of the awesome whirlwind. So Elihu emerges in the total context of the book as a comic figure whom the author exposes and ridicules. Like the friends, Elihu appears to be wise; and he indeed says many "right" things, but he ultimately misses the mark since he fundamentally misconstrues what is involved in Job's particular situation.
6.0 Most interpreters rightly consider the Yahweh speeches to be the climax of the book of Job. That the speeches are laced with irony is a widely held view; but what kind of irony is the debated issue. The speeches seem to side-step the questions posed by Job¾or at least they offer no clear-cut answers. At any rate ambiguity seems intrinsic to the speeches. How one finally resolves the problem of the Yahweh speeches and Job's responses is one important key to a comprehensive interpretation of the book of Job.
6.1 The most common view is to take the Yahweh speeches at more or less face value and interpret Job's repentance as genuine. Job had become pretentious and had stepped beyond his limits (cf. 40:1-8); so the divine interrogation was eminently appropriate. In his confrontation with God Job became aware of the hugeness of creation and the presence of a divine mystery that transcended human understanding. The overpowering theophany unveiled to Job not only the majestic Creator God but the wonders of creation: "I know you can do all things; No purpose of yours can be thwarted... .I talked of things I did not know, Wonders beyond my ken... .I had heard of you by hearsay, But now my own eyes have seen you. So I recant and repent in dust and ashes" (42:2, 3a, 5, 6). With such a vision Job's repentance is the appropriate and authentic response. What then, according to this view, is the intention of the Yahweh speeches and Job's responses? Von Rad's answer is typical: "The purpose of the divine answer in the book of Job is to glorify God's justice towards his creatures, and the fact that he is turned towards them to do them good and bless them. And in the intention of the poem that is also truly an answer to Job's question. If Job's holding fast to his righteousness was a question put to God, God gives the answer by pointing to the glory of his providence that sustains all his creation. of course this justice of God cannot be comprehended by man; it can only be adored" (1962:417). In a word the incongruity at the root of creation is surmounted by the vision of the Creator and his creation; prayer and praise become the only fitting responses.
6.2 If von Rad's view is typical, D. Robertson has recently presented a highly atypical interpretation. Utilizing a peculiarly literary tack, Robertson has set the Yahweh speeches in the larger context of the book of Job and argued the position that they yield a fundamentally
ironic sense (462ff.). For instance, in chap. 9 Job predicts what Yahweh would do in a face-to-face encounter: Yahweh would simply overwhelm Job with his awesome powers, and with his superior intellectual abilities he would pose questions that Job could not possibly answer (cf. especially 9:3ff.). Thus the Joban poet has "set up" God; we want and hope that God will not act as predicted, but when God does finally appear he in fact performs as Job says he will. "So God's rhetoric," claims Robertson, "because Job has armed us against it, convinces us that he is a charlatan God, one who has the power and skill of a god but is a fake at the truly divine task of governing with justice and love" (464). Moreover, argues Robertson, Job's repentance is "tongue-in-cheek," since both he and the friends had already predicted that Job would inevitably knuckle under in a show-down with God ("Though guiltless, my mouth would declare me guilty," 9:20a; cf. also 9:13-15) (467). So God becomes "the friends writ large" and is parodied as a blustery, false comforter . God himself in the end confirms this reading when he approves Job's words in the Epilogue (42:7). Thus the meaning of the book of Job, according to Robertson, is that the poet, like "a medicine man," has developed a strategy for dealing with "man's fear of fate, his destiny, the unknown" (468). That strategy involves the curing of fear by "ridicule of the object feared" (468). "So we know of him what we know of all tyrants, that while they may torture us and finally kill us, they cannot destroy our personal integrity" (469).
6.3 In my judgment it is possible to accept some of Robertson's insights into the irony of Job, but I think it is necessary to set them in the larger context of comedy. In this way the two diametrically opposed interpretations presented above may be brought together in a new and illuminating synthesis.
6.31 I would only underscore what Robertson says about the adroit use of irony in the book of Job; in fact, it is the type of irony the poet utilizes that leads me to suspect it is best interpreted from a comic perspective. As I have noted, time and again the irony often veers in the direction of the ludicrous and ridiculous. Incongruity and parody pervade the representation of Job's friends including young Elihu, Job's God, and Job himself. I think Robertson's interpretation, in fact, would have been strengthened had he not eliminated Elihu from his discussion and had he given more attention to the ironic portrayal of Job. For example, are not the friends correct to a point in their estimate of Job's pride? And is it not the case that Yahweh's magnificent parody of Job's heroic posture has elements of truth?
Gird your loins like a hero; I will ask you and you tell me!
... .....................
Have you an arm like God? Can you thunder with a voice like his?
Deck now yourself with grandeur and majesty; Be arrayed in glory and splendor.
Let loose your furious wrath; Glance at every proud one and abase him;
Tread down the wicked where they stand.
Bury them in the dust together; Bind them in the infernal crypt.
Then I will acknowledge to you that your own right hand can save you! (40:7, 9-14).
"[This] final challenge to Job," says Terrien, "parodies ironically the prerogatives and functions of the divine monarch in the ancient Middle East" (507).
6.32 Moreover, I think that even the irony in Job's predictions of how Yahweh would act takes a different turn from Robertson's description. It is true that Job declares that Yahweh would be physically and verbally overpowering a mere mortal in a face-to-face encounter. But from the perspective of comedy this kind of satirical questioning of the human hero is not at all out of place . Also, in my opinion, there is an incongruity between the content of Job's predictions and the content of the theophanic vision¾fulfillment does not quite match prediction. In Job's description of Yahweh's action he parodied the
Creator God as one who brought chaos not order, darkness not light, death not life (cf. 9:5ff.; 12:14ff.). But the Yahweh speeches move in a different direction. Terrien is correct, I think, in discerning at the heart of the Yahweh speeches a mythical pattern that appears in the seasonal changes with concentration on the life-giving rains¾which do indeed sometimes fall on "no man's land" (38:2ff.) (508). But should not the rains fall there? Are not the creation and its needs bigger than man with his more narrow vantage point on what constitutes superfluity and waste? The rhetorical questions concerning the emergence of new life bespeak the vitality of creation¾they do not focus on death and disorder (cf. 39:1ff.).
6.33 Finally, I think that it is not a misreading of the Yahweh speeches to hear a playful, festive note in the portrayal of creation. The occasion of creation was when "the morning stars sang together, and all the gods exulted" (38:7). The pictures of the animals, for the most part, do not conjure up images of primordial chaos so much as they do images of freedom (the wild ass), awesome strength (the buffalo), majestic power (the horse), and grandeur of flight (the hawk and the eagle). Even the much-maligned ostrich is not so much a symbol of threatening chaos as ludicrous stupidity¾yes the stupidity is God-given, but there are compensating features: "When up she spreads her plumes, She laughs at horse and rider" (39:18). She may be bizarre in looks, ridiculous in actions, but she is a superb runner! Similarly even the mighty Leviathan, the most terrifying and truly monstrous creature in this "carnival of animals" (to use Terrien's apt phrase), is described somewhat sportively¾at least from the Creator's view. The portrayal in Job 41:1ff. is not so disparate from what we find in Psalm 104:26: "Leviathan you formed to make him play in it" (i.e., the sea) or as an alternative translation puts it, "Leviathan you formed to play with." "Yahweh," says Terrien, "permits himself to speak of these threatening realities with the detachment of the humorist, because he controls them" (504).
6.4 On still another level I would argue that the irony and incongruity of the Yahweh speeches are best interpreted as elements in a comic vision. As interpreters have often noted, Yahweh's answer to Job is NO answer¾at least it is not an unambiguous answer. Incongruity is involved, however one chooses finally to deal with that incongruity. Professor Good seems to be correct in his contention that Yahweh decisively shifts the issue from the question of justice¾Job's question¾to the question of order (Good, 1973:480). That order involves justice is clearly a part of the Hebraic heritage, but it is an order that transcends narrow human views of justice and comprehends all creation. The issue is pinpointed in Job 40:8, which I believe has been correctly translated by Good: "Would you even annul my order (mi[scaron]pat ), treat me as wicked so you can be innocent?" (1973:479). Is it the case, Good asks, that either Job or God must be wicked and the other innocent? The answer in Good's opinion is "no!" (1973:480). "What God demonstrates," argues Good, "is that moral presumptions are not the way the world is handled, that the question of order is another one entirely from the one Job put" (1973:481). Thus if one examines carefully Job's speeches the trial metaphor involving guilt and innocence becomes dominant; but the Yahweh speeches move more dominantly in the mythological metaphors of creation .
Job's new perception, I would argue, is rooted in a comic perspective, which comes only when Job has a double view¾i.e., a divine and human view¾of himself and the world. This double view only becomes Job's through the theophanic vision. He sees God and through God's eyes he now sees the world. He sees the mysterious interworkings of the universe; he sees the seeming superfluity Which is nevertheless required for the larger needs of life in the cosmos; and he sees that man only constitutes a small part of the cosmos. "Job is invited in effect," says Terrien, "to liberate himself from the microcosm of his egocentricity, to borrow the perspective of God without pursuing the mirage of self-deification, and to discover the broad horizons of the macrocosm of life on the grand scale" (502). The mystery and incongruity remain¾they are now accepted but not resolved.
6.5 After the initial theophanic speech the hero is silenced: "Lo, I am small, how can I answer you? My hand I lay on my mouth; I have spoken once, I will not reply; twice, but I will say no more" (40:4¾5). Now on one level silence is a profoundly authentic response of the one who has become wise and this reaction is not to be denigrated. Yet there is a second divine speech and a second response. The seeming redundance of the two speeches has perplexed interpreters for centuries. A common approach is to brand the second speech as a secondary addition and then blend Job's two responses into one harmonistic account. I side with those who argue that the second speech lies on the primary stage of tradition; but whatever one's position on this question, it is still necessary to interpret the final stage of the text with its duplicate structure. As a rule when scholars have attempted to take the text as it stands and interpret the intention of the two speeches and the two responses, they have done so in theological and/or psychological terms: Job has been silenced, but he still needs to be repentant. Silence therefore is construed on a lower level in the hierarchy of appropriate responses. Terrien'sinterpretation typifies this approach: "Job no longer protests of his innocence, nor does he clamor for his rights. He is not yet ready to surrender his pride, nor, can he exteriorize a confession in words. The poet stresses the negative aspect of Job's response to the First Speech (40:4-5). He may well be aware of the need for psychological suspense in view of the processes of man's conversion. The encounter must continue" (502).
One can find evidence to support this view. Although there is a clear-cut parallelism in form and content between the two speeches and the two responses, the parallelism is designed to be incremental and build to a climax. The introductory challenge¾"Gird your loins like a hero; I will ask you, and you tell me"¾is repeated from the opening speech (38:3), but the issue under debate is now more clearly stated in 40:8. Moreover, the hero's arrogation to himself of the divine prerogatives, certainly present in the first speech, is sarcastically parodied in 40:9-14. Thus a climax is achieved in the second speech which is matched by the climax in the second response. The hero's silence is completed by his repentance. Hearing the divine speech silences the human hero, and seeing the divine presence¾as opposed to the hearing of God¾triggers repentance. Though silence is often the mark of the truly wise and faithful man in the Hebraic and Near Eastern tradition (cf. especially Egyptian wisdom), the two-stage movement in the book of Job seems to suggest that silence as a response is not sufficient; so silence must be transcended and climaxed in repentance.
6.6 I think, however, that comedy helps to illumine and further explicate this movement of the text. The incongruity between the two speeches and the two responses has comic dimensions. Just at the moment the reader finishes the first speech and Job's response, he senses that a climax has finally been reached¾a climax already delayed once before by the entrance of Elihu. But again the poet shifts his ground and throws off his audience, for he has Yahweh break in and repeat virtually the same challenge to Job. Yet one detects differences. As indicated above, one hears a more clear-cut formulation of the issue involved (40:8) as well as a sharper parody of the hero. Moreover, though the theme of the "carnival of animals" is resumed, the two primordial and mythological monsters are cast up before man's eyes as terrifying symbols of the powers of chaos and evil whereas they appear as mere playthings before God because he alone as Creator controls them. So presumably the audience, like the hero, is caught off guard. What was thought to be the climax was not the climax; in fact, it was only a powerful prelude to the second and more decisive encounter between the hero and his God. The stylistic technique of structural parallelism serves to heighten the sense of incongruity in Yahweh's renewed challenge to Job and Job's second capitulation in the act of repentance. Thus commentators have been right in discerning an incongruity between the two speeches, but they have gone astray in seeking a solution by deletion or rearrangement according to a logic that fails to catch that what the poet does is simply to exploit the age-old Near Eastern literary convention of parallel structures in order to create a comic effect.
6.7 In conclusion, Job's second response of repentance seems to have multiple levels of meaning. In Robertson's ironic interpretation, Job's repentance is "tongue-in-cheek" (466ff.); the hero bows his head but with a sidelong glance to his audience he winks his eye. It must be admitted that Robertson's view is appealing and has textual support on its side (note again the sequence of chap. 9 and the sequence of Yahweh's speeches and Job's responses). Moreover, it is obviously easy to incorporate a "tongue-in-cheek" repentance into a comic view; it would be one more element in the "poet's ironic joke" (to use Robertson's own phrase from another context). I think, however, that the repentance is an authentic response of the hero because he has been granted the double view delineated above; it is too simple therefore to view it as "tongue-in-cheek." Thus Job's confession is genuine and becomes equivalent to the recognition scene in the comic plot: "I talked of things I did not know, Wonders beyond my ken... . I had heard of you by hearsay, but now my own eyes have seen you" (42:3, 5). According to the poet, a crucial part of Job's vision is that he sees as God sees and paradoxically he sees that he as a mortal does not see! That he repents is expected because he now sees aright. His confession is authentic but paradoxical: his new wisdom is that he does not know all, his new perception is that he does not see all; but he now knows enough and sees enough. of course it is still possible to construe this confession of new sight as ironic and tongue-in-cheek; but I think that the poet's portrayal of Job's vision of God makes a difference when one remembers that Job has complained, on the one hand, about his inability to see God (cf. 9:11 and 23:8-9) and expressed on the other, the confidence that in the moment of his vindication he would see God (19:26-27). So I would argue that Robertson underplays the significance of Job's vision of God when he concentrates on the ironic interplay between Job's prior speeches and the Yahweh speeches. To be sure, whether one interprets the repentance scene as tongue-in-cheek or authentic depends finally on whether or not one senses an incongruity between Job's predictions of how God would act in a confrontation and God's actual self-representation in the Yahweh speeches. In my view, as I argued earlier, there is an incongruity between prediction and fulfillment which the poet has Job himself confess. Thus I read the confession as genuine and Job's acknowledgement of his new perception into the ways of God and the world as authentic. Job as comic hero rediscovers his limits as a man and repents before the creator God.
7.0 That the restoration scene (42:7ff.) follows immediately Job's repentance is explicable from the perspective of comedy; in fact, it is decisive to a comic movement according to numerous literary critics. Building on Cornford's classic analysis of Attic Comedy, Sypher argues that the movement from repentance to festivity is a necessary component of comedy, which shows among other things that comedy is a more complex form than tragedy (33ff.). "Retaining its double action of penance and
revel," says Sypher, "comedy remains an 'improvisation' with a loose structure, and a precarious logic that can tolerate every kind, of 'improbability'" (35). Thus critics have been correct in noting the "improvised," "improbable," and gratuitous quality of the restoration, but they have either missed or dismissed the significance of this part of Job within the totality of the book's structure. Here I part company with Terrien, Robertson, Good, and other interpreters who in different ways tend to discount the importance of the Epilogue. Good is typical: "The restoration of wealth is not a sign of divine pleasure but is simply something that happens, as far as Job cares" (482). I think this sort of interpretation overly psychologizes the hero and fails thereby to deal with the generic structure of the whole book. The restoration is not at all superfluous or surprising when one traces out the plot line of comedy, where catastrophe is typically followed by restoration, penance by festivity, and alienation from society by reintegration into society. And one should note that this restoration includes not simply Job and his new family but Job's three friends as well. A crowning irony surely comes when Yahweh rebukes the friends and commends Job (42:7)¾and then orders the friends to go to Job, offer sacrifice, and have Job intercede for them in order that they might likewise be restored to divine favor . All the crucial segments of the Joban society are therefore restored to a happy, harmonious relationship.
7.1 The "happy ending" of the book of Job illumines and helps to confirm the comic perspective I have tried to delineate. In fact, the happy ending, in my view, demonstrates the ultimate irony and comedy of Job, where the problems are not fully and satisfactorily resolved, where the contradictions and incongruities remain. Describing the book of Job as technically a comedy, N. Frye remarks: "The author of Job has solved the moral problem of his play in the usual comic fashion, by cutting its Gordian
knot. But we can accept this solution only by thinking of the world of Job's reward as a different world from the nightmare world of misery and boils and uncomprehending comforters" (1965:129). Although I owe an enormous debt to N. Frye for insights into comedy, I think his interpretation of the comedy of Job misses something. I would argue, first of all, that Frye does not give sufficient heed to the prior elements of comedy within the poem of Job; thus he depends too exclusively on the "happy ending" to define Job as technically a comedy. Moreover as I read comedy, it seems that a major point is its perception of the incongruities of existence in which celebration and festivity occur side-by-side with evil and death. Thus the comic vision does not necessarily eliminate evil and death; it is not incorrigibly and naively optimistic; it does not shut its eyes to the dark, jagged edges of life in this world. In fact, many would argue that it is precisely because man has experienced suffering that he has a sharpened awareness of comic incongruity . Comedy therefore may incorporate rather than ignore the haunting riddles of life. Thus even though the happy ending does stand in an incongruous relationship with the preceding poem, that does not mean it refers to a different world; it simply affirms that a harmonious, prosperous society is desirable in the midst of a world of pain and death.
7.2 That the book of Job fades out in a scene borrowed from the world of fairy tale and romance not only helps to confirm its comic mode, it also breaks off or at least alters its potentially tragic movement, which as we have noted has long been a concern of commentators. Even here, however, one must emphasize that the line between tragedy and comedy is fluid, and a work as richly complex and ambiguous as Job can legitimately evoke both responses. Job can indeed be painted as a tragic hero, as a Hebrew Prometheus who steadfastly holds to his integrity and defiantly challenges God and the world. But when Job has
his theophanic vision, when he beholds God and the world from a double view, when he sees that he does not ultimately see, when he perceives that the incongruities are not totally resolvable, then he "repents" and is duly "restored" to the idyllic life of a serene society . The eminent playwright, Christopher Fry, captures well these multiple dimensions in his perceptive observations on the interplay between tragedy and comedy:
The bridge by which we cross from tragedy to comedy and back again is precarious and narrow. We find ourselves in one or the other by the turn of a thought... .I know that when I set about writing a comedy the idea presents itself to me first of all as tragedy. The characters press on to the theme with all their divisions and perplexities about them; they are already entered for the race to doom, and good and evil are an infernal tangle skinning the fingers that try to unravel them. If the characters were not qualified for tragedy there would be no comedy, and to some extent I have to cross the one before I can light on the other... .[But] a bridge has to be crossed, a thought has to be turned. Somehow the characters have to unmortify themselves: to affirm life and assimilate death... .Their hearts must be as determined as the phoenix; what burns must also light and renew: not by a vulnerable optimism but by a hardwon maturity of delight, by the intuition of comedy... .The Book of Job is the great reservoir of comedy
The aura of ambiguity indeed remains to hover over the book of Job, but it is comedy¾rich, full, celebrative of life despite its contradictions and riddles¾that emerges as the final and dominant note in the Joban chorus of dissonant voices.
Corrigan, R. W., 1965, Cox, R., 1974, Cross, F. M., Jr. 1973, Davidson, A. B. and C. H. Toy., 1911, Davidson, A. B., 1962, Dhorme, E., 1967, Foster, B. R., 1974, Frye, N., l963, Frye, N., 1965, Fullerton, K., 1934, Good, E. M., 1965, Good, E. M., 1973, Guthke, K. S., 1966, Henn, T. R., l970, Kallen, H. M., 1959, McLelland, J. C., 1970, Polzin, R., 1974, Pope, M., 1965, Robertson, D., l973, Rosenthal, F., 1956, Rowley, H. H., 1970, Saliers, D., 1973, Shapiro, A., 1975, Skehan, P. W., 1971 Smith. J. Z., Speiser, E. A., l967, Styan, J. L., 1968, Sypher, W., 1965, Terrien, S., 1971, van de Walle, B., 1969, Via, D. O., Jr., 1975, von Rad, G., 1962, von Rad, G., 1966, Williams, J. G., l97l, 1. From the perspective of literary criticism of the Bible, William Whedbee's article, 1.2 I have no quarrel with Whedbee on this point. The question then becomes, what kind of comedy is Job. And for me this question is equal to the further question, how pervasive is the irony in Job. Is this irony contained by an essentially non-ironic ending and by two speeches by Yahweh and two replies by Job that are essentially nonironic, though they may have considerable ironic overtones? Whedbee's answer is yes. Aspects of Yahweh's speeches are incongruous (e.g., the fact that there are two of them) and so ironic; nevertheless, because they transpose Job's question of justice to the question of order and so emphasize the vitality of creation, they transcend irony (cf. 6.32 and 6.4). Similarly, while Yahweh's command to the friends to have Job intercede for them ironically reverses the positions of the combatants vis-à-vis God, the ending prose narrative belongs to the same world as the poem, and is, therefore, a genuine "happy ending" (cf. 7.1). 1.2 Or, alternatively, is the irony in Job all pervasive, encompassing the entire book in its arms, so that, for example, Yahweh's speeches are a joke on him, Job's replies tongue-in-cheek, and the ending ludicrous? This is my position, somewhat overstated, to be sure, for the sake of brevity. (See 2. In this response the question that interests me is not, is either of us right, and if so, which one, but how does one decide, on some sort of objective grounds, whether one of us is right. More broadly put the question is, given alternative literary interpretations that begin, generally speaking, from the same premise (in this case that Job belongs to the genre of comedy), how do you objectively decide between them. 2.1 One traditional way to solve this problem is to ask which interpretation more closely corresponds to the author's intentions, or, which interpretation more closely corresponds to how a work's initial audience would have read it. Many modern critics feel that it is a grave mistake to equate an author's understanding of his work with the most adequate understanding (cf. the debate over the "intentional fallacy"). I share these misgivings, but in any case it is not necessary for us to quarrel over this issue, since neither Job's author nor its date of composition are known or are likely to be discovered. So one way of introducing at least some objectivity into the debate between Whedbee and myself is barred. 2.2 We are left with the principle of coherency and comprehensiveness. The superior interpretation is the one that best accounts for all the data in the most consistent, uncomplicated fashion. It seems to me, though certainly I could be accused of thinking too highly of my own theory, that both interpretations hold up pretty well under these tests. Both fairly adequately account for the data, though neither is free from flaws. Whedbee makes two very
telling points against me. One is that I miss the irony directed at Job (cf. 6.31) and therefore conclude that we should sympathize more straightforwardly with Job than Whedbee thinks we should. The other is that I oversimplify the Yahweh speeches when I claim that they are a point by point fulfillment of Job's predictions (cf. 6.32). Even if by some clever maneuvering I could counter these arguments, I have to admit that a theory like his better accounts for the presence of irony at Job's expense and the subtlety of Yahweh's speeches. 2.3 On the other hand, I feel my theory possibly does more justice to several other features of the text. For example, I think the presence of Elihu cannot but inhibit a reverent response to Yahweh, since Elihu is so obviously a fool and also so obviously anticipates both Yahweh's bombastic manner and his attitude toward Job. The second speech of Yahweh has a similar effect, for, as Whedbee notes several times, repetition usually makes the repetitive party look somewhat ridiculous. Or again, despite Whedbee's very carefully constructed argument, I think it is hard for many of us to take the epilogue as referring to the same plane of experience as the poetry. 2.4 In short, though neither theory is free from defects, both are about as coherent and comprehensive interpretations of the book of Job as we are likely to get. Does this mean both are right? It must, unless we are willing to renege on our definition of right as coherent and comprehensive. It also means, of course, that any other theory that meets these tests is right. 3.0 It should surprise no one, however, that I still have a preference for my interpretation over Whedbee's. Upon what basis do I make this choice? If the above argument is valid, I have no rational basis for it. I must favor mine over his for irrational reasons, reasons possibly having to do with my background, training, predilections, and so forth, not to mention the fact it is my theory. I
like my interpretation better just as I like my daughter better than the next door neighbor's, though both are interesting and likeable people, or just as I like asparagus over green beans, though both may be equally nourishing. In other words, we decide between theories that are more or less equal in terms of cogency, not on the basis of reason but of taste. Such a conclusion does not leave the field of literary criticism totally vulnerable to invasion by the troops of Unreason. I think Kallen's theory that Job is Greek tragedy, for example, is nowhere near as rationally coherent or comprehensive as Whedbee's or mine. But when Whedbee remarks, "Whether one interprets the repentance scene as tongue-in-cheek or authentic depends finally on whether or not one senses an incongruity between Job's predictions of how God would act in a confrontation and God's actual self-representation in the Yahweh speeches" (6.7, italics mine), I think "senses" means "tastes" not "apprehend rationally."
Starting from the hermeneutical principle that the exposition can have heuristic function, the first part of the article attempts an imaginative staging of the book of Job in order to discover the interplay of the characters among themselves and with the audience; thus the interrelated concepts of ignorance, irony and commitment emerge. The second part explores the tension between two conceptions of God's justice: that of the judge who dispenses retribution impartially¾defended by Job's friends¾, that of the party summoned to a bilateral lawsuit¾the one sought by Job¾; this tension is tested through some selected passages of the drama. 0. One does not usually read or present the book of Job as a drama, probably because our concept of the literary genre "drama" is very precise and limited. The Book of Job itself might correct this narrow view of "drama"; since, however, I do not wish to proceed in a circular manner, I will resort to more convincing data. 0.1 First we might utilize E. Staiger's very flexible concept of "the dramatic" or listen attentively to N. Frye who states that: "the Book of Job is clearly an imaginative drama." Moreover we can have recourse to modern forms of drama in order to encounter the close ties between the dramatic form and our book. Recent works on lit
erary theory discuss such forms. (See the bibliography.) 0.2 I think that when the Book of Job is read as drama it becomes intelligible and comprehensible in its unity; it recovers its force of expression and its appeal. The book¾like its protagonist at the hands of his friends¾has suffered too much from rational or dogmatic interpretations; these have attempted to imprison it within a coherent and integral doctrine. We must project a mental picture of the book as drama, in order to be attentive to the dynamism of its conflict and to enable ourselves to be caught up in it. A supposed objectivity, neutral and disinterested, is not the best approach to this unique work. 0.3 The Book of Job is a drama with little action and much passion; or better, with much intellectual action involving an impassioned debate and search. In the pages which follow I intend to offer a pair of clues for the mental representation I propose. 1.0 Let us begin with the fact that immediately strikes the public: the staging. This aspect alone will teach us quite enough about the work. 1.01 Classic hermeneutics carefully distinguishes between heuristics, the art of discovering and establishing the meaning, and proforistics, the art of presenting this to the public. These are distinguished as two activities in a chronological order of subordination: the second comes after and depends upon the first. Today we know that a production itself can attain heuristic value, that is to say, the power of the spoken word helps us discover in a work things we did not see previously. Included here would be those aspects that are made manifest only in the very presentation of the dramatic piece. 1.02 Now then, allowing ourselves to be influenced by reminiscences or suggestions from J.B. by Archibald MacLeish, we can imagine a stage with a second floor on the
left side, which can be lighted with greater or less intensity and which remains invisible to the actors on the floor below. In this upper realm the prologue in heaven unfolds, the speeches of God with the Satan; here God is seated and continues to observe without being seen or heard by Job until the final act. This gives an advantageous position to the audience but a powerless one to Job. His ignorance is necessary because we are concerned here with a wager and a test (God tests the liberty and loyalty of Job). God is somewhat of a spectator of the reactions of Job and his friends, he overhears without being seen, he is addressed but does not respond, they seek him without finding him: 1.03 The spectator must be kept aware of this presence of God; for this reason the technician manning the lights will keep him partially illuminated and will spotlight him at relevant moments (for example, when Job speaks the words just quoted). This triangular vision is a source of irony that very much enriches the drama. Only at the end of the fourth act will the barrier be removed so that Job can see and hear God: pleased to see him, but appalled to discover that God has been listening all the while. 1.04 Another fundamental dimension follows from the suggested arrangement. The audience sees two groups of actors: actors who perform below, and actors who look on expectantly. Consequently, through this dramatic construction, the author (also the character of God?) views the spectators in order to see how they react, how they begin to take part, or how they refuse to take part. The author does not appeal to the resources of modern drama, such as asides directed to the audience (Brecht); he obtains his effect with the same efficacy through the work itself. 1.05 And this has a theological significance (for believing readers, those whom the author seeks). The sacred
representation of Job is much too powerful to allow an indifferent reader or audience: he who does not enter into the action with his own responses or internal questions, he who does not participate, will not understand a play that through his own fault remains incomplete: if he enters and participates, he will find himself under the gaze of God and subjected to a test through the perennial drama of the man Job. 1.06 This also constitutes a magnificent irony: the character of God becomes a spectator and a judge of the audience viewed as characters. 1.07 We have a proof of this in the very book itself: all of a sudden there came a reader¾a character of the audience¾who, unable to contain himself any longer, jumped upon the stage and began to speak as if he were a member of the cast. His name is Elihu: he is an intruder in terms of the book's construction, an impulsive volunteer in terms of the cast; he is a witness to the provocative power of the book. This is why the book was composed: to transform the audience into the cast. 1.08 We will now examine certain points in the book in order to test the reading and approach we have just suggested. 1.1 First, at the end of the second cycle or second act, when Job responds to Zophar. The text says:21:2 Hear my word attentively, 1.11 Spoken to the friends , these words are a hard reproach: the friends have not been able really to hear Job nor have they wanted to; if they have listened, they did it to "catch him in his own words" in order to refute his arguments; instead of really listening, this is making a
mockery of the person and his suffering. His first desire was consolation, and instead they offered the doctrine of retribution: what great comfort for a man writhing under torture to hear someone say that he has deserved it! At this moment the doctrine of retribution that overwhelms Job sounds like a cruel jest. Better consolation would be for the friends to keep silent and listen to the truth: to be able to disclose one's feelings before another, to declare one's own innocence, to lament the injustice one suffers, even though all this would not relieve the pain, it would constitute true solace. 1.12 Spoken to the audience , these words have another resonance: are we truly listening to Job? Do we do this merely to indulge our curiosity? Job requires of us that we listen with an awareness not of logical argumentation but of our common humanity. He wants us to see ourselves reflected and even embodied in himself. He desires that we be less rational than his friends, yet more discerning. And what about that other member of the cast, that actor behind the scenes, the audience from on high? By allowing Job to disclose his feelings, has he consoled him? And how does he observe our reactions? 1.2 At the beginning of the fourth act, the friends have been reduced to silence and Job recites a long monologue in three parts: a poem of nostalgia, an elegy for himself, and an oath of innocence. In this forceful monologue the lonely Job more ardently desires to meet with God in order to accuse him and to demand an accounting from him. 1.21 The absence and silence of God hang oppressively over the stage, more than the seven-day silence of the friends. The audience knows that God is present, hidden and observant, but Job does not know this. Nevertheless, he speaks as if he has seen him, for he cannot accept this absence and this silence. In a trial born of his own desire and imagination, Job turns again to challenge his rival, he accuses him and swears his own innocence. What Job does not realize is that his imagination and desire are
much closer to reality than his ceaseless suffering is: they have surmised in a confused way the presence of God and even have offered a response. This of course Job cannot know, for his ignorance is part of the test that must continue to the end. Strictly speaking, possessions are not what count¾as the Satan so well pointed out¾not even one's skin matters; God can strike more inwardly than this: in the center of existence deeply longing for God. 1.3 Skipping over the intrusion of Elihu, we read at the end of the monologue: "Behold my signature! Let Shaddai answer me" (31:35). 1.31 God must speak. Dramatically speaking, two solutions suggest themselves: a long pause, increasing the expectant silence, or else an immediate response. I prefer the first solution. 1.32 God must speak in order to transfer the lawsuit of the four friends to a higher court, for God is the subject of the lawsuit. After three rounds of dialogue, no one had resolved the question or proven the contrary. God must speak, for Job has challenged him to a verbal duel. At these heights the neutrality of God is impossible: if he does not intervene, the doctrine of the friends will be discredited, for God could then be accused with impunity; and Job would emerge the victor since God has been silenced. God must intervene, the dynamics of the drama demands it, and everyone, actors and audience alike, expects it. How should he intervene? The different expectations of the characters create at this moment a twofold tension. 1.33 In the expectation of the friends , the intervention of God must be a thunderbolt that strikes Job and imposes silence upon him with the ultimate penalty. The logic of the argumentation and the repeated tirades about the fate of the wicked demand this. So do the friends think, divided between compassion and self-satisfaction. Thus for them the storm will be the end of Job; the thunderclap, God's voice without words, will be the response that accom
panies the execution, like the muffled sound of drums 1.34 Job hopes for a dramatic encounter¾the storm is a suitable setting¾a dialogue in which both parties can present their cases with equality of rights, and a sentence that will affirm the guilt of God and the innocence of Job. His discourses have moved in this direction. In his pain Job has grown, his weakness is his strength, and he is not afraid to face the tempest dauntlessly. 1.35 And the audience , what does it expect? An intellectual response to the problem? Some compassionate and merciful words? Between Job and his friends, the reader has taken Job's side¾the drama demands this; between Job and God, perhaps the audience might favor Job, with some reservations. A certain tension and ambiguity must characterize the audience's expectation. 1.4 Corresponding to this expectation, we shall ask at the end of God's discourses: do they leave us satisfied or confused? 1.41 Were we expecting an intellectual solution to the problem? God has not given this, nor could the author; because he does not have one, because a theory will not solve the existential problem of Job. Were we expecting a speech of compassion and consolation? This would not be sincere: after God has given a free rein to the Satan, words of comfort would sound hypocritical. The author has done well in not permitting his character of God to possess facile sentiments. What then? Were we expecting an understanding God? If so, God has understood the situation and the painful reasoning of Job: that he has not annihilated him, that he has established dialogue, that he has intervened with questions, irony itself, all are proofs of divine understanding. God has allowed Job to become mature in the test, and he has patiently allowed him to become mature in his own statements. 2.01 Up to now I have suggested some clues for staging and for the audience's participation in the drama, and I have put these clues to the test in some selected passages. Now it behooves us to see what the drama is about, and we can summarize this by contrasting the preoccupation of three characters: the Satan, Job, and the friends. 2.02 The Satan has wagered that all of Job's piety is motivated by self-interest, that he blesses God if he himself receives benefits, but would curse him if he suffered evil. God has wagered the opposite. Job's wife and the friends, in an indirect way, support the thesis of the Satan. 2.03 Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar defend the rigorous doctrine of retribution, and within this framework they defend the justice of God as judge. Everything they say will be a logical consequence of this principle; even their complementary notes will be included within this theoretical framework. 2.04 What does not concern Job is that kind of justice of God which his experience disowns. He longs for a lawsuit with God himself, in which he could argue his own innocence before God; in order to arrive at this lawsuit and to prove his innocence, Job will risk his life. 2.05 With these combined clues we can comprehend in a unified way the substance of the book. Let us test it with a few passages. 2.11 Interested Religion. Such was the claim of the Satan. In the prologue, Job gave the lie to this contention by his conduct: "In spite of all this Job did not sin, nor ascribe blame to God" (1:22). "In spite of all this Job did not sin with his lips" (2:10). But afterwards, when he curses the day of his birth (3), when he accuses God (9-10), does Job show the Satan to be right? On the contrary: here the speech of Job is more disinterested than
ever, involving the contempt of his own life: "I am innocent; I care not for myself; I loathe my life" (9:21). 2.12 With even greater vehemence in 13:13-15: Let the friends abandon their glorious role as defenders of God so that they may listen to Job's defense. In his speech he is going to risk everything in God's presence, because the moment has arrived when to speak matters more than life itself, when by speaking man saves himself. Such speech is supremely dangerous, for it is directed at God. Now then, if what he says is not correct, the act of courage certainly is. No one, not even God, could accuse the speech of Job of being motivated by self-interest; this already guarantees the situation. To be admitted to the presence of God so that one may defend himself and die is already salvation, provided that his appearance before God and his speech are vehement, desperate and a risk of his life. And he who has nothing more than pious considerations, let him be silent and listen. 2.21 Retribution. The friends take up and amplify he position of the Satan. In a religion of pure retribution, man lives virtuously to obtain benefits from God, and he blesses God for what he has received. The wager of the Satan fits in here: if this man receives evil he will curse God. God believes in Job, he does not judge that his religion is one of pure retribution, he accepts the bet knowing that even though Job suffers misfortunes, he will bless Him. The friends introduce a third position: if man receives evil he will discover his sin through this, he will confess and ask for mercy; thus the doctrine of retribution is preserved on another level; thus the friends exhort Job to seek pardon for his sin. 2.22 Job disarms the three positions: he does not curse, as the Satan was betting, rather he recites hymns (with reservations); neither does he simply bless, rather he questions, interrogates, challenges God in his eagerness to comprehend him; neither does he seek pardon and grace, but a hearing and justice. The friends say:22:21 Yield to him, submit; Thereby good will come to you.23a If you return to Shaddai you will be healed.29 (RSV:) For God abases the proud, but he saves the lowly ... Job does not accept this solution of self-interest, for it would hinder him from defending his innocence. He cannot accept an insincere confession of his guilt in order to obtain a pardon he does not seek:22:7As God lives, who withholds my right, 2.23 The friends have attempted to extract from Job the confession of his own guilt. A confession extracted in the midst of torture, with an assault alternating between promises and threats. If Job signs the confession, God will pardon him, reinstate him, and all will turn out well; if he refuses to confess, a terrible end awaits him. In order to force this confession, they have sung hymns to God, they have exalted his justice, untiringly they have repeated the old doctrine of retribution; they have been kind and cruel, they have endured the scandalous words of Job. All this in order to extract a confession from Job: when Job signs it, a theological doctrine will triumph
together with its representatives, and Job will be reinstated and admitted anew into the illustrious company of the wise. One thing shall have suffered defeat in such a confession: the truth, sincerity. This Job will not accept. Does God become justified by our insincerity? Would the God who demands a false confession be just? It is as if justice and truth have entered into conflict. Paradoxically, Job pronounces his oath in the name of the unjust God "who denies my rights," supporting his words upon the true God who obscurely illuminates his conscience. This will be the strength and wisdom of Job, his surrender to truth and sincerity in the presence of men and in the presence of God. 2.24 The integrity of Job had been proclaimed even before the test by God; his wife mocked him "because he continued to maintain his integrity" and did not curse God (2:9). Job persists in this precisely by not denying it, for to deny his integrity now would be the absence of integrity. Contrary to what his friends say, his words agree with his previous conduct; to confess his guilt would be to disprove what God said in the prologue, it would be to declare that his friends, and through them the Satan, had been right. 2.25 With this attitude of sincerity and disinterestedness, Job can turn against his friends and denounce their theodicy: they insist on defending God by condemning man, that is to say, with lies; they defend God as those who have been bribed, for they have received gifts and want to continue to receive them:13:4But you are daubers of deceit, A theology of silence would be better than a theodicy of selfishness. This dissolves the arguments of the friends. Those who came to console got themselves involved in a lawsuit, and end up vanquished in the dialogue. God will finally confirm this result: "you have not spoken truth of me, as did Job, my servant" (42:7). 2.31 The Lawsuit with God. There comes to Job the idea of a lawsuit with God. At the beginning, as an impossible thing: "Indeed, I know that this is so. But how can man be acquited before God? If he deigned to argue with him, could he answer him one in a thousand" (9:20-3)? 2.32 Upon seeing the impossibility of that dream, he pursues it in a series of unreal speeches that result in a terrible mental accusation:9:15 Though in the right, I could not answer; Nevertheless he pursues the idea of judgment: "Then I shall speak without fear, even though I may not prevail against him" (9:35) (L.A.S.) and he even composes and mentally delivers the accusatory speech of this imaginary lawsuit (chap. 10). 2.33 He forcefully reintroduces the idea of the lawsuit in chapter thirteen: "Now listen closely to my speech, my declaration be in your ears. See, now, I set forth my case. I know I will be acquitted" (13:17-18). He demands only that God be a fair judge in the trial: "Two things only do not do to me, then I will not hide from your face. Remove your hand from me, let your dread not dismay me. Then challenge and I will answer; or let me speak and you
reply" (13:20-22). On this note the curtain falls on the first act. 2.34 When he appears in the second act, Job contemplates in his imagination the judgment for which he has been longing and is mentally present at the trial: an officer arrests him and leads him to the court, false witnesses rise up against him, they resort to violence and to insult, God pronounces sentence over the convicted defendant and leads him to the executioners (16:7-11). Job becomes a spectator and chronicler of his own execution: he sees his inexorable weakening, with full consciousness he is present at his own slow execution, he surrenders his manly vigor to the earth, the final darkness casts its pall over his eyes, the last thing he sees is his own innocence and he does not surrender his righteousness (16:12-17). At this moment he hurls his last cry: "O earth, cover not my blood, that there be no tomb for my plaint" (16:18). To this, the cry of 19:25 responds: "I know my vindicator lives, a guarantor upon the dust will stand." 2.35 In the third act he returns to the idea:23:3 O that I knew where to find him, 2.36 In the monologue of the fourth act Job utters an oath of innocence, writes it down, signs it, and approaches God with it. "Behold my signature! Let Shaddai answer me" (31:35). 2.37 The final chapters introduce the lawsuit with God, giving to it an unexpected and decisive turn of affairs: God interrogates Job, and draws out his contention to its ultimate consequences:40:7Gird your loins like a hero; 2.38 In a bilateral lawsuit one of the parties ultimately must be convicted in order that the other emerge acquited. Job is certain of his innocence, therefore God is guilty. But is this alternative necessary? Must we condemn God so that man might justify himself? Man desires to justify himself even at the expense of God, and God takes on the lawsuit: if Job understands justice and right so well, let him occupy the place of God, govern the world and establish the reign of justice. In the moment in which he aspires to God's place, he will condemn himself. What then? Does he accept his place as man? Let him accept it with all its consequences, above all, before God: this will be Job's most valiant act. Job could not reach this height even by the end of the second act; he had to complete the dramatic journey he had begun. 3.1 Job has encountered God in the theophany and in the word, and this profound religious experience triumphs over all the theological tradition of the schools, the discourses of the wise: "I had heard of you by hearsay, but now my own eyes have seen you" (42:5); even more, it triumphs over a limited idea of God that distinguishes his knowledge from his justice. God was a topic of discussion in the mouth of the friends, God is now one whom Job has encountered. He has arrived at this point through the path
of the tenacious word, demanded by the objections of the friends and by his own pain. God did not close the mouth of Job when he finished his initial curse (chapter 3); God does not want mute collaborators, he wanted Job's words. Because they were necessary for us: a critical people, critical even of God, and Job is our spokesman. Therefore he could not be silent. Above our criticism of the God whom we imagine, there sounds the voice of God each time more real. Job could not be silent. 4. Note: the preceding pages are intended to offer a pair of clues for a dramatic reading. I believe that they are important clues for a necessary reading; but they are not exclusive. Other readings and other clues, also important, remain. I would not want my suggestions to be used in any way to diminish this rich and magnificent book. Alonso Schökel, L., 1971, Fedrizzi, P., 1972, Frye, N., 1957, Frye, N., 1973, Frye, N., 1973, Gordis, R., 1964, Hertzberg, H. W., 1950, Humbert, P., 1955, Jones, E., 1966, Knight, H., 1956 Kuhl, C., 1954, Lévêque, J., 1970, MacKenzie, R. A. F., 1959, Nober, P., Snaith, N. H., 1968, Staiger, E., 1951, Terrien, S., 1963, Tsevat, M., 1966, 0.1 The attempt to understand the Book of Job in the light of Greek drama lacks persuasiveness. One looks in vain for action, except in the initial scene. For this reason others have emphasized the psychological drama unfolding upon the pages of the book 0.2 I would describe the "drama" quite differently from Alonso Schökel's suggestive delineation of plot and action. In my view the play consists of two acts running concurrently and performed on different stages. They accomplish the masking and unmasking of God. One act portrays Satan's search for disinterested righteousness. The other dramatizes Job's quest for the real character of God 1.1 The initial act concerns the character of men and women. Satan, the divine CIA agent, inquires into human motivation: will anyone serve God for nothing? In his view, both God and creature are culpable. Humans serve God because it pays to do so; God, for his part, rewards virtue and punishes vice. Satan's creed, "All that a man has, even his religion, he will give up for his life," moves God to relinquish absolute sovereignty. To satisfy Satan's curiosity God sacrifices Job's well being, together with the lives of countless others. Disregarding the poetic dialogue, a cyclic structure emerges: God hedges in his loyal servant; Satan roots up the protective border; and God plants it again. From one perspective, that of the prose narrative, the play confirms Satan in his fundamental attack on God and humans. Obedience to God constitutes self-serving. 1.2 In the poetic dialogue Job does not entirely free himself from the charge of acquisitiveness. Even his desperate and defiant final act, courageous as it is, arises from a compulsion to clear his name. Job seeks vindication, his version of the highest good. Self interest gives birth to his titanic challenge of God. Satan's creed stands, despite Job's heroism. 1.3 Job's friends fare no better. They, too, live and breathe within a world operating on the principle of self-interest. Religious devotion capitalizes on the positive side of this governing principle. The friends act because they believe God will react. Job's wife, much maligned, gives voice to the same conviction. "Curse God and die." Do something heinous, she urges her husband, so God will punish you by sending relief in the form of death. 1.4 Conveniently removed from the scene of suffering, either as inflictor or as victim and commiserator, God wears his mask unperturbed. Others perform deeds, endure agony, cry out against heaven. Unmoved, God sits on his throne while others expose their identity. 2.1 On a different stage the second act unmasks God. In it Job searches for God's real character. His quest to remove the divine mask contrasts with God's passive resistence. Narrator and poet contradict one another on the matter of divine character. Ambiguity reigns to the end, where God concedes the veracity of Job's accusations (see Williams) and the error inherent within pious confessions on the lips of Job's friends. Inner tension characterizes Job's thoughts, for his attack upon God presupposes what he denies at the same time. If the principle of retribution has become inoperative, Job's basis for complaint vanishes. God escapes culpability so long as the universe operates from caprice. Such a universe exists, according to Job's words themselves. Additional tension surfaces within the dialogue. In rare nostalgic moments Job recalls the intimacy of a trusting relationship with God (10:12; 12:4). Astonishment abounds, therefore, when Job acquiesces to the divine charge of speaking without knowledge. Here Job insists that he has been speaking from derivative experience rather than from primary relationship. Where now is Job's integrity? 2.2 Job's quest for God's true identity exposes divine freedom as never before. The book's purpose, in my view, revolves around God's freedom. Indirectly it poses a test for the sages who gave birth to the play; does your world view reckon with gaps in the principle of retribution? For this reason I cannot accept Alonso Schökel's interpretation of the lawsuit as a force to which God was
subject. Neither legal challenge nor, for that matter, ritual curse (contra Robertson and Good) possessed power over God. The fundamental point of the book leaves no room for divine necessity. Alonso Schökel's language echoes that of Job's friends: God must speak, God must intervene. In my view God cannot be forced to act, either by a curse or by a lawsuit. Furthermore, God does not need words. Instead, this divine eavesdropper performs his own drama of silence. When he ventures onto the main stage his performance constitutes sublime irrelevance. One recalls the profound observations recorded in Prov 26:4-5. Job's dilemma¾or was it God's? ¾gave him no alternative. To answer a fool prevented arrogance on the latter's part, but it increased the number of fools by one. God's bombastic display satisfies no one. Alonso Schökel writes that assurance of retribution would provide no comfort to Job after his experience. True, but even that small comfort beats news that God acts capriciously, approaching the demonic. Such a God, like J.B.'s deity, hardly deserves a moment's reflection. 2.3 Job is not the only person hoisted on his own petard. The audience, both ancient and modern, fall victim to the view under attack. Reason sits upon the throne, and dogma stands in the shadows. Ancient spectators, at least, bristled at Job's extreme language and blasphemous behavior. To them Job's conduct earned rebuke. We applaud Job's words, for like him we pass judgment upon God. Divine freedom falls before our concept of equity. The play's purpose fails in this way, not in the audience's refusal to climb upon the stage. 2.4 The twofold drama accomplishes the unmasking of God. One wonders whether the quest was worth the effort. Job discovers the dreadful truth about God: that he acts with total disregard for human well being. If we limit our attention to Job, forgetting the other innocents
sacrificed to prove a point, we cannot rest content with reconstituted dialogue. How can talking past one another qualify as dialogue? In essence divine silence gives way to human silence: Job clams up. Confronted with One whose sole concern is to abase the proud, Job acquiesces. In God's presence he counts for naught. Job learned his lesson well. Henceforth he will not encroach upon God's territory. From this moment forward Job will never again doubt God's freedom to act as he chooses. What about God? Does he learn anything from the twofold search? We cannot be sure God profited at all, save in the eyes of Satan. In our weaker moments we think, like Job, that God regretted his experiment. Still, we have no evidence that God's eyes ever became moist with tears shed over his servant Job. Here, too, we creatures discover the chasm between us and God. We read about Job and see ourselves in the hero, or the villain. We lack the power to remain untouched by the profundity of the drama. In this respect, Jung stumbled upon a valid intuition: the one who reads Job does so with passion. Both Alonso Schökel and I confess an inability to remain neutral when confronted with the book that must have shaken the very foundation of knowledge in ancient Israel. Cook, A., 1968, Crenshaw, James, 1970, Crenshaw, James, 1974, Crenshaw, James, 1975, Good, Edwin M., 1973, Hempel, Johannes, 1938, Kallen, H. M., 1959, Robertson, David, 1973, Williams, James G., 1971, Since at least the late nineteenth century, the opinion has been current that literature¾especially poetry¾could or should discharge the function once discharged by religion. A corollary was that serious criticism had the importance of religious exegesis and that the masterworks of world literature taken as a whole were a salvific canon, a view here explored in the formulation of I. A. Richard's 0. Biblical themes interest writers less now than formerly. And yet when modern writers do attempt to reuse the biblical themes, and some still do, they are forced to decide whether to accept or to decline a responsibility which earlier writers scarcely had to consider. Before turning our attention to the re-use of the Book of Job in Neil Simon's recent play 1.11 In a recent interview in Salmagundi, Saul Bellow said that "Sometime in the l9th century it became apparent that writers would have to do something to replace the churches which were dying out and vanishing in influence, and writers took this requirement quite seriously" (1975a, see also 1975b). If we were to name a particular nineteenth-century writer and a particular work of his in which the requirement of which Bellow speaks came to full consciousness, we could scarcely avoid Matthew Arnold and the famous opening paragraph of It was Arnold who, more seriously than any, took it upon himself to "do something" about the dying churches; and it is this about him which, as the late Lionel Trilling wrote, makes him a poet who "reaches us not more powerfully but, we sometimes feel, more intimately than any other" (2-3). He reaches us, it may be, in shared fears and shared weakness. 1.12 Reading Arnold on poetry and religion is an exercise in the archaeology of knowledge; specifically, it is an excavation of the infamous "two cultures" controversy, in which the estrangement of science from the humanities is alleged to be the central malady of the modern
mind. In the passage just quoted, Arnold nowhere mentions science, and yet he addresses it in every line. It is the shaker of creed, the questioner of dogma, the dissolver of tradition, and the thief of fact. But note well: the enemy or the victim of science is not the humanities but religion. Reading Arnold, one realizes that, estranged though science and the humanities may be, to call their estrangement central is rather like saying that the central antagonism in the recent Watergate affair was that of Judge Sirica and President Ford. No: President Ford is the ineffectual successor, the real controversy was with his discredited predecessor. The central estrangement in modern society is not that of science and the ineffectual humanities but that of science and discredited religion. 1.13 Arnold reaches us intimately when his unabashed certainty that literature can provide what the times require flushes out lingering hopes of our own which, thus plainly stated, begin to seem absurd. Perhaps few writers today would directly acknowledge the "high destinies" that Arnold proclaims. Critic Helen Vendler's tart "The evangelist is the failed poet" expresses a common reservation. And yet the problem to which Arnold thought poetry could respond remains so far from resolution that whether a given writer may like it or not, his audience is likely to read him with unconscious Arnoldian expectations; and he, when he reads others, may do the same. In fact, the less a writer, as a writer, may feel he can or should meet such expectations, the more they may trouble him as a man. Thus Bellow admits:
The picture of Shelley¾past forty, tired out, and changing his mind¾is the picture of a responsibility grown too great to bear. 1.21 Bellow's most recent (1975a) novel is the story of a writer, von Humboldt Fleisher, for whom, while he lived, nothing was too super for poetic erogation; for whom poetry was ubiquitously, irrecusably relevant and as immense as Arnold's noblest dream; but a poet who died, insane and forgotten, in a New York flophouse. The novel, 1.22 We learn about Humboldt from his friend and onetime associate Charlie Citrine, a writer himself, the author of political biographies, "other people's memoirs," and one Broadway hit. Editors have been waiting for a "major statement" from Charlie, and Charlie has been half-waiting for it from himself. But by the end of the story, the most important of Humboldt's several gifts has been delivered: there isn't going to be a major statement; there can't be. Charlie explains to Humboldt's widow:
Listening to the sound of the truth that God puts into us means for Charlie the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner and for Bellow himself, reportedly, Owen Barfield and Saving
the Appearances , a propaedeutic to Steiner which its author describes as "written in the belief that it might be possible to slide a sort of hand across a good many of the things and ideas upon which the attention of western humanity has been concentrated for the last two or three hundred years" (11). 1.3 Though there are alternatives to Barfield, there will be no alternative, if imaginative literature is truly exhausted, to some sort of circling back to the question of science and religion as it was posed before imaginative literature came to seem the answer. For though Arnold was right when he said that "our religion has materialised itself...in the supposed fact,...and now the fact is failing it," he was wrong in hoping that a dematerialized religion, under poetic or any other auspices, could provide "a surer...stay." No religion known has functioned for long without relating individual destiny coherently to the best available "supposed facts" regarding material reality. If this relationship has not been the whole of any religious vision, it has been an indispensable part of all, no matter that in ancient times the physical shades off into the metaphysical, in modern into the ultraphysical. Arnold's couplet
is not only indifferent poetry, it reflects a strategy that has been fatal not only to religion but also, by stages, to the very artistic imagination upon which it relies. That this has been so may appear the more easily after a brief consideration of a defense against science mounted within Protestant exegesis itself. 1.41 Since Kant, philosophers of religion in Protestant Europe and America have sought to make religion an inference from the structure of human experience rather than from the structure of the physical world. "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing awe, the
oftener and more steadily we reflect on them," Kant wrote, "the starry heavens above and the moral world within." But as he saw it, only from the latter, from the moral world within, could religion take its rise. A proper moral epistemology was both to set the limits and secure the rights of religion. 1.42 Though Kant was not a Bible scholar, the sort of biblical theology that developed in theological milieux dominated by his intellectual heirs sought, as he had, to keep itself clear of any entanglement with cosmology. Biblical theologians had a much harder time with this than did philosophical theologians; for not only did the Bible contain explicitly cosmological materials but even its historical portions had been profoundly cosmologized during the patristic era and the middle ages. Popular resistance to any "explaining away" of the beloved myths was immense. 1.43 It is testimony to the apologetic inventiveness of Protestantism that it was able to assimilate Kant by taking what was in itself a second and unrelated disruption¾namely, the rise of critical history¾and exploiting it, first, to extend the Kantian interiorization of religion to and through the intractable biblical materials and then, most unexpectedly, to assay an explosive reexteriorization of those materials that seemed, briefly, to render Kant unnecessary. 1.44 The rise of critical history in the nineteenth century challenged the historicity of the Bible: celebrated events, it seemed, had simply not happened; celebrated personages had never lived. However, as idealist gave way to positivist historiography, Protestant historians themselves began to take the lead in writing the history of biblical times and, with superior control of the evidence, were in a position not only to counter many a specific challenge but also to embarrass any philosophy of history that would purport to catch Christianity up into
something larger than itself. In the flush of this success in historical apologetics, Protestant exegetes and theologians attempted to re-draw the boundaries of Christian revelation in such wise that the entirety of it would fall within the new-won territory. The ramifications of this stratagem are endless, but its taproot is the assertion that by contrast with all other religions, biblical religion is not "natural" but "historical." Thus Alan Richardson, to choose one among innumerable recent examples, writes in The title of Richardson's book makes particularly clear the fact that the theology of biblical history was yet another moment in the Kantian defense against natural science. Like the Kantian reconstruction of religion, so the re-conception of biblical revelation as purely historical was a strategic retreat designed to render the daunting encounter with natural science otiose. 1.45 It is instructive to view even the work of Rudolf Bultmann under this rubric. Bultmann, as Karl Jaspers was at pains to point out, was an historian and not a philosopher; and Bultmann's program for demythologization was continuous with such earlier historical scholarship as sought, when mythological material was under consideration, to investigate the users rather than the myth. Genesis 1 may not be history, but its form has a history; and through the study of that history, an historical mood can suffuse the whole. It is no great matter then to extend the history of use a step further and write of contemporary congregations as one wrote about ancient ones. Though demythologization is usually spoken of with
some initial reference to existential philosophy, it is best seen as a special kind of history; namely, as the completion of the process by which the Bible was delivered into the hands of historians so that the cordon sanitaire separating Protestantism from cosmology could be closed 1.46 We have already noted the apologetic usefulness of positivist history under Christian auspices against Hegelian, Marxist, and other idealist historical syntheses that sought, so to speak, to define Christianity into the past. A second apologetic stratagem became possible as positivist history under secular auspices began to redefine itself as a science rather than a narrative art. H. Stuart Hughes points out that this redefinition was resisted by many historians:
But in time the resistance was overcome, and the historian's status as a scientist became his chief boast. 1.47 Neo-idealism and such latter-day historical alternatives as retrospective anthropology and psychohistory have qualified the victory of historical positivism, but the temporary apologetic usefulness of that victory to Protestantism and after about 1950 to Catholicism as well was noteworthy. For what could Christianity have to fear from science if the historians of Christianity were scientists themselves? Where Kant and his successors had offered a non-aggression pact, history-as-science seemed to offer an alliance, the terms of which were formulated in a double enthymeme which, had it ever been spelled out, would have read: A flood of enthused biblical theology was produced in which the constant assumption was that since biblical history was now scientific, so too was biblical theology 1.48 The flaw in the double syllogism was, of course, an equivocation about the varying there-ness of nature and history. What is historically there is not, when all is said and done, naturally there. To put the matter in another but apologetically quite relevant way, Henry Ford was free to say, "History is bunk," but not to say, "Science is bunk." And since the point, in the long run, was rescuing God from the category of bunk, the theology of biblical history has lost much of its appeal. 1.51 Returning now from this excursus in Christian apologetics to the religious aspirations of modern literature, we may repeat that the undoing of both poetry-as-religion and Bible-as-history is a failure¾shared by Kant-to recognize an anthropological constant; namely, that some credible articulation of personal destiny in order to understood physical reality has been central to every effective religion. The rise of natural science should have been made the occasion not for a spiritualization of the biblical tradition but for a series of unabashed rematerializations of it in terms of the emerging knowledge. The successive scientific cosmologies have been different from earlier cosmologies, but it is quite gratuitous to assume hat human intelligence cannot confront the current one in whatever may be its cold materiality and ask, "Where do I fit in?" and it is equally gratuitous to assume that human courage is unequal to living with the answer. Those who make this assumption forget how incomplete and uncomforting are most religious worldviews, including most of those in the Bible. In religion as elsewhere, one does one's
best and lives with it. The conclusion of the Book of Job is no tidier than the paradoxes of the "Big Bang" universe, nor is the Shaddai who finally speaks there any less indifferent to Job than the "incurious stars" are to mankind as a whole. What the human being cannot endure is to confront cruel inevitabilities second-hand, in the deliverances of a preacher or a poet or a philosopher, an alleged comforter, who tells him that his universe is no longer spiritually inhabitable but can't show him why. Once fully and conclusively perceived, any inevitability becomes psychologically tolerable. One does not hear of scientists, who presumably know the awful truth best, flinging themselves from their laboratory windows. That happens, but the savage god generally prefers the flesh of poets and philosophers. Biologist Jacques Monod, when he wishes to talk about the spiritual anguish of modern man, has to borrow his language from Camus. Left to his own devices, he can find no better image for the human condition than breaking the bank at Monte Carlo. So it may be for anyone who will take his science straight. Bertrand Russell's dictum, "Only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built" sounds gloomy but is not. Russell's kind of despair is a firm foundation; if it is not in itself a habitation, one can build a habitation upon it. In the words of Job, "I knew you then only by hearsay, but now, having seen you with my own eyes, I retract all I have said" (42: 5) 1.52 This is not to say, tout court , that science is religion. It is to assert, however, that there can be a direct religious utility in such actual scientific information as the age and size of the universe, the origin of species, the biological limits of intelligence, the neurophysiology of sexual attraction, etc. The articulation of personal destiny to understood physical reality is not a scientific task. That articulation is not rendered impossible, however, if science is permitted to define its
latter term. On the contrary, since scientific knowledge is shared and¾by participation in technology, if in no other way¾assented to as no other knowledge is or ever has been, no sense of personal destiny articulated to a physical reality understood in any other way has a chance to become, in the full sense of the phrase, a common sense. Religion and common sense are reflexes of one another in all cultures that have an effective religion. Religion in scientific culture must also begin with what is held most in common. 1.61 When, as in the present instance, that which is held most in common¾physical reality itself¾is regarded as religiously irrelevant, the prior task of either a religious poet or a theologian must be to find or create something else which can be relevant, which men can hold in common, and which can work as powerfully upon them as physical reality. This task is not itself the writing of literature or theology but only a condition for the writing. Homer did not invent the Homeric cosmology, he inherited it. If he had had to invent it before writing his epics, we may venture to guess that the epics would never have been written, if not also that he himself would have died insane and exhausted in an Ionian flophouse. 1.62 The attempt to synthesize a cosmology from the stuff of a single life has been, in theology, a fevered series of theologies of : of sex, of revolution, of work, of dance, etc., culminating¾ne plus ultra ¾in the theology of autobiography. Paul Tillich, the master theologian of , appears once in In the Salmagundi interview, Bellow says:
Not all writers aspire to "moral power," but it would seem that those who do must either be suicidal or murderous: suicidal if, like von Humboldt Fleisher, they attempt to provide something "as big as life" from purely personal resources; murderous if, like Charlie Citrine, they attempt to provide it from the purely personal resources of others. Charlie's one Broadway hit is a cannibalization of Humboldt. In America, authenticity¾that sense of connectedness to some larger reality¾is scarce, and so you take it where you find it: Charles Manson, Hell's Angels, Richard Nixon, Marilyn Monroe, Muhammad Ali. Serious writers feed on real people just as Charlie, a serious writer, feeds on Humboldt, a real person, and just as Humboldt, for the same reason, feeds on himself. The celebrities, the stars , provide a mini-cosmos which may be substituted for the maxi-cosmos that has been signed away to science; and by relating himself to this mini-cosmos, the hungry consumer may achieve a mini-transcendence, forgetting for a moment his consuming hunger for the maxitranscendence that would be a true, ecstatic religion. "The strongest part of our religion today," Arnold wrote, "is its unconscious poetry." A century later, it would seem that the weakest part of our literature is its unconscious religion. 2.1 The religious vocation of the modern writer, we have already conceded, is eminently refusable. By no means every imaginative writer is attempting, even unconsciously, to meet a religious need in his audience; and it is superfluous, in many cases, for a writer even to disclaim such ambitions. However, when the subject matter a writer chooses is itself religious, or at the very least when it is scriptural, religious intentions become a matter about which some position will inevitably be taken. For it is one thing to build a priest or a rabbi into a story, or even to build a story or play around him, and quite another to re-tell the story of the sin of David or the crucifixion of Christ. Reverence for the Bible no longer burns bright, but the memory of reverence does; and the memory alone is enough, aesthetically, to force the issue. The memory touches the audience and charges the writer's words with burdens they would not otherwise bear. 2.21 It is in literary re-creations of biblical myths then that the religious function of secular literature, as just discussed, may be viewed to best advantage. We shall presently contrast Neil Simon's comedy 2.2 In 2.31 And yet if this quickening of interest expresses a hope that secular literary criticism may be more vigorous than the special sort of criticism that Bible scholarship has hitherto practiced, a close reading of Humboldt's Gift may be in order. For if literature is as exhausted as that novel suggests, how much energy can remain for criticism? A disgruntled professor of comparative literature writes of his response to the question, "Why aren't you writing more criticism?":
It may or may not be significant that this professor is something of an expert in Arnold and in Arnold's contemporary, the French biblicist Ernest Renan. What counts is the persuasiveness of his evocation of a literary criticism outrunning, in its self-confidence, the capacities of literature itself. 2.32 Bellow's Charlie Citrine sensed that something was seriously amiss when the world awaited "major
statements" from such as himself. A gifted professor of comparative literature perceives the same something amiss in the description of criticism as an "enterprise." What will lie ahead for the Bible if it ceases to be a category unto itself and settles into this "critical enterprise" as one among the several venerable classics of Western literature? Should that happen, should the Bible lose its special status only to be recanonized in the greater canon of the West, it may be that critics will begin to ask of it, in a quasi-Arnoldian way, what their very access to it will prove that it can no longer provide. 2.41 Richards allows the Bible no claim to special treatment. He puts to it in The field of Richards's critical endeavor is not the biblical canon, nor¾as in the historico-critical school of Bible criticism¾is it the "biblical period." It is rather "our tradition," as in the following:
The attitude which biblical exegetes have ever taken toward the contradictions of the Bible, not dismissing them but rather pondering and even cherishing them, is the
attitude that Richards takes toward the contradictions of his own canon. His appeal is to Niels Bohr, who
In "our tradition," then, the Bible is true by standing in a complementary relationship with other literature, also "canonical," which denies what it asserts. 2.42 Richards makes it plain that the Bible must suffer a certain violence before entering the greater canon, and he seems to regard himself as the appointed instrument. He is to do for the Bible what Plato did for Homer, and more:
2.43 Richards proceeds to give several pages' worth of such reasons. However, the chapter in which these reasons are listed is followed by an epilogue in which the classics of the western tradition, their contradictions working contrapuntally, are revealed as a new canon with salvific power. This epilogue, entitled "The Holy Word," is an exegesis¾no other word will quite do¾of Shelley's
Prometheus Unbound , a work which Yeats hoped would be read "'as a sacred book.'" After Jupiter's overthrow by Prometheus, Richards tells us, "Shelley knows what he is doing too well to set any substitute on Jupiter's throne" (1974:188). Instead, he allows Prometheus and Asia¾knowledge and love¾to find their way to an empty cave, a "most characteristic Shelleyan cave," which is, Richards explains, "the throne room of Poetry itself":
2.44 Richards closes 2.5 There is every reason to expect that among Bible scholars, particularly those whose religious faith is residual, Richards's understanding of criticism as "giving, receiving, and forgiving each other's trespasses" will become a dominant model. That is to say, Bible scholars will understand themselves to be in charge of one portion of the greater canon of the Western tradition and will not regard themselves as in any way exempt from the mutual correction by which these works may be made to function as a canon. It is precisely this mutual correction which carries the criticism of 2.6 I. A. Richards is undoubtedly "a rare genius and a great critic" 2.7 More basically, the cosmological question which, as argued earlier, has been the exhaustion of contemporary writers becomes a serious kind of distraction
in contemporary readers of classical literatures. If no sense of how personal destiny and physical reality relate is held sufficiently in common to function as a religious common sense, then in effect readers are always looking for it as they read. What they find of that common sense in past literature has, they know, been somehow outmoded by science. Contemporary literature, science fiction and fantasy aside, offers nothing of the sort at all. And yet the question¾"Where do I fit in?"¾demands an answer. The reader keeps thinking about it, whatever the writer would like him to think about. It gets in the way. Are modern literature and literary criticism Prometheus Unbound, or are they Citrine Unimpressed? What, on each hypothesis, is to become of the Bible, biblical criticism, and the literary re-use of biblical themes? What response, on each hypothesis, is offered to the disruption of inherited religious values by natural science? An answer of sorts will be attempted below in Section IV; but first, taking a cue from the late Thornton Wilder, "We have to use the comic spirit. No statement of gravity can be adequate to the gravity of the age in which we live" 3.12 Joe Benjamin (Job) is talking to his son David in a typical exchange from Neil Simon's sitcom version of the book of Job. In one of his innumerable asides,
Bellow's Charlie Citrine says, "To the high types of martyrdom, the 20th century has added the farcical martyr. " Joe Benjamin at his most dolorous never fails to be farcical. As a result, Neil Simon's play seems at first to have scarcely anything to do with the bleak Job of the Bible. However, if 3.21 It is all here¾wager between God and Satan, loss of family and property, comforters (here, one comforter returning three times), anger with God but refusal to renounce him, theophany, restoration of fortunes¾but all so knocked out of order and in so inexalted a language that it scarcely occurs to us to take it seriously at all. To begin with, any chance for noble rhetoric on the part of the innocent sufferer is blown when Joe Benjamin is let in on the gag before his suffering begins. The tragic potential might still be there, but Joe takes it for granted that God is quite within his rights in doing what he does. It doesn't occur to him to protest, at least not at first, and as a result it doesn't occur to us either. Our attention is held instead by wondering whether Sid Lipton, Joe's comforter and God's messenger, will finally trick, cajole, or badger Joe into a renunciation. Lipton announces:
This grotesquerie disperses any tragic catharsis before it can gather. As our identification with the biblical Job is facilitated by the vagueness of his complaint, so our alienation from Joe Benjamin is assured by the specificity of his. 3.22 Powerless virtue cannot appear to advantage without a penumbra of powerful vice, and Simon provides no such penumbra for Joe Benjamin. Sid Lipton has his own little gripes against his celestial employer¾low pay, poor working conditions, and the fact that "He wouldn't even say hello to me in the hallway." In addition, Joe is provided with some touching, if ineffectual comforters. As Joe stands in his living room, too wracked with pain to bear the slightest touch, Morris, his black retainer from palmier days, falls sobbing to his knees and pounds the floor:
Morris isn't good for much but making sure that Joe Benjamin never becomes a lonely, abandoned figure with his fist lifted to the sky. 3.23 When the palatial Benjamin residence burns down and the food runs out, Joe's wife Rose calls on him to curse God (though not to die) and, when he refuses, walks out on him, saying:
And everybody goes, but tearfully, regretfully: "It was such a nice house... Why couldn't God have tested a young couple with a small apartment?" (75) 3.24 In the biblical Book of Job, the sufferer disputes with comforters who call on him to admit guilt. In "Job's Comforting," Sid Lipton does not call on Joe Benjamin to admit his guilt. Sid knows that Joe knows that God knows that Joe is innocent. Sid's message for Joe is really just a presentation of the alternatives:
Lipton : "To Joseph Melvin Benjamin, devoted husband and father...if you cherish your children and wife, the house that shelters you, the clothes that warm you and the flesh that covers you, if pain, calamity and disaster do not in any manner whatsoever appeal to you, then renounce your God!" ... Joe : It doesn't make sense. Why? Why should I, a man who has believed in God all his life, suddenly renounce Him? Lipton : I take home a hundred-thirty-seven dollars a week. If you want theological advice call Billy Graham. Can I get the number fifteen bus on this corner? (42) Later, Sid loses his hundred-thirty-seven-dollars-a-week job in a major heavenly layoff, and he renounces God. Suddenly, Joe is the comforter:
Joe : We must carry whatever burdens God gives. Lipton : Sure. The poor carry their burdens and the rich have them delivered. Where's the justice?...Well, I don't care any more...What could He do to me now? (Yells up ) Hey, God! Do You hear me?...I renounce You, God! (81) 3.25 To say that God, in Neil Simon's comedy, is anthropomorphic is the sort of understatement that in Simon's urban, Jewish idiom could easily become a wisecrack. This celestial tycoon with his answering service, cleaning people, and favorite clients is the furthest remove imaginable from the august cosmic force that speaks from the whirlwind in Job 38-41. As a result, Joe's
confrontation with Him is nothing that Beethoven would have cared to orchestrate. However, there are two theophanies in 3.26 David has never believed that it was God who gave Joe his wealth, and he does not believe that it is God who has taken it away. His father's gratitude for prosperity and patience in pain strike him as equally fatuous:
3.27 Every re-creation of the Book of Job is an expansion at some point. Neil Simon's expansion begins at Job 1:5, where Job offers holocausts to God because "Perhaps my sons have sinned and in their hearts affronted God." In When Rose calls on Joe to renounce God, she asks, "How can you love someone who makes us suffer so much?" Joe's answer is: "David makes me suffer...and I love him" (74). In context, this too is funny. 3.28 The second theophany comes when David, who has by now left home, returns¾totally blind. This time, Joe does clench his fist and shake it at the sky.
Joe : (...His grief, his anger, is enormous ) Is this Your work?...Is this Your test of faith and love?...You blind my first-born son and still expect me to love you? Punish me , not my son...Where is your love? Your compassion? Your justice?...I AM ANGRY AT YOU, GOD! REALLY, REALLY ANGRY!...And STILL I don't renounce you! How do you like that , God? (There is a bolt of lightning and a crack of thunder. David cries out and holds his eyes , then takes his hands away ) David : (Lightly) I think that did it, Pop. Joe : You can see, David? (David nods. Joe looks up ) It's over. The test is over! (85) 3.31 The classical Christian interpretation of the biblical Book of Job has been that Job's question finds its answer in the Christian teaching that unmerited suffering¾as of Christ on Calvary¾can be redemptive. The cruelty of the experiment with which God demonstrates to Satan that suffering need not destroy faith becomes mercy when performed not by God on man but by God on Himself; scil. , by God on the God-man Jesus. 3.32 In 3.41 The biblical tale abstracts from everything but the justice of Job and the omnipotent benevolence of God, and these appear as a result in the starkest relief. 3.42 Envy is an element in human suffering to which the Book of Job scarcely attends at all. Job speaks as if each of us must suffer alone. The fact is, of course, that each of us suffers by comparing his own complement of joy and sorrow with that of others; and though the joy and sorrow may be personal, their conceptualization as fortune or misfortune is social. Looking only to oneself and God, it might be impossible to complain at all. One recalls the New Testament parable of the workers in the vineyard: all of them are paid justly, but some are paid generously; those who have received mere justice complain of their misfortune. If this solution to the problem of evil¾well short, as it is, of any doctrine of redemptive suffering¾is a logical trick that works only by clever omissions, so too, we might argue, is the Book of Job: things may often enough be as bad for others as they are for Job, but they are never bad in quite his isolated, creature-vs.-creator way. At the very least, something rather crucial happens to the problem of evil when we regard it as the struggle to resign oneself to the good fortune of others. 3.43 When the problem of evil is set upon a crowded, gabby stage, it becomes impossible to mount a tragedy around it. One may defy Necessity or rebel against God, but can one defy his neighbor's happiness? Can I rebel
against your winning ticket in the Irish Sweepstakes? At most, I may say with Robert Burns "A man's a man for a' that" and sulk a bit, like Jonah in the biblical book that Robert Frost so sagely chooses for the companion piece to his own recreation of the Book of Job The biblical hero is a comic hero who, though exhausted, is never annihilated; and though Simon provides his hero with a motive beyond any offered in the biblical original, his play is truer to that original than any tragic version could be. It is, to borrow a term from E. M. Good's analysis of the irony of Job, a successful anthropodicy (240). David denies that his father's virtue is genuine and, by implication, that any true virtue is possible; but he is refuted even as Satan is refuted in the biblical book. Job and Joe complain but never despair and, unlike Oedipus, experience neither mutilation nor divinization. The stakes are smaller for them, but the outcome is surer. 3.5 The subtitle of I. A. Richards "Job's Comforting" is "(The Book of' Job, abridged and re-arranged and with one single sentence added)" (1971). Leaving aside, as Richards evidently does, an insertion from the
Septuagint, the "one single sentence" is the ratification of a curse. In the following exchange, it is the last line:
Shaddai : Our wrath is kindled against you because you have not said of us the thing that is right as Job has. Jahweh : Go now to our servant Job and take seven bulls and seven rams and offer up for yourselves a burnt offering that we do not with you as you deserve, and Job will pray for you and his prayer we will accept. For he has said of us the thing that is right. Shaddai : And so has our servant Dinah. (1971:324) Richards's translation of the taunt of Job's wife, Dinah¾a taunt which Marvin Pope translates as "Do you still maintain your integrity? Curse God and die"¾is "Will you be absolute for Jahweh yet? Say to him 'Thou fool!' and die" (Pope: 19) 3.6 Earlier if rather less effectively than Richards, Archibald MacLeish doubled the deity in his by providing a being for each line. His Distant Voice is omnipotent amorality, his Mr. Zuss well-intentioned weakness. Richards's Shaddai and Jahweh are the same two characters. 3.7 Richards achieves most of his interpretation through stage directions and a surprising assignment of lines. A typical stage direction follows the first speech of Eliphaz:
The most important assignment of lines apart from the division of God's lines between Shaddai and Jahweh is the assignment to Satan of the prose prologue, a poetic epilogue (the ode on the search for wisdom of Job 28), and other lines that, addressed to the audience during the action, make Satan the voice of the common man as the chorus is the voice of the common man in Greek tragedy. 3.8 The fact that Job's fortunes are not restored in "Job's Comforting" and that Job 28 has, as epilogue, the effect of the common man's (the chorus's) caution against seeking wisdom make Richards's rearrangement of Job read like a Greek tragedy. But more important than these considerations to its tragic effect is the spectacular dominance in it of Shaddai, described in the stage directions as "as grand a disaster image as can be staged." In an unpublished fragment on the Book of Job, philosopher Henry Bugbee quotes in French a text of Angelus Silesius, much admired by Martin Heidegger: "la rose est sans pourquoi, fleurit parce qu'elle fleurit, n'a souci d'elle-même, ne désire être vue" (1974). Disaster is, of course, also without wherefore, exploding because it explodes, not caring about itself, nor wishing to be seen. But this is no objection: it may be that only in gratuitous disaster can the gratuitousness of the rose, in Hopkins phrase, "explode into meaning"¾and then comfort. After all, it is not only man who dies: Bugbee writes that the vision of Shaddai is "a vision of things":
J.B. says of God, "He does not love. He Is" (MacLeish: 94), alluding (one wonders) to "Tell them that 'I Am'sent you" (Exodus 3:14). This Shaddai, this disastrous God of Nature, is the God that makes human existence tragic and sublime. And this God, though not to the exclusion of a milder, more fatherly principle, is the God I. A. Richards insists on. 4.0 In the preface to Internal Colloquies , Richards writes, "Exploring readers have not been misled. The various voices overtly distributed in a play may be as distinctly recognizable in what may present itself as straightforward exposition or confession" (1971:ix). Exploring readers of the preceding three sections will have recognized several voices, all contending for the small honor of being mine. But since the answers I can offer to the vasty questions left unanswered at the end of Section II are so intuitive and so personal that close argumentation will only conceal their true character, it seems wisest now to speak as I can out of the whirlwind of the first-person pronoun. 4.11 During the 1960's, it seemed to me as a Roman Catholic, at least by history and sensibility, that Protestant Christianity was choking on the Bible. To me, the Bible was not Christianity but something that Christianity owned. For them, plainly, it was more than that. Furthermore, secular American culture, as the secularization of this kind of Protestantism, seemed to be choking on its own literature. Worst of all, when American Catholics broke through to a major participation in the intellectual life of the nation, as they did for the first time in that decade, they tended¾if they remained religiously active¾to adopt the Protestant attitude toward the Bible and¾if they did not¾to adopt the exegetical American attitude toward secular literature. Protestant problems and the problems of the American intellectual elite, Philip Rieff's 4.12 With the waning of the Protestant neo-orthodoxy (palaeo-heterodoxy for Catholics), Protestantism has begun to spit the Bible out, and a parallel expectoration has been noticeable in the secular culture. James Barr writes that younger Protestant clergy in both England and America are asking:
Barr's fellow Bible scholars abide his question, for their faith in the Bible is weak. By contrast, the parallel loss of faith in secular literature, when Leslie Fiedler announced it in Playboy in 1970, has rarely been spoken of by Fiedler's fellow critics but for the denial. Richard Stern ended his throttling of it in Book World with "Burn
on, Leslie. Scorch these antique hutches. Bring us the hot future in the aluminum covers of The Funny-Bunny Gospel." Norman Podhoretz was more modulated but no less derisive a few years later in Saturday Review. But then Fiedler had made the mistake of immediately proclaiming a rebirth of faith:
Perfervid to be sure; but it seems to me that in 4.20 If American literature is exhausted, What Is to be Done? I can only answer a question like that by saying, "Or What?" That is, what other disaster will be my punishment if I do nothing about this one? Because this one I mysteriously think I could live with. Citrine's girlfriend tells him: "In spite of all your credentials, you don't really care much for culture. Deep down, you're from Chicago after all" (Bellow, 1975a:348). I am from the Chicago of the map and maybe, too, from the Chicago of the mind. 4.21 There is, however, a real "Or What?" that faces me. The looming menace of global scarcities threatens the survival of the species, and I wish the species to survive. Camus said that one is never without a reason to commit suicide, and he was right. Worse, the reasons for suicide are easy to formulate. By contrast, reasons to live, to go on living, are almost impossible to formulate in any
way equal to their power within us. All attempts seem vague or trite. 4.22 But as for the man, so also for his continuation in the human race. One is never without a reason not to have a child, and the reasons are easily spelled out, while the reasons in favor of having a child are elusive, however powerful, and tend always to sound vague or trite. Attempting to explain why he wanted to become a father, a young man told a sex researcher, "I want to help something to grow," to which she responded, "Buy a plant." Her response suggests at first a kind of sardonic wisdom, a hard-headed kindness, protecting the unborn from aspiring parents who do not know what their aspiration entails. But in fact, no young man, however perfectly suited for fatherhood, could offer a motive invulnerable to such a response. He would be best advised to offer none at all, and I offer none for my wish to see the species survive. 4.23 For me, the question of human survival is the God-question and is that without further formulation or reference. It is the "Or What?" to which every "What Is to be Done?" is addressed. In the words of my colleague Philip Hefner: In the first place, we must recognize that the question concerning the trustworthiness of the evolutionary processes is the question concerning God. We must resist the temptation to say that it leads to or implies the God-question, just as we must avoid the assumption that if only men were more lucid, they would understand that the question of life's untrustworthiness is the God-question, or that if a man decides that life is trustworthy, he then must acknowledge that he is living with an implicit affirmation of God. All of these are forms of theological paternalism or totalitarianism that have as their end the demonstration that all men really do play the same games that Christian theologians play and the attempt to show that theologians' traditional language is thereby applicable to all these games. (1970) 4.31 Now, from this perspective, the exhaustion of literature might be an exhaustion about which something
must be done, but only if literature can be regarded as moral resource. Concerted action at the level of entire populations will be necessary if the challenge of global scarcity is to be thrown back. Can literature begin this mobilization? Can it provide the unifying belief that will make united action possible? Bellow¾and many others in demurrals less silencing than 4.32 And who am I to do it such kindnesses? An inconsiderable person, no doubt, but as Edmund Burke wrote, "Public calamity is a great leveler; and there are occasions when any, even the slightest, chance of doing good must be laid hold on, even by the most inconsiderable person." I am at my own beginning, toting up my resources. Forgive me if I cut my losses where I can. 4.40 I have said that Protestantism is spitting the Bible out. I mean, of course, intellectual, liberal Protestantism. Conservative Protestantism remains quite purple in the face. Spitting the Bible out means confronting the problems of the Bible and those of religion separately. Among liberal Protestants, one party seems to be investigating a set of Bible-related problems, now no longer thought of as too exclusively religious but as
bearing rather on literature and language. Another party seems to be tracking down a set of religious problems no longer thought of as having, necessarily, anything to do with the Bible or religious literature but as bearing rather on religious behavior and religious institutions. I confess that I find the latter set of questions more promising in the interests of a popular front against global catastrophe. The former set seem at their outer limit to give themselves Humboldt's gift (das Humboldtgift ). 4.41 As an ex-Jesuit, I have always felt a certain surreptitious sympathy for the Grand Inquisitor. That is, while I allow as how there is an Absolutely Absolute receding willy-nilly before all inquiry, I cherish the Relatively Absolute, the consentaneous, small-t truth that makes for order and civility. It is only truth of this order that can become popular enough for the formation of a front. The promise I hear in the second set of questions spilled out by liberal Protestantism is the promise of a new respect for small-t truth; if you like, for idolatry. Three years after Pius IX, our pio nonno , had declared himself the Relatively Absolute in person, Matthew Arnold wrote:
If we have by now the anthropological sophistication to recognize that all religions¾as well as all science, all language, and all institutions¾are, whatever the amplitude of their implication, man-made and made in man's
image, why can we not set about making the religion we need? Or is it impossible to be an idolater and know it? 4.42 In American culture, the set of ideas which most nearly constitutes the Relatively Absolute is that provided by experimental science. Owen Barfield is right in Saving the Appearances to call these ideas idols, for their makers, having made them, no longer recognize themselves in them. However, he is righter still and righter than nearly everyone else who has spoken about this idolatry in urging an intensification of it as the necessary prelude to a recovery of that sense of cosmic "participation" which has been the foundation and strength of past religion and literature. He speaks of the participation of the past as "original" and of that of the future as "final," in an argument much too complex to be summarized here. The point, however, is that the scientific revolution will prove a boon to man for having "scoured the appearances clean of the last traces of spirit, freeing as from original, and for final, participation" (185). He talks like Ronald Laing: plunge on into your psychosis, be it personal or cultural; on with it, into it, deep in, and then through it and free of it. From some burrows there is no backing out. 4.43 It has seemed to me that most of our enthusiasm for both non-western religious traditions and religion-and-literature studies owes to a fleeting sense of original participation which they can provide. There is a truth in those highs, of course, but there is a harder truth in the hangover. Our social reality is so constructed that either one quarantines this sort of experience in his own life or, if that proves impossible, quarantines himself from his own society. If one quarantines the experience, one reduces it to little more than a palliating distraction. If one quarantines himself, he excuses himself from any responsible role in society as it now is. There is some gain, of course, in knowing the name of
one's affliction; but such knowledge, as in the Buddhist fable, is like knowing the name of the poison on the arrow with which one has been shot. We must take thought rather for a remedy. 4.44 When I think of remedies, of how it might be possible to recreate here some version of those mindstilling myths and ceremonies and of how on that very basis it might be possible to draw up a popular front against the extinction of the species, I think of Science Digest 4.45 A few glosses on this remarkable passage: 1) peasant-dreaming : science fiction outsells mystery and western fiction combined , and larger than all fiction sales combined is that peculiarly American category of writing called "self-help." Merely reaching the peasant may mean little. It is a question rather of reaching him as he begins to waken from his dream. First
wakefulness runs to self-improvement and popular science, second wakefulness to science fiction. 2) the oriental student : Tillich knew by the end of his career that because of the mixing of cultures in the late twentieth century, Christian thought would be shaped by the encounter with eastern religions as it never had been in the past. He also felt, however, that the encounter of the separate religious traditions with one another would prove less fateful than their common encounter with the institutions of international secularism. As Barfield might put it, each would be separately scoured by that encounter, and then perhaps they might fit together. 3) Marxism : it is no great challenge to dispatch the "scientific" character of dialectical materialism with a few embarrassing quotes from Engels. The lesson to be learned is rather the astounding readiness of this age to hear a moral message that comes to it in something like scientific dress. The unscientific character of psychoanalysis teaches the same lesson, and there are scores of less spectacular illustrations. Even Transcendental Meditation only began to mushroom when it had its lactic acid graphs ready for display. The fact that a case could be made against those graphs was forgotten. What counted, in a mood of prior willingness to find a scientifically acceptable road to peace, was the fact that some kind of case could be made for them. It is misleading to explain this as mere gullibility. Against some kinds of gulling, a given population at a given time may be quite resistant. Our population at this time, having despaired of beating science, is trying desperately to join it. 4.46 Popular science then may be the "firm foundation" of which Russell spoke, inasmuch as it represents our most common language and the rudiments of a common sense. But if Barfield is right, it will only become the soul's habitation when, as he puts it, "it becomes
impossible to write a popular manual of science without referring to the incarnation of the Word." Writing popular science in this way means writing it up not as reality but as an agreed upon version of the Unrepresented, as the incarnation in this culture of the Word. Thoughtful research scientists and philosophers of science have usually done this, at least in this century and at least in the English-speaking world. However, popular science talks another language; and sometimes when research scientists talk at the popular level, they lapse into it. It may be that they fear that exposing the consentaneous basis of even scientific knowledge would prevent concerted social action, but in fact quite to the contrary, as long as the layman thinks that science hasn't quite got the correct picture but may soon have it , he will postpone his action against those later results. Once even Science Digest readers know that all we shall ever have is temporary consensus, they may be willing to act on that basis. 4.47 As the consentaneous character of scientific knowledge becomes apparent, the fact that religious knowledge has only a consentaneous guarantee will no longer be a stigma. It will be recognized that the religious consensus has been reached in an unscientific, non-experimental way; but since the last stage of even scientific experimentation is only consensus, the religious consensus will suffer no embarrassment. And though there will be no danger that the two forms of consensus will be confused, congruencies between them¾and there are many more than are commonly noted¾will be welcomed. Each is only a "collective representation," in Barfield's terminology, of the Unrepresented. 4.51 There are many more than two ways to build a consensus, of course. The popularity of any work of literary art represents a consensus about its truth. However, if there can be a rapprochement between the major, organized traditions of experimental science and religion, then
writers will be free to pursue their art with a proper sense of irresponsibility. The writer should be like the Fool in Lear's court, free to say whatever he wants but confident that someone else will care for the kingdom while he does so. The artist should be unbound, but he should not be Prometheus. This, I think, is the point of 4.52 To the extent that writers may cease to feel themselves in any way called on either to meet spiritual needs that religion should have met or to refute cognitive claims that science should never have made, they may discover a new willingness to re-tell old tales. Part of the power of science and of theology alike is that in any given argument so much is agreed upon that the smallest variations can be exciting. Discussions are interesting, paradoxically, because so little in them is new. In literature, this sort of interest is only generated when the audience already knows the story. The extraordinary tension in Greek tragedy between audience and actors revolves not around what will happen but around when and how the actors learn what the audience already knows. The Bible is one of the very few resources for this kind of art in our culture. When the Broadway audience settled into its seats in December, 1974, when 4.53 I am convinced that the search for novelty in literature has not been a literary search. It has been a search imposed upon the writer by unsolved problems elsewhere in his society, problems that may weigh upon him as a man but which actually keep him from his art. To the extent that the solution of these other problems is shifted onto other shoulders, writers may begin to devote more time to artistry in language and less to the hunt for "material." This is, of course, only an intuition on my part, but then so is everything else I have said. 4.61 The role of literary criticism in this case, and the role particularly of the criticism of the Bible, will be that of keeping alive the memories that can make this kind of art possible. Robert Pirsig reports in his haunting 4.62 For what we call false inference or hasty generalization may also be thought of as amnesia, even as precipitous and willed oblivion. It is not too much to say that the God of Israel, understood as omnipotent solicitude, as the fusion of the Mesopotamian high god El and the patriarchal God of my Fathers, was a false inference from the escape of the Israelite tribes from Egypt. But one may also read early Israelite religious thinking as the temporary but necessary exclusion of what Israel knew of God from previous paganism. It could not have been otherwise at the start, but it could not have remained so indefinitely¾and did not. 4.63 For there was truth in what had been excluded, and in the Book of Job the truth returns. Like Israel, Job had "already heard" what he saw in the conclusive theophany: that Good is not always victorious and that God and the harshness of nature, though they may not be One, are not separable. The challenge to him¾as to all believers in Yahweh from the Babylonian Exile to the present¾became the psychological challenge of retaining the old knowledge against the new. For the original inference had not been totally false and yet was not and would not ever be patient of simple correction. In the Exodus narrative of the ten plagues, some scholars believe that the hardening of Pharaoh's heart by Yahweh against Yahweh's own injunction represents a re-assignment of
lines (Richards!) originally assigned to Satan. Early monotheism could live with incoherence in its narrative more easily than it could live with a second superhuman power set against that of its God. In the Book of Job, the lines are shifted back: Satan returns. And yet His return does not represent a correction in the belief about God. It represents, so to put it, a correction in the believing about God. 4.64 In considering the vocation of the literary critic and Bible scholar today, it may be well to recall that while there are many parallels to the speeches of Job in earlier cognate Semitic literatures, there are scarcely any within the earlier literature of Israel itself. In writing those speeches, this biblical writer not only wrote against the temper of his own national literature, he did so quite plainly on the strength of a kind of research. His language is not only eloquent, it is¾in a way that translations can scarcely be expected to convey-erudite. The author was a scholar and an antiquarian, not the sort from whom important new knowledge is awaited unless¾but who ever waits for such a thing? ¾the new knowledge should come as the recovery of forgotten knowledge. 4.7 The possibility of such a recovery is the romance of archaeology. Most of the time historians and antiquarians¾the critics of dead literatures¾are engaged in seeing to it that knowledge not now lost but not well attended to manages to make it from their generation to the next. But on occasion the disconnected stars in their firmament become a constellation to steer by, and the custodian may then suddenly become a reformer. Critics who expect this to happen as a matter of course and who accordingly speak of the critical enterprise "as if it were ...a way to end the arms race" have an inflated understanding of what they are and do. Most of the time this sort of thing does not happen, and under normal circumstances the critic is not even looking for it. However,
one can never know in advance, when one begins to deal with a past literature, how much of it has already been forgotten and how much of what is remembered is not power but only the aftertaste of power. 4.80 I. A. Richards is right, it seems to me, to read the classics of the West dialectically, though wrong in placing Poetry on the throne of God. The Bible undoubtedly needs the sort of hard ethical-aesthetic look he has given it, however surprised scholars of the historico-critical school may be to see the source-criticism that is so useful in reconstructing the history of Israel counted against the Bible's aesthetic effect and however discomfited preachers may be to see ethically embarrassing passages publicized. But it must be so: neither the text of the Bible nor the perfectly recovered event which stands behind the Bible (or behind those portions of it that have something to do with an event) can function as the single source of authority, as a surrogate pope for a sundered Christendom. Historical criticism itself must, as suggested above, assume a position subordinate to literary appreciation. And rather more to the point in a largely secularized culture, the Bible can perform no analogous authoritarian task in any new canon of literary masterpieces either. 4.81 The most common response to the insolubility of the problem of religious authority in the West has been one form or another of privatization. Among religious illiterates, this is frequently enough a scrap of childhood lore secretly adhered to. Among religious sophisticates, it tends to be a celebration of the shamanistic personality read psychoanalytically as the precursor of the modern artist. I have interpreted Saul Bellow to say that the modern artist is destroyed when forced to take on the responsibilities of the shaman, and I shall maintain further that a society where everyone aspires to be a shaman¾or even where everyone aspires to be somehow unusual¾will go mad. The attempt to rebuild religion
must not begin with what is rare but with what is common. If psychological analogies count for anything, they count for most when they are drawn from the psychohistory of the common man. 4.82 An ordinary infant's first experience of life is of radical insecurity. With luck, there succeeds an experience of security in which neither the benevolence nor the power of the child's significant adults seems open to challenge. The adolescent discovers that the infant's perception of radical insecurity was the correct one and rails against his former protectors: if they are secure, it must be because they are malevolent; if they are benevolent, it must be that they¾and he with them¾are insecure; either way, aghast at a world so much larger and so much less personal than he ever dreamt it could be, he feels himself misled. At length, the adult recognizes that his childhood habit of perceiving reality as presided over by omnipotent benevolence remains with him as a resource that makes it possible for him to make the best of that world from which, in adolescence, he so recoiled. 4.9 It is an oversimplification but not, I hope, a distortion to read 5.1 The program limned in the section just concluded calls for the construction of a new common sense by the addition of a still-to-be-written popular language
analysis to popular science so that a cultural permission, now generally denied, may be granted for the use of religious language. Will religious language, even then, return to common usage? It may, but only if it succeeds in making effective use of ordinary-language resources to isolate and thematize concerns not adequately dealt with in competing language games. Language analysis, as Langdon Gilkey has shown (231-241), takes all language games as given. If a given game breaks up, language analysis offers no counsel for its reorganization. In my opinion, the resources of popular science for the organization of a significantly religious language game are considerable. All sacred language, after all, is profane language borrowed for sacred purposes. Natural science offers a repertory of models which, in flexibility and detail, are not matched elsewhere. Their exploitation for the thematization of the deepest human concerns, though it cannot guarantee truth, can offer, in Gilkey's sense, an enhancement of meaning. The point of the present article, however, is not to develop this program but to clear away an obstacle. It is to insist, against a gathering mood in biblical studies, that nothing made of language¾no parable, no poem, no apothegm, no oracular graffito¾can free us from language. 5.2 Literary critics are not commonly philosophers of language. Bible critics, however, in as much as they are commonly theologians and so philosophers of a sort, have of late become philosophers of language with a vengeance. In doing so, not a few have fallen prey, betimes, to the hazard of their new occupation, a hazard which strikes them at the end of a long evening when, the rules of the clamorous language games regulated and all illusory claims laid to rest, they stay up late with illusion itself. Wittgenstein did this, Richards does it, and post-Christian Bible critics are doing it in their turn. 5.3 We learn from Toulmin and Janik that Wittgenstein's Tractatus , the magna carta of language analysis, was
So stated, of course; language mysticism may be quarantined as yet another language game. However, language mysticism may elude language analysis if the mystic refuses to speak; this would seem an odd sort of language mysticism, but Toulmin and Janik say that "the closest we may be able to come to understanding Wittgenstein's mind, at this point [when he wrote the Tractatus], is to call to mind the aphorism of Karl Kraus: 'Why does many a man write? Because he does not possess enough character not to write'" (Toulmin and Janik: 201). 5.41 In 5.42 "Acquiescence," the poem Richards wrote for inclusion in his 1973 Festschrift , opens as follows: Richards, in his youth, was a climber of geological as well as philosophical mountains. The rest of the poem ("Hence, to the Lodge of Leisure/With easy steps and few") is an assessment of what in his sixty years has been too hard and what has been all too easy to accomplish (Brower: 38). And though the author of 5.5 The analogue to Wittgenstein's Schweigen and Richards's "Acquiescence" in current Bible criticism is the selection and celebration of those portions of the Bible that are most oblique and gnomic. Thus the Gospels and within them the parables win a new appreciation, especially when read as a moment in the ongoing, sacred mission of art to speak without speaking. Toulmin and Janik report (201) that when in the military, Wittgenstein was nicknamed "the man with the Gospels" by his fellow soldiers because he was never seen without his copy of Tolstoy's
The response to all this may come best from Charlie Citrine:
The question is not whether Bible scholars should talk to poets (why shouldn't they?) but whether human destiny hangs in poetry's balance. If we are right to read 5.6 In his 5.71 In a kind of reductionis reductio ad absurdum , Arthur Peacocke has written:
Anything may be reduced to anything else, Peacocke is saying, depending on where in the circle one takes one's stand. I have for some time privately referred to this game as "Who Includes Whom?" It may, in the present context, be better named "Who Laughs Last?" If the larger is explained by the smaller, the physicist laughs last. If the smaller by the larger, the astronomer laughs last. If the mind by the brain, the neurophysiologist laughs last. If the concepts of brain research by logic, the metaphysician laughs last. And so forth. 5.72 There is, of course, little real humor in all this; the struggle is a struggle for mastery in which the losers must kneel at the feet of the winners and be told what they "really" are and what, all unknowing, they have been about. In the present instance, if myth is explained
by theology, then theologians¾who are pleased to see human enterprise as a tissue of myths¾stand, while all others kneel. And if the whole raucous chorus, including theology, is an illusion, then they alone stand who know illusion from the inside¾novelists, namely, and poets, the masters of illusion; all others (except literary critics?) kneel. Dominic Crossan refers to parable as "subversive" (passim), but all agents provocateurs are in someone's employ. The better word is imperialistic. 5.8 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, an Austrian poet "of whom it was said that if only he had died at the age of twenty-five he would have been guaranteed immediate entry to the Hall of Immortals," wrote a farewell to poetry in his twenty-fifth year which may be compared, in its intent, to Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Like Wittgenstein's work, von Hofmannsthalls Letter of Lord Chandos "draws the limits to the sphere of the ethical from the inside, as it were"; but here, the inside is the inside of art rather than of philosophy. Wittgenstein was to find that philosophy could say nothing of consequence in ethics; von Hofmannsthal a generation earlier had found that neither could art:
Not unlike Citrine, who exhorts that we "listen in secret to the sound of the truth that God puts into us," Lord Chandos urges that we "think with the heart." Thinking with the heart, von Hofmannsthal himself began collaborating in musical comedies of a sort. It remains to be seen what Bellow will do, but in 5.9 The last question left unanswered at the end of Section II asked what special value, if any, Bible-inspired literature could have if literature in general had no redemptive function. The general value of such literature, it may now appear, is at least that power which it has in common with all literature; namely, the power to entertain. If it has a special value, that value may be the indirect support it provides to Bible scholars in their role as custodians of a major cultural memory. Our culture celebrates innovation more than it does faithful retention. One of the reasons why archaeology excites American Bible scholars more than it does Europeans is that it provides a way to come up with that apparent contradiction, the new memory. But the Americans are right to get excited. In cultural as in personal history, one can forget and then forget that he forgot; and then indeed there can be stunning new memories. The difference between recalling what we have forgotten we forgot and remembering what we know is as great as the difference between exhuming the buried and sweeping the floor. In both of these tasks, but particularly in the latter, Bible-inspired literature can play an important role. What it cannot do is what the Bible itself cannot do: it cannot save. Abrams, M. J., 1971, Albrektson, Bertil, 1967, Arnold, Matthew, l973, Barfield, Owen, 1965, Barr, James, 1973, Bellow, Saul, 1975a, Bellow, Saul, 1975b, Bellow, Saul, 1975c, Brower, Reuben, ed., l973,
Semeia 07: Studies in the Book of Job
David Robertson
University of California, Davis
Semeia 07: Studies in the Book of Job
Luis Alonso Schökel
The Pontifical Biblical Institute, RomeAbstract
1. Dramatic Staging (mise en scène )
Lo I go forward, and he is not there;
Backward, and I cannot perceive him;
Left I turn and cannot see him;
I turn right and do not spy him. (23:8-9)
Let this be the solace you give. 3Bear with me, let me speak.
When I have spoken, mock on ... 5Look at me, and be dismayed,
Clap your hand over your mouth. 34 Why then offer me vain comfort?
Your answers remain sheer fraud.2. The Lawsuit with God
Be silent before me that I may speak,
Then come upon me what may.
I take my flesh in my teeth,
My throat I put in my hand.
He may slay me, I'll not quaver.
I will defend my conduct to his face.
Shaddai who has embittered my soul,3While I have life in me,
God's breath in my nostrils,4 My lips will not speak falsehood,
Nor my tongue utter deceit.5 Far be it from me to declare you right; Till I die I will not renounce my integrity.6 My innocence I maintain, I will not relinquish it;
My conscience gives no reproach my lifelong.7 May my enemy be exposed as guilty,
And my opponent as unjust. (L.A.S.)
Quack healers, all of you.7 Is it for God's sake you speak evil,
For him that you utter deceit?8 Will you show partiality for him,
Will you contend for God?9 Will it be well when he probes you?
Can you trick him as men are tricked?10 He will rebuke you severely,
If you covertly curry favor.5 I wish you would keep strictly silent!
That would be wisdom for you!
I would have to entreat my opponent.16 If I summoned and he answered,
I do not believe he would heed me17 He would crush with a tempest
And multiply my wounds without cause.19 Be it power, he is strongest;
Or litigation, who could arraign him?20 Though righteous, his mouth would condemn me;
Though guiltless, he would declare me perverse.
That I might come to his tribunal. (L.A.S.)4 I would lay my case before him,
Would fill my mouth with arguments.5 I want to know what words he would answer me,
To consider what he would say to me.6 Through an attorney would he sue me?
Nay, he himself should give heed to me.7 There I will argue honestly with him,
And my right will finally prevail. (L.A.S.)
I will ask you, and you tell me.8Would you annul my right,
Condemn me that you may be justified?
(L.A.S.)9 If you have an arm like God,
And a thundering voice like his, (L.A.S.)10 Deck yourself with grandeur and majesty; (L.A.S.)11 Let loose your furious wrath;
Glance at every proud one and humble him.12 Glance at every proud one and abase him;
Tread down the wicked where they stand.14 Then I will praise you
"Your own right hand has given you
victory." (L.A.S.)3. The Necessary Drama
Works Consulted
Semeia 07: Studies in the Book of Job
James Crenshaw
Vanderbilt University. Luis Alonso Schökel yields to this temptation, stressing an intellectual drama consisting of passion and search. Action of a different sort fills both the narrative and the dialogue. The intensity of feeling and scope of the quest justify the term drama, even if in a loose usage. I have no quarrel with an heuristic use of the category, insofar as it enriches our knowledge of a profound disputation .. Both acts stand in tension with one another in literary form and content. This tension persists, whether viewed as drama or otherwise. The book's prose and poetry cannot be harmonized. Suspense fills the universe as the heavenly audience awaits the outcome of the two quests. At long last God, the director of the strange play,
abandons the spectator role and assumes that of actor. Ironically, at that moment his mask vanishes, and Job sees God for who he is.1. The Masking of God
2. The Unmasking of God
Works Consulted
Semeia 07: Studies in the Book of Job
John J. Miles, Jr.
Doubleday, Garden City, NYAbstract
1. The Exhaustion of Literature
The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialised itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion to-day is its unconscious poetry. (Trilling: 299)
I'm worried about the responsibility which is thrust upon the writer, responsibilities which are didactic, moral, and so on. After all, we are, most of us, frail vessels: how much do we think we can do, what the devil do we think we are doing anyway?...I don't like the feeling of supererogation that goes with this. I don't even know how many times Shelley would have said poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, if he had lived beyond the age of
forty¾perhaps it would have tired him out saying it over and over again. Possibly he would have changed his mind. (1975b:7)
You know? There's the most extraordinary, unheard-of poetry buried in America, but none of the conventional means known to culture can even begin to extract it. But now this is true of the world as a whole. The agony is too deep, the disorder too big for art enterprises undertaken in the old way. Now I begin to understand what Tolstoi was getting at when he called on mankind to cease the false and unnecessary comedy of history and begin simply to live. It's become clearer and clearer to me in Humboldt's heartbreak and madness. He performed all the steps of that routine. He was conclusive. That¾it's perfectly plain, now¾can't be continued. Now we must listen in secret to the sound of the truth that God puts into us. (1975a:477)
Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends;
Nature and man can never be fast friends.
(Trilling: 52)The world of nature is not the place where "wisdom" (in the biblical sense) is to be found. Biblical faith has always known this; the pagans might claim to find a revelation of God in the wonders of nature, but concerning a knowledge of God derived from nature the standpoint of the Bible is that of Job 26:14: "Lo, these are but the outskirts of his ways, and how small a whisper do we hear of him."
.The fear of scientific attachments may be rooted in unfortunate early experience: it may go back to college days when a young scholar with a strongly literary bent found himself inept in the laboratory. It may reflect an aesthetic distaste for scientists as cultural barbarians with no feeling for language. It may mask a sense of inferiority: after all, scientists have no trouble in understanding what historians write, but the reverse is far from true. (3)
History is there for the scientific historian;
But the Bible is history;
Therefore the Bible is there.
But again God is in the Bible;
Therefore God is there for the scientific historian......he intended to be a divine artist a man of visionary states and enchantments, Platonic possession. He got a Rationalistic, Naturalistic education at CCNY. This was not easily reconciled with the Orphic. But all his desires
were contradictory. He wanted to be magically and cosmically expressive and articulate, able to say anything ; he wanted also to be wise, philosophical, to find the common ground of poetry and science, to prove that the imagination was just as potent as machinery, to be free and to bless mankind. But he was out also to be rich and famous. And of course there were the girls. (1975a:119)
I don't believe that [writers] are capable of originating a moral power by themselves¾in conjunction with something else, yes, in conjunction, that is, with an ideology or a church, a belief or something of that sort; but writers who tell you life is beautiful or writers who tell you life is vile are, alike, imbeciles. (1975b:13)
2. The Critical Enterprise
.I replied in measured tones that I thought it was the lowest of all possible genres and that in fact most of the stuff actually printed was garbage. Well, perhaps, he said, but you know, there are some of us (he named a few intellectuals, aside from himself, belonging to the Upper West Side-Greenwich Village Axis) doing things that are really different. What could I say? This guy believes, I don't. [Another academic] an anthropologist turned comparatist,... reverently speaks of "the critical enterprise," as if it were a cure for cancer or a way to end the arms race. Actually I think the functional metaphor for a lot of these literary people is Hadrian's Wall: they think they're guarding the frontiers of the Cultural Empire from the barbarian hordes without. Yecch.
Three diverse springs indeed¾Homer, Plato, and the prose prelude [to Job]; they are confluents to a tradition within which, as yet [sic] , means of distinguishing and analyzing what they contribute remain strangely little developed, less still the means of relating and reconciling. To these three the poem of Job brings in a fourth set of attitudes... . ... ...Iliad: Republic ::tale:poem. Some sort of opposition, of ratio, proportion, or analogy, is here asking for clarification. (1974:60).
...within each of these confluents, as between them, different and opposing positions are not only present but active , thereby sustaining tensions without which their hold and sway in our tradition would be far slighter. (1974:60)
...pressed for the recognition in more complex studies...of his Complementarity Principle, made so evident by the situation in atomic physics. There the very simplicity of the transactions under study made it manifest that experimental-conceptual setups which are mutually exclusive (his favorite term)...could yet yield results valuable in further inquiries. (1974:162)
Now that we have to doubt, as very few a century ago could, whether the politico-industrial interferences of Judean-Christian enterprise with the rest of mankind have been as desirable as was supposed, we may well bear in mind that the Bible has been the educator of the West far longer and far more deeply than Homer had been "the educator of Greece" when Plato so described him. Plato had the freedom and the courage to depose Homer and to give explicit reasons why neither the Olympians nor Achilles were worthy models... .[But] Plato...was not nearly drastic enough. He was still far too much under Homer's spell. Similarly, those who have hitherto regarded the Bible as an influence misshaping man have been too lenient. They have not sharply enough directed attention to the reasons why it should be dethroned. (1974:166-167)
Such, then, is the "Holy Word" Prometheus Unbound conveys. The phrase leads us, of course, to Blake:
Hear the voice of the Bard.
Who Present, Past, & Future sees;
Whose ears have heard
The Holy Word
That walk'd among the ancient trees,
Calling the lapsed Soul,
And weeping in the evening dew;
That might controll
The starry pole,
And fallen, fallen light renew! (1974:200). What in Matthew Arnold was scarcely more than a hint has become in the hands of I. A. Richards a mature program and one which Bible scholars in search of a secular vocation will readily make their own.. And yet, alongside his brave and oracular Shelley, we must place Bellow's Shelley¾worn out, past forty, and changing his mind about the fitness of poetry for Jupiter's throne. The question, as one compares the two, is whether the Bible will be built into the canon of humanist faith just as the age of that faith comes to an end. Bellow, of course, is arguing the specific inadequacy of contemporary literature to the moral demands that are placed upon it, rather than the inadequacy of Western literature taken as a whole to any set of moral demands. And yet the vitality of contemporary literature is required if the resources of past literature are to remain available. Would anyone visit the Chicago Art Institute if there were no store-front galleries, if the replenishment of those galleries were felt to be impossible, a futile effort? Only, one imagines, with a thought to solving the mystery of why the store-front galleries had had to close¾and then opening one up.. It is time for some comic relief.3. The Comedy of Exhaustion
3.11 Joe : Ohhh, David! David David David David David
David David David David David David David David David David David! David : Are you talking to me, Dad? Joe : Yes...but who are you? Who are you, David? Do you know? Do you know? Because I don't. I don't know who you are. Do you know who you are, David? David : Just casually. I've seen me around the house. (Simon: 22)They are accessible only in the mythical element, they are irreplaceable, unique. They cannot be interpreted rationally; they are interpreted only by new myths, by being transformed. (16)
The previews. The coming attractions. Let me read you what's playing July tenth through August fourteenth... (Reads ) A hernia, gastritis, a double impacted wisdom tooth, a root canal job, the heartbreak of psoriasis, constipation, diarrhea, piles, dysentery, chills, fever, athlete's foot, lumbago, a touch of gonorrhea and a general feeling of loginess... All this, mind you, is on the left side of your body. (Simon: 78).
Poor Mr. Benjamin. Poor Mr. Benjamin. Poor Mr. Benjamin. (Accidentally hits Joe's foot ) I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. (73)
Then stay here and suffer¾because I'm going. I've got five mouths to feed. If there is a God, that's what He intended me to do...I'm going to Welcome Wagon and get some coffee and doughnuts. Come, everybody. (74)
David : Hey, God, You want to test us? Here we are! You want us to show You what we're made of? Show us what You're made of!...What about it, Big Fella, show us a little musle! (He starts to laugh with glee, and at that very moment, an enormous clap of thunder erupts and a bolt of lightning hits the portico, just missing David and leaving a ball of smoke. The drapes fall down, and books tumble off their shelves. The women scream and David rushes back into the room, ashen white) Ho-ly shit! (55)
Joe : Am I wrong?...Is all of this too much for one family? If it is, then why did You give it to me? It's enough already, dear Lord. Don't give me any more...Just David. Give me back my David...If it be your Will, dear God, that's all I ask...Amen! (26)
. To one with a taste for tragedy (and there are many with that taste), the happy ending of Job, like the resurrection of Christ, spoils the story: life isn't like that¾except sometimes, and those aren't the times that count. D. D. Raphael put the matter well in ...the religion of the Bible is inimical to Tragedy, first because it is optimistic and trusts that evil is always a necessary means to greater good, and secondly because it abases man before the sublimity of God. Tragedy on the other hand treats evil as unalloyed evil; it regrets the waste of human worth of any kind, and does not think that innocent suffering can be justified. Secondly, it shows human effort to be sublime, a fit match for the sublimity of nature and nature's gods. If this is true, it will follow that Tragedy is hardly possible against a background of Biblical religion... . (Sanders: 55)
. As the passage quoted makes plain, Richards's play has two deities, Jahweh and Shaddai; and the point of the added line is that it is wrong to be absolute for Jahweh. This is consistent with the complementarity principle espoused in If God is God he is not good,
If God is good he is not God, (passim)At this Job raises his head and stares fixedly at Eliphaz. Bildad and Zophar nod together in approval. Dinah puts her hand gently on Job's shoulder. Satan looks ironically at Jahweh, who buries his face in his hands. (1971:313)
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth. the things of-heaven-and-earth, dramatized in their emergent majesty, wonder and inviolable reserve. But seen in the mode of this, their being. And seen as it for the first time, yet as belonging to a domain, in which dominion (not domination) reigns, forever and ever: the dominion of being itself. (1974)
4. What Is to be Done
Why should this collection of old books have any more influence over us than another lot of books, and why should it have more importance than all sorts of perceptions which we gain from other sources, both ancient and modern, written and unwritten? (9)
...literature becomes again prophetic and universal¾a continuing revelation appropriate to a permanent religious revolution, whose function is precisely to transform the secular crowd into a sacred community, one with each other and equally at home in the world of technology and the realm of wonder.
The infallible Church Catholic is, really, the prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come; the whole race, in its onward progress, developing truth more complete than the parcel of truth any momentary individual can seize. Nay, even that amiable old pessimist in St. Peter's Chair, whose allocutions we read and call them impotent and vain,¾the Pope himself is, in his idea, the very Time-Spirit taking flesh, the incarnate "Zeit-Geist"! O man, how true are thine instincts, how over-hasty thine interpretations of them! ( xxv-xxvi )
, a little magazine to which I subscribe for only $6.00 per year. Barfield spoke of popular science in There will be a revival of Christianity when it becomes impossible to write a popular manual of science without referring to the incarnation of the Word. It is these books, not popular theology (however excellently and simply it is written, as to-day it often is) on which the mind of the proletariat seizes as it awakens from its ancient peasant-dreaming and peasantwisdom. It is these¾especially if they are laced with Marxism¾which the needy oriental student in Bloomsbury devours and takes home with him; it is these which up to now are the answering legacy of the West to the East, whence she once derived her religion. The hungry sheep look up and are not fed. But Marxism forges ahead, because the scientific outlook (which is in the blood of the proletariat, because it is in the collective representations to which they are awakening) is part and parcel of its message; whereas to Christian doctrine, as now presented, it is at worst a stumbling-block and, at best, totally irrelevant. (164-165)
5. The Last Laugh: What Is Not To Be Done
an expression of a certain type of language mysticism that assigns a central importance in human life to art, on the ground that art alone can express the meaning of life. Only art can express moral truth, and only the artist can teach the things that matter most in life. Art is a mission. (197)
His young Mont Blanc could say,
For Shelley, what he would.
O serene Throne
Unseen, Unknown!
Mine, threescore years away,
For other searchings stood:
Spoke to me of Beyonds
But too well gainable,
Of means and aims
Dwindling to games.
Now what in me responds
To the Unattainable?My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one. My book draws limits to the sphere of the ethical from the inside as it were, and I am convinced that this is the ONLY rigorous way of drawing those limits. (Toulmin and Janik: 192)
where the human question is likely to gain a hearing today is where theologians are talking to artists, poets, and those who wish to speak a word for NATURE [sic ]. There is evidence slender though it is, that a new poetic tradition is taking root. It has spilled over into the theatre, the nightclub... .The rejuvenation of poetry and the transformation of theology cannot be far behind when it [is?] perceived that human destiny hangs in the balance. (154)
My very fingertips rehearsed how they would work the keys of the trumpet, imagination's trumpet, when I got ready to blow it at last. The peals of that brass would be heard beyond the earth, out in space itself. When that Messiah, that savior faculty the imagination was roused, finally we could look again with open eyes upon the whole shining earth. (1975a:396)
...physiological processes are merely forms of applied biochemistry, which is merely applied chemistry, which is merely applied physics, which is merely the application of mathematical truth, which is merely the result of the laws of logic and of forms of thought, which are merely the product of social, cultural, and linguistic influences, which are merely the expression of psychological mechanisms, which are merely physiological processes... .
Images and concepts only lead back to themselves. They do not open any way to the nature of things and to individual life. They are a roundelay, similar to a circle in which everything is in tune, everything is in a state of harmony and beauty, but they are 'eyeless statues,' forms without genuine relation to existence. (Toulmin and Janik: 116)
Works Consulted