The Faith of a Heretic

Suffering and the Bible

No other problem of theology or the philosophy of religion has excited so sustained and wide an interest as the problem of suffering. In spite of that, people keep saying, as if it were a well-known truth, that you cannot prove or disprove God’s existence. This cliché is as true as the assertion that you cannot prove or disprove the existence of y. Of course, it is easy to construct a formally valid proof that y, or God, exists—or, for that matter, that they do not exist: x said that y exists; x always spoke the truth (in fact, he said: I am the truth); hence, y exists. Or: y is a z; no z exists; hence, y does not exist. But whether the existence or non-existence of y, or God, can be proved from plausible premises depends on the meaning we assign to y, or to God. And the term “God,” as we have seen, is almost, though not quite, as elastic as the symbol “y.”

One’s strategy in trying to defend or to attack the claim that God exists obviously depends on what is meant by “God.” It may be objected that it is not so difficult to isolate what might be called the popular conception of God. The problem of suffering is of crucial importance because it shows that the God of popular theism does not exist.

The problem of suffering is: why is there the suffering we know? Dogmatic theology, criticized in the preceding chapter, has no monopoly on dealing with this problem. Let us see how a philosopher might deal with it, after repudiating dogmatic theology and endorsing the importance of the “critical, historical, and psychological study of religion.” My approach will be part philosophical, part historical—only partially philosophic because the problem can be illuminated greatly by being placed in historical perspective. What matters here is not to display philosophic acumen but really to remove some of the deeply felt perplexity that surrounds this problem; and toward that end, we shall have to draw on history as well as philosophy.

There are at least three easy ways of disposing of the problem why there is suffering. If we adopt the position that everything in the universe, or at least a great deal, is due to chance, the problem is answered in effect. Indeed, as we reflect on this solution, it becomes clear that the “why” of the problem of suffering asks for a purpose; a mere cause will not do. Immediately a second solution comes to mind: if we say that the universe, far from being governed by chance, is subject to iron laws but not to any purpose, the problem of suffering is again taken care of. Thirdly, even if we assume that the world is governed by purpose, we need only add that this purpose—or, if there are several, at least one of them—is not especially intent on preventing suffering, whether it is indifferent to suffering or actually rejoices in it.

All three solutions are actually encountered in well-known religions. Although the two great native religions of China, Confucianism and Taoism, are far from dogmatic or even doctrinaire, and neither of them commands assent to any set of theories, both approximate the first solution which accepts events simply as happening, without seeking either laws or purposes behind them.

The second solution, which postulates a lawful world order but no purpose, is encountered in the two great religions which originated in India: Hinduism and Buddhism. Here an attempt is made to explain suffering: the outcaste of traditional Hinduism is held to deserve his wretched fate; it is a punishment for the wrongs he did in a previous life. We are all reborn after death in accordance with the way we behaved during our lives: we receive reward and punishment as our souls migrate from one existence to the next. The transmigration of souls proceeds in accordance with a fixed moral order, but there is no purpose behind it. The scientific world view also disposes of the problem of suffering by denying that the laws of nature are governed by any purpose.

The third solution is familiar from polytheistic religions—for example, the Iliad and the Odyssey—but present also in the Persian religion of Zarathustra (or Zoroaster), who taught that there were two gods, a god of light and goodness (Ormazd or Ahura-Mazda) and a god of darkness and evil (Ahriman). Here, and in many so-called primitive religions, too, suffering is charged to some evil purpose.

In all three cases, and for most human beings, the problem of suffering poses no difficult problem at all: one has a world picture in which suffering has its place, a world picture that takes suffering into account. To make the problem of suffering a perplexing problem, one requires very specific presuppositions, and once those are accepted the problem becomes not only puzzling but insoluble.

For atheism and polytheism there is no special problem of suffering, nor need there be for every kind of monotheism. The problem arises when monotheism is enriched with—or impoverished by—two assumptions: that God is omnipotent and that God is just. In fact, popular theism goes beyond merely asserting God’s justice and claims that God is “good,” that he is morally perfect, that he hates suffering, that he loves man, and that he is infinitely merciful, far transcending all human mercy, love, and perfection. Once these assumptions are granted, the problem arises: why, then, is there all the suffering we know? And as long as these assumptions are granted, this question cannot be answered. For if these assumptions were true, it would follow that there could not be all of this suffering. Conversely: since it is a fact that there is all this suffering, it is plain that at least one of these assumptions must be false. Popular theism is refuted by the existence of so much suffering. The theism preached from thousands of pulpits and credited by millions of believers is disproved by Auschwitz and a billion lesser evils.

The use of “God” as a synonym for being-itself, or for the “pure act of being,” or for nature, or for scores of other things for which other terms are readily available, cannot be disproved but only questioned as pettifoggery. The assertion that God exists, if only God is taken in some such Pickwickian sense, is false, too: not false in the sense of being incorrect, but false in the sense of being misleading and to that extent deceptive.

It is widely assumed, contrary to fact, that theism necessarily involves the two assumptions which cannot be squared with the existence of so much suffering, and that therefore, per impossibile, they simply have to be squared with the existence of all this suffering, somehow. And a great deal of theology as well as a little of philosophy—the rationalizing kind of philosophy which seeks ingenious reasons for what is believed to begin with—has consisted in attempts to reconcile the popular image of God with the abundance of suffering.

In this perspective, much of the Old Testament appears in a new light. In most of the Hebrew Scriptures it is simply axiomatic that suffering comes from God. “Is a trumpet blown in a city, and the people are not afraid? Does evil befall a city, and the Lord has not done it?” asked Amos (3:6). About 150 years later, after the fall of Jerusalem in 586, Jeremiah exclaimed in his Lamentations: “Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that good and evil come?” (3:38). And not quite fifty years later, as the Persians, who believed in two great gods, one good and one evil, were approaching Babylonia, the so-called Second Isaiah repudiated any such dualism: “I am the Lord, and there is no other; besides me there is no god…. I form light and create darkness, I make peace and create evil; I am the Lord who do all these things” (45:5 ff.). Evil and suffering do not come from an evil god, Ahriman, but from the one and only God. In the same spirit, Job asks his wife: “Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?” (2:10).

It also seems to have been accepted as a fact—and it surely is a fact—that children often suffer for their parents’ deeds. This evidently offended Jeremiah’s moral sensibility, but he was less prone than most men to retouch reality. Nothing ever kept him from telling his contemporaries how grim he considered both the present and the imminent future. But looking into the very distant future, he gave voice to his hopes: “And it shall come to pass that as I have watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring evil, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the Lord. In those days they shall no longer say: ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’ But every one shall die for his own sin; each man who eats sour grapes, his teeth shall be set on edge” (31:28 ff.). With his grim realism, Jeremiah did not question the plain fact that those who suffer frequently do not deserve their suffering; but he felt that this was unjust, and he proclaimed that a time shall come when it will not be that way any more. As for the present, he did not question the patent injustice of history: “Our fathers sinned, and are no more; and we bear their iniquities” (Lamentations 5:7).

Only a few years later, possibly even at the very same time, another prophet arose in the Babylonian captivity and took a further step: Ezekiel. He marks a new point of departure.

One ought to divide the Hebrew prophets into three groups instead of distinguishing the “major” from the “minor” prophets, using the mere size of their books as the sole criterion. Nor is it sufficient to separate the pre-exilic from the later prophets: in a crucial way, the so-called Second Isaiah is closer to the pre-exilic Isaiah than he is to Ezekiel, his own contemporary.

Three types of Hebrew prophets might be distinguished as follows. First, there are those who did not write books or compose magnificent speeches. Among these, the most memorable is Elijah in the ninth century; and the Bible also devotes a good deal of space to his follower, Elisha. Both stand in a tradition that is easily traced back at least another 200 years to the time of Saul and David; and from the time of David a notable parable, told by the prophet Nathan, has been preserved. The Books of Samuel and Kings are full of similar prophets, though not all were of equal stature.

The two first representatives of the second type were Amos and Hosea, in the eighth century. They were soon followed by Micah and Isaiah, a century later by Jeremiah, and still later by the Second Isaiah. There were others, more or less similar though not quite so impressive. What sets the men of the second type apart is that they spontaneously composed great poetic speeches, generally in the name of the Lord. They did not, like some of the prophets of the first type, induce ecstatic trances by dancing, nor did they wait to be consulted, nor did they claim to perform miracles, nor did they merely tell the king after special provocation what they thought of him, with the whole emphasis falling on the contents of their remarks and little or none on the precise words. Whether the prophets of this second type recorded their own words in writing or left it to others to do, they were great literary artists as well as moralists. The gist of their messages was generally that their people were acting immorally, that such conduct was bound to lead to hideous consequences, and that the people should mend their ways, the consequences being inevitable unless the people should repent and return from their wicked ways.

The first great representative of the third type is Ezekiel who, during the Exile, turned away from reality and had visions. When Isaiah described the Lord’s call, in Chapter 6, he gave us the bare bones of a vision, providing no more than the setting in which he found himself addressed. Everything leads up to the words he heard: what really mattered could not be seen. God’s “train filled the temple,” and Isaiah saw some amazing creatures whom he called seraphim; but all this merely underlines the exceptional nature of his experience. The climax is not reached until Isaiah is addressed: “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then I said: Here I am, send me! And he said: Go and say to this people: …” Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah, Hosea, and Amos were not visionaries. Their experiences were primarily auditory: they heard God’s voice, they were inspired to say things. Only very occasionally are their messages underscored by visual detail; but even then they do not lose themselves lovingly in elaborations; what matters is the spoken word and not a vision. All this is different in Ezekiel who, as it were, founded a new genre.

In the Old Testament, the next two major representatives of this genre are Zechariah and Daniel. Outside the Old Testament, a whole vast apocalyptic literature developed in which various authors spun out their visions in minute detail, showing the influence of Ezekiel and Daniel in a great variety of ways, not least by taking over many of their images. While this literature was not accepted as canonical by the Jews and deliberately excluded from the Hebrew Bible, one apocalypse, known variously either as The Revelation of St. John the Divine or as The Apocalypse, was included in the New Testament; and the influence of apocalyptic literature is plain in the Gospels and in other parts of the New Testament, too.

It is a commonplace that Jesus stands in “the prophetic tradition.” Our distinction between three types of prophets allows a certain refinement of this cliché. Jesus does not go as far as Amos and Hosea, Micah and Isaiah, and Jeremiah did in their radical criticism of the cult of their religion and their exclusive insistence on justice, mercy, and humility, though it is plain that the general tenor of his preaching was closer to this tradition than it was to ritualism or theology. Still, seeing that others before him had gone so far, it is noteworthy that he went so much less far. Although Bultmann, in his Theology of the New Testament, ascribes to Jesus “a great protest against Jewish legalism” (10), he has to admit that “there is not the slightest trace in Jesus’ words of any polemic against the temple cult” (16). The great prophets of the second type had outdone each other in such polemics. And in his early book on the Synoptic Gospels, Bultmann points out that it is highly significant that various minor violations of the ritual law are “related of the disciples only and not of Jesus himself”; and he gives reasons for believing that “the ‘disciples’ who have broken with these customs are the primitive Christian community” (23; cf. my Critique, § 57).

To be sure, the New Testament relates that Jesus healed a man on the Sabbath, but the Pharisees would have considered this permissible if there had been an emergency. Since the man had been lame all his life, most of them felt, no doubt, that Jesus might have waited a few hours until the Sabbath was over, though a minority might have been as liberal as he was. Clearly, this was a borderline case which involved the interpretation of the law: the whole atmosphere is that of first-century Judaism, not that of the great prophets of the second type. Like many, though by no means all, of his contemporaries, Jesus and the evangelists were evidently much more deeply influenced by the Biblical stories of Elijah’s miracles and ascent to heaven and by the apocalyptic tradition than by Amos and his successors. It is not merely such a phrase as “Son of Man” which recalls Daniel and Ezekiel but, more importantly, Jesus’ whole attitude toward this world and his concern with another world: this world ceases to be the center of attention, as it was in the tradition that led from Amos to the Second Isaiah; this world is about to come to an end; and even now it behooves us to concentrate much less on this world than on another—indeed, if possible, to have no thought of this world at all and to subordinate everything to preparing for the other.

Ezekiel was the grandfather of the apocalyptic tradition—a new point of departure—but not himself preoccupied either with the end of the world or, strictly speaking, with another world. He was a man who, literally, had visions. Some doctors have speculated that he may have been an epileptic, and Karl Jaspers has written a paper on this question. If Ezekiel had told his people that they would one day return from their Babylonian exile and rebuild their temple, they might well have laughed at him. No other people had ever returned from this kind of exile, and the memory of the destruction of the northern kingdom, Israel, was still fresh: Samaria had been razed by the Assyrians, the people had been exiled, and the ten tribes had been lost forever. But Ezekiel saw the rebuilt temple—saw it in such minute detail that he could go on and on describing it and giving measurements. He could see even now what was to be, and many people believed him; and later on, no doubt, some insisted on rebuilding the temple just as he had described it.

With Ezekiel, the Ought took precedence over the Is, even to the extent of a flat defiance of everyday realities. Expressly going beyond Jeremiah, Ezekiel said: “What do you mean by using this proverb about the land of Israel, ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge’? As I live, says the Lord God, this proverb shall no more be used by you in Israel” (18:2 f.).

It takes only one further step, and we are assured that, appearances notwithstanding, God is just—not merely that “in those days,” in some distant future, things will change and God will become just, but that even now he is just. The New Testament assures us, climaxing a development that began in exilic Judaism: God is perfect. He is not unjust. As the German poet, Christian Morgenstern, said in a very different context, in one of his many delightfully funny poems:

For, he argues razor-witted,

That can’t be which is not permitted.

It is at this point that the perplexing problem of suffering is created and at the same time rendered insoluble—unless either the traditional belief in God’s boundless power or the belief in his perfect justice and mercy is abandoned. Short of that, only pseudo-solutions are possible. Three such pseudo-solutions were offered in short order and later, in Christian times, a fourth as well.

The first was inspired by the religion of Zarathustra, with which the Jews came into contact a generation after Ezekiel. The Second Isaiah had met the dualism of the Persians, and their belief in an evil deity, with a firm denial that there is more than one God and with an equally unequivocal assertion that the one and only God creates evil as well as good. But soon a new conception arose in Israel: that of Satan.

Literally, Satan means accuser or slanderer, and he was evidently originally conceived as a functionary at the Lord’s court, the way the prologue to the Book of Job pictures him—or, to use the language of a later age, as one of the angels. Satan never gained any great importance in Judaism, least of all in the Hebrew Bible, but some of the lesser minds invoked him to solve the problem of suffering.

In the Second Book of Samuel (24), it is said that “the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, Go, number Israel and Judah.” David then gave orders to number the people “that I may know the number of the people”; and this order prevailed over the warning of Joab, his general. “But David’s heart smote him after he had numbered his people. And David said to the Lord: I have sinned greatly in what I have done….” Even so, “the Lord sent a pestilence upon Israel … and there died of the people from Dan to Beersheba seventy thousand men.” To understand the mind of the historian, one needs only to recall the words of Amos: “Does evil befall a city, and the Lord has not done it?” If a pestilence struck down seventy thousand people, surely the Lord had sent it; and if shortly before that David numbered the people, though he knew that this was a great sin, surely “the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he incited David.”

After the Babylonian exile, when it was widely believed that God was perfect and just, the historian of the First Book of Chronicles, who retold this story, leaning heavily on the Second Book of Samuel, could no longer accept this naive, pre-moralistic, non-utopian conception of God. Why, then, did David number the people? The later historian has recourse to a pseudo-solution of the problem of suffering. He begins his account (21): “Satan stood up against Israel and incited David to number Israel.”

That this is no solution appears as soon as we ask why God allowed Satan to do such a thing. The problem has merely been pushed back, not solved.

The second pseudo-solution invokes the immortality of the soul or an eventual resurrection of the dead. These are two very different ideas, though most people do not bother to distinguish them. According to one conception, the soul lives on after death, without a body, and retains some sort of consciousness. According to the other notion, we do not survive death; but some time in the future, possibly thousands of years hence, our bodies will be resurrected from the dust, and we shall come back to life to be judged. It is interesting that religious people who disdain all disbelief in an afterlife have for the most part thought so little about this whole question that they do not even know which of these two claims they themselves believe. But as far as the problem of suffering is concerned, there is no important difference between the two.

We are assured that although there is patently little or no justice in this life and the wicked flourish more often than the just, the day of reward and retribution will come. This idea, too, seems to have been suggested to the Jews by the Persians, and later it was powerfully supported by Greek influence. By the time of Jesus, most, but not all, of the Jews took it for granted. As was mentioned in the last chapter, the Pharisees accepted it, while the Sadducees did not. But in the Old Testament this idea is mainly notable for its absence, and only a few traces of it are found in occasional verses which, scholars almost unanimously agree, are of very late origin, even later than the few references to Satan. The dominant Old Testament view finds expression in the 6th Psalm: “Turn, O Lord, save my life; deliver me for the sake of thy steadfast love. For in death there is no remembrance of thee; in Sheol who can give thee praise?” King Hezekiah’s prayer in Isaiah 38 is very similar. In this matter, Ecclesiastes is no exception at all: “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, where you are going” (9:10). It is Isaiah 26:19, parts of Isaiah 66, and Daniel 12:2 that are exceptional.

What matters in the present context is that no doctrine of immortality or resurrection can solve the problem of suffering. Suppose that Anne Frank enjoys eternal bliss in heaven: should an omnipotent god have found it impossible to let her have eternal bliss without first making her a victim of the Nazis and without having her die in a concentration camp? If you treat a child unfairly, it may possibly forget about it if you afterward give it a lollipop, but injustice remains injustice. Faith in immortality, like belief in Satan, leaves unanswered the ancient questions: is God unable to prevent suffering and thus not omnipotent? or is he able but not willing to prevent it and thus not merciful? And is he just?

The question remains why such conceptions as immortality, resurrection, and Satan were accepted from other religions after the Exile, seeing that the Jews had much earlier encountered similar beliefs among the Egyptians and rejected them rigorously. Indeed, the Egyptians’ preoccupation with the life after death exceeded that of the Persians and Greeks. Apparently there were mainly two reasons.

The first, not sufficient in itself, is that the Exile marks a turning point in Jewish history. After the Jews left Egypt, in the days of Moses, Joshua, the judges, and the kings, the people assumed responsibility for their own affairs, took a healthy interest in this world, and never quite lost the initiative for more than a short spell of time. When their enemies got the better of them, they soon rallied around a new leader who, before long, succeeded in liberating them. There was always hope, never long deferred. The Babylonian exile was an utterly new and thoroughly traumatic experience: here was a disaster from which their own power could not possibly deliver them, not even with the aid of God. It took another great power, the Persians, to end Babylonian dominance and restore Jewish freedom. But post-exilic freedom was not what freedom used to be. Persia might have been an instrument of God’s plan; but henceforth Israel did not recover complete control over its own affairs. One was dependent on Persia, later on Alexander and his successors, still later on Rome. This loss of initiative was accompanied by some loss of interest in this world and by the growth of speculations about another, better world, a world to come—after death or at the end of history. The people of Moses, Joshua, and the judges had no reason to hope for the end of history; the nations of the Hellenistic and the Roman world had every reason, and the growth of otherworldliness is not a phenomenon confined to Israel but characteristic of the Near East following Alexander’s conquests.

For all that, it is much more astonishing than most people realize that the ancient Hebrews should have developed a religion that was so free from the most central concerns of the religion of Egypt. Even if not all of the people had spent some centuries in Egypt, as the Bible claims, Egyptian influence in Palestine was powerful, and contacts with Egypt were manifold. The reasons suggested so far are utterly insufficient to account for the complete rejection of any belief in a life after death. There must have been a will as grand and granitic as the death-intoxicated art of Egypt—an uncompromising will that hammered an unprecedented ethos of resistance into heart and mind, creating a new conscience. There is no prodigy of which the Hebrew Bible gives a more elaborate, grateful, and loving account than this: Moses. That Israel, after the Babylonian exile, succumbed to some extent to the syncretism of that time was due in part to the lack of another Moses. But that it succumbed so little and, on the whole, withstood the tidal wave of syncretism as a rock of nonconformity was largely due to the enduring force of Moses’ heritage and the labors of his heirs, the prophets. The Second Isaiah, for example, may deserve much of the credit for the fact that Satan never could gain much importance in Judaism; but it would have taken another Moses to keep Satan, immortality, and resurrection altogether out of Judaism.

Besides Satan and immortality, a third pseudo-solution remains. It consists in asserting, in flat defiance of experience, that everybody gets precisely what he deserves—no better and no worse: if Anne Frank suffered more than Heinrich Himmler, that proves that she was much more wicked.

The one book of the Old Testament that is given over to an extended consideration of the problem of suffering, the Book of Job, rejects the first of these pseudo-solutions out of hand, refuses to take up the second, and repudiates the third emphatically.

The frame story, unlike the core of the book, is in prose. Here Satan appears, and the few words put into his mouth show a master’s touch. As Heyman Steinthal, one of the founders of Völkerpsychologie, remarked in the first essay of Zu Bibel und Religionsphilosophie (1890): probably nowhere in world literature before Goethe’s Mephistopheles, who was deliberately modeled in the image of the prologue to Job, can we find words that are equally “Mephistophelic.” After Satan has remarked that he has been walking up and down on the earth, the Lord asks him whether he has noticed “my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil. Then Satan answered the Lord: Does Job fear God for nothing? Have you not put a hedge around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But put forth your hand now and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face. And the Lord said to Satan: Behold, all that he has is in your power; only on him do not put forth your hand.”

Job loses everything but does not curse God. The Lord asks Satan what he thinks of Job now, and Satan replies: “Skin for skin. All that a man has he will give for his life. But put forth your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face. And the Lord said to Satan: Behold, he is in your power, only spare his life.” Now Job is afflicted “with loathsome sores from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head”; he sits down in ashes, and three friends come to comfort him. At first they cannot recognize him, then they sit on the ground with him seven days and nights, “and no one spoke a word, for they saw that his suffering was very great. After this Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth”—in magnificent poetry.

From this point, at the beginning of the third chapter, through the first half of the last chapter (42), great poetic speeches alternate. First, Job’s alternate with those of his three friends, several times over; then a fourth friend joins in—a later interpolation, according to the scholars—and then God himself delivers his reply to Job, speaking out of the whirlwind. In the last half of the last chapter, the prose narrative is resumed.

Throughout, it does not occur to anybody even to try to solve the problem of suffering by pointing to Satan. God’s omnipotence is never questioned, and all concerned apparently realize that no reference to Satan can explain Job’s suffering without in effect denying either God’s justice or his omnipotence. Job’s friends refuse to question either of these. All four of them take the same stand: it being certain that God is both almighty and just, the only conclusion possible is that Job deserves his suffering. Since he is suffering, he must have sinned.

Job refuses to accept their reasoning. He never questions either God’s existence or his omnipotence; but God’s justice, mercy, and goodness he not only questions but denies outright. This is a highly unusual approach to the problem: almost all Christian theologians and philosophers who have dealt with the problem of suffering have clung to God’s moral perfection while in effect, though hardly ever admittedly, they have denied his omnipotence.

In the Old Testament there is no exact equivalent of “omnipotence,” though shadday is generally translated as Almighty. It is a numinous term which stresses mysterious and unbounded power, not a cerebral concept. The play on words in Isaiah 13:6 and Joel 1:15 shows that in Biblical times the word was associated with shod, devastation. Nowhere else in the Bible does shadday appear so constantly as the name of God as in the Book of Job. But the claim that God’s omnipotence is not questioned in the book does not rest merely on the use of a word. Rather, the point is that it does not occur to anybody that God might simply be unable to prevent Job’s suffering.

Job’s denial of God’s goodness takes many forms. In Chapter 3, in powerful verse, he curses the day when he was born; then the first friend replies; and Job’s response surpasses even his previous speech, reaching a climax in Chapter 7: “I will not restrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul…. When I say, ‘My bed will comfort me, my couch will ease my complaint,’ then thou dost scare me with dreams and terrify me with visions, so that I would choose strangling and death rather than my bones. I loathe my life; I would not live forever…. If I sin, what do I do to thee, watcher of men? Why hast thou made me thy mark? … Why dost thou not pardon my transgression and take away my iniquity?” Job does not say that he has done evil but insists that, even if he had, this would not justify God’s treatment of him. If a child has done wrong, a loving father has no excuse for tormenting him cruelly without respite. Centuries in advance, Job replies to generations of philosophers and theologians.

The second friend speaks, and Job in his reply says: “I am blameless; I regard not myself; I loathe my life. It is all one; therefore I say, he destroys both the blameless and the wicked. When disaster brings sudden death, he mocks at the calamity of the innocent. The earth is given into the hand of the wicked; he covers the faces of its judges—if it is not he, who then is it?” (9:21 ff.). Job, like the early prophets, has no patience with the utopian religion that divorces God from reality and uses the name of God as a synonym for moral perfection. He echoes Amos’ “Does evil befall a city, and the Lord has not done it?” The innocent suffer and the wicked flourish, and Job insists that God is responsible: “If it is not he, who then is it?”

To be sure, occasionally one may detect something of poetic justice in history, but Job asks (21:17): “How often is it?” And two verses later: “You say, ‘God stores up their iniquity for their sons.’ … What do they care for their houses after them?”

Later (29), Job gives an account of his righteousness: “I was eyes to the blind, and feet to the lame”; and two chapters later he offers a famous “negative confession” in which he lists the things he did not do; and in both cases we may well marvel at the exalted standards that find expression here. To take offense at Job’s conviction of his own righteousness and to suppose that for that he after all deserved his afflictions is surely to miss the point of the book and to side with his friends: Job is not presented to us as a historic figure but as a character who is, as we are assured at the outset in the words of the Lord, “blameless”; and the Lord adds that “there is none like him on the earth.” Nor does the Lord, when he finally speaks from the whirlwind, accuse Job of any sin. The point is clearly that even if there were a human being who had never done any wrong at all and who was “eyes to the blind and feet to the lame,” there would not be any reason at all to suppose that he would be less likely than others to come down with some dreadful disease or to suffer unspeakable torments.

Indeed, that is the point of the Lord’s great speech. Far from insisting that there is some hidden justice in the world after all, or from claiming that everything is really rational if only we look at it intelligently, God goes out of his way to point out how utterly weird ever so many things are. He says in effect: the problem of suffering is no isolated problem; it fits a pattern; the world is not so rational as Job’s comforters suppose; it is uncanny. God does not claim to be good and Job in his final reply does not change his mind on this point: he reaffirms that God can do all things. And then the Lord says in the prose conclusion that Job’s friends have aroused his anger, “for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has; … and my servant Job shall pray for you, for I will accept his prayer not to deal with you according to your folly; for you have not spoken of me what is right as my servant Job has.”

The last words of the book seem offensive at first. “The Lord restored the fortunes of Job when he had prayed for his friends; and the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before.” Also, Job again had seven sons and three daughters, even as he had had seven sons and three daughters at the beginning, before all ten had been killed early in the book. But, after all, the book does not say or imply that this vindicates God’s mercy or justice, or that Job felt that his second set of ten children was fair compensation for the first. There is no need to charge this strange conclusion either to an insensitive editor who had missed the point of all that went before or to an old folktale. Probably it did come from a folktale, but the author knew what he was doing in retaining this conclusion. It underlines the weirdness of the ways of this world, which is nothing less than grotesque.

Nietzsche remarked in The Dawn (§ 84) how Christian scholars and preachers had spread “the art of reading badly.” The usual treatment of the Book of Job furnishes a fine example of that. Again and again one reads and hears that in the end Job is given twice as many children as he had in the beginning, and his forthright denial of the justice of God, which the Lord himself accepts as “right” in the end, is simply ignored. Worst of all, it is accepted as a commonplace that the ethic of the Old Testament is an ethic of prudence and rewards, as if the point were that it pays to be good. Clearly, it is the whole point of the Book of Job that this is not so, but Protestant scholars and preachers have often claimed that Job’s friends represent the ethic of the Old Testament. This is rather like claiming that the sinners in Dante’s Inferno represent the Christian virtues. If it should be countered that large numbers of Jews in Old Testament times were probably like the friends of Job rather than like Job himself or the author of the book, it is equally probable that most Christians in the age of faith resembled the sinners in Dante’s hell rather than the poet or the saints in his heaven.

Still, it might be objected that the authors of most of the other books of the Old Testament are closer to Job’s friends than to the author of the Book of Job. But this is simply not so. This common claim involves a thorough misunderstanding of the ethic of the Old Testament. Not even the moralistic historians who considered it essential to grade the behavior of the kings of Israel and Judah inferred, like the friends of Job, that success proved virtue; failure, sin. Omri, one of the most powerful kings, who would certainly have been glorified in the annals of any other nation, and who died in splendor and peace, was said to have done “more evil than all who were before him” (I Kings 16); but of Josiah, who suffered a diasastrous defeat at Megiddo and was slain in battle, it was said that “he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, and walked in all the way of David” (II Kings 22).

To be sure, we encounter perennial appeals to the consequences of moral and immoral conduct, but in the overwhelming majority of cases it is the nation that stands to profit or to suffer, not the individual. The dominant ethic of the Old Testament does not invite comparison with the ethic of the Roman church but rather with the ethic of ancient republican Rome: the individual is expected to subordinate his own pleasure and profit to the interests of the commonwealth; it is presupposed that ethical conduct involves such unselfishness. Even as the ancient Roman did his stint and risked his life when called upon, and then, if he survived, returned to the anonymity of private life without even expecting fame, the ancient Hebrew, too, is called upon to do what will benefit the people as a whole, if only in the long run, and to refrain from doing what will hurt the people, even if only after his death.

In this respect, too, Jesus does not stand in the prophetic tradition: in the Gospels this ancient appeal to selflessness is no longer encountered; it is presupposed that every soul is concerned with how he may enter the kingdom of heaven; and prudence has come to mean enlightened selfishness.

This is not the way the New Testament is usually read; and such an important matter cannot be settled in passing. We shall return to this question in Chapter VIII.

Between the age of the prophets and the time of Jesus, the whole climate of thought had changed about as much as it had in Rome between the time of the first Brutus and the age of Caesar Augustus. Concern with oneself and the other world was common indeed, though by no means universal—and Jesus and the evangelists were not as independent of their age as Moses and some of the prophets had been of theirs. The author of the Book of Job had been more independent, too.

The author of Job had been at one with the prophetic ethic in his radical opposition to the vulgar ethic of his day, and of all times, and in his radical opposition to syncretism. In an age in which the ancient sense of solidarity was crumbling and the individual experienced his sufferings in that utter solitude which is now once again the mark of modernity, the author of Job refused all the comforts that go with the assurance that God is perfectly merciful and just—the promises that being moral pays either in this life or the next—and, with a radicalism that has parallels in Amos and the other prophets of his type, but scarcely in the Gospels, claimed that God was neither just nor the embodiment of mercy or perfection.

Later theological attempts to solve the problem never advanced beyond the Book of Job. The theologians always insisted on God’s justice, goodness, and perfection, like Job’s friends, and generally had recourse to one or another of the three pseudosolutions which we have considered—or to a fourth.

The fourth spurious solution, which is one of the prime glories of Christian theology, claims in effect that suffering is a necessary adjunct of free will. God created man with free will, which was part of God’s goodness since a creature with free will is better than one without it. (Why, in that case, he first made so many creatures without it, we are not usually told.) Man then misused his free will, disobeyed God, as God knew he would do, and ate of the fruit of the one tree in Paradise whose fruit he was not supposed to eat. This made suffering inevitable. (We are not told why.) The uncanny lack of logic in this supposed solution is generally covered up with a phrase: original sin.

How old this doctrine is is arguable. Some of the motifs are encountered in pre-Christian times, not only in Judaism but also in Greek thought. But in its familiar form it is a specifically Christian dogma. Augustine thought that he found it in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans 5:12: “Therefore, as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men—eph ho pantes hamarton.” What was the meaning of these four Greek words? The last two clearly mean “all have sinned”; but what does eph ho mean? Augustine did not read Greek but Latin, and wrote Latin, too, and took it to mean “in whom” (in quo), while the King James Bible and the Revised Standard Version translate “in that” or “because” (eo quod). As George Foot Moore puts it: “For … ‘for that all have sinned,’ the Latin version has in quo omnes peccaverunt ‘in whom (sc. Adam) all sinned.’ If the translator had rendered eo quod, it is possible that the Western church might have been as little afflicted with original sin as the Greeks or the Orientals” (II, 198).

The doctrine of original sin claims that all men sinned in Adam; but whether they did or whether it is merely a fact that all men sin does not basically affect the problem of suffering. In either case, the following questions must be pressed.

First: if God knew that man would abuse his free will and that this would entail cancer and Auschwitz, why then did he give man free will? Second—and this question, though surely obvious, scarcely ever gets asked—is there really any connection at all between ever so much suffering and free will? Isn’t the introduction of free will at this point a red herring? To show this, it will be best to give a vivid example. Here is one from the beginning of Nathanael West’s short novel, Miss Lonelyhearts:

Dear Miss Lonelyhearts

I am 16 years old now and I don’t know what to do and would appreciate it if you could tell me what to do. When I was a little girl it was not so bad because I got used to the kids on the block makeing fun of me, but now I would like to have boy friends like the other girls and go out on Saturday nites, but no boy will take me because I was born without a nose—although I am a good dancer and have a nice shape and my father buys me pretty clothes.

I sit and look at myself all day and cry. I have a big hole in the middle of my face that scares people even myself so I cant blame the boys for not wanting to take me out. My mother loves me, but she crys terrible when she looks at me.

What did I do to deserve such a terrible bad fate? Even if I did do some bad things I didnt do any before I was a year old and I was born this way. I asked Papa and he say: he doesnt know, but that maybe I did something in the other world before I was born or that maybe I was being punished for his sins. I dont believe that because he is a very nice man. Ought I commit suicide?

Sincerely yours,

Desperate

Far from solving the problem by invoking original sin, Augustine and most of the Christian theologians who came after him merely aggravated the problem. If such suffering as is described in this letter and the New York Times’ annual pre-Christmas survey of “The Hundred Neediest Cases,” and in any number of other easily accessible places, is the inevitable consequence of Adam’s sin—or if this is the price God had to pay for endowing man with free will—then it makes no sense to call him omnipotent. And if he was willing to pay this price for his own greater glory, as some Christian theologians have suggested, or for the greater beauty of the cosmos, because shadows are needed to set off highlights, as some Christian philosophers have argued, what sense does it make to attribute moral perfection to him?

At this point, those who press this fourth pseudo-solution invariably begin to use words irresponsibly. Sooner or later we are told that when such attributes as omnipotence, mercy, justice, and love are ascribed to God they do not mean what they mean applied to men. John Stuart Mill’s fine response to this has been cited in Chapter II (§ 5). In a less rhetorical vein, it may be said that at this point the theologians and philosophers simply repeat ancient formulas in defiance of all sense. One might as well claim that God is purple with yellow dots, or circular, or every inch a woman—provided only that these terms are not used in their customary senses. These, of course, are not ancient formulas; hence, it is not likely that anybody in his right mind would seriously say such things. But the point is that when anybody has recourse to such means, argument fails. It is as if you pointed out to someone that eleven times eleven were not equal to one hundred and he said: it is, too—though of course not if you use the terms the way one usually does.

To be sure, one need not remain speechless. One can ask for the admission that, as long as we use the terms in the only way in which they have ever been given any precise meaning, God is either not omnipotent or not perfectly just, loving, and merciful. Some people, when it comes to that, retort: How do you know that we use the words right? Perhaps the way in which we ordinarily use these terms is wrong. This might be called psuedo-solution number five.

To this, two replies are possible. The first is philosophically interesting but may not persuade many who are sincerely perplexed. When we use English, or Greek, or Hebrew words in conformity with their generally accepted meanings and fully obeying the genius and the rules of the language, it makes no sense to say that perhaps their “real” meaning is quite different. It does make sense to suggest that a particular term has an additional technical sense; but, if that is the case, one should admit that, as long as it is used in its ordinary, non-technical sense, God is, say, unjust, or cruel, or lacking in power.

The second reply interprets the question differently. What the questioner means may well be that our ordinary conceptions of love, justice, and mercy stand in need of revision; that our ideals are perverted. If so, we should presumably model ourselves on God’s “justice” and “love.” But this is precisely what former ages did. Children who disobeyed and adults who broke some minor law or regulation were punished in ways that strike us as inhumanly cruel. Those who do not like reading history will find examples enough in Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo.

This last point, which is surely of very great importance, can be put differently by recalling once more Job’s wonderful words: “If I sin, … why dost thou not pardon my transgression and take away my iniquity?” The attempt to solve the problem of suffering by postulating original sin depends on the belief that cruelty is justified when it is retributive; indeed, that morality demands retribution. Although Job denied this, most theologians have clung to it tenaciously; and to this day the majority of Christian theologians champion the retributive function of punishment and the death penalty. At this point, some liberal Protestants who invoke the fifth pseudo-solution are less consistent than more traditional theologians and ministers: they fight as unjust and unloving what they consider compatible with perfect justice and love. But, as we have seen, the traditional theologians did not solve the problem either, and their conceptions of love and justice are inhuman—especially if one considers that Job and Jonah were part of their

Bible.

Indeed, Augustine and his successors aggravated the problem of suffering in yet another way, instead of approaching a solution: by accepting as true Jesus’ references in the Gospels to hell and eternal torment, and by bettering the instruction. According to Augustine and many of his successors, all men deserve eternal torture, but God in his infinite mercy saves a very few. Nobody is treated worse than he deserves, but a few are treated better than they deserve, salvation being due not to merit but solely to grace. In the face of these beliefs, Augustine and legions after him assert God’s perfect justice, mercy, and goodness. And to save men from eternal torment, it came to be considered just and merciful to torture heretics, or those suspected of some heresy, for a few days.

The major modern philosophers who have tackled the problem of suffering have contributed little indeed. Generally they have implicitly, but not admittedly, denied God’s omnipotence. Three may be considered very briefly.

Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) claimed that reason was strong in discovering fallacies but weak in attempting to reach positive knowledge; and even his critics grant that this was true of his own reason. He excelled in pointing up all kinds of contradictions in the Christian faith; he insisted that Christian doctrine goes against reason; and he said that only for that reason was it meritorious to accept it on faith.

The German philosopher Leibniz (1646–1716) sought to answer the Frenchman in a book he dedicated to the first Queen of Prussia. He called it Theodicy (a justification of God, or a vindication of God’s justice) and composed it in French. He wrote philosophy either in French or in Latin, never in German. Ernst Cassirer, a famous twentieth-century philosopher and historian of ideas, says in his work on Leibniz—and he is surely right—that the book might just as well have been called “Logodicy” (a vindication of reason). Leibniz denies that reason contradicts faith, and to that extent he rehabilitates reason. God’s will, he says, is subject to his wisdom, and his wisdom knows the eternal verities. God did not make the eternal verities; he did not decide that things should be subject to certain unalterable rules; he could not help evil. Evil is not something positive but a lack, a privation, a deficiency, an aspect of infinitude. But forces are necessarily finite, and a world without evil would be a world without forces—and hence nothing at all, which would be the greatest of evils. Our world, on the contrary, is the best of all possible worlds. A world must consist of things finite, and perfect finite things would be like square circles, a contradiction in terms.

On the popular level, Voltaire answered Leibniz when writing Candide. On the philosophic level, one may reply that, whatever else is odd about Leibniz’ solution, he certainly denies God’s omnipotence; for if God is unable to prevent the suffering of girls born without noses, of childbed fever, cancer, and millions of specific instances of suffering, without every time incurring a still greater evil, then he is clearly not omnipotent.

The claim that suffering is somehow logically necessary poses a special problem for the Christian conception of heaven, assuming that in heaven there is no suffering. If God could create a heaven without suffering, why not an earth without suffering—or why not just heaven and no earth at all? Or would a heaven without any earth, and without any hell or purgatory, really be inferior to the world we have? Would the blessed in heaven be unable to appreciate their bliss if they could not observe the torments of the damned? If so, they do not deserve their bliss. But if they could, why then is suffering necessary?

Even if we do not enter into speculations about a world without any suffering at all, no adequate theological or metaphysical justification can be offered for the presence in the world of as much suffering as there is. Let us say, for example, that Dostoevsky’s suffering bore fruit in his great novels which, in turn, make many readers more humane and better. An omnipotent God could have presented us with Dostoevsky’s novels simply by saying “Let there be The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed”; or, for that matter, he might have created us more humane and better.

Two separate points are involved. First, having to use means to achieve ends is one of the features that distinguishes limited power from omnipotence. The original model of omnipotence is surely found in Genesis I: “God said: Let there be light. And there was light.” Plato’s demiurge, in the Timaeus, not being omnipotent, made the world by imposing Forms, as eternal as he was himself, on an equally eternal receptacle: he made the best world he was able to make under the circumstances; but his power was limited, and what imperfections there are in the world must be charged to the material with which he had to work. Clearly, Leibniz’ God is closer to Plato’s demiurge than to the God of Genesis.

Second: the uneconomic use of unpleasant means to achieve doubtful ends with frequent failures clearly points to limited power rather than omnipotence. Whatever results can be shown to have been attained with the aid of suffering generally seem to have been obtainable with less suffering; and more often than not, what suffering there is does not appear to be instrumental in the achievement of any good.

If it should be objected that nothing could prevent an omnipotent God from choosing not to avail himself of his omnipotence, from using means to achieve ends though he did not have to, and even using these means uneconomically and often un-sucessfully, this would amount to an indictment of God’s mercy and justice. In any case, this is not Leibniz’s view; for Leibniz insists that this is the best of all possible worlds.

Among recent treatments of the problem of suffering, Josiah Royce’s essay on “The Problem of Job” is of special interest. Royce, William James’s younger colleague at Harvard around 1900, was the chief exponent of American philosophical idealism and tried to blend religion and philosophy. He clearly saw the faults of many previous solutions. He admitted that one could bypass the whole problem by declining to believe that the world is governed by a purpose. He rejected the suggestion that evil is an insignificant and inevitable incident of a plan that subjects men to some law; that suffering is a kind of discipline, a needful warning, or “the dirt of the natural order, whose value is that, when you wash it off, you thereby learn the charm of the bath of evolution…. This explanation of one evil presupposes another, and a still unexplained and greater evil”; namely, “why I was created so far from my goal.”

What must be shown, Royce says, is “not a physical but a logical necessity.” Those who assert that free will requires the possibility of evil claim a logical necessity; but it is empirically false that men are always responsible for their own suffering. And if we revise the position and say that “the innocent may suffer for the guilty,” then it appears that God does not “protect the innocent”; and so “Job’s cry is once more in place.” If the position is revised again to say that men do suffer only for their own sins, but often for sins committed in a previous life, Royce counters, perhaps under James’s influence, with a pragmatic argument: this suggestion would discourage men’s impulse to help their fellows; the claim that “no harm can come to the righteous” implies “this cynical consequence.”

After these inadequate solutions have been shown up, there remains idealism. “Job’s problem is, upon Job’s presuppositions, simply and absolutely insoluble.” Like practically everybody else, Royce, conditioned by centuries of utopian piety, does not see Job’s emphatic denial of God’s justice and, in flat defiance of the text, assumes that Job presupposes God’s moral perfection. Royce would deny another presupposition of the problem, namely, “that God is a being other than this world.” In other words, he rejects theism for some form of pantheism. But with the typical assurance of an idealist philosopher, not one whit less bold than Hegel and legions of theologians, he assures us that his doctrine is nothing less than “the immortal soul of the doctrine of the divine atonement.” He exhorts us: “Your sufferings are God’s sufferings.” That is the real meaning of incarnation and crucifixion: God did not remain a being apart from the world. This is, after all, as Leibniz already said, “the best possible world”: if God could do any better, there would not be any suffering. (After all, it hurts him as much as, if not more than, you.) “We ourselves exist as fragments of the absolute life,” and whatever any man suffers anywhere is part of God’s sufferings.

False idealism sees evil as a mere illusion, “a mirage of the human point of view,” due merely to our limited perspective; but “if the evil were but the error, the error would still be the evil.” True idealism asserts that God really suffers, too; that this suffering is necessary because the good which consists in the overcoming of evil is greater than that which consists in the absence of evil. “The existence of evil, then, is not only consistent with the perfection of the universe, but is necessary for the very existence of that perfection.”

Royce does not only deny God’s omnipotence, nor does he merely reject traditional Christianity while boldly claiming that he gives the most truthful and faithful interpretation of what it really means. He also claims that the suffering of the girl born without a nose is justified because the discovery by some future doctors of some way to avert such mishaps makes for a better world than we should have had if there never had been any such mishaps in the first place. That is what the girl should have been told; also, that it hurt God as much as her.

“What,” to quote Ecclesiastes, is “the conclusion of the whole matter”? There is, first of all, a Biblical notion not yet mentioned—that of vicarious suffering, beautifully expressed in Isaiah 53: “He is despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief…. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows…. He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities…. The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” Christians have seen in these words a prophecy of Christ; Jews have applied the words to their own people, in an effort to give their own perennial sufferings some meaning. The search for a purpose behind suffering is not a mere matter of metaphysical speculation, nor a frivolous pastime of theologians. Man can stand superhuman suffering if only he does not lack the conviction that it serves some purpose. Even less severe pain, on the other hand, may seem unbearable, or simply not worth enduring, if it is not redeemed by any meaning.

It does not follow that the meaning must be given from above; that life and suffering must come neatly labeled; that nothing is worthwhile if the world is not governed by a purpose. On the contrary, the lack of any cosmic purpose may be experienced as liberating, as if a great weight had been lifted from us. Life ceases to be so oppressive: we are free to give our own lives meaning and purpose, free to redeem our suffering by making something of it. The great artist is the man who most obviously succeeds in turning his pains to advantage, in letting suffering deepen his understanding and sensibility, in growing through his pains. The same is true of some religious figures and of men like Lincoln and Freud. It is small comfort to tell the girl born without a nose: make the most of that! She may lack the strength, the talent, the vitality. But the plain fact is that not all suffering serves a purpose; that most of it remains utterly senseless; and that if there is to be any meaning to it, it is we who must give it.

The sufferer who cannot give any meaning to his suffering may inspire someone else, possibly without even knowing it, perhaps after death. But most suffering remains unredeemed by any purpose, albeit a challenge to humanity.

There is one more verse in Job that should be quoted. At the end of the first chapter, when he has lost all his possessions and then his children as well, he says: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” Without claiming that the following remarks represent or distill “the immortal soul” of his words, one can find more meaning in them, or find them more suggestive, than meets the eye at first glance.

Job’s forthright indictment of the injustice of this world is surely right. The ways of the world are weird and much more unpredictable than either scientists or theologians generally make things look. Job personifies the inscrutable, merciless, uncanny in a god who is all-powerful but not just. One may question whether, at least today, this use of the name of God is justified—whether it does not invite needless misunderstanding. Of course, the author of the book no less than its hero is intent on the continuity of this conception with the God of the prophets; and the God of the Book of Job is addressed and replies. What is said to him and by him amounts to a radical repudiation of popular theism; but when the book was written, another, older tradition was still available, could still be appealed to, was still understood. Today this older tradition seems buried. One can no longer count on its being remembered when one speaks of God. One can at most try to dig it up again like an archaeologist or, speaking without metaphors, like an historian. This chapter represents an attempt in this direction; so does the next.

In the chapter on “The Quest for Honesty,” reasons were given for not using the name of God. Soon after the Book of Job was written, the Jews stopped using what was then considered God’s name and said “Lord” instead. But their piety still permitted them to speak of “God” and the “Lord.” Our new piety no longer permits that. As I have explained elsewhere,¹ “honesty is the new piety.”

The reason for speaking of piety in this context is that there is something impious about the arrogance of Job’s friends and their many successors who talk as if they knew what in fact they do not know. In a sense, Job is more pious; and so are those who admit, in Rilke’s words, “that we are not very reliably at home in the interpreted world”; those who are open to new experiences without insisting on fitting them into some preconceived scheme. But perhaps it would be clearer and better to say that Job and his friends stand for two different kinds of impiety. Instead of speaking of “infidel piety,” as I did in my Critique (§ 66), it might be better to say: Honesty is the new impiety.

It is not important that some heretics and infidels should be called pious. What needs to be said is rather that heresy may be prompted by humility and honesty, as it was in Job’s case.

Job’s cry is possible in the mouth of an unbeliever; and what Job hears out of the whirlwind could be heard by an infidel, too. The infidel’s attitude would hardly be identical with that of the Biblical Job; but it might well be closer to Job’s attitude than the piety of Augustine and Aquinas, Bayle and Leibniz, Royce and most believers.

Those who believe in God because their experience of life and the facts of nature prove his existence must have led sheltered lives and closed their hearts to the voice of their brothers’ blood. “Behold the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them! On the side of the oppressors there was power, and there was no one to comfort them. And I thought the dead who are already dead more fortunate than the living who are still alive; but better than both is he who has not yet been, and has not seen the evil deeds done under the sun.” Whether Ecclesiastes, who “saw all the oppressions that are practiced under the sun,” retained any faith in God is a moot point, but Jeremiah and Job and the psalmists who speak in a similar vein did. Pagan piety rose to similar heights of despair and created tragedies.

The deepest difference between religions is not that between polytheism and monotheism. To which camp would one assign Sophocles? Even the difference between theism and atheism is not nearly so profound as that between those who feel and those who do not feel their brothers’ torments. The Buddha, like the prophets and the Greek tragedians, did, though he did not believe in any deity. There is no inkling of such piety in the callous religiousness of those who note the regularities of nature, find some proof in that of the existence of a God or gods, and practice magic, rites, or pray to ensure rain, success, or speedy passage into heaven.

Natural theology is a form of heathenism, represented in the Bible by the friends of Job. The only theism worthy of our respect believes in God not because of the way the world is made but in spite of that. The only theism that is no less profound than the Buddha’s atheism is that represented in the Bible by Job and Jeremiah.

Their piety is a cry in the night, born of suffering so intense that they cannot contain it and must shriek, speak, accuse, and argue with God—not about him—for there is no other human being who would understand, and the prose of dialogue could not be faithful to the poetry of anguish. In time, theologians come to wrench some useful phrases out of Latin versions of a Hebrew outcry, blind with tears, and try to win some argument about a point of dogma. Scribes, who preceded them, carved phrases out of context, too, and used them in their arguments about the law. But for all that, Jewish piety has been a ceaseless cry in the night, rarely unaware of “all the oppressions that are practiced under the sun,” a faith in spite of, not a heathenish, complacent faith because.

The profound detachment of Job’s words at the end of the first chapter is certainly possible for an infidel: not being wedded to the things of this world, being able to let them go—and yet not repudiating them in the first place like the great Christian ascetics and the Buddha and his followers. In the form of an anthropomorphic faith, these words express one of the most admirable attitudes possible for man: to be able to give up what life takes away, without being unable to enjoy what life gives us in the first place; to remember that we came naked from the womb and shall return naked; to accept what life gives us as if it were God’s own gift, full of wonders beyond price; and to be able to part with everything. To try to fashion something from suffering, to relish our triumphs, and to endure defeats without resentment: all that is compatible with the faith of a heretic.

¹ From Shakespeare to Existentialism, 226 ff., 232, 243.