The presents its chief protagonist in two discrepant ways: Job the patient and Job the rebel. Ancient Jewish interpretations of Job praise Job the patient and condemn, or at least do not praise, Job the rebel. Modern Jewish interpretations, by contrast, praise Job the rebel and scant the patient, pious Job of the frame story. Job the rebel becomes a model of sincerity or authenticity, a chief value of modernity. Job the patient and pious sufferer so celebrated by antiquity is at best an ambivalent figure.
This is a first approximation. To be more precise we must distinguish between types of ancient Jewish interpretations. In Hellenistic Jewish literature, most notably the Testament of Job, Job is a hero—but at the cost of completely ignoring the rebellious Job of the majority of the biblical text.Footnote 1 So too, in the sole New Testament reference, Jas 5:11, Job is commended for his patience and fortitude; his rebelliousness is simply ignored. This sets the patient Job on a trajectory toward Christian sainthood. Rabbinic Jewish literature, by contrast, does not ignore the full complexity of the Book of Job and therefore has a decidedly mixed assessment of its main character. Although the Babylonian Talmud is sometimes as bold as the Book of Job itself in challenging the justice of God, it cannot unequivocally affirm the rebellious Job. One might even say that the rabbis marginalizd both the book and its protagonist. The book has no liturgical use per se. One text suggests that the book was at one point used liturgically on the Fast of the Ninth of Av, but the rabbis suppressed its use. Similarly, the rabbis seem to have gone to great lengths to avoid reading Job as the source for such Jewish mourning customs as sitting for seven days or rending one's garment, both of which could easily be traced to the book.Footnote 2 The philosophers of the rabbinic tradition in the Middle Ages reclaimed the book as a framework for their ventures in theodicy. They continued, however, the rabbinic criticism of Job qua rebel against God. Philosophers such as Saadia Gaon exonerate Job's doctrinaire friends, rather against the grain of a straightforward reading of the book itself, and criticize Job's challenge to divine justice.Footnote 3 It remains for Jewish moderns, whether philosophers, literary figures or biblical scholars, to find the words to affirm the rebellious Job. Among the moderns, Job's friends become shallow philistines. Job becomes a paradigm of modern intellectual and moral virtue. He combines truth-seeking and truthfulness. He remains true to his own experience, unwilling to bow to external authority and tradition. Job regains his heroism. But unlike the heroic Job of antiquity, it is the Job of the poem, not of the prose frame story, that is valorized.
The history of Joban interpretation among Jews casts light on the development of theodicy within Judaism. Within the biblical literature, Job offers a challenge to the dominant theodicy-orientation of the deuteronomic literature.Footnote 4 Indeed, the Book of Job itself, likely as the result of a composite authorship, might well be the product of an intramural argument between competing theodicies. Bruce Zuckerman has argued that the pietistic ideals embodied by the patient Job of ancient Near Eastern legend “provoked the anger of a great literary artist who determined to counterattack its message, using the literary weapon of parody,” which yielded the contrapuntal, tension-ridden received text.Footnote 5 The intramural argument over theodicy continues in rabbinic literature. In general, the earlier rabbinic texts (of Palestinian provenance) take a more conservative, doctrinaire approach to the assertion of God's justice and the inadmissibility of doubt or challenge to that justice. The Bavli, although frequently upholding the “orthodox” view, also gives much greater latitude to radical views, echoing those of the rebellious Job. Some sages explicitly endorsed a reward and punishment theodicy of the kind articulated by Job's friends (e.g., the view attributed to Rav Ami in B. Shabbat 55a: “There is no death without sin and no suffering without transgression”); others explicitly reject this, believing that suffering can be unmerited and inexplicable.Footnote 6 While the complexity of rabbinic theodicy must not be simplified or flattened out, it is nonetheless fair to say that there is rabbinic ambivalence toward Job. Perhaps this represents anxiety in regard to the full brunt of the Joban challenge.Footnote 7 To make a philosophical distinction, the rabbis excuse what people say in the midst of suffering but they do not justify it. Job is an example of suffering humanity and a goad to our empathy, but he is not a moral exemplar.Footnote 8 The rabbinic ambivalence toward Job implies a refusal to sanctify the attitude of defiance that Job shows toward God. Job is excused, not justified. Rather than justifying God's ways, even when morally unintelligible, Job requires that God justify them to him. This claim on God, as Job himself learns, has its limits. It is not, in a tradition as polyphonic as that of Judaism, ipso facto wrong. But neither is it ipso facto right. Better the willing acceptance of martyrdom, as demonstrated by Rabbi Hananiah ben Teradion and his family, for example, than the open skeptical impatience of Job.Footnote 9
The medieval philosophical authors are even more concerned than the rabbinic sages to buttress standard theodicy tropes against Job-induced skepticism. The reliance of medieval philosophers on Greek metaphysics expands the conceptual vocabulary with which they work. Metaphysics introduces system and rigor, with the possibility for both new depth and new rigidity. Unlike the talmudic sages, the philosophers have doctrines to defend. Metaphysics allows for, indeed requires, doctrinal precision.Footnote 10 By contrast with the medievals, the philosophers of modernity give vent to so profound an aporia that they imperil the very possibility of theodicy. Indeed, for some, such as Emmanuel Levinas, theodicy is no longer an intellectual possibility. It is, or ought to be, a moral impossibility.Footnote 11
In this article, I consider trends in the Jewish interpretation of Job in order to gain perspective on the problem of theodicy as a problem for modern Jewish thought. Such an inquiry, of course, touches on a vast field of literature, both in terms of biblical interpretation and philosophical theology. One can only make a small advance here. After looking at some samples of premodern Joban interpretation, I shall attend to Kant's interpretation of Job. Kant argued for the failure of all possible theodicies. He delineated the philosophical conditions in terms of which precritical theodicies must now be seen as unacceptable. The plausibility of theodicy as an intellectual project, I suggest, rests on more than the strength of faith. It rests on the cogency of a supporting metaphysics. The Kantian and subsequent modernist rejection of metaphysics, as an intellectual framework for giving us knowledge of the ultimate nature of reality, enfeebles the project of theodicy. It is not then necessarily the case that modern Jews doubt theodicy because of a weakness of faith. Rather, the intellectual context in which they operate denies them the conceptual tools for making the kind of assertions available to their ancestors.
Kant is not, needless to say, solely responsible for the decline of theodicy among modern Jews. He is an important factor, however. Kant's contemporary, Moses Mendelssohn, could still use Leibnizian metaphysics to grapple with the theodicy problem in response to his own infant daughter's death.Footnote 12 But such robust confidence in metaphysics, either in the ancient and medieval or early Enlightenment versions, did not survive the Kantian critique. Modern Jewish views, even if not explicitly Kantian, work within the horizon of the critical philosophy. They have lost the confidence, still shared by Mendelssohn, in speculative metaphysics. With the loss of metaphysics, I suggest, one can no longer justify God's ways by reference to the harmony, perfection, or justice of the whole; for metaphysics as the science of the whole has lost its plausibility.Footnote 13 What becomes plausible, after the demise of the whole, of the “Great Chain of Being,” is an explanation of suffering from the perspective of the suffering individual. The emphasis in Jewish modernism on the rebellious, “authentic” Job reflects the “massive subjective turn of modern culture” as Charles Taylor puts it.Footnote 14 The assertion of the self, or of the moral universe as seen from the perspective of the self, replaces the metaphysical whole within which theodicy, on the philosophical account of the ancients up to Leibniz, made sense. We are then left with the question of what role, if any, there is for a contemporary theodicy without the kind of metaphysical assertion about the whole that modern thought seems to exclude. Is the focus on the authentic individual who struggles to remain true to the voice of his or her own suffering a sufficient basis for rational reflection on the reality of suffering for believing Jews?
The Job of Traditional Jewish Interpretation
Susan Neiman argues that in the Western tradition, “Job's [misfortunes] were not viewed as unfair until a very late date. Sometime during the Enlightenment, commentators stopped looking for ways in which Job's torments could be justified.”Footnote 15 Neiman further suggests that “Earlier writers identified with Job's friends, the theodicy makers who found justification. Later ones identified with Job, who found none.”Footnote 16 The stance of traditional Jewish commentators is more complex. It is negative, but also ambivalent. They struggled with Job's behavior, with whether he acted justly or presumptuously before God. Seeing their own condition reflected in his, they blamed him in some ways and exculpated him in others. Unlike Hellenistic Jews and Christians, they did not identify with the pious Job of the prose frame story so as to heroize him. Traditional rabbinic interpreters saw all of the characters as flawed and mistaken in their views. But ultimately God is just and Job errs in his challenge of God. Let us consider three different traditional approaches to Job: a midrashic analysis in the Talmud, a theological analysis by Saadia Gaon, and a philosophical treatment by Maimonides.
The extended talmudic discussion of Job (Bava Batra 15a-16b) reveals rabbinic ambivalence toward the character of Job and toward the implications of the book.Footnote 17 The rabbis struggled to determine whether Job was a real person or whether the story was simply a parable.Footnote 18 A long discussion was conducted in prerabbinic literature as to the genealogy of Job. Job was often related to Abraham. By suggesting that Job might be purely imaginary, the rabbis signal a break with the discourse of Job as an ancient worthy.Footnote 19 Furthermore, the possibility that Job is merely an allegory—a prospect that the rabbinic sages otherwise almost always eschew for biblical figures—minimizes the challenge to God. If the book is a parable, then God did not really cause the suffering of an actual righteous man. On the view that it is a parable, what is its point? The classic rabbinic commentator on the Talmud, Rashi, claims that the point of the book (qua parable) is twofold: It provides examples of how to answer heretics who blaspheme against God's justice, and it shows that people cannot be held accountable for what they say when they are in pain. While Rashi's first pronouncement indicts Job, his latter view exculpates, or at least excuses, him. Traditional rabbinic ambivalence toward Job is in full flower.
On the assumption that Job was a real person, the rabbis debated about when he lived and whether he was Jewish. As to when Job lived, the Talmud asserts that after Moses' death, the divine presence no longer rested on gentiles. Thus if Job were a gentile he must have lived before or during the time of Moses. In this view, even if Job were a gentile, the rabbis did not deprive him of his experience of the divine presence. That does not spare Job a harsh assessment, however. One source that the Talmud quotes implies that Job was a gentile prophet, similar to Balaam, whom the rabbis utterly condemned. Another suggests that he was a gentile who was blessed in this world, (i.e., after his possessions and family were restored to him), but will be punished in the world to come due to his blasphemy.Footnote 20 Although the argument over his status is not fully resolved, the text seems to favor viewing Job as a Jew.
One of the implications of considering Job to be a Jew is that he can now be compared with other Jews. The Gemara enters into a lengthy parallel between Job and Abraham, in which Job initially compares quite favorably. Job's righteousness is so outstanding that God even rebukes Satan for persuading Him to let Job suffer affliction (16a)! The Gemara suggests, astonishingly, that Satan was acting for the sake of heaven and had pure motives. Satan feared that because God was so favorable toward Job, God would forget the merits of Abraham. (R. Levi said: “Satan … had a pious purpose. Satan, when he saw God inclined to favor Job said, ‘Far be it that God should forget the love of Abraham’”B. Batra 16a.) Satan had therefore to suggest that Job had potential failings in order to defend Abraham.
Although the initial assessments are positive, in the discussion that follows, the rabbis dwell on Job's flaws. Commenting on the verse “In all this Job did not sin with his lips” (Job 2:10), the sage Rava remarks, “With his lips he did not sin, but he did sin in his heart.” Rava argues that Job sought to “turn the dish upside down,” that is, to deny the sovereignty and justice of God in the world.Footnote 21 Another sage, however, defends Job, limiting his alleged blasphemy to a critical comment about the temporary sway of Satan over the world. Another instance of his alleged blasphemy is adduced: Job blames God for creating him the way that he is. Job invokes a Clarence Darrow defense. He could not act other than he did due to forces beyond his control. His friends, here evaluated positively by the Gemara, censure Job for his view. Should people come to believe that there is no free will, then religion will collapse. Although God created us with the disease of the evil inclination, he also gave us the Torah as its cure. Job's blasphemies are enumerated by the Talmud. A sage recommends: “Dust should be put in the mouth of Job” not only because of the accusatory quality of what he said, but because of his presumptuous familiarity with God. “He makes himself the colleague of heaven.”Footnote 22 Can a slave call his master to account? Is God, as Rashi puts it, a business partner with whom one negotiates to see who owes what to the other? The discussion concludes with two main points. The text comes to teach that a man cannot be held responsible for everything that he says when he is in pain. Second, without friends a man dies. Job's friends were true friends who came from an enormous distance to comfort him. The Talmud does not condemn them.
Does the ambivalence toward Job, the partial exculpation, open up a narrow space for legitimate Jewish “blasphemy?” Do the rabbis insinuate that the accusations of the Jewish people against God in the pain of exile are not without foundation? This may press the text too far. The text excuses the “blasphemy” of Job; it does not justify it. God is fully entitled to be God, to do with Job what he will. Although God apparently regrets his rough treatment of Job, there is no suggestion that God has acted unfairly or unjustly.
What the Talmud does is allow the rabbis room for both psychological release— the expression of anguish that might almost verge on heresy—and political responsibility, that is, keeping the belief in God's sovereignty and justice intact for the Jewish people. Albeit in a very unsystematic fashion, the Talmud upholds both a justification of God's actions and a morally excusable opportunity for protest against them.
The Jewish thinkers of the Middle Ages are impatient with the unsystematic, midrashic approach of the Talmud. Philosophical theologians such as Saadia (882—942) feared that the Talmudic mιlange of confecting assessments of Job was likely to confuse people and obscure the “real” point of the book.Footnote 23 Saadia follows the Mutazilite school of Kalam in his belief that God always acts justly and that divine justice is fully comparable to human justice.Footnote 24 The mystery and sovereignty of God do not render his justice inscrutable. In Saadia's reading of Job, Job is a righteous man who is tested by God so that he will receive an even greater reward than what he was already owed. God only tests those whom he knows can withstand his trials. He imposes “sufferings of love” upon them. They do not deserve these as punishments. Rather, their very righteousness motivates God to provide them with opportunities for greater heavenly blessedness.Footnote 25 Saadia attributes this view to Job's youngest friend, Elihu.Footnote 26
None of Job's friends, in Saadia's view, have committed theological mistakes. Their fundamental understanding of theodicy was correct. They failed to apply their principles to the case at hand in the proper manner, however. Their improprieties, such as they were, were ethical improprieties, insofar as they impugned Job's character, not theological ones. Thus Saadia renders the critical verse (42:7), where God, at least in modern translations, seems to accuse the friends of speaking falsely about the divine and to exonerate Job for speaking the truth: “God said unto Eliphaz the Temanite: ‘My wrath hath waxed against thee and against thy fellows, for ye did not speak the truth in My presence about my servant Job.’” Saadia's rendering shifts the emphasis from talk about God to talk about Job. The friends got God right; they only misrepresented Job.Footnote 27
For Saadia the main point of Job is to enlighten the believer on the perfect justice and rationality of God's universe and of his actions within it. Even fully righteous men—as well as fully innocent children—may suffer justly at God's hand not as a punishment but as a means to higher blessedness and reward. These martyrs perforce witness to God's blameless ways in the world. The seeming absence of God strengthens their fortitude. The perplexity of their condition only contributes to their merit if they endure. As for the public, the suffering of the righteous has a heuristic function. People see that God chooses the righteous because they are exemplary: They bear their suffering with faith and confidence. The people will see and be awed.
To the modern reader, Saadia's view is disturbing. The equanimity and certainty with which he asserts his analysis of gratuitous suffering is hard to bear. The package is too neat, too tidy. Better the unsystematic, emotional give and take of the Talmud to Saadia's rigorous theological rationalism! For Saadia, however, a disorderly, recondite universe is more terrifying than one where God tries the righteous with gratuitous suffering. Saadia mutes the subversive potential of Job, the book's implicit challenge to a theodicy of reward and punishment. Job is harmonized with the Torah's more “orthodox” theodicy-strategy. We may assume that, as the occupant of an important political post, the head of the academy of Sura, Saadia acted out of political responsibility as well. He quelled the doubts of the people and assured them that righteousness will, in the end, receive its reward.
Two centuries later, Maimonides (1138—1204) offers a much more complex reading of Joban theodicy than Saadia. While Saadia's work is entirely exoteric, aimed at assuring the believer that his faith is rational, Maimonides is an esoteric writer who probes, in veiled fashion, the tensions between faith and Aristotelian reason. Maimonides rejects Saadia's doctrinaire approach, equating it with the consensual view of the friends. The friends believe that “everyone who does good obtains a reward and everyone who does evil is punished” and that “the heaviest misfortunes befall the most perfect individual.”Footnote 28 Job, by contrast, believes that God's affliction of the righteous proves that God has contempt for the human species and treats the righteous and the wicked alike. According to Job, God must be aloof from cares about this world. In Maimonides' view, both of these opinions are wrong. God does not dispense particular providence in the form of reward and punishment on ordinary individuals, as the friends (and Saadia) believe. Nor is God detached from governing the world at all, as Job originally believes.
As an Aristotelian, Maimonides believed that divine providence is equivalent to natural law. God governs the entirety of the universe through fixed laws; he ensures the continuity of each species. He does not, however, take account of the individual members of the species. This is only possible for human beings and only then for those humans who are capable of abstract thought.Footnote 29 Human beings who are able to transcend the severe limitations of matter and embodiment and cleave to the Active Intellect can experience divine providence, transcend contingency, and achieve a kind of impersonal immortality. Evil, in a physical sense, is a necessary feature of a material world full of contingency. The existence of natural laws and the eternity of the species are sufficient proof of divine providence. Given these indications of divine providence and cosmic perfection, one cannot complain especially since God has given human beings intellect, which means that they have the possibility of redemptive intellection.
In Maimonides' view, the Book of Job describes its protagonist as righteous, but not as wise.Footnote 30 What Job learns in the theophany is that righteousness is not correlated mechanically with desert, in this world or in the next. Righteousness is at best a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the emergence of wisdom. Wisdom, in the sense of rational speculation, allows one to move beyond mere hearsay about the deity based on “acceptance of authority, just as the multitude adhering to a Law” know Him.Footnote 31 With wisdom, one knows Him with certain knowledge, which confers true happiness in the Stoic sense of ataraxia, of imperturbability. When Job grasps the truth about God, freeing himself from the doctrinaire calculus of reward and punishment, he realizes that such things as “health, wealth, and children” are not the ultimate goal.Footnote 32 The internal good of true, abstract, speculative knowledge of the divine is the ultimate goal. When he learns this during the theophany, Job accepts his situation with equanimity. Due to Job's repudiation of his prior view—that God has nothing to do with the direct governance of the world—God says that Job (now) speaks correctly of Him (Job 42:7), unlike his friends who still cling to their rabbinic, Saadia-like orthodoxy. Note that for Maimonides, Job's previous view had no merit. God's praise of him for speaking the truth about the divine comes only after Job realizes his error. Although on an exoteric level Maimonides sometimes seems to assert the traditional view that reward and punishment flow from God in relation to human action, the esoteric, modified Aristotelian position is probably his real view.Footnote 33
The wisdom that Job acquires is equivalent to the central insight of Maimonidean theology, which is that the language that we use to describe God is necessarily a human language, a language whose nouns, adjectives, and verbs derive their sense from a world of human actions, traits, and qualities. The uniqueness of God, however, entails that no terms rooted in the human sphere can logically describe God at all. Maimonides' theology is severely negative.
The notion of His providence is not the same as the notion of our providence; nor is the notion of His governance of the things created by Him the same as the notion of our governance of that which we govern. The two notions are not comprised in one definition, contrary to what is thought by all those who are confused, and there is nothing in common between the two except the name alone.Footnote 34
This radical and indeed subversive—from the point of view of na○ve faith—truth comes out in the theophany, where the point of the description of the wonderful complexity of creation is to show us our epistemic limits. All of the creatures and processes described exist at our level of the universe, that is, below the sphere of the moon, yet we do not understand the genesis of any of them. Even within a sphere where our knowledge can reach, unlike the sphere of the divine, our knowledge is necessarily limited. Thus, the purpose of the Book of Job as a whole is to argue from the hard facts of our epistemological experience that we “should not fall into error and seek to affirm in imagination that his knowledge is like our knowledge or that his purpose and his providence and his governance are like our purpose and our providence and our governance. If a man knows this, every misfortune will be borne lightly by him.”Footnote 35 He will be able to bear misfortunes because he will have abandoned idle questions about divine “purpose,” “providence,” and “governance” of the world. Maimonides is not saying that God is simply mysterious and inscrutable and that our questions therefore are impious. He is saying that our questions are illogical. They derive their sense entirely from our world yet pretend to knowledge about another world. Of that world we literally know nothing, can know nothing, and ought to keep silent.Footnote 36 The questions of classical theodicy arise in imagination, not in reason. Imagination, as Maimonides states elsewhere, is the domain of the evil inclination, which is equivalent, in his demythologizing view, to Satan. The ordeal of Job begins in a failure of reason.
Maimonides is thus poles apart from both the Talmud, in all of its ambiguity, and Saadia, in all of his assertive certainty. Yet all of them stand at some remove from the modern, post-traditional interpreters. All of them continue to affirm a divine governance of the world that can be disclosed by reason. All of them hold to a purposive, teleological universe, as opposed to a modern universe of mechanical, material causation from which final causality has been banished.Footnote 37 All of them counsel acceptance of misfortune as the appropriate response to the divine plan. None of them see evil as a fatal threat to an ordered universe and a coherent theism. None despair of theodicy.
The Job of Kant
Kant's commentary on Job is found in his 1791 “On the Failure of all Possible Theodicies” (ἄber das Misslingen aller philosophischen Versuche in der Theodizee), a brief essay appearing soon after the publication of the third Critique, The Critique of Judgment (1790). Footnote 38 The latter work has been characterized as the product of “a mind exhausted by its labours, still pregnant with unformed thoughts, but unable to give them their full elaboration.”Footnote 39 This characterization can apply with equal justice to the theodicy essay. Although Kant's concise treatment of Job is clear and well-formed, his analysis of traditional theodicy leaves much to be desired. Kant sometimes descends to disparagement in lieu of analysis. He seems to assume that, given his immense work of systematic criticism, his readers are already conversant with his views and do not require a detailed interrogation of the alleged failures of all versions of theodicy.
The theodicy essay assumes the apparatus of the various Critiques and of the Critique of Judgment, in particular. That work dealt extensively with teleology, that is, with the issue of purposiveness in nature.Footnote 40 Nature, on the Kantian view, discloses itself to the human understanding under, among other things, the category of cause. Causation is strictly mechanical. Causes precede their effects. The Aristotelian and medieval understanding of teleology, of final causation, does not belong to the categories of the understanding. Nonetheless, teleology does belong to reason. It is an ineluctable idea of reason, a schema for organizing our concepts of nature, which derive from the understanding, at the highest level. When we reflect on the mind's work of making sense of nature, we discover that we cannot do so without teleological ideas however alien those ideas are to the immediate work of the understanding. There, only mechanical (i.e., efficient) causality applies. Once we become aware of the ineluctability of rational teleology, we can appreciate teleological Schemas for what they are worth: they tell us nothing about the world; they tell us everything about reason's role in sense-making.
Kant thus envisages a two-tier program of scientific sense-making. On the bottom tier (the tier of “determinant judgment”) is the empirical process of seeking out mechanical causes for objects, states, events, etc. This is the primary work of science and must proceed without metaphysical impediments thrown in its path by speculative reason. On the top tier (the tier of “reflective judgment”Footnote 41) speculative reason finds that it must integrate all of the discrete causal accounts generated by natural science into what we today would call a master narrative. This master narrative will necessarily have a teleological form; nature will appear to be thoroughly purposive, goal directed. That appearance, however satisfying it might be to reason or however heuristic it might be for further conceptual exploration, does not describe the world-in-itself, however. It does not even describe how understanding accounts for the existence of any discrete object. It is a work of pure reason; the very thing repudiated by Kant in the first Critique. Nonetheless, Kant had reintroduced a kind of metaphysics in the second Critique and continues with that indulgence of a chastened metaphysical urge in the third Critique. In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant postulated freedom as a necessary idea of reason over/against the causal determination of the will from a natural point of view. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant posits teleology in a purely rational sense over and against mechanical causation, which is the more grounded framework for interpreting nature.
Once we grant that purposiveness in nature—including the idea that God's design and guidance of nature is one way of imparting purpose to the whole—is a regulative idea, we run up against the limit Kant imposes on metaphysics. Our minds may need the imputation of purpose in order to make sense of the data fixed by both experience and the sciences, but nature, in herself, as it were, has no purpose. No purpose, at least, that we can know. We cannot make any claims about the goal-directedness of the world per se.Footnote 42 Even if we grant entrance, on stringent Kantian terms, to God as the creator and governor of the whole, we do so only to the idea of God. We talk only about more or less efficient or coherent ways of human sense-making, not about the world in se. Kant does maintain, in the Critique of Judgment, that the idea of God is the most powerful, coherent and useful idea to bring order and sense to nature, but idea it remains.Footnote 43
In the project of theodicy, the idea of God is employed in illegitimate ways. God figures as more than a regulative idea. Theodicy asserts metaphysical knowledge— claims about divine agency—which cannot be known. Kant argues that given ineluctable human ignorance about God, claims about God's justice or about evil as divine punishment for injustice are not merely empty, they are disingenuous. Pre-critical thinkers made them not only because they were confused about the limits of the legitimate deployment of reason but because they were self-interested. They were trying to fatter God with a kind of unctuous philosophical praise (Schmeichelei). Job's friends become a paradigmatic case of such disingenuousness. Job becomes a model of resistance to it.
We have seen that Kant's critical philosophy can support teleology as a purely conceptual way of organizing ideas. Kant even concedes that invoking divine purpose can be the most coherent expression of teleology. In interrogating theodicy, what is at issue for Kant is whether claims of divine purposefulness can withstand the abundant evidence of natural and moral evil. Granted that the idea of God is a useful idea, but is its use compatible with the presence of evil? One can, in the manner of Job, as we will see, hold the idea of God together with the reality of evil. What one cannot do, in the manner of Job's friends and all other practitioners of theodicy, is to take the idea of God from the realm of the conceptual and ascribe substantive properties to it—endow it with agency—vis-à-vis the phenomena of suffering. Insofar as this is an illegitimate move, from the critical point of view, theodicy does not defend God at all; it defends illicit religious speculations. Theodicy is a rear guard attempt to protect territory that has already been lost.
Three sorts of evidence challenge the view that a divine wisdom purposefully guides the events of the phenomenal world. There are evils that reason finds so contrary to the putative divine plan— especially sin (moral evil)—as to cause doubts that there is such a plan. Some evils are so grave that we must reject the view that they serve a higher purpose. (The Holocaust, we might say, cannot be justified on the grounds that it led to the establishment of the State of Israel.) Second, there are evils, such as physical pain (natural evil), which might conditionally serve some purpose. Pain, although evil, may be justified when it is employed as punishment to bring about a desirable correction. The frequent disproportion between pain, construed as punishment, and the putative crime leads straight to a third sort of evidence against divine purposefulness. The disproportion, which reason often perceives in the relationship of “crime” and “punishment,” casts doubt on whether a relevant evil should actually be construed as punishment.
These three complaints are lodged against the divine wisdom, which has three corresponding attributes. The holiness of God as a legislator is held in tension with the moral evils of the world. The goodness of God as a governor or sustainer of his creatures seems to be offset their physical sufferings. The justice of God as a judge is questioned by the scandalous disproportion between the crime of human sin and the divine punishment. Kant construes the traditional arguments of theodicy as attempts to refute the three kinds of complaint by assertions compounded from the three putative attributes of God. The existence of massive moral evil, for example, may be “refuted” by an appeal to the mysteriousness of God's thoughts, which is a correlate of his holiness. His ways are not our ways; his laws are not our laws. We therefore “err when we make a law valid only relatively for men in this life into an absolute law, so that we hold that what, in our consideration from our lowly observation point, appears unsuitable must be so also from the highest observation point.”Footnote 44 Significantly, Kant does not try to refute such a classic move with a developed argument. He brushes it aside with no small amount of indignation. “This plea, in which the response is worse than the charge, needs no reply. It can safely be left to the reprobation of any man who has the slightest sense of morality.”Footnote 45 The attempt to ascribe to God a morality allegedly higher than the moral laws of which we are aware is odious in a moral sense and self-contradictory in a philosophical sense.
The stipulation of a mysterious divine morality that differs fundamentally from our morality is an example of the sort of empty, indeed morally blasphemous, speculation that the critical philosophy condemns. Our morality is the only one of which we have knowledge; its laws are the only laws that deserve to be called moral. Furthermore, within our moral universe—the only moral universe known by reason—agents cannot be held accountable for acts over which they have no control. Thus, the typical attempts of theodicy to exculpate divine purposefulness because of the limitations of creaturely matter or because of the consequences of human freedom offend against human responsibility. If I have no responsibility for how I have been made, then I can take no responsibility for those occurrences that issue as a result of my nature. Although not all of Kant's answers to the various attempts at theodicy are persuasive or clear, his own position is categorical: “No theodicy proposed so far has kept its promise; none has managed to justify the moral wisdom at work in the government of the world against the doubts which arise out of our experience of the world.”Footnote 46
The failure of theodicy does not signal a loss of wisdom about God. It signals rather a salutary recognition of the overreach of reason. This critical recognition does not bring religious affirmation to an end. It constrains and transforms it, however. Kant freely admits that while, because of the limitations of our reason, we cannot in good conscience make claims about the divine, neither have we disproved claims about the divine. Our ignorance cuts both ways. We cannot say for certain that reason is “completely powerless when it comes to determining the relationship between this world, as we know it through experience, and the supreme wisdom.”Footnote 47 Although a glimmer of human competence in such matters may be possible, until such competence can be demonstrated reason has no choice other than to abandon the effort to fathom divine wisdom. The “negative wisdom” of understanding the limits of our reflection on the divine should “put an end once and for all” to theodicy.Footnote 48
Against this background, Kant offers his own interpretation of Job. Job practices what Kant calls “authentic” (authentisch) as opposed to “doctrinal” (doktrinal) theodicy.Footnote 49 Authentic theodicy—a term that does not imply that such theodicy is correct or intellectually permissible—arises spontaneously from the wounded soul of a pious man whereas doctrinal theodicy is burdened by theological sophistry. Although Kant rejects the intellectual content of Job's claims he validates their moral basis because of their spontaneous authenticity. He rej ects, correspondingly, the moral basis (and, of course, the intellectual content) of the utterances of Job's friends. Kant dismisses the ratiocinations of both Job and his friends (which are “not remarkable”) but emphasizes their respective moral characters.
Job spoke as he thought, as he felt, and as every man in his position would feel. His friends, however, spoke as if they were overheard by the Almighty whose behavior they were judging, and as if they cared more for winning his favors by passing the right judgment than for saying the truth. The dishonesty with which they affirmed things of which they should have confessed that they had no knowledge and with which they feigned convictions which in fact they did not have, contrasts with Job's free and sincere outspokenness, which is so removed from lying flattery that it almost borders on temerity. This contrast puts the friends in an unfavorable light.Footnote 50
Job becomes a Kantian hero because he confesses that he had spoken unwisely about things of which he knew nothing. Job rejects, as it were, the old, precritical, discredited metaphysics. While his friends' theories were more in accord with doctrinal speculative reason and would therefore “seem to exhibit more pious humility,” it is Job's sincerity and integrity that win God's approbation.Footnote 51 “Only uprightness of the heart, not the merit of one's insights, the sincere and undisguised confessions of one's doubts, and the avoidance of feigned convictions which one does not really feel … are the qualities which caused the upright man Job to be preferred in the eyes of the divine judge to the pious flatterers. ”Footnote 52 Job roots his faith, according to Kant, in the conviction of his own moral integrity. Sincerity stands in for or replaces faith, at least the faith that is a conviction of the existence of things unseen. Faith is transposed into the key of ethics, into the decision of man to live a moral life: “Job proved that he did not base his morality on his faith but his faith upon his morality. In this case, faith, however weak it may become, is a truer and purer one; this kind of faith is not found in a religion that cultivates self-interest and seeks favors, but in a religion of good behavior.”Footnote 53 This encapsulates the Kantian transformation of religion into ethics. Religion no longer has a wisdom of its own. Its language is an encoded moral language that speaks, however misleadingly, only of worldly and practical (that is, moral) things. At its best it inculcates virtue. Its church is the good will. Its mission is to secure the civil peace of the secular city.
By transposing faith into the key of ethics, Kant not only deprives religion of a unique nature but he embeds it without remainder into the inner world of the self. Henceforth, with its exclusive focus on moral duty, religion becomes a dimension of the modern self's reflexive process of self-creation. Religion becomes a domain where the self affirms its integrity, sincerity and authenticity.Footnote 54 Job becomes a drama about how a man remains true to himself. The aspiration of moral rectitude, the enactment of the good will, fills the space where affirmations of divine justice once held sway.
The Job of Post-Traditional Judaism
There is an almost categorical difference between the ancient and medieval interpretations and modern ones. In the traditional interpretations, even at their most skeptical, daring, and esoteric, Job deserves in some measure what he gets. The distance between the dominant theodicy orientation in the Torah and the prophets— that suffering and sin are implicated in one another—and the theodicy implicit in Job—that God's ways cannot be exhaustively justified in terms of the dominant theodicy of the Torah and the prophets—is minimized. Traditional exegetes, while not ignoring the tensions between a theodicy of reward and punishment and the more inscrutable theodicy of Job nonetheless seek to harmonize their different thrusts. (Maimonides is an exception to this rule only in the esoteric strata of his text. Exoterically, he asserts the cogency of the deserts-oriented framework.) Job, on the traditional account, is a flawed and ambiguous figure. Job on the modern account, however, is a heroic figure: a model of probity that rejects the facile pseudo-answers of the official “orthodoxy” and insists on the truth of his own experience. For modern Jewish interpreters, the Book of Job in a sense redeems the Torah. Were reward and punishment all that Jews had to work with, not only theodicy but Judaism might wither. For the traditional interpreter, the gap between these strategies must not loom too large. For the modern interpreter, the larger the gap, the better.Footnote 55
I have suggested that Kant's attempt to demolish theodicy marks a caesura between traditional and modern philosophical practice. We see that caesura clearly in Kant's greatest modern Jewish disciple, Hermann Cohen.Footnote 56 Cohen, like Kant, relates religion to the legitimate work of practical reason: God, free will, the soul, etc., are necessary postulates for the fruitful deployment of practical reason on which moral action depends. Like Kant, these terms stand for logical constructs required by (practical) reason, not substantive realities about which metaphysical inquiry could provide knowledge. Unlike Kant, Cohen fills religion—at least religion governed by practical reason (Religion der Vernunft)—with a purpose that allies with ethics but is not reducible to ethics. Religion, for Cohen, is the ground for the discovery and nurture of authentic selfhood. Ethics, in its Kantian universality, has to do with duties, with a moral law, which addresses the generality of human beings, indeed, of all rational creatures. Religion, by contrast, discovers the individual, who can not be reduced to a moral agent standing under a universal moral law. The individual has to do with uniqueness, with unique and sacred value. Such a concept does not emerge in Greek thought, where persons are confined by their lineage and set on trajectories governed by fate. (Cohen sees tragedy, especially the Oresteia, as paradigmatic of the highest Greek thinking about personhood.) According to Cohen, the Torah and the biblical prophets first discover the concept of the individual. The one proximate to us (Nebenmensch) becomes a fellowman (Mitmensch), for whom we can, indeed must, feel empathy and love. This insight recognizes the individuality of our fellow man or woman and calls upon us to respond to his plight with compassion. This, however, is not yet enough for the discovery and grounding of one's own authentic individuality, without which the individuality of the other is imperfectly grounded. The late prophet, Ezekiel, constitutes a breakthrough in his assertion that every man dies for his own sin. It is sin, more specifically, the consciousness of guilt that gives rise to the desire for forgiveness, which in turn occasions the relationship with God known as repentance that provides the ground for individuality. Individuality emerges, not merely in the I-Thou encounter with the Mitmensch, but in the experience of self as sinner, penitent, sufferer and reborn being, which the turn to God out of guilt effectuates. It is in Cohen's treatment of suffering, in the context of his discussion of atonement and the Day of Atonement, that he considers the meaning of Job.
Cohen's teaching about suffering is provocative. It provides one of the standard objections to his thought; his view of suffering seems entirely too benign for a post-Auschwitz age. As a Kantian, Cohen rejects the question of the cause of suffering. “Why is this happening to me?” is the kind of illegitimate metaphysical question raised by pure reason. It must be systematically translated into the kind of question that practical reason can legitimately ask and answer, namely, “What must I do given the fact of suffering?” The pervasive fact of human suffering must not be ascribed a divine causality. To the extent that the causal question has any legitimacy, we can say that suffering has to do with our management of the world. Suffering for Cohen has little to do with death, disaster or sickness. These latter are simply part of the world and cannot fruitfully be questioned in metaphysical terms. Following Kant, there are neither legitimate questions nor answers here; there is no philosophical theodicy available. The proper context is that of practical reason and the imperative of practical reason is: alleviate suffering! In the first instance then, the only suffering that bears meaning is humanly induced suffering, such as poverty and other injustices. These can and must be alleviated. Suffering is therefore a call to recognition and response. Suffering teaches us about ourselves and the moral universe we inhabit. Suffering is an occasion for the moral growth of the individual (Bildung) and for the historical progress of humanity. The Jewish people, suffering throughout history on behalf of humanity, serve to remind humanity of its higher moral purposes, namely, to cease doing injustice and turn toward a Godly path.
At this level, suffering (typically in the form of poverty and other injustices) is something that non-sufferers perceive and, turning to the sufferer as a Mitmensch, ought to try to alleviate. Recalling Cohen's deepened concept of individuality, however, we must also ask how suffering grounds one's own individuality. What should we think when we ourselves are sufferers? The conceptual framework remains the same: It is not fruitful to ask “Why am I suffering?” What we must do is respond to our suffering in such a way so that we learn from it and thereby deepen our sense of relationship with God (in Cohen's technical idiom, our correlation). We must accept our suffering as an occasion for advancing our correlation with the good God who forgives us, alleviates our guilt, and renews us as rational beings and moral agents no longer freighted by past sin. (Sin equals inevitable moral failure in this scheme.) Suffering is a divine gift that allows us to engage in repentance. Repentance entails, among other things, construing our suffering as punishment for our sin. There is no true repentance without paying a price; suffering (qua notional punishment) is the price we pay for renewal of the correlation with God. Cohen is not saying that suffering is, in some metaphysical-causal sense, punishment for sin. He is saying that the sufferer should, within the conceptual vocabulary of practical reason, construe it as such for the sake of his own moral and spiritual development. True to his Kantian roots, Cohen asserts that suffering qua punishment must even be self-legislated: “Suffering is the punishment that man demands inexorably of himself for himself.”Footnote 57
The tale of Job, on Cohen's account, exemplifies the moral purposiveness of suffering. Cohen applauds Maimonides' view that Job is a prophet. Recalling that prophecy for Cohen stands for the imperative work of practical reason in alleviating suffering and nurturing true selfhood, Job qua prophet teaches that suffering is a meaningful part of God's plan for human betterment. Job's friends were both theoretically and morally wrong to ascribe a cause (Job's putative sin) to his suffering and to frame his suffering as punishment for his sin. Such a framing is something that the sufferer can do as an expression of practical reason. It is not something that an observer should do, especially in terms of a speculative metaphysics. Cohen writes:
Job's friends are not right when they wish to console him in his suffering by reminding him of his sin. His friends should have acknowledged him as a prophet who could instruct them about the value of suffering. Job is a prophet from whom his friends should have learned that suffering is a force in God's plan of salvation. This plan, however, is obscured and dissipated unless the sufferer is considered as suffering for the sake of others. It is obscured if one thinks erroneously that suffering and punishment are related as cause and effect.Footnote 58
The friends should have seen that Job suffers, in a sense, on their behalf, that is, his suffering can teach them about “God's plan for salvation.” By this Cohen refers to the process of asking forgiveness such that guilt is alleviated, accepting punishment and being renewed as a moral agent and a self. Job, like Israel, should be seen as suffering for the sake of, that is, teaching, the world.
Cohen's “prophetic” interpretation of Job brings us to concern for the Mitmensch but it does not yet address the deeper process of developing authentic individuality, which Cohen found to be initiated by Ezekiel. Continuing his analysis, Cohen argues that “Job himself does not lack the deeper insight that he is in need of suffering and deserves to pass through it, although not so much as a single individual but as a self in its correlation with God.”Footnote 59 As a prophet, Job is “the symbol of humanity.” The world is in need of this symbol; but the symbol is also a human being, who is “in need of himself.”Footnote 60 Job is both a public and a private man, so to speak. “The ambiguity in Job's suffering therefore remains: as a prophet he suffers for others, but he himself remains a man and, as such, is in need of suffering for his own self.”Footnote 61Bildung has its costs.
Cohen's interpretation of Job is brief but immensely subtle. Unlike other moderns, including Kant, Cohen does not valorize the rebellious Job who boldly questions divine justice. Like the ancients, his Job is the patient Job of the frame story who accepts suffering as an inscrutable part of the divine plan. He also echoes the rabbinic concern that sufferers should be excused, not criticized for what they say in their pain. And, like the medieval exegetes, Cohen sees the purpose of the Book of Job as inculcating a correct philosophical position. He puts it quite categorically: “The value of the biblical poem is limited to the refutation of the prejudice that there is a causal relation between sin and suffering; it rather introduces suffering, as do all the other prophetic writings, into the working of the theodicy of the moral world.”Footnote 62 This last phrase, “the theodicy of the moral world,” might suggest that Cohen is reintroducing theodicy where his master, Kant, would bar it. But this is not correct. Here we see Cohen's break with the past; his fundamental modernity. Cohen, no less than Kant, disallows theodicy in the manner of metaphysical speculation about providential divine action within the context of an ordered, balanced or harmonious physical universe. The “theodicy of the moral world” refers to the organization of the concepts of practical reason, the transcendental conditions for ethics and, in Cohen's religious thought, for authentic selfhood. Despite mapping some of the theodicy tropes of ancient and medieval Judaism, Cohen's approach is thoroughly formed by the “massive subjective turn in modern culture.” Cohen's Job is patient because he is a critical philosopher: what he acquiesces to is the incompetence of pure reason. His only recourse is to admit insuperable ignorance about the ultimate features of the nonmoral world and to rise to faithful practical activity in the moral one. Whether Cohen's deep hope, which must not be trivialized, in the moral progress of humanity can withstand the disconfirming evidence of Auschwitz cannot easily be answered.Footnote 63 Cohen provides, within Kantian limits, a rational theodicy for an irrational age.
Cohen's intellectual and political opponent, Martin Buber, offers a far more existentialist interpretation than that of the rationalist Cohen. Buber's point of departure is the contrast between the Book of Job and the prophet Ezekiel. Cohen saw Job as flowing from Ezekiel's teaching about individuality. Buber agrees to an extent but also differentiates his view from Cohen's. Buber argues that Ezekiel does represent a certain breakthrough in the history of Israelite religion. He stands at the point where the old understanding of collective guilt and punishment breaks down and a new, individualized understanding of agency and responsibility takes hold. Earlier prophets, such as Amos, hardly deviated from the ancient belief that natural and historical catastrophes punished the entire people, without regard to the deserts of the individuals among them. Collective punishment would be counterbalanced by collective restoration; a remnant will return. Ezekiel, writing after the destruction of Judah, had to speak to a generation that could no longer accept such cold comfort. Accordingly, Ezekiel “denounces the whole religious tradition of collective responsibility.” Buber continues:
It may also be said that Ezekiel in his Messianic prophecy sees Israel as a community, but in his vision and reproof of the present he sees it as a multitude of individuals, each one of whom is responsible before God for himself alone. This personal responsibility, however, is full and entire. No one has to bear an inherited sin, no one shares in accumulating new guilt, no one has to answer for his fellow, but each one has to answer fully for himsel.Footnote 64
The new emphasis on the responsibility and hence the “objectively comprehensible” punishment of individuals atomizes the community and the covenant. Ezekiel compensates for this atomization by stressing the centrality of a renewed cult, which will unify the people once again in the messianic future. For Buber, this emphasis on religion, as it were, negates Ezekiel's positive discovery of individuality. Consequently, Ezekiel is a flawed figure. Although his teaching responds to the lived experience of his people, indeed, although it originates in his own authentic prophetic experience, it remains stultified and doctrinaire. Ezekiel produced a divine image that “did not come from an overwhelming experience, but from an attempt to overcome a questionable situation.”Footnote 65 The detached, relatively inauthentic, merely “religious” quality of Ezekiel's experience—doktrinal, in Kant's terms—meant that it could not satisfy the anguished perplexity of the generation of the Babylonian Exile. Although those Jews fundamentally agreed with Ezekiel that God metes out punishment to the wicked on account of their individual sins, the discrepancy between their assent to this theodicy and the facts of their own experience led to the felt need to honor that experience. Out of this tension, the Book of Job was born. The view of Job's friends represents the view of what Buber dismissively terms “religion”: “the assertion of an all-embracing empirical connection between sin and punishment.”Footnote 66 The friends take Ezekiel's situation-specific theodicy and universalize it into a mechanical rule thereby mocking the lived experience of the innocent sufferer. Theodicy of this sort erects a “great ideological idol.” “Religion,” which visits Job on his ash heap, attacks man's faith and “uses every art of speech to take away from him the God of his soul.”Footnote 67 Religion is the paradigm for inauthenticity. Its static, abstract framework cannot but help to alienate the sufferer from an authentic confrontation with his suffering. Buber replicates, within his own idiom, the Kantian distinction between authentic and doctrinaire theodicy.
Job's own view amounts to a repudiation that God is just. Job continues to believe in justice and he continues to believe in God, but he cannot believe in both with a single faith. He believes in justice in spite of believing in God and believes in God in spite of believing injustice.Footnote 68 He does not understand how God can violate his own justice. This irresolvable dilemma drives Job into isolation from both God and other human beings. His friends, he knows, do not contend for the true God. The true God must be “near and intimate,” a “nearby person” rather than the silent and “sinister power” that seems to confront him now. What Job craves is intimacy with God. Although he does not want to abandon justice, he begins to sense that intimacy with God is a separate matter from affirming justice. When God ceases to hide his face, as he soon does, the theophany will not reveal a God of justice, at least of a justice intelligible in human terms. The speech of the theophany “declares in the ears of man, struggling for justice, another justice than his own, a divine justice. Not the divine justice, but a divine justice, namely that manifest in creation. The creation of the world is justice, not a recompensing and compensating justice, but a distributing, a giving justice.”Footnote 69
But in what sense is creation justice? Buber's view is not that of a medieval who finds in creation a divine equilibrium—in a perfect whole, the good outweighs the inevitably concomitant evil, for example. Rather, justice qua creation means every being receiving that which it needs “to become entirely itself … The just Creator gives to all his creatures his boundary, so that each may become fully itself.”Footnote 70 Our ordinary conception of justice relies on a principle of desert and “intends to give everyone what is due to him.” God's creation-justice, which man is here called upon to emulate, “gives to everyone what he is.”Footnote 71 Job was not wrong to expect justice from God. He just expected justice of the wrong kind. But what kind of justice is receiving what one already has? Maimonides, at least, rescues the radical equivocation of terms such as justice by a theory of language. Buber seems simply to redefine terms and subordinate our ordinary language sense to an allegedly superior sense.
The answer is found in Buber's underlying philosophy of Ich and Du. The dialectically constituted Ich is given back to Job only in his encounter with the divine Du. He becomes himself, so to speak, only when God becomes near to him again. Although Job was mistaken about the character of divine justice, he was not mistaken in his understanding of God as a living person and in his demand for encounter, Begegnung. Job contrasts favorably with his friends, who were locked into an objectifying, “religious” construal of God. Accordingly, God justifies Job because he has spoken rightly of Him, unlike the friends.
Within Buber's distinctive idiom, Job has become a hero of authenticity. He insists on individual religious experience as a means of disclosing the truth of Being. Unlike Maimonides, whose Job moves from acceptance of inherited, authoritative opinions to rational, speculative proofs, or Cohen, whose Job, accepts the limits of reason and sets out on the infinite task of ethics, Buber's Job does not think or act, he encounters. Being displaces thought and ethics. Mere religion defers the encounter with Being. Religion is an inauthentic mode of being. Buber's neo-romantic thought arises in the changed intellectual field necessitated by Kant's critical demolition of speculative metaphysics and rational theology. As in Cohen, Buber's Job learns the deepest truths about individual existence through suffering. Suffering enables Job to grow in authentic selfhood in a way that inherited religious “truths” could not. Unlike Cohen, Buber places encounter with God as a living presence, a divine Du, where Cohen posited a correlation with a transcendental idea.
Let us briefly consider some American interpreters to round out the modernist picture. Although not as robustly existential as Buber, other modern Jewish interpreters have absorbed the same predilections. Horace Kallen, a German-Jewish ιmigrι philosopher revised the Book of Job on the model of a Greek tragedy. Styling its anonymous author an Hebraic Euripides, Kallen sees his book as a testament to a tragic view of life. For Kallen, Job exemplifies the aloneness of man in an unjust universe. Man proves his worth by rejecting the platitudes of religion and demonstrating the virtue of courage.
[T]he ultimate value of human existence is not existence merely; the ultimate value of human existence is the quality and distinction of existence of which consists a man's character, his nature as this or that kind of man… . To cling to his integrity while he lives, to assert and to realize the excellences appropriate to his nature as a man, as this particular kind of man, knowing all the while that this is to be accomplished in a world which was not made for him, in which he shares his claim on the consideration of Omnipotence with the infinitude of its creatures that alike manifest its powers—this is the destiny of man. He must take his chance in a world that doesn't care about him any more than about anything else.Footnote 72
The appropriate, authentic response to his condition is “courage rather than faith, with self-respect rather than with humility, or better perhaps with a faith that is courage, a humility that is self-respect.”Footnote 73
Robert Gordis also construes Job as a conflict between personal experience and accepted religious tradition. While praising Job for affirming his own integrity in the face of tradition, Gordis sees honest rebellion as enriching tradition. “For religious truth, like all truth, can grow only through the evidence derived from the experience of life. To use the language of the hour, Job's protest is existential, but it contributes to a deeper essential religion.”Footnote 74
Similarly, Moshe Greenberg, praises the book's “theological honesty” and “passion to teach the reality of God's relation to man [in a manner] unique in the Bible. Job cannot rest after the collapse of his old outlook until he has come to a better one, more congruent with the facts of experience. ”Footnote 75 Once again the emphasis is on Job's lived experience, in all of its immediacy and authenticity. Greenberg posits a sharp contrast between Job, on the one hand, and the Torah and Prophets on the other. They present radically different justifications of God in history. The Torah and Prophets speak primarily to the fate of the nation. When individuality became thematic in Israel, the theodicy concept of the Torah and the Prophets failed. Judaism, according to Greenberg, preserved these discrepant approaches because the “religious sensibility apparently absorbs or even affirms the contradictions embodied in these books. That may be because these contradictions are perceived to exist in reality.”Footnote 76 Experience is larger than any rational scheme of the sort that a Saadia or a Maimonides would employ to pretend to account for it. Where the authenticity of experience becomes thematic, rational, systematic thought must recede.
Conclusion
Kant, as mentioned in the introduction, is not the only factor in the development sketched above. Modernity as a whole, as Anthony Giddens reminds us, is a world of “disembedded selves.”Footnote 77 The social systems of modernity removed people from what were once stable locations in time, space, class, religion and other markers of an ordered cosmos. The practice of theodicy, I suggest, assumes an ordered cosmos. Theodicy is a theory of disorder, but it assumes the reality of an underlying normative order. Theodicy is most at home in a traditional society where timeless social referents undergird cosmic order. Suffering, in the Jewish case especially the suffering of the exile and its attendant disorder, is only temporary. In the future, the underlying order, the divine justice, will become apparent once again. The exile will end and the disordered cosmos will be rectified. Until then, the ideal order of the Torah, the divine law, remains as a symbol and a model of divine justice. In a future kingdom, God will rule according to the Torah, which is already in the midst of Israel.
The promise of the divine kingdom is the telos of history. The order of the universe is a teleological order: it begins in a divine creation and it ends in a divine redemptive unity. Along the way, all events, whether in the natural world or in the fraught domain of history, can be ordered according to a teleological narrative. In such an ordered, rationally perspicuous universe, evil does not disconfirm order. Evil may be redeemed, albeit with great difficulty, by the transcendent telos. As we have seen in Kant, the demise of theodicy reflects, in part, the demotion of teleology. Teleology becomes a way of organizing concepts—essential for human reason but also essentially fictive. Further, as understood by modern science, the inherent rationality of the world has to do with its material causes, not its spurious final ones. Philosophical assaults on theodicy, such as Kant's, are of a piece with the reconfiguration of teleology.
The diminution of metaphysical theodicy gives expression to the dynamic, “disordered” world of modernity. In a world without an ultimate purpose that bridges the physical and the metaphysical, the natural and the divine, humans are thrown back onto their own resources. The virtue of authenticity, of being true to oneself, replaces the rational project of understanding the universe as given in reason and revelation. Rather than seek certitude in God, moderns seek honesty, or at least clarity, about their own experience. Job becomes a paradigm of this search. God becomes an accessory to the human project of self-creation. It is difficult to see how, without the indulgence of a second na○vetι, theodicy can be restored as a respectable intellectual project. But it is also difficult to see why, given the horrors of our time, it should be. The problem of evil cannot be solved by profound contemplation about the problem of evil.
(Bat Yam: Tag, 1994) 151-81.
