The book of Job is among the other Old Testament
books both a philosophical riddle and a historical riddle. It is the
philosophical riddle that concerns us in such an introduction as this; so we
may dismiss first the few words of general explanation or warning which
should be said about the historical aspect. Controversy has long raged about
which parts of this epic belong to its original scheme and which are
interpolations of considerably later date. The doctors disagree, as it is
the business of doctors to do; but upon the whole the trend of investigation
has always been in the direction of maintaining that the parts interpolated,
if any, were the prose prologue and epilogue, and possibly the speech of the
young man who comes in with an apology at the end. I do not profess to be
competent to decide such questions.
But whatever decision the reader may come to
concerning them, there is a general truth to be remembered in this
connection. When you deal with any ancient artistic creation, do not suppose
that it is anything against it that it grew gradually. The book of Job may
have grown gradually just as Westminster Abbey grew gradually. But the
people who made the old folk poetry, like the people who made Westminster
Abbey, did not attach that importance to the actual date and the actual
author, that importance which is entirely the creation of the almost insane
individualism of modern times. We may put aside the case of Job, as one
complicated with religious difficulties, and take any other, say the case of
the Iliad. Many people have maintained the characteristic formula of modern
skepticism, that Homer was not written by Homer, but by another person of
the same name. Just in the same way many have maintained that Moses was not
Moses but another person called Moses. But the thing really to be remembered
in the matter of the Iliad is that if other people did interpolate the
passages, the thing did not create the same sense of shock as would be
created by such proceedings in these individualistic times. The creation of
the tribal epic was to some extent regarded as a tribal work, like the
building of the tribal temple. Believe then, if you will, that the prologue
of Job and the epilogue and the speech of Elihu are things inserted after
the original work was composed. But do not suppose that such insertions have
that obvious and spurious character which would belong to any insertions in
a modern, individualistic book . . .
Without going into questions of unity as understood
by the scholars, we may say of the scholarly riddle that the book has unity
in the sense that all great traditional creations have unity; in the sense
that Canterbury Cathedral has unity. And the same is broadly true of what I
have called the philosophical riddle. There is a real sense in which the
book of Job stands apart from most of the books included in the canon of the
Old Testament. But here again those are wrong who insist on the entire
absence of unity. Those are wrong who maintain that the Old Testament is a
mere loose library; that it has no consistency or aim. Whether the result
was achieved by some supernal sprirtual truth, or by a steady national
tradition, or merely by an ingenious selection in aftertimes, the books of
the Old Testament have a quite perceptible unity. . .
The central idea of the great part of the Old
Testament may be called the idea of the loneliness of God. God is not the
only chief character of the Old Testament; God is properly the only
character in the Old Testament. Compared with His clearness of purpose, all
the other wills are heavy and automatic, like those of animals; compared
with His actuality, all the sons of flesh are shadows. Again and again the
note is struck, "With whom hath He taken counsel?" (Isa. 40:14). "I have
trodden the winepress alone, and of the peoples there was no man with me" (Isa.
63:3). All the patriarchs and prophets are merely His tools or weapons; for
the Lord is a man of war. He uses Joshua like an axe or Moses like a
measuring rod. For Him, Samson, is only a sword and Isaiah a trumpet. The
saints of Christianity are supposed to be like God, to be, as it were,
little statuettes of Him. The Old Testament hero is no more supposed to be
of the same nature as God than a saw or a hammer is supposed to be of the
same shape as the carpenter. This is the main key and characteristic of
Hebrew scriptures as a whole. There are, indeed, in those scriptures
innumerable instances of the sort of rugged humor, keen emotion, and
powerful individuality which is never wanting in great primitive prose and
poetry. Nevertheless the main characteristic remains: the sense not merely
that God is stronger than man, not merely that God is more secret than man,
but that He means more, that He knows better what He is doing, that compared
with Him we have something of the vagueness, the unreason, and the vagrancy
of the beasts that perish. "It is He that sitteth above the earth, and the
inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers" (Isa.40:22). We might almost put it
thus. The book is so intent upon asserting the personality of God that it
almost asserts the impersonality of man. Unless this gigantic cosmic brain
has conceived a thing, that thing is insecure and void; man has not enough
tenacity to ensure its continuance. "Except the Lord build the house, they
labor in vain that build it. Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman
waketh but in vain" (Ps. 127:1).
Everywhere else, then, the Old Testament positively
rejoices in the obliteration of man in comparison with the divine purpose.
The book of Job stands definitely alone because the book of Job definitely
asks, "But what is the purpose of God? Is it worth the sacrifice even of our
miserable humanity? Of course, it is easy enough to wipe out our own paltry
wills for the sake of a will that is grander and kinder. But is it grander
and kinder? Let God use His tools; let God break His tools. But what is He
doing, and what are they being broken for?" It is because of this question
that we have to attack as a philosophical riddle the riddle of the book of
Job.
The present importance of the book of Job cannot be
expressed adequately even by saying that it is the most interesting of
ancient books. We may almost say of the book of Job that it is the most
interesting of modern books. In truth, of course, neither of the two phrases
covers the matter, because fundamental human religion and fundamental human
irreligion are both at once old and new; philosophy is either eternal or it
is not philosophy. The modern habit of saying"This is my opinion, but I may
be wrong" is entirely irrational. If I say that it may be wrong, I say that
is not my opinion. The modern habit of saying "Every man has a different
philosophy; this is my philosophy and it suits me" - the habit of saying
this is mere weak-mindedness. A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit
a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more
possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.
The first of the intellectual beauties of the book
of Job is that it is all concerned with this desire to know the actuality;
the desire to know what is, and not merely what seems. If moderns were
writing the book, we should probably find that Job and his comforters got on
quite well together by the simple operation of referring their differences
to what is called the temperament, saying that the comforters were by nature
"optimists" and Job by nature a "pessimist." And they would be quite
comfortable, as people can often be, for some time at least, by agreeing to
say what is obviously untrue. For if the word "pessimist" means anything at
all, then emphatically Job is not a pessimist. His case alone is sufficient
to refute the modern absurdity of referring everything to physical
temperament. Job does not in any sense look at life in a gloomy way. If
wishing to be happy and being quite ready to be happy constitutes an
optimist, Job is an optimist. He is a perplexed optimist; he is an
exasperated optimist; he is an outraged and insulted optimist. He wishes the
universe to justify itself, not because he wishes it be caught out, but
because he really wishes it be justified. He demands an explanation from
God, but he does not do it at all in the spirit in which [John] Hampden
might demand an explanation from Charles I. He does it in the spirit in
which a wife might demand an explanation from her husband whom she really
respected. He remonstrates with his Maker because he is proud of his Maker.
He even speaks of the Almighty as his enemy, but he never doubts, at the
back of his mind, that his enemy has some kind of a case which he does not
understand. In a fine and famous blasphemy he says, "Oh, that mine adversary
had written a book!" (31:35). It never really occurs to him that it could
possibly be a bad book. He is anxious to be convinced, that is, he thinks
that God could convince him. In short, we may say again that if the word
optimist means anything (which I doubt), Job is an optimist. He shakes the
pillars of the world and strikes insanely at the heavens; he lashes the
stars, but it is not to silence them; it is to make them speak.
In the same way we may speak of the official
optimists, the comforters of Job. Again, if the word pessimist means
anything (which I doubt), the comforters of Job may be called pessimists
rather than optimists. All that they really believe is not that God is good
but that God is so strong that it is much more judicious to call Him good.
It would be the exaggeration of censure to call them evolutionists; but they
have something of the vital error of the evolutionary optimist. They will
keep on saying that everything in the universe fits into everything else; as
if there were anything comforting about a number of nasty things all fitting
into each other. We shall see later how God in the great climax of the poem
turns this particular argument altogether upside down.
When, at the end of the poem, God enters (somewhat
abruptly), is struck the sudden and splendid note which makes the thing as
great as it is. All the human beings through the story, and Job especially,
have been asking questions of God. A more trivial poet would have made God
enter in some sense or other in order to answer the questions. By a touch
truly to be called inspired, when God enters, it is to ask a number more
question on His own account. In this drama of skepticism God Himself takes
up the role of skeptic. He does what all the great voices defending religion
have always done. He does, for instance, what Socrates did. He turns
rationalism against itself. He seems to say that if it comes to asking
questions, He can ask some question which will fling down and flatten out
all conceivable human questioners. The poet by an exquisite intuition has
made God ironically accept a kind of controversial equality with His
accusers. He is willing to regard it as if it were a fair intellectual duel:
"Gird up now thy loins like man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou
me" (38:3). The everlasting adopts an enormous and sardonic humility. He is
quite willing to be prosecuted. He only asks for the right which every
prosecuted person possesses; he asks to be allowed to cross-examine the
witness for the prosecution. And He carries yet further the corrections of
the legal parallel. For the first question, essentially speaking, which He
asks of Job is the question that any criminal accused by Job would be most
entitled to ask. He asks Job who he is. And Job, being a man of candid
intellect, takes a little time to consider, and comes to the conclusion that
he does not know.
This is the first great fact to notice about the
speech of God, which is the culmination of the inquiry. It represents all
human skeptics routed by a higher skepticism. It is this method, used
sometimes by supreme and sometimes by mediocre minds, that has ever since
been the logical weapon of the true mystic. Socrates, as I have said, used
it when he showed that if you only allowed him enough sophistry he could
destroy all sophists. Jesus Christ used it when he reminded the Sadducees,
who could not imagine the nature of marriage in heaven, that if it came to
that they had not really imagined the nature of marriage at all. In the
break up of Christian theology in the eighteenth century, [Joseph] Butler
used it, when he pointed out that rationalistic arguments could be used as
much against vague religions as against doctrinal religion, as much against
rationalist ethics as against Christian ethics. It is the root and reason of
the fact that men who have religious faith have also philosophic doubt.
These are the small streams of the delta; the book of Job is the first great
cataract that creates the river. In dealing with the arrogant asserter of
doubt, it is not the right method to tell him to stop doubting. It is rather
the right method to tell him to go on doubting , to doubt a little more, to
doubt every day newer and wilder things in the universe, until at last, by
some strange enlightenment, he may begin to doubt himself.
This, I say, is the first fact touching the speech;
the fine inspiration by which God comes in at the end, not to answer
riddles, but to propound them. The other great fact which, taken together
with this one, makes the whole work religious instead of merely
philosophical is that other great surprise which makes Job suddenly
satisfied with the mere presentation of something impenetrable. Verbally
speaking the enigmas of Jehovah seem darker and more desolate than the
enigmas of Job; yet Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is
comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and
tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told. The refusal
of God to explain His design is itself a burning hint of His design. The
riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.
Thirdly, of course, it is one of the splendid
strokes that God rebukes alike the man who accused and the men who defended
Him; that He knocks down pessimists and optimists with the same hammer. And
it is in connection with the mechanical and supercilious comforters of Job
that there occurs the still deeper and finer inversion of which I have
spoken. The mechanical optimist endeavors to justify the universe avowedly
upon the ground that it is a rational and consecutive pattern. He points out
that the fine thing about the world is that it can all be explained. That is
the one point, if I may put it so, on which God, in return, is explicit to
the point of violence. God says, in effect, that if there is one fine thing
about the world, as far as men are concerned, it is that it cannot be
explained. He insists on the inexplicableness of everything. "Hath the rain
a father?. . .Out of whose womb came the ice?" (38:28f). He goes farther,
and insists on the positive and palpable unreason of things; "Hast thou sent
the rain upon the desert where no man is, and upon the wilderness wherein
there is no man?" (38:26). God will make man see things, if it is only
against the black background of nonentity. God will make Job see a startling
universe if He can only do it by making Job see an idiotic universe. To
startle man, God becomes for an instant a blasphemer; one might almost say
that God becomes for an instant an atheist. He unrolls before Job a long
panorama of created things, the horse, the eagle, the raven, the wild ass,
the peacock, the ostrich, the crocodile. He so describes each of them that
it sounds like a monster walking in the sun. The whole is a sort of psalm or
rhapsody of the sense of wonder. The maker of all things is astonished at
the things he has Himself made.
This we may call the third point. Job puts forward
a note of interrogation; God answers with a note of exclamation. Instead of
proving to Job that it is an explicable world, He insists that it is a much
stranger world than Job ever thought it was. Lastly, the poet has achieved
in this speech, with that unconscious artistic accuracy found in so many of
the simpler epics, another and much more delicate thing. Without once
relaxing the rigid impenetrability of Jehovah in His deliberate declaration,
he has contrived to let fall here and there in the metaphors, in the
parenthetical imagery, sudden and splendid suggestions that the secret of
God is a bright and not a sad one - semi-accidental suggestions, like light
seen for an instant through the crack of a closed door.
It would be difficult to praise too highly, in a
purely poetical sense, the instinctive exactitude and ease with which these
more optimistic insinuations are let fall in other connections, as if the
Almighty Himself were scarcely aware that He was letting them out. For
instance, there is that famous passage where Jehovah, with devastating
sarcasm, asks Job where he was when the foundations of the world were laid,
and then (as if merely fixing a date) mentions the time when the sons of God
shouted for joy (38:4-7). One cannot help feeling, even upon this meager
information, that they must have had something to shout about. Or again,
when God is speaking of snow and hail in the mere catalogue of the physical
cosmos, he speaks of them as a treasury that He has laid up against the day
of battle - a hint of some huge Armageddon in which evil shall be at last
overthrown.
Nothing could be better, artistically speaking,
than this optimism breaking though agnosticism like fiery gold round the
edges of a black cloud. Those who look superficially at the barbaric origin
of the epic may think it fanciful to read so much artistic significance into
its casual similes or accidental phrases. But no one who is well acquainted
with great examples of semi-barbaric poetry, as in The Song of Roland or the
old ballads, will fall into this mistake. No one who knows what primitive
poetry is can fail to realize that while its conscious form is simple some
of its finer effects are subtle. The Iliad contrives to express the idea
that Hector and Sarpedon have a certain tone or tint of sad and chivalrous
resignation, not bitter enough to be called pessimism and not jovial enough
to be called optimism; Homer could never have said this in elaborate words.
But somehow he contrives to say it in simple words. The Song of Roland
contrives to express the idea that Christianity imposes upon its heroes a
paradox; a paradox of great humility in the matter of their sins combined
with great ferocity in the matter of their ideas. Of course The Song of
Roland could not say this; but it conveys this. In the same way, the book of
Job must be credited with many subtle effects which were in the author's
soul without being, perhaps, in the author's mind. And of these by far the
most important remains to be stated.
I do not know, and I doubt whether even scholars
know, if the book of Job had a great effect or had any effect upon the after
development of Jewish thought. But if it did have any effect it may have
saved them from an enormous collapse and decay. Here in this book the
question is really asked whether God invariably punishes vice with
terrestrial punishment and rewards virtue with terrestrial prosperity. If
the Jews had answered that question wrongly they might have lost all their
after influence in human history. They might have sunk even down to the
level of modern well-educated society. For when once people have begun to
believe that prosperity is the reward of virtue, their next calamity is
obvious. If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be
regarded as the symptom of virtue. Men will leave off the heavy task of
making good men successful. The will adopt the easier task of making out
successful men good. This, which has happened throughout modern commerce and
journalism, is the ultimate Nemesis of the wicked optimism of the comforters
of Job. If the Jews could be saved from it, the book of Job saved them.
The book of Job is chiefly remarkable, as I have
insisted throughout, for the fact that it does not end in a way that is
conventionally satisfactory. Job is not told that his misfortunes were due
to his sins or a part of any plan for his improvement. But in the prologue
we see Job tormented not because he was the worst of men, but because he was
the best. It is the lesson of the whole work that man is most comforted by
paradoxes. Here is the very darkest and strangest of the paradoxes; and it
is by all human testimony the most reassuring. I need not suggest what high
and strange history awaited this paradox of the best man in the worst
fortune. I need not say that in the freest and most philosophical sense
there is one Old Testament figure who is truly a type; or say what is
prefigured in the wounds of Job.
