by Muriel Spark
But above all, I was inspired by the beautiful painting Job Visited by his Wife by Georges de La Tour which hangs in the art museum at Epinal in the Vosges district of France. It is a mysterious fact that I had already started the novel and conceived the characters Effie and Ruth, before I had actually seen this picture of Job’s magnificent wife. After seeing it myself I naturally ‘sent’ my hero Harvey Gotham to see it.
The story of Job was a starting point but my story is my own. The problem of suffering is indivisible from life itself. It is insoluble, a mystery. It is a reality, both soft and harsh, and I have sought to convey it.
The American critic, the late Allen Tate, made a claim, in a broadcast discussion, to the effect that a good novel should be a poem. He meant this in a very special sense; he was not thinking of ornate language or of the prose-poem; he meant the intrinsic construction, the conception, the vision. I would wish all my novels, and particularly The Only Problem, to be judged under this deep and haunting light.
[1984]
The Mystery of Job’s Suffering
For the reader acquainted with the Book of Job but not with Dr Jung’s writings, the major difficulty about this book is the idiom, which is largely allegorical. Terms like ‘God’ and ‘Wisdom’ are employed, not in their usual theological connotation, but as symbols for psychic concepts.
That Dr Jung does not hesitate to draw theological conclusions is a different question which may be considered in the light of his Preface. There, Dr Jung writes,
I shall not give a cool and carefully considered exegesis that tries to be fair to every detail, but a purely subjective reaction … I shall answer injustice with injustice, that I may learn to know why and to what purpose Job was wounded, and what consequences have grown out of this for Yahweh as well as for man.
The Book of Job, according to Dr Jung’s thesis, represents a decisive point in human and divine development. (He conceives God and man developing together, dependent one on the other.) It was in the figure of Job that the capricious Yahweh of the Old Testament met his match. Job is subdued to silence only by the thundering of superior brute force; morally, he emerges superior to his Creator. Job, moreover,
has seen God’s face and the unconscious split in his nature. God was now known, and this knowledge went on working not only in Yahweh but in man too. Thus it was the men of the last few centuries before Christ who, at the gentle touch of the pre-existent Sophia, compensate Yahweh and his attitude, and at the same time complete the anamnesis of Wisdom.
God, having failed to consult with his own omniscience, has revealed to Job a savage, unconscious side of the divine nature. It does not dawn on God until later that Job’s submission was insincere, a reply intended to humour and placate the deity rather than express Job’s true feelings. The realisation at a later date of Job’s moral victory forces God to honour His own attribute of justice. ‘Yahweh must become man precisely because he has done man a wrong.’
The cult of Wisdom, occurring about the time of the composition of Job, is cited with emphasis on the typological identification of Wisdom with the Blessed Virgin. God, preparing for the Incarnation, calls Wisdom to mind. Eventually, ‘Yahweh’s intention to become man, which resulted from his collision with Job, is fulfilled in Christ’s life and suffering’.
So far as the Book of Job is concerned, the thesis ends here. As theology, it is far too anthropomorphic to be satisfying; as a history of the development of Hebrew conceptions of God, there is nothing very new. But Dr Jung allows himself the next half of his book in which to speculate seriously on the theological implications of his reading of Job. It is not, therefore, good enough for Dr Jung to plead a ‘purely subjective reaction’; his conclusions are didactic, dogmatic, presented in the guise of facts.
A psychological rendering of the post-exilic saga of Israel may be pretty enough, but theology has to do with objective reality; and though Dr Jung’s method of ‘answering injustice with injustice’ produces an intensely real theory as it concerns the experience of Dr Jung himself, we ourselves who also possess souls have to test his reality against our own experience of Job, and our own beliefs.
In Dr Jung’s belief, God is an irrational union of opposites containing both good and evil. Although this belief is argued here from the Book of Job, it is well known that a lifetime’s study of the human psyche has gone to form the author’s opinions. Dr Jung emphasises that to him, God is a ‘psychic reality’, and that this reality is very real indeed.
The psyche is a natural phenomenon. Dr Jung, as an empiricist, admittedly does not deal with things supernatural. ‘It is only through the psyche that we can establish that God acts upon us, but we are unable to distinguish whether these actions emanate from God or from the unconscious. We cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities.’
That is where his findings differ from those of Christian theology. His further tenet, that God ‘continually incarnates through the Holy Ghost in the temporal sphere’, is in line with Christian belief, but allied with a dualistic conception of deity, it throws on mankind the tremendous task of bringing to light ‘the dark side of God’.
We are at present concerned with these doctrines as they derive from Dr Jung’s study of the Book of Job, his rationale.
The Book of Job is a magnificent dramatic poem. It is fictional, not historical; that is clear to the common intelligence and the fact also enjoys the approval of the strictest orthodox. In it a character called ‘Job’ is ruinously beset by a character called ‘Satan’ by permission of a character called ‘God’. The anonymous poet arranges for Job to engage in a circuitous dialogue with three predatory characters, his Comforters, to whom a fourth is later added.
The poet has conceived Job’s character as one which provokes suffering. Job, by his punctilious uprightness, has, in a sense, tempted Satan. When, bereft of his family and property, he sits nursing his boils on an ash-heap while his friends wait silently by him, it is Job who bursts forth with an eloquent curse, the sort of holy blasphemy that is inevitably misunderstood. The Comforters respond, they develop into tormentors. Job’s tribulations increase as the poem proceeds. He not only argues the problem of suffering, he suffers the problem of argument.
The harm Satan did to Job seems trivial in comparison with the crushing afflictions which we actually see in progress. He appears surrounded by a conspiracy of mediocrity, obsessed with a raging need to shock them and at the same time to communicate his feelings. The zealous patriarchs are no less exasperated. The appearance of the fourth Comforter, Elihu (whether inserted by a later hand or not), merely aggravates the situation; the dialogue makes no rational progress, and Elihu is in every sense the last straw.
At this point God speaks from the whirlwind; the characters cannot understand each other, but this is something they can all understand. To distinguish God’s speech from those of the previous cycles, a close study of the imagery would be necessary; the imagery follows a poetic ‘rationale’ and indeed it is only by this means that the poet conveys the deeper import of the speeches underlying their apparently inconsequential rhetoric.
In tone, God’s first speeches do not differ from what has gone before, in fact he speaks of Himself in terms which appear to support the Comforters rather than Job; the effect is of a grandiloquent display of power. There follows an epilogue, in which God addresses Job and his first three Comforters. Job is commended for what he has spoken, and instructed to pray for his friends, while they, who have not spoken rightly of God, are to offer burnt sacrifices for themselves. Job’s property is restored double-fold, and he is blessed with a new family.
The stumbling-block for most intelligent readers of Job is the epilogue. The poet has elevated his hero in our eyes by subjecting him to a purgatorial inquisition; having survived this, Job must, we feel, emerge in a different, more highly spiritualised form. What, then, are we to make of his reward? – 14,000 sheep, 6,000 camels, oxen, asses; seven sons, unnamed; three daughters re
spectively and frivolously entitled by names which, translated, are ‘Turtle Dove’, ‘Cassia’ (a perfume), and ‘Box of Eye-Paint’. Can we really imagine our hero enjoying his actual reward? The tendency of commentators to ignore the epilogue is understandable.
The construction of the Book of Job is commonly understood to be as follows: prologue and epilogue, written in prose, are derived from a traditional story, current at the time of composition and representing a pre-exilic, patriarchal point of view. We have here the beginning and the end of the older story (of which a Babylonian version is known), presented by a later hand but preserving the traditional situation. The dialogue, written in verse, makes up the body of the book.
Anyone interested in the literary form of the work will notice the almost Aeschyllian twist which the dialogue gives to the ancient narrative, an observation which is not at odds with modern textual research. It is as if the poet employed the fable in order to question, though not necessarily to refute, its tenets, reflecting as they do the complacent sentiments by which the Comforters take their several stands.
On textual grounds there is no justification for absolutely ignoring the prologue and epilogue. They appear in all texts of Job as we know it. For purposes of exegesis some commentators prefer to regard both prologue and epilogue as decorative, background material, concentrating on the import of the dialogue. It is difficult to suspend consideration of these passages, since they include indispensable information, without which the poem loses all dramatic significance.
Without the prologue, we cannot begin to understand Job’s first outburst; and in the epilogue we find the only rational words which God is represented to speak in his answer to Job; that is where Job is instructed to pray for his friends and they to offer sacrifices for themselves. (This is, in fact, the only intelligible answer to the problem of suffering, from a literal reading, which the Book of Job has to offer; the importance of retaining the epilogue should be evident from this fact alone.)
None the less, if commentators make their method sufficiently clear, it is possible to treat the dialogue separately. But there is no logical foundation for the practice of accepting the prologue and rejecting the epilogue. That is what Dr Jung does. He chooses to cut the work short at Job’s final speech of submission. He even congratulates the poet on doing so! He actually writes:
The poet of this drama showed a masterly discretion in ringing down the curtain at the very moment when his hero, by prostrating himself at the feet of God’s majesty, gives unqualified recognition to the apophasis megale of the demiurge – his ‘great declaration’ of himself. No other impression was permitted to remain.
Yet the epilogue remains, giving quite a different impression from what Dr Jung asserts of the poem. It is true that the literary sense of Western humanism would be better satisfied without the epilogue, but one cannot edit the writings of the ancients if true knowledge is desired of what went on in their psyche. If Dr Jung wants the prologue (and his whole theory hangs upon it) he must have the epilogue, no less than his hero Job had apparently to suffer his reward.
A sense of horror at God’s indulgence of Satan, as it is presented in the prologue, is Dr Jung’s predominant motif; himself a compassionate man who has presumably seen much suffering, he is angry with God for permitting evil. Christians accept this fact, and call it a mystery. They mean by this to recognise a situation which cannot be explained by human analogy. At the point where human reason cannot reconcile the fact of evil with the goodness of God, an anthropomorphic conception of God breaks down. Is this not the main point of the Book of Job?
Dr Jung does appear to see that the poem marks a critical stage in the development of Israel; knowledge of God could not be calculated from human standards, that is what the poem teaches. But Dr Jung, if he sees this, does not apply it to his speculative reckonings. By human standards he calculates a God in whom good and evil are together contained. The epilogue of Job reveals, perhaps, too good a God to be true in Dr Jung’s conception of what is true. Or is the epilogue too ‘goody-goody’ to be convincing?
The question turns on the epilogue. And it is, after all, a question of common sense. We are dealing with a work of art; it is susceptible to many interpretations throughout; and then we do not apply the same quality of interpretation to every part. That the prologue and epilogue are to be read in a different sense from the dialogue is obvious; the former are prose writings, the latter verse. The prologue and epilogue belong to the childhood of the race. They are fabulous and suggestive; the dialogue is immediate and particular.
If we read only the prologue and the dialogue, the effect is extremely ironical; add the epilogue and we are given that type of anagogical humour which transcends irony, and which is infinitely mysterious. Read aright, the epilogue is not merely a conventional happy ending; it represents something beyond the reach of discourse which Job, for all he was an upright man, really had to come to terms with in order to gain his peace; some wisdom which combines heavenly ideas with earthly things not the least of which, perhaps, are symbolised by Eye-Paint and her sisters.
[1955]
An Unknown Author
‘The Patience of Job’ is a popular nineteenth-century concept. I know of no serious or studious reader of Job since, and including, the poet Shelley who ever thought of Job as a patient man. Professor Scheindlin attacks the concept without need. That apart, he has given us a beautiful new translation and a profound commentary which should last a long time in the field of Job studies.
If the Book of Job were a true story, one might be struck by the number of times Job asserts God’s innocence, refusing ever to attribute to God any blame for his agonies. Is this because he is being overheard by God? One wonders what Job might have said had he been assured of complete privacy. With God we have none of us any privacy, in itself an almost intolerable burden. If we did not set God aside in our minds for most of the time, we would be semi-paralysed. We could never get anything done, never be ourselves.
The Book of Job is one of the most magnificent narrative dialogue-poems ever written. The original myth sprang from a source or sources known as ‘the Babylonian Job’, but the Book of Job as we know it belongs to a single author of the fifth or fourth century BC. It is the one book of the Bible that we are not invited to take literally. There was no real Job in the sense that there was a Moses, an Abraham. Job, like a character in the parables (say, the Good Samaritan), is an idea, not a person of history.
Job is afflicted with great suffering. Some say it was an attack of shingles, which, as anyone who has suffered from the affliction knows, is extremely painful. He is shown sitting alone outside the city, visited by a series of friends who are commonly known as the Comforters. They do little to comfort him. They keep telling him: ‘Job, this is a punishment from God. You must have done something.’ But Job answers emphatically that he has done nothing to deserve this fate. Suffering falls on the worthy and the unworthy alike. ‘But Job, you must have sinned’, they say. ‘No,’ says Job, ‘God is not like that.’
I feel that Job’s friends the ‘comforters’, who come to question and counsel him, and occasionally gloat as he sits outside the city among the ashes, are very much alike. There is a bureaucratic duplication of what they say, and nothing of it really applies to Job’s condition. They resemble interrogators sent in one after the other to question a suspected prisoner and try to trip him up.
At this point in Hebrew development the moment was ripe for a Prometheus-like figure to challenge the all-mighty powers of creation. Job challenged God to come out like a man and reason with him.
[…]
What resolves the situation is a whirlwind, and God himself speaking out of it. And from here we come to the finest poetry of all time. God points to his creation of the world.
Professor Scheindlin observes:
Job’s poetry achieves the book’s purpose of consolation partly by providing its own vigour as an antidote to its pessimism, by changing the level of the
discussion from a meditation on life’s injustice to a parade of life’s sheer multitudinousness. The poetry is in part a vehicle for steering us away from the suffering with which life burdens us towards the delight at what life has to offer. This is not a quantitative argument. The author does not make the simplistic claim that life’s delights are commensurate with or compensation for life’s sorrows. He does not make any argument at all. All arguments have been rendered nil by the book’s premise. Since the narrative presents Job’s complaint as rational and correct, there is no room left for a rational solution. Rather, poetry is used to shift the ground from reason, where life must lose, to emotion, where it at least has a chance.
The construction of the Book of Job is a poetic joy. There was an author, the one who perfected the final Hebrew version. Who was he? How one would like to know.
[1998]
Man’s Estate
In The Phenomenon of Man Father Teilhard de Chardin applied himself to reconciling Christian theology with natural science. With the same grandeur of vision Le Milieu Divin is set in a more specific field to reconcile personal aspirations, the religious and the natural, and to define their ultimate single purpose.
