The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  “Comfort my people,” says our God. “Comfort them!

  Encourage the people of Jerusalem.

  Tell them they have suffered long enough

  and their sins are now forgiven.

  I have punished them in full for all their sins.” (Isaiah 40:1-2)

  “Arise, Jerusalem, and shine like the sun;

  The glory of the Lord is shining on you!

  Other nations will be covered by darkness,

  But on you the light of the Lord will shine. . . .” (Isaiah 60:1-2)

  Now God promises victory to Israel.

  “I have trampled the nations like grapes, and no one came to help me.

  I trampled them in my anger, and their blood has stained all my clothing.

  I decided that the time to save my people had come; it was time to punish their enemies.” (Isaiah 63:3-4)

  And He announces a New Creation.

  “I am making a new earth and new heavens. The events of the past will be completely forgotten. . . . The new Jerusalem I make will be full of joy, and her people will be happy.” (Isaiah 65:17-18)

  Isaiah’s God, then, is the God not only of Israel but of all history. “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool” (Isaiah 66:1). “I am coming to gather the people of all the nations. When they come together, they will see what my power can do and will know that I am the one who punishes them” (Isaiah 66:18-19). Jeremiah’s warnings (late seventh century-early sixth century B.C.) that Israel would be punished for idolatry were drastically fulfilled by the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, by the destruction of the Temple, and by the Babylonian exile of the people of Judah.

  But a change of heart, God promises, will save the people. “I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah. It will not be like the old covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand and led them out of Egypt. Although I was like a husband to them they did not keep that covenant. . . . I will put my law within them and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. None of them will have to teach his fellow countryman to know the Lord, because all will know me, from the least to the greatest” (Jeremiah 31:31-34).

  The last of the great prophets, Ezekiel, deported by the conquerors, had carried the message of faith in Yahweh and personal responsibility. The fall of Jerusalem in 587 B.C. and the destruction of the Temple were the fate of idolatry.

  The Lord spoke to me and said, “What is this proverb people keep repeating in the land of Israel?

  ‘The parents ate the sour grapes,

  But the children got the sour taste.’

  “As surely as I am the living God,” says the Sovereign Lord, “you will not repeat this proverb in Israel any more. The life of every person belongs to me, the life of the parent as well as that of the child. The person who sins is the one who will die.” (Ezekiel 18:1-4)

  Only the choice of Yahweh and not the merit of the people made Israel a special people. And since Yahweh is everywhere, the duties of the believer go with him wherever he may be.

  Ezekiel too sees Israel redeemed in a New Covenant, a kind of new creation. This he foresees in the famous figure of the Valley of Dry Bones, when the Lord commands:

  “Prophesy to the bones. Tell these dry bones to listen to the word of the Lord. Tell them that I, the Sovereign Lord am saying to them: I am going to put breath into you and bring you back to life. I will give you sinews and muscles, and cover you with skin. I will put breath into you and bring you back to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.” (Ezekiel 37:4-6)

  The survival of the faith of Yahweh did not require a fixed sanctuary. That faith could live in the heart of a believer anywhere.

  3

  Struggles of the Believer: Job

  While Moses with his commandments posed the test of obedience and the Hebrew prophets posed the test of faith, the search for meaning was not so simple. The Seeker would not be merely a receptive audience. He would put his faith to the test of experience. The classic travail of this test is in the tale of Job. And his struggles would foreshadow the problems of all later Seekers.

  The Book of Job in the Old Testament embroiders an old folk tale of a just man who suffers unaccountably and seeks explanation from his God. Yahweh Himself had boasted to Satan (the Accuser) in his heavenly council. “Did you notice my servant Job? There is no one on earth as faithful and good as he is. He worships me and is careful not to do anything evil.” And Satan replied, “Would Job worship you if he got nothing out of it?” Satan suggests that Job’s virtue and piety are explained only by his desire for the reward of prosperity. Job has already received the reward of his virtue in a rich farm, a beautiful family, and the respect of all his neighbors. “You bless everything he does,” Satan insists, “and you have given him enough cattle to fill the whole country. But now suppose you take everything he has—he will curse you to your face!”

  Yahweh then allows Satan to put the man’s faith to the test. Job’s cattle are stolen, his sheep are struck by lightning. His children are all killed in a desert storm. And, finally, Satan covers Job’s body with sores. Still Job does not curse God, but he does curse the day he was born. And he asks, “Why let men go on living in misery? Why give light to men in grief? Instead of eating, I mourn, and I can never stop groaning.”

  Three friends then come to Job, and each in turn gives his reasons for Job’s suffering. Each has another way of saying that Job is being punished. “Can anyone be righteous in the sight of God or pure before his Creator?” asks Eliphaz. “God does not trust his heavenly servants; he finds fault even with his angels. Do you think he will trust a creature of clay, a thing of dust that can be crushed like a moth?” Bildad suggests that Job’s children must have sinned and so God only punished them as they deserved. Zophar insists that Job must have sinned even when he did not know it. “God is punishing you less than you deserve.” Job himself does not admit to sin, and does not curse God but only complains of God’s capriciousness. There seems to be no understanding of the ways of God. In a second round of dialogues, these friends recite the punishment of the wicked, while Job retorts that on the contrary the wicked do prosper. In still another round, the friends once again accuse Job of sins he had not recognized. But Job demands an opportunity to present his case directly to God. Still Job does not curse God but extols the Wisdom “not to be found among men.”

  When God finally responds to Job’s complaint of God’s capriciousness it is not by assertions of His power, but by reminders of His glory and the wonders of His creation. He appeals not to revelation but to experience. And He reminds Job that he is addressing the Creator God.

  Who are you to question my wisdom

  with your ignorant empty words?

  Stand up now like a man

  and answer the questions I ask you.

  Were you there when I made the world?

  If you know so much, tell me about it.

  Who decided how large it would be?

  Who stretched the measuring line over it?

  Do you know all the answers? (Job 38:2-9)

  Job, have you ever in all your life

  commanded a day to dawn?

  Have you ordered the dawn to seize the earth

  and shake the wicked from their hiding places? (Job 38:12-13)

  Unashamedly God boasts the rhythms and glories of nature, along with the bizarre miscellany of his creatures:

  Who is it that feeds the ravens

  when they wander about hungry

  when their young cry to me for food?

  Do you know when mountain goats are born?

  Have you watched wild deer give birth? (Job 38:41-39:2)

  Was it you, Job, who made horses so strong

  and gave them their flowing manes?

  Did you make them leap like locusts

  and frighten men with their snorting? (Job 39:19ff.)

  Look at the monster Behemoth;


  I created him and I created you.

  He eats grass like a cow,

  but what strength there is in his body. (Job 40:15ff.)

  Can you catch Leviathan with a fishhook

  or tie his tongue down with a rope?

  Can you put a rope through his snout

  or put a hook through his jaws? (Job 41:1ff.)

  Touch him once and you’ll never try it again. (Job 41:18)

  Finally Job confesses that the Lord is “all powerful; that you can do everything that you want . . .”

  I talked about things I did not understand,

  about marvels too great for me to know. . . .

  In the past I knew only what others had told me,

  but now I have seen you with my own eyes.

  So I am ashamed of all I have said

  and repent in dust and ashes. (Job 42:2ff.)

  The Lord finally accepts Job’s confession, truer than the words of his friends. And blesses Job with a greater prosperity than he had ever known before—fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, two thousand head of cattle, and a thousand donkeys. Now he has seven sons and three daughters, and no other women in the world are as beautiful as Job’s daughters. He lived a hundred and forty years, enjoying his grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

  Why is Job not punished for questioning God’s ways? Nor is he ever told why he had suffered. Was God now rewarding his faith—or only his independent spirit? Could God have admired Job’s courage in challenging his maker? Or was God only reminding Job that God’s ways were beyond his understanding? Did God enjoy wrestling with his creatures?

  This problem that haunted Western thought—Why would a good God allow evil in the world He had created?—was one that Judeo-Christian man had made for himself. It was plainly a by-product of ethical monotheism: a “trilemma” created by the three indisputable qualities of an all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-benevolent God. “If God were good,” observed C. S. Lewis, “He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.” Some have chosen a more radical solution. “The only excuse for God,” said Stendhal, “is that he does not exist.”

  Reluctant to abandon belief in their God, Western Seekers have exercised ingenuity and imagination. Not until the seventeenth century did the philosopher Leibniz give a name to this troublesome problem. “Theodicy” (from Greek theos, God, and dike, justice), he called the study aimed to justify God’s ways to man. And ever since Job, thoughtful men and women have been tantalized by the meaning of evil. They would deny neither their God nor the facts of their suffering lives. Where would they turn?

  4

  A World Self-Explained: Evil in the East

  But this problem of justifying God’s ways to man did not haunt all the world equally. Other world religions were not especially troubled by how to account for the suffering of the innocent or the existence of evil. The Muslims (from islam, surrender to divine will) believed that God owed no explanations to His insignificant creature, and it was blasphemy for man Job-like to demand one. Still, Muslim thinkers volunteered explanations of their own. One was that everything was predestined by God for His own inscrutable reasons.

  Whomsoever God desires to guide,

  He expands his breast to Islam;

  Whomsoever he desires to lead astray,

  He makes his breast narrow, tight. (Koran, Sura 6:125)

  So God’s ways need no further gloss, for “He leads none astray save the ungodly.” And “Whatever good visits thee, it is of God; whatever evil visits thee is of thyself.” For the Muslim, wrong-worship, failure to surrender to the one God, was the sum of all evil, for which man alone must bear responsibility.

  This was the paradox of Islam. For every man must bear the consequences of failure to surrender to “the Lord of the Lord of the worlds.” Yet only an inscrutable God could guide man to the true worship. In the Koran, “the Book in which there is no doubt,” Muslims dissolved the “problem of suffering” in the unchallengeable sovereignty of God. Who was man to make suffering a “problem” when it was simply a fact of Allah’s creation?

  Hindus and Buddhists, who had not committed themselves to a single Creator God, and so had not the burden of ethical monotheism, found their own ways of explaining evil and suffering. “For Hindu thought,” Alan Watts observes, “there is no Problem of Evil. The conventional, relative world is necessarily a world of opposites. Light is inconceivable apart from darkness; order is meaningless without disorder; and, likewise, up without down, sound without silence, pleasure without pain.” The fertile Indian imagination enjoyed enriching their populous celestial pantheon and embroidering their prolific mythology. They even imagined some gods who created evil against their own will.

  Prajapati created the golden egg of the universe. He created the gods, and there was daylight. Then, by his downward breathing, he created the demons, and they were darkness for him. He knew that he had created evil for himself; he struck the demons with evil and they were overcome. Therefore, the legend which tells of the battle between gods and demons is not true, for they were overcome because Prajapati struck them with evil. (Sata. 11.1.0.1-11)

  Other gods created evil willingly. When a wise man asks why Brhaspati, the guru of the gods, told a lie, he replies, “All creatures, even gods, are subject to passions. Otherwise the universe, composed as it is of good and evil, could not continue to develop.” The gods themselves were pleased at the variety and mixture and plenitude of the creation, which would have been incomplete without evil. This mixture was revealed in the paradoxes of good demons and evil gods. The wonderful plenitude appeared in the birth of death, in the overpopulation of the heavens with gods, in the appearance of heretical gods, and every conceivable combination of good and evil.

  * * *

  Still, two quite specific dogmas, shared by Hindus and Buddhists in various forms, diverted them from the problem of the origins of evil and the suffering of the innocent. First, most distinctive and ingenious—and convenient—was the idea of karma (from Sanskrit karman, “deed,” fate, or work). This was a by-product of belief in the transmigration and reincarnation of souls. Karma was a name for the force of all a person’s acts—good or evil—in all past incarnations shaping his destiny in the next incarnation. So karma was an ingenious way both of giving each person some responsibility for prosperity or suffering in the present life and, at the same time, of affirming a fatalism that left the person little power to change the fortunes of the present life.

  A classical form of the idea imagined this karmasaya, an accumulation of the forces of good and evil from what a person did (or failed to do) in earlier incarnations. The suffering or good fortune in the present life, then, was a punishment or reward for earlier acts, just as suffering or good fortune in future lives would compensate for the acts in this life. Personal weaknesses like ignorance, egotism, hatred, and even the will to live all stored the seeds of punishment in the flow of karma. Writers in the Upanishads suggested that somehow the practice of yoga or the power of a god who lived outside the realm of karma might possibly help get a person off the wheel of samsara (life-and-death-and-life). Thus a person might avoid consequences of his acts in earlier incarnations. Otherwise, for example, by the rule of karma, a person driven by gluttony in one life might be reborn in the next life as a hog. It was conceivable that a devout ascetic, renouncing all corrupting desires, might struggle free of his karmic debts.

  Some Hindu sects saw karma as physical seeds that could be passed on through the generations. A dying father, in one Upanishad text, is said to transfer his karma to his son. “Let me place my deeds on you.” Then the son’s acts of atonement would free the father in his later incarnation from the consequences of his own earlier misdeeds. The Jains, from the sixth century B.C., made much of these possibilities. They imagined the pure liva, or living spirit, in each per
son that could and should be kept free of the karmic pollution that might burden a person’s next incarnation. The Jains’ discipline aimed to keep the liva unpolluted, and so assure its rising toward enlightenment through rebirths. Their ahimsa, dogma of absolute nonviolence, made them fearful even of accidentally killing insects. As rigorous vegetarians, they applied ahimsa to plants. They refused to pick a living fruit from a tree, but waited till it fell ripe to the ground.

  Followers of Buddha (who died about 480 B.C.), embroidering the Hindu notions, found their own ways of calculating the ethical balance sheet. They distinguished “deed karman” from “mental karman” (thoughts and motivations), and distinguished deeds from their results. They also attached karma to families and nations. But they kept inviolate their belief in the inevitable balancing of the karmic books. A person’s present life was determined by past actions in other incarnations, but only until all those influences had been used up. Still, the chanting of sacred verses by a relative or a monk might reduce the force of evil karma. The Buddhist belief in an all-pervading flux kept them from any idea of a personal immortal soul. But they imagined a kind of karmic residue that adhered through endless incarnations.

  Hindu Seekers, not believing in a single original Creation by one Creator God, unlike the West, were not so troubled by the Fall of Man. Instead, they avoided the problem by their belief in cycles—cycles of birth, death, and rebirth for the individual, and cycles for society too. For them the problem of origins was dissolved: there was no Origin, and there never was a Beginning. Instead they dramatized the never-ending cycles in their myth of the Four Ages of Man, of deep and vague antiquity.