Being Old And Full Of Days
William Safire, he the conservative spitfire, has a mildly interesting piece in today's NYTimes on, of all things,
Howard Dean and the Book of Job (the link here is to a paper in Germany, just to ensure easy access for everyone). As a teacher of literature, I often have to invoke stories from the Bible to make a point about this or that, and with the possible exception of the Genesis and Exodus myths (and I use the word myth not in the derogatory 'not true' sense that others have pinned to it over the years, but in the Greek-sense of
mythos, meaning 'story'), the Book of Job is the one that has come up the most often. More provocatively, I've always felt that three books stand within the Bible very peculiarly, 'sticking out like sore thumbs' being probably the most appropriate cliche: those books, by the way (from my perspective), are Revelation, the Gospel of St. John, and the
Book of Job.
I don't really want to talk about Dean, whose invocation of the Book of Job strikes me as being about as appropriate as Pat Robertson calling on God to bring down pro-choice Supreme Court justices. But I do want to talk about the Book of Job for a bit, which many take to be a vindication of human suffering, and a parable to encourage human supplication before God, because, as God chides Job, (paraphrasing) where we when He created and tamed the behemoth (40:15), and where we when He shut up the sea with doors (38:8); have we seen the doors of the shadow of death (38:17) or have we drawn out the Leviathan with a hook (41:1)? And on and on. God's response to Job's suffering is very much like that of the father to a child, not answering the child's question's, but scolding it for the things it has not done and has not known, and basically minimizing Job and his suffering against the larger pattern of God's actions and designs. God never fully addresses the truth, that the tragedies that befell Job (the loss of his daughters, of his home, of his wealth) were the result of a bet -- a
bet-- God made with the Adversary (Satan) on Job's ultimate fidelity to God. (Keep in mind that the Adversary in Job is not quite the same vision of
Satan that most of us associate with Milton, or The Far Side, or even
The Exorcist. He is more of an accepted, so to speak, devil's advocate within God's heaven.) But God's answer is essentially a rumbling of his bellyful, an answer of "shock and awe" rather than substance, a cowing of Job with natural and bestiary visions intended, apparently, to cause a wracking of Job's doubts with His power and wisdom. In other words, God's answer is something to the effect of, "How dare you question me? You don't know what I have to do here? You don't, and you can never, understand what I do and what I have done? So, how dare you challenge my wisdom? How dare you ask to understand what you cannot understand?"
It's easy to see, from God's response to Job (as well as other parts of
ta biblia) how Curiousity became known as a sin of pride and
vanitas (of thinking oneself of the same level of God, of seeing one's own self before one's supplication before the wisdom of God). I think we all know what happens after God speaks, though. Job demures, and declares his devotion and faith toward God, for which God "blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning" (42:12) and granting him seven sons and three daughters (42:13), the daughters (of course) being fairer than all of the other young women in the land (42:15). As if replacement children managed to brush away the losses of provious children, we should be logically asking, but logic is not something the Book of Job gives much of a damn about. Northrop Frye once posited that the Book of Job may well be an exercise in taking us as far as possible into the depths of tragedy and somehow finding a way to drag a happy ending out of it, even if that happy ending, especially to modern minds, is about as convincing as an episode of
Reba. When the Book ends with words, "So Job died,
being old and full of days" (42:17), most of us with modern sensibilities are left with a kind of jaw-dropping astonishment at the sudden, and perhaps flip, restorative gestures by which the myth is concluded. Is this just God as a kind of Baba-Yaga figure? Is this just a cautionary tale in not coming between the dragon and his wrath? Is this just an allegory about faith through suffering, or is there a degree of beratement and belittlement at work here, in which the Good Man (TM pending) acquiesces before all that he does not, and supposedly cannot, know?
Modern readings of Job have tended to be very skeptical, or at least problematized, as much as I hate to use that word with all its PoMo associations. Safire mentions Virginia Woolf, who thought God didn't come out of the story looking very good, and he also mentions Nobelist Elie Wiesel who is disturbed by God's evasiveness. Then there's Frye, whose reading is difficult at best, Carl Jung's (see
Answer to Job) whose attempt to understand the book is even longer than the book itself. And William Blake, well, William Blake, had to
wrestle with Job as if he were the Archangel Michael. One can't help but wonder if the God of Job wouldn't dismiss all of the critiques and challenges to God's answer as exercises in hubris and pride and unnatural curiousity. It's interesting, too, how Job responds to God's answer:
THEN JOB answered the Lord, and said,
I know that thou canst do every thing, and that no thought can be withholden from thee.
Who is he that hideth counsel without knowledge? therefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not.
Hear, I beseech thee, and I will speak: I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me.
I have heard of the by the hearing of the ear; but no mine eye seeth thee.
Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes. (42:1-6)
Say what?!?!?!?! Notice that there are no declarations of love, and no declarations of the satisfaction of God's answer. Notice that these, in many ways, are the words of a scolded child, admitting that he doesn't understand the parent's ken. And notice, too, that something very interesting happens here: Job
sees, or claims to see, God, something
no one else in the Bible claims to do; Moses saw a burning bush, not God himself; and no other figure claims to see God, whether in fact or in his or her mind's eye. (This is not including the human figure of Jesus, but let's not open that can of worms: let us merely say that the 'traditional' God is only seen, supposdely, by Job. God, in other parts of the little books, manifests himself to humans only by sound.) Talk about shock and awe, and I can't help with my cynical self help but think of the
Touched By An Angel trope of a light-show suddenly turning the tide of even the most curmudgeonly toward belief. Let there be light, indeed-- or perhaps darkness, for all we know. But this is the textbook example of obedience despite knowledge, of affirmation without knowledge; it is the lesson of accepting one's ignorance, with the resounding moral seeming to be "trust me." Pardon me, and perhaps this, once more, is my cynical mentality, but I get nervous when I'm told to lay my trust blindly.
So why am I going through this riggamarole? Is there a point to all this, or am I just going over once more the fissures of the Book of Job? Well, to be honest, I can't say there's a specific point, but I can't help feel the same awkwardness permeating our culture at the moment, especially as highly-secretive sources keep telling us to do this and to watch that, but refusing to be more specific than that; there's the pervasive sense that we're being fed elusive answers rather than direct ones, the subtext to those 'answers' being an apparently flip but not necessarily condescending 'trust me,' because perhaps there are things we cannot understand quickly or readily. We have to wonder, however, if we're the object of obfuscations, however necessary or however spurious. And, to be honest, I am no Job: I have a very hard time accepting a lot of the current 'answers' given to matters of our everyday concern. Likely, were it the Book of Doctor J, after God's answers, I'd probably be "but, but, butting" God until he just smote me into silence or until he turned to the Adversary and said "Oh, I give up. He's hopeless." Perhaps this makes me guilty of pride and/or unnatural curiousity or whatever, at least by the earlier standards of such terms. I'm also pretty sure, though, that as lovely as my new daughters were and how glad I would to have sons and wealth and so forth, I'd be constantly reminded of the children I lost, even if I knew or believed they were in 'better' hands. Being old and full of days after such losses might finally prove merely more time to lament the lost, and to suffer in regret.
I think my point, if there really is one, is that we're in a historical situation right now that is not that far removed from the Job situation, of supposed settlement despite the inherently unsettling nature of that settlement. We're asked to put our trust in the wisdom of others, sometimes with apparent benefit, even though many of us may legitimately question the ways and means of such supposed wisdom. We also have to wonder what true wisdom is. Is it the wisdom of knowing what we need not know, or is it the wisdom to question further and to pursue knowledge even into its darkest caverns? The Book of Job provides one answer, but it's also an answer many of us ('with enquiring minds' better not follow that ;-) ) find finally more disturbing than the situations which engendered our initial doubts and fears. Is this a failure of faith on my part, on the part of many of us now used to searching for knowledge? Perhaps. But many of us also know all too well that faith is often something for which others plead while they betray.
Do we stand up to the obscurantism, or do we supplicate ourselves before a wisdom that we cannot be entirely told? Do we accept the condition of settlement, regardless of how unsettling that condition may be in its making? Do we abjure knowledge to a tenet of faith, especially if faith, like love, can be manipulated against us? And is there a 'happy' ending on the horizon, to which we ought surrender ourselves? And is this truly a happy ending, or just an ending we're supposed to accept as a happy one, tacked-on and self-justifying as it may seem?
I can't say I have any answers to any of this. But here's where I come back to Howard Dean. Dean's invocation of comparing himself to Job by virtue of his questioning of authority seems to me reductive, and if Dean is indeed a man of thought and belief, he'd question further his own self-figuration, as indeed I'd hope the likes of William Safire would offer further thought. Perhaps we are not here to verify, or instruct ourselves, or inform curiousities, or carry report. But perhaps there must be more than praying where prayer has been valid. I don't know.
All I do know is that the prospect of being old and full of days may either be our great curse or our great redemption. But must we come to abhor ourselves, after placating ourselves before the things we do not know? And must we lay our hands upon our mouths? If so, pardon me while I gather my doubts as the whirlwind rumbles its bellyful. (And, yes, as many of you well know,
King Lear is never too far from my mind. The Zaniac recently discovered that he's reached the point that he sees Hamlet under his bed at night; I see
King Lear, in all its Jobean might.)
