Three knights of faith on Job’s suffering and its defeat

ABSTRACT

The paper explores the manners in which suffering, both natural and moral suffering, is understood and defeated in the lives of different ‘knights of faith,’ who emerge in ‘conversation’ with the book of Job. I begin with Maimonides’ Job who emerges as a ‘knight of wisdom’; it is through wisdom that his suffering is defeated, dissolving into mere pain. I proceed with Kierkegaard’s Job, who emerges as a ‘knight of loving trust,’ who defeats suffering by seeing it as a divine gift, and by obediently and lovingly accepting it as such. Through his loving trust, suffering transforms into blessedness and joy, without diminishing or disappearing, a transformation referred to as a ‘miracle’ by Kierkegaard. I end with my own Hasidic-inspired Job, whom I portray as a ‘knight of protest,’ who defeats what he takes to be divine abuse by protesting against it, forgiving God while refusing to be reconciled with Him. I argue that it is by paying attention to these diverse Jobs that the complex nature of faith can be elucidated. Moreover, I argue that all three Jobs, despite their differences, may be embraced, both from a philosophically descriptive perspective as well as from a religiously committed one.

KEYWORDS:

• Maimonides
• Kierkegaard
• faith
• love
• trust
• protest
• forgiveness
• problem of evil
• Job

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.​

Notes

1. By ‘moral suffering’ I mean suffering that is understood as an injustice.

2. All quotes from the bible are from The Tanakh, A New Translation of the Holy Scriptures According to the Traditional Jewish Text (Philadelphia, New York and Jerusalem: The Jewish Publication Society, 1985)​.

3. All reference to Maimonides within the text are to Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed.For more on the Maimonidean knight of wisdom and his manner of defeating suffering see Verbin, “Moses Maimonides on Job’s Happiness.”

4. For more on the distinction between pain and suffering, see, e.g. Edwards, “Three Concepts of Suffering”; and Cornevale, “A Conceptual and Moral Analysis of Suffering.”

5. The arguments that are contained in the guide that purport to show that we cannot apply any positive predicate to describe God rely on various presuppositions concerning God’s nature, e.g. that He is one, perfect, eternal, etc. If these presuppositions are correct then the conclusions that follow from them, which contradict them, must be false; if the presuppositions are false, then they cannot justify the conclusion. Thus, the divine name, YHWH, has a reference but no meaning. For more on meaning and reference in Maimonides, see Benor, “Meaning and Reference in Maimonides”; see also my paper, Verbin, “Moses Maimonides on Job’s Happiness.”

6. See also the Guide I/Introduction, 7​

7. I am grateful to Cecilia Lind and to Alan Sørensen for helping me with the Danish text.

8. The following abbreviations of Kierkegaard’s works are used within the text:CD: Søren Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses and the Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).EUD: Søren Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).M: Søren Kierkegaard, The Moment and Late Writings. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).SUD: Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).UDVS: Søren Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).WL: Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).

9. There are numerous expressions of Kierkegaard’s insistence that suffering is a necessary feature of the Christian life. See e.g. WL, 192–4. Similarly to Lippit, I find Kierkegaard’s outlook on social suffering: his conceptions of ‘offense,’ of ‘Christian self-denial’ and the ‘double-danger’ of Christianity problematic. See Lippitt, Kierkegaard and the Problem of Self-Love.

10. The will that wills one thing, the will that wills God is not one more tendency, disposition or will among them. It is helpful to understand it as a second order will, saddled with the multiplicity of first order wills, tendencies, and dispositions. As Frankfurt points out, animals too, have first order wills, tendencies, and dispositions. It is the second order will that is characteristically human. It is, thus, the second order will that wills one thing. Kierkegaard indeed speaks about ‘resolving to will to suffer’ (M, 294). See Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person.”

11. See, e.g. ‘love is … devotion and self-sacrifice’ (WL, 107). Thus, it is not the case that ‘renunciation is not necessarily a painful experience because the person who discovers the emptiness of the temporal and the value of the eternal renounces the temporal out of joy of the eternal ….’ Bøgeskov, “Can We Joyfully Will One Thing?” 145.

12. See, e.g. Søltoft, “Is Love of God Hatred of the World?”

13. For a discussion of Kierkegaard’s concept of ‘salighed,’ see Khan, Salighed as Happiness.There seem to be different models of the defeat of suffering in Kierkegaard’s Discourses. For example, the discourse ‘The joy of it that bold confidence is able in suffering to take power from the world and has the power to change scorn into honor, downfall into victory’ (UDVS, 321–41) seems to present a somewhat Maimonidean defeat of suffering by transcending the world. See particularly UDVS, 335. In this paper, however, I focus on what seems to be a distinctively Kierkegaardian model of the defeat of suffering and one, which I find particularly challenging.

14. See, e.g. ‘How does this change take place? I wonder if it is not because a thought, an idea, intervenes … Therefore it is with the aid of the thought, of the idea, of being in love that the change takes place’ UDVS, 234.

15. For more on different types of ‘despair’ see SUD. Despite the conceptual distinction between passive suffering and active sorrowing, Kierkegaard often uses the terms ‘suffering’ and ‘sorrow’ interchangeably. I shall follow him in so doing.

16. For more on the ‘distinction of category’ between suffering and eternal happiness, see Walker, To Will One Thing, 122.

17. For a detailed discussion of Job as a knight of protest, see Verbin, Divinely Abused, particularly Chapter 5; and Verbin, “Resentment and Protest as Theological Responses to the Shoa.” For a rich discussion of Jewish literary sources that present and discuss religious struggle with God and religious protest see Laytner, Arguing with God. See also David Blumenthal’s theological discussion of religious protest in his Facing the Abusing God.

18. See, e.g. Murphy, “Forgiveness and Resentment,” 25. Hampton, “Forgiveness, Resentment and Hatred,” 59–60.

19. Hampton, “Forgiveness, Resentment and Hatred,” 59–60.

20. Ibid., 57.

21. The distinction that I here employ between resentment and moral hatred is borrowed from Jean Hampton. See Hampton, “Forgiveness, Resentment and Hatred.”. For different accounts of resentment and its relation to moral hatred see, e.g. Butler, “Upon Forgiveness of Injuries”; and Griswold, Forgiveness.

22. Hampton, “Forgiveness, Resentment and Hatred,” 59.

23. An example may help to tell the two emotions apart. An elderly victim who was robbed by a gang of youngsters would characteristically feel humiliated by the attack that he had suffered. He would feel resentful toward his attackers and morally hateful toward them. When reading a report of the attack in the newspaper, uninvolved members of society, e.g. ourselves, would not feel resentful toward the attackers; we were not hurt nor would we feel humiliated. We would, however, characteristically feel moral hatred toward the attackers, moral repugnance toward what they had done.

24. Job maintains that God abuses the whole cosmos, disrupting regularities in nature, causing earthquakes and natural disasters, (Job 9:4–7​), malevolently interfering with human society to disrupt the mind of the elders (Job 12:17–19) and malevolently disrupting individual human lives, particularly his own (see e.g. Job 7:12–14; 16–19).

25. Literary depictions of the believer forgiving God for divine injustice appear in Jewish Hasidic tales. See, e.g. Agnon, Days of Awe, 230. I read this narrative backwards into the book of Job and argue that it provides a possible and plausible interpretation of Job’s final address to God.

26. For a detailed argument in favor of a narrow conception of forgiveness, see Verbin, “Forgiveness and Hatred.”

27. These verses, when compared to Job’s response to God’s first revelation, seem to indicate a change in Job. He had said the following words in response to the first divine revelation: ‘See, I am of small worth; what can I answer You? I clap my hand to my mouth. I have spoken once, and will not reply; twice, and will do so no more’ (40:4–5).

28. Had the first attempt at compensation been successful, there would not have been any need for a second one; the same goes for the second. Three or four attempts at compensation/reconciliation reveal a severe breach within a relationship.

29. I am grateful to Victoria Harrison’s work on embodied values for this thought as well as for the recognition of its relevance for interreligious dialogue. See, Harrison, “Embodied Values and Muslim Christian Dialogue.”

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported​ by the Israel Science Foundation [Grant number 1110/13].

Notes on contributors

N. Verbin

Dr. N. Verbin is a senior lecturer at the Philosophy Department and the former Head of the Religious Studies Program of Tel Aviv University, Israel. She specializes in philosophy of religion and in the encounter between philosophy of religion, philosophy of language and ethics. She is the author of Divinely Abused: A Philosophical Perspective on Job and his Kin (London and New York, Continuum, 2010), a co-editor of Forgiveness: Probing the Boundaries (Oxford: Inter Disciplinary Press, 2010), and the author of numerous articles that explore the nature of faith, doubt and their relation to one another.