Blake, Job and his so-called “Comforters”
Spiritual Sunday
Like many, I am challenged by the Book of Job, which has provided the Old Testament reading for the past three Sundays. Of course, nothing is more baffling than why bad things happen to good people, at least if you believe in a benevolent deity. Milton grapples with this question when, in Paradise Lost, he seeks to “justify the ways of God to man.” The Book of Job wrestles with it in its own way.
To gain some insight, I turned to Archibald MacLeish’s 1956 verse play J.B. I can’t do full justice to the work in this post, but here are some thoughts. Just as Job rejects conventional explanations for suffering in the Old Testament, MacLeish has modern versions of Job’s so-called comforters in J.B. These are “friends” who show up when Job is diseased and forlorn.
In The Book of Job, the three friends find ways to rationalize what has happened to him. Since one shouldn’t question God, they conclude that the fault must lie in Job. They can’t acknowledge that, as Job puts it, God “destroys both the blameless and the wicked.” They refuse to accept that “there is no justice” or that the wicked often prosper (“the wicked live, reach old age, and grow mighty in power”). There will not grant to Job the right “to argue my case with God.” They recite by rote shallow platitudes.
In J.B., the comforters are History, Science, and Religion. (When Job asks, “Why have you come?” Bildad/History sarcastically replies, “For comfort, Big Boy. Didn’t you ring?”) The comfort they offer is modern-day explanations. History informs J.B. that individuals, whether innocent or guilty, are ground up in its mill, and Science provides a similarly impersonal account of human evolution. Zophar/Religion, however, informs him that all humans are guilty and so deserve whatever they get. To this J.B. replies,
Yours is the cruelest comfort of them all,
Making the Creator of the Universe
The miscreator of mankind–
A party to the crimes He punishes…
Making my sin…
a horror…
a deformity…
Religion answers,
If it were otherwise we could not bear it…
Without the fault, without the Fall
We’re madmen: all of us are madmen…
J.B. banishes the three comforters for failing to adequately address his suffering, at which point MacLeish has God, as in Job, speak to him out of a whirlwind. The poetry is magnificent (“Where wast thou/When I laid the foundations of the earth?”) but neither the play’s Satan figure (Nickles) nor its God figure (Mr. Zuss) are satisfied. Mr. Zuss objects to how J.B. arrogantly forgives God:
Then, he calmed me!
Gentled me the way a farmhand
Gentles a big, bulging bull!
Forgave me!…
For the world!…
for everything!
And further on:
…In spite of everything he’d suffered!
In spite of all he’d lost and loved
He understood and he forgave it!…
MacLeish, I think, is getting at how Job becomes a bigger person when he acknowledges the bigness of God, even when that bigness includes human suffering. It’s something I’ve noticed in Greek tragedies as well: while humans work within god-run systems, the divinities can never be more than a system. By contrast, humans like Oedipus or Agave have room to grow, even in their suffering. In that way, they are bigger than their fate. Especially in their suffering.
Nickles/Satan is not all that impressed with God’s complaints about Job’s arrogance:
Arrogant!
His suppurating flesh–his children–
Let’s not talk about those children–
Everything he ever had!
And all he asks is answers of the universe:
All he asks is reasons why–
Why? Why? And God replies to him:
God comes whirling in the wind replying–
What? That God knows more than he does.
That God’s more powerful than he!–
Throwing the whole creation at him!
Throwing the Glory and the Power!
What’s the Power to a broken man
Trampled beneath it like a toad already?
What’s the Glory to a skin that stinks!
And this ham actor!—what does he do?
How does he play Job to that?
“Thank you!” “I’m a worm!” Take two!”
Plays the way a sheep would play it–
Pious, contemptible, goddam sheep
Without the spunk to spit on Christmas!
But Nickles doesn’t have better suggestions on how Job should respond, suggesting only suicide. That, he says, would be a way to get back at God.
The answer the play gives, however, has an element of divinity in it, even though the God figure isn’t part of it. Job reconnects with Sarah his wife, who earlier counseled him to “curse God and die.” She left him, she says, because
I couldn’t help you any more.
You wanted justice and there was none–
Only love.
Peering into the darkness of his suffering, J. B. says, “It’s too dark to see,” to which she replies,
Then blow on the coal of the heart, my darling.
It’s all the light now.
Blow on the coal of the heart.
The candles in churches are out.
The lights have gone out in the sky.
Blow on the coal of the heart
And we’ll see by and by…
We’ll see where we are.
The wit won’t burn and the wet soul smolders.
Blow on the coal of the heart and we’ll know…
We’ll know…
When I had my own Job moment—when my 21-year-old son Justin died in a freak drowning accident—I didn’t blame God only because I didn’t see God operating in our lives in this way. As I saw it, God was more a framework than an intervener.
MacLeish’s play, however, has opened my eyes to where God was. God was in the love of my wife and my other two sons and all my family and friends. I will remember until the day I die certain embraces I had with Julia.
It was love that kept me from becoming cold and brittle. I agree with Nickles that God’s magnificence doesn’t impress. But God can also enter into the most private moments of intimacy. Jesus understood such an intimate God and I catch glimpses of this God as well.
