Three Philosophies Of Life

by Peter Kreeft

  The other thirty-eight books of the Old Testament are summarized in these last two verses. Here indeed are the meaning and purpose of life. For the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. But it is not the end.

  The fear of the Lord, that is the beginning of wisdom, and therefore belongs to the beginnings, and is felt in the first cold hours before the dawn of civilization: the power that comes out of the wilderness and rides on the whirlwind and breaks the gods of stone; the power before which the eastern nations are prostrate like a pavement; the power before which the primitive prophets run naked and shouting, at once proclaiming and escaping from their god; the fear that is rightly rooted in the beginnings of every religion, true or false; the fear of the Lord, that is the beginning of wisdom; but not the end (G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man).

  Conclusion

  Ecclesiastes is a bright book of life. It is bright precisely in its dazzling darkness. It is a book of life precisely because it honestly and nakedly confronts the fact of death. It is a great, great book because it explores, deeply and uncompromisingly, a great, great question: What are our lives here under the sun for?

  That is the greatest question in the world. The only greater book than this would have to be a book that gave the greatest answer in the world—a book like the next book in the Bible, the Song of Songs. The philosopher asks the question, but the lover answers it. The head thinks, but the heart sings.

  In the Song of Songs, life is seen as a love song. Our lives are notes in a great music, a cosmic harmony, a “music of the spheres”, and the point of the song is love because the singer of the song is God—our story, history, is his story—and God is love. But that is another story. And the way to it is by way of Job.

  JOB:

  Life as Suffering

  It is universally recognized that Job is one of the greatest books ever written: a masterpiece, an all-time classic: To the sensitive reader, it is real magic. It is terrifying and beautiful, beautifully terrifying and terrifyingly beautiful. It is fascinating, haunting, teasingly mysterious, tender, and yet powerful as a sledgehammer. It can be obsessive as few books can.

  Though bottomlessly mysterious, it is also simple and obvious in its main “lesson”, which lies right on the surface in the words of God to Job at the end. Unless you are Rabbi Kushner, who incredibly manages to miss the unmissable, you cannot miss the message. If Job is about the problem of evil, then Job’s answer to that problem is that we do not know the answer. We do not know what philosophers from Plato to Rabbi Kushner so helpfully but hopelessly try to teach us: why “bad things happen to good people”. Job does not understand this fact of life, and neither do we. We “identify” with Job not in his knowledge but in his ignorance.

  The book of Job is an enigma answering another enigma. The enigma it answers is life’s deepest problem, the problem of evil, of suffering, of injustice in a world supposedly ruled by a just God. This God, however, is not a hard, bright, brittle, little formula but a mystery. He is the God of whom Rabbi Abraham Heschel said, “God is not nice. God is not an uncle. God is an earthquake.” We may or may not like the God who is an earthquake rather than an uncle, but our likes and dislikes do not change reality. If wc cannot take the God of Job (and the rest of the Bible), that is skin off our noses but not off God’s. We do not make the universe hold its breath by holding ours.

  Job is mystery. A mystery satisfies something in us, but not our reason. The rationalist in us is repelled by Job, as Job’s three rationalist friends were repelled by Job. But something deeper in us is deeply satisfied by Job, and is nourished. Job is not like consommé, clear and bright, but like minestrone, dark and thick. It sticks to your ribs. When we read Job we are like a little child eating his spinach. “Open your mouth and close your eyes.” Job, like spinach, is not sweet tasting. But it puts iron in our blood.

  The power of Job is like the power of the Hebrew language itself. Max Picard described this language (in The World of Silence) as severely limited but concentrated in power (like a laser beam), able to say only a few things, but those few things that it says it says with a trumpet. Its words are like great columns sunk one by one into the earth. The words are vertical words; they join Heaven and earth, as the one Word of God, Jesus, was to do centuries later. Hebrew is the language of the Incarnation. There is a similar “feel” of “verticality” about Job, as if it were written in Heaven.

  I would never have understood Job without the help of two very great writers: J. R. R. Tolkien and Martin Buber. Of course I still do not understand it, but now I can at least stand under it and not under something else that I confuse with it (that is mis-under-stand-ing). Tolkien is the one who translated Job for the Jerusalem Bible, and Buber is the one whose single suggestion gave me the key to open Job’s most mysterious locked door. Let me briefly explain each of these two contributions.

  Only once have I ever encountered a translation that made such a difference, that so opened up for me a previously closed book. That was Frank Sheed’s translation of Augustine’s Confessions, which I found to be as living as molten lava. The most widely used translation of the Confessions is the one by a Mr. Pine-Coffin, and it is worthy of his name. It is a dead translation. Sheed’s is living. When I first read Job in the Jerusalem Bible translation, I did not know Tolkien was the translator. Then, after the remarkable experience of seeing the book open up and come to life and leap out at me from the pages, I later found out that the can opener was Tolkien, whom I always thought to be one of the great epic storytellers of all time. Surely nothing since The Divine Comedy can match The Lord of the Rings except Paradise Lost. Together with The Aeneid and The Iliad and Odyssey, these six make up an epic class of their own.

  But I must thank Martin Buber even more for putting in my hand the golden key that opened up the central door, the central theme of the book, the central solution to the central enigma. Even more than that, this key opened up one of the deepest secrets of theology for me, Christian theology as much as or even more than Buber’s own Jewish theology, by illuminating the koan puzzle of God’s own self-revealed name, the sacred Tetragrammaton, the Ultima Thule of human thought, the revelation of the nature of ultimate reality, the essential nature of God as he is in himself, not just in relation to us. All this was done in a startlingly simple, unexpectedly unsophisticated way. The key to Job is in Exodus 3:14.

  But I am going too fast. I will not talk any more about this solution yet, because a solution is meaningless without an appreciation of the problem. I hope I have whetted your appetite with the promise of a spiritual meal of gourmet dimensions and with just desserts. But we must now begin at the beginning, with the enormously troubling problems raised by this book. I do not mean the problems about the book raised by scholars (for example, who wrote it, why, when, where, and so on) but the problems about life, that is, about ourselves, raised by this book. What arc they?

  Job is like an onion, or a set of nesting boxes, or a package wrapped in many layers. Peel off the outside, and there are more and more on the inside. It is bigger on the inside than on the outside—like a human being, and like the stable in Bethlehem, and like Mary’s womb. There are surely many more problems, and levels of problems, than the four I see and say here, but these four, at least, are there, and they are a start, a priming of your pump so that you, the free and independent reader, can find more on your own.

  1. The “Problem of Evil”

  This is surely the problem, the problem of problems. Most generally, it is the problem of why there is evil at all, especially in a universe created and ruled by an all-good and all-powerful God. Aquinas formulates the problem with maximum succinctness in the Summa; “If one of two contraries is infinite, the other is wholly eliminated. But God is infinite goodness. Thus if God exists, evil would be wholly eliminated. But there is evil. Therefore God does not exist” (STh I, 2, 3, Obj. 1). Augustine’s version is a little longer and a little more explicit: “If God were all-good, He would will only good, a
nd if He were all-powerful, He would be able to do all that He wills. But there is evil [as well as good]. Therefore God is either not all-good or not all-powerful, or both.” A third formulation of the problem is more practical than theoretical: How could God—the all-good and all-powerful God—let bad things happen to good people? This formulation is closer to job’s complaint. It is not just the sheer existence of evil, any evil at all, but the personal presence and experience of evil, the specific evil of injustice, that is the pressing problem. Punishment for deserved crime is evil in a sense, because punishment has to hurt, but in another sense it is not evil at all but good: it is justice. But Job is experiencing not justice but injustice. Bad things—very, very bad things—are happening to him, and he is “good people”, in fact very, very “good people” according to the author of the book (Job 1:1) and, even more authoritatively, according to the author of Job’s very being, God himself (Job 1:8).

  There are only four possible answers to this problem. First, there is the obvious (but wrong) answer for someone who believes in the God of the Bible, the God who is both all good and all powerful: namely, that Job is not “good people”. This is the answer of Job’s three friends, and it is enormously reasonable. The author of the book has to go out of his way to tell the reader at the very beginning that Job is “a sound and upright man, one who fears God and turns away from evil” and to put this truth into the mouth of God himself (Job 1:8). Otherwise, like Job’s three friends, we would certainly opt for this solution. The shocking contrast between appearance and reality, between what appears to be the obviously true solution and what is the real, infinitely more difficult and mysterious and surprising solution, is one of the main dramatic interests of the book. We must not see Job’s three friends as fools, because they are not and because then we would miss the great drama, the irony, the contrast between appearance and reality. We must sympathize with the friends in order to be shocked by God, as they were. In a sense this is the main reason the book was written: to shock the reader with God, the real God, the “Lord of the Absurd”, to use Father Raymond Nogar’s title, as distinct from the comfortable and convenient God of our own expectations and categorizations. If God himself, the all-wise designer of the whole story we arc in, were not this shocking and surprising “Lord of the Absurd” but rational, predictable, comfortable, and convenient, then life would not be a mystery to be lived but a problem to be solved, not a love story but a detective story, not a tragicomedy but a formula. For tragedy and comedy arc the two primary forms of mystery, and if Job teaches us anything, it is that we are living in a mystery.

  The first answer to the problem, then, the answer of Job’s three friends, namely, that Job is not “good people”, is to be rejected because (1) it is evidently not the answer of the author of Job, (2) God himself refutes this answer both at the beginning of the book when he speaks to Satan about Job’s virtues and at the end when he praises Job and castigates Job’s thee friends, and (3) this answer would reduce life’s central mystery to a problem. So we must turn to a second possible answer.

  Perhaps God is not good. This is the answer Job flirts dangerously with when he dreams of dragging God to court and winning his case if there were only an impartial and just judge to sit above both himself and God, but laments that there is no such judge and that God has all the power on his side, but not justice. In other words, God is not good, but God is powerful, so goodness (justice) and power are ultimately separated, not one. This is a horrible, an unspeakably horrible, philosophy, and only Job’s honesty and scepticism about his own innocence deliver him from it:

  How dare I plead my cause, then.

  Or choose arguments against him?

  Suppose I am in the right, what use is my defense?

  For he whom I must sue is judge as well.

  If he deigned to answer my citation,

  Could I be sure that he would listen to my voice?

  He, who for one hair crushes me,

  Who, for no reason, wounds and wounds again,

  Leaving me not a moment to draw breath,

  With so much bitterness he fills me.

  Shall I try force? Look how strong he is!

  Or go to court? But who will summon him?

  Though I think myself right, his mouth may condemn me;

  Though I count myself innocent, it may declare me a hypocrite.

  But am I innocent after all? Not even I know that,

  And, as for my life, I find it hateful.

  It is ah one, and this I dare to say;

  Innocent and guilty, he destroys all alike.

  When a sudden deadly scourge descends,

  He laughs at the plight of the innocent. . . .

  Yes, I am man, and he is not; and so no argument,

  No suit between the two of us is possible.

  There is no arbiter between us

  To lay his hand on both (Job 9:14-23, 32-33).

  The Resurrection of Christ fills the Christian with cosmic joy because it definitively, concretely refutes the horrible philosophy that goodness and power are ultimately separated. Goodness incarnate, the only totally good man who ever lived, the only infinitely good thing ever to appear to finite eyes, triumphed over death, the great evil power that no man can conquer, “the last enemy”. The psychological consequences of belief in the Resurrection are so ingrained in the Christian consciousness that we usually do not realize the chasm between Yes and No here, between belief and unbelief. Try to imagine it: one day you realize that God does not care, that almighty power is indifferent to good and evil, that the story of the universe and the story of your life are told by a bland, blank blah instead of a loving Person. That is the horror that looms on Job’s horizon here.

  Denial of the Resurrection, or of the conjunction of ultimate goodness with ultimate power, can take another form, and this is a third answer to the problem of evil: instead of denying God’s goodness, we can deny God’s power. Imagine one day discovering the bones of the dead Jesus in a Jerusalem tomb. The logical result is the same in both cases—the phenomenon of evil is “explained”—but the psychological results are different. If the God we worship is power but not goodness, goodness is demoted and power exalted in objective reality, and therefore in our lives, too, if we are sane enough to conform our lives to objective reality. We then begin to worship power and reduce goodness to a secondary thing, a means to the end of power or success. Thus religion is divorced from ethics. If, in contrast, the God we worship is goodness but not power, we still put goodness and ethics at the highest level, as absolute, but we cannot trust or expect the good to triumph. We side with God, but we are not confident we are on the winning side. We are good but not confident. It we believe solution number two, the affirmation of God’s power but not of his goodness, we are confident but not good. If we believe solution number three, the affirmation of God’s goodness but not of his power, we are good but not confident.

  Solution number three, the denial of God’s omnipotence, is a very popular solution today, as it was in pagan times. The pagan version of it was polytheism, dividing God into little godlets, none of which has total power. The modern version of it is reducing God to nature or time (process). “Process theology” is the fashionable form of this heresy today. Rabbi Kushner and Dr. Nicholas Woltersdorff have both recently written very popular books propounding this solution for the very same reason: each of them had to rethink his faith in light of a tragic death of a beloved teenaged son. Each had to hold on to the love of God, God as lovable, God as good. Each concluded that God was not in total control of things, that God is still growing and perhaps will always be growing and learning, that God is subject to natural laws. This means that the lovable and loving Person of God is not the ultimate, but that impersonal necessity or the laws of nature are ultimate. They are above God himself. This “solution” takes from us the precious gift of confidence and trust. We can no longer be little children, as Christ commands, and call God “Abba” (“da-da”), totall
y secure in his arms. We have to fend for ourselves. God is reduced from omnipotent Father to Big Brother. He is powerful, but not all powerful.

  Job never flirts with this solution. Like most people, he implicitly argues that if there is a God at all worthy of the name, he must be omnipotent. If he created the universe, he must be omnipotent, for it takes infinite power to create everything out of nothing. Ordinary language agrees with job; the adjective we spontaneously affix to the name “God” is almighty, as if it is God’s first name. Throughout the Bible the question is never whether God is real (only “the fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God’ ”) or whether God is all powerful (only a pagan polytheist or a modern naturalist would question that) but whether God is good and trustable; what he is up to, and what wc are supposed to be up to. Job is a biblical book not only in the sense that it is in the Bible but also in the sense that it assumes the theology of the rest of the Bible. To try to interpret it as contradicting the rest of the Bible, as Kushner and others do—to interpret it as teaching that God is not all powerful or that job is right and God is wrong or that life is a problem to be solved rationally rather than a mystery to be affirmed by faith (all these notions are essentially Kushner’s interpretation)—is to do fundamental violence to the solid foundation of biblical assumptions that neither job nor the book of Job, neither the character nor the work and its author, ever put into question.

  If we cannot solve the “problem of evil” by denying that (1) bad things do happen to good people, as Job’s three friends do by saying that Job is not a good person; or by denying that (2) God is all good; or (3) God is all powerful, then the only thing left seems to be (4) denying God’s very existence. But this simply magnifies all the terrible consequences of all the other “solutions”. Furthermore, it is not Job’s or the book of Job’s solution, for neither Job nor the author of Job is a “fool”. What fifth solution is then possible?