Three Philosophies Of Life

by Peter Kreeft

  The test is only secondarily the loss of all Job’s earthly goods. The test is fundamentally job’s apparent loss of God. Proof of this is the fact that even before Job gets any of his earthly goods back, he is satisfied at the end just because he got God back. But for thirty-seven agonizing chapters, he does not find God, though he seeks him. His faith tells him, in effect, “Seek and you shall find; all who seek, find.” But his experience tells him the opposite. No one seeks as much, as passionately, as needily as Job seeks; yet he finds nothing. “I go to the east, and he is not there. I turn to the west and he is not there either” (Job 23:8-9). Why? Why does God not answer Job? How is the God of faith, the faithful one, compatible with the experience of seeking without finding?

  The experience is not confined to Job. As C. S. Lewis put it, in A Grief Observed, reflecting on the lack of consolation his faith gave him after the death of his wife:

  Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be—or so it feels—welcomed with open arms, But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.

  In previous ages, especially the Middle Ages, which were strong on reason but weak on psychological introspection, and attention to feeling and experience, the crucial problem was the relation between faith and reason. (Some of the philosophical and scientific conclusions of Aristotle seemed to contradict fire Christian Faith.) In our age, which is weak on reason (and even doubts reason’s power to discover or prove objective truth) and strong on psychology and experience, the crucial problem is the relation between faith and experience. Today many more people lose their faith because they experience suffering and think God has let them down than lose their faith because of any rational argument. Job is a man lor all seasons but especially for ours. His problem is precisely our problem.

  What is the solution? Specifically, why does Job experience God’s absence when God promised to be present? One part of the answer is easy: God is testing Job’s faith. Job must believe in God as real and present and faithful not only because it is easy to believe, because things are going well, because experience so confirms faith that faith is almost unnecessary; he must also learn to believe in God out of sheer faith, even when experience and appearances seem to contradict faith—like Jesus on the Cross, forsaken by God, without consolation of any kind. Such faith is infinitely more precious than the cheap and dispensable faith that leads you in the same direction as experience does. Teeth-gritting faith is valuable not because suffering is valuable in itself or because teeth gritting is valuable in itself but because such faith comes from the deep, eternal center of the person, the I, the will, not from feelings, not from the parts of the person that are dependent on the environment and what happens in the world. For the world will pass away, but the self will not. What the self decides in time is ratified in eternity. The stronger the choice for God at this obscure and unemotional center of the self, the surer and deeper will be the eternal salvation of the whole self. The will is the custodian of the feelings and must learn to lead them, not follow them.

  That is the obvious and easy part of the answer. God is toughening and perfecting Job’s faith, Job’s fidelity, in the furnace of suffering. But there is another part of the answer, which comes not from the nature of Job but from the nature of God. Because of what God is, he cannot show up in answer to Job’s questions, in function of Job’s needs. God will not answer Job because God is not the Answer Man. He is not the Answerer, the Responder. He is the Initiator, the Questioner. He is not second but first, “in the beginning”. His name (which reveals his essence) is “I Am”, not “He Is”. God exists in the First Person Singular. He is Subject, not Object, not even object of Job’s searchings and questionings.

  Everyone who has ever met God as distinct from a concept of God, all the saints and mystics, everyone, in other words, who is like job rather than like Job’s three theologian friends, has said the same thing; when you meet God, you cannot put the meeting into words, much less the God you meet. God cannot be an object of our concepts. Concepts shatter like broken eyeglasses, like broken eyes—in fact, like broken I’s. No longer am I I and God my Thou, my object; now God is I, and I am his thou, his object. Thus the mystics say such strange things about the self, as if it were an illusion or destroyed in this encounter. The illusion that is destroyed is not the self itself but its usual standpoint in which I am I, the center, and God appears on my screen somewhere. This self is illusion, and God shatters it by reversing the standpoint; we appear on his screen. We are his object, not he ours.

  That is why Jesus manifests his divinity so powerfully by always reversing the relationship into which questioners try to put him. His enemies try to pin him down; he pins them down. Theners to classify him; he classifies them. They try to judge him; he judges them. Even his friends try to unveil him, understand him, reveal him, get the mystery of who he is to come out of hiding; but every encounter accomplishes the opposite: they are unveiled, understood, revealed; the mystery of who they are has to come out of hiding when in the presence of the divine Light. “Shall we stone the adulteress or not?”—“Let him without sin cast the fust stone.” “Should we pay taxes to Caesar or not?”—“Give God what is God’s and Caesar what is Caesar’s.” (They were robbing both.) “Who is my neighbor?”—“Go and be a neighbor, like the good Samaritan.” Whenever you try to test him, he tests you, for he is the teacher and you are the student, not vice versa.

  Viktor Frankl speaks of this experience of startling, sudden reversal of standpoint or perspective in the context of the concentration camps. He says in Man’s Search for Meaning that many of the prisoners learned to stop asking the question “What is the meaning of life?” and realized that life was asking them what their meaning was. Instead of continuing to ask “Life, why are you doing this to me? I demand an answer!” they realized that life was questioning them and demanding an answer—an answer in deeds, not just words. They had to respond to this question, this challenge, by being responsible. Even when they did not interpret life, as God’s instrument, even when “life” was an abstraction rather than a person, they felt it questioning them, as the millions of people who have had near-death experiences felt the “Being of Light” questioning them, rather than vice versa. For the one thing you cannot light up is light. Light is the best physical symbol for God because it is the only physical thing that cannot be an object of sight. God cannot be an object of sight, physical or mental. Saint Thomas Aquinas says that we know God correctly only when we know him as unknowable. Scripture says the same thing: “No man has seen God at any time; only the only-begotten Son, in the bosom of the Father, has made him known” (Jn 1:18). If God had not taken the initiative to reveal himself, there is no way we could know him. When we want to know a stone, it is all passive, and we are all active. When we want to know an animal, it is a little bit active, and it can run away and hide. When we want to know another person, we are dependent on the other’s free choice to be known, as well as our own free choice to know: the two roles are equal. Finally, when we want to know God, all the activity must begin from his side.

  So God cannot show up in answer to Job’s questions as if he were a library book (which is the way Job’s three friends treat God). Job pushes buttons, but the God machine does not work, not because it is broken but because it is not a machine. Job finally realizes this when God shows up in his true character as Questioner, not as Answerer. That is why Job repents in the end (Job 42:6). What he repents of is not some specific sin he has committed and hidden, as the three friends suspect, but of his metaphysical mistake, his sin against the grammar of being, his playing the part of God. The best words Job uttered were hi
s last: “The words of Job are ended.” Only when Job shuts up does God show up.

  Most of us talk too much. It is amazing how short Jesus’ sayings arc. When we pray, who does most of the talking? Is it the most important party to the conversation or the least important one? If we had the opportunity to converse with some great person, like Mother Teresa or Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, would we want to do most of the talking, or would we want to listen most of the time? Why do we talk so much to God that we have no time to listen? How patient God must be, waiting until we get rid of all our mental and verbal noise and hoping thatwe do not then immediately turn from addressing him to addressing the world. In that split second of silence between the time we stop talking to God and start talking to the world, God gets more graces into us than at any other time outside the sacraments.

  Job says at one point to his three talkative friends, “What a plague your need to have the last word is!” They are like soap opera queens, always waiting at the exit door to deliver the “zinger” and then leaving. But Job does to God exactly what Job’s friends do to Job! They do not listen to Job because they are too busy talking to him, and Job does not listen to God because he is too busy talking to him. What Job repents of in the end, when God appears, is not that he was worse than his three friends but that he was just like them! They were like the four Zen monks who made a vow of lifelong silence. One day, one of them let out a single word. The second said to him, “You broke your vow of silence.” The third said to the second, “You’re a bigger fool than he is. You did, too!” The fourth smiled to himself and said, “I’m the only one who didn’t.”

  Have you ever kept silent for half an hour, speaking with neither your lips nor your mind? You are going to have to learn that art if you want to endure Heaven, because there will be silence in Heaven for half an hour after the opening of the seventh seal (Rev 8:1).

  Only in silence do faith and experience perfectly line up, for faith tells us that God is I Am, and silence lets us experience his I-ness as well as his am-ness, his priority as well as his reality. All talk subtly falsifies God. As Lao-tzu put it, “Those that say don’t know; those that know don’t say.” For “the Way that can be spoken of is not the eternal Way”. Nevertheless, the Way has spoken to us. “In the beginning was the Word”, not just the silence. We need silence not because God is silence but because God is Word. Only in silence do faith and experience totally line up.

  3. The Problem of the Meaning of Life

  The greatest of all questions, the question that includes all other questions, is the one Job asks God in Job 10:18: “Why did you bring me out of the womb?” In other words, what kind of a story am I in? What are my lines? What play is this? Why was I born? Why am I living? What’s it all about, Alfie?

  It is Ecclesiastes’ question, too, but Job gets an answer, while Ecclesiastes does not. Pascal calls them the two greatest philosophers, and I agree. But why did Job get an answer and Ecclesiastes not? For the same reason Moses got an answer to the questions about which philosophers had speculated endlessly and fruitlessly for ages: Who is God? What is his name? What is his nature? Moses had the good sense to ask him! (See Ex 3:14.) Ecclesiastes is like Job’s three friends: endlessly philosophizing about God. Job is like Moses: Job asks God; he seeks God’s face. And “all who seek, find”.

  But not for a long time. Why the delay? What is the meaning of the delay? Job’s life, about which he asks, is twofold: seeking and finding. Clearly, the answer to the question: What is the meaning, purpose, end, point, and consummation of life? is in finding God. But what about the other half, the seeking? For whom does God let Job suffer and seek and agonize? What did God have to prove? Is Job a bug in a test tube to satisfy God’s idle or sadistic curiosity? Or did God turn up the heat under the test tube just to win his bet with the devil?

  Clearly, God does nothing for Satan’s sake, for evil’s sake. There is no justification for Good kowing to evil, and no need for omnipotence to make the smallest compromise to evil. And clearly not for God’s sake, for omniscience has no need of experiments. God did not need to know Job’s faith would hold. But Job did. All the agony and waiting must have been for Job’s sake, for Job’s good, for Job’s beatitude. Even the cross “is the gift God gives to his friends”, says one of the saints. Especially the cross.

  This world is “a vale of soul making”, a great sculptor’s shop, and we are the statues. To be finished, the statues must endure many blows of the chisel and be hardened in the fire. This is not optional. Once we lost our original innocence, the way back to God has to be painful, for the Old Man of sin will keep on complaining and paining at each step toward his enemy, goodness. Saying “not my will but thine be done” was ecstatic joy in Eden and will be in Heaven, but it is life’s most difficult (and most necessary) task now. Without it, we have no face with which to face God. Why could Job see God face to face and live? Because Job got a face through his suffering faith. As C. S. Lewis says at the end of his novel Till We Have Faces, “How can we meet the gods face to face till we have faces?”

  That is the meaning of life: getting a face, becoming real, becoming yourself—but in ways and toward an end not even dreamed of by the pop psychologists who say these things so casually. Yes, life is a process of becoming yourself—but this is done by suffering, not by sinning; by saying No as well as saying Yes; by climbing against the gravity of the selfish self, not by the direct paths of “self-realization” and “self-actualization”. The meaning of life is war. And our enemies are not less but more real and formidable than flesh and blood. Unless we defeat them, we will die a death infinitely more hopeless and horrible than any battlefield gore. It is not easy to get a face. Job is no exception, but the rule; the trouble God had to bring him through is ours, too, in one way or another. However, Job’s way is unusually visible, extraordinarily externalized. Not all of us lose our children, our health, our possessions, and our confidence in one day. But all of us must learn to lose everything but God, for all of us will die, and you cannot take anything with you but God.

  Philosophers give some noble and beautiful answers to the question of life’s meaning, purpose, and end: virtue, wisdom, honor, character, joy, freedom, “the true, the good, and the beautiful”—but they ignore the grubby little question that nags us as we admire these true ideals: How? How is this dwarf to fly like that eagle? How can I get from here to there, from Before to After, from cretin to Christ? “All right, now you know what you are made for: to become a shining, radiant, strong, noble creature that can endure the perfect light of Heaven, a veritable god or goddess. So get on with it, please. Turn into one. Be ye holy as the Lord your God is holy. Be ye perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” Right!

  You see, a bit of doing is necessary. A bit of sculpting. A bit of spiritual warfare. What is remarkable is not that God hits us with so many blows of the sculptor’s chisel but that he manages with so few. What is remarkable, once you see the distance between where you are now and where you are destined to be, is how God’s mercy succeeds in bringing us there with so little trouble, so little pain. What is remarkable is not how many bad things happen to good people but how many good things happen to bad people. And this is what Job realizes as soon as he sees God at the end, and this is why he is answered and satisfied. And we will be, too.

  God could have created us in Heaven to begin with, happy and sinless. Why did he our chilead give us a time of testing on earth? For the same reason a good teacher does not give the student all the answers. We appreciate the truth more when we find it for ourselves. Then it is more truly ours. The truth here is not just objective truth but our own identity, our own true face. God designed it, but God arranges for us to cosculpt it, to cocreate our own very selves by our choices and experiences in time. We find out who we arc only by living.

  This means that until we are finished, we do not really know who we are (once we stop fooling ourselves). It means that every life is a prolonged identity crisis. Job’s is only mor
e visible and sudden. Once he was Job the righteous, Job the just, Job the good example, Job, God’s favorite. Now all these labels are torn away, and he is a heap of sores on a dung heap scratching himself with a potsherd. No wonder his three friends, when they arrive, do not recognize him (Job 2:12)!

  The Jerusalem Bible’s apt footnote reminds the reader of the suffering servant of God in Isaiah 52 and 53, who was the outcast, like a leper, one from whom men hide their faces, one who was taken outside the city gates to be crucified, outside humanity, excommunicated from his people, “a worm and no man”, as Psalm 22 says that he recited from the cross. Job is a Christ figure, so starkly unrecognizable that he is starkly recognizable, for this is part of what Christ is: unrecognizable, “a worm, and no man. . . outcast of the people”.

  The only place Job can find his identity is in his Author and Designer. The same is true of everyone, for we are all characters invented by one Author, and how could the character find his identity outside the Author? Thus, Job finds his identity only in finding his God; Job solves problem three (his identity and purpose) only in solving problem four, the deepest problem of all, the God problem, to which we must now turn.