 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Suffering in Jewish Philosophy As universes go, this one does have its good points. There is the occasional promotion at work, the odd open-air screening of Buster Keaton's The General, the opportunity to enjoy friends, family, and podcasts. But on the other side of the balance is the enormous amount of suffering endured by humans. Poverty, war, sickness, pain, these things have always been prevalent in human life and show no sign of being banished any time soon. It's a matter of dispute, whether the good outweighs the bad, but there's no disputing the reality and extent of suffering. So, theologians and philosophers of all religious persuasions have always felt the need to offer what is called a theodicy, from the Greek words theos or God and dike or justice. To offer a theodicy is to justify God, that is to explain how it can be that the world does contain evil and suffering, even though it was fashioned by a wise, good, and powerful divinity. Obviously, this issue is nothing new in our history of philosophy. Plato's appeal to the principle of necessity in his Timaeus, Plotinus's idea that evil is a kind of privation or non-being, the Greek church-father origins idea of fallen souls, these are only a few of the prominent theodicies we've already discussed. But the problem of suffering might nonetheless be said to occupy an especially central place in the Jewish philosophical tradition. The narrative of Judaism embodies the problem at its most paradoxical. The Jews are selected by God as the chosen people, yet wind up suffering more than any other people, their temple destroyed, their homeland lost, scattered in exile. How providential then, perhaps literally, that the Hebrew Bible should include one of the classic religious texts on suffering, namely the book of Job. I don't know if you've read it recently, but if not you might want to. It's not terribly long and has a poetic power that is awesome in every sense of the word. I'll summarize it for you now, occasionally quoting from Len Goodman's translation of the Arabic version by Sa'adi Yagaon, which is a nice Job if you can get it. It begins in once-upon-a-time mode, with the following words, A man there was in the land of Uz, whose name was Job, and that man was blameless and upright, God-fearing and shunning evil. Here we already have one of the key thematic and philosophical points of the book. Job is a good man, so surely God will shower favors upon him, right? Well, yes, at first. He has a large family, is wealthy with lots of livestock, and conscientiously sacrifices to God to thank him for this bounty. But then, a second character turns up—Satan. He suggests to God that Job only shows due reverence to his Lord because he has been so highly favored. Take away his prosperity in his family and he'll sing a different tune, cursing God's name. God agrees to test Job, and arranges for his wealth and family to be lost. Job is, naturally, rather upset by this. He tears his clothing, shaves his head, and falls prostrate, saying, Naked came I from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return to the grave. Still, he does not curse God, so Satan urges God to take away Job's bodily health. God allows this too, instructing only that Job's soul be left unharmed, and Job is struck down with illness, covered from head to toe with sores. Now, Job laments at greater length. He still does not curse God, but does curse the day he was born, and in general, bewails his fate. At this stage, things turn more in the direction of a debate. Three friends of Job appear, with the rather wonderful names Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. Rather than offering comfort and sympathy, they berate Job. Surely he has committed some sin, or God would not be visiting such misery upon him. Job denies this, insisting that he has remained righteous. Next, a fourth friend, named Elihu, having listened to this and been unimpressed by Job's critics, joins the conversation. He puts it to Job that God and His majesty may be inscrutable to us in his ways, but can never be accused of injustice. If God sees fit, He may send down the greatest of suffering on any man, until his soul wretch at food, even the choicest ailments and the bulk of his flesh perish from sight, his bones ground until invisible. Then he may also reward the same man later in compensation. Job is silenced by this speech, but a far more impressive speaker is yet to come. From the midst of a great storm, the voice of God comes to Job, saying in effect, who are you to complain? Where was Job when God was fashioning the world? Suitably chastised, Job agrees that the Lord's power is invincible and recants his lament, taking solace in dust and ashes. Which turns out to be a good move. God is now satisfied that Job has passed the test, and commands that Job be restored to wealth, regain wealth and a large family, and in general live happily ever after. This riches to rags to riches story can be read as a kind of philosophical dialogue, albeit not of the sort preferred by Socrates. There is no question and answer exchange or detailed refutation. Rather, the cast of characters mostly declaim at one another in long accusatory speeches. On the other hand, the book of Job does have something in common with the Socratic dialogue. It ends without giving any obvious answer to the main question at hand. There's no clear message about why a just God would allow suffering to be inflicted on a good man. What does come through loud and clear, like a voice from the whirlwind, is God's might and unquestionable majesty. Perhaps the answer to our question about why God allows evil is that, as mere humans, we have no right to ask. But Jewish commentators on the book of Job were not content to leave it at that. It received some attention in antique Judaism, but came to be an object of especially intense scrutiny in the medieval period. Many commentaries were written on Job, often dealing more with the linguistic or surface meaning of the book. But philosophers too were attracted to it. Like late ancient commentators on Plato, they thought the text's failure to provide any clear doctrine was only skin deep. A philosophically informed reading could discover a rich teaching on divine providence, often on the basis of small but crucial clues. Looking at these treatments of Job will allow us to do two worthwhile things at once—to follow the key philosophical theme of suffering through the history of medieval Jewish thought, and to see how scriptural commentary could be a means of philosophical reflection, and vice versa. I'm going to look at several readings of Job, beginning with the one offered by its Arabic translator Saadia Gaon. As you'll remember, Saadia was the leading early medieval Jewish philosopher. He lived from the 9th to the 10th century. He discusses the problem of suffering in the work we talked about before, the book of doctrines and beliefs, but he also wrote a commentary on the book of Job itself. Like later philosophical commentators, Saadia thinks it contains a positive teaching about God and evil. He avoids the most tempting and easy resolution of the problem, which is to agree with Job's friends Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar—love those names—that Job must have done something to deserve his torment. There is something right about their view in that God does indeed punish the wicked with suffering, but there is another purpose for suffering too—to test the righteous. This is the hidden message of the speech given by Job's fourth and wisest friend Elihu. Here Saadia is giving a fairly plausible reading of the text, since in the dialogue between God and Satan, God does seem to agree to wreak havoc upon Job as a way of testing his devotion. The idea is also faithful to Jewish tradition, since late ancient rabbinic thought had offered a similar interpretation of the infamous episode in which Abraham is commanded to sacrifice his own son, Isaac. There too, Abraham was being tested by God. Like Abraham, Job passes the test with flying colors. To maintain this reading, Saadia needs to quash any suspicion that Job's lament in the book is itself a kind of sin, a failure to accept what God has sent, however unwelcome it may be. It may seem unjust for God to test Job in this way, especially if he's being arbitrarily singled out for such an ordeal, but this overlooks the fact that Job will be rewarded later on to recompense him for his pains. That's what happens at the end of the story, when Job has his considerable wealth, health, and family restored to him. On Saadia's interpretation, it's crucial that God does not explain his whole strategy in the final speech from the whirlwind. Suppose he were to say, look here Job, all of this is like a scheduled fire drill, only a test. You just need to be patient and you are guaranteed to win out in the long run. In that case, Job would not really be tested, since it would be obvious that the smart play is to display devotion and humility until the test is over. Hence, God simply declares his own unchallenged power to see whether Job will submit as he ought to. Once Job does submit, he gets his reward. Of course, none of that is to be found at the surface level of the text. As Robert Eisen has said in his very useful study of the book of Job in medieval Jewish philosophy, Saadia is often the philosopher, reading ideas into the biblical text, rather than the exegete, reading them out of it. And not just any philosopher either, but a philosopher who was deeply influenced by Islamic kalam. When we first looked at Saadia, we saw that he borrowed extensively from the contemporary Muslim theologians known as the Mu'athazilites. Of course, they too had something to say about suffering and divine justice, and sometimes they even did so in the context of discussing Job, whose travails are mentioned twice in the Qur'an. As the self-styled Upholders of Divine Justice, the Mu'athazilites wanted above all to avoid admitting that God would ever deal unfairly with his creatures. Just as any evil we commit in this life will be punished, either before we die or in the hereafter, so any suffering we undergo in this life will be recompensed either in this life or the next. The Mu'athazilites went so far as to extend this idea to animals, stating that those who suffer will be rewarded in paradise, for instance with food. The Mu'athazilite God has been compared to a cosmic bookkeeper, always making sure the scales are balanced with evil going punished and suffering made good by compensation. In sharp contrast would be the theory of the rival kalam school, the Asharites. Their view would correspond to the don't ask, don't tell reading of God's final speech in the book of Job. We should simply accept what God, in his majesty, chooses for us without presuming to evaluate how well it conforms to our human expectations of justice. Saadia lived too early to see this opposition become entrenched in Islamic kalam, but it was well known to later Jewish philosophers, including the greatest of them, Maimonides. As we know, his guide to the perplexed is meant to help resolve philosophical difficulties arising from Scripture, so it is no surprise to see him include in it a discussion of the philosophically difficult book of Job. Where Saadia, and for that matter I, have presented Job's three friends as sharing a single view, Maimonides thinks that they represent three different ideas about divine providence. On his reading, only Eliphaz thinks Job is being punished for previous sins. Maimonides agrees with Saadia on this point. As it says right at the start of the book, Job is a righteous man, he has committed no sins for which he could be punished, so Eliphaz is simply wrong. Next comes Bildad, who for Maimonides is espousing the fire drill theory of Saadia and the Motezilites. Suffering is only a test. Zophar, meanwhile, goes with the Asherite view that God's ways are simply inscrutable. More remarkable still is that Maimonides sees Job himself as espousing a theory of providence. Maimonides thinks of the theory as being that of Aristotle, but it actually bears a greater resemblance to the interpretation of Aristotle we long ago saw being offered by Alexander of Aphrodisias. According to this Aristotelian theory, divine providence looks to the general good order of the universe but has no application at the level of the individual. To this, one could add Avicenna's question about whether God even knows about the things that befall individual people, never mind whether he actually intends them. So, when Job laments, he is not really blaming any divine plan, he is just cursing the fact that the natural order has by chance visited particularly harsh suffering on him. What this theory misses, according to Maimonides, is the fact that in exceptional cases humans may be granted reprieve from the vicissitudes of the natural order. This is the point he finds in the speech of the fourth friend Elihu. At one stage Elihu refers to an angel who will speak on behalf of the afflicted. What does this angel represent? Apparently some intervening force that can rescue people like Job from their distress. For Maimonides this has to do with the distinctively human faculty of intellect. The angel could represent a prophetic vision of future events, which allows the recipient of the vision to avoid future evils. But more fundamental, for Maimonides, is the idea that the intellectual part of each human transcends the physical realm where suffering occurs. So, Maimonides does after all diagnose a failure of sorts on the part of Job. Though Job is righteous and without sin, he is no philosopher. This means that he conceives of happiness in terms of the material goods of wealth, health, and family, and can only lament when these material goods are suddenly lost. What he ought to do is seek refuge in intellectual life, identifying himself with that part of him which is invulnerable. We are given a hint in this direction early in the book of Job, when God tells Satan that he can ruin Job's body but must spare his soul. The lesson discovered by Maimonides shares much with ethical teachings we have seen previously in our history of philosophy. Ultimately, it goes back through the Platonist tradition to the ethical ideal of Stoics like Epictetus. We should value only what is invulnerable, which for Platonists means nothing but the immaterial intellectual soul. Among texts from the Arabic-speaking sphere, it may remind us of the ethical treatises of figures like al-Kindi, al-Balchi, al-Razi, and Miskaway. They all argued that goods apart from intellect are inevitably lost, so that valuing them leads inevitably to sorrow. For subsequent Jewish philosophers, though, this intellectualist ethics would be first and foremost associated with Maimonides. His interpretation of the book of Job was taken up by two rationalist, pro-Maimonidean thinkers we looked at in episode 164, Ibn Tibbon and Gersonides. Both of them adhere fairly closely to Maimonides's reading of Job, albeit that they turn his ideas in rather different directions. The arch-Maimonidean Ibn Tibbon wants to stress the irrelevance of the material sphere for the happiness of the right-thinking person. He focuses especially on the immortality of the human soul. Like Maimonides, Ibn Tibbon thinks that Job laments because of his lack of philosophical understanding. If he were a philosopher, he would know that he is going to live on after death and be free of suffering. The surest way for him to avoid misery in this life is to identify himself with that intellectual part of him that will survive, since it is already beyond the bodily realm. This doesn't seem to justify the bodily sufferings that are visited upon us. To state the obvious, pain hurts, and the fact that I have an immortal soul doesn't make it hurt any less. But Ibn Tibbon thinks the Maimonidean theory can help explain why God would allow suffering. It is actually good for us to suffer, not because we are being tested as Saadia proposed, but because it teaches us not to seek happiness in this world. If our earthly lives consisted of nothing but pleasure and comfort, what reason would we have to turn towards our true happiness which lies in intellectual perfection? Gersonides takes a rather different tack in his Wars of the Lord, as well as a commentary he devoted to the Book of Job. Yes, yes, Gersonides agrees, we should pursue intellectual perfection, as the philosophers say, but this is not the ultimate lesson of the Book of Job. It is rather the assumed background. Unlike Maimonides and Ibn Tibbon, who thought that Job laments because he lacks philosophical insight, Gersonides thinks that Job is a philosopher from the start. What he needs to learn is that God has provided us not only with the prospect of an afterlife free of suffering, but also by helping us in this life. When Job begins his lament by cursing the day he was born, Gersonides takes this to represent a belief in astrological determinism. As an Aristotelian philosopher, Job thinks that our bodies, though not our intellectual souls, are at the mercy of nature and its workings. The speech of Elihu and the declaration of God from the whirlwind are supposed to remind Job, and us, that it is within God's power to show favors to individuals if he so chooses. He can do so by selecting someone to receive prophecy, for instance. Here, Gersonides is correcting the excesses of Aristotelian rationalism, where too little room is left for miraculous divine intervention. Gersonides has good reason to establish harmony between the Maimonidean approach and more traditional conceptions of divine providence. Remember that Maimonides and his followers did not step into an intellectual void. Generations of thinkers in Andalusia have already tried to marry the philosophical and Jewish traditions. This could take the form, or should I say matter and form, of Neoplatonic revival and the work of Ibn Gabirol. But the mainstream approach was more that of an author like Ibn Pakhuda. In his ethical work On the Duties of the Heart, which we examine several episodes back, he adopted a view on human suffering much like that of Saadia Khan. The mere fact of embodiment, which makes it possible for us to suffer, is a test sent to humankind by God. The right response is not to develop some kind of complex theory of providence, or to achieve unity with an act of intellect. Rather, it is to endure whatever God decrees for us with patience and humility with no thought of reward. This means that Ibn Pakhuda has a very simple take on the book of Job. For him, it shows a righteous man accepting the suffering that has been inflicted upon him. Job's friends are simply wrong to say that this is in any way a punishment that Job has deserved. In the 14th century, at least one author reasserted this sort of traditionalist interpretation against the rationalist exegesis of the Maimonideans. This was Simon ben Zimah Duran. He was, I regret to say, not one half of a 14th century music duo called Duran Duran, but rather a rabbi and legal scholar of Spain and Algeria who opposed rationalist developments within Jewish philosophy. One of Duran's works is a commentary on the book of Job, and in it he retrenches to a viewpoint much like that of Sadia and Ibn Pakhuda—suffering is a divine test sent by providence. Unlike them, though, Duran thinks that Job must have done something wrong to bring on this test. He finds the prospect of completely unprovoked suffering sent by God intolerable. Duran finds it easy to assume, though, that Job must have sinned at least a little, since after all he was a rich man who lived a life of comfort. For that matter, the very fact that Job gives voice to his anger and distress can itself be counted as a sin. By so forthrightly rejecting Maimonides's reading of Job and returning to a more traditional Jewish theodicy, Duran gives us a small glimpse of a wider phenomenon. We are accustomed to thinking of Maimonides as the greatest of medieval Jewish authorities in both philosophy and law, but in the generations following his death, his impact was not universally welcomed. The most obvious example was the Maimonidean controversy, which we've already examined. It was in the face of this sort of hostility that Gersonides sought to soften the rationalist edges of the Maimonidean philosophy. Further reactions to Maimonides came from a more radical direction, as we saw with Crescus's assault on Aristotelian natural philosophy. Mystical writers too criticized the great eagle for refusing to achieve a higher altitude. These critics belong to the movement known as Kabbalah. In the next episode, I'll be discussing the roots and development of the Kabbalistic tradition and how its authors responded to philosophers like Maimonides. So, don't mess with the Zohar, but do join me next time for Philosophy and Kabbalah, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.