Perspectival Knowledge in the Book of Job October 22, 2009

The book of Job is often correctly understood as a poetic treatise on Theodicy, within which various theodicies are offered up as explanations as to why Job suffers as greatly as he does. The internal theodocies almost seem to be set against one another, and this has led many to believe that the book does not give a clear answer to the problem of suffering.

However, this simply isn’t true.

As we examine Job, we see that the book argues upon the basis of assumed fixed perspectival epistemological limitations.

Briefly, these are:

1. Human Knowledge: Human knowledge is limited in three domains: (1.)Theology (cf. 42:1-6), (2.)Science (cf. 38-41), (3.)Others (i.e. their minds and hearts/intentions, etc. cf. 1:1-5, spec. v.5).

2. Angelic Knowledge: Although Satan’s lack of intimate knowledge regarding Job’s intentions in worshipping God are clearly seen in 1:6-12, he – acting as God’s agent  in judgment and Job’s spiritual growth (which I’ve argued elsewhere) – is aware of how such trouble came upon Job, and (to some limited extent) why it does. The “sons of God”, moreover, are also presented as having a superior epistemological perspective to that of Job/humanity in 38:1-7 (spec. v. 7), having been present with the Lord at the moment when the foundations of the earth were laid.

3. Divine Knowledge: Chapters 38-41 clearly present God as omniscient in Theology (implicitly) and Science, they do not show His omniscience regarding others (i.e. the minds and hearts of others). Job’s incapacity to know the heart of his children, as well as his wife and friends’ inability to empathize with him can be set in contrast to the Lord’s sovereign usage of Satan’s ill will (cf. 2:3b) and complete knowledge of the minds and hearts of others (as evidenced in His judgment upon Job’s children, and His words of rebuke for Job’s friends [cf. 42:7-9]).

These three perspectives are not superfluous details, but the very foundation upon which the theodicy of the book is built.

William Lane Craig on The Problem of Suffering December 14, 2008

When I was in seminary, I never really took to Dr. William Lane Craig , although some of my profs and fellow seminarians swore by the man. But now that I’ve let the majority of my skepticism run its course, I’m beginning to appreciate his contribution to the dialogue.

The Fall as Communal Event: Degrees of Responsibility in Genesis 3 November 30, 2008

One of the problems I’ve always had with traditional theology is its strong emphasis on a simplistic one-to-one correspondence theory of etiological responsibility that is reductionist and only partially representative of what the Bible teaches.

Biblically speaking, the “fall” is always a communal event that individuals contribute to in varying degrees, even when a narrative presents us with an apparent transgressor-transgression schema.

Because these instances are more pronounced, we often fail to consider the role that other individuals in the surrounding narratives play in creating the kind of environment conducive to such transgressive behavior. Over time, we have been trained to read the Bible in paragraphs and isolated verses, viewing the book as a disjunctive collection of allegorical narratives and aphorisms, rather than as an organic narrative unity.

However, in spite of the many attempts of some scholars to read the Bible in such a piecemeal fashion, the events of the Fall narrative refer back to the preceding general creation narrative (1:1-2:3), as well as the following special creation narrative of man and woman (2:4-25), beginning a narrative pattern followed closely throughout the remainder of the book of Genesis.

A brief outline of this extrapolative style of narration would be as follows: 1. a general account of creation (and later, pro-creation, in the genealogies of Adam and onward), 2. a closer narrative account of God’s dealing with a specific individual (who serves as the figure-head of the community), and 3. a Fall event for which members of the community are judged by God (e.g. compare Gen. 1:1-2:3 (general creation) and 2:4-25 (special creation), with 5:1-32 (general pro-creation account) with 6:1-7:9 (special pro-creation account).

The consistency of this pattern indicates how the fall narrative should be read: as a communal event for which the serpent, the woman, and the man are held individually responsible. Adam is the central figure, I believe, because the commandment was entrusted to him directly by God (2:16-17); however, he is not the only individual at fault. Each individual bears responsibility for their contribution to the Fall event: the serpent is cursed for deceiving the woman (a topic I’ll touch upon later), the woman is cursed for believing the serpent’s word (regarding God’s character) above Adam’s word and, via implication, God himself, and Adam is cursed for directly breaking the commandment.

Other Theories

Textually, there isn’t much support for theories attempting to explain sin as transgression against the creaturely hierarchy. Contrary to the opinions of those who have proposed that Adam’s sin consisted in “listening to his wife” (3:17) and, thereby, failing to maintain God’s appropriate order, that Eve’s sin consisted in her not obeying her husband, and that the serpent’s sin lay in attempting to usurp man’s role as custodian of creation, the presented hierarchy is simply: God, Man and Woman, creation.

God gives Man and Woman full dominion and responsibility over creation (1:26-28); that is to say, his image bearers are given full joint responsibility to replenish the Earth and populate it. In fact, the decree to implement a political structure of any sort does not even come into play until 9:5-6, indicating that humans were not to rule over one another as they ruled over the rest of creation, but co-dominate and co-rule over creation, and, ipso facto, that Adam and Eve’s sin would not (primarily) be against the created order.

Poe the Ironist? September 9, 2007

Reason and Nature Vs. “Madness” and the Supernatural

The Fall of the House of Usher is obviously the work of a masterful ironist. Although the narrative’s manifest content bespeaks an affinity with themes encountered in the Surrealists, and did, to a greater or lesser degree, manage to reveal a primordial, instinctively incestuous and aggressive nature that perhaps had been ignored or denied by the more overtly moralistic American literary figures that preceded him, the latent content openly valorizes reason and reads more like a moral driven detective story than it does a horror story. Poe’s criticism seems to be aimed at the suspension of reason as exhibited in belief in an antiquated ideological framework (Medievalism), drug abuse (in spite of Poe’s personal addiction to drugs and alcohol), and the Romantic subordination of reason to pure experience.

Poe, from the onset of the text, sets nature and reason (symbolized by the rational, self-composed, and painfully honest narrator) in opposition to “madness” and the supernatural (symbolized by the fully sensory, disheveled, and skillfully deceptive recluse); and in the end, it is reason and nature that survive. The apparently chaotic sequence of events following Madeline’s inexplicable “death” is revealed to be a meticulously organized mirroring of the texts that “had formed no small portion of the mental existence of the invalid” (803), concluding with the collapse of an antiquated social structure that drowns in “the deep dank tarn” whose sound is like “the voice of a thousand waters.” The description of the tarn’s sound, strikingly similar to the biblical description of the voice of God, places Nature and divinity, if only by implication, in an intimate, reflective relationship in which Nature, like God, punishes those that do not behave in accordance with her decrees and grants salvation to individuals sola ratio. Seemingly supernatural events are revealed to be natural events, the causation of which is determinable through a process of deduction.

A Note about the Texts

The role that literature plays in The Fall of the House of Usher cannot be overlooked. Roderick Usher is a man of letters, well versed in literature ranging from politics (Machiavelli), to religion (Swedenborg), to medieval torture practices (Eymeric de Gironne), and, finally, poetry (Tieck). He is a man who, interestingly, finds coherent expression only through the arts, particularly, writing. Usher’s writing, in contradistinction to his speech, is remarkably cogent, beautiful, and reminiscent of Romantic poetry, drawing upon a host of stock images, including seraphs, flutes, spirits, and royalty (801-802). The narrator’s admission that Usher’s “phantasmagoric conceptions” did not “partake so rigidly of the spirit of abstraction,” moreover, only adds to the critical overtones of the story; Usher wrote well, but what he wrote about, excluding his letter to the narrator, was nonsensical, lacking any connection to external reality (i.e. Nature).

Considering the importance of literature as a vehicle for expression, therefore, it is no wonder that Usher’s actions mirror the texts that he and the narrator “pored together over” and that, according to the narrator, “had formed no small portion of the mental existence of the invalid” (803). Each text, including the fictitious Mad Trist of Sir Launcelot Canning (yet another reference, albeit a mocking reference, to medievalism), coincides with narrator’s recounting of the events that occurred, suggesting that what took place was carefully crafted. Machiavelli’s Belphegor, for example, is a satirical novel about marriage, in which a female demon marries a man who, thereafter, suffers immensely. What makes this listing of literary works even more striking is the narrator’s declaration that the Directorium Inquistiorum, a book delineating specific methods of torturing Catholic heretics, was one of Usher’s “favourite volumes[s].” And, finally, completing the heroic tragedy that Usher has conducted is the narrator’s reading of “that well known portion of the [Mad Trist].”

Usher’s Forced Heroism: The Death of Romanticism and the Triumph of Reason

Usher, it can be argued, is not mad; instead, he is playing multiple roles that, in an Enlightenment society, are no longer practically functional: he is the tortured, saintly aesthete, the villain, the dungeon keeper, and the chivalric hero all at once. If there is any form of madness that Poe wishes to convey to the reader, therefore, it is the madness that belief in the type of irrational and fictitious literature (via their incommensurability with natural events) that lines Usher’s library shelves. There are no dragons, dungeons, heroes, villains, angels, or demons; there is no heaven or hell; there is Nature and individuals who either have or lack Reason. Roderick Usher, a man marked by an acuteness of the senses, is also an incontinent man (in the Aristotelian usage of the term) who has no control over his desires and stands in opposition to the narrator, who, in spite of admitting his occasional susceptibility to the sensations, beliefs, and actions that plagued the mind of Roderick Usher, manages to keep himself controlled, acting rationally all throughout the narrative.

Poe’s story warns the reader of the dangers of belief in the supernatural and “phantasmagoric,” with Roderick Usher serving a twofold symbolic purpose: he is a symbol of the antiquated, unnecessary, and, in essence, harmful superstitions of medievalism, and a symbol of the writers who have indulged in those superstitions. Despite the superficial eccentricities of Poe’s writing, what is being presented is a fairly conservative ideology that condemns irrationality, drug abuse[1], and the supernatural (unnatural?). The innumerable references to “the arrangement of objects” (i.e. objects if thought, spiritual objects, physical objects, et cetera) provide a clue as to how the narrative should be read, clearly indicating that the cause of Roderick Usher’s madness can be found through a careful deductive assessment of the narrative (unlike Madeline’s illness, to which there was no known cause). In the end, the House of Usher destroys itself and is consumed by Nature, while Reason, the unnamed narrator, stands beside the event to record it.

The Fall of the House of Usher, moreover, is not the only work in the Poe canon that, through irony, gives support to the Enlightenment. The Tell Tale Heart, for example, is another implicit attack on the medievalism that The Fall of the House of Usher smugly mocks. The “mad” narrator is a man who holds superstitious beliefs and stands in striking contrast to the “profound old man,” who “suspected that every night, just at twelve, [the narrator] looked upon him while he slept” (810). The scrutinizing gaze of reason, symbolized by the old man’s eye, although it is blinded momentarily, is resurrected by the narrator’s irrepressible moral sensibility, giving law, the epitome of rationality (indeed, what urged Aristotle to call man a political animal), the upper hand.

Lastly, and perhaps most striking about both narratives, is the painful honesty with which the events in both stories are relayed to the reader. There are no suspicions as to the veracity of each narrator’s account. Ironically, however, the same cannot be said about their author.

---

 

[1] As suggested by the parallels that the narrator frequently draws between drug induced states and the feelings that came over him (e.g., 794).

An Atheological Interpretation of Genesis 22 May 1, 2007

(a.)

After dinner last night, I opened up Soren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and began looking for something to get my mind off of a pressing issue that’s been driving me insane as of late. So, as with most of the books I possess and have read over three times, I flipped through the pages in search of marginalia worthy of scrutinization, which I never found. Instead, found poorly sketched emoti-scrawlings (similar to this) that, I hoped, were placed along side large paragraphs underlined with a crooked hand in order to summarize some profound “thunder-bolt” philosophical revelation.

No such luck.

I can usually pick at a text until the pages have nearly disintegrated into sand. Not this time. Rereading #4 didn’t do much for me but remind me of my already pretty firmly set ideas about Kierkegaard’s atheological ontology and epistemology. But I did find the sacrifice narrative of Genesis 22 (the text Kierkegaard is giving an analysis of in Fear and Trembling) to yield some interesting ideas when read as a psychological narrative instead of a strictly theological narrative.

(b.)

[1.] Isaac and the Ram: Child/Property, Indispensable/Dispensable, Conscious/Non-conscious, etc. The two are set in opposition to one another and shed light on Abraham’s mis-perception of Isaac as exhibiting the qualities which the ram possessed. Seen in this manner, the ram sacrificed on Mt. Moriah does not seem to be an editorial interpolation functioning to distract the readers from the “cruel” and absurd demands of a wrathful God. Instead, it is a narrative device, the symbolic embodiment of values and attitudes (supervenient upon those values) that need to be sacrificed in order for Abraham to become the “father of many nations,” or, before that, simply, to live up to his birth name.

[2.] A Teleological Suspension of the Ethical?: The journey to Mt. Moriah underscores the process of individuation that Isaac undergoes, which is probably the most overlooked but, nonetheless, most fundamental element of the narrative. Kierkegaard explains, as he does elsewhere, that prior to the subject’s qualitative leap from one dimension of subjectivity to another (see here for more details) the subject is in a state of anxiety, which the qualitative leap resolves. Language, custom, and consciousness itself are retroactively reflected upon, re-categorized, retrofitted to the dimension the dimension of subjectivity the subject, posterior to the leap, inhabits (see Repetition).

For Kierkegaard, “consciousness emerges precisely through the collision” of “Ideality” (i.e. the dimension of subjectivity that is no longer a sufficient means of understanding the moment of anxiety) and “Reality” (i.e. the dimension confronting the non-functioning dimension, absurd by virtue of its linguistic, cognitive, etc. inexpressibility and simultaneous comprehensibility, however subjective this may be).

[For more on "the collision," see Princeton University Press' 1983 publication of Fear and Trembling, pages 274-275.]

Abraham and Isaac experience such a collision, where the Ethical and the Religious confront one another, rendering inutile the language and customs of the former (or the “universal”) and, intuitively, revealing the efficacy of the latter as its replacement.

[3.] Departure, Ascension, Descent, and Restoration: Perhaps most compelling of all is the concept of Restoration, a theme that finds expression, albeit in a different form, in the book of Job as well.

In contradistinction to Job, however, Abraham’s loss is a direct consequence of his submission to God’s direct command, and is not a material loss but a psychological one. And, more importantly, what is restored is not material but psychological, serving to elucidate how the paradoxical event strengthens the preexisting father-son relationship – a relationship at risk of absolute failure by dint of unquestioned attitudes, practices, and beliefs – by placing it under a new set of categories befitting to it.