Job, Camus, Ashes
Don't skip to the end too quickly
One of my favourite novelists, and certainly my favourite of the French existentialists, is Albert Camus. I've read most of his novels several times, and most recently have revisited The Stranger (L'Étranger) and The Plague. Camus I'd my favourite of the French existentialists, but also one of my favourite novelists full-stop. I'm not always sure why that is, but I think it's a combination of just his style and skill and savour as an author, and it's the wrestling with his philosophy, and his wrestling with life and meaning, that draws me in. And a few other things.
Lately I've also been reading, and leading a small group in studying, the book of Job. One of my complains about how people handle Job is a tendency to just read the bookends : chs 1-2 and then 38-42. And then they short-cut to a conclusion which is perhaps true, but it lacks solidity, it lacks the thickness of 35 chapters of poetic dialogue, it's 2d. And that conclusion is usually, "Job suffered unjustly, but his friends were wrong to impute him with sin; God's answer to Job is better than an answer, it's his majestic and terrifying presence; and then God sets everything right."
I don't think that's an adequate reading, not least because it renders most of the book pointless if you simply say that Job's three friends were wrong. Why bother having 38 chapters of divinely inspired scripture in which everything 4 out of 5 characters say is negligible? Furthermore, as you read the friends' speeches, so much of it sounds so much like... other parts of Scripture. Eliphaz very often sounds like the Book of Proverbs.
Throughout his works Camus deals significantly with the question of meaning, the idea of the Absurd, and the paradox, or conflict, that arises between his unwavering commitment to a certain kind of moralism and humanism, in the face of a meaningless and absurd universe. From the absurd life of Mersault in L'Étranger, to the heroic and intractably futile, beautiful struggle, resistance, and martyrdom in La Peste, Camus asks, nay confronts us with the question of how to live, and how to make sense, of an absurd, meaningless existence. Though Camus himself rejected his characterisation as an existentialist, especially later in life, his philosophical framework embraces this key existentialist problem at least. The making of meaning in the face of meaninglessness.
Job, too, is a book about meaninglessness. In that way, it forms a kind of twin or pair with Ecclesiastes. Proverbs is a book about how things "generally" go in a mostly ordered world, that is if you try to live a sensible, prudent, well-ordered life, then most of the time life will mostly turn out better for you and yours, than those who live foolish lives. The other wisdom books (not all) explore what happens when that doesn't happen.
Job and his friends inhabit a moral world where Proverbs-type logic happens at both physical and spiritual levels, so that good acts result in good consequences, even when they are not directly caused but spiritually warranted because God rewards good; evil acts result in bad consequences, even when not directly caused, because God punishes evil. It is Just World. The only reason the book of Job works on a literary level is that in chapters 1-2 we are told as an audience that Job's suffering is not the result of his sin, an insight unavailable to Job's friends (who insist that it must be) and to Job (who knows that it isn't, but is then left with meaninglessness).
And it's this meaninglessness that hurls Job into the vortex. A life in a meaningless world is absurd, but a life in a meaningless world characterised by meaningless suffering is unbearable. Job's predicament is Camus' reality.
The word חִנָּם (ḥinnām) turns up 4 times in Job. It means something like "in vain, without reason, for nothing". And so the Accuser first asks YHWH in Job 1:9, "Is it for nothing that Job fears God?" Isn't Job's righteousness merely self-interest, because good gets rewarded with good? In 2:3 when the Accuser returns a second time to YHWH, it is God who says that the Accuser "stirred me up to destroy him without reason". It is the groundlessness of Job's affliction that God hurls back at the Accuser, Job has acted for good even when his reward has been removed. But the real key comes in 9:17:
He bruises me with a tempest
and multiplies my wounds without cause.
(Hartly, Job, NICOT, p174)
Job's experience of his own suffering is ḥinnām, without cause. To endure suffering for a purpose is hard but one is sustained by the goal, the end, the telos. To endure it without either sight of relief, explanation of cause, or any meaning for it whatsoever, is to live in a world that inflicts suffering without reason, and strips the human person of dignity, worth, and the ability to make sense of reality. Job's trial is as much existential as it is suffering.
As I write this, it's the season of Lent, as season of the church calendar I'm giving more intentional attention to this year. So I was reflecting upon Ash Wednesday recently, and how it soberly confronts us with mortality. Ash Wednesday combines the existential and the penitential, in the words of Gen 3:19 pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris (you are dust and to dust you will return). It is a reminder of a frailty, fragility, mortality, and finitude. Yet at the same time we are, per Gen 1-2, made in God's image, which means we are walking animate representations of God on earth. The words of Genesis 3:19 are not a description of our existential mortality, but our penitential existence - death is the result of sin. Our condition as mortals is the result of the Fall, not the Creation per se.
It is this that in turn allows us to make a theological sense of Camus, because our condition as humans is to be plunged into a world of meaningless suffering, which had general causes and general explanations but not specific ones, not clear ones, not one's that give rhyme and reason to us. Why do some of my friends seem like magnets for personal tragedy? Why do some people suffer so much in this life, through causes far beyond their jurisdiction, through chance and misfortune and happenstance? The moral world of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar is a cruel version of karma that places all blame (and credit) back on the individual themselves.
I've heard/read that Edmund Clowney's take on Camus is that Camus is right about our human condition, except that the absurdity of our existence is a curse, not just a given. Here is where reading Camus and Job in concert helps us make sense of both.
Job offers no easy answers, it is a long poem that wrestles with the problem of evil, the problem of suffering, that we live in a world where if we want to affirm that God is both Just and God, alongside the fact that we as humans suffer things, often grievous things, even the most heart-wrenching, soul-crushing, life-defining misery that are simply not attributable to our own wrongdoing, we are going to come up against a wall of ignorance that leaves us bent over double, eyes exhausted from tears, barely able to choke out the word "Why?" into the void. Job takes us into that space, whether life has taken us there or not.
Camus takes us into the same world, the meaningless one with no easy answers. Camus' attempt to make an answer runs aground on the rock of "this is just the world as a given", whereas the meaning-making frame of the Hebrew Bible gives us something else: this is the world not as it was given, but as it now is. The difficulty is that it is virtually impossible for us to get outside this frame of reference. We lack the imaginative capacity to truly imagine a world not characterised by our frail mortality and our suffering. We have no choice but to live in it until our bodies return to dust.
And yet, the fact that this is a result of the Fall, not the Creation, means there is more. There is the hope that things could be different. That there might be a more profound purpose to suffering than "it happens and the universe doesn't care", more dignified than "you deserve it", and more comforting than the platitudes we casually toss at each other. I do think that answer comes in the story of Jesus, as the fulfilment of the type of Job, and the hope of resurrection. But that is a story for another day.
One shouldn't skip too quickly to the end of the story, too readily grasp for the "Jesus/Everything will be alright/there's a meaning and a purpose" card to get out of the existential jail free. That's also why Job takes 42 chapters. We need to wrestle our way there if we are going to wrestle through suffering. It's not meant to be a "this will only take a second" of the nurse jabbing a needle into our arm. Faith that can survive chronic meaningless suffering is not forged in an instant, not fostered with theological fast-food, not faked with a smile and another Hallelujah. It's made in the crucible of a prayer that won't let go of God until the morning.