XV. "Where Wast Thou When I Laid the Foundations of the Earth?"
Gerald Stanley Lee: But Job was more than the discoverer of infinity. He was the first to see the bearing of infinity on righteousness. He was the Moses of the sky and the earth and the sea. He connected the Ten Commandments with the universe. He did for the first chapter of Genesis what David did for the twentieth chapter of Exodus. He set it to music. He made it an incentive to action.
The imagination of Job was the science of his day. He turned men to God through the natural world. It was the return of religion to nature, the renaissance of creation. His heart had the further listening in it. He heard the voice beyond the Sinai voice - the Voice of the voice - when darkness was upon the face of the deep, and God out of the infinite shadow moved forth over the chaos of the earth, and the young thunders called across the new seas, and the "morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy." (Job 38:7)
The Jewish law had not seemed, for the most part, to go back of Mount Sinai. The voice of God was an inland voice; like the voice of man, it had a place where it belonged - the cloud and darkness over a mountain in the wilderness. It was trivial with geography. It was provincial, personal. "The Lord said unto Moses." (Exod. 19:9)
To bring the Voice out of a desert in Arabia, to teach the world to listen to the silence of the sky and the whisper of the earth this is the destiny of Job. He looked beyond the Burning Bush. The Day was a Face that watched the lives of men. The Night was a shadow for the sleep of the world.
The prelude to the Ten Commandments had been simply "I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt." (Exod. 20:2) Egypt was enough infinity for the earlier Hebrew theology. Mosaic law was based upon an experience. The great point of the Hebrew was the Lord's relation to him. He did not care what God had been doing before. Howsoever it may have been, the earth had been created.
Religion was the sublimer way of getting as much as possible out of it. The Lord's relation to others was irrelevant. The Hebrews did not attempt to make converts of the Egyptians. They took their jewels. Their way of converting the inhabitants of Canaan had been to destroy them, and their indifference as to God's relation to other men took the kindred form of an indifference as to God's relation to the natural world. Creation was irrelevant. It had occurred, and had no practical bearing upon what God would do next. The natural world was not an expression of Him, but something that he had power over, and as long as they were supplied with manna, and the power was used in their behalf, they were satisfied.
Abraham was told that his children would be as the stars for multitude, which statement, instead of being a revelation of creation to Abraham, was a calculation. He argued that Jehovah would keep his promise because he had kept other promises. Job would have argued that the Lord would keep his promise because he was the Lord of the stars and promises together. Job was a poet. He established a new connection.
The early Hebrews do not seem to have been interested in the Lord - as a Lord. They were too shrewd with Jehovah to understand Him. They never forgot themselves. They approached Him for a purpose, and to the piety that is a mere deification of a contract, the Spirit is slow in revealing itself. Though dim suggestions and beautiful outlooks cannot be crowded out of practical things, in divine revelation, as in human art, the practical emphasis is not practical. The too eager hand belongs to closed eyes. We cannot know Dante by his account-book, nor Shakspere by his bargains with the actors, and Xantippe [the scolding wife] never knew Socrates [philosopher, 422-352 B.C.], because she could never see him without compelling him to do something for her.
The point of the Jewish character, which involves almost every failing, from the lie of Abraham to the rejection of Christ, is the characteristic Hebrew inability to see anything in an impersonal way, from God in the heavens to thirty pieces of silver in the hands of a priest.
Jacob, wrestling with the angel of the Lord, is the type of Hebrew prayer - blind, splendid, indomitable desire. The blessing is the God. The blessing is what God is for. It is the sublimity of Job that his conception of duty was based not upon what God had done for him, but upon God considered as a God, - the wonder that he would do anything for him at all. The sublimest personal faith in the Old Testament was based upon impersonality itself. For the very reason that God mocked him in the whirlwind, "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?" (Job 38:4). Job clung to Him. It is the mightier faith that is conquered from despair. The peace of awe was upon him - the breath from the worlds. The skepticism of Omar Khayyam was the faith of Job. The worship of vastness in which the Persian felt it logical to lose his soul, was Job's way of finding his.
"Impotent pieces of the game he plays
Upon this checkerboard of Nights and Days;
Hither and thither moves and checks and slays,
And one by one in the closet lays.
"And that inverted bowl they call the sky,
Whereunder, crawling, cooped we live and die,
Lift not your hands to It for help - for it
As impotently rolls as you or I."
(Edward Fitzgerald, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam)
Another voice:
"Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days begun?
And caused the day-spring to know its place?
Hast thou comprehended the breadth of the earth?
Declare if thou knowest it all.
Where is the way to the dwelling of light?
And as for darkness, where is the place thereof,
That thou shouldst take it to the bound thereof,
And that thou shouldst discern the paths to the house thereof?
By what way is the light parted -
Or the east wind scattered upon the earth?
Canst thou send forth lightnings that they may go
And say unto thee, `Here we are'?"
(Job 39)
Singing under Omar Khayyam's sky:
"Oh, that my words were written!
Oh, that they were printed in a book!
That they were graven with an iron pen and lead,
They were graven on the rock forever!
I KNOW THAT MY REDEEMER LIVETH
And that He shall stand at last upon the earth,
And tho' after my skin, worms destroy this body,
Yet in my flesh I shall see God,
Whom I shall see for myself -
And mine eyes shall behold and not another!"
(Job 19)
- the angels of the Resurrection fifteen hundred years away.
And this is Job, finding glory in being forgotten. With the night-light, his soul discovered God. Under the hush thereof:
"Behold, I am vile.
I lay mine hand upon my mouth.
I had heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear,
But now mine eye seeth Thee."
(Job 42)
And Job, the inspirer of pain, the redeemer of sorrow, forging out of despair his mighty creed, marks the transition from the childhood to the manhood of faith.
The whole human spirit struggles in this far-off song. The centuries met one night in this grand old heart. Under the empty sky they cried themselves out - silenced - sky-silenced - as long as the spirit of Job keeps answering in the world. For the few short years we sojourn under the stars a song shall follow them. It is Job's sky and God's.
The discoverer of a lost Creator, Job was the first pure, disinterested worshiper that God ever had. No longer a divine Convenience, a Promise-Divinity, the Creator was rediscovered - drawn out from the tiny nook of faith that the desires of men had made for him, into His Own House.
XVI. Curse God and Die
THE very essence of Job's faith was its breadth. Breadth was its practicalness. The faith of Eliphaz and Zophar and Bildad was too narrow to cover the case. Job cries, "Have pity on me, O my friends. The hand of God hath touched me." (Job 19:21). Zophar soothes him: "Such is the portion of the wicked man. Terrors come upon him and the heritage decreed from the Mighty One." (Job 20)
Job had lost his children. He had lost his flocks. He had lost all for whom he lived, and he had boils and - friends.
Comforting a poor man in sorrow by telling him that he deserved it, and that he will have more if he does not grant that he deserves it, may seem satirical to the modern mind, but it must be remembered of the friends of Job that they not only began well, by sitting with him seven days and nights and not saying anything, but they offered the very best comfort, when they felt it dutiful to speak, that theology afforded at that time.
Trained to believe that righteousness was remunerative and that unrighteousness was not, a mere glance at Job showed how wicked he was, and seven days and nights of watching his suffering could only deepen the impression that came when they had first heard that he had lost his property - that he must have been a very doubtful character, in spite of appearances, from the first. This was their theology.
It was the test of their orthodoxy that they were on the side of the lost she-asses and the boils. They very truly said that they could not do differently - they and the Lord. It was the Mosaic conception of duty and its reward. Job was a most unquestionable heretic. He did not have a shadow of precedent in his favor. Seven deaths, and a missing fortune, the Sabeans and their swords, fire and wind, were their argument, and a wife, with her "Curse God and die." (Job 2:9)
The real grandeur of Job was his impatience. His humility before God is but the more beautiful side of his anger with his friends, and his self-abasement before his Maker is the crowning dignity of a self-respect which is one of the epics of the world. The only proof he had of his righteousness was himself. And he bowed before his Maker and believed in Him because he dared to believe in that self against hail and fire and death and the words of men and the fear of their prim little dogma-god.
"My righteousness I hold fast and will not let it go" (Job 27:6) - the parable of every hero; wonderful now, but more wonderful then, when Job fought the mighty fight alone, and went before us all down through sorrow to the heart of God.
His maintaining his righteousness in the face of evil was the shadow of the Messiah. Christ did not argue about the cross. He died on it. The argument was in Job. Isaiah prophesied the glory of suffering - the suffering of the righteous; Job proved it in his life, Christ with his death.
The whole Hebrew faith had been put into a honeycomb of special providences, and with all this array of disaster the friends of Job either had to give up Job's righteousness or God's; either believe that every detail of good and evil that happened to them was a special providence, which was religion; or special improvidence, which was atheism.
It was because Job would do neither that he struck out a new path and won the freedom of God - the right to bring evil upon those he loved; one of the first instances in the world in which breadth was more practical than narrowness. Job was the discoverer of a practical faith which would stand the test of life, because he was the first to take God's point of view - to see that in the nature of the case it must be a universe; that a God whose point of view was not the universe would not be a God at all.
Infinity was gained with its perspective. It was something more than an ornament of Deity - a poetic invocation. It was God himself living into a vast system in which every soul and sorrow and blessing had its place. The dovetailing of rewards into one little existence - the whole creation a body-servant for a worthy Jew - Job had the sublime humor of every greater poet, and the Little God who does little things for little men to gain a little faith for a little time, puttering with their egotism to win their souls, vanished.
The egotism which is the religion of the little man when he succeeds, the infidelity of the little man when he fails, the "I," which is the essence of littleness, which is the blasphemy alike of creeds and curses and prayers and sneers, met its sublime, eternal, triumphant rebuke in Job.
Though living under a false astronomy, he had just that quality of selflessness in his worship which would have made him surmise that the universe was not made to revolve around the earth as a center, or especially arranged to furnish heat and starlight to the Land of Uz. Such a discovery on Job's part would have been but the astronomical form of his theology.
With the star measurements to measure himself and suggest his immeasurable God, Job did not expect the universe to be preoccupied with his estate, and performed his duty without requiring it.
He was too spiritual to have a Land of Uz God, or a Job's God, or a Jews' God. With their tiny, compacted, Land of Uz faith, his friends gathered around him, and accused him of blasphemy because God was so much more of a God to him than to them; because he gave Him room and gave Him time - the prerogatives of a God; because he saw that even a God was not divine enough to have a thousand centers, or hinge infinity on Uz.
With a breadth of conception that made the Creator nearer as well as farther, Job found in the vast "itself" the homelikeness the infinite alone can afford for our struggling human faith; the peace that passeth all understanding (Phil. 4:7) - peace just because it passeth all understanding.
Eliphaz had to understand. He could have but the peace that comes a little at a time, as understanding comes, and that moves away when understanding goes. The Infinite is the only rest the finite has. Job rested in it.
From the point of view of Eliphaz and Zophar, infinity in a God was unpractical. It was vague - the nebula of divinity. It had nothing definite to grasp. The men of Uz could not be governed by the aurora borealis. In the burning of a city, the recourse of Eliphaz was the Sodom hypothesis - an hypothesis which, like all narrowness, was very practical from one side, if, considering the sins of men, one ignored, on the other, that the least a logical God could do would be to burn the city over every year.
The doctrine of Eliphaz by its irreverent definiteness was the greatest practical encouragement toward wickedness in his day. A motive for righteousness which required constant fires could hardly be practical in a world which could only be kept burning part of the time. Only a broader law applying before a fire as well as after, would be worthy of a jurist, or a God.
Thousands of miles of telegraph would have been scientific proof with which to balance the striking of his flocks by lightning; but Job was a poet. He could take for granted.
Mystery was a conviction in his theology, and humbleness, and giving God the benefit of a doubt, and when the great wind smote his sons, he did not need several thousand years of windmills and the sails that discovered the New World, to be sure that God's arrangements were best, or sure that wind had suddenly become a personal affront, had come from the ends of the earth across snows and seas to rebuke a man named Job.
Job was practical because he was broad. He had a definite solution for the struggle of life because he was vague. Mystery was the conviction that made his theology at once the sublimest and most practical conception of the living One.
He was the first to give God time, the first to give Him room, the first to see His long looks, His glances of a thousand years. Out of the treasuries of the snow, the guiding of mornings and wandering of nights, and all the vast and beautiful care of the infinite heart, Job learned the awe that was to make his faith one of the mighty memories of men.
Thus he was the emancipator of righteousness, the inspirer of pain. He shall be remembered as the redeemer of sorrow, one who could sing with a cross; one who lifted duty above reward and degraded sin below punishment, because he discovered the infinity of God, because he lost himself in the wideness of His ways.
XVII. Doth Not Wisdom Cry and Understanding Put Forth her Voice?
SOLOMON could not keep the Proverbs. So he wrote them. The founder of moral philosophy - the duty which Moses stated and David attempted, Solomon explained. Morality passed into its motto stage.
But the prayer at the dedication of the temple must be read with the eleventh chapter of Kings ("But King Solomon loved many strange women . . . and his wives turned away his heart.") And "Without me ye can do nothing." (John 15:5)
A book with a less inspired conception than the Bible, of religion, and therefore of art, following the more common human instinct, would have suppressed this chapter in Kings. Solomon's literary executors, seeing that it would jar upon the artistic unity of his work, would have arranged the writing of his biography with decorous deceit. It would have had all those unprophetic omissions that belong to the narrower idea of beauty and the smaller artists' cowardice of life.
The readers of Proverbs for thousands of years would have innocently longed to be like Solomon. The world would have been set back in its spiritual achievement for an indefinite period, and all those reserves of knowledge which come of knowledge experiencing itself, would have been lost.
Confidently working upon the impossible, full of the glad consciousness that the Proverbs were the solution of moral effort; in the blind, crude ways of life would the world have learned that there had been a lie somewhere - a moral romance - that had to be suffered and suffered away from the human heart - because the perfect finish of Solomon's art had been preserved.
To the sublime literary morality of the Bible we are indebted for the fact that the most valuable contribution that Solomon made to us was not thus sacrificed - the comment of the eleventh chapter of Kings upon the three thousand Proverbs. Called the wisest man in the world because he repented in bons mots, because no one has had so gifted a repentance since, Solomon will be immortal in the minds of men, because of his consummate literary longing to have them do wrong more wisely.
Eloquence is not having what we want, but wanting it. Wisdom is the art of demanding that others shall do better than ourselves. A proverb is saying what we wish we had done, or hoped that we would and all the wise sayings that stretch their dainty rhetoric over our naked lives are the inventories of our ignorance - the retrospect of the beauty we have lost.
The great Redeemer Satire of the Old Testament, Solomon comes to us the climax of the bitter truth - the human heart waiting with words, bitterly with words - with words - outside of the gates of Bethlehem. Giving to the Hebrews a larger assortment of thoroughly understood sins, and no inspiration to avoid them, except an ironical life - "I have not kept these Proverbs; how much less chance there is for you, who cannot even say them" - this was the mission of the wisest man in the world.
And yet that it was better for men to do wrong intelligently than ignorantly, this passing phase of mottoes shall stand as one of the records of God. The moral philosophy which had been simply God's convenience, came to an end in this questioning and observing of life. Solomon went back of the divine will to the nature of things. Bringing the Law out from the mere authority of One in whom a man might believe or might not, he surrounded it with the authority of this actual world, in which a man has to live, whatever he believes. It was the discovery of reasonableness, of what might be called the mind of God.
The natural rudimentary Mosaic attitude toward a fire - not that it blisters, but that it has been said, "Thou shalt not touch it," - finds its supplement in Solomon; and the higher obedience, based upon knowledge, in the brilliant son of David comes to its first great emphasis. Philosophy was the study of blisters.
Discovering a larger man, as Job had discovered a larger God, he represents a humanist movement, the turning of man to himself - the self-discovery which wrought out as a habit of thought the identity of the moral law with the nature of man. A teacher of the experiences of morality, Solomon connected the mystical voice of Sinai with the conscience of every day, and the religion of what they knew about themselves as well as the religion of what they had been told about their God was given to the race.
But the higher value of Solomon's reign was not this. It is only by standing in the ruins of his temple that we can worship there, can read in the mighty, broken outlines the truth at last. Built with proverb and stone and gold, it is one of the great half-truths of history, completed alone by being half destroyed. The Saracen in fierce unconsciousness [as later conqueror of Jerusalem] was to become the interpreter of Solomon, bringing to its logical conclusion in the dust of the earth the gospel of the eleventh chapter of Kings.
At once the discoverer of moral philosophy as the theory of heaven and the way to hell, Solomon is the immortal illustration of the merely moral man - not that he was moral, or that the merely moral man is ever moral, but that he is impossible. The oft-recurring type of the broad and understanding man who enlarges the area of the truth without having life enough to cover it, finds its great original in one who substituted reasonableness for righteousness and forgot God in building a temple for Him.
The history of the human race is the Brobdingnag [from "Gulliver's Travels" by Jonathan Swift, 1726] biography of every unknown soul. The passing phases of our lives are the old shadows of these mightier destinies that have crossed our world, to prove with a classic tragedy what we know with a passing thought.
Nations have been born and lived and died to furnish the moral philosophy of a child, of an afternoon. With a thousand years and a million sorrowing hearts tucked into his epigrams, Solomon himself shall be to us an unforgotten proverb - a great experience of the world. Writing a book which has the distinction of being the only book in the Bible that every one outgrows, his appeal is to the time of crudeness, when observation is still piety and the will not yet unmasked, still proud of its trim omnipotence.
In the time of spiritual glibness and dogmatic confidence, in the zest of our ignorance, we conjure inspiration out of Proverbs and dream of life, but to life itself must always come the wondering humbleness of the New Testament. To live is yet to look back upon Solomon's sayings with sad wonder at ourselves. With their tiny courtly glory in the struggle of the years, they but linger by the name of Christ - dim, pathetic decorations on the sternness and the realness and the silence of the cross.
David was not a philosopher, and Solomon would have patronized the childishness of his father's faith, but the Son of God was called the son of David because Solomon was not; and the only value of the temple that the wise king built, was that his father's prayers would be prayed there, that long after the stately obviousness of the Proverbs had become an old ornament in the world, the songs of David's spirit should be upon the lips of the nations as far as sin and longing and hope and fear have reached their cries upon the earth - the wise earth - the wearily-wise earth - the hungering and thirsting earth - parched with proverbs dying with epigrams - waiting for God.
XVIII. Vanity! Vanity! All is Vanity
ECCLESIASTES is the text-book of suicides. Though not without hope, the hope is a gilded discouragement, lighting the world to show how dark it is. Only in a book as supremely victorious as the Bible could such an appealing and beautiful prophecy of despair be safely printed. It is the shadow song of the earth. It is the masterpiece of the Night. It is the culmination of the Proverbs and the lives of the kings. "As when a hungry man dreameth and behold he eateth, and he waketh and his soul is empty."
Sadder than David's Psalms, because they had tears; sadder than death, because there was no death, it is the confessional of wisdom, and through its wonderful lines, hallowed with a broken heart, the restless spirit of man shall move forever to find in its forbidding fellowship, its sublime self-pity, the Miserere ["Have mercy", 51st Psalm in Latin] of the world.
Even when the poet comes to his climax and struggles toward joy - "Rejoice, O young man. Remove sorrow from thine heart," (Eccl. 11:9) the Gloria ["Glory be to God" doxology] strives for its voices in the song of youth only to modulate into death, death, death, "When the mourners go about the streets and the dust returns to the earth as it was and the spirit to God who gave it." (Eccl. 12:5)
"Vanity! Vanity! All is vanity!" (Eccl. 1:2) - the litany of philosophy, closing at last with its saddest sentence, "All hath been heard," (Eccl. 12:13) in the middle of the Bible.
The pitiful attempt at a New Testament, Ecclesiastes is the caricature of a Proverb straining to be a cross. The immortal argument of the merely moral man confuted by himself, it marks at once the beginning of moral philosophy as a contribution to mankind, and the end of moral philosophy as the solution of human life.
The author of Ecclesiastes, whoever he may have been, was a man like men: a universal man. The last testament of a man of affairs - a scholar, a seer, a diplomat, a lover, - it cannot be set aside as the discouraged wisdom of a monk or the pessimism of an aloof life.
I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem,
By the roes and the hinds of the fields,
That ye stir not up nor waken love
(Song of Songs 2:7)
- the wooing strain in the song of Solomon floats softly through all the lines of what must ever stand as the most experienced book in the Old Testament; the very force and completeness of which is altogether lost if it is not the symphony of a wonderful and various life. The love-song motif, "Awake, O North Wind, and blow thou South!" (Song of Songs 4:16) like the ghost of a brighter melody through the mighty minor chords that sing the weariness of the world, winds ever like a beauty that is lost, not by being overlooked, but by having been lived down through to bitterness. "One generation goeth and another generation cometh, and the earth abideth forever," and the minor chords, and "That which hath been is that which shall be, and that which is to be hath already been, and God seeketh again that which hath passed away." (Eccl. 1:4)
"All hath been heard." The voices are still and the world sleeps and dreams and waits. The hush of darkness is upon it. It is the starlight Revelation.
No man knoweth. The morning comes at midnight - only to God.
by Gerald Stanley Lee (1862-1944), New York: The Century Co., 1896
Contents
Part 1
INTRODUCTION
I. THE PAGAN EMPHASIS
II. THE EMPHASIS OF LIFE
III. THE EMPHASIS OF THE IDEAL
IV. THE HAGAR NATION
Part 2
V. THOU SHALT NOT
VI. THOU SHALT NOT
VII. THOU SHALT NOT
Part 3
VIII. THUS SAITH THE LORD
IX. MILK AND HONEY
X. I AM THAT I AM
XI. THY GENTLENESS HAS MADE ME GREAT
Part 4
XII. DEEP CALLETH UNTO DEEP
XIII. WHO GIVETH SONGS IN THE NIGHT
XIV. WHEN THE PEOPLE SAW THE MOUNTAIN SMOKING THEY STOOD AFAR OFF
Part 5
XV. "WHERE WAST THOU WHEN I LAID THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE EARTH?"
XVI. CURSE GOD AND DIE
XVII. DOTH NOT WISDOM CRY AND UNDERSTANDING PUT FORTH HER VOICE?
XVIII. VANITY! VANITY! ALL IS VANITY
Part 6
XIX. THE SHADOW CHRIST
XX. THE SHADOW CHRIST
XXI. THE SHADOW CHRIST
XXII. THE SHADOW CHRIST
XXIII. THE SHADOW CHRIST
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