Kreeft, Job, and the Meaning of Life

On existence, purpose and suffering:

The big issues in life are considered only by humans, not by animals. Giraffes and whales and baboons do not think about the serious questions of life, such as: Why we are here? Where did we come from? What is wrong with us? Where are we headed?

In a recent piece I penned on the difference between animals and humans, I made use of the 2012 volume Summa Philosophica by Christian philosopher Peter Kreeft. In it he said that “we find at least ten differences in kind between animals and humans.”

The first one was this: “Animals have absolutely no signs of religion, of an awareness of God or immortality.” Humans of course do. Sure, not all of us might cogitate and reflect on God and the big questions of life, but humans are the only creatures who do so.

One need not be a philosopher to think about and wrestle with these big-ticket items. But since I have already quoted from one, let me here share from another key book that Kreeft wrote: Three Philosophies of Life (Ignatius, 1989). He says this in the Introduction:

“I have been a philosopher for all of my adult life, and the three most profound books of philosophy that I have ever read are Ecclesiastes, Job, and Song of Songs. In fact, the book that first made me a philosopher, at about age fifteen, was Ecclesiastes.” (p. 7)

He goes on to say this:

There are ultimately only three philosophies of life, and each one is represented by one of the following books of the Bible:
1. Life as vanity: Ecclesiastes
2. Life as suffering: Job
3. Life as love: Song of Songs.

 

No more perfect or profound book has ever been written for any one of these three philosophies of life. Ecclesiastes is the all-time classic of vanity, Job is the all-time classic of suffering. And Song of Songs is the all-time classic of love….

 

The essence of Hell is not suffering but vanity, not pain but purposelessness, not physical suffering but spiritual suffering. Dante was right to have the sign over Hell’s gate read: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

 

Suffering is not the essence of Hell, because suffering can be hopeful. It was for Job. Job never lost his faith and his hope (which is faith directed at the future), and his suffering proved to be purifying, purgative, and educational: it gave him eyes to see God. That is why we are all on earth.

 

Finally, Heaven is love, for Heaven is essentially the presence of God, and God is essentially love. (“God is love.”) (pp. 8-9)

While all three deserve to be looked at closely, here I will stick with Chapter 2 on suffering and the book of Job. In it he has a section on ‘The Problem of the Meaning of Life.’ Here is what he says in that section:

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 kowtowing 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 externalised. 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. (pp. 84-85)

He goes on to say this:

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 instead 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 are 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 more 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. (pp. 85-87)

Kreeft closes the chapter with these words: “Only one thing in life is guaranteed: not happiness, not the pursuit of happiness, not liberty, not even life. The only thing we are absolutely guaranteed is the only thing we absolutely need: God. And wisdom consists essentially in absolutely wanting that which we absolutely need, in conforming our wants to reality.” (p. 95)

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