My foray into great books today was a blast. It was a lecture for the instructors of Columbia's venerable Literature Humanities first year curriculum, some of whom, I learned, had been teaching this occasionally updated series of great text for decades. It was a new thing for me to think about how Job might fit into a program of "Masterpieces of Western Literature and Philosophy." Here's the semester's trajectory:
Homer, Iliad • Enheduanna,“The Exaltation of Inana” • Enuma Elish • Genesis • Homer, Odyssey • Fragments of Sappho • Song of Songs • Job • Aeschylus, Oresteia • Plato, Symposium; • Virgil, Aeneid • Life of Aesop • Gospels of Luke and John • Apuleius, The Golden AssIt's a strange amalagam of traditions, but at least Job doesn't have to stand in for all of the Hebrew Scriptures (or biblical monotheism tout court). Still, this is a different company than I'm accustomed to seeing it keep, humanistic rather than biblical or, well, "spiritual" (with Bhagavad Gita, Dao De Jing, etc.). What "literature and philosophy" is it that students are supposed to learn from it?
I decided to wend my way to Job's assault on canons of all kinds. I began with Job's desperate and defiant wish that he had never been born, his fearless attack on the apparent immorality of God, then let God enthuse about his non-human creations, from hailstones to ostriches and wild asses. Each of these has been celebrated as an instance of the literary sublime (Robert Lowth for Job 3, Edmund Burke for the paean to the war horse in Job 39), and none of what either says is assimilable in received canons of knowledge. The former reduces Job's well-intentioned friends to a kind of panic, the latter reduces Job himself to a mumbling acquiescence in "dust and ashes." The depths of individual human experience and the vastness of the cosmos burst the limits of our thought - if not of our language.
Inviting Job into your canon is asking for trouble, I said, as soon as we recognize that his friends represent canonical knowledge - the best that any human (including Job) had been able to do before the events of this vertiginous tale. We miss this point because moderns dismiss the friends out of hand as pompous and insincere. But what if their failure to do right by Job or God came not from an inability or unwillingness on their part so much as from flaws in the forms of thought they held true? Does canonical knowledge disclose the depths of the world to us or shield us from facing it? Job threatens shipwreck not just for the particular pieties of its writers' time but for all views cherished as pieties, especially our own. How thrilling!
