Well, not surprisingly, I'm not the first person to think about the Book of Job and the Anthropocene. On the very first page of his Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming (Duke, 2017), where he names our as a time in which some old myths now feel revelatory and several official narratives lurch closer to nightmares, political philosopher William E. Connolly turns to Job. Specifically, he turns to Stephen Mitchell's poetic translation-adaptation - the one Bryan Doerries, who uses it for Outside the Wire's readings, calls "Buddhist." Connolly likes the way Mitchell's version floats free of the multiple religious traditions he imagines it's crossed, from Job's world (in which Connolly strangely thinks Job was a "minority") through Judaism and Christianity. Indeed, in the introduction to his version of Job Mitchell aligns the theophany with Shiva's words to Arjuna (and Oppenheimer at Alamagordo) in the Bhagavad Gita, interlacing his interpretation with words from texts of other traditions:
When the great Tao is forgotten,
goodness and piety appear.
TAO TE CHING
If you bring forth what is inside you,
what you bring forth will save you.
THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS
To men some things are good and some are bad.
HERACLITUS
Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will.
YEATS
What the Book of Job shows us, Connolly argues, is how, in response to crisis, most people become ever more shrill in denouncing their opponents, who are in fact minor voices in themselves. Job, however, rebels against this logic of intensification, albeit with ambivalence (3), and Connolly isn't convinced he buys the faith in mystery of the complex moral story proffered by the irenic "thoughtful friend," as Mitchell dubs Elihu. This religious version of "it's complicated," which Connolly thinks dominates Job interpretation, is reaffirmed in the epilogue. But does that not miss the true "conversion" Job goes through?
"The Nameless One" (Mitchellese for God; Connolly notes that it might be a subdued voice in [Job] that was clamoring for attention) confronts Job, through questions, with all he doesn't know of creation; oceans and storms, the patterns of heaven and the edge of the universe, ostrich, hawk and vulture.
Job becomes spellbound as the questions accumulate. You might too, as you wonder how so many diverse beings, forces, and energies could coexist in the same world and how they could possibly either mesh neatly with us or be predisposed to our deployment. It is a grand, volatile world of multiple forces, perhaps worthy of our admiration even if we now construe ourselves as minor agents in it. (5)
The Nameless One isn't finished, of course, but eventually Job relents. I know you can do all things, and nothing you wish is impossible. . . . I had heard of you with my ears but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I will be quiet, comforted that I am dust. Patriarchy seems assumed here, Connolly notes, but it nowhere says that obedience to mystery will ensure protection of favorites - that's all in the epilogue, surely a later appendage designed to to tame the wonder of the poem (8):
Perhaps the poem, and the diverse energies bursting through it, points to human entanglements in a dissonant world of multiple forces that do not carry special entitlements or guarantees for any beings. We inhabit a majestic world with implacable powers that exceed ours. Its energies solicit our embrace in part because we and it are made of the same stuff. Perhaps the freedom of Job consists in his creative rebellion against the punitive stories of his friends, an appreciation of implacable forces, and an emerging attachment to a multiplicitous world that exceeds the stories he and his friends shared and contested. (8)
It's a nice reading of Job, offered to secularists as well as religious people, all who pursue affinities of spirituality across difference in creed during a dangerous time (8), in a spirit of conversation. Connolly finds in Job a diagnosis of the shrillness of climate denialism, immunization against the hubris both of those who think humanity the end of creation and those who think we are called to become so through our technological mastery. But Job's finding comfort in the words of the Nameless One matters too. It's an antidote to what Connolly calls passive nihilism: the formal acceptance of the fact of rapid climate change accompanied by a residual, nagging sense that the world ought not to be organized so that capitalism is a destructive geologic force. The “ought not to be” represents the lingering effects of theological and secular doctrines against the idea of culture shaping nature in such a massive way. (9)
How do I feel about this rather Nietzschean retrieval of Job? I guess I'm happy that someone else sees Job's promise in these dangerous times, maybe even a little reassured. Job is part of "Holocene religion," too, after all, fruit of an unusually harmonious time in human-Earth relations. But I've just read Jeremy Davies' impassioned argument (in The Birth of the Anthropocene) that the Holocene was far from a stable Eden from which the Anthropocene vaults us (and civilization far from a good thing for most humans, let alone getting ever better), so perhaps we shouldn't presume that the world religions are by definition unprepared for the adventure of geological time. And if Connolly accepts the modern view that the poem of Job is primary, he at least pays a little attention to the dialogue, and takes on the challenge of understanding what Job understood after the theophany, honoring it as an understanding and not just a capitulation.
Do I have anything to add to it, beyond the idea, already suggested, that what Connolly calls "Jobian" insights have been part of those traditions Connolly seeks to skirt - and valued, at least by some, as part of the "complex moral story" of our existence? In my thoughts about future retrievals of Job I've found myself retrieving the part of the story so many moderns deplore, Job's restoration. Not as the replacement of what was lost: like all those species we have already pushed into extinction, Job's first family are irreplaceable, gone forever but not forgotten. Rather the story tells of something more like the mysterious acceptance of newness in the face of unthinkable loss that led Kierkegaard to devote his Repetition to Job. Making kin - new kin - is also a response to passive nihilism. (I'm sure Connolly would agree.) Perhaps it's well to consider our capacity to do this a gift of the Nameless One.
