My copy of the Muriel Spark Centennial edition of The Only Problem just arrived. The rather disappointing introduction by Richard Holloway (remember him?) rehearses the impossibiity of theodicy and wonders at the seriousness of Spark's religion:She believed in God, but it was a God in her own image. As a great novelist, she understood the impulse to tinker with her characters, much in the way God plays about with Job. (xiv)
I'm amused that the line from the book which I used to frame my Renmin course (you might have noticed it in the group photo with a big question mark over it) appears on the cover: It is the only problem. The problem of suffering is the only problem. It all boils down to that.
But is that really so? (Holloway thinks it so only for those who believe in God.) Part of what I learned from this teaching experience is that there are all sorts of unexamined assumptions in this claim: That suffering is one thing. That it - all of it - is a problem. That it's one problem. That it's the same problem. Here's another mistake I shouldn't have made, should have known better than to make! Did I not make a big deal, way back when, of rejecting "the problem of evil," replacing it with the intentionally ungainly but truer "problems of evil"?
Perhaps it's spending too much time with Job that's made me so forgetful. I suppose the Book of Job is the prooftext for those assumptions, the back story to the western monotheistic sense that everything else does boils down to that, that things tend to boil down to one problem. Perhaps I need to spend time with other figures! I don't have time for it today, but soon I'll mull what would happen if one's prooftext weren't the story of Job but, say, that of the Warring States period poet and archetypal "virtuous failure" Qu Yuan. Several folks in my Renmin class suggested such a comparison might be illuminating...
