The Storm and Its Voicepart iii · providence and the book of job

The strange and wonderful Book of Job treats of the same subject as we are discussing... and aims at explaining the different opinions which mankind have held on Providence. Guide III:22

In Guide III:17 Maimonides enumerates five positions on the question of why the righteous suffer. He attributes the first four to traditions he rejects — Epicurean accident, Aristotelian general providence, Ash'arite occasionalism, Mu'tazilite wisdom-we-cannot-see — and reserves the fifth for himself and the prophets. The book of Job, he then argues across III:22–23, dramatises exactly these positions. Each of Job's interlocutors speaks for one of the rejected views; Elihu speaks for something close to the right one.

The fifth position

Maimonides' own view is unusual. He holds that individual providence — the kind of attention that protects a particular person from particular harms — is real, but is proportional to intellectual perfection. The more a person's intellect is actualised — the more they have apprehended of the truth, the more they have come into communion with the active intellect — the more individual providence attends them.

Divine providence is in this world... only with those who have attained that emanation. It follows therefore that divine providence does not watch in an equal manner over all men. Guide III:18

The position is uncomfortable. It says that providence is not democratic; that it is, in the language of the time, a function of perfection. The pious-but-unphilosophical and the philosophical-but-impious are equally outside its protection. Only the rare figure in whom intellectual virtue and right action are joined is fully sheltered.

Job's transformation

And here Maimonides makes the move that the Book of Job invites and few commentators take. He reads Job's restoration not as compensation for his losses — not the simple return of cattle and sons — but as the consequence of his having, in the course of his suffering, attained knowledge:

Now I know God by a true knowledge. Job 42:5, paraphrased at Guide III:23

Before the storm, Job had wealth and family and the conventional piety that goes with them. He did not have philosophy. The Adversary's challenge is permitted precisely because Job stands at this level — possessed of goods, lacking the one good that would have made providence cover him. His suffering is the path by which he acquires it. When he says, at the end, I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth Thee, he is no longer the Job of the prologue. He has been drawn into the range of providence by becoming the kind of person to whom it attaches.

The hard implication Maimonides accepts is that the suffering of those who never make this transit is not, in the strict sense, redressed. Their suffering is a natural event in a world where individual providence is not yet effective for them. He does not soften this. The doctrine demands the courage to admit what the comforting alternatives obscure.

What the thread connects to

The whole structure depends on Maimonides' cosmology and his account of the active intellect — see Aristotle in a Cave. And his treatment of suffering as a discipline that yields knowledge anticipates the discussion of the reasons for the commandments — also disciplines, also yielding knowledge. That thread is Reasons for the Mitzvot.