FROM BUGBEE’S 1979 SEMINAR: Return to Syllabus

Implicit here (as often in Rilke’s letters to Kappus too) is sensitivity for what I have alluded to as karmic logic, or – as divine justice. You will recall that Psalm 73 entered our discussion in connection with this theme. Few texts reveal more succinctly or faithfully and candidly what a desperate struggle it can be to understand rather than to misunderstand this theme. The psalmist explicitly recognizes the central implication that his own heart is placed in question by it, and that try as he might he could not purify his own heart not only of the resentment and vindictiveness he has felt over the wicked (even blithe in their false ways and ‘getting away with murder’); but also and perhaps even more deeply he may be offended to the quick that the truth of this matter should so persistently elude him – as if God were utterly perverse and letting us down, as it were, not to make it unmistakably plain, and to all concerned. And who is not offended in his own sense of justice, we may add, if divine justice is thought to imply sanction for the suffering of the innocent? Could we help but feel a moral revulsion and revot at such a ‘scheme’ (as does Camus’ Dr. Rieux, for example, in The Plague)?

The psalmist, at any rate, names the actual occasion of his finally coming to understanding and a genuine affirmation of divine justice: The occasion is simply that of his entering into “the sanctuary of God.” (Psalm 73: 17). Then he can acknowledge God as ‘the strength of his heart’ even as he acknowledges how fallible ‘his heartland his flesh’ are (Verse 26); and how foolish and ignorant he has been (Verse 22). The revelatory force of having come into the sanctuary of God is attested out of that actual occasion. And the sanctuary of God? However we might imagine that, it would seem that we would have to imagine it as having spoken as profoundly and decisively to the psalmist’s condition, and to the condition of man, as the Voice from the Whirlwind of Job. Well, on the theme of divine justice there seems to be no room for blithe or pat assurance, or for a theoretical overview, as it were, in the lived world. It might be all one could do, given the opportunity, to from it from the bottom of one’s heart and within a scrupulous exercise of one’s intelligence, as concrete occasions may eventually provide warrant; warrant for such affirmations, then, as one may recall one has heard before; different from demonstrable assertions; yet by no means devoid of logic.

In the Old Testament is it not clear that the sense of existing before God entails the sense of being unconditionally claimed – called upon? Let us note three points that may be suggested in this connection:

1) The actual occasions in which God’s ‘presencing’ comes home to the respondent seem to be occasions of solitude, as when Abraham is called upon in a way touching upon his concern for Isaac; as in Moses’ being addressed from the burning bush and summoned alone up Mount Sinai; as in the dream that comes to Jacob, and in the call thrice coming upon the young Samuel in the night; as in the address received by Elijah at the mouth of the cave; as in the calling of Jeremiah and of Isaiah. As Kierkegaard might put it, this call comes as ‘singling’ the respondent out. The address is to the man at the heart of his sense of responsibility.

2) The way in which the respondent is thus radically called upon always touches on his responsibilities in the world and the way in which they need to be understood, so that he issues from solitude as one sent forth into the world prepared to acknowledge the legitimate call and claim upon his concern engendered in his active participation in the world. It is in the world and with the beings of the world that what may be called for has to be continually worked out. (That is the force of coesse).

3) I wish to risk an interpretation of the theme in the Old Testament that no man could see God and live – taking it apart from the sense in which God’s power might break forth upon the Israelites assembled around the foot of Sinai to their destruction (cf. the incident of Uzzah with the Ark of the Covenant?). The sense I wish to suggest in which it might be intelligible to say that no man could see God and live presupposes that this is just not possible – ‘to see God.’ But were it possible then ‘God’ would no longer be God: namely, as the animating source of our lives (as Augustine puts it, “life of our lives”). Were it possible to convert our existing before God into ‘God existing before us,’ that would spell the human death of us. To speak in a figure of radical derivation, we come forth from the root, not toward the root.

What, then, when Job says (42: 5-6) “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes.”? Has he literally ‘seen God?’ Is that the sense of the matter? How would that fit with the voicing of the creatures, brought forth as such in living speech in demand for his acknowledgement? Isn’t it in such encounter with them as presencing in this way that he is at the same time brought from ‘hearsay,’ as it were, into discerning acknowledgement of God? God’s presence is borne in upon him as never before with the force of the encounter, it would seen, even as now he abhors himself, and repents in dust and ashes before God. Is he abased then, “a worm” before God (in the word of Bildad? 25:6). NO, he is addressed as a man and sponsored in answering for himself. But what has been brought home to him has unutterably humbled him, even as he has been redeemed by it from despair.

A final comment or two while we are again on location here with The Book of Job: Job has been called into question for having tended to darken counsel by words without knowledge (38:2). A question, then, prompted by very helpful thought in the journal of Doug Pierce: what place have the creatures themselves, what voice have they in ‘counsel’? Surely the Voice from the Whirlwind commands a taking of them to heart in rightful heeding and concern for them. And the appalling implications of darkening counsel seem to be spelled out for Job in 40:2, 8-14; Job is made aware of that potential, that direction in which he was headed – all inadvertently, no doubt – in his having hidden counsel without knowledge’ (42:3). In 42:2 Job has just said “I know… that no thought can be withholden from thee.” Consciousness by no means presides over the life of the soul; yet one may become conscious that everything that goes on in the life of the soul – however inadvertently – counts. The way in which things come to mean for us and to concern us is thus surely composed.