Page 44 - GALIET KAFKABEL JOB, KANT AND MILTON: Omnipotence, Impotence and Rebellion IV+

Galiet & Galiet
In Judaism’s pain and redemption moral order, devoid of Kant and Milton’s enlightenment and commonwealth ideals, Job and Josef K must eternally submit. Eternally guilty in the temporal eternal present, Job is always under the fickle dominion of Yahweh. By cursing Yahweh in the present, which is the future, Job is guilty in the past, present and the future, which is the temporal eternal present. If Job were to be tried again, his goodness would eternally return to sin because he is condemned to curse Yahweh again and again and to desire to rouse up Leviathan (3:1-26). Yahweh’s trial does not primordially test Job’s innocence or reaction, but the eternal return to sin. It affirms Satan’s insidious suspicion that no one, absolutely no one 3⁄4 mortal or angel 3⁄4 is righteous or pure before God (4:17). If Job revolts, curses, and yearns to conjure up Leviathan to end all of God’s creation, he is guilty of self-interest. Thus, Job sins in the present to inculpate his past and his future in the temporal eternal present. All of temporal time, thus, collapses into times of guilt for Job. This is Satan’s clever and moral victory over Yahweh: he commands the eternal return to sin in the temporal eternal present and ensures that guilt consciousness propagates by whispering ‘guilt rumours.’ It is not surprising that Kafka, in his devoted inquiry of ‘judgment,’ is equally concerned about gossip and the whispering of rumours.239
If maliciously, Satan’s rumours spread sin consciousness to Job’s friends, the Court rumours spread Josef K’s guilt to friends and strangers alike to ensure they submit. In Judaism’s moral order, Josef K, like Job, shall be eternally guilty. He shall always need to be enlightened this or that way, and be subjected to infinite arbitrary trials, no less frightening than Job’s, to either prove his innocence, if morally perfect, or to undergo a purgation trial, if morally imperfect. In both instances, Josef K must submit. He shall know again and again, how futile petitions and confessions are to an omnipotent and arbitrary Moral Court, whether he is blameless like Job, or flawed like Everyman. There 3⁄4 the guilt rumours are ceaseless. They prolong the tyranny of divine subjection and of Nietzsche’s ‘bad conscience’ in an irrational moral world where Yahweh dominates and grounds good and evil.
If Yahweh irrationally grounds good and evil, oppression and deliverance in the Old Testament, the God of the New Testament reconciles them. There is rare use of despotic terms in the New Testament.240 In fact, God is revealed in Christ.241 If Kant’s categorical imperatives do not admit contradictions or the irrational, Milton’s God is not irrational Yahweh. It is a Christianized, Platonized God, revealed in Christ.242 He is all Just, all Good, and all Beautiful. He does not possess Yahweh’s ‘jealousy’ attribute, or any of his mercurial will, whim and woe attributes,243 as if he were at times an Apollonian deity, and at others, a Dionysian whirlwind 3⁄4 a hurricane, blessing Job with one hand, and with the other, authorizing Job’s household wreckage and illness. If many of Job’s speeches affirm that Yahweh perverts justice “and rules the world immorally,”244 Yahweh reiterates it, (41, 42) and restores Job for speaking the truth about Yahweh, the Unjust (41, 42): the non-Platonic God 3⁄4 the platform of despotism.
239 Anderson, Mark. Reading Kafka. Prague, Politics, and the Fin de Siècle. Wagenbach, Klaus. “Prague at the Turn of the Century.” Ed. Mark Anderson. New York: Schocken Books, 1989. 35
240 Despotic terms only appear in master-slave metaphors. See Luke 2:29, Acts 4:24, 2 Tim 2:21, Rev. 6:10.
241 See Col. 1:15; II Cor. 4:4; Heb. 1:3; Matt. 1:23.
242 Milton. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. By Merritt Y. Hughes. The Tenure ofKings and Magistrates. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1957.
757
243 “Whim, will, and woe” are the English translations of the German, “Wahn, Wille, Wehe.” Nietzsche, in the Birth of Tragedy, posits that these are the
mothers of tragedy. Through them, we descend to the Dionysian realm. Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Ed. Edmund Geuss and Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Chapter 20. 75b
244 Please see Job 16:22, 17:16, and in particular, 19:23, which is part of a longer speech, that affirms that God perverts Justice. See also Fohrer, G. Das Buch Hiob. 257. Cox, Dermot. The Triumph of Impotence. Job and the Tradition of the Absurd. Analecta Gregoriana. Roma: Universita Gregoriana Editrice, 1978. 35
—44—