Page 83 - GALIET KAFKABEL JOB, KANT AND MILTON: Omnipotence, Impotence and Rebellion IV+

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the lights of subjugation to OT’s religious moral discourse. Instead, it reveals the immanence of Jesus, the socio- political man, dissident and rebel against the prison of custom Milton vehemently deplores.466
If God, the transcendental, is Dead in Nietzsche, Jesus, the immanent man, dwells in Josef K. He is both the transcending immanent man and the immanent transcending man: the innocent man in all his splendour. Under the Civitas of Rome, Jesus is emphatically innocent to Pontius Pilatus thrice (Lk 23:4; 14, 22). Under the Sanhedrin, he is emphatically guilty. To K, Yahweh emblemizes guilt, while Jesus, innocence. Jesus entombed is the new temple of the immanent spirit and K is part of that spirit. If Jesus is the whole of immanent life, K is part of it in the beaming of his flashlight.
Just as Christ perishes in desolation between Titorelli’s frail trees hounded as the suffering servant, K perishes as the suffering servant to Christ’s immanence, to his presence, and politically, to Republican ideals of non-domination and non-interference,467 grounded on Rousseau’s noble-savage principles. The Trial asks what occurs when these religious morallawsarepolicedandenforcedlikecriminallaw?468 Job,thehero,andLeviathanconjurer,trembling,becomes his antithesis: the repentant anti-hero that purchases his life by bondage (41:1-8, 41:13-34). Job receives a vulgar compensation, and the valiantly opposed old dogma that the righteous, prosper and the wicked suffer returns, a world-view that renders K and Christ guilty and their deeds sinful. Hastily, Job submits and his rash heroic abdication demoralizes.469 Job, the superb hero of revolt, succumbs: terrified, he cannot defy, ask or argue, but tremble. Muted, he is subdued to repent. One mighty Divine speech suffices for Job to renounce his heroic candour and plight. Sisyphus in him perishes, and Job, the Lupin of Lupins wilts, as all things, swiftly return to the beginnings of the end.
Job and Josef K learn they are powerless against Behemoth, Leviathan, and the world (40-41; T228),470 just as Jesus and Josef K, the seditious, impetuous and unrepentant socio-political-religious hero-reformers learn they cannot contend with the socio-political theocracies and mores of their times. In their haste, both may have erred or marred what they sought to mend, yet when unable to save and change the world, they are scape-goated and man
466 Milton agrees with Plato. He argues that custom is never allied to reason, but to licence, the passions, and indulgence. See Plato’s Republic VIII, 582c. To Milton, “untrained minds are, therefore, naturally vicious, permitting wretched rulers. When human beings are irrational, they can neither discern good from evil, nor a good King from a tyrant King and justice flees away; it becomes perverted. Thus, the rule of law becomes a tyranny that serves the master, and not the people or commonwealth. Rather than freeing and elevating minds to greater deeds and freedom, it enslaves them and reduces them to servility and fear, and dissent and civil war. Moreover, when the appetites govern, the desire for power overwhelms corroding virtue, and inviting disorder and chaos to reign. In this state, humans incapable of self-governance are incapacitated to govern a nation.” Milton. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. By Merritt Y. Hughes. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1957. 754-58
467 To Pettit, a republic, as res-publica, seeks the public’s common good, and ensures that it is an empire of virtuous laws and not of men. Pettit argues that genuine republics aim to secure liberty as both, non-interference and non-domination in order to protect everyone against might and the arbitrary interference of others and the state. The state has the power to interfere only to correct private or corporate imbalances of power, where the strong overtake the weak. In a republic, citizens must not only consent to the Law, but also must contest it if it violates the common good. Pettit, for the most part, follows Locke in that the aim of liberty “is not to restrain but to preserve and enlarge freedom by protecting citizens against violent impositions of their fellow human beings.” Quoted in Pettit, Philip. Republicanism. A Theory of Freedom and Government. See Chapter I, “Republican Freedom, Before Positive and Negative Liberty,” Chapter II, “Liberty as Non-Domination,” and Chapter III, “Non-Domination as a Political Ideal.” Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. 17-109
468 Dodd, William. Der Prozess. Scotland: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1991. 21
469 This alludes, too, to Elie Wiesel’s sentiments, “much as I admired Job’s passionate rebellion, I am deeply troubled by his hasty abdication. He appeared to me more human when he was cursed and grief-stricken, more dignified than after he rebuilt his lavish residences under the sign of his newly found faith in divine glory and mercy.” Wiesel, Elie. Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends. N.Y: Simon & Schuster, 1985. 233
470 Behemoth and Leviathan serve as metaphors for the power of Court in The Trial. Josef K, on the way to his execution, remembers how he had always wished “to seize the world with his twenty hands, and what’s more, with a motive hardly laudable. That was wrong,” he says (T228). K’s arrogance and pride could not change the world. He could not fight against the system of universal lies, just as Job’s pride needs subduing before he can deliver himself from evil, as Peake argues (40:14). Josef K was wrong in that he had misunderstood or miscalculated the enemy’s over-reaching power and its tyrannizing, unjust and mercurial bureaucracy. Please see footnote 14. Peake, A.S. The Century Bible. Job. Ed. By Walter F. Adeney. Edinburgh: T.C. & E.C. Jack, 1904. 334
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