The Loss of Transcendence

And the LORD answered Job from the whirlwind and He said: Who is this who darkens counsel in words without knowledge?”  Job 38:1  Robert Alter

Darkens counsel – Robert Alter notes that this poetic response is a “manifestation of God’s transcendent power and also an image-for-image response to the death-wish poem that frames Job’s entire argument.  The unusual phrase ‘darkens counsel’ is not merely an indication of speaking ignorantly (as the parallel in the second verset spells out) but a rejoinder to the spate of images of darkness blotting out light in the death-wish poem of chapter 3.”[1]

Transcendence is the answer.  We know that; we just don’t like it.  Transcendence means that we are not on equal footing with the Creator.  He might share things with us if He chooses to do so, but we aren’t equipped to sort out the principles of the  universe on our own.  It is this noetic incapacity that so infuriates modern man.  Modern man believes that he should know and if the “gods” deem not to tell him, then he’ll just deny that they exist and ignore them.  Mircea Eliade calls this version of humanity the “non-religious man.”

“The non-religious man (the term would mean almost nothing in the ancient world) has become a reality.  Mircea Eliade has done much to characterize him:

            ‘The non-religious man refuses transcendence, accepts the relativity of ‘reality’ and may even come to doubt the meaning of existence . . . Modern non-religious man assumes a new existential situation; he regards himself solely as the subject and agent of history, and he refuses all appeal to transcendence.  In other words, he accepts no model for humanity outside the human condition as it can be seen by the various historical situations.  Man makes himself, and he only makes himself completely in proportion as he desacralizes himself and the world.  The sacred is the prime obstacle to his freedom.  He will become himself only when he is totally demysticized.  He will not be truly free until he has killed the last god.’”[2]

Otto remarks, “ . . . society had finally become God.”[3]

Why do we need to keep an eye out for the non-religious man?  Because in our world he is everywhere.  He has thrown off the shackles of the celestial realm and asserted that he, and he alone, will be the master of his universe.  He is the ultimate conclusion of the great Greek project: Man is the measure of all things.  And on this basis, Job’s quest is not a failure.  It’s stupidity.  The truth of the non-religious man’s universe is that accidents happen.  The world is the product of random chaos.  There is no higher purpose or principle.  C’est la vie.  While the ancients would find this absurd (atheism was a capital crime in Rome), we moderns have progressed to the point of denying divinity and any and all of its trappings.  We call that “rational.”  We are truly Sarte’s evolved oddities, creatures without purpose, capable of fooling ourselves with made-up meaning.  Giving up the story of Job means more than running afoul of the good versus evil debate.  It means becoming pointless.

Topical Index: non-religious man, Mircea Eliade, purpose, transcendence, Job 38:1-2 NASB

[1] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, Vol. 3, The Writings (W. W. Norton & Co., 1996), pp. 563-564, fn. 2.

[2] Robert Palmer, “Introduction”, Walter F. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult (Spring Publications, 1965), p. xi, citing Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and Profane, pp. 202 f.

[3] Ibid., p. xii.