Job & J.B.

"To me, a man committed to no creed, and more uncertain than I should be of certain ultimate beliefs, the God of Job seems closer to this generation than he has to any other in centuries." So says Poet Archibald MacLeish, 66, author of Broadway's latest hit (see THEATER). J.B. is an analogy between the Bible's searching sufferer and modern man. In the New York Times, MacLeish explains the necessities of heart and mind that led him to write the play; he also gives a moving view of his generation's despair--and hope.

MacLeish needed "an ancient structure" on which to build a contemporary play, and the Book of Job was the only one that seemed to fit the modern situation. The drama of Job is his search for meaning behind his agony, and man today is searching for meaning behind his own.

Comforters & Comforted. "We attempt--millions of us, the psychiatrists say--to justify the inexplicable misery of the world by taking the guilt upon ourselves, as Job attempted to take it: 'Show me my guilt, O God.' We even listen, as Job did, to the Comforters. [But where] Job's Comforters undertook to persuade him, against the evidence of his own inner conviction, that he was guilty, ours attempt to persuade us that we are not--that we cannot be--that, for psychological reasons, or because everything is determined in advance by economic necessity anyway, or because we were damned before we started, guilt is impossible. Our Comforters are, if anything, less comfortable than Job's for they drive us from the last refuge in which our minds can hide from the enormous silence. If we cannot even be guilty then there are no reasons.

"There are those, I know, who will object that . . . the God of Job is God the Creator of the Universe, and science, they say, now knows that there is no such Creator." But "Einstein has told us that he had sometimes the sense that he was following, in his plumbings and probings of the universe, the track of an Intelligence far beyond the reaches of his own." Furthermore, "there has been nothing in human history that has brought mankind closer to the immanence of an infinite creativity than the revelation that the minutest particles of inert matter contain an almost immeasurable power."

Love--to Live. The successful businessman MacLeish makes of J.B. is no carbon copy of Biblical Job; for one thing, he is not as devout. But he is no better prepared than Job was for the avalanche of disasters that fall upon him.

"And such a man must ask, as our time does ask, Job's repeated question. Job wants justice of the universe. He needs to know the reason for his wretchedness. And it is in those repeated cries of his that we hear most clearly our own voices . . .

"And it is here, or so it seems to me, that our story and the story of Job come closest to each other. Job is not answered in the Bible by the voice out of the whirling wind. He is silenced by it . . . by the might and majesty and magnificence of the creation. He is brought, not to know, but to see. As we also have been brought."

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the Book of Job, MacLeish notes, is that after it is over, Job accepts his life back again, to live over again with all the hazards of pain and injustice. "And why? Because his sufferings have been justified? They have not been justified . . . Job accepts to live his life again in spite of all he knows of life, in spite of all he knows now of himself, because he is a man.

"Our own demand for justice and for reasons comes to the same unanswering answer. A few days before he died, the greatest of modern poets, William Butler Yeats, wrote to a friend that he had found what, all his life, he had been looking for. But when, in that letter, he went on to spell his answer out in words, it was not an answer made of words: it was an answer made of life: 'When I try to put it all into a phrase I say, "Man can embody truth but he cannot know it." '

"Which means, to me at least, that man can live his truth, his deepest truth, but cannot speak it. It is for this reason that love becomes the ultimate human answer to the ultimate human question. Love, in reason's terms, answers nothing. We say that Amor vincit omnia but in truth love conquers nothing--certainly not death--certainly not chance.

"What love does is to arm. It arms the worth of life in spite of life . . .

"J.B., like Job, covers his mouth with his hand; acquiesces in the vast indifference of the universe as all men must who truly face it; takes back his life again. In love. To live."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.