HCE, Job and the Guilt of Everyman, Part 4 (fourth part of seven), by Ann Cavanaugh

The biblical God we meet is seduced (or tested himself as it were) by Satan to allow the torture of Job as a way of testing Job’s devotion to God. Lots of testing going on here. Perhaps seduced is the wrong word. Perhaps it is an idea that found favor with God but required the agency of Satan to be put into operation. H.H. Rowley, in his essay; The Intellectual Versus the Spiritual Solution (in Glatzer’s anthology) states; “It was the expression of God’s confidence in him, and by his very suffering he was serving God.” One can reasonably ask; serving God how or for what? Serving him in his war with Satan? One can’t help but think of Joyce’s warring twins Shem and Shaun as the human example of this warring archetype. The twins are split off from a unity which is ultimately mended in the Wake and an argument can be made for Satan as the split off son of God. 

Unlike Christ who is tempted but castigates Satan, this God succumbs. Job loses everything and suffers untold pain in the course of his trials and asks/demands nothing but to be heard and considered by this God, who has joined forces in an unholy alliance, which renders Job pitiable. With HCE the focus remains on the concept of guilt/Guilt over something that may or may not have happened in Phoenix Park. Rather than a loss of worldly goods, children and personal health HCE’s brand of torture comes in the form of the wealth of his accusers and the dearth of supporters. Joyce seems to see this as a particularly Irish form of the manifestation of cruelty and shame. Take his words for instance, “Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow,” or as another example, the cruelty of the rejection and “crucifixion” of Parnell by the Irish: and this over, of no small consequence, Parnell’s acting on sexual desire outside the rules (Law) of Catholicism. 

The story of Job is resolved through Job’s coming to see that he has been expecting to understand the ineffable vastness of the contract with the small instrument of human knowledge. In fact he appears to be coming from an understanding of there existing a contract (ie an agreement around proscribed behavior of the signatories) rather than from the idea of covenant which Eichrodt in his Theology of the Old Testament describes as essential to defining Israel as Israel and “controlling the formation of national faith.” He goes on to say: “As an epitome of the dealings of God in history the ‘covenant’ is not a doctrinal concept, with the help of which a complete corpus of dogma can be worked out, but the characteristic description of a living process, which was begun at a particular time and at a particular place, in order to reveal a divine reality unique in the whole history of religion.”(Italics his). In this sense we can think of this covenant as similar to a marriage agreement which is an agreement of commitment but which does not determine necessarily the day to day interactions of the partners and does not determine the quality of the partnership over time. This analogy to a marriage contract is of course apt as Israel is described as the bride of God. It is clear from Eichrodt’s work and also various writings within the Hebrew Scriptures that the understanding of contract or covenant might be clear and definitive in one moment in history and then understood differently at another time.