by wv

Mazzinghi (2025), The Book of Job and the Problem of Evil

2026-02-24 by wv – Last Updated on 26-04-26 by wv

English translation by Claude Sonnet (Anthropic), revised by wv. The original Italian text is the authoritative version.

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What it is

Questioning the meaning of life is an experience that belongs to everyone; it is, as far as we know, a thought specific to human beings. Believers and non-believers alike, we understand beautiful emotions like “And so we came out to see once more the stars”1 or tragic ones like “Ill-fated is the day of birth for all who are born.”2

The question that a biblical scholar and a philosopher set themselves is the meaning of human life as tested by evil. And Evil — Male — is the title of the small volume that brings together their contributions to the theme.3

The two authors are not in direct dialogue; they do not speak to each other within a single text, but in two brief essays — prologues — each argued with their own tools of the trade.

Here we summarise the reflection of the biblical scholar Mazzinghi; in a subsequent post we will address the other contribution. In both cases we place ourselves in what might be called a third position: ignorant of theology and philosophy, we proceed by comparison.4

What works and what doesn’t

Mazzinghi, a biblical scholar, enumerates historically the eight responses given to the question: “…how is it possible that the gods, a good God, permit suffering, pain, death?”5

Responses that also apply to two consequent questions:

  1. Why does God permit the suffering of the innocent and the good beyond any doubt — children?
  2. Why does God permit the wicked, the torturing oppressor, the malevolent being, to suffer nothing at all — to grow in health, wealth, and arrogance, untouched by any pain?

The question is posed by Job, the persevering believer. The blameless one, the innocent who sees his riches vanish, his seven children die, his wife mock him. Alone, ill, atrociously suffering, guiltless — he puts it to God.6 7

Historically, and prior to the Book of Job, five responses had been given: first, if you suffer, it is through prayer that God “will intervene to save you and do justice”; second, “the gods [are] the true responsible parties … for evil”; third, “…no true justice exists … the only possible solution [to evil] is suicide”; fourth, “…faced with the prospect of evil … it is worth enjoying life…”; fifth, “…one choice is as good as another and evil strikes … without logic.”8

The biblical scholar notes that Job’s interlocutors give responses that echo the first of these — and frankly one cannot see how it could be otherwise, given the alternatives: false and malevolent gods, incitement to suicide, to unreasoned enjoyment, to the arbitrariness of evil.

Those who gather around Job’s pain say: prayer is the means of salvation for whoever has sinned. In other terms, they accuse the poor sufferer. They say: “…[since] the wicked are always punished by God, [it follows that] the cause … is the sin of the human being…”: punishment presupposes guilt. It is an idea of pain as retribution for the fault of having sinned. Therefore if Job suffers, it is because he has sinned — no other explanation exists. Certainty of punishment, we might say in modern terms: if you sin, you will suffer. Sin is presupposed by the presence of punishment, regardless of whether you are aware of having sinned.9

Mazzinghi consequently observes that, from this perspective, the response implies faith as a safe-conduct: it would reduce faith to “…the function of an insurance policy against misfortune…” — nothing higher.10

The second response offered by Job’s friends — the sixth in historical order — instead shifts attention to the meaning of evil, of suffering. Suffering has meaning: “…God liberates the poor through affliction.” The purpose of endured evil is pedagogical; it is a lesser suffering than what would await us were we not brought to a halt. It functions as a warning of the danger we run. Suffering, then, is an alarm bell — a signal at the threshold of no return.11

The seventh and eighth responses annul all the preceding ones and resolve the doubt.12

The seventh response is given by God — that is, by the author of the Book of Job — as he reveals himself to Job: “God … cares for life in all its aspects, even those that seem to us useless or even harmful.”13 The human claim to place itself at the centre of nature is arbitrary. It is an extraordinary response: among many, the human being is one, and not even first among the many — if not quite among equals. Like an ostrich, a fish, [a virus?], the human being holds no particular pre-eminence. There is simply no reason for it.14

Then the eighth consequent response: the biblical scholar says that “God brings to light how the human pretension to judge according to its own criteria does not hold.”15

God, then, is not answerable from a human point of view, but only from one possessing a universal and atemporal perspective — a hypothesis beyond discussion, since God is unique.

In any case, a point of view to which the human being cannot accede, given its evident intrinsic limits: it has no eyes to comprehend the complexity of creation, it does not live an eternal life, and above all it possesses neither generative nor regulatory power.

How to reconcile an omnipotent God with evil, if not by conjecturing that God renounces his own omnipotence — self-suspending, so to speak, in order to allow human beings to choose freely.16

“I therefore propose the idea of a God who, for a determinate age — the age of the cosmic process — has abdicated all power of intervention in the physical course of the world… In granting freedom to human beings, God has renounced his own power.”17 18

Marchionni, S., (ed.), Mazzinghi, L., Di Maio A., (2025) Male. with “Introduzione” by Piccolo, G.. EDB, Bologna. ISBN 9788810981535, pp. 138. €13,00

Footnotes

  1. Dante, A., Inferno XXXIV, 139. Trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. ↩
  2. Leopardi, G., XXIII – Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell’Asia (Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd in Asia). The poem, one of Leopardi’s Canti (1831), is a meditation on the futility of existence addressed to the moon: a shepherd wandering the Asian steppe questions whether life holds any purpose, comparing his restless consciousness unfavourably to the placid ignorance of his flock. The closing line — “ill-fated is the day of birth for all who are born” — directly echoes Job 3:3. The poem is reproduced in full in the Italian original: Murgia (2026), Lezioni sull’odio — versione italiana. ↩
  3. Mancuso, Vito. (25-04-2026) “Se l’invenzione di Dio è un enigma da risolvere”. La Stampa. https://www.lastampa.it/cultura/2026/04/25/news/mancuso_dio_religione_mistero_dante_kant15598014/ ↩
  4. In this post the notes are of particular importance. ↩
  5. “Then Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth. He spoke, saying: ‘Let the day perish on which I was born, and the night that said, “A man is conceived.” Let that day be darkness; let not God above seek it, nor light shine upon it.'” Job 3:1–4. ↩
  6. Piccolo, G. (2025), “Introduzione” in Marchionni, S., (ed.), Mazzinghi, L., Di Maio A., (2025). Male. EDB, Bologna. p. 7. ↩
  7. The Book of Job is one of the most interesting biblical texts, with the most “tormented” interpretation: see Card. Ravasi, G., https://youtu.be/hgZwHu8Sb3g?si=s3AbserafXDQMR5S. (downloaded 16.02.26). ↩
  8. Mazzinghi, L. (2025), “Il libro di Giobbe e il problema del male”, in Marchionni, S., (ed.), Mazzinghi, L., Di Maio A., (2025). Male., op. cit., pp. 27–28. ↩
  9. Ibid., p. 29. ↩
  10. Ibid., p. 32. ↩
  11. Ibid., p. 33. ↩
  12. Ibid., p. 43. ↩
  13. Ibid., p. 44. ↩
  14. Ibid., p. 46, italics ours. ↩
  15. Jonas, H. (Der Gottesbegriff nach Auschwitz: Eine jüdische Stimme, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1984), ed. it. (2004), Il concetto di Dio dopo Auschwitz. Una voce ebraica. Trad. di Maurizio Vento. Il Melangolo, Genova. p. 18. ↩
  16. Jung, C. G., (Antwort auf Hiob, Rascher, Zürich, 1952), ed. it. (1992), Risposta a Giobbe, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino. p. 59. Introduces a new perspective and — it seems to me — a question about the necessity of thinking God: “From the Apocalypse onwards we know again that God must not only be loved but also feared. He fills us with good as well as evil, otherwise He would not need to be feared; and because He wants to become man, the solution of His antinomy must take place in man. This means for man a new responsibility. He can no longer adduce the excuse of his smallness and nothingness, for the dark God has given him the atomic bomb and the chemical weapon and has thereby caused him to take on a quasi-divine power of destruction. Since, so to speak, an almost divine power has been conferred upon him, he can no longer remain blind and unconscious. He must know of the nature of God and of metaphysical processes if he is to understand himself and thereby arrive at God.” On the choice of the verb ‘arrive’ it would be interesting to see the text in the original language. In any case suggestive is the substitutive hypothesis: a secular reflection on human emancipation through thinking about one’s own — the human being’s — destructive and regulatory power. If one prefers: it brings us back to the question of the single God (at least temporarily, until emancipation brings the human being to an ethical level adequate to its general responsibilities — one might say: an inverse path, equal and contrary to the divine will of becoming human: a human will of becoming a good God), that is, the God of Jonas from note 15 above. ↩
  17. Vattimo, Gianni. (2012), Della realtà: fini della filosofia. Milano: Garzanti. p. 194, point 4) in particular: “3) From the perspective of being as gift or event, evil does not exist. But with this the discourse does not close — it has barely begun. How do we explain the undeniable experience of evil? Social injustice, mass exterminations, our own individual awareness of being in some sense ‘guilty’; (or, according to an emblematic page of the Gospel, the problem of the man born blind? John 9, 1–41). 4) For (my-our) philosophy, today — not according to a doctrine that claims to be definitive and metaphysically necessary — evil is primarily metaphysics itself: the identification of being with the presenting itself as a stable object. The confusion of the God of Jesus with the God of the philosophers. Evil is the unleashed dominion of measurable objectivity, the anxiety of not losing this dominion, in all the manifold senses in which we experience it: from the claim not to lose the physical prowess that allows us to seduce, enjoy, prevail over others, to the will to power of the great historical subjects, to the multiple forms in which the principle of performance unfolds at every level of our existence.” See also my post Under War. 06 Dehumanization, note 10 in particular. ↩
  18. Jonas, H. (2004), Il concetto di Dio dopo Auschwitz. op. cit., p. 17. In a related sense, and with an amused tone, see also Murgia, M., (2026), Lezioni sull’odio, Einaudi, Torino, p. 31. ↩

– Last Updated on 26.10.26 by wv

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