Sometimes a novelist is called a 'world-maker', and we talk about "the world of Dickens" and such, and it has become common for fantasy and sci-f authors to construct 'magic systems' or extraterrestrial cultures.

While non-fctional works represent the actual world, what do fctional works represent? Many have thought they represent 'possible worlds,' or, ways the world could be. What are possible worlds? According to Leibniz they are compossible sets of possibilia (and possibilia are 'complete concepts' in the mind of God), but many11 have treated "possible worlds" more metaphorically, as 'World-Books,' that is, maximally specifc and exhaustive sets of propositions. The idea that 'possible worlds' are like Fictional World Books, whereas the Actual World's Book is the only one representing a real thing, is an extremely popular one.12 There are many different views in this neighborhood, but the shared idea is that worlds are identical with, or represented by, consistent sets of sentences or

9 In this he is inspired by Hefter's (2013) interpretation of Rabbi Leiner (1995). Lucid dreams occur when one is aware that one is dreaming, and can consequently direct it to some extent.

10An alien archaeologist, far in the future, fnding a copy of *Napoleon: A Life* (by Andrew Roberts), could be forgiven from thinking this is fction, or that *Dangerous Liaisons* (an epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos) is a collection of actual letters.

11Mostly semanticists or modal logicians, who often regard 'possible worlds' in a merely functional or heuristic manner.

12You can fnd over twelve theories comparing possible worlds to books (or linguistic entities). See Divers 2002, 178–179 for details.

propositions. John Divers calls such proponents "Book Realists."13 These possible worlds are not like those of speculative cosmology and physics. There is no spatiotemporal path from our world to these, and they are fundamentally different kinds of entities.14

For the Classical Theist Book Realist, God authors these books, outside of time. 'The book' which represents the world is authored instantaneously. God knows any way a world could be, since He knows all the possible objects and properties, aggregates every possible combination of them, and picks one world to 'actualize,' where every last detail is settled. Every possible world-book, including what will become the actual world, is already 'written.'

#### *15.2.3 God: The Lone World-Artist*

A ubiquitous metaphor is that God stands the world as an artist to their work of art. But which kind of medium is the world best viewed as? Like a painting? A song? Maybe a flm.

Regardless of the metaphor, the Classical Theist adheres to two main points. First, the World Artwork is not a collaborative project, and the only artist is God Himself. Second, the artwork is birthed complete and entire. God is in eternity; He does not fddle about in time. His creations may exist in time, but their past, present, and future are all equally known to Him. His difference-making contribution to the world is completed upon creation.

#### *15.2.4 Problems with the Metaphors*

For the Open Theist these metaphors just won't do: they don't refect the world as she sees it, God as she sees Him, nor do they capture the relations between Him, the world, and us.

For example, on the Bird's-Eye View metaphor, the 'journey' is all laid out, and our future is just another part of the Block Universe, just as real as the present. A completed book is one where, while the protagonist is deciding on one page, the decision is already settled on a later

13Divers, *Possible Worlds*.

14At least, according to most. Some people are 'modal realists' who think that all possible worlds exist in the same way, and ours is not privileged in any way. See Lewis, *On the Plurality of Worlds*.

page—hence not free. Completed books, flms, audio fles—if made instantaneously—could not have evolved differently. By collapsing the distinction between completed flms and *flming,* they end up with flms whose constituents could not have made the flm any different than it in fact is.

These concerns are used, not to argue against Classical Theism, but to help construct desiderata for metaphors amenable to the Open Theist. I believe the OT'ist should consider the following fve desiderata which are in bold.

Metaphors for the Open Theist should shed light on how **petitionary prayer can change God's mind**. That is, they should support a model where something occurs which would not have occurred had the petitioner not prayed, where it was open before the prayer whether it would be prayed or not. So, this leads to the **open future** desideratum, which is also necessary in order to allow Libertarian free will in general.

The metaphors should also shed light on **how providence works**, both in general and in particular instances, whether miraculous or not. The metaphors should show both **how God takes risks, while allowing us to have confdence in Him and His plans**.

A corollary to some of the aforementioned for Open Theists who, like myself, accept quantum randomness is that **randomness** must be compatible with, or illustrated by, the metaphors.

## 15.3 Metaphors for Open Theists

I will briefy cover two discussed metaphors amenable to OT, but I'm mainly interested in the two I will propose, which share the feature of improvisation. The main point of this essay is that improvisational metaphors more accurately capture the spirit of OT, which sees God and free agents as unequal collaborators in making the world be the one that it is and will become.

#### *15.3.1 The Shrinking Tree*

Storrs McCall (1994) makes use of a branching model of time in order to lay out a hybrid 3D/4D view which invokes the metaphor of a 'universe tree.' The rough idea is that we can think of the past as like the trunk of a tree, and all the possible futures are like branches.15 The present is the point of the trunk where the bottom-most branches join the trunk, and we can envision it like a saw blade. As it moves up the trunk, it lops off unactualized branches. Suppose that event e1 can be followed by (mutually exclusive) e2 or e3. If e2 occurs, e3 is simultaneously 'lopped off' by the saw of the present. It is no longer possible. As time moves on, the future possibilities get lopped off, and, while the 'tree' shrinks, the 'trunk' of the past expands.

Before the 'saw of the present' chops off the other branches, there is nothing ontologically privileged about the future which will come to be, since it was not determined that it would come to be. If it was determined that a branch would not occur, then it wouldn't be a 'choppable' branch in the frst place.

I fnd this model and metaphor extremely helpful and plausible, since it gives a surrogate for God's knowledge of the future in Classical Theism, namely, God's knowledge of all possible futures.

## *15.3.2 More Dynamic Metaphors: 'Books-in-Progress' and the 'Growing Block'*

Static Classical Theists don't necessarily have a monopoly on the novel metaphor. A Dynamic Open Theist could employ it in a different way. They may have a different view of what novels *are*.

Static theorists see novels as sequentially ordered sets of propositions. But one could, and maybe should, see it differently. The writing of a book is an *event*, and the reading of a book is an *event*. Words, by themselves, just sit there, just like individual flm cells on a motion picture reel. In order to work, the novel needs movement and perception just as much as the flm does (and, arguably, more active imaginative involvement). Novels are a means to an end in a certain medium, the end of having certain *experiences*. 16 The squiggles on the novel's pages are a means. Toward what end? The generating of certain imaginings and representations in the reader. One could view the writing of a book more dynamically. That is how authors experience the writing and readers the reading. Texts, when used as directed, *move*. Read, turn page, repeat.

15Which themselves have branches, *ad infnitum*, unless there's a fnal moment.

16And *thoughts*, if you think the term 'experience' doesn't capture propositional content.

So, book metaphors need not be the sole province of Static Classical Theorists. God stands to the world as an author does to a book she is *writing*. Half-fnished novels are no less real than fnished ones.17 So, just like half-fnished houses being built are not half-real completed houses, but rather real half-built houses, so are half-fnished novels not half-real completed novels, but rather real half-fnished novels, or, we could say, *books-in-progress*. 18

And perhaps we are characters in the world-novel being written which could 'possess' God in the way that characters possess authors.19

One further metaphor which can act as an adjunct to the book-inprogress metaphor is a view of the nature of time—the Growing Block.

C.D. Broad thought of space-time in a way akin to Eternalism, but with a crucial caveat. The block is *growing*—growing into the future. "Fresh slices of existence" keep getting added to the block, which accounts for the fow of time.20 For Broad, the past and present are real, but the future is not. It does not yet exist. Combined with a denial of determinism, which slice will be added next is not settled.

The theistic Growing Blocker can see God as either adding each slice or setting up the block as grow independently, or some blended view. While a Growing Block theorist has fexibility with regard to dynamism and determinism, their view will invariably be more dynamic than any Eternalist view.

#### *15.3.3 God as Collaborative Improvisational Director-Participant*

According to the most apt metaphors I fnd for God in relation to the world, He is an improvisatory director and co-performer. I will examine in particular the metaphors of God as a jazz ensemble head, and as an improvisational play director-participant.

17Relatedly, how one sections a long book or series is somewhat arbitrary, and so whether one is fnished with a book or in fact working on a sequel is somewhat arbitrary too.

18C.f. Szabo-Gendler 2008.

19 In terms of surprising the author. I'm not supposing that we are pushing God around. There is a well-known phenomenon that fction authors deal with, called 'character possession,' where it seems that the characters are telling the author what they will do rather than the other way around. Just to be clear, I don't think this is literal possession.

20Broad 1923, 66. Note that the issue of determinism is orthogonal to the question of the growing block.

Since it is a component of both metaphors, we can begin by laying out some of the elements of improvisation.21

## *Spontaneity*

Spontaneity in performance is the soul of improv, even if an artifact is a goal. Something is improvised, in part, by being made up 'on the fy,' or not prepared beforehand. We can see it in dance, music, some painting (e.g., Pollock's finging of paint), flm, theater, 'automatic writing,' William Burrough's découpé,22 and so forth.

Some works are completely improvised, some partially improvised, and the improvised elements can be structured and prepared to different degrees.

## *Structured*

Ad-lib does not mean ad hoc. Improvisation is not purely random behavior or gobbledygook. In improv theater and jazz, the goal is a structured or coherent performance. There may, and perhaps must, be elements of randomness, but the whole should not seem completely random.

## *Collaborative Yes-And'ing*

We are looking at *collaborative* improvisational forms. Improv theater and jazz bands work together to make a single work. One is a member of a team, and team goals trump personal ones. If someone in improv tries to stand out or works against their colleagues' contribution, the work usually suffers. Scenes only work if the players focus on doing what's right for the scene and characters, and build on, rather than deny, their colleagues' introduced content.

## *Playfulness*

Arguably, improvisation is playful. It is participated in for joy and recreation, even if it has a serious purpose or application. One of the main draws for both artist and audience is that it is fun, even though (or partly *because*) it is diffcult.

22Burroughs 'wrote' some pieces by cutting out words and randomly selecting them, while making some corrections for grammar and coherence.

21 See Zaunbrecher 2011 for more detail.

#### *Aesthetics of Ephemerality in Live Performance*

Improvised art forms have aesthetic novelty. The most 'pure' improv and jazz are made to be performed live. In improv, this has to do with audience participation. Usually the direction an improv game or play takes will start with audience suggestions. Audience members are often asked to participate, sometimes on stage. Audiences usually cut a lot of slack to the performance that they wouldn't with a written play. Improv is selfconsciously so, and that's part of what makes it the practice it is. In both improv and jazz the mutual interaction between performers and audience often makes a difference to the performance.

The ontology of an improv play is arguably different from a written one, and the same goes for an improvised jazz performance versus a recording, or a fully composed piece.23 This has to do with entrenched Western ideas of what works of art are, as well as the distinction between composition and performance. With Western classical music, performer and composer are usually distinct, and the different performances are seen as different instances (or, 'tokens') of the same work (or 'type').

But the distinction between type and token breaks down with improv. In most cases, the performer and composer are one and the same, and the composition and the performance (to some extent) are one and the same. My friends Curtis Erhart and Tyler Denison, members of the improv troupe *Ephemerata*, begin every play by saying, melodramatically, "this play has never been performed before—and will never be performed again."

While there still are *kinds* of improv, both 'long-form' play structures (La Ronde, the Harold) and 'short-form' games (Word-at-a-time, Film Dub, etc.), performances in these structures are not different instances of the same work of art. The games are merely rules employed to shape spontaneous composition of plays.

With the most avante-y of *Avant-Garde* Jazz, every performance and composition are the same. With mainstream jazz, there are indeed different versions of the same piece, but some of the composition happens on the fy, so they are not instantiating a preexisting completed work.

Domenico Pietropaolo, while abstracting away from all the differences in the different schools of *commedia dell'arte* (the precursor of modern improv), analyzes *commedia dell'arte* as a "stochastic composition process" (Pietropaolo 1989).

23C.f. Solis, 316.

We can look at the various jazz soloing conventions and the formats of long- and short-form improv as stochastic composition processes. These are rules for making pieces and plays, which rely on randomness as a contributory agent. Randomness—it's not a *bug*, it's a *feature*!

### *<IP_ADDRESS> Example 1: Jazz Band Leader*

I am not the frst to make a metaphorical connection between jazz and OT. Darryl Wooldridge on Sanders:

Open Theism … proposes that God's give-and-receive relationship with humans requires that they have freewill and that God's actions are contingent upon human unknown actions. It is freewill that may change God's fexible strategies making macro predestination viable but micro predestination contingent, a bit like improvisational jazz solos within an overriding melody (Sanders 2007, 245). In other words, there is an unstructured or unknown polyphonic, improvisational element to human existence for which God accounts and responds, in real time, in harmonic kind.24

I am going to assume some familiarity with jazz25 and will mostly refer to mainstream jazz of the 1940s and 1950s (especially 'Cool Jazz'). These works, like all jazz, have some amount of pre-arranged structure.26 A familiar structure is a standard bop format, which is as follows: "there is an introduction, followed by the head, a series of solos and fnally a closing recapitulation of the head" (Solis, 317). The 'head' is the main theme or melody of a song, and, very often, the work has a 32-bar AABA structure.27

The head remains recognizable in the piece's different versions, while improvisation provides for the difference. *Every* performance of an improvised jazz piece is different.

Improvisation is so central to jazz that 'covers,' or replication, is impossible. The band *Mostly Other People Do the Killing* (MOPDTK) did a painstaking, note-for-note reproduction of Miles Davis' album *Kind of Blue*. How can an intrinsic duplicate of a jazz *performance* not be the same

24Wooldridge 2014, 65.

27 Solis, 317

25For those unfamiliar with the genre, here are some paradigmatic exemplars of the subgenres discussed in this paper: John Coltrane, "Alabama": https://tinyurl.com/y343ef6s, Miles Davis, "So What?": https://tinyurl.com/d3mack3, Thelonious Monk, "Don't Blame Me": https://tinyurl.com/ls2xlbh

26 Some *Avant-Garde* works excluded.

jazz *composition*? Because, as (band leader) Elliott puts "it, 'the defning characteristic of jazz is improvisation,' and that's by defnition precluded from this project."28 Exact intentional replication is impossible since spontaneous creation is essential to the piece.

In jazz sheet music, there is often notation indicating when improvised solos should occur.29 So, if one is not improvising, one is not playing the piece. MOPDTK weren't improvising "So What?," so they weren't playing it. Copying is not improvising. They weren't doing what Davis and crew were. Whether or not one is playing jazz is not intrinsic to the musical sounds, it depends on the intentions and preparations, or lack thereof, of the musicians.

Most small group jazz collaboration requires continuous simultaneous co-adjustment. They need to be playing *with* each other, not merely *beside* each other, and need to be creating something new as a group.   Everybody's playing some stuff that they practiced. … On a certain level there's like a feeling, "Well, I like playing with you," but … what does that mean? …  We didn't do nothing together. I played my stuff, you played your stuff, we didn't screw up the time.30

It would, however, be a misconception to think that jazz solo work comes *ex nihilo* out of the head of the composer, in the moment. David Sterritt shows (as should be obvious) how jazz improvisation is based on hours of practicing and learning the various 'tricks' for improvising performances. "The allegedly inherent traits of improvisation—authenticity, spontaneity, individuality," which can give the art, and the artist, an air of mystique, or an aura of cool, "are often exaggerated or misrepresented by its advocates,"31 Arguably, many improvised solos are pre-composed in part. As Thomas Owens states, all spontaneous performances "were

28 See https://tinyurl.com/ybf875yh

29Or, at least, there is always an assumed convention that solos should occur during the piece.

30Monson 1995, 84. My source is Solis, 333.

31 Sterritt, 166.

actually precomposed in part … no one can create fuent, coherent melodies in real time without having a well-rehearsed bag of melodic tricks ready."32 And Sterritt states that "the typical improviser's mind … is 'stuffed with a congeries of motifs, instrumental sounds … scales, chords, modes, and the rest.'"33

This is not to denigrate jazz improvisation. While genuinely improvised, we must understand that the performance comes from disciplined preparation, shaping novel sounds from familiar material. It's the same with improv. Improvisers practice accents, character types, games, transitions, and so on.

If God interacts with us like a jazz band leader, perhaps we should look at an example.

John Zorn, while not a paradigm jazz band leader, provides a good example. A saxophonist, he plays and composes in many different genres. In the piece I will discuss (at https://tinyurl.com/pa6ue3h34), Zorn is solely directing. The piece's head is a simple guitar riff,35 a few bars long, together with a keyboard chord progression. It begins by the guitarist, Marc Ribot, improvising with notes echoing the main riff, and Zorn points to his head when he wants Ribot to start playing the head, and, as you can see, he directs changes in tempo, volume, and points in certain ways when he wants an individual to solo or cease soloing. The keyboard chords act as an 'anchor' to give continuity and coherence to the piece, and when it's time for the keyboardist's solo, the head is taken up by Ribot to keep things anchored while the keyboardist wanders. You'll notice that at 3:29 Zorn pokes Ribot's leg to get his attention and points to his head to indicate the solo should end and he should get back to the head of the song. Ribot doesn't *immediately* go back to the head, but improvises a sensible way back, Zorn trusting Ribot to do this. You can see the constant microcommunications not just between the leader and band members, but directly between band members, and indirectly between members via the leader as a focal point.

This hopefully suffces to get the idea across how improvisational music is 'dialogical,' developing communicatively and communally among the

32Owens, 30. My source is Sterritt, 166.

33Both quotes from Sterritt, 166.

34The frst piece, from the beginning of the video up until minute 9.

35A riff is a short series of notes which are catchy, repeating, and rhythmic.

musicians, usually coordinated through a leader. The emphasis is often on process over product, or perhaps, *process as product*. But, when a work is recorded, it can enter the popular culture as a work which is appreciated as an entity in and of itself, such as classics like *Monk at the Five Spot*, or *Bill Evans at the Village Vanguard*.

Gabriel Solis argues convincingly that jazz performances and recordings make it so that jazz has a kind of dual-life. Recently, he states, the emphasis on scholarship has focused on

The dialogic qualities of jazz, on the ways that performances are multiply authored, undermining the priority of the single author, and focusing on the emergent, processual aspects of jazz performance, rather than viewing jazz as simply a collection of texts.36

Perhaps the recent scholarship has swung too far away from the preceding postmodern conception of jazz works, which regards them as 'texts' the paradigm of completed, 'frozen' products.

Solis says

I would like to suggest that the protocols of action and imagination that people involved with jazz—musicians and audiences—use to engage jazz recordings allow for a coexistence of a dialogic-processual interpretation of jazz recordings alongside an understanding of them as products.37

Compare this to the earlier distinction between two kinds of entities: an entire world, as it is unfolding, versus the completed recording of a world. Extreme Static Classical Theists regard the world as only the recorded and completed artifact, whereas extreme Dynamic Open or Process theorists see it as only the unfolding (or 'becoming') itself.38

Those who embrace the improvisatory metaphor that I'm using can also say that the world has a dual-life, the present unfolding processual life and its static past history. And, just like how MOPDTK's note-for-note intrinsic duplicate of *Kind of Blue* is not of the same kind as the original, so God, if He created a complete intrinsic duplicate of a 'fnished' world

36 Solis, *op cit.*, 333.

37 Ibid.

38An Open Theist thankfully does not have to embrace a process metaphysics a la Hartshorne or Whitehead (but they may have to embrace some form of process).

with libertarian free will or randomness, would not be duplicating the same kind of world as the original.

## *<IP_ADDRESS> Example 2: Improv Troupe Director-Participant—Christopher Guest's Model*

With improv performance there is usually no ruler, just rules. While an improv instructor during class gives directions and instruction, this is considered practice, not rehearsal.

There are many forms of improv, and I'll resign a short discussion to a footnote.39

In the metaphor envisioned, where 'the play' is all of history, I prefer to model it with Christopher Guest's method, with some signifcant variations.

Guest, after starring in Rob Reiner's *This is Spinal Tap*, a 'mockumentary' about a heavy metal band, went on to make many improvised mockumentaries himself.40 While Guest directed them, most were co-written with Eugene Levy. There wasn't exactly a script in the usual sense. The scripts were between 10 and 20 pages that merely outlined the scenes and story arc. They would also write up some brief background material for each major character. After casting was decided, flmmaking would consist in just throwing the actors together to start improvising the planned scenes. How each scene would develop was broadly settled, but how they would get there was up for grabs. No dialogue was written, being entirely improvised.41

39 Improv plays are either short or long form. Short-form pieces are composed via the rules of improv games. Here's a simple one–'Questions.' The players get on stage, and ask for a setting suggestion from the audience (e.g., 'offce,' 'beach'). Then they improvise, with the constraint that they can only ask questions. If someone fails, they are 'out,' until only one is left—the winner. Long form is much less constrained. Structures are provided to enable the players to create a play on the spot. One form, the La Ronde, works as follows. After an audience suggestion of a relationship, two of the players come out and start a scene. The other players form a line on the side of the stage. When it seems apt, the player next in line on the wall 'taps out' one of the players on stage, who exits to the back of the line, and a new scene begins. The next player will tap out the earlier of the two until everyone has had a turn, and it wraps up by a concluding scene with the frst- and last-appeared characters. The goal is to develop the characters, their relationships, and to portray some alterations in the relationships.

40They include *Waiting for Guffman*, *Best in Show*, *A Mighty Wind*, and others.

41Usually they ended up with 30 hours of flm, edited down to 1.5–2 hours for the fnal cut. Here's a trailer for *Waiting for Guffman*, just to give you a taste: https://tinyurl.com/

Guest frequently uses the same actors across flms. Frequent co-star Parker Posey herself compares what they do to jazz:

"It's like jazz," says Posey … "Everyone is a different instrument and adds a different element. Guest is very much a maestro, an *auteur*. … On *Waiting for Guffman* we'd do these long improvisations until the mag would run out. For like seven minutes, we're just lying on the foor, doing some acting exercise where everyone is talking and 'Yes-and-ing' each other." … The director, she continues, "defnitely created his own formula with actors that only worked in a specifc kind of way. It had to do with the creating of a certain character or persona. And you don't know what you're going to say—you're just going to be in the moment with someone else … and then something happens."42

#### *The Divine Improv*

The Divine Improv is a live, one-shot performance, with no editing, no revision, and relatively minimal preparation. The Director has envisioned an improvised play with a broad story arc, but with unsettled fne details. Each player receives a description of their character, background, and relationships. But one thing the Director *doesn't* do is tell the actors exactly what the story arc is. If the story strays too far from his vision, he has several tools at his disposal. For starters, he can enter the play whenever he wishes as a character.43

There are also some arranged prop and audio conventions. The Director is free to just throw a prop on stage whenever he wishes, and the actors must work it into the narrative in as plausible and seamless a way as possible. For example, he could throw an engagement ring in a box on stage when two characters who are lovers are out to dinner. Or, another time, he could play audio of a car crashing, and so forth.

The actors may discern where the action is going and can *try* to thwart matters. But this Director is so smart, with enough tools, that she will get from them roughly what she wants in any case. One thing she wants is what is best for each character, within limits set by logic, the demands of justice, and respecting each character's autonomy.

y8v8x5nl. Musical numbers are usually not improvised.

42From https://tinyurl.com/yb8kczah

43Analogous to, for example, a voice on Mount Sinai, or, for Christians, as Jesus. Also angels or internal suggestions work as presence by proxy.

These actors work on a "need-to-know basis." They do not know where they are going, for if they did, they would not arrive. Some of them may begin to discern the Director's benevolence for her characters, despite the play's vagaries indicating otherwise. The actors may begin to have faith in the end, glimpsing an ending which is surprising yet inevitable, but they cannot see how they will arrive. But a good improviser in this case will have trust in the Director's vision.

## 15.4 Salutary Upshots

And now for some explanations how these metaphors elucidate or support dynamic views of God and His interaction with the world.

1. Prayer can change things

While improvisation is extremely fexible, the players are constrained by genre-specifc considerations. A competent leader-participant will be responsive to changing facts 'on the ground' in order to meet the player's needs. The Classical Theist cannot accommodate this—any contribution God would have as leader would be exhausted once the play or performance begins. While His effects may be located during the present, this would only work if he foreknows everything which will happen—which is incompatible with OT. Blending an open future with the God of Classical Theism directing would be like Him delivering a video-recording of a conductor conducting a future performance—it would be unable to respond to changes.

According to Classical Theism, God responds affrmatively to prayer by actualizing a world where one's prayer for x is followed by x. But on the Open view, if a prayer is free, it cannot be 100% predicted beforehand; therefore God *must* act in time in order to respond.

2. The future is open

Improvisation would be much more boring and low stakes if what will happen is fxed beforehand. Regardless of our epistemic shortcomings, if it is somehow metaphysically determined what will happen for any particular improv, then the practice would lose some of the features that make improv uniquely good—a product of random associationist thought tempered by improviser choice and skill. If we are engaged with God in a project of realizing a good, just, kind, and interesting world with highstakes difference-making choices, a model which is collaborative and open-ended seems more apt than a sole-composed static work entirely realized before time, where each player's lines are all written.

### 3. Illustrating Providence: Freedom through constraint

The 'providence' of the band leader or collaborative improv directorparticipant can be divided into the help *before* the performance and *during* the performance.44 First, the writing of the musical piece, or the development of the story arc, helps narrow the space of possibilities within which the artists can fourish in their given roles, and assigns them guiding structure. A good improv leader does not craft a piece for generic artists, but crafts and customizes the work in light of the particular artists involved. That there even is a song or play to perform depends on the improv leader, and if it is a good one, then it is thanks to her.

In jazz, in order for some individuals to perform their best, to exhibit their individuality in improvisation in the most excellent way, they may have to be not merely guided, but also goaded, by the band leader. A good leader often pushes their performers and, somewhat paradoxically, makes them freer by constraining them.

Solis notes that in some cases

the need to come to a session prepared to 'bring something' to a dialogue with other musicians—the ability to make 'musical conversation'—is clearly mediated by the authority (if not the authorship, *per se*) of the leader.45

He then describes a case where Charles Mingus, with his domineering personality, dominated his band members to get them

to bring every bit of themselves to the performance, so that the arrangements would be refective of the individuals involved, rather than a mere collection of instruments. This goal is a composerly one. … The performance culminated in a performance of "Meditations on Integration."46

Buddy Collete describes a great moment during this performance:

44Henceforth, I will refer to both as 'improv leader,' and sometimes just 'leader.'

45 Solis, 333.

46 Ibid.

Everyone was getting into it, playing solos. Mingus had two other trumpet players (besides Bobby Bryant) … and he let them play. Bobby knew he wasn't going to get a chance. It was getting louder, more intense, really screaming. Then Mingus looked at Bobby and said, "Now!" Bobby at this point was so angry he hadn't played that he took his horn and blew the bell off it to show Mingus what he could do. And that did it. Mingus got the climax he wanted and the people just went crazy. … He had psyched Bobby out. He knew Bobby was strong as a bull and he wanted a killer punch. … There it was. Mingus had captured all these moods. He knew how to get them. He was like a little teaser: 'Not yet' or 'Maybe you won't get any' and then 'Okay, now!' It does work. It's what coaches do for fghters. Sometimes you need that little kick.47

I think what is analogous to aesthetic performance in the metaphor must be our moral performance or our will's alignment with God's. God is the jazz band leader or improvisational director of our moral behavior, according to this model, but many folk don't know they are playing, much less playing in an ensemble, and much less that there is a leader. That's why their songs stink and their solos detract from, rather than enhance, the communally produced piece. The way we are directed does not make us unfree—it makes us more free to be able to realize the fourishing we are intended for.

4. God's risks, assurances, and sovereignty

Most believers I know accept, and should accept, both of the following:

While we think that God may test us and allow us to suffer, we believe that (a.) still holds despite our calamities, since we think that ultimately He will not abandon us.48

Given that the improv leader employs fallible humans, there is no guarantee that the composition will be as good as it can be. Given the freedom artists in the medium enjoy, and a fckle world, there is no guarantee that, for example, one's solo will shine by being free from a distracting

47Collette 2000, 34–35. My source is Solis ibid.*,* 334.

48C.f., for example, Habbakuk 3:16–19.

colleague, or that one's presuppositions laid out in the improv will be noticed, remembered, and so forth. But you can nevertheless trust the leader since, if there is a track record, one has seen how the leader has often pulled the play/song back from the brink, such as by helping a character's suffering make sense or tying together loose ends.

Many complain that views such as OT entail that God is not sovereign and is undermined by no longer being the sole author of the world. The correct response to this is nuanced.

How many authors are there for a jazz performance or improvised play? A case can be made for *one*, and a case for *many*. 49

I think we can have it both ways. Solis mentions how, even though a jazz piece may be realized by a group collaborating and soloing, there can still be "reasonable individual authorial attributions" (Solis, 331). For example, the frst recording of Monk's "Evidence" features Milt Jackson on vibraphone. While other, later versions did not, they were nevertheless versions of the same piece. But if, on the frst recorded version, the vibraphonist improvises—why is he not an author of the piece as well? Especially if it is true, as mentioned, that the composer/performer distinction breaks down?

The answer for why he is not an author is that the differences he brings do not make a difference to it being the piece that it is, while they essentially bring to it something that makes it the version that it is. (The initial album was to showcase Jackson's work).50

With jazz, the non-authorial improvising performers are what we could call 'essential version-realizers.' While their solos do not make the song be the one that it is, they do make it be the version it is, distinct from any other performance of it. Improvising band members, while less than coauthors, are more than merely instruments to instantiate the composer's vision.

So, if we are the musicians in God's band, playing His piece, we also are less than co-authors but more than instantiating instruments. While the 'head' or coarse-grained structure of the piece is settled, we determine the fne-grained details and hence complete the work. We, like the band members, make a contribution to it being the piece it is.

Things are the same, *mutatis mutandis*, with improv. Maybe all the world is God's stage, but we are not merely players. The structure is

49When there's a single composer.

50Milt Jackson and The Thelonious Monk Quintet (Blue Note BLP-1509, 12", 1956).

broadly determined, but we decide how some of the particulars go. We are more than mere actors given a script, yet less than co-authors. Below an author is a contributor. We contribute to the play, and if it weren't for us, the play would be different—but not a different play. We may 'author' our lines totally, but this is not enough to make us a co-author. Maybe we cannot choose our role, but can choose how we play it.

The point is that these analogies retain God's sovereignty, while allowing us to make a difference-making contribution to the world. And nothing about this view denies that God *could* take over to any degree He wished, if He so wished. I don't know how often He does, but we can see many things go on that are decidedly *not* what He wishes.

### 5. How randomness fts in the picture

Randomness, non-determinateness, or chance plays a crucial role in improv. If improv is, as Pietropaolo says, a "stochastic composition process," then how does the stochastic part come in?

I don't think the analogies provide much illumination into what randomness *is*, but I do think they can illustrate how randomness is *employed*, both by us and by God. In improv, unexpected things (e.g., notes, chords, puns, actions) just 'come to us,' and to our colleagues, and from the audience, and we need to work with that. Concentrate on attempting to make a great plan pan out, come what may, or on preparing for *any* possibility and the whole thing falls apart. But, one can practice a lot beforehand so that more and better things come to one more easily, and actions undertaken more skillfully. We can ask the leader to help hone our skills. Analogously, we will be put into situations where our morality and character will be tested. At some point deliberation must end and action begin, and how we weigh and measure will be a somewhat intuitive and characterbased matter. 'Growing' as a performer is analogous to forming one's moral character. (These metaphors lend themselves somewhat to a 'soulmaking' theodicy like that proposed by John Hick.51)

Another point about randomness—'stuff' happens, and it often seems to have no rhyme or reason. A bad split-second decision, or a slow reaction time, which could be caused by lack of sleep (which may depend on the vagaries of that damn alley-cat's estrous cycle), can make the difference between life and death. History is full of stories of battle where who lived

51 Such as in Hick 1981.

and died had nothing to do with a soldier's skill, character, cleverness, or lovableness. There are many close calls, when we are happy that God is looking after us. Yet, sometimes other fne people aren't so lucky, and we'd be terrible if we used that as evidence that God doesn't care for *them*. We have to be careful with explanations of purpose and trying to explain away all randomness as actually pregnant with purpose. It could be that there is *no* reason some events occur,52 and a good improviser will often be hampered by seeking explanations when things go badly.

In a striking passage from Stephen King's *The Stand* (not all of which I agree with, in characterization or tone) a narrator states:

The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God … is accepted as the frst cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, *nothing is left to chance* … or change. Once such incantatory phrases as "we see now through a glass darkly" and "mysterious are the ways He chooses His wonders to perform" are mastered, logic can be happily tossed out the window. Religious mania is one of the few infallible ways of responding to the world's vagaries, because it totally eliminates *pure accident*. To the true religious maniac, it's all *on purpose*. 53

Is the reason you didn't get the job over your less-qualifed competitor because God is punishing you for not paying enough attention to your children? Or because of racism, sexism, or ableism? Or is it because in the interview you came off as arrogant?  Or is it because a member of the committee forgot to set their alarm at that conference long ago, and in so doing and waking up late, happened to meet one of the future candidates in a cafe line and liked the cut of their jib? Likely you'll never know. In any case, however, the answer of what to do is somewhat like the improviser's—we've got to roll with it.

This does not mean that you should not be perturbed by anything, nor seek to rectify injustice. Rather, that you should foster a resilient and fexible disposition as much as you can—you're going to need it.

52Or that chance *is* the reason.

53Book II chapter 48*.*

## 15.5 Conclusion

If God constructs the world like how one directs an improvised play then what is the *genre*? Genres not only shape the plot and themes, they shape expectations. If it's a comedy, expect some laughs. If it's a mystery, expect a crime and expect some false leads. While many good works are genre-bending, usually genre-crossing leads to disaster, like if aliens landed halfway through the flm *Chinatown*, or if a wizard was the main explanation behind the aliens in *Alien*.

In improv, as in daily life, we may be terrifed that we won't know what to do. But if we have a good Director, or Muse, we should not worry. Stephen Pressfeld relates the following:

Patricia Ryan Madson taught improv at Stanford for years. … Patricia has an exercise that she calls "What's in the Box?" She asks her students to imagine a small white box. Imagine a lid on this box. Now lift the lid. What do you fnd inside? Sometimes students say a diamond. … Sometimes a pomegranate. The trick is, there is always *something* inside the box. … Patricia was addressing her students' seminal terror: that they would get up on stage and draw a blank. The professional trusts the mystery. He knows that the Muse always delivers. She may surprise us. She may give us something we never expected. But she will always put something inside the box.54

Alasdair MacIntyre also has written about genre, and, in *After Virtue*, he compares us to authors, but of our own lives, and stresses the importance of narrative:

thus the narratives which we live out have both an unpredictable and partially teleological character. If the narrative of our individual and social lives is to continue intelligibly … it is always both the case that there are constraints on how the story can continue *and* that within those constraints there are indefnitely many ways that it can continue. … I can only answer the question 'What am I to do?' If I can answer the prior question, 'Of what story or stories do I fnd myself a part?'55

It will help the players' performance to discover what genre of play they are in. If they are acting like they are in a comedy, when in fact they are in a tragedy, aesthetic disaster will ensue. But it may well be that having to

54Pressfeld, *Turning Pro* 117.

55MacIntyre 1981, 216.

discover themselves what genre they are in is instrumental toward it being the instance of the genre that it is.

We do not get to fully determine what genre we are in. Part of the scoundrel's problem is that he believes he is in a heroic tale, where in fact he is in a tragedy, with himself as the anti-hero. A buffoonish blowhard may believe he is a stable genius and part of the greatest riches-to-greaterriches success story, whereas he is actually in a tragi-comedy about a spoiled rich boy and the soul-destroying effects of greed, power, and narcissism.

Maybe if we came to realize that we are all primarily in a *love story*, or collectively playing a *love song*, and are not composing, much less directing, on our own, we would come to change our expectations, attitudes, and show some real chops.

The world which is a love-themed improvised artwork is unique. This is the only love story wherein the very characters of the story can come to realize that they are both the story's subjects, and the story's collaborators, and that the story is also about a perfect loving author, who wants to play with them—not as playthings, but as playmates. Hence the story of the world reaches outside of itself.

The love which the work is *about* is not only represented by the work, the work is constituted and sustained by the very love which it is about.

## Bibliography

———. 2017. Hassidic Idealism: Kurt Vonnegut and the Creator of the Universe.

D. Pietropaolo, 167–175. Ottawa: Dovehouse.

Polkinghorne, John. 1989. *Science and Providence: God's Interaction with the World.* Templeton Press.

Pressfeld, Stephen. 2012. *Turning Pro*. Black Irish Entertainment.

Sterritt, David. 2000. Revision, Prevision, and the Aura of Improvisatory Art. *The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism* 58: 2.

Szabo-Gendler, Zoltan. 2008. Things in Progress. *Noûs* 42 (1): 499–525.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

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## Saadia on "what is in the hearts of people when they reach the limits of endurance in a trial"

## *Josef Stern*

Saadia ben Joseph Al-Fayyumi Gaon (b. Egypt 882, d. Iraq 942) is one of the best examples of the impact of Islamic civilization (which absorbed Late Ancient culture and thought) on medieval Judaism in the East. The most distinguished rabbinic scholar of his generation, he was "Gaon" ("His Excellency"), or Head, of the famous Talmudic academy in Sura and later in Baghdad (under the Abbasids), the author of important legal responsa and treatises, especially on procedural law and on the calendar, and a powerful opponent of the sectarian Karaites. He also wrote pioneering work on Hebrew linguistics and grammar, poetry, and liturgy; translated the Hebrew Bible into Arabic; and composed commentaries on

Earlier versions of this paper were given at the Munich School of Philosophy, Bar-Ilan University, and Kehillat Kol Dodi, Jerusalem. I wish to thank Eleonore Stump, Godehard Bruntrup, Kelly Clark, Shira Weiss, and Umeyye Isra Yazicioglu for comments and criticism.

J. Stern (\*)

The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
© The Author(s) 2022 339

K. J. Clark, J. Koperski (eds.), *Abrahamic Refections on Randomness and Providence*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75797-7\_16

selected books, including the *Book of Job*. However, he is probably best known for his *Book of Doctrines and Beliefs*, a book of Jewish *kalam*, socalled dialectical theology, an attempt to systematize the beliefs of Judaism and, arguably, the frst book of Jewish *philosophy* (in a broad sense of the term "philosophy," although it is not Aristotelian *falsafa*).1 It was the frst such text to initiate a *tradition* of Jewish thought.2

In the fourth and ffth treatises of *Doctrines and Beliefs* and, as we shall see, in the Introduction to his commentary on the *Book of Job*, *The Book of Theodicy*, Saadia discusses the constellation of metaphysical issues that revolve around providence, the problem of evil, free will and human responsibility, reward and punishment, suffering, and, in particular, unjust or undeserved suffering, which is known in rabbinic Judaism as the problem of *zaddiq ve-ra' lo'* (the suffering of the righteous) and *rasha' ve-tov lo'* (the prospering of the wicked). First, Saadia defends a libertarian conception of human freedom against strong Ash'arite arguments that deny it in order to secure divine omnipotence manifest in occasionalism, the doctrine that there are no intermediate natural causes and that all natural phenomena, including human action, are directly causally dependent on the will of God.  However, while He allows such evils—after all, the harm their free actions cause is not to Him but to themselves—at the same time He warns humans not to commit them out of His mercy for humanity. The fact that humans commit those evils is, in any case, neither incompatible with His power (to do only the good) nor does it show that He lacks power (over humanity). Second, in order to demonstrate the compatibility of natural evil, or suffering, with the

1*Doctrines and Beliefs* was not, however, the frst book of Jewish *kalam*. That distinction goes to al-Muqammas 2016 (9th c.) which is also the frst Arabic theological treatise we possess.

2For the major works of Saadia, see Saadiah 1946/2002; 1948; 1972; 1973; 1988. All citations in the text to *Doctrines and Beliefs* are to Saadiah 1946/2002 (Altmann translation) and all citations in the text to the Commentary on *Job* are to Saadiah 1988 (Goodman translation). For Saadiah's intellectual biography and especially the Islamic background to his life and thought, see Malter 1921; Brody 2016; and Stroumsa 2003. On the Commentary on *Job*, and its Islamic background, both in the *Qur'an* and *tafsir* literature, see Goodman's introductory essay to Saadiah 1988, 4–109; Goodman 1990; Stump 1997; 2000; Rosenthal 2001, 97–125; Eisen 2004, 17–41; and Cohen 2005, 243–253. On Saadiah's general theory of providence, see Stump 1997 and Nadler 2009, 624–628. On Saadiah's epistemology, see Heschel 1942–3 and 1944–5. On the signifcance of traditions in the characterization of Jewish philosophy and Saadiah's place in a tradition, see Josef Stern 2017.

existence of God and, more important for Saadia, with divine justice, he offers a number of traditional theodicies: that natural evil is an illusion if one were only to know the "big picture," that there are no goods without evils, and that evils are often corrective devices. However, the problem of evil that most concerns Saadia is that of the suffering of the righteous and the prosperity of the wicked. Not only is this unjust. According to Saadiah, it challenges the very idea of reward and punishment. His general reply is that while there is reward and punishment, we can never know who is truly deserving of either. Thus he attempts to disabuse us of one problem with evil—Why are we suffering and what did we do wrong?—by constructing an account that both affrms that there is a theodicy, or justifcation for all evil, and delimits human understanding of how to apply such a theodicy to actual cases.

More specifcally, Saadia's theodicy to account for the suffering of the righteous distinguishes two kinds of suffering or evil: (i) punishment and (ii) trial or testing.

I fnd that suffering befalls the pious in this world in one of two ways: either as punishment for the relatively small number of their transgressions … or, alternatively, as a visitation from God in order to test them, provided He knows that they will be able to endure it.  (Saadiah 1946/2002, 137–8)

When sufferings and calamities befall us, they must be of one of two classes: either they occur on account of prior sins of ours, in which case they are to be called punishments, and we must search out the relevant shortcomings and remove them and improve our actions. … Or they are a trial from the Allwise, which we must bear steadfastly, after which He will reward us. (Saadiah 1988, 130)

The frst justifcation for suffering is that it is punishment for past sins and wrongs. However, the function of the suffering is not only retribution but also purifcation of the sinner's soul of lasting bad effects on his dispositions and character as a result of his individual sinful actions. People's actions, good and bad, leave their traces on their souls, rendering them either pure or sullied. One function of suffering is to correct, purify, or cleanse the soul of any defect or unclean stain on the sinner's character or personality, and to restore it to its pristine condition. But only God can discern the faws in the soul and recognize whether there are long-term effects on our dispositions and characters. Hence, humans can never know—especially about others—why in particular they suffer, although the fact *that* they suffer should be attributed to just desert.

 If someone fell in a single category, the purely righteous or the purely wicked, there would be no diffculty in explaining why he prospers or suffers, respectively. But generally humans are a mix of the righteous and the wicked. Thus divine justice demands that even the very wicked receive their due for good actions or virtues, and analogously for the very righteous, for their sins. Therefore, reward and punishment cannot be measured as simple one-to-one effects of or reactions to individual actions; they require calculation and computation, balancing good with evil and the evaluation of punishment and reward in a more holistic fashion, looking at the whole person, not just his isolated acts, one by one. Only God can know how to do this.

Saadia distinguishes two worlds: a "world of action," this world in which we humans live and act, and a "world of reward," a world in which human actions receive their compensation, reward or punishment. This second world according to Saadia is not necessarily "the world to come" in rabbinic terminology, the afterlife, paradise or hell. It is closer to a posthistorical age like the messianic era in which it is humans (perhaps resurrected), not disembodied souls, who are compensated. However, the fact that there exists a dedicated world for compensation does not mean that there is no evidence of reward or compensation in *this* world, the world of action. The true rewards may all come in the world of compensation but there is also some reward or compensation in the world of action, both to signal to humans that there exists a future world of compensation and, more important, because individuals are typically a mix of righteousness and wickedness and therefore demand *both* reward and punishment. In other words, the innocent are never totally innocent, nor are the wicked totally wicked. If "entrance" to the (sub-?) world (only) of reward is only for those who are due reward exclusively (and analogously for the (sub-?) world of punishment), what of the mixed cases? They cannot enter either world. Therefore, the Divine Bookkeeper calculates each individual's good and bad deeds and then rewards/punishes that class of deeds that are in the minority *in this world of action* in order to enable her soul to enter the (sub-)world of reward (or punishment, as the case may be) in a "pure" position. Because even the righteous have slight failings, given divine bookkeeping, they are punished in this world and likewise for the wicked who are rewarded in this world. However, this explanation solves the problem only insofar as the punishments (and rewards) in this world of action are *commensurate* to the supposed minor acts of wickedness for the righteous (and minor acts of righteousness for the wicked). But most cases of the suffering of the righteous appear to be exactly the opposite: the more righteous the sufferer, the more incommensurate seem to be the evil acts that are called upon to justify her suffering. Thus, the overall moral of this quantifed, economic model of suffering serves to underscore our human ignorance of how to calculate virtues and vices to determine reward and punishment. One should never draw inferences about desert and justice for any particular individual from either her prosperity or her suffering.

The second kind of justifcation for suffering and evil is what Saadia calls "trials and testing." These are not correctives for prior sins, but showtrials enacted by God to reveal to the world at large the piety of those tested. Enduring such show-trials demonstrates the piety of the sufferer to the whole world. However, if that is the purpose of the trial, one might nonetheless object that the suffering is not deserved. No past wrongs that the sufferer committed justify why he should be subject to evil. In order to address this objection and thereby render the suffering just, or at least seem fair, Saadiah argues that the trial leads to compensation or a greater reward (*gemul*) in the future for the sufferer, either in the temporal future or in the afterlife. In return for suffering now, the victim, or sufferer, is compensated in the future.

This second justifcation, the so-called doctrine of compensation, which is also identifed with the rabbinic notion of "sufferings of love," is severely criticized by Maimonides in the *Guide of the Perplexed,* and Saadia is clearly his target although he is not mentioned by name (1965, 498, 471). "God sends down calamities upon an individual, without their having been preceded by a sin, in order that his reward be increased" (Maimonides 1965, 497). But even if the victim is ultimately "paid back" for his losses and suffering with a greater reward at some time in the future, Maimonides objects that the suffering was undeserved at the time of the suffering and therefore it was unjust *then*. Nor is it obvious that any individual would willingly undergo suffering only for the promise of future compensation. So insofar as the suffering is not what the individual wants, even if the compensation is fair, it is not something the individual desires, hence, not good for him. In sum, although this explanation is, Maimonides grants, "generally accepted among people" (498), no one "endowed with intellect" (497) would believe such an impious opinion about God.

To recap, Saadiah offers two solutions, or theodicies, for the metaphysical problem of the suffering of the righteous human: punishment and trial. In addition, he gives a third account in the *Commentary* that suffering is simply part of, or constitutive of, being a created substance.

God created human beings in the frst place to test them. (Saadiah 1988, 129)

The very reason for creating fnite humans was to enable them to manifest their ability to survive or endure suffering—and to endure it autonomously, that is, through their reason. To be sure, they will be compensated, but on this explanation suffering is the rule, not the exception, for created life.

Saadia's clearest example of such suffering built into createdness is what I will call epistemic evil: doubt and uncertainty. Saadiah tells us that he wrote *Doctrines and Beliefs* because of the pervasive doubt among his coreligionists at his time, his contemporaries' lack of certainty and security in their beliefs, their many false or at least unjustifed beliefs, and a kind of pervasive relativism due to their cosmopolitan culture.

When I considered these *evils* …, my heart grieved for my race, the race of mankind … as I saw in my time many of the believers clinging to unsound doctrines and mistaken beliefs. … I saw men sunk, as it were, in a sea of doubt covered by the waters of confusion. (Saadiah 1946/2002, 28–29, my emphasis)

This leads him to ask:

How can it be reconciled with the wisdom of the Creator … that he allowed errors and doubts to arise in the minds of His creatures? We may answer this question at once by saying that the very fact that they are created beings causes them to be subject to error and delusion.  Indeed

To wish to have "knowledge that is free from doubt" is "to ask to be nothing less than like God."  But doubt and uncertainty are themselves evils and forms of suffering, both epistemic and psychological.

With this background, I now want to turn to Saadia's *Commentary on the Book of Job*, his *Book of Theodicy*. As I have already indicated, Saadia discusses the metaphysical problem of evil in his Introduction to his Arabic translation and commentary, more or less repeating the justifcations he presents at greater length in *Doctrines and Beliefs*. 3 However*,* I will argue that the main issue with which he is concerned in the commentary itself is not the metaphysical problem and its solutions, or theodicies. Rather the issue is what I shall call the *existential* problem of evil:

Knowing that throughout the ages the thoughts which pass before men's minds when sufferings befall them are of four sorts, corresponding to those which arose in Job's day, God required all this to be set forth for us. … Thus God caused the record of Job's trials and affictions to be set forth—his words, the words of his companions, the arguments of each, as well as Elihu's rebuttal—*with the purpose of revealing by this means what is in the hearts of people when they reach the limits of endurance in a trial*. (Saadiah 1988, 127)

What we learn from the *Book of Job* is not metaphysics—the compatibility of evil and suffering with the existence of God or with divine justice but what people enduring and witnessing suffering are *thinking when they suffer*, their *experience* of suffering, how they react to suffering—and, perhaps, in turn, how *we ought* to react to our own suffering. Thus Saadiah wants to give us primarily a phenomenology of suffering although sometimes he seems to slip from the descriptive to the normative, from what people *are* thinking to what they *ought* to be thinking.

Saadia's pursuit of this problem is itself highly original. I know of no other medieval Jewish thinker who poses such a question. As important, it is a problem that can be explored best, perhaps only, through a commentary on a narrative like *Job*, not through discursive philosophical analysis and traditional forms of argument or proof. Saadia was not, of course, the only medieval Jewish, Muslim, or Christian philosopher to write *both* philosophical treatises (or commentaries on earlier philosophical works) and philosophical commentaries on Scripture. However, when an author

3Weiss 2000 and Eisen take the Commentary primarily to recapitulate *Doctrines and Opinions.*

engages in different genres of philosophical writing (like these), one naturally wonders whether the one form enables her to address and explore issues that the other does not, or not as well or in different way. And how does the genre of writing affect how the author deals with the same problem in the different works? In particular, does a narrative or dialogue allow the author to address subtle questions from more perspectives than philosophical exposition?4 For example, in the passage just quoted, Saadia writes that it is from the words of *all* the fgures in the book, not from any one speaker, that we learn "the thoughts which pass before men's minds when sufferings befall them." The "record" of *Job* consists not only in Job's words but equally in "the words of his companions, the arguments of each, as well as Elihu's rebuttal." No single character expresses what is revealed about "what is in the hearts of people," only the totality of different perspectives, each partial and even potentially in confict with one another. The opportunities made possible by the dialogue form in *Job* are reminiscent of Hume's explanation in the opening to his *Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion* in Hume 1779 (1993) of why he employs the genre of the dialogue: to explore a topic "where human reason can reach no fxed determination," where "reasonable men may be allowed to differ," and "where the variety of lights, presented by various personages and characters, may appear neither tedious nor redundant" (29–30). Is there something about the problem of evil, or God's relation to the world, that makes it especially appropriate for treatment in the dialogue form?

The task Saadia sets for himself in the Commentary on *Job* is not only novel and original. The commentary is a seminal work of scriptural exegesis and interpretation for at least two additional reasons. First, Saadiah gives radically naturalistic interpretations, downplaying, if not eliminating, the fantastic, mythical, supernatural elements in the biblical text, features that were emphasized and expanded upon in earlier rabbinic midrashic exegesis. For example, the *Leviathan* becomes a crocodile in Saadia's hands, and *Behemoth*, a hippopotamus or cattle. These are exotic animals but not mythical or fantastic creatures. And we will turn next to Saadiah's most naturalistic de-mythicizing interpretation of the narrative frame of the book.

Second, Saadia was the frst, to my knowledge, to reconstruct the rambling, repetitious speeches of the three friends and of Elihu, Job, and God as philosophical arguments, identifying theses for which they argue that

4For an intensive exploration of this question, see Stump 2010, ch. 9.

serve as objections and responses to each other, thereby shaping each fgure's speech into a "coherent" philosophical position, turning the book into a philosophical dialogue between different philosophical schools. Each character represents a different school—an idea that, in turn, will be borrowed by Maimonides in his interpretation of *Job* in the *Guide*, although the schools Saadia and Maimonides fnd in the book are not the same. So, for Saadia, Job is initially an Ash'arite: his God does whatever He wants without constraint, and justice is whatever God so decides. The three friends are all Mut'azalites: they insist that everything God does is just (in our sense of the term); hence, Job must have sinned for which he suffers as punishment. Elihu is a revised Mut'azalite (probably speaking for Saadiah himself) who introduces the doctrine of compensation and trials in addition to suffering and punishment. However, as Saadia emphasizes a number of times, none of the fgures in the *Book of Job*, or their respective schools, claim that God acted unjustly, none deny divine justice. It is because they all assume divine justice that the characters disagree among themselves as to how to resolve that with Job's suffering and evil.

In order to work out Saadia's phenomenology of what is in the hearts of people when they suffer, let's begin with his interpretation of the narrative frame of the book, chs. 1–2.

According to its traditional literal meaning, Satan is *God's* quasi-divine mythical adversary, and the description "*bnei ha-elohim*" (1, 6), which is usually translated as "children/sons of God," traditionally refers to angellike, supernatural, quasi-divine fgures, demi-gods, or other fabular beings in the divine court. After arguing against these supernatural interpretations, Saadiah instead offers his own naturalistic reading:

I rendered "*bnei ha-elohim*" as "God's beloved" (*awliya' Allah*; Kafh: *nikhbadey hashem*) in accordance with the widespread usage of the nation, as in *Children are ye to the Lord your God* (Deut. 14:1), *My frst-born child Israel* (Exod 4: 22), *Is corruption His? No, His children's is the fault* (Deut. 32: 5), *and the like*. These beloved would gather in a special place on appointed days to worship God and do His bidding. … The gathering was for worship of Him. … As for the adversary (*satan*), he was in fact an ordinary human being, like the one mentioned when Scripture says, *The Lord raised an adversary (satan) to Solomon, Hadad the Edomite* (1 Kings 11:14) It also says, *And God raised up against him an adversary (satan), Rezon, son of Eliada* (I Kings 11:23). Both of these were mortal men. … So commonly is this word (*satan*) applied to people who oppose one another that it occurs in many passages of Scripture which I shall not enumerate. … On the basis of this and other parallels, the adversary here would be a human being. It is farfetched in the extreme to infer that he should be an angel. (Saadiah 1988, 153–4)

In other words, the *bnei ha-elohim* are *humans* who assemble to worship God and obey His laws; hence, they are intimates of and beloved by God. Likewise, Satan is *Job'*s (not God's) adversary (Saadiah 1988, 154), and (based on v 6) also one of God's Beloved or nobles, hence, also a God-fearing and God-worshiping human but a special rival of Job, the leader of the Job-opposition party.

But Saadiah's naturalism does not stop here. His full explanation of Job's suffering is also naturalistic: in terms of human psychology and attitudes. As we said, the human *bnei ha-elohim* are sincere servants of God who shun sin and pursue virtue and, if they are not quite as virtuous as Job, nonetheless they are worthy to be loved by God, good people deserving happiness and a good life. But

with all Job's probity and plenty, there were folk in that land who envied him on both accounts, who said of him that he served God only out of solicitude for His blessings, and that if some disaster befell him or if he were deprived of some of those blessings, he would falter in his faithfulness and turn apostate. (Saadiah 1988, 159)

Notwithstanding the fact that they were also beloved by God, these same folks *envied* Job for his piety and prosperity. They charged that, as blameless as he was, he was pious, if not *in order to* receive the plenty, then *only so long as* he was blessed with plenty. That is, they raise the suspicion: does Job prosper because he is pious or is he pious only because he is prosperous?

According to Saadiah, it is "envy" that gives rise to this suspicion about Job. Who or what creates the envy? According to the literal meaning of v. 8, the source is God Himself who singles out Job's exceptional blamelessness and God-fearingness—"for there is none like him in the land." In other words, among God's Beloved, all of whom worship God, all of whom are good people, God plays favorites—and rewards Job more than the others. What Saadiah is getting at, in more contemporary terms, is the basic inequity of distribution of goods in social life. Not everyone, even when they are all good and deserving, is treated or rewarded equally. Or at the very least not everyone *perceives* him/herself to be equally well treated as everyone else is. Someone will always take someone else to be better treated, more beloved, than she is. We cannot help but compare ourselves to others and ask the following: What did I do not to deserve the same great fortune he is receiving? If I am as good as that other person, why is she better off than me? This sort of envy is a source of suffering, hence, an evil.

But even worse than this suffering is the suspicion of others that envy breeds. In these circumstances, it is all too easy to suspect the credentials of others whom we perceive to be doing better than us, to accuse others of *being* good only because they *receive* goods, that they would not act as well if they were subject to more diffcult circumstances—if they were subject to the diffcult circumstances that *each* person believes is *his* lot in life despite his good behavior. Hence, others are always less, or at least no more, deserving than us. This delegitimation of others Saadiah calls "slander" or "defamation" (Saadiah 1988, 159), a kind of humanly inficted violence, again, an evil.

This, I propose, is how Saadiah interprets the opening frame of the *Book of Job*. Job's world, for all of its pious obedience and worship, was a very unhappy place in which good people were nonetheless so jealous and envious of Job's pious success that they could not but suspect his motives and sincerity. The challenge the author of the *Book of Job* presents to us or that God faces—is: How, in such a world, can one prove the righteous person's, Job's, true and genuine piety and love and fear of God? The scenario Saadiah proposes is to make Job suffer. In Satan's words, he will then "falter in his faithfulness and turn apostate." Therefore, God inficts Job to vindicate him of this charge. In more naturalistic terms, the *Book of Job* adopts what I call the "Thucydidean test."

In the various cities these revolutions were the cause of many calamities—as happens and always will happen while human nature is what it is, though there may be different degrees of savagery, and, as different circumstances arise, the general rules will admit of some variety. In times of peace and prosperity cities and individuals alike follow higher standards, because they are not forced into a situation where they have to do what they do not want to do. But war is a stern teacher; in depriving them of the power of easily satisfying their daily wants, it brings most people's minds down to the level of their actual circumstances. (Thucydides 1972, 242)5

5 See also Reeve 1999.

If we follow Thucydides' wisdom, in order to discover who humans really are, to expose true human nature and the authentic characters of humans, we should pinch them, put them under pressure: subject them to a plague, civil war, disease, loss of children, illness—in a word, suffering. Prosperity deceives or at least fails to expose the true self. Only when someone is desperate and suffering does she manifest who she really is. Only then, depending on how she endures or expresses herself in her suffering, can we tell whether she is as pious and deserving as she *should* be to receive goods and rewards. Happy circumstances leave open the question whether one is pious because she is prosperous or prosperous because she is pious. The function of suffering is to disambiguate or resolve this doubt.

However, as Saadiah goes on to interpret the story of Job, suffering alone does not disambiguate his situation. Thus I take part of the point of the *Book of Job* according to Saadiah to be a critique of the Thucydidean idea that suffering will unambiguously reveal the true self. Instead, suffering itself admits multiple interpretations and breeds its own ambiguities. Let me give you just one of a number of examples.

One would prima facie think that Elihu's theodicy of future compensation or reward is a good alternative to either incriminating Job (thereby making his suffering, punishment) or (allowing Job to be innocent) to rendering God arbitrary at best and unjust at worst. But in fact Elihu's theodicy creates a further ambiguity in suffering. On the table now are three disjuncts. Suffering can either be *unjust persecution* of Job despite his absolute innocence or *punishment* for prior sins or a *trial* to be compensated in the future. According to Saadia, no character or school in the *Book of Job* entertains the frst disjunct: that God is unjust. With Elihu's intervention, however, that leaves two other disjuncts. Ambiguity persists. Whenever one suffers, one knows that it is either for one or for the other, but not which one. Hence, the Thucydidean test, suffering, fails to disambiguate Job's true piety. Beginning with ch. 37, Saadiah again and again emphasizes the ambiguity that accompanies Job's suffering, the fact that the victim must continually ask himself and ask God: Why am I suffering? The impossibility of clarifcation or disambiguation leads to isolation and alienation. Following Elihu's speech,

Job heard this discourse but held his peace, offering no rebuttal to Elihu. His silence at this point might indicate one of two things: either acquiescence or reservations. And it was for this reason that God addressed Him, to exhort to acknowledge Elihu's arguments and leave behind his fancies and suppositions, which in effect constitute his failing—although He does not say so directly, lest the people think little of Job's forbearance. (Saadiah 1988, 379)

Is Job silent because he accepts Elihu's explanation for his suffering silence is assent—or is he silent because he is *silenced* by Elihu—that is, overpowered by his rhetoric and too exhausted to fght it, though he resents and rejects it in his heart—or perhaps he is simply unsure? According to Saadiah, the question before God, as it were, is as follows: How will Job be perceived and judged by his fellow humans? God knows what Job feels, but it is necessary that Job publically articulate his *reasoned acceptance* of suffering *for* and *to* other humans if he is to disambiguate and thereby vindicate his piety. This in turn forces God to address Job in order to make him publically acknowledge Elihu's theodicy. And we would prima facie think that God's own speech to Job is unambiguous. But it isn't. Recall that Job has repeatedly pleaded with God to respond to his suffering by either killing him or by revealing his sin to him. God's lack of response, His silence, has only increased Job's lonely suffering. And when God fnally speaks to Job from the whirlwind, Saadiah argues that what literally appears to be God extolling His all-powerfulness and control of Creation, is in fact, a new kind of silence.

Job had tried to understand why God tormented him and had entreated God to make the reason known to him [See 23: 3–5]. … But God did not make this known to him. Sifting through many of the accounts of the ancients, we fnd that whenever one of them was afficted by God in some way, and then asked his Lord to make known to him why that misfortune had been loosed upon him, we fnd a division: if the victim had suffered deservedly, God made it clear to him and told him, "This is for your wrong doing." … But if the sufferer was being tested and had committed no offense to begin with, God did not explain his sufferings, so as not to undermine his forbearance in people's eyes. … This is the pattern with those who are undergoing a trial. God does not directly inform them that they will be recompensed. Rather *they must persevere on the basis of their reason alone.* … So when Job asked his Lord to make known to him why He tormented him, God did not answer him about that but spoke to him instead about something else, describing Himself to him in terms of His power and greatness, and His choosing what is best for all creation. And this answer on God's part was one mark of His wisdom. (Saadiah 1988, 383–384)

God's "silence"—his blank refusal to answer Job's question: Why am I suffering?—is His four-chapter-long and very loud *speech* extolling His power and benefcence. In reality, Saadia writes, this very speech is a demonstration of God's *powerlessness*. God *cannot* tell Job why he is suffering—as a trial to prove his piety that in turn will be compensated in the future—because were He to reveal that reason, people would say that Job accepts his suffering only to receive that reward—thereby undermining the test and injuring Job yet again. Thus God is constrained to be silent about the one thing Job wants to know—constrained by His own creation, other humans' perceptions, and the implications of His own speech. All of God's talk about His all-power*fulness* is a mask to conceal His power*lessnes*s. To be sure, this also makes Job suffer, but perhaps it is the lesser of the evils God would have committed had He explicitly answered him.

What exactly is it for Saadiah for humans "to persevere on the basis of their reason alone"? I don't have a full answer to this question but one thing emerges in God's speech. According to Saadia,

When God says, *I shall ask thee* (38, 30), it does not mean that God is giving him the power to answer as he pleases. Rather He is requiring Job to answer truthfully, that is, to submit (*altaslim*) to Him*.* (Saadiah 1988, 396)

First, when challenged, as in a debate—and Saadiah uses here terminology like *altaslim* and *mas'ala* drawn from the logical language of dialectic—*one perseveres by reason* by committing or submitting oneself to the challenger's question, responding explicitly and openly according to the demands and standards of truth as revealed by reason and science. One does not evade or ignore the challenge. One takes it up and responds.

Second, by "perseverance on the basis of reason alone" Saadiah also seems to mean that one should follow her reason even when it leads to uncertainty, doubt, and more suffering. When God has completed His speech, describing His wisdom manifest in nature, Saadiah tells us

Since the word had descended upon Job from God, it seemed best to him to hold his peace and say nothing. He supposed that such would be the proper behavior for one who submitted to Him. This called for a second address by God, making known to Job that discourse (*al-kalam*) was preferable. (Saadiah 1988, 396–7)

I take Saadiah to mean that Job's silence *after* God's speech, like his silence after *Elihu's* speech, is still ambiguous, so, God forces Job in ch. 40 to speak to disambiguate "the thoughts in his heart." But even so, Job does not speak unambiguously:

What he says can bear two different senses. This statement of Job's was ambiguous. It does not convey to the hearer a clear idea of his meaning. One who says to someone who confronts him, "Truly, I cannot answer you," could be understood in two ways: either he is admitting the justice of the other's position and saying that he is not prepared to refute the truth, or he could be implying that the other is in the wrong, and saying, "How can I refute you when you have the upper hand?" (Saadiah 1988, 402)

Now, Job's *speech*, rather than his silence, is ambiguous. And "by suggestion he is impugning divine justice." And for yet a third time, this ambiguity repeats itself in ch. 41 when Job again does not speak. According to Saadiah,

[God says to Job:] 'As long as you leave your answer in suspense, you are in fact impugning My justice while holding yourself blameless.' The fruit of this utterance should be for Job to make a clear statement before his Lord, explaining to all who hear him that he acknowledges that God is the Alljust, who does no injustice, and that it is imperative to admit that He treats His servants only as is best. And that is what Job does. (Saadiah 1988, 408–9)

Ambiguity persists in both silence and speech. True submission (*taslim*) requires explicit acknowledgment through a confession of impotence, ignorance, or limitations on one's knowledge, and regret—all aspects of repentance. This is what Job fnally delivers in ch. 42.

In this passage Job combines all that was required of him: he confesses his impotence and his paltry ability to comprehend the grace in the governance and decree of the Allwise; he repents of what has passed … and he resigns himself submissively (*yaslam*) to God, taking solace for himself. (Saadiah 1988, 410)

The ending of the book is reconciliation of Job with God—reconciliation depicted as a complex act of repentance. But this is not repentance for a sin he committed but a confession of his fnite condition, his being a creature of creation, and his inability to comprehend the benevolence in the governance of God, which is accompanied by regret (*haratah*) and rejecting, or spurning, of his previous state, and submission, yielding solace.

However, Job's repeated ambiguous remarks underscore the problematics of ambiguity as an expression of his own mental suffering and of the evil he experiences. As long as he is not explicit, whether in speech or in silence, he is perceived as "controverting" God's justice. Although Job *is* innocent, he cannot state "I am innocent" because that would implicate that God is guilty, hence, unjust. So, to avoid that implicature, Job must do one of two things, neither of which is true to himself. Either he can say that he is guilty—but that would violate his own integrity. Or he must explicitly acknowledge that God is just and only acts for his creatures' good (408), which effectively belies his own suffering, re-describing the evil he experiences as a divine good.

What, then, *"is in the hearts of people when they reach the limits of endurance in a trial"*? First and foremost: repeated instances of ambiguity, both of silence and of speech, both about why one is suffering and about how to react. As we said, ambiguity is a species of doubt, and doubt is an epistemic evil. I am tempted to say that for Saadiah, Job's suffering state of mind and doubt replaces the earlier bodily, material, familial, and physical evils he suffered. The inner state of epistemic evil—how Job thinks about his external suffering—replaces the external evil of physical and material suffering. But the evil is twofold. First, the ambiguity allows others to continue to impugn Job's piety, which is yet another moral evil inficted on Job. Second, the ambiguity refects Job's own state of mind, his uncertainty, anxiety, isolation, and powerlessness due to his ignorance of why he is suffering and how he should react. But this kind of inability to understand God's justice and governance is not because God's will is incomprehensible, as it is for the Ash'arite. Job's lack of understanding is an achievement of his own reason, not a surrender. Job's reason leads him to its limits, but at the same time he is empowered by it to fulfll the obligation of submission or commitment to God—to explicitly, propositionally, discursively articulate in the third person what he is thinking. This kind of submission, and consequent reconciliation, not a theodicy, is what the *Book of Job* teaches us and that is the reason why it was written:

[God] caused their [Job's and the other friends'] history to be written as a lesson to all creation, so that we may bear sufferings with fortitude when they befall us and not hasten to impugn God's judgment but submit to God and accept His wisdom and direction. (Saadiah 1988, 410)

## Bibliography

———. 1988. *The Book of Theodicy: Translation and Commentary on the Book of Job*. Translated by Lenn E. Goodman. New Haven: Yale University Press.

———. 2010. *Wandering in Darkness*. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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## Randomness, Causation, and Divine Responsibility

*Scott A. Davison*

What does it mean to say that someone is responsible for something? It turns out that the concept of responsibility is both vague and ambiguous. Let us say that someone is *casually responsible* for something E in virtue of actively contributing causally to E's production.1 Being causally responsible for something E is not enough, all by itself, for being *morally responsible* for E, where moral responsibility includes also the possibility of the appropriate application of the retrospective, reactive attitudes of praise or blame.2 But being causally responsible does seem to be necessary for being morally responsible.3

1Could one also be causally responsible for the occurrence of something E simply because one failed to prevent it? This is an interesting and complicated question; I do not want to enter the dispute about it here, so I will simply set it aside. (For a powerful and detailed discussion of the power of causal absences, see Goldschmidt 2016.)

2Being morally responsible for something does not imply that one deserves praise or blame for it, though—one might be morally responsible for something that is neutral, in such a way that neither praise nor blame is appropriate.

3 See Fischer and Ravizza 1998, chapter 1.

S. A. Davison (\*)

Morehead State University, Morehead, KY, USA e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
© The Author(s) 2022 357 K. J. Clark, J. Koperski (eds.), *Abrahamic Refections on Randomness and Providence*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75797-7\_17

What else is necessary for being morally responsible? Although there is sharp disagreement about this,4 it seems to me that moral responsibility requires the capacity for foresight, the capacity for causal contribution, and the capacity for intentional action directed at a particular outcome. But I will not argue for these claims here, and as far as I can tell, nothing I say in this chapter assumes that they are correct. It is important to note that one could satisfy all of the criteria for being morally responsible for something that is neutral, so that one does not deserve praise or blame for it—rather than create a new category of responsibility to cover this kind of case, we should just keep in mind its possibility.5

Consider the following thesis:

*Divine Moral Responsibility*: God is morally responsible to some substantial degree for the occurrence of every contingent event.

There seems to be strong support for Divine Moral Responsibility from the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions (e.g., see Freddoso 1988). In virtue of creating and sustaining the contingent universe, God contributes causally to every contingent event. Furthermore, God has the maximum capacity for foresight possible, and the greatest possible capacity for intentional action directed at particular outcomes.6

But suppose that there are *ontologically random* events in the universe, events which have no suffcient cause and could have turned out differently in some respect, given the same initial conditions and laws of nature. Would the existence of such random events count against Divine Moral Responsibility? To explore this question, I will begin with a muchdiscussed approach to the problem of evil and God's responsibility for free creaturely actions before turning to questions about shared moral responsibility.

4A great deal has been written about the claim that libertarian freedom is necessary for moral responsibility; see Frankfurt 1969, Nagel 1976, Adams 1985, Fischer and Ravizza 1998, and Morriston 2000 for the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Libertarian accounts of free action have their defenders (see, for instance, Van Inwagen 1983, Kane 1985, O'Connor 2000, and Clarke 2003), but they are not as popular today as their compatibilist rivals. I will not try to resolve this dispute here.

5For an interesting argument for the conclusion that God's unsurpassable goodness implies that God does not deserve praise or thanks, see Howard-Snyder 2008.

6This might lead us to think that for God, unlike for human beings, there is no such thing as casual contribution without moral responsibility.

## 17.1 Augustinian Approaches to Evil

How could a perfectly good creator make a less than perfectly good world? Historically, the most popular approach to answering this question involves trying to blame the imperfections of the created world on created agents, rather than the creator, where such created agents are viewed as introducing randomness into the world in a way that provides some casual distance between God and evil. This strategy typically assumes that if one person is fully morally responsible for something, then nobody else is morally responsible to any degree for that same thing. In this section, I will explore the role that this assumption plays in typical Augustinian approaches to the problem of evil, and then explain in the next section why it is false.

Contemporary interest in the problem of evil can be traced to rigorous formulations of the problem generated by J. L. Mackie (1955) and H. J. McCloskey (1960). Their articles led to infuential responses from John Hick (1966) and Alvin Plantinga (1974a, b), among others. In his survey of historical approaches to the problem, Hick distinguished between two groups of theodicies, the Augustinian and Irenaean, where the former explains evil as an accidental by-product of the free choices of creatures, and the latter explains it as necessary for moral development ("soul-making").7 Hick himself defended an Irenaean approach, whereas Plantinga developed a highly technical formulation of the Augustinian approach called the Free Will Defense. Plantinga's Augustinian approach has received the lion's share of attention in the literature, and I will return to it later. But it will be helpful to begin with St. Augustine himself in order to explain in more general terms how assumptions about causality and moral responsibility function in an Augustinian approach.8

7 St. Augustine's theodicy is not the frst one to be based explicitly on human freedom, though—that honor might belong to the author of the Biblical account in Genesis 3. Or it might belong to the great Stoic Cleanthes of Assos (c.331–232 BCE; see the discussion of Stoic responses to the problem of evil in Jordan 1987, 200–5); a version of this strategy can also be found in Plato's *Timeaus* (42d–e). There is more to St. Augustine's position than the argument concerning freedom and moral responsibility that I explore here, but I will continue to use Hick's label ("Augustinian") because it has become commonplace in the literature on this question; for perhaps the most detailed classifcation and survey of possible responses to the problem of evil, see Tooley's essay in Plantinga and Tooley 2008.

8 I am not an expert in St. Augustine's thought and do not claim that my brief summary here sheds any new light on his views; instead, I will draw only upon one of his early work (*On Free Choice of the Will*), which seems to capture adequately the general outlines of what I am calling here an Augustinian approach.

In trying to explain how "the goods pursued by sinners are in no way evil things, and neither is free will itself," St. Augustine says that

When the will clings to the common and unchangeable good, it attains the great and foremost goods for human beings. … But when the will turns away from the unchangeable and common good toward its own private good, or toward external or inferior things, it sins. (St. Augustine 1993, 68)

This movement of the will, the turning away from a higher good to embrace a lower one, is the essence of evil, according to Augustine.9 Since this movement is "not coerced, but voluntary, it is justly and deservedly punished with misery" (Augustine 1993, 68). What is the cause of this movement of the will, one might ask? Augustine answers:

But perhaps you are going to ask what is the source of this movement by which the will turns away from the unchangeable good toward a changeable good. This movement is certainly evil, even though free will itself is to be counted among good things, since no one can live rightly without it. For if that movement, that turning away from the Lord God, is undoubtedly sin, surely we cannot say that God himself is the cause of sin. So that movement is not from God. (St. Augustine 1993, 69)

St. Augustine seems to argue here as follows:

Therefore,

3. God is not the cause of evil.

Although there are questions (to which I shall return later) about what exactly it is saying, to defend premise 2, the Augustinian might offer the following argument:

9Here I am concerned only with what is often called moral evil, as opposed to natural evil (see Plantinga 1974a, 30). Plantinga claims that St. Augustine himself thought that all evil was moral evil, because he thought that all cases of apparently natural evil were caused by "Satan and his cohorts": see Plantinga 1974a, 58.

Therefore,

6. If a created person S performs an evil action A freely, then God is not morally responsible to any degree for S's performance of A.

There is something to be said in defense of each of these premises. First, premise 4 refects the Augustinian's libertarian view of the nature of free action, according to which an action is free only if it is not determined. This view of freedom, which implies what I have called ontological randomness, seems essential to the Augustinian approach to the problem of evil.10 As Plantinga says, "Now God can create free creatures, but He can't cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if He does so, then they aren't signifcantly free after all; they do not do what is right freely" (Plantinga 1974a, 30). One of Plantinga's most vocal critics, J. L. Mackie, seems to agree:

[The Free Will Defense] alone allows the theist to admit that there are some real and unabsorbed evils, some items which the world would, from however broad and ultimate a perspective, be better without (so that this is not the best of all possible worlds), and yet at the same time to detach their occurrence from God, to show them as not having been chosen by God.. (Mackie 1982, 156)

Second, premise 5 is a clear consequence of the following general principle:

10For more on St. Augustine's libertarianism, see the preface to Augustine 1993, xi–xiv. Libertarian accounts of free action have their defenders (see, for instance, Van Inwagen 1983, Kane 1985, O'Connor 2000, and Clarke 2003), but they are not as popular today as their compatibilist rivals. A great deal has been written about the Augustinian claim that libertarian freedom is necessary for morality in general, or praise and blame in particular; see Frankfurt 1969, Nagel 1976, Adams 1985, Fischer and Ravizza 1998, and Morriston 2000 for the tip of the proverbial iceberg. I will not discuss here the plausibility of libertarian accounts of free action or the alleged connection between libertarian freedom and responsibility.

7. A person S is morally responsible for something E to some degree only if S causes E.

However, the inference from 4 and 5 to 6 is problematic. In order for 4 to be true, the word "cause" must be understood as "provide a causally suffcient condition," because God clearly provides many causally necessary conditions for creaturely free action (more on this later). To avoid equivocation, then, "cause" must be understood in the same way in 5 (and hence in 7). But in general, providing a causally suffcient condition for an event E is not necessary for being morally responsible for E.11 For example, "If two people pick up a heavy rock [together] and chuck it on a third person's head, both will be responsible for the consequent injury" (Zimmerman 1985b, 355). So 5 and 7 are not plausible if "cause" is understood in the way that is required for 4 to be true. Could the Augustinian argument be revised in order to accommodate this fact about causation and moral responsibility?

Here is the most natural and straightforward way to revise 7 in order to meet this objection:

8. A person S is morally responsible to some degree for something E only if S contributes causally to the production of E to some degree.

From 8, one might infer 9:

9. If God does not contribute causally to any degree to a created person S's performance of an evil action A, then God is not morally responsible to any degree for S's performance of A.

These revisions yield the following version of the Augustinian argument:

10. If a created person S performs an evil action A freely, then God does not contribute causally to any degree to S's performance of evil action A (replacing 4).

11 Some will say that 5 is false for another reason: because it is possible to be responsible for something that one fails to prevent, even though one does not contribute causally to its occurrence. (Still others would say, to the contrary, that the failure to prevent something is itself a kind of causal contribution.) I do not want to enter this dispute here, so I will simply set it aside; for a powerful and detailed discussion of the power of causal omissions, see Goldschmidt 2016.

9. If God does not contribute causally to any degree to a created person S's performance of an evil action A, then God is not morally responsible to any degree for S's performance of A (replacing 5).

#### Therefore

6. If a created person S performs an evil action A freely, then God is not morally responsible to any degree for S's performance of A.

Before commenting on the strength of this argument, I should point out that throughout the chapter, I am talking about causation in the sense of effcient causation (not formal, fnal, or material causation, to use Aristotelian terminology). Even if God does not exist on the same ontological plane as creatures, as some people say, traditional theists hold that God is an effcient cause of the obtaining of various states of affairs in the world, whether or not God's causation involves other created agents as intermediaries.

Returning now to the argument: it is clearly valid, but according to traditional theism, the frst premise (i.e., proposition 10) is false. This is because according to traditional theism, God creates, sustains, and cooperates with the action of every created cause in the world, including free human beings (see the discussion of this point in Freddoso 1988); so God must contribute causally to the performance of every creaturely action, even those evil human actions that are free in a libertarian sense. But since God's causal contribution is not suffcient, all by itself, for the performance of those evil actions, and God does not intend them per se, the Augustinian approach outlined earlier would insist that God is not to be blamed for them.12 As the sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina says,

From what has been said we have it only that our morally evil actions are not attributed to God as to a positive cause who has an infuence on them. This is in accord with the example of the workman who produces swords. For just as the deeds which are done by those who do not use the swords rightly are not imputed to the workman (for the swords are indifferent with respect

12 I will return below to the question of the relationship between moral responsibility and blame.

to good or bad use), but are instead imputed to the free choice of those who use the swords badly, so too, since God's general concurrence is indifferent with respect to good and evil actions, the evil actions should not be attributed to God, but should rather be attributed to those who abuse God's general concurrence in order to do evil. (Molina 1989)

In other words, since created persons freely determine for themselves whether their actions are good or evil, they are completely morally responsible for this, and therefore God is not. St. Augustine seems to agree:

There is nothing I feel so frmly and so intimately as that I have a will by which I am moved to enjoy something. If the will by which I choose or refuse things is not mine, then I don't know what I can call mine. So if I use my will to do something evil, whom can I hold responsible but myself? (St. Augustine 1993, 72)

Perhaps, then, the following argument captures better than the previous ones the Augustinian approach to the problem of evil:

Therefore,

6. If a created person S performs an evil action A freely, then God is not morally responsible to any degree for S's performance of A.

This argument seems to capture the essence of the Augustinian approach. But is this argument sound, assuming that free creaturely action involves the kind of randomness described earlier? If so, then it seems that Divine Moral Responsibility is false, because God is not morally responsible to any degree for creaturely evil actions. And a parallel argument would seem to show that God is not morally responsible to any degree for any free creaturely actions at all, whether good or evil—but this would seem to be quite problematic, at least from the point of view of traditional theism.

## 17.2 Zimmerman on Shared Responsibility

It seems to me that Michael J. Zimmerman has shown that premise 12 is false.13 In this section, I will present and extend his arguments for this conclusion. Along the way, I will also criticize his arguments for the view that degree of causal contribution is not a factor in determining degree of moral responsibility.

Zimmerman discusses possible cases of group action which are either oversupplied (i.e., "there is a greater supply of agents involved in the action than is in fact causally necessary for the outcome at issue") or standard (i.e., not oversupplied: see Zimmerman 1985a, 116). According to Zimmerman, group action involves more than one individual acting together in such a way that each one contributes causally to a single outcome.14 Consider the following case of standard group action, to which Zimmerman refers as case X:

Imagine a group of teenagers pushing a large boulder off a plateau, so that it rolls down a slope and wrecks a car at the bottom. Each of the teenagers intends to contribute to the damage to the car and freely participates in the enterprise, in the full knowledge that his contribution to the enterprise is required if the boulder is to be shifted and the car wrecked at all. (Zimmerman 1985a, 116)

Zimmerman argues that in this case, each of the teenagers involved is fully morally responsible for the damage to the car. His argument for this interesting conclusion involves an appeal to a slightly different case, Y, which differs from case X in only one respect: in Y, just one of the teenagers involved in case X is present (let's call him "S"), and this teenager wrecks the car all by himself. In this case, Zimmerman claims, "there would be no hesitation in ascribing to S full (that is undiminished; not merely sole) responsibility for the damage" (116). In both cases, S's action is causally necessary but not causally suffcient by itself for the damage (since S's action requires the co-operation of other factors or agents in both cases, such as the boulder being able to be moved, the boulder and the car being

14Although this description does not imply that the members of the group share a common purpose or make a concerted effort: see Zimmerman 1985a, 115–6.

13Although other work on shared responsibility has been done since then, as far as I can tell, Zimmerman was the frst to articulate this clearly, and his formulation of the question remains the standard formulation.

properly positioned relative to one another, the force of gravity, etc.). More formally, here is Zimmerman's argument in detail:

So,

(E) In case X, S is fully morally responsible for the outcome.

Therefore,

(F) In case X, all participants in the action are fully morally responsible for the outcome (Zimmerman 1985a, 117).

I think that Zimmerman's main argument here is essentially right, although it seems to presuppose that degrees of moral responsibility do not depend upon degrees of causal contribution. This is especially evident in connection with premise (D). It is one thing to claim that someone acts without excuse, so that his or her moral responsibility is undiminished because of co-operating factors; it is another thing to claim that someone is fully morally responsible for something. Full moral responsibility would be responsibility to the highest degree possible, and degree of causal contribution does indeed seem to be relevant to determining this.15 Let me explain.

Consider Zimmerman's agent S, the teenager in case Y who pushed the boulder down the slope and wrecked the car all by himself. Case Y must

15 In personal correspondence, Zimmerman has explained that by "full" moral responsibility, he meant only undiminished-by-any-excuse moral responsibility and not moral responsibility to the highest possible degree, because he does not know how to make sense of the idea of such a maximal degree. As will become clear, it seems to me that S would have the highest degree of moral responsibility for E just in case S contributed to the maximal degree to the obtaining of E, intended that E result for its own sake, and had maximally certain foresight that S's causal contribution would lead to the obtaining of E. (Such a condition might be satisfed by God's creation of the material world in its initial state *ex nihilo*, for instance.)

differ from case X in some respect with regard to the initial conditions, since in case X, the contribution of each teenager is causally necessary for moving the boulder, whereas in case Y, S acts alone to accomplish (roughly) the same thing. Now compare case Y to a third case, Z, which involves just two persons, S and P. Suppose that S casually suggests to P the possibility that P could push the boulder down the slope all by herself, without any (other) help from S; imagine that S then walks away, but thanks to S's suggestion, P freely decides to do this and does so, where this possibility would not have occurred to P without S's prompting.

Shouldn't we say that S's moral responsibility for the damage to the car in case Z is less than S's moral responsibility for the damage to the car in case Y? After all, if we hold all of the other factors constant, S's causal contribution to the wrecking of the car in case Z is not causally suffcient (in the circumstances) for the wrecking of the car, since it must operate "through" P's free decision to push the boulder down the slope all by herself. (If P's decision is free, then it is not determined by the prior events, including S's attempts to persuade.16) By contrast, if we hold all of the other factors constant, S's causal contribution to the wrecking of the car in case Y is causally suffcient (in the circumstances) for the wrecking of the car. Doesn't this difference clearly indicate different degrees of causal contribution in the two cases, and doesn't this difference indicate a difference in degrees of moral responsibility in the two cases?

I think so. But Zimmerman offers an argument against this approach. He mentions a variant on his original case X which involves S twisting P's arm so that P will help S to push the boulder against P's will, and says this about such a case:

In a case such as that just given it is common and tempting to talk of the differing "extents" to which S and P contributed to the outcome; but I think that such talk should be avoided. Presumably more blame is to be ascribed to S than to P—he is more to blame for the outcome than P is, he is also to blame for twisting P's arm, and so on—but, given that the action of each is causally necessary and of neither is causally suffcient for the out-

16Here I am assuming, of course, that P's decision is free in some libertarian sense. (Those who fnd this example incoherent because they fnd the concept of libertarian freedom incoherent will fnd a different example of degrees of causal contribution leading to different degrees of responsibility in the discussion of Zimmerman in the next few paragraphs.) For persuasive arguments for the conclusion that intervening agents do not necessarily diminish moral responsibility, in general, see Zimmerman 1985b.

come, it seems misleading to talk of S contributing to a greater extent than P to this outcome. In general, it seems to me best to say the following. There is a sense to be attached to the claim that different individuals have more or less "important" roles in the production of an outcome, but such a claim is, frst, a normative one and, second, not to be confused with the non-normative issue of contribution to an outcome (a factor which admits of no degrees). (Zimmerman 1985a, 117)

I think that Zimmerman is mistaken here: just because various factors are in themselves neither causally necessary nor causally suffcient for a given outcome, it does not follow that there can be no differences between them in terms of their respective causal contributions. Case Z, involving causal contribution that is non-necessitating, seems to illustrate this clearly; causal contribution is a matter of degree.

Here is another way to illustrate this same point, this time by reference to another hypothetical case from Zimmerman. This case involves group action which is sequential instead of simultaneous:

Imagine a dozen people, with murder on their minds, each delivering one stab to the body of some victim. Let us suppose that each of the stabs is causally necessary for the death to ensue. I submit that, given certain other conditions (full freedom, intent, and so forth), each of the assailants is fully morally responsible for the death. (Zimmerman 1985a, 117)

Zimmerman's argument for this last claim is essentially similar to the one mentioned earlier in connection with case X: each of the stabs is causally necessary but not causally suffcient, so each of the assailants is morally responsible to the same degree for the outcome. Furthermore, we could imagine a case in which only one of the assailants administered just one stab and killed the victim, and there is no reason to regard that one person's moral responsibility in the modifed case as different from his moral responsibility in the original case involving the twelve people.

But Zimmerman's case of the dozen stabbers can be modifed easily to illustrate different degrees of causal contribution. Suppose that instead of people stabbing, we have a million people, each laying a single straw on the proverbial camel's back, except for the last person, who lays a hundred straws on the camel's back (all at once, let's say).17 As before, let's follow Zimmerman in assuming that each of the million straws is causally necessary for the outcome. Isn't it obvious that the person who lays a hundred straws at once contributes causally to the breaking of the camel's back to a greater extent than any of the other people do? This gives us good reason to think that Zimmerman is mistaken here, that causal contribution does come in degrees, and that degrees of causal contribution help to determine degrees of moral responsibility.

However, Zimmerman offers one fnal argument in this connection that is worth considering. This argument occurs in the context of the evaluation of group action which is oversupplied:

If the argument concerning the possibility of the proper ascription of full moral responsibility to each of the participants in a standard simultaneous group action is successful, then it is easy to argue for this possibility when it is oversupplied rather than standard action that is at issue. Suppose that ffteen teenagers had pushed the boulder instead of ten. This surely would not have diminished the responsibility of any of the original ten. (What an easy "out" that would be! Just invite a few more friends to participate.) (Zimmerman 1985a, 119)

My claim about the relevance of causal contribution to moral responsibility might seem to imply that Zimmerman's case of oversupplied group action should be diagnosed as involving diminished moral responsibility for the participants. But this apparent implication is only apparent; I agree with Zimmerman's claim that adding more agents is insuffcient, all by itself, to diminish moral responsibility. As Zimmerman says, in another context,

To say that someone is fully responsible is not to say that he is solely responsible; responsibility is not to be cut up, like a pie, so that the more people that join in a wrongdoing, the less responsibility to be allocated to each. (Zimmerman 1985b, 355)

But it is easy to imagine a case which is similar to Zimmerman's case involving the ten teenagers pushing the boulder in which it does make a

17For further discussion of this example with respect to the responsibility for created persons in connection with answered petitionary prayers, see Davison 2017, chapter 7.

difference if more agents are added. For example, suppose that ffteen teenagers are involved instead of ten, and imagine that the causal contribution of each teenager is reduced accordingly (so that the case is not oversupplied, but rather standard, like the original case X). Then it seems reasonable to say that the moral responsibility of a given participant S would be less in this case than it would be in the original case X, all other things being equal. The difference might be slight, of course, and perhaps not important enough to make a difference practically in terms of our response to each individual, but there would be a difference.

Hence I conclude that Zimmerman is mistaken about degrees of causal contribution and that different degrees of causal contribution explain different degrees of moral responsibility, at least in some cases. But notice that along the way, Zimmerman has shown that just because one agent is fully morally responsible for a given event, it does not follow that no other person can be morally responsible for that same event—in other words, the Augustinian premise 12 is false.18 How should traditional theists who wish to pursue something like an Augustinian approach to answering the problem of evil respond to this?

It seems to me that they should accept the claim that God is partly morally responsible for evil in the world, but then argue that God's responsibility does not imply that God is worthy of blame for such evil. This could be done by explaining the reasons that actually justify God's permission of evil (in the case of theodicy), or explaining the reasons that could justify God's permission of evil (in the case of defense), or simply explaining why we should not expect to know such reasons if they existed (in the case of the so-called skeptical theism). If these strategies are successful, then either God would be worthy of praise for God's contributions to such things, or at least God would be neither worthy of praise nor worthy of blame (although satisfying the other requirements for moral responsibility, in the sense mentioned at the beginning of this chapter). Whether or not such

18By way of reminder, I am understanding premise 12 of the Augustinian argument in terms of effcient causes. The argument I have cited here as showing that premise 12 of the Augustinian argument involves only creaturely effcient causes, rather than a combination of divine and effcient causes, but I don't see how that makes any difference. (If there are other kinds of causation, then perhaps some analogue of premise 12 is true for them; I am agnostic about this possibility.)

strategies can be successful, in terms of explaining how God could be responsible but not blameworthy for evil, falls beyond the scope of this chapter.19

## 17.3 Conclusion

We should conclude that the ontological randomness involved in creaturely libertarian freedom (should actual creatures possess it, of course) does not by itself imply that God is not morally responsible to any degree for the free actions of creatures, whether good or evil, assuming (as traditional theists do) that God makes some causal contribution to the free actions of creatures. But what about random events that do not involve the free actions of any creatures, such as the random decay of radioactive isotopes?

In cases such as these, it seems important to note that the randomness in question is randomness over a limited range of possible outcomes. In the famous example of Schrödinger's cat, for instance, there are only two possible states of the radioactive substance in the box with the cat: either it has decayed, or it has not. If it has decayed, then the Geiger counter detects the decay and triggers the hammer to release the poison, which kills the cat. If it has not decayed, then the Geiger counter does not detect the decay and does not trigger the hammer to release the poison, so the cat remains alive. Whether or not the cat is dead, then, involves what I have called ontological randomness. But this arrangement does not involve the possibility of the cat becoming a full-grown horse, a nuclear weapon, or an atom of hydrogen; these last three outcomes are inconsistent with the initial arrangement.

So if God is morally responsible for the fact that a random process is in place that will result in either X or Y, and God knows this, then it seems clear that God is morally responsible to some degree for X if it occurs and morally responsible to some degree for Y if it occurs. Assuming (as I have) that God's degree of causal contribution to the outcome of a random process is not suffcient to guarantee any particular outcome, we might think that God's causal contribution in such cases is less than it is in cases

19For an approach to theodicy that does not appeal to libertarian freedom among creatures at all, or to any kind of compensation in an afterlife, see my forthcoming paper, "A Naturalistic Intrinsic Value Theodicy."

in which God's causal contribution is suffcient to guarantee a particular outcome. But as the discussion of degrees of causal contribution shows, causal contribution and hence moral responsibility come in degrees, so we cannot conclude that those cases that involve God's causal contribution to random processes are cases in which God's causal contribution is not necessary or important. Hence traditional theists need not reject Divine Moral Responsibility because of the existence of what I have called ontologically random events in the world.20

## Bibliography

20For a very different approach to a closely related question, see van Inwagen 1995 and the reply in Freddoso 1987. Many thanks to Jeff Koperski, Kelly James Clark, Thomas P. Flint, Samuel Lebens, Emil Salim, Marilee Coetsee, and other participants in the third annual Abrahamic Refections on Science and Religion program in Casablanca, Morocco, for helpful comments and suggestions concerning earlier versions of this chapter.

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