Zło czynione człowiekowi niewinnemu — przypadek Hioba

Abstrakt

Evil inflicted upon an innocent man: the case of Job

The paper addresses the problem of responsibility for the blows of fate that bear down on the innocent protagonist of the biblical Book of Job. The author asks about the agent behind the evil inflicted upon Job: whether it is God, Satan, or human beings. In seeking an answer to this question, he analyses two divergent in terpretations of the tale of Job, proposed respectively by C.G. Jung and R. Girard. The former ascribes the responsibility for Job’s sufferings to God, who in his view is essentially involved in both good and evil. Only such a God could have possibly caused evil, while subject to guilt, to be redeemed only through the sacrifice of the incarnated Son of God, Christ, on the cross. The latter scholar interprets the Book of Job as a chronicle of persecution of an innocent man, a scapegoat, while differentiating clearly between the archaic deities and the God of the Bible, which enables him to recognize in the biblical account a sharp contention between the sacrum as implied by the offering rites and the God of the Bible. The sacrum can indeed validate Jung’s perspective on God, but the true God of the Bible is rad­ically unlike a divinity including both good and evil aspects: He has no inherent evil whatever, being the absolute Good, who delivers us from all things evil.