Why Satan MATTERS
Maimonides on the Book of Job
by Rabbi David Cohen-Henriquez
It is not surprising that the great Maimonides´analysis on the book of Job would strip the supernatural elements of angels and demons to present us with a discourse on philosophy and understanding of life through the sciences.
The book of Job deals with the issue of theodicy that attempts to explain why is there pain and suffering in this world. The agonizing set of events that engulfs Job during the narrative is the result of a cosmic debate between God and Satan, one of his divine beings.
For a rationalist as Maimonides it is hard to believe the story in its literal sense. Therefore he explains the figures of angels and divine creatures are symbols of different forces of nature, are and represented in the Bible in an allegorical way. Therefore each angel represents a different element, force, emotion, intellect; angels are the representation of all that exists.
Yet it is the figure of Satan, the fallen angel, which is harder to describe. What does he represent? Is he the root of evil, and if so why does God let him exist?
First we have to understand what Satan symbolizes. If all the other angels represent something in the natural world Satan becomes the privation, lack or absence of the natural form of something in an object of creation. It´s the corruption of matter, its decay. The natural world, Creation, is unstable and decays, it falls.
We can understand from this that Satan is not only “the fallen angel”, but also the angel that makes things fall, draws them back to nothingness. It is also the reason in the story of Job it is said that Satan has come from roaming the earth. His place is down here, in the physical, decaying, limited Creation realm, and not in the Heavens, where things are eternal and pure.
Without privation and decay there would be no existence. In order for life to exist there needs to be a balance, a constant struggle between decay and aspiration towards the source of life. Decay and privation has to happen to give change to new life to appear as well as to keep the current existing life form in a homeostatic point.
We can take as an example an organ of the body; if the cells in the organ start decaying too fast it creates malfunction and disease and eventually death. However, if cellular death never happened the growth would not be regulated and we would end up with a tumor, a saturation of the expansion of the life process of the cells.
It is our misunderstanding of this natural process of how things work in life that, like the hero of our story, we human beings cannot fathom the reason why these things happen and we classify them under the label of Evil or Bad.
These types of “evils” occur in three different levels according to Maimonides:
The natural disasters, which is the most basic and raw manifestation of this entity.
The violence that humans cause others, which is the second level.
The harm that we cause ourselves, which is the level of diseases and internal pains caused by us voluntarily or by neglecting the needs of our bodies, falling into diseases according to Maimonides’ medieval understanding of medicine.
The book of Job comes to explain about the limitations that we humans have over knowledge and the ways of understanding the Universe that surrounds us, the visible and the invisible. If we follow Maimonides view the story teaches us about achieving a psychological level of understanding that would lead us to an immunity towards suffering, understanding and loving the world as well as the Creator, and avoid falling in desperation and depression when the limited world falls pray of the decay brought by privation.
