147 - Kant and Job's Comforters

Kant and Job's Comforters
By A.L. Loades
Newcastle Upon Tyne, England, Avero Publications, 1985. 174 pp.

Every age, it seems, has its ambassadors of cheap religion, religion that gives easy answers to difficult questions in order not to have to face the challenge those questions pose to faith. The biblical paradigm is the case of Job's comforters, whose consolation amounts to telling Job that his suffering is justified, whatever Job may think, because God is just.

Ann Loades transposes the image of Job's comforters to the eighteenth century in order to represent the theological optimism that characterized Kant's early work and that he later abandoned in his critical philosophy. According to Loades, this shift came about as Kant's appreciation of the depth of human wickedness became

148 - Kant and Job's Comforters

ever more acute. Before 1781, Kant treated the theological problem of evil in the manner of Leibniz, according to whom this world, as the product of the Creator's perfect wisdom, goodness, and power, is the best of all possible worlds. The theological claims in Kant's writings that appeared after 1781 were far more tentative, resembling more the resolve of Job than the optimism of Leibniz.

This book is an original and provocative approach to Kant's theology, written by one who knows his work well and who has a strong sense of the historical context in which that work developed. The argument is impeccably documented, but it is also very compressed, and as a consequence it will probably do more to whet the reader's appetite than to satisfy it.

Jeffrey C. Eaton
Hamilton College
Clinton, N.Y.