It seems boys tore the wings off of flies in the 16th century just as some likely do now. Do the gods (still?) kill us for their sport? So thought the Duke of Gloucester in Shakespeare's King Lear, a kind of response, or riposte I sometimes think, to the Book of Job--or perhaps merely a parry.
It sometimes seems they do, life and our grotesquely selfish propensities given what they are, and one can see why someone believing in a personal, oddly Earth-bound or human-bound god or gods might think so. Except of course for Job. Much has been made of his faith, his trust, in God while writhing in the "fell clutch of circumstance" at which we lesser sorts wince and cry aloud. Lesser sorts than Job, in any case, and it appears the Victorian William Henley or his narrator in his poem Invictus.
Someone, somewhere, sometime, must have considered whether Job may be called a Stoic, and (who knows?) whether Henley was one or was trying to portray a Stoic point of view in his poem. That poem is, unfortunately, forever associated with mass murderer Timothy McVeigh, and his infatuation with it seems to me to disqualify it from being Stoic and to emphasize that it cannot have been written by a Stoic. McVeigh certainly was not one, as he could never have killed and maimed all those he did if he was a Stoic, and the characterization of the world as a darkness black as the pit, full of wrath and tears, and circumstances as fell, is not at all Stoic, either.
And Job? Job's not a Stoic, I think; not a Stoic Sage, in any case. Nor is his God one that a Stoic could believe in.
A Stoic would find it impossible to believe in a God who tests his creatures by setting Satan loose on them. That's a very personal God indeed and one that intervenes in life and the world, in this case to wreck havoc. The Stoic God, I think, is life and the world or perhaps better thought of as the soul or intelligence of life and the world.
The Book of Job properly notes that we humans do not think from the perspective of the cosmos, and may "explain" that what we believe to be evil is not such from the cosmic perspective (I say "may" because it's unclear, the God of Job not being inclined to explain why Satan was allowed to heap misfortune upon him). But that doesn't quite do the trick either. Job doesn't seek to consider things from the cosmic perspective. How can he, and believe in the God he believes in? His God apparently doesn't see things from the cosmic perspective either. If he did, he wouldn't tell Satan to torment Job, nor would he honor Job and rain blessings and material goods upon him after he passed the "test" and repented for questioning God if not failing to worship him.
Once again, I'll write to say that I think what most distinguishes Stoicism is the perception that we should not concern ourselves with things not in our control. What happens to Job is the result of things undoubtedly outside of his control. He seems to have understood this superficially, but had he been a Stoic Sage, if not an aspiring Stoic, he not only would have resigned himself to them he would not have attributed to them any particular meaning as he wouldn't have thought of them as being peculiarly directed towards him. There are no victims in Stoicism. There simply is what there is, and our part is to do the best we can with what is in our power. This is Stoicism regardless of whether Nature or Providence or God is thought good or bad, regardless of whether there is evil or good.
Evil or good is something we do, not the universe. We do evil when we desire or are disturbed by things beyond our control. The things we desire (which include people) or are disturbed by exist, as we do, as part of the universe, but our desire for them or fear of them is within our control, and it's that desire or fear which in turn generate evil in the form of our greed, hate, violence, cruelty, and all our passions.
Our likes and dislikes aren't the concern of the cosmos, nor are our needs. Those are defined by our interaction with the universe of which we're a part. The "test" we're subject to is this interaction, but it isn't a test put to us by some deity or demon. It's what it is to be a living part of the living universe. Do we live intelligently or do we not? Do we seek to have or avoid what isn't in our control or do we not, instead acting reasonably with what is in our power?
Stoics aren't as flies to wanton boys, nor are they Jobs.
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