[In the following essay, Christensen considers critical reaction to MacLeish's verse play J. B. and defends the work from its detractors.]

The publication a few years ago of J. B., a play in verse by Archibald MacLeish, was generally regarded as a literary event of exceptional importance. The critical reception of the play was warm, even laudatory. A critic of recognized stature called it “the play of the century.” Another said, “It may well become one of the lasting achievements of the art and mind of our time.” It drew a Tony citation and a Pulitzer award. Revised and adapted to production in the theater, it was successfully staged at home and abroad. Though pronounced too big for Broadway, it played there for many months to capacity houses. Posing as it does an age-old problem in religion, and drawing its inspiration from the Bible, it immediately challenged the attention of church, synagogue, and seminary. Eminent theologians, Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic, expressed with eloquence and vehemence varying degrees of pain and pleasure.

Much of the critical response was paradoxical. While agreeing quite generally on the excellence of J. B. as a poem and a play, the critics, literary and theological, disagreed quite sharply as to its meaning. Nearly all found in it unresolved problems, distressing ambiguities. They could not decide whether in its final or total effect it is a religious play at all. Raising anew in a modern setting the universal problem of innocent suffering, did it reaffirm the Biblical solutions? Or did it in effect repudiate them? Did it say to suffering man in the modern world that he must look beyond the Book of Job and the old theologies for the meaning of his troubles and for the strength to endure them?

Difference of opinion was most marked among the men of religion. There, as Chaucer loved to say, “Diverse folk diversely they demed.” Reinhold Niebuhr missed a personal God in the MacLeish view of man's predicament. The play, he said, states its problem honestly and develops it with artistic ingenuity. But it emphasizes the meaninglessness of man's suffering and neglects the deeper problem, the meaning of man's life. In an age which has had the greatness to discover nuclear energy but lacks the wisdom to avoid nuclear annihilation, the most relevant problem is not the meaning of man's suffering but the meaning of his life. J. B. suggests, Niebuhr said, two solutions to the problem. One of them is negative. It is the solution of the Voice heard in the wind and the thunder: the meaning of human life lies beyond man's comprehension. The other is positive: man can build for himself “an island of love” in an ocean of meaninglessness, where life can be sustained and given a measure of purpose and direction.

Rabbi Louis Finkelstein saw symbolism in the play. In the character of J. B., MacLeish has created, he said, an image in which all of us see ourselves and our society “troubled and guilt-ridden”—hence the play's popular appeal, its capacity houses on Broadway. The theme of the play is found not in its particular texts but in its whole texture. And paradoxically, indeed, this theme, the Rabbi said, stems ultimately from the Comforter Elihu, who does not appear in the play at all, but for whom MacLeish himself is supposed to speak in the totality of his poetic conception. Hence, J. B. is rebuked in the play, as Job is in the Book of Job, not for sins committed before calamity falls upon him, but rather for his behavior in the midst of calamity, for his failure to transform his suffering into “a new vision of God, one not possible except in adversity.” Implicit, therefore, in J. B.'s agony is a consolation as old as Aeschylus and Sophocles: the way of suffering is the road to wisdom. But in J. B., as in the Book of Job, the new vision of God which would give meaning to all suffering is seen only through a glass darkly. MacLeish's insight has beauty and depth but not the penetration to see the Kingdom of God which awaits a humanity that has been purified, ennobled, and exalted in the fiery ordeal of universal suffering and disaster.

To Thurston N. Davis, S. J., editor of America, a Catholic weekly, J. B. as a religious play is entirely negative. If it is anything, it is “an urbane but shallow repudiation of religious faith.” Implicitly it is an assertion that there are no divine reasons for human pain, no ultimate justice that will set things right, no Mind or Providence at work in human affairs, no evidence of a God whose love envelops man through all his days of trouble. It is a play not about God but about man, man “liberated from old theologies.” On its positive side it is a weak “secular affirmation of human life and human love as the sole props and rationale of bewildered humanity.” Calling up the ghosts of MacLeish's literary past, Father Davis asserted that in J. B. the poet-dramatist stands religiously “on the same arid ground in which he pegged down his tents some thirty years ago.”

Literary criticism, like a fever, usually runs a course. Appraisals are normally followed by reappraisals. Having delivered first decisions, the most Olympian of judges are likely to remain restive, a bit uncertain that they have spoken for both time and eternity. Frequently they climb the mountain for another view, issue a second verdict, make a new bid for judicial immortality. The literary criticism of J. B. is apparently entering the period of reappraisal. John Ciardi, poetry editor of the Saturday Review, has recently written a “J. B. Revisited.” He has taken a second look at MacLeish, and is unhappy—almost petulantly unhappy—with what he now sees.

                                                                                                                                            O, woe is me,
T' have seen what I have seen, to see what I see!

For Ciardi's first look had filled him with prophetic enthusiasm. J. B. was born a classic and destined to life beyond life. In it, as nowhere else, verse drama in America had reached maturity, had found a poetic language in which the poet-dramatists of the future would fashion and express their art, their passion. The great issues of life raised in the play made it too good, too sublime for Broadway. But how different the critic and the criticism of the second look! The poet and his poetry have shrunk dismally to this little measure: MacLeish has left the main issue or theme of his play blurred or totally undetermined, and its resolution correspondingly shadowy or uncertain. What he had intended to be the resolution is in effect a sentimental excretion precariously sticking to the closing moments of the drama. J. B., his protagonist, who bears the burden of suffering, and expresses the substance of its thought, is a “fatuous” “fathead” “howling” his questions and complaints into the empty places of a senseless universe. All that Mr. Ciardi can salvage from his first pronouncement is the certainty that MacLeish “has gone farther than any man of his time toward forging a true poetic verse that works on the stage.”

I am not mentioning Mr. Ciardi or the custodians of religious truth to quarrel with what they have said. One who has grown old with the poets, and has known most of their critics from Plato to Mr. Ciardi, is not likely to die attacking or defending a literary judgment. It seems only yesterday that I. A. Richards—persuasive critical theorist—was telling us that the history of literary criticism is a description of graveyards, an account of abandoned theories of value. And no one has intimated that the end of such abandonment is yet in sight, unless it be in that Paradiso of Modern Poetry, where poets seem always to sit in beatific and ineffable vision, and critics are always masters of a divine exegesis. Those of us who still read Shakespeare and Milton in the original, without benefit of symbol or paradox, continue to doubt that anything currently said about J. B. by Mr. Ciardi—or even by me—is all that could be said intelligently. The same caution befits religious comment. In the variable field of religious thought the ancient Pilatean query, What is truth?, still remains a relevant one. Always in religion there are men who cry, “Thus saith the Lord.” Always it is good for religion and its truth that other men question the competence of anyone to speak for the Almighty.

Anatole France, the French impressionist of a generation ago, used to say that literary criticism, when doing its proper work, is a description of an encounter between a soul and a masterpiece—or, in less opulent terms, a report of a reading experience. In the pages that follow, I tell about J. B. as a personal experience in reading. And, in parenthesis, let me say that, in my judgment, the future of J. B. is in the library, not in the theater. MacLeish's finest poetic conception was what he published for readers, not what he was persuaded to give to the actors.

II

My first encounter with J. B. was troubled. I sensed uncertainties, ambiguities, particularly in J. B.'s Gethsemane. In his suffering there appeared to be no coherent progress, no evolution. There was everything to be endured, nothing to be gained or done—no relief or release through thought or action. Then it occurred to me that what I was experiencing in J. B. was what years ago I experienced in the Book of Job; that the obscurity of the one was an inheritance from the other; that to understand J. B. one must first understand the Book of Job. And that is not an easy task. It demands reading the Book of Job as scholars read it, finding in it various types of writing, composed by various writers, at different times, with different purposes.

In their accounts of it, scholars differ in details but agree in substance. Most of them find in it an ancient folk tale about a devout desert nomad, a man who has always feared God and eschewed evil, but whose loyalty and devotion to God are tested in a succession of calamities visited upon him as a divine concession to a cynical Satan or Adversary, who attributes Job's loyalty and devotion not to intrinsic righteousness but rather to God's sheltering care and bountiful gifts. But through the tests imposed—the losses, sufferings, sorrows—Job remains unshaken. He stoutly affirms the changeless goodness and justice of God: the Lord has given and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. Should a man receive the good and not accept the bad? In the end Job's piety and devotion are rewarded: his losses are made up and his prosperity increased.

Engrafted on or in this rather primitive tale is what scholars have called the great Debate or Symposium between Job and his Friends or Comforters. Here Job is no longer the simple sheik of the folk tale. He is now a philosopher-poet, arguing with other philosopher-poets the great problem of evil and the mystery of human suffering. Here he is not the patient, submissive nomad, unwavering in his confidence in the divine goodness and justice. He bitterly laments his existence, curses the night of his conception and the day of his birth. He recognizes the power and wisdom of God, but boldly questions His goodness and justice. If only he could lay his case before the bar of the Almighty, or find an advocate who would! But God seems lost in the vastness of His creations, and Job cannot find Him. The replies of the Comforters to Job's lament are variations of what is essentially the same argument: God is a god of undeviating justice; human misfortune and suffering are invariably punishment for human sin; Job is, therefore, a sinner compounding his sins with rebellious arrogance; he should humble himself, acknowledge his wrong and repent of it. But at the end of the Debate the Comforters are silenced; they yield to the force of Job's defense, a defense born of Job's own suffering and soul-searching. “Job was justified in their eyes,” says the Biblical writer. And apparently he was also justified or vindicated in the eyes of his Lord. God commanded the Comforters to offer penitential sacrifices for having contended wrongfully against him. Implicit in this resolution of the debate is a divine admission that Job's protests are just, that he is right in maintaining his integrity, right in employing his own conscience and intelligence in trying to solve the baffling riddle of human existence.

But in such a conclusion to the Book of Job there was a decided note of skepticism; there was a too obvious encouragement to question, to doubt, the divine Providence. So, we are told, new poets, poets of greater piety, added the speeches of the fourth Comforter, Elihu, to strengthen the arguments of the others. They added also the magnificent speeches of the Lord, speeches intended to overwhelm Job with a sense of his littleness and ignorance before the awful might and inscrutable wisdom of God. Thus they created another Job, one who accepts the divine rebuke, confesses his sins, particularly the sin of presumption, and repents in dust and ashes all he had previously said and done.

Thus the Book of Job as we have it presents us with three Jobs: the devout, sinless, patiently suffering Job of the primitive folk tale; the questioning, protesting and vindicated Job of the great Debate; the totally crushed and repentant Job of the late poetic additions. Correspondingly there are three suggested solutions to the problem of Job's suffering: his suffering is a test of his loyalty to his God; it is a punishment for his sins; it is a manifestation of the inexplicable will of an inscrutable Providence. What, then, is the meaning of the Book of Job? What does it say with definiteness and persuasive power about the mystery of human affliction, its causes, its justification? Really nothing. If the careful and informed reader turns from J. B. to the scholar's Book of Job to escape confusion and perplexity, he only finds confusion and perplexity compounded. If he goes from the Book of Job to J. B., he soon discovers that MacLeish has taken from his Biblical source all of its contradictions, and has woven them into the thought and feeling fabric of his own play. For, here or there in J. B., through one character or another, the reader finds restated, not only the somewhat formless essence of the Biblical poem, but also much of its detail. But he finds more than restatement. Though the total vision of idea and emotion in J. B. may to him seem somewhat blurred, he does find, I think, a point where the mist thins out, where something new and significant emerges, clearly seen and clearly stated. At that point MacLeish says what he wants to say. There the play reveals its meaning, delivers its message.

III

J. B. is, as everyone knows, a modern play. Its Job is a modern man subjected to calamities which only a modern world could impose. In pursuit of its meaning and message let us look hurriedly at the play itself, its setting, its people, and its action—and in so doing sample its poetry. The scene is a corner of a circus tent, where a side-show dramatization of the Book of Job is daily staged as part of the circus entertainment. The hour is late. The circus and side-shows are over; the crowds and performers are gone; most of the lights are out. Two circus vendors appear in the semidarkness, Mr. Zuss, with a bunch of balloons hitched to his belt, and Mr. Nickles, with a popcorn tray strapped to his shoulders. They are old men, old actors, professionally fallen on evil days. But the actor is still alive in their bones. The empty stage of the side-show is to them an alluring and irresistible opportunity. Why shouldn't they do the play of Job—and, of course, do it right? Mr. Zuss, big, florid, sonorous, orthodox, rather insensitive and unimaginative, casts himself in the role of God, and assigns Mr. Nickles the part of Satan. Mr. Nickles is gaunt, sardonic, skeptical, and bitterly discerning—anything, O Lord, but a beatnik! Throughout the play Zuss and Nickles play dual roles: in the masks of God and Satan they read the Biblical lines with which MacLeish links the episodes of his play together; in their own characters they comment like a Greek chorus on the tragedy that unfolds before their eyes. They agree that the title role of Job is not for either of them, though Nickles would like to try it. But whom will they get to play it? They remember that always in the world there is someone playing the part of Job. Yes, says Nickles, there are millions of men in the world, the war-torn world, playing, always playing, the part of Job:

Millions and millions of mankind
Burned, crushed, broken, mutilated,
Slaughtered, and for what? For thinking!
For walking round the world in the wrong
Skin, the wrong-shaped noses, eyelids:
Sleeping the wrong night wrong city—
London, Dresden, Hiroshima.
There never could have been so many
Suffered more for less.

All they will have to do to find a man for the title part is to start the play, pronounce the cues, and some Job or other among the millions playing the part will appear. Job is everywhere we go, says Nickles,

His children dead, his work for nothing,
Counting his losses, scraping his boils,
Discussing himself with his friends and physicians,
Questioning everything—the times, the stars,
His own soul, God's providence.

So mounting the lighted platform above the darkened stage—the heaven above the earth—Zuss and Nickles don the masks of God and Satan and begin to declaim the opening lines of the old Biblical drama:

GODMASK:
                                        Whence comest thou?
SATANMASK:
From going to and fro in the earth
And walking up and down in it.
GODMASK:
Hast thou considered my servant Job
That there is none like him on the earth,
A perfect and an upright man, one
That feareth God and escheweth evil?

The light on the platform above fades out and Zuss and Nickles are lost in darkness. Lights on the stage below come on disclosing J. B. and his family at Thanksgiving dinner. No shadow of misfortune has yet fallen upon them. They have wealth, health, home, mutual love and loyalty. J. B. and Sarah, his wife, are in their middle thirties, the children, David, Mary, Jonathan, Ruth, and Rebecca, range from thirteen to six. For J. B. and the children it is a festive hour, an hour expressive of vibrant health and robust appetite, calling only for food and drink, seasoned with love and good will. Sarah alone is troubled. God is in her thoughts, a rather Hebraic God, who rewards the deserving and punishes the undeserving—and the ungrateful. The abundance overflowing in her life and in the lives of her husband and children fills her with unaccountable fear, fear lest their good go beyond their deserts, and they lose all. And it's ridiculous, she says,

Childish, and I shouldn't be afraid.
Not even now when suddenly everything
Fills to overflowing in me
Brimming the fulness till I feel
My happiness impending like a danger.
But if ever anybody deserved it, you do.
J. B.:
That's not true, I don't deserve it.
It's not a question of deserving.
SARAH:
Oh, it is. That's all the question.
However could we sleep at night …
J. B.:
Nobody deserves it, Sarah:
Not the world that God has given us.
But I believe in it, Sal, I trust in it.
I trust my luck—my life—our life—
God's goodness to me.

J. B. is not a thinker. His thought is intuitive, not reasoned. God is sensed, not deduced. He is not so much a person, here or there, or anywhere, as He is a Presence, indwelling, everywhere. J. B. feels Him in the world as he feels the strength alive in his own veins and muscles. God is “sun on the floor, air in the curtains.” His justice is not in His moral judgments, but in His uniformity, His unchangeableness:

                                        A man can count on Him.
Look at the world, the order of it,
The certainty of day's return
And spring's and summer's: the leaves' green—
That never cheated expectation …
Eat your dinner, Sal my darling.
We love our life because it's good:
It isn't good because we love it—
Pay for it—in thanks or prayer. The thanks are
Part of love and paid like love:
Free gift or not worth having …
Eat your dinner, girl! There's not a
Harpy on the roof for miles.

“Well, that's our pigeon,” exclaims Mr. Zuss—his way of saying that J. B. is the Job of their play, the man who must pass through the fiery furnace of loss, sorrow, suffering. And how will he play the part? Will he curse God and die? Will he at the end say, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord”? Or will he say something not written in the book?

“And there came,” says the folk tale, “a messenger unto Job and said, The oxen were plowing, and the asses were feeding beside them: And the Sabeans fell upon them, and took them away; yea, they have slain the servants with edge of the sword; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” Such a messenger came one night to the home of J. B. and Sarah, the harbinger of their first calamity. A world war had come and terminated. David had been in service overseas. He had written that he would soon be home. But there had been a stupid order by a stupid officer. David and his buddies had walked blindly into something and been blown to pieces. One only had escaped alone to tell them. Then there came another night and another messenger to J. B. and Sarah to tell them about Mary and Jonathan, to tell them what he alone had seen:

Four kids in a car. They're dead.
Two were yours. Your son. Your daughter.
Cops have them in a cab.
Any minute now they'll be here …
                                                                      He was there. He saw it
Route two. Under the viaduct.
Traveling seventy—seventy-five—
Kid was driving was drunk,
Had to be drunk, just drove into it.
He was walking home. He saw it.
Saw it start to, saw it had to
Saw it. J. B.'s son. His daughter.
Four in all and all just kids.
They shrieked like kids, he said …
                                                                                Then silent.
Blond in all that blood that daughter.

Still another night and another messenger. Little Rebecca had been missing since nightfall. Hours of search and frenzied anxiety. Then again the messenger:

                                                                                          Just past midnight
Pounding his beat by the back of the lumberyard,
Somebody runs and he yells and they stumble—
Big kid—nineteen maybe—
Hopped to the eyes and scared—scared
Bloodless—he could barely breathe.
Constable yanks him up by the britches:
“All right! Take me to it!” …
Well, he took him to it—back of the
Lumber trucks beside the track …
She had a toy umbrella,
That was all she had—but shoes,
Red shoes and toy umbrella
That was tight in her fist when
                                        he found her—still.

And then the finale, the triumph of the bomb. Blocks of the city levelled. All of J. B.'s banks and factories in rubble. And the messenger stumbling through the ruins of J. B.'s house with the unconscious Sarah in his arms. No trace of Ruth, the last of the children. Certainly somewhere dead under fallen stone.

And how through all of this does J. B. play the part of Job? At first pretty much as it is written in the Book of Job, with all of its ambiguities. Now he is the Job of the old folk tale, staunch in his trust and loyalty, patient in his acceptance: Should a man receive the good and not accept the bad? The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Then he is the Job of the Symposium: questioning, protesting, pleading. “Show me my guilt, Oh God!” And then he hears the awful Voice in the wind and the thunder, in the presence of which he abhors himself and repents his presumption.

Climactic and memorable is the scene in which Sarah leaves him, leaves him alone in the rubble, with his rags and his sores, leaves him alone in the ruins of his moral world. The scene opens in profound silence, out of which comes a muffled sound of sobbing—Sarah sobbing for her babies. For her babies, not for her children. For Sarah is bewailing the slaughter of innocence of which the baby is the ultimate and most poignant symbol. In the name of her outraged motherhood she is asserting the injustice of God. J. B. pleads with her to find rest, to try to go to sleep:

                                                                                          Go! go where?
If there were darkness, I'd go there.
If there were night, I'd lay me down in it.
God has shut the night against me.
God has set the dark alight
With horror blazing blind as day
When I go toward it … close my eyes.

J. B. understands, yet doesn't understand:

                    I know those waking eyes.
His will is everywhere against us
Even in our sleep, our dreams. If I
Knew … If I knew why!
What I can't bear is the blindness—
Meaninglessness … the numb blow
Fallen in the stumbling night.

In the turnings, the revolving torments of his thought, J. B. always comes back to the question of guilt, his guilt. There must be guilt in him, guilt wherever there is suffering and death. Only that way can God be just. And God is just. But Sarah cries out in an agony of bitter protest:

If God is just, our slaughtered children
Stank with sin, were rotten with it.

But her memories and everything decent in her argue their innocence. To keep God good J. B. would falsify himself and his children, would make them all evil. Sarah will have no part in such a betrayal:

I will not stay here if you lie—
Connive in your destruction, cringe to it:
Not if you betray your children … They are
Dead and they were innocent: I will not
Let you sacrifice their deaths
To make injustice justice and God good …
If you buy quiet with their innocence—
Their or yours, I will not love you.

J. B. follows the logic of Sarah's thought, but he shrinks from the conclusion toward which it points. To grant that in the world innocent suffering and death exist would seem to banish God from it, or question His goodness. And that J. B. is not yet prepared to do. Without God in the world the life of man has no meaning:

God is God or we are nothing—
Mayflies that leave their husks behind—
Our tiny lives ridiculous—a suffering
Not even sad that Someone Somewhere
Laughs at as we laugh at apes.
We have no choice but to be guilty.
God is unthinkable if we are innocent.

But we do have one choice, cries Sarah. We can choose to live or to die—curse God and die. And Sarah chooses to die. Soundlessly she runs out to find waters under bridges, waters opening and closing, and reflecting afterwards the image of the stars.

J. B. is not long alone with his rags, his sores, his agitations. The Comforters appear, modern Comforters with various modern nostrums for the various troubles of the modern mind. Why, they ask, should J. B. call to God for explanation? Why cry out about guilt and innocence? Why should God reply to him

From the blue depths of His Eternity,
Blind depths of His Unconsciousness,
Blank depths of His Necessity?
God is far above in Mystery;
God is far below in Mindlessness;
God is far within in History.

Why should God have time for him? J. B. and his troubles, one says, do not register in the relentless, mechanical sweep of history. History is God. It has no time or concern for innocence. Classes, nations, perish in their innocence, and no reckoning made. Guilt is a psychophenomenal situation, an illusion, a disease, a sickness. Science has surmounted guilt:

Science knows now that the sentient spirit
Floats like the chambered nautilus on a sea
That drifts it, under skies that drive:
Beneath, the sea of the subconscious;
Above, the winds that wind the world.
Caught between that sky, that sea,
Self has no will, cannot be guilty.
The sea drifts. The sky drives.
The tiny, shining bladder of the soul
Washes with wind and wave or shudders
Shattered between them.

Nonsense! says another. Guilt is the only reality. All mankind are guilty. Their sin is simple: they were born men. By birth, by nature, their hearts are evil; their wills are evil. Adam and Eve are in their genes. Men, then, are evil not by what they do but by what they have always been, by what they incurably are.

But for J. B. there is no comfort in the Comforters, no healing in the philosophy that would ascribe to man the innocence of the automaton, the irresponsibility of the laws of gravity. I'd rather suffer, he cries,

Every unspeakable suffering God sends,
Knowing it was I that suffered,
I that earned the right to suffer,
I that acted, I that chose,
Than wash my hands with yours in that
Defiling innocence. Can we be men
And make an irresponsible ignorance
Responsible for everything?

Even less comfort, less healing, is there in the religious dogma of innate evil, of natural depravity:

That is the cruelest comfort of them all,
Making the Creator of the Universe
The miscreator of mankind—
A party to the crime He punishes,
Making my sin a horror, a deformity.

Nor is J. B.'s desperate need met by the Voice speaking to him in the wind and the thunder. J. B., crying in an agony of spirit for meaning, for understanding, cannot be appeased by a voice that merely belittles him, that asks him where he was when the foundations of the earth were laid, when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy. True, J. B. replies in the words of a completely humbled Job—“I abhor myself and repent”—but I cannot escape the feeling that he is silenced not so much by the power of what is said to him as by his own utter weariness, his spiritual desolation, his appalling persuasion that he stands alone on a darkling plain where he can expect no light from the sky above. He would still the Voice in the wind and thunder not by arguing with it but by accepting without protest its rebuke. He is sick of mysteries, of comforters, of lights that fail. He would welcome the oblivion and utter darkness of death. He has moved toward a new insight, toward the recognition that man in supreme trouble must ultimately depend on an inner light, an inner strength. J. B. is ready for the final scene of the play and the illumination and resolution it brings.

Sarah had gone out to find water under bridges. She didn't find water under bridges. She found instead a bit of forsythia pushing its petals up through ashes. Looking for death she found in the bit of forsythia a symbol of universal life, a life that is persistent and unafraid. There is no devastation so complete, no rubble so sterile, but from it sometime somewhere, a blade, a leaf, a petal springs to proclaim the imperative of life, its unconquerable power of renewal. With the forsythia cradled in her arms Sarah returns to J. B. to tell him about it and the ashes:

All there is now of the town is ashes.
Mountains of ashes. Shattered glass.
Glittering cliffs of glass all shattered
Steeper than a cat could climb
If there were a cat still …
                                        And pigeons—
They wheel and settle and whirl off
Wheeling and almost settling—
                              And the silence—
There is no sound there now—no wind sound—
Nothing that could sound the wind—
Could make it sing—no doors—no doorway—
Only this, the forsythia, among the ashes!
Gold as though it did not know …
I broke the branch to strip the leaves off—
Petals again! But they so clung to it!
J. B.:
Curse God and die, you said to me.
SARAH:
Yes, you wanted justice, didn't you?
There isn't any. There's the world …
Cry for justice and the stars
Will stare until your eyes sting. Weep,
Enormous winds will thrash the water.
Cry in sleep for lost children,
Snow will fall, snow will fall.
J. B.:
Why did you leave me alone?
SARAH:
                                        I loved you.
I couldn't help you anymore.
You wanted justice and there was none—
Only love.
J. B.:
                                                                                He does not love. He
Is.
SARAH:
But we do. That's the wonder.
J. B.:
Yet you left me.
SARAH:
                                                                      Yes, I left you.
I thought there was a way away …
Water under bridges opens
Closing and the companion stars
Still float there afterwards. I thought the door
Opened into closing water.
J. B.:
Sarah!
SARAH:
                                        Oh, I never could!
I never could! Even the forsythia …
Even the forsythia beside the
Stair could stop me.

Stage directions tell us that here J. B. and Sarah cling to each other; that Sarah rises and draws him up; that he peers into the surrounding darkness:

J. B.:
                                        It's too dark to see.
SARAH:
Then blow on the coal of the heart, my darling.
J. B.:
The coal of the heart …
SARAH:
                                                            It's all the light now.
Blow on the coal of the heart.
The candles in churches are out.
The lights have gone out in the sky.
Blow on the coal of the heart
And we'll see by and by …

J. B. joins her in picking up chairs and putting things in order. She goes on,

                                                  We'll see where we are.
The wit won't burn and the wet soul smoulders.
Blow on the coal of the heart and we'll know …
We'll know. …

IV

And so the play ends—and to my profound satisfaction. I am, as it were, shut up in measureless content. But, as we have seen, such content is not shared by some of the critics. The ending, they say, is tacked on. It is not organic, not a reasonable outcome of what has gone before. It is not an acceptable resolution of what seems to be (but may not be) the dominant issue of the play. It is palpably too sentimental, too lightly romantic, to be in dramatic rapport with the tragic sound and fury that precede it. Neither do the men of the church share my measureless content, nor do they see eye to eye with one another. The poet's intent is obscure, but what they see in the obscurity varies among them. What MacLeish seems to be doing is well, but not well enough. He probes deeply into the mystery of human suffering but not deeply enough—not deeply enough to plumb the depths of their thought, their ultimate concern. At its best, says Father Davis—who likes it least—J. B. is a “weak secular affirmation of human life and human love as the sole props and rationale of bewildered humanity.” At its worst it is a “shallow repudiation of religious faith.”

Most of the religious objections to J. B. lose, I believe, their validity and relevance in the light of the author's intention. One should not expect in J. B. a defense of dogma, a philosophy of religion, a commendatory footnote to the Book of Job. J. B., as I read it, was intended to be a tragedy, and tragedy, in life and literature, has always been a challenge to the claims of religion. “The Tragic Muse,” says F. L. Lucas, “was born of religion, but she has always remained something of an infidel.” “Scrutinize the motives of tragedy, ancient or modern,” says W. Macneile Dixon, “and you find embedded in them the fundamental problem of all religions, the problem of evil.” To me the ending of J. B., so objectionable to some critics, is not only organic to the play as a whole but also evidence conclusive that in writing his play MacLeish intended to write and did write a tragedy, faithful to the tragic experiences of life and true in spirit to the great tragedies of literature. In the language of the books, J. B. shows us how through terrible affliction a theist becomes a humanist, how a man loses his God in an inexplicable universe and in so doing finds himself.

In the beginning of the play J. B. is basking in a sun-lit, a God-centered world. He feels the divine presence everywhere about him: it is “sun on the floor, airs in the curtains.” He senses in all the happenings of his life the justice and goodness of God. In all the human relationships of his life, God has favored him, stood with him, near him. At the end of the play he stands alone on a darkling plain to which no light from church or heaven comes:

The candles in churches are out
The lights have gone out in the sky.

God is, J. B. says, but where or what He is, J. B. no longer pretends to know. He is not a God of love and justice as man knows love and justice. He is not an available and dependable source, sponsor, guardian, of the values most needful in the world of suffering men and women. Man on the darkling plain must look for light not in church and sky but within himself. He must blow on the coal of the heart, blow it into a glow, a flame. Only in love, and in compassion born of love can man find his way, secure the guidance, the courage, the strength he needs in a tragic world.

Great tragedy is always humanistic. In it, man is always dignified, never belittled, by the misfortunes that crush him. In it, man's cry is always a futile protest against injustice. In it, man is forced in the end to look within, to rely on his own spiritual resources. Broken and disillusioned he rises among the ruins of old faiths and reassurances to assert his eternal worth as a human being. At the end of our play that is what J. B. and Sarah are doing. And most of us are proud of them.

And the love that draws J. B. and Sarah together in another stand against a world that has crushed them is no light thing. It is as deep and profound as the reader has capacity to make it. In the contemplation of love only depth can respond to depth. To some, the love which to Sarah remains the “wonder” of their plight is only a biological imperative, the upward thrust of the forsythia through ashes and rubble. To others it means perhaps the instinctive, helpless, clinging of human being to human being when all other supports have been suddenly snatched away—it is the “Ah, love, let us be true to one another!” of “Dover Beach.” To still others love could mean what it sometimes means to Erich Fromm, “the only passion which satisfies man's need to unite himself with the world,” the only passion which can give fulfilment and sanity to human life in human society. Or what it means to Ashley Montague, “the touchstone and the compass by which man may guide his own most successful course through the shoals and reefs of this life, instead of being tossed about … in a rudderless boat upon a mysterious and uncompassionate sea.” To a few this love, this “wonder” of Sarah's thought, could suggest an aspect of Tillich's ontological love which strives to banish all estrangements in the world, strives to draw together in the universe all things that belong together—including God and man.

We'll see where we are (says Sarah).
The wit won't burn and the wet soul smoulders.
Blow on the coal of the heart, and we'll know …
We'll know. …

I like this ending—simple in diction, familiar and homely in imagery, organic with what has gone before, hopeful as to what the future may hold. I wouldn't change it in word, thought, or feeling. It reminds me of another ending by a poet who had brought a man and woman through trouble to the gates of Paradise, to the loss of Eden. Though the poet was a master of the full orchestra, he ushered man and woman into a bleak world on one of the simplest and purest strains in literature—bad modern drama, perhaps, but in effect marvelous poetry:

Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.