Job sat among the ashes. Aristotle sat beside him, listening. For a while, neither spoke.
Aristotle: You have told me what you lost. But you have not yet told me what your life was like before the loss.
Job: I went out to the city gate, and there I took my seat in the public square. The young men saw me and stepped aside. The old men rose and stood. The princes stopped speaking.
Aristotle: You were honored.
Job: I was listened to.
Aristotle: Is that not much the same?
Job: Not always. A man may enjoy being praised. But at the gate, people came seeking judgment. The poor cried out, and I answered. The fatherless had no one to speak for them, so I took up their cause. I was eyes to the blind and feet to the lame.
Aristotle: Then your place there was not merely a seat of honor. It gave you the chance to act.
Job: Yes. I thought I understood what my life was for. I had the means to help, and I helped. I had influence, and I used it to defend people who had little. I broke the power of the wicked when they preyed upon the helpless.
Aristotle: That sounds like a life of virtue.
Job: It was a life. Now it is a memory.
Aristotle: In my account of the good life, wealth and honor are not the highest good. Wealth is useful because it enables us to do things. Honor can recognize excellence, though it depends on others' judgment. Neither one, by itself, makes a person good.
Job: I did not think my wealth made me good.
Aristotle: No. But you had wealth, standing, and the means to act. Those things mattered.
Job: They mattered because people mattered. My flocks were not only numbers. The oil and milk were part of a life in which the land gave its abundance, and I had enough to provide. I thought my future would continue. I said I would die in my nest and multiply my days like the sand.
Aristotle: You believed your life had found a settled shape.
Job: I believed tomorrow would resemble yesterday. Is that a sin?
Aristotle: Not necessarily. A human life needs some measure of stability. Friends, family, resources, a place in the community. These are not imaginary goods. They make it possible to live and act. But no one can make them secure forever.
Job: You speak as if knowing they can be taken prepares a man for their loss.
Aristotle: It does not fully prepare him.
Job: Then what good is the knowledge?
Aristotle: Perhaps only this: we should not mistake good fortune for something we have mastered.
Job: I did not think I had mastered it. I knew the faces of the people who came to me. I knew which widow had lost her protection, which poor man had been cheated, which child had no one to defend him. Can you call all of that “external goods” and be done with it?
Aristotle: No. The phrase does not make them unimportant. It means that they are goods a person does not possess entirely by his own character. They are part of the conditions of human life. Their loss can wound that life.
Job: Then say it plainly. A man can be made poorer by losing his place among his people.
Aristotle: Yes.
Job: He can lose more than comfort. He can lose the work that made his days meaningful.
Aristotle: Yes.
Job: And if the people who once waited for his words now turn away from him, that is not only the loss of praise.
Aristotle: No. It is also the loss of friendship, trust, and participation in the common life.
Job: At the gate, I was not alone. I belonged there. My words mattered because other people were there to hear them. Now the young men mock me. The men whose fathers I would not have placed beside the dogs of my flock laugh at me. They find my suffering and take it as permission to despise me.
Aristotle: Then the change is not simply that your reputation has fallen. The people who once received your justice have become part of the company that rejects you.
Job: You understand something of it, then.
Aristotle: I understand that virtue does not make a person invulnerable. A just man still needs a community in which justice can be practiced. A generous man still needs the means to give. A citizen needs fellow citizens.
Job: Yet my friends say that if I were truly just, I would not have fallen so far.
Aristotle: They have mistaken fortune for proof. They see that you have suffered and assume that your life must have deserved it.
Job: That is what the gate once did for me, too. The people saw my wealth and honor and assumed they knew the meaning of my life.
Aristotle: Did you?
Job: I knew what I had done. I had helped the poor. I had defended the fatherless. I had not used my strength to prey upon the weak. I can remember that without claiming that I understood all things.
Aristotle: And can you remember the man you were at the gate without pretending he still has the life he had then?
Job: I do not know how. When I speak of those days, it sounds as though I am asking to have them returned.
Aristotle: Perhaps you are grieving them.
Job: They are gone.
Aristotle: Yes.
Job looked toward the city, though from the ash heap he could not see it.
Job: If I return to the gate, will they rise when I enter?
Aristotle: I cannot tell you that.
Job: If I never return, was the man who sat there still a good man?
Aristotle: His goodness was not created by the people who rose for him.
Job: But they were part of the life in which I did good.
Aristotle: They were. That life was real, and its loss is real.
Job: Then sit with me a while longer.
Aristotle: I will.
Aristotle looked toward the city gate, then back at Job. He offered no explanation for the distance between the man Job had been and the man who now sat among the ashes.