In the Bible, Job is the name of a good man who, despite his entirely pious and righteous life, is made inexplicably to suffer unbearable hardships by God. A wealthy Bedouin herder, Job is suddenly attacked by a tribe who steal his animals and slaughter his innocent workers—then by the Babylonian army, who do the same—then by God Himself, who sends fire raining down from heaven onto his land, burning his sheep and workers alive—then by chance winds, which shake his family’s house so violently that it collapses, crushing his sons and daughters beneath the rubble. Finally, even in mourning his dead family, Job becomes infected with rashes and boils and sores that cover his body as he lays, scraping himself with dried clay, in the desert ashes. After a time, two of his friends arrive, with whom Job engages in an extended poetic debate about the meaning of suffering. His friends are fond to point to the platitudinous answers usually given by well-meaning if naive counsel: either that Job must have done something wrong to deserve his lot, or else that he doesn’t understand what is really going on, etc. But Job is defiant in his righteous anger at the state of his meaningless suffering. In his defiance he comes close to blasphemy, making all sorts of claims and demands on God in light of his tragedy.

The Book of Job is a profound rumination on the causes and meaning of human suffering. The figure of Job becomes the very archetype of the good person unjustly afflicted. All point to the fundamental theological question of theodicy: why does a good and all-powerful God allow such things to happen? This questions has plagued thinkers and theologians since the dawn of monotheism. It seems clear enough that no satisfactory answer has ever been proposed. Attempts are always easy to lambast as dismissive, naive, based on special pleading, etc. (One thinks of Voltaire’s satire of Leibnitz’s popular theodicy in the ridiculous optimism of Dr. Pangloss in the face of absurd calamity in Candide). Anything close to a successful religious theodicy must, it seems, truly grapple with the horrors of the potential for human suffering. This is what Dostoyevsky offers in The Brothers Karamazov, anyway, with Ivan’s withering examination of human cruelty and depravity. Ivan’s is no strawman argument against God for Dostoyevsky to strike down, but a visceral undermining of theodicy making use of actual, historical examples of seemingly senseless, awful, brutal human experience. If Dostoyevsky’s book is to offer any meaningful “justification of the ways of God to men” (as all theodicies aim to do), it must first present suffering unflinchingly, in all its horror. It must consider, even propose, the notion (as Ivan does) that the only appropriate response to such suffering is to side with humanity against any God that could allow such atrocity—in other words, to “mutiny” (as his interlocutor, his monk brother Alyosha, fearfully terms it, and from which the name of the chapter in the book derives).

As a Congolese refugee, Julian’s Job seems to be doing something very similar. Job’s account seems to be based on events that would occur during the Second Congo War, also called the Great African War. In this horrific conflict—beyond the usual barbarity of murder, pillaging, and torture tragically common to civil breakdown and armed conflict—there was pervasive use of methods even more psychically and socially devastating: weaponized rape. Rampaging militias would use extreme forms of sexual violence to demoralize and destroy their enemies. Beyond gang-raping women themselves, often to death, they would also order family members at gunpoint to rape each other: fathers daughters, sons their sisters and mothers. Such terrors served to dominate and destroy the most basic social fabric and psychic stability of the people they opposed. Those who survived would have to face not only their physical wounds (broken bones, mutilated genitalia, and incontinence from gang rape) but the psychological scars of their self-imposed familial torture.

Accounts from the Congo of this type were widespread, and seem beyond even the horrors that Ivan recounts in his litany of suffering in The Brothers Karamazov. In this sense, Job stands as a personification of the theodicy problem in the modern world. First and foremost, before even Faust’s intellectual arguments against God (which might seem aloof and distantly abstract by comparison), Job confronts us with the depths of possibility for human depravity, pain and suffering. Unlike the Biblical Job—to whom God appears, assuages, and sets things right—this character sides with Ivan, with mutiny against God, born of the deepest, most awful, most indefensible and inconceivable suffering.