Alternative Modes of Piety

The Mazeppist has examined "Jobean Piety" in past installments and related it to what the mid-20th century Orientalist Hellmut Ritter termed "Muslim mystics' strife with God" (use the search feature to find those posts). A powerful expression of this mode of piety may be found in Montesquieu's Persian Letter # 161. The letter itself was not composed by Montesquieu to be read in this way, but he long ago passed into the Great Beyond and, as a result, is helpless to stop my appropriation of it.

Two paragraphs in particular stand out. Imagine, if you will, a Jobean (Ayoubean) Dervish addressing God:

How could you have thought me credulous enough to imagine that I was in the world only in order to worship your caprices? that while you allowed yourself everything, you had the right to thwart all my desires? No: I may have lived in servitude, but I have always been free. I have amended your laws according to the laws of nature, and my mind has always remained independent.

You should even be grateful to me for the sacrifice that I made on your account, for having demeaned myself so far as to seem faithful to you, for having had the cowardice to guard in my heart something that I ought to have revealed to the whole earth, and finally for having profaned the name of virtue by permitting it to be applied to my acceptance of your whims.

Yes, to conventional piety, these lines addressed to God would be viewed as the height of impudence and impiety. But Ayoubean Dervish piety is not conventional. It displays the Abrahamic intimacy with the Divine that permits such a lover's quarrel, not the slavish versions of Abrahamic religion that would forbid it.