Moral clarity is the readiness to accept that there is no solution to the problem of suffering. Indeed, Neiman says (rightly it seems to me) that there is something "blasphemous" about the many philosophical attempts to resolve it in purely literal and prosaic terms. In the biblical story, what is offered instead is the Voice from the Whirlwind, describing the inexhaustible mystery of creation, "when the morning stars burst out singing, and all the angels shouted for joy". What we are meant to take away from this, on Neiman's reading, is that "life itself is a gift...[that] there is no moral order in the world as it is...[and that] creating moral order in the world is just what we're meant to give back to it".

Is this, in the end, a religious vision of reality? I think myself that it is. Or, at least, that it could never have come from a writer who was not steeped in the culture and traditions of Judaeo-Christian theism — the culture that some of our contemporary militant secularists are so bent on destroying. Anyone who has followed the journey Neiman takes in this powerful and, in the end, quite moving book, will I think be left with a dilemma. To believe in the vision of justice that she so passionately advocates requires us, as she underlines, to be sustained by hope. Yet if "ought" is as utterly divorced from "is", as she maintains, if reality has no ultimate goodness at its source and if the final message of Job is that "we are on our own", then it is hard to see any lasting basis for such hope. So perhaps what we need to recover from the Enlightenment is not, pace Neiman, a secularised interpretation of Kant, but something closer to what Kant himself actually proposed in his Critique of Practical Reason, that a wholehearted commitment to morality inescapably requires faith in the ultimate triumph of goodness, and that this in turn makes believing in God a moral necessity.