The Meaning of Suffering: Part VI

Jul 05, 2007 12:31 PM

Dr. Gregory Yuri Glazov, Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies at Immaculate Conception Seminary School of Theology at Seton Hall University and the Coordinator of the Great Spiritual Books Program for the Seminary’s Institute for Christian Spirituality. He earned an M.Phil. and a D. Phil. in Jewish Studies in the Graeco-Roman World as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and is the author of The â€˜Bridling of the Tongue’ and the â€˜Opening of the Mouth’ in Biblical Prophecy (Sheffield Academic Press 2001). He specializes in Old Testament Prophecy, Wisdom Literature and Jewish-Christian Relations. His translation of and commentary on Vladimir Solovyov’s Writings on Judaism and his own book on Judaism: Judaism as a Saving Covenant: Models of Judaism in Catholic Perspective are due to be published this year.

Dr. Gregory Glazov: Thank you for inviting me to participate in this discussion. Allow me to do so by reflecting on how a phrase or two in each of the preceding contributions resonates with me and the religious and philosophical traditions I draw on. It will be interesting to see how our experiences and insights stand to corroborate, console, or challenge us.

“And in them I found solace.” Frimet Roth found solace for the slaying of her dear daughter Malki in those Jewish sources that concede the “inherent sadness in our existence”. The mixture of good and evil dealt out to her in life presents a quandary which patently inaccurate adages fail to address. Her words resonate with many speeches in the Book of Job which highlights that suffering disturbs us deeply and prompts us to search for some understanding that would provide solace: “Does a wild ass bray when he has grass... Can what is tasteless be eaten without salt?” (Job 6:5-6). This is what Job asks of his friends who compare his wild laments and curses of life to senseless braying. But their words lack salt. Consolation â€“ the quiet of non-ego-repressive silence â€“ comes with an opportunity to chew only on something that provides that understanding which enables us to comprehend and contain our anguish, something that, in Rabbi Yelin’s insight about Charoset, that sweetens, as it were, the bitterness. For lack of this, it is honest to give vent and “bray” at God, out of the perception that He, being Who He is, must somehow be implicated in what is happening, because what is happening is allowed by His hand and is therefore in some way, positively or negatively, a manifestation of its power (Job 1:11, 2:5, 19:21) and thus indicates that our suffering, while bound up with the nature of earthly life, also transcends it.

For this reason, the reflections surrounding the discussion with Judea Pearl about whether or not God transcends our image of Him also touch on this insight from The Book of Job and suggest that we pause on it as is often the norm in such discussions. We may pause to note that this book explores the freedom of religious piety, for this is the meaning of the second question which we meet in the book, the question of the evil spirit of the Satan who challenges God’s faith in Job’s righteousness, suspecting it to be mercantile in origin: “is Job righteous for nothing?... touch him and he will curse you...” (Job 1:11, cf. 2:5). All the human characters in the book evince this philosophy: Job’s wife, his friends and even to some extent of Job inasmuch as he, having discovered that the world does not reward good and punish evil mechanically, wishes to sue the Creator for not designing it that way. This is also true of Ivan Karamazov who was mentioned at the outset. But it is not true totally of Job inasmuch as he does not let go of his righteousness and is thus vindicated. The reader thereby perceives that a “clockwork paradise”, a “clockwork orange” will not do. Automatic justice would be a perversion of true justice. Job is consoled in the end when he learns this by meeting God and discovering that God transcends his imagination of Him and discovers that the mythical, Canaanite images which he harbored of God as his enemy were in fact that, mythical. Scripture thus encourages us to be open to the discovery that God may transcend our mythical images of Him.

We may note how Job grows through suffering. If his righteousness was suspect at the start, it is manifestly free at the end. It is thus in a rather ironic manner that he, and people who have been salted by analogous experiences, may uphold the reflection of Sheikh Palazzi that suffering is purificatory. Where there is clear fault, suffering should be purificatory. Do we not witness to our hope that such may be the highest justification of penal punishment by the shock we register over imprisoned murderers who continue to gloat over their crimes?... and therefore bear witness to the depth and mystery of evil in the human heart. Perhaps the commitment and freedom to choose evil may be so absolute as to be unredeemable.

I baulk somewhat at Sheikh Palazzi’s notion that by means of suffering God “destroys our ego when he uses it to helps us to say "Thine will, not mine, but always done!" as also by the phrase that“Every creature is annihilated every time it exhales, and created again every time it inhales.” Pedagogy and purification is one thing, annihilation another. Job’s ego is not destroyed. My theological tradition’s commitment to the fundamental goodness of existence makes me baulk even at the idea that God would annihilate those whose wills resist redemption. The key reconciliatory word here is probably transubstantiation - used in Rabbi Yellin’s reflection. If suffering redeems, it does so by transubstantiating us and our understanding.

I would grant Sheikh Palazzi’s words about annihilation may be a poetic attempt at saying that God’s will sustains our existence at every moment and so is a response to the proposition put before him that God “cannot involve Himself in our affairs since if He did, we wouldn’t be free”.If so, this phase of the conversation registers two aspects of human freedom which I see as integral: it is because God involves Himself intimately in our choices that we are free. If free choices are not illusionary, we are more than clockwork, more than biological mechanism. The freedom underpinning free choice, then, is something of a miracle, it is a sign of God’s deep ongoing involvement in our lives, in the light of which it is that we think and choose. Hence, the more openness to this presence, the more freedom and vice versa. For this reason we may thank God for the good things we do and not blame Him when we succumb to temptation.

This perspective prompts me to turn to Judea Pearl’s invocation of a scientific, non-spiritual stance ...which simply cannot buy the notion that suffering carries hidden meaning... and to his qualms about permitting another being to go through pain to absolve him from responsibilities that are totally his. On what grounds if not spiritual can one ground logical thought, inference, science, choice and talk of responsibility? To put it more clearly, when a person dismisses a certain explanation on the grounds that it is based on Pavlovian association, he does so on the grounds that this dismissal itself is not based on the same type of thinking but what is that if not spiritual? For it its not spiritual, all talk of meaning is done for. There is something here, I fear, not quite resolved. Again, on what, if not on a process of prolonged moral and therefore spiritual reflection, whether one calls it that or not, can one repudiate a vain God by concluding that "Here I am!" means I am perfectly aware of those dangers, and still I am committed to educate my sons by the principles of civilized society? This position is very similar to Job’s for espousing righteousness “for nothing”.

But while Job patiently clings to righteousness “for nothing” as it were, there is meaning to his steadfastness and it turns out to be “for something” after all. And I suppose that this is the ultimate question, is it all for nothing or something? Hence, to take up Rabbi Yellin’s adage: gam zo l’tovah â€“ “this too (is) for the good”, the problem turns on the degree to which it is adequate and true. The phrase resonates powerfully with a phrase from Virgil’s Aeneid, the epic of the unspeakable (infandum) struggle to reach the ever receding coast of Italy and found Rome, a struggle over which hangs a perpetual “perhaps” (forsan) as Aeneas says to his shipwrecked sailors: “Perhaps someday you will rejoice to recall even this” (1.203). On what grounds are we to have hope that “even this is/can be for the good”? How to escape from the limbo of this “perhaps”?

My reflections should resonate with Fr. Maurice’s underlining of the mystery of human cruelty but in speaking of evil I would not, with him, give it the last word and so focus on two other words in his reflection: the dream that evil will be conquered through Jesus’ gospel. The Gospel is the good news that the dream of a happy ending and a joy which we touch whenever we experience the eucatastrophe of a happy turn, in story or experience, is an inkling of a truth about the world and its Creator. Do not Jews and Christians live in hope that the loftiest human dreams and myths are rooted in something profoundly true which will be realized by God in the end and that pagan dreams are mythical and false to the extent that they fall too short of God’s good purposes and providence. It is because of that that we “do not return the ticket.” At the same time, our division largely revolves around the role to be attributed, in the realization of this dream, to suffering in general and to the suffering of Jesus in particular. On what grounds do Christians attach meaning to Jesus’ suffering? Christianity begins at the point at which what seemed to Jesus’ disciples to be a bloody mess â€“ His passion and death â€“ was taken up by and into the glory of His resurrection. And the good news is not that this just happened to Him, but that He made it into an outward sign of an inward reality which we can consciously embrace in the course of securing and breaking our daily bread, the bread of our blood, sweat and tears, and so cooperate in the work that can transubstantiate the earth that we are into what God planned it to be.