The New Criterion

Jul 05, 2007 01:23 PM

The Meaning of Suffering: Part VIII (end of Round One)

by Roger Kimball

Roundtable Index: Introduction | Part I: Roth | Part II: Palazzi | Part III: Pearl | Part IV: Yellin | Part V: Guimond | Part VI: Glazov | Part VII: Evanier | Part VIII: Kimball | Part IX: Roth | Part X: Palazzi | Part XI: Pearl | Part XII: Yellin | Part XIII: Guimond | Part XIV: Glazov | Part XV: Evanier | Part XVI: Kimball (Conclusion) |

Kimball: I had planned to begin my response, Jamie, as some of the others have by thanking you for inviting me to participate in this symposium. But now that I see what a formidable array of commentators you have assembled to weigh in on the question of the meaning of suffering, I am not so sure that gratitude is the attitude du jour--even if, as I believe, gratitude is essential in rightly understanding the significance of suffering.

By setting the question in the context of Easter and the story of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection, you offer readers one traditional scheme through which suffering can be understood. But you broadened and complicated the question in several ways. You did this, first, by invoking Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, who dramatizes that hoary problem Christian and Jewish students will remember from theology 101: how can we reconcile innocent suffering with the idea of a God that is at once loving and omnipotent?

I do not propose to add to the oceans of ink that have been spilled over the centuries in the effort to answer that question. I merely wish to note that oceans of ink have been spilled in the pursuit of an answer. Which means that whatever satisfactions we might take in the clever lucubrations of an Augustine or Thomas Aquinas to answer the question, we find in the end that the question is, if not unanswerable, exactly, at least it is perpetually renewed. The question of suffering, that is to say, is not susceptible of being "solved." At bottom, it is not an intellectual puzzle (though thinking about it involves intellectual puzzles) but an existential reality inseparable from the adventure of human life.

You complicated my task further by placing me last: what can I add to the sensitive, intelligent, and wide-ranging reflections that precede me? Not much, I fear. I’ll content myself with a few notes and comments.

Since suffering is such a regular concomitant of human life, it is not surprising that the world’s great religions lavish a lot of attention on the subject. Your respondents have brought to bear the resources of many great traditions--Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and, in the case of Messrs. Pearl and Evanier, the tradition of modern secularism. Were this a college seminar, we might pause to consider the traditions of Buddhism and Stoicism, which seek to solve the problem of suffering by short circuiting its motor: attachment to the world. There is, for example, a famous passage in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura which speaks of the sweetness of watching from the safety of land a boat tossed about in a battering storm. "The sweetness," Lucretius writes, "lies in watching evils you yourself are free from."

Like Buddhism, Lucretius’ Stoicism endeavors to solve the problem of suffering by denying it, by plucking us out of the cares and concerns of life and transforming us into Olympian observers: "How sweet, again," Lucretius writes, "to see the clash of battle/ across the plains, yourself immune to danger."

It is easy to see that attractions of such a view of life--immunity or at least resistance to life’s travails is a tempting substitute for life’s pleasures--but it is also easy to see its limitations. A dollop of stoicism may be a salutary thing, indistinguishable from the traditional Brit’s stiff-upper-lip in the face of life’s quotidian adversities. But elevated into a philosophy of life, it has the disadvantage of exiling one from life’s riches. You avoid the penalty of desire by the severe expedient of never wanting or caring for anything. It is also worth noting that Stoicism tends to work best when the tests to which it is subjected are light. Real calamity can usually be counted on to spoil its tranquility.

In any event, I mention the by-way of Stoicism and its allotropes (Buddhism, the philosophies of Schopenhauer and George Santayana, etc.) not to endorse them but simply to fill out the roster of possible responses to the question: what is the meaning of (which implies the further question, what is the solution to) suffering?

In Agamemnon, Aeschylus wrote that "wisdom (mathein) comes only through suffering." Maybe. But the observation that "Ignorance is bliss" has an historical patent just as venerable if not so exalted. I am glad that Gregory Glazov dilated on the Book of Job. That most awful (in the old sense) book of the Bible is full of wisdom, from Job’s observation that "Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble," to the image of Satan "walking to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it."

That was a long time ago, but Satan is a tireless pedestrian; he is walking here still. For me, the most powerful passages of Job came toward the end, when God answers Job out of the whirlwind and puts to him that long list of unanswerable questions ("Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the Earth?"). These passages have the effect not only of demonstrating God’s greatness but also of reminding us of his inscrutability. If Job forbears to follow his wife’s advice ("Curse God, and die"), it is not because he understands but because he submits to God will. In this context, it is worth noting that many scholars believe that Job’s happy ending, when "the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before," was a later interpolation--a concession, perhaps, to the same scruple that led some Victorian moralizers to graft a happy ending on to King Lear.

What is the meaning of suffering? To say that something has "meaning" is to say that it gestures beyond itself: that it achieves its full significance only when attached to something else. Does suffering possess this semantic leaven? That depends. Although I am a Roman Catholic, I have considerable sympathy with David Evanier’s declaration that: "I see no meaning in suffering, and certainly no way in which it would increase my belief in the existence of God." It is likely, however, that a belief in God would increase the significance of suffering, providing that tertium quid which adds meaning to experience, thus endowing the merely painful with the solace of understanding.

But that, I believe, is an alchemy we must each perform for ourselves. There is something untoward, not to say downright obscene, about presuming upon the suffering of others. When we ask whether suffering has "meaning," we covertly imply that it would be a good thing if it did, that "meaning" would exude something analgesic or propitiatory to calm the sting of suffering. Who has the gumption to suggest that to Frimet Roth or Judea Pearl in the face of their hideous losses? Who is going to presume to say to Mr. Pearl that he is wrong when he says that "I simply cannot buy the notion that suffering carries hidden meaning to us as human beings and certainly not the notion that suffering has anything to do with redemption"? Not I.

In the end, the meaning of suffering must wait upon one’s answer to the question: What is the meaning of life? And that is a question we do not answer in words but in deeds. In this context, let me mention how much I appreciated Rabbi Yellin’s magnanimous pragmatism. When we ask about the meaning of suffering, we are often led to dwell on how we feel. Much more important, as the Rabbi observes, is how we behave. "Imagine," he says, "living in a world where some human mind or power judges us on what we believe rather than on how we act." Of course, we do inhabit precisely such a world, as is shown by phenomena as disparate as the fatuous dictates of political correctness on U.S. college campuses to the grimmer orthodoxies enforced elsewhere in the world. Jean-Jacques Rousseau taught us to equate virtue with the emotion of virtue, i.e., with a species of narcissism. Voltaire offered a salubrious antidote when he asked, "What is virtue, my friend? It is to do good: let us do it, and that’s enough. We won’t look into your motives." That wouldn’t have pleased Kant (to say nothing of Rousseau), but what a breath of fresh air!

Suffering can make us wiser. It can also just make us harder, which is not the same thing (though it can look alike to the untrained eye). Aristotle was right, I think, when he observed that courage is the most important virtue, because without courage you cannot reliably practice any of the other virtues. And here I come back to the issue of gratitude. It is curious, perhaps, but the virtue most complicit with suffering is gratitude--not, I hasten to add, gratitude for suffering itself but rather gratitude for the amplitude that suffering jerks us into recognizing anew. I say this not proscriptively, but merely as a matter of observation, based on the testimony of many people who have endured grievous suffering and come out, so to speak, on the other side.

It doesn’t always happen that way, of course, and it is worth stressing again the unseemliness of exacting gratitude from anyone but oneself. But within the interstices of one’s own heart, the moral economy of suffering seems to require gratitude if it is not to fester. And here, I think, I might venture a small correction of Aristotle. Cardinal Newman was right when he said that, about most subjects, to think as did Aristotle was to think correctly. But I have to take issue with Aristotle’s definition of man as the "rational animal." The "ungrateful animal" is usually closer to the truth. I do not, by the way, exempt myself from that observation. But that brings us to the threshold of other mysteries, and I fear I have already gone on too long.