The Mystery of Suffering Read online

  A thing goes on being, even if the effects that flow from it may point the other way. Mountain streams may dry up, but this does not prove that snow has ceased to exist. Art is still there, even if every artist in the world contradicts the purpose of art. A sense of humour is not disproved by bad jokes. (If a man had no sense of humour whatsoever, he could not make jokes at all, good or bad.) Since this is not the place to give the arguments for the existence of God, the course to be followed now is simply to explain what is meant by his permissive will.

  This chapter opened with a short dissertation on personal suffering in relation both to past sins and future spiritual advancement. It is always easier to observe the particular than the general. Now that we pass from the individual to the human race, we should bear in mind that the same principles apply. God does not antecedently will concentration camps, poverty, incurable diseases, the loss of children’s innocence, and the exploitation of greed. He is good and he loves his creation. Then what does he do? All things being equal, God wills that rational beings should share in his own happiness. That is what he made them for. His own goodness is such that it requires positively to spread itself. Hence the act of creation.

  But all things are not equal. In the original plan for creation, there was no place for suffering. Man was designed to be happy. Grace was his firmament; he was in the state of charity. The plan allowed for a period of happiness on earth—a happiness reinforced by preternatural gifts: powers above the ordinary gifts of nature, yet not beyond the created order, and this was to have been followed by a painless passing to the joys of heaven. These graces and gifts were possessed on the condition of man’s total subordination to the will of God.

  But man refused to stay subordinate. Demanding autonomy, and rejecting the supernatural law that bound him to God, man was left with the self-determination which he had coveted. The preternatural privileges, held conditionally, withdrew from him. With only his natural powers left, and with only natural resources to quarry from, man now found himself liable to suffering. Cold, heat, exhaustion, sadness: these things were felt for the first time and found unpleasant.

  “By one man sin entered in this world, and by sin death,” St. Paul writes to the Romans, “and so death passed upon all men” (Rom 5:12). Death is only one of the effects of man’s rebellion: all those other things which we think of when the “problem of evil” is brought up were likewise the consequence. Better to think of it as “consequence” than “penalty,” because the idea of a punishing God makes it harder to understand that he is primarily the God of love.

  Now once the fall took place, all chance of finding perfect natural happiness on earth vanished. The time of paradise was over. The “problem of evil” is a stumbling block to those who imagine that life is still meant to be conducted according to the laws of paradise. People argue as though we were still entitled to be perfectly happy, and when they see that we are not they turn round and accuse the one they ironically call a loving Creator of having cheated us. God has not cheated mankind; mankind has cheated itself. How can there be any question of stable enjoyment in this life when the condition on which it was possessed is no longer operative?

  But though the license, as first issued, has expired, a new order has come into being, with the Incarnation and Atonement, which puts us on the road again. Though it is not the same road, since the preternatural gifts have left us and we still have suffering to deal with, it is one which leads to greater heights of service in this life and the same eternal happiness in the next. Our first parents, even at their best, did not enjoy the opportunity of modelling themselves upon the pattern of God made man and of living in Christ.

  “Not as the offense, so also the gift,” says St. Paul again to the Romans, “for if by the offense of one many died, much more the grace of God and the gift, by the grace of one man, Jesus Christ, has abounded unto many. And not as it was by one sin, so also is the gift. For judgment indeed was by one unto condemnation, but grace is of many offenses unto justification. For if by one man’s offense death reigned . . . much more . . . they shall reign in life through one, Jesus Christ” (Rom 5:15–17).

  If only the problem-of-evil people would recognize it: the Incarnation is pledge of the Creator’s abiding love for mankind. God still loves human beings so much that he dwells among them in the Person of his Son. It is pledge too of his power, because how could he show himself more powerful than by first taking on the life of man and then, when that life had been destroyed by death, bringing it back again in the Resurrection?

  Yes, but he has still left us to suffer. Of course he has, because therein lies our opportunity. In Christ, who has suffered more than anyone else in the history of the world, we can share in repaying the debt. In Christ, who has loved more than anyone else in the history of the world, we can re-learn the lesson of charity and re-live the life of grace. Because suffering is the law of our fallen human state, Christ, though not himself fallen, submitted himself to that law. He became obedient to it, and to the Father’s will regarding it, even unto the death of the cross. Greater love he could not have shown for us than by doing what he did. In laying down his life for us, Christ’s purpose was not to spare us suffering but to raise our sufferings to the level of his own.

  That souls should come up against suffering and stumble on the necessity of it is, in the nature of the case, inevitable. Gentile and Greek cannot but see scandal and folly in the cross, but to us who have faith and have seen, however dimly, into the meaning of the Passion, the cross is supreme wisdom, supreme love. Christ is wounded by wars, greed, extortion, lust, deceit, and the rest. The things which caused the wounds are evil, but the wounds are sacred. Not sacred because they are wounds but because they are his. So if we are truly members of his body and we suffer wounds, we do not have to believe that the evils which put them there are, as if by some sleight of hand or trick of grace, in fact good. They are just as evil as ever they were. But the wounds which they inflict are good, because those wounds of ours are really Christ’s.

  Such must be the reason then why God allows man to be torn with pain, temptation, distress. God is not saying, “Man is only getting what he deserves . . . he’s asked for it.” He is saying, “Man is getting what I never meant him to have, but which now that he’s got is bringing him closer to me.” The distinction between God’s antecedent and his permissive will may sound an academic one, a theologian’s hair-splitter, but in fact it unties the knot as neatly as can be expected. Antecedently God wills the maximum happiness to man, permissively he wills him suffering in terms both taught and ratified by Christ.

  6

  Suffering as a Punishment

  Up till now we have considered suffering more as a privilege than as a punishment. This chapter aims at correcting any false emphasis which there may be about this, and at showing how compunction, a spirit of penance, is a necessary part of the soul’s spiritual development. That pain is part of man’s retribution for his misuse of free will is something which demands more than a mere notional assent: the idea has to be brought into practical life. While it is obviously a more lofty concept to think of our human suffering in the context of Christ’s Passion, there is the less lofty side of it too—namely that we thoroughly deserve what we get.

  It is a curious fact that, in the modern world, people suffer a strong sense of guilt while repudiating a sense of sin. Sin is excused, explained away, mistaken for quite half a dozen other things, yet guilt remains. People have become so confused about sin that perhaps, like the unfortunate hero in Kafka’s novel The Trial, they genuinely do not know the terms of their accusation or the precise nature of their crimes, but all the time they are haunted by a dread for which they must take the blame. Our first parents could cover themselves with leaves, but they could not cover up their shame.

  People are always inventing new leaves to cover old sins, but there is such a thing as conscience which cannot be fooled. With conscience goes fear, and the more a man tries to stifle conscie
nce with one or other unreality, the more real does his fear become. Various philosophies in history have set out to deliver the mind from the fear of eternal punishment. In apostolic times, it was the Epicureans who were the difficulty, belittling the consequence of personal wrongdoing; today it is those psychologists and analysts who base all our instincts on “nature” and who reduce the morally wrong to the outwardly harmful or anti-social.

  For those who would have us believe that the only evils are antisocial evils, the good tends to reduce itself to humanitarian good. So long as people do not harm others, and so long as they try to be kind and nice, there is nothing (so the argument runs) to worry about. Unkindness in one form or another becomes accordingly the only ground for guilt. Charity to everyone, readiness to forgive, always the helping hand. It looks Christian enough. But it is a very cockeyed view of Christianity because it does not go all the way.

  Even if our only sin were unkindness, we would have plenty to answer for, but in fact we deserve punishment for a whole catalogue of sins, which present-day Epicureans rule out as being inherited tendencies, psychotic compulsions, instincts yearning for appropriate—and therefore legitimate—fulfilment. If chastity is a repression, if jealousy is a conditioned reflex, if habitual lying and laziness and greed can be clinically accounted for, the sinner has little left in the way of sin which he can call his own. What is he going to be sorry for? Why should he be punished? How does suffering help?

  Now the sense of personal responsibility is part of the gospel itself, and for this reason the Christian idea of suffering is part of the gospel itself. Our Lord preached to men who were sinners and called them to be saints. He was not preaching to men who must have been saints already because they owned up to no sins. The gospel takes it for granted that we are fallen creatures, needing salvation. We need to be penitent if we want to be saved. And if we want to be saved, we must accept the idea that our sins will need to be burned off us, either in this life or in the next, by suffering. True, Christ’s Passion does the really effective work of cleansing, but even the least Christlike of us has to cooperate to some extent—seeing in pain the price of sin.

  Evasion has as many tactics as there are individuals who evade, but they all come down to the same thing in the end: the unwillingness to accept the truth about oneself. It may be from looking at others more blatant in their sinning, from imagining that my sin is so general that it cannot be imputed to me for what it is, from seeing it as so much part of me that I can hardly be blamed any more, from counting on God to turn a blind eye: from whatever cause the effect is hypocrisy. The Pharisee who has blinded himself is no less a Pharisee for being blind.

  To put all the blame on corrupt human nature and then to come up smiling is virtually to cast out devils by Beelzebub. “I am innocent of this man’s sin,” I say of myself, washing my hands with Pilate. So before I can appreciate the doctrine of suffering as a punishment, I must appreciate the doctrine of sin as a reality, as a personal liability. When St. Augustine became a Christian, the first thing he did was to oppose the Manichean theory that the evil in the world was strictly superhuman, and that in giving way to the principle of world evil the individual soul was only doing what he could not help doing. For St. Augustine, sin was nothing else but the free choice of evil on the part of a human being capable of choosing good.

  So much for St. Augustine on sin. St. Augustine on punishment is more to our present purpose. In his commentary on the forty-fifth psalm (where the psalmist said, a sceptre of uprightness “a sceptre of uprightness is the sceptre of your kingdom; you have loved righteousness and hated wickedness.” Augustine says that “God cannot so act as not to punish sin. Sin is to be punished, else it were not sin.” From this as his starting point, St. Augustine goes on to exhortation. “Turn yourself to the punishment of your own sins since it is not possible for sins to go unpunished. The punishment must be at your hands or at God’s. It is for you to acknowledge so that he may forgive.”

  So we have it on the authority of a doctor of the Church that retributive justice is one of God’s attributes—and that man does well to go along with the implication of this doctrine by submitting willingly to discipline. Hence voluntary mortification. Now another doctor of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas. In his Summa, the saint proposes the theory that punishment is “satisfactory when the sinner exacts the penalty from himself.” Presumably, then, the more real and deep-reaching the soul’s compunction, the less is any other punishment needed.

  The conclusion to be drawn from all this is the importance of not wasting a tear of sorrow or a minute of pain. Forget about the apparent injustice in the world, and break it down into the component parts. Take your stand on the need for atonement, and then look around for opportunities for you, as an individual, to atone. You do not have to look far. Whatever the suffering that comes your way, it is the right one for you. It punishes, it purifies, it puts you in the authentic tradition. This may read like a television commercial, but perhaps in this materialistic age in which we live it is only an advertising technique that can bring home to souls the true doctrine of Christ. The gospel is always on the market; for your soul’s sake, buy it. The point which we are trying to make here, at the sacrifice of literary good taste, is that the price is worth it.

  To get back to the loftier ideal with which we embarked upon the present study, do you not think that as our Lord rose from the tomb on the first Easter morning he looked back upon his sacred Passion—looked back also perhaps with his own bodily eyes upon the path he had come along the via dolorosa from Jerusalem to Calvary—he must have said to himself “It was worthwhile”? Oh yes, of course, this is fancy. But do not forget that if it had not been worth while he would not have done it.

  The same with us. We suffer, and at the time we hate it. It would not be suffering if we did not hate it. But when we have known the worst that life can do to us, taking away those we love and giving us an environment in which we cannot find what we think is peace, we are still given just that non-marginal grace which lets us believe—whether or not it lets us feel is immaterial—that somehow, in a dimension of which we cannot in the nature of the case have experience, it was worthwhile. So long as we can whisper, forcing the will and forgetting the imagination, the one word fiat, then surely we are using punishment right. What is wanting to our intention is made good by the Passion. Through all the loneliness and bitterness, the tears and the trials, suffering is counted for currency. Sin, by God’s grace, is expiated.

  7

  The Sufferings of the Race

  Though we are not mass-produced, but on the contrary fashioned as unique entities, we would do well to get the notion of collective punishment right. Look at it this way, from God’s point of view. The individual soul has his eternal reward or punishment waiting for him in eternity. Not so in the case of the nation. Reward and punishment have to be dealt out here. The nation, as such, has not got a place reserved for it in heaven. The nation’s destinies are strictly temporal.

  All the same, and in spite of the fact that one civilization follows another according to what appears to be historical circumstance, the pattern and sequence remain in God’s hands. God, the first cause, controls the secondary causes, which produce their appropriate effect—whether rewarding or punishing. There is nothing accidental about the progress of mankind, nothing mechanical. The same sort of process is employed whether God is dealing with societies or with souls. The difference is that the soul has an afterlife whereas the society, considered as a society, has not.

  But the affairs of a society, like the affairs of a soul, are affected by the same supernatural influences. Prayer, for example, offered to him by a trusting populace, can elicit from God a redirection of the normal course of events. This factor of prayer is itself a part of the divine plan. Just as his antecedent will gives place to his permissive will, so the ordinary series of consequence can be bent by the power of prayer, which is not ordinary but extraordinary. God allows for this in the or
dering of history; man does not allow for it nearly enough.

  Apart from the supernatural factors that are brought to bear upon the destinies of a nation (or, come to that, upon the human race as a whole), there are certain straightforward effects which follow certain straightforward causes. God has only to let these causes work themselves out, and his purposes will be served. He does not have to come down like a ton of bricks upon a generation or a country or a way of life: the society in question asks for its own rewards or punishments.

  It is a mistake to think of God as revenging himself upon this or that nation for its sinfulness by sending it a war. It is more true to think of that particular nation inevitably becoming involved in war as the result of its refusal to acknowledge the source of peace. Where the rank and file, the politicians, the press, the statesmen—in other words, when the aggregate of individuals—may be judged to have chosen material in preference to spiritual values there will be material consequences. It will be in the spiritual order that this is appreciated, but it will be in the material order that the effects will be experienced.

  In this way are the fortunes of nations accounted for. Take the history of the Chosen People. One after another their alliances were made according to material prospects, and one after another their hopes were dashed. Why was this? It was because they were told to trust to God and not to material advantage. When a nation resorts to unfairness and brutality, it will come up against another nation that is even more unfair and brutal. This may be called God’s manner of being even more unfair and brutal. This may be called God’s manner of chastising a wayward people, or it may be called the process of natural attrition. Either way, it is punishment.