The Problem of Suffering

AMAN was recounting how that of late the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune had been hurled at 'him, and was saying that he felt it to be unjust. It may be that one's extempore response was only the greeting of a fellow-sufferer. But to a private sense of the intel- lectual advantage conferred by our provisional theodicy there was joined a strong feeling of need for a restating, in terms congruent with modern modes of thought, of the Christian doctrine in its bearing upon pain. The doctrine which has for millions been a guiding-star or a pillow, as the case may be, is now by too many educated men ignored, under the impression that it stands confuted and that its supersession by the aridity of unfaith is rational : restatement serves at least for the testing afresh of its philosophical adequacy. The point raised by my friend respecting justice brings before us that problem in philosophy which in its manifest bearing upon the conduct and quality of life is of weightier import than any other.

It is not unreasonable to speak of happiness as the aim of our being. But the word may suggest hedonistic con- ceptions, and Aristotle's word, " eudaimonia," best rendered "well-being," is a much better term. WheR Dante referred to Aristotle as "the master and leader of the human reason," it was on the specific ground that the philosopher had apprehended well-being as the goal of being. That goal may be attained in the individual life, throtigh a. threefold set of adjustments of attitude.

F'irst, there is a conflict of impulses within, and these need co-ordinating. Thus, to borrow an illustration from Mr. Bertrand Russell, a, man may wish to spend the eveiling drinking and may wish to be fit for his work on the morrow ; one of these impulses will have to be subordinated to the other : and so throughout the whole range of life-impulses—it is all,a matter of adjustments. On the harmonious co-ordination of impulses depends the possibility of fruitful activity.

Secondly, there is the social environment ; for man, belonging to society, needs to be in right relations to his fellows. Experience, it may be briefly said, supports the Christian teaching that the more nearly the relation achieved by one's adjustments shall approximate to love, the higher will be the degree of one's well-being, and the greater the possibility of fruitful social activity.

It might appear that for this harmonious life to be lived it is needful to have favouring circumstances. Pain breaks in, swallows up well-being, dispels harmony. The pain may be physical suffering, bereavement, grievances .resulting from injustice of men, frustrations, &c. How then shall harmony and well-being be restored, or, if we can say so, maintained ?

It is here that another consideration comes in, first to complicate and afterwards to help to resolve the problem of well-being. My pains and griefs may lead me to cry out that there is injustice in the scheme of things, injustice on the part of the gods or of God. This brings in an all- important phase of the environment, which we had in mind when saying that• the adjustments must be three- fold. For I find myself standing in relation not only {first) to the complex impulses of the self, and (secondly) to my neighbour, but also (thirdly) to the universe or to God. And in this last relation my attitude at the moment is by hypothesis one of opposition. Now it is all right for me to feel opposed to self (despite the contra- diction in terms) because there are in me sundry potential selves in competition : it may be all right for me to be opposed to my neighbour, because things are not right in the world around me, and need righting : but opposition to the universe or to God is senseless, because upon any hypothesis it, or He, cannot be altered. He who dashes his head against a stone wall may have his brains scat- tered, and the ego which gives battle to immutability will come to grief.

This disharmony must be annulled if I am to have well- being. The Greeks were aware of the necessity, and thence it came about that the Greek mind found a religious satisfaction in tragedy ; a dramatic performance could be given as a religious act at a festival. This is easily understood in the case of the works of Aeschylus, full as these were of the sense of sin and consequent curse, ever emphasizing, as they did, Divine justice ; but the works of some other dramatists regarded as equally suitable for such occasion might be found to emphasize only a mysterious Necessity or tragic Chance. Certainly a dominant thought in drama was that of the great opposeless wills, often regarded as arbitrary, of the gods. The point would then be that the individual was to be regarded as involved in a large all-embracing fate, in which, as he could not fight against it, it was his wisdom to acquiesce.

Hebrew minds could not be satisfied with a tenuous philosophy of fate which would leave life only half rationalized, wherefore, agonizing with circumstances, they strove to rationalize life wholly by attributing destiny uniformly, and with even more insistence than we find in Aeschylus, to the personal God operating in comprehensible justice. Hence the Hebrew emphasis, which tended to be over-emphasis, upon sin. Thus Job's friends assured him that as he was suffering extraor- dinarily, it must needs be (seeing that God is just) that he had sinned extraordinarily. "Surely you are the people," was Job's ironic response, "and wisdom will die with you ! " He knew that the sin-solution was orthodoxy, but felt it to be inapplicable to his case. So he had to work out his urgent problem without the help of fellow- believers, and there are two stages in his ultimate solution.

First, the creative magnificence, seen in a multitude of natural phenomena which he cannot account for, forces him to recognize that he must not expect an intellectual solution of that particular problem which is illustrated in his subjection to suffering, so that he has simply to submit. That position is not far from the wisdom of the Greeks. Secondly (in this I am following Dr. A. S. Peake), he casts himself confidingly upon infinite benefi- cence, and finds fellowship with his God as thus appre- hended. That is a big step in the direction of the Christian position.

Sweet may be the uses of adversity. It may be when faced with the perturbing problem of ill-fortune, rather than in material prosperity, that man will try to find God, and then he may discover that God has by the same means been trying to find him. If in adversity one arrives at a conviction of Divine beneficence, or at a conviction that the universe is, because it must be, fundamentally right, one has then achieved a readjustment of attitude towards the environment in its largest and deepest aspect, and a richer sort of well-being results; whereas if one allows ill- fortune to embitter, one is impoverished by it.

The state of well-being which results from such right adjustment of attitude towards the larger environment is called peace, and implies a rising above circumstance.

That is exactly what some of the Greek philosophers pro- posed enabling us to attain. Say, rather, proposed enabling a few choice spirits to attain. It is a distinctive glory of the Christian doctrine that it avowedly includes the crowd of the simple-minded in the scope of its appeal : the philosophy of the ancients was not for the many. And as for the choice spirits who had ears to hear its call, strait was the gate and narrow was the way which it indicated to them as leading into peace. Some such were the words in which Kebes, pupil of Socrates, set forth• the philosopher's discipline ; such too the words in which the Lord Christ set forth His. The meaning of their parable was much like what we got from Mr. Bertrand Russell's illustration : there are competing life-interests which the gate will not admit, nor the way accommodate, side by side. Thus inhibitions must be resorted to, and something will have to be painfully discarded, sacrificed. Pride, for instance, would not find space to keep to Christ's narrow way or to pass His strait gate. Might not the philosopher's disciple of that day seem more for- tunate, in that he could take his pride through with him into the way ? Yes, and yet some things of great worth he must needs give up ; for his teacher, the best available, would probably instruct him that emotions were to be regarded as diseases of the soul, and that only by their suppression could he attain to the philosophic ideal, since that ideal was the calm of the unimpassioned. This was what it meant to take things philosophically. And be it remarked that a pragmatist criterion is here to be found for the testing of this or that proffered philosophy of life : let us know the trend of the co-ordination which it re- commends to us, the character of the inhibitions which it requires of us, that we may judge whether the gate indicated opens into a life that is life indeed. For the attainment of peace without inhibition of a range of precious interests and impulses, the Greek philosophies proved in general inadequate owing to a certain lack of depth. Modern knowledge -should make it feasible for our speculation to reach deeper towards the bases of being.

Peace requires, for its dwelling-place, theology. The foundation of that spired structure must be on the cosmo- logical rock. The attainment of rational peace is facili- tated by perceiving (though one's vision be dim) that the Divine justice and beneficence are only to be reconciled with existing conditions upon the understanding that pain has a supremely important part to play in the scheme of things. Is not pain all through the evolu- tionary process, first in shadow, as for example in the agonies which have produced granite or coal, and then in actuality, once you get to the biological sphere ? Is it not a governing principle throughout ? And may not well-being and advance depend, at every stage of organic existence, upon the quality of the reactions to pain- stimuli ?

Somehow pain is at the centre of being as known to us. Rituals of sacrifice, pagan, Jewish, Christian, have as their roots several great truths, whereof one is that cosmoramic notion of suffering. Indeed, a deeper- reaching metaphysic will find more rational than naturalism the doctrine of such, even, as might extrava- gantly aver that under the forms of food for sustenance of the body there can by a heavenly alchemy be made available for the sustenance of the spirit, the broken body and shed blood of God. Of God who is a spirit—the spirit that is moving everywhere. The theologians solved one third of that antinomy under the definition of the hypostatic union.

In conclusion, there is this to be said : that the existing state of things may not be ideal. I am given to understand that in the ideal state "there shall be no more crying neither shall there be any more pain " ; and in the meantime our energies are to be directed, at the cost of some crying and pain, to the lessening of the sum total of these in the spheres of our limited influence. The Cross symbol as yet stands unimpaired in philosophic value ; and if (to borrow the anthropologists' term) we can get our pain sacralized, may we not thus get that turned to our weal which must else be to our hurt ? And this is but saying what has been said by Christian teachers bountleSs times hi other forms of words.

F. TRENCH.