Adrian Reimers

The Structure of Suffering

Human suffering is a strange topic. On its face, suffering

appears to be straightforward and uncomplicated. Suffering hurts

and it is bad. We do not want to suffer and we should not inflict

suffering on others. Everyone knows when he is suffering, what it

means to suffer. However, when – Socrates-like – we try to define

suffering, we find, like Socrates, that the definition escapes

us. Contemporary philosophers speak of pain as a kind of

perception or sensation which is disliked for its own sake1, but

to define something as insistent as pain in terms of a perception

or sensation seems curiously inadequate. For one thing, physical

pain is valuable and important. If your tooth does not ache, then

you are not aware that you need the dentist to repair is. On the

other hand, a person in perfect physical health may complain of a

pain deep in his heart resulting from the loss of a loved one¸

from a tragedy involving his children. Some philosophers and

psychologists debate whether and in what way animals suffer. A

dog will wail when struck and hence seems surely to experience

some pain. Can we therefore say that he suffers? Suffering is a

complex and paradoxical issue.

My purpose in this essay is twofold. First is to

characterize human suffering adequately, so as to determine its

deepest roots. Second is to address the question of the

1 “Pain”, in Honderich, Ted (Ed.) The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Oxford and NewYork, 1999, 641.

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‘redemption’ of suffering, the question whether suffering can

have been worth undergoing in the sense that the person who

suffers actually benefits from the suffering itself.

Characterization of suffering

Two perspectives

Let us start by considering two contrasting perspectives. In

his Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill’s purpose is to found the basis

of his morality on the human good. Mill characterizes human

happiness as “pleasure and the absence of pain”, unhappiness as

“pain and the privation of pleasure”. He continues: “Pleasure and

freedom from pain are the only things desirable as ends, and (…)

all desirable things (…) are desirable either for the pleasure

inherent in themselves, or as a means to the promotion of

pleasure and the prevention of pain”2 (Mill, 2001: 7). In short,

good is to be recognized by its being pleasant. Evil is

recognizable as pain; it is constituted by pain. What human

beings ultimately desire is pleasure and the absence of pain, the

evidence for which is simply that, in fact, human beings seek

pleasure and try to avoid pain. Mill does not identify what

constitutes pain. He can confidently assert that everyone knows

when he is in pain. He then proceeds to argue that the moral good

consists in maximizing the experience of pleasure and minimizing

that of pain.

2 J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, (Indianapolis: Hackett 2001), 7.

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Mill’s position is widely accepted in contemporary

philosophical circles. Environmental philosophers raise the

concern that in providing for their own comfort and needs, human

being may behave wrongly by inflicting pain on other living

beings, especially the higher animals. At issue is not simply

that tormenting animals to induce pain is wrong, but more deeply

that animal sufferings increase the totality of suffering in the

world, and this is bad. In arguing that it may be moral in some

cases to kill disabled infants after birth, Peter Singer relies

on a calculus of pleasures, maintaining that the killing prevents

future suffering of both the infant and his parents and allows

the parents the opportunity of greater pleasure by the conception

of a future healthy infant3. Again, the morality is determined by

the increase in pleasure in the world. In his recent book, Better

Never to Have Been4 (Benetar, 2006), South African philosopher David

Benetar maintains that it is morally evil to conceive and bear

children, because every life is affected by suffering and the

evil of pain. Because parents cannot preserve their possible

offspring from this, they mistreat their children precisely by

giving them life.

Although such conclusions have received a respectful hearing

within philosophical circles, most people find them strange, if

not indeed nonsensical. Ordinary intelligent persons generally

reject the conclusion that we can weigh the happiness of a

3 Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 135.4 David Benetar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

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possible future child against the possible unhappiness of an

existing child, or that any prospect of evil makes a life not

worth living. (There are, however, many who do accept and agree

with Benetar’s reasoning and conclusions). But the philosophical

point is essential. What is the status of pain, of suffering? A

severe pain – consider, for example, third-degree burns over much

of one’s body – constitutes an insult that abides in the psyche.

Once suffered, it colors and changes one’s life. It detracts

something from the sufferer’s well-being, from his feeling of

happiness. Precisely here is the challenge of the redemption of

suffering: Can pain or suffering have any positive value of its

own, not simply in it consequences but of itself? If suffering is

the measure of evil or its criterion, then it is hard to see how

suffering can be redeemed. If this is so, then Singer and

Benetar, as well as others like them, are right. At the core of

this position is that suffering is fundamentally subjective, that

it is a mental event whose principal locus is in the lived

consciousness of the one suffering.

In his letter on suffering John Paul II takes an alternative

position: “It can be said that man suffers whenever he experiences

any kind of evil”.5 In support of this he notes that the vocabulary of

the Old Testament or the Hebrew Scriptures lacked a specific word

for “suffering”, but simply spoke of “evil”. His point here is

that, contrary to the utilitarian analysis which makes suffering

the criterion of evil, suffering is essentially consequent upon

5John Paul II, Apostolic Letter, Salvifici Doloris, §7.

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evil. John Paul II continues: “Thus the reality of suffering

prompts the question about the essence of evil: What is evil?”

That is to say, if suffering is the experience of an evil, then it is

not necessarily identical with evil. Indeed, the suffering itself

may possibly be a good. Conversely, if there is an evil which is

not experienced – thus we speak of the existence of an evil not

accompanied by suffering – it remains an evil, whether or not one

is aware of it.

John Paul II’s position accords with experience. We need

only think of the nature of pains, which try the patient but are

important to his physician. Knowing what hurts the patient, he is

led to discover the underlying ailment and deal with it. Watching

a film about the Titanic or a similar disaster, we watch the

passengers continuing to eat, drink, and dance, unaware that the

ship’s brief shudder came from its deadly collision with the

iceberg. A serious evil has just befallen them, but they feel

very pleasant. When they learn what has happened, their pleasure

will soon be turned to fear. And this is the more reasonable

position, the better starting point for our analysis, that

suffering is the experience of some evil. We cannot immediately

say, however, that John Paul II’s position directly solves all

problems. Suffering can remain when the evil is gone – the burn

victim’s pain continues long after the physicians have treated

him – or it can fail to correlate with the organic situation –

consider the phantom pains that the amputee may feel in his

missing hand.

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With these introductory comments, we may turn now to an

analysis of the experience of suffering.

Phenomenology of suffering

If we examine our experience closely, we find that all human

suffering presents threefold structure as pain, defeat, and

despair. I propose that these three constitute the experiential

elements in all suffering. Let us consider them more closely.

Pain

Suffering presents itself first as pain, the subjective

feeling of evil intruding upon one’s self and life. Pain is

repulsive and undesirable, insistently demanding, as it were, the

sufferer’s full attention. Of course, physical sufferings are

manifest primarily as pain, and we tend to apply this term ‘pain’

to bodily sufferings. However, other forms of suffering are also

manifest in pain. The healthy athlete who has lost an important

contest may remark on how much defeat hurts. Someone who has lost

a beloved – we may think of a mother whose child has died

unexpectedly – will speak of a persistent pain in her heart. In

its subjective immediacy, suffering is present as pain. One who

is afflicted with chronic depression has the experience of being

in pain, even though nothing ‘hurts’. Every instance of

suffering, every experience of evil, is marked by pain, for pain

is precisely the subjective aspect – the feeling – of suffering. As

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the subjective aspect of suffering, pain is necessarily private

and incommunicable.

Defeat

Besides pain, suffering manifests itself as defeat, which is

the failure to attain some desired goal. If the human will

desires good, then evil is a frustration of the will. If pain is

private and incommunicable, defeat is public and objective. The

athlete engaged in competition and lost. The army retreated in

disarray from the field of battle. Unsuccessful in his studies,

the student withdrew from the university. Defeat is a matter of

fact, of the agent’s unsuccessful engagement with the world and

its outcome.

Although not private, like pain, defeat strikes closer to

the core of one’s self, because defeat means one’s will is

thwarted. Having desired some good and set out to attain it,

one’s efforts fall short, and the good is unattained. Reality

has, as it were, rebuffed and rebuked him. Regardless of his

intelligence and skill, regardless of the energy of his efforts,

he has failed. Defeat results from the ‘hardness’ and ‘density’

of the world before the human will. On the other hand, even minor

defeats verify the reality of the world, that the world is truly

independent of our thoughts and wills.

Despair

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With the question of despair – and hence of nihilism or

meaninglessness – we address the properly human element in

suffering. As any nature film or video shows, our animal cousins

experience pain and defeat. Only human beings suffer from

meaninglessness, which is the most profound and indeed

fundamental aspect of suffering. By ‘spirit’ we mean the

fundamental human orientation to truth and goodness,6 and despair

is the characteristic suffering of the spirit. Unlike the other

animals, the human person orders his life according to his

understanding of the truth about the good. Although we may often

fail to notice it and although some will even deny it, human

beings do not and cannot live ‘naturally’, that is simply by

following their natural inclinations. The wildcat eats the

turkey, but the human being has to have it cooked with sage or

rosemary, but not overcooked. Animals mate when a female is in

heat. Humans court and plan their sexual activity, which can be

decisively affected by dress, verbal communications, plans for

tomorrow or for next year, and so on. Virtually all human

behavior is shaped by how the person understands reality and what

he thinks to be good. Therefore, to be deprived of the truth or

to be oriented toward a goal that is not truly good is to suffer

an evil. When the person loses touch with the truth about the

good, then his fall into despair begins, and in this is the key

to understanding human suffering. Paradoxically, however, we must

recognize also that the person may well be unaware of his

6 Karol Wojtyła, Love and Responsibility, 22-23.

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despair, of his deepest suffering. Lest I be thought to be

speaking in circles, riddles or mystical paradoxes, let me

explain.

Pain is about one’s subjective state, his feeling, as he

experiences evil, and the frustration of defeat arises from

interaction with the world. But at the core of the human person’s

life and activity are his powers to know what is true and to love

the good. If the animal lives in his environment, to which he is

adapted and in which he can meet his needs (this is a consequence

of natural selection),the human being lives in a world, a cosmos,

which is structured by meanings, laws, and values. The human task

is correctly to interpret the world and intelligently to discern

his authentic good. Unlike the animal, the human person lives at

a cognitive distance from his environment. He can even choose to

live in a completely new, and possibly hostile, environment.

Water buffalo would die in the Artic; Eskimos make clothes. If

the human being’s knowledge of the truth about the world and

especially the truth about the good is flawed by falsity, then he

suffers a serious evil. Sometimes there are immediate and

practical consequences to ignorance. Believing that his sore

throat is “really nothing”, the camper sets out for the back

woods, later to find himself in pain and feverish, needing

emergency evacuation for his strep infection. In some

circumstances – think of being lost on a road trip – ignorance

can lead to the distress of confusion and disorientation. The

evils of error and vice – what we call the defects of

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understanding and love – are deeper in their implications than

such practical consequences. Indeed, a person may fundamentally

misconstrue the nature of reality, misidentifying the authentic

good, and still successfully navigate his way through life to

comfort and survival. Josef Stalin died in his bed. Serious

spiritual harm seems not to ‘hurt’, and therefore those suffering

spiritually do not immediately or directly perceive a problem to

correct. This is precisely the problem that Plato sets for us in

Book II of his Republic: If to direct one’s life toward ignorance

and even evil will result in comfort and prosperity while virtue

and understanding may lead to pain and poverty, of what value is

justice? Socrates’ task in that dialogue, of course, is to prove

that the unjust man does in fact suffer seriously from his

injustice.

“Redemption” of suffering

Having briefly characterized the phenomenological structure

of suffering, we turn to the question of the ‘redemption’ of

suffering. Can suffering have value? If so, what can give it

value? If, as we have said, suffering is the experience of some

evil, then ourquestion becomes: What good can there be in

experiencing an evil? Indeed, because evil is precisely the

opposite of good, it would seem that the experience of evil can

only be evil.

Pain

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Often, the problem of evil is identified primarily with the

problem of pain, and more specifically, of physical pain, as

though an ideal situation would be one in which the subject does

not experience pain. A world without pain would presumably be a

better world. However, this is clearly false. When the body is

ill or injured, pain is important, because it signals that

something is wrong with the organism. To diagnose and treat his

patient, the physician relies on the patient’s reporting of his

pain. Indeed, the failure to experience pain can be dangerous,

precisely because a dangerous condition may go unnoticed.

Regardless of the subject’s intentions or desires, pain intrudes

in the psyche with its insistent call to address the problem. We

may consider the simple example of marching on a blistered foot,

a situation that arises often enough in the training of new

soldiers. One can march with a blister. Although the leg and foot

perform their muscular and mechanical functions quite well, the

pain of the blister ‘cries out’ as it were for the marching to

stop, for the soldier to attend to the wound and not aggravate it

any longer. Pain is important even where the pain is

psychological. The person who has suffered a grievous personal

loss (such as the death of a child) may jump back into her daily

routine of chores and work and other activities, only to find

tears welling up and that it becomes hard to focus on the task at

hand. Just like the soldier’s blister, the pain inside is telling

her to stop and attend to the problem. Not only does pain alert

us to injury and insult, but it can warn us to change our

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behavior. For instance, a persistent backache may indicate that

one needs to stand up straight.

Situated in the context of our interactions with the world,

pain becomes relativized. That is to say, one may well accept or

even embrace pain in pursuit of an important goal. We see this

frequently among athletes – consider simply the image of the

victorious boxer, his battered face grinning as the referee

raises his hand in victory. He does not care about his pains.

Soldiers in elite military units take pride in the demands of

their training and in their ability to endure hardship for the

sake of their mission. Such men take pride in their pains. And

perhaps the best image of such redemption of pain is the

experience of mothers who willingly undergo serious labor pains

to give birth to their children. Generally, although one may

regret the pain he is currently enduring, none of us

realistically desires a world without pain. We realize and

understand the value of our pains. We take them not only as a

protection but also as directly connected with the strength of

our character.

From this we can draw the conclusion that as such pain is not

an evil. Even if we may dislike pains as we suffer them, this need

not and does not imply that they are evil. Pain as such can be

‘redeemed’, first in its capacity to ‘signal’ damage to the

organism and second as a kind of indication of one’s strength of

character is confronting difficulties. Here it is relevant to

note that this ‘redemption’ of pain occurs not on the level of

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feeling (as though a pain somehow were to become pleasurable),

but on the objective and public level.

Defeat

Defeat itself is directly an evil in the sense that it is

constituted by the failure to attain some good. Because pain is a

sign of some evil, it can readily be seen as a good, but if one

has chosen some good and set out to attain it, the loss of that

good – defeat – is eo ipso an evil with respect to that good. In

this way, defeat is an absolute. This good is lost, even if a

similar good should later be attained.

Nevertheless, defeat can be redeemed, and to find this

redemption is taken as a kind of wisdom. Parents and educators

know that one of the principal benefits children derive from

athletics is the experience of the disappointment of defeat. In

victory one should learn to be a generous and gracious victor.

After defeat, the loser has to ‘pick himself up’, practice more

assiduously, develop his skills, and refrain from tears, excuses

and complaints.Because we can learn more from our defeats than

from our victories, participation in athletic competition is a

useful for maturation.Because defeat or failure is personal – it

was I who failed, who did not achieve my goal7, whose will is

thwarted – the defeat can be redeemed within a larger context.

Specifically, failure indicates an opportunity for self-

improvement. The athlete can learn and sharpen his skills,

7 Of course, there are persons who can and do make excuses for their failures,attributing them to external factors.

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improve his discipline, and so on. Furthermore, far more so than

victory, defeat can put certain goods into a more complete

context. Even if the game was lost, it remains the case that it

was only a game. This perspective is much easier to embrace, of

course, if all that is at stake is a game. If the loss was on the

battlefield, then indeed what has been lost will not be regained

in a future season. The defeated army may have to resort to new

strategies and tactics (such as guerilla warfare), or the people

may have to defend their fundamental goods by other means. Here

we may think of Poland’s retention of her national culture and

identity during the partition from 1795 until 1918, when her land

was divided among Russia, Germany, and Austria.

Because failure is a consequence of the reality and

resistance of the world, the redemption of defeat must be found

not only in athletics but in virtually all realms of human

activity. In particular, the advancement of the sciences depends

as much on failures – erroneous hypotheses, unsuccessful

experiments, ‘blind alleys’ of research – as on great successes.

To the attentive researcher, the failure of today’s experiment

here may well lead to success in tomorrow’s experiment someplace

else. Indeed, science cannot be done selfishly. Charles S. Peirce

writes: “He who would not sacrifice his own soul to save the

whole world is (…) illogical in all his inferences, collectively.

Logic is rooted in the social principle”. 8My failures in

8 On this see Charles S. Peirce, “The Doctrine of Chances”, in C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers, (Edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). 1.654.

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research are irrelevant, so long as together we (scientists, that

is) continue to move toward truth. But defeat is an evil for the

here and now, because this desired good – whether a game, or a

business contract, or a pleasant picnic in the park – has been

lost. Even if another is gained tomorrow, this good is lost, and

that constitutes an evil.

We experience defeat because the world is real and not in

accordance with our own desires. Ultimately defeat is a necessary

good because it shows us that we are not the creators of the

reality in which we live, that we are necessarily subject to the

laws of the world around us. The world in which my will is always

realized is unreal. It is a world whose governing principles are

no higher than the dreams of my own imagination. Let us note here

that this discovery is not forced on a person. One can cope with

defeat by withdrawing from engagement with the world, seeking

rather to enjoy what ready pleasures may lie at hand

unchallenged. It may seem to be possible to live in the pursuit

of modest pleasures without seriously engaging the real world,

and certainly one may pursue such a life. We may conclude,

therefore, that defeat is redeemed by the understanding, by

situating oneself more appropriately and accurately within the

context of reality.

Despair

Earlier I proposed that hallmark of human suffering is

despair, that is, hopelessness and meaninglessness. The logic of

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the initial presentation would suggest this conclusion, for only

the human being, as rational and spiritual, lives according to

the meanings of things.We must ask, however, whether this truly

accords with human experience. Severe pain or the frustration of

serious defeat make their brute impact on the psyche regardless

of one’s understanding of the universe.How does despair lie at

the root of human suffering?

We begin by defining our terms. Despair is the lack of

integration according to an overarching adequate standard of

good. Because man is ordered to transcendence, he is capable of

despair. When Glaucon, defending Thrasymachus, challenged

Socrates to justify justice in the face of unmerited suffering

and disgrace9, Socrates’s response led inevitably to

transcendence. The human being, according to the argument

developed in Republic is not only a consumer of pleasures and

pains. Nor is he only a conqueror of obstacles. The pleasure-

seeking and spirited (victory-seeking) parts of the soul find

themselves in chaos if not governed by the reasoning part.

Without the government of reason, argues Socrates, the soul falls

victim to the tyranny of its strongest desires10. For the animal,

nature provides the inner principles of unity by which the beast

is able to act appropriately for its own good, whether this be to

seek food, fight off or flee from enemies, or to mate. Nature has

not so provided for human beings, but rather leaves it to his

rational judgment to determine what to do. We see this all the

9 Plato, Republic, Book II, 361b-362c.10Republic, Book IX, 577d-e..

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time. For reasons of religion a human being may fast from food. A

weaker man may remain in unequal combat for the sake of honor,

believing it better to die honorably than to retreat in disgrace.

No stag or lion would so insist on his honor. But if reason is to

govern the life of the human person, then it must access the

truth and gain true understanding. The point of the analogy of

the cave11 is precisely that human beings must transcend

appearances and lay hold of the truth of things. The Form of the

Good, which is the final thing to be seen when the prisoner is

outside the cave is, as it were, the principle of principles, in

terms of which all the forms (or principles of reality) find

their unity. Unless the intellect rises to an understanding of

the transcendent principles underlying reality, the person is

doomed ultimately to fruitless thrashing about as he follows his

sense desires and pursues what victories seem good to him.

The conclusion remains paradoxical. Plato does not propose

that the person is doomed to pain and defeat whose soul is

pleasure or victory-seeking soul or even tyrannical. Hitler died

in comfort by his own hand to thwart his enemies and Stalin died

in bed. Neither tasted humiliation and agonies comparable to what

they put their victims through. He does, however, imply that such

men – true tyrants both – can be happy. But let us leave them for

the moment and instead consider the condition of their victims.

According to the ordinary logic of suffering, that suffering

consists in pain and defeat, then the victims of Hitler’s camps

11Republic, Book VII, 514a-517c.

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or Stalin’s Gulag (to remain with these modern examples) were

worse off than the tyrants. We know, however, from the abundant

literature that has come out of these experiences, that even the

dreadful pains and humiliations and cruel deaths in Twentieth

Century camps could be redeemed. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago

and One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Henryk Górecki’s Symphony no. 3

“Sorrowful Songs”, Elie Wiesel’s Night, Vaclav Havel’s Disturbing the

Peace, or Natan Sharansky’s Fear No Evil, as well as the artifacts

and writings created within the prisons and camps, testify that

those apparently doomed to hopelessness in this life nevertheless

found redemption of their sufferings. Here Solzhenitsyn’s

reflections are particularly pertinent, as he warns that the

principle “survive at any price” brings with it moral

degradation12, that the person who does what is needed to preserve

his own life and sense of dignity, degrades himself in a way that

camp guards and overseers cannot. To save his own life or better

his treatment, the prisoner must cooperate with and participate

in (even if to a small extent) the evil perpetrated on others by

his captors. However – precisely this is Solzhenitsyn’s point –

it is more degrading to a person’s humanity to abuse and step on

others than to be abused by them.

To lack an adequate overarching standard of goodness is to

despair. The doomed Jewish mother in the ghettocobbling scraps of

cloth into a doll for her child or the zeks arguing about

12Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, trans. T. P. Whitney, vol.2 (New York: Harper and Row, 1975) 603-10.

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literature in the Siberian camps (a favorite theme in

Solzhenitsyn’s writings) glimpse a good that is greater than

their own pain and loss. They have something yet to live for. The

Jew knows that both she will die within the year, if not well

before, but so long as the child is there, she will love her and

give to her what she can. The zeks may well have been imprisoned

precisely for speaking their minds, but they persist in arguing

with each other about the truths they know. That they do not

despair is clear from the fact that even under extreme pressure

from the evils laid upon them, they continue to do what only humans can

do. When Aristotle, seeking an account of human happiness, asks

what is the good for man, he raises the question of the human

‘function’13, which must be something higher than simply to live –

for this is what even plants do – and more than the life of

sensation, which man shares with the oxen. The human good must be

found in the life guided by reason. And this verifies

Solzhenitsyn’s hard-won insight from Stalin’s camps. To do

anything necessary stay alive, to acquiesce to evil just for some

relief from abuse is to relinquish precisely that by which a

person is human.

We may now begin to see how pain and defeat may be redeemed.

Pain is often useful for diagnosis and it can measure our power

to endure resistance in pursuit of our goals. Defeat can help us

to improve our performance and to discover our errors.

Ultimately, however, pain and defeat seem to have the final say.

13Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I, 7 1097b22-1098a17.

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Our bodies wear out and we die. Mozart’s Requiem was finished by

another posthumously, and my mother died with a half-completed

blanket in her knitting basket. More grievously, misfortune,

illness, and the evil of others can inflict inescapable pain and

frustration upon us, robbing its victims of all comfort and

taking from them the ability to pursue their own ends. If in the

final analysis, our pains and defeats cannot be redeemed, then we

have no hope. We will suffer pain. We will be defeated. If pain and

defeat have the last word, then our lives are defined by them. We

are hopeless – in despair.

The redemption of suffering is possible where the evil is

relative to some transcendent good. In the context of such a

good, suffering and defeat can be “worth it.” In this context it

is worthwhile to consider Thomas Aquinas’s response to on

formulation of the ‘problem of evil’ in relation to the existence

of God. In posing the question he considers the objection: “But

the name God means that he is infinite goodness. If therefore,

God existed, there would be no evil discoverable; but there is

evil in the world. Therefore God does not exist”14 In reply he

quotes from Augustine and then adds, “This is part of the

infinite goodness of God, that he can allow evil to exist, and

out of it produce good15 Is this realistic? Or should we even call

it cynical? The first movement of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony,

is punctuated by harsh, dissonant chords, without which the piece

would lose its power and beauty. The dissonanceis justified by

14 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 2, a.3 obj. 1.15Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 2, a. 3, reply 1

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the masterwork, which could scarcely communicate Beethoven’s

musical thoughts withoutit. In nature’s order mice die that cats

may live. And yet, are we not challenged by Ivan Karamazov’s

objection concerning the underserved suffering of children: “If

all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have

children to do with it, tell me, please? It’s beyond all

comprehension why they should suffer, and why they should pay for

the harmony” 16 Beethoven’s dissonant chords suffer no pain, and

there is some evidence that the mouse actually suffers very

little in his final moments, when escape is impossible. Even if

their sufferings do serve some celestial harmony, the tiny girl

freezes in the outhouse and the little boy is torn apart by the

general’s dogs17. Ivan’s challenge to his brother is to justify

the suffering of these children, not in terms of some grand order

of the world, but for the children themselves. Even the

punishment of the abusive parents or the cruel general does not

suffice for it does not undo the pain of the children. But for

his part, Aquinas says that In his “infinite goodness” God can

allow evil and produce good from it. If this is so, then it would

seem that he can produce that good precisely for those suffering

children. If the evil is to be redeemed, it must be precisely in

the lives of those children. How can this be, that dreadful evils

can be redeemed?

In one sense, there is no answering Ivan, because he

presents us with images of suffering ‘from without’. We see the

16 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Book V, Chapter 4: “Rebellion”, 126.17The Brothers Karamazov, ibid. 124-25

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little girl alone and freezing in the outhouse, her mouth smeared

by her mother with excrement18. It is an image that we (and

Alyosha) have difficulty understanding. Dostoevsky does give us a

couple of useful hints, however. First he tells us, through Ivan,

that as the little girl sat alone in the outhouse, she prayed to

“dear kind God”. The observers – Ivan and, through his narration,

Alyosha and we – see the undeserved torment, but the child

herself turns to her God for succor. In other words, from

‘without’ we see the girl as an object of cruelty. The child,

herself, however, acts as an agent of her own coping. To be sure,

given her age and condition she must have been terribly confused

and hurt, unable to comprehend why Mommy and Daddy do this.

Nevertheless, she does more than simply absorb pain and

humiliation, but instead she turns to ‘dear, kind God’ for help.

Even if Ivan may reproach us for trying to see this girl’s

sufferings in some kind of universal master plan, the girl herself

believes in a God who, even in her painful punishment, will hear

her.A second and equally pertinent hint is that Alyosha, Ivan’s

interlocutor, although rendered speechless by his brother’s

passionate narrative, does himself give a kind of answer through

his own compassionate attention to a tormented, dying boy in

their village. This boy, whose father Dmitri Karamazov (Alyosha’s

other brother) had publicly humiliated and who consequently had

been bulliedby other boys, found in his dying days friendship and

honor precisely among those boys, primarily through Alyosha’s

18 Her parents were angry that she had soiled her bed while she slept.

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efforts. What we see here (and indeed throughout Dostoevsky’s

novel) is that the one who suffers is not simply an object, a

container full of pain. The sufferer is a personal agent whose

response to suffering is decisive. To put this more

philosophically, we may say that Ivan has missed an essential

truth that Aristotle had glimpsed.

Aquinas’sassertion that in his infinite goodness God can

draw good out of evil sheds further light on our problem, and in

two ways. First, byaffirming that God is personal and infinite in

his goodness, he also implies that evil is not infinite. This is

important, because if Ivan Karamazov or – more prosaically –

David Benetar is right, then evil is insuperable and

immeasurable, impossible to justify or redeem.Evil is infinite.

Nothing can comprehend it. The little girl in the outhouse,

however, believes and hopes in something greater than her misery

and her incomprehensible (to her) parents. Although we don’t know

what became of this little girl on whom Dostoevsky based his

narrative, we do know that this author’s own sufferings

profoundly formed the understanding of our nature which is

reflected in Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment, works which

have since opened our minds more fully to our modern situation.

A second implication of Aquinas’s principle follows from the

very nature of the human being. If indeed, man is made in the

“image of God”19, if the human soul bears within it something of

19Summa Theologiae, Ia-IIae Prologue; cf. Genesis 1:27-28.

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the divine20 and in its highest activity imitates that of the

gods21, then the human soul, too, should be able to draw good out

of evil. In other words, because the human person is a spiritual

being, his relationship with good and evil transcend the sensible

and material planes. Implicit to utilitarianism and the

scientific materialist worldview that underlies it is the

conception of the human being as an entity whose behavior is

determined by evolutionary determinants and environmental

conditions and whose conscious life is formed by pleasurable an

painful stimuli. The human being thus becomes on the one hand a

victim of the world’s power and a consumer of its pleasures and

pains; his life may be said to be received from other factors

without him. If, as ancient philosophy, the Bible and Thomas

Aquinas hold, and as Dostoevsky (among others) suggests, the

human being lives from within, from his spirit, then the decisive

factor for the human being – and we speak here of Ivan’s little

girl in the outhouse, of Stalin and Hitler, of the Jewess in the

ghetto and the zek freezing in the Gulag, and of you and me – is

what proceeds from him. By his attitudes and choices, more

precisely by his pursuit of truth and goodness, the human person

can so shape himself and his suffering that he can draw good from

it, very much as Aquinas’s says of God.

Conclusion

Our question here is twofold: What is suffering? And how can

it be redeemed? Because the only satisfactory definition of20Republic, 518e, 590c, 613a21Nicomachean Ethics, Book x, 1178b7-1178b23.

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suffering is that given by John Paul II – suffering is the

experience of an evil – our question becomes the question about

evil. To maintain, as is required by utilitarianism, that evil

consists in the suffering of pains, is precisely backwards and

leaves us with no way to account for the redemption of suffering.

Because our bodies are vulnerable to illness and injury, and

because the world is hard and resistant to our wills, we suffer

pain and frustration. If, as scientific materialism maintains, we

are nothing more than highly-evolved physical organisms, then

there is no satisfactory answer to the problem of suffering. The

problem of evil can be properly addressed and the nature of its

resolution glimpsed only if we understand that the human being is

a spiritual being, really ordered to truth and goodness. Only a

spiritual being can find his way, even if only imperfectly, to

the redemption of his suffering.

In the end, we must die and this would seem to constitute

the ultimate and unanswerable evil. Death is painful. And it

permanently frustrates all our plans. There is no cure for death.

There is no ‘next year’ to redeem this year’s losses. In this way

and from the perspective of this time and space, death is the

irredeemable suffering. Only if the person can live for something

eternal, for an enduring reasonable good can this suffering be

overcome. Even one who cannot believe in literal immortality of

the soul must, if he is to avoid true and ultimate despair,

believe in something higher and better than himself and direct

himself toward that.

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Bibliography

Aquinas, St. Thomas, Summa Theologiae, (English translation by Fathers of the English Dominican Province), Great Books of the Western World, Vols. 19-20. Chicago, London, Toronto: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952.Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, (translated by David Ross, revised byJ.L. Ackrill and J.O. Urmson), Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1998.Benetar, David, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).Dostoevsky, Fyodor, The Brothers Karamazov, (translated by Constance Garnett), Great Books of the Western World, Volume 52, Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952.Honderich, Ted (Ed.), The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Oxford and New York, 1999.John Paul II (Karol Wojtyła), Apostolic Letter, Salvifici Doloris, (Vatican Translation), Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1984.John Paul II (Karol Wojtyła), Love and Responsibility, (Translated by H.T. Willetts) San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993.Mill, John Stuart, Utilitarianism, (Indianapolis: Hackett 2001).Peirce, Charles S., “The Doctrine of Chances”, in C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers, (Edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. Plato, Republic, (translated by G.M.A. Grube, revised by C.D.C. Reeve) Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1992.Singer, Peter, Practical Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979Solzhenitsyn, Alexandr, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, (trans. T. P. Whitney), vol.2, New York: Harperand Row, 1975.

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Summary

Although suffering is a common human experience, we find it

difficult to define philosophically. Because we approach the

concept subjectively, an adequate characterization seems to ‘slip

from our grasp’. This essay takes a twofold approach. First,

suffering is defined not in terms of some kind of feeling but,

following Pope John Paul II, as the “experience of some evil”:

Whenever evil is experienced there is suffering. Then we turn to

a kind of phenomenology of evil, by which we can characterize

three fundamental forms of suffering: pain, defeat, and despair.

The contention is that every instance of human suffering takes on

at least one of these forms. The paper concludes with the

affirmation that only in transcendence of the conditions of this

earthly life can one adequately overcome suffering.

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