the mystery of suffering in the art of dostoevsky, camus, wiesel, and grünewald

American Academy of Religion

The Mystery of Suffering in the Art of Dostoevsky, Camus, Wiesel, and GrünewaldAuthor(s): Thomas A. IdinopulosSource: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Mar., 1975), pp. 51-61Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1460734 .

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The Mystery of Suffering in the Art of Dostoevsky, Camus, Wiesel,

and Gruinewald THOMAS A. IDINOPULOS

NO writers in the modern era have dramatized more effectively the tragic complexities of human suffering in challenging the Judeo-Christian belief in the providential will of God than Fyodor Dostoevsky, Albert Camus,

and Elie Wiesel. It is important to say here at the outset that these literary artists should not be viewed as crypto-theologians whose stories are mere vehicles for carrying out the apologetic aim of resolving the human question through finding the proper religious answer. It is in their very skills as story-tellers that they have succeeded in exercising the great power which art has over the disciplines of knowledge. The artist does not communicate facts to the understanding; rather, in

creatively, intelligently, and sensitively expressing what he takes as object, he makes us feel the weight of its reality. More than educating us, the artist transforms us by what he says and makes us feel.

In their stories and the telling of them, Dostoevsky, Camus, and Wiesel make it possible for us to perceive the power and mystery of suffering, to recognize the tragedy which God and man share, to sense if but for a moment the original order and beauty from which the human world was torn. The Hasidic legend which stands at the heart of all of Elie Wiesel's writings suggests that when the world is broken all that man has left is a story to tell about it, but in the story he acts to overcome that brokenness:

When the great Rabbi Israel Baal Shem-Tov saw misfortune threatening the Jews it was his custom to go into a certain part of the forest to meditate. There he would light a fire, say a special prayer, and the miracle would be accomplished and the misfortune averted.

Later, when his disciple, the celebrated Magid of Mezritch, had occasion, for the same reason, to intercede with heaven, he would go to the same place in the forest and say: "Master of the Universe, listen! I do not know how to light the fire, but I am still able to say the prayer," and again the miracle would be accomplished.

THOMAS A. IDINOPULOS (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. Recent publications include articles and reviews in the Journal of Religion, Scottish Journal of Theology, Soundings, Encounter, Christian Century, and Process Studies; he is also the author of The Erosion of Faith: An Inquiry into the Origins of the Contemporary Crisis in Religious Thought (Quadrangle Books-New York Times, 1971). An earlier version of this article was presented as an invited public lecture at the Institut Oecumenique de Recherche Theologiques, Jerusalem, January, 1974, where Mr. Idinopulos was a resident scholar for six months.

51



52 THOMAS A. IDINOPULOS

Still later, Rabbi Moshe-Leib of Sasov, in order to save his people once more, would go into the forest and say: "I do not know how to light a fire, I do not know the prayer, but I know the place and this must be sufficient." It was sufficient and the miracle was accomplished.

Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn to overcome misfortune. Sitting in his armchair, his head in his hands, he spoke to God: "I am unable to light the fire and I do not know the prayer; I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is to tell the story, and this must be sufficient." And it was sufficient.

God made man because he loves stories.

Dostoevsky, Camus, and Wiesel make us aware of the inextricable bond between suffering and providence: The sufferer always raises his eyes toward Heaven, where God always sits in silence. What these writers perceive in the pain and humiliation that human beings endure on earth is not the non-existence of God, but the ineffectiveness of divine will. What they probe in their stories are the anxious thoughts of human beings as they give witness to the break-up of a fundamental order and decency which God seems unable to prevent and correct. What they dramatize through the tortured reflections of their heroes is not the death of God, but the death of God's creation.

When Dostoevsky's great atheist-hero, Ivan Karamazov, tells of the torment of children by their elders, and then concludes that human shame of such sort forces one to reject the world of divine creation, what Ivan has subjected to doubt is not God's reality, but the belief that God's creativity and benevolence are effective in a world of stark evil. When Camus' humanist-skeptic, Dr. Rieux, observes the wholesale extermination of man by uncontrollable disease, what he doubts is not whether the God who sits in heaven loves men, but whether the love of God has any effective power over the events of history on earth. And when Elie Wiesel writes in his memoir of a youth torn from him by what he endured in Nazi concentration camps, he cannot but express his sadness at the weakness of God on earth. What Dostoevsky, Camus, and Wiesel make us aware of is that suffering is the most powerful experience in human life, and that no one can truly say he has tried to understand what human beings are made to suffer in their lives unless he can also risk contemplating the weakness, the absence, the failure of the Creator in the face of his creatures' helplessness.

A conversation takes place in The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's last great novel of 1878-1880, which is unquestionably one of the most profound and sensitive inquiries into suffering in modern literature. It is an exchange between Ivan Karamazov, a self-confessed atheist, and Alyosha, his younger, deeply pious brother. Ivan presents an account of the pain and humiliation which human beings inflict on each other - an account which, to him, refutes the biblical belief that man is a creation of God. It becomes clear in the course of his eloquent and passionate statement that not God but man is the true enemy: He would like to persuade Alyosha to cease believing in the divine authorship of man, for the pitiless cruelty of man shows that even if man had been created after the divine image, he has long since proved unworthy of it.



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THE MYSTERY OF SUFFERING 53

But here Ivan finds himself in a curious dilemma. If he rejects the belief in the divine creation of man, he also requires, formally at least, the existence of this belief in order to make his case about human cruelty and suffering and the ineffectuality of God's justice in his own world. For what Ivan seems unwilling to believe is that man is naturally brutal, possessed of no greater spirit, no higher being than the common beast, and no more responsible for what he does. It is certainly not hatred of God, nor rejection of God's existence, that motivates his attack on the religious dogma of creation; it seems rather to be his own insight, expressed sometimes sadly and other times in rage, that man has fallen from a high station and is deserving of much less respect than we accord the beast. Ivan's aim is to demonstrate to his brother that any true sensitivity to the questions of cruelty, suffering, and justice means that one cannot, indeed should not, believe in God as the creator of man. Man is simply unworthy of God.

The story of horror that Ivan tells is that of heartless cruelty to children. There is nothing unique in Ivan's account of the suffering of innocents. We know that Dostoevsky took his facts from Russian newspapers: Soldiers bayonetting children before their mothers' eyes; a small girl beaten senseless by her mother who then smears her face with excrement; a misbehaving boy thrown to savage dogs for punishment. What Dostoevsky perceived in this destruction of children is man's capacity for ultimate evil. For the crime against the child, unlike any other, is man's crime against his own very being. The torments which human beings inflict on their own progeny suggest the metaphysical shape of human evil. Unlike the beast whose instinct it is to devour its own kind, the crime against the child is a crime of despair, a giving up on life wherein man seeks to complete his self- destruction by erasing the last living memory of himself. Thus for Dostoevsky, speaking through his character Ivan, the destruction of the child calls into question the Creator of the Universe because it demonstrates the absence of that moral decency and order which is the effective aim of creation.

But can the world be made right again? Can God exercise his justice in a world of savagery? Ivan seems to think he cannot. Retribution will not do as justice: "What good can hell do, these children have already been tortured," he exclaims. Nor is forgiveness justice. Forgiveness is an easy reconciliation bought at the expense of another's blood. "I don't want the mother to embrace the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs!" Ivan says sadly, "She dare not forgive him! Let her forgive him for herself, if she will. Let her forgive the torturer for the immeasurable suffering of her mother's heart. But the suffering of her tortured child she has no right to forgive, she dare not forgive the torturer, even if the child were to forgive him." What Ivan is saying is that no one can atone for the pain inflicted on a child - not man, not God. And without atonement there can be no healing of the world, there can be no new creative harmony.

Alyosha is moved by his brother's tale of man's cruelty, but he cannot accept the conclusion that there is no atonement. What about Jesus Christ in whose ministry of love, on whose sacrificial death and resurrected body, man has been reunited with God, creature with its Creator? Ivan's response is unsparingly honest. He tells a kind of parable about Christ, "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor," whose point is the failure of Christ's mission on earth.

The ultimate aim of Christ's life and death, the parable seems to say, was to reveal the great truth of man's freedom, that human beings alone bear




responsibility for all that they think and do and are. Christ did not come on earth to lighten the burden of being human; he came rather to increase it immeasurably by teaching and witnessing to its true nature as the freedom of the individual human spirit. But the history of man since the death of Christ, no less so than before the birth of Christ, shows that freedom leads to moral chaos, to brutal suffering. The history of man in the past 1900 years is a story of increasing bloodshed and repression, sad evidence of the failure of Christ to heal the Creation. What human beings have come to learn is that it is far too hard to live the ideal of freedom which Christ embodies. So they renounce their freedom, agree to submit to the social and legal authority of the state, which guarantees security by forcibly preventing crime. This exchange - freedom for security - Dostoevsky saw as the fundamental spiritual dialectic: the contest over the soul of man between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor, between God and Satan - a contest which history shows that Christ and God never ceased losing.

For Ivan, then, a child's suffering is an outrage which cries out to a silent heaven. The eschatology of the Bible is false. For no forgiveness, no retribution, no dying and rising Savior can undo what man has done. Ivan states that his mind is Euclidean, an earth mind. The suffering of innocents is earth-suffering, which no God-of-eternity can justify. It is respect for this earth-suffering that compels Ivan to say to Alyosha that he rejects any notion of future harmony that would seek to compensate through heaven what human beings suffer on earth. "Is there in this whole world a being," Ivan asks,

... who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? I don't want harmony. From love for humanity I don't want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it's beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.

We know from the development of Dostoevsky's fiction and the publication of his literary diaries that what tormented him also inspired the deepest insights of his great novel about the Karamazovs: that the freedom which divinizes man also reveals his degradation. This is what Ivan cannot finally tolerate, knowing as he does that neither man nor God can change it without robbing man of his humanity. When he returns his ticket to God, he has in effect said that he cannot live in a world where the price of freedom is the torture and murder of children, whose beauty and innocence is no less precious than the freedom which their elders exercise against them. In returning his ticket, Ivan signals his own wish to live solely by his belief that since the world is without moral order, without a creator, man is without a judge, released to the chaos of his own choices. It is a despairing knowledge in Ivan's life, as we know from the story, for it eventually joins him to other desperate souls in acts of suicide, madness, and murder.

Ivan's question about divine justice in a world of human suffering goes unanswered in the novel because its author regarded it as unanswerable. But in the character of Alyosha, Dostoevsky struggled to give his clearest, strongest response to the question of whether it is worth living in the kind of world Ivan rejects. Alyosha, no less than Ivan, recognizes the reality of suffering in the world, and he too is tempted to question divine justice; but where Ivan despairs and grows more




alienated from himself and from everyone about him, Alyosha sets out to practice a life of compassion. There is hardly a scene in The Brothers Karamazov in which some character discovers some important psychological meaning about himself that does not involve a dialogue with Alyosha. Wherever healing, self-acceptance, and forgiveness take place, they do so through the ministrations of Alyosha. He not only hears the confessions of his father, brothers, and other tormented souls in the novel; he also understands their compulsions and their weaknesses.

Dostoevsky portrayed Alyosha as an embodiment of Christ - an immensely more successful portrait than the earlier Prince Myshkin, the hero of The Idiot. The essence of this embodiment is the love which consists of compassion, fellow suffering - a love which does not forsake but rather which forgives the sinner, accepts tragedy as well as joy in life, a love which perceives and celebrates the inner mystery binding all beings to each other as fellow creatures in a common world, despite the demonic energies working to tear them apart. It is an ideal vision of love, redeeming, creating, and sustaining the world, given voice by Father Zossima, the spiritual mentor of Alyosha, when he addresses his fellow monks with these words:

Brothers, have no fear of men's sin. Love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth. Love all God's creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love. Love the animals; God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble it, don't harass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent. Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to the animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you - alas, it is true of almost every one of us! Love children especially, for they too are sinless like the angels; they love to soften and purify our hearts and as it were to guide us. Woe to him who offends a child!

III

If Dostoevsky anticipates in his stories the carnage that is to be human history in the twentieth century, Camus writes from having lived deep within that carnage. The Plague (La Peste), Camus' novel of 1947, is a story of a city seized by contagious disease; but within the story there lies a parable of the murder of 30 million human beings in the second world war, and by implication a parable of the killing of humans by murderous powers and institutions in past ages and in the ages yet to come.

Camus' themes are the struggle to defeat evil, the sensitivity to suffering, and the courage to reaffirm one's common humanity in the midst of, and because of, useless death. The moral intensity of Camus' style makes it clear that he, no less than Dostoevsky in whose footsteps he follows, looks on the catastrophes that befall human beings as a matter that points directly to the questions of the salvation and damnation of their souls.

Through his hero, Dr. Rieux, Camus sought to express all that is best in human beings in a time of catastrophe. Rieux, very like Ivan Karamazov, cannot face the




suffering he has seen and felt without wrestling with the question of a God who is mute and weak before the actions of his creatures on their own earth. He shares with Ivan the belief that the visible torments on earth can neither be justified nor rectified by the invisible motions of heaven. But where Ivan draws the conclusion that in the absence of God "everything is permitted," Rieux reaches the contrary judgment that only without God is man made more fully responsible for what he does and what he makes of himself on earth. Where for Ivan freedom leads to self- destructive despair, Rieux experiences a fresh hope in the decision to fight a plague. And where Ivan laments the ineffectuality of God, Rieux seems to take heart in it, recognizing that as long as man is tempted to turn to heaven, he will overlook and obscure the possibilities in his own existence on earth.

The plague that descends on Oran, the Algerian seaport, is unexpected, relentless, and incomprehensible. But it is a fact which, if men but face it unashamedly, can make possible the discovery of their own humanity. What decides whether or not a man will give voice to the humanity within him is his personal response to the sickness and death that plague brings. Each character in the novel is confronted with the decision to acknowledge the disease for what it is: a waster of human kind, an outrage against the human spirit. Those who see disease and death truthfully are moved to fight against them, tempted neither by the illusion of conquest nor by the despair of defeat.

Confronting the world as it is, learning to struggle with it as we find it, not as we would wish it to be: This is the highest good that human beings can practice, a stoic ethic of human realism made effective for the present day. In this perpetual struggle to see things as they are, Camus believes that man lives through his own uniquely human spirit; for in seeing things as they are, he lives by courage and intelligence and honesty. In seeing things as they are, he proves to be a rebellious spirit, for he will not be deceived by the dark, dread forces that lay waste human lives. In seeing things as they are, the human spirit resists seduction by ignorance, foolishness, and deceit.

But not everyone in Camus' novel proves so to be a rebel. One of the best drawn characters is that of a Roman Catholic priest, Father Paneloux. It is through the character of this priest that Camus expresses the deadening inhumanity of the refusal to rebel against the absurd.

One day, without warning, a terrible disease falls on the city of Oran. In each neighborhood the rats come out of their holes to die convulsive deaths, and soon the people of the city follow them. As the deaths reach thousands, the mediaeval spectre of pestilence looms larger in the minds of people. At this time Father Paneloux, inspired by the wish to illumine the dark night that has fallen, preaches a sermon to the citizenry. He proclaims from the pulpit that God has acted in Oran as he has acted so often before in biblical times. He has allowed a calamity to befall his people as punishment for their lack of faith. And he concludes: ".. . from the dawn of recorded history, the scourge of God has humbled the proud of heart and laid low those who hardened themselves against Him. Ponder this well, my friends, and fall on your knees."

Camus has put in the mouth of the priest what he believes to be the antithesis of rebellion. Paneloux's sermon does not awaken the human spirit in the face of sickness and death; rather, in presuming that suffering is theologically explicable, he assists the deadly absurdity of the plague to defeat the spirit. For in striving to fit




into a theological scheme the wretchedness that people suffer and watch others suffer, Paneloux has, in effect, stated as true what millions of human beings on earth know in their souls is not true: that suffering is understandable and justifiable and perhaps even good. Paneloux's sermon is a deceit, for he makes the unconscionable conscionable. Seeking to assign suffering a "higher purpose" (as Ivan Karamazov called it), he blurs the sight of pain and death.

But for Camus, as for Dostoevsky, respect for suffering demands foreswearing the temptation to invoke theological explanations when the ugliness, the shame, and the guilt at the sight of suffering is more than one can bear. It is not from clear insight and strength of purpose that Paneloux turns to a theological account of evil, suffering, and death; it is from the dread feeling of his own ignorance, helplessness, and loss. The deception lies in his unwillingness to acknowledge the truth about himself and about suffering.

But we must be careful in speaking of the respect for suffering which both Camus and Dostoevsky demand. By "respect" they do not mean the wide-eyed stare, that tongue-clucking of weak sympathy which masks the all-too-human fascination, even secret delight, at the sight of the calamity of others. Both authors agree that respect for suffering begins with the refusal to imagine suffering as something other than what we see and hear and touch and know as the torments visited on human beings in their ordinary lives. Respect for suffering is not being seduced into believing that suffering contains a meaning or conceals a truth greater than itself. Suffering is a particular which is respected only as particular, and never respected when the generalities of theological doctrine are used to ease the burden of truth.

Though the priest Paneloux never quite proves the rebel, Camus, his author, is prepared to pay him a quiet tribute. The priest eventually experiences the ravages of the plague himself, and before he dies he recognizes that if the torment and sorrow of man on earth is not as great a mystery as God's grace in heaven, it is a genuine mystery, at any rate, which cannot be subsumed under the category of divine glory. The turning point for the priest occurs in a scene which unfolds at the hospital bed of a young boy whose convulsive death throes he has witnessed alongside the atheist, Dr. Rieux:

Paneloux went up to the bed and made the sign of benediction. Then gathering up his cassock, he walked out by the passage between the beds.

Rieux was already on his way out, walking so quickly and with such a strange look on his face that Paneloux put out an arm to check him when he was about to pass him in the doorway.

"Come, doctor," he began. Rieux swung round on him fiercely. "Ah! That child, anyhow, was innocent, and you know it as well as I do!" He strode on, brushing past Paneloux, and walked across the school

playground. Sitting on a wooden bench under the dingy, stunted trees, he wiped off the sweat that was beginning to run into his eyes. He felt like shouting imprecations - anything to loosen the stranglehold lashing his heart with steel. Heat was flooding down between the branches of the fig trees. A white haze, spreading rapidly over the blue of the morning sky, made the air yet more stifling. Rieux lay back wearily on the bench. Gazing up at the ragged branches, the shimmering sky, he slowly got back his breath and fought down his fatigue.




He heard a voice behind him. "Why was there that anger in your voice just now? What we'd been seeing was as unbearable to me as it was to you."

Rieux turned toward Paneloux. "I know. I'm sorry. But weariness is a kind of madness. And there are times

when the only feeling I have is one of mad revolt." "I understand," Paneloux said in a low voice. "That sort of thing is revolting

because it passes our human understanding. But perhaps we should love what we cannot understand."

Rieux straightened up slowly. He gazed at Paneloux, summoning to his gaze all the strength and fervor he could muster against his weariness. Then he shook his head.

"No, Father. I've a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture."

A shade of disquietude crossed the priest's face. "Ah, doctor," he said sadly, "I've just realized what is meant by 'grace'."

Rieux had sunk back again on the bench. His lassitude had returned and from its depths he spoke more gently.

"It's something I haven't got - that I know. But I'd rather not discuss that with you. We're working side by side for something that unites us - beyond blasphemy and prayers. And it's the only thing that matters."

Paneloux sat down beside Rieux. It was obvious that he was deeply moved.

"... working side by side for something that unites us - beyond blasphemy and prayers.

.... it's the only thing that matters." In these words Camus expresses

what he believes to be the only authentic response a man can make to suffering consistent with his humanity. The response is not to be found in the theological or

ideological attempts to give meaning to suffering, but rather in the practical efforts to gain clear knowledge and make clear decisions. Modest efforts these are, but they alone will determine, in Camus' judgment, whether or not the human spirit survives in the face of the raging evils which beset it.

IV "I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture."

This is Dr. Rieux's statement as it was Ivan Karamazov's before him. It is also the statement of Elie Wiesel, the contemporary Jewish writer who, in some nine books of stories and essays, has introduced the question of God where few theologians - Christian or Jewish - have dared raise it: at the center of the Holocaust. In his hauntingly beautiful memoir La Nuit (Night), Wiesel records how he was seized one day from the little Hasidic world he knew in the mountains of Transylvania, and transported in one long train ride to the inferno that is named Auschwitz.

The power of Wiesel's story does not consist of the depiction of physical horror, any more than the accounts of suffering in Camus and Dostoevsky rely on literalism. The strength of his style, like that of his forerunners, lies in his ability to employ a combination of moral intensity and human tenderness. In his depiction of suffering he expresses the feeling of the slipping away of innocence, the loss of childhood trust in a Creator-Father of life. In treating humiliation, brutality, pain, and death, he achieves pathos because his aim is not to shock the mind but rather to convey, through feeling, moral and even spiritual knowledge.




We can feel the impact of Wiesel's style as we hear his narration of the execution of a young boy who is suspected of sabotage by the concentration camp guards. The boy is hanged alongside two adults also accused of committing crimes against the SS. Wiesel writes:

The SS seemed more preoccupied, more disturbed than usual. To hang a young boy in front of thousands of spectators was no light matter. The head of the camp read the verdict. All eyes were on the child. He was lividly pale, almost calm, biting his lips. The gallows threw its shadow over him.

The three victims mounted together onto the chairs. The three necks were placed at the same moment within the nooses. "Long live liberty!" cried the two adults. But the child was silent. "Where is God? Where is HeT' Someone behind me asked. At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs tipped over. Total silence throughout the camp. On the horizon, the sun was setting. "Bare your heads!" yelled the head of the camp. His voice was raucous. We

were weeping. "Cover your heads!" Then the march past began. The two adults were no longer alive. Their tongues

hung swollen, blue-tinged. But the third rope was still moving; being so light, the child was still alive...

For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet glazed. Behind me, I heard the same man asking:

"Where is God now?T' And I heard a voice within me answer him: "Where is He? Here He is - He is hanging here on this gallows. . ."

V

Neither Dostoevsky, nor Camus, nor Wiesel is able to contemplate the suffering of human beings on earth without pointing a finger at the silence of God in heaven. One must be careful not to misinterpret this theme of divine silence in their stories. We must remember that Ivan Karamazov does not hold God responsible for the savagery of the human heart; that Dr. Rieux seems to pity a God too weak to help his creatures in their need; that the hero of Wiesel's novel The Gates of the Forest prays for the soul of a God who looked on silently at the murder of his people. We do not have here the conventional atheistic deduction, "Evil exists, therefore God does not exist." Within the suffering and the evil and the helplessness of human beings on their own earth, these authors perceive the disruption of universal order, the disfigurement of creation. The world has been given over to dark, sinister forces not easily conquerable.

What our authors hold in contempt is not the helplessness of God but the presumption of theologians who continue to propound doctrines that God rules the universe from his heavenly kingdom. For if he does rule the universe, the moral history of man demonstrates that he rules badly. This explains why Ivan mocks the theology of eternal harmony; it explains why Dr. Rieux scorns any man who, in a time of common human travail, would think first of preaching a sermon; and it




explains why young Elie Wiesel should perceive the figure of God in the hanging corpse of a child. It is not the death of God these authors announce - it is the death of God's creation.

Moreover, all three of these authors find in the suffering of children a metaphor for the severing of the life-line between God and creation. For the child symbolizes what creation means: the bringing together of sun and moon and earth; the fusion of water, warmth and flesh; the unity of innocence and beauty and hope. The child is the preordained ideal of life. And to have killed the child is to have killed the possibility of life itself.

VI

The greatest temptation facing anyone who wishes to discuss the questions of suffering and God in the works of these authors is to take the artist and to make of him a thinker. It is a temptation to be avoided. One errs in assuming that Dostoevsky, Camus, and Wiesel, preoccupied as they are with God, evil, and suffering, approach their subject matter as a problem for solution. The materials are shaped differently in their hands. Through the powers of imaginative perception, exercised within the craft of story-telling, they aim to create images--images which, if successful, convey to their readers not so much information about suffering, but something of greater importance: the mystery of suffering. That is really the heart of the matter: the mystery of suffering. We cannot ever experience the suffering of another human being; but if we are to retain the bond of all human kind, we are obliged to come as close to the reality of suffering as we dare come.

It is equally true that the artist makes us perceive what we do not otherwise understand when he imaginatively expresses the mystery of suffering, not of a single being but of a whole class of people, as in Zola's Germinal or in Dickens' Hard Times, or in Orrosco's murals, or in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath or in Goya's drawings.

But suffering is not limited to human beings. If we know little of what it is for other human beings to suffer, we know virtually nothing of what it is for animals to suffer, to despair, and to die without hope. Yet when we read of the cruel beating of the wagon horse in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, or when we see the gape- mouthed agony of the beasts in Picasso's "Guernica" or observe through film the destruction of African animals through the wrecking of their migratory patterns, we begin to feel the weight of what we cannot experience ourselves.

The art of a Dostoevsky, of a Camus, of a Wiesel, does for us what the disciplines of theology, psychology, and journalism cannot do: It gives us a personal relationship to what we cannot otherwise grasp intellectually. The stories of these authors make us perceive with our senses and our emotions the impenetrable darkness of another's pain. Art does not seek to penetrate this mystery of suffering; it seeks rather to deepen the mystery by witnessing to its singularity, witnessing to its magnitude, witnessing to the burden it imposes on all who attend to it. Only art truly understands that human suffering is particular, never general. The sufferer exists in a world of his own. Art does not presume to force its way into this world any more than the priest can force his way into the heart of the mystery he celebrates. But art, like religion in its own way, celebrates




the mystery through the creative imagination. Through its own special powers of perception, art creates the image which makes it possible for us on the outside to be put in contact with the mysterious interiority of all sufferers.

In that way the artist, through his works alone, introduces to the experience of the world an aesthetic measure, hence a spiritual decency or order which never existed before. In this regard Paul Tillich often stated that when the artist struggles to depict the wounds of human existence, creatively, insightfully, and movingly, he acts in effect to heal these wounds. And one could add, however blasphemous it sounds, that the artist through his work acts as Creator and Redeemer in place of an absent or weak God.

VII

We have said that Dostoevsky, Camus, and Wiesel cannot contemplate suffering without wrestling with the silence of God in heaven. It is precisely this sense of the silence of heaven that has always focused for art the humanness of human suffering. The Gospel writers seem to have understood this in portraying the death of Jesus. For who can deny that the last words on the Cross are what have preserved the humanness of Jesus' suffering and death. The final cry, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani" (Lord, Lord, why hast Thou forsaken me?) has always kept the church from engulfing Jesus in celestial glory.

The power and truth of these last words are borne in upon us by the sixteenth- century painter, Matthais Griinewald. In Grtinewald's Isenheim altarpiece, we are given to see the human truth of Jesus' Cross. Jesus is nailed to pieces of wood, suffering torments that will bring about his death, a wretched figure, alone and forgotten. The mood of this crucifixion painting evokes knowledge of the countless, unnamed human beings who suffer and die on their crosses each day of the earth's history. In Griinewald's depiction of the Crucifixion there is no effort at softening, at blurring, at using the warm blues and soft pinks that idealize what is hard and real. There is no stretching and smoothing of the body to make it appear full and lovely, to give it that strangely erotic appearance that one finds in the abominable crucifixion art hanging everywhere in Christian institutions. In Grtinewald's picture there is twisted sinew, the bones are bruised, the body pallid, the head hangs limply from the shoulders, the open mouth exhudes the odor of impending death. There is all about the air of humiliation and defeat. Looking at this pitiful figure, one cannot be easily persuaded that he is the anointed Son whose Father awaits him in heaven. Only in relation to such a depiction could the miracle of Resurrection appear to be truly a miracle. What Gruinewald depicts in his portrait of the Crucifixion is the crushing truth of common suffering. The religious power of these pictures suggests that if one can draw comfort and strength from the knowledge of God's suffering, then the suffering of God is no other than the deepest mystery of man's own suffering.

Grtinewald depicted in his paintings what Dostoevsky, Camus, and Wiesel expressed in their stories: that it lies within the power of art to take the muteness of suffering and give it voice, to proclaim a kind of gospel which speaks of human suffering, in which one recognizes both God's helplessness and man's imaginative responses to it.



the mystery of suffering in the art of dostoevsky, camus, wiesel, and grünewald

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