“Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.” ~ John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism
Philosophers do not know what to make of suffering. No one wants pain. Suffering is an insult, and it is simply unfair. That is, if I suffer, it is unfair. You may tell me that it is my own fault that I did not change the oil in my car, or more seriously, that I knew that stealing the car would get me punished, Grudgingly, I might admit the point. However, we too often see that even those who acknowledge their own carelessness or fault cannot—or will not—accept that their subsequent suffering is just. Why is this? Whoever I may be, suffering offends and interferes with my life, with my plans. If an arm is broken, a physician can set it. If my arm is broken, then sharp pain dominates my mind until the doctor sets it. Then I have to live with the cast, unable to play my favorite sport or to do my work properly. I suffer the humiliation of being crippled. It is understandable that bones break, skin burns, plans and projects go awry, but when it happens to me(whoever I may be), it is an insult and simply unfair.
Saint John Paul II tells us (in his Apostolic Letter on suffering, Salvifici Doloris) that suffering is the experience of an evil. But if God is good—so goes the argument—then why is there evil? God is almighty. Being almighty means that he can do anything he wants. If there is evil, then God can prevent or at least fix it. If he does not end evil and suffering, then it logically follows that either
God is not almighty, or
God does not care about evil; he is not loving.
After all, continues the argument, if you were to see a house on fire with a child inside whom you could easily rescue, it would be callously irresponsible not to rescue him. Well, doesn’t this apply to God? Without harm to himself, he could save that child. Yet, we know that children do die in house fires. And there are more grievous tragedies. On December 26, 2004, an earthquake in the Indian Ocean triggered a tsunami that killed 228,000 people. Today Russian rockets strike civilian targets in Ukraine, and residents of Gaza starve as war rages around them. Elie Wiesel writes of being forced to watch the hanging of a boy in Auschwitz. Still a child, his body weight was not sufficient to hasten his death as it would an adult. Behind him, Wiesel heard another inmate mutter, “Where is God?” And in peaceful lands ordinary people suffer in cancer and cardiac wards. Suffering seems to be a normal condition for most of humanity. We philosophers cannot account for it. Suffering is unreasonable and—scandalously—unjust.
Saint John of the Cross wrote, “Human beings know neither how to rejoice properly nor how to grieve properly, for they do not understand the distance between good and evil.” (Sayings of Light and Love, #63) Here is a challenging thought: We don’t know the distance between good and evil. Is the Spanish saint crazy? Granted that some people are very bad, most of us are basically good. But this is wrong. Rather than looking at God for someone to blame, let us look for a few moments at us and at what we are like. (In a future posting we can think about suffering in relation to God’s mercy and justice.)
When we look around, we are—or we should be—dismayed at what we humans can do, what we have done. We Catholics regularly honor the saints, and as we do so we learn of their sufferings. St. Lawrence was pan-fried on a gridiron, purportedly joking, “I’m done on this side. Turn me over”. St. Joan of Arc was burned alive. Joseph Kowalski was arrested by the Gestapo and transported to Auschwitz, where after repeated beatings, he was drowned in a full cesspool. Of course, we can look at others who were not martyrs for their faith. Saddam Hussein reportedly immersed enemies in boiling oil. Drug cartels operating now on our continent brutally torture and kill their rivals and enemies. Our fellow human beings, both men and women, do horrific things to others.
It would be comforting to attribute these acts to a special class of people—we can call them ‘monsters.' But we cannot. The soldiers who tied up Deacon Lawrence and put him on the gridiron had nothing against him personally. They were following orders. The Gestapo agents who showed up at St. Stanisław Kostka church to arrest Father Kowalski were obedient officers, following the orders of their superiors. And the guards at Auschwitz or in Stalin’s Gulags? They were ordinary men, doing their job and staying out of trouble. Besides, if they did not run the barracks assigned to them, someone else would. There is no point is causing trouble for yourself. The germ of cruelty is found in ordinary people.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn tells of his arrest and transport into the Soviet Gulag. He was placed in a crowded railway boxcar with far too many prisoners for the limited number of beds. The car was run by one group of real (and not political) criminals—toughs who had been picked up by the police for ordinary crimes. Solzhenitsyn was an officer in the Red Army, who had enjoyed the respect of his colleagues and subordinates. Of all the riffraff in that boxcar, he certainly deserved a bunk and not a spot on the floor. When he let it be know who he was and what he deserved, the leader of the toughs (a real criminal) ordered one of the “politicals” off his bunk to make room for Solzhenitsyn, the important officer from the Red Army. Climbing into his bunk, Solzhenitsyn realized what he had done. For his own comfort, he had joined the toughs and humiliated another political prisoner like himself, a man who had suddenly found himself in the hands of the Secret Police and headed toward a painful destiny in the camps. The former artillery commander of the Red Army was humbled. He had chosen to go the way of the toughs. Later on, he wrote, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn recognized in himself that root of evil, into which anyone can fall.
John Stuart Mill taught us that the difference between good and evil is the difference between pleasure and pain. I have taught about Mill in introductory philosophy classes, and of all the philosophers I have taught about, most students understand Mill best. And they agree with him. But J. S. Mill and his utilitarian philosophy are dreadfully wrong. We are not nice Victorian ladies and gentlemen who can be good by following their own inclinations. We Americans are generally nice people, eager to like others and to have them like us. When terrorists struck on 9/11 we were genuinely puzzled. Why did these Muslims hate us? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and even more dramatically Saint John of the Cross tell us a truth that we don’t see, much less acknowledge. When asked what was wrong with the world, G. K. Chesterton answered, “I am”. He was serious.
Life has been easy for us, and we no longer recognize how good we have it. [Reality check: Contemporary Americans have a far safer, more prosperous, healthier, and better educated lives than most other people in the world and than almost everyone else in history.) We are tempted to think that because things are going well for us, we deserve good things. We believe that we are good. It is a dangerous deception. There is a germ of cruelty in every human heart.