When Bad Things Happen to Other People (26 page)

A certain rudimentary problem with the idea of seeing God in suffering should be noted here before moving on. If God’s love is in fact the highest good of life and itself a supreme consolation, believers must explain how it is that non-believers are seemingly denied this consolation and therefore made to suffer quite a bit more than they otherwise would. The great philosopher Wittgenstein, regularly tormented by his competing Jewish and Catholic identities, remarked to his friend M. O’C. Drury in 1929, “I think one of the things you and I have to learn is that we have to live without the consolation of belonging to a church.”4 Forty years after having seen an otherwise unextraordinary play in Vienna, Wittgenstein told his friend Norman Malcolm he suddenly felt himself spoken to in the words, “Nothing can happen to you! No matter what occurred in the world, no harm could come to 
him
!”5 It was then that Wittgenstein first perceived the possibility of religious belief. According to Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein remembered throughout his life a play he had seen at the age of 21 and longed for faith, a faith which looks remarkably like Socrates’s assurance in the 
Apology
 that no harm can come to a good person.

A more jarring example of this deprivation is the suffering of Mary Tyrone, the mother in Eugene O’Neill’s play 
Long Day’s Journey Into
 
Night
. Mary attributes her mental anguish, immediately caused by the drug addiction, which she has once again failed to conquer, to divine punishment.6 The malaise pervading the play, and the lives of the Tyrone family, seems to stem from Mary, who is looking desperately for something (here I quote selectively):

Something I miss terribly. It can’t be altogether lost.

Something I need terribly. I remember when I had it I was never lonely nor afraid. I can’t have lost it forever. I would die if I thought that. Because then there would be no hope.

[Longingly]

If only I could find the faith I lost, so I could pray again!...

“Hail, Mary! Full of grace! Blessed art thou among women...”

[Sneeringly]

You expect the Blessed Virgin to be fooled by a dope fiend reciting words! You can’t hide from her!

Mary suffers because she cannot believe as believers do. Her suffering cannot be considered redemptive, for it does not bring her closer to God, who she feels has turned his back on her. Her consciousness of thought should be viewed over and against unconscious believing and wanting. She has lost her faith in God, yet she is no atheist. She interprets her lack of belief as punishment for wrongdoing rather than as evidence of the belief’s falsity.

A useful Catholic answer to the question of why it is that not everyone possesses faith points up the randomness of suffering. Arthur Danto has remarked that faith is often viewed as a gift from God, in a sense just good luck:

There is a theory, a version of which is exemplified in the Third Meditation of Descartes, that having a belief in the existence of God is a mark of grace, there being no way save through the mediation of grace that believing in God can be accounted for: it is a gift.7

As Danto points out, this explanation is largely sound, since it links the 
causes
 of having a belief with the conditions which make the belief true. By believing in God, the believer is committed to hold that his believing is explained with reference to whatever makes the belief true. Assent to the observation, “Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall” (
Measure for
 
Measure
, ii.I.38) attests to the role of luck in evading suffering and undermines the belief that suffering signifies sin. Like the gift of faith, the affliction of suffering should be understood as random and inexplicable.

God’s ways are not our ways, we learn with Job. The moral of the Book of Job might be that God does not work as an accountant, perfunctorily meting out earthly reward or punishment on the basis of discrete actions or desires. Were he to do so, Satan’s question would be a damning one: Job, like other mortals, might well adore God purely or principally in the hope of obtaining divine favors. In any event, we are at God’s mercy. For everything good and evil comes from God (Amos 3:6; Isaiah 45:7; Job 2:10). The Hebrew Bible diverges from the Greek tradition here; a relationship with God might be easier if we could believe with Plato: “For good things are far fewer with us than evil and for the good we must assume no other cause than God, but the cause of evil we must look for in other things and not in God” (
Republic
 II.379). Accepting Plato’s counsel, though, requires us to think of God as less than all-powerful. So there does not seem to be any entirely satisfactory way of thinking about God’s role in our suffering.

Suffering in the Hereafter

Heaven and hell are all about suffering. The reflex to think of suffering as both secular woe and spiritual punishment would seem entirely reasonable, given that Jewish and Christian understanding of the hereafter includes not only a clear distinction between the virtuous and the wicked, but also divine justification for their divergent lots.

What role does thinking about the hereafter play for believers? According to Nietzsche, the concept of heaven serves an important psychological function. Ceaselessly afflicted by a world of contradiction, plurality, flux, and falsity, Christian philosophers sought a world beyond suffering in compensation for pain and death. Nietzsche held that thoughts of heaven express our hatred for a world that makes us suffer. Hell complements and completes the expression of human hatred of suffering, even as it perpetuates and infinitely magnifies that suffering. Nietzsche’s aim to deflate the realm of heaven stemmed from a drive to liberate our energies so that we could turn to the elimination of the causes of suffering rather than merely “narcoticizing” their effects. In 
Nietzsche:
 
Life as Literature,
 Alexander Nehamas has suggested that Nietzsche sometimes succumbed to the appeal of such comfort, though: Nietzsche’s anguished demand for consolation over the death of God in 
The Gay Science
 (Section 125) can be taken to indicate the depth of his own yearning for heaven, or at any rate consolation from the ravages of suffering.

Thinking about the hereafter not only provides relief from suffering; it can also explain away the obvious injustice of a world in which “some rise by sin and others by virtue fall.” Bad people who succeed on earth will get their due after death; good people who do not prosper on earth will get their reward in heaven. Heaven entails the absence, and hell the intensification, of all suffering. Although Christianity is more prone than Judaism to rely on the imagery of hell to reinforce the consequences of sin, the New Testament did not invent the notion of hell. Quite the contrary: it incorporated into the new tradition a notion it borrowed from later Judaism. Hebrew Scripture includes the idea of an afterlife in Sheol, a place for departed souls. One of the thirteen principles of Maimonides derived from the Bible is that God will resurrect the dead. Although the word 
hell
 in not used in the Hebrew Bible, its counterpart 
Gehenna
 represented the final destination of the dead bodies of those who had rebelled against Yahweh (Isaiah 66:24). Extra-biblical Jewish writings frequently refer to the place as a fiery abyss. Nowhere does suffering bear a clearer meaning than in hell. In hell God punishes the damned for their sins. No suffering is random or accidental there.

We find mention of Gehenna seven times in the gospel of Matthew, three times in Mark, and once in Luke.8 The Book of Revelations describes the place as the final destination of the wicked; earlier in the New Testament it appears as a place of weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matthew 8:12; 13:42, 50; 22:13; 24:51; 25:30), a place where the worm does not die (Mark 9:48), yet also a place shrouded in darkness (Matthew 8:12; 22:13; 25:30). The devil is to be found in hell: the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 speaks of “perpetual punishment with the devil” for those in hell. Curiously, hell is not mentioned in the documents of the Second Vatican Council, nor in Pope Paul VI’s 
Credo of the People of God
 of 1968. Roman Catholic belief in hell has by no means faded into the background, however, for reference to “eternal punishment for the sinner” can be found in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s “Letter on Certain Questions Concerning Eschatology” of 1979. Certainly, belief in hell as the climax and paradigm of suffering endures in many of the Protestant churches as well.

Hell is a function of justice, then. Judaism teaches that the ultimate goal of compassion, both our own and God’s, is justice. The Hebrew Bible is replete with instances of God punishing, sometimes quite viciously, his chosen people (and others) for their transgressions of the law. God’s love for Israel entails the enforcement of justice; the punishment suffered returns Israel to a proper love for God. The punitive aspect of God’s compassion manifests itself in the New Testament as well. In the gospel of Matthew we find a clear parallel with the emphasis on justice that runs throughout the Hebrew Bible:

When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all his angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will place the sheep at his right hand, but the goats at the left...Then he will say to those at his left hand, “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me; sick and in prison and you did not visit me.” (Matthew 25:31–33, 41–45)

Judaism and Christianity share a retributive view of justice. These words of Jesus evince Jewish influence. Even though Jesus himself does not seem particularly concerned with hell in the New Testament, this excerpt stands in the way of anyone who views the very idea of hell as antithetical to Jesus’s gospel of love.

In this passage Jesus contrasts heaven with hell and reveals that the just will reap glorious reward on the Day of Judgment. To illustrate the import of this event, he admonishes that the unjust will 
not
 be rewarded, but will instead suffer terribly. His message is bracing. Though he says nothing about celebrating the fate or the imminent torments of the damned, nothing in his message indicates that God will eternally regret their awful punishment. The damned will be left to suffer the horrific fate they 
deserve
.9

The agreement between Jewish and Christian sources is not complete, however. A cursory glance at leading figures in either tradition will bring out some discord relevant to a discussion of emotional responses to punishment. The tenth-century Jewish philosopher Saadya ben Joseph, known better as Saadya Gaon, sought to demonstrate that the assertions of the (Hebrew) Bible do not insult or oppose valid philosophical argument. Saadya, like Maimonides after him, remained convinced that reason could explain even the most difficult passages in the Bible. Consider what Saadya has to say in his magnum opus 
The Book of Beliefs and Opinions
 about the interaction of the just and the unjust in the hereafter:

In regard to the tenth question, namely, whether those to be requited in the hereafter will meet each other, let me say, on the basis of my studies and findings, that, so far as the righteous and the wicked are concerned, they will only look at one another with their eyes. Thus Scripture says concerning the righteous: 
And they shall
 
go forth, and look upon the carcasses of the men that have rebelled
 
against me
 (Isa. 66:24). Whenever, then, they regard their sufferings, they will say: “Praised be He who saved us from this torment!” and they will rejoice and be glad over their own condition.

Likewise Scripture remarks concerning the wicked: 
The sinners
 
in Zion are afraid; trembling hath seized the ungodly: Who among
 
us shall dwell with the devouring fire? Who among us shall dwell
 
with everlasting burnings?
 (Isa. 33:14). In amazement they will watch the righteous abide in the burning fire without being in the least hurt by it, and they will sigh regretfully over the reward which they forfeited.

Further [bearing out this view] is the analogy given elsewhere in Scripture of people who are invited to a banquet whilst others are brought there merely in order to be tormented, with the result that the latter, when they see the former eat, give vent to sighing. That is the import of the statement: 
Behold, My servants shall eat,
 
but ye shall be hungry; behold, My servants shall drink, but ye
 
shall be thirsty; behold, My servants shall rejoice, but ye shall be
 
ashamed; behold, My servants shall sing for joy of heart, but ye
 
shall cry for sorrow of heart, and shall wail for vexation of spirit
 (Isa. 65:13, 14).10

Note the distinct lack of pleasure in the sufferings of the unjust in Saadya’s account. In the first section quoted above, Saadya’s commentary on Scriptures contains no suggestion of rejoicing over the suffering of those who rebelled against God. The just experience relief, which is a self-regarding emotion, as opposed to 
Schadenfreude
, which is an other-regarding emotion. What is further striking about Saadya’s depiction are the regretful sighs—as opposed to violent shrieks—of the unjust in the “devouring fire.” Saadya does not conceive of the separation of the just from the unjust in the way we find in Dante’s widely familiar isolation of paradise from both purgatory and hell. Rather, the just and the unjust rub elbows, as it were. That Saadya speaks of the 
sighing
 (as opposed to, say, shrieking) of the unjust in the fire suggests a certain reluctance on his part to portray the punishment of the unjust as monstrously painful. Rather, the distress in question is likened to hunger or wistfulness.

Now consider how Aquinas rearranges the stage in order to introduce pleasure, to which he assigns an expansive, if crucially ambiguous, role.