When Bad Things Happen to Other People (27 page)

Here are St. Thomas’s answers to the questions 1) whether the saints in heaven will see the suffering of the damned in hell and 2) whether the saints will delight in the torments of the damned (Supplement to the 
Summa Theologiae
, Question XCIV):

I answer that,
 Nothing should be denied the blessed that belongs to the perfection of their happiness. Now everything is known the more for being compared with its contrary, because when contraries are placed beside one another they become more conspicuous. Therefore in order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them and that they may render more copious thanks to God for it, they are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned (Article 1).

I answer that,
 A thing may be a matter of rejoicing in two ways. First, in itself, when one rejoices in a thing as such, and thus the saints will not rejoice in the punishment of the wicked. Secondly, accidentally, by reason namely of something joined to it; and in this way the saints will rejoice in the punishment of the wicked, by considering therein the order of Divine justice and their own deliverance, which will fill them with joy. And thus the Divine justice and their own deliverance will be the direct cause of the joy of the blessed, while the punishment of the damned will cause it indirectly (Article 3).

Given that the 
Supplement
 to the 
Summa
 was assembled by Aquinas’s pupils from his earlier writings after his death, some caution is in order here. Thomas writes at length on the beatific vision in the 
Summa Theologiae
 (Ia.12; IIa 1–5) and it should not seem farfetched to take these passages from the 
Supplement
 as generally representative of his mindset. In fairness to St. Thomas, recall that the author of the Book of Revelations invites (Christian) readers to identify with God and to take pleasure in the great suffering awaiting the damned.

Whereas Saadya and Aquinas concur that the saved and the damned will be able to see one another in the hereafter, Aquinas adds that this sight is something of a privilege. According to Aquinas all the saints will see God, but those in whom charity is stronger will see him more perfectly. Although the beatific vision is not subject to degrees, some saints are better able to enjoy that vision than others. Enjoyment, an act of the will, follows an act of the intellect. The essence of beatitude follows from the intellect, whereas joy stems from the will. The enjoyment of Aquinas’s saints tells us something important about their character.

These passages from the 
Summa Theologiae
 are presumably those that astounded Nietzsche (in the first essay of 
The Genealogy of Morals
) because of their profound cruelty. For my purposes it is unfortunate (although perhaps not accidental) that Nietzsche does not refer to Saadya in this essay. While Nietzsche regarded Judaism and Christianity as essentially different sides of the same coin, it must in fairness be noted that Saadya strives to lessen the horror of the scene to which Aquinas introduces pleasure.

In the same spirit of fairness, it must also be noted that Aquinas makes a pivotal distinction in the second passage—a distinction between the direct and indirect cause of the saints’ joy. It is not the operative suffering 
in
 
itself
 that will please the saints, but rather contemplation of the order to which that suffering testifies. The fulfillment of God’s justice is not a result of the suffering of the damned, at least not in any causal sense; their suffering is an expression of that justice. The damned do not merit anything by their suffering, nor does their suffering bring them closer to God.

They suffer because of their sinfulness. What is of value is the overall state of affairs, within which suffering plays an integral part. This distinction fails to mitigate Nietzsche’s revulsion in
The Genealogy of Morals
. No one can deny the force of Nietzsche’s charge of rationalizing malicious glee; this does not mean, though, that this charge cannot be answered. We might ask, first, whether Aquinas’s distinction is tenable, and, secondly, what Nietzsche risks in ignoring this all-important sleight of mind.

Aquinas is not alone in making a teleological distinction in order to assess the moral status of joy that comes from the misery of others. In the twenty-seventh canto of Dante’s
Paradiso
, St. Peter bemoans the demise of the papacy into a sewer of blood and stench.11 Dante’s Satan delights not so much in the present troubles of the papacy as in the hope that such troubles raise. In this canto Satan does not derive much pleasure, if any, from the actual suffering of an actual pope, but rather from pleasant reflection on the spectacle of the imminent ruin of an institution that had fallen into terrible corruption. Dante’s characterization of Satan lends credence to the distinction Aquinas lays out in the
Supplement
, though it is important that Dante depicts Satan as
more evil
 for focusing on the sweet contemplation of the defeat of God’s system of justice than on the suffering of a pope. We are left to conclude that Nietzsche either fails to grasp the point of Aquinas’s distinction (which seems most unlikely, given his consummate interpretive powers), or that he suspects Aquinas of a rationalization of hatred. The latter possibility, in any event, resonates with Nietzsche’s general stance toward suffering. Nietzsche sees no interesting difference here between taking pleasure in the suffering of another person (Aquinas’s direct cause) and taking pleasure 
because
another person suffers (Aquinas’s indirect cause).

I will be discussing the same sort of mental dodge in Bernard Häring’s disavowal of
Schadenfreude
. For now, there is one more detail to add to this brief sketch of Jewish and Christian meditations on suffering in the hereafter: theological uncertainty about the concept of hell. Because its organizational structure makes Catholicism somewhat easier to generalize about than various Protestant churches, I will limit myself to a telling uncertainty in the Roman Catholic tradition.

In his sweeping catechetical work 
Catholicism,
 Richard McBrien has cautioned that biblical passages regarding hell are to be interpreted according to the same principles which govern the interpretation of apocalyptic literature.12 The New Testament passages regarding hell are not to be taken literally, nor as a balanced theological statement of the hereafter (note, for instance, that St. Matthew describes hell as both a pit of fire and a place of darkness). Jesus never stated that persons actually go to hell or are there now. Like Jesus, the Catholic Church restricts itself to the 
possibility
 that persons may suffer eternally in hell. Not insignificantly, hell lends itself to other interpretations: it can be viewed as God’s yielding to our own freedom to choose evil instead of good, to turn our backs to God resolutely. Catholics are to understand Jesus’s own descent into hell after his death as a sojourn to the underworld, where those who had died before him remained, and not to the place of fire.

For most Western believers, hell stands as the 
locus classicus
 of suffering. The less believers understand hell, the less they understand suffering. Ecclesiastical reservations or disagreements about hell (how awful it is, whether people will actually be sent there for eternity) might reasonably discourage believers of relevant faiths from thinking they understand God’s rationale for punishing. A Jew or a Catholic, in any event, might prudently insist that we cannot make sense of human suffering without attacking or opposing religious tradition.

Earthly Suffering and Divine Retribution

For believers, the idea of attributing the reason for human suffering to God’s anger is not so much preposterous as presumptuous, in so far as such attribution claims a familiarity with God that enacts the sin of pride.

What is the basis for reading God’s will into the physical or emotional state of a person? Pentateuchal and prophetic doctrine proclaimed exclusively earthly rewards or punishments for those who fulfilled or transgressed the obligations of God’s covenant (Jer. 11:1–12). Those rewards mentioned in Proverbs were all related to this world as well, for example wealth and honor, land and possessions, and numerous, healthy children. The folly of wickedness, on the other hand, brought sudden and early death (Prv. 8:17–21; 10:27; 22:22–23). Jack Miles takes the following passage in Isaiah to be a crucial turning point after which God punishes discriminately the sinful:

Therefore the Lord says,

the Lord of hosts,

The Mighty one of Israel:

“Ah, I will vent my wrath on my enemies,

and avenge myself on my foes.

I will turn my hand against you

and will smelt away your dross as with lye

and remove all your alloy.

And I will restore your judges as at the first,

and your counselors as at the beginning.

Afterward you shall be called the city of righteousness,

the faithful city.” (I:24–26)

According to Miles, God had thought of punishment differently prior to this point (
God,
 p. 206). When punishing the generation of Noah, for example, he thought mankind as a whole incorrigible. This remained God’s view throughout much of the Hebrew Bible. With the exception of II Samuel 7, when God said that he would be a strict father to David’s house but no more than that, punishment had not been understood as discipline before the example in Isaiah. What Miles does not state explicitly is that such discipline took place in the here and now and that only in the latest books of the Hebrew Bible did the hereafter figure into the notion of punishment and reward.

The only passage in the New Testament that holds out a specific promise of earthly rewards is found in Mark 10:30: those who have left all to follow Christ will “receive now in the present time a hundredfold as much, houses, and brothers, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands—along with persecutions...” There is less explicit evidence in the New Testament than in the Hebrew Bible to support a nexus between sin and suffering here on earth.

Numerous philosophers and theologians in both the Jewish and Christian traditions have woven into their reflections on divine justice a similar concession regarding a correlation between sin and suffering. Saadya carefully reserves for the “realm of compensation” the bulk of God’s judgment upon humans, yet allows that God rewards and punishes us in this life as well:

...God does not leave His servants entirely without reward in this world for virtuous conduct and without punishment for iniquities. For such requitals serve as a sign and an example of the total compensation which is reserved for the time when a summary account is made of the deeds of God’s servants. That is why we note that He says of such
blessings
 as those listed by Him in the section of the Torah [beginning with the words] 
If in My statutes
 (Lev. 26:3): 
Work in my behalf a sign for good
 (Ps. 86:17), and again of the 
curses
 listed in the section [beginning with the statement] 
But it
 
shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken
 (Deut. 28:15): 
And
 
they shall be upon thee for a sign and for a wonder, and upon thy
 
seed for ever
 (Deut. 28:46). (
Book of Beliefs,
 pp. 208–209)

Saadya instructs that the rewards and punishments we observe in the lives of our neighbors are a “specimen and a sample” of what each respective person may reasonably expect in the next life. While qualifying the belief that God punishes discriminately the sinful, Saadya simultaneously endorses it. Saadya believes that evil in the world is fairly distributed, even when we cannot understand precisely how this takes place. In Saadya’s thought, God works and thinks much as mortals do, rewarding and punishing on the basis of desert.

Despite his insistence on the incommensurability of God and man, the twelfth-century philosopher Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) echoes Saadya’s conclusions about the meaning of suffering. In 
The Guide of the
 
Perplexed
, an exegetical rather than speculative work, one of the great theological rationalists of the Middle Ages explains:

It is likewise one of the fundamental principles of the Law of 
Moses our Master
 that it is in no way possible that He, may He be exalted, should be unjust, and that all the calamities that befall men and the good things that come to men, be it a single individual or a group, are all of them determined according to the deserts of the men concerned through equitable judgment in which there is no injustice whatever. Thus if some individual were wounded in the hand by a thorn, which he would take out immediately, this would be a punishment for him, and if he received the slightest pleasure, this would be a reward for him—all this being according to his deserts.13

According to Maimonides, all events, whether they are of nature, acts of will, or outcomes of pure chance, are causal and can be ascribed to God (
Guide
 II, Section 48). Maimonides’s agreement with Saadya ends over the question of determining the appropriateness of suffering, for Maimonides goes on to aver that, “we are ignorant of the various modes of desert.” Maimonides emphasizes, where Saadya minimizes, the distance between the works of God and the minds of men. Maimonides cautions us against confidence in assessing what others deserve in the way God can and does determine. A minor point to be taken from Maimonides’s position with respect to the question of whether God punishes discriminately the sinful in this life is the idea that
Schadenfreude
might be cognized as a gift from God.

Calvin, to offer a later example of theological association of temporal suffering with sin, stridently declared that the experience of the reprobate was a foretaste of hell. Calvin enjoyed enormous popularity in England.

Fifteen editions of 
The Institution of Christian Religion
 appeared between 1574 and 1587; toward the end of the sixteenth century, this work became required reading for all students at Cambridge and Oxford.14 Calvin’s well-known doctrine of predestination included a lens through which to interpret suffering. “By dogmatizing about God’s treatment of the reprobate on this side of the grave Calvin encouraged the idea that predestination worked itself out in the everyday detail of life.”15 Crucial to Calvin’s exposition was a vision of how the suffering of the just differs from the suffering of the unjust in this world. The experiences conveyed distinctly divine attitudes: “For the order of playne teachyng, let us cal the one kinde of judgement, the judgement of Revenge, the other of Chastisement” (
Inst
. 3.4.31). The sufferings of the unjust were “a certayne entrie of hell, from whense they doe alredy see a far of their eternall damnation”; this suffering served to prepare them for “the most cruell hell that at length abideth for them” (
Inst
. 3.4.32). Worldly events lent themselves to interpretation of God’s plan for an individual, but Calvin did not hold that this plan was immediately comprehensible. Calvin’s theology and its wild popularity cultivated in yet another sphere the popular belief that God punishes discriminately the sinful in this world. In contemporary Protestantism, the divine mystery of love has been emphasized more than the significance of punishment.