When Bad Things Happen to Other People (28 page)

These, then, are several instances of how explicitly religious thinkers have linked, however tenuously, earthly suffering and divine dissatisfaction. They have allowed that punishment for sin may take place in this world 
in addition to
 the hereafter. Not surprisingly, persons who themselves suffer may believe that God is punishing them for some sin, as O’Neill’s Mary Tyrone did. In his moving 
Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions
, John Donne pondered whether his own grave illness represented God’s punishment. Today, reflection on the AIDS epidemic frequently includes similar speculation. In describing a family coming to grips with an HIV-infected member, the physician Sherwin Nuland has stated:

I prefer to believe that God has nothing to do with it. We are witnessing in our time one of those cataclysms of nature that have no meaning, no precedent, and, in spite of many claims to the contrary, no useful metaphor. Many churchmen, too, agree that God plays no role in such things. In their 
Euthanasie en Pastoraat
...the bishops of the Dutch Reformed Church have not hesitated to deal quite specifically with the age-old question of divine involvement in unexplained human suffering: “The natural order of things is not necessarily to be equated with the will of God.” Their position is shared by a vast number of Christian and Jewish clergy of various denominations; any less forbearing a stance is callous and a further indecency heaped upon people already too sorely tried.16

Rabbi David Novak has echoed this conclusion:

...AIDS seems to raise what was thought by most moderns to be an ancient superstition long behind us, namely the whole issue of God’s punishment of sin through physical maladies. Yet, as anyone with either therapeutic or pastoral experience knows, the first question most often raised even today, even by many “nonreligious” people, who have discovered serious disease in themselves is: “What did I do for God to do this to me?”17

Although Novak ties the contraction of the HIV virus to behavior he views as sinful (that is, male homosexual activity and intravenous drug use), he affirms a categorical duty to care for the sick, irrespective of ways in which people become ill. According to Novak, infected gay men and IV drug users cannot be called passive victims; nor, for that matter, can chain smokers who die from lung cancer. Novak maintains that we bring certain illnesses upon ourselves. About other diseases Novak urges caution. Curiously, he dismisses as “an ancient superstition” the “whole issue of God’s punishment of sin through physical maladies.” That “superstition” plays a pivotal, if not mystical, role in other thinking about God.

Bernard Häring, likely the most influential Roman Catholic moral theologian of this century, offers another reason for thinking of human suffering as a sign of divine dissatisfaction: the sins of others. The reason that innocent people suffer is that they are paying for the sins of the guilty.

Apropos of nothing explicitly sexual, Häring asserts in 
Free and Faithful in Christ
, “the sick person must ask himself whether he has properly resolved the erotic or moral crises of his life.”18 Coming as they did just several years before public awareness of the AIDS crisis, Häring’s words might appear an uncanny omen. However, Häring’s cautious interpretation of human suffering obviates the supposition that he would unreflectively view the AIDS of gay men as divine punishment.

Häring’s view of suffering surfaces in several works, including his magnum opus 
The Law of Christ
. Although illness is only one example of suffering, it is a particularly good one in so far as it resonates with virtually everyone. Häring ties our physical problems to guilt:

Illness points to guilt, though indeed not always to personal or individual guilt. In our sickness we bear the guilt of our first parents and our ancestors. Many unfortunately in their illness suffer the consequences of sins which their parents committed in the time of their conception and upbringing...Not rarely is a disease the consequence and manifestation of personal sins.19

This reasoning extends the link of suffering to sin across generations. It is of a piece with some passages relating to retribution in the Hebrew Bible. By his adultery and murder, for example, King David doomed his son to death and his royal line to perpetual warfare and violence (2 Samuel 12:7–14). The classical statement about punishment meted out by Yahweh on the presumably innocent children of evil men appears in Exodus 34:7. The same passage assures us that God’s mercy and forgiveness will endure “for a thousand generations.”

Häring deepens the difficulty of separating suffering from sin by raising the possibility that even a living saint may suffer because of the sins of a forebear. As if the range of causal antecedents to suffering were not already sufficiently vast, Häring expands the list of possible reasons for divine retribution to include punishment for the sins of others:

Even though personal defect may not lie at the root of the illness, it still may be (and should be) borne patiently in the spirit of penance for the actual sins from which none of us is altogether free. Above all it should also be borne in atonement for the sins of others, for at the root of all illness there lies in some way the guilt of the race with which we are united in the solidarity of the original fall. (
LC
, III, pp. 224–225)

Some suffering, then, is not the result of personal wrongdoing, but rather 
human
 wrongdoing. The dialectic of self and other in his thinking leaves permanently open the possibility that other people are a part of the bad things that happen to us. Häring exhorts the innocent sufferer to endure pain for the sake of humanity (that is, for other people). Häring espouses a certain ancient Hebrew logic according to which repayment for the crime or virtuous act of an individual affected the group to which the person belonged. Hebrew tribal background produced this idea, as did the belief that God had chosen the Israelites as a people, not as individuals. It was only logical to conceive of God as punishing the nation for one person’s sin and as rewarding it for the good action of another. The most obvious example of group punishment for the sins of individuals is the expulsion from the Garden of Eden (Genesis, Chapter 3). Later in Israel’s history the 
lex talionis
 (Exodus 21:24) served to control the indiscriminate vengeance that could decimate entire tribes and families. The compensation of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” curbed excessive revenge and focused attention on the crime and its perpetrator, rather than on the group to which the perpetrator belonged. Separating the guilty individual from his innocent group prefigured the Israelite idea of the justice of God in avenging sin.

We are all guilty in Häring’s view. My suffering should matter to you, then, for the reason that I am paying for our collective debt. In Häring’s thought we all become fellow-sufferers. Because its cause may be far removed in both space and time, suffering should not be expected to bear a readily apparent meaning of much specificity. Häring greatly weakens our capacity to see sin in suffering, even as he affirms it.

Häring says that ours is not to know why some people seem to suffer more than others; what we can conclude is that such persons enjoy a special opportunity to reduce the total sum of human transgression. The idea of vicarious suffering was fully developed by Isaiah in his “Servant of the Lord Oracles” (Isaiah 42:1–4; 49:1–7; 50:4–11; 52:13–53:12). This idea runs throughout the New Testament as well, where the suffering of Christ is presented as wholly vicarious. The Christian, as a redeemed member of Christ’s mystical body, must share in Christ’s suffering if he wishes to participate in Christ’s glory. St. Paul rejoiced in his own suffering, because it consoled others (2 Corinthians 1:4–7) and contributed to their salvation (2 Timothy 2:10).

Häring comes up with a new way of saying that hell is other people. Other people put us through hell on earth because we have to pay for their sins. This is as strong a sense of human community as we will find anywhere. Because other people can and do atone for our sins, we are a part of the bad things that happen to other people.

Interpreting God’s will is not easy. Neither wholly inscrutable nor transparent, the will of God seems best understood as somewhat non-compliant with human ambitions for it. What is clear are certain risks: that mortals make God an accomplice in their various injustices, and that, while supposedly glorifying God, persons in fact idolize good fortune and demonize suffering. If it is true that God’s ways are not our ways, then we should think twice about seeking a message from God in any given instance of human suffering. Even a believer, who must concede that all events unfold according to God’s will, can conclude that some suffering simply happens or that some suffering simply defies theological explanation. Aquinas wisely steers us to a reasonable
via media
: he stresses that the notion of Divine Providence does not exclude the operation of chance or luck (
Summa Contra Gentiles
, III, lxxiv).

Even the Nicest Priests Feel It

What makes Häring so interesting for my purposes is that even someone so open-minded can remain deeply loyal to a set of beliefs. If asked to name a priest who strove heroically to make the world a kinder, gentler place, many liberal Catholics throughout the world would think of Häring. Father Häring, who died in 1998 at the age of 85, led the way to many of the reforms wrought by the Second Vatican Council. Häring worked to break down walls between Catholics and non-Catholics and to make the Church of Rome more explicitly respectful of other religious faiths.

Having carefully conceded that suffering can properly be considered a function of sin, Häring appeals to God in order to condone joy which springs from even, or perhaps especially, the terrible suffering of others:

Nor is it the sin of rejoicing over the misfortune of another [
Schadenfreude
] if one is glad that the proud enemies of God are crushed and humiliated, or that the suffering of a fellow man has led him back to God. (
LC
, I, p. 376)

In this terse and finally enigmatic passage Häring disavows 
Schadenfreude
. This disavowal, which is also an avowal, would not merit attention if it weren’t for the idea, in evidence here, that there must be instances in which it is appropriate to take pleasure in the suffering of another person (for example, the child murderer who fails to win an early release from prison or the self-righteous minister who gets caught in a sex scan-dal). Although he does not entirely oppose the impulse to see sin as the reason for suffering, Häring shifts our thinking about
Schadenfreude
away from the appropriateness of suffering to the inappropriateness of sympathy. Just as sympathy for the criminal who is sentenced to life in jail is in some sense inappropriate, Häring considers inappropriate that sympathy for reprobate persons whose suffering may teach them a valuable lesson. Otherwise stated, sympathy for the “proud enemies of God” who suffer is inappropriate because that very suffering may lead them to a proper understanding of God. The suffering of St. Paul as Saul might be a good case in point. What is perhaps most disturbing about Häring’s supposed disavowal of
Schadenfreude
is that he allows for the possibility that we might rejoice over terrible (as opposed to relatively trivial) suffering.

It might be objected that this interpretation takes a few words from Häring out of context. At issue here, however, is not just a brief passage but the whole way of thinking behind
The Law of Christ
. It is not my aim here to portray Häring as draconian or afflicted with 
odium theologicum
. Quite the contrary: he is valuable precisely because he supported ecumenical reform in the Second Vatican Council. The conviction upon which all of Häring’s extensive theology rests must be insistence on an internal connection between religion and morality. Häring has insisted that ethics for the Christian is a 
religious
 ethics; his moral theology is thoroughly Christocentric.

In the passage quoted above, note that Häring does not defend 
Schadenfreude
; in fact, he considers it a sin. As with Shakespeare’s case of “cruel to be kind,” Häring regards suffering as a
means
, not an end. There is some reason to conclude that Aquinas would approve of Häring’s disavowal of 
Schadenfreude
, for both thinkers aim to ensure a proper understanding of God’s will and both insist on a distinction between direct and indirect causes of joy. Disallowing
Schadenfreude
per se and allowing pleasure in the humiliation of “the proud enemy of God” entails the same mental adroitness required by Augustine’s exhortation to hate the sin and love the sinner. It may be logically possible to rejoice in the justice of a punishment, yet to regret or even to feel sorrow over the suffering of the one being punished. Psychologically, however, this must be quite a challenge.

Another difficulty with Häring’s disavowal lies in the temptation to decide which instances of happiness in others’ suffering we find acceptable and then to justify our joy through the hope that this suffering will prove instructive, much as Saul’s suffering did immediately before his conversion. But even this insight is more suggestive than conclusive, for it begs the question of whether the pleasure Häring condones is
Schadenfreude
or a thinly disguised rationalization for hatred. It is well known that religious beliefs may cloak or incorporate intolerance. The means for rationalizing suffering as appropriate are as varied as human creativity will allow and one could argue here that Häring is rationalizing hatred as justice.

Careful analysis can usually differentiate between conscientious application of religious ethics and the use of religious precepts as a cover for personal animosity. In what remains of this chapter I will caution against convicting Häring of malice and hatred. The case of Bernard Häring furthers our understanding of suffering by focusing attention, as neither Saadya, nor Maimonides, nor Aquinas did fully, on the appropriateness of sympathy for sufferers in the here and now.