Since suffering is such a regular concomitant of human life, it isn’t surprising that the world’s great religions lavish a lot of attention on the subject.
Buddhism and Stoicism seek to solve the problem of suffering by short-circuiting its motor: attachment to the world.
There is, for example, a famous passage in Lucretius’s “De Rerum Natura” (Concerning the Nature of Things) that speaks of the sweetness of watching from the safety of land a boat tossed about in a battering storm.
“The sweetness,” Lucretius writes, “lies in watching evils you yourself are free from.”
Like Buddhism, Lucretius’s Stoicism endeavors to solve the problem of suffering by denying it, by plucking us out of the cares and concerns of life and transforming us into Olympian observers:
“How sweet, again,” Lucretius writes, “to see the clash of battle / Across the plains, yourself immune to danger.”
It’s easy to see that attraction of such a view of life—immunity or at least resistance to life’s travails is a tempting substitute for life’s pleasures—but it’s also easy to see its limitations.
A dollop of stoicism may be a salutary thing, indistinguishable from the traditional Brit’s stiff upper lip in the face of life’s quotidian adversities.
But elevated into a philosophy of life, it has the disadvantage of exiling one from life’s riches.
You avoid the penalty of desire by the severe expedient of never wanting or caring for anything.
It’s also worth noting that Stoicism tends to work best when the tests to which it’s subjected are light.
Serious calamity can usually be counted on to spoil its tranquility.
In any event, I mention the by-way of Stoicism and its allotropes (Buddhism, the philosophies of Schopenhauer and George Santayana, etc.) not to endorse them but simply to fill out the roster of possible responses to the question: What is the meaning of (which implies the further question, what is the solution to) suffering?
In “Agamemnon,” Aeschylus wrote that “wisdom comes only through suffering.”
Maybe. But the observation that “ignorance is bliss” has a historical patent just as venerable if not so exalted.
The Book of Job is perhaps the most awful (in the old sense, i.e., awe-inspiring) book of the Bible.
It’s full of wisdom, from Job’s observation that “Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble,” to the image of Satan “walking to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it.”
That was a long time ago, but Satan is a tireless pedestrian; he’s walking here still.
For me, the most powerful passages of Job came toward the end, when God answers Job out of the whirlwind and puts to him that long list of unanswerable questions (“Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the Earth?”).
These passages have the effect not only of demonstrating God’s greatness but also of reminding us of his inscrutability.
If Job forbears to follow his wife’s advice (“Curse God, and die”), it isn’t because he understands but because he submits to God’s will.
In this context, it’s worth noting that many scholars believe that Job’s happy ending, when “the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before,” was a later interpolation—a concession, perhaps, to the same scruple that led some Victorian moralizers to graft a happy ending on to “King Lear.”
What is the meaning of suffering?
To say that something has “meaning” is to say that it gestures beyond itself: that it achieves its full significance only when attached to something else.
Does suffering possess this semantic leaven?
That’s an alchemy we must each perform for ourselves.
There’s something untoward, not to say downright obscene, about presuming upon the suffering of others.
When we ask whether suffering has “meaning,” we covertly imply that it would be a good thing if it did, that “meaning” would exude something analgesic or propitiatory to calm the sting of suffering.
In the end, the meaning of suffering must wait upon one’s answer to the question: What is the meaning of life?
And that’s a question we don’t answer in words but in deeds. When we ask about the meaning of suffering, we’re often led to dwell on how we feel.
Much more important is how we behave.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau taught us to equate virtue with the emotion of virtue, i.e., with a species of narcissism.
Voltaire offered a salubrious antidote when he asked, “What is virtue, my friend? It is to do good: let us do it, and that’s enough. We won’t look into your motives.”
That wouldn’t have pleased Kant (to say nothing of Rousseau), but what a breath of fresh air!
Suffering can make us wiser.
It can also just make us harder, which isn’t the same thing (though it can look alike to the untrained eye).
Aristotle was right, I think, when he observed that courage is the most important virtue, because without courage you can’t reliably practice any of the other virtues.
And here I come back to the issue of gratitude.
It’s curious, perhaps, but the virtue most complicit with suffering is gratitude—not, I hasten to add, gratitude for suffering itself but rather gratitude for the amplitude that suffering jerks us into recognizing anew.
I say this not proscriptively, but merely as a matter of observation, based on the testimony of many people who have endured grievous suffering and come out, so to speak, on the other side.
It doesn’t always happen that way, of course, and it’s worth stressing again the unseemliness of exacting gratitude from anyone but oneself.
But within the interstices of one’s own heart, the moral economy of suffering seems to require gratitude if it isn’t to fester.
And here, I think, I might venture a small correction of Aristotle.
Cardinal Newman was right when he said that, about most subjects, to think as did Aristotle was to think correctly.
But I have to take issue with Aristotle’s definition of man as the “rational animal.”
The “ungrateful animal” is usually closer to the truth.
I don’t, by the way, exempt myself from that observation. But that brings us to the threshold of other mysteries.
In the human world, unlike the world of nature more generally, when we speak about suffering it’s appropriate to speak of the problem of suffering.
That may sound cryptic. What I mean is that man is a meaning-seeking (and meaning-finding) animal.
For him, suffering isn’t simply a natural event, synonymous with pain or misfortune.
Suffering isn’t an end itself; it becomes what it is only in the context of the cares and concerns of human life.
Even the existentialists, who championed absurdity as the meaning of life, couldn’t rest until they bore witness at least to that hard-won truth (if it is a truth) about the human condition.
Man would rather have the void as meaning, Nietzsche observed, than be void of meaning.
A dog or a cat might suffer; they don’t regard their suffering as a challenge to their understanding of the world.
I’m not sure that there’s much solace to be wrung from the fact that man is the only animal for whom suffering is a problem.
But it does remind us of the radical incompleteness of human life: that no man, as the poet John Donne put it, is an island, entire of itself.
That does nothing to blunt the sting of suffering. In the end, understanding isn’t an analgesic.
But it is, perhaps, a light shining in the darkness.
