​Chapter 13. Suffering

A freedom conferred and left alone would sit where it was gained; something has to press the will to want its openness shut. The ache of living supplies the raw material, and the tradition does not leave it raw. It builds the ache into a goad and aims it.

The crude form of the goad is punishment, and it is weak. Told that his pain is the wage of a fault, a will can contest the sentence and harden against the judge who passed it; a penalty invites a grievance. So the strong form drops the courtroom for the sickroom. Suffering is recoded from sentence to schooling, under the doctrine of providence — every affliction placed and meant, nothing falling on a life that the governor of the world did not order to its good.

The schooling has a repertoire. Anguish purifies, scouring from the soul what clung to it; pain corrects, set across a road like an interruption that forces a heedless life to look at itself. One who has been broken reads another's breaking from inside, so consolation is farmed from the wound. Each reading fastens a forward purpose to the raw fact: the pain no longer just presses. It points toward the good.

The figure that gathers the repertoire is the physician. God administers suffering as a doctor prescribes a bitter draught, and the ascetic writers press the figure without softening it — the medicine is meant to sting, and the patient who curses the knife has mistaken his cure for his injury. "For whom the Lord loves, he disciplines" (Hebrews 12:6). Under this figure the affliction ceases to be an injury held against the afflicter. It becomes his tenderest work, and the sufferer is taught to receive the blow as a caress and thank the hand that lands it.

The disease the physician claims to treat is pride and self-will — the creature's insistence on remaining its own source, under its clinical names. The medicine is calibrated accordingly: suffering wears down the will's grip on itself until the grip lets go. The pedagogy of pain teaches surrender, and the health it drives toward is a will that has consented to be closed.

A healing wound needs a disease, and the case with no disease shows what the model is for. Job is blameless and upright, and his ruin is permitted with the text conceding it falls on him without cause. His friends run the fault-model at full strength, certain the affliction must uncover a hidden sin, and the book breaks them for it. The answer from the whirlwind assigns no fault either; it meets scale with scale, a sovereignty so far past the sufferer's measure that the question of desert dissolves instead of being answered. Meaning is still assigned — submission to a purpose beyond sight. But the blameless case forecloses the premise on which the entire construction rests: that the meaning was read off a real sin. The assignment comes first; the fault, where a story affords one, is cut to fit it.

The pedagogy covers only the pain that can be read. A fault can be found for the drunkard's ruin and a lesson in the proud man's fall, but the tumor in a child has no fault to answer for it and teaches nothing to a pupil who cannot yet spell, and the earthquake and tsunami that destroyed Lisbon on the morning of All Saints took the town's faithful in their churches, mid-prayer, the lesson dissolving in the scale. Theodicy meets these cases and visibly fails, and the failure remains in plain sight — no doctrine patches it.

It does not need patching. Senseless pain is unbearable because it is senseless: a will can carry an ache that means something and cannot rest under one that is meaningless, and where the world offers no meaning the will is driven to look past the world for it. The one address at which sense is promised for the senseless is the center, at the far side of the road. The unexplained remainder is the goad at its sharpest, pressing the will toward the only counter where the debt of meaning is said to be redeemable.

Wrong done by men runs the relay through a different hunger. The murderer dies old in his bed; the innocent lies unavenged; the account stays open on earth, and the tradition concedes the books do not balance here — the psalmist watches the wicked prosper, "until I entered God's sanctuary, and considered their latter end" (Psalm 73:17). Justice withheld in the world is found by entering the sanctuary, the settling of accounts is moved past the threshold and payable only there. A will wronged seeks requital as fiercely as a will in pain wants sense, and a demand the earth refuses becomes a pull toward whoever holds the court. The last judgment is a lure — the unclosed ledger aimed, like the unexplained ache, at the exit.

Suffering was never an independent evil that broke into a clean order. An order casts off what it cannot carry — mercy sets down the justice it declined, judgment the pardon it withheld — and the discarded side is real, with weight and effects. Fixed law is reliable because it is indifferent, and the indifference that makes the world dependable lets the loosened stone fall on whatever head is beneath it. Suffering follows from order the instant the law is drawn; the pain is immediate; meaning is assigned afterward. Providence is the assigning, and the meaning it assigns is that the pain leads home.

So the physician is never caught in the act. No tormentor presides over affliction and deals it out; the suffering is deposited by the order as the residue of its founding cut, authorless in the moment it strikes, its authorship lying further back, in the founding division that could not be laid down without its shadow. The center that deposited the ache is the same God who offers himself as the cure, and providence bridges the two, letting the healer bend over a bed his own order filled.

The two families of blame converge here. The fall fixed the gain and the not-seeing as one openness; charge the pain to the fall or charge it to ignorance, and either way it is charged to a free will. Each account then steps around the same figure. The fall names the one who cursed the ground but charges the curse to the creature who occasioned it; ignorance names the conditioned arising in which not-seeing comes to hurt but leaves that order without an author. In both cases, the order that carries the ache escapes blame.

The impersonal diagnosis keeps more honesty at the origin and none at the exit. Buddhism begins with suffering as the First Noble Truth, woven into conditioned arising and passing; Schopenhauer roots it in striving as such, so that to be an individuated wanter is to be in pain. The source is set squarely in conditioned existence or striving, with no creature's first fault to carry the blame — and then the honest diagnosis is put to the use that the theodicies make of their dishonest one. Pain named truly becomes the reason to have done with the willing that suffers. Origin told straight or origin concealed, the exit is the same, and the will is pressed again to consent to its own ending.

Augustine, and the schoolmen after him, held evil to have no positive being — a lack of a good that ought to be present, a wound in a nature rather than a nature of its own. Nothing was made, so no maker answers for it, and the ledger this reading keeps has no entries. Grant the metaphysics as a whole. The charge here was never laid against a substance. An order was drawn in which a creature can be torn, starved, and left to feel its openness as an injury, and the drawing of that order is as positive as any act gets, whatever ontological rank is assigned to the damage it permits. A privation cannot press on anything; whatever presses a will toward the cure is real, and the road, the ache, and the offered relief are furnished rather than absent. Note also what the doctrine does, which is the operation the archive showed under another name: the record is kept and its meaning annulled, the deposit reassigned to nothing at all. A theology able to grant every fact of suffering and deny that anyone laid it down is a theology that has solved its problem in the accounting.

Under every name, the goad has the same effect. It makes a will's openness hurt until closing it feels like rescue, and it dresses the pressure as love, so that the will hurries toward the cure and calls the hurrying freedom.