Re: Suffering
Posted by kit on 2025-May-13 01:21:42, TuesdayIn reply to Re: Suffering posted by diogenes on 2025-May-12 05:24:13, Monday
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Of course I certainly don't mean anything so tenuous as the claim that the experience of suffering (or evil) doesn't exist. The phenomenology of evil isn't in doubt - the question is a purely ontological one. And it rests, of course, on the Christian theology of Creation. It is essential to Christianity that God made the cosmos - and not only made it but actually pronounced it good. Being, therefore, worldly Being is intrinsically positive. (This doctrine distinguishes orthodox Christianity not only from Buddhism but also from excessively world-denying Gnosticisms.) Yes, to be sure, Creation is ravaged by sin and by suffering, but as neither of these things is created by God, and certainly neither can be said to be good, neither can exist in the way that goodness exists. They are like holes in an old jumper - places where the fabric of Creation has broken apart, but not really 'things' so much as the failure of something to be. (If this all sounds suspiciously Platonist to you - well, yes - it is.) The image of a wound is perhaps the right one - not exactly a thing in itself, but rather an absence, a gap in the divinely-created order of things. It is the Christian doctrine of Creation that makes the privative model of evil necessary: a privative theory of good (which you suggest below) would require a creation that was itself intrinsically evil and only accidentally good. Buddhism sometimes seems to me to hold out this vision. I must say, I don't think of this as a mathematical exercise - tallying up the balance sheet of good and evil to work out whether the universe was ultimately worth it. (This strikes me as a very modern and rather capitalist way of thinking!) Christianity, as I'm sure you've been told before, tends instead to use the language of the gift - existence in this world as a gift of enormous value and insurpassable goodness, for all its appalling miseries and failures. And if being is intrinsically good, then nobody could ever rationally desire not-being - not for themselves and certainly not for those they love. Buddhism holds out personal annihilation as it's ideal, but this is to succumb to negation rather than resisting it. Christian theology, by contrast, utters an unequivocal 'no' to all negativity - to all evil and suffering - and it does so by affirming human (and non-human!) existence in all its unbroken fullness. I don't mean to imply any escapism or levity: I am extremely conscious of the wretchedness of so many in the world right now, and especially of the appalling tragedies playing out before our eyes in Gaza and Sudan. Can a Christian seriously see the lives of Gazans as a gift? What difference does it make to Gazans to know that evil doesn't ultimately exist? Well the answer to the second question is 'none at all,' though it might make a difference to Christians elsewhere in their attitude to confronting evil. If goodness exists in a way that evil does not, then these are not just two options that could equally be chosen according to the actor's own personal preference. To oppose the mass-murder of Gazans is not just a matter of personal taste - it is to cut along the grain of the Universe. It is to side with existence rather than the gaping void. And for the first question - how is the life of a Gazan child a divine gift? It would be hard to answer that question affirmatively if you think, as the Buddhist does, that life is simply a cycle of endless misery and torment. But Christians - as I have said - are playing out a comedy, not a tragedy. Suffering is not the end of the story - even death itself is not the end of the story. Children of God are never ultimately foresaken, however godforsaken their situation might appear to be. This is where we come to what I think of as the real moral danger of Christianity: not banging on about guilt or sex, but rather placing too much emphasis on the next world and not worrying enough about this one. (To be fair, I think a lot of Christians of my acquaintance have these days gone too far in the opposite direction.) But Christians have always believed that divine love - love for a good Creation and for human creatures made in the divine image - imposes formidable ethical challenges on us here and now. If God's image is being destroyed in Gaza, then the proper attitude is neither solipsistic detachment nor resigned hope that the next world will be better. It is to echo the uncompromising divine 'no' to sin and suffering - the negation of negation paradoxically enacted in the great negativity of the Cross. |
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