Chapter III: The Problem of Pain

J. R. ILLINGWORTH.

The problem of pain, always prominent in a sensitive age, has been exceptionally emphasized in the literature of modern pessimism as an objection to Theism in general, and Christianity in particular. The existence of pain is urged as incompatible with the belief in a God who is at once omnipotent and benevolent, that is with Theism in its ordinary form; while Christianity is further charged with being a religion of pain, a religion which has increased the sum of actual, and the expectation of prospective pain, darkening the shadow that lies upon our race. Suffering is not a subject upon which anything new can be said. It has long ago been probed, to the utmost limit of our capacity, and remains a mystery still. But, in face of the adverse use now made of it, it may be well to bear in mind how much has been said and is to be said upon the other side.

To begin with, there are two classes of pain, animal and human, which however intimately they may be connected must, for clearness, be considered apart. The universality of pain throughout the range of the animal world, reaching back into the distant ages of geology, and involved in the very structure of the animal organism, is without doubt among the most serious problems which the Theist has to face. But it is a problem in dealing with which emotion is very often mistaken for logic. J. S. Mill's famous indictment of nature, for example, is one of the most emotional pieces of rhetoric of which a professed logician was ever guilty. When a certain class of facts is urged in objection to our Christian belief, we are entitled to ask how many of those facts are known, and how many are only imagined. There is of course a scientific use of the imagination, but it is only permissible within the bounds of possible, or at least conceivable, verification. Imaginative conjectures which, from the nature of the case, will never admit either of verification or disproof are poetry and not science, and must be treated as such in argument. With all the changes that have passed over our knowledge, we may still do well to attend to the caution with which Butler begins his Analogy:--

'One cannot but be greatly sensible how difficult it is to silence imagination enough to make the voice of reason even distinctly heard; as we are accustomed from our youth up to indulge that forward delusive faculty, ever obtruding beyond its sphere; of some assistance indeed to apprehension, but the author of all error: as we plainly lose ourselves in gross and crude conceptions of things, taking for granted that we are acquainted with what indeed we are wholly ignorant of.'

This needs repeating, because much of the popular knowledge of the day consists in the acceptance of results without examination of the methods of their attainment; somewhat as, in the countryman's simple faith, a thing must needs be true because he has seen it in a book. While the case in point is further confused by the fact that imagination has an important bearing on all our conduct towards the lower animals, and cannot, for that purpose, be too emotionally developed. But it is one thing to err on the safe side in practice, and another to convert such possible error into argument.

What then do we really know about the suffering of animals? No reasonable man doubts that they suffer. But the degree and intensity of their suffering is almost entirely a matter of conjecture. We speak of, and are affected by the mass of animal suffering; but we must remember that it is felt distributively. No one animal suffers more because a million suffer likewise. And what we have to consider is the amount which an individual animal suffers. We have no knowledge, but we are entitled to meet conjecture by conjecture. We may fairly suppose that the animals do not 'look before and after,' and it is this that gives its sting to human pain. Again, they would seem like children to give strong indications of slight pain. Further, many muscular contortions which simulate extreme suffering are believed on scientific evidence to be due to quite other causes. And then there are the phenomena of fascination, which may well resemble the experience of Livingstone in the lion's mouth. While many pains are prophylactic and directly contribute to the avoidance of danger and maintenance of life. All these considerations may mitigate our view of animal suffering. But a stronger argument is to be drawn from our profound ignorance of the whole question. Animals can perceive colours invisible to us; they seem to have organs of sensation of whose nature we know nothing; their instincts are far more numerous and finer than our own; what compensations may they not have? Again, what are they? Had they a past? May they not have a future? What is the relation of their consciousness to the mighty life which pulses within the universe? May not Eastern speculation about these things be nearer the truth than Western science? All these questions are in the region of the unknown, and the unknowable; and in face of them the Theistic position is simply this. We believe, on complex and cumulative proof, in an omnipotent and benevolent Creator. That belief is a positive verdict of our reason, interpreting evidence which we consider irresistible. And against such a conclusion no presumption of the imagination, which from the nature of the case cannot possibly be verified, has any logical validity at all: not to mention that such presumptions admit of being met by as probable presumptions on the other side. We decline to arraign our Creator for a deed which we have not even the means of knowing that He has done.

'All difficulties as to how they (the animals) are to be disposed of are so apparently and wholly founded in our ignorance that it is wonderful they should be insisted upon by any but such as are weak enough to think they are acquainted with the whole system of things.'... 'What men require is to have all difficulties cleared; and this is, or at least for anything we know to the contrary it may be, the same as requiring to comprehend the Divine nature, and the whole plan of providence from everlasting to everlasting[148].'

But with human suffering the case is different, for here we are in a measure behind the scenes. We watch the process no longer from the outside but from within; and though it still remains mysterious, its mystery is full of meaning. In saying this we make two assumptions; first, that moral evil is an ultimate fact for us, in our present state of being, in the sense that it can neither be explained nor explained away: and, secondly, that character and not pleasure, being, and not feeling, or to phrase it more generally, the greatest goodness of the greatest number, is the primary end of ethics. The first of these assumptions most men are willing to admit, while the few philosophical attempts to disprove it have conspicuously failed. The second has the assent of all moralists except the hedonists, and those who without being aware of it are hedonists in disguise; the pessimism, for example, which makes so much of pain, being simply disappointed hedonism. Starting then from these premises, the problem of practical ethics is the formation of character in the face of moral evil. And in the solution of this problem pain and sorrow have a place which no other known agency conceivably could fill.

To begin with its simplest if lowest aspect, pain is a punishment; and without importing any _a priori_ notions into the question, we find punishment to be a necessary element in the evolution of character. Punishment is a complex thing, and the tendency of civilization is to lay stress upon its corrective rather than its vindictive aspect. But we must remember that with uncivilized races this cannot be the case; and that pains and penalties, considered simply as retrospective vengeance for the past, have been historically, and in some cases still are, essential to our social development. Indeed, it is a shallow view that regards vengeance as a survival of savagery. Vengeance is intimately bound up with our sense of justice, and the true difference between the savage and the sage is that what the one eagerly inflicts upon his neighbour, the other would far more willingly inflict upon himself. Plato expressed this once for all when he said that the sinner who is punished is happier than the sinner who escapes scot free. We rightly shrink, as far as possible, from sitting in judgment on our fellow-men; but we feel none the less that our own ill deeds demand a penalty, which may vary from bodily suffering to interior shame, but which in one form or another must be endured before we can recover our self-respect. And self-respect is a necessary factor in all moral progress. Punishment, then, considered as vengeance, is a necessity for the social development of barbarous races; and though less obviously, quite as really for the personal progress of the civilized man.

Now, without committing ourselves to the statement that suffering was introduced into the world by sin, which is not a Christian dogma, though it is often thought to be so, a vast amount of the suffering in the world is obviously punishment, and punishment of a very searching kind. For not only are obvious vices punished with remorse, and disease, and shame, but ignorance, impatience, carelessness, even mistakes of judgment are punished too, and that in a degree which we are apt to consider disproportionate; forgetful that consequences are God's commentaries, and this apparent disproportion may reflect light upon the real magnitude of what we often are too ready to consider trivial things.

But these punishments, it is urged, fall on the innocent as well as the guilty. And this leads us to another point of view. Pain is not only punitive. It is also corrective and purgatorial. And this again is a fact of ordinary experience, quite apart from the further consideration of why it should be so. Among primitive races the penalties of law, by the merely mechanical process of forcibly restraining certain actions, slowly elevate the social tone. And as men rise in the scale of development and begin to be a law to themselves, the same process is continued within the individual mind. The pains and penalties of evil doing, physical and mental, tend to correct and purify the character; and when we say that men learn wisdom by experience, we mostly mean by experience of something painful. Of course, the most obvious form of this correction is that in which the suffering can be recognised by the sufferer as merited, because due to his own misdeeds. But apart from such causal connection, what we call unmerited suffering exercises the same influence in an even greater measure. Its forces, not being exhausted in the work of neutralising past evil, are able to expand and expend themselves in a positive direction, elevating, refining, dignifying the character to an infinite degree. The men of sorrows are the men of influence in every walk of life. Martyrdom is the certain road to success in any cause. Even more than knowledge, pain is power. And all this because it develops the latent capacities of our being as no other influence can. It requires no mystic insight to see the truth of this. However unable we may be to account for it, it is a fact of everyday experience, visible to ordinary common sense. And this being so, there is nothing of necessity unjust in what we call unmerited suffering, not even in the sad inheritance by children of the results of parental sin. For while the sight of the miserable entail may, if rightly used, become the parent's punishment, its imposition may be the child's call to higher things. True, like all other useful agencies, it often fails of its end; but such failure is of the problem of evil, not of the problem of pain.

And, lastly, with men, as with animals, suffering is largely prophylactic. Bodily pain sounds the alarm bell of disease in time for its removal. Mental and moral pain arrest the issues of ignorant or evil courses before it is too late. While the desire to remove pain from ourselves, or better still from others, is among the strongest incentives of the scientific discoverer, the patriot, the philanthropist. And though it may seem a fallacy to credit pain with the virtues which spring from the desire for its removal, common sense rises above logic and recognises the real value of a spur without which many of our noblest activities would cease.

Now, though all these considerations naturally lead on into theology for their further treatment, yet it should be noticed that they are in no sense exclusively theological. The penal, the corrective, the preventive, and the stimulating uses of pain are all recognised in the average man's philosophy of life. Indeed, they are too obvious to need dwelling on at any length. But the point to be noticed is, that taken together, they cover a very great deal of ground. For it is hardly too much to say that in one or other of its various aspects, every human being has need of suffering for the due development of his character. And this is a fact which should go far to outweigh much brilliant declamation of the pessimists. Pessimism, in fact, stereotypes and gives a fictitious permanence to what is only one among our many moods of thought. It harps upon the fact that we naturally shrink from pain. It ignores the fact that we are conscious of being the better for it, and unable to conceive progress without it. And though these considerations afford no solution to the speculative mystery of pain, they make in the direction of a speculative solution. They do not explain why pain exists, but they shew us that its existence, in the only region in which we can really test it, is eminently useful, and therefore consistent with providential and beneficent design. Their precise logical relation to the Theistic argument might be put as follows: Arguments drawn from many departments of life and thought converge in favour of Theism, but one large and important department, that of human suffering, blocks the way. When, however, we isolate and examine that department, we find that even within its limits the evidence of provident purpose is prominent, if not preponderant. Its prominence is certainly enough to neutralize the negative bearing of the department upon the general argument. Its preponderance, which many if not most men would admit, carries us further and makes the net evidence of the whole department an affirmative contribution to Theism.

So far common sense carries us. But when we turn to the place of pain in the religions of the world, two further thoughts are suggested. In the first place, the belief in a future life, which is common to almost all religions, at once opens endless vistas of possibility before us. The pain which has failed to purify here, may yet purify hereafter; the high-handed wrong-doing, which has seemed to go unpunished here, may there meet with its righteous due. The pains which we have thought excessive here, may there be found to have worked out for us a far more exceeding weight of glory. And so the particular difficulty which arises from the unequal incidence of earthly suffering may one day find its adequate solution. No doubt there is an element of truth in the familiar taunt that belief in a future life has been a curse as well as a blessing to the world. In some stages of culture, for example, the future life has been supposed only to emphasize the inequalities of the present: the slave living on in everlasting slavery, and the warrior in incessant war. But this has been a partial and a passing phase of thought, which rapidly gave way before more ethical conceptions. The ethical conceptions in their turn, which were based on future rewards and punishments, confessedly could not produce a very high type of morality. But they have filled their place, and that a large one in the history of human development, while even after ceasing to be the dominant motives, they still witness to the ineradicable expectation of our race, that holiness and happiness, sin and failure, shall one day coincide. More serious and sad is the fact that distorted dreams of future punishment have often reflected a lurid light upon the whole of life; goading zealots into cruelty, sinners into madness, thinkers into unbelief; and have lingered on, as savage survivals, even into Christian times, to the hopeless obscuration, in many minds, of the creed that God is Love. But even here we must draw distinctions. Early races express intensity by an accumulation of material metaphors--fecundity by an hundred breasts, omnipotence and omniscience by an hundred arms or a thousand eyes. And so, when they saw the unrighteous man enjoy the fruits of his unrighteousness, and die in unrebuked defiance of laws human and divine, their sense of outraged justice could not but express itself in terms of material horror. We have grown to be more pitiful, more refined in our moral thinking, less dogmatic about unknown things: yet neither our moral experience nor our Christianity has availed to remove the dread of that unutterable 'pain of loss,' which the passing of a soul in obdurate impenitence has ever suggested to the mind of man. And however confidently therefore we may put aside the distortions, and debasements, and interested exaggerations which have darkened the thought of future punishment, we must remember that the thought itself was no alien introduction into history; but due to the instinctive craving of the human heart for justice; man's own tremendous verdict on his sin[149]. But the universality, or at least extreme generality of the belief in a continued existence, is quite distinct from the particular pictures of it which the imagination has variously drawn; much as the universality of conscience is distinct from its varying content among diverse races and in different ages. And the broad fact remains that from the dawn of history the majority of mankind have believed in and looked with confidence to a future life to rectify, and therefore justify, the inequalities of earthly suffering; however much their views have varied as to what should constitute rectification.

Secondly, there is an instinctive tendency in all religions, from the savage upwards, to view pain, whether in the form of asceticism or sacrifice, as inseparably connected with an acceptable service of the gods or God. The asceticism of poor Caliban foregoing his little mess of whelks, and that of the Hindoo whose meritorious sufferings are expected to prevail, by intrinsic right with heaven; the hideous holocausts of Mexico, and the paper substitutes for offerings of the parsimonious or hypocritical Chinee are widely different things. But they all spring from a common instinct, variously distorted, yet persistent through all distortions, and progressively refined, till it culminates in the Hebrew substitution of the broken heart for the blood of bulls and of goats. It is the custom of some modern writers to represent the higher forms of sacrifice as merely survivals of the savage desire to propitiate the gods by food. But this is not an adequate analysis even of the savage creed. Naturally enough the primitive hunter, to whom food is the chief good, may think food the worthiest offering to the gods. But it is not simply food, but his own food, that he offers, the choicest morsel, that which it costs him something to forego. In other words, the root of sacrifice is self-sacrifice, however crudely it may be expressed. Of course, the primitive hypocrite would seek to evade personal suffering as naturally as the civilized hypocrite will give alms at another man's expense. But sincerity must come before hypocrisy, and the sacrificial instinct is in origin sincere. Its first account of itself may be irrational, and its earlier manifestations often blundering and repulsive; and if it were now only a survival, the same should be true of its later forms, for survivals are not commonly improved in the process of surviving. But so far from this being the case, it has been refined by successive developments and is as integral an element of later as of earlier religions, being in fact the symbolic statement that a more or less painful self-surrender is the necessary condition of all human approach to the divine. Natural religion then, in the widest use of the term, carries us on beyond common sense, in attributing a mysterious value to suffering here, and expecting an explanation of its anomalies hereafter. The first belief may be called mystical, the second hypothetical, and yet the two together have done more to reconcile man to his burden of sorrow than all the philosophic comments on the uses of adversity; for they have seemed to lift him, though blindfold, into a loftier region, where he felt himself inbreathing power from on high. And so here, as in other things, natural religion leads on into Christianity.

The relation of Christianity to the problem of pain, may be best seen by contrasting it with the empirical optimism of common sense. Enlightened common sense, as we have seen, is fully aware of the uses of sorrow; but it looks at the usefulness through the sorrowfulness, as a compensation which should make the wise man content to bear his pain. The change which Christianity has effected consists in the reversal of this view of the subject. Once for all, it has put the value before the painfulness in our thoughts. The Author and Finisher of our faith, 'for the joy that was set before Him, endured the Cross, despising the shame,' and 'our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding weight of glory, while we look not at the things which are seen but at the things which are unseen.' It bids us not wait 'till the sorrow comes with years,' but take up our cross, from the first moment of our conscious discipleship. And accordingly the real Christian looks at sorrow not from without, but from within, and does not approach its speculative difficulty till he is aware by experience of its practical power. Consequently he cannot explain himself to the merely external critic. He may urge in argument such general considerations as have been touched upon above, and meet the pleas of pessimism with the counterpleas of philosophic optimism; but if pressed for the inner secret of his own serenity, he can only answer with the esoteric invitation, 'Come and see.' Enter the dim sanctuary of sorrow through the shadow of the Cross. Abide there, and as your eyes grow accustomed to the darkness, the strange lines upon its walls which seemed at first so meaningless, will group themselves into shapes and forms of purposeful design.

Once for all the sinless suffering of the Cross has parted sin from suffering with a clearness of distinction never before achieved. The intellectual Greek had tended to confuse the two as kindred forms of ignorance; the weary Oriental as kindred consequences of our imprisonment in the body, 'the too too solid flesh;' the self-righteous Jew viewed blindness, or death from a falling tower, as evidence of exceptional sin. Everywhere in the ancient world the outlines of the two were undefined, and their true relation of antagonism misunderstood. But the sight of perfect sinlessness, combined with perfect suffering, has cleared our view for ever. Sin indeed always brings suffering in its train, but the suffering we now see to be of the nature of its antidote; an antidote often applied indeed with inexorable sternness, but in its intention wholly merciful. Thus every sin has its appropriate suffering. Bodily indulgence brings bodily disease; cruelty ends in cowardice; pride and vanity in shame. And though the suffering of itself cannot convert the sinner, it can and does prevent both the gratification and contagion of the sin. Then comes the more terrible sorrow of remorse; and remorse is potential penitence, and penitence potential purification. But while sin thus involves suffering, suffering does not involve sin. It is not only an antidote, but one of those antidotes which taken in time is prophylactic. And this is not only true of the pains of self-denial and self-sacrifice, the voluntary bearing of the cross, but of many an involuntary sorrow also. Delicate health, Plato's bridle of Theages, inherited pain, privation, bereavement, may all refine the character and train the spiritual eye to that purity of heart that shall see God. Pain in fact, in its manifold methods, is like the angel of the Eastern story, changing its form incessantly to cope with the shifting shapes of sin, and passing by turns into a lion, a bird, a sword, a flood, a flame, in sleepless eagerness to follow and find, and slay and quench and burn away the least last lingering particle of evil. So far from being our enemy it is our safest ally in the battle of life, and we fail through shrinking from the stern alliance. We suffer because we sin; but we also sin because we decline to suffer.

Still, the very sharpness of the severance between sin and suffering on the Cross forces upon us the further question--Why should the sinless suffer? The vicarious suffering of Christ is said to conflict with our sense of justice. And it does so, as misrepresented in much popular theology. But rightly viewed, it is the climax and complete expression of the process to which we owe the entire evolution of our race. The pleasures of each generation evaporate in air; it is their pains that increase the spiritual momentum of the world. We enter into life through the travail of another. We live upon the death of the animals beneath us. The necessities, the comforts, the luxuries of our existence are provided by the labour and sorrow of countless fellow-men. Our freedom, our laws, our literature, our spiritual sustenance have been won for us at the cost of broken hearts, and wearied brains, and noble lives laid down. And this is only the human analogue of that transference of energy by which all life and movement is for ever carried on. The sun is so much the cooler by the heat it daily gives to earth; the plant and tree the weaker by the force that has matured their fruit; the animal generations exhausted in continuing their kind. And how should their Creator draw all men unto Him, but through the instrumentality of His own great law of sacrifice? If we shrink from our share in the conditions of the solemn legacy, it is easy to persuade ourselves that the system of things is wrong. But if we accept it, and resolve that we too in our turn will spend and be spent for others, we find beneath all the superficial suffering the deep truth of the benediction, 'It is more blessed to give than to receive.' And in the experience of that benediction we see further still into the mysterious significance of sorrow.

Further; but not yet to the end. For the human heart desires more than merely to work for others. It desires to be one with those for whom it works. Love is the highest form of that unity; but even short of actual love, we instinctively crave communion and sympathy with our kind. And it is no morbid view of life to say that sorrow brings about this union in a way that joy does not. There is something, under our present conditions, in the very expansiveness of joy which dissociates, while sorrow seems to weld us, like hammer strokes on steel. It is the nationality whose members have together struggled for existence, the soldiers who have faced the shock of battle side by side, the persecuted party, the husband and wife who have known common suffering that are most intimately, indissolubly one. Nor is this union merely negative like the bond which fellow-prisoners feel, and yet would eagerly escape from if they could. It is due to a distinct sense that the common crisis has aroused all that is highest and noblest and most spiritual, and therefore most sympathetic in the soul.

But again, it is only in the light from the Cross, that we can see why pain should possess this power. For in that light we understand how pain unites us to each other, because, as even natural religion dimly felt, it unites us to God, and therefore through Him to those who in Him live and move and have their being. It unites us to God because it purifies us, because it detaches us from earth, because it quickens our sense of dependence, because it opens our spiritual vision, and above all because He too, as man, has suffered. But the mystics who have seen furthest into heavenly things have felt that it unites us to God in still more vital wise, as being, at least in its form of sacrifice, the very beating of the heart of love. And so they have raised the question,--Has it not an antitype far in the illimitable depths of the unseen? For we are told that God is Love; and love, as we know it, must be shewn in sacrifice; though the sacrifice grows painless in proportion as the love is pure. And when we recall how in the days of our Lord's ministry on earth, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit bore their witness each to other, but no one of the Holy Persons ever to Himself, we are led on to wonder whether 'in the light that no man can approach unto,' where the Three are One, some higher analogue of what we call sacrifice does not for ever flame; whose radiant reflection on the universe only becomes shadow when it falls on a world of sin. But however these high things may be, the simplest Christian feels and knows that, in his present state, the unitive way, the way to union with both God and man, is the 'via dolorosa,' the way of the cross:--a serious and solemn belief, which is very far from leading to complacency, in presence of the awful spectacle of animal and human pain; but still is based on sufficient experience to justify the hope that all its mystery will be one day solved. More than this we do not expect, for the intellect, in our Christian view, is as much on its probation and as liable to error as the will; and inordinate curiosity not less misleading than inordinate desire.

[148] Butler, _Analogy_.

[149] Cf. pp. 514-16.