THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING

THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING

By F . H. CLEOBURY

SOMEONE—I forget who—remarked of the 1755 earthquake that it

'destroyed Lisbon and the faith of Goethe'. And I heard recently of

a youth-club discussion in which the Aberfan disaster was deemed

by some to have disposed of the notion that there is a good God. In

my Conference lecture recorded in the October 1966 number of The

Modern Churchman I touched on the problem of evil and suffering.

I could not avoid this, for it was clearly relevant to the theodicy

involved in my treatment of the concept of Reality. But time did not

permit of my amplifying my reference to this problem, and I am

grateful, therefore, to the editor for allowing me to do so now.

In the 20th century we have come to recognise, as never before,

our human proneness to wishful thinking. In itself this is good, but

we must be careful lest it prompts us to over-compensate. In our

desire not to accept some view of life merely because it is comforting,

we can fall into a morbid suspicion of any philosophy that is in fact

comforting. We must avoid both extremes. Our metaphysic—our

overall view of the scheme-of-things—must be neither comfort-seeking

nor masochistic. We must aim at calm objectivity—at seeing life

steadily and seeing it whole.

Some Christian attempts to deal with this problem exhibit a

feature which I deplore. They give me the impression that the writer

is conducting a retreat—in the military sense. The suggestion seems

to be that belief in a good God is an inference from the good things

in life, and that it is only subsequently that we notice the bad things,

and so have to explain them away. In this process we give the impression

that we are withdrawing our advanced posts, and finally

taking up a position farther back—the position that in spite of the

pain of life it is sufficiently good, on the whole, to enable us to hold

on to our belief in a good God.

Now I object to this on three grounds. First, the process of explaining

away suggests to the onlooker, and even, subconsciously, to

ourselves, that our faith is wishful thinking. If faith is to be secure,

we shall reach it not by retreat but by advance, as I shall try to

show. Second, a Christian who thinks in this way has failed to

notice that the historic Christian faith was not, primarily, an inference

from the good things in life. Third, the problem demands,

and in the 20th century can receive, a much more radical treatment.

I will deal with the second point first, as it can be disposed of

briefly. The starting-point of the historical process leading to the

Christian conception O f God was not the discovery of happiness but

the discovery of the moral conscience—the explicit awareness of the

essential distinction between right and wrong and the inner obligation—

implanted in us by the nature of things—to choose the right.

(For example, Micah's 'What doth the Lord require of thee, but to

do justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?')

This at first led to inferences about God's dealings with man which

experience invalidated. There was the notion that goodness must lead

to earthly prosperity, and in common with all primitive peoples the

earliest thinking was in terms of the group—in this case the Jewish

nation. Before the time of Christ the deeper thinkers had to face the

fact that goodness is not always vindicated on earth, and that if God

is good at all He must be good to individuals. The theodicy which

Jesus accepted was individualistic and other-worldly.

I must now amplify my point that sound faith can be reached only

by advance, not by retreat. We must start from the rear; we must

seriously entertain the hypothesis that the worst is true. We shall

see reasons for being sceptical of this, as Browning's Bishop Blougram

discovered. We shall then find that the problem takes on a new form,

and this will bring us to my third point—that the problem demands,

and in the 20th century can receive, a much more radical treatment.

The thesis before us, then, is that human life has no overall significance

or purpose. With all our capacity for suffering we are but

the chance products of impersonal forces and are ultimately at their

mercy. Since there is no scheme-of-things, let alone a moral schemeof-

things, there is no guarantee that wickedness and folly will not

continue to dominate earthly life (and there is no other life) until it

is destroyed by the forces that created it. If intelligent people choose

to bring children into such a world it is only because they gamble on

the chance that their children will be among the lucky ones. If this

gamble does not come ofl?, their children will have a grievance against

them. Such a Universe is in effect (though not in intention since

there is no overall Intention) an evil Universe.

Now as a philosopher I must not reject this view merely because

I do not like it. If I am to reject it, it must be because there are

intellectual objections to it. One strikes me at once; it is open to

precisely the same charge as is the shallow optimism of wishful

thinking; it is not based on a calm, synoptic appraisal of all the facts.

For one thing, if a humane and fully rational person believed it, and

had the courage to oppose conventional ethics, he would advocate

the suicide of the human race. This would not mean that he would

advocate the extermination of those already alive; the desired result

could be obtained by a universal refusal to have children. If an

atheist disputes my inference it will show that he does not, in his

heart, accept the pessimistic diagnosis. But he cannot have it both

ways. He cannot at one and the same time claim that the human

situation is so hopeless that there obviously cannot be a good God,

and so hopeful that it is obviously our duty to continue the human

experiment.

So we can begin an advance from the line of complete pessimism.

And the advance can continue for some distance. There is no need

for me to argue this in detail; most of the points I should make would

not be novel to thoughtful people. Broadly speaking, the thesis would

be that sophisticated, detached thinkers tend to exaggerate the suffering

of life. Ordinary people, who are more concerned with life than

with thinking about life, find life good on the whole, and cling to it.

With regard to the suffering of animals, there are sound reasons for

believing that the lower the scale of life, the less the capacity for

suffering—physical and mental. Even primitive men must have been

able to endure, and to find pleasure, in circumstances from which

civilised people nowadays would recoil. One of the most hopeful

features of modern life is our increased sympathy with children, but

mothers are usually less sentimental than grandparents. Children are

in some ways tough-minded. One hesitates to publicise any truth

which people could twist into a justification of complacency over

the sufferings of others, but one ought to be fair, even to God.

It becomes clear, then, that if we start from the pessimistic rear

we find that the facts—not merely our wishes—compel an advance

to a dualism. Life is not all joy but it is not all pain. This is a platitude,

but the point I am trying to make is so far from platitudinous that

it is often overlooked. We overlook it when we speak of the problem

of evil, or the problem of suffering. For if it is a dualism that creates

our problem, there is just as much justification for speaking of a

problem of good, or a problem of happiness. By stressing the point

that the problem lies in a dualism, we are now in a position to ask

the right question. Students of logic are well aware that not only

answers, but questions, can be wrong, for among the many fallacies

we have to avoid is the fallacy of 'Many questions', the smuggling

of questionable assumptions into our questions. The stock instance

is 'Have you given up beating your wife?'. Philosophy is largely a

matter of getting our questions right. If we can do this, we sometimes

find they answer themselves.

The first step, then, in dealing with the problem of suffering, as

we call it, is to see that it is created by a dualism. One incidental

advantage of this is that it enables us to use a type of argument which

we should otherwise have to dismiss as invalid. For example, if I

postulate a good God merely on the grounds of the good things in

life, and then include anaesthetics in my list of the good things, I

expose myself to the retort that an all-powerful Being would not have

needed to create anaesthetics; he could simply have refused to permit

pain. But the position is different if I am concerned, at the moment,

only to insist on a dualism—to insist that there are empirical grounds

for postulating a power, not ourselves (as Matthew Arnold put it)

that works for righteousness, and, I might add, that combats pain.

This justifies my putting anaesthetics in my list. For aught I can see,

there might very well have been no anaesthetics, and it is certainly

significant that the very developments in the human psyche which

increased sensitivity to pain led to the discovery of an antidote.

But the human intellect revolts against the notion of an ultimate

dualism—the dualism expressed by saying, in popular language, that

there is a good God and a bad Devil. Still more does it revolt against

the sheer pluralism involved in language about good and evil forces

at work in the Universe. We are satisfied with nothing less than a

coherent world-view, and the notion of coherence contains the notion

of unity. It is the revolt against pluralism that brought pure science

into being. If a scientist can introduce systematic unity into his data

to the extent of deducing them from three basic principles, this is a

great triumph. It will become a greater one if he can reduce the three

to two, but he will still feel the urge to see the two as connected, as

features of a final unity. You may say, of course, that human demands

are one thing, but that objective facts are another, and that our

demand for system and unity is no evidence of objective system or

unity. But this is to overlook the point that we, including our basic

instincts, are what we are because Reality is what it is; we are

organic to the nature-of-things—are part of it. The burden of proof

lies on him who asserts that there is no connection between otu*

innate mental categories and reality. Actually we do not find ourselves

demanding that Reality shall be a consistent, coherent whole; we find

ourselves assuming that if what is before our minds is incoherent, it

is to that extent not reality but only appearance. The triumphs of

pure science encourage us to trust our reasoning powers. The most

dissolving of all scepticisms is scepticism about the validity of

reasoning, for it invalidates all serious thought about anything whatsoever.

There seems, moreover, to be a connexion between the

mystic's insight that Reality is The One, and the rationalist's conviction

that Reality must be a system, a unity-in-diversity. For man, too,

is ideally a unity. There is logic in mysticism, and mysticism in logic.

We now begin to see the form which our question must take. If

we are content to use metaphors, we can ask whether goodness lies

deeper in Reality than does evil, or whether there are grounds for

thinking that goodness reveals the purpose in the scheme-of-things

whereas evil distorts it. Or, eschewing metaphor and using the language

of logic, we can ask whether, since we refuse to see good and

evil as co-ordinate, we can subordinate good to evil or evil to good.

Or we may ask whether it is easier to account for evil in a good world

than for good in an evil world. We can best tackle this type of

question by appealing to the obvious consideration that the goodness

which we deem to be the highest value is quite other than mere

innocence, and can have come into being only in a world like this,

where people suffer and are tempted to do wrong. But we must use

great care in developing this argument. We must not, for example,

imagine God as one Being among other beings in the tim.e series like

ourselves, as having at some past time 'made' the world as a carpenter

makes a box, and as then being confronted with the necessity of

creating evil in order that a greater good may come. This would leave

us with a finite 'God', an unresolved dualism—indeed, a pluralism.

It is m.yth and metaphor, not metaphysic, for it imagines God as in

the time series, as just one of us. God cannot rightly be conceived

as 'making' a world as men make material objects.

How, then, must we proceed to develop our thesis of the subordination

of evil to good? I will begin with an illustration. In 1845

the astronomer Leverrier discovered an apparent irregularity in the

orbit of the planet Mercury which was never satisfactorily explained

in the 19th century. But in 1881, working in a quite different field,

namely an attempt to calculate the velocity of the earth relative to

the alleged 'ether' by measuring the velocity of light in different directions

over a distance of a few miles, Michelson obtained a very

mysterious result which was not finally explained until, in 1905,

Einstein enunciated the Special Theory of Relativity. Now one of

the reasons for the universal acceptance of Einstein's theory by

scientists was that it provided an adequate solution not only of the

problem set by Michelson's discovery but also of problems in other

fields, including the problem of the orbit of Mercury. Conversely, the

problem of Mercury was felt to be solved precisely because the

solution was not an ad hoc one—was not an additional postulate

thought up to explain away this particular difficulty, but because the

Theory of Relativity just took the Mercury problem in its stride. In

much the same way the problem of suffering is best dealt with not

by an ad hoc attempt—an attempt to explain it away—but by work

in another field—Epistemology or the Theory of Knowledge—which

will take our experience of suffering in its stride.

Any sound study of human knowledge, as philosophy since Descartes

has recognised, must concern itself with the limitations of

finite knowledge as such. We can say, paradoxically, that human

thought's greatest triumph is its explicit recognition of its limitations.

We are not so limited as the animals, for they are unaware of their

limitations. In a sense we transcend our limitations in recognising

them. People often shake their heads at philosophy and say 'The

ultimate mysteries are beyond us', without pausing to reflect that if

we can say that human knowledge does not satisfy the criteria of

ideal knowledge we must have at least some formal knowledge of

those criteria. Our intellectual dissatisfaction with our human knowledge

is due to the fact that in spite of the great advances the best

minds have made, our world-story does not entirely 'hang together',

i.e. it is still incoherent, and it is still brute-factual, i.e. contingent.

We can see, moreover, that our intellectual limitations could not be

transcended unless we could transcend our awareness of reality as a

succession of events, i.e. as in the time order. Belief in God is belief

in an Objective Mind which eternally achieves the ideal that for ever

eludes us. For us, reality-awareness is an ideal; for God it is real, is

actual. Indeed, we define 'reality' as 'the universe-as-God-knows-it'.

Finite beings, then, can know truths but not Truth. We can have

mental pictures which are true for limited purposes, but we cannot

combine them into one over-all picture of complete consistency and

coherence. This is not, however, to say that all human knowledge, as

such, is illusion. There is a sharp distinction between truth and error

within the sphere of our limited human knowledge. We must not,

with certain religious cults, dismiss evil and pain as 'unreal', for the

word 'real', in ordinary discourse, implies something which we have

to take account of, something which afiects our actions. I can walk

through an imaginary or illusory wall; I have to scramble over a real

one. Evil and pain are obviously 'real' in that sense. There must,

moreover be something in the Divine awareness corresponding to my

experience of evil, but God sees it in a context which eternally

redeems it.

The two basic contrasts, then, between God's reality-awareness

and our finite awareness are that the former transcends our timeawareness,

and that the former grasps reality as systematic or ordered,

whereas we experience disorder or conflict. Pursuing the ideal of

coherence, we try to see a connexion between these two forms of

contrast. It then occurs to us that if those time-transcending attributes

of God-in-Himself of which we have only bare, formal knowledge

are to reveal themselves to us empirically in the time series, it may

well be that they can reveal themselves only as in conflict with their

opposites. If the real is to be revealed in time it must be revealed as

an ideal, to be attained gradually, by using means to ends, i.e. it

must be purposive or teleological. The Divine system must be seen

as seeking to produce order out of disorder. In so far as evolution

operates at all, it is essentially this, whether as seen by biologist or

by sociologist.

The conflict between good and evil is clearly connected with—is.

indeed, an aspect of—the conflict between order and disorder. We

feel moral approval for the ordered or integrated life—whether

individual or social. Moreover, the dawn of self-consciousness, a stage

nearer the Divine awareness, was also the dawn of conscious altruism

which could rise to the height of self-sacrifice.

Our belief, then, that it is the good side of the dualism of good

and evil that reveals God is no arbitrary one; it is not merely wishful

thinking. It stems from rational conclusions reached by studies in

another field altogether—studies of the relation of human experience

to Reality. It can be taken up into a wider generalisation, namely

that the empirical real which forces itself on us in the immediate

here-and-now is continuous with a transcendent Real which actually

fulfils our ideals—intellectual, moral and aesthetic.

The Christian answer to the problem of suffering involves a ruthless

rejection of some familiar modes of speech and their accompanying

mental pictures. We must reject the myth of the God in the timeorder

who 'made' a world long ago and created, or at least permitted,

evil. The key-concept is not 'making' but 'revealing'. The Old Testament

speaks of God as dwelling in thick darkness; His ways are not

our ways nor His thoughts our thoughts. We could know Him only

as He revealed Himself. And amid all the uncertainties in the field

of Christian origins there is at least one final certainty, namely that

because Jesus lived and died, and because his disciples were convinced

that he still lived, there was born into the world the faith

that the highest and deepest revelation of God is the sacrificial love

with which the Spirit of God can fill the hearts of men. For Christians

this has always meant that although men now see through a glass

darkly, they can one day see face to face.