Don: Evil seems to be actualized by death and, perhaps even more, by pain. Not just physical pain, but emotional, psychological, economic, and conceivably spiritual pain.
As a doctor I deal with patients’ pain every day. Diagnosis is based to a large extent on defining their pain—its location, type, severity, and onset. When blood flow to an organ or limb is impeded, certain patterns of pain can lead vascular surgeons such as Charles to determine what might be wrong.
No normal person seeks or likes pain. Yet in serving as a warning system pain actually serves to do good. So is the link between pain and evil a valid link? The story of the Garden of Eden seems strongly to imply that God intended Wo/Mankind to live free from pain. Such a condition is specifically stated to obtain after the restoration of paradise:
…and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.” (Revelation 21:4)
It seems that the elimination of evil is accompanied by the elimination of pain, darkness, death, and sorrow. Does the absence of these then imply the absence of evil? Pain seems to be a common ingredient of evil and something that requires healing.
Is pain good or bad? In scripture, evil is rooted in the desire to be like god. In Genesis it was said that if Wo/Man were to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil they would become like god. The serpent said so and god himself acknowledged it after Adam and Eve had eaten the forbidden fruit. The same desire for godliness is stated in Isaiah:
“How you have fallen from heaven,
O star of the morning, son of the dawn!
You have been cut down to the earth,
You who have weakened the nations!
“But you said in your heart,
‘I will ascend to heaven;
I will raise my throne above the stars of God,
And I will sit on the mount of assembly
In the recesses of the north.
‘I will ascend above the heights of the clouds;
I will make myself like the Most High.’ (Isaiah 14:12-14)
Paul Brand, a neurosurgeon who specializes in leprosy, co-wrote (with Paul Yancey) the book The Gift of Pain, which analyzes an actual example of a world without pain: A leper colony. Lepers literally feel no pain in their diseased flesh and limbs, but the consequences of that freedom from pain are horrifying. Dr. Brand’s work among the lepers convinced him that pain is one of God’s greatest gifts, in alerting us when something goes wrong and needs our attention.
Leprosy was a common disease in biblical times (and is not uncommon today in India). When mentioned in scripture it is associated with evil: Lepers were banned from camp, required to shout “Unclean!” to warn people to stay clear of them, and so on. So in healing lepers, Jesus was taking people who were free from pain and making them capable of feeling pain!
So is pain the result of evil, or its antidote?
Robin: Pain is present only when something is wrong. It is not present when everything is fine. So pain is associated with bad things but I am not sure that makes pain bad in itself.
Joyce: Pain inflicted as discipline—on naughty children, for example—is a result of love and care (assuming it does not cross the boundary to real abuse, of course). But society is less and less tolerant of such discipline even while recognizing its utility. Similarly with change, which we often regard as painful but in our best interests. So pain is useful.
David: Pain itself is not the issue, not the evil. The presence of evil depends upon the motivation behind the cause of pain. To me it seems clear that pain that occurs through accident has no association with evil. Even the pain felt by the children of Sandy Hook as they were being shot was not the issue: The evil was not in the pain of the bullets tearing through them but in the extreme suffering—the fear, the terror, the helplessness—they must have felt.
Chris: Before the Fall, pain and evil did not exist as far as Adam and Eve were concerned. After the Fall, they were introduced first to physical pain (in Eve’s case, the pain of labor) but pain associated with evil perhaps originates with the Holy Spirit, the Inner Light, as a warning, an alert to the presence of evil. Some people live with chronic pain. Initially it seems unbearable but over time they become somewhat numbed to it. We need to be careful that we do not become numbed to pain associated with evil. Pain that is ignored can lead to something much worse. If the pain of appendicitis is ignored for long enough, the appendix will burst with much greater consequences than the pain of the appendicitis. So knowing pain is a good thing; the key is in how one deals with it.
Spiritual pain warns us that something is not god’s will. We need to heed the warning.
Ada: I have difficulty associating pain with evil. I don’t think they are related. Pain certainly indicates that something needs to be done but it does not necessarily indicate that something evil is happening to you.
Don: Is it possible to have evil without pain?
David: The mere anticipation of pain can cause fear and terror. If pain or the threat of it is caused or inspired by a normal human then it is evil. So to the extent that the gunman was normal, the murder of the children at Sandy Hook was evil. I keep seeing a public service appeal on TV for help for abused animals. It shows a badly beaten puppy, a starved horse, and so on. It is unbearable to watch, not because I feel the pain of their beatings and other privations but because I feel their bewilderment and terror of the evil as it was unleashed upon them.
Michael: You could say you feel their emotional pain.
David: Yes, that’s true.
Charles: The kingdom of Wo/Man is material, corporeal, and worldly. The kingdom of God is spiritual, faithful, and godly. Suffering, death, darkness, and pain are necessary conditions for reconciliation with God. Without them, it would be difficult to experience reconciliation, salvation; to return to the kingdom of god.
At Mass last week I was reminded that:
For since by a man came death, by a man also came the resurrection of the dead…. For He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet. The last enemy that will be abolished is death. (1 Corinthians 15:21 and 25-26)
So I see suffering, death, darkness, and pain as the product of the material, corporeal, and worldly kingdom of Wo/Man in which we must sojourn in order to reconcile with God and return to the life, light, and freedom from suffering of his spiritual, faithful, and godly kingdom. Pain and suffering are good for us because they push us inexorably away from the material, corporeal, and worldly and towards the spiritual, faithful and godly. They drive us along on our spiritual journey, and that is good.
Robin: Charles and Joyce are supported in this passage:
Furthermore, we had earthly fathers to discipline us, and we respected them; shall we not much rather be subject to the Father of spirits, and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good, so that we may share His holiness. All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness. (Hebrews 12:9-11)
Kiran: In my experience, anticipation magnifies pain. So I have learned to try to embrace it rather than recoil from it. If evil is the absence of goodness and heaven is nothing but goodness then it can contain no evil and therefore nothing that can inflict pain. A news video of a white Ferguson police officer alone in a crowd of demonstrators but hugging a frightened young black boy showed that he literally embraced his fears. He overcame animosity with goodness, and he defused a dangerous situation.
David: Jesus seemed fearful of something as his crucifixion drew near, but I doubt it was fear as trivial as fear of the physical pain of the nails.
Joyce: It was emotional pain driven by fear of separation from his father.
Robin: He experienced what should have been ours—fear of having no hope of reconciliation.
Joyce: Hopelessness would seem to be a particularly horrible form of suffering. Jesus took this burden from us; and yet, we are still left with it. The Jews suffered it to unimaginable extremes in the Holocaust. And yet there were non-Jews—people with no religious bond—who would risk their own children’s lives; be willing to undergo that much pain—to shelter Jews from the Nazis.
Robin: Indeed, there was no religious bond, but there certainly was a spiritual bond.
Joyce: Americans are hardly deprived compared to people in other parts of the world. Yet many of us try to avoid even mild pain. How would we deal with the kind of pain the Jews went through?
Robin: We can and do “switch off” when faced with the pain and suffering of others, but God cannot. He must endure it. We are responsible for God’s unimaginable suffering.
Joyce: On the other hand, if it was all God’s plan as we are told it is, why should we feel sorry for him? Why did he include the Holocaust in his plan? I worry more about the pain he allows to be inflicted on us than about the pain we inflict on him. It sounds on the face of it ridiculous that people who helped their Jewish neighbors avoid the Holocaust would risk their own children as an act of faith in the God who planned it.
David: Humanists argue that God will not step in to help but humans will; in other words, that humanity beats divinity in doing good. Our mortal and corporeal inability to comprehend the ways of a divine and spiritual God also render us incapable of imagining a world with no pain. In our world there has to be pain and suffering in order for us to perceive, value, and (from time to time) achieve a state of being free from pain and suffering. The balance of good and evil comes down even in this world largely on the side of good, and the balance of suffering and non-suffering comes down largely in favor of non-suffering. We suffer headaches, but for the vast majority of us who do not suffer migraines, headaches are a rarity occupying a tiny fraction of a percent of our lives. We can buy medicines for some of our pains, we can switch of the TV when confronted with painful images of suffering people and animals. Surely, God cannot; but that has to be his problem. We can and, through our humanity, we do tend to deal with the problems of our world. I believe that our humanity is driven by the divine spark of the Inner Light, by God. But I cannot go beyond that. How could I?
Chris: In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus was grieved to the point of death. He asked that the cup pass from him, but only as God willed. Since God wills goodness—loving God with all your heart, loving your neighbor as yourself—then by doing his will you help to relieve suffering in your fellow wo/man. If instead you do your own self-centered will then you are separating yourself from others and from God. We all would like to align his will with ours (rather than the other way around), but this is where we allow evil and the pain and suffering that accompany it to slip in.
Kiran: Joyce asked a very hard question. But I have to wonder: Did God allow the Holocaust, or did “I” allow it, through my failure to take action to stop it? I know the atrocities ISIS is committing in the Middle East and I am ignoring it, doing nothing about it. Surely there is something I could do, but I am not doing it. Maybe God has nothing to do with this.
Charles: Suffering is the first noble truth of Buddhism. To Buddhists, the cause of suffering is desire, and to end our suffering we have to let go of our desires. Evil crept in to the Garden when we chose our will, our desire, over God’s. As horrific as such suffering caused by events such as the Holocaust is, they lead us to desire peace, goodness, the fruits of the spirit—God. These are God’s will.
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