answer. We haven’t been told, as far as I know. We have been told the astonishing thing that for those who love God, all things work together for good. Now, that is hard to believe. I love Thornton Wilder’s novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey about a Franciscan priest, Brother Juniper, who is losing his faith. He is a scientist, and he asks God for some clues, just some clues. “Life is a mysterious tapestry,” he says. “I don’t expect to see the front side where God is weaving it, but some loose threads on the back side, they should make at least some sense.”
One day he reads in a paper that a rope bridge over this gorge has parted and five young people have fallen to their untimely deaths, and he is scandalized. He says this makes no sense at all; so, he makes a scientific investigation of their lives. He interviews family members and reads diaries and collects clues, and the result of the investigation is, he thinks, he gets just enough clues to believe; so, he concludes with a memorable sentence: “Some say that to the gods we are like flies swatted idly by boys on a summer’s day; others say that not a single hair ever falls from the head to the ground without the will of the heavenly father.” Both are possible choices.
Q: Is it possible to be happy without having ever suffered? Or are happiness and suffering mutually exclusive?
A: How can you be really happy if you’ve never suffered? You are a spoiled kid; you appreciate nothing. We appreciate things only by contrast. I just came from Hawaii. There was an international conference on arts and humanity. I thought it was a real conference; there were 1,687 people who went to that conference. They all delivered papers to about two or three people, and universities paid their way. It was just a scam to get to Hawaii. I’m a surfer; Hawaii is Mecca to me. But I didn’t really deep down enjoy myself. Why not?
I guess because I am a New England, puritanical, Calvinistic Red Sox fan; there is no suffering out there. Things are so perfect. I couldn’t live there. I would not appreciate the summer without the winter. You have to live through this kind of winter to appreciate the summer. And if we never died, we wouldn’t appreciate life.
There’s a fascinating book written about twenty years ago called The Immortality Factor by a Swedish journalist Osborn Segerberg Jr. He first interviewed geneticists about whether artificial immortality was theoretically possible, and most of them said, “Yes,” and that it will come in two hundred to three hundred years. Most scientific predictions, by the way, are much too long. It will probably come much earlier than that. That’s another story. Then he looked at the old myths about immortality and the science fiction stories. Both the old myths and the modern science fiction stories— such as the myth of Thesonius the Greek or the Wandering Jew or the Flying Dutchman or the book Tuck Everlasting or Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke— almost all said this would be horrible, the worst thing conceivable. Without death, life becomes meaningless.
Then, Segerberg went to the psychologists and asked what would happen. Most of them said, “Oh, this would be wonderful— the end of suffering, the end of fear. We would have utopia on earth.” He concluded that the myths were perhaps wiser than the psychologists. So, I guess we need suffering, because we’re very stupid, and if you’re very stupid, you have to have your nose rubbed in something, since you will appreciate something only by its contrast. I’m continually impressed by how stupid I am.
One of the most unpopular doctrines of Christianity is the doctrine of Original Sin. I have no difficulty at all believing that, because I know from my own experience that whenever I sin, I suffer, but I keep sinning. I wake up in the morning, and I get assaulted by a thousand little soldiers sticking pins into my brain and saying, “Think about this, think about this; worry about this, worry about this.” If I kill them ruthlessly and give God a little bit of time in the morning, I’m happy, and everything happens well in the day. And if I don’t, it doesn’t. If I don’t do it, I’m insane! We all are. So, we need to be slapped around a bit, I guess.
Q: I would love to hear your thoughts on reconciliation and the idea of suffering in the mind of somebody who believes he or she is unforgiven as the cause of suffering.
A: You would have to address their problem, which is the belief that there is something that is unforgiven. If God is totally good, he is not Scrooge. He does not forgive some things; he forgives all things. The only possible sin that cannot be forgiven is not accepting forgiveness, which is why in traditional Christian theology, pride is the worst of sins: “I am too good to be forgiven; there is nothing to forgive.”
Q: Follow-up question: I mean unforgiven by another person, who has caused suffering.
A: Oh, that is a very serious problem. Yes, I suppose the only refuge there would be is the belief that since God forgives them, they have to forgive themselves. In other words, it can’t be just a horizontal thing, because that is blocked very often. But if both the horizontal members are connected vertically, then in a way that I don’t think we usually understand, there can be a reconciliation that we don’t usually see. That is rather mystical, I guess. I think that works even in time. Since God is eternal, he can change the past. But we can’t see that, because we are in time.
Q: You mentioned Aquinas, and, as I recall, he was a very practical Aristotelian type of thinker. How would you compare his views that you gave tonight with Augustine, who always appeared to be more Socratic? How would you compare their two views on faith, hope, and love, and, in particular, on suffering?
A: In his encyclical Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason), Pope John Paul II speaks of faith and reason as the two wings of the dove— the human soul. I would say that within the intellect, Augustine and Aquinas are the two wings. Augustine is a wonderfully passionate thinker. There is nothing like The Confessions— a heart and a mind working at fever pitch together. I love the medieval statuary of Augustine. It always shows him with an open book in one hand and a burning heart in the other.
Aquinas, on the other hand, is a perfectly clear light, a perfect scientist. Augustine, you might say, is a mole burrowing through the deep mysteries, whereas Aquinas is the eagle soaring over it all, making a map. Together, they give you a great picture. Aquinas’s answer to that problem that he formulates, by the way, is wonderfully Augustinian in the sense that it is dramatic. It is not just an abstract philosophical concept. The problem is, how can there be God if there is evil? If one of two contraries is infinite, the other is destroyed. God is infinite goodness; if there were God, there would be no evil. There is evil; so, therefore, there is no God.
His answer— and he gets it from Augustine, who says that God would not allow any evil; God doesn’t do it, but he allows it through human free will. God would not allow any evil, unless his wisdom and power were such as to bring out of it an even greater good. The fairy-tale answer. We are not yet in the happily-ever-after; we are struggling toward it.
Q: I think that one of the most difficult problems that many of us have in dealing with the problems of suffering is not how we deal with them individually, but how other people deal with suffering, as we perceive it. At the end of the movie that is now certainly drawing an awful lot of comment, The Hours, one of the lead characters describes her choice that has to do with leaving her children with a very familiar phrase. Of course, in the movie you never really understand that she’s having a problem with this child; it’s revealed only at the end. The movie is about suicide, if you haven’t seen it. That is not the ending, which is much more dramatic; this is just a piece of it.
She says, “I chose to leave because I chose life.” Now, that is not ordinarily the application of that phrase— that a mother would leave her children in order to choose life. There really is a whole lot more to the film, if you haven’t seen it. I was just absolutely struck by the application of that phrase to what, to me, on the surface of it would be someone struggling to overcome
