At the start the object of this book was stated. It was the health of the intellect, which is sanity. Sanity involves seeing what is; in relation to ourself it means seeing what we are, where we are, what life is about. Our object was to come mentally to citizenship of the real world, that we might be at home in it, familiar with it— knowing its realities and its laws, knowing how to conduct ourselves in it. And all this not merely as something known, so that if questioned about it we could answer correctly, but as something seen, as a kind of landscape in which the mind habitually lives: not something that we have to recall when some special occasion arises, but something that we see as a matter of course when we see anything at all. From all that has gone before, it is evident that the fullest possession of this whole vision of reality— without which no individual section of reality is intelligible— is made possible only when we receive the supernatural virtue of Faith and gift of Understanding. We are now in position to make some rather summary survey of the reality which now lies before the mind's gaze.
Notice in the first place how vast an enlargement of the universe it is. Man has built walls around and about him, through which no light of infinity can break, rather like an eccentric millionaire who, having inherited a mansion, chooses to live in the coal cellar. It is a kind of insanity within an insanity to have built the walls of our own prison. Even without Faith, the powers of the mind were sufficient to blow those self-invented walls away and see something of infinity and eternity and its own kinship with both. But the awareness the mind could get for itself is only a pallid shadow of what the revelation of God lays wide open to Faith. There is an increase beyond measure in the range of things we are aware of and in the vividness of our awareness.
We are aware of God, Infinite and Eternal, and we are in vitalizing contact with Him, loved by Him, utterly certain, in Dame Julian's phrase, that "love is His meaning". If our only deficiency were to be less than He, this awareness would still be a marvellous thing. But in the actual fact of us, with an abyss of nothingness at the core of our being always tormenting us and drawing us towards it, it is vital that we should grasp and use every existent fact of kinship, and possibility of contact, with the Infinite.
We are aware of the spiritual world, not simply of the reality that is under our noses but of all that is. We live in a universe where angels good and evil and souls of living and dead are greater realities than the bodies which throng upon our awareness so powerfully by way of senses and imagination. We are saved from the intellectual destitution that comes of being aware of a teeming material world beneath us, and above us only emptiness.
We are aware of the human race, and our membership of it, of its movement through time and of our place in the movement. As part of that awareness, we are aware of our membership of Christ and so of one another.
We are aware of ourself and of the war within ourself. Above all we know what by no supreme effort of the mind we could have ever so dimly suspected— the grandeur of our own nature, which God could take and make His own. We see our life as a road with a beginning and a goal, for we know the realities from which, through which, and to which it proceeds. In the only true sense of an abused phrase, we know the facts of life.
We know not only that spirit is real and valuable, but that matter is real and valuable: no one who knows the dignity of matter will under-rate the dignity of labour.
We
know totality, so that we do not mistake parts for wholes, giving them a
sufficiency which they have not and expecting from them a satisfaction which
only the whole can give.
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The plain blunt man finds all this rather complicated. He has a plain blunt feeling that religion should be simple: why? Because it would be simpler that way. In plain truth he does not want to have to use his mind on religion, but only his emotions— his mind being needed for more pressing matters: and indeed even emotion is too strong a word for what has become only an uncertain sentiment turning to vapour.
This attitude is at once so curious and so widespread that it is worth a second look. As it happens, it is only in regard to religion that men demand this sort of barbaric simplification. In science for instance, they take mystery and complexity for granted. Imagine how the plain blunt man would snort if it was the Church and not science which taught that the sun does not go round the earth. Incomprehensible nonsense, he would call it: a lot of mystification: why, hang it, he has seen the sun moving across the sky. But since science teaches it, he not only does not snort, he actually purrs. He is pleased with the mysteriousness of the universe, feeling, reason-ably enough, that it confers a certain mysteriousness upon him. "Wonderful fellow Einstein," he chuckles delightedly, "only six men in the world understand him."
However superficially silly the expression of this attitude may be, or however profoundly silly the man may be who expresses it, yet there is great truth in it. Reality is mysterious and highly complex; science is right to see it so and to say it so, and the layman is right to find a certain joy in it and a sense that he is the gainer by it. But if science is rightly complex in its explanation of part of reality, why must religion be simple in its explanation of the whole of reality? Religion is not something distinct from reality and unrelated to it. It is (among other things) a light by which we see reality. It is hard that the explanation of the lowest section should be praised for complexity, and indeed incomprehensibility, while for the whole some rule of thumb explanation must be found which calls for no effort of mind at all.
What we see of science, applies to the natural life of man as a whole: it would be horribly impoverished by the kind of simplification proposed for religion. But there is another point. Like most vital functions, religion is complex to analyse, but simple in operation. Complexity in structure actually simplifies things for us. Breathing, for instance, is a simple and satisfying operation resulting from a highly complicated mechanism. Eliminate some of the elements of the mechanism by which we breathe, and breathing would cease to be simple, and might even cease to be breathing. Simplicity, indeed, is one of those qualities which has suffered from being praised without much thought. One leg is simpler than, that is half as complicated as, two; but to have only one leg would complicate walking. Similarly to explain life by one principle, either spirit or matter, would be simpler than to explain it by two. But it would leave life quite inexplicable.
In fact the mind, enabled by faith and its own co-operative activity to see reality as it is, does not find itself impeded by over-complication, but for the first time able to move freely about reality. In the realization of the Infinite, there is a sense of enlarge-ment and confidence, not lessened but added to by the resultant awareness of our own finiteness; for finiteness is no constraint to a being that is simply trying to be itself. The mind is not forever baffled by the multiplicity of things, once it sees them related to God, whose meaning is love, and so to each other. A heap of human features tossed pell-mell on to a table, or even arranged in some arbitrary order— in order of size for instance, or in alphabetical order— would be very baffling indeed, but in their proper order in the human face they are not baffling.
Just
as the mind finds freedom and not confusion
in the seen complexity of things,
so life and action find freedom and not frustration.
For there is a miraculous principle of simplification
in seeing that the significant movement of life,
to which all other movements are secondary,
is according to whether we are going towards God,
the logical end being sanctity,
or towards self as distinct from God,
with the logical end of damnation.
There is nothing in human life that cannot be related to this single simple
principle.
It is with this that the Church is concerned,
to the great puzzlement of those who do not possess this key to simplicity.
To take one obvious illustration:
whereas, in the light of natural justice,
we tend to see men primarily as exploiters and exploited,
with the result that we see as a first duty the overthrow of the exploiters and
the relief of their victims,
the Church sees them primarily as saints and sinners.
Her job being to turn the sinners into saints and the saints into greater
saints.
The practical conse-quences of this are enormous and frequently disturbing.
Where the world sees a strong man triumphant in tyranny, who must be put down,
the Church sees a poor stunted soul in peril of damnation, who must somehow be
saved from that mortal peril.
To the world, arrogance is a provocation and we rage against it,
to the Church arrogance is a disease in the soul,
arousing compassion and a loving desire to heal.
Other considerations may intervene—the good of souls endangered by the sinner—
leading the Church to resist.
But even then Her action is still guided by the principle that what matters is
the movement of souls toward God or away from God.
It is good, since this is the principal question, that someone should
specialize on it, so that it is not left merely to take its chance among the
myriad motives for which men act.
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The vision of reality involves seeing not only what is, but how we should conduct ourselves in this now-seen universe. Reality has laws, and we can know them.
God did not make a chaos, in which any cause might have any effect. That would make intelligent living impossible. We must see laws primarily as statements of cause and effect. In other words laws may be seen from one of two angles. Primarily they are statements, secondarily they are commands. As statements they tell us what the relations are between one reality and another: reality is so. As commands they order us to act in accordance with reality thus shown to us: reality being so, do so.
Apply this to the moral law. It is a law of reality that fidelity in marriage is right for the kind of being man is; from this it follows that if we commit adultery, we must suffer damage to our soul. So far we are dealing with a truth about man, seizable by the intellect. But God has made a command of it, Thou shalt not commit adultery. This is addressed to the will, so that to disobey it is sin; but it is still seen right by the intellect as an instruction from our Maker as to how we should best run ourselves, so that to ignore it is folly. Obviously our obedience to the command is aided enormously by our awareness of the reality about ourselves upon which it is based.
Return for a moment to consider law as statement rather than command. It says that a particular course of conduct is best for man, because he is what he is. To act otherwise always damages man, either by some positive damage, a real wound in his nature, or by stunting his development so that, though there is no actual wound, he does not grow as he might have grown. All this is obvious enough to us in regard to material bodies, because in the disordered state of our nature bodies are so especially seeable. But there are elements in man more difficult to see than his body, and the laws that govern these elements are more difficult to see than, say, the law of gravity. But they are laws, for there is no chaos in this nobler part of reality either; and they are more vital, precisely because this part of us is nobler. We need to know them in order to be ourselves. Knowledge of law is a condition of freedom, material or moral. Such knowledge limits our freedom to guess, but increases our freedom to act and to think. Observe that there is no such thing as freedom from law, but only freedom within the law. As we have seen, we cannot frustrate God's law at any point. There is no such thing as breaking the law of gravity. We can ignore it, but we literally cannot break it. It can break us. Similarly there is no such thing as breaking the law of purity. We can disobey the command, but the law is not broken, we are. There is a common fear that religion, with its insistence upon acceptance, shackles the mind; in fact it shackles the mind no more than knowledge of the law of gravity shackles the body.
But if the moral law is always a condition of our freedom, it is not always an immediate convenience. It is often highly inconvenient. So indeed is the material law. Thus the law of gravity may mean that if from the top of a high cliff you see a man drowning, you may have to go miles around to reach the sea level —in other words you have to let him drown—instead of jumping. Jumping represents a short cut, but it would destroy you and not help the drowning man. Immorality similarly represents a short cut, but it always damages and may destroy us. The trouble is that man finds a short cut almost irresistible. It may help us to see how a clear view of reality helps us to observe the moral law, if we consider a couple of cases; and it will help most if we choose instances where the sin is all the more tempting because it does not appear to damage some other person. It is still something to our credit that we shrink—even if not uncontrollably—from sins that will hurt others.
There is a small but already growing and likely to grow larger movement for euthanasia, the painless killing of patients suffering agonies from an incurable disease. The case for it is put very persuasively, and there is something in us to which it makes a very powerful appeal. As Catholics, we know that there is a plain command of God by which it is murder. That settles the matter, but it leaves us with an unsatisfied feeling. Yet, quite apart from the command of God according to which it is murder, there are certain plain facts of reality by which it is madness. The argument for it is usually clinched by the reminder that we would not let a dog suffer so, we would put him out of his misery. But the cases are not parallel. We put the dog out of his misery, and there the matter ends. We put the man out of his misery, and there the matter does not end. The further question arises, what do we put him into? If he happens to be in a state of unrepented rebellion against God, then we have put him into hell. It is true that we cannot know, but precisely because we cannot know, we should not take an action which might involve a catastrophe so vast and so final. Only in this life can repentance be made, grace gained or regained. Even if (what we cannot know) the sufferer be in a state of grace, it is also true that only in this life can grace be added to and the soul's capacity grow. It may well be that in the agony of that unrelievable suffering, the soul might thus grow, so that when death finally came it would enter heaven with a far greater capacity to live the life and receive the joy of heaven. Again we cannot know; but to risk sending a man either to hell or to a lower circle of heaven to save him from bodily pain however great would (like so much well-meant meddling) do credit to our heart perhaps, but none at all to our head.
So far we have considered only the effects in the next world of this particular disobedience of the law of God. Obviously there can be no effects upon the sufferer in this world, since we are putting him out of it. But there are effects in this world all the same, not upon the man but upon the whole structure of society. A society lives or dies by the values it holds. This truth is almost always omitted from modern discussion of problems that used to be called moral. Our tendency is simply to count the number of people immediately benefited by a proposed line of conduct and the number of people harmed by it, and if there be a clear preponder-ance of people benefited, to assume that no further argument is required: that line of conduct is justified. But this statistical simplification of morality will not do. Only a society which values life so that it will not sacrifice it save for values indubitably higher is a healthy society. Escape from bodily suffering is not a higher value. To allow that a man's life may be taken, even with his own consent, in order to save him from bodily suffering is to reduce the value of life and the whole of society lives in the shadow of that diminished value.
We may take one further instance of a sin which seems to hurt no one. A man marries a woman whose husband has already left her. Who is damaged, and how? We are assuming that neither party is Catholic. Now obviously this is not one of the worst breaches of the law of God. The parties concerned do not know of God's positive law against their act, and the modern conscience is no longer very lively on the point, so that there is no question of a deliberate setting of their own will against God's will, which is the really destructive element in sin. But the law of monogamy is as real a law as the law of gravity, and whether we know it or not, to break a law of reality is to suffer damage. But in this event what damage? To the persons concerned, probably, there is not much positive damage, of the kind we have compared to a wound in the body; but they have missed the development that living by the law of morality, which is the law of reality, would have brought them. Because the law is God's law, God sees to it that those who live by it will grow by it. The absence of knowledge may very well mean that there is no guilt, in fact no sin. But there is a law by which they might have gained something, and they have not gained it.
Further we have the same consideration as to the effect upon the social order that we have already seen in the matter of euthanasia. The sacredness of life is one value by which society lives healthfully. The sacredness of marriage is another. To allow that a particular marriage may be dissolved is to assume that marriage as such is dissoluble; and everyone's marriage is thereby weakened.
Summarizing the various considerations
upon law,
we observe that the will of God is a reality.
The sensible, indeed the only rational, thing to do is to learn it and live by
it.
There is only childishness in letting yourself be broken by reality because you
would like reality to be different.
There is no great harm in wishing reality different,
provided we do not proceed to act as if it were different:
for that is to act in unreality.
There is no more point in objecting that the moral law has no right to
constrain you and that you will act as you please in regard to it than in
objecting that cold air has no right to freeze you, that you will go where you
like and wear what you like—
that you will for example stroll through a blizzard in a bathing dress.
That would be madness in relation to physical law.
The other would be no less madness in relation to the moral law.
The first point of maturity is to accept law.
The highest point of maturity is to be in love with law:
for law is the will of God and God is love.
In between this first and last step lies the acceptance of law not because we
fear the consequences, but because we love the Lawgiver: If you love Me, keep My commandments. We
have already seen the frenzied effort to read personality out of the universe:
and with personality gone, will goes,
and law is only mechanism.
But the universe we are in is an expression of will,
and the will it expresses is love.
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The vision of life and law is splendid, but there is mystery in it. The higher sort of mystery we have already discussed— mystery about the great realities: mysteries like all that we cannot see about the Blessed Trinity, mysteries about that lesser but still great thing the soul of man— his free will, for example. To be too much bothered by the questions we cannot answer is to be irked at not being God. Above all we must not be so bothered by the darkness ringing our circle of light that we cannot enjoy the light. Nor is there any reason why we should be. The mind may well be tormented by truths seemingly irreconcilable, by its own inability to see their reconciliation, if it cannot see why it cannot see. But we, knowing the great things with which we are dealing, see why we cannot see further. So that in fact (as we saw early in this exploration) our very darkness is a kind of light.
But in our vision there is a mystery of a more practical sort, and we have not yet discussed it. It is the mystery of suffering. Observe first that while it is right to call suffering a mystery, or a problem, the mystery or problem is commonly misconceived. We talk as if we had to explain suffering away, to defend God in relation to it; whereas our real task is to see the meaning of it and to use it. The chief problem of suffering is how not to waste it. Certainly no one who has followed the thought of this book thus far will come to the question as if we were putting God on trial. We come to it in full knowledge of His omnipotence and His love. We seek to understand it, for ourselves, and to help others to understand it if we can. If we are aiming to justify the ways of God to men, it is not for the sake of clearing God's character, but of preventing men from being kept from Him.
The question why does God allow suffering is all but meaningless. It could only mean why does God allow us. He could prevent suffering by preventing us, a cure more drastic than we should desire. This is not mere flippancy, but the most obvious truth. Given that we are what we are, we can get into a wrong relation to reality. To be in a wrong relation to reality must have an effect on us. The name for the effect is suffering. The suffering will be related to the kind of being we are, to the elements in us which have got into the wrong relation to reality. Thus we may inherit or acquire bodily defects: our lungs, for example, may be wrongly related to reality because they cannot handle air properly for the good of the body; or there may be a famine, so that we cannot get food, and our body's right relation to reality depends upon food. Again the want of harmony with reality may be in the mind: a man may want something that he cannot have, a woman for example. He may be unable to have her because she is dead, or because she is married. In the one case his desire has collided with a physical law, in the other with a moral law.
The wrong relation with reality may be one that we can easily put right. The defect in the body may be healed, the energy of the mind may be directed to something attainable. We may very well seek relief from suffering, if relief is to be had. But we must be careful not to deceive ourselves and act as if relief were to be had when it is not. In the instance of the man and the woman above noted, he will know that he cannot have her if she is dead: the physical law does not allow of question. But in face of the moral law he may have an illusion of freedom: although she is married, he can in fact have her, if she is willing. But the law remains a law. He has merely turned from one wrong relation to reality— wanting what he should not have— to another wrong relation to reality— taking what he should not have. His felt suffering may be relieved; but the damage to him is greater and not less.
Anyhow the principle remains: we can get into the wrong relation with reality in one way or another: we suffer as a result. This is the sense in which I have said that God could prevent suffering by preventing us. But a second question remains and it is in the practical order the heart of the problem. Given that finite creatures with fallible intellects and free will are pretty certain to bring suffering upon themselves, the question still remains to torment us— why did God make us so that we can suffer so much? Some part of the answer may emerge as we continue our examination of the working of our first principle.
Let us apply it to bodily suffering first. The reality to which we belong and from which we cannot subtract ourselves has laws expressive of real and knowable sequences of cause and effect. We can collide with these laws through our own fault or someone else's or, as it sometimes seems to us, through nobody's. To suggest that God should intervene every time we come into collision with reality and prevent the causes taking their effects would mean that we should not be living in a universe of law at all. If the universe were not run by laws, but by myriads of special interventions by God, we could hardly handle our lives intelligently: we could simply passively let ourselves be handled. God does intervene, of course. We call His intervention miracle. In the nature of the case miracle is exceptional. It means that the cause we see does not produce its usual effect, or that the effect we see has no relation to a natural cause. This is invariably a surprise, pleasant if we benefit by a miracle, disconcerting if it is against us. But if ever miracles ceased to be exceptional and became common, considered action would have to cease. We could not master our environment, grow in our environment, exercise our will by choice, take the con-sequences of our choice. We should never be sure what the consequences of our choice were. It is hard to see how we could reach maturity.
The laws of reality represent real sequences of cause and effect. Some of these laws we know, some we do not know yet: even these last we can sense, we live in the effect of them, and may some day get to learn them. But we could never learn them if they were never allowed to operate to our disadvantage, but were always interfered with by special acts of God. None of this means that the laws of reality are merely mechanical, acting automatically like a machine long ago wound up and capable of running only as it is wound. There is a continuous personal will in operation. It operates even in the laws that seem most mechanical, it operates to make them what they are and to enable them to function as they function. But beyond that there is the continuous possibility of intervention by God, not only by miracle, nor because someone has asked Him and He has heard the prayer, but rather by way of a higher law. As part of this higher law God lavishes gifts upon men as a reward, lavishes punishment upon men either simply as punishment demanded by justice or as healing because He is merciful. What I have called the mechanical laws function in the framework of the universal law of God's love. One of mankind's tasks is to find the principle of this higher action of God in the universe. There are unquestionably spiritual laws which set material laws in motion. So much we might suspect, even without revelation. But if we live by the revelation of God, we shall come to see more and more clearly what these laws are.
What is true of law in the material order, where its operation is most obvious to us, is true also in the order of rational action, the order of our psychological life and our social life. Man's right relation to God is needed if the world is to go right for man. It is surprising how little this is grasped, even by people who have some general notion of God. Men who have only the faintest beginning of faith or hope or charity expect God to act as if they had them in full measure. This sort of strain we are always putting upon the reality of things. We make ourselves un-men and expect God to treat us as men. We are to ignore God's laws and God is to treat us as if we had observed them; men are to be selfish and God is to prevent wars; men are to be sinful and God is to prevent evil. All this is as though men were to be forever jumping off cliffs and God forever stopping them in mid-air.
In this connection notice that we are still by nature members of the human race as we are of the material universe. Each man must live in an environment created by all men. We cannot subtract ourself from the human context and expect God to treat us thus in total isolation. We do not know what problems the race is setting God. Therefore we do not understand how God's treatment of those problems must incidentally affect us. Even naturally we are members one of another, and the disease of one will bring suffering to another. We must see the conflict of giants in which we are. The perspective of individual suffering is all wrong if we do not. Just as in the physical order, a tidal wave cannot be expected to drown everybody else but choose out me for survival; so in the social order the evils which the human race brings upon itself by its massive ignoring of God's law, which is the law of reality, cannot be expected to single out me for exemption from suffering.
But though it would be unreasonable to expect as of right, or even as of rule, that God would prevent us suffering along with the race to which we belong, we know for our consolation that God can see to it that we do not thereby lose. We cannot be saved from suffering pain, but we can be saved from suffering loss. This does not mean only that God can compensate us by happiness in the next life. Even if it did, this would still be something vast. St. Paul tells us that he counts the sufferings of this world as unworthy to be compared with the glory to come. Nor was this a mere mouthing of platitudes. When St. Paul said that, he knew very well what the sufferings of this world could be: Five times the Jews scourged me, and spared me but one lash in the forty; three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned; I have been shipwrecked three times; I have spent a night and a day as a castaway on the sea. What journeys I have undertaken, in danger from rivers, in danger from robbers, in danger from my own people, in danger from the Gentiles; danger in cities, danger in the wilderness, danger in the sea, danger from false brethren! I have met with toil and weariness, so often been sleepless, hungry and thirsty; so often denied myself food, gone cold and naked. (2 Cor.xi.24-27.)
In saying that God sees to it that we do not lose by that suffering which comes to us not for any fault of our own but simply because we are not excepted from the calamities that flow from our place in the material universe and the human race, I had not in mind merely the possibility of eternal compensation for suffering that ends. What the phrase meant was that our suffering itself should not be wasted. It is not merely an unfortunate by-product of broken laws, a by-product in whose power we unfortunately find ourselves so that we cannot but be involved in it: something, therefore, from which we cannot be exempted, but for which we can be compensated. Suffering is more than that. It is constructive, it is building stuff. God uses it. Our suffering can be used directly for ourselves; in the solidarity of the human race, our suffering can be used for the building of others, and theirs for ours.
There is a tendency to dismiss impatiently any answer to the problem of suffering which brings in God's action. The unbeliever mocks at it, and even the Christian feels that it is something of an anti-climax: he would like some explanation which did not call upon God for so much. What we are looking for, to comfort our-selves and to quieten the derider, is some self-contained theory which would be equally valid if there were no God. But we can hardly expect God to leave what He Himself would do out of account when planning the universe. If we continue to study the problem with an awareness of God as the most important element in it, we shall find not that the darkness vanishes, but that there is a pretty solid increase of light all the same.
Our problem is, as we have said, to see how suffering may be used and not wasted. Ordinary human experience shows that suffering can be maturing, indeed that anyone who is spared from suffering too rigorously will never reach maturity at all. But suffering, as the same experience shows, can be destructive, too. Whether it shall develop a man or shatter him is not simply a matter of the quantity of suffering. Of two men suffering greatly, but so far as we can judge unevenly, the one who suffers less may be shattered and the one who suffers more may be immensely developed by it. Which way it shall go does not depend upon the suffering, but upon the will. The beginning of a positive answer to suffering, at any level of intensity conceivable, lies in the will's acceptance of it as a part of reality, whether reality seen impersonally as the order of things, or personally as the will of God. Of itself and necessarily, this acceptance cuts at the central point of man's profoundest disease. That central point is the over-assertion of self. Suffering can come to us in a thousand guises: the element common to them all, the element therefore which constitutes suffering as such, is that something is happening to us which we intensely dislike. Given that our deepest-lying disease is the over-assertion of self, then to accept what we intensely dislike, and not merely disintegrate in impotent rebellion against it, is of itself and directly a healing and strengthening of the will, fitting it for, helping it towards, restoring it to, its proper domination of the whole man. Self-control is the first condition of any control. No matter how vast an empire a man may have, if he does not control himself then he does not control the empire either: whatever controls him controls it.
This healing and strengthening effect of suffering operates even if it is merely the acceptance of reality, a determination to cope with what is; still more if it is the acceptance of reality as a moral law, even if this is only dimly apprehended in conscience and not seen in relation to a personal lawgiver; but above all if it is a conscious union of the will with God. Acceptance at the first level is difficult. To suffer in a universe directed by no mind is to be tortured by blind forces which know nothing of man and care nothing for man. This could easily lead to despair, even in a mind of great vitality. Where the mind is already devitalized, it can hardly do otherwise: life is futile anyway, without having torture thrown in. But if we see the universe directed by a mind, then the suffering might be directed too, might be for our gain. Thus, if we accept the impact upon us of the laws of reality by uniting our own will to God's will, suffering has the chance to do a vast constructive work in us; and this constructiveness reaches its peak when, as we saw in chapter x, we reach the point where we can unite our sufferings to the redemptive sufferings of Christ. For as the sufferings of Christ abound in us: so also like Christ doth our comfort abound. (2 Cor.i.5.)
Every articulate Christian has met almost universal reaction to any such attempt as I am making to see suffering as constructive, to see how there can be comfort in it. It is the answer contained in Kipling's rhyme:
The toad beneath the harrow knows Exactly where each toothpoint goes The butterfly upon the road Preaches contentment to that toad.
A man suffering intensely will always feel something of this as he listens to what must seem to him a cold-blooded rationalization of suffering by one who sounds as if he has never suffered. That is why I quote St. Paul: I could as easily quote a hundred other saints: and beyond these there is the massive testimony of millions who have fallen short of sainthood, but would have fallen shorter still but for suffering.
Because we are living in a universe and not a chaos—because, that is, the laws of reality are made by a God of infinite knowledge and infinite love—we can be sure that no one gets more suffering than he can with God's help bear. No one gets more suffering than he can, by co-operation with God's grace, turn to his own profit. It would not be possible to prove this empirically— or disprove it either, for that matter. It is simply a case for trusting God. If we cannot trust God we cannot trust: for no one else has given us God's reasons for trust.
So much for suffering that can develop the sufferer— and this whether he be innocent or guilty. But the mind is more profoundly troubled by suffering that seems as if it could in no way bring growth to the sufferer, for example suffering which kills while the suffering itself is at a point of such intensity that the sufferer's reaction to it seems little more than an animal reaction to torture in which the spirit is for the moment drowned; or again the death in agony of tiny children. Here we see less clearly or perhaps not at all. But we have one firm principle for our support. If a thing seems wildly cruel and unfair to us, it still remains that God loves men more than we do, for He has done two great things for them that we have never done— created all of them, and died for all of them. If it really were cruel and unfair. He would know it. But that is not all: it is the greatest thing we can say, but it is not the only thing we can say. Here again we can remind ourselves of the rewards that God has laid up for us in Heaven, the glory to come, which St. Paul said was an incomparably greater thing than any suffering here. The child who died in agony yesterday is saying that today. But there is another consideration, too, arising from the solidarity of the human race. We have seen how suffering does of itself balance sin.
The acceptance of what we intensely dislike is a direct healing for the over-assertion of self which is the key to sin. Suffering can be an energy filling up the energy spilled away in sin. But as reality is constituted. God can use the suffering of one for the healing of another, the suffering of all for the strengthening of all. This is one of those laws of the universe which are not merely mechanical. The infant has no sin of his own to be made up for by suffering. But his suffering can be used by God. Thus the infant is given the enormous privilege of doing something for others. Under God, there is no higher privilege.
Many readers will find the theory of suffering just stated fairly satisfactory. Every so often some type of suffering will occur to them which this does not explicitly cover— for example the deliberate and seemingly permanent moral corruption of the innocent young by older people. Nonetheless for the vast mass of the world's suffering there is some light in it. But we should assure ourselves that the line of answer here suggested is not for us simply something academic, satisfactory enough while we are considering suffering in the abstract, but liable to collapse in the face of real suffering really apprehended. When we discuss the problem of suffering, it is not the problem of a word or a notion. The reader should test how firmly the principles here suggested hold his mind by reading some of the classic accounts of various sorts of human suffering. If we are honest with ourselves, we may have to admit that these accounts of suffering in the concrete do give our principles a pretty thorough testing. The chances are that they leave us with our theories still standing if shaken, but with no tendency whatever to think that there is any slick glib answer. It may help us to clarify our own mind if we see certain intellectual defects in ourselves which make the seen fact of suffering such a temptation not only against trusting God, but against those principles which in tranquillity our mind had seen and balanced.
The first difficulty lies in the simple fact that we do see the suffering, but we do not see the application God makes of it to the soul here and now, still less do we see the glory that is to come. Suffering causes so vast a shuddering in the soul. God so tiny a vibration; often enough when we think we are seeing the suffering in relation to God, we are only feeling how much greater the shuddering is than the vibration. Things seen are mightier than things heard; things that can seize the imagination loom larger than those that must appeal direct to the intellect. Not only in relation to suffering, but in relation to all things whatsoever, we must be aware of this defect in ourselves and try to make allow-ances for it. It is worse still when unbelievers challenge us upon suffering. We give an answer to people to whom suffering is real, God is not: they are aware of God only as a word, and the word carries none of the living implications that it has for us.
The second difficulty lies in our almost incurable habit of seeing this life as the whole and judging accordingly; seeing its tragedies as final, whereas the one tragedy is to make the fundamental choice of self in preference to God; for that means to leave life unfit for what lies before us. Since this life is a preparation, the only ultimate tragedy is to leave it unprepared. Our heart may tell us otherwise, but the heart is not the teller. Nor can our heart tell us, either by its hopes or its fears, what souls have in fact left this life unprepared. Sanctifying grace, which is the principle of eternal life, may be in men as no more than a grain of mustard seed. We cannot tell. They cannot tell. Grace is like the little leaven that leavens the whole lump. Until it has leavened the whole lump, we can see only lump and no leaven. But the tiniest fragment of leaven is sufficient for salvation. In all our consideration of this life, we must try to make it utterly matter of course to see it as a preparation. We waste so much apologetic effort trying to "justify" God's action on us in this life as if this life were not preparatory but complete in itself; whereas frequently the only justification is that it does prepare, even if we do not see how. There is a rough comparison in the way in which pre-marital purity is a preparation for marriage. At the time it may seem pointless and dreary and even painful: its perfection as preparation is seen only when marriage comes. So with this life as a whole in relation to the next. In a sense we may think of it as the tuning of the instruments, so that it gives only a hint of the glory of the symphony when all the instruments are tuned and all are obeying the conductor.
One final point. If we reject this answer to the problem of suffering, we are left with no answer. At best we can have an indignant sympathy with the sufferer which does not help him, least of all if the sufferer happens to be ourselves. The true answer is hard but vitalizing. The alternative is despair.
It may seem that in our survey of the vision of reality, we have given a disproportionate space to one of the elements which may cloud the vision. The disproportion is only apparent. The whole book has been about the vision, whereas suffering is treated in detail here only. The vision is the thing. Suffering is an appalling problem to one who sees it, but does not see the whole context of reality. The believer may find it as unanswerable as the unbeliever; but he is not troubled by it in the same way, for he sees so much, has experienced so much, has quite simply lived so much. His real life is lived consciously in the company of God and of the Mother of God and of the gifts of God. A given patch of experience may be one hundred per cent dark, but it is not ten per cent of the whole landscape. That is the sense in which we have spoken earlier in this book of the necessity of seeing reality as a whole as a preparation for living wholly in it. Seeing it is not the same thing as living wholly in it, but it is an excellent preparation. Our wrestling is still, as St. Paul saw it, not against flesh and blood, but against Principalities and Powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness. (Eph.vi.12).
But
our foot is upon firm ground.
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