In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s philosophical masterpiece
The Brothers Karamazov, the brilliant
but tortured Ivan rejects the possibility of a Christian God because he cannot
countenance a world in which the suffering of innocent children is the means
for a higher end. “Listen!” he cries to his brother Alyosha. “If all must
suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children to do with it, tell
me, please? ... And if it is really true that they must share responsibility
for all their fathers’ crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond
my comprehension. Some jester will say, perhaps, that the child would have
grown up and sinned, but you see he didn’t grow up, he was torn to pieces by
dogs, at eight years old.”
Better to have no architect, he believes, than to have one who would build even
an earthly paradise on the sufferings of one child, and he respectfully hands
back his ticket.
Ivan’s
critique is echoed, in a less sophisticated form, almost every time we of the
21st century (particularly evangelical Christians) try to deal with
the intrusion of evil into our lives: A good God wouldn’t intend to hurt good
people, says the apologist for God. I simply could not love a deity with agency
in the suffering of a child, or a mother, or an American soldier. But Jesus is
my friend, and I need him on my side. So Sophie’s cancer is Satan’s fault. The
Holy Spirit is rooting for her to beat it. God’s design has nothing to do with
her pain, or my pain, or anybody’s pain.
The
temptation is always to get angry at this castration of the Trinity, to echo
Paul’s “But who are you, O man, to answer back to God?” and to swagger away.
It’s such a dominating kind of
answer, and is why high church Presbyterians are so popular. In The City of God against the pagans, Augustine
approaches the problem with a greater degree of kindness, since for him the
question is far from abstract—his people had been raped, tortured, and murdered
as the Aryans swept through Rome. But he also insists throughout on the
involvement and efficacy of God’s will in human suffering. That suffering,
however, is not ultimately an evil for believers. Rather, it is the rod of
reproof, administered in love, by a father chastening his sinful children.
For
Augustine, suffering is about eternity, and justice operates on a higher plane
than earthly retribution. Everything points to the City of God, the heavenly
existence that the church strives towards but does not achieve until death.
Augustine would have seen Ivan’s idea of the innocent child as naive—no one,
not even the youngest, is truly righteous. “For though they are very far from
being shameful and ungodly criminals,” he writes of Christians, “they still do
not find themselves so entirely unacquainted with fault as to judge themselves
undeserving even of temporal penalties for their misdeeds.”
All have sinned and fallen short, and man is not owed happiness on this earth. Indeed,
true happiness is impossible even for the most temporally powerful believer:
“We say that, for the time being, such Christian emperors are happy in hope and
that, in time to come, when that to which we now look forward has arrived, they
will be so in possession.”
Earth prepares us for eternity. Joy will come later. Suffering is the refining
fire of the preparation.
Suffering,
then, bears good fruit even on this earth. Augustine believes it is a blessing
to be refined. “When He subjects me to adversity,” Augustine writes, “this is
either to test my merits or chastise my sins; and He reserves an eternal reward
for my pious endurance of temporal ills.”
Augustine’s organizes these temporal ills into the categories of financial
loss, physical torture or imprisonment, rape, and murder. Augustine views the
loss of earthly treasure as probably more beneficial than otherwise,
particularly since he so admires voluntary Christian poverty (as exemplified by
someone like Paulinus, bishop of Nola).
“As a good servant Job held the will of his Lord to be a great treasure in
itself, through attendance upon which his spirit should grow rich,” he writes.
“Nor was he saddened to lose in life those things which he would in any case
shortly lose in death. But those weaker Christians who, even though they did
not prefer these earthly goods to Christ, nonetheless clung to them with no
small desire, discovered in losing them how much they had sinned in loving
them.”
True treasure is in heaven, and earthly riches make this world too comfortable,
tempting us to idolize worldly possessions at the expense of heavenly ones.
“Perhaps, then, the tortures which taught them to love an incorruptible good
were of more benefit to them than those goods whose love brought torture upon
their heads without any valuable fruit,” Augustine writes.
Even Christians can have their libido
dominandi empowered by gold, and God actually blesses his children through this
severe correction.
God, Augustine reminds his congregation,
is always present in their suffering, and this is meant as a comfort. The poor
whom the Aryans tortured for their non-existent riches have received an even
greater blessing, since their suffering compelled them to long for eternity,
and build up treasure in heaven by means of their Job-like fidelity while in physical
pain. The Aryans took some Christians back with them as captives. “This to be
sure, would be great misery,” Augustine writes, “if they could have been led
away anywhere where they did not find their God.”
The
Aryans raped consecrated virgins, for whose state Augustine had the highest
respect. But God consecrated them further through their violation. Although
God’s ways are unsearchable, and Augustine does not presume to prescribe what
God is doing in any particular Christian’s life, he reminds the women that God
cleanses us of self-righteousness just as he purges our more libido driven sins: “In the case of
both, therefore — those who took pride in the fact that their flesh had never
suffered the touch of shame, and those who might have begun to take such pride
had they not been violently defiled by the enemy — their chastity was not
diminished, but their humility strengthened.”
God can purify his children through rape.
But
many Christians were killed, and a violent death does not sanctify the victim.
But this death, Augustine writes, is simply the final earthly step towards
unity with God, and “though, in the sight of men, these things may seem hard
and dire, ‘precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.’”
Death is the end of suffering, and God sends suffering into the lives of
Christians because He loves them.
But
evil men exist, Ivan might counter, and he reminds his monkish listener that
“In every man, of course, a demon lies hidden—the demon of rage, the demon of
lustful heat at the screams of the tortured victim, the demon of lawlessness
letting off the chain, the demon of diseases that follow on vice, gout, kidney
disease, and so on.” May the rapist
tell his victim: “God is chastening you through me”? Doesn’t the idea of
purgative suffering remove the possibility of immanent justice? Augustine knows
the libido dominandi saturates this
earth: “...We must not pass over in silence the earthly city also: that city
which, when it seeks mastery, is itself mastered by the lust for mastery even
though all the nations serve it.”
What then? Ivan asks. It is not a
sufficient punishment for the child-killer to be mastered by his own lust for
mastery. The world demands real justice for the crime. “I don’t want the mother
to embrace the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs!” he says. “She dare not
forgive him! Let her forgive him for herself, if she will, let her forgive the
torturer for the immeasurable sufferings of her mother’s heart. But the
sufferings of her tortured child she has no right to forgive; ... Is there in
the whole world a being who could have the right to forgive and could forgive?”
Augustine believes God sometimes punishes his enemies on this earth — the
constant violence surrounding Rome, brought on by arrogance and demon-worship, serves
as an example. But the come-uppance of criminals is not the Christian’s primary
concern. Instead, justice, that which Christians owe to the ungodly, is
compassion. The deprived mother must suffer with and for her child’s murderer.
A lack of compassion—which Augustine
defines as an excessive love of this life, and a fear to make our own lives
bitter by showing loving bitterness to sinners—deserves punishment. “It is
right that [Christians] should know bitterness in this life when they are
afflicted by God in common with the wicked;” Augustine writes, “for, because
they loved the sweetness of this life, they neglected to be bitter to the
wicked.” This bitterness towards sinners is didactic, the same bitterness that
God sends into the lives of His children for the purpose of correction. “For I
do not think that any right-minded person would condemn anger directed at a
sinner in order to correct him;” Augustine writes, “or sadness on behalf of one
who is afflicted in order to comfort him; or fear for one in peril, lest he
perish. ... And what is compassion but a kind of fellow feeling in our hearts
for the misery of another which compels us to help him if we can.”
Augustine has again made justice an eternal concern. The mother must forgive
her son’s mutilator, not by embracing his crime, but by hating his separation
from God. Augustine doesn’t expect this to be easy, but she dare not seek
vengeance, because the One with the right to forgive all men was compassionate
and suffered with and for men to satisfy the justice of God.
Ivan’s
great error is that he looks for an ultimate Justice that is earthly and
temporal, a rightness that man can comprehend now. “I must have justice,” he says, “or I will destroy
myself. And not justice in some remote infinite time and space, but here on
earth, and that I could see myself. I have believed in it. I want to see it,
and if I am dead by then, let me rise again, for if it all happens without me,
it will be too unfair. ... I want to see with my own eyes the hind lie down
with the lion and the victim rise up and embrace his murderer.”
This is not the justice that Augustine gives us, because the City of God is not
the City of Man. But God is in control. Satan does not win a cosmic battle of
yin over yang every time evil touches a godly man. “The whole family of the highest and true
God, then, has a consolation of its own: a consolation which depends neither
upon falsehood nor upon hope in those things which falter and fail,” Augustine
writes. “Also, its members have a life in this age which is not in the least to
be regretted: a life which is the school of eternity, in which they make use of
earthly goods like pilgrims, without grasping after them, and are proved and
corrected by evils.” Augustine
is not saying that all of this life must be miserable. Rather, he believes that
all earthly blessings should be loved in light of the Giver, and only in such a
way that draws us nearer to Him. When man idolizes God’s gifts—be they as
wonderful as chastity or life itself—the Lord in His mercy corrects that skewed
love and turns his child’s eyes back towards the Heavenly City. The eschaton is not yet immanent. But Christ has come, Christ has seen the sin and injustice rampant in this
world, and making the church a partner in his compassionate earthly mission, he
has conquered evil and satisfied eternal justice through his own suffering.
