“To live is to suffer; to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.”
Gordon W. Allport, Preface to Man’s Search for Meaning
Suffering can enhance us, or it can destroy us; and often what determines which plays out are the beliefs and assumptions we hold about the meaning and value of suffering. In this video we explore how a negative vision of suffering has infected the modern zeitgeist and fueled a widespread dependence on psychiatric and illicit drugs, alcohol, junk food, pornography, and technology use. We then present a positive vision of suffering which can help us cultivate what Nietzsche called “the discipline of great suffering”, which involves heroically enduring suffering and using it as a catalyst for personal growth.
“You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.”
Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Amiel’s Journal
Or as James Davies writes in the Importance of Suffering:
“…how we engage with and respond to an experience affects its very nature.…how we view our suffering (whether through a positive or negative lens) will greatly influence how we relate to it – that is, whether we relate to it productively or unproductively…our difficult relationship to suffering today is largely the product of the recent ascent of a new negative vision of suffering – a vision which has made our experience of suffering worse.”
James Davies, The Importance of Suffering
Throughout much of human history, positive visions of suffering flourished, and religion was a primary source of these visions. Christianity, for example, teaches that suffering is the road to salvation as through suffering we are granted the opportunity to become wiser, stronger, more compassionate, and purified of bad habits and sins. “It has been very good for me that I was afflicted, that I might be well instructed, and learn thy holy laws”, states Psalm 119. The 16th century theologian Martin Luther encapsulated the positive meaning Christianity ascribes to suffering when he wrote that:
“God works by contraries … a man feels himself to be lost in the very moment when he is on the point of being saved. When God is about to justify a man, he damns him. Whom he would make alive he must first kill. God’s favour is so communicated in the form of wrath that it seems furthest when it is at hand. Man must first cry out that there is no health in him. He must be consumed with horror. This is the pain of purgatory…. In this disturbance salvation begins. When a man believes himself to be utterly lost, it is only then when the light breaks.”
Martin Luther
And as James Davies continues:
“Although critiques of the Church’s misuse of suffering have their weight, this does not alter the fact that Christianity has consistently seen suffering as integral to moral or spiritual advancement; an idea which surfaces in religious literature of every sort and denomination.”
James Davies, The Importance of Suffering
The fact that one of the primary purposes of not just Christianity, but all religions, has been to help adherents productively relate to their suffering, led Carl Jung to state that:
“…all religions, including the primitive with their magical rituals, are forms of psychotherapy which treat and heal the suffering of the soul.”
Carl Jung, Practice of Psychotherapy
This positive vision of suffering has also been articulated by secular thinkers. Friedrich Nietzsche, who harbored a passionate disdain of Christianity, echoed Christianity’s view of suffering when he wrote that:
“Everyone who has ever built anywhere a new heaven first found the power to do so in his own hell.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
While the Stoic philosopher Seneca argued that just as fire removes impurities from gold, suffering removes character flaws and weaknesses and forces us to become resilient and courageous. As Seneca observed:
“Prosperity that is undiminished cannot withstand a single blow; but the man who has struggled constantly against his own ills becomes hardened by suffering and no misfortune makes him yield, indeed, if he falls, he still fights on his knees.”
Seneca, Essays
In the Importance of Suffering, James Davies conveys the commonalities among the positive visions of suffering that flourished throughout human history.
“The positive vision holds that suffering has a redemptive role to play in human life; as if from affliction there can be derived some unexpected gain, new perspective, or beneficial alteration…The positive vision of suffering sees pain as a kind of liminal region through which we can pass from a worse to a better place. A region from which can thus be derived something of lasting value for individual life.”
James Davies, The Importance of Suffering
This positive vision of suffering is supported by empirical evidence.
