Praising Pain: Martyrs, Holocaust, and Depth Psychology
“They are seeking under every shape and form a world where there are no limitations—that is, a world where there are no outlines; that is, a world where there are no shapes. There is nothing baser than that infinity. They say they wish to be as strong as the universe, but they really wish the whole universe as weak as themselves.”
— G.K. Chesterton, “On Certain Modern Writers”
“As to the causation of the feeling of meaninglessness, one may say albeit in an oversimplifying vein, that people have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning.”
— Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Abstract: Early Christian martyrdom provides a model of aiming toward a goal and accepting the focus, limitations, and freedoms that an aim entails.
Why suffer?
This question underlies early Christian thought, and by extension, much of Western Thought. If life entails inevitable and unavoidable sufferings, then why accept any additional suffering willingly? Why not aim to avoid pain, as the Epicureans did? Why not, to paraphrase Fyodor Dostoyevsky in The Notes from Underground, busy ourselves only with the eating of cakes and the propagation of the species?
In a theological sense, the answer to this question lies at the heart of Christianity. The cross, the central Christian symbol, represents maximal suffering, willingly undergone by an innocent person, aimed toward serving the highest good, namely God, and done, in addition, to harrow hell, conquer death, and redeem all humanity. Two perpendicular lines imply much. Through the cross, Christians asked not “Why suffer?” but “What is worth suffering for?”
Jesus’s first ambassadors, the twelve apostles, had cause to consider this question seriously. Under Roman persecution of Christians, they would need to decide whether espousing their faith merited suffering and even death. As we will see, Christian martyrs accepted their deaths willingly, even gleefully, honored to die in service not only of truth but also of whom they considered the Author of Truth. Thus, the early Christians rediscovered an ancient paradox, namely that aiming one’s life toward an ultimate purpose makes suffering incurred in service of, and en-route toward, that purpose more bearable, perhaps even meaningful. Suffering for something makes suffering mean something. I argue that early Christian martyrdom demonstrates that “aim” paradoxically implies both limitation and freedom.
Martyrs Facing Flames
Around AD 155 in Smyrna, St Polycarp prophesied his own death by burning alive. His prophecy proved correct, but his execution’s day arrived, the sacrificial fire merely caused his holy body to smell like baking bread as he peacefully praised God. Again in AD 180, six "Scillitan Martyrs"—martyrs of the Northern African province of Numidia—declined offers to escape punishment by recanting their faith. The proconsul then ordered their execution, and the martyrs declared together, “Thanks be to God.” Finally, around AD 210 St Perpetua foresaw her martyrdom in the gladiatorial arena but refused flight. She refused to dress as a Roman goddess, preferring her plain attire. She then survived a heifer's mauling and a centurion’s sword strike, and ultimately guided her executioner’s sword to her own neck, all the while thanking God.
Early Christians claimed to have faced flames, swords, and beasts with sangfroid and aplomb. Why not, to make an anachronism, cross one’s fingers while making the necessary sacrifices to the emperor? Christians viewed suffering for faith as a service not only to the truth, but also to the author of Truth, to God himself. An enlightened twenty-first century scholar might denigrate this devotion, but I submit that there is something deeply profound, something psychologically useful, in giving oneself so fully to an object that the suffering faced in pursuit of that object seems diminished.
Man’s Search for Meaning
Modern psychological research—modern, that is, by the measure of antiquity—appears to bolster the notion that aim attenuates suffering. The psychologist and founder of Logotherapy Viktor Frankl spent three years imprisoned in Dachau, Auschwitz, and other Nazi concentration camps. During those years, he continued his psychological research by observing his fellow prisoners and attempting to discern why some people—understandably—lost all desire to live while others did not, despite having every reason for dejection and despair. Frankl concluded through years of poring over his notes that the hopeful group conceptualized their unjust sufferings as subservient to a grander self-narrative, nested within a communal narrative, aimed purposefully toward a goal. The goals varied from concrete (publishing an unfinished manuscript, seeing one’s home again) to abstract (defying death, vindicating one’s innocence). Frankl’s later research led him to the conclusion that goal’s type mattered little, but having a goal mattered much. A goal allowed people to endure a broken body without suffering a broken spirit.
Here, Frankl draws a careful distinction. The point is not to seek superfluous suffering, “for unnecessary suffering is masochistic rather than heroic.” The point, instead, is to choose something worth suffering for and to fix one’s eyes upon it when inevitable suffering comes, to compromise one’s principles in the darkest hour. This shift in perspective does not end suffering but mitigates its effects. In Frankl’s words, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way” (Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 75). Every day and every hour, Frankl says, offers a decision to fight for one's inner freedom or to become “the plaything of circumstance” (75).
One might ask why this question should concern us today. After all, modern people rarely face a choice between their life and their creed. But I hold that the notion of ‘choosing something worth suffering for’ is more central to our world than we might imagine. Today, to deny one’s desire is to deny one’s self. The deeply influential psychologists Sigmund Freud, Wilhem Reich, and Herbert Marcuse have argued that restraint of desire precludes self-actualization, precisely the opposite of the early Christian argument that retraining desire is an act of self-actualization, of more fully realizing the image of God in oneself. As Allasdair McIntyre has shown in his seminal work After Virtue, Western culture’s moral emphasis has shifted inwardly. In the modern moral ecology, “the only moral criterion that can be applied to behavior is whether it conduces to the feeling of well-being in the individuals concerned. Ethics, therefore, becomes a function of feeling” (Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self). By determining in dialogue with one another what is worth fighting for, what deserves our efforts, our focus, and the sufferings that they entail, we can, perhaps, begin to discuss what our culture is and can be.
Propassion: The Thing Suffered For
Humans have been endowed with a yet incomprehensible consciousness and an unfathomable faculty of reason. We alone have some extra-biological hope of immortality, if not in a divine eschaton, then in our writings and works, in family and history, and in the hope of future generations whose minds will, just as unfathomably as our own, be able to understand to some small degree the importance of those works and the toil and trouble they required of us, the sacrifice they demand of us. In efforts to simplify discourse about this quest, I present a new word to refer to the object for which one is willing to suffer: propassion. Rather than a reason for being, this is a reason for suffering, a simpler object on which to focus. In the search for meaning that Frankl describes, propassion necessarily precedes, and ideally transforms into a raison d’etre. Here, to quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "Not to act is to act." A decision not to define a thing worth suffering for constitutes a decision to enter a stormy sea without a lifeboat, to be in a state of anomie. Suffering will come, and it must be faced. Defining one’s propassion blunts suffering and dulls its pain. More importantly, propassion grants peace of mind and the time to focus on other things, time to live.
If suffering for something made the martyr’s vicissitudes more bearable then, a fortiori, it can ameliorate quotidian difficulties. The early Christians did not seek martyrdom as an end in itself. Instead, Christians determined that, if the Roman state required their sacrifice to other gods, or their recanting Christian faith, the moral option left to Christians was to accept the natural consequences of telling the truth. The God of Truth constituted their justification for the suffering that exists as a concomitant of life, their propassion. What is yours?