tithesis—that prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament,rnadversity of the New—seems to us mere gibberish. In the agesrnof faith, Job was of key importance as the recourse-figure whenrntrying to comfort the innocent sufferer, the blameless victim.rnBy any human calculation. Job gets a raw deal. Yet, in his totallyrnundeserved affliction, he steadfastly exhibits a saintly fortitude.rnHe rejects his wife’s advice to curse God as the authorrnof his calamities—”though he slay mc yet will I trust him”—rnand instead turns his suffering to creative account. At the happyrnend he is rewarded for his endurance—an image of the heroicrnovercoming of suffering.rnChrist’s invitation to take up his cross gave a dignity to pain,rnpresenting it as an election rather than a curse. Into yourrnhands I commit my spirit: his dying words taught the suffererrnhow to comport himself when his own Calvary came round.rnGethsemane revealed the striking simplicity of the Christianrnattitude toward pain. If pain can be avoided, avoid it—let thisrnchalice pass; there is to be no masochistic traffic with anguish.rnBut if pain cannot be avoided—thy will, not mine—then itrnmust not only be borne but made fruitful; one thinks of howrnMary Craig’s handicapped children led her into dynamic participationrnin the work of the Sue Ryder homes. “Even if my Fatherrnchastises me, I am ready for scourges, because my inheritancernawaits me”: St. Augustine’s assurance arrests the modernrnreader. “I reckon that the sufferings of this time are not worthyrnto be compared with the glory that is to come which shallrnbe revealed in us”: St. Paul, who had suffered much, dismissesrnhis pain as trifling when set against his final felicity. Presentrnpain could even be desirable—woe to him, warns Augustine,rnwho pays none of his debt in this life. The undedying idea isrnthat there can be no complete evasion of suffering, that yournhave to suffer somewhere, if not in this world, then in the next;rnyou can be spared now or later—much better to pay now.rnThe gospel text repeatedly used to illustrate this was the parablernof Dives and Lazarus—the rich man now damned in hellrnfor his life of pleasure on earth; the beggar, one of the wretchedrnof the earth, now at peace in Abraham’s bosom.rnThe truth-content of such teaching is not the issue. NeitherrnMarx nor Freud deny the consolatory power of religion; theyrnsimply dismiss it as untrue. But even allowing that it is illusion,rncompensation, wish-fulfillment, this still leaves the possible efficacyrnof such beliefs concerning pain intact, both for the victimrntrying to come to terms with his suffering and for the doctorrntrying to sustain a patient through the hell of his affliction.rnMarx talks revealingly of religion as “the opium of the people,”rnbut it is a mistake to read this as mere denunciation. Marx hasrnno wish to deprive suffering humanity of its painkiller beforernthe proper remedy—the socialist reconstruction of society—rnhas been found: why operate on people without anesthetics?rnReligion may be a crutch, but we should heal the limb beforernwe throw the crutch away. Freud is, admittedly, sterner, morernstoical, acting what he preached; he reprimanded the doctorrnwho, in defiance of his categorical command, administered arnpainkilling drug to him during an especially severe bout of painrnwhile he was dying of cancer. But it is Freud who is untypicalrnhere, with his insistence upon consciousness even if it entailsrnagony—he wanted to feel his dying. The great difference betweenrnMarx and Freud is that the former is a Utopian optimist,rnthe latter a stoic tragedian. For Freud, suffering cannot andrnshould not be avoided if the price is the suppression of consciousness:rnwe must learn to live without opiates. “The abolitionrnof religion as the illusory happiness of the people is requiredrnfor their real happiness”: Marx is, assuredly, not recommending,rnwith Freud, a stoic acceptance of pain. In his optimisticrnscenario, we will reject illusion and eliminate pain simultaneously.rnMarx will have no truck with what Americanrnpsychologists refer to as “no-end grief,” by which they meanrnliving with a heartbreaking set of circumstances that are unalterable,rnunending, and ever-demanding: chronic pain, terminalrnillness, psychological despair. Nowhere is Marx more transparentlyrna great alternative religious leader, a heretic of thernJudaic-Christian tradition, than in his dream of an end tornsuffering and the establishment of a kingdom of peace andrnjustice—he differs only in the matter of its location.rnThe erosion of religious belief in our time, the increasingrnand apparently irresistible secularization of society havernmade it commensuratelv more difficult to recruit such religiousrnteachings concerning pain in the treatment of the chronicallyrnor terminally ill. Ours is a post-Christian, post-religious age: thernreassurances, promises, consolations of religion are less available,rnless potent today than in any previous historical period.rnOur expectations are totally different, our world view completelyrnother. Technology has given us control over our environmentrnin a way unknown to our predecessors. Our masteryrnof nature creates in us a pervasive expectation: the technologicalrnabolition of all suffering. For the first time in history peoplernare being born who do not expect to suffer. From ancientrnGreece to the end of the 19th century, pain was regarded as anrninevitable component of human life to be accepted, endured,rnembraced, because it could not be avoided. The flat truismrnthat we are born to suffer, announced again and again in the artrnof the West, so inseparable from its religion, has now for thernfirst time been challenged and rejected, decried as shameful,rnobscurantist nonsense.rnSchopenhauer remarks that we do not really experiencernhealth but rather its absence. Possessing it, we take it forrngranted, like the air we breathe; health is like paradise—whilernit is ours we treat it with cavalier disdain, prizing it only whenrnit is lost. The fact that we know health only through privationrnconvinced Schopenhauer that suffering is our natural, ourrnnormal condition. Accepting the same data as Schopenhauer,rnwe reach a diametrically opposite conclusion: that illness is unnaturalrnand perverse. Accordingly, we resent pain as an impertinentrnintrusion, an affront and an outrage, something thatrnought never to have happened. Psychologically, we are akin tornthe man who, on his first day in the death-camp, complainedrnto the guard that in his case a mistake had surely been made.rnIn a multitude of the condemned he protests his individualrncondemnation; in a world of pain each person is scandalized atrnhis own personal suffering. Even the suffering and death of relativesrnand friends fail somehow to convince us that they arernsimply our trailblazers.rnIn The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy shows a survivor rejectingrnthe thought that Ivan is his Baptist, anticipating and preparingrnhis way: “‘Why, it might happen to me all of a sudden, atrnany moment,’ he thought, and for an instant he was terrified.rnBut immediately, he could not have explained how, thererncame to his support the old reflection that this thing had befallenrnIvan Ilyich and not him, and that it ought not and couldrnnot happen to him, and that to think that it could meant thatrnhe was falling into a melancholy frame of mind.” The Lentenrnreminder of the dust from which we came and to which wernmust revert can only seem morbid to such a mentality.rnlULY 1993/25rnrnrn