CHAPTER II

THE THREE GREAT SHADOWS: SICKNESS, SORROW, SIN

Having concentrated attention upon the point that the end is not the development of any particular faculty or assemblage of faculties, but the awakening in man, in and through his development, of the consciousness of interrelation, of life in life, we shall now turn to the three great shadows: sickness, sorrow, sin. In the case of sickness the suffering, however acute, must be made to pass over into action. There is a certain work to be done, something to be accomplished on the sick bed. What is it? I shall briefly review a few of the answers that have been given.

First, the Stoic says: A man in pain is to resist the pain by an act of will, thereby demonstrating that his essential self is inaccessible to bodily suffering. “If there is a pain in thy limb, remember that the pain is in thy limb, and not in thyself.” Now the fortitude of the Stoic is admirable as far as it goes; his counsels are bracing and manly. But, because he is a materialistic pantheist, the reason he gives for his defiance of pain is not convincing. In effect his appeal is rather to the empirical than to the spiritual nature of man. The spiritual nature is characterized by humility; the appeal of the Stoic is to pride. Fate with all its sledgehammer blows shall not crush him. Yet the Stoic’s pride when put to the supreme test does not avail, and the proof of it is that at the last it breaks down in suicide.

We come to a second answer. There is business in hand for the sufferer on the sick bed. What is the business? To hide the expression of his suffering, so that the cloud which rests on him may not cast its shadow upon others, obscuring their sunshine. But, we are bound to ask, are others always worthy of such consideration? Is not our sympathetic regard for their pleasures, their sunshine, often misplaced? Are not their pleasures often selfish and frivolous? The Greeks believed that outcries in situations of great distress are perfectly legitimate, since they seem to afford a kind of relief. Is it not cruel to forbid such outcries? In our age the view prevails that it is a proof of moral grandeur to suppress the signs of suffering. But the cynical question obtrudes itself whether it may not be the collective selfishness of the multitude that imposes this rule. The common run of men desire to go on their way undisturbed by cries that emanate from the sick chamber, and perhaps it is on this account that they impose a rule of behavior based, not on the principle of human worth, but on its opposite. The individual forsooth is not to count; the unhappiness of one is not to interfere with the happiness of the greater number!

There is, however, another view of the matter possible. Everyone carries his own particular burden. When tortured by some painful malady, we are apt to think that others, because they wear a smiling exterior, are therefore free from pain. But often those who seem in sound health are in fact as great sufferers as we, or even greater. And physical pain is not the only kind of suffering. Why, then, should I, for one, add to the troubles of others by imposing my own upon them? Put in this way, it is plain that there is an ethical element in the kind of behavior that is expected of a manly person. But the reason assigned, sympathy with the pleasures of others, is unconvincing. Unless there be some good to which grievous suffering can be made instrumental, there is no warrant for enduring it. As for the Stoics, so for the philosopher of sympathy, the logical end would be suicide, at least when the pain is exceptionally intense.

There is a third answer. Something is to be worked out on the sick bed. What is it? To be purified in the furnace, to learn patience and humble submission to the inscrutable will of God. Patience is the supreme virtue. “Be patient, Oh, be patient,” I once heard a dying man repeat with touching accents. But patience for the sake of what? There must be some object to be gained by the patience to make it commendable. I can be patient in a storm at sea if I may entertain the hope of reaching port. I can be patient in conducting a difficult scientific experiment if I may hope that it will issue in an important discovery, or prepare the way for such discovery by others. I can be patient in sickness if I have any reason to expect a return to health. But patience for mere patience’s sake is absurd. Well, then, the third answer is,—patience for the sake of manifesting your faith and trust in a wise and beneficent Deity. Why he has sent this suffering, why he has so made the world that it is replete with the agony of sentient creatures we do not know. We cannot know. But he knows. Trust him, have faith in him: “Though he slay me yet will I trust him.”

Here a genuine characteristic of the spiritual attitude has been expressed, but the ground on which it is put is once more unconvincing. How do I know that there is such a being as this wise and loving Deity of whom you tell me? By the evidence of his works, by the testimony of the world he has created, by the life for which I am indebted to him. But the world is the playground of good and evil forces. There is a semblance of design; there is on the other hand apparently the wildest disorder. The stars in their courses travel with incredible celerity in every direction, but no astronomer has ever yet been able to discern a plan in their journeyings. Human life is full of sorrow as well as joy; and whether there be more sorrow or more joy in the lives of most persons, who will venture to say? There is kindness, but there is also cruelty. There is coöperation, and there is merciless competition. There is health and bloom, and there is miserable physical decay. At present, in my case, suffering and sorrow are in the ascendant. The picture of the Deity as fashioned from the evidence of experience is dark and bright, cruel and kind. If he be omnipotent, why did he introduce the elements of discord and trouble into his creation? Why, in particular, does he at present torture me so cruelly? In order that I may believe in him despite the evidence! But how can I believe, seeing that in my own case the evidence on the bad side preponderates? Thus the mind of the sufferer on his couch of pain gropes in the labyrinth of argument and counter-argument—for the intellectual processes are often preternaturally acute in times of physical suffering—and there is no outlet. In a fine spiritual nature there is something which pleads that the counter-arguments ought not to prevail. Desperately, by an act of faith, a man lays hold on his God. But presently his faith again relaxes, his state of mind becomes confused, and unless supported by strong impressions received in and retained from childhood on, the third answer will not avail him.

There is business in hand on the sick bed. What is it? The fourth answer, the answer as it appeals to me, depends on the very incongruity of the finite and the infinite order. Every attempt to explain this incongruity breaks down, every theodicy is a fiction. To explain is to find the cause of effects. But the notion of cause does not apply to the relation between the finite and the infinite. And of the infinite order itself we possess only the plan or scheme of relations. The members of this ideal world are related to one another in such a manner that the essential uniqueness of the one is to be provocative of the diverse distinctiveness of the others. This, as I think, is a very fruitful formula, furnishing a rule of conduct to be applied to our finite relations. But it sheds no light on the uniqueness itself, which is forever ideal. What in its ultimate constitution our spiritual being may be, remains unknown. Did we know, were we capable of comprehending the infinite order, and seeing things in that supersolar light, we might then be able to solve the insoluble riddle, the coexistence side by side of the finite and the infinite. As it is, the problem of finiteness especially in its human aspect of suffering and evil is impenetrable, inexplicable. _But if we cannot explain suffering and evil, we can utilize them for a definite spiritual end._ And that end is to achieve through the ministry of frustration and the persistence of the effort toward the unattainable, the consciousness of the reality of the spiritual universe and of our membership in it.

The answer, therefore, which I should offer, is based on this pivotal distinction between explaining and using. And thus the business in hand, the end to be gained, is the intensified realization of our spiritual interconnectedness with others, the life in life. To this end we accept from the Stoic, though for a reason which he does not give, resistance to pain, and from the philosopher of sympathy the obligation of not clouding the life of others with our shadow, and from the theologian the law of patience—and we take a step beyond all three.

Let me carry this out somewhat more in detail. To gain the consciousness of interrelation, there must be an object outside of myself of supreme interest to me, enabling me to transcend the ego. Now, pain has the opposite effect, that of concentrating attention on the ego. Pain builds a prison around us, raises up high walls which shut us in. Anyone in great pain is incessantly reminded of his physical state. In order that the mind may pass out of the prison cell and over the encompassing wall, there needs to be some object beyond the wall appealing enough to solicit the outward movement. This object is the spiritual self of my fellowmen. It is my concern for their spiritual self which is their highest good, it is my eager wish to reinforce what is best in them that works the transcendence of the ego and of its pains. In such supreme moments the lesser values dwindle into relative insignificance. And what is best in others is the same consciousness on their part of the interrelation. It is this that I am to awaken in them, to strengthen in them by the intensity with which I myself realize it. In the case of loving kin and friends, they, too, suffer with me. In vain I try to hide my sufferings. They divine what I try to suppress; and the more I try to suppress it, the more they suffer with me. They suffer not only with the suffering, but with the attempt to conceal the suffering. I have seen this in the case of a mother at the bedside of her dying daughter. They go with me to the brink of life. They enter into the anxieties and forebodings that haunt my mind as I face death. There may be young children that still need fostering care. Dangers to the family may arise after I am gone. The more my life is implicated in the lives around me, the more as I stand on the edge of life will my thoughts be occupied, not with the obliteration of my empirical self, but with the future of those that survive—that best future of theirs which I long to assure. And they, in turn, if they are fine natures, will pass through this inward experience with me. Thus I descend into the darkness and the depths, and they descend with me; and I am also to rise out of the darkness and the depths, and am to gain the force to do this in order that I may lift them with me.

This is the business in hand. I am to draw myself out of the depths, to overcome the centralizing, egotizing effects of physical and mental pain, in order by my effort to make those around me realize the intensity with which I feel my interrelatedness with them, and thereby to reveal to them the same spiritual power in themselves. Plans for the future education of the children, counsels of peace, by way of anticipation for the too lonely hours that await the most loving and the most beloved,—these things have value chiefly in so far as they are insignificant of the indissoluble interlacing of life with life.[47]

FOOTNOTES:

[47] I have spoken of the sick bed as surrounded by loving friends and near of kin. There are sick beds where the situation is quite different,—in the poor wards of hospitals for instance. Nevertheless, the loneliest person is never without certain human relations. It may be the pauper in the next bed, the nurse, or the physician, to whom his behavior will be of lasting meaning.

I would add a word as to the attitude of a person who is threatened with insanity, and who is aware that the disease is approaching. His last conscious act should be to honor the community to which he belongs by voluntarily putting himself out of the way of harming them. Not that the physical harm is itself the principal thing, but that the wish not to harm physically is the sign of his sense of the ethical relation in which he stands to his fellows. Also a person threatened in this way ought to be willing to put himself in the keeping of others, even of strangers, as being no longer himself competent to judge rightly of what shall be done to him. It is true that in accepting the judgment of strangers as a substitute for his own he is taking the risk of being treated with insufficient consideration, and possibly even mistreated. Yet the jeopardy in which he thus puts his future, the sacrificial act he performs, is evidence of mental nobility at the very moment when mental night is about to set in for him.