The Fall of the Tower of Saloam: Suffering and Evil, Final Thoughts

 

Or those eighteen whom the Tower of Siloam fell upon and killed: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who live in Jerusalem?

It seems to me that the problem of evil starts with death itself. It’s interesting and perhaps important that in the myth of Adam and Eve, the couple is told that on the day they eat the fruit they will die. They don’t die that day. But death enters the world, or, at least, the knowledge of death. Once death opens the door, through it comes with him everything we reference until this word: evil.

C. S. Lewis frames the problem of evil as the problem of pain and comes at the problem from the bottom up: from pleasurable discomfort up to the excruciating suffering of innocence. Dostoyevsky and many others center their concern on the suffering of children. I myself am haunted by accounts I’ve heard in the news, one of a child burned to death by an insane mother (responding to an imagination warped by religious language), another of a small child who, it seems, wandered out of her house one night in a storm and froze to death. Horrible as such things are, they fuel a feedback loop of imagination and emotion that gives them more place than is warranted in the question of evil. The question of evil is always one question: why does God allow suffering to exceed guilt? Why does God let innocent creatures suffer? There is no other question.

The first thing that must then be understood, beyond all examples or discriminations is this: if any suffering is allowed, all suffering is allowed. There is not going to be a point at which one can say, I would believe in God if children didn’t have to suffer, or I would believe in God if not for earthquakes or famine. Justice is a form of economics: a trade. It’s admittedly an idealistic economics where things have actual value—something that is never the case when actual goods and services are concerned. In the economics of good and evil, if you are forced to pay one penny more than the actual value, then you have been dealt with unjustly. If any injustice, if any suffering-beyond-desserts, is allowed, then no amount of suffering does any more to call into question the goodness of God.

Hell is an image of this.

I don’t know that it’s true that no one deserves death. I do know that it’s true that not everyone deserves death, not every living thing earns death. Not every child who dies, not every stillborn infant, not every virtuous adult, whatever their sins might have been, earns death.

By the same token you may say, and I often do, that no one earns life either. Life is something that happens to us. No one asks to be born. And if life is taken away, then, as was once routinely said of beauty, we have to acknowledge life was only ever lent to us. It was never ours. And what isn’t ours can always be reclaimed by the owner. Is the owner responsible if you fall in love with the toy he loaned you? He wants it back. What is it to him if you cry when you return it?

Yes. Yes, he is responsible in this case. He knew when he gave it to you that you would fall in love with it. He knew you would suffer when you had to give it back. And more than that, what he demands back—if it is the toy—is worth nothing to him. He has an infinite supply. And he doesn’t really want back the toy. He wants to destroy the toy you love in front of your eyes. He doesn’t want to make you suffer. He’s entirely indifferent to your suffering. He doesn’t laugh; he doesn’t smile; he doesn’t cry.

Or maybe he does cry. But he takes it back. And you suffer. And that is the only problem of “evil” we need to solve.

Why? You will say that if it was only death we would not complain. We could believe in God if everyone got ninety years and died in their sleep. Perhaps you could, but you would be wrong to do so if you are wrong to do so in a world with earthquakes and mosquitoes. The fact that you would be willing to accept a low threshold of suffering, that you would be willing to pay a few pennies more than the actual value without grumbling, doesn’t matter in a realm of the divine. It would still make God evil. And God cannot be evil. Either suffering is essential to the project of God, essential in a way that not even an omnipotent, omniscient God cannot stop or avoid, or it is not. If it is not, then that god does not exist. And if it is, then nothing is disallowed.

Well then, even so, wouldn’t a God who loves us draw a line somewhere? You may let your young child walk home ten blocks from school unescorted, knowing that you could have walked with her, could have protected her from any potential danger. And there are potential dangers. If every parent allows this to every child, most will make it home safely every day. But some will be injured. Some will be kidnapped. Some will die. But those who survive may be better for the experience. They will learn independence, self-reliance, the skills that allow one to grow up with confidence and that lay the foundation for a good life.

But you wouldn’t let your fourth-grader walk to Albuquerque.

God doesn’t have to allow mothers and children to die in childbirth. He didn’t have to make childbirth so hard it would be noted at the principle evil consequence for women tossed from Eden. And he didn’t need deadly weather and although we can accept colds, maybe, did we need viruses that would wipe out 90% of whatever population contracted them? The devastation wreaked on the “new world,” did that need to happen? Hawaii. Everywhere Magellan sailed. If there’s a lesson we need to learn, if we couldn’t be what we were destined to be without some of this shit, couldn’t we learn it with less? There has to be a maximum allowance and everything beyond that superfluous. Once you’ve piled on enough stones to kill the sinner, what’s the point of heaving more stone? If a penny too much is evil, why a dollar? Why a million?

The first answer has to be “maybe.” Maybe there is a point beyond which justice cannot go. But who knows what that line is? I said above that once any evil is allowed in, all evil comes through the door, or can in principle come through the door. But maybe not.

If there were no plague, there would still be COVID, or influenza or chicken pox or the common cold. Or there could be diseases that kill us back to one man and one woman. Do we know what the right line is? Six million Jews were killed by the Nazis and many others as well. All could have perished. Germany could have won that war. I am not saying God prevented that victory. I don’t believe that’s true. I’m saying only that whatever evil there is, there could be more. And our complaints would be of the same weight they are now.

And let’s be clear: the amount of evil that exists is just this: it is the maximum any one individual can suffer. Lewis was right about it. It is not the total amount of suffering in history. That is someone no one but God experiences. It is what one person can suffer, the greatest pain of the most innocent creature. This is why I and Dostoevsky, and everyone who walks away from Omelas pause or stop at the roadblock of the suffering child.  

Evil cannot be understood by how much there is or where the line is justly drawn. It can only be understood in light of its purpose. Not by how much there is but by why it’s allowed in the first place.

We know that everything we are and everything we love and even our ability to love comes from the shortness of life, the evanescence of beauty and pleasure, the inevitability of suffering, and actual suffering. Love makes us what we are. But love is not what love is without death. And mere death is not enough. There must also be the pain and the loss and the despair and the injustice and sorrow that makes love what it is. That makes us what we are. It ruins a lot of people. Good intentions ruin a lot of people. Zeal for God tortures, blinds, consumes a lot of people who want to be good and go to Heaven when they die. The purpose or function of evil is, among other things, to inspire me to write this essay.

No one can deny the devastating effects of evil. To believe in God is to believe that this is a price that must be paid for the good. We don’t have to like it. To be a Christian is to believe that God was willing to pay that price alongside us, to come to the earth in human form, to teach for a while and to suffer with us, to suffer all that can be suffered, right up to his own self-abandonment at the point of his greatest pain, to have no God when God was most needed. And then to be resurrected in the promise that all this shit we have to undergo will end. And when it’s over, having done the work that could not be done without it, we will put it behind us as we now put all the shit we suffer behind us when we do. But even more so. Absolutely, having been nourished by it, which, as with actual shit, is its function.

Of course you can reject this analysis, Christ, the whole story. I would not blame you. But I am not God. It may well be that the price is too high or that you believe the price is too high. You have no way of knowing. But you have no way of knowing that the price isn’t too high either. Am I trying to convince you to become a Christian? No. Too much evil has been perpetrated by people trying to convince other people to become Christians. And it is the job of Christians to reduce suffering. I’m hoping to help myself and anyone else who might need to think about this what the true choice is. If you reject Christ, if you reject God, that may be a perfectly reasonable thing to do. But it can’t be perfectly reasonable as an actual act until one has reasoned perfectly.

Most people don’t bother. Most people reject or accept the most fundamental facts of existence without ever really thinking about them.